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Race, Philosophy & Science • Chemical Reaction • Moral Feedback • Language Makes A Difference • God: To Be or Not To Be? • What Is Justification? • Women in Philosophy • Schopenhauer, Bringer of Joy • Hypothetical Dragons

Race, Philosophy & Science

Dear Editor: In her article in Issue 171, Sailee Khurjekar claims that race is culturally constructed rather than an inherent attribute. However, in the book The War on Science (ed. Lawrence Krauss), there’s an essay by Jerry Coyne and Luan Maroja reporting that a broad sample of genes from 3,600 people was examined, from people who self-identified as either African-American, white, Hispanic, or east Asian. Analysis of the sampled DNA showed that the genetic variation was distributed in clusters. The most striking finding was that there was a 99.84 percent match – an almost perfect match – between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. It seems to me this indicates differences that are biological rather than culturally constructed.

Peter Spurrier, Essex

Chemical Reaction

Dear Editor: I was very interested in Okan Nurettin Okur’s article in Issue 170, ‘Alchemy, Mining, Speculation and Experimentation’, in which he investigates the philosophy of chemistry. Okur claims that the main subject of chemistry is the transformation of matter by electron transfer or sharing, but I think energy considerations, including enthalpy and entropy gradients, and information transfer, are equally important. (Okan does state that the conservation of energy is fundamental.) I was impressed that Okan tackled emergence as downward causality, and mentions complex systems, but he omits to explain that these systems have built-in resilience due to feedback loops and transfer of information. This is encapsulated by Le Chatelier’s principle, which says that when a chemical equilibrium is disturbed – by changes in concentration, pressure, or temperature – the system does not passively drift. Instead, the disturbance is carried as information through chemical potentials and free energy gradients, and the system redistributes matter and energy until equilibrium is restored. This can be seen when the top is removed from a fizzy drinks bottle. In an unopened bottle, carbon dioxide is in equilibrium between being dissolved in the liquid and as gas above it. Opening the bottle drops the pressure, and the system responds by releasing more gas until a new balance is reached. Reseal the bottle, and the equilibrium shifts back toward dissolving more CO ₂ . Even here, matter is processing information about imbalance, and restoring coherence.

Importantly, Le Chatelier’s principle also applies at larger scales, including the Earth’s climate, which also resists disturbances through feedback loops: oceans absorb carbon dioxide; vegetation grows more rapidly; clouds adjust heat balance. While these processes operate on longer timescales and may not fully restore equilibrium, the underlying logic is the same: matter processes information about imbalance, and resists collapse. This shows chemistry not only produces emergent properties, but also encodes resilience through feedback: matter itself processes information to maintain coherence. Hence the philosophy of chemistry is vital for understanding nature, as well as for environmental ethics.

Russell Berg, Manchester

Moral Feedback

Dear Editor: I greatly enjoyed Lee Clarke’s essay, ‘What My Sister Taught Me About Humanity’ in Issue 170. My husband and I are both disabled, having acquired our disabilities during our careers. My husband is vision impaired, and I experience the world differently due to psychological factors. This has significantly altered our professional paths, and influences our worldviews. Each of us has experience of navigating a world in which we are often othered because of our perceived differences. These personal experiences give me a deep understanding of the narrative around disability and morality that Clarke discusses. I found his insights and illustrations particularly timely. Thanks for opening up this debate, which is often overlooked.

Claire Keogh, Dublin

Dear Editor: As the author hoped, I did enjoy Naina Krishnamurthy’s article ‘Forced Vaccination’ in number 170. The timely questions are: Can vaccination against certain contagious diseases be required by governmental authority? And the corollary, Is it morally wrong to refuse to get vaccinated in those circumstances?

