DOCSLIB.ORG

Thomas Nagel and Bernard Lonergan

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Thomas Nagel and Bernard Lonergan The University of Notre Dame Australia ResearchOnline@ND Theses 2018 A dialogue of traditions on the reality of mind: Thomas Nagel and Bernard Lonergan Robert van Gend Follow this and additional works at: https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Copyright Regulations 1969 WARNING The material in this communication may be subject to copyright under the Act. Any further copying or communication of this material by you may be the subject of copyright protection under the Act. Do not remove this notice. Publication Details van Gend, R. (2018). A dialogue of traditions on the reality of mind: Thomas Nagel and Bernard Lonergan (Master of Philosophy (School of Philosophy and Theology)). University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/237 This dissertation/thesis is brought to you by ResearchOnline@ND. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of ResearchOnline@ND. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A DIALOGUE OF TRADITIONS ON THE REALITY OF MIND: THOMAS NAGEL AND BERNARD LONERGAN Robert van Gend A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy School of Philosophy and Theology The University of Notre Dame Australia 2018 Abstract The scientific picture of the world is one of invisible particles and empty space, but this is not the world of our everyday experience. How can we reconcile the scientific view of the world with the view from our ordinary perspective? This thesis puts Thomas Nagel and Bernard Lonergan into dialogue on the question of the mind’s place in the world. Coming from different philosophical traditions, both thinkers provide a bigger picture in which to place materialism and to assess its errors. Thomas Nagel criticises modern forms of materialism because they try to explain away the reality of our perspective by reducing it to physical events in a perspective- less scientific picture. He criticises the fundamental conception of the physical world upon which these reductionist theories depend, a conception that had its origins in the seventeenth century scientific revolution and one which conceived of the physical world as having no place for subjects’ perspectives. In Lonergan’s opinion, the reduction of the human consciousness to mere physical events is the result of a truncated conception of objectivity. The reason for this mistaken conception is that we confuse two distinct kinds of knowing, which in turn is because of a mistaken cognitional theory. This thesis argues that Nagel makes some insightful contributions to the place of mind in the cosmos, but that he, like the reductive materialists that he criticises, is limited by a truncated conception of objectivity that prevents him grasping the nature of the mind. This suggests that future philosophies of mind need to examine their presuppositions more deeply and be open to dialogue with one of the less well-known traditions of philosophy in contemporary scholarship – the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, in which Lonergan worked. Declaration of Authorship This thesis/dissertation is the candidate’s own work and contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any degree or diploma in any other institution. To the best of the candidate’s knowledge, the thesis/dissertation contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. _____________________Robert van Gend _ __________________ Candidate’s Name Candidate’s Signature Date: 14.08.2018 2 Contents INTRODUCTION: The Monopoly of the Outside View………….………………………5 CHAPTER 1: Lonergan’s Cognitive Theory………………………………………………8 1.1 The Desire to Know 1.2 Cognitional Structure Experience Understanding Insight pivots between sense data and idea Kinds of Insights/Realities – Things Kinds of Insights/Realities – Conjugates Relationship of the Subject and Object in Experience and Understanding Judgment The Virtually Unconditioned Subjective and Objective Dimensions of Knowledge A Consistent Cognitional Theory The Accuracy of Human Knowing Summary: Levels of Consciousness 1.3 Intellectual Conversion 1.4 Mind and Reality – Kant and Lonergan CHAPTER 2: The Meaning of “Matter”.…………….…………………………………31 2.1 The Rise of Nominalism 2.2 Galileo: Primary and Secondary Qualities 2.3 Descartes: Mind and Matter 2.4 Contemporary Responses to Cartesian Principles Matter: a term without meaning? CHAPTER 3: Consciousness………………………………………………………………47 3.1 The Physical Conception of Objectivity Irreducibly Subjective Phenomena 3.2 Analysis of Nagel’s Epistemology CHAPTER 4: Reason………………………………………………………………………59 4.1 Inner Authority of Reason Reason’s Immunity to External Explanation Reason’s Intrinsic Authority 4.2 The “Order of Reasons” 4.3 Perspectival Knowing & Scepticism 4.4 The Intelligibility of the World – A Mystery Intelligibility Thought and Reality: Kant and Nagel Conclusions 3 CHAPTER 5: Be Attentive, Be Intelligent, Be Reasonable………………………………85 5.1 The Need for a New Objective Conception 5.2 The Data – “Be Attentive” 5.3 The Explanations – “Be Intelligent” Reductive or eliminative physicalism Non-reductive physicalism Epiphenomenalism Nagel’s Explanation Emergent Account Reductive Account 5.4 The Judgment – “Be Reasonable” 5.5 A New Natural Philosophy Beyond perception-based thinking CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………………105 