PHILOSOPHERS OF OUR TIMES Introductory Lecture Edinburgh Book
Festival 2015 This is a draft of an introductory lecture by Ted Honderich from his edited book Philosophers of Our Times -- 18 Royal
Institute of Philosophy Annual Lectures, in five groups starting with the
philosophy of mind. The draft includes a question or two by the editor, who was the chairman of the lectures.
There are also postscripts to the draft --
postscripts the day after, about what philosophy is, and consciousness,
and determinism or explanationism, and what is right. If you're here because you heard some laddish fellow
say 'Whot's philosophy then?', there are
some dictionary definitions of philosophy to start with, for what they're worth. "the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge" Merriam-Webster
dictionary "general understanding of values and
reality" Merriam-Webster "contemplation of the nature of being" Chambers
'knowledge of causes and laws of all things' Chambers "study of the fundamental nature of knowledge,
reality and existence, especially when considered as an academic
discipline" New Oxford Dictionary of English "study of the general and fundamental nature of
reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language" Wikipedia "rationally critical thinking about the world,
belief, and the conduct of life" -- 'thinking about thinking' Anthony Quinton, Oxford Companion to Philosophy The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy, more original in not entering into
competition with the Oxford Companion and
every other such volume, doesn't try to give you an answer at all to what
philosophy in general is. It Just gives you parts of the thing, such as the
Philosophy of Literature -- of which the rest of us philosophers had never heard
before. Can we do more to say what philosophy is, maybe what
it's worth, by way of a bird's-eye view
of 18 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lectures in the five groups, even
with the bird flying high and fast? That is what you're about to get. And can we also find out that or whether philosophy is
at the heart of life -- which is the declaration that summoned 320 of you to
this tent of the Edinburgh Book Festival?
PHILOSOPHY
OF MIND 1 Tom Nagel's Royal Institute Annual Lecture was an update from his
renowned paper about being conscious, 'What Is It Like To Be a Bat?'. Nagel said
originally and famously that what it is for a thing to be conscious, you or a
bat or maybe some future computer, is
for there to be something it's like to be that thing. His
Royal Institute l ecture, you can say, is an answer
to 'How
is what it is like to be a bat related to the bat?' That is an instance
or
expression of what is called the mind-body problem. He persuasively
says: Don't try
to believe what you can't understand. Does he mean we can't understand
the relation because we can't understand consciousness? But maybe we
can. Is there still my old question about his initial clarification of consciousness? And could it be that Nagel's renowned answer is circular, tells you nothing? Because it comes to 'What it is for a thing to be conscious is for there to be something it is like for that thing to be conscious?' Like being told being a dog is a canine.
2 Peter Strawson's paper, put into the book despite the
fact that he was not able to give his lecture because of a car accident, asks
what perceiving things comes to, say seeing the sheep out behind Magdalen
College Oxford. What are you really aware of in seeing? An
old answer, from the 17th Century right up to Freddie Ayer and still going, is that you are really
aware of things internal to you, things in your head -- ideas or images or
sense impressions or sense-data or qualia or whatever. John Mackie, another
Oxford stalwart, gave an answer called scientific realism. Strawson's answer was what he calls
common sense realism. What is it? Well it's not all about inner or cranial
things. A
thought for you. If the question is 'What is it to be conscious in perceiving?', what's the nature of that, don't you need an adequate initial
clarification of what you're talking about? Of consciousness? Settle what you're talking about before you go on
to say what it is, get to a theory or analysis of its nature? Is the pile of
disagreement or seeming disagreement about consciousness mainly or
significantly owed to people talking about different things, not asking the
same question? 3 Tyler Burge from Los Angeles asks the
question 'Where did mind begin?', meaning Where did it first come in in the whole
evolutionary or upward-to-us history of unconscious and then conscious things.
The development from single cells up to us? The
answer he gives is orthopods -- spiders and the like. To
go back to those definitions of philosophy, is that an instance of the pursuit
of wisdom? Contemplation of the nature of being? Could be, but if so, does that make any difference between philosophy any anything else. Say science? Or doing a puzzle in the newspaper? And, just by the way, isn't "knowledge of causes and laws of all things" at least more about science than philosophy?
4 Jerry Fodor of Rutgers University was in way concerned with that Peter Strawson,
Freddie Ayer, and John Mackie question -- roughly, what happens in your seeing?
