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Anonymous asked: What are some good books on Nihilism and Philosophy in general?
On Moral Nihilism (well, specifically expressivism), I’d suggest A.J. Ayers’ Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) and I think Simon Blackburn’s Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993). It has been a year or so since I have read on this topic, and my memory isn’t great.
I can’t help you with epistemological nihilism, merelogical nihilism, or metaphysical nihilism.
On Political Nihilism (specifically nihilist anarchism), I’d suggest checking out the tags nihilism and nihilist at the The Anarchist Library. The works by Renzo Novatore and Aragorn! are great.
On Existential Nihilism, I’d suggest the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on existentialism and perhaps Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
Finally, my philosophy education and reading has been deep rather than broad, so I can’t really think of any general texts. On the other hand, the aforementioned Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy could well be a great help.
On Augustine’s “Unchangeable Truth”
In Augustine’s On Free Choice of Will, he presents, through conversation with Evodius, the idea of an “inner sense”, which rules over the five senses and is in turn ruled over by Reason. From this he argues that there exists an unchangeable truth that is available to our understanding. Augustine claims that this unchangeable truth can be seen behind mathematics, which he calls Number, and Wisdom. However, his argument about this unchangeable truth is uncompelling, as can be seen in Augustine’s assumptions about the nature of mathematics.
On Kant’s “Prolegomena” and Hume’s Problem of Induction
In response to anonymous asks. I could be reading this totally incorrectly, because I have little experience with Kant beyond his idea of the “transcendental self” & its relation to liberalism and his ethics - to me the idea of the “transcendental self” was incoherent and his ethics seemed unjustified when looked at from a meta-ethical perspective. This was weird, because his argument in Prolegomena basically runs backwards.
Firstly, one major part of Hume’s Problem of Induction is that induction relies on the Principle of Uniformity in Nature, which he argues is unjustified.
Kant argues for the Principle of Uniformity in Nature, in a sense.
“there can be a rule-governed nature (in the formal sense) because our understanding demands that items that are thought about be brought under rules. “ (II:36)
Firstly, the idea that a “rule-governed nature” can exist does not imply that it does. Secondly, the idea that the universe would be incomprehensible (which is not even true in all cases) if a “rule-governed nature” did not exist does not in anyway influence whether or not such a universe exists. We could consider a universe with events generated at random, so to speak. Events in such a universe could appear to follow rules, and therefore we would think the universe is comprehensible, even though it is in fact not. This is analogous to a random string being generated with the pattern
0101010101010101010
which is just as likely as
0111010110100110010
or any other pattern-less string of the same length.
He claims that we “experience” and that “there can’t be experience without rules that are universally and therefore necessarily valid” (II:29). This seems incorrect to me - our experiences are interpretations/perceptions of what has happened, they are not predicated on the existence of universal laws governing what we experience. We can see this if we consider a universe where events happen at random. An observer would still have experiences of the events that occur, even though they follow no universal law. Kant does not give any argumentation for the idea that we are not living in such a universe.
Kant completely ignores this and instead states that “Nature is the existence of things insofar as it is governed by universal causal laws” (II:14) and claims that “we do have pure natural science, which discovers a priori certain laws that govern all of nature” (II:15). Here we can see that Kant assumes the Principle of Uniformity in Nature, in that he states that there are a priori natural laws which govern all of nature.
So yeah, based on the above, Kant’s claim that “the Humean problem is completely solved” (II:30) doesn’t seem to stand.
Your thoughts, anon?
Nick Bostrom has written, in my opinion, on some wonderful philosophical works (the Doomsday Argument, the Simulation Argument, etc.). This presents some of his ideas in an easier to understand format.
Nelson Goodman presented a different description of the problem of induction in the third chapter of “Fact, Fiction, and Forecast” entitled “The New Riddle of Induction” (1954). Goodman proposed a new predicate, “grue”. Something is grue if and only if it has been observed to be green before a certain time or blue after that time. The “new” problem of induction is, since all emeralds we have ever seen are both green and grue, why do we suppose that after time T we will find green but not grue emeralds? The standard scientific response is to invoke Occam’s razor.
Goodman, however, points out that the predicate “grue” only appears more complex than the predicate “green” because we have defined grue in terms of blue and green. If we had always been brought up to think in terms of “grue” and “bleen” (where bleen is blue before time T, or green thereafter), we would intuitively consider “green” to be a crazy and complicated predicate. Goodman believed that which scientific hypotheses we favour depend on which predicates are “entrenched” in our language.
W.V.O. Quine offers a practicable solution to this problem by making the metaphysical claim that only predicates that identify a “natural kind” (i.e. a real property of real things) can be legitimately used in a scientific hypothesis.
Victory.
I get to do my honours thesis in philosophy. Two possibilities floated so far:
- Frege (partially supervised by a visiting professor)
- Applications of Turing machines (and algorithmic probability) to the problem of induction (supervised by my favourite philosophy professor)
There is also room for other topics relating to mathematics.
Edit: Canadian followers. Have any of you studied under a University of Toronto lecturer, Imogen Dickie?
deadsullivan said: Would you scrutinize a whale for eating shrimp?
- Humans are seen as having a capacity for morality, and a capacity to make rational choices about our actions, thus humans are considered moral agents.
- Non-human animals are not seen as having a capacity for morality, and a capacity to make rational choices about their actions, thus non-human animals are not considered moral agents.
- So, as animals are not moral agents, they cannot be scrutinised for their lifestyles.
- Please note, a capacity for morality does not set us “above” animals in an objective sense, only apart from them. Whether an animal has a capacity for morality is not relevant to decisions about whether or not to alleviate their suffering.
On an ethical lifestyle and organ donation.
I’m an organ donor. I also am somewhere in between vegan and vegetarian. I see a contradiction in this.
This means that if I die, any of my usable organs will be harvested and transplanted into another human being, if possible. However, the odds of any of the recipients being vegan or vegetarian is very small. Somewhere around 2% of the Western world’s population is vegan with up to a possible 10% being vegetarian.
Here comes my worry. Something in the region of 300 animals are killed over the life of a single meat-eater (according to this on American meat-eaters, but it may be much higher). So, almost all of my organs are going to extend the life of meat-eaters, which means that even if they live for one year, each of my organs is responsible for the death of multiple animals.
On that basis, both vegans and vegetarians should not be organ donors.
Plans for my political philosophy course:
- Post-left/Insurrectionist critique of liberalism
- I/E anarchist critique of freedom and group-rights
- Anarchist critique of territory
- Mutualist/Marxist critique of capitalism
edit: I should remark that I will be subverting the actual course content in which they expect you to critique left with right, etc.
