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Letters
Letters
Rome If You Want To • Observing Science • Jack the Possibility-Bearing Dog • Morality or Bunk? • Wagner Was A Pagan • Happiness & The Philosophers • Middle School Misogyny • Race Is Environmental • Evolve Your Progress • Deep In The Sand
Rome If You Want To
Dear Editor: Philip Vassallo’s article in Issue 172 about the Roman educationist Quintilian contains a misconception. According to Vassallo, Quintilian “lashes out” against the notion that “the orator should learn to speak persuasively to either side of an issue.” As the context (Institutio Oratora, 2:17:30) makes clear, however, what Quintilian is saying is that this notion gives rise to a great number of petty criticisms of oratory – criticisms he then proceeds to refute. Indeed, as Michael Mendelson has shown, learning to argue pro and contra lies at the heart of Quintilian’s rhetorical education. As Aristotle says, “one should be able to argue persuasively on either side of a question… in order that it may not escape our notice what the real state of the case is and that we ourselves may be able to refute if another person uses speech unjustly” (Rhetoric). To them both, the ability to formulate opposing arguments is a key part of critical thinking.
Diogenes Laertius tells us that Protagoras was the first to propose that “on every matter there are two logoi [arguments] opposed to one another.” However, Luc de Brabandere in his history of critical thinking (also in Issue 172) sees Protagoras and the group known as the Sophists as the enemies of critical thinking, describing them as ‘masters of fallacious discourse’. This negative view of the Sophists is heavily influenced by Plato, who sought to distinguish his own philosophy from sophistic rhetoric. Ironically, perhaps the strongest evidence, in defence of Protagoras at least, can be found in the Platonic dialogue bearing his name. In that, Protagoras tells Socrates that he teaches “sound deliberation [in]… the proper management of one’s own affairs, how best to run one’s household, and the management of public affairs”, and thus “how to make the most effective contribution to the affairs of the city by word and action” (Protagoras 318e-319a). Such was his eminently practical wisdom, indeed, that Pericles gave Protagoras the job of drafting the constitution of a new pan-Hellenic colony in southern Italy.
Neil Foxlee, Lancaster
Dear Editor: I asked my wife this morning over breakfast what Sam Spound might have meant when he wrote that Machiavelli’s Florence “came under the yolk of corrupt oligarchs” (Philosophy Now Issue 172). She wondered if that explains why Machiavelli ended up so frequently with egg on his face as he tried to fathom political reality.
Linden MacIntyre, Toronto
Dear Editor: Thank you for devoting Issue 172 to Roman philosophy. I greatly benefitted from Abdullah Shaikh on Cicero’s idea of virtus. And Cassandra Brandt’s essay on how Stoicism helped her is beyond words.
It is important to remember that, as Momigliano and others have pointed out, what the Roman Empire lacked was precisely an ideological basis. This may be one reason why the Chinese empire, which was based on Legalism and Confucianism, lasted so much longer. This deficit was eventually made good by the adoption of Christianity by Constantine, and very briefly (361-3 CE), of Neoplatonism by Julian. The Eastern empire went on to last for 1,000 years. Its spiritual offspring are still with us in Eastern Europe and Russia. So much for Gibbon.
Antony Black, Dundee
Observing Science
Dear Editor: In ‘Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics’ (Issue 172), Kanan Purkayastha says Heisenberg’s thinking about the nature of reality in quantum mechanics revolves around matrix mechanics and the uncertainty relation, and asks: “But what are they?”
Current particle physics rests on three distinct pillars: General Relativity, the Standard Model, and coupling equations that describe forces’ influence on matter. While incredibly accurate, this framework represents a ‘mathematical playground’ rather than a fundamental description of reality. These theories operate on incompatible assumptions – smooth, deterministic spacetime versus discrete, probabilistic quantum fields – so they fail to unify. Consequently, the equations serve as effective tools to predict results at manageable energy scales, but not as a theory of everything. The reliance on mathematical renormalisation to cancel infinities, and the lack of a quantum gravity, further suggests physicists are manipulating elegant mathematical models to fit experimental data rather than uncovering the underlying nature of the universe. The unresolved tension, particularly at the Planck scale, proves these formulae are, effectively, high-level mathematical tools rather than the underlying truth.They are merely highly successful simulations, or in essence, just mathematical models that describe observations of the world.
