Leiter on Foucault

In a recent post on Leiter's blog, he shares a paper on Foucault he published on SSRN.
I wish to contest a portion of Leiter's text. Rather than specifically arguing for his assertion against Foucault's genealogical method (what I call his socio-historic analyses of various social institutions). On this apparent fatal weakness, Leiter simply asserts:

Yet it is now surely a familiar point in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science that the influence of social and historical factors might be compatible with the epistemically special standing of the sciences as long as we can show that epistemically reliable factors are still central to explaining the claims of those sciences.29 And that possibility is potentially fatal to Foucault's critique. (p. 16)

Mr. Leiter, this is a point you cannot get for free. What I feel you are missing is central to a proper understanding of Foucault, namely, that the sciences are historical activities by human agents. It is not that social and historical factors are alien, and the sciences can be seen as independently from these factors. Instead, science moves in history and culture. It is a human praxis. All that you have done is assert science's independence by philosophical name-dropping, nothing more. Surely, such independence, if won, would be fatal to Foucault's project. On this, there is no doubt. However, the burden of this independence is the very pretension Foucault resists because it is hard to deny the human agency in history and culture.

Moreover, reliability is just a substitute for independent-making feature of science Foucault is analyzing. Let us take an example. Suppose we want to criticize modern day chemistry as implicitly assuming that it is a good thing to master the forces of nature. A historical analysis of the origins of chemistry might tie chemistry to the unlocking of God's secrets in alchemy. Regardless of the reliability of, say, Avogadro's constant for calculating molar masses, the implicit norm of controlling nature is still a feature of the science. The reliability of Avogadro's constant does not negate the cultural and historical norm of controlling nature. Reliability doesn't seem to add anything.

Leiter takes issue with the suspicion Foucault's strategy casts on the special status of the human sciences. For Leiter, suspicion isn't argument, and the lack of substantive proposal is a shortcoming of the genealogical analysis of science through historical and cultural factors.

On the epistemic standing of the current human sciences, all Foucault leaves us with is a suspicion, rather than an argument. Suspicion is, as we have already argued,
epistemically important, but it needs to be supplemented with a critique of the truth of the claims at issue. p. 17

This isn't charitable at all. For Foucault, an interpretation is the argument. It is the whole genealogical aspect of exposing what is implicit through the genealogical method. Perhaps, Foucault is wrong, but meeting Foucault on the grounds of suspicious hermeneutics would, I think, involve showing why Foucault's interpretation is wrong. It seems that Leiter first accepts what Foucault's project is, but fails to meet it head on. Given his editorial supervision of a recent Continental Philosophy anthology, it is reasonable to think Leiter would know what is meant by the hermeneutics of suspicion. He should genuinely show Foucault as committed either to the wrong method completely (challenging this genealogical appropriation of one type of reading of Nietzsche), or committed to offering a different hermeneutics about science (he marginally approaches this with the comments on pedophilia towards the end, but it still remains highly underdeveloped). On the latter, he has nothing to say and on the former he merely asserts a potential fatal shortcoming without really arguing for it, as I have shown above.

Contrary to the tone of this post, I am only aggravated with Leiter. His tone of the essay ends fairly; I only question how he got there in the first place. Certainly, there are features of Foucault that need spelled out by his supporters. However, if we are to take your comments about his work seriously (as demonstrated by a decent exposition on Foucault) than the essential claims of weakness require bolstering of the same type you demand from Foucault's supporters.

Reflections on God and Freedom: A Kantian Answer to Religion and Politics

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky famously declared if God is dead, “then all is permitted.” This is the most famous sentiment for both existential theorists countenancing mankind's existence as contingent and free; on the reverse, Christians underwriting religious conservatism see the liberal challenge of free-thinking atheists as undermining the possibility of a moral world order. For them, while God cannot be dead, endorsing such a view undermines a moral world order necessary for the salvation of humankind. Christians believe that this world will be the eventual fulfillment Christian prophecy, and when that prophecy comes to pass, the stronger the moral world order, the better all our chances are on being on the receiving end of God's promise for salvation. Therefore, one finds politically motivated Christians lining the partisan politics of the Republican Party on major ethical issues from abortion to the death penalty along these lines.

At the outset, I want to be clear. By freedom, I mean not just the politically-loaded term best summarized by Thomas Hobbes as the “absence of external impediments.” External impediments are contrivances of human activity, e.g. imprisonment or depriving of other rights in general. I mean the capacity of individuals to be free in relation to the order of nature itself. Thus, I am not simply talking about those conceptions of freedom of political and moral magnitude. These senses of freedom derive from a larger picture of metaphysical freedom meant here. However, it is also important to mention that this metaphysical sense of freedom is experienced morally.

Orthodox Evangelical Christians advocate that God created mankind and that he gave them free-will. They move from the concept God first to then justify freedom. Within the bounds of this freedom, God suggested a moral code, a way of living that is scripturally-based in what we ought to do. In this view, we are free to transgress against God, and the morality he commands of us. I disagree. I feel that paying attention to the relation of the concepts of God and freedom can shed some light on the overall political motives of the religious right. Ultimately, I argue the reversal of the priority in agreement with Kant. Freedom makes possible our belief in God. This has ramifications for the political story that infuses much of the Evangelical worldview. Like Islam prescribing what ought to be the case in all areas of human life, Evangelical Christians desire what ought to be the case, and such evaluative judgments are undergirded by a religious conceptual story---the concepts of God and freedom. If freedom depends on God, then God can make moral demands on us since he is also the source of the capacity to recognize those moral demands. A person may believe in God is thereby made good on this view.

Reversing the order of freedom to God implies that a person who believes in God is not made good. Instead, a good man must believe in God. In so doing, an awareness of our freedom is needed to make the decision to believe. Any knowing of God must come from our awareness of our freedom, and this is what is meant to subordinate God to the concept of freedom. Kant argues this on purely moral grounds. Our freedom to believe in God secures us from the skepticism that good deeds will have bad outcomes. For the fulfillment of our moral duties requires a belief in the fact that good deeds will have good outcomes. Otherwise, the fulfillment of our duty would severely conflict with the order of things if it is true that good deeds led to the suffering of the innocent and the victimizing of good people.

Issuing from the belief that good deeds lead to good outcomes implies another belief, the end of our short chain of concepts, namely, God. The fact that we believe that good deeds result in good outcomes implies a moral order ensured by God. The moral order is of a different world than the one observed currently. Not believing in the moral world order would admit of despair, and be contrary to our experience of life in general. Thus, Kant can be seen as advocating God qua moral being, and at the very least of the Enlightenment construal, a governor of the world order. On this account, Kant does not think these beliefs about God as a guarantor of a moral world order capable of rational demonstration. Instead, they are “postulates of practical reason.” Since they are not capable of rational proof, Kant is seen as “making room for faith” based solely practical grounds, not theoretical grounds.

As stated above, this reversal of freedom to God has political ramifications, the first being that morality is not dependent on God with respect to its content. Kant can be seen as subjugating all principles to freedom, including God. In this way, morality is a construction and agreement of practical reason, and morality is given an extension, or a lifting up by God. God guarantees the freedom of practical reason to proceed onward by elevating the contingency of human action to the absolute necessity, its categorically bindingness. If God dictated the moral law to us, then we would be no longer free beings, and this removes the capacity of religion to heteronomously impose itself as the standard of right and wrong. Thus, this reversal incapacitates the moral punditry of Evangelicals who wrongly move from the concept God to constraining the bounds of freedom. In addition, a pluralist conception of religion is possible here if the religion in question can integrate this reversal. Moreover, not transgressing the boundary of freedom provides us with a working principle to evaluate religions in a pluralistic climate.

Secondly, by keeping religion in check with reason, the charitable work of religion does with respect to morality can be gleaned as morally valuable, and the faith that engenders such morally valuable actions can be publicly endorsed. On the first, consider a recent conversation I had with a worker of humantrafficking.org. This person told me that much of the work of human-trafficked people and refugee populations in Long Island is done by Catholic Relief Services. Certainly, CRS has its own Catholic mission, but a Kantian perspective allows us to see their work as morally worthy, despite any misgivings we might have of the religious ontology that motivates moral action. In regards to the second feature, many liberals advocate a type of secularism that pits religious citizens against themselves publicly. Such citizens are told to keep their religion to themselves, and their public life is half-alienated between whom they truly are from whom they must present themselves as being. The alienation felt makes people inconsistent within their lives. Such alienation need not endure if the view of religion is kept within the bounds of reason as discussed here. In this way, religion can be made consistent with Kant's “God of freedom” without succumbing to the public alienation one receives in a purely secularized realm of public affairs.

