Ask a Philosopher!

[Kozmos]

What is your personal opinion on Nietzsche and Russel's work in general? (odd pair I know)

 

[The Last Conformist]

Emotivists don't think that people are mistaken about what they intend, or about what they think they mean. They just think people are mistaken about the semantic content of some of their utterances.

That doesn't really leave me any wiser, but ...

That's really the best I can do... I have a hard time arguing against you since I'm a cognitivist myself!

... I certainly understand this; thank you for the attempt.

Perhaps you could point me to a layman-accessible defense or sympathetic summary of emotivism, preferably shortish and online?

Edit: I should perhaps add I found the WP entry on emotivism unhelpful. Not sure if this says more about me or it!

 

[Imperialmajesty]

Oh Fifty, how do you view Nietzsche and Foucault?

Also, do you think Philosophers will ever achieve certainty about anything?

 

[Elrohir]

Derrida is probably the worst of the bunch. A recent poll on a philosophy blog was on what person you most wish people would stop referring to as philosophers. The runaway winner was Ayn Rand, with Derrida coming in second and Leo Strauss coming in third.

Quite a few prominent feminist philosophers are worthless, too.

Now that I'm all caught up I look forward to being able to offer more comprehensive answers.

Speaking of feminist philosophy - just how worthwhile is most feminist philosophy? For most things, it seems like kind of a lame idea to me (I don't see how approaching many philosophical problems from a feminist perspective would be better than from a standard, non-feminist perspective) but I'm willing to admit I might just be biased.

 

[dwaxe]

What do you think about qualia?

 

[pau17]

There has been a pretty strong "normative turn" in epistemology. People like to think about knowledge in terms of "what is it that makes knowledge a good thing to have". Also, "Why is knowledge better than mere true belief". Other people have taken a "formal turn" in epistemology, which likes to think about knowledge in terms of probability functions and the like. I have sympathy with both camps, but think the normative people are doing more interesting work. I feel like some people in the formal camp are effected with Economistitus, a disease characterized by the belief that the more mathy something is, the more sciency and better it is.

That sounds quite interesting. Can you name any major authors/articles/books that would develop this in more detail?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I suppose some (such as Foucault) who are associated with that movement have their merits, but on the whole there is much more chafe than wheat from pretty much every post-Kantian continental school.

Forgive me, but what post-Kantian schools are not continental?

Absolutely. Derrida is a perfect and utter charlatan and fraud, and I think very very lowly of any academic discipline that takes him seriously.

Another nail in the coffin for my art history professor.

Derrida is probably the worst of the bunch. A recent poll on a philosophy blog was on what person you most wish people would stop referring to as philosophers. The runaway winner was Ayn Rand, with Derrida coming in second and Leo Strauss coming in third.

That reminds me, Eco and I had an argument about neoconservativism and Leo Strauss; Billass said you had things to say about it. So, what influence did Strauss have on the neocon movement?

Quite a few prominent feminist philosophers are worthless, too.

Do Marxist Humanists/Feminists like Raya Dunayevskaya go along with that? I think they ought to.

 

[Fifty]

What is your personal opinion on Nietzsche and Russel's work in general? (odd pair I know)

I haven't read much Nietzsche really, but I think fairly highly of him. I think he has suffered at the hands of people who treat him as a literary figure more than a philosopher. Plus people put too much emphasis on ideas of his that were a relatively minor part of his corpus of work, such as the uebermensch.

Nietzsche's theory of the origin of moral character is the one that is best supported by the relevant empirical data out of the three main alternatives, namely the Aristotelian view that moral character comes about through education, and Kant's that moral character comes about through rational choice. Nietzsche had the view that it was largely hereditary (he didn't use the term "hereditary", but that was his basic view).

My one beef with Nietzsche is that he seems somewhat Nostradamus-esque. Like, he said a bunch of stuff, and some of it will turn out true, but his style was so aphoristic that its tough to give him credit for rationally coming to have true beliefs, or just having some hunches, some of which turned out true.

At any rate, Nietzsche is one "continental" figure that is benefiting greatly by attention from "analytic" contemporary philosophers.

Most of what is written by Nietzsche by non-philosophers is crap, however.

As for Russell, I think extremely highly of him as a philosopher. The only stuff of his I've seriously studied is On Denoting, which explains his theory of the relationship between the meaning and reference of a word.

Perhaps you could point me to a layman-accessible defense or sympathetic summary of emotivism, preferably shortish and online?

