Talks on Philosophy and other fun things

 Me: “Hi Mr Anderson and Mr Baggini!  I’m not sure if you have met Mr Nigel Warburton before. I’m so glad you all were able to meet me, to help me understand a few things regarding your thoughts on philosophy. 

My first question is this: Do you think philosophy can help people learn to respect truth, facts, reality, and one another, and to reject falsehood, superstition, selfishness, polarization, partisanship, and mutual hostility based on differences of race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, belief, etc.?  If so, how?  If not, why not?

Warburton: “I say yes! ‘Philosophy thrives on debate, on the possibility of being wrong, on challenging views, and exploring alternatives.  Fortunately, in most ages there have been philosophers ready to think critically about what other people tell them must be so.’” (LHP, 14)

Baggini:  “I agree, but when it comes to Western philosophy, sometimes philosophers find it difficult to deal with other theologies.  ‘Although the classical philosophies of India, China and Greece differ in important ways, there are some highly significant commonalities.  Each started with a basic assumption that everything is one.  Whatever it is that explains human life must also explain the universe, nature, and anything else beyond…Another commonality was the assumption that a satisfactory account of the world must speak to reason.  Attractive stories and myths are not enough: we need to articulate an intellectual case that supports the view we adopt.  Reason  - meaning rationality – is in essence the giving of reasons, ones which can be scrutinized, judged, assessed, accepted or rejected.’” (HWT, xxiii-xxiv)

Anderson: “I’m going to disagree when it comes to western philosophy.  ‘America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump.  In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.’” (FL, 11)

Me: “I’m not sure I agree with you Mr. Anderson.  I definitely don’t claim to be a philosopher, or to even think in a philosophical manner, but I do live my life in accordance to the Bible.  And as a Christian, I don’t think me or anyone can respect another person completely if you don’t have faith in Christ.  Mr. Baggini, I think what you said reflects to there being a higher power, God, and that is what explains human life and everything else.  I guess I would want to know from each of ya’ll is can we separate religion from philosophy completely?”

Baggini: “’For those schooled in secular philosophy, it’s a challenge to respond to other traditions in ways that fully acknowledge both their philosophical value and their religious or spiritual dimensions.  Somehow, however, we must find a way to do this if we are to have an open dialogue across traditions.  We must acknowledge that the strict secularization of philosophy is itself a philosophical position that requires justification.  To simply stipulate that faith separates you from philosophy is as deeply unphilosophical as stipulating that a sacred text must have the last word.  Both positions need to be argued for as part of a shared philosophical enterprise.’” (HWT, 51)

Warburton: “According to Boethius and his book, The Consolation of Philosophy,  Philosophy told him that ‘riches, power and honour are worthless since they can come and go.  No one should base their happiness on such fragile foundations…But where can Boethius find true happiness?  Philosophy’s answer is that he will find it in God or goodness (these turn out to be the same thing).’” (LHP, 42)

Anderson: “Instead of turning all Americans into reasonable, rational Ben Franklins, the onslaught of newness and amazing technology drove many citizens more deeply into fantasy, Christian and otherwise.  As much as the nineteenth century was an American age of incredulity and wisdom, it was also an age of belief and foolishness.  Cultural historians have focused on the religious side, the invention and expansion and growing emotionalism of Protestant denominations.  But that frame is too narrow.  As the Yale religious historian Jon Butler has written , the early United States was an “antebellum spiritual hothouse,” Christina faith blending freely with folk magic-belief in the occult, clairvoyance, shamanic healing, and prophetic dreams, much of it old folk superstition no longer constrained by Puritan doctrine and order.  America was ripe for and rife with magical thinking of every kind.” (FL, 58-59)

Warburton: “But what about Pyrrho’s thinking?  ‘ Because we can’t know anything for sure, we should suspend all judgement and live our lives in an uncommitted way.  Every desire that you have suggests that you believe that one thing is better than another.  Unhappiness arises from not getting what you want.  But you can’t know that anything is better than anything else.  So, he thought, to be happy you should free yourself from desires and not care about how things turn out.’” (LHP, 19)

Anderson: “’What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts.  The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.  From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will.  In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.’” (FL, 5)

Baggini: “’Doctrines are less important than they are in Western Christianity in part because it is believed that the purest knowledge of reality comes from direct experience and so the most fundamental truths cannot be captured in language.  They are ineffable, literally unsayable’” (HWT, 26)

Me: “How would you answer William James’s “really vital question for us all: What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?”

Baggini: “Even if we can perceive reality unframed by concepts, it will still be framed by our perceptual and cognitive apparatus...Kant’s starting point is the realization that all the time we insist that our thoughts and concepts must conform to the way objects are, independently of us, we are doomed to failure.  No matter how much we try to examine nature as it is in itself, we only observe nature as it appears to us.” (HWT, 33)

 

Warburton: “I agree with Socrates when he said life is only worth living if you think about what you are doing.  An unexamined existence is all right for cattle, but not for human beings.” (LHP, 4)

Anderson: “Karl Rove once said ‘[You] I  what we call the reality-based community...believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.  That’s not the way the world really works anymore.  We create our own reality.’”

Me: “Last thing I wanted to ask, do you think all scopes of philosophy are treated equal?”

Baggini: “’…at a societal level – if not the individual level – there are always some justfications for belief which carry more weight than others; reasons why some things are accepted as true and other rejected as false.  Every culture has an implicit, folk epistemology – a theory of knowledge – just as almost every philosophy has an explicit one and these formal and informal epistemologies are connected.’” (HWT, 1)

Warburton: “I like to think about what Plato wrote in The Republic versus Pyrrhonic Scepticism.  Plato believed that philosophers were great at thinking about reality which should translate into philosophers having all the political power.  He believed in a sort of hierarchy where philosophers were at the top and should receive a special education but then in turn sacrifice their own pleasures for those of the citizens they ruled over.  Conversely, if you look at Pyrrho, his skepticism made him come to the reasoning of ‘You can’t know anything’ to ‘Therefore you should ignore your instincts and feelings about what is dangerous’.  I think if Plato had met Pyrrho he wouldn’t have wanted him ruling citizens.”

Anderson: “’As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise.  That’s the real-life reduction ad absurdum of American individualism.  And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.’”  

Me: “Thank you all for joining me in this discussion.  I feel as though I have learned a lot from you all.”