Monthly Archives: June 2008

Tyler Cowen

[A]n informed cosmopolitanism must be of the cautious variety, rather than based on superficial pro-globalization slogans or cheerleading about the brotherhood of mankind. […] [I]ndividuals are often more creative when they do not hold consistently cosmopolitan attitudes. A certain amount of cultural particularism and indeed provincialism, among both producers and consumers, can be good for the arts. The meliorative powers of globalization rely on underlying particularist and anti-liberal attitudes to some extent. Theoretically “correct” attitudes do not necessarily maximize creativity, suggesting that a cosmopolitan culture does best when cosmopolitanism itself is not fully believed or enshrined in social consciousness.

Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World’s Cultures, Princeton, 2002, p. 18

Tyler Cowen

Most individuals hold worldviews that exaggerate their relative importance. Real estate agents feel that most people should own homes, bankers see the relative merits of finance, and academics believe in the vital importance of scholarly writing. Cultural creators are no exception to this rule. They believe not only in the importance of art in general, but in the special importance of their era and genre. Competitors, and cultural change, threaten this importance.

Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998, pp. 188-189

Jon Elster

The [obsessional search for meaning] has two main roots in the history of ideas. […] The first is the theological tradition and the problem of evil. Within Christian theology there emerged two main ways of justifying evil, pain and sin–they could be seen either as indispensable causal conditions for the optimality of the universe as a whole, or as inevitable by-products of an optimal package solution. The first was that of Leibniz, who suggested that monsters had the function of enabling us to perceive the beauty of the normal. The second was that of Malebranche, who poured scorn on the idea that God has created monstrous birth defects ‘pour le bénéfice des sages-femmes’, and argued instead that accidents and mishaps are the cost God hat to pay for the choice of simple and general laws of nature. In either case the argument was intended to show that the actual world was the best of all possible worlds, and that every feature of it was part and parcel of its optimality. Logically speaking, the theodicy cannot serve as a deductive basis for the sociodicy: there is no reason why the best of all possible worlds should also contain the best of all possible societies. The whole point of the theodicy is that suboptimality in the part may be a condition for the optimality of the whole, and this may be the case even when the part in question is the corner of the universe in which human history unfolds itself. If monsters are to be justified by their edifying effects on the midwives that receive them, could not the miseries of humanity have a similar function for creatures of other worlds or celestial spheres?

Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge, 1983, p. 102

James Flynn

The best chance of enjoying enhanced cognitive skills is to fall in love with ideas, or intelligent conversation, or intelligent books, or some intellectual pursuit. If I do that, I create within my own mind a stimulating mental environment that accompanies me wherever I go. Then I am relatively free of needing good luck to enjoy a rich cognitive environment. I have constant and instant access to a portable gymnasium that exercises the mind. Books and ideas and analyzing things are easier to transport than a basketball court. No one can keep me from using mental arithmetic so habitually that my arithmetical skills survive.

James Flynn, What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect, Cambridge, 2007, p. 87

Donald Regan

Lest I offend anyone else by doubting their worth, let me begin by doubting my own. I am not depressed; I think I have an adequate sense of self by standard psychological criteria; I think I am not deficient in ordinary self-esteem; I am certainly not deficient in everyday self-centredness and selfishness. And yet, if I ask myself in a cool hour whether I have some deep intrinsic ‘worth’ that grounds the importance of what happens to me, or that justifies anyone, myself or another, in caring about things for my own sake, I do not find it. Much that goes on in my life is important (in a small way); much of it has intrinsic value, both positive and negative. And those facts matter to how I should be treated. But the idea that they either depend on or manifest my personal ‘worth’ is what escapes me.

Donald Regan, ‘Why Am I My Brother’s Keeper?’,  in R. Jay Wallace, Philip Pettit, Samuel Scheffler and Michael Smith (eds.), Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz, Oxford, 2004, p. 228

Quentin Smith

[T]here may be an even more basic (and perhaps unique) problem that arises due to the highly non-conservative shift in thinking that a transition to quantum cognitive science would require. It may be that quantum ontologies are so ‘strange’ that many, most, or virtually all philosophers find them psychologically impossible to believe. This may be a genetic problem, rather than merely a problem in the lack of intellectual acculturation in quantum ontology.

Quentin Smith, ‘Why Cognitive Scientists Cannot Ignore Quantum Mechanics’, in Smith and Aleksandar Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives, Oxford, 2003, p. 410

John Broome

Global warming is disconcerting in one respect. It seems inevitable that its consequences will be large, just because of the unprecedented size and speed of the temperature changes. Yet it is very hard to know just what these large consequences will be.

