Ideas 1 Part 2

In this post, I will offer an interpretation about section 49 in Ideas 1. This section does not establish a form of idealism in Ideas 1.  This came about from a recent confusion I've had about sections 49, and why Husserl thought that if the physical world were annihilated, then phenomenology as a research project could continue unhindered. At worst, it is an attempt as one friend put it "to out Descartes Descartes." By this account, Husserl extends the Cartesian moment not simply to negate individual beings so that certainty can be gleaned by the cogito's reflexivity, but to doubt further to the point that phenomenology can be valid even if our substantively the world is idealistic.

In Ideas 1, Husserl says this of Descartes, "his attempt to doubt universally is properly an attempt to negate universally" (p. 59) Within that project, Descartes only carries out the moment of doubt to the point he reaches reflexivity. He does not bracket enough the world to see what is given. In Husserlian terms, Descartes only negates the existence of the world, but does discover that the world, or perhaps nature "is possible only as an intentional unity motivated in transcendentally pure consciousness by immanental connections" (p. 115) . Employing the phenomenological reduction requires the connection of the world in the same fashion "in which colors are inconceivable without extension" (p. 115). There is an "involvement with Nature" to such an extent that phenomenology is inconceivable without thinking that mental processes have as their directedness the world at large. Elsewhere, Husserl suggests a connection with the world in perception:

The physical thing is also essentially capable of being perceived, and it is seized upon in perception as a physical thing belonging to my surrounding world (p. 99)

My reading is that perception puts us into contact with a world. This world has no other status for concrete living subjects than having meaning primarily disclosed to us from the first-personal standpoint, the phenomenological attitude. Strictly speaking, however, this description of a physical thing linked with our capacities describable in the first-person does not suggest a type of idealism. In fact, I would not think an idealist would say anything of this kind at all.

Instead, I interpret section 49 as offering a conceivability point in relation to the status of the world found within phenomenology. Husserl identifies through phenomenological description the limit of what we can know through experiential life of being conscious. Through phenomenological description we are not entitled to think away consciousness but must insist upon its own self-contained reality. I find this point similar to Hume showing what is really involved with causal judgments as being simply associative  conjunctions of customary experience. Hume exposes the naive assumption that there are necessary connexions between cause and affect. By analogy, Husserl exposes the naivety of the world. The sense our world has for Husserl beyond its appearance is always shaky in regards to its certainty. This is a product of phenomenology paying attention to structures of experience as they appear to us in our experiential life. Once we bracket our presuppositions about the world, we find that the natural world could simply be pure appearances. In this way, I interpret the annihilation of the world as a point of conceivability, that is, it is conceivable that if there were only appearances, phenomenology is still a conceivable research program. In this way, section 49 is not a tantamount proposal for some form of idealism.

However, even though the world is connected in our involvement through intentionality, the point of raising the conceivability point is that self-consciousness is a valid standpoint from which to glean structures of our experience with its own standards of evidential validity apart from the natural attitude supplied by the "involvement of Nature". In order for consciousness to be a source of legitimate knowledge, that is, eidetic cognition, consciousness requires that it exist as a "strictly self-contained domain" (p. 116).

Now, if what I have said is true, then my interpretation would not follow the same previous citation where Husserl also says,

In its [consciousness's] essence, it is independent of all worldly, all natural being, nor does it need any worldly being for its existence. The existence of nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness, since Nature itself turns out to be a correlate of consciousness: Nature is only as a being constituted in regular concatenations of consciousness. (p. 116)  

Some will further object that "independent of all worldly, all natural being" above supports reading Husserl as offering a transcendental idealism in which the correlate of consciousness is constituted to such a degree, that the world is fundamentally mental, a mere accomplishment of a fundamentally mental world. Under this interpretation, consciousness makes possible our knowing the sense of the world, and the world is ontologically equivalent with what brings it into being to have meaning. Such a reading, as I understand it, of thinking that Husserl is offering a version of idealism relies on the a metaphysical reading of intentionality while losing sight of the world Husserl links with it. In an idealistic interpretation, the constitution of intentionality is not an operative concept, but one that only engenders our knowing the fundamentally mental world; the whole enterprise of phenomenology would then reify the objects under phenomenological investigation.

This reading might further press onward, citing that ultimately Husserl collapses the distinction between subject and object with the metaphysical reading of intentionality. However, the simple fact that consciousness has its own presence and this interpretation takes it to be fundamental does not suggest that consciousness alone should be given any more ontological weight than the world of physical things. It's just that physical things belong to the possible determinate order it could have for me, but to read possibility for me as a consciousness is only half the story. It is only because there is a world at all that a determinate order of possibilities that physical things can be perceived for Husserl (p. 91). It is the fact that Husserl is the first to connect up consciousness with the this-ness of a particular perceptual object in the world. As such, one must remember that those passages which talk of the world as a correlate of consciousness are not offering an idealistic reading, but explaining that consciousness is its own legitimate source of knowledge apart from the naturalistic interpretations found within the natural attitude that would reduce or eliminate subjectivity altogether. It is on evidential grounds that Husserl so often speaks of consciousness apart from the world, not on offering us a metaphysics.

Everything I have said here should not simply point to Husserl as the philosopher who defends a foundational account of subjectivity against the world. It should be no surprise that Husserl speaks of transcendence. There are structures of experience that are shared between I and We, e.g. as the founding of values shared by our continual renewal to abide by communal norms. . Husserl should generously be read as offering various descriptions of structures of experience such as the previous example. In order for phenomenological descriptions of structures of experience to be intersubjective, belonging to a sense of the first-person plural 'We' that involve also intersubjectivity and the transcendence, such structures of experience require a shared intentionality, a co-founding a simultaneous unfolding of various constituting intentional subjects to bestow-meaning on our conduct. In this way, Husserl offers us ways of speaking about transcendence about one particular example. His efforts are not simply concluding a foundationalism of the subject that grounds all experience. In fact, if anything Husserl's project is about subjectivity and the transcendence required to make sense of our lived-experiences in the world.

Participating in a conversation at Prosblogion

There is an insane amount of reaction to a philosophy of religion professor just throwing up his hands and calling it quits. They're having a decent discussion about the direction of philosophy over at Prosblogion on this very issue. They do favor more analytic approaches to philosophy of religion, and I'm wondering if my comment that I subsequently made will appear.

Politics and Art

Politics of Art is a pernicious phrase. It is not threatening to me, ultimately, but to what this phrase conjures in my mind. First, I am skeptical that politics should have any say over art. At first glance, keep them separate. It brings up images of book burning, censoring content or schools cutting the budget of young people learning the benefits of living creatively. Secondly, however, my defense of people to say and express themselves freely comes not from reversing the priority of the previous phrase for political reasons. I'm devoted to the idea that a range of creativity is sovereignly expressed by the person expressing and cannot be censored by the state. But is it right to think that politics enables art solely or is there a different relationship philosophically that art maintains in relation to politics?

Unknowingly to myself, the previous rugged defense of individualism purely expresses what some have come to see as the death of tradition, art or at worse, the death of Western civilization. My very reasons for defending pure expressibility is nothing more than having grown up in a time where culture has been uprooted for a mass culture seeking and wanting to express themselves freely only for entertainment purposes. What I am missing in my reflection is that a politics of art is only a phrase symptomatic of a different problem altogether. The want to be entertained has grown so large it attempts to appropriate culture for instrumental ends, steering us away from beholding the eternal wonder and value inherent in cultural works possess beyond the life of their inception. Cultural works have become instrumentalized. Hannah Arendt makes these points brilliantly in her essay, Crisis of Culture.

Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world' entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. An object is culture to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality, which is the quality which makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up. The great user and consumer of objects is life itself, the life of the individual and the life of society as a whole. Life is indifferent to the thingness of an object; it insists that everything must be functional, fulfill some needs. Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things produced by the present or the past are treated as though they are only to fulfill some needs...(208)

For Arendt, cultivating a sensibility to the beautiful, to those works of art and culture that "arrest our attention" preserve the conditions of society in order that intrinsic value may survive. However, we have entered a time period in which, as I have said, this intrinsic interest has paved way for a more instrumental mentality to the point that culture is all but dead. Yet, Hannah Arendt finds in this crisis an optimism, or what can be taken as the only possibility. In her words,

And the task of preserving the past without help of any tradition and often even against traditional standards and interpretations, is the same for the whole of Western civilization. Intellectually, though not socially America and Europe are in the same situation: the thread of tradition is broken and we must discover the past for ourselves--that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before (204).

