The homeland of Helen Blums, along with a number of other former Soviet or Eastern Bloc countries, is in trouble due to emigration and low birth rates. Latvia's president said recently that the country's independence would rapidly become unsustainable if the net outflow of population was not stopped.
And in a provocative piece on the problems of fertility and emigration in some European countries, Edward Hugh suggests that the international community should start thinking about a 'country resolution mechanism' along the lines of the mechanisms for dealing with failed banks recently debated in Europe.
Hugh refers to Wolfgang Lutz's low fertility trap hypothesis which involves self-reinforcing mechanisms which may lead to population meltdown.
Economic factors are clearly crucial.
"... Not only do […] negative economic conditions discourage young people from forming families and having children (obvious I think), they can also have the effect that young people leave in search of a better future thus reducing the potential number of children who can be born in the future.
"The ensuing acceleration in the rate of population ageing and the proportions of older people only makes the problem of sustaining public spending on pensions and health systems worse and worse, causing the fiscal burden on those who stay to grow and grow, a development which makes it more and more attractive to leave and start up again elsewhere. And with each additional person who leaves there is another turn of the screw, and the costs of staying get higher, as do the advantages of not doing so. This is how melt down can happen.
"Naturally there can be a political dimension to the disintegration, as the need to implement ever less popular policies (especially policies unpopular with older people, those who do vote) leads politicians to become more and more demogogic while delivering less and less. Naturally the democratic quality of a country’s institutions starts to deteriorate under these circumstances, which only makes the young feel even more helpless and under-represented.
"This outcome is now becoming plain in much of Southern Europe, but it is obviously even more evident in Ukraine...
"... [T]he process of country decline, like most processes in the macro economic world, is non linear. That is to say critical moments or turning points will exist when suddenly things move a lot faster than expected. Hemingway grasped the essence of this in his much quoted “bankruptcy comes slowly at first but then all of a sudden”. As the economy falls back, and the burden of debt grows on the ever smaller numbers of young people expected to pay, the pressure on those young people to pack their bags and leave simply mounts and mounts, accelerating the process even further.
"In fact populations dying out is nothing new in human history if we move beyond the most recent world delineated by nation states. In hunter gatherer times populations occupied increased or reduced proportions of the earth’s surface as climate dictated. In more modern times, islands have been populated or become depopulated according to economic dynamics (think the Scottish coastline). More recently, it is clear the old East Germany would have become a country in need of “resolution” had it not sneaked in under the umbrella of the Federal Republic. Why people should find the idea of country failure so contentious I am not sure, perhaps we have just become accustomed not to have “hard” thoughts.
"Applying the argument many apply to banks, unsustainable countries “deserve” to fail, don’t they? Why should the US or German taxpayer have to pay to keep them afloat? Naturally, including Spain in this group of countries that can only now salute Caesar as they prepare to die may seem extreme, but just give it time.
"I expect (should I say “predict” in the Popperian sense, since this argument is empirical, and is surely falsifiable) the first countries to die to be in Eastern Europe, with the most likely candidates to get the ball rolling being Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia. But then gradually this phenomenon will spread along the EU periphery, from East to South..."
Friday, May 17, 2013
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Helen Blums
This is not really my thing, but it's a nice photo, and I am, as it happens, a great reader of obituaries, especially of people who lived long lives.
Though there is a strong genetic component in longevity, other factors cannot be ignored.
You would think that living through years of desperate poverty and war and chaos and grueling work would take its toll. But it seems that, in many cases, (involuntary) caloric restriction, physical activity and self-discipline may have proved more significant in the end than exposure to what we would now characterize as serious occupational and other health and safety hazards.
Those many ordinary and yet extraordinary people who survived the horrors of World War 2 in Europe are slowly disappearing. Many, of course, emigrated and have lived out the greater part of their lives in the USA, Canada, South America or Australia.
Like Helen Blums.
"... She was 28 years old in 1944 when her family fled their farm [in Latvia] to walk to the Baltic Sea to escape the [...] Red Army. Her older brother and sister, mother and sickly father embarked on the journey, leaving most of their possessions. Helen's father died in her arms near the Baltic coast in a smokehouse where a fisherman let them shelter. Despite the previous two refugee ships to leave the Baltic port of Liepaja being torpedoed by Soviet submarines, Helen's ship made it through. The next stage was a work camp in Nazi Germany. For the next five years they worked seven days a week, slept on concrete and were always hungry.
Helen was home-educated – she never went to a day of school – yet was fluent in reading and writing in three languages. She was indefatigable from the farm as a child to old age ...