Ms Krishnamurthy persuasively posits three prominent ethical frameworks to conclude that ‘forced’, that is, compulsory, vaccination, is sometimes ‘an ethical imperative’, and that the refusal to get vaccinated then is morally wrong. I have no quarrel with her arguments – but I suggest that they are unnecessarily limited to times when pandemics or public health crises are already in process. For Ms Krishnamurthy, compulsory vaccination is an ethical imperative during a crisis; but I suggest that compulsory vaccination against certain highly contagious and rapidly spread diseases is an ethical imperative before a crisis has occurred. Wouldn’t it be morally justifiable to compel vaccination so as to prevent a crisis? This is an urgent question for the United States in light of recent outbreaks of two diseases thought to have been eradicated: measles and polio. For both, the vectors are unvaccinated people. If they refused to get vaccinated, aren’t they morally culpable for a public health crisis that could have been prevented?

Gordon Shumaker

Language Makes A Difference

Dear Editor: I’d like to respond to the letter from Paulette Halili in PN 170 on Slavoj Žižek’s use of language, because I think I can help to clarify some of the issues she raises. The terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ were introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). His use of them formed the basis of Structuralism, a philosophy of signs and meanings. Jacques Derrida criticized Saussure’s theories in the early chapters of his book Of Grammatology (1967) as part of his more general critique of Structuralism. This established him as one of the first ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers.

The terms ‘enunciated’ and ‘enunciation’, on the other hand, were introduced by the linguist Emile Benveniste (1902-1976). The distinction is different to that between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. The ‘enunciated’ is the statement I make; the ‘enunciation’ refers to the fact that I am making this statement. As Žižek remarked in his article in Philosophy Now Issue 168, this distinction proved to be fruitful for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A central hypothesis of psychoanalysis is that what people say should not necessarily be taken at face value. There’s an old joke about two psychoanalysts who pass in the street. One says, “Good Morning!”, and the other thinks, ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ We might say, we know what the person enunciated, but what was the purpose of his enunciation?

Žižek’s article argued that this distinction could be a solution to the Liar Paradox. If I say, ‘I am a liar’, this statement might be intended to convey my fundamental honesty, in my willingness to admit dishonesty. In this, the ‘I’ of the statement ‘I am a liar’ does not coincide with the ‘I’ who makes the statement. Lacan called this the difference between the ‘subject of the enunciation’, and the ‘subject of the enunciated’. His view was that language in general produces this splitting of the ‘I’, and that this is the reason for the ‘split subject’ which forms the basis for the psychoanalytic conception of human beings.

I hope this is of some help in understanding the evolution of these ideas.

Peter Benson, London

God: To Be or Not To Be?

Dear Editor: In Issue 170, Raymond Tallis presents Anselm’s Ontological Argument as if it claims that God’s existence follows from the property of being perfect, and then invoking Kant and Frege to argue that existence is not a predicate. But this is a misrepresentation. Anselm was a Neoplatonist who held that God is ipsum esse: the necessary source of all dependent being. From this perspective, existence is not a property added to a concept, but rather, existence is identical with God’s essence. This means that understanding God’s nature entails understanding that God exists. Anselm does not rely on existence as a predicate at any level. So he is not “arguing a being into existence” as Tallis suggests. So while Kant’s and Frege’s objections arguably refute Descartes’ version of the Ontological Argument, they do not apply to Anselm’s version.

James Humphreys, Colchester

Dear Editor: In Issue 171 (Letters) Peter Spurrier makes an ingenious response to Professor Tallis’s treatment of the Ontological Argument in Issue 170. He claims that existence is a property, whereas in A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (followed by Tallis) maintains that existence cannot be a predicate of a subject: any such statement is merely analytic in that it provides no new information about the subject. The correspondent then goes on to argue that the cat in the sentence ‘the cat is on the floor’ is unreal because the cat is actually on the mat. He nevertheless considers this unreal cat an appropriate subject for an untrue statement about its location. This makes grammatical sense but lacks referential validity.

