Marcelo Gleiser: "The Island of Knowledge" (Talks at Google)

Marcelo Gleiser stopped by Google recently to discuss his new book, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (2014). His previous books are The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (2005), The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World (2002), and A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe (2010).

Here is the publisher's ad copy for the new book from Amazon:

Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth?

To be human is to want to know, but what we are able to observe is only a tiny portion of what’s “out there.” In The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited.

These limits to our knowledge arise both from our tools of exploration and from the nature of physical reality: the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the impossibility of seeing beyond the cosmic horizon, the incompleteness theorem, and our own limitations as an intelligent species. Recognizing limits in this way, Gleiser argues, is not a deterrent to progress or a surrendering to religion. Rather, it frees us to question the meaning and nature of the universe while affirming the central role of life and ourselves in it. Science can and must go on, but recognizing its limits reveals its true mission: to know the universe is to know ourselves.

Telling the dramatic story of our quest for understanding, The Island of Knowledge offers a highly original exploration of the ideas of some of the greatest thinkers in history, from Plato to Einstein, and how they affect us today. An authoritative, broad-ranging intellectual history of our search for knowledge and meaning, The Island of Knowledge is a unique view of what it means to be human in a universe filled with mystery.

Gleiser is a smart and entertaining guy, so this is likely a fun read.

Marcelo Gleiser: "The Island of Knowledge"

Talks at Google
Published on Oct 15, 2014


In The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (2014), he traces our search for answers to some of the most fundamental questions of existence and reaches a provocative conclusion: the main tool we use to find answers – science – is fundamentally limited. Yet recognizing science’s limits, Gleiser argues, is not a deterrent to progress or a surrendering to religion. Instead, it frees us to question the meaning and nature of the universe while affirming the central role of life and ourselves in it.

Marcelo Gleiser is Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College and the author of three previous books, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (2005), The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World (2002), and A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe (2010).

Big Think - All Meaning Is Relational

At Big Think a few months back, Jag Bhalla breaks down the argument against a "pleasure machine" that would provide any experience you'd like (presumably pleasurable) for all time (no unplugging). The argument is that such an experience would be the ultimate in hedonism, and therefore very non-relational.

This is a little convoluted (as are most thought experiments), but I like the conclusion quite a bit - meaning IS relational.

All Meaning Is Relational

by Jag Bhalla
June 27, 2014

All meaning is relational (otherwise it’s potentially useless and unhealthy). That’s true for both senses of meaning, and Nozick’s “Pleasure Machine” shows why workable individualism must be relational.

1. Individualism’s definition includes seeking your “own goals without reference to others,” especially free from collective constraints. “Individual” itself means “nondividable” (Latin translation of Greek “atom” = “uncuttable”).

2. Individualized meaning in language (private usage) if unshared, is logically irrelevant to others.

3. “Meanings of life” work the same way. Purposes pursued to make life feel worthwhile, if too self-oriented (unshared, unrelational) risk uselessness and unhealthiness.

4. Nozick’s Pleasure Machine manipulates your mind to experience (as if real) anything you’d like. The catch? Like “The Matrix” you can’t unplug.

5. Nozick felt few would choose this individualist Eden; its extremely self-absorbed pleasures wouldn’t make a meaningful life (showing we aren’t entirely solo pleasure-seekers).

6. Philosophically there’s no trace of genuine individualism in Plato or Aristotle (an Epicurean version arose later). Hobbes (the mushroom-logic guy) and Bentham (of utility bucket fame) invented today’s pleasure-centric individualism (they’d both love Nozick’s machine).

7. Related religious ideas illustrate Judeo-Christian differences. Christianity promotes self-sacrifice and selflessness (and somehow a gospel of wealth). But Judaism favors both self-benefit and other-orientedness (see Hillel).

8. Pop-science claims nature is ruthlessly “selfish.” But human nature crucially adds otherness to selfness. We’ve evolved for team survival for ~10,000 generations (we’re highly self-deficient and other-dependent). Hence our deep drive to belong to and seek “responsibility to something greater than the self.”

9. Individualism remains a sampling error: Most cultures are still socio-centric (not W.E.I.R.D.).

10. Economic ideas now dominate how we balance selfness and otherness (often trumping philosophy, religion, science, data, and experience). Economists generally promote maximum self-seeking, delegating most otherness to markets (turning relational into transactional). But free markets alone don’t—and can’t (in practice)—work as advertised, or deliver all that’s needed.

Meaning and pleasure (or supposed synonyms like utility or happiness) aren’t interchangeable labels for life purposes. Meaning is inherently relational. Many pleasures now are not. Their logic leads to Nozick’s machine (or a globally self-oriented market “Matrix”).


~ Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

Simone Stirner - Notes on the State of the Subject (after Postmodernism)

The following comes from Simone Stirner, posted at Notes on Metamodernism, which I discovered thanks to Michel Bauwens' P2P Foundation blog.

Notes on Metamodernism was founded in 2009 by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. They were later joined by Nadine Fessler, Hila Schachar, Luke Turner and Alison Gibbons. Today, the site features contributions by over 30 writers from across the globe, documenting anything from art to politics, critical theory to television.

A good introductory article, What is metamodernism? is available - here is the opening statement.

Metamodernism is neither a residual nor an emergent structure of feeling, but the dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. It can be grasped as a generational attempt to surpass postmodernism and a general response to our present, crisis-ridden moment.

This is interesting stuff.

Notes on the state of the subject

Simone Stirner
on November 2, 2011


Postmodernism announced the death of the subject, but recent developments in literature, philosophy and political agency suggest that it is alive and kicking as ever. Not in form of the modern Cartesian ego though and also not in denial of all the subjectivity-disrupting forces that postmodern theory pointed out. It returns with a great leap of faith, in a fragile moment of intersubjective trust and reveals characteristic traits that call for another vernacular, one that this webzine has come to describe as metamodern.[i]

“A prevalent discourse of a recent epoch concludes with its [the subject’s] simple liquidation”, states Jacques Derrida in an interview with Jean-Luc Nancy. The “recent epoch” Derrida is talking about is postmodernism, of course. And who would know better what postmodernism is about than the wizard of postmodern thought himself? In a discourse that casts doubt on the credulity of metanarratives, that questions the hermeneutics of meaning, the rational, self-contained subject of modernism has had a hard time indeed.For the subject at stake here, the subject allegedly liquidated in postmodernism, is the modern subject. Its beginnings can be traced back to sometime around the Renaissance and Reformation, but it is most commonly characterized in terms of the Cartesian Ego: it is strong, autonomous, reasonable and above all coherent. It has cast off determination by church doctrine and Christianity`s encompassing truths and instead goes for, as Heidegger puts it, “legislating for himself”[ii].