I don't know if you saw this SEP article, but if not I would suggest checking out that one.

Oh Fifty, how do you view Nietzsche and Foucault?

Nietzsche I explain above. Foucault I view a lot like Nietzsche, but even more speculative and Nostradamus-like.

Also, do you think Philosophers will ever achieve certainty about anything?

Well if by certainty you mean "no philosopher anywhere disagrees about x", then probably not. But there are certainly many areas of philosophy where there is a large professional consensus about some issue. Note that scholarly consensus doesn't necessarily mean philosophers have made up there minds about some foundational philosophical issue! Rather, they've just made up their minds about what sorts of arguments aer strong and which are weak, what sorts of solutions to problems are promising versus hopeless, etc.

Speaking of feminist philosophy - just how worthwhile is most feminist philosophy?

I don't think its of much value, to be honest. I think that the best sort of feminism results from the concrete struggle to alleviate gender-based injusticies. Philosophy doesn't have much to say about this stuff.

This is the absolute best evisceration of fashionable academic feminism I've ever read. In fact, its one of the best critical essays I've ever read.

What do you think about qualia?

For those who don't know, qualia is the term for the qualitative feel of various aspects of consciousness. For example, the redness of an apple. Why is redness like it is and not some other way?

I think that qualia exist. Frank Jackson's knowledge argument convinced me. The argument rests on a thought experiment. Imagine a scientist sits in a black and white room with no mirrors and learns everything there is to know about color and wavelength, in terms of exactly what sort of light people call "red", etc. She is so smart that she can instantly apprehend what color is produced by every single object you can imagine. So when you ask her about the color of an apple, she knows its red. If there are no qualia, then she has learned everything there is to know about apples. Now show her a red apple. It seems like she has gained knowledge. In particular, she now knows what redness is like. So qualia must exist.

That sounds quite interesting. Can you name any major authors/articles/books that would develop this in more detail?

Ernest Sosa's Locke Lectures, available here, constituted a major new piece of normative epistemology.

Also check out this, and the references therein.

Forgive me, but what post-Kantian schools are not continental?

I wasn't distinguishing continental from non-continental, but post-Kantian from pre-Kantian, and there certainly is some pre-Kantian continental philosophy.

That reminds me, Eco and I had an argument about neoconservativism and Leo Strauss; Billass said you had things to say about it. So, what influence did Strauss have on the neocon movement?

My understanding (haven't read Strauss) is that he was sorta the philosophical backbone of neoconservatism. He has a well known academic cult to his name, consisting mainly of philosophers not in philosophy departments (Like Harvey Mansfield).

Do Marxist Humanists/Feminists like Raya Dunayevskaya go along with that? I think they ought to.

I honestly know nothing about that person! I do know that Marx would have despised the "critical studies" movement in general, and that this sort of feminism is usually taken as a part of "critical studies", so it seems like a Marxist feminist (in this certain sense of feminism) is a bit of an oxymoron.

 

[Ignorant Teacher]

I don't know if this has been discussed already, but could you explain what the distinction between continental and analytical philosophy is?

 

[Imperialmajesty]

Well if by certainty you mean "no philosopher anywhere disagrees about x", then probably not. But there are certainly many areas of philosophy where there is a large professional consensus about some issue. Note that scholarly consensus doesn't necessarily mean philosophers have made up there minds about some foundational philosophical issue! Rather, they've just made up their minds about what sorts of arguments aer strong and which are weak, what sorts of solutions to problems are promising versus hopeless, etc.

I meant perfect knowledge totally secure from error, but you already answered my next question, now just answer that, and it all balances out

 

[Verbose]

I suppose some (such as Foucault) who are associated with that movement have their merits, but on the whole there is much more chafe than wheat from pretty much every post-Kantian continental school.

Just out of curiosity, having seen you post about these things before, have you partly reevaluated Foucault?

I mean, you're obviosuly someone continously doing that, reevaluating, and there's no actual merit in sticking to something just in order to stick to it, but it seems you were previously more dismissive of this particular philosopher? He's the darling philosopher of historians in recent years; in what way does he have at least some merit?

 

[Japanrocks12]

Fifty, by feminist philosophers, are you thinking of Gayatri Spivak/Judith Butler/Helene Cixous/Luce Irigaray?

 

[crabapple]

I guess this might be more sociology then philosophy but i still will ask

What do you think of Ulrich Beck and his risk society?

