Philosophy Bro

Special Event: What the Exciting Discovery of the "God Particle" Means for Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:14:00 +0000

Nothing.

Seriously. Knock it off.

Mailbag Monday: Ethical Dogmatism

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 22:40:00 +0000

Mailbag Monday: A weekly segment that covers readers' questions and concerns about all things Philosophy, Bro, and Philosophy Bro that don't quite fit anywhere else. Send your questions to philosophybro@gmail.com with 'Mailbag Monday' in the subject line.

--
Rolf writes,

Bro, i got a problem
So alright, you got this shit with ethics and not murdering for no reason and shit.
But if you keep asking 'why' long enough you discover that any sort of ethic-based code of living is eventually derived from either

intuitive feelings (i FEEL it's not right to murder)

or dogmatism (i can't murder because the bible says so)

and it eventually leads to some sort of nihilism where every fucking thing is subjective and you got like 2 philosibros arguing against eachother and im like 'yeah theyre both kinda right but whoever to believe doesnt really matter anyway cause its so fucking subjective'
Should i just pick whatever i 'feel' is right or live in apathy all my life?

Dude, you keep asking "why" long enough, you're going to have waaaaaay bigger problems than, "I'm not sure what's right or wrong anymore." Descartes tried it, and he had to rely on the existence of God and a really fucking suspect notion of how ideas work to get him anywhere other than, "Well, I exist right now at this moment in time insofar as time is maybe a thing." The external world, other minds, right and wrong, your memories of childhood, pretty much everything is fucked if you ask "why?" long enough.

In that sense, 'feelings' and dogmatism are really kind of the same thing - someone just asserting that this is the thing that grounds morality. You have to start somewhere! But people have derived morality from plenty of places - our capacity for pleasure and pain, our ability to reason, some sort of hypothetical contract - it's all over the place, man. It sure looks dogmatic when someone says, "It's utility that makes things right and wrong." Why? "Because. Because if we didn't get utility from things, we wouldn't have to bother." Well c'mon, that's just saying the same thing over again. But what are you supposed to say? What would an alternative to 'dogmatism' look like?

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Paradoxes

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 01:57:00 +0000

Hey bro, do you mind going over a couple paradoxes? Zeno's paradoxes, like what's the deal with them. Trying to explain that shit is fucking hard, think you can do it?

So maybe one of the reasons you're having trouble explaining paradoxes is that paradoxes are fucking hard to explain, and that's the whole thing about paradoxes. What is a paradox? Roughly, something that makes us go, "Oh, I get it, just... fuck, that does not make sense." Sometimes they generate straight-up contradictions - those ones are easy enough to understand, but hard to wrap your whole brain around, which is the point.

Take Russell's Paradox: Does the set of sets that don't contain themselves contain itself or not? If it does, then it doesn't - but if it doesn't, then it does. We used to think that you could just, like, name a set and you would get a set - like, "Uh, the set of all odd numbers!" and poof there it was. In one sense, Russell's paradox is a super-clear demonstration that "sorry assholes, it's not that simple." But in another sense we're like, "Wait, so... the set has sets that don't contain themselves? So it contains itself... which means it can't contain itself... so it doesn't... but then it would have to? That can't be right, can it?"

Go on...

Philosophy of Humor at the Partially Examined Life

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:52:00 +0000

Today's post is over at the Partially Examined Life! The guys at PEL had me on for their Wittgenstein episodes, which you should listen to because they're awesome. It's almost four whole hours of musings about Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which I have staunchly refused to summarize because there's so much shit going on there. Also, you can hear my dulcet tones filtered through several machines - I'm told I sound distinctly not Canadian... ladies.

Aaaaanyway, their most recent episode is on Henri Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic and discusses what exactly makes shit funny. I wasn't on the episode itself, but I sent them some varied musings on the philosophy of humor, and I'm hoping to get some cool discussion going over there. So go check those out! And listen to the episode, which is great.

In Defense of the Expectation Thesis | The Partially Examined Life

Karl Popper's "Introduction to the Logic of Science": A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 23:20:00 +0000

Look, there's been a lot of controversy lately about what is and isn't "good philosophy" and what we can and can't say, and opinions on that are like assholes - everyone's got one, and no one knows what to do about Wittgenstein's. But I think we can all agree that a really worthwhile task is understanding the world around us, especially with science. But no one is really talking about how science is supposed to work - they're just going around saying "Oh, science! Look at me, I'm science and I'm the best!" But if everybody is going to be using science, we damn well better make sure we understand exactly what the fuck is going on in science, right? I thought so.

