NOTE: THE TRUTH VALUES (Ts and Fs) BELOW DO NOT LINE UP RIGHT NO MATTER WHAT I DO. GAHHH!
There are three types of truth tables that you need to know for this Logic class. First, there are the basic truth tables (NOT, AND, OR, IF-THEN). These are the tables you have to understand to do the other two types of truth tables because each step of solving a truth table uses a particular case of these basic truth tables as a rule.
NOT
p ~ p
T F
F T
NOT is the most basic truth table with one variable (p)
and two cases (p is true, and p is false).
Notice that NOT takes a T and makes it an F or takes an F and makes it a T.
NOT does this to variables like ~ p {NOT P} and propositions like ~(p v q) {NOT (P OR Q)}.
All the other truth tables we will do involve two variables (p, q) and four cases.
The truth tables for AND, OR and IF-THEN:
AND
pq p ^ q
TT T
TF F
FT F
FF F
OR
pq p v q
TT T
TF T
FT T
FF F
IF>THEN
pq p > q
TT T
TF F
FT T
FF T
Notice that the four cases are always the same four cases in the same order, that AND is only true when p and q are both true (case 1), that OR is only false when p and q are both false (case 4), and that IF>THEN is only false when p is true and q is false (case 2).
IF>THEN is the tricky one. We all know that “p and q” is only true when both are true. If I tell you “I have an apple and I have a pear”, the whole proposition is true only if it is true that I have an apple and it is true that I have a pear. It is also fairly obvious that if I tell you “I have an apple or I have a pear”, the whole proposition is false only if I have neither an apple nor a pear. It is not so obvious why IF>THEN is TRUE in case 3 and case 4.
Many people make the mistake of thinking that case 3 and 4 are false because p is false. In fact, whenever p is false (p > q) is always true no matter whether q is true or false. Think about it as if it is a promise and the promise remains true unless it is broken. If I promise you, “If I bring you an apple, I will bring you a pear”, the only way I can break my promise is if I bring you an apple but I do not bring you a pear (case 2). If I do not bring you an apple, I have not broken my promise to you whether or not I bring you a pear. If I do not bring you an apple and I bring a pear or I do not bring you either an apple or a pear it cannot be breaking the promise because I said “IF I bring you an apple…”.
The second type of truth table uses the basic truth tables and their cases as rules to evaluate a proposition that contains p and q to see when it is true and when it is false.
Let us take the proposition ~ (p v q). We have to do two steps because there are two operators, NOT and OR. Just like algebra, we must do the order of operations correctly. First we do the inner OR, and then we do the outer NOT.
pq ~ (p v q)
TT F T
TF F T
FT F T
FF T F
Notice that the final answer or evaluation is in bold (FFFT). First you figure out the OR on the inside using the basic OR table, then you take those four values and invert them with the NOT as the second and final step.
pq (~ p v q)
TT F T T
TF F F F
FT T T T
FF T T F
Let us now look at the proposition (~p v q). Notice the NOT is now inside the brackets, and that the values for q stay the same while the values for p are changed by the NOT. Once you have written the values for each case under NOT p and q, you can then use the OR rule (the four cases of the basic OR table) to figure out the four truth values that go under the OR as the final answer.
Case one is now (F v T), which is case 3 of the basic OR table, so the value for case 1 is true because OR is always true whenever either side of the OR is true. Notice that only case 2 is false because in case 2 ~ p and q are both false. Notice also that (~ p v q) has the same four truth values as (p > q), and so the two propositions are said to be equivalent.
The third type of truth table is a proof that two expressions are equivalent (have the same four truth values in the same order). We use an equals sign (=) between two propositions, and if the truth values for one proposition are the same as the other, we can put four T’s down the middle.
Let us evaluate the equivalence of the propositions ~ (p ^ q) and (~ p v ~ q), the equivalence known as De Morgan’s Theorem A. When we evaluate the equivalence, it goes like this:
pq ~(p ^ q) = (~ p v ~ q)
TT F T T F F F
TF T F T F T T
FT T F T T T F
FF T F T T T T
Notice that the values underneath the NOT on the left side and the OR on the right side are equivalent, and so there are four T’s underneath the equals sign as the final answer. This means that by the truth table method we have proved De Morgan’s Theorem A! This is why Wittgenstein’s truth tables replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms as the central tool of modern Logic.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Logic: Russell and Mill
From here on out in the course, we will be studying modern European logic. Today we will examine the positivist position of Bertrand Russell and the skeptical position of John Stuart Mill, putting the positivist vs. skeptic duel into modern European times. I gave you several texts from Russell and Mill in your reader to give you the debate in the author’s words. Next class, we will begin studying Ludwig Wittgenstein and his truth table method.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is a big rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American positivist tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for facts. Thus, Russell often argues against Hegel, skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text.
First Text: Russell’s Problem of Induction
Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was similarly certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction.
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has become algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature was the dominant view of science. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe our conceptions of the regularities of nature. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and non-positivistic light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language.
Second Text: Russell’s Empiricist Answer to Skepticism
Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses a metaphor of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with STRING theory. He gives the Hegelians and Skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views, institutions, room for error, but SOME DATA has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we CAN ASSUME correctly that this is true data or fact.
Some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. We should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, thus principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue (different times, parts, purple, etc).
As a positivist, Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), skeptic and Utilitarian, comes from the opposing side of the debate, very much against Russell’s arguments.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham. Both sides agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to come up with concepts of the regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian’s ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
Third Text: Mill’s Logic & Mathematics
Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentiality is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
As we have noted, in the ancient world logic was about the foundations of debate. In the modern world, particularly fueled by the success of algebraic code-breaking of nature (cryptography from Islamic civilization, discussed last time) logic became a mathematical language that many hoped would provide and prove the foundations of algebraic mathematics.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is a big rationalist philosopher of the Anglo-American positivist tradition, a tradition that believes in doing the groundwork for facts. Thus, Russell often argues against Hegel, skepticism and instrumentalism (or Utilitarianism, the position of Mill next) by name as he does in the text.
First Text: Russell’s Problem of Induction
Russell says that we know the self and sense data exist. Interestingly, Descartes started modern European philosophy with a very similar position, though Descartes was similarly certain of a good and just God whereas Russell is a staunch atheist who believes in the positive truth of science, not religion.
Russell argues that if we want to know anything other than the immediate, we need to gather things in our conceptions into general principles. We can perceive lightning following thunder again and again, but we must draw a general principle from this if we want to know the relationship between the two. Notice this is exactly what the Nyaya sutra said about the relationship between induction and deduction.
Russell admits that this creates a problem (the central issue between positivism and skepticism, in fact): if we only know general principles by induction, then how can we know anything for certain? Russell takes the same position as Aristotle, and argues that we cannot be satisfied with mere opinion, but need knowledge of certain principles that are always true in order to have knowledge.
Russell says that science finds the laws of uniformity in nature, and thus gives us knowledge of certainties. Remember, science in Russell’s time has become algebraic code-breaking, and is not simply the observation of nature as it was in Gotama and Aristotle’s time, but Russell’s position is identical to that of Gotama in ancient India and Aristotle in ancient Greece. Russell argues that we need a founding principle, a starting point of certainty, or otherwise all of our sciences, including mathematics, are mere opinions. We must believe that there are certainties out there, and that our induction sometimes leads us to certain truth.
Unfortunately for Russell, he was writing the piece before the work of Einstein, when Newton’s laws of nature was the dominant view of science. Einstein’s work did much to swing scientists away from the use of the word “law” and toward use of the word “theory” to describe our conceptions of the regularities of nature. Another philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, would use the term “paradigm” to describe scientific conceptions in a similarly relativistic and non-positivistic light. As we will see, Mill would be quite happy by this change of language.
