current problems

I'd been battling with my friend Peter Boghossian about comparing philosophy to a game and about positivism and resisting a scientistic model of philosophy. 

I've been teaching labor history and critical accounts of economic rationalism -- also about sex, culminating in a panel discussion about sex-role stereotypes in society -- Foucault is a huge influence for me in understanding the Greeks and bringing a Greek mindset to the present. 

I've been studying Sartre's The Idiot of the Family, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and Lacan -- working with my colleagues in Montana. 

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Three last posts on philpapers -- talking with Derek Allan in Australia and Karen Elizabeth Zoppa in Winnipeg/Manitoba:

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Hi Derek and Karen

If you don’t mind I will go on with the conversation and try to address some of the big issues we have been thinking about.

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I am surprised to learn that science is uninspired by the highest values especially on the hundredth anniversary of the general theory of relativity.  

As philosophers I think we must make common cause with everyone who has the strength of mind to break free of convention and establish truth on the basis of sound evidence, rather than airy speculation or dogmatic belief.  We need not protect philosophy from the incursions of other fields, especially from empirical science.  New forms of reductionism and logical positivism and new ways to see big data and big complexity -- new forms of skepticism about big explanations too -- bring it on -- encourage scientific investigation and every form and elaboration of natural and human art-science-technology-skill.  We still have to encourage people to learn and add to the store of understanding.  Philosophy is an advocate for the cause of learning and certainly for scientific discovery.  Wake up and smell the science!

Einstein once said that the man of science is often a poor philosopher.  Philosophers likewise are often poor scientists -- Aristotle makes huge mistakes such as rejecting the atomic theory, the theory of evolution, heliocentrism.  Yet Aristotle is a towering philosopher and scientific spirits such as Frege, disastrous philosophers, make huge advances.  

Welcome to planet earth.  We have left and right and lots of problems with integration.  What is the special role that philosophy should play?

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When I first started teaching philosophy in the 1980s I was very conscious of the analytic/continental divide in the background.  I was interested in thinkers from both traditions, and also from other traditions -- Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, African philosophy, South American philosophy, philosophy from Oceania -- but few people I met had the same inspiration for philosophy as I discovered in myself -- I was also trying to keep up with my mathematical and scientific education, and my studies of ancient and modern languages, and studies in economics and social sciences -- trying to study the large arc of history to see what may be gleaned for the good of society.  All of this seemed relevant and even essential to me, for anyone who wanted to dig into philosophy in our time, with a world conception of philosophy and a conception of a truly global (not parochial) process of scrutiny, including an interrogation of the unremarked assumptions that attach to all our fields of study, and even to cultures themselves -- if this is possible.  I had some hope but little evidence for any global convergence of philosophical ideas on big questions, such as the primacy of free inquiry, a foundation in a humanistic orientation, a final standard in empirico-deductive evidence, and a clean break with the obscene prejudices of the past.  It did not seem possible to me that philosophy would continue on with its traditions of narrow interest and specialty -- Kantians vs. Platonists vs. Russell or Popper or German Idealism. 

Some thirty-odd years later for me, I see that the shape of philosophical inspiration today is still very much along traditional lines.  I do not meet people often who have a passion for philosophy that resembles mine -- but I do meet such people on occasion.  Some of us try to look across many traditions and fields, equally at home with history and mathematics.  More often I meet people who focus on one thinker or one strain in a single tradition -- even young people just starting out in their studies, with ambitions to become new Hume scholars or Platonists or Feminist philosophers.  Some of us see the analytic/continental divide but mots people ignore it -- they just go on in their subfield without a grander aspiration. 

My long-term conclusion is that the subjects that occupy people in philosophy may not be the point -- which would also make the traditions less the focus too.  Maybe the point is to develop a philosophical sensibility, a sensibility to argument, to tracking down ideas to their root metaphors -- certainly including the important “scientific” value of the decisive import of empirical evidence -- philosophy as an inspiration both for a welcoming tolerance and a fearless skepticism. 

