New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Sider's "Knee-Jerk Realism"

Imagine that a philosophically and psycho-analytically literate, Martian philosophical score-keeper descends down to earth and after being told that Theodore Sider is one of our most important contemporary metaphysicians, encounters this confession, which takes up most of section 2.5 "against subjectivity," in Writing the Book of the World:

But this is autobiography not argument. The argument here, such as it is, is that any subjectivity in the notion of structure would infect all the domains in which structure is applied. If structure is just a reflection of our language (or whatever) then so are the facts about similarity, intrinsicicality, laws of nature, the intrinsic structure of space and time...And this is incredible.

At its last step the argument again reverts to autobiography. Certain philosophers will rightly remain unconvinced, for example "antirealists" of various stripes--pragmatists, Kantians, logical positivists, and so on.

A certain "knee-jerk realism" is an unargued for presupposition of this book. Knee-jerk realism is a vague picture rather than a precise thesis. According to the picture, the point of human inquiry--or a very large chunk of it anyway, a chunk that includes physics--is to conform itself to the world, rather than to make the world. The world is "out there", and our job is to wrap our minds around it. This picture is perhaps my deepest philosophical conviction. I've never questioned it; giving it up would require a reboot too extreme to contemplate; and I have no idea how I'd try to convince somebody who didn't share it. (Sider (2011), 18; emphases in original.)

I bet such a Martian would note that if you have never tried to question your own fundamental convictions,  you most feel very anxious about the status of your convictions.  Moreover, she would add that one way to convince another is to engage their arguments and positions; maybe rational persuasion is too much to be wished for among Terrestrials, but the other may feel 'heard' and, thus, secure enough to re-evaluate their own stance. Finally, she would note the religious language here (e.g., convictions, conforming, unquestioning, etc.).

On Sensus Divinitatis in Plantinga, a footnote to Dutch Spinozism (Van Eeden & Dooyeweerd)

Dooyeweerd rightly rejects any dictation to philosophy on the part of theology; and where he thinks that traditional Reformed thinking deviates from the truth, he does not shrink from suggesting revisions. One of his virtues as a philosopher, I take it, is his refusal to be bound by all the formulae of past Reformed thinking. Still, however, if the total result is to be called a Christian philosophy and in particular a Reformed philosophy, it must be consistent with the spirit and the main doctrines of the Reformed and Christian tradition. And if his doctrine that meaning is the mode of being of created reality does imply that the relation between God and creation is like that between a thinker and the meanings he entertains, then at this point the accusation of a really significant departure from the Reformed and Christian tradition would be justified. For then created reality becomes constitutive of God's mind and thus of God.

And this is clearly to controvert the Christian conception of creation with its ontological chasm between God and created reality. But to have such a chasm seems to presuppose being on the part of creation as well as on the part of God. How, for example, can we conceive of sin in the context of a creature that is merely meaning? Can a meaning sin? What would an evil meaning be like, unless it is thought of as entertained by an evil being? The Christian philosopher must steer a nice course between the Scylla of giving finite reality too much self-sufficiency and power, and the Charybdis of altogether divesting creation of distinctness and "over-againstness" with respect to God. The first alternative threatens God's uniqueness and sovereignty; the second courts pantheism. Rightly determined to avoid Scylla, Dooyeweerd steers perilously close to Charybdis; for the very attempt to emphasize God's transcendent uniqueness and sovereignty may end by making him the author of evil in a very intimate sense and by denying an ontological distinction between Creator and creation altogether.--Alvin Plantinga (1958) "Dooyeweerd on Meaning and Being" (reprinted here [HT to Ingrid van Laarhoven, who helped me track this down.]; emphases in original.)

The quoted passage is the surprising conclusion of Plantinga's "first serious article." (Hengstmengel, (63)) It is surprising because Plantinga had begun the (short) article with the claim that "a slavish adherence to traditional modes of thought can discourage and stultify intellectual progress." (10) Yet, here Plantinga is quite clear that Dooyeweerd has deviated too far from the "spirit and main doctrines" of their shared tradition. While (the proto-Kuhnian) Plantinga clearly allows that "progress" within the "tradition" is possible and desirable, he basically insists that Dooyeweerd's Spinozistic doctrines are simply too revolutionary and disruptive, even though an outsider to the tradition, while drawing on, say, Susan James's recent book, might point to the considerable continuity between Spinoza's philosophy and Reformed doctrines, especially if one thinks (as the far more mature Plantinga footnotes against the authority of his father) that it "is by no means obvious that the right side won at the Synod of Dort." Either way, in the body of his paper, Plantinga offers a number of philosophical arguments (including some from "common experience" and another that anticipates Meillassoux's arche-fossil strategy against correlationism) against Dooyeweerd's position; nevertheless, in his conclusion Plantinga makes clear that to be called "Reformed," one cannot just follow the arguments come what may to their conclusion. I call the authority of tradition over the possibility space of philosophical thought an instance of the "Socratic Problem."

