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I’ve been mulling over the questions I asked a week ago about gender.  In my master’s program, apart from my reading Nietzsche, the topic of sexuality or human embodiedness was not taken up.  I did have a course at SLU in phenomenology, but I cannot recall much in the way along these lines (we didn’t read any Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

So here I am, interested in topics of epistemology, mind and religion, but finding myself unequipped to investigate what is a major component of human experience: gendered being. Read the rest of this entry »

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Summarizing or responding critically to Anthony Pinn’s Varieties of African-American Religious Experience is a difficult task.  Pinn covers the religions traditions of Vodou, Yoruba/ Santeria, the Nation of Islam and humanism in less than 200 pages.  His book spans centuries of history and travels across large stretches of geography.

I’ll restrict my critical comments to his final chapter, “How do we talk about religion?” and save that for another post.  As well, I won’t try to retell the history of the movements Pinn discusses.  I’d suggest you pick up his book to get that.  What I will do, briefly, in this post is to describe the ethical stance of the four groups, according to the author. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m not going to be afraid to express my faith, but at the same time I believe that if the policies I derive from my faith are also for the common good, I should be able to express the reasons why they are for the common good.  More here. 

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Thich Nhat Hanh has become a popular Buddhist writer for Western audiences.  He’s written books like Peace is Every Step and Living Buddha, Living Christ, and many others.  Hanh is famous for his “engaged Buddhism” and for emphasizing the practice of mindfulness to Western audiences through retreat centers.

So why would I be assigned his books (collected in a volume entitled Essential Writings) in a course on postcolonial religious ethics?  Read the rest of this entry »

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You can look forward to a critical response to Thich Nhat Hanh’s Essential Writings (tomorrow) as well as Anthony Pinn’s Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Wednesday)  I also hope to sketch out my investigation of gender, which will start from some of the topics in Judith “Jack ” Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (Thursday).

This weekend, I finished Middlesex, which I recommend highly (despite the fact that it’s been co-opted by the Oprah Machine).  I probably won’t do a full-fledged review of it, but it could come up in the discussion of gender.

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Since I mentioned it in my earlier post, I’m going to put up a summary of a nice article on Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992).  It’s old news now, and his attempt at solving the materialist - dualist problem has largely been refuted as a failure, but the discussion is interesting.

As well, although I stand by my fisking of Egnor’s article(s), I will say that there are quite a few philosophers and neuroscientists who believe in an immaterial mind.  While that position is berated as patently ridiculous by many, it isn’t so self-evident to many experts.  Please note that this isn’t an appeal to authority–I do not think that this is evidence for the theory, but it’s at least worth recognizing.

That said, onward with Daniel Palmer’s “Searle on Consciousness: Or How Not to be a Physicalist.” Read the rest of this entry »

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If I had thought ahead, I would have saved those Egnor posts to slowly trickle out over the weekend while I’m out of town.  But I didn’t.  So play in the archives–I’ve turned off the comment moderation so that all you need is a name and email address to make remarks.  Any Viagra or casino spam will be promptly deleted upon my return.

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I almost forgot to mention: creationists are often accused of “quote-mining”, taking people’s words out of context to make it seem like they support their views.  Michael Egnor cites John Searle at the end of his essay.  Searle is an analytic philosopher who rejects materialism and weak dualism/epiphenomenalism.*  You can find a description of his perspective here, and a review of a recent book he wrote about neurobiology and human freedom here.

Searle’s position is biological naturalism and it relies upon emergence:

…emergence but not emergence as the epiphenomenalist had assumed, i.e. as something radically different from brain processes, but “in the same way as solidity and liquidity are emergent features of systems of molecules” … The fact that mental features are supervenient on neuronal features in no way diminishes their causal efficacy. The solidity of the piston is causally supervenient on its molecular structure, but this does not make solidity epiphenomenal; and, similarly, the causal supervenience of my present back pain on micro events in my brain does not make the pain epiphenomenal…

This means that Searle, who Egnor seems to imply would support him, actually rejects the notion of an immaterial mind.  He views intentionality as an emergent property of the brain, but not something radically different (i.e., immaterial).  In contrast, the mind is causally supervenient upon the brain!

With this said, it should be apparent why my wasting any more time on this fellow is unnecessary.  Unfortunately, quoting philosophers and being a neurosurgeon gives you credibility among the casual reader.  Egnor is sadly irresponsible, however, in his representation of the arguments and his citations of the individuals involved.

*In fairness, I should note that Searle’s position is ambiguous to the extent that he claims the mind is not ontologically reducible to the brain, though it is causally reducible.  He is quite clear that he thinks he’s arguing against dualism, though, so I still think Egnor is being duplicitous in using him.  You can read Daniel E. Palmer’s article “Searle on Consciousness: Or How Not to Be a Physicalist” (1998) if you want more detail.

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In the last post, I talked briefly about how Egnor wriggled out of the contradiction he set up in his earlier article.  I am not going to rehash the mind-brain problem here–if you want the philosophical discussion, I suggest going to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and getting some background and introductory readings.  (Dualism, mental causation, physicalism, for starters).

Since Egnor himself cites Dennett and Churchland, I’ll assume he’s conversant with the philosophical background.  If that is the case, then I believe he makes some conflations and false dichotomies which are either intentional or naive.  (I won’t force a dichotomy here myself–perhaps there is a third option which someone can point out…)

Nihilism and Determinism Result from Materialism

The strategy he takes in this article is primarily ethical and metaphysical.  His first essay tried to demonstrate that the idea of a purely physical mind is absurd.  Here, he tries to show that the results are not only absurd, but morally problematic.  Read the rest of this entry »

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In his most recent article, Michael Egnor argues that materialism requires us to be nihilists about morality and determinists about free will.  Below, I will outline his basic argument and show how he is conflating several ideas together and forcing false dichotomies.  His article covers two topics: first, the connection between the material brain and the immaterial mind; second, the relationship between free will, morality and the mind.  This post covers the first topic (to which my criticism above does not apply).

Material Brain / Immaterial Mind

You can read the original at the link above–what follows is a distillation to premises.  I’m using Egnor’s terms, but you’ll see he’s not always clear about what he has in…mind, if you pardon the pun. Read the rest of this entry »

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