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June 17

Supernaturalism vs. Naturalism: Any Common Ground?

Supernaturalists suppose that existence is divided into the natural and supernatural, while naturalists suppose that existence is a unity, what we call nature. This fundamental disagreement about reality drives debates about religion, morality, cognition, personhood, free will, consciousness, and other basic questions. What underlies this disagreement, and is there sufficient common ground for productive argument? If not, can supernaturalists and naturalists agree to disagree?

Readings: 

David Papineau’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on naturalism.

Jon Jacob’s Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on naturalism.

Wikipedia on naturalism, here and here.

CreationWiki on supernaturalism.

Catholic Encyclopedia on the supernatural order.

Alvin Plantinga on naturalism ‘ad absurdum’.

At Naturalism.Org: 

·        Reply to Plantinga: Is naturalism self-defeating?

·        Two naturalists debate the commitments of naturalism.

·        When worldviews collide: root differences between theism and naturalism.

·        Review and exchange on Naturalism, a book critical of naturalism written by two supernaturalists.

·        Reality and its rivals: putting epistemology first.

 

 

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May 20

The Good Life: What is It, and How Would We Know?

Conceptions of the good life, of human flourishing, are as diverse as cultures and personalities. For some, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, while for others direct experience – of pleasure, excitement, novelty, triumph – is all that counts. Are we living lives worth living? What standards apply in deciding this question, and how do we justify them?

Readings:

Stanford Encyclopedia on well-being, see the various theories, e.g., hedonism.

Wiki on the good life.

Wiki on eudaimonia.

Owen Flanagan on eudaimonia, his related Beyond Belief lecture is here.

Christopher Grau on the Matrix and Nozick’s experience machine.

Scott Young on 7 rules for a life worth living- current U.S. pop psychology. Thought experiment: imagine variations of these as written in different cultures and times.  

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, co-editor, A Life Worth Living - on positive psychology, see his introduction to the book available in full at the link. 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations – the Roman emperor’s self-help manual on rules for a life worth living: transcending the self for the public good, finding consolations in philosophy. Browse this to see what seems plausible.

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April 15, 2009

Conservatism: Relic or Relevant?

In the aftermath of the 2008 election, conservatives are asking tough questions about their philosophy. What are the core tenets of conservatism? Should they be revised to reflect new political realities, and to respond effectively to pressing social concerns? Can conservatism change, and need it change, to offer a relevant alternative to a resurgent liberalism?

Readings:

The fall of conservatism by George Packer.

Conservatism at Wikipedia.

Political conservatism as motivated social cognition by J.T. Jost et al.

Newsweek on conservatism and its discontents:

 ~ A conservative’s case against Rush Limbaugh by David Frum.

 ~ The Republicans’ road back by Yuval Levin.

 ~ You can’t go home again by Jonathan Darman.

 
The culture warriors get laid off by Frank Rich.

Obama’s moral majority by Jonathan Haidt, on why Obama should recognize conservative moral concerns.

When morality opposes justice: conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize, by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham. 

 

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March 18, 2009

Compatibilists vs. Incompatibilists: Who’s Right About Free Will?

In one of the longest running debates in philosophy, compatibilists claim free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism, while incompatibilists claim they aren’t. Who’s right about this, and how do we decide?  So-called experimental philosophers are collecting data on what ordinary folk (non-philosophers) believe about free will and determinism. Should folk intuitions count in deciding the truth about free will, and if so, how much?

Readings:

[Suggestion: write down your own definition of free will before reading anything, then see where you end up in the traditional categories.]

Galen Strawson on free will at the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy – in nice bite sized chunks, this not too technical article gives the lay of the land regarding free will, compatibilism, incompatibilism and moral responsibility.

Michael McKenna on compatibilism (and incompatibilist objections to it) at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – a pretty thorough, somewhat more technical survey of the issues with further references.

