Montaigne and the Olympic Games

OLympic Stadium in Olympia, Greece

In the days of Montaigne there were no Olympic Games. The original Olympic Games of Antiquity had ended about 400 B.C. (the precise date is not known), while the first modern Olympic Games have been held in 1896. When Montaigne lived – the time of the Renaissance or Rediscovery of Antiquity – it was known that such games had been held long ago, but no one was interested to bring this past to life again. Compared to the day of today there was by far less interest in sport. However, tournaments like in the Middle Ages were still held, jeu de paume was quite popular, especially in France, as were boule games. Other sports practised were running, ice-skating (especially in the Netherlands), weight lifting, wrestling, etc., etc. But there was no competition on a scale that can be compared with what happens nowadays (one practical reason for this was, of course, that there was no good and fast transport system). Montaigne himself liked horse riding; just for pleasure, not for competition. One of his brothers played jeu de paume (and died after a ball had hit his head). So sport belonged to Montaigne’s life and to the society he lived in. Therefore it is not surprising that he mentions sport now and then in his Essays, though not very often. Sometimes Montaigne mentions the jeu de paume, sometimes he mentions sport in quotations or examples from Antiquity, and that’s most of it.
It is in examples that Montaigne mentions the Olympic Games four times in his Essays. Three references are not very interesting. However, one reference to the Olympic Games is, for it tells us a lot about the meaning and significance of sport. Although this reference doesn’t contain an idea of Montaigne himself but one developed by Pythagoras, it’s clear that Montaigne agrees with it. Here it is:
“Pythagoras was want to say that our life resembles the great and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their own.” (Essays, Book I, 25)
Montaigne refers to this view of Pythagoras in his essay “Of the Education of Children”. First, he says there that we must watch others and see how they behave, so that we can learn from it. In this context he mentions especially the ridiculousness and the arrogance of others. Such examples, such knowledge of what others have done “fortify our sight without closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good company in the other world.” And then Montaigne comes with the passage on how Pythagoras interpreted the Olympic Games. With this passage Montaigne wants to say that children – and actually not only children, but everybody – must be like spectators and that they must learn from what they see happening around them. However, to my mind the meaning of this passage is wider. It contains not only the metaphor that a child (and actually everybody) is like a spectator of a sports event, but the passage is a kind of allegory of life. Life is like a sports tournament in which each person has a role to play and in which the occurrences and incidents are like the occurrences and incidents in life. In a sports event like the Olympic Games but also in smaller sports events there are players – the main participants –; there are winners and losers; those who try to profit for personal gain, but are not the main players; onlookers and bystanders; but also others, not mentioned by Pythagoras, like organizers, people in the background who may have the real power, manipulators, cheaters and deceivers, supervisors, innovators, and so on. The more you think about it, the more you’ll see that the Olympic Games and in fact any sports event is a reflection of life. Events like the Olympic Games are maybe too big for it, but smaller events of that kind, local and regional events, can function as a school of life. Then we don’t need to be only spectators, as Montaigne suggests, but we can also play one of the other parts. Every part in a sports event has aspects that are important in life. In this sense, sport is more than relaxation and recreation as is often thought. But can we reproach Montaigne that he wasn’t aware of it? For sport in his days was very different from sport in 2021. Then sport was mainly relaxation and recreation, indeed, and several centuries would have to pass by before it became a real model of life; before it became life itself.

Random quote
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

George Orwell (1903-1950)

Photos as representations of society

For Wittgenstein, a picture represents what it depicts. Often it also expresses what we cannot say in words. If we can, maybe we need a long essay to describe what the picture captures in one image. As a photographer it’s obvious that I agree with this view and therefore it is not strange that once I got the idea to illustrate these blogs with photos. At first I did it only now and then, but now you find a photo of mine at the top of each blog. Sometimes I pick one from my archives and sometimes I take one especially for a blog. However, it happens also the other way round: I have taken a photo, for instance because I like the scenery that I captured with the photo, and afterwards I give it a wider – philosophical or sociological – interpretation and write a blog about it.
Take for instance the photo at the top of this blog. To my mind, it’s not only an interesting picture, but it says also much about our society and how we interact with each other. But let me first tell a bit about what made me take it.
Once on a trip to Paris I took a photo of Les Halls (once the old fresh food market, now a shopping centre; click here for the photo.) It’s a picture of a square in the shopping centre. In the middle you see a man with a notebook or something like that. Around him, people are passing by. What makes this photo special is that the people around the man look like shadows or ghosts. This effect was brought about by using a long shutter speed, when taking the photo. I had done so only because it was quite dark then. However, when I saw the result, it appealed so much to me that I wanted to take more photos like this one. It was just because of the artistic expression, not because they had a special philosophical or sociological meaning for me.
It proved very difficult to find places where I could take such photos, so places with the right people (one person stationary plus some persons moving) and the right light conditions. In the 30 years since I took the Paris photo, I succeeded to take only a few like that. One is the photo here at the top of this blog, taken in a shopping mall in Helsinki, some 15 years ago. At first, I found the result a bit disappointing, for wasn’t there too much movement in the photo? However, when I looked at it again after a while, my view had changed, for it was precisely this strong blur of the moving people passing by, as distinct from the still figures who were in focus – a man and a woman with a pram – that seemed to me to enhance the effect even more. Just this contrast turned out not only to produce a photographically appealing image, but also to give the photo a meaning that goes beyond the purely photographic image. In fact it is the core of the philosophical or sociological expression of the photo, not in the sense that it places this photo in a certain philosophical or sociological frame, for example because it is the photo of a certain type of photographer or because such photos are characteristic of a certain era or society, because many people took such photos then or there. No, the photo is, as it were, a theory about man himself.
On the one hand, when people act, they do it in a certain social environment that functions as the background of their actions. It is the space in which they act. However, this social environment is not merely background. The acting people are not separate from it. By their actions people also make their own social environment. The social environment is background and product of their actions at the same time. But what is the relationship with the social environment, with the people around us, worth when it really comes down to it? In this respect, this photo shows a pessimistic view. The man in the photo is doing something with the pram. Does he need help? No one seems to care. In this sense, the photo gives a certain pessimistic, if not negative, picture of society, indeed: in the end, we must rely on ourselves. Or is this too pessimistic? For there is also another person who obviously is involved. Is it the partner of the man behind the pram? The photo doesn't make it clear. What is clear is that we see one or two individuals socially isolated from the environment. From this point of view, and if this interpretation is right, the photo is an expression of our present highly individualistic society.
But maybe all this is a too pessimistic view on society. On the one hand people often altruistically help each other if they see others in need – see the present flood disaster in Europe – but on the other hand, how often isn’t it so that people think only of themselves and don’t care about others when they should. – see the corona crisis – However, that’s another discussion. What I want to show here is that photos often are not simply beautiful pictures, art for art’s sake, a manner to show to others what you did during your holiday, and so on. Photos can also – and I think they do so most of the time, if not always – have a wider philosophical and/or sociological meaning. They say something about who we are and how we live. A photo is a picture of reality; it is a model of the reality as we think it is.

