New Yorker review of Frankfurt and Blackburn

Jim Holt has a quite nice review of Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" and Blackburn's "Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed" in the August 22nd New Yorker, available online at:

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050822crat_atlarge

Puzzle for Aristotle Scholars

Aristotle scholars spend a lot of time debating what, exactly, Aristotle was talking about when he talked about the "eye-jelly" that is involved in visual perception. I propose that they spend some time figuring out what Aristotle is talking about in the following quotation from _de Anima_:

"While in respect of all the other senses we fall below many species of animals, in respect of touch we far excel all other species in exactness of discrimination. That is why man is the most intelligent of all animals."

Philosophy joke

From Bertrand Russell's _Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits_:

"I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprized that there were no others." (p. 180)

Sad philosophical moments

Here's something I'm going to begin collecting: comments made by philosophers in the context of debating some issue or another that they simply can't really believe. Consider the following claim made by Michael Slote, made in the context of discussing other minds skepticism:

"Even in cases where my own body is pain behaving and I feel no pain anywhere in my body, someone else may be feeling pain in my body."

If you're interested, I can reconstruct the line of reasoning that led him to the point of saying this. But right now I'd just like to dwell on the fact that once he was led to that point he didn't turn around and go home. Why not? Submissions of additional instances of this problem will be gladly welcomed, as will explanations of why philosophers do this.

More irony

In a letter to Arnauld, Descartes dismisses the objection to his philosophy that it cannot explain how mind and body, as different substances, can interact by saying that it is no more difficult to understand this than to understand how form and matter unite for the Aristotelians, which is something that everyone learns at school. (Now that's an example of irony if I ever saw one.)

Billy Wilder quotation

Below is what seems to me to be a perfect example of verbal irony. It's from Cameron Crowe's book of interviews with Billy Wilder. Wilder is talking about how it would take Marilyn Monroe many, many takes to say simple lines like "It's me, Sugar!" (From, 'Some Like It Hot'.) Here's the text from the book (Wilder is speaking):

"We spent quite a few takes getting 'It's me, Sugar!' I had signs painted on the door: IT'S. ME. SUGAR. 'Action' would come and she would say, 'It's Sugar, me!'. I took her to the side after about take fifty, and I said, 'Don't worry about it.' And she said, 'Worry about what?' The fiftieth take, that was, and then there was the fifty first, and the fifty second.... As I've said before, I've got an old aunt in Vienna who would say every line perfectly."

Anscombe quotation

Here's a quotation from GEM Anscombe's short article "Twenty Opinions Common Among Modern Anglo-American Philosophers" (which contains a list of commonly-held philosophical opinions, each of which is mistaken and can be argued to be such on purely philosophical grounds):

(Error #7) Imaginary cases, which are not physical possibilities for human beings, are of value in considering moral obligation. Thus it may be imagined that a woman gives birth to a puppy or that 'people seeds' float about in the air and may settle and grow on our carpets; this will have a bearing on the rightness of abortion.

Two conflicting moral intuitions

Have been reading too much of the New Yorker lately, but the following article is really quite good:

THE MORAL-HAZARD MYTH
The bad idea behind our failed health-care system.
by MALCOLM GLADWELL
Issue of 2005_08_29

Available online at:

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050829fa_fact

Reading this article, thinking about what I take to be its conclusion (namely, that the health care debate is really a moral debate about whether or not we think that the cost of health risks should be distributed evenly across the population or not), has reinforced my sense that at the bottom of a lot of contemporary political debate is a very deep moral debate between two sides, each of which privileges one of the following two moral intuitions:

(1) we're all in this together
(2) what's mine is mine

I myself think that (1) should be privileged. Not because there's an awful lot I can say in support of it. I mean, I do think things can be said, but right now I'm just dwelling on how hard it would be to argue for the claim that one or the other of these intuitions should be privileged. (2) just seems to me to be straightforwardly false; but I know that for some nothing is more important than it. I think I know people who are strongly committed to (2). But when I think about their commitment to it, I find it hard to get beyond my sense that they're just greedy bastards who can't think about anyone else but themselves. And that just disgusts me, making it hard for me to think clearly about what they might say in support of their position.

In thinking about how to support (1), I find myself making up imaginary situations in which there's no room for choosing between commitment to (1) and (2), because (1) is just obviously more importan. But, once again, this just reinforces my sense that there's nothing to (2). And, stepping back from my own commitment to (1), that realization makes me really worried about the possibility of genuine debate between advocates of (1) and (2). When I think about how I would argue with someone who deep down is committed to (2), I think I would very quickly just start to highlight (what I take to be) the morally disgusting nature of their commitment. And while I think rhetorically that might work, I don't think rationally it holds much weight. It just begs the question.