Experimental philosophy on folk intuitions about free will:

• Philosophy’s great experiment – Prospect article on the rise of experimental philosophy.

• John Doris and Stephen Stich at SEP: Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches, section on moral responsibility.

• Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner: Surveying Freedom: Folk Intuitions about Free Will and Moral Responsibility.

• Shaun Nichols and Joshua Knobe: Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions

• Eddy Nahmais: Folk Fears about Freedom and Responsibility: Determinism vs. Reductionism
   

• Paul Bloom: My brain made me do it.

• Shaun Nichols: Free Will and the Folk: Reply to Commentators

• Should the folk stay deceived about free will? - Thomas Nadelhoffer and Adam Feltz: Folk Intuitions, Slippery Slopes, and Necessary Fictions: An Essay on Saul Smilansky’s Free Will Illusionism

• Shaun Nichols and Adina Roskies: Bringing moral responsibility down to earth

 

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February 18, 2009

The Limits of Altruism:
Why Do You Give What You Give–and Should You Be Giving More?

with guest presenter, Hillary Rettig, author of The Lifelong Activist

There are lots of explanations for altruism, or selfless giving, ranging from the mystical (karma), to the sociological (community standards), to the sociobiological (we “give” in ways that maximize our genes’ propagation). Whatever the mechanism, it's clear that some people give a lot, while others not so much. Is there a proper level of giving, and how do we, as members of a wealthy society, justify not giving more to those in dire need, for instance in Nepal or Malawi–or even here in the U.S.? And what happens when a monetary reward or other incentive enters the picture?

Readings:

Kidney Karmarama, or… how my kidney found Mr. Right, by Hillary Rettig.

Desperately seeking a kidney - Sally Satel in the New York Times.

Waitlisted to death: improving incentives for organ donations, from the Wall Street Journal.

Putting a price on compassion, from the New York Times.

Some things are sacred - scroll down to sidebar in New Scientist article, "Immoral advances: is science out of control?," page 3.

Famine, affluence and morality by Peter Singer.

What should a billionaire give, and what should you? - Peter Singer in the New York Times Magazine.

The Life You Can Save - Peter Singer's latest book.

Oprah's Big Give - altruism on reality TV.

 

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January 21, 2009

Reality: A Necessary Fiction?

We commonsensically distinguish between how things seem and how they really are in themselves. We suppose there’s a real world “out there” independent of cognition that we sometimes grasp accurately, whether in conscious experience or in scientific theories. But do we ever encounter the world directly, unmediated by our models of it?  If not, is the very idea of a cognition-independent reality suspect, or must it survive as a necessary assumption of cognition itself?

 

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December 17, 2008

Souls vs. Cybernetics: Who Are You, Essentially? 

We usually experience ourselves as a unified subject, a self that feels, thinks and acts. A traditional explanation for this is that we are essentially souls or non-physical mental agents that control the brain and body. But modern neuroscience shows no evidence for such an entity, only a neurally-based cybernetic system that somehow constructs the sense of self. How do we decide between these very different explanations? Will the soul survive neuroscience, and if not can we reconcile ourselves to being neural constructions, not immaterial essences?

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November 19, 2008

Feelings vs. Freedom: Is There a Right Not to Be Offended?

People sometimes deeply identify with their worldview and take offense when it’s criticized. In many secular societies, freedoms of conscience and speech trump any requirement to respect another’s fundamental beliefs, while in some religious societies such freedoms are limited or non-existent. This dispute is now playing out in the UN, where an amendment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been proposed to prohibit insults to religion. Should deeply held convictions be protected from ridicule? Or are there good reasons for all individuals and societies to agree that worldviews should be fair game for free speech?

Readings:

UN resolution Combating Defamations of Religion.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Freedom of Speech.

International Ethical and Humanist Union: Vote on freedom of expression marks the end of universal human rights.

Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, on why The OIC does not speak for Muslims. 

