Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

« Older Entries

A Step Forward

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

Via The Leiter Reports:

Apparently, The American Philosophical Association has adopted a new policy on religious institutions that discriminate against gay men and women:

The American Philosophical Association rejects as unethical all forms of discrimination based on race, color, religion, political convictions, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, gender identification or age, whether in graduate admissions, appointments, retention, promotion and tenure, manuscript evaluation, salary determination, or other professional activities in which APA members characteristically participate. This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status […]

There has been no official announcement yet, but according to an unofficial report by Professor Alistair Norcross:

This statement will be displayed on the page where institutions buy ad space for JFP, and they will be asked to check a box to indicate that they are in compliance with our statement. If they do not check this box, a flag (i.e. a symbolic marking, like the dagger sign currently used to flag censured institutions) will automatically be added to the ad. The flag will say something like this: this institution has not indicated that it complies with the APA Nondiscrimination Statement.

In addition, the APA will fully investigate any complaints about institutions that may not be in compliance with our nondiscrimination statement, a flag will be used to mark ads taken out by any institution that is found not to be in compliance, and this flag will state that, following a full investigation, the APA has determined that the institution is not in compliance with the APA Statement on Nondiscrimination.

This is good news and about time.

Tags: ,
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

An Ethical Question: Should Journalists Be Allowed to Write About Philosophy?

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Patricia Cohen’s article in the NY Times, “An Ethical Question: Does a Nazi Deserve a Place Among Philosophers?” is another in a collection of recent hatchet jobs in the press (here and here) condemning the work of Martin Heidegger for his connections to the Nazis.

The occasion for these journalists writing about something they know nothing about is a book by Emmanual Faye, soon to be released in the U.S., claiming that Heidegger’s thought ought to be stricken from the canon because it was allegedly inspired by Nazism.

The articles consist of some “he said, she said” opinions about the matter with no discussion of the nature of Heidegger’s work. And Faye’s book has been widely discredited as itself a hatchet job. (see comments here)

I have no idea what inspired Heidegger. It is well known that he was a provincial German nationalist, probably an anti-semite, and an all-purpose jerk. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what this is supposed to tell us about his philosophy.

Heidegger’s main points, at least in his major work Being in Time, were that (1) our experience is always situated in a context of which we already have a non-cognitive (or non-representational) grasp prior to conscious deliberation, (2) that non-cognitive grasp is a product of the way things matter to us (care), (3) and ultimately how things matter to us must be understood in terms of our temporality (roughly our sense of past, present, and future). This view draws a sharp contrast with philosophical views that assume meanings are abstract, fixed entities without a history grasped primarily through theoretical reason. Heidegger’s ideas have found their way into the mainstream of philosophical thought and in fact have deeply influenced contemporary cognitive science.

I suppose one could interpret these ideas as meaning there is some sort of national destiny written into the “blood and soil” of a nation being disseminated through its history, and that the surge of “feeling” and “will” emanating from that destiny make reason irrelevant. Maybe Nazism flows from such an point of view. But it is a real stretch to find this in Being and Time–Heidegger’s works neither entail nor lend themselves to such a reading.

The genetic fallacy and the intentional fallacy are not necessarily incompatible with standards of good philosophical reasoning, but they must be handled with care—and neither Faye’s book nor the articles in question take the requisite care.

Heidegger’s limitations as a thinker (and perhaps a person) are revealed, not by what he said,  but by what he didn’t say. Moral relationships with other persons do not occupy a sufficiently central role in Heidegger’s thought. This is the source of much criticism of Heidegger, especially from thinkers such as Levinas, and to my mind the criticism is deserved. But that hardly makes his work an example of “Nazism” and is no argument for refusing to read Heidegger but, instead, for taking what insight one can and building a more adequate account.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

Au Contraire

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Last week I posted twice (here and here) about the limits of contrarians who seek publicity by going against the conventional wisdom. Both Bill Maher in his diatribes against the flu vaccine in particular and Western medicine in general, and Brownless and Lenzer, the authors of a poorly researched article in Atlantic Monthly on the effectiveness of flu vaccine, are guilty of a kind of knee jerk response to conventional wisdom on an issue that is important to people and may cause harm if not properly understood.

But the conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, so it is worth thinking about when being a contrarian is justified.

My short answer to this question is that “hit jobs” that cast doubt on the conventional wisdom  by oversimplifying the issue are never worth our attention. The point to remember is that if a contrarian is right about some issue, it typically makes the world more complicated, not less. The conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong but it is seldom without any reason or evidence behind it. Usually, people who hold conventional beliefs, especially in the sciences and social sciences that are evidence-based, have good reasons for holding the conventional belief.

When doubt is cast on those “good reasons” we are faced with attempting to confirm the new data, weighing the actual import of the new variables, assessing whether the new variables will produce multiple effects, and separating what was right about the old view from what was wrong about it and trying to accommodate the new information with what is worth saving of the old.

This process produces reactions, counter-reactions, and uncertainty among interest groups, and in the end the radical “new” insight is seldom as revolutionary as it appeared.

What matters then is that contrarians, or people who write about them, need to stay focused on the difficult search for truth and the need for nuance rather than bold statements that succumb to the temptation to be cute, hip, and cynical. Unfortunately, they are usually looking for entertainment value or promoting an ideology. Thus, contrarians are usually misleading.

This article at The Economist.com provides lots of examples of contrarianism run amok. (The new book by the authors of Freakonomics, called Superfreakonomics, is the latest example.) But there are others:

The first time I ever encountered an argument that I would now clearly recognise as “contrarian” was in elementary school, during Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, when I first heard someone argue the supply-side case that lowering taxes would raise government revenues. Another early encounter I recall was my father describing a social scientist interviewed on NPR who’d argued that the main effect of minimum-wage laws was to raise the unemployment level for poor urban youth. And it’s been my experience ever since that contrarian arguments tend to skew rightwards.

I doubt that the right has a monopoly on contrarians.

At any rate, it would be good if contrarians were devoted to encouraging people to think more. Unfortunately it is quite the opposite. To the extent they encourage us to oversimplify matters they encourage us to think less.

Tags:
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »

← Older Entries