Postmodernism then dismantles and deconstructs all the grand-narratives and overriding truths, only this time this affects not only the grand-narrative of religion, but also the subject itself, whose status as a rational entity is seen as another grand-narrative. Backed by post-structural linguistics, the different postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers, such as Foucault, Althusser or Lacan, are taking a tough stance towards the subject and are exposing it as foreign-ruled, schizophrenic, instable, a field of discourses. The skepticism against metanarratives remains one of the greatest achievements of postmodern thinking, changing not only the face of philosophy, but influencing profoundly such fields as identity and gender politics, backing disability studies, triggering post-colonial studies and bringing the project of multiculturalism to life.

These achievements remain unchallenged. Nevertheless, over the last ten years, quite astonishing changes have happened, for instance in terms of discussing subjectivity in academia. Across a variety of disciplines – literary studies, philosophy, political theory and even psychology – calls for a rethinking of subjectivity can be heard. Publications dealing with “The return of the subject” or “The Self beyond the Postmodern Crisis“, suddenly become ubiquitous.

But also in literature, film, arts and political agency, we can witness a paradigm shift. The subject reappears and it comes with other dismissed categories such as trust, belief, coherence and even love. I would suggest that it reappears in a confined space that Peter Sloterdijk in his “Spherology” describes as a “Bubble” – an artificially created space, where in a human, intersubjective experience, the outside forces exposed by postmodern thinkers can be temporarily shut out.

In Performatism or The End of Postmodernism, the literary scholar Raoul Eshelman depicts a new kind of subject that establishes itself in spite of disruptive forces in an act of belief. This subject is a coherent self that re-introduces the possibility for identification, affection and selfhood, although not in a naïve, unreflective way.

Similarly, Karen Coats assures that there is no way the Cartesian Ego can return after all that was learned from Postmodernism – only to then sling the slogan “I love, therefore I am” into the arena of debate, calling for a rethinking of the concept of the Self, acknowledging the role of love in its construction. The writings of Lebanese-French author Amin Maalouf ask for a rethinking of the concept of identity describing it as an act of positive affirmation, which can include an attachment to a religion or land or ethnic group, while acknowledging the instability of identity as such. And even the great evangelist of postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, suddenly calls for an “Aesthetic of Trust”, where in a “world flow of ultimate mysteries”, the relation between subject and object can be redefined in terms of “profound trust”[iii].

As others have documented on this webzine, in literature as well as film or television, too, we suddenly come to meet characters who masquerade as coherent subjects. They are innovative figures who step into the scene with a quirkiness that, perhaps precisely because of their idiosyncratic authenticity, renders possible a new relation between literary hero and recipient. Furthermore, we experience a shift considering political agency: Wasn’t the subject of Postmodernism (as Slavoij Žižek doesn’t cease to remind us), essentially powerless in the workings of global capitalism? Then the symbol of the OccupyWallStreet-Protests, the fragile, yet brave and daring ballerina on top of the iron bull, definitely proves a new kind of political agent.

While all of the above mentioned fields are worth taking a closer look at, it is one artist that best exemplifies, for me, the parameters of the metamodern subject: Miranda July. Readers of this webzine might know July from James MacDowell`s articles on the “quirky” cinematic sensibility, in which MacDowell describes her self-starred movie “Me and You and Everyone We Know” as one of those post-millennial American indie comedies that convey a metamodern tone and feeling. This does not only apply to her films, however. Across the oeuvre of all-rounder July, we are confronted with moments in which bitter irony is paired to straight sincerity, fear to trust, and skepticism to optimism.

Central to all her fictional works are characters that can be described –euphemistically – as socially awkward. They are naïve to an extent that one wants to scream at them or simply turn off the TV or throw away the book; they are lonely and desperately looking for love; they are either leading terribly average lives or they are isolated and insecure to such an extent that any glimmer of optimism on their faces can only generate a feeling of pity in the spectator. Yet this doesn’t happen. July’s characters somehow manage to overcome the inescapable trap of postmodern discourse. With all their oddities, they develop a braveness and self-confidence that seems highly unreasonable, preposterous and odd in itself, but nevertheless works for them, enabling temporary, intimate relations with others that convey a great deal of beauty.

In the short-story The Sister, a sex-scene between two lonely old men is doomed by bitter skepticism, repulsion, insecurity and one man’s fear of contracting STDs. This being the “real” that postmodernists loved “rubbing observers’ our noses in“[iv], as Raoul Eshelman describes it. But the two men don’t end up being disrupted by the context, instead develop a fragile mutual understanding and emotional proximity, a space where the subject – for the time being – is safe from contextualization. It is an instance of the modern self that is stabilized despite a postmodern background.

The same strategy can be observed in the relationship between a young boy and an embittered art curator in Me and You and Everyone We Know. Their relationship starts in a chat room, where the infamous line: “I want to poop back and forth, forever” is featured. The forces of discourse just hail down on the two characters, but the sincerity of the little boy and the trust of the older woman manage to form a protective shield against outside forces, leading up to a scene that contributed to the “R-Rating” of the movie in the U.S. This scene shows us two subjects in a sphere where context can get no hold of them: The boy kisses the woman, kind and forward, and she smiles for the first time in the movie. Miranda July’s fiction is full of such moments of tender weirdness.

Her interactive sculpture Eleven Heavy Things similarly deals with this possibility of subjectivity despite a hostile, postmodern context in a very unique way. The Sculpture – originally built for the Venice Biennale and later moved to New York Union Square Park, features a square-white pedestal with black inscription, reading:

This is my little girl. She is brave and clever and funny. She will have none of the problems that I have. Her heart will never be humiliated. Self-doubt will not devour her dreams.

At first glance the sculpture recalls the modern subject. It is strong and capable, standing on solid ground. If we were still in the hey-day of modernism, the scripture on the socket supporting whoever stands on it could even be read as a kind of manifesto, a messianic promise. But that is not all there’s to it. While containing space for a belief in the subject, it just as strongly contains space for its dissolution in postmodern irony: self-doubt will not devour your dreams? Seriously? You are a field of energies at the best and a Nothing dissolved in discourse at the worst.