Finally, the political order and institutions have no divine mandate of rational demonstration. Reason is not a tool of faith, nor is faith a tool for theoretical reason since Kant's anti-metaphysical commitments reign in the employment of theoretical reason to never reason beyond the boundaries of experience. Instead, the good will – practical reason – is the ultimate ground on which both the metaphysical impulse of theoretical reason and power of faith turn. For Kant, human life is the center stage of wonder and the moral law. Hence, no scientific proponent of theoretical reason, nor any faith can impose itself as an institution that deprives me of my dignity, my autonomy. I am free, and that is what matters. No matter the directon of political justification, whether liberal technocratic tyranny or conservative religious zealot, no one can override my freedom. Moreover, to act morally is to always presuppose that I act under the capacity of freedom.

A Feminist Commitment

Here's a "Hell Yeah" shout out to Linda Alcoff and Sarah Miraglia for an excellent well put essay on why Palin is not a feminist.

Alcoff and Miraglia essay link

Google Analytics

For a while now, I have been tracking the astounding number of visits I get from people all over the world that come to my blog. I really do want interaction and if you are even not that versed in philosophy, offering up some thought-provoking comment is welcomed. Please introduce yourself. Respond to a post, and know that all thoughts are welcome in that very spirit that drove Socrates to chat it up with friends and strangers alike.

Best,

Vancouver Philosopher.

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Dangerous Knowledge Documentary

n my department's list of courses, PHIL 100 is our basic Knowledge and Reality, an introduction into epistemology and metaphysics. On an introductory level, this means Descartes as the often cited introduction to the modern period, and the problems of knowledge conceptually involve some logic and problems of mind inaugurated by Descartes. In this course, they also teach Godel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's "Turing Machine." I've always thought this was a subject way beyond first-year students, and is a completely unfair way to distinguish the few from the rest. Now, I've found a really good documentary on these ideas that gives them a historical context. If you want to watch it, here's the link:

http://www.tv-links.cc/documentary/dangerous-knowledge.htm#

My training in philosophy passes over the importance of Godel and Turing completely. These thinkers are largely mathematicians and physicists, tackling problems I haven't even been trained to encounter. What I am linking here is a documentary that brings down to a level of comprehension as far as the consequences of their ideas, not the content of their ideas. I wanted to offer some thoughts on the documentary since the very same climate that undermined what I would call the classical narratives of order find expression in Nietzsche around the same time of these thinkers. Moreover, thinkers like Marx and Freud in their own way are also developing problems that are critical of these same orders of meaning. For Marx, it is overturning an entire system of economic power, and for Freud, he overturns the idea that we are conscious deliberators in control of our lives showing that what moves human concsiousness are unconscious drives. It is mostly with Nietzsche, the death of God, that concerns me. It is a cultural event with standing significance, mapped on to the heart of what Cantor and company are facing in the documentary.

At this time, old ideas are "slipping away." The very idea of an ordered and regulated cosmos guarantees certainty not only in the realm of predictable natural events. The same guarantee applies to an ordered moral universe. Aquinas and Augustine build a view of the world that sees order applying to both nature and morality. Reason is the power and faculty that discerns the ordered principles set forth by God. Thus, moral truth is ensured by design, and human reason in its finitude is empowered to find these out or intuit them. For the most part, morality is construed as overriding and impartial. It constrains our own wants and desires as well as applying to everyone in the same way. The story of morality, even in its secular form for Nietzsche, is given in the story of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In this way, Nietzsche's critique of morality is launched by encountering the very tradition incipient with it. He does not parse morality qua Kant or morality qua utilitarianism. The same impartiality and overridingness features of morality are birthed from the dominant tradition of the West.

Two things are important now. Not only was Nietzsche an atheist, the metaphysical thesis stating God does not exist, but also he was an anti-theist arguing that belief in God is detrimental to the believer. This comes through on the moral consequence of Christianity, the heart of the attack on God is seen as coming from morality itself. To believe in God makes one at odds with oneself. Morality is often more than not a hindrance to the pursuit of excellence in us. In religion, people are made to interpret the natural impulses of life as either something to be ashamed/repressed, or as something that one becomes alienated against. This honesty and approach to natural impulses of life are sources of value for Nietzsche. Repressing these life-affirming values represses the excellence in our humanity, and this is stated for many reasons, reasons that I won't address here. The productive work of Nietzsche's criticism is to allow for the expression of our excellence. Yet, once the moral guarantor of order is taken out of the picture, nihilism is a consequence, and while Nietzsche pronounced the cultural event of the death of God, so, too, does he wish to overcome the consequent nihilism (a huge misrepresentation of the story often left untouched by his critics, including Christian seminarians).

Like others in the documentary, Nietzsche plays on the precipice. There is much debate about what constitutes a proper interpretation of Nietzsche's provocative aphoristic writing style, yet I feel compelled to draw a further analogy to the documentary about his precipice playing. The most confusing thing about Nietzsche is that his substantive project looks to invent new myths -- the Ubermenschen for instance -- at the expense of overcoming older ones (Christianity). This looks almost religious in a way, yet I think the myth invention, if it can be called that, is at least a perspective endorsed by Nietzsche. For him, truth was perspectival, relative to the discipline or the knower in question, and through mutual contact, these perspectives would dialogue with each other somehow arriving at the truth. Yet, this is never spelled out how it is done, but only expressed as a hope. Like Godel, he thought the incompleteness theorem could be overcame somehow. Nietzsche regarded nihilism as a negative feature, and would dangerously disrupt our well-being. Like many in the documentary, he stares directly into the abyss of this disorder only to find madness at the end of his life.

The purpose of this short post is to suggest that Nietzsche views the same disorder in morality. In addition, I am showing that like others, he desires a type of unity in morality unraveled by shedding older conceptions of morality called into question. This is meant to contextualize the 30 second bit about the death of God in the film, as well as to add my own two cents to the documentary. Moreover, I think this documentary should be viewed by Jonah Goldberg. A best-friend and I have anticipated this intellectually chic work entitled Liberal Fascism. I wanted to see exactly how Goldberg, as a conservative, would interpret people like Nietzsche and Foucault. Goldberg picks up that these people question the status-quo, but I think he misses how inextricably complicated the end of the 19th century is or how nuanced Nietzsche's work is. I felt this documentary actually situates the academic climate quite nicely and perhaps, the story of order slipping away from science, art, literature and philosophy is the reason why so much of what I do in Continental philosophy is filled with what one professor at a conference called "gloppiness" to me. I hope you enjoy it. I know I did.

If artist works are a product of genius, as Kant described, then an artist is someone who has the subjective genius to transcend all time with their work of art. They push past all convention to the point that they break all established rules of composition with their genius. Geniuses present works of the imagination that 'prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it’ (CJ 314). Thus, the genius transcends our experience of the world with their imagination so much that their work stands the test of time. It has no meaning since it is beyond convention. Yet, I disagree wholeheartedly with this idea.

For me, art works are of cognitive import. They say something, and in the contemporary century, art objects critique the situatedness of their artists. While some works venture to explore, most contemporary artists of good repute use their art to critique, often producing visually disturbing shock value pieces. I know as a philosopher you would hope I am not guilty of assertion, but taking on Aristotelian mimesis from Gadamer without knowing arguments beyond a defense of hermeneutics is a gap that needs more justification. I think I will continue this post and add more to it a little later.

Reflections after McIntyre

I went down to Washington State to the small town of Bellingham. There I sat with a copy of McIntyre's book After Virtue. I completed reading the prologue and preface and found some disagreement and a little agreement. In reading his thoughts, I came to the following conclusions:

Defending liberalism along traditional lines is unsatisfactory. Liberal individualism is an excessive disregard for any common moral language that ties values together since it promotes a problematic view of human beings. The atomism of liberal individualism construes human beings apart from the nurturing and social aspects of community that are needed for morality to exist. Values acquire a salience only in terms of our communal relations.

Moreover, I am having a hard time with liberal excesses of freedom without regard for the type of people we are becoming when we do what liberalism affords as a freedom and a right. Many of our reasons for approving liberal agendas anymore come from the fact that the government should not sanction or restrict a behavior. Government need only ensure through its presence and authority that such restrictions never take shape, yet liberal pundits who argue this are only the inverse of what I find objectionable in conservatives.

Like their counterparts, conservatives restrict too quickly what they view as excesses, and they promote an agenda of restrictive deficiency with respect to our social freedoms. Government only need enforce the deficiencies--there is a space to which government need never venture, preferring to promote social structures as they have always been to the point they are unmalleable and unmanageable. In this way, conservatism is never concerned with what is right as much as it is blindly committed to what benefits the existing power relations.

In both approaches to governance, there is a failure with respect to the national conversation on moral issues. As a moral philosopher, I am concerned with doing the right via what type of people we become. Unless our ultimate ends are fixed together, morality can never take shape. We can never become a better society until people realize that in order for morality to involve others, we must first start with ourselves valuing others. I agree, along with McIntyre, this is why morality has lost its efficacious power to override interests of those that choose against what is moral. In our society, we have lost what the moral ends of our society should be. They were clearer in a Greek polis.

