Continentalists, Americanists and Feminists Strike Back

Many have come here and sometimes requested opinions in private correspondence about my conjoined interests in analytic ethics and phenomenology. Allow me the luxury of anticipating a thoughtful response.

Lo and behold, I woke up this morning to find on Leiter's blog a disparaging analysis of the type of philosophy he marginalizes had organized against his rankings with the Pluralist Guide to Philosophy Departments. Now, I have often wondered why he was so invested in the PGR rankings for philosophy departments. I have very much advocated on this blog a climate of co-operation and coexistence with my fellow philosophers no matter their self-identification because when axe comes down from those that don't appreciate the humanities at all, administrators won't distinguish a Heideggerian from a Strawsonian.

I told my logic students last semester to avoid hasty generalizations, and we should too. Perhaps, Leiter hasn't taught one of these classes in a while, otherwise he wouldn't have said this:

SPEP represents a group of philosophers in the U.S. who strongly identify with a certain conception of philosophy, most traceable to Heidegger (I have called it Party-Line Continentalism), and which identifies philosophy more closely with the kind of stuff that goes on in English Departments and cultural studies, than with the natural sciences, linguistics, history or psychology.   These are generalizations, but as Nietzsche often remarks, the rule is usually more interesting than the exception.

SPEP is not a homogenous group. To be fair, there is an "air of Heideggerian orthodoxy" and I deeply disagree with this. I am not alone, however. This can be seen if A) Leiter were to attend an actual meeting and B) look at the program. Every celebrated Husserl scholar I love attends SPEP and these people are by no stretch of the imagination liking the Heideggerian motif. One SPEP member, for instance, told me that Continental philosophy had become textual exegesis to such an extent that they no longer want to talk about structures of experience, and this is why phenomenology had more in common with the analytic tradition. I've heard this from several people.

SPEP is more numerous than I would like to count. There are people working on race, politics and gender. There are people very suspicious of phenomenology and there are people equally suspicious of the poststructuralism. Likewise, I cannot say that even with the Heideggerian orthodoxy, Continental philosophy is moving in different directions than when Carl Schrag and company founded the group. Marion and Henry, for example, are re-inventing phenomenology to articulate structures of religious experience while more naturalistic inclined phenomenologies are working alongside cognitive scientists on embodiment. I know one Merleau-Pontyian that is working on neo-natal development. If I were to include myself in the mixture, then I embrace the reflective equilibrium of Rawls but want to get clear first on what exactly constitutes moral experience in agency, values and otherness--a metaethical phenomenology of sorts which brought me to my current project of pitting Scheler and Heidegger together.

Now, let me concede even if it were true that these departments resemble English and Cultural Studies departments, then what would be wrong with that in principle? Why can't literature inform us with just as much as science unless of course Leiter thinks science more reliable in producing answers to the type of philosophical problems that constitute philosophy. This is what I suspect is the case. The divide between Leiter and these group of graduate schools is a disagreement about what constitutes philosophical questions and ultimately the methods employed in answering those questions. Further, I speculate that this difference comes across in the PGR rankings. There has been a cultural gap for years between these two and I think it is about time that this divide goes away. It won't go away any time soon nor can we afford the divisiveness professionally---this is a point of prudence, however, not substance. Substance is what divides.

There are times when literature can be more helpful than science, depending on the question. Let me take for example a question I have often thought about since my undergraduate days. What should be the lasting philosophical significance of Auschwitz? How should an ethicists respond to the Holocaust? I think these are questions that philosophy can answer, and some like Adorno have. Beyond that, however, as a side project, I am taking an English literature theory seminar that examines Holocaust literature. I do not think this question is easily answered in any ONE way or the other. Yet, it might help to read some Primo Levi and other survivor stories to get clear as to how exactly those people understood their experience.

Art can serve equally well in a concern like this that science cannot. Several German artists also represent a lifetime of being raised in the country that committed the Holocaust. For example, Anselm Kiefer moved me with his piece Lot's Wife.

Also, I want to speak to the SAAP "alliance"

One important caveat about the generalization:  in this case, the SPEP folks have also allied with philosophers involved with the Society for American Philosophy.  This alliance is political, not intellectual:   like the SPEPPies, the SAPies, feel marginalized from the dominant tendencies in the profession. 

There has been several moves of exclusion, and this exclusion can be seen from the treatment of central authors in the American tradition. Dewey comes to mind. Here is a man that did not have an idle pen, wrote as much as Husserl from what I can tell, and is often not even taught at top recommended philosophy departments (despite Dewey's mainstay was Columbia University). Moreover, I take this move personally since much of SAAP and SPEP call attention to the same matters.

My department is particularly represented at SAAP meetings as we have people doing dissertations that fuse Heidegger and Dewey together. Some work in philosophy of literature and have equal interests in Peirce and Gadamer. I am not saying that SIUC should be regarded as typical. I don't know. I just have friends that work in both areas and it is quite common for my department to have people common to both sets. Therefore, there is at least prima facie evidence to suggest that those interested in American philosophy might have equal interest in Continental figures. Therefore, it is not just that SAAP and SPEP are politically aligned. Instead, there is common ground between the two intellectually.

In this post, I have shown several things:

1. SPEP is made up of more than just Party-line Continentalists (and even that distinction is moribund and superficial. I've spoken about it before here);

2. Science can and does figure into the work of some phenomenologists who also attend SPEP;

3. Even if we grant Leiter's caveat about the work resembling English and Cultural Studies, there can still be philosophical work done that takes its inspiration from English and Cultural Studies. Holocaust literature provides me with a framework to ask questions about Auschwitz in as much as art does (See the Levi and Kiefer examples above)

AND,

4. There has been an attempt to control what counts as philosophy and this has resulted in the exclusion of American philosophers just as much as Continental philosophers. It is perhaps just surprising that by excluding Continentals, the Continentalists gathered at several schools, put a stake in the ground and declared some turf. From what I can tell, Americanists weren't even that lucky. SIUC is a wonderful little island for that reason.

Of those that I know, several of them are interested in cross-fertilization projects and this suggests prima facie reasons for rejecting Leiter's characterization of SAAP and its relation to SPEP.

Analytic Versus Continental by James Chase and Jack Reynolds

I recently got the following text out at the library. Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy by James Chase and Jack Reynolds. As I've said before, this blog originally arose as a way to synthesize my analytic experience with the Continental turn I made. Therefore, I have always enjoyed pieces that synthesize philosophical differences. I believe my enthusiasm got the better of me.

I read through several chapters. The phenomenology chapter did a very brief job of explaining the Husserlian roots, and it did a great job of putting the reader in contact with those who are critical of phenomenology and the dialectic strategy phenomenologists constantly employ against the criticisms. This is where the book excelled. It excelled at highlighting and underscoring the major themes of the positions. That's about all.

This book had so much potential. The extensive capability to describe such widespread traditions with charity impressed me greatly. However, that's where the book stopped. It emphasized a moderately controlled attempt at engagement only when greater exploration of methodological differences can be better articulated. Yet, it's been nearly half a century and any two that are capable of such splendid exposition don't need to wait---unless that's the subject of a future book.

