The Philosophers' Cocoon

Originality and the pursuit of truth

In an interesting interview, Les Green (Balliol College) says:

I’m hostile to the pursuit of originality in legal philosophy—and also in most other areas of philosophy. By this I mean that one should not set out to say something new; one should set out to say something true. I’ve seen too many graduate students hobbled by the anxiety that their ideas are not original, even though they are very illuminating, and I’ve read far too many books where the only conceivable explanation for their curious doctrines is that they were written in order to be original.

Of course, everyone’s work should be original in the sense that it should be authentically one’s own, not cribbed from the internet or stolen from your graduate students. But ‘originality’ in the sense of being unique, unprecedented etc. is something that should emerge, if at all, only as a by-product of the search for truth. 

I think I agree with much of this in principle--particularly that philosophical originality should ideally emerge in pursuit of truth. I also think I've had the experience that Green alludes to here: of reading philosophical works that seem to me to seek originality for its own sake, arguably leading away from truth rather than toward it. Nevertheless, I have a very different attitude towards originality: I adore it, in part because of how skeptical generally am about the received 'truths' of any given time in philosophy, and in part because of how originality can unexpectedly lead to greater philosophical understanding later if, if not demonstrably truth (which, I hope we all know, is tantalizing elusive in most areas of philosophy).

Anti-depressants do work: reply to Stegenga

In a piece at Aeon linked to at Daily Nous, philosopher of science Jacob Stegenga (University of Cambridge) contends that "we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve." I don't think the evidence available supports Stegenga's argument, and I made a comment to that effect in the comments section over at Aeon (which Stegenga replied to). Because I think this is a very important issue--one that could potentially affect people's choices and public attitudes regarding anti-depressants--I want to address Stegenga's argument here at the Cocoon.

I want to begin by noting two things. First, this issue is very personal to me. Mental illness not only runs in my family, affecting multiple people I am close to - it has also affected friends of mine. Second, I have experience working in the mental health field. As an undergraduate, I interned for a year in an out-patient day program utilized by dozens of individuals with serious mental illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, borderline personality disorder, and so on. Then, after graduation, I was Assistant Director of a group home that housed around a dozen residents with serious mental disorders. Among many other things, I was responsible on a day to day basis for dispensing medications, including importantly changes to patients' medications.  

Bearing this in mind, let us turn to Stegenga's basic argument that "we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve." He contends, first, that "the best evidence about the effectiveness of antidepressants comes from randomised trials and meta-analyses of these trials." I will explain below why--on methodological grounds--I believe this to be false. Stegenga's argument then is that in randomized trials and meta-analyses, observed mean effect sizes are tiny:

In meta-analyses that include as much of the evidence as possible, the severity of depression among subjects who receive antidepressants goes down by approximately two points compared with subjects who receive a placebo. Two points...We saw above how clinical guidelines have held that drugs must lower severity-depression scores by three points to be deemed effective. On this standard, antidepressants do not pass.

Hyman's analysis of atheism and some interesting Indian parallels

Gavin Hyman explains in his 2007 contribution to Martin's Cambdride Companion to Atheism as well as in his 2010 A Short History of Atheism that atheism is always the refusal of a given form of theism. In particular, in European history, atheism is the refusal of theism as conceived in modern times, with God as one "thing" among others. This claim might raise the eyebrows of readers of Julian Baggini, who in his 2003 Atheism. A very short introduction maintained that atheism is independent of theism, since it is tantamount to naturalism. The two claims are, however, less far than it might look like.

Modern atheism as naturalism refutes God because it considers him as a natural cause and shows (or believes to show) that there is no need to accept his existence, since the other natural causes are more than enough to explain the world.

By contrast, Hyman explains that the transcendental God of negative theology or of analogical theology* could not be attacked by atheism-as-naturalism. In short, Richard Swinburne's God can be attacked by atheism-as-naturalism, whereas this would have much less to say against the God of Meister Eckhart (the example is mine).

Why analytic philosophers of religion might want to be a little less orthodox

I recently accepted to be an executive editor for the Journal of Analytic Theology, and will be joining the team with Mike Rea and Oliver Crisp (senior editors) and Kevin Diller (executive editor). JAT is an open-access, interdisciplinary journal that fosters analytic approaches to theological topics, including analytic philosophy of religion. I'm excited to be a part of this, and it will be my first major editorial role (I'm on the board of other journals but it's not quite the same as co-managing a journal).

One thing I've noticed among analytic philosophers of religion is that they are fairly orthodox. You don't see analytic philosophers of religion (hence aPoRs) defending, say, Arianism or Pelagianism. Indeed, you will often see aPoRs arguing at length something like "Now at first, my approach may seem Pelagian, but it's really in line with the Catholic tradition"--or something to this effect. I even saw the acknowledgment section of an article in aPoR where the author thanked two other philosophers from saving him from heresy. 

A.I. ethics piece at Medium

My first stab at public philosophy, "We're programming A.I. psychopaths - and how to avoid it", is now up at Medium. Hope you all find it interesting!

Methodological problem: How to reconstruct a (missing) theory in comparative philosophy

While discussing a theory which is well-known in Europe and in the Anglophone world in comparison to (one or the other theory within) another philosophical traditions, say, premodern Indian philosophy, one can be faced with two alternatives: Either the theory is easily recognisable also in premodern Indian philosophy or it appears to be completely missing (with many steps in between).

Both cases involve risks. In the first case, one may be driven away by the easiness of the comparison and overwrite the Indian theory with one's own, more familiar one. This is a risk one runs when, for instance, discussing theology in an Indian setting, if one does not question whether God could mean something different in both contexts. The other case is also risky, since it leads one to a difficult situation. The clue to the answer is asking what is really meant by the question at stake.

For instance, let us suppose that one is investigating the topic of free will and wishes to compare what has been written about it in Europe and in the Anglophone world and in premodern India. Free will has been debated in thousands or millions of titles in Europe and America but not a single monograph is dedicated to this topic alone in premodern India. Here, one needs to think what exactly is meant by the question, so as to approach it, so to say, from the side. One will therefore notice that the question about free will arises out of a contrast, be it between one's will and God's one or between one's will and neuroscience data about the process of decision making. Having taken notice of that, one will realise that the topic of free will can be found in theistic traditions (and in fact it is discussed in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta), but not in monist ones. In this way, therefore, one understands both why a given topic is dealt with and why it is not.

This also leads me to one of the advantages of a comparative approach: At the very least, it enables you to gain clarity and become better aware of the complexities hidden in each given topic.

Did you ever understand X better through comparing it with the approach to X of a different tradition? How did it happen?

Popular mechanics on the "proof" we're not simulated

Like I said, Popular Mechanics nicely explains it was #fakenews! ;)

Did physicists show we're not living in a simulation? No.

A number of philosophers (including Justin at Daily Nous) have been sharing this article today claiming a new physics paper demonstrates we are not living in a computer simulation.

Readers may recall that I have a little bit riding on the simulation hypothesis, as I've argued that a new version of the hypothesis--the peer-to-peer (P2P) simulation hypothesis--might not only provide a unified explanation of quantum phenomena, but also open up conceptual room for a new theory of free will capable of reconciling interactionist dualism with physical-causal closure.

Does the new physics paper really show we're not in a simulation? Consider a simple summary of the paper's results:

They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated...The researchers calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.

If this is indeed their argument (and it is - see comments below!), then no, their paper does not show that we're not living in a simulation. As one commenter put it here, the problem with this form of argument is simple:

This argument is underwhelming to me...Consider if Pacman took some time to study physics. He analyzes Ghost behavior and realizes it would take more than 255 levels worth of data to describe it. Pacman concludes that he must not be in a simulation, because clearly there are only 255 levels in the world.

In other words, it's absurd to claim we're not in a simulation because it would take more data and memory than we have in the simulation. This is akin to arguing that 1GB hard-drives are impossible because it's only possible to build a 1KB hard-drive in Minecraft. 

Am I missing something?

How should we think about the moral risks of philosophy?

There's something I've had in the back of my mind lately that I'd like to float out there for discussion. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks. The question I have is how we should think about the potential consequences and risks of philosophy. While I'm no historian, from what I do know philosophy often seems to make a real impact in the world--sometimes in horrifying ways. Socrates, if I recall, was put on trial not simply because challenged the status quo but in part because his arguments against democracy were thought to be partly responsible for the bloody rise of the Thirty Tyrants. Similarly, I trust many of us have heard that Rousseau's political philosophy influenced the Jacobins and Robespierre, who were responsible for French Revolution's Reign of Terror. And of course there are the not-exactly wonderful forms of government inspired by Marxism; the ways in which Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies have been utilized in the service of Nazism; and so on.

Given that philosophy can be (and often has been) used in the service of evil, how should we think about the moral risks of engaging in it? This question has long been in the back of my mind, and surfaced again the other day when I read this article about how Richard Spencer and others in the "alt-right" have again twisted philosophical ideas in support of what many of us regard to be a dangerous and harmful social movement. One possible answer as to how we should think about the moral risks of philosophy is that bad people will find resources to support evil ends regardless of what we philosophers do--so, what we should do is simply seek the truth and do our best to make sure our ideas aren't twisted by evil people. Another possibility is that we have a duty to do more than that: to be careful to defend morally good ideas--ones that cannot easily be twisted to serve evil ends.

Omniscience in Indian thought---some preliminary thoughts

Dear readers, I have not been contributing much in the last months, since I focused almost exclusively on South Asian philosophy, which is not the main interest of most of you. Nonetheless, I thought of offering you a glance of a topic I worked on. I would be very grateful to read comments, criticisms and even just American-European parallel and constrasting views. Thus, comments are more than welcome! Please let me also know what just sounds crazy (so that I can see what I have not been able to convey ---Sanskrit authors are not crazier than other human beings).

"Omniscience'' (sārvajñya) assumes many different meanings in the various Indian philosophies. The understanding possibly most common in European and Anglo-American thought, which sees omniscience as including the knowledge of any possible thing in the past, present and future, is neither the only, nor the most common interpretation of omniscience.

Why is the topic of omniscience relevant in Indian philosophy? Because of at least two concurring reasons. On the one hand, for schools like Buddhism and Jainism, it is a question of religious authority. Ascribing omniscience to the founders of the school was a way to ground the validity of their teachings. Slightly similar is the situation of theistic schools ascribing omniscience to God, as a way to ground His ability to organise the world in the best possible way. On the other hand, for other schools the idea of omniscience was initially connected with the the ṛṣis and with the result of yogic or other ascetic practices. As for the former case, ṛṣis are believed by most schools to have directly seen the Vedas in a mythical past and are therefore endowed with a superhuman ability to see also sounds. In the latter case, omniscience is conceptually not different from aṇimā 'the faculty to become as small as an atom' and other special powers of yogins (see Pātañjala Yogaśāstra, book 3).

Philosophical/scientific virtues and the history of inquiry

Last Friday, Justin Weinberg ran a post at Daily Nous speculating on what the virtues of a philosopher are, and proposing the following as an initial list:

• Humility – knowledge of the limits of one’s knowledge, including one’s knowledge of those limits
• Curiosity – the propensity to be dissatisfied with one’s lack of understanding, but not discouraged by it
• Charity – the disposition to first seek the wisdom in what others say
• Courage – the strength to not mistake uncertainty for danger
• Grace – gratitude to those who help save us from ourselves

Readers then chimed in with their own thoughts.  However, while such speculation may be fun, I cannot help but be skeptical of its epistemic value. Reality, after all, is no more obligated to conform to our untutored intuitions about philosophical virtue than it is obligated to conform to our intuitions about space and time, etc. The issue of which traits are in fact philosophical virtues is a partly conceptual question, and partly empirical. First, we need to settle what the proper aim(s) of philosophy are. Then we need to examine which traits or learned disposition are most conducive to achieving the aim(s) in question, using actual data rather than intuitions. So, let's think about these issues a bit more.