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………107 4 Introduction – the Monopoly of the Outside View Sir Arthur Eddington famously described the lectern in front of him as it appears to us, and then in terms of its ultimate constituents as discovered by scientists: “One of them was visible, palpable, brown, solid and heavy; the other was mostly empty space with here and there an unimaginable wavicle”.1 How can we reconcile the scientific picture of the world with the world of our normal experience? In his short Meditations in a Toolshed, C.S. Lewis goes straight to the heart of the tension. He says we can approach realities from the inside and from the outside. As he explains, when a young man values ten minutes of casual chat with a woman as more precious than all the favours that other women could provide, he is experiencing love from the inside. The scientist explains the young man’s state of mind from the outside as genes interacting with biological stimulus. Lewis writes, “Which is the ‘true’ or ‘valid’ experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted.”2 The outside view is supposedly objective and what is really out there, whereas the inside view is subjective, consisting of how things seem or appear to us. Thomas Nagel (b.1937) is famous (or infamous among his materialist colleagues3) for criticising the modern form of materialism which is propped up by theories of Darwinian evolution. Materialism claims that reality is nothing more than matter or physical substance. The outside view is a true picture of reality and the inside view is reduced to physical events in the brain. Nagel says this reductionism is bound up with the materialist claim about the constituents of reality: “Materialist naturalism leads to reductionist ambitions because it seems unacceptable to deny the reality of all those familiar things that are not at first glance physical.”4 Nagel is keenly aware that the modern scientific picture of reality has its origins in the definitions of mind and matter that occurred at the time of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. This gives him ammunition with which to oppose the ideological dogmatism of the present physicalist conception of the world. It is dogmatic because it is so 1 Cited in Daniel A. Helminiak, Brain, Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015), 162. 2 C.S. Lewis, “Meditations in a Toolshed”, in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1970), 231. 3 See Andrew Ferguson, ‘The Heretic: Who is Thomas Nagel and why are so many of his fellow academics condemning him?’ The Weekly Standard, March 25, 2013. 4 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15, Kindle. 5 sure that it can explain everything. Nagel thinks many realities escape its net. Consciousness and reason, he argues, cannot be reduced to the physical. If the view from inside is not an illusion, how do the two views fit together? We are left with two views of the same reality which say different things about that reality. Nagel recommends that this is how we should approach reality – acknowledging our limits and allowing two perspectives to exist side by side. But we cannot expect the modern scientific picture, which is just one kind of objective conception of reality, to account for all reality. Nevertheless, Nagel says we should try to come up with a new objective conception of reality that places mind in the world alongside matter, so that we can make sense of how the inside and the outside views are both real. It is a difficult task, he says, because it would require the creation of concepts that we have not yet thought up. C.S. Lewis also acknowledged the difficulty of the task: “Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the ‘natural object’ produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for.”5 In Mind & Cosmos, Nagel considers monism (or dual aspect theory) to be a promising way to move our understanding forward and place the mind in the natural order. It came to light in my reading of Nagel that he was rejecting many sacred cows of the analytic tradition and pushing its limits.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Churchland Source: the Journal of Philosophy, Vol
    Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States Author(s): Paul M. Churchland Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Jan., 1985), pp. 8-28 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026509 Accessed: 07-08-2015 19:14 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 142.58.129.109 on Fri, 07 Aug 2015 19:14:45 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 8 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY structureof this idiom, moreover-its embeddingof a subordinate sentence-would have been clearly dictatedby its primitiveuse in assessing children's acquisition of observationsentences. Analogi- cal extension of the idiom to other than observation sentences would follow inevitably,and the developmentof parallel idioms for other propositional attitudeswould then come naturally too, notwithstanding their opacity from a logical point of view. Naturalness is one thing, transparencyanother; familiarityone, clarityanother. W. V. QtJINE Harvard University REDUCTION, QUALIA, AND THE DIRECT INTROSPECTION OF BRAIN STATES* DO the phenomenological or qualitative featuresof our sen- sations constitutea permanentbarrier to thereductive aspi- rations of any materialisticneuroscience? I here argue that theydo not.
