Theoretical constraint

“[That the universe is spatiotemporal in its fundamental nature] is in doubt in present-day physics and cosmology…. Note that if temporality goes, i.e. not just spacetime but temporality in any form, then experience also goes, given that experience requires time. One of the fine consequences of this is that there never has been any suffering. But no theory of reality can be right that has the consequence that there never has been any suffering.”

G. Strawson, Consciousness and its place in nature, p. 9.

An harried update

Don’t you just love people who precede an “h” word with an “an”?

This is not complaining. But this term I’m teaching over 240 students in all, distributed subject-wise among Metaphysics, Kant & the 19th Century, and an Humanities Breadth Course (“Civilization”). Just the book-keeping end of things is running me ragged. But, as I say, I’m not complaining, since each day I’m finding my head just packed with interesting ideas and questions. Years ago, when I was department head, I was run just as ragged, but my head was filled with stuff so stultifying that I can’t bear myself to try to recall any of it now.

This means I am encountering lots of material for the blog, but little time in which to blog it. But for now let me describe a fascinating (to me) line of questioning that developed from the Metaphysics class. We begin with this:

Does there have to be an ultimate reality?

(“Ultimate” there just for emphasis. Yes, it’s a needless emphasis.) Normally, I would like to answer, “Yes. For something must ultimately explain why it is that my experiences are one way rather than any other way.” But two further questions arise: (1) What makes me so sure that my experience COULD be any other way? and (2) Why couldn’t my experiences be the way they are because of some layer of mere appearance, which is the way it is because of some further layer of appearance, which is … and so on, without end?

Question (1) perhaps quickly turns to question (2), since if I accept that my experience couldn’t be any other way than it is, I’d next ask why it has to be the way it is. And then I would ask whether this question could be answered with infinite layers of appearances rather than through some appeal to an ultimate reality.

So, what about (2)? In response, I’d likely ask (3) What then determines why this infinite series of layers of appearance is the way it is rather than some other way? But the next question is the real kicker:

(4) What makes me so sure that there must be any cause, or any explanation whatsoever, for appearances being what they are?

When I am tempted to reply that there must be some cause, or some structure or something, which ultimately explains why appearances, and my own experience, has the particular qualities that it has, I realize quite suddenly that I’m sitting next to David Hume as he is writing his Treatise of Human Nature (1.3.2). Hume’s infamous doubt is that there needs to be any account or explanation given for the structure or patterns we encounter in experience. Sure, we are all tempted to infer that there must be some necessity in the way experience unfolds, but this inference is never demonstrated by experience itself — appearances never display to us any necessity — and the inference certainly is no tautology of logic. In the end: why not assume that there is nothing but appearance, with nothing grounding anything, and no need for anything to be grounded? And then I realize that Heraclitus and Nietzsche have been in the room all along.

The effect is dizzying. And we may as well add to this, of course, all of the familiar doubts about the permanence of the self. There is no reason not to suspect (as G. Strawson theorizes) that my consciousness is in a state of constant turnover, say every 2-3 seconds or so, with each state inheriting the memories and beliefs as the last state. Or, let’s make it crazier: perhaps my sense that appearances have a certain uniformity is some sense that has just been born, and will live only for a second or two until everything goes to hell and chaos reigns once more. Perhaps, that is, my consciousness at this moment is only an island of apparent order, bordered on each end by a tumultuous world of chaos, less even than a dream, as Kant put it. (Speaking of Kant, one can now see why he felt driven to such desperate measures to provide an escape from Humean skepticism.)

DAMN! Late for a meeting. Gotta run.

Clothes maketh the man

Actually, you should go to YouTube, find ChurchofBlow, and watch everything.

Foggy morning

Strawson & narrativity

Here is a thesis to consider: “One sees or lives or experiences one’s life as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.” Call it Narrativity. Many philosophers think the claim is true, and should be true (C. Taylor and A. MacIntyre, prominently). Some have thought it is false, but should be true (Plutarch). Some think is is true, but should be false (Sartre). But Strawson, from whom I’m gaining all this, thinks it is false as a general thesis and not obviously a good thing at all.

Strawson identifies himself as “episodic” which means “one does not figure oneself, considered as a self, as something that was there is the past and will be there in the future.” Indeed, I think GS holds that a new self is generated every 2-3 seconds (how does he come to that number, I wonder?). One has a sense (with John Updike) as “always just beginning.” One gets the sense of this sort of self in writers like Musil, Sterne, Stendahl, Woolf, Borges, Proust, Dickenson, and Pessoa (Portuguese writer and poet; I’ve meant to blog about him for some time; I think Rob would like him).

