Month: May 2009

Modern Materialism as Essentially Cartesian

Arthur W. Collins, The Nature of Mental Things, Notre Dame 1987, pp. 61-62:

Modern materialists have been so profoundly convinced by the general structure of Cartesian thinking about the mind that they manage to promote only a materialist version of a philosophy of mind that is essentially Cartesian in its underlying attitudes and its extensive matters of detail.  Contemporary mind-brain materialism is a body-body dualism  Materialists typically accept the Cartesian idea of an inner mental realm.  Contemporary repudiation of  dualism is generally a consequence of the extension of scientific knowledge in the biological field and the acceptance of a comprehensive evolutionary naturalism.  Many thinkers now sympathize with the materialist rejection of mental substance.  Impenetrable mysteries will be a part of the the understanding of the mind as long as a ghostly substratum for consciousness and mental activity is tolerated.

[. . .]

Materialism is on the wrong track because the trouble with Cartesian philosophy of mind lies in its conception of  a realm of inner mental things and events comprising conscious mentality.  This is the aspect of Cartesianism that is retained by materialists to this very day.  So the chief defect of materialism, in my view, is that it is a species of Cartesian philosophy of mind.

Collins' beef is with the notion of a "realm of inner mental things."  But what exactly is his problem?  Isn't there a tolerably clear sense in which memories, for example, are inner?  It's a metaphor of course; we are not speaking of spatial interiority.  Memories and such are not spatially inside of anything, which is why mind = brain materialism is absurd.    That thoughts are literally in the head is Unsinn.  That we sometimes talk this way cuts no ice, e.g., "He got it into his head to take up golf." And surely behaviorism is dead as a dog and out for the count:  beliefs, desires , memories, etc. cannot be understood  in terms of behavior or dispositions to behave.  I'll have to read more of Collins to see what he is driving at.  But I suspect I will no more fully understand what he is driving at than I ever understood what Wittgenstein was driving at.

I agree with Collins that contemporary materialism  is dualistic in that it is a brain-body dualism, or as he says, a "body-body dualism."  And I agree that it is absurd to attempt to identify thoughts with events in a hunk of intracranial meat.  But once the absurdity of behaviorism is appreciated, how avoid some notion of inner goings-on?

 

I’m Free! Some Thoughts on Compatibilism

SouthLake-SierraNevadaMts Backpacking solo in California's Sierra Nevada range some years ago, I had occasion to exult: "I'm free!" What did I mean?

I meant that I was doing what I wanted to do as I wanted to do it. I was not subject to any external or internal impediments, or any external or internal compulsions. An example of an external impediment would be a snowstorm or an uncooperative companion, while an example of an internal impediment would be acrophobia. An example of external compulsion would be being forced at gunpoint to hike. And if I suffered from cacoethes ambulandi, a pathological itch to ramble, a syndrome I have just invented, then that would count as an internal compulsion. But unencumbered as I was by any such impediments or compulsions, I was doing what I willed (wanted, desired, chose, . . .).

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Free Will Again: A Tension in Philoponus’ Doxastic Network

Near the end of Thursday night's symposium, Philoponus, animated but not rendered irrational by the prodigious quantity of Fat Tire Ale he had consumed, stated that he is really only interested in practical and existential topics in philosophy as opposed to theoretical ones.  He is concerned solely with questions on the order of: How should we live?  What ought we do? But he also took a hard determinist line on the problem of free will, based on his study of recent neuroscience.  He tells me he has been reading Daniel Wegner's The Illusion of Conscious Will.  It occurred to me the next morning that there is a certain tension between these two Philoponian commitments.

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Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities? Part II

On February 9th I linked to Thomas H. Benton's Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go.  Today I discovered his Just Don't Go Part II.  Prospective graduate students should digest it thoroughly albeit cum grano salis.  I don't recommend Benton's piece in order to discourage anyone but to apprise them of what they are up against should they embark upon graduate study.  But if ideas are your passion, and you have talent, and you are willing to live like a monk, take risks and perhaps later on retool for the modern-day equivalent of lens-grinding, then go for it!

