Philosophy Now ISSUE 74 July/Aug 09

EDITORIAL & NEWS Philosophy Now,

4 The Edge of Knowledge Grant Bartley 43a Jerningham Road,
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WAYS OF KNOWING Tel. 020 7639 7314
6 Is Psychology Science? rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Peter Rickman on hermeneutics www.philosophynow.org

8 Analytic versus Continental Philosophy Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis

Kile Jones thinks across the great divide Editor Anja Steinbauer
Assistant Editor Grant Bartley
12 Would My Zen Master Fail Me For Writing This? Graphic Design Grant Bartley, Anja
Patrick Cox explains Zen’s suspicion of explanations Steinbauer, Rick Lewis
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14 Evaluating the Scientificness of Theories Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Russell Berg has a set of criteria Reviews Editor Charles Echelbarger
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18 Feyerabend and the Monster ‘Science’ Administration Ewa Stacey
Ian James Kidd on a renegade philosopher of science Advertising Team

OTHER ARTICLES
21 Interview: Charles Taylor Chris Bloor talks to
Ways to Know Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org
UK Editors
pages 6-20 and elsewhere Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
a philosopher of culture and difference Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
24 Logic: Predestination and the Wagers of Sin US Editors
Robert Howell boxes clever with fate Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher
College), Andrew Chrucky,
26 Ethics: The Golden Rule: Not So Golden Anymore Prof. Charles Echelbarger (SUNY),
Stephen Anderson isn’t totally positive about doing to others Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer (Delta College),
Prof. Jonathan Adler (CUNY)
REVIEWS Contributing Editors
38 Book: C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.)
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40 Book: A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism Gregory, John Heawood, Kate Leech
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July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 3

Editorial
E pistemology is the mining boss of philosophy. It digs deep
into the foundations even of philosophy itself. The word
means the study of knowledge (from the Greek episteme meaning
‘knowledge’ or ‘belief’, or in some circles, ‘faith’.) Its question is,
How can we be sure about anything?
René Descartes asked this question in its most radical form
when he said: if a powerful, evil demon set out to mislead us
about everything, then how could we tell? If we couldn’t tell, how
do we know that there really isn’t such a demon?
Less generally, how can you ever credibly claim to know
something before you can say how you know it? Put this way, it’s
not hard to see that epistemology is at the base of science,
philosophy, religion and many other areas of human endeavour.
But the ways we know things may differ from field to field.
How do we know when a theory is scientifically valid? Here,
what we want to know is whether it is an accurate description of
the world, within its limits. The methodology of science is to
compare the theory with whatever it is that the theory is about,
then refine the theory as necessary until it gives a description
consistent with what is observed. (As to which theories are scien-
tific, a set of possible criteria is proposed by Russell Berg on
p.14.) Science is about the observed world. The principle of how
we know something to be true in science is, we know this is the
way the observed world behaves because this is how it may best (ideally,
incontrovertibly) be observed to behave.
Maths proofs are good for maths. In an attempt to uncover a
general pattern for knowledge, perhaps we could redescribe the
process of mathematical discovery so that it too could be thought
of as comparing a theory to what that theory is about. Here the
evidence for the conclusion would be the steps it takes to get
there. Similarly for arguments of logical symbolism: the evidence
would be the steps in the argument. Thus what counts as
evidence would be different for different domains, evidently.
(Philosophy doesn’t count as purely logical, because as soon as
signs are used as language, possible meanings for each sign
multiply exponentially. Peter Rickman argues on p.6 that
psychology cannot be considered science for this precise reason.)
Aside from the incontrovertible parts of science, maths and
logic, can any other way of thinking strictly be called ‘knowledge’
– that is, yielding an assurance of truth? Could there be ways to
what might rightly be called knowledge concerning religious
experience, emotional intuitions, philosophical ideas too?
Why/why not? (And which way? Kile Jones reports on the split
between analytical and continental philosophy in thought and
method on p.8.) To say that ‘religious experience’ for instance is
inadmissible as evidence begs the question of what is admissible.
4 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
The Edge of
Knowledge
However, the enquirer should also ask why and which religious
experience is admissible. Why trust this type? The unflinching
claim to know something without the willingness (or ability) to
respectably say how, is the most philosopher-baiting aspect of
dogmatism. The core impulse of reason, the demand for under-
standing, requires openness to all questions, especially
concerning how ideological claims to knowledge are justified,
because of the significant implications of these claims. On the
other hand, a sceptic’s lack of imagination is not necessarily the
same as a discernment of truth. We look at religious
knowledge-claims from both sides in the book reviews section
of this issue.
Even if in the less provable areas we can’t have what could
strictly be called knowledge, in the sense of ‘incontrovertible
assurance’, so what? Doesn’t the question of what to believe in
these situations simply soften into ‘What’s the most reasonable
thing to believe?’ This will not satisfy the truly paranoid
Cartesian, but scepticism to the extent that we can’t trust
anything we can’t incontrovertibly demonstrate, is only really
useful as an exercise in delimiting the borders of certainty.
Nevertheless, it’s a paradox of philosophy, or at least an
irritation, that you can’t often prove philosophical views; you can
only give your best reasons to support them – and these are
only the reasons you’re prepared to settle for... On the bright
side the acknowledgement of fallibility can have a moderating
effect on the passions of zealotry. As with anything, the claims
of any religion are only as justified as the best reasons to believe
they’re true – yet a wider appreciation of this fact this might just
take the edge off the absolute justification of idiotic and
barbaric acts in the name of The Truth.
The value of a good philosophy of knowledge can be seen in
all the fruits of science. Thus, contrary to Descartes’ mental
quicksand, and in the face of the fears of all who do not trust
questioning – who fear their belief-systems might be under-
mined by too many questions – we can view the epistemological
mission as benevolent: to increase the stock, strength and detail
of our most reasonable beliefs by providing them with the
strongest foundation of justification possible; and perhaps to
open up new ways of knowing. Engaging the epistemological
understanding which is the touchstone of scientific research was
like stepping into a hidden grotto universe. Who knows what
knowledge is possible if we find equally good ways of knowing
for other areas of enquiry too?
Grant Bartley is Assistant Editor of Philosophy Now. His book The
Metarevolution is available as a free download from
philosophynow.org. Scroll down to ‘About Us’, then click the link.
• The impermanence of the Dalai Lama-ship •
• Happiness breaks out everywhere •
• Bishops still generally annoyed •
News reports by Sue Roberts.
Souled Out
A senior Catholic bishop believes that
Britain has sold its soul to the pursuit of
scientific knowledge above all else. The
Most Rev Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of
Birmingham, believes that because only
provable facts are now considered valu-
able, arguments based on morality and
spirituality are being ignored. In a new
book about the rise of secularism, The
Nation That Forgot God, Nichols claims
that faith has been relegated to an indi-
vidual pursuit, and the country has sought
to define itself by secular and material
standards. In his view, society lacks cohe-
sion when there are no common values,
while the virtues of compassion, respect
and tolerance cannot survive once severed
from their roots in Christian teaching.
However, this view of Britain as a
secular society isn’t shared by Dr Rowan
Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
He claims that it is a country “uncomfort-
ably haunted by the memory of religion”
and not knowing what to do with it. He
cites the piles of flowers left at the scenes
of road accidents as potent symbols of
such a society. With regard to the
Church’s attitude to other faiths he says
“The ideal in a plural society is everyone
has the respect to say what they want. A
country in which we are all nervous about
offending each other is not a free society.”
Frankenstein Sperm
The debate over stem cell research has
been reignited by an announcement in the
journal Stem Cells and Development of what
could become an astonishing breakthrough
in fertility treatment. Researchers at the
Northeast England Stem Cell Institute
have created human sperm in the labora-
tory, from stem cells harvested from the
skin of the ‘parent’. The researchers
believe that with minor changes the sperm
could theoretically fertilise an egg to
create a child. If so, it could mean that in
years to come the technique might enable
infertile couples to have children who are
genetically their own.
Even more controversially, it might be
possible to create sperm from stem cells
collected from the skin of a woman. This
could leave men out of the reproductive
process altogether. At present the UK’s
Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act
bans the use of artificially-created sperm
and eggs in fertility treatment.
Some experts are sceptical of the claim,
saying that the cells did not constitute
‘authentic sperm’ with all the necessary
biological characteristics. Josephine Quin-
tavalle, rhe founder of Comment on
Reproductive Ethics, described the
research as “totally wrong... science must
be totally ethical and totally safe.”
Healthy, Happy Planet 1
The Happy Planet Index measures life
expectancy, happiness and environmental
impact on people of different nations.
Nick Marks, who devised the Index,
reported that the top 10 Happy nations
are middle-income countries in Latin
America, Asia and the Caribbean, where
there is high level of life satisfaction and a
low carbon footprint. On the other hand,
Britain ranked 74th out of 143 countries,
with Australia 109th and USA 114th.
All Change
The Dalai Lama has told fellow exiles
in India that the tradition of a monk
leading Tibet’s Buddhists by divine right
should end with him, and that in the inter-
ests of democracy, future leaders should be
elected. As the 14th Dalai Lama, (Jetsun
Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe)
Tenzin Gyatso has been Tibet’s spiritual
leader during six decades of turmoil.
The Tibetan parliament-in-exile will
debate this pivotal reform, but attitudes
may be very hard to change. A young man
of 24, Osel Hita Torres, was believed by
some to be the reincarnation of the
previous Lama when only five months old.
He was chosen by the Dalai Lama over
others to be raised accordingly. In keeping
with tradition, he was taken from his
home, and from 14 months old he lived in
News
a monastery and was treated like a god.
But Osel has now completely turned his
back on the order that held him in such
esteem. In spite of this rejection, and
although wearing normal clothing and
studying film in Spain, he is still revered
by many Tibetans.
Healthy, Happy Planet 2
In an attempt to improve customer
services, the Keihin Electric Express
Railway in Japan plan to subject their
workers to a ‘smile scan’ computer that
produces a smile rating between zero to
100 (depending on estimated value of the
fulfilled potential of that person’s biggest
smile). Workers will receive print-outs
each day, and be expected to keep them
throughout the day to inspire them to
smile at all times. Meanwhile, drivers on
the London underground are trying to lift
travellers’ spirits by reading out philo-
sophical quotes along with their normal
announcements. A book of quotations
from Jean-Paul Sartre, Mahatma Gandhi,
Albert Einstein and other great thinkers
has been compiled by the artist Jeremy
Deller. Such pronouncements as “An
ounce of actions is worth a ton of theory”
(Friedrich Engels) will now compete for
attention with sudoku or the daily cross-
word puzzle.
Euthanasia Overruled
Two former UK Cabinet Ministers,
Lord Falconer and Baroness Jay, recently
attempted to change the law to remove the
threat of prosecution from people who
take terminally ill loved ones to die abroad
in ‘suicide clinics’. However, their amend-
ment to the Coroners and Justice Bill was
rejected by a vote of 194 to 141. It is
believed that 115 people from Britain have
travelled overseas to die since 2002.
Currently, assisting suicide is a crime in
Britain, punishable by up to 14 years
imprisonment. The rejection of the Bill
was blamed on fears of giving a ‘green
light’ to the state sanctioning of all assisted
suicide.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 5
Is Psychology Science?
Science
Peter Rickman tells us why it isn’t

I
was slightly taken aback when I heard a speaker at a psy-
chology lecture meeting claiming confidently that psy-
chology was a science. Of course, if we define science
broadly, as the systematic search for knowledge, psychol-
ogy would qualify for that label. But it is not terminology that
is at issue here, but a matter of substantial importance.
When we talk of science, we primarily think of physical sci-
ence. If a mother said that her son was studying science at
Cambridge, would psychology come first to the listener’s
mind? The paradigm of the physical sciences is physics,
because its elegant theories based on ample observation and
experimentation provide clear explanations and reliable predic-
tions. It also provides the foundations for the technologies
which have transformed our lives. The man on the Clapham
bus may not understand the laws of physics, but he happily
relies on the means of transport based on those laws.
In consequence, the methods of physics become the model
of scientific methodology. The different disciplines concerned
with the study of humanity, such as psychology, sociology and
anthropology, seem to fall woefully short of this. The concepts
and theories of these disciplines are not consistently coordi-
nated; and their application does not compare with that of
physical sciences. While aeroplanes are pretty reliable, and mil-
lions of people enjoy television programmes, there are still too
many divorces and mental breakdowns. Groups of violent
youths still roam the city streets.
Unobservable Truths
Many students of the mind sought the remedy for their fail-
ures and their lack of public esteem in modelling the methods of
psychology on the physical sciences. An extreme example of this
is behaviourism. Why not focus on studying observable human
behaviour, as you can study the movements of falling bodies and
theorise on that evidence? After all, humans are behaving
bodies. There are various flaws in this approach, and one of
them is illustrated by a well-targeted joke. Two behaviourists
spend a night passionately making love. In the morning, one
says to the other, “It was good for you. How was it for me?”
A proper starting point is to recognise the disciplines which
study human nature as a distinct group which require, if not a
complete alternative to the scientific method, at least some
essential supplementary methodology.
The fact is that the bulk of the evidence given to the student
of humanity on which to theorise, are not observable facts, but
communications. These do not correspond to anything observ-
able. In other words, what is in front of the psychologist are
statements from interviews or completed questionnaires (eg, I
am afraid of dying, I was abused in childhood, etc), responses
to tests such as the Rorschach pictures, diaries, and the like.
Similarly, sociologists use interviews, questionnaires and legal
documents, while historians use biographies, letters, inscrip-
tions on gravestones, eyewitness accounts of battles and revolu-
tions and similar material. The same is true of other human
studies such as social anthropology or politics.
All this is pretty obvious and non-controversial. It needs
mentioning because of widespread error of taking what is com-
municated in this material as simple data whose meaning is
transparent. What is thus ignored is the immense complexity
of the process of communication. For instance, the question, as
well as the answers, may be misunderstood, or respondents
may be lying to please the questioner, motivated by pride or
shame or simply by wanting to get rid of the questioner. A lady
confessed to me that when canvassers of different parties come
to the door at election time, she says to all of them, “Yes I shall
vote for you,” and closes the door. Or, if a stranger rings your
doorbell and asks you how often you have sex, will you neces-
sarily tell him the truth? Certainly, commercial companies have
been the loser when trying to sell goods because of so many
people trying to be liked when answering their questionnaires.
An anecdote I quoted in one of my books illustrates one
type of miscommunication. An investigator was puzzled when a
man in prison answered ‘no’ to the questionnaire query ‘Were
you ever in trouble with the police?’ He went to see the man
and asked: “How come you gave that answer? After all, you are
serving a prison sentence.” The man answered: “Oh, I thought
you meant trouble.”
A case of partial failure in understanding is the famous study
of the Authoritarian Personality, which successfully demon-
strated some personality traits of fascists. It was later shown
that the characteristics pinpointed were not confined to fas-
cists, but also shared by members of left-wing parties. Here the
interpretation of the data was flawed by political naïvety.
It follows that the human studies cannot naïvely ape physical
science. If they don’t want to resign themselves to being woolly
and merely anecdotal, they must therefore address themselves
systematically to the complex problems of communication.

6 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009


Hermes and Hermeneutics
There is an ancient discipline concerned with the interpreta-
tion of communications. In Ancient Greece, education focused
on the study of literary texts. The theory and methodological
approach for the understanding of such texts was called
hermeneutics, after Hermes, the messenger of the gods. With
the advent of Christianity, quarrels and schisms arose over the
exact meaning of Biblical texts. To help settle these differences
of opinion hermeneutics then became a branch of theology.
This systematic textual interpretation continued throughout
Antiquity and the Middle Ages up to modern times. Schleier-
macher, philosopher, theologian and translator of Plato, was a
professor of hermeneutics who widened the concept of this
discipline. Not only texts but all other kinds of communication
needed interpretation and could be subjected to this type of
examination. Wilhelm Dilthey, a pupil of some of Schleierma-
cher’s followers, systematically developed Schleiermacher’s
approach, demonstrating the vital contribution hermeneutics
had to make to the human studies.
This is not the place for a full, systematic account of
hermeneutics, but it is the place for drawing attention to some
distinctive features of its
methodology which are
highly relevant. First,
Hermes, the messenger of the gods, painted by Hendrick Goltzius (1611)
one needs to emphasise
that unlike physical sci-
ence, the focus of under-
standing in hermeneutics
is not classes but individu-
als. Primarily, we aim to
understand a poem, not
poetry in general; a par-
ticular person, not the
group to which he
belongs. By contrast, in
physics or chemistry, the
example investigated is
not of intrinsic interest.
Once the experiment is
finished, the contents of
the test tube may be
poured down the sink:
they’re only useful inas-
much as they help form
general laws. Yet in the
human studies, the individual thing studied – it may be a
person, a family or a whole community – remains of interest.
The classic sociological study of ‘Middletown’ or the analyses
of Sigmund Freud are examples.
Physical objects are substantially explained in terms of the
class to which they belong. This is a diamond, this is a table,
etc, and they behave in such-and-such ways. But such explana-
tions of human beings – eg, she is a woman, he is a teenager,
etc – are inadequate, and often rightly condemned as stereo-
typing. Instead, we tend to better understand individuals by
placing them their context. A simple example concerns the way
in which the correct meaning of a word is only specified by the
sentence and general context in which it occurs. Terms such as
John Donne
1572-1631
‘club’ or ‘file’ have sev-
eral distinct defini-
tions, and the meaning
is determined only in
the particular state-
ment in which they
occur. Similarly, a ges-
ture like raising your
hand might be understood
as a greeting, a threat, or oth-
erwise, according to other
aspects of the circumstances which
accompany the act.
Each meaningful expression is a crossing point of contexts.
Take, for example, the John Donne poem ‘The Sun Rising’:
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Its grammar and vocabulary is obviously one of its contexts;
but the context is also the history of the sonnets, Donne’s per-
sonality, and the conditions and conventions of his age. To
understand the poem with insight – though on one level it
appears to be immediately accessible – we have to trace the dif-
ferent contexts as far as is fruitful and practicable.
Different Types of Disciplines
Because of the distinct methodologies involved, the distinc-
tion between the two groups of disciplines, the physical sci-
ences and the human studies, is both necessary and justified.
Of course, there are features common to both groups. Such
processes as checking data, forming and testing hypotheses and
the like, are required for all systematic research. Some of the
methods of the physical sciences are also required in the social
studies. The authenticity of manuscripts may need to be chem-
ically tested, vital statistics analysed, and the like. Typical
methods of the human studies are also not wholly absent from
the physical sciences. For example, in astronomy, the move-
ments of planets may be explained with reference to their con-
texts, such as their relation to other planets or against the
background of the stars.
It remains true, however, that a human study such as psychol-
ogy is not a science in the same sense as physics, because what-
ever it shares with the scientific method, it also receives essential
support from the methods of hermeneutics. Faced with commu-
nications, we need to establish the background, likely knowl-
edge and personal motives of the communicator.
© PROF. PETER RICKMAN 2009
Peter Rickman was for many years head of the (now-closed) philoso-
phy unit at City University in London.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 7
 Analytic versus
Continental Philosophy
S
Kile Jones explains the differences between these ways of thinking
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet
hakespeare never met Wittgenstein, Russell, or Ryle,
and one wonders what a conversation between them
would have been like. “What’s in a name, you ask?”
Wittgenstein might answer “A riddle of symbols.”
Russell might respond “An explanation of concepts,”
and Ryle might retort “Many unneeded problems.” What
might Hegel, Husserl, or Nietzsche reply? It seems odd to
even ask such a question, but why? To answer that, we need to
look at the philosophical traditions which these thinkers
inhabit. This will reveal the differences at the heart of the divi-
sion between what have become known as ‘analytic’ and ‘conti-
nental’ philosophy. I hope that by understanding these two
philosophical camps we may better understand their differ-
ences and similarities, as well as how they might compliment
each other.
Typical Definitions
In order to lay a general framework let’s start with some
typical definitions that scholars give, despite the fact that these
definitions tend towards over-generalization or over-simplifi-
cation. In his well-known collection of essays on this subject, A
House Divided, C.G. Prado begins with their difference in
methodology. He says:
“The heart of the analytic/Continental opposition is most evident in method-
ology, that is, in a focus on analysis or on synthesis. Analytic philosophers
SOMETHING OR NOTHING CARTOON © CHRIS GILL 2009. PLEASE VISIT CGILLCARTOONS.CA FOR MORE
8 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
typically try to solve fairly delineated philosophical problems by reducing
them to their parts and to the relations in which these parts stand. Continen-
tal philosophers typically address large questions in a synthetic or integrative
way, and consider particular issues to be ‘parts of the larger unities’ and as
properly understood and dealt with only when fitted into those unities.” (p.10.)
So analytic philosophy is concerned with analysis – analysis
of thought, language, logic, knowledge, mind, etc; whereas
continental philosophy is concerned with synthesis – synthesis
of modernity with history, individuals with society, and specu-
lation with application.
Neil Levy sees this methodological difference as well; in
Metaphilosophy, Vol. 34, No 3, he describes analytic philosophy
as a “problem-solving activity,” and continental philosophy as
closer “to the humanistic traditions and to literature and art...
it tends to be more ‘politically engaged.” Hans-Johann Glock
remarks in The Rise of Analytic Philosophy that “analytic philoso-
phy is a respectable science or skill; it uses specific techniques
to tackle discrete problems with definite results.”
Although these distinctions are helpful in understanding the
larger picture, they can be overgeneralizations. To say for
instance that there are no thinkers in analytic philosophy who
write political philosophy or harvest the blessings of history is
to be mistaken. One need only think of A Theory of Justice by
John Rawls or The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand
Russell. On the other side, it is not as if continental philosophy
has nothing to contribute to logic or language; Hegel wrote
extensively on logic, and Heidegger extensively on language. In
fact, every philosopher, if they are at all comprehensive, can be
found to make this line more blurry. Therefore, we must be
watchful in our generalizations, realizing
that any definitive assertion is likely to be
tentative at best.
With this warning in mind it should
equally be noted that these generalizations
contain partial truths. Philosophy of mind,
for instance, is strictly analytical: Hilary
Putnam, Daniel Dennett, David
Chalmers, J.J.C. Smart are all analytic
thinkers, and to look for this analysis in
traditional continental philosophy is like
looking for Prester John. Likewise, it is
almost impossible to find analytic philoso-
phers discussing phenomenology. This
reveals that these two camps are clearly
divergent in emphasis and have different
places in philosophy. They have different
trajectories, motives, goals, and tools, and
must be understood in light of their inde-
pendent and differing traditions. The
question now is, how did these different
traditions come about?
 The Split of Traditions
Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
If we must start somewhere to find the beginning of this
by Schlesinger, 1831
split, perhaps we should begin with the Sage of Königsberg,
the great Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant constructed a
theory of knowledge to explain how ‘synthetic cognition is
possible a priori’ [broadly, how there are some things that we
can work out by reason alone which aren’t just matters of defi-
nition – Ed]. One crucial step in his process is the bifurcation
between two realms: the noumenal (things as they are in them-
selves) and the phenomenal (things as they appear to us). There
is a chasm, says Kant, between what is known in appearance,
and what is beyond any possible experience, and so unknowable
(eg God, immortality, freedom). However, there were two
major backlashes against Kant’s doctrines.
The first of these came in the works of G.W.F. Hegel
(1770-1831), from whom many of the Continental philoso-
phers of the 20th century directly or indirectly drew inspira-
tion. Hegel’s backlash was primarily against Kant’s separation
of the noumenal from the phenomenal, ie of reality in itself
from its appearance. For Hegel there could be no such divi-
sion, because he believed all of reality was united in one Idea.
There could be no epistemic chasm between the knowable and
unknowable, for there’s nothing outside the Idea left to be
unknown.
Hegel became the precursor of the traditional continental
emphasis on grand overarching narratives and the inclusion of a posteriori (dependent on observation) truths; and they said
everything (literature, history, art, etc) into philosophy’s quest. that the only truths are either tautological (true by definition)
Speaking on this last aspect of continental philosophy, Michel or empirical (verified by observation).
Foucault noted that “from Hegel to Sartre [continental philoso- Therefore, these two reactions to Kant led to the formation
phy] has essentially been a totalizing enterprise.” of two distinct schools of philosophy, each with their separate
By the late 19th century Hegel’s idealist approach dominated attitude towards metaphysics and epistemology, thus having
philosophy right across Europe and even in Britain the leading differing philosophical methodologies and trajectories.
philosophers – like F.H. Bradley, J.M.E. McTaggart and
Thomas Hill Green – were Hegelians. But as the century Heidegger and Wittgenstein Widen the Split
closed, a second backlash against Kant was brewing both in As the continental post-Hegelians formulated their various
Cambridge and in Vienna. dialectical metaphysics, and while the Vienna Circle con-
While Hegel had reacted to Kant’s two-tiered epistemic structed logically-oriented theories of knowledge, German
reality, others now reacted against Kant’s synthetic a priori. professor Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was constructing his
G.E. Moore led the attack in Cambridge, rapidly convincing theories of ontology [ontology means ‘the study of being’ – Ed].
his colleague Bertrand Russell. Moore insisted on the impor- For Heidegger philosophy is, and should be, essentially ontol-
tance of analysing concepts; Russell, who was a philosopher of ogy. He describes philosophy as “universal phenomenological
mathematics, developed a reductionist approach to knowledge ontology” (Being and Time, p.62), placing Being in an elite
called logical atomism and a general focus on particular logical philosophical category because “it pertains to every entity.”
problems in opposition to any sort of totalizing enterprise, Contrary to the Vienna Circle, which saw philosophy as
both of which things led him away from the Hegelians. Mean- mainly an epistemological project, Heidegger argued that
while, Ernst Mach, a leading physicist and philosopher, saw Being precedes knowledge, and that phenomena (the contents
Kant’s joining of metaphysics and epistemology as hazardous of experience) must be studied prior to any logical categoriza-
to science, and even referred to Kant’s epistemology as ‘mon- tion or interpretation. This turn toward phenomenology cre-
strous.’ A group of philosophers in Vienna eventually gathered ated in Heidegger a distaste for logical analysis in philosophical
around the philosopher Moritz Schlick, with the intention of problems: Richard Matthews describes Heidegger as “trying to
furthering Mach’s philosophy. They first called themselves the place limits upon logic” and seeking “to free philosophy from
‘Ernst Mach Society’ but eventually became known as the logic”, yet one could go further and say that Heidegger cancels
Vienna Circle. Among the many goals of this circle of philoso- out logic in favour of a pre-logical phenomenology.
phers, were the eradication of metaphysics (Carnap), reclaim- Meanwhile there were numerous shifts in emphasis in ana-
ing the supremacy of logic in philosophy (Gödel), linguistic lytic philosophy. The revolutionary Tractatus Logico-Philosophi-
conventionalism (Waismann), and also the debunking of Kant’s cus by Russell’s student Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) led
‘synthetic a priori’. Those in the Vienna Circle instead made it to focus on the philosophy of language. Wittgenstein had
the Humean distinction between a priori (non-observable) and developed a theory which saw propositions as logical pictures

