[Bups-dis] A handful to things

[Duncan Crowe]

This message will no doubt seem disjoint. The four sections do not fit 
together nor can I make them do so.

Cogs in Machines
-------------------------
It being finals year for a lot of people I know the question has often 
arisen as to what they plan to do afterward. A surprising number have 
indicated they wish to go into teaching. I don't disapprove of this in 
and of itself, but it's nothing I'd want for myself. As a temporary job 
- you teach for two years upon leaving University: Teach first or the 
teaching equivalent of national service - I certainly see pros to it. As 
a job qua job it is probably one of the better ones. But from an 
abstract point of view the problem with it has always been the aim of 
the profession. Teaching the next generation of people... why? Surely so 
they can do something with their life. But then teaching suddenly looks 
like an admission or a resignation that you are not going to do 
something with your own life. You become an enabler rather than a thing 
enabled.

The thought sprang to mind when I came across minutes of a talk Hugh 
Mellor gave wherein he said that philosophy was a thing that was an end 
in itself, like music and poetry (his comparisons) and thus not like 
(again his example) medicine, which only justification was that it was a 
means to other ends that are valuable in themselves.

I have a number of random questions then:

Is philosophy valuable as an end in itself, or is it a means to some 
other ends? Before answering consider the petition to parliament to 
introduce philosophy and/or critical thinking into the curriculum. It 
definitely includes a conception of philosophy as a means to some ends.

Roman aristocrats used to practice poetry in their youths to improve 
their writing and their rhetorical skills. Are you doing philosophy to 
do philosophy or to improve yourself or for something akin to 
enlightenment (hoping to settle some of the answers to your own 
satisfaction if not to other peoples)?


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Pure vs Applied Philosophy
---------------
This thought does seem to follow rather neatly from the above, but if I 
recall correctly it came afterwards.

There is, in many disciplines, a division between the pure and the 
applied. The most obvious is, of course, mathematics but there are 
others as well. Physics, for example, has a well defined gap between the 
experimental and the theoretical. If we wish to take a humanities 
example; there is (arguably) a division in literary studies between 
those who originate theories, comment on theories or say that theories 
are a load of tosh, and those who apply theories to particular works. 
Say, Shakespeare scholars versus experts on 'marxist analysis'.

I would like to cautiously advance the thought that this division 
broadly exists in philosophy as well, and it seems to hinge on whether 
or not the questions one is concerned with are those which particularly 
deal with people or not. Ethics for example is the most obvious 
candidate for the applied bag, as is political philosophy and 
jurisprudence in so far as they are separate fields. Philosophy of Mind 
I would argue is also apt for the 'applied' branch because the questions 
it deals with are all to do with people, and their experience of the 
world, even though many of them are metaphysical in nature. I'll ignore 
the history of philosophy as I don't view it as a proper branch of 
philosophy in its own right.

The pure branch would be populated by logic, more abstract parts of 
metaphysics: tropes, particulars, time, determinism - not free will, 
that strikes me as applied. Philosophy of religion is a tricky one, but 
I'd counter intuitively be disposed to call it much of it pure as the 
traditional arguments at least are pretty far removed from most people's 
religious experiences. The field itself really ought to go with the 
applied side though.

This division might seem a little less arbitrary if we consider - 
particularly recent - philosophers. Quine, the early Wittgenstein, 
Kripke - Kripke could almost be the prototype for a 'pure' philosophers, 
largely unconcerned with people. Dummett is an interesting case in so 
far as he claims to have wished to write about more 'applied' matters 
but ended up trying to get the foundations sorted out first. 
Wittgenstein is a very odd case in so far as his early work is the 
perfect example of what I'm calling 'pure philosophy' while the later 
work is a good example of how you can deal with questions normally 
falling within the 'pure' camp with reference to human beings. For that 
reason, epistemology and philosophy of language operate in an 
uncomfortable grey area and where they go will largely depend on the 
philosopher discussing them. Davidson, for example, is a pure 
philosopher. His work on philosophy of language seems, at least to me, 
blissfully disconnected from any kind of realities of language. Russell 
is another interesting case who when he tried to write about borderline 
matters such as perception and language couldn't get past his work on 
the foundations of mathematics and when he started to deal with ethics 
and politics towards the end of his life it looks like he slipped out of 
doing philosophy entirely. Ayer is odd because in so far as what he was 
engaged in with language, truth and logic looks 'pure' to me, he still 
tried to remove most of 'pure philosophy' from philosophy, much for the 
same misgivings I have about some of it.

