How to annoy a Platonist...

I've been revisiting some ideas about Epicurean hedonism recently. In particular, I've begun to think again about the Epicurean idea that a state of painlessness is itself a pleasure, indeed the highest pleasure possible. It's an odd thought, and it has generally been subject to a great deal of scepticism. Rightly so, it seems to me now (although it's one of those questions on which I've wavered back and forth...) I'm beginning to think that Epicurus really should have read Aristotle on pleasure more carefully. Or perhaps he should have read Aristotle on pleasure full stop; it isn't so obvious that Epicurus had much of an idea of what is in what we have as the Nicomachean Ethics. Still, I reckon he'd have found a lot in there to his liking. In particular, he might have usefully adapted Aristotle's armoury of activities and changes (energeiai and kinêseis) for his own distinction between katastematic and kinetic pleasures. (I would like to think that perhaps he did try to do just that. Well, I've often wondered if the curious and obscure quotation from Epicurus' On choices at DL 10.136 might point to him doing just that:

“ἡ μὲν γὰρ ἀταραξία καὶ ἀπονία καταστηματικαί εἰσιν ἡδοναί· ἡ δὲ χαρὰ καὶ ἡ εὐφροσύνη κατὰ κίνησιν ἐνεργείᾳ βλέπονται.”

Unfortunately, the text is a bit wobbly and there are all sorts of tricky aspects of the syntax to work out: ἐνεργείᾳ or ἐνεργείαι, for example? Thats a job for another (rainy) day, perhaps.) But for now I thought I'd share one of my favourite bits of Epicurean provocation, which I remember once (I think genuinely) shocked one of my fellow graduate students. (That might be because he was of a Platonist sort of persuasion at the time...) Here goes:

I spit on the fine (τὸ καλόν) and those who vacantly gawp at it, whenever it produces no pleasure.

Quoted at Athenaeus 547a (Us. 512)

Terrific stuff.

Herding instincts

With the new influx of students, the town seems curiously full. Perhaps the impression is compounded by the herding instincts of particularly the new students. I imagine the thought guiding their group-bonding behaviour is that if you are ever more than a metre or so away from one of your newly-made friends you might (a) get lost, (b) be forgotten about, (c) spend your next three years at university lonely and unloved. This tends to calm down eventually, of course, but for now it is causing major problems with the traffic.

There have always been bad cyclists in Cambridge, but now they are supplemented by huge pelotons of students, trying to stick together and therefore heading to lectures riding three or more abreast down the street. Many of them haven't cycled regularly since they were young kids and don't yet have the traffic sense to get out of the way when required and speed up when necessary. (And lots of them don't know yet how to change gear with confidence so end up peddling furiously in a low gear but failing to make much progress down the road.)

The cycle herds are reinforced by flocks of pedestrians. This morning a bunch of ten or so decided that in order to get to a lecture on the Sidgwick site they were perfectly entitled to stand in the middle of the Queen's Road/Silver Street crossroads. Like a bunch of Buridan's asses they seemed caught between an urge to get to the other side and an equipollent urge to retreat to the curb. So they just stayed there, waiting for some brave soul to take on a leadership role and manage the crossing. I've seen this sort of behaviour on David Attenborough programmes, so it's comforting -- in a way -- to have such a graphic illustration of the fact that humans are, after all, social animals in much the way that wilderbeest are. Thankfully, Cambridge drivers are -- for now -- generally in a forgiving mood or the body count would be pretty horrific.

vicipaedia

Hahaha. You have to say the 'v' as a 'w'...

But it's really there: http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagina_prima

Not quite up to the standard of the Private Eye degree citations, but close. Here's a good example:

Britannia Spears

Britannia Spears, dicta Britney Spears, est cantrix et saltatrix Americana. Nata est 2 Decembris 1981 in Silva Cantii (Anglice: Kentwood) in Ludoviciana. Musicam popularem canit. Anno 2004, Coemgeno Federline nupsit, et duos filios habent.

Biographia

Britannia puella canere et saltare semper amabat. Anno 1991, cum annos novem haberet, ad Broadviam ivit ut "infrastudium" pro Laura Bella Bundy in fabula Immisericordis (Anglice: Ruthless) ageret. Postea, ab 1992 ad 1994, apparuit in Canale Disneyo cum Christina Aguilera et Iustino Timberlake in Sodalitate Mici Muris (Anglice: Mickey Mouse Club).

Hoc programmati primavera anni 1994 deleto, Britannia domi habitavit in Ludoviciana ut vitam puellae Americanam vulgaris habeat; revertit autem, post tres annos, ad mundum saltationis.

I especially like the idea of a 'vita puellae Americana vulgaris'...

Scarlet day

The new academic year has just begun and the weather has turned decidedly autumnal right on cue. I was feeling pretty lethargic last week and not at all looking forward to being pitched into the brief but very intense teaching term. But the city has been transformed over the weekend by the influx of new and returning students and there is a genuine buzz of excitement in the air. It's quite infectious, because for now at least I'm feeling quite positive about the term.

It might be because I was at the new undergraduates' matriculation dinner last night and it was hard not to be carried along by the mixture of pride, excitement and sheer terror that the new students are feeling at the thought of starting their degree courses. It's not so long ago -- I'd like to think -- that I was in a similar state myself. I seem to remember being particularly concerned about how to get the washing machines in the communal laundry to work; they were enormous great top-loading machines that had to be fed 50 pence pieces. They simply evened out the grime rather than properly washing things, so over the eight weeks your clothes became a uniform shade of grey. They would then emerge from the 20p guzzling 'driers' (enormous drums heated by alarming flames you could just glimpse if you peered round the back) slightly warm, damp, and grey...

But anyway, it's a very special time. In eight weeks or so we'll start interviewing for next year's intake, but for now we can concentrate on our current students and get them off to a good start in their first, or second, or whatever year.

This week is also a good time to be selling posters and toasters.

Michael Palin's pants are on fire

Jolly Brit abroad Michael Palin is limping around Eastern Europe and beyond for his new 'travel' programme, Palin's New Europe. Pah! It's a limp thing all round, this programme and yet another example of the current outbreak of telly not telling the truth. I know. It's bad, isn't it? Hot on the heels of the revelation that the footage of Alan Yentob nodding may not have been filmed at the very moment he was interviewing someone, now Palin is at it too.

Last night series out set-up interviews with 'colourful' new neighbours began with Palin watching some crazy Bulgarian mystics dancing in circles at the summer solstice. Weird, huh? You wouldn't get people in Britain celebrating a simple astronomical event as if it were a major energizing of the spiritual whatnot, would you? Oh. In any case this must have been in June. But later in his 'travels', after seeing some gypsies in Sofia -- crikey! There are gypsies there! -- he arrives in Cappodocia (Göreme, in fact, which Palin insisted on pronouncing GO-remmy...) and it's in deep snow. Now, either the rail network and the lorry he 'hitched' in were very slow, or this wasn't really part of a single journey. 'Fess up, Palin! More shoddy BBC work. No wonder people are turning off.