July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 9

of states of affairs in the world. This meant that sentences
were only meaningful if they painted such pictures. Thus,
along with Carnap and the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein found
himself destroying metaphysics and God-talk. In a lecture in
1929, Wittgenstein noted that:
“in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes.
But a simile must be the simile for something. And if I can describe a fact
by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe
the facts without it. Now in our case, as soon as we try to drop the simile
and simply to state the facts which stand behind it, we find that there are
no such facts. And so, what at first appeared to be simile now seems to be
mere nonsense.”
Not only was Wittgenstein a fulcrum in the long analytic
tradition of anti-God-talk, he created in analytic philosophy a
mentality which saw the analysis of language as a tool whereby
‘philosophical pseudo-problems’ could be deflated. What were
once held to be conceptual or logical problems were, accord-
ing to Wittgenstein, mere mistakes about language – problems
created by stepping beyond the limits of language, or through
semantically misguided statements that confused the logic of
language, to be dissolved by an analysis of the propositions in
question.
The Rise of Existentialism and Logical Positivism
In post WWII France, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) popu-
larised ‘phenomenological ontology’, which is how he
described existentialism. This has had decisive effects on Conti-
nental thought up to the present. For Sartre, human ontology
is united in its complete subjectivity: we are what we choose
and what we experience. Picking up Heidegger’s teaching of
the Dasein (being-there), Sartre identifies humans as existential
beings – we have been thrown into an uncaring world and we
find we are inescapably free and inescapably responsible for
our actions. Sartre famously remarks:
“I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain aban-
doned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water,
but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help,
engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being
able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an
instant.” (Being & Nothingness, p710.)
His friend Albert Camus (1913-1960) would find genuine
absurdity in our existential state. For Camus, “the absurd is the
essential concept and the first truth” and “accepting the absur-
dity of everything around us is... a necessary experience” (An
Absurd Reasoning, pp.15, 16.) Embracing and challenging the
absurd character of the world brought about true and authen-
tic experience. Yet there were two threats in embracing the
absurd: it might lead to despair and possible suicide; or it could
lead to idealism and ignorance. The goal is to balance between
these extremes of idealism and despair.
Continental philosophy was undergoing a shift while Sartre
and Camus were publishing their numerous works. No longer
were continental thinkers engaged in a totalizing project, but a
firm individualism. Hegel’s utopian ideas about the grand
10 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
sweep of history had not foreseen WWII and the rise of
National Socialism. Because of that war, continental philoso-
phers realized that any enterprise which sought a power
monopoly, even philosophy itself, was to be mistrusted.
Meanwhile, “the rise of analytic philosophy”, Robert Hanna
noted, “decisively marked the end of the century-long domi-
nance of Kant’s philosophy in Europe” (Kant and the Foundation
of Analytic Philosophy, p.5). Logical Positivism brought the
thoughts of the Vienna Circle to fruition while decisively
framing the focus of analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell
described his similar program of ‘logical analysis’ thus:
“All this [religious dogma and metaphysics] is rejected by the philosophers
who make logical analysis the main business of philosophy… For this renun-
ciation they have been rewarded by the discovery that many questions, for-
merly obscured by the fog of metaphysics, can be answered with precision.”
(The History of Western Philosophy, p.835.)
The procedure he named ‘logical analysis’ was to focus on
logical issues, philosophical problems and epistemology with
the tools of scientific testing and procedure, to avoid being
caught in the unprofitable web of speculative metaphysics.
This ethos became the trademark of analytic philosophy and
defined its methodology and trajectory. This was how analytic
philosophy was truly defined as a separate way of doing philos-
ophy over and against the continental.
Postmodernism as Modern Continental Philosophy
On the continent of Europe, existentialism largely ended
with Sartre and de Beauvoir, but a succession of other move-
ments there have continued a general trend of sceptical, anti-
authoritarian philosophy. Structuralism gave way to post-
structuralism and, with Jacques Derrida, to deconstructionism.
Foucault examined issues of government control, madness and
sexuality; Baudrillard raised questions on hyper-reality and
simulacra, and Vattimo resurrected nihilism. These various
developments are all loosely called ‘postmodernism’. It’s a hard
term to define, but what can be said is that it is about the task
of deconstructing absolute views of reality, truth, value, and
meaning. The meta-narratives of German Idealism come
sharply under scrutiny in postmodernism, for these overarching
systems of meaning have, in the postmodern view, only left
their hopefuls sadly disappointed. Postmodernists view parts of
analytic philosophy as similarly too optimistic and overly self-
satisfied – for instance, analytic philosophy’s trust in logic and
science can be seen as ignoring the big issues of meaning and
existence. Postmodernism can now be seen as a main terminus
within continental philosophy for continuing many of its classi-
cal traditions.
Philosophy of Mind as Modern Analytic Philosophy
In the late twentieth century philosophy of mind became
one of the main concerns of analytic philosophy. Hilary
Putnam, one of the great pioneers of modern philosophy of
mind, introduced ideas that he thought would solve the prob-
lem of how the mind and the brain relate. He became one of
the founders of functionalism, a theory which analyses mental
states in terms of their function. He also put forth a theory of
‘multiple realizability’, which posits that differing types of
physical entities could experience the same mental state if
there were the right organisational similarities. By contrast,
Donald Davidson became the champion for a theory known as
‘non-reductive physicalism’, which states that only physical
objects can cause physical effects, but that the mind is not
entirely reducible to the physical brain. David Chalmers,
director of the Center for Consciousness at Australian
National University, has argued that the mind cannot be
reducible to the physical brain because of various hypothetical
arguments, including the possibility of zombies. All of these
theories are within the tradition of analytic philosophy.
Summary: The Story So Far
There were two distinct responses to Kant’s metaphysical
and epistemological theories: one by Hegel and much later the
other by the Vienna Circle. Hegel rejected Kant’s two-tiered
world by advocating a strict ontological monism, while the
Circle rejected Kant’s synthetic a priori by dividing what can be
known into tautologies and empirically verifiable data. Hei-
degger translates Hegel’s idealist ontology into phenomenol-
ogy by placing strict emphasis on being-in-the-world.
Wittgenstein enters the philosophical scene with his analysis of
language, fueling the anti-metaphysical fire of the Vienna Circle
by postulating the criteria that language must mirror observable
nature and nature alone, if it is to be considered meaningful.
Over on the Continent, existentialism adopted many of the
teachings of the phenomenologists and added issues of exis-
tence, freedom, angst and absurdity. In England, Logical Posi-
tivism continued the analytic tradition of the Vienna Circle;
Russell and A.J. Ayer constructed various theories of knowl-
edge and methods of logical analysis. In recent times post-
modernism has emerged as a dominant strand of continental
philosophy. Postmodernism attacks absolutist views of truth,
historical meta-narratives, idealistic metaphysics and linguis-
tic/semantic realism. On the analytic side, modern philosophy
of mind has emerged as a strong movement which incorpo-
rates analytic thinking with biology, neuroscience, and physics.
Thus, continental philosophy started with German idealism,
which was translated into phenomenology, reconstructed in
existentialism, and is currently still in postmodernist mode.
Analytic philosophy started as a reaction to Kant’s epistemol-
ogy in the Vienna Circle, picked up its linguistic impetus
through Wittgenstein, became strictly formulated by Logical
Positivists and others, and continues today strongly in philoso-
phy of mind, among other disciplines.
What are we to do with analytic and continental philoso-
phy, then? Neil Levy makes a great and simple wish when he
writes that we “could hope to combine the strengths of each:
to forge a kind of philosophy with the historical awareness of
continental philosophy and the rigor of analytic philosophy.”
(Metaphilosophy, Vol. 34, No.3.) If we are to keep a balance, we
must understand that both camps have methods, trajectories,
and emphasis that can be honored and incorporated into a syn-
thesis. This is not to mean that we must believe everything.
Rather, we should realize that there are correct and incorrect
starting points, methods and answers in both analytic and con-
tinental philosophy. What a philosopher is dealing with –
specifically, what question she’s trying to answer – largely
determines what emphasis she will have. Yet philosophy can
also be done interchangeably: there is a way of doing analytic
phenomenology, and of doing phenomenological analysis; sci-
entific history and historically-minded science; epistemological
ethics and ethical epistemology.
Although it may be possible to use both camps to construct a
balanced philosophy of life, it becomes quite difficult once one
gets into specialized fields. When anyone enters the philosophy
of mind, for instance, they necessarily find themselves using
the methods of analytic philosophy.
What to Learn from Both Traditions
Each camp has something unique to contribute to philoso-
phy. Analytic philosophy should be able to enter into phenom-
enology, existentialism, literature, and politics with the same
enthusiasm as continental philosophy. It should also realize
that philosophy is not without a history; philosophy is a histor-
ical movement which tackles social and political questions as
well as more technical problems of logic and epistemology. To
assume that analytic philosophy is above the social and histori-
cal currents of its time is to canonize a golden calf and ignore
the wider reality. Similarly, the average person may not care
about answering the Problem of Induction or the Liar Para-
dox, but may wonder what life, existence, and history means to
her. She may be questioning her political situation or her place
within society, and to presume that what she’s asking are not
philosophical questions belittles the scope of philosophy.
Continental philosophy may have some things to learn as
well. It might need to realize that all reasoning must assume
that logic is meaningful and necessary; that language is intri-
cately connected with our ability to convey meaning, and that
epistemology is one of the most crucial areas to investigate:
whenever we are making assertions or expounding propositions
we act as if our ability to know is correct and justified. It seems
obvious that existence and Being are vital to philosophy, yet
analytic philosophers might ask how we know that to be true.
Continental philosophy may be forgetting those basics neces-
sary for intelligible experience. Science, logic, and the analysis
of language are not the only things that matter, but neither are
literature, art, and history.
What is the difference between a philosopher and a philan-
thropist? One is questioning issues pertaining to the life of the
mind, while the other is engaging in social concern and virtu-
ous living. We must never negate one for the other: they both
have a role to fill, and to harmonize them is the greatest of
goals. The balance between love and knowledge, the knowing
and the doing of the good, is the philosopher’s ideal state, and
the promised land to which the modern sage must set her eyes.
There is a great hope standing before contemporary philoso-
phy, somewhere between skepticism and dogmatism, nihilism
and idealism, logic and art. There is a hope for a progress with
humility, which will aid humanity not only epistemically but
also ethically.
© KILE JONES 2009
Kile Jones is pursuing a Masters of Sacred Theology (S.T.M.) at
Boston University on top of holding a Masters of Theological Studies
(M.T.S.) from the same institution.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 11
 Would My Zen Master Fail
Me For Writing This Article?
Patrick Cox tells us why Zen has to use words to get beyond words
I
n Zen Buddhism, one often finds ‘explanation’ spoken about
in a negative manner. But in writing on Zen, one necessar-
ily explains; explaining something is often the only purpose
of an article or book. Can Zen and explanation be reconciled?
What about concepts? Concepts (ideas) are the atoms of
explanation: they are what make up explanation. Zen is not
fond of concepts, and instructs students of Zen to avoid them.
“This mind is no mind of conceptual thought” says The Zen
Teaching of Huang Po, translated by John Blofeld, p.33. The
mind one is supposed to achieve in Zen is not a mind of con-
ceptualization: “[T]he concepts we have of things do not reflect
and cannot convey reality” as Thich Nhat Hanh says in Zen
Keys, p.41. This is why concepts are very frequently spoken of in
a negative manner in Zen. Yet when one attempts to convey to
others what Zen is, one must use concepts to explain it.
I’ll begin by discussing passages on explanation from books
on Zen, and then discuss the nature of Zen. To determine the
role of and view of explanatory concepts in Zen, I focus on its
method, its purpose, and the nature of a koan. To provide an
example of explaining Zen that hopefully resonates well with the
reader, I also explain a fundamental goal in Zen, achieving mind-
fulness. Finally, I come to a conclusion regarding the question
expressed in the title. Overall, I focus on the nature of purpose
and method in Zen Buddhism, and their interplay. These two
things play a crucial role in determining my answer.
Expressing the Inexpressible
“Those who speak of [Reality] do not attempt to explain It.”
Huang-Po says in The Zen Teaching of Huang Po p.31. How can
a Zen book, which spends chapter after chapter explaining
Zen, place explanation in such a low position? “The essence of
Zen is awakening. This is why one does not talk about Zen, one
experiences it” (Zen Keys, p.49). Yet to say “This is why” as Hanh
does repeatedly in Zen Keys, is obviously to explain something.
So explanation plays an important role in Zen, but so does
the lack thereof. Zen directs students to break free from a false
understanding of concepts as reality. Zen masters use confusing
and seemingly illogical koans [surprise sayings or questions] to
shock their students to the point that they grasp reality and
stop clinging to false concepts. But while masters intentionally
avoid explicitly advocating concepts and explanation, one does
not require exposure to ancient wisdom to predict that expla-
nation and concepts are used by Zen masters in teaching Zen.
A story equally lucidly shows the method of not explaining
in Zen. Someone seeking understanding of Zen goes back and
forth between a senior monk and the head monk, asking about
the essence of Zen. Instead of an explanation, he gets beaten
for asking the questions. He finally shows his understanding by
saying, “After all, there is not much in Huang Po’s Buddhism.”
Wing-Tsit Chan considers this anti-explanatory point to be
“one of the five most important in Zen” (A Source Book in Chi-
12 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
nese Philosophy, p.449). Yet even the fact that this story appears
in a work that attempts to teach Zen, shows that explanation
has some place in Zen. If Zen masters use explanation, but do
not explicitly afford it a lofty role in teaching, then what is its
role in Zen? The methods used in and the purposes identified
in Zen, and the overall nature of Zen books, hold the answer.
So let us now take a closer look at Zen’s purpose and meth-
ods. The purpose of Zen is to become fully aware at every moment.
One is supposed to become mindful of things in the world or the
situation one is in at each instant: to become fully aware of the
tea that one is drinking, for example. “In short, the whole philos-
ophy of the various methods is to broaden a person’s vision,
sharpen his imaginations, and sensitize his mind so that he can
see and grasp truth instantly any time and anywhere.” (A Source
Book in Chinese Philosophy, p.429). In other words, the goal of Zen
is maximum awareness of reality, unmediated by false concepts.
(Although Zen resists the tendency to define ‘reality’, let me
provide a definition of what I understand to constitute reality
for Zen, acknowledging my inability to do full justice to the
reality Zen mind can make known, and which experience veri-
fies. Reality is everything that can be perceived by the senses and con-
ceived by the intellect. Zen considers the non-Zen mind to view
reality through concepts and sensory data, which results in a
failure to fully understand it. Zen does not regard this common
partial understanding of reality as completely wrong; rather,
our normal conceptions are regrettably far from the perfect
understanding of reality that Zen mind tries to help us achieve.)
For Zen, mindfulness refers to awareness of all that crosses
the path of one’s faculties of sensation, and of all that pertains
to oneself as a moral being – a being who must make decisions
regarding actions in the world. As the mind is a sense organ in
Buddhism, the former includes various concepts like drinking,
cup, and tea as well as the sensory data that derives from the
experience of drinking a cup of tea. Zen mind grasps all such
sense contents perfectly and without effort – without thinking
through any of it, so to speak. Yet far from viewing all knowl-
edge as equal, it seems that in Zen mind the assessment of one’s
acquired knowledge is of primary necessity. However, true Zen
mind transcends even the attempt to prioritize ideas in terms of
importance, as Zen mind is the perfect awareness of reality and
does not rely on the division of reality through concepts.
Conceiving No Concepts
In Zen, concepts are used to explain why concepts should be
avoided: indeed, Zen books spend pages explaining why con-
cepts are to be avoided. In Zen Keys, the example of the experi-
ence of drinking tea is contrasted to one’s description of drink-
ing tea. One uses concepts to describe the situation, but the
concepts are not the reality. Thich Nhat Hanh explains that
one can drink tea in ‘mindfulness’; but when one tries later to
describe the experience, one must conceptualize to distinguish
this experience from others. So what is one lacking when one
conceptualizes? One lacks awareness of reality.
Hanh also speaks of prejudicial concepts, or prejudices, as
an inhibitor to understanding reality. Yet this is to affirm only
that Zen is markedly anti-dogmatic, because any proponent of
reason understands that prejudice prevents one from seeing
reality. In addition, Hanh distinguishes between things them-
selves and the concepts we have of them. Whereas things are
dynamic, concepts are static (Zen Keys, p.40). So to mentally
grasp the reality of things we would have to be more fluid and
less static in our approach to concepts. Furthermore, Hanh
states that ‘wood’ and ‘old’, for example, are more than our
concepts of them. This suggests that concepts can be inhibit-
ing; but not necessarily that they are not useful in the path to
enlightenment. Moreover, not every Zen master would speak
explicitly about concepts as static or as prejudices to explain
their inhibiting power. And whether or not every Zen master
would agree with such terminology is an open question.
What, then, is the practical method for achieving awareness?
More immediately important than questions about the outside
world, people must rid themselves of their subjective approach to
the world. Thus, even concepts and explanation are not being
criticized by Zen on a purely philosophical or truth-seeking
level. Zen is concerned with the method we must employ to
attain mindfulness. Zen’s concerns are of the most practical
nature: students are to seek practical enlightenment. They are
not to be interested in speculative philosophical questions, for
example. It understands the necessity for people to work on
making themselves more aware of the world before they can
change anything in the world for the better. Thus Zen identifies
the need for people to control themselves before they can reach
truth and deep awareness: “[I]t is impossible to organize things
if you yourself are not in order,” Shunryu Suzuki says in Zen
Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p.231. One must control the self before
attempting to use one’s mind to understand matters outside of
the self. In contrast, a quotation from Hanh gets at the method
by saying that we do not achieve mindfulness because of our-
selves, our desires, or intentions: “To intend to realize the Way
is opposed to the Way” (Zen Keys, p.50). Here again, Zen is con-
cerned with specifically human inhibitions to awareness – that
is, with the problem of human subjectivity.
Explaining No Explanations
Let’s further explore the nature of the methods used to
teach Zen. “The best way to control people is to encourage
them to be mischievous” (Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, p.235).
This quote exemplifies Zen’s oppositional nature as it seeks to
free us from the persuasive force of concepts. “Our body and
mind are both two and one... [O]ur life is not only plural, but
also singular” (p.229). This quote shows us that Zen employs
the method of telling its students things that the students will
find paradoxical, unexpected, and perhaps contradictory.
The original meaning of the word ‘koan’ is ‘decree’, sug-
gesting “the final determination of truth and falsehood.” (A
Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, p.429). Chan further states
that the koan is perhaps the “most misunderstood technique”
in Zen: “Zen Masters made use of any story, problem, or situa-
tion, the more shocking the better.” (ibid). Chan states that the
answers to koans are often interpreted to mean that the truth is
mysterious and irrational, but “Nothing is farther from the
truth.” Koans are tailored to the individual. Usually, they con-
sist of a question and an answer, and, as Chan stated, they are
meant to shock the student. Would such paradoxical sayings be
used for people who would thus be quickly turned off? No, for
Zen would not allow such an impractical approach to teaching.
This opens up room for an explanation of explanation in Zen.
The method of Zen is certainly not intended to make
people feel emotionally insecure and become confused to the
point of despair due to a lack of belief in themselves or in their
capacity to understand Zen. That would mean they never
achieve mindfulness. When Zen speaks of not concerning one-
self with reason, conceptualization, or explanation, it is not
referring to the definition of reason as the mental capacity to
know and to understand things; nor to the meaning of expla-
nation as that process which is fundamental to learning. Practi-
cally any book written on Zen by a Zen master clearly mani-
fests this latter use of explanation, showing, without explicitly
admitting, that explanation is at least fundamental to dialogue.
Zen does not find it useful to clarify this, because its method is
precisely to provide the student of Zen with statements that
shock us beyond explanations. Moreover, Zen will likely never
say explicitly that explanation is fundamental to learning pre-
cisely because we are so accustomed to thinking that explana-
tion is fundamental to learning: rather, Zen frequently reminds
us that explanation has been unsuccessful at producing in us
Zen understanding. Thus, the means by which Zen thinks we
will achieve mindfulness are markedly different from the
means by which this article, as an abstract explanation of dis-
tinctions, reconciliations, and methods, hopes to help us
achieve enlightenment. However, the goal of Zen and the goal
of the explanatory approach in this article is the same.
Whereas Zen intends for us to keep striving for awareness
while avoiding explicitly telling us to think of awareness as the
most important idea in life, an explanatory approach does allow
for the cultivation of this idea of awareness. The explanatory
approach allows the concept of awareness to be placed above
more inhibiting concepts, and subsequently, to be the guiding
force in our everyday life. If awareness is precisely what Zen
always aims at, then there is no danger, at least for many prac-
titioners, if the idea of awareness takes precedence over all
other concepts. I must stress that I am not stating dogmatically
that Zen is about the prioritization of ideas; but the practicality
of Zen leads to me think that it should not be excluded as a
possibility. While complete awareness of reality might be diffi-
cult to achieve, that does not discredit the idea that one should
always strive for it in the ways that one can as a finite being.
However, I also recognize that most ardent students of Zen
will instead achieve mindfulness from their masters’ koans.
Zen masters themselves often use explanation and concepts,
so an explanation of Zen could certainly be written with mind-
fulness. My Zen master, therefore, would not necessarily fail
me for writing this, as I might well have written it with Zen
mind – although he could very well disagree with my explana-
tory approach to teaching Zen.
© PATRICK COX 2009
Patrick Cox received his B.A. in philosophy & religion, psychology,
and political science from Boston University and is currently finishing
an M.A. in political philosophy at the University of Dallas.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 13
 Evaluating Scientific Theories
Russell Berg has fifteen criteria for scientificness and he knows how to use them

T
he ‘scientific method’ is a group of methods and proce-
dures. But since Thomas Kuhn argued in the 1960s
that the concept of ‘falsification’ formulated by Karl
Popper is insufficient on its own to determine the scientificness
of an idea, there has been no method of distinguishing scien-
tific theories from non-scientific ones. Kuhn himself muddied
the waters by rejecting the established rules for determining
scientific results, to broaden the conception of science to
include economics and psychoanalysis. The problem with this,
as Kuhn admitted, was that it makes it extremely difficult to
distinguish between science and pseudo-science. Examples of
the consequences are that in America creationists are arguing
that Creation Science and Darwinian Evolution should be
given equal time in school biology lessons. Alternatively, theo-
retical physicists have produced concepts such as string theory,
justified purely by its mathematical elegance, without any
experimental evidence. This is perhaps also pseudo-science.
As if this is not enough, scientific ideas such as Marshall’s
theory that stomach ulcers and stomach cancer are caused by a
bacterium were shunned for many years due to the combined
efforts of vested interests (ie pharmaceutical companies), plus
senior doctors’ and scientists’ fixed beliefs about the possibility
of microbes surviving in low pH, despite the evidence. Mean-
while, alternative medicine with little scientific merit – home-
opathy, aroma therapy etc – is funded by the NHS. What have
the philosophers of science been doing all this time?
From a utilitarian perspective a method for quantifying sci-
entificness would be worthwhile if it leads to a clearer distinc-
tion between science and pseudo-science, rejection of ineffec-
tive and unscientific medicine and a better grasp of the scien-
tific method amongst the general public. It would mean new
theories being judged on their scientific merit rather than
being hyped or hindered by vested interest and subjective prej-
udice. I see no theoretical reason why the quantification of sci-
entificness should be less reliable than the quantification of risk
which currently takes place in health and safety and food safety.
The next problem is what is the best method for quantifying
the quality of being scientific. I’ve chosen a simple descriptive
method so that as many people as possible may evaluate the
evaluation. In a more academic exercise, I would have chosen a
more enumerative approach which would provide significance
levels when comparing theories for scientific quality, such as
non-parametric enumerative statistics, discussing the merits of
a Wilcoxon test against each criteria vs a Kruskal-Wallis one-
way analysis of variance by ranks, or even the Friedman two-
way analysis of variance by ranks. But that’s for another day.
However to obtain a better tool for a job, we have to start
with a basic tool. The wheel had to be invented before the
pneumatic tyre. Therefore, the following fifteen criteria may
be used to evaluate the scientificness of theories, and a theory
can be scored against each criteria. When the aggregate score
is known, the theory will have a ‘Scientific Quotient’ (SQ).
Fifteen Criteria For Scientificness
1) Does the theory use natural explanations?
Thales of Miletus, the first recorded natural philosopher,
believed that natural events have natural explanations, not
divine. This rejection of explanations invoking gods or spirits
led to the need for natural explanations and the development of
the scientific method. Untestable supernatural explanations act
as stoppers which prevent or retard further enquiry or research.
2) Does the theory use rational, inductive argument?
Rational deductive arguments are based on logical inference
rather than appeal to authority. Rational inductive arguments
are uncertain but plausible explanations based on evidence con-
cerning cause and effect claims. A theory must use inductive
argument to be scientific (cf 9). An early example is Anaximan-
der’s claim that man must have been born from animals of
another kind, as humans alone require a long period of nursing.
3) Is the theory based on an analytical reductionist
approach rather than a synthetic approach?
Reductionism is the attempt to understand complex things by
analysing them in terms of their parts or simplest aspects.
Reductionism was first used by Thales, when he claimed that all
is water. A synthetic approach is the opposite of reductionism,
in that it attempts to build a system of explanation from theory
and usually results in added layers of complexity normally based
on argument alone rather than substantial evidence. Examples
are Plato’s forms, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist historicism
and string theory evoking extra dimensions.
4) Is the theory self-consistent?
According to Aristotle, the Principle of Non-Contradiction is
the most fundamental principle of logic and thus of thought.
The need for consistency is a manifestation of this principle.
Most theories are self-consistent, but occasionally a theory
can be internally inconsistent. Such theories are however

14 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

sometimes useful as transitional ideas. Take Rutherford’s solar
system model of the atom, in which electrons are imagined to
orbit the nucleus of the atom in a similar manner to planets
orbiting the sun. This model is inconsistent because electrons
orbiting the nucleus would emit electromagnetic radiation,
which would result in loss of kinetic energy, causing the elec-
trons to slow down and fall towards the nucleus, quickly collid-
ing with it. But the solar system model was a useful stimulus
for further thought about the structure of the atom.
5) Does the theory involve a mechanistic approach?
A mechanistic approach explains how a proposed idea works.
This is in contrast to an approach which simply states that a
situation is so (or less dogmatically, may be so). A good example
of a mechanistic approach is the kinetic theory of gases. This
states that as the temperature of a gas rises the molecules move
faster so that they are more likely to collide; hence they
become more reactive. This also explains why the pressure
increases with temperature if the volume of a gas remains con-
stant, as the molecules collide more frequently with walls of
the container as the temperature rises.
By contrast, a non-mechanistic approach is often taken by
extreme reductionism, such as Thales’s claim that all is water.
Sometimes a theory is formulated without an explanation of how
it works, such as Newton’s law of gravity and Darwin’s theory
of evolution; but good scientific theories will become mecha-
nistic as new observations are obtained or ideas are proffered.
6) Are qualities given quantities?
Pythagoras first successfully assigned quantity to quality when
he discovered that the pitch of a note depends on the length of
the string which produces it: hence concordant intervals in
musical scales are produced by simple numerical ratios. Accord-
ing to Arthur Koestler, this first successful reduction of quality
to quantity was the first step towards the mathematization of
human experience, and therefore was the beginning of science.
each with different values for these six constants.
e) This is the only universe, and the constants have their value
by pure chance.
f) This is the only universe, and the values of the six constants
are not independent but fundamentally linked together in ways
which we currently do not understand, due to theories of
physics which have not yet been formulated.
The present question is, which of these six theories is the
simplest, all other things being equal? They would not be
equal if we started to pick up information from another uni-
verse, or there was strong evidence for a yet-unknown theory
of physics that explains how these constants are linked.
Theories a) to d) all involve extra entities not required by
theories e) and f). So the question now becomes, is e) or f) the
simpler theory? I think that saying that the six constants are
linked actually produces a simpler model of the universe, so
according to this interpretation, theory f) should be the one
investigated first.
8) Does the theory conform to existing scientific under-
standing?
Scientific theories do not stand alone, but relate to other scien-
tific theories, hence it is not adequate for a scientific theory to
be merely self-consistent: the theory should also be consistent
with the existing body of scientific knowledge. However,
sometimes the evidence for an incompatible new theory is so
overwhelming that an existing theory has to be amended,
revised, or even dropped, so the situation isn’t simple.
When Alfred Wegener first proposed Continental Drift in
1912 to explain why the coast of Africa seems to fit into the
coast of South America like a jigsaw piece, the majority of
geologists did not accept that masses as large as continents

7) Is the theory the simplest way to explain the data?