 

[Ayatollah So]

Unchanging (with respect to person(s), time, or place) moral rules for particular types of situations = objective moral rules. Or if what is right and wrong does change with time, place and/or person(s), then it must change in a way that is predictable and describable and most importantly internally consistent; some sort of unchanging, eternal (verbal) 'formula' of how to determine right and wrong in any given situation, if you will. (I understand that this is what the different schools of ethics try to be, but philosophers still argue which one is definitive.) Thus what is right and wrong in a given situation may indeed change, but the way in which they're found out will not, and that brings us the needed objectivity.

I gotta say that I think this definition is excellent . It really gets at one of the most common senses of the word, especially when it comes to debates about ethics.

I've noticed that people who think that science has all the answers for philosophical problems often argue like this. They point to some established scientific claim, and they they infer from it something that goes beyond the mere scientific claim itself - not noticing that that very process of inference is philosophical, not scientific.

Amen to that, brother. But it's more widespread than just in philosophy; arguers often overstep the bounds of their evidence. For example, neuroscientists often infer things about general psychology from neurological observations, when additional assumptions are actually required. For example, they discover that neural state N1 causes psychological effect P1; and then they infer that people have no control over P1. But this assumes, at the very least, that people have no control over N1 or its causes - which is never actually shown, just assumed.

 

[dwaxe]

Our school has a Freethinkers Club (it's really just an atheist/agnostic/non-religious group), and in a discussion on what differentiates us from animals, we came up with the answer of sentience, which is given by language. Since fifty minutes of lunch time is not enough to think it through, and I want to continue the discussion on the internet, here are some questions.

What is the difference between language and simple sounds, like the ones non-sentient animals make? We thought that it is the same as the difference between a bit and a byte--more possibilities.

Does our ability to think complexly mostly come from language? We thought yes.

If so, how does language allow us to think more complexly? We thought that it allows us to better group or associate things more efficiently or complexly in our minds, and that is as far as we got in our discussion. Is there anything other ability that language gives us to allow us to think more complexly?

Can we conceive of a method of communication or of thinking that would be even better at doing what language does for us? Is there one?

 

[Fifty]

I don't know if this has been discussed already, but could you explain what the distinction between continental and analytical philosophy is?

Historically, it was a distinction between the style of philosophy done in the anglophone world and the style of philosophy done in France and Germany after Kant. Of course, even that historical distinction has exceptions. Frege was one of the founders of analytic philosophy, and he was German, for instance.

There was a period of anglophone philosophy in the 20th century in which people thought that what philosophy was all about was the "analysis" of "concepts". Hence the term, analytic philosophy. Since then, analytic philosophy can no longer be pegged into just consisting of conceptual analysis. People under the analytic philosophy banner do philosophy in a huge variety of ways.

I'm not sure if I can charitably characterize the style of continental philosophy. In any case, the style of philosophy done in continental philosophy has always varied quite a lot, so there really has never been such a thing as a continental style of philosophy.

So even historically, the distinction is only useful as a geographical marker.

These days, analytic philosophers study those continental figures worth studying. And contemporary "continental" philosophy is just a pejorative for bad philosophy that usually occurs in marginal philosophy departments, or outside of philosophy altogether (the garbage that passes for philosophy in literature and cultural studies departments, for instance, is generally taken to be "continental" in the pejorative sense).

I meant perfect knowledge totally secure from error, but you already answered my next question, now just answer that, and it all balances out

I'll just mention that it always seemed weird to me that there is this idea that knowledge requires 100% certainty, or that "real knowledge" or "true knowledge" (terms that have issues of their own!) requires 100% certainty. Why on earth should we believe that?

Just out of curiosity, having seen you post about these things before, have you partly reevaluated Foucault?

I mean, you're obviosuly someone continously doing that, reevaluating, and there's no actual merit in sticking to something just in order to stick to it, but it seems you were previously more dismissive of this particular philosopher? He's the darling philosopher of historians in recent years; in what way does he have at least some merit?

I think Foucault produced a lot of garbage, but he has had at least one idea that isn't obviously wrong (though its also not clear that it constitutes a substantive insight and not an obvious truth). I read an article about criticisms of morality from certain continental figures, and Foucault said a few useful things about normativity and its social dimension. I can't remember the details, but it had to do with how human sciences (e.g. psychiatry) help us decide what human flourishing amounts to, and human flourishing is an important component of at least some forms of moral theory, but that we have reasons to believe that those sciences don't track the truth of the matter for what constitutes human flourishing.

A useful idea, but I think he is wrong in thinking that our notion of human flourishing is heavily influenced by human sciences.

