Gendered Ethics

I've always been fascinated with arguments that derive philosophical insights from the social position and identity of the knowers rather than an abstract conception of an epistemic or moral agent. On one level, philosophy has proceeded usually to claim that epistemology attempts to discover the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. For moral agency, moral philosophers usually attempt to discover what practical reasoning is across the spectrum for all human beings and what is entailed by this faculty has direct implication for knowing and acting morally. Traditional philosophy tries to achieve an abstract and universal understanding of agency in which what holds for one agent will hold for all others of the same kind. Feminist philosophers and social epistemologists are skeptical of this impersonal characterization of agency in both epistemology and moral philosophy. Instead, more attention is paid to the actual context in which knowledge emerges, and an open honest assessment usually reveals that the production of philosophy by men typically favors the abstract conceptions of agency, conceptions that only the most educated historically could emulate. In a way, traditional philosophy justifies conceptions and interpretations that favor the position they occupied.

In creating my own syllabus recently, I decided to include a reading of Annette Baier. Instead of agency, her target is an entire systems of moral philosophy, and their subsequent concepts. I've picked up on the agency requirements since its range of concern is familiar to me, and is one essential concept within moral philosophy. The argument is made similar in kind. Let's see if I can reproduce it with any satisfaction.

(1) All moral philosophies of the past favor conditions of agency that only men (the elite) could emulate.
(2) By (1), it is evident that all past philosophies are gendered meaning that philosophies produced by past social systems are products of their times in which women did not even participate in philosophical discourse.
(3) Females have a distinctive moral perspective
(4) Given that moral philosophy is gendered and females would have contributed to philosophy uniquely had they done so, a new feminist ethics is necessitated by the historical realities to address the conceptual gap of previous historical moral philosophies.

There are two major assumptions here that demand attention. First, the argument turns on the assumption that philosophy cannot reach anything near the universality of its claims. Instead, making universal claims is just a way of rationalizing or supporting one's social position over others. Post-structuralists are fond of this claim, thinking that the idea of the subject in philosophy is only a tool for oppressing those that are different from the subject. I'm unsure of this claim. While there might be something said for a sensitivity to historical context in which philosophies emerge, does the truth of a view depend entirely on that context? I answer in the negative. This cannot be a reason for thinking entire contributions to tradition are foolhardy. Otherwise, we would not think through Aristotle's text in our intellectual history since he doesn't understand particle physics. Aristotle's physics are regarded as false because of reasons beyond which history and context imply.

Still, the first assumption of history and context are not the most powerful assumption. It is premise (3). Proving that women have a different moral perspective than men is the most substantial claim a proponent of feminist ethics makes. The truth of (3) is usually based on Carol Gilligan's work in children psychology, or some qualitative analysis of how women favor more nurturing caring relationships than the impartial justice morality typical of past philosophies. As for agency, this conception is very compatible with a model of practical reasoning that stresses community over atomistic individualism of moral agency.

The problem with (3) is thinking that it follows had women been liberated in previous centuries that moral philosophy would have turned out differently. Maybe, it wouldn't change. We note the gendered differences now, but what holds for our experience of gender now is or could be starkly different than if women had been equal to men in a very Greek context. Such moves only invite speculation, and that's not the biggest problem with this expectation either. Essentially, this expectation is bugged down in a deeper problem, and the expectation purports the very gender essentialism that women needed to shrug off for the advances in feminist activism. Allow me to explain.

The belief that philosophy would have been different had women participated in our ethical tradition relies on the assumption that women differ essentially from men in the first place. The claim is not just an evaluative claim about the fairness of past philosophical discourse. Any self-respecting philosopher could see the disproportionate past from still the under-represented female amount of philosophers today. Moreover, the insights from those same social science studies that corroborate the truth of (3) rely on the categories of men and women to the exclusion of spectrum of bisexuals, trans-gendered people etc.

I'm not dismissing the truth of (3). I'm just thinking the claim should be less robust than feminist ethicists want. The criticism might be something like the moral content of our duties may not be as sensitive to caring relationships, and the failure of what we require from morality is the issue. The view of feminist ethics, I think, has more value in uprooting the past injustices of philosophical praxis. I think they are right in a very broad sense, just not for the reasons they hold about a range of issues.