Yeah Okay But Still Blog's Solid Ruminations on the Divide

Back in 2006, I started this blog as a field of exploration. Some thoughts and threads have been abandoned, others refined and others completely rejected. Originally, I entitled the blog the Chasm as living metaphor for what felt at the time as a living reality, the dreaded Continental-Analytic Divide. During my Masters, I'd attended a fairly analytic school and several people there made me feel like reading Being and Time was akin to publicly reading porn. Five years later, I'm still going on strong, planning a dissertation on rejecting Heidegger's account of the emotions and articulating a replacement view with Scheler in mind.

I only live out the drama of this Divide at conferences from older folks. In Memphis, I was at a conference recently and an analytic philosopher told me that Continentals take seriously Hegel, and we don't. For a minute, I thought about saying something about the Neo-Hegelians at Pitt, but I just let it bounce off.  Though, it didn't really bounce off. It bugged me the entire time I was there. I thought maybe that was the goal, to razzle my fi'nazzle. Later, the same gentleman said "Hi" in a very congenial and professional manner. I think this gentleman is convinced. I asked him later who he thought had been overtaken by Hegelianism. He said "Heidegger and all that French stuff!" He was simply ignorant.

Years ago, I went over to UBC to see Peter Singer. After he had left the session with the UBC graduate students,  a PhD student that had asked a rather juvenile question and somehow thought my response to his question to Peter Singer respectful of his intellect came over to introduce himself to me (I don't want to get into it now).  He said, "So what do you want to study after the MA?" I said, "Husserl and phenomenology." He took a step back and looked at me if I were a bizarre three-headed monster. "Why would you want to study that? There are no jobs in that!" I smirked, the very same smirk I now make. We do just fine over here.

These two stories come up in my head whenever someone wants to discuss the Divide as Nick does here. In truth, I think it is collapsing, but it is collapsing more with the fact that it stands as its own specialty. In addition, it is collapsing because there are entire groups of people that have went into philosophy, never read any Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida and they are really curious. The curious thing, no matter how you slice it, is Continental thought has acquired more significance than analytic philosophy. It bugs them to death that the Barnes'n Noble book shelf has 12 Foucault books and maybe two books by Searle (the same is true at Chapters). By comparison, Continental thought addresses/addressed lived-experience of death, politics and guilt to name a few. We often seek out literary expressions of these concepts, find them in art work and talk about the world completely from how subjectivity plays out in experience itself. We do not seek to limit ourselves with Ockham's razor to the point that we shave away what can be talked about, and more importantly, Continental thought embraces how wide and open human experience is. This means that I don't have to reduce the problem of death and meaning of life to the position of an epistemic agent. This is just how analytic philosophers compose and construct their writing. They write from the position of an epistemic subject all the time, and assume that all forms of noteworthy writing will assume this position and impose logical dialectic onto the problem. As such, you get a de-personalized and purely epistemic rendition of a philosophical problem that matters to everyone. I go to Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Heidegger to understand human finitude and death, not analytic philosophy.

My analytic MA will no doubt help later on in the job search for the analytic barricade remnant of the last generation of scholars still holding on for dear life, and having several members on my committee from the Continental world will also help me. I am a rarit in disposition and training. In my philosophical disposition, I hate the extremes of this Divide. I hate hanging out with people that have only gone to Continental schools. They get rather blemished easily when they don't know who Bernard Williams is, and can't quite get what the Chinese Room thought experiment means. They are usually over-dramatic in their personal life and overly-embellished in their writing to the point it hurts my head to read. I also get rather pissed with the severely ahistorical analytic that would rather understand his/her contribution to a problem. The contribution made to a particular problem is so severed from the historical context that the PhD student is convinced of the contribution they are making to philosophy is original. This is the point of de-historicizing philosophy; it makes analytic philosophers feel very good about doing so little in truth. How many dissertations out there articulate a Neo-Humean account of practical reason? Seriously. I get that Hume thinks practical reason is not a source of ends as Kant thinks. I really do, but coming up with another account while taking seriously philosopher X's refutation of the general account and introducing your own -ism is not interesting. It is only thought provoking to a climate of de-historicized logic choppers.

Now, the above two are caricatures like James' caricatures of rationalists and empiricists in Pragmatism. There are examples I've met, but I've not met them in a while or met more. Most of us fall between the extremes. All philosophers are guilty of rhetorical flourish. Several self-identified analytic philosophers told me that philosophy as a subject should be written so clearly that a generally-educated person off the street could understand it. This general audience for analytic philosophy is a myth--it's an undergraduate pedagogical device and nothing more. I have not find the general reader yet that could understand it. I have met people that have read Melville and Sartre's Nausea. I doubt that literary minds could do justice to Being and Nothingness without guidance anymore than someone thrown into reading any work in analytic philosophy. "Hey you, over there. The guy in the scarf. Tell me what you think Parfit's account of the person might be!" This is an unrealistic expectation and can best be explained by analogy. Like art, philosophy's unfortunate fate is what it takes to appreciate it. The appreciation of philosophy requires time, training and practice just as much as it requires a lot of historical and contextual training to fully appreciate art and its history. Mostly, it requires a sense of living history to do philosophy well, and it is this awareness that makes us sensitive to the possibilities of how open we must be when dealing with philosophical texts and the philosophical conversations we have with each other. This is why the assumptions/methodology of logical atomism cannot constrain the openness needed when viewing Nietzsche's texts. As Nick, the author of Yeah Okay But Still puts it,

I have often been guilty of a “default” adherence to this method, and this is due in large part to my training. Yet, I (and we) must acknowledge that other forms of argument exist, ones which have wholly different validity-conditions.  Nietzsche argued, for example, that belief in a Christian god was no longer “credible” given the discovery of Christianity’s historical origins.  An Analytic Philosophy Monkey will look at this argument , utter the phrase: “genetic fallacy”, and move on.  If Nietzsche really intends to demonstrate, in a deductive fashion, the nonexistence of god, then he indeed commits the genetic fallacy.

Yet, surely he is trying to do something else.  In telling us about the dark, angry, psychologically troubling origins of Christian Good and Evil, he is trying to affect a different kind of change in his reader.  He knows full well that these considerations cannot entail the nonexistence of god.  Yet his argument seems to have a kind of importance.  This importance derives straightforwardly from its context: a Christian reader encounters it and is troubled by it. In order to understand why this is so, we must know so much more about this reader’s psychology, why he believes what he does, why his beliefs are important to him.  If we treat the argument as a straightforward logical deduction , we miss what is essentially an invitation, an opportunity to delve into this person’s life and the significance that philosophy can have for him.