Second Text: Russell’s Empiricist Answer to Skepticism
Russell calls out Hegelians and skeptics by name and says we cannot get the sort of independent certainties we want to call facts or laws by these methods. He says we can indeed whittle away at our theories to get to the pure data, the facts without interpretation but as they must be. Wittgenstein will later use the metaphor of bedrock (like Russell uses a metaphor of whittling).
Russell has faith in a ‘minimal theory’, what people are trying to find with STRING theory. He gives the Hegelians and Skeptics that there is always SOME uncertainty in truth, some relations of views, institutions, room for error, but SOME DATA has “independent credibility”, meaning we know its ‘just true’, ‘right there’, and we CAN ASSUME correctly that this is true data or fact.
Some things must be more than opinion, as opinions can contradict each other but the true fact never contradicts itself or other things. We should give the greatest weight (note the use of metaphor, again) to that which is most regular and most certain, thus principles and propositions. This is the method which Russell believes answers the skeptic. Interestingly, the examples Russell uses suffer from the same problems that Aristotle had before, arguing that what is red cannot be blue (different times, parts, purple, etc).
As a positivist, Russell is a big believer in the Principle of Non-Contradiction (a statement must be true or false, but not both) and the Principle of the Excluded Middle or Bivalence (a statement must be either true or false, but not neither).
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), skeptic and Utilitarian, comes from the opposing side of the debate, very much against Russell’s arguments.
Utilitarianism, which Russell attacks as ‘Instrumentalism’ says that there is no truth to things other than how they are used. This is a very similar position to the “existentialism” of Avicenna and Ockham. Both sides agree that the world has regular patterns, and that we use our minds to come up with concepts of the regularities. However, Mill and utilitarians argue that we are often fooled by our use and concepts of things into thinking that we grasp the essence of the thing when in fact all we are doing is using and grasping.
As algebraic science made many new discoveries, it is interesting that human beings again split along positivist and skeptic lines. Does science show us that the truth is out there and can be discovered, or that we should always be suspicious of our certain truths because new truths can overturn the old truths?
Utilitarianism was a powerful force in Britain against more traditional thinkers like Russell, who is fighting back against Hegelian process theory and Utilitarian’s ‘its whatever we want to do with it or make of it’ theory. Russell believes that things are factually as they are, and we should be objective to have true knowledge. A Utilitarian would say we can arrange situations such that we have knowledge, but there is no ‘true view’, purpose or nature of things. For instance, Utilitarianism was very useful for feminism, that there is no ‘true position’ of women but it is however we position things such that they are most useful.
Third Text: Mill’s Logic & Mathematics
Mill asks: if we admit that all is induction (British Empiricism, which Russell embraces) then why do we say there are “exact sciences”? We also similarly say that there are ‘hard sciences’. He argues that this is an illusion due to the fact that objects of math are conceptions and thus imaginary, hence they have perfect straight edges like an ideally straight line. A perfectly straight line, the example he uses, with no width, like a point, cannot exist outside of the imagination. It is a real being of the world, but imaginary and not physical. Some (Russell) say without perfection of a sort there is no math, science or knowledge possible (eternal facts as well), but Mill argues this is silly as we have these things yet do not have an instance of a perfectly straight line in the real world.
Russell argued that we can strip down or “whittle” to the pure straight edged truth, but Mill argues that this helps us to focus our observation and thinking but it does nothing to guarantee that our knowledge is certain at all. We can ignore aspects of a thing to focus on particular aspects or parts, but this does not successfully or completely take these factors out of the picture, even as far as relevance to the parts that are in focus. This is a very important ground for the positivist/skeptic debate today. If we take a banana and put it in a lab, are we more or less capable of seeing its truths there? If we create abstractions about bananas with our minds, are these getting into the thing or away from it?
Russell wanted a first certain principle of non-contradiction to give us certainty. Mill argues that there are no first principles of geometry, mathematics or anything else. Mill argues that the ‘first principles’ are in fact simply generalized observations of real world situations. Mill turns specifically to the two principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle with this skepticism. These principles are in fact observation in practice. We can see that belief and disbelief oppose one another, that they are “oppositional mental states” just as we can see that opposing stories tend to mean that someone is somewhat mistaken. This is the simple contrast between any two opposites. Mill argues that the two principles are merely useful generalizations, as are all “true” concepts used by human beings whether scientists, philosophers or common folk.
The Problem of Self Referentiality is one of the most famous and interesting problems with the principles of Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. This problem was very important for Russell’s career, and it brought him both great success and frustration.
The classic example is the liar’s paradox. Consider the sentence, “This sentence is false”. According to non-contradiction, this must be either true or false but not both, but if it is true then it is false and if it is false then it is true. It cannot be fully resolved either way.
Russell pointed out a similar paradox in the work of Frege, the German analytic philosopher who was central in trying to turn Logic towards founding arithmetic, who Russell and then Wittgenstein followed and overturned (as Wittgenstein later did to his teacher Russell). Frege thought he could prove that mathematics is simply a system of non-contradictory sets, which he called Set Theory. Russell realized, however, that there are still contradictions possible in this system of mere sets. He asked, “Is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves a member of itself?” Just like the liar paradox, if it is, then it isn’t, and vice versa.
Russell’s point is that there is a paradox that results from self-reference (‘this sentence’ or ‘this set’). Russell tried to use Frege’s work to finish a foundation of math, which he never completed to his own satisfaction. He thought that he could come up with a ‘theory of types’ that would prevent the paradox (so a ‘set’ is of objects but a ‘type’ is a group of sets, not objects), but it lead to further paradoxes. At this time, he discovered a young Austrian genius who showed up at his office hours one day simply to argue endlessly against everything Russell said, who Russell believed would finish his work but in the end came to stand completely against proof theory: Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Recently, a different version of the liar’s paradox has been proposed that supposedly does not suffer from self-reference: consider two people standing next to each other, one with a sign that reads “Her sign is false” and another with a sign that reads, “His sign is true”. Like Russell’s theory of types, this version of the paradox tries to eliminate self-reference to tidy up the problem, but the paradox remains.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Ethics: Lies & Propaganda
Individuals and groups manipulate the truth to serve their own ends, in a conscious/unconscious way that often resembles denial. Speech means that we can tell the truth or tell lies. This has been an issue for humans before they were even human, like theft and violence.
Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
Apes and Lying:
In one of the most fascinating stories of ape behavior I have heard, researchers documented that a young male baboon made the mistake of trying to force himself sexually on a high ranking female baboon of his tribe. When the female screeched, the rest of the tribe began chasing the young male along the ground floor. Suddenly, the young male turned and gave the call for leopard. The chasers dashed up into the trees and out of sight, while the young male stood, watching them leave, on the ground in no danger from any leopard. The researchers concluded that they had witnessed and documented an ape lying to save his own skin. Thus, we can assume, humans have been lying since before they were human.
Children and Lying:
Interestingly, we believe in lying to children as a matter of raising them. Children before the age of seven are quite incapable of telling the difference between fiction and reality or understanding sarcasm. This is why young children believe in Santa and wonder where Thomas the Train Engine lives.
There are two amusing stories I have on this. One of my students in a response paper wrote that as a young girl she had a pet goldfish and accidentally killed the fish by cleaning its bowl with hand soap. When she saw her fish was dead her mother, who did not want to torture the young girl with the truth, told her that the cat had walked by and the fish had a heart attack. Notice the utilitarianism here, and that Kant would be mortified. Secondly, there was a news story last year about a boy in Thailand who was stuck on the roof of a tall building, and he would not climb into the arms of the police who ascended a ladder to rescue him. One of the police dressed up in a Spiderman costume, and the boy threw open his arms and leapt into the waiting embrace of Spiderman, who carried him down to a cheering crowd.
