my recommendation thread

1. history of public education in the us
2. the new deal
3. black muslims (i.e., the us kind)
4. historiography of philosophy

This comes up with some interesting results: apparently there've only been three philosophers in history ("first-century Taoist metaphysician Wang Ch'ung, the fourteenth-century Zen mystic Bassui Tokusho, and the fourteenth-century Arabic philosopher Ibn Khaldun") that weren't plugged into a scene; the number of philosophers in classical China were comparable to that of Socratic Greece, but their number of connections were smaller. As you can see, this is sort of like Guns, Germs and Steel for philosophy. For a more fun recount of this that compares Immanuel Kant to Saturday Night Live, check out Malcolm Gladwell's article about scenes: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_12_02_a_snl.htm

As for #2, the best single book is probably David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear. It's a history of America from the Great Depression through World War II, but I'd recommend it for his analysis of the New Deal and his demonstration of how many of the New Deal's antecedents were rooted in the Hoover administration

i wonder if there is a book that is more policy-oriented? focusing in more detail on the various institutions etc. formalized by the various new deal initiatives, e.g.?

and i'll have a look for the cremin, mark, thanks.

You seem to be suggesting that philosophy should be focused on pinning down what you should believe the "best result" would be (say, choosing between maximizing your personal score, maximizing others' scores, maximizing the total score, minimizing your personal score, minimizing others' scores, minimizing the total score, achieving parity between the scores, etc.) (and you can try to do a simplistic pinning down of various philosophical movements to those approaches if you'd like, it's fun!). But so far, philosophy seems to be suggesting (and I hope Josh chimes in, because he surely is more well read in this stuff than I am) that we can't really "prove" that sort of thing, that philosophy can at best catalogue and deduct from those sorts of principles, but that it is useless at "pointing the way".

(N.B. IANAP.)

You seem to be suggesting that philosophy should be focused on pinning down what you should believe the "best result" would be

Yeah, maybe. Isn't self-examination part of/necessary for "the good life"?

I have no idea if self-examination is part of or necessary for "the good life". I don't know what "the good life" consists of. I know what seems to make my life "better" (and really I would qualify that much more), and self-examination seems to be part of it; more clearly than that, I know that other people have been in situations where they have been upset about something, and unable to get to a state where they aren't upset, which was the state they wanted to be in, and it seemed as though self-examination was a way to get from point A to point B, and so I recommended it: But! it's also possible that self-examination caused them to get to point A in the first place. It's hard to say.

Books of philosophy have been filled with ideas about what is "the good" or "the good life". But, as far as I can tell, they have at best been able to say "if you think X Y and Z are good, then this means you should do A B and C"; although many philosophers have tried to prove that X Y and Z are demonstrably good, they have, to the best of my perhaps very limited understand, failed.

And that might be fine! It is probably all for the best that logic alone and pure reason cannot get you to any sort of ethics, and that you need something else (religion, intuition, peyote) to get a sense of what is "good" and what "the good life" is, and then you can use philosophy from that point. It is nice that philosophers of the past have offered up a few such starting points, even if their rationales for those starting points were distractions at best; where they went with those axioms is the interesting philosophic work.

Although perhaps philosophy's role in all this is to remind us that we really can't say with any certainty what is "good" or what "the good life" consists of. Or, at least, if we have certainty, it is because of something other than rationally undeniable truth of our idea.

Philosophy giving up the idea that its function is to find some provable definition of "good" is, perhaps, similar to when science finally gave up the idea that nature was filled with "final purposes" (the nose was designed for smelling).

(And I think there's a difference between "best selfish gain" and "the good"-- otherwise the Prisoner's Dilemma would be no dilemma at all.)

Well, that of course depends on whether it's repeated (an unknown number of times) or not. If it's a one-off situation, the math says it's in your self-interested to give evidence. But if it's the game is repeated and cumulative, then it seems to be in your best interest to be nice at first and only retaliate when provoked -- which is a common definition of "good behavior".

And I couldn't say exactly where your professor was going with it, but I can certainly think of many philosophically relevant angles. Mostly, it is just a surprising (or, was surprising to people who didn't grow up with the idea) and fecund example of a certain type of logical thinking, one which philosophers would do well to have in their arsenal. (Plato's mathematics didn't include math whose answers depended solely on whether or not you knew how many times you were going to repeat the formula -- if it had, his conception of the how the world is put together might have been a bit different.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Oh, I wasn't really offended, just drunkenly overexuberant last night-- sorry. (And thanks for posting the link, Tom.)

