Critique of Religion and Philosophy, section 1, part 1, first installment

Notes on philosophers & schools of philosophy that are name-dropped in the Critique of Religion and Philosophy, by Walter Kaufmann. Most of this material is extracted from Wikipedia entries.

Section 1 (pages 1-3)

Bacon, Francis -- 1561-1626 -- Creator of Empiricism; established and popularized the scientific method and inductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning, knowledge is derived from the evidence of our senses, and our theories are not absolutely true, but rather are conditional on the evidence. Any theory may be falsified if new evidence is gathered which contradicts it (though the term theory is not properly applied to any hypothesis until it has been quite thoroughly tested.) He is also credited with bringing in the industrial age through his belief that innovation, informed by scientific knowledge, was capable of solving the problems of mankind.

Descartes, René -- 1596-1650 -- "The Father of Modern Philosophy" -- Laid the foundations for Rationalism. First champion of the use of reason (or logic) to determine truth; considered a well-informed reason to be the proper basis of morality. Used a method called methodological skepticism, which involved rejecting all hypotheses that "can be doubted" and then attempting to re-establish them. In doing so he shifted the emphasis in philosophy from "What is true?" to "Of what can I be certain?" "Cogito, ergo sum" -- "I think, therefore I am" -- was his first, and most famous, example of a self-evident truth. He felt confident that thought (specifically, conscious thought) existed, and trusted logical deduction as a method of proof, but doubted the evidence of his senses. Later in life, he put forward an ontological proof of a benevolent God, and used that proof to justify the conclusion that his senses could in fact be trusted (at least to a limited extent,) and that the external world of which his senses informed him did in fact exist, because a benevolent God would not choose to deceive him. (Yikes! Surely there must be a better reason than *that*!) Originated the concept of a dualism between a non-material mind and a material body, connected through the pineal gland as the seat of the soul (So that's where that idea comes from!) Believed in free will. Also a mathematician; the Cartesian coordinate system was named after him, and he laid the groundwork for the development of calculus. Influenced by Aristotle, Stoicism, Augustine.

Rationalism -- opposed by Empiricism. Originated in the work of Descartes; championed by Spinoza and Leibniz (all of whom were mathematicians.) The idea that reason, not evidence (i.e. logic, not experimentation) is the proper source of knowledge.

Empiricism -- opposed by Rationalism. Originated in the work of Bacon; championed by Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Rousseau, and Hume. The idea that sensory evidence, not reason, is the proper source of knowledge.

----------------

Socrates -- circa 469-399 BC -- primarily known through the writings of Plato; his beliefs cannot be readily distinguished from Plato's. Championed the Socratic method (a.k.a. dialectics,) in which a series of questions is used to elucidate a subject. In this method, beliefs are broken down and examined, and rejected if they can be contradicted. He applied this technique primarily in the field of ethics, but it is also one of the bases of the scientific method, in which a large unknown is broken down into smaller unknowns until one arrives at a hypothesis which can be tested. Made lasting contributions to epistemology; famous quote: "What I do not know, I do not think I know," often paraphrased/intepreted as "I know that I know nothing." He believed in the innate goodness of humanity, and that people only do wrong out of ignorance.

Epistemology -- the philosophy of knowledge. What is it, how can it be acquired, to what extent is it possible to know?

Sophism -- root word means "wisdom." An ancient Greek educational system, whose members taught philosophy and rhetoric to children of the nobility. They were condemned by Socrates for withholding wisdom from those who could not afford to pay for it.

Stoicism -- "Virtue is sufficient for happiness." Destructive emotions are a result of errors in judgement; a sage (perfect person) is free from such emotions. Actions, not words, are the true measure of a man. This school of thought originated in ancient Greece, a century or so after Socrates and Plato.

