In discussions of free will, one of the regular appeals of its proponents is to the idea that they have an intuition of their own agency. What is the nature of this intuition?

At first we may suppose that it is an experience like my experience of an apple. But does this make sense? I see the apple, I taste it, I feel it, I smell it, I hear it perhaps if it falls on someone's head. What is it I am doing to the free will such that I experience it?

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 I was having a chat with a friend the other day and he said "A vice is the opposite of virtue, but what is the opposite of virtuous?" and I said that it was sematically it was vicious. He couple of days later he comes back and say "It's dissolute". I suppose this is true in a way, but it's not the exact opposite, is it?

Am I right in thinking it's vicious?

Going off of what edcalamia and mendaciloquent said in this post, I've decided to make Plantinga my “disciple” philosopher. Why? I have no clue what to make of him, but he's very fun to debate on the side of because most atheists don't even know who he is.
( Anyway, here goes... )

Hello everyone - I've been reading this book, White Noise by Don DeLillo, and in it, the main character has something of a philosophical debate with his son (which I will type out shortly). It's fairly straightforward (if not a bit exaggerated) but I'm not very good at identifying different theories/schools.

At that, could someone please identify the opposing theories presented in ( this conversation? )

I was thinking Absolutism and Nihilism/Skepticism, but as I said, I'm not great with identification. Thanks in advance for your help!

Current Mood: curious

This place hasn't a good snot-slinging flamewar in a while.

Let's fix that.

It is a depressing truth that many students these days have had their minds polluted by all sorts of undesirable ideologies... libertarianism, naive empiricism, naturalism, materialism, moral relativism. I see this as the natural consequence of a society that trains people well for particular tasks but fails, even when they choose to pursue a generalist education, to find the connections between the various areas of study. In that sense, we lack synthesis, the sense that everything around us is connected in some very deep and meaningful way. Instead, we have proficiencies in this area or that, and tend to see every problem we come across as a nail just begging to be hit with our hammer.

Take evolutionary psychology. This is what happens when you let people that failed biology and psychology get a lab coat. It requires a whole host of unsound assumptions, but the two most facially deficient (and therefore, the most insisted upon by its adherents) are physicalism (or the idea that our psychology can be reduced to genetic "modules") and essentialism (or the idea that all human nature was fixed somewhere back in our early development when we all lived in hunter-gatherer societies).

The problems with this are numerous, as I hope you'll find out by reading that linked article. But more fundamentally, the problem of evolutionary psychology comes from looking at the problem of explaining human behavior and attempting to apply the wrong tool, evolution.

This is a well-meaning mistake, I'm sure. After all, evolution has influenced every part of our physical selves, including the brain. Given the strong correlation between brain states and mental states, it would be ludicrous to deny that evolution has had no effect on the human brain, and via that, in some fundamentally mysterious way, the human psyche. No one is denying that.

However, evolutionary psychology assumes a sort of given, neutral condition under which all human brains evolved. It denies that there is any unquantifiable, social (i.e., nurture) aspect to human psychology that is not in some way explainable by quantifiable, empirical facts (i.e., nature). In this quest to find human nature, evolutionary psychologists might claim that what they are doing is objective, value-neutral, agenda-less science.

But read the linked article above. What possible motivation might a scientist have for claiming that rape is a trait that increases evolutionary fitness?

In short, it's to legitimize a given value system (the one in which rape is causally-explainable in terms that do not put the blame on a party) as being "natural" and therefore either unavoidable or more desirable than some "unnatural" or "abnormal" state. Never mind the fact that the theory that rape → evolutionary fitness is very heteronormative and assumes that all rapes happen to people able to breed (which ignores homosexual rape, child molestation, rape of the elderly, etc.). That is all part of the value system that such "theories" (I use the term loosely) seek to legitimize as natural, beneficial or even "good" behavior.

Of course, evolutionary psychologists are very adept at turning the tables on objectors. "But that's just the data!" they will say. "It's science; you can't argue with it."

