The Chasm

Prospectus Defense

2012-01-21T16:24:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I have been writing and encouraged to write as I continue with thinking and reading through Heidegger and Scheler. However, I had not defended my prospectus, and now I am defending my prospectus. It is really happening. I can see more light at the end of the tunnel. Now, the light is bright with tiny streams of white pouring along the contours of the tunnel. The tunnel walls are more refined and somewhere in the distance someone is waving one of these:

Apple Products, Teaching and FoxConn Workers

2012-01-19T07:04:00.000-08:00

I prefer Apple to PCs. I used PC for years before my wife got one. I borrowed her computer "all the time" to her annoyance and my joy. Recently, I realized that computers are like food. We don't know where they come from, and once you learn about the conditions of some livestock, you begin to wonder about eating meat. Today, I read an article, and while I'll admit about being a "smart guy", I never would have thought that Apple products were made in China. More to my dismay, I would have never thought Apple would put profits before the value of treating workers fairly. I assumed naively they were made in pristine conditions. It is one thing for someone else to get dooped, but not me. I should have known better. I should have had some cynicism about the world philosophy usually provides to know that things need questioned. With Apple, you always see a pristine product, clean surfaces and geometric lines that impose upon you a clean ideal of its inception. This is false now, and forever in the back of my head as I go about teaching and interacting with likely students that are mesmerized by Apple products. Among the many examples, consider this excerpt from the article:

Daisey [the journalist involved in the report from the article] interviews dozens of (former) workers who are secretly supporting a union. One group talked about using "hexane," an iPhone screen cleaner. Hexane evaporates faster than other screen cleaners, which allows the production line to go faster. Hexane is also a neuro-toxin. The hands of the workers who tell him about it shake uncontrollably.

So the people that clean the screens are using a neuro-toxin! That just takes my breathe away and now, I will be e-mailing Apple a link to this blog entry. I would welcome any response about the treatment of workers in China. I especially think it germane they respond with positive change, and not some liberal platitude. Otherwise, I -- as a PhD Candidate writing my dissertation and a professional that will have contact with numerous young minds -- will always use the FoxConn treatment of workers as an example of how someone ought not act. As a graduate student, I have already taught 650+ students, and will teach many more in the years to come. Let us say I get a job teaching a 4/4 load at a university that does semesters. Here, around 35 students is a maxed out capacity for teaching Intro to Philosophy. Let's say I did only intro courses each time. That would be 240 students per year, and any time I do Intro, I always cover moral philosophy. Moreover, my favorite teaching preference is always Intro to Ethics where one could do case studies of company practices, and talk about what ought to be. Let us assume this to be consistent for 30 years until I retire. In that time, I would have contact with 7200 students in my classroom in one lifetime. This is also not the number one actually encounters at a university that are not the ones you are teaching.

Here are some of the pictures and reporting from a sister article.

So how about it Apple? Address the conditions of FoxConn and the working conditions of the Chinese, and specifically if you do respond. Follow the article's suggestion:

Unlike some electronics manufacturers, Apple's profit margins are so high that they could go down a lot and still be high. And some Americans would presumably feel better about loving their iPhones and iPads if they knew that the products had been built using American labor rules.
In other words, Apple could probably afford to use American labor rules when building iPhones and iPads without destroying its business.
So it seems reasonable to ask why Apple is choosing NOT to do that.
(Not that Apple is the only company choosing to avoid American labor rules and costs, of course — almost all manufacturing companies that want to survive, let alone thrive, have to reduce production costs and standards by making their products elsewhere.)
The bottom line is that iPhones and iPads cost what they do because they are built using labor practices that would be illegal in this country — because people in this country consider those practices grossly unfair.
That's not a value judgment. It's a fact.

There are always independent minds in a computer science department willing to build you a computer for far less than you pay a company to make one.

This article is making me literally sick that I am writing my dissertation on an Apple. It is a very visceral thing, and Apple needs to respond now. To be clear, it is not just me they ought to respond, but permanent reform and apologies to the workers. I feel deeply bitter and betrayed. Moreover, joining the FLA as detailed here is not a real start until Apple pushes the Chinese government to treat its workers better. A Washington DC-based monitoring group is a platitude.

Leiterite Headaches: Crochetedly Ole' Critchley

2012-01-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

There is a really, really deep-seated hatred of not what we might call "Continental philosophy" but Simon Critchley. Leiter hates him. He abhors him, and the 'Party Line Continental' approach to philosophy. In a devastatingly characteristic fashion, Leiter writes

The actual reality is this: there are a group of philosophers in the Anglophone world--at about a dozen PhD-granting programs in the US (basically the "SPEP universe"), and at a handful of places in the UK--who are marginalized from and not very knowledgeable about the main tendencies in Anglophone philosophy over the last fifty years, but who are deadly serious about Heidegger and who need to justify their existence to university administrators. Even though there are now literally hundreds of philosophers at the major "analytic" departments that award PhDs who work on the Continental traditions in philosophy (including Heidegger), these SPEPPies need to perpetuate the illusion of two different "camps" so they can explain why the folks in "their camp" aren't taken seriously outside their network...

I don't mean to prod, but there is no nice way to say this. Having a like for Heidegger's philosophy is no different than doing a dissertation on, say, Kantian practical rationality, and then having to face the anonymous administrator. At the end of the day, administrators don't seem to get that the humanities in general are necessary for civilization. They simply and often think that you can't get rid of everything else except the English department because employers want students to write well. They just happen to have the name of the language everyone needs to be writing well, and so they are the only humanities to be left at the end.

Moreover, Leiter does admit that Party-Line Continentals are "marginalized from and not very knowledgeable about he main tendencies in Anglophone philosophy over the last fifty years." However, I think this patently false. I know several younger Heidegger scholars that don't fit this bill and have come from "SPEPpie" institutions. Lauren Freeman's article on moral particularism and Heidegger is exceptionally revealing. Steven Crowell's reading Heidegger and Korsgaard is intriguing. So, it is very possible to come from these schools, have a background in the tendencies of Anglo-phone philosophy and seriously reject those approaches. It's allowed to happen.

Again, there is some good work being done at SPEP just like good papers in epistemology are given at the APA.

At serious issue is the hermeneutic character of Heidegger's thought, and what this means for anyone that thinks philosophy arrives at some privileged insight. If Heidegger is right, then there are no more immutable truths revealed at the end of the day. It is in these ramifications of section 31 and 32 inside Being and Time that incur the most wrath when we think about the methods we use in philosophical reflection.

On Reading Heidegger

2012-01-08T01:17:00.000-08:00

My relationship to Heidegger is always rough. When you read him, it is hard to come away unscathed. Your thoughts take on his troubles as if someone had scratched you with mental sandpaper and once you wipe away the dust, you find a lingering smoothness you don't want to admit is there. I have never had this experience with any "analytic philosopher" before though perhaps there is an admitted love of Bernard Williams, W.D. Ross and Martha Nussbaum I find comforting. It is definitely not the same.

In a alluring passage, Heidegger illuminates what he thinks the "ultimate business of philosophy is," or at least one of its many features.

Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems (section 44 in BT).

I love that phrase preserving "the force of the most elemental words" through which undergo life. We live through life in its depth and mystery. In this way, Heidegger has always had a poetic bent to a phenomenological orientation to human life. Moreover, this is also suggestive as to why Heidegger finds all art poetic, and why I find his works preserving this elemental force and restoring wonder to philosophy from my brief excursion into analytic philosophy. Some insights escape us if we do not hold fast to how we undergo and experience them firsthand, and some structures of experience cannot be encapsulated by previous philosophical frameworks. Therefore, a new vocabulary that attends to the phenomenological mystery must be brought to the fore while at the same time not creating an "uninhibited word mysticism" in Heidegger's own words.

Preservation of elemental force in Western philosophy reveals one of the many currents operating in Being and Time. In BT, Heidegger is worried about how we relate and actualize the past into the present while simultaneously acknowledging the limits of human finitude. Central to his concern is the possibility of philosophizing itself, and even though Heidegger is suspicious of elements from that past as forming likely possibilities for the future of philosophy, he is deeply aware of the imposed limits of philosophy. It is no surprise that the above passage occurs in the section on truth. For him, "truth" is a time-honored concept and though it has been distorted by the past, it is still one of the most elemental words in philosophy. However, at the end of that section, Heidegger re-infuses the word with an almost poetic quality that many might not tolerate.

On the flip side, Heidegger intimates the sense to which some philosophical terminology can obfuscate the dimension of lived-experience by simply imposing a technical jargon on a series of problems. One could argue this is what actually was going on in ordinary language philosophy where, for instance, the analysis of the concept good could illuminate an entire system of ethics for Moore. Now, perhaps, that's not entirely fair. Moore had inherited the problem of value as how value-predicates functioned in moral propositions. Even so, one could sympathize with Heidegger about a clever and often called analytic proclivity to merely think about "philosophical problems." I have never trusted that there are cottage industry of philosophical problems on their own. However, I do think that there are problems enmeshed in a history of thinking that constantly repeat and challenge thinking. It is simply not possible to get at the problem on its own -- as if one is distilling the essence of it -- without also thinking how such historical elements are appropriated by those thinking through them.

So, if you are reading philosophers and your soul is not enlivened, if the text stays dry and dull in your hands, then either you or the text is doing something wrong. Maybe a little bit of both?...Philosophy cannot survive if the wonder of its engagement is not conveyed in the reading of it and its elemental force is lost.

Leiter on Analytic/Continental Divide

2011-12-19T21:26:00.000-08:00

I must say that I agreed with almost 100% of what he said here.

Phenomenology of Indefinite News and Bad Faith

2011-12-16T11:04:00.000-08:00

The exercise of a right comes with the responsibility of its exercise, not mere possession. So many people in this country think they have a right to speak freely, but the practical wisdom behind the first amendment is to foster an informed citizenry. Political discourse means nothing if we don't take it upon ourselves to fulfill an epistemic duty to be as informed as possible, and this means to go further than cable news.

Simply due to the phenomenology of the experience, one might find warrant in adopting more options for information. When I watch cable news, I am drawn in to the news anchor, and it is an organic experience from the news anchor to the dearth of content. The news anchor gestures, her voice calculating. She is pretty or he is handsome. The voice is melodic and average; the news anchor cannot be smart--only average in appearance, mannerism and depth of perspective. The news anchor is dressed in business professional suit, and participates in a broadcast alongside the spectator. The broadcast itself feigns a terminable point to which there is no end in site. Therefore, the spectator awaits the announcement and news, and the news anchor unwittingly crafts the discourse to embody its inevitable arrival. Yet, it does not come at all. In politics, though some event might be accomplished; it can always be undone. Conservatives can always undo health care reform. Some event's are too concrete not to arrive, but when they do they are held onto for dear life.

When there is a lot of build up for some announcement, the camera pans to squeeze every sense of an event's termination. What will be the outcome of Dr. Conrad Murray? Eventually, the jury will exit, announce judgment. For the 24 hour newscycle, it will continue. The camera pans to a panel of experts. These experts will speculate about what is to come next. Even though there is some resolution, there is no resolution for America. He will receive a lighter sentence because California is overridden with inmates already. The Judge will give the maximum penalty in this case claims another. At this point, however, the spectator doesn't know that the news cycle is trying to generate more drama out of an event that generated countless stories before. America's consciousness cannot endure without knowing what will happen, or so the mentality is proffered by cable news. The broadcast attempts to overcome the event's finality in judgment by generating more content of an indefinite future to which the broadcast is headed. If and when that does not work, there is more.

Later that night, a panel of experts led by a comedian or some pundit will claim an outrageously controversial claim. Pehraps, it is about M. Jackson's race and the fact that Murray is black (or some such nonsense). The claim will be outrageous and its only intent is to generate more emotional drama over the terminable event so as to render aspects of the trial as interminable--that is, until the newscycle finds another story to feed its desire to present content where none exists. In this way, the newscycle doesn't inform. Rarely are facts presented and when they are, there is bias everywhere operating at a subtle level. This is because what holds for political discourse in the United States is nothing more than browbeating ideology.

So what can be done. For starters, we could teach more philosophy. But obviously, I have an interest in that sort of thing.

As a citizen, we should expand access to information and make it socially unacceptable for people not to be informed. I don't know how to do this. I am sure this means that while everyone might not want to read the American Political Science Review, they should.

Theism and Philosophical Faith

2011-12-11T16:35:00.000-08:00

I don't usually comment on this topic; I leave it indeterminate. I find discussions about God overly simplistic and in an academic climate, if it is found out that you are a theist, people generally dismiss you without much foresight. But as I get further into the dissertation about Scheler, I am constantly questioning his move to Catholicism, and the romanticism of the universal church and feudalism central to his political thought. As a philosopher, I could spill nothing more original, newer or insightful into the discussion of God. In fact, I am anything but conventional with respect to God even though I take fellowship in the life that church offers.

For me, God is not a paternal authority in the heavens that revealed his infallible word in the form of the Bible that informs us as to how things literally are. This type of naivete with respect to scripture and to the concept of God unnerves me. Accordingly, not much can be said about God. It's not as if we have a speculative use of reason that can apprehend through intuition or the imagination what God must be like. In fact, Kant showed that speculation can both affirm and deny the thesis of God's existence with equal precision. As such, we are left within an "antinomy". This happens because speculation over extends its concepts without having any frame of reference in experience. For Kant, reason operates within strict limits. Therefore, if traditional metaphysics is deprived of its right to use speculative reason and moreover it has never been grounded in experience, reason loses its authority altogether to create a metaphysical system in which God is understood (or in which God is rejected). Kant's thought is liberating. Let me explain.

When a scientist and creationist both insist on the literal truth of their belief about the universe, they are attempting to describe reality as such. The scientist reifies his current models, considers them literally true about the structure of the world compared against Biblical literalism in much the same way that metaphysicians thought they could describe reality as such in speculation. Some might not insist it is the same since scientific procedures are open to revision through systematic experimentation. However, to be against the falsity of Christianity, the skeptic proposes science as a static alternative no matter what that current alternative is. Neurath's boat is taken as is. It's only relevance is that it is a substitute for a religious perspective.

When a religious observer insists that what is written is literally true, the religious observer denies there exists anything like interpretation. The Earth must have been created in 6 days. God revealed scripture as inerrant to human beings through revelation. As such, the content of the literal language cannot be challenged under any other guise but itself. Religious truth somehow transcends the attempt of finite human beings to understand its content given the distance in historical context of a nomadic people speaking a different language to the politics of what books exactly could count as official scripture.

When scientists desire to refute religion, they reify scientific content to be revealing of reality and its structure as such. When religious observers desire to refute science, they reify religious content to be revealing of reality and its structure as such. In both cases, they over-extend their concepts and on top of that reify reality to suit their own needs. In both cases, reality is, at best, a mind-independent world of facts that can be disclosed as such. This is similar to the Kantian position in which both the thesis and the anti-thesis are asserted without having any ground in experience. The mistake lies in not only considering the world mind-independent, but in thinking that one also has access to that mind-independence and the taken for granted assumption that reality endures uniformly as such. Under such a view, the epistemic standpoint we take up to reality is vastly oversimplified, and this explains the oversimplification of both. The scientific perspective cannot reify the world; it requires inquirers to maintain an openness such that future models of explanation can be revised. Likewise, the religious perspective relies on inquirers maintaining an openness to future possibility since God exceeds any representation we may have of She/He/It. Such an openness requires interpretation and not the literalism that accompanies that understanding. This can be shown in what faiths means.

Faith is not simply an epistemic standpoint with commitments attached to it such that it can be replaced by a superiorly informed standpoint of science. It is not as if these standpoints trade only on knowledge about reality as such and that's all that needs consideration. When scientists make that shift in an argument where they trade one belief that describes the world for another, they have forgotten that life cannot simply be reduced to the epistemic position from which it is judged, and more than that, the epistemic standpoint is not primitively-basic to life as many past analytic philosophers have regarded (I can have more to say about this later). Instead, life is a matter of a dynamic orientation we maintain towards the world.

God is not a being separate and apart from the world anymore than subjectivity for me is separate and apart from the world. Instead, being-human consists in taking up the possibilities towards life and experiencing the world in a very "thick" way. Every scientific or religious possibility involves this dynamic orientation of life. And within that orientation, both succumb to the relational possibility we call experiencing the world. Each bears within itself a limit to what can be experienced. For the scientist, the world is a series of causal relationships and the scientist seeks to control and harness nature for human purposes. It is therefore silent on the very transcendence of God if God is taken to be above and beyond the representational-causal order, and within a religious orientation, God is best regarded as the God not-yet-arrived (the kingdom yet to come), the expression of everything that is wholly other.

Since God cannot be known with any exactitude and exists as beyond all representational order, it is a matter of faith that it is taken up and lived just as much as the faith operative in science might summarized as the belief that nature is accessible to experimentation. The only requirement of this faith is not in reifying it as a possibility with a determinate content, but instead faith requires the openness to the God to which exceeds all representation. By exceeding all representation, God cannot be appropriated for any particular agenda, belief or creed. He cannot legitimize the oppression of that which is different and other. In this very exceeding representation, God's inability to be appropriated, reified and used for some instrumental end is the model by which the otherness found in humankind must be treated. In God as wholly other, so too is one human being completely and wholly other unto himself/herself, and it is this absolved and transcendent individual uniqueness that human being shares in God.

In such a conception, the transcendence of God is not a reality-as-such. It is not a metaphysical transcendence objectively discerned. Instead, the transcendence of God lies in the very same unique singularity of one individual. As Jean Paul Sartre showed a man is a "series of projects" that transcend himself. Many of our concerns and projects take on a life of their own above and beyond their origin in us, and yet in some sense, we must take ownership of them as well. They are as much a possibility for others as they are for us, and it is in this being-responsible-for in which any woman or man reveals his unique singularity to the world. In this way, I draw upon the same existential attitude that exhibits projects that man comes to exceed himself and likewise within God too. This transcendence, however, is a communal possibility, a renewed possibility in which we all must honor the singularity of God. The singularity of God is the infinite wholly otherness found in each other, and so it comes as no surprise that God is the call of the ethical demand to serve the otherness found uniquely in all of us.

Now, this might be hard to swallow, especially since I sit in a pew next to you. I will not share that I am a philosopher. Amongst other church-goers, I am merely a man sitting next to them. I do not share my skepticism about literalism of scripture, nor do I tell them that I see literature as an articulation of a symbolic order conditioned by language, history and the uniqueness of the interpreter. I merely see God not as a metaphor but as a possibility in which community can be realized and a tradition to ground it. The part at which religion becomes negative is when that which exceeds representation becomes a dogmatism rather than the openness required in the inter-human world. It is in this openness towards difference, multiplicity and otherness in which my faith can be found. It is a faith of possibility and that is all God could ever be.

College Majors that Don't Pay

2011-12-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

From the humorous post here to the ominous bureaucratic management of China's proposal here, it comes as no surprise that I, a philosopher, would wonder if both the United States and China operate under a mistake. This is the mistake that universities are responsible for the training of employees--this belief is supported by the thought that professional majors like engineering, computer science and business earn more than their liberal art counterparts. However, that might not be true. Consider Edwin Koc, Director of the Strategic and foundation research at the National Association of College Employers says,

But the advantage possessed by career-oriented majors may be short-lived. Once in a career path, the more general skills of communication, organization and judgment become highly valued. As a result, liberal arts graduates frequently catch or surpass graduates with career-oriented majors in both job quality and compensation. A longitudinal study conducted several years ago by the National Center for Educational Statistics found that the wage differentials that existed between career-oriented majors and academically oriented majors were all but eliminated within 10 years after graduation.

Now, if this is true, and my experience confirms that it seems to be so, then what universities should be doing is holding true to standards in which the best can succeed, and if others are willing to put in the hard work, then they too should be held to a standard of excellence steeped in the liberal arts tradition. This has always been my problem. Philosophy majors tend to be exceptionally bright. They are studying the physics of the humanities and they have acquired a level and depth to their critical thinking that outstrips the typical business student. Now, I don't pretend to be not biased, but I have also taught in universities in which this bears out time and time again. Business students account for 1 in 6 majors in the United States. Philosophy majors, I read somewhere, account for about 1% of all Bachelor degrees given out every year.

The NCES study doesn't surprise me given that liberal arts majors are more likely to attend postgraduate education of some variety, and the pressing need for future critical thinking skills in life may far outweigh exactly how an accounting major learns to do her thing.

But let me return to my initial thought. Is it the job of universities to improve the quality of the overall person, or train future workers in a economy? Why is it the university's sole responsibility to supply an economy with workers ready-made and gift-wrapped upon graduation? Given how volatile our economic cycles can be, I do not think something as unpredictable should have a bearing on educational outcomes at all. Perhaps, it is the economy and the people working within it that need to be more adaptive to the inherent chaos within how an economy moves. Ideas come from innovative people, individuals with skills to adjust to life. It makes no sense to plan a life around something as volatile as the economy. This is not a call to hold back a second and try to assess how we can best serve ours students. This can only be done by a liberal arts education that fosters the capacities to learn and adapt--that is, namely, teaching those critical thinking and communication skills that come from assessing arguments in Plato, or reading theology, art history or any number of classical disciplines in which have no direct immediate gain; instead, the humanities proffer a lifetime gain over a long period of study by promoting reflection, critical thinking and the ability to clearly articulate and appreciate contexts that transcend the immediate and instrumental needs.

Maybe the private sector can help and anticipate its own needs by further training people as the needs become apparent. If companies want good workers with critical thinking and communication skills, then perhaps they should invest in human capital more, and I'll increasingly teach more philosophy majors to boot.

UC Davis, Political Violence on Campus and the Occupy Movement

2011-11-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

Universities are not places for police actions, and the intimidation used by police on peaceful protests. Universities are no violence zones. Period. End of story. I'm sorry, but call me old-fashioned. Weapons do not belong where the mind should have free reign. This means that violence of any sort is intolerable and wrong. Universities are about seeking out the truth and asking questions. The point of a university is never to be a place that condones violence. When the Chancellor Linda Zatehi condoned and ordered the removal of peaceful protesters at UC Davis, she violated the sanctity of the university. I am not surprised at the least, however. The Administrators of our universities are often scholars that couldn't hack it.

Now let's not be fooled. The Occupy Movement is so named since it is a form of civil disobedience that disrupts the cohesiveness of a public space's meaning. It seeks to appropriate that space, to re-invent its original function and re-integrate that space into an interrogation of the de facto meaning the space originally held. In this way, the Occupy movement seeks a transformation of a space as part of its protest. It is a disruption of the original status-quo, and calls attention to the specific problems and challenges facing America. As such, it is a new form of civil disobedience. It is a call to self-interrogation inasmuch as it might highlight or specify its claims.

Within the occupation, there is no violence. It plays on the ambiguity by calling for transformation by occupying, but occupying with irony. Usually, the term occupying is completely disruptive in that occupiers are the leftover of some invading force--"the boots on the ground" keeping steady the peace after some war. Here, they are occupying not through violence, but by locking arms, holding working groups and sharing ideas so that something may foment, come to the surface and radiate outward. It is a call for social transformation without much design; it is an organic dialogue that moves about in its own way like an infant learning to take its first step. Eventually, it will take form, mature and make demands. But part of its inability to be co-opted by the larger discourses is an enactment of political refusal. The Occupying movement is a movement actual commitment since so many times before the partisan discourses seek to integrate populist movements into itself and play off that political energy. Here, the political refusal is a resistance, a civil disobedient form itself. In that regard, it is very clever; it is neither Democratic or Republican. Though, I wonder how long before the possibility of the Occupy Movement becomes a New Left and integrates itself into the populist movement to reelect President Obama. Time will only tell, though I digress.

As a form of peaceful resistance, the system will lash back. There will be arrests, perhaps violence as we saw, and the integrity of the university will be far from the police officer's mind. However, it should never be far from the mind of a Chancellor that calls for the intolerance of peaceful protesting.

A. R. Luther's "The Articulated Unity of Being"

2011-11-15T08:34:00.000-08:00

There is a lot in this essay, and I offer my thoughts in no particular order. I am, however, interested in what is necessitated ontologically for values to be given in experience, and how far the phenomenological method is privileged by Scheler--the latter is a question about the merits of interpretation of his works. Oftentimes when I discuss Scheler's work, it seems that people want to push the phenomenological angle and subordinate later inquiries into metaphysics and philosophical anthropology to Scheler qua phenomenologist. It is easy, however, to smooth over the complexity of a thinker's thought and relegate the complexity into a unified conception. We make systems out of past thinkers usually; it is rare that past thinkers attempted to systematize their own thought in ways we reconstruct and interpret them. Thus, I am plagued by the tenacity of the phenomenological angle of interpretation of his later works.

Most notably, Arthur Luther apparently had a fondness for the phenomenological interpretation to such an extent that he reads the Eternal Cosmos in Man against Sceler's phenomenology.

For Heidegger, existence can be described without value. In some way, there is a mooded relief and backdrop implicit in the field of human life, but there are no values associated with those moods, only their function in relation to us. However, for Scheler, values can be articulated without human beings, but what they cannot exist without is God. For Scheler, as Luther interprets him, man, person and God come together in a creative becoming that is inexhaustibly full and rich. It is a coming together of the vital impetus and blind releasements of force and power in our biological reality and simultaneously the abiding and immediate expression of our primordial loving. For Luther, this structure has more phenomenological depth.

Pushing deeper here, it must be said that simultaneous and co-operative acting does not mean that God executes an act and that man as person executes an act, and that these two acts coincide. Simultaneous acting means that an act executed in and through man as person, when it is directed towards higher values (ultimately the Holy) is simultaneously God acting, to the extent that He is becoming in and through man becoming as the realization of values, which although disclosed in and through man, transcend man as absolute, by hence, as values of the absolute person, as values which coincide with the directedness of primordial loving. Moreover, in and through such realization of values God becomes really and fully who He is, but in a way that does not exhaust the fullness who He is because it is a way rather than that fullness itself. This relation between fullness itself, whole or totality (Ganzheit), and concrete expression, manifestation, realization is possible because fullness itself, whole or totality here is spirit, which is to say, no thing or object. Fundamentally boundless, the fullness which is spirit is inclusive while transcending as a whole or totality, any expression, manifestation or realization (Luther, Articulated, p. 36).

The actualization of acts is a relational aspect given entirely in the fullness of spirit. Man as person realizes higher values in a simultaneity of God realizing his own fullness of spirit whenever we realize higher values. This realization is a becoming in and through man, and unmentioned in the passage above is the plurality necessitated by that becoming. As such, like Levinas, God can only be a possibility realized in human community in Scheler's thought. It takes others, and others held at the level of un-objectifiable spirit or person, for God to become realized in and through man. This is why Being for Luther and Scheler means "solidarity of persons." A solidarity of persons "is a community of uniquely executed dynamic orientations" (p. 37). Persons are radically unique points of dynamic orientation. Phenomenologically, they are given in terms of their ability to act and be free such that persons are spontaneous free initiators of acts.

