Princeton, Here I Come!

A paper of mine has been selected for presentation at a conference at Princeton University! So in early April I will be heading off to the USA to take part in the 2010 Princeton Graduate Conference in Political Theory. I will have the opportunity to present my paper, ‘John Rawls and Onora O’Neill on Kantian Constructivism’, to hear feedback and field questions from Princeton graduate students and faculty, as well as hang out at one of the world’s most famous universities for a couple of days. I can’t wait!

Faith & Scepticism

“We walk by faith, not by sight”

– 2 Corinthians 5.7

In the Ancient world, there was a school of philosophy called scepticism. This word didn’t quite have the same connotations of pessimism, laziness and doubt as it does today. Rather, it meant someone who was first and foremost an inquirer, an investigator. They wanted to know the truth, and were trying to hunt it down.

Ancient sceptics thought that as you investigated an issue, you would turn up good reasons for one idea, and then good reasons for an opposite idea. As you tried to find the truth of the matter, you were confronted with two incompatible options, each which seemed as good and reasonable as the other. And so it turns out that we never have reason to commit ourselves one way or the other. We suspend judgment. We adopt a detached and uncommitted attitude to whatever the issue was.

If this is the case – how did sceptics think they could find their way around life? How can we commit ourselves to beliefs? How did this not paralyze them?

Sceptics thought that all that is available to us is to ‘live by appearences’ or ‘live by sight.’ That is, they thought that just because they cannot commit themselves to something 100% doesn’t stop things appearing to them in a certain way. Being rationally uncommitted or ‘on the fence’ doesn’t do away with other desires that help us get by – habit, desire, want of approval, fear of the law, basic needs, social enculturation and so on.

Paul told the early Corinthians Christians (who were, to point out the terribly obvious, Ancient Greeks) to live by faith, not by sight. Could he have meant: because we know God in Jesus, we have a kind of certainty that the sceptics were right to point out is never available to humans otherwise. Therefore, we don’t need to settle for living by sight like the sceptics prescribed, but can have a kind of certainty that can motivate and direct us through all sorts of desires, fears, needs, cultures, and laws?

Notre Dame Teaching

So this coming semester I will be teaching tutorials each week for an introduction to ethics course at The University of Notre Dame at Broadway. The work presents a unique opportunity. Since Notre Dame is a Catholic institution, all its students must take three compulsory subjects – introductions to philosophy, ethics and theology. It will be a terrific challenge to try and interest commerce, medicine, education and theology students in philosophy, and will hopefully help me sharpen my communication abilities. It will also be a great opportunity to engage in some dialogue about the intersection between Christianity and philosophy, since I assume many of my students will be Catholic…kinda.

It also represents a step forward in achieving my life-long ambition: to become Jed Bartlet.

The Darker Side of Political Philosophy

The subject-matter of justice, the site of distributive equality, is principally the background institutions of a society. This means that the commitment to distributive equality is fundamentally a commitment on the part of members  of society to order and organize the basic institutions of their society against certain distributive principles…This institutional focus also means that persons are not expected to regulate their day-to-day decisions and actions against these egalitarian principles.

– Kok-Chor Tan, ‘Liberal Equality: What, Where and Why’ in The Oxford Handbook to American Philosophy (2008), p. 529.

Most Anglophone political philosophy since John Rawls focuses on the state and its institutions. That is, political philosophy offers answers to questions to do with institutions like the legislative and judicial branches of government, taxation, democratic and parliamentary process, and public services. The guiding principle seems to be that political philosophy ought to try to come up with a conception of justice that can be mapped onto what Rawls called the ‘basic institutions’ of a society. If we can ensure that these basic institutions are suitably just, then we will be able to move forward.

What the above quote points out is that this institutional focus makes it easy for the average citizen to think that they are doing their bit to make their society more just, merely by taking part in democratic processes, or allowing their government to reform the basic institutions. Within this conceptual framework, a person can consider themselves to be pursuing justice and equality merely by watching their government  reform society through the implentation of more just and equal procedures. All that justice and equality demand of a citizen is that they pay their taxes, obey the law, and vote conscientiously.

This is an extremely hands off approach to justice and equality. Within this framework, there seems to be little place for being an agent of change in your community; for attempting to speak the truth, correct injustices and work for improvement on the smaller level. Whilst such a conception of justice doesn’t preclude such activity, or judge it as fruitless, it certainly leaves it out as an optional extra, and does not recommend it.

Whatsmore, it is a conception of government that Christians can never be satisfied with, as they attempt to listen to Jesus’s words to be ’salt and light’ (Matthew 5.13-16). I think the growing momentum behind NGOs over the past decade or so shows that, outside the academy, this way of thinking about government is in its twilight.

Philosophy 101 #3 – Internal and External Criticism

Philosophy is in the argument business. It constructs arguments that are supposed to give persuasive reasons for accepting one idea or another. Philosophy is also in the business of criticizing arguments, and revealing that in fact we don’t have any good reasons to accept a certain idea. One of the most powerful and useful tools for criticizing arguments is the distinction between external criticism and internal criticism.