Kant does not claim that such false assertions are illogical or meaningless, but merely that they do not correspond to the reality of things empirically verifiable. However, he does allow that we can make synthetic statements (i.e. ones that provide new information about the subject and are therefore valid predicates) about things which are themselves only hypothetical, unproven ideas. This is why, he argues, we can say ‘God is almighty’, but cannot then claim on the basis of such an affirmation that God exists, as Tallis points out in his article. This latter step is one that must be taken as an act of faith, which Kant does not disparage.

It is interesting to consider the foregoing points in the light of the distinction drawn by Thomas Aquinas in his Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia between essence and existence, which together constitute the substance of a thing. The first may be conceived and in principle be possible, but it is the second which renders it real in the phenomenal sense. Aquinas then argues that God, as the origin of all being, does not instantiate as substance but remains pure being, uniquely combining both essence and existence. This comes close to saying that if God is conceived of as the ultimate source of the existence of all things, the Prime Mover, he must therefore exist.

Colin Sowden, Abergavenny

What Is Justification?

Dear Editor: This is Kwame Teague from inside America’s prison system! After having read about knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ in the articles written by Maya Koka and Peter Keeble in Issue 169, I found their expositions inadequate. First off, the emphasis on justification through subsequent confirmation is misplaced. Belief as ‘a preconceived notion’ would more aptly embody what we would refer to as knowledge. Give me a moment to elaborate using Maya’s Xuangzang example. The scenario she presents never makes clear whether Xuangzang was just passing through the Gobi desert. If he was passing through without checking, his belief that he has seen water is still untested. But once he ultimately found out he was wrong, that lucky discovery is unconnected to why he had his belief or assumptions. So it seems that here, ‘being justified’ is being touted as just being right – which is a bit like justifying a broke watch because it’s right twice a day.

Kwame Teague, Hip Hop Humanism, Human Resource Department

Women in Philosophy

Dear Editor: Marcia Yudkin’s article, ‘What Women?’, in Issue 171 caught my attention immediately, and brought back some memories about my introduction to Philosophy in the late 1960s. I was starting a BA degree at the University of Toronto, and had made up my mind to pursue a Philosophy major to follow my particular interest in Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ethics. I was registered in an introductory course called Ethics 101 and I greatly looked forward to tackling some deep ethical theories under the direction of Professor L.M.G. Smith. It was a large class made up almost entirely of male students. To my surprise, Professor Smith was a woman. Lorraine Smith had recently completed her PhD in Philosophy at Oxford University, and she had been privileged to study under the internationally-renowned G.E.M. Anscombe. She had obviously been greatly influenced by Anscombe, and her lectures reflected much of Anscombe’s work. I was greatly impressed with Lorraine’s ability to articulate clearly and forcefully the arguments surrounding current ethical issues. Even the more outspoken students were no match for her spontaneous eloquence. Our first assignment was to write a brief paper on the ethical questions relating to the so-called Doctor-Mother-Baby case. A doctor is faced with the choice of crushing the baby’s skull to save the mother’s life, or saving the baby’s life and risking the mother’s death. I thought long and hard about the question, and I tried to refer to well-founded ethical theories in my essay. I felt I had done a good job. A common practice at the time was to have graduate students mark the written papers of undergraduates before being checked by the course professor. I received a C for my paper with a terse comment, “You’ve got it all wrong”. The marker made it clear she was a woman, a feminist, and someone with clear views about a woman’s rights. That was a bit of a shock, but I found a short hand-written paragraph at the bottom of the last page, written by Lorraine Smith. “Actually”, she wrote, “you’ve got it all right. The marker has got it all wrong.” She changed my grade to an A. The next class was a follow up on our papers. Lorraine pointed out that the topic was an emotional issue for many people. However, she told us, emotions have no place in philosophy. We have to look at firm premises from which we can derive conclusions. Then she added something which I never forgot. We all have emotions and feelings, she said, and we all have a brain. But for a philosopher, the brain must always wear the pants.

