Coming to terms

This will be the last week of the Michaelmas term.  It is always very busy.  In addition to the usual week's teaching (lectures, supervisions, MPhil seminar, research seminar, B Club) and meetings (College executive body) in our wisdom we choose this as the week for the first examiners' meeting of the year to prepare for the Tripos exams in the summer and also the submission of the first MPhil essays for marking.  It is also the week to meet and talk to all my philosophy students in Corpus and my tutees, to go over the term and set work for the vacation.

It is also the week before the admissions interviews for next year's undergraduates begin.  That means that there is no slack whatsoever for things to spill over into the next week because we will be busy making decisions and interviewing candidates.

This term has been particularly punishing.  I've taken on more teaching than I should and lost a few days to an -- excellent, it has to be said -- conference in the middle.

But more than that, I have been struggling day by day since my Mum died in October.  The funeral was difficult, of course, but that was an acute sadness.  Worse than that is the fact that there has been a constant feeling of sheer exhaustion dogging me ever since we heard she was ill in September.  Perhaps I should have stopped and taken some time off.  But, strangely, I have felt better at work than at home, talking to people who aren't my family about things not to do with my family, and thinking about things that are more disconnected from the loss.  The weekends are the hardest.  And now Christmas...  I'm not the most festive of people in any case, but I really don't want Christmas this year.  It will be strange, no doubt, and sad for us all.  As will every birthday without her, and every new year, and every milestone her grand-daughters pass.  We'll all stick together and we'll get through it.  But the mince pies don't seem very appetising right now.

Cicero, De Finibus 2.105

Here’s the relevant bit: 

quid, si etiam iucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum? ut proverbia non nulla veriora sint quam vestra dogmata. vulgo enim dicitur: 'Iucundi acti labores', nec male Euripides— concludam, si potero, Latine; Graecum enim hunc versum nostis omnes—: 'Suavis laborum est praeteritorum memoria.'

 Rackham translates:

What if the memory of past evils be actually pleasant? Proving certain proverbs truer than the tenets of your school. There is a popular saying to the effect that ‘Toil is pleasant when ‘tis over’; and Euripides well writes (I will attempt a verse translation; the Greek line is known to you all): 'Sweet is the memory of sorrows past'. 

 Cicero is criticising the Epicureans’ insistence that memory of past psychic pleasures can counteract present physical pains. He notes that not everything that was painful in the past is painful to remember. He translates a line from Euripides (taken usually to be 133 Nauck 2nd edition). The Greek, found at Arist. Rhet. 1370b4 and at Plut. Quaest. Conv. 630E is: ἀλλ’ ἡδύ τοι σωθέντα μεμνῆσθαι πόνων. 

Anyway, I was checking what some commentators say about this. Madvig says (I think; the pdf is a bit blurry): 

nosti omnes Cicero dixit, oblitus videtur, quot sermoni interesse finxisset; nam ut intellegatur: vos omnes Epicurei, quemadmodum Gaius [sic?] volt, fieri non potest, quom, cur illi versum esse sententiae plane contrarium praeter ceteros memoria retinerent, nulla caussa fuerit.’ (This is the from the 1839 edition I found on the internets; I have checked later editions.) 

It seems to me that Cicero could mean ‘all you Epicureans know the line’. If he does, then he poses a dilemma: either they remember the line but seem to have ignored the sentiment or they do not remember the line, in which case their powers of and control over their memory leaves something to be desired. It might also be interesting to wonder whether Cicero has quite remembered the line himself: the σωθέντα in Aristotle’s quotations does not appear in his version. Perhaps he’s being super clever and anyone who does remember the Euripides line in the original will also note that Cicero’s memory is less than accurate here.

Corbett Lecture 2011

Yesterday was the Faculty's annual Corbett lecture.  This year's speaker was Julia Annas, and her lecture was: 'Changing from within: Plato's later political thinking'.  You should be able to listen to it here and download a handout here.

Keeling over

I was at the UCL Keeling colloquium at the beginning of the week.  It was an excellent conference and it made me think about what makes a conference good.  I think there are various possibilities, and they aren't by any means all related to the excellence of the content of the papers or talks being presented.  I certainly don't like conferences that are too big.  I like to think that I've spoken to or met everyone there, more or less, by the end.  That way it feels like a properly shared social enterprise.  And I don't like conferences that are too long.  Three days is plenty, usually, because any less isn't really long enough to feel properly immersed and much longer is too exhausting if you're thinking hard.

