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Ratiocination

Hiatus


If movies are to believed, college students go on emergency road trips all the time. Not me. Until this weekend, that is. No more posts 'til after Christmas.

Reader Location


I always get a kick out of these: a world map indicating the approximate location of the last one hundred people to visit:

23rd Philosophers' Carnival


The carnival ( with a post from yours truly), hosted over at Right Reason.

A Relief


A dozen applications, with a folder and an addressed and stuffed envelope for each. Form after form. CVs. Personal statements. Writing samples. Transcripts. Letters of recommendation. As of today: all in the mail. Three to four months from now, I'll (hopefully) have some decisions to make. =)

Reading Roundup


As the end of the year approaches, I’ve reflected on the many books, articles, and short stories I read this year; and there are a lot of them. Here are three favorites from three categories (things I’d already read don’t count):

Philosophy (books):

• The Metaphysics of Theism, by Norman Kretzmann. A detailed commentary on Book I of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles, an often neglected exercise in natural theology. Kretzmann was a fine philosopher in his own right, but through him, I gained a much deeper appreciation for the Thomistic project. Thomas has a vision of what natural theology can do, and it is far thicker than that espoused by any contemporary apologists. Worth reading for both historical ('what did Thomas think?') and purely philosophical reasons ('what is the truth of the matter about kinesis?').
• Fashionable Nihilism, by Bruce Wilshire. A sometimes gripping tirade against the professionalization of the oldest academic discipline (especially for the first two essays in the volume). Every once in a while (though not often), Wilshire is right on—and for these jewels of insight, the book is worth reading. In his less veridical moments, Wilshire still entertains with witty prose. The volume ends with a deeply personal and touching essay reflecting on the death of his daughter.
• Theaetetus, by Plato. I know, I know, I should have read this years ago. And I had—but never in any detail. It took me til this spring to get around to it. I’m glad I did. It’s Plato, after all—need I say more?

Fiction:

• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. A fascinating, complex story. Brontë’s richly detailed environments and masterful use of language and symbols reward careful study. Plays like a classic horror movie.
• Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (for the short story, "Sexy"). Evocative, elegant prose that makes you just stop and think.
• Beloved, by Toni Morrison. A multi-perspectival study of the first person effects of slavery. This is a heart-wrenching book, but worth the effort. A theme of dehumanization and loss of person identity pervades the book, and it’s recounted through a uniquely subjective lens.

Honorable mention: Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (although I had already read these in high school). Fantasy at its finest.

Philosophy (articles):

• Fischer, John Martin. 2004. "The Transfer of Nonresponsibility." in Freedom and Determinism, Michael O’Rourke & David Shier (eds.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fischer skillfully reviews almost twenty years of literature on transfer principles and consequence-style arguments for incompatibilism. Out of all of this emerges a cogent skepticism about such arguments.
• Huemer, Michael: 2000. "van Inwagen's Consequence Argument," Philosophical Review 109. Huemer takes van Inwagen’s original argument and runs with it, successfully (to my mind) eliminating all major criticisms. I’m convinced. Thank God for the semi-compatibilist program, then!
• Hunt, David. 2005. "Moral Responsibility and Buffered Alternatives," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 126-145. Hunt rides the cutting edge of Frankfurt-style examples in this article, defending a ‘buffer’ case against a variety of objections. This is going to be a very important and widely-discussed article, I predict.

Honorable Mention:

The Road to Serfdom, by Frederick Hayek. It was irresponsible of me to not have read this book before now. Indeed, it would be irresponsible of anyone interested in the history of ideas to so have done. But I have rectified my past sins, and for that, I am happy.

A Strange Sight


Yesterday: a big old RV. With spinners.

Debate and Philosophy


I’ve competed in (or coached) one form or other of public debate for some seven years (policy, LD, and parli). While I’ve studied philosophy with any earnestness for only two and change, there are some interesting connections between the activities that I want to tease out in this post.

Debate and philosophy both ostensively revolve around the construction and analysis of arguments. Debaters are in the business of arguing. So are philosophers and students of philosophy. It’s what we do, day in and day out. We make, criticize, and evaluate the relative strength of arguments.

Naturally, the skillsets both activities develop are similar. Successful debaters learn to ask probing questions, to uncover assumptions and implications of a position, and to put pressure on the boundaries of a theory with counterexamples, hypothetical scenarios, and distinctions. These are the tools of philosophy.

