Maverick Philosopher – Page 535 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Popular Conceptions and Misconceptions of Philosophy

If you are a philosopher or a student of philosophy, how do you respond when someone asks what you do or study? What sorts of misconceptions about philosophy and other disciplines have you encountered? Combox open!

1. When I was a graduate student I would sometimes deflect the question by saying 'mathematics.' But then one day I received the reply, "Why do we still need mathematicians? We now have computers to do their work." The fellow apparently thought that mathematicians spend their time doing computations sitting under green eyeshades, with paper and pencil . . . .

2. When I told an art historian at Cleveland State what I taught, he naively asked, "What's philosophy?" The man had no idea. Here was an intelligent man in the humanities who had no clue, no clue at all.

3. An R. N. in one of my classes was very surprised to hear that there are philosophy journals. "There are journals of this stuff?"

4. At a rest stop off an interstate, some guy asked me what I do. "I teach philosophy." Whereupon the gent regaled me about the interesting philosophy they have up in Nova Scotia.

5. On a flight to Hawaii, I was reading from a copy of The Journal of Philosophy when the lady next to me expressed astonishment that philosophy is a technical subject and that she couldn't make head nor tail of the article I was reading. But at least she wasn't offended that it is a technical subject as some people are. The latter expect it to be comprehensible without any expenditure of effort, an expectation they do not have of physics, say. A curious double standard.

6. When an engineering professor of mine learned that I was abandoning engineering for philosophy, he said, "Whaddya gonna do when you graduate, philosophize?"

7. A relative asked me what I was working on. "At the moment I am reviewing so-and-so's book." "Are you getting paid for that?" The disgusting but all-too-common assumption is that only what one is paid to do is really worth doing. This assumption is discussed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

8. And then there's the opposite sort of response, "You actually get paid to teach that stuff?" The assumption this time is that philosophy is not worth being paid to do. Curious. If you are not paid, then you are wasting your time, and if you are paid, then you are still wasting your time — and others' time and money to boot.

9. No one asks the dentist whether he is still cleaning teeth or the carpenter whether he is still pounding nails. But it is not uncommon for a philosopher to be asked, "Are you still teaching philosophy?"

10. When my mother died, a great aunt of mine paid us a visit. She asked what I did. "I teach philosophy." "That must make you very serene." The old lady was not wrong about what philosophy ought to be. She was simply uninformed about what it actually is for most of its practitioners.

11. Philosophy courses, even if well-taught, don't seem to do much to ward of misconceptions. An Art Educator, with a doctorate in the field, thought philosophy a lot of rubbish because of her intro course in which she learned that some dead white guy said that everything is water, another that it is all fire, a third air . . . .

12. I overhead two girls talking about a colleague's logic class. "How do you like Dr. Richards' logic class?" "It's all a bunch of word games."

13. Philosophers are in part to blame for the PR problems of the discipline. Nationally syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager's low opinion of philosophy traces back to his freshman year. He began an intro course but dropped it when the professor opened by saying that they would be discussing whether or not people exist.

The Role of Concupiscence

The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, Plato, Augustine, and Pascal: "There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God." (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110) One wonders how much of the atheism of a Russell or a Sartre or an A. J. Ayer is the theoretical reflex of an inordinate love of this world and its flesh pots.

Frequent the flesh pots and it may turn out the best you can do by way of a conception of God is that of a celestial teapot.

Avicenna’s God and the Queen of England

For a long time now I have been wanting to study Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's hard-to-find The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Sunday I got lucky at Bookman's and found the obscure treatise for a measly six semolians. I've read the first five chapters and and they're good. There is a lack of analytical rigor here and there, but that is par for the course with the old-school scholastic philosophers. They would have benefited from contact with analytic philosophers. Unfortunately, most of the analysts of Wilhelmsen's generation were anti-metaphysical, being logical positivists, or fellow travellers of same, a fact preclusive of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefit Imagine the response of a prickly positivist to one of Jacques Maritain's more effusive tracts. But I digress.

Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons. To wit:

Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch. No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature. Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law." But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically. Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being. Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action. (Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43. First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)

Person and Potential

A person with undeveloped potential is not a potential person.

Forever Reading . . .

. . . never read. (Schopenhauer)

Correction (16 September): Schopenhauer is not the source; he is quoting Alexander Pope.

The Vital Imperative

Live Well, Live Now.

Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts, but aficionados will want to read the recent Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac, a New Yorker piece that raises the question of the contribution of football-induced brain trauma to Kerouac's decline and early death.

In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer lays into Kerouac's poetry with some justification:

Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it’s particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac’s poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac’s staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound—like Twain’s novels and Lincoln’s speeches—in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.

David Ulin of the L. A. Times responds to Bawer.

A Crass Measure of Autonomy

A crass measure of autonomy is the American measure: automobility.

Blasted Typos!

I am astonished at my poor ability to spot typographical errors despite my assiduous exercise of what is pleonastically referred to as 'due diligence.' I see what I bloody well want to see. I read the following a good dozen times and failed to see the mistake:

Astinence is no mark of a rounder

which I just now corrected to

Abstinence is no mark of a rounder

which is my response to Jeff Hodges'

Absinthe makes the heart go founder.

But I can't hold a candle to my old friend Monterey Tom, the undisputed master of the typo, as he demonstrates here.

Arguments Don’t Have Testicles!

Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations. They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals.

A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier.

Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion. Without a moment's hesitation, retort: Arguments don't have testicles!

Other applications are easily imagined.

We ought to be able to extend the idea to race. Suppose a left-wing black takes umbrage at a Bill O'Reilly-type pointing out of the causes of the problems in the black 'community.' Say: In my neck of the 'hood, arguments they ain't got no skin color. Hell, they ain't got no skin!

Norman Podhoretz on Barack Obama

It is good to see that Podhoretz the elder is still writing.

Is Obama an incompetent, way out beyond his depth? Or is he very skillfully executing the plan he had all along? N-Pod argues the latter.

The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing
statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days
away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of
us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the
left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the
anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers,
not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original
"community organizer."

[. . .]

But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama
believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and
destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation
he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence. And
just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to
take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic "isolationist" label abroad.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fruits and Vegetables

Mongo Santamaria, Watermelon Man, 1963. 1963 was one great year for popular music of all genres.

Peter, Paul and Mary, Lemon Tree, 1962

Harry Nilsson, Coconut, 1971

Chet Atkins, Orange Blossom Special

Led Zepellin, Tangerine, 1970

Little Richard, Tutti Frutti, 1956

Harry Belafonte, Banana Boat Song, 1956

……

Booker T and the MGs, Green Onions. Roy Buchanan guitar slinger version.

Dee Dee Sharp, Mashed Potatoes, 1962

The Kingsmen, Jolly Green Giant

Absence and Presence

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, as sometimes it does, it is equally true that sometimes presence makes the fickle look yonder.

It is in keeping with the chiaroscuro of our life here below that love and friendship thrive best on a blend of absence and presence.

Paul Churchland on Eliminative Materialism

Via Ed Feser, I see that that Paul Churchland's Matter and Consciousness has appeared in a third edition. Just what the world needs. I concur with Ed's judgment:

The only thing more outrageous than Churchland’s persistence in superficiality and caricature would be the continued widespread use of his book as a main text for introductory courses in philosophy of mind — at least if it were not heavily supplemented with readings that correct his errors, and actually bother to present the main arguments for dualism.