The problem with Narrativism, GS charges, is that it may lead you to stretch details of your life in the effort to make it a good story — it can lead to “falsification, confabulation, revisionism” (though need not necessarily do so). An episodic focuses on pretty much the here and now, without the concern to integrate actions and thoughts with some overarching theme or plot.

Some worry that an episodic won’t feel the obligation to keep promises, or will lack prudential concerns for the future. But GS answers this in two ways. First, feelings of obligation (as well as remorse, hope, dread, etc.) are feelings we experience here and now, of course; so the episodic has the same feelings as any narrativist. [Objection: really? Doesn't the narrativist have these feelings because he believes he is identical with the person back in the past, and with the person in the future? If we remove those beliefs, might not the feelings begin to fade?] Second, GS admits that he has a very special connection with that self in the past, and with that one in the future: he’s inherited items from the past self, and will bestow some on the future self.

I think Strawson would admit, though, that an episodic wouldn’t have exactly the same concerns over past and future selves that a narrativist has. But this may not be a bad thing at all. Narrativism might lead us to be too bound up with remorse/guilt, or pride, or fastidious concern for the future. Perhaps being episodic can free us, in some degree, from attitudes toward past/future selves that do nothing but corrupt the present.

A fine quote from GS, regarding guilt:

Experiencing guilt is “a chimpanzee thing, and wholly so, an ancient adaptive emotional reflex in social animals, encrusted, now, with all the fabulous complications and dreadful superstitions of human consciousness, but otherwise unchanged, an internal prod that evolved among our remote but already highly social ancestors (215)

Prose worthy of Nietzsche.

A bit more about Strawson’s materialism

In thinking about it further, I realized my electric blanket metaphor for Strawson’s materialism is misleading. As an analogy, it is better suited for so-called property dualists, who believe that some matter can have properties which are in an important sense immaterial (like “feeling joy” or “hearing C#”). Strawson, in contrast, wants to enlarge or extend our concept of materiality or physicality so as to include mental phenomena. The two views, property dualism and Strawson’s “real materialism,” end up functionally equivalent, but there is an important difference when it comes to the treatment each view gives to present physics.

Property dualists arrive at their view because, for the life of them, they cannot see how dead, inert, passive matter could ever itself constitute our wide and varied world of consciousness. So they bring in “alien” properties, which somehow attach themselves or supervene on chunks of matter. Strawson thinks, however, that this view is based on a hopelessly wrong view of matter. Matter is not as Descartes conceived it to be. It is instead — and here I’ll try to sound all quantummy — spheres of probabilities and potentialities, collapsing into actual fields and forces upon instantaneous, holistic interactions. In short, matter is far more lively and similar to the quicksilvery nature of consciousness than philosophers often pretend. With a more accurate understanding of physics, it is less clearly outrageous to think that consciousness may itself be a property of the physical world.

Here’s an analogy. Suppose physicists didn’t have any laws or theory or understanding of gravitation. Of course they could see that their existing theory was very incomplete — lots of phenomena they really could begin to explain. Some of them, let’s say, insisted that the unexplained phenomena would eventually be explained through other known theories and forces. Others insisted that there must be some alien, somewhat magical force. (These represent reductive materialists and dualists, respectively.) Then someone comes along (initials GS) and says: why not expand physics so as to include this additional force? It is different from the other froces and theories we know about, but not so different as to compromise the integrity of our scientific understanding of the world.

Moreover, GS would note, it’s not as if we have any reason for thinking existent physics is complete. No one yet has happily married up the quantum world with the relativistic world, and the attempts to do so (string theory) look far loonier than anything any philosopher has proposed. So why not simply accept consciousness and its contents as further physical phenomena, as basic to physics as gravitational phenomena, with no need for immaterial entities or reductive explanations?

I still haven’t quite grasped what this really means. GS himself (and this is charming) admits that it is initially hard to think of experience in this way. You should sit and listen to music, and say to yourself repeatedly that your experience is just part of the overall physical process (of sound waves, brain states, etc.). You should watch children learn and play, and think of their internal goings-on as no different in kind from what their bodies are doing. So it takes meditation and reconceptualization.

