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Comment by doone on October 5, 2012 at 4:23pm

THIS ENDLESSLY FASCINATING, ENDLESSLY MULTIPLE HERO

The problem with Odysseus’ intelligence, for many philosophical readers, is that it looks too self-serving. Odysseus is willing to put his mind to anything, and adopt any available means, in order to achieve his own selfish goals. This is the sophistical Odysseus damningly represented in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the man who is perfectly willing to trick a sick, lonely old man into giving up his only weapon and only means of livelihood – and do it without compunction, if that’s what it takes to win the war. No moral philosopher wants to taint himself with that particular kind of cleverness. Philosophers who focus on Odysseus’ intelligence, then, had to make extremely clear that the hero does not use his intelligence at the service of his own gain. Rather, he subdues his selfish passions for the sake of wisdom. The Calypso episode is a key piece of evidence for Stoics such as Epictetus. Odysseus’ behaviour in leaving Calypso is taken as a sign that he subordinates mere pleasure to the higher calling of wisdom – despite the fact that, as Montiglio notes, Odysseus in Homer doesn’t seem to be having any fun with Calypso at all (he is crying; he wants to go home).

more from Emily Wilson at the TLS here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on August 30, 2012 at 5:21pm

FOUR KINDS OF PHILOSOPHICAL PEOPLE

BLS Nelson in Talking Philosophy:

In my experience, many skilled philosophers who work in the Anglo-American tradition will tend to have a feverish streak. They will tend to find a research program which conforms with their intuitions (some of which may be treated as “foundational” or givens), and then hold onto that program for dear life. This kind of philosopher will change her mind only on rare occasions, and even then only on minor quibbles that do not threaten her central programme. We might call this kind of philosopher a “programmist” or “anti-skeptic“, since the programmist downplays the importance of humility, and is more interested in characterizing herself in terms of the other virtues like philosophical rigour.

You could name a great many philosophers who seem to hold this character. Patricia and Paul Churchland come to mind: both have long held the view that the progress of neuroscience will require the radical reformation of our folk psychological vocabulary. However, when I try to think of a modern exemplar of this tradition, I tend to think of W.V.O. Quine, who held fast to most of his doctrinal commitments throughout his lifetime: his epistemological naturalism and holism, to take two examples. This is just to say that Quine thought that the interesting metaphysical questions were answerable by science. Refutation of the deeper forms of skepticism was not very high on Quine’s agenda; if there is a Cartesian demon, he waits in vain for the naturalist’s attention. The most attractive spin on the programmist’s way of doing things is by saying they have raised philosophy to the level of a craft, if not a science.

—-

“What’s attractive about looking at all philosophers in part suspiciously and in part mockingly is not that we find again and again how innocent they are… but that they are not honest enough in what they do, while, as a group, they make huge, virtuous noises as soon as the problem of truthfulness is touched on, even remotely.” – Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil

Programmists are common among philosophers today. But if I were to take you into a time machine and introduced you to the elder philosophers, then it would be easy to lose all sense of how the moderns compare with their predecessors. The first philosophers lived in a world where science was young, if not absent altogether; there was no end of mystery to how the universe got on. For many of them, there was no denying that skepticism deserved a place at the table. From what we can tell from what they left behind, many ancient philosophers (save Aristotle and Pythagoras) did not possess the quality that we now think of as analytic rigour. The focus was, instead, of developing the right kind of life, and then — well, living it.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:08 PM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on August 19, 2012 at 7:28pm

Plato: The Original Sci-Fi Author

 

by Matthew Sitman

Charlie Jane Anders argues that "science fiction doesn't just illuminate philosophy — in fact, the genre grew out of philosophy, and the earliest works of science fiction were philosophical texts." She describes the nature of the genre this way:

Science fiction is a genre that uses strange worlds and inventions to illuminate our reality — sort of the opposite of a lot of other writing, which uses the familiar to build a portrait that cumulatively shows how insane our world actually is. People, especially early twenty-first century people, live in a world where strangeness lurks just beyond our frame of vision — but we can't see it by looking straight at it. When we try to turn and confront the weird and unthinkable that's always in the corner of our eye, it vanishes. In a sense, science fiction is like a prosthetic sense of peripheral vision.

And that, for Anders, is what philosophy at its best does, too - provide thought experiments that helps to see our situation with fresh eyes. Unsurprisingly, it all goes back to Plato:

Plato is probably the best-known user of allegories — a form of writing which has a lot in common with science fiction. A lot of allegories are really thought experiments, trying out a set of strange facts to see what principles you derive from them. As plenty of people have pointed out, Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the template for a million "what is reality" stories, from the works of Philip K. Dick to The Matrix. But you could almost see the cave allegory in itself as a proto-science fiction story, because of the strange worldbuilding that goes into these people who have never seen the "real" world. (Plato also gave us an allegory about the Ring of Gyges, which turns its wearer invisible — sound familiar?)

Comment by doone on July 8, 2012 at 11:31pm

Chart Of The Day

A detail from the history of philosophical connections according to Wikipedia:

The full chart is here. Simon Raper explains how he made it:

Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. The node and text are sized according to the number of connections. The algorithm that visualises the graph also tends to put the better connected nodes in the centre of the diagram so we get the most influential philosophers, in large text, clustered in the centre. It all seems about right with the major figures in the western philosophical tradition taking the centre stage. ... A shortcoming however is that this evaluation only takes into account direct lines of influence. Indirect influence via another person in the network does not enter into it. This probably explains why Descartes is smaller than you’d think.