Philosophizing is not simply about presenting ideas in argumentative dialectic. However, it is deeper than that, I feel. There is a passion for life animating Nietzsche's work, and this passion cannot be picked up by people enthralled by the fact that logic is ontologically-binding on reality, or what Nick has called the prominence of logical atomism. This is why so many of these problems in analytic philosophy take shape as they do. Since philosophy has no other method other than to think logical norms dictate how we ought to reason about the problems before us, philosophers internalize these norms to the point that thinking clearly and logically define the writing and its activity. This is not bad in itself and hence my annoyance at French obscurantism. The point, however, is that the confluence of factors that feed into philosophy should not over-emphasize one aspect that it goes on wholly unaware of its history---a sobering point as many top Leiterite philosophy programs eliminate or simplify their history requirements. I think this point is well made in the opening of Bret Davis' Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit, 

Philosophy perhaps always involves the frustrated attempt to get back to where we have already begun, to get this foundation in full view, if not indeed to lay it ourselves. We then repeat this backward step with an introduction to what we have disclosed, trying to determine the very reading of the reading we have given. This backward stepping is both the virtue and the folly of philosophy...Heidegger asked for his texts to be read as "ways--not works (Wege--nicht Werke, GA: 1:437)", we are invited to pursue the paths of thought his texts open up, rather than forever attempting merely to faithfully reconstruct his "system." In order to genuinely read a great thinker, both critically and "faithfully," one must go beyond merely reproducing his or her thought "in their own terms." Reading is interpreting; thinking is being on the way of a thought and happily so. The task is to attune oneself to what is question-worthy in a thinker's thoughts, to take up his way and not simply imitate his works (Emphasis mine, p 1-2).

I could not put it better myself. For philosophers to genuinely participate with a work in philosophy, one is required to take up this invitation into the very hermeneutic effort in which these texts presuppose and re-constitute in our appropriation. Mere imitation is never enough.

Taibbi's Article on Bachmann

Matt Taibbi's article almost makes me scared. Originally, I did not think the contemptuous laughter of the cultural elite (if that is what I am, or more than likely taken to be) is full of itself. That laughter discredits her, makes Bachmann a source of irritation that one handles like the awkward cousin nobody likes. You laugh at the things she says, and "move on." However, Taibbi might be right to end the article on the nightmarish prospect of Bachmann's rise to the American Presidency:

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.

Obviously, I owe Taibbi a beer sometime and must apologize for my laughter.

What is Marriage

Here's a link to a paper by two political scientists and Princeton philosopher arguing for an anti-gay conception of marriage.

Over at Philosophy, Etc., the refutation is well-argued.

I don't think I have anything to add except one fact. The natural view of marriage as facilitating human reproduction is argued as a "metaphysical fact." The insight shared by French feminists, post-structural theorists and thinkers like Levinas is clearly suspicious of Western metaphysics for tending to promote discourses that subsume all difference into a category propped up and passed off as metaphysically real. Such suspicions drive at the heart of thinking women are lesser than men due to apparent metaphysical arguments just as much as systemic discrimination against Blacks in the American South was propped up by phrenology. This is why discourses of the "Other" are so pertinent, and cannot be ignored.

New College of the Humanities

I have been following the links provided by Leiter's blog about Grayling's New College of the Humanities.

I encountered someone on this thread that made some odious generalizations about public universities--which I still believe are necessary.

Last Exit Books, the Hidden Gem of Kent, OH

Years ago, I courted my wife while she attended Kent State. Last Exit Books was a tiny "hole in the wall" with the philosophy section behind a curtained room. Today, it is much bigger, expanding beautifully with cozy couches and chairs. For $23 dollars, I picked up the following titles:

1. Hardcover of Heidegger and the Will On the Way to Gelassenheit by Bret Davis.

2. Paperback of Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine by Margaret Whitford.

It should be mentioned that the hardcover of Davis' book had been wrapped, and untouched. The Whitford book was free from annotation as well.

The philosophy section was very well-stocked, probably due to the fact that Kent State also runs an MA in philosophy. Some of the books make it back for whatever reason. I met a couple from New York that raided the literary and popular culture sections. I met another woman who was friends with a professor of philosophy at Akron and with a degree in mathematics was trying to find something in the philosophy of mathematics. Needless to say, the crowd I met in 20 minutes might be a very good sample of the reflective types that make this bookstore thrive. I highly recommend it.

There are still some very good primary texts of Irigaray there owing to some upper level class or seminar no doubt.

Exposing Entrenched Political Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 3: Two Arguments Against Libertarianism

I want to take issue with the fidelity to free markets. This post was prompted by watching Senator Ron Paul’s very faithful commitment to free markets and libertarianism in the recent Republican debate for the party’s nomination for the presidency. For him and libertarians like him, America was founded on the concept of liberty as articulated by libertarianism (I find this historical legitimizing of libertarianism problematic, but won’t get into in this post). A bold defense of liberty requires that we leave others alone. As such, libertarianism as a political and moral philosophy usually puts its principle:

Principle of Non-Intervention of Another’s Autonomy (PNIAA hereafter) states that agents ought to never interfere with the free exercise of another’s liberty and that the range of rights of others shares in this same principle reciprocally.

PNIAA is the fundamental principle that generates rights considerations politically and on the intra-personal level it generates a respect of an agent’s autonomy. In this way, it does come close to Kantian ethics, but in Kantian ethics, the respect for autonomy can decidedly inform more than what we ought not to do. It can generate some duties about what ought to do. PNIAA’s first shortcoming is that a deontological principle that forbids interference with the exercise of another’s autonomy can only generate principles of non-intervention, it can generate no positive duties. As such, adequate moral theories generate action guidance for both positive and negative duties. This theory is entirely one-sided. Therefore, it should be rejected.

Another fatal flaw of libertarianism is a flaw of its Kantian cousin—the isolated subject (what we can also call a self) necessary for such robust exercise of personal liberty. This is what is necessary for PNIAA to "get off the ground", that is, to make any sense whatsoever, yet the isolated subject does not exist. There is no concept of self that is atomistic and so autonomous that it can be abstracted from the concrete lived-experience of a self acting in the world. Selves are relational, and this relational aspect of the self is always becoming, always making possible my actions. It cannot be blatantly ignored. Selves know who they are from their interaction with others in a public space. I disclose myself in action as Arendt would claim and for my action to have any meaning whatsoever, it must appear before others in a very public space. Others must recognize what it is I have done, and a philosophical examination of the self acting in the world must articulate the necessity of otherness. Others recognize, accept, judge, hate, despise, vilify and enjoy who I am, what I have done and how my identity and actions resonate to the community. If I am an entertainer, I know that I am a good entertaining by being in relation to others.

In libertarianism, the self is completely abstracted from the concrete effects of a self relating to others. The theory in American political rhetoric takes on a dimension of the hypothetical, yet if your ideal does not mesh with how it is lived in practice, then what Ron Paul and other free-market enthusiasts are doing is using libertarianism as a trick. It is a trick to deceive you into favoring a system in which wealthy politicians already benefit. Libertarianism is attractive from the sense that it emphasizes no strings upon the state to affect the self-determination of those who work hard, and by work hard I facetiously mean those that have money already. It provides the myth of the self-made man that has entire control over what he can do if given enough freedom to do so. In libertarianism, the robust conception of a completely free self does not come with any aspect of relationality to it. This means that environment has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you suffer. All you have to do is bootstrap yourself and you can transcend to wealthy heights. The actual data supplied by social scientists that study social mobility is more depressing than we'd like to admit.