Random quote
The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

To say and to show. Wittgenstein and photography (2)

In my last blog we have seen that photography was important for Wittgenstein, not only because he himself was an enthusiast photographer, but also because he often referred to photos in his work, especially in his Philosophical Investigations (PI). Apparently, the basis for his “photographic view” on philosophy was laid in the 1920s by his photographic experiments, but we find already elements of this view in the preceding years. So, in a letter to Russell in 1919 Wittgenstein called the distinction between to say and to show the “main problem of philosophy”, and actually he stressed the significance of this distinction already in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus. From here the move from showing in general to showing with a photo is easily made, if you have become interested in photography.
In the Tractatus philosophizing is talking, saying, in the first place. There philosophy is logical analysis, so analysis in words. It is talking about thinking, and language is the totality of our thoughts. For example, Wittgenstein says in the Tractatus:
4. The thought is the significant proposition.
4.001 The totality of propositions is the language.
4.0031 All philosophy is “Critique of language” …
But what if you cannot express things in words? What if you have no words for what you want to say? What if there are no words for what you want to say? Wittgenstein gives the answer in the famous last sentence of the Tractatus:
7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
In the German original we read “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen”, and maybe this statement could be better translated as:
7’. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one needs to be silent.
Or in other words, one has no choice but to be silent.
That is what Wittgenstein said in the Tractatus. But in this work we find already the seeds of one of the main points of his Philosophical Investigations, namely the importance of the picture, the image, and so also of the photo, which is expressed in his famous words “Don’t think, but look!” (PI, 66) For we read already elsewhere in the Tractatus:
2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation; it shows it forth. (italics mine)
4.1212 What can be shown cannot be said.
Here, implicitly, the importance of showing is presented as an alternative to saying, although this idea is not yet developed in the Tractatus. Rather it is there ignored, if not rejected (cf. 7 above). Note, by the way, that in 4.1212 Wittgenstein sees saying and showing not as supplements to each other but as alternatives. This changes in the PI (which I’ll not demonstrate in this blog, but see what I said in my blog last week about the importance of photos and photography in the PI). But if, as in the PI, showing comes of equal standing to saying, then it is no longer true what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus 5.6, namely
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,
for now my world comprises also what can be represented in pictures, in images. Once we see this, the importance of photography becomes clear, for photography is one way – and currently one of the most important ways – to make images of the world. In a photo we show instead of say, and often we show with a photo what we cannot say. 

Related literature
|- Franz Hoegl, “Sagen, Zeigen, Beobachten.Eine philosophisch-systemtheoretische Betrachtung,” (click here)
- Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, “Sagen und Zeigen. Wittgensteins Hauptproblem” (click here, chapter 2)

Random quote
Every people must face the truth that in the space it calls its property and to which it is attached, it is a relatively recent and, moreover, contingent appearance.

Ton Lemaire (1941-) 

Wittgenstein and photography

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face reduced in scale struck them as inhuman. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, xi). 

Everybody knows Ludwig Wittgenstein as a philosopher. What is less known is that he had also a great interest in photography. Not only are there many references to photography in his work, like in the quote above, he himself was also an enthusiast photographer. In the mid-1920s, Wittgenstein did some photographic experiments with the help of his friend Moritz Nahr, a court photographer. One of these experiments was making a composite photo of three photos of his sisters and one of himself. This photo is said to be the start of the development of his ideas of language game and family resemblance. In the 1930s he made his own photo album. Now, in these days that everybody has a camera, albeit maybe only the one in the smartphone, this would not be worth to notice, but in Wittgenstein’s days not many people did. Then taking photos was something for the elite and for hobbyists, so it says something about the person Wittgenstein was. In 2011 photos by Wittgenstein have been exhibited by the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge, England, and from next November till March 2022 there’ll be such an exhibition in the Leopold Museum in Vienna on occasion of the 70th anniversary of his death.
Wittgenstein had an idea of what a photo represents and means that was yet rather unusual in his days. Then the mainstream idea was that a photo is an objective picture of reality. Generally, a photo that had not been taken according to strict technical rules, and was blurred, with a sloping horizon, too large a foreground, etc., was looked down upon as amateurish, even though there were already photographers who just used such “mistakes” as creative expression. Just in Wittgenstein’s time a new generation of photographers was coming that didn’t care about such rules. Already in his photo experiments we see that Wittgenstein had also a wider view on what a photo could be. Moreover, he didn’t think that a photo was an objective depiction of reality. A photo is a kind of “probability”. It is a mere snapshot. You don’t know what happened before and after it had been taken. If you would know it, the original meaning you had given to a photo might completely change. I can illustrate this best with a portrait: Someone poses for a portrait, but maybe s/he is acting and plays someone else. The real person is different, but can you see in the photo who s/he is? Knowing the before and after of the photo can give you a different view on the image. As Michael Nedo, keeper of the Wittgenstein Archives in Cambridge explains: “A photograph is a frozen moment, outside time. As Wittgenstein says it is ‘a probability’, not ‘all probabilities’, what one sees in the blink of an eye. But if you keep your eyes open you will see things move and change, nature as a dynamic event, and it is this constant changing that creates fuzziness on one hand but clarity on the other, because if you only glimpse then you exclude all other aspects, you have no greater clarity, you are blinkered.”
As we see in the quotation at the top of this blog a photo can, and is, also subjective in another way. Even if we agree what a certain photo is about, not everybody needs to see it in the same way. In Wittgenstein’s days photography was black-and-white photography. This gives him the idea that for one person a photo can be a good portrait and for another it is rather a caricature just because it lacks colour. But even if a photo, or in this case, a portrait, is in colour, it can bring different interpretations. For one a portrait of, say, Stalin, can arouse happy feelings because he sees in him the man that saved the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In another person the portrait can arise disgust because s/he sees in Stalin the man who murdered many innocent persons. In the same way non-portraits can lead to many different interpretations. As Wittgenstein implicitly said in the quote: A photo doesn’t depict an object but an idea, a view.
To end this blog, yet another quote from the Philosophical Investigations, although from a different context: “Don’t think, but look!” (66) Doesn’t this say more about Wittgenstein view on photography then any words? What you can’t say, you must show. 

