Surprise!

I'm trying to find a snappy way of distinguishing between the following cases, both of which involve someone enjoying something unexpectedly.

1.  Anne comes home to find her friends have arranged a surprise party.  She really enjoys it.

2. Bob knows he is going to a friend's party that evening; he does not think he will enjoy it.  But he goes nevertheless and ends up having a really enjoyable time.

(And we might even add 3. Charlie spends the day agonising about a friend's party he has to go to that evening.  His afternoon is ruined in dreading the thought of it.  Be he goes, out of duty, and ends up having a really enjoyable time.)

The pleasures that Anne and Bob enjoy at their respective parties can both be called, I think, 'unexpected' or 'surprise' pleasures.  I want a pair of labels that will clearly and concisely distinguish them. 

You’ll like this

I've been going back to a piece I'm trying to write about character and consistency in the Philebus. Along the way, I've been wondering about what you might call Protagorean hedonism, namely the idea that all pleasures are true – true in the same sense that Socrates wants to argue that some pleasures and false – and from there back to the Theaetetus. At Theaetetus 178d8–e6, Socrates argues that a cook is a better predictor than a dinner guest of whether a meal will be pleasant:

Or suppose a dinner is being prepared. Even the guest who is going to eat it, if he has no knowledge of cooking, will not be able to pronounce so authoritative a verdict as the professional cook on how nice it is going to be (περὶ τῆς ἐσομένης ἡδονῆς). I say 'going to be', because we had better not at this stage press our point as regards what is now pleasant to any individual, or what has been in the past. Our question for the moment is, whether the individual himself is the best judge, for himself, of what is going to seem and be for him in the future.

Trans. M. J. Levett rev. M. F. Burnyeat

We might find this peculiar since, after all, de gustibus nil disputandum. I am not inclined to think that if I dislike a meal at a restaurant I should defer to the chef's opinion that it is in fact delicious. But Socrates is clearly less reticent in affirming that matters of gastronomic pleasure are analogous to matters of health, for example, in being the province of a kind of expertise. An uneducated palate might well not take pleasure in something it should. The other important point is that Socrates is not considering cases in which a chef will tell a diner that what he thinks is not pleasure is in fact pleasant. Rather, the point is about predicting what will be pleasant. Here perhaps this is not such a peculiar thought. After all, famous chefs regularly produce dishes which an inexpert diner will predict are not pleasant (e.g. snail porridge) but which are in fact very nice. The chef's command of taste combinations allows him to produce surprisingly delicious new dishes. Still, we might reasonably insist that not all diners are the same and what one persons may enjoy another will not. So chefs might need to know something about their clientele and personal preferences. 

All the same Socrates' cautious restriction to talk about future pleasure does not show that he is at all committed to the thought that when it comes to the estimation of present pleasure each person is an authoritative and incorrigible guide. Not only is it clear from other discussions that Socrates has a tendency to think that people are often badly mistaken about their current state of pleasure or pain, but it is evident that the restriction to future pleasure in this case is merely for argumentative convenience at this point in his exploration of Protagoras' view. Even granted that restriction, Socrates and Theaetetus are inclined to think that an individual is not necessarily the best judge of what will be pleasant to him. Insofar as such a person can be mistaken (e.g. by believing on Monday that he will not like snail porridge but finding it pleasant on Tuesday), then this will offer a useful example of a false belief to add to the mounting case against Protagoras' assertion that 'main is the measure'. 

It seems to me that the Philebus adds to this analysis the idea that rather than a belief on Monday that such-and-such will or will not be pleasant, we might instead talk about a pleasure or pain on Monday in anticipation of a supposed pleasure or pain on Tuesday. If I am pained on Monday by the imagined experience of eating snail porridge on Tuesday but then enjoy the snail porridge on Tuesday, then Monday's was a false pain.

 

Chelmsford 123

Attention Virgin media customers in the UK!  You can now watch all of Chelsmford 123, the 1988-90 comedy set in Roman Britain on TV Choice on demand.  You can also watch it on Channel 4 On Demand and via Your Tube (just search for the title).  That means you can enjoy gems like this first episode which includes the first scene all in Latin.