Which is true: with good science, there's very little to argue with. But this isn't good science; it's certainly not value-neutral or objective. The "data" in this case is often gathered by statistically unsound means (you surveyed a group of American college students at an affluent university? And they all thought the same? Shocking!) or cherry-picked to achieve the "proper" results. There can be no "control group" that did not evolve in similar conditions to the people surveyed. There's no way of isolating the cultural influence variable to determine which came first: the cultural more or the genetic sequence you think you can associate with said more. This is why hard science isn't the proper tool to ask questions about human psychology.

Studying human psychology at the human level is very messy, quite often subjective, prone to error and difficult to reducible to easily-generalizable statements. The more we learn, the more likely we are to learn what we've thought has been wrong.

What I propose is that instead of looking for reductive ways to explain things, which equates to a denial of synthesis, we start looking for ways to explain things in their own terms (e.g., physics for physics, sociology and anthropology for culture, psychology for human behavior, etc.) and focus on how they are all connected, rather than which one enjoys some sort of primacy over the others. Of course, there must be a discipline suited to discovering these kinds of connections between ideas and theories. There must be a discipline capable of examining both the human psyche and the external world not in their own terms but in how they are presented to us, something that each and every person is capable of doing, whether in a labcoat or a library or an armchair.

Maybe this way we'll stop saying idiotic things like rape increases genetic fitness and come to a much better understanding of how neuroscience, biology and psychology intersect within the human subject.

Okay, I'm sure someone somewhere has argued something similar to this before. I'm not too familiar with the history of the Cartesians. But I've been reading a lot of Philosophy of Mind lately and I had this idea I wanted to try out. Here goes:

( Read more... )

I was having a discussion with someone about religion and God, an atheist who argued that to have faith in God requires the belief in magic. I argued that this is not true, because magic is the belief that a person can harness and manipulate supernatural forces to do one's bidding. This seems to me a fair enough definition of magic. My interlocutor replied with a dictionary entry from Merriam-Webster which read as follows (emphasis mine):

1 a: the use of means (as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces b: magic rites or incantations
2 a: an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source b: something that seems to cast a spell : enchantment
3: the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand

Definition two seems to equate those actions that theists ascribe to God as being magic, since according to that definition magic is simply synonymous with supernatural power.

My question is simply, how in philosophical arguments do we develop definitions for what we are discussing? I find 2a to be a meaningless definition of magic, but how am I able to justifiably discount it when a dictionary defines it as such? Or do I simply cede that under that specific means of defining magic that it is a valid advective for God?

The discussion with the person is over, btw. I'm just curious in general how philosophers come up with meaningful definitions of terms or concepts.

I was wondering what members of this community's favorite philosophy blogs are. I know that there have been many discussions here featuring internet philosophy resources, but I'm asking about blogs specifically and your preferences and why.

I haven't found any that have really kept my attention and I wonder if I'm just missing the good ones. There seem to be plenty to choose from, though. [I am interested in most non-mystical, philosophical inquiry.]

Please excuse me if this has been discussed before.

Can anyone direct me to literature discussing the hard problem from the perspective of process metaphysics?

I've read philosophers who posit "dual aspect" theories of ontology to explain the "hard problem", this explanatory gap between the substance of us and the experience of us. One that interested me in particular was Chalmers; his position is that information-bearing systems, complex and simple, all have a certain subjective quality which relates their internal status to their interactions with everything else:

One doesn't necessarily need to bring in new physics to explain the physical side of information. It's something that's there, it's the product of the mass, the charges and the forces that are out there already. And so we take that information that is already implicit within physical theory and then we add this extra component - the phenomenal component - and we say: "Hey, If I bring in the hypothesis that information has this two sided nature..." that may then give us what we need to then bring consciousness into our picture of the natural world.

So if I understand him right, he's defending a sort of three-story ontological tower, information resting upon materialistic monism, and phenomena resting on top of that.

This view feels to me like a kind of non-reductive reductionist point of view; The laws of physics explain it all perfectly well without bringing phenomena into the picture at all, but to ignore the existence of phenomena is to blind yourself to all sorts of fantastically meaningful patterns going on in the information systems.

If you're a materialist, I think his point of view is the way to go. But I'm not sure I'm a materialist - at least not entirely.

( THE UGLY REVEAL )

So. No doubt, I've offended materialists, idealists, and dualists alike. Does anyone know of Real Theories which resemble mine, and are presumably expressed far better than this? Does anyone see some obvious inconsistencies to tear apart?