Sources
- Josh Jones, „The Photography of Ludwig Wittgenstein”, https://www.openculture.com/2012/11/photography_of_ludwig_wittgenstein.html
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw-duXxYihdvWVlFaUhzclY5Vmc/view?
esourcekey=0-yM43SGwy4WylmIhjksh2BA
- “Wittgenstein on Photography”, http://leicaphilia.com/tag/wittgenstein-and-photography/
- “Wittgenstein’s Camera”, https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/wittgenstein%E2%80%99s-camera

Random quote
The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Celebrate the Dutch Landscape

IJssel River near De Steeg, Netherlands. This is one of the photos I exhibit in

the Naarden Photo Festival (see link under "Sources" below; till 29 August 2021).

The way we look at the world around us says much about who we are. Therefore it is not without meaning that it was only in the 14th century that in Europe artists started to paint landscapes. At first landscapes were backgrounds of portraits, but gradually landscapes as such became the main theme. At the end of the 15th century the landscape had become a genre of its own in the western art of painting. At the same time also man and society began to change. The God-centred closed society of the Middle Ages gradually opened itself to the world. Traditional man discovered that things could be different from what it had been for them. Man began to travel and became an explorer and discoverer or a travelling scholar. Rich young people made “grand tours” for their education. Romantics made walks in nature or went to other countries to see different ways of life. People began to travel out of curiosity or just in order to see what there is behind the horizon, or they simply wanted to be away from home. Tourism developed. A new man was born.
In a way, landscapes had always existed before they were painted, of course, and without a doubt some people always have enjoyed them; have enjoyed being there and walking or riding in nature. However, landscapes were not a subject of art and reflection till the end of the Middle Ages. With the expansion of the traditional world there came room for a new look on the space around man: The space seen as landscape.
As such a landscape is not any view or representation of this view (painting or photo) on the man surrounding space, whatever it is. It’s true, generally speaking we can – and often do – call a view of the wild Rocky Mountains or icy Antarctica a landscape, but when we look at the way painters and later also photographers represented the idea, a landscape is usually something different: It is something between the wild untouched nature and the completely man-made environment, the town. In this sense a landscape is a mixture of nature and culture. Actually in all landscape paintings both aspects are present. A landscape painting is meant to represent space and nature but it’s actually never so that we see only wild nature in a landscape painting. There are always elements that refer to man, to human presence. We see a farmhouse, or a cabin, or the shadows of a town in the background; a (usually lonely) man or woman strolling along a muddy road. A landscape is nature and culture in one.
What also seldom is absent in a landscape painting is the horizon, explicitly or implicitly. A horizon symbolizes space, but it indicates also that the world is wider than what you see depicted. In this sense a horizon is also desire. It closes the view but there is always something behind it that we cannot see but actually want to see. It is a limit we want to overcome (although when we try, it moves further and further away, showing that there is no limit to our desires).
This idea of landscape is quite romantic, maybe too romantic. It supposes that there is something like nature in the space represented in the image. Just those painters that have become famous for their landscape pictures, the Dutch masters of the 17th century, in fact depicted fully man-made sceneries, although they suggest a meeting between man and nature. Almost each meadow, each ditch or river, each other element there has been made or shaped by man. Already since ages there is no real nature anymore in the Netherlands. It’s not without reason that there is a Dutch saying that “God made the world and the Dutch made the Netherlands”. And isn’t this so also for large parts of Europe, certainly around cities and bigger villages?
If this was already the case in the 17th century, it is the more so in this day and age in the 21th century. In most of Europe and I dare say on every square cm of the Netherlands nature does no longer exist. Everything there is man-made, everything is culture. Even so-called nature reserves are, and all “wild” birds and animals there actually are zoo animals. But when cities penetrate the countryside, as they increasingly do since the 19th century; when townspeople buy and build houses in the countryside; when the countryside urbanizes, what remains then of the idea of landscape? Or must we give it another meaning?
A few days before I published this blog, in Naarden in the Netherlands the biennial Photo Festival has been opened. A special project of this festival is “Celebrate the Dutch Landscape”. What makes this project so special and valuable, thanks to curator Kenneth Stamp, is that you see there not only landscapes in the traditional sense of the 17th century, but that it discusses the idea of landscape as such: Is the traditional idea of landscape still valid these days that “nature” has become man-made? What has changed in the landscape outside the towns? Must we not look for the landscape also within the towns? Aren’t towns types of landscapes as well? Is there still room for the horizon? Must we regret these changes? In the photo festival these questions are discussed for the Dutch landscape but they are important for everybody who is interested in the idea of landscape.

Sources
- Ton Lemaire, Filosofie van het landschap. Bilthoven: Ambo, 1970.
- Naarden Photo Festival, especially the subpage on the special project Celebrate the Dutch Landscape.

Random quote
Who wants to write an unreadable book must describe life exactly as it is.

Theo de Boer (1932-)

Waiting

Don’t we spend all a lot of time on waiting? Sorry, no blog this week but just wait: Next week there’ll be again a new one, as usual.

Random quote
War is always more popular with those who don’t experience it.

Mark Kurlansky (1948-)

The free rider problem

Man is basically a social being. People help each other not only strategically, so with the purpose to gain from it, but also often for non-selfish reasons. However, the less someone is related to you, the smaller the chance that you will help this person for nothing, in the sense that you’ll not profit from it in some way. You are more likely to help a family member, a friend or a neighbour than a stranger, maybe in this order. And contributing to the “common good” without a special reason is not what many people do, for the idea of common good is quite abstract: Who are they, actually, whom you are supposed to help? Moreover, nothing is free. Every contribution to the common good brings you costs, at least in time and effort, and often also in money. For instance, you are asked to deposit your plastic waste in a common container at the end of your street, but nobody will force you or fine you if you don’t. Then the easiest for you is to put your plastic in your litter bin at home.
It is in this social space that the so-called free rider problem can arise. A free rider doesn’t only ignore the social well-being of others or the “common good”, s/he also profits from doing so. Or, to use the definition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a “free rider, most broadly speaking, is someone who receives a benefit without contributing towards the cost of its production.” An example that refers to the name of the problem is someone who takes the train but doesn’t buy a ticket. This person profits from the train service by a free train journey. Of course, there is the risk of being caught and fined, but if you are clever, you can minimalize this risk. And why wouldn’t you travel for free? One passenger more or less has no impact on the train service. True, when too many people think so, the train service will stop. That’s why the free rider problem is not simply a matter of someone who breaks the rules or the law, and that’s it. It can grow from an individual problem (an individual not paying the required contribution) into a social problem (the collective service or what kind of social activity we are talking about is undermined). The threat that the individual free rider problem becomes a social free rider problem is always in the background.
Some characteristics of the free rider problem are:
- The action is individual, the consequences are social.
- One single case of free riding doesn’t influence the availability of the common good. If enough people are vaccinated against a disease but you don’t want to have the jab for reasons of principle, nevertheless you’ll be protected by the herd immunity.
- The free rider problem is common with public goods. If enough people reduce pollution, everyone in society will benefit.
These characteristics show that the free rider problem has a clear moral aspect. It undermines the sociality of humans, so the idea that in the end we belong together and should help each other. 

