USUPhilosophy

Young is a philosopher currently at Wake Forest, who recently wrote a great biography of Nietzsche. Here is a thoughtful interview with him on university life, philosophy in general, and differences between analytic and continental philosophy. An excerpt:

Heidegger observed that in the age of electronic media the principle existential issue is ‘homelessness’, lack of ‘dwelling’. One dwells when there are things that are ‘near’ to one. But if some things are ‘near’ others have to be ‘far’. In electronic modernity, however, the ‘near’-‘far’ distinction is disappearing, things are assuming a ‘uniform distancelessness’. So the idea of a dwelling place is under threat. But there is more to dwelling than the idea of a special geographical region. Dwelling also depends on what Heidegger variously calls ‘the holy’ and ‘the poetic’. If you possess a dwelling place then it has, for you, a dimension that does not show up in a photograph – unless you are a very great photographer. One of the things Heidegger tries to do in his own writing is to convey the sense of this hidden, poetic, dimension. At the end of perhaps the greatest of his later works, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, he writes that ‘as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer’. This is my experience of reading and thinking with Heidegger, which is why I return to him again and again. It is, I guess, a kind of spiritual therapy.

“The results suggest that traditional lecture-style teaching in U.S. middle schools is less of a problem than is often believed.” There is an article here reporting a pretty narrow study which suggests this, but the commentary after the article is interesting. The upshot of the discussion, in my view, is that with some lecturers on some kinds of topics you can learn a whole lot; but some things you can’t learn by lecture, and some people really shouldn’t be lecturing at all. Ah, the fruits of social science.

Yes, I’m the most reductionistic philosopher on campus, but even my eyebrows went up when I read this article about the moral significance of oxytocin:

“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles,” [philosopher Patricia Churchland] says — surely not a phrase John Rawls ever uttered.

She told the story at the natural-history museum, in late March. Montane voles and prairie voles are so similar “that naifs like me can’t tell them apart,” she told a standing-room-only audience (younger and hipper than the museum’s usual patrons—the word “neuroscience” these days is like catnip). But prairie voles mate for life, and montane voles do not. Among prairie voles, the males not only share parenting duties, they will even lick and nurture pups that aren’t their own. By contrast, male montane voles do not actively parent even their own offspring. What accounts for the difference? Researchers have found that the prairie voles, the sociable ones, have greater numbers of oxytocin receptors in certain regions of the brain. (And prairie voles that have had their oxytocin receptors blocked will not pair-bond.)

“As a philosopher, I was stunned,” Churchland said, archly. “I thought that monogamous pair-bonding was something one determined for oneself, with a high level of consideration and maybe some Kantian reasoning thrown in. It turns out it is mediated by biology in a very real way.”

Well, at least in the case of voles, let us admit. Should we then infer that all that moral reasoning we go through is really just the sloshing of oxytocin? That’s quite a jump.

By senior year at St. John’s, we were reading Einstein in math, Darwin in lab, Baudelaire in French tutorial, Hegel in seminar. Seminar met twice a week for four years: eight o’clock to ten at night or later, all students addressed by surname. On weekends, I hung out with my friends. The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends. One sat in my room with a beer and “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” reading out a sentence at a time and stopping to ask, “All right, what did that mean?” The gravity of the whole thing would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so much fun, and if it hadn’t been such a gift to find my tribe.

In retrospect, I was a sad little boy and a standard-issue, shiftless, egotistical, dejected teen-ager. Everything was going to hell, and then these strangers let me come to their school and showed me how to read. All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.

The whole essay here.

The European: What possibilities for human enhancement do you see as especially promising and as least problematic, so that we should actually take concrete steps into their direction?
Bostrom: I think it would be great, for example, if we could develop a least some mild cognitive enhancements that give us a bit more mental energy or combat diseases like Alzheimer’s. In general, though, the difficulties of enhancing the capacities of a healthy human being may have been underestimated. Humans are very complex evolved systems. If we begin to tinker with that and don’t know what we are doing, we are likely to mess up and cause side effects that might only become evident much later.

Read the rest of the interview here.