In the end, my thoughts about good conferences came down on other characteristics that are important to a gathering's success.  It's important to have time outside the formal bits to chat, make friends, gossip about jobs and the like (lots of all of those at the Keeling) and, perhaps most of all, to make the job a more interpersonal one.  Fortunately, my field is small enough that over time we do mostly get to meet each other properly.  And it seems to me important to remember that, alongside all the high-minded stuff about pursuing the truth and the importance of following an argument wherever it leads, it's important to remember that the article you're reading and criticising what written by a person, after all.  And putting faces and voices and personalities to the names in journals and on book-shelves is rather useful too.  We can still engage critically and robustly with one another's work, of course, but writing that footnote that begins 'Pace X...' or 'As X mistakenly claims...' feels very different once you've had dinner with X and talked about his or her kids or shared a joke.

CFP: Truth, falsehood, and deception in ancient philosophy

Here is a call for papers for a conference in Cambridge next spring.  It is organised and run by some of our excellent graduate students and will be the second such event.

CALL FOR PAPERS 

TRUTH, FALSEHOOD AND DECEPTION IN ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY 

FACULTY OF CLASSICS, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 

20th-21st April, 2012

The history of logic, philosophy of language, ethics and metaphysics are suffused with the themes of truth, falsehood and deception. We welcome work focusing on said issues, broadly construed. Papers may focus on particular thinkers, individual texts, or broader traditions from the pre-Socratics up to and including Philoponus. Diachronic studies are also welcome. The conference is aimed at advanced graduate students and junior researchers (those who are within 3 years of their PhD). We invite abstracts of up to 500 words (for papers of up to 3500 words). Depending on the quality of submissions, we aim to allow for 6-8 papers. Each paper will be followed by a brief response. To submit a paper, please send an electronic abstract of 500 words to the committee by 5th January 2012. Notification will be made by 27th January. Abstracts should be in .pdf format, and prepared for blind review. Please include a one-word pseudonym (such as your mother's maiden name) in the file name of your .pdf. Please email submissions and questions to Matthew Duncombe. The conference is kindly supported by the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Classics.

More information can be found here.

Movember 2011

I shall not be repeating my brave 'tache-growing exploits this November.  In part, this is because I have to give a paper next week and I don't think the audience would appreciate being presented with a nine-day old fuzzy upper lip.  But it is still a good idea and a good cause.  If you fancy donating, perhaps donating again this year, then you can do so here.

Guthrie

I've been asked to write a (very) brief foreword to a new edition of Guthrie's The Greek Philosophers.  I should confess I hadn't really spent much time with the book before but I'm enjoying reading through it now.  It certainly rattles along.  And he is a wonderfully opinionated writer.  I like (but don't really approve of) his dislike of Parmenides and 'tiresome' Eleatic logic and some of the comments here and there are also good fun.  Here he is rejecting the idea that Anaxagoras' Nous might be material.  After all, doesn't he call it 'katharos' and 'leptos'?

‘In reply to this it is surely pertinent to ask what other epithets were available to the poor man?  It is a clear case of thought having outrun the resources of language.’ (55 n.1)

Other things are more jarring, however.  Guthrie regularly resorts to explaining deficiencies or oddities in the early philosophers by pointing out that the poor chaps were still too close to 'primitive' magical or superstitious ideas.

 ‘One idea which the Greeks at this stage found it difficult to absorb was that a word might have more than one meaning. Their difficulty no doubt had something to do with the proximity of the primitive magical stage at which a word and its object formed a single unity’ (47). 

Worse, he sometimes supports this by noting that anthropologists have found similar notions in modern 'savages'....)  For example, when wondering about Anaximander and the implication that according to him the whole cosmos is alive, Guthrie comments that this is a notion ‘to which anthropologists have found parallels among savage people all over the world’ (30–31).  Oh dear.

Pause

No posts for a bit.

ἡδὺ πανταχόθεν ἡ φίλου μνήμη τεθνηκότος.

Rude health

Leiter comments on the strength of ancient philosophy in the US here.  I'm not sure we can say the same thing about the UK, unfortunately, perhaps as a result of a decline in publicly-funded graduate places and also as part of a more general slide.  But I'd need to think about that.  

I also wondered about Leiter's comment:

It's an interesting question when the profession will come to realize that the kind of revolution in scholarship on ancient philosophy wrought by Owen and Vlastos fifty years ago has been going on in scholarship on 19th-century European philosophy for a generation now, and that the fruitful philosophical connections with many areas of contemporary interest are at least as plentiful there.

It's undeniable that Owen and Vlastos made a difference to the way ancient philosophy was perceived by philosophers and to the way it was done.  Does anyone think they still have a strong direct influence on the work being done now or are we already two generations on?

