Why Study History of Philosophy?

In undergrad I was fairly successful in avoiding having to study the history of philosophy. Unfortunately this could not last; as part of my MA I'm having to take no fewer than three courses on it - Ancient Philosophy, Rationalism and Empiricism (i.e. early modern philsophy - Descartes et al) and Continental Philosophy. This is a fairly fixed part of the curricula for degrees in philosophy, and for a long time I have wondered why. In this post I shall attempt to make a positive case for studying history of philosophy; I currently have no concrete plans to make the opposite case, but one might just happen to appear.

(1) The value of past philosophers
The fact that something is old does not mean its ideas are irrelevant. Indeed they may be stronger, for having stood the test of time. And perhaps there are some ideas which are just flat-out wrong (the world is not, for example, made entirely of water) but studying these ideas is useful for understanding the climate in which other, more valuable ideas, emerged. Perhaps much pre-Socratic philosophy reads like mysticism, but given that Socrates - at least in the earlier dialogues - is concerned not so much with making positive arguments so much as tearing down the ideas of others, it is important to know what he was responding to.

Kantian arguments still command respect in ethics; Jeremy Bentham, if he were alive today, would be accepted but broadly within the mainstream. The case is easier to make for ethics than for "natural philosophy", it is true, but this shows that there is still value to be had by learning historical ideas.

(2) Unlearning assumptions
Nowadays we take a great many ideas for granted. But these are not ideas you can genuinely project from a blank canvas: we believe them because we were brought up to believe them. If we are to hold (for example) advocacy of democracy as a substantive belief rather than as a tenet of unreasoning faith, we need to look at the thoughts of people for whom democracy was a strange and frightening idea. (And who knows, they might be right! The historical progression of ideas is not guaranteed to be in a positive direction!)

(3) Practice at interpretation
One of the key tasks of any philosopher is to respond to other philosophers and their arguments. Studying the history of philosophy helps to develop a number of skills useful for this. Upon first reading, many historical philosophers appear to be obscure and/or blatantly wrong. To properly apprehend what they have to say, we have to apply hermeneutics and the principle of charity - both of which will be useful when engaged in discussions with fellow contemporary philosophers.

NB. Even if the case I am making here is correct, I doubt it is really why we have to study history of philosophy. (1) provides little justification for reading anyone in the original, rather than merely in summary; (2) provides little justification for teaching history of philosophy as independent courses, when we could teach history of metaphysics as part of a metaphysics class*; (3) suggests that the choice of texts is in fact fairly arbitrary.


* Imagine that! A class mixing metaphysics with history of philosophy! The ultimate feast of utterly worthless mental masturbation!

An Operatic Miniature

A large part of being good at chess is pattern recognition: seeing that the position in front of you is similar to one you've seen before, and is therefore likely to reward the same principles. I had a recent example of this in a cute little game which rather neatly resembled the famous Opera House Game.

The Opera House Game was a game played in 1858 between Paul Morphy, an American would-be lawyer and likely the greatest player of his generation, and a pair of European aristocrats who compelled him to play them while he was trying to enjoy a performance of Norma.

As a brief run-though of the Opera House Game: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 Bg4 4. dxe5 Bxf3 5. Qxf3 dxe5 6.Bc4

White has got two pieces out while Black has none, and already threats are appearing on the board.
6... Nf6 7. Qb3 Qe7
White could actually win two pawns here, via 8. Bxf7+ Kd8 (8...Qxf7? 9. Qxb7) 9. Qxb7 Qb4+, but the queens come off and Morphy opts to just continue getting his pieces out.
8. Nc3 c6 9. Bg5 b5?

White has four pieces out and his rooks will arrive very shortly; Black has two pieces developed, one of which is pinned against the other. He also faces a real struggle to get pieces active, with both the c6 and e7 square occupied.
10. Nxb5! cxb5 11. Bxb5+ Nbd7 12. 0-0-0 Rd8

Black has very little space, with his king trapped in the centre and few of his pieces doing anything much. White now crashes through with a temporary exchange sacrifice:
13. Rxd7! Rxd7 14. Rd1
When attacking in chess, sacrificing one rook then bringing the other into its place is a classic maneuvre.
14... Qe6 15. Bxd7+ Nxd7

All is now set for the final flourish:
16. Qb8+! Nxb8 17. Rd8#
And White delivers mate with his last two remaining pieces.


