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'

New essays on ancient Pyrrhonism

Brill have published (or perhaps are just about to publish) a volume of essays on ancient Pyrrhonism (click on the pic for details).  I wrote one of the essays.  It's, as usual, a pricey volume (€97.00/$133.00) but you might be lucky enough to be able to get online access to pdfs of it all via this site.  I tried to log in using my Cambridge Raven account but it doesn't seem to work.  Other people might have more success.  I haven't read all the other contributions yet.

Contents:
1. Introduction Diego E. Machuca
2. A Pyrrhonian Plato? Again on Sextus on Aenesidemus on Plato
Mauro Bonazzi
4. The Cyrenaics versus the Pyrrhonists on Knowledge of Appearances
Tim O’Keefe
5. What God Didn’t Know (Sextus Empiricus AM IX 162–6)
James Warren
6. Skepticism and Everyday Life
Filip Grgić
7. Sextus Empiricus on Skeptical Piety
Harald Thorsrud
8. Sextus Empiricus’ Style of Writing
Stéphane Marchand
9. Moderate Ethical Realism in Sextus’ Against the Ethicists?
Diego E. Machuca
10. Is the Pyrrhonist an Internalist?
Otávio Bueno

Purely belter

We were discussing at lunch whether there have been any really good football films.  Escape to Victory?  Surely not.  Anyway, here was my suggestion: Purely Belter.  Perhaps it works because it doesn't make the mistake of including choreographed football in it, but it's still a football film without doubt.

Here is the trailer:

And here is the bit where they steal Alan Shearer's car.

A request

In a couple of weeks it will be time for the A level results (well, A2 results, I suppose).  There's been an unusual amount of real news recently so perhaps we will be spared the usual nonsense, but I would like you to send me any links to articles about the following:

1. How terrible it is that so many students now get the top grades and how this shows that standards are slipping.
2. How terrible it is that so many students who get the top grades did not get offers for undergraduate courses at Cambridge or Oxford.

It would be best of all if these two points were made in the same article or, failing that, the same edition of a paper.  But I'll take any examples of either.

And, as ever, do also look out for the classic photo op of (mostly girls) students 'leaping' with joy on receiving their results.  (Best illustrated here; it has already started.)  No doubt people at the Torygraph are praying for hot weather to last until the middle of the month.

Summer summer summertime (summertime)

Unlike the vast majority of jobbing classicists, I didn't go to the Cambridge Triennial last week.  I went here instead and had a lot of fun doing random things like clay pigeon shooting.  It's an interesting thought to wonder what the introduction of shot guns would have done to improve the Triennial... 

But now I'm back at the desk and face the familiar summer chores.  We need to prepare for incoming graduates and undergraduates, write or rewrite or revise the lectures for next year (I've never managed to work out how people write lectures during term; I really need to have them mapped out pretty fully before the teaching proper begins or I'd never keep my head above water), send off those articles I'd promised and badger people for chapters they've promised me (you know who you are...)  All this while trying not to miss out on the kids being home from school for the next few weeks.  And while trying to navigate a path through the hordes of tourists in Cambridge.  It was nearly impossible to move on Silver Street on Saturday and the coaches seem to think they can double park along Queen's Road to allow the backpacked ones to get on and off.  Grrrr.

Here are the Sundays. Harriet Wheeler is lovely.  And so is this song.

Conference news

Here's a plug for a conference in St Andrews in November (click the picture for a bigger version).  You can find some more information here.  If you're feeling brave, you can leave St Andrews and go straight down to London for the Keeling colloquium starting on Monday 7th...

Postcard

I'm in St Andrews to do a PhD viva.  The internal examiner has just taken me for a walking tour through the showers and sunshine and I saw this.  It's very pretty.  And it's very quiet here.  Makes Cambridge in July seem like a buzzing metropolis.

Spend, spend, spend

I spent the morning wondering what I would have done with a £165 million Euro lottery win.  Not easy.  After totting up the cost of a new house, new car (this one) and money for family, trusts for the kids etc., I reckon I'd still have a good £100+ million left at least.  Now, you need to put some of that to work so you can have a guaranteed income enough not to be worried but then there's still plenty to play with.  Probably enough to found a decent new Cambridge college and certainly enough to do a lot for a current one.  So, what else would be on the list, specifically concerning my day job and my concern for the health of my own area of research?

There would be plenty to make regular and substantial donations to various charities.  But there are some specific things that would be worth doing too.

Endow a research fellowship, probably alternating between classics and philosophy for new postdoctoral researchers.  Perhaps also endow a university lectureship (we've enough professors) provided that didn't mean the university could think it didn't need to keep funding the ones we have already.  Probably best to negotiate a B.O.G.O.F. deal here.  They promise to keep funding one, and we'll fund another.

A big chunk of hardship funding for undergraduates.

What else should go on this list?