After all, what makes science so great? Everyone seems to think it's induction, that induction is what makes science so great. They're all, "Look at all this data we have that proves that gravity is real! Where you at on the data for beauty and the soul, poets? Yeah, that's wht we thought. Fuckin' poets." Except fuck that, induction is broken. We've known since David Hume that induction is broken, and I'm here to tell you that there's no fixing it. You can't just drop shit a bunch of times and then be like, "Well, all these rocks keep falling at the same speed, and we've been dropping them for like three hours now so obviously that's how it is all the time everywhere in the universe." But for some reason people keep trying to figure out how many times we need to see rocks fall at the right speed before we can assume it's the same everywhere - "Uh, maybe if it happens the same way the first thousand times we try it, we can just go with it." Oh really? A thousand? How'd you get that number? Did we just test a thousand different things a thousand times and they've all worked so far, so we assume a thousand is the magic number? Bullshit, something could go terribly horribly wrong with the sunrise tomorrow and then your arbitrary "thousand" number is right the fuck out the window. You can't inductively justify induction, so you can't pretend like induction is all there is. Knock it off.

"But Karl, without induction, how will science tell us things? Why is is any different from metaphysical bullshittery?" Holy fuck, I'm getting there! Relax! But first, let's talk about how science even starts for a second. Probably because they've got their heads up their asses with induction, these same bros think that maybe we need to know how the scientist thinks, so we can get from one idea to the next and verify it, as if we need some logical breakdown of producing theories so that we can go about proving them in an orderly manner. But what the fuck would that even look like? Sure, maybe psychology can help us have better ideas or whatever, but how would understanding how we have ideas tell us anything about whether those ideas are good or not? Oh wait, right, it wouldn't. Whether a theory matches the world or not has nothing to do with how someone came up with it - we can draw theories out of a hat for all I fucking care.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Dialetheism

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 03:03:00 +0000

I was wondering if you could explain Dialetheism for me. That shit is confusing. How can a contradiction be true?

Right, so, for those of you playing along at home, dialetheism is (roughly) the belief that there are true contradictions, or dialetheias - for some p, both p and not-p are true. Which means that, whatever p is, you could ask, "Hey, bro, uh... p?" and I could legitimately respond "Yes! Also, no."

And of course, at first blush that sounds fucking crazy. How can a thing be true and false at the same time? If you're a Randian, you are perhaps stomping your foot here and just insisting that contradictions can't be true, and that's all there is to it. (Also, if you're a Randian you should know that I'm going to be presenting two sides to an issue here, so get out while you can.)

It turns out, some sentences just don't fit neatly into the true/false paradigm. Sentences like the Liar's Paradox: "This sentence is false." What do you do with something like that? Is it false? Well then it's true, so suck it. Maybe instead you want to say it's true? Well if it's true, then it's false, so also suck it.

Go on...

Robert Nozick's "State-of-Nature Theory, or How to Back into a State without Really Trying": A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 03:59:00 +0000

So let's start with the state of nature. I'm pretty sure my boy Locke got it mostly right about how a government state emerges from the state of nature. The one problem is that the whole "social contract" thing is kind of a myth, right? It's not like everybody signs the contract - like 14 white dudes signed a thing and then suddenly this thing binds everyone? That's some bullshit. We have to find a way to let people sign up for realsies.

Now look. In the state of nature, shit can get a little crazy from time to time. You're minding your own business farming when suddenly OH NO MARAUDERS MARAUDING YOUR FARM, and you have to protect yourself. Eventually, maybe people get together and decide, "hey guys, it's pretty fucking rough out there, why don't we work together? Pool our resources?" Now when your farm gets marauded, some guys with guns protect you because you paid them to do that. And if you have an issue with someone within the group, then the group just forms a court rather than fighting, so no one gets their skull crushed over some pigs eating some daisies. And maybe the group also decides on some rules to follow so no one is left in the dark about what rights they do and don't have. Are the rules more restrictive than the state of nature? Well, fucking obviously, because rules are more restrictive than no rules, that's what makes them rules. But that's a small sacrifice and in exchange they'll fuck the shit up of anyone who tries to mess with you. That's a solid deal.

So instead of doing justice yourself, you just pay these agencies with the guns and whatnot. But the bigger the agency, the better, because anybro who is in your agency is one more person you don't have to worry about murderizing you, since agency has courts and stuff. Plus BONUS it's way cheaper to belong to a huge agency than a small one, because have you seen the startup costs for a paramilitary? Tanks are fucking expensive unless you buy in bulk, but Costco Tanks are only a good value if you need, like, 30. Once there's a largest agency, it's just going to keep getting larger because of PROTECTION PAUL'S LOW LOW PRICES ON RIGHTS PROTECTION. And because it's hard to spread out a police force, in different areas of the world you get these dominant protection agencies.

Go on...

