Behemoth

You know there is nothing that renders human counsels difficult, but the uncertainty of future time; nor that so well directs men in their deliberations, as the foresight of the sequels of their actions; prophecy being many times the principal cause of the event foretold. If, upon some prediction, the people should have been made confident that Oliver Cromwell and his army should be, upon a day to come, utterly defeated; would not every one have endeavoured to assist, and to deserve well of the party that should give him that defeat? Upon this account it was that fortune-tellers and astrologers were so often banished out of Rome.

Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (p188 of the University of Chicago Press edition).

Premonitions of James again, almost - the will to believe affecting the outcome of events.

Free Libraries

The political philosophy course left me with a love of Thomas Hobbes and an interest in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries (which were also a major part of the course on the rise of scientific Europe). I read Leviathan last summer, since then On the Citizen, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, and Behemoth is currently being carried around to read occasionally (including a trip to Hardwick Hall the other weekend). I'm saving Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity for a rainy day. Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment is currently keeping me busy, bought after reading Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic (which also led me to buy Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, edited by Israel and currently sitting on the large pile of books I haven't yet read).

That's a lot of money - upwards of a hundred quid, even before you add in Noel Malcolm's Aspects of Hobbes or the Cambridge Companion to Hobbes's Leviathan. I don't mind that - I can afford it, and I like to have proper books. I occasionally read things on my PDA or iPod Touch, but it isn't a comfortable or convenient way of reading for me.

But increasingly, some of the more unusual writings of this era are available online. Leviathan is the only text by Hobbes available from Project Gutenberg, but the other day I stumbled across the Online Library of Liberty. This has many of Hobbes's works, scanned in from a mid-nineteenth-century edition, including some which I've never seen mentioned before, let alone in print. And that's a drop in the ocean - there's a vast catalogue of good-quality HTML and PDF versions of all sorts of famous works and obscurities. The Liberty Fund is fundamentally about promoting conservative individualist libertarianism, but there's no partiality in the selection of libertarian authors - Shaw is there, Shelley, Hazlitt and Marx (to pick a few names from the nineteenth century).

Nigel Warburton recently tweeted a link to Jonathan F Bennett's collection of Early Modern Texts, annotated and edited versions of some of the major works of the period. I'm not keen (I find his style of annotation obtrusive), but if the OU's discussion forums are any indication, many students would find them helpful when struggling with unfamiliar styles of prose.

And finally, the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, no sign of Hobbes or Spinoza but they do have Samuel Clarke's criticism of both (mentioned in Israel).

Back from the dead, again.

Not quite as large a dead stretch as the gap from 2001 to 2007, but I haven't updated this in a year. Perhaps because I spent late 2007 and most of 2008 studying a couple of general humanities courses where the emphasis was more on history than philosophy - A207 (From Enlightenment to Romanticism 1780-1830), and AS208 (The Rise of Scientific Europe 1500-1800). I'm now doing AA308 (Thought and Experience: Themes in the Philosophy of Mind), the final module for a BA in Humanities with Philosophy. I'm not finding it hugely inspiring (it's not an area of philosophy I find interesting), but it's the only OU philosophy course I haven't done yet.

Friedrich Pecht on Richard Wagner

One day when I called upon him I found him burning with passion for Hegel's Phenomenology, which he was just studying, and which, he told me with typical extravagance, was the best book ever published. To prove it he read me a passage which had particularly impressed him. Since I did not entirely follow it, I asked him to read it again, upon which neither of us could understand it. He read it a third time and a fourth, until at the end we both looked at one another and burst out laughing. And that was the end of phenomenology.

(From Bryan Magee's Wagner and Philosophy)

Morality

I'm in some ways very much against Kant, because I don't think rationality is such a great thing, so to speak. Or let me put it this way: imagine somebody seriously remorseful; there could be hardly a more sober moment in the moral life when someone is lucid, then seriously remorseful, and you imagine that person saying, 'My God, what have I done?' when there's a kind of realisation of the awfulness of what one has done. And then I've felt that if you put into the mouth of that person as an elaboration, what so many official accounts say, it comes out as parody, 'My God, what have I done? I've been a traitor to reason', you know, or 'My God, I've violated the social contract; negotiated behind a veil of ignorance' and so on. It might sound like a cheap shot but I think it's a very serious question as to why, at such a sober moment as in the moral life, the official accounts of what it is to have wronged somebody seem like caricatures.

Raimond Gaita, on The Philosophers Zone.

Pietism

This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province - the prince - confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachments, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface - you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.

Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, "The First Attack on Enlightenment". And from later on in that chapter, a description of Johann Georg Hamann's rejection of dualism, which is startlingly modern. In context it is perhaps not quite so modern - it's part of Hamann's rejection of rationalism - although again, there are startling parallels a couple of paragraphs later between Hamann's view of language as defining the world, and Wittgenstein. Difficult to know how much of this is Hamann and how much is Berlin, though.

The idea that there are a soul and a body which can be dissected, that there are spirit and flesh which are different, that the body is one thing, but there is something inside the man, a kind of ghost palpitating inside this machine, which is quite different from what the man is in his totality, in his unity, is a typical dissecting French view.

Man and Superman

Nothing has gone right since that speech that Professor Tyndall made at Belfast.

Mrs Whitefield, in George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. On the one hand I'm thinking "why doesn't this book have footnotes?", on the other hand it's all on the web these days. I'm finding M&S very entertaining - it's Shaw the provocative wit, rather than Shaw the hectoring vegetarian in wooly underpants.

Rousseau as proto-pragmatist?

As for those truths which have no practical or instructive value, how could they be something that is owed to us, since they are not even a valuable possession?
...
whether a piece of futile, unimportant and inconsequential information is true or false can be of interest to no one.
...
Something that is good for nothing cannot be owed to anybody; for something to be owed to somebody, it must be actually or potentially useful. Thus the truth which we owe to one another is that which concerns justice, and it is a profanation of the holy name of truth to apply it to trivial things of which the existence is a matter of general indifference and the knowledge totally useless. Truth without any possible usefulness can therefore never be something we owe to one another; it follows therefore that anyone who conceals or disguises it is not telling a lie.

Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Fourth Walk.

It's Rousseau in paranoid mode, wondering when it's acceptable to tell a lie (prompted by the belief that the Abbé Rozier has stolen his motto and is taunting him by sarcastically writing it on a pamphlet). He's talking about when you are obliged to speak the truth, rather than what the truth is, but there are some interesting similarities with the American pragmatists' thoughts on truth (I'm reading Richard Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, too).

Dogs Wake

I'm sure John Gray didn't write Straw Dogs with the intention that people would think it was laugh-out-loud funny, but that's how I'm finding it. It's Enlightenment's Wake (which I finished yesterday) rewritten for readers uninterested in structured argument, reasoning or (as Keith Sutherland notes in his review) properly cited sources. Enlightenment's Wake was fascinating (I read it with a pencil in my hand, underlining it in the way I would any philosophy text I am trying to understand, trying to work out how Gray is wrong and why), Straw Dogs is merely entertaining.

Chomsky on games

I'm speculating, obviously, but it seems to me reasonable to suppose that games are designed to be, in a sense, at the outer limits of our cognitive capacities. We don't make up games in which we are as skilled as we are in the normal use of language. That wouldn't be an interesting game. Everybody could do too much! What we do is make up games like chess, which is an extraordinarily simple game - its rule system is utterly trivial. Yet, even so, we're not very good at it. In using language we're all extraordinarily good, and we're essentially undifferentiable one from another over quite a substantial range, but when it comes to something like chess - which I assume is at the borders of our cognitive capacities - individuals of very similar make-up will diverge significantly in their ability to deal with its problems.

Noam Chomsky, interviewed by Bryan Magee in Talking Philosophy, a collection of interviews recorded in the mid seventies for a BBC TV series. I now have to investigate the seventeenth century British neoplatonists.

Warnock and Rousseau

Nigel Warburton is putting up podcasts of himself reading from his own Philosophy: The Classics (not terribly successful I think - he writes very well and he's not a bad reader but the recordings are somehow lifeless) and Philosophy Bites - short interviews with other philosophers conducted by him and David Edmonds. Those are very good so far - Simon Blackburn on Plato, Stephen Law on the weakness of various arguments for the existence of god, and Mary Warnock on philosophy in public life.

Warnock makes a point while discussing attempts to change the law on euthanasia - people who say our lives belong to God, she says, are arguing irrelevantly (her emphasis). Other people don't believe that, and (what I think she's getting at though she doesn't quite put it like this), laws must be based on common ground and reasons we can all agree on rationally, not on reasons which particular groups may feel very strongly about but which aren't universally accepted (so the religious belief is a good reason for the individual who holds the belief, but not for people who don't, so it's not a good reason when it comes to determining public policy).

I've got to write an essay on Rousseau's The Social Contract over the next couple of days, and I'm wondering how I can fit that in - it's a very Rousseauian argument, from a surprising source.

(Edit: Jonathan Derbyshire on the same subject)

William James

To be read later: "The Moral Equivalent of War".

I'm wondering whether this new biography of William James will be coming out in paperback over here, or whether I should just pay Amazon's price for the hardback.

