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?

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?