John Broome, Counting the Cost of Global Warming: A Report to the Economic and Social Research Council on Research, Cambridge, 1992, p. 9

C. D. Broad

Let us now sum up the theoretical differences which the alternatives of Mechanism and Emergence would make to our view of the external world and of the relations between the various sciences. The advantage of Mechanism would be that it introduces a unity and tidiness into the world which appeals very strongly to our aesthetic interests. On that view, when pushed to its extreme limits, there is one and only one kind of material. Each particle of this obeys one elementary law of behaviour, and continues to do so no matter how complex may be the collection of particles of which it is a constituent. There is one uniform law of composition, connecting the behaviour of groups of these particles as wholes with the behaviour which each would show in isolation and with the structure of the group. All the apparently different kinds of stuff are just differently arranged groups of different numbers of the one kind of elementary particle; and all the apparently peculiar laws of behaviour are simply special cases which could be deduced in theory from the structure of the whole under consideration, the one elementary law of behaviour for isolated particles, and the one universal law of composition. On such a view the external world has the greatest amount of unity which is conceivable. There is really only one science, and the various “special sciences” are just particular cases of it. This is a magnificent ideal; it is certainly much more nearly true than anyone could possibly have suspected at first sight; and investigations pursued under its guidance have certainly enabled us to discover many connexions within the external world which would otherwise have escaped our notice. But it has no trace of self-evidence; it cannot be the whole truth about the external world, since it cannot deal with the existence or the appearance of “secondary qualities” until it is supplemented by laws of the emergent type which assert that under such and such conditions such and such groups of elementary particles moving in certain ways have, or seem to human beings to have, such and such secondary qualities; and it is certain that considerable scientific progress can be made without assuming it to be true. As a practical postulate it has its good and its bad side. On the one hand, it makes us try our hardest to explain the characteristic behaviour of the more complex in terms of the laws which we have already recognised in the less complex. If our efforts succeed, this is sheer gain. And, even if they fail, we shall probably have learned a great deal about the minute details of the facts under investigation which we might not have troubled to look for otherwise. On the other hand, it tends to over-simplification. If in fact there are new types of law at certain levels, it is very desirable that we should honestly recognise the fact. And, if we take the mechanistic ideal too seriously, we shall be in danger of ignoring or perverting awkward facts of this kind. This sort of over-simplification has certainly happened in the past in biology and physiology under the guidance of the mechanistic ideal; and it of course reaches its wildest absurdities in the attempts which have been made from time to time to treat mental phenomena mechanistically.

C. D. Broad, The Mind and Its Place in Nature, London, 1937, pp. 76-77

Derek Parfit

Consider the fact that, in a few years, I shall be dead. This fact can seem depressing. But the reality is only this. After a certain time, none of the thoughts and experiences that occur will be directly causally related to this brain, or be connected in certain ways to these present experiences. That is all this fact involves. And, in that description, my death seems to disappear.

Derek Parfit, ‘The Unimportance of Identity’, in Henry Harris (ed.), Identity: Essays Based on Herbert Spencer Lectures Given in the University of Oxford, Oxford, 1995, p. 45

Leonard Katz

If I am a momentary conscious self, and might have (numerically) the same experience as I do now even if I were not causally connected to anything more remotely past or future than the before and after internal to my momentary experience […], then it seems that my continuant personal identity should not be of all that much special interest to me-now. For if the way that I am a continuant is by being a collection of, say, segments of continuing physical processes coming together into integrated systems of neural events at one moment only to come apart the next, why should I identify with the future of some of these causal processes rather than with others? Why not care equally about other momentary consciousnesses that I can causally affect, rather than just about that which bears my name? Why not about those that carry the effects of my deeds, or of my social interaction, equally? None of these will be the same momentary consciousness as I this moment am. All will be tied to my present consciousness by causal connections.

These considerations seem plausible to me. But, of course, they cannot really be used to foster the moral virtue of benevolence—which, like all of morality, essentially concerns our relations to persons as such. If this scene of thought undermines egoism and the egocentric fears (such as, perhaps especially, the fear of death), it might seem equally to undermine morality, too—by weakening the grip that our biologically- and socially based perception and attitudes toward persons as such have. For it seems to be here that morality finds its natural ground—on which the existence of moral facts and motivation, and the application of the distinctive normative force of morality (irreducible to that of seeking pleasure or any other form of welfare or good) depends. But philosophical hedonism, while perhaps undermining morality and self-interest together in this way by suggesting the momentary view, could also provide some justification for self-interest and morality in those moments in which we wonder how it all matters, at a fundamental level, by showing a deeper ground and point to human living—a ground in the momentary experience of pleasure (no matter whose), a ground beyond self interest and morality that lies deeper in the nature of things than does our perception of persons or of prudential and moral norms.

