Monday 31 October 2011

Christian philosophy

From its earliest days, Christianity has openly embraced philosophical inquiry, making full use of it in order to elucidate key elements of its theological system. Philosophy played a significant role in the thought of the Fathers and their elucidation of the key Christian doctrinal elements; and this role was somewhat ratified at the council of Nicaea when it was decided to make use of a philosophical and non-scriptural term (consubtantia/homoousios) in describing the nature of Christ. The relationship remained steady with philosophy being seen as a good and honourable field of study, and this persisted through the middle ages and into contemporary Christianity, with Pope John Paul II, not only himself being a philosopher in the continental tradition, but also defending the role of and need for philosophy in Fides et Ratio.

Such a relationship is not peculiar to Christianity. Judaism and Islam are both religions whose followers took up philosophy, and there was a lot of interpenetration of philosophical thought amongst these three major religions, especially in the middle ages. Furthermore, not only historically have there been religious philosophers, but also in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there are/have been a significant number of major philosophers who subscribe to one of the world religions noted above. One can list such names as: Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Frederick Coplestone, Michael Dummett, John Haldane, Eleonore Stump, Bas Van Frassen, Nicholas Rescher, Hilary Putnam, Alisdair MacIntyre etc.

Given the interpenetration of philosophy and religion, the question of how a philosopher who has adopted a particular religious creed should comport himself or herself to philosophical inquiry is an interesting one. The issue I wish to open here is whether or not there can be a philosophy that is specifically religious in the required sense, that is, can there be a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic philosophy?

In the Thomistic tradition in which I specialise, this question was a pressing one. In the early days of the Neo-Thomistic movement of the early twentieth century, Thomists had to consider how a follower of the thought of Thomas Aquinas should address the relationship of Christianity to philosophy. Two particular camps emerged. One group, principally inspired by Etienne Gilson and his followers, held that a Christian philosopher can find room for Christianity in his or her philosophy insofar as Christianity functions as a kind of Bildung or world picture within which the philosophical discussion takes place. By conducting the philosophical inquiry within such a world picture, it is argued that interesting discussions begin emerge, and historically speaking many interesting philosophical discussions on the nature of the person, substance, accidents, relations, etc were developed within theological contexts. On this account then, there could definitely be a Christian philosophy insofar as it is a philosophy that takes its central issues and concerns from within a Christian paradigm. On the other hand, there were those who held that the Christian philosopher ought not to try to find a place for his or her Christianity within philosophy, but that philosophy ought to find its place in Christianity. On this account, one’s Christianity should not have a positive influence on one’s philosophy, and should remain somewhat distinct from the discussion, though one’s philosophy should of course influence one’s Christianity and have a role to play therein. Thinkers in this camp usually held that there can be Christian philosophers but no Christian philosophy; their main representative, and opponent of Gilson, was Fernand Van Steenberghen.

Recently a third opinion has emerged, led by John Wippel, that attempts to accommodate both groups. On this view, when a philosopher comes to deal with a problem there must be distinguished two elements: (i) the moment of discovery of a solution and (ii) the formal statement of the solution. According to this group, the moment of discovery of a solution to a problem can come from anywhere and have any inspiration; one often finds that philosophers, when working on a problem, will take a walk, read the paper, listen to some music, and come back to the problem with some inspiration. Thus, when considering the moment of discovery of a solution, Christianity can play a role insofar as its doctrines contain answers to philosophical questions, though they are stated in a non-philosophical manner. However, when it comes to the formal statement of the answer to a philosophical question, the inspiration that played a role in the moment of discovery drops out and only the formal elements remain. Thus, when one provides an answer to a particular philosophical problem, that answer must be based on reasons and not appeal to the original inspiration that led to the answer in the first place. Thus, in the formal statement of the solution, one’s Christianity drops out. Overall then, on this account, Gilson’s view is accommodated insofar as the doctrinal elements of Christianity can provide the context within which the inspiration occurs for a solution to a philosophical problem. On the other hand, Van Steenberghen’s view is accommodated insofar as the doctrinal elements of Christianity must drop out of the the formal statement of the solution to philosophical problems.

