Philosophy@Utah State

This is an interesting tidbit. The Templeton Foundation is a private foundation which provides support for thinkers who try to integrate contemporary science with traditional religion. It’s an enormously wealthy foundation which awards the biggest cash prize in the world, for anything (bigger than the Nobel). It’s always seemed a little fishy to me, since some of the awardees seem to me to be plenty smart but hardly the greatest intellects around.

Anyway, the link is to Dawkins’ blog, which recounts some of the correspondence between a journalist and Dennett and A.C. Grayling about being paid attendees of a Templeton conference. The main question is whether you do more harm than good in engaging in public dialogue with those whose views you think are silly.

Interesting review here of a book written by a guy who spent a year reading “the five-foot shelf,” or Harvard’s classic edition of the great books.

NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty is coming to Logan on July 17.  She will be discussing her new book, Fingerprints of  God: In Search of the Science of Spirituality.  She will be on the Access Utah radio program that morning from 9:00-10:00am, then she will talk about her book at the Cache Valley Center for the Arts ballroom (upstairs) from 4:00-600pm.  All are welcome, should be interesting.

My brother alerted me to a “60-minutes” segment that aired last night about reading content from brains. (It’s the second story, just after the first commercial break.) The first part of the report is sort of interesting. A scientist has been brain imaging a bunch of people, asking them to think about certain objects, and recording the results. Then he takes a new person, asks her to think about certain objects (without telling the computer), and lets the computer guess what they were thinking (in a limited form; you ask the computer “Was it a barn or a screwdriver?”). The computer was right 100%. That’s pretty impressive, and scary when you think about possible consequences.

Those consequences emerge in the second part of the story, when the possibility is raised (through another line of research) of analyzing a suspect’s brain to determine if they had special knowledge of where/how a particular crime was committed. It’s there that the 5th-amendment right against self-incrimination collides with the state’s right to gather evidence (such as DNA samples).

Is this cool or what? It’s a chalk drawing by Justin Beever:

Chuck Johnson, longtime professor of philosophy at Utah State (37 years), passed away this morning after a long battle with cancer.  Many students reading this blog probably never got to meet Chuck as he has been out for some time now.  But those that did know him will remember his excellent teaching, his kindness, patience, endlessly positive attitude and his good humor  (He once remarked to me that he taught the whole history of philosophy in his courses – “both early and later Wittgenstein.”).

He will be missed by the many who loved him, and welcomed by The One who loves him most.

Feel free to share your Dr. Johnson stories here if you like.  Services will be held Friday, 10am at St. Thomas Aquinas Parish (not the Newman Center by campus, but the main parish – go north from campus on 800E, the church is on your left just as you cross into Hyde Park).

If the post below, about Sotomayor, whets your appetite for understanding how judges make decisions, you may want to watch this lecture by Brian Leiter. He provides a useful introduction to a couple of philosophies of judging — Ronald Dworkin’s and legal realism. It’s very informative.

Two thoughts:

A) A friend of mine emailed me this concern this morning (a quotation from Obama, and then my friends words, not mine):

‘This says it all: “It is experience that can give a person a common touch of compassion; an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live. And that is why it is a necessary ingredient in the kind of Justice we need on the Supreme Court.” (Obama)

There is a profound epistemological conviction evident here: the law is not about judgment as much as it is about understanding. Scary. I may sympathize and empathize with many people who are, like me, sinners who need mercy. However, the job of the justice is not to empathize or sympathize. The job of the justice is to read the law better than 99.9% of the population — and to do so in a dispassionate manner. Moreover, it is the job of the justice to do so in a way that is faithful to the system of checks and balances that the constitution recognizes balances power between the three branches of government.’

B) A few quotations from Sotomayor:

i) “Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases,” she declared. “I am . . . not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, . . . there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

ii) “I accept the proposition that…as…Professor Martha Minow…states ‘there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives–no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging.”  I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions.  The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others.”

The lesson from A and B, taken together?  Sotomayor is the ultimate postmodern judge.  There is no real objective truth, it is interpretation wall to wall.  Any claim to truth is naive to the fact that power relations have always already infiltrated any judgment, and in fact have always already determined any judgment.  While we might want to aspire to dispassionate impartiality, this is ultimately impossible since it is narrative and only narrative that matters.  What is more?  Some narratives are better than others (like latina ones over white) – even though we’ve already admitted as good pomos that we have no real reason for saying such a thing.

No comment.

I’ve never been able to get much into E. M. Cioran’s aphorisms, though it seems like I should. Here’s a review of a book about him, with this concluding paragraph:

To read Cioran is to be reminded of another strain in Western culture, one that rejects the progressive ethic of political compromise and social improvement. It is customary, now, to refer to such eruptive and wild-hearted modes of thought, particularly where they coexist with a penetrating intellect, acute criticisms of the liberal political order, and high talent for prose, as “dangerous” – to demean with this label anything touched by the slightest breath of anti-modern sentiment. Cioran’s work belongs to the category of the “dangerous”. And the word applies as both a term of opprobrium and a term of the very highest praise: After all, if philosophy is not dangerous, what purpose can it have?