So, we are to rediscover the tradition without any mediation, but encounter it for ourselves. And this is the point of crisis, we can either return to the historic authors of art and philosophy, or we can go on pretending we can do without them for mere entertainment. I am left to wonder if this can be done at all given entertainment's "gargantuan appetites", and more to the point about art itself. For I started wondering about a politics of art, and my want to preserve the individualism of the artist as a right. I invoked political language and the metaphor that an artist is sovereign, autonomous and downright in tension with the very society that would seek to censor expression.

A report by the National Endowment for the Arts came to some odd conclusion about how much time Americans are reading. The following synopsis comes from a CBS article here.

Among the findings:

 On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.

 Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

 In 2002, only 52 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24, the college years, read a book voluntarily, down from 59 percent in 1992.

 American 15-year-olds ranked fifteenth in average reading scores for 31 industrialized nations, behind Poland, Korea, France, and Canada, among others.

 Money spent on books, adjusted for inflation, dropped 14 percent from 1985 to 2005 and has fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s.

 The number of adults with bachelor's degrees and "proficient in reading prose" dropped from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003

The situation looks bad when so much of our current attempts to engage with culture are strictly entertainment. On top of that, anecdotal evidence from numerous college professors who I admire and respect corroborate the growing trend of incoming Freshman can't read basic Plato. This is my experience as well. Something like the Apology is difficult to teach. I struggled to teach the Euthyphro last year in my Intro class. How is it that Arendt can suggest an encounter with the sources of tradition where at the same time the death of that tradition has died? For a moment, I am granting that she is right about the state of affairs. Yet, I just don't see how it is that we can go on pretending there is no mediation given the death of tradition. It is like her optimism may have only applied to her from her New York City window. On the streets, things look a whole lot different, and this difference is a constant source of agitation for those of us teaching at public universities.

What to do as an educator, let alone a philosopher? I resist any attempts to turn my classes into a degree mill by administrators wanting clear-cut assessment. Such attempts at conformity in a curriculum do not challenge students to think, let alone think though the cultural works of Western civilization. However, as I look around, I encounter very smart people in other disciplines that do not share this sense of resistance. I feel like any resistance is again a political move. I come back to the very beginning that inaugurated this blog post, a politics of art.

Politically, I resist conformity and the gargantuan appetite of entertainment not for the artist to challenge orthodoxy (that's only a very small part of it), but that the transformative experience for students to encounter the greatest thinkers and artists of Western philosophy is also a renewal of culture. This is what Arendt misses. She misses that culture is renewed through every encounter, and the resistance it takes to entertainment is the very site of my classroom. This is what it essentially means to teach philosophy and allow the humanities to exist unhindered. It is not the goal of the university to breed consumers, but actively intelligent citizens that can engage with the world in an enriched understanding of its many dimensions: philosophical, political, sociological, poetic and aesthetic layers.

Douthat has it wrong, Corvino has it right

I don't think much needs to be said. Corvino has significantly refuted Douthat's argument in a NY Times column here. What Corvino has done is, however, extend charitability to Douthat's argument to the point that he transforms Douthat's op-ed piece into an argument. It is rather the simple assertion of deluded human being and it is to Corvino's character that he is so charitable.

The assertion of a belief, whether Christian or postmodern (pick your favorite label or eponym), is not an argument. That's all Douthat has done. Consider this passage:

The point of this ideal [of heterosexual marriage] is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it’s that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

The point I am making is this piece is mere assertion, and yet speaks to the stupidity of opinion pieces in popular media. Douthat offers no independent reason to convince us that the ideal of heterosexual marriage offers something distinctive. It is just the assertion that marriage ought to have this privileged status. This is what Corvino should have said about this op-ed piece.

Now, philosophers do this all the time -- they build up the background assumptions of an argument if they are not explicitly stated -- to the point that what they criticize is the best version conceivable. If that best version fails for some obviously flawed reasons, then we have a right to reject it and its lesser forms. As such, again, Corvino should be commended because I would not have the patience to be a philosopher with someone as moronic as Douthat.

Indirect Continental Bashing

Now, I've said that Derrida is obscure and never states what he means. However, a charitable reading of Derrida starts with this as a basic fact and then moves on from there. This is definitely not charitable:

I am personally very sympathetic to the analysis of Chomsky and others, for whom a certain variety of philosophical obscurantism results not just from sloppiness or from lack of intellectual rigor, but is indeed an intrinsic part of its proponents' strategy for protecting their racket. The usual line of criticism approaches the phenomenon of French obscurantism with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy (a measure by which it is doomed in advance), when what is in fact needed is sociology. It has often struck me that much American 'continental' philosophy depends on a total ignorance of the social milieu of the Parisian professoriat, and on a consequent inability to detect that what looks like the difficult expression of difficult ideas in writing is in fact just rarefied sociolect. Now sociolect, whether among carnies or professors, helps a group to cohere, and this helps it to survive. For Parisian professors as for speakers of carnie cant, all the better if outsiders are unable to understand....

What are the reasons for not clearly stating what one means? Here, it is read as a strategy to protect jobs of a few French professors, not a critique of a Western bias in philosophy since Plato to privilege a metaphysics of presence (obviously culminating in the work of Husserl!) Doubtful, Leiter would even want to know what the previous sentence means, though that is as clear and direct as I know how to say it. By extension, these poorly informed analytics do not want to actually engage with Derrida's work anymore than when French intellectualism of the 1980s was at its heyday.

Let us be fair. In the same post, Leiter does call our attention to the fact that this is an "ad hominem." Then again, Leiter has posted an excerpt on his wall giving credulity to an uncharitable interpretation of Derrida and promoting a philosophical intolerance for plurality. By grouping philosophers together that have nothing in common, he promotes the idea that there is something called "Continental philosophy". That's fallacious in itself. Why would a celebrated philosopher permit ad hominem arguments to stand on  his own wall if in fact the operative definition of philosophy is the systematic exchange of arguments in a dialectic to find the truth. I suspect motivations are not entirely philosophical, even with the qualifier.

As I've said many times before, even I find the interpretation of metaphysics qua presence questionable, but just because we do not accept a philosopher from the past does not mean we should not at least listen charitably to what they say.

Essay on the Superfluousness of Philosophy: What is to be done!?

A friend sent this to me over facebook. I must say this is quite extraordinary if only for the snarky comments about postmodernism. Where to start? A return to transcendence no doubt, a return to things themselves without losing sight of the fact that there are such things as truth, experience and minds.

School Rant

This is, I've got to say, one of the worst schools with respect to their health care. It is a self-insured plan completely administered by the university. They own it, and they don't give a rat's ass if you are even married. let alone have kids. Also, if you have a pre-existing condition, you'll pay the fees, wait around for one year, and then they'll cover you. The implicit hope is clear: they hope that you will go away, leave university and be sick. Can you imagine? Students paying for a service they can't use!

The only reason I am bitching is that this would have never happened in Canada. I say that in part I regret ever leaving Canada. Sometimes, I think I should have built up my work history even more, and applied for permanent residency.

I'm part of the Grad Assistant Union bargaining team for our contracts, and we'll probably mobilize on October 7th with all other public universities in the United States. The day of action's purpose is to make clear the want for affordable public universities. As people keep losing their homes, more and more people cannot afford the basic necessity of a higher education. This is forcing families to borrow unprecedented amounts. Top tier schools are out of reach for deserving middle and lower income families. If public universities cannot keep up, then I don't know what we'll do as a nation.

Ideas 1 Part 1

So, I have made my way through several chapters of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, vol 1., and wanted to catalog my opening impression of the first 60 pages. Now, most of what I say here will not be about what I like since I like all of Husserl. What I like would simply be a regurgitation of agreement. That would be really redundant. Instead, I will focus on areas of confusion and what provoked my marginalia comments. With that said, I do have one striking question about the first chapter.