My game does not have quite so nice an ending - largely because my opponent resigned when he saw what was coming - but is still rather nice.

loserforsale - nachtfalter, Chess.com, 10th October 2015
10 mins/game

1. d4 e5 2. dxe5 Nc6 3. Nf3 Qe7 4. e4 Nxe5 5. Nc3 Nxf3+ 6. Qxf3 Nf6 7. Bg5

You may already recognise some of the same patterns here. My plan as white is to castle and then to pay Nd5, which brings massive power to bear on f6 to win a pawn and prevent black from ever castling.
7...d6 8. 0-0-0 Be6??
This removes the queen's coverage of e5, which makes White's attack much easier.
9. e5 dxe5 10. Bxb7 Rd8 11. Bb5+ Bd7

Based upon the Opera House Game, can you guess what's coming?
12. Rxd7 Rxd7 13. Rd1

At this point my opponent resigned, though mate would likely have followed within five moves, e.g. 13...h6 14. Rxd7 Qxd7 15. Qc8+ Ke7 16. Qxd7#

Against Libertarian Libertinism

In the wake of the recent World Health Organisation (WHO)'s announcement that eating bacon raised your risk of cancer, there has been a rash(er?) of libertarians denouncing this and defending eating bacon. From a certain standpoint, this is rather strange.

An example, taken from the European Students For Liberty Facebook page.

The fact that a food raises your risk of cancer is, unless you are fine with getting cancer, a reason against eating that food. Not at all a decisive reason - you might well think that the enjoyment you get from the bacon is well worth the minute or two by which you shorten your life. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of choice that, as libertarians, we are committed to thinking people ought to be able to make for themselves. But if we recognise people's right to make that choice, we ought to recognise their right to choose either way. We ought not to be pressuring people to choose a particular way.

("But pressuring someone to make a particular choice is hardly the same as forcing them to make it!" It's imposing negative consequences upon their making a particular choice, and is from that perspective no different to taxing them for making a particular choice. Haven't you read Mill?)

Now perhaps this is a natural reaction to being "told what not to do." I'm not sure how plausible this interpretation is. The WHO has insisted that it is not telling people not to eat bacon, but (a) this is coming after the fact, potentially as a PR move, and (b) just because the WHO doesn't intend it that way doesn't mean that national governments won't take it that way.

Out of these, (b) seems most important. Western governments do an awful lot of moralising about tobacco, sugar, and such things, and this moralising is typically accompanied by taxation, censorship of advertising, and other deeply illiberal measures.

But it's far from obvious that the best way to respond to this is with anger. What I fear here is that something will happen similar to what has happened in the global warming debate. Global warming has been used by various left-wing people as a justification for policies that we all know they would be pushing for anyway - more taxes, monetary transfers from the first world to the third world, and (most damaging of all) a deliberate end to the search for economic growth. There are two ways that those of us opposed to such policies can respond. One is to point out that tackling CO2 emissions is perfectly compatible with a free market: just impose a Pigou Tax (which I view as just a particular way of enforcing rights) and you're done. The second is to dispute that global warming is actually happening. Unfortunately, most people seemed to take this second route, despite it relying upon demonstrably false premises. (One wonders whether many deniers on some level know that climate change is indeed happening, and continue to deny it as a form of ingroup signalling).

This allowed people opposed to massive government intervention against global warming to be painted as anti-science. My worry is that the same could happen with diet: the debate could become a purely scientific debate over which foods are bad for you, rather than a debate over values: do we want to live in a society which doesn't trust its members to take care of themselves?

The biggest problem with a scientific debate from the libertarian perspective is not that we might turn out to be wrong - governments' dietary suggestions have, as with most dietary suggestions, a long history of being terrible - but that even if we're right, we still can't win. Suppose it turns out that, contrary to official claims, food X is in fact good for you. Then the ground changes. Statists will stop advocating a ban on X and will start advocating subsidies, in a way that is just as harmful to liberty.

Ultimately, the debate has to be over values. They're the important thing, and they're the battle which we can - ultimately - win.

CEU Philosophers' Hand Jive Society show off their sweet moves

"The Teapot"

"The Stop Signal"

"The Bolt"

"The Creepy-Crawly"

"The Cosmic"

"The Torus"

Apparently not everyone's in the mood for dancing :(

(My apologies to everyone in these photos and to the photographers, but also my thanks for helping to make my first few weeks at CEU so enjoyable!)

