Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The philosophy of Henri Bergson, summarized. (I may have done this before but I can't find that post now, so we'll try again.) Time is real and important: it cannot without loss be treated in Einsteinian fashion as a particular dimension of space; Because time is real, novelty and free will are also realities: the future contains surprises that could not even in principle have been determined by calculation from the facts existing today; One must make a sharp distinction between intelligence and intuition. Intelligence is very useful — it is a survival mechanism for humans — but it cannot grasp the essence of reality, the movement of time. Intelligence geometricizes, which is why intelligent people often find themselves denying the first two propositions; As a philosophy of biology, Bergsonism asserts too that there is something about life that escapes mechanistic formula: that life and its evolution can never be explained as so much organic chemistry. Bergson populariz...

Robert Audi is a contemporary exponent of intuitionism within the field of moral epistemology. That is, his answer to the question "how do we know what is right" involves an appeal to a quasi-sensory and non-inferential recognition one might call intuition for lack of a better term. His 2013 book MORAL PERCEPTION is one of those that puts this view forward. My understanding is that Audi specifically thinks of duties and their breach as the objects of this intuition. We intuit things like "lying is prima facie wrong." We neither infer it nor are we making a statement of subjective preference when we say such a thing. We intuit it and we are sensing something objectively true when we do so. I think there is something both importantly right and importantly wrong in this. I think that it is appropriate to ground moral judgments in intuitions, but those intuitions are of the goodness of events, not the rightness of actions. Intuitionism, that is, works better wit...

Back in 2010, the fellow portrayed here, Ken Pulliam, made a fascinating point. Pulliam was the proprietor of a blog with the autobiographical title, "Why I De-Converted from Evangelical Christianity." Presumably he stopped adding new posts when he came to believe that he had said all he needed to say about that de-conversion. One of the posts of this blog in particular intrigues me. It is dated June 18th of that year. I'll provide a summary in a second but if you'd like to read the whole thing, here's a link: http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/06/defense-of-ethical-intuitionism-part.html Summary: Pulliam ceased to believe in the existence of the God of evangelical Christianity because he came to believe that the God depicted by that tradition would be a highly unethical being, if He existed. And that inference takes most of the point out of postulating His existence. In order to reach such a conclusion, one needs an Archimedean "place to st...

Brian Leiter, in his blog, has posted an abstract of the doctoral dissertation of one Jason Reza Jorjani, a lecturer in humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The fellow with his fist in the air is Jorjani. Technological science has shattered the worldviews of all traditional cultures subjected to it, at times provoking reactionary religious responses that only underscore the traumatic force of this worldwide development. Yet, as I argue, this world-colonizing force is not neutral. The anticipatory projection and world-building characteristic of scientific theorization are grounded in a practical comportment, so that the essence of technology or Craft is ontologically prior to theoretical science. In other words, science is always already Technoscience. Moreover the theoretical concepts and methodologies involved in predictive calculation and in crafting frameworks that model and mold the world are derived from pre-conceptual ideas of an aesthetic character, namely ...

Another candidate. As some of you may remember, I've been wondering aloud for some time whether there are any prominent ethical/meta-ethical philosophers active today who fit each of four labels in those fields that seem to me to go together rather naturally. Maybe Susan Haack would qualify. I recently reviewed a work of hers on the philosophy of the law of evidence, and in the process I expounded on her epistemology, "foundherentism." The idea is that learning about the world is like filling in a crossword puzzle. There is the foundational matter of satisfying the clues that come in from your senses (from outside the grid of the puzzle) and there is the coherentist matter of maintaining consistency within the grid, because of course the words cross each other. What occurred to me only after my review was published was that it is in principle possible that certain crossword puzzles will have more than one perfectly correct answer. Indeed, this is sometimes done....

I've posted in various places lately an inquiry about contemporary ethical and meta-ethical inquiry. I'll post it again here. Do my readers know of any scholar (preferably someone with academic cred, though not necessarily in a philosophy department) whose published positions enable us to describe him with each of the following four adjectives? Cognitivist, intuitionist, consequentialist, pluralist. It seems like a natural combination. As a cognitivist, our scholar would hold to a meta-ethics in which right and wrong, good and bad, are genuinely subjects for knowledge (not merely, say, for expressions of emotion). As an intuitionist, he/she would believe that there exists some immediate , non-inferential, grasp of some datum at the base of our reasonings on the subject. I have in mind especially Moore's notion that the good is in some sense like the color yellow, a perception that neurologically normal folk can take for granted, so that we don't reason about w...

From ethics to meta-ethics. Ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks how we should act, what we should consider to be good or bad/evil, meta-ethics is the branch of philosophy that asks about that activity. So "how should I act?" is an ethical inquiry, and "what does it mean to ask how I should act?" is a meta-ethical activity. I've outlined in recent posts here what I consider a breakthrough in my own understanding of ethics. Here I'd simply like to apply some meta-ethical labels to the view that results. As I've noted, a good name for this type of view given traditional taxonomies would be"teleological intuitionism." What does that mean? It means that the view is intuitionist in that it relies upon an inferred human capacity [or "faculty" if you like] for the direct recognition of intrinsic goodness.  It is teleological in that there is an end, the increase of the amount of intrinsic goodness in the world,...

G.E. Moore died in October 1958, just days after my own birth. That's a neat little irrelevant connection with which to return to my discussion of Moore 's approach to ethics and how its embrace feels like a philosophical breakthrough for me.   Moore's approach, in a few words, is to understand good as a direct observable though non-natural property of events and experiences, a property not reducible to anything else.   A quick qualification of that. Goods come in two classes, as we intuitively experience them, intrinsic and instrumental. We pursue instrumental goods so that we may secure and increase the intrinsic goods. A crude example: we eat nutritional foods so that we may survive so that sometimes we may savor dessert. So it is strictly intrinsic good that is the simple irreducible property.  This suggests, to revert to the Jamesian terminology I quoted yesterday, that with regard to intrinsic goods we have a "special intuitive faculty" o...