Or as MetaFilter put it:

Statistician Simon Raper has used Wikipedia and the open source graph visualization software Gephi to do what took sociologist Randall Collins 25 years to do in his book The Sociology of Philosophies, that is, map the relations of influence in the history of philosophy.

Comment by doone on June 23, 2012 at 11:57am

SECULARISM: ITS CONTENT AND CONTEXT

Excerpted from Akeel Bilgrami at The Immanent Frame:

Second, for all this generality just noted, ‘secularism’ —unlike ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’—is quite specific in another regard. It is the name of a political doctrine. As a name, it may not always have had this restriction, but that seems to be its predominant current usage. So, to the extent that it takes a stance vis-à-vis religion, it does so only in the realm of the polity. It is not meant—as the terms ‘secular’ and ‘secularization’ are—to mark highly general and dispersed social and intellectual and cultural phenomena and processes. Unlike the term ‘secularization,’ it is not so capacious as to include a stance against religion that requires redirection of either personal belief or, for that matter, any of a range of personal and cultural habits of dress or diet or… Thus it is not a stance against religion of the sort that atheists and agnostics might wish to take or a stance that strikes attitudes (to say nothing of policies) about the hijab. The increase in a society of loss of personal belief in God or the decrease in church- or synagogue- or mosque-going or the surrender of traditional religious habits of dress or prohibitions against pork, may all be signs of increasing ‘secularization’ but they are irrelevant to the idea of secularism...

Third, secularism, as a stance regarding religion that is restricted to the polity, is not a good in itself. It seeks what is conceived, by those who favour it, to promote certain other moral and political goods, and these are goods that are intended to counter what are conceived as harms, actual or potential. This third feature may be considered too controversial to be regarded as a defining feature, but its point becomes more plausible when we contrast secularism with a more cognitive (rather than political) stance regarding religion, such as atheism. For atheists, the truth of atheism is sufficient to motivate one to adhere to it and the truth of atheism is not grounded in the claim that it promotes a moral or political good or the claim that it is supported by other moral or political values we have. By contrast, secularists, to the extent that they claim ‘truth’ for secularism, claim it on grounds that appeal to other values that support the ideal of secularism or other goods that are promoted by it. Secularism as a political doctrine arose to repair what were perceived as damages that flowed from historical harms that were, in turn, perceived as owing, in some broad sense, to religion. Thus, for instance, when it is said that secularism had as its vast cradle the prolonged and internecine religious conflicts in Europe of some centuries ago, something like this normative force of serving goods and correcting harms is detectably implied.

Read the rest here.

Posted by Zujaja Tauqeer at 11:14 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on May 25, 2012 at 9:03am

DIVINE MACHINES: LEIBNIZ AND THE SCIENCES OF LIFE

Jeffrey K. McDonough reviews Justin Smith's Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life:

It is widely recognized that Leibniz's philosophical thought is deeply influenced by the mathematics, physics and philosophical theology of his era. Justin E. H. Smith's Divine Machines argues that many of Leibniz's most central philosophical doctrines are similarly bound up with the life sciences of his time, where the "life sciences" are understood very broadly to include fields as diverse as alchemy, medicine, taxonomy, and paleontology. Smith's groundbreaking exploration represents an important contribution to our understanding of both Leibniz's philosophy and the study of life in the early modern era. It is to be recommended to historians, philosophers, and historians of philosophy alike. Below I highlight four central topics in Smith's book, raising some reservations along the way.

1. First Things

The first part of Divine Machines is divided into two chapters, the first of which explores Leibniz's views on medicine. As Smith shows in detail, Leibniz, like many of his early modern contemporaries, was deeply interested in the study of medicine and its ancillary fields. Thus in a letter of 1697, Leibniz declares medicine to be "the most necessary of the natural sciences" and maintains that it is "the principal fruit of our knowledge of bodies," since the promotion of health may allow us to "work for the glory of God" (26). This lofty aim no doubt bolstered Leibniz's interest in (what we would call) chemistry and anatomy (28-33, 48-58). In connection with the former, Smith provides a rather detailed account of Leibniz's treatise on the "purgative power" of the ipecacuanha root, a treatise that Smith calls, with (I assume) unintentionally faint praise, "the most comprehensive and influential of Leibniz's contributions to the history of medicine and pharmacy" (40). In connection with anatomy, Smith chronicles what he sees as a shift in Leibniz's enthusiasms away from vivisection towards microscopy.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 07:41 AM | Permalink 

Comment by Chris on April 24, 2012 at 3:49am

I like the upside down 'tee' for Atheist.

Comment by Marianne on April 23, 2012 at 9:21pm

I'm afraid my mind is not very much geared toward minimalism!  I only recognized one, then got them bigger and understood...  thanks Doone

Comment by doone on April 23, 2012 at 7:33pm

Complex Philosophical Theories Explained in Basic Shapes

• Posted by alice on April 21, 2012 at 11:00am
• View Blog

If you enjoy seeing a complicated theory or idea boiled down to its essence, you'll appreciate this new set of posters by London based designer Genis Carreras. In fact, it should come as no surprise that Carreras claims to love "minimalism and Swiss style" especially after seeing this. Here he takes complex philosophical theories, like existentialism and utilitarianism, and whittles them down to basic shapes. Great!

http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/genis-carreras-complex-ph...

Comment by Adriana on April 22, 2012 at 5:42pm

Oh, I see why now! It's a book. I guess he's trying to sell the book.

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