To 'celebrate' this great event in the publishing world, I post a revised version of an entry from about five years ago:

The most obvious objection to eliminative materialism (EM) is that it denies obvious data, the very data without which there would be no philosophy of mind in the first place. Introspection directly reveals the existence of pains, anxieties, pleasures, and the like. Suppose I have a headache. The pain, qua felt, cannot be doubted or denied. Its esse is its percipi. To identify the pain with a brain state makes a modicum of sense, at least initially; but it makes no sense at all to deny the existence of the very datum that gets us discussing this topic in the first place. But Paul M. Churchland (Matter and Consciousness, rev. ed. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 47-48) has a response to this sort of objection:

The eliminative materialist will reply that that argument makes the same
mistake that an ancient or medieval person would be making if he insisted that
he could just see with his own eyes that the heavens form a turning sphere, or
that witches exist. The fact is, all observation occurs within some system of
concepts, and our observation judgments are only as good as the conceptual
framework in which they are expressed. In all three cases — the starry sphere,
witches, and the familiar mental states — precisely what is challenged is the
integrity of the background conceptual frameworks in which the observation
judgments are expressed. To insist on the validity of one's experiences,
traditionally interpreted, is therefore to beg the very question at issue. For
in all three cases, the question is whether we should reconceive the
nature of some familiar observational domain.

Even if we grant that "all observation occurs within some system of concepts," is the experiencing of a pain a case of observation? If you know your Brentano, you know that early on in Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint he makes a distinction between inner observation (innere Beobachtung) and inner perception (innere Warhnehmung). Suppose one suddenly becomes angry. The experiencing of anger is an inner perception, but not an inner observation. The difference is between living in and through one's anger and objectifying it in an act of reflection. The act of inner observation causes the anger to subside, unlike the inner perception which does not.

Reflecting on this phenomenological difference, one sees how crude Churchland's scheme is. He thinks that mental data such as pains and pleasures are on a par with outer objects like stars and planets. It is readily granted with respect to the latter that seeing is seeing-as. A medieval man who sees the heavens as a turning sphere is interpreting the visual data in the light of a false theory; he is applying an outmoded conceptual framework. But there is no comparable sense in which my feeling of pain involves the application of a conceptual framework to an inner datum.

Suppose I feel a pain. I might conceptualize it as tooth-ache pain in which case I assign it some such cause as a process of decay in a tooth. But I can 'bracket' or suspend that conceptualization and consider the pain in its purely qualitative, felt, character. It is then nothing more than a sensory quale. I might even go so far as to abstract from its painfulness. This quale, precisely as I experience it, is nothing like a distant object that I conceptualize as this or that.

Now the existence of this rock-bottom sensory datum is indubitable and refutes the eliminativist claim. For this datum is not a product of conceptualization, but is something that is the 'raw material' of conceptualization. The felt pain qua felt is not an object of observation, something external to the observer, but an Erlebnis, something I live-through (er-leben). It is not something outside of me that I subsume under a concept, but a content (Husserl: ein reeller Inhalt) of my consciousness. I live my pain, I don't observe it. It is not a product of conceptualization — in the way a distant light in the sky can be variously conceptualized as a planet, natural satellite, artificial satellite, star, double-star, UFO, etc. — but a matter for conceptualization.

So the answer to Churchland is as follows. There can be no question of re-conceptualizing fundamental sensory data since there was no conceptualization to start with. So I am not begging the question against Churchland when I insist that pains exist: I am not assuming that the "traditional conceptualization" is the correct one. I am denying his presupposition, namely, that there is conceptualization in a case like this.

Most fundamentally, I am questioning the Kantian-Sellarsian presupposition that the data of inner sense are in as much need of categorial interpretation as the data of outer sense. If there is no categorization at this level, then there is no possibility of a re-categorization in neuroscientific
terms.

What is astonishing about eliminative materialists is that they refuse to take the blatant falsity of their conclusions as showing that they went wrong somewhere in their reasoning. In the grip of their scientistic assumptions, they deny the very data that any reasonable person would take as a plain refutation of their claims.

Misheard Maxims

I asked the Gypsy Scholar for more dueling maxims and he gave me a misheard maxim instead:

Absinthe makes the heart go founder

which inspires me to coin:

Abstinence is no mark of a rounder.

We 'need' to compile a list of misheard lyrics such as 'There's a bathroom on the right,' for "There's a bad moon on the rise," and 'Scuse me while I kiss the guy' for "Scuse me while I kiss the sky."