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems and You - A Helpful Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Wed, 23 May 2012 03:50:00 +0000

I get a ton of emails asking me what is up with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, and with good reason: they are complicated as fuck, but they're also among the most important results ever obtained in logic. They're also super clever - it wasn't enough that Gödel was incredibly good at logic, he also had to be inventive as fuck to come up with this procedure. The theorems stand at this really weird crossroads of being important, celebrated, and complicated, and as a result they're a part of logic that people tend to hone in on, even when they have no context whatsoever. It's like asking what made Bobby Fischer so great at chess when you don't know how the pieces move - there's so much context necessary. So it's easy for people who don't know what they're talking about to get away with misrepresenting Gödel.

What do they actually show?

They say (very roughly) that no set of axioms capable of proving certain arithmetical truths can prove every arithmetical truth without also proving something false.

Examples might help.

Let's say there are fifteen sentences - 1-10 are true, and 11-15 are false. You've got some axioms, some rules you can play with like "If a=b and b=c, then a=c" and "if a=b, then b=a." You want to combine those rules in a way that lets you prove other sentences, sentences like "1+2=3+0". According to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, though, there is no way to get all ten of 1-10, whatever they are, without also sneaking in one of 11-15, which is bad. Maybe there are these three rules, rules a, b, and c, that combined can get you 1-6, and ruled a, b, and d can get you 5-10. But if you combine rules a, b, c, and d all at once, they'd prove 1-10, but they'd also prove 12, which is bad. And this happens no matter what. You can only ever prove some of 1-10, even though we know they're all true. If we want to keep false statements out of the party, we're going to have to keep some true ones out, too. Which true ones? Depends on how you decide who can come in. But there have to be some true ones.

Go on...

Plato's "Apology": A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 21 May 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Socrates: "Look, I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm seventy, I've never been in court before, but, I guess some people are trying to have me killed? And I'm supposed to defend myself? Just bear with me here, you guys. I'm just going to do what I normally do. Sorry if that's not proper.

"Everyone is all, 'Oh, Socrates! He thinks he's sooooo smart, he knows everything that happens in Heaven and below the Earth, and he makes arguments do all kinds of weird shit, and he teaches other people to do that.' And they've been telling you all this since you were little kids, so now you're thirty and you've heard for twenty-five years that I'm a huge asshole, and I've got a single day to undo that."

"Look, here's what really happened. I didn't want to make a big deal out of it or anything, but apparently the Oracle said I'm the wisest man alive. And I don't want to brag, because I was like, 'wait, what? I don't know shit.' But, you know, the Oracle is kind of a big deal, and I didn't want to go around telling people the Oracle is just straight up wrong, because that's actual blasphemy instead of the shit you dragged me in here for, but I figured if I could actually find someone wiser than me that I could say, 'Me? No way, Jimmy, he's definitely your guy,' then I wouldn't have to worry about wisdom or whatever.

"So THAT is what I started doing. I went to all the bros who had these great reputations for wisdom, bros who claimed to know tons of shit, and I'll be damned if they weren't mostly just fucking idiots. It was like, the better a reputation a man had, the fucking dumber he was. I'm not saying I knew more than them - I'm pretty sure that I know jackshit. But these guys also didn't know anything, and were pretty sure they knew everything. And when I tried to point out that they didn't know anything, they just got pissed off like it's my fault they've got their heads up their asses, which is why they told you guys growing up about how I think I'm smarter than everyone, even though I've literally never said that, ever.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Animal Rights and Some Logical Positivism

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:06:00 +0000

Typically, in discussions about animal rights the following exchange will take place:
Alex: we should care about animals because they have x capacities
Betty: but some humans do not have these capacities
Betty: does this mean, you think that it is ok to removing rights from disabled humans?
My question is, what is the best way for Alex to respond?

Well Sheraz, the bad news is that it might be that, uh, your friend "Alex," is completely fucked. Maybe x capacities, whatever they are, are stupid capacities. Maybe Alex should have chosen something different like "capacity to form even minimal social ties", which probably includes almost everyone. But really, why the fuck is Alex arguing that we should care about animals because of their capacities? That might not work for precisely the reason Betty says. Maybe he should have gone with "If you're a dick to animals then pretty soon you'll start turning on babies and shit, and suddenly you're just an asshole in general," which is a (very) rough paraphrase of Kant's argument. Bros have offered lots of different arguments to respect animal rights - not all of them have to do with capacities.

Or maybe Alex can just bite the bullet. "...Yes. I totally do think it's okay to take rights away from certain disabled humans." what an asshole, amirite?? Well, hold on. How disabled? Depends on the capacity he's talking about. If Alex is going with something like conscious thought then a very small subset of persons lack that capacity, and maybe Alex doesn't think they have rights. On the other hand, if Alex is going with something like, I dunno, thinking abstractly, then he might rule out some really great people and also all babies and I feel like you're definitely not asking me if babies have rights so there's that. Alex should be careful about what bullet he bites, I feel like he's not trying to get the mentally handicapped abused just to save cows.

Go on...