Volvo day

This coming Saturday, if you are travelling along the M11 or A14 here's a game you can play. Keep a look out for cars delivering students for university. 1 point for a car stuffed full of obvious university kit. Add a point for a bike on the back. Add another point for each pot plant (that is, plant in a pot) visible in a back window. Add a further point if you can make an educated guess at the subject the students is studying (visible textbooks, bits of anatomical skeleton etc.) The doble your tally if it's a Volvo.

If you live in Cambridge, of course, stay away from the town centre. The place was never designed to accommodate this influx of traffic and concerned parents. You'll never get served in a café and it's crazy to attempt to buy anything at Sainbury's or M&S. Best stay away altogether.

So we will swap the f*cking punt chauffeur types for bunches of students - new ones, a bit bewildered, not yet sure how to do laundry; returning students - suddenly feeling terribly important and confident.

Poor things. And poor parents too. They are paying for all this now and no doubt feel much more invested in the whole business. Many parents insist on coming to college Open Days and even try to come to the admissions interviews. Not a great idea, but you can see why they might feel they have much more of a part to play in the process these days.

Another symptom of the new atmosphere is the readiness of universities to address parents directly. See, for example, the St Andrew's website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/parents/ Nothing comparable yet at www.cam.ac.uk. But students themselves here organize a 'parenting' system -- assigning new first years to 'parents' in the second or third year. It's something of an odd exercise in genealogy and not all 'parents' take an appropriately paternal or maternal attitude to their offspring, of course. But then, they haven't just driven from Devon with a pot plant obscuring the rear view mirror...

Goooooooollllazzzzzo!

Two new books arrived for me today, just so I don't got to bed and dream about the dramas of uploading images or page hierarchies. Calcio: a history of Italian football and Morbo: the story of Spanish football. I hope they're as good as two of my favourite recent reads: Gary Imlach's My father and other working class heroes and Adrian Chiles' We don't know what we're doing (which has a very sad ending) ... The Italian one, at least, looks rather scholarly but now I will be at last sure that I'm right when I explain why the football teams in Milan are called 'Milan' (pronounced 'Meelan', NB not Milano) and 'Internazionale'... But then I noticed something very suspicious. The authors' names: Foot and Ball. Surely some conspiracy!

Does not compute

I've not been posting much for the last week because we are busy in the Faculty of Classics building a new website. The current one was put together somewhat 'organically' so it has lots of offshoots and a strange way of organizing the information. Most of it is there if you know where to look, but knowing where to look is the trick...

So we have a shiny new Content Management System and a number of us are busy generating pages and then making 'content'... It's pretty straightforward, if a bit fiddly. For example, I've spent the morning hunting down the odd character in pages we've more or less copied from the current site which is in the wrong coding. So a '£' shows up as a black square with a question mark inside...

I'm geeky enough to think this is all going to be worth it in the end. We should end up with a site which can be managed and updated by a number of people with much greater ease than the present arrangement. No one really needs to know any html or whatever, and what you see is (the stray tricky characters aside) what you get. The next big push is then to start putting video and audio on the site!

The Fire and the Sun?

I was doing some lazy research this morning for a schools' lecture on Platonic Love for the Faculty's VIth Form Study Day on 26 September (you know, type some random keywords into Google and see what happens). Sometimes it can be very interesting: 'strictly platonic', for example, generates an enormous list of classified ads by city for various kinds of personal relationships. Not sure Plato would have been too chuffed with most of it.

But the best and strangest I found is this excellent site for Platonic fireplaces. I imagine they cast wonderful shadows... Perhaps they are good for rooms containing large numbers of prisoners who want to be given a misleading puppet show.

And I found this cartoon which made me laugh.

What about Cicero?

I've been spending some time thinking about Cicero's presentation of Epicurean hedonism, particularly at the beginning of Fin. 2. In particular, I've been wondering whether the problems he raises there for the Epicurean identification of painlessness with the highest state of pleasure are telling. Certainly, it is an odd identification to make and the attempts made by the Epicurean spokesman, Torquatus, to defend it do not seem to be very promising.

Yet, there is a problem. Quite a few commentators, Gosling and Taylor in their 1982 The Greeks on pleasure in particular, are very hard on Cicero and his tactics. They find his emphasis on the Epicureans' interest in 'kinetic' pleasures unnecessary and even go so far as to claim that Cicero is himself mistaken in making such a deal out of a distinction between the pleasures of painlessness and the sensory pleasures involved in satisfying a need. For these commentators, that is not the central distinction in Epicurean hedonism and Cicero has distorted matters for his own polemical purposes.

Now, I'm not sure if I understand the Epicurean notion of pleasure well enough to know whether this accusation is right. One of the problems, of course, is that Cicero is one of our fullest accounts of Epicurean ideas about pleasure and I find it hard to be sure that we have a sound and accurate picture against which we can compare him and find him wanting. The other evidence is similarly polemical (e.g. Plutarch) or else very scrappy and ripped from any sort of useful context (e.g. the quotations in Cicero and Plutarch; the fragment at Diog. Laert. 10.136).

So how do we proceed? I suppose we need to do three things. First we need to have a clear account of precisely what Cicero's argument is in texts like the opening of Fin. 2 and we need to construct as part of this process an account of what Cicero's understanding of Epicurean pleasure is. We should do the same for Plutarch, and any other source. Second, we need to do a thorough linguistic and philosophical analysis of the scrappy bits of genuine Epicurean material which survive and -- if possible -- see if they can be pieced together into a consistent, though perhaps gappy, whole. Third, we need to do some genuine philosophical inquiry ourselves. For example, we might ask whether we can come to a satisfying account of what pleasure is or, failing that, some picture of the various possible options and what the consequences of each of them is. So, what if we abandon the idea of pleasure as somehow related to perception? Must pleasure be associated with a certain kind of phenomenological 'feel'? If not, what can we say about it? This third part of the process will help to set down some parameters to guide our thinking about what is and is not a plausible or even possible opinion to hold on the question of pleasure.

Finally, we have to put the results of all three kinds of inquiry side by side and see how they relate to one another. Does Cicero's argument, for example, show that he is committed to a view of Epicurean pleasure which is evidently incompatible with the primary Epicurean evidence? If not, is the Epicurean evidence compatible both with Cicero's argument and also with other conceptions of pleasure which are less susceptible to his criticisms? Does either Cicero's attack on Epicurus or the likely Epicurean picture itself offer anything like a plausible conception of pleasure, judged independently?

This is a laborious business, to be sure. And it requires a great deal of both philological and philosophical skill. But it seems to me that this is something like the ideal methodology for approaching this kind of question: we certainly cannot simply legislate that Cicero must be biased and disregard his criticisms as a result. Fortunately, the enterprise as a whole is something that can be pursued collaboratively -- some providing part of the picture and others other parts. And it is something which can proceed gradually, always open to revising the results offered so far. But, considered with my best rose-tinted specs on, that is how I think good ancient philosophy is done.

Protagorean hedonism

Here are some thoughts I’ve been having about Plato’s Philebus. I have been wondering whether, as an alternative to Socrates view that pleasures can be false, a coherent position can be outlined to the effect that pleasures are always true – not just in some sense of their being always ‘really’ a pleasure or some such, but that pleasures are always true in a sense of ‘true’ that corresponds closely with the likely sense in which Socrates thinks that pleasures can be ‘false’. He does not mean that some pleasures are not ‘really’ pleasures.