1. External Criticism

Imagine two people are locked in a debate. Immanuel believes that women have the right to choose whether or not to continue with their pregnancy, and so holds  to a pro-choice position in political and ethical debates about abortion. Georg thinks that women do not possess this right, but rather that the life of an unborn child ought to be protected at all costs, and so holds to a pro-life position. Now for Immanuel to criticize Georg via external criticism, two things need to happen:

     i. Immanuel’s position must be incompatible with George’s.

     ii. Immanuel must claim that his position is better – that is has some superior claim to authority, acceptability or rationality (or some such thing).

This form of criticism holds that we have reason to reject one idea, because we ought to see that some other idea is better. In our case, Immanuel wants us to reject Georg’s idea by showing that his competing and incompatible view is in fact more worthy of our belief. One great advantage of this line of criticism is that it presents us with a viable alternative, rather then just asking us to abandon a belief. It tries to show us that the ground we stand on is shaky, but fear not because there is firm ground nearby. The disadvantage is that this kind of criticism tends towards dogmatism. It is a temptation for Immanuel to resort to rhetoric or insult, to simply shout at Georg that his view is wrong and no rational person should hold it, without ever proving this.

2. Internal Criticism

Imagine that Immanuel is convinced that Georg’s view is wrong, but he doesn’t have his own alternative worked out. He could then criticize Georg’s view internally. That is, he could work out the logical commitments of Georg’s idea in such a way that it shows that it is not really a coherent view at all. The first step to doing this is to think about the idea and consider whether holding it actually commits you to holding other ideas. For instance:

     i. Georg believes that unborn children have the right to be born. This involves (say) holding that all people have rights and dignities that shouldn’t be ignored by those in a greater place of power.

The next step is to show that these other logical commitments are in fact incompatible with the earlier commitments. So:

     ii. Georg’s initial belief that governments ought to be able to legislate to prevent abortions is incompatible with this other committment as worked out above - the idea that people have rights and dignities that shouldn’t be ignored by those in positions of power, e.g. the woman’s right to control her own body, or make health decisions free of state interference. How can Georg consistently hold that  a woman oughtn’t to interfere with her pregnancy because her unborn child has inalienable rights, but that the  woman’s rights can be ignored by the government?

This line of criticism has the advantage of being more rigorous, since it needs to get inside the logic of an idea and try to analyse it. However, it has the disadvantage of being a purely destructive way of proceeding, since it shows that a view ought to be abandoned, without necessarily offering an alternative, or a diagnosis of how to mend the idea.

This blog post has already been far too long, particularly for what is an attempt to make philosophy interesting and attractive to those who may not have studied it. But to recap: external criticism is the attempt to show that we oughtn’t to believe some idea because we have greater reason to believe some alternate view that is incompatible to the extent that we need to choose to be committed to one but not the other. Internal criticism is the attempt to show that we oughtn’t to believe some view because when you think about things, it actually isn’t internally coherent.

…But the Faith That Justifies is Never Alone

We shall not learn how to save our souls by talking about the formation of virtuous characters. Nevertheless, such talk may teach us better than anything else what it is for a soul to be lost or saved, and so teach us to care about it for ourselves and others.

- Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (1986), p. 224

Feeling Squished Into a Mould?

For the systematic theological mind the little stories [in the Bible] too awkwardly resist their easy assimilation into an overall plot. There are too many fragments that seem to lead nowhere and too many that seem to point in opposite directions. It is tempting to take the principle of canonical hermeneutic, that the parts must be understood in the light of the whole, as a reason for simply suppressing the not readily assimilable parts. But these inescapable features of the actual narrative form of Scripture surely have a message in themselves: that the particular has its own integrity that should not be suppressed for the sake of a too readily comprehensible universal.

The Bible does, in some sense, tell an overall story that encompasses all its other contents, but this story is not a sort of straightjacket that reduces all else to a narrowly defined uniformity. It is a story that is hospitable to a considerable diversity and to tensions, challenges and even seeming contradictions of its own claims.

– Richard Bauckham, Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World (2003), pp. 93-94

As far as I can read our culture, one of the main reasons why many thinking, compassionate and interesting people seem to show no interest in the Christian faith is that they believe that if they were to become Christians, they would be forced into a mould. They feel that all their uniqueness – from the trappings of their life to their most treasured sense of themselves and their personality – will be asked to take a back seat as they are told what in fact they are to believe about themselves.

There is a scrap of truth about this, since Christians do indeed hold that there are important objective things to say about human nature and our relation to God.  But this quote from English theologian Richard Bauckham ought to cause Christians to think twice about how strongly they state these views. It seems to me like there may be more room in the Christian faith for originality and particularity then many, on both sides of the fence, constantly represent.

Book Recommendation: Amsterdam

I’m not much of a fiction reader, but this book is just superb! I read it in a single sitting last week, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for more than a few hours. Check it out.