Why people are free riders is sometimes explained by means of a prisoner’s dilemma game, such as this one, which I took almost literally from the website of the Corporate Finance Institute (see Sources):
Tom and Adel are considering a contribution to a public good. The personal cost of contributing is $6 and the benefit is $10. However, there is also an incentive to free ride as the benefit of this public good is freely available among the members of society.

Explanation:
- If Tom and Adel both contribute, the total benefit would be $20. Each person gains $10 for a net gain of +$4 ($10 – $6).
- If one person contributes but the other does not, the total benefit would only be $10. Each person gains $5, so the person who contributes would realize a net gain of -$1 while the person who does not would realize a net gain of +$5. So, if Adel contributes and Tom does not, Abel would be contributing $6 for a net gain of -$1 and Tom would be contributing $0 for a net gain of +$5 (because the benefit of the public good is divided among all members of society).
- If neither Adel nor Tom contributes to the public good, there would be no costs and no benefits of the public good (net gain of $0).
In the prisoner’s dilemma game above, we can see that both Tom and Adel would attempt to free ride (not contribute): If Adel thinks that Tom will not contribute, she would lose $1 for contributing, while, if Adel thinks that Tom will contribute, she would gain more by not contributing. Therefore, both people would come to the conclusion that it would be unwise to contribute. The public good, therefore, does not get built and thus a free rider problem is created. 

Several solutions are proposed for the free rider problem, such as
- Taxes, so that everybody pays, anyway.
- An appeal to altruism.
- Making a public good private, so making a barrier to profit by the once public good.
- Legislation that regulates use of the free good.
Of course, which solution is best, depends on the good concerned. 

Sources
- “Free Rider. Benefiting from a common resource without paying for it”, on https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/economics/free-rider/
- Hardin, Russel, “The Free Rider Problem”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/#toc 13 October 2020.
- Pettinger, Tejvan “Free Rider Problem” on https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/1626/economics/free-rider-problem/ , 22 May 2019.

Random quote
The very same mistakes and instances of forgetfulness are ascribed to normal human frailty when a younger person makes them, but to age when an aging person makes them.

Martha Nussbaum, (1947-) 

Philosophical intuitions

In my blog two weeks ago I wrote about an investigation by the Lithuanian philosopher Vilius Dranseika. In this investigation Dranseika tested a philosophical intuition on memory. Philosophical intuitions are often subject of investigation in experimental philosophy, but what are actually philosophical intuitions? To make matters short, I want to define them here as immediately justified beliefs. However, philosophical intuitions are not “just” beliefs in the sense that a philosopher who has a certain intuition thinks: It’s what I think, but maybe I am wrong and maybe matters are different. No, a philosopher who has a philosophical intuition thinks that it is true and that every reasonable person will agree that this intuition is true. Seen this way, we can define a philosophical intuition more precisely as an immediately justified true belief. Moreover, intuitions are not only true, but, as said, they are immediately true. Of course, not everybody will an intuition proposed by a philosopher immediately consider true. Then the philosopher will not say: “Maybe I am wrong and maybe the intuition is not as intuitively true as I thought.” No, s/he’ll find reasons to explain why the intuition nevertheless is true, for philosophers are good in confabulating reasons, for it is their job. And in the end she can always “play the man” and say: “Strange that you don’t see it. Everybody sees so.” Actually, it’s the last rescue in case you cannot convince your opponent, for it’s typical for an intuition that you cannot give it a factual foundation. Intuitions are simply true. Are they?
Before I want to discuss this question, I want to distinguish philosophical intuitions yet from psychological intuitions. Rather than being a form of true knowledge, psychological intuitions are a kind of “gut feelings”, and basically they are open to refutation. “Intuitively, I think that this man is a scoundrel” (but maybe he is the most honest man in the world). “Intuitively I think we should go to the left” (but maybe it was the road to the right that let to our destination). Etc.
Now I go to the question whether philosophical intuitions are true. As a first step to undermine the idea they evidently are, I want to discuss an example from psychology: The well-known Müller-Lyer Illusion. Please, click here for a picture of the illusion. Most people believe that the line on the top is shorter than the line under. Nonetheless both lines have the same length. (Measure them if you don’t believe!) Your intuitive belief is contrary to the fact. However, the Müller-Lyer figure is an illusion, so an observation error. It’s not a (false) philosophical intuition. But if such an apparently true observation about the lines in the Müller-Lyer Illusion can be false, why not then the same so for apparently true illusions? And that’s what I want to maintain here: Most philosophical illusions are false or not true to that extent as philosophers thinks. With the latter I mean that their truth is limited to certain contexts, like the context of investigation, culture, and the like (and even then I have my doubts).
There are so many intuitions in philosophy that it’s simply impossible to discuss them all, certainly in a blog like this one. It’s even impossible to discuss a representative fraction of the existing philosophical intuitions. However, they are especially used in thought experiments and therefore, by way of illustration of my critique, I want to discuss a much-used thought experiment in the discussion about personal identity in analytical philosophy: brain swapping. Such thought experiments have the form that the brain of person A is transplanted to the body of person B. Variations of this standard case are that the brains of A and B are switched; that the halves of A’s brain are transplanted into different bodies; that only the information of A’s brain is brought to B’s brain (after that first the information of B’s brain has been removed); or even that persons are copied and are “teletransported” to another place. (see here) Of course, everybody is free to invent what s/he likes, but can this thought experiment be the basis of a serious philosophical discussion? For the idea of brain swapping in one form or another is based on the implicit assumption that brain swapping is possible and that with swapping brains we swap personalities. Weren’t it so, it would have no sense to draw conclusions from such thought experiments about the characteristics of our personal identity. Nonsense will lead only to other nonsense. And that’s what is the case here. I don’t mean that the ideas about personal identity are nonsense, but if they are correct it is not because of these thought experiments. Take for example the idea that we swap personalities if we swap brains. It is founded on the intuitive idea that we are our brains. But if I formulate it this way, many philosophers will say: Of course, we are not our brains, we are more. I guess, that even some of those philosophers who use brain swap thought experiments in their discussions on personal identity will deny that we are our brains. Why then do they use such brain swap arguments in order to substantiate their views? I’ll give one example why your identity is not just in your brain. Simply said, some runners have fast-twitch muscles and others have slow-twitch muscles. Fast-twitch muscles will never make you a good long-distance runner, while slow-twitch muscles will never make you a good sprinter. Isn’t it not so then that the type of muscles a runner has is a part of his or her personal identity?
The upshot is: Philosophical intuitions are just opinions. Another thing is, of course, whether we do without them.

