interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah

Quite interesting, lengthy interview with Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher whose writing is engaging and lively:

Some Reflections on Contemporary Church Music

In a recent philosophy class of mine, discussion somehow turned to contemporary church music. Opinions on the subject were varied, with one student bemoaning the “me”-focused and mindlessly repetitive nature of the songs, and another student defending them as (at least sometimes) promoting heartfelt worship and devotion to God. Everyone seemed agreed on the danger that such music can cross the line from being of genuine religious value to being a matter of mere emotional self-gratification.

I understand the concern. I was raised on the great church hymns, and while some contemporary praise songs seem to me powerful, few carry the meaning of those hymns. (And some seem to have no meaning at all!) I regret that my children probably won’t learn the hymns as well as I did.

The problem, for me, is captured nicely in a song we sing at my church periodically, a spruced-up and modernized version of the hymn, “Take my Life and Let it be.” The original is beautiful, a humble prayer of one longing to be used and filled by God. Here’s the first verse:

Take my life and let it be
consecrated Lord, to thee.
Take my moments and my days;
let them flow in endless praise,
let them flow in endless praise.

After a few verses, the contemporized version adds the following interlude:

I am yours, set apart for you
I am yours, hungry for your truth
Take my life, you are all I live for
I am yours.

The shift in mood seems to me subtle and profound, and it works completely against the spirit of the original hymn. Suddenly I’m “set apart” for God, and God is all I’m actually living for. While the original states much in the future tense—as the last verse says, “Take myself and I will be ever, only, all for thee” (emphasis added)—the person singing this interlude seems to have already got it made. To my mind the humility of the original has completely disappeared, and perhaps the honesty has, too.

Contemporary church music can be wonderful and spiritually uplifting; but I’d say that the danger my students highlighted is real.

More Fuel for the Teleological Argument

The teleological argument for God's existence points to various features of the natural world and tries to make the case that God (or at any rate a cosmic designer) must be responsible for them and hence must exist. There are of course many versions of the teleological argument, but speaking generally, that's how they work.

The features that these arguments point to range from the intricate detail found in the fundamental constituents of physical reality, to the incomprehensible vastness of a universe which is somehow hospitable to us.

I recently came across a splendid website which gives an interactive "Scale of the Universe." It gives you a glimpse of the relative size of the constituents of the universe (from atoms to viruses to planets to stars), and of the universe itself. The site is both extremely informative and mind-blowing. What you see there raises the question: how can a universe that is at once so vast and yet composed of almost infinitesimally small building blocks have come to be purely as the result of chance?

Bad Academic Writing

You may have noticed that Bethel Philosophy blog entries aren’t coming out as regularly as they did in the fall. Blame that on an extremely busy January term and spring semester! But we’ll still post things once in a while.

Our topic for today is academic writing. I think it’s fair to say that philosophers are very often models of clear academic writing. They frown on needless complexity and the use of jargon for its own sake. Of course, not all philosophers fulfill these ideals, and some don’t even try. But as a group, philosophers tend to deal in careful and precise argumentation, and this leads to clarity of expression that is not always found or treasured in other academic disciplines.

Still, bad academic writing can be fun to read, if only in small doses. Here’s an enjoyable article by a journalist named Robert Fulford, who laments the tendency in some quarters to think that opaque writing is a sign of intelligence rather than confusion. He calls the use of jargon in service of academic-sounding nonsense, “pomo-babble.” He gives some wonderful examples, including this one:

In the logic of colonialist representations, the construction of a separate colonized other and the segregation of identity and alterity turns out paradoxically to be at once absolute and extremely intimate.

(That sentence is pulled from an actual book on globalization.) As Fulford puts it, “To commit a sentence like that is to subtract from the sum of human knowledge.”

If you’d like to compose your own pomo-babble but don’t know how, you can now do so with help from the Writing Program at the University of Chicago. When you go to this website, you make a few choices and it churns out an “academic sentence” for you. Impress your friends and family! Not your philosophy professors though, because they can usually see through this sort of thing.

Philosophy and Dogmatism

The New York Times columnist David Brooks is a fan of studies of human behavior. In a recent column, called “Social Science Palooza,” he summarizes the findings of a number of recent studies. Some of them are quite amusing.

Among my favorites:

- More physical contact among teammates on basketball teams correlates with better performance.

- Men are less inclined to date women who dumped their last boyfriends (instead of being dumped), while women are more inclined to date men who dumped their last girlfriends.

- Men tend to adopt more risky and daring strategies when playing chess against attractive women.

The finding most relevant to philosophy:

- The more people doubt their core convictions, the more they tend to forcefully defend them. (This phenomenon has long been recognized, but Brooks describes a recent study that supports it.)

This last one of course merely indicates a general tendency—it doesn’t mean that all people who forcefully defend their own views really doubt them. But chances are you’ve witnessed people (maybe even yourself) displaying forceful, and apparently irrational, conviction in the face of strong contrary evidence.

I think here’s a place where philosophy can do some good in the world. By promoting intellectual honesty and the pursuit of truth, study of philosophy can help to offset our all-too-human tendency to dig in our heels when in fact we feel doubt. Philosophy can encourage us to be gracious when our views are subjected to critical scrutiny.