Here's a clip from another episode:

Jobs for philosophy graduates

What can you do after studying philosophy at Cambridge?  Well, if you can't start a punk-surf band like this, you can do excellent work like this.  Carlene read Philosophy at Fitzwilliam College and I am pleased to say that I supervised her for her work in ancient philosophy. 

Hols

I'm just back from a holiday en famille at Center Parcs, near Thetford.  I was a bit apprehensive before we went because I had the idea it might be either a slightly up-market Butlins or else full of Fit Family types running from badminton lesson to quad-biking in their sports kit.  But in fact it was very nice.  We didn't do much running or biking or jumping, but we did a lot of swimming in the excellent pools (with slides and a raging rapids river...) and we did a lot of eating at the restaurants on site.  (Sure, you can cater for yourselves but we couldn't be @rsed, to be honest.)  The weather was mostly OK but even if it's bucketing down it's quite fun.  I decided on balance not to do the Cable Water Skiing just because it might have put to shame some of the obvious beginners who were having a go and (let's be frank) no one needs to see me in a wet suit.

I reckon it's a good family holiday, free from hassles about driving about the British countryside as we have done for the last few years, negotiating annoying car parks and over-priced 'attractions' (Yes, Wookey Hole, I mean you.)

We will probably feel sufficient academic guilt to want to go away someone at Easter (the kids want to see Pompeii...) but for now I feel quite rested.  Or at least, I did until I picked up the post and email when we got back.  (That's another thing: reception on Orange at the Elveden Center Parcs is patchy at best so you really can't reply to much.)

Eulogy magazine

Here's an interesting new magazine: Eulogy.  It discusses mortality, loss, funerals, mourning and celebrating the deceased.  Sounds like a perfectly good idea to me.  After all, there are all manner of magazines dealing with getting married or having a baby or buying a pram or choosing a house.  So why not one about something we are all going to do?  True, the dead are not the best demographic for marketing, so I suppose the editors are pitching more at the prospective dead.  But there are a lot of those around.  And don't you want to find out about a company that will press someone's ashes into a vinyl record?  Of course you do.  So here they are.

Food in Budapest

We've all been (for the second time) to this cafe in Budapest.  It's really good and the portions are enormous.  I couldn't even face the dessert menu although the hardy souls that did could tuck into some enormous pancakes with very very sticky chocolate sauce.  I'm told that the dish advertised as 'Pike-Perch' (I think it's Zander) was very good.  I had Wiener Schnitzel today and (I kid you not) the veal was a good nine inches in diameter.  Last time I had the goulash.   Anyway, what's important is if you are in this neck of the woods you should go along.

Queasy Jet

Not a lot to say at the moment, mostly because I ought to be working hard to keep up with the conference I'm at.  But here's a brief rant.  I'm luck to have access to email and the internets while I'm away.  So I was able to work out that a strange email from EasyJet with my booking reference as its subject line probably meant I should check my bookings on the website.  Turns out that my return flight has been 'disrupted' (i.e. the departure time has changed) and I may need to change to an alternative flight.  This happened after I had left home, of course, so I would have had no idea of the change without the email thingy.  It seems a bit much to me that they assume I do have access to this means of getting in touch when I'm away.   Tut tut.

Hellenistic Philosophy

I'm supposed to be writing a short piece about Hellenistic philosophy for a encyclopedia thing (called L'Antichità, I think).  I've about ten pages to fill and the title I've been given is: 'Luoghi, modi e caratteristiche della filosofia ellenistica'.  Fortunately, I can write it in English and they will translate.