First, what are the proper aims of philosophy? One obvious problem is that different people have different conceptions. For some, I suppose the aim(s) of philosophy is truth (viz. true answers to philosophical questions). Others, however, might gloss the proper aim(s) of philosophy as 'understanding' (viz. Sellars' claim that, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term"). And so on. I'm not sure there is enough agreement on the aim(s) of philosophy to settle what philosophical virtues are. However, offhand, I think it's plausible that the aims of philosophy are not that different than the aims of science--as the sciences aim for truth, understanding, and so on.

So, let's take science as a rough model. How might we collect data on scientific virtues? Well, we would need to determine which dispositions in individual inquirers tend to lead to the discovery of scientific truth and generation of scientific understanding. I do not have such data, and am not sure that anyone does (does anyone know of any good studies here?). What I do have, though, is a fairly good grasp of scientific history. As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite pastimes is reading intellectual biographies on famous philosophers and scientists from history. What, if anything, do those sources suggest? What types of traits and dispositions did scientists who contributed immensely to discovery of scientific truth and understanding tend to have? Did they tend to have the kinds of traits Weinberg proposes?

I cannot purport to provide anything like firm answers to these questions. However, as luck would have it, I purchased, "The Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking", this past Saturday and decided it would be fun to put together a compendium of reports on the traits and dispositions of different theorists. I've also used a couple of other sources, and here is what I found:

A true story, but also a parable?

The following is a true story:

Several years ago, my mother took our family dog (R.I.P.) out in the backyard to do his 'nightly business.' An unexpected rustle in the dark led the dog to growl and confront the intruder. It turns out the intruder was a mother raccoon with several of her babies. To protect them, the raccoon attacked the dog. To protect the dog, my mother the screamed and attacked the raccoon--and the raccoon attacked her. My father, who was in the shower, heard her screams and rushed outside naked with a baseball bat to protect my mother, who he feared was being assaulted by burglars. At that point, a next-door neighbor heard the commotion, and called to police to protect my mom "from a naked man wielding a baseball bat." Several minutes later, a number of police stormed the house like a SWAT-team with guns drawn, ordering my dad to drop then weapon. Finally, animal control showed up to capture and put the raccoon to sleep--and my mom and dog got driven to the hospital and emergency vet.

What a disaster, right? Yet here's the thing: so much of human life seems sadly analogous to it. Time and again, we see violent escalations arise from each side of a disagreement insisting that their standpoint is right--that they and they alone have discovered the God's Honest Truth. We see this throughout human history up to the present. In the Crusades, Catholics and Muslims both claimed to be 'in the right'--and so they fought. In the European religious wars, Catholics, Protestants, etc., claimed to be in the right--and so they too fought. More recently, both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argue that their side is in the right--and so they fight. Democrats and Republican think they are in the right--and so we fight. And, of course, on blogs, social media, etc., we see broadly the same thing. Wherever we look--on the news, in politics, in academia, etc.--everyone argues they are in the right...and so we constantly fight.

When will we ever learn? Better yet, what do we need to learn if we want these kinds of horrible cycles to cease? Allow me to offer up an answer to the latter question, and then return to the former question.

Passions of philosophers outside of philosophy -- Mike Austin

One of my favorite things to do over the past 15 years has been coaching soccer. Thanks to my daughters, I’ve had the opportunity to coach. My passion for the sport has grown and I’ve been motivated to learn more about the beautiful game. Being a coach also gives me some justification for watching Arsenal and Sporting Kansas City matches in order to develop my knowledge of the game. Or so I tell myself.

One of my first memories of soccer consists of being in a field in Kansas, where we not only dodged our teammates in scrimmages and drills, but also had to dodge cow patties. I played soccer off and on growing up, was a referee for youth games, and helped run some clinics with my dad and younger brother.

I started coaching youth soccer when I was still a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Our oldest daughter wanted to play, and they needed coaches, so I volunteered. She and our middle daughter both played soccer through their middle school years. After that, they focused on music and marching band. Our youngest daughter kept at it and truly loves the sport. I coached her at the youth level from U8 to U12, and enjoyed that a lot. Going into her 8^th grade year, her last year of middle school, they needed a coach and I took the job. After she moved on to high school, I kept coaching the middle school team because of how much I loved working with the young athletes and being around the sport as a coach. 

I’m very proud of the program I’ve helped build at the middle school. We compete against much larger schools, and for years the girls didn’t expect to do well against them. However, each of the past 2 seasons, we were undefeated in our league games. The girls now expect to compete with the teams from these schools, and it’s been rewarding to see them grow in skill and confidence. They play with so much heart and determination; it makes me proud to be their coach.

Just this month, I was named the high school girls soccer coach, which means I will once again coach my daughter, in her senior season with the team (I was granted permission by her, thankfully). We have some goals as a team related to different competitions that we’re in, but as a coach I also focus on doing what I can to encourage them to become better athletes and better people (as the Positive Coaching Alliance puts it, see here).

It is easy to make time for coaching soccer, because I love it. I do less (sometimes no) writing during soccer season, but that is an easy trade-off for me. My philosophical interests related to character and its relevance for different realms of human life cross over with my role as a soccer coach. Being a coach enables me to test out some of my views on character development and sport in the real world, and it gives me food for thought as I reflect on these issues. I’ve written papers on sports and neo-Aristotelian moral development, sport and humility, and I recently published a paper on sport as a means for cultivating the theologhttp://www.positivecoach.org/ical virtues of faith, hope, and love. I also hope to write a more popular-level book on sport and moral development in the near future.

I’m looking forward to many more years of coaching soccer, and hopefully a few more trophies along the way. But most of all, I value and look forward to the relationships I am able to have with these young athletes, encouraging them to see themselves as athletes, to value excellence, and to have some fun along the way.

Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment & Sensitivity

A new meta-analysis just appeared in the Journal of Moral Education on the neural correlates of moral judgment and moral sensitivity in parts of the brain associated with self-hood (full paper available here). Here are some of the key findings:

The default mode network regions were commonly associated with moral functions across diverse domains of moral tasks...The results showed that during [moral] judgment tasks, the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, temporoparietal junction, middle temporal gyrus and connected superior temporal sulcus, middle occipital gyrus, temporal pole, fusiform gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus and precuneus were activated. In the moral sensitivity condition, the dorsomedial, ventromedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, cingulate gyrus, temporoparietal junction, orbitofrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, temporal pole, inferior temporal gyrus, precuneus, cuneus and amygdala were activated.

Allow me to try to parse this out a bit.

Morality, the Problem of Possible Future Selves, and Christmas Parables

In my 2016 book, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory, I argue that morality is a solution to a problem of diachronic rationality called 'the problem of possible future selves.'

To simplify (very) greatly, the problem--which is partially inspired by L.A. Paul's groundbreaking work on transformative experience--is that (A) our present selves have to make decisions on behalf of our future selves, but (B) we do not know which future selves we will actually be (particularly as the future becomes more distant), including (C) what our future selves' retrospective preferences will be regarding our decisions in the present. I then argue that this problem can be solved if and only if our various selves cooperate with each other across time--not just across seconds or minutes, but across decades--to act on principles that are rational for all of one's possible future selves to endorse in unison given mutual recognition of the problem.

The final part of the argument is that this cross-temporal agreement consists of principles of fairness--principles which require one to treat all of one's possible selves fairly, and by extension, all other persons and sentient beings. The reason for this is broadly as follows: because one has an infinite number of possible future selves--some of whom are selfish, others of whom care about other human beings, animals, etc.--the only principles that all of one's selves can rationally agree upon in unison are those that strike a certain kind of compromise between self-interest and the interests of others: a compromise comprised by four principles of fairness.

Anyway, I argue that a rapidly increasing body of neurobehavioral evidence supports picture (a little of which is nicely summarized here and here). In essence, it increasingly appears not only that (A) the neural mechanisms that enable us to care about our own possible future selves just are the neural mechanisms that lead us to care about others, but also that (B) moral behavior and (self-regarding) prudential behavior are simultaneously enhanced or degraded together in direct proportion to the extent to which we concern ourselves with our possible future selves.

Still, all of this is very abstract. Can a simpler, more down-to-earth intuitive case be made for how moral cognition and motivation are rooted in concern for one's possible future (and by extension, possible past) selves? I believe that Christmas parables, of all things, can help!

Analytical Philosophy of Religion with Indian categories

As part of my attempts to go beyond my confort zone, Wednesday and Thursday last week I enjoyed two days of full immersion in the Analytical Philosophy of Religion. In fact, the conference I was attending was about the ontological status of relations from the perspective of Analytical Philosophy of Religion and most speakers started their talk saying that they were not experts in the one or in the other field. I was neither nor, which made me the sub-ideal target for all talks ---and yet one who could learn a lot from all.

A few random remarks:

1. "God" is an ambiguous term, in fact so ambiguous that I wonder why does not each study about philosophy of religion start with a discussion of what the author means by this word. I pragmatically distinguish (for instance, in my teaching) between god as devatā 'deity' (a superhuman being which is better than a human one, but only insofar as s/he has the same qualities of a human being in higher degree, like the Greek and Roman deities of mythology), god as īśvara 'Lord' (the omniscient and omnipotent being of rational theology), god as brahman 'impersonal being' (the impersonal Absolute of most monisms, including Bradley's one discussed by Guido Bonino) and god as bhagavat 'personal God' (the personal God one directly relates to in prayers, without necessarily caring for His/Her omnipotence or omniscience, but rather focusing on Him/Her as spouse, parent, child, etc.). Within this classification, Analytical Philosophy of Religion appears to focus on the īśvara aspect of God.
2. It is perhaps self-evident that this approach enables one to discuss logically about God and His/Her attributes. God is not a person one is in relation with (who could have whimsical desires etc.), but rather a perfect being who needs to be logically consistent. The only logical problem relates to God's alterity, so that one could wonder how far can human logic reach before crashing against its boundaries. Nonetheless, unlike in the case of God as bhagavat, one needs not worry too much about His/Her lying completely outside the realm of thinkability. The mysterium can be understood as a challenge to think deeper something which, at a certain point (in the liberated state) we will all be able to grasp.
3. Consequently, I could listen to several interesting discussions on God's temporality (does His/Her omnipotence include His/Her producing effects which are temporal, or is rather His/Her own activity itself which is temporal?) and on God's knowability (having said that God is not fully knowable by living human beings, the purpose of rational theology (continued in analytical philosophy of religion) is to find out whether what we can know about Him/Her is consistent with what we know through revelation).
4. The main topic of the conference was, however, God's being and its relation to His/Her qualities. Does God have wisdom? Or is wisdom (part of) God? The first definition leads to several problems, well-known to scholars of Sanskrit philosophy, insofar as one could always conceive a substance without its qualities (e.g., the soul in the state of liberation according to Nyāya) and, consequently, God's relation to His/Her wisdom would end up being adventitious. By contrast, the second solution leads to a different problem: How can one conceive of God as "being" wisdom? Marco Damonte suggested using Frege's distinction between sense and reference: All Divine attributes have the same referent (God), but different senses.
5. Summing up, it seems that the believers in a bhagavat do not gain so much out of their readings of rational theology or analytic philosophy of religion. This is, in Mario Micheletti's words "not foundational": one can believe even without theology (and, one might add, vice versa: one can enjoy theological thinking even without believing). Nonetheless, rational theology can persuade believers that what they believe can be rationally believed (and it plays a very important role in the metaphysical and philosophical discourse).