Lectures, day 1

The Cambridge peloton was much worse than this this morning, mostly because of an influx of students who don't really know where they are going and haven't ridden a bike since they were nine.

At the deep end

We start term a bit later than most UK universities, and the term only lasts for a full eight weeks of lecturing, but once it starts it gets going very quickly.  Yesterday, the new first years arrived at the college and within two hours were all gowned up and photographed.  Three hours later they were in the hall having a formal matriculation dinner (with pudding in kilner jars...  yum).

And this morning they have to run around sorting out all they need to get going with work tomorrow.  So we don't really do 'freshers' week'.  Or, if we do, we pack it into two days.  It's all a bit manic and I really don't know how anyone gets through it intact.  But perhaps because there really is no time for anyone to sit in a corner of an unfamiliar room and get lonely most people do fine.

As for me, I've seen about half my tutees, my philosophy students get going tomorrow, and the MPhil seminar begins on Wednesday.

So, I've mostly been fielding emails for the last week.  And haven't had much time for my own research.  But I've been thinking quite a lot about Philebus 41e-42d.  It all seems very complicated or perhaps I've just confused myself about something that is much more straightforward than I think.  But I have signed up to do a little talk at a new discussion group with some of the college's other fellows; we realised that we spend a lot of time together, mostly arguing in meetings about the cost of various things, but don't really have much of an idea what the others get up to in the secrecy of their own office or lab.  I'm going to introduce the argument against weakness of will at the end of the Protagoras, with marshmallows.  It's not quantum physics (that's slated for next term) but it's a start.

2011 Keeling Colloquium

Here is the programme:

The 9th S.V. Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy 

November 7-9, 2011, University College London 

‘Moral Psychology in Ancient Thought’ 

Department of Greek and Latin, UCL, Room 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PP 


Monday 7th November

1.30-3.15 Jessica Moss (Oxford), ‘Bare Urges and Good-Independent Desires: Appetites in Republic IV’; Matthew Evans (Michigan), ‘The Blind Desires of Republic IV’
3.15-3.45, Tea and coffee
3.45-5.00 MM McCabe (KCL), response to Moss and Evans, and question time
Session Chair: Fiona Leigh (UCL)
5-7 pm Reception, Seminar Room, First Floor, Department of Philosophy, UCL, ALL WELCOME

Tuesday 8th November

10.30-11am, Tea and Coffee,
11-12 noon, Rachel Barney (Toronto), ‘Virtue, Intellectualism, and the Method of Hypothesis’
12-1pm, Terry Irwin (Oxford), Response to Barney and question time
Session Chair: Jenny Bryan (UCL)
1-2.15pm, lunch break
2.15-3.15pm, James Warren (Cambridge), ‘Memory, Anticipation, Pleasure’
3.15-4.15pm, Anthony Price (Birkbeck), Response to Warren and question time
Session Chair: Peter Adamson (KCL)

Wednesday 9th November

10.30-11am, Tea and Coffee
11-12 noon, Raphael Woolf (KCL), ‘Courage and Pleasure in Aristotle's Ethics’
12-1pm, Sarah Broadie (St. Andrews), Response to Woolf and question time
Session Chair: Gail Fine (Cornell & Oxford)
1-2.15pm, lunch break
2.15-3.15pm, Daniel Russell (Arizona), ‘Two Mistakes about Stoic Ethics’
3.15-4.15pm, David Sedley (Cambridge), Response to Russell and question time
Session Chair: Fiona Leigh (UCL)

Attendance is free and all are welcome, especially students; registration is not required. Any queries to be directed to the convenor, Fiona Leigh, Philosophy, UCL.

False fear

And someone often pictures himself losing a large amount of money and experiencing many pains as a result. And also he contemplates himself in this internal picture taking particular pain in the situation. (After Plato, Philebus 40a9–12). 

I’ve wondered before whether there can be false pains. And it seems to me that Plato would think that there can be, even though he is more regularly noted as holding the view that there are false pleasures. In the Philebus, Socrates makes ‘hope’ one of two species of anticipation. In 32b9–c2 Socrates asserts that the anticipation (prosdokēma) in the soul alone of a pathos of pleasure is itself pleasant and that the anticipation of something frightening and painful is itself distressing. The most reasonable way to read this and the examples that follow, it seems to me, is that in Socrates’ view hope is an expectation of a future pleasure and therefore itself pleasant, while fear is an expectation of a future pain and is therefore itself painful. 