Nearing the end of the first chapter, Husserl introduces a range of logical concepts, yet he describe the purpose:

It has been our purpose to outline, on the basis of pure logic and as part of the fundamental structure of all possible cognition or cognitive objectivities proceeding from a pure logic, a schema in conformity with which individua must be determinable under synthetical principles a priori according to concepts and laws, or in conformity with which all empirical sciences are relevant to them and not merely on the pure logic common to all sciences (p. 32, section 17). 

I take it that whether grounded in pure logic or possible cognition or an ideal objectivity, Husserl wants to develop a schema, a type of conceptual representation that explains individual phenomena as determinable under synthetic principles a priori. In other words, the eidetic cognition that legitimates individual phenomena can be distilled to the point we can show eidetic cognition is the source for all possible knowledge of any individual phenomena. It can be shown to such an extent this eidetic cognition is a priori and comes to synthesize various elements of givenness from the phenomenon itself. In this way, it is not that these logical elements, or descriptions are common to all the sciences. Instead, these logical elements and descriptions serve as a legitimating force. So, here's the question: It feels like this was introduced in an impure way. Husserl does not bracket these elements, but instead simply insists upon these terms and logical elements. They seem to come out of nowhere, although they do have a stated purpose as I quote. So, the question that I first want to take on is if Husserl starts with these logical elements, terms and descriptions, then does the attempt at revealing their necessity feel a bit contrived apart from the phenomenology?

Now, it could be that this first chapter is simply a rehashing of the work Husserl did in Logical Investigations to establish the ideal objectivity of logical categories as independent from empirical naturalism. In this way, Ideas 1 is after a similar philosophical project, to defend the phenomenological attitude against any attempt to posit the general character of the natural attitude. So, I find that the contrivance of the logic chapter might not be that big of a deal, although it does feel a little too quick. I will post some other thoughts and questions I have tomorrow.

Husserl, Finally...

As many of you may know, I think the unknown genius of the early 20th century is Husserl. He had the greatest contact with some of world's top intellectuals (Russell, Frege, Scheler, Gurswitch, Reinach) and had the generation of the world's greatest students and scholars influenced by his work in philosophy (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Derrida). Yet, these are reasons of taste, not substantial reasons for Husserl's greatness. I don't really think we can argue for greatness, other than to say how it is that history overshadows someone's thought. Analytics write Husserl off as an echo of Frege, which is probably Follesdal's fault mainly. Continental philosophers (even though there is really no such thing as I have said) write Husserl off either completely or slightly given their misguided commitment to Heidegger. As Paul Ricoeur has said and I repeat this often, the history of phenomenology is a history of "Husserlian heresies."

Either way, the "finally" part of the above title hints at I am finally taking a Husserl course, an independent study, but an independent study nonetheless on Husserl. I will make my way through Husserl's Ideas I, II and III. This semester will be accompanied by courses in Kant's first critique and Heidegger's Being and Time. As such, the direction this blog will move is to meditate on the meaning of Husserl's thought in those works, and whatever ruminations will result.

I'll also slow down in my posting, and I am thinking of inviting others to join in on the festivities with discussions on Ideas I, II and III.

Joshua Knobe on Knowledge without Belief

I have commented on this thread, thinking that the phenomenological distinction between pre-reflective intentionality and reflective intentionality has some purchase. We'll see if anyone responds.

An Example of Phenomenological Description

Several of my friends from an analytic background have wondered what a solid piece of phenomenological analysis looks like given that I constantly warn against thinking of phenomenology as introspection.

Here is a solid description of the affectivity of hope.

Feminism and Moral Standards

Before I get going in this post, first a definition to avoid confusion. This post is mostly a post about values. "Values" is a broad term used to encompass all the stated reasons why members of a certain culture will act the way they do. In this way, values encompass norms and intelligible opinions and attitudes cultural members will have internalized and attempt to justify for why it is the fact they will or have acted in a given way. Next, I use the term cultural relativism to explain the thesis that there are no culturally-transcendent values; instead values are relative to a cultural framework/domain. Framework and domain are used interchangeably.

Now, this post is not really meant for philosophical colleagues. Rehearsing the all too often rejection of cultural relativism as a sound approach to moral theorizing is not my sole purpose here--although admittedly, it is here. Instead, the purpose of this post is to reveal that these problems are embedded in the social scientists' mainstream approach in their discipline--this holds for all of social science.

On a brief office visit to a sociologist friend, I sat down and asked her plainly that if one adopts a feminist commitment, then certainly one has adopted prima facie a commitment to addressing the immoral practices and unjust circumstances that women find themselves in. She agreed to that. Next, I asked independent of feminism, what is the status of those values that feminism will call upon? She did not give up the much anticipated answer that there are moral frameworks, and indeed we can study them empirically. We can survey attitudes and the values people hold of, say, the morality of homosexual marriage or female genital mutilation, but in the end, these values are simply groundless. They have no backing independent of the cultures that engender them. In her words, "there are no absolutes" and this view is consistent with the postmodern skepticism that social scientists can have knowledge that is definitively culturally transcendent. To observe, say, the unequal distribution of salaries of women in a profession is wrong only insofar as the cultural framework has conventions that can spell out exactly why it is wrong. If another culture dominates women to the point that they are denied equal opportunity under the law and that culture has no feminist critics, then one cannot get any moral point of view going since to construe morality as deriving from culture is a non-starter. This can be explained with a much needed example.

Suppose two cultural frameworks, I will call the first C1 and the second C2.

C1 is the cultural domain in which women have no rights under the law, are considered property and prescribed a "proper" place as domestic workers and mothers only.

C2 is the cultural domain represented by women with advanced education, empowered with a range of opportunities, possess equal rights under the law, and are not considered property by anyone.

Both C1 and C2 express values, and empirically they disagree on the fundamental role women play in their society. Yet, in keeping with the cultural relativism adopted in social science, we cannot say that one culture is better than another since to invoke better appeals to concepts outside either C1 and C2. At the same time, this has another consequence. As a member of C1, I cannot be within that culture and disagree with that culture. Sure, I may disagree personally, but my disagreement has no status if I oppose my culture. Since values originate in culture, C1 can never be wrong. It is inerrant in that C1 is the source and justification of its own values. This is what I meant that cultural relativism is a non-starter.

Aside for not allowing moral reform and criticism from two very different cultures, cultural relativism is defended not on multicultural grounds, but on the motivation for the social scientist to understand as much as possible. Multiculturalism is just the result of trying to be value-neutral. Let me explain. Social scientists spend lots of time studying many different groups, and in their opting to make no judgments as to how those members of that group are, they regard their activity as value-neutral. If I am a political scientist attempting to understand how various groups vote, I will not impose my liberal politics on the question, but instead opt for an impartial value-neutral perspective that surveys all the different groups and their voting patters. This is an often repeated suggestion for what the social scientist is doing. Yet, to regard is to value. The attempt at being value-neutral is motivated by valuing value-neutrality. It is not a value-neutral position itself.

If the social scientist concedes that they value value-neutral perspectives, it could be they don't want to become the very thing they study. Social scientists often can give deeply troubling reasons for why some groups fare better in societies than others. Oftentimes, this comes from one group imposing its values on another, even quite dogmatically. They don't want to do the same thing since that might give rise to oppression in some way. This is an admirable quality, and so of all values, perhaps the only value a social scientist will recommend is multiculturalism. It fits with studying different groups as a scientist in the first place, and as such the endorsement of cultural relativism is the after thought multiculturalism. Yet, cultural relativism should be teased apart from multiculturalism. Here's why.

Multiculturalism is valued in terms of prudence of governments having a diverse population to rule. Multiculturalism therefore has more to do with tolerance than it does with cultural relativism. Remember, cultural relativism is a certain skepticism that we can have culturally-transcendent values. It is commonly associated with multiculturalism for this reason, but the reasons why we back multiculturalism are not that we can't have culturally-transcendent moral knowledge; instead, it is prudent and pragmatic way to govern.