So, imagine that we disagree with Socrates of the Philebus and think that pleasures cannot be false. Imagine also that we disagree in this way not because we think that it is daft to think of pleasures as true or false, that is, we disagree not because we think pleasures are not ‘truth apt’. Rather, we disagree because we think that all pleasures are true. This is a possible view of Protarchus’ position in the Philebus.

On a plausible view of Socrates’ account, a pleasure can be false in this sense. Pleasures have, as it were, a propositional content. They can be expressed in statements of the form: ‘I am pleased that P’. A pleasure is false, on this view, if P is false. So if ‘I am pleased that you love me’ but you do not love me, the pleasure I feel is, alas, false.

Now imagine that we think that all pleasures are true. How is this expressed? Perhaps we borrow the notion that pleasures have a propositional content. So again, pleasure can be expressed in statements of the form: ‘I am pleased that P’. On this view, however, P is always true; it is true, presumably, in some sense because I take pleasure in it.

This is like one view of Protagoras’ position in the Theaetetus is respect of beliefs generally. On this view, Protagoras thinks that all beliefs are true. If I believe P then P is true. I cannot be mistaken. (He may also think that if P is true then I believe it. I am omniscient.)

Is Protagorean hedonism, the view that all pleasures are true, an absurd view? Certainly, it captures the sense in which we might baulk at the idea that it is possible to be somehow mistaken about what we take pleasure in. Socrates seems to want to say that it is possible to be experiencing a pleasure but there to be some kind of falsity about that pleasure. It is not merely that pleasures can be generated by beliefs that are mistaken; rather, there is something mistaken or wrong about the pleasure itself.

Protagorean hedonism rejects that. If I am pleased at P then P is true. Now, it is depressingly easy to find prima facie objections to this. For example, I might indeed take pleasure in thinking how much you love me, but in fact you do not love me at all. Surely there is something wrong about the pleasure here? If we do not want to go along the route of denying that pleasures are ‘truth apt’, we must somehow instead relativise the object of the pleasure. Now, ‘I am pleased that P’ where P is something true but its truth cannot be undermined by unfortunate facts about, for example, whether you do in fact love me or not. Instead, the truth of P must, it seems, somehow be guaranteed instead simply in virtue of my taking pleasure in it. Somehow, the truth of the pleasure I take in thinking how much you love me is entirely independent of whether you do or do not. It is instead guaranteed by my taking pleasure.

So this is where I have got. Now I have two other questions: How coherent is 'Protagorean hedonism'? Could an argument be mounted against it analogous to the arguments mounted in the Theaetetus against Protagoras’ more general position about beliefs?

Educashun, educashun, educashun

At long last, the Tories are beginning to think of some policies. Their education ideas are being floated at the moment and include two ideas worth thinking about. I'm not sure whether they will be useful or even desirable, but I was tickled by the the other parties' reaction.

The first idea is that kids at 11 who are under-performing would not be allowed automatically to proceed to secondary school. (Here's the BBC report. And here is the Tories' own version of the story.) They may be kept back at primary school until their level of achievement is up to the move. I suppose the idea is that this is an incentive not to be kept back, because of the possible stigma that might bring, and also that it might help secondary schools by removing the need for extensive remedial work with incoming pupils. Well, maybe. But here is what David Laws, the Lib-Dem spokesperson, had to say:

"Like the old 11-plus, proposals for what the Tories have called a remedial year would stigmatise the very children who need extra help. They would also increase class sizes and make it impossible for teachers and parents to plan ahead."

The first point is perhaps true but is presumably in part the point of the exercise. Whether in the long term it is overall to the educational and general social benefit or detriment of the pupil concerned is something I really have no idea about. So this might turn out to be a very bad idea, all told. But Laws' second point, though, is surely not quite right. Holding back pupils will increase class size, he says. Well, yes. But surely it will also decrease class sizes. For every extra pupil still in primary school there will be one fewer in secondary school. Or can we now manufacture pupils e nihilo? Sure, there may be an extra burden on some schools, but this is hardly an absolute increase in class sizes... The Tories certainly will need to say something about what they are going to do to help the primary schools to accommodate any such people. But they are even at present being put somewhere...

The second idea was apparently less worthy of the other parties' immediate comment. Here is the Torygraph report. But it seems to me not a bad idea to explore:

"The sixth form experience of many young people is now dominated from year one by the examination system and teachers tell us that the opportunity to explore young people's curiosity and enthusiasm in pursuit of academic byways has been almost totally removed," says a panel of experts, led by a former cabinet minister, Stephen Dorrell, and ex-vice-chancellor Baroness Pauline Perry.

That does sound like something worth taking seriously. And that has left me with a very disconcerting thought. Am I really thinking that the Tories have some potentially useful ideas in their education policies? Help! Either I am getting old and cranky -- and, please no, might even end up reading the Daily Mail... -- or British politics has finally gone completely topsy-turvy.

Hooray for autumn

Summer is nice but, especially in odd-numbered years, June and July and the first part of August are sadly football free. But it's all back and this year I seem spoilt for choice. Not only has 'five' (Channel 5) started to show Serie A games on Sunday afternoon's in Football Italiano but I have suddenly acquired via the 'kind' people at Virgin media Setanta sports -- so I can miss Premier league games during the kids' tea time/In the night garden time, but may be able to catch the odd SPL fixture (why?) or even Bundesliga, Portuguese league, and -- when I'm really lucky -- live Conference (sorry, 'Blue Square Premier') games. They even had Cambridge United a few weeks ago. The five coverage is pretty poor, unfortunately, and they seem to lack the wit and fun of the old Channel 4 (and then Bravo) Gazzetta programmes. They don't have James Richardson, for a start. And the title is wrong. Do they think we won't understand 'calcio'?

But best of all is the BBC Radio Five commentary. It's a real saviour for parents who, let's face it, aren't going to be allowed 2 hours of TV during the weekend to devote to watching a game. You can be doing something else while it's on, and still feel the excitement. It's perhaps even better in the car. For me, it certainly evokes the relief of getting back to the car after fighting your way around the shops on a Saturday afternoon, particularly around Christmas. A few minutes of commentary sets you up for a cup of tea and the radio when you get home. Or it reminds me of driving home from visiting the parents on Boxing Day. Special times.

A companion to guidebooks to the handbook of...

I'm hard at work editing a steady flow of contributions to what will eventually be the Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism. (By the way, if anyone has any bright ideas about a nice cover for the volume, then I'm open to suggestions.) And I'm currently thinking over a more ambitious editing project to cover ancient philosophy more generally. But I can't help having a certain sinking feeling about the never-ending and ever-growing set of companions, handbooks, guidebooks, and the like. What are they for? [1] Different things, I suppose. Some are clearly intended as monumental statements of the state of the art. Others are more introductory and aimed at students or scholars in related but distinct areas who want a handy way in to a different field. And they also differ according to the scope and ambition of the subject area they propose to accompany or guide you through. ('Companion' is, I now come to think, a much less authoritarian sort of thing to call a volume. A guidebook is a bit more dictatorial: 'this is what you should think.' 'Now look here.' etc. Companions are, perhaps, supposed to be something you have with you as you make your own way. A study-buddy...) Also, what is the intended relationship between a companion to a subject and a first-order piece of scholarly work on the same subject?