The Last Class

I have reached a sense of ending, to put it strangely. I was saddened today--I taught my last tutorial at Simon Fraser. My students couldn't comprehend the sad face, and nostalgia that accompanies the backward glance of life, the sense where you move onward in life from something comfortable to something new and foreign. Before them, they have the whole world and were more interested if I knew anything about the impending doom of their final.

I went back into the classroom after they had departed. I remembered my first class, and those undergraduates that have soared. During my time here, I even got a few students to major in philosophy.

My mind soars with possibility about the future, not the past. I am directed and comported towards mastering phenomenology, learning the the things that Carbondale can teach me, and what I can offer my peers at Carbondale. Already, I am reminded of the congeniality of my fellow Americans and the smalltown Pennsylvania life I left behind when I came to Canada nearly three years ago. I have talked over email to a great deal of the graduate students at Carbondale, my future peers. My wife and I were curious about the town, the life there and most importantly where we were going to move. While any of this still hasn't been decided, within just two short days, my box was populated by eight strangers nice enough to give me the low-down on the best parts of town and where the party centers were. I agree it is best to pursue one's PhD not amidst the swarms of undergraduate partying that plague American universities.

The Climate of Philosophy: Images and How They Speak to Us!

I'm reminded of the comments Heidegger makes about Van Gogh's Peasant Shoes. Heidegger regards the shoes as coming into being from concealment, the truth of their being is shown. The true practical nature of the shoes is rendered weathered, worn and worldly in Van Gogh's canvas.

Thus, art work has a revelatory power set truth in motion. Since I have moved to some brief flirtations with Italian futurism, the deep love of Friedrich's work, and I am now harkening back to the day where after leaving my undergraduate days, I went to the Cleveland Museum Of Art and witnessed Anselm Kiefer's Lot's Wife.



At the time, I was reading lots of Arendt, and thinking about the problem of evil. I immediately thought of the train tracks that went into Oblivion, like the famous tracks that are pictured into Auschwitz . This image struck me with the sense of abandonment evoked by the empty railroad tracks. A friend looking onward used the phrase "post-apocalyptic." There is some sense of abandonment, isolation or void left by this work. The landscape is ripped asunder.

This post has no real philosophical purpose. These are just the images that strike me. Some philospohical things may be said. Sartre seems fairly misanthropic suffering through WWII, and Adorno has even said that no poetry, no beauty is possibly articulated after Auschwitz. The climate of philosophy is entrenched in a modern dreariness, and one can understand why some thinkers offer an emancipatory component in their thinking.

In addition, I'm wondering if our contemporary culture of void -- the Heideggerian groundlessness left in Heidegger's wake -- bespeaks the silence we all suffer. God is dead. Science is uncertain, and the analytic optimism through scientism is left wanting in me (and many other Continentals, I imagine). Even Husserl in the Krisis, says "The dream is over [of founding phenomenology, I suspect]". The dream and confidence we should have in the world and our philosophical ability is surpasssed by the limit of our own cruelty in the past century.

Of course, maybe these images can be taken as signifying avenues for reasons to be moral. While we can be skeptical of ourselves and the claims we make about morality, we should be prompted for the ever-growing demand that morality imposes on us. Through these images, at least for me, the abandonment, the desolation and the very landscape speak volumes about how we should treat ourselves and this Earth.

Romantic German Painters: My Favorite

I've always loved Caspar Friedrich's work, and a recent visit to Blackburn's homepage reminded me of the Wanderer in a Sea Fog. Below is a painting that reminds me of the walks my wife and I take at night. She is a philosophical muse, but the man and woman contemplating the moon stand in for all those times she lets my philosophical soul run rampant.

Words, Reference and Being

A couple of days ago, I sat with a prestigious philosopher of language. He claimed that Heidegger was a fraud. The substantive claim revolved around Heidegger's fixation on the obscurity of Being, and dislike for science (amazingly enough the reasons for disfavor weren't concerned with the politics of the man!). Thus, we can see this charge as amounting to both a claim about Heidegger's ambiguous word-usage and uncritical rejection of science. In this post, I want to dismiss these as mere hand-waving. There is, indeed, a purpose to the language use, and points made about science and technology. I'll speak to each point in turn first starting with the claim of language.