Hilary Charlesworth: Resist attempts to dilute our rights – “Although it is clear that there has been inadequate attention given to understanding Islam in the West, the [OIC] resolution seems more intent on protecting religious ideas rather than individuals' right to religious freedom.”

Austin Dacey’s statement on Islam and Human Rights.

New York Times: Unlike others, U.S. defends freedom to offend in speech. 

National Center for Science Education: “The 1968 Supreme Court decision, Epperson v Arkansas, struck down antievolution laws such as that under which John T. Scopes was tried in 1925 in Tennessee. Noting that antievolution laws were passed because they offended certain religious views, the court wrote,  '... the First Amendment does not permit the state to require that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma....'"

 “[F]rom the standpoint of freedom of speech and the press, it is enough to point out that the state has no legitimate interest in protecting any or all religions from views distasteful to them which is sufficient to justify prior restraints upon the expression of those views. It is not the business of government in our nation to suppress real or imagined attacks upon a particular religious doctrine, whether they appear in publications, speeches, or motion pictures.” From the Supreme Court decision in Burstyn vs. Wilson . See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Decision.

US comes out against UN resolution: “The issue is somewhat thorny for several E.U. members who have Holocaust-denial laws on the books. Muslim countries have referred to such legislation to justify the need for legal protection of Muslims against what they deem insulting attitudes and words. But the OIC’s willingness to equate defamation of religion with racism as well as the Danish cartoon flap prompted the Europeans to come closer to America’s position, a staunch defense of free speech based on the First Amendment.”

Edmund Standing: The Free Speech Deniers – on what he considers to be the mistake of criminalizing holocaust denial.

Blog from Norman Geras: “The liberal principle that we may interfere with the actions of another (only) to prevent harm to others does have its difficulties since, like many other conceptual boundaries, the boundaries of the concept of harm are fuzzy. But the principle, if it is one, that freedom of speech must be curbed to avoid offending people, is manifestly a qualification of the right of free speech that all but destroys the usefulness of the right. For there are no boundaries on what people can be offended by. Liberals favouring that particular qualification of the right should be put upon their mettle to say in what their liberalism consists. Offending people is sometimes wrong; but no one has a right against being offended and everyone has the right, accordingly, to give offence.”

The Open Interrogation of Faith, a review essay on The Secular Conscience by Austin Dacey.

Stanley Fish: There is no such thing as free speech.

Haroon Sidiqui: Free speech cannot be an excuse for hate – “People will always differ on what constitutes hate or where to draw the line on free speech. But most people would agree that free speech is not a licence to target vulnerable groups, let alone risk rupturing the common good in Canada.”

Letter: “There’s no such thing as free speech - and a good thing too. There are rather just degrees of tolerance, permissiveness and relative freedom, with boundaries, legal, social and cultural.”

Christopher Howse: Salman Rushdie taught liberals to hate Islam – “The secularist haters of Islam pretend that that they have a sacred principle of their own, which is freedom of speech, freedom to publish.” 

Mark Mike at the Calgary Herald: A bureaucratic, political and court addiction to speech suppression.

Wall Street Journal article on the Danish cartoon controversy.

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October 15, 2008

Moral Politics: Are Liberals Missing Core Values? 

Despite having most human things in common, liberals and conservatives disagree sharply about politics and values. Why? Research by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that liberals have a narrow, individualist system of morality centered on equality and welfare, while conservatives add the values of group loyalty, respect for authority, and honor for what’s pure and sacred. Are liberals wrong to discount such values? Are there standards outside these divergent moral systems by which we could decide which is best?  If not, then how can liberals, or conservatives, be sure they’re in the right?

Readings:

What Makes People Vote Republican?, by Jonathan Haidt at Edge.Org, plus commentary.

When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions That Liberals May Not Recognize, by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham.

Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality, by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham.

Haidt's page on moral foundations.

The Social Animal, op-ed by David Brooks, suggesting that conservatives, not liberals, are more individualist in some respects.

