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Abandonment of Truth ..
Showing posts with label emotion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label emotion. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 April 2021
Abandonment of Truth
18-6-27 Jonathan Haidt | The Abandonment of Truth? - John Anderson > .Examining Irrationality - Alētheiai >> .
Wednesday, 21 April 2021
Friday, 19 March 2021
Lucrative Threats for Invented Sin
How the Medieval Church Frightened People Into Obedience > . (.... and still uses threats and un-deliverable promises of reward)
Marketing Superstition ..
[Caps inserted to differentiate between the institution (C) and places of worship (c)] "The medieval Catholic Church was a mixed bag of corruption, persuasion, and fear-mongering. There are a number of scary historical facts about the Catholic Church, many involving the use of intimidation and coercion against the faithful in an effort to - oddly enough - keep them faithful. Plus, this was a time when [like the modern 3rd world] the majority of people were illiterate and highly superstitious, making it that much easier for the Church to manipulate the population and make them ever dependent upon the Church."
Marketing Superstition ..
Sunday, 31 January 2021
∞ Cognitive Forays
Demise of Weakism? ..
Philosophy
Rapid Romp through Evolution of Philosophy ⇻Sunday, 27 September 2020
Bertie's Politics of Logic
"Bosanquet’s opening complaint about Russell’s methodology was, surprisingly, political. He argued that the ‘scientific’ methodology would inevitably make philosophy ‘cosmopolitan in character and free from special national qualities’. Since logic, and science more generally, respects no political or cultural boundaries, Russell’s philosophy could never function as a distinctive expression of a people. This was a problem for Bosanquet. He held ‘that philosophy, being, like language, art, and poetry, a product of the whole man, is a thing which would forfeit some of its essence if it were to lose its national quality’. British idealism for Britons, and German idealism for Germans."
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"The cosmopolitanism that Bosanquet thought implicit in Russell’s philosophical methodology was no illusion. Two weeks prior to Bosanquet’s attack at the Society, Russell had delivered a lecture at Oxford that would be published under the title ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’. Today it is remembered as a call to arms for logical analysis and it largely restated, in a more pointed way, the methodological outlook of Our Knowledge. Russell’s essay is not overtly political. And yet privately, Russell told one colleague that the talk ‘was partly inspired by disgust at the universal outburst of “righteousness” in all nations since the war began. It seems the essence of virtue is persecution, and it has given me a disgust of all ethical notions, which evidently are chiefly useful as an excuse for murder.’ To another colleague, he described the lecture as ‘inspired by the bloodthirstiness of professors here and in Germany. I gave it at Oxford, and it produced all the disgust I had hoped.’"
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"Russell’s suggestion is that ethical philosophy offers little more than self-serving argument to justify nationalistic violence. What is more, Russell had held up Bosanquet himself as an example of the kind of moralising metaphysics he meant to repudiate. In private, Russell referred to the essay as ‘Philosophers and Pigs’.
The political anxieties at play begin to make sense when one bears in mind the timing of all of this. Bosanquet’s attack was delivered in the midst of the earthquake that was Britain’s entry into the Great War. The quake didn’t just shake soldiers on the battlefield. It also shook intellectuals, and would permanently change the direction of abstract pursuits that might seem highly remote from the concerns of warfare, like epistemology and metaphysics. For Russell, a crucial spark of the violence was nationalism, and he regarded scientific philosophy as a tool for opposing it."
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Russell's theoretical antidote to the irrational, sectarian vitriol between European nations was to try to show how logic could function as an international language that could be used impartially and dispassionately to adjudicate disputes. His theoretical antidote was, in other words, analytic philosophy....
Russell didn’t intend logic to become the language of literature and poetry, much less to destroy those practices. But he very much intended his ‘scientific’ methodology to destroy a conception of philosophy as an articulation of a ‘national mind’.
The connection between Russell’s antinationalism and his metaphilosophy comes out sharply in his political writing of the era. In April 1915, he was again railing against the role philosophers were playing in promoting nationalism:
Leibniz, writing to a French correspondent at a time when France and Hanover were at war, speaks of ‘this war, in which philosophy takes no interest’. … We have travelled far since those days. In modern times, philosophers, professors and intellectuals generally undertake willingly to provide their respective governments with those ingenious distortions and those subtle untruths by which it is made to appear that all good is on one side and all wickedness on the other … I cannot but think that the men of learning, by allowing partiality to colour their thoughts and words, have missed the opportunity of performing a service to mankind for which their training should have specially fitted them. The truth, whatever it may be, is the same in England, France, and Germany, in Russia and in Austria. It will not adapt itself to national needs: it is in its essence neutral....