Ambiguous word usage is sometimes called the charge of obscurantism. Commonly, this charge is made also against Derrida and post-structuralist thinkers as well. In Heidegger, the language use reflects the methodological commitment of Heideggerian phenomenology. Legitimating this project involves several things that should be noted about the project itself. Good criticisms only come from charitable understanding. First, Heidegger regards philosophy as uncovering the implicit structures of our practical everyday being-in-the-world, which means that philosophy is directed at describing the concrete facticity of human existence, not fundamental inquiries of a more conceptual nature. In this way, Heidegger intends to turn philosophy inside-out. It no longer concerns the tripartite Kantian division of logic, metaphysics and ethics. Instead, philosophy works not from the outside looking at problems in the previous areas, but exposes from within those relations that are taken for granted in our everydayness. In this way, Heideggerian phenomenology looks to uproot common associations in our experience of being-in-the-world.

Secondly, the concern with Being is a philosophical problem abandoned in the practice of philosophy, and Heidegger needed to develop a way of retrieving and uncovering this old problem that's no longer talked about in a more original way. As such, he chose to pursue it through the lens of phenomenology which seeks to describe things as they reveal themselves. Phenomenology amounts to describing the world as it is lived and experienced through and through. Hence, the language is in the service of looking at a phenomena long since avoided in philosophy to begin with. We can pay attention to things like how relate to our own mortality or the inauthentic modes of our decisions. The upshot of thematizing things of our everydayness means philosophy has more to dealing with our actual existence than dealing with problems abstracted from the way we encounter the world (as Kant would have philosophy divided into logic, metaphysics and ethics). This also means the language must reflect those lived experience structures now coming under the attention of phenomenological description. Indeed, some creativity is needed in developing a language that can render the problem of Being in a way we can answer the question through phenomenology.

Now, the common move is to suggest that Heidegger doesn't mean anything by observing that the meaning of his terms are obscure. Sure people talk about authenticity or being-towards-death, but does that talk pick out anything really real in the world? Well, this attitude starts from several observations. Let's get the first one out of the way. First, the problem with such general skepticism coming from analytics is that reading a German thinker in translation, and judging them by the translation is severely misplaced. However, let's move beyond that one and straight to the heart of the matter. Heidegger is hard to understand. Yet, the implicit strategy of the skeptic is to mistrust Heidegger since the only true way we can speak about the world is somehow informed by the sciences (I say somehow informed since I want to leave a lot of room for disagreement amongst naturalists). However, it cannot be that the sciences are all that is true. Instead, what needs argued is a different but just as reliable way of knowing, namely, showing that the humanities can succeed in ways that the sciences cannot. Maintaining the sciences and humanities as distinctly different allows for us to speak about things that the humanities speak about (legitimating the literary side of things is one positive contribution that underscores much of Gadamer's project). In the same way, this also is Husserl's point about giving priority to the phenomenological viewpoint as a realm onto itself.

On the next move, Heidegger grew suspicious of science and the norms that constitute its possibility. The best articulation of the connection between his philosophy of technology and science comes from Iain Thomson (Understanding Technology Ontotheologically, or: The Danger and the Promise of Heidegger, an American Perspective," in Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis, eds., New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 146-66.). For Thomson, the critique of Being is a critique against our metaphysics, that is, the dominant metaphysical view (an ontotheology in the words of Heidegger and Thomson) that determines the limits of our conceptual understanding and interpretation of the world--as well as the source of the attack on Heidegger's antiscientism!

I thus interpret Heidegger's understanding of the ontotheological structure of Western metaphysics as advancing a doctrine of ontological holism. By giving shape to our historical understanding of 'what is' metaphysics determines the most basic presuppositions of what anything is, ourselves included. This is what Heidegger means when he writes that "Western humanity, in all its comportment toward entities, and even toward itself, as in every respect sustained and guided by metaphysics" (N4 205/NII 343). This ontological holism explains how the successful ontotheologies can function historically like self-fulfilling prophecies, pervasively reshaping intelligibility. Put simply since all entities are, when a new ontotheological understanding of what and how entities are takes hold and spreads, it progressively transforms our basic understanding of all entities...our great metaphysicians help establish the fundamental conceptual parameters and ultimate standards of legitimacy for each of our successive historical epochs (150).

This has a lot to say against any contemporary scientifically-minded philosopher that thinks Heidegger full of crap. They impose the standards of what is available to them at their own time. The authority of science purports to describe what basic categories exist, and if words can only express real things in the world, then the ontological holism of our time will determine the extent to which words are ontologically real and accessible. However, Thomson adds more to follow. There's a point to linking ontological holism about the ontotheologies with the culmination of Nietzsche's thinking

.