Of course, I am less pessimistic than McIntyre about moral philosophy's independence to deliver the goods on the conversation about what moral ends the United States should strive. The self-appointed function of moral philosophers to be the voice of reason amongst a few comes off first as hubris, yet if others are not going to share the burden of reflection, then any reflective individual -- either philosopher or not -- must burden themselves with the challenge of addressing questions neglected by a national consciousness. There are moral problems that require solving and there are answers. These answers must shape public policy to promote the necessary moral ends for the improvement of the United States at large. In this, yes, you may say that I am a perfectionist, opposed to the Rawlsian procedural secularist who sees that the state should only promote public principles to which everyone may assent. Instead, I see moral matters and community integrally related to such an extent that Rawls' proceduralism purges the meaning of morality if he looks to moral agents as each separately assenting by their own reason. Such an interpretation of agency promotes the unrealistic atomism of individuals. We are more communally-centered than such a conception allows for. Thus, for these reasons, I see morality as an objective evaluation of those ends to which we direct our action, and a necessary component of moral philosophy must center not on the level of action, but instead, we must analyze where we are headed as a people. In this way, I accept more than McIntyre. I see moral philosophy as empowered and capable of answering morally true questions.

A Favorite Davidson Passage

I like this passage by Donald Davidson:

"...however feeble or faulty our attempts to relate these various basic concepts to each other, these attempts fare better and teach us more, than our efforts to produce correct and revealing definitions of basic concepts...For the most part, the concepts philosophers single out for attention, like truth, knowledge, belief, action, cause, the good and the right, are the most elementary concepts we have, without which (I am inclined to say) we would have no concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts that are simpler?"

Donald Davidson, "The Structure and Content of Truth," Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), p. 267.

Graduation

It has been a while, and I have nothing really philosophical to offer the silent audience of my blog. I will tell you, however, that I have great news. I am graduating. After two years of slugging away at my MA, I have one more milestone to add to my life. I defend my professional paper in a course-based MA this coming Friday, July 25th, 2008. One more to go?

Intuitionism External Moral Order

Darwall defined the internalist conception in which rational intuitionists accept S's acceptance of a normative proposition as true only if they are moved by its truth. This immediately implies that since I have been exploring Ross for a while that if I follow Ross, I am committed to an external moral order of normative facts to which our intuitions are directed towards. It is this independent and external moral order that moves us through intuitions. However, I am wondering if I have to accept moral facts in this way, or is there another way to cash out the explanation for what our intuitions are about? Can intuitionism be a substantive theory without the requirement of mind-independent normative facts?

Value Pluralism?

In this post, I write some beginning thoughts on pluralism. I suspect that I may come to know conclusion on the matter. Whatever the outcome, I must say how puzzled lately morality as a concept has been. Questioning how we typically believe morality to be has produced in me profound interest in criticisms of morality. From Nietzsche to Bernard Williams, I enjoy thinking through exactly how morality should be shaped given how human beings are constituted. If our concept of morality is too simple with respect to how we are constituted or that morality's structure as revealed by living in the world is incoherent with what moralists claim is “moral”, then new philosophical responses are needed. My major intuition driving, perhaps, the next few posts will detail possible orientations in considered how morality truly is. We cannot expect people to do the moral thing if our concept of morality does not mesh with how people are.

Value pluralism is a thesis not about the realism/anti-realism debate concerning values; it does not concern itself with subjectivism, objectivism or relativism even, but as to the structure or shape of values. It is opposed to value monism. When we are concerned with the shape or structure of values, we are concerned with the question: Are there a set of universally consistent values that pertain to what is moral reducible to one type of good, or are there sets of values that pertain to morality as more than one moral good? If value monism is true, then values are structured simple, and there is only one relevant moral consideration in any one given moral situation. If value pluralism is true, then morality looks quite different than the one-to-one correspondence between a value and a moral situation that is present in value monism. Why this question matters philosophically is that when we hold moral agents morallly accountable, the very assessment of their accountability shifts with what structure is true about values. The more values there are the more relevant moral considerations must be taken into account to determine accountability. Our moral evaluations follow from the structure of values.

To think it through another way, the structure of values is whether or not there is one ultimate type of value that trumps all others. Classically, utilitarian authors said it was pleasure (Bentham and Mill). They thought pleasure was the only intrinsic good. They framed moral judgments as maximizing only one type of value over all others since those goods were reducible to one type of value. By constrast, value pluralism holds that there are multiple values added to what morality is. There is not one type of morally relevant value to reduce everything else to.

In deontology, values are moral principles, and the monist would see one type of principle grounding all others. In this way, Kant can be seen as being a value monist since the categorical imperative is the sole morally relevant principle that generates the right reason (maxim) by which we all being rational agents must assent to. By constrast, W. D. Ross thinks there are multiple principles and supports a pluralism of principles.

I've recently begun to think on this debate, and I cannot see one way or the other to go. First, value pluralism reflects the complexity about moral life that is overlooked in most forms of monism. Yet, the oversimplification in monism avoids incommensurability of values. Pluralism is struck by this problem of how exactly do we decide between values if there are more than one reducible value to which all others do not refer. The values are there in the moral situation, and in some cases, it is reasonable to expect they cannot be ranked. Here, I could appeal to some form of Aristotelian phronesis or practical wisdom, as is commonly done, but that just posits a mysterious faculty to which no answer can be given. If practical wisdom enthusiasts explicate how practical wisdom decides between incommensurable values, then it could very easily cascade into a procedure for settling all incommensurability problems, which is just monism again.

At times like these, I anticipate that a phenomenological reduction on values would help immensely. Yet, my inexperience in this area causes pause for reflection. Oftentimes, it takes writing just to see where one's confusion lie, and if by writing this, I realize that I am just more puzzled than when I began. Indeed, this is the best thing about philosophy. When it leads to more questions, you at least know you are on the right track

Intuitionist Expectation of Morality

Recently, I have begun to delve into moral skepticism of Bernard Williams, and revisited the par excellence critique of morality in Nietzsche. The thought that morality shouldn't be construed as impartial for everyone's interest, universally applicable to all involved, overriding and content-specifiable has been striking a tenor with me, as of late. Particularly, I am suspicious of the content-specifiability of morality. A goal of moral theorizing is often thought that such theorizing can provide content for action-guidance. However, I am thinking this level of content-specifiability is untenable since the reason why moral principles have such wide scope follows from their generality. Generality gets you universality, and some content--yet, it cannot secure such an exactitude as to prevent moral disagreement. This is what I want to get to in this post, no matter how sloppy of an attempt I'll make.

An argument against intuitionism in ethics proceeds as follows. If everyone has access to the same self-evident intuitions, then moral knowledge would be consistent, and no disagreement of morality, nor its expression in principles would occur. Disagreement does, however, happen. Therefore, there are no self-evident moral principles or intuitions. If there were, then disagreement would never, if ever, occur.

While the disagreement objection follows from intuitionism if such a position claims certainty about a class of self-evident intuitions and principles, it is unclear that when we say that there is a moral fact of the matter in this situation, such a normative observation of a situation involves the level of certainty built into the disagreement objection. Moreover, intuitions in Ross are seen as defeasible and prima facie justified. There can be other more pressing considerations that once critical reflection is underway those considerations reveal how false our initial intuitions may be. For instance, I am a bank teller and see a dirty dingy man coming to my line. I call over the bank manager, and ask him to call over the security guard because he has a gun slightly showing above his hip. However, when the man comes over, I see a badge pressed underneath a shirt, and the police officer reveals his ending a shift requiring him to go undercover. My initial reflective judgments, intuitions so called, was wrong, and I owe him an apology for possibly embarrassing him in front of other customers.

The point is that moral knowledge is not certain as any other realm. The push for content-specifiability is a result of philosophy taking as its influence the emulation of the natural sciences in which the phenomena encountered can be quantified in explanation. A level of precision in handling objects of empirical study is available unlike the precision available to our conceptual analysis of morality. I think this is a problem, and secondly, content-specifiability is made problematic given that normative theories no longer justify the structure of values in the form of monism. Generally speaking, moral theorizing has become somewhat more sensitive to the context of morality and often construes the role of ethical principles and values in the form of a pluralism over a monism. I adopt this move as an appropriate characterization of morality.

