Survey Update

I have only a 183 votes.

I want to run this for another week (March 17th) or so, and then post the results. For all those that voted, I want to say thank you.

Interview on CBC's Hour

Scott Westerson is from Portland, and used to own a contracting business building gardening structures. Suddenly, he quit his job, and became a citizen embedded journalist with both American and Canadian forces in Afghanistan. Initially, he spent a year filming a documentary that will be coming out entitled At War.

Some footage is detailed on the show's blog.

For those Americans back home, George Stroumboulopoulos is a wonderful interviewer, and I wish I knew about him prior to moving to Canada.

When I listened to the interview, I couldn't help but be a philosopher. The interview got me thinking. An embedded journalist is "in the thick of things." By going to the war zone, the journalist attempts to bypass both distance and bureaucracy. These are in direct opposition to learning the truth. We cannot feel for our American or Canadian soldiers if we don't know what they go through. The attraction of the embedded journalist is to make us feel by providing us, as did Scott Westerson, with a "raw" depiction of what our soldiers experience. Somehow, the rawness of embedded journalism is more real, more -- shall we dare say it -- truthful. Is it more truthful though?

I have nothing to offer except some curious skepticism if such embedded journalism does "get to the heart of the matter" in a way that mainstream media does not. Certainly, it is different.

Secondly, consider another point Westerson makes about war. Westerson praises the solidarity he feels for the soldiers manifest in live combat exchange.

Just some thoughts...

Being and Time Ruminations

I keep coming back to the power of Being and Time. For the next upcoming year, I said I would read this book as part of my New Years resolution. I'm mostly through Part 1. In addition, I have glossed some secondary literature, and I am always surprised at the wide variety of Heideggers available (See commentary on the paradigm shifts of Heidegger research here).

One such interpretation sees philosophy as bringing to light the facticity of human life. Philosophy's purpose is to interpret the concrete particular singularity of human life, that is, to develop a phenomenological approach to the hermeneutics of the facticity of being. As an ethicist, this is an affront on a discipline (and those that practice it--like myself) that would want to make sense of the concrete particular experience as a case for an application of a moral reason (whatever the ground might be for the normativity of that reason-we'll leave that open). Value talk is common-place, but has its power in its abstract and general nature. The more general and ideal a normative reason is, the more range of application over like cases a normative reason possesses. Heideggerian philosophy, on the other hand, thinks of our traditional philosophical concepts as distorted by tradition. This can be seen by looking at the structure of human life.

Human life is characterized by its concernful dealings (what I heard Dreyfus refer to as 'practical coping'). We 'care' about things to the point of circumspection, that is, avoidance of life that has a tendency to simplify life into one massive inauthentic whole. Heidegger describes this as fallen. We allow tradition to overtake our ownmost possiblities in which we interpret our own possibilities in an inauthentic manner. I find this is basically an amoral stance, and comes at the expense of thinking philosophy is only to make the particular and concrete manifest in our experience. Ethics doesn't do that.

Yet, people who want to construct theories of our moral reasoning, and find out exactly what the source of normativity have to navigate a sea of moral intuitions. We inherent a moral code, and as reflective individuals, we weigh the content of our code to see if it stands up to our suggested normative theories. Thus, part -- if not all -- the conceptual resources of ethics goes against the existential emphasis of this reading of Being and Time..

Heidegger did not think highly of the atemporal idealism that found its way into Husserl's phenomenology. However, I am reminded of what John McDowell said of Bernard Williams Internal and External Reasons. He said that some form of transcendence is needed for the ethical, and a rigorous science examining evident acts of cognition cohering together might not be the transcendence we want, it is at least a better candidate than a philosophy that undercuts tradition (our moral code) as an initial inauthentic mode of human comportment. My point is to only shed light on what accepting this might mean. Let's consider it's possible that our moral code might not have all morally good reasons. In it, it might contain moral judgments like 'Abortion is acceptable when the mother's life is in danger' and 'Bullying one's way through life is virtuous way to. Since the moral code is accepted by us as letting tradition overtake our possibilities, the moral code is at odds with the proper aim of a historicized examination of the concrete matters of human life. The moral code just gets in the way of authentic living. In fact, there might not be anything like action-guidance in terms of moral theories, but just some contingent reasons why we think our moral code is as it is. It just so happens that the first proposition is better as traditionally understood rather than the second one. Does this seem acceptable?

Laura Miller has a horrendous review of Critchley's new book, The Book of Dead Philosophers

The review gets really bad on page 2 when Miller naively divides philosophy into its two camps of analytic and Continental philosophy. Now, while I think there might be something said about this distinction, certainly this cannot be it:

Critchley is an adherent of the continental strain of modern philosophy, as distinguished from the analytic strain favored by American and British philosophers. To put it very roughly (and consequently provoke squalls of protest), the analytic philosophers concern themselves with what the universe is, or rather how we can know what it is, while their continental counterparts are more focused on the question of how we ought to live. Critchley doesn't have much use for the analytic side and its conviction that "philosophy should aspire to the impersonality of natural science." He's not especially respectful of science in general, and speaks slightingly of American philosophy's "infatuation" with it. A few scientists (Galileo, Darwin) are included in the book; others, such as Newton, Einstein, are not. Perhaps one reason why classical philosophy gets little more than a flyover from Critchley is that it was fundamentally entangled with the sort of discipline that we now call science. He is more comfortable with thinkers devoted to ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics.

Ethics cuts both ways across the Divide. It's naive to think that Critchley is the par excellence of pursuing this question. Many people have echoed this criticism on the salon.com, and I won't give it too much attention. Instead, I'll only say that I am disappointed that the general question of ethics is taken to be Continental and somehow analytic philosophy means just being "infatuated" with the natural sciences. This just oversimplifies the contribution both types of philosophy make to their respective fields.

Obama's Effort at Transparency

Here is a released memo of the US Department of Justice about the range of Presidential powers the Bush Administration thought it had regarding the War on Terrorism.

Best Continental Philosopher?

Who is the most important Continental philosopher in the 20th century?
	Husserl
	Heidegger
	Agamben
	Arendt
	Badiou
	Baudrillard
	Blanchot
	Bataille
	Beauvoir
	Benjamin
	Derrida
	Deleuze
	Foucault
	Gadamer
	Irigaray
	Butler
	Kristeva
	Lacan
	Lyotard
	Levinas
	Merleau-Ponty
	Nancy
	Ricoeur
	Sartre
	Adorno
	Habermas
	Scheler
	Schutz
	Bergson
	Zizek
pollcode.com free polls

What Is Philosophy?