Nietzsche is the pivotal figure in Heidegger's critique of technological epoch of enframing because, according to Heidegger's reductive yet revealing reading, Nietzsche's unthought metaphysics provides the ontotheological lenses that implicitly structure our current sense of reality...As Heidegger, thus puts it, Nietzsche understands the 'totality of entities a s such' ontotheologically as 'eternally recurring will-to-power,' that is, as an unending disaggregation and reaggregation of forces through their continual self-overcoming (In this Nietzsche was effectively universalizing insights Darwin had already drawn from his study of living entities and Adam Smith from his examination of the economic domain). Now, our Western culture's unthinking reliance on this implicitly Nietzschean ontotheology is leading us to transform all entities into Bestand, mere resources standing to be optimized, ordered and enhanced with maximal efficiency...[regarding ourselves]no longer as modern subjects seeking to master an objective world, but merely as one more intrinsically meaningless resource to be optimized, ordered and enhanced with maximal efficiency, whether cosmetically, psychopharmacologically, genetically or even cybernetically (151, brackets mine).

Now, one interpretive picture is in view about what is meant by Heidegger. Science is embedded in an enframed mindset by which the Nietzschean impulse to optimize translates into the outcomes of science, technology. The more this ontotheology spreads the more we relate to the world and ourselves differently. In fact, Heidegger says at one point that only "what is calculable is being." In other words, the very words we use must refer only to real things as determined by this pervasive ontotheology. This is his reason for being critical of science. As it produces more insight, the more Heidegger's critique of technology becomes apparent, and for Heidegger, the situation of this ontotheology is not replacing itself as it did in the past. Our way of talking is, now, stale. We've grown into a dogmatism within this enframed mindset and alienated ourselves from the very primordial relations that shape human experience. The very primordial relations to the world through art, literature, poetry, history and philosophy become/are continuously displaced, set farther away from our particular experience. This criticism of science might also explain the phenomenological demand of our age. A phenomenologist seeks to recover some sense of meaning in the world in opposition to the natural attitude that vitiates our experience of it. Ever since phenomenology's inception, the Nietzschean impetus for optimizing increases in reality, and this is also what Husserl and Heidegger have in common--or this is just me interpreting Husserl's criticism of the natural attitude through the Heidegger.

It can be said for these reasons that a) Heidegger is "onto something" with his use of language. Secondly, it can also be said that Heidegger's anti-scientism is defended for more critical reasons than is often charitably acknowledged.

Levinas Conference

I have reproduced the Call for Papers for the North American Levinas Society meeting in Toronto.
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Philosophy and its Others
The Fourth Annual Conference and Meeting of the North American Levinas Society

June 28-30, 2009
University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada)
Submission Deadline: April 13th, 2009

Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

Celebrating the fourth anniversary of our founding, the North American Levinas Society continues in our aim to build interest and promote dialogue around the important work of Emmanuel Levinas. Last year’s conference at Seattle University was a tremendous success, again bringing Levinas’ family from Paris and Jerusalem together with young scholars from across the world to forge important relationships and foster respectful discussion around the question of the sacred, the holy, and the ethical.

This year, the Society broadens its international scope, as we organize our first meeting and conference outside of the United States. We are pleased to announce our 2009 annual meeting and conference, to be hosted by the University of Toronto (Ontario, Canada). Confirmed plenary speakers include Dana Hollander (McMaster University) and James Hatley (Salisbury University).

The North American Levinas Society invites submissions of individual paper proposals and panel proposals for the fourth annual meeting and conference to be held June 28-30, 2009. While we will organize the conference around the broad theme of “Philosophy and Its Others,” we will consider proposals for paper and panels on any topic related to Levinas in an effort to draw the widest array of interests.

Especially in the Continental traditions, Levinas’ work is integral to a serious and sober examination of the history of philosophy and its priorities, blindnesses, insights, inner tensions, and possibilities. We pose this broad theme at a time when certain modes of rationality continue to prop up structures of economic inequality, perpetual war, and uncertainty. Given the current state of global economic and political relations, how must philosophy orient itself to help effect a healing and mending of the world? What is the relationship between philosophy and hope, activism, and reconciliation? We might begin by asking questions about Levinas’ difficult relationship with philosophy. How has the discipline and history of philosophy affected Levinas’ thought, and how has Levinas impacted the discipline and history of philosophy? How has Levinas’ philosophical critique of ‘the tradition’ been received and appropriated by other domains of inquiry, such as religious studies, Jewish studies, political science, women’s studies, gender studies, sociology, history, performance and media studies, race theory, legal studies and jurisprudence, literature, cultural studies, disability studies, environmental and ecology studies, medicine, and others? How has Levinas’ reception and application in these various fields in turn affected the discipline of philosophy?