Maybe what happens consciously? His
answer, at a first approximation, is that there is evidence and a line of
argument for there being something talked of an awfully lot loosely by other
American philosophers -- something called the
given. There is something inner to you and me but like pictures on walls,
like that sign at the gate that says Edinburgh Book Festival -- something inner but like ordinary outer representations
or images. As distinct, by the way, from thoughts or concepts. A
question for you. Does this answer to
a question about consciousness also depend on your initial idea of
consciousness? Is it the same as other people's idea? Are you asking the same
question? 5 Ned Block of Harvard and then MIT was in
effect on about the same question in his lecture, which he expressed as whether there is
something you can call mental paint. As
you may guess, mental paint is also in the line of philosophy that has those
ideas of the 17th Century in it and Freddie Ayer's sense-data and maybe Fodor's
the given. I
myself put a question to you. You're conscious in seeing this room. Does that
come to your having something or
being presented with it or not deducing or getting it from anything else? Does that had or presented or undeduced thing include more paint than the paint on the walls? Block
finds his way to the answer Yes. He also speaks of another kind of consciousness than what
seems to be ordinary consciousness, by the way. When you were thinking about
philosophy five minutes ago you were also somehow conscious of what the name on
your passport is -- conscious of it in that you could have given it if asked. Whot's
consciousness in general for him then? Same as your idea? 6 When
you're on the sidewalk waiting for the
lights to change to green, you do somehow intend to cross when they do.
When
they go green, you somehow intend to cross and do. Does all that
involve two
intentions or one -- a single one you also had when you were waiting,
and another
one that got you into action a little later? Are there both of what
used to be called forward-looking or inactive intentions and also
active intentions -- the latter maybe being what also used to be called
acts of will? That
is a simple form, maybe too simple, of the question in the lecture of John
McDowell. He was a Fellow in Oxford and is now ascended to the Philosophy
Department in the University of Pittsburgh. Able fellow to say the least, not confused about what department he works in. In connection with two kinds of intention, what about those initial dictionary ideas of what philosophy is
then? What about philosophy being "contemplation of the nature of
being?" What about its being "study of the general and fundamental nature of
reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind and language"? Waiting
for the lights doesn't seem grand enough for those descriptions, does it?
MORAL AND VALUE PHILOSOPHY 7 The
first lecture here is by Christine Korsgaard of Harvard, the
chairperson of its philosophy department, once the student of its
renowned theorist of an imagined social contract, John Rawls.
You get it into the lecture by imagining something,
God choosing between creating a happy universe, everybody happy, or
creating a miserable universe, everybody
miserable. The essential point is that if he chose the first universe there
would be nobody for whom that choice made them better off than they would otherwise be -- if they weren't there in
the happy universe they wouldn't exist at all. You agree, don't you, that the
first choice would be an awful lot better, that it would be right to choose it
if you were God? But there is a problem or question about this choice, isn't there? It 's not
the usual sort of choice or judgement having to do with happiness, misery and
the like? With respect to this choice or judgement, in favour of the happy
universe, all there ever is, there is nobody better off. It is between people and also animals existing and
being happy or miserable and those people and animals not existing at all. And you could
say that in a certain sense nobody at all would be being deprived of
happiness by the second choice. Further, there is the same kind of situation, it seems, about
choosing between a universe of greater equality and a different universe of
lesser equality. The question here, as in the first case, to put it
differently, is why the first world would be better. Here too, you can say,
there exists no one to whom it matters. Korsgaard
agrees that
the first choices are right but thinks about that a lot. No doubt she
is right,
but there are questions arising. By God there seem to be. What are they? Is there
some awful problem for the Principle of
Humanity, which I'll get around to? 8 What are
reasons? The
lecture of Tim Scanlon, once Oxford and now Harvard, is called 'Reasons
Fundamentalism'. Is that the idea or rather an idea that reasons for saying and doing things,
maybe moral reasons, are fundamental things themselves? That they do
not reduce or boil down to other things -- desires or inclinations or the like?
The
bird in this bird's eye view of all the lectures sticks his beak in again.