Long story short, I am very grateful to the organisers, Daniele Bertini and Damiano Migliorini. My only suggestion for a further improvement would be to allow for even more time for discussion (perhaps with the help of some leading questions by the organisers themselves?), especially insofar as their audacity in putting together physicists, theologians and historians of philosophy made the attempt to find a common language even more challenging than usual.

(cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can also read a few interesting comments)

Philosophical discussions: a metaphilosophical proposal

In my previous entry in this series, "Metaphilosophical concerns", I traced out some similarities between philosophy as it is practiced today and pre-scientific psychology. Several decades ago, before psychology increasingly adopted scientific methodology,

1. Theories in psychology were based primarily on how things "seemed" to different investigators.
2. Without any clear protections against forms of cognitive or emotional bias, motivated reasoning, etc.

This resulted in opposing theoretical camps--Freudianism, Jungianism, Behaviorism, Humanism, Instinct Theory--whose practitioners tended to think that their favored framework was better supported by arguments than their rivals. Unfortunately, this tended to result in very problematic forms of argument, such as post-hoc reasoning where each framework would marshall their own theoretical resources to "explain" the same phenomena. If, for instance, a patient resisted treatment, Freudians would say, "Of course - that's just what our theory of reaction formation predicts!"; Humanists would say, "Of course - that's precisely what one would expect from a humanistic drive to self-actualize!; and so on. The end result was a bunch of theoretical stalemates, in which proponents of each perspective maintained their framework was the most coherent with the evidence. The premises that one group of people found "plausible" did not seem all that plausible to people on the other side of the debate.

Philosophical discussions: metaphilosophical concerns

A few weeks ago, some of my philosopher friends were sharing this Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Is Philosophy Obsolete?", the tag-line of which reads, "No. It helps make us coherent to ourselves, and that's a never-ending project."

I don't think "seeking coherence" can be an adequate way of defending, or doing, philosophy.

First, there appear to be conclusive reasons to think that coherence per se is not truth-conducive (see sections 7&8 here). A set of beliefs can be as coherent as you like--but, for all that, they can be totally out of touch with the truth. This is a longstanding objection to coherentist theories of epistemic justification, and it seems to be a definitive one.

Second, while some might be willing to bite this bullet--suggesting that philosophy needn't be about getting at truth (I've heard a few people suggest this!)--I don't think that's a bullet we should want to bite. Making false views more coherent can be a very dangerous endeavor. Among other things, it can make false and harmful theories or belief-sets seem more plausible to those who already endorse them, as well as to others. To take just a few examples, consider Sir Robert Filmer's defense of the divine right of kings in his 1680 book, Patriarcha. Or consider young-earth Creationism or the views of the Flat-Earth Society. Or, of course, consider racism and white-supremacy. These doctrines can be rendered increasingly coherent, and indeed, their proponents have spun all kinds of coherent defenses of them--defenses which their proponents think constitute evidence for the view in question. But this, clearly, is a very dangerous thing to do. We should want to avoid approaches to inquiry that can lend an "air of legitimacy" to views that are false.

Finally, notice that coherence in one obvious sense lends itself to a kind of status quo bias. If our task as philosophers is to simply make our beliefs more coherent, we must begin with whatever beliefs we have--which is plausibly what led Filmer and those of his ilk to defend the divine right of kings. That doctrine fit with many status quo beliefs at the time, so of course it seemed defensible on coherentist grounds. Similarly, people resisted Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the solar system because it contradicted "commonsense" at the time. People resisted (and some still resist) the theory of evolution on such grounds. And yes, many physicists and philosophers initially greeted Einstein's theory of relativity not with open arms, but rather condemnation as obviously inconsistent with the "a priori fact" that space and time (obviously!) must be absolute.

For these reasons, I don't think philosophy or science should be in the business of rendering "commonsense" coherent. They should be in the business of discovering the truth--for, as we see in history, the truth often defies commonsense (or, at least, what people take to be commonsense at a given time). But how? What does it take for philosophy to be truth-conducive? And, are we currently using truth-conducive methods? Like a seemingly growing number of philosophers, I have a variety of concerns, some of which I would like to share here and explore in this post and several to come. 

On substances and qualities: An Indian perspective

The authors of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta school (a philosophical school flourishing in South India from the 10th c. onwards) claim that the whole world is made of God/brahman and that everything else is nothing but a qualification of Him/it. This philosophical concept, it will be immediately evident, crashes against the idea of a rigidly divided ontology, with substances being altogether different from qualities, as upheld in the more ancient school of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. In other words, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika world if seen from outside is similar to the world of today's folk ontology, the one influenced by scientism, while its structure resembles the one of Aristotle's ontology.

It is populated by subject-independent entities which are ontologically solid and persistent through time and to which qualities accrue which need them as their substrate. It goes without saying that this is a reciprocal distinction (substances are not qualities and qualities can never become substances), since it is grounded in an ontological difference (akin to Aristotle's ουσια). In other words, qualities cannot be further qualified by other qualities, since they cannot be their substrate (this leads to some complications, but I will not focus on the specific Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika answers now).

This scheme can not work if one wants to imagine the world as being constituted by just one reality (the brahman/God) with all the rest being an attribute of Him. In fact, this idea implies that there is one substance (God), which is qualified by further things which, however, cannot be called qualities, such as human beings and other material entities. One of the main authors of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Veṅkaṭanātha (1269--1368) is not afraid of stating explicitly that his school does not use the term 'quality' (guṇa) in a technical sense, like Nyāya did (see his Nyāyasiddhāñjana 4.4) and that for Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta everything can be considered a quality of something else when it specifies it.*

This, however, does not amount to say that qualities and substances are only subjective constructs. The ontological grounding is provided by God's existence as the world's foundation. The fact that all human beings are qualifications (viśeṣaṇa) of Him is not a subjective construct, since it is rather a state of affairs which exists independently of all subjective minds apart from God's one.

This brings us to the next step, namely, the importance of God's existence to ground the world. Given that Viśiṣṭādvaita authors have given up the subject-independent ontology of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, they need another way to ground the objective existence of the world and this cannot be achieved but through God. He is ultimately existent and therefore we can opt for being and avoid plunging into nihilism. But what tells us that the world as we see it is also subject-independent? The fact that it is conceived by God. It is a content within God's knowledge. Thus, the main thing to be analysed for Viśiṣṭādvaita becomes the status of God's knowledge. Knowledge is said, in Nyāyasiddhāñjana 4 and before that in Rāmānuja's Śrībhāṣya ad 2.2.27, to be a substance. This seems a daring statement in a context which was used to the idea that cognitions are rather qualities of the self. Rāmānuja does not want, in fact, to deny that cognitions are qualities of the self, he only wants to state that they are also substances. They are, therefore, not kevalaguṇas 'sheer qualities' but rather dravyātmakaguṇas 'qualifications being substances'.

*As a homage to Veṅkaṭanātha I will also not try to render the Viśiṣṭādvaita guṇas with a term different than the one I use for the Nyāya guṇas. Viśiṣṭādvaita authors are not talking about other types of qualifications, they rather claim that what Nyāya authors call qualities are indeed not necessarily a different class from substances.

(a similar version of this post has been cross-posted on my personal blog)

Philosophical discussions - new series

Ever since the Cocoon's inception, its mission has been to provide a safe and supportive forum not only for discussing early-career professional issues, but also a place to discuss our work--a place to engage in philosophical discussion! In recent months, just about all of the blog's content has focused on professional issues. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I very much plan to continue blogging about those kinds of subjects. Still, as someone who works in a very small department--and who rarely gets the chance to talk philosophy other than with undergraduate students--I thought it might be fun to talk philosophy for a change. But, what to discuss?

Because I don't like to compromise anonymized review, talking about stuff I'm currently working on is out as far as I am concerned. I also don't want to focus on stuff I'm not working on, as the best conversations typically result from discussing things one knows pretty well. Finally, I don't want to bore readers by simply presenting stuff I've published, because...well, that would be boring and self-indulgent! :) So, then, here's what I came up with instead. I thought it might be fun to begin a new series where Cocoon contributors discuss some broad philosophical issues they've been thinking about lately, whether in their published or unpublished work, sharing their thoughts on the issue at hand and inviting readers to share theirs. 

Does philosophy need to be less purified, or more?

Many of my friends on social media have been posting and discussing, "When Philosophy Lost Its Way", an article by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle over at the New York Times The Stone opinionator column (thanks to Robert Frodeman as well for drawing my attention to it). The post is also currently being discussed at Daily Nous, where a few commenters so far seem sympathetic with the main points of the, but many others report being unpersuaded.

Very roughly (and I'm paraphrasing a lot here), Frodeman and Briggle argue that:

1. Philosophy was once widely practiced, focusing on issues relevant to society and everyday life (e.g. wisdom, virtue, etc.).
2. It then increasingly migrated into the modern research university, where
3. It became increasingly specialized, modeling itself on the hard sciences, thereby
4. Coming to focusing less on issues relevant to society and everyday life (wisdom, virtue, etc.), and more on peer-reviewed publication and "its own arcane language" (e.g. conceptual analysis, etc.)
5. However, philosophy's attempt to model itself after the sciences not only divorced it from ordinary life and the humanities. It also lacks the virtues of the sciences--namely, reliable methods that lead to actual progress.
6. Thus, philosophy "lost its way": it abandoned its roots (messy, humanistic inquiry) in pursuit of a fool's errand (scientific precision), in a manner that both (A) marginalized philosophy as an academic discipline (alienating it from the humanities, but also from science, since scientist have their own, more productive methods!), and (B) alienated philosophy from everyday life and society.

Have I gotten their account right? In any case, Frodeman and Briggle suggest that the key is for philosophy to return to its messy, humanistic roots. They write:

Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.

What should we make of their critique, as well as their proposed solution? A number of Daily Nous commenters find the critique inadequately supported:

21st Century Philosophy: In Crisis, a New Beginning, Both, or Neither?

Dan Hutto (University of Wollongong) has posted a nice, short little piece at academia.edu entitled, "21st Century Philosophy: In Crisis or New Beginning?" As my blog post from a while back, "Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy" suggests, I very much agree with Hutto.

The general message of both pieces is roughly this: if we want to both (A) improve philosophy's methods, getting away from untethered intuitions (including empirically unsupported claims about folk psychology), and (B) help our discipline get taken more seriously and regarded as more relevant in the modern world (both of which, I think, we should want!), philosophy in the 20th Century is going to have to increasingly return to more naturalistic/anti-rationalistic modes of inquiry, increasingly drawing upon and interweaving with the sciences, rather than setting itself apart from the sciences as an a priori discipline (as analytic philosophy largely did during the 20th Century). This isn't to say that all forms of rationalism are bad, or that there is no room for a priori philosophizing. It is only to say that, in swinging so far in the direction of a priori/rationalistic methods in the 20th Century, analytic philosophy painted itself into something of a corner, both philosophically/epistemically (leaving little more than intuitions to motivate philosophical argument, with no clear tests of which intuitions reliably track truth), as well as socially, academically, and politically (distancing and isolating ourselves from the public at large, from other disciplines, and from current affairs). I, at any rate, have great hope that the 21st Century will be a "new beginning" of sorts for philosophy--a century of philosophy crossing disciplinary boundaries, drawing on the sciences, and drawing a more diverse body of philosophers, and different social and philosophical perspectives, into the fold. And indeed, there seem to me already clear signs of this occurring, with an increasing number of philosophers engaging more with the sciences, engaging more with issues of public interest, publishing in more public venues, etc.

