Plato’s weekend suggestions

readingsHere it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:

Julian Baggini at The Guardian reviews “Hands: What We Do With Them — and Why,” by Darian Leader, a book that asks “What if, rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilisation, we see today’s changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands?”

Lots of people think that philosophical thought experiments, like the infamous trolley dilemma, are irrelevant mental masturbation. Turns out, your actual life might depend on them…

Wendy Werris penned an article for Publishers Weekly where she described her very rough two weeks working for Barnes & Noble. Though it’s hard to imagine why on earth she was expecting something different.

The European soccer championship is entering its final phase, but this summary of famous philosophers’ take on sports events and what they teach us about life applies equally well to the Olympics, the SuperBowl, and the (so-called) World Series.

Heard about Brexit, right? Here is Sir Patrick Stewart’s take on it, in turn inspired by the famous Monty Python sketch, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

Finally, indulge me if I publish one of my own Plato Comics (TM), but let me clarify just in case that it obviously reflects my own idiosyncratic opinion, and that it is meant just for fun. So, no need to “reply” to it, it ain’t an argument…

Comics

249 thoughts on “Plato’s weekend suggestions”

  3. Daniel Kaufman

    Sorry, I’m not going to give an entire lecture on Kantian philosophy here. I get paid to do that. I’ve pointed people in the right directions. They can investigate themselves. That said, I have an entire online course that I’ve taught, where I filmed some 30 plus lectures, all of which are available on Youtube and Itunes U.

    The relevant arguments re: liberal values, pertaining to the inherent dignity and value of the individual — an idea on which Western liberalism is based, whether you think it is true or not — are in the sections of the Groundwork devoted to the “Kingdom of Ends.” They are important because they represent a way of grounding this idea, without invoking the idea of being created in the image of God.

    As for the conceptual tools and their use, I already said specifically, what many of them are. I am happy to leave it to readers to decide whether they are useful or not.

    Liked by 3 people

  6. Björn Carlsten

    While Dan says in the video,

    “You also need to be able to sit uninterruptedly and listen to the lecture…”

    I was playing FreeCell on the numpad. Whoops, caught.

    Excellent resource, by the way.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Coel

    Hi garth,

    As do most people. i.e. Fair is good. Unfair is bad. Virtually everyone agrees with this.

    Yes, though note that fairness is *also* a value judgement (cf. Rawls’s veil of ignorance) not a matter of objective fact.

    Hi synred,

    But I don’t think the problem is that people don’t say what they mean, it’s that they don’t know what they mean.

    Agreed in spades. You try asking a moral realist what the phrases “you should …” and “you ought to …” are actually supposed to mean under moral-realism, and you’d be amazed at the answers you get.

    And I agree with Robin that the moral-realist presumption of the language is a big problem for all moral discourse. Stances like emotivism tend not to get argued against, they just get misunderstood because they are too alien to intuition.

    Like

  8. garthdaisy

    Dan

    Thanks for the link. I’m going to watch your whole series. Looking forward to it.

    I don’t have a problem with the idea of philosophy being more akin to art than to science. But the questions that philosophy deals with, the ones that science can not answer, are questions that we need operational answers for. We need to make important decisions about how we structure society and evolve that society with mammoth changes to our environment like new technology and globalization. If science can’t answer the practical moral and meaning questions, and philosophy is not in the business of answering those questions, where do we get the answers from? Religion?

    People need to decide what the good life is so they can live it. We also need them to know and live the good life so they are not bad actors in the world. There’s no shortage of snake oil salesmen with an agenda of power out there who are more than happy to give people the meaning of life they are looking for. Most people in the world have had their sentiment hijacked by such predatory power structures. Are philosophers qua artists any help in this situation? Artists aren’t leaders. Don’t we need philosopher leaders?

    Again, if not from philosophers, where do we get the answers? Television? Religion? Do we just make it up as we go? Doesn’t seem to be working. Help.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. garthdaisy

    Coel,

    “Yes, though note that fairness is *also* a value judgement”

    Sort of. What IS fair is a value judgement. But “fairness” itself is a universal trait across all human cultures, and even in primates. The primates don’t need Rawls to figure it out and I don’t think humans do either. They just need to know the facts (correct or erroneous) about the way the world is. Then their innate sense of fairness will decide what is fair. Different beliefs about the way the world actually is can make the same sense of fairness react in different ways. But the fairness sense is a constant I think.