Sceptical Essays

OU tutor is being a bit of a pain about essays - I still haven't received a marked copy of the last-but-one essay, and the one I submitted three weeks ago doesn't have a mark on the website yet, with the fourth due in a couple of weeks. I've got good marks for the two I know about, but if he doesn't improve soon (and start using the electronic system for marking and returning assignments, which he ought to be doing), I'm going to have to start pointing out his obligations. I wouldn't object so much if the two tutorials I've attended hadn't been so awful.

Anyway - Locke was pretty straightforward but not terribly exciting (we are basically living in Locke's ideal world of liberal democracy, and alternatives are always more interesting than the status quo). Rousseau now, who is strange enough to be fascinating (although repellent in many ways).

Re-reading Russell's Sceptical Essays, which I think is the best of his collections of popular essays. "Philosophy in the Twentieth Century" is an interesting overview of the state of things in the twenties, concentrating on the American Pragmatists, Bergson (largely forgotten now, but a bête noire of Russell's), his ambitions for analytic philosopy (or "the new philosophy"), and a discussion of the implications of Einstein's theories for philosophy.

"The Need for Political Scepticism" is a typically provoking discussion of politics. Russell never quite reconciled his liberalism with his enthusiasm for planned economies and world government, and his assessment of human psychology is by turns shrewd and daft.

Unwise people who keep beavers in their libraries find that, when wet weather is coming, the beavers build dams out of books, because they used to live on the banks of streams.

Russell's point is that we're living in a world very different from the one which our habits were formed for (or, as an evolutionary psychologist would put it, the world which we are adapted for). Perhaps not the best story to use to illustrate his idea, though.

Consciousness and Hobbes

Review of Nicholas Humphrey on consciousness.

I've "done" Hobbes now, sent off the OU essay on Friday, although I'm still reading Laurie Bagby's guide to Leviathan - the section about the second half of the book, on religion. I'll be reading the whole of Leviathan when I have time - I've really enjoyed learning about Hobbes. Locke next, and I'm planning to reread the Second Treatise on Government on the plane to Australia.

Pragmatism

Visited Blackwells in Tottenham Court Road yesterday, and came away with John Dewey's Experience and Nature, and a collection of writings by Charles Sanders Peirce. I'm intrigued by Pragmatism - it's got a reputation now as a wishy-washy relativist "it works for me" kind of philosophy, the sort of thing that people who don't like science think will save them from having to believe things they would rather not. But the big names (Dewey, Peirce and William James) were absolutely committed to science (although I think there is more than a little bit of "god of the gaps" thinking in James, trying to find a little corner where his faith could still live).

The naturalistic method, when it is consistently followed, destroys many things once cherished; but it destroys them by revealing their inconsistency with the nature of things - a flaw that always attended them and deprived them of efficacy for aught save emotional consolation. But its main purport is not destructive; empirical naturalism is rather a winnowing fan. Only chaff goes, though perhaps the chaff had once been treasured. An empirical method which remains true to nature does not "save"; it is not an insurance device nor a mechanical antiseptic. But it inspires the mind with courage and vitality to create new ideals and values in the face of the perplexities of a new world.
(Dewey, preface to Experience and Nature)

I found myself trying to explain this bit to a friend as we walked alongside a canal in Camden (from the same source, I was scribbling in the margins in the lift up to the platform at Caledonian Road tube station) :

The office of physical science is to discover those properties and relations of things in virtue of which they are capable of being used as instrumentalities; physical science makes claim to disclose not the inner nature of things but only those connections of things with one another that determine outcomes and hence can be used as means.

I must read Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy again, because I seem to recall him saying something similar.

Humanism

I've enjoyed Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast so far, but chapter 4 (Animals) is very irritating. Wolpert initially argues (by repeated assertion, not a fantastic method of argument) that animals have no concept of causality. The rest of the chapter is stuffed with illustrations of animals having concepts of causality, which somehow don't count because animals don't have concepts of causality. Animals never make tools, apart from several species including New Caledonian crows which have impressive tool-making skills, but they don't count for some unstated reason. Animals never assemble separate objects into tools, apart from the chimpanzees who levelled an anvil by packing a stone under it (Wolpert admits that this is an example of physical causal understanding, but will only admit that it shows chimpanzees are "at the edge of causal understanding"). Rats and pigeons can watch a trained rat or pigeon moving a lever to get food, and will choose to move the same lever, but because they don't move the lever in the same way, that's evidence against their having concepts of causality (what?). And so on.