You seem to be suggesting that philosophy should be focused on pinning down what you should believe the "best result" would be

Well, ethical philosophy has to do this in order to defend the project of having an ethical theory at all. Fuller's argument is that the early philosophers' ethical theories were of primary importance to them, and that metaphysics developed as a field as an adjunct to/outgrowth of their primary ethical project ("ethics" including theories about the virtues and living well). Early metaphysics certainly seems completely intertwined with ethical theories of this sort-- the pre-Socratics all had ethical theories as well as crazy ass metaphors for understanding how the world actually worked. Which came first? I dunno, but some of the stuff I've read (such as Martha Nussbaum's Therapy of Desire) argues that philosophy was considered foremost to be therapy for the "soul"-- primitive science stuff was function secondary to the role of philosophers as educators, rhetoricians, etc. It seems like Fuller thinks that with specialization, Western philosophers have walked away from that role too much to play language-games, alienating their philosophy from its uses for laypeople (he's an ethical theorist and thinks ethical theory is getting short-shrift in today's world-- big surprise, right? And I've been reading stuff on Wittgenstein that suggests that this aliennation is unnecessary, arguing that Wittgenstein was an ethical theorist first and foremost (such as James Edwards' Ethics Without Philosophy: Wittgenstein and the Moral Life)).

it's also possible that self-examination caused them to get to point A in the first place.

Well, self-examination can sometimes remove a veneer that was hiding some unconfronted truths, but sure, it's just as easy to talk oneself into being sick (through neuroticism, overthinking) as it is to make oneself sick by avoiding facing such truths-- I guess I'd want to argue that that neuroticism isn't really proper self-examination. As the Zen priests like to say, you shouldn't put a head over your own head-- it strangles you instead of providing you with new foundations for action.

although many philosophers have tried to prove that X Y and Z are demonstrably good, they have, to the best of my perhaps very limited understand, failed.

You might try reading a book by an ethical theorist named Philippa Foot called Natural Goodness, where she claims to have succeeded in that project by appealing to basic facts about human nature (defining said "nature" is one of the cases where metaphysics seems to serve ethical theory).

logic alone and pure reason cannot get you to any sort of ethics

Kant would disagree with you! But ethical theories surely do depend on facts about human nature and dispositions, and there are theorists out there (such as G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica) that argue that "the good" is an unanalyzable concept that we encounter through intuition alone.

Although perhaps philosophy's role in all this is to remind us that we really can't say with any certainty what is "good" or what "the good life" consists of.

I think that a life of self-examination is necessary to determine what the best life is for yourself, which is always an ongoing project. Ethical theorists want to argue that there's a universalizable method for determining what well-being is and how to obtain it. (And they think they're referring to something specific when they're talking about the "good"/"happy"/"blessed" life, influenced by 2500 years of Western philosophical tradition that claims that the best, most thriving human life=the most rational life=the most humane or morally complete life.)

Philosophy giving up the idea that its function is to find some provable definition of "good" is

Wait, this is still very much being contested-- someone like Moore would think that you don't need to prove what "good" is because you already know what you're talking about when you use the term, and someone like Foot would claim that we can appeal to facts about the world to determine the "good" for humans (and allows for variation between cultural attitudes while doing so). I think that value judgements like "good" can survive perspectivism a little better than unwarranted teleology can-- after all, Nietzsche thought that a revaluation of all values was what was needed, not a devaluation.

Plato's mathematics didn't include math whose answers depended solely on whether or not you knew how many times you were going to repeat the formula

??? I can see where you're coming from though-- Plato carried reification a little bit too far, similar to Chinese folk beliefs about the inherent power of individual written characters.

Well, that's my point! I mean, Kant might have contributed some interesting ideas and tools for thinking about ethics, but they're all based on assumptions that he doesn't bother to try proving, which almost certainly cannot be proven, and which we do not need to accept. And therefore we do not need to accept Kant's ethical system.

You might try reading a book by an ethical theorist named Philippa Foot called Natural Goodness, where she claims to have succeeded in that project by appealing to basic facts about human nature (defining said "nature" is one of the cases where metaphysics seems to serve ethical theory).

Before I run out and buy it, do you have an example of one of these "basic facts about human nature"? It sounds like any such "facts" are going to be profound oversimplifications, and not the sort of thing I'd want as a foundation for an ethics.

Wait, this is still very much being contested-- someone like Moore would think that you don't need to prove what "good" is because you already know what you're talking about when you use the term, and someone like Foot would claim that we can appeal to facts about the world to determine the "good" for humans (and allows for variation between cultural attitudes while doing so).