Recommended literature
Elijah Chudnoff, Intuition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Random quote
You can deceive some people always. You can deceive all people for some time. However, you cannot deceive all people always.

W.F. Wertheim (1907-1998)

Setting goals, also when you are old. In memory of Robert Marchand.

Recently I heard a cabaret performer say when asked what he thought of old age (he is already in his eighties): It’s fine but what I miss most is that I cannot make plans anymore. Saying this, without a doubt (he didn’t explicitly say so) he meant that in the near future you’ll die when you are old and you don’t know when. You have no longer-term perspective anymore, for there is a good chance that you cannot finish what you have started. The future has become short.
It’s true what the cabaret performer said but in a sense it isn’t. A few years ago I wrote a blog about setting targets when you are old (see here). It was a blog about the cyclist Robert Marchand. Marchand, then 105 years old, had set a world record in one-hour track cycling in the over-105 age group, a category especially created for him. Of course, before he did everybody of that age could set such a record, for you just had to ride for one hour on your bike and you had it. Not so Marchand. He didn’t want to set simply a record, but he wanted to ride the best record he could, if possible one that was faster than the time he rode when he set the world record in one-hour track cycling in the over-100 age group. As was to be expected, Marchand didn’t break his 100+ record, but he cycled an unbelievable distance in that hour on the National Velodrome at Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines near Paris: 22,547 km. Who will ever go faster? But Marchand was a bit disappointed that he didn’t.
Marchand’s record was not only a remarkable time set by a remarkable man, but it refuted also the assertion by the cabaret performer I started this blog with: That there is no future, no perspective, no planning possible when you are old. Every sportsman knows that if you want to achieve a goal and you take it as seriously as Robert Marchand did, you must determine exactly what you want to achieve and you must make a plan. You must plan how to train in order to be able to get a top performance and you must determine a date when to perform. In other words, you must create a perspective for yourself, and that’s what Robert Marchand did.
Now I am the first to say that not everybody is still given to set goals when old. Health differences become enormous above, say, the age of 70. I don’t need to mention here all the diseases, illnesses and infirmities of old age. Many of them simply make setting goals and having a perspective for the future impossible or not sensible. There is no way than making the best of it and undergo the sufferance. On the other hand, many old people are still in good health. Then, as the case of Marchand shows, you can still set goals. Obviously, you are no longer as fit as when you were young. Especially you decline physically. Many people say: Mentally I still feel as if I am thirty but my body works against me. If you would ask me, I would say the same, but actually I doubt whether in my mind I am still that young, but anyway it feels so…
As for the physical decline, there is more to do about it than many people think. Particularly when you are old inactivity will be the end. “Use it or lose it” is an adage that was already known in antiquity. So even at old age, physical exercise is important, or maybe even more important, something that also Marchand knew. So, when not so long ago he stopped outdoor cycling for medical reasons, he continued training on his indoor bike trainer and doing exercises. What many old people don’t know is that by physical training you cannot only slow down the physical decay, but you can even become better! Of course, not when you are already top fit, but certainly when you are on a lower level of your capabilities, there is room for improvement. Moreover, do not look only at the physical side of yourself. Using and exercising your mental capacities, your brain, is as important as staying physically in shape. Use your brain and be open for what is new. A healthy mind in a healthy body. However, the other way round is as much important: A body cannot stay healthy without a healthy mind. Human existence is a whole. Mind and body interact and at the same time they are one. Nonetheless, and in that sense it’s true what the cabaret performer said, gradually your perspective shrinks; naturally. Your goals come – no necessarily must come – nearer in time; naturally. Nobody can surpass human existence. On the 22th of May, 2021, Robert Marchand died, 109 years old. 

Recommended literature
Martha C. Nussbaum; Saul Levmore, Aging Thoughtfully. Conversations about Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Random quote
Creative people … are those who try to prevent that the whole becomes a harmful routine.

Peter Sloterdijk (1947-)

Facts and what we remember

Rowan

A rather new branch of philosophy is experimental philosophy. It gathers experimental data in order to test fundamental philosophical questions and suppositions, usually by interviewing non-philosophers in an experimental setting. Actually “experimental philosophy” is a contradiction, for traditionally philosophy is seen as a kind of a priori reasoning – “armchair philosophy” – but experimental philosophy is just a reaction to the idea that truths can be found only by arguing from intuitions. One problem with this is that what is intuitively true for some need not to be so for others. Moreover, philosophers can disagree on the right argumentation leading to a certain conclusion. Etc. Then experimental testing can help to find out what is right and what isn’t.
Although experimental philosophy has forerunners in the sense that late mediaeval / early modern natural philosophy can be seen so, present-day experimental philosophy began around 2000, especially within analytical philosophy. Leading experimental philosophers are Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols. In several blogs I have discussed already some results from experimental philosophy. In this blog I want to discuss results from an article by the Lithuanian philosopher Vilius Dranseika about a philosophical intuition on memory. (see Source)
A common Claim among philosophers is (although not all philosophers say so) “that one can be truly said to ‘remember’ some event only if that person originally experienced or observed that event.” (p. 175). It is true that people can be blamed for saying that they remembered to be present at an event or that they took part in it, if it is clear that they weren’t there. Nevertheless, as an experimental study by Dranseika showed, Claim is too strict. For investigating its truth, he distinguished three kinds of memories: true memories (T), quasi-memories (Q) and artificial memories (A). To make things short, Q is for example a dream of something you never experienced but after the dream you think you did. A is for example a chip with someone else’s memories put in your brain. In order to check whether non-philosophers will consider cases of quasi-remembering and artificial memories as cases of remembering Dranseika presented vignettes with variations for T, A and Q to test persons. By way illustration, here is such a vignette:
Imagine it is 2086. Scientists have invented a technology that allows one [to install human memories (for Q and T) / to create artificial memories and to install such memories (for A)] into biological storage devices created for this purpose. This technology also allows one to transfer such memories into the brains of other people. A person, into whose brain such [other people’s (for Q and T) / artificial (for A)] memories are transferred, cannot distinguish such transferred memories from their own memories. Also, no available technologies can distinguish such memories from others. This technology at the moment is experimental and secret, but it is already sometimes used as an educational tool, since it provides an easy way to transfer knowledge that was memorized by another person. It is also sometimes used as a means to improve psychological wellbeing by transferring pleasant [memories of other people (for Q and T) / artificial memories (for A)]
Imagine now that Albertas is a teenager who had a lot of [other people’s (for Q and T) / artificial (for A)] memories transferred into his brain in his childhood. Albertas does not know and has no reason whatsoever to suspect that such memory transfer was performed on him. [Not all his memories, however, are transferred memories of other people. Some of his memories are from the period before memory transfer. (only in T)] One of [the transferred (for Q and A) / such original (for T)] memories is about tasting rowan-berries in childhood. When someone asks Albertas whether he has ever tasted rowan-berries, Albertas replies with confidence: “Yes, I clearly remember eating rowan-berries when I was a child.” (pp. 178-9)
Test persons got vignettes either for the quasi-memory case, or for the artificial memory case or for the true memory case. After having read them, they were asked two questions: “Do you agree that Albertas remembers that he has tasted rowan-berries when he was a child?”; the second question reads “knows” instead of “remembers”. They had to answer on a Likert scale. The result was that the test persons were willing to say that the agent “remembers” both in case of artificial memory and of quasi-memory. This is contrary to Claim, for the artificial and quasi memories in the vignettes were not based on what Albertas truly remembered!
In order to avoid the science fiction scenario in the test just presented, Dranseika made a new vignette and did a new test but for misidentified dreams (one thinks to have experienced a certain event, but in fact had only dreamed it), again with the same result, in this case that the test persons tended to agree that misidentified dreams were memories.
Dranseika makes yet a few refinements in his test, but they do not substantially change his results. So the upshot is (following Dranseika): Claim is not an essential feature of our ordinary use of “remembering” and “having a memory of”. We sometimes say “s/he remembers” while actually s/he doesn’t. We know s/he doesn’t, but we don’t see it as a problem. In view of other studies in the field of experimental philosophy (and not only there) once again there is reason to be skeptical about philosophical intuitions: Philosophers often think things are intuitively the way they claim, but once tested it appears to be nothing more than an opinion among other opinions. 

