My review of Edward Craig’s Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elliptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and mental needs and powers, living in societies speaking the same languages, living in finite space and time, living within the safety and danger of the natural world, living subject to the actions of other people, and living with the ability to do things that affect other people and the course of events. How do such beings understand themselves and make decisions about what to do?
The word mystery suggests a religious project, but philosophy is aimed at understanding mystery without trusting the stories of priests,prophets and gurus who claim to have had the mystery revealed to them or to have mastered a tradition based on revelation allegedly subjectively experienced by some individual person or persons in history. Religion rests on trusting stories of revelation and miracles presented by other human beings.
Category: Sharp Stick
Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction
Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction (ISBN 0-19-285421-6)by Edward Craig, is one of the Oxford University Press’s excellent Very Short Introductions.
A few years ago I started to read Simon Blackburn’s Think. I was thrown off by a few of the later chapters and never finished it. I have gone back into reading philosophy by way of some of Mortimer Adler’s books. Adler likes to go back to Aristotle, and is hard on most of the philosophers since the Enlightenment. For reasons that I don’t really understand, I have been finding that religious writing and serious theology, no matter how elegantly written and reasoned, does not carry a coherent vision. I am accepting that I am who I am – a stubborn and skeptical person.
Craig’s approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed.
Rating the Great Thinkers
From the news – a story in the (London) Times online about the BBC poll to find the greatest philosopher of all time. Marx has surged to the top of the list. He was the BBC’s Great Thinker of the Millenium in 1999. The old Left has not lost its will to live after all.
The BBC poll site has its explanation for this exercise, and some resources including noted ideas, and expert appraisals. Useful, actually, but not as much fun as the song in Monty Python’s Australian Philosophy department sketch. “Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar, he’d drink you under the table, Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am.”
Whose Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit seems to have been selling briskly. I have seen it listed as a bestseller on some of the lists in any given week. Bullshit is becoming a fertile tool for fashionable social criticism, although it seems to be falling back into its old usage of an epithet. People are jumping on the honeywagon, talking about the things things they don’t agree with as “bullshit”. Do some kinds of bullshit smell worse than others?
A couple of weeks ago, the Free Press published a review of Laura Penny’s book Your Call is Important to Us – The Truth about Bullshit. According to the reviewer, Penny quotes Frankfurt and applies the idea of bullshit to the way companies and bureaucracies treat their customers and clients, and to American politics, foreign and domestic. She is politically on the left, vaguely anti-American.
The book is being promoted like a new book, but it’s actually a quality paperback release, by McLelland & Stewart of a book originally published Your Call Is Important to Us: So Why Isn’t Anyone Answering? published by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross as (ISBN ISBN 1-55199-092-X). Macfarlane, Walter & Ross was a non-fiction publisher, sold by Stoddard to McLelland and Stewart before some of the turmoil in the Canadian book trade in the last decade. M&S announced it was shutting down that division in April 2003. I haven’t been able to find when the original edition of Your Call is Important to Us was published. Most bookstores don’t list it, or list it as unavailable. Some bookstore catalogues have obviously incorrect publication dates – they are in the future. Some pages that say it was published in April or September 2004, which may be more accurate. It’s a nearly dead Canadian book on the back list, revived by good marketing, riding the bullshit wave. The author owes something to some of the business bullshit of her publisher and agent.
Six Great Ideas
Once again, a note about a philosophy primer by Mortimer J. Adler. He wrote Six Great Ideas in 1981. He divides the ideas into two groups. Truth, goodness and beauty are ideas we judge by, and liberty, equality and justice are ideas that we act on. His discussion of each idea is broken down into 3 or 4 short chapters. The book is around 250 pages long, divided into 28 short chapters.
Seances, Carlos Castaneda etc
Following the links from an essay, featured at AL Daily, published in the San Franciso Journal called “Leaving the Left“, I reached the web site of Keith Thompson, a writer in California. His site includes some of his freelance articles and essays including his interview of the writer and fakir Carlos Castaneda, and a magazine piece about a seance.
Mediums get Small grant
A quick peek at the news from New Zealand – spiritualists get a civic grant to fund a counselling service.
Novel Perspectives???
Yesterday, I posted a link to The Onion’s satire about fictionology. today, a perfect example of an intelligent person who chooses a value system that lets her choose fiction over fact because it helps her to feels better about herself. Check out this essay by Martha Montello, Novel Perspectives on Bioethics at the Chronicles of Higher Education. She argues that we ought to be learning our ethics from fiction, and base our moral decisions on fairy tales and science fiction.
For a laugh
Since this is from The Onion, I guess it’s satire. It’s an unfortunately believable story about cults and postmodern ideas about making up the religion you want. It’s called “Scientology losing Ground to New Fictionology.”
Holy Comets
A Russian astrologer is suing NASA because a space mission, Deep Impact, is going to fire an explosive impactor into the Tempel-1 Comet. It’s against her religion. The story from SciAm Perspectives, the Web log of the editors of Scientific American, and from MosNews an English language Russian News service.