On the history of philosophy

And, in particular, the question: Why would anyone think it a good idea to do a PhD dissertation on a topic in the history of philosophy?  Here's a letter to prospective graduate students from Bob Pasnau at Colorado that tries to make a case in favour (pdf file).

Any thoughts?  I wondered myself about the following paragraph.  It might well be true of programmes and departments in the US, but I was less convinced that it is true of the UK, in part because of differences in the way that graduate places are assigned and also because often the division of labour between philosophy and other cognate departments may be different.

First and foremost, it is both easier to get into a good PhD program if you focus on history, and easier to get a job.  Almost every PhD program wants graduate students in history, and every department, no matter how small, needs faculty to teach the historical core.  There are, however, many fewer candidates for these positions.  Even the very top PhD programs in the history of philosophy receive only an handful of candidates seeking to study in those areas, and it is not unusual for there to be roughly as many jobs in the history of philosophy as there are plausible candidates.

He goes on to point out (rightly) that a dissertation in this history of philosophy does not shackle you to historical study for the rest of your career.  And there are other arguments that I think are more positive, including the observation that historians of philosophy tend to wield the principle of charity and do the best for the people they read, while it is often the case that in dealing with our contemporaries we are inclined to offer the least charitable interpretation of what they write...

Sentimentalism

I wondered before about the generic characteristics of a power ballad.  But now I am wondering about another genre of popular song.  I'm not sure it has a name so I'm going to christen it  'sentimental rock'.  Elbow are very good at it.  Here are two examples:

'One Day like This' from The Seldom Seen Kid (2008)



And 'Lippy Kids' from Build a Rocket Boys (2011).



Other examples to my mind will include:

'Shipbuilding', particularly as done by Robert Wyatt
'Nothing Lasts Forever' by Echo and the Bunnymen
perhaps even Bowie's 'Heroes' or Peter Gabriel's 'Solsbury Hill'.

Do these have anything in common?   I'm not sure, but I do think there's a family resemblance here.  Perhaps it will involve some or all of: An emphasis on a sentimental lyrical theme, a general earnestness of delivery, an arrangement that often builds into a surging anthemic chorus or refrain, a sense of nostalgia or loss (often with reference to childhood), the sense of using a particular personal recollection to signify something more general and universally significant.

I don't think it is a particularly masculine genre but I'm finding it more difficult to think of examples with female vocalists.  Any suggestions?

Choices

I was talking to someone recently who was researching what the University of Cambridge was like in the late 80s and early 90s.  I think this research was in part prompted by the current proposals to alter the way higher education in England is funded and in part because those of us who were students then might now have started to do something interesting.  Certainly, there was an interest in asking whether the socio-economic make-up of the student body then differs from how it is now.  And it's certainly true that a lot of us are worried about what the  current funding proposals will do to the chances of the less well-off coming into higher education so it's a good question to ask and something we need to look at very closely.

Anyway, as I was talking two things struck me.  First, I couldn't really tell this person whether any of my friends and, if any who, came from less privileged backgrounds.  Now, this was in part because I was a pretty think naive thing who might not have spotted these things.  But it also wasn't really anything we talked and thought about.  Is that good?  I don't know.  I suppose I knew what the parents of my close friends did and sometimes we'd visit over the vacations and see where their families lived.  But I don't remember us making much of which school someone had gone to.  Perhaps we decided it was best not to ask.  And perhaps we were all deciding that now we were grown-up undergraduates we weren't going to be defined any more by our parents or our schools.  Or perhaps we were too busy with other things.

The other thing I remembered vividly was being terrified about my Greek.  I had done no Greek at school and so learned Greek in the Faculty's 'Intensive Greek' (IG) programme.  I remembered not only being scared every time I had to write a Greek literature essay (because I really couldn't read the text very well) but also having a sinking feeling every time something I was reading for, say, Greek history, helpfully decided to quote a chunk of untranslated Greek.  No use to me.