I thought it wouldn't be too bad. After all, I often give introductory lectures to the period and have to say something general to orient students when they start.  But now I'm thinking about it I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to say.  I suppose in part the problem is because although I could say something about the period being characterised by dogmatic schools, each with a comprehensive philosophical account, and various sceptical adversaries.  But I'm not sure that's particularly distinctive.  A move to a kind of orthodoxy based on a founder's or some founders' views might be novel, but it seems to me that there is a lot of continuity between the classical and Hellenistic periods that is often overlooked.  After all, things didn't all completely change the morning after Aristotle died.  The Academy soldiered on, people continued reading and disagreeing about Plato, Theophrastus kept on looking at plants and stones and the like.  Even the Epicureans can trace a lot of their philosophy to earlier ideas and, for my money, were just as interested in reading Plato (and perhaps Aristotle) as the other guys.

So I think I'm going to say that the big changes occurred as the period went on.  Three hundred years later and philosophy has dispersed again from Athens across to centres around the Mediterranean including, most important of all, Roman Italy.  The rise of philosophy in Latin and the influence of Rome politically and intellectually and probably the most interesting changes over these three hundred years.

Right.  That's a line, at least.  I'll give that one a go today.

Update:  Look!  Here I am thinking about some Hellenistic philosophy in the library, brought to you by the power of the wireless interweb.

Hope and despair

The Philebus has lots of interesting things to say about the psychology of desire.

The desire involved when a person is thirsty, for example, involves the memory of the state of not being thirsty which supplies the drive and impulse towards finding something to drink. Presumably, the drive to find a drink to remove a thirst involves the conjuring from memory of some appropriate representation of the proper object of desire or perhaps of the proper state of that desire being fulfilled. Socrates then goes on to distinguish two cases involving a person who is in pain but can remember the pleasant things he lacks. In the first, he has a ‘clear hope’ (elpis phanera 36a8) of attaining what he lacks. In that case, the memory provides some pleasure while he is also experiencing pain (36a–b). In the second, he is both in pain and also aware that there is no hope of replenishment. In that case his suffering is two-fold (36b–c). We should note, then, that hopes and desires all involve some activity of memory since it is memory which provides the store of experiences which can be drawn upon to generate the appropriate objects of pursuit in any given situation and which allows the animal to bring to mind some state (which it has experienced in the past) which is the opposite of its present condition.

My question is: what is the force of the qualification phanera at 36a8? It seems to me that there are two possibilities. First, what we might call an ‘internalist’ view, is that it shows that to the hoper, as it were, the hope is clear and vivid. That clear and vivid character of the hope is what allows it to be a source of pleasure even though the hoper is also in pain. And the clear and vivid character of the hope is irrespective of whether in actual fact what is being hoped-for is likely to be attained. For all that it matters here, it could be a very vivid and arresting sort of hope that is extremely unlikely to come to fruition.

Second, what we might call an ‘externalist’ view, is that the hope is phanera just in case that the object that is being hoped-for is indeed likely to be obtained. (This may be in addition to the hoper being convinced that it is likely to be obtained or it may not; presumably, good hopers tend to hope for things that are likely to be obtained.)

(The same might be said of despair, of course: I might have a ‘clear’ desperation both in cases where I merely think that what I need is unlikely to come my way although in fact it is not at all unlikely, and also in cases where I accurately recognise the unlikelihood of my getting what I need.)

All in all, I’m not sure I can see much in the text at 36a that points one way rather than the other for certain. And perhaps that’s not a surprise. After all, it is in the next four pages or so that Socrates turns to outline to Protarchus that there is a very important distinction to be made between the pleasures to be had from hoping that are true and those that are false, although they may both seem pleasant enough to the hoper.

¡Gooooool!

Good to see Ben off of Outnumbered scoring a header last night to put out the Nationalmannschaft.  But wasn't it a bit past his bedtime?

Ben.








Ben after a bit of a haircut.

Summer, summer, summertime (summertime)

It's the summer, so it's time for summer schools to come and fill up the college rooms that the students have just left.  This is mostly not a problem.  We need the cash and, being a very old college with some less-than-four-star plumbing in many rooms, we can't really fill up with swanky conference guests.

Still, I'm not too chuffed at this appearing on my staircase this morning.  (Click to make it bigger. I'm in P7.)  Other signs tell me to 'Speak English!' and that my laundry day is Sunday.  If I brought some washing in, do you think they'd wash it for me?

