The 50 Greatest Living Philosophers
Who are the best philosophers living today? We should know better than to put a question like that to a philosopher. The ideas of the best philosophers live on and continue to enrich the philosophising of any age. And the work of the best or the most influential of philosophers is not always appreciated when they are alive. David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature attracted little attention when published in 1739-40. Hume joked toward the end of his life that it “fell still-born from the press.” Spinoza’s Ethics is another masterpiece that was neglected for a long time. Wittgenstein was a philosophical innovator of the highest level, his earlier and later work founding two different schools of philosophy, both of which he disowned. ‘We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work.’ (Wittgenstein’s obituary in The Times, 2nd May 1951). Wittgenstein struggled to write, to publish, despaired of ever being able to say what he needed to say. ‘I am convinced that I shall never publish anything in my lifetime, but after my death you must see to the publishing of my journal with the whole story in it.’ ‘I wish to God that I were more intelligent and everything would finally become clear to me.’ His later approach spread only through personal contact, since he published nothing other than a short article until his death in 1951. His book Philosophical Investigations came out two years after his death and became the most influential work in the English speaking world.
Previous philosophers, Wittgenstein considered, tried to talk about things that it is impossible to talk about, yet are the most meaningful things in life. The things that matter the most one cannot talk about – the meaning of life, God, how one ought to behave, beauty. With few exceptions, Wittgenstein says little about these things that mattered most. When one says what can be said, one has reproduced all the propositions of natural science and common sense, but these are not the most interesting things at all.
The notion of the best or greatest of the philosophers ‘living’ ‘today’ is hugely problematic, since the greatest thought of the best philosophers is only apparent in the ages to come. The ‘most influential’ philosophers could simply owe their current influence to their familiarity. The truly influential may well be ignored in the short run only to have their significance appreciated in the unfolding of time. The most influential philosophers today will include philosophers who are long dead. Of living philosophers, their greatest influence is yet to come.
So let’s give the obvious answer and state that it is too soon to say who is the greatest living philosopher and who will prove to be the most influential in the long run. The most popular and the most acclaimed today may simply fade with the concerns of prevailing society. The very best will more than likely be working under society’s radar. But we all have our favourites, the ones whose work moves us and influences us the most, depending on the issues we think are the most important. It doesn’t make them the greatest or the most influential in general, just the ones that have most influenced us in our own lives. The greatest philosophers influence every age that comes after them. Plato has never and will never go away.
Who is the most influential living philosopher? It depends who you ask. If you ask the question in the West, you will get a list of Western philosophers.
Names? I’ve just discovered Walter Ong and am most impressed. Derek Parfit has done great work on identity, John Searle on the philosophy of mind and language, Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett on mind, Frank Cameron Jackson for his work in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. Jürgen Habermas on reason, freedom, communication and the public sphere. Peter Singer has done fine work in Ethics and expanding the moral circle. I like philosophers who come out of the ‘ivory tower’ and reach out to the great public. In my own work, I attempt to extend virtue ethics to ecology, developing the Ecopolis as the good society. So I appreciate the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Rosalind Hursthouse for their work in virtue ethics and moral philosophy. Dieter Henrich for his work in German Idealism. Henrich deals with Hegel’s work in a systematic way. Žižek talks endlessly of Hegel, but sounds more like Lacan and reads more like an anti-philosopher.
What of those whose work adds to our knowledge and understanding of the world, even though they are not philosophers? Natural scientists certainly, but also poets and artists. Surely, these offer insights that are philosophical. Take Douglas Hofstadter or Owen Flanagan or Stuart Kauffman, whose work in science possesses a definite philosophical bent. Truly. But this is just an entertaining little question of no great significance, an excuse for me to muse on the current state of play in philosophy and how it relates to my own work. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on it. I can’t name the greatest or the most influential. I can name those whose work has been a significant influence on my own work. Others may name other philosophers. Some rave about Daniel Dennett and his Consciousness Explained. It reads more like Consciousness Ignored to me.
[On this:
World's Smartest Physicist Thinks Science Can't Crack Consciousness
String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”
"I think consciousness will remain a mystery. Yes, that's what I tend to believe. I tend to think that the workings of the conscious brain will be elucidated to a large extent. Biologists and perhaps physicists will understand much better how the brain works. But why something that we call consciousness goes with those workings, I think that will remain mysterious. I have a much easier time imagining how we understand the Big Bang than I have imagining how we can understand consciousness..."
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/world-s-smartest-physicist-thinks-science-can-t-crack-consciousness/
In the end, it all depends on what your interests, concerns and values are. Doesn't it? Because it that is the case, just what is the value of philosophy? Are we just amusing ourselves? Or does philosophy aim at something much more substantial than subjective fancies? What grounds does philosophy have? Is it all social use and perspectives? Or is there an objective foundation for the true, the good and the beautiful?
Identifying the best or the most influential philosophers is an impossible question to answer in general, without reference to, you know, some actual philosophizing … It’s the philosophizing that matters, not the beauty parade.
Here is the article which identifies 'The 50 Most Influential Living Philosophers'.
http://www.thebestschools.org/features/most-influential-living-philosophers/
I shall now proceed to the names on the list whose work has some bearing on my own work on “Being and Place.”
TYLER BURGE
Burge argues for anti-individualism, which he defines thus: “individuating many of a person or animal’s mental kinds … is necessarily dependent on relations that the person bears to the physical, or in some cases social, environment".
This view, and some variants, has been called "content externalism", or just "externalism."
This gives a view on objectivity and notions of objective reality and the relations of subjectivity to this objective order. In the Origins of Objectivity, Burge develops a subtle and nuanced query into the place of distinctively psychological capacities in the natural order.
‘It seems to me that philosophers should be more relaxed about whether or not some form of materialism is true.’
IS THERE A WAR BETWEEN RELIGION AND SCIENCE?
http://www.toughquestionsanswered.org/tag/tyler-burge/
NANCY CARTWRIGHT
‘It is not realism but fundamentalism that we need to combat.’ (Cartwright 1999:. 23)
‘Laws hold as a consequence of the repeated, successful operation or what, I shall argue, is reasonably thought of as a nomological machine.’ (Cartwright 1999: 4)
Cartwright, Nancy (1999): The Dappled World. A Study of the Boundaries of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nancy Cartwright´s Philosophy of Science
http://www.thur.de/philo/project/cartwright.htm
What kind of realism? Cartwright’s concerns are not with the problems of skepticism, induction, or demarcation but with how science achieves the successes it does, and what sort of metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are needed to understand that success.
Like many working scientists, Cartwright adopts a rather pragmatic/realist stance toward the observations and interventions made by scientists and engineers and particularly toward their connections to causality.
NOAM CHOMSKY
‘Anyone can be a moral individual, concerned with human rights and problems; but only a college professor, a trained expert, can solve technical problems by 'sophisticated' methods. Ergo, it is only problems of the latter sort that are important or real.’
‘The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.’
‘An ideal form of social control is an atomised collection of individuals focused on their own narrow concern, lacking the kinds of organisations in which they can gain information, develop and articulate their thoughts, and act constructively to achieve common ends.’