And finally, I remembered how that feeling persisted.  In my final year I was genuinely torn between applying to do research in Latin literature (prose, probably, perhaps historiography) or ancient philosophy.  The problem with ancient philosophy was that, although I really enjoyed it, I thought my Greek wasn't good enough.  Two of my supervisors (these two good people) very kindly took me for a cup of tea in the Sidgwick Buttery and we talked over the options.  In the end, I'm glad I made the choice I did but I very nearly chickened out.  Good job too; I would have been truly terrible at Latin lit.

The pains of being pure at heart

This isn't, I'm afraid to say, much to do with Plato and Aristotle on pleasure and pain (which is what I should be thinking about at the moment, although I've ended up getting bogged down in reading Odyssey 14 and 15 recently --- long story...).  But it's good; they are a band with a new LP (do we call them that still?) out soon.  They sound like things used to sound on the Sixth Form common room tape player.  And that's a good thing.  

Here's their website.

And here's their new single.


The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Belong by Slumberland Records

And here's their last album and EP.


    

And here they are in a video. With good fringes.

Hurray for CUP!

They are offering lots of interesting things in a print-on-demand series called the Cambridge Library Collection.  I've just got my copy of Diels' Doxographi for less than £40 (paperback)!  Bargain.  Lots of other things to buy too: Grote, Usener's Kleine Schriften, Madvig's De Finibus, Jowett's Plato...  All for not much more than it would cost to print out the pdf and get it bound in a reasonably sturdy way.

Pleasant memories of past pains

I’ve been thinking about this comment by Aristotle:

τὰ μὲν οὖν μνημονευτὰ ἡδέα ἐστὶν οὐ μόνον ὅσα ἐν τῷ παρόντι, ὅτε παρῆν, ἡδέα ἦν, ἀλλ’ ἔνια καὶ οὐχ ἡδέα.

But things that are pleasant when remembered are not only those that were pleasant when they were present. But sometimes also things that were not pleasant [sc. when present are pleasant when remembered], provided that what comes after this was fine and good.

Rhetoric 1370a35–b3

What does he mean and is he right? I can imagine that a past painful experience might be a source of pleasure when I remember it because:

(a) I recognise that it is over. Thank goodness! (‘You’ve stopped punching me. Phew! What a relief!)

(b) I recognise now that although it seemed painful at the time, it was in fact not bad at all – perhaps not in comparison with my current state – and perhaps take pleasure in that thought. (‘I thought it was terrible when X dumped me when I was 18, but that seems like heaven compared with what I’m putting up with now.’)

(c) I recognise that various good things resulted from this painful experience. (‘It was awful that X broke up with me, but if she hadn’t done so I would not have met Y and fallen in love...’)

I think (b) and (c) are the most likely given the proviso: ἡδέα ἦν, ἀλλ’ ἔνια καὶ οὐχ ἡδέα, ‘...provided that what comes after this was fine and good.’ But (b) seems odd because it threatens to imply that the past experience wasn’t really painful after all;  and I don’t think Aristotle means to deny that the past experience was indeed painful. And (c) seems odd because just because something good came of the painful past experience does not really mean that I look back on that experience and now take pleasure from it.

Also, is it possible to imagine cases where we can recall with pleasure a past experience even though none of (a)—(c) holds? Can we take pleasure in recalling a past painful experience even if there was no subsequent/consequent good?

CUFC a Community Trust Club

This is an important move from Cambridge Fans United.

Cambridge Fans United has launched a plan to turn Cambridge United into a community football club. Responding to the recent announcement by the club's Board that they were seeking partners to invest in the future and the invitation from Chairman, Paul Barry, to be part of that, CFU has published a brochure entitled "The Future of Cambridge United FC".

In it, the fans organisation sets out a vision of how the club could become run by a community trust, using the support and skills of supporters, local businesses and with the involvement of local authorities, with the goal of having a secure, sustainable and ultimately successful football club.

Vice-Chairman of CFU, Robert Osbourn, said "This is an opportunity to se if we can set up and run the club in a new and more sustainable way. You only have to look around in football to see many examples of where the traditional style of a board which invests big chunks of cash on a regular basis to prop up an unsustainable business model has led to crisis upon crisis."