How should we foster this new beginning? In addition to the above ways, I think we can do so in a number of related ways: by (1) continuing to question and move further away from methods (such as "the method of cases") that dominated 20th Century philosophy, but are increasingly seen as problematic, (2) increasingly insisting that areas of philosophy with empirical connections (e.g. moral philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of free will and agency) engage with, and be based on, a sound, thorough understanding of the relevant empirical areas, and (3) increasingly identifying a sound graduate education in philosophy with one that does not cordon off philosophy from empirical science, but instead draws upon, and merges, philosophical reflection and argument with scientific understanding (e.g cognitive neuroscience, empirical moral psychology, etc.). Or so I think. What do you think? Is philosophy in the 21st Century in crisis? Is it at the start of (potentially?, hopefully?) a new beginning? Both? Neither? 

Two papers critical of order effect research at Synthese

By Wesley Buckwalter

Several experimental philosophers have found that philosophical intuitions of both professionals and laypeople are sensitive to the order in which the thought experiments they come from are presented. A nice summary of the latest results about this by Schwitzgebel & Cushman can be found here.

But now, not one but two new papers critical of this body of research are set to appear in Synthese (what did order effects ever do to you, Synthese?). One paper “Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism” by Zach Horne & Jonathan Livengood questions the assumption that order effects indicate philosophical intuitions are unreliable. Another paper, “How not to test for philosophical expertise” by Regina Rini claims to have identified a deep methodological problem invalidating most findings about order in philosophy!

When you have 'the wrong intuitions'

A couple of my facebook/philosophy friends shared this old post of mine a couple of days ago. The basic idea I explored in the post is whether dominant professional standards of 'philosophical rigor'--by requiring arguments to be situated in a prevailing literature, beginning with premises that others in the literature find 'intuitive'--function in a problematically conservative manner: one that effectively excludes or further marginalizes philosophical voices who are already marginalized, requiring members of marginalized groups to begin with premises a dominant majority finds 'intuitive', regardless of whether one finds that premises at all intuitive oneself. As I explained,

I think I've seen these [exclusionary] forces play themselves out in the classroom, in philosophy seminars, and in professional conferences. I've taught in classrooms, for instance, where -- after spending, say, an entire semester teaching "The Greats" on ethics, or epistemology, or whatever -- I'll assign something by a feminist, or a critical race theorist...and my students will seem so much more skeptical than they did about the "Greats". Why? Here again, my feeling is this: the students are skeptical because the things the feminist or critical race theorist are saying conflict with the received "body of wisdom" they have been steeped in. Similarly, I've sat in philosophy talks where someone -- often someone from a different background from the majority -- tries to raise an alternative point-of-view, and the "feel" in the room is something like, "Okay, can we get back to Kripke/Rawls -- the "real stuff" -- now?" Finally, I've sat in APA sessions on feminist philosophy or African philosophy, and here too a couple of things stood out to me. First, the audiences in the room were pretty homogenous, with few representatives of dominant backgrounds or philosophical viewpoints in attendance. People working within dominant traditions in philosophy, by and large, just didn't bother to even attend these sessions (at least the ones I have attended). Second, in these cases I was struck by just how unlikely it would be for many of the arguments given in these sessions to "fly" with, say, a journal referee or editor of a mainstream philosophy journal. The more I listened, the more it seemed to me that our disciplinary standards for what counts as a "good argument" would immediately rule out the arguments given as bad arguments. Why? In my view, very roughly: because the premises people were appealing to "conflicted with received wisdom." Few things could drive a person from a field more, I think, than saying to them, "Well, the premises you find attractive conflict with the premises we find attractive -- and our premises are the ones you must work with if you don't want to be an outsider."

Although I am not a member of a marginalized group myself, thinking about my post again got me thinking again about a broader issue I've discussed before: the sociology of philosophy, in particular the potentially problematic ways in which "philosophical progress" might be driven less my arguments than by sociological forces, such as "snowball effects" where an intuition (or set of intuitions) pushed by a few philosophers might lead other people to "jump on the bandwagon" with those intuitions, leading entire philosophical literatures in specific directions, not to much on the basis of argument quality, but simply as a kind of snowball, where Big Name argues X, everyone then takes X as  a jumping-off point, etc. 

Some questions about Killoren's Extended Narrativity Hypothesis

In my previous post, I presented an account of moral status in terms of final value and direct obligations. About a year ago, another featured author, David Killoren, presented his "Extended Narrativity Hypothesis" (ENH) to acount for a the different obligations we have towards livestock and our pets (which he sums up elsewhere as a reformed "animal caste system") (see more details here and here). He wrote,

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

If the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.  

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion.

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

In the wake of my previous post, I'd like to offer a reply to David. While I am very sympathetic to the attempt to account for different obligations based on other features than just an animal's intrinsic properties, and while the ENH seems to plausibly account for some widespread intuitions about pets and livestock, I take issue with the way David frames the kind of value grounding our obligations and with his argument for generally excluding livetsock from the realm of narrative value.

Moral status worth having

By Nicolas Delon

I first want to thank Marcus and the Cocoon for hosting me in the next couple weeks. I'm glad, after years following the Cocoon, to get the opportunity to write from the other side. Much of what follows draws from relatively recent work but much of it is also prospective work-in-progress.

In my first post I would like to map the territory of moral status*. I will not talk much about the grounds of moral status. Here I'm interested in the notion itself, how it is variably used by philosophers and others, and whether we should keep talking about moral status at all.

I would like to address a challenge raised by what I think is a plausible understanding of the notion of moral status, namely that is has no desirable use in moral discourse. I will start by introducing the central features of my account and why I think it is plausible. I then consider the objection that the account is not normatively neutral. Let me first note that, while my account is to some extent idiosyncratic, it reflects essential features commonly cited in ethics in the last decades: final value, welfare, and obligations.

The duty to do philosophy cross-culturally

"Is the debate on global justice a global one?"---asks Anke Graness at the beginning of an article (available OA here) in which she analyses the more common positions on global justice held in Western academia and confronts them with the perspective on justice of two contemporary African philosophers (the Kenyan Henry Odera Oruka and the Ethiopian Theodros Kiros) and with the reinterpretation of the traditional African concept of ubuntu (yes, it is not only an IT system!).

This cross-cultural comparison is generally neglected by Western academics, who rather debate among their peers, who tend to be other Western academics. This lack of inclusion is particularly ironic in the case of the debate on global justice, since:

Astonishingly, even though the goal of the debate is to find and justify universally valid principles of global justice, the concepts, norms, and values of regions of the world other than Europe and North America are rarely taken into account. While the possibility for discourse and exchange […] was and is available […] the lack of a truly intercultural exchange reveals the injustice of the academic discourse. (p. 127)

Apart from the interesting topic of global justice, Graness makes some points which could be applied to potentially any philosophical enterprise. First, she notes the risk of

'othering', namely the belief that every culture or region has to develop by default ideas essentially different from European theory to be worth consideration. (p. 131)

I have discussed this risk especially on the Indian Philosophy Blog while speaking about possible strategies to make Western scholars aware of Indian philosophy. There I expressed the concern that a strategy like B.K. Matilal's (publishing on Mind and using the jargon of Analytic philosophy) could have meant leading people to consider that Indian philosophy is so similar, that it does not deserve separate consideration. Now I know how to call this risk. The risk of "othering" quickly leads to another risk, which I would call of "exoticisation", so that the West is considered the norm and other views are welcome as exotic additions to the norm. Graness points it out when she writes:

Here we are confronted with biased expectations which shape our perception of theories from different regions of the world, namely that 'Western' scholars formulate universal theories, whereas scholars from all other regions formulate regional theories. (p. 132)

This is what happens, I believe, when a book on topic X discusses Western views of X for 23 out of 24 contributions and then adds a chapter on "Non-Western views on X".* To put it plainly, a discussion of X which welcomes challenges, answers and ideas from wherever they come appears to me to be more likely to be fruitful of new stimuli. Further, Graness discusses the causes of the lack of inclusion of non-Western (and, I would add, non-mainstream) ideas in the mainstream philosophical discourse:

1. "Even though the academy claims to be free of politico-economical and ideological constraints, it cannot avoid being affected by the structural imbalance of power relations in our world" (p. 135)
2. "The canon-forming power of the universities" (ibid.). This point reminds me of Eric Schwitzgebel's acute formula: "Because the dominant academic culture in the U.S. traces back to Europe, the ancient Chinese philosophers were not taught to, and thus not read by, the succeeding generations. Ignorance thus apparently justifies ignorance: Because we don’t know their work, they have little impact on our philosophy. Because they have little impact on our philosophy, we believe we are justified in remaining ignorant about their work." (for a fuller discussion with further links, see Marcus' post here).
3. "An author's ability to choose a publisher has an enormous influence on which audience a publication will reach" (p. 135.)
4. Financial resources
5. Language: "a lingua franca clearly gives native speakers an advantage over non-native speakers" and one risks to assume that "what is not translated into English is irrelevant" (p. 136)

The result of all these factors, concludes Graness, is that

Euro-American-dominated philosophical discourse is in its majority unawre of concepts and arguments beyond its narrow discursive boundaries (p. 136).

Graness is however not content with the exposition of the problem and tries to suggest solutions:

First, philosophers have to be aware of their own contextuality and how it influences their thinking. (p. 137)

A point which could be enlarged as to encompass the scrutine of one's prejudices as the constant duty of a philosopher qua philosopher (see this post). Further:

Second, […] this means undertaking the often-difficult, time-consuming search for voices and sources from other regions of the world to start a comprehensive discussion This is not the easy way, but choosing the easy way keeps one at the navel-gazing stage. (ibid., emphasis added)

Graness works on cross-cultural and on African philosophy. Would we, as scholars of different traditions within philosophy, share her views? What would we say differently?

*Full disclosure: I have myself contributed a chapter on "Indian Philosophers" to the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis. It is possibly the most read thing I have ever written and I enjoyed writing and discussing it, but I sense the risk of ghettisation that these enterprises carry with them.

(cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy blog, where you can find further comments)

De Cruz on philosophical ruts

Our own Helen De Cruz has a really interesting post up at Philosophical Percolations on how philosophy often appears to fall into ruts "dominated by two well-outlined, opposing positions", and on steps philosophers might take to get out of them. Check it out!

Would contemporary philosophy interest "The Greats", or is it too faddish?

Justin at Daily Nous has posted an interesting survey today asking what contemporary philosophy "The Greats" should read. The survey caught my eye in part because of a social media post I came across yesterday--a post in which a prominent philosopher remarked on how little contemporary philosophy appears to have any lasting influence. More exactly, they remarked on how a friend of theirs in another department noted just how once-influential philosophers like Dummett and Davidson have largely faded from view.