This exactly is the kind of question I like to hear: why exactly do we think mental events are different in kind from physical events? What exactly is our understanding of physical events, and what is it in that understanding that keeps gravity in but color experiences out?

Strawson, Real Materialism

What exactly are the boundaries around the things we are likely to call physical? Do all material things have mass? But some of the elements of theoretical physics might not have mass. Do they have to take up space, or have determinate spatial location? Again, some theoretical entities lack these as well. Galen Strawson doesn’t provide guidelines for what to regard as being physical or material, but he’s willing to enlarge the boundaries so that consciousness counts as a physical entity.

It’s a bold and somewhat bewildering claim. One of the ways we’re likely to demarcate the physical is by excluding ideas or concepts from it. Ideas and concepts aren’t the same as consciousness, but they seem closely related — you need consciousness to experience ideas and concepts. Thinking of consciousness as physical runs against that line of thought, but why not? My own metaphor for understanding GS’s view is to think of consciousness as the heat generated by an electric blanket. It’s not a very good metaphor, since heat hasn’t seemed unphysical in the way that consciousness has to some, but the metaphor captures the idea that consciousness is something like a physical field generated by active components when they’re functioning in a certain way.

Interesting consequences follow. GS is not a dualist; everything, including consciousness, is physical (it’s just that consciousness can’t be reduced to brain states). (Exception: GS might be a dualist about numbers and concepts, but he doesn’t discuss it in these essays.) Each time a “consciousness field” is generated, it’s a new one — so we’re not necessarily the same numerical person after each dreamless sleep or state of unconsciousness. Similarly, each time I turn on my electric blanket, a new heat field is generated, though it’s very similar to the last one. GS also has a couple of essays against the importance of “narrative” for selves — he’s happily “episodic”, meaning that he feels no deep need for his actions to belong to some over-arching theme or story of his life. He does one thing, moves to another, and doesn’t need to see a continuous thread throughout. Moreover, he argues there is no need for such a continuous thread in order to be ethical.

He’s also a hard determinist. He doesn’t see a lot of value in the compatibilist notion of freedom, and he thinks genuine freedom would be the capacity to be the total cause of one’s actions (a causa sui); but we lack this capacity. He doesn’t think there can be such a thing as ultimate moral responsibility.

What I really like about these essays is GS’s style and approach. He is a bit of an outsider to professional philosophy. That might seem incredible, since he is a professor at Reading, and the son of one of the more important philosophers of the second half of the 20th century (Peter Strawson). But he spent many years outside the discipline, working at the TLS and other places, before finally completing his phil degree. He has read very broadly in many areas (literature, science, Buddhism, psychology), and has read the Great Dead (at least the British early modern Great Dead) with considerable care. He’s very straightforward about his own shortcomings and isn’t afraid to show his own personality. Many of his essays are a dialogue with imagined objectors.

Indeed, as I read the essays, I often felt excited in the way that drew me first to philosophy. It’s fun to kick around cool ideas and see where they land, without fretting so much about what imagined critics might say. Why not think of consciousness as a physical force? Why not suppose that each time I wake up I’m a different “field” than I was when I went to bed? Why not accept that, in the end, no one is ultimately responsible for what they do? Fun ideas to mull over.

The genius of Geraldine

So if you’re in the knitting business, at some point in the process of turning wool into a sweater you will need to take a large, washer-like disk of steel and punch little notches into its outer rim, for some use in the process which I do not know. You will gradually collect a zillion little bits of steel, each measuring about two by three millimeters, unless you are so stupid as to throw them away. Then you will take these bits of steel and stick them onto the business side of a big roll of masking tape, creating a steel mosaic. But the yellow masking tape will show itself between the gaps, so you will rub black show polish over the whole thing to turn the tape black but leave the steel shiny. You’ll do this until your mosaic reaches, oh I don’t know, 34 meters long. Then you’ll take a tiny paint brush and some paint (of course) and commence to recreate the Bayeux Tapestry, an 11th or 12th-century tapestry depicting the battle of Hastings in 1066. It should take 20 years or so, if you also decide to invent yourself the last quarter of the tapestry which has gone missing over the intervening centuries.

That’s exactly what you’ll do, anyway, if you are Michael Linton, a sweater-maker in Geraldine, NZ. You can see his account of the process here.

