“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Philosophy
Neoclassicism Making A Comeback?
From The City Journal: ‘American Architecture’s Classical Revival:’
Well, trying to suffuse an architectural movement with an entire political philosophy might be a little much, but more ‘local’ would be nice. Also, The Northeast has lost population, while many cities and the Southwest have gained.
‘Classical architecture is not just about history; it’s also about light, color, and human proportions, all of which help us understand it and relate to it so naturally. “People will not look forward to prosperity,” Edmund Burke once said, “who never look backwards to their ancestors.” In politics, as in architecture, tastes evolve. But lasting institutions can be built only on strong foundations.’
Some cool photos at the link.
As previously posted on this site. When the Romantic became the Modern, and a great American poet tried to find place in the world, something that would carry from generation to generation.
Postcard From The Volcano
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
Related On This Site: They designed a city in the heart of Brazil that really doesn’t work for people: Brasilia: A Planned City
No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision.: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’…
A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…
Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Roger Scruton In The American Spectator: The New Humanism…From Nigel Warburton’s Site: A Definition of Humanism?…From The City Journal Via Arts And Letters Daily: Andre Glucksman On “The Postmodern Financial Crisis”
Repost-The Prospect On Parmenides
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Via A Reader-‘Locke’s Empiricism, Berkeley’s Idealism’ …From Partially Examined Life-‘John Searle Interview Of Perception: Part One’
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce…Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Saturday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
Sunday Quotation-Sir Thomas More
‘The fact is, even the sternest ascetic tends to be slightly inconsistent in his condemnation of pleasure. He may sentence you to a life of hard labour, inadequate sleep, and general discomfort, but he’ll also tell you to do your best to ease the pains and privations of others. He’ll regard all such attempts to improve the human situation as laudable acts of humanity – for obviously nothing could be more humane, or more natural for a human being, than to relieve other people’s sufferings, put an end to their miseries, and restore their joie de vivre, that is, their capacity for pleasure. So, why shouldn’t it be equally natural to do the same thing for oneself?’
More, Thomas. Utopia. Penguin (trans. Paul Turner), 1965. Print.
“His problem (Plato’s) with the arts was that they operated by images rather than by ideas, and thus that they might cloud the truth rather than clarifying it.”
Yes, and religious traditions, for example, also have interpretations of how one ought to reproduce the image.
“Whatever one thinks of Plato’s solution to this problem, I suggest that this is one of the problems that elicited his proposals for severe censorship of the arts he so obviously loved and had been trained in.”
The Prospect On Parmenides
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Photo found here.
Some Sunday Thoughts-Thanks For Stopping By
‘The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture…’
‘…I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as unscientific cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the ‘transcendental’ and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. ‘
Scruton, Roger. “Effing The Ineffable” Confessions Of A Heretic. Notting Hill Editions Ltd, 2016. Print. (Pgs 87 & 88).
Personally, I’m not sure that all naturalists and people in the sciences I’ve known wish to reduce the world to strictly mathematical laws, nor consign all domains of human endeavor to ‘non-science.’
Some people, I suspect, have the onboard wiring and have pursued learning which make them profoundly interested in order, patterns, and logic. Some people are just really smart and dedicate themselves to a particular problem or two, maybe possessing the genius and courage, even, to define a new problem after years of hard work of mastering a field, leading to genuine new knowledge.
I am grateful for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and the hundreds of engineers that worked for much of their professional lives to land this thing on Mars. It’s still yielding valuable data.
But, I”m guessing there’s lot of waste and bureaucratic stasis at NASA. Perhaps a similar regression to the mean within institutions towards narrower ideas and ideologues happens here, too (if only x were removed, y will occur).
I see such outcomes partially caused by the decay of things, partially by design, and partially as a process of secularization (beneath the idealist and systematist lie human nature and reality). Such incentives don’t necessarily lead to leadership by the most knowledgeable, but over time, rather to leadership by administrative fiat and distant political winds.
—
Now, there’s arrogance, hubris and false pride to be in all of us, to be sure, and many sharp thinkers are no exception (in some cases the bigger the brain (or ego), the bigger the fool). I don’t find foolish and/or earnest conviction in any short supply on this Earth.
To be fair, I don’t think this proves, nor does Scruton even attempt to prove, that the ineffable, therefore, exists (or if the ineffable does exist, as it reveals itself to us, that it requires saying or expression through us, nor through Handel or Bach or post-Kantian German thinking).
Such expression surely offers me consolation, though, for I take refuge in works of art. I am profoundly grateful to walk at evening and listen to a few minutes of music:
I am profoundly grateful that I may share in someone else’s pain, suffering and disconsolation, across centuries, transmuted into an act of beauty and wonder, through a centuries-developed form and method (an orchestra is rather a thing of technical achievement, too, just as is a store-bought guitar or a Korg).
Sure, there’s much epistemological ignorance amongst some in the sciences and, frankly, within all of us.
Come to think of it, I think most of us manage one or a few things well, and mess up at least a few areas of our lives without even trying. It’s also very, very tempting to talk about that which we know very little (this blog, for instance), as though something is known.
This may make me no more than a 2nd or 3rd rate idea man, taking, essentially, more than has been given.
For today, I suppose this will do.
Repost-Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’
Also On This Site: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…
Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
From The Times Higher Education: Simon Blackburn On The The Atheist/Believer Debate…From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky
Repost-A Bleak, Modern House-Four Poems
‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known? Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’
In addition to the move away from traditional Romantic rhyme and meter towards modern blank verse, there’s also a certain conception of the Self rendered in them; a presentation of our natures that might be worth examining in some detail.
I believe we can see clearly a move away from tradition towards the Self, the Poet isolated, the poem itself as a means of communication, and an anxiety so common within the 20th century.
I should note that a friend points out Harold Bloom does it much better (well, yes…obviously). From this blurb:
‘At the heart of Bloom’s project is the ancient quarrel between “poetry” and “philosophy.” In Bloom’s opinion, we ought not have to choose between Homer and Plato; we can have both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior.’
Says the guy who writes about poetry…
What does one find within, as one looks without, waking from sleep and dream?
What kind of world is this, and can the poet actually help us know it?
T.S. Eliot (Preludes: Stanza 3)
3.
You tossed a blanket from the bed
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
—
The world will stain you, and it is a fallen, modern world, rendered profoundly and exquisitely.
As consciousness creeps in, building a bridge to the day, to the world, to the facts left as though they were the first facts, the light as though it were the first light, what one finds is distressing, both within and without.
That distress must be ‘made new,’ which is to say, the suffering (original?) in which we all sometimes find ourselves must match our experiences within the modern city and world, at least, the world created within Eliot’s lyrical verse.
Of the four poems, only the first and last have a 3rd-person subject.
—
Wallace Stevens‘ ‘I’ is in a more contemplative state, but it’s an ‘I’ exploring similar themes, and experiencing some distress in trying to know how the world actually is, and what might lie within.
The journey to The Self may not be a journey for the faint of heart.
The Poems Of Our Climate (stanzas II and III)
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
—
Even if the verse can describe a perfected world, delivering us, perhaps, a little closer to perfection, our poet is still not free from the impulses and desires which simply never cease.
Interestingly, we end-up not with a discussion of the heart, the spirit, libido etc. as a source for those desires (for Plato, the irrational), but rather, for Stevens, just a mind.
We also find more Romantic elements of language and an almost baroque/rococo arrangement of words and ideas, dandyish even, yet combined with an intense effort to abstract, define, and clarify. From here, the poet may proceed on his task of flawed words and stubborn sounds.
***I find myself thinking of elements of modern architecture and abstract-expressionist painting. The meaning, or at least some delivery from our restless existences, can be found within the abstract itself. Or at least within a retreat to the abstract for its own sake, away from the world.
The modernist, glass-walled house on the hill will exist in its own space, offering and defying meaning. The structure’s own shapes will be stripped down to often mathematically precise forms interacting with Nature. These shall guide Man, or at least offer individual men a little refuge.
It is perhaps in Stevens’ poem we can see the questions of knowledge about the world suggesting questions about whether there is a world at all, or, at least, what kind of worlds each Self might be able to inhabit.
—
Here’s one of Robert Lowell’s poems, occurring a generation later, in the mid 20th-century, as part of the confessionals.
The Self is extremely isolated. In fact, Lowell went more than a little crazy. Unlike the known nervous breakdown of Eliot from which Eliot recovered, Lowell’s life was essentially one long breakdown from which he never recovered.
Here he is, looking back:
Epilogue
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme-
why are they no help to me now
i want to make
something imagined not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything i write
With the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot
lurid rapid garish grouped
heightened from life
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts.
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
—
The weight of having to make that meaning, for yourself, and by yourself, is a horrible weight indeed. One can glorify one’s Self and family, but that, alas, only goes so far. Rhyme and form still carry one’s living name, as far as they do.