Source
Vilius Dranseika, “False memories and quasi-memories are memories”, in Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (eds.), Studies in Experimental Philosophy, Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pp. 175-188. I have extensively quoted from this article. A preliminary version can be found here.

Random quote
Our minds are arrangements and activities in matter and energy. But those arrangements, once they exist, are not causes of minds; they are minds. Brain processes are not causes of thoughts and experiences; they are thoughts and experiences.

Peter Godfrey Smith (1965-)

Collective intentionality and the development of man

One of the most discussed issues in present philosophy of action is whether some kind of group intention, collective intention, shared intention or how you would call it exists. If an individual plans an action like going to run tomorrow, we say that she intends to do so or has such an intention. But what if several persons plan to do something together like playing tennis or bridge? Since you cannot do this alone, can we say then that there is a kind of common intention and, if so, what is it? Several answers to this question have been proposed. Especially those by Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, John Searle and Raimo Tuomela are considered important.
In Bratman’s approach to common intentionality each individual has the intention to do his part of the shared goal and knows that the other(s) will do her part or their parts, while moreover the individual action plans mesh. According to Gilbert, if two or more individuals plan to do something together, they have a joint commitment. Each individual can cancel the obligation to contribute to the common task only after the consent of all other participants. According to Searle, collective intention transcends the individual minds “and collective intentions expressed in the form ‘we intend to do such-and-such’, and, ‘we are doing such-and-such’ are … primitive phenomena and cannot be analyzed in terms of individual intentions …” According to Tuomela, individual contributors have a kind of we-intention or joint intention to perform a planned joint action together.
All such tries to solve the problem of common intentionality start from two claims. These are (following Schweikard and Schmid in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – SEP):
- Common intentionality is no simple summation, aggregate, or distributive pattern of individual intentionality (the Irreducibility Claim).
- Common intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is their own (the Individual Ownership Claim).
As can be seen in the four different approaches just mentioned, the answers to the question what the commonness of common intentionality involves are very different, despite these shared starting points. Again following SEP, some see the commonness in the content of the intention, like Bratman: individual actors strive to do the same together. Others see the commonness in the mode of the intention, like Tuomela: the actor switches from an individual action mode to a we-mode, when he plans to perform an action together with others. Again others see the commonness in the acting subject, like Gilbert: for her a group is a plural subject with its own collective intentional state called joint commitment. Searle’s approach is a kind of mix between the mode-approach and the subject-approach: we-intentions are not individual intentions put together (mode-switch), but the bearer (=subject) of the intention is not the individual but the group.
Most accounts suppose – usually implicitly – that there is one kind of common intentionality and that the question is to find out what it is like. However, the American developmental psychologist Michael Tomasello has put forward a very different idea. For why should there be only one kind of common intentionality and why shouldn’t there be a kind of relationship, for instance developmental relationship, between the different types of common intentionality proposed? From that perspective prehistoric humans long ago first acted only individually together, so to speak: for practical reasons they sought the cooperation of other individuals for performing tasks that together could be done more successfully and effectively than alone (cf Bratman’s approach). Later this developed that way that humans who had made the appointment to work together were obliged to do so in the sense of Gilbert’s joint commitment. One could only withdraw, if the other partners in the job had rescinded the obligation (on sanction of being seen as untrustworthy if one didn’t meet one’s commitments). Later then, more complicated forms of common intentionality as discussed by Searle and Tuomela developed. (by the way, this is my interpretation of Tomasello; he doesn’t exactly say so) Seen this way it’s not the question which approach of common intentionality is the right one, be it the one proposed by Bratman, Gilbert, Tuomela or Searle, or who else has come with an idea what it is like, for the different approaches can be seen in a developmental perspective in the sense that one was followed by another. Moreover, this view on common intentionality makes it quite well possible that currently common intentionality still can have different expressions and can take different shapes. 

Sources
- Schweikard, David P., Hans Bernhard Schmid, “Collective Intentionality”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collective-intentionality/#WhaColAboColInt. See here also for literature on Bratman, Gilbert, Searle and Tuomela.
- Searle, John, “Collective Intentions and Actions”, in: P. Cohen, J. Morgan, and M.E. Pollack, (eds.), Intentions in Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1990; pp. 401-415.
- Tomasello, Michael, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass. Etc.: Harvard University Press, 2014.
- Zahavi, Dan, Glenda Satne, “Varieties of shared intentionality: Tomasello and classical phenomenology”, in: Jeffrey A. Bell, et.al., Beyond the Analytic-Continental Divide. Pluralist Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2015; pp. 305-325.

Random quote
The dimension of the mental, the psychic, is pushed away from the debate, because necessarily it doesn’t fit anywhere in a causal connection.

Gerhard Roth (1942-)

The anti-vaccination fallacy

Statement: “They say that vaccination against Covid-19 will bring the solution. It doesn’t, so I don’t want to take the jab.” Here “they” are the politicians, virologists and all others who urgently advice to have yourself vaccinated against Covid-19. In this blog I don’t want to discuss the question whether this vaccination really will bring the “solution” and will end the pandemic, but there are a few mistakes in the reasoning in Statement – a reasoning I often hear – and this gives me the opportunity to discuss again a few bad arguments and fallacies. Maybe there are more in it, and it’s up to you to discover them, but here I’ll discuss four such bad arguments.

