kenodoxia

Eurosong and philosophy

2013-05-16T10:34:00.005+01:00

Why Bonnie Tyler's 'Believe in me' is a bit like a Trolley Problem:

Cornel West and MM McCabe

2013-05-10T10:48:00.001+01:00

Talking about Philosophy in the Public Sphere, at a meeting at CRASSH.

Public art

2013-05-08T11:15:00.002+01:00

After the wonders of the Snowy Farr memorial liquorice torpedoes and the Goth-rock Corpus clock (I can't say enough how very very sorry I am about that last one), here comes another bit of public art to disturb the retinas of the people of Cambridge. To celebrate the fact that Parker's Piece in 1863 saw the first playing of football according to the 'Cambridge Rules', the City Council have commissioned a thing. Here is the initial design as released today. This is not a drill, people.

It is a really big Subbuteo referee standing on a circle on which the rules will be inscribed. Oh yes it is.

Here is the press release, if you can bear it.

And I don't know about you, but when I had a Subbuteo set within days all the players (including my prized England team in their 1982 Admiral kit) looked like this:

Adding up in Politics 3.11

2013-04-30T14:14:00.001+01:00

At the B Club yesterday, we were discussing an interesting chunk of Aristotle Politics 3.1, 11281a41–b15. There, Aristotle is offering an argument in favour of the view that the masses might be given authority in elections and audits of public officials even if each individual involved is not a good (spoudaios) person.

The idea seems to be that a collection of individuals, each of whom has some evaluative ability, may, as a group, have overall a greater evaluative competence than a single expert. (It is important to note that Aristotle is cautious and does not think this always happens. It just might happen sometimes.) So there is some notion of there being an additive quality of the relevant skill or character trait. Provided the individuals in the group are not entirely slavish then you can add them together and sum their respective competences. This seems odd just because it is not clear that virtue and wisdom (aretē and phronēsis: 1281b4–5) are the kinds of things that can be summed in this fashion according to Aristotle. Now it is possible to claim that what Aristotle means here is that collective decision-making by a group of individually deficient judges can be effective because the group itself generates a kind of helpful reflection: each learns from the others and overall a good decision is reached. Perhaps that is a plausible idea. [1]

Unfortunately, I am not sure this fits very well with the way the rest of the paragraph is presented and, in particular, the various analogies that are offered. Aristotle goes on to claim that a good person brings together in one individual the relevant skills and competences but these might be scattered and distributed between a number of individuals, each of whom is worse overall than the good person, but who when combined are better. This is not a mere additive notion since the idea here is that the group comes together as if to form a single agent (1281b5). This also seems to make better sense of the analogy of the feast at 1281b2–3: many people bring dishes to a meal. The feast is better than a single dish, even if that single dish is excellent while each of the many dishes in the feast is not as good as the single dish. This seems plausible to me only on the assumption that the group of many dishes (deipna) contains a variety of dishes and, what’s more, that variety is such that for example one is a starter, one a main course, one a dessert and they combine to make a feast (dapanē 1281b3). It is not obvious (though I can see how someone might want to argue for it) that a collection of a large number of mediocre but pleasant chocolate mousses is better than a single really excellent chocolate mousse. Certainly, I’m not at all convinced that the collection is better in terms of chocolate mousse-ness. But if each dish brings something different that contributes to the overall meal as a whole then perhaps the collection may be better than the single very good item taken on its own.

Incidentally, this notion of adding together complementary parts into a whole is probably present already at 1281b4–5 where the many individuals each have a ‘part’ (morion) of virtue. If we think of the parts not merely as ‘a certain quantity’ but rather as parts in the sense that each jigsaw piece is a part of the overall puzzle, then adding together all of these parts is what is needed for a good whole.

If that is right then thinking in terms of collective decision making that involves debate, reflection, learning from one another and so on, might be a more plausible way to defend the idea of the competence of crowds, but it doesn’t fit well with Aristotle’s analogies which are instead put in terms of this ’jigsaw pieces and jigsaw-puzzle’ model.