If there are a large number of philosophers worldwide who are not attuned to values like these, then perhaps the platform for discussion should be -- what is philosophy? -- why should anyone still care about philosophy? -- how can we translate our personal philosophical researches into paths towards the good society?  How can we attack and help eradicate the very unphilosophical disease of fanaticism that infects our societies?  Philosophers should be able to get together on the platform of intellectual freedom, tolerance, empiricism, logic and ethical care.  If we do not have this in common, then ‘philosophy’ is no longer a good in the world, and we don’t need to worry about it.  

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Derek you accuse me of both asking and answering my own question -- which if true seems out of sorts with the aims of philosophy -- philosophy should not perhaps ask questions that it has already answered.

I didn’t think I was answering a question -- just raising one.  What is philosophy? Since people go on pursuing projects like analytic philosophy, continental philosophy, ancient philosophy, comparative philosophy … and since, as your analyses point out, these projects are not aligned very well, perhaps there is no common theme … perhaps they merely resemble one another in various ways. 

You put my presumption to the test.  I seem to be identifying ‘philosophy’ with the development of a critical mindset rather than a set of conclusions or a focus on any particular problem.  But suppose this is wrong: as you say, let us look at the idea that ‘philosophy’ is not bound up with any of these things -- intellectual freedom, tolerance, empiricism, logic, ethical care, and the search for the good society. 

Let us try to imagine a kind of philosophy or an understanding of philosophy that does not respect intellectual freedom.  It forbids certain kind of inquiries.  Let us imagine a philosophy that is not committed to tolerance.  It is intolerant of difference across some boundary.  Let us imagine a philosophy that defies logic, ignores evidence, has no animating moral purpose and no concern for society at all.  What is left?  I don’t think we can call it “the fearless examination of arguments” if we have already eliminated the very bases of argument in logic, empirical evidence, and moral insight.  I don’t think that we have “answered” the question about philosophy by thinking about it in terms of reasoning, evidence and moral compass.  These are some of its internal components, its inner workings, and whatever philosophy is will involve these things -- this seems right -- but this does not specify what philosophy is, how it should be pursued or why there are philosophies rather than one singular phenomenon that everyone will see in exactly the same way. 

Let us acknowledge that there is more than one way to pursue this study -- philosophy.  Then perhaps we can get together as philosophers not on a set of conclusions but a common commitment to values such as respect for basic logic, respect for evidence, and respect for human beings.  

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Karen you raise the daunting question of situating ‘science’ in some broader understanding or putting it to the test as philosophy.  You warn us I think that we may be using this word uncritically and that we should be suspicious of purported “highest truths” -- for example in the case of General Relativity, whose centenary we were discussing -- perhaps these highest truths are being used to prop up some merely worldly power.  

I started thinking about Heidegger’s critical engagement and placement of science and technology in his big ‘history of being’ -- a kind of golden-age theory about the development of philosophy -- this version of Heidegger is an “environmental philosopher” and predecessor for environmental thinking by Leopold, Naess, Callicott and Hardin -- whose ideas appear to underlie much recent and ongoing work in environmental ethics.  Heidegger correctly identifies human culture itself as the culprit in the drama of environmental ethics.  Heidegger inspires a number of attempts to rethink human culture and to develop a new ethic to meet the challenge of the deadly impact of technology on the environment.  These attempts all contain a ‘primitivist’ strain of thinking aimed at returning human culture to an earlier and smaller footprint on the earth.  Aldo Leopold’s conception of “the Land Ethic” is an example of this ‘primitivist’ thinking.  But “the Land Ethic” and Heidegger’s earlier, pioneering ideas on this theme envision a society at odds with free speech, a free press, democracy, the city and all its problems -- an idyll from a dreamlike past.  

In a sense Heidegger was able to articulate a critique of science and technology because he had established a baseline in an earlier preindustrial idyll of human quiet and humble dwelling in the house of being.   Heidegger jumps away from the present to this dreamlike past and achieves a critical perspective on what’s going on right now.  

Habermas envisions the ideal speech situation which is an equal jump from the present to dreamlike future in which human conversation no longer struggled with deception, coercion, or mere power lust over the sincere pursuit of rational consensus.   