Hullo folks.

I'm new to this community, and so I'll start by mentioning that I am currently an undergrad student, with high hopes of one day being a philosophy professor. Hopefully that helps you get an idea of where I'm coming from.

My professor from the Biomedical Ethics course I took this past semester asked me a question which I was somewhat uncomfortable answering. After the semester finished, he asked me if I was leaning toward any of the particular Ethical Theory models we had discussed in class. I didn't see why I should have to sign myself up as a disciple of any particular framework. To be honest, we did not cover the model to which I find myself referring most. However, I picked one of the models we discussed and said I might be leaning slightly in that direction. His response surprised me more than the question. Apparently, he has observed a tendency among ethicists for females to side more with Kantianism and males to side more with Utilitarianism. I suppose, in retrospect, that if we take into account general sex/gender stereotypes that observation makes some sense.

So I suppose my question for you all is this:

Do you feel that students of philosophy should, for lack of a better way to phrase things, pick a philosopher or a theory and run with it, accepting all aspects of said philosopher's works or all parts of said theory (say, to become a Hegelian, Kierkegaardian, or with respect to ethics specifically, a Utilitarian, Kantian, Communitarian, etc.)?

This may be a rather niave view of the issue, but if that kind of discipleship is the status-quo, I find it somewhat perplexing. After all, philosophy is the love of wisdom, and how can we become wise if we constrain our perspectives?

Just curious...

Current Mood: curious

Can someone recommend a good book that covers most/all the major ethical systems and compares and contrasts them?  I am an early learner, and so don't really know the difference between things like Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology, etc.  I know some of these overlap, but I don't know how.  What are the other major ones I am missing?  Do you know of a book?  Thanks.

Heeeeeeelp please. I'm reading a French novel right now that is quoting something without reference to the original author and I believe it comes from some philosophy text that I have read before, but for the life of me I can't figure out what. From my translation, can you help me figure out what it might be?

"I am myself, nothing else. I am me. Therefore, I am not the chair I am sitting upon and I am not the tree that I'm looking at. I am very much distinct from the rest of the world. I am limited by the skin of my body and spirit. I am me and therefore I am not that man passing by..."

Thank you!

Hey, I'm currently writing an essay on induction and I wanted to use some formal logic in there, but I've never done a course on formal logic and I have no idea how to set it out. Help would be really really awesome. If you can't actually help me out on the specifics of how to lay everything out, then if you could direct me to a website which explains all this stuff, that would be good too.

1. How would I express the 'grue' puzzle in formal logic?
2. And the paradox of the ravens?
3. If A entails B, that means that not A entails not B. The example I gave was: Take the statement ‘the sun will rise tomorrow.’ Our definition of tomorrow involves the sun rising. If the sun does not rise, tomorrow has not yet occurred. If we see a white bird, it is necessarily not a raven because ravens are defined as being black and a stone is not an emerald unless it is green, just as we know that men are not bachelors unless they are single.
4. Related to Popper's ideas about induction: If we note all these occasions where A entails B and then in one instance A has not entailed B, we can prove that A does not always entail B.


x-posted.

There is a step, however small and quickly made, between our intuitive understanding of human and the definition that includes foeti, comatose patients, etc. (The distinction, for my purposes, between understanding and definition is that the latter must be comprised of necessary and sufficient conditions, whereas the former is much vaguer. Think Wittgensteinian family resemblances.) When we make this step, we are potentially turning from discussing humans qua social, political, moral animals to discussing humans qua neither tomatoes nor chimpanzees.

When we speak of a right to education or free speech, the subjects to whom we grant the rights are primarily you and I, and only by logical extension foeti (the example I will run with). But if we are changing from discussing humans in the first sense to discussing those in the second, then there is a possibility that our logic is flawed. There is no a priori reason to believe that the two senses of human are identical.

I think that we do intuitively sense a difference. In defence of this, consider: If we did feel an intuitive difference, but only very faintly and muzzily, then I think one could fairly predict that people would make mistakes in their reasoning when discussing any relevant moral decisions; and, particularly, that they would illegitimately conflate the two senses, and in doing so deny as salient certain features of humanity which are salient according to any one of the understandings. Depending on which of one’s intuitions is strongest, people will argue that either biological or social/moral/political features are irrelevant to any moral decision.