Chomsky is an innatist, someone who believes in a universal linguistic (and moral) grammar. An innate idea is a concept or item of knowledge which is said to be universal to all humanity — that is, something that all individuals are born with and hold in common on account of their membership of the human species, not merely something they have learned and acquired through experience. Innativism is a correlate of nativism. Advocates of nativism can be found in the field of cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics. Chomsky is one example. Jerry Fodor is another. The objection that nativists raise against empiricism is the one that rationalists raised, arguing that the human mind of a newborn child is equipped with an inborn structure and is not, therefore, a tabula rasa.
The question is central to the long-running nature versus nurture debate. Here, it is localized to the question of understanding human cognition.
In my work, I argue for nature via nurture. But that still presumes an innate nature. If we are born with innate structures of linguistic and by extension moral thought, isn't this a kind of determinism that denies political agency? What is the point of arguing for any change at all?’
Chomsky takes on this key question directly.
"The most libertarian positions accept the same view." he answers. "That there are instincts, basic conditions of human nature that lead to a preferred social order. In fact, if you're in favour of any policy - reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever - if you're at least minimally moral, it's because you think it's somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature. So whoever you are, whatever your position is, you're making some tacit assumptions about fundamental human nature... The question is: what do we strive for in developing a social order that is conducive to fundamental human needs? Are human beings born to be servants to masters, or are they born to be free, creative individuals who work with others to inquire, create, develop their own lives? I mean, if humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be ... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces. That's why if you look at the history of what's called radical behaviourism, [where] you can be completely shaped by outside forces - when [the advocates of this] spell out what they think society ought to be, it's totalitarian."
The charge of determinism or totalitarianism can be thrown back against the existentialists. This idea that we may choose our existence over against our essence may sound liberatory, certainly if it is the individual agent doing the choosing. But that’s the point, in a world of supra-individual forces, the individual is always set within a context of collective powers and beliefs and norms. If existence prevails over essence, then there is nothing to stop an external agency, a state, a political movement, an organisation of any kind, mobilising to manipulate and manage an individual according to purposes which are external to them. This external manipulation is entirely possible if the individual human being is merely the blank sheet of Lockean empiricism, or the unconstrained free agent of existentialism. For Chomsky, it is the fact that we possess a nature that prevents us from being subjugated by external forces and directed by anything other than our own purposes. Our innate, essential nature is our best protection against tyranny and totalitarianism. The range of possible political structures that we can tolerate is limited.
ANDY CLARK
“It matters that we recognize the very large extent to which individual human thought and reason are not activities that occur solely in the brain or even solely within the organismic skin-bag. This matters because it drives home the degree to which environmental engineering is also self-engineering. In building our physical and social worlds, we build (or rather, we massively reconfigure) our minds and our capacities of thought and reason.”
― Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
“According to EXTENDED, the actual local operations that realize certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward, and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body, and world. The local mechanisms of mind, if this is correct, are not all in the head. Cognition leaks out into body and world.”
― Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension
‘It becomes harder and harder to say where the world stops and the person begins.’
Andy Clark is hugely important for his extended mind hypothesis. In my work, I seek to develop embodied cognition and cultural evolution together - Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Clark addresses the key question as to whether the mind is to be found solely in the brain? In Clark’s view, the mind is not the same as the physical brain but includes, for instance, the hand, which also takes part in the thinking process. Clark is thus beyond the dualist perspective.
Clark develops a substantial and far-reaching critique of evolutionary psychology, but is concerned to integrate the strongest insights from the field, thus steering a course between the twin reefs of emergent vs innate, learned vs programmed, contingent vs inevitable, consistency as a product of systems v. assumption of universal ‘nature’.
The vision of the brain given by evolutionary psychology ‘has stressed the selective fit of the biological brain to some ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness, with an attendant focus on upon the limitations and cognitive biases that result.’ Evolutionary psychologists have tended to assume the existence of underlying, enduring structures in the brain, shaped by natural selection and encoded (even where we cannot find evidence) in genetic structures. In contrast, embodied cognition models the brain as a product of dynamic interplay among processes at different time-scales — evolutionary, developmental, and immediate, giving us a model of human cognitive development as ‘a kaleidoscope of complex ratchet effects [that] fuel the flexible and, to a significant degree, open-ended character of thought and action.’
The social brain, the embodied brain – brain plus gene plus environment = the happy habitus. This moves us beyond the nature vs nurture, innatism/nativism vs culturalism dualism to an integral conception.
HUBERT DREYFUS
“universalistic demands of morality. Faith requires”
― Hubert L. Dreyfus, A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism
Dreyfus is so well known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger that critics label his work "Dreydegger".
For Dreyfus, we cannot now, and will never be able to, understand our own behaviour in the same way that we can understand objects in, for instance, physics or chemistry. In other words, we can never consider ourselves to be ‘things’ whose behaviour can be predicted via 'objective', context free scientific laws. A context-free psychology is a contradiction in terms.
Dreyfus develops his arguments out of the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition, particularly the work of Martin Heidegger. As against the cognitivist views upon which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is based, Heidegger argued that our being is highly context-bound. Any context-free assumptions are false.
We can choose to see human (or any) activity as being 'law-governed', in the same way that we can choose to see reality as consisting of indivisible atomic facts should we so wish. But there is a big difference between seeing things this or that way because we want to to stating that it is an objective fact that things are actually this way. Since this is not necessarily the case, Dreyfus argues, any research program that assumes that it is will soon face insurmountable theoretical and practical problems. Dreyfus is thus sceptical of AI.
SUSAN HAACK
‘Compared with real-life evidence for real-life scientific claims, the old preoccupation with “this is a raven and this is black,” and its relation to “all ravens are black,” looks astonishingly simple and one-dimensional. Still, you may wonder if I have anything to say about black ravens, red herrings, blue emeralds, and all that; and you deserve an answer. In brief: such puzzles are artefacts of the narrowly logical conceptions of evidence, warrant, and confirmation that I have been contesting; they evanesce with the recognition that supportiveness of evidence is not a purely formal matter, but depends on the substantial content of predicates, their place in a mesh of background beliefs, and their relation to the world.’
~Susan Haack, Defending Science – Within Reason, p. 83
Haack is noted for her theory of foundherentism. It’s an ugly word. But no worse than my own use of the double-barrelled ‘doubly foundational’ which attempts to unite the idea of an objective reality and human agency as an unfolding co-creation.
In epistemology, foundherentism is a theory of justification that combines elements from foundationalism and coherentism as two rival theories subject to infinite regress (foundationalism prone to arbitrariness, and coherentism prone to circularity, as with the problems raised by the Münchhausen trilemma. Haack defined and developed ‘foundherentism’ in her book Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology (1993). Foundherentism is an intermediate theory that seeks to move beyond the endless and irresolvable arguments between foundationalism and coherentism. It is possible to include the relevance of experience for the justification of empirical beliefs and allow for pervasive mutual dependence among beliefs rather than requiring a privileged class of basic beliefs. Experientialist foundationalism can achieve the former, but not coherentism. Coherentism can do the latter, but not foundationalism. Foundherentism can do both.
JURGEN HABERMAS
"Does participation in democratic procedures have only the functional meaning of silencing a defeated minority, or does it have the deliberative meaning of including the arguments of citizens in the democratic process of opinion- and will-formation? ... Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future."