Is Teleology Conceptually Impossible? And If Not, When Should We Resort to It?

We all know—don’t we?—that modern physics is inconsistent with teleology, at least with real teleology, as opposed to the substitute version that so many of us have tried to fashion for use in “teleosemantics.” But what is it, exactly, that modern physics bans? What form would a teleological theory take? When pressed, most of us would be hard pressed to come up with an answer. (Do pause and think about it, Dear Reader. I can almost guarantee that if you are not familiar with the material I am about to discuss, you’ll get it wrong. I certainly did, and I am supposed to be an expert! Ha!)

This is the target of a brilliant 2006 analysis, “What Would Teleological Causation Be?” by John Hawthorne (Oxford) and Daniel Nolan (ANU). I’ll summarize the paper here, and reflect some more on it in a follow-up post.

(The paper was published in Hawthorne’s 2009 Essays in Metaphysics. I only heard of it recently, when it was cited by Tom Nagel in his recent book and mentioned in Eric’s insightful post on the Principle of Sufficient Reason.) 

It is often said that teleology is impossible because it involves backward causation—Aristotle says that the acorn sprouts “for the sake of” the mature oak, but (so the criticism goes) this cannot be a causal relation because the mature oak cannot make the acorn sprout. (Spinoza: "That which is really a cause, it considers an effect.") H&N demur. Teleology and backwards causation are different things, they show. (This, by itself, is one of the surprising and most valuable parts of the analysis.)

Suppose we observe the following strange occurrence, which I’ll call BAM. . .

The 'moral compass' of babies

In 2007, a study by Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom was published in Nature claiming to show that preverbal babies had what could be described as a ‘moral compass’ (not the authors’ own terms in the article). From the abstract:

Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take into account an individual's actions towards others in evaluating that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual. These findings constitute evidence that preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behaviour towards others. This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action, and its early developmental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a biological adaptation.

Philosophy on the Cover

Two lead reviews on philosophical books in the New York Times Book Review, both disappointing. Sarah Blakewell says nothing philosophical at all in her review of Jim Holt's Why Does the World Exist? And George Johnson's account of Steven Gimbel's Enstein's Jewish Science is (to say the least) puzzling. The book is not yet available, but here's a one-liner: "maybe relativity is 'Jewish science' after all." And the Google preview reveals that one of the chapters is entitled: "Why Did A Jew Formulate the Theory of Relativity?"

Intriguing? I now quote from the review.

Draft of Difference and Repetition section of SEP Deleuze article

As noted a few days ago, Dan Smith and I are revising our Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Deleuze. We are completely rewriting the Difference and Repetition section. Here is the draft. Some of the technical terms we use (e.g., "virtual") are discussed in the preceding section of the piece. 

This kind of reference article is very tricky to write. You have to be technical enough for the specialists and yet accessible for interested non-specialists. So we'd be very grateful for suggestions for additions, deletions, clarifications, expansions, and so on, either here in comments or by email.

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3.1 Difference and Repetition

Deleuze's historical monographs were, in a sense, preliminary sketches for the great canvas of Difference and Repetition (1968), which marshaled these resources from the history of philosophy in an ambitious project to construct a "philosophy of difference." Following Maimon's critique, which we mentioned above, Difference and Repetition produces a two-fold shift from the Kantian project of providing the universal and necessary conditions for possible experience. First, Deleuze wants to provide an account of the genesis of “real experience” – the experience of this concretely existing individual here and now – and second, to respect the demands of "philosophy of difference," the genetic principle must be differential so that the conditions of the genesis of an individual cannot themselves be individuated.   

Susan Stebbing: The History of Metaphysics at the Dawn of Analytic Philosophy

From this point of view metaphysicians are apt to seek for an indubitable datum. Descartes, for example, saw clearly the need for such a datum. Whatever one may think of the success of his efforts, it will probably be admitted that his procedure was correct provided that the aim of metaphysics be to provide reasons for our commonsense beliefs. Curiously enough, it is Descartes, rather than Spinoza who has shown most clearly the futility of a constructed system. Spinoza, so it seems to me, used the form of a deductive system in order to exhibit his vision of the universe. I see no reason why he should be dismayed by the charge of circularity; there is no reason why he should not wrap up in his definitions and axioms all that he desired to bring forth from them. For Descartes, however, such a charge, if it could be substantiated, would be fatal.--Susan Stebbing (69).