While in Berlin she worked in a chemical factory for six days a week and cleaned windows on Sundays for a jar of jam. At one stage she obtained a bicycle and read tarot cards for surrounding farmers. When she correctly predicted a wife would learn the fate of her soldier husband on her return home, demand escalated. She also set up shop in a basement cleaning and smoking fish..."
Helen Blums died recently in Melbourne, Australia, aged 97.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Metamusings
I've noticed that the handful of bloggers with whom I have been in intermittent contact, and who started around the same time I did (three years ago or so), have either discontinued or drastically scaled back their offerings.
It makes me wonder whether I am missing something. Has there been a decisive change in the digital environment or a subtle shift in the zeitgeist?
Or is it just a function of individuals only having a very finite stock of (worthwhile) things to say? Of course, people have always kept diaries, but diaries are not addressed to others and so the entries don't need to justify themselves in the way public comments (arguably) do.
But I suspect it's more a matter of people having found better things to do than having run out of worthwhile things to say!
I realize that social networks seem to be growing at the expense of blogs – or at least at the expense of blog commenting.
Speaking of which, I have been having problems again with comment spam and have changed the settings so that now comments on Conservative Tendency will be checked by me before they go up to make sure no more junk gets through.
I will be posting a couple of videos featuring David Albert and Thomas Nagel respectively on the other blog soon.
It makes me wonder whether I am missing something. Has there been a decisive change in the digital environment or a subtle shift in the zeitgeist?
Or is it just a function of individuals only having a very finite stock of (worthwhile) things to say? Of course, people have always kept diaries, but diaries are not addressed to others and so the entries don't need to justify themselves in the way public comments (arguably) do.
But I suspect it's more a matter of people having found better things to do than having run out of worthwhile things to say!
I realize that social networks seem to be growing at the expense of blogs – or at least at the expense of blog commenting.
Speaking of which, I have been having problems again with comment spam and have changed the settings so that now comments on Conservative Tendency will be checked by me before they go up to make sure no more junk gets through.
I will be posting a couple of videos featuring David Albert and Thomas Nagel respectively on the other blog soon.
Thursday, April 25, 2013
The spectre of nihilism
It might seem from some of my previous posts that I see philosophical thinking as outmoded and impotent. This is not my view, however, as I have consistently argued that there is and will remain an important place for philosophical thinking within – and on the margins of – the various sciences.
But I do – as I have most recently discussed here – have misgivings about pursuing areas like ethics and metaphysics independently of scientific investigations.
At the risk of boring those who don't have a vital interest in these matters and aggravating those who do, I want to air here a couple of my doubts about ethics.
I acknowledge that I am making very general and sweeping claims that reflect a personal – and also, in a sense, a conservative – perspective. But I wouldn't be making them if I didn't think they were objectively plausible.
Philosophical ethics, as I see it, is fatally incomplete because it carries within itself an implicit promise to provide fundamental justifications which it cannot fulfil.
Even if foundationalism is out of favor amongst philosophers, it seems to me that the very existence of a discipline of normative ethics inevitably raises expectations that philosophical reason can provide a basis for morality. But, of course, it can't. (And nor can science, I hasten to add.)
Moral philosophers have done some valuable work over the years clarifying ethical questions and elaborating ethical systems or frameworks of various kinds. But, more often than not, they have brought to their work strongly formed but unacknowledged convictions.
Most have been aligned with traditional religious and/or humanistic schools of thought, while some have operated within radical traditions of various kinds.
My point is that, loosed from the constraints of such implicit, culturally-formed convictions and beliefs, reason can all too readily become a destroyer of values, a kind of universal acid.
Our values are bio-cultural products, and there is every reason to see some of them as quite delicate and vulnerable.
In fact, the spectre of nihilism (which Nietzsche grappled with) has been a very real one in the West for at least the last century-and-a-half.
Writers in the Western tradition, from the Greek tragedians on, but especially within the last two centuries, have often written of a realm of chaos that lies behind or beneath the veneer of civilization. And many non-Western religious traditions also give credence or recognition to dark forces. (Think of the Hindu goddess Kali, for example.)
But philosophical ethics generally bears the stamp of two very optimistic (overly optimistic, in my view) traditions of thought: Western humanism, deriving from the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance, and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Both of these traditions looked beneath the surface of life and found, not darkness and chaos, but a reassuring order.
And yet the darkness and chaos is there – as a psychological reality, and maybe as more than that.
The view of the world which modern science is revealing has, in my view, a lot more in common with our darker religious and literary intuitions than with Platonistic humanism or with the cheerful deism of the 18th century.
Science is also throwing light on how our brains work, and the picture that is emerging seems, in general terms, to vindicate thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud (who emphasized the role of unconscious elements over conscious rationality) rather than the rationalists.
