Philosophers as a rule are excellent researchers; they've figured out how to prioritize their research focus to home in on the foundational meaning-of-life issues confronting all humans. This is confirmed at least in part by the foundational place of philosophy in the wikipedia hierarchy. (Would this have ever become clear before the days of hyperlinking? I remember those days; "woke" millennials don't; they have no frame of reference here.)
So let's consider the population of philosophers. A great many are in academia as full-time professionals, some are independent of that milieu.
Among that population there are those who are big on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle more or less was the first to perfect a research program (not that Plato was chopped liver). Time and time again Aristotle has reappeared on the history-of-philosophy scene to the great benefit of the participants (as inspiration if nothing else). The recent revival of virtue ethics when before only Kantian and utilitarian ethics dominated the scene is one case in point.
As documented extensively in this blog, there is a by-and-large formidable neo-Aristotelian stream of thought inspired by Ayn Rand. (Now things are starting to get pretty narrowed down.) If there's one central and crucial theme uniting the systems of Aristotle and Rand it is a focus on what I term intellectual perfection(ism). (Narrowing things down further....) The gist of this is that we have an ethical imperative to maximize the actualization of our intellectual potentialities; it is the best organizing principle available for better living. And while philosophers almost to a person (I leave out pseudo-philosophers who are more like sophists) value the principle of intellectual perfection or integrity or wholeness, Aristotle and Rand are among the few to make this into an explicit defining principle of living well. It's not just the actualization of just any set of potentials that makes for self-actualization or eudaimonia; at the foundation, center and peak expression, there is intellectual activity tending toward perfection.
Then there are those Aristotelians and Randians who are obsessively into methodological perfection(ism); the term "dialectic" comes up in connection with Aristotle and his comprehensive and sprawling research program; it's about tying together all the strands in an organized unity. In connection with Rand the terms/concepts "context-keeping" and "integration" cover more or less the same methodological territory. So we've more or less narrowed things down to Sciabarra (editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) and his circle of associates as far as "dialectic" goes, and to Peikoff (Rand's hand-picked heir) and his circle as far as integration/context-keeping go. But there's almost no overlap between these two groups; it is as though they exist in a condition of dialectical alienation or tension. (As to why that is, well. Long-ish story.)
As far as self-actualization or eudaimonist ethics goes, there is a subset of Aristotelian-Randians who specialize in ethics and who picked up on the themes of Norton's Personal Destinies. This includes "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen and Tibor Machan, but not all that many others. Norton integrates themes from classical eudaimonism (namely Plato and Aristotle) with modern humanistic psychology (Jung and Maslow). I've only read some of Jung and Maslow; somehow the intellectual-perfectionism theme in Aristotle and Rand covers the widest explanatory range of the content and appeal of eudaimonism in its strongest form. Anyway, Sciabarra - in the circle of associates with the "Dougs" and Machan - cites a massive number of sources informing his Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000), but Norton isn't among them. I guess he isn't the specializer in ethical theory that the "Dougs" and Machan are? So we encounter yet another division of sorts, resulting from a diversification of specialized knowledge. So an avid researcher would have to home in on the most significant sources/figures cited in Total Freedom (hint: Mises, Hayek, Rand) as well as, say, Machan's Individuals and Their Rights (1989) and the "Dougs" Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), to both have promising leads to Norton as well as to conjure up whatever connections Norton might have to Sciabarra's dialectical-libertarian thesis. Along the way, such a researcher will most likely have encountered the libertarian rights theory of Eric Mack and drew meticulous comparisons/contrasts to these others' rights theories. Further along the way, one may have encountered the 1974 volume edited by Machan, The Libertarian Alternative, which contains John Hospers' "What Libertarianism Is," which contains a memorable knock-down formulation of the synoptic libertarian norm: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."
The number of people who would have engaged in the research covering these works (which have already integrated a lot of source material themselves, so hopefully nothing big got overlooked in the lines of transmission), is probably quite small. But it is, in terms of foundational importance and tradition worked in, probably the most high-efficiency philosophical research to be done. Does anyone really do better work than the Dougs, explicit and avowed perfectionists? Norton also uses the term "perfectionism" as more or less interchangeably with "edaimonism," "self-actualization ethics," and "normative individualism." But he doesn't get into the more distinctively Aristotelian-Randian-style emphasis on intellectual perfection(ism).
I mention in connection with Aristotle the notion of an organized unity. Nozick, who has a sprawling research program of his own (he probably had a lot more raw smarts than I do), spoke of value in terms of organic unity, and more specifically an organic unity made up of two criteria: (1) the range, scope, or quantity of material being organized, and (2) the "tightness" of the unity or organization. (Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Examined Life (1989).) Somehow Nozick manages (I'm not clear as to how, exactly) to keep this conception of value separate from his idea of "flourishing" which he takes to be inadequate as a unifying theme in ethics. Given what I've been saying so far, I think there is a most-viable way to unify these, uh, strands. Are "organized life," "integrated life," and "flourishing/eudaimonic life" mapping different territories? I don't see how.
So at this point we have the following figures mentioned: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick.
Researchers on Aristotle researchers leads one to Oxford's T.H. Irwin, author of Aristotle's First Principles (1988) and the utterly massive The Development of Ethics (2007). Irwin is a good man, and thorough. If one has only so much time on one's hand to study Aristotle and the history of ethics, respectively, Irwin is a good bet. (Irwin is big on the theme of dialectical method in Aristotle, and is cited in Total Freedom.)
Ferrarin ties together the ridiculously abstruse presentation in Hegel's writings with themes central to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and spirit(/soul?), in Hegel and Aristotle (2001). Comparative studies between Aristotle and other towering figures in the history of philosophy include Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Engstrom and Whiting, eds., 1996) and The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Aufderheide and Bader, 2015). Leading Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard draws comparisons between Kant's conception of acting for the sake of duty and Aristotle's acting for the sake of the noble (to kalon), in a comparative essay in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) (or is that a reprint from the Engstrom and Whiting collection?). [Edit: Also, Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, Method (Sgarbi, 2016), which I was all over like flies on shit almost the moment it was published...] [Edit: Also, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Sherman, 1997).]
The concept of to kalon may not be limited just to the noble, but also the fine or beautiful, suggesting an aesthetic component to goodness. On the subject of the noble, specifically, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 287) speaks of the noble soul having reverence for itself. Not only is this mentioned by Rand in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, but the Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche refers to Aristotle on the great-souled man as a proper lover of self. It's like the strands just keep tying together. I'm aware of (but have not yet read) Alexander Nehamas's well-regarded Nietzsche: Life as Literature from the '80s, but the title suggests an aesthetic conception of a desirable or choiceworthy life (although I'm not really clear at this point on how the concepts of "desirable" and "choiceworthy" fit in with Nietzsche's metaethical scheme). In any case, these points need to be properly integrated and/or differentiated with the aformentioned theme in Nozick about organic unity and how aesthetic value specifically fits into that.
So we have a research program that includes so far: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick, Irwin, Ferrarin, Korsgaard, Nietzsche, Nehamas.