So what I would like to open for discussion is how you think one’s religious (or indeed non-religious) convictions should play a role in how we approach philosophical problems. Can non-philosophical influences have a positive role to play in our philosophical inquiries, and if so, what role should that be and how does it affect the inquiry?

Further Reading:
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.
____________, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages.
Fernand Van Steenberghen, La philosophie au XIIIe siècle.
John Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, Chapter 1.

Friday 28 October 2011

Friday Question: A Dilemma in Medical Ethics



I want to offer here a case that I take to be an excellent example of a moral dilemma that arises in the field of Medical Ethics. This case is one I remember vividly still from a graduate course in Medical Ethics at the University of Missouri with Professor Bill Bondeson, from whom I am quoting the following case.


Going to Australia...
A 69-year-old male, estranged from his children and with no other living relatives, underwent a routine physical examination in preparation for a brief and much anticipated trip to Australia. The physician suspected a serious problem and ordered more extensive testing, including further blood analysis (detailing an acid phosphatase), a bone scan, and a prostate biopsy. The results were quite conclusive: The man had an inoperable, incurable carcinoma--a small prostrate nodule commonly referred to as cancer of the prostate. The carcinoma was not yet advanced and was relatively slow growing. Later, after the disease had progressed, it would be possible to provide good palliative treatment. Blood tests and X-rays showed the patient's renal function to be normal. (The physician consulted with the urologist who had performed the prostate biopsy in order to confirm the diagnosis.)
The physician had treated this patient for many years and knew he was fragile in several respects. The man was quite neurotic and had an established history of psychiatric disease, although he functioned well in society and was clearly capable of rational policy and decision making. He had recently suffered a severe depressive reaction, during which he behaved irrationally and attempted suicide. This episode immediately followed the death of his wife, who had died after a difficult and protracted battle with cancer. It was clear that he had not been equipped to deal with his wife's death, and he had been hospitalized for a short period before the suicide attempt. Just as he was getting back on his feet, the opportunity to go to Australia materialized, and it was the first excitement he had experienced in several years.
This patient also had a history of suffering prolonged and serious depression whenever informed of serious health problems. He worried excessively and often could not exercise rational control over his deliberations and decisions. His physician therefore thought that disclosure of the carcinoma under his present fragile state would almost certainly cause further irrational behavior and render the patient incapable of thinking clearly about his medical situation.
When the testing had been completed and the results were known, the patient returned to his physician. He asked nervously, "Am I OK?" Without waiting for a response, he asked, "I don't have cancer, do I?" Believing his patient would not suffer from or even be aware of this problem while in Australia, the physician replied, "You're as good as you were ten years ago." He was worried about telling such a bald lie but firmly believed that it was justified. http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.html

What do you make of the doctor's decision here? Did he do the right thing? If so, why? If not, why not?

Monday 24 October 2011

Future Contingents

Frequently, we make claims about the future, claims that we think could either be true or false, depending on how the future unfolds. For example:

(1) "There will be a sea battle tomorrow."

As John MacFarlane (2002) has noted, a certain puzzle unfolds when we consider what truth value to assign (1). The puzzle is motivated by two competing intuitions. One intuition we'll call the indeterminstic intuition, according to which (at the time of uttering (1)) we think the future is open, and multiple possible histories can unfold. The indeterministic intuition aligns with the way we speak of sentences like (1) at the time of utterance, which is to say it's neither true nor false; there neither has nor has not been a sea battle tomorrow (at the time of utterance). A conflicting intuition is that, (as MacFarlane notes) we can be tempted to reason as follows:

Jake asserted yesterday that there would be a sea battle today.
There is a sea battle today.
So Jake's assertion was true. (MacFarlane 2002: 325)
The sort of reasoning suggest that, when we take the retrospective view we are inclined to think that the utterance 'There will be a sea battle tomorrow' was true (rather than undetermined) at the time of utterance.
But this is directly at odds with the view that utterances of future contingents are neither true nor false at the time of utterance.