The point of citing the above passage is that it one candidate amongst many that pushes Scheler in a phenomenological direction. However, I wonder if the tone of phenomenology is accomplishing anything significant here. This worry manifests since I have recently written extensively of the phenomenology of essences in the Formalism for part of my dissertation. I see this type of phenomenology as vastly different from Heidegger's hermeneutic turn in sections 31 and 32 of Being and Time. Luther construes Scheler's phenomenology as a deep commitment to an irreducibility. At the beginning of the Essay, Luther provides a lengthy but very relevant passage,

What is unique about Scheler's phenomenological approach is that it constitutes an attitude of "openness towards...", which permits what is revealing itself to reveal itself as it is in itself. The significance of this approach, or attitude, is that the openness it cultivates excludes reductionism of any sort. It is an openness which is ready for revelation in its fullness. More specifically, the openness here is the implicit affirmation that what appears is precisely what it is (Wesen) and not something else, hence, cannot be reduced to something else. The approach is not so much determined by an applied methodology as it is by how what is appear is , in fact, appearing in the openness who is man. The effort, then, in Scheler's phenomenology is not to reduce something to something else, or to explain something away, or to demonstrate the proof of something , but to account for "everything" as it discloses itself in concrete experiencing...Phenomena are everywhere apparent, referring to one another, in a dynamism of appearing that indicates an inexhaustible richness of potential meaning-fulfillment. The problem becomes one of penetrating each phenomenon, each revelation as it is in itself, in order to lay bare or let appear in some way that center or core or whole or totality which constitutes its essence (Wesen) or inner actuality (Wirklichkiet), without losing sight of the fact that each phenomenon is in relation to all other phenomena. The relational character of "appearing" is a priori. Man is man as a unique "place" of appearing; appearing here includes implicitly all that can appear, without determining in advance what will appear, with respect to the phenomenon itself or to the phenomenon as situated in the horizon or totality. In short, one is always encountering a whole, in and through perspectives, which either diminish or augment, occult or disclose the richness of that whole (Luther, Articulated, p. 4-5)

Before, you will note in the very opening, two words used by Luther. These are "revelation" and "fullness." Fullness for Luther is a way to communicate how the givenness of spirit and God are considered overflowing. A language of epistemological emphasis would talk about spirit and God as reified abstract representations,and could not account for the experiential elements of these two words. Yet, this brings up the fascinating point that if Luther along the way has tripped up Scheler. In the Formalism, Scheler makes references to God and the relationship between man, person, values and spirit. Yet, he does not present his talk about phenomenological method with the chosen religious tones with which Luther communicates it. Phenomena are apprehended as immediately given essences within intuition. If anything, the phenomenology of the Formalism is more akin to something like William Alston's religious epistemology than importing the theological emphasis with phenomenological tones.

Luther's talk about phenomenological description not succumbing to reductionism is a familiar point, especially considering the inauguration of phenomenological method in Husserl preoccupied itself with the erroneous tendency of psychologism. Psychologism proffered to reduce logical laws to descriptive psychological laws to the point that the normativity of logical laws could not suggest itself as a way we ought to reason. Instead, if we reasoned logically, it was because we were determined to do so since we had proper psychologies. Husserl's Logical Investigations is, then, a defense of the irreducibility of logical laws and how they are constituted within intentional consciousness. Husserl, like Luther, is consistently a good phenomenologist, and insofar as Scheler is a phenomenologist, he is attempting to describe phenomena as they appear to him. We do not presuppose anything about those phenomena, but let them appear as they will in experience. However, this also commits us to the possibility that if we are "too open" or in Luther's emphasis too "open towards" in attitude, then any phenomenon insofar as we have a word for it, or need to invent one, can appear for phenomenological investigation. This would be fine if we were nominalists like William James. However, Scheler has some very nasty things to say about ethical nominalism to the point that we can infer that he would be against any larger commitments to nominalism. By Luther exploiting that phenomenological openness in Scheler, it is very easy to sneak within that openness the very suppositions of a theological phenomenology without really being honest about it. It is, therefore, an open question whether or not all things can appear, nor should we be so naively open to the world such that simply because Scheler's phenomenological approach admits of irreducible phenomena that we should admit God, spirit, persons and values tout court.

Certainly, God, spirit, persons and values have a central place in Scheler's thought. This cannot be ignored. However, is it really the case that phenomenology can admit these things and still remain phenomenological? Perhaps, I am echoing Dominique Janicaud's worry too much. If we honestly bracket all things about moral experience, it seems intelligible that we can phenomenological access to the givenness of value in emotive intuition. I can readily point to examples of those kind such as loving and preferring in Scheler's thought, and readily admit them as evidence. Yet, to point to something like spirit or God is another matter entirely. Scheler can freely admit a phenomenological conception of the person as the intentional unity of acts. Being a person manifests as being the locus of intentionality in a lived-body. These are things that we can also easily point to describe. However, to call spirit the interiority of our experience the sphere of actuality and one of several spheres in human experience is not a readily available phenomenological insight. These spheres are not irreducible phenomena, they are mediated. Our understanding of organic and inorganic being might be phenomenological at first, but to put these concepts in touch with each other in a system is to exploit the openness attitude and irreducibility criterion of phenomenological description. Calling them phenomenological is a ploy in authority; it is a trump card against skepticism and the natural attitude. In this way, phenomenology is always in danger. It can be too open and liberal with what it thinks is given, and shore up one's biases rather than disclose what is truly given.

I suggest a way out of this predicament. When Scheler talks about how man relates to God, perhaps he is simply doing that attempting to conceptualize man's relation to God. Given how Scheler later came to reject Catholicism, it was a very pressing philosophical inquiry for him. We need not presuppose that this inquiry must take a phenomenological orientation that grounds all other attempts. To push the phenomenological angle oversimplifies many of the issue that Scheler's very short lived life could not further develop. What we do have, however, is a dynamic thinker that regularly adopts new methods, addresses completely new and alien contexts, incorporates old ones, and synthesizes all of these elements with frustrating detail. As such, Scheler scholars may always be frustrated that Scheler is not given to easy systematization, but that is exactly why we like him. This is also where Luther went wrong.

Update

2011-10-30T16:59:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine has a new paper coming out in Transactions and has given some brief description about it here. He combines insights from Heidegger and Dewey in much of what he does. I'm looking forward to reading it.

I also apologize for not blogging in a while. I have done some more work on editing Chapter 1 and have been very busy trying to internalize Scheler. Part of my attention has been to see what phenomenological method means for both Heidegger and Scheler--a point you might have thought made its appearance before introducing the problem in Chapter 1. However, I found it more logically conducive to establish what the problem is I find in Heidegger's writings before elucidating differences between Heidegger and Scheler. Chapter 2 is an expository chapter about Scheler's thought---mostly from the Formalism about his phenomenological ethics. I will draw conclusions and more comparisons in Chapter 3. It is a very simple plan. Right?

I have found that writing this montrosity is an organic process. It is a process of developing and going back, and revising what you have done. There are loopholes in my writing and Scheler's thinking, places where Scheler simply asserts his thinking and I find myself picking up the pieces from what he has done. For instance, there is a good a section where Scheler starts meditating on the nature of moral facts. It is familiar. Like an old friend, I feel like I am in the presence of Ross and Moore.

I have found that the most challenging part of dissertation writing is attempting to assume who is your target audience. Certainly, my committee is filled with a whole bunch of people knowledgeable about phenomenology. They know the differences between hermeneutic and Scheler's phenomenology of essences. However, the general reader would not, and so I am writing the dissertation to a target audience between my committee and the general reader.

Sometimes, I feel shorn philosophically. I am entering debates that are much older than myself, and sometimes I am not too sure they need retrieved. I am fascinated with the limits of phenomenology, conducting a phenomenological description about lived-experience and engaging texts primarily without the mediation of secondary literature. To write on Heidegger and ethics is so 1990s. We'll see where the dissertation writing takes me.

Seminar Question: Phenomenological Immortality and the Lived-Body

2011-10-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

I should say that I am having a blast in the Husserl seminar I'm auditing. With that said, today's seminar conversation really got me thinking.

Today, we read Section 24 in Analysis Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Appendix 8. Husserl concludes that the self-becoming of self-consitutions appears in experience without beginning or end. This can be called phenomenological immortality, and so it is not a conclusion about immortality as a property of the soul or endorsing anything metaphysical. It is simply a thesis about how the self is given before the self. I am given eternally as self-giving. I took issue with the fact that self-constitution is given in this way as phenomenologically immortal and consequently, I went the other direction of the whole seminar.

For me, to talk of self-givenness in this way reifies the process as it appears. There is no lived-body here. As I walked with the Professor of the seminar, I repeated my frustration and urged that the self-temporalization of becoming may appear to us as given as phenomenologically immortal fashion, but that doesn't remove the fact that self-temporalization takes place in a lived-body. It is the lived-body that also impinges and makes me aware of how I am given before myself. In this way, I urged that the constraints of the lived-body imply a phenomenological mortality.

The seminar ended with me conceding that I understood what Husserl had meant, but there is still a lingering suspicion that, like Descartes, we have reified the process of self-temporalization and implied the manner of givenness we think reveals itself as phenomenologically immortal. The Professor urged me that even if we conducted the same level of description at the level of the lived-body, we would arrive at the same conclusion. This leaves us with the question I wanted to quickly write it down here: Would phenomenological immortality of the givenness of self-constitution remain immortal if the same analysis described self-constitution of the lived-body?

Paper Proposal for Reasons and Rationality Conference

2011-10-05T00:05:00.000-07:00

Title: TBA

To act on a reason is to accept a propositional formulation to what a reason is. However, I find this type of talk limiting for two reasons. First, the fact that language constructs its syntax in certain ways might be misleading to what it is to act on a reason, and secondly, when we engage in “propositionalizing” reason, we abstract the intention, maxim or reason for acting from its worldly concrete context. An agent is someone that can give oneself a reason, and the reasons are separated from the context that inspire them when we talk in such a fashion. These two problems stem largely from Kantian conceptions of agency and rationality that still persist to this day.

In this paper, it is not enough simply to put out the “obvious” flaws in Kantian conceptions of rationality and agency. A difference must be posed, and a substitute for reasons must be found. Therefore, I briefly sketch out my conception of agency and reasons based in part by rethinking Heidegger’s existential analysis as a substitute for what the Kantian position defends and reviving the affective intentionality of Scheler’s moral philosophy. This has two advantages, and one flaw.

First, reasons are not possibilities given to oneself by oneself. There is more depth in this experience than Kant permits. For Kant, self-legislation stems from the noumenal character of rationality. This puts the practical agent outside the concrete world, and this really cannot stand. There is a question as to how that possibility arose in the first place. It arises in the “historicity” and the world we are “thrown” into which we have no control. The historicity of self-understanding implies that there are limits to practical rationality.

Secondly, the noumenal character of the practical standpoint, the claim of impartiality of practical reason, cannot stand. This can be seen by defending the existential analysis of moods that both Scheler and Heidegger open up in their analysis and its consequences it would have for agency. An agent cannot maintain absolute neutrality with regard to the reasons it comes to possess.

However, Heidegger’s analysis of affectivity is blind to values that feature in experience, and this is the flaw that while Heidegger possesses the fact that our reasons are always “mooded.”[1] Heidegger does not see that emotions are the place where values can be found. For my point here, values are evaluative reasons for actions, and I intend the term in that respect.

Let me take stock of this paper proposal, and what has been exactly claimed so far. First, the Kantian articulation of reasons as “propositionalized” and self-legislated is misleading and causes two confusions. It promotes the falsely noumenal character of what it is to give oneself a reason such that rationality and agency stand outside history and context in which true action is exercised. Therefore, I propose two theses about rationality and agency that attempt to return agency and rationality to the concrete world of experience.

The Hermeneutic Limit of Reasons: For any reason R, R is a possibility that comes to an agent A through historical mediation to such an extent that A’s identification with the possibility cannot be extricated from A’s situated understanding.
The Affective Intentionality Condition: For any reason R, R is always based in a existential mood M such that R can never stand outside M.

The first thesis comes out of Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time and is less problematic than the second. Thesis (2) comes in two varieties Heidegger’s and Scheler’s respective varieties. First, Heidegger does not associate affective intentionality with having a value correlate. Scheler’s position does construe value in this way, and so it is to him that we must turn on this point to reject Heidegger altogether for the second thesis. Taken together, these two insights are corrective measures against what the Kantian positions fails to articulate. The Kantian position fails to articulate a worldly concrete conception of rational agency.

Now, the reviewer of this proposal will note two things. First, this paper exhibits no ambiguous language concerning what Heidegger’s position is (nor Scheler’s position for that matter), and secondly, I am arguing against the Kantian position itself, not any particular Kantian. Therefore, I am engaged in a logical dialectic with a commonly held position and some thematization of that position is made on my part here. My thematization is based on a severe dissatisfaction with many Kantians to sneak unrealistic powers of autonomy into their conception of what rational agency is to such an extent that they ignore the historical source of that bias in Kant—the noumenal character of the practical standpoint.

The paper is organized into three parts. First, I will outline the exact nature and character of the noumenal conception of rational agency in Kant and the problems generated from that conception. In the second section, I will propose thesis (1) and defend it. In the third section, I will propose thesis (2) and show why Scheler’s conception of affective intentionality takes precedence over Heidegger’s conception.

[1] This insight is the thesis of my dissertation on Heidegger and Scheler.

Yeah Okay But Still Blog's Practical Reason Proposal, Part 1 and 2.

2011-08-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

I find any moral philosopher that questions mainstream ethical theories refreshing. Somehow, I think, moral philosophy has to re-invent itself and its methods when it gets to the point that ethics conceptualizes matters to such an extent that it does not bare out in experience. Sometimes you can run across a traditional metaethics professor that has conceptualized issues to such an extent that experience does not relate to the concepts. However, this is rare. For me, this was the only area in analytic philosophy in which something-like phenomenological description and lived-experience mattered to the subject.

Still, I have questioned Nick's proposal in Part 1 and 2 while still optimistic about its initial thrust. It's a proposal worth checking out. My comments are under Part 2.

Philosophy, Philosophers and the PGR/Pluralist Affair

2011-08-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

I do not like this singling out of an individual on the web, especially when it comes to singling out and ostracizing another professional philosopher. First, it wreaks of rumormongering and I wonder what effect it will have on someone's career. At worst, it comes across as bullying, and even more to the point, it promotes divisiveness. As if philosophers of any affiliation, expertise or approach can practically stand to be divided given that we live in an academic world that prides itself on supplying the demand of unreflective vocational degrees like business majors rather than valuing anything in the humanities! Much of the content on Leiter's Philosophy Reports has descended to that level with this whole Pluralist Guide debacle.

As philosophers, our common exchange is argumentation and interpretation. We give each other reasons for thinking X or Y, and that's the appropriate place for what we do. This includes the treatment of each other. Lately, there have been several blogs that trade in vitriol. I don't like it. It only bespeaks the implicit commitment that there is not only a divide between an us and them--without really knowing what it is exactly that we're disagreeing about while everyone insisting that the reason they personally are disagreeing with this whole affair is the same as everyone else's. It comes across as more attitudinal sometimes rather than substantive.

Surely, you can disagree with the actions of a professional colleague. Surely, you could raise these points with tact, but really to launch a survey about the issue, to elicit feedback from Leiter's gossip page can really damage someone's career. If Leiter doesn't like you, if you enter his little radar to the point that you piss him off, he could literally hurt you with his blog. I am privvy to the effects he made personally about a fellow colleague.

I have no evidence either way to infer anything on the part of Linda Martin Alcoff's actions or her motivations. I sometimes wonder what she heard that made her so fervently decide to place three top PG ranked schools as bad places for women to study philosophy. I don't know anyone at these schools; I probably never will. The point, however, should be what would motivate someone to suffer the cost of those reports? Equally disturbing is, if she is wrong, then how have her comments been received and affected the status of those graduate programs? If you are reading this, you probably don't know anymore than me. That's the point. We ought to suspend judgment on the truth of the proposition rather than surveying our social perceptions of a colleague. This is a reaction of taste. It's in poor taste that Leiter made it a survey. Again, tact is a wonderful thing. Tactful action at minimum involves respectful engagement with a colleague.

Can you imagine if the whole world of philosophy voted about your status? Imagine what it must be like to be under the hot seat. I'd be silent too. I'd wish it to go away. Moreover, if Leiter really wanted some answers about the Status of Women report, then a respectful engagement with Dr. Alcoff might have presented the results he would want: Answers.

Ever since this started, I've started her Feminist Epistemologies. It's quite good, thorough and well-researched. The only conclusions I could ever possiblly reach from her work (other than the obvious implications for phenomenology): She is more than likely smarter than me, and I'll probably teach at some liberal art school while she will carry the torch of Continental philosophy and feminist philosophy. Someone so accomplished does not require me to defend her, and this should not be read as a defense or a position in the whole affair. Instead, it is merely a judgment of taste, and an honest evaluation about what we truly know--little to nothing. If I were teaching critical thinking and my students told me that we knew little to nothing about a particular problem, then I'd advise them to suspend judgment until they acquire more evidence.

It is despicable what has become of this whole affair, and you can point fingers... The only conclusion that can be drawn is the following:

1. There are implicit power formations about what constitutes proper philosophy.

2. Various parties have a vested interest in maintaining some version of what constitutes philosophy proper and where best one should study such a conception. I don't make any claim as to what this type of philosophy should be.

3. Given 1 and 2 above, there is something like a "divide" and no precise definition can be given about it, though something like Wittgensteinian family resemblance is possible.

If 3 is remotely possible, then whatever it is that "divides" philosophers is a hermeneutic condition of the activity to such an extent that the denial that there was no divide ever seems naive. But, I digress from the main point of this post.

I don't think I'll go to Leiter's website anytime soon, and the fact that it seemed so distasteful the way he handled his criticisms, I don't suspect my call to boycott his site would have any effect. Regardless, that's where I am. I neither excuse nor praise Linda Martin Alcoff's actions since all that I know is that I don't know---what a wonderfully modest beginning and starting place for philosophy should also hold for a point as to how we conduct ourselves professionally.

That's all I got. I am glad the poll is closed. I will not post anymore about the whole Pluralist Guide/PGR debacle. I will simply end where I think philosophy is heading. If I am not mistaken, philosophy is headed towards more pluralistic grounds, and I don't know if that upsets the old guard. I have friends at some Pluralist Guide schools, and I have friends at excellent to mid-range PGR schools. I have friends writing on Sellars and pragmatism, I have other friends writing on moral psychology and philosophy of action. I have friends writing on Agamben, and I know others writing on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. I have friends that do metaethics, and I know others that do philosophy of culture and feminism. I, myself, seem headed toward a comparative dissertation between Heidegger and Scheler with the last chapter devoted (maybe) to Jesse Prinz's naturalistic conception of moral emotions. I read Matt Radcliffe's work on philosophy of psychology and his engagement with Heidegger. My associations are erratic, inspiring and intriguing. This is why I am excited to finally and hopefully transition to finishing the PhD and joining the ranks of my fellow colleagues. It is a truly inspiring thing we do, philosophy. For me, it's like art. It takes a while to appreciate how complex another philosopher's work is, and undoubtedly, you need to be trained to appreciate philosophy just like it takes one some time to familiarize oneself with art to appreciate its current manifestation.

In the end, all I really can say about the whole thing is "I don't like green eggs and ham. I don't like them Sam I am."

Conjunctivist Pluralism over at New APPS Blog

2011-08-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

I love this blog, and it's discussions.

'Nuff said.

Gov. Perry's Transcript and Political Rant

2011-08-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's what you get in the cult of personality Conservative politcs, completely mediocre students achieving power without intelligence. Here's Gov. Perry's transcript.

It should be said, however, that I think it is somewhat sleazy to run the story like the Huffington Post did. It's yellow journalism at its finest. You can reject conservatism without smearing the person. Both Senator Kerry and George Bush had C averages at their Ivy league schools.

What is interesting for me philosophically is the traits necessary to succeed in politics. You do not need intelligence. All it seems one require is wealth, social capital and a bit of charisma.

Years ago, I interned for a Congressman. I'll leave his name anonymous. At that point, the man was a freshman Congressman. He had attended law school. He'd been a State Representative and ran from State Representative all the way up to heavily populated 90% Democratic district. He was the up-and-comer in that state.

For two months, I answered calls, filled out paper work for flag requests and helped put together folders for academy nominations. I compiled a database of US manufacturers in the several counties. I met him once. He stopped by the office, and when I shook his hand, I felt just how "fake" he was. There was no doubt in my mind. The Congressman had a very charismatic personality, but I didn't feel anything very genuine from him. He had already been oiled and slicked by the party machine. I think this holds for almost any politician. Once they are situated in power, a variety of interests come to court them. They are forced to embed themselves in a nexus of power interests that hold sway over their reelection coffers.

US politicians don't do anything. They don't make anything. They don't wrestle with anything too controversial that would cost them to upset their respective constituents. In effect, they are useless. Call me bitter.

4 Problems of Attunement and Mood in Being and Time

2011-08-07T22:53:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share something I'm working on, and wondered if I am off base. Heideggerians and Schelerians alike are welcomed to respond. These are four criticisms I'm using in what will become my Dissertation Prospectus and Chapter 1. I'm still working out whether or not these are appropriate and well justified criticisms.

----

I wish to summarize the claims I have made and will make based on extrapolating from them.

(1) Heidegger’s conception of attunement through mood does not explain how attunement through mood brings into relief what matters to us. He merely insists on this point, and this cannot be given without some level of interpretation which he does not provide. If he did, then a proper candidate for bringing into relief what matters to us is not that the world is disclosed as such. More than that, the world is already “charged” by the very moods that prepare a way for the world to be disclosed. In this fashion, Heidegger is not wrong in thinking that there is already some agreement about what we find threatening prior to experience—we’ll see this in the example of fear below. Even more so, Heidegger outlines the basic non-neutrality of knowledge in general. We are already underway. We come to inhabit a world saturated with meanings already interpreted. As such, I am not claiming that Heidegger’s mood bring us into an original transcendent relation to what matters to us. Instead, I am merely claiming that without really stating how attunement relates to what matters to us, attunement leaves unsaid the truly interpersonal and intersubjective factors that help describe how it is that we come care about what matters to us. Put another way, how does attunement through mood find its expression in things mattering to us when there is no correlate established to how things actually matter to us? What is the phenomenological depth beyond simply positing that they matter?

(2) Heidegger’s avoidance of connecting affective life to value can partially be explained by Heidegger’s interpretation of values as present-at-hand. This explains why Heidegger never wanted to include within BT’s fundamental ontology a type of moral phenomenology. Even in Scheler’s dissertation, Parvis Emad reminds us that Scheler regarded values as nothing.[1] That is, Scheler did not even take up values as propositions or the discourse of moral facts. In the Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, Scheler describes value phenomenologically. For him, values are expressed as emotive intuition (fühlende Anschauung).[2] As it is too early to spell out these differences in full, part of the disagreement with Scheler will be the essential doctrine of intentional feeling and its correlate (or as Scheler uses the term “connection”) of values. It is within lacking intentional feeling that Heidegger fails to observe the reality of the full emotional life. This also follows that Heidegger does not observe the interpersonal dimension of emotional life and leads us directly into (3) below.

(3) Heidegger’s care structure is not primordially constitutive of Dasein. By describing affective life as co-operative with other elements of the structure, Heidegger cannot see the full independent problematic offered by the complexity of emotional life. Specifically, emotional life is its own independent sphere. It is rather the sphere of spirit at the level of the person that demands analysis. As such, care and anxiety are not fundamental but derivative structures of what is more fundamental, spirit. Within spirit, Scheler offers the interpretation that love and hate are more essential than anxiety.

(4) A central concern in Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is that an anticipatory resoluteness is not constrained by norms. This follows from the fact that in authenticity Dasein leaps ahead of others on its own, and if we admitted a degree of interpersonal dimension, such a possibility of Dasein would be a leaing-in would not be construed negatively as ontic and inauthentic. Leaping-in extols the publicness of the They to overtake my own possibilities. Thus, the authentic mode of being-in-the-world embodied in Befindlichkeit must shed the evaluative associations with inauthenticity over authenticity, even despite Heidegger’s claiming these are non-evaluative concepts in his fundamental ontology.

Given my interpretive claims above, Heidegger opens the way for phenomenologists. Heidegger provides the first primordial interpretation to emotional life apart from Scheler’s contribution anterior to his efforts of the early 1920s. Ever since Plato, most of Western thought has regarded the emotions with a secondary importance. Reason is that which most often trumps the passions. However, Heidegger might have opened the door for a conception of the emotions, but his aim has always been to provide an ontologically constitutive interpretation of human life in general and given how values centrally feature into human experience in general, no ontologically constitutive schema can avoid them. This is the shortcoming of Heidegger’s basic approach, and one I will advance in this dissertation. For now, let us move on to his example of fear in §30 in order to make good on my interpretation.

[1] Parvis Emad, Heidegger and the Phenomenology of Values (Glen Ellyn, IL: Torey Press, 1981), p. 110.

[2] Formalism Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism trans. M. S. Frings and R. Funk, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 265. I cite this as the Formalism hereafter.

Canadian PhDs

2011-08-05T16:26:00.000-07:00

I notice that I get several hits from Canada and thought it pertinent to mention.There is an article over at the New APPS about how Canadian departments do not hire Canadians attending their own Canadian PhD programs.

I cannot attest to the perceptions of Canadians about other Canadian departments. I will say, however, it was common knowledge that the MAs at Simon Fraser should seek to go to the United States rather than, say, someplace like Dalhousie to study philosophy. This was prudent advice offered by several members of the faculty. I've heard the same elsewhere. I talked to several folks at a university event over at UBC from the University of Alberta. They felt it was wrong of so many of U of A's PhDs did not fare well on the job market as compared to Canadians who attended prestigious American universities.

Now keep in mind. This is just the two incidents I have been privy to hear. I have a sense that the article does bear some truth to it.

The greatest thing about Simon Fraser's Philosophy Department is how developed the MA program is. Frankly, I am a better philosopher for having attended there, and while I only maintain a marginal interest in the courses I took there I know how well-suited I am to go on the market having gone there. Like Tulane or maybe Miami University of Ohio, there are few schools where as an MA student you can get trained to improve your dossier for PhD applications and receive funding at the same time.

Consider SFU if you are into philosophy of mind. With Eric Margolis at UBC and Kathleen Akins at SFU, Vancouver is a city primed for philosophy of mind. UBC tends to attract a lot of important speakers and SFU/UBC always have a tight-knit affiliation with courses taught between the two schools at SFU's Harbour Centre.

Moreover, Vancouver has a wonderful fringe art scene and great music. I would venture to say that several of my colleagues got sucked up into Vancouver as an awesome place to live.

New APPS Blog on more Ethics Suggestions

2011-08-05T10:28:00.000-07:00

The works on the list are quite good and predictable from a pluralistic perspective.

Props to Roman for mentioning Scheler before I did.

Women and Works in Moral Philosophy over the last 200 years

2011-08-04T21:40:00.000-07:00

Undoubtedly women have been pushed to the side in philosophy, and if and when I graduate with this damn PhD, I'll be hard pressed to tell future female philosophy students some of the experiences I've heard about. With that said, it is also incumbent upon us men to highlight those women that have had considerable impact in moral philosophy. 200 years is a long time, and certainly we have had women in the 20th century than should have made the list.

