Friday Question: Philosophical Judgments: A Product of "Anton's Syndrome?"

Today's Friday question is submitted by third-year QUB philosophy student Adrian Downey.

There are two positions one can take in the ontology of mind; emergentism and pan-psychism. Emergentism is the view that the world is made up of non-experiential matter and in certain cases experiential properties emerge from this matter. Pan-psychism is the view that the fundamental matter is itself experiential. Pan-psychism has been largely discredited (many see the view itself as a reductio) and so the majority of discussion in the ontology of the mind concerns itself with emergentism.  

Galen Strawson has recently argued that pan-psychism is the most complete materialist position one can take. Probably the main reason that pan-psychism has been discredited is that it appears unscientific but Strawson argues that this is not true. Physics is the study of the relations between particles, not what they are made off, and so is agnostic on this question. It appears pan-psychism was discredited because of an intuition, the assumption that fundamental matter could not be experiential.    

Within emergentism there are two positions one can take; materialism (there exists only one type of matter, the physical) or dualism (the mental substance that emerge from physical substance is a different type of thing). With a few notable exceptions aside[1], the vast majority of emergentists are physicalists of one stripe or another. Yet even these exceptions agree with the physicalists to a certain extent.[2] Henry Stapp argues this base agreement ignores the findings of quantam mechanics, which he suggests entail that dualism is in fact the correct theory of the mind.[3]   

I have brought up these points not to argue for any particular position but to show how, at the fundamental level, a lot of these disagreements rest on intuition and not facts or arguments. It seems the choices are made on hunches or guesswork more than anything else. When deciding what position to take in the ontology of mind it appears we have little more to work with than intuitions, assumptions and base preferences.

Some materialists argue that their position is better because it is ontologically parsimonious (offers the simplest explanation of the effect). This belief is itself an intuition because we don’t have any reason to believe that simplicity is a virtue of a position. The answer to the question of how many substances make up the world should in no way reflect the human maxim that the simplest theory is usually the better one. The number of substances which make up the world will be the number of substances that in fact make up the world (whether that number is one, ten or five hundred). Even if humans see a theory about the world as a better one because it is simple this will have no effect on whether it is true.

I feel that there are many such cases within philosophy. In the Chinese Room thought experiment John Searle argues against the possibility of strong AI (artificial intelligence capable of understanding). He argues that just as there is no individual point in which understanding occurs in functional systems, so there is no understanding occurring in functional systems as a whole. Many of the critics of this thought experiment argue that although Searle is right that there is no one place where understanding occurs; understanding does occur when we look at the system as a whole. At this point there appears to be no avenue for the disagreement to be reconciled; it seems that in such a case it is really just the intuition that the system doesn’t understand pitted against the intuition that the system does. And I feel both sides are within their rights to argue that the other is begging the question when stating their view.[4] 

The point I have been trying to make is that philosophy, which appears at surface to be a rigorous and structured analytic system, is at base little more than the presumptions or preferences of the individual who postulates them. The rationality comes in alright, but only after the decision of what to believe that has already been made. As I have argued earlier it does not appear that we have any real justification in making these assumptions. In the Chinese Room example both sides of the dispute agree that there is no understanding in individual parts of the system. Searle and his supporters argue that if no part of it understands then the system doesn’t. His opponents argue that although no individual part understands the system when taken as a whole does. At this point there appears to be no argument which can be made that has the force to propel someone to either position; it seems that one just decides who they agree with. There is no reasoning involved here. 

Anton’s syndrome is a pathological condition in which, despite objective evidence of visual loss, patients deny that they are blind. They will even confabulate to support this belief. Maddula, Lutton and Keegan describe an eighty-three year old patient with this condition. This patient, when asked what tie the doctor was wearing, would give an (incorrect) answer, in spite of the fact she was blind (Maddula, 2009). A cursory glance at the evidence from a range of other pathologies (e.g. split-brain syndrome) highlight the same type of thing happening. Subjects who are unaware of their deficiency for one reason or another will often confabulate and rationalise their actions nonetheless.

I have argued that we appear to make our philosophical judgements based on intuitions or judgements and that these are not rationally founded. I have also argued that we do not appear to have any real justification for making them. Arguably when we do philosophy we are behaving a lot more like the eighty-three year old with Anton’s syndrome than we may think. Perhaps we are doing nothing more than confabulating our unfounded and baseless intuitions in much the same way that the eighty-three year old confabulated about her choice of what colour the tie was. It could be the case that rather than getting to any fundamental truths of the world, we as philosophers are merely suffering from the effects of a human wide pathology. We may believe in what we are doing but, as sufferers of this pathology, in reality we are just deluding ourselves (and are perhaps biologically constrained to do so).       