Appeal to ridicule
Gregory L. Bock describes the appeal to ridicule fallacy in this way: “To ridicule a point of view is to disparage or make fun of it. When someone uses ridicule as part of an argument, she commits an appeal to ridicule, which is a fallacy of relevance”, so an attempt “to support a conclusion using an irrelevant premise.” Making fun of a premise doesn’t make this premise and so the whole reasoning false.
Indeed, that’s usually the context in which I hear this false reasoning: Making fun of and also talking down to those who promote vaccination. However, most politicians and virologists know that vaccination cannot make an end to Covid-19. The coronavirus will continuously change and new strains of the virus will develop, but vaccination will at least make the problem manageable by reducing the number of infections and making that vaccinated people become less seriously ill if they get Covid-19. But those who support Statement often have their own simple solutions to the pandemic and ignore that the problem is complicated. They just find it enough to ridicule politicians and virologists who incite people to take the jab. In this sense Statement is also an argumentum ad hominem (see here and here). (see Source, p. 118) 

Oversimplification
Implicitly I have discussed also another bad argument in the section above: the fallacy of oversimplification. This fallacy happens “when we attempt to make something appear simpler by ignoring certain relevant complexities”, so Dan Burnett (Source, p. 286). In Statement we see that politicians and virologists are said to see vaccination as the solution, while actually they see vaccination only as a part of the solution to end the pandemic. However, as Burnett ends his description of this fallacy: “When we obscure, ignore, or simply fail to identify certain factors, we run a high risk of misunderstanding reality.” Then “there’s a good chance our actions will – at best – be ineffective, or – at worst – exacerbate the very problem we are trying to solve.” (p. 288)

False dilemma
A false dilemma is reducing a complicated issue to excessively simple terms (see Source p, 346). Often it is reducing a problem to an either-or question. This makes it a kind of black-and-white thinking. In Statement it is either you see vaccination as “the solution” or you don’t take the jab. Nevertheless it can be reasonable to take the jab, although you don’t think that vaccination will bring an end to the pandemic. Being vaccinated will at least diminish the chance that you’ll become – seriously – ill for the time to come. Maybe you must be vaccinated later again, but taking the vaccination now is at least a temporarily solution; anyway for you, even if on a world-scale Covid-19 will not go away. Moreover, taking the jab is only one of the measures in the fight against the coronavirus. Keeping distance is another thing for example, like avoiding large parties, etc. 

Confusing levels
The idea that vaccination against Covid-19 will end the pandemic, as ascribed to politicians and virologists in Statement, is a claim that concerns the pandemic as a whole, but it doesn’t mean that there’ll still no longer be individuals who’ll get Covid-19. But by vaccinating the number of Covid patients will go down that much, so these experts say that we don’t need to speak of a pandemic anymore. Vaccination will make the problem manageable and make that the health services will not be overloaded any longer. This is a claim on national, regional or world-scale, but it is still quite well possible that a relatively small number of individuals will get Covid-19. In order to make that it will not be you who’ll get it, it is reasonable for you to take the jab. What’s true on a higher level (that most people will not become ill) doesn’t need to be true on a lower level (that you will not become ill). 

With the help of Statement I discussed four fallacies that are often heard in discussions. In some respects they overlap, as we could see in my explanations. Actually, at the same time Statement is an oversimplification, a false dilemma and a matter of confusing of levels, while also those who propagate anti-Covid vaccination are ridiculed. If right, together the fallacies discussed can be summarized in the context of the coronavirus pandemic as the “anti-vaccination fallacy”.
But maybe by using Statement as the starting point of this blog, I have ridiculed a substantial group of anti-vaxxers by oversimplifying what they think, by mistakenly saying that they maintain a false dilemma and by asserting that they confuse levels. Nevertheless some do. 

Source
Arp, Robert; Steven Barbone; Michael Bruce (eds.), Bad arguments. 100 of the most important fallacies in Western philosophy. Oxford, etc.: Wiley Blackwell, 2019.

Random Quote
The word, like a god or a daemon, confronts man not as a creation of his own, but as something existent and significant in its own right, as an objective reality.

Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945)

The second-person perspective

In philosophy (and not only there) we often talk about the first-person perspective. It is the way that I as a subject look at the world and interprets it. Another way of looking is the third-person perspective. It is the way to look at the world in an impersonal way, from a distance, without being involved. We can also speak here of a detached perspective or, using the words of Thomas Nagel, a “view from nowhere”. This view is also called “objective”, since it considers what it perceives as objects, as much as possible without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations. In the same way, the first-person perspective is usually called “subjective”, since the feelings, prejudices and interpretations of the perceiving subject are inherent in this perspective. But if there is a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective, then there should be also a second-person perspective, and indeed there is. To my mind it is quite neglected in philosophy, although the second-perspective is basic to how we as humans live, as, for instance, becomes clear from the works of Michael Tomasello.
In fact, the second-perspective is simple: It is the I’s view of you, the person whom I am dealing with in one way or another. Put yourself in the shoes of the other and then you have the second-person perspective. So simple is it. Simple? Not that much, for it took man a long way through prehistory to come that far. Still today many people have problems with taking the perspective of the other, let alone with taking it into account when dealing with others. But let me first look at what Stephen Darwall says about it, who has thoroughly studied the second-person view.
The “second-person stance is a version of the first-person standpoint”, so Darwall. “It is the perspective one assumes in addressing practical thought or speech to, or acknowledging addresses from, another…” The I sees the other, the you, as his or her equal and because of this gives the other authority and keeps the other accountable for what s/he does, especially towards the I. This concerns for example orders, requests, claims, reproaches, complaints, demands, promises, contracts, givings of consent, commands, etc. If the you accepts the I as an authority in these respects, the I can ask explanation from the you in case s/he fails (or just is successful); or the other way round, of course, for the I-you relationship is reciprocal. It is a relation from person to person. So, “[w]hat the second-person stance excludes is the third-person perspective, that is, regarding, for practical purposes, others (and oneself), not in relation to oneself, but as they are … ‘objectively’ … [I]t rules out as well first-personal thought that lacks an addressing, second-personal aspect.” (pp. 8-10).
Michael Tomasello, who heavily relies on Darwall in this respect, says it this way: “Second-personal engagement has two minimal characteristics: (1) the individual is directly participating in, not observing from outside, the social interaction; and (2) the interaction is with a specific other individual with whom there is a dyadic relationship, not with something more like a group … (3) the essence of this kind of engagement is ‘mutual recognition’ in which each partner gives the other, and expects from the other, a certain amount of respect as an equal individual – a fundamentally cooperative attitude among partners.” (p. 48)
At first sight a mutual relationship based on a second-person perspective seems obvious when two persons meet. However, look around and you’ll see that often it is absent where it should be expected, with nasty consequences. I want to give two examples, which I have both discussed in older blogs albeit in another connection:
The first example is the Stanford prison experiment by Philip Zimbardo (for details see here): In a prison experiment Zimbardo had selected about twenty test subjects and assigned them at random to two groups, one group being the prisoners, the other group being the prison warders. Although there was no initial fundamental difference between the test subjects in both groups, after one-two days both the prisoners and the prison warders acted very differently in a way that went beyond their particular roles: the warders begun to torture the prisoners, psychologically as well as physically. Isn’t it here that we see that at least the members of one party (the warders) forgot that they were dealing with fellow humans (the prisoners) even though they often dealt with them in personal relationships?
We see the same in a modern phenomenon: Contact via the Internet. Here we are in contact with another person, but some aspects of the immediate relationship from person to person are absent, especially when chatting. As the British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has pointed out: 50% of our communication with other people consists of body language and eye contact, another 30% is done by our voice. The importance of direct body contact like hugging or shaking hands is still unknown. Just such from-person-to-person contacts are often absent when we communicate on the Internet by chatting or in another virtual way. This absence of bodily communication limits our assessment of how other people react to us and restricts our own reactions: We do not see the impact of our words on our conversation partner, so that we hurt him of her unknowingly or even on purpose as often happens. (for details see here) We can also say it this way: Even though we are in touch with the other and relate with each other as an I and a you, because of the imperfect technology the I-you relationship is affected, with possible harmful consequences.
Doesn’t this illustrate how basic the second-person relationship is for understanding how we live?