Increasingly, I am coming to see ethics in terms of what is conducive to mental well-being and the social integration of the individual.
And certain forms of rationality-based introspection and discourse can actually work against these goals.
But I do – as I have most recently discussed here – have misgivings about pursuing areas like ethics and metaphysics independently of scientific investigations.
At the risk of boring those who don't have a vital interest in these matters and aggravating those who do, I want to air here a couple of my doubts about ethics.
I acknowledge that I am making very general and sweeping claims that reflect a personal – and also, in a sense, a conservative – perspective. But I wouldn't be making them if I didn't think they were objectively plausible.
Philosophical ethics, as I see it, is fatally incomplete because it carries within itself an implicit promise to provide fundamental justifications which it cannot fulfil.
Even if foundationalism is out of favor amongst philosophers, it seems to me that the very existence of a discipline of normative ethics inevitably raises expectations that philosophical reason can provide a basis for morality. But, of course, it can't. (And nor can science, I hasten to add.)
Moral philosophers have done some valuable work over the years clarifying ethical questions and elaborating ethical systems or frameworks of various kinds. But, more often than not, they have brought to their work strongly formed but unacknowledged convictions.
Most have been aligned with traditional religious and/or humanistic schools of thought, while some have operated within radical traditions of various kinds.
My point is that, loosed from the constraints of such implicit, culturally-formed convictions and beliefs, reason can all too readily become a destroyer of values, a kind of universal acid.
Our values are bio-cultural products, and there is every reason to see some of them as quite delicate and vulnerable.
In fact, the spectre of nihilism (which Nietzsche grappled with) has been a very real one in the West for at least the last century-and-a-half.
Writers in the Western tradition, from the Greek tragedians on, but especially within the last two centuries, have often written of a realm of chaos that lies behind or beneath the veneer of civilization. And many non-Western religious traditions also give credence or recognition to dark forces. (Think of the Hindu goddess Kali, for example.)
But philosophical ethics generally bears the stamp of two very optimistic (overly optimistic, in my view) traditions of thought: Western humanism, deriving from the Christian Platonism of the Renaissance, and the 18th-century Enlightenment. Both of these traditions looked beneath the surface of life and found, not darkness and chaos, but a reassuring order.
And yet the darkness and chaos is there – as a psychological reality, and maybe as more than that.
The view of the world which modern science is revealing has, in my view, a lot more in common with our darker religious and literary intuitions than with Platonistic humanism or with the cheerful deism of the 18th century.
Science is also throwing light on how our brains work, and the picture that is emerging seems, in general terms, to vindicate thinkers such as Nietzsche and Freud (who emphasized the role of unconscious elements over conscious rationality) rather than the rationalists.
Increasingly, I am coming to see ethics in terms of what is conducive to mental well-being and the social integration of the individual.
And certain forms of rationality-based introspection and discourse can actually work against these goals.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Ten conservative insights
1. Conservatives are more inclined than progressives and radicals to find value in the present, in life as it is, with all its imperfections and injustices. Resentment, in particular, is to be avoided at all costs.
2. And you can't really value the present without valuing the past. A sense of history is all about seeing the past in its own terms, and not just as a source of debating points for current controversies.
3. Though non-conservatives often resist the idea, conservative modes of thinking are, in fact, universal, as human brains are structured in a conservative way. This was evident long before evolutionary biology and brain science spelled out the details. The narrator in Proust's great novel about time and memory, for instance, reflects on the way our concepts are formed in our early years and affect the way we perceive new things. His concept of a flower was based on the flowers he saw in childhood, and exotic forms encountered in later life – like orchids – were somehow not real flowers.
4. Conservatives give due recognition to the familial and social instincts upon which cohesive societies – and, indeed, the individual's sense of self – are built.
5. They also tend to place great importance on certain (unfashionable) character traits – like self-discipline and frugality, for instance.
6. Related to this, conservatives have a more sophisticated notion of freedom than leftists and libertarians. They know that a lightly regulated society which allows the individual to exercise personal judgement and discretion to a high degree will only function properly if individuals are generally honest and self-disciplined. Personal freedom has its roots in morality rather than in law or politics.
7. Society is organic. This is a metaphor often used by conservative social thinkers. The essential point behind it is that social life and cultures grow and develop over time according to their own imperatives and may be tended, as a plant or garden is tended, but not controlled.
8. Another angle on this, for those who are wary of metaphors, is that the world is more complicated than we think and our theories are always going to be unable to take full account of that complexity. If conservatives are seen to be averse to theorizing (about the moral, social and political realms), it is because they recognize that social reality inevitably transcends any models we might construct.