Moral Expertise and The Distribution of Knowledge

By Jamie Carlin Watson

Ethics consulting is a growing practice in business, medical, and research contexts. And given the unique subject matter of ethics, there are concerns about the role of ethicists in professional decision-making, even among ethicists. Foremost among these is whether ethicists can, like authorities in other fields, speak as experts about their subject matter. I am currently working on a problem for moral expertise called the credentials problem: arguments that there are no sufficient reasons for non-ethicists to assign greater evidential weight to the testimony of ethicists about what one ought to do than to anyone else’s. I am working on an argument defending the moral expertise of consulting ethicists against this problem, but along the way, I’ve come across a popular objection to moral expertise that I call the distribution problem. While this problem has important implications for how we should respond to moral testimony, I don't think it is a challenge for the plausibility moral expertise. Here’s why.

Why I blog

By Helen De Cruz

Thank you to Marcus Arvan for raising the question why not more early-career philosophers blog. In fact, across the board most philosophers do not blog, and I'm not sure whether early-career philosophers are underrepresented. Still, the question remains why so few philosophers are bloggers. As some of the readers might know, I like to blog, and I think it can be part of an effective way to engage with philosophers outside of the normal routes. 

How do you respond to philosophical skepticism?

The impossibility theorems...show...that no measure of coherence is truth conducive even in a weak ceteris paribus sense, under the favorable conditions of (conditional) independence and individual credibility.

- Erik Olsson, SEP entry on Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification

This discussion on moral disagreement got me thinking again about the issue of philosophical progress, and the extent to which we should be confident that philosophy is at all truth-conducive. Most of us, presumably, go about our careers thinking that philosophy bears some relation to truth: that it 'isn't all B.S.', as some of our students cheerfully maintain. Yet some philosophers demur, questioning whether philosophy makes any progress or whether we have any reasons to consider it truth-conducive.

Loving God for no reason

Why does a devotee love God? Because He is good, merciful, omniscient…? Or just out of love?

This seems to be one of the moot issues between the two currents within the form of Vaiṣṇavism later to be known as Śrīvaiṣṇavism, since the theologian Piḷḷai Lokācārya (13th c.) stresses that loving without reason is superior to loving with a reason, just like Sītā's ungrounded love for God's incarnation as Rāma is superior to that of Lakṣmaṇa, who loves Rāma for his good qualities (see Mumme 1988, p. 150).

Rāma between Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā (r.)

In fact, one might add, Lakṣmaṇa would stop loving Rāma if he were no longer good, or might even start loving someone else, if that other person had better qualities than Rāma. Thus, one who loves with reasons is like a mercenary who is ready to serve a new warlord. Similarly, one might further speculate, one who loves God for His qualities is in fact in love with the qualities, not with God as a person. By contrast, when one loves a person, even her defects seem attractive to one.

This all makes sense, perhaps even a lot of sense. Yet… this means that there is no intrinsic reason to say that loving God is better than loving a demonic being who demands from us that we kill and torture living beings. If we love the latter, we will encounter consequences among human beings, such as jail, and possibily also in the after-life, since God is more powerful than demonic beings and will punish the people whe are not His devotees. Yet, there is no reason whence loving God should in itself be a reason for distinguishing better people. In fact, theoretically there might even be people who love a saintly being who is even 'better' (more compassionate, for instance) than God. And yet, they would not be compensated for choosing the more morally perfect being, since God would only compensate His devotees…

What is then the alternative to mercenary love and indiscriminate love for whomsoever?

(cross-posted, with minor modifications, in my personal blog)

Philosophy's crudity and Narrative's epistemological value

A recent post by Elisabeth Barnes raised a discussion in several blogs (including this one) about philosophy's "casual cruelty". Philosophers, it is said, argue about basic human rights in an abstract way, with thought experiments daring to ask whether it would be ethical to let die disabled children/abort disabled foetuses/prohibit disabled people to have children/… . Philosophers do not even stop speculating about the suppression of disabled people, Barnes continues, when they have a real disabled person in front of them.

This reminds me of Richard Rorty's discussion of the value of literature. Literature, Rorty argued, makes one identify with single persons, and not just with humankind in general. One sees Lolita's perspective and Humbert's one and one cannot fully condemn in a crude, rationalising way, because one sees the human side of the story.

In this view, I look forward for Marco Lauri's presentation at our panel on Testimony at the Atiner Conference (here is the program), since he will focus on the epistemological value of story telling. Story telling is not just the frame, it alters the meaning of the content communicated, it adds shades of meaning and depth to the content communicated ---so that the listener's belief or lack thereof in the content presented is intrinsically dependent on the story in which it is embedded (think of the Cretan paradox as the utterance of a repented lier and it is no longer a paradox).

Story telling can even have a transformative value, insofar as it changes the listener (and perhaps through her also the speaker). Thus, the ideal situation of a listener, a speaker and a content is possibly much more muddled in actual reality and the three can be reciprocally linked. However, let me add that the investigation of this hermeneutic circle does not need to lie outside the precinct of philosophy (although it has often lain outside analytic philosophy), as shown by Ancient Greek (Plato ---see Mark Hopwood's comment on this blog---, Aristotle's attention to poetical structures) and Arabic philosophy (Lauri will refer to Ibn Ṭufayl), by the fact that Rorty and Gadamer were also philosophers, by the usage of poetry and story telling in the works of well-known philosophers such as Derrida, Nietzsche (and Veṅkaṭanātha).

You can read a great post on philosophy and poetry (especially in Indian Philosophy) here. The same author (Andrew Ollett) dwells further on the issue here. (cross-posted ---with minor modifications--- on my personal blog)

Higgs vacuum stability and fine-tuning

Regular readers of this blog know that I think our reality is probably a massive peer-to-peer (P2P) networked computer simulation (also see here and here). Some of you may also recall that whereas for most of my life I self-identified as a religious Agnostic, I now self-identify not as a Believer but rather as a Hoper--someone who believes it is a serious epistemic possibility that some sort of 'God' exists, and who hopes against all hope (but does not believe) that a good God (one that can somehow redeem this rather wonderful but rotten world) exists (also see here).

I won't go into full detail here as to why I believe a Creator is a serious epistemic possibility, or why I hold out a sliver of hope (though not a ton!) that Creator might be good, or at least good enough to love. Suffice it to say, I think that if our world is a massive peer-to-peer networked computer simulation, it probably had to be made. Peer-to-peer networking--particularly networking on this massive of a level--is incredibly complex and requires an incredible amount of processing power. One of the other reasons I take the 'God' (or, if you prefer, Creator) hypothesis seriously, though, is that (as I've said before) the more I understand about physics and cosmology, the more miraculous this entire world seems to be.

Now, I'm sure you've all heard of the Fine-Tuning Hypothesis before--the view that our Universe is "finely tuned" in a variety of seemingly-miraculous ways. I'm sure you've heard something like the point that if gravity were just a bit stronger, the Universe never would have expanded as it has; and if gravity had been just a bit weaker, it would have expanded so quickly that galaxies, stars, and so on never could have formed. Or maybe you've heard that if the Carbon atom's Hoyle state had been just a wee bit different, life could never had formed. And so on.

I want to share with you another, more recently discovered case of fine-tuning that, I believe, will knock your socks off. You may (or may not) have heard of the Standard Model of particle physics. While the Standard Model is widely thought to be incomplete, it is an exquisitely well-verified model. It makes crazy-precise predictions about what we should observe in particle colliders, and each of the particles it predicts has been observed. Indeed, the final "key to the puzzle"--the only particle the model predicted but had never been observed, the Higgs Boson--was finally observed (decades after its first prediction) just over two years ago. 

The Higgs Boson is a unique particle unlike any other: it is the particle that all other known particles interact with that gives them mass. Without the Higgs, there would be nothing with mass at all! But, here's the really crazy thing. Although the Standard Model did not predict the Higgs' mass, its mass was found to be in literally the most improbable place you could expect to find it. Allow me to explain.

Here is a fun little chart:

As you can see, the Higgs mass was found in a little sliver of the chart labeled "meta-stability." Let me explain what this means. Very roughly, an unstable or non-perturbative universe (red areas) are sort of what they sound like: they are universes that can't possibly work. A stable universe, on the other hand (green area), are universes that work all the time. Finally, there's "metastability" (yellow area), which means that the universe works sometimes but not always. In the metastable area, the Higgs is temporarily set at one value--the value that makes our universe go round--but will someday fall to a different value: yes, that's right, a value with all new physics (since the Higgs will then interact with all other particles in a different way). Not only are we in the yellow area (a place where it is very hard for the Higgs to 'stay'). We are in the almost the littlest sliver of the yellow area: which means that our Higgs will be stable for a super-duper long time, but not always. Someday, the Higgs will change, and our universe will become another--one where, in an instant, none of us, none of our planets, stars, etc. exist. One in which all of physics changes. All in an instant. This is where we found the Higgs boson to be. We found it in the littlest, most unlikely sliver of the most unlikely area to find it.

There is another way to put all of this. Imagine a very steep cliff with almost no jagged edges. If you were to roll a golf-ball toward the edge of this cliff, where would you expect it to end up? Answer: one of two places: either someplace before the edge (i.e. on land before the cliff) or at the very bottom. The chances of the ball somehow stopping on just a tiny jagged edge would the most improbable thing you could imagine--sort of like the very well-known and justly famous cliff-climbing mountain goats:

The observed Higgs value tells us that our universe is like these goats. Or, to use another helpful image, consider an empty coffee cup. If you were to drop an individual coffee droplet out of the sky, where would you expect to find it? Answer: either in the coffee cup, or outside of it. You most certainly not expect to find it perfectly balanced on the lip of the coffee cup for 13.8 billion years, without ever rolling off one side or the other. But this, again, is what our Higgs--our universe--is like. As one commenter writes at a physics blog I visit occasionally:

20 years ago the Higgs mass could have been pretty much anything, but there was one value that was singled out as special: m_H = 125-126 GeV is the boundary of the stability region. Isn't rather remarkable that Nature chose this very special value?

We know that the Lord is subtle but not malicious, but it seems to me that the message that He is now sending is very clear and not the slightest subtle: there is no new BSM physics and the SM is balancing at the brink of instability. Perhaps better to seek to understand this message instead of looking for another class of excuses to ignore it.

UPDATE: For more, see here and here.

Is there "African Philosophy"? Or just Greek, German…and Indian Philosophy?

Don Howard recently uploaded an interesting paper on cross-cultural philosophy on academia.edu. The paper discusses stimulating topics, such as why we* react ackwardly when we hear of "African philosophy" or "Native American philosophy" and why these labels sound like a contradictio in objecto.

1. Has this to do with the nature of philosophy, which was born in 6th c. Jonia (as claimed in Howard's first paragraph)?
2. Or rather with our racial prejudices?
3. Or with our inability to recognise as philosophy what does not conform to our expectations?

Howard further notes that the only partial exception to the ban to non-Western philosophies is "Indian philosophy" (Jewish and Arabian philosophy are clearly part of philosophy and not in need of discussion). His answer as for why this is so regard all the xthree alternatives mentioned above, since he suggests that Indian thought might have in itself something more philosophical than, say, African thought. However, he also notes that the recognition of Indian philosophy by Schopenhauer and Deussen went along with the almost-coeval recognition of Sanskrit as an (or: "the main") Indo-European language, so that this "ratial" affinity could have vouched for Indian philosophy as a worthy discussant at "the philosophers' Stammtisch". Next, Howard also discusses the discipline's boundaries and their historicity (and their socio-economical reasons). Last, Howard concludes with the commitment to tell a story of continuity, continuity between philosophy and religion (and philosophy and history, and different cultures among each other).