Further, it is clear from 36c10–11 (cf. 40e2–4) that Socrates thinks there can be true and false fears, alongside true and false opinions and anticipations (prosdokiai: this latter may here be being used for what he earlier classified as hopes, which alongside fears are one of the two species of anticipations, or else is just standing for the whole class). We can therefore infer that there are false pains of anticipation as well as false pleasures, although it is only the pleasures that Socrates wants to examine in depth as part of his account of a good life. 

So I wonder whether Socrates would think it better to have true or false pains of anticipation in one’s life. Here we come across the familiar problem of deciding just what is false about the false pleasures of anticipation he does consider, whether what is false is that the hoped-for event (getting lots of money) does not in fact occur or whether when it occurs it is not enjoyed as it was expected to be. Leaving that unresolved, we can wonder about false fears: Is it better to take pain in the expectation of things that either do not occur as expected or are not as painful as expected (false pains of anticipation)? Or is it better to take pains in the expectations of things that do occur as expected or are as painful as expected (true pains of anticipation)? I think it is clear that, of the two, the second would be preferable for Socrates, even if he would prefer not to have any pains of anticipation at all even to this option. Why? I suppose because the true pains of anticipation are experienced by someone who (depending on the preferred interpretation of the cause of the falsehood) either is capable of predicting accurately what painful things will occur (he can accurately predict losing his money) or is capable of predicting accurately what things that will occur will be painful (he can accurately predict that losing his money will be painful).

What's more, I suppose that the very same capacity or trait of character that is responsible for an agent being free from the mistake that generates false pleasures of anticipation will make the same agent free from the mistake that generates false pains of anticipation.  When this person takes pleasure in anticipating some future experience, we can be sure that that future experience will be pleasant as anticipated.  And when this person is pained in anticipating some future experience, we can be sure likewise that that future experience will be painful as anticipated.

Lost in translation

I've just had the exciting news that a collection I wrote a piece for has now been translated into Portugese by a Brazilian publisher.  What's more fun is that I wrote in English and the piece was first kindly translated by one of the editors into French. And I suppose it's that French version that has now been translated again.  I hope I've got better with each new version.  Here's the new volume.  Click to go to the site:

And here's the French version (a bargain).  Click the amazon.co.uk link below or go to the PUF site here:

Marshmallows

I've been reading a bit about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment.  Here is a little video of some children thinking about temporal neutrality and the bias to the nearer future.  Or just about marshmallows.

What's particularly interesting is how results from these experiments correlate with results of tests on the same individuals up to forty years later. Here are some relevant papers (paper one (pdf), paper two).

Setting up

I have bought a new PC.  For some reason I hang on to my computers for longer than I should and by the end the poor things are coughing and wheezing away, gummed up with 7 years of updates and really not up to the stuff they are trying to do.  But now I have a young new eager PC.

Anyway, it was much less grim a process setting up the new machine.  (Dropbox makes a lot of it easier, although Thunderbird seems not to want to let you configure a mail account manually until you ask nicely and it tries and fails to search automatically.)  I also got hold of a new copy of Office 2010 for a bargain price from these people: very quick and very nice they were too.

Right.  Bring on the new term.

Deadline day

At 11pm BST the football transfer deadline is reached and there will be no more buying and selling players in the Premiership or Football League until the turn of the year.  You can follow all the 'excitement' on sites like this one.  So, while I am supposed to be doing something else, I wondered whether it would be a good idea to run academic appointments in the same way.  Reports of the form: 'Just spotted: Dr X currently of University Y arriving at University Z for a final lecture presentation test...'  'University P is happy to let unsettled lecturer Q go provided it can lure Dr R as a replacement...'  I think it would be quite fun.  We'd probably all have to hire academic agents to get on the phone and tout us around (or pretend to tout us around in order to arrange a better deal where we are) and it might be a bit stressful to go home and announce that I've been moved to a university the other side of the country and need to be fit to give a first lecture next Saturday, but it might be worth a try...

Regrets.... I've had a few

Here is a very interesting paper by Dan Moller on 'Anticipated emotions and emotional valence' (Philosophers' Imprint 11, 9 (July 2011)'.  It's interesting to me because I am (still) wondering about the treatment of anticipation and memory in Plato, especially in the Philebus and it made me wonder what Plato might have to say about the experience of, say, regret.  In particular, I wonder whether he would welcome Dan's useful distinction between the feeling of regret and the associated sensations it provokes.  I doubt it.  Or he would perhaps claim that even absent pain and the like, the thought that one has made a mistake of the sort it is reasonable to think an object of regret is itself bad and to be avoided.  Why?  Perhaps it is just bad to be the kind of person who does such things. Perhaps regret is a sign that one is not the kind of virtuous agent one would like to be.  (I guess he would allow even a virtuous to live with 'pro tanto' regret: the thought that even the right decision had certain negative consequences.)