This idea of a sum of the good parts of a collection of different items, where each item is overall not that great, seems also to be what Aristotle has in mind in the analogy from aesthetic judgement at 1281b8–10: if each person makes a good judgement about a separate aspect of the performance (one is good at flute-playing evaluation, another at evaluating some part of the dancing) then they might add up to a single all-round excellent judge. It doesn’t matter that the good flute judge has no idea about choreography because it’s only the flute-judging jigsaw piece that he provides. Similarly, at the end of the paragraph Aristotle seems to have in mind that the collection is a collection of just those positive aspects of each of the individuals. He compares a single beautiful person with an combination of a set of different beautiful parts from different individuals: Clooney’s jawline, Grant’s eyes, etc. etc. (1281b12–15).

But that raises is another worry. It’s just not true that if you bung together a collection of the best bits of different faces the collection is going to be as good as if not better than a single beautiful face. Here’s the proof:

[1] I think this is the sort of view favoured in R. Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2002), 402–6.

The Gray Lectures 2013

2013-04-23T14:05:00.000+01:00

Plato's Philebus, reviewed

2013-04-19T12:34:00.001+01:00

An 'untimely (deliberately anachronistic) review' by Ronald de Sousa in Topoi 32 (2013): 125-8. (Link to the pdf here.)

A snippet:

The work is offered in the form of a dialogue—in that respect, at least, it is not ‘‘trendy’’—between Socrates and an interlocutor called Protarchus. The latter defends a position attributed to one Philebus, a curiously ghostly character who unaccountably ‘‘leaves the field’’ on the first page, intervening again only three or our times to reiterate a simple-minded praise of pleasure as the supreme good. That is not the only one of this work’s quirks of style. Its organization is somewhat confusing. Its central pages contain an analysis and classification of pleasures, in the course of which Socrates attempts to persuade his interlocutor that some pleasures are false, but little is done in the dialogue to relate this claim to the work’s announced topic. One is left to assume, I suppose, that falsity might detract from the claim of any conditions to be life’s chief good. In this review, I shall not attempt to deal with the somewhat messy structure of the whole; neither shall I attempt to canvas all the topics that come up only to be desultorily dropped. I shall concentrate instead on the arguments adduced for the claim that pleasures can be false.

There untimely reviews are an interesting idea. You can read the editorial here.

Could be another wasted afternoon...

2013-04-16T16:33:00.005+01:00

I've ended up this afternoon going back to and fiddling with something I wrote quite a while ago. To be honest, I was looking for another file on my computer and saw this one as I was scrolling down. I remembered spending some time on it and so I opened it up to have a look. I had more or less abandoned it because it was, I came to see, a bit flabby in places and half-baked in others. But I have now spent the afternoon thinking that maybe, just maybe, with a tweak here and a trim there, there might be something worth salvaging. Surely it can't all be hopeless?

Oh dear. I'm not very good at just writing off the work and chalking it up to experience. After all, it would be odd if a significant proportion of what I type out were not in fact pretty useless. But arrogance or sheer bloody-mindedness tells me otherwise.

Epicuro Sulla Natura II

2013-04-14T19:07:00.001+01:00

I got to my college pigeon hole today for the first time in a while. Two nice surprises: a book from my friend in Lyon and, entirely unexpected, a copy of Giuliana Leone's new edition of Epicurus' Peri Physeōs Book II (PHerc. 1140/993 and 1783/1691/1010). Thanks! It's a hefty thing, so it will take me quite some time to digest it but it looks very interesting. And it's good to know that it is now available.

Here's a link to order it from amazon.it.

Cambridge 1944

2013-03-28T14:58:00.000Z

From the UEA East Anglian Film Archive. You can watch the whole thing here.

Some stills:

Here are some bright young chaps leaving (I think) one of Corpus' staircases in the morning:

And here is a chap off for a bath:

And here is Will Spens, Master of Corpus:

There are also some interesting scenes of the undergraduate ARP services practising out in Trinity's Great Court. And of the Provost of King's, John Tressider Sheppard, lecturing on Homer, the poetry 'of friendship and freedom'.