This is the oldest and most common question I am asked: What is philosophy? I've quoted some short answers given by the staff and students at the University of Dundee (the only Scottish University where one can take up serious reflection on Continental philosophy without going to Essex or Warwick). I like them since each in turn encompasses some aspect of philosophy. Of course, if you want to contribute to this blog, then suggest in the spirit of these short tidbits what you think philosophy is:

What is Philosophy?

"A way of understanding what shapes our beliefs and actions"

"Clear and distinct reflection upon our cognitive practices"

"Openness to thinking about the familiar in unfamiliar ways"

"Learning to continually scrutinise beliefs"

"The creation of concepts"

"The incessant attempt to think how that which is could be otherwise"

"The destruction of worlds and the construction of better, new ones"

"Reversing the normal direction of thought"

"A critical practice responding to our present"

"A way of thinking; since thinking defines the nature of being human, philosophy is of fundamental importance"

For more information about the Dundee Philosophy department, click here.

New Husserl Themes: Farber Continued

On page 555, Farber writes:

Husserl views an active individual as being in relationship with other persons, who are experienced as psychophysical. The ethical subject, in referring his living-in-the-world to a norm, finds the others with whom he can cooperate. By means of empathy, the ethical subject recognizes that every other subject is given "in the orientation form of the alter," is given in the form of the "ego." The potentiality of this empathy is taken to be the presupposition of a common life in the sense of stages of social organization. The single subjects "in their freedom" and in their social acts direct this activity upon another ego, and thus arises a "connection of ego with ego, of many egos to polysystems, of real and possible activity" (p. 161). Living in this synthesis, every ego, as active ethically, makes its best possible contribution to others, and produces, in connection with other persons, a society in which the egos become a "synthetic pole" of social transactions. A person does not live a "solipsistic life," but rather a "common life, a double-personal and still a unified ethical life." One person has to consider everything that is a true value for another person; the self-satisfaction of his fellow men cannot be a matter of indifference to him. It is only in connection with the "interlaced" life of another person that one can evaluate his own life. Such a life is taken to be "obviously" of higher value than a solipsistic type of life, and is therefore "categorically demanded." There is "no life without love," and every life is just known along with a consciousness of love, a "Liebesdeckung," in Husserl's characteristic language. The highest form of life thus occurs in the pure "spiritual love and community of love."

A moral phenomenology would start in the same place as we encounter the other. Here, Farber explains that Husserl sees active individuals experience each other, that is, are given phenomenologically as empathy opens our potential to experience a common world shared with others. This point of contact is synthesis of this empathic recognition of Others in terms of a single subject acts in relation to another, and those other subjects all act in a shared public world. Ethical activity is, thus, world-producing. Out of our inter-acting, a human world arises (Hannah Arendt is coming to mind), and I find it interesting here that solipsism is mentioned. Husserl, apparently, denies our living a life without inter-actions. Such a life would be solipsistic whereas the true ethical life is a life constituted by various ethical subjects opening up to each other in a real communal sense.

At this mentioning of solipsism, I am wondering now if the Fifth Meditation can be read ethically and not epistemically? Think about it. The same conditions that recognize the Other in terms of empathy (intersubjectivity) would be in place for either ethics or some nascent phenomenology qua epistemology.

Religious Bigotry Against Homosexuals

Below,is a reprint of my comments on Professor Beckswith's blog. I stand firmly on this.

I think you are misrepresenting the facts of the case, and possibly the truth of any authority your claims have against an objectivist ethics. The discrimination against homosexuals cannot be sugar-coated as Christian moral theology. You cannot mask injustice with beliefs that are unjust, period. I don't know a Kantian that could universalize the maxim "We ought to practice discrimination against homosexuals", nor do I know a utilitarian of any stripe that would maximize the practice of discrimination, and lastly, nor do I think protecting such practices as religious freedom of a religious institution leads to a flourishing society. Any way you cut it, ethical theories I think stand on firm agreement that we shouldn't discriminate against people, and this includes homosexuals. Moreover, if you think I am reading any of these basic normative theories wrongly, then you should provide me an argument as to why I should think otherwise. It is this extreme burden you have that makes it highly implausible.

These schools are religious, and in my mind, religion is literally 100% true (I would venture an opinion that some aspects of religion are allegorically true) fact, anyone that thinks so is ontologically irresponsible. To act on right reason, we must make sure that the reasons we act on are ontologically reliable and true, that whatever the source of normativity is for practical reasoning, it must be ontologically viable. People make claims that their reasons have religious authority, but since religion isn't true, then those reasons for acting are based on a false ontology. False ontologies cannot ground reasons for acting. This is what you are doing. Religious reasons cannot ground morality. If a religious reason is allegorically true, then it is because such a reason finds agreement with an independent source of normativity.

New Husserlian Themes 1: Encountering Farber's Discussion

Marvin Farber has an article entitled 'The Phenomenological View of Values' in Philosophy & Phenomenological Research Vol/Issue: 24 (4), Date: 1964, Page: 552. My discussion of Husserl opens with a careful perusal of this article. Just a note before beginning, the article is on JSTOR. You could also reference it here.

Farber opens up what Husserl regarded as the central concern of ethics qua normative science must precede every technology and must as a normative science (Farber translates Husserl) "survey human purposes in a universal manner and judges them from a normative point of view, in other words, investigates whether they are actually as they ought to be" (p. 553, from Husserlian Manuscript). First, I think Husserl is wrong, and lacking here. Being ethical not only involves evaluating normative levels of actions as the deontologist or consequentialist would have us believe. Instead, there are further questions that while associated with action cut deeper, these ethical determinations are agential, what you might call aretaic. As such, I would include in a phenomenological analysis of values directed towards expanding Husserl's notion of "purpose" in the above quote to include virtue ethical considerations. Eudaimonia considerations in virtue ethics concern cultivating agential characteristics (virtues) that lead to state of human flourishing (eudaimonia).

Now, a moral phenomenology in a Husserlian sense is highly influenced by the Husserl in Logical Investigations. Farber informs us that an analogy can be drawn here. Just as formal logic has "the principle of contradiction is the highest law, there is the axiological principle that something to which value is ascribed in some respect, cannot be valueless in the same respect." (Farber, p. 553, taken, I think from LI, p. 79). Let's put this into an example. This principle states that the reasons we value X cannot in principle be reasons that count against reasons for not-valuing X. Hence, the reasons I give for enjoying Star Wars fiction books cannot be reason that count against me finding them valueless. Moreover, when we give reasons for our valuations of X, those valuations find agreement in both willing and reason (Farber, p. 553).

