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Admittedly, allowing same-sex couples to marry will change the social meaning of marriage (it will no longer be part of this social meaning that every marriage is the union of a man and a woman); and for marriage to bring these intangible benefits, it needs to have a relatively stable and well-understood social meaning. However, there is no evidence that the introduction of same-sex marriage will change any other elements of this social meaning. Moreover, this social meaning has already changed radically over the years.
Marriage used to be generally understood as an unequal partnership, with the wife being subordinated to her husband, whereas now — at least in law and in most of mainstream culture — marriage is viewed as a partnership of equals. In general, the social meaning of marriage must change whenever such changes are necessary to avoid injustice; so this social meaning must now be changed so that it no longer excludes the participation of same-sex couples.
There is a lesson here for moral and political philosophy. In much of political philosophy, social institutions are conceived legalistically, as rules for the distribution of tangible benefits and burdens (such as money, health care, employment opportunities, and the like). Yet social institutions also have social meanings, which enable them to create important intangible benefits as well. Such institutions matter, not just because they are a mechanism for distributing tangible benefits and burdens, but because they create opportunities for meaningful human lives within society.
It is expertise that lets us get out of our heads, to the things that matter. Skillful, fluent action is not slavery to the neural zombie within; it is liberation from the rote and the regulated. It is flexible attunement to where we find ourselves. (Echoes of Emerson again.) It is intelligent life.
. Your training in financial theory, economics, mathematics, and statistics will serve you well. But your lessons in history, philosophy, and literature will be just as important, because it is vital not only that you have the right tools, but also that you never lose sight of the purposes and overriding social goals of finance.
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Finance, at its best, does not merely manage risk, but also acts as the steward of society’s assets and an advocate of its deepest goals. Beyond compensation, the next generation of finance professionals will be paid its truest rewards in the satisfaction that comes with the gains made in democratizing finance – extending its benefits into corners of society where they are most needed. This is a new challenge for a new generation, and will require all of the imagination and skill that you can bring to bear.
Professor Greene is lecturing. Down the hall, her arch-rival, Professor Browne, is also lecturing. Professor Greene is holding forth at length about how absurd Professor Browne’s ideas are. She believes Professor Browne to be lecturing in Room 33. So to emphasize her point, she writes on the blackboard the single sentence:
Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false.
But Professor Greene has made a mistake. She, herself, is in Room 33. So is what she has written on the board true or false? If it’s true, then since it itself is written on the board, it’s false. If it’s false, then since it is the only thing written on the board, it’s true. Either way, it’s both true and false.
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Paradoxes are apparently good arguments that lead to conclusions that are beyond belief (Greek: “para” = beyond, “doxa” = belief). And when you meet a paradox, you’ve got only two choices. One is to accept that the conclusion, implausible as it may seem, is actually true; the other is to reject the conclusion, and explain what has gone wrong in the argument.
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German mathematician Georg Cantor on the infinite led to one of the most major revolutions in the history of mathematics. Fundamental to it was accepting that there are indeed exactly as many even numbers as whole numbers. It is the very nature of infinite totalities that you can throw away some of their members, and have as many as you started with.
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Principles of logic can themselves be debated, and often are, just like principles of any other science. For example, one principle of standard logic is the law of excluded middle, which says that something either is the case, or it isn’t. Either it’s raining, or it’s not. Many philosophers and others have rejected the law of excluded middle, on various grounds. Some think it fails in borderline cases, for instance when very few drops of rain are falling, and avoid it by adopting fuzzy logic. Others think the law fails when applied to future contingencies, such as whether you will be in the same job this time next year. On the other side, many philosophers — including me – argue that the law withstands these challenges. Whichever side is right, logical theories are players in these debates, not neutral umpires.
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Another debate in which logical theories are players concerns the ban on contradictions. Most logicians accept the ban but some, known as dialetheists, reject it. They treat some paradoxes as black holes in logical space, where even contradictions are true (and false).
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we’d be in trouble if we could never agree on anything in logic. Fortunately, we can secure enough agreement in logic for most purposes, but nothing in the nature of logic guarantees those agreements. Perhaps the methodological privilege of logic is not that its principles are so weak, but that they are so strong. They are formulated at such a high level of generality that, typically, if they crash, they crash so badly that we easily notice, because the counterexamples to them are simple. If we want to identify what is genuinely distinctive of logic, we should stop overlooking its close similarities to the rest of science.
skeptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
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keptics (and, hum, philosophers!) are in the criticism business, and nobody likes to be criticized (including skeptics and philosophers). But we may cut some slack to critics if they also propose ways forward, constructive solutions to the problems they identify. This, I think, is a mistake. Criticism is valuable per se, as a way to engage our notions, show where they may go wrong, and help (other) people see ways forward. Criticism — pace Bacon — is inherently constructive, even when negative, because it allows us to make progress by identifying our errors and their causes.