The folks who've gone through the Peikoff courses thoroughly to the point of automatization/habituation of the prescriptions therein, by and large have it together pretty well. But I part ways with that crowd mainly on matters of the proper approach to "philosophical" polemics, such as their Kant-bashing. An effort to keep full context as prescribed in the Peikoff courses leads me to making a full effort to understand those philosophers as well as, . . . well, as well as Rand wanted her own ideas to be understood before critiqued or commented on.
Then there's Alan Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment (1998), a culmination of a long lifetime of ethical thought. I was kind of disappointed that Norton receives such cursory treatment there, but Gewirth is also integrating a ton of other material as well. As is an increasingly common occurrence in ethical theory these days, Gewirth synthesizes 'Aristotelian' teleology and 'Kantian' deontology. Mack was doing this back in the '70s with his 'Egoism and Rights' dissertation/article.
And then there's researcher extraordinaire, Mortimer J. Adler, the main organizer of the Great Books series (millennials know all about that, right?), and author/compiler of two massive books: Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought and Great Treasury of Western Thought (co-edited with Charles van Doren of Quiz Show notoriety, of all people?). I've only gotten through some parts of the Treasury but made it all the way through the Lexicon, which was quite edifying.
A great many of these items/authors seem to me to be essential parts of a top-notch philosophical research program. Other books that strike me as essential (but which I have not yet gotten to) include: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); S.L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (1989); and Parfit's major works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2010 and later). Also on any avid lifelong learner's bookshelf should be volumes of writings by Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. We're talking bare essentials here, now; if you have room for Thomas Paine he should be included.
I have among my "essentials" in hard copy format (in addition to gobs of books in e-format...) a 2001 or so volume titled Moral Knowledge (ed. Miller, Paul and Paul 2001), a collection on metaethics. Metaethics is a difficult genre; I have not yet gotten more than a few pages in that volume.
Back when I was an obsessive/completist/perfectionistic student of Econ before transferring that obsession to philosophy research (mainly due to Rand), I homed in on a particular volume titled A History of Economic Theory and Method (Ekelund and Hebert). I've since supplemented that with Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Karier, 2010). And I still have a nice volume, Austrian Economics: A Reader (Ebeling, ed., 1991-ish) which I must have discovered in a Laissez Faire Books catalog.
The Oxford Handbooks series is also a very useful, state of the art, highest-tier-university-press learning resource. (There's even an Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning. How soon do I get to it? Before or after the Cambridge History of Capitalism? Before or after Sciabarra-mentor Ollman on alienation and dialectical method? Before or after the Oxford Handbook of Virtue? And does the section on epistemic virtue therein draw close connections/integrations to intellectual perfectionism? Does LeBar's essay on (virtue-)eudaimonism in this volume serve as an adequate condensation of sorts of his The Value of Living Well [2013]?) One could keep busy with just this Handbooks series for a very long time.
One George F. Kennan condensed/essentialized a long lifetime of learning into his book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), which I happened upon in a used book store. When do I get around to it? Somehow I've already been pulled into reading another book found at the same store, Talents & Geniuses by Gilbert Highet; a nice read, certainly easier to get through than a metaethics text, say.
Dennett is a thorough researcher - somehow only he revived Rapoport's Rules, in Intuition Pumps? - but most of his books I've tried I made about halfway through before moving on to other things; his research priorities have him focused on other things, and that's cool.
Given constraints on time and cognitive powers, one needs to essentialize/condense as much as possible. The above resources seem to be what best survive the process of sifting and a modest book budget. This principle also applies to research in music and film. There are some films I can quote nearly back to front. Essential filmmakers include Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Welles as tippy-top tier. Do enough back-to-front sifting and re-sifting in major American team sports statistics, and you might develop some serious knowledge there as well. I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Bill James' league as baseball researcher, but at least I've read James fairly indepth. Millennials wouldn't remember that On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), a simple but really good measure of batting prowess, was once called Production and included in the Total Baseball encyclopedia.
As indicated in the post title, this was a narrowing down of some kind. Who on this planet has engaged in the research necessary to be able to list and discuss all these things above? Not very many people. In fact, it might be only one person. We might, if so inclined, bring in Leibniz's famous principle of the identity of indiscernables to identify that person. (How soon do I get to the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?) The one and the same person who listed and discussed all the things above also turns out to be the person who authored Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History (2015), which far (?) surpasses anything else I'm aware of in terms of the world-historic-important, fundamental essentials integrated into one work. (From a marketing standpoint it's something of a hurdle just to get past the title. Me, I'm all over a book with that sort of title like a fly on shit, of course. And probably the optimal course in this regard is not to invest a lot of time/resources in marketing but in more research front-loading to the point that it's front-loaded af for the next book or series of them.) On top of that, this author has a really thorough approach to blogging (with posts characteristically chock full of supporting/contextualizing links when needed). On top of that, the author has homed in on a 'Better Living Through Philosophy' theme, as though that were perhaps the most perfect theme one could present to a wide reading audience, and where no one else seems to be (explicitly, systematically) taking up the idea quite so obsessively. The progress here looks promising. Can the research be even better prioritized for honing in on the truly most essential?
If the traces a human leaves to posterity are key to what gives meaning to one's life, it's looking okay so far in this instance; it'll look even better if/when Better Living Through Philosophy becomes a final published reality. (Or, to adopt Norton's conceptual scheme, how does this implicit reality become actuality, where an "ought" and an "is" come into unity? And how Hegelian is that conceptual scheme, exactly?) But what comes before and after that final product, research-wise? And how "self-referential" must that text unavoidably be, particularly if it must be placed within the history (and future? and end of history?) of thought?
[something of a precursor post to this one, here]
(What would a fully meticulous narrowing down look like?... Well, darn, I left out Aquinas. Not an expert there. Doug R most likely would most fully know the integrations/differentiations with Rand there. My experience after about 140 pages of Stump's Aquinas (2003) was that it was coming off as distinctively rationalistic - lots of abstract conceptual architecture but hard to tie down to perceptual/concrete experience. Then very shortly thereafter I am re-listening to one of Peikoff's most essential courses where the subject of rationalist polemics comes up, and Aquinas is mentioned right off. Peikoff had made it his mission from Understanding Objectivism (1983) onward to root out rationalism (e.g., 'floating abstraction') in method. Sciabarra identifies both rationalism and empiricism as one-sided/incomplete rather than dialectical, and doesn't include Aquinas among his paradigmatic dialectical thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Rand). For whatever any of that is worth. Oh, and I did read through most or all of this book, which somehow caught my attention. That, along with the fairly extensive treatment of Aquinas in Irwin's Development of Ethics, is about the extent of my Aquinas study so far. And of course the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas awaits...)
Showing posts with label applied dialectical completeness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label applied dialectical completeness. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 16, 2019
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Rand, the Greeks, and the ideal (kalos) man
Pursuant to my previous posting, I'll keep this brief to draw mainly one (highly important but all too neglected) connection: between Rand's conception of the ideal man and the ancient Greek concept of kalos kagathos.
In her 1963 article, "The Goal of My Writing," Rand wrote: "The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself--to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means."
Compare with this portion of the wikipedia article on kalos kagathos linked above:
The word was a term used in Greek when discussing the concept of aristocracy.[4] It became a fixed phrase by which the Athenian aristocracy referred to itself; in the ethical philosophers, the first of whom were Athenian gentlemen, the term came to mean the ideal or perfect man.