------------

Spinoza, Baruch -- 1632-1677 -- Laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment. He rejected Descartes's mind-body dualism, and believed instead in the essential unity of all things. In his view, God is immanent in Nature, and all of reality is made up of a single substance, governed by a single set of rules. "Human experience is but a single drop of water in an infinite ocean which constitutes existence." (Cool; I love this conception of reality, but I never knew where it came from before.) He rejected free will in favor of determinism, believing that the course of history is entirely predetermined by an infinite chain of cause and effect. He imagined, however, that it is possible to achieve a more enlightened state of enslavement to our impulses, by becoming rationally aware, or conscious, of the reasons behind them (an idea that was fleshed out in Freud's psychoanalytic method.) In his view, good and evil are only meaningful in relation to a situation or set of interests: all that exists is part of the perfect underlying substance of God. Knowledge is divided into opinion, reason, and intuition; Spinoza preferred intuition.

Enlightenment -- An intellectual movement that favored reason and individualism over faith and tradition, and promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual exchange. 

Individualism -- The idea that individual rights take precedence over collective goals and interests.

Leibniz, Gottfried -- 1646-1716 -- Admired Spinoza's intellect, and was accused of appropriating some of his ideas, but was dismayed by his conclusions where they departed from Christianity. His ideas laid the foundations for logic, and anticipated analytic and linguistic philosophy. Believed that this is the best of all possible worlds God could have created, and that everything exists in harmony and for a reason. (This must be the philosophy that was caricatured in the person of Pangloss, in Candide.) Developed a theory of monads, which he conceived as individual, independent, eternal and decomposable "elementary particles" of being, which could be as simple as an atom or as complex as a human being. This was a departure both from Decartes's dualism and Spinoza's essential unity of being. He believed that reason and faith are ultimately compatible, and must be reconciled; to do so, he softened Spinoza's absolute determinism to a relative determinism in which spontaneous action is possible. God is infinite and perfect, in his view, but humans have limited understanding, and evil comes into the world through human error when we exercise our capacity for spontaneous action. Leibniz was too busy being a scientist to pull his philosophy together into a coherent body of work, so it's mostly been inferred from a collection of short articles and letters. 

------------ Okay, my brain is full. Here's a placeholder for the rest of them.....

Metaphysics

Kant (Immanuel)

Continental Philosophy

Hegel

Pragmatism

Positivism

Analysis

Existentialism

Romanticism

Plato

Aristotle

Hume (John)

Utilitarianism

Nietzche

William James

John Dewey

Linguistic Analysis

British Idealism

T.H. Green

Language Philosophy

Bradley

G.E. Moore

Bentham

Heidegger

Ack! That's it for section 1 (the first three pages)

Section 2.

Mill (John Stuart)

Russell (Bertrand)

Hobbes

Berkeley

My Dad, an Agent of Change

So what does an Agent of Change actually do?

I'm going to use my father as an example. He received a highly prestigious award, the "other" most prestigious Public Health award in the State of Minnesota, three days before he died. He had received the first most prestigious award more than thirty years previously. Both were given to him for the same achievement. He had worked first to document a problem and then to design and implement a system to address it. He had acted as an Agent of Change.

The problem he addressed was that people living in small towns and rural areas had many more adverse health outcomes than people living in the city. They, and their physicians, had no access to the cutting edge facilities, tools, and knowledge that were available in the urban research hospitals. At the time there were two independent health systems operating in the state, a network of small-town health clinics, and a network of city hospitals. The two did not communicate, and there was significant rivalry between them.

Dad spent years traveling around to every small town clinic in the state, meeting and talking to the leaders, and convincing them they would benefit from working together, instead of in competition, with the big city hospitals. At the same time he was speaking to the leaders in the hospitals, telling them about people who were dying in rural areas for lack of specialty services that were readily available in their facilities, and convincing them their services would be more effective if they worked together with small town doctors, instead of looking down on them. Eventually he convinced enough people to get a group together to discuss how they might form an alliance. When they came up with a plan he took it to the State Health Department, where he worked, and convinced them to fund it. Then back to the hospitals he went, and the small town clinics, to convince them to use the system. And he monitored -- and documented -- how it was working.