    [Show full text]
  • International Institute for Method in Theology, Newsletter 1
    Newsletter 1 International Institute for Method in Theology September 2018 The International Institute for Method in Theology was launched at a colloquium held at Marquette University in March of 2017. The Institute is sponsored by the Marquette Lonergan Project, the Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College in the University of Toronto, and the Faculty of Theology at the Gregorian University, Rome. Representatives of all three institutions were present at the colloquium: Robert M. Doran, S.J., from Marquette, Eric Mabry, Interim Director of the Lonergan Research Institute, and Gerard Whelan, S.J., Professor of Theology at the Gregorian University. In the lecture that he presented at the colloquium, Robert Doran, Emmett Doerr Chair in Catholic Systematic Theology and Director of the Marquette Lonergan Project, narrated how the founding of the Institute is the long-term result of a suggestion that he had made to a Canadian Jesuit Provincial, Reverend William Addley, S.J., in 1984. Doran was living in Toronto at the time, teaching and writing at Regis College in the University of Toronto. The suggestion led to the establishment by Fr Addley of the Lonergan Research Institute. Recent research in the Frederick Crowe Archives at the LRI reveals how this new project of an Institute for Method in Theology was a part of the original vision of the LRI when it was founded. It was put on hold because the principal efforts of the LRI from its inception centered around the publication of Lonergan’s Collected Works with University of Toronto Press and the cataloguing and preservation of Lonergan’s archival papers.
    [Show full text]
  • The Absurd Author(S): Thomas Nagel Reviewed Work(S): Source: the Journal of Philosophy, Vol
    Journal of Philosophy, Inc. The Absurd Author(s): Thomas Nagel Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 68, No. 20, Sixty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division (Oct. 21, 1971), pp. 716-727 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2024942 . Accessed: 19/08/2012 01:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of Philosophy, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Philosophy. http://www.jstor.org 7i6 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY The formerstands as valid only if we can findcriteria for assigning a differentlogical formto 'allegedly' than to 'compulsively'.In this case, the criteriaexist: 'compulsively'is a predicate, 'allegedly' a sentenceadverb. But in countless other cases, counterexamplesare not so easily dismissed.Such an example, bearing on the inference in question, is Otto closed the door partway ThereforeOtto closed the door It seems clear to me that betterdata are needed beforeprogress can be made in this area; we need much more refinedlinguistic classificationsof adverbial constructionsthan are presentlyavail- able, ifour evidenceconcerning validity is to be good enough to per- mit a richerlogical theory.In the meantime,Montague's account stands: thereis no reason to thinka morerefined theory, if it can be produced, should not be obtainable within the frameworkhe has given us.
    [Show full text]
  • Bernard Lonergan on the Cross As Communication
    Why the Passion? : Bernard Lonergan on the Cross as Communication Author: Mark T. Miller Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/2235 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2008 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Theology WHY THE PASSION?: BERNARD LONERGAN ON THE CROSS AS COMMUNICATION a dissertation by MARK T. MILLER submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosopy August 2008 © copyright by MARK THOMAS MILLER 2008 Abstract Why the Passion?: Bernard Lonergan, S.J. on the Cross as Communication by Mark T. Miller, directed by Frederick Lawrence This dissertation aims at understanding Bernard Lonergan’s understanding of how the passion of Jesus Christ is salvific. Because salvation is of human persons in a community, a history, and a cosmos, the first part of the dissertation examines Lonergan’s cosmology with an emphasis on his anthropology. For Lonergan the cosmos is a dynamic, interrelated hierarchy governed by the processes of what he calls “emergent probability.” Within the universe of emergent probability, humanity is given the ability to direct world processes with critical intelligence, freedom, love, and cooperation with each other and with the larger world order. This ability is not totally undirected. Rather, it has a natural orientation, a desire or eros for ultimate goodness, truth, beauty, and love, i.e. for God. When made effective through an authentic, recurrent cycle of experience, questioning, understanding, judgment, decision, action, and cooperation, this human desire for God results in progress.