Rationally grounded reasons provide the basis for ideal abstraction of ethics in Husserl. In general, this is also a truth of ethics. Formulated normative theories instruct us, that is, they provide action-guidance only because such action-guidance is grounded in cognitive judgments about which we can be right and wrong about. Practical wisdom comes about only because we can be right or wrong about how certain actions will go, or that something wasn't relevant when we thought it was in our moral acting. Ethics gets its substance from the ideality such practical wisdom takes on, and the ideality of practical action coheres with the body of reasons constituting such ideality.

Farber worries about the level of abstractionism in Husserl's ethics. One can easily be skeptical that there is a "harmonious social life" that remains ideal. Such a thing has never existed, nor ever will. Perhaps, agreement isn't even possible as to what the "harmonious social life" would entail (Farber, p. 554). Yet, this only is a concern if we think the harmonious social life requires strong conditions of moral agreement. I think I'm reaching an impasse here. For one, if we are ethical pluralists (as I am slowly becoming in the Rossian sense), there might be more than one way to achieve moral agreement. We need not be value monists in thinking that different goods cannot be counted in our moral considerations. Virtue, knowledge, pleasantness and consequences are the four goods Ross counts, and I'm uncertain we need more (let's be open about that for a bit).

As I continue, I'm thinking that a moral phenomenology might have to abandon the systematicity of a cohering set of value grounded moral reasons that resemble a formal eidetic science of a purely ideal nature. I'll continue moving in this article with additions to this post.

New Husserlian Themes

Intersubjectivity plays a central role in thinking of ourselves as acting, thinking subjects. Moreover, this type of acting and thinking conception of ourselves is what ethical theories construe as moral agency, but obviously without the capital P phenomenological language. For Husserl, intersubjectivity is part of the transcendental-we-community that co-constitutes elements of the lifeworld. The SEP lists three achievements of intersubjectivity as fundamental.

intersubjective experience plays a fundamental role in our constitution of both ourselves as objectively existing subjects, other experiencing subjects, and the objective spatio-temporal world. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the rational structures underlying — and making possible — these constitutive achievements. (SEP Entry on Husserl)

From this, I gather it is possible to explain what phenomenological structures of experience might be involved in thinking generally about the nature of values, and how such values -- which I define as reasons for acting -- relate to others as part of a moral community. My thought is that while values are ontologically mysterious (or better worded as metaphysically inadequate) in a non-natural way Husserl gives us a way to talk about values in such a way as to provide a cognitive architecture to the types of reasons we invoke in moral justification. I am resistant at strategies in ethics that seek to naturalize various domains of ethical analysis, and realize how much of a first start my effort is here. This is why I will outline what will concern me in the next few posts. The theme is that ethics is phenomenologically grounded and the type of properties used in moral justification and the nature of reasons that purport such properties are, in fact, irreducible. They are the type of thing that cannot be naturalized away under the weird umbrella term "evolutionary mechanism," but are readily manifest in moral experience.

In the next few posts, I will try and establish first exactly what is meant by empathy in the 5th Meditation. I will see what is in there that can help me explain the nature of values, their justification, scope and content.

Co-Sponsoring the APA in Vancouver

Simon Fraser University, the institution of my MA, is co-sponsoring the American Philosophical Association's Pacific Division Meeting in April with UBC. Here's the full announcement.

The APA in Canada, now that's rich!

Announcement.

Abstract/Papers available up until the conference. (Please don't cite or reference).

I'm really looking forward to UNM PhD student Tara Kennedy and her paper on Heidegger.

SPEP Announcement

CRITICAL THEORY WORKSHOP / ATELIER DE THEORIE CRITIQUE
Summer 2009 Theme: Time, History, Memory
Paris, France

Villanova University
Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques
Collège International de Philosophie
Professor Gabriel Rockhill

The Atelier de Théorie Critique (Critical Theory Workshop) is an intensive graduate-level seminar, which takes place every summer in Paris. The primary objective of the Workshop is to provide an international forum for interdisciplinary and comparative research in contemporary critical theory. The Workshop is comprised of a research seminar at CIEE’s Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques, a series of public lectures at the Collège International de Philosophie, and public debates with leading European intellectuals at the Centre Parisien d’Etudes Critiques. All three activities aim at providing students direct access to some of the most recent developments in French—and more generally European—critical theory.

Each year, the Workshop is structured around a central theme. In 2008, the theme was “Politics and Aesthetics,” and the authors studied included Sartre, Barthes, Foucault, Heinich, and Rancière, as well as figures such as Balzac, Rimbaud and Resnais. Invited speakers included Jacques Rancière (emeritus professor of philosophy, Université de Paris VIII), Nathalie Heinich (sociologist, CNRS) and Olivier Voirol (sociologist, Université de Lausanne and Institut für Sozialforschung).

In 2009, the theme will be “Time, History, Memory,” and representative authors will include Bergson, Proust, Deleuze, Foucault, Ricœur, Gauchet, Godard, Dosse and Worms. Depending on availability, the following speakers are likely to participate in public debates regarding their work: François Dosse, Marcel Gauchet and Frédéric Worms.

The language of instruction is French, and a minimum of 6 college semesters of French or the equivalent are required. Contact Hours: 45. Credit: 3 semester/4.5 quarter hours.

For dates, costs and application: http://www.villanova.edu/vpaa/intlstudies/summerprograms/arts.htm#Event7

For further information, contact Professor Rockhill: gabriel.rockhill@villanova.edu

Some Thoughts on Hard Naturalism

I define hard naturalism as the thesis that only physical entities describable by the natural sciences exist and secondly that in principle descriptions, even if philosophical, must be brought into line with what the natural sciences describe as real. Hard naturalism has the effect of either taking a hard-driven reductionism in which complex notions regarded as irreducible can either be eliminated in explanation by reference to natural parts, or a commitment to pluralism of posited objects. The former is more orthodox, and the latter is more controversial since it fails to explain why there is overlap between scientific theorizing of the various disciplines. Pluralism might be more plausible to its adherents that feel that unifying grounds of explanation in science are moribund. The scientific disciplines have become so thematic, specific and independent that this obsoleteness is not a product of the social organization of knowledge seeking, but revelatory of the phenomena studied. Reality is, after all, complex.

