Christmas in the 21th century?

The day that I publish this blog it is Christmas. It is a special day for many people in the world, in the Western world in the first place, but absolutely not only there. Therefore, I wanted to make a special blog for this special occasion. Usually it is so that I first write a blog and then make an illustration (usually a photo) that fits the blog. This time I decided to do it the other way round: The blog is the photo and the text is the illustration. Can’t you see the picture well, then click on it and it will become larger.

The photo contains Christian elements, but it isn’t only meant for Christians. The sense of it is for all of us. Christmas is traditionally not only the day that Christians remember the birth of Christ, but it is also a day of contemplation: We think about who we are, where we come from and what our future will be. We don’t need to do it especially on Christmas. We can do it each day, according to our religion, persuasion or way of life. But do we do? Therefore this photo is not a call for a revival of a certain religious view; it expresses a philosophical idea, like all my blogs. As Wittgenstein said at the end of his Tractatus (6.52): “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

Meno's paradox

Ask a philosopher, especially an epistemologist, what knowledge is, and she’ll probably answer that it is justified belief. Of course, she knows that the problem here just starts, for what does “justified” mean and when is a belief justified, and moreover, what is a belief? But I think that in order to get an idea of what I am talking about here this preliminary definition will do. Even then the definition is questionable. For example, once in a blog I discussed the Gettier problem, which says that we can have a true belief that is not justified. Here I want to consider another question. It was raised by Meno in his dialogue with Socrates. They are talking about what virtue is, but Meno wonders whether we can ever know it. Here is what he says and what Socrates replies:

“MENO: ... How will you enquire, Socrates, into that which you do not know? What will you put forth as the subject of enquiry? And if you find what you want, how will you ever know that this is the thing which you did not know?

SOCRATES: I know, Meno, what you mean ... You argue that a man cannot enquire either about that which he knows, or about that which he does not know; for if he knows, he has no need to enquire; and if not, he cannot; for he does not know the very subject about which he is to enquire.” (1)

In other words: We cannot look for what we already know, for we know it already, so what to look for? However, when we don’t know what a thing is, we don’t know what to look for. So trying to acquire knowledge is an impossible task. This problematic situation is called Meno’s problem or Meno’s paradox. Of course, it cannot be right. Much has already been written about it and here I cannot go into that, but I want to explain how I see the solution, which is quite simple to my mind.

Let’s first look at Socrates’s solution. Socrates thinks that all our knowledge is inborn but that we are unconscious of most of it. The trick is then to make this hidden knowledge conscious. In order to substantiate his view Socrates takes one of Meno’s slaves and asks him some difficult mathematical questions, which the slave successfully answers. Since the questions were about a new subject and since therefore the slave couldn’t have found the answers by himself – so Meno and Socrates suppose –, it must have been so, so Socrates states, that he, Socrates, brought the inborn knowledge that the slave actually already had to the surface. However, what actually happens is that Socrates steers the slave’s thinking. In fact he reveals what Socrates already knew. By the way the questions are asked the slave acquires new knowledge. It is as if the slave studies a textbook on mathematics and when he has finished it, passes the examination and is then a learned mathematician.

Nevertheless, Socrates’s method is not pointless. Actually it is the right method applied in the wrong way. The difference between us and the slave is, that the slave is questioned by another person and doesn’t need to think out the problem he is questioned about and doesn’t need to think up the questions. That’s why it is as if he reads a textbook. However, our situation is different, for the problem is ours. Once we have a problem we are already halfway to new knowledge, for usually we want a solution, for practical reasons or for scientific reasons or who knows why. John is at a railway station in an unknown town and wants to go home. When does the next train leave and from which platform? An astronomer has discovered an irregularity in the trajectory of a planet. How come? In other words, when you have a problem and want to solve it, you do like Socrates: You ask questions. But you don’t ask them to another person but you ask them to yourself. Once having asked your question(s), you devise intelligent solutions and you test them. If a solution applies or works, you have new knowledge. You have read on a table where and when your train leaves, and the next time you are there, you don’t need to look it up anymore. The astronomer thinks that the trajectory of the planet is disturbed by an unknown planet, which is later discovered by him. So we acquire new knowledge. Some knowledge is new for you, but not new as such (for someone had made the train table). Other knowledge is really new, for before the astronomer had discovered the new planet nobody knew about its existence.

