Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

John Martin Fischer on the latest scientist's foray into free will

Here; an excerpt with a couple of interspersed comments:

The view that causal determinism is true is not new, nor is the view that this entails no free will or moral responsibility, but Sapolsky collates and marshals the evidence (some of it recent and cutting-edge) as it bears on these issues. The cumulative effect of the discussions and Sapolsky’s analyses can be an overwhelming sense that we might be wrong about our very foundational beliefs in free will and moral responsibility, and even our selfhood. He writes, “…put all the scientific results together, from all the relevant scientific disciplines, and there’s no room for free will” (8; emphasis in text) [footnote omitted]....

Surprisingly, in a book about free will, Sapolsky offers no definition of it (or, for that matter, determinism—or even moral responsibility!). He writes, “What is free will? Groan… I’ll do my best to mitigate the drag of this” (14). Although he does not present a full definition proper, it is clear that he holds that free will requires the falsity of determinism—by definition (not as a result of argumentation):  "[To establish free will] [s]how me a neuron being a causeless cause in this total sense. …Show me a neuron (or brain) whose generation of a behavior is independent of the sum of its biological past, and for the purposes of this book, you’ve demonstrated free will." (15)

This is problematic in various ways. First, it claims that “being a causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” would be sufficient for a choice/action’s being an instance of free will. This is however surely false; pure randomness is incompatible with the control involved in free will. (In his discussion of quantum indeterminacy, Sapolsky is aware of this.) More plausibly, we should interpret him (here and throughout the book) as contending that, as a matter of definition or “meaning,” indeterminism is a necessary condition of free will. Note that the indeterminism of “causeless cause” or “independent of the sum of its biological past” is a very strong kind of indeterminism, leaving out the more appealing idea of not being fully determined by antecedent causes. (Sapolsky elides the distinction between causation and deterministic causation and thus does not consider indeterministic causal accounts of free will).

11 philosophers you [general reader, not professional philosopher] probably don't know, but should

For "World Philosophy Day" (whatever that is?), IAITV asked Martha Nussbaum, Cheryl Misak, Peter Adamson, Andrew Bowie and others to "nominate philosophers you probably haven't heard of, but you should know about."  The resulting list is eclectic and idiosyncratic, but includes some fine nominees including Porphyry (early animal rights advocate), Frank Ramsey, Cora Diamond, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (a key figure in Romantic hermeneutics, the scholarly kind that Gadamer sadly displaced).

"Loved, yet lonely"

Philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy comments.

Williamson on logic in everyday life and beyond

This short essay by Timothy Williamson is actually pleasingly clear and introductory, and could be profitably shared with someone who wanted to know "what is logic about and why does it matter"?

van Fraassen on Sellars

Philosopher Bas van Fraassen has another blog, and this one has a long and interesting post about Sellars.

What is it like to be a philosopher? Robert Stern edition

A very interesting interview--his reflections near the end about facing a terminal medical diagnosis are especially worth reading and thinking about.

More recollections of Putnam and Quine

A propos yesterday's post, Ned Block posted an amusing recollection at van Fraassen's blog:

I took a course with Putnam as a sophomore at MIT in 1962 and then one or two courses every semester until I graduated in 1964. He was brilliant then in a way that seemed almost other-worldly, a geyser spouting ideas. After 2 years in Oxford I went back to Harvard to work with Putnam but he seemed slightly dimmed, reading his lectures instead of just erupting with them as he had at MIT. He moved from one political nightmare to another, and then got religion. Hartry Field and I had dinner with him once where he seriously advanced the “Where there is smoke there is fire” argument for the existence of his god. Quine’s lectures were horrible. He just read from his Word and Object ms and would only take written questions submitted in advance. I went to see him once about something I was thinking about and he said in effect, “What does this have to do with Quine’s philosophy.” At departmental parties he would go around from grad student to grad student addressing each by name and making a comment that showed he knew something about them. We don’t have to speculate about the existence of Martians–-I have seen one.

Comments are open for more recollections of these "Harvard stars."

 

On Quine and Putnam

More distinctive recollections and observations from Bas van Fraassen.

Some illuminating material on Sartre

On FB, philosopher Jake McNulty calls my attention to a page devoted to Sartre, created by Paul Vincent Spade, a philosopher (now emeritus) at Indiana University at Bloomington, best-known for his work on medieval philosophy.  His notes from a fall 1995 graduate seminar on Sartre are especially instructive.  It's great that Professor Spade has made this material available.