In the following post, I detail how it is that hard naturalism is mistaken. There are some problems it encounters. First, I will deal with hard naturalism qua reductionism. Reductionist naturalism is itself an ideation of the intuition that reality is organized into causal interactions of parts and wholes. They would pretend this is only a generalization of specific cases of the “doings of science”. However, even in generalizations you run into the same problem. Generalizations and ideations require the regulative function of ideals. These ideals are universalizing the specific cases, and generalizing is just a locution to pretend that the generalizations aren’t universal. In order to perform any reduction of explanation, it has to hold that reality is organized into parts and wholes, which of course is a peculiar relationship that cannot be explained away by reference to a smaller part. In this way, logical truths necessary to express generalizing and universal features of explanation, as well as the intuitions, like ‘reality is organized into causal interactions of parts and wholes’, necessitate the irreducibility of the objective categories.

The second form of my brief excursion into naturalism is more problematic. Hard naturalism qua pluralism posits objects as needed in explanation. Such pluralism, I imagine, might be mitigated to Ockham’s razor so that positing would not “get out of hand.” Pluralism will foster the natural attitude that what is posited is real, and corresponds to reality when actually it is our best model up to date. However, most scientists require that explanations are revisable in some fashion. A good pluralist would be a good reviser, making changes where needed. Yet, pluralistic naturalism still ignores the central role that consciousness plays in our knowledge of the world. We can only posit objects as needed because we are conscious of the very need to posit. For the phenomenologist understands rightly that knowledge is a subjective accomplishment, an accomplishment of a particular knower. If the pluralism is open to the phenomenological, then such openness would no longer serve as a problem for the naturalistic pluralism.

On the first account, hard naturalism is defeated since it cannot ignore the very idealism it seeks to eliminate. On the second account, positing is a particular achievement of a subject, and positing cannot be taken to be what the natural attitude would pass over as a third-person feature of explanations themselves. Pluralism can be opened to phenomenology by making the move to incorporate the phenomenological as another level of complexity. On my end, it would be hard to ignore.

Discourses, Foucault and Genealogies

Recently, I got into a disagreement with a colleague about the type of work Foucault does as proper philosophy. The typical strand of argument I got is no different than other analytic philosophers skeptical of CP. This feels heuristic more than precise, but here goes.

P1: If discourses are meaningful, then the discourses are in some way compatible with the natural sciences
P2: Discourses are meaningful
C: Therefore, discourses are in some way compatible with the the natural sciences.

In order to resist this argument, I reject that the only way discourses are meaningful is in their demonstrated compatibility with the sciences. Take for instance, when I encounter objects in the world, I first encounter them as available to my use, as objects of equipment. I encounter the world first in terms of my practical engagement with the world such that objects are encountered in what we might call the nexus of human purposes. I don't encounter a watch or a chair as objects with a stable electron configuration, as an object described by physics. Instead, I see it as related to my ends or purposes. Moreover, I postulate that I can still have an understanding of the world such that I can have an entire discourse describing my encounter with objects in my experience that pump the intuition that compatibility with the sciences is not the hallmark of a good discourse. It is just one possible formulation.

Likewise, the point I am driving at is simple. There are more than just philosophy qua science approaches in philosophy. In order to see that, consider a more positive argument to establish an example of responsible CP work.

P1: All discourses have norms that establish the standard of truth for that discourse
P2: Science is a discourse
P3: Therefore, science has norms that establish the standard of truth for that discourse.
P4: Normative standards are constituted by their socio-historic and socio-political conditions of the agent's doing science
P5: Nietzschean genealogies qua method provide access to how normative standards are constituted
C: Therefore, any theorist using Nietzschean genealogies as a theoretical device can explain the socio-historic and socio-political conditions of a discourse, including science.

The implication of the conclusion is that Foucault and Deleuze are employing responsible methods for what undergirds one type of human activity, science. This entire line of thinking also takes seriously Nietzsche's claim about history in the "(History Essay)...Uses and Abuses..." in that we are historically finite knowers and that understanding must reflect our position as finite knowers. These discourses are meaningful ways to understand the social conditions of how we do understand the world, and provide ways of encountering past philosophies as uncharitable to our finitude. Instead, classical epistemologies for instance construe our knowing as exemplified by some ideal epistemic agent that if these necessary and sufficient conditions are met, then we can know what it means to know. However, finitude cannot be avoided. Denying our finitude amounts to refusing to see how understanding is shaped by our historical situation. In the same token, Heidegger and Gadamer embrace this same concept, providing us with ways to interrogate the structure of discourses that persist not independent of our history, but shaped by it.

My opponent could refuse P1. He could say that there are discourses independent of norms. Yet, I cannot think of how a counter-factual would go that could deny the fact that discourses are a human activity. Maybe, you could give me one, maybe not.

Aristotle, Virtue Ethics, and Political Theory

I like this book review, and wouldn't mind getting it a hold of it. I agree with the central premise that the moral Good is essentially bound to contexts in which the the Good occurs. As such, politics is a necessary condition for the Good despite liberal theory believing otherwise. In a way, this meshes with my belief that some level of hermeneutics is involved in the interpretation of moral principles in terms of their application. Of course, that's a separate issue. Still, here's the book review if you're curious.

Check Out Susan Collin's Aristotle and the Rediscovery Citizenship.

PhD Acceptance

I am really excited that I have been accepted into a top choice of my PhD applications. The program basically specializes in American and Continental thought with a dearth of analytic philosophy--how refreshing! Conversations with the graduate director have been encouraging, and I am ecstatic that this school told me on the very day I asked to marry my wife. While I am not one to be superstitious about unseen forces in the world, the universe has revealed itself in the rare sublime that undergirds, I'm sure, the sense the Romantic poets spoke about nature and humankind. Of course, this can just be all me. I'm really not sure.

I'm turning to an old problem, and found that several well-accomplished Husserl scholars, including David Smith and Dan Zahavi, have articles about Husserl and externalism. Smith's article is incredibly intriguing in his weakest claim. He proposes that a form of transcendental phenomenology is compatible with externalism. How unorthodox considering Husserl's commonly interpreted as a Neo-Cartesian internalist and anti-naturalist to say the least! In the same volume of Syntheses, I have yet to read the other contributions to the special volume, but I suspect that this will give me some insight into writing A Husserlian Response to Twin Earth. Moreover, I have questions about the strength of Husserl's alleged anti-naturalism, and so questions concerning how phenomenology ought to relate to the natural attitude intrigue me as of late.

If I am not too lazy, I'll try to produce something to throw around at conferences for my next upcoming year.

Peter Schaber's Lecture on Ethical Pluralism

Here's a decent exposition of the view ethical pluralism, its starting place in W.D. Ross and a good fleshing out of its conception.

I am listening to Obama. I cannot help but once feel pride again for the nation I coincidentally fled in search of Minerva's owl. The sun is out in Vancouver. Above the clouds, I sit staring into New Westminster. I close my eyes to the piece John Williams composed on this occasion.

