Thinking about Nature

The following is a post by David Knowles who is the serving vice-president of the philosophy society and a post-graduate student in the school:

Philosophical reflection on environmental issues generally tends to focus on environmental ethics and the clarification of relevant concepts such as sustainability. What is relatively neglected is a philosophical account of nature. In response to the current ecological crisis what is required is a philosophy of nature that is both scientific (paying particular attention to the science of ecology) and ethical (in so far as ecological degradation is an ethical issue, requiring an ethical solution). The French philosopher Deleuze once remarked in an interview that he and Guattari (hereafter D&G) would like to “produce a sort of philosophy of Nature, now that any distinction between nature and artifice is becoming blurred.”[1]  In this short post I shall argue that D&G‘s work does in fact contain a nascent philosophy of nature which can be grounded in Deleuzian ethics.

Often nature is considered to be an untamed wilderness that exists in an antagonistic relationship to civilisation or ‘man.’ Nature is also often held to be a place of beauty that is perhaps ‘revelatory’ in the sense that it discloses beauty or truth and forms subjects (for example, people are encouraged to go on ‘nature trips’ in order to ‘find themselves’). In each of these cases there is a bifurcation between humanity and nature. These views can be seen in pop-cultural expressions of eco-apocalypse, such as Wall-E, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road and in films which depict ‘nature’ as that which provides authenticity and truth (most famously in Avatar). In the second case (the view of nature as friend) nature is instrumentalised relative to humanity (i.e. nature is seen as that which gifts experiences or materials to humanity. Thus nature is that which is at the service of humanity rather than a limiting or encroaching force, as in the previous case).

In contrast to this nature-human dichotomy D&G write that:  “[W]e make no distinction between man and nature.”[2] The removal of the human-nature distinction acknowledges that humans are actors within ecosystems, rather than a unique species which stands above nature (to extract resources or truth from nature). This then means that nature cannot be conceived as that which existed prior to or apart from human influence. This raises questions for the issues of conservation and ecological restoration.

Laughing at Life

Imagine watching me standing alone in a corner of a crowded airport café, a folded newspaper in one hand and a pen in the other. I start to laugh (perhaps through clenched teeth) as I contemplate a move I can't make on the sudoku I'm attempting to complete. And suppose you learn that I wasn't waiting for a plane's departure or arrival, and I'm not using the café for the things that cafés serve, nor am I there to meet anyone. You might think there's something odd about someone going to an airport just to find somewhere to stand to laugh at a sudoku that they're completing, particularly since sudokus don't seem like the kinds of things that can be funny.

I think sudokus can be funny (or perhaps less trivially: that laughter can be an appropriate response to a sudoku). In fact, I think there's quite a lot to laugh at with sudokus in general, and I've encountered some particular puzzles which have a comedic content in a very similar way to how cryptic crosswords involve a groan-inducing element, if not out-and-out gags, but I'll save that for another occasion. Even more generally, I think laughter is an appropriate response to someone who goes out of their way to do something so seemingly pointless as to stand unnecessarily in a crowded airport café, laughing at a very disposable and unmomentous number-based logical puzzle.

In 'Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter' (Philosophy, 84: 111-134, Jan 2009), Bob Plant argues that laughter is an appropriate response to a slightly different type of absurdity. Albert Camus (and some other existentialists) maintained that there is something absurd about life - that our lives are caught up in a rather ridiculous situation, in which we are committed to repeating the pathetic (because futile) attempt to find meaning and reason for our existence. Plant thinks that if this is the case, we should probably just laugh.

Friday Question: On the Evidential Argument from Evil

Some philosophers of religion defend a version of the Evidential Argument from Evil known as the Direct Argument. The argument goes as follows:

(1) If there were a God, there would be no gratuitous evils (GEs)
(2) It is probable that at least one of the evils in our world is a GE.
(3) Therefore: probably, there is no God.

Firstly, regarding GEs: A given evil is a gratuitious evil (GE) if it is such that God would have no adequate justifying reason for permitting it (e.g. there is no sufficiently outweighing good that could not have been brought about without permitting a particular evil). [For more on gratuitous evil, see here].