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[1] David Chalmers, a dualist, and John Searle, who argues that he is neither a dualist or a physicalist

[2] David Chalmers believes that science must be extended in order to accommodate the mental and so in a sense he agrees with the characterisation of science as studying only the physical. John Searle argues that there exists only one thing in the world, physical particles contained in fields of force.

[3] “In view of the turmoil that has engulfed philosophy during the three centuries since Newton cut the bond between mind and matter, the re-bonding achieved by physicists during the first half of the twentieth century must be seen as an enormous development, a lifting of the veil. Ignoring this huge and enormously pertinent development in basic science, and proclaiming the validity of materialism on the basis of inapplicable-in-this-context- nineteenth-century science is not a rational judgement.” (Stapp, 2010) 

[4] David Chalmers’ ‘Zombie Argument’ and Frank Jackson’s ‘What Mary Didn’t Know’ are other arguments which immediately spring to mind that I think follow the same type of format. 

Anger and moral concern

The emotion of anger gets something of a mixed press. Although it is often presented as a dark and destructive aspect of human nature, there is a countervailing view that holds that, so long as it is suitably directed by reason, it can be an expression of virtue. Indeed some philosophers who take this view go as far as to suggest that not to feel anger in the face of serious immorality constitutes a vice since it fails to take wrongdoing seriously enough. Jeffrie Murphy, for example, claims that a failure to feel anger at moral injuries is a failure to care about the value incarnate in our own moral persons and thus a failure to “care about the very rules of morality”.

In this post, I don’t want to consider all of the ways in which this view of anger might be assessed or developed, but I do want to consider very briefly a particular style of argument against unconditional forgiveness that it sometimes motivates. The argument that I have in mind holds that it is wrong to grant forgiveness unconditionally and immediately because it fails to take the wrong seriously enough: in virtue of a positive assessment of the role of anger in the emotional repertoire of the virtuous agent, a negative view of unconditional forgiveness is inferred.

Whilst this argument seems to me to be worthy of serious philosophical consideration, the first point that I want to make in relation to it is that, instead of accepting its conclusion, we might see it as a reductio of the key premise. After all, those who are able to show unconditional forgiveness might be seen as illustrating the possibility of taking wrongdoing seriously without feeling anger. Consider – in this regard – the case of Gordon Wilson whose daughter was killed in the 1987 Enniskillen bombing. In the immediate aftermath of the atrocity, Wilson said that he felt no anger or ill will towards the perpetrators, yet it would seem strange to claim that he didn’t care about the norms that his daughter’s killers had violated (e.g. norms prohibiting the taking of innocent life) since he subsequently worked tirelessly for peace and reconciliation, engaging in dialogue with loyalist and republican paramilitaries and helping to set up a peace-building charity, all with a view to preventing other people suffering the kind of loss that he had suffered.

The second point that I’d like to make is that the argument seems to be much more plausible in the case of self-directed anger and forgiveness than other-directed anger and forgiveness. There does seem to be something right about the claim that those who self-forgive too quickly are failing to take their own misdeeds seriously, but this point doesn’t seem so plausible in the third-person case. It is therefore interesting to speculate on what accounts for this apparent asymmetry. Why does anger (perhaps in the modulated form of guilt) seem to be a more fitting and necessary response to our own misdeeds than to the misdeeds of others?

Saturday Question: Epiphenomenalism

This second Saturday question comes from Adam Kydd, a first-year Politics, Philosophy, and Economics student at Queen's University Belfast. (Again, I have does some editing.)

Could it be that we are entirely mechanical, biological beings, whilst all of our mental activity is nothing more than a by-product, or epiphenomenon?

In attempting to explain what it is to be a human person, there seem to be two features which can neither be ignored nor accommodated entirely comfortably with one another: mind and body. The French rationalist René Descartes (1596-1650) described human persons as typically being composed of two things, which were entirely different substances. However, Descartes’s theory faced a number of severe problems, such the need to account for the separation of these two substances and provide a plausible description of how they interact. After Descartes these problems eventually appeared to drive subsequent generations of philosophers further and further towards ideas of materialism or physicalism, which claimed that the world is composed purely of physical matter. At the extremity of materialism is the epiphenomenalist theory of the relationship between the mind and body.

Epiphenomenalism rests on premises from science which are paradigmatically well-established: that human beings are biological animals; that the brain is the physical organ of the mind; and that the physical world is causally closed, with no causes or effects entering into the physical world from without. These thoughts led the British zoologist Thomas Huxley (1825-95) to propose the conclusion that we humans are mechanical creatures with bodily organs and limbs and reflexes that entirely self-sufficiently run themselves; whilst the activity of the mind, all thoughts, emotions and conscious experiences, are nothing more than epiphenomena – by-products which do not have any causal role in the functioning of the body, despite the unshakeable illusion that they do rule over the body.