But there’s more. If you purchase his twin CD-Roms — and how could you not? — you will have the entire recreated tapestry at your disposal, and you can click on absolutely any item on the tapestry (person, Latin phrase, plant, dog, castle, etc) and get a full story of who the person was, what the Latin means, what the plant is, where the dog came from, and so on.

The discs also include some of Linton’s homemade puzzles. There are “alphametic” puzzles he’s made (example here) and several others of his own invention. Linton also sells a “magic cube” he invented, which he describes as follows:

This 8 x 8 x 8 magic cube consists of an array of numbers from 1 to 512, with no number repeated or missing. These numbers have been arranged so that every line, file, column and diagonal, including the four corner to corner diagonals, adds to 2052.

In addition, if you take the eight corners of any cube within the cube, you will get 2052.

What makes it even more magical, is that if you take any face and swap it parallel to itself (top to bottom, side to side, back to front, or vice versa), the cube remains magic. This can be repeated as many times as you wish.

The cube is represented virtually on one of the CD-Roms, which makes it easy to do the “face swapping.”

There are more puzzles and inventions to be found on his website (linked above), but you get the idea. In conversation with Mr. Linton, he explained that he didn’t do all that well in school, since they kept insisting that he pay attention to things that didn’t interest him. He’s involved his kids in his projects, and they’ve grown into fascinating, diverse, intelligent beings as well. One now invents games for Nintendo.

What struck me most about meeting him was the thought that in any little town you drive through, the most interesting and fertile mind may not (probably won’t?) be found in the local university or research lab. It is likely to be found in the sweater shop on the corner, the one hosting the world’s largest jersey:

Return from New Zealand

My family and I just returned from two weeks in New Zealand. Short version: a fun, magical tour, with highlights of Belgian food and a man who made copied a medieval tapestry out of metal bits and masking tape. Long version follows.

We landed in Auckland, and spent a day and a night there on the seafront, adjusting to the warm summer weather, and discovering the typical coffee drink down there called a “flat white.” It’s just espresso with steamed milk, but boy, is it ever addictive. The regular catch phrase every three hours became, “Time for another flat white?”

The next day we flew to Christchurch, which has now become one of my very favorite cities. It reminded me a bit of Oxford, in terms of an overall vibe, but without the 39 colleges cluttering up the works. It’s a fun and quaint city, with ample public gardens, a public tram, a little river (yes, called “the Thames”), punting boats, and a Belgian pub (more anon).

We also discovered a shop called “Whisky Galore,” which had to be explored further, as it shares a name with the emblematic film of Logan’s Scottish Film Society.

The shop is run by two very pleasant Scots, who displayed to me an original movie poster of the film, and also introduced me to a NZ single malt, distilled just down the road in Oamaru. We stayed with an exceptionally charismatic and generous family, toured the city, beach, and countryside, and left only with great reluctance.

We had rented a car, which afforded the kids great amusement each time I sat down on the wrong side to drive. We drove south to Dunedin, and stopped more for a break than for anything else at a little town called Geraldine. It was there that we met Michael Linton, a man who by profession is in the textile industry, and who by avocation is a genius of several surprising dimensions. It was he who has made a complete replica — nay, more than that! — of the Bayeux Tapestry out of bits of steel, masking tape, shoe polish, paint, and a tiny brush. I have too much to say about him for this post; more in the next, or you can read more here.

We also stopped along the way in Oamaru for — you guessed it! — a tour of the distillery and a whisky tasting.

(Thank God, or whatever, for my indulgent family). Dunedin itself didn’t do much for us — it has a beautiful old train station and a very effective museum — but we left soon for Christchurch once again and ate at a Belgian beer cafe. It was so wonderful that I begged the waitress to let me live there forever, and daughter Hanna helped by suggesting that I’m a good cook, but son Ben spoiled everything by telling her that I snore. (It’s a lie!) Anyhow, now listen carefully: if ever you get the chance, proceed directly to Christchurch, and to the Belgian beer cafe on the river Thames, and instruct the post office to have all mail forwarded to you there. You will thank me for the rest of your blessed life.

We traveled on to some small towns along the east coast of the south island, ended up in Picton to take the ferry ride to the north island, and spent a couple days in Wellington. Wellington is also very charming, though more commercially oriented, and we enjoyed the cable car to the city gardens, the cafes of Cuba street, and the massive museum. We had lunch at a sushi bar where you seized the little plates as they traveled past on a conveyor belt.