For example, some people would argue that humans which clearly do not possess what it is that makes you and I worthy of human rights nonetheless possess them; others would argue that humans which clearly do possess attributes that make them human in a biological sense are nevertheless not human.

That is to say, one side would argue that the biological definition of humanity is all that is necessary to make one worthy of rights granted people qua social animals, and one side would argue that the social understanding of humans is all that is necessary for them to be considered humans.

This is in fact quite close to what pro-life and pro-choice activists in fact think. So – allow me to assume that we do, all of us, have a discrepancy between our intuitive understanding of humanity and the definition of it we use in biology, etc. Now we can actually start a fruitful debate about human rights and how they extend to foeti (and, indeed, other limiting cases: people in comas, sheep, even criminals).

For our task is indeed just starting. Just because foeti are generally granted human rights only by logical extension does not mean that their rights are always illegitimate. Rights are granted you and I for a variety of reasons, not just because we are social animals. To take an example, suppose that we have a right not to be clocked over the nonce because we feel pain; by logical extension, quite legitimate logical extension, late-term foeti share this right. (As, indeed, do many animals. If you don’t like this conclusion remember that it is an example only.)

Interestingly and importantly and incidentally, we can apply this recognition to undermine traditional religious arguments against abortion. Maybe. I’m no expert, so let’s just take a simple version. The Bible instructs us not to murder, and the traditional Christian interpretation of this command is “Do Not Kill a Human.” We can accept this interpretation; but what we can not accept, and still be plausibly interpreting the Bible, is that when God told us not to kill humans He was telling us not to kill anything that matched the biological definition of human. In fact, it seems to me more likely that God was referring primarily to you and I. I think that if a religious argument against abortion is to be sustainable, it will have to start with human qua social animal, not human qua not-a-tomato.

hello all,
i am currently writing a 10 page essay on the philosophy of human nature, and it is actually quite interesting. I have all my philosophers that i will be writing about, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes and St Thomas Aquinas, aswell a a way i will intertwine them all ( a main purpose of this essay ) . However, i was thinking of first obviously an introduction, and then perhaps an explanation of science and literature on human nature and how they harmonize, do you think this is a good idea or completely irrelevant? Mind you, i am also having trouble finding how they do correlate with one another, so if you can assist me with that also i will be very greatful !

Also if you dont think this idea is good, please give me some suggestions.

Thank you so much !

For my Aesthetics class I had to read Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft/Critique of Judgement last semester. I now have to write a paper about a subject, referring to Kant's Critique of Judgement and aesthetics. I may also include other philosophers we discussed in my paper: Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Lyotard, Hegel, Nietzsche, Kant etc. My problem: I followed this class from September until December, so my knowledge has been kind of pushed to the background. My question to you: do you know any relevent subjects that I could write about with regards to the Critique of Judgement and aesthetics? (I don't know if this is relevant, but it has to be around 12 pages long) I hope this is allowed - if not, I'll delete it immediately. Thanks for your input.

( NARRATING THE HUMAN SUBJECT: RELIGION, CULTURE, AND THE POLITICS OF EMOTION )

Not sure if this is relevant to the community or not, but I was just reading a story at CNN regarding polygamists, and I was wondering, what are the ethical (if any) and/or anthropological (if any) and/or any other non-religious (if any) arguments against polygamy?

Education reform is one of the most complex and important issues facing contemporary society. The philosophical, sociological, economic, and political difficulties of education reform are overwhelming, but they are extremely rewarding to engage. A contemporary debate over charter schools has increased public awareness of the difficulties of education reform. I invite you to introduce yourself to the some of the issues of education reform through this debate.

VIDEO DEBATE: Randi Weingarten (head of teachers' union) doesn't want to lose power to charter schools, which are defended by (successful charter school director) Eva Moskowitz. http://www.successcharternetwork.org/ny1eva/

Randi gets pwned by Eva before the debate is half-over.

( Biased, Abreviated Transcript Under Cut )