Thursday, March 23, 2017
Epistemology
The Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier apparently coined the term 'epistemology' in 1854, as a translation of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. I had mistakenly said 1820, but I can't think why, since the book was originally published in German in 1794-5, and the standard edition 1n 1804. The vagaries of memory.
Neoplatonism and Plato
Here is a down payment on my promissory note to say what I meant about Neoplatonism deriving as much from Aristotle as from Plato. I wrote something about this a long time ago, and had to re-read it to remember why I thought that. More concisely, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"...in contrast to labels such as “Stoic”, “Peripatetic” or “Platonic”, the designation “Neoplatonic” is of modern coinage [early 19th century, probably coined by Schliermacher] and to some extent a misnomer. Late antique philosophers now counted among “the Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves “Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and profound."
In my much more long-winded treatment, I opined that the tradition of reading Plato doctrinally, as for example subscribing to the divided line and theory of Forms as dogmas, may be partly attributable to Aristotle, who in my reading is of a much more literalist turn of mind than Plato. Thus Plotinus' reinterpretation of the divided line five or six centuries later is more in the spirit of Aristotle than of Plato.
"...in contrast to labels such as “Stoic”, “Peripatetic” or “Platonic”, the designation “Neoplatonic” is of modern coinage [early 19th century, probably coined by Schliermacher] and to some extent a misnomer. Late antique philosophers now counted among “the Neoplatonists” did not think of themselves as engaged in some sort of effort specifically to revive the spirit and the letter of Plato’s dialogues. To be sure, they did call themselves “Platonists” and held Plato’s views, which they understood as a positive system of philosophical doctrine, in higher esteem than the tenets of the pre-Socratics, Aristotle, or any other subsequent thinker. However, and more importantly, their signature project is more accurately described as a grand synthesis of an intellectual heritage that was by then exceedingly rich and profound."
In my much more long-winded treatment, I opined that the tradition of reading Plato doctrinally, as for example subscribing to the divided line and theory of Forms as dogmas, may be partly attributable to Aristotle, who in my reading is of a much more literalist turn of mind than Plato. Thus Plotinus' reinterpretation of the divided line five or six centuries later is more in the spirit of Aristotle than of Plato.
Education no bar to genocide
I want to clarify the point I made in class, that contrary to what we might naturally suppose, societies with widely distributed and sophisticated literary, musical, and linguistic educational systems are not immune to paroxysms of xenophobia and mass killing. Germany under Nazi rule is a striking, though not the only, example of this (see Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, first published in 1997, which documents in detail that tens of thousands of ordinary and otherwise decent Germans participated vigorously in the holocaust, in an atmosphere of eliminationist antisemitism that their educations did not protect them from).
My point is about the unfortunate limits of learning, not about Germany as such; I don't think Germans are or were different from other people in this respect; in fact to the contrary I think their experience illustrates a difficulty we all face: none of us is ever too learned or sophisticated to presume we are exempt from the danger of being drawn into evil. On Clara's point that many Germans at the time may not have understood the genocidal scope of what was going on, I take no position one way or the other. The extensive documentary evidence shows that many did understand it, and participated anyway, which is what worries me about us, now.
.
My point is about the unfortunate limits of learning, not about Germany as such; I don't think Germans are or were different from other people in this respect; in fact to the contrary I think their experience illustrates a difficulty we all face: none of us is ever too learned or sophisticated to presume we are exempt from the danger of being drawn into evil. On Clara's point that many Germans at the time may not have understood the genocidal scope of what was going on, I take no position one way or the other. The extensive documentary evidence shows that many did understand it, and participated anyway, which is what worries me about us, now.
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Sunday, March 19, 2017
Brilliant Blogging
This week's blog discussions were the best yet. Except for those few who aren't participating, the process is everything I could hope for. Keep it up!
Sunday, February 26, 2017
Blogging in the balance
I like the blogging aspect of the course. It gives everyone a platform, at her or his convenience, to frame a question or start a conversation; it helps keep our sunousia going between our too-infrequent class meetings; it allows me to contemplate your thoughts and responses at leisure, so I can give a somewhat more measured response. However, unless everyone is doing it full-on every week, it doesn't work. So unless that happens this coming week, I will have no choice but to substitute a different kind of weekly written assignment for the balance of the course.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
This week's blogs
A handful of us are fully engaged in the blogging process; the rest need to join in.