To be fair, Leiter has included many seminal works in analytic and Continental philosophy respectively.

I nominate several following women whose works should be on the list. Certainly, there will be disagreements, but part of the sensitivity to women in the profession revolves around interrogating the philosophical reasons as to why that exclusion happened. Therefore, while some of these thinkers might be labeled more directly feminist than others, I think it is hard to claim that feminism is, in principle, not a form of moral philosophy. Feminism is so steeped in both a criticism of the history of philosophy and overriding normative concerns in both the history and contemporary life it can never be non-ethical. I don't even think the claim could be argued personally.

Judith Butler (Say what you will. Butler has wholly embraced the controversial thesis that values are wholly a social construction with specific with attention to gender and bodies)
Claudia Card
Virginia Held
Simone De'Beauvoir (especially Simone. To suggest Sartre over her "Ethics of Ambiguity" is a crime of clarity and sophistication)
Luce Irigaray
Marth Nussbaum
Jane Addams

There will, of course, be others. I am not perfect and this is off the cuff. Feel free to suggest more.

Dissertation Problem: Heidegger and Scheler on Moods

2011-07-31T11:18:00.000-07:00

This post presupposes familiarity with Heidegger's thought.

The distinction between fundamentally authentic moods and inauthentic moods differentiates with the depth of complexity. Fear takes an object and is, in a certain sense, not as primordial as anxiety. Anxiety is so fundamental that it does not take an object, but concerns everything and nothing. I want to claim that anxiety is derivative of a more basic mood. I am substituting anxiety with the example of love found in Scheler's work. At least, this is the basis of my critique.

Love does not take a specific object, but requires others. I want to say something like love concerns everyone and nobody all at the same time (thinking that love would have the identical structure to anxiety). It is a moral orientation I take up in relation to the world at a primordial level. Someone might object that I've just substituted an impersonal other to stand in for everyone and nobody all at the same time. Of course, my analytic training -- like a Spidey-sense if you're a comic book geek -- informs me I should reject the distinction authentic/inauthentic moods in Heidegger. However, this impedes my story to say that anxiety is not derivative at all. To say something derives from something else is to give an interpretation as to why X is more primordial than Y. Therefore, I still need to assume a level of primordiality which occupies the level of the authentic. This is my current problem.

I could disassociate authenticity from primordiality, but I take it that Heidegger's want for a primordial science, a fundamental ontology, is the aim of phenomenological research itself. If phenomenology is not after the fundamental structures of human existence at the primordial level, then I abandon the level where I am working out the problem. In Scheler, the immediately given within intuition is what is proper to phenomenology. I could substitute Scheler's conception of phenomenology first as a more "realistic" and concrete version. At that point, though, it is not so much as working the problem out within phenomenology as simply asserting that one is better. My project needs to be worked out in phenomenlogy for two reasons: A) it is the common background from which this problem emerges and B) internal to phenomenology, there are resources I think are here; I just need to find them.

Moreover, Merleau-Ponty might be right in thinking there is no complete reduction. As such, Heidegger is a product of that level of skepticism and Scheler is an enthusiast with respect to its exercise.

Echoes and Thoughts

2011-07-28T22:23:00.000-07:00

Part of the reason for studying Heidegger is my admiration for his thought, his uncanny way in which thinking tends to come alive in his texts. The same can be said for Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. I’ve been accused of making Heidegger a sacred text, and perhaps that’s a little hyperbole about my stated interest. It would be more careful to say I find Heidegger constantly irksome, intriguing and often downright wrong—all at the same time! On some things, we agree. It is, therefore, difficult to tell where the admiration and hatred begin and end.

One central point of agreement would be on method. I am a self-identifying phenomenologist since I like to put the “subject” back into experience. I like discerning the structures of existence, seeing what is there phenomenologically and thinking that philosophy qua phenomenology ought to put me into contact with the texture of life as lived. There are many philosophies that reify, objectify and assume characterizations about experience without looking to the first-personal experience how it is lived. This makes philosophy detached from the demands life makes in how it is lived. I found an echo of this love in Michael Bowler’s Heidegger and Aristotle.

Heidegger rejects any philosophy’s claim to be primordial science if it is not situated in life. The lack of primordiality in the philosophies of Rickert, Husserl and Natorp is indicated by the fact that one finds at the foundation of their philosophies a living element that they simply do not account for. Thus, according to Heidegger, the renewal of philosophy as primordial science requires exhibiting how philosophy is located in life as well as how it can be productive of life, most specifically, how it can be productive of the non-primordial sciences. This necessitates an investigation into philosophy as lived, i.e. philosophy as situated in life. In essence, philosophy as primordial science must be a ‘philosophy of life’ in the sense of belonging to life, but also as constitutive of life….if philosophy is to be primordial science then the concepts of world and intentionality must be resituated in life itself. They must be resituated in life because they have been removed from life by philosophical worldviews that conceptually objectify them (p. 92)

For obvious reasons…

Steven Crowell Interview

2011-07-28T01:11:00.000-07:00

Steven Crowell's Interview over at Figure/Ground.

Non-Argumento-Centric Philosophy Anthology

2011-07-27T07:14:00.000-07:00

The title is a term coined by Simon Glendinning, a philosopher at the London School of Economics who does research in Wittgenstein, ordinary language philosophy and then add "Continental philosophy." He has a piece in the Chase and Reynolds anthology I've recommended below. I also appreciate his book In the Name of Phenomenology.

Call this a speculative idea for now!

With that aside, I had an idea. I wanted to make a call on the blogosphere for a discussion about an anthology inspired by Glendinning's piece. Specifically, I wanted to organize an anthology about divergent traditions that are critical of the narrow focus of logical dialectic. I would want a whole range of perspectives, but the central issue would have to be if one acquires wisdom through non-argumento-centric modes, then what constitutes those modes? And how are they an improvement over narrow logical dialectic? Does the mode work in tandem with the argumento-centric mode, or does it modify, change, revise or undermine it? I imagine pieces from hermeneuts, psychoanalysts, pragmatists and phenomenologists would all be invited, not to mention philosophers of literature or maybe even philosophers of religion.

Each piece would, therefore, have to take up an "analytic theme" but do so in a non-polemic way. The piece would have to show intimate familiarity with the analytic tradition, and come to terms with how wisdom is given in that they are questioning argumento-centric modes of philosophizing.

Mortimer Adler's How to Read A Book

2011-07-25T17:56:00.000-07:00

My wife unknowingly downloaded Mortimer Adler's book How to Read a Book without knowing that Adler was a philosopher. In the future, I want to incorporate this book into Introductory courses, yet I wondered if anyone has ever required an audible text for their students?

In addition, I just wondered if anyone had devoted about 4-5 weeks to a how-to skills portion in their introductory courses?

Last time, I taught Intro to Philosophy, I used Lewis Vaughn's book on how to write philosophy for two weeks.

Philosophers Anonymous Thread

2011-07-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

My blog has been quoted as touching upon the Leiterite/Pluralism issue, "albeit badly." Posters are encouraged to post more about where I went wrong. The common device might be actual arguments.

From the main thread,

My biggest surprise, though, is the relative silence of some of the more vocal opponents of the Leiter Report. The Pluralist's Guide actually and overtly manifests all of the methodological flaws that critics of the PGR typically (though mistakenly) claim undermine the PGR and render it pernicious. So anyone who (misguidedly) objects to the PGR on methodological grounds has especially strong reason to object to the Pluralist's Guide-- the Pluralist's Guide really is what Leiter's ignorant critics say the PGR is

Someone care to explain?

Now, my criticisms of the PGR have always been twofold. First, 250 or so (depending on the year) people cannot speak for more than 10,000 + philosophers in the United States. That's pretty simple, and the methods simply reify attitudes of institutional pedigree that seem to result in silliness. Consider the following quote from Leiter,

The quality of philosophy and scholarship at the recommended SPEP Guide programs in continental philosophy is generally inferior to that at programs either ignored or not recommended that have offerings in the same areas. This is a judgment on the merits of work, a judgment based on considerations like argumentative and dialectical sophistication and perspicuousnes, historical and cultural erudition, and knowledge of the history of philosophy.

We're putting our faith in those that have faith in pedigree before substance, even to the point where we exclude others that are clearly doing excellent work. Let me point you to an example. Would I want Sean Kelly to supervise my dissertation if I wanted to work on Husserl, or Memphis with Thomas Nenon? I think the choice of the latter over the former an obvious one for supervisory reasons alone.
I think Memphis has a top-notch PhD program. Leiter has used it as an example of what he called Party-Line Continentalism some time ago.

The good news here is that Party Line Continentalism is, ironically enough, increasingly just an Anglophone phenomenon, confined to a handful of departments in the U.S. (e.g., Penn State, Stony Brook, DePaul, Memphis, Vanderbilt, the New School, Dusquesne), the U.K. (e.g., Middlesex and Dundee), and Australia (e.g., New South Wales). (Even these Party Line Continentalist departments are increasingly diverse, which is a welcome development!) On the European Continent itself, Party Line Continentalism is in retreat almost everywhere, as rigorous historical scholarship, that transcends national boundaries, and Anglophone-style philosophical work is increasingly dominant.

So, we have two examples of Leiter thinking such a program as lesser than a PGR ranked school. Why not, however, see Memphis as a place that just does things differently? Certainly, it is impossible for a single man to render judgment on all these programs and their collective work given that nobody could sample all their work, yet he does. The philosophical reason to call Leiter out on his attitude comes from the tremendous power exercised on behalf of his blog and position in the profession. I think having such a polemical attitude towards other philosophers is dangerous, and downright wrong.

Those that agree with him have a self-interest in the perception of their program being maintained. These are the very same people enacting the surveys, though it should be clear that a surveyor cannot render judgment about their own department. Even more to the point, these same people have now had the favor of Leiter's rankings to the point that undergraduate students of placed PhDs are sending those undergraduates back to the same resource they consulted. Thus, the reification of pedigree continues.

In my eyes, such reification is bad because it divides up the professional community in ways that do not benefit the whole of the community. With that said, Leiter is at least exemplary when any department of philosophy comes under attack. His blogging during the Middlesex fiasco supported philosophy, even though they were Party-Line Continentals.

The same reification would happen eventually to the Pluralist Guide. That's just the danger of ranking. It shores up our biases.

This isn't to say that Leiter is wrong about everything. His concerns about how exactly the women section was reported has some merit.

In conclusion, the criticism of PGR is that it reifies institutional pedigree over and above what actually might be prudent for a student to choose. I've used the example of Nenon vs. Kelly. If your interests were to use phenomenological method in conjunction with analytic discourses in the philosophy of mind, you'd go to Harvard (but then again, Memphis just got Shaun Gallagher whose work is very comparable). Again, we are only talking about supervisory reasons and the quality of work scholars produce that motivate those reasons for applicants. Therefore, the applicant should decide where they would receive the best supervision from the quality of work actually done. The point is that there will be times where a highly ranked program cannot supervise what an applicant wants to work on, and the reification prevents a solid evaluation of someone's work simply because they work at an under-valued department.

I don't know if any ranking could prevent this reification. As such, it might be better to have more than just Leiter's rankings out there, but the danger of reification would rear its ugly head conceivably in that way. As such, I firmly accept that the APA's statement on rankings. Then again, that's just me.

Commentary on the Ends of Thought Entry "Why is Continental Philosophy So Bad?""

2011-07-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

I have responded to comments over at the Ends of Thought blog. I like Roman a lot. He's been a good interlocutor in the past, and with that said, I respectfully think he tells a very oversimplified story about Continental philosophy. I argue for a principle of charity that is hermeneutic in nature since so many of the ways of the writing of Continental philosophy is tied to particular pedagogic aims. It is unfair to say that Continental philosophy is all bad, especially how it is framed. That's just a one-sided engagement that would never honestly see what is at work in a particular text. How about some examples?

Caputo writes texts that deconstruct themselves or Levinas avoiding epistemic frameworks altogether in order to describe how such a view would "reduce the other to the same." Irigaray uses language to avoid the gendered speech of Romance languages and alludes to the symbolism and metaphor of things like angels and mucous to talk about something that has never existed before (a wholly developed living subjectivity of women liberated from power structures). Could analytics buy into Irigaray's use of figurative expression, Levinas' avoidance of all Western discourses that subsume difference into the same, or Caputo's heuristic deconstructionistic style? There's a point sometimes to the ambiguity. Or my particular favorite, Heidegger's move to change our understanding of language to a form of poetics. These are all points worthy of our consideration as philosophers. We need not stray away from Heidegger, Irigaray, Levinas or Caputo to see if they have anything to say. It's about time that analytic philosophers learned to read hermeneutically, not the other way around.

The example of Irigaray is interesting. The New APPS blog did not comment on Margaret Whitford's contributions to philosophy but only listed her as doing work on Irigaray. Irigaray is an awesome styled thinker. As I noted earlier, her writing is Nietzschean and provocative in its own way. It would never sate the appetite of your typical analytic, however, nor the basis of her writings stemming from Lacan. It would be as dismissed as easily as women have been in this profession. It is one thing to shore up and be honest about one's personal biases and taste. It is another to think that there is no redeeming value in the strategies of engagement some Continental writers have taken up.

Leiterite Hysteria and the Protevi Journal Experiment

2011-07-20T20:21:00.000-07:00

John Protevi works on Deleuze. He's good, and often goes to SPEP. He corresponds with "analytics" like this New APPS thread. The thread is started out as an empirical attempt to see where Continental thinkers have been covered in "mainstream" journals. So far, the disparity hasn't really been commented on or explained.

There has been a point of impatience from more mainstream philosophers (to call them analytic philosophers now might be to belabor the point) that Continental philosophy has not been victimized. An anonymous poster by the name of Bizarre wrote this full length comment on Lance's "Queering the Analytic/Continental Distinction" thread.

I find sk's and Shelley Tremain's interpretation of the tenor of the discussion here rather tendentious. Being a party-line continental is not in itself at all like being a woman in philosophy, or a gay person in philosophy, or a person of colour in philosophy, or a disabled person in philosophy. For any criticism of party-line continentals to "sound like blaming the victim" it would have to be plausible that they are in any reasonable sense victims qua party-line continentals. But they are not. There is a crowd whose egos are apparently in such need of Brian Leiter's approbation that they will raise all hell if they don't get it (cf. Michael Fray, who writes on another blog "I take special offense at [Leiter's view of SPEP departments] because I am studying at one of the programs Leiter impugns in that post. I have been absolutely infuriated ever since. It is TOTALLY untrue that my professors are 'inferior' or that I am receiving sub-par training; Leiter should be ashamed of himself for saying such things."). But having Leiter (or any other philosopher) think you are an intellectual mediocrity because of the kind of work you do (as opposed to because you are a woman, or gay, or a person of colour, or disabled) is not in and of itself being oppressed. Party-line continentals have for a while now had a much broader influence across the humanities than party-line analytics (and some of their defenders readily admit as much; cf. John Drabinski complaining how "far behind" the other humanities philosophy supposedly is). This overall intellectual climate makes cries of continental oppression sound rather hollow. Someone uncharitable might even compare the situation to astrologers complaining about not being respected in astronomy departments - never mind how many millions of dollars more are globally spent each year on astrological services and merchandise than on astronomical research.

Likewise, it would be cavalier to dismiss party-line continentals' facing the prospect of being "out of a job" if what was being discussed was in fact unemployment simpliciter, with all the difficulties it brings ("visiting the food-bank (again), making decisions whose alternatives are paying rent or purchasing a much-needed prescription drug, going on welfare, eating a steady diet of boiled potatoes, becoming a sex worker, committing suicide"). But it is not. Rather, the discussion merely touched upon the fact that they may not be able to get a job in philosophy departments ranked (highly) in the PGR. And while it's reasonable to think that everyone is entitled to gainful and non-dehumanising employment, it's surely not reasonable to think that everyone is entitled to being a philosophy professor (much less a philosophy professor in some select group of departments).

The academic job market is abysmal for everyone. Many departments train many more PhDs than there are available jobs. This is not limited to philosophy, either, as we all know. One of the roles the PGR (or any alternative) has to play is to give prospective graduate students some sense of how professionally risky it is to undertake a particular course of study (of course, mentors have a much larger responsibility to do this). Ideally, all philosophy students would be aware of their almost universally dismal academic job prospects. But this is all orthogonal to the continental/analytic divide and what we ought to think of it. Mark Lance, and Brian Leiter, and Rebecca Kukla, and Lee Braver, and some others in this thread, have made a number of useful suggestions as to how the divide should be understood and overcome. All of these suggestions centrally depend on the intellectual merits of pluralism, and intellectual demerits of anti-pluralism. None depend on the idea that party-line continentals are somehow victimised in the profession

I do not think anyone would say that systemic discrimination against sexual orientation or race is analogous to the often felt boundary policing on the part of Party-Line Analytics against the internal achievements of Continental philosophy. Again, boundary policing is not the same as discrimination, but it is a form of powerplay. In my own experience, I've seen it happen firsthand and it's embarrassing. At a national conference, I've heard a famous analytic metaphysician once claim that one avoids Foucault as a matter of "intellectual hygiene." I once heard an up and coming Descartes historian laugh off Continental philosophy as he proceeded down the hallway. At the University of British Columbia, it is so bad that an UNDERGROUND group of students met in secret to read Continental authors. I have no knowledge if they continue to meet. I met one of them in Point Grey at a cafe. The group member was so happy to know that I was leaving SFU to study Husserl. Somehow, this confirmed they were not crazy.

The success of Continental philosophy in the humanities is an indication to them that they have not been victims of intellectual censorship from more analytic heavy weights. However, the success of a worldview or thinker to have an effect on other topics not covered by "mainstream" philosophy is logically independent as to whether or not mainstream philosophy has been discriminatory to Continental philosophy. When you consider that analytic philosophy has strictly confined itself to a narrow focus on matters largely epistemic, then what goes on outside of their attention is completely unknown to them. Continentals did have a large impact on more humanistic and historically-centered disciplines, but analytic philosophy could have never known that it did have this effect all the while discriminating against this type of "other."

Of course, it is healthy for this silly distinction to go away. Yet, it has to go away for the right type of reasons, as I've said. There must be equal respect and command of hermeneutic attention to central Continental thinkers in a way that engages "Continental" philosophy for what it says in its own way. This means an enlargement of philosophy that accepts in principle that art, literary works and creative expression can also be ways to share ideas inasmuch as logical dialectic. Given this, I very much sympathize with Babette Babich's heated comment from the same thread above.

Analytic philosophy remains and will always remain closed to ‘continental philosophy’ of any but the ‘analyticized’ kind (i.e., the kind of continental philosophy that eliminates all the continental bits like style and like authors referred to in favor of analytic bits).

The reason for denying the distinction between the two, for arguing that such distinctions should be abolished, is the logical consequence of this closed approach. Thus one speaks of “philosophy” just philosophy – which is coincidentally the method of choice in analytic philosophy to exclude or banish whatever one does not wish to engage, one argues that the refused is simply not doing philosophy.

Q. E. D.

She's right. I hate to say it. In my short experience (10 years of schooling, or half a decade between studying analytic and Continental philosophy), it is never that analytics were interested in collaboration or integration with the exception of the Davidson / Gadamer correspondence about the Philebus. It has always been from those, like myself in question, that see merits in being philosophically ambidextrous.

However, it is hard to accept that philosophical ambidexterity will result any time soon. If typical Party-Line analytics continually insist that philosophical analysis consists in providing causal explanations, and these explanations must be made consistent with science, even if the consistency is speculative on the basis of science, then those philosophers have a different ideas altogether of what philosophy is from someone like me. I agree with Gadamer or Heidegger that philosophy is about the hermeneutic engagement with the various strands of philosophical history that enable us to talk to each other. I won't spell out what this means right now, but these are two very different and incompatible metaphilosophical and methodological commitments. Someone needs to analyze these moments of methodological differences before pluralistic analytics want to dissolve "Continental philosophy" and engage it analytically. This is easier said than done.

Even I am at odds within my own soul on this point. When I do "ethics", I am attempting to describe moral reality, arrive at a non-foundational account of morality, while trying to eschew charges of relativism. I stand firmly against consequentialist approaches and find Bernard William's assessment of utilitarianism persuasive. When I do this, I am certainly not at all consistent with the previous claim of favoring the hermeneutic style of reflection I often engage in. Then again, philosophy requires an encounter with cognitive dissonance. It is about shaking the ground of one's soul to enter the depths. It's not easy. I'm still trying to figure this all out, and probably won't for a while. Then again, that's the whole point. Part of the solution might rest in the following article:

Glendinning, Simon (2010) Argument all the way down: the demanding discipline of non-argumento-centric modes of philosophy. In: Reynolds, J. and Chase, J. and Williams, J., (eds.) Postanalytic and metacontinental crossing philosophical divides. Continuum, London, UK, pp. 71-84

Again, engaging Continental philosophy means at least understanding why it is that analytics did not engage with it in the first place and I haven't really heard any honest explanations on that point. Undoubtedly, this will be a principle explanation as to why Continental thinkers haven't been taken up in "mainstream" journals.

I wonder what the consensus will be empirically, yet I dare not remind everyone on Protevi's thread that interpretation of empirical results is just another form of hermeneutics.

Pictorial Representations of Scheler's Philosophy

2011-07-20T06:07:00.000-07:00

I took these from a wiki page article, which on its own isn't that bad. It could be written better and more informative.

Below is a diagram of the hierarchy of values. Someday, I'll explain how this all works--post prelim examination in the PhD. For now, it's a nice picture. Philosophy rarely comes with pictures except during the Renaissance.

I'm ranting, but then again, this is a blog. If I can rant anywhere, then it is my blog.

In addition, the author included corresponded feeling states to their value-modalities.

Max Scheler Society of North America

2011-07-19T19:24:00.000-07:00

The Max Scheler Society of North America has put up conference papers from both the 2006 and 2010 meeting. These are some solid works. They appear on the right side panel.

Who is Zarathustra's Nietzsche? By David Allison

2011-07-18T08:14:00.000-07:00

This paper has been shared openly on other media platforms (by the editor of New Nietzsche Studies, Babette Babich), and the historical scholarship is pristine. David Allison informs us about the transitional awareness Nietzsche demonstrates in his own writings about himself. This Allison argues becomes a central point that provides explanation into Nietzsche's later works in the post-Zarathustra-period.

I liked it a lot. And, my reasons for posting it are twofold. Again, I liked it a lot, and in addition this piece wonderfully demonstrates the high quality of scholarship one might come to expect from SPEP "affiliated" schools.

Origins Essay and Heidegger

2011-07-18T00:24:00.000-07:00

Today, I am concerned with Heidegger's Origins on the Work of Art. In this blog post, I specifically want to concentrate on why poetry is extolled over all other art forms at the very end. In Origins, he writes:

Art, as the setting-into-work of truth, is poetry. Not only the creation of work is poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving of the work; for a work is in actual effect as a work only when we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own essential nature itself to take a stand in the truth of beings.

The art of essence is poetry. The essence of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth. We understand founding here in a triple sense: founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning. Founding, however, is actual only in preserving. Thus to each mode of founding there corresponds a mode of preserving... (186).

Now, this just might come across as confusing Heidegger-ese, but I think there is more to this lecture than meets the eye. First, the fact that Heidegger had always adapted his German to the phenomenon in question is notable, especially for adopting the phenomenological attitude that seeks to pay attention to experiences as they unfold in lived-experience. Such an attitude of reflection must adapt language to the purpose of the phenomenon in question and here Heidegger is describing the work itself without presupposing anything about the work itself. For the uninitiated, this is the basic phenomenological dictum in action "to return to things themselves" but only with Heidegger, the application of phenomenology brings into relief our existential relation to a phenomenon. In this case, both Gadamer and Heidegger pay attention to the movement of the text or work itself. The thought is an art work gains a life of its own, even after the artist created the work. The agency of the artist, however, doesn't matter if a particular life or strand of interpretation takes over the work.

I picked this passage since Heidegger specifically invokes poetry as the chief art form par excellence. Moreover, in choosing poetry, Heidegger's choice reveals his reluctance to regard language as a system of cohering statements that correspond to the world, or any formal structural criteria in language at all. For him, "all language is, in essence, poetry." In fact, he uses the word "poesy" which comes from the older poesis. It can mean the art of composing poetry, but in its sheer meaning "poesy" designates "creativity." This brings us to the opening of the passage above: "Art, as the setting-into-work of truth, is poetry. Not only the creation of work is poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving of the work." It should be understood that Heidegger is trying, again, to put us back into the texture of lived-experience where we experience the work itself. As such, to say that art sets into motion the work of truth indicates the work has something to say, some meaning relevant to our participation with it, yet it does not arise solely from us like some noncognitivism. Instead, the art work creates meaning. Thus, we can understand why poetry is chosen. In poetry, there is no structure, no set or established rules to communicate or convey its message. Often, poetry is short, concise and plays at the boundaries of what we think the structure of language could be, and it still achieves to produce meaning. In producing meaning, the work also preserves the truth it set into motion. This is especially true if a work has a longstanding persistence in the imagination of those belonging to a tradition and the work returns again and again thematizing itself what truth it preserves. But again, this preserving of meaning is a creative force itself. If a work has a longstanding tradition to be taken a certain way, there is no anchoring that interpretation, the work is the locus of meaning-production.

To say the work is the locus of meaning-production sounds too technical. First, Heidegger has in mind a primordial interpretation of an art work. He is attempting to strip the layers down and in peeling away all these different layers we get to the most fundamental being of the work. This is why the "actual effect" of the work requires "we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own essential nature itself to take a stand in the truth of beings." Given that the work preserves truth and puts the meaning of truth into contact with us, we cannot help but participate. Otherwise, we make culture inert, and our routine life in which the expectations we make for ourselves are not challenged by art or anything at all. Instead, routine is commonplace and deadens us to receive, welcome and see anew the world disclosed by the art work. A world in which we are closed off from the creative forces, the very forces that beckon us to come forward and "take a stand in the truth of beings" is a world made comfortable by the ease of technological production and mass culture. It is a safe world, but as Heidegger's own shortcomings reveal, human life can get swept up very easily by forces outside one's own routine.

I was not too subtle there. I made a distinction between those that are dead to the creative forces of the world and those capable of an exchange with the world and the art work. I politicized this distinction since namely we are undergoing something of a mass deadening in our ability to receive, articulate and interpret meaning in this culture. This shows itself anecdotally in higher education and in our political imaginary. At your fingertips, you can just "google" an art work, find what someone else wrote about it, and put that into your paper. You can do this in 20 minutes if you really want, and the art history professor overburdened with a 4/4 teaching load might miss it, or not care. He might know its the standard interpretation. Like any mass movement, higher education promotes a level of this passivity on a massive scale, even though it is perhaps the most necessary of institutions for democracy in training informed citizens.

