Philosophy Talk

We're gearing up to record our third annual Dionysus Awards Show.  This will be the third year in a row that we have given out Dionysus Awards for the most philosophically interesting movies of the year.   We're seeking nominations from you, our listeners.  Submit a nomination to comments@philosophytalk.org, along with information on how to reach you, in case we want to include you and your nomination on our final broadcast.  Please submit your nomination by January 9th, so that we have ample time to sort through them all and decides which ones we want to include in our awards show. 

This year,  the Dionysus Awards show work a little differently than in the past.  Instead of a live broadcast from the studios of KALW, we will "pre-produce" the show.  That will give us far more freedom to pick and choose movies and to include clips and other sound elements in the episode.  We plan, by the way, to market the show to the entire public radio system as a stand-alone, pre-Oscar special.   it's going to be great fun and a great episode.  And we'd love to have you be part of the action.  So step up to the microphone, and nominate the movies that you found most philosophically interesting for 2010.   You can also include philosophically interesting blasts from the past if nothing from the current crop strikes your fancy -- but we're  more likely to include movies from the past year than older movies. 

Don't just tell us what movies you liked, though, be sure to tell us why you liked it and why, in particular,  you found it philosophically compelling.

Let me make it clear that a movie can  doesn't have to be explicitly philosophical  in the way that, say, Inception is in order to count as philosophically compelling.  Indeed, some movies that try too hard and too laboriously to be philosophically interesting sometimes just don't work as movies at all.  As long as the movie is both good as a movie and  fruitfully looked at through the lens of philosophy, it's a plausible candidate for a Dionysus Award.  

So join the fun and submit a nomination!  You can do so by sending an e-mail to comments@philosophytalk.org.  You can also leave a comment here on our blog or over on our Facebook page  -- though those are by nature more public, of course.   No matter where you submit your nomination, make sure that we can get in touch with about it if you think you might like to talk about it on the air with us.

We'll be recording and editing the program during the last couple of weeks of January, for broadcast sometime early mid February  -- beginning February 13th on KALW and our other regular affiliates and hopefully right up until the time of the Oscars on other stations around the country. 

posted by KT

Our topic his week is the power of thought.  Human thought is an amazing thing.  It has given us science, literature, morality, and last --  but certainly not least -- philosophy.   Thought even has the power to create new realities.   And I’m not primarily thinking of literature and the arts or even of technology.   I’m thinking  of the entire social world.  Every size  social reality from clubs to nations and every thing in  between is a creation of the human mind, of human thought in particular.  They all exist because we simply think them into existence.  

Of course, the mind is not all sweetness and light.  Besides all the things I just mentioned, it has also given us superstition, slavery, and war.    But that just makes the nature and power of human thought all the more puzzling.  The mind that spent millennium after millennium, mired in archaic social formations, in the grips of irrational superstitions is the very same mind, with the very same powers of thought, as the mind that produced science, philosophy, and art.   Our goal is to understand just what human thought is such that it produces both the science and superstition, both democracy and slavery.

So let’s start at the beginning and ask just what thoughts are in the first place.   When you ask the person in the street, like our roving philosophical reporter did, she or he is liable tell you that thoughts are that little voice inside your head -- where that means inside the brain, if the person is a materialist and inside the mind, if person is a dualist.   But we’re trying to figure out  what thoughts are, not where they are.  If we’re going to understand the power of thought, we need to first understand the different kinds of thoughts and how each different kind works.

Take a simple thing like the belief that there is beer in the fridge. That’s a thought. But it’s only one kind of thought.  And suppose that you want a beer.  That’s a thought too.  But a different kind of  thought – a desire.  Beliefs represent, or misrepresent, how things are in the world.  They are the kinds of things that can be true or false.  Hopefully our beliefs are more true than false.  If our beliefs are false,  the rational thing to do is change our beliefs to match the world. Desires, on the other hand, don’t represent how the world is.  We don’t say that my desire to have a beer is false just because I don’t have one.  But we do say that my desire is unsatisfied, when you want a beer, but don’t have one.   The way to satisfy a desire is not to change it, but to change the world.   That’s  where a third kind of thought comes in – intentions.  If you believe there’s a beer in the fridge and you really want a beer, then maybe you will form a new kind of thought –  an intention.  An intention is the kind of thing that can make you get off your duff and walk over to the refrigerator and get a beer.    Or not --  if you’re a weak willed, lazy sort.