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This under-appreciated role of criticism, incidentally, may also be responsible (in part, i.e. egos and turf wars aside) for the continuing diatribes between philosophers and physicists, where too often the latter do not appreciate that the role of philosophy is a critical one, with the discipline making progress by eliminating mistaken notions rather than by discovering new facts (we’ve got science for the latter task, and it’s very good at it!).
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human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines' decisions.
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As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won't be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.
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The Ten Commandments of Teaching
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
- Bertrand Russel
"Nietzsche’s “high esteem for the Greeks is a commonplace,” Kaufmann says—yet many have decided to ignore his “great debt to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics” by supposing that he “wanted to return to the pre-Socratics.” Nietzsche’s affinity for the Socrarics is revealed in an epigram which appears at the end of Part I of Zarathustra and also in the Preface to Ecce Homo: “‘The man who seeks knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.’ “This remark should remind us of Aristotle’s principle (in the Nicomachean Ethics 1096a) that for the sake of maintaining the truth, we have a duty ‘even to destroy what touches us closely’ since ‘piety requires us to honor truth above our friends’ (ibid.). Indeed,
Nietzsche goes beyond Aristotle by urging his own readers: ‘One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil only’ (Z 122). Like Socrates, Nietzsche would rather arouse a zest for knowledge than commit anyone to his own views. And when he writes, in the chapter ‘On the Friend,’ ‘one who is unable to loosen his own chains may yet be a redeemer for his friend’, he seems to recall Socrates claim that he was but a barren midwife. (402—03)
These citations, Kaufmann thinks, render intelligible Nietzsche’s “emphatic scorn” for all who would discard their own beliefs so as to follow a master, and his “vision of a disciple who might follow his master’s conceptions beyond the master’s boldest dreams.” Hence, any references to being a follower of Nietzsche would be a contradiction of terms; for to be a Nietzschean, “whether ‘gentle’ or ‘tough,’ “one must not be a Nietzschcan” (403)."
Kuhn wanted to free us from the illusion that knowledge is independent of history and of the sociality that marks us as humans, but he did not think that all beliefs that our history and sociality put before us are equally worthy. Indeed, he quickly moved away from the "shift happens" conception of paradigms as bundles of beliefs, emphasizing instead that they're examples of good scientific practice that researchers apply in their daily work.
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Ever since Newton, we in the West have thought movement changes an object's position in neutral space but does not change the object itself. For Aristotle, a change in position was a change in a quality of the object, and qualitative change tended toward an asymmetric actualization of potential: an acorn becomes an oak, but an oak never becomes an acorn. Motion likewise expressed a tendency for things to actualize their essence by moving to their proper place
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From this, Kuhn learned several important lessons that surfaced in SSR 15 years later. First, scientific ideas occur within a context that enables them to make sense. Second, context is accepted for different sorts of reasons than are the hypotheses that emerge within it. Third, the idea of a new scientific context occurs roughly the way his own illumination of Aristotle's ideas did: all at once, an entire whole snapping into view the way a duck-rabbit illustration switches instantly from one view to another.
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Many people believe, with Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, that if ethical precepts were not grounded in God's commands, then anything would be permitted. From Plato on, however, the philosophical tradition has frequently questioned the idea of a religious foundation for ethics.
Despite this, philosophers have yearned for a different source of absolute ethical authority, substituting the dictates of reason for any divine imperative, seeking, with Kant, the "moral law within."
When she returned to Yale in 1973, Marcus was one of only two tenured women in the faculty of arts and sciences. In a recent correspondence, the scholar and M.I.T. professor Margery Resnick, a junior colleague at the time, described Marcus’s role among the women on campus:
Ruth and I were constantly asked to serve on “how to” panels for undergraduate women. “How to be a female professional,” “How to have a husband and profession,” “How to be a professional woman with children,” etc. … I remember one panel at which a student asked: “But how can you be assertive, direct and professional and still have the men in the department like you?” [Ruth answered:] “You can’t. Whether you smile and bring them coffee, or you demand to be treated equally, they will not like you. So my only advice is to speak your mind, be yourself, and be professional”… Ruth was a constant supporter of every woman faculty member who got in trouble because of her ideas ….[She] gave us hope that things could change.
Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.
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Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.
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somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.
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It is wrong to assume with Russell that liberalism is necessarily wedded to empiricism or vice versa. Socially, the connections between the two are less than logical and more than merely psychological. A thinker can defend a liberal position on the basis of an idealistic (even theological) metaphysics in the sense that his justifying reasons are expressed in the idiom of his system or creed. But what defines a liberal position in social and political affairs? Not any one trait or program, to be sure, whether it is “free enterprise” or the conception of the state as a neutral umpire between warring social groups. There is a family of traits which define the liberal temper, several of which must be present before we can justifiably classify a thinker as liberal. Among the things we look for in a liberal thinker are recognition of the moral primacy of the individual in appraising institutional life, acceptance of a free market of ideas, tolerance of political opposition, appreciation of diversity, openmindedness to alternatives, endorsement of the right to self-determination, national, social and personal, including the moral right to revolution if the demand for self-determination is persistently frustrated. And, underlying all, reliance on the methods of intelligence conceived not as Reason carrying out ends of which we are not aware, but as common sense fortified by relevant scientific knowledge. Liberalism is not so much a doctrine as an attitude toward political affairs which is aware of human finitude and the tentativeness of human judgment and yet is prepared to act vigorously in moments of crisis. When it is given to religious language, it regards the ascription of Perfection or Divinity to the State (which we find in Hegel), or to any other human institution, as blasphemous...
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there is something that contemporary liberals can learn from Hegel. This is the importance of the principles of continuity and polarity in avoiding lapses into doctrinaire positions. History abounds with illustrations, and we need not go far in our own time to find them. Not every plausible plan is a workable one. Readiness is not all the ripeness and maturity of conditions, independently determined, count for some thing too. We cannot wipe out history and begin as if we were born yesterday. There is no one principle that can guide us in human affairs whether it be the principle of freedom, peace, survival, justice, love, or what not. Each one exacts a price in terms of the others. Effective as these and similar maxims are in diminishing the risks of excess, by themselves they do not constitute an adequate philosophy. All they add up to is a counsel of caution.
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at one point Kissinger said he thought the best academic preparation for government service was training in philosophy, political theory, and history. In particular, he argued that training in political theory taught you how to think in a disciplined and rigorous manner, and knowledge of history was essential for grasping the broader political context in which decisions must be made. It was clear that he also sees a grounding in history as essential for understanding how different people see the world, and also for knowing something about the limits of the possible.
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I found this observation intriguing because these subjects are not what schools of public policy typically emphasize, even though they are supposedly in the business of preparing students for careers in public service. The canonical curriculum in public policy emphasizes economics and statistics (i.e., regression analysis), sometimes combined with generic training in "public policy analysis" and political institutions.
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philosophy is not science. For it employs the rational tools of logical analysis and conceptual clarification in lieu of empirical measurement. And this approach, when carefully carried out, can yield knowledge at times more reliable and enduring than science, strictly speaking. For scientific measurement is in principle always subject to at least some degree of readjustment based on future observation. Yet sound philosophical argument achieves a measure of immortality.
So if we philosophers want to restore philosophy’s authority in the wider culture, we should not change its name but engage more often with issues of contemporary concern — not so much as scientists but as guardians of reason. This might encourage the wider population to think more critically, that is, to become more philosophical.
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One such example is Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is best defined as the advantage of the stronger, namely, that which is in the competitive interest of the powerful. Socrates reduces this view to absurdity by showing that the wise need not compete with anyone.
Or to take a more positive example, Wittgenstein showed that an ordinary word such as “game” is used consistently in myriad contrasting ways without possessing any essential unifying definition. Though this may seem impossible, the meaning of such terms is actually determined by their contextual usage. For when we look at faces within a nuclear family, we see resemblances from one to the next. Yet no single trait need be present in every face to recognize them all as members of the family. Similarly, divergent uses of “game” form a family. Ultimately as a result of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, we know that natural language is a public phenomenon that cannot logically be invented in isolation.
These are essentially conceptual clarifications. And as such, they are relatively timeless philosophical truths.