Of course, there’s still wonderful rhythm and form here (this is excellent verse), but blanker now, with a relentless focus on the ‘I.’ The poet is perhaps talking a little more to himself, and the poem keeps self-consciously calling attention to itself.
—
In fact, it reminded me of the poem below, by Robert Creeley, which was published a few years afterwards.
From this page:
‘Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work.’
There’s Nothing but the Self and the Eye seeking and making meaning, by itself within a void of emotionally compact and precise language (of course there’s still form and other things besides).
Can the poet fit inside the little abstract chapel of words he’s building for himself (let alone the world, tradition etc.)?
For all the talk about ‘space,’ there seems very little.
The Window
Position is where you
put it, where it is,
did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered,
with the white church along-
side, lift
all that, to what
purpose? How
heavy the slow
world is with
everything put
in place. Some
man walks by, a
car beside him on
the dropped
road, a leaf of
yellow color is
going to
fall. It
all drops into
place. My
face is heavy
with the sight. I can
feel my eye breaking.
—
The distress is still there…but I’d argue that we are now a good distance away from the grandness of Eliot’s vision, his religiosity and virtuosity with form and meter at the dawn of Modernism. Very few people can/could do what Eliot did (addition: even if he can help us gain knowledge of our Selves or the world).
That said, it’s unclear there’s enough tradition and confidence to even undertake such a project, now, even as such talents come along. The state of things is more scattered. We’re in a very different place of selves and artists isolated, of anxiety and post-anxiety.
Aside from the very accomplished poets above, in terms of both knowledge (epistemology) and being (ontology), we often have writers feeling pressure to weigh-in on such questions without even being about to write that well; artists who can’t draw or paint that well, and frankly, quite a bit of bullshit besides.
So, where are we headed? Who’s ‘we’ exactly?
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
As previously posted:
Why not just put a few algorithms to work in writing those artist statements?
Bathe in the bathos of a warming world:
A reader sends a link to a SF Gate review of poet Jorie Graham’s ‘Sea Change:‘
‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.’
and:
‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’
Oh boy.
What are these poems being asked to do?
And moving away from poetry into the realm of ‘performance art,’
Tilda Swinton At MOMA-From Arma Virumque: ‘Nightmare In A Box’
Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment
Ah, Look At All The Lonely People-‘Jeff Koons Is Back’ Via Vanity Fair
Some Links-Boston & Blue
You’ve probably heard the intro to Boston’s ‘Foreplay/LongTime’ played in regular time, but what about half-time?
Mesmerizing and rather beautiful:
Because you didn’t ask:
‘I’ll begin the critique with the last point. “We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties.” (179) If van Inwagen can ‘peter out,’ so can I: I honestly don’t know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen’s claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don’t see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?’
From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’Repost: From the Cambridge Companion To Plato-T.H. Irwin’s “Plato: The intellectual Background’
And because you really didn’t ask:
I got nuttin’ over here.
Via A Reader-‘John Searle On The Philosophy Of Language’
Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
As previously posted: Paul Ibbotson & Michael Tomasello at Scientific American: ‘Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory Of Language Learning:’
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Worth a read.
As posted: Caitlin Flanagan reviews Tom Wolfe’s new book ‘The Kingdom Of Speech.‘ Jerry Coyne, ecologist, writing in the Washington Post, was not impressed:
“Noam Chomsky: The Last Totalitarian”The Politics Of Noam Chomsky-The Dangers Of Kantian Transcendental Idealism?
Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge
=====
Some Updated Links On Postmodernism…Daniel Dennett: ‘Postmodernism…And Truth’
A Bleak, Modern House-Four Poems
=====
Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘Miles Burnyeat On Plato’…Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘John Passmore on Hume: Section 1’
Saturday Quotation-Harry Frankfurt
‘The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen, who with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth, dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.’
From On Bullshit.
The Prospect On Parmenides
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Photo found here.
From Partially Examined Life-‘John Searle Interview Of Perception: Part One’
From Partially Examined Life: ‘John Searle Interview of Perception: Part One‘
Direct, naive realism requires some explanation of consciousness and a theory of perception:
‘We interview John about Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015). What is perception? Searle says that it’s not a matter of seeing a representation, which is then somehow related to things in the real world. We see the actual objects, with no mediation. But then how can there be illusions?
Well, we see things under an aspect: a presentation of the thing. And that presentation presents itself as caused by just that thing that the perception is of. If these “conditions of satisfaction” (i.e., that the perception is actually caused by that thing) are not met, then we have a case of illusion: we thought we were perceiving that thing, but we really weren’t. Simple! Right? Searle lays out his theory for us and amusingly dismisses much of the history of philosophy.’
Related On This Site: Via A Reader-‘John Searle On The Philosophy Of Language’
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce
Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce
Via Youtube: (1 of 3) Kant, Chomsky and the Problem of Knowledge
Repost-From Virtual Philosophy: A Brief Interview With Simon Blackburn
“Nigel: Has relativism had its day as an influential philosophical position?
Simon: No – and I don’t think it should ever die. The danger is that it gets replaced by some kind of complacent dogmatism, which is at least equally unhealthy. The Greek sceptics thought that confronting a plurality of perspectives is the beginning of wisdom, and I think they were right. It is certainly the beginning of historiography and anthropology, and if we think, for instance, of the Copernican revolution, of self-conscious science. The trick is to benefit from an imaginative awareness of diversity, without falling into a kind of “anything goes” wishy-washy nihilism or scepticism….”
It looks like we’ve been dealing with such a problem for a long time, in one form or another.
See Also On This Site: Can you maintain the virtues of religion without the church…of England?: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”…Are we going soft and “European”… do we need to protect our religious idealism enshrined in the Constitution….with the social sciences?…Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People
From Wikipedia’s Page On Leo Strauss: A Few Quotes: From The Philosopher’s Magazine Via The A & L Daily: ‘My Philosophy: Alan Sokal’
Monday Quotation-Voltaire
‘What is tolerance? it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly–that is the first law of nature. ‘
Thursday Quotation-Arthur Schopenhauer
‘The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity.’
Repost-Alas, What Were You Hoping For?
Simon Blackburn at the University of Toronto discussing the minimalist or deflationist view:
‘Along comes someone like Pilate, Pontius Pilate, and says something like: ‘What is truth?’ and everybody goes sort of dizzy, and you look to the philosopher to provide a suitably abstract and highfalutin answer. The minimalist says you shouldn’t answer Pilate, or rather, if you answer Pilate, you answer should take the form of a question…which is “What are you interested in?’
So basically, you throw the question ‘What is truth?’ back until the person who’s interlocuting you… gives you an example and says ‘Well, I’m interested in whether penguins fly’ and you say ‘Okay well the truth there…the truth would consist in penguins flying…’
…that’s very disappointing:’
Blackburn on Richard Rorty here.
From Kelley Ross, who takes a step back from moral relativism and good ‘ol American Pragmatism:
‘It is characteristic of all forms of relativism that they wish to preserve for themselves the very principles that they seek to deny to others. Thus, relativism basically presents itself as a true doctrine, which means that it will logically exclude its opposites (absolutism or objectivism), but what it actually says is that no doctrines can logically exclude their opposites. It wants for itself the very thing (objectivity) that it denies exists. Logically this is called “self-referential inconsistency,” which means that you are inconsistent when it comes to considering what you are actually doing yourself. More familiarly, that is called wanting to “have your cake and eat it too.” Someone who advocates relativism, then, may just have a problem recognizing how their doctrine applies to themselves’
And on Richard Rorty:
‘Pragmatism is really just a kind of relativism; and, as with Protagoras’s own strategy, it is a smoke screen for the questions that ultimately must be asked about what it means that something is “better,” or now that something “works.” Something “works,” indeed, if it gets us what we want — or what Richard Rorty wants. But why should we want that? Again, the smoke screen puts off the fatal moment when we have to consider what is true about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. All these responses are diversions that attempt to obscure and prevent the examination of the assumptions that stand behind the views of people like Rorty. It is easier to believe what you believe if it is never even called into question, and that is just as true of academic philosophers like Rorty as it is for anybody else. Being intelligent or well educated does not mean that you are necessarily more aware of yourself, what you do, or the implications of what you believe. That is why the Delphic Precept, “Know Thyself” (Gnôthi seautón) is just as important now as ever.’