9. And, clearly, trying to implement or actively impose such models on the real world is asking for trouble. Unintended adverse consequences are guaranteed.
10. It is important to be sensitive not only to the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences but also to the contingencies of time and place. Caution and pragmatism tend to characterize conservative approaches to political action.
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Philosophy as (disguised) apologetics
While trying to find out more about David Albert's religious views, I have stumbled across something rather more interesting and more significant: an article by Nathan Schneider (written from a point of view sympathetic to religion) which seems to confirm much of what I have been saying about philosophy and religion.
It seems that the John Templeton Foundation which, under the guise of promoting a dialogue between science and religion, seeks to enhance the status and intellectual credibility of the latter, has been providing a lot of funding to academic philosophers of late. Albert, who has benefited from Templeton in the past, is currently co-directing a three-year project on the philosophy of cosmology which is funded by the foundation.
Strangely enough, there is a prominent link to Schneider's article, which discusses not only the great influence of Templeton money on the discipline of philosophy, but also the 'silent coup' conducted over recent decades by Christian philosophers, on the website of David Albert's Templeton project.
The article gives interesting general background information on the John Templeton Foundation, but the excerpts which follow are specifically concerned with the wooing of philosophers by the foundation, as well as with earlier activities by Christian philosophers which had the effect of reversing an early-to-mid-20th century trend within philosophy towards more rigorously scientific and secular perspectives.
Controversy ... always follows money, especially when it's Templeton money. Partisans of Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists have long despised the foundation, interpreting its interest in dialogue between science and religion as an attempt to buy undeserved credibility for the latter at the cost of the former. Adds Brian Leiter, "It's clearly more of a windfall for philosophers who have some sort of vague religious angle to what they're doing." Yet he also points out that [Alfred R.] Mele is an exception. His foregoing work on free will expressed scant interest in the religious implications—which makes it all the more noticeable that his Templeton project has a component devoted to theology.
It's true that one tends to hear more Templeton-branded talk of "Big Questions"—spoken as if capitalized, and without irony—on the lips of philosophers with religious commitments, at religious institutions. When I met Christian Miller two years ago at a Society of Christian Philosophers conference at Wake Forest, the historically Baptist university where he teaches, he was still glowing from news of the three-year, $3.7-million Templeton grant he'd just received. Its purpose is "to promote significant progress in the scholarly investigation of character," and $2-million of it will go to empirical psychological research, alongside accompanying investigations in philosophy and theology...
[Barry] Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, isn't likely to turn up at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting ... "I myself have no interest in philosophy of religion and am not a religious person," he says. For years, Loewer has been working with a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in the New York area, meeting and collaborating on papers—nothing very expensive. But about five years ago a colleague at Rutgers, Dean W. Zimmerman, told the group about the Templeton Foundation and suggested that they apply for a grant. Zimmerman, a top Christian philosopher, had ... served on Templeton's advisory board ...
The idea at first was to do a project about quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics, which was an interest of Loewer's group. Templeton had other ideas. The foundation pointed the group in the direction of cosmology, with the prospect of a much bigger grant, and the researchers jumped at the idea. They realized that cosmology encompassed the questions of time and physical laws that had concerned them all along.
"You know that story of Molière's where someone discovers that he has been speaking prose his whole life?" says Loewer. "It was a bit like that."
The nearly $1-million grant his team received from Templeton last year coincided with another, slightly larger one called "Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology," which was awarded to scholars at the University of Oxford. Despite the change of plans at Templeton's behest, Loewer stresses, "They've been really helpful, and totally noncoercive in terms of any agenda that they might have. I had my eyes open for it."
Not that philosophers are especially well practiced in negotiating the terms of million-dollar grants, much less in thinking about how such money might sway them... But now that the money is coming into the field, it is being welcomed even by those who lack the foundation's spiritual proclivities. "Templeton picks some people whose Christian epistemology I might not share," Brian Leiter says, "but there's no quarreling that they're serious philosophers." Suspicions about some secret religious agenda tend to lessen the more widely the foundation's substantial sums begin to spread.
The phenomenon under consideration here can be traced to two others gradually converging over the past few decades: the rise of the John Templeton Foundation itself, and the quiet coup hatched by religious believers within analytic philosophy.
...The archtect of projects like Mele's and Loewer's is a philosopher named Michael J. Murray, who before joining the foundation taught at his alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College. He did a short stint directing philosophy and theology programs, and then was elevated, in February 2011, to the job of overseeing Templeton's entire portfolio of grant programs. Murray is a product of what has often been called the "renaissance" of Christianity in analytic philosophy. So is Dean Zimmerman, the one who connected Murray with Loewer. And so was the Wake Forest conference... This renaissance helped till academic philosophy for Templeton then to sow.