The pundit's 'for me': a philosophical analysis

2013-03-26T09:05:00.000Z

It is not clear what the precise force and implications are of the sports pundit’s qualifier ‘for me’ (hereafter: ‘FOR ME’). It is extremely common in most forms of pundit-discourse but there is no agreed single account of its force. This is a brief introduction to some of the principal philosophical options.

Consider the following examples:

1. ‘Rio, for me, is a world class defender.’

2. ‘For me, that’s a yellow card at worst.’

3. ‘That was never a foul, for me.’

Note that in natural language the ‘for me’ qualifier can be placed within, before, or after the clause it governs. We can nevertheless clarify the three examples as follows:

4. (FOR ME) Rio is a world class defender.

5. (FOR ME) That’s a yellow card at worst.

6. (FOR ME) That was never a foul.

A popular line of analysis notes that in many—perhaps the majority of—cases FOR ME is used in evaluative claims. This analysis then offers a deflationary reading such that FOR ME is either simply redundant or else simply marks what comes next as being an evaluative claim. FOR ME in that case makes no independent contribution to the meaning of the clause.

Further, some interpreters take FOR ME to be a marker of the expressivist nature of such claims. This is more plausible in some cases than others. For example, it is at least prima facie plausible that there is no fact of the matter whether Rio Ferdinand is a world class defender. In that case it is sensible to understand §6 above as having the force: ‘Hooray for Rio Ferdinand’s defensive skill and ability!’ FOR ME, in this case, is an explicit marker of the fact that the clause it governs is not truth-apt. [1]

Other interpreters find this unsatisfactory since it would render the many hours of TV punditry in reality no more than a group of men in bad suits shouting ‘Boo!’ and ‘Hooray!’ to one another. (This is known as the ‘TalkSPORT’ objection.) Attempts to modify the view, such that punditry expressions may nevertheless stand to one another in familiar logical relations, ‘Quasi-Punditry’, remain controversial. [2]

Alternatively, if FOR ME claims do have a truth value then there are further differences of opinion over how best to account for them. For example, one view begins with the observation that FOR ME claims are almost always offered in contexts of dissent. So, ‘§6 (FOR ME) That was never a foul’ is most likely to be uttered on the occasion of an official having decided that an offence has occurred. Assuming something like FIFA-positivism, the official’s blowing his whistle and indicating a foul is just what it is for a foul to have been committed. So §6 is false. The view that all such FOR ME locutions are in fact false is sometimes called the ‘Error Theory’ of punditry or, alternatively, ‘Shearerism’.

A more extravagant line, associated with some rather extreme general accounts of punditry, begins from the premise of Pundit Infallibility [3]. Given Pundit Infallibility, if the pundit utters §1 then it must be true (despite appearances) that Rio Ferdinand is indeed a world-class defender. But what if another pundit, sitting at the same time on the same sofa, should then utter §7 ‘No, for me, he has lost a yard of pace and won’t any more cut it at the highest level’? We might initially think that §1 and §7 cannot both be true; but this is just what Pundit Infallibility requires. In this situation, the FOR ME qualifier relativises the claim to the respective pundit. So FOR LINEKER Rio is a world-class defender and FOR LAWRENSON Rio is not a world-class defender. Some critics worry about the plausibility of this analysis since (1) it again threatens to make it impossible for there to be genuine agreement or disagreement between pundits; (2) in cases such as §3 above it seems odd to think in any sense that, granted a foul was in fact awarded, it can be true that there was no foul, FOR WHOMEVER. In response to (1) some critics simply accept this consequence. In response to (2) some less parsimonious critics posit that there is in fact some private world for each pundit such that they can remain infallible. In this case FOR LAWRENSON… has roughly the force of IN LAWRENSON’S WORLD…

[1] This view is most commonly ascribed to a line of thought inspired by the Scottish Enlightenment pundit, Alan Hansen.

[2] Quasi-punditry is often associated with pundits connected with Blackburn Rovers, a club where, it is sometimes said, it is possible to ‘have one’s half-time pie and eat it’.