I want to end this meandering thread on the fact that if I am accepting intuitionism in the form of W. D. Ross, then I must, like any intuitionist, give a response to the disagreement objection. In order to do this, I introduce a distinction between two levels of the moral epistemic scenario. First, our intuitions are reports of the morally relevant facts that pertain to our situation, and what centrally is at dispute with respect to the duty in a situation. I think here our intuitions gives us an understanding of what moral principles to apply. In Ross, however, one goes straight from seeing the morally relevant fact and this gets us the interpretation of the principles as it applies to the situation. I disagree. At the other end of the givenness of any moral situation, there stands the question of interpretation of applicability. The disagreement follows from interpretation of the intuitions, not simply from differing intuitions (which is still possible, I admit). Thus, I see a morally epistemic scenario as following three basic steps:

(1) Morally understanding the moral fact of the matter as it is given and pertains to the moral situation

(2) The framing of our intuitions of what is given to what pertains in the moral situation

(3) Deciding on how best to apply the framed intuitions in the moral situation.

I think (3) is a better source or culprit of disagreement more often than the difference in the content of our moral intuitions. I am not claiming that interpretation in application is the only source of disagreement. What I am claiming is that defenders of Ross never seem to consider this as a possible source of disagreement since the disagreement objection takes as its sole target our intuitions and not the interpretations of those intuitions to the particular cases in which such generality applies.

Response to Casey Interview

When someone asks whether or not there is a meaning to life, this is a misspoken way of asking whether or not there is an overall teleological aim to the universe, usually seen as grounded in a divine design of the universe. While such grandiose claims are suspect in philosophy, these questions always come back again and again to non-philosophical audience since much of our common assumptions about meanings of life are derived from religious sources. In this post, I address not these concerns so much, but rather what distortion such criticism fosters about morality.

Michael Casey is a sociologist, and Catholic who inaugurates a return to transcendent values, truth and objectivity in the classical theist spirit offered by Aquinas. His particular criticism is not so much original as devastatingly wrong in seeing that skepticism or rejection of theist-based systems of meaning collapse immediately into relativism. As such, like so many, Casey sees objectivity in morality as either absolutist, or relativistic. This is his first mistake, and as a consequence another important feature of morality in such theist-based ethics falls out. What Casey and so many others distort is the actual capability of the content of morality. The content of morality isn't as specific in terms of its action-guidance it offers as people regard it. There is a generality to morality that requires actual interpretation as to the extent such action-guidance offers to normative understanding, and it isn't so simple as God on high ordering positive and negative duties.

First, I am in agreement with classical accounts that moral judgments can be true in the moral realist sense. This is the force of moral truth. Moral truth provides a reason for thinking that morality is overriding in the way we experience being “in the grip of a norm.” Our practical reasoning and cognitive capacities through reflection have access to a set of values that are tentatively and universally relevant to our experience, but it is not through intuition that we see values as applied to concrete situations, but through interpretation. We may know moral principles through intuition, but their applicability originates in reflection and interpretation. In this way, I introduce an interpretive type of moral hermeneutics that explains why there is disagreement about morality. Just because we access to relevant intuitions doesn't mean we understand morality as specific in its content. We might encounter life situations that are so different from how our intuitions can make sense of them that a much needed moral hermeneutics is needed to make sense of those new moral situations. Moreover, it is possible through self-reflection that our moral intuitions may be false, and that through self-reflection and interpretation we could show why it is that some moral intuitions need rejected while others don't.

Secondly, our intuitions give us limited understanding, even after interpretations of those values to concrete situations. They are preliminary justifiable given no other weighty considerations come our way. In this way, our moral judgments are defeasible a priori prima facie duties. If I promise another graduate to take their tutorials because they're going to a wedding, and my wife falls ill requiring immediate medical attention, I have all the reason to see my prima facie promise made to the graduate student as less weighty than my obligations I have to my wife. This suggests a way of seeing moral demands as a comparable set of intuitions that gives us several things. First, it gets us out of the oppressive claim that befall Kantian and utilitarian accounts. Secondly, it paints a more realistic picture of how general moral knowledge is, and thirdly, this type of Rossian-based account explains why moral claims are true, as the theist wants (but is certainly unneeded for us here), without distorting the generality of moral knowledge previously mentioned, and can explain why some moral opinions are false.

Now, let's tie this up with Casey's comments. For Casey, meaninglessness amounts to a denial of a transcendent reality, and he feels that our Western culture is symptomatic of Nietzsche, Freud and Rorty's purporting of meaninglessness. Casey regards culture as a reference point to provide a common way to reflect on meaning for people at large. Further, he suggests that these thinkers see liberation in the meaninglessness in which Casey feels such optimism is unwarranted. Specifically, their denial of meaninglessness shares an insular effort to shield us from the why be moral question. We won't have any reason to be moral, or responsible for our own actions if we are not “anchored” in a transcendent reality of moral truth and purpose. On this, he says:

“It is true that when the moment for action comes, and we are immediately confronted with someone who needs our help or something which needs to be stopped, we don’t spend a lot of time philosophising. We just do it. But getting to this point doesn’t happen automatically. If we are socialised to think only of ourselves or what solves a problem in the short-term or delivers a pragmatic cheap fix, we are much less likely to help others or to stand against evil. And when helping others or opposing evil is not the one dramatic moment of heroism that we have in our imagination, but the long, slow, difficult and even dangerous work that both are most of the time in reality, you need something more than the knowledge that this is just your own personal perspective on things to keep you at it.” (italics mine)

I'm unsure of the absence of a common cultural framework gets us complete skepticism about how less likely we are to help others or oppose to stand against evil. Holding culture suspect is a Socratic virtue. More than that, cultural socialization is not the exhaustive determination about how future humans will behave. Its unclear if lacking objective moral grounds contributes to undermining our moral deliberations in such a slippery slope fashion. Is our moral agency truly undermined? I can engage in agential deliberation on my own about MY intuitions about what ought to be the case, interpret and apply them. What results is the tooth-and-nail deliberations we make, not because of culturally determined social forces, but because human beings occupy a normatively-ladened existence. In other words, culture is not the source of critical reflection. The Socratic impetus which truly gives us meaning doesn't arise from an independent metaphysics posited by reason, but a life actively questioned, even to the point that orthodoxy of culture is undermined; this is the immortal tension between faith and reason, between Socrates and his accusers for “impiety towards the gods.”

Finally, I should say that the reason for rejecting Judeo-Christian teleology of the universe amounts to a lack of success in explanatory power. The empirical sciences consistently rise to the occasion, and provide verifiable evidence in suggesting X is caused by Y much more plausibly than those points in literal exegesis on the bible where religion contradicts science. If we see this success coextensive with issues of reliability, then it is reasonable to extend our want for scientific credence to our beliefs at large. Historically, the reason why science pushes over religion is that much of what religion thought it capable of explaining no longer holds sway. Religion suggests too much. It makes the content of morality into specific rules or instances grounded in the illusion of transcendence. In here, I have tried to suggest that construing values in ways of teleology are unneeded. We can have reasonable moral epistemological descriptions of value-experience and a minimal a priori that gets us moral general truth and overridingness without the violation of Ockham's razor that always accompanies religious reasoning on moral matters.

Religion, Transcendence and Meaninglessness

 Here is an interview given by Michael Casey, a sociologist and Christian who despises Rorty, Freud and Nietzsche. In the interview, he chides modern secular notions of reason, arguing that only transcendent values can safeguard what is truly best in democracy and human rights. Here's the link: 

Michael Casey Interview

I am going to blog about this more, but I'll mention my intuitions. Yes, there is a limited aprioricity to moral values, but in a very minimal prima facie pro tanto like way. One doesn't need robust commitments of Christianity to secure a working and malleable ground for morality. I'll address the comments that piss me off in a later blog entry. This should be enough for now. 

How far does interpretation go?

So, I have just finished up one seminar paper on Gadamer, and an entire semester doing Truth and Method. In philosophical hermeneutics, one phenomenologically describes the conditions of our historically finite understanding. All understanding is interpretation. In Gadamer, there is no outside independent conditions under which rules for understanding are extra-linguistic, or transcendentally a priori. Interpretation cuts through us through and through. My question I put out to the void is simply is this accurate? Should we phenomenologically take our finite seriously and move away from transcendental standpoints or analytically move away from doing versions of epistemology that try to find out the necessary and sufficient conditions for human understanding?

Part of me is compelled, if only a product of a recent fascination with Gadamer, to take on board the fact that everything is interpretation. How far does this cut into human knowing all over the board? What motivates Gadamer is a level of phenomenological description of truth in the human sciences differs from the natural sciences. Here, you can read human sciences as we conceive of the humanities. In German, wissenshaft is simply a rationally constructed system of knowledge, and this word for science doesn't evoke simply the natural sciences. However, I do not know if this is any longer the case, at least it used to be at the time in which Gadamer published TM in 1960.

For Gadamer, the natural sciences doesn't explain everything worth knowing. There is a type of self-knowledge produced by one's engagement with a tradition that is actively and alive in one's experience of the world. For the root of tradition in Latin is to hand down that which must be understood. Literature, art, history and philosophy are disciplines that engage us actively in how we understand the world. In this way, Gadamer is very antithetical to those who practice philosophy as co-extensive with the natural sciences.