Epiphenomenalism offers a solution to the mind-body problem – but at the expense of the mind. It would mean that our whole comprehension of ourselves is largely delusory. It would eliminate all causal power from our beliefs, intentions, desires, and love. Furthermore, a restricted version of the theory might have some plausibility – since, as behavioural economists are discovering, we humans do tend to act automatically in many situations where one might have thought that our behavior was more deliberately guided. Are there any good objections to the possibility of epiphenomenalism?

A simple rejoinder would be that we humans have intentions, and that when we will something, we thereby do it, thus demonstrating a clear causal relationship between mind and body. However, the epiphenomenalist could explain the succession of an intention by an action by saying that this is just an example of an illusion – that the belief that one’s intention caused the actions is just another epiphenomenon.

Another more promising alternative could come from the ideas of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who had a more Aristotelian view of the relationship between mind and body. For Hobbes, the mind should not be thought of so much as a substance, but rather part of the mechanism of the human body. This theory is attractive. While epiphenomenalism is not easily refuted, is it not rather far-fetched in comparison to the idea that the mind is a deeply-embedded structural feature of the human body? Although in Hobbes’s theory, the mind and body are still squeezed together rather uncomfortably, it appears to be a more realistic, and less terrifying theory of human nature.

What do you think?

Saturday Question: Descartes's Conceivability Argument

Usually we have Friday Questions, but this week I am posting two questions on Saturday instead. This first question comes from Amanda Donnan, who is a student in the first-year Human Nature module at Queen's University Belfast. (I have edited the question slightly.)

Descartes tries to prove that the body and the thinking mind are separate substances. He provides three central arguments for this claim, the doubt argument, the conceivability argument and the divisibility argument. Here I will discuss the conceivability argument.

The Conceivability Argument for dualism is given in Descartes’ Sixth Meditation. The argument is as follows:

1. I can conceive that I, a thinking thing, exist without my extended body existing.
   
2. Anything that I can conceive is logically possible.
   
3. If it is logically possible that X exist without Y, then X is not identical with Y.
   
4. I, a thinking thing, am not identical with my extended body.

This argument appears problematic: it is possible that thinking is essential to the mind or soul and extension is essential to bodies. However, it does not (obviously) follow that it is my sole essence to think, unless Descartes knows that thinking and extension cannot be essential properties of the same thing. In other words how can we know that the thinking thing does not have the property of extension?

TCD Metaphysical Society Event

This upcoming Monday, the Metaphysical Society at Trinity College Dublin is hosting an event. Here is the official announcement:

The TCD Metaphysical Society welcomes you to its annual symposium, which will take place on Monday the 26th of March, in the chamber of the Graduates' Memorial Building. This year's theme is Realism and Anti-Realism. The papers will address topics including the nature of meaning, the relation between mathematical and scientific methods, or the role of reason in ethics. If you are interested in this kind of thing, then do come along for a day of fascinating philosophy. Please see the schedule below for the details of speakers and timings:

10:30 - 11:00 David Boylan (TCD) - Introduction and explanation of theme.

11:00 - 12:00 Paal Antonsen (TCD) - Warrant Conditional Semantics

12:15 - 13:15 Clare Moriarty (UCD) - Mathematical Anti-Realism and Naturalism

14:00 - 15:00 Ole Hjortland (Munich) - Assertion and Denial in Classical and Intuitionistic Logic

15:15 - 16:15 Simon Blackburn (Cambridge) - Some Ways to Misunderstand Hume

Contact: metafizz 'at' csc 'dot' tcd 'dot' ie

The Open Question Argument

(For those regular readers, I apologize that this post is a day late. Unfortunately, a cold waylaid me this past couple of days.)

In this post, I want to discuss G. E. Moore's famous open question argument. As I understand it, the open question argument allegedly creates a problem for certain reductive theories of genuinely normative properties (such as the goodness or ought-to-be-doneness of an action) to certain descriptive or non-normative properties (such as caused pain-minimization). The idea is that we have principled reasons for ruling these theories out because it is always an "open question" whether, say, the goodness of an action can be identified with the pain-minimization that the action caused.

(I should say that I think that the open question argument can be formulated in such a way as to not only theories that identify genuinely normative properties with some descriptive or non-normative properties, but also theories that say that, on a particular possible occasion, the having of these genuinely normative properties will be nothing more than the having of some or other descriptive or non-normative properties, in the sense that the latter will explain, without remainder, why the former is instanced. To formulate the "open question" argument in this way, one suggests that it is always an an "open question" whether, say, the goodness of particular action on some occasion can be constitutively explained by the pain-minimization that the action caused even in light of what other descriptive or non-normative properties the action had on that occasion.)