Is this a way to avoid leaving behind different philosophies?

*The pronoun is Howard's. Perhaps readers of this blog will have a different intuition. Within the authors of this blog, Chike Jeffers might, e.g., have a different opinion about "African Philosophy", see here.

(cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog)

There is growing evidence our universe is a giant hologram

Yes, it's true--and it just might help solve a lot of philosophical and physical problems. Okay, to be fair, some disagree. Only time will tell! ;)

Humans as animals (West and East)

Humans are not animals according to Descartes' distinction of res cogitans and res extensa. They are also not animals according to many Christian theologians (Jesus came to save humans, not animals). Perhaps humans are not (only) animals also according to the Aristotelian definition of human beings as ``rational animals", which attributes to humans alone a distinctive character. Humans are also quite different than animals when it comes to their respective rights. But here starts a moot point:

1. If, in fact, humans have more rights than animals because they are the dominant group, then this resembles very much racism or any other dominion of one group over the other.
2. If, by contrast, humans have more rights than animals because they are different than animals, then what does this difference consist of? If it amounts to rationality, should psychically empaired human beings have no rights?

Since after the end of the Nazi experiments a (more or less) general consensus has been achieved about the fact that psychically empaired human beings deserve the same rights, one is led back either to No. 1 or to a different basis of the human claim for rights. This could be Peter Singer's claim that one's moral stand should be calculated not on the basis of one's ability to reach a soteriological goal or one's rational value but on the basis of one's ability of experiencing pain (Singer 1975). This includes psychically empaired human beings. But it also includes at least many animals (one might argue about the fact that many invertebrates with no nerve ganglia cannot literally speaking experience pain).

The discussion about the inclusion of animals within the realm of beings to whom human rights can be ascribed, thus, seems to hit a nerve in Western thought. It seems that no straight line can be legitimately drawn to separate animals and humans and that there is more a net of family resemblances than a straight opposition between the two groups (a dolphin or a gorilla, just to take an obvious example, seem to me to resemble a human being much more than they resemble an amoeba, although all three can be used for the sake of medical research or kept in zoo-like institutions).

The situation is slighly different in other traditions of thought. In Classical Chinese Confucian philosophy, for instance, the idea that we have stronger obligations towards the members of our extended family and towards further "proximate" people is a viable option and one could easily extend this model to animals, so that it would be legitimate to attribute rights first to the members of our families, then to members of our communities, then to further human beings, then to pet-animals, then to further animals with whom we are somehow connected and only at last to further animals. However, this option clashes with the Western ambition of building a universal ethical system, does not it?*

I wrote about Indian reflections on this topic in a forthcoming article (a preliminary draft of which is available here), where I basically argue that most Indian thinkers seem to see non-human and human animals along a hierarchical sequence with no brisk interruption. Daya Krishna connects this with the utilitaristic approach to knowledge which characterises most Indian explicit reflections about it:

The usual Indian analysis is centered around the hedonistic view of human nature which sees it as naturally seeking pleasure and avoding pain and has a pragmatic view of knowledge which sees the `truth' of knowledge in terms of its ability to avoid pain and afford pleasure to the humanking. But on this view no distinction is possible between the human and the animal world as the latter also is supposed to seek pleasure or avoid pain and `sees' the `truth' of its knowledge in terms of the `success' achieved by it in this enterprise. In fact, the whole learning theory in modern psychology and the training of animals is based on this premiss (2004, p. 237)

Let me just add that Daya Krishna is thinking of the first aphorism in the foundational text of the Nyāya school (NS 1.1.1), where knowledge is linked to the achievement of one's summum bonum. In another philosophical school, the Mīmāṃsā, animals are also considered on the same level as humans when it comes to the fact of desiring happiness (PMS chapter 6).

* I am grateful to L.E. for having discussed this topic with me.

I wrote about what ''nature'' should mean on this blog, here. Again on this blog, David Killoren has dedicated two insightful posts to the rights of animals owned by human beings and to how we can justify their "slavery". On why I am citing Daya Krishna, see this post. Within Chinese philosophy, on Confucius vs. Mozi regarding the universality of rights see this post by Eric Schwitzgebel.
(cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog)

 

How to know God? —UPDATED

Basically, we can either claim that God can be known through reason ---with or without further empirical evidence--- (Samuel Clarke, Anthony Collins, Voltaire, Kant, Nyāya, Śaivasiddhānta…) or that S/He can be known through personal insight and/or Sacred Texts (Śrī Vaiṣṇavas after Yāmuna, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas…).

(image by Arne Niklas Jansson)

The first attitude could lead to a rational theology, or even to deism, as it happened during the Enlightenment, since it presupposes that all human beings could equally reach an adequate knowledge of God, if only they were to apply properly their instruments of knowledge to the concept of God or to the empirical data at their disposal. The second attitude suggests that there is no way to prove the existence of God apart from one's own experience and the (one of others as recorded in) Sacred Texts. Historically, religions tend to explain that one should be suspicious of one's insight alone, since it might be due to one's projections of what one would like to see as the ultimate reality, so that the second way is usually at least a mixture of personal experience and its validation through the Sacred Texts. In other words, if you "saw" the Virgin Mary as she is described by other reliable sources, yours could have been a genuine religious experience, whereas if you "saw" a Flying spaghetti monster, you should reconsider your evening meals. Now, the first attitude may seem appealing to our contemporary and secularised world (csw), since it does not recur to the external authority of Sacred Texts, which is usually hard to accept to members of csw. However, it presupposes a totalitaristic move, since if the existence of God can be rationally proved, then your failure to comply amounts to a cognitive fault. It is the same argument which enabled Soviet Union (etc.) leaders to claim that the ones who were not agreeing with the rationality of Communism needed to be reeducated. (cross-posted on my personal blog)

 

The (weak) epistemology of public shaming

I recently run across this new book on public shaming in the Internet age and today I read this fascinating article about this practice. The problem with public shaming, as I see it, is that it is epistemologically weak. Suppose X has done something wrong. A legal trial (or its equivalent in non-legal contexts) is certainly not completely reliable but offers at least some warrants for all the parties involved: If you have blamed X of having done Y, you must be able to prove it. By contrast, public shaming allows no epistemological check: It is enough for one in a position of authority to say that X did Y to elicit reactions, as it recently happened in Afghanistan where a man accused a young woman who was blaming him for selling amulets of having burnt a copy of the Quran: the mob beat her to death). One shames and continues shaming, without ever having to encounter an epistemological control. Moreover, since shaming is a collective enterprise, the individuals participating in it hide in the crowd and forget their personal responsibility. Should you think that shaming is the weapon of the underrepresented ---who would never get a fair trial--- against the established power, think again. In the article linked above, Eric Posner interestingly observes that the targets of public shaming are rather exactly the weakest groups:

[T]he truth is nearly the opposite. If you try to think of which group has been the most consistent target of social media shaming, it is surely women who dare to express their opinions or to break up with boyfriends. The major effect of social media is that it enables people to broadcast an opinion—or, more accurately, a gut reaction—to the whole world, instantly, without pausing to give it any thought. This, combined with pervasive anonymity and traditional animosity to anyone who acts or thinks unconventionally, has awoken atavistic instincts that are multiplied a hundredfold through herd mentality. And then these ill-considered reactions are stored indefinitely, while being immediately accessible to anyone, thanks to the efficiency of search engines. It is possible to argue that the Internet has re-created small-town society, where everyone knew everything about everyone, so everyone acted virtuously in order to avoid ostracism and other sanctions. But this argument rests on a romanticization of that era. Small-town societies bred small-mindedness and conformity, and if they were ever tolerable, it was only because one could leave. One can’t leave the Internet. Once shamed, always shamed.

As an antidote for the problem of epistemological weakness, I would recommend, as usual, testing one's sources and evaluating them as one should evalute any other piece of linguistic communication. As an antidote for the problem of lack of personal responsibility, I would recommend acting in one's own name (no pseudonyms, no anonymous comments) and thinking of one's action as if one were alone. Would one persist shaming X if there were no one else doing it and thus justifying the fact that what one is doing is right? (cross-posted on my personal blog)

"Is there Philosophy in India?" and what this question tells us about "Philosophy" in general, an essay by Ankur Barua

After many years, I am sort of fed up with having to answer the question above, and this is also why I had not read the essay by Barua (bearing the title Is there 'Philosophy' in India? An Exercise in Meta-Philosophy and available here) until he recommended it to me. In fact, the article tells more about what it means to ask the question, than about the answer (which is a straightforward "yes").

First, the question bears on the distinction between faith and reason and theology and philosophy (and the consequent dismissal of Indian philosophy as a quest for liberation, mystical etc.):

[There is an] often-heard criticism that classical Indian thought cannot be characterised as an intellctually acceptable branch of 'academic philosophy' becayse it is entangled with 'religion' (p. 14).

And already on the first page, Barua speaks of the parallel condemnation of the medieval Scholasticism and of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas:

The Schoolmen are not 'philosophers' because they are Churchmen whose point of departure is a specific Christian world-view, and hence thier learned treatises are to be cognised, as David Hume famously put it, to the withering flames of logical analysis.

Thus,

Anglophone philosophy's rejection of its internal other, medieval Scholasticism, is paralleled by its suspicion of its external other, Indian darśana ---both are supposed to be fatally implicated in Metaphysics, Authority and Tradition (pp. 14--15).

This conclusion supports the more general point that "philosophy is not a natural kind" (p. 6) and that, thus,

Any definition is controversial and already embodies a philosophic attitude (Russell 1975:7, quoted at p. 7).

In this sense, the question at the title of this post opens an exercise in meta-philosophy ("What do we expect 'philosophy' to mean?"). As for the possiblity of detecting "philosophy" in India,

as it often happens with the translation of terms which are richly woven into one specific cultural universe into those of another cultural universe, we may argue that terms such as darśana and ānvīkṣikī are 'not the same, and yet not another' from philosophia (p. 27).

But this by no means means that one should refrain from using the word "philosophy" while speaking of Indian schools and discussions. On the one hand, as shown by Barua, the soteriological commitment of several Indian schools does not mean that they did not engage in philosophical arguments about the issues deriving from such a commitment (e.g., the nature of reality and of the self). On the other (at last, in the present writer opinion),

As for western philosophers themselves, in the wake of Kuhn and other thinkers who have developed various froms of social epistemology, they have become less shy of speaking of authoritative testimony (pp. 27--28).

As for the sociality of the scientific enterprise, this article focusing on the Western scenario by Dominik Wujastyk is also worth mentioning. Beside the above, Barua's essay also deals with several instances of debates both in India and in the West. Barua refers to J. Ganeri's point that we have to "rescu[e] a story suppressed by Orientalism --- the story of reason in a land too often defined as reason's Other" (Ganeri 2001: 4, quoted at p. 26). Nonetheless, whereas Ganeri and Matilal dealt with the accusation that Indian thought is just mysticism by showing its rigour, Barua recurs to Hadot and shows that also in the West philosophy does not need to be disinterested and pure theoresis. Section "C" is in fact a long discussion of Augustine's conception of time and of how his philosophical reflections are not "an exercise in idle speculation but are closely related to his exegetical struggles with the Biblical text" (p. 12).

A further, personal comment: Some time ago, a friend has been interviewed for a leader position in an institute for Asian thought. She said she would like the institute to have a "philosophical focus" and one of the people in the committee (who does not work on philosophy) rebutted that using the word "philosophy" could be suspected of a "colonialist attitude", since "philosophy" is a Western concept. I am sure this objection was well-meant, but I am suspicious of its consequences, namely the implicit statement that only Westerners are able to think philosophically. While thinking we are fair and diversity-aware, we are in fact delegitimizing centuries of philosophical elaborations by refusing to call them "philosophy" just because they happened to take place East of Suez.

