Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Resuming our series on the serious critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s turn to Simon Blackburn’s review in New Statesman from a few months back.  Blackburn’s review is negative, but it is not polemical; on the contrary, he allows that the book is “beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope” and even that there is “charm” to it.  Despite the review’s now somewhat notorious closing paragraph (more on which below) I think Blackburn is trying to be fair to Nagel.

Rosenhouse keeps digging

Here’s a conversation that might occur between grown-ups:

Grown-up #1: I haven’t read Nagel’s book or much of the positive commentary on it, but based on what I’ve seen in the popular press it all seems like a lot of absurd intellectual silliness based on caricature and sheer assertion.

Grown-up #2: Jeez, don’t you think you ought to read it before making such sweeping remarks?  You’re hardly going to get a good sense of the content of a set of complex philosophical arguments from a couple of journalistic pieces!

Grown-up #1: Yeah, I guess so.  Fair enough.

And here’s a conversation between a grown-up and Jason Rosenhouse:

EvolutionBlog needs better Nagel critics

EvolutionBlog’s Jason Rosenhouse tells us in a recent post that he hasn’t read philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  And it seems obvious enough from his remarks that he also hasn’t read the commentary of any of the professional philosophers and theologians who have written about Nagel sympathetically -- such as my own series of posts on Nagel and his critics, or Bill Vallicella’s, or Alvin Plantinga’s review of Nagel, or Alva Noë’s, or John Haldane’s, or William Carroll’s, or J. P. Moreland’s.  What he has read is a critical review of Nagel’s book written by a non-philosopher, and a couple of sympathetic journalistic pieces about Nagel and some of his defenders.  And on that basis he concludes that “Nagel needs better defenders.”

Nagel and his critics, Part VII

Let’s return to our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  New commentary on Nagel’s book continues to appear, and to some extent it repeats points made by earlier reviewers I’ve already responded to.  Here I want to say something about Mohan Matthen’s review in The Philosophers Magazine.  In particular, I want to address what Matthen says about the issue of whether conscious awareness could arise in a purely material cosmos.  (Matthen has also commented on Nagel’s book over at the New APPS blog, e.g. here.)

Review of Kurzweil

My review of Ray Kurzweil’s recent book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed appears in the April 2013 issue of First Things. 

Ferguson on Nagel

In the cover story of the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson reviews the controversy generated by Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  Along the way, he kindly makes reference to what he calls my “dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics.”  For interested readers coming over from The Weekly Standard, here are some links to the articles to which Ferguson is referring, with brief descriptions of their contents.

Capital punishment lecture

This Friday, March 15, I’ll be speaking at California State University, San Bernardino on the topic “Is Capital Punishment Just?”  Details here.

(The short answer, as my longtime readers know, is “Yes.”  I’ve discussed the issue on the blog and elsewhere many times, such as here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.  But the talk on Friday will address some fundamental issues about the grounds of punishment in general that are not discussed in these earlier articles and posts.)

The whole man

My recent review of Michael Gazzaniga’s Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain is now available online at the Claremont Review of Books website.  And while you’re on the subject of philosophical anthropology, you might also take a look at William Carroll’s recent Public Discourse article “Who Am I? The Building of Bionic Man.”

Spare not the Rod

David Bentley Hart’s First Things article on natural law, which I criticized a few days ago, got some positive responses elsewhere in the blogosphere.  One of its fans is Rod Dreher at The American Conservative, who wrote:

If you don’t believe there is any cosmic order undergirding the visible world, and if you don’t believe that you are obliged to harmonize your own behavior with that unseen order (the Tao, you might say), then why should you bind yourself to moral precepts you find disagreeable or uncongenial?  The most human act could be not to yield to nature, but to defy nature.  Why shouldn’t you?  Or, to look at it another way, why should we consider our own individual desires unnatural?  Does the man who sexually and emotionally desires union with another man defying [sic] nature?  Well, says Hart, it depends on what you consider nature to be.

Well, yes, it does.  This is news?  Who, exactly, are the natural law theorists who have ever denied this?

Philosophy on radio (UPDATED)

I’ll be appearing later today on Catholic Answers Live, at 4:00 pm (Pacific time).  Today’s show is billed as an “Open Forum for Atheists,” so have at it.  Links to some previous radio interviews can be found here.