In other news, I'm doing some homework for the Symposium Hellenisticum on Cicero's De Finibus, trying to finish papers on the comparison of pleasure and activity with the 'bloom on those in their prime' in NE 10.4 and rejigging an piece on the Philebus so that it's directed at the question why Socrates thinks that just and pious people aren't likely to have the sort of false pleasures described in the example at 40a.

And we've still got to go through the college results.  But that's after a very large breakfast.  Perhaps some more on that next week...

Latin in primary schools

Read the report, written by Christopher Pelling and Llewelyn Morgan for Politeia, here (pdf format).

It proposes:

If the new Government decides to accept the status quo, i.e. most primary schools are already teaching a foreign language, the Secretary of State should ensure that Latin is given the same status as other foreign language options. This would mean including Latin as a primary foreign language option in statutory measures or nonstatutory guidance. In particular:
• The DfE’s previous non-statutory guidance for foreign language teaching for primary schools should be changed so that Latin is treated in the same way as other foreign languages.
• The DfE should make clear that Latin is a permissible option and give Latin the same prominence and support as given to the modern language options. The simplest course might be to change the official documents or guidance to read ‘foreign language’ teaching (not ‘modern foreign language) and make consequential changes in departmental papers and instructions for such teaching in schools.

If the Government decides to withdraw any non-statutory encouragement to primary schools to teach foreign languages, it should nonetheless ensure that schools which do voluntarily offer a foreign language have the same official encouragement to offer Latin as a modern foreign language.

Plato's careful composition...

..of his works was, of course, noted in antiquity.  Most famously, there is this story, told in Dion. Hal. Comp. 25.209-18 (cf. DL 3.37):

ὁ δὲ
Πλάτων τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ διαλόγους κτενίζων καὶ βοστρυ- (210)
χίζων καὶ πάντα τρόπον ἀναπλέκων οὐ διέλειπεν
ὀγδοήκοντα γεγονὼς ἔτη· πᾶσι γὰρ δήπου τοῖς φιλο-
λόγοις γνώριμα τὰ περὶ τῆς φιλοπονίας τἀνδρὸς ἱστο-
ρούμενα τά τε ἄλλα καὶ δὴ καὶ τὰ περὶ τὴν δέλτον,
ἣν τελευτήσαντος αὐτοῦ λέγουσιν εὑρεθῆναι ποικίλως (215)
μετακειμένην τὴν ἀρχὴν τῆς Πολιτείας ἔχουσαν τήνδε
‘Κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ μετὰ Γλαύκωνος τοῦ Ἀρί-
στωνος’.

 But Plato did not cease, when eighty years old, to comb and curl his dialogues and reshape them in every way. Surely every scholar is acquainted with the stories of Plato's passion for taking pains, especially that of the tablet which they say was found after his death with the beginning of the Republic ("I went down yesterday to the Piraeus together with Glaucon the son of Ariston") arranged in elaborately varying orders. (trans. W. Rhys Roberts).

Plato and stichometry

Jay Kennedy at the University of Manchester has an interesting piece coming in Apeiron applying a musical analysis to the construction of Plato's dialogues.  There's an introduction to his work here and the pdf of the proof of the article is here.

No one will deny, I think, that Plato was a careful writer.  But just how careful and for what end?

Office 2010

So I have a shiny laptop to use for conferences and the like. And it has arrived with the new Office 2010 software. I hadn't spent much time with the 2007 version and the ribbon thing takes up an enormous amount of the screen (though you can hide it) but there are already a couple of small touches that seem to be a real improvement on the 2003 version I've used most on XP. Two examples for now, though these might seem standard to the Maccy types…

First, there is a cute button in Word that takes one click to attach the document you are working on to an email. That's handy; before you'd have to plug in a pdf printer-thing, print the file to pdf then find it and attach it to an email.

Second, Word comes with what I'm using now – a natty thing that lets you type a blogpost and then publish with a click, so you don't have to rely why you are typing on the WYSIWYG editor thing on the website. I quite like it.