The first person to formulate this principle was William of
Ockham, hence it’s referred to as Ockham’s Razor. (Ockham’s
formulation was ‘entitia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessi-
tatem’: ‘entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity’.) It
has been extended to the idea that the best interpretation of a
phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible. This
principle is also referred to as the Law of Parsimony or the Law
of Succinctness. Ockham used it to argue that ideal forms in the
mind of God were unnecessary for entities in this world to exist.
In Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer
Royal, discusses six physical constants fundamental to the struc-
ture of the universe, such as the speed of light. If any of these
values were slightly different the universe would not be capable
of supporting life. However, the probability of all six constants
randomly having a value that would together give rise to a life-
supporting-universe is very low, so how did it happen?
Possible explanations are:
a) God gave the constants their values.
b) The constants were set by another intelligent designer.
c) The universe is a computer simulation.
d) This universe is one of many in a multiverse of universes,

July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 15

could move round the surface of the Earth. However, after the
Second World War, evidence was discovered that supported
plate tectonics. Paleomagnetic studies found a striped pattern
of magnetic reversals in the Earth’s crust, which showed that
the crust was moving around. Also, most seismic activity was
found to occur along the lines where the plates would be col-
liding. The anti-mobilists’ understanding had to be revised in
the face of the new evidence.
A general rule of thumb is that the greater and the more
fundamental changes required to existing scientific thinking,
the more conclusive the evidence must be for the challenger
theory to obtain scientific orthodoxy, as this will only be possi-
ble after the more established theories have been reviewed. It
is unlikely that existing theories will be reviewed if a new con-
flicting theory is proffered without any substantial evidence.
9) Is the theory based on observed data?
The gathering of data is the first stage of the inductive process
developed by Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. It became
the basis of Newtonian science, and empiricism generally.
This is where science parts from philosophy. In philosophy,
theories can be based purely on speculation without the
burden of data-gathering. Plato’s division between body and
soul and his theory of forms were products of speculation
rather than observation or gathered data, for example. How-
ever, science is concerned with what may be observed.
10) Has the theory been tested?
At the beginning of the eighteenth century Georg Stahl pro-
posed the existence of ‘phlogiston’ to explain why some sub-
stances burned and others do not. According to this theory,
substances which burnt contained phlogiston, which was
released by the fire. The problems were that phlogiston had
never been isolated.
The quantification of qualities (see 6) had then barely entered
chemistry. But Lavoisier tested the theory of phlogiston by care-
fully making measurements, and he found it wanting. Lavoisier
showed that when metal is burned it increases in weight, and the
air in a closed container suffers a corresponding loss of weight.
So the metal doesn’t lose phlogiston by burning it; rather, it
gains something else. After further experimentation, Lavoisier
proved that only one fifth of the air could support combustion,
and he concluded that it was this ‘oxygen’ which combined
with the metal during burning. The theory of gases had come
into being, and the theory of phlogiston was dead.
There was a similar occurrence in 1948, when Hoyle, Bondi
and Gold proposed the Steady State Theory to explain the
observation of galaxies moving away from each other. They
claimed that the universe had always existed in the state it was
now, and that matter formed from nothing in the spaces
between the galaxies, which coalesced into stars and new galax-
ies, pushing the others away and making space for more matter
to form. The problem was this theory hardly made any predic-
tions which could be tested (see 14) – except for the creation of
matter between galaxies, which had never been observed and
would be very difficult to observe in any case.
However the alternative Big Bang Theory made testable
predictions, one of the most important being that there would
be background radiation from the Big Bang. The background
16 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
radiation was discovered by Penzias and Wilson by accident in
1964, in the microwave range, at about 3.5º above absolute
zero. Also in the early 1960s, radio astronomer Martin Ryle
discovered that the further away (and so back in time) he
looked, the greater the percentage of radio galaxies. This
showed that the universe had changed with time. The Steady
State theory suffered a similar fate to the phlogiston theory.
11) Do the results of the tests plausibly support the theory?
Homeopathy was invented at the beginning of the 19th Cen-
tury by Samuel Hahnemann, who proposed that ill people
could be treated by medicines that would be harmful to
healthy people. Even more controversial was his belief that the
more dilute the medicine the more potent the vanishing drug.
In contemporary homeopathy the solution is diluted to half its
strength thirty times, making it unlikely that there is even one
molecule of the ‘active’ ingredient in the final medicine.
Homeopaths get round the problem of the lack of medicine in
the medicine by claiming that water has memory. This con-
flicts with existing scientific understanding (see 8), yet testing
by the double blind method does show that homeopathy is of
some benefit. However, this benefit is of equivalent power to
the placebo effect. Hence there is not adequate evidence for
the claim that water has memory. (When homeopathy started,
conventional medicine was less scientific and included many
untested treatments which often did more harm than good, so
the more ‘neutral’ homeopathy rapidly gained popularity. How-
ever, conventional medicine has progressed scientifically but
homeopathy has not, being trapped in a blind alley.)
12) Are the experiments repeatable by different experimenters?
In 1989 two scientists in America, Fleischmann and Pons,
claimed they’d achieved nuclear fusion at relatively low temper-
ature – in a standard laboratory, rather than at the exceedingly
high temperatures which occur in a star or a particle accelera-
tor. If cold fusion is possible, the world’s energy supply would
be virtually limitless. However despite numerous attempts by
other scientists, none succeeded in repeating their ‘results’.
13) Can the theory be falsified?
Experiments can be set up to disprove some theories, but
others might not be potentially falsifiable. Theories that cannot
be disproved by experiments fall into two categories: those
intrinsically immune to experimentation, and those that cannot
be disproved by experimentation due to lack of technology.
The concept of falsification was formulated by Karl Popper
when investigating the differences between dogmatic and critical
thinking. Dogmatic thinkers, including the followers of Marx
and Freud, try to interpret all events in terms of their favoured
theory or beliefs, whilst a critical thinker tries to find the flaws in
theories – especially their favoured ones. Popper gives Einstein as
an example of a critical thinker, when Einstein said “If the red-
shift of spectral lines due to the gravitational potential should
not exist, then the general theory of relativity will be untenable.”
14) Does the theory have predictive elements?
Without a predictive element, science would be an esoteric or
speculative subject, the output of which would only be higher-
definition ‘Just So Stories’. It’s the predictive element which
gives science its practical value, allowing us to say how materi- A disadvantage of this approach is the subjectivity in the
als will behave or what various reactions will produce. This weighting of the criteria and the scoring process. However this
made possible the technology which changed the world during problem can be offset by choosing an expert panel to evaluate
the industrial and information revolutions. Physics underpins the theory against the criteria. (This is not meant to exclude an
the technology of locomotives and jets. amateur from calculating a scientific quotient.)
As medicine has become more scientific it has been more There are other complications too. History shows us that
successful. Dr Alexander Fleming observed the mould Penicil- whether or not a theory is scientific can change in the light of
lium retard the growth of the bacterium Staphylococcus, and pre- new evidence or new techniques. What is currently not
dicted that penicillin could be used to treat bacterial disease. testable can become testable, for example. The first six criteria
Also, Marshall’s theory that stomach ulcers are caused by bac- given are intrinsic properties of theories, not alterable by new
teria and hence are treatable by antibiotics, has proved correct. data or techniques. The criteria of simplicity, conformity, falsifi-
cation and predictive elements are transitional, insofar as new data
15) How accurate are the predictions based on the theory? and techniques are highly unlikely to change this part of a
Scientific theories are not the only explanatory systems that theory’s nature with time. The remaining five criteria are extrin-
produce predictions. Long before there was science there were sic properties that are likely to change as new data is gathered
oracles, the most famous being the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi. or new techniques become available.
However, her prophecies were not subject to the statistical The aspects of a theory’s scientificness are not independent.
analysis used to test modern scientific predictions. Also, like For example, just because a theory is based upon observed and
the quatrains of Nostradamus, Oracular predictions were gathered data it does not necessarily mean that the theory is
ambiguous and relied on equivocation. When King Croesus of accurate or is the simplest (see 7). Moreover, the criteria are
Lydia asked the Oracle what would happen if he went to war not of equal weight. Some of the criteria given above are nec-
against Persia, the Oracle prophesied that a great empire essary for a theory to be scientific, others more amorphously
would fall. She just didn’t say whose great empire. influential. We can combine this scientific quotient scoring
The predictions based on the laws of motion of Newtonian system with a star system in which all the necessary criteria for a
physics, for instance, are very different. These laws were used theory being scientific are given a star (as shown), and so theo-
to accurately predict when Halley’s comet would next be visible. ries are unscientific if they do not pass all the starred criteria.
Unfortunately not all theories which claim to be scientific These criteria include: Is the theory self-consistent? Is the
are as accurate in their predictions as Newton’s. Marxist theory theory based on data? Has the theory been tested? etc. How-
(which Marxists claim to be scientific) claims that it can predict ever, a star system alone would not distinguish the degree of
future historical periods: in Marxist theory the feudal period is fulfilment of criteria between two competing theories, unlike
succeeded by the capitalist period, which is succeeded by the the Scientific Quotient system. Before the background radia-
socialist period, which in turn is succeeded by the communist tion from the Big Bang was discovered it was inconclusive
period. But according to Marxist theory the countries which which was the stronger theory. However, using the Scientific
would be the first to undergo socialist revolution would be the Quotient system, I think the Big Bang theory would still have
advanced capitalist ones, Britain, Germany or the United had a higher score. It would have fared better on simplicity, a
States, not the peasant-based economies of Russia or China. single creation then expansion being a simpler explanation
This prediction failed, even though it was a very broad theory. than the continuous creation of matter. Also, at that time the
Big Bang theory was more in tune with the rest of physics than
Critical Qualifications Of The Criteria matter being formed in interstellar space (violating the first
Let us briefly compare some well-known theories by assign- law of thermodynamics), and so had a stronger fulfilment of
ing scientific quotients according to each of these criteria: criterion 8.
Furthermore, many theories at the boundaries of science
Evolution Creationism ID (Score out of 10.
1. Natural Explanation * 9 1 8 Stars indicate a
would cease to be scientific having failed to obtain stars for
2. Rational Argument * 8 6 8 necessary criterion.) ‘Has the theory been tested?’ Currently string theory and mul-
3. Reductionist Approach 9 2 2 tiverse theory would fall into that category. And by the mecha-
4. Self-Consistent * 10 10 10 nistic criterion, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selec-
5. Mechanistic Approach * 10 1 1 tion could have been said to be unscientific until Watson and
6. Qualities in Quantities 6 1 1 Crick discovered DNA. I would think it fairer to say these are
7. Simplicity 8 3 4 untested or otherwise incomplete rather than claim that they
8. Conformity 9 2 4 are unscientific. If we acknowledge that some of the necessary
9. Data Based * 9 2 3
criteria for being scientific are extrinsic (dependent on factors
10. Tested and Verified * 9 1 6
other than the theory itself), the claim that whether a theory is
11. Supported by Test Results 6 1 4
scientific or not could change with time. Or perhaps we can
12. Repeatability 1 1 1
13. Falsification 6 1 2
augment our vocabulary and say that there are immature scien-
14. Predictive Elements 6 1 1 tific theories. As I say, this theory of evaluation is itself in its
15. Accuracy of Predictions 4 1 1 preliminary stages.
TOTAL/150 110 34 56 © RUSSELL BERG 2009
SQ: 73 23 37 Russell Berg studied at the University of Leeds and is currently
VERDICT: SCIENTIFIC? YES NO NO working as a food microbiologist.

July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 17

Paul Feyerabend
And The Monster ‘Science’
Ian James Kidd introduces an iconic iconoclast of the philosophy of science.

P
aul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was not a conventional
philosopher – a fact he delighted in and took great
care to maintain. He trained as an opera singer and a
physicist, and only came to philosophy by accident, as
he freely admitted. He disliked academia and was consistently
critical of the philosophy of science, once describing it as “a
subject with a great past.” Feyerabend was also unwilling to
confine his research to the bounds set by academic convention.
His writing makes generous appeal to Hesiod and Homer, to
Renaissance art and sculpture, and he moves easily between Pla-
tonic epistemology and astrology, quantum mechanics and the
history of witchcraft. His personality is also evident in his use of
rhetoric, provocation, humour and anecdote in his writing.
For these reasons then, it is interesting to find that Feyer-
abend was also an eminent and influential philosopher. He
became one of the ‘Big Four’ philosophers of science of the last
half of the twentieth century, alongside Karl
Popper, Thomas Kuhn and his close friend Imré
and “used entities such as space and time and objective existence
but without examining them.” (Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, p.80.)
Mach insisted on pursuing the philosophical implications of sci-
entific research not merely as a tangential and perhaps idiosyn-
cratic interest on the side, but as a necessary component and
corrective to scientific thought and practice. The history and
the philosophy of science should be indispensable parts of scien-
tific practice, and whenever they are not, stagnation and dog-
matism is the inevitable result, he said.
There are close parallels here with Feyerabend’s own criti-
cisms of science. (Indeed, Feyerabend admitted that many of his
ideas were simply observations he had taken from scientists and
reapplied for the benefit of the philosophers of science who, it
seemed to him, had not thought to listen to them.) Like Mach,
Feyerabend abhorred the lack of critical reflexion among scien-
tists and insisted that scientific progress demanded the constant
Feyerabend asked, Would we sacrifice all traditional relationships

Lakatos. Lakatos suggested that he and Feyerabend with the natural world for a monolithic scientific worldview?

set down their opposing views on science in a

volume they intended to call For and Against Method.
Sadly, Lakatos’ death in 1974 put paid to this idea;
but Feyerabend pressed on, the result being his
iconoclastic classic Against Method (1975). This
book was, he emphasised, a ‘collage’ of earlier
papers, spiced up with challenging rhetoric.

Against Method
Against Method made the radical argument that a
single ‘scientific method’ does not exist, and that
successful scientific research does not and cannot
conform to the idealised models designed for it by
philosophers. Here, Feyerabend had the Logical
Positivists particularily in mind. Anticipating the
emphasis of later philosophers of science such as
Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking, Feyerabend
insisted that instead, philosophy of science should
remain close to scientific practice and the history of
science. For this reason, he praised the philosophi-
cal physicists of the early twentieth century – men
like Ernst Mach and Niels Bohr. They could also
augment their experience as practical scientists with
a keen awareness of the philosophical ramifications
of their research.
Mach is a good example of the sort of philosophi-
cally-conscious scientist that Feyerabend admired.
Mach, he says, was a scientist, but was also familiar
with psychology, literature and the arts, and the his-
tory of science and of ideas. Mach was also dissatis-
fied with the scientists of his day for their lack of
critical reflection. Their science, says Feyerabend,
following Mach, “had become partially petrified”

18 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

examination and questioning of its theories and even the meth-
ods of research. Otherwise, he warned, science would ossify
into a standard set of uniform ideas which would inhibit the
freedom and experimentalism that characterised progressive
research. “Successful research” argued Feyerabend on the first
page of Against Method, “does not obey general standards; it
relies now on one trick, now on another.”
The pluralism and opportunism this implies means that
actual scientific practice is far more complex or ‘anarchistic’ than
philosophers of science had been willing to admit. This means
that the monistic ‘scientific method’ to which philosophers of
science had pointed in their attempts to establish the special
authority of scientific knowledge didn’t exist.
The idea of a unique and distinctive scientific method had
been the foundation of the special status of scientific knowl-
edge as compared with other forms of inquiry, such as magic,
theology or mythology. The scientific method was supposed to
ensure that scientific knowledge, unlike other forms of knowl-
edge, was objective, reliable and free from the contingencies of
idiosyncratic beliefs, values and prejudices. However if scien-
tific method, at least as traditionally imagined, turned out to be
chimerical, and if scientific research was in fact an erratic com-
bination of formal techniques, opportunism, ad hoc manoeuvres
and so forth, then the special status of science and scientific
knowledge became far more difficult to establish.
Moreover, the pluralistic nature of science (‘now one trick,
now another’) meant that the outcome of that research was in
fact contingent, not inevitable. Different combinations of
methodology, opportunism and conjecture will result in differ-
ent results, and so in a different set of ‘scientific knowledge’.
Feyerabend hence asked the question, “What’s so great about sci-
ence? – what makes sciences preferable to other forms of life,
using different standards and getting different kinds of results
as a consequence?” (‘On the Critique of Scientific Reason’ in
Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, p.110.) This question, I think,
came to occupy him for the remainder of his career.
New Old Pathways
Unfortunately, Feyerabend’s work after Against Method
attracted much less attention. Many philosophers were upset
and offended by the book and its mode of presentation. It was
criticised for being aggressive and antagonistic, and for its
apparently hostile rhetoric and mocking humour. Feyerabend
was disappointed and stung by these criticisms, and responded
in kind. He complained that his reviewers had failed to under-
stand the book and described them as ‘illiterates’. Afterwards,
he seemed to retreat from mainstream academia, about which
he had always been rather reticent. Although he remained a
professor at Berkeley and Zurich until his retirement in 1991,
and continued to publish and teach, he was no longer a visible
frontline philosopher of science.
Indeed, his interests had moved in other directions. True to
his pluralistic and opportunistic inclinations, he had always
enjoyed wide interests, but in the 80s and 90s he began to
explore the consequences of his criticisms of the special status
of science. In particular, he asked the question, ‘If science is
not quite as privileged as we think it is, what will be the impli-
cations for our treatment of non-scientific beliefs and prac-
tices?’ Science, at
least in the West- Paul
Feyerabend
ern world, gener-
ally commands
absolute authority
as a source of
knowledge.
Physics, medicine,
psychology and the
other physical and
life sciences pro-
vide an articulated
description of the
universe and our
place within it,
confidently tack-
ling questions of cosmology and human nature that were pre-
viously the domain of mythology, religion or other traditional
beliefs. Usually, the replacement of these prescientific world-
views by science is depicted as a positive development – the
Triumph of Reason. But, says Feyerabend, if science, the vehi-
cle for Reason, cannot assume the special authority it claims to
have, then we must reassess the credentials of magic, mythol-
ogy and traditional beliefs and practices. In particular, this
reassessment must begin with our current Western attitudes
towards indigenous ways of life.
Once we abandon the scientistic assumption that ‘science
knows best’, or that science has unique license to describe the
world and the best way of living within it, indigenous ways of
thinking must come to be seen in a new light. Feyerabend is
emphatic and passionate in his insistence that paternalistic atti-
tudes towards indigenous peoples must give way to sympa-
thetic acknowledgement of the efficacy and merits of their
ways of life. “People all over the world,” he says, “have devel-
oped ways of surviving in partly dangerous, partly agreeable
surroundings. The stories they told and the activities they
engaged in enriched their lives, protected them and gave them
meaning.” (Against Method, 3rd ed, p.3.) Despite the efficacy of
such ways of life serving the spiritual as well as the material
needs of the cultures which employed them, under the banner
of Reason, Western cultures “destroyed these wonderful prod-
ucts of human ingenuity and compassion without a single
glance in their direction.” Thus, the indigenous cultures of the
Andes, the Amazon, the African savannah, Southeast Asia and
the South Pacific islands had sophisticated worldviews and
ways of life that met their needs and described their world and
their place within it, but these ways of life were trampled by
Western cultures, initially through soldiers, merchants and
missionaries, and recently through development agencies and
educational programs, who tend to operate under the pre-
sumption that Western culture and specifically science knows
best. Feyerabend was vigorously opposed to these destructive
and parochial attitudes, and worked to develop forms of philo-
sophical relativism which could sustain his critique of them.
Such an attitude of tolerant pluralism would of course require
that Western cultures abandon, or at the least retract, their
belief in the universal authority of scientific knowledge. Science
and the technological ways of life it sustains may suit Western
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 19
cultures, but cannot be uniformly applied to all cultures every- masters. As Feyerabend said, “I am totally opposed to any atti-
where. One should, says Feyerabend, approach other cultures tude which says: ‘I am out to find the truth, come what may’.
with humility, offering one’s own ideas and beliefs and practices What truth? And why? would be my question.” (Ibid.)
in a spirit of cooperation and exchange. Unfortunately, such an Thus, having begun with a critical study of scientific
attitude would be difficult to introduce into our contemporary methodology, Feyerabend gradually found himself questioning
international institutions, which assume and act on the superi- the role science has played in the expansion of Western cul-
ority of Western values and ways of life – scientific medicine, tures since the Renaissance. Anticipating later postcolonial
liberal democracy, market economics and so forth. Any cultures theorists and the anti-globalisation movement, he criticised the
which do not recognise the desirability of these things are relentless imposition of Western values and practices through-
demeaned by Western ideologues as ‘under-developed’ and as out the world, and the homogenising effects that such cultural
needing social, economic and political ‘development’. imperialism inevitably brought (and brings) with it. Rich and
diverse cultures are being erased because they do not conform
Farewell To Reason to Western intellectual ideals, out of a philosophical ideology
In Farewell to Reason (1987) Feyerabend argued that cultures which presumes that a single way of thinking and living is best
ought to be left to their own devices, living and acting according for all. In the face of this culturecidal imperialism conducted
to their own beliefs and customs. However he later retracted through a powerful rhetoric of liberation and development,
this on the grounds that this tended to imply that cultures were Feyerabend argued passionately and persuasively that “diver-
static and isolated entities, and would prohibit interaction with sity is beneficial while uniformity reduce our joys and our
and moral criticism of other cultures. So into the 1990s Feyer- intellectual, emotional, and material resources.” (FTR p.1.)
abend argued that cultures are in fact fluid and mutable, and Today Feyerabend’s work has a new significance. Despite the
that, for better or worse, they change through interaction with growing hostility to mass Westernisation and corporate hege-
others: “potentially every culture is all cultures.” This interac- mony, and new concerns for the gradual disappearance of lan-
tion would allow the members of each culture to pursue their guages, cultures and peoples, science still enjoys an unequalled
own ways of life, whilst also allowing them to change and authority. But if we are to address the global concerns, then the
develop through internal action and external stimulus. How- role of science in our society will need to be reevaluated. As
ever, even if all cultures are potentially all cultures, there is the Feyerabend said, perhaps it is time to confront the monster
constant danger that one culture (or set of allied cultures) will ‘science’, and take steps towards ending its tyranny over us.
conspire to transform all the others into its image. © IAN JAMES KIDD 2009
Feyerabend says this is a general trend in world history Ian Kidd is doing a PhD in the Department of Philosophy at
since the Enlightenment, and Farewell to Reason is largely Durham University.
devoted to a defence of cultural pluralism against the tenden-
cies to uniformity encouraged, he claims, by shifting confeder-
ations of philosophers who consistently maintain that “there Crossword No.28
exists a right way of living and that the world must be made to
accept it.” (FTR p.11.) Although differing in their values and Solution
ideals, these philosophers all insist that their particular view of (See page 46 for the clues)
the ideal way of life is best for everyone, and strive to legitimate
their monolithic prejudices by describing themselves as ‘ratio-
nalists’. The consequence is that “a collection of uniform views
and practices [are] being imposed [in the culture of origin],
exported and again imposed [upon indigenous peoples].” (p.2.)
It’s clear that Feyerabend has now moved considerably beyond
the philosophy of science. His motivations here, as he explains,
are ‘humanitarian, not intellectual’, since his concern is not
with the pursuit of knowledge or with intellectual values such as
truth, but instead with human well-being. As he once explained
to Thomas Kuhn, “I judge the importance of a topic from the
influence a specific solution of it may have upon the well-being
of mankind… which derives, among other thing, from the exer-
cise of one’s imagination, from the full development of human
faculties, and from spiritual happiness.” (Quoted in Hoyningen-
Huene in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 37, pp.613-
614.) Thus to Feyerabend, human well-being now becomes the
primary criterion in the assessment of theories, methods, world-
views and ways of life – not abstract standards such as ‘truth’ or
‘knowledge’. If one puts such abstractions ahead of human
well-being, then one has lost sight of the purpose both of sci-
ence and of philosophy, which should be our servants, not our

20 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

 harles Taylor’s intellectual journey
C
took him from studying at McGill
University in Montreal to Balliol
College Oxford, then back to McGill.
There he has taught philosophy and poli-
tics while writing a series of influential
articles on concepts of freedom and the
nature of explanation in the social sci-
ences. His books include works on
Hegel, as well as Sources of the Self: The
Making Of The Modern Identity. His most
recent book, A Secular Age, was published
in 2007. In 2007 he was also awarded the
Templeton Prize for his life’s work,
which comes with an award of $1.5 mil-
lion; and this year he was awarded the
Kyoto Prize, which includes an award of
50 million yen ($500,000).
Chris Bloor: Professor Taylor, were you sur-
prised to win the Kyoto Prize?
Charles Taylor: Yes, I was indeed,
because it’s a very rare honour. I didn’t
expect it at all. I understand it more now
that I’ve gone there and talked to the
judges. They’re not only looking for peo-
ple who have done something important
intellectually, but they look very much at
your attitude – whether your motivation
is to help mankind and so on. And the
application to the political world of the
idea of helping humanity was very
important in my motivation.
Before that you won the Templeton Prize?
That’s right. That was even more sur-
prising in a sense, because in previous
years they were giving it to natural scien-
tists who were interested in a link with
spirituality, and not at all to… whatever I
am! I guess I’m somewhere in-between a
social scientist and a humanities person.
What are you going to spend the money on?
A lot of what I do in philosophy, in my
work in general, comes out of networks.
Certain people I work with need to
meet together, and we can’t simply wait
until we all get invited to go to a sympo-
sium in London or wherever. It’s very
helpful to be able to move around, and
to move other people around, and to
bring them together in small groups, be
it in New York or Chicago or Europe,
The Kyoto Prize is an “international award to honor those who have contributed sig-
or even Delhi, which is one of the places
nificantly to the scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind. The Prize is
presented annually in each of the following three categories: Advanced Technology,
Basic Sciences, and Arts and Philosophy.”
The Templeton Prize was set up in 1972 and is awarded to “a living person who has
made an exceptional contribution to affirming lifeʼs spiritual dimension, whether
through insight, discovery, or practical works.” (Quotes from Prize websites.)
Interview
we’ve been meeting. That’s essential for
everybody in this type of work, unless
you’re a total hermit and get it all out of
your own head, which I could never pos-
sibly do. I need to work like that. I’m
doing things across disciplinary bound-
aries, and I probably make lots of mis-
takes when I cross these boundaries and
poach in historians’ territory or political
scientists’ territory or sociologists’ terri-
tory. You make less terrible mistakes if
you’re working with sympathetic social
scientists, historians, and so on.
You found the analytic philosophy at Balliol
College dry and uninvolving. Do you have
any advice to students who might find philos-
ophy off-putting or not what they expected?
Really, it’s a DIY situation – do it your-
self! That’s not necessarily impossible – I
don’t mean do it yourself alone. I suppose
I can best put this autobiographically.
When I felt like that in Oxford, I found
some like-minded graduate students, and
we very quickly discovered some interest-
Charles
ing authors – in our case Merleau-Ponty
Taylor
– so we read them together. This is what
you sometimes just have to do, if it isn’t
on offer in the course you’re doing. And
on the web it’s even easier to get hold of
interesting stuff and discuss it than it was
for us back in the 50s.
is one of the world’s
leading living
The flip side of that is that some students, par-
ticularly in multi-disciplinary courses, find philosophers.
philosophy fascinating but overwhelming. They
embark on required texts such as Heidegger’s Chris Bloor talks to
Being and Time or something by Foucault,
but they can’t understand them, there’s some- him about philosophy
thing missing which they expect to be there.
What would you advise such students? and society.
Well, yeah, that’s a very difficult thing,
because you are quite right, sometimes,
as with the work of Foucault, it can take
a really big investment of time, particu-
larly if it’s just you and the text and
you’re reading it for the tenth time, ask-
ing ‘What’s going on?’ But there are
some good commentaries out there.
Hubert Dreyfus has written a commen-
tary on Division One of Being and Time
that I think really bridges the gap
between Heidegger and anybody with a
certain knowledge of philosophy in the
English-speaking world. But it is cer-
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 21
tainly true that for both Heidegger and
Foucault you definitely have to retool
your mind (laughs). You don’t get it right
away, because they’re not writing in
terms immediately connected to the
terms you’ve been used to.
Do you think there’s a problem in trying to
fit such characteristic and difficult thinkers
into a typical university syllabus?
At any given moment, in any given situ-
ation where people are discussing
things, there are assumptions so deep
they’re not even seen as assumptions,
because they look so obvious – they look
like ‘two and two make four’. The great
example that I’ve been battling with
throughout my life is the whole episte-
mological tradition from Descartes.
Descartes says in one of the letters that
we get all our ideas from the impact of
the outside world causing representa-
tions in our minds. When he was saying
that, he was saying ‘two and two make
four’ – an obvious thing – yet it’s actually
quite wrong in many ways (laughs). But
people don’t see that: they get so into
this ‘obvious’ way of thinking that it just
never occurs to them it might be wrong.
When you get somebody thinking
beyond the obvious, at first you’re baffled
by what they’re saying – they seem to be
speaking nonsense: ‘two and two is five’!
‘Retooling your mind’ means being able
to haul the absolutely unquestioned
frameworks up and looking at them, and
seeing that it ain’t necessarily so; or
maybe it is so in a way in the end, but you
have to argue for it in light of other possi-
bilities. That’s a very big change. And
before the penny drops, you can be com-
pletely baffled by a text where somebody’s
challenging your basic assumptions. It
looks like somebody’s just denying obvi-
ous facts about the world or the mind.
In you work you’ve often been trying to cor-
rect a kind of failure of self-understanding
of our culture. For example, you called
Sources of The Self ‘an essay in retrieval’.
In some sense we’re missing what it is to
have arrived at this point in our history, so
your work is an attempt to explain Western
culture in the early 21st century to itself.
I think that’s right. I try to do that by
delving back into history. If you’ve lived
through a transformation you under-
stand something of how you got to
where you now are. But further genera-
tions may lose sight of history, and they
take the mental landscape they’re in as
being totally natural. They therefore
miss something about the nature of that
22 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
landscape, about the nature of their ref-
erence points of identity. They take
them not as adopted possible reference
points, but as the obvious ones you can’t
avoid. So they’re living their identity,
but in a way which hides very important
dimensions and features of it. So it is a
matter of retrieval – retrieving the tra-
jectory that brought you to where you
are. I think that should be a very impor-
tant part of philosophical work.
How might that be accomplished?
Well, I think that there are certain
moments in university history where this
kind of retrieval was maximally facilitat-
ed. At the time of Max Weber – maybe
we nostalgically magnify that – and even
slightly later, you found that philosophy
students in Germany, were given an
incredibly broad course in Greek philos-
ophy and the history of philosophy, and
Kant and German idealism; but they also
read Weber, Durkheim, Troeltsch, and
Dilthey. So they had a broad under-
standing of how the questions then
being debated had got to that stage.
That was one of the things that
struck me when I managed to see the
tail end of it – because I think it’s dying
out, even in Germany. When I visited
Habermas, he was handing on that kind
of education to his students, even
though he didn’t necessarily agree with
a lot of the stuff that he was conveying
to them. That’s what got me riled up
when I went to Oxford – they were so
narrow, those people: they weren’t even
reading one tenth of the tradition that
had got them to where they were.
I wanted to ask you about Sources of the
Self. This year is the twentieth anniversary
of its initial publication.
That’s right – already! That’s so fast, it
just seems like yesterday!
That was the first book where I sys-
tematically presented what I wanted to
say. Before, I wrote books on Hegel, and
a lot of articles on aspects of social sci-
ence. I was very much wanting not just to
argue against certain positions in social
science, psychology and so forth, but to
understand why people were defending
those positions which I thought were
false and very implausible. But in order
to see why, you have to see the develop-
ment of the modern conception of the
self. So that was the first attempt I made
to open up that area – not simply arguing
against certain errors, but trying to
explain how the situation could arise in
which those errors would be plausible to
people. I still feel that was a real turning
point in my work, because from then on I
could expand and work on that field of
problems – how we got to the point
where the things we’re arguing about are
‘x and y’ as opposed to ‘y and z’ or ‘z and
q’ – why the obvious alternatives seem to
be these and not something else. And
that’s a real effort of retrieval, trying to
see how we got here, and trying to
understand it differently.
You make many powerful assertions about
modern identity drawn not only from philos-
ophy but from the history of religion, and
literature and art and so on. It is difficult for
someone who does not have that breadth of
knowledge to assess your claims adequately.
Yes. So great (laughs) – so people might
go and read something! It connects up
with what I was saying about my ideal
picture of the German university circa
1920: that we really should have that
kind of breadth in our education system
for the history of humanities, social sci-
ence, and so on. So I’m not displeased
by that kind of reaction. If people really
want to know if an idea is right, then
they’ll go and read something, and it will
make them capable of forming their own
view about how we got to where we are.
The book contains a soundbite that sums up
your criticism of the shallower aspects of our
culture: ‘Nothing would count as a fulfil-
ment in a world in which literally nothing is
important but self-fulfilment’.
Well, ‘what makes things important in
the end’ can’t simply turn on fulfilling
or satisfying the self. That puts you in a
kind of regress: ‘Okay! But what is it
that is going to give me self-fulfilment?’
You have in the end to point to some
purpose in something beyond you, such
as in the way things are, or the way the
universe is, or the way human beings
are, or the direction of human history.
The things that people find deep, deep
self-fulfilment in all have that feature.
One person says “I want to work with
Médecins Sans Frontieres in the Congo”
and another person says “I want to write
the Great Canadian novel.” It should be
obvious that all these forms of very deep
satisfaction refer to something that
reaches beyond you. So it’s a soundbite,
but it has an important truth.
I was thinking about your recent book A
Secular Age this morning and a bus passed
by with an atheist (or more correctly, agnos-
tic) slogan “There’s probably no God: now
stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
Interview