Jürgen Habermas, Leadership and Leitkultur, The New York Times, October 29, 2010
Habermas is best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. His theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions. Habermas’ work affirms the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is critical of modernity whilst seeking to defend and enrich and complete the Enlightenment project. Working within the rationalization thesis set out by Max Weber, Habermas seeks to recover the connection between reason and freedom.
At the heart of Habermas’ work is an intersubjective conception of freedom.
Freedom, even personal freedom, is conceivable only in 'internal connection with a network of interpersonal relationships', in the context of the communicative structures of a community, so that 'the freedom of some is not achieved at the cost of the freedom of others'. There is a need, then, to ‘analyse the conditions of collective freedom' so as to remove the 'potential for Social-Darwinist menace' inherent in individualist conceptions of freedom. 'The individual cannot be free unless all are free, and all cannot be free unless all are free in community. It is this last proposition which one misses in the empiricist and individualist traditions' (Habermas 1992 Autonomy and Solidarity P Dews ed (Verso)
JOHN HALDANE
‘Not only are many teleological concepts irreducible, but a commitment to the reality of objective natures, functions and associated values is presupposed by actual scientific enquiry and speculation. Functional intelligibility – not just invariable succession – is a common presupposition in the life sciences and it brings with it certain orders of value. An animal, organ or vital process admits of objective evaluation by reference to its proper operation or development as a thing of that sort of nature. Far from excluding such ideas, real sciences are built around them, and the picture of the world that emerges is one of living things developing in accord with intrinsic teleologies.’
- Haldane, Rational and Other Animals in Verstehen and Human Understanding, Cambridge University Press 1996
Haldane is a Thomist in the analytic tradition and is credited with coining the term Analytical Thomism.
Aquinas among the Analytics
‘John Haldane is a Thomist analytic philosopher who is always brooding on faith and religious belief, philosophers who have strange and oracular remarks that ignite the imagination, the metaphysics of Aquinas and the making sense of immateriality, the depths of ontological arguments, some Aristotelian roots, Hegel’s Christian stuff, religion and the philosophy of mind, the link between Aquinas and Anscombe, the link between Aquinas and Wittgenstein, the evasiveness of D.Z. Phillips, when human beings start, Hume and Reid and their attitude to Catholicism, the Scottish Enlightenment, plus Christopher Hitchens and the new atheism all done in the cool hand Luke style of unflappable chill. Which all in all makes him the P Daddy of the philosophy of religion.’
Haldane works in the field of virtue ethics. His “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life” explores how virtues are the cornerstone of a happy life, including how the sciences of human behaviour are related to philosophical investigations of value and conduct, and how ethical evaluation of action has to do with the issues of existential meaning and happiness.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/aquinas-amongst-the-analytics/
GRAHAM HARMAN
"There is a usual tendency to oppose honest openness and evasive obliqueness, but all powerful intellectual life lies somewhere between these two poles, and there’s no getting around the fact that thinking is more like witchcraft than like robotic calculation. This notion comes to me not from Heidegger, Whitehead, or Latour, but from Plato, and it is time for Plato to be revived."
- Graham Harman, from more Amontillado
Harman’s is a central figure in the speculative realism trend in contemporary philosophy. His work on the metaphysics of objects led to the development of object-oriented ontology. Harman first defines real objects as inaccessible and as infinitely withdrawn from all relations and then proceeds to puzzle over how such objects can be accessed or enter into relations: "by definition, there is no direct access to real objects. Real objects are incommensurable with our knowledge, untranslatable into any relational access of any sort, cognitive or otherwise. Objects can only be known indirectly. And this is not just the fate of humans — it’s the fate of everything. Fire burns cotton stupidly ..."
The idea that real objects are inexhaustible is central to Harman's philosophy: "A police officer eating a banana reduces this fruit to a present-at-hand profile of its elusive depth, as do a monkey eating the same banana, a parasite infecting it, or a gust of wind blowing it from a tree. Banana-being is a genuine reality in the world, a reality never exhausted by any relation to it by humans or other entities." (Harman 2005: 74). On account of this inexhaustibility, Harman reasons, there is a metaphysical problem regarding how two objects can ever interact. His solution to this problem is to introduce the notion of "vicarious causation", according to which objects can only ever interact on the inside of an "intention" (which is also an object).
Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially its linguistic turn, Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and metaphorically allude to a strange subterranean world of "vacuum-sealed" objects-in-themselves: "The comet itself, the monkey itself, Coca-Cola itself, resonate in cellars of being where no relation reaches."
In Tool-Being, Harman develops Heidegger’s tool-analysis to “its most extreme form,” or at least to its most non-anthropocentric form. In the process, he proposes an understanding of reality, or the things that comprise reality, as both relationally expressive and ultimately unknowable — in the manner of a distinction between Heidegger’s ‘world’, as the relationally, referentially networked cosmos of meanings and interactions, and ‘earth’ as the “bearing and supporting system on which all else forever rests but which itself forever recedes from view” (197). Harman understands this duality to be constitutive not so much of the universe as a whole as of everything in it: “every point in the cosmos is both a concealed reality and one that enters into explicit contact with others” such that “there is no such thing as a sheer ‘relation’; every relation turns out to be an entity in its own right” (288-9).
Our role in this as human beings is to act as engaged participants: “There is no exit from the density of being, no way to stand outside the brutal play of forces and vacuum-packed entities that crowd the world. We ourselves are only one such entity among innumerable others” (289) and we can “never manage to rise above the massive clamor of entities, but can only burrow around within it” (294). “Everywhere, the world is a plenum crowded by tool-beings, by formal units that retreat behind any external contact with them.” (288)
Dictionary of concepts for Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy
https://avoidingthevoid.wordpress.com/dictionary-of-concepts-for-graham-harmans-object-oriented-philosophy-draft-work-in-progress/
INGVAR JOHANSSON
‘Looking retrospectively, my philosophical interests centre on ontological problems. In the book Ontological Investigations. An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man and Society (Routledge 1989) I make an attempt to find and present a modernised realist Aristotelian theory of categories. Since I am a fallibilist within epistemology, I regard my "Kategorienlehre" as provisional. However, I think that it is possible to combine a traditional scientistic view of mind-independent nature with an anti-naturalistic view of man, that direct realism is true, and that both traditional individualistic and holistic conceptions of society suffer from indefensible philosophical flaws.’
Ontological Investigations: An Inquiry into the Categories of Nature, Man and Society.
Ontological Investigations is devoted to problems within analytic metaphysics. The book presents an ontology and theory of categories inspired by Aristotle, but revised in light of modern science. Proceeding from the view that universals exist, but only in the spatiotemporal world (immanent realism), the book examines the ontology of both natural and social reality. In bringing Aristotle's ontology up-to-date, making it compatible with the findings of modern science, Johansson draws heavily on the thought of Edmund Husserl, conceiving the stuff of the universe to comprise Husserlian relations of existential dependence and understanding intentionality to be a non-reducible category in the ontology of mind. Johansson’s philosophy appeals to realists, yet offers plenty for conceptualists and nominalists, too.
