Philosophy and Literature Blog

I noticed in part of the argument that Socrates mentions that goodness of something is due to the 'presence' of goodness, badness due to the 'presence' of badness. He uses this to defeat Callicles. Now, this is all in translation, so I don't know how close 'presence' is to the actual Greek word. But you can't hear this and not think about Derrida. Callicles admits Socrates is right about all of this presence business. Is the fact that I found this line of argument questionable that I'm some sort of crypto-postmodern? I agree that the point where Callicles could stop losing the argument is by refusing to admit the 'presence' stuff. But if you don't buy the presence stuff, you disagree with both Callicles and Socrates. Callicles is a moralist in the same way that Nietzsche is. I'm sure that using the word 'moralist' here may seem strange, but if you think about it, there is a kind of ubermench-ish morality in play here. The pr...

After discussing rhetoric with Gorgias, Socrates takes on Polus and talks him around to agreeing that the one who suffers injustice is better off than the one who inflicts it. They discuss dictators who seize power unjustly and do not suffer punishment. I'm not going to rehearse the arguments, rather, I'm going to talk about the suffering of Macbeth. The power of Macbeth for me is Macbeth's powerful imagination and the depiction of guilt and insecurity of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Shakespeare dramatizes the damage the murders do to the psyche of the Macbeths. Macbeth says he heard voices saying "Macbeth has murdered sleep", and he goes on, indicating apparent remorse. And Lady Macbeth is driven to insanity and suicide. Macbeth himself degenerates to concluding "life's but a walking shadow". Is Macbeth's famous speech merely a representation of the effects of treason, or has Macbeth, in his degenerated state, seen a deeper truth? Or is the ...

So I started listening to Plato's Gorgias on my MP3. I bring it up because it goes back to an issue I have wrestled with over the years:  are there real answers to adversaries like Callicles? But before Callicles there is a VERY timely discussion of rhetoric. So I will concentrate on that here. Gorgias admits that the rhetorician does not know medicine but knows how to persuade patients to submit to the knife. In fact, the specialty of the rhetorician is to persuade. Thus the students of Gorgias, and the other accomplished sophists, can be very powerful, more powerful than those who actually know the arts themselves. Now, convincing sick people to go to the doctor seems like a great thing. But, as Gorgias admits, specialists at persuasion can also persuade others to do bad things. Gorgias says the teacher can't be held responsible for students using their training for evil. But rhetoric is a particular kind of skill, a skill at persuading, completely neutral, that bends oth...

     In sections 139-142 are some of the most interesting so far. Here he uses the example of the cube to investigate the relations between the picture we get of a word and how we may use it. That is, how does the picture we get of a cube really limit the way we may use it.      One may think that the picture we have of a cube will completely determine how we use the word. But, we will be surprised when we can think of a triangular projection of a cube and still have to call it a 'cube'.      It is too easy to just say, as everyone does these days, that the USE of a word is what we mean by it. Wittgenstein, pun intended, turns it around in his mind and shows how the notion of 'use' reveals potentials in a word beyond what we immediately think when a picture occurs in our mind. We may think we mean the picture by the word, and that has to be an important part of it, but it is not the full expression of the word. It is the plac...

Alright, I'm going to say a few things about Ferguson. Here goes: 1. The prosecutor did not want to prosecute the case, that's obvious. I think a special prosecutor would have avoided the appearance of a conflict of interest. The presentation he gave the night of the announcement sounded more like a defence attorney. Furthermore, while it may seem fair to present both sides to a grand jury, my gut tells me other defendants do not get the same consideration. This appears to be a double standard. 2.  Wilson said he didn't carry a taser because it was 'bulky'. I understand that a police officer has to be agile, but we should consider the possibility that a bulky encumbrance is a small price to pay if it means not killing an unarmed person. Also, I've certainly heard of and even seen on TV police using tasers, I would need to know how they were able to carry them if they were so bad, but I'm not an expert on this and would be interested to hear other opinion...

     So, I had a sudden inspiration to read Thomas Merton's book The Inner Experience , which talks a lot about the "I", and play that off against Harris' book, which will talk about how the "I" is an illusion, and see whether anything interesting comes from it. Maybe, maybe not.

     Here Harris is right on. There is no reason to conclude from QM that the universe is fundamentally Mind. QM is indeed mysterious and counter-intuitive in many ways, but Idealism is not the necessary consequence of this. As Harris points out, 'measurement' does not invoke Mind per say, it only invokes measurement.      Now, there are strange things in QM, mainly non-separability, which is genuinely strange, but that doesn't mean we have to smoke doobies and try to use The Force.      Additionally, Harris points out that the Mind is still dependant upon the physical processes within the body, and, as much as I find Penrose an interesting read, it is not obvious that QM gets us anywhere when it comes to solving the PHILOSOPHICAL problem of Mind.