I find this view compelling since not all my fields of inquiry operate in straightforward naturalistic assumptions. In ethics, I invoke concepts I employ for normative understanding on a daily basis, especially since I TA Intro to Ethics. When I teach Kant's Formula of Humanity, I don't refer to it in non-moral terms. I partake in a tradition that I inherit. Kant's concepts, and many concepts in philosophy operate outside of naturalism--this is the impetus that pushes people to insist on an irreducible status for their field of philosophy usually.

I haven't really gone anywhere in this post. I've just circled back to why my intuitions are pointing towards accepting in whole or in part Gadamer's insistence that the humanities operate differently than the natural sciences, and to insist otherwise is to misconstrue the humanities, including philosophy. Gadamer thinks that the humanities are directed towards a type of self-knowledge that is productive and brings to light how one can be transformed by engaging with tradition (vice versa as well). Gadamer's insistence that the hermeneutical project is a universal one threatens/challenges the idea that philosophy has access to original grounds outside of our historicity. I wonder if this is even true? Should I remain committed to a transcendental viewpoint in which the world is given, and all phenomena once traced through a genetic phenomenology in Husserl deliver over to me an original and primordial understanding of the world in a way that transcends history? For Husserl, even the lifeworld is filled with invariant structures!

Post-Continental and Post-Analytic Philosophy

I thought I would supply the more accurate picture of the Divide's collapse as many people have commented on Alexander Pruss's blog. I've found that many people are listing my blog either in their blog rolls or providing a link to my entry entitled Continental Ignorance. In addition, google analytics reveals that I have had 30+ visitors in one day, and I am taking time to show two instances of scholarship that are not moving to become analytic philosophy simpliciter, however much Pruss would want such a thing to be true. On the contrary, philosophy is perhaps just becoming philosophy, and many people are realizing just exactly how much work and arguments are contained in the Continentals, especially those phenomenologists that I love seen as relevant to philosophy of mind. I am listing a few sources that might be of intellectual interest to people.

The first is a book review for Post-Analytic Philosophy edited by John Rajchman and Cornell West written by H. Veatch. I enjoyed this review and read a series of these essays long ago since this is a 1985 book. This is a PDF from mediafire.com.

Richard Rorty's comments in A House Divided are particularly salient to this discussion. The link here is only to Amazon.com.

Lastly, this is a link to the NDPR. Continental Philosophy (however, perjorative a term this might be) has been rather stagnant, and a new direction in CP is seen as a form of immanentism given in John Mullarkey's Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline.

Continental Ignorance

Alexander Pruss recently commented rather ignorantly on the merits of what constitutes philosophy proper. Too much work at the Ends of Thought blogspot has shown the erroneous nature on this already, and rehashing Roman Altshuler's thoughts on the matter need not repeated.

Philosophers trained to be biased of the perjorative "divide" between the two traditions is rather a source of irony historically. It is analytic philosophy that actively maintains there is something like continental philosophy. For, if someone tells me that I do continental philosophy and labels me a French poststructuralist, I will tell them that I find it insulting and that there is nothing in my love for Husserl or Heidegger that stands in common with such ignorant grouping (accepting certain interpretive commitments of Heidegger). A phenomenologist has nothing in common with a poststructuralist anymore than a poststructuralist has in common with a phenomenologist; pigeon-holing them does little to understand them. If someone is trained in analytic philosophy and is never taught anything about the Continental tradition, all the label "Continental philosophy" achieves is a mass grouping to recognize one's ignorance. There is no substantial work honestly demonstrated by grouping everything European in a geographical label, yet we've grown to accept in terms of an Anglo-American dominated world.

People will notice that I still use the term only because of its common nature. I find it a useful way of saying that, unlike Quine, I think that philosophy is more than just an extension of the natural sciences. Continental philosophy casts a wider net than a Quinean conception of philosophy allows. I find philosophy the intellectual engagement with human existence that liberates us from the drudgery afforded by an unexamined life. In this way, philosophy -- like literature or art -- uplifts and uproots our everyday absorption in a Western culture that often propagates injustices only because a large part of our human life goes without being subjected to inquiry. Thus, inquiry is an organic and creative expression of human freedom that Russell noted very aptly:

Philosophy has value not because it is likely to provide definitive answers to the questions it asks, but rather because the questions are profound and important ones. Philosophical contemplation removes us from our narrow everyday concerns and takes us into a realm of generality which can put our lives into new perspectives. (Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy)

Seeing authors in terms of the analytic tradition wrongly suggests that the history of philosophy is nothing more than the history of intellectual puzzles. The richness of philosophy from Tyler Burge to Gadamer, instead, reveal a richness in range beyond thinking of analytic philosophy as solving problems only.

Current Research

Here is the summary of a current research project:

An unattractive feature of post-Habermasian influence on Gadamer scholarship is to view Gadamer's thought as reactionary to Heidegger. Commonly, this view is one of discipleship in Habermas famously put Gadamer's contribution to philosophy as the“urbanization of the Heideggerian province.”¹ While it is important to keep in view Gadamer's connection to Heidegger, I find Gadamer more active and productive than this discipleship view might suggest, even in his appropriation of certain Heideggerian concepts. As such, I argue Gadamer's understanding of truth is an appropriation of Heidegger's conception of truth, and his use of the concept of truth accurately describes how the subject matter (Sache) is understood in hermeneutic experience. In reversing the primacy for interpreting the central notion of truth, one can find Gadamer’s appropriation as an original contribution to phenomenological understanding of truth. The contribution lies in seeing truth in our lived hermeneutic experience.

The move on my part at looking what truth is in both Heidegger and Gadamer has several functions. First, Heidegger's concept of truth as used by Gadamer makes possible seeing the difference between the human sciences and the natural sciences. Secondly, the mediation spoken of between past and present, that is, the fusion of horizons, I argue, is connected to the notion of Heidegger's truth. In section I, I explicate Heidegger's notion of truth. It is my contention that Heidegger only sets the stage, but that Gadamer gives it content.² Next, I develop the connection of truth between the fusion of horizons and Heidegger's concept of truth in section II.

1 Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles, tr. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1983), 190.

2The fact that Gadamer doesn't fully develop a theory of truth in Truth and Method has been seen as a shortcoming. This criticism is developed y Robert Bernasconi in “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer,” Research in Phenomenology, 16 (1986), 4. I don't claim content-bestowing conditions at the level of phenomenological analysis in Gadamer and Heidegger. Instead, my use of “content” designates a well-developed conception of phenomenological truth that isn't given much treatment by Heidegger in either Being and Time or in Heidegger's dealing with the issue of truth indirectly in his 1931 lectures On the Essence of Truth wherein Heidegger develops his concept of truth indirectly through an analysis of Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Theaetetus.

The Vita Activa and the Vita Contemplativa

Today, I was told I have excellent leadership experience, and the attitudinal commitments necessary to professionally work canvassing for the Demorats this Summer. The offer to do such work comes at a point in my life where offers are shy. Working and paying off my indentured servitude to attend grad school thus far is another reason for taking the job. I am defintely going to take the job; I can only say that philosophy has been fun, and that to have a job reflective of one's values is another reward not common amongst many that have to transition from the contemplative life, the vita contemplativa, to the practical life, vita activa. In this post, I reflect on my experiences of living abroad the the immortal tension between a life of action, that is the philosophical life, and life yet to be lived by my recent hiring, the active political life.

First, a rehashing of Hannah Arendt is in order. The distinction really is explained in her Human Condition. For her and the tradition of political thought, there has always been a tension between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa since the active life requires a constant immersion into practical affairs whereas the contemplative life is one best characterized by Plato's Allegory of the Cave. In the story, the philosopher is pulled from the shackles of opinion, those that dwell within doxa are the mass of individual incapable of retreating inward into the mind for contemplation. The unshackled philosopher is brought out of the cave pulled upward to see the world for what it truly is, its pure essence or eidos. From then on, the philosopher knows that the common ordinary understanding of the appearing world where politics occurs is not how the world truly is. The joy that comes along with retreating inward and contemplating the universe far outweighs the burdensome life of action necessary for the human world. I am leaving that joy behind. Eventually, I will come back. For now, though, I have to "make this happen."

Part of me is deeply saddened. I cannot believe I must leave Canada. Living abroad (as far as any American wants to admit "living abroad" is 20 minutes north of Blaine, Washington.) has shaped me. The weather is not that different from other Pacific Northwesterners in WA and OR, and the land to my North is filled with rigid mountains crowned in a coniferous treeline. The sky is gloomy often, but when the sun peaks through densely dire clouds of grey, the land illuminates, manifesting the sublime in everyone's appreciation for everything green. The tolerance and multiculturalism of Vancouver is unrivaled, although the lacking of good Tex-Mex restaurants makes me water for more familar American dining options. Vancouver is a beautiful city, a city of glass and tears from the sky. Its beauty has fostered in me an appreciation for the literary and analytic tradition of philosophy I once mocked for its singular obsession with the natural sciences. Still, I mock it, but less so. The people I have met have moved me, molded me, and now I must depart for the United States in less than two months time.