The open question argument seems related to Hume's suggestion that one cannot "derive" an 'is' (that is a descriptive fact) from an 'ought' (that is a normative fact) or vice-versa. Critics of the open question argument might accuse proponents of begging the question on this front. Perhaps some of these questions are not open, but only seem so because we are not fully rational enough to grasp how the question is closed (because our grasp on genuinely normative properties is a bit tenuous). The idea is that there is no further information (gained, for instance, via ethical intuition) that we need to see that the question is closed; we simply need to do better at processing the information that we have. Call this "the first response." (A second response would be to claim that although the question is open, still some sort of reduction is possible.)

I think that the first response fails, and I want to give some reasons why before opening up the discussion to others. The reason that I think that the first response fails is that it simply ignores the motivational aspect of the genuinely normative concepts that pick out these genuinely normative properties. Note: The word 'genuinely' here is supposed to make it clear that we are talking about just those concepts (or just those properties that these concepts pick out) that have this motivational aspect, and not any others that don't.

The motivational aspect that I have in mind is just this: The use of a genuinely normative concept incurs certain rational commitments when it comes to action. For instance, if I use this genuinely normative concept to judge that I ought (all-things-considered) to be nice to my elders, then if there is something rationally defective about me if I intentionally go on to act in a not-nice-way to my elders. (Basically, I am not functioning properly in this kind of scenario.) To avoid this rational defectiveness I need to either relinquish my judgment or stop failing to be nice to my elders.

The motivational aspect of genuinely normative concepts seems to suggest that these concepts already incorporate one way of picking out genuinely normative properties. Genuinely normative properties just are those properties that make it irrational to judge one way or act contrarily (as described with me and my elders).

My reasoning, then, is that given that we already have one way of picking out genuinely normative properties (as the properties that account for why it is rational to act in certain ways), then it must be an open question whether we can also pick them out in some other way by certain descriptions that have nothing to do with motivation and proper functioning.

Questions: Is this reasoning right? If so, what is the upshot for naturalism about genuinely normative properties?

Friday Question: Modal Rationalism

(Note: The past couple weeks, the Friday Questions have come from students in the first-year QUB Human Nature module. There are a couple more questions queued up for posting from these students, but I will save them for next week.)

For this Friday Question, I want to address a question in modal epistemology.

In philosophy, we are very often interested in what could have been or what has to be rather than what merely happens to be the case. For instance, philosophers interested in the mind-body problem are interested in knowing not just whether there are correlations between instances of mentality and certain patterns in the distribution of physical properties, but whether these correlations are indicative of some sort of metaphysically necessary connection between mind and body rather than a correlation that happens to be due to, say, natural laws that could have been otherwise. Knowing whether there is a metaphysically necessary connection or not seems crucial to addressing whether mind is distinct from body in the way that Descartes suggested.

One might reasonably wonder about the source of our grasp on what is metaphysically necessary or metaphysically possible (assuming, of course, that we have any such grasp). Modal epistemology is the study of what this grasp consists in.

One particular prominent school in modal epistemology is modal rationalism. According to modal rationalism, knowledge of the metaphysical necessity or possibility is always attained via purely rational abilities. For instance, it might be grounded in knowledge of what sorts of scenarios are "conceivable," where the conceivability of a scenario is something that we can test out by deploying our rational abilities. A better word for conceivability might be "intelligibility." The idea is that we can rule out the metaphysical possibility of a scenario by appreciating that the scenario doesn't make any sense or fails to be coherent; at the same time, we can confirm the metaphysical possibility of a scenario by appreciating that it does make sense or is coherent.

Certain examples (made prominent by Saul Kripke) force us to revise this last thought. For instance, from a position of ignorance it appears it would be coherent for Kim to think that Jack O'Hearts, a cheesy secret admirer, is distinct from her best friend John even if, actually, John just is Jack O'Hearts. Presumably, it isn't metaphysically possible for one and the same person not to be himself, so it isn't metaphysically possible for Jack O'Hearts to be anybody but John, or vice-versa.

The modal rationalist can respond to this situation by suggesting that although intelligibility isn't sufficient for metaphysical possibility, that is only because the intelligibility of a scenario may presuppose certain things about the actual world that are false. For instance, the intelligibility of the scenario in which Jack O'Hearts is not John may require the presupposition that the actual world is such that Jack O'Hearts is not John. If we were to suppose instead that in actual fact this is one and the same person, the scenario in which this identity doesn't hold no longer makes sense. The suggestion would then be that intelligibility is sufficient for metaphysical possibility so long as the intelligibility does not presuppose anything false about the actual world.