Doug Clark, Edinburgh
Dear Editor: Reading Mark Vernon’s article on William Blake in Issue 171, I was struck by how closely Blake’s wariness of generalisation anticipates later philosophical worries. What Blake seems to resist is not science as such but the quiet metaphysical inflation of abstraction into reality. Once our representations begin to stand in for the world itself, they acquire a kind of tyrannical authority – a danger Blake sensed in the assumption that universal principles govern all that lives. Scientific laws begin as modes of seeing, but risk hardening into appearing to be the very structure of reality.
This concern finds a striking echo in Wittgenstein’s remark, at the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that the modern worldview rests on the illusion that the laws of nature explain natural phenomena. The ancients, he suggests, were at least clearer in recognising a terminus – God or Fate – whereas scientism makes it appear as though everything has been explained when explanation has merely been delayed. Read in this light, Blake’s insistence that “General Forms have their vitality in Particulars” is not anti-scientific, but philosophical – a warning against mistaking representations for what they represent. Abstract thinking, once severed from perception and lived experience, risks becoming not a tool of understanding, but an idol.
Aoife Hardiman, Dublin
Jack the Possibility-Bearing Dog
Dear Editor: Concerning Raymond Tallis in Issue 172: I have a farm, and in a paddock on this farm there is a large heap of dead branches and building material. I gather all this up with my tractor whilst my cattle dog, Jack, busily circles the heap ready for any hiding rabbit which may leap out. Jack imagines many possible exits the rabbit will have. He taps into his ‘structured sense of possibilities’, along with his nose and experience, then works out the probabilities of various exits for the rabbit. Jack has none of Hume’s reservations when it comes to inductive thinking: his methods have caught rabbits before and will catch them again. This ‘Possibility-Bearing Animal’ clearly has ‘the sense of what might be’. When the rabbit makes its run, Jack pursues. He predicts every rapid move left and right, then goes for the kill. After catching the terrified rabbit Jack plays with it before killing (complicating the ideas of Peter Singer’s moral distinctions, since we don’t hold Jack responsible). Jack then eats half, and buries half, imagining the second helping for the next day, but also considering the possibility of a fox finding his food.
Tallis argues, ‘Man is the possibility-bearing animal’… but so is Jack!
Michael Hanley, Melbourne
Morality or Bunk?
Dear Editor: I totally agree with Dylan Neri’s critical review in 172 of Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds, which is based on Peter Singer’s analogy of our duty to send resources to the poor in the Third World with our duty to save a child from drowning in a shallow pond. The two moral situations are entirely different and one moral duty cannot be derived from the other. For instance:
1. Once you save the child and return them to their parents, the necessary action is completed. But the supposedly analogous duty to the poor is endless.
2. Saving the child is an action you can perform without help. There is little you can do to help the millions of poor, unless many others act like you.
3. Only you can save the child. Many others can give to the poor, even if you do not.
4.The cost to you of saving the child is known, finite, and bearable: it’s the ruin of a pair of new shoes. In contrast, it is difficult to know how much one should deprive oneself to assist the poor.
Our duties to others are derived from our overall duty to care for each other. It is not possible for one person to fulfil every duty. Generally, performing one act of care does not imply a duty to perform an entirely different act of care.
Allen Shaw, Leeds
Dear Editor: This email was prompted by the review of Death in a Shallow Pond, by David Edmonds, in Philosophy Now 172. Admittedly, I haven’t read the book, but I find it difficult to believe that it’s as bad as the entirely negative review suggests. Neither the tone nor the content suggest any attempt to engage with it in an objective way. Issue 172 also contained ‘A Very Short History of Critical Thinking’: the author of that piece could have used this review to illustrate the ad hominem and straw man fallacies! The interest of your readers might be better served by a review with some degree of balance.