Review: West Side Story, Hungarian State Opera

West Side Story
Hungarian State Opera, Erkel Theatre

3/5

West Side Story is dominated by two themes, both of them as recognisable and as powerful now as they were in 1957: love, and racial tensions. Racial tensions are particularly salient in the wake of the Syrian Refugees crisis, so what would be the reaction to such a politically charged musical, at a theatre less than ten minutes' walk from the very epicentre of the crisis?

Keleti Palyaudvar, one of Budapest's main railway stations: left, on 1st September 2015, right, on 26th September 2015. Left photo from the Evening Standard.

If you want an answer, I'd suggest asking someone who speaks Hungarian. Since I speak perhaps two dozen words of it at most, my review shall focus on the music, drama and staging of the performance.

The Erkel Theatre is unquestionably ugly. By contrast with the State Opera House, which is an ornate and elaborate declaration of the power and grandeur of the 19th-century Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Erkel Theatre is a shell of wood painted in brutalist colours. This doesn't matter too much during a musical, since your attention is on the stage, but it makes a bad first impression.

The scenery was similarly sparsely decorated. There was no particular background; merely a set of blocks which were used interchangeably as balconies and as platforms to separate the singers from the dancers, a table, and a rather grubby mirror which was lowered over the stage from time to time. The director alone knows why, since the aforementioned grubbiness of the mirror made it near-useless as a reflective surface.

To top off the soviet nature of the stage, the screen used to display Hungarian translations of the songs was a petty little thing, a board with dim-orange lights that would have been much more appropriately placed at a bus stop.

From some Hungarian website or other. The blue stuff is - I think - painted wood,
though going by appearance it may as well be concrete.

With that said, the lighting was fine - not having much of a clue about this matter, this is the highest praise I am ever able to give - and the costumes were used well. Whereas an American performance of West Side Story would typically use Hispanic actors, if not actual Puerto Ricans, to play the Sharks, and a British performance might struggle for Hispanics but would have no difficulty finding enough skilled actors of ethnic minorities to make up half a cast, this performance used costume to separate the groups. Hence the Jets wore chavvy clothing with a white-and-black theme, while the Sharks' garb was colourful verging on the flamboyant. An easy way for the audience to tell the gangs apart, although it made a mockery of Riff's instruction that, when challenging their rivals, the Jets should dress "sweet and sharp".

Sergeant Krupke patrols in front of the Jets. This, and all following photos, are
taken from the official website.

The orchestra was good - not up to the standard of the Hallé Orchestra, perhaps, but generally competent and with enough confidence to inject their own character at parts - holding longer onto the brief cello solo in "Tonight", for example.

Unfortunately the size of the theatre meant that, at least for those of us sitting near the back, the key advantage of live orchestral music was missing: one could not pick out the different parts and explore the subtleties, since the sound of the orchestra came as a single impression rather than a melange of different ones.

It's sometimes said that people lose their accents when singing, and had you told me that a couple of weeks ago I might have believed you. The actors on stage didn't; not one of them, for example, could pronounce the letter w. This wasn't too much of a problem during the solos, but it did sometimes impede clarity when there were groups singing.

While none of the singers could have been confused for a native speaker of English, the people playing Tony and Anita were at least fluent enough to emphasise certain words above others, and to do so intelligently - to inject that large amount of communication which comes from things other than our exact words and body language. The rendition of "A boy like that" was genuinely the finest I heard, beating even that of the seminal West Side Story album released last year by Michael Tilson-Thomas and the San Fransisco Symphony.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticise their accents - after all, singing in a Hungarian accent may well have been more clear for most of the audience (though not for me personally). What I do feel ought to be criticised is the gross overuse of vibrato, which seemed to pop up in every note which could possibly sustain it. Vibrato sounds silly when used to this extent, and ought to be saved for those notes which really must be held on to.

The dancing was another thing that, not being qualified to offer even basic commentary on, I shall have to report as merely "fine". It was, though, rather odd to see Tony dancing with Bernardo and Riff even after the latter two had been fatally stabbed.

Tony (centre) stabs Bernardo (right), to avenge Riff (left).

Overall the evening was worth seeing, especially given that tickets start at the bargain price of 300Ft (about £0.70) and spiral up to the heady heights of 3500Ft (about £9). For someone who has been in love with West Side Story for several years but had never seen it live, though, it was something of a let-down: I could have tolerated poor playing of the music, having heard it all at least fifty times before, but the performance offered little, dancing aside, to improve upon just staying at home and listening to Spotify.

