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Philosophy in Practice VOLUME 15 VOLUME SPRING 2021 SPRING Philosophy in Practice VOLUME 15 VOLUME SPRING 2021 SPRING CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY Philosophy in Practice VOLUME 15 – SPRING 2021 © Copyright 2021 by CSULA Philosophy Department. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Individual copyright reverts to the authors upon further publication of their articles. CONTENTS Acknowledgements .................................iv Faculty ...........................................v Professor Spotlight: Henry Mendell ...................vii Articles: The Viability of Physicalist Emergentism Stephen Boynton ............................ 1 Persons Evereywhere Everywhen and One of Each: Motivating Toward Observer Presentism Panpsychism Daniel Castro .............................. 23 The Right to Choose a Deaf Child Alexandra Meyering ........................ 30 Unity of Virtue and Wisdom in the Protagoras John Hurley ............................... 53 Human Rights, Universality, and Moral Desert David Randall . 70 A Question of Control Heather Norwood .......................... 94 Hutto and Myin Fail the Hard Problem of Content David Dixon .............................. 109 The Idols of the Mind in Modern American Political Economy Sabrina Pirzadaa .......................... 135 Doing Our Duty: The Moral Impermissibility of Suicide Hudson Olander .......................... 147 The Film-as-Philosophy Debate Marcel Giwargis .......................... 163 Can Happy Hard Determinists Stay Happy? James Savage ............................. 175 Contributors .....................................194 Philosophy Program Information ....................196 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Philosophy in Practice is produced by students at California State University, Los Angeles. The editorial staff wishes to thank all the authors for submitting and refereeing articles, the faculty of the philosophy department for agreeing to supervise individual contri- butions, and the University for its generous financial support. EDITORS: Stephen Boynton John Hurley Heather Norwood Sabrina Pirzada FacULTY ADVISOR: Dr. Michael K. Shim iv CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LOS ANGELES PHILOSOPHY FACULTY David Pitt (2003– ), Chair, Ph.D. City University of New York. Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics Mohammed Abed (2008– ), Ph.D. University of Wisconsin, Madison. Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophies of Violence, Genocide and Terrorism Bruce Atta (1996– ), M.A. California State University, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy Mark Balaguer (1992– ), Ph.D. City University of New York. Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, Meta-ethics, Philosophy of Language, Logic Talia Bettcher (2000– ), Chair, Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. History of Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Self, Gender and Sexuality Jay Conway (2005– ), Ph.D. University of California, Riverside. 19th-20th Century Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Aesthetics, Social and Political Philosophy Richard Dean (2009– ), Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Ethics, Kant’s Moral Philosophy, Applied Ethics Foad Dizadji-Bahmani (2013– ), Ph.D. London School of Economics, United Kingdom. Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Probability Ronald Houts (1983– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Epistemology, Logic Keith Kaiser (2001– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind Steven R. Levy (2005– ), Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles. Epistemology, Metaphysics, Logic, Applied Ethics v Henry R. Mendell (1983– ), Ph.D. Stanford University. Ancient Philosophy, History of Ancient Mathematics and Science, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics Sheila Price (1964- ), M.A. University of California, Los Angeles. Recent Philosophy, Comparative Religions, Medical Ethics, Environmental Ethics Michael K. Shim (2007- ), Ph.D. State University of New York, Stony Brook. 