Memories of Grunbaum and Popper...

...from another great philosopher of science, Bas van Fraassen.

"When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to be bluffing"

An interview with philosopher Alex Byrne about his book The Trouble with Gender and related topics at The Free Thinker. 

(I, for one, was not surprised by the herd-like behavior of academic philosophers, that Professor Byrne discusses, since they are a timid and conservative lot, easily frightened, even when they have tenure!)

"Wittgenstein vs Wittgenstein"

Philosopher Lee Braver comments.

Lederman on the tasks for Chinese philosophy scholarship

Philosopher Jeremy Goodman calls to my attention this essay by philosopher Harvey Lederman (who does formal work, but also works on Chinese philosophy) on the tasks confronting Chinese philosopy, and suggested it might make a good topic for discussion; an excerpt:

The meat that scholars of Chinese philosophy have in our mouths are these curious, beautiful,
and inspiring texts. As I see it, our job as scholars is to tell the story of these texts: to understand the people who wrote them as well as the people who read them; to bring to life their ideas, regardless of whether they seem familiar or unapproachably strange; and to determine as best we can which of these ideas are plausible and which are not. Our job is to teach students to read these texts with care, with reverence 敬, but also with a critical, skeptical eye. In both our writing and in our teaching, our job, like the impersonator 尸 of the dead at a ritual, is to bring these ideas to life in a very literal sense, to make it possible for others to have a real conversation with them, in the hope that all of us can better understand their authors’ beliefs and the challenges they faced as they sought to live virtuous lives in often quite challenging political circumstances.

I am afraid that this job is not glamorous or easy. It requires humility, patience, and an exacting
discipline. The texts often do not speak to the most exciting recent trends. But our job is still to impersonate them, even when they don’t talk about what we most wish they did. This job can be a lonely one. We wake up in the morning and wonder if we really need to re-read hundreds of pages of challenging, confusing passages again, and the only person who says we need to isourselves. The job is also slow. We watch our colleagues (or perhaps another half of ourselves) produce dozens of papers or books in other areas. But our jobs cannot be done quickly—we cannot write those dozens of books—since we must respect, reread, and rethink, our texts. Our work has only the slow glory that belongs to the miniaturist, a glory realized in details, which appears in long-labored works only to those who are willing to look closely themselves.

This is well-said, and not at all specific to the study of Chinese philosophy it seems to me.  Comments are open for reader reactions.

Hermann Helmholtz talks to Richard Marshall...

...at 3:16 AM.

The downsides of virtual reality

Philosopher of science James Ladyman (Bristol) discusses these and other issues in connection with David Chalmers's recent book:

(Professor Laydman flags for me two errors: Erik M Conway is the co-author of Merchants of Doubt. Also the term ‘digital enclosures’ comes from sociology, specifically Mark Andrejevic:  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714420701715365?journalCode=gcrv20.)

MacIntyre on the moral philosophy of the 20th-century...

...and a synoptic account of the evolution of his own views.  I found his explanation of the relevance of Marxism to his intellectual evolution particularly interesting:

Marx and Engels had argued that every morality is the morality of some particular social and economic order and that every moral philosophy articulates and makes explicit the judgments, arguments, and presuppositions of some particular morality, either in such a way as to defend both that morality and the social and economic order of which it is the expression, or in such a way as to undermine them. And my acknowledgment of the truth of this thesis was reinforced by my encounters with social anthropology, especially first with the work of Franz Steiner and later with that of Rodney Needham. I therefore asked: What is the distinctive morality of this social and economic order that I inhabit, and how does contemporary moral philosophy stand to that morality? And in pursuing an answer to this question I was guided not only by Marx and Engels but also by John Anderson, who had urged that, if we were to understand social institutions and relationships, we should ask not what function or purpose they serve but to what conflicts they give expression. This suggested that both the morality and the moral philosophy of the present age are best understood as milieus of conflict, sites of disagreement. But those disagreements find significantly different expression in the arenas of philosophical debate on the one hand and in those of everyday moral and political practice on the other.

Einstein on philosophy and science

An intelligent, short popular piece by the always good Kenan Malik in The Guardian.

On beauty and morality

An interview with philosopher Alexander Nehamas at The Point.

Philosopher Edward Halper talks about Aristotelian metaphysics...

...with Richard Marshall at 3:16 AM.

Philosopher Aaron Preston talks about the history of analytic philosophy and "personalism"...

...with Richard Marshall at 3:16 AM.