Children believe in superheroes and villains. One would like to think that the use of heroes and myths ends with childhood, but the literature on propaganda tells us that all civilizations make myths that glorify themselves and demonize their enemies, both internal and external. Because children are raised with these myths, they often do not think to question them even when they are quite past the age of seven.
Consider the use of superheroes in comics, fighting criminals at home and enemies of America.
Watchmen is a good look at some of these dynamics. Consider that Iron Man was originally from Korea, then the recent movie puts him in the middle east. We still use superheroes to stand for “truth, justice and the American way”, but we have subtler ways. I think you can look at Iron Man and the new Batman movie and see distortions that we not only pass on to kids and teenagers but the adults in the audience as well.
City States and Rock Edicts:
The Assyrians were masters of propaganda, and they were one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Most of their conquest was through trade, though they invented all of the siege weapons used through the European middle ages. Rock edicts, tall carvings in cliffs and on monuments, declared glorious meanings for the common people to consume. Interestingly, the common people could not read, and someone who could read and pass the messages to others was called “one who makes the stones speak”. Just like a modern textbook, the human authors are lost and the media simply speaks for itself.
Here we come to the old and the new style of propaganda. The old propaganda model is simple, and it is still in use particularly by traditional and communist countries: We are the King/State, we tell you what you need to know, namely that we look after you and our enemies are evil. WE are the great multicultural empire that looks after everyone (Assyrian did not denote a race, but a citizen of the empire), but our enemies will oppress you and kill you for no good reason. Very little has changed over several thousand years.
The new propaganda is even more effective, and strangely it does not call itself propaganda at all. In China today, the communist government says openly that they use propaganda to educate the people, and the same was admitted in the United States and Britain until just this last century. The government tells you “brush your teeth, it is good for you” and this is acknowledged as a message coming from authorities telling you what you should know and do. Chomsky, who we will study today, is quite clear on this point, as is Bernays. Propaganda only recently became something evil, something that the enemy does.
I am going to focus on American propaganda from WWI through the Cold War, and then talk about Chomsky’s theories on propaganda models and the American media’s role in American empire and economics.
Hegel tells us when we haven’t looked into an issue, perspectives are polarized. Here in America, similarly in Britain, it is thought that we are free and love democracy, but other cultures (especially the Germans in WWI and II, the Russians in the Cold War, and Islamic extremists) are not civilized but rather lie as much as they can because ‘they hate our freedom’.
We have failed to have a real discussion about censorship and bias in America. This means ‘THEY’ are simply biased and put forth propaganda, and WE would never do something like that. This is not only the basic human frame as before, but Americans and British got set in this in a particular way through WWI and II. In WWI, propaganda became something the Germans do, not the Belgians, British or Americans. In WWII, the Germans and Japanese do propaganda, and in the cold war the Russians. The British and Americans, however, would never do ‘propaganda’ by name, as they are the champions of liberty, democracy and freedom from tyranny (even as Britain and then America plundered and sought empire in the same way that the Germans, Russians did). Today, this is ‘Islam and the West’ where we have unbiased journalism while they simply put forward obvious propaganda (watch ‘Control Room’ for the best of this).
What we need? We need to see how people censor and authority is abusive in comparison, and this is what is never done. Rather than hear one line of Chinese media through ours and say “Propaganda!” we need to compare censorship operation by the government in both places and see the complex similarities and differences. I am going to show human overall consistencies while describing the particular way that Americans are involved in the inscription of messages and ideology in our society. That way, we get beyond the strange complex of saying that in America there is no propaganda while living in an America that knows how to sell and spin professionally better than anyone ever has.
WWI (the British/Americans vs. the Germans)
The Germans invade Belgium, and the British make up all sorts of things. The Germans become the evil Hun, and the Belgians the poor victim, even though they had just gotten bad world press by systematically killing 10 million Africans in the Congo.
The British run propaganda in America to get us into the war, and teach us the techniques of British style empire and propaganda. You set up ‘free’ reporters to say your messages, rather than do the old way like Germany and Russia with a Ministry of Propaganda.
Thus, after the horrors of WWI, ‘propaganda’ became a bad word in Britain and America.
Since then, we do not do propaganda at all. We do ‘education’, ‘information’, ‘public relations’, ‘human relations’, and in time of war we may engage in psychological warfare, but we never do ‘propaganda’.
Propaganda is not an evil conspiracy. Consider great example of guy who did ‘Birth of a Nation’, KKK film, being jailed for 10 years for his next movie showing British and Natives committing war crimes against Americans.
Basically, the British and Americans lied as much as possible about German atrocities, the French and British took most of what Germany had after WWI, the Germans fell even lower in the 20s with the market crash, and they came back as the Nazis, NOW as bad as the British and Americans had led others to believe.
Consider that Irish newspapers in NY were shut down for telling people that the British have been evil in Ireland, Scotland, India, Africa, all while calling themselves the defenders of democracy and freedom. At this time, government censorship during time of war was unquestioned (story about Pentagon lifting ban on coffins today).
Bernays book Propaganda:
Chomsky says that Bernays was one of the first propaganda specialists in America and he is quite open about praising the use of propaganda. Bernays says, during WWI, that it is remarkable that the moment America propaganda explodes (advertising, PR), becomes a necessary tool of corporations, it becomes ‘evil’ in name. PR went from being Barnum and Bailey to every corporation running spin and ad campaigns. Bernays invented the committee of Doctors who tell you to eat eggs and bacon for a ‘hearty’ breakfast, saying old way is ‘Eat Bacon!’, new way: ‘Drs say, ‘Eat bacon’’. This is ‘free expert’ style of propaganda.
In 1938, writing his book, Bernays says that half the front page of NYT is identifiably propaganda, stories planted by interested parties. He says the NAACP is a great PR group, and show a strong hand holding their annual conference in Atlanta. He got out of cigarette ads in the 40s, tabloids having picked up on the health risks. It wasn’t till the 1970s that major media carried the story at all. 1953 Bernays helped United Fruit convince everyone that Guatemala was a communist threat, so the US overthrew the elected leader with a CIA coup and we supported dictatorship there for cheap labor to supply Americans with cheaper fruit.
Nazis and WWII:
Hitler says: We did not have as good propaganda as the British and Americans, but next time will be different. Nazi TV, engineering goes to American, America rises above Britain in wake of WWII. During WWII, the Americans and British praised Stalin and his Red Army as they all fought the Nazis. Then, as soon as the war was over, the British led the Americans in the Cold War anti-communism campaign. This is where stuff gets REALLY INTERESTING: US vs. Soviet Union. Both say, ‘THEY do all of this, so WE HAVE TO’, in the official channels, but the story for the masses is: only THEY would do that.
COLD WAR
The following material is drawn largely from the book The Cultural Cold War by Saunders.
Post WWII, the French and Russians had largely convinced everyone that America has no culture, only cheap commercialism, and America talks a lot about Freedom, but look at how they treat black people. US and Soviets started ‘Congresses’, (Soviets for World Peace, US for Cultural Freedom). It is now know that these were the two big umbrella groups for a lot of fronts for propaganda campaigns. These groups used historians, scientists, poets, artists, philosophers, professors, you name it, to give the impression that individuals were lining up against ‘the evil’ of the other. The US wanted to fight the ‘French Flu’ and push European intellectuals away from Marxism as liberation towards free market capitalism as liberation. Ex: US intellectual goes to Paris, gives a talk about the ‘Negro’s progress in America’. Then when he is heckled (“possibly by communists”), brings out black band to do jazz all night.
