virtual philosopher

Thinking from A to Z

Julian Baggini of the Philosophers Magazine interviewed me in 2001 about my book Thinking from A to Z . The video has just surfaced on You Tube:

Spot the Mistake - Out for a Duck?

Julian Baggini has an interview about his new book on reasoning here. Can you spot the mistake he makes about reasoning right at the end of the podcast?

Clue: it has something to do with sausages...

Further clue: see under 'bad reasons fallacy' in my Thinking from A to Z (3rd ed.).

Why are we so bad at assessing probabilities?

Human beings are terrible, on the whole, at working out how likely it is that something will occur. We are prone to describe things as miraculous or beyond any chance occurrence when in fact they are statistically quite likely. Why is this? Michael Shermer gives an evolutionary account of what he labels 'folk numeracy' i.e. 'our natural tendency to misperceive and miscalculate probabilities' in his short article 'Why our brains do not intuitively grasp probabilities' His answer is that we dwell in Middle Land - we have evolved to deal with short term, close-by phenomena, and often miss the bigger picture as a result. But it is not obvious that this answers the problem: we'd be much better adapted to our environments if we were intuitively good at assessing probablity and risk...

What Does 'Humanism' Mean? An Interview with Andrew Copson

What does 'humanism' mean? Some writers are intent on seeing similarities between all the things that have ever been labelled 'humanist'...but just because the same word is used, it doesn't follow that they have anything else in common, or are on a continuum. Does so-called religious humanism have anything significant in common with the kind of humanism that non-religious humanists endorse?

To clear these muddy waters, I turned to Andrew Copson, Director of Education and Public Affairs at the British Humanist Association (BHA).

Nigel: There is some confusion about what 'Humanism' means. What do you understand by the term?

Andrew: I think the Oxford Companion to the Mind has it right when it calls Humanism 'a morally concerned style of intellectual atheism openly avowed by only a small minority of individuals (for example, those who are members of the British Humanist Association) but tacitly accepted by a wide spectrum of educated people in all parts of the Western world.' This contemporary and widely-shared meaning, which the word has had now for over half a century, takes it to denote a non-religious worldview entailing a belief in reason and evidence as the ways of understanding reality, in human welfare and fulfillment as the aim of morality, and  in the capacity of humanity to make meaning and purpose for itself in the absence of any 'ultimate' meaning or purpose to the universe. This is the meaning of the word understood by the British Humanist Association and all the other national Humanist organisations in the world, and the meaning that is commonly understood in education in UK schools today. It is the Humanism described in books like Richard Norman's On Humanism (Routledge) or Jim Herrick's Humanism: An Introduction (RPA) and great books from the 1960s such as Hector Hawton's Humanist Revolution. Any confusion that there still is over the term, I think, is down to the word having had different uses at different points in the past, before it came to mean what it mainly means today, and this sometimes gives rise to misleading uses of the word.

Confronting Prejudices: a taxi driver and The Daily Mail

When my train to London was late yesterday, unusually for me, I took a taxi to get to my appointment. Perhaps my mistake was asking to be taken to Westminster, but instantly the taxi driver began a rant that gradually descended into racism. At times I wondered if I was in an Ali G spin-off and being taken for a ride in both senses - that pendant hanging from the mirror - did it have a concealed TV camera?  Stephen Lawrence, he told me, must have said something to the people who killed him (though he agreed that wouldn't have justified murder) - his evidence: apparently Lawrence is giving the black power closed fist salute in all the photographs of him (this from someone who declared he doesn't read the newspapers or watch TV - so where does he see these photographs?) 'Why does one murder get all the attention' People are killed all the time.' (I tried rather feebly to point out that a racist murder has a symbolic value as well as the tragedy that it is for the individual and those he left behind).

In the course of a 15 minute ride he made comments about how he believed that black lesbians get preferential treatment when it comes to doing 'the knowledge', Eastern Europeans are the ones who rob cabbies at knife or gunpoint (no, it had never happened to him), and so on. He was a cheerful, friendly sort of man, and my attempts to stop the flow of racism by engaging him in a discussion of his prejudices were pathetic. I felt sullied by the whole experience, caught off-guard and weak at not confronting him more robustly...and possibly just getting him to stop the cab and get out. What really annoys me is that when I jumped out in heavy traffic I instinctively left a tip, despite my disgust at his views and disappointment about him matching up to the worst stereotypes of a London cabby - almost to the point of caricature (he even used the classic phrase 'what's it all about then?')...I'm still not absolutely sure I wasn't the victim of some kind of performance artist or reality TV stunt.