    [Show full text]
  • University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy Nousletter Interview with Jorge Gracia
    University at Buffalo Department of Philosophy Nousletter Interview with Jorge Gracia Jorge Gracia is a polymath. He works in metaphysics/ontology, philosophical historiography, philosophy of language/hermeneutics, ethnicity/race/nationality issues, Hispanic/Latino issues, medieval/scholastic philosophy, Cuban and Argentinian art, and Borges. Gracia’s earliest work was in medieval philosophy. His more than three decades of contributions to medieval philosophy were recently recognized by his being named the winner of the most prestigious award in the field in 2011, the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s Aquinas Medal. That put him in the ranks of Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Bernard Lonergan, Joseph Owens, G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, Michael Dummett, John Finnis, Brian Davies, Anthony Kenny, Alisdair McIntyre and one Pope, Karol Wojtyla, and now one saint. Even after Gracia redirected some of his intellectual energies into other branches of philosophy, UB was still being ranked by the Philosophical Gourmet Report (PGR) as one of the best schools in medieval philosophy: 13th in 2006 and in the 15-20 range in 2008. If there were PGR rankings for Latin American philosophy or the philosophy of race and ethnicity, Jorge Gracia’s work would have enabled us to be highly ranked in those fields, higher, I suspect, than UB is in any other philosophical specialization. In the 2010 Blackwell Companion to Latin American Philosophy, Gracia was listed as one of the 40 most important figures in Latin American philosophy since the year 1500! Gracia is also one of the leaders in the emerging field of the philosophy of race and ethnicity.
    [Show full text]
  • New Directions for Catholic Theology. Bernard Lonergan's Move Beyond
    JHMTh/ZNThG; 2019 26(1): 108–131 Benjamin Dahlke New Directions for Catholic Theology. Bernard Lonergan’s Move beyond Neo-Scholasticism DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/znth-2019-0005 Abstract: Wie andere aufgeschlossene Fachvertreter seiner Generation hat der kanadische Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984) dazu beigetragen, die katho- lische Theologie umfassend zu erneuern. Angesichts der oenkundigen Gren- zen der Neuscholastik, die sich im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts als das Modell durchgesetzt hatte, suchte er schon früh nach einer Alternative. Bei aller Skep- sis gegenüber dem herrschenden Thomismus schätzte er Thomas von Aquin in hohem Maß. Das betraf insbesondere dessen Bemühen, die damals aktuellen wissenschaftlichen und methodischen Erkenntnisse einzubeziehen. Lonergan wollte dies ebenso tun. Es ging ihm darum, der katholischen Theologie eine neue Richtung zu geben, also von der Neuscholastik abzurücken. Denn diese berücksichtigte weder das erkennende Subjekt noch das zu erkennende Objekt hinreichend. Keywords: Bernard Lonergan, Jesuits, Neo-Scholasticism, Vatican II, Thomism Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), Canadian-born Jesuit, helped to foster the re- newal of theology as it took place in the wake of Vatican II, as well in the council’s aftermath. He was aware of the profound changes the discipline was going through. Since the customary way of presenting the Christian faith – usu- ally identified with Neo-Scholasticism – could no longer be considered adequate, Lonergan had been working out an alternative approach. It was his intent to provide theology with new foundations that led him to incorporate contem- porary methods of science and scholarship into theological practice. Faith, as he thought, should be made intelligible to the times.1 Thus, Lonergan moved beyond the borders set up by Neo-Scholasticism.