Some glitch prevents me from commenting on Clara's very challenging post, so here is a reply. In class I suggested an analogy between the following arguments:
1) Socrates in Phaedo suggests that we are likely to live better lives if we hold to a good hope that "this, or something like this, is true..." (my emphasis). The background is aporia -- we do not know what if anything happens after death, but since we have no choice but to operate on some assumption or other, the claim is that we need to make a careful, hopeful choice.
2) To illustrate how an argument like this might work, I suggested that even climate change skeptics should support conversion to renewable energy, since in the absence of absolute, a priori knowledge about the climate (but good reason to think something is going on), the economic cost of transition is quite small, and there are enormous potential benefits even if climate science is mistaken.
The analogy is inexact, of course. The latter argument sounds a bit more like a Pascalian bargain than does Socrates', so doesn't fully capture what I take to be its force. Hence the Gandhian argument:
3) Gandhi urges that we not be discouraged from taking action, even though (for all we know) our efforts may come to nothing. My gloss on this is that persisting in the absence of certainty is wise because it leaves open the possibility of having a good effect, whereas allowing ourselves to be discouraged guarantees, in a self-fulfilling way, that nothing we do matters.
All of these arguments have difficulties. We can reasonably ask whether it is true that living our lives in the hopeful expectation of an afterlife is actually healthy (we seem to need some limits on what counts as a 'good hope'), and we can wonder, as Clara does, whether the manner of the transition to renewables might be hijacked for another agenda. We can even ask about Gandhi's assumptions concerning what constitutes a good action. These are legitimate questions. But at issue is the possibility that there is a non-fallacious role for the fact of incomplete knowledge, in a context where we must make a consequential choice.
Some glitch prevents me from commenting on Clara's very challenging post, so here is a reply. In class I suggested an analogy between the following arguments:
1) Socrates in Phaedo suggests that we are likely to live better lives if we hold to a good hope that "this, or something like this, is true..." (my emphasis). The background is aporia -- we do not know what if anything happens after death, but since we have no choice but to operate on some assumption or other, the claim is that we need to make a careful, hopeful choice.
2) To illustrate how an argument like this might work, I suggested that even climate change skeptics should support conversion to renewable energy, since in the absence of absolute, a priori knowledge about the climate (but good reason to think something is going on), the economic cost of transition is quite small, and there are enormous potential benefits even if climate science is mistaken.
The analogy is inexact, of course. The latter argument sounds a bit more like a Pascalian bargain than does Socrates', so doesn't fully capture what I take to be its force. Hence the Gandhian argument:
3) Gandhi urges that we not be discouraged from taking action, even though (for all we know) our efforts may come to nothing. My gloss on this is that persisting in the absence of certainty is wise because it leaves open the possibility of having a good effect, whereas allowing ourselves to be discouraged guarantees, in a self-fulfilling way, that nothing we do matters.
All of these arguments have difficulties. We can reasonably ask whether it is true that living our lives in the hopeful expectation of an afterlife is actually healthy (we seem to need some limits on what counts as a 'good hope'), and we can wonder, as Clara does, whether the manner of the transition to renewables might be hijacked for another agenda. We can even ask about Gandhi's assumptions concerning what constitutes a good action. These are legitimate questions. But at issue is the possibility that there is a non-fallacious role for the fact of incomplete knowledge, in a context where we must make a consequential choice.
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Why it's dangerous to think of Socrates as 'essentialist'
In response to Miles's first post, I want to say a little about so-called essentialism (we can say more in class). The historical Socrates was prone, apparently, to ask what something is on the whole (kata holon -- later combined by Aristotle into a word for something like 'universal concept' -- katholou). For example, if two sticks are equal to each other in length, and we can correctly judge whether this is true, and if two rather different kinds of things are ALSO equal to each other (say, two runners are equally fast), then it would seem that there must be something both pairs of things, sticks and runners, have in common. That would be equality. But if both claims of equality are true, and we're using the word properly, then we must in some sense know in advance what equality is before we start in with the comparisons. Raising questions like this seems to be about as far as Socrates the man got.
Others later developed this into something like a theory of universal meanings, and it got turned into some kind of dogma (hence the oft-attributed "theory of forms," to which Plato may, or may not, have subscribed at some point or other in his life). But to project this back onto Socrates and call him essentialist is anachronistic and extravagant. This is so not least because the term itself, 'essence,' was coined in the late middle ages by the Arabic scholars Ibn Sena and Ibn Rushd (known as Avicenna and Averroes among Europeans). Reading Aristotle more closely than anyone else (they are largely responsible for restoring much of the Aristotelian corpus to European attention), they noticed that Aristotle uses the one Greek term 'ousia' in two distinct ways: first as being (in the sense of the bare existence of something), and then as being (in the sense of what is unique or singular about the kind of thing it is). The first they called Existence (from an Arabic phrase for 'that something is,' or that-it) and the second Essence (the 'what-it-ia' of the thing). This was of course about a millennium and a half after Socrates died.