The Tea Party is even worse. The Tea Party while constantly resistant to thematization has at least some beliefs they do cluster around. In this cluster, it is safe to say that some gravitate towards originalism or what Justice Scalia has called textualism. This is a very naive engagement with the constitution in which originalists/textualists think that by looking at the historical legislative intent of a law, or precedent that we can be guided by this force as if history was entirely independent of our coming upon the law to say nothing of a tradition and the demands of the living-present. If we had the ability to take a stand in the production of meaning of the text of the US Constitution, we could see how the text through its historical manifestation has meaning for us. It is not the case that the text had the meaning there the whole time, and that we simply discovered it. In fact, for Heidegger, these meanings constitute our relation to the text for us now. Art works and cultural works more broadly effectuate in their present situatedness--that is, where the art work is encountered they literally produce meaning. Thus, the interest in the ideology of the Tea Party wants to constrain the possibility of what the Constitution might mean for us today by substituting its own interests as the only possible "meaning" of the text. This is what happens when ideology takes over our capacity to receive and stand in a disclosive relation with works (and tradition more generally). It is within maintaining and preserving an openness to

While I have maintained some measure of politicization with Heidegger's passage above, let me now return to the important philosophical messages. There are, namely, two. First, I have already gestured and explained how it is that the work takes its own fluidity, its own event-like life in which the art work constitutes meaning by its sheer force of allure and indeterminateness. It is indeterminate because there is no fixivity to what meaning can be produced. Heidegger tries to give us the analogy to the poetic side of language that sustains and preserves this fluidity. For there are many examples of deadening discourses that stifle those concepts that ought to be about more than just their logical implication or propositional truth. In Descartes, God is that which we can be absolutely certain, yet God is de-personalized into an ontological principle of organization and certainty. It is God's divine veracity that guarantees the intelligible order of the world even to the point I can have a clear and distinct idea of the existence of an external world. God would never allow my senses to be wrong about that! By contrast, look at Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard shows how committed one must be to God as absurd. He articulates the lively manner in which the requirements of faith must be affirmed (if you think he has described faith's structure accurately).

Secondly, the constitution of the work involves an active relation of a community of those that engage the work. This is the work of the language of founding, and I've already hinted at this through the example of the Tea Party. To found something denotes a multiplicity of senses to the "founding of truth", and Heidegger separates them for us. Founding-as-bestowing means to present, as in to make manifest for the participant in relation to the work. The language of bestowal has a Husserlian ring to it. Husserl speaks of the constitutive function of intentionality as "sense-bestowal." This is to say that it is within consciousness access through the reduction I will get at the core of the structure. Since this structure is intentional, it is always relational. There is never just a subjective awareness and an object. They are conjoined into one field in which the subjective and objective poles may be gleaned, even separately but never without emphasizing how they fold into each other.

Next, the art work literally creates and opens up a horizon of the world. It "grounds truth" by founding it. This is an ontological realization of meaning. Literally, the art work grounds the possibility of the world to have meaning in the first place. Consider the United States. If the United States has a political narrative from the inception of the Republic all the way until now, then such a political narrative can only take shape if we consider the writings of Jefferson, the Constitution, the Gettysburg address, the Greco-Roman emulating architecture of Washington DC, the immortal images of General Washington crossing the Delaware River and the photograph of Iwo Jima all come to converge. Now, I want to be clear that the grounding function of founding is an establishing of meaning and while we might think of the experience of attending the museum or exhibition at a gallery, it is not a solitary experience. The grounding is necessarily intersubjective, and the political example serves to drive home the sense this grounding has when an entire tradition of art and cultural works converge together and engender meaning.

The last sense is founding as beginning. In the beginning, an event can rupture and ripple outward like a maddening disease. It can create a fervor, and the indeterminate nature of works does not help the situation. The meaning of a work cannot even be foreshadowed by its author or artist. However, while it certainly can be abused, the concept of a beginning is also a hopeful and liberating one. The work points to the future, and in the future, no one can control the indeterminate nature of the work. There are some that may try, suppress and control intensely what may be said, written, or thought. However, the phenomenological structure of the art work itself cannot help but be indeterminately open, world-creating and unfolding before others.

A commitment to this relation requires that all three senses of founding be preserved. Without which, human life would be boring, stale and utterly without meaning. I interpret Heidegger as thinking all three senses of founding manifest simultaneously. Moreover, they co-penetrate or complement the whole of the work in question. The political example of America proves all too easily. To be without works is to be in a world without wonder. If society gets to that point, we are dead already. Luckily, there are those that still engage with works. This engagement cannot be measured by typical art works alone, but means any work that sufficiently arouses our engagement and prompts us to be aware, to be in relation with the work's hold over us and the self-understanding accompanying it. Thus, I come to my last and perhaps dangerous conclusion. To be open to art as poetry is also to be a citizen open to the world.

Bengtsson's Article and Solid Quote

2011-07-17T18:37:00.000-07:00

I like this:

The reason for this restraint [not to speculate about realities beyond appearances] on the part of phneomenology is that lived experience is conveived of as a pre-predicative and pre-reflexive level that precede and is presupposed in every theoretical discourse. To avoid spceulative constructions and arguing in a circle, phenomenology takes this departure in lived-experience. (p. 521 'Phenomenoological Historical Outlines' by Jan Bengtsson in Phenomenology World-Wide: Foundations, Expanding Dynamics - Life Engagements ed. A. T. Tymieniecka, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002, p. 520-531)

This is one of the best articles I've encountered on the various ethical approaches taken in "moral phenomenology." Good solid review.

I did not know this, but Roderick Chisholm translated two books about Brentano's ethical theories as well. The Origin of Knowledge of Right and Wrong and The Foundation and Construction of Ethics.

Mark Lance's "Queering" the Analytic/Continental Divide

2011-07-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

As pointed out by N.J. Jun on a previous thread, Mark Lance's thread is quite good. It suggests the divide is more damaging to the concept of rankings in general. I do have reservations, however, about the comment that someone just trained in, say, phenomenology has received bad training. Lance assumes a lot about an ideal world in which it is only the analytic and Continental philosophies that require synthesis.

When approached by someone else on the thread about various other regional and historical philosophies, there is an unfriendly tone.

I should just say that I've been living in this distinction for a while and would welcome its dissolution. However, it has to be dissolved for the right reasons over and against simply feigning tolerance for what has been around for a long time. These analytics have been fighting battles against Continentals for a great while. There is a long line of conflict stretching back to when Ryle reviewed Being and Time. This is to say nothing of the fact that I don't even know about LGBT philosophy, Latin-American political thought or Native-American philosophy, nor will I likely know more about them any time soon. I've been forced to specialize and read a lot about phenomenology and ethics. The dissertation will take time, and when applying for jobs all that time and research goes into specializing even more. I don't have the time to go off and read about an environmental ethics based off some Native-American conception of nature. I wouldn't know if I could learn from it one way or the other---that's the point! That's why the best inference suggests that we ought to be pluralistic.

We cannot know for certain where we can learn from, and hopefully we can find some common language to cross the threshold of why I ought to learn from this outside tradition... to the point that it is no longer even called an "outside" tradition. Thus, the openness of experience and to the world in general must be maintained for reasons above and beyond thinking that we have a sense of what could be "good philosophy" prior to its articulation. I will someday form a hiring committee and I will look for the philosopher of biology capable of teaching social/political and has an interest in medieval thought. I will write the job ad as wide as possible to catch someone that might somehow fit everything the search committee is looking for. I just hope that Kukla and Lance might see that someday.

Feminist Philosophy Blog

2011-07-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

Feministphilosophers.wordpress.com has a thread on the Pluralist Guide to Philosophy. Leiter continues to insult places like SIUC and calling all these schools, SPEP schools. We do shoddy work? Really? Come down and see what at least I do. I'll take you out for coffee.

I don't think ad hominems are good practice in philosophizing.

Continentalists, Americanists and Feminists Strike Back

2011-07-12T11:43:00.000-07:00

Many have come here and sometimes requested opinions in private correspondence about my conjoined interests in analytic ethics and phenomenology. Allow me the luxury of anticipating a thoughtful response.

Lo and behold, I woke up this morning to find on Leiter's blog a disparaging analysis of the type of philosophy he marginalizes had organized against his rankings with the Pluralist Guide to Philosophy Departments. Now, I have often wondered why he was so invested in the PGR rankings for philosophy departments. I have very much advocated on this blog a climate of co-operation and coexistence with my fellow philosophers no matter their self-identification because when axe comes down from those that don't appreciate the humanities at all, administrators won't distinguish a Heideggerian from a Strawsonian.

I told my logic students last semester to avoid hasty generalizations, and we should too. Perhaps, Leiter hasn't taught one of these classes in a while, otherwise he wouldn't have said this:

SPEP represents a group of philosophers in the U.S. who strongly identify with a certain conception of philosophy, most traceable to Heidegger (I have called it Party-Line Continentalism), and which identifies philosophy more closely with the kind of stuff that goes on in English Departments and cultural studies, than with the natural sciences, linguistics, history or psychology. These are generalizations, but as Nietzsche often remarks, the rule is usually more interesting than the exception.

SPEP is not a homogenous group. To be fair, there is an "air of Heideggerian orthodoxy" and I deeply disagree with this. I am not alone, however. This can be seen if A) Leiter were to attend an actual meeting and B) look at the program. Every celebrated Husserl scholar I love attends SPEP and these people are by no stretch of the imagination liking the Heideggerian motif. One SPEP member, for instance, told me that Continental philosophy had become textual exegesis to such an extent that they no longer want to talk about structures of experience, and this is why phenomenology had more in common with the analytic tradition. I've heard this from several people.

SPEP is more numerous than I would like to count. There are people working on race, politics and gender. There are people very suspicious of phenomenology and there are people equally suspicious of the poststructuralism. Likewise, I cannot say that even with the Heideggerian orthodoxy, Continental philosophy is moving in different directions than when Carl Schrag and company founded the group. Marion and Henry, for example, are re-inventing phenomenology to articulate structures of religious experience while more naturalistic inclined phenomenologies are working alongside cognitive scientists on embodiment. I know one Merleau-Pontyian that is working on neo-natal development. If I were to include myself in the mixture, then I embrace the reflective equilibrium of Rawls but want to get clear first on what exactly constitutes moral experience in agency, values and otherness--a metaethical phenomenology of sorts which brought me to my current project of pitting Scheler and Heidegger together.

Now, let me concede even if it were true that these departments resemble English and Cultural Studies departments, then what would be wrong with that in principle? Why can't literature inform us with just as much as science unless of course Leiter thinks science more reliable in producing answers to the type of philosophical problems that constitute philosophy. This is what I suspect is the case. The divide between Leiter and these group of graduate schools is a disagreement about what constitutes philosophical questions and ultimately the methods employed in answering those questions. Further, I speculate that this difference comes across in the PGR rankings. There has been a cultural gap for years between these two and I think it is about time that this divide goes away. It won't go away any time soon nor can we afford the divisiveness professionally---this is a point of prudence, however, not substance. Substance is what divides.

There are times when literature can be more helpful than science, depending on the question. Let me take for example a question I have often thought about since my undergraduate days. What should be the lasting philosophical significance of Auschwitz? How should an ethicists respond to the Holocaust? I think these are questions that philosophy can answer, and some like Adorno have. Beyond that, however, as a side project, I am taking an English literature theory seminar that examines Holocaust literature. I do not think this question is easily answered in any ONE way or the other. Yet, it might help to read some Primo Levi and other survivor stories to get clear as to how exactly those people understood their experience.

Art can serve equally well in a concern like this that science cannot. Several German artists also represent a lifetime of being raised in the country that committed the Holocaust. For example, Anselm Kiefer moved me with his piece Lot's Wife.

Also, I want to speak to the SAAP "alliance"

One important caveat about the generalization: in this case, the SPEP folks have also allied with philosophers involved with the Society for American Philosophy. This alliance is political, not intellectual: like the SPEPPies, the SAPies, feel marginalized from the dominant tendencies in the profession.

There has been several moves of exclusion, and this exclusion can be seen from the treatment of central authors in the American tradition. Dewey comes to mind. Here is a man that did not have an idle pen, wrote as much as Husserl from what I can tell, and is often not even taught at top recommended philosophy departments (despite Dewey's mainstay was Columbia University). Moreover, I take this move personally since much of SAAP and SPEP call attention to the same matters.

My department is particularly represented at SAAP meetings as we have people doing dissertations that fuse Heidegger and Dewey together. Some work in philosophy of literature and have equal interests in Peirce and Gadamer. I am not saying that SIUC should be regarded as typical. I don't know. I just have friends that work in both areas and it is quite common for my department to have people common to both sets. Therefore, there is at least prima facie evidence to suggest that those interested in American philosophy might have equal interest in Continental figures. Therefore, it is not just that SAAP and SPEP are politically aligned. Instead, there is common ground between the two intellectually.

In this post, I have shown several things:

1. SPEP is made up of more than just Party-line Continentalists (and even that distinction is moribund and superficial. I've spoken about it before here);

2. Science can and does figure into the work of some phenomenologists who also attend SPEP;

3. Even if we grant Leiter's caveat about the work resembling English and Cultural Studies, there can still be philosophical work done that takes its inspiration from English and Cultural Studies. Holocaust literature provides me with a framework to ask questions about Auschwitz in as much as art does (See the Levi and Kiefer examples above)

AND,

4. There has been an attempt to control what counts as philosophy and this has resulted in the exclusion of American philosophers just as much as Continental philosophers. It is perhaps just surprising that by excluding Continentals, the Continentalists gathered at several schools, put a stake in the ground and declared some turf. From what I can tell, Americanists weren't even that lucky. SIUC is a wonderful little island for that reason.

Of those that I know, several of them are interested in cross-fertilization projects and this suggests prima facie reasons for rejecting Leiter's characterization of SAAP and its relation to SPEP.

Analytic Versus Continental by James Chase and Jack Reynolds

2011-07-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

I recently got the following text out at the library. Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy by James Chase and Jack Reynolds. As I've said before, this blog originally arose as a way to synthesize my analytic experience with the Continental turn I made. Therefore, I have always enjoyed pieces that synthesize philosophical differences. I believe my enthusiasm got the better of me.

I read through several chapters. The phenomenology chapter did a very brief job of explaining the Husserlian roots, and it did a great job of putting the reader in contact with those who are critical of phenomenology and the dialectic strategy phenomenologists constantly employ against the criticisms. This is where the book excelled. It excelled at highlighting and underscoring the major themes of the positions. That's about all.

This book had so much potential. The extensive capability to describe such widespread traditions with charity impressed me greatly. However, that's where the book stopped. It emphasized a moderately controlled attempt at engagement only when greater exploration of methodological differences can be better articulated. Yet, it's been nearly half a century and any two that are capable of such splendid exposition don't need to wait---unless that's the subject of a future book.

Yeah Okay But Still Blog's Solid Ruminations on the Divide

2011-06-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Back in 2006, I started this blog as a field of exploration. Some thoughts and threads have been abandoned, others refined and others completely rejected. Originally, I entitled the blog the Chasm as living metaphor for what felt at the time as a living reality, the dreaded Continental-Analytic Divide. During my Masters, I'd attended a fairly analytic school and several people there made me feel like reading Being and Time was akin to publicly reading porn. Five years later, I'm still going on strong, planning a dissertation on rejecting Heidegger's account of the emotions and articulating a replacement view with Scheler in mind.

I only live out the drama of this Divide at conferences from older folks. In Memphis, I was at a conference recently and an analytic philosopher told me that Continentals take seriously Hegel, and we don't. For a minute, I thought about saying something about the Neo-Hegelians at Pitt, but I just let it bounce off. Though, it didn't really bounce off. It bugged me the entire time I was there. I thought maybe that was the goal, to razzle my fi'nazzle. Later, the same gentleman said "Hi" in a very congenial and professional manner. I think this gentleman is convinced. I asked him later who he thought had been overtaken by Hegelianism. He said "Heidegger and all that French stuff!" He was simply ignorant.

Years ago, I went over to UBC to see Peter Singer. After he had left the session with the UBC graduate students, a PhD student that had asked a rather juvenile question and somehow thought my response to his question to Peter Singer respectful of his intellect came over to introduce himself to me (I don't want to get into it now). He said, "So what do you want to study after the MA?" I said, "Husserl and phenomenology." He took a step back and looked at me if I were a bizarre three-headed monster. "Why would you want to study that? There are no jobs in that!" I smirked, the very same smirk I now make. We do just fine over here.

These two stories come up in my head whenever someone wants to discuss the Divide as Nick does here. In truth, I think it is collapsing, but it is collapsing more with the fact that it stands as its own specialty. In addition, it is collapsing because there are entire groups of people that have went into philosophy, never read any Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida and they are really curious. The curious thing, no matter how you slice it, is Continental thought has acquired more significance than analytic philosophy. It bugs them to death that the Barnes'n Noble book shelf has 12 Foucault books and maybe two books by Searle (the same is true at Chapters). By comparison, Continental thought addresses/addressed lived-experience of death, politics and guilt to name a few. We often seek out literary expressions of these concepts, find them in art work and talk about the world completely from how subjectivity plays out in experience itself. We do not seek to limit ourselves with Ockham's razor to the point that we shave away what can be talked about, and more importantly, Continental thought embraces how wide and open human experience is. This means that I don't have to reduce the problem of death and meaning of life to the position of an epistemic agent. This is just how analytic philosophers compose and construct their writing. They write from the position of an epistemic subject all the time, and assume that all forms of noteworthy writing will assume this position and impose logical dialectic onto the problem. As such, you get a de-personalized and purely epistemic rendition of a philosophical problem that matters to everyone. I go to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger to understand human finitude and death, not analytic philosophy.

My analytic MA will no doubt help later on in the job search for the analytic barricade remnant of the last generation of scholars still holding on for dear life, and having several members on my committee from the Continental world will also help me. I am a rarit in disposition and training. In my philosophical disposition, I hate the extremes of this Divide. I hate hanging out with people that have only gone to Continental schools. They get rather blemished easily when they don't know who Bernard Williams is, and can't quite get what the Chinese Room thought experiment means. They are usually over-dramatic in their personal life and overly-embellished in their writing to the point it hurts my head to read. I also get rather pissed with the severely ahistorical analytic that would rather understand his/her contribution to a problem. The contribution made to a particular problem is so severed from the historical context that the PhD student is convinced of the contribution they are making to philosophy is original. This is the point of de-historicizing philosophy; it makes analytic philosophers feel very good about doing so little in truth. How many dissertations out there articulate a Neo-Humean account of practical reason? Seriously. I get that Hume thinks practical reason is not a source of ends as Kant thinks. I really do, but coming up with another account while taking seriously philosopher X's refutation of the general account and introducing your own -ism is not interesting. It is only thought provoking to a climate of de-historicized logic choppers.

Now, the above two are caricatures like James' caricatures of rationalists and empiricists in Pragmatism. There are examples I've met, but I've not met them in a while or met more. Most of us fall between the extremes. All philosophers are guilty of rhetorical flourish. Several self-identified analytic philosophers told me that philosophy as a subject should be written so clearly that a generally-educated person off the street could understand it. This general audience for analytic philosophy is a myth--it's an undergraduate pedagogical device and nothing more. I have not find the general reader yet that could understand it. I have met people that have read Melville and Sartre's Nausea. I doubt that literary minds could do justice to Being and Nothingness without guidance anymore than someone thrown into reading any work in analytic philosophy. "Hey you, over there. The guy in the scarf. Tell me what you think Parfit's account of the person might be!" This is an unrealistic expectation and can best be explained by analogy. Like art, philosophy's unfortunate fate is what it takes to appreciate it. The appreciation of philosophy requires time, training and practice just as much as it requires a lot of historical and contextual training to fully appreciate art and its history. Mostly, it requires a sense of living history to do philosophy well, and it is this awareness that makes us sensitive to the possibilities of how open we must be when dealing with philosophical texts and the philosophical conversations we have with each other. This is why the assumptions/methodology of logical atomism cannot constrain the openness needed when viewing Nietzsche's texts. As Nick, the author of Yeah Okay But Still puts it,

I have often been guilty of a “default” adherence to this method, and this is due in large part to my training. Yet, I (and we) must acknowledge that other forms of argument exist, ones which have wholly different validity-conditions. Nietzsche argued, for example, that belief in a Christian god was no longer “credible” given the discovery of Christianity’s historical origins. An Analytic Philosophy Monkey will look at this argument , utter the phrase: “genetic fallacy”, and move on. If Nietzsche really intends to demonstrate, in a deductive fashion, the nonexistence of god, then he indeed commits the genetic fallacy.

Yet, surely he is trying to do something else. In telling us about the dark, angry, psychologically troubling origins of Christian Good and Evil, he is trying to affect a different kind of change in his reader. He knows full well that these considerations cannot entail the nonexistence of god. Yet his argument seems to have a kind of importance. This importance derives straightforwardly from its context: a Christian reader encounters it and is troubled by it. In order to understand why this is so, we must know so much more about this reader’s psychology, why he believes what he does, why his beliefs are important to him. If we treat the argument as a straightforward logical deduction , we miss what is essentially an invitation, an opportunity to delve into this person’s life and the significance that philosophy can have for him.

Philosophizing is not simply about presenting ideas in argumentative dialectic. However, it is deeper than that, I feel. There is a passion for life animating Nietzsche's work, and this passion cannot be picked up by people enthralled by the fact that logic is ontologically-binding on reality, or what Nick has called the prominence of logical atomism. This is why so many of these problems in analytic philosophy take shape as they do. Since philosophy has no other method other than to think logical norms dictate how we ought to reason about the problems before us, philosophers internalize these norms to the point that thinking clearly and logically define the writing and its activity. This is not bad in itself and hence my annoyance at French obscurantism. The point, however, is that the confluence of factors that feed into philosophy should not over-emphasize one aspect that it goes on wholly unaware of its history---a sobering point as many top Leiterite philosophy programs eliminate or simplify their history requirements. I think this point is well made in the opening of Bret Davis' Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit,

Philosophy perhaps always involves the frustrated attempt to get back to where we have already begun, to get this foundation in full view, if not indeed to lay it ourselves. We then repeat this backward step with an introduction to what we have disclosed, trying to determine the very reading of the reading we have given. This backward stepping is both the virtue and the folly of philosophy...Heidegger asked for his texts to be read as "ways--not works (Wege--nicht Werke, GA: 1:437)", we are invited to pursue the paths of thought his texts open up, rather than forever attempting merely to faithfully reconstruct his "system." In order to genuinely read a great thinker, both critically and "faithfully," one must go beyond merely reproducing his or her thought "in their own terms." Reading is interpreting; thinking is being on the way of a thought and happily so. The task is to attune oneself to what is question-worthy in a thinker's thoughts, to take up his way and not simply imitate his works (Emphasis mine, p 1-2).

I could not put it better myself. For philosophers to genuinely participate with a work in philosophy, one is required to take up this invitation into the very hermeneutic effort in which these texts presuppose and re-constitute in our appropriation. Mere imitation is never enough.

Taibbi's Article on Bachmann

2011-06-26T06:10:00.000-07:00

Matt Taibbi's article almost makes me scared. Originally, I did not think the contemptuous laughter of the cultural elite (if that is what I am, or more than likely taken to be) is full of itself. That laughter discredits her, makes Bachmann a source of irritation that one handles like the awkward cousin nobody likes. You laugh at the things she says, and "move on." However, Taibbi might be right to end the article on the nightmarish prospect of Bachmann's rise to the American Presidency:

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.

Obviously, I owe Taibbi a beer sometime and must apologize for my laughter.

What is Marriage

2011-06-20T23:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to a paper by two political scientists and Princeton philosopher arguing for an anti-gay conception of marriage.

Over at Philosophy, Etc., the refutation is well-argued.

I don't think I have anything to add except one fact. The natural view of marriage as facilitating human reproduction is argued as a "metaphysical fact." The insight shared by French feminists, post-structural theorists and thinkers like Levinas is clearly suspicious of Western metaphysics for tending to promote discourses that subsume all difference into a category propped up and passed off as metaphysically real. Such suspicions drive at the heart of thinking women are lesser than men due to apparent metaphysical arguments just as much as systemic discrimination against Blacks in the American South was propped up by phrenology. This is why discourses of the "Other" are so pertinent, and cannot be ignored.

New College of the Humanities

2011-06-20T09:08:00.000-07:00

I have been following the links provided by Leiter's blog about Grayling's New College of the Humanities.

I encountered someone on this thread that made some odious generalizations about public universities--which I still believe are necessary.

Last Exit Books, the Hidden Gem of Kent, OH

2011-06-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I courted my wife while she attended Kent State. Last Exit Books was a tiny "hole in the wall" with the philosophy section behind a curtained room. Today, it is much bigger, expanding beautifully with cozy couches and chairs. For $23 dollars, I picked up the following titles:

1. Hardcover of Heidegger and the Will On the Way to Gelassenheit by Bret Davis.

2. Paperback of Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine by Margaret Whitford.

It should be mentioned that the hardcover of Davis' book had been wrapped, and untouched. The Whitford book was free from annotation as well.

The philosophy section was very well-stocked, probably due to the fact that Kent State also runs an MA in philosophy. Some of the books make it back for whatever reason. I met a couple from New York that raided the literary and popular culture sections. I met another woman who was friends with a professor of philosophy at Akron and with a degree in mathematics was trying to find something in the philosophy of mathematics. Needless to say, the crowd I met in 20 minutes might be a very good sample of the reflective types that make this bookstore thrive. I highly recommend it.

There are still some very good primary texts of Irigaray there owing to some upper level class or seminar no doubt.

Exposing Entrenched Political Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 3: Two Arguments Against Libertarianism

2011-06-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

I want to take issue with the fidelity to free markets. This post was prompted by watching Senator Ron Paul’s very faithful commitment to free markets and libertarianism in the recent Republican debate for the party’s nomination for the presidency. For him and libertarians like him, America was founded on the concept of liberty as articulated by libertarianism (I find this historical legitimizing of libertarianism problematic, but won’t get into in this post). A bold defense of liberty requires that we leave others alone. As such, libertarianism as a political and moral philosophy usually puts its principle:

Principle of Non-Intervention of Another’s Autonomy (PNIAA hereafter) states that agents ought to never interfere with the free exercise of another’s liberty and that the range of rights of others shares in this same principle reciprocally.

PNIAA is the fundamental principle that generates rights considerations politically and on the intra-personal level it generates a respect of an agent’s autonomy. In this way, it does come close to Kantian ethics, but in Kantian ethics, the respect for autonomy can decidedly inform more than what we ought not to do. It can generate some duties about what ought to do. PNIAA’s first shortcoming is that a deontological principle that forbids interference with the exercise of another’s autonomy can only generate principles of non-intervention, it can generate no positive duties. As such, adequate moral theories generate action guidance for both positive and negative duties. This theory is entirely one-sided. Therefore, it should be rejected.

Another fatal flaw of libertarianism is a flaw of its Kantian cousin—the isolated subject (what we can also call a self) necessary for such robust exercise of personal liberty. This is what is necessary for PNIAA to "get off the ground", that is, to make any sense whatsoever, yet the isolated subject does not exist. There is no concept of self that is atomistic and so autonomous that it can be abstracted from the concrete lived-experience of a self acting in the world. Selves are relational, and this relational aspect of the self is always becoming, always making possible my actions. It cannot be blatantly ignored. Selves know who they are from their interaction with others in a public space. I disclose myself in action as Arendt would claim and for my action to have any meaning whatsoever, it must appear before others in a very public space. Others must recognize what it is I have done, and a philosophical examination of the self acting in the world must articulate the necessity of otherness. Others recognize, accept, judge, hate, despise, vilify and enjoy who I am, what I have done and how my identity and actions resonate to the community. If I am an entertainer, I know that I am a good entertaining by being in relation to others.