Think of the migrants drowning in the Mediteranean Sea. Suppose I give my Principle of
Humanity as my reason for doing something. Say England doing as much as Germany is doing. Is my reason not in a category of things that is concerned with desires, inclinations and the like, a matter of what you could call affective consciousness rather than perceptual consciousness or cognitive consciousness? Well, .... 9 Are moral reasons, as this next lecturer
declares, somehow or other a matter of
exactly desires or inclinations or the like? Certainly affective rather than cognitive consciousness? Simon
Blackburn, now back around Cambridge after a spell in North Carolina, was not
invited to give a Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture because he disagrees
absolutely with what he calls Tim Scanlon's assertion of the sovereignty or
majesty of reason. That is just how it worked out. But he sure does disagree. You
will gather that in this dispute is in some connection with those philosophical
or religious declarations to the effect that real reasons for action are
something like objective and those other declarations, some of them
philosophical, to the effect that reasons somehow include attitudes. The greatest of British philosophers said so. David Hume of Edinburgh. Pity his city knocked down his house. Simon's definition of philosophy, by the way, in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy,
is 'The study of the most general and abstract features of the world
and categories with which we think: mind, matter, reason, proof, truth
etc." 10 Mary Warnock, a philosopher of whom someone
once said, truly, that she gives the great and the good a good name, has as her
subject what is natural, and whether
something's being natural matters. In
particular, what about reproductive cloning for humans if we can get around to be able to
do it? A born child having only one parent, like Dolly the Sheep? Certainly
not natural, whatever questions there have been about the natural. Certainly
a bad idea because unnatural? Mary Warnock sheds a lot of light, but she
doesn't say that. Excellent
philosophy, but an instance of 'knowledge of causes and laws of all things'?
Of course not, if English still has meaning. And by the way, doesn't that definition cover science, indeed cover it more
exactly than it could ever cover philosophy? There
just must be better definitions than at least some of those we began with.
Including the one I'll end up with? FREE-STANDING QUESTIONS IN
PHILOSOPHY 11 Are you in this place we're in as a matter of your own
freedom? Or was your choosing all
determined? Explained by causes and the causal circumstances of which they are parts? Your bird providing you with a bird's-eye view admits on the wing
that he has spent or misspent a lot of time on this question. He is
a repeated offender in saying that determinism is true, and so there isn't ever
the particular freedom that is free
will, sometimes called originationby
philosophers. That is, there isn't the freedom that is uncaused
choices, what you might call little acts of creation. There's just
the freedom that is ordinary voluntariness, which is choosing and
doing what you want to do -- not because of a man with a gun or
prison walls or whatever. But John
Searle of Berkeley California and the Reith Lectures and so on, who also
single-handedly put an end to a computerism about the mind and more particularly
about consciousness, is a free-willer. The man who singlehandedly defeated the idea
that understanding Chinese, not just operating with it, is
something that a computer does. Searle's being happy about uncaused willing is a shock
to my sytem, to which I am getting used. Maybe a support to your system? Do
you think we have free will because you want a standing
for us humans? Somehow above nature, or above the rest of
nature? Is that a good enough reason? And might it be the case that you
can get
some standing by way of the right understanding of consciousness?
Does the right understanding make you into what has been called,
in a more low-class lecture than this one, a kind of
little demigod, a very small creator of a kind of world? 12 What makes you who you are, that particular
person? The one with your name? What makes for personal identity? Some say it's an inner thing, your self, maybe also to be identified, if
there are any remaining Freudians, as your ego.
Some say it's the body that is you.
Some say it's something different, which is the
human being you are. Derek
Parfit, of All Souls and elsewhere, the English philosopher and the thinking
life exemplified, denies that last proposition. So he has a lovely and
exact title
for his lecture. 'We Are Not
Human Beings'. We are instead unities of a kind, unities including
memory above all. Who I am, above all, is a matter of
what is remembered in some unity of stuff. I
butt in, yobbily. Does who you are therefore have a lot to do with your being conscious?
And, since that is so, are you helped to a personal identity answer by getting
a good answer to two questions? (1) Your being conscious is what? (2) Where? I'd
say the answers are consistent with the Parfit truth, maybe closer than that to it. 13 Anthony Kenny, educated in Rome, once a
priest, then excommunicated for marrying, then Master of Balliol, goes against
one of his Balliol predecessors who told us 'Never apologise, never explain'.
He explains lucidly why for him belief in God is possibly false -- but
nonetheless reasonable. So religion, as he says, is not really the root of all
evil. The
lecture is also about a lot of what you can call the epistemic facts:
knowledge, certainty, truth, belief, reason, scepticism, faith. The latter, faith, I guess I am glad to hear, is
found not to be a virtue but a vice. The
lecture is also about what class of degee is to be awarded in the final examination of the atheist and
biologist Richard Dawkins. Not to be confused with the same question about
Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist and cosmologist, he who said
philosophy is dead, being uniformed of the preceding line of undertakers, mostly scientists, that philosophy has buried. I'd
say the Kenny lecture's alive and about as good at truth as any other lecture around
here.