Minnesota was the first state to forge such an alliance, and the system my dad developed became a model for the rest of the nation, implemented state by state over the years between his first prestigious award and his second. Meanwhile, dad's life fell apart and then, slowly, came together again. The work (and the dissolution of his marriage) had taken a toll on him, and he developed stress-related health problems. Then a regime change took place in the state's political system, and he was reorganized out of his position as Assistant Commissioner of the State Health Department into what he considered to be a dead-end desk job. I believe he blamed himself for the reassignment: in any case, he abandoned his attempts to reform public health and turned his attention to becoming an Agent of Change for himself. He went into medical treatment, took up yoga, took up jogging, learned to cook, and transformed himself and many of his relationships in the process. But he hated his job until the day he retired.

Shortly before my dad went into hospice care, his former colleagues approached him about nominating him for that second award. He was incredulous at first, but they convinced him to let them do it. And so, many years of bitterness were healed -- at least in part -- during those final months of his life.

I suppose you might be able to map this onto the classic tale of a hero saving the world -- there is a central actor, an agent of change, in any case -- but the process was dramatically different from that action-packed adventure. There's no arch nemesis, no object of desire, no happily-ever-after, and very little dramatic tension. What I see in this story (most of which I've fabricated, or inferred, from the bits and pieces I observed and discussed with him over the years,) is a vast amount of legwork, persistence, problem solving, networking, organizing, documenting and justifying and estimating and measuring, and a heart that made him care enough to keep it up until he was done.

God is Watching You

This is a reflection on self-awareness. There's something my mind does, on a regular basis, that really bothers me. I imagine someone noticing and admiring whatever I happen to be doing in the moment. I think when I was very young, I imagined that someone to be my mother. It certainly would have been a Good Thing, at that age, if she'd been watching me, and even better if she had felt admiring as she did so. So I imagine that I must, over time, have internalized my memories of the moments in which she actually was paying attention, and admiring me. And I must have merged those memories over time into a persistent 'other' who could watch me when she wasn't around to do so.

I suspect that Christians do the same thing, but imagine that 'other' to be God. I vaguely recall that I tried to imagine it that way in the days when I was trying on Christianity for size. These days, however, my tendency is to imagine the 'other' to be a romantic partner (one that is a good bit more attentive than any romantic partner I've ever actually had.)

But as a person who's entering the second half of my life, I find it embarrassing that I still have this habit of mind. It may feel satisfying when it's operating pre-consciously, but when I become aware of it I wince: it makes me seem so childish and self-absorbed.

In reality, this 'other' that I'm imagining is simply me, another part of my own mind, that is watching me from the outside while I act. Or, more accurate but more convoluted, it's simply me -- another part of my own mind -- imagining an 'other' watching me from the outside, while the me that I usually call me is doing whatever I happen to be doing in the moment. A self-conscious me, imagining me watching me. And then yet another me notices me imagining an 'other' watching me, and feels embarrassed. It leaves me wondering how many me's there are, sharing space in this mind of mine.

Even now, as I write this self-reflection, I'm imagining a reader reading it. Probably not admiringly, because it's pretty silly, but I can always hope....

Saving the World

What does it mean to "save the world," and how would one go about it? The phrase is used a lot in the sustainability community, but in an automatic, unreflective way. Some people take it as a given that saving the world is both well-defined and possible, and debate at length whether particular technologies or policy changes will accomplish that purpose, while others rail against the idea and call it an illusion, and say instead that we all are doomed. I've even been asked to be a panelist on a discussion of just this subject -- the title is "Can Science and Technology Save The World?"

But when I reflect on the phrase itself, what immediately comes to mind is the genre of super-hero fantasies, and their adult equivalents. King Kong rampages through Manhattan, our object of desire clutched in one fist while the other shoves skyscrapers out of the way, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing spandex tights. Or, in a more mature version of the story (I'm thinking of Avatar as an example) the Evil Corporation rampages through the sky, destroying our object of desire's home and demolishing the Primeval Forest to make room for a mining operation, and our hero rushes to the rescue wearing a virtual reality machine.

