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.

Philosophy 101 #2 – The Difference Between Abstraction and Idealization

Abstraction, taken straightforwardly, is a matter of bracketing, but not denying, predicates that are true of the matter under discussion…Idealization is another matter: it can easily lead to falsehood. An assumption, and derivatively a theory, idealizes when it ascribes predicates – often seen as enhanced, ‘ideal’ predicates – that are false of the case in hand, and so denies predicates that are true of that case. For example, if human beings are assumed to have capacities and capabilities for rational choice or self-sufficiency or independence from others that are evidently not achieved by many or even by any actual human beings, the result is not mere abstraction; it is idealization.

– Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), pp.40-41.

Philosophy is often accused of falling prey to the vices of abstraction and idealization. Keeping these two notions separate is very important. Abstraction is a kind of thought that aims to say something true on a general level such that it could be true of many cases. Idealization is a kind of thought that proceeds in the abstract register, though involves premises that skew reality. The first should be the friend of the philosopher, and can be a very handy intellectual tool. The second can be deeply misleading.

Take the examples of milkshakes. An abstract sentence might run as follows, ‘A good milkshake is a milk and cream based drink.’ This sentence is abstract since it says nothing about flavour, temperature, total ingredients, size, deliciousness etc. If you had never seen or tasted a milkshake before, this sentence doesn’t give you that much of an idea of what milkshakes are like. But this in itself is, of course, no vice. In O’Neill’s language, this abstract sentence has simply put those issues to one side – those issues which may be more descriptive, but that can change from milkshake to milkshake – for the sake of achieving a helpful description that will apply to many things that we want  to call good milkshakes.

Compare this with this idealized sentence, ‘A good milkshake is a refreshing milk and cream based drink that leaves the drinker feeling youthful, energized, and like they can take on the world.’ This is still an abstract kind of sentence since you are talking at a level of generality that aspires to describe all milkshakes. The difference is that this last sentence builds what O’Neill calls ‘enhanced predicates’ into the abstraction. Is it really true that  all milkshakes will leave the drinker feeling empowered in such a way?

If you were a milkshake enthusiast, and wanted to come up with a theory of milkshakes, this first would be a helpful starting point, albeit abstract, the second would be a bad starting point since your theory is skewed from the outset, and worthy of the criticism of being ‘idealized’. As I see it, this is one basic job of philosophers working in all fields, and once basic contribution philosophy can make to other  discourses.

So next time when you hear a philosopher being criticized for being way too abstract and idealistic, remember that these are different things, and only one of them is a problem.

Abortion and Personhood: O’Neill on the Religious Perspective

Debates about abortion quickly reduce to debates about personhood. That is, the question typically shifts from ‘Is abortion wrong?’ to, ‘Is a foetus a person such that it warrants ethical treatment?’. The answer to the first is assumed to follow logically from the answer given to the second.

Onora O’Neill, an important contemporary philosopher, suggests why debates over abortion seem to go back and forth with little hope of fruitful conclusions being reached, and then has some surprising words to say about the place of religious voices in this debate:

Yet it is all too plain that universalist discussions of ethical standing in bioethics and beyond during the last twenty-five years have lead mainly to interminable and inconclusive controversy. The protagonists hunt endlessly for some definitive, essential characteristic that will distinguish who is an agent, so might be entitled (for example) to autonomy and self-determination, and who is, whether or not an agent, still at least a ‘moral patient’ or ‘subject’ and entitled to care or at least to ‘moral consideration’. The answers given range widely, even wildly. There are still many who take possession of an immortal soul as the key criteria of ethical standing, and there are some tough-minded secular thinkers who substitute having a sense of oneself as a continuing subject of mental states for having a soul (e.g. Michael Tooley). Others follow Bentham in championing sentience as the criterion of ethical standing (e.g. Peter Singer)…

There seems little prospect of resolving these debates about ‘ethical standing’ within the terms in which they are usually conducted. Without a more explicit vindication of some background perfectionism, or more generally of the necessary metaphysics, it may quite simply be impossible to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for qualifying as an agent (or person), or as a subject (or holder of rights)…

The long-running public and philosophical debates on abortion illustrate these impasses vividly. Most parties to these debates have aimed to identify essential criteria…criteria that would fix the ethical status of the foetus once and for all. This may be why theologians and religious believers, who often accept a perfectionist view of man and matching metaphysical claims, seem comfortable with the terrain on which the debate is conducted, if manifestly distressed by their opponents’ views.”

– Onora O’Neill, Towards Justice and Virtue (1996), p. 94-96.

What first struck me about this passage was the remarkable clarity with which O’Neill sums up the abortion debates. In philosophical papers and the opinion section of the Sydney Morning Herald, the debates quickly turn to why one conception of personhood ought to be rejected, or why another conception is preposterous. Ad hoc scientific data is wheeled in, some philosophical arguments are deployed, name calling is exchanged, and the debate quickly turns cold, with no prospect of resolution.  It can be summarized like this: Step 1) adopt certain position, Step 2) said position is reduced to a fundamental claim about personhood, Step 3) squabble interminably about personhood.

The second thing that struck me was how O’Neill locates the religious perspective. O’Neill seems to say that religious believers are comfortable in these debates because the vocabulary of universals and metaphysics which they have at their disposal is able to give the most coherent and defensible position. To paraphrase O’Neill: If identifying essentialist characteristics is the name of the game, than the Christians will always have the upper hand, since their essentialist characteristics are full-throated and unashamedly essentialist and metaphysical, whereas secularists have kept the project of trying to articulate what makes a person a person through theories which just don’t fit the criteria as well. They are searching for something like the possession of an immortal soul to latch onto as the essence of personhood.

Most secular philosophers, particularly in the analytic tradition, have a suspicious attitude toward metaphysics and universal claims, like ‘God exists’ or ‘stealing is always bad.’ However, O’Neill helpfully points out that the issue of determining personhood requires a universal claim, ‘all people are people because they possess x’, and it is probably going to need some background metaphysical story – that is, some larger story about the world and humankind’s place in the world – to lend weight to why this particular property x is the specific characteristic which conveys personhood. To generalize and claim that all persons are persons since they necessarily possess quality x is a task more suited to philosophies which have certain metaphysical entailments, rather than philosophies that want to avoid metaphysics. That is, it seems to make more sense to say that persons are persons since they are created by God, then persons are persons because they have the natural ability to feel pain. The question, well why does that characteristic rather than this characteristic make a person a person seems to arise much quicker for the secular response.

To my lights, O’Neill’s observation seems to describe the debates clearly. So long as debates about abortion are reducible to debates about whether the foetus is a person and so worthy of ethical consideration, and so long as theories about personhood locate and recommend ‘some definitive, essential characteristic that will distinguish who is an agent’, Christians will always have a more plausible case to argue – they are accustomed to using universal language, and their claims mesh naturally with their consistent metaphysical story, whereas secular philosophers may use universal language from time to time, but certainly not all the time, and their metaphysical story will probably be half-hearted due to the fact that they are none too happy that they have been bullied into doing metaphysics when they just wanted to do ethics.

To me, O’Neill draws attention to the fact that the deep question, ‘what makes a person a person?’ is one to which Christianity is ready to give a rich, consistent, and morally pointy answer.

Do you agree? If it is the case that Christians genuinely have the upper hand in this dialogue, how should it affect the way Christians communicate about this important issue to those who disagree? Is vitriolic dancing and flag waving in order, or invitation to further dialogue and review, or something in-between?