Compare also with this encyclopedia.com entry:
Kalon : the neuter of the Greek adjective kalos, beautiful, fine, also admirable, noble; accompanied by the definite article (to kalon ), for example, the beautiful (or beauty). In Greek culture, what is kalon is typically the object of erôs, passionate or romantic love, and in (male-dominated) literature (and art), the term is predominantly applied to males around the age of puberty. Plato appropriates the kalon (along with the good and the just) as a key object for human striving and understanding in general, discovering in it, along with the good, one of the properties of the universe and of existence; erôs itself, in Plato, is transformed from a species of love into love or desire tout court, for whatever is truly desirable—and good (for the human agent). See especially his Symposium, Phaedrus (Hippias Major, possibly not by Plato, represents an unsuccessful attempt to define the kalon ). The truly beautiful, or fine, is identical with the truly good, and also with the truly pleasant, as it is for Aristotle (Eudemian Ethics I.1, 1214a1–8). The Aristotelian good man acts "for the sake of the fine (to kalon )" (Nicomachean Ethics IV.2, 1122b6–7), an idea which is sometimes used as a basis for attributing to Aristotle a quasi-Kantian view of the ideal agent as acting morally, even—if occasion arises—altruistically, as opposed to acting out of a concern for his or her own good or pleasure. Against this, we need to take account of Aristotle's treatment of his good person as a self-lover, someone who seeks a disproportionate share of the fine for himself or herself (NE IX.8, 1169a35–b1), though he or she may willingly concede his or her share to a friend (NE IX.8, 1169a32–34). This is consistent with Aristotle's wanting to treat the fine (or the admirable) as itself part—the most important part—of the human good; and indeed, he ultimately seems to recognize only two objects of desire, the good and the pleasant (NE VIII.2, 1155b18–21; cf. e.g. EE VII.2, 1235b18–23). In this context the pleasant will include only those pleasures that are not fine and good. For this move we may compare Plato's Gorgias (474C–475D), where Socrates actually reduces fine to good, pleasant, or both. Later Greek philosophy trades on, while sometimes modifying, this complex of ideas, which also forms the basis for the analysis of beauty in literature or in the visual arts.
And what is Rand's ideal of moral beauty or perfection, as it were? Here's a major clue:
Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.(Note that very early on in my book, I identify the ideal of an (Aristotelian) end of history with a cultural norm of unbreached rationality, i.e., something well above the viral/toxic/low-effort dreck of social media as we now know it. Getting kids on philosophy as early as possible/apprioriate would help with that problem; getting them on philosophy most expressive of the ideal of kalos would speed up the process.)
Given a fundamental agreement here between Rand and Aristotle on the human exercise of the intellectual capacity as virtuous/excellent/kalos human activity, and given the seriousness with which Aristotle is widely taken as a philosopher, it stands to reason that Rand's conception of the human good merits wider attention from philosophers. It also follows that the culmination of 'Randian' study in the art of thinking in a course by that very name (1992) by Peikoff merits close attention from scholars in this area. Excuses (among Rand-commentators especially) for avoiding such materials have to be rather pathetically weak (very non-kalos) at this point.
(The Aristotle-Nietzsche connection here also seems under-researched. Also, any connection between the concepts of intellectual perfection and dialectical completeness should be duly-thoroughly researched.)
Notes on dialectic
Or: An exercise in advanced differentiation and integration* 75+ hours fasted (with electrolyte water), listening to some favorite music, and cannabinized with just a couple hits of very-residual kief. (* - "Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration." --Rand, ITOE, first sentence)
Also: How a dialectic between leading philosophers in history and the likes of Ayn Rand might realistically play out, given a now large and ever growing roster of prominent philosophy professionals now taking a serious interest in her thought.
How might Nietzsche and Rand have 'dialectized' to reach a conclusion they could agree on? Nietzsche spoke of an 'overman', but Rand spoke more matter-of-factly of 'man the rational animal,' a position she claims to have shared in a very deep sense with Aristotle and also Aquinas. ("The three As" Rand would call them. She thought very highly of her own philosophical ability, but didn't proclaim to have surpassed these other two. But the only other philosopher she acknowledged a philosophical debt to, is Aristotle.)
Aristotle, the 'fountainhead of dialectic,' as Chris Matthew Sciabarra, author of Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (published 2000 by PSU Press, so exhaustively researched as to have a 48-page or approximately 1300-reference bibliography, which is at least 3 times what any other impressively researched academic book would have; the man is thorough) (Also, he wrote an also-thoroughly researched book on Rand, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995, PSU), containing the most complete bibliography of Leonard Peikoff materials, especially including Understanding Objectivism, an essential reference source for serious understanding of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Peikoff having spent oodles more time discussing philosophical issues with Rand than anyone else, etc. etc., although philosopher (and a serious well-reputed academic one at that) John Hospers also took Rand seriously enough to spend a lot of time discussing philosophical topics as well; but it's materials like Understanding Objectivism that one needs to master in order to be a seriously qualified scholarly commentator on Rand), dubbed him.
Hold on, let's say that it was Aquinas (say) dialecticalizing with Nietzsche (say), and while I haven't spent nearly the time studying these two that I had studied Rand's ideas (mainly for their claimed and real similarity to those of Aristotle, the fucking MAN...although much of my understanding of the fucking MAN comes from solidly reputed secondary sources, e.g., John M. Cooper's 1975 Reason and Human Good in Aristotle...), I can kinda imagine how a dialectic between (pre-Revelation-and-death) Aquinas and the (pre-going-mad) Nietzsche might have transpired, given the basic sensibility-vibe that I get from the various research sources (both primary and secondary) I've consulted on these two. But what if we hypothesize that Nietzsche got to know Aquinas and Aristotle and Rand better than he apparently did, how might a dialectical synthesis between these four (say) figures transpire? What sort of 'overlapping consensus' might they reach?
But wait, for Nietzsche to have become more familiar with these thinkers (most importantly Aristotle?), we have to hypothesize that, at minimum, he had a few more decades of intellectual productivity in him, and as we know from Aristotle and others and hopefully first-hand to a great extent, intellectual productivity is a very lofty thing for a human being to aspire to. I don't know how long it would have taken for Nietzsche to get around to a serious and close study of Aristotle.
One thing I do know, is that in Walter Kaufmann's (leading Nietzsche scholar and fairly prominent philosopher in his own right) translation of Beyond Good and Evil, namely aphorism 287 (or is it 257) about the noble soul having reverence for itself, Kaufmann makes a footnoted reference to Aristotle on the great-souled man. But it's that same aphorism that Rand had originally considered placing at the beginning of The Fountainhead, my pick for her best novel even though Atlas Shrugged has a great many virtues, as aesthetics-expert Hospers highlighted. This is during the phase of her career when Nietzsche was her primary intellectual influence (aside from herself, obviously) (and there was also Isabel Paterson), but it was within a few years that Aristotle (and secondarily Aquinas) became the chief intellectual influence to the point she acknowledged a philosophical debt only to him. Anyway, all three of the thinkers - Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand - seem to be in fundamental agreement about a great-souled man or noble soul having reverence for itself, a fundamental component of Rand's distinctive variety of egoism for sure. So why isn't she taken that much more seriously by academic philosophers already? Good question. One thing is, few if any of them were in the epistemic position that, say, Hospers was in, now were they.
