September Topic:

  

Has Science Made 
Philosophy Obsolete?  

   

When: September 14 at 7:30 pm  

Where: YWCA 136 Bishop Allen Drive; Cambridge, MA 

  

Topic moderator: Richard Bennett 

Has science made philosophy obsolete?

Philosophy is viewed by many as irrelevant to their lives. Unneeded by any but a few that have the time to spend on arcane theories that have no real use.

Science has largely replaced what used to be the role of philosophy. Science, which is considered factual rather than fanciful, now is in the business of supplying the answers we need.

Adam Kirsch, writing for the New Yorker,  suggest that we have not outgrown our need for the philosopher's insight. In reviewing  Anthony Gottlieb’s new book, “The Dream of Enlightenment” Kirsch reminds us that historically none of the founders of modern philosophy were originally specialized academics. Descartes and Leibniz were mathematicians, Spinoza was a lens grinder, Hume an Historian, John Locke was a doctor and a diplomat. They “became” philosophers when they went beyond their science or their craft and constructed a theory- a metaphysical theory.

“One of Gottlieb’s central insights:,,, “the history of philosophy is more the history of a sharply inquisitive cast of mind than the history of a sharply defined discipline.” You might say that philosophy is what we call thought in its first, molten state, before it has had a chance to solidify into a scientific discipline, like psychology or cosmology. When scientists ask how people think or how the universe was created, they are addressing the same questions posed by philosophy hundreds or even thousands of years earlier. This is why, Gottlieb observes, people complain that philosophy never seems to be making progress: “Any corner of it that comes generally to be regarded as useful soon ceases to be called philosophy.”

Their thought was informed not just by previous philosophy but by politics, religion, and science—the whole intellectual and spiritual life of their times. And it was because these times were so tumultuous that they were able to think in such a radical way. Eras in which everything is up for grabs are very rare, and they seem to be highly productive for philosophy.”

The kind of thinking that philosophy supplies is needed when assumptions that were taken for granted are shattered and a new orientation toward reality (metaphysics) is called for.

In the 17th  and 18th centuries , every fixed point that had oriented the world for thousands of years began to wobble. The discovery of America destroyed established geography, the Reformation destroyed the established Church, and astronomy destroyed the established cosmos. Everything that educated people believed about reality turned out to be an error or, worse, a lie. It’s  (Kirsch says)  (it is) impossible to imagine what, if anything, could produce a comparable effect on us today.

Well there actually is one: we could come to understand consciousness!  Finally deciding whether Descartes was right in his idea that matter and mind were forever different substances, or perhaps on the other hand, the action of matter, configured in a way that allows electrical patterns. results in consciousness as an emergent property. Such a discovery would definitely change our world-but it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.

Wilfred Sellars gave a definition of what philosophers do, that underlines Gottlieb’s thought:

“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”

It is in this broad sense that philosophers endeavor  to rearrange the  furniture of the world.

Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions  made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community.

One interpretation of Kuhn’s view is that paradigm shifts are largely the work of philosophy ,or at least scientists with their philosophers hats firmly on their heads.

If The Enlightenment led physicists to wax philosophical, is it the case that such current conundrums, like those posed by quantum physics relationship to causality, might bring about a keener appreciation of what philosophers have to offer?

http://www.npr.org/sections/ 13.7/2016/09/06/492779594/ what-if-evolution-bred- reality-out-of-us?utm_source= pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_ campaign=pockethits

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ book-reviews/anthony-gottlieb/ the-dream-of-enlightenment/

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=joul2MSHZtc

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video What Great Philosophers Can Teach Us About How to Live: Alain de Botton (2000)

What Great Philosophers Can Teach Us About How to Live: Alain de Botton (2000)

May 10th Topic: Logical Irrationalism

NEW LOCATION: 7 Temple St, Cambridge, MA 02139  Time 7:30 pm May 10, 2016

Logical Irrationalism?:  What Do We Make of the Early Wittgenstein’s  View of Ethical and Aesthetic Values as  being Supernatural?