One of the great scandals of analytic philosophy is our utter ignorance of our history. Long after my  graduate education I encountered Susan Stebbing´s name for the first time in Mike Beany´s writings on early analytic. (But don't try looking for Stebbing in Soames.) Stebbing (1885 – 1943) was a crucial organizational figure in the movement (she helped found Analysis, brought Carnap to Cambridge for the first time, etc) and important popularizer. (Stebbing is useful to those who wish to tell an alternative to my stories (and here) about Ernest Nagel as Prophet of Analytic Philosophy.) Even so, here I focus on her because she was arguably the first significant theorist of analytic philosophy and the method proper to it. In particular, it is astonishing that Stebbing's (1932) master-piece, "The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics," was (I believe) never properly anthologized in the early readers of analytic philosophy.

Now, Stebbing (and her critic, Max Black) worked hard at explicating what the technique and method of philosophical analysis amounts to. What is crucial is that long before Strawson, Benardete, and Kripke-Lewis, a pre-eminent analytic philosopher had articulated (on the basis of deep reflection on Russell and Moore) how one should think about the marriage of analytic philosophy and metaphysics, which according to Stebbing "is a systematic study concerned to show what is the structure of the facts in the world to which reference is made, with varying degrees of indirectness, whenever a true statement is made." (65) For Stebbing metaphysical analysis had a direction toward the precise understanding of absolutely simple elements (that are taken to exist). Now Stebbing insisted on a distinction between logical analysis and metaphysical analysis. Black denied the distinction and offered a deflationary model for philosophy, which is primarily interested in the "structure of sentences rather than with fact." (258) Black seems to have won the day initially (although I think he misunderstands Stebbings position as uncovering facts rather than the structure of facts), but either way from our post-Lewisian vantage point, Stebbing seems most prescient. (Black ridicules the very idea of an analysist being able to describe basic facts.) We can understand Lewis' natural properties as giving Stebbing her cake (Lewis and Stebbing share a deep respect for common sense and natural science) with little loss of...ahum...simplicity. 

Translation of Raphaël Millière's "La métaphysique aujourd’hui et demain" ("Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow")

Translation (by Mark Ohm, with the assistance of Leah Orth, me, and Emily Beck Cogburn) HERE.

The paper is Millière's inaugural piece for the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines. Anyone interested in the history of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics in continental philosophy (as well as contemporary accounts of what exactly metaphysics and ontology are) will need to read Millière's canonical discussion.*

It's a very weird sensation when something you helped to translate ends up being much better English language philosophical prose than anything you've ever penned yourself.

[*The whole ATMOC project is a philosophical gem. Millière's piece is the first publication that we've translated as part of our putting up an English language mirror site HERE. This is just the very beginning of an on-going anglo-continental metaphysics collaboration, since ATMOC will start up again next spring when Millière is back from NYU.]

How Something Came To Be From Nothing

[THANKS TO LAURIE PAUL FOR THE POINTER.]

Why is there something rather than nothing? How did there come to be something rather than nothing? Two different questions. A positive answer to the first, especially if a priori, implies that the second question has a false presupposition; if the reason is a priori, then it should have force at every moment of time, and this implies that there never could have been a moment when there was nothing. Conversely, if there is a positive answer to the second—if the Big Bang is an answer, for example—then there cannot be a positive reason for the first.

The two questions seem not to be distinguished by Lawrence Krauss, in a recent book, A Universe From Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing.

Adrian Moore on a content difference between analytic and continental: identity and difference

I'm on record as favoring a sociological perspective on the question of the relation of analytic and continental philosophy. In other words, I think it's much more useful to focus on hiring and citation networks than on questions of style or of content or method. That's because I do not think we can produce a finite list of necessary and sufficient condition to create a clean distinction between the two groups. In other words, there's no essential definition that wouldn't produce easy counter-examples, so that figures usually associated with one side or the other would be mis-classified. 

But, if we switch to a family resemblance or broad tendency approach, the question of the priority of identity to difference or of difference to identity does seem a promising one for a content distinction, with AP favoring the former and CP the latter. That brings me to this passage from Adrian Moore's new book, which we've discussed before.

