Category: Philosophy
-
Status Anxiety
Last night I saw Status Anxiety, an intelligent and entertaining two-hour British documentary (2004) written by Swiss author Alain de Botton. It looks at our ideas of success and failure, the anxiety we feel over our careers, the envy our peers evoke in us, and why it’s harder now to feel calm than ever before. Is success always earned? Is failure? What role does snobbery and envy play in our lives? What is the flip side of equality, individualism, and meritocracy? Where do our goals and ambitions really come from? And finally, how to get beyond all this. It’s based on the book by Botton with the same name, Status Anxiety. If you only have time for a condensed TED talk, see it here.
Category: Art & Cinema, Books & Authors, Culture, Economics, Humor, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Video -
Is There Such a Thing Called “Religion”?
It frequently amazes me that so many people are able to debate the pros and cons of “religion” without ever defining what they mean by the term. What exactly is this thing called “religion”? Is there a meaningful cluster of concepts that can delineate it, allow us to talk about it as a stable-enough category of human behavior, and study it as a scholarly discipline using the best methods of science and reason? This is not a mere academic question. I, for instance, come from a land with a bewildering array of beliefs and practices that can pass off as “religion”, where there is no need to even believe in God or spirits to be religious. Indeed, what do we talk about when we talk about “religion”?
In this thoughtful essay, anthropologist Pascal Boyer, author of Religion Explained, argues that as an observable phenomenon, “religion, like aether and phlogiston, belongs in the ash-heap of scientific history”. Empirical studies of “religion” eventually boil down to studying “genuine natural kinds, like costly signaling, counter-intuitive concepts, monopolistic specialists guilds, coalitional psychology, imagined agents, etc.” which are “found in many other contexts of human communication, and [are] often not found in “religion””.
I do not know if many scholars of religion still believe in gods or spirits, but I know that a great many of them believe in the existence of religion itself – that is, believe that the term “religion” is a useful category, that there is such a thing as religion out there in the world, that the project of “explaining religion” is a valid scientific project. Naturally, many of the scholars in question will also say that religion is a many splendored thing, that there are vast differences among the varieties of religious belief and behavior. Yet they assume that, underlying the diversity, there is enough of a common set of phenomena that a “theory of religion” is needed if not already available. -
Enfield on How Language Shapes Thought
On the Culture and Cognition blog, Nick Enfield‘s absorbing review of a book by Guy Deutscher: Through the Language Glass – Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. It also provides a good overview of the work of numerous scholars who have tackled the question of how language shapes thought. Enfield is a professor of Ethnolinguistics and is affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
[The preceding text] suggests a prima facie argument for a form of cultural relativity grounded in differences between languages. Given that concepts provide a basis for categorization and decision-making, and given that different languages supply their speakers with different concepts, then different languages provide their speakers with different bases for decision-making, and, subsequently, different patterns of behaviour. It’s a captivating possibility. We are members of a single species, but could it be that the different linguistic systems we inherit from different cultural histories cause us to think and act in fundamentally different ways? Or that as bilinguals, when we switch languages, we switch cognitive personalities? This is what linguistic relativity suggests….A version of relativity more likely to succeed begins with the observation that we cannot determine facts independently from the measuring instruments that are used. In life, our measuring instruments are our bodies. Why can dogs hear sounds we can’t? Because dogs have different bodies from us. For humans with human ears, those ultrasonic noises may as well not be real (though we are able to infer their existence using other means, from hi tech instruments like spectrograms to low tech measures like naked-eye observations of dogs’ behaviour). The body defines an individual’s horizons, both limiting and licensing our possible perceptions and actions. If you have the body of a bat, a pitch-dark cave will seem like a good place to be. But with the body of an earthworm, you will feel at home in a stretch of turf. If these are not different worlds they are certainly different worldviews.
-
How to Change the World
Ben Wilson’s review of Eric Hobsbawm’s latest work, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism.
Near the end of this fascinating study of Marxism, Eric Hobsbawm charts the recession of Marxist thought. A theory that had offered certainty and hope was beset by doubt. The abysmal record of communist states and their eventual fall, the collapse of organised labour movements, the decline of radicalism, the success of capitalism in fulfilling human needs and many other factors placed Marxism in eclipse.For Hobsbawm the financial crisis changed everything. “A systematic alternative system may not be on the horizon,” he argues, “but the possibility of disintegration, even collapse, of the existing system is no longer to be ruled out. Neither side knows what would happen in that case.”