"Other clubs which have restructured as trusts, such as Exeter, Wimbledon and Telford are being successful and as Paul said at the General Meeting, this week, they are the clubs which we should seek to emulate. We have already been talking to local business people about the potential and there is a lot of genuine interest."

"We shall be handing copies of the brochure to fans at the home match with Rushden on Saturday and seeking their support for the plan to see if we can make it a reality. Obviously, if there is someone out there with some money and who might want to share in the vision, then we shall be pleased to hear from them."

The brochure can be found at:

http://www.cambridgefansunited.org/uploads/meetingminutes/31.pdf

Also see the Supporters Direct site for more information.

Rejection letters of the ancient philosophers

I’m afraid that I cannot recommend the submission ‘Euthyphro, or On piety’ for publication in the Athenian Journal of the Pursuit of Wisdom. I come to this view despite the fact that there are lots of things to like about the submission. For example, there is a neat point here about the possible difficulties in relating ‘what is pious’ to ‘what the gods love’. However, even here at its best the submission is ultimately disappointing. Having raised an interesting question we find only a short and inconclusive discussion before the author moves on to something else. And that is the most important failing of the piece in its current form: no conclusion or positive thesis is advanced at all. This is most infuriating and I imagine your subscribers will find it very frustrating. After all, any philosophical thought worth taking seriously requires the assertion of, preferably, a very striking and surprising positive thesis from a clear standpoint of dogmatic authority. The present submission, on the other hand, neither claims support from divine revelation nor asserts as we would expect  at the outset of the submission that every other discussion of this subject is woefully misguided. Indeed, the author makes no personal assertion whatsoever and seems perversely excited at the thought of hiding his (I assume it is a male author) own views.

Indeed, I can see no reason whatsoever for the  unnecessary self-indulgence involved in concocting a conversation, at least one of whose participants is a well-known and controversial figure. Such a confusion of real figures and disguised authorship cannot fail to generate all manner of interpretative difficulties for your readers that seem to me to serve no useful purpose whatsoever. If the author would agree to recast his submission in a more usual form (some hundreds of lines of nice direct hexameter poetry perhaps)  then he would at least remove some of this unfortunate confusion. But even then it is not clear to me whether the author has any positive view of his own to offer. And until he does he should leave aside this kind of modern literary indulgence.

What early Greek philosophy was not like...

Extract from The Asia Minor Journal of Rational Natural Philosophy  vol. 2 (580 B.C.)

‘On Nature’

Anaximander

(University of Miletus)

Accepted June 580 B.C.

ABSTRACT

In this article I argue against the hypothesis of Professor Thales [1] that all things are ‘from water’. I first demonstrate that Thales’ claim fails to disambiguate between different possible understanding of ‘from’ and then advance a much more compelling thesis concerning the identity of the ultimate principle of all things based on rigorous rational argumentative grounds.

“... Further, in addition to the lack of any empirical data to ground his proposal beyond the vague gestures towards the importance of ‘moistness’, Thales’ article fails to address the obvious objection that since it is evident that the four elements transform one into the other there is no more reason to think of any one rather than the other as the principle of things [2]. Hence, the principle of things must be something prior to and foundational to all these four...”

[1] ‘On nature’, Journal of Non-mythological Speculation 1 (590 B.C.): 1-3. I understand that Professor Thales’ former research student, Dr Anaximenes, intends to publish a revision of this thesis that proposes ‘air’ instead as the primary principle of all things. This thesis is also wildly mistaken and my refutation of Thales will hold also for Anaximenes (forthcoming).

[2] Cf. my application of this same principle in ‘The stability of the Earth: an a priori argument in reply to Professor Thales’, forthcoming in Proceedings of the Milesian Cosmological Society 3: 15-23.

Vlastos online

Yes!  Listen to an interview with Vlastos from 1981 here.  And then listen to Montgomery Furth from 1987 here.

It's the clever ones you need to worry about...

