Horner's Corner

The End of Philosophy…?

In case you haven’t seen it, the target of today’s comic/rant is a ridiculous piece in the New York Times by David Brooks titled (no joke) “The End of Philosophy”. The title is especially absurd because he doesn’t target philosophy in the article at all – just ethics, which of course (but perhaps Mr. Brooks doesn’t understand this) is a sub-field of philosophy, not philosophy itself.

The worst part is the nature of the argument against doing normative ethics. As near as I can tell, the argument is that since the sciences (psychology, socio-biology, etc) are giving us evidence that moral judgments are something we make automatically, based on emotion and intuition rather than reason, we needn’t concern ourself with speculations about moral principles or justifications or the like. Morality is all built into us already, so there’s nothing to figure out! Right?

Wrong. This argument is, of course, completely idiotic. It commits the naturalistic fallacy in a manner that I might expect from one of my intro-philosophy students, not from an Op-Ed Columnist in a major publication like the New York Times. The very obvious fact is that no amount of description of how we actually tend to make moral judgments is going to resolve the question whether those moral judgments are right or not. To answer that question, we’re going to have to engage in good old fashioned philosophical reasoning and argumentation about moral principles. It should be no surprise if reflective moral evaluation yields the conclusion that at least some of our natural tendancies and biases produce faulty snap moral judgments and we decide that they need to be compensated for in various ways. But this is something that Mr. Brooks’ position rules out in principle.

Anyway, here is a nice blog on the article by one Sabrina Jamil (who first brought my attention the article), and another one here by PZ Myers. They’re both worth looking at. And those of you readers who are involved in philosophy, or who care about it at all – please spread the word. These sorts of ridiculous misconceptions of philosophy are damaging to our discipline and need to be answered.

Reblogged: via chaospet.

Continuing our series of discussions about the nature of happiness, here is a contribution from a philosopher. I’d say the happiness he describes here is only one of the varieties (and I don’t agree that the type described below was  Aristotle’s only idea about what happiness is – but it certainly gets my vote).

What is happiness? How does one get a grip on this most elusive, intractable and perhaps unanswerable of questions?

I teach philosophy for a living, so let me begin with a philosophical answer. For the philosophers of Antiquity, notably Aristotle, it was assumed that the goal of the philosophical life — the good life, moreover — was happiness and that the latter could be defined as the bios theoretikos, the solitary life of contemplation. Today, few people would seem to subscribe to this view. Our lives are filled with the endless distractions of cell phones, car alarms, commuter woes and the traffic in Bangalore. The rhythm of modern life is punctuated by beeps, bleeps and a generalized attention deficit disorder.

But is the idea of happiness as an experience of contemplation really so ridiculous? Might there not be something in it? I am reminded of the following extraordinary passage from Rousseau’s final book and his third (count them — he still beats Obama 3-to-2) autobiography, “Reveries of a Solitary Walker”:

If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. (emphases mine)

This is as close to a description of happiness as I can imagine. Rousseau is describing the experience of floating in a little rowing boat on the Lake of Bienne close to Neuchâtel in his native Switzerland. He particularly loved visiting the Île Saint Pierre, where he used to enjoy going for exploratory walks when the weather was fine and he could indulge in the great passion of his last years: botany. He would walk with a copy of Linneaus under his arm, happily identifying plants in areas of the deserted island that he had divided for this purpose into small squares.

Read more  here: Happy Like God – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com.

 -Simon Critchley