In support of premise (2), William Rowe has suggested that mere reflection on some of the more heinous forms of evil in our world ought to convince us that it is probable that at least one of the evils in our world is a GE. As Murray and Rea suggest, "It seems simply obvious when we consider cases like [<Warning: distressing picture> a deer dying an agonizing, slow death in a forest fire] that there is no greater good to which we might appeal that could justify it." (Murray and Rea 2008: 167). Stephen Wykstra calls these kind of arguments "Noseeum Arguments": when considering certain cases like that of the deer, we look long and hard for some possible greater good, and yet we come up empty handed; put simply: we can't see any possible greater good, so it's probably not there.

As Murray and Rea point out, two conditions have to be met for a Noseeum inference to be a good one. Firstly, you have to be looking for the thing in question in the right place. Secondly, it must be the case that you would see the thing in question if it were really there. A Noseeum inference is a poor one if either of these conditions isn't met. After all, your inference that there is no milk in the refrigerator is no good if either (i) you would know milk if you saw it but looked in the wrong place for it (say, the garage), or, (ii) you looked in the right place for it (the fridge) but wouldn't know it if you saw it (say, you think milk looks like something much different than it does). Skeptical theists object to Noseeum arguments in defence of (2) of the Direct Argument, and this is because they think we are not well positioned when it comes to identifying assessing the reasons God might have for permitting evil. Their main contentions here are that, given the finitude of our human cognitive and moral faculties, it seems that there are many types of good with which we are not familiar, and further, that even if we were acquainted with the relevant goods, there is doubt that we would adequately comprehend the role these evils might play in bringing about those goods. (Murray & Rea 169.) Rowe responds to Skeptical Theists on this point by suggesting that, a problematic implication of their position is that we we must admit that no matter how much evil there might be in the world (and no matter how terrible it seems) we would never be in a position to accept (2): that it is probable that at least one of the evils in the world is a GE. Rowe also suggests that, in reply to the Skeptical Theists, it's not just that we looked and we can't see reasons that might justify God in permitting certain heinous evils (i.e. the deer's agonizing death), but that we can't even conceive of what such reasons would be. What do you think of Rowe's replies to the Skeptical Theist at this juncture? How might the Skeptical Theist reply?

Is New Atheism philosophically interesting?

Often they stare unblinking, with clear frustration and disdain piercing through their expressions; “What do you mean you don’t care if God exists or not?”, and I sit back filled with a sense of dread as I await another impassioned onslaught, usually incorporating talk of Darwinism, feminism, terrorism and gay rights and often concluding with a rather hasty ultimatum along these lines:  “You are either on the side of oppression, segregation and superstition or freedom, liberty and truth.”  And so I am presented again with the rather trite fork in the road of too many discussions in and around campus with the ‘enlightened’ amongst the Theism/Atheism debate.  Everything seems to be presented in such black and white terms; no doubt this is fuelled by a media culture of sound bites and headlines, propped up by massive book sales as it quite literally rages across forums, social media and YouTube. 

I can vicariously feel my interlocutor’s sense of certainty as he berates me, after all I remember as a young teenager being convinced that my lack of belief formed some important aspect of my identity; I even had some sense of affinity with the rather sweeping claim that ‘religion poisons everything’, to quote the late Hitchens.  Growing up surrounded by religious fundamentalism on both sides in Northern Ireland it was not hard to find the fuel for my resentment.  Over the past number of years however I have come to increasingly associate this New Atheist (NA) movement with fundamentalism, and I want to focus on one aspect in particular which contributes to my finding NA so unsatisfying.

“I do not believe in God”; what are we left with after the negation?  I get the sense both Fundamentalism and NA privilege the epistemological status of belief (or unbelief) over the cultural and political presence of religion; we are told repeatedly by those of the NA camp that belief in God is unjustified, ridiculous and dangerous but for me these claims ring hollow.  It is most often the absolute nature of their statements which I have picked up as a defining feature of this style of discourse and it is ultimately this characteristic which fills me with an acute sense of disillusionment. 