Phew.  Lots of teaching at the moment so I'm not able to think very much about the sort of philosophical things I like to blog about.  But here's a gem of an argument from SE PH II, which we are reading in our Thursday seminars.  He's offering arguments against there being a kriterion  -- here, against 'human' being the answer to the question of the kriterion 'by whom...'.  He is here thinking about whether a particular type of person, the wise man, would be a good answer.  No, it turns out unsurprisingly... (PH II.42):

ἵνα δὲ καὶ κατὰ συγχώρησιν δῶμεν, ὅτι οὐδεὶς τοῦ ὑποτιθεμένου συνετοῦ συνετώτερος οὔτε ἔστιν οὔτε ἐγένετο οὔτε ἔσται, οὐδὲ ὣς πιστεύειν αὐτῷ προσήκει. ἐπεὶ γὰρ μάλιστα οἱ συνετοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἐν τῇ τῶν πραγμάτων κατασκευῇ τοῖς σαθροῖς παριστάμενοι πράγμασιν ὑγιῆ καὶ ἀληθῆ ταῦτα δοκεῖν εἶναι ποιεῖν, ὅταν τι λέγῃ οὗτος ὁ ἀγχίνους, οὐκ εἰσόμεθα πότερόν ποτε, ὡς ἔχει τὸ πρᾶγμα φύσει, οὕτω λέγει, ἢ ψεῦδος αὐτὸ ὑπάρχον ὡς ἀληθὲς παρίστησι καὶ ἡμᾶς πείθει φρονεῖν ὡς περὶ ἀληθοῦς, ἅτε δὴ συνετώτερος τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἁπάντων ὑπάρχων καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ὑφ' ἡμῶν ἐλέγχεσθαι μὴ δυνάμενος. οὐδὲ τούτῳ τοίνυν συγκαταθησόμεθα ὡς ἀληθῶς τὰ πράγματα κρίνοντι, διὰ τὸ οἷόν τε μὲν εἶναι αὐτὸν ἀληθῆ λέγειν, οἴεσθαι δ' ὅτι δι' ὑπερβολὴν ἀγχινοίας τὰ ψευδῆ τῶν πραγμάτων ὡς ἀληθῆ βουλόμενος παριστᾶν ἅ φησι λέγει. διὰ ταῦτα μὲν οὖν οὐδὲ τῷ τῶν ἁπάντων ἀγχινουστάτῳ δοκοῦντι ὑπάρχειν ἐν τῇ κρίσει τῶν πραγμάτων χρὴ πιστεύειν.

Here is Bury's translation:

And even should we grant, by way of concession, that no one either is, way, or will be more sagacious than our hypothetical sage, not even so is it proper to believe him.  For since it is the sagacious about all who, in the construction of their doctrines, love to champion unsound doctrines and to make them appear sound and true, whenever this sharp-witted person makes a statement we shall not know whether he is staring the matter as it really is, or whether he is defending as true what is really false and persuading us to think of it as something true, on the ground that he is more sagacious than all the other men and therefore incapable of being refuted by us.  So not even to this man will we assent, as one who judges matters truly, since though we suppose it possible that he speaks the truth, we also suppose that owing to his excessive cleverness he makes his statements with the object of defending false propositions as true.  Consequently, in the judgement of propositions we ought not to believe even the man who is thought to be the most clever of all.

I like this for two reasons.  First, I like the snide characterisation of smart arses who are so clever they take particular care to provide the most obscure and crazy conclusions as a sort of badge of honour: their intellect encourages them to take up perverse causes (I like the phrase 'excessive cleverness', ὑπερβολή ἀγχινοίας).  Second (and this is the better argument) Sextus does not need to insist that all smart-arses are in fact perverse or deceitful.  Rather, given that they are by definition smarter than us ( this is why they might be handy kriteria) we have no way of being sure whether they are telling the truth.  They may insist on their correctness, but how are we to be sure?  The rest of us are just not smart enough to be able to tell whether smart people are telling the truth.  The mere possibility that they might be deceitful is enough to throw everything they say under suspicions.  Now, you might want to try to argue that wisdom has some direct connection with veracity and benevolence but that too is quite a tall order.  And if you try to persuade me that you do have a good argument that I should believe because you're clever and have worked it out, then, I would feel a suspicion about that too...