The artwork of Miranda July thus contains, I believe, both a modern and postmodern subjectivity and thus exemplifies the space where an ingenious, metamodern subject can show itself. In this restricted area the subject is characterized by fragile belief that cannot brush aside good old postmodern irony completely – which would dissolve the subject immediately – but keeps it at bay for the moment.The installation enables the creation of a space where love can exist again. As fragile and problematic as it might seem to shut out discourse, it is carried out carefully so it doesn`t fall back into a (modern) fanatic personal-cult.

It is this oscillation between the belief in what is written to be true and the consciousness of it being utterly unlikely that makes for the beauty of the artwork and reflects a feeling that may very well be called metamodern. It is a moment of trust and love despite the harsh reality. It possesses at the same time sincerity and irony. The installation provides us with contained hope that is accompanied by a twitch of melancholy.

The reemerged subject is not the old modern one. It contains no transcendental justifications. Concepts of identity, selfhood and subjectivity can always be dismantled and deconstructed. But while the awareness about this still rightfully persists, new times call us to acknowledge that the subject nevertheless appears, in moments of intersubjectivity, in reciprocal spaces of belief, trust and love.

Notes

[i] The concept of Metamodernism and my understanding of it, is drawn from articles on metamodernism.com and Vermeulen, Tim and Robin van den Akker (2010): Notes on Metamodernism, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 2, 2010 DOI: 10.3402/jac.v2i0.5677

[ii] Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper and Row, (1977), New York, p. 148.

[iii] Hassan, Ihab: “Beyond Postmodernism. Toward an Aesthetic of Trust“, in: Klaus Stierstorfer (Ed.), Beyond Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory and Culture, de Gruyter (2003), Berlin and New York, p. 211.

[iv] Eshelman, Raoul: “Performatism, or The End of Postmodernism”, in: Anthropoetics – The Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology, Volume VI, number 2 (Fall 2000/Winter 2001)

http://www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap0602/perform.htm

Sources:

Coats, Karen: ”The Role of Love in the Development of the Self: From Freund and Lacan to Children’s Stories“, in: Paul Vitz and Susan Felch (Ed.), The Self Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, ISI Books (2006), Wilmington.

Eshelman, Raoul: Performatism or The End of Postmodernism, Davis Group (2008), Aurora.

Hassan, Ihab: “Beyond Postmodernism. Toward an Aesthetic of Trust“, in: Klaus Stierstorfer (Ed.), Beyond Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory and Culture, de Gruyter (2003), Berlin and New York.

Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press (1984), Manchester.

Miranda July: No one belongs here more than you, Canongate (2007), Edinburgh.

Miranda July: Me and You and Everyone We Know, DVD 91 min, IFC (2005)

Sloterdijk, Peter: “Sphären/1. Blasen“, Suhrkamp (1999), Frankfurt a . Main.

Top image: courtesy Miranda July. Still from Me and you and everyone we know (2005). Lower image, left: courtesy Adbusters. Occupy-poster What is your one demand? Lower image, right: courtesy Lukas Wassmann. Photo Eleven Little Things.

John Martin Fischer - How Does a Belief in Immortality Affect the Way We Live Now?

Immortality seems to me to be morally indefensible. The Earth is right now at 7 billion people, so let's say we develop immortality in 10-15 years, when the population will be at 8 billion or more. So none of those people die, and yet people keep reproducing, forever. Imagine the Earth with 15 billion people, or 25 billion. We have already overpopulated the planet. How would we feed these people, where would we get fresh water (as of now, 780 million people lack clean drinking water and 2.3 billion lack basic sanitation), and what about the lack of natural resources for homes, and so on.

Personally, the idea of immortality is abhorrent. Where and how would we find purpose in life if we never die? Boredom would eventually set in, so the only choice would be suicide. Even in the modern vampire stories, creatures who are immortal, many of the oldest vampires express their sense of exhaustion with existence, their "living" malaise. The fact that this idea turns up even in our myths suggests that it is a commonly held belief.

Anyway - this article sets out a philosophical argument for how the idea of immortality might affect how we live our lives today.

How Does a Belief in Immortality Affect the Way We Live Now?

By John Martin Fischer
July 8, 2014

image: Getty

I was asked to address the question,” "How does a belief in immortality affect the way we live now?" I am going to break this into two separate questions that are related to (if not identical to) it. The first question is, “How would the recognition of extreme longevity or even living forever change the way we would behave (or should behave)?” Then I’ll turn to how a belief in an afterlife would (or should) affect our behavior.

First: imagine that you knew that you would live for a very, very long time. We can simplify and imagine that you know that you will live forever. How would or should this hypothetical supposition affect your behavior? Well, it depends! It depends at least on certain background assumptions about the conditions of your envisaged life. Let’s make the “rosy” assumptions that you are in good health, that your body is not deteriorating, that you are comfortable financially, that you have friends and loved ones who are also immortal (in the sense of living forever). These are, of course, big assumptions; but to ask a really big question, sometimes we have to make big assumptions.

Some would say that, even under these very optimistic assumptions, our lives would be totally different—and unpleasant or even unrecognizable as choiceworthy human lives. Various reasons for this curmudgeonly conclusion have been offered, and we’ll consider just a few. First, some have argued that life under such circumstances would be intolerably and relentlessly boring. The idea is that what keeps us from being bored are our “projects”, and eventually we would run out of projects in an indefinitely long (or even just a very long) life.

I just don’t think this is true. That is, I don’t accept the conclusion that we would run out of projects in a very long (even an infinitely long life). Just consider, for starters, all of the scientific problems that remain to be solved. Focus, as a concrete starting point, on all of the diseases that plague human beings. The project of curing all the currently existing diseases would take a very, very long time. And, even assuming we can (given enough time), cure all existing diseases, by that time many new diseases will have popped up, offering new challenges. I just don’t think that it is obvious that we will ever get to the point where we will have cured all diseases (and palliated all human pain, suffering, and distress—both physical and mental). Simply having lots of time—even infinite time—doesn’t seem to imply that all of these challenges will successfully be met.

And we have just focused on a relatively tiny portion of all of the human challenges—the health challenges. How about all of the other scientific and technological challenges? How long will it take to answer certain fundamental questions of physics and cosmology? Even when they have been answered, if they ever are, there would remain the problems of connecting the abstract theories with all manner of practical problems.

Think, just for another set of concrete examples, of all of the challenges we face in preserving our planet from further environmental degradation. These are multifaceted and daunting. They will keep us busy for a long, long time (if we have that long). They could keep us going for a very long time in an infinitely long life.