Well, yes, that's also what I'm saying: You "don't need to prove what 'good' is" because you can't, and all philosophy can do is proceed from there. The idea that we can appeal to "facts about the world" seems deeply problematic, since we can't even rely on our relationship to "the world".

???

Plato is constantly leaning on mathematics to prove his arguments, and looking for the purity of mathematics in the world (and rejecting the world when it doesn't match up). But his mathematics is very primitive and doesn't include Gödel's theorem, fractals, calculus, or even a decent concept of infinity, and this screws up a lot of his arguments. (For ex.: He understands that a series can be infinite with no end, but can't wrap his head around the idea that a series can be infinite with no beginning.) If his math skills were different, his philosophy would have been different, is what I meant.

Ha ha ha, welcome to philosophy, eh? Foot has this weird claim that "the good" is what is good for human beings as organisms of their type (and thus not what's beneficial in a selfish sense for the individual), so ethical theory ends up encompassing what we call the virtues as well as "morality" as such. For instance, she leans pretty heavily on the fact that humans are pack animals to defend the necessity of selfless moral action. Codes of conduct can change according to societies' needs according to her, and she doesn't make any claims for the inviolability of codes of conduct like Kant does, but she still thinks that "the good" is something that's universalizable and definable in a way that matches our "unprovable" intuitions. I had to write a final paper on this stuff and I'm still not sure how much I want to buy into what she's saying, even though it makes a sort of intuitive sense to me (ha ha).

and rejecting the world when it doesn't match up

Yeah, U & K-- Plato gets perspectivism backwards, right? Have you read any Nietzsche?

Foot has this weird claim that "the good" is what is good for human beings as organisms of their type

Well, uh, what does it mean for something to be "good" for humans, though?

Is it strictly at a species level? It seems like her method would allow a concept of "the good for mammals", "the good for Canadians", "the good for men", "the good for white people", "the good for rapists", etc.

Yeah, U & K-- Plato gets perspectivism backwards, right?

I don't really know what you mean by that. (By the sentence, not by what "perspectivism" is.)

"good" for humans

Thriving, flourishing-- contributing to eudaimonia, the good life. It doesn't have to be strictly on a species level as biologist would use the term (and she starts out by making claims about "the good" for many other species of organisms). Yeah, you raise a good point that's probably a problem for her theory, but I think that considering "the good" for insiders as of being greater ethical importance than that of outsiders a) is partly mitigated by practical considerations, which she covers in saying that moral considerations are overriding but that the necessity for prudence and self-preservation also guide our use of "practical reason" and b) usually people behave badly towards each other because they don't see the other as fully human in the first place. Like I said, something about Foot sounds appealing but I'm not sure if I want to ascribe to the letter of her law.

Thinking about this stuff, I think I might agree with you about the intuitive thing more than I was saying earlier. In Plato's Republic, he makes that appeal to knowledge of the Form of the Good guiding the behavior of the philosopher judges. Ever since my Ancient Philosophy prof wondered out loud in class if the Form of the Good didn't equal "necessity", I've been thinking of Plato's theory as akin to Buddhist claims about "right vision" determining "right action". Something still intuitively has to tell you what's right from what's wrong (although I think it's different from rule guided morality). But this would actually support Fuller's claims, that knowledge of the Form of the Good is only necessary because of the demands of organizing and maintaining a community.

Anyway, we should probably wrap this up here so that Josh can actually make good use of his thread again at some later point. Sorry, Josh.

james collins, 'interpreting modern philosophy'

(before i began seeing lovejoy's 'great chain of being' mentioned in all the reading about history of ideas and history of philosophy i've been doing, i had avoided it because i did not realize what sort of study it was.)

william bartley's biography made claims about wittgenstein's homosexuality on the basis of some 'lost' notebooks (i haven't read his book so i don't know if this refers to the 'secret notebooks' eventually published in german) and confidential information from friends/acquaintances. i hear that at the time there were a number of touchy denials etc. as one unfortunately expects (maybe in particular about claims of wittgenstein's red light district cruising?), but whatever controversy that surrounded that book seems to have died down. the monk biography has an appendix about the debate.

it would not be unexpected to find free-form speculation in 'a philosophical investigation' or in 'the world as i found it' but i don't know since i haven't read them; i would expect less factual fidelity from the kerr, more from the duffy.

12th c. provencal lyrics in english, not involving e. pound?