    [Show full text]
  • Lonergan Gatherings 7
    James Gerard Duffy Words, don't come easy to me How can I find a way to make you see I Love You Words don't come easy1 Introduction Recently I saw the movie “Suite Française” (2014), a drama set in in the early years of the German occupation of France which portrays a developing romance between a French villager awaiting news of her husband and a dapper, refined German soldier who composes music. In the initial half dozen or so scenes they cannot speak to one another, for he is a German officer with a responsibility to follow orders, while she lives under the thumb of her controlling mother-in-law who forbids her to interact with the enemy. But they have already met in a shared love of music and in a few wordless encounters. How, then, are they going to meet, protect, and greet each other? In this essay my aim is threefold. In the first section I briefly comment on my experience of meeting, protecting, and greeting undergraduates and graduate students in the last twenty years in the United States and Mexico. In particular I focus on two questions: “What do you want?” and “What do we want?” In the second section I suggest some ways to implement heuristics in order to ask these two questions patiently and humbly. In the third and final section I respond to McShane’s claim in Lonergan Gatherings 6 regarding ‘the unashamed shamefulness’ of leading figures in Lonergan studies. 1 “Words Don’t Come Easy,” F.R. David. 1 I.
    [Show full text]
  • Distinguishing Science from Philosophy: a Critical Assessment of Thomas Nagel's Recommendation for Public Education Melissa Lammey
    Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2012 Distinguishing Science from Philosophy: A Critical Assessment of Thomas Nagel's Recommendation for Public Education Melissa Lammey Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES DISTINGUISHING SCIENCE FROM PHILOSOPHY: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THOMAS NAGEL’S RECOMMENDATION FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION By MELISSA LAMMEY A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2012 Melissa Lammey defended this dissertation on February 10, 2012. The members of the supervisory committee were: Michael Ruse Professor Directing Dissertation Sherry Southerland University Representative Justin Leiber Committee Member Piers Rawling Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii For Warren & Irene Wilson iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is my pleasure to acknowledge the contributions of Michael Ruse to my academic development. Without his direction, this dissertation would not have been possible and I am indebted to him for his patience, persistence, and guidance. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of Sherry Southerland in helping me to learn more about science and science education and for her guidance throughout this project. In addition, I am grateful to Piers Rawling and Justin Leiber for their service on my committee. I would like to thank Stephen Konscol for his vital and continuing support.
    [Show full text]
  • The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy
    Introduction n recent years the classical authors of Anglo-Saxon pragmatism have gar- Inered a renewed importance in international philosophical circles. In the aftermath of the linguistic turn, philosophers such as Charles S. Peirce, William James, George H. Mead, Ferdinand C. S. Schiller, and John Dewey are being reread alongside, for example, recent postmodern and deconstructivist thought as alternatives to a traditional orientation toward the concerns of a represen- tationalist epistemology. In the context of contemporary continental thought, the work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze comprises just a few examples of a culturewide assault on a metaphysical worldview premised on what Michel Foucault called the empirico-transcendental doublet, and presents a wealth of potential exchange with the pragmatist critique of representationalism. In both cases, aspects of pragmatist thought are being used to add flexibility to the conceptual tools of modern philoso- phy, in order to promote a style of philosophizing more apt to dealing with the problems of everyday life. The hope for a pragmatic “renewing of phi- losophy” (Putnam) evidenced in these trends has led to an analytic reexami- nation of some of the fundamental positions in modern continental thought as well, and to a recognition of previously unacknowledged or underappreciated pragmatic elements in thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Within the current analytic discussions, a wide spectrum of differing and at times completely heterogeneous forms of neopragmatism can be distinguished, which for heuristic purposes can be grouped into two general categories according to the type of discursive strategy employed. The first of these consists in a conscious inflation of the concept of pragmatism in order to establish it as widely as possible within the disciplinary discourse of philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • Consequences of Pragmatism University of Minnesota Press, 1982
    estratto dal volume: RICHARD RORTY Consequences of Pragmatism University of Minnesota Press, 1982 INTRODUCTION 1. Platonists, Positivists, and Pragmatists The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a prag- matist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about. For pragmatists, “truth” is just the name of a property which all true statements share. It is what is common to “Bacon did not write Shakespeare,” “It rained yesterday,” “E equals mc²” “Love is better than hate,” “The Alle- gory of Painting was Vermeer’s best work,” “2 plus 2 is 4,” and “There are nondenumerable infinities.” Pragmatists doubt that there is much to be said about this common feature. They doubt this for the same reason they doubt that there is much to be said about the common feature shared by such morally praiseworthy actions as Susan leaving her husband, Ameri- ca joining the war against the Nazis, America pulling out of Vietnam, Socrates not escaping from jail, Roger picking up litter from the trail, and the suicide of the Jews at Masada. They see certain acts as good ones to perform, under the circumstances, but doubt that there is anything gen- eral and useful to say about what makes them all good. The assertion of a given sentence—or the adoption of a disposition to assert the sentence, the conscious acquisition of a belief—is a justifiable, praiseworthy act in certain circumstances. But, a fortiori, it is not likely that there is something general and useful to be said about what makes All such actions good-about the common feature of all the sentences which one should ac- quire a disposition to assert.