In the 1960s and 70s, while the atheistic straitjacket of logical positivism was loosening, smart, young Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff began crafting new ways of defending Christian faith from the deliverances of the latest epistemology and modal logic. They formed the Society of Christian Philosophers to help coddle their conversations and cultivate successors, and they ascended to chairs in eminent departments—Plantinga at Notre Dame, Wolterstorff at Yale. Soon, thanks to them, the world of analytic philosophy that was once decidedly hostile to religious believers became significantly less so. More science-savvy students soon followed suit, crafting their own sophisticated defenses of faith in terms of physics, neuroscience, and biology. Michael Murray, who earned his Ph.D. at Notre Dame, has played a part in this, including as editor of a 1998 book, Reason for the Hope Within, which triumphantly summarizes the fruits of the renaissance so as to equip lay Christians to defend their faith. Follow these contours, and Templeton's recent projects—even those led by people outside the Christian-philosophy fold—seem to follow a certain apologetic logic. Free will, for instance, is a critical feature of Plantinga's celebrated defense against the problem of evil; although Al Mele does not partake in religious speculation himself, he is a respected opponent of the brazen neuroscientists, like Michael S. Gazzaniga, who announce free will's nonexistence. Cosmology, too, is considered one of the most promising avenues lately in arguments for God's existence, particularly thanks to evidence that basic features of the universe may be "fine-tuned" to provide for the possibility of life. Barry Loewer isn't particularly interested in arguing for a divine fine-tuner, but his efforts might indirectly lend aid to someone who is. The recent $5-million grant to study immortality went to a philosopher who doesn't believe in the afterlife, but the very fact that so much money is going to study it might give more credence to those who do.
It is clear that Templeton money is not just supporting respected, mainstream academics and institutions.
Much as Notre Dame served as the headquarters of the Christian-philosophy renaissance ushered in by Alvin Plantinga, a 104-year-old evangelical institution on the outskirts of Los Angeles called Biola University has cleared the way for one of the ren aissance's most spirited and ambitious outgrowths. Biola supports the Evangelical Philosophical Society, a more doctrinally austere cousin of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and it houses the country's largest philosophy graduate program, which is devoted to sending Christian students with its master's degrees to leading Ph.D. programs. For a few weeks each year, Biola is graced by an intensive by William Lane Craig, the master of public "God debates," who famously trounced Christopher Hitchens in 2009.
This summer Biola received the largest foundation grant in its history—a $3-million Templeton award to support a new Center for Christian Thought, an interdisciplinary forum led by three philosophy professors. One of them, Thomas Crisp, was a star student of Plantinga's at Notre Dame, and he first met Michael Murray during a 2010 Society of Christian Philosophers good-will expedition to a symposium in Iran. A year later, Crisp and the others in the center's "leadership triumvirate" were hard at work on a proposal for the foundation, and he sees Templeton and Biola as an ideal match.
Indeed.
It seems that the John Templeton Foundation which, under the guise of promoting a dialogue between science and religion, seeks to enhance the status and intellectual credibility of the latter, has been providing a lot of funding to academic philosophers of late. Albert, who has benefited from Templeton in the past, is currently co-directing a three-year project on the philosophy of cosmology which is funded by the foundation.
Strangely enough, there is a prominent link to Schneider's article, which discusses not only the great influence of Templeton money on the discipline of philosophy, but also the 'silent coup' conducted over recent decades by Christian philosophers, on the website of David Albert's Templeton project.
The article gives interesting general background information on the John Templeton Foundation, but the excerpts which follow are specifically concerned with the wooing of philosophers by the foundation, as well as with earlier activities by Christian philosophers which had the effect of reversing an early-to-mid-20th century trend within philosophy towards more rigorously scientific and secular perspectives.
Controversy ... always follows money, especially when it's Templeton money. Partisans of Richard Dawkins and his fellow New Atheists have long despised the foundation, interpreting its interest in dialogue between science and religion as an attempt to buy undeserved credibility for the latter at the cost of the former. Adds Brian Leiter, "It's clearly more of a windfall for philosophers who have some sort of vague religious angle to what they're doing." Yet he also points out that [Alfred R.] Mele is an exception. His foregoing work on free will expressed scant interest in the religious implications—which makes it all the more noticeable that his Templeton project has a component devoted to theology.
It's true that one tends to hear more Templeton-branded talk of "Big Questions"—spoken as if capitalized, and without irony—on the lips of philosophers with religious commitments, at religious institutions. When I met Christian Miller two years ago at a Society of Christian Philosophers conference at Wake Forest, the historically Baptist university where he teaches, he was still glowing from news of the three-year, $3.7-million Templeton grant he'd just received. Its purpose is "to promote significant progress in the scholarly investigation of character," and $2-million of it will go to empirical psychological research, alongside accompanying investigations in philosophy and theology...