CHRISTINE KORSGAARD
“The reason for participating in a general will, and so for endorsing one’s identity as a citizen, is that we share the world with others who are free, not that we have confidence in their judgement. A citizen who acts on a vote that has gone the way she thinks it should may in one sense be more wholehearted than one who must submit to a vote that has not gone her way. But a citizen in whom the general will triumphs gracefully over the private will exhibits a very special kind of autonomy, which is certainly not a lesser form.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity
“If you view yourself as having a value-conferring status in virtue of of your power of rational choice, you must view anyone who has the power of rational choice as having...a value conferring status.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
“Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself.”
― Christine M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends
Korsgaard’s work in defence of Kant and Kantian views in moral philosophy has an obvious appeal for someone like me, given the extent to which my own work is steeped in Kant. Korsgaard works on moral philosophy and its history, practical reason, the nature of agency, personal identity, normativity, and the ethical relations between human beings and the other animals. As such, she seeks to develop a Kantianism for the Age of Ecology.
Christine Korsgaard is a Kantian moral philosopher who works on the problem of value.
In answering Kant's question "what ought I to do?" and the meta-question "why should I do what I ought to do?", she searches for the source of normative moral obligation. Why should human beings be moved by the motives provided by morality? In answering these questions, Korsgaard wants not only to explain the moral obligations that human beings have to each other, but also justify those obligations.
Korsgaard seeks to show that if we are to understand anything as having value, then we must acknowledge that we have moral obligations. Korsgaard bases her argument on the autonomy or self-legislation championed by Immanuel Kant, and on contemporary Kantian constructivists like John Rawls. Here, the source of normativity of moral claims is found in the agent's own will. Kant thus identifies the moral law (in the form of a categorical imperative) with the human will. Moral obligations are thus self-imposed. Human beings are free in living by ends they have given themselves, a self-legislation in a universal realm of ends that gives us a form of authority over ourselves and which establishes the normativity grounding moral claims.
In Kant's ethical system, human beings must be treated as ends, and never merely the means to an end. Korsgaard develops this view of human beings as belonging to the "Kingdom of Ends." Human beings are unique on account of their their ability to reflect consciously on their actions. The human mind is capable of self-consciousness, introspection and reflection. This reflexivity generates feelings of guilt or resentment with respect to actions which are deemed to be immoral. Obligations and values are thus the "projections" of our moral sentiments and dispositions.
Korsgaard argues:
'[Reflexivity] sets us a problem no other animal has. It is the problem of the normative. For our capacity to turn our attention on to our own mental activities is also a capacity to distance ourselves from them, and to call them into question. I perceive, and I find myself with a powerful impulse to believe. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesn't dominate me and now I have a problem. Shall I believe? Is this perception really a reason to believe? I desire and I find myself with a powerful impulse to act. But I back up and bring that impulse into view and then I have a certain distance. Now the impulse doesn't dominate me and now I have a problem. Shall I act? Is this desire really a reason to act? The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason. Otherwise, at least as long as it reflects, it cannot commit itself or go forward.'
The Sources of Normativity, p.93
Korsgaard proceeds from here to an extended discussion of Kant's view of free will.
'It is because of the reflective character of the mind that we must act, as Kant put it, under the idea of freedom. He says 'we cannot conceive of a reason which consciously responds to a bidding from the outside with respect to its judgments'. If the bidding from outside is desire, then the point is that the reflective mind must endorse the desire before it can act on it, it must say to itself that the desire is a reason. As Kant puts it, we must make it our maxim to act on the desire. Then although we may do what desire bids us, we do it freely.'
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
“unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
“In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre is responsible for revivifying the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues. His book After Virtue offers an acute diagnosis of modern society and ethics. His Aristotelian framework for analyzing intelligible human action is exemplary. My choice for the top position. Building on the substantial figures of Aristotle and Aquinas, MacIntrye is a heavyweight who has the substance to see us come from under the shadow of Weberian modernity.
THE VIRTUES OF ALASDAIR MACINTYRE
by Stanley Hauerwas
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/10/004-the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre
‘The constructive character of MacIntyre’s work is apparent in his understanding of the philosophical task. A philosopher, he insists, should try to express the concepts embedded in the practices of our lives in order to help us live morally worthy lives. The professionalization of philosophy into a technical field—what might be called the academic captivity of philosophy—reflects (and serves to legitimate) the compartmentalization of the advanced capitalistic social orders that produce our culture of experts, those strange creatures of authority in modernity.’
Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism
Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (eds.), Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism, University of Notre Dame Press, 2011
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/28288-and-politics-alasdair-macintyre-s-revolutionary-aristotelianism/
MARY MIDGLEY
“The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don’t love others enough.
"The End of Anthropocentrism?”
‘All moral doctrine, all practical suggestions about how we ought to live, depend on some belief about what human nature is like.
The traditional business of moral philosophy is attempting to understand, clarify, relate, and harmonize so far as possible the claims arising from different sides of our nature.’
“Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe, but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated.”
― Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and its Meaning
Mary Midgley is a philosopher of ethics, human nature and science. Her book Beast and Man: Roots of Human Nature is essential reading, concerned as it is with the implications of our understanding of human nature for moral philosophy. Any notion we develop of a good society begs an understanding of human nature.
Mary Midgley: a late stand for a philosopher with soul
‘Midgley insists that no one can know this, and that there is in fact much evidence to suggest there is purpose. Our own planet, she argues, is "riddled with purpose… full of organisms, beings that all steadily pursue their own characteristic ways of life, beings that can be understood only by grasping the distinctive thing that each of them is trying to be and do".
Although she is not a believer in God, she speaks about a "life force", some mysterious tendency towards life "and the gradual complexifying of life" that forces its way into existence and survives extinctions. She's not talking about DNA or genes, but something that gives rise to them. She quotes her philosophical soulmate, the American Thomas Nagel. "He says the possibility of the development of conscious organisms must have been built into the world from the beginning. It cannot be an accident."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/23/mary-midgley-philosopher-soul-human-consciousness
Midgley believes that philosophy matters. And to those for whom philosophy is something ephemeral, something impossibly idealistic in comparison to the hard realities of life, philosophy matters even more. Such people stand most in need of philosophy. Midgley compares human knowledge to the dolphin tank in a zoo: "human life [is] like an enormous, ill-lit aquarium which we never see fully from above, but only through various small windows unevenly distributed around it. Scientific windows - like historical ones - are just one important set among these. Fish and other strange creatures constantly swim away from particular windows... reappearing where different lighting can make them hard to recognise. Long experience, along with constant dashing around between windows, does give us a good deal of skill in tracking them. But if we refuse to put together the data from different widows, then we can be in real trouble."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/13/philosophy
TIMOTHY MORTON
“We can get a sense of it, to be sure, though it will upgrade our ideas of "real" and "thing" to boot. Ecology shows us that all beings are connected. The ecological thought is the thinking of interconnectedness. The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it's also a thinking that is ecological. Thinking the ecological thought is part of an ecological project.”
― Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought
‘Among many, the argument against sustainability elicits an emotional response. As the ecological theorist Timothy Morton writes in his book “Ecology Without Nature,” the environmental movement has become, and perhaps always was, infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia (not to mention nostalgia). This melancholia, I would argue, is connected to the death of God, or the ability to conceive God in a certain way, and stems from that Romantic transference of the divine into nature. In either case, as with any death, first comes denial — we can save nature! — but it eventually gives way to acceptance. Talk about “sustaining” nature, or “preserving” it, only exacerbates this mourning and indulges our melancholia. Like the bereaved who must learn to speak of the dead in the past tense, if we are to move forward in our habitation of the planet, to face the future and not the past, to say “yes” to the anthropocene, we should change our language.’