So while it's fair to say that Socrates was interested in finding the truth about things, and thought there must be some important and difficult truth to be learned about general concepts such as piety, it is a stretch to saddle him with essentialism.
Others later developed this into something like a theory of universal meanings, and it got turned into some kind of dogma (hence the oft-attributed "theory of forms," to which Plato may, or may not, have subscribed at some point or other in his life). But to project this back onto Socrates and call him essentialist is anachronistic and extravagant. This is so not least because the term itself, 'essence,' was coined in the late middle ages by the Arabic scholars Ibn Sena and Ibn Rushd (known as Avicenna and Averroes among Europeans). Reading Aristotle more closely than anyone else (they are largely responsible for restoring much of the Aristotelian corpus to European attention), they noticed that Aristotle uses the one Greek term 'ousia' in two distinct ways: first as being (in the sense of the bare existence of something), and then as being (in the sense of what is unique or singular about the kind of thing it is). The first they called Existence (from an Arabic phrase for 'that something is,' or that-it) and the second Essence (the 'what-it-ia' of the thing). This was of course about a millennium and a half after Socrates died.
So while it's fair to say that Socrates was interested in finding the truth about things, and thought there must be some important and difficult truth to be learned about general concepts such as piety, it is a stretch to saddle him with essentialism.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Monday, January 30, 2017
Reading Plato
It occurs to me that we can, and ought, read the dialogues on several distinct levels. We initially engage with the dramatic or dialogic presentation; we can enrich and deepen our understanding of it with historical or other contextual background; we can explore the lines of reasoning and ideas that so centrally inhabit the content; and finally we can attend to the sunousia between ourselves and the author, or amongst ourselves in the discussions that the dialogues stimulate.
I suspect that attendiing to these four dimensions of the dialogues, as well as how they interact, will be a fruitful method for working through Plato.
I suspect that attendiing to these four dimensions of the dialogues, as well as how they interact, will be a fruitful method for working through Plato.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Plato's Dialogues
Welcome to skeptiblog! This will be the central clearing-house for course blogging in Plato's Dialogues, so you will want to bookmark it. Student blogs will appear on the list to the left. Here's my theory of course blogging:
Why Blog? To be a good student is actively to engage with the course material in collaboration with others – the most effective students have always spent considerable time outside of class talking with one another about the course material and everything that relates to it. Since some students will tend to speak more readily than others in class discussion, and since class time is severely limited, active learning must spread beyond the classroom to be effective for everyone, just as teammates do not learn to play tennis just by showing up for the meets. Regular course blogging enables and encourages interactive learning, while removing many of the barriers to it – you can craft posts and replies at your own pace, and post them at any time of day or night. Blogging is a relatively informal type of writing, so it fosters drafting and editing as well as conversational skills in a low-pressure context.
Why Blog? To be a good student is actively to engage with the course material in collaboration with others – the most effective students have always spent considerable time outside of class talking with one another about the course material and everything that relates to it. Since some students will tend to speak more readily than others in class discussion, and since class time is severely limited, active learning must spread beyond the classroom to be effective for everyone, just as teammates do not learn to play tennis just by showing up for the meets. Regular course blogging enables and encourages interactive learning, while removing many of the barriers to it – you can craft posts and replies at your own pace, and post them at any time of day or night. Blogging is a relatively informal type of writing, so it fosters drafting and editing as well as conversational skills in a low-pressure context.
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
Weekly Flip
To the first class meeting of
each week (normally Tuesday), each student will bring a brief, thoughtful Flip,
printed (in manuscript format) on one side of a single page. We will often use
these in class discussion, after which I will collect them to review. A
thoughtful, good-faith effort will receive a check, and a check every week earns an A for that segment of the
course. A check-minus indicates some
significant problem, such as imprecise citation, inadequate editing, or
uncareful reading, whereas a (rare) check-plus
suggests exceptional perceptivity about the reading, or skill in discovering
possible value in unfamiliar ideas.
I.
Identify an idea
(a claim, a practice, a background assumption, or an ideal) in the text that
strikes you as unfamiliar, and seems somehow mistaken (based on a
misdescription of things; unlikely to foster human thriving; or in some other
sense just plain wrong). Explain what you take it to mean. You need only
explain very briefly, perhaps in a
single sentence, your reasons for thinking it mistaken -- we can discuss that
in person.
