fearing death

Instead of posting, I should be relaxing and thinking about fun things while on vacation on the north shore of Lake Superior...

Here’s a quick argument about death and fear in the spirit of Epicurus.

Epicurus writes in his Letter to Menoeceus, “Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience... when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

(1) Everything that is bad for us is embedded in our actual experiences.
(2) Death is the absence of experiences.
(3) The absence of experiences cannot be bad for us.
(4) Hence, death cannot be bad for us.
(5) It is irrational to fear something that is not bad for us.
(6) Hence, it is irrational to fear death.

The most contentious claims are (1) and (5).

Someone might argue that something can be both bad for us and fail to be embedded in actual experiences. For example, I wonder if being the victim of a nasty, false rumor (a) which one never discovers and (b) from which one never suffers any negative consequences is something that can be said to be “bad for that someone.”

Someone also might argue it is rational to fear something that is not bad. For example, I wonder if it’s rational at times to fear success or power, neither of which are bad in and of themselves. Response: Maybe it’s not the success or power that one may fear, but rather one may fear one’s own character and what one might do in a context of possessing such things. The real object of fear then is a possibility that is bad. So, the fear is rational after all.

How about social justice? I fear that, and social justice is not bad; in fact, it’s good. Response: Maybe I’ve confused rationality with overextended self-interest. My self-interest (sometimes) conflicts with the moral calling of social justice, but that conflict is one that is distinct from the domain of rationality.

Hey, maybe claim (5) has got more going for it after all. I would have never thought that I might end up agreeing with something so Platonic and ancient.

I’m still not sure about claim (1).

Merely Verbal Disputes and the Origin of Ideas

Re-reading Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding for the umpteenth time, I am struck (again) by just how many perennial disputes in philosophy are dismissed by Hume as merely verbal disputes. Once we get clear on what we mean by our words, we can swat away pesky problems like the compatibility of liberty and necessity or the nature of causation. Other than Wittgenstein, has any other philosopher been so dismissive of so many "classic" problems in philosophy?

I think it should be noted, though, that Hume's rhetoric is a bit loftier than his (usually very careful) arguments. As he is quite clear to say, when not in high-literary mode, his principle that every idea comes from a corresponding impression plays a large role in dismissing these debates. When pressed with an alleged idea in metaphysics that must be accounted for, Hume presses us to consider the origin of this idea, and if the original impression cannot be produced, the idea is discarded. When dealing with philosophy problems, this (controversial) strategy helps clear the field quite quickly.

I have to admit to being almost completely unmotivated by this line of argument that occurs so regularly in Hume. For even if I were to grant Hume's controversial premise that every idea comes from a corresponding impression ("the Copy Principle"), I see absolutely no reason why I should have to provide that impression whenever someone questions the legitimacy of one of my ideas. Of course, it may help to get clear on an idea to ferret out the original impression, but that I must provide some sort of Certificate of Authenticity for each and every one of my ideas strikes me as an unhelpful and counterproductive test. I'm not one to think I have a great deal of insight into my own soul or my own ideas, but I do think that I can sometimes have a particular idea without being able to say where this idea originated. And I think I am fully within my philosophical rights (were there such a thing) to cling to an idea for which I cannot produce the original impression, even if I were to accept Hume's claim that every idea comes from an impression.

Even if one accepts the Copy Principle, that does not seem like enough to motivate the test of authenticity that Hume wields throughout the Enquiry (and Treatise). But at least it gives us some reason to think that many of our disputes might be dissolved by getting clear on our terms. Which is more than motivates most claims of verbal disputes. One of the most irritating expressions tossed about by students and other would-be disputants is that a problem is really "just semantics." Besides denigrating the worthy field of semantics, it is often misused for problems that are not really about the meaning of words but about concepts. And, most frustratingly, it seems motivated by the twin evils of carelessness (in the use of terms) and laziness (in working through an issue under debate). I've said many times that if I could pass one requirement for students receiving a B.A. it would be that they never, ever dismiss a problem as "just semantics."

Okay, end of grumpy old-man rant.

end of year lunch

Earlier this week, the department took our teaching assistants out to an end of year lunch to thank them for their hard work. The food was lovely.

Ray and Dan


Dan and Carrie


graduating senior


yummy bread

graduating seniors


graduating seniors


Eric and some graduating seniors

graduating senior, Paul, and Gary (colleague from another department)

Good times were had by all.

a bit of religious confusion

Please allow me to share my religious confusion with you.

First, the good news: There was a heart-warming story about a 3 year old toddler in Missouri who wandered away from home. He was lost for about three days, and he was found by search and rescue volunteers. He’s a tough kid who survived in the woods for three days. That’s pretty cool.

Here’s what the father said: “It’s indescribable how grateful we are. I mean, you doubt if God’s actually with you for awhile, and then something like this happens, and you know he’s there.”

Okay... I understand the sentiment. In fact, as a person of religious faith (or, for that matter, as simply a decent human being, religious or not), I share in his joy.

But I find myself utterly ambivalent about these kinds of proclamations.

There is another story of a 3 year old toddler who went missing in Montana. He also was found, but in this case, he was found dead in a septic tank three days after he went missing. He drowned in filth and refuse.

So, I guess what I’m saying is I don’t understand what it means to proclaim things like “God is there.” It cannot be the case that the expression “God is there” implies that “God saves me (us) from calamity.” Is that what the father of the rescued boy believes? Maybe he means something more subtle, such as “God is there” implies that “Sometimes God saves me (us) from calamity.” But then, what are the conditions that govern the “sometimes” qualifier? Or, perhaps it’s the case that dumb luck (bad or good) plays some determinative role. But then, is that kind of chance consistent with the traditional view of God that we find in the Christian religion? Do you see why I’m confused? I just don’t know.

At the end of the day, I haven’t said anything profound or new. All I’ve done is articulate in a somewhat plebeian way the problem that evil (both moral and natural) poses for anyone who claims to believe that there is a good, powerful, and intelligent (or at least competent) deity governing our world. Nevertheless, even though I haven’t really said anything new, I at least acknowledge a fundamental tension that some of my religious friends would rather either ignore or paste over with wafer-thin theodicies.

Another thought occurs to me... I truly marvel at the generations of past Jewish and Christian peoples (sidenote: I focus on these religions only because of my familiarity with them, not for any intentional slight on the saints of other religious traditions) who endured unspeakable hardship in the midst of their faith. In the 18th and 19th centuries of America, for example, the notion that one would lose a child was almost a matter of course given the prevailing public health conditions, and persons of faith did not automatically find that tragic phenomenon to compete against their notions of God’s governance of this world. Strange... I can’t get in that mindset. Perhaps the persons of faith in those generations would say of me that I’ve been warped by the fact that I can take a Tylenol when I have the slightest headache, and this has been transposed by me into my conception of “oughts” and “shoulds” that I then apply to how God should govern the world.

Maybe so... But I confess that I’m still religiously confused.

Philosophy
by Billy Collins

I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandyglass.

I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.

But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room --- disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.

Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God’s existence,

intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,

those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.

I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,

but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, titled back on the stick of its axis.

He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun—

that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the ampitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,

I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.