Now, let's bring back the discussion of feminism. Feminists make moral claims that there are injustices against women. From the previous example, this might look like C2 making claims about C1. Cultural relativism will limit the moral claims members can make to either C1 or C2. Moral claims can only be internal to the cultural domains they come from. Again, there is no legitimacy for C2 members to make claims about C1 if this is so. However notice what motivated my friend's compliance with cultural relativism, it was a limitation of method and that method involves a constant explanation of people in terms of being members of a cultural domain. Social science does not seek to explain people as committing to a standpoint that transcends or acquires knowledge apart from culture. Culture is, in fact, an uber-explanatory force that removes us from viewing ourselves from the first-person standpoint, what I call moral agency. This type of explanation does not see people as beings  with desires, values and intentions that act freely on their own accord. For ethics itself looks to explain people in terms of the experience of individual freedom to respond to moral situations.

The next limitation of method in the social sciences is a conflation of two categories--the descriptive and the normative. When social scientists empirically observe differences in culture, say again C1 and C2,  the social scientist immediately infers that we should adopt cultural relativism. Yet, the empirical observation of their disagreement does not entail cultural relativism. The fact that C1 and C2 differ is only a description about the world, it does not remove the possibility that there is no fact of the matter that moral knowledge can be culturally-transcendent (and therefore objective). Moral knowledge instead looks to see how the world ought to be, not is. Disagreement is an observation of difference and no reason to think there is no truth, plain and simple. For example, in one culture people might have believed that the Earth is flat, and another culture might have thought the Earth is round. Given that there is disagreement between the two cultures (even if both cultures have no science or mathematics to really settle the issue), we cannot say that all knowledge is relative to culture.

So where does that leaves us? Feminism could be a proposed set of moral judgments about values we should see in our history, culture and social experiences that dominate women. In this way, it is an orientation that follows out of thinking that moral knowledge is culturally-transcendent in much the same way that basic truths of mathematics are true in all cultures at all times. Moreover, this does not mean that moral knowledge and the various theories we hold about morality are clearly known and dogmatic. On the contrary, moral knowledge is hard, difficult and there is much left unsettled. Given its hardness, it is better that we think that moral knowledge requires much effort and take to heart how easily it is for us to be wrong about things, even morality. This means that we should approach moral matters with a sense of humility, but on some things, we need not be as humble to think that genocide and systematic oppression of women are theoretically unsettled. They are just plain wrong, and any skepticism otherwise is untenable.

Phronesis and Openness

I have always found comfort in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Particularly, what Robert Louden has called anti-theory. However, I have never liked this expression since it questions Aristotle's general focus on ethics as a move to anti-theory. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, ethics is capable of a very general level of precision. It is not about finding a single monistic principle by which to explain all of morality and the content of what we ought to do. Instead, practical wisdom, or what I will call throughout this post as phronesis is to be cultivated through our virtuous character. Central to this ethics is a process of responsive realization we have to difficult scenarios, and in denying that morality is codifiable -- that is by a principle or set of principles as in deontology or consequentialism -- practical wisdom stands in for determining what we ought to do. Virtue ethics is in my words a wisdom tradition and phronesis is at the heart of it all.

Phronesis is practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is acquired through the reinforced habits of our ability to discern, see, judge and realistically implement the best course of action. It is incredibly open only insofar as there are many wise things to do in a given situation. The usual rendering of its ethical principle is the following: 

An action and/or character-trait is right if and only if it is exemplified in a phronimos. 

Phronimos are ideal moral agents in the community that are known for their excellence. They excel at doing the wise thing and knowing what one ought to do.  In truth, most difficult moral scenarios take time and a great deal of maturity to handle. Aristotle does not deny that there is intrinsically valuable life, a worthy life lived well. It's just that there are many ways to respond, and it is proper to respond well through the exercise of the virtues, including the intellectual virtues which are at the heart of knowing what we ought to do. Yet, it is anti-theoretical given the range of openness conducive to the exercise of a virtue trait and construes morality as something other than a principle or set of principles. Let me explain. 

Suppose a man is a former Marine and trapped in a hostage situation. The Marine is with his girlfriend and is one of several customers lying on the floor while the gunman is having a nervous breakdown at the chance of little or no escape. He has already shot one hostage. Now, when the negotiator is on the phone, the man reaches down to the Marine's girlfriend. The Marine as you has every right to think that he is dangerous in his intentions. Prevailing practical wisdom might require that we respond courageously to this incident, and acting courageously is understood as a v-rule. Conceding this point, however, we can interpret a whole range of morally appropriate manners:

1. Acting courageously might require that you get in the way of the gunman to grab your girlfriend

2. Acting courageously might require that you attack the gunman straight out. 

3. Acting courageously might require that you wait and do nothing while waiting for the police.

4. Acting courageously might require that you talk down the gunman. 

Now which of these three are the most morally appropriate? In many ways, the Marine can still do the courageous thing. Yet, it does not specify exactly what I ought to do precisely. Such a level of thinking permits us to respond contextually to a full range of possible outputs. This openness is then a strength and it takes phronesis to discern what we ought to accept. 

Feser's Bias Masked in Metaphysics

I have already given a very long response to this post over at Feser's blog. I will say, however, that I too defend a conception of virtue ethics. I am fond of the idea that besides thinking morality only applies to actions it primarily is about what type of people we ought to be. Unlike Feser, I don't go around and throw up very antiquated metaphysics even though I like Aristotle's formulation of virtue ethics. As contemporary philosophers, it is our job to identify those themes most pertinent to our theoretical need while also having an eye to the truth. We need to identify those parts of Aristotle that contribute in a positive manner to our need while at same time jettisoning a lot of it.

Feser wholeheartedly accepts Aristotelian teleology. For him, homosexuals don't share in the proper teleological essence of man. This is a sure way to loose any credibility amongst common everyday orthodoxy. In order to get this project off the ground, you need a very robust and metaphysical view that has been dead for a very long time. Feser has called on conservatives to not be cowards and adopt a "classical essentialist metaphysics".

The mistake lies in several areas. Among them is to think that teleology can only be a principle about nature. First, we might have a teleology as a proposed explanation that comes from our rationality, but is not constitutive of nature. This is a Kantian way to go. We might think that we can construct teleologies for evolutionary explanation since the limit of biology is largely a science of observation. This, however, is contingent upon systematizing our current observations. We might revise such explanations later. Both are more in line with a naturalist bent than thinking that nature is populated by essences conforming to nature's purpose. Even in a phenomenological sense, there are essences, but the principle of the phenomenological insight is to judge a thing's givenness solely without presupposition. This cannot be enacted by having a prior commitment to A-T essentialism. In this way, even phenomenology is more modest in its approach than Feser himself.

Secondly, a Thomist thinks they have reason to know God's law. A Thomist commits the Augustinian mistake--they think God is intelligible rather than siding with Plotinus who sees God as ineffable. If they saw the divine in more modest terms, they would not be so quick to see that God is on their side. For when anyone thinks they can know God's will, it inevitably follows that God will shore up your biases. That's what Feser has ultimately done.

Leiter's Excerpt on Political Media

We have had our disagreements, and some email correspondence about philosophical matters. It is interesting to see here that Leiter excerpts a good description of media bias here. Me likey-likey.

Past and Naturalism

As a philosopher, I often think that I have some good arguments. Moreover, I find myself revisiting elements of my own faith when pressed into the corner. I cannot say for certain whether or not a full-fledged naturalism is the best way to go. In my previous Anglophone analytic experience, it was the ONLY way to go. I've complained that numerous times that people in their presentations and after parties wanted more acceptance from their philosophical peers, resulting in a need to legitimize the conceptual bag of concepts they used. As such, they speculated on naturalizing their concepts over drinks, and then all was settled. There wasn't much need for any other philosophizing since anything else other than naturalism and full commitment to Ockham's razor was the only way to go. In fact, this implicit commitment to naturalism or some type of physicalism is now the guiding norm so much that I find myself in the same climate that Husserl found himself in tension with psychologism.

I am not against a naturalism program per se, but I find the orthodoxy achieved as something of an illusory confidence, as if some philosophers no longer want to argue for their premises. To do so, I think would show that naturalism is not as sturdy as originally thought.