So far we have considered just a few (admittedly central and important) scientific challenges that would generate projects in an immortal life. There are more where they came from. And think of all of the other kinds of projects: athletic, artistic, social. Consider the projects of writing poetry or novels or creating lovely paintings or sculptures. Or reading and appreciating novels. Why suppose that these projects would run out? Even if you had an infinite amount of time, why suppose that you would exhaust all of the novels worth reading? Suppose you were to read all of the novels currently worth reading. That would take a very, very long time. But (as with the diseases above) by the time you were finished, there would certainly be a new set of novels worth reading (novels that had been written during your very long process of reading). And why suppose that you could not find challenge and engagement in writing novels, even after a million or a billion years? (Of course, all of one’s projects would have to be distributed appropriately—reading or writing or anything can be boring if pursued without a break!).

The challenges and associated projects discussed above might be called “other-directed” projects. But there are also “self-directed” projects, such as eating delicious food, drinking fine wines, listening to music, enjoying art and natural beauty, sex, prayer, and meditation. These are “self-directed” projects in the sense that they aim at or crucially involve pleasant or agreeable mental states of the individual whose project it is. Again, you would have to distribute these projects properly in a very long or even infinitely long life. But why would a life that contained at least some of these projects necessarily be boring? Why couldn’t these activities be part of an overall life that is engaging and worthwhile?

Assuming that we would still have projects—other-directed and/or self-directed—in a very long or infinitely long life, would we have any motivation to pursue the projects? Some have thought that, given an infinite amount of time, all our activities and projects would lack “urgency”. They have even suggested that we would not have any motivation to do anything insofar as “there would always be time”. This is kind of a procrastinator’s nightmare (or perhaps dream!).

But I don’t have much sympathy for the contention that we would have no motivation in an immortal life. Consider, for example, the motivation to avoid pain—that would still exist in an immortal life. Similarly for the motivation to address other forms of limitation or impairment. We care about how we feel now; if we are now in pain or impaired, we will want to address those issues in a timely way. If I am in significant pain now, it is hardly comforting to know that I have forever to live and so eventually my pain will subside.

Similarly with loneliness. If am separated from someone I love or care about, or if I am just lonely now, I have reason to seek to reunite with the person or to find friendship, love, and companionship. The mere fact that I know that I have forever does not alleviate the suffering of loneliness now.

The curmudgeons about projects in an immortal life are too pessimistic. They are spoil-sports. They greatly underestimate the prospects for human engagement and fulfillment. They look at our projects as like books in a library; with infinite time, we can read all of the books. They forget that there will always be new books to read and even new perspectives to bring to the old books.

What about the second way of understanding our basic question? That is, what if we were to come to believe in immortality in an afterlife? How would (or should) this affect our behavior? Well, again, it depends. First, it depends on what conception of immortality we work with—a Buddhist or Hindu view of reincarnation? A Judeo-Christian conception of the afterlife in heaven or hell?

But let’s abstract away from details. In all plausible religious views, what matters crucially for your prospects after you die—your next life in the wheel of reincarnation or your place in heaven, hell, or perhaps purgatory—is the moral quality of your life here and now. That is, your prospects are enhanced by right action for the right reasons in this life. You need actually to care not just about yourself, but about others—you need to love others and to care about justice. If your actions manifest love of others and a dominant concern for justice, then you will be rewarded in the afterlife. It is key that you must act for the right reasons. And here it is important that the reason for your behavior must not be that it will enhance your prospects in the afterlife. You may of course understand and anticipate this fact. But it cannot be your reason for action. If it were, then your action would be motivated by self-interest and not morality. You would not be doing the right thing for the right reason. So there is a sense in which your behavior now should be focused on this world and the needs and interests of others here and now, even if one were to believe in an afterlife.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you agree that you would not necessarily run out of other-directed projects in a very long life? An infinitely long life?

2. Do you agree that you could still have self-directed projects in a very long or infinitely long life? Or would such a life necessarily be boring?

3. Do you agree that, even if you believe in an afterlife, you should be concerned about your behavior and motivations here and now. Or do you thank that you should focus more on the life to come?

Related Questions  

• How Do We Find Purpose in Life?  
• What Does Our Understanding of Time Suggest About the Nature of Reality? 

The Partially Examined Life, Episode 76: Deleuze on What Philosophy Is

From The Partially Examined LIfe - a very cool philosophy podcast and blog - this is an interesting discussion on Gilles Deleuze's vision of what philosophy is. Here are a few helpful links to get you acquaniuted with his ideas.

Gilles Deleuze at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Other Internet Resources

• Deleuze Web (includes Deleuze's lectures at Vincennes in French, English, and other languages)
• Deleuze and Guattari on the Web, a comprehensive site maintained by Charles Stivale of Wayne State University
• Summary of Deleuze's ABC's, (L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze), produced by Charles Stivale of Wayne State University
• Course page on Deleuze and Guattari, including lectures and outlines of texts by Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari
• Entry on Deleuze, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• La voix de Gilles Deleuze, Transcripts and sound files (MP3) of Deleuze lectures

Enjoy the podcast.

Episode 76: Deleuze on What Philosophy Is

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:10:55 — 119.9MB)
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer on May 14, 2013

On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1991).

How is philosophy different from science and art? What’s the relationship between different philosophies? Is better pursued solo, or in a group? Deleuze described philosophy as the creation of new concepts, whereas science is about functions that map observed regularities and art is about creating percepts and affects. Just reading or writing about past philosophers is not enough; you have to actually create concepts, and to create or understand a concept requires a “plane of immanence,” which is something like a set of background intuitions that is not private to a particular mind. Such a plane constitutes an image of what thought is and determines what questions will be considered legitimate, so trying to evaluate a past philosophy without grappling with the plane means you’ll inevitably misunderstand the philosopher and your critiques will just talk past him or her. Likewise, if you yank a philosophical concept out of its plane and try to turn it into a proposition that you can evaluate, it’s inevitably going to seem weak, like “just an opinion,” because propositions are not what philosophy creates. As for a pragmatist, “truth” for Deleuze is something defined within a plane, not some transcendental standard used to judge planes or concepts.

Mark, Seth, and Dylan are joined by “sophist” (PhD in rhetoric) Daniel Coffeen to try to figure this out. Read more about the topic and get the book.

End song: “Tolerated” by New People, the new album Might Get It Right. Read about it.

Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate to help support our efforts. A recurring donation will gain you all the benefits of PEL Citizenship, including another Deleuze discussion.

