Selling out

          I usually try to stay away from commenting on current events, or anything too relevant. There isn't anything specifically wrong with doing so. It just that doing so is usually a strategy to get people to actually read what you have written. Using things that actually happen in the world, things that get attention, is a way to divert some of that attention to yourself. And, since I am fairly certain no one really reads this unless I personally ask him or her to, a situation which I don't really see any need to change, current events just isn't what I do.

Private Knowledge and Public Policy

One of the reasons I began this blog was to build confidence. Another was to become more articulate in expressing the ideas I have, and of my reading of philosophy. While I have been willing, in past posts, to state my own ideas, I haven't gone much further than comfortable responses to books and essays I read as a student. Today, I find myself willing to put down something of my own. This may be as a result of growing confidence. Or, perhaps I am just running out of things to say. Either way, this should be a challenge.

I know he can do the job, but can he get the job?

Yet another article on the marketability of skills developed while studying philosophy.

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/01/be_employable_study_philosophy_partner/

You'll have to excuse my butchering of a quote from Joe Vs. The Volcano. But this seems the obvious question. Philosophy majors might do well in whatever they end up doing, but how do they get to do it in the first place? If you know, would you mind sharing with the rest of us?

You keep using that term, I don't think it means what you think it means...

Before I get into this week's topic, I'll take a moment to review some of the older philosophical posts. In going back over them, I found several cases where I seemed to be making an argument which I didn't intend to make. And, in others I don't seem to have a point at all. This is all fine. I am learning how to put these ideas down in writing more effectively, and that was always going to involve starting less effectively.

Now all I have to do is sit back and let the money roll in...

http://dornsife.usc.edu/phil/undergraduate/

Brain in a Vat

Time has been hard to come by recently, and this post will have to be brief. But my wonderful cousin Tracy, who is one of the very few people to ever visit this blog brought up Descartes' Brain in a Vat thought experiment a few weeks ago, and I want to say something about it.

I am certain that what I will say has nothing to do with what led her to bring it up, or the insight she had into the thought experiment. So I am really just expressing my own (half-baked) thoughts on the subject.

When uncool became cool, I was still uncool.

It would seem that "coolness" is not a quality of the good life. And by that, I mean that it does not have ethical or moral value. However, we use coolness in order to attach value to something. But we do this in an indeterminate way. We like something that is cool because it is cool, rather than because it has some clear positive quality, even though we associate coolness with generally positive or desirable qualities. If we like a brand of shoe, it can be said that is "cool." But if we were asked to describe what is good about it other than the fact it is cool, we may not be able to come up with an appropriate answer. Sure, it is possible that the brand can be some genuinely good things: durable, even fashionable. And if that is the case, then it is entirely possible to value the brand's desirability without depending on whether or not it is cool. Too often "coolness" stands in for these clearly definable qualities, and since it is possible to be both "cool" and not have any of them, it interrupts our ability to reasonably consider a choice between it and another "cool" brand of shoe that has genuinely good qualities.

The post in which I use entirely too many long quotes.

If we have understood the archaeological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order, reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religion. That is to say, while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious--there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious.

- From Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown by Jonathan Z. Smith, page xi.

I had the good, but nonetheless unfortunate luck to have been exposed to the ideas expressed by Smith as an undergraduate. I say unfortunate, because I found that as a seminary student, it was almost impossible to make the very simple claim that religion is something we invented in order to think about things like Christianity and Buddhism, an intellectual category, rather than something that exists within the actual practice of these things, a historical category. Certainly Christianity exists, and Buddhism exists. But to say they are both "religions" in the historical sense is to claim that they are, in a sense, the same thing. That they developed for the same reasons. That they answers to the same set of questions. My response, if Buddhism were Christianity, it wouldn't be Buddhism. To think otherwise risks making judgments about the superiority of one over the other. Judgments, in this sense, being a euphemism for xenophobia, and in extreme cases, fascism.

Feedback

OK, so I received some feedback this week. It was actually kind of nice. A relative asked me to post about The Matrix and Descartes. And a friend asked me to blog about the Peter Sellers classic Being There. I may have to break my own rule of keeping movies and philosophy separate to post on these, but I don't mind. Once I get a chance to see these again, and read up on Descartes, I'll write about them.

If you have any movies or ideas you would be interested in discussing, please comment. I'd  be happy to try to accommodate.

See. And you said philosophy was pointless!

Philosophy: questioning everything in life but getting no answers.

Knowledge: something that is true, that you believe, and that you can prove (have evidence).

