Hume's Viciousness

We discussed today in "Art and Philosophy" David Hume's proposed solution to the antinomous depiction of art as open to "critical" (that is, objective) judgments that are irreducibly subjective in origin. Hoping ultimately to reconcile a multiplicity of human "sentiments," he invokes putative instances of universal agreement from which to generate principles of artistic excellence. But on what basis does Hume assume that mere (inter-subjective) agreement is sufficient to generate an objective (that is, trans-subjective) standard? Is he simply claiming that "the best art" always conforms to standards implicit in our best artistic products and processes? If so, Hume is open to the charge of vicious -- or at least ineffectual -- circularity. As T. Gracyk writes:

"Whatever the standard, Hume's essay poses the problem of an apparent circularity in argumentation. A limited number of works are used to identify the best critics (leading, in turn, to the list of the qualities of such critics), but those works attain the status of masterpieces only through the judgment of such critics. So Hume either defines good critics in terms of good art, or good art in terms of good critics. (Is Homer's greatness demonstrated by the fact that true critics say so, or is their status as good critics to be demonstrated by the fact that they agree on Homer's merits?) It may be, as Hume claims, that we face "questions of fact" in asking whether someone possesses the characteristics he attributes to true critics, or whether a specific work has appealed to such critics across cultures and the ages. Either way, how has he shown that "established" beauties provide the "finest" pleasure? Why are they superior to the "vulgar," transitory entertainments Hume dismisses? The features of the true critic are often read as Hume's way out of this trap. But Hume seems to have predetermined that only someone with wealth, education and leisure will ever possess good taste. The only answer, in the end, is the verdict of our common human nature: "the sentiments of all mankind are agreed" that such critics are superior."

Comments always welcome,

DKJ

The Art of Dewey's Pedagogy

I claimed the other day in "Art and Philosophy" that my pedagogical assumptions owe much to the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. We saw that Dewey parses "an experience" as a consequence of wresting from the relatively inchoate and undifferentiated flow of experience a finite temporal span (one with a clear beginning and ending) imbued with a certain degree of significance or meaning (so that the cessation -- the ending -- has the character of a consummation). In like fashion, a successful learning experience is one born of those deliberate efforts to cull an educational experience from conscious life generally.

Consider this summary from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"The roots of aesthetic experience lie, Dewey argues, in commonplace experience, in the consummatory experiences that are ubiquitous in the course of human life. There is no legitimacy to the conceit cherished by some art enthusiasts that aesthetic enjoyment is the privileged endowment of the few. Whenever there is a coalesence into an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present circumstances, life then takes on an aesthetic quality--what Dewey called having "an experience." Nor is the creative work of the artist, in its broad parameters, unique. The process of intelligent use of materials and the imaginative development of possible solutions to problems issuing in a reconstruction of experience that affords immediate satisfaction, the process found in the creative work of artists, is also to be found in all intelligent and creative human activity. What distinguishes artistic creation is the relative stress laid upon the immediate enjoyment of unified qualitative complexity as the rationalizing aim of the activity itself, and the ability of the artist to achieve this aim by marshalling and refining the massive resources of human life, meanings, and values."

It seems to follow as well that "intelligent and creative human activity" in the educational arena can and should include Dewey's aesthetic emphasis on immediate satisfaction. That is, along with its obvious utilitarian virtues, learning can and should be enjoyed for its own sake.

Comments always welcome,

DKJ

A Monist's Anomaly

A question surfaced today in "The Nature of Human Nature" about D. Davidson's anomalous monism (AM). Here's a thumbnail sketch of AM from philosophyprofessor.com:

"...View associated especially with the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1920-2003), saying that mental events are identical with certain physical events (hence the monism), but that there are no laws which are purely mental, or which connect mental events with physical ones (hence the 'anomalous'; that there are no strict deterministic laws for predicting or explaining mental events is called the 'anomalism of the mental').

