Archive for August, 2007
Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and straw men
Hopefully I’ll have time to parse this article out a bit more, but I’d first point you to Misty Iron’s take here. Irons is a self-described "straight, married with three kids, homeschooling, evangelical Christian of the Reformed variety" who blogs about giving gay people civil marriage rights. Since I was previously a Reformed Christian (and the rest of my family still is), I continue to keep an eye out on what that segment of Christendom thinks and says. The Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and their publications, Modern Reformation and the online magaizne Reformation21, influence a great number of reflective believers.
So I am disappointed to see that they cite Jeffrey Satinover and Joseph Nicolosi as psychiatric experts, and present the purportedly monolithic "gay community" as a straw man in the article linked above.
As for me, I’m interested to investigate their portrayal of Michel Foucault. (It’s taken, oddly from a citation in Madsen’s After the Ball, a book that anti-gay writers seem to think all indoctrinated gay persons have a copy of, as a manual). Look for that later.
Image: A Young John Calvin, founder of the Christian Reformation movement in the seventeenth sixteenth(!) century.
The point of philosophy blogging
I had created a ginormous draft post about the nuances of philosophy blogging: different kinds, benefits to readers and the blogger, etc. Then Wordpress ate it. This leads me to my first point, right out of the gate: blogging as a primary form of scholarship is dangerous unless you’re backing up your work (and taking pains not be be plagiarized).
The original reason I started the post was reading another philosophy blogger’s blog and it made me reflect upon why I do what I do. Probably the best way to characterize what I do is “reading journal blogging”, which means I’m not spending a lot of space on my own ideas (though I do have them and post some occasionally). Rather, I’m concerned to make sure I understand the primary sources and can explain them to someone else. My audience isn’t necessarily the specialist; although I anticipate there will be those of my peers who do read.
What I saw at the other blog was a false dichotomy between who the blog is “for.” At least in my experience, making this blog “for others” (trying to explain ideas, find fresh analogies) has resulted in a benefit to me. I wind up meeting others through the blog, which can yield deeper conversations offline. I also have returned back to this space as a kind of reference desk to generate bibliographies and summaries.
So that said, I will continue to blog for the “in-between” audience of general readers with interest in philosophy. But I will also need to delve deeper into some abstract topics, which could lose some of these readers. (I’ll try to spice up the blog with UU topics, occasional critiques of news coverage, etc.) I’m working up some bibliographies in the topics I tend to cover, which I’ll put online when they’re closer to complete.
I’ll close this short(ened) post by soliciting some reflections from you. Those of you who read philosophy blogs, what broad categories would you put them in? Who do you think are the major beneficiaries (in terms of education, networking, etc.) of these blogs? Do you see any success stories in terms of the commenting communities created by the moderators?
I see several categories myself: the group blog, the thought experiment blog, the links/news blog, the reader journal blog. Of course, these are not self-contained. Which do you read, and why?
Persons and consciousness
Mark Siderits and David Chalmers aren’t exactly talking about the same problem, but their concerns overlap enough that I think looking at both approaches is helpful. Siderits is investigating a thesis he calls “Buddhist Reductionism” about the existence of persons. Chalmers is focused on explanations (or lack thereof) we have for the phenomenon of consciousness.
Both projects rely heavily upon ideas about supervenience and reduction and the properties of things such as pains, mental states and psychological events. In this post I’ll start with the basic terminology and arguments, and in my next post talk about where their projects converge. Read the rest of this entry »
Language and self-awareness
A recent study published in Brain Research Bulletin investigates how closely connected language and self-awareness are, in undertaking different tasks. The researcher blogs about it at Science and Consciousness Review. The seven task areas studied were:
(1) agency (knowing that you are the cause of your own actions),
(2) self-face recognition (identifying a face seen on a screen as being yours),
(3) emotions (assessing how you currently feel),
(4) personality traits (determining if a trait adjective describes you),
(5) autobiographical memory (remembering a personal past episode),
(6) preference judgments
and the seventh was a resting state.
I’ll be interested to get into Habermas’ concept of communicative rationality and how he believes other forms of rationality rely upon this as a foundation. Surely language is implicated somehow in thinking, but as one commenter mentions (and I’ve blogged about here in relation to Peter Carruthers’ book, Language, Thought and Consciousness), it may only be required for conscious thought. There are background requirements to rationality that Habermas describes which may be pre-conscious or un-conscious.