[Barry] Loewer, a philosopher at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, isn't likely to turn up at a Society of Christian Philosophers meeting ... "I myself have no interest in philosophy of religion and am not a religious person," he says. For years, Loewer has been working with a group of philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in the New York area, meeting and collaborating on papers—nothing very expensive. But about five years ago a colleague at Rutgers, Dean W. Zimmerman, told the group about the Templeton Foundation and suggested that they apply for a grant. Zimmerman, a top Christian philosopher, had ... served on Templeton's advisory board ...
The idea at first was to do a project about quantum mechanics and the foundations of physics, which was an interest of Loewer's group. Templeton had other ideas. The foundation pointed the group in the direction of cosmology, with the prospect of a much bigger grant, and the researchers jumped at the idea. They realized that cosmology encompassed the questions of time and physical laws that had concerned them all along.
"You know that story of Molière's where someone discovers that he has been speaking prose his whole life?" says Loewer. "It was a bit like that."
The nearly $1-million grant his team received from Templeton last year coincided with another, slightly larger one called "Establishing the Philosophy of Cosmology," which was awarded to scholars at the University of Oxford. Despite the change of plans at Templeton's behest, Loewer stresses, "They've been really helpful, and totally noncoercive in terms of any agenda that they might have. I had my eyes open for it."
Not that philosophers are especially well practiced in negotiating the terms of million-dollar grants, much less in thinking about how such money might sway them... But now that the money is coming into the field, it is being welcomed even by those who lack the foundation's spiritual proclivities. "Templeton picks some people whose Christian epistemology I might not share," Brian Leiter says, "but there's no quarreling that they're serious philosophers." Suspicions about some secret religious agenda tend to lessen the more widely the foundation's substantial sums begin to spread.
The phenomenon under consideration here can be traced to two others gradually converging over the past few decades: the rise of the John Templeton Foundation itself, and the quiet coup hatched by religious believers within analytic philosophy.
...The archtect of projects like Mele's and Loewer's is a philosopher named Michael J. Murray, who before joining the foundation taught at his alma mater, Franklin & Marshall College. He did a short stint directing philosophy and theology programs, and then was elevated, in February 2011, to the job of overseeing Templeton's entire portfolio of grant programs. Murray is a product of what has often been called the "renaissance" of Christianity in analytic philosophy. So is Dean Zimmerman, the one who connected Murray with Loewer. And so was the Wake Forest conference... This renaissance helped till academic philosophy for Templeton then to sow.
In the 1960s and 70s, while the atheistic straitjacket of logical positivism was loosening, smart, young Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff began crafting new ways of defending Christian faith from the deliverances of the latest epistemology and modal logic. They formed the Society of Christian Philosophers to help coddle their conversations and cultivate successors, and they ascended to chairs in eminent departments—Plantinga at Notre Dame, Wolterstorff at Yale. Soon, thanks to them, the world of analytic philosophy that was once decidedly hostile to religious believers became significantly less so. More science-savvy students soon followed suit, crafting their own sophisticated defenses of faith in terms of physics, neuroscience, and biology. Michael Murray, who earned his Ph.D. at Notre Dame, has played a part in this, including as editor of a 1998 book, Reason for the Hope Within, which triumphantly summarizes the fruits of the renaissance so as to equip lay Christians to defend their faith. Follow these contours, and Templeton's recent projects—even those led by people outside the Christian-philosophy fold—seem to follow a certain apologetic logic. Free will, for instance, is a critical feature of Plantinga's celebrated defense against the problem of evil; although Al Mele does not partake in religious speculation himself, he is a respected opponent of the brazen neuroscientists, like Michael S. Gazzaniga, who announce free will's nonexistence. Cosmology, too, is considered one of the most promising avenues lately in arguments for God's existence, particularly thanks to evidence that basic features of the universe may be "fine-tuned" to provide for the possibility of life. Barry Loewer isn't particularly interested in arguing for a divine fine-tuner, but his efforts might indirectly lend aid to someone who is. The recent $5-million grant to study immortality went to a philosopher who doesn't believe in the afterlife, but the very fact that so much money is going to study it might give more credence to those who do.
It is clear that Templeton money is not just supporting respected, mainstream academics and institutions.