Jami (my partner) watched this the other day and I watched over her shoulder - it's entertaining to see a 9-year-old thinking in such meta-philosophical ways. NPR picked up the story and now so has Open Culture. Enjoy.

9-Year-Old Philosopher Ponders the Meaning of Life and the Universe

March 30th, 2013


He’s nine years old. And they call him “The Philosopher.” Give the clip a few seconds and you will see exactly why. The Philosopher tackles the biggest questions: Why are we on earth? What’s our place in the universe? Is there life elsewhere in that universe, or, for that matter, do we live in a multiverse? What’s the meaning of life? And, finally, might our life be predestined — all scripted out for us in advance? Watch it, and then ask yourself: Do you know many adults who can reel off better answers? Doubt you will say yes. 

via NPR via @Alyssa_Milano

George Dvorsky on the Anthropic Principle at io9

Over at io9, George Dvorsky has posted an interesting and well-done article on the anthropic principle. This topic is of special interest to me because it's one of the issues that bothers me about Buddhism, integral theory, and various other theories that posit a universe with consciousness as an essential element of its existence.

Theories of emergence make a lot more sense to me without the need for panpsychism as an explanatory feature for the existence of consciousness.

How does the Anthropic Principle change the meaning of the universe?

George Dvorsky
March 8, 2013

One of the more extraordinary things about the universe is that it has produced beings who can observe it — namely, us. Its laws and constants are so precise that, if they were even slightly modified, no human would be here to see it. Many cosmologists and philosophers have wondered if we should read anything into all this preciseness: Are the finely-tuned physical laws that surround us mere coincidence, or does it imply that we are somehow meant to be here? That's where the Anthropic Principle comes into play.

The Anthropic Principle (AP) is that hazy grey area where philosophy meets science. And in fact, many scientists loathe it for this very reason. It's untestable, they argue, and tautological — a skewed form of reasoning in which the principle is basically being used to prove itself.

And indeed, the AP does seem like a strange concept at first. It essentially states that we will only find ourselves in a universe that's capable of giving rise to us. Put another way, observations of the universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it.

It's a principle that makes perfect sense — and for some, no sense at all. But like so many things in science and philosophy, the devil is in the details.

The AP forces us to take a giant step back and evaluate the conditions of the universe in consideration of our presence within it. For scientists, it's a kind of ‘40 foot perspective' that can help illuminate — and even possibly explain — some of the more surprising aspects of cosmology. And at the very least, it serves as a constant reality check to remind us that we will always be subject to observational selectional effects; no matter where we go, we will always be there.

A good thought experiment in this regard comes from the Canadian philosopher John Leslie. In his book, Universes, he asks us to imagine a man facing a firing squad of fifty expert marksman. After aiming and firing, the executioners miss their mark.

Now, there are two ways in which we can evaluate this surprising outcome. We can either shrug our shoulders and point to the obvious, that they they simply missed. Or we can come up with some explanations as to why they all missed. This latter point is very much at the heart of anthropic reasoning.

Origins

The AP has been around for quite some time, though it only really took on its modern form in the last forty years.

Early efforts to come to grips with observational effects were expressed in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Kant's ideas about how our experience of the world is formulated by our sensory and intellectual faculties. Back in the 1920s, James Jeans observed that, "the physical conditions under which life is possible form only a tiny fraction of the range of physical conditions which prevail in the universe as a whole." Likewise, his contemporary, Arthur Eddington, speculated about "selective subjectivism," the idea that the laws of nature are indirectly imposed by the human mind, which in turn determines (and constrains) what we know about the universe.

More recently, some scientists have used it to explain the series of bizarre "large-number coincidences" in physics and cosmology. These are the surprisingly large order-of-magnitude connections that exist between (apparently) unrelated physical constants and cosmological parameters.

For example, the electromagnetic force is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. If it was any closer in strength, stars would have collapsed long before life could emerge. Or, the universe's vacuum energy density is about 120 orders of magnitude lower than some theoretical estimates, which, if any higher, would have blown the universe apart. And the neutron is heavier than the proton — but not so heavy that neutrons cannot be bound in nuclei where conservation of energy prevents the neutrons from decaying. Without neutrons, we wouldn't have the heavier elements needed for building complex life. There are many other examples, each one pointing to extreme specificity.

In 1961, Robert. H. Dickie used a prototypical version of the AP to explain away these coincidences, saying that physicists were reading too much into it. These large numbers, he argued, are a necessary coincidence (or prerequisite) for the presence of intelligent beings. If these parameters were not so, life would not have arisen. And in turn, we wouldn't be here to marvel at the ‘surprisingness' of these physical constants and laws.

Read the whole interesting article.

Tania Lombrozo - Is It Silly To Seek Purpose In The Natural World?

From NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, this is an interesting look at the human need to find meaning in the world.

Is It Silly To Seek Purpose In The Natural World?

by Tania Lombrozo

October 29, 2012

Does it have a purpose? Does it need a purpose? | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

 

Science and religion alike grapple with some of our deepest questions: What is the purpose of life? Why is the natural world just so? Why does the biological world strike us as so exquisitely designed?

But do all questions deserve an answer? In a 2008 lecture, Richard Dawkins argued that they don't (you can hear his lecture on "The Purpose of Purpose" here). In particular, we can't always answer purpose-seeking "why" questions. Sure, science can explain why birds have wings in evolutionary terms, or how mountains form by appeal to geological processes. But can science answer a question like, "What is the purpose of a mountain?" According to Dawkins, this is a silly question that doesn't deserve an answer.

But not everyone finds questions about the purpose of mountains so silly. In a 1999 paper, developmental psychologist Deborah Kelemen asked 4- and 5-year-old children a variety of questions about the living and nonliving natural world, including "What's the mountain [in this picture] for?" Over half the children provided purpose-based answers, suggesting, for example, that the mountain was "to climb" or "to drive around." When asked to agree with a character who claimed that "mountains are made for something," or another who claimed, like Dawkins, that "this is silly," the majority of children judged the call for purpose sensible, not silly.

Perhaps more surprising, most adults aren't so different from these purpose-minded preschoolers. In a study released earlier this month (press release here), Kelemen and colleagues presented college students and college graduates with a series of explanations, some of which involved scientifically-unwarranted appeals to purpose. For example, one explanation was that "mountains fold inwards in order to maintain mass," another that "germs mutate in order to become drug resistant." Students accepted these explanations almost half the time, with an acceptance rate of 45 percent. College graduates were close behind at 40 percent and even science and humanities PhDs accepted them some of the time (15-21 percent), especially when forced to respond quickly (29-32 percent).
Is it silly to seek purpose in the natural world?