 

A quick initial reading of Wittgenstein’s early work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicusmight lead one to think that Wittgenstein advocated a rigorous logical rationalism and a militantly scientistic outlook.  Indeed, during the 1920’s, the Vienna Circle of Positivists interpreted his work in that way, and adopted the views that they attributed to Wittgenstein themselves.  However, when they initiated discussions with Wittgenstein, they were amazed to discover that the “master” had a very different understanding of his own work.  In spite of appearances, the early Wittgenstein did not limit validity to logically rigorous statements, but thought that logical thought could only address trivial and uninteresting issues; actually important issues, including those involving ethical and aesthetic values, could only be addressed in a manner that seems downright mystical.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein outlined a theory of how we should understand the natural world and the role of language in providing knowledge of it.  Knowledge is possible because the world is made up of facts, and these facts can be pictured (more or less accurately) by propositions or statements.  The logical relationships of the different statements mirror the structure of the world, because they reproduce the relationship between the different facts of the world.  (Don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense, we’ll go over the argument more carefully at the Philosophy Café.)    Any statement that cannot be interpreted as a propositional picture of such facts is, according the Tractatus, literally “senseless” or meaningless.  Wittgenstein acknowledges that ethical, aesthetic and (other )spiritual concerns cannot be expressed through propositional pictures.  Therefore ethical, aesthetic, theological etc. propositions are meaningless and therefore rationally worthless.

However, Wittgenstein does not draw from this the conclusion ethical, aesthetic or spiritual concerns are unimportant.  A highly intense and passionate man, throughout his life, the ethical, aesthetic and spiritual issues were always central for him.  If such concerns were inaccessible to rational thought, then so much the worse for rational thought, Wittgenstein felt.  By definition it seems, the natural world was what could be represented by propositional pictures.  If something was real but could not be so represented, it was, again by definition, supernatural.  (Wittgenstein had no interests in miracles, ghosts etc.) When Wittgenstein said that whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent, he was not advocating a disinterest in those concerns of which one was able to reason coherently.  Ethical, Aesthetic, and the rest of the spiritual truths could only be “shown”, not said.  Of course, if one wants a coherent account of what “showing” involves, that would be impossible according to Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein, throughout his life, even after he adopted a very different philosophy of language in his later years, remained skeptical, sometimes even contemptuous of scientific progress.  He valued clarity in thought rather than quantity of knowledge.  And he abhorred attempts to address rationally what lay beyond Reason’s province; at the same time he saw many crucial concerns as being beyond reason’s province.

 

Some Questions to Consider:

1)      Wittgenstein later came to reject his picture theory of meaning and adopt a “use” theory of meaning instead.  (We’ll discuss what that is at the meeting.)  Should we nevertheless accept the Tractatus Account?

2)      Does the picture theory of meaning necessarily require either irrationalist values, or skepticism with respect to values?

3)      Are we comfortable with orientation that the Tractatus attitudes toward values implies?

4)      Should we take Wittgenstein’s disdain for scientific progress seriously?

 

Readings:

The Tractatus Itself…….    http://people.umass.edu/phil335-klement-2/tlp/tlp-ebook.pdf

Wikepedia’s Account of the Tractatus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus

Comments by Bob Corbett on the book Wittgenstein’s Vienna by Janik and Toulmin   http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/personal/reading/janik-wittgenstein.html

February 16th Topic- The Import of Evolution in Philosophy

The Import of Darwinism in Philosophy

Darwin's conceptual scheme for explaining the origin and evolution of species as being a consequence of natural selection has become the conceptual thread that ties together essentially all of modern biology.  More remarkably, what we may loosely call Darwinism has impacted nearly every field and perennial question in philosophy.

At least five reasons readily come to mind why Darwin's ideas have had such broad impact.

1)  By providing an alternative to intelligent design as the explanation of the origin of all living and extinct species, including Homo sapiens, Darwinian evolution undermines one of the most compelling arguments for the role of a supernatural creator in the natural world and in human affairs.  This alternative explanation reopens a great many philosophical questions in which Western thought had previously presumed a major role for the Creator.  It thus impacts metaphysics, ontology, and ethics.