John Brownridge, Ontario

Schopenhauer, Bringer of Joy

Dear Editor: I write as one whose natural life outlook is pretty much that of a relentlessly glass-half-full Labrador [a famously happy-go-lucky breed of dog. Ed.]. I have to stick my neck out here… It’s taken me three years to read every (translated) word Schopenhauer published, and no other philosopher’s work has given me such consistent solace and sustained joy. Did he show himself to be a grump-faced pessimist, misogynist, racist and pretty horrible man? Yes, and this simply makes him a perfect example of a crucial truth he posits, namely that we humans are deeply flawed creatures, swimming through this glorious horror show and battle-of-the-wills called life, endlessly at the mercy of our prejudices, inclinations and stormy passions. Open any newspaper! I can do no better here than to quote the eminently reasonable and sensible Bryan Magee: “No general philosophy – no ontology, epistemology or logic – can entail pessimistic conclusions … The traditional identification of [Schopenhauer] in terms of his pessimism is largely irrelevant to a serious consideration of him as a philosopher: I am tempted to say that it is a view of his writings which leaves his philosophy out.” Poor old Arthur!

Gary Matthewman, Brighton

Dear Editor: I was interested in Eric Comerford’s imagined conversation between Bilbo and Gandalf on happiness and wellbeing (Philosophy Now Issue 171). To misquote Socrates, life without challenges is not worth living. There are a couple of issues here, one of them being the role of fiction in humanity’s evolution. Fiction is not unlike dreaming in that we confront scenarios that we might not encounter in real life, yet we can learn from them. In fact, I contend that the language of stories is the language of dreams, and that, if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work.

The overcoming of adversity is a universal theme in fiction, going back to Homer’s Odyssey, if not earlier. And of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings exemplifies this in multiple storylines with multiple characters.

All of us, when we reach a certain age, can look back at all the events in our life that ultimately formed our current selves as if we are a piece of clay moulded by life’s experiences. And the thing is that the negative events in our life are just as significant in this process as the positive ones, if not more so. It’s very important to find a purpose, but it invariably involves challenges and also failures. So to revisit Socrates: arguably, a life without failure is not worth living.

Paul Mealing, Melbourne

Dear Editor: In Issue 171 Professor Hammerton provides a useful discussion of the tension that can occur between achievement in life and the enjoyment of it. He uses the term ‘meaningful’ to describe lives of achievement. I find the description of any life as ‘meaningful’ to be unhelpful. The word can be applied to so many very different lives, from the life of a religious hermit, to the mother of a family or to a great scientist or artist. And certainly the life of Adolf Hitler was meaningful to the many millions that he harmed. If a term can be so widely applied, is it useful? Does it tell us anything about the person it is meant to describe? Also, if the term is used, one might expect its opposite to give some information. But whose life can be called meaningless or not meaningful? Even the life of a fetus aborted in the first trimester was not meaningless to its mother.

Other descriptive terms give extra information about a life. It may be long or short, happy or unhappy, beneficial or harmful to a few or to many. It is also useful to say in what way it harmed or benefited how many others and which ones. Just to say a life was ‘meaningful’ conveys no extra information.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: I am writing in regard to your recent Ultimate Guide to Ancient Greek Philosophy, particularly the article ‘Pythagoras and the Numbers Game’. In the section ‘The Collapse of Pythagoreanism’ it is stated that “Irrational numbers are both even and odd at the same time.” This is complete nonsense. It is like saying that the colour orange is both a planet and a star at the same time. Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers (positive and negative whole numbers). The terms ‘odd’ and ‘even’ apply only to integers. An integer, call it x, is odd if it can be expressed as x = 2y + 1, where y is an integer. On the other hand, an integer, x, is even if it can be expressed as x = 2y, where y is an integer. I repeat, it is a statement that applies to integers. It cannot be applied to irrational numbers.

Catherine Notman

Hypothetical Dragons

If a dragon breathes on you, then you get burned.

If what follows if is then, then if if’s so,
then so is then.
If then is so, then if may be,
but not so necessarily.
If if is not, then then may be,
or then again, then may be not.
If then is not, then ‘tis a fact, if is not,
and that is that.

Joe Atkinson, Kemptville, Ontario