The Frontal Cortex

Philosophers are great at asking questions, but how often do they ask fruitful questions? The so-called "big questions," such as why are we here, are frequently anthropocentric. Some scientists, like Erwin Schoedinger asked, What is Life? Lynn Margulis asked the same question and came up with some marvelous insights--of science, not philosophy.

Since when have professional philosophers asked questions that contain testable hypotheses? You have some of the best philosophers, like Dan Dennett, reading philosophy mostly out of a sense of obligation. Given the paucity of progress in the history philosophy over the span of millenia, and given the dramatic progress by scientific inquiry over a few decades, aside from pleasure reading and retracing great thinkers (who were frequently mistaken, such as Descartes), why is the pursuit of philosophy worthwhile? Unless you've got gobs of time and the mathematical skills of a Russell, Peano, or a Wittgenstein, why not just pursue scientific inquiry, such as Marc Hauser has done in Moral Minds, a psychology book?

Posted by: Alan | December 10, 2007 4:42 PM

To Alan: I understand your lack of regard for professional philosophy, but I hope it does not extend to philosophy itself. Progress may not be the best yardstick for measuring philosophy's value, and in any comparison of this sort with science, the decks are stacked against philosophy from the start. Philosophers over time have been tempted to give their discipline more credibility by turning it into a more scientific pursuit, and it seems to me that the results have generally been disastrous. At its best, the study of philosophy can teach us to construct a good argument, shoot holes in a flawed one, understand abstract relationships, read a text, think critically about it, etc. Obviously, this skill can be learned studying other subject matter, and is also transferrable from the study of philosophy to the study or practice of other things.
I must confess that in another life I was a graduate student in philosophy. I grew to despise "academic philosophy" and left graduate school. Since then, I have tempered my views somewhat. I did not like the community of philosophers, and I think the community did not much like me. It is a self-selecting community, like all communities, and can look pretty strange, pretty hostile and pretty petty from the outside. It may look like philosophy does not always ask fruitful questions, but that doesn't mean it never does. Philosophy exists in and is part of the history of ideas, and for that reason alone is worth studying. I think it was Whitehead who said that all of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and that pretty much sums it up. But what a long and fascinating footnote to a fascinating body of work.

Posted by: peggy | December 11, 2007 5:11 PM

Responses to Alice and Peggy follow below.
To Alice: Thanks for your follow up to my post. My intention was not to generalize to broadly about ther merit per se of philosophical inquiry, or the role that such inquiry has played over Western history. My skepticism is more directed toward the legitimacy of applying scientific methods to traditionally philosophical questions. If the agenda is to find pathways between the two cultures, as framed by C.P. Snow, then it's a laudable goal, but it shouldn't be a forced agenda.
I think Marc Hauser and Steven Pinker, for example, who do a great job with their popular works on psychology. The legendary researcher Antonio Damasio has written two books with philosopher's names in the title, but they're not philosophy books. Aside from the historical and intellectual works of say, William James, David Hume, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and of course, Dewey, Whitehead, Russell, (and a little Santayana for pleasure reading), I'm not seeing much of value in modern philosophy in terms of (1) generating new insights and perspectives into the human condition, and (2) informing our worldviews in ways that bring us together as a species.
To Peggy: Thanks for your candor and insight. At root, I think a grand philosophical quest, posed in terms of the painter Gauguin, "D'ou venons nous; ou allons-nous" in one of his Tahitian works (or something like that; pardon my French), is worthwhile in itself as an exercise in self-reflection, and not merely as a step toward some conception of "progress." While progress can be seen as having a factual basis in some areas. Having no formal training in philosophy myself, I can only say that your comments have confirmed my general impressions of academic philosophy, and I think our views are rather congruent on that score. To get very much to the point, how much of a human life should be devoted to re-evaluating questions that lead to intellectual dead ends? I am admittedly suspicious of the push for humanities departments to get a new lease on life (and funding) by diversifying into scientific inquiry. But should they be doing this? Isn't there a scary risk of dumbing down science, conflating that which should not be conflated? I'm all for the idea of consilience, it is necessary, but we don't have enough E.O. Wilsons around to help effectuate it. Ending with a quote from Alexandar Pope: "The Memory's soft Figures melt away. One Science only will one Genius fit; So vast is Art, no narrow Human Wit; Not only bounded to peculiar Arts, But oft in those, confin'd to single Parts." (On Criticism). Cheers.

Posted by: Alan | December 12, 2007 11:05 AM

Reply to Alan: I wrote a longer reply but it disappeared before my eyes and I can't retrieve it. Oh, well. To reiterate just the key points, you said you began reading philosophy for fun and I say good for you. Philosophy should only be read for fun, and academic philosophy takes the fun out of it--at least it did for me.
With respect to your comment about how much of a human life should be devoted to pondering dead-end questions: Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. I think every human heart and mind can agree with that. But perhaps he should have added that the over-examined life is not worth much either.
The great works of philosophy are great works of literature and offer insights into human psychology. I'm thinking of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Descartes, Rousseau, Nietsche, Mill, the early work of Marx, Foucault. I'm forgetting many others. They explore pivotal questions about virtue and vice, honesty, trust, the basis of human society and government, the existence of God, the alienation of labor, the basis of capitalism, the importance of free speech, notions of the self, how we know what we know, and the list goes on. For anyone who has ever wondered about these things, which I hope is just about everyone, they are worth reading for more than just their historic value. They truly can offer some idea of where we come from and where we may be going.