Ursula K. Heise reviews Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/ursula_k._heise_reviews_timothy_morton
A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies.
Since 2009, Morton has engaged in a sustained project of ecological critique, primarily enunciated in two works, Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010), through which he problematizes environmental theory from the standpoint of ecological entanglement. In Ecology Without Nature, Morton proposes that an ecological criticism must be divested of the bifurcation of nature and civilization, or the idea that nature exists as something that sustains civilization, but exists outside of society's walls.
As Morton states:
'Ecological writing keeps insisting that we are "embedded" in nature. Nature is a surrounding medium that sustains our being. Due to the properties of the rhetoric that evokes the idea of a surrounding medium, ecological writing can never properly establish that this is nature and thus provide a compelling and consistent aesthetic basis for the new worldview that is meant to change society. It is a small operation, like tipping over a domino...Putting something called Nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar does for the environment what patriarchy does for the figure of Woman. It is a paradoxical act of sadistic admiration.'
Viewing "nature," in the putative sense, as an arbitrary textual signifier, Morton theorizes artistic representations of the environment as sites for opening ideas of nature to new possibilities. Seeking an aesthetic mode that can account for the differential, paradoxical, and nonidentificational character of the environment, he proposes a materialist method of textual analysis called 'ambient poetics', in which artistic texts of all kinds are considered in terms of how they manage the space in which they appear, thereby attuning the sensibilities of their audience to forms of natural representation that contravene the ideological coding of nature as a transcendent principle. Historicizing this form of poetics permits the politicization of environmental art and its 'ecomimesis', or authenticating evocation of the author's environment, such that the experience of its phenomena becomes present for and shared with the audience.
Art is also an important theme in The Ecological Thought, a "prequel" to Ecology Without Nature, in which Morton proposes the concept of 'dark ecology' as a means of expressing the "irony, ugliness, and horror" of ecology.[20] From the vantage point of dark ecology, there exists no neutral theoretical ground on which to articulate ecological claims. Instead, all beings are always already implicated within the ecological, necessitating an acknowledgement of coexistential difference for coping with ecological catastrophe that, according to Morton, "has already occurred."
Closely related to dark ecology is Morton's concept of the 'mesh'. Defining the ecological thought as "the thinking of interconnectedness," Morton thus uses 'mesh' to refer to the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, consisting of "infinite connections and infinitesimal differences."
He explains:
'The ecological thought does, indeed, consist in the ramifications of the "truly wonderful fact" of the mesh. All life forms are the mesh, and so are all the dead ones, as are their habitats, which are also made up of living and nonliving beings. We know even more now about how life forms have shaped Earth (think of oil, of oxygen—the first climate change cataclysm). We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts. Iron is mostly a by-product of bacterial metabolism. So is oxygen. Mountains can be made of shells and fossilized bacteria. Death and the mesh go together in another sense, too, because natural selection implies extinction.'
The mesh has no central position that privileges any one form of being over others, and thereby erases definitive interior and exterior boundaries of beings. Emphasizing the interdependence of beings, the ecological thought "permits no distance," such that all beings are said to relate to each other in a totalizing open system, negatively and differentially, rendering ambiguous those entities with which we presume familiarity. Morton calls these ambiguously inscribed beings 'strange strangers', or beings unable to be completely comprehended and labeled. Within the mesh, even the strangeness of strange strangers relating coexistentially is strange, meaning that the more we know about an entity, the stranger it becomes. Intimacy, then, becomes threatening because it veils the mesh beneath the illusion of familiarity.
Dark Ecology reading list
http://www.darkecology.net/dark-ecology-reading-list
THOMAS NAGEL
“Some form of natural teleology, a type of explanation whose intelligibility I briefly defended in the last chapter, would be an alternative to a miracle— either in the sense of a wildly improbable fluke or in the sense of a divine intervention in the natural order. The tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the nonteleological laws of physics and chemistry. This seems like an admissible conjecture given the available evidence. And once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture , resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future—though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge, and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.”
― Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
“I am drawn to a fourth alternative, natural teleology, or teleological bias, as an account of the existence of the biological possibilities on which natural selection can operate. I believe that teleology is a naturalistic alternative that is distinct from all three of the other candidate explanations: chance, creationism, and directionless physical law. To avoid the mistake that White finds in the hypothesis of nonintentional bias, teleology would have to be restrictive in what it makes likely, but without depending on intentions or motives. This would probably have to involve some conception of an increase in value through the expanded possibilities provided by the higher forms of organization toward which nature tends: not just any outcome could qualify as a telos. That would make value an explanatory end, but not one that is realized through the purposes or intentions of an agent. Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are "biased toward the marvelous".”
― Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
“This is a throwback to the Aristotelian conception of nature, banished from the scene at the birth of modern science. But I have been persuaded that the idea of teleological laws is coherent, and quite different from the idea of explanation of the intentions of a purposive being who produces the means to his ends by choice. In spite of the exclusion of teleology from contemporary science, it certainly shouldn't be ruled out a priori. Formally, the possibility of principles of change over time tending toward certain types of outcome is coherent, in a world in which the nonteleological laws are not fully deterministic.”
― Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
“Reason is universal because no attempted challenge to its results can avoid appealing to reason in the end—by claiming, for example, that what was presented as an argument is really a rationalization. This can undermine our confidence in the original method or practice only by giving us reasons to believe something else, so that finally we have to think about the arguments to make up our minds.”
– Thomas Nagel (1995) Other Minds, p. 213.
Nagel is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind, particularly in his essay "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings. Continuing his critique of reductionism, he is the author of Mind and Cosmos (2012), in which he argues against a reductionist view, and specifically the neo-Darwinian view, of the emergence of consciousness.
Thomas Nagel is not crazy.
The philosopher's new book has been fiercely criticised, but he is right to doubt science's ability to explain everything
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/thomas-nagel-mind-and-cosmos-review-leiter-nation
‘What Nagel does suggest is that philosophers, or scientists who wish to provide philosophical insight look at the relationship between mind and nature in a different way. In particular, philosophers should stop assuming that reality will one day be exhaustively explained by science, and start trying to incorporate other methods of explanation into our worldview.’
JEAN-LUC NANCY
? I've heard of him. I'll leave the evaluation to those more qualified. He hasn't influenced me at all. But, reading him, I feel that he could.
‘There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.’
“What this world needs is truth, not consolation. It must find itself in its ordeal and by way of its restlessness, not in the solace of edifying discourses that do nothing but pile on more testimony to its misery.”
― Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness Of The Negative
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
‘The Capabilities Approach can be provisionally defined as an approach to comparative quality-of-life assessment and to theorizing about basic social justice. It holds that the key question to ask, when comparing societies and assessing them for their basic decency or justice, is, "What is each person able to do and to be?" In other words, the approach takes each person as an end, asking not just about the total or average well-being but about the opportunities available to each person. It is focused on choice or freedom, holding that the crucial good societies should be promoting for their people is a set of opportunities, or substantial freedoms, which people then may or may nor exercise in action: the choice is theirs. It thus commits itself to respect for people's power's of self-definition. The approach is resolutely pluralist about value: it holds that the capability achievements that are central for people are different in quality, not just in quantity; that they cannot without distortion be reduced to a single numerical scale; and that a fundamental part of understanding and producing them is understanding the specific nature of each. Finally, the approach is concerned with entrenched social injustice and inequality, especially capability failures that are the result of discrimination or marginalization. It ascribes an urgent task to government and public policy—namely, to improve the quality of life for all people, as defined by their capabilities.’
― Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
THE PHILOSOPHER OF FEELINGS
Martha Nussbaum’s far-reaching ideas illuminate the often ignored elements of human life.
'She is one of the central figures in the revival of philosophical attention to the emotions in the 20th century, she makes extensive use of literature in her work, and she focuses her attention on intimate personal matters and real-world issues. Think about that: a philosopher whose work emphasizes emotions, stories, personal life issues, and real-world politics is by many measures one of the most successful and accomplished philosophers alive.'
I've said it a million times before ... Martha Nussbaum is my favourite living philosopher (along with the immense Alasdair MacIntyre - "After Virtue", "Dependent Rational Animals", "Philosophy recalled to its tasks", "Truth as a good" ...).
Not sure the materials here do her full service, but her work is well-worth becoming acquainted with for its depth, vision, commitment to public life.
http://dailynous.com/2016/07/18/worlds-most-successful-different-philosophers/
Nussbaum drifted from the moderns back toward ancient philosophy, where she could follow Aristotle, who asked the basic question “How should a human live?” She realized that philosophy attracted a “logic-chopping type of person,” nearly always male. She came to believe that she understood Nietzsche’s thinking when he wrote that no great philosopher had ever been married. “I think what he was saying is that most philosophers have been in flight from human existence,” she said. “They just haven’t wanted to be entangled.” She rejected the idea, dominant in contemporary philosophy, that emotions were “unthinking energies that simply push the person around.” Instead, she resurrected a version of the Stoic theory that makes no division between thought and feeling. She gave emotions a central role in moral philosophy, arguing that they are cognitive in nature: they embody judgments about the world.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/martha-nussbaums-moral-philosophies?currentPage=all
“To be a good human being,” she has said, “is to have a kind of openness to the world, the ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered.” She searches for a “non-denying style of writing,” a way to describe emotional experiences without wringing the feeling from them. She disapproves of the conventional style of philosophical prose, which she describes as “scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid,” and disengaged with the problems of its time. Like Narcissus, she says, philosophy falls in love with its own image and drowns.
'Utilitarian and Kantian theories were dominant at the time, and Nussbaum felt that the field had become too insular and professionalized. She was frustrated that her colleagues were more interested in conceptual analyses than in attending to the details of people’s lives. While writing an austere dissertation on a neglected treatise by Aristotle, she began a second book, about the urge to deny one’s human needs. In “The Fragility of Goodness,” one of the best-selling contemporary philosophy books, she rejected Plato’s argument that a good life is one of total self-sufficiency. She argued that tragedy occurs because people are living well: they have formed passionate commitments that leave them exposed. She began the book by acknowledging:
"I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing something wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take to be not just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of practical wisdom."
'We began talking about a chapter that she intended to write for her book on aging, on the idea of looking back at one’s life and turning it into a narrative. “Did you stand for something, or didn’t you?” she said. She said that she had always admired the final words of John Stuart Mill, who reportedly said, “I have done my work.” She has quoted these words in a number of interviews and papers, offering them as the mark of a life well lived. The image of Mill on his deathbed is not dissimilar to one she has of her father, who died as he was putting papers into his briefcase. Nussbaum often describes this as a good death—he was doing his work until the end—while Nussbaum’s brother and sister see it as a sign of his isolation.
She said, “If I found that I was going to die in the next hour, I would not say that I had done my work. If you have a good life, you typically always feel that there’s something that you want to do next.” She wondered if Mill had surrendered too soon because he was prone to depression.'
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/martha-nussbaums-moral-philosophies?currentPage=all
Martha Nussbaum has influenced my own work immensely. If you don't know her, get acquainted.
"Dr. Martha Craven Nussbaum has led global discourse on philosophical topics that influence the human condition in profound ways, including contemporary theories of justice, law, education, feminism and international development assistance.
Starting with studies of ancient Greek tragedy and Aristotelian philosophy, Dr. Nussbaum has taken a critical stance toward the rational individualism in modern Western society while emphasizing the ethical values embodied in emotions. She strives to present ethics that effectively promote human welfare amid an environment of globally changing social conditions that often produce conflict in values and emotions.
Among her best-known achievements is the development of a political philosophy that focuses on human capabilities. Over many years, Dr. Nussbaum worked with Dr. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist who attempted to reintegrate philosophy and economics and advocated a capability approach to human well-being. Dr. Nussbaum’s version of the “capabilities approach” was created by developing the results of their collaborative research in a unique way. Reinterpreting the notion of Aristotle’s dynamis, she has advocated a new idea: that the normative justice of liberalism should focus on the development of capabilities—what each individual is able to do or be—so people can unlock their potential and flourish."
The award citation:
http://dailynous.com/2016/06/18/martha-nussbaum-wins-kyoto-prize/
'“Martha Nussbaum embodies the Greek ideal of philosophy as an art of citizenship,” said Prof. Gabriel Richardson Lear, chair of UChicago’s Department of Philosophy. “People around the world listen to her because she is able to make original contributions at the level of abstract thought and then show how they make a difference to the most important issues of our political and personal lives. The range of her influence is extraordinary—distributive justice, opera, political emotions, Plato's theory of love, the Aristotelian manuscript tradition ... to name just a few.'
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2016/06/17/prof-martha-nussbaum-wins-kyoto-prize
The Intelligence of Emotions: Philosopher Martha Nussbaum on How Storytelling Rewires Us and Why Befriending Our Neediness Is Essential for Happiness
“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”
Nussbaum writes:
"A lot is at stake in the decision to view emotions in this way, as intelligent responses to the perception of value. If emotions are suffused with intelligence and discernment, and if they contain in themselves an awareness of value or importance, they cannot, for example, easily be sidelined in accounts of ethical judgment, as so often they have been in the history of philosophy. Instead of viewing morality as a system of principles to be grasped by the detached intellect, and emotions as motivations that either support or subvert our choice to act according to principle, we will have to consider emotions as part and parcel of the system of ethical reasoning. We cannot plausibly omit them, once we acknowledge that emotions include in their content judgments that can be true or false, and good or bad guides to ethical choice. We will have to grapple with the messy material of grief and love, anger and fear, and the role these tumultuous experiences play in thought about the good and the just.
[…]
Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself."
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/11/23/martha-nussbaum-upheavals-of-thought-neediness/
Creating Capabilities
'If a country’s Gross Domestic Product increases each year, but so does the percentage of its people deprived of basic education, health care, and other opportunities, is that country really making progress? If we rely on conventional economic indicators, can we ever grasp how the world’s billions of individuals are really managing?