Living in Canada has always taught me that no matter what it is imperative that the United States get back on track. The United States is the most targeted country for abhorrence and satire in the Canadian experience. They view us as a hungry desperate people, lacking a government that funds wars but not health care. They mock us at every turn, and make it clear how Canadian they truly are, even in situations where they clearly are "like us." It is a deeply ingrained pathology to deny one's close relationship with anything remotely American. Of course, this paragraph may be guilty of slight hyperbole. However, one must recognize the source of the Canadian disagreement. The disagreement lies that at the heart of the Canadian mentality--there is a sense of collective responsibility for the welfare of one's countrymen, an attitude uncommon in the United States.

Our obsessant individualism makes it hard to convince others of the morally and politically necessary intuitions of collective welfare. As a people, the United States is fragmented, divided into clear oppositions that blind us to these intuitions. These divisions are between have and have-nots, Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Collective welfare is the talk of pinko-commies, socialists and the way left that are skeptical of private enterprise and capitalism. Yet, private businesses and capitalism still occur in Canada. The fact that they know they either sink or swim as a people together might be a result of having the population of 33 million people (approximately, the population of Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania), and a greater social anxiety comes when one realizes that 300 million people can rarely assent to anything in common. The point is to do just that. By going from door to door, we must make the change, and I'll be damned if I am going to sit by watching America descend into another unstoppable quagmire with Iraq, or conservative (of any stripe moderate or Neo-con) raise the instrumental concerns of profit before collective welfare.

New York Times Philosophy Article

Here's a New York Times article explaining the success and increase in philosophy as a major for undergraduates. I especially like the fact that an uncertain economy creates mindful students looking to study philosophy for the skills it fosters: argumentation, critical reasoning and an increased ability to write logically. I wonder what my newly acquired friends in the English Department would say to that one! Hopefully, this translates into a direct need for university administrators supporting philosophy faculties everywhere.

Here's a link to the article:

http://www.mediafire.com/?dyxd0azzd9y

Bernard Williams and Moral Phenomenology

“Ethical experience” can cover many things. There could be a way of doing moral philosophy that started from the ways we experience our ethical life. Such a philosophy would reflect on what we believe, feel, take for granted; the ways in which we confront obligations and recognize responsibility; the sentiments guilt and shame. It would involve a phenomenology of the ethical life. This could be good philosophy, but it would be unlikely to to yield an ethical theory. Ethical theories, with their concerns for tests, tend to start from just one aspect of ethical experience, beliefs. The natural understanding of an ethical theory theory takes it as a structure of propositions, which, like a scientific theory, in part provides a groundwork for our beliefs, in part criticizes or revises them. So it stars from our beliefs, though it may replace them (Williams, Bernard. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1985, p. 93, italics mine)

This quote has been on my mind for a few days now. Williams agrees that my proposal for a moral phenomenology, as far as I made PhD applications this year, "would be good philosophy." However, I am finding central disagreement with his very point of a moral phenomenology not delivering on the merits of ethical theory. Let me explain.

It is common in moral philosophy generally to proceed on two strategies of disagreement. Let there be two ethical theories X and Y with corresponding adherents. As the opponent of ethical theory Y, X can claim:

(1) Y is counter-intuitive leading to an absurd moral intuition as exemplified in a thought experiment of X.

And/Or

(2) Y is incongruent with our ethical life; X matches up more with our ethical life.

Depending on how 1 and 2 are carved up, these can look like two separate claims whereas I just think that 1 is a general instance of the claim 2. Some moral theorists might try to keep 2 separate due to the feature of Y's incongruent nature. However, for my purposes, it doesn't matter how 1 and/or 2 are divided. There is a disingenuous and irresponsible move in our theorizing to make these types of criticisms without first looking to the phenomenology of our moral life. It is precisely on these grounds that ethical theories always fall short in some other capacity in relation to each other because various ethical theories, as Williams said, focus on different aspects of our moral life. For Williams this is the realm of moral beliefs, and those beliefs can be about many different things in our ethical life. This amounts to Williams acknowledging that a phenomenology couldn't deliver a normative ethical theory, though it would be beneficial for understanding how these elements of our moral life fit together. Why the tension?

The reason why a moral phenomenology is seen as falling short of ethical theory is that theorizing here still means delivering principles and clear cut rules for action-guidance. It is still largely just about answering the question of our obligations, and nothing more. A fuller and richer experience with the philosophy of morality would exemplify how it is that various elements of our moral life fit together: guilt, our care for intimates, the split between motives and reasons and so on. These elements, as I call them, constitute the possibility of being moral, and hence take a certain priority over the action-guidance criterion for ethical theorizing.

Recent explorations in virtue theory of ethics have led me to conclude that the fetishizing of rules and principles that so much of deontology and utilitarianism revere cannot encapsulate our moral life. Instead, the virtue ethicist asks two central questions demanded of ethical theory. First, what I ought to do? But, more importantly what kind of person ought I to be? The virtue ethicist is in touch with those traits that lead to a flourishing life, that is, what I would call the moral life. Now, the picture is far from complete, but the intuitions being pumped in virtue ethics parallel my suspicions of Kantian-based and consequential theories that solely seek to answer the first question without ever addressing the overwhelming concerns of the "elements of our moral life."

Going back to resolving the tension, a phenomenology looks at phenomena as they appear to consciousness while at the same time bracketing -- putting out of play -- our presuppositions we maintain of the world already. This is what Husserl called the epoche. Phenomenology, in this way, is a descriptive effort to see what undergirds the claims we make about the world. These descriptions often conflict with people who think that the mind-independent structures posited by science should be privileged as "all that matters." By extension, moral philosophers would put out of play their respective normative theories, and look at the particular instances of, say, guilt and shame. If a moral theory implies or states a conclusion about guilt and shame outside of what is revealed in lived experience of these elements, then the phenomenology could yield not an ethical theory, as Williams observed, but a check of applicability. For, if a moral theory is inapplicable in experience but noble in theory, then such a moral theory will have to be discarded since a developed moral phenomenology can inform us of a theory's inapplicability. From this, it follows that moral philosophers have an obligation first and foremost to develop a phenomenology of all those concepts they employ for normative understanding as to ensure the demands they claim about our ethical life truly supports how it is that we experience the ethical life.

John Searle at UBC

John Searle came to Vancouver. As such, I trekked over to UBC to hear him. In the same theatre that afforded me the opportunity of hearing Peter Singer, Searle stood on stage unwavering as a speech act theorist. Searle gave the unbridled passionate speech about how natural sciences unify around a model or principle of a mind-independent world. For chemistry, it is the chemical bond, and for physics, it is the atom. For the question regarding social ontology and the status of social things, it is the status-function declaration.

Status-function declarations, as far as I understood him, designate a collective recognition of our representing X because we think of X as being represented as X. So, we think of money as being money only because we participate in the collective recognition of X being represented in our minds as money. As such, status-declarations explain why it is we have social things, and gives us an organizing principle for a theory of social things.

Searle was a little confusing when it came to how status-function declarations related to morality. I asked him in front of everyone if there was an a unifying status-function declaration for morality, and pressed how he might answer the 'why be moral' question. He had offered that status-function declarations of friendship provide the norms for being a friend, yet I couldn't find any reason why status-function declarations should be seen as reaons why I abide by norms. They do well to explain how it is that moral agents internalize a moral code, but beyond that, they would only amount to something like the following:

(1) Being a good friend is collectively recognized as having characteristics F1 to Fn only because we think of F1-Fn as being represented as F1-Fn (we might add some contextual constraint on these norms as well)

However, (1) doesn't tell us why I ought to be a good friend. It only informs me of the status of how friendship is regarded by others. If there are norms suggested in the common representation of the status of the friendship characteristics F1-Fn, then this adherence to these norms is not reason-generating, but only habitually practiced. Of course, Searle can say that he is not addressing the question of seeking how we determine the content of moral reasons. He would just say that he is looking for the conceptual underpinnings of why social things are the way they are, yet Searle then shouldn't suggest that deontic implications follow from his view without giving us a story of how the ontological status of duties gives us reasons to follow implicitly from the social ontology.

(1) might be compatible with a relativism as exemplified by Harman's account. Yet, even in Harman, I am left dissatisfied with how norms and values in context give me reasons to do what they describe--so, the same problem cuts across both views, namely, that contextually functioning rules fail to produce morally-guiding reasons; instead, they only produce functioning rules because those rules are habitually ingrained in collective recognition of their status.

So, yeah... I was mad at Searle for failing to answer my question!!!