Sources
- Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint. Morality, Respect, and Accountability. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006.
- Michael Tomasello, A natural history of human thinking. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 

Random quote
Human thinking is individual improvisation enmeshed in a sociocultural matrix.

Michael Tomasello (1950-)

Montaigne’s Father

Most of us owe much to their parents and so did Montaigne. It is striking, however, that Montaigne’s mother is completely absent in his Essays, while he regularly mentions his father and praises him as the “best father in the world”. Even more, thanks to his father Montaigne got the education that made him the philosopher we know today. So, good reason to ask the question: Who was Montaigne’s father, Pierre Eyquem?
Like later his son, Pierre Eyquem was born in the Château de Montaigne, on 29 September 1495. The castle had been owned by the family since his grandfather Ramon Felipe Eyquem (1402-1478) bought it. Ramon Felipe was a merchant from Bordeaux who had become rich through the trade in fish, wine and indigo. The business was continued by his son Grimon Eyquem (1450-1519). Grimon was also a councillor in the Bordeaux city council for some time. Because he pursued nobility for his family and because a noble could not be a merchant, Grimon Eyquem broke with this family tradition at a later age and decided that his son Pierre should be educated as a knight. Therefore, he sent him to Jean de Durfort, Viscount of Duras, to serve as a page. In 1518 Pierre joined king France I’s army, where he was a soldier for ten years. He joined a company of archers that only accepted noblemen. The army service brought Pierre Eyquem to Italy, where he came into contact with the Renaissance and with Humanism. This gave him all kinds of ideas that would strongly influence him in his actions and thinking, such as in the upbringing of his son Michel.
Back at his castle, Pierre Eyquem began to expand his estate with the purchase of new land. His wife, a strong personality, helped him managing the sites. For in 1529 he had married Antoinette de Louppes de Villeneuve (1514–1603), probably a daughter of a family of Spanish Jews who had been converted  to Christianity (voluntarily or by force) and who had moved to France. The couple had six children, of which Michel was the eldest, apart from two children who had died early. Pierre Eyquem also took part in the administrative life of Bordeaux and held there various important positions. In 1530 he was appointed first jurat and provost of Bordeaux. A jurat was what we would now call an alderman or councillor. Moreover, the jurats chose the mayor. A provost was a kind of tax administrator but also oversaw the management of the city’s buildings and goods and had a number of legal powers. In 1536 Pierre Eyquem was elected deputy mayor of Bordeaux and re-elected provost. In 1554 he was elected mayor. As mayor, he had the particularly difficult task of going to King Henry II to recover the city rights, which Bordeaux had lost in 1548 after a popular uprising against the salt taxes. Pierre Eyquem had to try to reconcile the king with the city. As a gesture of reconciliation, he had brought twenty barrels with Bordeaux wine with him. Some time later Bordeaux did indeed get its old rights back. Although he often stayed in his city house in Bordeaux, Montaigne’s father did not forget his status as a nobleman and chatelain. He continued to physically train himself as a true knight and he received distinguished guests at his castle. One of them was Pierre Bunel, a scholar from Toulouse. On a visit in 1542, Bunel left behind the book Theologia Naturalis by Raymond Sebond as a gift. This work would later exert great influence on young Michel.
In 1554, the year he became mayor, Pierre Eyquem was also allowed to fortify his castle with a wall and towers. Until then it was no more than a large mansion. This was also necessary because of the violent religious discords in the region, which were getting stronger and stronger.
Pierre Eyquem died on 18 June 1568 in Bordeaux, possibly from the effects of a kidney stone attack, an ailment that his son Michel would also suffer from.
Pierre gave his eldest son Michel a special upbringing that was strongly influenced by his contact with the Renaissance and Humanism in Italy. Immediately after his birth, Michel was taken to a nurse in a nearby village. He would stay there for two years. Pierre then decided that his son’s mother tongue would be Latin. This was recommended by Erasmus in his book De Pueris from 1529. Pierre Eyquem appointed a German educator for his son, who did not know French and had to raise him in Latin. Moreover, everyone in the castle had to speak Latin with the young Michel. It was only when Michel went to the prestigious Collège de Guyenne at the age of six to continue his education that he started speaking French again, but because of his knowledge of Latin he was allowed to skip two classes. Although Montaigne says in his Essays that his knowledge of this language later subsided, the level remained sufficient to read Latin works in the original language. In order to prevent that Michel would forget his Latin after his time at the Collège de Guyenne, his father asked him to translate the Theologia Naturalis. Michel did so and published the translation, a year after the death of his father. Sebond’s work would, as said, exert great influence on Montaigne, and he wrote a long treatise on the Theologia Naturalis. It has become by far the longest essay in the Essays. Pierre Eyquem managed it also that his son got a job as a lawyer at the Cour des Aides of Périgueux, a kind of court dealing with tax matters. This institution was later merged with the Parliament of Bordeaux and transferred to that city. Also Montaigne was transferred to Bordeaux. 

Sources
- Desan, Philippe, Montaigne. Une biographie politique. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2014
- “Montaigne, Michel de (1533-1592)”, https://mediatheque.sainthilairederiez.fr/node/597440?&from=/node/597440
- “Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne”, in Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Eyquem_de_Montaigne