Posts Tagged ‘philosophy’
Process philosophy
I’ve found some new books about process philosophy, and I’m very excited. Truly, process philosophy seems to have a sounder basis in—or approach to—reality than some other approaches. From Process Philosophy: A Survey of Basic Issues, by Nicholas Rescher:
… It seems sensible to understand “process philosophy” as a doctrine committed to, or at any rate inclined toward, certain basic propositions:
- Time and change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding.
- Process is a principal category of ontological description.
- Processes are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things for the purposes of ontological theory.
- Several, if not all, of the major elements of the ontological repertoire (God, Nature as a whole, persons, material substances) are best understood in process terms.
- Contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding.
A process philosopher, then, is someone for whom temporality, activity, and change—of alteration,striving, passage, and novelty-emergence—are the cardinal factors for our understanding of the real. Ultimately, it is a question of priority—of viewing the time-bound aspects of the real as constituting its most characteristic and significant features. For the process philosopher, process has priority over product—both ontologically and epistemically. This process-oriented approach is thus historically too pervasive and systematically too significant to be restricted in its bearing to one particular philosopher [he's thinking here of Alfred North Whitehead, whose book Process and Reality, was quite influential – LG] and his school. Indeed, one cardinal task for the partisans of process at this particular juncture of philosophical history is to prevent the idea of “process philosophy” from being marginalized by limiting its bearing to the work and influence of any single individual or group.
In addition to the book mentioned, above, I have Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, also by Nicholas Rescher (and, I think, a better introduction than the book above, which has a certain focus on unsolved problems and unfinished tasks in process philosophy: suggestions for research and thought, in other words), and Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead, by C. Robert Mesle. Although one shouldn’t overemphasize Whitehead in a general discussion of process philosophy, he’s nonetheless a major figure in its develop—though in fact, one can trace it back to Heraclitus as the earliest exponent, and certainly Leibniz was a major figure as well.
I have three books by Henri Bergson on order as well—he, too, is a proponent of process philosophy.
I find this fascinating, though others may not.
Interesting lecture notes in philosophy
Worth downloading if philosophy’s your thing. From the link:
These lecture notes have been developed over many years and draw on material presented by Alan Code in his Introduction to Ancient Philosophy course given at UC-Berkeley in the 1980s when I served as his Teaching Assistant. Prof. Code has granted permission for use of the material which is, at this point, integrated throughout the notes.
Here’s one example:
Why Be Moral? – Republic I-II (PDF)
Cheating: determinism vs. free will
Does your belief in determinism (or free will) making you more or less likely to cheat? Determinists will, of course, say that the question is meaningless: if you cheat, it’s not a matter of choice, since there is no (true) choice, merely the illusion of choice. OTOH, even if determinism is true, you can (or—more properly—are forced to by being pre-determined) measure the difference in cheating rates between those who believe in determinism and those who believe in free will. And someone has done an experiment to find out what happens:
Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it’s a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every “decision” we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual’s control.
Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don’t actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their achievements are due to innate ability rather than their own effort, they are less likely to persist at similar tasks in the future. But until recently, no study has attempted to directly study belief in free will and how it affects behavior.
Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler have found a way to study this question (though they can’t tell you whether they were predestined to do it or they came up with the idea through their own independent efforts!). They had 30 students read one of two passages by Francis Crick. The first passage argued that most scientists now recognize free will as an artifact of the way the brain works, that free will is simply an illusion and our actions are determined solely by genetics and the environment. The second passage discussed consciousness and did not bring up free will at all. Then the students were given a test to measure their belief in free will versus determinism.
Finally, the students were asked to take a computerized mental arithmetic test with twenty questions like 1 + 8 + 18 – 12 + 19 – 7 + 17 – 2 + 8 – 4 = X. Next came the key to the experiment: the experimenter told them there was a small computer “glitch” that caused the answer to be displayed shortly after the question appeared. To avoid the glitch, students had the space bar as soon as they saw each question. In fact, the computer recorded both the answers and whether or not the space bar was pressed. Here are the results:
Why consciousness?
What good is it, anyway?
No one doubts that our experience of phenomenal consciousness—the felt redness of fire, the felt sweetness of a peach, the felt pain of a bee sting—arises from the activity of our brains. Yet the problem of explaining how this can be so seems to many theorists to be staggeringly hard. How can the wine of consciousness, the weird, ineffable, immaterial qualia that give such richness to subjective experience, conceivably arise from the water of the brain? As the philosopher Colin McGinn has put it, it’s like trying to explain how you can get “numbers from biscuits, or ethics from rhubarb.” The philosopher Jerry Fodor recently claimed, “The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling.”