Leonard Katz, Hedonism as Metaphysics of Mind and Value, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1986, pp. 177-179

David Lewis

The afterlife is a more heterogeneous affair than people have thought. The point of our earthly lives isn’t to divide us into two groups, one to live forever in unimaginable bliss, the other to suffer unimaginable torment. Instead of being tried, we simply discover who we are. Some, perhaps the most fortunate, find out that they are people for whom the adoration of the deity is the highest form of rapture; they appreciate Christ’s sacrifice and are summoned to the presence of God. Others resist the Christian message and develop different ideals for their lives. They are assigned to places in the afterlife that realize those ideals for them. Atheist philosophers, perhaps, discover themselves in an eternal seminar of astonishing brilliance. Each of us finds an appropriate niche.

David Lewis, ‘Divine Evil’, in Louise Antony (ed.), Philosophers without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life, New York, 2007, p. 237-238

James O’Neill

[Tesla’s] mental constructs were built with meticulous care as concerned size, strength, design and material; and they were tested mentally, he maintained, by having them run for weeks—after which time he would examine them thoroughly for signs of wear. Here was a most unusual mind being utilized in a most unusual way. If he at any time built a “mental machine,” his memory ever afterward retained all of the details, even to the finest dimensions.

James O’Neill, Prodigal Genius: The Life of Nikola Tesla, New York, 1944, pp. 51-52

Carlos Santiago Nino

Si no fuera posible distinguir mis decisions de las de usted, lector, ni yo ni usted seríamos autónomos.

Carlos Santiago Nino, ‘La autonomía personal’, in Nino et al. (eds.), La autonomía personal: investigación colectiva del Centro de Estudios Institucionales de Buenos Aires, Madrid, 1992, p. 37

Timothy Williamson

Sceptics are troublemakers who can disrupt our position without having a coherent position of their own, by presenting us with considerations to which we cannot find a response that we find satisfying. If they are sick, they infect us with their sickness. Although some people have more natural immunity than others, probably few epistemologists feel no conflict at all within themselves between sceptical and anti-sceptical tendencies.

Timothy Williamson, ‘Knowledge and Scepticism’, in Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford, 2005, p. 694

Bryan Magee

It was astounding that anything existed at all. Why wasn’t there nothing? By all the normal rules of expectation—the least unlikely state of affairs, the most economical solution to all possible problems, the simplest explanation–nothing is what you would have expected there to be. But such was not the case, self-evidently. And yet although it was impossible to know what there was, and therefore impossible to say what it was, and perhaps therefore even impossible to assert that there was anything, something was unquestionably going on. Yet how could anything be going on? In what medium? Nothingness? Impossible to conceive: and yet undeniably something was happening.

Although more and more given to talk and discussion and argument as I grew older, for several years I never encountered anyone who felt the same fascination as I did with these questions. By the time I had grown into adulthood I had become familiar with a number of general attitudes to experience that seemed to embrace among themselves most people, at least most of those I met, but none of them was at all like mine. There seemed to be three main groupings. First, there were people who took the world for granted as they found it: that’s how things are, and it’s obvious that that’s how they are, and talking about it isn’t going to change it, so there’s no purpose that perpetually questioning it is going to serve; discussing it is really a waste of time, even thinking about it much is a waste of time; what we have to do is get on with the practical business of living, not indulge in a lot of useless speculation and ineffectual talk That seemed to be roughly the outlook of most people. Then there were others who regarded that attitude as superficial, on religious grounds. According to them, this life was no more than an overture, a prelude to the real thing. There was a God who had made this world, including us, and had given us immortal souls, so that when our bodies died after a brief sojourn on earth the souls in them would go on for ever in some “higher” realm. Such people tended to think that in the eye of eternity this present world of ours was not all that important, and whenever one raised questions about the self-contradictory nature of our experience they would shrug their shoulders and attribute this to the inscrutable workings of a God. It was not that they used this as the answer to all questions, because what such people said seldom answered any actual questions: they felt under no pressure to do so. God knew al the answers to all the questions, and his nature was inscrutable to us, therefore the only thing for us to do was to put our trust in him and stop bothering ourselves with questions to which we could not possibly know the answers until after we died. It seemed to me that this attitude was at bottom as incurious as the first; it just offered a different reason for not asking questions; and equally obviously it did not really feel the problems. There was no awareness in it of the real extraordinariness of the world: on the contrary, people who subscribed to it were often marked by a certain complacency, not to say smugness. They seemed to be happily lulling themselves to sleep with a story which might or might not be true but which they had no serious grounds for believing.