Larry Arnhart At Darwinian Conservatism is skeptical of the Nietzchean influence: ‘Prinz’s Deceptive Silence in His Arguments for Emotivism and Cultural Relativism:’
‘In Beyond Human Nature, Jesse Prinz argues for emotivism and cultural relativism in his account of human morality. In doing this, he employs the rhetorical technique of deceptive silence. What I mean by this is that in presenting the research relevant to his topic, he picks out those findings that seem to support his arguments, while passing over in silence those findings that contradict his arguments. For example, he sets up a stark debate between Kantian rationalism and Humean emotivism in explaining the basis of human morality; and he argues that empirical research supports emotivism by showing that moral judgment is purely emotional and not rational at all (293-95). This is deceptive in two respects. ‘
Also On This Site: A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…Repost-Some Thoughts On Noam Chomsky Via The American Conservative: ‘American Anarchist’
Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’
Roger Scruton On Moral Relativism And Ross Douthat On Bill Maher
Wednesday Poem-Wallace Stevens
Postcard From The Volcano
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;
And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt
At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky
Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion’s look
And what we said of it became
A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,
Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,
A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
A little authoritative and paternal, but a romantic poet. A modernist, brilliant with language but precise in meaning, abstract, somewhat philosophical. They say he had a deathbed conversion. Here’s another line of his:
“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.“
And then just to frustrate matters more:
Beauty is no quality in things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.
See Also: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…and while I may not agree with his conclusions, Denis Dutton knows aesthetics pretty well and philosophy too: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…
Repost-The Prospect On Parmenides
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Via A Reader-‘Locke’s Empiricism, Berkeley’s Idealism’ …From Partially Examined Life-‘John Searle Interview Of Perception: Part One’
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce…Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Repost-From The Times Higher Education: Simon Blackburn On The The Atheist/Believer Debate
He appeals to David Hume’s depth and humor.
“But it is not just that old tunes are being replayed, but that they are being replayed badly. The classic performance was given by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, written in the middle of the 18th century. “
and Blackburn’s last paragraph:
“The upshot ought to be not dogmatic atheism, but sceptical irony. Of course, the latter is just as infuriating to those making special claims to authority, perhaps more so. Men and women of God may find it invigorating and bracing to meet disagreement, but even benevolent mockery is mockery. They would find that it is much harder to bear the Olympian gaze of the greatest of British philosophers.”
Recent related posts: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”…and how to get away from creationist/darwinist dualism…From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science
Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘John Passmore on Hume: Section 1′
Repost-Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’
Full post here. (link may not last)
Perhaps Hawking is guilty of a little hubris in weighing in with such certitude on the God question?
Here’s a quote of his Hawking’s posted previously:
“His [Kant’s}argument for the thesis was that if the universe did not have a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before any event, which he considered absurd. The argument for the antithesis was that if the universe had a beginning, there would be an infinite period of time before it, so why should the universe begin at any one particular time? In fact, his cases for both the thesis and the antithesis are really the same argument. They are both based on his unspoken assumption that time continues back forever, whether or not the universe had existed forever.”
-Stephen Hawking-A Brief History of Time
Not so much that time continues back forever, but that it’s impossible to conceive of a point outside of time. Kant wished to argue that both time and space are not necessarily inherent characteristics of the universe (or any object at all…especially those objects with which we have no direct experience, like a black hole, though according to Kant we can have knowledge of objects) but rather time and space are part of our onboard apparatus, and preconditions for us have intelligible experience in the first place (unlike as is assumed in calculus, for example). He constructed a vast metaphysics to make his point in the hopes of putting metaphysics on the same ground as the sciences (the Enlightenment was going strong around him, and he latched onto Newton’s laws especially). It’s questionable as to whether or not he succeeded, but fascinating to think about nonetheless.
Also On This Site: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism…
Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
From The Times Higher Education: Simon Blackburn On The The Atheist/Believer Debate…From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky
Thursday Quotations-A Thread Of Stoicism
“Cling tooth and nail to the following rule: Not to give in to adversity, never to trust prosperity, and always to take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases, treating her as if she were actually going to do everything it is in her power to do. Whatever you have been expecting for some time comes as less of a shock.”
–Seneca The Younger
What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
Repost-From YouTube-Bryan Magee: On The Ideas Of Quine
Via Wikipedia-Quine’s position denying the analytic/synthetic distinction is summarized as follows:
It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact. … Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.[13]
— Willard v. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, p. 64
As a pretty strong materialist, Quine rejects a priori synthetic statements as necessary, as well as mind/body duality problems, regarding the ‘why?’ questions as fundamentally unanswerable. At least such questions are not for philosophy to posit nor answer, anyways.
There simply doesn’t exist a category of knowledge we humans possess that doesn’t have its origins in our experience.
For Quine, it seems, philosophy is more abstract and general than the sciences (asking questions about questions, clarifying), but it it can’t hope, as Kant hoped, to be placed onto the same ground as the sciences.
Yet, as a Youtube commenter points out: Aren’t there still abstract entities beyond our material existences on Quine’s view (not souls, not God, not ideal forms), but rather just numbers and number sets naturally existing, and perhaps waiting to be discovered?
A link posing a re-purposed Quinian idealism:
ABSTRACT. Quine’s web of belief is influenced by, and encompasses, the entire scope of reality. It is established with a minimalist vocabulary, and is an efficient and integral vehicle toward his metaphysical [a]nd unambiguous ontological commitment, which leads to a somewhat bleak but rigorous membership in the world. Physical objects exhaust the domain of substance, and man becomes a mere four dimensional physical object. All states of mind are psychologized, or reduced to their impact on behaviour. Effectively, idealist criticisms have not simply been taken note of, but idealism has been hijacked, and the result is a new kind of empiricism and an original view of the world.
Via A Reader-BBC Discussion Of Arthur Schopenhauer
Thanks, reader: ‘Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Guests include A.C. Grayling, Béatrice Han-Pile and Chris Janaway.’
It’s all pretty much will, but how he arrives at such a metaphysics gets some treatment.
As posted:
‘The separation between so-called duties of law and duties of virtue, more correctly between justice and philanthropy, which was effected by Kant in so forced and unnatural a manner, results here entirely of itself and thereby testifies to the correctness of the principle. It is the natural, unmistakable, and sharp boundary between the negative and positive, between doing no injury and helping.’
Schopenhauer, Arthur. On The Basis Of Morality.
Also On This Site: From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Repost-From YouTube-Bryan Magee: On The Ideas Of Quine
Tuesday Quotation-Harry Frankfurt
‘The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen, who with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth, dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.’
From On Bullshit.
Clive James At The Prospect On Joseph Conrad-Some Links
James revisits many quite original, quite accomplished works.
Of note to this blogger:
‘They are, in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terrorism to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organise itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness. Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.’
Clive James’ site here.
Michael Dirda on ‘Clive James Last Readings’ review: A Critic’s Final Homage To Literature, Life:’
‘In 30 brief essays James goes on to tell us — in his most digressive, conversational manner — about the books he’s discovered or returned to quite probably for the last time.’
============
Not entirely unrelated:
John Gray begins a discussion of his book ‘The Silence Of Animals‘ with a quote from Conrad:
————————————-
Added bonus if you act now in the face of no possible objective knowledge.
Part of Bryan Magee’s series:
=========================
Nietzsche directed his thought against Christian morality, secular morality (Kantian and utilitarian), was quite anti-democratic, and anti-Socratic.
Related On This Site: From The NY Times Book Review-Thomas Nagel On John Gray’s New ‘Silence Of Animals’.
A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy..
From Edward Feser: ‘Nagel And His Critics Part IV’…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”…
John Gray Reviews Jonathan Haidt’s New Book At The New Republic: ‘The Knowns And The Unknowns’
Update And Repost- From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?’
From Slate Star Codex: ‘All In All, Another Brick In The Motte’
Click through (great comments)
‘The original Shackel paper is intended as a critique of post-modernism. Post-modernists sometimes say things like “reality is socially constructed”, and there’s an uncontroversially correct meaning there. We don’t experience the world directly, but through the categories and prejudices implicit to our society; for example, I might view a certain shade of bluish-green as blue, and someone raised in a different culture might view it as green. Okay.’
From Remarks On Bertrand Russell’s Theory Of Knowledge:
“The following, however, appears to me to be correct in Kant’s statement of the problem: in thinking we use, with a certain “right,” concepts to which there is no access from the materials of sensory experience, if the situation is viewed from the logical point of view.
As a matter of fact, I am convinced that even much more is to be asserted: the concepts which arise in our thought and in our linguistic expressions are all — when viewed logically — the free creations of thought which cannot inductively be gained from sense experiences.”
From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of ScienceFrom Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science
From Maverick Philosopher: ‘Peter van Inwagen, “A Theory Of Properties,” Exposition And Critique
‘I’ll begin the critique with the last point. “We never see properties, although we see that certain things have certain properties.” (179) If van Inwagen can ‘peter out,’ so can I: I honestly don’t know what to make of the second clause of the quoted sentence. I am now, with a brain properly caffeinated, staring at my blue coffee cup in good light. Van Inwagen’s claim is that I do not see the blueness of the cup, though I do see that the cup is blue. Here I balk. If I don’t see blueness, or blue, when I look at the cup, how can I see (literally see, with the eyes of the head, not the eye of the mind) that the cup is blue?’
From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’Repost: From the Cambridge Companion To Plato-T.H. Irwin’s “Plato: The intellectual Background’
Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
Thursday Quotation: Arthur Schopenhauer
“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
A re-post.