Fifty, by feminist philosophers, are you thinking of Gayatri Spivak/Judith Butler/Helene Cixous/Luce Irigaray?

Yep. Butler and Irigaray I'm particularly familiar with, and they are both beyond awful.

What do you think of Ulrich Beck and his risk society?

Haven't heard of him, I'm afraid.

I gotta say that I think this definition is excellent . It really gets at one of the most common senses of the word, especially when it comes to debates about ethics.

You would want to make sure that that definition didn't exclude non-moral context sensitivity in the moral status of an action. I'm not sure that it does so exclude, but its useful to point out to everyone that moral objectivism does NOT imply an insensitivity to context!

What is the difference between language and simple sounds, like the ones non-sentient animals make? We thought that it is the same as the difference between a bit and a byte--more possibilities.

I'm getting a bit out of my element here into linguistics, but I think I can say something.

First, you are right that there are more possibilities in a couple ways:

1) You can form new sentences with language. It has infinite potential variety.

2) Languages have far more semantic content than mere simple sounds.

Second, I think there is a representational component to language. Language is represented in our mind, and it represents the world.

Does our ability to think complexly mostly come from language? We thought yes.

I think this is largely an empirical question that I don't know the answer to (and I don't think anyone does). I will say, however, that its an extremely tricky empirical question. That is, it would be difficult to distinguish whether thinking results from language or just that things with the capacity to think also have the capacity to have language.

If so, how does language allow us to think more complexly? We thought that it allows us to better group or associate things more efficiently or complexly in our minds, and that is as far as we got in our discussion. Is there anything other ability that language gives us to allow us to think more complexly?

I think it certainly allows us to think more complexly. It allows us to communicate in far more ways, and it allows us to sorta keep track better (association, as you say). Again, though, I think this is really up to cognitive linguist types to figure out empirically.

Can we conceive of a method of communication or of thinking that would be even better at doing what language does for us? Is there one?

I think we could conceive of a better language, but not something that isn't a language that is better than language. Unless, of course, we could have direct neural access to eachother's mental states or whatever.

 

[Ayatollah So]

n a discussion on what differentiates us from animals, we came up with the answer of sentience, which is given by language.
[...]

Does our ability to think complexly mostly come from language? We thought yes.

The word you want is sapience, not sentience. "Sentience" comes from the same Latin root as "sensation", and sensation is something very many animals are capable of.

To my mind, self-consciousness is the most important hallmark of sapience. Now, Fifty's right: this is an empirical, more than a philosophical, issue. But allow me to go slightly OT, and suggest that there is good evidence that self-consciousness does not require language. Further, there's some reason to suspect that high intelligence is possible without language; PM me if interested.

You would want to make sure that that definition didn't exclude non-moral context sensitivity in the moral status of an action. I'm not sure that it does so exclude, but its useful to point out to everyone that moral objectivism does NOT imply an insensitivity to context!

Yes, that's very important. That's part of why I liked his definition: he did make some effort in that direction.

 

[Fifty]

Ayatollah you're more than welcome to discuss that sort of thing here... It's close enough to philosophy, and you're trained in philosophy, so I trust you

At any rate the empirical claim has philosophical import, so it might be worth discussing. I'd be interested!

 

[MagisterCultuum]

The word you want is sapience, not sentience. "Sentience" comes from the same Latin root as "sensation", and sensation is something very many animals are capable of.

To my mind, self-consciousness is the most important hallmark of sapience. Now, Fifty's right: this is an empirical, more than a philosophical, issue. But allow me to go slightly OT, and suggest that there is good evidence that self-consciousness does not require language. Further, there's some reason to suspect that high intelligence is possible without language; PM me if interested.



Yes, that's very important. That's part of why I liked his definition: he did make some effort in that direction.

The Latin root of sentience and sensation really has two seperate but related meanings. It can mean to feel something, or to feel some way about something. Sentience thus entails both sensation and having an opinion. It implies a degree of volition. It is an important part of consciousness, although of course other animals have it too.


Sapience is simply discernment. Its root means "to smell" or "to taste." It generally implies a certain intelligence, but we can probably program computers to have all that is needed for sapience. That does not make them conscious or persons. Sapience is probably required too.

 

[Bill3000]

So fifty, as philosophy includes deciding the demarcation of science, what prestigious fields of today claim to be science or rigorous but in reality aren't? Is Economics an example of this? What fields of social science can be considered genuine science and what can't?