[3] Historically, this view can probably be traced back to the ancient pundit Jimmy Hill and his claim that ‘The pundit is the measure of all things: of fouls that are that they are fouls, of offsides that are not that they are not offsides’. The interpretation of this claim is, of course, also rather controversial.

You could buy a lot of other things for £150

2013-03-21T15:21:00.001Z

I'm very much looking forward to the publication of Dorandi's new edition of Diogenes Laertius in the CUP 'Orange' series. It should be out some time in the next couple of months. (I use DL quite a lot and right now I am working on something on part of DL book 9.) But look at the price. Look at it. Yes: £150! It's a hardback, for sure, and it will be sturdy and pleasant to use. But £150! One. Hundred. And. Fifty. Pounds. Crikey.

If you're quick, amazon.co.uk are doing a cracking deal on it. You can save a whopping 5%, which comes out at £7.50. Which you can then donate to help your local postman with the chiropractor bills brought on by lugging the thing to your door.

Football tactics genius

2013-03-20T09:29:00.001Z

Richard Money (aka 'Dicky Dosh'), manager of the mighty Cambridge United, gives a concise summary of the essentials of successful football. This is where 'Pep' got all his ideas. Here's hoping for a techno/dub-step/whatever-it-is-the-yoot-listen-to-now remix very soon.

listen to ‘Pass, pass, bomp, bomp with Richard Money (20-03-13)’ on Audioboo

One fewer lost work by Epicurus

2013-03-06T16:05:00.000Z

I’ve been looking through Cicero’s De Divinatione today. Here’s a nice bit of Ciceronian sarcasm that might tell us something about the contents of his library and also its state of repair. He is countering Quintus’ defence of prophecy and divination and poo-pooing various purported portents.

Ante vero Marsicum bellum quod clipeos Lanuvii, ut a te dictum est, mures rosissent, maxumum id portentum haruspices esse dixerunt; quasi vero quicquam intersit, mures diem noctem aliquid rodentes scuta an cribra corroserint! Nam si ista sequimur, quod Platonis Politian nuper apud me mures corroserunt, de re publica debui pertimescere, aut, si Epicuri de voluptate liber rosus esset, putarem annonam in macello cariorem fore.

Cicero De Divinatione 2.59

Here is W. A. Falconer’s translation:

‘But’, you say, ‘the fact that just before the Marsian War mice gnawed the shields at Lanuvium was pronounced by the soothsayers to be a very direful portent.’ As if it mattered a whit whether mice, which are gnawing something day and night, gnawed shields or sieves! Hence, by the same token, the fact that, at my house, mice recently gnawed my Plato’s Republic should fill me with alarm for the Roman republic; of if they had gnawed at my Epicurus On Pleasure I should have expected a rise in the market price of food.

It’s no surprise that Cicero had a copy of Plato’s Republic (although it is perhaps a surprise that it was not kept out of harm’s way). But it is perhaps not so obvious that he would have had a copy of Epicurus’ On Pleasure. There’s no mention of a Peri Hēdonēs in the list of Epicurus’ works at Diog. Laert. 10.27ff., although Diogenes makes clear that his catalogue is not exhaustive. And this mention in De Div. is the only reference given for Usener’s inclusion in his section of Perditorum librorum reliquiae of a work On Pleasure (p. 101). I wonder if Cicero is not here referring to a work by the title Peri Hēdonēs but rather to the work On the Telos which doubtless included a lot of material ‘about pleasure’. Peri Telous is mentioned in Diogenes’ catalogue. And there are various references and quotations from this work under the title Peri Telous (Us. pp. 119–23), some of them from Cicero himself. Cicero refers to Epicurus’ ‘liber de summo bono’ (Tusc. 3.41-4, Fin. 2.21) and more than once gives a Latin version of the notorious passage cited by Athenaeus (546e) where Epicurus says he cannot conceive of the good without the pleasures of sex and the senses (see Us. 67). He also gives a Latin translation of another passage of this same work at Tusc. 3.42 (Us. 69), noting that it comes a little later than the one translated at Tusc. 3.41. So there is every reason to think that Cicero had a copy of Epicurus Peri Telous. There is no strong evidence that there was a separate work by Epicurus Peri Hēdonēs and therefore we might suppose that in Div. 2.59 Cicero is referring also to the Peri Telous. In that case ‘Epicurus On Pleasure’ in Falconer’s translation should instead be: ‘Epicurus’ work on pleasure’. That would make one fewer lost work by Epicurus.