US used CIA and many fronts to tour black performers through Europe, increase publication of certain books (Camus, not Sartre example, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, introductions written to spin Animal Farm and 1984 by Orwell, who hated both). The idea was to promote the NONCOMMUNIST LEFT. (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty not studied in America, as they boycotted Congress of Cultural Freedom invitations due to US treatment of Black people).
The US had spent $34 million on this by 1950 (also, wealthiest country at this point, passing Britain in financing the rebuilding of Britain, Germany and France). The money quadrupled in rate of expense after 1950, as China became the world’s largest communist country. The CIA set up French literature reviews, toured the Boston symphony orchestra, approached wealthy individuals about setting up art collections that praise US art and European art that honors the US.
Pollock and others (though communists) praised and toured through Europe to show that American has genius painters after all. Agent as director stockpiled abstract minimalist art at the NY Moma (Contemporary Chinese art exhibit in Berkeley today). The Ford and Rockefeller foundations remain serious fronts for money dispensed in America to artists, writers and performers who do work that promotes America even as it is avant-garde art.
At home, Billy Graham got money knowingly from intelligence, toured America telling Christians that ‘Communism is masterminded by Satan’, never mind that the first communes were French Christian communes. John Wayne and Ronald Reagan were promoted as Soldier/Cowboys, both spied for the FBI against communism at home for the house of un-American activities committee of McCarthy. Disney and Warner brothers made cartoons for the US in WWII, then denounced their writers and animators as communists when they went on strike. Disney spied for the FBI, testified for HUAC, while he was doing illegal things to his workers like sending strike breakers to beat people up and the FBI looked the other way.
In films, token black people began appearing well before the civil rights movement. Documents of agents who worked with studios on scripts say, ‘took out a drunk, added a black person’. One of the best examples is a black golfer and caddy added into the background of a scene on a golf course, at a time when white Catholics and Jews had a rough time getting into golf clubs. Consider that the civil rights movement was partly started by seeing token black people in the cinema, like the golfer and caddy, and wondering aloud why this could not become a real lived reality. Both US and Soviets fought over who liberates and who oppresses. In 1956, the ‘Melting Pot’ became a slogan for the US. We can see that many Russian films and Korean propaganda posters deplore the evils that America has done to black people as a simple tactic.
Today, if your movie has anything to do with police or military, they will give you heavy support as long as they go over the script and ok it. Six media owner companies means each needs a cushy relationship with both cops and military. That means: America is well aware of the streamlined view of America put out all over the world in TV and Movies. They are the BEST form of propaganda. There are consulting firms who specialize in getting your script ready for police and military approval, so that you do not get charged extra by the official government representatives who review the scripts for a fee.
Meanwhile, stories pepper the news about how “Iran censors movies” and “China might be censoring the internet”. No further detail is drawn. This is the British/American style: THEY simply censor, without any comparison of us and them. THEY censor (so, we don’t?). Recently the media corporations agreed with the government not to show footage of coffins coming home from the war. Is there ever a need for a conspiracy when power works the way it always has?
Chomsky and Herman’s MANUFACTURING CONSENT:
There is no better book on American propaganda and the stories both promoted and ignored by the American media. The book argues that the mass-media protects the interest of the wealthy and powerful individuals and institutions in America by promoting particular views and filtering out others. This process involves the ownership of media groups, the reliance of media on the government for information and support, the reliance of media on advertising revenue, flak heaped upon dissident views (particularly socialist views and those critical of business interests).
Intro Philosophy: Descartes and Hume
DESCARTES (1596-1650) is called the ‘first modern philosopher’ in the tradition of European and ‘Western’ scholarship. He went to law school following his merchant father, but decided to become a mercenary instead and fight in the 30 years war, ‘to seek truth’. It seems he did not find truth in law school. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Church for his solar centric theory (which India and Islam had for more than 700 years). Descartes thus decided not to publish his views on physics, but his ‘Discourse on Method’ instead. This is considered the first work of modern European philosophy. However, it was condemned by the pope in 1663, thirty years later, put on the prohibited index of books alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship.
Descartes’ death is famous (and unfortunately funny). For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day (an aristocrat has the time to do this). After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and then dead. Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia and dying after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat.
We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought. Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes being up in the heavens to cause being the mechanics of this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world. This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics. The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown. This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious.
Best illustration of this is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights. In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles and forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces. Solomon uses mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and doing it as magic. In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone. This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that he had died. Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled. In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below. There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces. Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often. One guy falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror. Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story.
Remembering the automata in Islamic palaces, Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings. Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing. Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind). Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics. This is what developed into our ‘scientific’, ‘modern’ mentality. The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.
This is what led in Protestantism to loosing Saints and Angels with functional roles and simply praying directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous systems (including Catholicism). Now that there is increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint. The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice. Temples become increasingly research facilities.
Positivists celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity. Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities.
Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow.
Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting positivism which is foundational for positivists and the departure point for skeptics.
Now, first let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment. In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.
Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment: he asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist. Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since. One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what you think of Descartes simple experiment.
Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from? Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naïve’) affirmation of existence? To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s. Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later. Gnosticism, as we briefly mentioned, spoke of a deceiving demon false God that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.
Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land. This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures. Then quickly the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy. The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.
Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon. Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.
I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works, Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations. Let us work through the texts.
In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment. He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes.
He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream. (This is similar to Zhuang Zi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man instead).
Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness. He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties. A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical. First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted. Already there are grey areas here. Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part? Aren’t both ‘sensed’?
Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong. Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain. The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions. This remains a central question. Positivists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.
Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions).
There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides. However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me: this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment. The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks. The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.
Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.
Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness. Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.
HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking and truth is induction. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. I gave you Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ because it is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original was convoluted and difficult to understand.
Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other. Notice the recent development for Europe, and England. Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection. Remember with Descartes, whose skepticism quickly turns to orthodoxy. Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be proved, which opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.
Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions. Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions of objects that are present, and ideas of objects that are not present.
For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table. If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head. Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table. Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker. Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions. Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate idea. It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that must be certain regardless of experience.
Now, Hume gets to his famous and central billiard ball analogy. Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue. There are two events. First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball. Second, the blue ball moves away from the red ball. Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball. Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events. We did not perceive the causation. The causation is itself invisible. Then how did we all understand it? The answer is: we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices. We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball. Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward. Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions. Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the two events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact perceived or known. Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct. For example, if I made a flash movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other. Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion. In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’. We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events.
Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification. This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy. If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad. Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place. While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning. Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us. They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world. Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate. Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”
“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past. When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”
“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.
Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life. As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it.
Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (remember 2+3=5). He argues: how can they know this from experience? Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced in God so much as in other things. Mathematical and Geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.
Descartes’ death is famous (and unfortunately funny). For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day (an aristocrat has the time to do this). After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor. Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am. Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and then dead. Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed. This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia and dying after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat.
We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought. Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes being up in the heavens to cause being the mechanics of this world. Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world. The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world. This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics. The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown. This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious.
Best illustration of this is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights. In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles and forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces. Solomon uses mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and doing it as magic. In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone. This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that he had died. Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled. In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below. There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces. Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often. One guy falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror. Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story.
Remembering the automata in Islamic palaces, Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings. Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing. Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind). Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics. This is what developed into our ‘scientific’, ‘modern’ mentality. The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces.
This is what led in Protestantism to loosing Saints and Angels with functional roles and simply praying directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous systems (including Catholicism). Now that there is increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint. The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice. Temples become increasingly research facilities.
Positivists celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity. Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities.
Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow.
Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting positivism which is foundational for positivists and the departure point for skeptics.
Now, first let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment. In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away. What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed? Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself. For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.
Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment: he asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist. Thus, his famous line: “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since. One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what you think of Descartes simple experiment.
Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from? Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naïve’) affirmation of existence? To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s. Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later. Gnosticism, as we briefly mentioned, spoke of a deceiving demon false God that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.
Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land. This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures. Then quickly the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy. The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.
Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon. Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon. Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe. Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.
I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works, Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations. Let us work through the texts.
In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment. He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”. Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes.
He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream. (This is similar to Zhuang Zi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man instead).
Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness. He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties. A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical. First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted. Already there are grey areas here. Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part? Aren’t both ‘sensed’?
Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step. Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong. Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth. We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain. The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions. This remains a central question. Positivists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.
Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire. He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass. Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions).
There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides. However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion. Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like the movie The Matrix). He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me: this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment. The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks. The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.
Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.
Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness. Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us. Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5. When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness. Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.
HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much. Hume’s position is that all of our thinking and truth is induction. This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate. I gave you Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ because it is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original was convoluted and difficult to understand.
Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other. Notice the recent development for Europe, and England. Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection. Remember with Descartes, whose skepticism quickly turns to orthodoxy. Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be proved, which opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.
Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions. Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions of objects that are present, and ideas of objects that are not present.
For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table. If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head. Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table. Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker. Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions. Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa/Blank Slate idea. It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that must be certain regardless of experience.
Now, Hume gets to his famous and central billiard ball analogy. Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue. There are two events. First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball. Second, the blue ball moves away from the red ball. Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball. Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events. We did not perceive the causation. The causation is itself invisible. Then how did we all understand it? The answer is: we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices. We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball. Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward. Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions. Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the two events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact perceived or known. Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct. For example, if I made a flash movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other. Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion. In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’. We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events.
Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification. This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy. If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad. Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place. While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning. Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us. They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world. Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate. Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”
“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past. When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past. However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”
“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.
Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life. As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it.
Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (remember 2+3=5). He argues: how can they know this from experience? Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced in God so much as in other things. Mathematical and Geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Social & Political Philosophy
I am happy to announce that I get to teach a new class at BCC this coming Spring 2011 semester: Social & Political Philosophy. I am still working out the details of the course content, but this political climate has been giving me many ideas.
The idea so far is to cover four topics:
Authority & Law
Democracy & Decision
Communism & Equality
Capitalism & Freedom
For each topic, we will examine texts from many societies to look critically at how humanity understands and lives the ideals of law, decision making, equality and freedom. In particular, we will consider how communism sometimes sacrifices freedom for equality and capitalism sometimes sacrifices equality for freedom.
The idea so far is to cover four topics:
Authority & Law
Democracy & Decision
Communism & Equality
Capitalism & Freedom
For each topic, we will examine texts from many societies to look critically at how humanity understands and lives the ideals of law, decision making, equality and freedom. In particular, we will consider how communism sometimes sacrifices freedom for equality and capitalism sometimes sacrifices equality for freedom.
BCC Philosophy Club
We will be starting up the BCC Philosophy Club again this semester. We will be meeting in room 54 at noon every Friday to hang out and discuss topics.
Please come by! You don't have to attend every meeting, and you are always welcome.
Please come by! You don't have to attend every meeting, and you are always welcome.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Logic: Islam & Early Europe
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to logic, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it is important today to mention that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
Algebraic equations allowed for modern truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and provides us with true knowledge, while skeptics say that mathematics builds models and remains human perspective and opinion. To see an interesting problem, consider the “proof that one equals two” (found easily online).
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called “Qiyas” (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said Inductive is the only one, the others are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second.
We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
MOST IMPORTANT for this class: he pioneered propositional calculus, the medium of logic from here on out in this class (in most logic classes it is the only thing taught).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. A pioneer of skepticism and doubt.
His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHER/LOGICIANS
Aquinas (1225-1274)
Lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna.
Augustine is the bringer of Plato and Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Showed he was brilliant, so the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. His brother’s brought him a prostitute, but ‘he drove her away’. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
He seems influenced primarily by Al Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom we said were critics of Avicenna, Averroes a supporter of Aristotle. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but then the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge.
50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council he was pronounced the central thinker of the Church (and thus Europe).
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. Thus, he is an essentialist. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel next week). The Superman argument is often used today in philosophy classrooms to shoot this down, along with Descartes who follows Aquinas’ argument for highest, most necessary being as God.
William of Ockham (1288-1348)
An Avicenna style Existentialist: Only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. Often called the first modern thinker, we can see that he is putting forward Avicenna’s ideas. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our add-ons. Just like Avicenna, only Being (God) is not contingent and custom.
Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct.
Notice how this does away with hierarchies of universals as real, to call them simply mental and thus the simplest reasoning is the best.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it is important today to mention that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
Algebraic equations allowed for modern truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and provides us with true knowledge, while skeptics say that mathematics builds models and remains human perspective and opinion. To see an interesting problem, consider the “proof that one equals two” (found easily online).
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called “Qiyas” (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said Inductive is the only one, the others are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second.
We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
MOST IMPORTANT for this class: he pioneered propositional calculus, the medium of logic from here on out in this class (in most logic classes it is the only thing taught).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. A pioneer of skepticism and doubt.
His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHER/LOGICIANS
Aquinas (1225-1274)
Lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna.
Augustine is the bringer of Plato and Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Showed he was brilliant, so the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. His brother’s brought him a prostitute, but ‘he drove her away’. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
He seems influenced primarily by Al Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom we said were critics of Avicenna, Averroes a supporter of Aristotle. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but then the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge.
50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council he was pronounced the central thinker of the Church (and thus Europe).
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. Thus, he is an essentialist. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel next week). The Superman argument is often used today in philosophy classrooms to shoot this down, along with Descartes who follows Aquinas’ argument for highest, most necessary being as God.
William of Ockham (1288-1348)
An Avicenna style Existentialist: Only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. Often called the first modern thinker, we can see that he is putting forward Avicenna’s ideas. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our add-ons. Just like Avicenna, only Being (God) is not contingent and custom.
Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct.
Notice how this does away with hierarchies of universals as real, to call them simply mental and thus the simplest reasoning is the best.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Ethics: Theft, Zinn & The Corporation
Theft is a difficult issue, one that has particular implications today. First we will examine the context and history of theft, and then use the Ethical concepts we have studied as lenses
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abuseful) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
The notion of ‘property’ is bound up with European and Western identity, often seen as a principle of politics particular to Europe or fully realized in full within European historical development. We can easily see, however, that the origins of property, like most human cultures, has its origins in ape social behavior. While Europe has developed cultures of property that are highly sophisticated, these stem from cultural borrowings as much as they do from within Europe itself. Consider Islamic cultures of borrowing with interest, writing and cashing checks, etc.
Turning to ape behavior to see precedents, we can clearly identify with apes both in focusing on and becoming possessive of objects and forgetting this possession and its objects. Consider that an ape will become attached to a banana, fight against other apes that try to take the banana, and then, upon seeing a better banana, the ape will abandon the first and ignore whether or not the first falls into other hands. We can see that the ape can come to possess as ‘mine not yours’, and come to forget this possessing (‘neither mine nor yours’). This is parallel with self-other distinctions already discussed, as with the child psychology that says in the beginning there is neither and both must arise together in tension (codependent arising of Jainism and Buddhism).
There is also evidence that apes can not only fall into a ‘mine vs. everyone’ relation of possession (of objects), but apes can also recognize other apes as possessing objects themselves (selfish as other). Consider the case (from an old Anthropology class of mine) of the female chimpanzee ignoring another male chimpanzee trying to give her a banana for sex, and how the female only snatches the banana for herself when the male ape gets bored and goes out of sight so that there is no expected reciprocity. We should be cautious of the sexism here (females ‘push bananas’ at males too), but also marvel in how familiar this behavior is to humanity (next week, we will see that apes know lying too).