So I started off thinking about companions with this question: What would I want the ideal one of these to be like? I reckon, it ought to have a number of virtues, certainly including these four:

1. It should offer a reliable account of the subject area. For a historical subject, this would mean saying what the evidence is, what is generally made of it, and so on.
2. It should give a good idea of why the subject area is interesting.
3. It should give a sense of what at present are the major scholarly debates or schools of thought on the given subject.
4. It should guide the reader to more specialised discussions, related areas and the like.

So this should be a point of entry and an invitation to a field of thought. It should not be thought to replace the first-order research. But it should show what the research is like, why it matters, and what sort of things it talks about. It is not a textbook which will replace or subsitute for the already-existing literature.

But there is something else I think they ought to do. For companions (or whatever) to philosophy, I would think they ought to give an impression of the practice of philosophy. So a companion to metaphysics ought not to be a list of positions or a survey of what conclusions might be reached; instead it would also have to show what it is like to be engaged in philosophical inquiry. It would therefore have to exemplify what it is about.

For my line of work, a companion to some historical period or school of philosophy, a good companion would introduce the reader to the practice of thinking philosophically and to the practice of interpreting and contextualising the particular subject matter. So it would have, for example, to show how to read a bit of Aristotle both by engaging with the argument and also, perhaps even initially, by showing how to get from a bit of Aristotle's writings to a relatively clear view of what it means. Of course, these two practices are not easy (or desirable) to keep apart; that, it seems to me, is what working on historical philosophy is all about: it is both history and philosophy.

I think I am coming to the view that a good companion will have two, perhaps very different, functions. It will (i) lay out the state of play, explain where to go to find various texts, say what they are generally thought to be about and so on; but also (ii) it will function as a protreptic to further deeper work and offer a set of examples of what is involved in working 'unaccompanied' with this material. This second might take the form of more specific or specialised bits of research. The authors can feel liberated from the need to 'cover' an area because their job here is to offer up an example of what the next stage of work would look like, exposing the difficulties and wondering explicitly about methodological questions.

[1] There are some interesting thoughts in G. R. F. Ferrari's introduction to the new Cambridge Companion to Plato's Republic (2007, Cambridge), xv. Ferrari also stresses the idea of 'accompaniment': 'This Companion, by contrast [sc. with a scout striking a new path], seeks to walk with those who are already on the road...'

Just desserts

You can't make a jelly with pieces of kiwi fruit suspended tantalisingly inside. We learned that lesson yesterday the hard way -- and, after several hours, had only a bowl of sticky runny strawberry gloop with some kiwi pieces floated on top. But here's the reason why, from the helpful people at Planet Science and their fruity-jelly-making tips:

Just don't try fresh pineapple or kiwi fruit!

These fruits contain an enzyme, a molecular machine, which chops up proteins. As gelatine is a protein it is chopped up by the enzyme. As the gelatine fibres are chopped up their net falls to pieces, allowing the water to flow freely and turning the jelly back into a sloppy liquid. If you fancy pineapple in your jelly, then use the tinned sort. As part of the canning process the fruit has been heated up. This destroys the enzyme so that it can no longer chop up the gelatine.

So only tinned pineapple will do.... Damn those fresh fruit!

Things to do in Dorset

Here are my top five (in no particular order):

Monkey World. It's a whole world of monkeys. (Well, they have apes too -- as my eldest pointed out -- so maybe 'Primate World'. Less catchy, but more taxonomically accurate.)

Maiden Castle. Lots of fun even on a windy and wet afternoon. You share it with the sheep and can pretend to be a windswept and wet Iron Age person. They were probably pretty grumpy quite a lot of the time and I can see why you'd need to plait your hair. Blimey, it was windy.

Dorset County Museum, Dorchester. Dress up as a Roman (if you are five). Look at some brilliant stuff, including a jade axe head. JADE! Completely pointless as an axe head, of course, but amazing and beautiful and all the way from Italy. A really super little museum with well thought out exhibitions and lots for people from 2 to 102...

Winborne Model Town. A totally bonkers idea. In the 50s some blokes decided to make a 1:10 replica of their town. Unfortunately their replica does not include a 1:10 scale model of the model village, which would also have to contain a 1:100 scale model.... etc. Nice cream teas.

The Red Lion, Winfrith Newburgh. Really good food. There wasn't any lamb kleftiko this time, alas, though I'm told the beef stifado was just as good. R. liked the bruscchete.

Sale on now!

People in the UK cannot afford to miss this Amazon offer on The Wire DVD box sets. 65% off for the best TV series in the world?

Tolerance

I've just come back from a week's holiday en famille in Dorset. We went back to a lovely little cottage in Winfrith Newburgh, called 'Snail's Place' (information here), which is perfect for this kind of trip. The kids love the olde worlde bit and we can tuck them up in the evening and stay downstairs with a good bottle of wine and a DVD -- currently more of The Wire...

On the way, we stopped on the M3 at Fleet services to stretch our legs and get something to eat. We had already crawled round the M25 and were a bit frazzled. The two-year-old is not always great on such occasions and this time she really kicked off and had a bit of a tantrum. Nothing nuclear, really, just a lot of noise. But it was a very busy place and lots of peole were feeling similarly grumpy and many of them had kids who were doing the same or had done so in the past.

But one couple at a table next to us were not very happy with being this close to a wailing child. I suppose I can see their point, but there is not a whole lot you can do about it in a place like that and in holiday-traffic levels of people. Still, what was unusual was that in addition to the tutting and eye-rolling, one of the men decided to lean across and directly address our daughter with several loud orders to 'hush'. Not what normally happens. Of course, this did not result in a quiet toddler; quite the opposite. In fact, had I been so ordered by someome who might -- by a less kind critic -- have been described as 'gaunt, with an overly-tight white t-shirt and Club Tropicana highlighted hair', I would have been uninclined to do anything but scream back. Which is precisely what happened.

I was a bit annoyed at them too. I know screaming kids are incredibly annoying. Other people's screaming kids are perhaps more annoying still. But we were hardly in a Hampstead bistro and I would have thought that you might expect to come across some less than perfectly behaved kids in Fleet services on an August Saturday. And even if they were, perhaps understandably, annoyed and put off their muffins just a little, you don't shout at other people's children like that.

What was Sextus Empiricus up to?

Events at the end of the Symposium Hellenisticum cast (and will continue to cast) a long shadow over the entire proceedings. But it was a very engaging conference and I came away with a number of new questions which it seems to me are worth noting down here. My paper will require quite a lot of revision, so I will ponder these as I go about that job. My principal questions are about Sextus' method and background knowledge.