Spartan High School Musical

From the ever brilliant Horrible Histories.

Booooooo!

Here is some applied ethics for you.  Is it justifiable to boo your own team?  The World Service blog has some comments on the question and we now know that Mr Rooney's view is that it is never acceptable, even if you have watched your national team wander aimlessly around for 90 minutes unable to pass to one another.

There seem to be two relevant factors.  First, booing a team will demoralise them and make them play worse.  I'm not sure if that's true; certainly, last night it did not seem to help at all.  Second, booing a team is a reasonable reaction to being faced with a poor performance that has cost a lot of time and money to watch.  The tension here is between considering the team as something to which the fan owes allegiance and support and something that is being viewed by a paying audience member.

Both perspectives are evidently at work in any fan's experience; a fan both will consider his or herself as somehow contributing to their chosen team's performance and will think that they can positively influence that performance in some way and will also think that their commitment of time and money entitles them to some kind of return.  

Consider two different kinds of perspective.  Someone who pays to go and see a concert by a favourite performer will probably feel it reasonable to voice their objections if the concert is poor.  But this is only a partial analogy: it is not the case that a concert audience will  think it an integral part of their role in the whole concer try to inspire the performer to do better with cheering and chanting during the song.  Second, someone who goes to support their child in a school team will cheer on the team so as to encourage them.  But the parent will probably not feel it reasonable to boo the team if they perform below par.

So, Wayne isn't right.  But he isn't entirely wrong either because a football fan occupies a curious hybrid position as both a supporter and audience member/consumer.  Wayne might like only to think of us in the former category but his manager and PR people would do well to remember the latter category too.

USA! USA! USA! etc.

(T-shirt available at When Saturday Comes.)  So we didn't beat Team USA!  (As R remarked as we watched the game: 'Why is there always someone called Brad?')  But then Spain lost to them when they played last year and there are quite a good team.  I'm more worried about us mucking up against Algeria and Slovenia.

Things to be cheerful about: Heskey did a good job; Lampard and Gerrard played well; Lennon and Wright-Phillips were good attacking wingers.  Rooney took a while to get going, and our centre-backs looks a bit dhort for pace when people ran behind them, but all in all we've seen worse.  France were poor in their first game, much poorer than England.  And only Argentina so far have looked very strong.  So let's cheer up.

And I did predict 1-1 in the college 1st round score-predictor-game, so silver linings and all that...

Coming up for air

Phew. The examining is nearly over. We all take this bit of the job very seriously, of course, even though the marking can be grim.  Probably not as grim as taking the exams, but grim nonetheless.  There are some nice moments too and some very impressive performances, but we get everything done in an intense and short period of time - so as to leave the summer for research - so everything else gets dropped while the scripts get marked.  I shall console myself with a list of things I will do once we have seen the students off the premises.

• I will watch lots and lots of the World Cup.  Even Serbia v. Ghana. 
• I'm off to a conference in July in Hungary.  I've never been there before and it looks like it will be good.  Have to finish the paper first.
• I will be able to get back to some thoughts stirring on some bits of Plato's Protagoras and Laws and trying to finish something on NE 10.4.
• I want to read the new David Mitchell book properly.  I've started but haven't had the energy to dive in fully.

If I wanted, I could get very worried about the likelihood that Higher Education funding might be cut significantly and be partially replaced by higher tuition fees.  (You can read Willetts' speech given earlier today here.  He seems mostly to be interested in getting various places to do teaching for students then to be examined by external universities.  People will worry about an explicit and institutionalised  (return to a) two-tier tertiary sector, I reckon.)  I haven't got my head around precisely which bit of the oncoming storm is the most awful because I don't really want to think about it at all.  But it's coming alright.  What's worse is the likely dearth of jobs in the next few years so people, excellent people, finishing PhDs and trying to start a career, are going to find it even harder than ever.

Still, cheer up.  It's 'Universities week' next week.  (No, I didn't know either.)  There's a cheery website about it here.