Biopower and You: A General Summary According to Michel Foucault

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:30:00 +0000

Right, so, biopower. I don't mean, like, ethanol fuel; I'm not talking literally about energy. I'm talking about the other kind of power. You know - power. Control. The ability to make things happen the way you want them to happen. And biopower is power over bodies. That's the "bio-" in biopower, clue is in the title.

It used to be, back in the day when there were kings and shit, they had power over your death - if you were a problem they would just fucking kill you, because fuck you I'm the king and I can do that. And that was more or less it. "Do what I say, because I say so. Just don't give me any reason to kill you, and everything will be fine." What were those things? Pay your taxes, worship the right God, don't attempt an uprising, and go fight places we need you to fight. In other words, things that kept the state in place and secure. Sometimes good kings would, I don't know, feed their people, but that was just so they didn't have hungry peasants all burning cottages and shit. As long as the king wasn't threatened, he didn't give two fucks about "it's so cold" or "clean drinking water" or "seriously we're hardly getting by on like 80 hours of farming a week and we could really use some ditches dug." Fuck whatever rabble his whiny subjects happened to be rousing at the time.

But eventually, kings began to figure out they could use power to create power. And the more we learned, the more the law could be used to create rather than destroy. With the advances in science and genetics and the discovery of evolution, we knew more about humanity than ever before, and slowly, power over death got replaced with power over life. The state stopped trying to just survive - now states are actively trying to create a healthy, productive populace. And you can't create a healthy, productive populace just by fucking menacing them with the death penalty all the time, not that some real assholes didn't try that route. No, now laws do a whole lot more than just condemn shit the state doesn't like - they decide what is normal and healthy and okay for people to do.

Go on...

Bronouncement: New Kind of Thing (On the Blog, Not in General. Sorry Metaphysicians.)

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Thu, 10 May 2012 11:24:00 +0000

Hey kids!

I've noted before that summarizing a particular text is by far the most exhausting part of the blog - it involves tracking down the text, familiarizing myself with it, outlining it, and finally summarizing/translating it into what you get to read. It's also super-rewarding because it's the thing that teaches me the most things, which, fuck yeah, but part of the reason I'm so inconsistent is that when I can't find the time to do a text right, I just don't do it, so you get something like the Summer Of Only Mailbags or... whatever the fuck happened this semester.

There's this other thing where sometimes an idea runs through lots of texts, or gets developed over time, or, I mean, who the fuck knows. For example, I've received a ton of questions about Foucaultian biopower, which I assume are mostly from lazy debaters who want to use Foucault to avoid having to do new thinking every single round, because Biopower Ks are easy and thinking is hard. (Sorry, that got away from me.) The point is, biopower is a confusing but interesting idea, except it's really only laid out in one text, and isn't the main point, and then it's also used all over the literature... it's really out of hand. And if I try to force the textual summary to be about biopower, then you miss out on all the really sexy sex stuff in History of Sex and now no one is happy even though all Mommy wanted was a summary of biopower on the table when she got home from work and what? I blacked out for a second.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: The Double Effect

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 07 May 2012 23:29:00 +0000

Gabe writes,

Can you do a writeup of the Doctrine of Double Effect? In particular, I'd like to know what you think the best arguments in favor of it are since I haven't been able to find one that I don't think is complete horse shit (the distinction between a bad effect that's used as a means to a desired end and a foreseen bad effect that's "merely" an unavoidable side effect of producing that end seems completely bogus and I don't see how it could ever be morally relevant). Thanks!

Holy shit, the ol' Doctrine of the Double Effect, huh? It starts all the way back with Thomas Aquinas, who was talking about what things we can and can't do - what is and is not permissible. His discussion was actually pretty short; he's like, "What if a guy is going to kill you and you have to really injure him to stop you? Uh, well, you don't mean to hurt him because you're not a dick; you're just trying to save yourself, so as long as you're not excessive, you're all good brah!" And then he's off to other topics and you're all, "WAIT COME BACK THAT SOUNDS SUPER IMPORTANT I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS" but it's too late. Fortunately, plenty of others have taken up the Doctrine since then, and we've got a pretty robust discussion going.

Sometimes an act has two different effects - one good and one bad. You might even say it has a... Double Effect. For example, hitting that guy in self-defense has a good effect (saving you) and a bad effect (harming another guy). There are lots of situations like that: sometimes I don't go out partying, and I have a shitty night but I'm really productive the next day. (That actually never happens, but roll with me here.) Sometimes you bomb an enemy base, which brings a war to an end but also some civilians also get killed. (I admit, that got dark quick. Welcome to moral philosophy!)

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Is-Ought Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:58:00 +0000

Alex writes,

will you explain the is-ought problem and its implications?
Thanks, bro.