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Husserl, Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind EMERITUS PROFESSORS Thomas Annese (1961–1992), Epistemology, Modern Philosophy Sharon Bishop (1967–2004), Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophical Psychology, Feminist Ethics Donald Burrill (1962–1992), Ethics, Philosophy of Law, American Philosophy Ann Garry (1969–2011), Feminist Philosophy, Philosophical Methodology, Epistemology, Applied Ethics, Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Law Ricardo J. Gómez (1983–2011), Philosophy of Science and Technology, Philosophy of Mathematics, Kant, Latin American Philosophy Joseph Prabhu (1978–2017), Philosophy of Religion, 19th and 20th Century German Philosophy, Moral and Social Philosophy, Indian and Comparative Philosophy Kayley Vernallis (1993–2019), Moral Psychology, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy, Ethics, Aesthetics, Gender and Sexuality George Vick (1967–1997), Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Philosophy of Religion, Medieval Philosophy vi PROFESSOR SPOTLIGHT: HENRY MENDELL Professor Henry Mendell knew at age 13 that he would be a philosopher. Mendell developed an interest in analytic philosophy as a teenager, and went so far as to attend an academic philosophy conference as a senior in high school. His lifelong interest in mathematics and his study of Attic Greek before college led him to specialize in ancient philosophy. Much of his work is on Aristotle and ancient mathematics. In addition to his B.A. in Classics and Philosophy from Cornell, Mendell earned a second B.A. in Philosophy at Cambridge University. He attended Cambridge “by pure accident”—he’d applied for a B. Phil. (master's level equivalent) program at Oxford and a second B.A. program at Cambridge, but his Oxford applica- tion was lost due to a postal strike. Cambridge turned out to be the right choice though. Mendell already knew he wanted to focus on Aristotle, and he was able to work with leading Aristotle specialist G.E.L. Owen at Cambridge. He joined the philosophy department at Cal State LA in 1983, obtaining a tenure-track position several years before finishing his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford. Dr. Mendell describes himself as a "hyper-historian" in his view of ancient work. Asked which area of ancient philosophy is most relevant to the modern world, he first resists the ques- tion on the grounds that it can lead to misreading of ancient texts. Ancient work like Aristotle's Physics is valuable for the insight it provides into ancient thought, he suggests, rather than for substan- tial understanding of physics. “Part of the purpose of studying the history of philosophy vii is to learn what it is for things that are familiar to actually be very unfamiliar.” Learning ancient philosophy is “a process of defamiliarization rather than familiarization.” It is easy to read modern thinking back into ancient texts, but “there are areas of ancient thought that are hopelessly not modern.” Students reading Aristotle for the first time will find much that is familiar, because Aristotle “is part of the modern world.” Yet, to understand Aris- totle “as it is,” they must put the modern context aside. Failure to do this results in misreading of ancient texts. For instance, “Nietzsche picks up pre-Socratic philosophers [in an ahistorical way] and decides that there is a Schopenhauerian way of looking at them. Other writers have interpreted the work of the geometer Apollonius in terms of algebra, which was unknown in ancient times. They may succeed in rewriting his insights in a formally equivalent way, but they miss the value of understanding Apollo- nius's way of thinking.” Dr. Mendell believes we should not read ancient work only to understand how it led to modern thought, but on its own terms; ancient texts can reveal “what the possibilities of human thought really are” only if we understand them in their own context. “We don’t want to remove the familiarity entirely, but making it unfamiliar is a useful exercise in seeing how human thought looks when it’s contextualized, while also realizing what is non-contextual about it.” The tasks of reading an ancient text is not just to understand its relation to modern thinking, but also to see “both abstractly and in the details how it is a different way of thinking… that is important and valuable. And that is the hardest thing to do.” “When you read a text with an argument in it,” Mendell says, “there are always gaps in the argument. Where there is an important concept being used, it often looks like there is an amphiboly [a semantically ambiguous phrase]; in this place [an ancient writer] is using a concept in this way, in another place he's using it in another way.” Yet, what looks like equivocation to us in fact reflects our understanding of a distinction that did not viii exist for an ancient writer. Once the distinction is “in the air, no one knows what it is to think without that distinction. Then people sit down to write about history, and they don't know how to write about those writers without their modern conceptualization.” For example, at some point the Presocratics began discussing the rela- tionship between appearance and reality. The sophists Protagoras and Antiphon may have rejected the distinction, claiming that what we perceive is reality itself.
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