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL
PHILOSOPHY 14
Noam
Chomsky, the rescuer and then among the makers of
the science of linguistics, the greatest intellectual of The Left, the
preserver
of the sanity in the proposition of innate ideas as against the
dopiness of behaviourism,and a fellow who says there is no
mind-body problem, is also
something else. Indeed universally known for something else. He
is the proponent of the view that there are
not only hard problems but simple, available and refuting truths about
terrorism, justice, anticipatory self-defence, and more. One
such truth is that our societies, anyway the leaders of our societies, are
engaged in inconsistencies about terrorism and so on, and so give no arguable
judgements as to right and wrong. Another truth is that our societies and
anyway our leaders make their judgements in historical ignorance or in denial
of past fact. America stands out in this respect. There is state terrorism of course, some of it American. Does
Chomsky take it that there is no need for a general principle of right and wrong? In
order to have an argument for which of two inconsistent propositions is
right and which wrong? 15 Alasdair MacIntyre, another leaver of Oxford
for America, a philosopher many have reason to swear by, including me, on
more than the present occasion. His books are his own, not products of a joint
workplace. His lecture here is 'Social Structures and Their Threats to Moral
Agency'. He asks what moral agents are, and how they can become such, and and
what societies are against their existence and them. The
lecture starts with a man who is a scheduler of German passenger and freight
trains during the war. His defence is that he did his prescribed duty, which
had nothing to do with what was in the trains. Like his society, he doesn't
escape judgement in the end. Nor does a certain American company executive. And
all of his society. MacIntyre's
lecture is like Chomsky's in engaging with
societies, not being somewhere else. Certainly the subject of
right and wrong is in philosophy, wherever else it
is. The lecture also enables you to say a good word for what may or may not need it, which is
sociology. 16 Jurgen Habermas. Here is Continental
Philosophy for you. The real stuff. However it fits those definitions mentioned at the start. The
lecture of the leader of contemporary German philosophy, the personification of
the Frankfurt School, thinks Germanly and effectively on the subject that there
are or should indeed be cultural rights in our democracies, including for
Islams -- and that cultural rights have had as their pacemaker religious
tolerance. From
such beginnings as a distnction between toleration and tolerance, and
Goethe's superiority to tolerance, it goes on to Muslim calls to prayer
by loudspeaker.It
is as good an example of another philosophy as we in Scotland, England,
and
America are likely to have. It is different. It is more concerned than
our
philosophy with experience in the sense of lived lives, more akin to
reflective
literature, closer to the history of philosophy, less in touch with
science. An
antidote to insularity? To a continentality? The American continent? I'd say so. PHILOSOPHY IN GENERAL 17
Bernard Williams of Oxford, University College London,
Kings College Cambridge, California and more, draws on his experience to say
what philosophy in general has often been, and what should it be, which is not
always what it is now. Philosophy
(1) should be not scientized, but (2) should be a humanist discipline, which is
to say (3) it should be making the best sense of our lives. Thus it is (4)
something from a perspective, in a sense subjective, and (5) philosophy entails an awful lot more
than just attending to our history and the history of philosophy. It
comes very naturally to a philosopher to disagree with his teachers, as I do,
except about (1) scientization, if that is more than
respect and use of
science. Proposition (2) is somehow or other true if obvious --
philosophy isn't science. Proposition (3) is vague. Proposition (4) is
somehow arguable but no distinction of
philosophy. (5) is elevated, classy,
but, so far as I can see, not much more than an audacious loyalty to an old degree in Oxford with Greek and ancient Greece in it.
I myself was in favour of allowing University of London undergraduates
to get a degree in philosophy without doing a finals paper in ancient
Greek philosophy. That happened. (1), to go back to it, must indeed somehow be true -- for anyone
with a decent sense of the practice of philosophy, of which more in a couple of
minutes. 18 Last but definitely not least is David Chalmers, philosopher and
neuroscientist, the affirmer of what is widely known as the hard problem
of consciousness, the mind-body problem. His
proposition in his lecture is the more general one that there is less
progress
in philosophy than in science -- notably on consciousness, determinism
and
freedom, and right and wrong. There hasn't been as much consensus as
there is in science with respect to scientific questions. He took a
poll that more or less proved it. He
touches on the reason, among others, that philosophy has to be argument rather than proof. That tends
to bring the two of us together. My agreement has to do with my definition or rather account of philosophy. He
also notes that there are verbal disputes in the way of progress -- no
agreement on a common question -- which proposition again brings us together.