Finally, there were people who condemned both of these other sets of attitudes as uncomprehending and mistaken, on what one might call rationalistic grounds. They critically questioned both the ways things are and traditional religious beliefs, and challenged the adherents of either for proof, or at least good evidence; for some justification, or at least good argument. These tended in spirit to be either children of the enlightenment or children of the age of science, and in either case to have a kind of outlook that did not begin to exist until the seventeenth century. They seemed to believe that everything was explicable in the light of reason, that rational enquiry would eventually make all desirable discoveries, and that in principle if not altogether in practice all problems could be solved by the application of rationality. Most of my friends and fellow spirits seemed to fall into this third category, and indeed I tended to agree with their criticisms of the other two. My problem was that their own positive beliefs seemed to me manifestly untenable, and their attitudes—well, perhaps not quite as comfortable and complacent as those they criticized, but comfortable and complacent none the less. They seemed to think that the world was an intelligible place, and I did not see how in the light of a moment’s thought this belief could be entertained. […] What cut me off most deeply of all from this attitude, and what I also found hardest to understand about it, was its lack of any sense of the amazingness of our existence, indeed of the existence of anything at all-the sheer miraculousness of everything.

Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper, London, 1997, pp. 13-15

Peter van Inwagen

Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of. And why not? How can it be that equally intelligent and well-trained philosophers can disagree about the freedom of the will or nominalism or the covering-law model of scientific explanation when each is aware of all the arguments and distinctions and other relevant considerations that the others are aware of? How can we philosophers possibly regard ourselves as justified in believing anything of philosophical significance under these conditions? How can I believe (as I do) that free will is incompatible with determinism or that unrealized possibilities are not physical objects or that human beings are not four-dimensional things extended in time as well as in space when David Lewis—a philosopher of truly formidable intelligence and insight and ability—rejects these things I believe and is aware of and understands perfectly every argument that I could bring in their defense?

Peter van Inwagen, ‘Quam dilecta’, in Thomas V. Morris (ed.), God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, New York, 1994, pp. 40-41

Frank Jackson

The physical sciences—physics, chemistry, biology—tell us a great deal about what our world is like. In addition, they tell us a great deal about what we are like. They tell us what our bodies are made of, the chemical reactions necessary for life, how our ears extract location information from sound waves, the evolutionary account of how various bits of us are as they are, what causes our bodies to move through the physical environment as they do, and so on. We can think of the true, complete physical account of us as an aggregation of all there is to say about us that can be constructed from the materials to be found in the various physical sciences. This account tells the story of us as revealed by the physical sciences.

Frank Jackson, ‘Consciousness’, in Frank Jackson and Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, New York, 2005, pp. 310-311

H. L. Mencken

That alcohol in dilute aqueous solution, when taken into the human organism, acts as a depressant, not a stimulant, is now so much a commonplace of knowledge that even the more advanced varieties of physiologists are beginning to be aware of it. The intelligent layman no longer resorts to the jug when he has important business before him, whether intellectual or manual; he resorts to it after his business is done, and he desires to release his taut nerves and reduce the steam-pressure in his spleen. Alcohol, so to speak, unwinds us. It raises the threshold of sensation and makes us less sensitive to external stimuli, and particularly to those that are unpleasant. Putting a brake upon all the qualities which enable us to get on in the world and shine before our fellows – for example, combativeness, shrewdness, diligence, ambition-, it releases the qualities which mellow us and make our fellows love us – for example, amiability, generosity, toleration, humor, sympathy. A man who has taken aboard two or three cocktails is less competent than he was before to steer a battleship down the Ambrose Channel, or to cut off a leg, or to draw up a deed of trust, or to conduct Bach’s B minor mass, but he is immensely more competent to entertain a dinner party, to admire a pretty girl, or to hear Bach’s B minor mass. The harsh, useful things of the world, from pulling teeth to digging potatoes, are best done by men who are as starkly sober as so many convicts in the death-house, but the lovely and useless things, the charming and exhilarating things, are best done by men with, as the phrase is, a few sheets in the wind. Pithecanthropus erectus was a teetotaler, but the angels, you may be sure, know what is proper at 5 p.m.

H. L. Mencken, ‘Portrait of an Ideal World’, The American Mercury, 1924, p. 101

Jeff McMahan

Pain that is equally intense may be equally bad even in the absence of self-consciousness. It is not necessary to have the thought “I am in pain” in order for pain to be bad. As people who have experienced the more intense forms of pain are aware, pain can blot out self-consciousness altogether. Intense pain can dominate consciousness completely, filling it and crowding out all self-conscious thoughts.

Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life, New York, 2002, p. 229