In this powerful critique, Martha Nussbaum argues that our dominant theories of development have given us policies that ignore our most basic human needs for dignity and self-respect. For the past twenty-five years, Nussbaum has been working on an alternate model to assess human development: the Capabilities Approach. She and her colleagues begin with the simplest of questions: What is each person actually able to do and to be? What real opportunities are available to them?
The Capabilities Approach to human progress has until now been expounded only in specialized works. Creating Capabilities, however, affords anyone interested in issues of human development a wonderfully lucid account of the structure and practical implications of an alternate model. It demonstrates a path to justice for both humans and nonhumans, weighs its relevance against other philosophical stances, and reveals the value of its universal guidelines even as it acknowledges cultural difference. In our era of unjustifiable inequity, Nussbaum shows how—by attending to the narratives of individuals and grasping the daily impact of policy—we can enable people everywhere to live full and creative lives.'
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050549
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674050549&content=reviews
JOHN SEARLE
‘I don’t think philosophers should worry too much about what people think about them, just get on with the work. As far as I’m concerned philosophy is the most important subject of all because other subjects get their importance by how they relate to the larger issues. And that’s what philosophy is about – the larger issues.’
‘Now, I admire the history of philosophy, but not for the right reasons. I don’t think I learnt a lot of truths from reading Leibniz or Kant. I think Leibniz was probably the most intelligent person who ever lived, but I think his philosophical views are probably pretty much mistaken. I mean, the bit about the monads and so on. Kant was probably the greatest philosopher that ever lived and he is an obsession, but I think the whole thing is based on a mistake – that you can’t have a direct knowledge of things in themselves. You can. I’m looking at a desk and I see a thing in itself.’
http://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/john-searle-it-upsets-me-when-i-read-the-nonsense-written-by-my-contemporaries/
'How is it possible for physical, objective, quantitatively describable neuron firings to cause qualitative, private, subjective experiences?' (Searle 1995.) We still wait an answer.
John Searle has no proclaimed allegiance to Aristotle or Aquinas, but he writes this:
‘there is no nonintentional standpoint from which we can survey the relations between Intentional states and their conditions of satisfaction. Any analysis must take place from within the circle of Intentional concepts.’ (Searle, Intentionality, 79). In other words, in our attempt to understand the cosmos it is impossible to eliminate the notion of final causality. Though final causes have been much maligned, they shouldn’t be. Final causes simply specify the regular and characteristic actions of the various agents and efficient causes that operate in the natural world. An efficient cause specifies how something happens – it names the agent which makes something happen. A bricklayer is an efficient cause of a house. A final cause specifies why something happened, it provides the purpose, goal or typical direction of an agent.
Earlier, I referred to Mary Midgley’s belief that the world is infused with purpose. This idea is something that crops up in the philosophers whose work I favour.
‘Scientists never ask themselves why things happen, but how they happen. Now as soon as you substitute the positivist’s notion of relation for the metaphysical notion of cause, you at once lose all right to wonder why things are, and why they are what they are’ (Eteinne Gilson, God and Philosophy, 112). But not all scientists have renounced ‘the metaphysical notion of cause’. ‘Aristotle’s eidos is a teleonomic principle which performed in Aristotle’s thinking precisely what the genetic programme of the modern biologist performs’. (Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 88; see also biologist Armand Leroi’s work on Aristotle).
‘If philosophy identifies true knowledge with useful knowledge, as modern scientism [positivism] does, final causality will be by the same stroke eliminated from nature and from science as a useless fiction. Aristotle … saw things otherwise. In his philosophy final causality occupied a considerable position because its workings were, for him, an inexhaustible source of contemplation and admiration… Not so much aesthetic beauty … but first of all and above all the intelligible beauty, which consists in the apperception by the mind of the order which rules the structure of forms and presides over their relations’ (Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin, 19).
‘Time out of mind it has been by the way of the ‘final cause,’ by the teleological concept of end, of purpose or of ‘design,’ in one of its many forms .. . that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of the living world: and it will be so while men have eyes to see and ears to hear withal. With Galen as with Aristotle, it was the physician's way; with John Ray as with Aristotle it was the naturalist's way; with Kant as with Aristotle it was the philosopher's way. ... It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature in the hearts of men.’
—D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1942
Aristotle ‘realized, as a later generation will perhaps again realize, that 'purpose' is engrained in all natural processes, not superimposed by man, though purpose no more admits the ulterior explanation than does causality.’ (Mumford The City in History, 1966: 215).
Mumford describes purposeless materialism as ‘the vice that now threatens to overwhelm our own civilization in the very midst of its technological advancement’. Our mistake is to have treated materialization as an end in itself. (Mumford 1966 ch 4).
‘If human life has no purpose and meaning, then the philosophy that proclaims this fact is even emptier than the situation it describes. If, on the other hand, there is more to man's fate and history than meets the eye, if the process as a whole has significance, then even the humblest life and the most insignificant organic function will participate in that ultimate meaning. (Mumford, The Conduct of Life, 1952: 61/62).
For Flew, it is the argument from design that shows that the existence of God is probable. He has been impressed by recent scientific developments that suggest that the universe is the product of intelligent design. “It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design,” explains Flew.
Flew cites Gerald Schroeder’s work The Hidden Face of God and Roy Abraham Varghese’s The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God as particularly impressive. In the foreword to the new (and final) edition of his God and Philosophy, which Flew now describes as “an historical relic”, he acknowledges that the argument from design “becomes progressively more powerful with every advance in humankind’s knowledge of the integrated complexity of what used to be called the ‘system of nature’.” As this progress continues, perhaps more will follow Flew’s lead in conceding ground to theism.
http://www.existence-of-god.com/flew-abandons-atheism.html
http://www.bethinking.org/does-god-exist/a-change-of-mind-for-antony-flew
ERNEST SOSA
From Noah Lemos – An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge
Virtue Epistemology emphasizes the role of intellectual virtues in knowledge and justification. The focus of this chapter is the theory put forward by Ernest Sosa.
“While reliabilism holds that beliefs enjoy a positive epistemic status in virtue of being the product of a reliable cognitive process, Sosa’s virtue approach maintains that beliefs enjoy a positive epistemic status in virtue of being the product of a truth conducive intellectual virtue.” (p98)
Sosa distinguishes between two kinds of positive epistemic states: aptness and justification. A belief is apt in virtue of its being the product of a truth conducive intellectual virtue. A belief is justified in virtue of its coherence. Sosa is accepting the epistemic merits behind both coherentism and reliabilism and their guiding intuitions through this distinction.
What is an intellectual virtue?
In general, an excellence of some kind, either innate or acquired. A disposition, skill, or competence that makes one good at achieving some goal. A skillful result vs. a lucky result. It can be thought of in terms of ‘avoiding error’.
This constitutes a reliable belief forming process. However, to attain the status of an intellectual ‘virtue’, the established disposition must have some bearing on relevant real-life knowledge situations. This is ‘aptness’ over ‘justification’. Justification is a matter of coherence, aptness a matter of the intellectual virtue that yields it. Sosa is introducing a supplement to justified belief, which is aptness. Aptness is necessary for knowledge in addition to justification.