Against this background, it seems we have two different strategies of response. Firstly, we can assume what MacFarlane calls the absoluteness of utterance-truth: this assumption is that the truth of a given proposition is not relativised to a context of assessment. This is a widely held position. With the absoluteness of utterance truth in the background, we must argue that EITHER Jake's utterance has an indeterminate truth value OR that it has a truth value (the same truth value it had at the time of utterance). An alternative strategy is to reject the absoluteness of utterance truth and allow that the truth of utterances to be relativised to the context in which they are assessed. This would be a version of truth relativism. The idea would be, roughly, that when the context of assessment of the utterance 'there will be a sea battle tomorrow' was the time of utterance, the utterance is neither true nor false. But if the context of assessment of the utterance is the following day (in the middle of a sea battle, say) then the utterance counts as true. Which strategy do you think is the best?

References:

MacFarlane, John (2002). "Future Contingents and Relative Truth," in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 212.




Friday 21 October 2011

Friday Question

This week's Friday question engages with the issue of the role and value of philosophy.

We have just witnessed the elections to the Students' Union council. A lot of students canvassed on a number of issues. One particular issue was that of free education, and I believe that some philosophy students canvassed under this issue. This raises the interesting question of the relationship of philosophy to politics and practical matters more generally. In particular, the question often arises as to what contribution philosophers have to make to society.

Marx famously stated that philosophers merely interpret the world, whereas the point is to change it. Now it is arguable that Marx was reacting to a form of speculative Hegelianism that did not put Hegelian philosophy to any practical use, whereas Marx saw a need for a practical kind of Hegelianism. Be that as it may, his position raises a serious question for the role of philosophy (and other speculative disciplines) within society.

There is no doubt that there are branches of philosophy that are highly speculative and of very little practical advantage. Tell a single parent struggling to make ends meet that the world is made up of discrete substances as the basic constituents of reality or that mind and world exist in two heterogeneous spaces and you will, if fortunate, be asked to leave their presence. On the other hand, tell such a person that it is the duty of the state to tax the rich and help the poor, provide free education, school dinners etc, he or she will soon become interested. The distinction is palatable: in some areas philosophy has a very practical use whereas in others it is seen to be abstract, stuffy, mere speculative reasoning with no connection to the matters of living.

On the other hand, speculative philosophers will claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, that once the necessities of life are taken care of, human beings do not curl up and go to sleep; rather they start to think about the starry heavens above and the moral law within, and seek to understand the world around them. There seems to be a drive in human beings to gain some kind of understanding of the world in which they live, in which case even when all the practical questions of life have been answered, there remains a longing to find out more. Speculative philosophy, just like any other speculative subject, answers to an innate desire to know, and just like the fulfilment of the desires for warmth, shelter, food etc, the fulfilment of the desire to know is its own reward, and thus ought to be prized as a goal in itself and not evaluated on the basis of its instrumentality to the state.

So we are left with an intriguing question, should speculative philosophy be a subject that is preserved in our university curricula and wider social framework, or should it be relegated to the private sphere and taken up only by those who have the time, money, and inclination to pursue it?

Sunday 16 October 2011

Belief

It seems plausible enough that to have a belief is to be in a particular state of mind. But what kind of state of mind? What is the essential nature of belief? What sort of conditions must be met to qualify some state as a belief? What sort of conditions, when met, would suffice for qualifying some state as a belief? These questions are very hard, but it is not impossible to sketch some alternatives.

One suggestion is that beliefs might be like the "states of emergency" that governments declare. A state of emergency is a state that is supposed to play a particular kind of role in the activities of the institutions and citizens of a nation. In particular it is supposed to be a state in which institutions and citizens of the nation prepare themselves to adequately face real impending difficulties like natural disasters or wars. Of course, states of emergencies need not play this kind of role. Sometimes corrupt politicians create them artificially merely as opportunities to seize power, in which case there are no real impending difficulties for institutions and citizens of the nation to prepare themselves to adequately face (unless it is the corrupt politicians themselves, in which case, the state of emergency is undermining its own purpose).