It's done. It's done.

Electricity in the Air

I'm in Vancouver, BC. I look out my window to the Southeast and I can see where Mt. Baker should be in Washington State. All day, I sang to myself, bursting into gleeful cheer. Two events of significance fill me with happiness: my native Pittsburgh's own football team, The Steelers, has made it to the Superbowl. Next, I am getting a new President in 2 hours and 12 minutes. It happens around noon, East coast time, and so I cannot sleep.

Partisan values cut all the way down in me. I cannot endorse a Republican platform. Never could and never will. It's just not in me to think that anything Republicans think is rational, let alone the morally right direction for my native country to take. I'm literally ecstatic with hope, and cautious optimism about America and its relation to the world at large.

It is a time to serve, a time to lead and a time to dream.

I feel the impulse of doing philosophy giving way to a more virtuous life, an active life opposed to the thinking one. A life devoted to bettering the others directly while making a living doing it. Sometimes, I wish this, and philosophy gives me solace in the quiet act of reflective withdrawal. Yet, there's just something about taking up an issue, and devoting one's life to staking out and protecting what one cares about. Philosophy is not an active life devoted to this pursuit, but in some ways it allows for one to achieve an integrity as one pursues the infinite task of truth. Unlike public service, philosophy is massively incomplete since its problems are always present, and never conclusively resolved. With public service, one can achieve one's goal, sometimes.

Obama offered a vision of Americans working together. He offered a more optimistic, yet realistic outlook on the failures of the Bush Presidency and the Neoconservative project. Deregulated free markets do not make a good economy. Science isn't an affront to the hope and faith of a nation--it is rather what we should have faith in to know the world reliably. Moreover, guns don't make people safer, the lack of guns makes people safer. Deceptive reasons for going to war are never good, despite the rhetoric of the Right. And empowered women with equal pay and control over their bodies is better than slavery, kitchen and aprons.

There's more. There's more in my heart than I could ever spill here.

Continental Journals for Publication

The Leiterrific world of philosophy have some opinions about what journals are noteworthy and what aren't. I am asking Continental philosophers to list their favorite journals, the types of journals that you use all the time in your research.

Secondly, do you think there is a hierarchy of Continental philosophy journals among your favorite groups?

Grounds of Philosophy

Some latenight meditation has proven useful.

On some readings of Heidegger, Heidegger came to recognize there is no fundamentally unifying ground on which philosophy qua metaphysics can come to rest upon. There is no Cartesian edifice to build a system of philosophy.

This claim can be understood a number of ways. The two senses that follow about grounding here are meant ontologically. First, it can mean there is no privileged a priori on which philosophical analyses have access to. Secondly, it can mean a denial of a fundamental characteristic of reality that guarantees that objects of experience are real. This second sense is more familiar since it has a history in the moderns and Kant. In such systems of thought, the reality of the world is guaranteed by the subject as in Kant and Descartes. Other systems of thought might make God the guarantor of the real, or notions of substance.

Grounding can also be meant epistemologically. My belief in the external world is grounded on the experience of my embodiment. Such a belief would be warranted given what work embodiment would do for us. Central concepts in philosophical systems, I believe, can be the same in their providing justification for a belief as constituting what is real ontologically. My driving impulse for this post is that this relation between epistemology and metaphysics is why they seem to infect each other. It is not a clear distinction between the two. Whatever the concept of ground does for eliciting beliefs about the Real is, in fact, what gives justification for what to believe about the Real.

Heidegger's denial about a fundamental unifying characteristic to philosophy is foolish. When we employ such skepticism about the reality of the ground/central concept, we only wind up grounding such skepticism in denial. The very act of denial becomes its own ground, and this strategy winds up being self-defeating in the end. Instead, we shouldn't think of various philosophical systems as themselves foolhardy in establishing a ground or framework. We should interrogate the framework or ground on its own merits.

Some will notice this is a very modernist discourse. Yes, I admit that philosophy as I practice it looks for foundations. I am a type of foundationalist in my methodology. However, it is completely unfair to assume that, like the moderns, I am a top-down thinker. What Husserl shows is a full-agreement with Descartes. It is an inward examination of our subjectivity which matters for these problems. The grounds offered are not independent of the thinker that proposes them. The bottom-up approach is phenomenological, and while I will not get into the merits of phenomenology versus other methodologies, it is phenomenological fact that to do philosophy is always to work with assuming a ground for the very possibility of a discourse before it is underway. In this way, we are always working within inescapable grounds, sets of conceptual backgrounds that figure into our way of navigating philosophical problems. Thus, it would seem that some privileging of phenomenological description and hermeneutics central to the start of any philosophical inquiry.

New Years Resolutions

My wife visits some rather cool design blogs. While I am not in the least interested in design blogs, I have discovered almost all these blogs list New Years resolutions. As a philosopher, I think resolutions come rather close to an agent endorsing either what they value.

1. Spend more time with my wife. If anyone says anything about graduate school, it is rather time-consuming and fosters indirectly what Williams called "life-projects." I tend to think that Williams meant grad school there.

2. Start to seriously learn German.

3. Once again become an active citizen in my nation's politics. I'm a Democrat, and fairly partisan when it comes to issues. I will no longer apologize to the other half of my nation for thinking the Second Amendment is stupid, the flag is not the most sacred thing in the world, the bible is not literally true, and women should have the right to seek an abortion. Sorry Conservatives...I think Mary Anne Warren was on to something with her arguments about personhood.

4. I will read all of Being and Time.

Good Quote

Since much of my life rests on two divides. On the first, it is America and Canada, and this comes only since I have resided in Canada for the last 2.5 years. The second is, of course, invoked by the imagery of my blog's title, and that is the analytic/continental Divide. I found this quote a while back and wanted to share it with you. It comes from Gary Gutting's review of Leiter's Future of Philosophy over at the NDPR. I've been wondering if Leiter's newest edited anthology by Oxford University Press is a product of Gutting's deadly accurate criticism.

I agree that there is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of substantive doctrines distinctively characteristic of the two sides. But it seems to me that we can still draw a significant distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of experience and reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing in this volume.

Babette E. Babich's Essay on the Analytic/Continental Divide

This essay is far-reaching and well-accomplished. It spells out methodological difficulty of the stylistic propensity of our philosophical climate with a keen eye to Heidegger and Nietzsche. Very good.