Aw yeah, the is-ought problem. Shit's classic, bro, goes back to Hume, and it goes something like this:

Sometimes, when I'm talking ethics with my bros, they describe the way the world is. They're like, "That chair is over there. The bar closes at 4AM. The sky is blue." and I'm like, "Yup. Yup." How could I disagree? These are obviously true things. But then suddenly they're like, "Therefore, we should go on a roadtrip tomorrow." And I'm like, "woooooooooah!" How the fuck did they get from how things are, to how things should be? Those aren't the same at all. If I asked, "Where should we go?" and you told me where we already are, that wouldn't answer my fucking question.

Let's say my bro Ice and I are drinking. Ice is about to do some stupid drunken shit (as he's wont to do) and I say the following:

"You are so drunk that you could die if you tried that."

That's an is-statement. It just describes something about Ice and the thing he's about to do. Maybe you're thinking he should not do this fucking thing. But why not? "Because he'll die." So what? "Well, you shouldn't do stuff that will kill you." AHA! See, that's not an is-statement. It's an ought-statement, which describes how Ice should proceed. Before we could say that Ice shouldn't do this stupid fucking thing, we needed to say he shouldn't do stupid fucking things in general.

People typically accept that statement, and in fact, so many people accept that statement that it seems obvious, and you might miss that it's hiding in there. You might just gloss right over it.

Sometimes, though, the hidden ought isn't so widely accepted.

Go on...

George Berkeley's "Treatise Concerning Principles of Human Knowledge": A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:01:00 +0000

Ideas are just the things that go on in our minds. Perceptions, imagination, thoughts. Everyone seems to be on board with the suggestion that, you know, ideas couldn't exist without minds. Right? That seems straightforward, right? If no minds existed to percieve things, then how could anyone have ideas? If minds didn't exist, what would feel the sensation of getting burned? Nothing.

Okay. So, uh, why do people think that shit exists outside the mind, too? How does that even fucking happen? That shit does not make sense. Here are the things that we know exist: the things we percieve. Here are the things we percieve: the things that there are. That's it! That's all there is! Want proof? Watch this: try to think of something that exists without existing in a mind somewhere. Got it? Good. Gotcha bitch. IT'S IN YOUR MIND oh snap you just got told.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Analytic and Continental Philosophy

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:32:00 +0000

I get lots of questions about analytic and Continental philosophy. I think the following is the best jumping off point for the discussion.

Rocket writes,

Hey bro,

Why are analytical and continental philosophers always at loggerheads with each other? To me, they're talking about the same thing, just in different languages.

So, if you've been in a philosophy department long enough, you've no doubt heard the labels "analytic philosophy" and "Continental philosophy" thrown around, and if your department leans heavily one way or the other, you've possibly heard sweeping dismissals of the other school.

Now, 'analytic' and 'Continental' aren't neat, tidy labels into which we can force all philosophy - you've got tons of Eastern traditions that these don't cover, for example. Also, it's not like we have neat lists of attributes, and everything that does fit under one of those labels has all and only the attributes on one list or the other. But it turns out, we've got these two general schools of thought about philosophy, and sometimes, they're critical of the other. It happens.

I guess it's not as hostile as it used to be, but to hear some analytic philosophers tell it, Continental philosophers are just a bunch of bros competing to see who can say the most meaningless thing, as if Continental philosophy began as a complicated prank on academia that took on a life of its own; the initial perpetrators just lost control. And if some Continental philosophers are to be believed, analytic philosophers are just a bunch of nerds retreating to the safety of familiar letters and complicated formulas who like to argue over dumb technicalities because God forbid anyone have a daring new idea that isn't just a rearrangement of the same old shit. I once saw a talk where one Continental professor discussed the Problem of Evil in the Kantian terms of the thing-in-itself, and said something like "we can't directly access what is good or evil in the world", and then a grad student with an analytic bent stood up in the Q&A and was like, "Yeah, uh, I have seven objections..." and they proceeded to accuse each other of meaningless hand-waving and empty chess maneuvering for the next twenty minutes. Shit was intense, yo. (Do people still say 'yo'? I'm bringing it back... yo.)

Go on...

Bronouncement: Your (Sort Of) Worst Fears Confirmed

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:21:00 +0000

Hey kids,

So, I've decided to go on hiatus for a while. It turns out I'm busier than I've ever been with all sorts of things, and I just don't have the time to devote to this blog that I'd like to devote to it, you know? I mean, I've had an outline of Idealism sitting on my desk for, like, two fucking weeks now and no time to get to it. And it's not fair to you guys to leave you hanging. Plus, it's become easier and easier for me to neglect the blog day-to-day, and I think the best way to overcome that is to take some time off and get organized so that I don't have to neglect the blog.

SO. I'm setting myself a hard date to come roaring back to life: Dec. 26th, which also happens to be the first birthday of the blog. MARK YOUR CALENDARS - I'll be back then. In the meantime, I'll leave the site up, because there are a ton of helpful things already written, I think. And I'll be around - you should continue to follow me on twitter, where I'll continue to snark about philosophy, and I'm sure I'll be around Facebook and whatnot. I just don't have the time to output as much as I have. So it's not like I'm leaving forever - just taking some time off.