I heard about that! It’s hilariously funny.
It’s very odd, isn’t it? I’m trying to figure
out why this is happening in our time.
This new phenomena is puzzling – athe-
ists that want to spread the ‘gospel’, and
are sometimes very angry. I think it may
be rather like the response of certain
bishops to Darwin in the 19th century.
The bishops had a sense that the world
was going in a certain direction – more
and more conversion, and so on – and
then they find they’re suddenly upset in
their expectation and they get very rattled
and very angry. Similarly, we’re seeing
this now among the secularising intelli-
gentsia – liberals who felt that the world
was going in a certain direction, that it
was all going according to plan – and
then when it seems not to be, they get
rattled. So you get these rather pathetic
phenomena. Putting things on buses as
though that’s going to make people some-
how change their view about God, the
universe, the meaning of life and so on. A
bus slogan! It’s not likely to trigger some-
thing very fundamental in anybody.
It seems symptomatic of when you say that
modern people are stuck between two
polarised positions – as you put it, Strong
Atheism on the one hand, and on the other,
Strong Religiosity. But this leaves the aver-
age person wavering between the two, not
particularly drawn to one pole or the other,
but kind of messing around in the middle.
That’s right. And it can lead just to per-
plexity, or it can lead to bricolage –
putting together your own position. In A
Secular Age I mention lots of people who
obviously do so. Victor Hugo is a very
good nineteenth century French exam-
ple of people who put together a middle
position, and I think it’s a very, very
widespread phenomenon today – includ-
ing the cases where it’s de facto bricolage,
but it doesn’t appear that they’ve put it
together themselves. Then there are the
cases where people are self-consciously
putting it together. That’s what people
often mean when they say, “I’m spiritual,
but not religious. ‘Not religious’ means I
don’t belong to any tradition with a pre-
existing formula that I would have to sign
up to; but I’m ‘spiritual’ in that I’m
exploring this whole area.”
This scene of such a tremendous
number of different positions – spiritual,
anti-spiritual and what have you – being
held simultaneously in the same society
– is undoubtedly unprecedented in his-
tory, I think, and the number of posi-
tions are multiplying. There are posi-
tions which were just not thought of a
Interview
Interview
hundred years ago at all. That passage
about the two extremes people are react-
ing to was my attempt to look at some
of the underlying dynamic.
You make the point in your work that liberal
democracy is confused when it holds itself up
as neutral. You say, in fact ‘liberal democracy’
is itself a value, which sometimes comes into
conflict with other values, as it should, and
we should recognise that this is inevitable.
Yes. I think that there’s no such thing as
total neutrality, particularly in terms of
what the good life is. For instance, the
notion of participating, of being a citizen,
taking part in determining the future of
yourself and your society – I think this is
not an ‘optional virtue’, as it were (laughs):
it’s very close to the health and lifeblood
of liberal, democratic society. We should
be upfront about that.
You’ve suggested that when considering the
claims of different cultural perspectives, it’s
valuable to adopt a ‘language of perspicuous
contrast’ – striving for a form of discourse
which highlights the differences between
those cultures rather than attempting to
gloss over or reconcile them.
I think that’s what we have to aim at if
we want to get these differences out into
a sphere where there can be a rational
and calm discussion of how to live
together with tension between different
groups. It’s only by coming to such a
language that we can have a discussion
that doesn’t degenerate into a kind of
stigmatising of the other. It’s not just
important in the classroom or the
anthropology monograph, it’s tremen-
dously important in our public debate.
We need it very badly in our diverse soci-
eties. I’m very pleased about what hap-
pened in a public consultation in Que-
bec over religious extremism. People
started off saying very xenophobic-
sounding things, but then others, partic-
ularly Muslims, came along and said
“this is just wrong.” The debate evolved
to a non-caricature way of presenting
the differences. I think that’s what we
always have to try to do.
In an interview with Bryan Magee in 1978
you said a lesson from Marx is that “at the
very moment when men have developed
immense potential to control their lives and
to make of themselves whatever they want,
this power is, as it were, wrenched from their
hands by their own internal divisions.” Sim-
ilarly, in Ethics of Authenticity, you wrote
of ‘La Lotta Continua’ – ‘the continuing
struggle’ – a phrase you borrow from the
Italian Red Brigade. Is
your message here that a
degree of conflict and
upheaval is inevitable in
Western society?
I hope we don’t have to get used to this
level of disarray in our economy! But
yes, in a general sense there are no final,
determining solutions. There are deep
dilemmas, and we’re being pulled in dif-
ferent directions, and we’re going to
have to find the least destructive way of
putting things together. I think that’s
true also of the current dilemma, of on
the one hand needing markets and a
certain degree of free agency in them,
and on the other hand, the need to head
off the terrible consequences that mar-
kets can bring about if left unfettered.
The resolution’s going to be difficult.
The same thing is true of the two ten-
dencies I call the ‘technologist’ and the
‘expressivist’. I think most of us have
both tendencies, but there are obviously
people who are more into one or other,
and they square off against each other.
We’re never going to reach a final and
definitive solution. That’s what I mean by
La Lotta Continua. There’s always going
to be the problem of putting perspectives
together. There will always be people
pushing terribly hard in one direction and
not paying attention to other require-
ments. We are always going to need to
knit together a solution that will last for
a while between opposing tendencies.
So is the hope that we can strive towards some
higher level in which the fundamental con-
flicts of culture are resolved a pipe dream?
Yeah. That’s a pipe dream. It’s a beautiful
dream, but it’s not something we can
possibly hope for. It’s a pipe dream in the
kind of sense that Marxism in its original
form contained. This means that Marx-
ism’s a tremendously interesting philoso-
phy to read, because it holds out an
important definition of the main cultural
contradiction – as opposed to its error of
thinking that we can resolve it. It’s just as
bad not even to see the contradiction –
to have this bland neo-liberal view that
there are no major cultural contradic-
tions at all, and things will all go swim-
mingly, that we’ll all just globalise. This
is the absolute nadir of blindness. Those
neo-liberals have to be put to read Marx
– and if they totally convert to Marxism,
then maybe they’ll have to be corrected
by a dose of reality! PN
Chris Bloor studied under Charles Taylor
and now philosophizes in London.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 23
Predestination
and the Wagers
Robert Howell suggests a surprising reason for piety.
“We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he determined
within himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not
created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some,
eternal damnation for others” (Calvin, Institutes 3.21.5).
of Sin
persuasive reasons in their favor. In general, though, most
people – at least those unschooled in the problem – side with
the one boxers. Why? The Predictor is extremely good at
predicting whether people take one or two boxes, and you
know this. We can imagine that you’ve seen him play this game

C
alvinists and their ilk believed that there are a group with hundreds of people, and every time people take one box
of people, the Elect, who are predestined by God to they receive a million dollars, and every time they take two
partake of the fruits of Heaven while the rest are they receive only the $50,000. When it’s your turn to choose,
headed for a less salubrious fate. One cannot tell why think that you can buck the odds? You should act in such a
who the Elect are, except by gleaning a hint from the fact that way as to maximizes expected utility, and the probabilities are
they lead perfectly Christian lives. Nevertheless, Calvinists extremely high that if you take one box you will walk off with a
typically adhered to an extremely strict and inconvenient reli- cool million, while if you take two you’ll have to gripe about
gious regimen. Why? It is not as if they were earning their only receiving fifty grand.
salvation, since whether or not they were saved or damned was As I said, it seems to me that most people are one-boxers.
already determined, and could not be affected by any of their The interesting thing for us is that the rationale for being a
actions or thoughts. Consequently, the obedience of the one-boxer is exactly the same as the rationale for being
Calvinists is often rationalized by appealing to their fear either extremely well-behaved if you’re a Calvinist. God is the
of self-loathing or of ostracism. According to this story, Predictor; Heaven might or might not be in the opaque box,
Calvinists act pious so as to preserve the appearance that they and sinful pleasures on earth are in the translucent box. Heaven
are among the Elect. However, this is not a particularly chari- is in the opaque box only for the Elect; but God chooses the
table interpretation of Calvinist motives, as it seems to mislo- Elect based upon his infallible prediction as to whether or not
cate their reasons for being pious. If this were all that moti- they partake of earthly sins. Thus by the same utility-maximiza-
vated them, then it would be entirely possible to satisfy that tion strategy, it seems quite rational to be very well behaved
goal through self-deception or deception of others while being
impious. While there were surely no hypnotists then available
to aid in self-deception, or Rings of Gyges to aid in deceiving
others, it does seem dubious that these lacks were the only
reasons Calvinists remained truly pious. It behooves us to find
an explanation for their actually being pious, and not merely
seeming so, that doesn’t ascribe to them a blatant irrationality.
An important puzzle in decision theory can help in sorting
out intuitions behind these matters, I think. In Newcomb’s
problem, we’re asked to imagine the following scenario. An
immensely intelligent fellow, christened by reputation The
Predictor, is able with astounding accuracy, approaching
perfection, to predict the actions of others. The Predictor sets
you the following game. There are in front of you two boxes;
one opaque and the other translucent. The game allows you
two options: you can either take both boxes and keep the
contents of both, or you can take only the opaque box, keeping
only its contents. In the translucent box, there is $50,000. In
the opaque box, the Predictor (who has amassed quite a
fortune by his forecasting excellence) will have placed either $1
million or nothing at all. He places the money within the box
an hour before you make your choice. His decision about what
to place in the box is determined by the following rule: if he
predicts that you will take only the opaque box, he will place
$1million within it; if he predicts you will take both, he will
place nothing inside the opaque box. Should you take only the
opaque box, or both boxes?
People have conflicting intuitions on this matter: there are
many one-boxers, and many two-boxers. Both sides adduce

24 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

indeed. Calvinists were just one-boxers ahead of their time!
I think it is a sufficient vindication of the Calvinists that there
is this plausible defense of their behavior. If they were making a
mistake, it’s an easy one to make, and it certainly leaves them
with a rational justification for their pious obedience. They’re
not out of the woods, however, for the old complaint against the
Calvinists still resonates. Consider yourself confronted with the
two boxes once again. The money is either already in the
opaque box or it is not. Nothing you will do can change that.
How can you go wrong by taking both boxes? The
Predictor either put the money in the opaque box or
he didn’t. Suppose he did. Then, if you take both John Calvin
two-boxer, they can always say, “Thanks for the lesson in deci-
sion theory, but I’ve noticed that whenever someone acts on
your argument they wind up in Hell. Excuse me, but I think in
light of that, it is quite rational to remain pious.” At this point,
one suspects that the Calvinist and his critic must simply part
paths, perhaps in more ways than one.
© DR ROBERT J. HOWELL 2009
Robert Howell is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Southern
Methodist University, in Dallas.

boxes you wind up with $1,050,000 – fifty grand out of the box

more than if you had just taken the opaque box. Or

suppose he didn’t. Well, then you go home with
$50,000 – which is again fifty grand more than if
you had only taken the opaque box. It would
seem that whatever the Predictor actually did,
you would be better taking two boxes – how
could this be anything but the rational thing to
do? One can furthermore imagine that the
Predictor, who is also a truth-teller, tells your
buddy whether or not the million is in the box.
What would your buddy, who has all the infor-
mation about the potential payoffs, recommend
that you do? If he had your financial interests at
heart, he would always, no matter what the
Predictor did, also recommend you take two
boxes. It would seem completely irrational to go
against the advice of your well-informed friend.
These considerations support the doubts
about the motivations which drove pious
Calvinists. God already knows if someone is a
member of the Elect – he has already decided
the matter, and it’s irrevocable. Now suppose
Satan, a two-boxer to the bitter end, knows of
Jacob whether or not he is a member of the
Elect. It seems that no matter whether Jacob
was a member of the Elect or not, Satan would
recommend that he partake of whatever carnal
sin tickled his fancy. Despite Satan’s wily ways, it
seems that in this case he would have Jacob’s
best interests at heart, and that any angel who
wasn’t completely under the thumb of the Old
Man would also recommend the same. It
furthermore seems that pious Jacob, once in
Heaven, would be right to kick himself and say
“I was one of the Elect all along! I should’ve
gone for Goody Whitfield when I had the
chance!” So, anyway, suggests the Protestant
two-boxer.
Whether or not the Calvinists were right, or
whether one should be a one-boxer or not, is a
troubled question, and if it is ever solved
conclusively, it will not be here. In any case, it
seems without a doubt that the Calvinists have a
more rational justification than is usually
ascribed to them. After all, in response to the

July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 25

 The Golden Rule
Not So Golden Anymore
Stephen Anderson analyses as he would be analysed
P
luralism is the most serious problem facing liberal
democracies today. We can no longer ignore the fact
that cultures around the world are not simply different
from one another, but profoundly so; and the most urgent area in
which this realization faces us is in the realm of morality. West-
ern democratic systems depend on there being at least a mini-
mal consensus concerning national values, especially in regard
to such things as justice, equality and human rights. But global
communication, economics and the migration of populations
have placed new strains on Western democracies. Suddenly we
find we must adjust to peoples whose suppositions about the
ultimate values and goals of life are very different from ours. A
clear lesson from events such as 9/11 is that disregarding these
differences is not an option. Collisions between worldviews and
value systems can be cataclysmic. Somehow we must learn to
manage this new situation.
For a long time, liberal democratic optimism in the West has
been shored up by suppositions about other cultures and their
differences from us. The cornerpiece of this optimism has been
the assumption that whatever differences exist they cannot be
too great. A core of ‘basic humanity’ surely must tie all of the
world’s moral systems together – and if only we could locate this
core we might be able to forge agreements and alliances among
groups that otherwise appear profoundly opposed. We could
perhaps then shelve our cultural or ideological differences and
get on with the more pleasant and productive business of cele-
brating our core agreement. One cannot fail to see how this
hope is repeated in order buoy optimism about the Middle
East peace process, for example.
It seems clear there is some similarity in the various intu-
itions about moral responsibility that people have had in vari-
ous times and places around the world. But what could the
elusive universal ‘core’ of the many diverse moralities be? For
over a century now, the chief candidate has been the Golden
Rule. The Golden Rule, whether articulated as ‘Treat others as
you would wish to be treated’, or ‘Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you’, or in any of the other several ways in
which it has been stated, is by far the most oft-cited formula-
tion of universal morality. Policy makers declare it. The
media repeats it. School textbooks promote it. Many ordinary
folks simply believe it. It is generally believed that not only
does it appear in all major cultures and religions, but that it can
be detected in some submerged form even in moralities that
seem only dubiously compatible with it.
A few brief examples will have to suffice: there are simply
too many I could list. For example, in ‘A Short Essay on the
Golden Rule’, ethicist Harry Gensler writes,
“The golden rule is endorsed by all the great world religions; Jesus, Hillel, and
Confucius used it to summarize their ethical teachings. And for many centuries
the idea has been influential among people of very diverse cultures... These
facts suggest that the golden rule may be an important moral truth.”
26 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
In fact, Gensler argues that an awareness of the Golden Rule
is the most important practical resource for the performance of
ethical thinking. Likewise, theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in
‘When Everything is Permitted’ (First Things 80), calls this kind
of ‘rule of mutuality’ a basic concept of the natural law. Multi-
culturalism advocates also proudly cite the Golden Rule as the
lynchpin of universal morality: the Scarboro Interfaith Mission
presents what it perceives to be Golden Rule variations in
twenty-one religious traditions from around the world (see later
for some of them). It is also advocated by experts in moral edu-
cation. For instance, in Moral Education: Theory and Application
(eds Berkowitz & Oser, 1985), Thomas Lickona writes,
“in a pluralistic society, respect for persons is common moral ground. It is
something that all people, regardless of what else they believe, can agree
on. Indeed, the best-known expression of the principle of respect – the
Golden Rule – can be found in religions and traditions all over the world.”
We can detect the Golden Rule in various forms even in ethi-
cal reflection of the most scholarly kind. For instance, it is not
hard to see that it re-emerges as essential components of things
such as John Rawls’ ‘veil of ignorance’ and Jürgen Habermas’
‘U’ principle. Golden Rule Universalism is also commonly dis-
seminated in the press. For instance, we find Heather MacDon-
ald of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Studies announcing in
USA Today for Oct 23rd, 2006, “The Golden Rule and innate
human empathy provide ample guidance for moral behavior.”
She goes on to argue that from these two things essential moral
principles “are available to people of all faiths or no faith at all.”
Thus Golden Rule Universalism is a recurrent theme.
Clearly there are large numbers of intelligent people operating
under the assumption that something like the Golden Rule
provides the essential core of a universal morality. It is hard,
then, to fault the ordinary person for believing likewise.
The Universality of the Golden Rule
That many people from a variety of situations seem intu-
itively to have discovered the values articulated by the Golden
Rule would seem to imply that the Rule is not the exclusive
possession of one culture or of a group of cultures, but taps
into a universal moral recognition. At the very least, the
Golden Rule seems to address the very widespread tendency to
think that morality means equity: that everyone should be treat-
ing everyone else in the same way. Perhaps even if we agree
upon nothing else, we can be said to agree upon this rule. This
might well prove to be our moral salvation in an increasingly
complex and conflicted world.
But is it plausible to argue that the Golden Rule or some close
variation of it articulates the hidden core of human morality at
all times and in all places? In order to answer that, we must look
more closely at the Golden Rule itself, especially at the variations
it appears in in our major religious and philosophical traditions.
 It becomes obvious immediately that no matter how wide-
spread we want the Golden Rule to be, there are some ethical
systems that we have to admit do not have it. In fact, there are
a few traditions that actually disdain the Rule. In philosophy,
the Nietzschean tradition holds that the virtues implicit in the
Golden Rule are antithetical to the true virtues of self-assertion
and the will-to-power. Among religions, there are a good many
that prefer to emphasize the importance of self, cult, clan or
tribe rather than of general others; and a good many other reli-
gions for whom large populations are simply excluded from
goodwill, being labeled as outsiders, heretics or infidels.
Humanist George Bernard Shaw also had no affection for
the Rule. He famously (and paradoxically) quipped, “The
Golden Rule is that there is no golden rule.” Shaw believed that
to assert any universal moral principle was to deprive the indi-
vidual of the chance to form his or her own morality.
Therefore, there are some views of morality that simply
exclude the Golden Rule. But perhaps it would be unfair to say
that this fact alone militates against our belief in the universal-
ity of the Golden Rule. Perhaps we can say that although there
are marginal traditions that reject the Golden Rule, the bigger
and more important traditions embrace it.
Two Distinct Forms of the Golden Rule
So let’s consider some articulations of the Golden Rule as it
appears in the various major religious traditions, and see how
well we can get this last idea to work. Firstly, of course, there is
the best-known account of the Golden Rule in the West. Here
Jesus says, “Do unto others what you would have them do unto
you.” Below is a list of some other articulations of this idea:
1) Buddhism: “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself
would find hurtful.” (Udana-Varga 5:18)
2) Confucianism: ‘Do not do to others what you do not want
them to do to you.” (Analects 15:23)
3) Hinduism: “This is the sum of duty: do not do to others
what would cause pain if done to you.” (Mahabharata 5:1517)
4) Humanism: “Don’t do things you wouldn’t want to have
done to you.” (The British Humanist Society)
5) Islam: “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his
brother what he wishes for himself.” (#13 of Imam Al-
Nawawi’s Forty Hadiths.)
6) Jainism: “A man should wander about treating all creatures
as he himself would be treated.” (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33)
7) Judaism: “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
(Leviticus 19:18)
8) Zoroastrianism: “That nature alone is good which refrains
from doing unto another whatsoever is not good for itself.”
(Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5)
(Quotations selected from the Scarboro Missions list.)
This provides us with a good sample of at least some of the
major equivalents of the Golden Rule. Since the wording of
each is somewhat different, we can begin by saying that proba-
bly the outstanding feature is that they all seem to suggest that
there is some kind of relationship between how we ought to
treat others and what we would wish for ourselves. Superfi-
cially, this might lead us to think these injunctions all amount
to the same thing. But look again. Reading carefully, we will
note that some of these statements appear in a positive form
(‘Do…’) and some appear in a negative form (‘Do not do…’).
Jesus’ version, plus numbers 5, 6 and 7, might be called posi-
tive, whereas all the rest are in the negative form.
Considering the Negative Golden Rule
Does it make a difference? Some people argue that the two
types of versions are functionally the same thing. But they are
not. Consider, for instance, that your children are fighting and
you say to them, “Leave each other alone!” This would be the
negative commandment. On the other hand, “Be nice to your
sibling!” would be the positive commandment. Anyone who has
had children (or siblings) will quickly recognize that it is easier
to enforce commands in the negative (ie not to do things) than it
is to enforce commands in the positive (ie to do something).
This difference is substantial, and we can see how it works
out in practice. If we have only a negative duty, an obligation
to avoid harming people, that can be construed as imposing
minimal obligations. We simply are not allowed to do anything
actively harmful – anything additional is left to our discretion.
In fact, the negative version may be fulfilled (if we wish to con-
strue it that way) simply by ignoring our neighbor, for as long
as we are not directly implicated in his harm, we have not
transgressed the negative version of Golden Rule ethics.
This negative version of the Golden Rule is particularly min-
imal if we happen to be among those millions of people in the
world who believe that a person’s lot in life, even his suffering, is
caused by fate or karma: to ‘not do harm’ might then mean that
we have a duty to leave him alone. Perhaps we might think it is
in his ultimate best interest to suffer, and thereby to achieve his
penance, enlightenment, or moksha. To be sure, we might not
see things this way, and we might decide to help the sufferer.
But – and here is the key point – under the negative version of
the Golden Rule we would have no obligation to help him.
The Positive Version
The positive version of the Golden Rule has somewhat dif-
ferent implications. Under it, we would be obliged to help a
sufferer, on the assumption that if we ourselves were suffering
we would want to be helped. Actually, ultimately the positive
version imposes a burden on us to bring others up to whatever
standard of well-being we would wish for ourselves. Of the
three positive versions we have listed, 6 and 7 make this most
clear, but 5 could also imply it.
Inevitably, this points to a supplementary problem. If it is
our duty to ‘love’ our ‘neighbor’ (version 7) or our ‘brother’
(version 5), then we might well ask, “Who is my ‘neighbor’?” or
“Who is my ‘brother’?” Does it only include people of our own
kind who live close to us and with whom we have natural sym-
pathies? Or does it include people who live in distant lands, and
whose suffering thus seems remote and unreal? Does it include
men and women; children; people of a different tribe or lan-
guage? Does it include those who deny our cultural or religious
traditions? Does it include criminals, the unborn or the physi-
cally challenged? Thus one problem with even the positive ver-
sion of the Golden Rule is that it is escapable depending upon
who one identifies as the entitled recipient of the goodwill.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 27
 This problem arose when the Christian version was first
articulated. A young scholar of the Jewish religious Law
approached Jesus and asked him what he would have to do if he
was to inherit eternal life. Jesus replied, quoting, among other
things, the Judaic Golden Rule. But the passage says that the law
student, wishing to justify himself, asked “And who is my neigh-
bor?” – to which Jesus told the famous ‘Good Samaritan’ para-
ble in reply (see Luke 10:29). The problem highlighted by the
young scholar is that people can still find an escape-clause
from the positive version of the Golden Rule by choosing not
to see someone as a ‘neighbor’.
Can the Positive Golden Rule Work?
Any rule, golden or otherwise, that demands no more than
ignoring one’s neighbor (ie, the negative version) has a doubtful
claim to reflect the essential core of human morality. It would be
only marginally better if it were improved to the point that it
mandated goodwill only to a select membership, not to the
human race at large (ie a limited positive version). Yet perhaps we
still have a way to save the Golden Rule. Let us suppose that, as
suggested earlier, we eliminated all those peripheral moral sys-
tems that reject the Golden Rule outright; and furthermore, that
we add the claim (though it seems rather snobbish to say it) that
traditions that have only the negative form of the Golden Rule
are possessed of only part of the essential core of morality. But
perhaps that is fair, and they are capable of taking the next step,
and converting to a positive view of the Golden Rule. If, then,
we could get all major religious and philosophical traditions to
admit the validity of the positive Golden Rule, could we at last
say we had discovered a secure core for a universal morality?
That might initially sound plausible. Perhaps we can get
people to see that we owe our neighbor whatever we would
wish for ourselves. Some Golden Rule advocates call this ‘reci-
procity’. Reciprocity means equal give and return. It views
morality as a balanced equation, in which a person who receives
the benefit of a moral action has a responsibility to respond in
kind. Such moral treatment of others requires things like being
fair, equitable or even-handed. It means ‘I’m-okay-if-you’re-
okay’, or ‘you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours’. Recip-
rocal responsibility between citizens sounds like a pretty good
way to run a society, especially a liberal democracy, at first.
However, there are good reasons to suspect reciprocity will
not work on its own. Many aspects of society cannot work on
simply an equitable give-and-take basis:
something higher and much more morally
demanding is involved in maintaining a soci-
ety. Societies require the principle of sacrifice.
This will come as no surprise to anyone
who has been married, or who has had chil-
dren. Marriages simply do not function
unless the partners are prepared to make sac-
rifices without expectation of return, and
children certainly cannot be expected to
repay the sacrifices parents find it necessary
to make in raising them. Those who have
been in a serving profession – a teacher, a
cleric, a doctor, a charity worker, a counselor,
or even a politician (sometimes) – know that
28 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
their profession could not continue without what they con-
tribute to the public welfare without expectation of reciprocity.
A society cannot survive without the things people do while
not demanding that society should equitably repay them. But if
reciprocity is not enough to ground a society, we can hardly
argue that it represents the essential core of human morality.
No principle of equity would be sufficient to make people
see the value of sacrifice. Rather, they need a reason to accept
inequity. They must be content to render, for the good of
others, things that cannot be returned. The very height of this
behavior is the one who, like a soldier in a good cause, lays
down his life in order that others may live freely. Such we
regard nearly as moral ‘saints’.
The Platinum Rule
There is even a level of morality above the level of simple
sacrifice. Sacrifice for an acknowledged cause may have some
attractions. Yet what about those who make sacrifices for those
whom they do not know, or even for those who are, on some
level, their enemies? Perhaps we would have to call the principle
behind such sacrifices the Platinum Rule, for it seems so far above
even the positive articulation of the Golden Rule that most of us
find it hard to imagine. Yet it’s found in our moral traditions; for
instance as, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neigh-
bor and hate your enemy’. But I tell you: Love your enemies and
pray for those who persecute you...” (Matthew 5:43-45.)
I think anyone who views the case objectively must admit
that this principle of sacrifice represents a higher moral value
than the laissez-faire attitude of the Golden Rule in its negative
form, and a higher moral value than the reciprocity principle
of its positive form as well. The chief criticism that can be
raised against the Platinum Rule is that it requires more than
most of us are able to deliver. However, that may say less about
the Platinum Rule than about human nature.
Nevertheless, the Platinum Rule has influenced at least one
modern political project, the South African Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission. This aspires to transcend the reciprocal
idea of justice, and to orient a solution to the higher values of
mercy and forgiveness. Given that injustice and inequality have
been so rife in modern history, it may never be possible to
restore justice to our world through any principle of reciproc-
ity. In such conditions, the higher principles of the Platinum
Rule may offer the only hope, as it did in South Africa.