Moral Politics, by George Lakoff, contrasts the liberal and conservative mindsets and worldviews.

Empiricism and Equality: The Prospects for Enlightenment 2.0 at Naturalism.Org, includes an analysis of Haidt's descriptive and normative commitments.

 

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September 17, 2008

Mental vs. Physical: Does Folk Metaphysics Get It Right?

The distinction between mental and physical is basic to commonsense conceptions of reality and a central concern of philosophy of mind. Where do our notions of mind and body come from, and are they justifiable? Are we natural born dualists, as psychologist Paul Bloom has suggested?  If so, is the split between mental and physical an accurate reflection of reality, or an artifact of how we're predisposed to represent it? 

Readings: 

~ See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s (SEP) entry on dualism for a good overview of various distinctions between the mental and physical and their history. Here’s a quote describing some basic territory: 

Mental states are characterized by two main properties, subjectivity, otherwise known as privileged access, and intentionality. Physical objects and their properties are sometimes observable and sometimes not, but any physical object is equally accessible, in principle, to anyone. From the right location, we could all see the tree in the quad, and, though none of us can observe an electron directly, everyone is equally capable of detecting it in the same ways using instruments. But the possessor of mental states has a privileged access to them that no-one else can share. That is why there is a skeptical ‘problem of other minds’, but no corresponding ‘problem of my own mind’. This suggests to some philosophers that minds are not ordinary occupants of physical space. 

Physical objects are spatio-temporal, and bear spatio-temporal and causal relations to each other. Mental states seem to have causal powers, but they also possess the mysterious property of intentionality — being about other things — including things like Zeus and the square root of minus one, which do not exist. No mere physical thing could be said to be, in a literal sense, ‘about’ something else. The nature of the mental is both queer and elusive. In Ryle's deliberately abusive phrase, the mind, as the dualist conceives of it, is a ‘ghost in a machine’. Ghosts are mysterious and unintelligible: machines are composed of identifiable parts and work on intelligible principles. But this contrast holds only if we stick to a Newtonian and common-sense view of the material. Think instead of energy and force-fields in a space-time that possesses none of the properties that our senses seem to reveal: on this conception, we seem to be able to attribute to matter nothing beyond an abstruse mathematical structure. Whilst the material world, because of its mathematicalisation, forms a tighter abstract system than mind, the sensible properties that figure as the objects of mental states constitute the only intelligible content for any concrete picture of the world that we can devise. Perhaps the world within the experiencing mind is, once one considers it properly, no more — or even less — queer than the world outside it.

~ For alternatives to dualism that suggest how mind and body might be related, or reduce to one another, see the SEP entries on physicalism, functionalism, neutral monism and panpsychism, and see the Wikepedia entry on idealism. That the SEP doesn’t have an entry on idealism per se suggests that it’s not considered a live option by contemporary philosophers.

~ Paul Bloom’s essay at Edge.Org on how we might be Natural Born Dualists.

~ V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein’s paper on the Three Laws of Qualia.

~ G.E. Moore’s classic paper The Refutation of Idealism.

June 18, 2008

The Uncanny Effectiveness of Mathematics:
Is Nature Ultimately Quantifiable?

In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner wrote: “The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” Why should mathematics be so successful in describing the natural world? Are we projecting our mathematical concepts onto nature, or is nature in some sense ultimately quantifiable? If it is, is that a reflection of some yet deeper fact about reality?

Some readings and quotes:

~ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics, by R. W. Hamming:

"It was Galileo who said, 'The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics.' Newton used the results of both Kepler and Galileo to deduce the famous Newtonian laws of motion, which together with the law of gravitation are perhaps the most famous example of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in science. They not only predicted where the known planets would be but successfully predicted the positions of unknown planets, the motions of distant stars, tides, and so forth. Science is composed of laws which were originally based on a small, carefully selected set of observations, often not very accurately measured originally; but the laws have later been found to apply over much wider ranges of observations and much more accurately than the original data justified. Not always, to be sure, but often enough to require explanation."