Humans, of course, have taken these impulses and instincts and complexified them with many inter-competing cultures, cultures that are actually capable of stealing from each other as much as they can describe and criminalize stealing themselves! While there are many intellectuals who have defended the view that while trade is universal only the West developed ‘capital’, I am critical of this view (interestingly enough, the one to coin this specialized term was the great opponent of Capitalism, Karl Marx). We have yet to do justice to intercultural borrowings, and ‘The West’ is very proud of its economics today. Is ‘capital’ a new device, particular to Western thought? I think that a study of Islam passing to Europe shows this can only be a partial truth, but we get a better view if we turn back the clock to the origin of the device known as MONEY, capital being one of its distant yet certain relatives.
Where does money come from? Why does it exist? What relationship does money have to theft, and is this different from the relationship between theft and any other object?
Money is a very interesting and unique device. Before wood pulp paper bank notes, the Sumerians and Babylonians get the credit for coining money first, the government controlling the pressing process of coinage. Today, we use Chinese style paper bank notes, backed by the government, just like in China after 500 CE or so. Wood block printing and the block printing press are other devices of Chinese origin that are crucial to this process. These two stages suggest that ‘capital’, though it may have been developed to its extent today in Europe and increasingly in American privatizing economics, cannot possibly have been a ‘inwardly European’ device of the ‘Western mind’. Other cultures of mind have had no problem inventing and using devices that are the ancestors of modern day capital.
But, WHY MONEY?
Before money, people of course possessed many things and traded them between individuals and groups. This trade was always barter, swapping one sort of thing for another sort of thing without the device of money as swapping medium. As people settled into city states, practices of borrowing and lending became stabilized. The first money was likely tokens indicating amounts of stuff borrowed from the ruler or other wealthy individuals.
The culture which includes the device of money has advantages over the culture of mere barter. Money as a device is very simple, simple the ways that numbers are simple for much the same purpose. Money is good (and bad) because it is very easy to gather/amass and divide/distribute, much more than any other object or substance.
Consider the salmon fisher in a village. She goes down to the water, and scores 20 large salmon. This is far more than she can eat, but she can trade salmon for other things that she needs in the barter culture. However, salmon does not keep for long, even if one knows how to salt and preserve it. What happens if she goes to the market and not many people want or need salmon that day? What if she has enough salmon to get what she wants, but there are not enough people who need salmon to trade with her for what she wants? In a culture where the salmon can be sold for money, you can keep the money for thirty years (even with inflation and other problems, deterioration of coins, etc) but no one can keep salmon for thirty years, even with freezers! In this way, money is much easier to amass and to keep than salmon.
In the same way, money is easier to divide than salmon. Let us say our fisher comes to market with 20 large salmon, and wants to trade for a basket. I, the basket maker, tell her that one third of a salmon is worth one basket, but I want the front half of the salmon. What happens if she wants to leave the salmon uncut, or if she needs four fifths of a salmon later for someone else? What if she wants to keep all the fish heads for herself? Money has no features to it other than quantity, even though the pictures are often very pretty. Fifty dollars is just fifty things, nothing less, so there is no problem with changing it to two twenties and a ten. You cannot make a whole salmon again from twenty salmon heads! In this way, money is much easier to divide and distribute than salmon. If we consider the bustle of a crowded market, it becomes clear why money would be such a useful (and thus abuseful) device, and how its invention allowed for the modern merchants and bankers of today. Consider the trillion dollar bailout today, how this is very abstract yet very real for many people. Luck for us we do not need to bail out banks with truckloads of salmon!
There are, however, two great disadvantages to the culture of money use:
First, theft, like trade, becomes easier! In fact, money not only creates and supports many types of legal economics, it simultaneously creates and supports many types of illegal economics like paying money for sex or drugs (Derrida and the signature).
Second, the desire for money becomes quite intense. Considering that money, sex and cocaine have been shown to light up similar areas of the human brain, money to barter is like cocaine to chewing coca leaves. Since money can be traded for anything, even ironically illegal things, the draw towards money becomes the draw towards any and everything desired. In this sense, the desire for money is far more intense than the desire for salmon because money can buy salmon, or remain money, or buy anything else if one ceases wanting salmon. Just as having salmon means that the possibility of eating salmon is now practically guaranteed, having money means the possibility of satisfying any desire whatsoever is guaranteed. This ultimately means that there is far more reason to steal money than there is to steal salmon, strange considering that you can eat salmon and live off of it alone!
In terms of world politics, which includes the Zinn reading I gave you, stealing and money are central issues of identity. Communism and Capitalism are divided on the issue of money, even as Communists print government money and Capitalists organize socialist programs (public education like BCC, social welfare, public roads and institutions). The question is: do you trust the government or the corporations more with your money and economics (an instance of the one/many problem again)? America has shown that there are great advantages to privatization, letting corporations control economics rather than the centralized government. Unfortunately, this does not do away with problems of authority and corruption (consider that PG&E is still in charge of California’s power, a pretty plum, in spite of being convicted of stealing from Californians en masse). Truth be told, both America and the Soviet Union told third world countries that they would not steal from them or enslave them like their other surely would, only to both be guilty of similar forms of corrupt authoritarianism.
A great book to read on all of this is John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He actually came to BCC last semester for a reading, but I had my other job. As Perkins says so perfectly, in American foreign relations we try to get people in debt to us because that binds everyone to our economy and our desires. I know firsthand from UCB Hass Business School students that indebting the poor here in America and poor third world countries is an open practice, spoken of openly in instruction. The financial crisis today was clearly caused by irresponsible and predatory lending. Our newspapers never speak of these things, but a piece on NPR my friend gave to me will tell you just as clearly and honestly an economics professor at Hass. CREDIT is itself like money, a device that has its advantages but also its disadvantages, especially for the disadvantaged. If our economy falls far from where it is today, it could very well be due to the disadvantages of credit and capital that we have stalled and distanced from ourselves for the time being as a privileged and advantaged culture. The point is: money helps the advantaged steal from the disadvantaged, even as it helps the disadvantaged gain advantage! This is why Americans are relatively wealthy yet there is an increasing gap between rich and poor here as well as in the third world. While the ‘American way’ sometimes allows the poor to get rich, it also very much allows the rich to get much richer and there is only so much in the pot.
Of course, the rich are also more encouraged than ever to steal from the rich as well as from the poor. Consider in 1996 CIA convicted of manipulating business to favor Americans over Australians. Neither Australians nor Americans can recall this, due to lack of media coverage in both locations. Since America and Australia are both wealthy Capitalist countries, you are only doing the system disservice by making such a scandal public.
Now that we have briefly examined the history of money and advantage, we have set the stage to ask the question of theft. The Ethical question we must ask is: Is theft ever justified?
We can use our Ethical concepts we have studied to give various answers to this question. While I will not say that there is a certain answer here, we can see that there are many ways of answering the question but each has its problems. This is how we know we are investigating the question in matters of real life and not in an ideal construct.
Principle
Kant, of course, would give the first and most positive answer to this question: NO, theft of property is NEVER justified. Notice that Kant, living in the German Enlightenment of the 1700s, is very proud of the culture of property and considers the possession of property to be an entirely reasonable and principled act. This is questionable when we trace its roots all the way back to chimpanzee behavior, of course.
This answer has the obvious advantage of never getting one involved in most questions of stealing, but there remain issues. What if one’s society is stealing from another, and legally one has become wealthy within the stealing society? While we could imagine that one is ignorant of the ongoing theft and therefore not DIRECTLY guilty of theft, one is INDIRECTLY guilty. Societies, especially America, store their wealth in the pockets of the wealthy. America stores its wealth in its millionaires and billionaires primarily, and encourages these individuals economically to siphon money from other economies and put it in their pockets because this is the central way that America gets wealthier. Thus, while one may hold fast to the principle of ‘I shall not steal’, one could be complicit in groups and cultures that are engaged in theft that benefits the individual and the individual actively supports (even in the absence of conscious consent).