More self-reflection

2013-02-26T09:16:00.001Z

Two additional pieces, these mostly on the state of the discipline, one rather up-beat and the other less so.

J. Annas (2004) 'Ancient Philosophy for the Twentieth Century', in B. Leiter (ed.) The Future for Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 25-43.

J. Barnes (2006) 'Bagpipe Music', Topoi 25: 17-20.

And a collection of appraisals of the recent history and state of the discipline around the world:

L. Rosetti (ed.) (2004) Greek Philosophy in the New Millennium: Studies in honour of Thomas M. Robinson, Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag

UPDATE: suggestions from 'Interlocutor'

Jonathan Barnes's review of Bernard Williams's The Sense of the Past, The Journal of Philosophy 104, 2007, 540–545. Modified version 'The History of Philosophy' in Method and Metaphysics.

Barnes also mentions Kevin Mulligan, 'Sur l'histoire de l'approche analytique de l'histoire de la philosophie: de Bolzano et Brentano a Bennet et Barnes' in J.-M Vienne (ed), Philosophie Analytique et Histoire de la Philosophie (Paris, 1997), pp. 61-103, and to the methodological discussions in the Introduction to the first volume of Anthony Kenny's New History of Western Philosophy, and the introduction to David Charles's Aristotle Philosophy of Action (p. ix has a definition of 'philosophical scholarship').

Self-reflection

2013-02-25T12:30:00.003Z

I'm putting together a brief bibliography of discussions of the nature and practice of the study of ancient philosophy. This is what I have so far. What have I missed?

Aubenque, P. (1992) ‘L’histoire de la philosophie, est–elle ou non philosophique? Oui et non’, in B. Cassin (ed.) Nos grecs et leurs modernes, Paris: Seuil: 17–36

Burkert, W., Gemelli Marciano, L., Matelli, E. and Orelli, L. (eds.) (1998) Fragmentsammlungen philosophischer Texte der Antike / Le raccolte dei frammenti di filosofi antichi, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht

Barnes, J. (2002) ‘La philosophie entre guillemets’, in M. Canto and P. Pellegrin (eds.) Le style de la pensée: recueil de textes en hommage à J. Brunschwig Paris: Les Belles Lettres: 522–47; English version, ‘Philosophy within quotation marks?’, in J. Barnes (2011) Method and Metaphysics: Essays in Ancient Philosophy I, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 23–42

Brunschwig, J. (1992) ‘L’histoire de la philosophie, est–elle ou non philosophique? Non et oui’, in B. Cassin (ed.) Nos grecs et leurs modernes, Paris: Seuil: 37–96

Frede, M. (1987) ‘Introduction: The study of ancient philosophy’, in M. Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press: ix–xxvii

Frede, M. (1992) ‘Doxographie, historiographie philosophique et historiographie historique de la philosophie’, Revue de métaphysique et morale 97: 311–25

Makin, S. (1988) ‘How can we find out what ancient philosophers said?’ Phronesis 33: 121–32

Rée, J. (1978) ‘Philosophy and the history of philosophy’ in J. Rée, M. Ayers, and A. Westoky eds. (1978) Philosophy and its Past, New Jersey: Humanities Press: 3–39

Rorty, R. (1984) ‘The historiography of philosophy: four genres’ in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.) Philosophy in History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 49–75

Taylor, C. (1994) ‘Philosophy and its history’ in R. Rorty, J. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (eds.) Philosophy in History Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 17–30

False character and false pleasure

2013-02-21T12:29:00.000Z

I am trying to understand the reports about Theophrastus' criticism of Plato's account of false pleasure in the Philebus. We know about these criticisms from a brief report in Damascius. So, I'm really thinking about Damascius on Theophrastus on Plato on false pleasure. (I should get out more.) It's all a bit complicated and expressed very concisely. This is Theophrastus' second argument.