In libertarianism, the self is completely abstracted from the concrete effects of a self relating to others. The theory in American political rhetoric takes on a dimension of the hypothetical, yet if your ideal does not mesh with how it is lived in practice, then what Ron Paul and other free-market enthusiasts are doing is using libertarianism as a trick. It is a trick to deceive you into favoring a system in which wealthy politicians already benefit. Libertarianism is attractive from the sense that it emphasizes no strings upon the state to affect the self-determination of those who work hard, and by work hard I facetiously mean those that have money already. It provides the myth of the self-made man that has entire control over what he can do if given enough freedom to do so. In libertarianism, the robust conception of a completely free self does not come with any aspect of relationality to it. This means that environment has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you suffer. All you have to do is bootstrap yourself and you can transcend to wealthy heights. The actual data supplied by social scientists that study social mobility is more depressing than we'd like to admit.

As far back as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it has been realized that the actual political conditions that foster the conditions under which we all live has a direct relation on whether or not we can achieve the good life. It was Aristotle and not Marx that first had this insight. Here, the “good life” does not mean a condo in the Hamptons, or a top spot in a wealthy career. The good life is something more akin to living a life in which the goods of one’s life: friendship, justice, family, knowledge and even wealth are balanced such that one is permanently content. There is no one good that you possess that takes central attention away from any others, and it is the type of life that when looked back from the deathbed, one can say they have lived a good life.

Given that Americans are so obsessed with the exercise of their freedom in consumer-like ways, this argument usually falls on deaf ears. However, the intuition behind it is sound. Rather than focus on a moral and political philosophy that promotes a lofty conception of the self, we should focus instead on promoting a dialogue that examines the ends of what we want our society to become. It should not be one in which the exercise of freedom can only be understood in economic terms of utility. That is a base conception already of how we are, and once someone is trapped in that instrumental reasoning of means-to-end mentality of a cost-benefit analysis, one cannot see the error of that way of thinking. Time and time again, I get "into it" with free market enthusiasts (and one economics graduate student) and they cannot understand how value (meant here as a reason for why someone acts) can be intrinsic and non-instrumental. This creates a problem--namely that moral reasons largely lose their purpose (though some versions of utilitarianism might survive). The exercise of freedom to create and live has more dimensions than the way Americans tend to always associate the exercise of their freedom to the accrue of profit. There's more to life, and the Aristotelian way of understanding this insight facilitates a better way to address what America ought to become.

If the political world fosters conditions such as a disparity between all the resources necessary to live the good life, then it does not promote human flourishing. Libertarianism is dangerous for that reason. It divorces the communal structures that come to play out and determine how people can exercise their capacities to better themselves. Therefore, I recommend that what replaces a fidelity to free-markets in our public discourse is a renewed consideration as to what we think the conditions of Americans desire for the flourishing of our country rather than insist on ideologies that are blatantly false in their metaphysical articulation of what a self is.

Exposing Entrenched Power Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 2: Naive Originalism and the Constitution

2011-05-30T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Tea Party and conservatives have for a long time complained about President Obama and liberals not respecting the US Constitution. The same goes for the reverse. When Conservatives are in power, Liberals then complain that Conservatives are not respecting the Constitution. In this way, it becomes fashionable for both parties to strongly disagree with each other as to whom is respecting the Constitution. Why is it such a big deal? Well for starters, the Supreme Court avoids political entanglements allegedly by holding lifetime appointments and the largest role the Supreme Court has is to review the constitutionality of various laws at all sectors of governance. In theory, an independent judiciary is great to review the fairness of the laws of the land. However, ideology and partisan politics just occupy a less than obvious implicit status when nominating a Justice to the bench, and what each Justice considers "interpretation" serves the implicit status of power politics. What is deemed "constitutional" or "unconstitutional" serves not only ideology of the partisan interest, but what they consider appropriate to the act of interpretation is instrumental to how the Court functions.

Needless to say, I've heard the mantra from the Tea Party that we must be faithful to the Constitution. Yet, what exactly is involved in demonstrating faith. If anything, the best version, however flawed, of such an opinion comes from Justice Scalia's commitment to something he calls "originalism."

Justice Scalia defines originalism as the only way of proceeding in terms of constitutional interpretation. In originalism, the text as law is interpreted under looking to the historical authorship of the law up to including the legislative intention in which the law is authored. By looking to this historical authorship, one assumes that one can have access to the authorial intention of the law. Anything short of originalism is a picking and selecting arbitrarily at what one wants the text to mean-such people are guilty of a form of judicial activism.

If we stipulate ahead of time that judicial activism is essentially Judges reading into the law what their personal views, then any time a Judge reads his personal views into the act of interpretation it can be said that such an act is wrong when interpreting the law. If one accepts originalism as a way of proceeding, then they, too, believe prior to the act of interpretation a personal view that they read into the law as well. Their prior commitment to finding the historical situation in which the law was written violates the central principle of their criticism of judicial activism.

What is ludicrous above is the fact that it is an unrealistic assumption that interpreters can separate themselves from the body of preexisting beliefs. time and place of their current situatedness. Since the law is about interpreting the law, one stands at the horizonal moment of a text -- between past and future expectation. Interpretation is never concerned with the past in a way that the originalist assumes the past available. Instead, the interpretive act is always futural. We look to history and what has happened in the past for our practical need to engage the law in the present, that is, toward the demands of our current situation. I think an example is in order to organize our intuitions on this very matter. The following example is inspired by its analogue in Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire.

Let us suppose that Suzy is a tenant in a building. Under state law, a "Landlord must provide suitable time for tenant eviction." Suzy is getting her car repaired, and cannot leave immediately despite her landlord's desire for her to vacate the apartment so as to rent to more reliable tenants. Suzy leaves her apartment for a second to do some grocery shopping after staying 3 days over the day the landlord wanted her to vacate the apartment. As such, the landlord uses his key and starts to move all her possessions onto the lawn in front of the building. When she returns, she finds her pieces of furniture have been rained on, and the landlord ushering his nephews to hurry with her belongings. Suzy and her landlord end up in court.

The source of the disagreements rests between the two parties on how to define a "suitable time for tenant eviction." Laws are written with general appilcability in mind, often without precision in the law's authoring. Legal interpretation is assumed to flesh out the generality of what the laws shall mean in terms of their applicability. Suzy's civil claim would be compensation for property damage, and the landlord would counter claim the right to evict a tenant after suitable time has passed, arguing 3 days is "suitable." Any look to the legislative intention might be something like general guidelines so as to curtail private quarrels between interested parties. What is one to do for the legal interpretation of the state statute?

The above is a palatable example. It drives the fact that the law is a socially argumentative practice built on the praxis of concepts, not the stasis of universal meanings solidified in the past. Legal interpretation is more like Aristotle's notion of phronesis in which one gets better at practical reasoning in moral situations the more one gets better at being/cultivating the virtues over time. For this reason, this is why Gadamer revives Aristotle on exactly this point. The act of interpretation is connected to the past in a lively and workable way through the needs of interpreter. Privileging originalism is just hiding one's conservatism in a way that stagnates judicial review and does not reflect the overall hermeneutic experience of legal interpretation.

It is one thing to beat the drum of the untenable premises that undergird originalism, namely, that interpretation is about having epistemic access to the past in the way originalism thinks it does, but it is quite another to leave empty what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would have to answer. As such, I now turn to outline several unrelated points to the above post on what I think a good Constitutional theory of interpretation ought to have.

1) Constitutional interpretations employ normative concepts. Central to these concepts is justice, and as such a good theory must give us an answer to what justice is, and its relation to interpretation.

2) Constitutional interpretation relies on the assumption that the Constitution has legitimacy, that is, the Constitution has authority over us. This means that a good theory of interpretation must give us a story as to why we find the Constitution authoritative.

3) Conceptual analysis of interpretation needs to cut through the normative posturing; a deep philosophical story of what exactly interpretation is, and how far interpretation can go epistemically are necessary to give us a fuller story. I have alluded to what I think would be a good analysis on this end, a Gadamerian story of legal hermeneutics as found in Truth and Method.

In conclusion, I will summarize my thoughts on originalism. First, the originalist rhetorically move to say that judicial activism is nothing more than reading what you want to read into the law is absurd in that originalism is guilty of the same way it defines judicial activism for other competing acts of interpretation. Moreover, I show that what the criticism lacks is a realistic picture of how interpreters are using the past to secure applicable knowledge for their present situation. This means that interpretation is always normative, never impartial--always bound to the reconstituted historical moment of the interpreter. All interpretations points to the present, and this is the more realistic temporal relation revealing the past as never static and accessible to be known in the way originalism thinks the past available. Instead, interpretation is an act, a lively and workable engagement with the text, past and situation one finds oneself in; the analogues for this type of activity is Aristotelian phronesis by which we live morally better and better by acquiring the practice that only living morally in experience can provide.

In essence, I oppose originalism by defending Gadamer's conception of phenomenological hermeneutics as a way of proceeding on these matters. In addition, I end by outlining several concerns as to what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would look like.

Exposing Entrenched Power Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 1: Evangelical Literalism

2011-05-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

I have set myself to a certain task in philosophy. Through philosophy, it is more or less a hobby as I do not want to give it much time, but I think it cannot be helped. In following out the conception of philosophy that most bears fruit, it is one in which the philosopher is intimately connected to evaluate the structures of the lifeworld as they are currently lived, that is to philosophize about contemporary cultural forms. In so doing, it is my intention to expose dangerous political narratives in American culture that entrench unjust power dynamics and not just proceed phenomenologically. There are those that do this better than me. Butler has, for instance, written much on the performative aspects of gender and taken to task a critical interrogation of the concept with surprising results. I am no Butler.

In this entry, let me take to task Evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity is particular form of Christianity that naively appropriates the Augustinian principle of having a personal relationship with God. Now, this is true of all Protestant forms of Christianity. As an institution, The Church is no longer man's correction to his sinful nature and by emphasizing that one can have a personal relationship towards God one is no longer required to relate to God institutionally through the Church. Therefore, not only does the Augustinian conception of a personal relationship with God emphasize a new orientation for the believer, it also de-legitimizes the historical and political authority of the Church. This forms the background of Evangelical Christianity, but in a more practical way.

With no mediated authority for the sacred to take place, the Christian message can come right into your home like any product of direct marketing. James Kennedy and the "Hour of Power" or Jerry Falwell can come streaming into your life through your television set, or literally streaming from the internet. They tape broadcasts and convince thousands of others of their powerful message. In this way, the personal relationship gets co-opted by their powerful charismatic personalities. Some ministers have even called themselves "Doctor" for marketing sakes only to have no PhD (Jerry Falwell took on the term "doctor" because he felt honorary degrees conveyed the privilege of doing so even outside the institution that awarded the degree).

More than that, these religious authorities relate Biblical themes straight into their own participation in culture from a naive literalism. To be fair, no religiously oriented person can avoid participation in culture. To be a communal being means we participate in our cultural setting. However, the point of this group is to abuse how such a personal relationship with God manifests in experience. Augustine's personal relationship with God did not mean being the naive source of direct Biblical literal reading. Augustine meant reading scripture in its original Greek and attending to this relationship with God with the serious mind of a scholar. It did not mean two hicks in a trailer being moralized by a Sunday preacher 453 miles away in Columbus, OH. It did not mean promoting megachurches and their mission like one supports the profit mission of Walmart to bring cheap goods to American consumers.

As a philosopher, I don't have much patience for religion. That much is clear. I have a general sense of the divine, but do not account for it metaphysically. Instead, I find extreme comfort in Kant's criticism against speculative metaphysics. That is surely not the way into religion. That's why we have faith as Kant wanted "to make room for faith", yet in the expression of our faith, if we miss the point of God as "wholly other", then we miss the point of God. For God has always been an expression of that which is radically transcendent and outside ourselves. In every worship of Him, we are humbled before that which is Other in God. This is a model for relating to Others, and we are called to be humble for God inasmuch as we OUGHT to humble ourselves before others (that which is different from ourselves). This means whenever a gay boy is bound to a tree and beaten to death, we are called to oppose such treatment of those that are different. We must embrace difference and not shy away from it. Whenever an LGBT person is ridiculed, mocked, beaten or killed, difference is not respected. Evangelicals have politically instituted their naivety and abandoned the ethical call of Christianity. They would rather hate sinners than see themselves as one and the same. But why?

The answer comes aground once more. Evangelicals believe in the inerrancy of Biblical scripture. Incapable of understanding revelation through metaphor and analogy, they conclude some very strange things. Down near Cincinnati, there is the Creation Museum. Filled with animatronic machines, music and amusement park rides, one can simulate the actual co-habitation of man with dinosaurs.

This is how messed up my country is. Though to be fair, the founder of the Creation Museum is Australian.

In such an experience, one doesn't need to critically evaluate the claim made upon us through religion. Religious texts, indeed, make claims of us. Like any art or cultural work, the texts demand to be thought and rethought. This is why the experience of scripture is anything but naive. It calls for a deep hermeneutic experience in much the same way that Gadamer describes. The depth of hermeneutic experience of the Bible is completely missed by those pictured above.

Let me dispose of one common and anticipated objection. If I make a universal claim about all Evangelical Christians, then the counterfactual existence of one Evangelical that shares in what I have claimed will falsify my account. Well, if that is what you think I have done, then you've missed the point completely. When I commit to being philosophical about cultural forms of life and practices, it is not a claim about the people of the cultural form. Instead, it is the danger of the idea, what the idea gives rise to. In this, I do not think it can be denied that the people in the documentary Jesus Camp fulfill what I have said, and the level of education necessary for that type of Christianity is very low, unreflective and naive in the fullest sense. As such, yes, there very well could be a reflective Evangelical Christian whose experience is devoid of my criticism. However, such a person is not in the spotlight and I would hope such a person would come to internally question their own tradition in the way that I have explained its overall weakness.

In conclusion, a naive literalism accompanied with a dearth of understanding Luther's retrieval of Augustine's personal relationship with God makes for a dangerous combination. It is not so much that these things are "wrong" (for whom am I to judge the accuracy of theological work as a phenomenologist) as much as they are dangerous in practice. This much is clear philosophically. Without acknowledging God as wholly other and how this relation is the basis for honoring difference, naive Christians will find reasons to hate that which is impure even with the irony that we are all sinners. In addition, their form of unreflective Christianity will unlikely disappear insofar as the Bible is treated with literalism that does not challenge the hermeneutic promise of the text itself, including understanding the very dimension of a personal relationship of God Augustine actually meant. Instead, Christianity will continually devolve into the similarity it already possesses with consumerism to the point that it will continually surface as a force to challenge thoughtful and reflective people (believers and non-believers alike). This is even more dangerous since the populism of Christianity and the populism of American politics integrate into a new narrative of America as a shining city on a hill. Once a polity gets a sense of its own destiny through the divine, it will tend towards more dangerous aims. More on this later...

Aristotle's De Anima

2011-05-24T16:26:00.000-07:00

I won't really have much to say about philosophical issues this summer. I continue to read about Heidegger and Scheler. I continue to place them in tension with each other, but such a continued effort is now on hold. I am doing my reading for the preliminary examination in my PhD. I only take one test, and this is it. Likewise, my PhD program is historically-oriented. I read the really big books of Western philosophy and try to get a hold over what the arguments are (or a basic exposition of the view).

Right now, I am reading Aristotle's De Anima. I cannot stand it. You would think that a self-professed phenomenologist would love the discussion of consciousness, the capacities of the soul so described. Yet, the only thing that matters here is Aristotle's invention of intentionality. "The sense must be percipient of itself" (III: pt. 2, lines 17). I take little else from this book. I can't stand hearing about Aristotle solving the nature of light in one paragraph. I don't know. Perhaps, I am being too impatient and not exercising the demanding philosophical patience with this text.

I also wonder about Aristotle's definition of life. His definition of life is that it is a composite between self-nutrition and growth. A phenomenological conception of life is that it strives towards the world, and in my conception, this striving has no structure other than the production of the same type of its own kind. Unlike Nietzsche, however, I do not think this striving includes within it an exercise of domination over others indifferently that results in injury and harm. Certainly, if there is no overriding structure to this striving, then it can result in a will-to-power, but the striving might take on other forms like perhaps a will-to-love.

Truth, Perspectivism and Methodology in Philosophy

2011-05-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

Gadamer observed in an essay on Truth in the Human Sciences that many different people can appropriate the humanities for different political purposes and there is no proper way to study the humanities in order to prevent this from occurring. Unlike the sciences, there are no clear methodologies one can point towards in the study of humanities (I say this as a wholly convinced phenomenologist). One literary interpretation of Leviticus can commit one's faith to exclusion of otherness, while a more generous reading might carry the day for openness. All we can do is maintain an openness to otherness and do so as if it were an ethical imperative.

This reflection is spawned by watching the documentary Equality U. In this documentary, LGBT Christian Activists went to 19 different Christian universities to end religiously-based discrimination. Now, some of the exchanged between these groups reached a theological impasse. Group A maintained that homosexual gay lifestyles were inherited sinful. That's just what we believe and the other Group B urged for a loving-kindness and openness. At one point, members from Group A just said "Let's just agree to disagree." The activists felt their viewpoint needed to be shared and they spent about two hours in the film justifying their activism. What made this so difficult for them is a problem that lurks in the humanities in general, not just theology. Activism can feel like the assertion of an ideology rather than an argument for the "truth" of that moral position.

In any science -- whether it is social or natural science -- there are clear methods one uses to access structures in the world. The power of the science is limited in what we can actually say about that objective world, but the point is that objectivity is a goal of the scientist. They talk about something they can all experience and even repeat within the methods used to describe the same thing. Therefore, the "truth" of the science has a point of reference. Theology, on the other hand, has no clear method to access the world and does not share the same reference. There is no objective structure one is pointing towards, even if they are referencing the same text. Interpretation mitigates this access and interpretation itself is the problem. In the humanities, that is all we can do.

The hermeneuticist in me might want to claim a reversal of priority in method. I could argue that scientists are fooled; they are as bootstrapped in the same way as the humanities. All science is just interpretation, but without texts, the scientist must interpret through a series of signs and symbols--essentially the theoretical model and the quantitative representation of the phenomenon in question. Some scientists think of the model as what is truly real and others construe the model as an instrument to make sense of reality. I don't know I can go so far in claiming science is like hermeneutics, but I do have sympathies with this view. It's just that I don't know where to place the emphasis on openness. In science, the scientists usually have a good grasp of the limit built within the practice. If they don't, they're not really doing science. Science is about asking questions to things we don't know and designing ways to investigate our best guesses about a phenomenon.

Back to the openness... In the beginning, I said that we must maintain an openness to difference. We must be humble in our intellectual commitments lest we commit the political sin of excluding others from counting. In the 1800s, European racists concocted "phrenology" to exclude Negroes from counting in the moral community. They weren't African-American, nor even people. They were slaves and treated like cattle. People used the Bible to justify slavery. The Bible was also appropriated by Martin Luther King, Jr. as a point of wisdom to oppose Jim Crowe laws. Yet, where do we point to say who had the right theological interpretaton? We can't with any reliability. We can, however, make sure we have a constant open attitude towards openness and view our beliefs as tentative efforts to know the world. We should not be convinced with certainty about our beliefs to the point they become dogmas and exclude others from counting. This is harder said than done. Also, this is the ethical imperative of postmodernism and why postmodernists exert great effort in showing that meta-narratives of truth are dead.

On Nietzsche's Systematicity and the GM

2011-04-25T20:16:00.000-07:00

A friend over at Yeah Okay But Still has an excellent post on both Hurka and Reginster's attempt to systematize Nietzsche's moral philosophy. As I have said in the past to others, Nietzsche inspires very good philosophy done on behalf of his name, but whether or not that is what Nietzsche claimed is a different matter entirely. I wrote the following in a journal of mine after completing the Genealogy of Morals (GM hereafter) for prelim reading.

The GM is the one book that if it is right by a hair in any way, then my efforts in ethics will suffer in some way. I've been thinking of the main problem I have in N's GM. My problem amounts to what I take to be an ambiguous relation between nature and culture within his work (at the very least there is a conceptual tension between these two things). It seems very generally that at times the way we are culturally such as being "sick" or men suffering from "bad consciences" is at odds with a more natural way, men with will-to-powers who are stronger, more healthy and do not suffer from cultural forces. Thus, we might say that N is offering us an examination of how we ought to reshape culture in light of how we are naturally. Now, while N might also claim this relationship is an interpretation, it does seem like it is a causal story doing the work for his analysis.

However, there is a real problem I have with this type of thinking found in experimental philosophy. In X-phi, various ethicists are sampling they're 18-20 year old students to see how morality should be structured such that the conceptions of morality respect how it is that we are psychologically constituted. However, the strategies employed are simply polling students with surveys. These surveys occur at a a level of analysis in which I think it is epistemologically impossible to tell where culture and nature can be teased apart. If we can't reliably know the moment they pull apart, then just as it is the case in X-phi, I am unsure how the relationship obtains in N's work such that what is justifying the claim that we should endorse the ways of the master morality over slave moralities (or whatever you take the active skepticism concerning common slave morality in N to be) loses its efficacy. At best, the inability to tell the difference might make us skeptical that N is right into identifying the "correct" side as nature over culture. Perhaps, it is then that nature selects for cooperative behaviors over individualistic ones.

Of course, the immediate rejoinder might be to emphasize N's thinking that culture is just a perverted understanding of nature, and that it is contained within the tent of N's commitment to a type of naturalism. At the moment, I think something like this is probably the case for N's work, though I still think the division in interpretation between culture and nature needs clarification.

Early Phenomenology Conference

2011-04-21T04:26:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving a paper at the Early Phenomenology Conference in Steubenville, OH. The group at Franciscan University at Steubenville is very oriented towards Scheler in general. I can make some contacts, discuss his work and I'm giving a paper on Husserl.

Submission to a Conference

2011-04-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

I'm becoming an increasing fan of applying the phenomenological method to areas of interest rather than thinking that as phenomenologists, we should just simply regurgitate textual exegesis.

Phenomenology and the Sense of Nature

In this paper, I will argue that phenomenological descriptions of nature cannot establish a value or ethic. Phenomenology can only study the form of these experiences. HoweveNo r, the benefit of adopting a phenomenological orientation to nature brings to light what emotive engagements arise in relation to nature. Some of these emotive engagements condition the response to nature as either objects of instrumental use, or the sublime beauty of nature. An ethics of nature or the environment is therefore a consequence of reading our aesthetic emotive engagements of nature back into the very orientation we take up in relation to nature. In other words, phenomenology recovers the sense to which the meaning of nature arises.

This approach flies in the face of modernity in two respects, which I argue are still present for us today. On the one hand, as long as philosophers continually operate with a Cartesian attitude that scientific and philosophical knowledge empowers human beings to possess nature, and on the other hand, ethical theories restrict value to human beings only. My phenomenological description of relating to nature then comes into contact with these two proclivities. As such, I argue phenomenology provides us with an alternative as to how we find nature meaningful; it is through the emotive engagements of the sublimeity in nature that should open up how we see nature acquires the sense of value inherent within (offering us a different eidetic seeing of nature).

Let me speak to the paper’s organization. In section 1, I describe what I take to be the relation to nature uncovered by phenomenological description. In section 2, I explain what I take to be the Cartesian attitude towards nature and likewise the same in section 3 in relation to the human-value bias in ethical theories. Finally, I conclude in section 4 how the description of section 1 can amend both the

G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument and Phenomenology

2011-04-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

In this post, I want to suggest something different about Moore's Open Question argument. It might be weird to say, but I've always found this argument convincing; yet it's more about what the Open Question argument implies Let's review.

For moral property M, M expresses the fact that there are intrinsically good things in this world like moral values. M is not the same as natural properties N in N is simply a descriptive state of affairs about how the world is, not how it ought to be. According to Moore, no M can be identified with an N. If an M is identified with an M, then the strange thing is we can still ask if M is really an N? It is an open question whether or not, e.g. the good is identified with maximizing collective welfare. We can still ask if maximizing collective welfare is good? Thus, all determinate identifications of M as N suffer from the open indeterminacy of any predicate attributed to what is good. The inference suggested is that natural properties and moral properties are an irreconcilable divide, and any future identification between these realms of fact and values, is-statements and ought-statements, or what is called the descriptive and the normative is foolish. Instead, we should think that values are irreducible following that the difference between fact and value is a difference in kind, and it is not a stretch to say that within moral philosophy the sphere of the personal is also maintained as irreducible.

Husserl gives us good reasons to think that something like this follows from Moore's argument--that is, there is a diference in kind between what can be explained naturally and what should be explained at the first-personal level. From the natural standpoint, all events can appear as if they can be described by the totality of Ns in the universe. From this point of view, all events occur as N revealed in a long chain of physically caused phenomena. In this way, the antecedent conditions of the causal story result in my having chosen any decision and one gets in the habit of positing events as N all the time. Among the events as N, the fact that I have subjectivity and have initiated deliberation as an event is lost in this perspective. There is nothing like consciousness in this view. All events that become subsumed in the overall chain of events. Thus, any first-personal perspective in which I initiate, feel or experience in any way is a fact to be explained. Yet, according to a shift in the perspective taken from the standpoint of my conscious experience, it is I that decides what to do. It is me that decides to endorse my son's adoption of a baby, or not. For moral experience, and the experience of M in general, the dimension of experience bearing on any moral quandary is to be lived through at the practical level of the first-personal experience. This is where all moral experience takes place and this is where the experience of the personal matters. It is never a question of what is to be explained as part of an overall order of natural explanation. Rather, it is a question of values pertaining to how different in kind they are from matters of description.

Let me be clear. Moore's argument does not endorse phenomenological analysis of the sphere of human being or of moral experience. Yet, it does not limit it either. What Moore's open question argument achieves is a strict non-identification between the natural and the moral. This adds evidence that we are not off base for thinking that our experience of morality should seek its answer within the lived-experience of human life. In other words, there is more to moral experience than seeking to explain the ontology of value-predicates in moral judgments. Given that Moore's argument achieves this, it is not a stretch to assume the possibility of a moral phenomenology. Moreover, it is silent on whether or not a moral phenomenology is the only way to get to the experience of values. One might as easily treat the moral and the natural with a pragmatic conception of experience. Thus, while I advocate the phenomenological approach, it is at least conceivable that there are other approaches to describe the respect of lived-experience the Open Question Argument implies.

What am I doing?

2011-04-07T20:42:00.000-07:00

This harder than it looks. Define what you are doing right now. Define it by doing, but while you do that try and clearly define the boundary of something as big as philosophy. Hmmf. Hit a wall. Yeah, I know. The problem with the "love of wisdom" is that wisdom demands much from us. A look to what it means to be wise offers no consolation...