Here is the question you should ask yourself.  Will I consider it to have been a waste of time and money to have devoted 4-10 years of my precious youth to graduate study if I find that I cannot secure a tenure-track appointment in a reasonably good department in which the chances of tenure are reasonably good and find that I either have to re-tool or become an academic gypsy moving from one one-year appointment to another, or end up as an adjunct teaching five courses per semester for slave wages?

If you answer in the affirmative, then you almost certainly should avoid graduate school given a very bad job market that gives every indication of getting worse. But if you love your discipline, have some talent, and your very identity is bound up with being a philosopher, say, then you should take the risk.  I did, and I don't regret my decision for a second.  Of course, I was one of those who secured a tenure-track position right out of grad school and went on to get tenure.  But had I failed to get a job, I would not have considered my time in grad school wasted.  They were wonderful years in a wonderful place: Boston on the Charles, the Athens of America.  I lived on next-to-nothing but avoided debt by tailoring my lifestyle to the modest emolument of my teaching fellowship.  But that's just me.  Philosophy for me is the unum necessarium.  I cannot imagine who I would be were I not a philosopher.  For me, no way of life is higher.  I am going to do it one way or another, whether or not I can turn a buck from it.

Now if you think like I do, but allow yourself to be cowed by parents and friends and the manifold suggestions emanating from a money-grubbing society in which 'success' is spelled '$ucce$$' and pronounced 'suck-cess' into thinking that you must be 'practical' and put economic and career considerations above all others, then you may wake up one morning a rich shyster or medico but with deep regrets that you didn't have the courage to pursue your dream.

Politics: Would That I Could Avoid It

Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper.

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Academic Credentials

The Ph.D. is a trapping that means something, but not that much. There are fools with doctorates, and sages without them. Should Kierkegaard go unread because he is a mere Magister? Does anyone prefer his brother Peter over Søren because the fomer was called Doktor? Should we turn a blind eye to Eric Hoffer's True Believer because its author was a migrant farm worker and stevedore who, as a pure autodidact, had no credentials at all, not even an elementary school diploma? Fifty years after it was written, in these days of Islamo-militancy, Hoffer's penetrating book has gained even more relevance.

As Schopenhauer was always keen to point out, there is a difference between a philosopher and a professor of philosophy, namely, the difference between someone who lives for philosophy and someone who lives from it. The professors, parading their titles and credentials, show thereby that they are more concerned with appearance than with reality, when the office of the philosopher is precisely to penetrate appearance and arrive at reality. (I am reporting Schopenhauer's view here, and would point out against him that of course a professor of philosophy can be a genuine philosopher. Schopenhauer himself would be forced to admit this given his great admiration for Kant.  What he could not abide was Hegel, whom he considered a charlatan, and Fichte whose Wissenschaftslehre he mocked as Wissenschaftsleere and as Onanie.)

An important text relating to the question of academic credentials is William James, "The Ph.D. Octopus" in Essential Writings, ed. Wilshire (SUNY 1984), pp. 343-348)  It first appeared in 1903 in the Harvard Monthly.

In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow).  I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy."  I also took a course in logic from him.  The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books.  And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I taught.

I don't believe Morris ever published anything.  The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question.  But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.

The moral of the story?  Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy.  So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.

I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when.  The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend.  I've done it a number of times.  I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher.  I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no.  What ingrates we  are.

So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.  Heute rot, morgen tot.

John Hospers and the Unteachability of Ayn Rand

An extremely bright autodidact who is also supremely self-confident will often prove to be unteachable.  If such a person should then acquire a worshipful cult-like following, and if she never exposes her work to professional scrutiny, and excommunicates even those well disposed to her when they dare criticize, John Hospers being one example, the result is unteachability in excelsis.  This is the case of Ayn Rand.  Click on the following links for some fascinating reading.  The lady could have learned so much from Hospers if she hadn't been such a pigheaded ideologue.