Sunday Photo And A Poem By Emerson-‘Boston’
Boston
(Sicut Patribus, sit Deus Nobis)
The rocky nook with hilltops three
Looked eastward from the farms,
And twice each day the flowing sea
Took Boston in its arms;
The men of yore were stout and poor,
And sailed for bread to every shore.
And where they went on trade intent
They did what freeman can,
Their dauntless ways did all men praise,
The merchant was a man.
The world was made for honest trade,-
To plant and eat be none afraid.
The waves that rocked them on the deep
To them their secret told;
Said the winds that sung the lads to sleep,
‘Like us be free and bold!’
The honest waves refuse to slaves
The empire of the ocean caves.
Old Europe groans with palaces,
Has lords enough and more;-
We plant and build by foaming seas
A city of the poor;-
For day by day could Boston Bay
Their honest labor overpay.
We grant no dukedoms to the few,
We hold like rights and shall;-
Equal on Sunday in the pew,
On Monday in the mall.
For what avail the plough or sail,
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
The noble craftsmen we promote,
Disown the knave and fool;
Each honest man shall have his vote,
Each child shall have his school.
A union then of honest men,
Or union nevermore again.
The wild rose and the barberry thorn
Hung out their summer pride
Where now on heated pavements worn
The feet of millions stride.
Fair rose the planted hills behind
The good town on the bay,
And where the western hills declined
The prairie stretched away.
What care though rival cities soar
Along the stormy coast:
Penn’s town, New York, and Baltimore,
If Boston knew the most!
They laughed to know the world so wide;
The mountains said: ‘Good-day!
We greet you well, you Saxon men,
Up with your towns and stay!’
The world was made for honest trade,-
To plant and eat be none afraid.
‘For you,’ they said, ‘no barriers be,
For you no sluggard rest;
Each street leads downward to the sea,
Or landward to the West.’
O happy town beside the sea,
Whose roads lead everywhere to all;
Than thine no deeper moat can be,
No stouter fence, no steeper wall!
Bad news from George on the English throne:
‘You are thriving well,’ said he;
‘Now by these presents be it known,
You shall pay us a tax on tea;
‘Tis very small,-no load at all,-
Honor enough that we send the call.’
‘Not so,’ said Boston, ‘good my lord,
We pay your governors here
Abundant for their bed and board,
Six thousand pounds a year.
(Your highness knows our homely word,)
Millions for self-government,
But for tribute never a cent.’
The cargo came! and who could blame
If Indians seized the tea,
And, chest by chest, let down the same
Into the laughing sea?
For what avail the plough or sail
Or land or life, if freedom fail?
The townsmen braved the English king,
Found friendship in the French,
And Honor joined the patriot ring
Low on their wooden bench.
O bounteous seas that never fail!
O day remembered yet!
O happy port that spied the sail
Which wafted Lafayette!
Pole-star of light in Europe’s night,
That never faltered from the right.
Kings shook with fear, old empires crave
The secret force to find
Which fired the little State to save
The rights of all mankind.
But right is might through all the world;
Province to province faithful clung,
Through good and ill the war-bolt hurled,
Till Freedom cheered and the joy-bells rung.
The sea returning day by day
Restores the world-wide mart;
So let each dweller on the Bay
Fold Boston in his heart,
Till these echoes be choked with snows,
Or over the town blue ocean flows.
-Click through for more photos.
Sunday Quotation
“Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
The Prospect On Parmenides
The Prospect has a good article here on Parmenides (no longer free). Stanford’s page here.
“By these arguments, Parmenides arrives at his picture of the world as a single, undifferentiated, unchanging unity. Needless to say, scholars have disagreed over exactly what he meant. They have questioned whether he meant that the universe was one thing, or only that it was undifferentiated.”
Here is a quote from this abstract:
“According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting “fictions”. Each rests upon a “mistake”, the commingling of “qualities of the imagination” or “impressions of reflection” with “external” impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither.“
and also:
“Unlike Hume, however, he (Kant) undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes.“
Photo found here.
Roger Sandall-R.I.P.
My belated condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Roger Sandall, who passed away on August 11th, 2012. He was an Australian thinker and critic of cultural relativism, romantic-primitivism and the Noble Savage. He was a keen observer of the ways in which certain strains of Western thought interact with the non-Western, and often, tribal worlds.
While not as strong as in Australia, we’ve seen the rise of multicultural apologetics in the U.S. regarding the native population: “Well, we robbed this land from the Indians, anyways.” Sandall highlights the problems and hubris of such sentiment, and what can become the “Disneyfication” of the natives and the historical record.
His home page where his essays can be found.
Here’s “The Rise Of The Anthropologue”
R.I.P
Related On This Site: Romantic primitivism: Roger Sandall: Marveling At The Aborigines, But Not Really Helping?…Repost-Roger Sandall At The American Interest: ‘Tribal Realism ….Roger Sandall At The New Criterion Via The A & L Daily: ‘Aboriginal Sin’…Roger Sandall: ‘Plato Vs. Grand Theft Auto…
Via Architizer Blog: ‘Modernism Goes To The Movies’
Some pictures at the link.
There’s mention of the Mt. Rushmore house at the end of North By Northwest. I suspect some among us have wanted to live in a modernist lair.
From an article in Der Spiegel on the Bauhaus, where modernism got its start:
‘The real feat achieved by Gropius and his cohorts was to have recognized and exposed the sociopolitical and moral power of architecture and design. They wanted to exert “effective influence” on “general conditions,” fashion a more just world and turn all of this into a “vital concern of the entire people.”‘
I’m always a little skeptical of such grand visions. Utopianism runs deep.
Here’s Robert Hughes saving some choice criticism for the Empire State Plaza in Albany and the centralization of power through architecture as he saw it (a rich mix of the corporate and the bureaucratic from 50’s and 60’s America):
——————
Some of Le Corbusier’s work here, examples of Modern Architecture here.
See Also: They designed a city in the heart of Brazil that really doesn’t work for people: Brasilia: A Planned City
No thanks to living in planned communities upon someone else’s overall vision.: Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?…Repost-Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…Cities should be magnets for creativity and culture? –From The Atlantic: Richard Florida On The Decline Of The Blue-Collar Man…From Grist.Org Via The New Republic Via The A & L Daily: ‘Getting Past “Ruin Porn” In Detroit’… some people don’t want you to have the economic freedom to live in the suburbs: From Foreign Policy: ‘Urban Legends, Why Suburbs, Not Cities, Are The Answer’
A structure in the desert…not even a city Update On LACMA, Michael Heizer And The ‘Levitated Mass’-Modern Art And The Public;..where is modernism headed? Via Youtube: Justin, The Horse That Could Paint…
Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Bryan Magee Via Youtube: ‘John Passmore on Hume: Section 1’
——————-
For when the German idealism gets thick…
Some Sunday Quotations: (On) Kant, Locke, and Pierce
For a friend:
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett.
On Locke at the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy:
‘Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes.’
On Charles Sanders Peirce. Full entry here:
The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
L.A.’s New Public Art Piece ‘The Levitated Mass,’ Or As The American Interest Puts It: ‘A Moving Rock’
Perhaps you haven’t heard about the Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Art Museum:
‘…an artwork by Michael Heizer comprised of a 456-foot-long concrete-lined slot constructed on LACMA’s campus, upon and at the center of which is placed a 340-ton granite megalith. As visitors walk along the slot, it gradually descends to fifteen feet deep, running underneath the megalith before ascending back up.’
This is L.A., but…still. Our author at the American Interest wonders:
‘It would be interesting to know whose idea was to move the 340-ton rock from a quarry (at a distance of almost a hundred miles) to the Los Angeles County Museum—an operation costing millions, necessitating extra police forces to deal with the traffic problems caused by the slow progress (five miles per hour) of a gigantic truck (“196-wheel transporter”) specially made for this project.’
Wonder no further:
————————————–
Well, at least it was paid for by private donations. Even so, a great nation deserves great art. This piece fills a spiritual and cultural void at the heart of the Angelino multicultural experience, creating a communal space (absence) in which the public can find meaning through public Art by incorporating Nature itself (a large rock…prescence) into their rootless, isolated, traffic-weary daily lives. It is a mass for the masses!
While passing under the megalith, it may slowly dawn on some Californians that what seemed like levitation or another mildly interesting new art installation actually has a terrible weight to it, and could potentially crush them to death. This may even inspire fear or resignation (like the California debt burden), or perhaps like the Hajj it will become a pilgrimage destination, even uniting people in a state of passive reverence for something so mildly holy (as only good, secular, public Art projects can do).
There was also a gala opening for the rock as though it were Oscar night. From the American Interest:
“In the final analysis, moving this rock to a museum may be seen as an apt symbol of the cultural/aesthetic relativism that has of late engulfed much of our society. Admiration of the rock also illustrates a rare agreement between elite groups (such as curators and benefactors of museums) and ordinary people about what should be regarded as an object of art. Perhaps most importantly it reflects a growing incapacity of many Americans to distinguish between events which are appropriate occasions for reaffirming social bonds and experiencing exhilaration and those which are meaningless and wasteful spectacles.”