By the way, what is the ancient Greek for ‘regret’? I’ve done a quick search on μεταγιγνώσκω and related forms and it doesn’t quite capture it. Later, μετάγνοια/η does mean ‘remorse’ or ‘repentance’ but in classical texts I’m not sure the verb often means more than ‘change one’s mind about’ in a way that may or may well not also suggest an accompanying affective response (see e.g. Pl. Phaedr. 231a4).  Perhaps μεταμέλεια is the better bet (as in e.g. Arist. NE 1110b19...)

Anyway, on the subject of regret:

Damascian sarcasm?

I've just found this comment in Damascius' lectures on Plato's Philebus §171.  Damascius is listing the various possible forms of false pleasures.  After those experienced by people in dreams or by the insane he gives this example:

ἀπὸ τῶν ἐν ἐλπίσι κεναῖς· ὃ καὶ οἱ πεπαιδευμένοι πάσχουσιν ἀρίστας πολιτείας ὑπογράφοντες καὶ ταύταις μὴ παρούσαις ἐφηδόμενοι.

Next: those that come from empty hopes.  This is what educated types experience when they sketch out ideal constitutions and take pleasure in them although they are not real.

Westerink's note assures the reader that Damascius certainly cannot have been making a sarcastic remark about Plato himself, who may, we can suppose, have taken a certain amount of pleasure in thinking about ideal yet unrealised constitutions.  Instead, Westerink sees a reference to some otherwise unknown contemporaries of Damascius.  I don't know enough about Damascius to judge his sense of humour (I suspect he may not have had one) but I like the comment all the same.

Middle age

Here is Miranda Sawyer on being middle-aged and perhaps thinking about having a crisis about it.

I think there are two kinds of problem here and they are sometimes conflated.  That's not such a bad problem because they are also clearly related to one another.  Let's call them:

1.  The problem of lost youth

and

2. The anxiety of comfort

Grand names for pretty mundane things, but they are, I think, distinct.  The problem of lost youth arises when you realise that you are not the young thing you once were.  This means not only that you have to accept that a lot of things you once might have thought were aimed at you (fashion, new technology, music) are not in fact aimed at you but also, perhaps more frightening, that you are now more like your parents were when you were a striving and objecting youth than the current striving and objecting youth.  (Spending my life teaching and talking to people aged 18-25ish makes me sometimes forget this fact but sometimes it reminds me of it starkly and violently.  Also, as my own kids grow up I think I will be more comfortable in the thought of not being a young thing myself.)  In part, this problem is also to do with a loss of possibilities.  I won't now ever be an Olympic athlete or professional footballer.  I won't ever be the charismatic guitarist in a challenging but popular new band.  (These weren't ever genuine possibilities, but now they are definitively ruled out not only by my sheer age but also because I don't think I'd want them any more.  The loss of those desires is something that is itself a little sad.)  Anyway, wrapped up in the problem of lost youth is a connected bundle of thoughts about loss of vigour, or sexual potency, of potential and of energy.

The anxiety of comfort, on the other hand, is a feeling you get when you realise at some point in your life that you have a job, a family, a house (and mortgage or rent) a car to tax and MOT etc.  These often impinge on my thinking in the guise of problems and difficulties but they also stand together as a reminder that I have already acquired and achieved various things.  I don't think any more about what it will be like to have a place of my own for the first time.  I don't aspire to the various things that I already have achieved.  True, we can replace these with other things to aspire to (a better job, a bigger house) in a never ending chain.  And such desires might well keep away for a while the anxiety of comfort by replacing it with a different kind of unfulfillable need.  But this is only ever temporary.  No.  The problem here (and it might be odd to think of it as a problem, but I reckon it is) is that at a certain point at least in the West and in certain parts of Western societies we really do have more or less all that we ever really wanted and more than we ever really need.  We can retain ambitions and hopes but, materially, all is well.  You can go and buy a sports car for weekends and jeopardise your comfort in various ways, but all in all, things are pretty good.  I think this is itself a cause of anxiety since I at least am not very good at appreciating what is excellent about comfort.  I tend to find it dull, boring, routine.  The thought that I might be doing for the rest of my professional life more or less what I do now is strangely irritating.  But why?  I quite like it.  It's what I spent years trying to do...  Some people, eh?

Anyway, that's what I think is the problem.  The two are related because part of what we miss in youth is the very precariousness and uncertainty that is gone.  And it is removed by the attainment of those very things that generate the irritating comfort.  

In other news, here's a greeting from the excellent 'someecards'