A Quick Thought on Hassoun and Autonomy

I'm part-way through listening to the New Books in Philosophy interview with Nicole Hassoun, in which she discusses her book on Global Justice. One claim she makes is that people subject to coercive institutions ought to be in a position to consent (or not consent, for that matter) to these institutions. In order to meaningfully consent, she says, they must be autonomous - which requires that they already possess various basic goods such as healthcare.

The first sentence seems sensible enough. The second worries me somewhat. Suppose I pick up a stone and attempt to skim it across a lake. I am, in a sense, behaving coercively towards the stone. I am taking control of it for my own ends, and not paying any attention at all to whether the stone might like this or not. This is not, however, something we take to be immoral. Stones are incapable of autonomy.

Suppose it were in some way possible to give the stone a form of agency, so that it might or might not consent to my skimming it. Would I be obliged to do this and to actually obtain consent before skimming it? Surely not. Why, then, might we be required to ensure that other people are autonomous in Hassoun's sense before we interact with them?

There's an obvious, gaping worry with what I'm saying. I seem to be suggesting that it may be acceptable to treat people as objects. I think that there are two ways for me to resist this, both of which are entirely comfortable positions, compatible with each other, and both of which display a great deal more respect for the people of the third world than Hassoun's account.

The first is to object that people in general already are autonomous. Perhaps not as autonomous as we might wish, but nevertheless capable of making their own choices, trades and sacrifices. They do not need a white knight to come in and make them autonomous with provision of free healthcare and education.

The second is to suggest that, even when people fail to be (to use a piece of philosophical jargon) "persons", possessing a morally important type of autonomy, there are still limits to what may be done to them - perhaps not that much less stringent than the limits on what may be done to persons. This is hardly an unusual position - after all, without such a view it is hard to explain how children and the severely mentally ill have rights.

In sum, I'm highly sceptical of the idea that, in order to obtain valid consent from all people for coercive institutions, it is necessary to bring them up to a particular level of autonomy.

NB: It is not my aim to defend third world states. The coercive institutions I have in mind to defend are those of global capitalism, those institutions which say "This car is mine, and if you try to take it from me then I have the right to use violence in order to keep it in my possession."

NB2: As mentioned, I have not read Hassoun's book and I am only part way through the podcast. It is possible that I have misrepresented Hassoun's position, in which case I can only apologise and note that it is not my intention to do so.

Is morality part of wellbeing?

In ethics, there is a common view that part of human wellbeing includes being a morally upright person. This is a rough sketch of an argument against this thesis. I'm not certain how much weight to give to my argument, but it seems to be worth recording.

The thesis I am attacking is closely related to internalism about moral motivation (the view that moral beliefs are inherently motivating). Indeed, perhaps they are the same thing. I don't know enough about the subject to know, so for the purposes of this essay I shall refer to my target as "morality as a constituent of wellbeing", or MCW.


P1: If MCW is true, then attempting to cause other people to act morally is paternalistic.
P2: In general, it is impermissible to be paternalistic to other people.
L1: If MCW is true, then in general it is impermissible to attempt to cause other people to act morally.
P3: It is not in general impermissible to attempt to cause other people to act morally.
C: Hence, MCW is false.

P1 I'm uncertain about. Is paternalism confined to forcing people to act in a way that you regard as good for them, or can it apply to a wider range of cases where you privilege your own reasoning over some else's?

P2 seems right. My position is that paternalism is usually wrong except in cases where the patient is incapable of acting rationally, or in accordance with their own considered judgement.
One response might be that by acting immorally, and therefore (according to the defender of MCW) irrationally, people demonstrate that they fall into the "incapable of acting rationally" category. But this seems highly dubious. Most obviously, the fact that someone chooses to act irrationally does not mean that they couldn't have acted rationally.

L1 follows from P1 and P2.

P3 seems sensible. In the words of Leah Libresco, "Breaking a promise is a betrayal, but walking with your friend or partner into evil isn’t loyalty." We rely on our friends and family to keep us on the straight and narrow.

One possible intervention, which could come on either side of the debate, is Joseph Heath's idea that self-binding is one of the crucial "benefits of co-operation". I can see this being used to argue in favour of P3; on the other hand, I can also see it being used to argue that forcing others to act morally isn't really about paternalism.