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Though philosophy does sometimes employ thought experiments, these aren’t actually scientific, for they are conducted entirely in the imagination. For example, judges have imagined what might happen if, say, insider trading were made legal. And they have concluded that while it would lower regulatory costs and promote a degree of investor freedom, legalization would imperil the free market itself by undermining honest securities markets and eroding investor confidence. While this might appear to be an empirical question, it cannot be settled empirically without conducting the experiment, which is naturally beyond the reach of jurisprudence. Only legislatures could conduct the experiment by legalizing insider trading. And even then, one could not conduct it completely scientifically without a separate control-group society in which insider trading remained illegal for comparison. Regardless, judges would likely again forbid legalization essentially on compelling philosophical grounds.
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"His critique of those universal philosophies of history (Marx, Toynbee, Spengler) that have made a lasting mark on our century: philosophies which all claim to have discovered the ultimate meaning of history, both the basic principle of historical structures and the causal force behind historical development). To him, these philosophies show themselves to be a ‘secularization of theologies’. In the act of the ‘idolization of history’,’ such theologies obey the personal philosophical possibilities of their creators in a secularized civilization. By contrast to other political ideologies, the secular religions absorb metaphysical, spiritual components; in Aron’s view, they are nourished by the substantive core of the universal philosophy of history, for they adapt to the above-cited elements in order to establish a historical truth.
In its character of promising inner-worldly salvation, the secularized religion, eschatological promise and proclamation of an absolute, dogmatic truth instrumentalize history as an instance of legitimation of their respective world-views - world-views that are fixed in stone as true. Accompanying the substitution of Christian belief in a secularized mass society, one finds here both a simplification and a banalization of transcendent belief — even a caricature of it. The secular religions, which therefore have pejorative connotations, transpose the individual human being’s formerly transcendent expectation of benefit and salvation into collective, inner-worldly promises of liberation. These are supposed to provide an ‘equivalent of the lost eternity’ in the form of new kinds of homogeneous social structures."
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Perhaps the trouble started with Theodozius Dobzhansky, one of the fathers of modern evolutionary theory, who famously said that nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution (the phrase is, in fact, approvingly quoted by Pross). Problem is, Dobzhansky was writing for an audience of science high school teachers, and his statement is patently wrong, as an even cursory examination of the history of biology makes clear. For instance, developmental biologists had done a lot of highly fruitful research throughout the 19th and 20th centuries even as they ignored Darwin. And molecular biologists made spectacular progress from the 1950’s though the onset of the 21st century, again pretty much completing ignoring evolution. This is not to say that evolutionary theory doesn’t help in understanding developmental and molecular systems, but it is a stretch of the record to make claims such as those of Dobzhansky. (It would be like saying, for instance, that nothing makes sense in physics except in the light of quantum mechanics. Plenty of things in physics make perfect sense even as one brackets quantum mechanics and considers it a background theory.)
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Of course, Darwinian evolution is indeed applicable to some non biological systems, particularly to so-called genetic algorithms, a type of evolving computer program whose properties have been studied by computational scientists over the past few decades. Indeed, genetic algorithms mimic biological evolution so closely that a number of population geneticists I know have been annoyed by repeated claims of computer scientists to have discovered this or that principle describing such systems, apparently without realizing that many of those discoveries had already been made by theoretical population geneticists decades earlier.
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Hume, on the contrary, thinks that suicide is morally permissible, also on the grounds of his analysis of duties. He talks about three types of duties: to god, to ourselves, and to others. I will skip the first category, since I don’t think there are any gods toward whom we have any duties.
In terms of duties to others, Hume claims that in committing suicide we do not harm others (again, with the partial exception of the distress we may cause to loved ones). However, we also — by necessity — cease to do any good for society, which may present a problem. Hume’s response here is that our duties to society are in proportion to the benefits we receive from society (a form of pragmatic reciprocal altruism, if you will), and since we do not receive any benefits from society after we die (obviously), it follows that we do not have any duties toward it either. More broadly, in Hume’s words, “I am not obliged to do a small good for society at the expense of a great harm to myself.”
The plausibility of theories of truth has often been observed to vary, sometimes extensively, across different domains or regions of discourse. Because of this variance, the problems internal to each such theory become salient as they overgeneralize. A natural suggestion is therefore that not all (declarative) sentences in all domains are true in exactly the same way. Sentences in mathematics, morals, comedy, chemistry, politics, and gastronomy may be true in different ways, if and when they are ever true. ‘Pluralism about truth’ names the thesis that there is more than one way of being true.
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