Actually Meno’s problem as formulated by him is a false problem. He formulated as a static problem what in fact is a dynamic problem. You cannot know how the opposite bank of the river looks like, when you are on this side. However, you can ask yourself how to come over there and look for solutions: build a bridge, rent a boat, learn to swim. That’s how science works and that’s how we get knowledge. Science and knowledge is not about the right answers but about the right questions. That’s what Meno learned from Socrates and what we can learn from Socrates. As for this, Socrates’s question asking is okay. What Socrates didn’t see is that he had not to ask his questions to another person but to himself. But is it not what he actually does in his dialogues all the time, even if he asks them sometimes to others?

 (1) Quoted from Benjamin Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Meno on https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1643/1643-h/1643-h.htm

A lost library

Montaigne's study in his castle. On the wall the points 

where his book cases had been attached can still be seen.

Montaigne loved books. He had a large collection of books. About thousand books. Maybe it’s not impressive in view of what many people have today, but he lived in a different age, and not many people could afford to buy such a collection. Moreover, many people were illiterate in those days. Also Montaigne hadn’t bought a big part of his collection himself. He inherited the library of his friend Étienne de La Boétie, who had bequeathed his books to him on his deathbed. It’s a pity that nothing remains of Montaigne’s book collection, for after his death his daughter sold his books or gave them away. How nice then that at the moment a project is going on to reconstruct Montaigne’s library: https://montaigne.univ-tours.fr/restitution-3d/ . Nevertheless, it would be interesting not only to know which books Montaigne had, but to really have them as well, for he had the habit to make notes in his books. They could tell us much about his ideas and intellectual development. Until now only a few of his books have been found back. Anyway, we know that Montaigne had dedicated his bookcase to La Boétie by having put a board with such a text on the top of it. Till about 1820 it still must have been there in Montaigne’s study and some have described the text. Since then it is lost. Also the bookcase is no longer there.

Happily, we know a lot of what Montaigne read from his Essays. He even wrote an essay about it, titled “Of Books” (Book II, 10). Montaigne writes there that he read for amusing himself in the first place. In case he wanted to gather knowledge from a book, it was in order to know himself better and to learn to die and live in the right way. Montaigne wrote about the latter also in his Essays and it made that this book is still so popular. It’s one of the classics one has to read if one wants to know what philosophers see a good life.

Montaigne preferred classical literature to modern literature. The former is better, he thinks. Since he also preferred to read books in the original language, he read mainly Latin books, for his schoolboy knowledge of Old Greek, as he calls it, was not good enough for understanding the Greek literature well. Besides, in his days not yet much classical literature had been translated into French. Note that it was the time of the Renaissance, when many old books just were rediscovered. In view of this it’s striking that the first book after his remark that he prefers the classics is Boccaccio’s Decamerone, which he read for his amusement, so he says, just like for instance, Rabelais. As for the classics, Montaigne first mentions in his essay “Of Books” the poetry of Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus and Horace. From Virgil he especially names his Aeneid, which is an epic poetic work; not what most of us would consider poetry today. He says that in his days Virgil’s work was often compared with the work by Ariosto, an Italian writer who lived some fifty years before Montaigne and who was quite popular then. For many people today Ariosto will be unknown, unless you are an opera lover, for composers like Vivaldi and Händel used his texts for their operas. Montaigne didn’t think much of Ariosto, certainly when compared with Virgil. In addition to the classical authors just mentioned, Montaigne loved the playwrights Terence and Plautus.

These are the authors Montaigne loved most. As for other writers he likes and who “mix business with pleasure”, he mentions the philosophers Plutarch and Seneca first of all. Plutarch was a Greek, indeed, but La Boétie had translated some work by him, so he could read it in French. Montaigne read also Seneca’s Letters, which are still popular today. And he read Cicero, of course. He found his moral philosophy especially useful, but he disliked his style of writing.