Anyway, if we could get these three rather meticulous thinkers to agree on that premise - I say if, but I think it's a given? - about the great-souled and (therefore?) Randian-egoistic man, then shouldn't that inform a dominant new paradigm in ethical thinking?
What is dialectic, anyway? Sciabarra refers to it as "the art of context-keeping" (a fundamental focus of Understanding Objectivism, the chief methodological 'treatise' of Objectivism, duh.), and I take his Total Freedom to be a pretty complete - indeed 'dialectically complete or perfectionistic' - exercise in the art of context-keeping, starting with that fucking massive bibliography. (There are two books that I know of with larger bibliographies: Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (Rand's phrase "in the name of the best within us" comes to mind in this context) and T.H. Irwin's monumental 3-volume, 5000-ish-page-equivalent The Development of Ethics (OUP, 2008). Irwin is I think definitely most impressed with the Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical tradition, no surprise given how he compares them exhaustively with prominent alternatives including even Kant. All three of these books strike me as seriously impressive; what if they were in some way dialectically synthesized together along with the putative Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian synthesis about ethical egoism or individualism or eudaimonist-individualism or individualist-perfectionism, etc.
And funny I should bring up individualist-perfectionism, since that's a key theme of neo-Aristotelians Douglas Rasmussen (a Catholic who could be the leading authority on how Randian and Thomistic thought might be synthesized) and Douglas Den Uyl. Funny I should bring them up, since they did a response to Nozick on the Randian argument and I hadn't even brought Nozick up. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on the back cover by some prominent philosopher type as exhibiting an unsurpassed 'dialectical sensibility,' which it arguably does. Does this mean that he out-dialecticizes Rawls? Does anyone out-dialecticize Alan Gewirth, who wrote the book Self-Fulfillment (1998, PUP, at age 86, mind you) and Reason and Morality (1978, Chicago UP), the key themes of which are defended in Deryck Byleveld's daunting-looking 1991 book, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC)? That book looks thoroughly researched as well. Does dialectical completeness require some sort of positive rights after all? But if everyone adopts an Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian ethos about eudaimonistic individualistic perfectionist dialectical-completist, etc., would positive rights ever be a factor at that point, with everyone flourishing so? But is that realistic? Well, let's say we stage for a national audience a debate (well, dialectic) between long-dead but now-taken-very-seriously figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, et al, and see what kind of overlapping consensus they reach.
I'm not talking about intellectually lazy trolls on social media, now, I'm talking serious dialectical synthesis here.
Assume that all these thinkers in this staged debate/dialectic are adequately informed of at least a lot of the scholarship and philosophical writing that has occurred since their actual lifetimes. Would they all at least agree that you can only hope to match but not exceed Aristotle? Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl (RDU) appear to do so, and they're pretty dialectically complete, too, and they also happen to be in fundamental agreement (from all available indications) with Sciabarra about that (Aristotle the fountainhead of dialectic being among them, eudaimonism in ethics being another, and so on). Indeed, one must think of post-2000 RDU writings as having dialectically presupposed Total Freedom (a unit that condenses another 1300-ish units, we might say, or the way an internet link can condense a reference to a wider context within one word...), which makes it that much more dialectically complete. (What if Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism and (RDU's) Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2006, PSU) translate into essentially the same idea?) But have they dialecticized with Gewirth? Not that I know of, beyond Den Uyl's 1970s article on what he then referred to as Gewirth's Principle of Categorial Consistency or PCC at the time, but I do remember reading Rasmussen vs. Sterba in a 1987-ish book, The Catholic Bishops and the Economy: A Debate, and I'm not sure the debate there was resolved to my complete satisfaction.
(okay, that was composed during a listen of the 50-minute album Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, currently #6 on my list of favorites. to be continued, or have I made my point? ^_^ )
also, context-keeping and integration (a key focus of Rand's, and Peikoff's lecture courses and books) are essentially the same process. I.e., integration and dialectical synthesis are the same process. Where does Marx fit into all this, I haven't even mentioned him yet. But then I have to bring up Mises and Kolakowski, i.e., see how they fit into, i.e., integrate with these other concrete instances (of thinkers), and so on and so on. But how can I understand all these other thinkers to the same extent, with the same resource-constraints, that I studied and understood Rand so extensively? (My one "peer reviewed professional literature publication" is on Rand. My book was reviewed by a few esteemed peers (including an academic neo-Aristotelian philosopher) and passed with flying colors, I also think it's pretty good shit...but almost sure to be overshadowed by BLTP....)
also, dialectical completeness has something fundamental/essential to do with perfectionism in the philosophical tradition (of whom Aristotle was an exemplar, given his dialectical completeness, i.e., perfectionism and - therefore ultimately - intellectual perfectionism). Also, Rand is some sort of intellectual perfectionist (although she didn't seem to think that theoretical contemplation was the highest or most noble of the intellectual activities, but seemed to include all activities resulting from intensive focus, a fundamental that would lie at any account of 'Randian perfectionism' and perhaps arguably any similar perfectionist account such as the Dougs').
Also, Norton's eudaimonist perfectionist individualist self-actualization-ethics fits into all this quite beautifully, synthesizing ancient Greek themes with themes from modern psychologists like Jung (a big 'individuation' guy) and Maslow (hierarchy of needs or objective goods).
Ok so that's about an hour and 8 minutes worth of output, not bad I guess. Some promising, uh, leads anyway.
also this should tie in (integrate) closely with any philosophy curricula for children, duh.
1.5hrs spent after edits/additions, and the cannabuzz is gone. later?... (Next up?: How would Aristotle blog, cannabanized and fasted? Or: Aspiring to great-souled dialectical perfection/integration/kalon, etc.) (Is this one chock full of enough thorough-research-derived contextualizing links/leads yet? Hell, I hadn't even brought up Hegel yet, but Sciabarra incorporates his insights as well. And what did Hegel think of Aristotle? Surely Ferrarin (2001, CUP, post-dating Total Freedom by one year...) has insights there.)
Also: How a dialectic between leading philosophers in history and the likes of Ayn Rand might realistically play out, given a now large and ever growing roster of prominent philosophy professionals now taking a serious interest in her thought.
How might Nietzsche and Rand have 'dialectized' to reach a conclusion they could agree on? Nietzsche spoke of an 'overman', but Rand spoke more matter-of-factly of 'man the rational animal,' a position she claims to have shared in a very deep sense with Aristotle and also Aquinas. ("The three As" Rand would call them. She thought very highly of her own philosophical ability, but didn't proclaim to have surpassed these other two. But the only other philosopher she acknowledged a philosophical debt to, is Aristotle.)