Here's the link:

http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/babich02.htm

Philosophical Gourmet Report Tirade

Brian Leiter is now approaching the two year point where he uses 469 nominated evaluators to speak for a profession of 10,000 philosophy PhDs in North America, and countless numbers elsewhere. I cannot help but this is really an unfair evaluation process since it really doesn't do justice to the work or contribution of philosophers in general. I've always wondered why the current Continental Philosophy list never included the following schools:

1. Southern Illinois University Carbondale
2. Depaul University
3. Duquesne University
4. Villanova
5. University of Oregon
6. Middlesex University (in the UK)
7. Marquette University
8. University of Ottawa (Canada)
9. University of Guelph (Canada)

You can compare the 2006 - 2008 rankings on Leiter's page with the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy's website.

Good programs in Continental philosophy are specialized programs that offer chances to study texts in the original language, groups that informally study the texts of the European tradition, have foreign exchange programs with sister-universities in Europe and have more than just the typical "token" Continental in an overwhelmingly analytic department. In fact, this is upsetting since many schools proferred as places to study Continental philosophy like Cambridge, I imagine, do not have the same resources that, say, Penn-State University or New School University have to develop good solid Continental philosophers.

Don't get me wrong. There are several good recommendations on the list of the PGR's breakdown. I just don't imagine that 469 people can speak for the work done by 10,000. Instead, we should all follow the advice of the APA statement on rankings which encourages aspiring graduate students to seek out Graduate Directors of programs. Leiter's list becomes more of a developed high school popularity contest than truly representing the interests of European philosophers. Moreover, such a mainstream conception of philosophy tends to overlook really unique programs where one can study marginalized areas outside mainstream philosophy. There are some good programs in Indian philosophy at the University of New Mexico, University of Hawaii and perhaps Temple University--these schools are only taken seriously by evaluators insofar as they are good places to do Indian philosophy, but will never approach what is valued as mainstream philosophy. I think such perceptions pernicious to a discipline that is rooted in the "love of wisdom."

Julia Annas and Moral Phenomenology

In a recent article, Phenomenology of Virtue (March 2008), Julia Annas wants to know how to distinguish the content of what it is to be virtuous from what it is to be less-than virtuous. For her and myself, there must be a content to the experience of being a virtuous person. For her, this follows that virtue ethics makes claim about what type of people we ought to be, and the methodology of doing ethics in this way assumes what I also take for granted as a phenomenology--there is content in how we experience phenomena in the first-person-perspective. Both the virtue ethicist, and the phenomenologist meet on these assumptions about the subject/moral agent as an experiencer of subjective content in relation to having an experience.

In her view, she suggests Aristotle's answer that the virtuous person finds being virtuous pleasant is the solution to what the phenomenology of virtue consists. While I make no claims about her substantive proposal. Her suggestion might just be the case. She grounds her interpretation of Aristotle's answer in a very closely familiar Heideggerian way. She invokes notions of practical involvement, the exercise of being absorbed in our world through the work of social psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's "flow experience." This proposal sounds very, very, very Heideggerian to me. Consider this part of the text that captures of the core of the view:

Defensible forms of virtue ethics, in my opinion, hold that virtues are acquired
and exercised in a way which is relevantly similar to the acquisition and
exercise of practical skills. The person learning to be brave will need to ask
herself, when faced by a situation in which someone needs to be rescued, what
would be a brave thing to do here, or what a brave person would do
here...Someone who is, as we say, truly or really brave, the mature brave
person, will respond to the other person's need for rescue without having to
work out what a brave person would do, or what would be a brave action here. not
only do we not need to suppose that such thoughts occur, we can see how they
might, in the brave person, actually inhibit the needed response (p. 24)

I'm going to think about this for a while, but I anticipate this interpretation will come close to Heidegger's construal of Dasein as "being-in."

The Ethics of Christmas: Readers make Comments

I wanted to throw this out there since, yes, I'm updating my philosophy blog on Christmas Eve. No life, I know, I know. Anyway, here's the question:

If you accept a moral prohibition on lying (as many normative theories lend themselves, I believe), then what about participating in the deception of children for Christmas?

Give a bunch of answers, as I'm curious what people's intuitions are.

Nietzsche Reading Group in Vancouver

For those that follow my blog close by...I'll be starting up a Nietzsche or Heidegger reading group. No one is thrilled at the stigma of reading Heidegger out in the open, but some of you are into the naturalist readings of Nietzsche through Brian Leiter. Many analytic philosophers have been looking to Nietzsche as a speculative naturalist. I'm thinking of focusing on this:

Nietzsche and Morality, ed. Brian Leiter

The Eleatic Impasse and the Moral Impasse

Heidegger’s seminal Being and Time announces itself amidst a Platonic aporia. The impasse is quoted from the Sophist by the Eleatic Stranger who says,

For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being.” We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed (BT, p. 1).

Like Heidegger, I announce my intention with a state of observed philosophical perplexity. Unlike, Heidegger my concerns haven’t been completely eschewed by philosophers as the question of the meaning of Being. Instead, moral philosophers have paid attention to what I call the basic concepts of the good, the right and the just, and their opposite privations. Yet, it is the manner of contact these moral philosophers in the tradition have articulated understanding that demands phenomenological attention.

Moral philosophers are fragmentary in their reflective efforts to produce a coherent whole of unified beliefs concerning the possibility of moral knowledge, what moral values are, what, if any, principle(s) determine what we ought to do and what are the contents of morality itself. In their efforts, moral philosophers have left a collage of various moral intuitions and beliefs that require constant investigation, and piecemeal precision. The landscape of our normative condition is scattered with various problems in normative ethics and meta-ethical domains, maybe even both.

With this condition, the possibility of a unified moral philosophy that answers wholly the previously mentioned concerns is regarded as a pipe-dream, an implausible philosophical hubris too common to mention. Alasdair MacIntyre observed this lack of morality’s unity, and the implausible aims of ethics itself as a lack of historical and metaphysical commonalities to which all of us comply. Observing this dire state of ethics, he writes:

What we possess [in terms of morality]…are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. (After Virtue, p. 2)

Now, I think it fair to say that MacIntyre is like the Eleatic Stranger. We have lost our way in moral thinking, and our culture, Western at large and the world, have either retreated to offer minimalist standards of obligation in some way, rejecting the possibility of ethics completely in nihilism or error theory, or somewhere in between these two extremes. Either we give up on the unity completely, reject the possibility of unity or lie somewhere in between. However, what is suspect in ethics is the entire spectrum of these possibilities. While to some they might be answers, they only conceal what is at issue in the poor neglect where we find ethical theorizing.