Philosophical Explanations

Like all my blog posts, this should be taken as an undeveloped intuition pump to get my ideas out there.

Call a philosophical explanation any conceptual description of human experience. Usually such explanations are causal accounts, they might be something like explaining how practical reasoning works in terms of desire-satisfaction, or they might be even more naturalistic in invoking some compatibility or subsumption in a physical science. The Churchlands do this with neuroscience, explaining what a mind is via concepts like a neural network.

I take it that philosophical explanations might be minimal with respect to what is invoked in explaining human experience. For some fellow pragmatists, they are devoted to a certain feature of "experience" that mitigates outlandish conceptual claims with real world concrete experience. This usually means a skepticism concerning a priori claims like a transcendental apperception in Kant for instance, or anything metaphysically essential. In this way, pragmatic explanations are also philosophical explanations, in that the theory/philosophical explanation in question is derived from our first being practical-historical beings.

Philosophical explanations have at least two trajectories I have encountered in recent philosophizing. I would not commit myself to saying these are the only two trajectories. Instead, I would only say these are possible formulations of the higher-order distinction between transcendence and historicity; there could be other formulations of this problematic elsewhere.

Transcendence is the quality of a concept to represent something that is beyond the immediate facticity of our socio-historic world. Phenomenology is often used as a defense of transcendence. For instance, Husserl's Logical Investigations are a defense of ideal objectivities in logic that cannot be explained by thinking of logical laws as laws of psychological science. It is a defense of the irreducible elements of logic. One might interpret Heidegger's early description of the structures of Dasein as a transcendent (This is contentious however).

Now, historicity is the quality of a concept to represent something only within the boundaries of facticity and the historic ontotheology that determines the threshold of our ability to understand/interpret something.

Philosophical explanations can pick out transcendent concepts like consciousness, noema, intentionality and then see how these explanations explain a variety of human experiences, or they can be historical in which the concepts become a hermeneutic level that articulates present understanding. The historic explanations work to point out the limits of understanding and often are seen as generating fictional problems because of surpassing or being trapped within the historical limit.

In the historic explanation, our concepts become instances of our historical threshold. It explains past movements or texts as being samples of the historic time that determines what they could have said. Descartes and the moderns could not conceive of nature as nothing but the totality of space-time coordinates given that they were determined by historical formulations of geometry and how Being was understood (Husserl's formulation of this problem preserves living subjectivity) This historical explanation subsumes the living-subjectivity of those authors and construes them as determined to imagine what they wrote given the operative historic understanding of Being at the time. Such an explanation invites many problems, among which I have already hinted it. It sees human experience as an articulation of the historical dimension through which they interpret their world, and nothing more. These are not people with a living-subjectivity trying to solve the problems they face in their current life. Instead, this means that the historic explanation equivocates the term, "explanation" since it can mean both the hermeneutic limit of what people can understand, or also the hermeneutic limit that causes people to believe what they do. It therefore explains causally and establishes the limit of what can be understood.

Next, the historic explanation relatives philosophy to the framework operative at the time, what both is the limit and cause of past philosophers and the content of what they have said. In this way, there is no genuine knowledge possible, but only knowledge at a historical time. It is therefore impossible to think that human beings have been confused about one genuine problem throughout philosophy. There is no transcendence of the problem of how the mind relates to the body even though we have been thinking about it for nearly four centuries. Such a claim could hold no water.

Moreover, and what I find very counter-intuitive is that these explanations deny that theory can be done at all. There is no genuine knowledge about how we ought to act, and thus ethics looses any way to prescribe action given that we could just chalk up normative advice to the current societal framework. No transcendence in moral knowledge means that nothing really has any normative weight and no culture has better practices than any others. Nazis were just articulating their moral understanding of their own culture in as much as I believe in a free press to hold a democracy accountable. This not only seems counter-intuitive, but a little bizarre with similar effects in logic. No transcendence means that there is no way to tell better viewpoints from others. There are no norms to good reasoning, but only the self-asserted ramblings of whatever is the historic zeitgeist at the time says is true. In effect, the historic explanation gives up in actively searching for truth, and this is its greatest weakness since in circular fashion it, too, is only true in that the historic explanation itself is true at the time it is articulated. That really gives us good reason to think that it itself is true.

It should be said that what post-Kantian philosophers and Husserl mean by transcendence is not the same as with science. Philosophers of the logical positivist variety wanted a transcendence per se, but they wanted science to replace the transcendent concepts they thought were nonsensical. In this way, we are still looking to describe human experience. It is unwise to give up that fight.

Kevin Mulligan On the History of Continental Philosophy

Below is my short reaction to Mulligan's online article about Continental philosophy.

I am skeptical that there is anything like Continental philosophy other than a convenient shorthand for job applications. For the phrase has never had any purchase with me since I have had and never will have anything in common with post-structuralists or psychoanalysts who are both supposedly an illustration of Continental philosophy. There are so many people grouped into the phrase "Continental philosophy", I find it offensive that anyone would lump so many competing philosophical positions into a phrase. It's like grouping, Russell in with Putnam or Tarski with Davidson without so much as thinking whether or not they have anything in common. It's always been a political term, a term suggested by others that do not want to bother reading "that stuff over there." It is exclusionary to the point of absurdity--absurd since those rejecting it most often know nothing about it (In the department hallway at Simon Fraser, a visiting lecturer called all of Continental philosophy "crap" and when I asked him what he read, he smirked and said "Nothing.") One should demonstrate a passing knowledge of its content if one is going to dismiss it.

If there is nothing really like Continental philosophy, then I find it decisively wrong that Mulligan would look to a literature review of Dilthey's work from 1884 and suggest this is the moment something like Continental philosophy comes on the scene. As a starting point, Mulligan wants it to speak as an origin that seemingly overtakes all subsequent "Continental" thought. In so doing, it suggests implicitly that Continental philosophy cannot work with science since the review in question is about Dilthey's suggestion that history should take the focus of analysis rather than thinking that philosophy should work with the sciences in much the same way that history and tradition become the focus of Gadamer over thinking that philosophy should always coincide its efforts with the natural sciences (A great essay demarcating this distinction might be Truth in the Human Sciences by Gadamer). Not all of Continental thought is a pure anti-scientism, but simply a tolerant enlargement that philosophy can talk about things within human experience and not always consult the natural sciences to do so. In fact, "Continental" philosophy can work with science. Much of Merleau-Ponty's research is as a child psychologist in as much as Husserl talked to many mathematicians and famous physicists at Gottingen (A great article detailing these famous contacts is Patrick Heelan's Husserl's Philosophy of Science). Moreover, phenomenology in its contemporary form is called a post-phenomenology where whatever you may consider it, phenomenology is being actively appropriated by either phenomenologists or philosophers of mind as a way to articulate notions about proprioception, embodiment and cognitive science (Zahavi, Gallager to name a few).

More importantly, Mulligan cites in Footnote 2 that his entire essay starts as an "accumulation of prejudices" in the cliches presented at the very beginning which "seem to me to be one and all true". He writes,

Continental philosophy is often held to have the following distinctive features; it is inherently obscure and obscurantist, often closer to the genre of literature than to that of philosophy; it is devoid of arguments, distinctions, examples and analysis; it is a problemarm "Ask me what I'm working on, and I'll reply with the the name of a problem", the Analytic philosopher will proudly say, "ask the, and they'll reply with a proper name": (a variant on this: Continental Philosopher to an Analytical Philosopher: "I'm a Phenomenologist", "I'm an Analytical Philosopher, I think for myself"). It is also, he will ruefully add, terribly popular, but, he will happily continue, mainly in departments of literature and in some of the human sciences. He might also add that Continental Philosophy came to prominence in the English-speaking world because it seemed to address issues that analytic philosophy had conspicuously fialed to address: the nature of textual interpretation, aesthetic questions, as well as a variety of issues in social and political philosophy. The fact that this one-sidedness had all but disappeared by the 1970s does not, he will have to go on to say, seem to have impeded the career of Continental Philosophy. 