"During my thirty years of practicing mathematics in industry, I often worried about the predictions I made. From the mathematics that I did in my office I confidently (at least to others) predicted some future events-if you do so and so, you will see such and such-and it usually turned out that I was right. How could the phenomena know what I had predicted (based on human-made mathematics) so that it could support my predictions? It is ridiculous to think that is the way things go. No, it is that mathematics provides, somehow, a reliable model for much of what happens in the universe. And since I am able to do only comparatively simple mathematics, how can it be that simple mathematics suffices to predict so much? "

"Mathematics has been made by man and therefore is apt to be altered rather continuously by him. Perhaps the original sources of mathematics were forced on us, but as in the example I have used we see that in the development of so simple a concept as number we have made choices for the extensions that were only partly controlled by necessity and often, it seems to me, more by aesthetics. We have tried to make mathematics a consistent, beautiful thing, and by so doing we have had an amazing number of successful applications to the real world."

"...the simplicity of mathematics has long been held to be the key to applications in physics. Einstein is the most famous exponent of this belief. But even in mathematics itself the simplicity is remarkable, at least to me; the simplest algebraic equations, linear and quadratic, correspond to the simplest geometric entities, straight lines, circles, and conics. This makes analytic geometry possible in a practical way. How can it be that simple mathematics, being after all a product of the human mind, can be so remarkably useful in so many widely different situations?"

~ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, by Eugene Wigner:

“However, it is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena. This shows that the mathematical language has more to commend it than being the only language which we can speak; it shows that it is, in a very real sense, the correct language.” 

“We have seen that there are regularities in the events in the world around us which can be formulated in terms of mathematical concepts with an uncanny accuracy.”

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning.”

Reply to Wigner and Hamming, by Jef Raskin:

"As evolution shaped the trout’s form for survival, so did evolution build mental abilities on the logical shape of the world."

~ Statement by Michael Heller, winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize:

"When contemplating the universe, the question imposes itself: Does the universe need to have a cause? It is clear that causal explanations are a vital part of the scientific method. Various processes in the universe can be displayed as a succession of states in such a way that the preceding state is a cause of the succeeding one. If we look deeper at such processes, we see that there is always a dynamical law prescribing how one state should generate another state. But dynamical laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations, and if we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about a cause of mathematical laws. By doing so we are back in the Great Blueprint of God’s thinking the universe. The question on ultimate causality is translated into another of Leibniz’s questions: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes.”

~ Philosophy of mathematics in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, see also sub-entries on Godel's mathematical Platonism and Quine's mathematical naturalism.

~ Philosophy of Mathematics in Wikipedia.

~ Mathematics and Reality, by David Valdman:

“In order to really grasp our reality, one needs to shed his potentially corrupt sensory data and any preconceived notions no matter how obvious seeming. All our experiences and observations are results of the interaction between our minds and bodies with an underlying reality, but if there were a way to bypass that interaction and reach the underlying reality directly only then would we grasp the essence of what is out there. We must literally study reality from the perspective of a rational inanimate object—a rock with reason—ignoring our internal reality and focusing only on the external. This requires a physics stripped of the physical. It requires mathematics.”
 

~ Quote from Douglass Hofstadter:

[Certain people] have an instinctive horror of any "explaining away" of the soul. I don't know why certain people have this horror while others, like me, find in reductionism the ultimate religion. Perhaps my lifelong training in physics and science in general has given me a deep awe at seeing how the most substantial and familiar objects of experience fade away, as one approaches the infinitesimal scale, into an eerily insubstantial ether, a myriad of ephemeral swirling vortices of nearly incomprehensible mathematical activity. -  Douglas Hofstadter, "Reductionism and Religion," reply to John Searle in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980 (emphasis added). Quoted by Goetz and Taliaferro in Naturalism.

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May 21, 2008, 7:30-9:30 pm