Indeed, but I suppose that’s up to the people of Los Angeles to decide. They may like it. The L.A. Times blog writes more here (comments are worth a read).
See also: Tergvinder’s Stone, a poem by W.S. Merwin. Maybe you could see this coming.
Addition: Apparently not everyone recognizes an attempt at postmodern public art blurb satire when they see it.
Related On This Site: Via Reason: ‘Salvador Allende’s Cybersocialist Command Center’…Left of Center politics and art: From ReasonTV Via Youtube: ‘Ken Burns on PBS Funding, Being a “Yellow-Dog Democrat,” & Missing Walter Cronkite’…Repost-From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?
Joan Miro: Woman…Goya’s Colossus…Goya’s Fight With Cudgels…
Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion, at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…Here’s Nietzsche scholar J.P. Stern on Nietzsche’s anti-Christian, anti-secular morality (Kant, utilitarians), anti-democratic, and anti-Greek (except the “heroic” Greek) biases…
Nothing that Allan Bloom didn’t point out in the Closing Of The American Mind: Update And Repost: ‘A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche / Strauss Connection’
Repost-From Virtual Philosophy: A Brief Interview With Simon Blackburn
I just wanted to focus on an interesting problem:
“Nigel: Has relativism had its day as an influential philosophical position?
Simon: No – and I don’t think it should ever die. The danger is that it gets replaced by some kind of complacent dogmatism, which is at least equally unhealthy. The Greek sceptics thought that confronting a plurality of perspectives is the beginning of wisdom, and I think they were right. It is certainly the beginning of historiography and anthropology, and if we think, for instance, of the Copernican revolution, of self-conscious science. The trick is to benefit from an imaginative awareness of diversity, without falling into a kind of “anything goes” wishy-washy nihilism or scepticism….”
It looks like we’ve been dealing with such a problem for a long time, in one form or another.
See Also On This Site: Can you maintain the virtues of religion without the church…of England?: From The City Journal: Roger Scruton On “Forgiveness And Irony”…Are we going soft and “European”… do we need to protect our religious idealism enshrined in the Constitution….with the social sciences?…Charles Murray Lecture At AEI: The Happiness Of People
From Wikipedia’s Page On Leo Strauss: A Few Quotes: From YouTube: Leo Strauss On The Meno-More On The Fact/Value Distinction?
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry On Eliminative Materialism
‘Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and accurate account of the mind. In other words, it is the view that certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do not exist’
and
‘Here we see a tension that runs throughout the writings of many early eliminative materialists. The problem involves a vacillation between two different conditions under which mental concepts and terms are dropped. The first scenario proposes that certain mental concepts will turn out to be empty, with mental state terms referring to nothing that actually exists. Historical analogs for this way of understanding eliminativism are cases where we (now) say it turned out there are no such things, such as demons and crystal spheres. The second scenario suggests that the conceptual framework provided by neurosciences (or some other physical account) can or should come to replace the common-sense framework we now use.’
Related On This Site: Jesse Prinz Discusses “The Emotional Construction Of Morals” On Bloggingheads.
From Scientific Blogging: ‘The Gravity Of Free Will’
Comments are worth a read.
Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy entry on free will here.
Related On This Site: Political Philosophy: From The Information Philosopher: Another Take On Libertarianism
Thursday Quotation: Bertrand Russell
Sent in by a reader:
“As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.
On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.”
Repost-Continuing On A Theme Found Elsewhere: Painting The American West
Below is Albert Bierstadt’s ‘Puget Sound, on the Pacific Coast, 1870″ which is on display the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Bierstadt painted the picture without having seen Puget Sound! More on the Hudson River School here, with its strong roots in romanticism.
From KentOfKent’s photostream on Flickr, part of his Olga Comes To Seattle series.
—————————————–
The Smart Set had a recent article (with a reproduction of one of the paintings) of Xie Zhiliu, a Chinese painter taken with Yosemite:
“Then you get to the last room of the exhibit, where something special happens. In 1994, Xie traveled to Yosemite National Park with his painter wife Chen Peiqiu. There, he produced a series of paintings that are a testimonial to cognitive dissonance. He paints the mountains and trees of Yosemite, but they look vaguely Chinese.”
How do we come to know nature? What do we do with all this wilderness?
Related On This Site: Where is modern art headed?: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Joan Miro: Woman…Goya’s Colossus…Goya’s Fight With Cudgels… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise
Also at SAM: A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’
How might Nietzsche figure in the discussion (was he most after freeing art from a few thousand years of Christianity, monarchy and aristocracy…something deeper?), at least with regard to Camille Paglia. See the comments: Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful
From The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy: Charles Sanders Peirce
The previous point must be tempered with the fact that Peirce increasingly became a philosopher with broad and deep sympathies for both transcendental idealism and absolute idealism. His Kantian affinities are simpler and easier to understand than his Hegelian leanings. Having rejected a great deal in Kant, Peirce nevertheless shared with Charles Renouvier the view that Kant’s (quasi-)concept of the Ding an sich can play no role whatsoever in philosophy or in science other than the role that Kant ultimately assigned to it, viz. the role of a Grenzbegriff: a boundary-concept, or, perhaps a bit more accurately, a limiting concept. A supposed “reality” that is “outside” of every logical possibility of empirical or logical interaction with “it” can play no direct role in the sciences. Science can deal only with phenomena, that is to say, only with what can “appear” somehow in experience. All scientific concepts must somehow be traceable back to phenomenological roots. Thus, even when Peirce calls himself a “realist” or is called by others a “realist,” it must be kept in mind that Peirce was always a realist of the Kantian “empirical” sort and not a Kantian “transcendental realist.” His realism is similar to what Hilary Putnam has called “internal realism.” (As was said, Peirce was also a realist in quite another sense of he word: he was a realist or an anti-nominalist in the medieval sense.)
Related On This Site: Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant…Via YouTube: “Cosmic Journeys-Is The Universe Infinite?”
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Via YouTube: “Cosmic Journeys-Is The Universe Infinite?”
Towards the end of the video, it’s suggested that the physical sciences have now separated themselves from the binds of metaphysics (or as I presume, the binds of certain kinds of metaphysics: Aristotelian, in the case of Galileo and cosmology in the 16th century and onwards).
We have perhaps returned to open questions of infinity as posed by the pre-Socratics, and freed such high-end mathematical thinking from many a metaphysician, or natural philosopher, or theologian; thus establishing natural science as a confluence and continuance of Enlightenment development. Onward we go. Of course this view, while possibly accurate, relies on its own assumptions.
As sent in by a reader: Kelly Ross makes the Kantian metaphysical argument here:
“Kant does not think we can know, or even imagine, the universe as either finite or infinite, in space or in time, because space and time are only forms of perception and cannot be imagined or visualized as absolute wholes. The universe, as the place of things in themselves, is not in space or in time and so is neither finite nor infinite in space or in time. Thus there cannot be an a priori, rational or metaphysical, cosmology.”
And while this may have freed Kant from the metaphysical disputes of his day, especially both Rationalist and Empiricist as he synthesized both, what do the current thinkers about such matters stand to gain by being tied into Kantian metaphysics (his Copernican revolution)?
Addition: As I’ve discussed with many people, I don’t have a specific answer as of now. Kant was deeply tied in to Newton’s laws, and stayed abreast of the developments of his day (Any metaphysician of similar weight would probably have to deal with Einstein, QED etc) . He wanted to put metaphysics on the same footing as the sciences, and it’s doubtful he succeeded. The rest of us are picking through what he did achieve, which has been highly influential.
Related On This Site: Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points…From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant…Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’
From Erranter: ‘Separating The Humanities And Science’
“Some people, professors, thinkers, philosophers and whatnot, like to talk about bringing the humanities and sciences together in a comfortable marriage, “just like it used to be.” I say this is a terrible idea “
Indeed. In fact, I say it’s a failure on the part of many a humanities department not to maintain a curriculum without devolving into balkanization and politicization…thus pathetically trying to copy science in search of a new curriculum. Nice try.
Also On This Site: How much of this is simply economics?: Repost-From NPR: ‘Author Louis Menand On Reforming American Universities’…Conservative Briton Roger Scruton suggests keeping political and aesthetic judgments apart in the humanities: Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment…Repost-From Scientific Blogging: The Humanities Are In Crisis-Science Is Not…
That’s what happens when you let unreasonable people steer the debate: Repost-Revisting Larry Summers: What Did He Say Again?
…Repost-Is Psychology A Science? From Richard Feynman’s ‘Cargo Cult Science’
Via The University Of British Colombia: Kant-Summary Of Essential Points
I’ve found this to be useful teaching material.