 For both the NAs and religious fundamentalists, religion is at times equated with correct propositional belief (what Dawkins calls the 'God hypothesis' – 'the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other').  William Stahl argues that both new atheists and religious fundamentalists suffer from what Richard Bernstein has called 'Cartesian Anxiety'; this is to be understood as the need for certainty and authority (whether from inerrant text validated by science or from infallible reason validated by science). Steve Fuller argues that both groups depend on a geometrical epistemology wherein the first principles are guaranteed and deductions can be made from them.  In this epistemology the empirical is fused with normative value.  New atheists deduce from atheistic evolution and make social and moral claims on this basis, whereas fundamentalists deduce morals from an inerrant sacred text.  Both view belief as authoritative in that belief establishes what is normative and in doing so downplay the influence or authority of tradition, community or experience.

This focus on some cognitive state of belief/unbelief seems to me to be greatly overstated to the detriment of the great political, moral and cultural questions which face post-enlightenment atheists.  Religion involves community, rituals, moral teaching all of which has contributed to the formation of our cultures worldwide, and if we are to accept that the metaphysical commitments underpinning these belief systems have rotted away, which I do, then there seem to be far more important and interesting problems to deal with than the NA movement has the stomach for. 

When Nietzsche had his madman proclaim the Death of God he has him run into a crowded market place holding a lantern on a bright morning crying out, “I’m looking for God!” before proclaiming: “We have killed him – you and I!”  Instead of an exuberant victory dance, or running home to write a best-selling (and Hume ignoring) treatise on how morality can be securely founded on science, the madman instead announces this event with a great sense of gravity and foreboding:

“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?... How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers!  The holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood from us?... Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us?  Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it? ...it has not yet reached the ears of men.” (The Gay Science §125)

There is a certain irony here in that we are told many of those who heard the madman’s cries were atheists, and they simply laughed at him.  I just can’t help but wonder if others out there share my contention that there is certain shallowness to the current state of the debate, a shallowness I have suggested may rest on some latent philosophical presuppositions made by those who carry it out in the public eye.  I appear to be far more pessimistic about what a mere negation of a belief can hope to accomplish.           

Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture

This Thursday (the 23rd) at 3.30pm Dr Alison Hills, a leading moral philosopher from Oxford University, will be giving a talk entitled “Cognitivism About Moral Judgement” in the Conference Room (20.103), here in the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy.

This event, which is part of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture series, is open to everyone, and undergraduate and graduate students are particularly welcome to attend.

A Puzzle About Compensation

Duties of rectification are a familiar part of practical reasoning. Both as a matter of law and morality, it seems only right and proper that wrongdoers ought to try to set matters straight by providing full and adequate reparation. But what qualifies as full and adequate reparation? Accepting for the sake of argument that there are duties of rectification, what counts as fulfilling them?

One approach to this question appeals to the Counterfactual Test. This holds that the duty of rectification is a duty to establish the situation that would have obtained had the initial wrong not taken place. On this view, if I wrong you with the result that you end up on n units of utility, but you would have ended up on n+1 units of utility had I not wronged you, then I fully discharge my duty of rectification if I bring your utility-level up from n to n+1.

However, this account of what it means to provide “full and adequate reparation” encounters a curious problem in cases where a wrongful injury is followed by an unexpected benefit. Suppose, for example, that I wilfully damage your car, with the result that you miss your flight to America, but it so happens that the flight in question crashes into the Atlantic, with the loss of life of everyone on board. The Counterfactual Test implies that I fully rectify the wrong by bringing about the situation that would have obtained had I not damaged your car, which in this instance involves your dying in a plane crash. But clearly this is absurd: rectifying my wrong can’t involve my killing you.

I therefore wonder whether there is a way of characterizing “full and adequate reparation” which is plausible in its own right and which handles cases of “unexpected benefit” in a satisfactory way. One option, of course, is to insist that, in the plane crash case, no wrong has been committed and no duty of rectification has been incurred. Another option is to tweak the Counterfactual Test so that the relevant point of comparison isn’t the (near) possible world where you die in the plane crash but the (more distant) possible world in which you catch the flight and cross the Atlantic safely. But can either of these options be made to work? Or should we search for a different strategy for thinking about rectification that does away with counterfactual reasoning altogether? What do readers think?

Annual Spring Conference of the IPS: Philosophy in Ireland

CFP:

Annual Spring Conference of the IPS:

"Philosophy in Ireland: Past actualities – present challenges – future potentialities?"