Thanks again for following. Above all, writing Philosophy Bro for you guys is a privilege, and it's one I have to relinquish for a bit, because I don't have the time to indulge the way I like to. And rather than scrape by a measly few summaries for you over the next couple months, I'd rather get some in the bank, reorganize my backend, and come out swinging in December. So keep sending me interesting questions for the Mailbag, because I need cool things to drown out the waves of intro class essay questions I get week in and week out, and keep sending requests my way. I'm still listening. I'm just not answering - for now.

If you've just found the site recently, in the interim between posting this and my return, welcome! Have a look around! Check out the full list of work I've done. Spread the word! And be sure to check back on Dec. 26th, when I'll definitely have more cool stuff to share with you.

As David Hume once said, sort of, "Be a philosopher. But amidst all your philosophy, be still a bro."

-PB

Mailbag Monday: Philosophical Revolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:10:00 +0000

George writes,

Yeaux Breaux,I've been reading "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn recently (which I highly recommend by the way, he made up the word "paradigm" I mean how badass is that). Anyways, it got me thinking: have there been recent revolutions in philosophical thought recently? Do new ideas ever invalidate old ones, or do they just add to this huge ever-growing cluster of philosophical thought? Do philosophers' set of intellectual tools change over time, and what kind of things have metaphilosophers had to say about this kind of stuff? I don't feel like writing more questions to thoroughly cover the breadth of my mental void, but take this wherever you can.

Bro, I'm picking up what you're putting down. Kuhn is indeed a badass, and Structure is a great read. I'm on board here, and it's a fucking interesting question. So let's do this.

The short answers are "yes, yes, all the time". The middle of the 20th century was a huge period for revolutions in philosophy; bros were throwing conceptual haymakers left and right. Political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, no subject was safe.

Go on...

Bronouncement: Some clarifications

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 23:45:00 +0000

So, lately I've been seeing more and more comments coming through that assume I hold to the ideas in my summaries. In particular, when it comes to God and/or religion. For example, this comment on my most recent summary:

wrt way # 1: Bro, just because there's an unmoved mover (and who knows, maybe there is just an infinite regress of movers), that doesn't mean it's Jesus Christ. That's just lazy goddamn thinking right there. It could have been (well, not really) any of a myriad of other gods attested throughout history, or more likely there's some natural explanation.
wrt way #2: Bro, more laziness? It's the same fucking thing, with 'cause' substituted for 'move'. FFS, college freshmen are coyer about their bullshitting than Aquinas, bro.
wrt way #3: Yeah okay, this is Philosophy Bro and not Physics Bro, but there's plenty of research in physics that indicates that absolutely nothing is a lot less stable than something. Nature abhors a vacuum, and all that.
wrt way #4: So good just comes from god? Killing babies is good, so long as god gives the go-ahead? Sorry bro, I need to go make a call to someone about some good psychiatrists.
wrt way #5: http://tinyurl.com/3v7rlbf
I love this site, bro, but where's the diversity of viewpoints that normally comes with your other posts? This seems a little lazy.

Or this comment on my Nietzsche summary:

To the author of the article: Man oh man, are you ever confused about religion and God. You probably don't feel confused though, but you are. Thoroughly.

And just the other day I got an email that started out,

I'm curious, since you believe there's a God...

I suppose I'll go ahead and take responsibility for this misconception; I did precious few summaries this summer and stuck mostly to the Mailbag, and any new readers who showed up in that time period might think that's most of what I do. The Mailbag is much, much less work than a summary, and, well, it was a busy summer. It turns out, though, what initially launched me to fame and what constitutes the bread and butter of this site during the academic year when I have full access to the usual resources and the right sort of time and whatnot, are my summaries of the philosophical works of others. All such summaries are written from the perspective of the original author, or else in some way follow their style (as in the dialogue format of The Allegory of the Cave or the objection/response format of the Summa) and if a summary lacks a diversity of viewpoints, it's because the original work lacked diversity of viewpoints, which is pretty standard for, you know, works that purport to explain the one way shit is. As my FAQ will tell you, I have intentionally occluded my own views on almost all subjects, because they are not the point of this blog.

However, where I think you will find a decent diversity of thought (thought I do admittedly heavily favor the traditional Western Philosophical tradition, as a result of both my background and the majority of requests I get from you guys) is in my selection of works to summarize. In the obviously controversial field of religion, for example, you will find - in addition to the Thomistic apologetics and antitheist existentialism linked above - Christian existentialism, Humean skepticism, and whatever the fuck Schopenhauer was trying to say. I don't really favor one viewpoint over another; I make an effort not to, in fact.