Also On This Site: From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant…Repost-From YouTube-Bryan Magee: On The Ideas Of Quine
Sunday Quotation: From Jonathan Bennett On Kant
“The problem of how a judgment can be synthetic and a priori, then, presents itself to Kant as the problem of how two concepts, neither of which includes the other, can be connected in a way which does not rest upon past experience and is not vulnerable to future experience.”
Page 23 of ‘Kant’s Analytic‘ by Jonathan Bennett
A Few Sunday Quotes From ‘Problems From Kant’ By James Van Cleve
I was asked if it would be foolish to demand of Einstein that his laws conformed directly to his experience, or to claim that his thought experiments had their roots in our theory of direct experience of objects? Or why even try to place him within the towering metaphysics of someone like Kant?
Why not just let a 20 year old student of mathematical physics rigorously learn the equations necessary to allow him a useful arrival at pondering a great problem, and to maybe crunch the numbers at CERN and work through a functioning theory, rather than routing him through either Hume, Kant, or any other profound philosophers of the natural world?
I’m not sure I know.
Here’ a question I can better answer with some quotes from James Van Cleve’s book Problems From Kant Pg 31. What led him out on his limb of synthetic a priori reasoning, and does it hold if you follow it?:
——
First a reconstruction of Hume’s argument, and how it may have looked to Kant:
1. If a proposition is a priori, its denial implies a contradiction.
2. If a proposition implies a contradiction, it is inconceivable.
3. The denial of the causal maxim is conceivable.
4. Therefore, the denial of the causal maxim does not imply a contradiction (from 2 and 3).
5. Therefore, the causal maxim is not a priori (from 1 and 4).
We may add to this that the causal maxim is not knowable empirically, either. As a universal proposition (every event has a cause), it outruns what experience could ever establish…
…So, if Hume is right, the causal maxim is not knowable at all–a result that Kant thought would be disastrous for science and knowledge. Such is the problem Hume posed for Kant…
…In Kantian terminology, the short way to say that the denial of a proposition p implies a contradiction is ‘p is analytic’. From Kant’s point of view, therefore, the argument amounts to this: the causal maxim is not a priori because it is not analytic (step 4), and only the analytic is a priori (step 1). A similar argument, Kant perceived, would show that not even mathematics is a priori-an assertion from which Hume’s “good sense would have saved him” (B20). This is why the category of synthetic a priori judgments was so important for Kant: if they are possible, the Humean argument above can be evaded.
Related On This Site: From Bloggingheads: Adam Frank And Eliezer Yudkowsky Discuss The Epistemology Of Science
Hilary Putnam On The Philosophy Of Science: Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Repost-Roger Scruton on Kant: A Response To Hume?
“It is a common empiricist assumption that I can know my experience simply by observing it. But this is not so. I do not observe my experience, but only its object. Any knowledge of experience must therefore involve knowledge of its object. But I can have knowledge of the object only if I can identify it as continous. Nothing can have temporal continuity without also having the capacity to exist when unobserved. Its existence is therefore independent of my perception.”
-Roger Scruton here.
This is part of a brief summary of Kant’s transcendental deduction, of which Scruton later says:
“It is fair to say that the transcendental deduction has never been considered to provide a satisfactory argument (boldface mine). In all its versions it involves a transition from the unity of consciousness to the identity of the subject through time. Hume pointed out that the slide from unity to identity is involved in all our claims to objective knowledge; he also thought that it could never be justified. Kant did not find the terms with which to answer Hume.”
Also On This Site: A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism…Link To An Ayn Rand Paper: The Objectivist Attack On Kant…A Few Thoughts On Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts Of Liberty”
A Few Responses To Kant’s Transcendental Idealism
There is a world out there, and your senses do give you an impression of it which yields genuine knowledge of empirical objects, according to Kant, but what empiricists fail to take into account is the apparatus that we depend upon to make sense of that world:
“Kant thought that Berkeley and Hume identified at least part of the mind’s a priori contribution to experience with the list of claims that they said were unsubstantiated on empirical grounds: “Every event must have a cause,” “There are mind-independent objects that persist over time,” and “Identical subjects persist over time.” The empiricist project must be incomplete since these claims are necessarily presupposed in our judgments, a point Berkeley and Hume failed to see. So, Kant argues that a philosophical investigation into the nature of the external world must be as much an inquiry into the features and activity of the mind that knows it”
As mentioned, The American thinker W.V.O Quine has a dispute with the way in which Kant arrives at his answer to that problem.
From a paper by Arthur Sullivan here:
“There do not exist two distinct types of reality in the world which require two distinct modes of expression. This leads Quine to conclude that the analytic-synthetic distinction is a purely logical convention that is ontologically unnecessary and empirically superfluous. In this respect, Quine agrees with the radical empiricism of Mill, with its claim that there is no a priori knowledge. The fact that something is the case, or even the fact that something seems to be necessarily the case, does not imply the reality of a priori truths. Quine goes so far a to refer to the notion of a priori knowledge as a “metaphysical article of faith.”
Of course, so also did Schopenhauer have a problem with Kant (wikipedia summary here).
This quote was found here:
“Empirical concepts are ultimately based on empirical perceptions. Kant, however, tried to claim that, analogously, pure concepts (Categories) also have a basis. This pure basis is supposed to be a kind of pure perception, which he called a schema. But such an empiricist analogy contradicts his previous rationalist assertion that pure concepts (Categories) simply exist in the human mind without having been derived from perceptions. Therefore they are not based on pure, schematic perceptions.”
Just some thoughts on a Sunday, as it was requested by a friend. If you can refer me to a more comprehensive critique, I’d appreciate it.
From Bloggingheads: Tamar Szabo Gendler On Philosophy and Cognitive Science
Szabo-Gendler aims to bring a deeper philosophical understanding to the cognitive sciences and neuroscience (popular neuroscience especially) by bringing up an important argument that philosophers from Aristotle to Hume have consistently made:
“life goes very well when one’s reasoned commitments and one’s habits are in line with one another”
In other words, one’s relationship between the reason and the passions can potentially get you out of whack (addiction would be a good example). Also, the depths of moral philosophy can help to deepen cognitive science.
Perhaps it can even guard against excessive idealism (we’re seeking the holy grail of human knowledge kind of thinking) that could be best avoided when thinking about the limits of neuroscience. Perhaps, as one commenter points out, such idealism is an inevitable product of popularization (and writing) as found in the works of Jonah Lehrer and Jonathan Haidt. They’re not the first to write books about the pursuit of happiness:
“It’s really irritating to read, for example, Haidt’s book on happiness or Jonah Lehrer’s introduction to _How We Decide_ where Plato and Aristotle (because they regarded man as “rational” in some sense) are presented as having held the ridiculous belief that all or most of our actions must be the direct result of conscious, plodding deliberation.”
I’d also offer that some people who are attracted to and develop skills in music, poetry, literature often find some of their skills transferable in psychology and the social sciences (mutual fear of mathematics? a specific kind of habitual development of the passions? would Nietzsche be an extreme example?).
Something to think about.
Also On This Site: Jesse Prinz argues that neuroscience and the cognitive sciences should move back toward British empiricism and David Hume…yet…with a defense of multiculturalism and Nietzsche thrown in: Another Note On Jesse Prinz’s “Constructive Sentimentalism”
Was Nietzsche really a philosopher?: A Few Thoughts On The Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy Entry: Nietzsche’s Moral And Political Philosophy…A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection
Bryan Magee On YouTube: Michael Ayers On Locke And Berkeley
Have a good weekend.
Some Differences Between Newton And Goethe: Theories Of Light
“My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments…”
Here’s a brief visual (scroll to the bottom of the page) of 2 of his experiments.
From A Wolfram biography of Newton:
“Newton invented a scientific method which was truly universal in its scope. Newton presented his methodology as a set of four rules for scientific reasoning. These rules were stated in the Principia and proposed that (1) we are to admit no more causes of natural things such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances, (2) the same natural effects must be assigned to the same causes, (3) qualities of bodies are to be esteemed as universal, and (4) propositions deduced from observation of phenomena should be viewed as accurate until other phenomena contradict them.”
An artist can transport you to a vast imaginative world of profound insight and profound truth. Anyone who’s experienced great art can attest to that. Yet, part of the rigor of science is in its painstaking correspondence to observable phenomenae, to measurement (and a capacity for nimble and accurate estimation), and to a set of laws often derived from mathematics which as far as we know, have not yet been proven wrong when applied to nature.
Many artists seem to take much freer license with their imaginations, and despite their own rigors which are rarely appreciated by the audience, seem to differ in many important ways from such a standard.
——————–Here’s a repost I put up about Goethe:
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe is perhaps Germany’s greatest poet and writer, best known for Faust. Not so well known is Goethe’s theory of color (which claimed insights that could refute Newton). Like many artists, Goethe isolated the effect color has in terms of experience, making profound observations on refraction…for example…but for which he didn’t have a workable theoretical framework. To this, a certain type of philosopher might say: he ignored the fact that his thoughts and his senses combine to form experience.