2)  By invoking gradual change as the mechanism of the development of all the amazing variations of form and behavior seen among living things, Darwinism calls into question many of the sharp distinctions made historically by philosophers and pre-Darwinian scientists.  Epistemology and volition in an evolved creature cannot be entirely separate from biology.  Neither can ethics, social organization (including concepts of governance and justice), or esthetics, since each of these could at least potentially be subject to natural selection.  

3)  By invoking chance as the raw material on which natural selection can work, Darwinism begs the question as to how much of our nature, history, and culture are, even more than we previously suspected, the result of chance rather than of destiny or physical or historical laws.  Thus Darwinism further impacts virtually all the fields mentioned above.

4)  Since Darwinism in itself invokes no values, and requires of "fitness" only that it be a measure of the ability of an individual to have fertile offspring in its current environment, the structure of the theory gives considerable inspiration to all those who contemplate relativism in many different fields.  

5)  Since evolution through natural selection applies not only to biological populations, but to any system in which entities are capable of reproduction with random alterations and variable reproductive success, Darwin's ideas also have at least some bearing on cultural products and beliefs, and perhaps also nonliving physical forms, from tiny crystals to the nature of the multiverse.

Obviously, in our cafe, we have no hope of being exhaustive, balanced, or scholarly in our evaluation of the impact of Darwinism.  Instead, we propose to conduct a parlor game:  Any player may nominate a philosophical field or question as one upon which Darwinism has had, or should have, no significant bearing.  To that nomination, the cafe will respond with either assent or counter-examples, and probably both!  

In honor of Darwin's February birthday, we invite you to the party and encourage you to bring a nomination to share.

READINGS

Online:

Evolution and Philosophy, An Introduction, John S. Wilkins (a Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Sydney, the author of Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today.)

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil.html

Darwinism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/darwinism/

Books:

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett (1991)

Darwinism and Philosophy, Vittorio Hosle and Christian Illies (2005)

January 19th Philo Cafe Topic ( 7:30 pm, Democracy Center, Cambridge MA)

 Much Ado About "Aboutness": How can Words, Concepts or Ideas be “About” Things in the World?

 The capacity to have or make beliefs, disagreements, statements, arguments etc. about specific things in the world seems an important part of our humanity (whatever the extent that other animals share that capacity.)  Our explanations of human behavior routinely assume the capacity to think or speak about things and events in the world; the PhiloCafe could not function without it!  Is there anything mysterious about “Aboutness” or can we easily explain it?

Let us take a belief involving “aboutness”: I believe that my cat is male.  On the face of it, this is some kind of relationship between me and my cat: the ascription of maleness to my cat.  This relationship seems to be conceptual not physical in nature, even though this relationship can have material consequences for my cat's future (I might get it spayed.)  So, on the face of it, an immaterial entity (my belief about my cat's sex) can physically impact a material object.  But according to the dominant Naturalist and scientific understandings of the world only physical forces and entities can impact other physical forces and entities.  So it should be impossible for an immaterial, non-physical, entity such as a belief of mine to have such an intimately physical impact on my poor cat.  Explanations of human behavior invoking the capacity for “aboutness”, it has been argued, seem to contradict our basic naturalistic understanding of the world; they seem to assume a dualism of causal effects, if not one of mind and body.

Another way of highlighting the problem is made by British philosopher, Michael Luntley.  According to Luntley, “aboutness” (he talks about intentionality and meaning) is a normative concept that determine rules on how we refer to things rather than the objective physical causes and effects that affect (or are affected by) those things . Materialist and natural scientific discourse deal with objective physical causes and effects, not norms.

Materialists will not take this lying down.  One line of response, the eliminativist one, resolves this dilemma by denying that “aboutness” actually involves a non-material connection between our concepts and things in the world..  Another line of riposte is to claim that underlying the apparently immaterial phenomenon of aboutness are all-too material processes, involving our sense-receptors, our brains, and physical objects in the world.  The former line is taken by eliminativists.  The latter by Jeremy Fodor.