I know where Wolpert's heading. He's a "strong humanist" - humans have some sort of vril or soul (although being a scientist he's not going to call it by either of those names), and animals don't. The RCP cult on usenet used to waffle on in nature/nurture debates about humans having some special quality which means they transcend questions of nature or nurture because of their power to act as conscious agents. It's a rejection of materialism, by people who can't bear to think of themselves as not being materialists (which is why they are never clear about what this special pixie-dust is that humans are sprinkled with and animals are not). A shuddering revulsion at the thought that we might actually have more in common with monkeys, pigs, dolphins and crows than we like to think.

Virtue

I bought Alistair MacIntyre's A Short History of Ethics a couple of years ago and have only just rescued it from the unread pile. Virtue Ethics is a slippery subject, but MacIntyre's making it clearer to me. As far as I can see (having only read the chapters on Greek philosophy so far), it boils down to rejecting Plato's view in The Republic of The Good as a separate quality, in favour of the more traditional Greek view of good as an evaluation of the fitness of something - it's conformance to a standard. MacIntyre gives the example of "a red book" - Plato's explanation of Good is that it's like redness, so you can say "there's a red thing here" and "there's a book here" - on Plato's account, "a good book" is a book which also has the quality of goodness. The other way of looking at it is that it's more like saying "a good footballer" - someone who is very competent at a skill, not a footballer who has the separate quality of goodness. So "a good book" would be a book which measures up well against the standard by which books are judged, and "goodness" is inseperable from the context in which it's being judged. (Links to moral relativism?)

I'm not sure that's clear, either here or in my mind. I probably need to re-read those chapters!

Thomas Hobbes explains the nature of comedy

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves.

(Leviathan, chap. vi)

Purkinje

Only the born geniuses let themselves be worried and fascinated by these outstanding exceptions, and get no peace till they are brought within the fold. Your Galileos, Galvanis, Fresnels, Purkinjes, and Darwins are always getting confounded and troubled by insignificant things.

(William James, What Psychical Research Has Accomplished, 1890)

I didn't really feel up to reading On some Hegelisms in bed on Saturday morning, not knowing a great deal about Hegel, so I skipped to James on contemporary research into psychic phenomena. One of the incidental interests of the book is the lists of great men and examples of historical events which he obviously thought his audience would be familiar with. I'd never heard of Purkinje, and I'm still not sure why James thought he belonged in that list.

James is almost saying the same thing as Thomas Kuhn - "normal science" (Kuhn's term) excludes things it can't categorise, eventually the number of discovered facts it can't explain becomes impossible to ignore, and it takes a genius to change the way people think. James obviously thought a paradigm shift was about to happen with psychic research, but it never did. Psychologists made discoveries about the ability of the human mind to delude itself, and sceptics uncovered fake psychics. The phenomena were explained away rather than piling up to an intolerable level which demanded an explanation. (Interesting similarity to something mentioned on In Our Time the other week - scientists faced with an apparently falsifying fact usually don't do the "correct" Popperian thing of abandoning their now discredited theory, they try to find out what they've missed to explain away the anomaly - they posit another planet, rather than abandoning Newtonian physics because Uranus isn't behaving properly).

There's an interesting division between the hard-headed side of James's temperament (what he calls the "scientific-academic mind") and his desire to believe that psychic phenomena (and the spiritual world in general) could be given a rational explanation and integrated into science. He had enough scepticism to recognise that many psychics were frauds, but thought there was a core of phenomena which needed an explanation. He's scathing about the ability of the "feminine-mystical mind" to provide explanations for anything, but says people with that temperament notice things which scientists ignore because they can't be categorised within the current scientific system. An alternative explanation is that people who tend not to think rationally and sceptically will observe things which aren't really there, or read significance into coincidence and randomness.

Responses to James

James's essay The Importance of Individuals is a response to Grant Allen's The Genesis of Genius, and John Fiske's Sociology and Hero Worship, which in turn are responses to Great Men and Their Environment, a criticism of Allen's view (derived from Herbert Spencer) that individuals have no influence on the course of history.

I'm reading The Will to Believe / Human Immortality, a Dover collection of two books (The Will to Believe is itself a collection of essays, some originally given as lectures). I wish the Allen and Fiske pieces had been included in the collection.

Routledge charges an extortionate price for Bertrand Russell's What I Believe, a pamphlet he wrote in the twenties as part of a series. The series included Russell's Icarus, a response to Haldane's Daedalus, and Russell's then wife Dora wrote Hypatia, on women's liberation. It would have been nice to have at least Icarus and Daedalus included in the paperback of What I Believe (eight quid for fifty pages!).

The Dover collection of James is good value for money, but similarly it wouldn't have hurt to have added another couple of dozen pages to it, which would make James's response more understandable.