Thus we can achieve critical perspectives on the present by looking ahead and before -- perhaps we cannot achieve a critical perspective and remain in the present as actors --  our criticism, that is, is blunted somewhat by our being situated in the same world we are surveying.  

To the critical engagement with science and technology and all the problems that seem to be plaguing us at this moment of history --  especially the plague of violence,  and religious fanaticism,  and religious intolerance -- versions of secular fanaticism and intolerance are also in no short supply.   In truth I feel incredibly small and powerless in the face of these enormous forces of history.  I am so filled with anger about the time I’m living in and the outrages that the human spirit has to suffer that I can hardly walk and chew gum at the same time.   But I am also living as a philosopher. I’m trying to go on with these questions. If I’m going to engage with science -- if I can figure out what that is -- and critically situate it in a broader context of ideas, then I must do so from a philosophical perspective.   So my question to you Karen is: what is your philosophical perspective?

Note on Husserl

Husserl shows why all fields have a conundrum about foundations and indiscernibles at the origin. 

It is because intellectual constructions first emerge naively in the already-made world preceding the    act of reflection.  The already-made is also the cultural root out of which all examination grows -- ultimately the most basic indefinables are performances rather than ideas -- the "basis from which."

Radical subjectivity tries to get behind this untutored positing -- radical self-investigation is universal self-investigation -- so we try define more narrowly world, time, space, psyche, organism, culture -- perhaps to rid ourselves of these beginnings and replace them with scientific precepts.  But to get to this intrinsically first being, we have to face the deep problems of what it means for something to be an accident -- we have to face fate and death and the meaning of human life -- we have to inquire whether it makes sense to distinguish a "genuine" human life from human life just by itself -- in brief we have to confront all the traditional "ethic-religious" problems -- which is why a truly phenomenological investigation must be an all-embracing self-investigation (Cartesian Meditations, § 64).

The big problems are inside, in the concepts we use -- the handhold system, upon which we build our sciences -- the truly Cartesian reflection will take this final jump -- this is a jump into the world we live in and in which we face the problem of orienting ourselves in a positive sense of life-meaning -- a sense of our own responsibility -- thus to lose the world by suspending our judgments about it, and to regain it by self-examination.  Thus at the end of his long series of experiments in the Cartesian spirit, Husserl comes back to his initial idea -- Turn back into yourself: truth dwells in the inner man -- know thyself!

usserl shows why t

mind maps

My themes in recent years have been the complexity of the ‘I’ and ideas about psychological integration.  I have tried to understand something about the mind’s construction of the world, and about what the individual can do to take power and determine the meaning of things on one’s own-- to see what there is, and what to do.

The big outlines of my studies have to do with “mind” and also with “society”-- the mind as society, and society as a kind of mind -- looking through different categories across boundaries of self/other and home/alien and unconscious/voluntary -- in all cases trying to make some maps of these territories, which I call mind-maps.

There is a great deal of work being done in this arena in current thinking -- the Canadian thinker Paul Churchland for example studies the impact of “social-level institutions that steer second-level learning” -- this gets him to the idea of “situated cognition,” an idea that connects the origins of language in human prehistory, and ideas about neurological evolution, to large systems of “nested regulatory mechanisms” such as language, oral tradition, written records, legal systems, schools, libraries, universities and research institutions -- this “epicerebral process” represents a constraint on action and thus a new formula by which to propose new initiatives.  Churchland sees that the underlying picture this view develops is Platonic: the physical brain captures a landscape of abstract universals -- form precedes experience -- reality as something humans ‘experience’ is constructed in social space, which itself develops over time from prehistory to today, fashioning new tools and groups and growing into something new by a social dynamic.

In my most recent work “Criticism and Healing,” I look at what we can learn from studying historic ideas of mental illness and different conceptions of what it means to “put oneself back together” after having fallen apart.  Here are a few excerpts:

“For the last several months my research has focused on the relation between criticism and healing. More specifically, I've been looking at critical partitioning in relationship to therapeutic strategies.  Put differently: I have been looking at various kinds of mind maps and various opportunities for self-regulation that they suggest.  The key problem of psychological integration varies with, must adapt to, and is empowered by the elements we identify as out of sync and needing integration.  Thus we can learn something from looking into this distinction and its development through history.”