So, if you don't find those ideas very convincing, then you probably wouldn't find the original text very convincing. Which is fine! I have, by now, summarized several works that I am not personally persuaded by, and in fact disagree with strongly. My views are not the point of this blog. Please! Feel free to discuss in the comments the content of the works at hand. And if you feel like there's a major view that's underrepresented, the solution there is to email me a work to remedy that.

Finally, and this is just a peeve of mine I'm going to take the opportunity to pontificate on, it's fucking annoying to be told I'm lazy or confused. Not because I'm particularly insulted - I'm perfectly aware that I'm awesome, thanks - but because you're really calling the ideas lazy or confused, and I fucking hate to see a lack of engagement with the ideas. That happens all the time in philosophy classes, when people dismiss a historically badass motherfucker just completely out of hand. ALL THE TIME I see freshmen like, "Uh, Descartes used circular reasoning, herp derp." And it's just not that simple. We wouldn't read Descartes in every single fucking intro class ever for the last three centuries if it were as simple as, "He's going in circles, NEXT." I'm not saying you have to agree with Descartes or Aquinas or Nietzsche or, really, anyone; I am saying that a bro who spent his entire life in a monastery writing the two-volume treatise of philosophy that defines an entire era of thought and that people still find relevant today is probably not guilty of intellectual laziness, and of all the shit you could accuse Aquinas of being, lazy probably isn't in the top 50. There are perfectly valid arguments against all five of his Ways, but this shit's lazy isn't any of those arguments. It's possible Aquinas is dead fucking wrong. That doesn't make the thinking less excellent. THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE. My point is, if a guy is really, really famous for philosophy, at the very least a bunch of professors with PhD's think his ideas are valuable in some way, so don't be dismissive out of hand. You will be a much, much better thinker if you learn to respect your ideological opponents' strength. Because if you call some bro lazy or confused and it turns out you're wrong and their shit is super-rigorous and really thorough, then you look like a fuckwad instead of an engaged and intelligent participant in dialogue. And there are plenty of fuckwads in the world already, out there mucking up public discourse. Why would you want to be one? You wouldn't. You're much too intelligent for that, which is why you find this blog valuable.

Okay. That got away from me, but I'm glad I said it. Guy who made that comment, don't feel like I'm picking on you in particular, you just gave a really good example of a comment that accomplished a lot of mistakes at once, and I'm trying to help you (and everyone else) not make those mistakes. I don't think you're a fuckwad. I do think you don't know as much as you think you do. That's pretty common. We've all been there.

tl;dr: ideas in summaries belong to the original author, not me, and summaries are not balanced because individual works are not balanced. If you think I'm not covering a perspective that I should cover, make a suggestion. Don't be a dick, and if you're going to be a dick, make damn sure you're correct, or you look silly. No one likes wrong dicks.

Thomas Aquinas' "Summa Theologica, Q2, Article 3: Whether God Exists" Or, The Five Ways: A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:41:00 +0000

Objection 1: It seems like God doesn't exist. If you had two things that were constantly opposed, and only one of them was infinite, you'd think that would fucking wipe out the other, wouldn't it? We're not just talking opposites here; it's not like positive and negative, where they just meet at zero and go on their merry fuck way in separate directions. We're talking about real contraries here, fucking going at it, and one of them is infinite. You'd think it would have no problem whatsoever overwhelming the other. As advantages in conflict go, infinity is pretty high up there. But God is supposed to be infinite goodness, so if God exists, there shouldn't be any evil in the world. Well fucking riddle me this, Batman: there IS evil in the world. Pretty sure that means God doesn't actually exist.

Objection 2: Besides, why make shit more complicated than it is? If we can explain everything simply, why throw God into the mix, too? "Oh hey, here are a bunch of equations that perfectly describe how nature works, and, oh, here's how people work. That explains everything? Really? Cool. Also, God exists." Why the fuck did you throw God in there at the end? We got it. Physics and whatever the fuck it is that drives humans, and that's plenty. Who needs God anymore?

Except that God exists, and his very nature is existence. And right now maybe you're all like, "But how can we knoooooow God exists?" Well buckle the fuck up kids because I've got onetwothreefour FIVE FUCKING WAYS you can be sure God is real.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: Inscrutability of Reference

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 05:29:00 +0000

Sam writes,

Seriously Bro,
When we all talk to each other, have conversations or engage with a language in any way, how do we know that the content (meaning) of our words is the same as the person we're talking to?
It's like Wittgensteins [sic] beetle in a box thing only for EVERYTHING! Like the words and sentences we use are consistent with the language framework we're using (eg. English) BUT, since these words can only be defined in terms of other words, we can never know what anyone is saying even if we ask them to carefully explain it. No?