The authors of the study argue that ascribing purpose to the natural world is a "lifelong cognitive default" that can be "masked rather than replaced" by education. So even if it is silly, it may be part of the human condition, as suggested by Gary Robertson in response to Dawkins' dismissive remarks. (Dawkins conceded: "It may well be part of the human condition to ask silly questions.")

Another response is that it isn't silly, it simply isn't science. After all, purpose has traditionally fallen under the purview of religion. Kelemen sums up the findings from her research by suggesting that "our minds may be naturally more geared to religion than science." Religion may be compelling in part because it ascribes purpose, picking up where science typically leaves off.

Here's a third response, and the one I favor: there are no silly questions in science. Once we define what we mean by "mountains" and "purpose," it's an empirical question whether or not mountains are the sorts of things that have purposes, just as it's an empirical question whether zebra's stripes have a purpose (in the sense of a biological adaptation: camouflage), or whether chairs have a function (the result of intentional design: supporting sitting).

It could be that a species of super-smart aliens set up the geological conditions for mountains precisely so that humans would have somewhere to climb. If this were the case, the preschoolers would be right to say that mountains are "for climbing." Of course, this is a silly answer to the question, "What is the purpose of mountains?" But it's silly because centuries of science give us very good reasons to reject it, not because the question itself is nonsensical.

Other questions may be "silly" in the sense that they rest on a conceptual confusion ("Are mountains divisible by zero?"), or because they aren't fruitful to pursue ("Are there any mountains exactly 1,942 feet high?"), but we typically make conceptual and empirical progress by asking questions, evaluating possible answers, testing them empirically when it's possible to do so and analyzing our successes and failures – not by delimiting the set of questions considered fair game. It matters that we ask the right questions, but we learn which those are as we go.

I'm tempted to misquote Mr. Garrison from South Park, who famously quipped that "there are no stupid questions, only stupid people."

There are no silly questions, only answers that strike us as more or less silly based on our current understanding of the world.

---

Guest blogger Tania Lombrozo is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Freeman Dyson - What Can You Really Know?

For the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews the new book from Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. The book chronicles his visit with many of the world's leading philosophers, asking each of them one question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”

What Can You Really Know?

Freeman Dyson

Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story
by Jim Holt
Liveright, 307 pp., $27.9

November 8, 2012

Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story is a portrait gallery of leading modern philosophers. He visited each of them in turn, warning them in advance that he was coming to discuss with them a single question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” He reports their reactions to this question, and embellishes their words with descriptions of their habits and personalities. Their answers give us vivid glimpses of the speakers but do not solve the riddle of existence.

The philosophers are more interesting than the philosophy. Most of them are eccentric characters who have risen to the top of their profession. They think their deep thoughts in places of unusual beauty such as Paris and Oxford. They are heirs to an ancient tradition of academic hierarchy, in which disciples sat at the feet of sages, and sages enlightened disciples with Delphic utterances. The universities of Paris and Oxford have maintained this tradition for eight hundred years. The great world religions have maintained it even longer. Universities and religions are the most durable of human institutions.

According to Holt, the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century were Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Heidegger supreme in continental Europe, Wittgenstein in the English-speaking world. Heidegger was one of the founders of existentialism, a school of philosophy that was especially attractive to French intellectuals. Heidegger himself lost his credibility in 1933 when he accepted the position of rector of the University of Freiburg under the newly established Hitler government and became a member of the Nazi Party. Existentialism continued to flourish in France after it faded in Germany.

Wittgenstein, unlike Heidegger, did not establish an ism. He wrote very little, and everything that he wrote was simple and clear. The only book that he published during his lifetime was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in Vienna in 1918 and published in England with a long introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1922. It fills less than two hundred small pages, even though the original German and the English translation are printed side by side. I was lucky to be given a copy of the Tractatus as a prize when I was in high school. I read it through in one night, in an ecstasy of adolescent enthusiasm. Most of it is about mathematical logic. Only the last five pages deal with human problems. The text is divided into numbered sections, each consisting of one or two sentences. For example, section 6.521 says: “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. Is not this the reason why men, to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?” The most famous sentence in the book is the final section 7: “Wherof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

I found the book enlightening and liberating. It said that philosophy is simple and has limited scope. Philosophy is concerned with logic and the correct use of language. All speculations outside this limited area are mysticism. Section 6.522 says: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself. It is the mystical.” Since the mystical is inexpressible, there is nothing more to be said. Holt summarizes the difference between Heidegger and Wittgenstein in nine words: “Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain.” These words apply equally to their characters as human beings and to their intellectual output.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

The philosophers that Holt interviewed wander over a wide landscape. The main theme of their discussions is a disagreement between two groups that I call materialists and Platonists. Materialists imagine a world built out of atoms. Platonists imagine a world built out of ideas. This division into two categories is a gross simplification, lumping together people with a great variety of opinions. Like taxonomists who name species of plants and animals, observers of the philosophical scene may be splitters or lumpers. Splitters like to name many species; lumpers like to name few.

Holt is a splitter and I am a lumper. Philosophers are mostly splitters, dividing their ways of thinking into narrow specialties such as theism or deism or humanism or panpsychism or axiarchism. Examples of each of these isms are to be seen in Holt’s collection. I find it more convenient to lump them into two big groups, one obsessed with matter and the other obsessed with mind. Holt asks them to explain why the world exists. For the materialists, the question concerns the origin of space and time and particles and fields, and the relevant branch of science is physics. For the Platonists, the question concerns the origin of meaning and purpose and consciousness, and the relevant science is psychology.

The most impressive of the Platonists is John Leslie, who spent most of his life teaching philosophy at the University of Guelph and is now living in retirement on the west coast of Canada. He calls himself an extreme axiarchist. The word “axiarchism” is Greek for “value rules,” meaning that the world is built out of ideas, and the Platonic idea of the Good gives value to everything that exists. Leslie takes seriously Plato’s image of the cave as a metaphor of human life. We live in a cave, seeing only shadows cast on the wall by light streaming in from the entrance. The real objects outside the cave are ideas, and all the things that we perceive inside are imperfect images of ideas. Evil exists because our images are distorted. The ultimate reality hidden from our view is Goodness. Goodness is a strong enough force to pull the universe into existence. Leslie understands that this explanation of existence is a poetic fantasy rather than a logical argument. Fantasy comes to the rescue when logic fails. The whole range of Plato’s thinking is embodied in his dialogues, which are dramatic reconstructions of the conversations of his master Socrates. They are based on imagination, not on logic.