Virtue & Consequence
According to the concept of ethical virtue, theft is fully justified as long as the individual is virtuous or becomes virtuous through the act of theft. In a very similar way, Utilitarians and Consequentialists would argue that theft is justified if in the long term it results in good and justice, much happiness and prevention of harm. Seems impossible? Robin Hood is the perfect example for consideration. If I rob the evil rich people and give to poor people who are starving (i.e. if we construct an example in which many would agree), many would say that I am virtuous and that I have acted for the best ends in the long view. I may be hanged for the crimes, but my actions benefit others and can be argued to benefit my own character (though this is debatable).
Balance
The concept of balance draws our attention not only to the duality of stealing and not stealing but also to the duality of possessing and forgetting about possession, grasping and letting go. There is a great passage of the Dao that says, ‘if you want to be free from robbers, do not store up treasure in your house’. If one stores up wealth, one brings theft to one’s doorstep. If one stores up wealth and becomes attached to it, one brings fear of theft to one’s mind (a Zen koan theme is calling intention in the mind a thief, that the grasping of desire in the mind is the real thief). If you do not worry about money, not only do you not have to worry about stealing from others, you do not worry about others stealing from you, no matter how much one has!
Also, consider that if one steals and gets away with it, this makes the compulsion for stealing stronger. One continues to steal, and then gets caught. Getting away with stealing can be a major cause of getting caught stealing, a paradox similar to the bad example attack on Utilitarianism (in this case, ‘good’ examples can lead to bad just as bad examples can lead to good).
One problem with using balance here: should we think that we can do bad as long as we balance it out with good? If we give to charity every time we steal, does this balance things for our own merit or for the shared situation?
Drive and Self Interest
At first, it seems that this concept would tell us, ‘steal to your heart’s content’. This may prove harder than it sounds. Is it in one’s self interest to steal from everyone? Not if everyone has large sticks and helmets haven’t been invented yet. Unfortunately, this concept is best for understanding the international situation and the reading I gave you from Zinn. America today feels that it must indebt the third world to itself to strengthen its capitalist way of life, as it did during the Cold War. Supporters of the Vietnam war as well as the ‘War on Terrorism’ today say openly on the News that we need to ‘defend America’s interests’. Thought the word ‘economic’ is left off the front of ‘interests’ here, this is essentially what is being argued. America is a very fine omelet (a money credit omelet, if you will), and this means eggs need to be stolen from the hen house. Perkins’ book gives us excellent insight into its mechanisms.
Perspective and Intersubjectivity
To repeat what was said at the beginning, we have all had the experience of stealing and having things stolen. Hopefully there is something that moves us towards wisdom in not stealing even though theft seems an inevitable and in fact integral part of our world. Aside from the ‘Golden Rule’, there is likely no other constant source of deterrence from theft considering that the government that prints the money and prosecutes the theft also in some circumstances supports theft between its citizens and steals from other governments in the name of life.
To further show the mechanisms and complexity of theft in the modern world, there is no better nor more relevant documentary than ‘The Corporation’.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Intro Philosophy: Islam & Early Europe
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to philosophy, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are no good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (I have found this is true of Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic religion, literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s great civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of technology and study. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on modern society. There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has always been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic.
Here are some awesome ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran:
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income. Nestorians and Jews fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thus thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. 1492 is a good example: it is the year that the Christian Kings of Spain and Portugal retook those lands from Muslims, and the start of the Spanish Inquisition that brutally attacked Jews, Muslims and non-Catholic Christians.
Algebra is possibly the most used device (if it can be called a device) in human history. It is important to consider algebra because in the second half of the course logic becomes an algebraic language (remember, logic used to be about debate in the ancient world, but it gradually became a highly specialized form of math that was intended to ground the foundations of mathematics). Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system and began doing math in the form of equations we are all familiar with today (taught by law to everyone up through college).
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through town with the latest things and systems of thought (books come this way too from China). Castles are Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, philosophy, logic and science that equations became the language for structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in paragraph form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas but is quite anachronistic and misleading to do this.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosopher/scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language.
ISLAMIC JESUS
Jesus is mentioned in the Koran more than anyone, the greatest prophet after Mohammed. He is the patron saint of scholars and wisdom, and he sounds much like Confucius.
The worst man is the scholar who is in error, since many people will err due to him.
The one who has learned and taught is great in the kingdom of heaven.
Stones, mud and gold are equal in my sight.
‘Teacher, who are the people of my race?’ ‘All the children of Adam.’
No one taught me. I saw the ugliness of ignorance and avoided it.
How many fruits, but not all are good! How many sciences, but not all of them useful!
THE MAIN DIVISIONS OF ISLAM
Many are familiar with the Sunni-Shiite split of Islamic cultures without realizing that the central issues between groups are philosophical positions on human reason. The Sunni believe that revelation such as the Koran is the supreme authority, and all else is secondary. The Mutazilites, a smaller sect of Islam and one of the great forces for philosophy and science, believe that God/Being is fully reasonable and human reason and logic are supreme to following tradition or scripture. Mutazilites argued that God can not contradict reason and thus cannot possibly commit error, which became a major theological and philosophical issue in the golden age of Islamic thought and civilization. The Shiites, the second major sect of Islam like the Sunnis, take a middle position between reason and scripture/tradition. Sunnis argued that one must investigate matters when scripture and reason contradict each other. This is important to recognize today, as Muslims are often believed to be unquestioningly traditional and literal in their understanding of the Koran.
THE GREAT ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHERS:
Al Kindi (801-873)
Pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method,
introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. Wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, argued that time and space were relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later.
Argued that Islam and Philosophy/Logic are completely compatible. Our scholarship says that he mostly merged Neoplatonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian/Buddhist Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950)
Little is known about Farabi’s origins or ethnic background. It is argued by scholars that he was Turkish or Persian. Farabi took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides famously said he could not understand Aristotle at all until he read Al-Farabi’s commentary, and then got it. Paid much attention to Imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and get right, you have visions of the cosmos and its workings. This is close to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments in his later thought.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037)
Foremost doctor of his time. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, neuropsychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), and the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing microscopic organisms as the cause of disease. The first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He learned Indian Arithmetic from and Indian grocer. This is ignored in most. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you, was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars. Today, in the wake of Islamic and European civilization, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? This was the big issue. Avicenna asks: Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that a real horse is one thing? Does the horseness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horseness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horseness’ are both mental. Avicenna uses the phoenix and unicorn as imaginary beasts to illustrate.
His floating man thought experiment, showing self-consciousness, shows imagination.
This is considered by some to be a source of Descartes’ ‘I think’ with demon.
After this, there was a split in his followers: which is primary, the essence or existence?
Essentialism (What it is 1st, the thing second) vs. Existentialism (thing first, what 2nd).
Al Ghazali (1058-1111), Persian
One of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism. Sufism is Islamic mysticism, who like mystics of other religions and cultures believe that all is a supreme One and judgment and desire obscure this from human vision. Many are familiar with the Sufi story of the blind men and the elephant, a story that Sufis argue is about their practice being the religion of all religions. Ghazali was a pioneer of skepticism and doubt. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certain human knowledge. When he says ‘The philosophers say’ I have read authors say, ‘this means Plato and Aristotle’, but I trust the scholars who say he means ‘Avicenna says’ as the position he always attacks. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that Atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of Negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) Cordoba, Spain
Wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, thus central for Europe Aristotle.
Wrote ‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, arguing against Ghazali and for Farabi etc.