If Mulligan allows for the possibility that these could be nothing more than the accumulation of prejudices in the very beginning of the article, then why continue to write this piece? It would seem that the bias overtakes what he said of the Continental distinction at the end, it might be a "spurious fiction" and despite his own observation of it, he continued on with the very prejudice he felt may have constituted his first efforts. This is the very same prejudice motivating how ruefully ignorant many Analytic philosophers are. I should say this is what happens to philosophy when you are so convinced that the problems you work on are more important than the historic connection to philosophy that Analytics actively pretend is not there.

Anyway, you can decide for yourself.

Adorno and Husserl

I'll be posting on this paper (entitled Husserl and the Problem of Idealism) Adorno wrote a long time ago. A friend came to me and we will meet to discuss it next week. I will post some results of that discussion here in a few days. Amazingly enough, it is in J Phil.

Intuitions and Ethics

I can't seem to hate conservative philosophers. If anything, they are my favorite type of conservatives, reflective and willing to engage in philosophical debate. In this post, Edward Feser takes issue with Dennett's intuition pumps and groups them together with moral intuition from ethics. It is the latter that concern me here. In this post, I show they are completely different from each other, and likewise do not represent the same methodology. He says,

But intuitions are also often appealed to in a positive fashion, as a way to support some claim or other in metaphysics or ethics. Hence we have John Rawls’s well-known appeal to what our “considered intuitions” about justice have to tell us. 

The two are entirely distinct since the intuition use, or appeals to intuition in ethics. His specific claim is what such a grouping cannot achieve objective understanding of morality. In his words,

As Alan Lacey notes in an entry on intuition in the Ted Honderich edited volume The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “recently… the term ‘intuition’ has been used for pre-philosophical thoughts or feelings, e.g. on morality, which emerge in thought experiments and are then used philosophically.”

This is most regrettable. It gives the impression that ethics and metaphysics are ultimately subjective, which is – certainly from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view (which is my point of view) – not at all the case.

Primarily, I feel that when I claim a normative judgment is intuitive, I mean -- like Ross -- there is a self-evident truth that a mature and experienced person can accept. There is some moral claim about the situation we face, and that's what is normatively at issue for us. For the Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher, it is then only that the intuitions are about what morally face us, and it should also be noted that intuition used in the Rossian way doesn't refer to incorrigible pieces of knowledge either. The fact that we are bearers of intuitions about a pre-philosophical experience doesn't immediately infer that they are unreliably subjective either. It's just part of the overall explanation of our moral epistemology as to how we come to know what is moral and immoral. For Ross, our intuitions are left open to critical reflection and can be modified since they are prima facie justified only. To me, this sounds like Ross can account for the openness of practical wisdom requiring experience and maturity that an A-T would find plausible. To further push this thought, Ross was also an Aristotle scholar and translator of Aristotle's works. This is why I do not think that Ross demands much theoretical precision and realized that openness about moral matters requires humility when dealing with ethical matters--all the while using the word intuition. 

Moreover, Rawls appeals to gaining reflective equilibrium between our accepted moral intuitions and the principles we use to justify our notions of justice is not wrong. It is not a flagrant irresponsible attitude to try and gain coherence between the principles we think morality is undergirded by and the beliefs we have. An A-T philosopher would always start with the respected opinions of his day, and then evaluate whether they are true or false. That's just an Aristotelian modus operandi. Moreover, Aristotle does not overthrow tradition in much the same way that the word intuition comes to be used in the early Oxbridge ethicists. For Sidgwick thought that moral theory should also explain our common-sense moral beliefs, which are part of our tradition. This belief is shared by Ross as well. 

What might be suspect is coherence as a way to decide moral matters. It can seem very self-serving, even after someone has read Rawls, and Rawls is without the openness that Ross shares with Aristotle's phronesis. However, that is a post for another time. If I were to summarize, I would say that the modern use of thought experiments and intuition come from early ordinary language philosophers who thought meaning independent of our confusion in much the same way Feser thinks natural law theory provides rational grounds to accept the truth of a claim on apart from us. It is irresponsible to group together Rawls as an ethicist and Dennett's use of intuition pumps simply because it is the same word without paying attention the actual historic usage of the word itself. Where better to start than Rossian intuitionism? 

Post on Depth Psychology

I think this post is as good as it gets when it comes to analysis and the claims abstracted from historical authors. It's an interesting read, though I do worry about the reading of Nietzsche that centers around the will-to-power and wonder if the author is being too loose with Schopenhauer.

Depth psychology has also been called false consciousness in Marx, and false consciousness as far as I am aware was never an explanation for action inasmuch as it is an explanation for why we might find some emancipatory alternative to current practices. For this reason, there is a normative angle to why these thoughts are offered. It is not simply about a shared method between these authors (but that thesis of commonality alone between Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Schopenhauer is part of the fun of this post at the same time). The author passes off depth psychology as a blanket program with much in common between a range of thinkers that only minimally share this feature. As such, I wonder if the danger of Strawman is lurking around the corner due to an attempt to ahistoricize these ideas from their historical moments. I would need more than the rantings of a Thomist (A. McIntyre) to substantiate these claims about these ideas.

Naturalism

Nature is a vast thing. For philosophers, the term "naturalism" has many versions. One might be a methodological naturalist believing that one ought to proceed under the assumption that science discovers natural laws while leaving alone ontological naturalism which states that only physical objects and their causal relations exist. A very strong naturalist might be adhere to both versions. In addition, one might consider any number of philosophical descriptive accounts as natural. I might defend a version of non-cognitivism in which I need the work of the emotions as does Alan Gibbard require remorse and guilt at the agential level. Other naturalists might be skeptical that such folk psychological terms really capture any understanding about how people are when they act morally. And the battle rages on philosophically.

Now, what is the point of going through the above motions (other than the really nice picture)? Well, I drop my hat and simply say that these questions have been on my mind lately. Moreover, this blog post goes nowhere but to document my confusions on the matter.

As some of you may know, I start with phenomenological description and proceed from there as a general rule of thumb. The rule is simple: philosophy must start with our lived-experience and whatever is given to us within experience provides a leading-clue as to what ontological level of explanations suffice for philosophy. In this way, I do not think that philosophy is simply preserving biases of unscientific understanding of the world. Instead, I think that philosophy ought to contribute to understanding our worldly experience. To many times in the past, philosophy has tried to pass off concepts that are justified apart from experience, which is namely a Kantian demand. Our concepts must arise from our lived-experience in much his inquiry started with the various points-of-view he thought were basic to human life: knowing, acting and judging. Apart from Kant, the moderns did not do this. Instead, they justified everything according to their basic belief in the epistemic position as primitively basic to human life. That's a little absurd, and shows how it is that modern philosophy with its focus to the epistemic position came to infect the development of analytic philosophy with the same basic belief (such a genealogical analysis should be forthcoming from me, but it is late. In truth, that's a book right there).

What makes naturalism interesting to me is how uncritically accepted as a position it is within mainstream philosophy, and where we are in ethics with respect to what is called moral psychology taking over metaethics. Let me speak to the first and then I will elucidate the climate of ethics in relation to psychology. An anecdote will help. I studied at an all analytic department, and found the same objection constantly wielded against Husserl---Husserl's transcendental idealism is an unattractive and unscientific position. Unscientific was code for "not natural enough". The question usually went: How is it that I could even read that "stuff"? Well, it comes from the fact that I want philosophy to say something more than trailing the coattails of the blind analytic adherence and reverence to the natural sciences. This can be gleaned from ethics.

Ethics is one of the few knowledges that preserves the first-person point of view; it preserves subjectivity to point to Kierkeegard. It talks about what tests we can use to guide our current deliberations, and conceptually describes what the good life might look like. It gives us a language to reflect on the issues of our own life, and the lives of others. Within ethics, naturalism is a dominant position for those describing things like practical rationality, moral epistemology and philosophy of action. All these areas inform the backdrop of what we might call moral psychology, which assumes naturalism implicitly and strikes me as just another reincarnation of the failed attempt to naturalize explanations about laws of logic as laws of psychology. Yet, instead of laws of logic up for grabs, it is the fundamental belief that we are simply objects in an overall chain of determined physical relations deciphered by the natural sciences. This gets us away from experience entirely. It is just another veiled attempt for the natural attitude to describe what should be described in terms of lived subjectivity. Of course, this is just a phenomenologist talking.

