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| Kant's house in Königsberg |
Bear in mind that I am not a professional philosopher, though I have done a lot of reading, and these are my personal opinions. If you want a large, even-handed history of philosophy I recommend the History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston S.J. in eleven volumes!
- One of the things that David Hume is famous for is waking German philosopher Immanuel Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers." Kant is credited by many as the father of modern philosophy because of his work on ethics and metaphysics. He is a very difficult philosopher to read even if you understand what the "synthetic a priori" is! The two main modern schools of moral philosophy are utilitarianism and deontological ethics. Kant is the locus classicus of the latter which is pretty much the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) updated. A good book to read is the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
- Utilitarianism or consequentialism, the other main school of moral philosophy was founded by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill and has probably done more damage to public policy than any other philosophy, with the exception of Marxism, of course. Utilitarianism seems very plausible, inevitable even, as it judges actions solely by their consequences and aims for the greatest good for the greatest number. Strangely, it usually ends up with rather unfortunate consequences. There have been many criticisms of the various forms of utilitarianism, one of the most intriguing is from Derek Parfit: "According to Derek Parfit, using total happiness falls victim to the repugnant conclusion, whereby large numbers of people with very low but non-negative utility values can be seen as a better goal than a population of a less extreme size living in comfort. In other words, according to the theory, it is a moral good to breed more people on the world for as long as total happiness rises."
- The Germans came a bit late to the philosophical debate, but once they got started they really got their teeth into it. One of the most important is Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who wrote a stack of rather large volumes on just about everything: philosophy of history, metaphysics, epistemology, ontology and so on. He was born in the same year as Beethoven and in terms of the breadth and range of his influence the two are certainly comparable. Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics as mentioned by our commentator the other day, might be worth a look.
- Friedrich Nietzsche who had a real problem trimming his mustache. He is another difficult German philosopher, but a very influential one. His On the Genealogy of Morality is a very important book that discusses the evolution of moral concepts.
- I find the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein to be of immense interest because of the way he sidesteps most of the traditional obsessions of philosophy by examining our language and how we use language to describe the world. This is more important than it might seem. There is an immense amount of commentary on him as well as published books, notes and manuscripts. The best discussion I have found is The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations by Marie McGinn which is remarkably clearer than most.
- One of Wittgenstein's closest associates was G. E. M. Anscombe who herself published a very important paper that shook moral philosophy out of its dogmatic slumbers: "Modern Moral Philosophy" reprinted in Virtue Ethics, edited by Roger Crisp and Michael Slote. Virtue ethics is a revival of the basic approach to ethics that Aristotle outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics and it resolves a lot of modern difficulties.
- Finally, a contemporary figure, Peter Singer whose Famine, Affluence, and Morality has sparked a great deal of pious gnashing of teeth in the elevated ranks of society. I think of him as the Professor of Virtue-Signaling at Princeton University.
UPDATE: I forgot to put a philosophy video clip in this post, so let me add one now. Here is another one by Jeffrey Kaplan about the problem of consciousness:
As a scientist I don't like to exert myself reading philosophy. Scientists are Aristotelian while mathematicians are Platonic. I found Whitehead impenetrable. Nietzsche isn't really that bad if you have a general historical knowledge. The only philosopher I have in my library now is George Santayana since he wrote in a very literary style and in fact wrote a novel late in life. Despite the colorful prose he is a complete skeptic in the Humean mode. He also wrote the last significant book on aesthetics, The Sense of Beauty. His major philosophical work is the 4 volume Realms. He is best known for the phrase: those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't want you to strain anything, but why don't you have a look at the video clip at the bottom. A scientist might find it interesting.
ReplyDeleteAs a scientist I'm not sure the nature of self consciousness per se is a philosophical problem despite the argument expressed in the video and elsewhere. Incidentally one of the Realms that Santayana discusses is the Realm of Spirit which is not the supernatural but essentially the life of the mind that goes on more or less independently of the world it inhabits. We have to distinguish between the nature of consciousness and the particular experience of consciousness that each person has. The latter I think is what philosophers call the qualia of experience that is unknowable to another not in a Vulcan mind meld. But to experience qualia one must first inhabit the world of matter. The facts of human and animal consciousness reside there IMO unless there are unknown supernatural ways to do it, using "supernatural" in a matter of fact sense as outside the universe we inhabit.
ReplyDeleteThere are many things in this world that are unknowable even in mathematics so unknowability per se is not supernatural.
What I find compelling is the idea that, once we list every physical object in the universe and every energy gradient and so on, we have still not accounted for everything--especially consciousness. Over the years there have been some publicized bets between philosophers and physicists as to when the problem of consciousness will be solved by scientists. So far the philosophers have won those bets. But I'm not making any supernatural claims.
ReplyDeleteDo you mean the basis of conscious behavior or the individual experience of it? If I were in a speculative mood I would say that there is a connection between the former and REM sleep.
ReplyDeleteThis gets us rather deep in the weeds of philosophy. Conscious behaviour could be argued as simply behaving in a conscious manner. Wittgenstein makes a lot of arguments in this area. But the idea of an "individual" and the idea of "experience" are both rather outside what we think of as the physical world. To borrow a metaphor from Wittgenstein, an eyeball is not part of the visual field (its visual field) and conscious awareness of the world is not part of the world.
ReplyDeleteObviously we are not going to solve this issue here. Plus I have only a slim knowledge of Wittgenstein. But in philosophy and in science there is a concept of emergent properties i.e. events or capacities that happen in a complex system that are not obvious from the union of separate elements themselves, say, love of music. I suppose emergent properties are ultimately a result of incomplete understanding but in our present state are a useful shorthand. But if consciousness is an emergent property of a certain level of neuronal or similar organizational complexity it would not be otherworldly. Wittgenstein as you stated above is making more of a mystical statement although I would need to see what he wrote exactly. However he does seem to have had a certain leaning in that direction given some quotes I have seen.
ReplyDeleteAs I implied above I would not be surprised at all if there is some kind of self conscious behavior/thought in non verbal animals of a certain complexity. They just can't talk about it and can't easily remember what they thought about or experienced on whim.
Jason Ananda Josephson Storm has written about how one of the flaws in semiotics was misconstruing the fact that while sign associations are arbitrary initially they retain meaning through use and that some philosophers too deep into the "linguistic turn" forget that if language is so opaque as some people claim then you can't train your pets to respond to verbal commands yet we pretty much know from experience this can obviously be done. Inter-species communication at any level ("sit") suggests that animals are capable of understanding audible instructions even if they differ from humans in terms of the sheer variety of sounds they can produce.
ReplyDeleteYour dog or cat may only be able to make so many sounds but they can let you know if they're hungry or want attention.
That even cats will look at things if you point to them indicates that non-human animals have some working theory of mind.
Oh yes, Wittgenstein most certainly has a mystical side! He just thought that we couldn't talk about it. That idea of emergent properties sounds a bit like Aristotle's concept of the soul being the entelechy of the body. Re people and animals, there is a qualitative difference between our experience of living things like people and animals (though not plants) and our experience of non-living things like physical objects and also robots. The words and movements of living beings have a significance that those of non-living beings do not. These include a whole panoply of things like intentions, desires, expectations and so on.
ReplyDeleteHere is a little puzzler for you: does my intention to have a friendly discussion with you appear in the list of physical objects comprising the universe?