The last category of books Montaigne mentions is historiography. These books are pleasant and easy to read and they show how man is. This is especially the case for bibliographies, which are his favourite books. Here he names Diogenes Laërtius, a biographer of Greek philosophers. However, most of all Montaigne recommends to read Caesar, not only in order to know the historical facts, but especially because of himself, since he outstrips all others in perfection – or at least this is what Montaigne thinks. But Montaigne read also work by his contemporary Jean Bodin, who was not so much a historian as well a political philosopher.

Montaigne read these authors not only for his amusement and self-improvement, but we find many quotes from their works in his essays, especially from the classical authors. So although his books have been lost, from the Essays we know what Montaigne read and what he thought about what he read. There is a saying “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are”. But shouldn’t we simply read the Essays in order to know who Montaigne was?

Berent Enç on free will

I have something to put right, for I made a mistake. Yes, such things happen sometimes, and probably I make even more mistakes than I realize. Anyway, it’s a mistake I discovered myself. In my last blog I wrote that Berent Enç ignores the problem of the free will. It’s not true. He does give it some attention, though not much. The reason why I didn’t see it is that I wrote the blog with the help of old notes and I didn’t check them in Enç’s book. Usually I check what I write as much as I can. But who doesn’t trust his own notes? I did, and immediately I was punished. It was not Enç who ignored the problem of the free will, but it was I who did ... in these notes. But at the time I wrote them, I wasn’t yet interested in it.

Although Enç uses the words “free will” here and there, actually he speaks of “voluntary acts”. Voluntary acts, so Enç, are “movements ... caused by intentions [and] ... under the agent’s control.” (p. 221) So they are based on the idea that we act in view of our intentions. Now it is so that intentional acting need not imply voluntarily acting. A man has had four drinks at a bar intentionally. Then we can say that it was his free will to take a fifth drink only, if he was not too drunk to take a deliberative decision that he wanted to have this fifth one, too. Or, as Enç puts it, “he must have gone through a deliberation in which he considered the pros and cons of downing that fifth drink or walking out.” (221) If he was too drunk for a deliberation, “then I am committed to saying that he did not form the intention to have that fifth drink.” (221) How is this possible “in the causal network that defines the deliberation process”?, Enç asks (221). There, almost at the end of his book, he doesn’t give the answer but he confines himself to saying that the answer must be found “in a compatibilist account of voluntary acts, of autonomy, or of acts done of one’s own free will” (221), and he discusses only briefly some authors he agrees with. Discussing an essay by Stampe and Gibson, Enç refers to an example of theirs of a compulsive hand-washer who decides to wash his hands because he just has handled fish. “Rational as [the hand-washer’s] action may be in the actual situation,” so Enç, “his will may not be free if he is so constituted that he would be washing his hands even at the expense of missing a vitally important phone call. So a necessary condition for acting of one’s free will is that the agent’s decision be rational in the actual and relevantly counterfactual situations.” (222) At the risk of again saying something about Enç that is not entirely correct, I must bypass here the remaining of Enç’s short but preliminary discussion of the idea of the free will in relation to his causal theory of action. But the essence is that – and then I quote him again – “for an act to be voluntary [so free], it is necessary, but not sufficient, that it be the causal consequence of an intention that has been formed as the result of a deliberative process. An additional necessary condition would be that the deliberation involve beliefs and desires that dispose the agent to act rationally.” (227) The latter means that the action must not only be rational under the actual circumstances but also be flexible enough to adapt it to changing situations. And, I would like to add, once this free deliberation process has been finished at the macro-level, it can set to start the micro-units that execute the relevant behaviour. Seen that way, my view last week of what might be the importance of Enç’s causal theory of action for the idea of the free will is actually not too different from what Enç himself thought of it, if it is different at all.

Reference

Enç, B. (2003). How We Act: Causes, Reasons, and Intentions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.