virtual philosopher

A New Scottish Enlightenment?

According to a recent article (read it here) the numbers of students studying Philosophy in Scottish schools have gone up by 41 per cent in the last five years. Like Australia, Scotland seems to be a fertile country when it comes to producing philosophers of note given the relatively small population...is it something in the water perhaps?

Free Speech - Peter Tatchell TV interview

Peter Tatchell debates issues about free speech and its appropriate limits with the President of the Oxford Union, Luke Tryl  (who just gave a platform to David Irving and Nick Griffin) and Brendan O'Neill from Edge. You can watch this half-hour debate here (should open in a new window). Tatchell makes a clear and reasonable case for limits to free speech in certain circumstances. Oddly Tryl seems to feel he has an obligation to give a platform to extremists.

Who Says Science and Religion Don't Conflict?

A professor at London's Institute of Education, Michael Reiss, wants science teachers to handle questions about Creationism sensitively. This seems harmless. But may not be. It depends how this is interpreted. If a pupil from a religious background who believes in Creationism questions Darwinism when it is taught, then of course that  pupil needs answers. Science teachers need to answer the student's questions - and no doubt would answer without having read Reiss's book. But there is surely not an obligation to give much time to discussing the ideas or treat them as scientifically respectable in any way. These are science lessons. If we go down this route, then we may end up needing to include some alchemy in Chemistry lessons as a serious alternative to empirical science. The real danger here  is that this will be seen as an admission that Creationism (or alchemy) is a theory that merits discussion in a scientific context...something that has proved disastrous in the US educational context.

This is a bit like the issue of including papers by Holocaust deniers in an academic History conference. Only some false ideas are sufficiently coherent and evidence-based to justify their entry into the debate. Just by discussing some of the wilder ideas alongside evidence-based ones they are inadvertently given far greater respectability than they deserve. Creationism as an idea-virus is a good subject for sociological study; but given the US experience, educationalists should be wary about lending it as a 'theory' a seriousness that it does not in the least deserve...we might end up taking seriously the idea that thunder is caused by Zeus's anger too. Something like ten percent of students in the UK seem to believe in Creationism in some form according to Professor Reiss; but probably more than that believe in astrological predictions too...but that doesn't mean science lessons should get sidetracked into discussions of the evidence base for astrology (I'm an Airies by the way so of course I would be aggressive about this).

I like Dr Hilary Leevers's response that science teachers would be teaching evolution not creationism and so should not need a book to tell them how to "delicately handle controversy between a scientific theory and a belief". This raises interesting questions about what the role of a science teacher is. Surely it is at the most basic level to teach students about science, its methods and value. It is also to model good scientific practice which is certainly not to take all beliefs equally seriously.

If a Holocaust denier asks a question in a History lesson we wouldn't expect a History teacher to treat the student's position as just another belief: the point would be to show why this is not a position that a historian could hold without denying overwhelming evidence, and then move on swiftly. Presumably we wouldn't want a History teacher to engage in an extended debate about the actual evidence at this point as that would give deniers a credibility as part of the evidence-based debate that they don't merit (I support  Deborah Lipstadt's action here - she declines to appear on the same platform as deniers such as David Irving, despite having refuted Holocaust denial in great detail in an English court following a libel action from Irving. For more on that, see her excellent book History on Trial).

Philosophy: Lived and Important

I came across this passage in a book by Bryan Magee today (Popper in the Fontana Modern Masters series):

"He believes that philosophy is a necessary activity because we, all of us, take a great number of things for granted, and many of these assumptions are of a philosophical character; we act on them in private life, in politics, in our work, and in every other sphere of our lives - but while some of these assumptions are no doubt true, it is likely that more are false and some are harmful. So critical examination of our presuppositions - which is a philosophical activity - is morally as well as intellectually important. This view is of philosophy as something lived and important for all of us, not an academic activity or a specialism, and certainly not as consisting primarily in the study of the writings of professional philosophers." (Magee, 1973, p. 15).

This is a neat encapsulation of the value of philosophical thinking for everyone. But this critical examination of presuppositions has to be well-executed; otherwise  dogmas may do less harm than sloppy thinking. The difficult of philosophy isn't that it is a technical subject; it is in avoiding rationalization and rhetoric. Other people's prejudices and reasoning errors are much easier to spot than one's own...Nietzsche put it too strongly when, in Beyond Good and Evil, he accused philosophers of involuntary autobiography under the guise of impersonal reasoning; but you can see why he said it. Smug rationalization is as dangerous as unquestioned prejudice...