In 1996 Leslie published a book, The End of the World, taking a gloomy view of the human situation. He was calculating the probable future duration of the human species, basing his argument on the Copernican principle, which says that the situation of the human observer in the cosmos should be in no way exceptional. Copernicus gave his name to this principle when he moved the earth from its position at the center of the Aristotelian universe and put it into a more modest position as one of the planets orbiting around the sun.

Leslie argued that the Copernican principle should apply to our position in time as well as to our position in space. As observers of the passage of time, we should not put ourselves into a privileged position at the beginning of the history of our species. As Copernican observers, we should expect to be in an average position in our history, rather than close to the beginning. Therefore, we should expect the future duration of our species to be not much longer than its past. Since we know that our species originated about a hundred thousand years ago, we should expect it to become extinct about a hundred thousand years from now.

When Leslie published this prognostication, I protested strongly against it, claiming that it was a technically wrong use of the theory of probability. In fact Leslie’s argument was technically correct. The reason I did not like the argument was that I did not like the conclusion. I thought that the universe had a purpose, and that our minds were a part of that purpose. Since the goodness of the universe was revealed in our existence as observers, we could rely on the goodness of the universe to allow us to continue to exist. I opposed Leslie’s argument because I was a better Platonist than he was.

The antithesis of John Leslie is David Deutsch, whose book The Beginning of Infinity I recently reviewed in these pages. Holt visited Deutsch at his home in a village a few miles from Oxford. The chapter describing the visit is entitled “The Magus of the Multiverse.” Deutsch is a professional physicist who uses physics as a basis for philosophical speculation. Unlike most philosophers, he understands quantum mechanics and feels at home in a quantum universe. He likes the many-universe interpretation of quantum mechanics, invented in the 1950s by Hugh Everett, who was then a student in Princeton. Everett imagined the quantum universe as an infinite assemblage of ordinary universes all existing simultaneously. He called the assemblage the multiverse.

The essence of quantum physics is unpredictability. At every instant, the objects in our physical environment—the atoms in our lungs and the light in our eyes—are making unpredictable choices, deciding what to do next. According to Everett and Deutsch, the multiverse contains a universe for every combination of choices. There are so many universes that every possible sequence of choices occurs in at least one of them. Each universe is constantly splitting into many alternative universes, and the alternatives are recombining when they arrive at the same final state by different routes. The multiverse is a huge network of possible histories diverging and reconverging as time goes on. The “quantum weirdness” that we observe in the behavior of atoms, the “spooky action at a distance” that Einstein famously disliked, is the result of universes recombining in unexpected ways.

According to Deutsch, each of us exists in the multiverse as a crowd of almost identical creatures, traveling together through time along closely related histories, splitting and recombining constantly like the atoms of which we are composed. He does not claim to have an answer to the question “Why does the multiverse exist?” or to the easier question “What is the nature of consciousness?” He sees ahead of us a long future of slow exploration, answering philosophical questions that we do not yet know how to ask. One of the questions that we know how to ask but not to answer is: “Does quantum computing play an essential role in our consciousness?” For Deutsch, the physics of quantum computing is the most promising clue that may lead us to a deeper understanding of our existence. He theorizes, Holt tells us, that “all the different parallel universes in the multiverse” could “be coaxed into collaborating on a single computation.”

There are many other kinds of multiverse besides the Everett version. Multiverse models are fashionable in recent theories of cosmology. Holt went to see the Russian cosmologist Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University in Boston. Unlike Deutsch, Vilenkin has multiple universes disconnected and widely separated from each other. Each arises out of nothing by a process known as quantum tunneling, spontaneously crossing the barrier between nonexistence and existence with no expenditure of energy. Universes spring into existence with precisely zero total energy, the positive energy of matter being equal and opposite to the negative energy of gravitation. Mass comes free because energy is zero.

The title of the Vilenkin chapter is “The Ultimate Free Lunch?” Holt describes a conversation between the young physicist George Gamow and the old physicist Albert Einstein when both of them were in Princeton. Gamow, the original inventor of the idea of quantum tunneling, explained to Einstein the possibility of the free lunch. Einstein was so astonished that he stopped in the middle of the street and was almost run over by a car.

Opinions vary widely concerning the proper limits of science. For me, the multiverse is philosophy and not science. Science is about facts that can be tested and mysteries that can be explored, and I see no way of testing hypotheses of the multiverse. Philosophy is about ideas that can be imagined and stories that can be told. I put narrow limits on science, but I recognize other sources of human wisdom going beyond science. Other sources of wisdom are literature, art, history, religion, and philosophy. The multiverse has its place in philosophy and in literature.

My favorite version of the multiverse is a story told by the philosopher Olaf Stapledon, who died in 1950. He taught philosophy at the University of Liverpool. In 1937 he published a novel, Star Maker, describing his vision of the multiverse. The book was marketed as science fiction, but it has more to do with theology than with science. The narrator has a vision in which he travels through space visiting alien civilizations from the past and the future, his mind merging telepathically with some of their inhabitants who join him on his journey. Finally, this “cosmical mind” encounters the Star Maker, an “eternal and absolute spirit” who has created all of these worlds in a succession of experiments. Each experiment is a universe, and as each experiment fails he learns how to design the next experiment a little better. His first experiment is a simple piece of music, a rhythmic drumbeat exploring the texture of time. After that come many more works of art, exploring the possibilities of space and time with gradually increasing complexity.

Our own universe comes somewhere in the middle, a big improvement on its predecessors but still destined for failure. Its flaws will bring it to a tragic end. Far outside the range of our understanding will be the later experiments, avoiding the mistakes that the Star Maker made with our own universe, and leading the way to ultimate perfection. Stapledon’s multiverse, conceived in the shadow of the approaching horrors of World War II, is an imaginative attempt to grapple with the problem of good and evil.
 
For most of the twenty-five centuries since written history began, philosophers were important. Two groups of philosophers, Confucius and Lao Tse in China, and Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Greece, were dominant figures in the cultures of Asia and Europe for two thousand years. Confucius and Aristotle set the style of thinking for Eastern and Western civilizations. They not only spoke to scholars but also to rulers. They had a deep influence in the practical worlds of politics and morality as well as in the intellectual worlds of science and scholarship.