Aristotle, the 'fountainhead of dialectic,' as Chris Matthew Sciabarra, author of Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (published 2000 by PSU Press, so exhaustively researched as to have a 48-page or approximately 1300-reference bibliography, which is at least 3 times what any other impressively researched academic book would have; the man is thorough) (Also, he wrote an also-thoroughly researched book on Rand, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995, PSU), containing the most complete bibliography of Leonard Peikoff materials, especially including Understanding Objectivism, an essential reference source for serious understanding of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Peikoff having spent oodles more time discussing philosophical issues with Rand than anyone else, etc. etc., although philosopher (and a serious well-reputed academic one at that) John Hospers also took Rand seriously enough to spend a lot of time discussing philosophical topics as well; but it's materials like Understanding Objectivism that one needs to master in order to be a seriously qualified scholarly commentator on Rand), dubbed him.
Hold on, let's say that it was Aquinas (say) dialecticalizing with Nietzsche (say), and while I haven't spent nearly the time studying these two that I had studied Rand's ideas (mainly for their claimed and real similarity to those of Aristotle, the fucking MAN...although much of my understanding of the fucking MAN comes from solidly reputed secondary sources, e.g., John M. Cooper's 1975 Reason and Human Good in Aristotle...), I can kinda imagine how a dialectic between (pre-Revelation-and-death) Aquinas and the (pre-going-mad) Nietzsche might have transpired, given the basic sensibility-vibe that I get from the various research sources (both primary and secondary) I've consulted on these two. But what if we hypothesize that Nietzsche got to know Aquinas and Aristotle and Rand better than he apparently did, how might a dialectical synthesis between these four (say) figures transpire? What sort of 'overlapping consensus' might they reach?
But wait, for Nietzsche to have become more familiar with these thinkers (most importantly Aristotle?), we have to hypothesize that, at minimum, he had a few more decades of intellectual productivity in him, and as we know from Aristotle and others and hopefully first-hand to a great extent, intellectual productivity is a very lofty thing for a human being to aspire to. I don't know how long it would have taken for Nietzsche to get around to a serious and close study of Aristotle.
One thing I do know, is that in Walter Kaufmann's (leading Nietzsche scholar and fairly prominent philosopher in his own right) translation of Beyond Good and Evil, namely aphorism 287 (or is it 257) about the noble soul having reverence for itself, Kaufmann makes a footnoted reference to Aristotle on the great-souled man. But it's that same aphorism that Rand had originally considered placing at the beginning of The Fountainhead, my pick for her best novel even though Atlas Shrugged has a great many virtues, as aesthetics-expert Hospers highlighted. This is during the phase of her career when Nietzsche was her primary intellectual influence (aside from herself, obviously) (and there was also Isabel Paterson), but it was within a few years that Aristotle (and secondarily Aquinas) became the chief intellectual influence to the point she acknowledged a philosophical debt only to him. Anyway, all three of the thinkers - Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand - seem to be in fundamental agreement about a great-souled man or noble soul having reverence for itself, a fundamental component of Rand's distinctive variety of egoism for sure. So why isn't she taken that much more seriously by academic philosophers already? Good question. One thing is, few if any of them were in the epistemic position that, say, Hospers was in, now were they.
Anyway, if we could get these three rather meticulous thinkers to agree on that premise - I say if, but I think it's a given? - about the great-souled and (therefore?) Randian-egoistic man, then shouldn't that inform a dominant new paradigm in ethical thinking?
What is dialectic, anyway? Sciabarra refers to it as "the art of context-keeping" (a fundamental focus of Understanding Objectivism, the chief methodological 'treatise' of Objectivism, duh.), and I take his Total Freedom to be a pretty complete - indeed 'dialectically complete or perfectionistic' - exercise in the art of context-keeping, starting with that fucking massive bibliography. (There are two books that I know of with larger bibliographies: Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (Rand's phrase "in the name of the best within us" comes to mind in this context) and T.H. Irwin's monumental 3-volume, 5000-ish-page-equivalent The Development of Ethics (OUP, 2008). Irwin is I think definitely most impressed with the Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical tradition, no surprise given how he compares them exhaustively with prominent alternatives including even Kant. All three of these books strike me as seriously impressive; what if they were in some way dialectically synthesized together along with the putative Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian synthesis about ethical egoism or individualism or eudaimonist-individualism or individualist-perfectionism, etc.
And funny I should bring up individualist-perfectionism, since that's a key theme of neo-Aristotelians Douglas Rasmussen (a Catholic who could be the leading authority on how Randian and Thomistic thought might be synthesized) and Douglas Den Uyl. Funny I should bring them up, since they did a response to Nozick on the Randian argument and I hadn't even brought Nozick up. Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on the back cover by some prominent philosopher type as exhibiting an unsurpassed 'dialectical sensibility,' which it arguably does. Does this mean that he out-dialecticizes Rawls? Does anyone out-dialecticize Alan Gewirth, who wrote the book Self-Fulfillment (1998, PUP, at age 86, mind you) and Reason and Morality (1978, Chicago UP), the key themes of which are defended in Deryck Byleveld's daunting-looking 1991 book, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC)? That book looks thoroughly researched as well. Does dialectical completeness require some sort of positive rights after all? But if everyone adopts an Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian ethos about eudaimonistic individualistic perfectionist dialectical-completist, etc., would positive rights ever be a factor at that point, with everyone flourishing so? But is that realistic? Well, let's say we stage for a national audience a debate (well, dialectic) between long-dead but now-taken-very-seriously figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, et al, and see what kind of overlapping consensus they reach.
I'm not talking about intellectually lazy trolls on social media, now, I'm talking serious dialectical synthesis here.
Assume that all these thinkers in this staged debate/dialectic are adequately informed of at least a lot of the scholarship and philosophical writing that has occurred since their actual lifetimes. Would they all at least agree that you can only hope to match but not exceed Aristotle? Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl (RDU) appear to do so, and they're pretty dialectically complete, too, and they also happen to be in fundamental agreement (from all available indications) with Sciabarra about that (Aristotle the fountainhead of dialectic being among them, eudaimonism in ethics being another, and so on). Indeed, one must think of post-2000 RDU writings as having dialectically presupposed Total Freedom (a unit that condenses another 1300-ish units, we might say, or the way an internet link can condense a reference to a wider context within one word...), which makes it that much more dialectically complete. (What if Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism and (RDU's) Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2006, PSU) translate into essentially the same idea?) But have they dialecticized with Gewirth? Not that I know of, beyond Den Uyl's 1970s article on what he then referred to as Gewirth's Principle of Categorial Consistency or PCC at the time, but I do remember reading Rasmussen vs. Sterba in a 1987-ish book, The Catholic Bishops and the Economy: A Debate, and I'm not sure the debate there was resolved to my complete satisfaction.
(okay, that was composed during a listen of the 50-minute album Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, currently #6 on my list of favorites. to be continued, or have I made my point? ^_^ )
also, context-keeping and integration (a key focus of Rand's, and Peikoff's lecture courses and books) are essentially the same process. I.e., integration and dialectical synthesis are the same process. Where does Marx fit into all this, I haven't even mentioned him yet. But then I have to bring up Mises and Kolakowski, i.e., see how they fit into, i.e., integrate with these other concrete instances (of thinkers), and so on and so on. But how can I understand all these other thinkers to the same extent, with the same resource-constraints, that I studied and understood Rand so extensively? (My one "peer reviewed professional literature publication" is on Rand. My book was reviewed by a few esteemed peers (including an academic neo-Aristotelian philosopher) and passed with flying colors, I also think it's pretty good shit...but almost sure to be overshadowed by BLTP....)
also, dialectical completeness has something fundamental/essential to do with perfectionism in the philosophical tradition (of whom Aristotle was an exemplar, given his dialectical completeness, i.e., perfectionism and - therefore ultimately - intellectual perfectionism). Also, Rand is some sort of intellectual perfectionist (although she didn't seem to think that theoretical contemplation was the highest or most noble of the intellectual activities, but seemed to include all activities resulting from intensive focus, a fundamental that would lie at any account of 'Randian perfectionism' and perhaps arguably any similar perfectionist account such as the Dougs').