Concluding Concerns
Several things become apparent even from this brief survey
of the Golden Rule:
• It is not actually universal.
• It has two forms, negative and positive.
• The two forms create very different results.
• Both forms fall short of requiring the sacrifices society needs.
• Neither form represents the highest moral standards.
At this point perhaps I may be accused of having a spoilsport
disposition, for casting doubt upon a rule of life so widely cele-
brated, thus chipping away at a source of common moral opti-
mism. I can only reply that it should be a source of wonder that
a belief so open to criticism should be so widely celebrated,
adding that optimism is no virtue if glibly invested. If, as I have
suggested, we stand in need of a core universal morality upon
which we can base liberal democratic social projects, then we
would be ill-advised to embrace a counterfeit; for counterfeits
notoriously prove unreliable at the crucial moment. Thus the
Golden Rule, in either its positive or negative articulations,
cannot be the gold standard of moral behavior: it cannot support
the things liberal democratic nations need in the 21st Century –
like consensus on policy, general standards of justice, and a war-
rant for human rights. First, it is not universal; but even if it is
generally reflected in all major cultures, the Golden Rule can still
hardly be the core of all morality. It offers little resistance to
weak, inconsistent or morally-questionable applications, and it
fails to reflect our highest moral standards. Thus we should be
concerned about the enthusiasm with which some people tend
to embrace something like the Golden Rule as a cure-all for the
THANKS TO TOM GLOD FOR PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS IMAGE. PLEASE VISIT WWW.BEOFONEMIND.COM
modern problems of value pluralism; and we should wonder
what that tendency tells us about our unwillingness to squarely
face the fact that cultures have disharmonious moral styles. It is
true that if we could find a universal rule of morality – some-
thing like the Golden Rule – it would help us resolve a great
many serious moral and political problems. But the fact remains
that the Golden Rule is very clearly not the core of morality, and
yet it has been embraced as such nonetheless.
Moreover, whatever advantages to democratic politics may
come from Golden Rule universalism, it also has an insidious
side. Its subtext is the denial of the unique moral contributions
of diverse societies in the name of creating superficial har-
mony. We may well doubt that people who indwell particular
cultural/religious traditions and who have long labored under
the impression that they have unique moral positions to con-
tribute to humanity would be happy to hear that they have
been wrong, and that their whole heritage can be boiled down
to the same thing as everyone else’s. We might also have a
hard time convincing them that our attitude was not born
more of cultural tone-deafness than of tolerance.
The arguments here against Golden Rule universalism are
obvious ones. Very clearly, we ought to know better, but we
appear to have a strong emotional stake in not knowing better.
Our refusal to face this has to be troubling to any rational
person, and a source of concern to anyone genuinely interested
in pursuing mutual understanding in a pluralistic world.
© STEPHEN L. ANDERSON 2009
Stephen L. Anderson is a high school teacher, and a PhD candidate in
the Philosophy of Education at the University of Western Ontario.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 29
MORAL MOMENTS
& other
by Joel Marks.
From Here to There:
A Phi-Fi Investigation
S
ome say that personal identity is closely connected to
memory. However, in an earlier column (‘Who Are You?’
in Issue 61), I commented, “You could suffer amnesia and
have the contents of your mind erased, but you would still be
you. Why believe that? Well, suppose you knew you were about
to suffer total memory loss and then be thrown into a cauldron
of boiling oil: would you not feel dread on behalf of yourself?”
It is certainly my intuition that I would experience that dread.
But I know that not everybody shares my intuition. Do you?
Even if you do, an intuition is not a proof. A person can have
an intuition that something terrible is about to happen to them,
but then nothing does; or that something wonderful is about to
happen, but then something terrible does.
What would be a proof that one and the same person existed
before and after such amnesia? It seems safe to assume that a
person exists both before and after; so if it were not the same
person, would it be two different persons? Then the person
after amnesia would be a brand-new person, who was literally
‘born yesterday’ (or a minute ago). And yet unlike a newborn
babe, this person, we are supposing for the sake of the example,
is fully equipped with adult knowledge of the world, having for-
gotten only the details of his or her identity as so-and-so. Thus,
s/he might be a fluent speaker of French, but not respond to
the name ‘Jean/ne’.
If subsequently Jean/ne’s full memory returned, then we
would seem to have the proof we desired. Perhaps there would
also be memory of the amnesic episode: “I remember that I had
no idea who I was… like those moments after awakening when
sometimes one does not know where one is or even who one
is.” Or perhaps it would just be a blank: an amnesia of the
amnesia. “All I know is that I was unlocking the door to my
apartment, and now… here I am in this hospital ward. It is like
awakening from a dreamless sleep.” Since one is presumably
the same person after awakening, so the amnesiac must be the
same person.
But let us put the question speculatively à la sci-fi – or as I
like to call it, phi-fi (for philosophical fiction). Suppose you
entered a device that was supposed to transport you to a distant
location by means of a light beam. This so-called teleporter
would have great advantages over normal means of conveyance
because it would not have to carry a physical body, thereby
avoiding the need for vehicle and fuel, and would move people
(and things) at the fastest speed possible, namely, the speed of
light. Economics would dictate the universal adoption of such a
method of travel as soon as it became technologically feasible.
But how exactly would it work? For example, what happens
30 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
to the body that enters the device if it is not transported to the
other location? If this is a one-way ticket, then it might be
destroyed, since presumably a new body would be constructed
at the destination. All one would need for the teleportation
itself is a plan of the body to be communicated via the electro-
magnetic signal. It would be like sending a CAT-scan over a
radio link. Just as today an image is created at the destination,
so in the future whole bodies could be (re)created from raw
materials, which would perhaps be recycled from bodies that
had been teleported and discarded at that site.
So in you walk on Earth, and out you walk on Mars, where
a receiving station had been set up by the pioneers who had
rocketed there before teleportation was possible. If you were a
commuter, then perhaps you could reenter your original body
back on Earth at the end of the day. So instead of constructing
a new body from scratch, the CAT scan transmitted from Mars
would be used to make the appropriate changes to your origi-
nal body and brain on Earth such that when you resumed con-
sciousness you would remember what you had done on Mars.
(But if you had accidentally scarred yourself while on Mars, you
could put in a special request not to have the scar inserted onto
your Earthbound body.)
Does teleportation make sense? It seems to me that the tech-
nology I have described will be perfectly possible in strictly
material terms. That is, it should be possible someday to create
a new body on the plan of an old one down to the nth detail.
This is really only a further elaboration of the commonplace of
manufacture, is it not, wherein any number of copies can be
made from a single design? The tricky part, however, is that now
we would be dealing with a person. Why is this problematic?
There are several reasons. Consider, for example, that if instead
of returning to Earth you decided to live on Mars, and mean-
while the technician on Earth neglected to destroy the body that
had been CAT-scanned. Would there now be two of you? We
could imagine the Earth person calling his own number on his
cell phone and having the Mars person answer the phone (which
had also been teleported) and having a conversation with
himself. “So, what’s the weather like on your planet?”
We can multiply such scenarios ad infinitum, and at this
point, I think, our intuitions would completely break down.
This is another reason why intuitions cannot be relied upon for
knowledge: they can contradict one another. But maybe there
is a kind of knowledge to be derived from contradiction as such.
In other words, when our intuitions do generate contradictions,
perhaps this tells us that what we are thinking about makes no
sense. In this case we are talking about the concept of a person.
Hence, there may be something deeply flawed about person-
hood or the self. Thinkers from the Buddha to today’s Tom
Metzinger have certainly thought so.
Insofar as I can rank my own intuitions, my feeling is that tele-
portation such as I have described is impossible. I mean that no
person would be conveyed from one location to another. A person
enters the sender and a person emerges from the receiver, but
they are numerically distinct, albeit qualitatively identical. Thus,
the situation is not like the amnesiac, not to mention, the dream-
less sleeper. The difference is precisely that in teleportation there
has not been a continuation of the same body. From this, two
Food for T h us C ons c i en c e Doth
Thought Make Crickets of Us All Tim Madigan is startled by the form of the angel on his shoulder.
Take the straight and narrow path
and if you start to slide,
E
give a little whistle!
Give a little whistle!
And always let your conscience be your guide.
As sung by Jiminy Cricket in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio
thicists such as Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Butler and
Immanuel Kant grappled mightily with the question of
the nature of our conscience – that inner voice which
tells us when we are acting rightly or wrongly. But for
all their learned writings, none of these wise gentlemen have
had as major an impact on the popular understanding of the
conscience as Walt Disney, who gave us its best known repre-
sentative – Jiminy Cricket, the dapper, devil-may-care bug with
a song in his heart who is always willing to give advice to his pal
Pinocchio on proper behavior. Voiced by the beloved Cliff
Edwards (known to all the world as ‘Ukelele Ike’), Jiminy is the
kind of friend anyone would long to have. 2010 will mark the
70th anniversary of the film, which has just been released in a
spiffy 2-DVD Platinum Edition to mark the occasion.
Coincidentally, a new edition of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 Le
Avventure di Pinocchio has also just been published, ably trans-
lated by Geoffrey Brock, with an introduction by Umberto
Eco. Like most people in the English-speaking world, I had
never read the original. Eco notes:
I remember the discomfort we Italian kids felt on first seeing Walt
Disney’s Pinocchio on the big screen. I should say at once that, watching it
again now, I find it to be a delightful film. But at the time, we were struck
further implications can be drawn: (1) Any person entering a tele-
porter whose body is destroyed dies and (2) personal identity
resides essentially in a particular physical body.
By the way, a fictional version of this argument, which draws
out the implications more direfully, can be found in John C.
Snider’s online science-fiction magazine SciFiDimensions here:
www.scifidimensions.com/Oct05/teleporter.htm.
© JOEL MARKS 2009
Joel Marks is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of
New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. More of his essays can be
found at moralmoments.com
by the stark difference between the
American Pinocchio and the Pinoc-
chio we had come to know both
through Collodi’s original text and
through the book’s early illustra-
tors... And though I admit that
Disney’s Jiminy Cricket is an extra-
ordinary invention, he has nothing
to do with Collodi’s Talking Cricket,
who was an actual insect: no top hat,
no tailcoat (or was it a frock coat?),
no umbrella. (Pinocchio, p.ix)
The original Talking Cricket
Indeed, not only is the Talking Cricket – a rather minor
figure in the picaresque tale – undressed and unnamed
(“Jiminy Cricket!” being a popular American way of nicely
saying “Jesus Christ!” when upset), he isn’t even Pinocchio’s
friend. The cricket first appears in Chapter IV, where it is
stated that he has lived in Geppetto’s home for over a century
(unlike the vagabond Jiminy, who scuttles in to get out of the
cold at the very moment of Pinocchio’s ‘birth’). He scolds the
marionette boy for his misbehavior which includes kicking
people in the shin, lying, and causing Geppetto to get arrested
by pretending to be physically abused by him: “Woe to any
little boy who rebels against his parents and turns his back on
his father’s house! He will come to no good in this world, and
sooner or later he’ll be filled with bitter regret,” the cricket
solemnly intones (p.14). Wise words, but not very friendly. He
further chastises Pinocchio for shirking his household respon-
sibilities, and for not desiring a proper education. If you won’t
go to school, he warns, you’ll have to get a job to support
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 31
 A pre-Disney Pinocchio

yourself. “Of all the trades the cricket, appropriately enough by means of another wooden
in the world,” Pinocchio contrivance. But, just as Arthur Conan Doyle found out when
replies, “there’s only one he tried to do away with his creation Sherlock Holmes by
that really suits me... That having him plunge to his death from the top of the Reichenbach
of eating, drinking, sleep- Falls, the public wouldn’t stand for such an ending, and Collodi
ing, playing, and wander- was compelled to bring him back to life.
ing wherever I like from The Disney movie version stands on its own as a true cine-
sunup to sundown.” The matic masterpiece. In many ways, it’s even more disturbing than
cricket laments that this the original. For instance, in Collodi’s work, the Fox and the
attitude will only lead to Cat pay the price for their evil-doing by becoming blind and
the poor house or to paralyzed. Not so in the Disney story, where we never learn
prison. When the puppet what becomes of them. And I for one will never forget the
warns him that his gloom- chilling scene where the wayward boys turn into donkeys, and
and- cry out for their mothers. Truly the stuff of nightmares.
doom Walt Disney was smart to spruce up the Talking Cricket,
prog- putting on a top hat, tying up his white tie, and brushing up
nosti- his tails. Jiminy Cricket earns his 18 Carat Gold Official
cations Conscience Badge from the Blue Fairy by giving good
are starting advice through personal example and sincere friendship.
to get on his nerves, the cricket calls him a As Walt Disney so astutely understood, nobody likes to be
blockhead, which is literally true, but not scolded. We want a conscience with a touch of class!
very nice to say. Much to my surprise, © DR TIMOTHY J. MADIGAN 2009
Pinocchio reacts to such rebukes in a Tim Madigan’s favorite Disney character is J. Worthington Foulfellow.
manner very different than in the Disney
version, where he is always contrite after being upbraided. In
the Collodi original, he grabs a wooden mallet and flings it at
the criticizing cricket. “Perhaps he didn’t mean to hit him at all,
but unfortunately he hit him square on the head. With his last
breath the poor Cricket cried cree-cree-cree and then died on the
spot, stuck to the wall.” (p.15) Wow! That was uncalled for.
As Eco points out, Collodi’s original puppet is much more
mischievous and genuinely naughty than the rather goody-
goody Pinocchio in the film version. However, he is never
deliberately malicious. Like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn (whose
own sense of right and wrong is beautifully delineated in
philosopher Jonathan Bennett’s classic article ‘The Conscience
of Huckleberry Finn’) he is in need of a conscience. It’s just too
bad that the one he finds is such a prig. Walt Disney astutely
realized that his puppet needed a pal, not a know-it-all. Yet
Collodi’s Pinocchio seems to do fine without the bug, who
later reappears as a ghost, and at the end of the tale is charita-

FILM STILLS AND JIMIINY CRICKET CHARACTER FROM PINOCCHIO © 1940 WALT DISNEY PICTURES LTD.
ble towards the puppet, when he sees how compassionate he
has become toward Geppetto. When Pinocchio asks for the
Cricket’s forgiveness, he replies “I’ll have mercy on the father
and also on the son. But I wanted to remind you of the cruel
treatment I received, to show you that in this world, whenever
possible, we should treat others kindly, if we wish to be treated
with similar kindness in our hour of need.” (pp.154-155). As
the Golden Rule tells us, don’t hurl mallets at others’ heads if
you don’t want mallets hurled at your own.
Collodi’s book is filled with many bizarre characters and situ-
ations not found in the film. This is not surprising, since it was
written originally as an ongoing serial, very loosely structured.
Collodi, a Florentine journalist and freethinker whose real name
was Carlo Lorenzini, became bored with his own creation, and
tried to kill him off. He did this by having the Fox and the Cat
(called Honest John and Gideon in the film) hang Pinocchio
from a tree – thereby getting his own comeuppance for killing

32 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

Josh Tomlin attends an honest job
interview, while Natasha Morgan and
Gary W. Gilbert philosophise poetically.
“Ah yes, I believe that I am a slightly above-average human
being. Do I qualify?”
“Well, that depends, young man. Are you an exceptional
slightly above-average human being?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ah, allow me to explain myself. Can you demonstrate an
exceptional capacity to satisfy all of the criteria specified by us
as requisite in order to do what we want our employees to do?
For example, will you be able to draw a rose-tinted veil over
the eyes of both your colleagues and yourself, as you do jobs a
monkey could do? Ha-humph. I’m sorry. Allow me to excuse
myself – human beings are better workers than monkeys! Of
course they are! They’re more intelligent. But, there is some-
thing else. Human beings are social creatures. It is very impor-
tant that they be kept amused. So, are you a work horse that
will be able to entertain our other work horses? Will you be
able to make jokes about your mundane tasks? In short, can
you have fun, young man? Do you enjoy life? Hmm?”
“Well, yes, I – ”
“How?”
“Sorry? Oh. Well... I like reading.”
“Reading! Well, I say! What do you like reading, son?”
“Philosophy. I think that – ”
“Philosophy! Philosophy, eh? Hmmm. I suppose you like to
think about the, the... the, er... bigger picture? Hmm?”
“Yes, you could call it that. I like to try and see things as
they really are, you know? To – ”
‘The mission of poetry is to make us alive’ – Lorca
I will dance with you one more time
and you will be my prince
so I will die in your arms
while the party members arrive
and shuffle their feet in the corridor outside,
while you tell yourself
it’s the party, the politics of it all that counts,
more than the dance.
And I’ll be sent to bed
and you’ll have your most serious meeting
debating the life of the party
and Stalin and Marx and Lenin,
and I, the heart and the soul of the dance,
hunched on the stairs,
will creep down
so much later
to ask for
maybe could you spare me perhaps
a glass of water?
© NATASHA MORGAN 2009
Natasha Morgan teaches art therapy in London.
Art Corner
“Yes yes yes, I understand. The bigger picture is a fascinat-
ing thing, a fascinating thing indeed... But each of us has a dif-
ferent bigger picture, you must understand. You see, it depends
on the size of the picture with which one starts. Now my pic-
ture – MY picture, my boy – is a big picture, and my big pic-
ture is, is... well, let’s say, ‘considerably large’. And as such it is
quite hard to hang. So I leave it be, up in the attic.” He taps his
temple with his forefinger. “But you, my boy – I imagine that
you are forever trying to hang up your bigger picture. I can see
it in your shoulders right now. But now I’m going to ask you,
boy – on whose wall are you going to hang that great big
bigger picture of yours? Not mine, my boy! No, certainly not!
Let me show you something.” He leads them out of the office.
“Before you is the shop floor. You can see the workers doing
their work. Their work is on their desks, so they look at their
desks. Do you see? Good. Now, suppose, just suppose for a
moment... Are you following me boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Well, just suppose that you were to hang your
bigger picture on the wall over there – which you wouldn’t,
because it’s my wall. But anyway, suppose you hung it there. I
dare say that it’s a fascinating thing, your bigger picture; and I
dare say that all of the workers would think so too. They love
to be entertained, as I was saying. But you must understand! I
cannot have them looking away from their desks!”
© JOSH TOMLIN 2009
Josh is a recently qualified barrister, but is still hunting that elusive job!
But, Socrates
I like to compare
A chair and a stool
Or a horse and a mule
To induce, of course,
The chairness of chair
Or the horseness of horse.
But, Socrates,
I have to confess
I can make quite a mess
Of the essence of ness,
If you please.
The sine qua non of a stone
Is its stoniness,
That’s a certain text.
But sine-qua-noniness
I had best let alone
Like a stone unperplexed
In its loneliness.
© GARY W. GILBERT 2009
Gary W. Gilbert is a writer living in Wyoming.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 33

Heroes, Hatred & Human Rights
DEAR EDITOR: I very much enjoyed
Issue 73 of Philosophy Now, and whilst
not a comics reader or superhero fan,
nevertheless I found the related articles
interesting reading. I was particularly
struck by Todd Walters’ review of the
recent Batman film (which I have not
seen), and his wise conclusion that in
times of crisis we must ask “how to rec-
oncile order which is not oppression
with freedom which is not license.”
Unfortunately, the review was rather
spoiled for me by the nonsense about
hatred he endorsed. Walters’ first praised
the Batman films for their exploration of
moral ambiguity, but then he began to
spout reductionist nonsense which
appeared to support an over-simplified
Good Guys vs Bad Guys worldview. His
citing of Berman’s thesis that all hatred is
the result of an ‘irrational paroxysm’, and
his conclusion that “The wildest of
hatreds do not need a cause outside of
ourselves” is unhistorical, patronising
and downright dangerous. Presumably
Russians, Iranians and various other peo-
ple who live outside the liberal West are
more prone to these paroxysms than we
are: the fact that they may have some-
thing to rebel against is conveniently dis-
missed by this thesis. After all, these peo-
ple are simply being irrational, so we
need not take them seriously or examine
the circumstances that might drive them
towards their actions.
Moreover, Hitler and Stalin were cer-
tainly not nihilists. Both had their own
moral codes and both believed in some-
thing. Stalin was well-read in Marx,
Engels and Lenin, and probably
obtained his messianic streak from
studying in a seminary. Hitler was influ-
enced by Nietzsche, Houston Stewart
Chamberlain and Herbert Spencer,
among others. Both believed what they
were doing was right and morally justi-
fied, and both were a product of their
times. Why was Hitler considered a joke
in Germany in the 1920s, but voted for
34 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road •London •SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
by millions in the 30s? Surely it was
something to do with the material con-
ditions Berman and Walter so glibly
dismiss – or were the Germans subject
to a paroxysm of hatred that just hap-
pened to coincide with the onset of
mass unemployment and economic col-
lapse following the Wall Street Crash?
Berman’s, and so Walters’, treatment
of history is too simplistic and neat. It
brands the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Pol
Pot as maniacs, and thereby exculpates
everyone else, the societies that pro-
duced them, from any responsibility. But
if we brand our enemies as ‘irrational
evil maniacs’ we will never understand
them or what put them in power, and
thereby never tackle the causes of their
actions. This, surely, is the antithesis of
what philosophy should be about.
COLIN JENKINS
HIGHAMS PARK, LONDON
DEAR EDITOR: I have little interest in
comics, just like I have little interest in
novels. Both are a form of escapism and
entertainment that I don’t need. But I
understand that those genres perform a
social service. Both relate to and expand
the commonalities of the human condi-
tion. Thus, in a subliminal way, by
appealing to what people have in com-
mon – emotions, needs and aspirations
– they help facilitate social cohesion,
which is essential if we are going to live
well together. (I think that the Danish
comic depictions of Mohammad helped,
in a perverse way, to engage and defuse
a lot of animosity between faiths that
otherwise would have continued to fes-
ter and potentially have led to worse.)
In her book Inventing Human Rights
Lynn Hunt writes about the role novels
have played in the development of rights.
Human rights would never have been
established if the mining and cultivation
of the common characteristics that make
us human, like sympathy and empathy,
hadn’t occurred in novels. Hunt
describes how Rousseau’s novel Julie
(1761) was an early contributor to this
process.
If the novel was instrumental in culti-
vating human rights, I see the comic
doing the same thing, but in a different,
simpler, way, mainly graphically. Now
we have the combination of the two, the
graphic novel. Some may see this as a
dumbing down from the traditional
novel, but in its clipped, pictorial version
its messages may be reaching and influ-
encing more readers, producing an addi-
tional venue in which to bring a com-
mon understanding.
DAVID AIRTH
TORONTO, CANADA
Credit Where It’s Due
DEAR EDITOR: I just wanted to compli-
ment Toni Vogel Carey’s clarifying arti-
cle in your latest issue (73). I’ve read a lot
about the financial crisis, but her essay is
a necessary corrective to the misin-
formed opinions coming from a lot of
talking heads in the media, floating in the
blogosphere and elsewhere. And she’s
not afraid to name names! Perhaps some
wise foreign leader – from Norway, for
instance, where a natural wisdom seems
to have left that country’s finances
untouched by this mess – should hand
President Obama a copy of Wealth of
Nations while the cameras are rolling. Or
maybe someone should just send him a
copy of this article.
STUART BERNSTEIN
NEW YORK, NY
DEAR EDITOR: Philosophers who venture
into economics need to be sure of their
ground. I’m an amateur philosopher, but
a finance professional, and I would say
that Toni Vogel Carey got into marshy
terrain in trying to lay the blame for the
international liquidity crisis on a retired
US central banker, relying on a few selec-
tive quotes from the US press for her
case. She also got some technicalities
wrong. Derivatives are merely bets where
there is no ownership of the related asset.