Goethe from Steiner, from wikipedia:
“The colours therefore, to begin with, make their appearance purely and simply as phenomena at the border between light and dark…”
Colours arise at the borders, where light and dark flow together.“
Click here for a visual representation.
Goethe seems to have thought of light and dark in terms of a metaphysical dualism, from whose interaction color is born.
Newton held that white light passing through a prism is diffused into its various wavelengths. He also may have steered the discussion into wave-particle duality.
See Also: Wikipedia’s article, Physics Today article on his experiments, Goethe’s color triangle.
It seems like this debate (art/science) is a product of the times. I don’t think I’ve offered too much in the way of real insight.
See Also: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
From Scientific American: Was Einstein Wrong?
Can philosophy/metaphysics effectively help to deepen physics…or will it always be a way of attaching particulary deep thought (if done well) to even deeper thought?
———————————————————————————————
The authors, philosopher trained in physics David Albert and writer Rivka Galchen point out a problem they think ought to be focused on:
“-In the universe as we experience it, we can directly affect only objects we can touch; thus, the world seems local.
-Quantum mechanics, however, embraces action at a distance with a property called entanglement, in which two particles behave synchronously with no intermediary; it is nonlocal.
-This nonlocal effect is not merely counterintuitive: it presents a serious problem to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, thus shaking the foundations of physics.”
I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to answer…
———————————————————————————————
See Also: David Albert’s turn on bloggingheads with Sean Carroll.
Also, maybe it’s a trend (writers moving directly to science)? Writer Louisa Gilder has a book out called “The Age Of Entanglement” on much the same subject, which she discusses here too on bloggingheads.
———————————————————————————————
Further: The enlightenment happened, so if you’re going to make a successful metaphysical theory, it’s good to try and understand the mathematical sciences of the day and go from there (Newtonian mechanics for Kant), like Kant did:
Michael Friedman’s Kant And The Exact Sciences tackles the subject ( I know him not and of course this too is more metaphysics and certainly not the mathematics of today…but if you’re going to be carrying Kant around …it’s good too understand how deep he went, what he seemed to understand and what he may have not understood at all about the Enlightenment explosion around him).
A Few More Thoughts On Denis Dutton’s New Book: ‘The Art Instinct’
I used the analogy of Noam Chomsky and his theory of language to describe Denis Dutton’s aims in his new book, The Art Instinct. As much as I disagree with Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalist politics, I think his achievement lies quite far apart from his politics (though even this could be argued).
Dutton’s book may be more of an attempt to use libertarian principles, Darwin’s Origin Of Species, and perhaps ultimately the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant to try and direct the arts in our country in a new direction (hopefully away from the toxic mix of politics and moral sentiment active in many of our universities and major publications, often on the left…which can divide us politically).
This could be a useful goal.
However, it doesn’t seem quite like philosophy, and seems much more like aesthetics (deep theories about art and the pursuit of beauty and truth within it).
Perhaps it’s not radical enough to be ignored and reviled as much as it could be?
Dutton’s bloggingheads appearance here.
Dutton On The Colbert Report here.
Again, I’m saying a lot on very little, as I haven’t read the book. Your thoughts and comments are welcome.
Addition: I have read the book and offered some commentary (not a formal book review): Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’
Related On This Site: From Bloggingheads: Denis Dutton On His New Book: ‘The Art Instinct’…A Sympathetic View Of Noam Chomsky?
 |
|
by wnyc
Dutton also runs the Arts & Letters Daily, which can be found on the blogroll at right.
Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise
From Christopher Want’s Introducing Kant:
“In the case of the pyramids:
‘the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension from the base to the peak, but during that time some of the earlier parts are invariably extinguished in the Imagination before it has apprehended the later ones, and hence the comprehension is never complete..’ “
What about this video of a surfer on Maui’s north shore?
Perhaps you get a sense of awe and wonder at observing this wave, but this may have more to do with your imagination and your onboard apparatus for observing the wave than perhaps any necessary characteristic of the wave itself (for Kant, the imagination is a very specific category of perception, which can ((amended)) function without the rules of the understanding, especially in aesthetic representation but which ultimately is applied to the rules of the understanding to give us the best knowledge we have, which are in turn guided by the Ideas Of Reason…).
Here’s another quote:
“…a light broke upon all natural philosophers. They learned that reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design; that it must not be content to follow, as it were, in the leading-strings of nature, but must proceed in advance with principles of judgement according to unvarying laws, and compel nature to reply its questions.”
Immanuel Kant–Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason.
Newton’s 3rd Law might be a good example of those ‘unvarying’ laws.
Related On This Site: When aesthetics goes too far?: Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…some problems with Kant and potential idealism when applied to American politics: From The Internet Encyclopedia Of Knowledge: Immanuel Kant And Utilitarianism
From Bloggingheads: Aubrey De Grey On Aging
De Grey thinks about, and perhaps would like you to think about aging as a disease to be treated, not a problem so large as to be insoluble.
In the clip above he lists his 7 major reasons why we die, suggesting there is enough biological evidence that pursuing solutions to them might be fruitful.
He rather offhandedly discusses some pretty grim facts we put out of our minds…
From Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On Youtube: Geoffrey Warnock On Kant
Did Kant really address why his own metaphysical system is necessary as charting a course for possible human knowledge? Warnock states that Kant thought:
“All we can establish foundations for is the notion of possible experience and what can be an object of possible experience…”
In other words, physics can tell you all kinds of things about energy, but it can’t tell you what energy is. And this is the best of our knowledge (which philosophers like Kant try to explain). Kant’s metaphysics (and religion too) can’t even do that, and are doomed to failure.
In a way, metaphysics may be just where Aristotle left it, or where someone like Roger Penrose leaves it (after a lifetime of applying deep mathematical thinking to physical theory in his work on black holes): An exercise in trying to develop firm footing for our knowledge after the fact…trying to provide some context for our knowledge and not being able to do so…yet…
Addition: Of course, this doesn’t nullify the depth of Kant’s contributions, nor the depth of his moral theory. It just may not make it a moral law in the same sense as Newton’s laws (deeper laws have already come along) . I dug up one side of this exchange from the Bloggingheads Sentimental Mood Jesse Prinz Edition. So just because Kant didn’t perhaps validate his project as he’d have hoped, it doesn’t follow that you need to embrace some moral relativism as does Prinz:
—————-
1. If there are facts of a certain sort (chemical, biological, psychological, moral, whatever) which may be true true, even though everyone thinks they are false, then facts of this sort (chemical, biological, etc.) must never change.
The trouble is that you yourself don’t actually believe this principle. For example, geographical facts are clearly objectively true — even if everyone believes in El Dorado, El Dorado doesn’t exist; and even if no one believed in Everest, Everest still would exist. But it’s obvious that it doesn’t follow that geographical facts don’t change over time. Mountains and polar ice caps and rivers come and go. Geographical facts change all the time — it’s just that our beliefs don’t change them.
Perhaps your point is, not that the geographical facts don’t change, but rather that the geological laws don’t change. But at a certain level even this isn’t true: Plate Tectonics fits the earth over most of its history, but it doesn’t exactly fit the earth when it was molten or when it eventually cools down completely in the distant future. It doesn’t fit the moon or Jupiter. Perhaps at a high level of abstraction, we can imagine a final theory of planetary geography that fits ALL types of planets anywhere in the universe. Perhaps these very abstract laws don’t themselves vary (once there are any planets to talk about).
But if you make the moral law sufficiently abstract, it can be as unvarying as any laws of universal planetology. Utilitarianism is the theory that there is a rather abstract law of morality, which, though it does not vary, accounts for why seemingly quite different things can be right or wrong in different circumstances (e.g., why leaving your elderly to die may have been OK for the Eskimos in conditions of scarcity while it would be very wrong for us).
A Few Philosophical Works On Space-Time Reviewed At Notre-Dame
Carl Hoefer reviews Robert DiSalle’s Understanding Space-Time: The Philosophical Development of Physics from Newton to Einstein here, and Bradford Skow reviews Harvey Brown’s Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective here.
DiSalle’s goals are very ambitious, and in broad terms they are threefold. He wants to (1) direct philosophers away from the canonical absolute/relational disputes, (2) reshape our understanding of the motivations, arguments, and achievements of the two giants of space-time physics (Newton and Einstein), and (3) refute, in passing, the Kuhnian view that the main paradigm changes in space-time physics are essentially arational and impossible to justify via non-circular arguments.
Newton’s and Einstein’s theories are:
“…frameworks established ‘for the interpretation of phenomena, not a kind of mechanism or hypothesis to explain them’”
The framework of a framework?
From Bloggingheads: Metaphysics Of The Hangman
At UNC, both Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz are making deep arguments for morality having its origin in the emotions. Knobe brings up Nietzschean metaphysics of the hangman.
I have some doubts about the aims of experimental philosophy, though it’s interesting.