This issue calls to mind a quote I read to my students on the last day of my Intro to Philosophy class this semester. It’s by Bertrand Russell, from the last chapter of his book, The Problems of Philosophy.

“The value of philosophy,” he says, “is . . . to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. . . Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom . . . [I]t removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.”

A little update from the Bethel athletics department

Bethel alumni out there may be interested to know that the Bethel football team beat St. Thomas this past weekend and now moves on in the NCAA Division III football playoffs. Imagine that: playoffs in college football! Bethel will play in the semi-finals this coming Saturday against the Mount Union Goliaths from Ohio. (They aren't really the "Goliaths"--I don't know what their team name is. But I do know that they dominate NCAA III football year after year, and that when Bethel played them in the semi-finals a few years ago, witnesses reported that Mount Union's players were rather larger than average. Still, we know that Goliaths can be beaten...)

Go Bethel!

Update 12/12: Mount Union beat Bethel 34 - 14, and Bethel flew home afterwards into a blizzard. A splendid effort (and season) from Bethel, but Mount Union is a very tough team to beat.

Profitable but Unethical Business Practices

We’re often told that ethics is good for business. Companies that sell quality products and treat customers fairly thrive because of it, while unethical companies fail.

In some ways the internet has helped to promote ethical business behavior. In years past, if you were treated badly by a company you might fire off an angry letter, complain to family and friends, or report the problem to the Better Business Bureau. Now you can make your voice heard on the internet, where consumers interested in the same product or company can find out about your bad experience. Companies often take complaints on review sites very seriously, because a low rating for a product or seller can kill a business.

But now we get this story in the New York Times about a business owner who turns the ethical behavior formula on its head. The story is long but highly entertaining. I’ll give the short version. Vitaly Borker, from Brooklyn, runs an online business that sells fashionable eyeglasses. His customer service is abominable: he overcharges for the glasses (which he often buys on eBay), cheats his customers, and abuses and threatens the ones who complain. (The tales of abuse are quite awful.) And yet, somehow, he makes a profit.

Here’s how. You’d think that the internet complaints about his business practices would be damaging, but not so. (Warning: the complaints contain bad language--from the seller, not the customers!) They actually draw traffic to his website. Viewers drawn by the complaints don’t buy his products, of course; but the heavy traffic and internet references to his site pushes it high up the lists people see when they run Google searches for the glasses he sells. That’s the dream of every web entrepreneur. Guided by Google, unsuspecting customers visit his website and are impressed by his low prices. They buy, some of them complain, more traffic flows to the website, and it remains high on Google search lists.

In this way, Borker has run a profitable business. Fortunately, as the story reveals, his immoral behavior may be catching up with him. But who would have thought that offensive customer service could be a recipe for business success, even in the short term?

Update 12/07/10: Borker has been arrested--an encouraging development for business ethicists everywhere.

Science and the Color Red

One of the problems physicalists have to deal with is how what are called qualia can be physical. (Qualia are mental states that involve sensations, or "raw feels," like the feeling of pain, an itch, or nausea, or the experience of redness.) The worry for physicalism is that it is unclear how physicalism can account for qualia. How can the feel of pain simply be a state of the brain or an event going on in it (the organization or firing of neurons, for example)?

An argument called "The Knowledge Argument" was put forward by philosopher Frank Jackson years ago, and it claims that qualia cannot be physical. The basic idea: Mary, a brilliant neuroscientist, knows everything physical that goes on in a person's brain when a person sees something red. However, Mary herself has been locked her whole life in a black-and-white room and prevented from seeing anything red herself. Now suppose she is released and allowed for the first time to see a red tomato. At this point, so the argument goes, she learns something new. She knew all the physical facts about color-vision, but she didn't know all the facts about color vision--she didn't know what red looks like! Hence some of the facts about color-vision aren't physical, and hence physicalism is false.

This argument has been much debated, but despite increasing advances in cognitive neuroscience, the question of how physicalism can account for qualia, or for consciousness more generally, will not go away. It is raised again, nicely, in the Toronto Globe and Mail, in an article "Science still can't explain the colour red," which quotes some top contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists who have done work on the subject.

Speaking of philosophers and cognitive scientists, here at Bethel our very own Dan Yim is co-teaching a course on consciousness this spring with a member of the psychology department. The course is called "Consciousness: Psychology and Philosophy in Dialogue." No doubt it will discuss the question raised in the Globe and Mail article: how much can science tell us about the mind?

Steve Martin's Atheist Song

Everyone admits that religion has spawned brilliant music and art (to say nothing for philosophy!). Atheism, on the other hand, has had little going for it musically. In this video, comedian/actor/musician/author Steve Martin tries to rectify the situation with an amusing tune called, "Atheists Don't Have no Songs."



One reason I post this here is that Steve Martin has some connection to philosophy--he was a philosophy major in college. He writes about his interest in philosophy, and about his ground-breaking career in comedy, in his memoir "Born Standing Up."

Dwight's Logical Problem

Fans of "The Office" might enjoy watching Dwight get himself into a little logical trouble. (Thanks to Jeremy for the link!)