"The Indian Pragmatist"

Here.

Laurie Paul talks to Sam Harris...

...about "transformative experiences" and Derek Parfit's "weird" intuitions (amen to that!).

"Entanglement" in the quantum world

Philosopher Huw Price and a physicist offer a simple explanation.

Kitcher talks about "Rescuing Philosophy"...

...at Commonweal.  (Earlier discussion here.)

 

Chalmers/Koch bet regarding consciousness

Chalmers wins (but what does he win?):

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

“It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

(Thanks to Joshua Selby for the pointer.)

In praise of doing nothing

A short essay on the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.

Peter Ludlow did not like Philip Kitcher's book either

An amusing takedown (earlier); an excerpt:

It is said that the very first Western philosopher was Thales of Miletus, who lived from around 620 to 546 BCE. That is about 150 years before Socrates, and 200 years before Plato. His greatest claim to fame is his conjecture that “all is water,” which is important because it is our earliest record of someone asking about the fundamental constituent stuff of reality. But Thales second greatest claim to fame involves that time he fell in a well or a pit or whatever it was. Plato conveyed the story in the Theatetus dialogue...

[W]hat really matters is the point that Plato was trying to convey: People are always up in philosophers’ business, giving them shit for not doing practical things. Sometimes philosophers feel the sting of this criticism and take it to heart. According to Aristotle, Thales decided to show the world that he could do practical things if he wanted to, so one season when he predicted a large imminent olive harvest, he cornered the market on olive presses and price gouged the poor olive famers around Miletus. He thus became not only the father of western philosophy, of but risk arbitrage as well. A Milesian Gordon Gekko. Aristotle thought Thales thus proved that “it is easy for philosophers to be rich if they choose, but this is not what they care about.”

Epistemology in the Andes and Amazonia

An interesting project.

Which philosophers are mentioned in the most articles at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?

It wasn't possible (due to false positives) to search smoe (like Berkeley, David Lewis, William James, and Bacon--Berkeley and Lewis would have surely been in the top 30), but for the rest the number of articles in which they appear tracks fairly well some earlier polls run here, though with an obvious skew to the major figures in 20th-century "analytic" philosophy.  I searched only philosophers no longer alive (some living figures would have made the top 30).

1.  Plato (1012)

2.  Aristotle (1001)

3.  Kant (801)

4.  Hume (590)

5.  Descartes (542)

6.  Leibniz (451)

7.  Locke (442)

8.  Frege (395)

9.  Socrates (391)

10.  Aquinas (374)

What is it like to be a philosopher? Eric Winsberg edition

Here.

Stephen Mulhall did not like Derek Parfit's way of doing philosophy...

...so, unsurprisingly, he did not much like a biography of Parfit.  There were a couple of apt criticisms of the philosophy and the philosopher.  For example:

[A]lthough Parfit’s favoured method for pursuing and refining ethical thinking presents itself as open to all whatever their ethical stance, it actually incorporates a subtle but pervasive bias against approaches to ethics that don’t focus exclusively or primarily on the outcomes of individual actions.

And also:

You don’t have to be Nietzsche to see in Parfit’s adult life a particularly stark version of an ascetic ideal that has its historical roots in the religious framework his family inhabited, but which has mutated into a variety of avowedly secular cultural forms, in science, art and philosophy. These ideals attribute a transcendent value to truth and truthfulness, and so to forms of human life that seek it, no matter what costs they impose. To the martyred Galileo and the abused avant-gardiste, we can now add the moral philosopher who cloisters himself within a cloistered institution whose founding purpose was to pray for the faithful departed. All these exemplary figures exhibit a sadomasochistic structure of self-denial, in which most of what makes life worth living is sacrificed to one’s intellectual calling. 

UPDATE:  Dr. Roger Albin writes:

Thanks for linking to Mulhall’s interesting review of the Parfit bio.  Having read Reasons & Persons, I agree with several of his criticisms.  His comment about Parfit’s personality and adult life, however, particularly the “…sadomasochistic structure of self-denial, in which most of what makes life worth living is sacrificed to one’s intellectual calling” remark may be misleading.  At an earlier point in the review, he notes that Parfit’s biographer suggested that Parfit might have had an autism spectrum disorder (though disorder is something of a misnomer).  Based on what I’ve read about Parfit, I’d say this is more than plausible.  But if that is the case, then spending his life in the cloistered environment of All Souls College, and Parfit’s apparently obsessive conduct, would not be “sadomasochistic denial.”  Many of the ordinary demands, pleasures, and uncertainties of conventional life may well have been distressing for Parfit.  His life would be uncomfortably demanding for the great majority of us, but it may well have been the most comfortable for him. 