Also, Norton's eudaimonist perfectionist individualist self-actualization-ethics fits into all this quite beautifully, synthesizing ancient Greek themes with themes from modern psychologists like Jung (a big 'individuation' guy) and Maslow (hierarchy of needs or objective goods).
Ok so that's about an hour and 8 minutes worth of output, not bad I guess. Some promising, uh, leads anyway.
also this should tie in (integrate) closely with any philosophy curricula for children, duh.
1.5hrs spent after edits/additions, and the cannabuzz is gone. later?... (Next up?: How would Aristotle blog, cannabanized and fasted? Or: Aspiring to great-souled dialectical perfection/integration/kalon, etc.) (Is this one chock full of enough thorough-research-derived contextualizing links/leads yet? Hell, I hadn't even brought up Hegel yet, but Sciabarra incorporates his insights as well. And what did Hegel think of Aristotle? Surely Ferrarin (2001, CUP, post-dating Total Freedom by one year...) has insights there.)
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Spreading philosophy for children ASAFP
As I keep pointing out (and for abundantly good reason), philosophy for children is far and away the biggest no-brainer of all time. Right now people are fighting over crumbs compared to what's at stake here. Given the nature of philosophical activity, properly conceived - as love of wisdom and therefore organized (and therefore better) living - there is perhaps no human problem that can't be solved by more philosophy. (It gets even better with Aristotelian philosophy, which may be the best kind of philosophical activity around. If you haven't yet thought in terms of 'Ultimate living through ultimate philosophy,' then you have some catching up to do.)
The thoroughly-researched Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on Philosophy for Children has an almost fresh copyright date (2018), so it's not like this article has been sitting around for a long time not being noticed on its merits. What the 2018 copyright date does say is that it took about that amount of time for a philosopher to do the necessary integration of research materials out there and consolidate the essential findings all in one place, with a compelling narrative tying it all together.
(I've had the time/resources only to go through McCarty's Little Big Minds, within the past several months or so. Just on its own it makes a compelling case for philosophy for kids, but it has a 2006 copyright date. What has happened in the intervening 13 years? Someone with the time, interest and expertise had to come along and organize all the available research. YouTube will provide leads to Jana Mohr Lone and others (edit: see also Lone's blog), but won't provide you the comprehensive set of leads available at the SEP entry.)
So we're into the second year after the SEP entry's publication, and at least one philosopher has taken up the task of blogging about it vigorously. I have just taken the next step of contacting the author of the SEP entry by email to inquire about how best this no-brainer idea can be spread ASAFP. The author probably has a good network of contacts in this area, and if a network of contacts includes philosophers, a potential intellectual juggernaut is in the making. By its very nature any opposition to philosophy for children is intellectually impotent, easily overwhelmed given enough time and dedication among the philosophers, the most advanced-level integrators in the humanities.
The question: why didn't I think of contacting the author before today? Well, this is the nature of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and limitations on time and mental resources. Were I smarter than I am (I am merely a fanatical lover/pursuer of wisdom), this may well have happened sooner. The better (Aristotelian) policy of mental integration being applied, the sooner such discoveries can be made and exploited for maximum benefit.
And, so, if you're reading this, what measures might you take to help spread the message of philosophy for children? Perhaps contact the author of the SEP entry as I have and express your support. Provide the SEP link with a good money-quote (this linked one quoting the author that most anyone with philosophical curiosity themselves can teach this subject; and most anyone can have philosophical curiosity) on social media when good opportunities arise, making sure to mention how authoritative the SEP is. Those are a couple ideas that occur to me so far. (Do I have to do all this myself? Or will the end of history simply have to be a collaborative effort? But of course it will....)
When a philosopher-friend on facebook linked to this article (by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative almost despairing over the seductive appeal of "alt-right" views to alienated young white men seeking meaning (and we're not talking the benign and philosophical Jordan Peterson-type guidance, but, well, identity-politics for white males), the thought occurred to me: "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if this or the next generation of young males are taught to think philosophically before this all becomes a problem...." Seeing as I can't fathom a remotely plausible comeback to this, there probably isn't one.
Is there any social problem that wouldn't be optimally addressed by philosophy for kids? Just now I see on the news the latest story about cop-killing dirtbags. Put the kids on philosophy and they won't end up being cop-killing dirtbags.
Given that this topic is of the highest priority for a wisdom-lover, I will continue to pursue this vigorously however I can. Providing top-notch blog postings as evidence for the benefits philosophy can bring will continue to be a part of this process. But others with sincere concern about the future of humanity will have to do their part, as well.
I am currently discussing a bet on facebook with Bryan Caplan (Econ, GMU), winner of 14 bets in a row and counting, as to how soon philosophy for children can/will be part of the regular education curriculum nationwide (if not worldwide...). If you follow the logic of this through, at some point there will be a checkmate situation against any opposition to philosophy for children. (Just the very publicizing of the bet/idea can only affect the very circumstances being betted on, in the direction of philosophy-for-children sooner than later. Think this through, and the only end-result is checkmate, pretty soon. Just what the endgame will look like, I do not know yet, but it should be pretty awesome.) I am willing to bet with long odds. Given my own context of knowledge, it's a no-brainer.
Like Sciabarra did his homework in his own area of expertise, I did my homework well enough to notice the McCarty book in a library (who uses those anymore?) and to notice and promote the SEP entry so relatively soon after its publication, as no other philosophy blog or social-media platform is doing (yet). (I found the SEP entry by googling "philosophy for children" after finding only so much material on youtube and not being satisfied with that.)
The rest of this blog's entries, and my book, should be a good indicator of how well and thoroughly I do my homework. Philosophy for children will get them doing their homework really darn well, also.
Why delay?
[Addendum: Why does American politics kinda suck right now? Well, a huge part of it has to do with our elected 'leaders' being so philosophically illiterate when contrasted with all of the key Framers. Think of whatever social problem we have and it probably, likely, or definitely has to do with not enough philosophy going around.]
[Addendum #2: Imagine a scenario: the teachers get a 5% bump in pay/funding if they teach philosophy for kids according to the best available researched protocols, and additional bumps as results come in. Why wouldn't they go for it?]
The thoroughly-researched Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on Philosophy for Children has an almost fresh copyright date (2018), so it's not like this article has been sitting around for a long time not being noticed on its merits. What the 2018 copyright date does say is that it took about that amount of time for a philosopher to do the necessary integration of research materials out there and consolidate the essential findings all in one place, with a compelling narrative tying it all together.