Interestingly, a collegiate debate tournament has a very similar feel to some philosophy conferences. Participants meet in a central place at a college or university campus, examine the program, and then retreat to various paper sessions/debate rounds to argue. Just as there are star players on every debate circuit, so also, philosophy conferences have an analogue: the big names you skim a program for mention of. For example, see the (large, for a philosophical paper) audience of Scott Soames’ sessions at the 10th Annual Southern California Philosophy. You gotta feel sorry for the presenters assigned to concurrent sessions!

Debaters learn to argue impersonally. That is, we don’t take it as a personal insult when our arguments are criticized. It’s all part and parcel of the sport, after all. Similarly, philosophers tend to be more thick-skinned than the rest of the academy, when it comes to criticism. This is an important real-life skill to develop, and both debate and philosophy are ideal environments in which it can be honed.

Competition is an explicit part of every debate round. There is a winner (a judge determines who this is) and a loser, with points assigned for demonstrated skill in various categories. And as can be expected, the competition brings with it some unsavory elements: a cutthroat mentality, cheap tricks, rhetorical maneuvers that sacrifice truth for victory, resentment, and a whole lot of intellectual puffery. The desire to win will bring out a lot of ugly things in people.

Ideally, philosophy would have none of this. It is not a competitive sport, and there is no prize for ‘winning’ a philosophical argument (whatever such a victory might amount to). Getting at the truth is the prize, and (as an economist might say) such a prize need not involve rivalrous consumption. It seems that everyone can rejoice when a seemingly sound argument is unmasked as a deception and a snare; and so, too, everyone can rejoice when a sound argument for an interesting conclusion is discovered. The more known truth the merrier. The collaborative process of philosophy helps these things happen, and who could object to that?

But human nature lurks in the shadows. There is all too much puffery, posing, and sharking to be found at philosophy conferences and in the classroom. In fact, one philosopher described a particular conference as “watching a bunch of aggressive peacocks during mating rituals.” An anecdote. I recently witnessed a prominent senior philosopher (not one of my teachers, thankfully!) rip a confused grad student to shreds after the student read a paper; what was most disappointing is that he seemed to get his jollies out of the process. He genuinely took pleasure in the verbal beating he gave to a clearly inferior philosopher, as if doing so meant that he won some competition or other. That’s just repugnant (and pointless, too—like beating a dog at chess). This anecdote is not the rule, of course, but it’s common enough to note. And as distasteful and wrongheaded this sort of thing is, it’s not hard to understand. It feels good to be right, after all, and it feels even better when everyone knows that you’re right.

There are other and more deeply rooted incentives in philosophy that perpetuate this sort of behavior. Consider professional advancement. It’s not enough to merely be well-liked to substantially advance in the profession; there’s a sense in which one must be widely regarded as an outstanding philosopher. A subtle mind. A skilled arguer. A clever counterexample-machine. The thought here is something like this: what better way to cement such a reputation than to ‘win’ battles at conferences? And what better way to ‘win’ such battles than by publicly crushing one’s opponents?

All of this suggests that philosophy isn’t nearly so pure as it may first seem (eg, when compared to the rough and tumble of competitive debate). Many (highly successful) debaters are well-known for resorting to a variety of rhetorical tricks and maneuvers to embarrass their opponents and gain victory in an argument. I’m suggesting that (highly successful) philosophers aren’t above such tactics.

Don’t get me wrong; there is much good in competitive debate. It’s taught me more than I can relate in a blog post. And debate will not inevitably turn a competitor into a mean-spirited sophist. It brings with it, however, a set of dangers and temptations—dangers and temptations that philosophers seem to share in, too.

Why Free Will?


Free will is a topic that has gripped my philosophical attention for some time now. I here indicate a few reasons why this is so. This is a defense of free will as a research project in philosophy, if you will.

First, free will is one of the truly great problems in the cannon of classical philosophy. Its puzzles are deep and intractable, and it has attracted work from nearly all the great minds (think Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Leibniz, and Kant, among others).

Second, free will is a diverse field. It brings to bear fascinating questions of general metaphysics and ontology, causation, modality, philosophical psychology and moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion and action theory (the list could go on). Any interesting answer to a free will puzzle or problem will have implications for countless other aspects of the discipline. There are many research programs that fall within the rubric of free will; regardless of ones proclivities, one will likely find at least some of these to be of interest.

Third, free will is a topic on which philosophers have made genuine progress, especially in the last thirty or forty years. The central fault lines of classical free will debates have been clarified like never before. Old questions have been revived and sharpened. Many really top-notch philosophers have done work in the field (think Fischer and van Inwagen). A host of new problem-solving tools are available to philosophers (eg, the machinery of formal logic, possible world semantics, etc). New arguments, puzzles, and positions are being articulated at a breathtaking pace (eg, the consequence argument, compatibilist theories of moral responsibility, source incompatibilism, experimental philosophy, etc). Of course, the multiplication of arguments does not progress make; in this instance, however, it is indicative of a thriving subfield in which better questions and answers are regularly discovered.