So something that you believe that may not be true, something that is true that may not be proven and something that has evidence that may not be believed is not knowledge, therefore, we probably all know nothing. Which, according to Socrates, is wisdom.

You might think this quote came from Samuel Beckett or a Monty Python sketch, but it didn't. It was my very own cousin and amateur philosopher Tracy Roberts, summing up what some things she learned taking philosophy courses through Coursera. Good one Tracy.

That's a good point...but

     Locke's introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a little over four pages (in the edition I have). It has an endnote that is seven pages long. While that alone is worth a chuckle and provides good material to poke fun at philosophers with, I think that it makes a good point about Locke in specific and philosophy in general.

A Philosophy of Fear

Book 11 of the Iliad includes this testosterone soaked wisdom, worthy to be included in the lyrics of a Rocky theme:

Now Odysseus the fine spearman was alone, abandoned by the panic-stricken Argives. Perturbed yet proud, he asked himself: ‘What now? Shame if I flee in fear of enemy numbers but worse to be cut off, since Zeus has routed the rest of the Danaans. But why think of that? Only cowards run from battle, a true warrior stands his ground, to kill or die.’

Which is kind of odd, because three books earlier, we saw Odysseus doing just that, running from battle: 

And now old Nestor would have lost his life, had not Diomedes of the loud war-cry seen them, He called to Odysseus, with a dreadful cry, to urge him forward: ‘Wily Odysseus, Zeus-born son of Laertes, where are you off to with your shield at your back, like a coward in the crowd? Mind no one plants a spear in your back as you run. Now hold your ground, so we may keep this wild man from old Nestor.' 

He called, but noble long-enduring Odysseus failed to hear, as he ran for the hollow ships of the Achaeans.

     This second passage, showing Odysseus behaving cowardly was first brought to my attention as an example of Aristotle's philosophy of courage. It is also sometimes called bravery. I think another good term is confidence. However, I think that these passages are about something slightly different. Fear.
     While explaining the virtue of bravery in book 3 of the Nicomachean Ethics, a virtue he sees as important enough to discuss first, Aristotle has to explain what fear is. And, since whole books have written about bravery, I am going to focus on just that explanation.

Objectivity

My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist subjectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social events and occasions, the public world of common life, and to organize it in such a way that the connections between theoretical formations and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to dark sciences. I have never been impressed by the argument that, as complete objectivity is impossible in these matters (as, of course, it is), one might as well one's sentiments run loose. As Robert Solow has remarked, that is like saying that as a perfectly aseptic environment is impossible one might as well conduct surgery in a sewer. - Clifford Geertz, from The Interpretation of Cultures

     Every once in a while, or perhaps more often than that, I will re-watch a movie, or return to a book to find some significant quote, expecting a specific line of dialogue or a particular sentence, only to find that I invented it. I assume this happens to everyone, but it may be that few people devote as much time as I do re-watching movies, or re-reading books. It isn't exactly the most rational thing to do. But I hope you know what I am referring to.
     While this post is about objectivity, and this is an illustration of subjective memory, I am not actually trying to make you aware of the fact that memory is subjective. I assume everybody realizes that. If you don't, well then, I am sure you'll have plenty to complain about if you bother finishing this post. Feel free to let me know what you think, but don't expect to persuade me of anything. No, the reason I bring this up is entirely different. I enjoy coming across subjective memories. They present me with an opportunity. The times when I misremember movie dialogue almost always involve me inventing lines that I thought more funny, or more emotional, or more revealing than what actually appears in the movie. In a way my mind is synthesizing the movie, and presenting shorthand for what it creates by inserting this extra little bit. Just about everybody does this. Recognizing when it happens allows you to see what meaning you attached to something.

Hobbes' Beggar

          As this is the blog’s first philosophical post, I thought I should pick something I am at least moderately qualified to comment on. Though, truth be told, I don’t know much about altruism. There has been so much said about it, and not only by philosophers. Anthropologists, biologists, psychologists, sociologists all have made contributions to our understanding of altruism. And the contributions made by each discipline are unique. Theories within each field are just as varied. (A more formal analysis would require this claim to be substantiated by citing examples from each of these fields. Indeed, I would love to do that. But this is supposed to be a readable blog.) Nevertheless, all these disciplines affirm that humans are capable of behaving altruistically. Economics stands out as the only field that denies, as a matter of fundamental principle, that people can act for the primary benefit of others. Or, to put it in economic terms, that people labor without compensation.