Does Matter Think?

If matter (wholly material beings) could think, then matter would not  be matter as currently understood.

Can abstracta think?  Sets count as abstracta.  Can a  set think?  Could the set of primes contemplate itself and think the thought, I am a set, and each of my members is a prime number?  Given what we know sets to be from set theory, sets cannot think. It is the same with matter.  Given what we know or believe matter to be from current physics, matter cannot think.  To think is to think about something, and it is this intrinsic aboutness or original intentionality that proves embarrassing for materialism.  I have expatiated on this over many, many posts and I can't repeat myself here.  (Here is a characteristic post.)

But couldn't matter have occult powers, powers presently hidden from our best physics, including the power to think?  Well, could sets have occult powers that a more penetrating set theory would lay bare?  Should we pin our hopes on future set theory? Obviously not.  Why not?  Because it makes no sense to think of sets as subjects of intentional states. We know a priori that the set of primes cannot lust after the  set of evens.  It is impossible in a very strong sense: it is broadly logically impossible. 

Of course, there is a big difference between sets and brains.  We know enough about sets to know a priori that sets cannot think.  But perhaps we don't yet know enough about the human brain. So I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers.  Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think.  But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand.  And that is my point.  You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations that ought to seem unseemly to hard-headed empiricistic and scientistic types.

Such types are known to complain about spook stuff and ghosts-in-machines.  But to impute occult powers, powers beyond our ken, to brain matter does not seem to be much of an improvement.  For that is a sort of dualism too.  There are the physical properties and powers we know about, and the physical properties and powers we know nothing about but posit to avoid the absurdities of identity materialism and eliminativism. So instead of an ontological property dualism or an ontological substance dualism we have an epistemological property dualism, a dualism as between properties and powers we know about and properties and powers we have no idea about.

There is, second, the ontological dualism as between thinking and feeling matter and ordinary hunks of matter that do not think or feel. Even the materialist must admit that there is a huge difference between Einstein and a piece of chalk. How explain that some parcels of matter think and some do not?

It is worth noting that the reverent gushing of the neuro-scientistic types over the incredible complexity (pound the lectern!)  of the brain does absolutely nothing to reduce the unintelligibility of the notion that it is brains or parts of brains that are the subjects of intentional and qualitative mental states.  For it is unintelligible how ramping up complexity can trigger a metabasis eis allo genos, a shift into another genus. Are you telling me that meat that means is just meat that is more complex than ordinary meat?  You might as well say that the leap from unmeaning meat to meaning meat is a miracle.   Will you say that consciousness emerges from certain parcels of sufficiently complex matter?  But then it is not matter any more, is it?  It is an emergent from matter.  Emergentism is a form of ontological dualism. What's more, the word 'emergence' merely papers over the difficulty, labeling the problem without solving it.  Do you materialists believe in miracle meat or mystery meat?  Do you believe in magic?

There is, third, a dualism within the brain as between those parts of it that are presumably thinking and feeling and those other parts that perform more mundane functions.  Why are some brain states mental and others not? 

The materialist operates with a conception of matter tied to current physics.  On that conception of matter, it is simply unintelligible to to say that brains feel or think. I tend to hold that this unintelligibility is a very good reason to hold that it is not my brain or any part thereof that thinks when I think, and that it is not my brain or any part thereof that feels when I feel.  (I am using 'think' in the broad Cartesian sense to cover all instances of intentionality, and 'feel' to cover all non-intentional conscious states and events.)

"But from the fact that such-and-such is unintelligible to us now it does not follow that it is not the case."  True.   Two possibilities.  It might be the case that p even though we will never understand how it is possible that p, and it might be the case that p, even though we cannot understand at present how it is possible that p.  The first is a mysterian position, the second is not mysterian but a pin-hopes-on-future-science position.

My thesis is that it is reasonable to hold that when I think and feel it is not my brain or any part of it that thinks or feels.  But who knows? Maybe future science will prove me wrong.  It is just that I wouldn't lay any money on being wrong.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Go Carly!

Carly Fiorina is beginning to look good to me, politically speaking.  Let's see what we can scrounge up on the Carly/Carla/Carl/Karl/Karla theme.

Carly Simon, You're So Vain.  Good video. This one goes out to Donald Trump.  I like Trump and his cojones (metaphorically speaking), but a lack of gravitas condemns him.  Reagan had the right blend of cojones and gravitas:  "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

Ray Barretto, El Watusi (an old '60s number featured in Carlito's Way).  Don't ask me what it means.