Is this form of modal rationalism viable?

QUB Philosophy Speaker Series event today: Paddy McQueen

Dear all,

Paddy McQueen, Political Theory PhD Student at Queen’s University Belfast, will be giving a talk today entitled “The Philosophy and Politics of Recognition” at 3:30 p.m. in the seminar room. All are invited to attend.

For further spring philosophy events, see the speaker series document below. Note: Jeremy Watkins's talk has been re-scheduled to 29 March.


http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofPoliticsInternationalStudiesandPhilosophy/FileStore/Research/Philosophy/Filetoupload,275892,en.pdf

Kings College London: Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

Undergraduates in philosophy might be interested in this international undergraduate conference in philosophy at KCL in early April.

Keynote Speakers: Professor A C Grayling (Birkbeck) and Dr Eleanor Knox (KCL)

Places are limited, so for registration and venue information, please email kclphilsoc@gmail.com

 Details here:

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/events/archive/ugconf2011.aspx

Programme

Saturday, April 2nd

09:30 Conference Opening: Check-in and Welcome

10:00-11:30 Keynote by A.C. Grayling

11:30-12:30 “Moral Disagreement and the 'Impartial Spectator’” James Matharu , London School of Economics

12:30- 13:30 “Discussion of Social Components of Pathology” Lily Bristow, Bristol

13:30 -15:00 Lunch

15:00-16:00 "Describing the Indescribable Heidegger and Husserl" Harry Lewendon, Liverpool

16:00-17:00 "Do some theories of truth help explain Verisimilitude better than others?" Ben Weisz, Cambridge (Trinity College)

*Social events will be held in the evening for all conference participants*

Sunday, April 3rd

9:30 Day Two Opening


10:00-11:00 "Can Machines be Murdered" Alex Miller Tate & Rory Scott, Birmingham

11:00-12:00 "The Impossible Heap: The Representation of Apocolypse in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame” Diana Martin, University of Bucharest and European College of Liberal Arts Berlin

12:00- 13:30 Keynote by Eleanor Knox

13:30-15:00 Lunch

15:00-16:00 "Does Modality Supervene on Actuality?" Emily Adlam, Oxford (Queen's College)

16:00-17:00 "Rawlsian Objections Against Utilitarianism as a Theory of Distributive Justice and Equal Consideration" Dimitar Milanov, Nottingham
Registration

Book Launch at QUB

Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar
Order this book online via: www.fourcourtspress.ie

The School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast have pleasure in inviting you to the launch of Thomas Aquinas: Teacher and Scholar edited by James McEvoy, Michael Dunne, and Julia Hynes on Friday 30 March at 6.00 p.m. in the Canada Room, Lanyon Building, Queen’s University Belfast.
RSVP to Julia Hynes: j.m.hynes@qub.ac.uk

This book will be launched by Dr Michael Dunne.

This is a book launch and a memorial event to mark Professor James McEvoy’s academic contribution to Queen’s University Belfast.

Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any additional information on the book or the launch.

With best wishes,

Anthony Tierney

Buy our books online via www.fourcourtspress.ie

Personhood and After Birth Abortion

In the Journal of Medical Ethics (February, 2012), Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that given the same moral status or lack thereof between a foetus and a new born baby, the same conditions that would justify the killing of the foetus also justify the killing of the new born ('After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?'). They structure their argument around what they take to be the fact that neither the new born nor the foetus is a person, in which case it is not subject to a moral right to life in which case the rights and interests of actual persons, such as the mother, society etc, ought to take priority. They consider the potentiality objection to the effect that both the foetus and the new born are potential persons and reject it arguing that no harm is done to a potential person by not allowing such an entity to develop into a person. They also reject the adoption objection to the effect that adoption would be a better option than abortion or after birth abortion since they do not believe that it is straightforwardly true that the mental health of the mother would be better in the adoption case than in the abortion/after birth abortion case; and if in this case the interests of an actual person (the mother) should prevail, then after birth abortion should be a valid alternative to adoption.

I do not wish to engage in-depth with the details and presuppositions of their article. What I would like to do is take the occasion of their paper to explore a position on what it is to be a person. On one account of personhood (an account broad enough to include that of Giubilini and Minerva), to be a person is to have some property or set of properties such that one can potentially but not actually possess them and then, if allowed to develop, actually possess them; in which case one was only potentially a person and then actually so. I want to present an alternative view.