And that there seems less progress in philosophy because when there is some
about a problem, the problem is taken out of philosophy and into science.
That's it. Thanks
for listening. Buy the book. It's the real stuff. And don't be shy about questions now. There's a lot to talk about. POSTSCRIPTS THE DAY AFTER
You
can use the 18 lectures in the book and maybe the very slight summaries above of them as means to answering the question of what
philosophy is. See also my fuller editor's introductory summaries of all the lectures in the book -- and also on this website. My
own answer to the question of what philosophy is is closest to that one in The Oxford Companion to
Philosophy -- closest but more informative. The Companion definition, I remind you, was rationally critical thinking about the world,
belief and the conduct of life. But, remembering waiting for the traffic
lights, and feminist philosophy on pornography, and other bits and pieces,
should we have something a little less grand? And with less implication of generality of subject matter? My
answer is as follows. Philosophy, the practice of philosophy, and the right way
to read it and hear it as, is concentration
on the logic of ordinary intelligence.
That comes to four things: (1) clarity, usually analysis, (2) consistency
and validity, (3) completeness, (4) generalness. Philosophy is therefore necessarily a matter of judgement,
not big proof. If you want something still snappier, philosophy is thinking
about facts rather than getting them. It is this nature of philosophy that
makes it harder than science. And
oh yes, is philosophy at the heart of life? That was the proposition that the
Edinburgh Book Festival promised for consideration in the lecture. I leave
that to you. Maybe it's more the several or various hearts of life? If it concentrates on ordinary
logic, it doesn't leave a lot out. Doesn't leave out your waiting for a
green light. Or God and those two universes.
You can also use the lectures as
stimuli to your own answers to philosophical questions. My main
questions are the following three about mind, about determinism and freedom, and about right and wrong. (II) As for consciousness, each
of us has a hold on her or his own consciousness. As a result, there's a database that puts together the
identifying mouthfuls that we take our being conscious to be. What the database
adds up to is that ordinary consciousness is something's being actual. That is an adequate initial clarification
of ordinary consciousness. You can go on from that to a theory or analysis of
consciousness. For a good start, it will answer two questions. What is
actual? What is its being actual? The
answers are different with the three sides or parts of consciousness --
perceptual or in-perception consciousness, and cognitive consciousness, and affective consciousness. Roughly the
consciousness in seeing, and the consciousness that is kinds of thinking, and
the consciousness that is kinds of wanting. What's actual with your perceptual consciousness right now is probably a room out there. A stage of a world.
Physical and out there but different from the objective physical world.
What
is its being actual? Its being subjectively
physical. Which, to mention just a few of its characteristics, is its being lawfully dependent on both the objective physical world also out there
and and on you in here, you neurally. What's
actual with cognitive and affective consciousness? Representations in here.
Subjectively physical in a different way. Look
out for the book Actual Consciousness, which
is for a dogged reader. Or wait for the snappy precis: Your Being Conscious is What? Where? (III) The
main philosophical problem about freedom has been the consistency of it with
determinism or explanationism, the latter being the denial that there are
events without standard lawful explanations, say standard causal explanations,
whether or not we can find them or not. That problem is solved by the obvious truth that there are two ideas of freedom. We have them both -- the fact that philosophy has had a history of overlooking. One that is inconsistent with explanationism is of course free will or origination, which does not exist. The other is the freedom that is being able to do what you want, which is consistent with determinism. That obviously exists, in different degrees. Does anybody now deny that we have the two ideas? Have a look at the short book How Free Are You? or the long book A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes. (IV) The
only decent answer to what is right is the Principle of Humanity. It rests on
the fact of our shared human nature, not on self-concern and the like. It is
to the effect that we are to take all rational steps without exception to
getting people out of bad lives. Anything if it really works and of course does
not defeat itself. Bad
lives are not left vague but defined by way of the fact of our shared
fundamental desires, these in my view being six in number. Decent length of life; bodily well-being; freedoms and powers; respect and self-respect; goods of relationship; goods of culture -- one of the goods of culture, I guess, being philosophy, not quite so large as being able to read. A book: Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... American edition: Right and Wrong, and Palestine, 9-11, Iraq,7-7.... |