This is because whether two events are connected by a law depends on how they are described. Two mental events will also be two physical events, and described in physical terms may be connected by a law; but if one or both are described in mental terms (for example, as a decision rather than as a neuron-firing), no law will connect them.

This is because, though any mental event is identical with some physical event, there is no reason to think that all mental events of a certain kind (for example, all decisions) are also physical events of one and the same kind (for example, a certain kind of neuron-firing)."

What does AM have to do with our topic, determinism and free will? If Davidson is right to say that there are no psycho-physical laws connecting mental events with physical events, then his anomalous (that is, non-lawlike) explanation of the mind and its originating intentions would seem to be consistent with his nonreductive physicalistic (and deterministic) view of the universe.

The two common criticisms of this apparently "compatibilist" approach to questions surrounding free will and determination are (1) that, contra Davidson, such lawlike connections do in fact exist (hence AM is wrong) and (2) that, assuming that these laws, pace Davidson, do not exist, the mental threatens to become strictly irrelevant to explanations of our actions, leading to the much-discredited theory of human action called epiphenomenalism.

Comments always welcome.

DKJ

Humans vs. worms?

As a sideline to Dewey's naturalistic aesthetics (where, as he says, human artistic abilities are "prefigured in nature"), we considered briefly -- and somewhat comically -- in "Art and Philosophy" today the sense of claiming that humans are "greater than worms in every conceivable respect." I offered the suggestion that we replace the italicized phrase with the more descriptive "humans and worms (or any nonhuman animal for that matter) differ with respect to their capacities for x." For example, we could note that individual worms are greater soil turners and fertilizers than individual persons, so long as we disallow technological extensions of the latter's "natural" abilities. In addition, there are many things worms/humans can do (slither through keyholes/play the piano) that humans/worms cannot do.

Several students thought that my reparsing of the more simple "greater than" claim unfairly removed technology from the human's bag of natural ticks, on the reasonable assumption that employing various capacity-enhancing technologies is "not an unnatural" human capacity.

Though not unnatural, (advanced) human technology is mostly a social product rather than a manifest capacity of individual humans. And technology is unlikely to make us better keyhole slitherers. The absurdity of these comparisons is a product, I think, of tacitly comparing (in the original claim that "humans are greater in every respect to worms") both the physical and cognitive features of two different species. To say that worms are better keyhole slitherers is simply a convoluted way of saying that worms are better worms than humans could ever hope to be. Likewise, the claim that "humans are greater in every respect to worms" is a misleading way of observing that humans are better humans than worms could ever hope to be.

Comments always welcome.

DKJ

Abort Animal Rights?

Today in "The Nature of Human Nature" we breifly touched on a potential incompatibility between the robust defense of (nonhuman) animal rights and a pro-choice position on abortion:

If one supports, say, the rights of dogs, cats, or even lowly rats or fish, then shouldn't one, for consistency's sake, favor the basic rights of fetuses over a woman's right to choose abortion (in non-emergency situations)?

This is enough to rock the ideological foundations of many pro-choice animal ethicists, but I don't think it should. Aside from theological musings about human "ensoulment" at conception, the considerable intrinsic value of humans and nonhumans alike arises in the first instance from their degree of sentience (or capacity consciously to experience painful or pleasurable states). Science and commonsense conspire to suggest that blastocysts, zygotes, and early fetuses are in fact nonsentient; that is, constitutively unable to think or want or prefer or (consciously) feel anything at all.

However, the eventual sentience of most later-stage fetuses introduces a potential conflict in basic rights. At that point, (extrinsic, relational duties notwithstanding) we must consider both the emerging moral status of developing fetuses and their mothers' right to privacy and self-determination. Distinguishing "primary" rightholders (mothers) from "subserviant" rightholders (sentient fetuses), Gary Franzione (of Rutgers Law Center) offers one solution here.

Comments and suggestions always welcome.

DKJ