Fourth, what one has to say about free will has important implications for theology. Those uninterested by theology will find these implications uninteresting too—but for everyone else, there’s something important here. Many theological debates (think predestination and the various conceptions of it) revolve, not around exegetical issues, but around more logically basic questions about human free will and moral responsibility. These are questions theology is poorly equipped to answer; not so, philosophy.

Finally, free will is a classic entry-point to philosophical interest, and one with a practical twist. The question of whether we have it and what it is has led many to study philosophy. We tend to think of ourselves as persons—as subjects with some kind of control. Is this common sense view correct? Would this conception of ourselves change if we discovered determinism was true? What sort of moral responsibility do we have for our actions? These and similar questions are intrinsically interesting—but practical, too; there is a longstanding tradition of connecting free will debates to social institutions of punishment and praise. In this way, how we think about free will has implications for how we live our lives.

In short, there are few philosophical topics more interesting and rewarding to study than free will. I commend the practice to all.

It Must be Paper Season


It must be paper season somewhere out there in college land. My referal URL logs have been clogged in the last two weeks or so by what appear to be searches by students for philosophy papers to read, borrow from, or plagiarize. Most popular seems to be the prècis I posted on Roderick Chisholm's The Problem of the Criterion and a summary of one Kripkean argument for property dualism from the Nature of Necessity. Somewhere out there, a bunch of philosophy professors must have assigned Chisholm and Kripke as paper topics. =)

In Which My World is Rocked


The price for single loaves of french bread at my local Albertsons has been raised from 99 cents to $1.29. Believe it or not, this will make a big difference in my life; I live off of those things!

Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism


I posted a new paper draft. An iteration of this paper will be my grad school writing sample for most of the twelve programs I'm applying to.

I hold something like the following argument to be sound:

1. If a successful Frankfurt-style case can be devised, all 'transfer' arguments for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism are unsound
2. A succcessful Frankfurt-style case can be devised
3. So all 'transfer' arguments for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism are unsound

The paper I've posted is an extensive defense of (1)--an argument for the importance of Frankfurt-style cases to consequence-style arguments. I have also developed a Frankfurt case that avoids many standard criticisms, but as this portion of the paper began to take on a life of its own (20 pages and counting!), I struck it from the project. A detailed defense of (2), then, is another project for another time. As it stands, the paper weighs in at 17 pages (and a 2 page appendix).

The paper abstract:

In this paper, I contend that several arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are unsound. In �1, I exposit a widely influential argument for the incompatibility of moral responsibility and determinism. The argument relies on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, a principle famously subject to so-called Frankfurt-style counterexample. In �2, I consider a �direct� argument for incompatibilism. But the transfer principle deployed by the argument will be subject to Frankfurt-style counterexamples too, casting doubt on the argument�s validity. In �3, I argue that strengthening the transfer principle is not sufficient to avoid these counterexamples. In �4, I consider a radically different strategy: an argument for incompatibilism employing a provably valid transfer principle. This strategy, too, will be subject to criticism via Frankfurt-style counterexample. In doing all this, I dismantle an entire class of motivations for incompatibilism about determinism and moral responsibility.

Bibliography: The Principle of Alternate Possibilities


I spent much of this semester in study of Peter van Inwagen's Principle Beta (a power necessity closure principle). As it turns out, relating Beta and arguments using it to moral responsibility brings in another cluster of issues. These issues revolve around the Principle of Alternate Possibilities (the thesis that one is responsible for something only if one could have done otherwise), and an ingenious set of cases first devised by Harry Frankfurt ("Frankfurt-style cases"). Here is a bibliography documenting some of the more important literature on PAP and Frankfurt-style cases out there these days. I haven't attempted to be exhaustive, but I have included just about every article that was either useful/interesting to my study or widely cited in the literature.

Analytic Philosophy Sentence Generator


An analytic philosophy generator I put together, inspired by a similar theological piece. Here's how it works. Pick a random four digit number. In one of the charts below, pick one entry from each column corresponding to the digits in your chosen number. For example, "4438" generates "Intuitively, it seems obvious that trope theories bolster Nozick's radical account of stage theory iterations of four-dimensionalism." A fine sentence of analytic philosophy if I ever heard one!

Try it out yourself; there are some 10,000 possible results, after all. The challenge, of course, is to get one that comes out as true. =)

GIF chart
PDF chart