“The “mind” is what the brain has developed in contact with the world, and in social life, in a complex and nuanced interaction with itself, as a strategy for survival or as a way of equipping itself to survive.  It does not seem possible that the region of the brain that is most involved with speech would not be deeply integrated with structures involved with social behavior as well as memory and imagination, in wildly different degrees and circumstances.  The idea of response or of the whole being reacting to its environment and exploiting resources at hand to try to survive and flourish -- which we can see in much simpler cases -- is what we are trying to say with the word “mind.”  The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is doing so much, and is interacting so powerfully with other brains, in so complex a form, that we have so much to look at when we start thinking about consciousness.  My idea here is simply that the basic functions -- such as seeking, fear, rage, surprise and play -- in interactions with each other and in society, constitute what we call mind.”

Greek maps

“Aristotle is an important source for the idea that creativity is bound up with passionate, violent emotions that break through social conventions; that forces deep in the soul shove themselves forward and upend morals; that we can measure thought by emotion and get some practice doing it, sometimes checking and sometimes encouraging desire, which builds up in us as habits -- what Aristotle calls ‘strengths of character’ or ‘virtues.’ 

“Nietzsche takes a critical step beyond Aristotle in further reasoning on the question, arguing that we harness the creative process by laying hold of the impersonations one has already undergone and enacted in countless episodes of social life; he argues that taking on roles in social life offers a precedent for explicitly creating a persona for oneself and acting it out; so that by conscious intention one may transform oneself into one’s own explicit creation. He emphasizes that creative work emerges out of a place where good and evil are still indistinct, but not because self-creation is amoral; instead, because art tries to wrestle raw, rude drive energies into an explicitly ‘created’ form.

Medieval maps

“In the medieval Morality play, we see Youth traveling on the Road of Life, set upon by Temptation and encouraged by Wise Counsel.  Our protagonist strays from proper guides such as Simple Virtue or Godly Life, and begins to spend his time with Misrule, Ignorance or All-for-the-money.  Things go downhill as Ignorance introduces Youth to Pride and Pride introduces him to Lechery and Lechery at last brings him to Iniquity, typically through the door of a tavern.   Then Charity, reminding the audience of the mystery of divine Grace, frees Youth from the influence of Ignorance and restores him to the company of Humility.   Thus we glimpse the profound change in the underlying psychology in society in making the jump from the heroic ideal of classical times -- a world of self-power -- to a new world of faith in which the agent cannot extricate himself from the troubles of life on his own initiative, but only by the grace of God …”

Biological maps

“The fundamental concept of mental health that seems to emerge in these researches is complex; it is about exposure to reality; it is social in nature -- it is a kind of growth via relation; it involves replacing automatic responses with mindful responses (via social resources we have a chance to isolate what is going on unconsciously within us -- by means of social learning we get some handholds to bring more of the automatism under conscious control -- ultimately to a new kind of unforced but still thoughtful response).  In this sense Freud’s maxim that where Id was, there Ego shall be is exactly right. 

A frequent metaphor from the new biological synthesis is imagining oneself as a very small rider on top of an enormous elephant.  This goes to the sense that we are much more elephant than we are rider.  At the same time absolutely everything depends on the rider learning something about the elephant, and gradually getting some control over the elephant.  This is very difficult and should make us patient with people who have some trouble handling their elephant.  We get a chance to learn something from experienced riders, and from people who spend their lives studying elephants, and from poets, artists and philosophers who show us the elephant-struggle in all its complexities -- but mainly we learn, and have to unlearn, from our families, and from our struggle to get out from the closed world of the family into the enormous reality that includes it -- which means that much is expected of us -- healing is something we have to work for.”

current projects

Aspasia of Miletus (article to be published this spring)
Philosophy of religion -- Portland State University / Jan-March
Existentialism -- Portland State University / Jan-March
"Critique of Heideggerian Environmental Philosophy," Oregon Academy of Sciences / 2-28
"Theism, Atheism and Human Flourishing," George Fox University / 3-9
Ancient philosophy -- Portland State University / March-June
Criticism and Healing (draft underway for the 2015 EPIS conference)