Ruse on Setiya on Kitcher (with Leiter's commentary)

Philosopher Kieran Setiya wrote a fairly critical review of Philip Kitcher's recent book, What's the Use of Philosophy.  A few excerpts:

What Kitcher finds in philosophy today is arid technicality, produced for an audience of insiders. He complains about the fetish for clarity and the needless use of formalism; he objects to a methodology that splices intuitions about fanciful cases with assertions of a priori knowledge (‘sprinkling fairy dust’); he accuses philosophers of not knowing enough about the sciences that pertain to their work and of failing to question whether their projects are worthwhile. What he wants is a philosophy of use to scientists, or which can be applied to social problems. He also wants new synthetic visions, ways of seeing the world that bring together different disciplines with an eye to human flourishing.

Scientists are useful people, but there is more to philosophy than being useful to science or solving "social problems," although I do think philosophy could do a lot more of the former, and has done almost none of the latter.   Genuine philosophers are legislators of value, as one 19th-century German observed (Kant and Hegel were not genuine philosophers on this view, merely "philosophical laborers" who "pressed into formulas" existing values:  see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 211).  Perhaps that latter conception of philosophy falls under Kitcher's idea of producing "ways of seeing the world...with an eye to human flourishing."  Setiya continues:

Kitcher pleads for a ‘reconstruction in philosophy.' 

Timothy Williamson talks about the "philosophy of philosophy"...

...at Parker's Pensees.

(Thanks to Aaron Preston for the pointer.)

Ernest Lepore (Rutgers) talks about philosophy of language, slurs and other topics...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

What philosophical ideas should non-philosophers know about?

Philosopher Iskra Fileva posed this nice question on FB, and I thought it would be interesting to pose it here for a wider audience.  Professor Fileva asked her friends to pick just "three top" ideas, but I'm happy if readers want to propose more than three.  From many years of teaching philosophy to law students (and very good law students I might add), as well as talking to very smart law faculty, here are a few familiar philosophical ideas that I think are valuable for non-philosophers to understand:  the difference between justification and truth, and, relatedly, the difference between an epistemic and a metaphysical claim; the idea of a "natural kind," whether understood in the Kripke-Putnam way, or the earlier Whewell-Mill-Quine way (I prefer the latter); the difference between realism and anti-realism about some domain, and its relationship to ideas of mind- or attitude-independence.   I'm sure there are many others, so welcome reader perspectives on this.  I'd be particularly interested to hear from non-philosophy readers about what philosophical ideas they have found especially useful.  It's also fine to answer this question with an eye to philosophical ideas "ordinary" people might find important in their lives, and not simply those that are helpful in other areas of scholarship or study. 

Philosopher Rachel Barney (Toronto) discusses the Sophists...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

"Philosophy in the Open" from the Open University

 Philosopher Dan Cavedon-Taylor from the Open University writes:

A new online exhibition is being launched today on the Open University Digital Archive. Philosophy in the Open: The OU Philosophy Media Archive, contains over 30 hours of footage of interviews and debates between some of the most celebrated mid-to-late 20th century British philosophers (readers may be familiar with the Evans and Strawson debate on truth). These videos, many of which were originally broadcast on the BBC, were made in the early days of the Open University to support its teaching in Philosophy. They are a snapshot of a golden age of philosophy in Great Britain, made public here for the first time. 

Interviewees include: 

A. J. Ayer, Renford Bambrough, K. K. Baublys, R. B. Braithwaite, Gareth Evans, Allen Phillips Griffiths, Susan Haack, R. M. Hare, Rodney Hirst, A. J. P. Kenny, Martha Kneale, Stephan Körner, Anthony Quinton, Gilbert Ryle, Dennis Sciama, B. F. Skinner, Charles Taylor, Godfrey Vesey, G. J. Warnock, Alan White, Bernard Williams. 

OU has also commissioned some new essays and videos by contemporary philosophers discussing these older ones.

Death may be near, but there's still living to do

Philosopher Paul Woodruff writes about his experience:

My death is close at hand...because of a lung condition called bronchiectasis, and I am on oxygen day and night. But I do not think of myself as dying. I am living each day with as much life as I can put into it. For me, that means going to bed each night planning at least one project for the next day — something worth getting out of bed and living for. As I think of dying, I make each day a time for living, for having something to live for.