Carl Wilson, I Can Hear Music

Karla Bonoff, When you Walk in the Room.  The old Jackie De Shannon tune from '64.  While we have Jackie cued up: Put a Little Love in Your Heart.

Carlos Santana, Black Magic Woman

Another reason to like Fiorina:

 

“I graduated from Stanford with a degree in medieval history and philosophy — there is life after a medieval history and philosophy degree,” she said happily.​ After graduation, Fiorina said, she was “completely unemployable” so she tried out law school.

 

“I was an obedient, goody two-shoes middle child,” she said of that decision, explaining that her parents wanted her to go. “Hated law school. Quit law school after one semester. And now my resume reads, ‘Medieval history and philosophy. Law school dropout.” Fiorina then went to work as a secretary. Six months in, two of her male colleagues saw her potential and asked if she wanted to learn the business.

 

“And still, in 2014, there is no other country on the face of the earth where a young woman can start out as a secretary and become CEO of the largest technology company,” she said.

 

This is where the politics comes in. “I’m a conservative because I think our policies unlock potential in people and I have seen too many lives and too many livelihoods sacrificed at the altar of liberal ideology and it happens all the time,” she said. Fiorina talked about the evils of bureaucracies and the virtues of entrepreneurship, education, jobs and freedom.

 

Galen Strawson Versus Nicholas Humphrey on Consciousness

(This is a repost from February 2013 slightly emended, except for an addendum added today.  Reposts are the reruns of the blogosphere.  You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode just once do you?) 

…………………

A couple of days ago I had Nicholas Humphrey in my sights.  Or, to revert to the metaphor of that post, I took a shovel to his bull.  I am happy to see that Galen Strawson agrees that it is just nonsense to speak of consciousness as an illusion.  Strawson's trenchant review of Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness is here.  Unfortunately, I cannot see that Strawson has shed much light either, at least judging from the sketch of his position presented in the just-mentioned review:

There is no mystery of consciousness as standardly presented, although book after book tells us that there is, including, now, Nick Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness. We know exactly what consciousness is; we know it in seeing, tasting, touching, smelling, hearing, in hunger, fever, nausea, joy, boredom, the shower, childbirth, walking down the road. If someone denies this or demands a definition of consciousness, there are two very good responses. The first is Louis Armstrong's, when he was asked what jazz is: "If you got to ask, you ain't never goin' to know." The second is gentler: "You know what it is from your own case." You know what consciousness is in general, you know the intrinsic nature of consciousness, just in being conscious at all.

"Yes, yes," say the proponents of magic, "but there's still a mystery: how can all this vivid conscious experience be physical, merely and wholly physical?" (I'm assuming, with them, that we're wholly physical beings.) This, though, is the 400-year-old mistake. In speaking of the "magical mystery show", Humphrey and many others make a colossal and crucial assumption: the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of matter that gives us reason to think that it's surprising that it involves consciousness. We don't. Nor is this news. Locke knew it in 1689, as did Hume in 1739. Philosopher-chemist Joseph Priestley was extremely clear about it in the 1770s. So were Eddington, Russell and Whitehead in the 1920s.

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

The main point of Strawson's first paragraph is surely correct: we know what consciousness is in the most direct and  unmistakable way possible: we experience it, we live through it, we are it.  We know it from our own case, immediately, and we know it better than we know anything else.  If Dennett doesn't know what a sensory quale is, then perhaps the cure is to administer a sharp kick to his groin.  Feel that, Dan?  That's a quale.  (I am assuming, of course, that Dennett is not a 'zombie' in the technical sense in which that term is used in philosophy of mind discussions.  But I can't prove he isn't.  Perhaps that is the problem. If he were a zombie, then maybe all his verbal behavior would be understandable.)

In the second paragraph Strawson rejects an assumption and he makes one himself.  He rejects the assumption that we know enough about the intrinsic nature of matter to know that a material being cannot think.    The assumption he makes is that we are wholly physical beings.  So far I understand him.  It could be that (it is epistemically possible that) this stuff inside my skull is the thinker of my thoughts.  This is epistemically possible because matter could have hidden powers that we have yet to fathom. On our current understanding of matter it makes no bloody sense to maintain that matter thinks; but that may merely reflect our ignorance of the intrinsic nature of matter.  So I cannot quickly dismiss the notion that matter thinks in the way I can quickly dismiss the preternaturally boneheaded notion that consciousness is an illusion.