Perhaps beliefs are also states that are supposed to do something as well. For instance, beliefs might be states that are supposed to be true. True beliefs might adequately prepare us to act so as to get what we want. Of course, some beliefs are not true, in which case, it would follow that some beliefs are not "doing their job" in this respect. In certain cases, this mishap might be due to bad luck, but in other cases the lack of truth might come as no surprise because the beliefs were not "fitting the evidence."

It can be interesting to think about what consequences this theory of belief has for religious belief. Occasionally, one hears the suggestion that religious belief should be belief that is insensitive to the evidence, so that it persists even when the evidence may not positively support it. Can we make sense of this suggestion if beliefs are, by their very nature, states of mind that are supposed to be true?

Friday 14 October 2011

Friday Question: A Puzzle about Free Will

For this week's Friday question, let's consider (in a basic, straightforward way) a problem that arises for those wishing to endorse an 'incompatibilist' approach the problem of free will. The problem of free will is an age-old problem in philosophy that is framed around two independently plausible but apparently conflicting positions. On the one hand, it appears that determinism is true: every event (E) is caused by some antecedent cause (or causes) which make it such that that E couldn't not have occurred. Determinism stands in an obvious tension with the doctrine of free will, which maintains that--any time we act--we could have acted otherwise. There are two prominent approaches to the tension between these two doctrines. One approach, incompatibilism, supposes that the two doctrines are mutually incompatible, which means that at least one of the two independently plausible positions must be abandoned. The other approach to the problem is called compatibilism: the view that these two doctrines only appear incompatible with each other.

These descriptions of the two positions are rather rough, but they will do for the purposes of bringing to attention a curious puzzle that arises for proponents of an incompatibilist approach to the problem. The problem is that, as one might be inclined to see it, the way to vindicate free will on an incompatibilist program is to argue that (despite the apparent plausibility of determinism) determinism is actually false. Suppose for the sake of argument that one has successfully defended such an argument, and then reasons as follows:

1. Incompatibilism is true.
2. Determinism is false (ex hypothesi)
3. Therefore, the doctrine of free will is true.

A problem with this sort of argument is that the falsity of determinism doesn't vouchsafe free will. The falsity of determinism only gets you the following: that indeterminism is true. So in order to secure the doctrine of free will by arguing for the falsity of determinism, one would have to defend the following inference:

I: Indeterminism is true, therefore the doctrine of free will is true.

Problematically, though, a presupposition of acting with free will is that one controls one's own actions. One hardly acts freely if one's actions are, say, 'random' or 'spontaneously generated' as would be the case if indeterminism were true. So, it seems that (despite what might have been initially supposed), if indeterminism is true, we don't have free will.

However, this result implies an awkward position for the incompatibilist.

1. Incompatibilism is true.
2. Either determinism or indeterminism is true.
3. If determinism is true, the doctrine of free will is false (from 1)
4. If indeterminism is true, the doctrine of free will is false (given that we lack free will without control over our actions).
5. Therefore, the doctrine of free will is false.

Against this dilemma, is there any way to defend an incompatibilist approach to the problem of free will and nonetheless avoid the conclusion that we don't have free will?

Monday 10 October 2011

Transcendental Arguments

There are many and various arguments for the existence of God, some of which are easily classifiable, some of which are not so. Usually in order to facilitate performance under exam situations, introductions to the philosophy of religion group such argumentation into easily recognisable groups; but the problem with this is that the arguments lose their individuality, and readers often gloss over important argumentative steps, associating say one cosmological argument with another, and offering criticisms which are really not to the point.

One type of argumentation for the existence of God that I have recently defended (‘Aquinas’s Argument for the Existence of God in De Ente et Essentia, Cap. IV: An Interpretation and Defence’), is what could be called a transcendental argument. This argument performs a metaphysical analysis of entities and holds that such entities display certain characteristics that place them within a nexus of causal dependency. The argument goes on to hold that this nexus of dependency is not self-existing, though it is itself existing, and thus requires some foundational existential principle, which we call God.