As far back as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it has been realized that the actual political conditions that foster the conditions under which we all live has a direct relation on whether or not we can achieve the good life. It was Aristotle and not Marx that first had this insight. Here, the “good life” does not mean a condo in the Hamptons, or a top spot in a wealthy career. The good life is something more akin to living a life in which the goods of one’s life: friendship, justice, family, knowledge and even wealth are balanced such that one is permanently content. There is no one good that you possess that takes central attention away from any others, and it is the type of life that when looked back from the deathbed, one can say they have lived a good life.

Given that Americans are so obsessed with the exercise of their freedom in consumer-like ways, this argument usually falls on deaf ears. However, the intuition behind it is sound. Rather than focus on a moral and political philosophy that promotes a lofty conception of the self, we should focus instead on promoting a dialogue that examines the ends of what we want our society to become. It should not be one in which the exercise of freedom can only be understood in economic terms of utility. That is a base conception already of how we are, and once someone is trapped in that instrumental reasoning of means-to-end mentality of a cost-benefit analysis, one cannot see the error of that way of thinking. Time and time again, I get "into it" with free market enthusiasts (and one economics graduate student) and they cannot understand how value (meant here as a reason for why someone acts) can be intrinsic and non-instrumental. This creates a problem--namely that moral reasons largely lose their purpose (though some versions of utilitarianism might survive). The exercise of freedom to create and live has more dimensions than the way Americans tend to always associate the exercise of their freedom to the accrue of profit. There's more to life, and the Aristotelian way of understanding this insight facilitates a better way to address what America ought to become.

If the political world fosters conditions such as a disparity between all the resources necessary to live the good life, then it does not promote human flourishing. Libertarianism is dangerous for that reason. It divorces the communal structures that come to play out and determine how people can exercise their capacities to better themselves. Therefore, I recommend that what replaces a fidelity to free-markets in our public discourse is a renewed consideration as to what we think the conditions of Americans desire for the flourishing of our country rather than insist on ideologies that are blatantly false in their metaphysical articulation of what a self is.

Exposing Entrenched Power Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 2: Naive Originalism and the Constitution

The Tea Party and conservatives have for a long time complained about President Obama and liberals not respecting the US Constitution. The same goes for the reverse. When Conservatives are in power, Liberals then complain that Conservatives are not respecting the Constitution. In this way, it becomes fashionable for both parties to strongly disagree with each other as to whom is respecting the Constitution. Why is it such a big deal? Well for starters, the Supreme Court avoids political entanglements allegedly by holding lifetime appointments and the largest role the Supreme Court has is to review the constitutionality of various laws at all sectors of governance. In theory, an independent judiciary is great to review the fairness of the laws of the land. However, ideology and partisan politics just occupy a less than obvious implicit status when nominating a Justice to the bench, and what each Justice considers "interpretation" serves the implicit status of power politics. What is deemed "constitutional" or "unconstitutional" serves not only ideology of the partisan interest, but what they consider appropriate to the act of interpretation is instrumental to how the Court functions. 

Needless to say, I've heard the mantra from the Tea Party that we must be faithful to the Constitution. Yet, what exactly is involved in demonstrating faith. If anything, the best version, however flawed, of such an opinion comes from Justice Scalia's commitment to something he calls "originalism."

Justice Scalia defines originalism as the only way of proceeding in terms of constitutional interpretation. In originalism, the text as law is interpreted under looking to the historical authorship of the law up to including the legislative intention in which the law is authored. By looking to this historical authorship, one assumes that one can have access to the authorial intention of the law. Anything short of originalism is a picking and selecting arbitrarily at what one wants the text to mean-such people are guilty of a form of judicial activism.

If we stipulate ahead of time that judicial activism is essentially Judges reading into the law what their personal views, then any time a Judge reads his personal views into the act of interpretation it can be said that such an act is wrong when interpreting the law. If one accepts originalism as a way of proceeding, then they, too, believe prior to the act of interpretation a personal view that they read into the law as well. Their prior commitment to finding the historical situation in which the law was written violates the central principle of their criticism of judicial activism.

What is ludicrous above is the fact that it is an unrealistic assumption that interpreters can separate themselves from the body of preexisting beliefs. time and place of their current situatedness. Since the law is about interpreting the law, one stands at the horizonal moment of a text -- between past and future expectation. Interpretation is never concerned with the past in a way that the originalist assumes the past available. Instead, the interpretive act is always futural. We look to history and what has happened in the past for our practical need to engage the law in the present, that is, toward the demands of our current situation. I think an example is in order to organize our intuitions on this very matter. The following example is inspired by its analogue in Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire.

Let us suppose that Suzy is a tenant in a building. Under state law, a "Landlord must provide suitable time for tenant eviction." Suzy is getting her car repaired, and cannot leave immediately despite her landlord's desire for her to vacate the apartment so as to rent to more reliable tenants. Suzy leaves her apartment for a second to do some grocery shopping after staying 3 days over the day the landlord wanted her to vacate the apartment. As such, the landlord uses his key and starts to move all her possessions onto the lawn in front of the building. When she returns, she finds her pieces of furniture have been rained on, and the landlord ushering his nephews to hurry with her belongings. Suzy and her landlord end up in court.

The source of the disagreements rests between the two parties on how to define a "suitable time for tenant eviction." Laws are written with general appilcability in mind, often without precision in the law's authoring. Legal interpretation is assumed to flesh out the generality of what the laws shall mean in terms of their applicability. Suzy's civil claim would be compensation for property damage, and the landlord would counter claim the right to evict a tenant after suitable time has passed, arguing 3 days is "suitable." Any look to the legislative intention might be something like general guidelines so as to curtail private quarrels between interested parties. What is one to do for the legal interpretation of the state statute?

The above is a palatable example. It drives the fact that the law is a socially argumentative practice built on the praxis of concepts, not the stasis of universal meanings solidified in the past. Legal interpretation is more like Aristotle's notion of phronesis in which one gets better at practical reasoning in moral situations the more one gets better at being/cultivating the virtues over time. For this reason, this is why Gadamer revives Aristotle on exactly this point. The act of interpretation is connected to the past in a lively and workable way through the needs of interpreter. Privileging originalism is just hiding one's conservatism in a way that stagnates judicial review and does not reflect the overall hermeneutic experience of legal interpretation. 

It is one thing to beat the drum of the untenable premises that undergird originalism, namely, that interpretation is about having epistemic access to the past in the way originalism thinks it does, but it is quite another to leave empty what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would have to answer. As such, I now turn to outline several unrelated points to the above post on what I think a good Constitutional theory of interpretation ought to have.

1) Constitutional interpretations employ normative concepts. Central to these concepts is justice, and as such a good theory must give us an answer to what justice is, and its relation to interpretation.