And then, again very unusually for me, I read Monday's The Daily Mail which was lying around at home (it was free at the gym) and while it's coverage of some topics fitted by stereotypical view of that newspaper, I was blown away by the leading letter to the editor: it was about Sartre's existentialism! Andew J. Smith from Roehampton University had written a clear response to a review of a prurient book about Sartre's and de Beauvoir's supposedly 'essential' relationship..He points out that, "far from being the 'bible or our licentious times'...existentialism is a philosophy which demands that all of us ask ourselves a very personal question: what gives my life meaning?" I don't  agree with this as an encapsulation of Sartre's existentialism (since he answers that question rather than invites us to ask it - Sartre's answer is  the choices I make, the sum of what I actually do). But how prejudiced of me not to expect to find existentialism being discussed in the letters page of the Daily Mail...

Free Speech has To Respect Religion Says UN Leader - How Exactly?

It is not clear to me how it is possible to live up to the latest UN pronouncement on free speech. You can read a Reuters' Report on this here.

If all those who speak, write, express their views have to respect all religious sensitivities, then what can anyone say? Some religious group is likely to be offended by almost any expression of a view. Does the UN want to stop us watching The Life of Brian, Jerry Springer the Opera, etc? Will atheists have to keep quiet about their beliefs for fear of offending religious sensitivities? Watch out Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and co. And how does all this square with the US First Amendment?

Philip Hensher wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian on this topic in 2006.

Time to Get Out of Our Armchairs?

If you want to stay sharp you should do some aerobic exercise. That's the message coming from current brain research. Read about it here.
 

Presumed Consent and Organ Donation

The British Government is thinking about implementing an 'opt out' policy on the donation of body parts. The presumption will be that everyone with suitable body parts has consented to having them used post mortem unless they have explicitly removed their consent. This seems, on the face of it, a good idea, particularly if it delivers more organs for transplant. But not everyone is happy. Mick Hume has some critical points to make (particularly in relation to recent political history) in his article in Spiked.

Listen to a discussion on this topic on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze (only available until Tuesday 22nd Jan.)

Zizek on Violence: Misleading About Free Speech

I picked up Slavoj Zizek's book Violence today which has some good jokes, some thought-provoking cultural references and some interesting ideas all delivered with panache. But ultimately I don't trust his judgement. Here's why.

No Socrates, Zizek like many postmodernists, poses as one who knows, who can see through ideology and diagnose the short-sightedness of those in the grip of naive enlightenment ideas or systemic violence that is more or less invisible to most of us. We dim-sighted ones naively rail against what he calls subjective violence (or what we traditionally call 'violence'), apparently blind to systemic and symbolic violence.

Unfortunately when he comes to discussing 'historian' David Irving he seems to commit symbolic violence himself (I feel liberated to use 'violence' in this metaphorical sense by Zizek's own practice). On p.92 of Violence, in the context of a discussion of the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, Zizek suggests that the freedom of the press in the West is not as extensive as we like to believe because we can't tolerate questioning of the Holocaust. He writes

'...we should examine the various prohibitions and limitations which underlie the so-called freedom of the press in the West. Isn't the Holocaust a sacred and untouchable fact? At the every moment when the Muslim protests were raging, the British historian David Irving was in an Austrian prison serving a three-year prison term for expressing his doubts about the Holocaust in an article published fifteen years earlier?' (Zizek, Violence, 2008, p.92)

Does Reading Literature (and even Philosophy) Improve Moral Character?

Norman Geras has an interesting post on normblog about whether or not reading literature (and maybe even philosophy) improves our moral character. It's a response to a supposedly knock-down argument against the idea that it does put forward by Stanley Fish. You can read Fish's piece  from the New York Times here: 'Will The Humanities Save Us?' 

On the question of whether or not reading philosophy improves moral character (a question Norm sidesteps), the answer surely depends on which philosophy you read and in what state of mind. That is, unless you think that it is the act of reading  itself that is morally improving. Critical reading, and a concern for consistency, might be thought a stimulus to the kind of reflection that is a pre-requisite of acting morally at all, I suppose...but having the pre-requisite won't guarantee the result (but see earlier post about the UNESCO official line on the value of studying philosophy).