Then on to the east coast of the north island, and some of NZ’s finest wine country. We did a fair amount of driving over our trip, and so saw a fair deal of NZ countryside, which is somehow always beautiful and always changing. There are always hills or stark mountains; there is always greenery, and sheep; and always little roadside cafes with flat whites. But every 30km or so brings on a new arrangement. The landscape is in a pleasant struggle between tropical Pacific and British countryside, which really works.


The little town along the coast were a little too touristy for us, but in each place we found something interesting to do, whether it was mini-golf or wine-tasting. We spent Christmas eve and day in Rotorua, renown for its therapeutic hot springs.

We ended with a return to Auckland, a flight to LA, a night, and then the flight home, where it’s now a sunny winter day. I plan to have a few more postings soon focusing on particular episodes in the trip.

On ‘giving talks’

When philosophers ‘give talks,’ or ‘give papers,’ that usually means one or the other of a few things: they read a paper aloud (most often), they read some and discuss some, they have a Powerpoint presentation, or they have a lengthy handout that they work through with the audience. Very rarely do they show up without any props and just say what they know — indeed, I only remember seeing it done twice, with Burton Dreben and Cornel West. Let me say right away that I don’t see anything necessarily wrong with doing any of these things. I’ve seen them done poorly and done well, meaning: I’ve learned from some of them and not from others.

But I keep thinking of a couple of passages in Plato’s dialogue, the “Phaedrus,” where Socrates relates an old Egyptian tale. A king named Thamus goes to the god Theuth, who has given people the arts of arithmetic, geometry, writing, and astronomy, etc., and Thamus asks what each is good for. When they come to to the art of writing, Theuth says it will make people wiser and improve their memories, but Thamus the king thinks otherwise:

And so it is that you, by reason of your tender regard for writing that is your offspring, have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows. (Hamilton & Cairns, p. 520).

The idea is that, in ‘giving a paper,’ I am only showing ‘what the paper knows.’ Of course, I wrote the paper, and so there is some sense in which the paper represents my knowledge — but it is ‘my’ knowledge as scattered over the course of a few weeks or months, on separate occasions as I pondered this part of the problem or that part. It’s knowledge I’ve never had at any single point in time — not even when I’m ‘giving the paper’ (since otherwise I wouldn’t need the paper now, would I?). The paper makes it seem as if I do have knowledge and memory; though Thamus would say it’s only the ‘conceit’ of wisdom, coupled with some reminding props.

Could it be that if I need a paper, outline, presentation, etc., then I really have not gained an understanding of the material? If so, then perhaps what I need to do is put together the paper, and then study it myself so well that I truly know it, myself, at a single time, and can rehearse it without any props or crutches. (Sounds like Descartes’s third rule of method, come to think of it.) Is this possible? Would it represent an advance in my understanding, or just some needless compulsiveness? I mean these all as genuine questions. I think it is worth some experimenting with.

A further problem is that it seems to me that when people address other people, they ought to engage in a real-time, constructive project that grows from the knowledge and interests of both speaker and audience. That is to say, it is a genuine dialogue among individuals (even if one person does most of the talking), and not a canned speech to be given irrespective of who is in the audience. Here is the way Plato puts the same concern in the dialogue:

[O]nce a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong.

In short, pre-conceived papers and presentations are not necessarily attuned to the audience to whom they are delivered.

What would be best — according to this line of thought — would be to master a subject totally, so that one can explain it as easily as one might give directions to the nearest market, and then ‘give talks’ in such a way that everyone in the room gets involved in the common project, even if they aren’t necessarily experts. I think that’s very hard to do — but on the other hand, it seems to me a worthy goal to strive for.

(There’s an added irony here I’ll just gesture toward: here I am writing about what Plato wrote about the evils of writing. Does this post, if successful, undercut its own argument?)

Well, now: THAT was interesting

I was at the U of Utah yesterday, and had a great time in a number of activities. I visited my friend Mariam’s class, and we debated whether the evolutionary account of religious inclinations should cause a believer to doubt. Then I had lunch with six engaging grad students, and visited Elijah Millgram’s Nietzsche class, in which he gave a “walk-through” presentation of how to write a philosophy paper. (I could use two or three more of those.)