2) Constitutional interpretation relies on the assumption that the Constitution has legitimacy, that is, the Constitution has authority over us. This means that a good theory of interpretation must give us a story as to why we find the Constitution authoritative.

3) Conceptual analysis of interpretation needs to cut through the normative posturing; a deep philosophical story of what exactly interpretation is, and how far interpretation can go epistemically are necessary to give us a fuller story. I have alluded to what I think would be a good analysis on this end, a Gadamerian story of legal hermeneutics as found in Truth and Method.

In conclusion, I will summarize my thoughts on originalism. First, the originalist rhetorically move to say that judicial activism is nothing more than reading what you want to read into the law is absurd in that originalism is guilty of the same way it defines judicial activism for other competing acts of interpretation. Moreover, I show that what the criticism lacks is a realistic picture of how interpreters are using the past to secure applicable knowledge for their present situation. This means that interpretation is always normative, never impartial--always bound to the reconstituted historical moment of the interpreter. All interpretations points to the present, and this is the more realistic temporal relation revealing the past as never static and accessible to be known in the way originalism thinks the past available. Instead, interpretation is an act, a lively and workable engagement with the text, past and situation one finds oneself in; the analogues for this type of activity is Aristotelian phronesis by which we live morally better and better by acquiring the practice that only living morally in experience can provide. 

In essence, I oppose originalism by defending Gadamer's conception of phenomenological hermeneutics as a way of proceeding on these matters. In addition, I end by outlining several concerns as to what a good theory of constitutional interpretation would look like.

Exposing Entrenched Power Dynamics in American Political Narratives, Part 1: Evangelical Literalism

I have set myself to a certain task in philosophy. Through philosophy, it is more or less a hobby as I do not want to give it much time, but I think it cannot be helped. In following out the conception of philosophy that most bears fruit, it is one in which the philosopher is intimately connected to evaluate the structures of the lifeworld as they are currently lived, that is to philosophize about contemporary cultural forms. In so doing, it is my intention to expose dangerous political narratives in American culture that entrench unjust power dynamics and not just proceed phenomenologically. There are those that do this better than me. Butler has, for instance, written much on the performative aspects of gender and taken to task a critical interrogation of the concept with surprising results. I am no Butler.

In this entry, let me take to task Evangelical Christianity. Evangelical Christianity is particular form of Christianity that naively appropriates the Augustinian principle of having a personal relationship with God. Now, this is true of all Protestant forms of Christianity. As an institution, The Church is no longer man's correction to his sinful nature and by emphasizing that one can have a personal relationship towards God one is no longer required to relate to God institutionally through the Church. Therefore, not only does the Augustinian conception of a personal relationship with God emphasize a new orientation for the believer, it also de-legitimizes the historical and political authority of the Church. This forms the background of Evangelical Christianity, but in a more practical way.

With no mediated authority for the sacred to take place, the Christian message can come right into your home like any product of direct marketing. James Kennedy and the "Hour of Power" or Jerry Falwell can come streaming into your life through your television set, or literally streaming from the internet. They tape broadcasts and convince thousands of others of their powerful message. In this way, the personal relationship gets co-opted by their powerful charismatic personalities. Some ministers have even called themselves "Doctor" for marketing sakes only to have no PhD (Jerry Falwell took on the term "doctor" because he felt honorary degrees conveyed the privilege of doing so even outside the institution that awarded the degree).

More than that, these religious authorities relate Biblical themes straight into their own participation in culture from a naive literalism. To be fair, no religiously oriented person can avoid participation in culture. To be a communal being means we participate in our cultural setting. However, the point of this group is to abuse how such a personal relationship with God manifests in experience. Augustine's personal relationship with God did not mean being the naive source of direct Biblical literal reading. Augustine meant reading scripture in its original Greek and attending to this relationship with God with the serious mind of a scholar. It did not mean two hicks in a trailer being moralized by a Sunday preacher 453 miles away in Columbus, OH. It did not mean promoting megachurches and their mission like one supports the profit mission of Walmart to bring cheap goods to American consumers.

As a philosopher, I don't have much patience for religion. That much is clear. I have a general sense of the divine, but do not account for it metaphysically. Instead, I find extreme comfort in Kant's criticism against speculative metaphysics. That is surely not the way into religion. That's why we have faith as Kant wanted "to make room for faith", yet in the expression of our faith, if we miss the point of God as "wholly other", then we miss the point of God. For God has always been an expression of that which is radically transcendent and outside ourselves. In every worship of Him, we are humbled before that which is Other in God. This is a model for relating to Others, and we are called to be humble for God inasmuch as we OUGHT to humble ourselves before others (that which is different from ourselves). This means whenever a gay boy is bound to a tree and beaten to death, we are called to oppose such treatment of those that are different. We must embrace difference and not shy away from it. Whenever an LGBT person is ridiculed, mocked, beaten or killed, difference is not respected. Evangelicals have politically instituted their naivety and abandoned the ethical call of Christianity. They would rather hate sinners than see themselves as one and the same. But why?

The answer comes aground once more. Evangelicals believe in the inerrancy of Biblical scripture. Incapable of understanding revelation through metaphor and analogy, they conclude some very strange things. Down near Cincinnati, there is the Creation Museum. Filled with animatronic machines, music and amusement park rides, one can simulate the actual co-habitation of man with dinosaurs.

This is how messed up my country is. Though to be fair, the founder of the Creation Museum is Australian.

In such an experience, one doesn't need to critically evaluate the claim made upon us through religion. Religious texts, indeed, make claims of us. Like any art or cultural work, the texts demand to be thought and rethought. This is why the experience of scripture is anything but naive. It calls for a deep hermeneutic experience in much the same way that Gadamer describes. The depth of hermeneutic experience of the Bible is completely missed by those pictured above.

Let me dispose of one common and anticipated objection. If I make a universal claim about all Evangelical Christians, then the counterfactual existence of one Evangelical that shares in what I have claimed will falsify my account. Well, if that is what you think I have done, then you've missed the point completely. When I commit to being philosophical about cultural forms of life and practices, it is not a claim about the people of the cultural form. Instead, it is the danger of the idea, what the idea gives rise to. In this, I do not think it can be denied that the people in the documentary Jesus Camp fulfill what I have said, and the level of education necessary for that type of Christianity is very low, unreflective and naive in the fullest sense. As such, yes, there very well could be a reflective Evangelical Christian whose experience is devoid of my criticism. However, such a person is not in the spotlight and I would hope such a person would come to internally question their own tradition in the way that I have explained its overall weakness.

