Atheists' spiritual experiences

Philosophy professor Dan Fincke on the errors atheists make when they imagine they have no bodies:

When confronted with claims about immaterial spiritual souls or spiritual lives or practices, the first mistake is to imply that people’s experiences that they call 'spiritual' are not 'real.' 'Spiritual' experiences are real events that happen in the real world. Superstitious reifications are just hastily (and with all sorts of cultural and religious encouragement) naively misinterpreting them as somehow evidence for something otherworldly or something which puts them in touch with otherworldly things. It is useless and sounds woefully psychologically ignorant to question whether they refer to something real when they talk about spiritual experiences. We do much better to engage them about what their real experience really indicates.  

The parallel superstition among some atheists is a tendency to conceive of people as minds that respond to reason alone and that can only reason well if they are not being influenced bodily.

Finke concludes that atheists -- and he counts himself in that number -- should evaluate "emotional mechanisms" based on end results, rather than rejecting such mechanisms and practices altogether.

There's nothing inherently wrong, for Fincke, with atheists singing songs. Not singing songs, on the other hand, is often evidence of a philosophy deeply uncomfortable with human embodiment.

Read More

Charles Taylor

Read More

A materialist account of historical possibility

A materialist account of historical possibility is interested not in motives for action but in the conditions that produce and contour such motives, the conditions in which our actions are iterated, and the conditions with which our actions interact to produce certain effects.... A materialist understanding of history does not imply that economic imperatives 'cause' or directly 'determine' human experience; rather, within a certain order of economic and attendant social relations, there are many possibilities for belief and action. But there are not infinite possibilities.

-- Wendy Brown, "The Sacred, the Secular, and the Profane: Charles Taylor and Karl Marx"

Read More

Things that Žižek says in between saying other things

Notes of confessions, disavowals & affirmations & other asides in Slovoj Žižek's speech, "Das Jahr der gefährlichen Träume," in Heidelberg, Feb. 25, 2013.

"You say: 'Now you are a stupid magician. You go all around, where is your rabbits?'"

"Now I make some crazy steps."

"Of course, I am still a communist and so on."

Žižek in Berlin, 2011.

"Of course, I am still opposed to Islam."

"This is the logic I am afraid of, you stick to your ideals."

"Don't worry."

"Now we come to the philosophy part ... I mean politics."

"Malcolm X, you know, said 'fuck the African roots.'"

"They really hated me, all those multi-culturalists."

"Don't hit me. I am a feminist. I say this to provoke."

"This is what is beautiful in global capitalism, what I really love: Even the English language itself is being taken away from the English ones."

"Besides the obvious stupid fact that English is not my language."

"The answer is unambiguous: yes and no."

"I will try not to be too long, so I will skip how the logic I am trying to describe functions here."

"All great thoughts occur by mistake."

Read More

Read More

An interpretive endeavor

Jason N. Blum, "Retrieving Phenomenology of Religion as a Method for Religious Studies," in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Dec. 2012:

Phenomenology of religion is not keyed to offer explanations of religion, and especially not in naturalistic or social scientific terms. However, it is well equipped to offer an interpretation of religion, or of religious experience and consciousness. It is this interpretive function that should define phenomenology of religion, and which sets it apart from social scientific or naturalistic methods that seek to explain religion. The category of explanation is privileged by McCutcheon, Proudfoot, and others, and may be regarded as the style of analysis that characterizes a good proportion of social scientific work. An economist or sociologist may, for example, seek to explain why conservative or fundamentalist types of religious identification tend to increase in the face of economic hardship, globalization, or intecultural penetration. In this sense, “explanation” consists of proposing a causal relationship wherein certain observable, natural factors are identified as providing reasons for related religious phenomena.

By contrast, the phenomenologist of religion attempts to interpret or understand religion, which is to say that he seeks to disclose the meaning or meanings of it as they are constructed, perceived, and experienced within consciousness, or from the perspective of the religious subject. While this interpretive task is distinct from the explanatory one, it is not necessarily opposed to it, and may in fact represent a guide or aid in the explanatory endeavor.

[.... It is] an interpretive endeavor designed to disclose the meaning of religion, as understood and experienced from the perspective of religious consciousness."

Read More

The Derrida point

"I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going."

-- Jacques Derrida, in response to a question after his 1966 presentation of "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" at Johns Hopkins University, which was a critical event in the history of theory in the United States.

It's a funny comment because, from one standpoint, this is Derrida confirming & affirming a main line of attack on Derrida, that is that he is most essentially an obfuscationist. From another, tho., the comment is the enactment or demonstration of exactly the critical sort of problematic at issue in all of Derrida's thinking.

That is, the inherent internal instability of things.

The instability being such that "where I am going" is to "where I do not know where I am going," the latter being already inherent in the former, subverting it. The unstable state being such that the point is to get to the point of not knowing the point: the first "point," there, making the last problematic or even impossible, so that middle "point" is always frustratingly simultaneously both the point and not the point of knowing what the point is.

The comment, one cld say, both eats itself & is itself in the eating of itself. All at once: always already.

As Derrida says in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," referring to something else but equally applicable here:

"This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse -- provided we can agree on this word -- that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum."

Or, as he also says, in the same piece:

"Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique."

This includes -- also & especially -- in this "moment" & this "event" -- the language of the critique of the critique of the language of the critique, & so on & so on.

It's either brilliant & helpful & exciting or maddening & stupid, depending on one's standpoint.

Read More

The very, very basic problem of scientism

"Scientism" is the idea that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge, subject to experiments, empirical verification, and so on. It is "the view that all answerable questions are empirical."

Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and the author of A Universe from Nothing, recently argued for (and, more, from) this position in The Guardian. He argued that philosophy should be replaced by science, since answers, to count as answers, have to be science's answers. What some might see as science's "imperialism," he said, is actually "merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science."

The standard challenge for scientism -- dealt with, kind of, in the interview -- is about ethics. How can a statement about what one ought to do be proven empirically? How could an injunction against, say, cannibalism, be verified by observation? What would "verification" in such a case even mean?

Another issue with this idea that all answerable questions are empirical is raised by Mark de Silva at the New York Times' philosophy blog. Math, de Silva says, is generally not considered to be empirical. The answer to the square root of negative one can't be found in experience, but that doesn't mean there's not an answer.

There's an even more fundamental problem with this idea, though.

The claim is nonsense by its own standards of nonsense.

If it's the case that "all answerable questions are empirical," what empirical evidence could be proffered to answer the question of whether all answerable questions are empirical? There's an induction problem here, and also a self-referential coherence problem. What possible scientifically acceptable test could there be to prove that scientific tests offer the only real form of knowledge? What observable fact can be cited to support the claim that questions have answers if and only if such answers are observable facts?

The claim can't logically be grounded in empirical evidence. Which means, it itself isn't grounded in itself at the very moment it claims to arbitrate the only available ground of reason. If it's true that "all answerable questions are empirical," then the question "are all answerable questions empirical?" is not an answerable question.

This is not a novel argument I am making. In the history of philosophy, the above issue is most directly associated with the critique of the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. I make no claim to originality on this point. It would be helpful, though, if those claiming science has or can or should replace philosophy knew enough philosophy and history of philosophy to at least recognized the very well established problems with their overly simplistic claims for science.

Scientism -- or at least this version of it -- has a problem with morals, and it has a problem with math. It also especially has a very very basic problem of making its own claims meet the standards those claims set for legitimate claims.

Read More

Derrida's preformative dimension

Lee Braver, author of Groundless Ground: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, a reader's guide to Heidegger and A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, mounts a defense of the philosophy -- and the philosophical style -- of Jacques Derrida:

"Derrida’s difficulty is exacerbated by a kind of performative dimension to his writings. He believes that language is inherently unstable and that a text’s meaning is always open to more than one legitimate interpretation (not infinitely open—readings must be based on what is actually written), and he shows this occurring in his own writing, playing with language and emphasizing ambiguities. This is all very carefully done and, with some work, you can see what he’s doing, but it is very different from our normal ways of reading and, if you don’t have some patience, it comes across as impenetrable gobbledygook. Note, however, that this way of writing follows from his views on the nature of language. Surely this is a sensible an approach as Quine’s describing the fact that there is no fact about meaning in as clear and unequivocal a way as possible.

"He is accused of not doing philosophy, of attacking and rejecting reason, and of not reading his subject matter carefully. But just what philosophy is and how it works and what is allowed to be reasonable is precisely what is at issue in a lot of philosophy, and is often challenged by the great philosophers."

This seems exactly right to me.

Read More

X is in the general interest

"I shall begin by assuming that the proposition: 'Recommendation X is legitimate' has the same meaning as the proposition: 'Recommendation X is in the general (or public) interest,' where X can be an action as well as a norm of action or even a system of such norms (in the case we are considering, a system of domination). 'X is in the general interest' is to mean that the normative validity claim connected with X counts as justified. The justifiability of competing validity claims is decided by a system of possible justifications; a single justification is called a legitimation. The reconstruction of given legitimations can consist, first, in discovering the justificatory system, S, that allows for evaluating the given legitimation valid or invalid in S. 'Valid in S' is to mean only that someone who accepts S -- a myth or a cosmology or a political theory -- must also accept the grounds given in valid legitimations. This necessity expresses a consistency connection resulting from the internal relations of the justificatory system."

-- Jürgen Habermas, "Legitimation Problems in the Modern State."

Read More

Marx explains German philosophical prose

"German literature, too, labored under the influence of the political excitement into which all Europe had been thrown by the events of 1830.... It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their productions, by political allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels, reviews, the edrama, every literar production teemed with what was called 'tendency,' that is with more or less timid exhibitions of an anti-governmental spirit. In order to complete the confusion of ideas reigning after 1830 in Germany, with these elements of political opposition there were mixed up ill-digested university-recollections of German philosophy, and misunderstood gleanings from French Socialism, and particularly Saint-Simonism; and the clique of writers who expatiated upon this heterogeneous conglomerate of ideas, presumptuously called themselves 'Young Germans,' or 'the Modern School.' They have since repented their youthful sins, but not improved their style of writing.
 

"Lastly, German philosophy, that most complicated, but at the same time most sure thermometer of the development of the German mind, had declared for the middle class, when Hegel in his 'Philosophy of Law,' pronounced the Constitutional Monarchy to be the final and most perfect form of government. In other words, he proclaimed the approaching advent of the middle classes of the country to political power. His school, after his death, did not stop here .... [They] brought forward bolder political principles than hitherto it had been the fate of German ears to hear expounded, and attempted to restore to glory the memory of the heroes of the first French Revolution. The abtuse philosophical language in which these ideas were clothed, if it obscured the mind of both the writer and the reader, equally blinded the eyes of the censor, and thus it was that the 'young Hegelians' writers enjoyed a liberty of the Press unkown in every other branch of literature."

-- Karl Marx, in Revolution and Counter-Revolution; or, Germany in 1848, giving a historical account of the obtuse and turgid style of philosophical German prose.

Read More