Then I was to give a colloquium paper. The room was packed, maybe 50 people, and a little warm. I have a lot of friends in that department, but I was still feeling a bit nervous. Normally philosophers read papers to audiences, or have some sort of organized Powerpoint presentation, or an outline on a handout, but I was trying something different: I wanted to just explain what I think I know, with only some texts along with me for supportive quotes. That might sound easy — just say what you know! — but when you get in front of a group, there’s a decent chance your mind will go blank, you’ll panic, and then train wreck ensues. Still, I’ve done it before, and do it in class all the time, so I had some reason to think I could pull it off. (Moreover, I have philosophical reasons to recommend this sort of performance — I’ll blog about that another time.) But I was a bit worried about keeping my mind ordered and relaxed; and being worried about not being relaxed enough is something of a self-fulfilling worry.

Everything began okay. I started by framing the problem, and began to chew away at the solution. But I was feeling really hot. I thought, “I’ll bet I’m blushing! How embarrassing! Just stick to the ideas; you’ll be okay.” But I still felt really hot. Really hot. So I stopped my presentation and asked the audience, “Is anyone else hot in here? I feel like my face is turning red.” They said the room was warm, but I looked fine. So I asked for a glass of water and tried to continue. But my mind was getting fuzzy, and then my ears started to tune out, and the next thing I experienced was my friends gently lowering me down to the floor and explaining that I had passed out!

That’s a first.

I was impressed by how the Philosophy department sprang into action. They elevated my feet, put a jacket under my head, and called 911. I felt fine almost immediately, and passed all the EMT’s tests — good blood pressure, pulse, blood sugar, EKG. I even seemed coherent, which is rare. I will go to a doc to rule out anything more troubling, but I’m betting it was just “some damn thing” — overdetermination of heat, worry, and the drugs they slipped into my tea. (No.)

I was taken to dinner afterwards and enjoyed good and fun conversations, and drove home to Logan just fine. I’m always glad to give a memorable performance.

Because I would not stop for Death…

… he kindly dropped by my office for a photo opp. This is William Holloway, Philosophy major, completing a creative assignment for another class.

Music update

I’ve been to two chamber music concerts this year, both of them excellent. The first was last September, with the Shanghai Quartet. They played fascinating, difficult, and very compelling pieces by Penderecki and Yi-Wen Jiang. They have an incredibly balanced tone — very unified, and highly expressive. But it was their performance of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” that stole the show. I recently purchased a recording of the Emerson Quartet playing the piece, and blasted it while home alone yesterday afternoon. Schubert is, as the cognoscenti all say, friggin’ awesome, and that piece just rocks. An added plus: the Shaghai’s cello player, Nicholas Tzavaras, looked a lot like Schubert, and I had the chance to chat with him over wine and snacks afterwards. Very interesting guy.

Last night we heard the Claremont Trio, with guest clarinetist Jonathan Cohler. They played Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and did well by each, though I usually find Mendelssohn’s music sort of muddled: it’s like Brahms, but without the emotional purity, and not complicated in a way that speaks to me. In their second half they played Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” — a strange, mystical work that maintains a very high tension over a long time, and is hugely unpredictable. It left me in a sort of welcomed daze. Messiaen wrote the work while a POW in a German camp during WW2, and performed it with a couple of imprisoned fellow musicians in a bitter January, 1941. No word on how the fellow prisoners felt about it. Probably not a Johnny Cash/Folsom Prison sort of deal.

And a recent purchase: a boogie-woogie style version of Khatchatourian’s “Russian Sabre Dance” on a 78 — soon to be featured in an upcoming video, to be sure.

Ladyman and Ross, Every Thing Must Go

I recently finished this book, which aims at correcting current ways of doing metaphysics by insisting that metaphysicians take seriously what contemporary physics tells us about the world.

The problem is that “many” (I guess) contemporary metaphysicians suppose that the world, ultimately, is composed of tiny, billiard-ball like particles, which bang in to each other, and somehow generate the macroscopic world we experience. Sure, there are supposed to be some complications coming from the direction of quantum mechanics, but metaphysicians typically suppose that whatever complications there are may be safely ignored.

Not so, say these guys. Lots of claims passing for “apriori” or “intuitively certain” among metaphysicians are just false, if we take physics seriously. The positive campaign of this book is to show what a scientifically-respectable metaphysics would look like. As it turns out, we are wrong to think of thing-like particles as fundamental. What’s fundamental, it seems, are certain structures best described through mathematics, from which we derive claims about so-called “particles” and “waves” and “fields”. So what’s real, ultimately, are structures. Further down the road, we discover that these structures somehow contribute, at some level of analysis, to “patterns,” which we may identify as macroscopic objects (including you and me), and their characteristic behaviors. Structures and patterns; that’s it. Every thing must go!