The presenter of January's topic will argue, shamelessly plagiarizing from the thought of   Hilary Putnam,that both lines of materialist argument fail.  With respect to the eliminativist line of argument, if one assumes that what we mistakenly thought of as the relationship of aboutness is really an organization of neurons in the brain, one has to still explain how an organization of neurons can provide an account of things in the world.  The only possible response, it seems to me, is to say that the organization of neurons constitutes a particular representation.  But to ascribe the power of representation to a set of neurons is to ascribe them a capacity for aboutness.  Aboutness forces itself back in, without being clarified in any way!  Fodor would argue that there is a physical explanation of why a particular representation has a particular meaning: the meaning of a particular representation is the entity that routinely causes its invocation (I call cats "cats" because growing up the word "cat" was routinely associated with the presence of a cat, or cat-like object (such as a drawing.)   Putnam argued that there is no evidence for this and that it doesn't make sense.  We learn the meaning of terms describing things that we may not be able to identify and were never consciously exposed to (Putnam's example is an elm tree.  Many people who could not identify an elm tree, and were never shown what it looks like can nevertheless make meaningful statements about elm trees.  Sometimes the absence of something (food or drink) can generate representations of it (people asking for respite from hunger or thirst.) as much as the presence.  Besides, without a pre-given intentional sense, how does one learn what aspects of a "cat experience" for example to identify as defining of "cat-ness."?

Questions to Consider:

1)  Is some notion of “aboutness” really indispensable as claimed above?  Might the sciences not find an alternative set of concepts for explaining human behavior?

2)  Can Fodor's model withstand the criticisms lobbed against it?

3)  Assuming that no materialist account of aboutness is possible, Putnam argues that the concept of mental representations plays no useful philosophical or psychological role.  Is he right?

4)  How do we understand the “aboutness” in fictional discourse?

5)  Is it possible that since all thought presupposes aboutness, thought is inherently incapable of critically understanding it?  (An analogy could be made to the impossibility of seeing your own eyeballs.  You can only see reflections etc. of them!)  

Readings:

Stanford Encyclopedia on Intentionality: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

Stanford Encyclopedia on Eliminative Materialism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/

Stanford Encyclopedia on Causal Theories of Meaning: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-causal/

Stanford Encyclopedia on Semantic Externalism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-externalism/

John Rawls
 Image from http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/05/09/can-reason-bear-liberalisms-weight/


For those who really want to impress at our Philo Cafe on Wednesday,  Jim Farmelant has found a PDF version of Theory of Justice online: http://www.univpgri-palembang.ac.id/perpus-fkip/Perpustakaan/American%20Phylosophy/John%20Rawls%20-%20A%20Theory%20of%20Justice~%20Revised%20Edition.pdf 

December 16th Philosophy Cafe: John Rawls' A Theory of Justice

John Rawls's A Theory of Justice: Can philosophy provide us with the rules for a just society?

Our next Philosophy Café (December 16 at 7:30 p.m.) will be on John Rawls's book A Theory of Justice (“TJ”), considered by some to be no less than the seminal work of 20^th century political philosophy.

Rawls attempts to determine the fundamental principles of social justice.  He employs a number of thought experiments, including the "original position" – in which those who will decide what rules shall govern society are assumed to be situated behind a "veil of ignorance" in which they do not know which social positions (e.g. gender, race) or assets (e.g., wealth, intelligence) they will have during their life on earth, nor what fundamental conceptions of the “good life” they will hold. 

Rawls thus takes the “social contract” approach of philosophers such as Rousseau, but attempts to apply it concretely so as to determine what specific rules and institutions would be adopted by the “contracting parties” who set out to create our social order.

Countless summaries, critiques, and abstracts of TJ can be found in print and online.  The book itself is well worth reading; but a few options for shorter versions include:

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/rawls.html (a concise summary)

  

http://www.iep.utm.edu/rawls/#H2  (specifically, Part 2, which provides a somewhat more detailed analysis)

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Rawlschaps1and2.pdf (fairly readable, though it doesn't get into the notion of the Original Position in much depth). 