Much as Notre Dame served as the headquarters of the Christian-philosophy renaissance ushered in by Alvin Plantinga, a 104-year-old evangelical institution on the outskirts of Los Angeles called Biola University has cleared the way for one of the ren aissance's most spirited and ambitious outgrowths. Biola supports the Evangelical Philosophical Society, a more doctrinally austere cousin of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and it houses the country's largest philosophy graduate program, which is devoted to sending Christian students with its master's degrees to leading Ph.D. programs. For a few weeks each year, Biola is graced by an intensive by William Lane Craig, the master of public "God debates," who famously trounced Christopher Hitchens in 2009.
This summer Biola received the largest foundation grant in its history—a $3-million Templeton award to support a new Center for Christian Thought, an interdisciplinary forum led by three philosophy professors. One of them, Thomas Crisp, was a star student of Plantinga's at Notre Dame, and he first met Michael Murray during a 2010 Society of Christian Philosophers good-will expedition to a symposium in Iran. A year later, Crisp and the others in the center's "leadership triumvirate" were hard at work on a proposal for the foundation, and he sees Templeton and Biola as an ideal match.
Indeed.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Physicists and philosophers fight it out
I have lately spent rather too much time and effort catching up on a controversy concerning reactions to a book by physicist Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing, published last year), and, in particular, concerning a muscularly negative review of the book by philosopher David Albert.
The controversy has been recently reignited by the withdrawal of Albert's invitation to join a prestigious panel (including Krauss) for a public discussion at The American Museum of Natural History.
As Jason Streitfeld makes clear, one of the underlying issues relates to the status of philosophers vis à vis scientists (in this case physicists).
The demarcation lines and motivational factors in this disinvitation dispute are not all that clear, however. It should be noted, for instance, that David Albert, as well as being a philosopher, also has a PhD in physics, and that attitudes to religion are playing a key role.
Albert's main contention is that Krauss's 'nothing' (relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states) are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff, and therefore far from nothing as generally understood.
But Albert is particularly scathing about what he sees as Krauss's facile rejection of religion. He writes:
"When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb."
Krauss called Albert's review "moronic", by the way.
Physicists have a history of disparaging philosophers. Some months ago, one of the most reflective of contemporary physicists, the (then) 88-year-old Freeman Dyson ruffled a few feathers by disparaging contemporary philosphers in an essay published in The New York Review of Books.
I read it at the time, and intended to do a piece on it, but didn't get around to it. Strangely, the expression "the fading of philosophy" – used by Dyson – must have lodged in my subconscious, and I used it as the title for a post last month without realizing its source.
I am in sympathy with much – though not all – of what Dyson says, and I am attracted by his somewhat world-weary tone and contrarian instincts.
There is something of the amateur and the dabbler about him, and he has (or had) one of those almost freakishly clever mathematical minds which can sometimes lead to a certain kind of hubris about one's own abilities and judgements as well as to an overestimation of the power of technologies to solve problems.
Dyson balances these tendencies with a genuine sort of wisdom, however. His little anecdote about a disappointing encounter with Wittgenstein, and then the story of his accidentally coming across Wittgenstein's grave in the course of a winter walk fifty years later, is quite moving.
Dyson's essay is a series of reflections on (rather than a review of) a book by Jim Holt based on interviews with various thinkers (philosophers, physicists and cosmologists) on why there is something rather than nothing. (In fact, Holt has been invited to join the panel from which Albert was disinvited. The world of public scientific intellectuals is a very small one. Even our old friend Massimo Pigliucci plays a part in the controversy.)
Dyson was not impressed with the calibre of Holt's philosopher interviewees. Dwarfs, he calls them, in stark contrast to the philosophical giants of the past. Only one, John Leslie (retired and living on Canada's west coast), gets a favorable mention.
"Philosophers became insignificant," Dyson wrote, "when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines."
I too have been arguing against philosophy as a stand-alone discipline, and see philosophical thinking as being something which arises naturally in the context of the pursuit of the various sciences.
But I have to say that I find Dyson's way of expressing himself at times vague and imprecise. The last sentence quoted above, for example, could be read as suggesting that all of the great philosophers of the past covered all of these disciplines, or, alternatively, that some covered one or some disciplines and some covered other disciplines. Also, religion is not a discipline. This is just poor writing.
I have some reservations also about Dyson's view of philosophy as a literary phenomenon, and I tend to see, for example, the Book of Job more as literature with a religio-philosophical slant than as philosophy as such. But this is perhaps little more than a semantic – or definitional – question.
My more serious disagreement with Dyson relates to his obviously religious tendencies, which I don't share. But I will concede that, of all the possible religious outlooks I have considered (and rejected), Dyson's Platonic and mystical approach ranks amongst the least unappealing.
Dyson's key point about philosophers having become insignificant relates directly to the disinvitation controversy, and, though Dyson and Krauss are about as different from one another as two physicists could be, it is interesting that they are both dismissive – albeit for different reasons – of contemporary philosophy.