Ἔτι, φησὶν ὁ Θεόφραστος, τριχῶς τὸ ψεῦδος· ἢ γὰρ ὡς ἦθος ἐπίπλαστον ἢ ὡς λόγος ἢ ὡς πρᾶγμά τι ὄν. κατὰ τί οὖν, φησίν, ἡ ἡδονὴ ψευδής; οὔτε γὰρ ἦθος ἡ ἡδονὴ οὔτε λόγος οὔτε ὂν οὐκ ὄν· τοιοῦτον γὰρ τὸ πρᾶγμα τὸ ψευδές, ἐν τῷ μὴ εἶναι χαρακτηριζόμενον. ἢ ῥητέον ὅτι κατὰ τοὺς τρεῖς διορισμούς ἐστι ψευδὴς ἡ ἡδονή· καὶ γὰρ ἐπίπλαστος, ἡ τοῦ ἐπιπλάστου ἤθους, καὶ ἄλογος, ἡ ἀντὶ τοῦ ἀληθοῦς εἰς τὸ ψεῦδος ἀποπλανηθεῖσα δόξα καὶ τούτῳ ἐφηδομένη, καὶ μὴ οὖσα, ἡ κατὰ ἀπουσίαν τοῦ λυπηροῦ φανταζομένη ⟦ἡ⟧ ἡδονή, καὶ ταῦτα μὴ παρόντος ἡδέος.

Damascius, Lectures on Plato’s Philebus §168

Theophrastus argues as follows. There are three possible senses of ‘pseudos’ (falsehood): (a) an insincere or feigned (epiplaston) character; (b) a false statement (logos); (c) a ‘false’, i.e. non-existent, substance (ousia). But pleasure is neither a character, nor a statement, nor a substance and therefore a pleasure cannot be false. The argument relies on two things: the three-fold analysis must be exhaustive and it must be denied that pleasure fits in any of the three categories. Damascius attacks the second of these two things but his tactic is not straightforward.

He seems to argue that there can be false pleasures that arise from falsehood in each of the three senses that Theophrastus lists and accepts (ἢ ῥητέον ὅτι κατὰ τοὺς τρεῖς διορισμούς ἐστι ψευδὴς ἡ ἡδον). In that case, the pleasure must be said to be false in a derivative way since it is caused by or has as its object something that is false and fits into one of Theophrastus’ three categories.

I've only got as far as Damascius' reaction to (a). Damascius argues first that there is feigned pleasure (epiplastos hēdonē) that comes about because of feigned character (καὶ γὰρ ἐπίπλαστος, ἡ τοῦ ἐπιπλάστου ἤθους). I am not sure what he means. In particular, I am not sure whether the feigned character is the object of the pleasure or whether the pleasure is something being taken by someone who has a feigned character. To explain: perhaps Damascius means something like the following. I take pleasure in a colleague asking after the health of my children. But my colleague is merely feigning an interest in my children and in fact could not care less about their health. Perhaps the pleasure I feel might be false in the sense that it is caused by a feigned character. Alternatively, the situation might be as follows. Imagine I am feigning an interest in the health of my colleague’s children. (In fact, I couldn’t care less about them. I met them once at a party and they were very annoying.) I have heard they have been unwell and so, out of politeness, I ask how they are. My colleague replies that they are much better. I say how pleased I am to hear that, smile, and look to move the conversation on. In that case, the ‘pleasure’ that I experience might be said to belong to a feigned character.

Are these the interpretative options? If so, which is better?

Well, that's my job over

2013-02-14T11:54:00.002Z

Harry Styles, of the haircut, has taken the advice of a philosophical friend and is teaching the world about philosophy. He's starting, as any good lecturer might, with Socrates.