If you smell theoretical panic, you’re right. But are the scientific answers really so far out of reach? Have people been beguiled by the marvelous properties of consciousness into asking for the moon, while what is at issue is really much more down to earth? Everybody says they are waiting for the Big Idea. But perhaps the big idea should be that consciousness, which is of such significance to us subjectively, is scientifically not such a big deal.
It all depends on asking the right questions at the outset. I can show what I mean with the example of a well-known visual illusion. Consider what you might want to explain about the experience of looking at the object in the picture to the left (Fig. 1), a solid wooden version of the so-called impossible triangle. Since it is at first sight so surprising and impressive, any of us might very well innocently ask the (bad) question: “How can we explain the existence of this triangle as we perceive it?” Only later—indeed only once we have seen the object from a different viewpoint (Fig. 2), and realized that the “triangle as we perceive it” is an illusion—will it occur to us to ask the (good) question: “How can we explain the fact we have been tricked into perceiving it this way?”
Now, no one wants to think that consciousness is likewise some kind of trick. But let’s nonetheless see where the analogy may lead. The standard philosopher’s example is the case of what it’s like to see red. So, suppose you were looking at a ripe tomato: What might you want to explain about the qualia-rich red sensation that you are experiencing?
Since the qualia are indeed so up-front and remarkable, and since no one knows why this is, we are all, most probably, going to start off by asking what may be a bad question: “How can we explain the existence of these qualia as we experience them?” So here, again, it will only be if we undergo a radical shift in perspective and realize that the “qualia as we experience them” could be a mental fantasy, that we shall move on to asking what may be the good question: “How can we explain why we have the impression that such fantastic qualia exist even if they do not?” But, here is why it is likely to be so difficult to make this move: In the case of consciousness, we cannot simply change our perspective to see the solution. We are all stuck with the first-person point of view. So, the result is we persist with questing for the qualia as such.
Yet if consciousness is a trick, then of course this quest is a fool’s errand. It will make no more sense to try to explain the existence of qualia than it would to explain the existence of the impossible triangle. What we should be doing instead is trying to explain just how we have been set up—and why.
Epicurus on the happy life
And what modern research says about his views.
“If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.” –Epicurus
Philosophers down the ages have been keen to tell the rest of us how to live and how to be happy. Certainly their advice comes to us with the lustre of intellectual achievement; it is both high-brow and high-powered, but can we understand any of it and how does it fare against modern psychological research?
One philosopher who dispensed clear advice about how to live a happy life was Epicurus, a Greek who lived in the third century B.C.. In a new article in the Journal of Happiness Studies, Bergsma, Poot and Liefbroer (in press) explain Epicurus’ guide to the good life and then compare it with some of the huge body of work in psychology looking at satisfaction with life.
Especially now as we launch ourselves into a New Year it is worth thinking about what both philosophy and psychology have to teach us about how to live the good life.
Philosophy on TV—not in the US
Interesting post from My Mind on Books:
In France they watch philosophers talk on TV – as discussed in a recent book called Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television
by Tamara Chaplin (found through this blog post, see also publishers’ website)
By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.
Meanwhile in the US we take the opposite approach, issuing a spate of pop-culture-related “…and philosophy” books (such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer)
, as recently discussed in Philosophy Now.
Yeah? But how many reality shows does French TV have, huh? Tell me that.
The consciousness of the universe
A very interesting theory is discussed in the NY Times Magazine today: consciousness comes from matter and thus is inherent in matter.
Profile of Socrates
I enjoyed this. Perhaps you will as well:
During his lifetime Socrates wrote nothing down. Yet his wisdom has formed the bedrock of western philosophy. Socrates was viewed as a great teacher. But he did not claim to be a teacher. In fact, he frequently said ‘all I know is that I know nothing’. By all accounts Socrates was both poor and ugly. Yet in a society that placed tremendous value on beauty and wealth, people of all classes were magnetically drawn to his teachings and enigmatic personality.
As he wrote nothing down, there is some dispute about what Socrates actually said. But, from the writings of Plato and others, we can gain a few glimpses into the character and ideals of this ancient sage and unique philosopher.
The Socratic Dialogue
Perhaps the most arresting feature of Socrates’ legacy is his unique method of teaching and arriving at the truth. Socrates didn’t claim the truth is this or the truth is that. He sought to question students in a way that would lead them to arrive at the truth themselves. Socrates frequently claimed to know nothing. Yet, if Socrates knew nothing, why were people so eager to hear him talk? The reason was that Socrates was able to make people reconsider their own ingrained ideas; Socrates had a way of making people think for themselves and consider truth from different angles.This method of conversation incurred the ire of some people; they were not happy that Socrates was able to show the limitations of their thinking. Yet, the genius of the Socratic method was that he never had to directly tell people their inadequacies; they came to realise it themselves.