    For example a person thinks X is fair. Then they learn some new information about the way the world is and now they think X is not fair. Their fairness value did not change, their belief about the way the world is changed, and from that new perspective, X is now not fair by the same sense of fairness that it was once fair.

    I think the same is true of all moral intuitions. Facts about the world (correct or erroneous) dictate the actions they produce. Ample and correct facts will produce actions in most humans that I think most people would be pleased with.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Philosopher Eric

    Yes Daniel, I’ve now gone through your essay once again, and consider it to be a very effective argument. There’s something quite refreshing about having such an unapologetic *answer* for this question — here philosophy is defined essentially as “an art.” Fortunately there are no uncertainties about where my own ideas stand from your definition, or on the side of science. But here I’d hope for you to not complain if modern science does then end up developing its own variety of epistemology, since it seems to be in desperate need of accepted understandings in this regard. The same would apply for “the mind,” as demonstrated by the sorry state of cognitive science (as pointed out in your essay). And again for ethics, though in a purely descriptive exploration of what’s good/bad for any given subject. From here we’d be able to theorize how to lead our individual lives, as well as structure our individual societies, based upon theory of what’s good for any of them. Then as for metaphysics, well I don’t know that science would have much use for this sort of study.

    Anyway if it’s true that humanity is in great need of such understandings, and that philosophy effectively functions as “art,” would you object to science taking a crack at such questions in its own distinctive way?

    Like

  11. davidlduffy

    “No one may force anyone to be happy according to his manner of
    imagining the well-being of other men; instead, everyone may seek his
    happiness in the way that seems good to him as long as he does not
    infringe on the freedom of others to pursue a similar purpose, when
    such freedom may co-exist with the freedom of every other man
    according to a possible and general law.”

    “the liberty of the press is the sole palladium of the rights of the
    people.”

    “The problem of organising a state, however hard it may seem, can be
    solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The
    problem is: ‘Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal
    laws for their preservation, but each of which is secretly inclined to
    exempt himself from them, to establish the constitution in such a way
    that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other,
    with the result that public conduct is the same as if they had no such
    intentions.'”

    “A good constitution is not expected from morality, but, conversely,
    a good moral condition of a people is to be expected only under a good
    constitution.”

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Robin Herbert

    Hi synred

    Yes, what I meant is that people who do mean those things should say them, rather than use the moral language, which people generally don’t generally use to mean those things.

    Like

  13. Coel

    Hi Robin,

    … rather than use the moral language, which people generally don’t generally use to mean those things.

    Well they do mean those things whether they realise it or not! Your request would be fair enough, if accompanied by a request that anyone else using moral-realist language also be clear about what they mean by it.

    Liked by 4 people

  14. Robin Herbert

    Hi Coel

    Well they do mean those things whether they realise it or not!

    What you actually mean is “Robin, you are completely right”, whether or not you realise it or not!

    Like

  15. Robin Herbert

    As I have pointed out often enough, the things I think are right and fair and good are often just the way I don’t want the world to be, because the injustice is currently more or less in my favour. I suspect that is true for many people. Possibly it is true for most people who are favoured by injustice.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Daniel Kaufman

    garth: Yes, the questions philosophy is tasked with addressing are important ones But they are also the sort for which there commonly is not just one viable answer. And what answers there are, are often only partial answers. Sometimes — as in the case of ethics — different theories help us make sense of different parts of the landscape, but are terrible at making sense of other parts. Kant and Mill are classic examples of this — each addresses a key cluster of our moral intuitions, but neither addresses the others territory very well or at all.

    This seems a frustration for a lot of people who think that where there are questions, there must be single answers or at least complete ones. But philosophical questions — and the other most important questions in life — are not like that.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. SocraticGadfly

    Per Dan, I quote Iranian philosopher Idries Shah, a quote that deserves many readings:

    “To ‘see both sides’ of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.”

    Liked by 4 people

  19. garthdaisy

    Well I didn’t say anything about one right answer. I just said we need operational answers to the important questions taken up by philosophy.

    “What is a good life?”

    Surely there are many answers to this question. Surely some of them are terrible. Are some of them right or wrong? Perhaps no answer to that question can be considered “right” or “wrong” technically but surely some answers will seem much righter and others much wronger. We are after all genetically virtually identical beings. Our answers to that question can not diverge that much in the end. They must be similar. We all have the same pleasure and pain centers.