Socrates, born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in Ancient Greek philosophy.
— Harry Styles (@Harry_Styles) February 13, 2013

So, colleagues, we are no longer needed. At the time I am writing, this piece of doxography has been retweeted more than 41000 times. So, there we are, fellow academics. We failed to reach out sufficiently to a wider world of people hungry for philosophical advice (since, of course, that really is what we are supposed to do) and now, inevitably, our role will be usurped by popstars and 'slebs. It's all our own fault, so there's no use moaning about it.

(Thanks to JB for alerting me to the end of my useful working life.)

Cambridge 1959

2013-02-07T14:32:00.000Z

Interesting to compare this (from the excellent BFI archive on YouTube) with more recent recruitment films:

Epicurean theology on TV

2013-02-06T15:12:00.001Z

It's not often you get a reference to Epicurean theology in a Channel 4 comedy programme. But here is just such a reference from an episode of Chelmsford 123 first shown in 1988. (The Epicurean bit is here and you can watch the episode from the start here.)

Breaking point

2013-01-28T15:08:00.003Z

Here’s a bit of Aristotle De Caelo 2.13:

ὥσπερ ὁ περὶ τῆς τριχὸς λόγος τῆς ἰσχυρῶς μὲν ὁμοίως δὲ πάντῃ τεινομένης, ὅτι οὐ διαρραγήσεται, καὶ τοῦ πεινῶντος καὶ διψῶντος σφόδρα μέν, ὁμοίως δέ, καὶ τῶν ἐδωδίμων καὶ ποτῶν ἴσον ἀπέχοντος· καὶ γὰρ τοῦτον ἠρεμεῖν ἀναγκαῖον.

This is like the hair that is stretched strongly but equally at every point at will not break, or like the case of the person who is intensely but equally thirsty and hungry, but who is equally distant from the food as from the drink – for he will necessarily stay put.

Aristotle is interested in various explanations for why the earth stays where it is. He is discussing the idea that it stays where it is because of homoiotēs, i.e. because it is no closer to this edge of the cosmos that to the opposite edge and so has no more reason to move this way than that… Here are two other arguments of the same type.

I asked an engineer friend about the example of the hair. He said, first of all, that it is a silly example because as things are there will always be variations along the length of a hair or wire which mean that it will be weaker in one place than in another. This seemed to me to be a very unhelpful reaction since I wasn’t really interested in the facts of the matter. Just suppose that there were no such variations: this is a perfect and perfectly homogeneous hair or wire. Then what? He sighed and tried to leave. But I made him answer what he obviously thought was a very silly question. The answer I eventually got was that at a certain point the hair or wire would break at each and every place where there was a break between the atoms or molecules. This wouldn’t be of much interest to Aristotle, of course, who was convinced that atomism is a daft idea.

Then I wondered about the example of the person who is equally—and intensely—hungry and thirsty. There are obviously other versions of this (e.g. Buridan’s ass) but I like the detail in this version, particularly the idea that the opposing desires are for different objects but that the different objects are (i) desired with equal intensity and (ii) equally easy or equally difficult to obtain. There is no more reason to slake my thirst before satisfying my hunger than there is to satisfy my hunger before slaking my first. So, the argument goes, if I have no reason either to slake my thirst first or satisfy my hunger first I do neither – until, at least, one desire gets larger than the other or someone helpfully takes away the tray of biscuits and I then get released from my torture and pick up the mug of tea.

Here’s a thought: suppose this kind of reasoning is correct. Does it offer a way of avoiding acting in a way you know is contrary to your best interests? Suppose you know you’re the kind of person who over-indulges in puddings. One way to help yourself to do the right thing is to cultivate an equally intense desire for something else and make sure you have an equally easy-to-hand supply of all the different things you desire. This sounds like it might be more fun than Plato’s answer that you have to make sure you train your desires properly, have the desire for what is genuinely good always in command etc. etc. Instead, you should combat the potentially damaging desire by cultivating lots of other competing and equally intense desires. The just make sure that all of these competing desires are equally easy to satisfy. You run the risk of never doing anything at all, but at least you won’t act in accordance with a damaging desire.