UPDATE: The podcast of the show is now available here.

A Christian Hart, a Humean head

Note: The following article is cross-posted over at First Things.

In a piece in the March issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart suggests that the arguments of natural law theorists are bound to be ineffectual in the public square.  The reason is that such arguments mistakenly presuppose that there is sufficient conceptual common ground between natural law theorists and their opponents for fruitful moral debate to be possible.  In particular, they presuppose that “the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind, regardless of religious belief or cultural formation.”  In fact, Hart claims, there is no such common ground, insofar as “our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions.”  For Hart, it is only when we look at nature from a very specific religious and cultural perspective that we will see it the way natural law theorists need us to see it in order for their arguments to be compelling.  And since such a perspective on nature “must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations,” as a deliverance of special divine revelation rather than secular reason, it is inevitably one that not all parties to public debate are going to share.

Back from Lafayette

Back today from Lafayette, Louisiana, where I gave a talk (available for viewing via Vimeo -- or, alternatively, on YouTube) at Our Lady of Wisdom Church and Catholic Student Center, adjacent to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  I thank my host Fr. Bryce Sibley and the other folks at the Church and Center for their warm hospitality.  The fine group of guys you see above are some readers with whom Fr. Sibley and I had a nice evening of gumbo, whiskey, and philosophical and theological discussion. 

Forgetting nothing, learning nothing

Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing managed something few thought possible -- to outdo Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in sheer intellectual frivolousness.  Nor was my First Things review of the book by any means the only one to call attention to its painfully evident foibles.  Many commentators with no theological ax to grind -- such as David Albert, Massimo Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne -- slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy.  Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When even Jerry Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time to throw in the towel.  Causa finita est.  Game over.  Shut the hell up already. 

But Krauss likes nothing so much as the sound of his own voice, even when he’s got nothing of interest to say.  A friend calls my attention to a recent Australian television appearance in which Krauss, his arrogance as undiminished as his cluelessness, commits the same puerile fallacies friends and enemies alike have been calling him out on for over a year now.  Is there any point in flogging a horse by now so far past dead that even the Brits wouldn’t make a lasagna out of him?  There is, so long as there’s still even one hapless reader who somehow mistakes this wan ghost for Bucephalus.

Noë on the origin of life etc.

UC Berkeley philosopher (and atheist) Alva Noë is, as we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  In a recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s book, focusing on the question of the origin of life.  Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say, due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago.  Our problem isn't merely historical in nature, that is.  If that were all that was at stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life in a test tube.  But we can't do that.  We don't know how.

Back from Blackfriars

Back from Oxford, and exhausted.  I thank Bill Carroll and the Dominicans at Blackfriars for their warm hospitality.  (And thanks to Brother James of Blackfriars for taking the photo, elsewhere in Oxford.)  Regular blogging will resume ASAP.

The limits of eliminativism

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a variety of anti-realism, which is in turn typically contrasted with realist and reductionist positions.  A realist account of some phenomenon takes it to be both real and essentially what it appears to be.  A reductionist account of some phenomenon takes it to be real but not what it appears to be.  An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our account of the world altogether.  Instrumentalism is a milder version of anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

New ACPQ article

My article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” appears in the latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  Here is the abstract:

James Ross developed a simple and powerful argument for the immateriality of the intellect, an argument rooted in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition while drawing on ideas from analytic philosophers Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, and Nelson Goodman.  This paper provides a detailed exposition and defense of the argument, filling out aspects that Ross left sketchy.  In particular, it elucidates the argument’s relationship to its Aristotelian-Scholastic and analytic antecedents, and to Kripke’s work especially; and it responds to objections or potential objections to be found in the work of contemporary writers like Peter Dillard, Robert Pasnau, Brian Leftow, and Paul Churchland.

Around the net

I’m a bit “Nagel-ed out” at the moment, but before long I’ll be writing up at least one or two more installments in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and its critics.  In the meantime, The New York Times has covered the controversy over the book, H. Allen Orr has reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books, and Mohan Matthen has reviewed it in The Philosopher’s Magazine.  In the blogosphere, we have commentary from Keith Burgess-Jackson and from Wes Alwan at The Partially Examined Life.  I’ll comment on some of this myself soon.