(cross-posted on my personal blog)

Is theology comparable? —CfP

Recently a few articles and posts (see here, here and here) have raised the issue of whether philosophy of religion is not really little more than Christian apologetics. A straightforward answer (see Tim's comment here) would be that it is not, but an output of the question is what it means for philosophy of religion (and theology) not to be confined to Christianity only. On the one hand, in fact, one might say that to be "apologetic" is not a bad thing, insofar as it really amounts to taking problems at heart and creating sound arguments about difficult issues (I, for one, am inclined to think that little or no philosophical, mathematical and logical problem at all would have been solved if it were not for one's determination to take it at heart and consider all possible solutions). On the other, makes it at all sense to look beyond the precinct of the religion(s) we know best while working on a given theological or philosophical issue?
This range of questions lies at the basis of this panel. A legitimate answer to the questions mentioned above could be that one should focus on one religion only and that all comparison might be misleading ---and it would be interesting to see why this is the case. Another possibly legitimate answer would be to show that theological topics can be better understood once perceived from a different point of view, as it frequently happens with other philosophical categories. If the latter is the case, this should lead to the result that, e.g., the relationship between God's Wisdom (the OT Sapientia) and the second person of the Godhead (are they ontologically identical or is one a property of the other? If the former, should this mean that God is not like an (Aristotelian) substance but rather like an action?…) could be better understood or throw light on the relationship between God and his Potency in Śrīvaiṣṇavism (Śrīvaiṣṇavas also claim to be strictly monotheistics, although they admit the presence of God's Potency beside God Himself). Please note that a sheer juxtaposition of two topics does not make a comparison. We do not expect contributors to be able to shape a comparative contribution themselves, but we expect them to be open for a comparative discussion.

Just as an example, let me attempt to sketch a discussion about God as person which can be rooted in more than one tradition:
Is God a person? If yes, is S/He a person in the same way as we are such? And what does ``being a person'' imply? Do persons need to correspond to a substrate? Does this substrate coincide with their body? And is such a body a material abode or rather the substrate of experience?
The problem can be developed in different ways, ranging from the co-existence of three persons in one God in Christianity (in which sense are they distinct? In which sense are they the same?) to similar problems in other theologies (e.g., the role of God's personality in Indian theology). Further, is God's personality an essential part of Him/Her or does it only regard the devotional level?

Each discussion within the panel (although not necessarily each paper) will cross through geographical boundaries (as usual in the Coffee Break Conference model), showing how philosophical (and theological) problems can be debated together from different perspectives. Participants are encouraged to focus on the philosophical significance of the ideas at stake, rather than on a sheer description of a narrow topic.

Practical issues
The panel will take place within the next Coffee Break Conference, "Sapienza" University of Rome (Italy), 17--19 September 2015. For more on the CBCs in general, see here and here.

Deadline for submitting abstracts (to me): 31st of March 2015.

Travel costs cannot be covered, accommodation will be provided, either at a hotel (in which case, you will be asked to contribute part of the costs) or at one of the organisers' place. Lunches and coffee breaks and conference materials are included.

Trakakis' "Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?"

Just a quick follow-up to my recent post, "Vicious Philosophical Reasoning?". In response to my post, Keith DeRose brought to my attention Nick Trakakis' recent article, "Theodicy: The Solution to the Problem of Evil, or Part of the Problem?". I definitely recommend reading it. Here are a few choice excerpts that spoke to me, beginning with several amazing passages by D.Z. Phillips and Kenneth Surin:

It is true that sometimes considering a matter further is a sign of reasonableness and maturity. But this cannot be stated absolutely, since at other times readiness to be open-minded about matters is a sign of a corrupt mind. There are screams and screams, and to ask of what use are the screams of the innocent, as Swinburne’s defense would have us do, is to embark on a speculation we should not even contemplate. We have our reasons, final human reasons, for putting a moral full stop at many places. (Phillips 2004, p. 115)

Theodicy, by its very nature, involves the application of the principles of reason to a cluster of problems which are essentially such that they cannot be resolved by the mere application of rational principles. Evil and suffering in their innermost depths are fundamentally mysterious; they confound the human mind. And yet the goal of theodicy is, somehow, to render them comprehensible, explicable. (Surin 1986, pp. 52-3)

Given the nature of many of the evils human beings undergo, it would make little sense to speak of compensations for them after death. It does not even make sense to speak of compensation, in this life, with respect to many of our losses – the loss of a child, the end of a friendship, various forms of injustice which create harm, a harm done to someone who dies before any restitution can be made and so on. In some of these circumstances, the law decrees financial compensation, but one almost always hears those who receive it say, ‘Nothing, of course, can compensate for…’ Faced with this undeniable fact the picture cannot change by changing the landscape from an earthly to a heavenly one. (Phillips 2004, pp. 85-86).

And finally Trakakis:

Some theodicies, I concede, do appear to create hope and meaning even in situations where there seemed to be none. But such hope and meaning is, I claim, illusory. For the kind of meaning theodicies offer does not help us make moral sense of tragedy and misfortune, but rather (as argued earlier) provides a picture of suffering that has all manner of morally (and socially) unwelcome consequences, such as undermining our moral practices, failing to countenance the full depth of evil, and treating the sufferer as a mere means to some divine end, usually an end that the sufferer has not themselves chosen or endorsed. People in the midst of great adversity often sense this, and that is indeed why, in many cases, offering a theodicy to someone who is undergoing some terrible suffering has the counter-productive effect of adding to that person’s woes, or at least bringing them little or no comfort. 

In attempting to make sense of the realities of evil and suffering, theodicists inculcate a sense of detachment both in themselves and in their readers. They never stop to ask, however, whether we should, or even could, be detached from the stark realities of evil in the ways they propose. No question is ever raised as to whether there might be some moral danger involved in promoting a strategy of detachment...

Thus, the distancing strategies promoted by those who approach theodicy as a purely theoretical undertaking only add to the evils of the world, rather than illuminating or counteracting them.

Kenneth Surin, similarly, argues that the theoretical pursuit of theodicy can have disastrous moral consequences, not only for writers and readers of theodicies, but for society at large. To view theodicy as an exclusively academic undertaking, notes Surin, "…is already to possess the perspective on good and evil which Max Weber found to be characteristic of modern times; namely, an essentially bureaucratic view of the nature of good and evil. [Surin explains by way of a footnote that, ‘It is typical of the bureaucratic view of good and evil that it regards them in an abstract way, as something involving roles of office, administrative procedures, protocols, etc., but rarely personal guilt and responsibility. The evil bureaucrat par excellence, who rendered evil “banal”, was of course Adolf Eichmann.’] If this is in fact the case, then to regard theodicy as a purely intellectual exercise is to provide – albeit unwittingly – a tacit sanction for the evil that exists on our appalling planet." (Trakakis 2014, pp. 183-4).

Or, as Trakakis' epigraph states, "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of the burning children." – Rabbi Greenberg (1989: 315)

• Greenberg, I. (1989). Cloud of smoke, pillar of fire. In Roth and Berenbaum (Eds.), Holocaust: Religious and philosophical implications. pp. 305–345
• Phillips, D. Z. (2004). The problem of evil and the problem of God. London: SCM Press
• Surin, K. (1986). Theology and the problem of evil. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

On philosophers of religion focusing on their own religion only…

A few days back, I discussed (here) why one should test one's logical hypotheses against something alien, be it a Medieval paradox, a Sanskrit text or the perspective of a thinker being outside the mainstream (e.g., a disabled at a time in which disabled were not allowed to be part of the mainstream society).

Today, I came back to the same thought while reading Adriano Mannino's post about the diffusion of theism among philosophers of religion. Adriano discusses the worries of some philosophers who think that "philosophy of religion" is in fact a disguised Christian apologetic and is, therefore, not philosophical at all. Personally, I think that apologetics can be (and often are) philosophically interesting, but readers of the Cocoon might remember that Moti Mizrahi had manifested in a comment here his disappoint with the fact that journals on philosophy of religion tend to focus only on Christianity and disregard even Judaism.

Whatever the case, should philosophers of religion want to reply (I am not saying they should) to this attack by showing that they are genuinely interested in their subject and not just in justifying their personal choices as believers, they could try to engage in religions and theologies different than their own or at least different than the Christian one. (By the way, if you are looking for an excuse to start doing it, have a look at this call for papers).

(Cross-posted, with some modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy blog)
 

Vicious philosophical reasoning?

Kevin Timpe's post entitled, "Moral Outrage", over at his and Thomas Nadelhoffer's new blog, Discrimination and Disadvantage, as well as this moving New York Times Magazine article by disability-rights advocate Harriet McBryde Johnson recounting her experiences meeting and debating Peter Singer, have both gotten me thinking about a more general issue that has bothered me for some time: namely, whether some philosophical questions, ideas, and arguments are simply wrong (and even vicious) to investigate.

On philosophy blogs, one often hears the refrain that we philosophers are/should be in the business of questioning everything--that nothing should be off-limits. As a staunch believer in free expression and academic freedom, I'm willing to accept that we should be permitted to engage in philosophical and scientific inquiry that others find hurtful, offensive, and morally outrageous. My question, though, is not about social policy, but about personal morality: that is, about what we should be willing to do ourselves, what kind of people we should be, and how these questions relate to philosophical inquiry (again, are there some questions we just shouldn't ask? Are there some arguments we just shouldn't make?).

Before I give the example that first gave rise to these questions in me, I'd like to begin by deferring to Timpe and Johnson. Timpe writes:

What I found pretty quickly, however, upon digging into the disability literature is that I become outraged by some of the views I encounter. These views aren't just (in my view) wrong, but (again, in my view) morally offensive. To hear individuals claim, for instance, that my son has no moral standing at all (despite never having met him); to ask, apparently in all honest, if the severely disabled have a right not to be eaten; to discover sterilization of some individuals with disabilities is not only legal but compulsory in some states--these, and other views, provoke a very strong visceral reaction.

Similarly, Johnson writes in detail of how harrowing her experiences meeting Singer have been. She writes:

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live...

In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The ''illogic'' of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness...

He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged -- but it's for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.

Although I cannot (and will not) speak for them, Timpe and Johnson arguably imply that it is wrong and indeed vicious to entertain certain questions, ideas, and arguments, and indeed, that the very conception of philosophy that has led its practitioners to entertain those questions, ideas, and arguments--a conception of philosophy that coldly prioritizes Truth above all else, above flesh and blood human beings in particular--is in some sense morally rotten on precisely these grounds: the assumption that Truth is more important that human beings.

This is something that has long worried me, and which in my case emerged in a different area: the theological Problem of Evil. In his well-known work, "Why God Allows Evil", Richard Swinburne admits up front:

It is inevitable that any attempt by myself or anyone else to construct a theodicy will sound callous, indeed totally insensitive to human suffering...I can only ask the reader to believe that I am not totally insensitive to human suffering, and that I do mind about the agony of poisoning, child abuse, bereavement, solitary imprisonment, and marital infidelity as much as anyone else.