σωτηρία τοῦ βίου

I’ve been thinking about the description of the ‘measuring art’ at the end of Plato’s Protagoras as the ‘saviour of our life’ or perhaps the ‘preservation of our life’ (356d3: σωτηρία τοῦ βίου). Does anyone know of any specific discussion of this term? [Update: Ah! How could I have forgotten Nussbaum in FOG ch. 4? That's my next port of call.]  Anyway, this is as far as I have got on my own.

A quick glance at the use of the term sōtēria in other authors suggests that it is mainly used in cases in tragedy, for example, when a character hopes or despairs for their lot. Here sōtēria is something wished for. It is simple survival. A similar use can be found in Thucydides. A broader meaning of ‘preservation (sc. of one’s current state)’ can be found in other writers such as Aristotle.

Commentators have rightly wondered whether the measuring skill is offered to Protagoras in part because Socrates cheekily alludes to the sophist’s most famous pronouncement that ‘man is the measure’. But Socrates’ use of the term sōtēria here for his proposed art of measurement is  another allusion to another originally Protagorean idea, this time taken from earlier in the dialogue itself. As part of his great speech, Protagoras had told a story of how Epimetheus set about arranging a division of powers between the various new species of living creatures. sōtēria occurs there too.

320e3: To some animals he gave claws or horns and to others he gave some other means for their sōtēria.

321b6: Those species who were preyed upon by others he made more numerous for the sōtēria of the species

321c8ff.: As a means of sōtēria for mankind, Prometheus gave them fire and technical skill (entekhnos sophia sun puri).

Here, sōtēria seems also to mean survival or preservation. Some animals have claws in order not to starve; others are numerous so that they do not become extinct through predation. Humans were able to survive despite their lack of physical defences against predation and the elements due to their intellectual abilities.

This is interesting to me because the measuring art at the end of the Protagoras is often compared with a hedonic calculus and imagined to be a means of maximising pleasure over a life. This maximising role does not seem to me to be well captured in the term sōtēria, which would seem rather to suggest that the measuring art is there to prevent us from falling prey to our own ignorant or unthinking appraisal of goods. Socrates is perhaps, in that case, cleverly turning the possibility of akrasia or, rather, the ignorance often mistakenly taken to be akrasia, into a threat to our lives as pressing as the need to avoid hunger, cold, thirst, and the attentions of naturally much better armed creatures.

Kenodoxia on the move

I know you busy people are often desperate to read this blog on your mobile device.  Well, now you will automatically access a stripped-down mobile version of the site, which should be easier and quicker to navigate around.  I think this barcode thing will point you to it.

January Sales

are usually rubbish.  The only one I've been to this year started today: the Cambridge University Press Bookshop Sale (now in the old Past Times store on Green Street) ...  Bargain prices (£3 for every pbk, £7 for every hbk; cash payment only) and new stock coming every day for the next week or so.  What did I find?  Not much.  I bought the new edition of Reading Greek, because I haven't ever really felt like paying full price for it, and nothing else.

That's not to say that everyone was so restrained.  I was there for about ten minutes.  At least half of the crowd in there (you can't really see the fog on the windows in the photo, but it was really steamy...) were lugging piles of a dozen volumes each.  It was, as a friend has just remarked to me, like the academic version of the Next clothing store's Boxing Day Sale: a bit of a feeding frenzy.  The commonest tactic was to grab as many volumes as possible off the shelves to be squirreled away and sorted in a corner, just in case someone else got them in the meantime.

I might go back later in the week when the stock is refreshed and try again.  After all, CUP books are so monstrously expensive that it would be mad not to.  But then again, I do have a lot of books already and I do remember when a poor and needy graduate student thinking it a bit rich that lecturers who could more or less afford to buy books when not in the sale snapped up stuff that I couldn't otherwise afford...

Some geeky things and some e-texts

I've been playing about with my new Kindle.  Some of the pdfs from places like www.archive.org are perfectly fine while others won't work.  I think the pdfs need to be 'flattened', but I don't have the full version of Adobe to do it.  Does that sound plausible?