Memories of Ayn Rand. Conversations with Ayn Rand 1.  Conversations with Ayn Rand 2.

A Hylomorphic Solution to the Interaction Problem?

Interactionist substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is supposed to face a devastating objection, the interaction objection. In the first part of this post I will present this objection in its traditional form and suggest that it is not all that serious. In the second part, however, I take the objection seriously and consider whether Aristotelian- Thomistic hylomorphism has the resources to counter it.

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Samuel Alexander on Emergence

Samuel Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. II, Peter Smith 1979,(originally published in 1920), p. 46:

The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour.  The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I would prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the "natural piety" of the investigator.  It admits no explanation.

If, however, the emergent entities admit of no explanation, if their emergence is a brute fact, then claims of emergence are open to the 'poof' objection.  It would appear to be rather unbecoming of a hard-assed physicalist to simply announce that such-and-such has emerged when he can offer no explanation of how it has emerged.  If interactionist dualists are supposed to be embarrassed by questions as to how mind and body interact, then emergentists are in a similar boat.

That being said, "natural piety" is a beautiful phrase.

The Pairing Objection to Substance Dualism

As I understand the  Pairing Objection to substance dualism it goes like this.  Let m1 and m2 be mental tokens of type M and b1 and b2 brain tokens of type B, and suppose that M-type events cause B-type events. Suppose m1 and m2 both occur at time t, and b1 and b2 both occur at a slightly later time t*. Suppose further that m1 is in Tim's mind, m2 in Tom's mind, b1 in Tim's brain and b2 in Tom's brain. What makes it the case that m1 causes b1 rather than b2, and that m2 causes b2 rather than b1? What insures that m1 is paired with b1 and m2 with b2? How, on dualist interactionist assumptions, can we insure that the picture looks like this:


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Nietzsche, Guilt, and Incoherence

I love reading Nietzsche, just as I love reading his opposite number, Kierkegaard. There is  much to admire in them: their stylistic brilliance, the penetration of their psychological insight, the singlemindedness of their quest for truth. They are about as far away as one can get from the mere professor of philosophy. Nevertheless, both were hell-bent on tangling themselves up in absurdities. Herewith, yet another example.

Execution. — How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the scrupulous preparation, the insight that here a human being is being used as a means of deterring others. For it is not the guilt that is being punished, even when it exists; this lies in educators, parents, environment, in us, not in the murderer – I mean the circumstances that caused him to become one. (Human, All Too Human (1878), vol. I, sec. 70, tr. Hollingdale.)

So it is not the criminal who is guilty, but the circumstances in which he arose. But if the criminal is not guilty, then no one and nothing is. Either there is guilt on both sides, or on neither side. It is incoherent to displace guilt from the criminal onto his environment. (And what is a hard-assed political reactionary like Nietzsche doing making a soft-headed liberal move like this?) What Nietzsche really wants to say is that that there is no guilt on either side, since “no one is accountable for his deeds…” (Sec. 39) But if so, then we are not accountable for our judging the criminal and punishing him. If he is a deterministic system, then so are we. It follows that it is absurd to say that we ought not punish him, or that “to judge is the same thing as to be unjust….” (Sec. 39) If there is no such thing as moral responsibility, then neither ‘just’ nor ‘unjust’ are words that apply to anything.

Why can’t Nietzsche appreciate this simple point? And in section 107, where he writes, “Everything is necessity…. Everything is innocence…,” why can’t he see that if all is necessity and there is no free will (cf. Sec. 102), then both ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’ fail to apply to anything? Merely paradoxical formulations, or deep underlying confusion? I incline toward the latter view.

Nietzsche on Bentham, Mill, & Co.

"If we have our own why of life, we shall get along with almost any how. Man does not strive for pleasure; only the Englishman does." (Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows," #12.)

The art of the aphorism at its best.

In all fairness to the English I should point out that it was an Englishman who provided what is perhaps the best refutation of hedonism we have, namely, F. H. Bradley in his "Pleasure For Pleasure's Sake"  in Ethical Studies.