Philosophers’ Corner

I gather, from our research team’s pre-interview with Walter, that he is a die-hard atheist. He thinks that there is ample reason to doubt God’s existence and no good reason to affirm god’s existence — at least if one means the all powerful, all loving, all knowing god, existing outside of space and time. Since it’s a season of religious, and quasi-religious holidays, we thought it might be fun to actually reflect on the rationality, or lack thereof, of the religious beliefs that lie behind the celebration of such holidays.

On our now not so recent episode about Berkeley, with David Hilbert, I said in passing that idealism, in some form or other, is permanently tempting. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe in idealism. I consider myself a realist and a physicalist. Not only do I think that the world is (largely) independent of mind. I also think that the mind is ultimately just a part of that mind-independent world. That is, the mind is ultimately built out of and reducible to stuff that is not yet mind. Or so I would argue. So I don’t come here to defend idealism.

Why did human beings develop traditions of storytelling? Of course, any answer to this question is going to be speculative. But it might be reasonable to assume that the capacity for imagination is adaptive (I need to be able to predict what is going to happen as a result of different courses of action), and that engagement with fictions helps to hone the relevant skills.

The journal Topoi has asked a number of philosophers to write essays on the current…

The Philosophy Talk team just finished a brief stint “on the road.” On October 27th, we taped a show in front of about 200 Stanford Alums up in Sacramento on behalf of the Stanford Alumni Club of Sacramento. The topic was “Progress and the Environment.” Our guest was Terry Tamminen, formerly head of California’s Environmental Protection Agency and currently Cabinet Secretary (Chief of Staff, roughly) to our beloved Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I recall saying during our on-air conversation that we are inclined to go along and imagine whatever the author of a well-constructed fiction invites us to imagine. Without the slightest resistance, we accept invitations to imagine scenarios that contradict the known laws of nature or that rewrite some large or small fragment of the history of the world. We have no resistance to imagining scenarios that, on one way of measuring, might be seen as altogether metaphysically impossible.

Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles in a language you don’t speak ? You probably didn’t watch the whole thing, because—no matter how worked up the actors got—you didn’t follow it and they’re just actors anyway. Contrast that feeling of lack of interest with the intense feeling of engagement you get watching your favorite film. For me that would be American Beauty or The Godfather, Part I. Let’s call the first kind of feeling the this-is-lame feeling and the second the this-is-awesome feeling.

I read somewhere that when the boat with the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop arrived in New York, there was a crowd a block deep waiting to find out what happened to Little Nell. Those closest to the boat found out that she had died, and as the message filtered back through the crowd a visible wave of horror and despair followed, with people breaking down in tears.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York Times did its best to run an informative obituary of each of the victims, those at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the airplanes that were hijacked. So there were in the neighborhood of 2000 of these obituaries. Reading them, day after day, made a very deep impression.

George Lakoff has recently been arguing that the main reason that Democrats lose elections is that Republicans have been masters at framing the issues, while Democrats have not been. We didn’t get very deeply into this idea on the air. Too bad, because Nunberg has some pretty interesting things to say both about Lakoff’s claims about framing in general and about Lakoff’s particular suggestions about how certain issues might best be framed by the democrats.

There is more to living well than slavishly and single-mindedly devoting oneself to moral perfection — either of oneself or of the world. I want a life filled with goods of all sorts — many of them non-moral. I want moments in which I contemplate beauty, even if by such contemplation I achieve nothing for the world at large and merely elevate myself above the mundane demands of the everyday.

I’ve gotten some nice responses on my previous blog on Self-Deception and Moral Dilemmas. I argued…

By the Cartesian moment, I mean that moment in Western philosophy when the individual knowing subject and the contents of the subject’s own mind were elevated into the first and most secure objects of knowledge. At that moment, knowledge of everything outside of the thinking subject — god, other minds, the physical world — came to be problematic.

For almost forty years I have taught Descartes’ Meditations in my Introduction to Philosophy Class. The skeptical problem which he poses bring up a host of interesting problems which occupy us for the rest of the course: the external world, the self, God, and the relation between mind and body.

I agree with Nussbaum that how we think of future possibilities has a lot to do with our emotions. If I think that X is going to have a root canal, I am filled with sympathy. Well, not filled, but I have some sympathy for X. If I realize that X is me, a whole different set of emotions rise in my breast, or brain, or heart, or wherever emotions are taken to arise these days.