Posted by: peggy | December 12, 2007 1:12 PM

And now for something really fun, here's the Monty Python Philosophers' Drinking Song:

Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.

Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.

David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, [some versions have 'Schopenhauer and Hegel']

And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as shloshed as Schlegel.

There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed.

John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.

Plato, they say, could stick it away--
Half a crate of whisky every day.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle.
Hobbes was fond of his dram,

And René Descartes was a drunken fart.
'I drink, therefore I am.'

Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed,
A lovely little thinker,
But a bugger when he's pissed.

Posted by: peggy | December 12, 2007 4:36 PM

To Peggy: The Monty Python song is hilarious! Really like it. I wonder how many would get some of the references. It's enjoyable communicating with you folks, albeit through blog comments.

A further thought or two on William James. His Varieties of Religious Experience is a landmark, and a fun read. James counted himself as a "sick soul," a reference that I personally think he picked up from Epictetus, who styled his a school for sick souls. Today we might say that James suffered from a mood disorder, but the widespread medicalization of human suffering is another issue. In the Will to Believe, James says that maybe we're like stained glass through which the divine light shines. Compare that idea to neuroscientist Read Montague's statement: "We are like the ultimate eddy current of flesh and bone holding pattern of body and thought..." (Why Choose this Book, p. 12).

In "Looking for Spinoza," Dr. Damasio notes that James, in characterizing Spinoza as having a cheery disposition, got it wrong. Spinoza had to actively work at countering a negative thought with a positive one. (Things most excellent are as difficult as they are rare). This reminds of the approach attributed to the Indian Patanjali, if you are familiar with the tradition. So, Peggy, what you say, sounds spot on. The unexamined life may not be worth living per Socrates, but introspection can be taken to excess. I highly recommend the book by psychologist Jonathan Haidt at UVA, entitled, The Happiness Hypothethis, which examines ancient wisdom in light of modern psychology. Haidt started out as a philosophy student, but got turned off, and switched to psychology. I won't spoil the enjoyment by giving away his conclusions. In general, for a link to some great thinkers and books, check out Edge.org, and keep posting! Cheers.

Posted by: Alan | December 13, 2007 10:13 AM

To Alice: It is said that Isaiah Berlin gave up pursuing philosophy because he met Ludwig Wittgenstein, and brilliant though Berlin was, he knew he could never out-cogitate Wittgenstein. Russell wrote the introduction to the Tractatus. In that work, Wittgenstein concluded as follows:

"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

I guess this also brings us 360 degrees to my original assertion concerning the general fruitfulness of modern philosophical inquiry. The philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend spent much of his career actively arguing for the abolition of his field. I find it interesting that Feyerabend, also an Austrian, was set up to study under Wittgenstein, but before he could travel to England, Wittgenstein had passed away. Instead, Feyerabend studied with another Austrian, one Karl Popper, whose claim to fame was his emphasis that empirical statements have to be falsifiable. This gets to the crux of my viewpoint: philosophical questions are not falsifiable, though I am open to any accounts of how this assertion may be mistaken.

Posted by: Alan | December 13, 2007 10:38 AM

Alan,
I think Popper would agree with you that philosophical problems are not falsifiable. In fact he was trying to draw a line, which he called demarcation, between statements of the empirical kind and all other statements

And he was a philosopher...a useful one at that!

I went back and read the original article and I am wondering what the philosophy students were actually experimenting about. One of the examples cited was that they watched people's reactions to moral quandries on an MRI.It seems that testing these reactions would be more in line with neuroscience. Unless of course they were trying to prove that humans are moral, but that would be psychology wouldn't it?

The lines do blurr.

I wonder if results in any of the social sciences are falsifiable. I once read someone disputing Cosmides and Tooby's theories in evolutionary psychology as being un-falsifiable.

But then Popper says this....

"I realize that such myths may be developed and become testable; that historically speaking all-or nearly all- scientific theories originate from myths and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientiic theories."

and maybe Proust was a neuroscientist.

Posted by: alice | December 13, 2007 11:45 PM

speaking of intentionality... there is a guy named Daniel Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard,(are you impressed?) who posits the theory that the conscious will is an illusion and feeling created by the mind that helps us remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do.
In his final page in "The Illusion of Conscious Will" he writes:

"The fact is, it seems to each of us that we have a conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusory is trivial........It is only with the feeling of conscious will that we begin to solve the problems of who we are as individuals, of discerning what we can and cannot do and of judging ourselves morally right or wrong for what we have done.

My daughter brought this little mind bender home from her first year at college. "Here read this Mom!"

Check out his website www.wjh.harvard.edu/~wegner/

Posted by: alice | December 14, 2007 3:39 PM

Wegner also writes that "[a]lthough the experience of conscious will is not evidence of mental causation, it does signal personal authorship of action to the individual and so influences both the sense of achievement and the acceptance of moral responsibility."

Peggy wrote earlier: "Maybe it is useful to be able to say, when philosophizing, that "most people think x" and then back it up with the results of your clipboard inquiry, but it sounds like just one more attempt to add interest to the study of philosophy, not to mention a veneer of scientific respectability." I agree. That would may be a subtle (or not so) form of advocating for a pet hypothesis. And without double blind controls, errors of confirmation bias are bound to creep in.

Posted by: Alan | December 15, 2007 11:10 PM