Certainly, these are only a few questions regarding “Philosophy and Its Others” broadly posed, but it is clear that such questions open our own work to a more difficult, and perhaps edifying, scrutiny. We are also interested in receiving panels that address the relation between philosophy, the ethical, current political affairs, community, justice, and pedagogy.
Submissions

* Individual paper proposals: Individual abstracts, prepared for blind review, should be 500 words outlining a 20-minute presentation. Accepted papers will be organized into panels of two or three presentations.
* Panel proposal: Panel proposals, consisting of 2-3 speakers, should be 1000 words for a 75-minute session. Please include the session title, name of organizer, institutional affiliations, discipline or department, along with the chair’s name and participants’ names in addition to 250 word abstracts detailing the focus of each paper. Prepare panel proposals for blind review as well.

Please send materials via email attachment (preferably Microsoft Word) to: submissions@levinas-society.org.

If you have questions regarding the Society or the conference, please send inquiries to secretary@levinas-society.org.

A Revamping of the Beauty Myth Argument

A friend of mine has a good post against the objectification of women.

Obama's Centeredness A Weakness for Reform?

While I have revealed in the past a deep affinity for the Democrats, there are some areas of disagreement. The following conclusions came from a chance meeting. It just so happens that my old MA Advisor walked into a Starbucks where I happened to be grading essays. Since he's been on sabbatical, we haven't had a chance to talk. As Americans in Canada, we starting discussing my move back to the US, and how two ethicists perceive the current attempts to rectify the American economy. My advisor claimed Obama's politics is a form of conservative consequential socialism.. By this he meant:

Conservative consequential socialism recognizes an intervention as morally justified for the greater good by conserving status quo economic institutions with public funds.

Now, I take from this two possibilities.

First, if the system of capitalism requires that some institutions fail to accrue wealth or achieve stability, then there might be some reasons to let them fail, that is, if we want to remain capitalists. On some level, this may be too naive, or at the outset, too harsh. We are talking about a consequentially driven line of thinking. Yet, the attempt to bolster or enhance current institutions so that people may retain their jobs rather than have those institutions fail might engender worse consequences in the future which means that CCS might not achieve the maximization of good consequences it set out to achieve.

Secondly, conserving current institutions may be the entirely wrong approach. Unlike the first point, it is possible that capitalism is an inherently self-destructive. Perhaps, we should have moved away from it. With the amount of money so far spent, we could have funded people's salary for several years, given them education to better themselves in science and mathematics, or developed auniversal health care. In so doing, the institutions would have failed, and people would be worse off currently. However, the institutions that improve human life would exist come time for things to improve in the future.

Now, my point is that the centeredness of Obama rests on standing between the first and second proposal. He's too moderate to ever let capitalism run its own course, and he's too moderate to ever shift focus to a more European model where public programs ensure some level of prosperity for everyone. It may just be the case that one of the more extreme positions is more correct than attempting to remain moderately center of one over the other. If that is the case, then Obama might not be able to see what is necessary to be seen, or perhaps, his centeredness is more nuanced than I have picked up on.

Either way, I am doubtful of the amount being spent though I remain cautiously optimistic. I want the best for the United States. However, I think that Obama could learn a little from Aristotle. First, wealth is instrumental in helping people achieve the Good life. This only means that the more money people have, the more a chance they have to refuse the ill-choices of those who have not. Secondly, when exemplifying generosity with one's wealth, you must only give to those that would remain virtuous. Giving money to the same institutions that perpetuated an active deception is questionable since they didn't make the right choices when they had wealth (or made choices to maximize their own interest beyond what virtue required) and we have no reason to think they would change for the better.

The Inadequacy of Religious Reasons

I have been making a claim for some time informally, and wanted to spell it out more clearly. My claim concerns what reasons an agent may count as metaphysically adequate for acting. Put more eloquently, false ontologies cannot ground reasons for acting. I call this principle, the principle of metaphysical adequacy:


POMA: An agent with reason R cannot be justified in doing A as long as R is derived in principle from a false ontology.