I bring it up because I think there's something peculiarly upside down 
about philosophy in some ways. In Cambridge, especially in Trinity I'm 
told, where mathematics is a blood sport, there is a distinct pecking 
order which goes pure mathematics - applied mathematics - theoretical 
physics - experimental physics. The more abstracted from anything to do 
with the real world you go, the higher up the ladder you are. With 
philosophy it strikes me that it should be different; that what we're 
doing it something which is or ought to be very concerned with human 
beings and human experience. It does strike me as quite strange that it 
isn't quite like that. Most of the people who become 'world famous 
philosophers' are what I am above calling 'pure philosophers' - the 
logicians and the metaphysicians. Perhaps this is because, like the 
mathematics division, they do the most to advance the discipline by 
adding to it more scaffolding, but it seems to me that they are rather 
enablers rather than the people doing the parts which are truly useful - 
which are the point of philosophy. It does strike me that getting things 
straight about ethics is more central to what philosophy is supposed to 
be doing than getting things straight about sets.

As you can tell, I'm having a hard time deciding between mathematical 
logic and political philosophy next year.

-----------------
Aristotle vs Hume
-----------------
This will probably form the basis of my paper for the BUPS conference, 
research permitting, but I thought I'd run it by some people now.

I get very upset trying to choose between people who seem to be right, 
but it looks like I'll have to do it with Aristotle and Hume. There are 
a number of - what seem to me very important - differences between their 
ethical theories. I list three of the more pressing (these might seem 
strange to those familiar with Aristotle, but I maintain that most of 
the 'apparent' problems could be changed).

1) For Hume you do not need to be virtuous in order to recognise virtue. 
For Aristotle you really do. This probably leads to (2),

2) For Hume praise from others is a fairly standard currency. This seems 
to fly in the face of something that seems as much a fact of standard 
moral life as anything; that we more esteem praise that comes from 
someone virtuous (or substitute wise if you wish) than from someone 
vicious (or a fool). If I were alone in performing certain actions in a 
camp of fools and they all cursed at me for doing so, despite the fact 
that those actions were necessary for the welfare of the camp, I would 
not conform to their judgement. Aristotle allows for the saliency of 
inner judgement and for the fact that this can trump the collective 
judgement of the community, most likely because there is for Aristotle 
(more of) a fact of the matter about right and wrong.

3) For Hume, it seems to me, there can be no external reasons. This is 
fine in and of itself as there aren't for many. Nevertheless it strikes 
me that it seems like there are external reasons even for the most 
ardent naturalist in so far as there is a motivation to be more like the 
ideal person - there is pressure to conform to a (inner?) conception we 
have of the ideal person.

I'm more interested in (3) than anything else. It strikes me that the 
way to resolve it would be to appeal to the notion that human beings 
naturally have a motivation 'to be good' or to aim towards this 
conception of the ideal person (thus making this an internal rather than 
an external reason, thus wedging (a sort) of Aristotlean perfectionism 
into a Humean framework. You simply have to 'go nativist' for it to 
pass. (It will be a product of the way your innate moral faculties work. 
It is very much not the kind of thing you would acquire as an internal 
reason as a result of empirical observation of the world).

Comments are solicited, particularly if they are in the form of 
'gasp/oi!, you've got Hume/Aristotle/Williams totally wrong'. Like I 
said, I'm more drawn to the general form of Aristotle's views than the 
detailed particulars (the 'mean between the extreme' for example, can 
pretty much go hang as far as I'm concerned. Though that would be 
another argument in itself and one I'd probably lose).

Necessary explanatory post-script: For those not in the know, the jargon 
of internal vs external reasons was coined by Bernard Williams in his 
paper 'Internal and External Reasons'. An internal reason is a reason 
(e.g. to do something) generated by my own motivational states. An 
external reason is a reason which comes from outside my motivational 
states. Williams contends that there can be no external reasons.


