Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is a shout-out to Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein, the editors behind a  new anthology HEGEL'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY from Oxford University Press. Brooks is a professor of political philosophy at Durham University. I may have mentioned him in this blog before, because he has his own blog that regularly comments on Brit and Eurozone politics in a way I find stimulating. Stein is with the philosophy department of the University of Heidelberg. Other than that, I know nothing about him at all. But I'm not surprised Hegel is taught in Heidelberg. And I know little about the book, except what one can gather from a review by Timothy Brownlee of Xavier University, at NDPR: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/hegels-political-philosophy-on-the-normative-significance-of-method-and-system/  It seems from that review that one of the big questions underlying the book is whether what one thinks of the value of Hegel's political philosophy rises and falls with what one thinks of the v...

In the last two posts, with the help of the imaginative and erudite folks at Existential Comics, we've discussed how Hume and the Buddha agreed that there is no self in the traditional sense, no enduring person behind the experience day to day, no soul subject to judgement as good or evil. We also discussed the extent to which their inferences from that premise diverged (utterly). Today I'll ask a Jamesian question about what underlies those last two posts. What is it to say of any X that it exists? What is it to deny existence of any X? What is it to say that the millionth digit of the number pi exists? Does that imply that we know what it is? No. For all I know (I haven't looked into the matter) no one has yet bothered to calculate what the millionth digit of pi is. If they HAVE, then we could use some further digit for the example. Does our affirmation of its existence mean anything Platonic -- that it exists beyond the cave of our earthly affairs, in a super...

My commentary on a comic continues. The imagination of the folks in Existential Comics brought together Hume and Buddha, sitting them at a booth in what looks like a 20th century (not so much the 21st) diner. In its first half, they discuss what they have in common. In its second, how greatly their views diverge. For if the self is not real ... what follows? For Buddha, what follows is that one must turn away from earthly passions into contemplation. A man once came to the Buddha saying "I want happiness." The Buddha said he should take away the I from that sentence. Then he should take away the "want," for it is the now-disappeared I that has desires and wants. Happiness will be what is left. [The comic doesn't tell the story of that exchange, but the sentiments it puts into Buddha's mouth are consistent with that.] Hume doesn't see it that way. In the comic he says that the non-existence of the self means we should pursue ONLY sensual pleasu...

A neat installment of "existential comics" recently did a compare/contrast on David Hume and the Buddha. Here's a link to the comic. This is the first of a series of three posts inspired thereby. What do Hume and the Buddha have in common? The denial of the self. Hume wrote, "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, ... and never can observe anything but the perception."  The implication here is that the self is just a loose bundle of the perceptions that get assigned to it, there is no permanent center to the bundle. Buddhism is built upon much the same contention. This is formally referred to as the doctrine of anatta. Intriguingly, the anatta did not get in the way of the Buddhist inheritance of the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.  You might think that strange and ask, what IS it that gets reincarnated, if it is not the self or soul? The Buddha answers: it is the fa...

Both Plato and Aristotle believed in a tripartite human soul Was that just a coincidence, just a symptom of the attraction that the number three has for the human mind? or is the classification in the one case more similar to the other than might first appear? In Plato's view, the soul contains an appetite, a spirit, and an intellect. These correspond to the classes in an idealized city, where the appetite corresponds to the ordinary working stiffs, the spirit corresponds to the warriors (sometimes called "guardians"), and the intellect to the philosopher kings (sometimes also, confusingly, called "guardians"). In the world of fantasy, the three levels correspond to Dorothy's friends: where the appetite might be represented by the sentimental tin man, the guardian spirit by the lion, and the intellect by the scarecrow. What about Aristotle? He wrote of the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the (uniquely) human soul. The vegetative functions o...

Recently the acquittal of Noor Salman has re-opened discussion of the mass murder at the gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. The photo here is of Salman (in the yellow blouse) posing with her attorneys. Salman's husband, Omar Mateen, did the deed, walking into the Pulse and killing 49 people, wounding another 53, then dying in a shootout with law enforcement.  The Feds charged her as an accessory on the theory that she helped him scout the location and accompanied him on a shopping trip during which he purchased the ammunition.  The jury acquitted her. Judging from post-trial interviews with jurors, this was a reasonable-doubt acquittal. For example, as to that shopping trip: it may have been that Salman was in another store buying a toy for their child, while he was buying the ammo. The issue of her complicity became bound up with the issue of his motive. The FBI's theory of the case was that he specifically wanted to shoot up the Pulse because it was a...

An op-ed in a US newspaper recently said that Jordan Peterson has become (arguably) Canada's "most famous academic ever." I'm pretty sure I've discussed Jordan Peterson in some capacity or other in other blog posts. I won't even look it up now. But the phrase seems to me a clear case of presentist bias. Surely Marshall McLuhan made a bigger splash on both sides of the border (and in the world in general) than Peterson has. Heck, McLuhan played himself in Annie Hall ! How much more high profile can an academic get! Northrop Frye, the famous literary critic and theorist, also comes to mind, though Frye is a more high-brow choice than either Peterson or McLuhan. And surely not the stuff of Hollywood movies.

This is from Freud's book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). Freud throws off in a footnote a rather wild speculation about the origins of the human use of fire. I'll just paraphrase most of it, but I'll directly quote a bit at the end. In primordial days, lightning would strike the branches of trees and  set them ablaze in this primordial forest, and primitive people would see the branches, still burning, fall to the ground. Then usually, one or more men would step toward the branch and put out the fire with their urine stream. Freud presumes that this was very pleasant for the men who did this: a form of sexual excitation, even. Why? Well … it was apparently an Oedipal thing. The father gods in the sky had sent the fire, the men of the tribe were conquering the father gods by pissing on the fire. Aaaaaah, feels good, eh? The real Prometheus? The real hero who tamed fire for the human species? That was a man who deprived himself of this pleasure by … N...

Plotinus wrote that, yes, the sensible world is a mere imperfect copy of the intelligible world, but he also wrote against the pessimism of the gnostics, against the idea that the sensible world is a bad thing.  He wrote thus:  “what more beautiful image could there be? After the fire of the intelligible world, what better image of it could there be than our fire? What earth, outside of the intelligible earth, could be better than ours?" In short: yes, we live in a cave looking at shadows, but the cave is not at all a bad place to be.  Those who aren't philosophers (most of the species, on Plotinian premises) can never get outside the cave, but that doesn't make their fate too dire. They get to look at all those fascinating shadows on the wall.  Meanwhile for those few who can sometimes get out of the cave and look at the real world ands even glimpse the sun, those times are of necessity brief. We'll have to return to the cave. We can resign ourselves to th...