Collateralised debt instruments, on the
other hand, represent real liabilities,
albeit thinly spread to mitigate – or hide –
the risk. The crisis was systemic; but
those to blame, if anyone, are the com-
placent and mechanistic credit-rating
agencies, and the banks who tried to out-
smart the regulators for the sake of profit.
But it is not true to say that the financial
markets are unregulated, as Carey does.
The problem is that the (quite strict) con-
trols on capital adequacy did not bite the
ingenious instruments that the bankers
devised to maximise return at, they
hoped, minimal risk. It’s true that the cri-
sis revealed the inherent instability of
markets, as Mike Fuller says, but it
doesn’t take a thinker of the stature of
Marx or Keynes to deduce the obvious.
The banks, who had previously
resisted and avoided regulation, are now
gratefully absorbing the funds the public
authorities are throwing at them in an
attempt (which seems to be succeeding)
to avoid deflation of the scale of the
Great Depression. I suspect history will
judge former President Bush, and per-
haps soon-to-be-former Prime Minister
Brown, kindly for their prompt rescue
measures. The central banks are also
playing a part, in the UK by the mysteri-
ous practice of quantitative easing.
Are philosophers any better placed
than journalists or economists to com-
ment on the credit crunch? There are
epistemological questions, to be sure;
but the failures of the credit agencies
arose less from the staff of Moody’s or
Standard & Poor’s succumbing to
Humean scepticism about the impossi-
bility of induction, than from the com-
placency and self-serving which is char-
acteristic of the financial services indus-
try. In any case, the credit crunch was
not only predictable in principle, but
was actually predicted in practice, by the
venerable but largely unknown Bank of
International Settlements. Taleb’s thesis
about probability, debated in this letters
column recently, sheds no light, because
the credit crunch has had huge global
impact together with high predictability.
Perhaps political philosophy has ben-
efited most from the credit crunch,
because the belated intervention by gov-
ernments and central banks has ruined
the case for neo-liberalism for good. It is
open to question how far the neo-liberal
agenda ever really dominated politics.
The proportion of GDP taken by the
public sector remained much the same in
the UK throughout Conservative and
Labour governments, and it’s wrong to
equate Thatcher and Reagan, for the
National Health Service has survived in
the UK (more or less) as a model left-
wing US Democrats can only dream of.
The true lesson of the credit crunch is
the triumph of neo-socialism.
MARK FRANKL
KINGSTON-UPON-THAMES
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 73 Mike Fuller
stated: “Karl Marx famously pro-
nounced: ‘The last cause of all real crises
always remains the poverty and restricted
consumption of the masses as compared
to the tendency of capitalist production
to develop the productive forces in such
a way that only the absolute consuming
power of society would be their limit.’”
In a less well-known pronouncement,
quoted in Vince Cable’s 2009 book The
Storm, Marx apparently also predicted in
Nostradamus-like fashion: “Owners of
capital will stimulate the working class to
buy more and more of expensive goods,
houses and mechanical products, pushing
them to take more and more expensive
credits, until their debt becomes unbear-
able. The unpaid debt will lead to
bankruptcy of banks, which will have to
be nationalised, and the state will have to
take the road which eventually will lead
to communism.” It is unclear where
Marx is held to have said these things,
but the latter quotation is so laughable it
is clearly a forgery. Snopes seem to agree
with my opinion, at snopes.com, as does
liberation.typepad.com. It is unfortunate
that an academic like Dr Mike Fuller was
taken in, and that your editorial controls
are not strong enough to identify such
forgeries.
ATRI INDIRESAN
BY EMAIL
Tallis: Knowing and Not Knowing
DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed Raymond
Tallis’ well-argued article about atheism
in Issue 73. His ‘bad’ reasons for not
believing in God are particularly good.
When still a child, brought up in a very
Catholic (yet outwardly communist)
country, I once asked my mother a
rhetorical question: “If I had been born
in India, I would have been believing in
very different gods, going to different
temples, and praying different prayers.
So it’s only an accident that I am a
Letters
Catholic believing in Christ, isn’t it?’ My
first seed of doubt and disobedience was
sown. Darwin did the rest.
‘Gods’ are created by the human
brain, hence the ubiquitous presence of
religion in different cultures. The atavis-
tic mind (equivalent to today’s psychotic)
was prone to formulate beliefs in
response to extraordinary experiences,
such as hallucinations or moments of
ecstasy. These mystical events feel as real
as they are puzzling. Their most frightful
quality comes from the collapse of the
mind’s categorical framework (particu-
larly the categories of time and space),
accompanied by an all-pervading sense of
presence and extraordinary meaningful-
ness. A compelling need for rationalisa-
tion renders a willing suspension of belief
impossible. A vision or a voice would
instantly, uncritically, and without any
attempt at ‘falsification’ or other testing,
solidify into an idea that ‘explains it all’.
A life-saving phantom is thus created!
Such ideas can take the comforting,
anthropomorphic shape of a personal
God, or the frightful theriomorphic
shape of a personal Satan.
Hallucinations and other psychotic
phenomena were common in early cul-
tures (some believe as late as at the time
of Homer). We still observe their rem-
nants in the form of psychoses. It’s this
regression to humanity’s earlier emotion-
ality and ‘proto-reasoning’ that lies at the
heart of God-creation. If someone came
along today and insisted he was the Son
of God, wouldn’t he be committed under
the Mental Health Act? People have
been committed for less!
Mystical experiences are the domain
of prophets, who fall in love with their
phantasms readily and with great tenac-
ity. Herds of the faithful then follow the
charismatic seer... until the next prophet
emerges and a new religion is born that
often re-works elements of the old. The
cauldron of religious ideas contains a
limited quantity of archetypal images,
regularly recycled. For example, Isis the
mother of Horus transforms into Deme-
ter the mother of Core, who in turn
becomes Mary the mother of Christ: the
dismembered god Osiris metamorphoses
into Dionysus, and Dionysus transmutes
into Christ, and so on.
But why should our existential alone-
ness feel so unbearable when it could be
downright empowering? As John Milton
asked, is it not better to reign in hell than
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 35
Letters
serve in heaven, even if we are our hell’s
makers? Unreason (no matter how com-
forting) can never bring salvation to
humanity, whether it comes in a shape of
God, a prophet, or Derrida! Refusal to
yield to Unreason is, I think, the best
reason for not believing in God.
DR EVA CYBULSKA
PSYCHIATRIST, LONDON
DEAR EDITOR: Towards the end of his
explanation of why he is an atheist in
Issue 73, Raymond Tallis writes that he
is not willing to imprison “a thrilling
intuition of transcendent possibilities
arising out of (his) sense of the
unknown.” Isn’t that a definition of God?
DYANA RODRIGUEZ
MA PHILOSOPHY STUDENT, LAMPETER
DEAR EDITOR: I am grateful to Raymond
Tallis for dispensing with human
behaviour as a justification for atheism.
To reject the notion of God because
some humans act hideously in God’s
name is as illogical as refusing to vote
because MPs fiddle their expenses, and is
also unscientific, because the undeniable
evidence is that other people act well in
the same cause.
However I would like to take issue
with the two reasons he enlists to under-
pin atheism. First, that the notion of God
is incoherent, even comical (I regret his
use of the word ‘infantile’). The religious
systems with which I am familiar share
the notion that God is a mystery, ulti-
mately beyond human ken. Indeed a God
fully comprehensible by the human mind
would be too small to qualify as divine. I
suggest that the more we see God as
paradoxical and complex, the more we
tread the path of wonder and humility.
God’s otherness is not sufficient reason
to reject God’s existence, then. This
argument, I think, supports agnosticism,
but does not prove atheism.
His second reason is that the religions
present such a bewildering array of stories
about God that it is impossible to choose
between them. I agree that this seems
impossible, but would suggest an analogy.
Imagine that you wanted to understand
games involving bats and balls. You could
read in your study the rules of cricket,
baseball, rounders and stoolball, and
decide that the whole family is so varied
that the concept of ‘ball game’ is vacuous.
Or, you could join a club and start to
play; or support a team. Then you would
36 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
understand that commitment makes the
concept come alive. (I think this argu-
ment says more about human rootless-
ness than about atheology, though.)
The question modern atheists do not
seem to be able to answer is why atheism
itself needs to be promoted. If atheism is
right, and religious belief is a fading cul-
tural meme, why bother to write against
it? On the other hand, if atheism is
wrong, and religious belief survives and
even revives, why not question the athe-
istic worldview rather than support it?
RICHARD MARTIN
STROOD, ROCHESTER
DEAR EDITOR: Raymond Tallis’ ‘I Kid
You Not: Knowingness and Other Shal-
lows’ (Issue 72) analyzed an important
but rarely recognized social phenomenon
– ‘knowingness’. Much has been written
about stupidity, ignorance, dogmatism,
prejudice, and bigotry, but next to noth-
ing about knowingness, which I see as an
important topic for the philosopher, psy-
chologist, sociologist, and historian.
I personally define knowingness as
thinking and claiming that one knows
more about the world, life, politics, his-
tory or whatever, than one really knows,
especially for purposes of showing soli-
darity as a ‘regular guy or gal’ with the
person(s) one is addressing, and practic-
ing ‘one-upmanship’ against those fool-
ish or perverse enough to doubt or dis-
agree with one’s own prejudices by dis-
missing them as naïve, uninformed, sen-
timental, or unwitting dupes of sinister
interests. As Tallis notes, it “also carries
an air of cognitive privilege.” Some peo-
ple, he said, “seem permanently in the
know, and – especially when their ‘exper-
tise’ lies in conspiracy theories, or
‘women’, or ‘men’, or ‘sex’ – they are
insufferable.”
I have also long noted Tallis’ ‘epis-
temic community’ of those with an “air
of cognitive privilege” of “one who is ‘in
the know’.” Most writers so far have
focused on the contents of the knowing
ones’ diatribes, their specific ideological
biases or social and cultural resent-
ments.They have been satisfied, for
instance, to simply assert that Sarah
Palin is poorly informed about many
things and obviously an ultra-conserva-
tive Republican. But these writers have
rarely ever addressed the psychological
and social dynamics of knowingness; the
stances or poses assumed by ‘knowing’
speakers or writers, which Tallis did per-
ceptively analyze. Unlike him, they have
rarely described the process of binding
speakers and hearer(s) into the buddy-
buddy solidarity of an epistemic commu-
nity of a regular guy or gal speaking to
other regular guys or gals, et cetera.
If I may indulge a bit of sociological
speculation, I’ve long felt that knowing-
ness is a folkish or populist reaction to
modern industrial society’s increasing
reliance on education and expertise.
Many ‘plain folks’ – and many unsophisti-
cated, unintellectual ‘rich folks’ too – feel
that they are being left behind by ever-
increasing formal education, certified
expertise, and ‘book-learning’. This alien-
ation is found at all social and economic
levels: in drawing-rooms and country
clubs as well at kitchen tables and in cor-
ner taverns; at Ivy League or Oxbridge
alumni reunions nostalgically celebrating
the ‘rah-rah’ side of college life, as well as
in taxicabs and bowling alleys. It espe-
cially afflicts, I think, conservative parents
dismayed to find that their children going
away to college have been ‘seduced by
radical ideas’ and ‘led astray by pinko
professors’. They respond by claiming
that formal education and certified exper-
tise isn’t everything – that the ‘experts’,
‘intellectuals’ and ‘professors’ can be and
often are plain wrong: either naïve, or
even deliberate, conscious liars serving
sinister interests. These parents stress the
virtues of common sense, ‘native shrewd-
ness’ and ‘having been around’ that are
supposedly devalued by the intellectuals,
professors, elite media, and naïve, callow
college kids who think that they know
everything.
T. PETER PARK
GARDEN CITY SOUTH, NY
Machine Of The Heart
DEAR EDITOR: I read the articles in Issue
72 surrounding the morality of machines
with great interest. I am a practicing
anesthesiologist at an institution where
left ventricular assist devices (LVADs)
are routinely placed in patients dying
from heart failure. LVADs are devices
that essentially act as an external heart,
diverting blood flow from the lungs to
the body. These devices can do a remark-
able amount of good, allowing some
patients to live longer and with a better
quality of life. They can also be a costly
exercise in futility, worsening quality of
life and prolonging the inevitable at the

expense of our rapidly-disappearing
health care dollars.
Now imagine if these machines were
programmed with a ‘moral code’. From
what or whose perspective would that
moral code derive?
From the perspective of the individual
who returns home to his or her family,
the LVAD will keep pumping happily.
However, from the viewpoint of the
patient who is bedbound in the intensive
care unit with their other organs failing
in grisly succession, the Moral LVAD
may or may not shut itself down depend-
ing on the patient’s concept of quantity
versus quality of life (would shutting
down be considered suicide?). Of course,
maybe that same ‘decision’ would be
made differently if programmed from
the perspective of the family who cannot
accept the loss of their loved one. And
what about from the standpoint of the
surgeon who promises the possibility of a
longer (if not better) life? Would the
LVAD drum on to help prevent com-
promised patient care? Of course the
LVAD would likely be built and pro-
grammed in an industrialized nation
with resources to spare. Here the LVAD
may keep running like a perpetual
motion machine. But maybe the pro-
gramming was farmed out to cheaper
labor in developing nations. Their per-
spective on the utility of resource alloca-
tion would shut the LVAD down before
it even starts (how many immunizations
could fifty thousand dollars buy?).
As medicine continues to progress at a
meteoric pace, and the ratio of resources
to population dwindles, the role of
Machine Morality, Roboethics, Friendly
AI, etc. will likely prove to be indispens-
able to our health care system.
BYRON FERGUSON
BY EMAIL
Switching Glasses
DEAR EDITOR: There are two types of
people in the world: those willing to
commit murder and those not willing to
do so. Lawrence Crocker (‘Switching
Wine Glasses’, Issue 70) wants to protect
the former from the latter. He asserts
that to be ethical, those not willing to
murder must not switch wine glasses
with those actively attempting to murder
them. In fact, he says, when one has been
intentionally served poisoned wine, one’s
absolute certainty that the wine glass
contains poison actually enhances the pro-
hibition against switching it with one’s
would-be assassin’s. He asserts, “you will
be criminally liable if you switch a glass
that you know to be poisoned – and you
should be.” Turn about, in this case, is
not fair play. This reasoning is based on
the premise that deadly force is permissi-
ble only if ‘the necessity test’ has been
met – ie, one must be in “imminent risk
of death or serious injury,” before one
can respond in kind, it is alleged.
I agree with Crocker on what consti-
tutes an imminent risk, but disagree with
him on what justifies immediate and sub-
sequent uses of deadly force. Obviously,
any successful use of deadly force in self-
defense would have to be in response to
an attack. Self-defense must not be pre-
emptive. And any successful act of self-
defense which takes the life of the
attacker, amounts to a dealing out of the
death penalty for the attempted offense.
Here a life has been taken without the
attacker having taken a life, or even having
produced serious injury. This is entirely
justifiable – yet not by the mere immi-
nence of risk, but rather by the threat
itself – and most importantly, because of
the forfeiture of the perpetrator’s right to
life resulting from the threat he offered.
By contrast, if the right to life of the
offender remained intact, then the taking
of his life would be murder, regardless of
when it was taken. Or in other words, the
right to life of the mortally-threatening
perpetrator must be nullified before self-
defense can be justified. This fact, and not
imminent risk, determines justification.
Furthermore, the perpetrator’s right to
life is not restored once the imminent risk
passes, because the intended violation
poses an ongoing (although not immi-
nent) threat.
Crocker’s idea that the victim of an
attempted murder is morally obligated to
harmlessly empty the glass of poison
meant for her, is a result of a mistaken
assumption that rights to life are abso-
lute. In such a world the imprisonment,
execution or killing of anyone for any
reason would be impermissible.
To be sure, ethics does not require the
use of force under any circumstances, but
it also does not prohibit force in the
administration of just deserts. It is com-
monly understood that justice is achieved
when the punishment fits the crime.
What is more perfectly balanced than
knowingly switching wine glasses with a
would-be poisoner? Is society not bene-
Letters
fited when erstwhile murderers are elimi-
nated from the population, and when
potential assassins are justly hoisted on
their own petards? The theory that
imminent risk alone justifies self defense
leads to the remarkable conclusion that
we must not switch wine glasses with
murderers to avoid natural justice.
Crocker indicates that Penny may
serve Quinton the poisoned lemonade he
had served her if the probable outcome
would cause him only minor discomfort,
like a stomach ache; but she may not serve
him the deadly poison he intended for her.
But if Quinton deserves to get sick for
playing a prank on Penny, why doesn’t he
deserve to die if he tries to kill her?
ROBERT KRAFT
CHICAGO, IL
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 70, Lawrence
Crocker discussed the ethics of switch-
ing glasses if one thought that their
drink had been poisoned. He did not
believe that this situation came up in
real life, and says, “I did not prosecute
or defend a single poison switch case,
and I did not hear of anyone else han-
dling a case with even the remotest
resemblance.” Yet a moment of thought
will show that far from being an exceed-
ingly rare occurrence, people are often
being warned against the possibility of
their drink being poisoned – by date
rape drugs. Indeed, ordering two of a
certain drink and giving one to the per-
son paying would be an extremely useful
way of dealing with the possibility of a
spiked drink. If one had doubts, one
could simply switch drinks, assuming
that both drinks were being consumed.
AARON THOMSON
HAMILTON, ONTARIO
Apologies if you were baffled by a
Evolutionary Erratum
discontinuity in Daria Sugorakovaʼs
article on Dragons and Memes in
Issue 72. The missing text, which
should have gone on the end of p.23
and led into p.24, reads:
“Another hypothesis has a greater likeli-
hood: for every culture to have these
myths and legends with similar features,
a very long time ago there was a com-
mon observation of some disastrous
event. What kind of event could have
been observable all over the world, dis-
astrous, and looking like a dragon?”
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 37

Books
C.S. Lewis and the
Search for Rational
Religion
by John Beversluis
C.S. LEWIS HAS HAD AN
enormous impact on the
evangelical mind. His
books still top the charts in Christian
bookstores. But what about the substance
of his arguments? Philosopher Dr John
Beversluis wrote the first full-length criti-
cal study of C.S. Lewis’ apologetics in
1985, titled C.S. Lewis and the Search for
Rational Religion. For twenty-two years it
was the only full-length critical study of
C.S. Lewis’ arguments. Beversluis took as
his point of departure Lewis’ challenge, “I
am not asking anyone to accept Christianity
if his best reasoning tells him that the
weight of the evidence is against it” (Mere
Christianity p.123). Beversluis thoroughly
examined the evidence Lewis presented
and found that it should not lead people to
accept Christianity.
Beversluis is a former Christian who
studied at Calvin College under Harry
WITCH AND LION FROM THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE © 2005 WALDEN MEDIA/WALT DISNEY PICTURES LTD.
Tilda Swinton as Narnia’s White Witch
38 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
Reviews at the borders of knowledge as John Loftus heartily
agrees with a debunking of C.S. Lewis, Luke Pollard finds
nothing new about the New Atheists, and David Braid
peers at the limits of what we can possibly know anyway.
Jellema, who tutored Christian thinkers
such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas
Wolterstoff. Later Beversluis was a stu-
dent at Indiana University with my former
professor James D. Strauss. He became a
professor at Butler University.
According to Beversluis, his first ver-
sion “elicited a mixed response – indeed, a
response of extremes. Some thought I had
largely succeeded. I was complimented for
writing a ‘landmark’ book that ‘takes up
Lewis’ challenge to present the evidence
for Christianity and... operates with full
rigor’.” (Revised Version pp.9-10) But the
critics were ‘ferocious’. He said, “I had
expected criticism. What I had not expected
was the kind of criticism… I was christened
the ‘bad boy’ of Lewis studies and labeled
the ‘consummate Lewis basher’.” (p.10)
This Revised and Updated edition, pub-
lished by Prometheus Books in 2008, was
prompted by Keith Parsons and Charles
Echelbarger. In the Introduction Beversluis
claims “this is... a very different book that
supercedes the first edition on every point.”
(p.11) According to him, “Part of my pur-
pose in this book to show, by means of
example after example,
the extent to which the
apparent cogency of
[Lewis’] arguments
depends on his rhetoric
rather than on his
logic… Once his argu-
ments are stripped of
their powerful rhetori-
cal content, their
apparent cogency
largely vanishes and
their apparent persua-
siveness largely evapo-
rates. The reason is
clear: it is not the logic,
but the rhetoric that is
doing most of the
work. We will have
occasion to see this
again and again. In
short, my purpose in
this book is not just to
show that Lewis’ argu-
ments are flawed. I also
want to account for
their apparent plausi-
bility and explain why they have managed
to convince so many readers.” (pp.20, 22)
Additionally, Beversluis tells us, “I will
reply to my critics and examine their
attempts to reformulate and defend his
arguments, thereby responding not only to
Lewis but to the whole Lewis movement –
that cadre of expositors, popular apologists
and philosophers who continue to be
inspired by him and his books. I will argue
that their objections can be met and that
even when Lewis’ arguments are formulat-
ed more rigorously than he formulated them,
they still fail.” (p.11)
C.S. Lewis’ writings contain three major
arguments for God’s existence: the
‘Argument from Desire’, the ‘Moral
Argument’, and the ‘Argument From
Reason’. Lewis furthermore argued that the
‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord Trilemma’ shows that
Jesus is God. He also deals with the major
skeptical objection known as the Problem
of Evil. Beversluis examines these argu-
ments and finds them all defective; some are
even fundamentally flawed. Finally
Beversluis examines Lewis’ crisis of faith
when he lost his wife, the love of his life.
I can only briefly articulate what
Beversluis says about these arguments. ‘The
Argument From Desire’ echoes Augustine’s
sentiment in his Confessions when addressing
God that “You have made us for yourself
and our hearts find no peace until they rest
in you.” Lewis develops this into an argu-
ment for God’s existence which can be for-
mulated in several ways; but the bottom line
is that since humans have an innate desire
for joy beyond the natural world (which is
what he means by ‘joy’), there must be an
object to satisfy that desire, therefore God.
Beversluis subjects this argument to crit-
icism on several fronts. How universal is the
desire for this ‘joy’? Is Lewis’ description of
‘joy’ a natural desire at all, since such desires
are biological and instinctive? Must our
desires have possible fulfillment? What
about people who have been satisfied by
things other than God – with their careers,
spouses and children? In what I consider
the most devastating question, he asks if
there is any propositional content to Lewis’
argument. Surely if there is an object corre-
sponding to the desire for ‘joy’, then some-
one who finds this object should be able to
Book Reviews

describe it from her desire. Beversluis
argues she cannot do this, and since that’s
the case, how can she know there’s an object
which corresponds to the desire for ‘joy’?
Lewis’ ‘Moral Argument’ is basically
that all people have a notion of right and
wrong, and the only explanation for this
sense of morality must come from a Power
behind this moral law, known as God.
Beversluis claims this argument is based on
some questionable assumptions related to
Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma, and it also
depends on Lewis’ criticisms of ‘ethical
subjectivism’, against which theory Lewis
only critiques straw man arguments rather
than the robust arguments of Hume and
Hobbes. If that isn’t enough to diminish
C.S. Lewis:
medievalist,
theologian and
children’s
author
Book Reviews
Aslan from Lewis’ Narnia stories.
A big divine lion head in the sky,
what’s irrational about that?
Lewis’ case, deductively arguing that there
is a Power behind this moral law is said to
be committing ‘the fallacy of affirming the
consequent’ (p.99). This fallacy is: 1) If
there is a Power behind the moral law then
it must make itself known within us. 2) We
do find this moral law within us; Therefore,
there is a Power behind the moral law.
Thus the Moral Argument is invalid.
‘The Argument From Reason’ is best
seen in Lewis’ book, Miracles. According to
Beverluis, it “is the philosophical back-
bone” on which “his case for miracles
depends” (p.145). There Lewis champions
the idea that naturalism [the idea that
everything can be explained with reference
only to the natural world] “impugns the
validity of reason and rational inference,”
and as such, naturalists contradict them-
selves if they use reason to argue their case.
If you as a naturalist have ever been trou-
bled by such an argument you need to read
Beversluis’ response to it. It’s the largest
chapter in the book, and I can’t adequately
summarize it in a few short sentences,
except to say that Beversluis approvingly
quotes Keith Parsons: “surely Lewis cannot
mean that if naturalism is true, then there is
no such thing as valid reasoning.” (p.174)
Lewis’ ‘Liar, Lunatic, Lord Trilemma’ is
one of the most widely used arguments
among Christian popular apologists. Lewis
said that since Jesus claimed he was God, the
only other options to this being true are that
he was either a liar or a lunatic, which isn’t
reasonable, given Jesus’ moral teaching.
Therefore Jesus is God, as he claimed.
Books
Even William Lane Craig defends this
argument in his book Reasonable Faith. But
it is widely heralded by opponents as
Lewis’ weakest argument, and fundamen-
tally flawed as he presented it. Beversluis
subjects Lewis’ and his defenders’ defense
of it to a barrage of intellectual attacks.
There is the problem of knowing for sure
what Jesus claimed – which by itself “is
sufficient to rebut the Trilemma.” (p.115)
Also, it is a false trilemma. Even if Jesus
claimed he was God he could simply have
been mistaken, and not a liar or lunatic.
It’s quite possible for someone to be a
good moral teacher and yet be wrong
about whether he’s God. Furthermore, the
New Testament itself indicates that many
people around Jesus, including his own
family, did think he was crazy. In the end,
Beversluis claims, “we can now dispense of
the Lunatic or Fiend Dilemma once and
for all… If the dilemma fails, as I have
argued, the trilemma goes with it. In the
future, let us hear no more about these
arguments.” (p.135). I agree.
In the book The Problem of Pain, coming
at the heels of WWII, Lewis deals head-on
with the Problem of Evil. How Beversluis
tackles Lewis’ argument is probably best
summed up by Christian philosopher Vic-
tor Reppert, who wrote: “If the word
‘good’ must mean approximately the same
thing when we apply it to God as what it
means when we apply it to human beings,
then the fact of suffering provides a clear
empirical refutation of the existence of a
being who is both omnipotent and per-
fectly good. If, on the other hand, we are
prepared to give up the idea that ‘good’ in
reference to God means anything like
what it means when we refer to humans as
good, then the problem of evil can be
sidestepped, but any hope of a rational
defense of the Christian God goes by the
boards.” (dangerousidea.blogspot.com)
This is must reading if you think C.S.
Lewis was a great apologist. Beversluis’
arguments are brilliant, and devastating to
the apologetics of Lewis and company.
© JOHN W. LOFTUS 2009
John Loftus is founder of the blog debunk-
ingchristianity.blogspot.com and author of
Why I Became an Atheist; A Former
Preacher Rejects Christianity (Prometheus
Books, 2008).
• C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Reli-
gion, Revised and Updated by John Beversluis,
Prometheus Books, 2008, 363 pages pb,
$21.98, ISBN: 978-1-59102-531-3
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 39
 quotes, which can make for laborious read-
A Sceptic’s Guide To
ing; but conversely, this also pulls together
Atheism
the key statements from the main thinkers.
by Peter S. Williams
A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism is a wonderful
WHETHER IT’S POSITIVE resource if one’s main aim is to study the
or negative, it’s there, history of the New Atheists, or if one wants
being proclaimed from to save time: the book is a good substitute
the roof-tops: a new phi- for reading every popular New Atheist tome
losophy for a new age. A new atheism. – most of their arguments, and best quotes
You may have heard of the New Athe- on the God debate are contained within.
ists, and now a brilliant sceptic writes his Williams first sets out to assess the cur-
account of this ‘phenomenon’. He’s a rent level of atheism. Through sourcing a
heretic – but not for denouncing God; variety of polls, he finds that lack of belief
instead, for concluding that He exists. in a God may be declining world-wide, but
Peter S. Williams’ new book A Sceptic’s is growing in parts of the West.
Guide to Atheism seeks to challenge the pop- Why is this? Williams claims it is mainly
ular conception that the New Atheist move- to do with the devastating effect Logical
ment has a monopoly on the rational. He Positivism had in the 20th Century on reli-
examines modern popularist anti-theistic gious belief. Logical Positivism holds that
writings, specifically focusing on the New only statements that can be observed to be
Atheists, and concludes, altogether rebel- true through our senses or otherwise be
liously, that “I am not impressed.” potentially verified, have any meaning. This
Sunrise or sunset?
leaves the
unverifiable
God hypothesis
meaningless.
However,
argues
Williams, it
does the same
to the opposite
claim too. The
atheist declara-
tion ‘there is no
God’ is also
impossible to
scientifically
According to Williams, the New Atheist prove. So under Logical Positivism, atheism
movement is nothing new, drawing much is also meaningless. As Williams writes in
of its philosophy from Hume and others Ch1, “Dawkins’ atheism, no less than the
living hundreds of years ago. But it is theism he opposes, is built upon Posi-
“angry, acerbic and rhetorically cunning.” tivism’s grave.” Positivism had to die for
Unfortunately, claims Williams, these atheism to live. However, Williams then
eccentricities tend to crowd out the philo- moves on to argue that bizarrely, Logical
sophical essentials – reason and rigorous Positivism is historically the main reason
argumentation. In popular culture the atheism has such a grasp on public imagina-
philosophical extremists from both religious tion today. It provided the social credibility
and anti-religious groups have shouted for atheism upon which the New Atheists
down the rest. Williams’ book is an attempt have built.
to redress this – promoting thinking, and However, the book’s real attraction is
lending logic to the debate. He helps us to not its history lessons. Instead, it is the log-
see that the question of God can be ical assessment of the atheist arguments.
addressed with care and precision, as is Williams dedicates a chapter to each one,
done in more academic circles (sometimes). first giving it a fair hearing and then criti-
A Sceptic’s Guide to Atheism acts, first and cally appraising it. Evidence and reason is
foremost, as a thorough account of the allowed to rule above rhetoric and emotive
God debate in contemporary circles. It gut-reactions. Williams doesn’t hammer
covers the key arguments in favour of athe- his point across – you don’t finish reading
ism, as propounded by the New Atheists. with the sense that you’ve been intellectu-
In the attempt to ensure that the arguments ally mugged. Instead you feel enriched by a
are not misrepresented, Williams over- plethora of new information. This is the
40 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
opposite of a mugging – leaving you with
more in your pocket than at the start.
Williams deals with most of the big
arguments against theism. For example, he
examines the ‘Faith is the root of evil’ argu-
ment, which he sees as a foundationless
moral reaction against foundationless reli-
gious belief. The argument that science
leaves no room for a God is also dismissed.
Following on from this is a debate about
whether the ‘Who designed the designer?’
argument is logically valid, or even coher-
ently expressible. Williams also discusses
the less-popular argument that explaining
the prevalence of religious belief in evolu-
tionary terms negates any truth that it may
hold. That is Daniel Dennett’s position,
Williams claims; but few other New Athe-
ists support this kind of attack. Williams
also examines many other, less famous
arguments. He deals with the big thinkers
on both sides of the debate, getting us to
re-examine ideas we’ve all heard before.
Williams attempts to raise the level of
debate not by reciting his own arguments
whilst the other side recite theirs, compet-
ing to be the loudest voice. Instead he
interacts with the New Atheist arguments,
evaluating them logically, thus giving us a
well-thought-out perspective. This is rela-
tively uncommon at the popularist level.
And whilst we have plenty of deep books
on both sides (which are, unfortunately,
rarely the popular ones), it is unusual to
have them interacting with the alternative
perspective in such a compelling way.
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and
Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion
are other exceptions to this rule. However,
The God Delusion tends to offer false ver-
sions of classical theistic arguments, and The
Dawkins Delusion relates almost entirely to
Dawkins. This book is different, interacting
with all the main lines of reasoning, thus
giving us a new level of civilized debate.
Entering this debate at the popularist
level is a risky move for anyone not pro-
moting atheism. Although it is written
from a Christian perspective, Williams’
precise, logical style makes it fascinating
reading for the rest of us. Thus it is an
essential resource, helping the reader to
get to grips with every angle of the God
debate. As such, it will probably be burned
as heretical teaching.
© LUKE POLLARD 2009
Luke Pollard is a writer interested in the areas
of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion.
• A Sceptic’s Guide To Atheism by Peter S.
Williams, Paternoster, 2009, £12.99, ISBN:
9781842276174
Book Reviews