On the alternative view, to be a person is not essentially to have a certain property or set of properties, but it is a distinct state of being, that is to say, a person is a type of thing and thus personhood goes along with being that type of thing. The motivation for the view that being a person is being a type of thing and not having certain person constituting properties is as follows. Properties whilst serving to identify a thing are not identifiable with a thing. Rather, properties are multiply realisable such that different individuals can possess the same properties. But if several different individuals can possess the same properties, then a problem arises with regard to the property based conception of personhood. A person is a unique and non-repeatable individual; there might be many people named Gaven Kerr in the world, but there is only one of me. So whilst there are a lot of people, a person is essentially an individual. But if a person is essentially an individual, then it cannot be constituted by some property or set of properties, since properties are such that they are multiply realisable whereas a person is not. It follows then that the status a thing has as a person is not granted to it on the basis of properties that it has, but on the basis of the thing itself that instantiates those properties. Thus, it is the very individual that is a person, and not the properties that make the individual a person.

Given the latter, to be a person is to be an individual type of thing and not to come to possess a certain property or properties. Now, if being a person grants one a moral status, as Giubilini and Minerva grant, then a thing that is a person has such a status. But contrary to Giubilini and Minerva, a person is not something that becomes over time through the accumulation of certain properties, but is what the thing in question is. This then entails that one is not potentially a person and then actually so, but that one just is a person period, from beginning to end.

On this account of personhood, if one is prepared to recognise that the entity which is 28 years old is the same entity that was 18 years old and is the same entity that was 8 years old and is the same entity that was newborn, and the same entity that was in utero, i.e. in my own case, a self-developing and independent human substance, then given that to be a person is to be a type of thing and given the continuity of identity over all of the aforementioned time spans, a human substance did not first come into being and then a human person, rather a particular self-developing independent substance that is a person came into being, and, qua person, such an entity is subject to a moral right to life.

Friday Question: Aristotle on the Soul

David Mckay, a student in the first-year Human Nature module at Queen's University Belfast, submitted the following Friday Question:

Aristotle’s De Anima

Aristotle’s groundbreaking and influential work on the soul in De Anima (mainly focused on in Book II) fundamentally changed the face of philosophy. However, Aristotle’s views on the soul are, at the very least, controversial. Modern scholars and philosophers cannot even seem to agree on a common understanding of his theories, which have been so widely interpreted that Aristotle has been made to fit into almost every school of thought in the philosophy of mind. Differentiating the true Aristotle from the interpretations is, therefore, extremely difficult, if not impossible.

His thought was nothing if not original, and his systematic approach has left a profound body of work still being interpreted to this day. His work on the soul however, seems to leave a number of unanswered questions and has been subject to harsh criticism.

To explain very briefly, Aristotle seeks to discover the nature of the soul through a teleological analysis, trying to discover the purpose of it, the role it serves. For Aristotle this alone distinguishes an object, with the example he gives (De Anima, Book II, Chapter 1, 412b 10.) being an axe; “Suppose, for example, that an instrument, say an axe, were a natural body, its axiety (i.e. what it would be for it to be an axe) would be its substance, would in fact be its soul.”

This thought was motivated in Aristotle by a division which runs through the core of Aristotle’s work. Aristotle differentiates between potentiality (matter) and actuality (form). Think of a sculpture, the potentiality is the stone which when formed/sculpted becomes a statue and is actualised or realises its actuality. For something to exist therefore it requires both potentiality/matter and actuality/form. Human beings are no different, the body is the matter to which the soul animates and forms what it is to be a living human.

Finally, (for the purposes of this entry) the big question, what is the purpose of the soul? What makes a soul a soul if you will? Living and perceiving, the latter can be done by all living beings by the base sense (sense-organ), touch. What is it to be distinctly human? To engage in thought and communication- which Aristotle believed to be innately and exclusively human.

In this brief summary, there are two questionable areas which I wish to challenge- (i) the basis of his teleological understanding, (ii) his reliance on perception.

Aristotle’s entire investigation relies upon teleology. Can we really understand human nature simply by the functions and capacities of the soul which is inseparable from the body? If an axe cannot cut, is it still an axe? Does the same apply for humans, if a human cannot think or communicate is he not a human? This appears a very narrow scope of human activity, being human involves a lot more than simply thinking, or maybe a lot less.

My major concern is can we really understand human nature or even the “thing-in-itself” solely by the external activities of the thing? Once an axe goes unused, it slips back into potentiality- it has the potential to cut, until it is used this potential is not realised. But Descartes took the opposite approach, for Descartes (something never considered by Aristotle) we can only discover human nature and the soul by ignoring the potentially deceptive sense perceptions of the external world, and (to quote Confucius) “turn(ing) your gaze within.” Which approach is more meritorious?