David Bourn, Newcastle upon Tyne
Wagner Was A Pagan
Dear Editor: Hilarius Bogbinder says in Issue 172, “Wagner embraced Christianity in his opera Parsifal.” There’s nothing Christian about Parsifal. Hilarious!
Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen, Eastbourne
Happiness & The Philosophers
Dear Editor: I found Matthew Hammerton’s discussion of meaning and well-being in Issue 171 thoughtful and conceptually clear. The distinction between total value (‘meaning’) and balanced value (‘well-being’) is elegant, and the examples are well chosen. Still, I want to raise a concern from a perspective largely absent from the discussion – that of the Scandinavian welfare-state model and the ordinary lives it is designed to support.
Hammerton’s essay treats the tension between meaning and well-being as something individuals must ultimately navigate through personal life choices. But this framing already presupposes a social context in which individuals are expected to carry the burden of ‘meaning-production’ themselves. From a Nordic social-democratic perspective, this is neither inevitable nor desirable. In high-tax, large welfare-state societies like ours, a great deal of what might be called ‘the good’ is produced, distributed, and maintained institutionally. Public administration, healthcare systems, education, infrastructure, social insurance, and regulatory frameworks are managed by professionals whose job it is to handle precisely the large-scale moral and social goods that Hammerton associates with ‘meaning’. The point of this arrangement is not efficiency alone, but also moral relief. Ordinary citizens are not required to live heroic or sacrificial lives in order for society to function well. A plumber, nurse, warehouse worker, or primary school teacher doesn’t need to ask whether their life maximizes goodness. By working normal hours, paying high taxes, and trusting public institutions, they already participate in a moral project. This allows them to live balanced lives centered on family and modest personal aspirations. From within this model, their lives do not appear deficient in meaning; rather, meaning is diffuse, low-intensity, and shared.
In this light, the dramatic tension between meaning and well-being may be seen as partly an artifact of societies that have privatized moral responsibility. When welfare institutions weaken, individuals are forced to compensate by turning their lives into projects of impact, sacrifice, or exceptional achievement. Figures like Darwin or Parfit then become not just examples, but aspirational models. But from a Scandinavian perspective, this looks less like philosophical insight and more like institutional failure. This is not to deny that some individuals will reasonably pursue extraordinary projects or accept severe imbalances in their lives. But it is worth asking whether a good society should require this of many, or celebrate it as paradigmatic. A social order that enables most people to live decent, balanced, unheroic lives without existential overexertion may represent not a retreat from meaning, but an arguably more humane way of organizing it.
Anders Wallin, Uppsala
Dear Editor: Reading Issue 171 of Philosophy Now (the Happiness Issue) I was as inspired as only a glass-half-empty person can be to compose a poem:
A Glass Half Empty
My glass is never half full
Its contents never rising higher:
My glass is always half empty
Frequently running drier.
Yet it’s a metaphor I like –
It reduces disappointment;
For should disaster strike
It’s the pre-prepared ointment.
Ready to apply to the cuts
A salve to soothe the pain
Following a kick in the guts;
A cover against the rain.
My glass is never half full
Its contents never rising higher:
My glass is always half empty
Frequently running drier.
Stefan Badham, Portsmouth
Dear Editor: A meditation on moral philosophy: I never believed that ‘ignorance is bliss’ until they started putting calorie counts on restaurant menus. I’ve not enjoyed a meal out all year.
Robert Frazer, Salford
Middle School Misogyny
Dear Editor: I read Marcia Yudkin’s ‘What Women?’ in Issue 171, and have a few thoughts to share. Yudkin discusses the misogyny she faced as a philosophy grad student at Cornell, and it made me think of the misogyny I faced in my last year of middle school.
Although I and the others in my class are young, there’s still quite a bit of misogyny from my male classmates. I have also come to notice that some students even display acts of misogyny towards our teacher. Talking with some of the other girls in my algebra class, they have also experienced forms of misogyny. For instance, one of them was working with a small group at a whiteboard, and while she was in the middle of writing a male classmate snatched the marker out of her hand! He did not act this way toward his male peers. So I find that misogyny starts a lot younger than most might think. Because of that, girls often have to learn how to deal with it before they even realize that they’re being discriminated against. Children pick up on the misogyny our society has created. Subtle cues from parents, social media, and interactions, can all influence the bias of your mind.