In conclusion, a naive literalism accompanied with a dearth of understanding Luther's retrieval of Augustine's personal relationship with God makes for a dangerous combination. It is not so much that these things are "wrong" (for whom am I to judge the accuracy of theological work as a phenomenologist) as much as they are dangerous in practice. This much is clear philosophically. Without acknowledging God as wholly other and how this relation is the basis for honoring difference, naive Christians will find reasons to hate that which is impure even with the irony that we are all sinners. In addition, their form of unreflective Christianity will unlikely disappear insofar as the Bible is treated with literalism that does not challenge the hermeneutic promise of the text itself, including understanding the very dimension of a personal relationship of God Augustine actually meant. Instead, Christianity will continually devolve into the similarity it already possesses with consumerism to the point that it will continually surface as a force to challenge thoughtful and reflective people (believers and non-believers alike). This is even more dangerous since the populism of Christianity and the populism of American politics integrate into a new narrative of America as a shining city on a hill. Once a polity gets a sense of its own destiny through the divine, it will tend towards more dangerous aims. More on this later...

Aristotle's De Anima

I won't really have much to say about philosophical issues this summer. I continue to read about Heidegger and Scheler. I continue to place them in tension with each other, but such a continued effort is now on hold. I am doing my reading for the preliminary examination in my PhD. I only take one test, and this is it. Likewise, my PhD program is historically-oriented. I read the really big books of Western philosophy and try to get a hold over what the arguments are (or a basic exposition of the view).

Right now, I am reading Aristotle's De Anima. I cannot stand it. You would think that a self-professed phenomenologist would love the discussion of consciousness, the capacities of the soul so described. Yet, the only thing that matters here is Aristotle's invention of intentionality. "The sense must be percipient of itself" (III: pt. 2, lines 17). I take little else from this book. I can't stand hearing about Aristotle solving the nature of light in one paragraph. I don't know. Perhaps, I am being too impatient and not exercising the demanding philosophical patience with this text.

I also wonder about Aristotle's definition of life. His definition of life is that it is a composite between self-nutrition and growth. A phenomenological conception of life is that it strives towards the world, and in my conception, this striving has no structure other than the production of the same type of its own kind. Unlike Nietzsche, however, I do not think this striving includes within it an exercise of domination over others indifferently that results in injury and harm. Certainly, if there is no overriding structure to this striving, then it can result in a will-to-power, but the striving might take on other forms like perhaps a will-to-love.

Truth, Perspectivism and Methodology in Philosophy

Gadamer observed in an essay on Truth in the Human Sciences that many different people can appropriate the humanities for different political purposes and there is no proper way to study the humanities in order to prevent this from occurring. Unlike the sciences, there are no clear methodologies one can point towards in the study of humanities (I say this as a wholly convinced phenomenologist). One literary interpretation of Leviticus can commit one's faith to exclusion of otherness, while a more generous reading might carry the day for openness. All we can do is maintain an openness to otherness and do so as if it were an ethical imperative.

This reflection is spawned by watching the documentary Equality U. In this documentary, LGBT Christian Activists went to 19 different Christian universities to end religiously-based discrimination. Now, some of the exchanged between these groups reached a theological impasse. Group A maintained that homosexual gay lifestyles were inherited sinful. That's just what we believe and the other Group B urged for a loving-kindness and openness. At one point, members from Group A just said "Let's just agree to disagree." The activists felt their viewpoint needed to be shared and they spent about two hours in the film justifying their activism. What made this so difficult for them is a problem that lurks in the humanities in general, not just theology. Activism can feel like the assertion of an ideology rather than an argument for the "truth" of that moral position.

In any science -- whether it is social or natural science -- there are clear methods one uses to access structures in the world. The power of the science is limited in what we can actually say about that objective world, but the point is that objectivity is a goal of the scientist. They talk about something they can all experience and even repeat within the methods used to describe the same thing. Therefore, the "truth" of the science has a point of reference. Theology, on the other hand, has no clear method to access the world and does not share the same reference. There is no objective structure one is pointing towards, even if they are referencing the same text. Interpretation mitigates this access and interpretation itself is the problem. In the humanities, that is all we can do.

The hermeneuticist in me might want to claim a reversal of priority in method. I could argue that scientists are fooled; they are as bootstrapped in the same way as the humanities. All science is just interpretation, but without texts, the scientist must interpret through a series of signs and symbols--essentially the theoretical model and the quantitative representation of the phenomenon in question. Some scientists think of the model as what is truly real and others construe the model as an instrument to make sense of reality. I don't know I can go so far in claiming science is like hermeneutics, but I do have sympathies with this view.  It's just that I don't know where to place the emphasis on openness. In science, the scientists usually have a good grasp of the limit built within the practice. If they don't, they're not really doing science. Science is about asking questions to things we don't know and designing ways to investigate our best guesses about a phenomenon.

Back to the openness... In the beginning, I said that we must maintain an openness to difference. We must be humble in our intellectual commitments lest we commit the political sin of excluding others from counting. In the 1800s, European racists concocted "phrenology" to exclude Negroes from counting in the moral community. They weren't African-American, nor even people. They were slaves and treated like cattle. People used the Bible to justify slavery. The Bible was also appropriated by Martin Luther King, Jr. as a point of wisdom to oppose Jim Crowe laws. Yet, where do we point to say who had the right theological interpretaton? We can't with any reliability. We can, however, make sure we have a constant open attitude towards openness and view our beliefs as tentative efforts to know the world. We should not be convinced with certainty about our beliefs to the point they become dogmas and exclude others from counting. This is harder said than done. Also, this is the ethical imperative of postmodernism and why postmodernists exert great effort in showing that meta-narratives of truth are dead.

On Nietzsche's Systematicity and the GM

A friend over at Yeah Okay But Still has an excellent post on both Hurka and Reginster's attempt to systematize Nietzsche's moral philosophy. As I have said in the past to others, Nietzsche inspires very good philosophy done on behalf of his name, but whether or not that is what Nietzsche claimed is a different matter entirely. I wrote the following in a journal of mine after completing the Genealogy of Morals (GM hereafter) for prelim reading.

The GM is the one book that if it is right by a hair in any way, then my efforts in ethics will suffer in some way. I've been thinking of the main problem I have in N's GM. My problem amounts to what I take to be an ambiguous relation between nature and culture within his work (at the very least there is a conceptual tension between these two things). It seems very generally that at times the way we are culturally such as being "sick" or men suffering from "bad consciences" is at odds with a more natural way, men with will-to-powers who are stronger, more healthy and do not suffer from cultural forces. Thus, we might say that N is offering us an examination of how we ought to reshape culture in light of how we are naturally. Now, while N might also claim this relationship is an interpretation, it does seem like it is a causal story doing the work for his analysis. 

However, there is a real problem I have with this type of thinking found in experimental philosophy. In X-phi, various ethicists are sampling they're 18-20 year old students to see how morality should be structured such that the conceptions of morality respect how it is that we are psychologically constituted. However, the strategies employed are simply polling students with surveys. These surveys occur at a a level of analysis in which I think it is epistemologically impossible to tell where culture and nature can be teased apart. If we can't reliably know the moment they pull apart, then just as it is the case in X-phi, I am unsure how the relationship obtains in N's work such that what is justifying the claim that we should endorse the ways of the master morality over slave moralities (or whatever you take the active skepticism concerning common slave morality in N to be) loses its efficacy. At best, the inability to tell the difference might make us skeptical that N is right into identifying the "correct" side as nature over culture. Perhaps, it is then that nature selects for cooperative behaviors over individualistic ones. 