Well Sam, The simple answer to your question is that we don't know that the other person knows what we're talking about. You're going to want to look at W.V.O. Quine's idea of the inscrutability of reference. The idea here is that when we hear someone speak, there is always a bunch of different ways to interpret whatever they say. Let's say you're a bro out hunting with some indigenous tribe you discovered like a boss, and one of the hunters points to a rabbit and goes, "Gabaga." Now maybe you take out your notebook and you write down, "Gabaga = rabbit. BOOM." And maybe you're fucking wrong and shouldn't assume shit. Maybe it means "rabbit feet" or "small white thing" or "potential food" - you'd have to spend a lot more time with them to eliminate those possibilities. But even once you were sure he was referring to the thing that you call a rabbit, and not some part of it or a general description or whatever, the problem still hasn't gone away. Maybe this culture has a religion that, among other things, teaches that everything is part of the same, unified life-force. So where you see rabbit, hunter-bro sees life-force part that looks like a rabbit. And to understand that, you would have to not only know enough language to eliminate the other options, you'd also need a pretty good grasp on the culture of this tribe, so that you'd know they don't really ever refer to individual things so much as distinguishable parts of this life-force situation.

And honestly, if it works for some language you learn later on in life by studying some random tribe, this idea also probably works for the language you learn early on in life by studying the tribe around you. Your roommate that you just met this week from the other side of the country from you? Maybe he's thinking something completely different from you when he's like, "so, we getting hammered this weekend?" You think, "Hammered = really, really drunk" but he thinks, "hammered = having reduced control of faculties as a result of alcohol in particular".

Go on...

No Mailbag Monday

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:16:00 +0000

Hey kids,

I spent all day today taking care of some stuff I needed to take care of before the semester kicks off, and I need a night to sit around with my bros and shoot the shit for a while. So. I'm not going to get to the Monday Mailbag, from which I usually draw questions on Monday.

Instead, I've got summaries in the works for this week, because it's time to start ramping those up again, so stay tuned as I get back into the swing of things. It's going to be awesome.

-PB

Mailbag Monday: Aesthetics

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:34:00 +0000

Bro, I have a few questions about Aesthetics. It seems that beauty is defined by both objective features and subjective experiences, but how do they come together? You see, most of us seem to agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yet many of us would more likely agree that a Manet painting is more beautiful than a stick figure drawing. So despite what they say about subjective beauty, there seems to be a fairly objective standard to art, or at least the kind of art that we could put in a museum, charge people to view and convince intellectuals to write endless papers about. At the same time, many artists we respect today weren't always respected or their works would not have been appreciated by an audience from a different period. And I don't just mean fine art, but literature and film and the next cover girl of vogue too. How can art or beauty be both subjective and objective at the same time?

Fucking aesthetics.

If you go to the Stanford Encyclopedia and search for 'aesthetics', you get a bajillion pages titled '[Some guy]'s Aesthetics'; there aren't schools of thought in aesthetics so much as wholesale attempts to explain the phenomenon that is art by practically every important bro in history. Okay, maybe not all of them. But a fucking lot of them.

I'm no aesthetician, and here's why: Kant? Hegel? Dostoyevsky? Hume? Heidegger? Every single one of them said the same thing: "Fuck those assclowns. I know what beauty is, and I'll fucking school you in it." And it's exactly for the reason you give: it seems so simple on the face of it. Beauty is tantalizingly obvious; we're all drawn to it, and we all recognize it when we're confronted with it. Like the Sirens themselves, it calls out to philosophers. And like fools, philosophers fucking dash themselves on the rocks, the whole time insisting, "I fucking got this. How hard could it be?" Anyone giving a final answer to the question, "Is beauty objective or subjective?" isn't something I see happening. But I think I can shed some light on your question anyway.

Go on...

David Hume's "Of the Different Species of Philosophy": A Summary

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 04:49:00 +0000

Okay, so recently there's been this fucking incredible surge in philosophy, which is sweet, but no one is making sure that it's done properly; everyone is just sort of saying shit all willy-nilly, without any attempt at real understanding of exactly how philosophy is supposed to work. We should probably have a framework for all this before we go on, wouldn't you say?

I mean, there are two different kinds of philosophy, and you probably don't even know the difference. First, there's the easy, obvious shit that's written all poetically to guide the man on-the-go. You know what I mean - the exhortations to "be excellent to each other" and "give it our all" and all that fun bullshit. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, I'm just saying, you know, how hard can it be to tell people not a be a dick? None of the great orators were ever like, "The children? Feed 'em to wolves!" because if they said that, they wouldn't be great orators, they'd be just be eloquent fuckwads, and we all know plenty of those. I'm just saying it's hard to fuck up the easy stuff. That's all.

Go on...

Mailbag Monday: An Assortment of Questions

noreply@blogger.com (Philosophy Bro) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:45:00 +0000

This week, I'm diving into the Monday Mailbag, which contains the questions for Mailbag Monday; I'll answer readers' shorter questions, questions that don't require a full post; these questions usually go neglected in favor of longer treatments of interesting questions. Well not today, kids.

Go on...