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Letters
Letters
Charlton Heston • Divine Intervention • Arguments and Fallacies • Unsympathetic Male • Boils and Biographies • Sex and Particle Physics • More Science Fiction • Spanish Inquisition “Not Expected”
Charlton Heston
DEAR EDITOR: When I opened my latest issue of Philosophy Now and beheld the full-page, glossy ad on the inside cover, I almost fainted. Charlton Heston, the NRA poster boy, explaining the subtleties of the world’s great philosophical works. It was as shocking as discovering Bin Laden doing baggage security checks at the airport.
I understand you can buy tapes with Heston reading the Bible. I’m not sure if it’s the ‘Shooter’s Bible’ or the ‘King James’. I’ve heard that once he gets past “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, he loses interest.
I protest this ad being in your fine publication in the names of Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dewey, Sartre and the thousands upon thousands killed and maimed by guns each year.
RA UHLIG
BY EMAIL
Divine Intervention
DEAR EDITOR: You ask who wrote the Open Letter to Dr Schlessinger which now frequents many web-sites.
I did.
All the quotes come from my first book, the Old Testament, which represent what critics have called my ‘wrathful years’. In those days the world was very new and one pretty much had to make things up as one went along. I tried to redress some of my faulty thinking in my second volume, The New Testament. In many respects this shift was an anticipation of Wittgenstein’s later rejection of the ‘atomic’ and ‘picture’ theories of language put forward in his Tractatus in favour of his ‘language games’ concept. Similarly, there was Heidegger’s famous turn from a concern with the phenomenological study of being to addressing the matter of Being. Not before time, if you ask me, but don’t ask me what I mean by ‘before time’. I can assure you that I have arranged that philosophers of language will get all the time they need to debate such issues in a trillion year seminar on the use of the phrase ‘use of’, with no coffee breaks, a faulty sound system, and an audience comprised of everyone who knows more than they do and can remember every mis-reference.
In short, the document you printed was written in the style of ironical selfparody, later made famous by Kirkegaard, and also utilises the technique of taking matters to the absurd to make an inverse point, in the style of Plato. I hope this sets the matter straight.
You mention that you intend to publish the name of the author. I would suggest that you didn’t. Smiting may no longer be a fashionable response to philosophical disagreements, but it can still be done, if you get my drift.
Sincerely,
GOD
‘ALL ISWELL’, HEAVEN.
p.s. It may amuse you to know that a fallen employee of mine actually did send an evil demon to confuse Descartes. Worked well, didn’t it?
Arguments and Fallacies
DEAR EDITOR: John Shand (Issue 34) takes a novel approach to the classic problem of induction by arguing that there is no problem that needs solving since inductive arguments are either simply invalid or else incomplete (or ‘enthymemetic’, to use the logician’s term, meaning that one of the premises of an argument is hidden or merely implied). As it happens, I defended a similar claim some years ago (‘When Is a Fallacy Not a Fallacy?’ 1988) in the journal Metaphilosophy (Vol.19, Nos.3+4, pp.307-312), namely, that the so-called informal fallacies are enthymemetic. However, I think Shand goes too far when he maintains that all genuine arguments must be logically valid; anything falling short of that is what he calls a ‘putative argument.’ But does this not render his own reference to ‘invalid arguments’ oxymoronic?
Furthermore, I think Shand is too quick to apply the latter label (‘invalid argument’) to supposed counterparts of the (valid) enthymemetic arguments. He seems to think it would be up for grabs whether to hold that the inference from, say, “Aristotle said the Earth is at the center of the universe” to “The Earth is at the center of the universe” is invalid on its face or else enthymemetically valid (because it really also contains the premise, “Anything that Aristotle said is true”). But I have two equally strong yet contradictory intuitions: (1) The inference is clearly invalid and (2) The inference is clearly enthymemetic, assuming an unstated general (albeit false) premise that would make the argument formally valid (for why else would someone have supposed the inference to make sense?).
My own resolution of the apparent paradox was to postulate a distinct species of ‘informal’ inference that involves unspoken warrants (along the lines of Stephen Toulmin’s notion) rather than unspoken premises. Thus, one and the same argument could be both formally valid and informally invalid. But that is also not completely satisfactory, for reasons given in the cited article. So I happily invite Shand to continue to apply himself to this issue.
PROF. JOELMARKS
UNIVERSITY OF NEW HAVEN
WEST HAVEN, CT
Unsympathetic Male
DEAR EDITOR: Any sympathy that I had with the plight of the French female philosophers as given by Jacqueline Swartz (‘Cherchez la Femme?’, March/April 2002) quickly dissipated on reading a passage of Julia Kristeva’s in George Frankl’s excellent Foundations of Morality, Open Gate Press, 2000. The passage reads, “The State as set of all sets is a fiction, it cannot exist, just as there does not exist a set of all sets in set theory… The State is, at most, a collection of all the finite sets.” (Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 1974). We can only hope that Richard Mason is right in ‘Why Spinoza?’, (March/April 2002) and that this great philosopher is at last given his rightful place in France above the verbiage that is/was postmodernism/ deconstruction.