Now we really want to understand the power of thought  and what it actually does in the world we have to to understand  how beliefs manage to represent, or misrepresent,  the way the world is; how desires manage to set forth ways the world might become; and how intentions move us to act to actually change the world.      That may seem like a very tall order, but it’s a little more simple than it might at first seem,  because beliefs, desires, and intentions are built out the same basic building blocks -- just put together in different ways.  In particular,  they are all built out of concepts or ideas.  My belief that there is beer in the fridge, my desire to drink a beer, and my intention to go and get a beer all involve the concept or idea of beer, for example.  So  we can make a start on understanding the power of thought by thinking about the nature of concept or ideas, where they come from, and the different ways they can be put together to create such a wide-variety of thoughts.  And once we’ve got a handle on that, we can think more about the different things that different kinds of thoughts do. 

Unfortunately, that’s probably more than John and I can handle on our own – especially in a one hour radio show.   But luckily for us, we’ll have help in the form of Steven Pinker, the world-renown author of an amazing series of books about the human mind – including his most recent, The Stuff of  Thought:  Language as a Window on Human Nature.  Should be a fun hour. 

 posted by KT

This week’s topic  is Reading, Narrative, and the Self.   I suppose everybody has a pretty good idea of what each of those things, taken individually, means.   Reading is something that most people do.  A good narrative  -- or story, to use a less fancy term -- is something most people enjoy.  And a self is something everybody has.   But I think I need to explain what reading, narrative, and the self have to do with each other.  I’ll take them in reverse order, starting with the self.

 Everybody has a self.  Or maybe it would be better to say that everybody is a self.  But what exactly is a self, anyway?  The answer to that question depends on who you talk to.  Psychologists, for example, tend to  think of the self in terms of the particular set of attributes a person most strongly identifies with – those attributes that define who and what he or she is in the world.   But we philosophers tend to think of the self less in terms of particular attributes, and more as the underlying agent or thinker who possesses the kinds of attributes that define the self in the psychologist’s sense. 

 We’re going to be concerned with both senses of the self at various stages of this week’s episode.  Let’s start with the self in the psychologist’s sense.  The self in that  sense is not just given to us in advance as something fixed and determinate.   The self in that sense has somehow to be “constructed” out of materials that our society and culture make available.

 It may sound absurd  -- or at the very least so very post modern -- to call the self a social construct.  The self, it would seem, could exist even without society and culture.   But whether that’s absurd or not really depends on what notion of self you are talking about.   When I say that the self is a social construct, I really have in mind only the psychologist’s notion of self.  But the self in the philosopher’s sense – the thing that underlies the psychologist's self – that definitely isn’t a social construction.   In fact, I think the self in the philosopher’s sense is the thing that does the constructing, not the thing that gets constructed.

Now here’s where narrative begins to come in. Narrative helps us to make sense of our selves.  One way we understand ourselves is by narrating ourselves, telling ourselves stories in which we figure as prominent characters.  Think of a son who inherits the family business.  In trying to make sense of his life, his choices, his situation, he narrates his life as an episode in a great drama, stretching backwards in time over multiple generations.    But the stories that we tell ourselves aren’t just about relating the present to the past.  They also look to the future. They help shape our choices and decisions.  We try to make our narratives true, by trying to become what we've told ourselves we are.

I don’t mean to make it sound like we're prisoners of the stories we tell ourselves, or the ones we inherit from our family, or our culture.  We have the freedom to reject the narratives that our society or culture or family offer up.  But we can’t make sense of ourselves or even plan for the future without some background narrative in place.   We don’t really have a choice about that.  It’s part of the human predicament.