Add a few premises and you get something like:

(1) POMA
(2) Religious literal interpretations or sources of revelation are derived from false ontologies
(3) Therefore, no agent with a religious reason can be justified in doing A, or ~A.

When one tries to capture the nature of practical reasoning, the positive thesis about what constitute the range of practical reasoning provide us with a way of thinking about what is both rational and irrational. In this case, (2) advances a wide claim, a net intended to ensnare the rationality of religious considerations. Literal interpretations and divine revelation provide no reasonable evidential weight for deliberation, and count as irrational. In the age where one could hardly deny the authority of science and its advancements, thinking that reasons are generated by interpretation and revelation take on board too much metaphysical baggage.

I feel (2) is a stronger and more robust way of advancing the claim that we can only act on true reasons. The problem with putting the epistemic constraint on reasons is that the epistemic constraint is always very general, and the problem is construed in terms of motivation for acting moral reasons. The problem of acting on true reasons isn't held in the same regard post B. William's Internal and External Reasons. In extremely simple cases, it is easy to see its relevance. Bernard Williams uses the example of a glass of petrol when someone thinks it is a glass of gin and tonic. Clearly, if this person acts on his belief, then the mere fact the glass is petrol nullifies this person's reason R for doing A. That person can be said to be no longer justified.

In stronger cases, the epistemic constraint requires a commitment to what is metaphysically adequate. Imagine Suzie is a fundamentalist Mormon. Her faith and community do not endorse R, where R might be “Abortion is morally permissible.” In fact, following her faith, she is dedicated to ~R. However, according to (1) and (2), ~R cannot be true. The Mormon faith isn't a good view of the universe and what it proposes about the nature of abortion is false. As such, if we want to ground considerations against abortion, they cannot be religiously-based. I imagine it is still feasible to entertain metaphysically adequate considerations against abortion just as much as it's opposite.

Now, the problem of religion becomes clear. There is no principled way to discriminate against what other religions claim and what others do. Is the Bible more reliable than the Lotus Sutra? Buddhism and Christianity are far apart on many issues, and to think that there is a way to discriminate within religion itself is foolhardy. Religions ascribe to particular beliefs about the authority of some reasons over others. These views are extreme enough to warrant consideration that they could ever fulfill any metaphysically adequate criterion. This problem comes in view when we see extreme cases where the diachronic elements of our history stand unconnected to ancient Biblical times. In Leviticus, I am to stone any child I would have in the future for talking back to me. Yet, I can't think that has any potential to ground moral reason I am to act on.

To summarize, I haven't claimed any positive proposal as to what is metaphysically adequate, that is a true ontology. However, I think we can take some clues from a more dedicated openness to learn just what our reasoning is psychologically, and perhaps, those sciences having contributed so much to human understanding might offer glimpses into the nature of practical reasoning. Until then, I am skeptical and continually remain so that religions satisfy any threshold of certainty beyond themselves to justify a moral reason. Moreover, if a non-naturalism is to succeed in grounding reasons, then those reasons cannot (at least) derive from religion. Whatever the source of normativity, that is the source of our reasons for acting must demonstrate an adequate story as to where those reasons originate and how they function for moral deliberation.

Who is the most important Continental philosopher in the 20th century?

Selection Votes
Husserl 9% 30
Heidegger 35% 110
Agamben 1% 4
Arendt 1% 2
Badiou 2% 7
Baudrillard 0% 1
Blanchot 1% 2
Bataille 1% 3
Beauvoir 1% 2
Benjamin 1% 2
Derrida 8% 25
Deleuze 11% 36
Foucault 8% 26
Gadamer 1% 3
Irigaray 0% 1
Butler 1% 2
Kristeva 1% 3
Lacan 3% 8
Lyotard 1% 2
Levinas 1% 2
Merleau-Ponty 1% 4
Nancy 0% 0
Ricoeur 1% 2
Sartre 3% 8
Adorno 5% 17
Habermas 3% 8
Scheler 0% 1
Schutz 0% 0
Bergson 0% 1
Zizek 2% 6
Total votes: 318

The Work of Greg Mortenson

For those of you having an interest in ethics, I was really moved by Greg Mortenson. Check out his blog here, and his charity here. He is the author of Three Cups of Tea, and has built dozens of schools to educate young girls in Afghanistan. In the interview on NPR's Tell Me More, he lectures public officials and Army Cadets at Westpoint about amending the injustices of ignorance--a more moral way to proceed in fighting extremism in the world.