Of course, the immediate rejoinder might be to emphasize N's thinking that culture is just a perverted understanding of nature, and that it is contained within the tent of N's commitment to a type of naturalism. At the moment, I think something like this is probably the case for N's work, though I still think the division in interpretation between culture and nature needs clarification. 

Early Phenomenology Conference

I'll be giving a paper at the Early Phenomenology Conference in Steubenville, OH. The group at Franciscan University at Steubenville is very oriented towards Scheler in general. I can make some contacts, discuss his work and I'm giving a paper on Husserl.

Submission to a Conference

I'm becoming an increasing fan of applying the phenomenological method to areas of interest rather than thinking that as phenomenologists, we should just simply regurgitate textual exegesis.

Phenomenology and the Sense of Nature

In this paper, I will argue that phenomenological descriptions of nature cannot establish a value or ethic. Phenomenology can only study the form of these experiences. HoweveNo r, the benefit of adopting a phenomenological orientation to nature brings to light what emotive engagements arise in relation to nature. Some of these emotive engagements condition the response to nature as either objects of instrumental use, or the sublime beauty of nature. An ethics of nature or the environment is therefore a consequence of reading our aesthetic emotive engagements of nature back into the very orientation we take up in relation to nature. In other words, phenomenology recovers the sense to which the meaning of nature arises.

This approach flies in the face of modernity in two respects, which I argue are still present for us today. On the one hand, as long as philosophers continually operate with a Cartesian attitude that scientific and philosophical knowledge empowers human beings to possess nature, and on the other hand, ethical theories restrict value to human beings only. My phenomenological description of relating to nature then comes into contact with these two proclivities. As such, I argue phenomenology provides us with an alternative as to how we find nature meaningful; it is through the emotive engagements of the sublimeity in nature that should open up how we see nature acquires the sense of value inherent within (offering us a different eidetic seeing of nature).

Let me speak to the paper’s organization. In section 1, I describe what I take to be the relation to nature uncovered by phenomenological description. In section 2, I explain what I take to be the Cartesian attitude towards nature and likewise the same in section 3 in relation to the human-value bias in ethical theories. Finally, I conclude in section 4 how the description of section 1 can amend both the 

G. E. Moore's Open Question Argument and Phenomenology

In this post, I want to suggest something different about Moore's Open Question argument. It might be weird to say, but I've always found this argument convincing; yet it's more about what the Open Question argument implies Let's review.

For moral property M, M expresses the fact that there are intrinsically good things in this world like moral values. M is not the same as natural properties N in N is simply a descriptive state of affairs about how the world is, not how it ought to be. According to Moore, no M can be identified with an N. If an M is identified with an M, then the strange thing is we can still ask if  M is really an N? It is an open question whether or not, e.g. the good is identified with maximizing collective welfare. We can still ask if maximizing collective welfare is good? Thus, all determinate identifications of M as N suffer from the open indeterminacy of any predicate attributed to what is good. The inference suggested is that natural properties and moral properties are an irreconcilable divide, and any future identification between these realms of fact and values, is-statements and ought-statements, or what is called the descriptive and the normative is foolish. Instead, we should think that values are irreducible following that the difference between fact and value is a difference in kind, and it is not a stretch to say that within moral philosophy the sphere of the personal is also maintained as irreducible.

Husserl gives us good reasons to think that something like this follows from Moore's argument--that is, there is a diference in kind between what can be explained naturally and what should be explained at the first-personal level. From the natural standpoint, all events can appear as if they can be described by the totality of Ns in the universe. From this point of view, all events occur as N revealed in a long chain of physically caused phenomena. In this way, the antecedent conditions of the causal story result in my having chosen any decision and one gets in the habit of positing events as N all the time. Among the events as N, the fact that I have  subjectivity and have initiated deliberation as an event is lost in this perspective. There is nothing like consciousness in this view. All events that become subsumed in the overall chain of events. Thus, any first-personal perspective in which I initiate, feel or experience in any way is a fact to be explained. Yet, according to a shift in the perspective taken from the standpoint of my conscious experience, it is I that decides what to do. It is me that decides to endorse my son's adoption of a baby, or not. For moral experience, and the experience of M in general, the dimension of experience bearing on any moral quandary is to be lived through at the practical level of the first-personal experience. This is where all moral experience takes place and this is where the experience of the personal matters. It is never a question of what is to be explained as part of an overall order of natural explanation. Rather, it is a question of values pertaining to how different in kind they are from matters of description.

Let me be clear. Moore's argument does not endorse phenomenological analysis of the sphere of human being or of moral experience. Yet, it does not limit it either. What Moore's open question argument achieves is a strict non-identification between the natural and the moral. This adds evidence that we are not off base for thinking that our experience of morality should seek its answer within the lived-experience of human life. In other words, there is more to moral experience than seeking to explain the ontology of value-predicates in moral judgments. Given that Moore's argument achieves this, it is not a stretch to assume the possibility of a moral phenomenology. Moreover, it is silent on whether or not a moral phenomenology is the only way to get to the experience of values. One might as easily treat the moral and the natural with a pragmatic conception of experience. Thus, while I advocate the phenomenological approach, it is at least conceivable that there are other approaches to describe the respect of lived-experience the Open Question Argument implies.

What am I doing?

This harder than it looks. Define what you are doing right now. Define it by doing, but while you do that try and clearly define the boundary of something as big as philosophy. Hmmf. Hit a wall. Yeah, I know. The problem with the "love of wisdom" is that wisdom demands much from us. A look to what it means to be wise offers no consolation...

A good wise person is someone that is convinced by good arguments only, or can, say, philosophy find wisdom in artistic and creative expressions in art and literature? Should a philosopher be poetic or rational? Maybe both? Should a philosopher only be concerned with science since science is an exemplar about how we ought to know? Should philosophy be none of this, but a type of systematic thinking that reveals the weakness of various systems of belief and ideology? Should philosophy talk about clearly delineated problems with a logical structure, or should such structure be recognized as a movement away from what phenomenologists call "lived-experience" or what Dewey called "the Problems of Men"? Should philosophy assume its problems in light of a standpoint capable of universal and transcendent conceptual knowledge, or should philosophers be wise to their limits and construe the possible interpretations of philosophy as historically-mediated? Should philosophers strive for objectivity, or should they recognize this as impossible? Should philosophy be based in anyone area of concern first like epistemology and then do other things like metaphysics, ethics etc? Should philosophy be a conversation between the historical formation of my background knowledge and my present lived-experience? Should we move away from phenomenology's attention to the sense-formation of meaning in consciously lived experience and merely trace out the consequences of an idea itself? Are their biases in philosophy that have gendered its possibility? Should philosophy recognize it is a product of social forces of power? Should philosophy seek to only critique various systems of thought? Should philosophy concern itself only with the emancipation of human beings from domineering social, political and economic ideologies? Should philosophy be based in reason and oppose faith? Should philosophers be faithful, or should philosophers expose an oversimplification between faith and reason?