I agree with Strawson's first paragraph; I understand the second; but I am flabbergasted by the third.  For now our man waxes dogmatic and postures as if he KNOWS that consciousness is a wholly physical phenomenon.  How does he know it?  Obviously, he doesn't know it.  It is a mere conjecture, an intelligible conjecture, and perhaps even a reasonable one.  After all it might be (it is epistemically possible that) the matter of our brains has occult powers that physics has yet to lay bare, powers that enable it to think and feel.  I cannot exclude this epistemic possibility, any more than Strawson can exclude the possibility that thinkers are spiritual substances.  But to conjecture that things might be thus and so is not to KNOW that they are thus and so.  All we can claim to KNOW is what Strawson asseverates in his first paragraph.

Here is Strawson's  argument in a nutshell:

1. We know the intrinsic nature of consciousness from our own case.

2. We know that consciousness is a form of matter.

Ergo

3.  There is nothing mysterious about consciousness or about how matter gives rise to consciousness; nor is there any question whether consciousness is wholly physical; the only mystery concerns the intrinsic nature of matter.

The problem with this argument is premise (2).  It is pure bluster: a wholly gratuitous assumption, a mere dogma of naturalism.  I can neutralize the argument with this counterargument:

4. If (1) & (2), then brain matter has occult powers.

5. We have no good reason to assume — it is wholly gratuitous to assume — that brain matter has occult powers.

Therefore

6. We have no good reason to assume that both (1) and (2) are true.

7. We know that (1) is true.

Therefore

8. We have good reason to believe that (2) is false. 

Further Thoughts: Strawsonian Theology? (20 September 2015)

Strawson tells us that he is assuming that we are "wholly physical beings."  Now a proposition cannot be true or false unless it is meaningful.  But what does it even mean to say that we are wholly physical beings given that this entails that some wholly physical beings are conscious and self-conscious?  What does 'physical' mean if beings as richly endowed with mentality as we are count as "wholly physical"?  There is a semantic problem here, and it looks to be a failure of contrast.  'Physical' contrasts with 'mental' and has a specific meaning in virtue of this contrast.  And vice versa. So if nothing is mental, then nothing is physical in the specific contrastive sense that lends 'bite' and interest to the thesis that we are wholly physical.  To put it another way, if nothing is mental and everything is physical including us with our richly endowed inner lives, then the claim that we are wholly physical is not particularly interesting.    It is nearly vacuous if not wholly vacuous.  It has been evacuated of its meaning by a failure of contrast.  If we are wholly physical in an umbrella sense that subsumes the contrastive senses of 'physical' and 'mental,' then Strawson has merely papered over the problem of how the mental and the physical are related when these terms are taken in their specific senses.

Suppose Einstein and his blackboard are both wholly physical.  We still have to account for the fact that one of them is conscious and entertains thoughts while the other isn't and doesn't.  That is a huge difference.  What Strawson has to say is that  in us thinking and feeling beings powers of matter are exercised that are not exercised in other, less distinguished clumps of matter.  Hidden in the bosom of matter are powers that a future physics may lay bare and render intelligible.

But if Strawson widens his concept of matter to cover both thinking and nonthinking matter,  does he have a principled way to prevent an even further widening?

If minds like ours are wholly physical, why can't God be wholly physical?  God is a mind too.  Presumably God cannot be wholly physical because God is not in space and is not subject to physical decomposition.  But if we can be wholly physical despite the fact that we think and are conscious — if there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out thought and consciousness — then perhaps there is nothing in the nature of matter to rule out material beings that have no spatial location and are not subject to physical decomposition.

If an advanced physics will reveal how meat heads like us can think, then perhaps there are other properties and possibilities of matter hitherto undreamt of.  Consider Christ's Ascension, body and soul, into heaven. Christ's Ascension is not a dematerialization: he ascends bodily into a purely spiritual, nonphysical, 'dimension.' Without losing his (resurrected) body, Christ ascends to the Father so that, after the Ascension, the Second Person of the Trinity acquires Christ's resurrected body. On our ordinary way of thinking, this is utterly unintelligible.  God is pure spirit, pure mind.  How can Christ  ascend bodily into heaven, and without divesting himself of his body,  enter into the unity of the purely spiritual Trinity?  It is unintelligible to us because it issues in a formal-logical contradiction: God is wholly nonphysical and also in part physical.  A mysterian would say it is a mystery.  It happened, so it's possible, and this regardless of its unintelligibility to us. 