Adrian Moore on treating analytic and continental philosophy with equal respect

I've been looking forward to reading Adrian Moore's The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (Cambridge, 2011) since I saw its announcement last year. I'm now reading it, and will write more about it in the coming weeks. What attracted me to the book was its attempt to treat the analytic and continental traditions on equal footing -- to treat, with respect and charity, Quine and Lewis and Derrida and Deleuze and many others.

Of course good intentions have to be cashed out by quality philosophy, and so, after I read the Preface and Intro, I skipped to the end to read the Deleuze chapter, thinking that might eating this part of the pudding would give me the proof of its quality. And the quality is very good indeed, as I hope to be able to show in future posts. Today I just wanted to reproduce a striking passage from the Preface: 

There would, I think, be justification in the publication of this book if it made a significant contribution to overcoming the absurd divisions that still exist between -- to use the customary but equally absurd labels -- 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy. I do not deny that there are important differences between these. Nor do I have any scruples about the fact that I am an analytic philosopher. But I unequivocally distance myself from those of my colleagues who disdain all other traditions. The 'continental' philosophers whom I discuss in Part Three of this book are thinkers of great depth and power; they are knowledgeable about philosophy, science, politics, and the arts; their work is rigorous, imaginative, and creative; and it is often brutally honest. I despair of the arrogance that casts them in the role of charlatans. Perhaps, if I were asked to specify my greatest hope for this book, it would be that it should help to combat such narrow-mindedness. Or, if that seemd too vague a hope, then it would be that the book should help to introduce analytic philosophers to the work of one of the most exciting and extraordinay of these 'continental' philosophers: Gilles Deleuze. 

Is there something special about evolutionary debunking arguments?

I just went to an APA session on evolution and meta-ethics, where one of the speakers was Sharon Street. A question that repeatedly came up was: do evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) against moral objectivism enjoy a special status? Differently put: Does the theory of natural selection as applied to our evaluative judgments add anything more that is not found in other types of debunking explanations (e.g., sociological or cultural explanations)? 

Hurry up, January 2012

UPDATE WHICH MAKES A HASH OF THE TITLE: Apparently I was on the Australia site for CUP. Moore's book will be availble in the US in November 2011, according to this page.

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Because that's when The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things by Adrian (AW) Moore will be released by Cambridge UP.

Blurb: This book is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. Taking as its definition of metaphysics 'the most general attempt to make sense of things', it charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the early modern period, the late modern period in the analytic tradition, and the late modern period in non-analytic traditions. In its unusually wide range, A. W. Moore's study refutes the tired old cliché that there is some unbridgeable gulf between analytic philosophy and philosophy of other kinds. It also advances its own distinctive and compelling conception of what metaphysics is and why it matters. Moore explores how metaphysics can help us to cope with continually changing demands on our humanity by making sense of things in ways that are radically new.

Contents: Preface; Introduction; Part I. The Early Modern Period: 1. Descartes: metaphysics in the service of science; 2. Spinoza: metaphysics in the service of ethics; 3. Leibniz: metaphysics in the service of theodicy; 4. Hume: metaphysics committed to the flames?; 5. Kant: the possibility, scope, and limits of metaphysics; 6. Fichte: transcendentalism versus naturalism; 7. Hegel: transcendentalism-cum-naturalism; or, absolute idealism; Part II. The Late Modern Period I: The Analytic Tradition: 8. Frege: sense under scrutiny; 9. The early Wittgenstein: the possibility, scope, and limits of sense; or, sense, senselessness, and nonsense; 10. The later Wittgenstein: bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use; 11. Carnap: the elimination of metaphysics?; 12. Quine: the ne plus ultra of naturalism; 13. Lewis: metaphysics in the service of philosophy; 14. Dummett: the logical basis of metaphysics; Part III. The Late Modern Period II: Non-Analytic Traditions: 15. Nietzsche: sense under scrutiny again; 16. Bergson: metaphysics as pure creativity; 17. Husserl: making sense of making sense; 18. Heidegger: letting being be; 19. Collingwood: metaphysics as history; 20. Derrida: metaphysics deconstructed?; 21. Deleuze: something completely different; Conclusion.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating,* and I'm not sure about "non-analytic traditions" as a category, but just to have that last section in the book is an extremely hopeful sign (see the first category I'm putting this post under). Anyone interested in participating in a New APPS discussion on this book please email me (protevi AT lsu DOT edu).

*The paracite is I think "the proof is in the pudding," which is something mischevious British students might do with their friend's logic homework.

h/t Simon Glendinning on FB.