-
The Secret Powers of Time
In this presentation, Philip Zimbardo “conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.” Going by the reviews, Zimbardo develops this idea more fully in The Time Paradox. At its best, the book seems to illustrate the many ways in which our approach to time shapes us (as do our approaches to death, family, justice, etc.). However, I am rather wary of his promotion of an “ideal” approach to time for a “better” life.
-
Rorty on Beauty and Consolation
Here are three Rorty videos I’ve enjoyed. The first is an intro, with other philosophers opining about him, recorded soon after his death in 2007. The second is a wonderful conversation with philosopher Donald Davidson (in six parts, 65 mins). The third is a wide ranging interview titled, Of Beauty and Consolation (featured below, 67 mins), which struck me as intimate and honest. I am inclined to see Rorty as an American version of a scholarly Tibetan monk in the tradition of Nagarjuna.
Additional reading (more here):
Richard Rorty: What made him a crucial American philosopher?
Rorty on Bernard Williams: To the Sunlit Uplands
Last words from Richard Rorty -
Coetzee’s Ethics
Here is the back cover blurb of a volume of essays titled J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature. Edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer, published in June 2010 by CUP.
In 2003, South African writer J. M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his riveting portrayals of racial repression, sexual politics, the guises of reason, and the hypocrisy of human beings toward animals and nature. Coetzee was credited with being “a scrupulous doubter, ruthless in his criticism of the cruel rationalism and cosmetic morality of western civilization.” The film of his novel Disgrace, starring John Malkovich, brought his challenging ideas to a new audience.Anton Leist and Peter Singer have assembled an outstanding group of contributors who probe deeply into Coetzee’s extensive and extraordinary corpus. They explore his approach to ethical theory and philosophy and pay particular attention to his representation of the human-animal relationship. They also confront Coetzee’s depiction of the elementary conditions of life, the origins of morality, the recognition of value in others, the sexual dynamics between men and women, the normality of suppression, and the possibility of equality in postcolonial society. With its wide-ranging consideration of philosophical issues, especially in relation to fiction, this volume stands alone in its extraordinary exchange of ethical and literary inquiry.
-
The Mind’s Eye
In the Telegraph, Simon Ings reviews The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks:
Oliver Sacks’s neurological case histories make exemplary short stories. Even without their documentary spice, their frisson of ‘there, but for the grace of God, goes the reader’, they would rank amongst the finer output of the New Yorker. They sport that publication’s motley – the careful closure, the circumspect reassurance of the fireside ‘weird tale’.This time, however, and deliberately, Sacks has allowed the cracks to show. One of his subjects – hidden away until page 82, and then cast ever-more centrally as the book progresses – is Oliver Sacks himself: a man who remembers faces very poorly and is more than capable of walking past his apartment without recognising it – not once, but three times in a row.
-
Whence Comes Relativism?
Why do some people seem to incline towards moral relativism more often than others? Is it because they have a more powerful imagination and greater openness to experience? Joshua Knobe, Assistant Professor, Program in Cognitive Science and Department of Philosophy at Yale, finds experimental results that he claims suggest this (also see the interesting comments section beneath his article):
[Many studies suggest that] people are more inclined to be relativists when they are high in openness to experience, when they have an especially good ability to consider multiple possibilities … my collaborators and I thought that it might be possible to offer a single unifying account that explained them all. Specifically, our hypothesis was that people are drawn to relativism to the extent that they open their minds to alternative perspectives. There might be all sorts of different factors that lead people to open their minds in this way (personality traits, cognitive dispositions, age), but regardless of the instigating factor, researchers seem always to be finding the same basic effect. The more people have a capacity to truly engage with other perspectives, the more they seem to turn toward moral relativism… [so a team ran many new studies to test the hypothesis.]
Category: Philosophy -
On the Void of Nagarjuna
(Cross-posted on 3 Quarks Daily, where it has received many comments; a shorter version appeared in Himal Southasian, Jan 2011.)
In December 2005, I took a bus out of the coastal city of Vijayawada in South India. Heading west, I passed small towns and villages whose names—opaque to me because written only in Telugu—I kept guessing at from a map. After years of regional drought, the monsoon had been bountiful this year. We passed field after verdant field of cotton and pepper in a region infamous for its depleted water tables and farmers fleeing to other regions, or committing suicide to escape debt. It took most of the morning, on three buses and an auto-rickshaw, to reach my destination: a village with tourist facilities near the ruins of Nagarjunakonda.A city flourished around 1,800 years ago at Nagarjunakonda (‘Hill of Nagarjuna’). A great religious and educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism, one of the names it had then was Vijayapuri, after king Vijaya Satakarni of the Satavahana dynasty. Thereafter a capital of the Ikshvaku dynasty (225-325 CE), it fell into terminal decline after the demise of the last Ikshvaku king. It was only in 1926 that a teacher, S Venkataramayya, discovered the ruins of the ancient city. Much of it now lies under one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar, formed in 1960 by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam across the Krishna River. Archaeological digs in 1926–60 turned up finds from the early Stone Age to medieval times, spread over 130 sites across 24 sq km. Many structures were moved and reassembled on what is now an island on the lake, as well as on the lake’s eastern bank at Anupu (much like the ‘saving’ of Abu Simbel from the Aswan Dam in Egypt).