Policy question

2013-01-22T11:42:00.001Z

I've just turned down a request to referee an article submitted to a journal because the (helpful) abstract made it clear that much of the argument was aimed at refuting something I wrote. Is that the right decision? I was concerned I was precisely the wrong person to give the submission a fair assessment because, although I wrote about this stuff a long time ago, I wasn't sure I could give the criticisms a fair hearing.

Does anyone else have a policy/view/thought about this?

What will I want?

2013-01-21T09:44:00.000Z

There was an interesting column in the paper on Saturday by Oliver Burkeman. It discusses the difficulties we all have in realising that we will change over time. It's easier to recognise the fact that our characters, preferences, desires, and the like once used to be rather different from how they are now. But we all tend to think that the way we are now is likely to be stable over time in a way that we know our past character was not.

Here is a link to the paper in Science by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson that sets out the research and the main conclusions.

Here is the abstract:

We measured the personalities, values, and preferences of more than 19,000 people who ranged in age from 18 to 68 and asked them to report how much they had changed in the past decade and/or to predict how much they would change in the next decade. Young people, middle-aged people, and older people all believed they had changed a lot in the past but would change relatively little in the future. People, it seems, regard the present as a watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives. This “end of history illusion” had practical consequences, leading people to overpay for future opportunities to indulge their current preferences.

I find it interesting because I have been thinking about prudential reasoning and, in particular, about extreme forms that recommend that our plans, decisions, and so on ought to take into account the consequences for our well-being throughout the remainder of our lives. If it does not matter when a benefit or a harm happens within my life, then I have no reason to favour nearer rather than further goods, for example. But if the 'End of History Illusion' holds, then this is one more psychological obstacle to making the right kinds of decisions, on this temporally neutral model. Not only is it difficult to imagine how our character, plans, preferences and the like will alter over the remaining period of our lives, but we apparently suffer from the illusion that the character etc. we currently have is the one on which we should base decisions and plans from the remainder of our lives. And in this we are very likely to be mistaken.

Tough, isnt' it?

Never go back?

2013-01-15T15:21:00.001Z

I've been spending the last few days trying to get some thoughts together about a section of Diogenes Laertius book nine (9.67-73) where he mentions various earlier philosophers that were apparently admired by Pyrrho and then lists some poets and philosophers who might be thought to anticipate Pyrrhonism in one way or another. It's all for an interesting conference in October. (That will also be the first conference I will attend via video-conferencing, because it's mostly happening in New York and I can't get away in the first week or so of our term.)

Anyway, it's an odd feeling going back to some things that I haven't thought about very much since I wrote about them in my PhD. When I look back it's quite amazing how much I must have read and how learned some of the footnotes seem. Good job they are there, though, because so long as I have sufficient confidence in my former self I can shortcut what would have been a much longer job getting sorted all the tricky business of the scholarship on Diogenes' sources.

I'd prefer to be able just to write about Diogenes and to talk about what he is doing, but unfortunately sometimes it is hard to discern any clear organisation on his part and you do have to start wondering about just what has been cut and pasted together to end up with the text as we have it.

So, some of this at the moment seems quite slim pickings. But you never know, perhaps inspiration will strike soon.

What Plato needs is a jazz background

2013-01-08T14:14:00.001Z

Happy new year. This amazing track was posted recently on The Philosophy Smoker. It's Sidney Poitier reading Jowett's translation of the Cave simile from Republic VII against a jazz background.

Nice.

But that's not all. There's a whole album of this stuff out there.

This is from it too, I think. Part of the Apology.

Smooth.

Operation pedalo

2012-12-19T15:14:00.000Z

I'm too worn out from admissions interviews and Christmas shopping to put anything philosophical up here. But, instead, have a read about this anti-crime offensive by Cambridge police, who are trying to put a stop to bicycling naughtiness around the city. The report is accompanied by an exciting gallery of pictures of naughty cyclists with their faces pixellated like they do on Crimewatch. It will be quite a job for the police, I think, because there is a lot of naughty cycling in Cambridge. Tut tut.