A good wise person is someone that is convinced by good arguments only, or can, say, philosophy find wisdom in artistic and creative expressions in art and literature? Should a philosopher be poetic or rational? Maybe both? Should a philosopher only be concerned with science since science is an exemplar about how we ought to know? Should philosophy be none of this, but a type of systematic thinking that reveals the weakness of various systems of belief and ideology? Should philosophy talk about clearly delineated problems with a logical structure, or should such structure be recognized as a movement away from what phenomenologists call "lived-experience" or what Dewey called "the Problems of Men"? Should philosophy assume its problems in light of a standpoint capable of universal and transcendent conceptual knowledge, or should philosophers be wise to their limits and construe the possible interpretations of philosophy as historically-mediated? Should philosophers strive for objectivity, or should they recognize this as impossible? Should philosophy be based in anyone area of concern first like epistemology and then do other things like metaphysics, ethics etc? Should philosophy be a conversation between the historical formation of my background knowledge and my present lived-experience? Should we move away from phenomenology's attention to the sense-formation of meaning in consciously lived experience and merely trace out the consequences of an idea itself? Are their biases in philosophy that have gendered its possibility? Should philosophy recognize it is a product of social forces of power? Should philosophy seek to only critique various systems of thought? Should philosophy concern itself only with the emancipation of human beings from domineering social, political and economic ideologies? Should philosophy be based in reason and oppose faith? Should philosophers be faithful, or should philosophers expose an oversimplification between faith and reason?

In essence, the questions are many and you can imagine many wise people asking these questions.

The only thing I can fathom I am actually doing as a philosopher is asking questions and using my intellectual imagination to address these questions. The questions are big and small. Some of these questions I don't ask, but some of my fellow colleagues do.

Persons and Alabama

2011-04-05T13:45:00.000-07:00

As these efforts in Alabama focus on what a person is. I often have to insist that this is not where to end the abortion debate. What is at issue is not the ontology of the person which we then use to deduce when someone has moral standing! Mary Anne Warren had this trouble in her 5 criteria for personhood. There was no clear way the criteria happened. As soon as the baby possessed one of the five criteria, then bingo! It was a person. This also seemed to correspond to the miraculous manifestation of these properties when the baby entered the world. Bingo personhood once out of the womb! Like some weird Kantian property of contra-causal freedom of the will...

The abortion debate starts with first admitting two things from the extremes. First, it is not an issue of bodily autonomy in which abortion is morally neutral like getting a haircut. Secondly, the complexity of fetus in the very beginning of fertilization isn't exactly a person, and that we should not conflate being a person defined by species-membership and a being with moral standing. Given that, where do we begin?

Quite frankly, we start by admitting that there are moral scenarios where two beings have competing normative claims. On behalf of the woman, we have many possible issues: physical harm from birth and possibly death, quality of life for both the woman and potential child, and perhaps the desire to be free from having a child in the first place in combination with any of the other above all reasons. On behalf of the fetus, we cannot ask it to state its normative claim, and so we interpret that if the fetus had any claim, it follows from its dependent nature that the child would have a right to life. I concede that point wholeheartedly to anti-abortionists. If there are two competing claims, then we must admit that the function of morality is to resolve the competing claims so as to provide action-guidance to the conflict before us. As such, it is only the woman that can entertain reasons for why she ought to have an abortion, and while the fetus cannot communicate its claim to a right to life, we must default to the woman. The woman is actual, and the fetus's claims are only potential. Even if the fetus has a right to life, this claim only follows from its potential and dependent nature. The woman is an actual being, and has more concrete relation to the world that her choices will trump any potential being since moral norms apply more in proportion to actual beings than potential beings.

Heidegger on the Limits of Philosophy

2011-04-04T22:11:00.000-07:00

In this post, I detail some thoughts I've had for a while. It concerns the limits of what philosophy becomes after Heidegger's influence in Being and Time (BT hereafter), and the claim of the Daseinanalytik. For those unfamiliar with BT, Heidegger claims that if we are concerned with the question "What is Being" we need not further ask anymore than to locate this question within the self-referential nature of Dasein. It is within Dasein (for now just think of Dasein as his word for you and me). Dasein has an intimate awareness with Being since it is the only entity that can pose the question of its own being to itself. Therefore, an analysis of Dasein's ability to pose the question is the locus of interrogation for the more general question "What is Being?". In this way, Heidegger proposes to outline the primordial structure of Dasein to get at the heart of Being by consulting only Dasein. Like a phenomenologist, Heidegger commits himself to the view that he wants to get at the heart of the phenomenon of Dasein without presupposing anything about it. As such, this move to do a phenomenology as a fundamental ontology of Dasein means Heidegger has to address many presuppositions before such an analysis of Dasein can take place.

With the transition to putting Dasein clear aThe totnd in focus, many things have to be addressed. Heidegger advocates a deconstruction of Western metaphysics, makes truth into a historically revealed event, and insists on the on mediated character of experience just to name a few. Heidegger overturns the typical notions subjectivity, and opts for an analysis of pre-reflective consciousness in terms of the structure of care while at the same time insisting on the hermeneutic character of philosophy. For Heidegger, philosophy cannot step outside of history since Dasein's structure is temporalized. Yet, sometimes, Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's care structure invokes a sense of the transcendent, as if the description of that structure of care is transhistorical in nature. In the opening of Division II, he states:

"The totality of Being-in-the-world as a structural whole has revealed itself as care" (BT, H. 231).

So the question is how to reconcile instances of thinking this reveals that when Heidegger describes the structural whole of the care structure, he's describing the transcendental preconditions of Dasein's possible experience and the added fact that if that's true, then Heidegger no longer observes the hermeneutic limit he establishes for philosophy. If there's something else gong on, it is less clear to me what is going on.

Several options might be relevant to mention to allay the interpretive tension with candidate passages above:

1. Heidegger could be using a sense of the transcendental in different ways, or a more nuanced way than Kant or Husserl. If so, then what does his analysis ultimately imply?

2. We could read Heidegger as an existentialist. This might alleviate some burden since existentialists describe the human predicament in general terms, but Heidegger strives to differentiate himself from Sartre in the Letter on Humanism. There is no room for thinking that Heidegger is fine with simply an existentialist label.

3. We could read Heidegger as just another species of Husserl--as a transcendental phenomenologist. This doesn't seem to bode well either since most of his fans follow out a story to do with the severe differences mitigating Husserl and Heidegger's approach to things.

I know there are other options, and I'll not focus on them. Please feel free to make your own suggestions.

Sci-fi Movies and Philosophy

2011-03-31T14:26:00.000-07:00

I want to have this thread open up and invite suggestions for sci-fi movies tied to specific philosophical readings. There is one example of a sci-fi and philosophy anthology, but I didn't like it. Somehow, discussing personal identity with Locke and watching Arnold in the Sixth Day just doesn't seem like a good move. There has to be better movies for personal identity and Locke for instance.

Right before, C-3PO thanks the "Maker" for an oil bath he's about to receive. Does Threepio have an understanding of how he must be pious toward the Maker as Socrates discusses in Plato's dialogue titled "The Euthyphro"

The main motivation for this is in part stemming from my anticipated conference participation with the English PhDs. They get to write up cultural study dissertations on Philip K. Dick and read science fiction. Trudging through Heidegger and Husserl seems more rewarding but not as fun as reading graphic novels on Spiderman or children's literature. Thus, I want to develop a syllabus for philosophy and science fiction. In my future professional life (hopefully someone will hire me), I can still be a geek and a philosopher.

So, do you have any suggestions?

Grant MacEwan Philosophy Video

2011-03-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

Insofar as I want to return to Canada in all honestly, I beset myself the challenge of reviewing all the philosophy programs in Western Canada--basically BC and Alberta. My goal was only to look at how they fare now, teaching expertise and the like. After a google search, I found this video on youtube. My hat is off to MacEwan for what honestly are all my reasons for studying philosophy on a personal level.

However, this brings me to another question. Will departments have to pitch these types of videos in the future as more and more university decisions about funding relate to the instrumental gain over the intrinsic value philosophy possesses on its own? Only time will tell.

Pragmatism Emphasis with Continental Philosophy

2011-03-27T10:28:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of some essential features pragmatism maintains with Continental philosophy in a panel given long ago:

1. Both emphasize the dissolution between the chasm of subject and object.

2. Both emphasize the lived experience as a starting and end point for inquiry.

3. Both emphasize the primacy of practical reason in this lived experience over and above the derivative character of speculative reason

I liked them, so I just thought I'd list them.

On the Sense of the Thing?

2011-03-26T03:10:00.000-07:00

1. The sense or meaning of a thing is lost when we don't pay attention to how consciousness ultimately relates to a phenomenon.

This is the claim of Ideas 1 Husserl, and often my starting point for engaging with many of my colleagues. The above claim is based on transitioning from a critique of the natural attitude to something like the following:

2. The origin of the sense/meaning of a phenomenon has its origin in the constitutive function of consciousness itself.

Therefore, the sense/meaning of a phenomenon gain ultimate priority in our philosophizing because it is through the bracketing of the world and an engagement with how the first-personal dimension of conscious experience allows the phenomenon to manifest itself. We only describe that self-showing. We presuppose nothing about the self-showing of the phenomenon. This is the point of phenomenology: to retrieve the implicit process of how consciousness in my experience really effects the formation of sense. In other words, we do not want to take for granted "the sense of the thing."

Now, perhaps I'm coming full circle. I wonder about accepting 1 and 2 as true any more. This is Husserl's story as to why there are things like ideal objectivities in logic and mathematics. Those ideal objectivities exist independently of what can be said about knowing these ideal objectivities within psychology. If you identified those ideal objectivities having their causal origin in our psychology, then the ideal objectivities would lose their independent normative force to guide proper inferences. We'd have no reason really to abide by the principle of non-contradiction since in doing so, we were only determined to do so. In principle, this has always made sense to me. Some features of our experience are irreducible (and perhaps normative?). Largely, this is just what the "sense of the thing" is. It is the irreducible parcel of human experience we live through that deserves its own autonomous science, phenomenology, apart from the naturalism in the world that would seek to explain away this irreducible feature of human experience. In other words, all other philosophies or science take for granted the sense of the thing and do not trace out 1 and 2.

Now, Husserl will not give any real argumentation for 1 and 2. I don't know if you can really. It would be like trying to give an argument for why it is that consciousness is consciousness of. In fact, that's just it. Husserl marks out the independent constituting feature of intentionality for all conscious acts and correlates of meaning attached to those acts as a legitimate domain of study over against those that would delimit recourse to subjectivity as ill-informed (for whatever reason: materialists about consciousness, eliminativists avoiding folk psychology etc). The purpose of phenomenological philosophy is to bring to light this legitimate domain of consciousness shared by all humans and bring into relief how it is that we live through these many irreducible structures of the act-correlate dynamic. These irreducible structures are revealed to us through the phenomenological description enacted after we've shifted into the phenomenological attitude, the reduction, to open up how it is that a phenomena appears to consciousness. We get at the heart of its structure, phenomenological "seeing" of the phenomenon's essence.

It might be offered that Husserl can offer an argument for 1 and 2, but those reasons cannot be from skepticism about either the whole natural attitude or some part of it. Take for instance someone taking for granted the sense of consciousness itself as materially-based. If we have sufficient reasons to be skeptical about forms of materialism in philosophy of mind take for granted "the sense of the thing", then we would be skeptical for reasons we'd already presuppose, and that wouldn't lend support to thinking 1 and 2 are plausible. Given this, the only plausible story might be a Kantian transcendental strategy in which we accept the existence of ideal objectivities like Husserl does in Logical Investigations, and then suggest the transcendental preconditions for ideal objectivities cannot be supplied by anything else other than 1 and 2. My gut reaction is to find that dubious.

Perhaps, I am going through a pragmatic update of my initial Husserlian inclinations. If ideal objectivities are socially constructed prior to my awareness of them (let's face it, I did have to learn about the principle of non-contradiction at some point by doing syllogisms), then for a pragmatist-in-general, those are the most "real" things we have in our experience. We have no reason to question their source and origin but only how it is that belief in those ideal objectivities affect my practical orientation in the world. Call the ideal objectivity of the principle of non-contradiction a habit of mine. This habit engenders a set of consequences that have practical benefit. I never maintain two things in my belief as true and false at the same time. I avoid that, and if it is revealed by someone that I've fallen into a contradiction, I quickly start to question myself. I shouldn't get bogged down in the metaphysics of intentionality, epoche and the reduction. In this way, pragmatists tend to avoid metaphysical discussions like tracing out 1 and 2 above. This isn't to say that pragmatists don't do metaphysics at all, but they seem wise to pick their battles. I might just be worrying over some dogmatism than thinking about what I ought to be thinking about. I'm unsure about 1 and 2 anymore.

Beyond pragmatism, we might have Heideggerian reasons to think that 1 and 2 need modified, not necessarily a whole rejection. For Heidegger, Dasein is the first-personal level of experience, and in some ways, Heidegger has a view of intentionality in Being and Time. I'll save that post for another time.

Heidegger, Scheler and the Problem of Value

2011-03-22T11:10:00.000-07:00

Preliminary Dissertation Outline

Chapter 1: The Problem of Value in Early Analytic Philosophy, Kant and Why a Moral Phenomenology

1.1 What is the Problem of Value?

1.2 Moral Subjectivism about Value and Mackie’s Argument from Queerness

1.3 A Candidate Portrayal of Emotivism in Stevenson

1.4 G. E. Moore’s Naturalistic Fallacy as a Phenomenological Description

1.5 Ross’s Intuitionism as a Close Phenomenological Alternative and Scheler’s Conception of Intuitive Evidence

1.6 Scheler’s Response to all of Ethics and Kant’s Formalism in Particular

Chapter 2: Heidegger on Moods and Attunement in the Structure of Care

2.1 Kierkegaardian Anxiety in relation to SZ.

2.2 Nietzsche’s Drive of Life in relation to SZ

2.3 Heidegger’s Departure from Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

2.4 Authenticity, Inauthenticity, the Structure of Care, Ontic Ethics and the Ethical Overtones of SZ

2.5 The Challenge of Ethics in SZ

2.6 Heidegger’s Conception of the Person in SZ

Chapter 3: Scheler’s Account of Emotional Life and Value

3.1 Scheler’s Conception of Phenomenology vs. Heidegger

3.2 Emotions in the Formalism

3.3 Emotions in the Nature of Sympathy

3.4 The Emotional Tonality of Human Life and Value Heirarchies

3.5 Ordo Amoris and Reasons of the Heart over Rational Reasons

3.6 Scheler’s Concept of the Person

3.7 Ethics Without a Decision-Procedure and Phronesis

Chapter 4: The Central Difference Between Heidegger and Scheler

4.1 Methodological Differences Between Fundamental Ontology and Phenomenological Attitude

4.2 Heidegger’s Account of the Emotions in SZ: What is Missing?

4.3 Scheler’s Account of the Emotions in relation to SZ

4.4 Scheler and Heidegger on Intersubjectivity

4.5 Conclusions and the Promise of a Moral Phenomenology

Chapter 5: A Phenomenological Account of Ethics: Some Objections

5.1 Walter Sinnot-Armstrong’s Objections to Moral Phenomenology in Terms of the Unity of Moral Judgment

5.2 Response to Sinnott-Armstrong

5.3 Harman’s Moral Relativism as an Objection

5.4 Response to Harman and Non-Contingency of Emotions

5.5 Simon Kirchin’s Objections to Phenomenology Can Support Metaethical Positions

5.6 Response to Kirchin

5.7 The Problem of Motivation, Bernard Williams and Scheler’s Ordo Amoris

5.8 Scheler’s Personalism as a Metaethical Form of Realism over Anti-Realism

5.9 The Place of Scheler’s Phenomenology and Autonomy of Ethical Theorizing

5.10 New Directions in Virtue Ethics?

Scheler

2011-03-21T13:41:00.001-07:00

I now have an official outline as to what I am going to write. It's what I want to do. I want to write a piece of philosophy that might be of interest to those even outside Continental philosophy. I'm going to pick up on objections from Kirchin, Sinnott-Armstrong, Harman just to name a few in the last chapter. I'll be introducing the phenomenological overtones of the "Oxbridge" non-naturalists as a way to suggest that analytic ethics has always had an affinity for the type of view Scheler is proposing. I don't know. I'm excited about the outline and finally "getting down to business." I want to finish next year, but PhDs in three years are not healthy for one's well-being. We'll see what happens.

Butler a Blast from the Past

2011-03-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

Remember this essay by Judith Butler about Obama in 2008. She was right, even I got sucked in.

Continental Philosophy Video

2011-02-27T02:41:00.000-08:00

This video is a good example of why "Continental philosophy" (though there really is no such thing) is often misunderstood. However, the limitation is a failure to observe how closely connected Derrida's ideas are to Husserl. Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence is more important than Derrida's criticism of language alone. Both are tied conceptually, but Derrida only gets to this point through rejecting Husserl's phenomenology in Voice and Phenomena.

Zen College life has me wrong

2011-02-27T00:38:00.000-08:00

Of the top blogs listed in philosophy over at http://www.zencollegelife.com/50-best-philosophy-blogs/ They list my blog at #2 and say of me "...The Philosophical Chasm is a dark look into the thoughts of a Canadian philosophy teacher lecturing at Southern Illinois University, while finalizing his PhD. A great blog if you identify with the philosophers from whom Carbondale Chasmite (our author) draws his inspirations."

As far as I can tell, zencollegelife.com is a mill site paid for by online colleges. There's nothing really honorable in being associated with a site that promotes irresponsible financial practices and burdening students with cheap curriculums. Aside from that, however, a couple things need mentioned:

First, I lament ever leaving Canada, but that was as an American. I love BC and all its quirkiness, and I'm quite public about that fact. However, I do not think I can be Canadian as I was born in New Jersey and have spent my entire adult life in Western Pennsylvania. I did take a Masters at Simon Fraser, but that's quite another story entirely.

Secondly, I don't know why it is so dramatic. This blog is not a "dark look into" my thoughts. I try and be as honest as I can about matters in philosophy. And perhaps, it is a dark thing, philosophy. The only thing philosophers can ever agree on is anything written in philosophy demands to be scrutinized, challenged and reflected upon. So if we find Nietzsche's pronouncement about the fact that we have killed God, we should ask ourselves why Nietzsche said what he did. We do not shy away from him. Is that dark? How about Heidegger? Heidegger showed that philosophy is highly determined by history and language. Do we shy away from him for saying what he did? Is that dark? I reject Heidegger almost completely, then again, I still read him.

Contemporary philosophy of mind has settled upon materialism about mind. This means that there are no more souls. Is that dark? I still confess a slight interest in philosophy of mind, and I still read some of it.

I am hostile to naive religious dogmas that inform American conservative politics and cultural praxis. I reject traditional views about God, while still believing in a divine reality. I maintain that we need a new parousia of understanding God, and follow Irigaray -- a French psychoanalytic thinker and feminist -- in this regard. Is that dark? America needs a newer conception of God to replace its inert, reified and patriarchal figurehead for more reasons than the feminist ones I tend to agree with.

I am hostile to ethical theories that only seek to supply us with notions of right and wrong. I want a fuller, more developed ethical theory that meshes with our phenomenological experience of value and at the same time considers what type of people we ought to become. Is that dark? So, I like Aristotle.

Now some will disagree with me. Someone might find Irigaray's writings obscure. Others might find it possible to accommodate my phenomenological worries without sliding into a virtue ethics. Someone might opt for a defense of Cartesian dualism against my acceptance that a physical substrate underlies human minds. The dialectic of philosophy is a dark place for those that want to preserve beliefs. Philosophy leaves no stone unturned in questioning and the pursuit for truth. That is dark for others, but I in no way find it uncomfortable, nor do I think it is uncomfortable to even my analytic friends in this universe. To call my thoughts "dark" is to look at philosophy from the outside and not practice it from within.

The Weakness of Robust Evidentialism

2011-02-26T08:24:00.000-08:00

The following argument takes issue with what I call Robust Evidentialism. The thesis behind Robust Evidentialism has two components, which are (1) and (2) below. The first part of this thesis is committed to the normative principle that all beliefs require evidential justification, and the second part delimits evidential justification as only that which comes from the sciences. Here, science is to be understood broadly to include the social and natural sciences. This post is an attempt to not introduce the higher-ended debate in a field like epistemology or philosophy of science. Instead, my ambition is to capture how it is that the popular debate actually occurs in popular media.

The reason behind concentrating on robust evidentialism is that this is the position people like Dawkins and Dennett are committed to in popular debates about science and evolution versus religious claims. According to Dawkins, religious claims are neither justified nor scientific, and you can see how strongly tied evidence is to the legitimacy of a claim for these new atheists. It is held that science is the all encompassing principle to explain all facets of the universe, yet if we hold to our guns, I think you'll find like I do, the problematic feature of maintaining such a position. Let me give you my premises.

(1) All beliefs must be justified by evidence

(2) The only evidence that can justify beliefs is science

(3) In order to accept premise (1), following (2), (1) must be justified by scientific evidence

(4) (1) is not justifiable by science since no experiment can demonstrate a normative claim—that is to say science only studying factual claims about the world cannot tell us how the world and human beings ought to be.

And by extension we have (5):

(5) Given that science is not up to the task of supporting (1), we have a few options to take this argument:

(a) we can broaden our notion of justification and evidence to include non-scientific evidence up to and including the use of logic and argumentation that philosophers use in addressing problems of a conceptual nature. This involves giving up on premise (2).

(b) we can try to reconcile the divide between normative and descriptive domains of human experience and argue that science can bridge this gap in some way. This involves giving up on premise (4)

(c) we can reject (1) entirely and recognize that some beliefs are self-evidential, and open ourselves up to the possibility that some beliefs are known a priori.

Needless to say, I do not even think option (b) is possible. (a) is a weaker form of (c), and I think if we accept either (a) or (c), then we have no real way to reasonably reject truths claimed by revelation anymore than we do someone claiming the truth of the Ontological Argument for God’s existence based on self-evidential reasoning. Yet, I am strangely comfortable with this predicament because we are right back where philosophy starts with an analysis of our intuitions and the authority philosophy has to deal with problems that cannot be solved by common sense, faith or science alone. Inevitably, this is why we reflect. We reflect on these philosophical mysteries because no amount of any one single strand of science, faith or common-sense is up to the task on its own.

Qadhafi's Dissertation

2011-02-23T00:42:00.000-08:00

Qadhafi's son's dissertation was plagiarized while receiving a PhD at LSE in political science. Direct passages were just lifted out of texts.

It's embarrassing to philosophers since Nancy Cartwright, a philosopher of science of some renown is directly thanked by him in the committee. The liberalism section definitely deals with aspects of Anglo-American political philosophy, and the section is competent. It does not seem, however, Cartwright's cup of tea.

In the dissertation, he also thanks Alex Voorhoeve; this is obviously the political philosopher that directly may have had some oversight of the theory section. Note that Voorhoeve doesn't list Qadhafi as a student.

David Held has denied being Qadhafi's advisor, but said he played a more intimate role. He was not his advisor, and Cartwright is a philosopher of science. As such process of elimination leaves Voorhoeve, and he does not list Qadhafi on his faculty page at LSE among the students supervised.

Either way, it is really embarrassing for us as philosophers.

Experience and its Intelligibility

2011-02-19T17:10:00.000-08:00

To see experience has meaning as it is lived is to be under the preoccupation of phenomenlogical methodologies. However, these methods are not for everyone, and even internal to the phenomenological tradition, there is disagreement. However, it is clear that if philosophy passes over this level of lived-description, it is unclear what philosophers are doing for the sake of wisdom. They are rather promoting the gain of knowledge without thinking about the whole of person.

For instance, Putnam once supported a position largely called semantic externalism. This position stated that for any proposition about the world, the meaning of the proposition itself derived its content from our causal interaction with the world. Experience was determined by causal interaction--meaning was a process between mind and world. Meaning was never "in the head" as the early Putnam exclaimed emphatically; it is rather in the world. This put the efforts of philosophers to regard the epistemic moment of knowing meaning, and in order to analyze our experience in the world, these philosophers have focused only on the narrow field of epistemic knowing. There are other dimensions of human life the person lives. Philosophy has sequestered these areas as outside philosophical concern. Yet, my intention in focusing on this very briefly is to put forward an interesting historical thesis: Analytic philosophy in reducing all problems of its inquiry to the epistemic subject has narrowed how it is we really do "experience" the world whereas phenomenology takes seriously how ladened and "condemned" to meaning human life is. In this way, phenomenology usurps the narrow conception, and lets lived-experience predominate our concern to put us back into contact with the world in the right way.

Now what is the lesson that might follow my thesis? First, it is pointless for philosophy to search for the source of experience's intelligibility other than what we may generally say about some domains of human experience. For instance, there are some experiences that start with brute meaning -- as is the case with values -- in our affective life. A room may be distressingly decorated, and prevent me from being calm in order to read. This immediately given datum of the room fills out my interaction with that space in such a way that I must leave the room in order to read. I close my eyes away from looking at the tone of colors and the splattered abstract designs and cannot help but offend my host who notices my looking away from his new renovated house. In such cases, I could give a phenomenological description of my lived-experience and even generalize about method and procedure used to see such experiences. However, in the end, this method of philosophizing talks about common everyday lived experience in a non-mysterious manner.

Next, it should be thought that I think all of analytic philosophy incapable of relating to lived-experience. There is still only one area in which it excels at connecting up with our lived-experience. This has always been the various problems associated in typical normative ethics. In Moore's open question argument, it seems that it is a phenomenological description about how we encounter the good. It is an indefinable property since we can always comport ourselves openly to the possibility as to whether or not we are right this time about what good means. The open possibility of its meaning being otherwise presents us a challenge to provide a one-stop answer to the nature of what good means. In this way, the ordinary language philosophers were proto-phenomenologists offering descriptions of ordinary meanings as we tended to live them. They were not phenomenological in that they did not get passed bracketing much of what needed bracketed, and tended to reify elements in the natural attitude as that which was ordinary.

Now, I don't want to get bogged down in a polemic. That's never been my style, but in pushing for the thesis that we should no longer philosophize about the source of experience's intelligibility but see ourselves as encountering intelligible meanings in and through our life suggests the world is already intelligible. We cannot get away from the fact that experience is always meaningful. We can, however, attempt to describe with rigor what goes unnoticed in our experiencing the world, and this is the wise move of phenomenology.

Scheler, Good News and Teaching News

2011-02-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

This has been an excellent week. Yesterday, I was dropped a hint of the career variety that makes mouths water. I can't say more than that.

Today, a student told me "I come to class taught by you to learn logic; I don't learn anything in lecture." This boosts my ego. My students really like me, and they are very capable. It is very rewarding to teach logic this semester.

The Grad Chair referred to me as a "Padawan." We discussed plans for writing up and moving to dissertation land. Dissertation Land is the place I want to go and live for a year. Wouldn't it be nice if we get paid to do that?

Lastly, maybe Scheler vs. Husserl vs. Heidegger. ??

Dermot Paper on the History of Intentionality

2011-02-16T19:46:00.000-08:00

Wonderful paper.