This overreliance on a vulgar conception of perception has led to G.R.T Ross condemning Aristotle as promoting “what looks like the crudest materialism.” Ultimately, without perception a thing cannot be alive. However, in an issue increasingly prevalent in modern philosophy of mind, how do we know other human beings think or perceive as we do (or as I exclusively do)? How do we know that an animal’s sense of touch (the base perception) is the same as our own?

Has Aristotle pandered to ‘common-sense’, making assumptions which leave noticeable gaps? Fundamentally for Aristotle, the soul is nothing more than a categorising terminology, without the body or individual it does not exist. Do we, therefore, lose all sense of what we mean when we say ‘I’? Can ‘I’ exist separate from the bodily form, free from purpose? For Aristotle, clearly not.

Violence and disparity: two challenges for non-patterned principles of justice and libertarian capitalism

The following is a post by Mikael Kristiansen who is the serving treasurer for the QUB Philosophy Society and a 2nd year undergraduate studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics:

Consider a society with a widely disproportionate distribution of wealth, where only a small percentage of people, or even a single person, owns property, and the rest subsist solely on wages from selling their labour.  This state of affairs, depending on your situation and interpretation of the actual world economy, may sound somewhat familiar.  In what sense can this pattern of distribution of goods be called just, and what remedial measures, if any, should be taken?  Some theories are understood to predicate the answers to these questions on a distribution meeting some sort of social goal or its conformity to an ideal pattern of holdings.  In contrast, a right-libertarian theory of justice characteristically holds that a distribution of goods in a society is just inasmuch as it is the result of free exchanges, regardless of the pattern of actual holdings.  As a result, these so-called non-patterned theories are concerned with procedural aspects of property accumulation as relevant to justice. This, according to Robert Nozick, is made clear via an analogy to logical inference:  ‘As correct rules of inference are truth-preserving, and any conclusion deduced via repeated application of such rules from only true premises is itself true, so the means of transition from one situation to another specified by the principle of justice in transfer are justice-preserving...’ (1977, p. 151).  Rival theories that make reference to social goals (e.g egalitarianism and utilitarianism) are charged with an error comparable to manipulating an argument to reach a favoured conclusion and, perhaps more heinously, unjustifiably forcing individuals to become resources for others (i.e. by forcibly redistributing the fruit of their labour or their entitled property, etc.).  Thus, a free market in capital and labour is characteristically prescribed.

Two challenges are outlined below that have been touched upon by Will Kymlicka and Jeffrey Reiman.  These are directed at Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice, which is of course not the only right-libertarian theory of justice, but it is perhaps the most well-known, so it serves well as a starting point for discussion and consideration. How other theories may fare with these puzzles will hopefully be brought forth by commentators to this article.