For these reasons, I may want to research a dissertation on the foundations of ethical naturalism, or at the very least write a historical genealogy tracing out the concept in its brief history. I bet I would find a less than judicious use of Ockham's razor throughout the history of philosophy, and more to the point if I paid attention to the history of naturalism itself, I would find that the efforts to naturalize normativity with respect to agency puts me at the very start of where the Oxbridge non-naturalists were just a century ago. We have come full-circle only to think that our science is better when, in truth, we forget that science is what Husserl calls "a life-praxis." Science only achieves its meaning for us since it is accomplished by beings with lived subjectivity. When we are so convinced that science can answer all questions philosophically, we privilege science over other forms of human experience and do not see the value in the artistic, literary and cultural productions around us. These, too, aid our understanding of the world--maybe more so than science ever could since they have no real way of corroborating with truth as the scientists want us to believe. Maybe that is true?! But, the point of listening to the arts and other humanities is to show something else--the humanities and the arts contribute to the understanding of the world for us in that they provoke from us meaning. Science can do that along with these very same things, but we must view them as one of the many tools we have to understand our world. We should not let our adherence to naturalism sway us differently.

Nussbaum on Banning the Burqa

Here is a good article about how one might reason about moral problems. Many times I am asked by my family and people outside philosophy what good reasoning about moral matters might look like. This is a review of common political arguments that don't really hold any water when put to a moment of critical reflection.

Nussbaum on banning the burqa. 

Leiter Headache Again

Apparently, Leiter just can't tell the difference between good Heidegger scholarship and bad Heidegger scholarship. In either case, here he recommends a blog post about Heidegger's philosophy. Interestingly, it's rather stupid post about Heidegger from a political theorist and International Relations scholar, not even a philosopher.

In terms of epistemic authority, this is like going to a Chaucer scholar in an English department for an exposition of Churchland's eliminative materialism.

So the cookie crumbles.

The Powers (Alleged?) of Analysis

I have been asking myself lately what exactly is it that I do. First, I have had sustained conversations over the last year of my Ph.D. with several distinguished scholars in the field, and I feel there is no clear-cut way to do philosophy. In fact, doing philosophy feels more eclectic everyday as I navigate the space of historical scholarship and problem-solving. Never the twixt shall meet, it seems. Yet, I want them to meet, I want them to have a sustained conversation with each other since I feel that is the only way this dreaded "Divide" between Analytic and Continental camps can ever be achieved. However, to do so, requires a constant philosophical reflection on method. My adopted strategy is to study Husserl, the most penetrating "Continental" figure ever since he talks about concrete lived experience. That's what is attractive about him. He gives a conceptual architecture to talk about the concrete structures of our lived-experience. A recent reading of a colleagues paper had this to say coming from outside the tension between Analytic/Continental divide. He writes,

...they are analytic philosophers, trained to believe that it is perfectly alright for a philosopher to lift whatever he or she likes and happens to agree with from any historical context, and use it for whatever purposes strike their present fancies, or more fairly, whatever seems most relevant to the problems with which they are occupied, however narrow those problems may be.

I do not know if this is fair or not. Part of me thinks that if past philosophers are in any sense like me, then some degree of "lifting" out of the text is philosophically responsible. This is because if past philosophers internalize the same activity, that is, they try to make timeless arguments to solve problems that face them presently, then we can also appropriate their insights insofar as we are trying to identify the best aspects of past philosophers to solve our current problems. However, this can be done too quickly and may lend itself to bad scholarship. Yet, I do not think every insistence of doing the above amounts to bad philosophy since it is what we might call analysis.

It is conceptual analysis, and it is the tool of the early 20th century ordinary language philosophers. I love Moore and Ross in this regard because they analyzed concepts of the good and right. Sometimes, I feel, articulating the phenomenological richness of these words; they certainly had at the very least "phenomenological tendencies." Alas, however, it is historically erroneous to identify conceptual analysis with phenomenological describing. I am digressing. To do conceptual analysis is to analyze the ordinary meanings of our concepts as they are confused in our language and to give some reflective attention to their clarification. This allows us to see more richely what exactly is the problem and if so, we may have to provide a solution to a problem. I will not count how many solutions suffice for philosophical problems (even counting that it might be the dissolution of the problem that ought to be an answer-- a favorite Derridian strategy). In the end, to do analysis involves several assumptions:
1. The confusion in our language reflects the conceptual confusion we face presently.
2. Philosophical reflection can clarify the extent to which this is a problem and then theorize solutions of all types of this problem.
3. In order for 1 and 2 to be true, it also must be true that the confusion we presently face can be picked out by analyzing the concepts we use and that these concepts are fixed in their meaning since we continually encounter confusion over their meaning and usage.

So, what is the real question with analysis as it is with all philosophy? We must become reflective of those moments in philosophy where we, philosophers, become mindful about the limits of philosophizing. At this moment, I am pressed to ask why can't we do philosophy within the immanence of our own lives? If I am faced with a philosophical quandary and I approach something as a problem, I am not being historically irresponsible by seeing that others have faced the same dilemma as me. Instead, I reflect and think about it for a long while in relation to my own experience and life. I know that others have thought about, for instance, "what exactly are values?" Moreover, if there are values, what does the ontology of the world look like? I know that neither common-sense, faith or science can take the reins solely on this question. I often think about this question and consider it a reflective moment in my life to arrive at an answer that best fits the evidence and self-reflection I bring to bear exactly on this problem presently before me. In so doing, I think this question cannot be satisfactorily answered from all options I have heard from ethical naturalists like Gilbert Harman or David Copp. I adopt some strand of moral realism, and this has followed from the strategy that assumed implicitly in 1, 2 and 3 above.

Now, if we think all of philosophy is a problem presently before me, then there is the danger of excess. We will convince ourselves that we can lift anything out of a philosophical text regardless of historical context. That I am sure is right about the quoted passage above. However, it is another thing to say completely that an entire group of people will do so without being historically responsible. Being a philosopher is also to live out one's life and experience the world philosophically. Our experience is richly historical, but does unfold presently. This is part of the problem really. We cannot reinvent the wheel with every problem, but there may be permutations of a philosophical problem that come to a special light in our day. It shoudld be right that we can then use analysis to find out the limits of our problems, and we need to do this in order to honor the previous historical contexts that allow us to have philosophical conversations. Futhermore, some conversations are richly historical while others are more to our moment. I cannot be sure which moment passes before me when I philosophize, but I think it is suitable to both be mindful of the problems and how history has shaped our ability to face the problem before us. Perhaps, again, this is why there is a division between problem-solving qua Analytics and historical-textual analysis qua Continentals. It would seem the most sensible that a synthesis of these two tendencies to be a more sensible option in philosophy than the exclusion of one over the other.

Critchley's New Column, Leiter and What I Am

So, I get a headache anytime Leiter, a talented philosopher of law, goes off the handle and insists on a select few "real" philosophers. He's done it with Judith Butler, calling her a bad writer -- as compared to his colleague the celebrated Martha Nussbaum. Sometimes, Leiter does it with the Derrida and Levinas scholar, Simon Critchley. Now, Mr. Critchley has in some fairness become the Dennett of more popular philosophy, though I think Leiter with his naturalist inclinations would disagree with the level of contribution Dennett makes versus Critichley. Critchley recently wrote a book on how philosophers have died. After perusing the text at Chapters, I put it down. It need not be held in my hands again. Now, Critchley has a column with the New Yorker called The Stone.  Critchley has flown the nest on this one as a fellow blog friend puts it here.