Ophelia Benson talks about Why Truth Matters on Point of Inquiry Podcast

Point of Inquiry has just released a 25 minute interview with Ophelia Benson (you can listen to it here). Ophelia runs the excellent Butterflies and Wheels website and is co-author with Jeremy Stangroom of Why Truth Matters and the Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense. In a wide-ranging discussion she explains why truth is so important, why we owe it to our children not to mislead them, the dangers of anti-intellectualism, and why literary theorists are so often snappy dressers and  mathematicians generally aren't. This is part of an ongoing series of Point of Inquiry podcasts that you can subscribe to via iTunes.

Read Ophelia's earlier interview on Virtual Philosopher

Is Moaning a Matter of Tone?

I've been thinking about moaning (in the sense of complaining) as a result of taking part in a live discussion on this topic on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour last week (listen here - currently misleadingly linked from 'Endometriosis' on the website)...

When people complain that someone else is moaning, this is clearly a put down. But is it fair to call it ad hominem (not in the strict logical sense, but in the widely used sense of 'getting personal')? The anti-moaner usually singles out the tone rather than the content. So Cassandra could have been accused of 'always seeing the negative, going on about the fall of Troy' and the Greens ten years ago who made a big deal about global warming were often disparaged as killjoys always having something to complain about.

What is nasty about moaning is that the negative emotion can be draining...and even contagious, and moaner and listener alike can be sucked into a whirlpool of (often self-indulgent) going on about things that ends in inaction and the bad faith of perceived helplessness where it is easier to complain about things apparently beyond your control than to do something. But it can also be a realistic judgment of the way things are and the last resort of the powerless: their attempt to express their profound disappointment that the world falls short of their dreams. The relentlessly positive can be sentimental fools. The mild moaners bond socially, and have the therapeutic benefits of tension release (even if the tension isn't necessarily coming from the target of the moan). If you accept a hydraulic model, the suppressed aggression of the person who forces him or herself to be positive in the face of obstacles may come out somewhere else...

Philosophers, particularly analytic philosophers, have been trained in what J.S.Mill called 'negative logic' (read my previous comments on this): finding fault with other people's arguments (and sometimes even their own). To outsiders this may look like the relentless negativity of a bunch of moaning minnies...Journalists get accused of the same thing.

Perhaps the Aristotelian mean lies between relentless self-indulgent passive-aggressive negativity and over-optimistic naivity...So moderate moaning, where it doesn't lose touch with reality and become an end in itself, may be part of the good life... 

New edition of Thinking from A to Z published today!

The third edition of my book Thinking from A to Z has come out today in a dinky new format (pocket sized). I hope you like it. New entries include:

• principle of charity
• lawyer's answer
• least worst option
• poisoning the well
• sentimentality
• sunk cost fallacy
• weasel words
• 'you would say that wouldn't you'

A Misleading Generalization?

A nice statement made  by an interviewee on  Radio 4 yesterday morning:

'It's always misleading to generalise'

Raymond Tallis' Annoying Choice of Book for Desert Island Discs

Raymond Tallis, (physician, philosopher, poet) is a model of good sense on the value of  science and what's wrong with pseudo-science and anti-science as for example in the podcast linked from his Times article.

He also won many hearts some time ago with his brilliantly titled Not Saussure which savaged trendy literary theory. On Radio 4's Desert Island Discs repeated today, his clarity and intelligence shone through particularly on medical issues about dying, and his choice of music included two bullseyes: Bach's Cello Suites, and Schubert's String Quintet.

But the deep mystery to me is why his choice of book for his hypothetical desert island soujourn was Heidgegger's Being and Time - one of the most obscure books of the twentieth century, which, though it obviously does contain some interesting ideas, buries them so deep in verbiage and neologisms that only the full time scholar has a chance of excavating them or making anything remotely comprehensible out of them (and for a sceptical reader like me there is the constant suspicion of being conned by deliberate obscurantism and even the philosophical equivalent of homeopathy). I suppose it is like taking a fiendishly difficult cryptic crossword on a long journey...I wish he'd opted for something by David Hume or Friedrich Nietzsche. Surely it would be better to take something by an undoubted genius such as either of these two (both whom were also superb writers) than a doorstop by someone who definitely couldn't write and probably wasn't a genius.

Academic Integrity and the Web

Philosopher Lawrence M. Hinman has a streamed video (23 minutes) on the subject of  'Academic Integrity and the Web' available free. His thesis is that there are five key aspects of academic integrity:

1. Honesty
2. Responsibility
3. Respect
4. Fairness
5. Trust

and that these are pre-requisites of a flourishing academic life. The Internet facilitates plagiarism, which can be carried out privately; the most successful plagiarists may never be caught. Policing this with plagiarism-detecting software is a heavy-handed solution. Far better to cultivate  respect for the values of academic integrity...He also touches on the interesting question of whether the kinds of virtual identities possible on the Internet might undermine integrity by disrupting out continuity as moral selves.

Read my earlier post on plagiarism...

and a post on Hubert Dreyfus's pessimism about teaching at a distance