Some Musings on Wisdom and the New Evil Demon Problem

Imagine that a team of extraordinarily gifted scientists can do the following bizarre thing: they can (through the powers of, say, “lasers”) duplicate your body (including brain), atom from atom, and cause it to appear—a perfect intrinsic duplicate of your right now—in a parallel universe. Call your duplicate in the parallel universe “You2.” Suppose further that You2 is not only your physical duplicate but also your psychological duplicate, and suppose further that the parallel universe looks to You2 just like ours does to you, and in fact, everything there is perceptually indistinguishable from how things seem to you here. There is just one catch: everything in the parallel universe is an illusion, created by the gifted scientists’ cohort, an equally gifted malicious demon, who feeds your psychological duplicate with images of all the same things you see in the actual world, only for your duplicate, these are all mirages. The situation I am describing here is used in various guises by contemporary epistemologists under the heading of the “New Evil Demon” problem. This thought experiment has typically been employed as a way of committing reliabilists about epistemic justification to an absurd consequence. Reliabilists about justification claim that a belief p is epistemically justified for S just in case p is produced by a reliable belief forming process of S. A belief forming process is reliable just in case it typically produces true beliefs and avoids error. To see how the gist of the New Evil Demon argument against reliabilism (about justification) goes: Suppose you are looking at a goldfinch, and your psychological duplicate, You2, is having an indistinguishable experience , though for You2, it is a goldfinch-mirage. Plausibly, as the line goes, if you are perceptually justified in believing “There is a goldfinch,” your psychological duplicate is also justified in believing “There is a goldfinch” when looking at the goldfinch-mirage, given that you and your duplicate are psychologically identical and form the belief “There is a goldfinch” on the basis of perceptually indistinguishable experiences. According to reliabilism, though, only you are justified; your counterpart You2 did not form the belief via a reliable belief-forming process; this is because all of You2’s belief forming processes are (unlike your own) maximally unreliable. Although reliabilists have used different strategies to try to show that this thought experiment isn’t ultimately problematic for their position, most all reliabilists are at least in agreement that You2 does not have a reliably produced belief. I want to abstract a bit from the scenario as one that threatens reliabilism about justification and consider that You2 fails to have any factive state; all of You2’s beliefs are false. You2, of course, fails to have any knowledge; knowledge is factive; one knows p just in case p is true. Also plausibly (though perhaps a bit more controversially), You2 fails to have any understanding. We think that understanding is factive in a way that is slightly different from how knowledge is factive. Whereas the object of (propositional) knowledge is a proposition (that must be true for the agent to know it), the object of one interesting sort of understanding—objectual understanding—is rather than a proposition, a subject matter. For example, following Kvanvig’s example, “The Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries”. Understanding a subject matter requires (plausibly) that one grasp the explanatory relationships between a range of true propositions one believes about a subject matter. (After all, I fail to understand the Comanche’s dominance of the North American plains if all or most of the propositions I believe on the matter are false).  While “You” understand the Comanche dominance, let’s say that You2, in virtue of failing the factive requirement of understanding, merely has an “intelligibile picture” (or something weaker than understanding), which involves a grasping of explanatory relations between a coherent set of believed propositions, which turn out to be false. If this is right, you understand the Comanche dominance of the North American plains between the 17^th and 19^th centuries, but your intrinsic duplicate doesn’t. After this rather long set-up, I have now made my way to the actual question I want to ask: presumably, like understanding, wisdom is a cognitive achievement that has at least some factive element. I’ll capture this idea as uncontroversially as I can: an individual cannot achieve wisdom without at least some correct beliefs. If this factive element of wisdom is right, then we should expect that the New Evil Demon scenario will be one in which your recently created counterpart (You2) in the demon world would fail to be wise. After all, You2 has all false beliefs, courtesy of the demon. However, this seems somehow wrong: it seems that anyone who is a psychological duplicate of someone who is wise is also wise. Take, for instance, Aristotle or Gandolf, or whomever you revere as a bastion of wisdom. Now suppose the scientists create an intrinsic duplicate (that is also a psychological duplicate) of Aristotle and Gandolf and put them in a demon-world, where their beliefs about the world are all false. Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 inherit the wisdom of Aristotle1 and Gandolf1, don’t they? If you think they do, then how can this much be reconciled with the plausible thought that wisdom is (in some sense) factive and the demon strips Aristotle2 and Gandolf2 of any facts to correspond with their beliefs about the world.  I have a few ideas about what to say at this point, but will stop for now and encourage readers to weigh in. 

Friday Question: Morality and Government

Keir Anderson is a student in the QUB first-year Human Nature module (PHL1002). He submitted the following Friday Question after reflecting on the analogy between a soul and a city-state in Plato's Republic:

In Plato’s dialogue Republic, he compares the human soul to the government of an idealized city, noting parallels between the two. In discussing this perfect city, he touches on the parallel concepts of morality. In light of current political controversies, this raises an interesting point: is there any moral code by which governments should abide? Naturally they must be bound by some sort of preconditions, a constitution or the like. Ideally, some set of ideals would be written into this, but what about issues that aren’t addressed therein?

For example, President George W. Bush has been verbally slaughtered for his role in waging the war in Iraq. The argument could be made for a “just war,” liberating the Iraqi people from a dictator. A different argument could be made about unjustly forcing Western political ideals upon an unwilling population. This sort of controversy seems to imply that, being unable to agree on a moral standard for the war, the United States should leave such things up to the voters, allowing them to use their personal moralities in conglomerate.

Perhaps more pertinent to the citizens of a nation is the domestic policies of its government. The question of administrative morality, while easily ignored in foreign matters, becomes harder to ignore closer to home; the more personal it becomes, the more relevant. One of the favorite cases in the United States, for example, is the issue of healthcare. Naturally, most people can agree that it is good for individuals to have access to modern medical services. However, the question never fails to arise: is it the moral responsibility of the government to provide for this? In this case, one would be more likely to say that, as an entity whose responsibility is to provide for the welfare of its people, the government should certainly offer this service.

Clearly government has some necessary responsibility toward its citizens, namely, to carry out the terms under which the government exists. In addition, there is also a certain requirement to keep up civil foreign relations, if only for the purpose of self-preservation. On the one hand, it seems logical to allow controversial issues to be decided by popular vote, rather than by a set moral code. After all, who would be responsible for determining such a thing? But on the other, popular opinion changes with spatiotemporal location, so it can’t adhere to any absolute morality. Should governments be held to their own moral code? And if so, how is that code determined?