    [Show full text]
  • THE HORNSWOGGLE PROBLEM1 Patricia Smith Churchland, Department of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA
    Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3, No. 5ñ6, 1996, pp. 402ñ8 THE HORNSWOGGLE PROBLEM1 Patricia Smith Churchland, Department of Philosophy, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. Abstract: Beginning with Thomas Nagel, various philosophers have propsed setting con- scious experience apart from all other problems of the mind as ëthe most difficult problemí. When critically examined, the basis for this proposal reveals itself to be unconvincing and counter-productive. Use of our current ignorance as a premise to determine what we can never discover is one common logical flaw. Use of ëI-cannot-imagineí arguments is a related flaw. When not much is known about a domain of phenomena, our inability to imagine a mechanism is a rather uninteresting psychological fact about us, not an interesting metaphysical fact about the world. Rather than worrying too much about the meta-problem of whether or not consciousness is uniquely hard, I propose we get on with the task of seeing how far we get when we address neurobiologically the problems of mental phenomena. I: Introduction Conceptualizing a problem so we can ask the right questions and design revealing experiments is crucial to discovering a satisfactory solution to the problem. Asking where animal spirits are concocted, for example, turns out not to be the right question to ask about the heart. When Harvey asked instead, ëHow much blood does the heart pump in an hour?í, he conceptualized the problem of heart function very differently. The recon- ceptualization was pivotal in coming to understand that the heart is really a pump for circulating blood; there are no animal spirits to concoct.
    [Show full text]
  • JL Mackie – “The Subjectivity of Values” Thomas Nagel – “Ethics”
    Lecture 23: The Objectivity or Subjectivity of Morality J. L. Mackie – “The Subjectivity of Values” Thomas Nagel – “Ethics” 1 Agenda 1. J. L. Mackie 2. Thomas Nagel 3. Ethics versus Metaethics 4. What Does it Mean for Morality to be Objective? 5. Argument from Relativity 6. Argument from Queerness 2 J. L. Mackie • John Leslie Mackie (1917 – 1981) • Australian philosopher from Sydney. • Interested in metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, metaethics, and the philosophy of religion. • Professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1955 to 1959. The Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1959 to 1963. Chair of philosophy in the University of York from 1963-1967. 3 Thomas Nagel • 1931 – present • Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at New York University. • Works in political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. • PhD from Harvard. 4 Ethics versus Metaethics • First order moral questions concern how you ought to act. (Theoretical and Practical Ethics) • Second order moral questions concern the nature of morality. For example, is morality objective? (Metaethics) • Are first order and second order moral questions completely independent? 5 What Does it Mean for Morality to be Objective? • Mackie says that when he is denying the objectivity of morality, he is denying that any categorical imperative is objectively valid. “The objective values which I am denying would be action-directing absolutely, not contingently… upon the agent’s desires and inclinations” (2). • Mackie understands himself to be espousing an error theory, namely “a theory that although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim… to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false” (3).
    [Show full text]