1. How much did Sextus know about e.g. the Stoic philosophy he was attacking? Was he, for example, fully aware of the Stoic distinction between the sense in which the present exists and the past and future merely subsist?
2. If he did know about these niceties did he care about them? If not, is this due to sheer sloppiness or does he simply think that such word-magic is of no philosophical use?
3. Who was he writing for? Were M 9 and 10 written for people already tempted by Pyrrhonism, perhaps even practising Pyrrhonists? It's unlikely that any committed Stoic would be much moved by what he writes, for example, so does that make him a poor dialectician or is that all part of the Pyrrhonist stance?
4. How much had Sextus read? In particular, how much did he know of any philosophical work (particularly in the dogmatic schools) after, say, Aenesidemus?
5. What are we to make of the methodological introduction to M 9? Does Sextus carry through with this manifesto? If not, why not? If he does so more in some areas than others, why?
6. Sextus seems both very taken by and also keen to distance himself from Diodorus Cronus although Diodorus produces plenty of useful material for the anti-physiologia project. Why? Does this have to do with methodological qualms, differences of aim, or something else?

The fact that I am left with such apparently basic questions is a virtue of the conference. I had not been made to think these issues through before, but they are all very basic to understanding the work.

End of the conference

The Symposium ended with some extremely sad news.

Waiting to present...

We're about half-way through the conference now, moving from book 9 to book 10 of Sextus. This morning we get to be concered about where there is place... I've drawn the short straw and am giving my paper last of all, on Saturday afternoon. On the one hand, by then everyone might be tired and sleepy and not in the mood for any serious aggression. On the other, they may have got so grumpy over the week that I get a serious going over. It's hard not to spend the whole week in a state of anxiety, worried whether someone is going to come out and say something that either anticipates the very small amount I think I have to add to the general discussion or else totally undercuts the basis of my paper. Them's the risks, I suppose.

From our embedded correspondent

So here I am in Delphi, enjoying the view (fantastic), the food (excellent) and getting thoroughly confused by Sextus Empiricus (probably what he wanted...) I would add a photo, but this slightly antiquated computer doesn't seem to like the fancy Blogger features. Perhaps when I get back. More updates if and when something occurs to me.

UPDATE: I've now added a photo. This surely ranks as one of the best views from a conference centre anywhere in the world:

Packing for Pyrrhonism

I'm off (very early) tomorrow morning to the Symposium Hellenisticum in Delphi. I'll be away from the kids for a week, which will be a shame, but the conference looks like it is going to be very rewarding. And it's a lovely location.

Is the Fellow next to me at lunch a Time Lord?

I'm re-reading Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency. Chapter 3 has an excellent account of a high table dinner at a Cambridge college (here it is the fictional St. Cedd's, probably based on Adams' own college, St. John's) which I had not properly appreciated before, since I must have read it first when I was about 15 and a very long way from a Cambridge college high table. One of the fellows dining is the excellent Professor Urban Chroniotis, 'Reg', the Regius Professor of Chronology... It turns out that Reg is a Time Lord, and a refugee from a Doctor Who story.

Lots of fun. And, it has to be said, it has made me look a little differently at some of my colleagues. Perhaps those odd non sequiturs at lunch are not a sign of age or the sheer weight of learning. Perhaps it is just difficult to keep track of things when you're zooming back and forth across the space-time continuum. And no wonder people seem to have more time than I to get things done. If a deadline is looming, they just pop into a time machine and give themselves a but more leeway... Handy.

BB geets cultured

S. pointed this out to me yesterday. Why has Radio 4's Mark Lawson entered the Big Brother house under the obvious pseudonym of 'Jonty'? Perhaps Channel 4 have responded to concerns over the low-brow nature of much of its content and are re-introducing late-night arts discussion programmes by stealth. Good for them.

'Jonty'


Lawson

Private pain

I'm still wondering about Sextus Empiricus M 9.162-7. At the moment I am wondering about the sense in which Sextus thinks that pain is 'private'. He certainly argues here that the only method by which god might acquire knowledge of pain is by experiencing it. The relevant bit of the argument is as follows:

If god possesses knowledge of these [sc. of goods, bads, and indifferents], he knows what sort of things are good, bad, and indifferent. Since, then, suffering is one of the indifferent things, he knows both suffering and what it is like by nature. And if so, he has experienced it; for without experience he would not have formed a notion of it, but, just as the man who has not experienced white colour and black, owing to his having been blind from birth, cannot possess a notion of colour, so too god cannot have a notion of suffering if he has not experienced it. For when we, who have often experienced it, are unable to discern distinctly the special quality of the pain suffered by gouty patients or to guess it from descriptions, or to get consistent accounts from the actual sufferers, since they explain it in different ways, and some say that they find it to resemble twisting, others bending, others stabbing, -- surely, if god has had no experience at all of suffering, he cannot possess a notion of suffering.

The question whether Sextus thinks that to have knowledge of pain it is necessary to experience pain first-hand, so to speak, may turn out also to be relevant to a long-standing question about the scope of ancient scepticism and, more generally still, about the overall ancient treatment of what we might call subjectivity. Does Sextus consider pain to be what we might all a ‘subjective state’? That is, does he consider pain to be a state such that there is ‘something it is like to be in pain’, that there is some ‘characteristic phenomenological feel’ to it? If so, does he think that there can be a reasonable question about whether we can or indeed do have knowledge of such states qua subjective states? In short, does he think it is a reasonable question to ask whether we can have knowledge of pain, if pain is indeed in his eyes something we would recognise as a subjective state? If the answer to this final question is yes, then this might lend support to a view which sees less of a radical difference between Sextan and, for example, Cartesian approaches to questions of knowledge and certainty, especially when those questions are applied to knowledge of one’s own mental states.

The question of Sextus’ attitude to pain would appear to be a good place to look for useful evidence in trying to answer this set of questions since pain would perhaps count as a particularly good example of a ‘subjective state’ in modern philosophy. Pain, on at least one persistent view of its nature, is thought to be private and grasped only via some kind of introspection. There is, additionally, certainly something it is like to be in pain. Indeed, these assumptions are precisely what generate some rather difficult modern problems in dealing with pain since they make it rather difficult to see what relationship pain in this sense can have with physical damage and the equally plausible assumption that pain is physically localised in distinct parts of the body. We can leave these difficulties aside for the moment however, if it is sufficiently agreed that pain would be an interesting test case for Sextus’ treatment of so-called subjective states.

Sextus does in this passage seem to accept that pain is private. At least, he claims more than once that knowledge of pain can be acquired only by experiencing it first-hand. But it seems to me that this need not mean that he holds anything like the particular modern notion of pain as a subjective state, since there are various ways in which the privacy of pain might be explained. In fact, the comment about the impossibility of learning about pain through interviewing gout sufferers would seem to fall perfectly in line with the view that, on Sextus’ view, pain is inaccessible to anyone who is not suffering not because it is somehow an ontologically special and personal mental state, but rather because it depends on a particular internal state of the sufferer which is adêlon to all except the sufferer himself. Perhaps the most telling point of all is that Sextus even for the slightest moment is prepared to entertain this proposal of simply asking people to describe their feelings as a possible method of acquiring knowledge of pain. To put it another way, Sextus could have said in reply to this suggestion: ‘Don’t be silly. Of course, if you want you can ask other people what gout feels like, but this is no way to acquire knowledge of the pain of gout. Pain is the sort of thing that is private. I mean that it is private in a special way. Person X’s pain is not hidden from Person Y in the way that the interior of Person X’s private apartment is hidden from Person Y. Rather, pain is private in the sense that it is an essentially first-personal subjective experience. You can’t know what it is like to feel the pain of gout without yourself feeling gout, just as you cannot know what it is like to be a bat without yourself being a bat.’ Further Sextus could, for that matter, have pointed to the descriptions of the pain of gout as ‘twisting’, ‘bending’, or ‘stabbing’, and said that these are no use because at best they are only metaphorical or, at worst, are misleadingly describing some sort of mental occurrence in physical terms.