However, whenever I read something like this--when I read Swinburne's own answer to the Problem of Evil or hear some other philosopher of religion suggest that the problem has been solved, etc.--I can't help but shake my head in dismay. I experience Swinburne's words as a performative contradiction. When he writes, "I do mind about the agony of poisoning, [etc.], as much as anyone else", I think to myself: you just showed me that you don't! The agony of poisoning, child abuse, genocide, etc., are not things that one should "mind as much as the next person" (which sounds entirely cold to me); they are things that should inspire horror in you and lead you to think: I can't possibly answer the Problem of Evil; no one can. I experience it, in other words, as callous (to those who suffer) to even attempt to answer the problem. I imagine looking the eyes of someone who has suffered their whole lives with little or no recompense--a person for whom this world has been an abject nightmare--and I cannot imagine bringing myself to give that person any "solution" to the problem of evil in good conscience. And, I think to myself, if I couldn't say it to them--if they would think me a monster for trying to philosophically rationalize a world that they experience as a cruel joke--then I probably shouldn't say it, or think it, at all. I should instead--if I am to do justice to them, flesh and blood human beings--not even attempt to answer the question. Just like Peter Singer should not attempt to argue that persons with disabilities shouldn't be born.

Or so I am inclined to think. Am I wrong?

Why testing logic (or philosophy in general) on non-Western ideas?

As some of you may have noticed already, I am working with some colleagues (of the Theory and Logic Group within the Computer Languages Department) at the formalisation of the deontic logic (i.e., the logic of prescriptive statements) presupposed by the Mīmāṃsā interpretation of the ancient Indian Sacred Texts.
Now, a question could arise, namely, what is the use of such an attempt? I am usually the one who has to answer from the point of view of a researcher on Indian philosophy, but I will try here to address the question from the opposite point of view. Please note that much of what I will say could apply to philosophy in general.

• Even more than philosophy in general, logic necessarily aims at universality. If it were proved that logic only works within a given culture or, even worse, within a given language, logic would turn out to be a complete failure. Thus, like philosophy and even more than it, logic needs to constantly look for possible falsifications outside the culture in which it had been developed.
• Testing logic outside its original context may mean discovering that old principles might not be as universal as initially thought (the principle of contradiction is at odds with the Jaina tetralemma, for instance).
• Likewise, such a test may lead to the discovery or confirmation of new theses (a notable example is Graham Priest's study of the consistency of paraconsistent logic as applied to Mahāyāna Buddhism).
• In our case, deontic logic is a newcomer in the field of logic, but deontic texts have interpreted for centuries within the Indian Mīmāṃsā school of philosophy, so that it is very likely that new challenges will come from an accurate attempt to formalise it.

Now, for a last point: It is more than easy to think that a wikipedia-like knowledge of, say, "Buddhism" will be enough to start an interesting comparison, and in fact it will be enough to write a charming paper or to deliver an intriguing conference presentation. I, by contrast, am a strong believer in team-work. If you want to really test a logical concept, you need to be sure that you are not superimposing on your comparing element what you expect to be the result. I am not in the position to evaluate Graham Priest's work, but Christian Coseru claims that this is what happened in his case and that his reading of Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy is not reliable enough.

Thus, let us (researchers working on Western and non-Western logic and philosophy) work together more often!

Free will in Rāmānuja

As frequently observed, free will was not a main topic in Indian philosophy, and discussions about it need rather to be looked for either at partly unexpected places (e.g., within logical discussions about agency) or in texts which are not primarily philosophical and in their commentaries, e.g. in the Bhagavadgītā. Nonetheless, a precious exception is offered by a passage in a 11th c. theologian and philosopher, namely in Rāmānuja's Vedārthasaṅgraha, which focuses on a constellation of topics quite similar to the one Western readers are accustomed to.

In fact, an objector staged by Rāmānuja observes that if God is omnipotent, then there can be no human being who is fully responsible of his or her action.

What is specifical for the South Asian theological discourse is the fact that this, in turn, leads to the conclusion that there can be no adhikārin. The adhikārin is the person who is eligible to perform a given ritual and that is consequently responsible for carrying it out. In order for one to be an adhikārin, one should be able to actually carry out the action (e.g., a physically disabled person cannot be an adhikārin), but this is in fact something which lies beyond each person's possibilities, says Rāmānuja's opponent, since one can only act if God makes him or her act.

By contrast, common to Western speculations on free will is the appeal to Sacred texts stating that there is no such thing as free will:

He alone causes the person whom He wishes to lead out of these worlds, to perform a good deed. He alone causes the person whom He wishes to fall down to perform an evil deed

(Kauśitaki Upaniṣad 3.8).

Even more striking is the conclusion driven by Rāmānuja's opponent:

Thus, since He is the one who causes [people] to perform good or evil deeds, He is cruel.

Rāmānuja's answer to this (powerful) objection is worth quoting in full:

[R:] To this, we answer: The Supreme Self arranged for all conscious beings in a general way (i.e., he just gave each conscious being the presuppositions for acting, without interfering with one's intentions) the whole multitude of undertakings and ceasings consisting of the connection with the power to think, the connection with the power to undertake and [the connection with the power to cease]. He then entered [into each conscious being] being their support in order to realise these [powers] and He rules as one who permits [that each conscious being undertakes the action s/he wants to undertake]. In this way, He remains the Entire to which all parts belong.

Therefore, [each conscious being], having received the power [to think, undertake or cease an action], undertakes, ceases to act or [thinks] from himself/herself alone. The Supreme Self observes the one who does so without interfering (\emph{udāsin}). Therefore, everything is logical.

In contrast [to what the opponent claimed], the fact of causing to do good or evil acts is the content of a specific arrangement, it is not generally directed to all.

(Vedarthasangraha 1894, 138--141).

Rāmānuja's solution implies a double level of interpretation, ontological and ethical. On the former, Rāmānuja is an upholder of Viśiṣṭādvaita, i.e., a form of Vedānta according to which nothing exist but God and His attributes. Included within the latter category are the world and all individuals. Thus, God is present as the substrate of each individual. Can an attribute of God develop any action independently of Him? Surely not. What, however, an individual attribute can develop independently is the thought, or the resolution to act or cease to act. In other words, the individuals constitute God's physical body in their physicality, whereas their psychic component appears to be independently able to conceive thoughts. Accordingly, God performs what humans have only desired or thought.

On the concept of adhikārin, you might want to read this post and its comments. On free will in Indian philosophy in general, see this post. You can read more on free will in another exponent of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, namely Veṅkaṭanātha, here. Cross-posted, with more Sanskrit, on my personal blog.

Results of my survey on religious disagreement

Religious disagreements are conspicuous in everyday life.  Most societies, except perhaps for theocracies or theocracy-like regimes, show a diversity of religious beliefs, a diversity that young children already are aware of. One emerging topic of interest in the social epistemology of religion is how we should respond to religious disagreement. How should you react if you are confronted with someone who seems equally intelligent and thoughtful, who has access to the same evidence as you do, but who nevertheless ends up with very different religious beliefs? Should you become less confident about your beliefs, or suspend judgment? Or is it permissible to accord more weight to your own beliefs than to those of others?

In November and December 2014, I surveyed philosophers about their views on religious disagreement. I was not only interested in finding out what philosophers think about disagreements about religious topics in the profession (for instance, do they consider other philosophers as epistemic peers, or do they take the mere fact of disagreement as an indication that the other can't be right?), but also in the influence of personal religious beliefs and training. I present a brief summary of results below the fold; a longer version can be found here. 

A contemporary Indian Philosopher's dialogues

Daya Krishna (1924--2007) was an Indian philosopher, a rationalist and iconoclast, who constantly tried to question and scrutinise acquired "truths". The main place for such investigations was for him a saṃvāda 'dialogue'. That's why he also strived to organise structured saṃvāda inviting scholars from different traditions to debate about a specific problem. The minutes of such dialogues have been published in Saṃvāda and Bhakti.

Shail Mayaram, in the introduction of a book dedicated to Daya Krisna and Ramchandra Gandhi, Philosophy as Samvad and Svaraj adds some interesting information about the saṃvādas which have no written record:

A dialogue on bhakti attempted to universalize the phenomenon of devotion and encourage thinking about it philosophically. A dialogue on Śilpaśāstra [traditional Indian study of architecture, EF] was held in Amber, Jaipur and brought together traditional sthapatis ['carpenters', EF] and architects. I […] was fortunate to be present at the dialogue on Kāshmir Śaivism (with a special session in an open ground in Gulmarg). […] Subsequently, two dialogues were held in Lucknow and Hydearabad.

Within the same volume, Mustafa Khawaja reproduces the letter of invitation sent by Daya Krishna to scholars of Islamic philosophy. Daya Krishna predominantely wrote in English, but he was well aware of the risk of neglecting other languages. Thus, the saṃvādas were open to scholars speaking in different languages (as attested also by the proceedings mentioned above) and Daya Krishna was very keen to listen also to marginal philosophical traditions (such as that of the Islamic theologians speaking Urdū). Also the invitation letter is written in two languages and is full of open questions to be debated.
Nonetheless, this openness did not always work. Mayaram writes:

I remember the meeting of the scholars' group including Daya Krishna, Ram Chandra Dwivedi, Arindam Chakrabarti and Mukund Lath with Laxman Joo, then celebrated as one of the greatest living exponents of the school of philosophy that is popularly known as Kashmir Saivism [I would rather speak of the Pratyabhijñā school, EF]. Laxman Joo responded to their questions with complete silence. […] After their departure, he asked Bettina Bäumer, yeh nāstik kaun the [Who were those non-believers?]

For outsiders, it might be interesting to note that the scholars visiting Laxman Joo are among the most important scholars of Indian (and in many cases also Western) philosophy (on Arindam Chakrabarti, see here), so that his silence appears all the more puzzling.

The possibility of failure is an interesting point, because dialogue cannot be imposed on someone, its very "democratic" structure makes this impossible. Thus, what to do with those who do not want to speak? Or is dialogue among people not sharing the same presuppositions (e.g., the same religious praxis) impossible?

(Cross-posted for insiders on my personal blog.) On Daya Krishna and his volume on bhakti, see this post and this one respectively. On English as the predominant language, some interesting comments can be read at this post and at the linked ones. I am grateful to Elise Coquereau for sending me a copy of Shail Mayaram's article.

The Many-Interacting-Worlds Interpretation of QM and the P2P Hypothesis

Readers may find this new(ish) interpretation of quantum mechanics of interest (see also here). Basically, the authors suggest that QM should be understood in terms of many parallel worlds interacting with one another. On that note, I think it is worth pointing out some obvious similarities between their approach and the P2P Model that I proposed earlier here and here (for a brief overview, see also here). My model also understands QM in terms of many-interacting-worlds. One main difference--a difference that I believe may stand in favor of my model--is that whereas their model assumes a primitive, unexplained force pushing "nearby" worlds away from one another, my model explains the probabilistic nature of QM in terms of non-primitive, computational processes we already understand: the functional architecture of peer-to-peer computational networking. I also think the P2P Model explains philosophical phenomena (e.g. the mind-body problem, free will problem, and problems in the philosophy of time) that their model does not. Finally, my model has one important virtue that theirs does not: their model entails that all of the parallel worlds are equally real, including a vast variety of counter possible me's and you's in different dimensions. My model implies, to the contrary, that our actual, intersubjective "universe" is the superposition of worlds selected by sentient beings' consciousnesses in a peer-to-peer environment, whereas other possible universes are not actualized by conscious experience at all (and so, are merely possible universes that *could* have been experienced).

In any case, I'm glad to see the general, many-interacting-worlds approach gaining some traction!