I think that a colleague of mine said it best when the talk sounded like a "analytic recasting of Foucault."

No Ethics for the Drowned

Our President is unethical. His moral compass and religiosity are but blinders to the abhorrence of profound immorality disguised in debauched and callous reason--this is what he either calls national security or piety.

If someone can follow this line of thought all the way through, then I assume that such a person of reasonableness could find no fault in my claim. Of all true moral propositions, the truest is that each moral person has a right of inviolable dignity and that to violate that dignity, to use another human being as a pure means to an end, cannot suffice for any moral standard. For morality requires above all else, the respect to another human being's dignity is sacrosanct, meaning nothing more than to respect each other as people who set our own ends. If this be one agreed upon standard of morality, then torture as violating human dignity is morally and unquestionable wrong, and the fact that my President vetoed an anti-torture bill exemplifies that the Republican Party has no place being the party of morality.

It is far beyond repugnant; it is downright fucking unbelievable. If any of you my friends condone the CIA using water torture, then you -- like G. W. Bush -- are immoral, and share highly undesirable aims of what counts as the moral Good with me. Torture violates human dignity, plain and simple. It is immoral, and now, it makes me so fucking furious to think that my President has shown the world his true character.

Phenomenological Descriptions of Hope

I should qualify that this post isn't a sustained philosophical piece of writing, but an exploratory inquiry into the phenomena of hope. In my lived experience of the political, I keep seeing hope tied to contexts as I stress over the Democratic nomination for the US Presidency. As usual, there is usually a lovely inspiration from my wife's beautiful mind pervading my philosophical attention.

I was seated next to my wife on campus. I was reading an article of Clinton criticizing the ambiguity of Obama's speeches. It was noteworthy since the speech happened somewhere in Youngstown, OH (the exact area around Ohio where we are from originally). Clinton's message was simple: Hope doesn't put food on the dinner table, nor pay your stack of bills. My wife snickered and said something to the effect that hope is a more powerful message. She said that hope would make people do something for themselves rather than awaiting the government to do something one should do for oneself. I thought to myself there may be something to her intuition about hope that is phenomenologically descriptive. So, the question concerning me here what would a phenomenological description of hope look like?

Hope phenomenologically reveals itself as a hope of one's own--that is, there's something about hope that makes someone pursue it. Political hopes are practical in this regard. Moreover, it's tied to someone's authenticity, even when people are mostly in the mode of inauthentic herd mentality. Someone has decided to have a resolute determination for themselves, and at this point, the object of hope molds its believer. Like a traveler hitchhiking, hope stands off at the distant horizon as a pristine example of the socio-political world as a "could-be." Our actions become absorbed in the experience of the political as a "could-be." We pursue what is most likely resembling the could-be.

Promisemaking is a will-be. The politician promises the world will resemble their own vision as it is promised as. If you vote for me, the promisemaking act guarantees the state of affairs will be thus, yet, promisemaking is deficient with respect to the contingency of human action. Hope is couched in terms of generality where a theme is just a could-be, and to be truly hopeful, one has to hope that contingency of action works in the favor of what might not come to pass. As such, could-be is a more honest and prudent approach since it acknowledges the vision of the future as better, but doesn't specific too much on the content as will-be promises. Hence, will-be is a passing attempt of someone to tell you how they will rule. Promises qua will-be is a telling what "others want to hear" whereas hope invites others into its being since so many can hope that the world "could be" this way.

If you would like to respond to this post, then I have two questions plaguing my mind:

Do you think there is another phenomenological description of hope that better suits the how hope appears in our lived experience or not?

What type of social ontology is supported by hope?

Recovering the World

Phenomenology is described at an attempt to arrive at the world of immediate contact. In phenomenology, the world is already there prior to any theorizing about it. As many of you may well know, the idea that the world is already there, and that its being there constitutes our relation to it is abandoned in more naturalistic theories. For naturalists, there are entities in the world best described in terms of the natural sciences, and entities are mind-independent. While the world is independent of itself in our field of experience in phenomenology, our experience of the world is something we must retrieve actively.

Now, phenomenology doesn't achieve causal accounts. Instead, phenomenology identifies the fundamental relation of being-in-the-world and attempts to retrieve that understandng for us. I'm wondering whether the fundamental attempt to retrieve essences of the world is in a way causal. How far do you push the thesis that phenomenology identifies constitutive a priori facts that play no causal role because when describing the world?

New Work in Continental Philosophy

Every so often, B. Leiter posts on areas of work being done in different philosophical fields, and I feel it is about time the question gets put to Contiental Philosophy: What is some of the exciting work being done in Continental Philosophy? I feel I want to know what people are doing in Continental Philosophy. So, if you visit this blog and happen, like me, to be a graduate student in philosophy, then tell us the area you're working on.

For instance, I have noted a dearth of Continental phenomenology amongst those appealing to moral phenomenology in Anglo-American ethics. Essentially, the definition of phenomenology offered is something more in line with a Nagel-ian what-is-it-like-to-be-X. As such, there is no broad knowledge of a consciousness as taking on an object in the Husserlian sense. Instead, phenomenology is only the "seems" part of the seems/is distinction often found in philosophy of mind. As such, I've proposed to take a look at questions of Anglo-American ethics. I want to see what undergirds these traditional problems -- such as a conception of practical reason or the incommensurability of values. I argue that the phenomenological reduction whence employed in looking at such problems can better guide our ethical theorizing.

In recent years, I know that the debate on how to take Heidegger has been raging in regards to whether or not Heidegger's phenomenology amounts to a form of transcendence or is it better understood as an existential phenomenology. But again, these are areas of scholarship that are currently beyond me right now.

So what are the current areas of continental philosophy that are intriguing to many?

Zahavi's Routledge Entry

There is a very good introduction to phenomenology written by Dan Zahavi, arguably one of the most important Husserl scholars around. It has a good review of the areas of agreement between figures of phenomenological canon. I especially like the beginning reference to Ricoeur calling all phenomenology after Husserl the legacy of "Husserlian heresies." I'll have to look up this reference since my qualifying paper for my MA this term argues more in favor for a transcendental phenomenology over what I distinguish from a existential phenomenology.

Zahavi's Phenomenology Piece for Routledge originally linked off of Online Philosophy Papers blog.

Canadia "Symposium" Call for Papers

Badiou represents an important point in contemporary Continental thought. He employs set theory, historical analysis of traditional Continental thinkers, including Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, and Deleuze, and his own theoretical meditations in order to think through some of the foundational concepts of multiplicity, “the one” or “counting as one,” the world, subjectivity, and the event. He believes that philosophy is possible only when it is de-sutured from the events of mathematics, poetry, politics, and love. We welcome papers around these various aspects of Badiou’s work. Also, we welcome papers attempting to answer some of the following questions: What is the significance of Badiou’s work for the Continental/analytic divide in contemporary philosophy? What is the relation between subjects and events, and is Badiou’s account sufficient? Are there worlds that can resist Badiou’s logic or counting? Can one think of events on micro and macro levels? These questions are meant to stimulate ideas, but they are by no means comprehensive. All papers focused on Badiou’s work are welcome.

CALL FOR PAPERS / APPEL DE COMMUNICATION

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Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy Call for Papers ~ Appel d’articles

Alain Badiou: Being, Events, and Philosophy

Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy will dedicate an upcoming issue to the emerging thought of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. With the publication of Being and the Event and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II), Badiou represents an important point in contemporary Continental thought. He employs set theory, historical analysis of traditional Continental thinkers, including Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger, and Deleuze, and his own theoretical meditations in order to think through some of the foundational concepts of multiplicity, “the one” or “counting as one,” the world, subjectivity, and the event. He believes that philosophy is possible only when it is de-sutured from the events of mathematics, poetry, politics, and love. We welcome papers around these various aspects of Badiou’s work. Also, we welcome papers attempting to answer some of the following questions: What is the significance of Badiou’s work for the Continental/analytic divide in contemporary philosophy? What is the relation between subjects and events, and is Badiou’s account sufficient? Are there worlds that can resist Badiou’s logic or counting? Can one think of events on micro and macro levels? These questions are meant to stimulate ideas, but they are by no means comprehensive. All papers focused on Badiou’s work are welcome.

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS:

Papers may be submitted in both French and English and should be between 5000 and 6000 words. Please double-space all submissions. The issue will be published as the Fall 2008 issue. Please submit two hard copies or an electronic copy of your paper by March 30, 2008 to the address below. Notifications of acceptance will be sent after the deadline.

Antonio Calcagno, Guest Editor, Symposium
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, King’s College in the University of Western Ontario
266 Epworth Avenue, London, ON N6A 2M3, CANADA
calcagnoantonio@yahoo.com

Jonah Lehrer and Neuroscience

I found an interesting article arguing that reductionism in neuroscience ignores the subjective experience. Now, as a phenomenologist following in line with Husserl, I cannot help but think this article is great for a wider audience. Enjoy.

