Nussbaum’s Liberty of Conscience

Martha Nussbaum has a new book out, Liberty of Conscience, which addresses the territory surrounding freedom of religion and the first amendment. An interesting review, by the editor of the Catholic First Things, can be found here. I have yet to see the book, but I admire Nussbaum greatly, and I think she is one of the best philosophers writing today.

Brains and math

Here is a strange but true brain story about a guy who has trouble figuring out what number “5” represents, let alone adding and subtracting, but who has other unimpaired comeptencies. I find this interesting because the rationalist in me has always found the ability to comprehend math simply basic to having an intellect. I need to study the article further, but a quick read suggests he has an intellect without even a minimal capacity for math.

Universal condition of despair?

In the long chain of comments following Kleiner’s “Are we alone?” post, Vince suggests that there are some basic truths any human can recognize, if they are paying attention, and recognizing them forces a move in one direction or another:

1. I am not who I want to be.
2. I cannot change things of my past.
3. I have a dead end in the future.
4. I cannot completely control my relationship with others.
5. The world around me is full of terror and sadness that I cannot erase.

… I sound a bit like Schopenhauer (”the worst of all worlds”).

But these conditions bring angst when a finite person reflects on his very large and (mostly) uncontrollable environment. The Buddhist hopes to remove the desires that bring this angst. The Christian hopes to receive forgiveness and an new life to remove this angst. Sartre hopes to remove angst by being free to choose his experience (his estimate of freedom is rather optimistic). Nietzsche, who seemed to be full of alienation and despair, required of himself the complete embracing of his actions in the presence of his alienation and despair — to live his actions (and angst) eternally.

I still hold that anyone with a human self-consciousness experiences angst over something or they are not working as a complete human in some way. The existentialists seem to be saying that these discoveries and decisions of the finite self in the midst of this large world are the essence of a human. I don’t believe this is necessarily metaphysics. It is observational sociology. Once the existentialists start relating the human condition to Other or Being or No Other, then this is metaphysics.

This does seem to me to be a plausible list of items we typically try to ignore in our day-to-day lives, but once we recognize them, we can either try to do something or try to forget. And “doing something” means, in part, doing philosophy.

Any thoughts?

Are we alone?

This from Kleiner’s blog:

An article that talks about the “raised hopes” that we may not be unique in the universe:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23212185/

I am always confused by people who “hope” that we find out that we are not unique.  If there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life, that would be an extraordinary thing to be sure.  But why “hope” for something like this?  One might be curious, but “hopeful”?

Walker Percy addresses this in his brilliant little book “Lost in the Cosmos.”  Percy suggests that Sagan and others are so hell-bent on finding intelligent life elsewhere (or that apes have language here) because they are desperate to affirm science’s apparent judgment that we are not unique in the cosmos (that we really are just an accidental pile of cosmic dust).  But why be so bent on proving you are not unique?  

The real trouble, for Percy, is that they spend so much time looking out into the universe that they do not know themselves – and they manage to ignore how singularly amazing the event of human language is.   

Sagan, like every other ET searcher, is in need of connection – community.  He is alienated (lost in the cosmos).  But is the answer as much “in here” as it is “out there”?  Will we really know ourselves and secure “hope” by the finding of other allegedly random bits of matter organized in a way similar to us?