Triennial

The Cambridge Faculty of Classics will be hosting the Triennial Conference, 'A celebration of classics', on 25-29 July.  You can find out all about it here and even read a programme of events (pdf here).  There's quite a lot of ancient philosophical stuff going on, if that's your thing.  And Cambridge will be looking nice, despite the enormous numbers of tourists and annual scaffolding boom.  Here's the poster:

Football and philosophy

Here is an interesting piece on aesthetics and football written by Stephen Mumford in the Times Higher.  (He has a book coming soon; perhaps I should wait until I've read the full account, though given its £75 price-tag I might not manage to.)  He is right to claim that there is something aesthetically pleasing and engaging about sport.  On the other hand, it seems to me that his advocacy of non-partisan viewing is problematic, at least for football.  True, I can and do enjoy watching games between two sides with which I have no particular connection.  The World Cup is great just because I can indulge myself in watching such matches.  On the other hand, it is extremely difficult not to adopt one of the two sides, often for no particular reason, and take on a supporter's role.  It is difficult to remain disengaged sufficiently to have no partisan feelings whatsoever.  Of course, it is possible simply to enjoy watching the skill on display but this is a contest after all and not a performance or improvised display.  The teams display the skills they have in order to win the game.

It is also surely the case that partisanship opens up a deeper and broader range of experiences in watching than disengaged aesthetic appreciation.  Watching sport is often a shared experience, shared often by groups who arrange themselves and display themselves as comrades.  Let's distinguish watching a football match on the sofa and home from sitting or standing among a group of supporters of a given team at the ground itself.  The reason it is worth going to the ground is the intensity of the shared experience.  It does matter, at least for those 90 minutes, whether the goalkeeper makes a save and whether a pass finds its intended recipient.  We choose to make it matter and because we surrender in that way we are able to experience the joy at a goal or the despair at losing.  

So when Mumford writes...

The purist and the partisan can see different games because one regards it aesthetically while the other sees the contest primarily as something to be won. The partisan would far prefer to see their team win a dull game 1-0 than to lose 3-4. And keenly contested tackles that are appreciated by the purist will for the partisan be either a show of superior strength when they win them or outrageous fouls committed by brutes when they lose them.

...I think I would contest the sense of the term 'purist' here.  It is a different perspective, for sure, to watch from a non-partisan viewpoint.  But it is not a purer appreciation of a game of football.  A game my team wins (perhaps because it is not a common occurrence) is not really a dull game.  A 1-0 win can be nervy (if the team scores early I then spend the time desperately willing the ball away from my team's penalty area; I applaud an almighty clearance over the stand if it relieves the pressure) or amazingly uplifting (a late goal, no matter how scrappy).  That seems a pure appreciation of football to me.

Deep Wilson

Open Days today and tomorrow.  Perhaps more on those later.  For now, here's what I listened to as I walked to work.  I think you should listen to it too.

Aristotle sets hears a-flutter

Browsing some Aristotle today I came across this in De Partibus Animalium 3.6. He is discussing the lungs and making a case that they are for the sake of respiration. As part of the discussion he dismisses the idea that lungs are there to cope with the ‘jumping’ of the heart. His argument for this is interesting because it seems to offer some evidence for his distinction between human and animal psychological capacities (669a17-23):

τὸ δὲ πρὸς τὴν ἅλσιν εἶναι τὸν πλεύμονα τῆς καρδίας οὐκ εἴρηται καλῶς· ἐν ἀνθρώπῳ τε γὰρ συμβαίνει μόνον ὡς εἰπεῖν τὸ τῆς πηδήσεως διὰ τὸ μόνον ἐν ἐλπίδι γίνεσθαι καὶ προσδοκίᾳ τοῦ μέλλοντος, ἀπέχει τ’ἐν τοῖς πλείστοις πολὺν τόπον καὶ κεῖται τὴν θέσιν ἀνωτέρω τοῦ  πλεύμονος, ὥστε μηδὲν συμβάλλεσθαι τὸν πλεύμονα πρὸς τὴν ἅλσιν τῆς καρδίας.

Here is a translation by William Ogle (1912):

It has been said that the lung exists as a provision to meet the jumping (halsis) of the heart. But this is out of the question. For man is practically the only animal whose heart presents this phenomenon of jumping, inasmuch as he alone is influenced by hope and anticipation of the future. Moreover, in most animals the lung is separated from the heart by a considerable interval and lies above it, so that it can contribute nothing to mitigate any jumping. 

 See Hippoc. Morb. Sacr. 17 (§XX in the Loeb) for the idea that the phrenes jump and cause palpitations as a result of unexpected excessive pleasure or distress (εἴ τι ὥνθρωπος ὑπερχαρείη ἐξ ἀδοκήτου ἢ ἀνιηθείη, πηδῶσι [αἱ φρένες] καὶ ἅλσιν παρέχουσιν).

This is the bit that interests me: only humans have hope (elpis) or expectation for the future (prosdokia); this is why only humans experience their heart ‘jumping’. This suggests that hope and expectation here are being understood to have some rational component or source.  What exactly distinguishes them from the kinds of forethought that non-rational animals are capable of?