John Drummond Paper about Virtuous Persons

2011-02-16T18:13:00.000-08:00

Most of my work revolves around what is phenomenologically basic to being a person, and this question has an ethical focus for me. I've come to really love Drummond's work on Husserl, and here is a good example of Husserl intersecting with ethics is an interesting way.

Fox News Insider at Media Matters

2011-02-15T17:23:00.000-08:00

This is a very telling article. It's really no surprise. Americans are picking up on the fact that cable news is not real news, and people want to replace substance with ideology. Cable news is entertainment, even if it is muted like CNN, or more liberal like MSN-BC. It's beyond me how to remedy the situation. One thing you can do is make sure Republicans don't succeed with denying funding to PBS and NPR.

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

2011-02-14T15:15:00.000-08:00

Andrew Shaffer has basically reflected on philosophers blurring the line between literary thinkers and philosophers. His history conflates art and philosophy to the extent that it makes philosophy into a rumormongering. By accessing their personal lives, philosophers are revealed as failures at love. It is not even a bad book of philosophy. It is a book about the perplexing lives these people live written by someone who wants to popularize philosophy for a larger audience. This is not a bad ambition. But, someone not educated about the historical nuances of these texts and dialectic about these philosophical problems will make very dangerous and distorting leaps. I've already hinted at this by blurring the line between literary thinkers and philosophers. Yet, as we philosophers know, there are often thoughts endorsed by philosopher that do not map onto the lives of their authors very easily. How does Descartes loving a maid relate to developing substance dualism? Obviously, it doesn't. How does his fathering an illegitimate child when contraception was not fully developed as it is now have to do with anyting other than commenting on how easily it was to sire progeny during the 17th century? Moreover, it is still an open question about the limits of philosophical biography, but what we should acknowledge is we're still asking this question, especially since Ray Monk published the well known philosophical autobiography on Wittgenstein. There is no relation to this event and Descartes' primary contribution to propose that truths reside in a foundational epistemology over and against the traditional scholastics at the time.

Now, philosophy is about taking it slow. It is about careful and systematic reflection, and I'm pretty open about what and how of reflection. I've got friends who are analytic, pragmatic and Continental, and I count myself in the first and the third of these categories. However, I do not recommend books that want to libel the easy aspects of someone's life.

Reclaiming for nonfiction a form of literary art does little to advance philosophy. This is just a way to say you aren't a scholar of philosophy and denying it should be done at all. When outsiders write about philosophy, they distort and miss very important things. This is essentially how Shaffer can continually say he is not interested in scholarship, but if we owe anything to these philosophers' lives, we owe both to get their philosophy and life right. This requires we stand within the text itself, the horizon of past and future interpretations and we come to see how the text articulates a contribution to truth. To do philosophy historically is to preserve the insight that these historical individuals were wrestling with difficult problems. They saw their activity as aiming at the truth and this is what we need to sustain when reading them. Historians of ideas and other disciplines see historical individual philosophers as products of the times. In this sense, they generalize to such an extent that a philosopher's life becomes that which subsumes the idea in the text, or some movement comes to manifest in a particular text. The life or movement reifies the free subjectivity that participated in relation to authoring the text. Instead, as philosophers, we ask what the argument in this text is AND how it is that historical factors have come to shape our understanding of it. We never lose sight of these texts as capable of expressing truth, even if historically delimited. This is the difference in how we treat our texts.

We treat our texts in a very formal way, and for good reason. It takes time to understand how these historical conversations have taken shape, what has come to determine another, and that philosophical texts are accomplishments of the freedom of a unique individual. Reading them, often, requires knowledge of the primary language other than English, and a severe treatment of those that preceded the philosopher in question. Yet, the philosopher in question has never lost the first-personal element when examining philosophical questions in the text now before you he or she has written. We treat them as part of an endless conversation, and only patient treatment of philosophy can distill these insights. This formalism internal to philosophy is well-placed. Let me give you an example from my own experience.

Analytic philosophers have interpreted intentionality in a different way than Husserl. For purposes beyond this post, it is not important to cash out that difference. The important thing is the careful attention to how analytic philosophers understood and received Brentano's philosophy apart from how Husserl reacted to Brentano's descriptive psychology. Dermot Moran's paper is the most wonderful piece on intentionality I have ever read, and explains why it is that intentionality in one tradition went one way, the other tradition the other way. Someone coming to early analytic philosophy and phenomenology studying Brentano, Frege and Husserl would not "get it" as someone who has spent a great deal of time doing the history of late 19th and early 20th century philosophy.

Because people outside of philosophy won't get it, the only way to ensure a proper understanding is to take philosophy classes in a traditional university setting. Making headway in philosophy requires slow tedious reading and critical engagement with philosophical ideas. Furthermore, these philosophical ideas demand Socratic presentation, inquiry and mentoring to get it right. This is contrary to what is sometimes claimed by some. I often commonly hear "I don't need to take philosophy; I can just read it myself if I want to." This is an objection made to much of the humanities, and perhaps even one Shaffer might embrace since he is "reclaiming literary art qua nonfiction" and not interested in scholarship or journalism. He is interested in genre-bending of literary genres, and treats all texts as art. Yet, it is not true. Genre-bending, however, is not appropriate when so much is at stake to get it right. Anything else is a waste of time and devalues philosophical praxis.

Don't buy this book. Read the history of philosophy from respected philosophers.

Ninja and Shadows

2011-02-10T09:03:00.000-08:00

This is not the run of the mill philosophy post. Actually, it is more an admonishment of guilt. If you'll permit me five paragraphs to tell you about my Ninja and her philosophical dispositions.

Ninja's Philosophical Dispositions

I have a cat. Her name is Ninja. She is a medium domestic hair. She is black with dark brown splotches which you can only see in the sunlight. She is frisky, secretive, meows at us for everything, and thus highly opinionated. True to form, she is also pretty smart. Long ago, we played the red dot laser game, and after three minutes of chasing around the ephemeral dot, she clawed at it curiously. Ninja stopped chasing the dot, and attempts to scoop it up. She found it strange that she could not scoop up light. She calculates that it is not worth her time, and eventually came to connect my picking up the small laser pointer as a sign to play. Ninja is an empiricist for this very reason.

Ninja has an immense ability to communicate and plan her desires. When I would sit in what was clearly "her chair", she would sneak behind the chair, poke me with her claw, and when I jumped out of the seat, she would then jump up into "her chair." Like a Ninja, she would hide behind the couch or from behind the bed and poke us. She knew we could not get to her, and she could attack in relative safety. On Sunday mornings, she will jump in between my wife and I while we sleep. She has all her food and water, and she yells at us so that we may play with her. In this way, she has adopted a desire-satisfaction account of the good.

Ninja is a bit too fearless for her own good. When we moved back to the United States from Canada with her, we had to stay at my mom's with five golden retrievers over the summer before I started my PhD. Needless to say, she simply stayed in my bedroom for the first few weeks. In truth, the apartment in Vancouver, BC wasn't that big and she was not in the habit of living in bigger spaces. Like all kitties, she got curious as to what existed beyond the bedroom door. One night she escaped downstairs with Ninja-like Stealth. At night, my mom takes four of the golden retrievers to sleep in my parents bedroom. My wife and I were downstairs with Mr. Bear. Bear is a sixty pound golden retriever with broad shoulders and an impressively large head. In truth, he is quite docile, but when he knows that animals are smaller than he, he can be quite fierce. Ninja snuck all the way into the kitchen where Mr. Bear was sleeping. When she saw us, she let out a little whimper to tell Ashley and I she was near. Not knowing what would happen, I quickly ran to intervene. Mr. Bear had woken up.

Mr. Bear was fully awake and stared up at Ninja from the floor. Above him, Ninja was leering at him from the kitchen counter. Ninja stared intensely into the huge 60 lb. golden retriever's eyes. Mr. Bear's lip curled silently growling under his breath. Ninja lowered her back and arched downward. I could hear the lower powerful whining of Ninja's furious high pitch threats. She hissed at Mr. Bear and he coiled back unsure about his current prey. Ninja's calculated movement made Mr. Bear lose eye contact while she never looked away from his eyes. In the animal world, I hear that is bragging rights. I digress. Ninja continued to arc forward, her claws extended and she looked like she was going to pounce him. At this time, I finally managed to enter the kitchen, grabbed her and took her upstairs. She screamed in absolute protest. She doesn't like when "her humans" mess in her affairs or intrude upon her autonomy. In moral philosophy, my cat is either an egoist a la Nietzsche or a Kantian. I often can't tell.

The Paradox of the Shadow

In recent months, a problem has intensified. I am partly to blame. Originally, it started out innocent. Ninja would notice the early morning birds fly across the stream of sunlight hitting the wall in the second bedroom. She would chatter her teeth and lick her lips in anticipation of some kill, I speculate of course. With all intensity, she'd wait for the flicker of a bird's shadow to fly across the wall. So my wife and I started doing shadow puppets. This is where guilt enters into the equation. We did shadow puppets about two months ago. Now, she has made the connection: there are things like shadows on the wall that move. She waits for the sun to strike parts of the apartment in the morning and sits at night watching our silhouettes from the side wall light. She goes up to them like the laser dot, smells them and meows softly at us. She seems concerned about the shadows. She seemingly knows about their insubstantial nature, but she warns us often of their movement. It has become more obsessive than watching birds out of the actual window. It has consumed her life, and we are to blame.

We've tried to move our hand and have her notice the same movement on the wall. To no avail, we cannot get her to make that connection between the fact we are moving, and the shadow moves. From a distance, she will notice the flicker of her own tail's shadow and then not notice her own shadow as moving. Perhaps, she is indirectly demonstrating a Humean skepticism that one event necessarily follows another, or that I should read more Plato for my preliminary examination. Like an aspiring Platonist, she is investigating the shadows cast on the wall in the hopes of knowing more.

I feel really guilty about this. I have stressed my cat in a way I could never have anticipated and nothing I can do seems to stop Ninja from attacking shadows. Originally, I felt there would be no harm. She got the laser pointer fairly easy. I just hope she "grows out of it." I cannot stand to see my cat obsessed about some feature of the world. If anyone has any suggestions, I am all hears.

North Texas Philosophical Association

2011-02-06T05:21:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to be accepted to the NTPA. Conference organizers let me know early since I'll be applying for travel funds from my department. I gave them a paper on Husserl and Derrida. It ought to be fun.

Philosophical Strangeness

2011-02-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

the strange thing about being a philosopher: you can watch the world burn, give reasons for it and even contribute to a possible dialogue about it, but oftentimes there's just nobody who wants to listen.

MidSouth Philosophy Conference at the University of Memphis

2011-01-25T17:44:00.000-08:00

So, I got my paper The Phenomenological Rejection of Naturalism in Contemporary Ethics accepted to this conference. Really excited!

Continental Philosophy Blog

2011-01-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

The Continental Philosophy Blog has had a makeover. Really awesome. Check it out here.

Husserlian Encounter with General Pragmatism

2011-01-23T08:14:00.001-08:00

Pragmatists eschew metaphysical debates. They avoid the type of debates that do not any practical consequences. We might say that how free-will debate occurs in early analytic philosophy between compatibilists, determinists and libertarians has no consequences other than the simple fact that it can be contemplated on its own. In fact, it might be thought that we should only consider philosophical problems as they pertain to human action. Accordingly, it is a common theme in American pragmatism to think of truth as contextual to such an extent that the truth of an idea is how it relates to action within concrete consequences the idea generates in context. Ideas do not correspond to reality. Instead, pragmatists embrace that our ideas must be tested in our experience. The reason for this favoring of experience over ideas, action over theory, is simple. For the pragmatist, human beings are first and foremost practical beings. Theory derives itself out of practice (through the consequences of the idea itself) and not vice versa. You can contemplate Platonic Forms all you want, but if the idea has no consequences to bear on human life (experience), then you should be talking about something else. As such, you might find many pragmatists somewhat dismissive about the conceptual problems faced in what might be called rationalist philosophies.

Rationalist philosophies in my use of the term have two things in common: A) they think philosophical problems often involve a priori elements to them that can be reasoned about on a purely conceptual level, B) there is at least enough common intelligibility to how subjectivity experiences its contact with the world that experiences can be articulated in a manner common to one subject, and there is a basis for communicating universal truths that have their origin in a priori elements also to other subjects. A and B are in direct conflict with the tenets of basic pragmatism. For the truth of these rational ideas is accessed by the same subjective structure as someone else. There is a transcendence to how it is that subjectivity works on this account.

Now, pragmatism would react fundamentally to any conceptual claim if it did not have its relation to experience/practical action. For instance, Kant engages in a transcendental argument to show that if one accepts moral requirements as a fundamental, then the form of those moral requirements would take the form in such a way that one could only deduce that the moral law requires us to never make an exception of ourselves. This follows from the idea of moral requirements itself, or so it would seem. However, the pragmatist might claim that such an abstract conceptual analysis leads away from how the truth of an idea is revealed within experience. The often cited phrase to me is pragmatism is a “fidelity to experience” since it is only within experience that ideas arise, and only in experience can ideas be tested.

Phenomenology has the same dedication to experience. It is a return to things themselves. By this, the Husserlian phenomenologist implies that we pay attention to the manner in which phenomena appear to consciousness. For this is how phenomena are lived through. Experiences are lived-though in our conscious life since consciousness is thoroughly a structural intentionality. We are conscious of our consciousness. Consciousness is a consciousness of the phenomena in question. In this way, consciousness always takes an object where the object of experience is a correlate of a conscious act. Intentionality is a philosophical truth in which human life consists, and is a layer pragmatism does not explain.

In pragmatism, ideas happen within experience. They are causa suis. Ideas just happen within experience, and pragmatism in its dedication to lived-experience has no mechanism to suggest why this ideality happens. In truth, the commitment to lived-experience is very phenomenological. Yet, in Husserl, there the same commitment to described lived-experience but Husserl also gives us the cognitive architecture of an intentional consciousness that constitutes the meaning of its intentional contact with the world. In this way, Husserlian phenomenology can explain better the how and what of how things are experienced. He has a better grasp to offer a philosophy committed to describing how it is that ideas affect our lives practically. In other words, he can describe

The problem observed of pragmatism’s causa suis and the ideality of experiences comes from assuming a rich conception of experience. For this account of pragmatism to work, the discursivity of experience must be readily assumed. If it is to be assumed simpliciter, many pragmatists run the risk of conflating their experience with everyone else’s. Experiences run together then not because of the consequences of an idea. Instead, they run together and like consequences only because the thorough conceptuality experience possesses. A transcendental phenomenologist has no problem with this level of either generality or what we might call the transcendence of a subject’s immanence. But, pragmatists want to avoid metaphysics for the fear that it succumb to dogmas of past philosophies like what I pointed out as A and B of rational philosophy. However, the conceptual-laden nature of experience remains unexplained. It is so in that pragmatists do not have the doctrines of either intentionality and constitution at work within experience. In trying to remain so true to the level of pragmatic experience they ignore providing a thorough account as to how meaning actually arises. This is also what no other phenomenologist after Husserl can explain neither.

It is therefore my contention that we should abandon pragmatism for its implicit inability to make sense of how it is that we truly do experience of the world and embrace Husserl’s procedure in order to maintain that we experience the world in the first-personal dimension of intentional consciousness and can pay attention to how something is given with respect to how consciousness constitutes in evidential insight the manner of a phenomena’s givenness. We should keep the pragmatic insight of remaining truthful to experience. Yet, the problems for pragmatism only arise when we highlight the assessability of an idea’s truth lies in consequences. Instead, they should have pointed to the intentionality of consciousness as a point of convergence and then proceed from there.

Anthology review at NDPR

2011-01-16T09:42:00.001-08:00

Another interesting anthology about the analytic/continental divide.

Cogburn's Observation about Leiterism

2011-01-15T01:05:00.001-08:00

Cogburn's sentiments are wholly real, and unfortunate.

Heidegger, Dreyfus and Leiter, Oh My!

2011-01-14T22:24:00.000-08:00

You can read Leiter's comments on viewing the old BBC documentary on Heidegger.

I found a transcript of an interview Dreyfus gave in which he claimed Heidegger was refreshing to analytic philosophy. He calls it boring! If it wasn't for a traveling fellowship, he would have never came upon Karl Jasper and Heidegger's defenders at Freiburg. I mention this since we should not find Heidegger scary, and wonder rather from Dreyfus's example why Heidegger made him see things differently.

Now, Dreyfus rarely minces his words. He writes on Heidegger in a very concise and succinct way. I speculate that years teaching at MIT and U.C. Berkeley will do that to you. If one hangs around analytic philosophers long enough, one will start to write in a very systematic and maybe even boring way (I just spent the last three hours reading John Drummond's Chapter on the "Structure of Intentionality" in Welton's The New Husserl). Truthfully, this training from Simon Fraser has helped me more than hindered my abilities thus far.

My only real disagreement with Leiter is that this documentary gets to the "entirety of Being and Time." I didn't find that to be the case since much of Being and Time is a silent engagement with Kierkegaard and the concept of anxiety. The documentary is more or less a slight introduction to those of whom will never really want to read Heidegger, but might find some knowledge beneficial. Moreover, if Leiter presents a thesis arguing for the contentiousness of why Heidegger is a major relevant philosopher, such a claim can appear to have a semblance of authority behind it. Yet, I think it is very misleading to suggest that it can be otherwise without first noting that those that object to Heidegger's philosophy usually don't know it well enough. I'm not saying this is the case with Leiter. However, it does stand to reason that most analytically-inclined philosophers -- like those Leiter often favors on his blog -- in the mainstream do tend towards views that are naturalistic, and therefore somehow continuous with what philosophers take to be scientific. This means they are skeptical already, even implicitly, towards philosophies that thematize matters of our existence first, what I would call phenomenological themes in the capital 'P' sense.

To be sure, Being and Time is Heidegger's most provocative and concise effort. It is important for hijacking Husserlian phenomenology and transforming it into an existential phenomenology that abandons many assumptions that analytically-inclined naturalists take for granted. So, Heidegger's relevance should be judged in a more nuanced way than Leiter's sweeping generalization.

It is unfortunate, though, that the documentary gives the impression that everyone agrees Heidegger was a "great" philosopher, and that the only doubts about him pertain to his disgusting political and personal behavior. In fact, there are extensive doubts among philosophers, both European and Anglophone, about Heidegger's originality and philosophical depth.

A close reading of a text and its history is not something many analytically-inclined naturalists are up to doing. I don't know any "Continental" philosophy who can get away with never reading Heidegger, and quite frankly, I don't know many "Anglophone" philosophers that think reading him is a good idea. There are many reactions to Heidegger, and so Leiter is right to point them out. However, it should be stated from the outset that philosophers that seek to describe the world continuous with science reject the aim of phenomenology already (there are even substantial differences with what the term "phenomenology" refers to from analytically-inclined philosophers of mind). This implicit assumption is thee major reason why so many are skeptical about Heidegger. The difference in method already colors the perception. In some ways, it is similar in Leiter's work on Nietzsche. Leiter is very skeptical of what he calls the cultural therapeutic Nietzsche over his more -- again -- naturalist reading of Nietzsche as a speculative naturalist in much the way Hume is claimed to be a speculative naturalist. In this way, Heidegger will never get a fair shake, and my colleagues in philosophy will think this documentary the only synopsis needed for an otherwise sophomoric introduction to Heidegger's thought.

However, the difference in method does not remove the fact that Heidegger needs to be overcome because of his originality and depth. He needs to be overcome because of his lasting influence. We shouldn't be skeptical of that influence anymore than we should think philosophy should remain Heideggerian. Yet, that is a blog post for another time, but a point of lasting significance that cannot be washed away with a call to contentiousness. I find it is a rhetorical trick of preference and nothing more on Leiter's part to suggest Heidegger's claim to fame a matter of contention. In fact, we can always cite our philosophical opponent whose work we find disagreeable and lay claim to their status as a philosopher. That's the easy thing to do. It is quite another to critically engage Heidegger's lasting significance and overcome it.

Again, this documentary is not that good in giving the background thought about Heidegger's thinking. Heidegger is one of those thinkers that you need to have an extensive amount of background knowledge to make sense of his work. You have been warned. Besides, the Sartre documentary is better in my opinion.

Fox News President Roger Ailes's Advice to News Anchors

2011-01-12T22:42:00.000-08:00

Fox News President Roger Ailes's had this advice to give to his news anchors:

I told all of our guys to shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually. You don't have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that. (source)

Now, this advice is rather interesting. First, Fox News anchors might only refer to the day cycle of "news" and not include the opinion shows. On this, it is not clear.

Next, Fox News anchors would need to know what an argument is. An argument is a series of propositions one of which is the conclusion and others being reasons that lend support to the overall conclusion. As my philosophy students know, there are many types of arguments that tend to either be bad or good. Bad arguments involve a whole bunch of fallacious reasoning, the relation between the reasons and the conclusion might not be that "tight", the conclusion might overstate its case, etc. Good arguments avoid logical forms that lend to bad inference-making, avoid fallacies and in general attempt to avoid transgressing the norms of reasoning.

Unfortunately, delivering the news is never simply as rational as exchanging arguments on a philosophical topic. Even the daily news cycle of Fox News is filled with implicit normative assessments of the news that favor free-enterprise choices, and often pretends that all they do is simple information-giving without being honest about their biases. Consider the following video:

Look at the choice of words between "government-run health care" rather than "public option." The choice of words and labels is one way to commit a strawman when presenting information.

Now, I could go on. Yet, the spectacle of cable news networks will constantly inspire me to teach Intro to Logic to my students and what fallacious reasoning looks like. :)

Violence

2011-01-10T06:41:00.000-08:00

I cannot believe the violence. I cannot believe the vitriol. I cannot believe I live in this country, again. I will do everything in my power to leave once I have my PhD. America, you can have your lack of commonsense health care, right-wing inspired fear-mongering and utter blindness to social injustice.

Philosophical New Years

2011-01-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

In the first year of the PhD, I was just happy to be here, working towards the end. Now, my coursework is over. Now, the light at the end of the tunnel is very bright. I have no classes and have begun to take dissertation hours so that I can at least have some time to dedicate to my literary prospectus and prepare for my preliminary examination. As such, this year I am done reading other miscellaneous things. I have two responsibilities to myself philosophically. I will read through the chronological list of the history of Western philosophy, and secondly I will read and engage material only relevant to the intersection between phenomenology and ethics.

In addition, I will complete the reading of listed articles for a friend's more analytic program as to at least judge myself competent to continue my skill set I acquired during my Masters. It would be so easy to throw it all away and just market myself as a Continental who could teach the history of ethics, and even work from that perspective. However, I find myself in agreement with a comment made by Bernard Waldenfels made at lunch last semester. I am interested in describing things. I am not interested in construing philosophical activity as a sort of hermeneutics that eschews the world for interpretation. Someday, I will have to face Continental philosophy's more Heideggerian orthodoxy in a formal engagement. In essence, I will have to revisit Heidegger's conception of truth and refute it. However, that is not today, nor likely to follow for some time.

Eagleton's Death of Universities

2010-12-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

Below is my response to Terry Eagleton's Article in the Guardian.

As universities continue to struggle with the shortfall of public assistance, this situation opens up the financial crisis to speak once more on the function of higher education, and what we value as higher education.

First, the function of a university is employment for most people. However, does this really follow? I never thought it did. I have friends with degrees in French literature working at Enterprise Rental Car, or investment firms hiring linguistics degrees in addition to more common degrees like Business or Finance. Back at the turn of the 21^st century, I walked into a philosopher’s office, and decided to change my major. I went from Art Education to Philosophy. It’s a rather strange switch, I know. However, it just felt right. I did it for my own purposes, which I saw as self-empowerment. I never went to university to think that I’d get a job in my field of study. Instead, I went because in some ways I was expected to go.

Self-empowerment came from philosophy’s benefit as a therapy of the soul. Philosophy courses taught me not what to think as so many other courses do, but challenged my personal beliefs. Every philosophy professor challenged me to rethink my own thoughts. I’d learn how some problem had been articulated by a historical philosopher, and challenge their argument. I’d see the implications of some historical idea for my life, or I’d find that the philosophy or philosopher in question led to different questions altogether than the one’s I had started with. I’d stop by the professor’s office hours and have very meaningful conversations that one cannot find in the public anywhere else. In this way, philosophy taught me to think about questions that have no definitive answers. It fosters skills in critical thinking, logic and the intellectual imagination that only comes from philosophy and by extension other humanities-based disciplines.

Think about it—an entire major that answers questions that have no definitive answers. How many times in life do we come into contact with those types of questions? Everywhere. Whereas if we conceive of education as only for getting a career, our education will not be soulful or meaningful beyond the career we have chosen. Certainly, human life has more experiences that reflect the type of questioning that goes on in the humanities at large, and more specifically philosophy. How many times have we wondered if something our governments did was just, or how we ought to proceed in doing a very difficult and moral thing? How many times have we reflected on what was art, or what really is beauty? How many times have we found our faith lacking in certainty and sought in reflection what we thought faith took for granted?

The type of questioning in a philosophy courses we ask our students to do cannot be reliably predicted. The benefit I argue for philosophy is one in which this unpredictable growth produces a sense of intellectual autonomy and learning that defies contemporary practice. Students are made uncomfortable once they are shown exactly how vulnerable our beliefs actually are, and this is the most common reason why students fail to experience philosophy (and the humanities at large) in a positive light. They are taught that more practical fields of study can be given a single answer. In many disciplines, students are shown the right answer, and the questions they are taught to ask have definitive answers. In engineering, the calculation for what the buttress can support has one right answer. However, in living our lives as human beings, we rarely face such clear problems. Not every dilemma we face can be put to an equation. Sometimes, our problems are different than that.

This is not to say that the humanities are for everyone. They are not. Some people are just better at soil science than others. Some people are more comfortable with narrowly entrenched questioning than going to push the limits of what is conceptually possible to know. However, a university is a place for self-empowerment and understanding. Students should have the freedom to study these questions. These are the types of questions that are important to reflective individuals. If you’re not reflective about the human condition, then do something else. If you have the nerve to ask questions of a philosophical nature, then the more power to you as an individual versus a world that is unsettled by philosophical investigation. Philosophy so affected my soul in my younger days that I couldn’t put it down. I can’t stop being philosophical and so I have decided to go to philosophy graduate school. I have taught it to undergraduates for the last five years, and continually love teaching it.

Now, does anyone think that the humanities are for the rich at large? I’ve never found this to be the case. I’ve studied philosophy at Essex in the UK, Simon Fraser University in Canada, and at SIUC in the United States. Most of the graduate students I’ve run across are run-of-the-mill Middle-classers. No one is exceptionally rich and the demands of graduate study force one into poverty. We all know that as first-time lecturers or as Associate Professors in North America, we will not make much. We’ll be lucky to payback some of the student loans. Still, if we can land a job in academia, we will be comfortable, and that’s all I or my colleagues truly want.