He was another central author in Europe for science and philosophy. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe followed him. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our science is now more like Avicenna, but for the longest time it was Aristotleian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as necessary to be flawed that Europe swung back into a ‘all is contingent’ Avicenna direction.
NEOPLATONISM AND THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
First, they would have called themselves ‘Platonists’. Neo was added by first translator into English, and the title has been adopted by scholars in Europe and America. The start of the tradition comes from Alexandrian (Egyptian) Greek Platonists who were reading the Timaeus and participating in religious/philosophical debates amongst the many cultures of the trade port, including Egyptians, Nubians, Gnostic Christians, Coptic Christians, Jews, Indians, Persians, Mesopotamia etc.
Two texts that were central to Platonism were the Chaldean Oracles, which were supposed to be the secret teachings of Zarathustra from Persia, and the Hermetic Corpus, the secret teachings of Hermes Trismegistus (Thoth-Tat as a sage) from Egypt. These two sources became very important in the Renaissance, showing us that it was much more than a love of Greece and Rome that artists and scholars celebrated. These two texts actually had just been invented by Greek authors who were clearly using Plato to try to back-form the wisdom of Persia and Egypt that the ancient Greeks themselves praised, but at the time they were believed to be authentic and then well past by European scholars. Thus, they were sources that were believed to be earlier than Plato, which conveyed the wisdom that Plato himself developed and passed on as the true philosophy of all cultures.
Most famous Hermetic text is the Emerald Tablet, a short set of aphorisms. The line most quoted: the world is a sphere in which the center is everywhere and nowhere. Chaldean oracles aphorisms:
Explore the river of the soul, to rise to the order from which you descended.
When you see a formless fire, flashing through the depth of the world, hear the voice of fire.
The intelligible draws open the flower of the mind.
Central teachings of this tradition of Platonism:
The Soul must return to the One, the All (All-Lord or God), which it must do by way of lesser gods or angels and demons. The system is very much psychology of the soul, which is also angelology and demonology in classifying forces of the cosmos.
The macrocosm is the microcosm- small and big, so soul/mind is the universe.
Opening up the mind is returning to the cosmos that produced you.
Theme of the Fall and the Return (later in Christians id with Adam and fall from Eden).
There are two motions of mind to develop:
Kataphania and Apophania, positing and negating, affirming and doubting.
To get to the One, you must move Dialectically, back and forth, to open up and become the whole.
Humans occupy a unique place in the cosmos. They have the ability to subsume all the motions of things low and high, thus are most like the all-motion of the One.
Humans are the One fallen away from itself, journeying back to itself.
Time and space are the eternal moment and unity fallen and fragmented.
This is truly the most beautiful thought of Europe, which most don’t know about because it happened long before the gap of tech and science separated Europe from other cultures.
All the main thinkers of European Christianity were (Neo) Platonists for quite a while, and it thus still held much sway even after things branched out considerably.
Augustine, Pseudo Dionysius, Boethius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Ficino and Pico of the Ren (we will speak of them in particular), Bruno, Ren artists like Michelangelo, Botticelli, scientists like Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler.
Augustine (300) brought it into Christianity (from ‘Pagan’ authors). One of the most important author and church father, he was North African. He made the gods angels officially (each with an office) and talked about how light into the mind creates visions/theophanies/ideas of the cosmos and its order.
Pseudo-Dionysius (500) was a Syrian Christian who read Augustine and other authors and was big into negative theology, kataphania. He argued that the journey to the One was essentially one of unknowing or kataphania, and the One was the great Unknown, above all qualities or being (just like 99 names of Allah).
Eriugena (800) merged these two, working them together with many other authors, to create an amazing system. The first European Christian Platonist, Hegel wrote about him in his History- ‘With him, true philosophy first begins’, since Hegel is tracing an evolution of all thought up to himself, and Hegel is quite a European Platonist.
Notably, Hegel ignores the Islamic Zoroastrian Platonists who are writing at about the same time we learned about last week. Eriugena was one of the only people who could read a bit of Greek at the time, and so he was protected in the court of Charles the Bald who protected him from the Pope in exchange for translating and commentary on PD.
Basically, Augustine was cannon, and Eriugena was heretically saying that Augustine and PD are two sides of the same coin.
Eriugena saw the One as HyperOusia- the sum of being and non-being, the source of both but neither of the two at the same time. He took the radical unknown One of PD and made it the unknown source of both known and unknown in all levels of the cosmos.
God splits apart into oppositions to then form all the differentiations of the cosmos.
For Eriugena, psychology is physics, as we co-create our world as a product of our vision and the One’s vision. The One is unknown to itself/fully known to itself above human divisions of judgement, and it shares both of these with human beings, the special mediators of the cosmos. Like in Sufism, Humans are unique in potentially being God, encompassing the lowest and highest of all orders (the worm and the angel). Humans have free will thus- it was defending this radically which led to condemn. Authority comes from Reason, not the other way around.
Nicholas of Cusa’s mustard seed thought experiment- the boundless and infinite are present both active/potential, in the mundane of the world, just like the One/Christ.
St. Francis of Assisi (later San Francisco in Spanish) Visited Sultan’s Court, came back with a very Sufi vision. All religion is one brotherhood in God, give all to the poor, contemplate all through radical love. At the end of time, we will be standing side by side, hand in hand with sister death and brother fire.
The Renaissance (1400-1500)
‘Italy’ was not something that Ren people would have known. “Florence”, the city state was their nation. ‘Italy’ had yet to be unified and titled such, so ‘Italian Ren’ is a bit of a mis-title. Central power of the Pope had withered, and now trader city states can create competing cultures (another fall apart, good for thought time).
Vatican Library shows how books and Greeks had yet to be popular in 1400 Europe:
1443- 2 Greek books, 340 books total (that’s it)
1455- 400 Greek, 1200 total
1484- 1000 Greek, 3650 total
Frequently assumed by scholars that Renaissance was celebration of Greeks and Romans, both Philosophy and Art. Taking a close look at Ficino and Pico, the two major Platonists of the Renaissance and thus fathers of all European scholarship to follow, shows that the Egyptian and Persian wisdom was given a higher place than Plato.
Cosimo Medici founded the Platonic Academy of Florence in 1462 (meeting, not building as thought) and Ficino rose quickly to soon lead it, with Pico della Mirandola as student. Cosimo de Medici, when he knew he was dying, ordered Ficino to put aside translating Plato’s complete works and finish translating the Corpus Hermetica, the supposed secret wisdom of Egypt passed to the Hebrews and Greeks. Shows who was important. Plato is a follower of Hermes, and Zarathustra. Ficino translated ‘Maat’ as Logos, which is a bit of a confusion. Ficino finished translating the 17 texts in 1471.
Ficino argued there was one unbroken tradition of wisdom which included the Eyptians, Persians, the Brahmans of India (who he doesn’t go into detail on) and the Greeks.
This is like the Sufis, as well as arguing that Phil and Bible were compatible.
Ficino gave Europe the first Latin trans of Plato’s works, many derived from Arabic sources. Ficino thought that Zarathustra was the first prophet of the one true phil/rel, followed by Hermes from Egypt, then Moses, then Plato, then Jesus.
Pico, his student, thought it was first Hermes of Egypt, then Zarathustra, then Abraham, then Plato, etc. These remained the debated opinions for centuries.
Thus, Bruno and Masons follow Pico in Egypt being lost center of all wisdom.
Ficino repeatedly uses the Zoroastrian oracles to back up his points, and continuously mentions the 3 persian Magi visiting Jesus as infant in the Bible. Ficino writes that Plato had a third eye, which contemplated the union of being and nonbeing (The One), which came from a strange source. Pico was very big on Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, saying it was Egyptian.
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