It is not the details of this argument on which I want to focus (though if the posts take that trend, then so be it); what I want to focus on is the argument's originality. It argues from the presence of some particular thing to outlining the conditions for the possibility of that thing. Thus, given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x? In other words, what are those conditions without which a thing could not be? As a type of argumentation for God’s existence, this argument cannot be reduced to the traditional three: cosmological, ontological, and design; and thus I have dubbed it the transcendental argument, taking the term ‘transcendental’ from Kant’s use thereof.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have two questions that may serve to open up the debate: (i) is transcendental argumentation (given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x?) a valid argumentative procedure?; (ii) if we can discern the conditions for the possibility of a thing's existing, can we thence say that there are certain things or states of affairs that cannot exist?

Friday 7 October 2011

Friday Question: What should you do when you disagree?

Suppose you have just gone out to dinner with a good friend. Afterwards, the bill is presented and you and your friend (call him 'Chuck') both try to calculate 15% of the bill to leave as a tip. You finish calculating first and arrive at the belief that the tip should be £8.35. Chuck, shortly afterwards, tells you the tip should be £8.65. Suppose further that, prior to this disagreement, you and Chuck recognize each other to be of equal (and very good) mathematical ability and of all the same evidence on the issue at hand. You are, as philosophers in the epistemology of disagreement refer to it, epistemic peers on this particular matter.


What is the rational response to this fact of disagreement (with an epistemic peer?)


Consider two very different options:


(1) Hold your guns. The fact of disagreement with an epistemic peer does not rationally require you to revise your belief. You are epistemically justified in continuing to believe the tip should be £8.35 despite the fact that Chuck, your epistemic peer, disagrees with you.


(2) Split the difference. The fact of disagreement with an epistemic peer does rationally require you to revise your belief. In this case, given that you take it that you and Chuck are both equally likely to be right on the matter, you should give up your belief and withhold judgment about the amount of the tip.






Monday 3 October 2011

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Part 2)


Last week, our focus was on Divine Command Theory, which claims:
Divine Command Theory (DCT): an action is right if God commands it, wrong if God forbids it.
     We considered further a critical question Socrates (in Plato's Euthyphro dialogue) raised toward this sort of view. Call this critical question the Euthyphro Dilemma:
Euthyphro Dilemma: Is conduct right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?
     I alluded to the fact that this question frames a dilemma for proponents of DCT. Let's explore now the substance of the dilemma. It is, to stress, a 'dilemma' for the DCT proponent because--as we'll see--accepting either of the two options appears to make an endorsement of DCT problematic (for different reasons).
     Suppose a defender of DCT takes the first 'horn' of the dilemma and claims that conduct is right because God commands it. The problem with taking this horn is that it commits one to what appears to be an absurdity, the absurdity of recognizing that anything would be right, so long as God commanded it. As Peter Singer has put the point in his Practical Ethics, "if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad" (Singer 1993: 3) But, as the argument goes, surely torture would not be right, whether God commanded it or otherwise.
     Given that, strictly speaking, the first horn of the dilemma allows for any conduct to be right so long as God commanded it, endorsing the first horn of the dilemma would have the problematic effect of making God's commandments morally arbitrary: anything he happened to command would be right, no matter what it was. Can proponents of DCT fare any better by taking the second horn and saying of right conduct that God commands it because it is right? This move dodges the arbitrariness objection that faces an endorsement of the first horn, but at a cost. The cost is that DCT, in taking the second horn, is at the same time admitting that what makes right conduct right is something other than God's will, a concession endorsers of DCT are typically unwilling to make. Peter Singer puts the two horns of the dilemma together nicely: 
     Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of “good” is nothing other than “what God approves”. Plato refuted a similar view more than two thousand years ago by arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods’ approval that makes them good. The alternative view makes God’s approval entirely arbitrary: if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad. (Ibid., 3)
     Question: What is the best way for DCT to respond to the objections posed by the Euthyphro dilemma? Should DCT, on the basis of the Euthyphro dilemma, be rejected? If so, why? If not, why not? Another question for discussion: if the Euthyphro dilemma shows DCT to be untenable, how might a different sort of attempt to base morality on divine dictates avoid the problems the Euthyphro dilemma poses to endorsers of DCT?