On Strawson's approach there needn't be any mystery here:  some parcels of matter have amazing powers.  For example, we are wholly material and yet we think and feel.  It is truly amazing that we should be thinking meat!  If so, God might be a parcel of matter that thinks, feels, and — without prejudice to his physicality — has no spatial location and is not subject to physical decomposition. If so, the Ascension is comprehensible: Christ ascends bodily to join the physical Trinity.  It is just that he sheds his particular location and his physical mutability.  He remains what he was on earth, an embodied soul. 

The same could be said of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven.  She too entered bodily into heaven.  On a Strawsonian theology, this might be rendered intelligible without mysterianism.

To sum up.  If matter actually thinks and feels  in us, as Strawson holds, then he has widened the concept of matter to embrace both 'ordinary' matter and sentient, thinking, 'spiritual' matter.  But then what principled way would Strawson have to prevent a further widening of the concept of matter so that it embraces God, disembodied souls, angels, and what not?

The Fact-Free Flamboyance of Francis

George Will takes the present Pope to task.  Francis is as foolish as Obama.  Both are much exercised over 'climate change' but not so much when it comes to the slaughter of Christians in the Middle East and the destruction of their languages and culture.  If Obama is an Obamination, Bergoglio is an imbroglio of politically correct nonsense.  Both are disasters.  The first for the USA and the world, the second for the Catholic Church.  The real disaster is not climatic but cultural , and these two clowns have nary a clue.

Francis’s fact-free flamboyance reduces him to a shepherd whose selectively reverent flock, genuflecting only at green altars, is tiny relative to the publicity it receives from media otherwise disdainful of his church. Secular people with anti-Catholic agendas drain his prestige, a dwindling asset, into promotion of policies inimical to the most vulnerable people and unrelated to what once was the papacy’s very different salvific mission.

Related:  The Pope is a Buffoon When it Comes to Economics

Click on that link, boys and girls, it is a fine post.  If you are liberal you will learn something.

Why Write?

Why Do I Write?

I write to know my own mind, to actualize my own mind, and to attract a few like-minded and contrary-minded people.  The like-minded lend support, and the contrary-minded – assuming that their criticisms are rationally based – allow me to test my ideas.  Dialectic is to the philosopher what experiment is to the scientist.

Why Do I Blog?

If you are going to write at all, why not publish?  Why hide your light under a bushel?  To publish is to make public, and the beauty of blogging is that no editor stands between the blogger and his audience.

Writing and Self-Expression

Good writing is not any sort of petty self-expression, but an expression of the engagement of mind with world whereby the little logos of the individual seeks to adjust itself to the world-Logos.

Related:  Copy Editor Makes Me Out to be a Disease

Liberals and Standards

Heather MacDonald reports:

Monday’s violence [at the West Indian American Day Parade] also should provide advance warning that the New York City Council’s plan to decriminalize such quality-of-life laws as public drinking and public urination is a recipe for disaster. The decriminalization agenda in New York and nationally is driven by the specious claim that enforcing the law unfairly targets blacks and subjects them to draconian penalties. The parade toll shows the opposite: the best way to save black lives is to enforce the law.

This suggests a polemical definition of 'liberal':  a person who never met a standard he didn't want to erode.  You have to be pretty far gone to think that public intoxication and public urination are acceptable behaviors, and are you not a racist if you think that blacks cannot be held to minimal standards of public behavior?

If reasonable laws unfairly target blacks, do laws against armed robbery unfairly target males inasmuch as males as a group are much more likely to commit such a crime than females?

Suppose someone said that the latter laws are 'anti-male' because they 'target' males rather than females.  You'd say the person is an idiot, right?  You would explain to the fool that, of course, anti-armed-robbery laws have a 'disproportionate impact' on males because — wait for it — males, as a group, are much more aggressive than females, as a group, and much more likely to commit murder, armed robbery, rape, and other dastardly deeds.

A Tautology at John 19:22?

"What I have written, I have written."  (Pilate)  Another example of a tautological formulation the meaning of which is non-tautological:  What I have written I will not change.  Sentence meaning and speaker's meaning come apart.

I explore this phenomenon in detail in the following posts:

When is a Tautology not a Tautology?

Seldom Seen Slim on Tautologies that Ain't

'He's His Father's Son': More on Tautologies that Ain't

Mass Incarceration?

Leftist lies here demolished.

To understand the Left you must never forget that truth is not a leftist value.  Living proof: Obama and Hillary.