Regardless, check out the link for some colorful fMRI scans and the thing I like the most: an actual scientist explaining his own work via a blog, for the benefit of those of us who may not be reading the primary sources in the journals.
Reductionism
Just a heads up that I’ll be posting on the concept of self and reductionist versus non-reductionist explanations. I’m working through David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind and Mark Siderits’ Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy together. (I’ve set aside Dennett and Hofstadter for a little bit, to look at some different approaches).
I think the question of the self is a useful one to investigate, since we make so many assumptions based upon our intuitions about personal identity, continuance over time, etc. These assumptions impact work in the area of perception, epistemology and of course, ethics. A few days ago, I was reading Kierkegaard and came across a famous passage about conflict between the “first self” and the “deep self” and the implications this has for human meaning, etc. I recognize Kierkegaard’s method is different than what I’m used to, but I was surprised that he seemed to assume these two “selves” as having some kind of reality. Perhaps he was speaking metaphorically, but that doesn’t seem to fit the thrust of the passage.
Anyway, all that is to say I’ll have more later this week/end on reduction and the self.
T-Shirt Project
Starting this semester, I am making it my goal to create a T-shirt for each of my classes. I hope this will help the philosophy apparel market, since a search on CafePress.com resulted in zero hits for "Habermas." Just think of those poor students, looking for hip shirts and coffee mugs boasting Jϋrgen’s face and sayings!
Never fear, you can get your Nietzsche, Foucault, Wittgenstein and other assorted philosophy goods at my Cafe Press store. Just in time for the winter season, you’ll soon be able to get your Kierkegaard and Habermas sweatshirts and be one of the twelve people* wearing Arbitrary Marks(TM) designs!
*This is an actual count, by the way. It’s strangely compelling to know that random people in California and New Zealand are wearing stuff I made in MS Paint on a whim.
God and lasting meaning
There’s a passage in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve always found amusing:
"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don’t. QED"
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn’t thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. (Source: Wikiquote)
Of course, this only works if God is a fideist and has retreated from rational defense of its existence. In my course at Loyola, taught by Paul Moser, we’re going to grapple in part with why, assuming that God could exist, it is so darn difficult to demonstrate that truth. But first, Moser spent today motivating the topic of God’s existence as a meaningful claim (contrary to the logical positivist analysis of language) and the relevance of said alleged existence to human beings.
Empirical-transcendental doublet
Foucault famously characterized Kant’s understanding of human beings as an "empirical-transcendental doublet", a being who bounces back and forth between two viewpoints: that of empirical science, which tells us about facts, but not norms, and that of linguistic intersubjectivity, which gives us norms without facts. Habermas, of course, wrote Between Facts and Norms in an effort to solve this paradox.
Another thinker who attempts a solution is John McDowell, who I was introduced to during my time in an analytically-oriented program, but who is also indebted to continental thought, particularly Gadamer. In fact, as I’ve started to read about Habermas’ concerns (currently, through the perspective of David Ingram’s summary and some reading in The Divided West), I am continually brought back to Mind and World.
Two broad approaches to the problem of knowledge (how we justify our true beliefs about the world, in one definition) are epistemic naturalism (W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson) and transcendentalism (Immanuel Kant). A simplistic take on the two is that each emphasizes the primacy of one side of the mind : world pair. Read the rest of this entry »
Bladerunner
I feel like I’m in Bladerunner, but without the cool technology. It’s been raining in Chicago nearly non-stop for a week and a half now. That’s all I have to say, though I am working on a post about the purpose of graduate students maintaining philosophy blogs and I should also have a bit more on Habermas later.
8 random facts meme
A while ago now, Aspazia tagged me for the 8 Random Facts Meme. The idea is for bloggers to disclose eight previously uknown facts about themselves to their readers, and then tag others. I’ll start with:
1. I don’t usually do memes. Actually, this may be implicitly known to my readers, since I haven’t posted many before. But now it’s out in the open. Boy, does that feel good.
2. I was an engineering major for a semester. Not only that, but I did two internships at the United States Naval academy, one in fluid dynamics and the other in electrical engineering. For the first one, I was preparing a module to go up in the Space Shuttle (it never did) and the second one I was evaluating some EE software on the basics of electrical circuits. This brings me to: Read the rest of this entry »