Perhaps the best thing I read in all the pretty wild and woolly discussion associated with the Krauss/Albert dispute was – apart from Albert's original review – a little joke in the comment thread of a blog post I didn't make a note of.
It was a brief mock-warning to scientists about the dangers of being rude to philosophers of science. They had better be careful because the philosophers might go on strike, and where would the scientists be then?
The controversy has been recently reignited by the withdrawal of Albert's invitation to join a prestigious panel (including Krauss) for a public discussion at The American Museum of Natural History.
As Jason Streitfeld makes clear, one of the underlying issues relates to the status of philosophers vis à vis scientists (in this case physicists).
The demarcation lines and motivational factors in this disinvitation dispute are not all that clear, however. It should be noted, for instance, that David Albert, as well as being a philosopher, also has a PhD in physics, and that attitudes to religion are playing a key role.
Albert's main contention is that Krauss's 'nothing' (relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states) are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff, and therefore far from nothing as generally understood.
But Albert is particularly scathing about what he sees as Krauss's facile rejection of religion. He writes:
"When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t, but it had to do with important things — it had to do, that is, with history, and with suffering, and with the hope of a better world — and it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the back of one’s head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb."
Krauss called Albert's review "moronic", by the way.
Physicists have a history of disparaging philosophers. Some months ago, one of the most reflective of contemporary physicists, the (then) 88-year-old Freeman Dyson ruffled a few feathers by disparaging contemporary philosphers in an essay published in The New York Review of Books.
I read it at the time, and intended to do a piece on it, but didn't get around to it. Strangely, the expression "the fading of philosophy" – used by Dyson – must have lodged in my subconscious, and I used it as the title for a post last month without realizing its source.
I am in sympathy with much – though not all – of what Dyson says, and I am attracted by his somewhat world-weary tone and contrarian instincts.
There is something of the amateur and the dabbler about him, and he has (or had) one of those almost freakishly clever mathematical minds which can sometimes lead to a certain kind of hubris about one's own abilities and judgements as well as to an overestimation of the power of technologies to solve problems.
Dyson balances these tendencies with a genuine sort of wisdom, however. His little anecdote about a disappointing encounter with Wittgenstein, and then the story of his accidentally coming across Wittgenstein's grave in the course of a winter walk fifty years later, is quite moving.
Dyson's essay is a series of reflections on (rather than a review of) a book by Jim Holt based on interviews with various thinkers (philosophers, physicists and cosmologists) on why there is something rather than nothing. (In fact, Holt has been invited to join the panel from which Albert was disinvited. The world of public scientific intellectuals is a very small one. Even our old friend Massimo Pigliucci plays a part in the controversy.)
Dyson was not impressed with the calibre of Holt's philosopher interviewees. Dwarfs, he calls them, in stark contrast to the philosophical giants of the past. Only one, John Leslie (retired and living on Canada's west coast), gets a favorable mention.
"Philosophers became insignificant," Dyson wrote, "when philosophy became a separate academic discipline, distinct from science and history and literature and religion. The great philosophers of the past covered all these disciplines."
I too have been arguing against philosophy as a stand-alone discipline, and see philosophical thinking as being something which arises naturally in the context of the pursuit of the various sciences.
But I have to say that I find Dyson's way of expressing himself at times vague and imprecise. The last sentence quoted above, for example, could be read as suggesting that all of the great philosophers of the past covered all of these disciplines, or, alternatively, that some covered one or some disciplines and some covered other disciplines. Also, religion is not a discipline. This is just poor writing.
I have some reservations also about Dyson's view of philosophy as a literary phenomenon, and I tend to see, for example, the Book of Job more as literature with a religio-philosophical slant than as philosophy as such. But this is perhaps little more than a semantic – or definitional – question.
My more serious disagreement with Dyson relates to his obviously religious tendencies, which I don't share. But I will concede that, of all the possible religious outlooks I have considered (and rejected), Dyson's Platonic and mystical approach ranks amongst the least unappealing.
Dyson's key point about philosophers having become insignificant relates directly to the disinvitation controversy, and, though Dyson and Krauss are about as different from one another as two physicists could be, it is interesting that they are both dismissive – albeit for different reasons – of contemporary philosophy.
Perhaps the best thing I read in all the pretty wild and woolly discussion associated with the Krauss/Albert dispute was – apart from Albert's original review – a little joke in the comment thread of a blog post I didn't make a note of.
It was a brief mock-warning to scientists about the dangers of being rude to philosophers of science. They had better be careful because the philosophers might go on strike, and where would the scientists be then?
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