Author: Huenemann

You may want to take a few moments to check out these portraits by Steve Pyke of influential contemporary (or near-contemporary) philosophers, along with their views of the nature of philosophy. It’s interesting to see the diversity of views; one wonders if the same diversity would be found among practitioners of any other discipline (other than literary criticism, I suppose). (h/t to Brian Leiter’s blog.)

There is an interesting and lengthy discussion here about the causes of our behavior and the (possibly irrelevant?) stories we tell ourselves about the causes of our behavior. The traditional view is something along the lines of this: when we consciously deliberate over our actions, we should be held morally accountable for what we do, since the moral worth of what we do has some connection to the reasons we take ourselves to have for doing it. (Some authors call this a “neo-Kantian” view, which seems to me inapt for several reasons, but set that aside.) But suppose it turns out – as some research suggests – that even when we pause to deliberate, our decisions may have less to do with our reasoning than we commonly suppose. So, for example, some studies say that if you find a dime, or smell fresh cookies, you are far more likely to help someone in need than otherwise. And that’s independently of the reasons you recite to yourself about whether you should help the person in need. If this is so, then do we still consider your reasons for action as morally relevant?

In truth, the issue comes down to acting from causes vs. acting from reasons. Lots of things act from causes, and it seems incorrect to hold anything accountable for what they do merely because of causes (consider blaming a stone for rolling downhill, or blaming a person for being hit by a meteor and splattering an elegant dining party with their bloody innards). But when they act from reasons, we do hold people morally accountable. Maybe this is because actions done for reasons are somehow free, or maybe this is because actions done for reasons issue from the appropriate sorts of mechanisms (I am trying to set aside the question of determinism). But now suppose that any time we find an act supposedly done for reasons, we find causes in the mix that very strongly and reliably influence the action. What effect does that have on our attributions of moral responsibility?

Anyway, have a look at the intelligent debate. Nice work. (Thanks to Rob Sica for pointing the discussion out to me.)

SCHAUMBURG, IL—In an ultimately futile act some have described as courageous and others have called a mere postponing of the inevitable, existentialist firefighter James Farber delayed three deaths Monday.

Full story from The Onion here.

Here’s a passage from the memoirs of Robert Paul Wolff:

For the first time in my life, I had assigned a casebook, which is to say a collection of snippets from the great philosophers, instead of assigning entire works, such as Plato Dialogues. I soldiered on, “covering” the material, until I got to a selection by Hume containing his classic critique of causal inference. This was relatively late in the semester, and I was bored out of my mind. I can say with absolute confidence that I was not doing a good job of teaching. At the end of the next class after we had done Hume, a young man came up to talk to me. He said he had been troubled by Hume. I was astonished. I had done everything in my power to drain the last vestige of power from Hume’s words. I asked him how he had handled this distress. “I spoke to my priest,” he said, “but he could not help me, so he told me to call the office of the Archdiocese.” “What did they say?” I asked, expecting to be given some version of the party line. “A Monsignor answered. When I told him what Hume said, He answered, ‘Well, some people say that, but we don’t,’ and he hung up the phone.”

I was genuinely humbled. Despite my best efforts to guarantee that no student would walk away from my class with an original thought, David Hume had reached his hand across two centuries, grabbed that student by the scruff of the neck, and had given him a shaking that bid fair to shake him loose from a lifetime of unthinking obedience to received truth. It was the greatest testimony I have ever personally witnessed to the power of a liberal education .

One endeavor you may wish to take up is an organized assault upon the great books. Over on this website is a 10-year plan for working through many great works. You can probably polish off the first three years or so this summer, if you work at it.

An added plea: if you decide to do this, and you are on or near campus, please keep requesting the relevant volumes from the “Great Books of the Western World” series edited by Mortimer Adler. All of these volumes are currently being held in the automated-retrieval system at the USU library (the “BARN”), and the best way to get these volumes shelved in the public stacks is to keep requesting them. It’s easy: just look up the work from the online catalog, and click the “request” button, and the book will be waiting for you at the circulation desk. The great books really don’t belong in a barn!