Lehrer's article with the LA Times

Inspired by Peter Railton...

Suppose there is a couple, a deeply devoted couple whom everyone agrees exemplifies the moral virtues of marriage. Each partner is steadfast, loyal and sensitive to the others needs. One day, the husband is asked about his commitment to his wife by his best bro over a glass of beer. His friend asks how is it they are so right for each other. He responds in kind, "I realize I have a duty to my wife to be sensitive to her needs and act so accordingly" Let us imagine that the wife came upon him, standing behind him for some odd reason. Maybe, she saw him in the window and walked this way from the store into the bar to surprise her husband. What would the wife respond to the husband's claim of simply recognizing he has a duty to his wife. It is rather cold, impersonal and from the outset seems to undermine the value of their respective commitment each has towards the other.

It is a conceptual feature of practical reasons given for justifying actions that to talk morally about situations is to abstract them in part from their situational content and to subsume them into general acts or rules of morality. This practice, though necessary for doing moral philosophy, undermines and alienates how each would feel towards the other. The wife may want her husband to act in the exemplary manner he does because he loves her. That should be "reason enough." From what the husband said, he has given the practical reasons why he is steadfast, loyal and sensitive to his wife neesds, yet it is insensitive, alienating the wife from her husband.

What is going on here? The moral point of view talks about agents and their reasons for acting as justifications for why they act. Is this moral point of view appeal to the intuition that morality is undermining, and alienates the wife from her husband. Is there a solution?

I think there is a solution. I want to claim that practical reasoning involves representational understanding, that is, the ability to represent the viewpoint of another. It is a conscious act of understanding to situate yourself in "someone else's shoes", and for that reason whenever someone claims a practical reason, a feature of that practical reasoning is its origin in terms of representing the viewpoint of others. This is, what I call, the subsumption of representation view in which particular people, the situation of being in a relationship with a husband and wife, and particular factual and situational understanding, are subsumed under a general principle. I borrow this from Kant's idea of a reflective judgment where the particular situation before us has its origin in a greater representation than the final judgment displays.

When the husband gives his justification for why it is that he is sensitive, a basic deontological answer of duty, the conceptual landscape that enables him to form that belief is enriched with the active attempt of representation and subsumption necessary for moral reasoning. I have yet to "flesh" this out into a coherent framework for what a practical reason is.

I am firmly a cognitivist (maybe enjoining to the label of internalism is in order as well), believing that the reason for not doing X is a motivation for not doing X. However, the ability to get to that determination involves the enriched landscape of emotions, sensitivity and representation characteristic of what it is to be moral. Being moral, I argue, is nothing more than having a greater ability of the imagination to represent the viewpoint of another.

Obama, Canadians and Implosion

I know that this is a space reserved for philosophy, but my thoughts have meandered as of late to the upcomer and underdog for the Democratic Primary for US President -- my favorite -- Barack Obama. Not only does his name sound like a Bounty Hunter from the Star Wars galaxy, but his educated and well-mannered tone foster in my heart an optimism I haven't felt since I began studying politics long ago (my second undergrad major was in Political Science).

In my heart of hearts, I feel he can do it. On Super Tuesday, Feb 5th, he carried a majority of the states. Today, he carried all 3 primaries: Nebraska, Louisania, Washington State and the Virgin Islands. What his victories tell me is he can reach and grab the attention of Republican dominated rural states. I feel this comes from his message of union and hope. His politics may be less liberal than I would hope, but if he can heal the great divide of liberal/conservative, Democrat/Republican, then there is a chance I can feel pride in my home once again.

Now, I often am obsessed with phenomenology, but it should be said that I am somewhat more of an ethicist right now. Perhaps, if I do get into a PhD program andmy research interests change, this will change. However, the research strength of my university is in its tremendous experts in ethics, meta-ethics and moral psychology. As such, I am at my best when doing ethics, and so it is not a far stretch of the imagination to hear an ethicist speculating about a better hope for America. Ethicists are a worrisome bunch about "what ought to be the case"

Canadians often refer to being the neighbor of America as "having an elephant as a neighbor." Most of my colleagues are liberal academics like myself, and BC is a pretty liberal place. Given this, my anecdotes of note are suggestive of a small representation of Canadian opinions concerning the United States. I find it funny that given these conditions and how liberal Hillary Clinton is believed to be over Barack Obama that the majority of Canadian colleagues I have talked to want Obama over Hillary. There is something untrustworthy about a politician who is so scripted! This criticism has come up more than once.

Jean Baudrillard has said that traditional categories of political space have imploded into other social categories. This idea of implosion in relation to politics has seen a collapse of entertainment and politics. In fact, they are pretty much the same thing anymore. We are supposedly entertained by the drama of a campaign trail, and part of this entertainiment is the scripted responses we get from our candidates. You could say we almost expect the answers they give before they give them like Hamlet pondering "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them." Like the return of a festival, as Gadamer would describe it, we expect the same routine, the same performative utterances to be played out before us. Obama has defied such performative expectation.

When Obama started gaining my attention, it was from the 200,000 college kids that added themselves to the Facebook group wanting him for President. At several speeches and debates, Obama has been lively and engaging. Often, you can see him no longer looking at the teleprompter. He is spontaneous with words pouring from his heart, or so I believe. As a philosopher, I can acknowledge the force and conviction I have for his sincerity. I can always be proven wrong, and therefore must revise my beliefs. However, I have no evidence to suggest otherwise, and from everything I have heard I will consider myself justified prima facie in believing that Obama is a man who cares far above the anticipated scripted narrative of Hillary Clinton's persona.

Besides, apparently Obama was moved by Nietzsche, Sartre and a few other philosophers as reported by the New York Times

NYT Article on Obama

Assumptions About Doing Continental Philosophy

For the first time ever, I am making my base assumptions of how to proceed in Continental Philosophy (CP herein, CP-ers for “Continental Philosophers”). Here's how I think to navigate the Divide and renew interest in CP. This is basically a rant internalizing the healthy criticism I have received from many Analytics.

For me, philosophy comes down to arguments and an analytic attitude to know when someone is feeding you sophistry or genuine arguments. Essentially, what this means is that one can view CP in this way and defy all pigeon-holing from those that think CP is nonsensical. This amounts to rethinking CP canon with such authors as like Blanchot and Derrida. One doesn't dismiss them from not making sense. Instead, I recommend that CP-ers learn to write and do philosophy analytically. Unknown to many analytic philosophers, there is a history of dialectic argumentations in CP-ers that is never fully illuminated by how they are often approached by CP-ers ourselves.

The approach CP-ers take when writing on these CP thinkers often fail to push forward an argument clearly available for analysis. As CP-ers, this may make our case harder to make, but there are others doing good work in CP that are overlooked. For instance, Follesdal's JPHIL 1966 article on Husserl's Notion of Noema is a classic piece in Husserl scholarship, appears in J PHIL and meets all the expectations of good philosophical writing. In fact, I argue this piece should be emulated as a way of doing CP. The success of CP turns on CP-ers having the ability to explain CP in terms of arguments. For instance, a good CP-er and scholar of Levinas should be able to put Levinas' thought into the context of a dialectic. If one is a defender of his, then one will have to argue why ethics is a first philosophy and that my encounter with the other is transcendent. The better one can achieve mastery over what arguments are made in CP, the better CP will be in the future.

Finally, the fact that CP-ers want to talk to Analytics but can't do it effectively is another piss poor sign that something has gone seriously wrong. This is what I bring to the table other than being an Ethicist. Being schooled in the Analytic tradition allows me to know where other people are coming from, see arguments and work within a framework as the rest of the profession. I assume this is the best way to work, and my work on Heidegger and Husserl has benefited tremendously from these base assertions.

The insistence of argumentation is pushing those interested in CP to do actual philosophy. Such assertions are consistent overall with the pedagogical assumptions in teaching critical thinking, and the ideals we strive to emulate for in writing in our courses in every philosophy department worldwide. I would never TA a course in which the instructor attempted to emulate Derrida-like reasoning in its approach to writing. Yet, I would be very interested to TA a course in which Derrida's points were presented as arguments even though this last point of presenting his ideas would have him turning in his grave.

Philosophy Annuals

Brian Leiter is esteeming the Philosophy Annuals which for the past 25 years pick the best 10 philosophy papers a year. While the aim is good, selecting the most insightful and challenging papers in a given year, this is a daunting task. I scanned the pages from volume XXIV to 1978, and I found one article on Nietzsche and morality. The rest, as far as I can tell only serve to foster the bigoted attempt of analytic philosophers to push away Continental Philosophy into the gutter.

My question is simple: How can the editorial board read philosophy in a different language if most of them may have submitted their foreign language requirement for logic?