(I've had the time/resources only to go through McCarty's Little Big Minds, within the past several months or so. Just on its own it makes a compelling case for philosophy for kids, but it has a 2006 copyright date. What has happened in the intervening 13 years? Someone with the time, interest and expertise had to come along and organize all the available research. YouTube will provide leads to Jana Mohr Lone and others (edit: see also Lone's blog), but won't provide you the comprehensive set of leads available at the SEP entry.)
So we're into the second year after the SEP entry's publication, and at least one philosopher has taken up the task of blogging about it vigorously. I have just taken the next step of contacting the author of the SEP entry by email to inquire about how best this no-brainer idea can be spread ASAFP. The author probably has a good network of contacts in this area, and if a network of contacts includes philosophers, a potential intellectual juggernaut is in the making. By its very nature any opposition to philosophy for children is intellectually impotent, easily overwhelmed given enough time and dedication among the philosophers, the most advanced-level integrators in the humanities.
The question: why didn't I think of contacting the author before today? Well, this is the nature of incomplete and imperfect knowledge, and limitations on time and mental resources. Were I smarter than I am (I am merely a fanatical lover/pursuer of wisdom), this may well have happened sooner. The better (Aristotelian) policy of mental integration being applied, the sooner such discoveries can be made and exploited for maximum benefit.
And, so, if you're reading this, what measures might you take to help spread the message of philosophy for children? Perhaps contact the author of the SEP entry as I have and express your support. Provide the SEP link with a good money-quote (this linked one quoting the author that most anyone with philosophical curiosity themselves can teach this subject; and most anyone can have philosophical curiosity) on social media when good opportunities arise, making sure to mention how authoritative the SEP is. Those are a couple ideas that occur to me so far. (Do I have to do all this myself? Or will the end of history simply have to be a collaborative effort? But of course it will....)
When a philosopher-friend on facebook linked to this article (by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative almost despairing over the seductive appeal of "alt-right" views to alienated young white men seeking meaning (and we're not talking the benign and philosophical Jordan Peterson-type guidance, but, well, identity-politics for white males), the thought occurred to me: "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if this or the next generation of young males are taught to think philosophically before this all becomes a problem...." Seeing as I can't fathom a remotely plausible comeback to this, there probably isn't one.
Is there any social problem that wouldn't be optimally addressed by philosophy for kids? Just now I see on the news the latest story about cop-killing dirtbags. Put the kids on philosophy and they won't end up being cop-killing dirtbags.
Given that this topic is of the highest priority for a wisdom-lover, I will continue to pursue this vigorously however I can. Providing top-notch blog postings as evidence for the benefits philosophy can bring will continue to be a part of this process. But others with sincere concern about the future of humanity will have to do their part, as well.
I am currently discussing a bet on facebook with Bryan Caplan (Econ, GMU), winner of 14 bets in a row and counting, as to how soon philosophy for children can/will be part of the regular education curriculum nationwide (if not worldwide...). If you follow the logic of this through, at some point there will be a checkmate situation against any opposition to philosophy for children. (Just the very publicizing of the bet/idea can only affect the very circumstances being betted on, in the direction of philosophy-for-children sooner than later. Think this through, and the only end-result is checkmate, pretty soon. Just what the endgame will look like, I do not know yet, but it should be pretty awesome.) I am willing to bet with long odds. Given my own context of knowledge, it's a no-brainer.
Like Sciabarra did his homework in his own area of expertise, I did my homework well enough to notice the McCarty book in a library (who uses those anymore?) and to notice and promote the SEP entry so relatively soon after its publication, as no other philosophy blog or social-media platform is doing (yet). (I found the SEP entry by googling "philosophy for children" after finding only so much material on youtube and not being satisfied with that.)
The rest of this blog's entries, and my book, should be a good indicator of how well and thoroughly I do my homework. Philosophy for children will get them doing their homework really darn well, also.
Why delay?
[Addendum: Why does American politics kinda suck right now? Well, a huge part of it has to do with our elected 'leaders' being so philosophically illiterate when contrasted with all of the key Framers. Think of whatever social problem we have and it probably, likely, or definitely has to do with not enough philosophy going around.]
[Addendum #2: Imagine a scenario: the teachers get a 5% bump in pay/funding if they teach philosophy for kids according to the best available researched protocols, and additional bumps as results come in. Why wouldn't they go for it?]
Monday, January 28, 2019
Philosophy for children, cont'd
When you can get philosophers in unanimity on something, you know (or do you?) that it's a no-brainer. One thing that philosophers can be in unanimous agreement about, once they've read the (thoroughly researched) Stanford Encyclopedia entry at the very least, is the urgent necessity to spread the idea of philosophy for children as far and wide ASAFP. Once again, a money quote:
(Is it any wonder Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock for his philosophical activity - on charges of "corrupting the youth" and "denying the gods." I believe the human race has since learned better.)
The kind of resistance described here can be remarkably easy to overcome. For a period of years now I have been in regular personal discussion and correspondence with a Christian pastor who is thoroughly on board with the spread of wisdom-loving once I've explained the basic concept. He is now urging me to write that (ultimate?) philosophy for children book that may well need to be written (or does it?...). Take as an example the highest-level theistic philosophizing in blog format (or any other that I know of) at Maverick Philosopher. Far as I can make out, Maverick is the wisest blogger on the planet and it might not be close. (So anytime now, he, too, should be robustly on board with philosophy-for-children....) If anything, the kids need philosophy to best defend their faith against the intellectual sloppiness and hubris of the 'new atheists.' (David Bentley Hart's smackdown of the 'New Atheists' and their philosophical illiteracy is pretty epic.) Aquinas is the greatest pro-intellectual-perfectionism figure in the Christian tradition. There's nothing for Christian parents to fear here, and tons to gain. (Doesn't a loving God want intellectual perfection for us, so that we may face our earthly demise with the utmost wisdom?)
Nevertheless, because they lack background in the formal study of philosophy, many teachers are reluctant to encourage the philosophical thinking of their students. Their fears, however, are exaggerated. Familiarity with some of the standard philosophical literature might be desirable, but it is not necessary for bringing Philosophy for Children into the classroom. What is required is the ability to facilitate philosophical discussion. For this, it is much more important that teachers have some philosophical curiosity themselves than a familiarity with academic philosophical literature. Like their students, teachers unfamiliar with the discipline of philosophy may nevertheless have an aptitude for philosophical thinking—or at least a knack for recognizing when others are engaged in philosophical thought. [emphasis added]The implications of this are of end-of-history-level (or should I just say it: utopian) significance. (I now have a bet on offer with Bryan Caplan on facebook about how soon, say, philosophy-for-children might end up in the regular education curriculum. Given Caplan's betting protocols - he's undefeated in 14 bets and counting - I should be rather confident that I know whereof I speak.) One implication is this: in order to do the rightest-possible thing by our kids and get them into philosophy at as young an age as feasible, the adults need to get philosophically curious themselves. (About fucking time?) Philosophy is intellectual curiosity, and intellectual curiosity about philosophy may well be the best kind there is. Just maybe.