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On the Subject of Wittgenstein and religion
----------

Some will hopefully remember that I accused Wittgenstein of being a 
Catholic and was justly rebuked from it. To bolster the case against my 
earlier claim I came across this section from Norman Malcolm's 'Ludwig 
Wittgenstein: A Memoir' (thoroughly recommended; one of the most 
thoroughly enjoyable books I've come across in months, I only wish I'd 
troubled to obtain it sooner) which - at the risk of flaunting copyright 
law - I will quote verbatim;

p58
"At this point I should like to say what I can on the difficult subject 
of Wittgenstein's attitude towards religion. He told me that in his 
youth he had be contemptuous of it, but that about the age of twenty-one 
something had caused a change in him. In Vienna he saw a play that was a 
mediocre drama, but in it one of the characters expressed the thought 
that no matter what happened in the world, nothing bad could happen to 
him - he was independent of fate and circumstances. Wittgenstein was 
struck by this stoic thought; for the first time he saw the possibility 
of religion. He said that during his service in the First World War he 
came across Tolstoy's writings on the Gospels, which made a great 
impression on him.

Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus: 'Not how the world is, is the 
mystical, but that it is' (s 6.44). I believe that a certain feeling of 
amazement that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced 
by Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period but also when I 
knew him. Whether this feeling has anything to do with religion is not 
clear to me. But Wittgenstein did once say that he thought that he could 
understand the conception of God, in so far as it is involved in one's 
awareness of one's own sin and guilt. He added that he could not 
understand the conception of a Creator, I think that the ideas of Divine 
judgement, forgiveness, and redemption had some intelligibility for him, 
as being related in his mind to feelings of disgust with himself, an 
intense desire for purity, and a sense of the helplessness of human 
beings to make themselves better. But the notion of a being making the 
world had no intelligibility for him at all.

Wittgenstein once suggested that a way in which the notion of 
immortality can acquire a meaning is through one's feeling that one has 
duties from which one cannot be released, even by death. Wittgenstein 
himself possessed a stern sense of duty.

I believe that Wittgenstein was prepared by his own character and 
experience to comprehend the idea of a judging and redeeming God. But 
any cosmological conception of a Deity, derived from the notions of 
cause or of infinity, would be repugnant to him. He was impatient with 
'proofs' of the existence of God, and with attempts to give religion a 
rational foundation. When I once quoted to him a remark of Kierkegaard's 
to this effect: 'How can it be that Christ does not exist, since I know 
that He has saved me?', Wittgenstein exclaimed: 'You see! It isn't a 
question of proving anything!' He disliked the theological writings of 
Cardinal Newman, which he read with care during his last year at 
Cambridge. On the other hand, he revered the writings of St Augustine. 
He told me he decided to being his Investigations with a quotation from 
the latter's Confessions, not because he could not find the conception 
expressed in that quotation stated as well be other philosophers, but 
because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it. 
Kierkegaard he also esteemed. He referred to him with something of awe 
in his expression, as a 'really religious' man. He had read the 
Concluding Unscientific Postscript - but found it 'too deep' for him. 
The journal of George Fox, the English Quaker, he read with admiration - 
and presented me with a copy of it. He praised one of Dickens' sketches 
- an account of the latter's visit on board a passenger ship crowded 
with English converts to Mormonism about to sail for America. 
Wittgenstein was impressed y the calm resolution of those people, as 
portrayed by Dickens.

I do not wish to give the impression that Wittgenstein accepted any 
religious faith - he certainly did not - or that he was a religious 
person. But I think that there was in him, in some sense, the 
possibility of religion. I believe that he looked on religion as a 'form 
of life' (to use an expression from the Investigations) in which he did 
not participate, but with which he was sympathetic and which greatly 
interested him. Those who did participate he respected - although here 
as elsewhere he had contempt for insincerity. I suspect that he regarded 
religious belief as based on qualities of character and will that he 
himself did not possess. Of Smythies and Anscombe, both of whom had 
become Roman Catholics, he once said to me: 'I could not possibly bring 
myself to believe all the things that they believe.' I think that in 
this remark he was not disparaging their belief. It was rather and 
observation about his own capacity.


Duncan.