In the interview, they had one school attacked, burnt to the ground. The Taliban thinks that women should not be educated, and so the one school rebuilt and hired armed guards to kill anyone that doesn't identify themselves as they approach the school! You have to ask yourself how in the age of the 21st century does one need to hire mercenaries to protect a school of girls? Now, I'm no stranger to the injustices of the world. I just think that a man who thinks that educating young girls and giving the gift of knowledge is more of a hero than a recipient of a purple heart.

Husserlian Themes Again

This is the first two pages of something I am working on. It is for the North American Levinas Society at U of Toronto if I can get it done in time.

The Ethical Subject in Husserl: An Ethical Interpretation of the Fifth Meditation

According to Levinas, ethics starts with the recognition of the otherness of the Other. There is something so radically different about the Other in my experience that no totality, no representation can encompass the Other so understood. The Other is not like an object of my perception couched in terms of modernist epistemology with similar talk of representations. Instead, there is something radically different about the Other As Levinas puts this point,

The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us...1

Even more to the point, when I represent the Other in my own understanding, there is an asymmetry between my self and the Other. I can make demands of myself that I cannot make of the Other. There is a lack of reciprocity between both the self and the Other. As Simon Critchley puts this point,

When I totalize, I conceive of the relation to the Other from some imagined point that would be outside of it and I turn myself into a theoretical spectator on the social world of which I am really part, and in which I am an agent. Viewed from the outside, intersubjectivity might appear to be a relation between equals, but from inside that relation, as it takes place at this very moment, you place an obligation on me that makes you higher than me, more than my equal.2

In other words, there is an inadequate understanding of the Other in ethical theories that ‘universalize’ or ‘totalize’ the conceptions of how one moral agent relates to another. Above, Critchley divides the problem in terms of an outer and inner perspective about totalizing ethical conceptions of the subject, the agent. In the former, equality – which I take as having moral status in a moral community – might be exemplified by Kant’s kingdom of ends. We are all rational beings and it is our capacity for rationality that grounds our moral considerations such that we all form a moral community of autonomous subjects.
Within the inner perspective, there is a problem. Within the experience of being a subject, I know myself more fully, more intimately. When I represent the viewpoint of another, the very possibility of intersubjectivity dissipates. I make claims of the Other in my representation of them. My claims of obligation reduce the Other to a logic of sameness rather than considering them in terms of their singular and concrete nature. I respect the idea of someone, not the transcendent person outside of me—not the face that escapes all representation.
In this paper, I want to overcome the inner and outer problematic of ethical subjectivity as it relates to the Other. Those in the company of Levinas are wrong. It is possible to establish the experience of the ethical subject as sharing in an equal relationship both within and without. We must establish the concrete ways in which the ethical subject relates to the Other. This requires us to explore what moral intentionality would look like, and what constitutes such moral intentionality. In order to argue this point, I turn to Husserl’s Fifth Meditation in the Cartesian Meditations.3 I argue that Husserl’s Fifth Meditation can be interpreted as offering avenues for exploring moral intentionality. In so doing, I begin to sketch an account of the ethical subject answering the worries of Levinas and his contemporary defenders.4

Teaching Experiences of Asserting as Arguing

This semester has been a tremendous joy to lead a tutorial group in a basic introduction to metaphysics and epistemology. Currently, I am reading papers, and the course supervisor and the TAs (including myself) have went through great pains to teach philosophy as a dialectical enterprise. However, I've said this many times over and over, philosophical argumentation doesn't equal Group or Author X claims A while Group or Author Y claims B. The language of claim-making is what they are taking the exchange to be about. Students aren't moving to the level of finding out reasons why these groups or authors endorse their claims.

I'm wondering if other people have this experience. Certainly, a range of philosophy students "get it" over others that see arguments as just making assertions. I'm wondering though if there are pedagogical strategies that reach beyond repeated demonstrations through examples and concepts in lecture that this is not the case.

I'm looking for contributions to this thread that provide favorite examples of teaching philosophy as a dialectical enterprise. Also include your favorite assertions qua arguments that students typically make. Several semesters ago, I had a student claim that God exists because supernatural powers stemming from Sikh meditation prove that God exists.

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