It seems to me that when pupils see a teacher merely as someone who’s there to teach, her commands are acceptable. But when they’re like my math teacher – an intelligent woman who’s not here to put up with the shenanigans of middle schoolers – the boys feel threatened and need to prove themselves. Yudkin articulates this sort of defensiveness well in the article when she writes, “As women, we were outsiders in academe, and represented a threat to the towers of male power.”
Lily M, West Virginia
Race Is Environmental
Dear Editor: I read with interest the points made by Sailee Khurjekar in her article ‘The Philosophy of Race’ in PN 171. She’s concerned with the political and social constructions of race; but race seems to me to be first and foremost environmental – something not particularly tackled in the article.
My daughter-in-law is Anglo-Egyptian and lives on the west coast of Scotland, where there’s cloud and rain. Having been here over a decade, she’s paler than her sisters who live over 500 miles south, on the east coast of England. This is of course due to the amount of sunshine. In effect, it’s healthier to have darker skin the nearer the equator you are, to protect from exposure to the sun’s rays, and healthier to have paler skin the more north you get (for example, Scotland’s west coast), as paler skin absorbs more sun, producing more vitamin D. This is environmental. The effects on skin tone can be seen in my daughter-in-law over the years. They can also be observed in as short a time as days, because when we do have good weather, I, a white person, tan, hence protecting me from the sun. It seems then that the differences in appearance humanity has developed over the millenia is largely environmental. How folk choose to treat those of different appearances is another matter.
Kristine Kerr, Renfrewshire
Evolve Your Progress
Dear Editor: I read with increasing misgiving Adam Neiblum’s explication of the confusion between ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ in PN 171. Whilst initially sympathetic, I gradually realised his argument was a thinly-veiled attack on spirituality in general and Christianity in particular.
He reasonably analyses ‘evolution’ as the accidental success of genetic mutation when it enhances the fit of an organism with its environment, versus ‘progress’ as planned movement towards a goal. However, I believe ‘evolution’ and ‘progress’ can alternatively be defined as, respectively, the ongoing adaption of lifeforms to each other and their environment, and the ongoing change to the physical environment and other lifeforms made by one lifeform (humanity) for its own fitness. On this definition, the inherent risk to the environment from ‘progress’ is clear.
Following his initial analysis, Neiblum cites Stephen Jay Gould to pin the confusion on ‘Christendom’s anthropocentrism’ – thus ignoring anthropocentrism from other epochs, creeds, societies, etc. Neiblum then avers: “we’ve simply morphed from being the Christian ‘crown of creation’ to being the naturalistic ‘pinnacle of evolution’.” He presses home his point: “Our ignorant exceptionalist self-conception is also arguably at the core of many of the devastating problems we now face.” He emphasises that humanity has no more inherent right to escape extinction than any other species. However, he then contradicts himself, saying that, uniquely, “our future is in our own hands” – but only if we choose progress “rooted in science, reason and knowledge.” But he appears to treat reason and knowledge as synonyms of ‘science’. Thus he rejects spirituality having any role in our survival.
Given the current state of the world, I wonder if Neiblum would accept that spirituality tempering ‘scientific progress’ might be beneficial? Science has indeed provided us the means to live more fulfilling lives than our predecessors; but scientific progress also continues to bring pain and misery to both humanity and the animal kingdom, and despoilation to the planet. Nuclear arsenals, climate crisis, environmental destruction, and mass extinction, do not arise from spirituality.
Clearly, Christianity and other religions have caused much suffering as well as hope and love; but to put our faith in scientific progress alone is unjustifiable.
Brian Johns, Hertfordshire
Deep In The Sand
Read Sartre on a sunny beach?
I tried it; not a fan.
Nausea? No Exit? Out of reach
For this windsurfing man.
A downer, dude, right from the start,
I don’t see his allure. Us
Hippies also hate Descartes –
But love our Epicurus!
Steven Kent
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