It seems philosophy is at its best in the pursuit of metaphysics (going deeper than physics), not necessarily in the pursuit of emulating physics through empiricism, or scientific method, or experimentation. Metaphysics has deeper legitimacy problems enough as it is…and I’m wondering if this type of thing will advance the field (if there is a field).
It may, however, likely provide some philosophical depth for evo-biologists and cognitive scientists across the land. The pursuit of a secular morality?
Addition: My ignorance shows: I should say, through deep, often rationalist metaphysics pursing “empirical research.” As for Prinz, he has made a case for directing cognitive sciences back toward emipricism.
Bryan Magee’s Talking Philosophy On YouTube
Some of Bryan Magee’s series has been made available on youtube. Recommended.
This is Hilary Putnam on the Philosophy of Science.
Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe is perhaps Germany’s greatest poet and writer, best known for Faust. Not so well known is Goethe’s theory of color (which claimed insights that could refute Newton). Like many artists, Goethe isolated the effect color has in terms of experience, making profound observations on refraction…for example…but for which he didn’t have a workable theoretical framework. To this, a certain type of philosopher might say: he ignored the fact that his thoughts and his senses combine to form experience.
Goethe from Steiner, from wikipedia:
“The colours therefore, to begin with, make their appearance purely and simply as phenomena at the border between light and dark…”
Colours arise at the borders, where light and dark flow together.”
Click here for a visual representation.
Goethe seems to have thought of light and dark in terms of a metaphysical dualism, from whose interaction color is born.
Newton held that white light passing through a prism is diffused into its various wavelengths. He also may have steered the discussion into wave-particle duality.
See Also: Wikipedia’s article, Physics Today article on his experiments, Goethe’s color triangle.
Some Differences Between Newton And Goethe: Theories Of Light
Mike Oldfield’s To France: By A Spanish Pianist…and Plato?
Mike Oldfield wrote tubular bells, the eerie background music for the Exorcist. He also wrote To France, a tribute to Mary Queen of Scots escape from England which is covered in the video above. The song catches some of the spirit of English ballad and traditional folk while dealing with Protestant/Catholic subject matter.
Spaniards have a real interest in Oldfield, and I can’t help but wonder if there aren’t some shared Catholic traditions that spark the Spanish interest in Oldfield’s music (besides all the shared history).
……….
On a related note, an emailer wrote me wondering why I had posts about music, when many other posts contain arguments which are contradicted by an indulgence in music. I’d say there certainly is a lot of naivete and danger in seeking transcendance through music, which is so easily used by politicans, armies on the march, churches, dictators, …even witch doctors… to soften the mind rather than sharpen it, to incite the passions, and even perhaps to corrupt the spirit.
It’s not anything you won’t find in Plato, or in this essay on Plato, frankly:
This also meant that the artist is two steps removed from knowledge, and, indeed, Plato’s frequent criticism of the artists is that they lack genuine knowledge of what they are doing. Artistic creation, Plato observed, seems to be rooted in a kind of inspired madness.
So, good point, dear emailer.
Ron Csillag In The Toronto Star: Math + Religion=Trouble
Csillag has an interesting article on the combination of mathematics and mysticism, in which he seems motivated by a fear that deep impulses and beliefs channeled into the metaphysical doctrines and practices of religion, or at least left unexamined by the believer…are dangerous, especially if the believer happens to be a great mathematician.
Betrand Russell also accused the Pythagorean cult of combining the two, perhaps in an unnecessary way. Would Csillag agree with with Russell’s atheism and empiricism?
Here’s the final line of the piece:
“Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings”
But some mathematicians have discovered equations that were eventually applied to the creation of the atomic bomb. Is mathematics a set of pure ideas unrelated to the moral consequences that flow from them?
I’m not convinced Csillag’s argument has to do particularly with religion, nor Islam, rather than (as a piece of journalism) with the construction of an edifice of atheism, or maybe an attack on that edifice.
Does it all lead back free will?
See also: Law At The End Of The Day: From Kant to Fichte to…Right Now, More On The Kant-Fichte Argument: What Was Hume Doing?
Simultaneity: Depends On How You Think?
In the previous post, the sonic boom video (from sec 00:13 on) mentions that thunder and lightning occur at the same time, however we experience lightning first because the speed of light is so much greater.
This idea assumes a concept of simultaneity, which also has a spatial component (two events occur at the same time in the same place, say, a mile away). However, one problem you may find is that the more you think about time, the more you realize that it is a deeper phenomenon that such simple explanations support.
For example, the vector calculus used to determine the electric field lines and voltage of the lightning bolt relies upon a complex and deeper set of ideas about space and time.
In fact, the video (and it is a simple explanatory video) relies upon the radical re-workings of time and space for its explanations…
Here’s a video illustrating the relativity of simultaneity and time dilation.
Addition: Here’s the bigview.com on the subject, including Kantian space-time.
More On The Kant-Fichte Argument…What Was Hume Doing?
I brought up Bertrand Russell’s criticism of Kant in his History of Western Philosophy, and here’s a brief defense of what Kant was likely trying to do:
David Hume’s metaphysics were penetrating enough, and as Wikipedia (the absolute authority) has it:
“Hume thus concludes that our inductive practices have no rational foundation, for no form of Reason will certify them.”
We come to know the world very well through inductive reasoning, but this is not connected to our reason according to Hume, it is merely an intuitive and experiential means by which we understand the world, which is in turn enfolded by Nature.
Kant speculated that this argument can lead, if one follows it, to a denial of reason itself, and more importantly, a world we are actually coming to know outside of ourselves. Kant did more than any philosopher to categorize our own intuitive processes to show the limits of our reason, but he also believed we could come to real knowledge of things (the problem is his arguments for empirically real things aren’t so good) through our reason. His critique is merely a survey of what he thought those limits of reason were.
As Russell has Kant, he’s merely yet another philosopher floating somewhere between science and religion, doing a lot to update traditional metaphysics, theology, thinking about science…and other fields…but errantly placing reason upon a pedestal of transcendence as have so many before him (not least of all because of the Germany he was a part of).
Kant probably thought he was saving science from the errors he saw in both Hume and Leibnizian rationalism.
Here’s a Rationalism/Empiricism page at Stanford which says much of what I’ve tried to say here…probably better.
Roger Scruton on Kant: A Response To Hume?
“It is a common empiricist assumption that I can know my experience simply by observing it. But this is not so. I do not observe my experience, but only its object. Any knowledge of experience must therefore involve knowledge of its object. But I can have knowledge of the object only if I can identify it as continous. Nothing can have temporal continuity without also having the capacity to exist when unobserved. Its existence is therefore independent of my perception.”
-Roger Scruton here.
This is part of a brief summary of Kant’s transcendental deduction, of which Scruton later says:
“It is fair to say that the transcendental deduction has never been considered to provide a satisfactory argument (boldface mine). In all its versions it involves a transition from the unity of consciousness to the identity of the subject through time. Hume pointed out that the slide from unity to identity is involved in all our claims to objective knowledge; he also thought that it could never be justified. Kant did not find the terms with which to answer Hume.”
An Awesome Visual Exercise: Maybe Sublime?
From Christopher Want’s Introducing Kant:
“In the case of the pyramids:
‘the eye needs some time to complete the apprehension from the base to the peak, but during that time some of the earlier parts are invariably extinguished in the Imagination before it has apprehended the later ones, and hence the comprehension is never complete..’ ”
Here’s a video of a surfer on Maui’s north shore:
A Trip Through The Universe
Here is a neat video (with some incorrect English). If we travelled at the speed of light (so far theoretically impossible) what could we find, and how far could we go?
Some thoughts on Immanuel Kant’s thoughts, as the video gets a little mystic at the end:
1. There may be a God, there may not be. The arguments for God, however, are no longer valid. God falls into the category of a transcendant object (that which transcends the senses and all known experience). Kant offered good arguments for why these arguments for the existence of God are not good, nor deep, enough.
2. As scientists know, they can tell you precise things about how energy behaves, how it can be measured, what will happen according to known laws, but they can’t tell you what energy is. That is a different question.
3. Science itself (while yielding genuine knowledge) also makes errors that he attempted to clarify with his antinomies. Kant sincerely wished to encompass all knowledge. While he may not have achieved that lofty goal, he did think some of the deepest thoughts there have been, and may still be pointing us in the right direction.
Addition: Kant sincerely wished to ecompass the limits of reason, and while there are obvious problems with the antinomies, his concept of freedom, and the ethics derived from such ideas, he is one of the most important philosophers…..likely ever.
I’m not sure anyone has drawn new limits yet, at least not of this kind.
Addition: According to friesian.com, “Kant’s antinomies are intended to show that contradictory metaphysical absolutes can be argued and justified with equal force, meaning that neither can actually be proven. It can be argued however, that Einstein answered Kant by proposing a non-Euclidean (Riemannian) universe that is finite but unbounded (i.e. without an edge).”