(22^nd – 24^th June 2012)

This year marks the 50^th Anniversary of the Irish Philosophical Society. In order to celebrate this anniversary, the theme of this year’s IPS spring conference will be devoted to ‘Philosophy in Ireland: Past Actualities, Present Challenges, and Future Potentialities’.

It will take place from the 22^nd to 24^th June 2012, at the National University of Ireland / St. Patricks’ College, Maynooth.

Papers that shed light on the contribution of philosophy and, more broadly, of Irish thought, to ethical, spiritual, and political choices in the Irish past are invited. Papers discussing current developments in Irish philosophy, including the work of influential contemporary Irish philosophers and Irish writers of strong philosophical interest, are welcome. Finally, papers which are concerned with possible future developments in Irish philosophy, in particular in ethics and its contribution to social life, aesthetics, metaphysics and the philosophy of language are also invited.

The aim of the conference is not only to celebrate and show how Irish philosophers have in the past influenced philosophical movements and the connections to the present but also to explore links between philosophy and art, especially literature, in which Irish writers have made such a strong contribution internationally, as well as the connection between Ireland and major philosophical thinkers such as Wittgenstein. Postgraduate students are particularly encouraged to submit papers for a special postgraduate research session.

Topics of interest for this Conference include, but are not limited to the following:

1.     History of Irish Philosophy and Irish Thought:

§       The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena, Richard FitzRalph, and Peter of Ireland

§       Observation of Nature and Irish Thought: Robert Boyle

§       Irish Enlightenment and its counter movements: John Toland, Edmund Burke, and George Berkeley

§       Wittgenstein in Ireland

2.     Contemporary Developments in Irish Philosophy and in Irish Thought:

§       The Philosophy of William Desmond, Richard Kearney

§       General developments in fields of ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language

§       Philosophy and literature (Beckett and Existentialism, Joyce and Deconstruction, Heaney and Heidegger)

§       Philosophy and Film (Neil Jordan; …)

§       Philosophical traditions in Ireland (phenomenology, analytic…)

The sessions on individual topics will be followed by a Round Table Discussion on Sunday (24^th June), addressing questions pertaining to the present state and challenges of philosophy in Ireland as well as possible contributions not only to philosophical scholarship but also to the wider sense of engaging with current issues and future challenges by contributing to new visions needed to respond to what President Michael D. Higgins has called the “intellectual crisis in society”.

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Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. David Berman, Trinity College Dublin

Prof. William Desmond, Catholic University Leuven

A detailed schedule will follow in due course, after selection process for received abstracts has been completed.

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Abstracts & Selection Criteria

Authors are invited to send abstracts (maximum 1 page) of their papers (approximately 30 minutes presentation time, 20 minutes for postgraduates) on topics indicated above, or on themes of their own choosing relevant to the Conference’s topic.

The Editorial Board welcome abstracts from academics in the relevant disciplines and departments as well as independent researchers working on topics relevant to the conference.

Schedule for Submissions:

-       Abstracts: One page (c. 600 words maximum) and CVs (maximum of 2 pages,

 including any personal statement and/or listing of publications) to be received by 6^th April 2012.

-       Abstracts to be short-listed by the Editorial Board and papers invited by 30th April 2012.

Please send abstracts (and any queries) to Conference Co-ordinators:

Susan Gottlöber, Philosophy Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Email: demitras@gmail.com 

Cyril McDonnell, Philosophy Department, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Email: cyril.mcdonnell@nuim.ie 

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Cost & Accommodation

Registration Cost: 25 EUR

Concession (Student, Senior): 15 EUR

IPS Member: 15 EUR

There is reasonably priced On-Campus Accommodation available; we would strongly advise that you book early. See: http://www.maynoothcampus.com/accommodation.php

All speakers and participants at the Round Table Discussion are invited to the Conference Dinner on Sat, June 23^rd 2012.

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Publication of Proceedings:

Within 12 months of the event, a special edition of the Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society will be published, according to normal academic process of double-blind peer review, comprising selected papers presented at the conference and/ or received.

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Rev. Dr Gavan Jennings
Hon. Sec. IPS
t: 353 (0)1 6767 420
m: 086 065 2313info@irishphilosophicalsociety.ie
gavanjennings@gmail.com

The Irish Philosophical Society
Cumann Fealsúnachta na hÉireann