Observing these difficulties and considering them aright, moral philosophers are forced to answer some tough concerns. The very possibility of unity and objectivity in our moral thought is challenged by the fact that discourses take place within the simulacra of morality. We have lost those historical and metaphysical grounds that used to ground moral discourse in meaningful ways. There is no significance to these past historical habits of moral speech, words and concepts we employ. In effect, we are as Heidegger observed living in a time unconcerned with the most primordial of questions. For me, such a question is not about being, but about our basic conceptual tools to make sense of our moral life.

The very reason the simulacra of morality exists is the very reason I find the question of ethics so vitally important. Human beings care about morality. They cannot live without being so encumbered by morality. For we all care about how the world ought to be, even if by “ought” we do not mean good or right for all—instead, only “me.” Thus, the basic condition of human life is normative, and therefore it is likely that since morality is so intimated to what human beings are and live, then it follows that we would use our moral terms, language, speech and concepts even unknowingly in cases where there is no context or tie to the meaning in which such terms, language, speech and concepts had meaning. We unwittingly and unknowingly perpetuate the simulacra.

Given this condition of groundless morality, ethics can be labeled as being in crisis. The crisis refers to ethics and its inability to fully unify its elements into a meaningful whole. The whole can only be representative of our moral life if we understand how moral life is structure. Moreover, it is the intention of this author to prepare a way for a ground of morality. I argue that the ground of morality can only be seen if we first understand how it is that morality is lived and experienced. Once we capture how it is that we truly are in relation to morality, once our moral-being-in-the-world is elucidated, the basic structures of ethics can come into relief. Hence, a good moral theory is one that captures the phenomenological insights of moral experience and all its aspects. Henceforth, I announce this intention to construct a moral phenomenology using those insights of phenomenology to face off a crisis that much of Husserl’s phenomenology directs itself.

The question facing me, now, is whether such a phenomenological shift in ethical theorizing is an appropriate response to the concern raised herein, and the larger question is what aspects of our moral life require the employment of the phenomenological reduction?

Applications Slow

It is a slow season. Working part-time and carrying 5 tutorials as a TA are taking a toll on me. In the city of Vancouver, I can do much apparently, but one of theme that pays the best for my time is TAing. It's a rewarding job that I enjoy very much.

On the up and up, I have had a good conversation with a Graduate Director at one of my top picks. Of course, this means little unless one gets in. However, I am confident that this school is likely to admit me if I get my application there first. I don't know if I can compete heavily for Fellowships, but an Assistantship, I think, is very possible given that I have been a TA at a serious university for about 3 years on a traditional academic semester calendar.

I've got two applications done, and I don't really want to do anymore. It takes up way too much time and you wind up being time consuming.

After having spent so much time in graduate school, I realize how deficient my life is. I just want to get back to the United States, or at least put us in Ontario where we are seriously just an 8 hour ride from our parents. This whole other side to North America isn't that special. The weather is nice given that it never reaches below freezing, but that also is coupled with the fact that it rains too much.

I know this blog is supposed to be my outlet for creative philosophical energies. But every once in a while, it is good to pause and bitch. It helps my day.

Upcoming ideas for projects:

1) A Sartrean contrast view to the typical desire-satisfaction model in Anglophone philosophy departments of agency.

2) Contrasting the views of realist phenomenology over the transcendental phenomenology. I still don't know where I stand in Husserl.

3) What is Husserl's theory of the imagination given it is the source of eidetic variation?

Is War Ever Justified?

In the following post, you'll note a contradictory attitude towards war that appears in the post "Heideggarian Proclivities" or "Dove with Hawk-like Vision". I always fight myself on whether or not I think violence is necessary or morally justified. There is a mess of beliefs that I am trying to wrestle with, but honestly, it might take more reflecting than just blog-writing to get some consistency on these beliefs. As a professor of epistemology told me, "Grad school is about practicing ideas." You have to explore whole sections of the mall before you can shop in it effectively so to speak.

I am wondering whether or not such an answer can readily be provided to such a provoking question. Recently, I bought Larry May's edited anthology, War: Essays in Political Philosophy. These questions have been on my mind from some of the readings. Moreover, as the election rolls around, a reflective look of my nation's foreign policy is largely needed. Presidential elections are a good time for a fresh look at the mistakes and successes (if there are any) of our current President, George Bush.

In this post, war is the active strategy of employing violence for the achievement of some end, whether that end be political, economic or other. States justify war in any number of ways: some moral, others more prudentially. For our purposes, I assume the ethical perspective, that is, looking for moral justification as to why we fought Iraq. I argue that a lacking justification from self-defense undermines how justified we are in having ever fought the Iraq War. Consequently, since we lack moral justification for our waging a war, the longer we remain in Iraq the more complicit we are in doing the immoral thing, even though in keeping the peace we are attempting to stabilize a mess we caused.

In order to understand my argument, we need to talk about what it means to justify morally an action. To say that an action is justified morally is to say some action ought to be done for these reasons. There's an "ought" component, an evaluative reason claiming that some party ought to act or refrain from acting. Usually, a state justifies a war in the interest of preserving itself from a threat. If there is no demonstratable threat from a state, then there is no justification for going to war. In Iraq, we found no WMDs, and the threat of no WMDs fosters skepticism about the original justification for war. In so doing, the United States is now seen as acting preemptively on faulty intelligence. It can be said for these reasons that the Iraq War is morally unjustified.

Yet, this is a typical political response. I'm wondering something a bit more narrow. I'm wondering if there are reasons that "go all the way down" in justifying war. Are states ever justified in fighting a war? If you find that the content of morality is distinguishable, then are there duties to wage war? Immediately, I can think of a consequential argument for the non-existence of moral justification for war. If war hurts more people than those who fight in the war, then when a war happens more suffering is engendered by waging it. In other words, the moral cost of the war is too high to be paid, and since any reasonably educated person ought to recognize that more people suffer in wartime than in peacetime, then the promotion of peaceful ends over those favoring violence create more good in the world.

I don't know if this argument goes far enough, yet it does have some strengths. First, any waging of a war must acknowledge the fact that more suffer from wars waged than those that fight in them. This consequential argument is powerful with respect that you can see that it works for whatever your measure of the good, and many types of good--knowledge, pleasure or virtue. War forestalls cultural development, the stability needed to do science, with perhaps the exception of war related research--which is marginal by the standards of all scientific research and many other valuable activities. So, with these strengths why question the consequential argument against war? The limitations comes in the very form of consequential arguments take to justify morally right action, consequences.

