On the Sense of the Thing?

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Heidegger, Scheler and the Problem of Value

Preliminary Dissertation Outline

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

           

1.1 What is the Problem of Value?

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

           

1.3 A Candidate Portrayal of Emotivism in Stevenson

           

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

           

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

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

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

            2.1 Kierkegaardian Anxiety in relation to SZ.

            2.2 Nietzsche’s Drive of Life in relation to SZ

2.3 Heidegger’s Departure from Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology

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

            2.5 The Challenge of Ethics in SZ

            2.6 Heidegger’s Conception of the Person in SZ

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

            3.1 Scheler’s Conception of Phenomenology vs. Heidegger

            3.2 Emotions in the Formalism

            3.3 Emotions in the Nature of Sympathy

            3.4 The Emotional Tonality of Human Life and Value Heirarchies

           

            3.5 Ordo Amoris and Reasons of the Heart over Rational Reasons

3.6 Scheler’s Concept of the Person

            3.7 Ethics Without a Decision-Procedure and Phronesis

Chapter 4: The Central Difference Between Heidegger and Scheler

4.1 Methodological Differences Between Fundamental Ontology and Phenomenological Attitude

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

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

            4.4 Scheler and Heidegger on Intersubjectivity

4.5 Conclusions and the Promise of a Moral Phenomenology

Chapter 5: A Phenomenological Account of Ethics: Some Objections

           

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

5.2 Response to Sinnott-Armstrong

5.3 Harman’s Moral Relativism as an Objection

5.4 Response to Harman and Non-Contingency of Emotions

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

5.6 Response to Kirchin

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

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

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

5.10 New Directions in Virtue Ethics?

Scheler

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

Butler a Blast from the Past

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

Continental Philosophy Video

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

Zen College life has me wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Weakness of Robust Evidentialism

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

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

(1) All beliefs must be justified by evidence

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

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

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

And by extension we have (5):

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

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

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

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

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

Qadhafi's Dissertation

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

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

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

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

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

Experience and its Intelligibility

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

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

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

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

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

Scheler, Good News and Teaching News

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

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

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

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

Dermot Paper on the History of Intentionality

Wonderful paper.

John Drummond Paper about Virtuous Persons

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

Fox News Insider at Media Matters

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

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninja and Shadows

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

Ninja's Philosophical Dispositions

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

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

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

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

The Paradox of the Shadow

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

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

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

North Texas Philosophical Association

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

Philosophical Strangeness

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

MidSouth Philosophy Conference at the University of Memphis

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

Continental Philosophy Blog

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

Husserlian Encounter with General Pragmatism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthology review at NDPR

Another interesting anthology about the analytic/continental divide.

Cogburn's Observation about Leiterism

Cogburn's sentiments are wholly real, and unfortunate.

Heidegger, Dreyfus and Leiter, Oh My!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fox News President Roger Ailes's Advice to News Anchors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence

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

Philosophical New Years

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

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

Eagleton's Death of Universities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of the Year

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

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

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

Geeky

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


Ability Scores:

Strength-11

Dexterity-11

Constitution-11

Intelligence-20

Wisdom-15

Charisma-16


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


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


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


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


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

Thomson on Heidegger and Levinas AND Co-incidence

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

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

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

Warby Parker Glasses

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

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

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

The Tea Party and the Politics of Negation

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

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

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

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

.

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

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

Retraction of Angst

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

On the Person

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

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

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

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

Phenomenologically Thick Concepts

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politics and Everything Conservative Under the Sun

What is conservative really mean for American politics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming Conference

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

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

"The Phenomenological Inadequacy of Ethical Naturalism"

Interesting Thread

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

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

Another Mildstone

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

So, at the end of this term:

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

Steps still to overcome:

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

For Fun:

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