In more recent centuries, philosophers were still leaders of human destiny. Descartes and Montesquieu in France, Spinoza in Holland, Hobbes and Locke in England, Hegel and Nietzsche in Germany, set their stamp on the divergent styles of nations as nationalism became the driving force in the history of Europe. Through all the vicissitudes of history, from classical Greece and China until the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers were giants playing a dominant role in the kingdom of the mind.

Holt’s philosophers belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Compared with the giants of the past, they are a sorry bunch of dwarfs. They are thinking deep thoughts and giving scholarly lectures to academic audiences, but hardly anybody in the world outside is listening. They are historically insignificant. At some time toward the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers faded from public life. Like the snark in Lewis Carroll’s poem, they suddenly and silently vanished. So far as the general public was concerned, philosophers became invisible.

The fading of philosophy came to my attention in 1979, when I was involved in the planning of a conference to celebrate the hundredth birthday of Einstein. The conference was held in Princeton, where Einstein had lived, and our largest meeting hall was too small for all the people who wanted to come. A committee was set up to decide who should be invited. When the membership of the committee was announced, there were loud protests from people who were excluded. After acrimonious discussions, we agreed to have three committees, each empowered to invite one third of the participants. One committee was for scientists, one for historians of science, and one for philosophers of science.

After the three committees had made their selections, we had three lists of names of people to be invited. I looked at the lists of names and was immediately struck by their disconnection. With a few exceptions, I knew personally all the people on the science list. On the history list, I knew the names, but I did not know the people personally. On the philosophy list, I did not even know the names.

In earlier centuries, scientists and historians and philosophers would have known one another. Newton and Locke were friends and colleagues in the English parliament of 1689, helping to establish constitutional government in England after the bloodless revolution of 1688. The bloody passions of the English Civil War were finally quieted by establishing a constitutional monarchy with limited powers. Constitutional monarchy was a system of government invented by philosophers. But in the twentieth century, science and history and philosophy had become separate cultures. We were three groups of specialists, living in separate communities and rarely speaking to each other.

When and why did philosophy lose its bite? How did it become a toothless relic of past glories? These are the ugly questions that Jim Holt’s book compels us to ask. Philosophers became insignificant when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines. Until the nineteenth century, science was called natural philosophy and officially recognized as a branch of philosophy. The word “scientist” was invented by William Whewell, a nineteenth-century Cambridge philosopher who became master of Trinity College and put his name on the building where Wittgenstein and I were living in 1946. Whewell introduced the word in the year 1833. He was waging a deliberate campaign to establish science as a professional discipline distinct from philosophy.

Whewell’s campaign succeeded. As a result, science grew to a dominant position in public life, and philosophy shrank. Philosophy shrank even further when it became detached from religion and from literature. The great philosophers of the past wrote literary masterpieces such as the Book of Job and the Confessions of Saint Augustine. The latest masterpieces written by a philosopher were probably Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1885 and Beyond Good and Evil in 1886. Modern departments of philosophy have no place for the mystical.

* The New York Review, November 10, 2011.

 

Omnivore Links - Philosophy, Religion, and Science

A veritable bonanza of links from Bookforum's Omnivore blog - on the value of philosophy, the centrality of religion, and how science advances. Enjoy!

The value of philosophy

Sep 20 2012  

9:00AM

• Re'em Segev (HUJ): Justification Under Uncertainty. 
• Daniel Whiting (Southampton): Is Meaning Fraught with Ought? and Should I Believe the Truth? 
• Kate Manne (Harvard): How Desires Might Matter: The Veto Power View. 
• A review of Against Moral Responsibility by Bruce N. Waller. 
• From Quadrant, James Franklin on the lethal philosophy of Peter Singer. 
• Eric Schliesser on Zizek and Kant on philosophical taboos (or: on the demise of philosophical history). 
• From 3:AM, an interview with Simon Blackburn, a groovy humanist philosopher who sticks it to the Pope and thinks respect can’t be taken for granted; an interview with Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, the de Chirico mannequin of philosophy; and an interview with Huw Price, an ice cool pragmatist philosopher with global expressivist deflationary thoughts that he writes about in his many books. 
• From Homiletic and Pastoral Review, John Young on the value of philosophy: True philosophy throws light on all other forms of knowledge, revealing their relation to each other — with philosophy underpinning them all. 
• Spinoza in Shtreimels: A professor and three Hasidim walk into a bar to study philosophy — true story.

 * * * * * * *

The centrality of religiosity

Sep 20 2012  

1:00PM

 

• Ngaire Naffine (Adelaide): How Religion Constrains Law and the Idea of Choice. 
• Stefan Huber (Bern) and Odilo W. Huber (Fribourg): The Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS). 
• How “god” evolved: Whilst we do have a decent understanding of when religious ideas arose, the hows and whys of their appearance are still unknown (and more). 
• From Crisis, is Man by nature in relation to the Infinite? 
• Defending religious liberty: An interview with Eric Metaxas. 
• Ariel Sabar has the inside story of a controversial new text about Jesus, a 1,600-year-old text fragment that suggests that some early Christians believed Jesus was married. 
• Colleen Murphy reviews The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age by Martha Nussbaum. 
• Before becoming Pope, Benedict XVI once dreamed he would become the archivist and librarian at the Vatican. 
• Kristen O’Neal on when the Bible bets boring: How to uncover new life in the old story. 
• A review of Global and Local Televangelism. 
• Why should Christians read literature? Michael Travers investigates. 
• Matthew B. O’Brien reviews Roger Scruton’s The Face of God.

* * * * * * *

How science advances

Sep 21 2012  

9:00AM

 

• From Ars Technica, most of what you read was wrong: John Timmer on how press releases rewrote scientific history.
• Scientists are often responsible for “spin” of their results, research finds. 
• Bradly Kneisel on the evolution of scientific knowledge. 
• What would scientists learn if they could run studies that lasted for hundreds or thousands of years or more? 
• Leslie Horn on 9 scientific breakthroughs that happened totally by accident. 
• Neanderthal sex and lesbian albatrosses: Michael Brooks on the perils of populist science. 
• Evolution and the complexity principle: Nicholas Beale and Brian Josephson on how science advances by deeper mathematical and conceptual understanding. 
• From THES, a review of Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject by Helene Mialet; despite being the father of modern computing, Alan Turing's greatest impact on contemporary science may stem from his insights into altogether more complex hardware, argues Ray Dolan: the human brain; and a review of Is American Science in Decline? by Yu Xie and Alexandra A. Killewald. 
• Is a science Ph.D. a waste of time? Don’t feel too sorry for graduate students — it’s worth it.