And now it should be easier to appreciate what the third topic on our list of three – namely, reading -- has to do with the other two.  Great works of literature are rich storehouses of narrative possibilities.  In real life, we only get one time through.  We get one chance to narratively construct a self.  But the great works of literature can expose us to thousands of experiments in narrative self-construction.    So who better to help us with this trio of topics – reading, narrative, and the self -- than someone steeped in the theory of literary narratives.  That's Josh Landy from Stanford University, where he co-directs the Literature and Philosophy Initiative.  

 Posted by John Perry

Civil disobedience is a great tradition.  Particularly in America, where we have Thoreau, who refused to pay a poll tax, because the money supported the Mexican War and the Fugitive Slave Law.  Then, there’s Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.  And the Viet-Nam War protester.  But then, as philosophers, we must ask, what exactly is civil disobedience?   Suppose Henry Thoreau and Henry Schmo both refuse to pay their poll tax.  Thoreau does it for the noble reasons you mentioned, but Henry Schmo does it because he’d rather spend the money at the pub.  They're both disobeying a civil law; they're both, in a literal sense, civilly disobedient.  What’s the difference?  Just that Henry has good intentions? 

Thoreau was trying to influence policy; his non-payment a speech act.  Is that the important difference? What if Thoreau’s grouchy uncommunicative cousin Larry Thoreau didn’t pay his poll tax, either.  He also didn’t want to support the fugitive slave law and the Mexican war, but he didn’t tell anyone why. So it wasn’t really a speech act, no attempt at communication.  The war and the slave act made him sick; he couldn’t bear to pay his taxes, so he didn’t.  Still seems kind of admirable.  But no speech was involved. Is that Civil Disobedience?

Well, Civil disobedience clearly isn't a scientifically precise concept.  I can’t give you a definition.  But I bet we can list some traits that a paradigm case of civil disobedience will have.  For one thing, it will be a refusal to obey or follow a law that is itself unjust, like the law against making salt that Gandhi broke, or a law that supports unjust policies, like the poll tax.  That’s a start, but it doesn’t tell us the difference between famous Henry and grouchy Larry.

Gandhi and Thoreau weren’t just disobeying the law, but protesting law and policy by doing so publicly.  Their acts were of speech as well as disobedience.  They were done openly, and they didn’t attempt to escape punishment.  The same for draft-card burners, and those who sat in at shops that refused to serve blacks.  So grouchy Larry Thoreau gets eliminated, at least as a paradigm civil disobeyer.  That doesn’t mean we can’t admire him.

To continue with our paradigm, usually we have in mind non-violent activities, like sit-ins and marches.  And of course there is the intent is to change things; to get the law repealed, or the policy changed.

Putting it all together, a paradigm act of civil disobedience includes:  Disobeying or refusing to follow a law or policy believed to be unjust, or supportive of injustice, publicly and non-violently, with the intent of drawing attention to the law and policy, and getting it changed.

That leads to the next question.  We admire all those people we mentioned --- Thoreau, Gandhi, King, the student boycotters in the Civil rights movement, and so on.  Does that mean that they were right to break the law?  How can it be right to break the law?

We, the admirers, think the laws or policies were unjust.  How about a crowd non-violently blocking the entrance to an abortion clinic?  I don’t happen to think the laws allowing abortion are unjust.  But these people do.  Does that make them morally right?

We admire those who protest the laws we think are unjust.  But we're all part of a democracy full of people with very different values.  We're supposed to settle things by voting, or having our representatives in legislatures and congress vote.  But any law or policy on a controversial issue is going to go against someone’s deeply held beliefs.  Does that give them the moral right to disobey it?  That would create chaos.

Other things being equal, it seems in a society like ours, where there are other remedies, like voting and taking things to the courts, those methods should be tried first.  But other things aren’t always equal.  Time may be of the essence in setting the injustice right, but courts take time --- and money.  Sometimes it seems civil disobedience has to be a first resort, not a last resort, because it's the only way to make anyone care about an unjust policy in time to do anything about it.

That doesn’t exactly solve all the issue or answer all the questions.  Luckily, Ken and I will be joined by Kimberley Brownlee, Professor of  Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester, to help think things through.  I hope you join us!