In light of this let's consider one piece of feedback I've gotten about this on facebook (on a homework-doing-focused group, Polymath Mafia):
Michael Strong Chris Cathcart I've been leading highly philosophical intellectual dialogues in classrooms since the 1980s. I started out in Chicago Public Schools, then created special dedicated programs in public schools in Alaska, and since then have created or co-created a charter and many private schools in which Socratic dialogue was core (I've looked at the Philosophy for Children curriculum and found it a bit too constraining for my tastes, but I've certainly spent thousands of hours engaging students of all ages in philosophical dialogue in classrooms). By the mid-1990s I had concluded that it is impossible to do this at scale with any kind of quality in government schools. The combination of political governance and bureaucratic management makes any kind of serious innovation at scale in public schools impossible. There are certainly individual teachers, principals, and occasionally superintendents who implement good programs for a period of time. But when the supporting school board member(s), superintendents, or principals leave then the programs tend to revert back towards the mean: Public education is mostly about compliance. In small districts there can be some responsiveness to parent demands, but in larger districts bureaucratic compliance is the name of the game. Moreover, in many parts of the US the parents are actively hostile to philosophical inquiry. When I was implementing Socratic questioning in Alaska, a parent approached me saying, "Your questions cause confusion. Confusion comes from Satan. What you are doing is Satanic. I'm going to get you kicked out of the district." And in most districts, 5-10 activist parents can kill just about any innovation. Thus paradoxically, in order to create a more philosophically sophisticated citizenry, we need to eliminate government schools and allow for a market in education. My book, which outlines my approach, https://www.amazon.com/Habit-Thought-Socratic-Seminars-Practice/dp/0944337392
(Is it any wonder Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock for his philosophical activity - on charges of "corrupting the youth" and "denying the gods." I believe the human race has since learned better.)
The kind of resistance described here can be remarkably easy to overcome. For a period of years now I have been in regular personal discussion and correspondence with a Christian pastor who is thoroughly on board with the spread of wisdom-loving once I've explained the basic concept. He is now urging me to write that (ultimate?) philosophy for children book that may well need to be written (or does it?...). Take as an example the highest-level theistic philosophizing in blog format (or any other that I know of) at Maverick Philosopher. Far as I can make out, Maverick is the wisest blogger on the planet and it might not be close. (So anytime now, he, too, should be robustly on board with philosophy-for-children....) If anything, the kids need philosophy to best defend their faith against the intellectual sloppiness and hubris of the 'new atheists.' (David Bentley Hart's smackdown of the 'New Atheists' and their philosophical illiteracy is pretty epic.) Aquinas is the greatest pro-intellectual-perfectionism figure in the Christian tradition. There's nothing for Christian parents to fear here, and tons to gain. (Doesn't a loving God want intellectual perfection for us, so that we may face our earthly demise with the utmost wisdom?)
I don't agree with all of Michael Strong's points above. The schooling format is essentially irrelevant in this context. The benefits far exceed any costs. At the present time, fights over school formats or funding are fights over CRUMBS compared to what's at stake here. The only problem here is an incompleteness of (shared) knowledge, is all.
AOC and the toxic twitterized destruction of discourse
It's amazing how no one has drawn the cognitively-available stark connection between these two phenomena yet.
The most important topic that can be discussed right now is philosophy for children. You won't find that being discussed on Twitter.
Let's set aside the Trump phenomenon for now - I'm not interested in the slightest in leftist-loser and Democrat whataboutism at the moment - and look at perhaps the single most intellectually-destructive and therefore toxic figure on social media right now, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I know that twitterized memories may be short, but let's look back within the past month for the level of idiocy AOC is capable of, and rewarded with "likes" on social media for:
(This tweet was in the wake of incoming Demon Rat congresscritter Rashida Tlaib saying that they would "impeach the motherfucker!")
I'll reproduce what I said earlier in this blog, and to which there is no reasonable counter that I can remotely fathom:
In the twisted cognitive world of [AOC] & Co., such gender-baiting is now the norm even when it is illogical and gratuitous. To anyone with common sense - this excludes today's unhinged leftists - the gender of the person using foul language toward Trump is entirely irrelevant.
But even more damning of [AOC]'s cognitive "skills": anyone who knows how to read and parse language properly knows that Trump was not admitting to sexual assault. He said that he grabbed women "by the pussy" and that they welcomed it. ("You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything....Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.")
Perhaps the demonic Democrats have managed to bastardize the meaning of "sexual assault" as well?
This is not the only time AOC has spread her blatantly toxic (intellectually inferior) garbage on social media. Let's try this one out:
Ryan Saavedra provides video in which AOC says: "If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House." Saavedra adds: "The 3 branches of government: executive, legislative, judicial."
How does AOC respond to Saavedra's correction? Watch:
Maybe instead of Republicans drooling over every minute of footage of me in slow-mo, waiting to chop up word slips that I correct in real-tomd, they actually step up enough to make the argument they want to make:
that they don’t believe people deserve a right to healthcare.
Let's set aside for the moment the issue of a 'right to healthcare' (an issue AOC would be too ignorant to discuss non-toxically). [ * - see appended note]
Here is what AOC considers to be a real-time correction:
"If we work our butts off to make sure that we take back all three chambers of Congress — Uh, rather, all three chambers of government: the presidency, the Senate, and the House."
It is simply rationally unacceptable for an elected member of Congress to get away with saying that she made a correction here. Do I need to spell it out?
(See also: Dunning-Kruger effect, observed in those whose overestimate their own cognitive abilities and don't know it.)
(See also: Dunning-Kruger effect, observed in those whose overestimate their own cognitive abilities and don't know it.)
In just the past few days, AOC took to more flat-out intellectual laziness/dishonesty, by smearing a source based on its supposed funding source. (Only when she was called out on her obvious scummery did she back down.) She doesn't really care about doing her homework before making her claims. Nothing about AOC's MO is progressive.
[Edit: Does AOC's following have the cognitive characteristics of an apocalyptic cult? Cult leaders are well-known for their charisma but otherwise generally reviled as toxic.]
[Edit #2: In the "You can't make this shit up" department, AOC said, "I think it’s wrong that a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage." How can someone possessing such a superior moral compass be so intellectually lazy?]
[Edit #3: The real problem with AOC? Her enablers.]
If we want to really crack down on social media (and especially twitter) toxicity, we should home on in its biggest offenders ASAFP.
Next up: More on philosophy for children.
[*] - The global GDP right now is roughly $75 Trillion, or about $10K for every inhabitant of the planet. How much would it cost to fund this so-called right for all people who putatively have this right? Why are the so-called rights of which AOC and her "progressive" ilk speak so expensive? This is a separate issue from whether a decent people, through some institutional arrangement or other, statist or private, help to ensure people's needs are met. This is about what kinds of enforceable claims we can make on the lives, minds, and efforts of others. [The claim of a right not to be killed is enforceable, but doesn't really make any demands on the lives, minds, and efforts of others, now does it. Anyway, the point of having a government isn't to generate desirable outcomes but to secure freedom.] Even Ayn Rand says in her Galt speech that helping others as a spiritual payment for their virtue is a selfish necessity, but not a matter of duty as such. This is even assuming people would need help in a society where its members live with maximum rationality, able (e.g.) to compose blogs that meet high philosophical standards. It's easy to make happen. Plus, healthcare costs can be drastically reduced for just about anyone who does his lifestyle homework. The Democrats and Republicans are fighting over CRUMBS right now.
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