Leftists, like Islamists, feel justified in engaging in any form of mendacity so long as it promotes their agenda.  And of course the agenda, the list of what is to be done (to cop a line from V.I. Lenin), is of paramount importance  since, as Karl Marx himself wrote, "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it." (11th Thesis on Feuerbach). The 'glorious' end justifies the shabby means. 

As for Islamists, their doctrine in support of deception is called taqiyya.

Islamism is the communism of the 21st century.

You should not take at face value anything any contemporary liberal says.  Always assume they are lying and then look into it.  Obama, of course, is the poster boy for the endlessly repeated big brazen lie.  It is right out of the commie playbook.  "If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan."

Companion post:  Orwellian Bullshit

You may also enjoy Hillary the Fabulist

Is the Christian the True Philosopher?

Steven Nemes makes two main points in his Christian Life as Philosophy.  The first I agree with entirely: Jesus Christ is not a philosopher.  The philosopher is a mere lover of wisdom.  His love is desirous and needy; it is eros, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks.  But Jesus Christ lacks nothing; he is is the fullness of wisdom, "The Wisdom of God embodied," as Nemes accurately puts it.  So Christ is no lover of wisdom in the strict sense in which Socrates is a lover of wisdom.  Divine love is not erotic but agapic.

The wisdom of Socrates was largely the wisdom of nescience: he knew what he did not know.  In stark contrast, Christ claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth in the via, veritas, vita passage at John 14:6: "I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me."  Ego sum via et veritas et vita; nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me.

Here is Nemes' second point:

So Christ falls into the category of god or sage (or both), rather than that of philosopher. On the other hand, the Christian — the person who desires to learn of Christ, and who finds in him the fount of all wisdom — is the true philosopher. The Christian admits that she lacks wisdom, yet she desires it. So she goes to the source of all wisdom, which is Christ, in order to learn from him.

Christian life can therefore be understood as philosophy: a desirous effort to learn wisdom from Wisdom Itself, embodied in the person of the Godman Jesus Christ.

I disagree with this second point. A philosopher is not only one who, lacking wisdom and desiring it, seeks it, but also one who seeks the truth in a certain way, by a certain method.  It is characteristic of philosophy that it is the pursuit of truth by unaided reason.  'Unaided' means: not aided by divine revelation.  (It does not mean that the philosopher does not consult the senses.)  The philosopher operates by reason and seeks reasons for what he believes.  The philosopher relies on discursive reason as he encounters it in himself and accepts only what he can validate by his autonomous use of reason.  Qua philosopher, he accepts no testimony but must verify matters for himself .  The philosopher is like Doubting Thomas Didymus at John 20:25: "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." 

That is the attitude of the philosopher.  The philosopher is an inquirer into ultimate matters, and doubt is the engine of inquiry.  Where's the evidence?  What's the argument?  What you say may be true, my brothers, but how do you know?  What's your justification?  You say  our rabbi rose from the dead?  That sort of thing doesn't happen!  I want knowledge, which is not just true belief but justified true belief.  You expect me to believe that Jesus rose on no evidence but your testimony from probably hallucinatory experiences fueled by your fear and hunger and weakness ?  Prove it!  W. K. Clifford takes it to the limit and gives it a moral twist:  "It is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything on insufficient evidence."  Presumably the testimony of a bunch of scared, unlettered, credulous fisherman would not count as sufficient evidence for Thomas Didymus or Clifford.

The Christian, however, operates by faith.  If Reason is the faculty of philosophy, Faith is the faculty of religion.  The philosopher may reason his way to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, but he cannot qua philosopher arrive at the saving truth that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14) by the use of reason.  The saving truths are 'known' by faith and not by reason.  It is also clear that faith for the Christian ranks higher than reason.  As Jesus says to Thomas at John 20:29:  "Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen and have believed."

The attitude of the believer who is also a philosopher is fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding.  But what if no understanding is found?  Does the believer reject or suspend his belief?  No.  If he is a genuine believer, he continues to believe whether or not he achieves understanding.  This shows that for the believer, reason has no veto power.  The apparent logical impossibility of the Incarnation does not cause him to reject or suspend his belief in Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  If he finds a way to show the rational acceptability of the Incarnation, well and good; if he fails, no matter.  The Incarnation is a fact known by Revelation; as an actual fact it is possible, and what is possible is possible whether or not we frail reeds can understand how it is possible.  The believer in the end will announce that the saving truths are mysteries impenetrable to us here below even if he does not go to the extreme of a Tertullian, a Kierkegaard, or a Shestov and condemn reason wholesale.