“First, knowledge requires not just any reliable mechanism of belief formation, it requires that belief derive from an intellectual virtue. Second, it distinguishes between aptness and justification. An apt belief is one derived from an intellectual virtue, whereas a justified belief is one that fits coherently within the perspective of the believer.. Third, it distinguishes between animal and reflective knowledge. For the former, apt true belief is sufficient. Reflective knowledge requires not only belief that is true and apt, but also belief that is justified, that fits coherently within the subject’s epistemic perspective.” (p104)
Sosa has been influential as a result of his development of “virtue epistemology.”
Virtue epistemology represents a renewed philosophical interest in the concept of virtue, introducing intellectual virtues as a way to resolve the debate between foundationalism and coherentism.
Contemporary interest in virtue epistemology began with a paper by Ernest Sosa, where he claimed that a turn to virtue theory would allow a solution to the impasse between foundationalist theories of justification and coherentist theories of justification.
‘This is the context in which Sosa suggests that virtue epistemology will do the trick. Suppose we think of virtues in general as excellences of character. A virtue is a stable and successful disposition: an innate ability or an acquired habit, that allows one to reliably achieve some good. An intellectual virtue will then be a cognitive excellence: an innate ability or acquired habit that allows one to reliably achieve some intellectual good, such as truth in a relevant matter. We may now think of justified belief as belief that is appropriately grounded in one's intellectual virtues, and we may think of knowledge as true belief that is so grounded. By adopting this position, we can see the foundationalist's epistemic principles as instances of this more general account of justified belief and knowledge. The idea is that human beings possess intellectual virtues that involve sensory experience; i.e. stable and reliable dispositions for forming beliefs about the environment on the basis of experiential inputs. Such dispositions involve various sensory modalities such as vision and hearing. Other cognitive beings might possess analogous dispositions, involving kinds of sensory experience unknown to humans. Accordingly, Sosa argues, virtue epistemology provides the unified account that was needed.
The same idea accounts for the truth involved in coherentism as well. Namely, coherence gives rise to justified belief and knowledge precisely because it is the manifestation of intellectual virtue. In our world, and for beings like us, coherence increases reliability, and therefore constitutes a kind of intellectual virtue in its own right. Moreover, coherence of a certain sort allows for reflective knowledge as opposed to mere animal knowledge. According to Sosa, we rise to a different and superior kind of justification and knowledge when we are able to see our beliefs as deriving from intellectual virtues. This perspective on our virtues must itself derive from a second-order intellectual virtue, one that allows us to reliably monitor and adjust our first-level cognitive dispositions (Sosa 1980).’
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/
Ernest Sosa and virtuously begging the question
http://scholar.uwindsor.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1037&context=ossaarchive
CHARLES TAYLOR
“To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.”
― Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity
“What should have died along with communism is the belief that modern societies can be run on a single principle, whether that of planning under the general will or that of free-market allocations.”
― Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity
‘There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.’
To understand Taylor's views, there is a need to understand his philosophical background, especially his writings on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemologies. In his essay "To Follow a Rule", Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge it is that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions, we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions.
Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life". More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions, and tendencies.
Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules by explicitly representing them to ourselves, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application: application requires that we draw on an unarticulated understanding or "sense of things"—the background.
Charles Taylor's transcendental arguments for liberal communitarianism
Yong Huang
‘This paper sees Charles Taylor's moral discourse as a version of liberal communitarianism, an attempt to reconcile liberalism and communitarianism, by examining his three transcendental arguments: the liberal transcendence from the parochial to the universal; the communitarian transcendence from the instinctual to the ontological; and the theistic transcendence from the good to God. While this liberal communitarianism absorbs some great insights from both liberalism and communitarianism and overcomes some of their respective weaknesses, it fails to avoid their common dichotomy of the good and the right because Taylor's fundamentally communitarian commitment leads him to believe that there must be a universal ontological (religious or metaphysical) idea of the good as the foundation for any needed universal social and political idea of the right.’
http://psc.sagepub.com/content/24/4/79.abstract
Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor argued that moral and political judgment will depend on the language of reasons and the interpretive framework within which agents view their world, hence that it makes no sense to begin the political enterprise by abstracting from the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs, practices, and institutions (Taylor 1985, ch. 1; MacIntyre 1978, chs.18–22 and 1988, ch.1; Benhabib 1992, pp. 23–38, 89n4).
Charles Taylor interviewed
AC Grayling: Well, we could begin with Aristotle and we could trudge on through Stoic ethics. There’s a very profound tradition of humanistic ethics. Why doesn’t that catch your imagination?
Taylor: It does, but I see it as a very different universe from Hume. For instance, Aristotle has an understanding of us as embodied minds, embodied agencies that Hume has been “Cartesianised” away from. In other words, the Humean idea that I could object to faith with my understanding, with some inner intensive mentoring, is un-Aristotelian and un-Stoic.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/charles-taylor-philosopher-interview
AMIE THOMASSON
‘In Thomasson’s view, many of the metaphysical disputes about existence that populate contemporary philosophy suffer from being misguided in their basic questioning. Rather than offer a complex, highly abstract rebuttal of such arguments, Thomasson has provided a simpler (though not to imply insignificant) answer: that these questions can be answered much more easily than many philosophers have imagined, using inferences from uncontroversial premises.’
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/fictionalism-phenomenology-and-ordinary-things/
PETER UNGER
Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas: Interview with Peter Unger
‘Philosophy: you either get it or you don't. The field has its passionate defenders, but according to its critics, philosophy is irrelevant, unproductive, and right at the height of the ivory towers. And now, the philosophy-bashing camp can count a proud defector from the other side: Peter Unger, Professor of Philosophy at New York University, has come out against the field in his latest book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy.’
‘To me, all this sort of stuff is parochial, or trivial. People who are signing up for philosophy don’t think they’re going to end up with this kind of stuff. They want to learn something about the ‘ultimate nature of reality’, and their position in relation to it. And when you’re doing philosophy, you don’t have a prayer of offering even anything close to a correct or even intelligible answer to any of these questions.’
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2014/06/philosophy-is-a-bunch-of-empty-ideas-interview-with-peter-unger.html#sthash.H7fBmCK4.dpuf
‘Bad news: much of what you say as a philosopher is concretely empty. Yes, you, even if you do not work in metaphysics: Peter Unger's target is 'mainstream philosophy' of the past fifty years and, whilst he sets aside wholly normative claims, he makes plain their prospects are also dim. So a reviewer must establish what Unger means by 'concretely empty', before examining his reasons for thus classifying most of what philosophers-these-days say.’
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/54908-empty-ideas-a-critique-of-analytic-philosophy/
I've defended philosophy at length against claims that it is an ivory tower profession that leaves the world unchanged. The emptiness of modern philosophy and ethics I take to denote an emptiness of a modern disenchanted world that our scientific method and socio-economic practice has shorn of meaning, value and goodness. As a philosopher, I seek the fullness and wholeness of the world, a world that expresses a unity with differentation, a universality that manifests itself in concrete particulars. To get there requires philosophy.
“Philosophy is about possibilities: logical, metaphysical, human, social, and political possibilities. That’s why philosophy is so abstract: it keeps its distance from the world. That’s also why philosophy is a tool of criticism: it focuses our attention on ways the world might be. Philosophy’s focus on the possible is the source of its distinctive beauty, and also its special dangers.”
– Joshua Cohen