What kind of project is worth living for? Not a project I could complete today. Worthwhile projects spread out over time. Writing this small essay and finding someone to print it will take at least a week, and today is only the first day. I will make sure that the last day for this essay will be the first day for something else. Thinking of death, I want to live every day as if it were the first for something.

(Thanks to Michael Sevel for the pointer.)

Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland profiled in El Pais

Here (in English).

Free will and addiction in the NYT...

...discussing the work of philosophers Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins) and Chandra Sripada (Michigan).

"Seeing fast and thinking slow"

An informative review of Ned Block's latest book by psychologist Chaz Firestone and philosopher Ian Phillips (both Johns Hopkins).

"Philosophising in..." lesser-studied languages

Jonathan Egid, a PhD student in philosophy and comparative literature at King's College London, writes:

I recently launched an interview series titled 'Philosophising in...' - https://www.philosophisingin.com/ -  that is devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world, and promoting them as media of philosophy. I thought that you and the readers of your blog might find one of our most recent interviews, on 'Philosophising in Afaan Oromo,' interesting, as it contains an account of the history of teaching philosophy in socialist Ethiopia, and a short account of teaching Marx to peasants in the mountain towns of Oromia.

"On the impractical gifts of an intellectual life"

An interview with philosopher Zena Hitz.

On the "normativity" revolution in philosophy

I was out at Stanford a couple of weeks ago, giving a talk (about ideology) in the philosophy department.  I corresponded a bit afterwards with philosopher Jorah Dannenberg, who had asked me a good question at the workshop.  In the course of our correspondence, he pointed me to his paper on the ubiquity of "normativity" talk in philosophy, and his skepticism about it, which is coming out in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. (UPDATE:  the published version is here.)  Here's a taste:

Many philosophers thinking about morality evidently do believe this recent turn toward talking in terms of ‘normativity’ constitutes real
progress. My aim is to encourage much more skepticism and circumspection concerning whether this is so, particularly as compared to the optimism right now being enforced throughout our profession.

I really do mean enforced. Indeed, I invite you to think in a more “political” register while reading this paper, than you are perhaps accustomed to when reading a piece of contemporary analytic philosophy. For what is ultimately at stake in the question about how we choose to use the term ‘normativity’ is, I think, how power is wielded within our discipline: the complex ways it is exercised and justified, both within and across the various branches and subfields of academic philosophy, as these are now identified and defined. Ideas about ‘normativity’ and its importance or relevance in thinking about morality, when operationalized within the discipline, becomes claims to various forms of intra-disciplinary authority, made on behalf of those studying or debating ‘normativity’. Their work-product, it is supposed, is of great value or import for the rest of us.

The sociology (or politics, if you prefer) of the discipline is, alas, far more relevant to explaining the content of what gets discussed than philosophers like to admit.  I am glad to see Professor Dannenberg calling attention to this in one important context.

Noam Chomsky talks about the history and philosophy of linguistics...

...at Robinson's Podcast.

Paul Woodruff discusses philosophy and war...

...at Robinson's Podcast.  Professor Woodruff, now emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught for nearly fifty years, served in the army in Vietnam.

"Human Nature Forum"

A new website of videos, projects, and discussion fora (via Edouard Machery).

Richard Marshall interviews Macchiavelli...

...at 3:16 AM.

More on intuitions and reality...

...a rejoinder to Machery, from Nevin Climenhaga, also at IAITV.

Heidegger the Nazi, redux

An illuminating review of a new book by the intellectual historian Richard Wolin; an excerpt:

Heidegger in Ruins draws on the work of a range of historians to present the by-now familiar story of Weimar’s reactionary modernists who attacked democracy and supported dictatorship. But four other elements of the book are new and important, especially in the English language scholarship. First, Heidegger’s mendacity and his corruption of scholarly ethics in connection with the publication of his collected works; second, the persistence and the intensity of his radical antisemitism; third, the apocalyptic, extremist, and eschatological nature of his writings during World War II and the Holocaust; and fourth, the manner in which his discussion of technology contributed to apologia for Nazism in postwar West Germany.

As has become clear, Heidegger's reactionary bigotry infects parts of his work (in a way, say, that Frege's virulent anti-semitism does not infect his).  One reason, I suspect, for the appeal in the Anglophone world of Dreydegger (Hubert Dreyfus's selective reading of Heidegger) is that it extracts ideas of philosophical interest that are more remote from the ugly reality of the man and his actual views.