Scripture, Authority, and Faith

An an Evangelical Christian, one of the things I just love to say, is that I take the Bible seriously. One of our great-grandaddy’s, John Stott, once said that this is the hallmark of Evangelical Christianity – the disposition to believe whatever the Bible can be accurately shown to teach, and to allow it to shape your life.

However, this statement has its limits. It is clearly polemical, implying that all other Christians don’t take the Bible seriously. It is also not that illuminating. ‘What exactly would it be to take the Bible seriously?’ you might genuinely ask. Here is one of the more thought-provoking treatments of this question that attempts to fill out the notion.

If we need to say more about the Scriptures than that they are authorized, perhaps we may follow John Webster in speaking of their ’sanctification’ for their work. That means simply that God has set them apart. As he  has set apart a particular member of the that race for the salvation of the world, so he has set apart particular  writers to bear a definite and decisive  testimony to what he has done. It was, of course, a human testimony they had to bear, a work performed in human ways by human servants. In a thousand ways, the texts that lie between the covers of our Bibles show that they are the product of painstaking and creative human labor and reception. But we must be careful what we make of that word ‘human’. If we glide from speaking of their humanity into implying some kind of inadequacy in them, as though their being human were a shameful secret we have laid bare, a deficiency we are now in a position to patch up, then it is we, not they, that must stand  charged with ignorance and superstition. The humanity of the Scriptures does not entitle us to patronize them. Just as we speak of the sinlessness of the human being Jesus of Nazareth, and some Christians speak of the immaculate human conception of the Virgin Mary, so we may speak quite appropriately of a perfection of Holy Scripture. Its perfection is sui generis, a fitness for its own assigned task. The perfection of the Psalms does not consist in their being the most perfectly metrical verses or containing the most perfect poetic imagery. The perfection of the letters of Paul does not consist in their being the highest examples of epistolary elegance. Neither does the perfection of the historical books consist in their being the most unambiguous records or the  most discerning evaluation of sources.

The only perfection that counts is this: that God truly attests himself and his deeds through this poetry, these letters, this history. The faith required of the reader of Holy Scripture  is obedience to the testimony that God bears within them, and that is one and the same as the faith that  leads to salvation.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis (2008), p. 55-56

Top 9 of 2009

People are beginning to put together those inevitable “Best of 2009…” lists, so I thought I would jump on board the reflective December mood. Here are my Top 9 reads of 2009: the books and articles that had the greatest impact on my thinking this year.

          1.   Myles Burnyeat, ‘Culture and Society in Plato’s Republic‘, Harvard Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 1997

Bernard Williams once said that you are missing out on something if you only ever read Plato in the latest edition of Mind. These lectures are stimulating and expansive that achieve a pretty rare thing – presenting a faithful and historically informed close reading of an important text from the history of philosophy and making its main point seem more important than ever. Unreservedly recommended to everyone – especially those who may have only read about Plato in the latest edition of Mind.

          2.   Richard Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979)

I owe quite a lot to this book, not least the beginnings of an appreciation of the history of Analytic Philosophy, the development of a Wittgensteinian-type approach to philosophical questions, and the resources to find my way around contemporary epistemology. Recommended to those who think that Analytic Philosophy has to be maths/physics in disguise, ahistorical, and complete with ’serious’ metaphysical and epistemological aspirations.

          3.   N. T. Wright, Surprised By Hope (SPCK, 2007)

Not only did the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth actually happen, but it matters quite a lot. Loved Wright’s reflections of the purpose of the church, politics, aesthetics and work, and particularly his ability to constructively dismantle stereotypes to allow the story of Jesus to surprise and energize you. Recommended to christians who think that you go to heaven when you die, so you may as well buy that SUV now.

          4.   N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress Press, 1992)

Wright presents the completely uncontroversial thesis that Jesus was a Jewish Man and that First-Century AD Judaism was a complex and rich culture in a way that opens up the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and words in a new way. Recommended to any Christian that hasn’t read the Gospels in a long time, or any non believer who thinks that they know basically what the story of Jesus is about.

          5.   John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993)

Abstract, Confusing, Infuriating, Suprising…and just a little inspirational.

          6. Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1989)

O’Neill did a lot to fill in my knowledge of Kant. Whilst every philosopher is caricatured, Kant is caricatured a lot! This book presents a plausible and suprising treatment of Kant’s ethics and politics, and offers a terrific construal of his themes of objectivity, universalizability, and reason.

          7.  John McDowell, Mind and World (Harvard University Press, 1994)

A brilliant example of the kind of Analytic Philosophy I am more and more sympathetic towards. Wittgensteinian in approach, more humanistic than mathematical, and attempting to bring the history of philosophy in touch with current work.

          8. Gary Gutting, Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2005)

I really don’t know enough about Foucault to judge Gutting’s portrait of him in this book. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this book is that it made me want to read a lot more Foucault. Contains several fascinating presentations of his themes, and seems to shy away from simplification and caricature at every step.

          9. Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2001)

The difference between Continental and Analytic Philosophy is the difference in how you read Kant. A bold thesis that I was quite convinced by.