    Who’s job is it to discern good, better, worse, more correct, or less correct answers to the question above? Not philosophers? Someone else? Individuals? Are there really 7 billion distinct answers to that question out there? Is it possible, given that we are well over 99% identical, that there is one general answer to that question that more or less works for everyone, with only slight variations per individual?

    Liked by 1 person

  20. synred

    E.g., ‘the Trolley Problem’. I’d likely still be thinking about it while the 5 people on the track got killed and the ‘brain stem’ response would follow after the whole incident was over. People with different personalities might push ‘Ollie’ on the track and worry about the ethics later…

    If the fat man was ‘Moe’ I might push him even if there was nobody in danger </:0) …

    Or in memory of Ellie Wiesel, there are the truly 'evil' who just don't give a damn … ' kalt und herzlos sein!'

    -Traruh

    Like

  21. Daniel Kaufman

    . We are after all genetically virtually identical beings. Our answers to that question can not diverge that much in the end. They must be similar.

    ——————————————

    I couldn’t disagree with this more. Acculturation has a far bigger impact on these questions than genetic endowment. I don’t think there is any reason why people need have similar conceptions of the good life, and in fact, they don’t.

    Liked by 2 people

  24. garthdaisy

    Robin,

    I live in a nice big house in Canada right across the street from a beautiful beach and I don’t have to work my fingers to the bone for it. Presumably the injustice in the world is in my favour and I should not want anything to change. But I do. The injustice bothers me greatly. I have guilt. I don’t want others to suffer for my good life. But I have no control to stop the suffering and injustice in the world, even if I chose to opt out and take a life of self imposed poverty. All I can do is lobby for change to a more fair system, and I do.

    So even though the world system is currently unfair, seemingly in my favour, I still want it to become more fair at my financial expense, because being unhappy and guilt ridden over the inequities is actually not in my favour. I don’t want that feeling. It’s not what I favour.

    Liked by 2 people

  25. Philosopher Eric

    Daniel,

    Regarding what you’ve said about philosophy not having unique and complete answers, I did quickly get this impression as a kid in the late 80s at university. But even then the kernels for my modern theory were quite well set. I decided that given this “art” situation, that formal study in the field would only teach me to fail to develop the kinds of answers that are practically needed, or ones which have the potential to become generally accepted. Now that I’ve returned decades later with my ideas extensively worked out, I find a very defensive field that not only likens itself with art, but also defines progress as the kinds of things which it does. Yes tempers are on edge! So how might I diffuse this defensiveness so that my own “non-art” kinds of answers for epistemology, mind study, and ethics, can indeed be assessed?

    I know that this brings a smile to your face as you ponder how to effectively communicate to us all that if there’s anything which thousands of years of philosophy has demonstrated, it’s that simple answers do not exist here! Well maybe, but perhaps (credit Socratic) the proper questions haven’t always been considered? I’ve developed some very simple answers to questions which are not entirely the same as the standard ones, and they seem to go unchallenged perpetually.

    Regardless I don’t see how the pressure on philosophy will ever diminish, as long as it presides over humanity’s most important questions, though without also providing generally accepted answers for its practical use. “Art” is obviously not going to cut it, when we still require tangible answers.

    Liked by 2 people

  26. synred

    Hi Dan,

    There is certainly more variation among human societies than among chimps, orangutans or gorillas which at least until recently when we killed most of ’em had more genetic diversity than us.

    There are both genetic and cultural reasons for differences. I thought this ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate was settled in favor of both!

    I think, as you indicate, for humans ‘nurture’ gets the edge.

    Like

  27. garthdaisy

    “Acculturation has a far bigger impact on these questions than genetic endowment.”

    I couldn’t disagree with this more. Unless you think culture can make someone not desire pleasure.

    “I don’t think there is any reason why people need have similar conceptions of the good life, and in fact, they don’t.”

    In fact they do. Unless you are just talking about hobbies.

    Like

  30. Daniel Kaufman

    Eric: That’s right. The questions are not the sort that have those kinds of answers. Which is why I’ve never found your accounts at all compelling. To my mind, they completely misunderstand the questions to which they are directed.

    Like

Comments are closed.