CHRIS COPSEY
BANGOR, COUNTY DOWN
Boils and Biographies
DEAR EDITOR: Do we admire and perhaps agree with Hegel’s philosophy because we think he was a great man, or do we think that he was a great man because we admire and perhaps agree with his philosophy?
At the end of his article, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Philosophical Biographies’ (Philosophy Now, Issue 35), Tim Madigan does finally get round to “The origin of a thought and its impact are not one and the same.” (This version of the intentional fallacy is as much a fallacy in aesthetics as it is in philosophy; these days even serious musicology seems largely to be concerned with composers sexuality, Handel being the most recent victim of a particularly ludicrous account.) But it is not enough to tuck the crux of the matter away in an aside like that; I should like to clarify the position more thoroughly by making a clear distinction between three different genres (though any given book or article may include two or all three). These are Philosophy, History of Ideas and Biography.
A philosophical argument or system must be judged on its own merits. This is so even if the author has developed his or her position partly or wholly by means of a critique of other people’s ideas. In that case the latter must obviously be understood by the reader if the new philosophy is to be understood, but this is not a matter of the History of Ideas; rather, the assumption that the reader is familiar with the ideas critiqued is a matter of economy of space, avoiding the necessity of spelling everything out from scratch .
The relationship of a philosopher’s thoughts to those of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors beyond the immediate use of another position as a springboard – the History of Ideas – allows one to judge the degree of the philosopher’s originality. But the degree of originality is not the same as the correctness or the absolute value of the philosopher’s ideas. (The History of Ideas is, of course, important in its own right as part of History in general, and the cultural background within which a philosopher works may help to account for – but, as Tim Madigan says, account for, not evaluate the outcome of – the direction his or her work goes in.)
Finally, the fact that a philosopher’s work seems to one to be interesting and powerful may make one want to find out about his or her life and personality. There have been many people with boils on unfortunate parts of their anatomy, but we read with interest about Marx’s boils, not about all the others. But this is Biography, not Philosophy: it is intriguing, it may be of psychological, social or cultural relevance, but it has no bearing whatsoever on whether one agrees or disagrees with the philosopher’s ideas or finds them valuable.
MICHAEL GRAUBART,
LONDON
Sex and Particle Physics
DEAR EDITOR: I’m not sure if I understand Mary Midgley (Issue 35). That she can write an essay without using physics does not entail that reductivism is false. Sure, we live in houses and are surrounded by fences. Would we learn more about ourselves if we saw us at a distance as scribed by a map? No – so yes, I agree that questions are important. I also agree that we draw upon different areas of knowledge to answer a plethora of questions. We would certainly not explain adultery in terms of chaos theory or particle/anti-particle annihilation nor explain multiple sexual partners in terms of a Fibonacci sequence. That we don’t use physics to explain the ordinary does not mean that we cannot. Would it be the easiest explanation? No, probably not. Explanation and ontological truth will always be bad bedfellows. Using a map analogy for epistemology will never be the right choice when it comes to separating explanations of epistemology from ontological truth.
Cheers,
EMMET TMILLER
UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND
More Science Fiction
DEAR EDITOR: I was pleased to see the Philosophy Now issue dedicated to science fiction (Issue 34). There is much science fiction being published nowadays that is philosophically literate, and might be of interest to readers of your magazine. I recommend Permutation City, by Greg Egan; Fountains of Youth, by Brian Stableford; Antarctica, by Kim Stanley Robinson; The Stone Canal, by Ken MacLeod; and Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson (although the latter is more of a philosophical techno-thriller).
PHILIP EBERSOLE
ROCHESTER, N.Y.
Spanish Inquisition “Not Expected”
DEAR EDITOR: It is probably churlish to level any criticism against any publication which recounts the repeated theft of Bentham’s head, however, it does seem to me that Issue 35 played a bit fast and loose with philosophy.
Yes, I disagreed strongly with Daniel Hill’s argument that there can only be meaning in life if there is a grand Designer, however, he put forward an interesting argument. The editorial, on the other hand, searching for something to say about heresy, rolled out a few facile commonplaces about the Spanish Inquisition and the ‘innumerable’ people it persecuted. The Spanish Inquisition was a shameful episode in human history, but fewer than half the people that died on September 11th were executed between its inception and its wane in the eighteenth-century (of course both Galileo and Bruno fell into the hands of the Roman Inquisition). As for your mentioning that the Romans left offences against the gods in the hands of the gods, that would be have been welcome news to the Christians who lived under Nero, Trajan and Diocletian. Sadly, religious persecutions have been common during most times when one group claimed to possess revealed, supernatural truths.
This brings me to James Hale’s article on Augustine. Philosophy may well be a meta-discipline but an article focused on the gender of the Holy Spirit seemed much more like simplified Christian theology to me. (Mr Hale might like to look at the Odes of Solomon (c. 100 CE) where he will find unusual support for his theory in “The Father is he who was milked and the Holy Spirit is she who milked him because his breasts were full.”) So yes, themed issues are great, but don’t force things into a glib coherence.
DR JOHN FLOOD
BISHOP GROSSETESTE COLLEGE,
LINCOLN