Suppose we can formulate a scenario in which the cumulative goods maximized by not fighting war are outweighed by actually fighting in a war. Such an example would be hard to construe, but certainly not impossibly by any stretch of the imagination. Imagine a rogue state with a nuclear arsenal that has harbored technology that it could fight a massive war to confront the entire Western world. Perhaps, significant innovation in artificial intelligence? All the states must come together in orchestrating one decisive campaign against this rogue state (or even a collection of states) to defeat that which threatens all levels of society. On this score, I have always found consequentialism limiting in its capacity to distinguish satisfactory accounts of right and wrong. It would seem that good consequential arguments are relative to the time-slice in which they are made, and that future scenarios could always be imagined in which doing what is prohibited is better than not doing it.

A deontological argument against war preserves our backward-looking glance at our moral intuitions, and is stronger in making sense of not fighting war. Or is it? A deontological theory grounds rightness and wrongness in independent principle, or principles. These principles are grounded in our rationality, God's law or nature. Deontological approaches characterize matters of right and wrong in the language of rights. I believe a general prohibition on fighting war would turn on protecting the rights of those civilians in the field. However, this approach has a shortcoming that can be seen a mile away. Any defense of someone's rights, such as protecting the innocent from harm might rest on not waging a war to endanger the innocent, or waging a war to protecting the innocent from imminent threat. Such a principle would be grounded in a Kantian way (rationality), in the just war tradition (God's law in some instances) and nature.

The trouble in these last two approaches rests, I think, in that deontology is backward looking at our intuitions, and consequentialism is limited by its forward-looking perspective. What is needed, if there is a reason to never fight a war, is a normative theory that can preserve the large negative impact war has on those that suffer from its practice. For this is the wrongmaking property of war--the suffering it causes. I think that virtue ethics capable of giving us what we want. In brief, virtue ethics of the Neo-Aristotelian variety tries to achieve a conception of flourishing for all involved in our community by pinpointing those virtues that get us to live the flourishing life. At this stage, we are at the international level, and the question becomes the flourishing of human beings at large. The question then becomes: Does war ever lead to flourishing?

A Working Introduction to a Project of Mine

I have been focusing as of late on Heidegger's critique of presence. The critique of presence is hard to pin down for someone of analytic background since by presence Heidegger describes the relation either between the traditional subject relating to an object of experience, or the subject as related to its own awareness of itself. Analytical philosophers often have a hard time with the generality and obtuseness of Heideggerian language. However, there doesn't need to be any confusion. The two descriptions of presence are simply propensities that characterize much of the history of ontology, that is, how various philosophers have described the subject's epistemic relation with objects, and the characterization of the transcendental viewpoint of the Cartesian subject as aware of itself. According to Heidegger's thought, the overlooked propensities of presence are biased unquestioned assumptions in the history of metaphysics that require exposure.

In exposing these common interpretive assumptions, Heidegger feels justified in calling them into question, and so he should since no assumption can be left unturned in philosophy. However, what you find in Heidegger is an anti-metaphysical, or what one might call an uncritical dismissal of philosophies that violate/perpetuate a "metaphysics of presence." This assumption has formed the bedrock of European philosophy for the last century, and on its own merits paints a picture of philosophy unlike anything I would call "philosophy." In fact, it is this very dismissal I take issue with. As such, I disagree with Heidegger's conception of the subject and being-in-the-world. Instead, Husserl offers a much better picture of philosophy's capability to provide insight into the very relations Heidegger denies through his critique of presence. One guiding thought motivating this essay beyond Husserl is that if these are biases of our tradition, then the re-emergence of these biases in the history of ontology might be productive for understanding in the Gadamerian sense of "bias" rather than a historic failing on the canonized metaphysicians of Western thought since Plato.

Heideggerian Proclivities

A philosophy professor once remarked to me that philosophies are relative to a time and place. He made this remark in light of being a historian of philosophy--it was a course in political philosophy. At the time, I never thought about it, but when I explore Heidegger's writings, the theme of his Nazism always arises in me. Yet, it's not in the typical "where-is-the-Nazism-in-Heidegger's-philosophy" routine. Instead, my worry is more directed at myself. For I have a belief that can surface in odd ways, and it worries me to no end sometimes that I will end up like Heidegger.

I have an idea of America that is grandoise, reverent and special to my heart. While I do not think the United States is the best country on earth currently, I believe it very well could be. We have the resources, technology and know-how to do so much good in the world. At the turn of the 21st century, President Bill Clinton gave an interview in which he said the challenge facing America in the 21st century is how America uses its power. As an ethicist, I find myself examining political decisions about our foreign policy (in larger scope than the War on Terror). After examination, I have conluded two general beliefs:

1) The American political tradition and its values constitute the best ideal formation of government and Constitution yet known.

2) Given 1) and the fact that human beings are willing to sacrifice their lives for ideals, it follows that I tentatively approve that 1) entails my approval of policies that use violence in order to protect and enforce the benefit of 1)

Given these two beliefs, it logically follows that I approve of war as long as that war protects 1). Now, I don't know how the War on Terror in Iraq protects 1), but certainly the Taliban's unwillingness to cooperate with the force we were ready to bring upon them for sheltering our enemies has justification in light of 1). Thus, I approve of America's campaign in Afghanistan years ago, and fail to see Iraq's contemporary relevance in service of 1).

I have not mentioned reasons why I support 1), and that could be the subject of an entire post. Among some of these features of esteem, I feel that the separation of powers and prevention of tyranny of one branch of government over others to be a great innovation. Secondly, a continual living constitution protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority is the second greatest reason. A fully defensible Bill of Rights outlines and protects freedom and equality. These ideals when universalized to excluded populations find sanctuary in the United States, as long as the rule of law and order are preserved in the United States. With all the money and resources, the United States could, if it so chose, develop the sciences in ways that no other nation could. The list is exhaustive for reasons to favor the United States over other countries.

However, the worry comes back. My love for my home country, no matter if Canada treats me well, shines through. I wish for a better America, and if the chance to revitalize the idea and create anew arose, then I would in a heartbeat go back home to usher in a new America. However, I wonder how much Heidegger is in me at the love for America. Ultimately, compatible with 1) and 2) is a belief in the righteous quest for America to spread its values and ways of life to other parts of the globe. If it is even remotely defensible that the current political organizations of states has as its best version the United States, then the role of the United States -- like Rome -- would be to make other people Roman so to speak. This is entirely defensible if America's way of doing things is the best in principle. Now, I don't think I am as naive as Heidegger, but the danger to put my loves first uncritically stands to reason. I favor violence as a means to make the world safer for the best country on earth, and when I say that out loud, I endorse it.

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

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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.