Lastly, I wanted to touch upon the incompatibility between advanced capitalism and public universities. Eagleton’s point about their incompatibility raises the question that I started this response with: How are we to value higher education? If our societies are not interested in turning out reflective individuals, but simply consumers and career-oriented people, then what is valued is not reflection about the human condition. Instead, what is valued is how universities simply function as a cog in the overall machine of the economic state. We make practical oriented decisions about what we value everyday. In so doing, we don’t need to dispose of the idea of how some public goods are better managed by government than the private market forces that have infected the management of public goods. We can make practical decisions without disposing of some intrinsic goods that must always be part of the equation such as public housing for the poor, or emergency responders. How we manage our universities is just another way to ask what we value as a public good over thinking that no such intrinsic goods need matter—a debate it should be pointed out that is entirely philosophical!

End of the Year

2010-12-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

In about twenty minutes, I will walk down the hallway into my PHIL 303 Philosophy and Art class, and I will miss it. I've had a blast teaching it, and these are the types of students that actually want to learn, read and reflect on art. Teaching philosophy can be very rewarding.

If any of my students ever find this blog, know that you're missed.

So, I do have a variety of philosophical things to say, now, about Husserl and Heidegger, yet I haven't formulated any statement about them. I will continue to master Husserl's corpus and might switch from moral phenomenology to a more manageable topic given I am writing my prospectus next semester. In principle, I want to start next year off with a project in mind, and take a year to write it. I'd love to be done with school. We'll see what happens.

Geeky

2010-11-04T13:40:00.001-07:00

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard/Cleric (3rd/2nd Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-11

Dexterity-11

Constitution-11

Intelligence-20

Wisdom-15

Charisma-16

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Primary Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Secondary Class:
Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Thomson on Heidegger and Levinas AND Co-incidence

2010-11-04T10:11:00.000-07:00

I am not really convinced by Thomson's interpretation that Levinas is committed to an implicit understanding of Heideggerian phenomenology, particularly about death -- to get his thought "off the ground." It is as Thomson observes a "non-standard interpretation." I do agree that Levinas is one of the more thoughtful and creative interpreters of Being and Time. Although I do not agree Levinas is as beholden to it as Thomson suggests, it is an amazing article with a commanding depth. Moreover, Thomson has such a command over these thinkers that when he writes on "Continental" philosophy, I think we should take stock of actually how he writes Continental philosophy. It is rather clear and lucid.

Reading this article comes as I am amidst a Heidegger seminar on Being and Time.

I find myself navigating through Division II, part 2 in BT. I will argue that Levinas's description of conscience better fit the phenomenology of conscience, but our reasons for rejecting Heidegger's description cannot be that Heidegger can clearly be said to not take ethics seriously. He is very ambiguous on this point with his ethically charged language. Rather, Heidegger's ambiguity on the possibility of ethics opens up need for meditations like Levinas to centrally articulate the phenomenology of our moral experience. We do have to reject, however, that ethics is an ontic inquiry and is, as Levinas suggests, a more constitutive experience than ontology can thematize.

Warby Parker Glasses

2010-10-31T14:17:00.000-07:00

The short story: My wife got very ill and was hospitalized for six days. Before that, however, I had won a blog contest of sorts for a free pair of glasses for my wife. While she was in the hospital, I lost track of time and space, let alone when her free glasses were coming in the mail. In fact, I still don't know what happened. When I relayed the story to Warby Parker, not only did they say "No sweat, we'll send out a new pair for my wife." They also said, "Have a pair for yourself."

My wife originally learned about Warby Parker from various design blogs. They're stylish, chic and are remarkably vintage. That's not all. As a moral philosopher, I love it when a company takes on the duty of being engaged communally. For every Warby Parker pair of glasses sold, one is given to a person in need! I will make no jokes about being a poor PhD student in need. I won them from a contest. Needless to say, the company is a good fit for my educated sensibilities as well as my eyes. In the future, I'll always buy my glasses from this place.

Warby Parker has found a friend in one philosopher. Below is a picture of my glasses lying on my favorite philosopher, Edmund Husserl.

The Tea Party and the Politics of Negation

2010-10-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

Before anything else, I’m a philosopher. I’m a philosopher before I’m an activist. I’m a philosopher before I’m an American citizen. In fact, you might say that philosophy subsumes all particular roles I have into itself, and the only thing I may say about myself is that I’m Socratic—questioning and reflective, cautious to assent too quickly to a point and modest in my making claims about the human condition. In truth, I think every American ought to be this way, but that’s another post for another time. For now, let me explain what I find so dangerously fascinating about the Tea Party movement.

With this temperament, I’m not too overly optimistic about Tea Party claims. The Tea Party is a miscellaneous category, the politics of all that is other, yet it’s come to solidify with a cluster of ideas and identities. It is born out of a populist rejection of moderate liberalism it seeks to exaggerate into the wretchedness of Marxism and socialism. Within its ranks, the Tea Party consists mostly of libertarians, disgruntled Republicans and upset rural Democrats. It has nothing new to say but like the Republicans during the Health Care debate, “No, no and no.” The make-up is also largely white. Philosophically, we might inquire behind the reasons that motivate such views, yet, I think such cohesion is rather impossible. That’s the very interesting philosophical point. Let me explain.

When a group comes together with disparate viewpoints, one can usually know what a group stands for. A collective representation of their particular vantage point is disclosed in the actions made on behalf of the group’s name. The actions taken are “authored” in the way that Hobbes’s Sovereign authorized the action of those that embody the will of the Sovereign. Moreover, such groups usually publish their core values, and when an American joins these groups, a practical knowledge of what they value can be known. However, the Tea Party movement is entirely grassroots. It is made of up of individuals with no identifiable leader. During media coverage of one of their rallies, this was a sticking point and reason given for the greatness of the Tea Party. With no identifiable leader and a pluralism of upset citizens, the group has no hierarchical values it shares. Instead, this plurality and grassroots structure dissolves any meaningful claim it can make as movement, and the only meaningful criticism can come from its members themselves.

Now, while this may seem highly unproblematic in a America so celebratory of its individualism, it means functionally the meaning of what is valued can only come from the member. One can, then, only say “I feel that X” or “I see it as Y.” The possibility of articulating a vision of political change is ruptured by no cohesion amongst the members. There might be a spectrum of upset individuals comprising the group to the point that many different criticisms are all coming at the President and his policies. The lack of a solid identity is not an advantage; there is no upshot to a group that can negate the politics of Washington. Even if there are solutions to be found within the Tea Party about a range of problems, which I doubt, the level of plurality manifests only within the negation since negation is the only way the plurality of the Tea Party members can be brought together in activism. And this is the danger of the Tea Party! They are unwise to their own nullity in action, and cannot therefore carry together any meaningful change since they have no vision to offer. Political power must arrange the world constructively in some fashion, not simply negate the status-quo.

The negativity in Tea Party politics obstructs them to the danger of populist political movements. Populist movements openly deny the complexity of a political situation and substitute a radically disconnected view to replace current practices. Some Tea Party candidates want a flat tax, say 15% across the board. Consider that 15% of a millionaire’s yearly income would be high, but not as high as say someone who makes $30,000 USD in a year. With the decrease in the mean of American household incomes, the amount normal people would pay under a flat-tax might equally be more damaging than having a gradual scalar tax that depends on income. Of course, this prediction is incumbent upon the continual state of income decline in the recession and the slow climb expected of our economic return to pre-2008 status. The very rural poor White American sitting around the various Tea Party rallies would pay more of what they did have than those at the top in this recession alone if income tax is changed to a flat tax. The Democratic solution to maintain an income tax based on income is more favorable to lower-income American households.

Another disconnected proposal that might surface is the dissolution of entire government agencies based on a libertarian impulse from the classical liberalism of such thinkers as John Locke. While I love the attention that philosophers get outside my classroom, I do not expect any productive solution from Locke to come forward. Locke abstracts human beings from the social conditions and environment. It privileges an atomism that is unrealistic. I’ll have more to say on these issues later.

Retraction of Angst

2010-10-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

One should never write anything while moody. Okay, let's go as far to say that one should not write philosophy while moody or angsty. I formally retract my Nietzschean commitments of the previous post. I'm still bitter, but the sun is shining today. I am no longer aware of the burden of Being (Heideggerian joke).

On the Person

2010-10-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

To be a person is a distinct, if not, concept on its own. In an age where ontology qua scientism drives the push of philosophy, we often forget the concrete subject that lives through these experiences. Primitively basic to living through our experiences as a subject is being a person.

The tricky part in philosophy is to assume only so much is suspect in the very question you ask. For instance, in ethics you ask about what is right and wrong action. Thus, this question assumes implicitly: A) moral properties are evaluative of only actions and B) assumes that very level of being a person basic to the ethical experience. Call this the 'received view' of what ethics is. My only point is that being a person is subsumed under the 'received view' of ethics. There is, actually, a deep phenomenological core to describe underneath what the typical 'received view' of ethics.

Contrary to phenomenology, I find that two moves in contemporary ethics have been made about persons, and both an be united under assuming beforehand the nature of persons. The nature of persons are decided before one would phenomenologically look to Following Kant, being a person is expressed through rationality. A person has moral standing only insofar as a person can grasp the form of morality in the categorical imperative and apply it. In consequential formulations, a person is also expressed through rationality, but it is a rationality about the means to satisfy an end that benefits all. This does nothing to differentiate the basic reduction of a person to the rational capacities. A person is only that which can determine the ends of action. Yet, there is more to being a person than a practically rational maximizer or rational apprehender. There are more facets to our lived experience, especially in the ethical dimension than laying bare the basic structural principle of all morality. Laying bare a structure requires that Kant and Mill presuppose the nature of persons prior to describing the structure of morality.

A phenomenology of the person would reject assuming the person outright. The person would have to be defined in such a way that levels of revealing could come forth from personhood itself. For now, a person is that which has subjectivity. Subjectivity is lived through in relation to a world with others, and participants in the lifeworld.

Phenomenologically Thick Concepts

2010-10-05T23:52:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I gave a talk to our department. I maintained several things, but I hinted at two implicit intuitions I'd like to bring into relief now.

A) Relevant moral properties are never thin properties, that is, no moral property is ever just evaluative.

and

B) All relevant moral properties/considerations are thick properties, that is, all moral properties have a descriptive and evaluative component to them.

I also stated that virtues, or virtue considerations are thick, and here's my reasoning. Virtues describe the reliable trait I have or ought to have as a state intrinsic to the practical "who" I am. These virtues are better described as practical abilities I exercise and grow into. That's the descriptive element. As a teenager, I might not be as patient as I now am, especially regarding things I want from things I need. However, in my 31 years of life, I have more wisdom to be patient for things, and can readily distinguish between what I need from what I want. In this way, it is descriptive of the practical "who" I am that one might describe me as "patient".

Notice in the above example that the description of the agent possessing patience is pregnant with evaluative meaning. The fact that there is a difference in description between my impatient teenager self and the more refined 31 year-old PhD student carries with it the message that only now do I realize that as a teenager I ought to have distinguished between the patience virtuous demands generally and how impatient I really was. By all accounts, I should have been different; I should have had more patience as a teenager. In this way, the virtue of patience is both a trait I now have, and reflection about patience independent of my possession of the trait has evaluative significance.

Now, the fact that agents possess a trait and ought to have it occur simultaneously in reflecting on a given virtue. The truth is that virtues are never abstracted from the practice of agent's possessing them. Virtue ethics is an ethics of realizing a balanced life where the virtues facilitate our growth. There is no moment when we can call upon a morally thin property to parse out the difference between the descriptive (having a virtue) and the evaluative (the practical wisdom stemming from a virtue). In order to see this, let me first discuss the opposing view of thin properties.

Normative theories advance rightness as the model thin property. So an act consequentialist might accept that an act is right if and only if it generates more good, but in order to believe in such a morally thin property as rightness, the act consequentialist is forced to value only one element in an action. Rightness is forced upon only the action, and that action is either right or wrong. More peculiar, right and wrong are simple predicates that can only attach to actions. An action could not be described as brutal. Brutality intimates the presence of the doer with the deed. Under such a view, the doer is not distanced from action. Instead, the agent comes to possess a quality with the use of "brutal" that the act consequentialist cannot stand for, and yet this is the theoretic advantage of morally thick concepts. It brings to light the unforeseen level that it is the agent and action that are morally valuable, and if we dare say so, the type of person I ought to be is the source of why an action is brutal in as much as it is wrong. Put another way, wrongness is a minimal level of moral evaluation. It says something different if I call an action brutal. The act consequentialist has cleaned up morality to be so thin that it makes for a highly precise measure of the value of an act, but that precision is maintained at a level no normative theory can describe (even though they think they can). My chief reason for thinking that precision is general in ethics is a demonstration that moral properties are actually thick, incapable of inspiring certainty as thin ones do.

However, it can be argued that I have removed the certainty of at least our common intuitive judgments about what we are morally certain about. Leaving an infant alone in a trash heap is wrong, and the criterion of wrongness offered by act consequentialists or Kantians might differ. Yet, it is the fact that these theories try to establish one overall principle that best explains why it is that we are certain about some of our common intuitions. The certainty flows from their actually existing a certain method of testing for rightness and wrongness. It can be done to any action. However, actions are not simply the product of a self-contained moral agent. Instead, an action is a display of the responsive strategies of the type of person who I am. When a mother abandons a baby to a trash heap, it is not as if the action were the only thing to have a value. Such an action is a realizing of the type of the mother is. A mother that discards her baby in a trash heap is morally deficient in her being. She lacks the ability to care for her child in the way someone ought to care for their child. Our judgment of the mother would be lessened if the mother abandons the baby at a convent in the foundling wheel. In fact, the sacrifice to abandon one's child to the church may be a sign of great love. The mother knows she cannot provide for her child in the same way that the church can.

The recognition of these judgments about the type of people revealed in action takes place within intentionality. This is the phenomenological connection. There is a conceptual space as intentional living subjects that can be captured by phenomenological analysis. It is the description of how it is that I live out the structure of moral experience through the possession of morally salient virtues versus vices. I do not have all the answers about such an experience, but it is one that I am interested in opening up in future phenomenological descriptions.

Politics and Everything Conservative Under the Sun

2010-10-03T23:24:00.000-07:00

What is conservative really mean for American politics?

It means the abuse of history to legitimate one's current ideology and usual historical blindness to how antiquated classical liberalism is for contemporary politics.

It means promoting radically individualistic autonomous selves that are atomistic to such an extent that the communal bonds necessary for any society are deemed as irrelevant to practical considerations we might face.

It means making people radically responsible for things they cannot control like the demographic determinations of someone's background in a largely unjust world.

It means fundamentally believing in a free market system so radically and fervently that any criticism of it is demonized before the substance of that criticism comes to the fore. This is especially exemplified by the philosophical illiteracy demonstrated by demonizers of Marx to have never read his texts and secondly to not understand Marx was a perverted Hegelian.

It means usually adhering to an Evangelical interpretation of Christianity to such an extent that religion becomes a force to manipulate a massive amount of people with the subsequent consequence of promoting a theocracy in American government.

It means thinking that the private ownership of firearms will prevent the rise of a tyrannical state despite the massive gap between what the military owns and what we, the citizens, own as weapons.

It means thinking that there is something called hetero-normativity about sexuality despite the massive amount of sexual difference inherent in the human experience.

It means thinking that the United States is so sovereign that rational multilateral decisions in which states work together for a common peace are deemed irrelevant to the needs of our national interests.

It means thinking that women cannot be liberated through advances in medical technology such that they cannot decide the fate of their own reproductive system.

It means thinking that a woman's body is owned by the state since in denying her personal autonomy for abortion, conservatives will wind up owning a woman's body through legislating what a woman can do.

It means usually thinking that creationism should be taught in biology classrooms, and if we do that, then why not bring back Aristotelian four elements to replace particle physics?

It means being so ignorant of the rise Islam and its subsequent history that we cannot separate out fundamentalist radicals from the rest to such an extent that we hide our bigotry about Islam behind the tactful suggestion that a Mosque in New York City be built elsewhere than two blocks away from ground zero. Moreover, we are so blind to the complexities of world politics and Islam at large that Conservative Christians propagate a medieval us vs. them model which is commonly accepted as common sense in the Republican party.

It means being so blind to economic policies that benefit the disappearing middle class that you blindly appeal to the dream of social mobility to hard-working Americans who will never see the dream promised to them by a Republican party that defends the interests of the rich over the most poor.

It means falsely informing people that there will be death panels and that Canada's health care system is ruthlessly inefficient. I lived in Canada for three years, and if I have the choice, I will emigrate and raise a family there.

Okay, I'm done with this. This is only making me angrier.

Upcoming Conference

2010-09-29T22:24:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving a talk at the West Virginia Philosophical Society on October 8th.

I just wish it didn't have the words "West Virginia" in it, even though I get to go back home to Western Pennsylvania to do so.

"The Phenomenological Inadequacy of Ethical Naturalism"

Interesting Thread

2010-09-23T14:08:00.000-07:00

Over at Perverse Egalitarianism, there is some musings on the relationship between naturalism and phenomenology. I don't know how naturalism is used in this thread, but there is something like an anti-naturalism in phenomenology only insofar as the general positing character of the natural attitude becomes all-encompassing. This is what is really important when speaking about naturalism in Husserl. Husserl does not eschew the world. Moreover, it might be possible to have a naturalism that works in tandem with phenomenology. I'm aware that Shaun Gallagher thinks phenomenology puts us in contact with mental events in the right type of way and as such, argues for a neurophenomenology that is not simply a folk psychology.

For me, naturalism is the reduction of philosophical inquiry to what the natural sciences posit. In such a relationship, philosophy disappears as directed inquiry of a free subject. Philosophy becomes only reactionary to science in the most excessive form. This is not to say, however, that there cannot be a range of activity studied by the natural sciences. In so doing, those studying science must regard themselves as engaging in a life-praxis. It is only when the scientific character of the world is presupposed as the only legitimate standpoint we can ever take on issues that makes robust naturalism problematic.

Another Mildstone

2010-09-20T23:58:00.000-07:00

So, the graduate director emailed me and told me that I had fulfilled my language requirement. That put me in a really good mood since things have kinda sucked recently.

So, at the end of this term:

I will have taken all coursework required for the PhD
I have my language down
I have my analytic course requirement (waived from the analytic MA)
I have a preliminary outline of a literature prospectus (a little ahead of the game)

Steps still to overcome:

I will take the prelims for my PhD next Fall.
I will need to complete a literature prospectus, form a committee and write something called a dissertation

For Fun:

I will continue to audit more German courses because German is fun.
I will start exploring Scheler's work on moral personhood in addition to Hart and Sokolowski on the person as well.

Phenomenological Account of Commitment

2010-09-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

Commitment is what separates out successful relationships from bad ones. It is the word most associated with comedically about how a man will fail to live up to the virtues of monogamy. We have an entire cliche industry about this phenomenon. This is my first real attempt at a solo phenomenological description of commitment.

In the Same Sex Marriage Debate (SSM hereafter), someone may claim that commitment and the conventionality of marriage alone give us reason to allow for SSM. I reject straight out relativism about the conventionality of our moral practices, but think that in the SSM debate, there is something about commitment that features in our experience of love. This experience seems common enough to both hetero and homosexual couples that I posit its essential featuring.

In commitment, you take on and internalize living-for-another. You are not obligated to anyone other than someone you have sworn a vow of commitment towards. You are allowed to be partial in this experience. Let me elucidate the structure of this experience.

In living-for-another, the meaning of my actions are defined in relation towards the other. To lay claim to a practice as one's own is a reflection of the other's character. If I go out and steal TVs, I embarrass my wife since my actions reflect on her. The reflecting on her is the fact that my actions chosen in this way are oriented towards how I have chosen to relate to others through her. When I do something shameful, I have forgotten how I ought to live-for-her since living for another requires a moral orientation towards one's partner that makes one's life completely suffused with the my partner's presence. Living-for-another is, then, a normatively driven disposition to take on someone else as the condition for which you will always act.

Living-for-another is a surrendering over to the promise of the partner's transcendence. When I need something, I simply call out and my wife will be there-for-me. Regardless of what she is doing, she will come, even if begrudgingly, into the room to answer my question or get what I need. In this way, commitment requires a devotion to surrender, and it goes both ways. In traditions past, men had a more active role and women reacted to their wants and needs. However, this ethically unsustainable, and gives reason to reject any form of relationship in which both partners are not equally surrendered. It is the possibility of equal surrendering that separates out good relationships from bad relationships. Moreover, the surrendering over explains why it is that one's actions reflect on the other, as explained above. To be committed is to be promised and deliver over to another. It is through this mutual surrendering of wills that one finds their partner worthy for the respect of love.

Commitment cannot simply be about attracted love. It is a deeper type of love than simply liking another person. Many people substitute the concept of attracted love for something deeper than what it is not. Attraction can lead to sexual possession of the other. However, purely physical and attraction are not substitutes for mutual surrendering. The confusion lies in that surrendering the body over to the other in the sexual act is not surrendering it in a sexual act in the sense of living-for-another. The sexual act in living-for-another is carnally about possessing the other's flesh, but it is an enactment of surrendering to the point for that mutual surrendering. Mere possession of the flesh can lead to transcendence of the other in mutual surrendering only if that possession is directed towards that mutual surrendering. This is best captured by the vernacular phrase "making love." If it isn't, it is something else, superficial, hedonistic or otherwise.

The mutual surrendering of the other's transcendence creates partnerships. Yet, in living-for-another a partnership cannot be a sustained relation only between two parties once consummated in a ceremony. Instead, it is like faith in that it requires renewal. Mutual surrendering will be renewed in the act of each surrendering to the other. The submission required for living-for-another enacts a promise a new to sustain what has been, or to correctly re-establish where the couple ought to proceed. The renewal enables us to see that we are once again anew, the newness of re-invoking the vows of commitment. They must be taken on again every so often in order that we may sustain the awareness that living-for-another requires.

Living-for-another can be suffocating and you will see many couples assert a separation from living-for-anotherness. The man may do something like carve out a space in the garage to work on his life-projects or establish a man-cave. He will go out with single friends and act as if he were not living-for-another. If this breaks down too much, then the living-for-another will become threatened, and hence will not be renewed as it requires. Infidelity is one example of the ultimate break in which commitment breaks down the possibility for renewal since so much of the renewal of living-for-another takes place in the transcendence of the sexual act. For living-for-another, the sexual act takes on the mutual surrendering required at all times in life, but within this act, sexuality is a surrender of the body to symbolize more than the bodily possession of the other. It is an opening of promising where the other's pleasure becomes your own, and the union of flesh (no matter heterosexual or homosexual) becomes shared between two. To break that bond and transgress against the possibility of renewal is what is so devastating about cheating on one's partner. It disrupts the security and sanctity of the renewal commitment necessitates in its own structure.

Given that I have described commitment as a living-for-another. It follows that part of this experience allows me to see what types of relationships do not have commitment in them. They are, as it were, substituting the concept for the experience, superficial pleasure for commitment itself. In this way, all relationships can be judged accordingly to how committed the partners are within that relationship. We have a way to view in some sense how it is that living-for-another takes shape in the concrete experience of our lives and know how silly counterfactual reasoning is when they assert wrongly that sincerely committed relationships are not enough for marriage. Rather, it is commitment that makes possible our ability to share in a commitment with a loving partner.

Something Weird

2010-09-13T16:45:00.000-07:00

This happened twenty minutes ago and as a phenomenologist, I wanted to capture this narrative. A woman had been visiting her daughter. The daughter dropped of her baby at daycare. Then, the daughter got into an accident. Relieved to hear that the baby was not in the accident, I uttered, "God bless." At the utterance at that phrase, a strange feeling external to myself came over me. I felt reassured that Ashley (my wife) would also be Okay. She is currently in the hospital for an unknown severe infection and complications of possibly a virus or severe allergic reaction to an antibiotic.

A strange and ultimately weird experience ensued. I felt whole, or at the very least connected to the sun on my back. I quickly entered my car and burst out in tears thanking Jesus. I knelt over the steering column excited and shaking. My tears were not that of mourning, or that something bad was coming. I was rejoicing. I felt like Ashley's health would be delivered to me. Deliverance.

A couple of nights ago, I prayed. I confessed to a philosophical friend of mine in my department, and called my more Conservative friend. I had prayed ask-fors, the type of prayers that are insincere. The type of prayers where a man covers his bases "just in case." Cephalus in the opening of the Republic in Book 1 leaves to do this very thing before the arguments get under way.

It should be known that I have defended materialist ontologies in philosophy of mind. I have ridiculed those that go to excess in faith, and still mock the impiety of the Inspiration channel. I love to read even Sartre and his existentialist positions concerning how man makes himself, and I think that evolution is right about how material processes unfold naturally. I have never considered myself a theist. At the age of 17, I scolded a Christian apologeticist for misconstruing the complexities of Carbon dating at a youth group. I told him he didn't understand what he was talking about and decisively left, putting Northminster Presbyterian behind me. In high school, I told off a strange kid that God will not strike me down for saying God did not exist. In college, I found Descartes for two weeks and soon found that mind-body dualistic interactionism had to many problems to be true, and found a materialist ontology quite satisfying to explain consciousness as just a neural network.

In that experience, I also recalled my Kant, and the antinomies of pure reason. Speculative reason cannot confirm or dis-confirm the existence of God. Reason should always remain agnostic to problems it can never solve. To live life philosophically is not simply to adopt the epistemic orientation to world and see in every moment whether one has justified beliefs about what is before them. Faith is an operative concept, more akin to the habituation of virtues in Aristotle. It is a way of seeing, an opening to the possibility of something greater, a connection that lives through and constitutes -- no better put "permeates" the field of my subjective horizon. It is that maintaining the openness in a world of constant doubt and idiotic literalism where religion goes wrong. It is the insight of religion so often missed, and I do not know how to register this experience.

I am going over in my head. Did I create or foster this in myself by constantly asking the divine to aid in the health of my wife? Could my stress have altered my brain to foster conditions to calm my stress down? Was this an experience grounded in some materialist ontology of my situation? What about the prior asking, the pseudo-prayers. I know these were insincere. These were the "what-if" prayers of an undecided Kantian (on matters of metaphysics only). These were not the prayers of a man devout, but a habituated naturalist. Did I presuppose the existence of God by being open? I don't think so. If I presupposed God, then the content of the experience wouldn't be that overwhelming. It'd be like when you know your little brother will come back for your hidden stash of cookies. It wouldn't be overwhelming, nor would it be a break in the normal flow of expectations of your experience.

These very expectations of my experience are that easy and tidy scientific categories organize the world, and that these categories are responsibly posited by systematically agreed upon criteria of practicing scientists. I accept these explanations as easily as I toss a coin. These categories explain reliably the concordance of how to expect the world. Things will fall because of gravity, animals will mutate randomly. Surface tension of water will cause the water to drop. It is not like I asked for Jesus, or to have a complete urge of certainty overtake my body, causing me to shudder over a steering column. It does not fit the concordance of the natural attitude presupposed normally. It breaks that mold, and forces me to put my cat on the chair by the draped window. I kissed her, and said "Let's look at sunlight together." She meowed in agreement.

I must go and return my wife to good health.I may never be a whole-hearted Christian, but I will express my faith in the tenants of my culture. I will ask for Christ's guidance every now and again. I pray for the safe return of my wife.

Same Sex Marriage Again

2010-09-13T10:50:00.000-07:00

I'm over at edwardfeser.blogspot.com at this thread urging several points about the SSM debate.