What We Can Never
Know
by David Gamez
THE POTENTIALLY ALL-
encompassing title gives
a good indication of the
sweep of Gamez’ argu-
ment. Drawing together several of the
main streams of philosophical thought, the
author offers much more than just an
overview of various attempts to surpass the
limits of our knowledge of ourselves and
everything else. Beginning with a concise,
clear discussion of ‘stable’ versus ‘collaps-
ing’ theories, he applies these categories to
a number of disparate yet related subjects,
including ‘Evidence for the Brain’, ‘Impos-
sible Speech About Time’, and ‘Merging
Madness and Reason’, making the connec-
tions between the limits of our knowledge
explicit, and explaining why they are essen-
tially unsurpassable.
Gamez finds common ground between
writers as diverse as Baudrillard, Dawkins
and Philip K. Dick. What We Can Never
Know also bears the influence of Derrida,
except that he’s trying to deconstruct not
texts but philosophical and scientific theo-
ries. The self-reflexive limitations of those
theories are exposed in the main chapters,
where they are turned into models. Gamez
claims that this process of model-building
enables us to see our theories in a different
way: “The process of condensation and
abstraction into a model can highlight how
utterly absurd some theories are; how they
are all-embracing monstrous metaphysical
visions.” (p.3).
The first chapter gives details of Gamez’
framework of ‘stable’, ‘collapsing’ and
‘unstable’ explanatory circles. This frame-
work is used to show the limitations of the-
ories in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2
examines theories of mind and deals with
the question of whether the qualities of
experience can be explained using the
brain. Gamez argues that this is only possi-
ble if our bodies and our physical environ-
ment are represented within a single virtual
reality, with our brains becoming virtual as
well. This avoids the problem of how the
mind can interact with something that’s
non-mental, as everything is now in the
mind, at least potentially. But if so, we are
led to the conclusion that our entire world
consists of virtual impressions: “Virtual
bees sup at fake flowers beneath a cyber
sky.” (p.84). Neuroscience is therefore con-
fronted with the paradox that it is based on
evidence taken from our experiences with
Book Reviews
Books
‘real brains’, and yet this evidence leads to theory of knowledge right in the centre of
the conclusion that we have never seen or his ‘labyrinth of conflicting aspects’, accept-
touched a real brain: “there are just virtual ing that this makes it both true and untrue
arms, virtual tongues and virtual lips. All at the same time – another unstable
my evidence for the brain hypothesis has hermeneutic circle...
also vanished; virtual observations take the With its eclectic mixture of aphorism,
place of this lost objectivity, and the brain detailed thought-experiment and academic
hypothesis becomes an absurd metaphysi- argument, the style of the book has a touch
cal and theological leap.” (p.84). of the informal throughout. Like Descartes,
In Chapter 3, Gamez examines Relativ- Gamez speaks from the first person as the
ity Theory and uses Bergson and Ouspen- initial point of reference. This has the
sky’s philosophies to build an elaborate effect of amplifying the sense of the subjec-
model of time as a kind of cinematic pro- tive, thus underscoring the limits of our
jector. Kojève’s reading of Hegel is used to experience-ability and therefore our knowl-
argue that if we were living in objective edge about what the ‘outside’ may consist
[independently-existing] time, we would be of, if anything at all. However, he argues
unable to speak about it. Despite a number from first principles, employing a bottom-
of imaginative thought-experiments, this up approach whereby one can clearly fol-
chapter was not always easy to follow, and low the construction of his theory.
probably the least convincing. Ironically, a book that takes as its subject
The chapter ‘Merging Madness and the grandest notion of all – the possibility
Reason’ brings to light the acute and ruth- of some form of ultimate knowledge – and
less way in which madness is diagnosed then goes on to systematically destroy the
according to what are fundamentally little very idea of even attempting to consider it
more than the mores of a particular society. as a possibility, may find particular strength
By making madness relative in this way, in its application to more everyday fields
Gamez suggests that there is something such as the notion of madness and what it
arbitrary and artificial about the distinction may mean for the individual and the culture
between madness and sanity. Indeed, this in which they reside.
blurs the distinction to the extent of elimi- © DAVID BRAID 2009
nating it altogether: “there is just a single David Braid, a composer of contemporary classi-
‘homogenous zone’ of madness and rea- cal music, has researched the temporal percep-
son” in which “we have always been foam- tion of music and its effect on musical form. His
ing fools pouring out an endless stream of new CD of vocal and chamber music One Year
fantastical metaphysical, scientific, reli- Lighter will be available from Toccata Classics
gious and cosmological imaginings.” later this year. Please visit www.davidbraid.net
(p.178). Unfortunately, this dissolution of
the distinction between madness and rea- • What We Can Never Know: Blindspots in
son is self-defeating – if I am mad, how can Philosophy and Science by David Gamez,
I ever know that I am? Or indeed, how can Continuum, 2007, 304 pages, £12.99, ISBN:
I ever know that I’m not mad? Gamez han- 0826491618
dles these problems
using his notion of
the ‘unstable
hermeneutic circle’.
The final chapter
sets out a contradic-
tory, labyrinthine
understanding of
knowledge, influ-
enced by Pyrrhonic
(absolute) scepticism
and Nietzsche’s per-
spectivism. Ques-
tions about self-
reflexivity are never
Photo by Dave Pape
far away – a theory
of knowledge has to
be able to account
for itself – and
Gamez places his Researcher testing a CAVE virtual reality environment
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 41

Film
I
f Hollywood genre movies can be
depended upon to deliver one thing, it
is a good hero pitted against an evil
foe. Simplistic though it is, Hollywood
cinema seduces us all with these Manichean
conflicts that persuade us to side with the
good guys. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007
Oscar-winning There Will Be Blood marked
a rare exception to this rule, giving audi-
ences an unconventional protagonist – one
seemingly beyond good and evil.
There Will Be Oil
The narrative, a cinematic adaptation of
Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil, centres on the
epic rise, and ultimate decline, of oil mag-
nate Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis).
But this is no typical tale of poor boy made
good, for Plainview is far from good in any
moral sense, despite his admirable charac-
teristics. Instead Plainview is a thoroughly
Nietzschean figure, and if one is seeking
ways to vivify Friedrich Nietzsche’s philoso-
phy – especially his attitude towards Chris-
tian morality – one can do no better than
through this film. While Plainview embod-
ies many aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy
and personality, I will limit my focus to
how the film illuminates Nietzsche’s cri-
tique of Christianity. The parallels go far
beyond Plainview’s bushy moustache.
The central conflict of There Will Be
42 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
There Will Be Blood
Terri Murray tells us about a Hollywood hero beyond
good and evil.
Blood is between Plainview, who is a plain-
speaking businessman with big ambitions in
the burgeoning oil industry, and a hypocrit-
ical Christian preacher, Eli Sunday, who
shares Plainview’s ambition for wealth but
doesn’t want to get his hands dirty earning
it. The film opens in 1898, when we see
Plainview making his first discovery, and
badly injuring his leg in the process.
There is no dialogue during the opening
scenes, and our attention is drawn instead
to the raw, uncivilized physicality of man as
animal struggling against the elements.
Several years pass, and again we see Plain-
view prospecting for oil, this time with a
team of colleagues, one of whom is killed in
an accident at a primitive drilling site, leav-
ing a son. Plainview adopts the orphaned
boy, who goes by the name ‘H.W.’. These
early scenes of injury and death set the con-
tours of what will follow: destruction, loss
and injury is seen throughout the film as an
integral part of all that is exceptional, ener-
getic, life-affirming and productive, not as
antithetical to it. It is a means to greatness,
progress and flourishing.
It is not until 1911, some thirteen years
after his first discovery, that we hear Plain-
view speak for the first time. He is by this
time seeking to buy leases on plots of land
where he wishes to drill for oil, offering a
share of his profits to the owners. Before
long, a young man comes to sell him infor-
mation about the location of a plot of oil-
rich land that can be bought cheaply. He
wants $500 cash for the information.
Eventually Plainview reaches an
agreement with the shrewd
young man, who introduces
himself as Paul Sunday, from a
poor family of goat farmers who
can’t grow anything on their
land, which is mostly dry rock.
Plainview wastes no time going
to the oil-rich town, Little
Boston, with H.W., where they
have ostensibly arrived to do
some quail hunting. Plainview
finds the barren Sunday farm,
and meets Paul’s father Abel,
who is so poor he cannot even
offer Plainview and his son
bread. While setting up camp near their
home, Plainview and H.W. are greeted by
a man who introduces himself as Eli, Paul’s
brother. This is somewhat perplexing, as
Eli appears to be the same young man who
had previously introduced himself as Paul.
Soon afterwards H.W. and Plainview
ascertain that the land is indeed as oil-rich
as ‘Paul’ described it, and Plainview
attempts to negotiate a price with Abel Sun-
day. Eli intercedes to raise the price, since
he’s the only member of the family who
knows the true worth of the lot. Plainview is
inclined to pay Eli’s asking price of $5,000
plus a cash bonus of $5,000 more when the
well starts to produce, although again there
is some ambiguity about this. The oil man
wants to build a pipeline through Abel’s
land that could stretch to the ocean and
make him very rich, since it would allow
him to circumvent the railways and their
exorbitant shipping costs. During the nego-
tiation, Plainview asks Eli what he wants the
money for and Eli replies “for my church.”
Plainview looks at him in disbelief and
replies, “That’s good. That’s a good one.”
This cynicism shows us parallels between
Plainview and Nietzsche. Nietzsche, whose
father was a Lutheran pastor, thought we
would do better to study the motives that
drive philosophers and preachers to their
particular moral conclusions than to con-
cern ourselves with their ‘truth’. Nietzsche
thought that, like everything else, philoso-
phy and religion were expressions of self-
interest. Plainview too does not even enter-
ALL IMAGES FROM THERE WILL BE BLOOD © 2007 PARAMOUNT VANTAGE AND MIRAMAX
Plainview washing
his hands
FILLMS, EXCEPT FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, OVERLEAF.
tain the possibility that Eli’s desire might be
motivated by anything other than his will-
to-power. There is no question in Plain-
view’s mind that Eli uses religion merely to
rationalise his motives and dispositions.
Plainview quickly brings wealth and
progress to the people of Little Boston.
Where once bread was scarce, now they
will have it in abundance – along with
water wells, irrigation, education, employ-
ment and new roads. However, Plainview’s
form of advancement has a distinctly Niet-
zschean flavour. In Beyond Good and Evil
(Aph. 258) Nietzsche asserts that a “good
and healthy aristocracy” must be founded
on the belief that society does not exist for
its own sake, but as a scaffolding upon
which a select kind of being can raise itself
to a higher existence, much as a climbing
vine wraps its tendrils around an oak tree
to ascend until it emerges into the sunlight
and unfold its coronas. Nietzsche felt that
when an aristocratic society tosses away its
privileges, and from an excess of moral
feeling begins to try to justify itself in terms
of what the nobility do for society, it gets
things the wrong way round. He identified
this inversion of the power relationship as a
symptom of ‘democratic’ decadence and
corruption. While Daniel Plainview’s oil
drilling enterprise can improve living con-
ditions for the townspeople, he clearly sees
these benefits as means to his own success
and wealth. Plainview is first and foremost
an entrepreneur, not a philanthropist.
This is consistent with Nietzsche’s view
of leadership. The noble person, he says,
feels himself as determining value. He does
not need the approval of others, or of God.
He creates values: he knows that he is the
one who causes things to be revered, so
does not need approval. He feels a kind of
fullness, of overflowing power, so that if he
helps the unfortunate it is not out of pity
but out of an urgency created by an abun-
dance of power: “The noble person
reveres the power in himself, and also his
power over himself, his ability to speak and
to be silent, to enjoy the practice of sever-
ity and harshness towards himself and to
respect everything that is severe and
harsh.” (BGE Aph. p.260, trans Marion
Faber, Oxford World Classics, 1998.) The
fundamental principle of Nietzsche’s ‘mas-
ter morality’ is that we have duties only
towards our peers, and we may treat those
of lower rank as we think best. Aimed as it
was at containing, diminishing and moder-
ating the natural passions, European
morality was, in Nietzsche’s view, leading
to a decline into mediocrity. Nietzsche
thought moral codes a tyranny against
nature. He saw in contemporary European
society a kind of levelling that was making
people ‘equal’, to be sure, but at the price
of elevating “those who can’t do much
harm any more” while suppressing the
power of their natural masters.
Beyond Good and Evil
Eli Sunday sets about trying to make
converts of the new arrivals to Little Boston
but is met with indifference. He seems to
have nothing to offer men and women
whose bellies are full of bread and whose
days are filled with productive work. He
attempts to siphon off some religious cur-
rency from the new oil well by requesting
that Plainview allow him to give a blessing
at the public opening of the new well.
Plainview appears to give his assent, but
when the townspeople are gathered in front
of the well, he gives his own ‘blessing’:
“Let’s forget the speech; I’m
better at digging holes in the
ground than making speeches,
so let’s forget the speech for
this evening. Just make it a sim-
ple blessing. You see, one man
doesn’t prospect from the
ground, it takes a whole com-
munity of good people such as
yourselves, and uh, this is good
– we stay together. We pray
together, we work together,
and if the good Lord smiles
kindly on our endeavour, we
share the wealth together.”
At this juncture he says, “God bless you
all, Amen,” the well is opened, and drilling
commences. Eli has been rendered impo-
tent and silent. Plainview has demon-
strated that he knows the true source of
power in Little Boston, and that any reli-
giosity to be drawn from the well will be
under his authority, not Eli’s.
Plainview is not against the use of reli-
gion as a means to power; and neither was
Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the responsibility
of the ‘free spirit’ is to his own develop-
ment. For this, the free spirit may use reli-
gion, in the same way that that he might
exploit political or economic circumstances.
Those who are strong, independent and of a
noble nature can use religion to remove
obstacles. Nietzsche also saw that religion
tends to make the drudgery of life bearable
for those powerless to change their circum-
stances. It gives meaning to their suffering
and allows them to remain content with the
Film
circumstances of their lives by assuring
them that they have a place in an illusory
higher order. But to Nietzsche, religion
goes wrong when seen as an end in itself, or
when it celebrates or exalts what is weak
and ought to die out. He thought that
Christianity was nihilistic to the core, sacri-
ficing everything of value in others and our-
selves, ultimately even God himself. Chris-
tianity sacrifices everything real – life – for a
non-existent future. But for the church,
Nietzsche’s life-affirming values are sins.
One evening there is a fatal accident at
Plainview washing
his soul
the well, and Plainview is forced to shut
down until the middle of the next day.
When he learns that the deceased was a
devout Christian, he feels obliged to visit
Eli to ask whether he would give the man a
Christian burial. When he arrives at the
Church of the Third Revelation, he finds
Eli in the throes of a ‘healing’. Eli Sunday
is transparently false, and we are posi-
tioned to identify with Plainview’s point of
view on his disingenuous antics, which
swing between extremes of saccharine
sweetness and uncontrollable rage. This
also fits Nietzsche’s description of the reli-
gious disposition. Nietzsche noted that
repression and denial of the will leads to
“spasms” of “extravagant voluptuousness”
followed by penitence and “denial of the
world” (Aph. 47 in BGE). Nietzsche diag-
nosed this tendency to swing back and forth
between extremes as a kind of ‘neurosis’.
When Eli Sunday has finished the ‘heal-
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 43
Film
ing’, Plainview says, “That was one God-
damn hell of a show.” Eli launches into a
diatribe about how the accident could have
been avoided if Plainview had only let him
bless the well – suggesting that not only Eli
but divine providence had been displaced
from the well. He continues to taunt Plain-
view with accusations, but the older man
interrupts him with a reminder that the well
cannot “blow gold all over the place” if the
men are too tired from listening to Eli’s
gospel. At last this silences Eli, whose bluff
has been called by Plainview’s acute dis-
cernment of where his true motives lie.
Both men are ambitious for wealth and
power, they have simply chosen different
means of getting it. Like Nietzsche, Plain-
view knows that the will-to-power works in
many ways, but is always the underlying
explanation for men’s actions and thinking.
Nietzsche observed that the saint is a fasci-
nating riddle to us because we wonder at
how anyone can have such strength of will.
Surely the asceticism must be being endured
for a reason? Nietzsche suggests that the
ascetic is also exercising his will-to-power,
but simply using an indirect means, and that
is why powerful people sense a “strange
unconquered enemy” when he approaches.
Not long after the first accident, an
equally horrible one occurs at the well,
leaving the young H.W. deaf. In the midst
of the tragedy, with H.W. still lying
injured, oil shooting out of the ground and
raining down on everything, and fires
burning the rig, Plainview says to his assis-
tant, “What are you looking so miserable
about? There’s a whole ocean of oil under
our feet. No one can get at it except for
me!” There’s a stunning close-up of Plain-
view’s face covered with slick black oil, his
eyes glowing with passion in the light of
44 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
the fire. With chaos and devastation all
around, he sees the vast potential that lies
within this raw power. Yet when his assis-
tant asks, “H.W. okay?” Plainview replies
matter-of-factly, “No he is not.” While
obviously unhappy about what has hap-
pened to his adoptive son, it is as though
Plainview accepts the fact that great
achievement cannot be had painlessly, nor
without the shedding of blood.
This is why Eli Sunday is particularly
annoying to Plainview. When Eli comes to
collect his family’s $5,000 land bonus from
him, the viewer can hardly help but share
the oilman’s disdain for this preacher who
has shed no blood, no sweat, and no tears
for the wealth the well has produced. By
contrast, Plainview knows that his adoptive
son’s loss of hearing is his responsibility,
and he bears the full weight of this knowl-
edge with great difficulty – but not with
regret, and without resentment. Plainview
knows that his choices have exacted their
toll, but this is the price of being decisive,
ambitious and ultimately successful. He will
not give up his enterprising spirit just
because it is sometimes costs more than the
average man can bear. So when Eli Sunday,
a man who has neither ventured nor lost
anything, confronts Plainview with a
demand for his cash bonus, Plainview loses
his temper, throwing him into a pool of oily
mud, slapping mud on his face and even
forcing it into his mouth, saying, “I’m gonna
bury you underground, Eli. Oooooh. I’m
gonna bury you underground.”
De Profundis
Plainview himself is a man who has
emerged from the depths of the earth. We
saw him injured in the opening sequence
while digging in a deep hole. We have seen
his filthy hands and his face covered in dirt
and oil, and we know that his power comes
from the same source. The metaphor is one
of evolution – of man the species who has
emerged from dust, from lower forms of life,
and who survived through his adaptation
and overcoming of adversity. By contrast,
Sunday is a soft, effete, solicitous fellow who
in Nietzschean terms is unfit for survival.
He is an embodiment of everything Niet-
zsche despised about Christianity. In Niet-
zsche’s view, Christianity exalts the meek,
the lowly, the oppressed, the poor – in
other words, that which naturally ought to
die out. It elevates what is ignoble, making
it an object of praise, while stigmatizing the
‘manly’ virtues, labelling them ‘sins’.
Indeed, Sunday attempts to do this by try-
ing to make Plainview ashamed of the very
character traits – independence, will, ambi-
tion, fearlessness, strength, decisiveness –
that make the viewer admire him. But
Plainview feels no moral guilt.
There is a distinct flavour of social Dar-
winism in Nietzsche’s outlook. He described
the liberal dream of social conditions of
equality and justice as the invention of a life
form that has lost all its organic functions.
Nietzsche was convinced that human life
devoid of its exploitative nature is not wor-
thy of being called ‘life’ at all. To Niet-
zsche, Christianity originated from what he
called ‘slave morality’: that is, it emerged
amongst oppressed groups who resented
their more powerful masters. Yet because
they were unable to throw off their chains
and overpower their natural superiors, they
invented religion to invert the masters’ val-
ues of conquest, domination, strength and
creativity. And it is precisely out of resent-
ment – because he cannot fight back
against the stronger, more influential oil-
man – that Eli Sunday goes home from his
embarrassing run-in with Plainview to
abuse his frail and defenceless father. Eli
beats Abel violently, calling him “stupid”
for having sold the plot in the first place.
Of course, we know that it was not Abel
who made the decision, but Eli himself. He
had little choice in selling, since the only
choice was between getting some of Plain-
view’s wealth or nothing at all, and his
attempt to assert his claim to the money as
though it were his ‘right’ is dismissed by
Plainview’s swift slap. Plainview understands
only one kind of ‘right’, and it is might. To
Nietzsche, the ideals of ‘rights’ and ‘equal-
ity’ so venerated by 18th century American
and French revolutionaries were concocted
to allay people’s fears of domination and
abuse. According to Nietzsche, what’s
needed in order to improve humans is not humiliate and take revenge. The tension
Film
rights, but self-discipline and a master between the two mounts as Plainview is Once more, this leaves the audience to
morality which accepts life in its essence – made to get on his knees and confess over ponder whether there was indeed another
which for Nietzsche meant “appropriating, and over that he is a sinner to prove his brother – or whether ‘Paul’ is simply Eli’s
injuring, overpowering those who are for- worthiness for ‘God’s’ (Eli’s) forgiveness alter ego, the man he should have been –
eign and weaker; oppression, harshness, while Eli exhorts him to “Beg for the blood the man who would have successfully held
forcing one’s own forms on others, incor- [of Christ]!” Yet as his baptism ordeal Plainview to his agreement to pay $10,000
poration, and at the very least, at the very draws to a close, Plainview can already taste for the land. At this point, Plainview begins
mildest, exploitation...” (BGE, pp.152-3) sweet victory. No sooner has Eli taken his chasing Eli around his private bowling alley
There Will Be Blood presents Plainview’s impotent revenge than Plainview’s dream is with a bowling pin as the latter begs him to
acts of violence from a Nietzschean per- achieved and his pipeline will be a reality. stop. Finally Plainview beats Eli Sunday
spective – done not from resentment or This oil pipeline is likened to a vein, sup- with the pin, leaving him dead in a pool of
sadism but from the need to eliminate the plying the lifeblood of the industrial revo- blood. As he collapses beside his prey,
Daniel Plainview appears to have gone mad.
“The noble person reveres the power in himself, and This leaves us with a question that’s
equally relevant considering Nietzsche’s
also his power over himself, his ability to speak and to descent into madness and demise – what do
be silent, to enjoy the practice of severity and harsh- we do with this ‘madman’ who has liber-
ness towards himself and to respect everything that is ated us from the lowest constraints on our
nature? Should we condemn his ideas and
severe and harsh.” Friedrich Nietzsche acts as immoral? Or should we too question
whether our own system of morality hasn’t
obstacles that obstruct his projects. Seen in lution and powering a whole planet lead us to madness and self-destruction?
this way, Plainview’s later murder of his towards prosperity (and as we now know, Modern liberals accept moral constraints
(pseudo-) brother Henry takes on a post- possible destruction). in the class of ‘other-regarding’ behaviours
moral kind of neutrality that we associate – limiting the liberty of individuals so that
more with animal survival instincts than There Is Blood all can be free to live without constant fear.
with an evil intent. The worry for Niet- The final scene resolves the conflict The price of constraining those whose
zsche, as for Plainview, was that the neces- between Plainview and Eli Sunday. After power would otherwise allow them to
sary violence done in the course of life- several years Eli comes to Plainview’s home oppress and exploit weaker people, is that
affirming projects (what is merely ‘bad’) to announce that William Bandy has passed the most powerful have to give up some of
would be misinterpreted within a Christian away, leaving the leased land to his son, a their natural advantage. The question is
context as ‘evil’. Indeed, it is only when the very good member of Eli’s congregation. whether these constraints on the ‘fittest’ are
Bible-toting William Bandy learns of Plain- This gives Eli the leverage he needs to sug- a price worth paying for the freedom of all.
view’s murder of ‘Henry’ that Plainview is gest that Plainview develop and drill for the Nietzsche felt that it would be better to
forced to repent for his ‘sin’. Bandy owns oil on the plot, for which privilege Eli wants constrain no one and let nature weed out
the last plot of land that prevents the build- a $100,000 bonus, plus the $5,000 Plain- the weak. The problem with this is that
ing of the pipeline, and the only thing that view ‘owes’ him, with interest. Plainview power left unchecked soon turns into
will make Bandy sell is Plainview’s public agrees to the terms on the condition that tyranny, with the consequence that only a
baptism at the hands of Eli Sunday: Eli confesses that he is a false prophet and few powerful ‘masters’ have any degree of
that God is a superstition. The tables are real freedom. Liberals think giving every-
BANDY: God… God has told me what you must do. turned. Eli is desperate for money, and he one relative freedom is preferable to giving
PLAINVIEW: What is that? now has to endure the ordeal of humiliation an elite minority absolute freedom. But
BANDY: You should be washed in the blood of that Plainview underwent at his ‘baptism’. There Will Be Blood is post-liberal, and lets
Jesus Christ. The scene is a reversal of the baptism, viewers draw their own conclusions.
except that it is not public. When Eli has It is virtually de rigeur that there will be
The resulting scene is probably the best finished making his excruciating confession, blood in Hollywood movies – but seldom is
in the film. Plainview arrives at the Church Plainview tells him the bad news: the areas it shed by such an amoral protagonist, and
of the Third Revelation for his baptism. In Eli is offering for development have already seldom does it leave us with no feeling of
a direct reference to the film’s title, and been drained by Plainview, who owns all moral indignation. One may accept Niet-
with absurd irony, in front of the congrega- the surrounding land and has simply sucked zsche’s view, as I do, that orthodox Chris-
tion Eli announces to Plainview, “You will the oil underneath the Bandy plot as it tianity reeks of hypocrisy, fully supporting
never be saved if you… reject the blood.” seeped out into the surrounding areas. Now in its very doctrines the abdication of per-
The absurdity is that Plainview never it is Plainview who revels in his revenge: sonal moral responsibility, and yet deny the
eschewed real blood. From a Nietzschean Nietzschean idea that moral responsibility
perspective it is Eli who rejects the blood – “You’re not the chosen brother, Eli. It was Paul who ought to be abandoned altogether.
the blood of life with all of its cruelty; the was chosen. He found me and told me about your © TERRI MURRAY 2009
bloodshed that comes from the strong land. I broke you and I beat you. It was Paul told me Terri Murray teaches film studies and philoso-
expressing their strength, and conquering, about you. He’s the prophet. He’s the smart one. He phy at Hampstead College of Fine Arts &
exploiting, injuring and being injured. knew what was there and he found me to take it out Humanities in London. She is also a post-grad
Eli Sunday relishes this chance to of the ground. I paid him $10,000 cash in hand.” research student at Oxford Brookes University.

July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 45

 Crossword Corner
Our twenty-eighth potpourri of perplexing philosophical phrases
perspicuously placed in parallel poses by Deiradiotes

Across
1 How the Vienna Circle might have
appeared to an observer? (7)
5 Author of the original book The
Queen. (7)
9 A French bedroom I used freely is
without blemish. (9)
10 Kind of architecture found in
Greenland or Iceland. (5)
11 Narcotic discovered in Punjab
hangar. (5)
12 These people really deliver. (9)
14 Orphan at market produces pithy
summary of Epicureanism. (14)
17 An ancient philosophy is a mixture
of paganism and theory. (14)
21 It’s on its way in a van. (2,7)
23 Follower of 17 from Syracuse lost
monad. (5)
24 Man and others sound silly? (5)
25 Mean Stoic could be one who
gives praise. (9)
26 Injure a football team:
sadomasochism is a philosophy! (7)
27 Nosy elk disturbed Russian
scientist. (7)

Down
1 Dance of an island with an airline. (6)
2 Offence given by old shade. (7)
3 Arid area of China, Algeria and most of Hungary once. (8)
4 Cress and tripod could be symbols. (11)
5 Director Browning’s ivy bush. (3)
6 Wavy dune moving east. (5)
7 Violently angry fool consumes vetch. (7)
8 Centaurs confused dissenter. (8)
13 ‘A form of a language’, I state, ‘is logical.’ (11)
15 Old philosopher from Eretria used men and me badly. (9)
16 There is confidence in the philosophy of Leibniz. (8)
18 Guardian covers broken lute with tar. (7)
19 Shia man organised festival. (7)
20 Colouring held by man at tonsorial establishment. (6)
22 Very musical. (5)
25 Tree begins exuding ligneous matter. (3)
(See page 20 for solution)
Question of the Month
We’re still looking for answers to the question: How Are We Free?
Explain the nature of free will and other freedoms in less than 400
words to win a random book from our book mountain. Subject lines
or envelopes should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must
be received by 1st October. If you want a chance of getting a book,
please include your physical address. Submission implies permission
to reproduce your answer physically and electronically. So no
freedom there, clearly.

