Welcome!

To all the MG students taking my Intro to Philosophy course this fall: welcome! As you can see, I've been blogging here all summer; hopefully you'll spend some time browsing my posts and find something that catches your interest.

Before you get started, though. The first thing you should do is follow the 'Intro / Read Me' link (to the right). This will take you to the very first post on the blog, which will give you a short overview of my expectations for your participation in the online life of the course. Once you've read it, you'll be prepared for what follows. I expect you to have questions: after all, questions are what philosophy is all about!

Does Philosophy Matter?

I mean, really. What difference can philosophy possibly make in the real, day-to-day world in which we live? If I study philosophy, isn't my only career option to become a teacher or professor?

Read this interview (in *.pdf), published in Cogito magazine, with Martha Nussbaum, a renowned philosopher, legal thinker and public intellectual. See if you can spot all the different ways she claims philosophy has a real influence in areas like economics, politics, medicine, and others.

Are you convinced? Play 'devil's advocate': can you come up with any convincing arguments against her evidence?

"Doing Good", Self-Interest, and Cows

"Doing the right thing" - that is, being ethical - is all fine and good. It's a noble ideal, one we have grown up with and absorbed from early childhood. We share, at least, a vague sense that things in the world would be a lot worse if people generally made immoral choices, and that, overall, it's better for most everyone to act ethically most of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's the possibility of exceptions to our general rules that keeps ethicists awake in the wee small hours of the morning. Sure, I should tell the truth rather than lie - generally; but what if the Gestapo at my front door asks me where to find my Jewish neighbor (who just so happens to be hiding in my basement)? I have a pretty strong sense that, at least in this one particular case, it might actually be moral to lie. But "going with your gut" isn't a reliable method of choosing, and so I have to think long and hard about why lying here might be right, and try to come up with good reasons. (And this is a pretty straightforward situation - they get a lot trickier in real life.)

Anyway, that's the background for much of our ethical reasoning in philosophy. (Not all, though; there are plenty of other issues in ethics that don't rest on the question of exceptions.) This July 2009 article explains the "tragedy of the commons," a classic thought experiment in real-world ethical decision making - in particular, it shows how "doing the right thing" for yourself might, sometimes, contradict "doing the right thing" for the rest of the people around you.

Cows are involved.

A provocative quote from the article:

Rational individuals (and states) will always benefit by being free riders
in the short term. If you do the right thing, you lose; you’re a sucker. Doing
the wrong thing at least keeps you even.

Once the author lays out the classic thought experiment, he takes it and applies it to issues of global environmentalism, psychology, game theory... it's a long article, but very thought-provoking.

Generation Tech 2: The Death of General Knowledge?

We used to consider someone well-educated who knew a broad range of facts - in geography, literature, current events, science, the arts. But nowadays, isn't that what the internet is for? This article explores how our increasing access to data has "outsourced" the storage of information from our brains to our Blackberries, and gives one perspective on what consequences we can expect.

Food for thought: If storage and recall of facts is a job now performed by our tech, not our minds, have we made ourselves obsolete? or is there still some role for human intelligence?

Bats and Brains

Philosopher Tom Nagel wrote perhaps his most widely-known article, "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?", in 1974. The focus of the piece is the issue of subjective experience: there is something it feels like to have your consciousness, and this feeling-like is both essential and unable to be reduced to, or explained away as, some mere physical feature.

This is an interesting position. Many folks think that consciousness can be completely explained by neural structure - once we completely understand the network of our brains, we will know all there is to know about consciousness. Nagel rejects this so-called "reductionist" thesis, using a pretty engaging thought experiment.

Anyway, an article in today's BBC News made me think of this issue: an "immersive" exhibit at a conference in New Orleans demonstrates what it's like to experience the world with animals' senses rather than our own. Infrared and ultraviolet sight, etc. Perhaps even the sonar of a bat...?