However, he says neither such thing. Instead he rules out the indirect acquisition of knowledge of pain because the reports of the peculiar nature of gout are such that no clear and consistent authoritative picture will emerge. It is because the gout is internal to the gout-sufferer that no one else can access it in such a way as to be able to acquire knowledge of it. An external observer, Person Y, might see the external symptoms of Person X’s gout, notice Person X’s groans and the like. But he cannot perceive the pain of gout. In a case such as this we are therefore reliant on the reports of those people to whom the pain of gout is evident, namely the sufferers themselves. So Sextus’ treatment of this possibility suggests that pain is not private in a way which would render such a form of inquiry immediately wrong-headed. Instead the problem faced is a very familiar one concerned with disagreement and the apparently irresolvable nature of the conflicting appearances. In this respect, there appears to be little difference in Sextus’ mind between the obstacles faced by (i) someone who has never experienced gout in answering the question: ‘What is the pain of gout like?’ just by asking sufferers to describe it and (ii) someone who has never entered an area of a temple reserved only for priests in answering the question: ‘What is it like in the inner sanctum?’ just by asking the priests to describe it.

Too old and too boring

This made me laugh, probably because it struck a chord. I'm off to a conference in a couple of weeks and need some light cotton trousers. The conference is in Greece so it's going to be warm. I can't spend the week in shorts because I have pasty weird English legs and, besides, when you wear shorts what can you wear on your feet? Trainers make you look like a clown or a high-school student -- you might as well put on a baseball cap and complete the look. And I cannot bear to wearing sandals or (gulp) flip flops... My family has recently gone crazy for Crocs shoes but since I don't work most of the time in a hospital operating theatre and can't in any case pull off bright pink clogs, I've been the only one to give them a miss.

Anyway, as I think I've said before there is a black hole of male clothing between the student years and the Werther's Originals phase. Some people go straight for the tweeds and come over all Ede & Ravenscroft, but my accent wouldn't fit... So I found myself in M&S buying some nice but -- let's face it -- really boring trousers. The only answer is just to give in and resign myself to beige and shapeless things until I decide that what I really nice is a nice warm cardie...

Allusion and intertext in two children's classics

Well, if it's good enough for classical poetry it's good enough for children's books. But I can't claim much credit for spying this -- my youngest daughter, on being read Maurice Sendak's Where the wild things are (1963) for the first time, pointed to one particular wild thing and exclaimed 'It's a Gruffalo!' I can see her point. (I think the wild thing in question is the one on the right.)

Not very telling, you might think, because monsters in children's books might be thought to have to follow some very basic and general parameters. No wonder that sometimes they resemble on another. Here, by way of comparison is the cover of Donaldson and Scheffler's The Gruffalo (1999): (You might want to compare the cover of the US edition, in which the Gruffalo seems rather more hidden behind a tree. Is this to make the book more exciting? Or is the monster too scary for open display in US bookshops?)


But then we read on and came to this description of the wild things (p.9):

And when he came to the place where the wild things are they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.

Anyone who has read The Gruffalo as many times as we have will surely spot the allusion made there in a very strict poetic metre to Sendak's looser but poeticised prose. In the later work, the Gruffalo himself also has 'terrible tusks and terrible claws', not to mention 'terrible teeth in his terrible jaws'. It is not beyond credibility, surely, that this is a deliberate reminiscence of Sendak's classic [1]. Whereas the wild things are, we are encouraged to think, some kind of imaginative projection of the hero Max's anger and exuberance, the Gruffalo is initially the creative imagination of the hero in the later book, a mouse, designed to scare away various predators. But the mouse's creation turns out to be real, and this creates yet another creature to outwit.

[1] One of the reviewers on the Amazon.co.uk page, 'humptydumpty', seems to agree, as does the review from Publishers' Weekly, cited here. For similar claims about Sendak's influence, see here.

Light reading

I really should be getting down to finishing a draft of my paper on Sextus for the Symposium Hellenisticum and examining a PhD thesis, but I might get distracted by a new book which arrived this morning. It's hard to ignore -- the cover (black with red lettering -- very 80s) and title demand attention. And it might help with some of the worries I've been having about pleasure and pain.

There's a lot of good stuff in there, for a brief glance, although it won't really count as holiday reading. Hmmm. Is pain the next place for me to turn my philosophical attention after death? Is there a pattern emerging here?

Still, there are a number of philosophers interested in pain (insert joke here). Here is a good blog on the subject, by Adam Swenson, currently wondering about snail venom. (His 2006 Rutgers PhD on pain and value can be read here.) And the editor of the collection pictured here has a good online bibliography.

Oh dear

I've just asked for the film rating of this blog. (You can do the same for yours here.)

It turns out that this blog should not be read by minors without appropriate supervision. And, let's be honest, adults should be warned that there may be some shocking content... Mostly, the fact that so far I have mentioned 'pain' 52 times seems to be major reason for this result. Better to be forewarned, I suppose.

God and Pain II

I noted yesterday an interesting argument in Sextus M 9.162-5 and wondered if the reference there to the 'peculiar pain of gout' in the context of an argument about acquiring knowledge of pain might point to an interesting idea about the first-personal introspective nature of pain in general. Does Sextus think that to 'know pain' is to know 'what it is like to be in pain' and that this latter can be acquired only by experiencing pain personally?

I think there are good reasons for thinking that Sextus’ conception of what it is to have knowledge of pain is not to be quickly assimilated to modern concerns about the acquisition of knowledge of qualia. Sextus does have concerns about the indirect acquisition of knowledge of pain, that is of acquiring knowledge of pain in any way which does not involve experiencing pain first-hand, but they seem not to be because he thinks that pain is such that it can only be known about through direct first-personal experience.

The grounds for this caution are to be found in some of Sextus’ supporting arguments. Even in such a compressed argument, Sextus finds time to address two counter-objections, both of which try to show that god might acquire knowledge of pain without having to experience it. The first of these counter-arguments is the most important, since this is the occasion on which he responds to a claim that knowledge of pain might be acquired by interviewing, as it were, people in pain. (I might look at the second some other time.)

The first response is part of an a fortiori argument. Sextus wants us to think about how difficult it is for us, who have at least experienced some pain, to come to know the pain of gout. (He assumes, therefore, that his audience are not gouty-types themselves.) You might think that it is possible to know what it is to feel the pain of gout, for example, by talking to people who are experiencing or have experienced that pain and discovering what it is like. But, Sextus argues, it is not possible for us to acquire knowledge of the pain of gout in that way and, remember, unlike the hypothesised pain-free but knowing god, we at least have experienced some pain in our lives. If it is impossible for us to know the pain of gout, then a fortiori it is impossible for god to do so.