In other news, archive.org does a natty tool to embed on web pages.  Here's a bit from Burnet's OCT of Plato (vol. 3 - one of the pdfs that my Kindle won't handle, incidentally):

Click to make it full screen and then browse away.

And here, for those coming to the Thursday seminar this term, is Mutschmann's Teubner of Sextus Empiricus PH II:

Sextus and natural philosophy

I've just had the good news that CUP have agreed to publish the proceedings of the 2007 Symposium Hellenisticum on Sextus Empiricus M 9 and 10 (Against the physicists).  The other good news (to my mind, at least) is that the volume won't have an alliterative title like some of its ancestors (Justice and Generosity etc.)  In part, this might be because there was no such obvious title.  But they had sometimes been a bit groan-inducing anyway.

I've got a piece in the volume (on the last section, on coming-to-be and passing-away) so I can't say whether it is a good collection or not.  But I hope it will at least be interesting. M 9 and 10 are full of good material and together the chapters will form something like a running commentary on the lot.

A domestic indifference argument

Happy New Year everyone.

I've just about managed to get through the Christmas/New Year period.  There is a bit of a backlog on the email that's making feel a bit anxious about work and I've quite a lot of lecturing and teaching to do next term that I've yet to turn my mind to (lectures on: Plato's Crito, Early Greek Philosophy: Thales to Heraclitus, a set of Intensive Greek classes and the ancient philosophy MPhil seminar) but just as you think the holidays are coming to an end the school lobs in an INSET day and prolongs it just a little more.  I need to get thinking about the January Admissions Pool, as does my wife who is also a Director of Studies at one of the colleges.  But here's the issue.  The kids are off school so need to have at least one of us around.  What's more, there's no more reason for me to go to work and Sara stay at home than there is for Sara to go to work and me to stay at home.  And since at least one of us has to stay at home, the upshot is that we both do.  

The logic may not be impeccable [1], but it tends to be the practical outcome.

[1] I suppose it also needs at least the premise that 'go to work' here means to go in for a full day.  We do sometimes have to 'top and tail': swap over at lunchtime.  But sometimes you need to a full day to achieve anything worthwhile and the disruption caused by the relay is a distinct disadvantage.

The S of KRS

I hope you've been following Peter Adamson at KCL's podcasts on The History of Philosophy with no Gaps .  The most recent one is an interview on Presocratic things with Malcolm Schofield.

The B Club, post-war

I've added some more of the minutes from the B Club books, now taking the story up past the 100th meeting to the end of 1954.  The archive can be foud here.  Some highlights include:

1.  The minutes of the refounding of the club in 1946.  Here, I smiled at the idea in club rule 6: 'That if there were on any occasion no volunteer to read papers at subsequent meetings the question might be decided by lot.'

2.  On 19 January 1953, Professor Ryle 'of Magdalen college, Oxford, read a paper entitled "Socrates' Dream - Theaetetus 201-20" in which he discussed Plato's attack on Greek epistemological theory, [almost] identical with the 20th century "Logical Atomism" of Frege, Russell, and others".    The 'almost' was added in later, perhaps by the Chair (H. Bowden) when the minutes were read at the next meeting...  This is likely, I think, to be an ancestor of the paper eventually published in Phronesis 35 (1990) [JSTOR link].  According to the annotated bibliography in Burnyeat's Theaetetus, Ryle had read the paper to the Oxford Philological Society in  February 1952 [The Phronesis article's Forward includes the minutes of that meeting].  The January meeting of the B Club was perhaps its next appearance.

Here is Ryle in a deckchair:

Kindling

My Christmas present this year is an Amazon Kindle.  I'm planning to use it a lot for reading pdfs from JSTOR and the like (as well as the handy pdfs of OCTs and Teubners you can get from archive.org).  But is there anything else I really must have on it?  Amazon.co.uk have some free philosophy editions - Hume's enquiries, for example - but I can't always tell whether the translations of, say, Plato and Aristotle are any good.  I did buy Jowett's complete Plato for 72p, because I'm a real risk-taker like that. But are there any other bargains I should know about?