Not very realistic, but such is the stuff our metaphors are made of. We are a species that spins stories, after all, to make meaning of our lives. But what does saving the world look like in the real world, when you strip it of the trappings of fantasy? Is the concept meaningful at all? And what about that business of imagining that we might be the heroes, the ones to accomplish it?

What does it mean to save the world?

I'm going to leave this question as a placeholder for now, and expand it later.

What role might I play?

I got onto this topic, this time around, through a comment thread on Ryan Bell's Year Without God blog. Ryan mentioned that he attributes the phrase "saving the world" more to white male privilege than anything else. I understood this to mean that he perceives it as a conceit, originating in the sense of entitlement that a white male God-child (to borrow a term from Robert Bly) is raised to consider his birthright.

As a person who carries two X chromosomes, I am positioned in these fantasies as the helpless object of desire, rather than the hero. And (as you might expect) one of my instinctive reactions to the thought of saving the world is to view it as utter hubris: How could I, one person among seven billion, hope to have any impact at all, let alone save the world? That sense of absurdity immediately pushes me toward skepticism.

At the same time, I'm entirely capable of identifying with the hero instead. I, too, was raised to imagine that it is possible for one person to save the world through heroic action, even if it's a stretch to imagine myself to be that person. And I was born into the dominant race in the most privileged nation on earth, at a time when feminism was a prominent social force, which made it possible for me to study at the most prestigious Institute of Technology in the world despite my chromosomal affiliation. It's not entirely inconceivable that I might be able to influence *something*, *somewhere*, even if it's not so grandiose as to single-handedly save the world. So I'm not ready to jump immediately to the opposite extreme, and declare the whole enterprise to be doomed.

How does change actually happen in the world?

The question then becomes, how *does* change happen? What can I do, realistically, to influence the course of events in the world? Write; teach; send letters to Congress; attend rallies; donate to non-profits? Live my own life as an example? I do all these things, and imagine them to be worth doing, but they do little to satisfy my sense of urgency around this question.

In his comment, Ryan lists a collection of potentially world-changing institutions. Although he perceives it as limited, his list is wide-ranging. He lists everything from business to art to politics to religion, and more. Note that he's thinking in terms of institutions -- the collective actions of organized groups -- rather than individual heroes. That clearly moves us a step away from Batman and toward a more realistic understanding of how the real world operates. Even when change is initiated by a single individual, it's mediated by many people acting together. So Ryan is contemplating not how to be a hero, but rather how he can plug into an existing organizational structure and either influence its direction or further its goals.

Another idea about change has become popular in my surroundings, though I'm not certain where it originates. This is the idea of becoming an Agent of Change. I've seen this described as an educational goal in schools that are pioneering a sustainability curriculum. The underlying assumption is that if we, as educators, are able to both teach our students about the challenges facing us, and teach them how to become effective Change Agents, they will then go out and transform the world. So the mythology of change is transformed, in this line of reasoning, from one of a solitary hero to one of an educational institution that turns ordinary people into Agents of Change.

What other ideas are out there? What does change look like, when you strip away the metaphors and examine it directly? I suspect that we might be more effective at it if we actually understood what we were doing.  This is another placeholder.

Space to Expand

*Whew* I'm having a storm in my brain, and there's no place to put it. So I'm creating a space for my thoughts to expand. I've been wanting to start an ongoing blog for awhile, but haven't known what to call it. Minerva's Musings? (too vacuous) Working Class Intellectual? (too limiting) Some other catchy title? It's much easier to manage a blog on a specific topic for a specific time period. The amorphous quality of "ongoing" stumps me -- it means I have to find a name that somehow sums up the whole of what I think about from day to day or year to year. But right now all I really need is space. And the title, after all, is not all that important.