Sextus’ response to the proposal that such knowledge may be acquired indirectly is telling, since it offers another clue to his general presumptions about the nature of pain and the nature of the knowledge of pain. The problem he outlines is not, importantly, the most general point that some more modern philosophers might make, namely that pain cannot be known except by direct, first-personal, acquaintance. Rather, he says that it would be impossible to acquire knowledge of pain through these indirect means because even those people suffering from the same ailment – gout, for example – will describe their experience in wildly differing ways. Some say it is like a kind of twisting; some say it is like a kind of bending; others say is it like a kind of stabbing. We can recognise here a very common form of Pyrrhonist argument: he has outlined a general diaphōnia between gout-sufferers. This disagreement is, furthermore, impossible to resolve in favour of any one rather than the other proposed descriptions of what it is like to experience the pain of gout. The ‘twisting-gout sufferers’ are no more authoritative than the ‘stabbing-gout sufferers’, and so on. And since these descriptions are competitors, we cannot simply accept all of them as capturing some aspect of the phenomenon such that they can be simply combined.

Although Sextus does not make this claim explicit, the form of this reply suggests that he is at least prepared to imagine that it might be possible to acquire knowledge of pain in this fashion, if only there were not such an irresolvable difference between the various sufferers’ descriptions. In that case, the difficulty is not with the very principle of the procedure of asking for sufferers to describe their pain but with the problems faced in trying to get any reliable and useful single answer to the question being posed. It is not, in other words, that Sextus thinks it wrong-headed to try to understand what it is like to experience gout by asking a gouty person to describe it to you; it is rather that it is terribly difficult to get any clear and reliable answer to the question: what is it like to suffer from gout? If that is right, then Sextus’ objection to this method of acquiring knowledge of pain is not based on a conviction (even a conviction on the part of his opponent which Sextus is prepared to use dialectically) that pain can be understood only via direct first-personal experience.

God and Pain I

I’ve been doing some homework for a conference next month and have come across a passage which is also interesting for my ongoing thoughts about pleasure and pain in ancient philosophy. At M 9.162–5 Sextus offers the following argument against the existence of god. It is based on the idea that if god exists then god must possess wisdom and therefore know what is good, bad, and indifferent. He must therefore know pleasure and pain. Sextus insists that this in turn requires that god must have experienced pleasure and pain since that is the only way in which knowledge of these may be acquired. But if god must experience pain in order to have the wisdom essential to god’s being, and to experience pain is to be receptive of change and decay, then there is a central incoherence to the notion of god under scrutiny. God cannot be both unchanging and perfect and also wise. The argument in full is as follows:

εἰ δὲ ἐπιστήμην ἔχει τούτων, οἶδε ποῖά ἐστι τὰ ἀγαθὰ καὶ κακὰ καὶ ἀδιάφορα. (163) ἐπεὶ οὖν καὶ ὁ πόνος τῶν ἀδιαφόρων ἐστίν, οἶδε καὶ τὸν πόνον καὶ ποῖός τις ὑπάρχει τὴν φύσιν. εἰ δὲ τοῦτο, καὶ περιπέπτωκεν αὐτῷ• μὴ περιπεσὼν γὰρ οὐκ ἂν ἔσχε νόησιν αὐτοῦ, ἀλλ’ ὃν τρόπον ὁ μὴ περιπεπτωκὼς λευκῷ χρώματι καὶ μέλανι διὰ τὸ ἐκ γενετῆς εἶναι πηρὸς οὐ δύναται νόησιν ἔχειν χρώματος, οὕτως οὐδὲ θεὸς μὴ (164) περιπεπτωκὼς πόνῳ δύναται νόησιν ἔχειν τούτου. ὁπότε γὰρ ἡμεῖς οἱ περιπεσόντες πολλάκις τούτῳ τὴν ἰδιότητα τῆς περὶ τοὺς ποδαλγικοὺς ἀλγηδόνος οὐ δυνάμεθα τρανῶς γνωρίζειν, οὐδὲ διηγουμένων ἡμῖν τινων συμβαλεῖν, οὐδὲ παρ’ αὐτῶν τῶν πεπονθότων συμφώνως ἀκοῦσαι διὰ τὸ ἄλλους ἄλλως ταύτην ἑρμηνεύειν καὶ τοὺς μὲν στροφῇ, τοὺς δὲ κλάσει, τοὺς δὲ νύξει λέγειν ὅμοιον αὑτοῖς παρακολουθεῖν, ἦ πού γε θεὸς μηδ’ ὅλως πόνῳ περιπεπτωκὼς (165) <οὐ> δύναται πόνου νόησιν ἔχειν

This is Bury’s translation:

If he possesses knowledge of these [sc. of goods, bads, and indifferents], he knows what the goods things are and the evil and the indifferent. Since, then, suffering is one of the indifferent things, he knows both suffering and what its real nature is. And if so, he has experienced it; for without experience he would not have formed a notion of it, but, just as the man who has not experienced white colour and black, owing to his having been blind from birth, cannot possess a notion of colour, so too god cannot have a notion of suffering if he has not experienced it. For when we, who have often experienced it, are unable to discern distinctly the special quality of the pain suffered by gouty patients or to guess it from descriptions, or to get consistent accounts from the actual sufferers, since they explain it in different ways, and some say that they find it to resemble twisting, others bending, others stabbing, -- surely, if god has had no experience at all of suffering, he cannot possess a notion of suffering.

The claim that god is without pain or toil is not uncommon in Greek philosophical thought and can be traced back at least as far as Xenophanes (DK 21 B25). Sextus evidently feels that it has now become sufficiently central to a conception of divinity that if he can demonstrate that it is incompatible with another common characteristic of divinity, namely that god is wise, then this inconsistency is extremely damaging for a dogmatic theist. My principal interest in this passage is in Sextus’ apparent contention that the only way in which it is possible to acquire knowledge of pain is through experiencing it. The reference to the ‘special quality of the pain suffered by gouty patients’ and the idea that it cannot be grasped except by having gout is certainly suggestive of such a view. This is an interesting claim because it might be thought to anticipate in an important way a claim often made in more modern philosophical discussions of pleasure and pain that they are essentially first-personal private experiences. Some modern philosophers also make the additional claim that experience of pleasure and pain of this kind is incorrigible: a person cannot be mistaken in his assessment of whether he is experiencing pleasure and pain. Sextus, we should note at the outset, makes no such additional claim and in any case need not do so for the purposes of this destructive argument. He needs only the claim that in order to acquire knowledge of pain it is essential to experience pain. It is not, therefore, possible to claim that god may acquire knowledge of pain by experiencing the positive pleasure and being able to extrapolate from that positive experience what it would be like to experience its opposite, pain. Rather, knowledge of pain can come only from a direct and personal experience of pain.