The UK entered the war August 4th, 1914. By the end of the week, the House of Commons passed the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), which gave the government broad wartime powers – including censorship. In 1916, Russell would be dismissed from his post at Trinity College, Cambridge, following his conviction under DORA (and thanks in part to a campaign at the university led by another British idealist, J M E McTaggart). Russell spent six months in jail for his outspoken pacifism.
https://aeon.co/essays/philosophy-at-war-nationalism-and-logical-analysis .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_entry_into_World_War_I .
Thursday, 24 October 2019
Enlightenment - struggling towards rationality
"The Enlightenment began with the scientific revolution in the mid-17th century, and culminated in the French Revolution at the end of the 18th. ... The Enlightenment was a diverse phenomenon; most of its philosophy stood far apart from Kantianism, let alone from Hegel’s version of Kant. The truth is that Hegel and the 19th-century Romantics, who believed they were moved by a new spirit of beauty and feeling, summoned up the ‘age of reason’ to serve as a foil for their own self-conception. Their Kantian subject was a straw man, as was the dogmatic rationalism of their Enlightenment.
In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – René Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason.
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Another totemic figure of the French Enlightenment was Denis Diderot. Most widely known as the editor of the massively ambitious Encyclopédie (1751-72), Diderot wrote many of its subversive and ironic articles himself – a strategy designed, in part, to avoid the French censors. Diderot did not write down his philosophy in the form of abstract treatises: along with Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade, Diderot was a master of the philosophical novel (as well as experimental and pornographic fiction, satire and art criticism). A century and a half before René Magritte wrote the iconic line ‘This Is Not a Pipe’ under his painting The Treachery of Images (1928-9), Diderot wrote a short story called ‘This Is Not a Story’ (Ceci n’est pas un conte).In France, the philosophes were surprisingly enthusiastic about the passions, and deeply suspicious about abstractions. Rather than holding that reason was the only means of battling error and ignorance, the French Enlightenment emphasised sensation. Many Enlightenment thinkers advocated a polyvocal and playful version of rationality, one that was continuous with the particularities of sensation, imagination and embodiment. Against the inwardness of speculative philosophy – René Descartes and his followers were often the target of choice – the philosophes turned outward, and brought to the fore the body as the point of passionate engagement with the world. You might even go so far as to say that the French Enlightenment tried to produce a philosophy without reason.
...
Diderot did believe in the utility of reason in the pursuit of truth – but he had an acute enthusiasm for the passions, particularly when it came to morality and aesthetics. With many of the key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume, he believed that morality was grounded in sense-experience. Ethical judgment was closely aligned with, even indistinguishable from, aesthetic judgments, he claimed. We judge the beauty of a painting, a landscape or our lover’s face just as we judge the morality of a character in a novel, a play or our own lives – that is, we judge the good and the beautiful directly and without the need of reason. For Diderot, then, eliminating the passions could produce only an abomination. A person without the ability to be affected, either because of the absence of passions or the absence of senses, would be morally monstrous.
That the Enlightenment celebrated sensibility and feeling didn’t entail a rejection of science, however. Quite the opposite: the most sensitive individual – the person with the greatest sensibility – was considered to be the most acute observer of nature. The archetypical example here was a doctor, attuned to the bodily rhythms of patients and their particular symptoms. Instead, it was the speculative system-builder who was the enemy of scientific progress – the Cartesian physician who saw the body as a mere machine, or those who learned medicine by reading Aristotle but not by observing the ill. So the philosophical suspicion of reason was not a rejection of rationality per se; it was only a rejection of reason in isolation from the senses, and alienated from the impassioned body. In this, the philosophes were in fact more closely aligned with the Romantics than the latter liked to believe.
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The Enlightenment did have distinct national characteristics, and even within a single nation it was not monolithic. Some thinkers did invoke a strict dichotomy of reason and the passions, and privilege the a priori over sensation – Kant, most famously. But in this respect Kant was isolated from many, if not most, of his era’s major themes. Particularly in France, rationality was not opposed to sensibility but was predicated on and continuous with it. Romanticism was largely a continuation of Enlightenment themes, not a break or rupture from them."
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