TJ also gave rise to countless books and articles that challenges Rawls, philosophically and/or politically, from the left and the right, as well as from non-Western traditions.

One of the earliest and best-known critiques of TJ was Nozick's Anarchy, State & Utopia, which attacks Rawls largely from a libertarian perspective.  See http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/#H2  for a summary of Nozick's view (specifically Part 2).

John Kekes has also argued against Rawls in a piece called “Dangerous Egalitarian Dreams.”  http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_urbanities-dangerous.html

To lighten the mood, thanks to Tom Canel for pointing out that TJ has even been made into a musical.  Here is the trailer https://vimeo.com/ondemand/atheoryofjustice.  Tom notes that he is asking for the soundtrack for the holidays – though in the Original Position, he wouldn’t know whether it would be for Christmas or Chanukah!  

11/18 Philosophy Cafe Topic and Readings

The November 18th Philosophy Cafe starts at 7:00pm  in the Democracy Center, 45 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge MA.  This month's discussion will be led by Kiril Sinkel and will be:

John Kekes on the Human Condition:
How should one conduct one's life in an indifferent universe?

John Kekes is a secular philosopher (now professor emeritus at the University of Albany in NY) who has absorbed  the lessons of the scientific revolution of man's insignificance and non-centrality in the overall scheme of the universe and developed a response. He starts with a few premises about the human condition -- i.e. about the situation we humans find ourselves in. These can be summarized as:

1.       We live in a universe that is indifferent to human life. It itself imposes no purpose on our existence.

2.       We have only partial control of our lives. There are many contingencies which we cannot predict nor whose effects we can control.

3.       We are fallible. Our knowledge is incomplete and our ability to come to correct conclusions is imperfect and so our beliefs may be untrue or in error.

Significantly he does not make some other assumptions that have been made by other secularists. For example he makes no assumption of human goodness or 'perfectibility'. In fact he feels that humans are ambivalent concerning goodness and are capable of acting in both good and evil ways. Similarly he is neither 'optimistic' nor 'pessimistic' about human perfectibility and its prospects in the future.

Of course just because the universe seems indifferent to us and offers no ultimate purpose or goal  does not mean we ourselves should be indifferent. In fact we have every reason to care deeply about our lives. This naturally raises the question of what our goal should be. Kekes proposes that what we are interested in is our well-being.

While each of us can readily imagine what might constitute well-being, Kekes does not define it further.  Pointedly, he does not connect well-being categorically with freedom, equality, autonomy, security or abundance. For Kekes, there is no single overriding principle characterizing well-being -- its recipe is as likely as not to be a blend of compromises.

What is more important for Kekes is that each of us have our own concepts of well-being and that these concepts are shaped largely by the accidents of our heritage and upbringing and cultural milieu. Furthermore we act in accordance to our psychology -- our needs, desires, aspirations, and inclinations among many other drivers. Thus to Kekes, our beliefs about well-being together with these psychological drivers form a kind of theory of behavior. I shall return to this point in a moment.

Another important aspect of Kekes's theory is the role of what he calls contingency -- his term for all the aspects of our lives over which we have no control. These include both negative and positive aspects and include the misfortunes of natural disasters, disease and war, our congenital talents and handicaps, social position and even episodic strokes of good or bad luck. Basically 'stuff happens'. Try as we may to anticipate or ameliorate its effects, there is some residue which we cannot anticipate or control.

Kekes's response is that we should therefore concentrate our efforts in areas over which we do have control. These are primarily our concept of well being and our psychological drivers and attitudes.  In the first place, our concepts of well-being are subject to error. Some of our predispositions -- wants, fears, preferences -- may similarly be counter-productive. Since these are internal to us, these are the areas where we have the most control. Thus Kekes feels that our freedom and agency lies primarily in critically examining these concepts and predispositions and developing the most productive ones that we are able.

Reading

Jussi Suikkanen: Review of Kekes's The Human Condition  

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24575-the-human-condition/