But, let's get back to my headache. Without any "real" argument, Leiter calls Critchley a "bullshit artist" and thinks that "shut the fuck up" is the right response to Mr. Critchley. Again, he is without taste in his demeanor towards Continental philosophy, or what in the past he has called Party-Line Continental philosophy. This is not really justified, but just a deeply ingrained bias. Critchley is an accomplished Levinas scholar in his own right. Yet, to see this accomplished status, someone might have to actually consider writers like Levinas and Derrida philosophers. And that's just it. Leiter and the rest of the Anglophone world think that we're trying to pull the wool over their eyes with obscure terms and ambiguous phrases. If a plainly educated person has no chance of understanding what philosophy you write, then you might as well not write the damn thing--that's their attitude. And, how many times do you know of an averagely educated person that can understand Russell on referential meaning, or what exactly non-cognitivism means for Alan Gibbard? They pretend as if the level of clarity they have achieved corresponds directly to what is valuable in philosophy, and that's a line I just can't ever buy. Moreover, this provides a good example to say exactly why.

These Leiterites don't want to hear that the structure Levinas is trying to describe defies description in the language typical to epistemological, metaphysical and ethical language, or that Derrida's criticism of Western metaphysics relies on a non-demonstrative strategy. On the first, Levinas is trying to capture exactly how others are given in my experience of them, yet typical conceptual schemas fail to capture this givenness. In this way, Levinas tries to overcome both what Husserl and Heidegger have also said on this issue. The move to demonstrate Derrida's points would succumb to the very thing he wants to avoid, namely, that meaning is univocal in any conceptual system.

Now, I am sympathetic to Levinas since he is a way into moral phenomenology, and am skeptical that Derrida's project could ever achieve success. However, I will at least give their due, and make my way through their texts. I have no problem with philosophers being rude. I am rude at times, and Socrates was fairly rude to Euthyphro. Euthyphro wasn't a philosopher, however. The consistent blog-bullying of Leiter amounts to philosophers chopping their own legs off. We are already so under-appreciated in a world that doesn't value art, history, literature -- let alone philosophy -- that I don't think we can forget Davidson's principle of charitability. There is a level of respect we should have to each other, even if we disagree with the scope of methodology, project and analysis. As a phenomenologist, I have nothing in common with eliminative materialists, but I would never call the Churchlands abhorrent for their view on matters of qualia, intentionality and Husserl. I'd argue they are wrong, but would do so in a way befitting the Churchlands as philosophers of mind.

As for Critichley's entry on being a philosopher, I really have nothing to say. I've always preferred Husserl's notion of a "perpetual beginner." When we take up reflection, we begin anew. We are finite, and can't re-invent the wheel with every new philosophical question. We can become mindful of what philosophy means for us and how we are related to it through our common philosophical history. One wonders why Critchley began with the Thracian maid and Thales? What does that anecdote say about us other than philosophers are so overwhelmed by their awe they don't notice wells at their feet?

Ironically, Critchley has become the face of the public intellectual as public as Socrates inaugurated his practice of philosophy. He has a column like Socrates challenging normal people in the agora. In this parallel, one can only hope that people will find some transformation when reading philosophy.

Commentary on Jason Stanley's "Crisis in Philosophy"

Below are my comments to Stanley and others, awaiting approval from Insidehighered.com. His post is revealing of the deeply entrenched idea that philosophy can only be about inquiries from the perspective of a epistemically-centered subject. 
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I want to address the weird interpretation of Positivism from Stanley's post. I earlier commented with an ambiguous phrase, the politics of reading, and now wish to give that phrase a little more bite. First, I explain how it is that positivism is still exclusionary implicitly, and secondly, this can be found within the "story" Stanley provides.

It should be noted that positivism has internal to its own texts a disavowal of metaphysically queer properties like values of right, wrong, beautiful. In essence, anything not corroborated by the principle of verificationism at that time was deemed to consist of poetry. Any philosophy not in line with the principle of verificationism and compositionality is utterly worthless, ambiguous and vague. For these opposite philosophers that oppose this attempt at clarity and rigor exemplify the worst of those they were fighting against, those that " played the role that philosophers are supposed to be play in society – challenging powerful social forces that appeal to mysticism and faith for support." This further excludes any philosophy that would elevate either mysticism, faith or areas not easily confirmed by positivism's scientistic commitments. In this way, it is still exclusionary of what experiences we can talk about that do not conform. If it cannot be stated clearly and, studied scientifically, then one should not even think it can be talked about, let alone philosophized about. Thus, one can already see this commitment makes one suspicious of what one can even read that is philosophical.

Moreover, what makes positivism and largely Analytic philosophy its best and worst IS the continual belief that all modes of inquiry assume the centrality of an epistemically-centred subject. It is not surprising that Stanley sees Zizek and Nietzsche as deviating from the modern tradition of being in line with Descartes and Spinoza. The modern period can be identified as the emergence of the impersonal subject that must justify its epistemological and metaphysical commitments. 

One can do philosophy in other ways not in accord with this overall implicit story of how philosophy must be about the epistemically-centred subject. For instance, there are types of experiences that do not easily conform to this epistemically-centred subjectivity. I am not only a philosopher, but I am a historically mediated subject. I live in a lifeworld that has been sedimented to think in terms of the natural attitude in such and such a way. I am connected to others through communal rituals, religion and politics. In this way, there are strands of philosophy that analyze our lived-experience in ways that attend directly to these experiences while not construing these as problems ahistoricized to an impersonal epistemically-centred subject. That's where the real disconnect with the other humanities is (and speaks to the success of Continental philosophy outside analytic circles in other humanities).

Stanley's pedagogical philosophy also follow this strange line of reasoning--construing the identities of students as holistic worldviews (however incomplete they are to the university student freshman in the intro course), and these belief systems are further rendered along the same line of tradition he reads positivism into, a preserving the continuity from Descartes onward. He offers them another belief to replace their own, to put them into cognitive tension with the self-reflection hopefully modeled on the manner he implicitly assumes is at issue philosophically, so much in fact that once again, the inevitable elevation of science and reason commences. Stanley writes, 

"Logical Positivism, in its embrace of the transformational power of science and reason, does not mark a break with traditional philosophy. Rather it is a continuation of it."

Membership, being part of a tradition, is no means to justify that tradition over others as exemplary. Traditions themselves give no warrant for their own beliefs anymore than my insight that philosophy should pay attention to lived-experience of our concrete human life (if this indeed constitutes a separate tradition). This is why I read Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas personally. It is rather strange that we should be so ingrained and socialized into a tradition, that our preference and even how we read ourselves into the tradition of philosophy is, at this point, revealed as a politics of reading, a cultural outgrowth of methodology. This is revealed also in a certain Brian calling continental figures as anti-philosophical theorists. Is it anti-philosophical to question long-held assumptions in the history of Western thought, and to expose these long-held assumptions? 

I think not. If that held as well, then when Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment denounced that "meaning ain't in the head" as the tradition of philosophy had held, then semantic externalism would never gotten off the ground. It's just that this mode of questioning didn't abandon the story of the epistemically-centred subject that drives much of Anglophone philosophy currently. As such, Heidegger and Derrida can be read as questioning long-held assumptions in Western philosophy. That's very philosophical to do, and that is NOT DEGENERATE by any stretch of the imagination. Anyone that thinks otherwise cannot stand to interrogate the very foundations they appropriate when engaging in philosophy. Philosophy is always a questioning of itself and its limits while also addressing basic concerns that repeat throughout its history. 

So let's be clear what I have claimed. Stanley's construal of what counts as philosophy is itself a historical bias of placing first and foremost the concerns of the epistemic subject. This can also explain how he identifies Positivism within continuing from Descartes onward. Thus, it can be seen that it is a legitimate concern contrary to Stanley's claim (and other supporters) that there is something anti-philosophical about philosophers that a) question this leitmotif of an entire tradition and b) look to other forms of experience outside thinking that philosophy should always be continuous with the natural sciences. The refusal to assent to either a) and/or b) is the result of a historical and methodological priority that is at best an uncritical "politics of reading." 

Phenomenological Descriptions of the Humean Practical Reasoning Enthusiasts

Here is a recent post I have slightly contributed to. It is one of those examples in ethics where I think Husserlian phenomenology (as well as what Don Ihde calls post-phenomenology, the type of phenomenology that integrates itself with disciplines beyond itself like social sciences or what Dan Zahavi does with Husserl and cognitive science etc.) could be used to do some good. I know I have advocated this type of thing before many times here, nor do I know how I would proceed on this problem either.

Any thoughts?