I’m still thinking this through because I have the suspicion that some of what Sextus later says in this argument makes it less like the first-personal private sensation view. Something for a later entry, I think.

Confused

Now TV is really messing with me. Last night, still fuming at the self-aggrandising that was the Alastair Campbell Diaries, I turned over to Channel 4 to see Big Cook Ben and Little Cook Small presenting Big Brother's Big Mouth. Without a grown-up helper. And Big Cook Ben was much smaller than Little Cook Small. Cripes! There's more of their 'adult' comedy here, if you're bothered...

Eros and university teaching

Here's an interesting article from The American Scholar, 'Love on campus', about the erotic aspect of university education. It's somewhat polemical in tone, but it's worth reading just in order to wonder whether its attempt to point to Plato's Symposium as a model for a positive kind of passionate learning is successful; is it in fact something we can or should want even to try to emulate? (There you are, perhaps there is something worth thinking about in Plato's Symposium, even for philosophers...)

There is, I admit, something to the rhetoric of the piece. For example:

Love is a flame, and the good teacher raises in students a burning desire for his or her approval and attention, his or her voice and presence, that is erotic in its urgency and intensity. The professor ignites these feelings just by standing in front of a classroom talking about Shakespeare or anthropology or physics, but the fruits of the mind are that sweet, and intellect has the power to call forth new forces in the soul. Students will sometimes mistake this earthquake for sexual attraction, and the foolish or inexperienced or cynical instructor will exploit that confusion for his or her own gratification. But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught.

The link to Plato is made explicit just below:

I’m not saying anything new here. All of this was known to Socrates, the greatest of teachers, and laid out in the Symposium, Plato’s dramatization of his mentor’s erotic pedagogy.

What is not said is that even for Diotima in the Symposium the love of souls is not the final resting point of the ideal conversion of the soul towards its proper erotic object. So the 'brain sex' (I kid you not, that is the phrase the article uses) of a teacher and pupil, although a step up from bodily sex, is not the be all and end all by any means. Still, I do encourage you to read the piece. It's quite funny, in an odd sort of way, as a kind of apologia. It is certainly an interesting example of the ongoing idealisation of Greek cultural practices through the prism of, first, an original Platonic idealisation of pederastic sex and courtship and, later, an idealisation of Plato as a touchstone for educational excellence.

I've wondered here before about the often supposed link between teaching (especially, for some reason, teaching philosophy) and erotic attractions of various sorts. Right now, I'm thinking about it again because I've volunteered to give a talk at the Cambridge Faculty of Classics Sixth Form Open Day (on 26 September) on the question 'How Platonic is Platonic love?' (One of those occasions when you come up with a title long before you've really thought about what you want to say about it.)

Philosophy for kids

I was really pleased by this report about philosophy classes for primary school children. The example problem being discussed was whether it is possible to step into the same river twice. Good question. And the children seem to have been thinking about it in an interesting way with skilled supervision. But then the teacher, Peter Worley, goes and says this:

"There's something wonderfully naive about the ancient Greeks because they were right at the beginning of it all," says Mr Worley. "There's something that the children can identify with - it is at the same level as themselves, but it is also sophisticated in its own way," he adds.

Sigh. You can find out more about this company, 'The Philosophy Shop' on their website. They also offer philosophical counselling.

Conspiracies

I've been wondering recently about conspiracies -- not, I hasten to say, about how to organise one or even how to spot one, but about how easy it is to convince oneself that one is afoot. It must have something to do with a combination of a lack of knowledge about a situation and a set of assumptions about other people's likely motives. Well, that's as far as I had got. Other people, fortunately, have thought more about it. And in a philosophical way! Hooray for philosophy!

For starters, look at Brian Keeley's 'Of conspiracy theories' JPhil 96, 1999, 109-26 (available online here or via JSTOR here; Keeley has some other online papers, some of which are follow-ups to this, available here.)

There is plenty more to read, including a volume of essays: Conspiracy theories: the philosophical debate edited by David Coady. Also, Pete Mandik's nicely-titled paper 'Shit happens'.

A lot of this discussion centres around the proper way in which one ought to criticize conspiracy theorising. What, in other words, are the epistemological shortfalls of this kind of approach? Is the difficulty with conspiracy theories generated particularly by the assumption that the agents whose intentions and actions they purport to illuminate are acting in a manner designed to keep those very actions and intentions secret? Or is the problem with conspiracy theories largely similar to the general problems of any post hoc explanation of historical events in terms of the intentions and beliefs of a set of agents?

I'm not sure. I do wonder, however, about the pressures which lead people to posit conspiracy theories in the first place. So it seems to me worth asking why conspiracy theories arise and how they take hold. I imagine it comes about from a combination of beliefs such as:

1. this particular event E promoted the interests of group X;
2. group X was able to influence the occurrence of event E;
3. group X had reasons not to declare that they influenced the occurrence of event E (perhaps because of 1...);
4. event E would not have occurred except as a result of some intentional influence on the part of some group or other;
   
5. conspiracies occur.

In any given proposed conspiracy, it seems to me that each of 1-4 will be subject to some plausible doubt. (I shall assume that 5 is true.) What will carry the day and generate the suspicion of a conspiracy is the combination of 1-4. And the combination of all 4, once it has generated this suspicion, will -- I think -- further suggest that each of 1-4 is itself individually more plausible than it is. For example, if a conspiracy theorist is challenged to defend 4, they might well point to 1, 2, and 3. Or if asked to defend 3 they might point to 1, 2, and 4. The more each is considered in the light of the general suspicion, the more each seems to be independently plausible. And this in turn makes the overall general suspicion more and more plausible.

De signis II

I park my bike in front of this sign. Something about it makes me confused.

Does this mean that when the Chapel is not open I can walk on the grass and enter the other buildings?

More charity

In response to some of my earlier fumblings about the Principle of Charity and the reconstruction and assessment of historical philosophical views, Steve Makin kindly and gently reminded me of his paper: 'How can we find out what ancient philosophers said', Phronesis 33 (1988), 121-32. I had read this before but should have gone back to it because it is a very helpful and thought-provoking paper. I particularly like his strong support for the principle that we are indeed justified in using rational reconstruction of a philosophical view in ascribing a particular claim or argument to some philosopher. After all, we should assume that -- even ancient, even 'Presocratic'(!) -- philosophers were in the business of trying to offer what were to their mind consistent theories. Now, this does of course provoke the question of how we go about assessing what would seem a consistent theory to a given historical philosopher, so there is a certain amount of historical reconstruction needed also. But that's just as it should be.

Stupid Dad!

Our 5-year-old palaeontologist has been looking at some small fossils we bought on holiday in Dorset. She has decided that there are some small marks on the ichthyosaur vertebra (left) and has matched them up with the fossil shark's tooth (right). 'Ha! Case solved', she declared. (The shark's tooth is, it has to be admitted, only about 50m years old, so much younger than the other fossil, but it's not a bad match.) I just thought she might want to consider some other possibilities so tried hard to think of any other possible culprits. Perhaps it was a liopleurodon, I wondered. Or a mosasaur.

'But Dad', she sighed, 'There were no ichthyosaurs in the Cretaceous!'. Duh!