I skimmed 80% of the book, since I’m not well-educated enough to follow all the science. But I hope I’ve come through with a roughly accurate summary. I like the way it confirms Nz’s view that we are wrong to let our grammar determine our ontology, and Spinoza’s view that individuals aren’t genuinely real, when all is said and done. But I’m wary, since more than once I’ve read something like this and entered into discussion with physicists, only to discover I’ve been sold a bill of goods. It really does frustrate me that there’s no easy way to get a decent synopsis of all this important stuff, and incorporate it into philosophy, without doing all the real work required to have a thorough understanding. What’s a lazy guy like me to do?

James Kugel’s How to Read the Bible

Most readers are probably familiar with the Documentary Hypothesis. The basic idea is that the Bible, as an artifact, is best explained by supposing that it is a compilation of several ancient texts, written by different people in different times and cultures. Somebody (“the Redactor,” maybe Ezra) compiled many of the texts by the third century BCE. This explains why not all of the stories fit smoothly together; why there are two accounts of creation, and two accounts of the ten commandments; and why the style varies so much. Moreover, as one delves into the Bible along with archeology and the study of ancient civilizations, one begins to suspect that many of the stories served quite different purposes that the ones uninformed readers project upon the stories nowadays — or, indeed, from the first century CE onward.

An example. After Moses and the Jews have left Egypt, they get into a battle with the Amelekites (Exodus 17). Moses’s plan is to have Joshua command the Israelites while Moses stands atop a nearby hill and holds up his hands. So long as Moses’s hands are outstretched, the Israelites do well; but if he lets them drop, they begin to fail. Moses’s arms get tired, so his helpers give him a rock to sit on and help prop up his arms, and the Israelites eventually prevail.

Weird story. What does it mean? Jewish commentators say something along the lines of, “So long as we turn up our hands in supplication to the Lord, we have his favor.” Christian readers suggest that Moses, in stretching out his arms, foreshadowed the crucifixion, and the victory over death. But compare these readings to a more ordinary hypothesis. The name of the place where the battle takes place, Rephidim, resembles a Hebrew phrase meaning “spread out” or “prop up.” When you say the name aloud, it sounds sort of like you are saying “the hands grew weak.” So maybe, in the area, there was a prominent hill with a couple of rocks on top of it, called “Rephidim,” and the Moses story was invented to explain how the hill got its name. My family when I was growing up similarly made up all sorts of stories about how “Sheboygan” got its name, all of them invoking an ancient Indian who was disappointed at his wife’s inability to give birth to a daughter (“She boy again!” Har har).

Kugel, in this book, provides many similar etiological hypotheses (explaining weird stories as attempts to explain how a place got its name, or why we have some expression, or why two groups don’t get along, and so on). The overall effect is twofold. On the one hand, the Bible becomes a very interesting and complicated text from which you might be able to learn a lot about how ancient people saw their world, as well as how they tried to explain it. On the other hand, a lot of divine significance is drained from the work. Many allegedly inspired and inspiring stories turn out to be just about as rich as my old “Sheboygan” stories.

What’s fascinating is that Kugel is an Orthodox Jew, and so he really wants to revere the text, though his reverence is challenged by his considerable expertise and knowledge. He ends up with the following view. Yes, there are humdrum natural explanations for everything in this old, complicated text. But what makes it sacred are the layers and layers of interpretations that commentators have shellacked over it for centuries. The text has managed to hold the fascination of brilliant scholars for all that time, and the interpretations are wondrous, and somewhere in all that lies the sanctity of the work.

I’m glad this works for Kugel, and I’m hesitant to ask whether he’d also revere any work that supported wild misinterpretations over several generations. (He does give a groovy religious reading of “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes,” so I’m guessing this possibility has already occurred to him.) This seems to me to be clearly a case of denying what he knows to be true, and hiding behind a thin veil of hermeneutics.

This is a fascinating book, though — highly readable and well-informed (I guess, but what do I know?). I really think it needs to be read by anyone who wants to take the Bible seriously, or by anyone who wants to get a clearer picture of how this book — the most influential one in the western world, by far — came to be written.