-
MacIntyre on Money
John Cornwell introduces many central ideas of moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (whose work I haven’t read), including on economics. Thought-provoking ideas for sure, though some of them will raise eyebrows:
MacIntyre’s key moral and political idea is that to be human is to be an Aristotelian goal-driven, social animal. Being good, according to Aristotle, consists in a creature (whether plant, animal, or human) acting according to its nature—its telos, or purpose. The telos for human beings is to generate a communal life with others; and the good society is composed of many independent, self-reliant groups…. In philosophy he attacks consequentialism, the view that what matters about an action is its consequences, which is usually coupled with utilitarianism’s “greatest happiness” principle. He also rejects Kantianism—the identification of universal ethical maxims based on reason and applied to circumstances top down. MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end….
-
Morals Without God?
Excerpts from a fine essay by Frans de Waal (via 3QD):
We started out with moral sentiments and intuitions, which is also where we find the greatest continuity with other primates. Rather than having developed morality from scratch, we received a huge helping hand from our background as social animals. … At this point, religion comes in … While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.
-
On Language and Cognition
According to Lera Boroditsky, “the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality, and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.” As one familiar with multiple languages, I am quite sympathetic to this viewpoint. This is largely why every vanishing language feels like a great loss to me. In an exchange with Joshua Knobe, Ms. Boroditsky sheds more light on the topic (via Cognition and Culture).
-
Confucius and Modern China
An interesting article on China’s emerging political culture by Daniel A. Bell, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing. A communitarian at heart, he has written perceptively about the so-called Asian values and against the universal pretensions of western liberalism. He is also the author of China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.
-
On Power, Human Nature, Justice
I saw this 1971 exchange between Chomsky and Foucault some years ago (I especially resonate with the latter’s take on these topics). Part 1 is below, here is Part 2. I wish the entire exchange was available online but it’s not—here is a transcript (thanks, Louise).
-
The Lost Art of Democratic Debate
The inimitable Michael Sandel’s TED talk, a short digest of his brilliant Harvard course that I heartily recommend for one and all.
-
Between Heaven and Earth
A most excellent article by Ronald Aronson on the false choice between god and science:
It is as subjects, indeed social subjects, that we know, we decide on truth, and we judge right and wrong. As social subjects we decide on the rules of “communicative action” in which these activities take place. And these rules include the existence of such a thing as objective truth, and the active belief that people are capable of arriving at it. If we are truth-seeking animals, we might of course ask how we got that way, but we must also ask what our truths are and what are the rules for arriving there.
-
Rorty on Plato and Freud
Richard Rorty’s review of Jonathan Lear’s Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. It’s a decade old but shows no signs of aging:
Philosophy and psychoanalysis are related as fusion is to fission. Philosophers seek commonalities, psychoanalysts idiosyncrasies. Ever since Plato, philosophers have been trying to answer the question ”What is a good life for a human being?” This question presupposes that one size fits all — that we all have the same built-in mechanism (”reason,” ”human nature”) that steers us toward the same goal. We are all here for the same purpose. Philosophy will help us understand what that purpose is. It will do so by turning us away from appearance toward reality — from the way the world looks from some merely subjective point of view to the way it objectively is, and thus from what merely seems good to what truly is good.Jonathan Lear, who is both a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a psychoanalyst, started out as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, but soon became fascinated by Freud. Freud tells us that each of us is steered through life by a different mechanism, a unique set of quirky, largely unconscious fantasies. These fantasies were installed in us early on as a result of the interaction of our genes with our infantile experiences, our family circumstances and the like. They determine what each of us will count as a happy, fulfilling life.
-
Spivak on the New Subaltern
Here is an entertaining and though-provoking—if also a tad dense—lecture by Columbia Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading literary theorist and cultural critic (she is introduced in the video), well known for her essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?
-
Two Articles and a Contest
Here are two recent articles I found thought provoking and insightful (via 3QD). I’d also like to draw your attention to a new contest for the best blog post in Arts & Literature.
Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found. Category: Philosophy