The attitude of the philosopher who is open to the claims of Revelation is different.  He feels duty-bound by his intellectual conscience to examine the epistemic credentials of Biblical revelation lest he unjustifiably accept what he has no right to accept.  This attitude is personified by Edmund Husserl.  On his death bed, open to the Catholic faith, he was yet unable to make the leap, remarking that it was too late for him, that he would need for each dogma five years of investigation.

There is a tension here and it is the tension between Athens (Greek philosophy) and Jerusalem (the Bible), the two main roots of the West whose fruitful entanglement is the source of the West's vitality.    As Leo Strauss sees it, it is a struggle over the unum necessarium, the one thing needful or necessary:

To put it very very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is is the life of autonomous understanding.  The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love.  The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 246, bolding added.)

So is the Christian the true philosopher?  Only in the sense that philosophy points beyond itself to something that is no longer philosophy but that completes philosophy while cancelling it. I am tempted to reach for an Hegelian trope while turning it on its head:  if Christianity is true, then philosophy is aufgehoben, sublated, in it.  If Christianity is true, then the Christian arrives at the truth that the philosopher at best aims at but cannot arrive at by his method and way of life, the life of autonomous understanding.  To achieve what he aims at, the philosopher would have to be "as a little child" and accept in obedient love the gift of Revelation.  But it is precisely that which he cannot do if he is to remain a philosopher in the strict sense, one who lives the life of autonomous understanding.

The Christian life is not the philosophical life.  It lies beyond the philosophical life and, if  true, is superior to it.

On Indoctrination

Is indoctrination ever a good thing?

Presumably, to indoctrinate is to teach one doctrine as if it is true, as opposed to presenting a variety of different doctrines on the same topic without endorsing any one of them.  In general, indoctrination ought not be done at the college level: Competing positions should be presented fairly and objectively and students should be encouraged to think matters through themselves and form their own opinions.  But this point demands careful qualification. 

For surely indoctrination is legitimate in some subjects such as mathematics and the hard sciences.  No one could fault a math or science teacher for failing to give equal time to the views of numerologists, alchemists, astrologists, flat earthers and geocentrists.  And in political science classes short shrift should be given to 9-11 'truthers' and other conspiracy enthusiasts.  Their views may be discussed in passing, but to present them as if such theories are serious contenders in the arena of ideas makes a mockery of the search for truth, which presumably is what universities ought to be about. Certain views are beyond the pale and ought not be dignified by being taken seriously, e.g., Holocaust denial, the allegations made in the protocols of the Elders of Zion, the views of NAMBLA members, and so on.

But even in philosophy some indoctrination could well be justified, in logic, for example. One is justified in teaching introductory standard logic dogmatically without bringing in Hegelian and Marxist and dialetheist critiques of the law of non-contradiction, say.  But not only in logic.  To borrow an epithet from Arthur Collins, eliminative materialism is a 'lunatic" philosophy of mind.  I would cover it in a philosophy of mind course, but I would not present it as a possible view that one might justifiably hold; I would present it as not merely false but as incoherent.  And I would take myself to be justified in doing so.  Of course, I would present the doctrine and the arguments thought to support it accurately; but I would not present it as if it were one epistemically possible view among others.  So in that sense I would be engaged in legitimate indoctrination: if not by the promotion of the true view, at least by the rejection of false or incoherent ones.

If one were to oppose all indoctrination, then one would have to present every extant view on every issue as if it had a legitimate claim on our attention.  But this would encourage the view in students that all views are equally good, which is obviously not the case.   For example, in the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism, behaviorism, and type-type identity theory are all very bad theories with eliminativism being the worst and the identity theory being the best of the three.  But nothing hinges on this example.  I could give many from different areas of philosophy.  The point is that a pedagogic posture of studied neutrality with respect to every view is as bad as an extreme doctrinalism in which contentious positions are tendentiously promoted.

One can see from these sketchy remarks that the issue is not easily sorted out.  Teaching that promotes relativism and skepticism, that leaves the student with the notion that all views are equally good or that nothing can be known is bad teaching.  Equally bad is teaching that merely foists opinions on students without inculcating habits of critical thought or without fairly presenting the debates surrounding reasonably debatable issues.  (Not all issues, however, are reasonably debatable.) Navigating between the Scylla of of the one and the Charybdis of the other is no easy task.