46 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009

Our philosophical science correspondent
Massimo Pigliucci says
Hypotheses?
Forget About It!
N
ewton famously said “hypotheses
non fingo,” meaning, “I frame no
hypotheses” – a rather startling
position for a scientist to advocate. Isn’t
science precisely the activity of construct-
ing and testing hypotheses about the natu-
ral world? Certainly this has been the view
of influential philosophers of science such
as Karl Popper. Popper said that scientific
hypotheses can never be proven correct,
but they can be falsified, that is proven
wrong. For Popper, science progresses
through the successive elimination of
wrong hypotheses. Many scientists proudly
ignore philosophy, but Popperian falsifica-
tion is one of the only two philosophical
concepts you are likely to find in an intro-
ductory science textbook. (The other is
Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigms. This is
rather strange, since Kuhn was a fierce
critic of Popper.)
I came across a delightful paper by
David Glass and Ned Hall – the first a
biomedical researcher, the second a
philosopher – published in a rather unlikely
place, the journal Cell (August 8, 2008). As
its title states, the main point of the paper is
to provide readers with ‘A Brief History of
the Hypothesis’. This makes it a must-read
for young (and perhaps not so young) sci-
entists. But what caught my attention in
the paper is Glass and Hall’s suggestion
that, contrary to Popper’s conception of
science, scientists would be better off
replacing hypotheses with two other guides
to their research: questions and models.
Let me explain. Half of the problem
with hypotheses was mentioned above:
there is no way to conclusively prove a
hypothesis correct, because there is always
the possibility that a new set of observa-
tions will disprove it. The bad news is that,
unbeknownst to most scientists, philoso-
phers have also made a very compelling
argument that hypotheses cannot be deci-
sively disproved either. Falsification doesn’t
work, because one can always tweak the
hypothesis enough to accommodate the
initially discordant data, or question some
of the ancillary hypotheses, or even ques-
tion the accuracy of the data itself. (This is
not as far fetched as it may seem given the
complexity of the machinery used nowa-
days to produce scientific data, from parti-
cle colliders to genomic sequencers.)
What now? Glass and Hall advise us to
go back to the basics. Science is really
about asking questions, they suggest: “it
would seem that a question is the appro-
priate tool because the question, as
opposed to a hypothesis, properly identi-
fies the scientist as being in a state of igno-
rance when data are absent.” Right! I
became a scientist because science has the
power to answer questions about nature.
Questions can be formulated in either
open-ended or very specific ways, and
both ways can provide guidance for fruitful
empirical research. Besides, as Glass and
Hall also note, in many fields of modern
science one would not even know how to
begin to formulate sensible hypotheses.
For instance, in the field of genomics, it’s
easy to ask questions: how many genes are
there in the human genome? How much
does the human genome differ from that
of other primates, and in what ways? But
what sort of hypotheses could one possibly
formulate to replace such questions?
Genomic research is highly explorative,
so it is natural to base it on well-thought-
out questions. Even when research is more
advanced and less explorative, Glass and
Hall contend that hypotheses still will not
do, as they can’t be proven and they can’t
be disproven. Instead, here we need models
of the phenomena under study.
Unlike a hypothesis, a model is con-
structed after some of the data is in, and
then the model is used to predict new data.
A model can be statistical or directly causal
in nature, mathematical or verbal, but its
predictions are probabilistic and always sub-
ject to refinement.
It is the very dynamism of models
which makes them powerful intellectual
tools in the scientific quest for knowledge.
Glass and Hall write: “eliminate the
‘hypothesis’ term and substitute the ‘ques-
tion’ for settings where experiments are
Science
performed before sufficient data exist, and
the ‘model’ for situations where the scien-
tist is working with sufficient data to pro-
duce a construct that can be tested for
inductive [predictive] power.”
In fields which rely heavily on statistical
analysis, such as biology and the social sci-
ences, some scientists have already moved
away from hypothesis testing to model
comparisons. It used to be that statistical
tests were rigidly set up to pit a simple
(some would say simplistic) ‘null hypothe-
sis’ (nothing’s happening) against an alter-
native, catch-all hypothesis (there’s some-
thing going on here…). Slowly but surely,
people have figured out that this is not
particularly productive, and recent years
have seen a steady increase in the use of
statistical software that can pit several
alternative models against each other, with
analytical methods that can tell which ones
are more likely, given the available data.
The funny thing about all this is that a
few years ago the US National Science
Foundation made a ‘philosophical’ move in
their guidelines for grant proposals. They
explicitly asked scientists to do away with
questions (the traditional way to frame
grants) and to replace them instead with
the more ‘solid’ concept of hypothesis. So
now a prospective grant applicant can be
seriously penalized if she does not put her
proposal in a way clearly contradictory to
Newton’s dictum (I venture to say that cit-
ing Newton as a reference will not help).
But this is what happens when scientists
pay so little attention to philosophy that
they are a few decades out of date with the
philosophy of science literature. Maybe we
should mandate Philosophy of Science 101
for all graduate students in the sciences.
© DR MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2009
Massimo Pigliucci is Chair of the Philosophy
Department at City University of New York,
Lehman College, and is the author of several
books, including Making Sense of Evolution:
The Conceptual Foundations Of Evolu-
tionary Biology (Chicago Press, 2006). His
philosophical musings can be found at
www.platofootnote.org
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 47
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July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 49

 T allis
in
Wonderland
I
’m watching the classic BBC sitcom
Dad’s Army. It is 1940, the hour of
maximum danger. The survivors of a
sunken German U-boat have been
picked up by a fishing vessel and taken to
Walmington-on-Sea, where the Home
Guard, under the leadership of Captain
Mainwaring, are to hold them until a
proper military escort arrives. The U-boat
captain, undaunted by his situation,
demands Mainwaring’s name so that he can
put him “on a list” for when the war has
ended with victory for the Axis. Private
Pike, who is not the sharpest knife in the
drawer, defiantly sings a song which
describes Hitler in terms the Führer might
not approve of. The U-boat captain
demands his name too. Captain Mainwar-
ing jumps in: “Don’t tell him, Pike!” It’s
one of those lines that make you laugh how-
ever often you hear it – but, since you are a
philosopher, it also invites you to think, in
this case about proper names, and perhaps
about the profoundest of all mysteries – the
relationship between words and the world.
At first sight, proper names seem the
most straightforward of all grammatical
forms, and hence philosophically the least
interesting. They are certainly less baffling
than common nouns such as ‘dog’ or ‘table’,
or general terms such as ‘truth’ or ‘virtue’,
which have prompted some of the pro-
foundest philosophical investigations in the
2,500 years since Plato tried to make sense
of them. This is ‘the problem of universals’.
Plato’s way of dealing with the mystery of
generality in a world of particulars – by cre-
ating another world accessed by our intel-
lect and not by our senses, composed only
of general meanings which he called
‘Forms’ (or ‘Ideas’) – has been bitterly con-
tested. But no-one has come up with an
entirely satisfactory way of making sense of
the generality of general terms. And as for
‘grammatical’ or ‘function’ words such as
prepositions and articles and conjunctions –
well, they are even more challenging. How
do they work? More to the point, how do
they work together with other words in
50 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
Don’t Tell Him, Pike!
Raymond Tallis from the home front in the war of words.
expressions, utterances, and all those long
and short emissions that come out of our
mouths, pens and word processors?
So proper names seem like a good place
to start. You don’t have to dream up a Pla-
tonic heaven to house their meaning. Here
is the word – ‘Pike’; and there is the object
– Pike. The object is not only the referent
of the word; it is also the meaning of it.
Thus proper names would seem to support
the much-scorned “Fido”-Fido theory of
‘I have a little list...’
language, which claims that the meaning
of the word is the object to which it refers.
Alas, scorn is justified even here. If the
meaning of ‘Pike’ were Pike himself, then
the term would lose its meaning when
Pike ceased to be. And words that referred
to non-existent objects would also be
meaningless – semantic bouncing cheques.
Yet manifestly they are not: ‘unicorn’ and
‘squared circle’ are not meaningless.
Besides, objects and the meanings of words
are not really the same kind of thing. If
you don’t believe it, try getting Pike into a
sentence about himself.
Even so, there does appear to be some-
thing very basic about proper names. I
could put it technically by saying that they
access their referents immediately rather
than by going through a more general
sense. That is, when I talk about ‘Pike’, I
seem to home directly on the item in ques-
tion; but when I talk about a ‘man’, I
access any actual man only indirectly,
through a general category which then has
to be supplemented with other specifying
terms. I can of course bring the general
category down to particular earth, and fas-
ten the word to a singular thing by talking
about ‘this man’, as it were verbally point-
ing to the person in question. However,
the use of demonstratives (like ‘this’ and
‘that’) in this context is extraordinarily
complex, as philosophers
of language have found
to their cost.
We might instead
specify what is distinctive
ALL SOLDIER IMAGES FROM DADʼS ARMY © 1968-1977 BBC.
about proper names by
saying, as John Stuart
Mill did, that they have
‘denotation’ without
‘connotation’: that is,
they mark out something
without implying any
significance or personal
interpretation to me.
And, because proper
names do not rely on
connotations to carry
them to their objects, they are highly arbi-
trary: Pike could just as well have been
called ‘Jones’. This is my excuse when I
forget the name of someone who could
reasonably be offended at my having done
so, thinking that my amnesia signals that I
don’t care for them. In fact I have mislaid
only an arbitrary denotation; meanwhile,
all that I (of course) cherish them for –
their connotative aura – glows undimin-
ished in my mind.
Notwithstanding Mill’s perceptive
observation, it should now be obvious that
there’s nothing primitive about proper
names – nothing, anyway, that should
enable them to work by mere mental asso-
ciation, so that the name acts as proxy for
the object – as a psychological stand-in for
the thing itself. And the highly-charged
exchange at Walmington-on-Sea confirms
this. It shows that we employ proper
names not only to denote people, but also
to tie them into all sorts of other dis-
courses. Our name is the primary tag for
our identity. Via the tag ‘Raymond Tallis’
I am located on endless documents, regis-
ters, and lists (including, who knows, per-
haps the kind of list on which the U-boat
captain wished to include Private Pike)
recording my characteristics, curriculum
vitae, attendances, absences, entitlements,
obligations, criminal record, blood potas-
sium levels, and so on. My name, and
nowadays, my e-name, give me a presence
and identity that far exceed anything I
could imagine. That I, Raymond Tallis am
‘Raymond Tallis’ is both a truism and
untrue. Jorge Luis Borges’ wonderful little
essay ‘Borges and I’, begins by noting that
“The other one called Borges, is the one
things happen to.” At any rate ‘Raymond
Tallis’ has a life on papers and computer
screens and in the minds of those who read
them that I would hardly recognise.
A proper name, then, is a hook that
links our living flesh and its life to
the larger human world – to
an infinite nexus of dis-
courses. It is the means by
which others get hold of us.
Hence the urgency of Captain Main-
waring’s self-cancelling instruction to Pike
to withhold his name.
Name Calling
When we seek someone’s name, we ask
what they are called, as if the essence of a
name is a handle by which we can grasp
them. Wittgenstein once observed what a
strange thing it was to call someone by their
name. Animals may call to each other, but
the summons is not mediated via names:
beasts do not linguistically recognise each
other’s singularity. It is our names that
acknowledge us as subjects and as ‘subjected
subjects’ – ‘abjects’, as the paranoid French
philosopher Louis Althusser once argued.
The world that gets hold of you by using
your name as lexical tweezers also has your
number, as it were. It may assert power over
you – the power to tie all those little knots
that might Gulliver you to the common
ground. Which is why, Private Pike, there
are as many reasons for withholding our
names as for introducing ourselves by
offering them along with our outstretched
hand. We can even assert our power over
others by the tone of voice in which we
utter their name, or by employing a sur-
name rather than a first name, by omitting
titles, or by inflicting an unchosen abbrevi-
ation or unwanted nickname. The ultimate
denial of equal subjectivity is to replace
someone’s name by a number: one’s
uniqueness is reduced to the merely objec-
tive singularity of occupying a place in a
series of units like yourself.
And names may be used to direct com-
mands to their targets, of course. Since
sounds promiscuously enter all ears within
earshot, a spoken instruction does not nec-
essarily single out its intended recipient.
When the skull of the commanded is
thought to be somewhat dense, the com-
mand may need to be spiked with the
recipient’s name to ensure that it penetrates
a burqa of inattention. Pike’s own name
was, Mainwaring thought, such a necessary
poke – hence “Don’t tell him, Pike.” Of
course Mainwaring didn’t mean to utter
Pike’s name as a piece of information. Yet,
alas, it was inescapably both poke and
information.
There could be
no
more striking
tribute to the
complexity of
proper names than this moment, in which a
name participates simultaneously in two
different speech acts, one intended and the
other unintended. Captain Mainwaring was
caught up in the pragmatic contradiction of
revealing what was to be kept under wraps
to the very person from whom it was to be
hidden, as a result of specifying the person
who was to keep it under wraps. This is
how he tripped himself up and made us
laugh 35 years ago, and laugh again now.
Mainwaring’s ‘Pike!’ is a reminder that
proper names are a special form of refer-
ence by which that which is referred to is
caught hold of. No wonder we are prone
to magic thinking, believing that names
may invoke things. This kind of thinking
may also spread to certain very emotive
general terms: obscenities and oaths. What
would be the point of obscenity if referring
to certain parts of the body did not seem to
bring them, wobbling and dangling, before
our eyes, or if the action of the two-backed
beast was not somehow made present by
the f-word? And what of our imprecations
to the gods? Their systematic absence is
alleviated a little bit when, in our agony of
T allis
in
Wonderland
loss, or when we bark our shins, we believe
that saying ‘Christ!’ somehow causes to
materialise that which is spoken of.
The intimate relation between the
proper names and the existence of their
deity is brilliantly dramatised in Arthur C.
Clarke’s Nine Billion Names of God. A com-
puter programme is designed to test the
Take your pike
claim that, once all the names of God have
been spoken, the universe will come to an
end. When the programme finishes churn-
ing out the list, the scientists, disappointed
that there is no Apocalypse, look up at the
sky, and see the stars going out one by one.
Our names are strange possessions by
which we are also possessed until death,
when, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said,
one discards “one’s own name as easily as a
child abandons a broken toy.”After that they
continue without us, glimmers on others’
memories, perhaps chiselled on memorials,
as something that ‘liveth forever’ (sort of).
Thus are we reduced to the seemingly
most straightforward of all words remind-
ing us, via Captain Mainwaring’s gaffe,
that no word is at all straightforward. For-
give me if this philosophical autopsy of a
delicious joke removed the smile from
your face. The DVD will put it back again!
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2009
Raymond Tallis is a physician, philosopher,
poet and novelist. His book The Kingdom of
Infinite Space: A Fantastical Journey
Round Your Head is published by Atlantic.
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 51
 Dear Socrates
Having traveled from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-
First Century A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist
so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.
Dear Socrates,
In a previous dialogue (in Issue 65) you mentioned that there
are no evil opossums because there are no virtuous opossums.
My question is this: Assuming that good and evil are really just
abstract human notions applied to the behavior of other
humans, could not these notions just as arbitrarily be applied to
opossums? Something is good only if a human designates it as
such (and other humans typically agree), so an opossum could
be good or bad just as a human can if we agreed to designate it
as such, right? If you disagree, please respond and explain to me
another way of looking at right and wrong.
Josh McIntyre
Alto, Michigan, U.S.A.
Dear Josh,
Let me turn the tables on you and note that, if moral desig-
nations are only the result of human consensus, we could just
as well dispense with labeling human beings as good or bad
and doing right or wrong things. Why not all of us return to
the state of nature before Adam and Eve ate of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil, to cite the Biblical story? Having
eaten of that tree, would it be possible now for us humans to
give up this knowledge? And if so, would it be desirable for us
to do so?
As it happens I have been pondering this question a great
deal lately. I must admit that I sometimes tire of preaching
virtue and morality, not to mention striving to exemplify them.
I also notice that some of my worst traits, such as anger and
egotism, appear to be caught up in that striving and that
preaching. There is nothing quite so satisfying as being able to
condemn somebody else with full certitude and passion,
thereby also to bask in the reflected glory of one’s own superi-
ority. What would it be like, I wonder, if nobody cared about
ethics at all?
We might expect all chaos to break loose without the
constraint of social standards and personal conscience. But
when I consider the world of the opossums and other animal
species, I do not see chaos. They clearly do not have morality
as we do, but they nevertheless coordinate their affairs in effec-
tive ways. They raise families, they find food, they have social
interactions and community, they are sufficiently at peace to
sleep a great deal of the day, and so forth. It is not obvious to
me that their lives are “nasty, brutish, and short.”
Even when I consider human beings, if I think carefully
about what is motivating our actions, I do not always find
morality underlying the best. Instead, there is often a sponta-
neous feeling of sympathy for the pain of another that prompts
52 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
us to help them. We do not need a commandment to tell us to
do so. In fact, it is a commonplace that a commandment will
prove idle if there is no feeling to back it up.
Conversely, when I consider many of the truly heinous acts
of humans, morality is often to be found at their root. The
self-assured and self-righteous of all times and places have
been the scourge of this world. If I am Right, and accordingly
am convinced of an obligation to stamp out the Wrong: watch
out! “The way I see things must be the way everybody should
see things.” What an awful regimentation that forebodes. But
in fact it is the more sure path to chaos and strife, since every
society feels the same way about its own mores; and so all clash
with all.
I am sure that what I am saying must horrify you, and
surprise you. My reputation is as a seeker after virtue. Now I
seem to be impugning virtue. But I think I do not contradict
myself. Virtue may not be the same as morality. What I seek is
the good life. But perhaps my good life would not conform
with every other good life. And perhaps it would not consist of
duty but rather of freedom and reason.
I know that many of my successors attempted to reconcile
these various motifs. Might not morality be the result of our
exercising freedom and reason? One could call it that, Josh,
since, as you implied, it is up to us to call things whatever we
want. But I have become wary of the word ‘morality’, and even
the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when used in the moral way,
since they have been implicated in so much mischief through
the ages.
I honestly believe that people do not even know what they
are referring to most of the time when they use those words.
As I said at the outset, I suspect what is mainly going on is that
people are venting their emotions, and not the noblest ones at
that.
Therefore I recommend that we try to live with more
awareness of our true motives and, on that basis, decide how
to act. Let us be like the Zen opossum who said, “When
hungry I eat, when tired I sleep.”
As ever,
Socrates
Readers who would like to engage Socrates in dialogue are
welcome to write to Dear Socrates, c/o Philosophy Now or to
email him at socrates@philosophynow.org. In doing so you
implicitly grant us permission to publish the correspondence in
print or online. Socrates will select which letters to answer and
reserves the right to excerpt or otherwise edit them. Please
indicate if you wish your name to be withheld.
 The Bells, The Bells
Kevin Robson drinks whiskey and sees things in a different way
Y
ou know our pub The Careless Whisper? We had this
singer on stage there last week. You know Fred? Fred
was telling me she was a “terrible monstrosity” – him
mouthing the words slow at me like a bloody goldfish, coz if
you know me, you’ll be knowing I’m partially deaf in both me
ears. He wrote down “FAT WALRUS CROAKING” on my
deaf pad I always carry. I told him I was glad then that I was of
the deaf persuasion. This made him laugh out loud. I clapped
him on the back. “It was the Bells that made me deaf,” I was
telling him, “Bells Whiskey, that is.”
Seems to me how the committee had a change to their minds
after that awful singer. They swapped
things around. Instead, Saturday night we
had this big ugly old sock of a fortune-
teller. Just for a change, here for one night
only at the Whisper, we had a clairing
voyant. She only went an’ picked me out.
Fortunatellerly, it was about nine o clock
in the evenin’ by then, and I’d had enough
of the fighting-spirit Dutch courage.
There I was, me with just the dozen
double whiskeys under my belt. Everyone
hooted me to go on up on the stage. Natu-
rally I couldn’t wait to show her what’s
what. I’m great with the craic, me. I got up
there, an’ I sat down on a chair facing her.
She grabbed my one hand between her two
sweaty palms, and then placed me other
hand on top of her crystal ball. I could see
close up how truly ugly she was. Moles
over her face like a country lawn in Spring,
and the biggest wonkyfied yellowed teeth to
go with a wonkyfied stare. On her head she had a dishrag of
tartan, knotted up under one of her chins. She looked the part –
she also looked familiar, if you’ll be catching my drift. She
might also have been Old Ma Jenkins from the Post Office: her
that keeps all her half-eaten sweets in her linen hanky for later
on.
She was jabbering away with the talking, going nineteen to
the dozen, breathing her smelly breath into my face, and I hear
a call from down below behind me, like you might be hearing
something if you’re under water, far away like, shouting, “He’s
deaf, you know!” Someone threw her me deaf pad, someone
else a stub of pencil. She writ scratchily, and tore off the page like
she was in a temper with me. Honestly, I’d done me best wit the
woman. She folded the page and pressed it into my hand. Then
she done a strange thing. She grabbed me by me hair and lifted
me out of the chair. Then she turned me round an’ pushed me
on to the stairs down the stage. I missed the first step down,
and managed to land myself a good ‘un almost face-down back
in my chair. I heard a stripe of laughter and saw folk clapping.
Well, I sat back in my seat and I opened that scrap of paper.
It said, ‘Tomorrow Sunday 11.14 p.m. Outside the Careless
Whisper by the crossroads. White Audi A4 Whiskey Golf
Foxtrot 194 Tango. Thirty-eight mph. Watch Out!’
“Rubbish!” I thought “What would I be wanting to buy
meself a car for, especially if it can’t get up to 40?” and I sig-
nalled Harry at the bar for another of them there double
whiskeys. I crumpled the paper and let it sit on the table.
The very next night was a Sunday. I was to be found in my
usual seat in the Whisper, doing what I do best. After closing
time, Fred, Harry and a couple of the others gave me a help
through the door. I still had me glass in me hand, and was
being most especially careful not to let the going of it. I
downed the last of me whiskey to my lips,
and tossed the glass back over my shoul-
der, turning to see that it had broken with
no noise on the pavement. As far as I could
see, and in my very best of judgement, the
road seemed relatively clearish. But as I
stepped out from the pavement my legs
were suddenly took away from under me.
It was as if I’d been blown up high into the
air by the hugest gust of wind.
I remember seeing a wisp of a white blur.
No pain. Me sat sitting on the crown of
the road among shattered headlights and
splinters of red wet things. A dark bush
was sat on me lap. A number plate looked
out at me from the side of the bush, WGF
194 T. I’m sure I’d seen those numbers
before, but I couldn’t for the life of Jeezus
remember where I’ve been knocked down
by a motor before. Haven’t you been?
Yeah, we all have.
The ambulance driver’s name was Hugh. He was desisted
by Lloyd, the parrot medic. Lloyd had a wonkyfied eye too. I
oughta get one, perhaps they’re all the rage. Soon, it’ll be you
can’t come in the Whisper unless you’ve got a messed-up eye,
to be sure. He also had the mother of all foul breath from him.
“Hugh,” I asked, “Hugh, do you believe in God?”
“Quiet, shhhh.” He tightened something hard round my neck.
I’d heard him! Me hearing had come back to me! Not such a
bad thing, being run over, it’s not all bad... does mighty good
for your hearing. Still, I wouldn’t let it lie. “Hugh,” I said,
“Hugh, do you believe in God?”
“Quiet, shhhhh...” He tightened me neck up more.
“Hugh, does God believe in you, though?” I chuckled as
they put their fingers under me and rolled me onto a bed on
the floor. I blacked out.
Next I knew I was finding my surroundings to be a hospital
bed. “Nurse” I cried, “I can’t feel my legs!”
She came. “I can’t... I can’t feel my legs!” I repeated.
“I’ll get a doctor, he’ll explain,” she told me in her soft Scot-
tish lilt. Put me in mind of Simon’n’Garfunkel. They were of
the Scotty persuasion, if I remember rightly. “In the clearing
July/August 2009 G Philosophy Now 53
stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade,” I sung to my newly
re-activated earholes.
4 a.m. I still had my watch on me wrist. I felt the hands.
The glass was missing. An Asian doctor has come in, the collar
of his blue shirt too big for his scrawny neck, a child in man’s
clothes. I told him: “You’re a child in man’s clothes,” I said.
“I’m sorry, I’ve been on call,” he tells me, stethoscope round
his egg-blue collar.
“You should get your mother to take you to Peacocks,
they’ve got some lovely shirts in the winda,” I tell him. He
comes back with somethin’ like, “You were in a car accident.”
He has a very serious look on his fizzer when he says it.
“Oh really?” my voice dripping with the sarcasm. “Try to be
telling me something I don’t know.”
He picks up a clipboard. I think he’s gonna clock me with it.
Instead he says again, “You were in a car accident.” Then he
goes all formal like. “I will come back
when you’re more reasonable. Before I
go, is there anybody you’d like us to call –
a friend or relative?”
“My daughter. I have a daughter.”
“I’ll get the nurse to take the details.
Get some rest. We’ll talk in the morning.”
This morphine kicks in. It’s not as
good as the whiskey, mind. It’s not yer
Jamesons, nor even yer Black and White.
Makes you the awfullest itchy in a man’s
peculiars. But it does work. Eventually the
nurse arrives. She comes over. My watch
says 4.55. It’s a liar. My watch is a liar. I’m
gonna total this watch! I’m gonna do the
Flatley stamping on the muvva!
Now there’s two of them there now
standing over me – two wee golden
angels, smiling down a mother’s love on
me.
“Abby – is that you?”
“No, I’m Livvie, I’m your nurse. Who’s Abby?”
“Not you nurse. My daughter Abby, next to yourself.”
“There’s no one else here, just me,” she says, and puts her
hand right through my Abby’s tummy.
“She looks like you nurse, does my Abby.”
The other figurine I saw with my own eyes vanishes.
“How do we reach her?” the nurse asks.
“You phone, dontcher.”
“The number?”
“I used to ’ave it. She moved on.”
“We’ll need a number.”
“Let… sleep. I’ll remember it,” I reached out my hand to
where Abby had been, where I’d been seeing my Abby, but
she’d clean mean disappeared.
Fields of yellow and blue grass. My mother holding me. My
first love. The time I almost drowned. Going to Macdonalds.
My first long trousers.
She was back again tugging me shoulder. “Go away nurse,
I’m having a lovely dream.”
“We checked all records – we can’t find a number for your
daughter.”
54 Philosophy Now G July/August 2009
“It’s not important... Tell me nurse – was there anywhere
you really wanted to go – really wanted to, mind – and when at
long last you got there, it wasn’t ‘alf as good as you thought?”
“Uh huh?” She looked at me funny, like I was a bomb not
yet for exploding, and she moved away like a crab; a slow step,
then another slow step. When she got to the bottom of the
bed I let her have the both of me barrels: “Well, answer me
bitch! No, tell you what – you shut up! Shut up when I talk to
you!”
“I’ll get the doctor.”
“You go – get him then!” I thundered at her. “You get him
then, you see if I care!”
What a dream I had. I was back in County Cork, marrying
my Jessie, Abby coming along seven months later – premature
and not premature, if you know what I’m meant to be mean-
ing, in that type of a town-full-of-curtain-twitchers way. In
days when they said, “Did you see that Jessie
Tyler with that doyty man from the Chalk
Pit? Ooooh, bold as brass that one.” That’s
the sorta thing what they’d say – what they
said about me and my Jessie.
Still, I showed them different. Made an
honest woman of my Jessie, so I did. I can
still see me – that’s me, that is, throwing me
babby Abby, high into the air; and the catch-
ing of her, her so much loving it, gurgling
and chuckling. There’s me, look – holding
Jessie and Abby, posing for a photograph in
our first own brand new home. My car. Me
dressed in olden days, wrapped in crinoline
of juniperberry and wine. You held my
hand. We’ve all gone to look for America.
Feeling Groovy.
Here’s a strange thing: me looking down
on me. The me I’m looking at is in a hospi-
tal bier, wired up to a whole load of tellies
and sweet-shop bottles. I can smell roasting
pork, there’s a crowd of suited ‘n’ booted hospital bodies.
“Stand back!” goes the head honcho hospital body. Then
he hits me chest with two steam irons with wires hanging out.
There’s that sizzle, more roasted pork smells.
He stands back and looks at the tellies biting his lip.
“Once more,” he says, him full of panting, with the sweat-
ing, green circles under the arms of his dress.
The same palaver again with the irons.
Again he stands back and looks at the tellies, biting his lip.
“Are we agreed?” – plummy voice like he’s been to college,
or even university – “Time of death, zero nine three six?”
The others look up at the clock or their watches. All
murmur or nod their soppy hatted heads at him. I look at all
the dust on the top of the strip lights, on the tops of the tellies,
and at the doctor with cartoon pictures on the top of his green
cap, and down at the all the bits of red shiny cutlery. “Your arse.
I’m not dead, not dead, not dead... Hello Abby. Hello Jessie.”
© KEVIN ROBSON 2009
Kevin Robson ducks and dives in Hadleigh, where he is contracted by
the second-hand-car-sales Mafia to enforce the strict Essex code of
honour.