In essence, the questions are many and you can imagine many wise people asking these questions.

The only thing I can fathom I am actually doing as a philosopher is asking questions and using my intellectual imagination to address these questions. The questions are big and small. Some of these questions I don't ask, but some of my fellow colleagues do.

Persons and Alabama

As these efforts in Alabama focus on what a person is. I often have to insist that this is not where to end the abortion debate. What is at issue is not the ontology of the person which we then use to deduce when someone has moral standing! Mary Anne Warren had this trouble in her 5 criteria for personhood. There was no clear way the criteria happened. As soon as the baby possessed one of the five criteria, then bingo! It was a person. This also seemed to correspond to the miraculous manifestation of these properties when the baby entered the world. Bingo personhood once out of the womb! Like some weird Kantian property of contra-causal freedom of the will...

The abortion debate starts with first admitting two things from the extremes. First, it is not an issue of bodily autonomy in which abortion is morally neutral like getting a haircut. Secondly, the complexity of fetus in the very beginning of fertilization isn't exactly a person, and that we should not conflate being a person defined by species-membership and a being with moral standing. Given that, where do we begin?

Quite frankly, we start by admitting that there are moral scenarios where two beings have competing normative claims. On behalf of the woman, we have many possible issues: physical harm from birth and possibly death, quality of life for both the woman and potential child, and perhaps the desire to be free from having a child in the first place in combination with any of the other above all reasons. On behalf of the fetus, we cannot ask it to state its normative claim, and so we interpret that if the fetus had any claim, it follows from its dependent nature that the child would have a right to life. I concede that point wholeheartedly to anti-abortionists. If there are two competing claims, then we must admit that the function of morality is to resolve the competing claims so as to provide action-guidance to the conflict before us. As such, it is only the woman that can entertain reasons for why she ought to have an abortion, and while the fetus cannot communicate its claim to a right to life, we must default to the woman. The woman is actual, and the fetus's claims are only potential. Even if the fetus has a right to life, this claim only follows from its potential and dependent nature. The woman is an actual being, and has more concrete relation to the world that her choices will trump any potential being since moral norms apply more in proportion to actual beings than potential beings.

Heidegger on the Limits of Philosophy

In this post, I detail some thoughts I've had for a while. It concerns the limits of what philosophy becomes after Heidegger's influence in Being and Time (BT hereafter), and the claim of the Daseinanalytik. For those unfamiliar with BT, Heidegger claims that if we are concerned with the question "What is Being" we need not further ask anymore than to locate this question within the self-referential nature of Dasein. It is within Dasein (for now just think of Dasein as his word for you and me). Dasein has an intimate awareness with Being since it is the only entity that can pose the question of its own being to itself. Therefore, an analysis of Dasein's ability to pose the question is the locus of interrogation for the more general question "What is Being?". In this way, Heidegger proposes to outline the primordial structure of Dasein to get at the heart of Being by consulting only Dasein. Like a phenomenologist, Heidegger commits himself to the view that he wants to get at the heart of the phenomenon of Dasein without presupposing anything about it. As such, this move to do a phenomenology as a fundamental ontology of Dasein means Heidegger has to address many presuppositions before such an analysis of Dasein can take place.

With the transition to putting Dasein clear aThe totnd in focus, many things have to be addressed. Heidegger advocates a deconstruction of Western metaphysics, makes truth into a historically revealed event, and insists on the on mediated character of experience just to name a few. Heidegger overturns the typical notions subjectivity, and opts for an analysis of pre-reflective consciousness in terms of the structure of care while at the same time insisting on the hermeneutic character of philosophy. For Heidegger, philosophy cannot step outside of history since Dasein's structure is temporalized. Yet, sometimes, Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's care structure invokes a sense of the transcendent, as if the description of that structure of care is transhistorical in nature. In the opening of Division II, he states:

"The totality of Being-in-the-world as a structural whole has revealed itself as care" (BT, H. 231).

So the question is how to reconcile instances of thinking this reveals that when Heidegger describes the structural whole of the care structure, he's describing the transcendental preconditions of Dasein's possible experience and the added fact that if that's true, then Heidegger no longer observes the hermeneutic limit he establishes for philosophy. If there's something else gong on, it is less clear to me what is going on.

Several options might be relevant to mention to allay the interpretive tension with candidate passages above:

1. Heidegger could be using a sense of the transcendental in different ways, or a more nuanced way than Kant or Husserl. If so, then what does his analysis ultimately imply?

2. We could read Heidegger as an existentialist. This might alleviate some burden since existentialists describe the human predicament in general terms, but Heidegger strives to differentiate himself from Sartre in the Letter on Humanism. There is no room for thinking that Heidegger is fine with simply an existentialist label.

3.  We could read Heidegger as just another species of Husserl--as a transcendental phenomenologist. This doesn't seem to bode well either since most of his fans follow out a story to do with the severe differences mitigating Husserl and Heidegger's approach to things.

I know there are other options, and I'll not focus on them. Please feel free to make your own suggestions.

Sci-fi Movies and Philosophy

I want to have this thread open up and invite suggestions for sci-fi movies tied to specific philosophical readings. There is one example of a sci-fi and philosophy anthology, but I didn't like it. Somehow, discussing personal identity with Locke and watching Arnold in the Sixth Day just doesn't seem like a good  move. There has to be better movies for personal identity and Locke for instance.

Right before, C-3PO thanks the "Maker" for an oil bath he's about to receive. Does Threepio have an understanding of how he must be pious toward the Maker as Socrates discusses in Plato's dialogue titled "The Euthyphro"

The main motivation for this is in part stemming from my anticipated conference participation with the English PhDs. They get to write up cultural study dissertations on Philip K. Dick and read science fiction. Trudging through Heidegger and Husserl seems more rewarding but not as fun as reading graphic novels on Spiderman or children's literature. Thus, I want to develop a syllabus for philosophy and science fiction. In my future professional life (hopefully someone will hire me), I can still be a geek and a philosopher.

So, do you have any suggestions?

Grant MacEwan Philosophy Video

Insofar as I want to return to Canada in all honestly, I beset myself the challenge of reviewing all the philosophy programs in Western Canada--basically BC and Alberta. My goal was only to look at how they fare now, teaching expertise and the like. After a google search, I found this video on youtube. My hat is off to MacEwan for what honestly are all my reasons for studying philosophy on a personal level.

However, this brings me to another question. Will departments have to pitch these types of videos in the future as more and more university decisions about funding relate to the instrumental gain over the intrinsic value philosophy possesses on its own? Only time will tell.

Pragmatism Emphasis with Continental Philosophy

Here is a list of some essential features pragmatism maintains with Continental philosophy in a panel given long ago:

1. Both emphasize the dissolution between the chasm of subject and object.

2. Both emphasize the lived experience as a starting and end point for inquiry.

3. Both emphasize the primacy of practical reason in this lived experience over and above the derivative character of speculative reason

I liked them, so I just thought I'd list them.

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.