II.
Give a full,
detailed citation of the particular text and commentary in which you find the
errant idea, one that will enable any reader to locate it and identify its
source in context directly.
III.
Now set aside
your strong intuition about the error, and construct a credible defense of the idea to which you object
in part I. The aim here is to explore, at least provisionally, an
interpretation of or wider perspective on the offending text, in light of which
it is at least worthy of serious consideration.
Example (note that this is not in manuscript format):
Flip #1, September 13, 2016
Somaphilus K. Estudiante
I. Mengzi argues that “Humans all have hearts
that are not unfeeling toward others,” suggesting that the capacity for empathy
is a defining feature of our humanity, and thus that we are all equipped by our
nature, with the proper education, to live compassionate lives in harmony with
others. But perhaps one person in a thousand, by one popular estimate, apparently
lacks the emotional capacity to understand or care how others feel. Perhaps
Mengzi is mistaken, at least with respect to sociopaths, about human nature and
the potential for harmonious society.
II. Mengzi argues for the essential similarity of
human sensibilities at 2A6, appearing in Joel J. Kupperman, Ed., Human Nature; A Reader (Hackett, 2012),
pp. 77-8.
III. Mengzi need not claim that everyone is equally empathetic by nature, and our
tendency to respond to others’ pain or need certainly comes in degrees. Indeed,
his developmental program for a harmonious community proposes to identify
precisely the degree of fellow-feeling we have and build on it, widening our
sphere of concern (as in the example of King Xuan in 1A3). It is difficult to
imagine a harmonious or effective human community that does not rely on a basic
emotional potential for benevolence, so if there really were sociopaths who had
zero sense of others’ feelings, and were unable to learn, perhaps he would be
correct to say they are not human in the relevant sense.
Attendance
In
accordance with official college policy, I expect students to attend all
scheduled classes. By enrolling in the course, you make a very strong
commitment to do so, and it is especially important in light of the nature of
this course. Since our process is conversational rather than didactic, our
relations and discussions as a group
are key to the learning experience – absence affects not merely your individual
work in the course, but the classroom dynamic itself and thus the other
students as well.
I
have a principled objection to the rest of the official attendance policy,
which sets out in detail what constitutes an excusable absence. As legal and
moral adults, neither the college nor I have any business adjudicating your
life choices. So as far as this course is concerned, should you ever decide to
absent yourself, your reasons are entirely your own concern. What is a legitimate concern is the effect
that an absence, whatever its reason, has on your educational experience, and
on that of your classmates. I thus respectfully request that:
a) You never absent yourself from a
scheduled class meeting for any but a very compelling reason, according you
your own judgment.
b) If you must be absent, remain in
close communication with your classmates, so that when you return you will be
completely up to speed with everything that we did and said in your absence.
c) Proactively consult with me, and with
your other professors, if a personal circumstance will affect your completion
of the course as a full participant.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
Bag it!
We talked earlier about seemingly trivial matters such as plastic bags (which seem not so trivial in their aggregate billions).... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/saving-america-from-plastic-bags?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20%2834%29&CNDID=11845149&spMailingID=8846191&spUserID=MTA5MjM5NjU3OTQwS0&spJobID=902793621&spReportId=OTAyNzkzNjIxS0
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Thursday, April 21, 2016
Some Good News
Just as we were discussing the Northeast Direct Pipeline yesterday, the plan was suspended. The company didn't cite citizen resistance as the reason, of course, though they had earlier conceded that they had never experienced such significant pushback as they did in Berkshire County. Here's the story in the Berkshire Eagle: http://www.berkshireeagle.com/local/ci_29792079/kinder-morgan-suspends-northeast-energy-direct-project
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Betsy Kolbert on reefs and forests
In a thoughtful bit of reporting on efforts to develop resilient corals and chestnut trees, Kolbert here nicely frames some of the ethical dilemmas involved in managing catastrophe. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/a-radical-attempt-to-save-the-reefs-and-forests
Friday, April 1, 2016
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Lynn Margulis
This is the scientist I was talking about on Wednesday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
More bad news
This article overstates the case slightly (this past February can hardly have been the warmest month on record; more likely it was the warmest February on record), but is legitimately alarming.
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35413-climate-disruption-brings-record-wildfire-to-kansas-and-it-s-only-spring
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35413-climate-disruption-brings-record-wildfire-to-kansas-and-it-s-only-spring
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
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