Monthly Archive for November, 2010

From The Philosophers’ Magazine…

So long as people read Wittgenstein, people will read Peter Hacker. It’s hard to imagine how his work on the monumental Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations could possibly be superseded. He spent nearly twenty years on that project (ten of them in cooperation with his friend and colleague Gordon Baker), following in Wittgenstein’s footsteps, and producing a large number of important articles and books on topics in the philosophy of mind and language along the way. Nearer the end than the beginning of a distinguished career as an Oxford don, at a time of life when most academics would be happy to leave the lectern behind and collapse somewhere with a nice glass of wine, Hacker is in the middle of another huge project, this time on human nature. He also seems keen to pick a fight with almost anyone doing the philosophy of mind.

This has a much to do with his view of philosophy as a contribution to human understanding, not knowledge. One might think that philosophy has the same general aim as science – securing knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in – even if its subject matter is more abstract and its methods more armchair. What is philosophy if not an attempt to secure new knowledge about the mind or events or beauty or right conduct or what have you? According to Hacker, philosophy is not a cognitive discipline. It’s something else entirely. More…

From Scott Esposito at Publishers Weekly…

Reza Aslan is the editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, an enormous and impressive anthology of 20th-century Middle Eastern literature.

What made you want to take on this project?

I was interested in telling the story of the modern Middle East from a literary perspective, instead of the usual lens that’s used to look at the region—the lens provided by academics and outsiders, colonialists and conquerors. It’s an incredibly diverse region with a rich literary history, and I wanted to see how the story of the region sounded when the region spoke for itself.

This had to be an enormous undertaking.

It was a very long and grinding process. Words Without Borders [the online magazine] wanted to put together a collection of literature from “the Muslim world”—everything from Rumi to Pamuk. I disagreed with the notion of “literature from the Muslim world,” because there’s no such thing as a “Muslim world” and because most of these writers don’t think of themselves as Muslim writers, any more than Philip Roth considers himself a Jewish writer. More…

From the New Statesman…

Ted Honderich, “What is fair in a society?”

John Stuart Mill, proud of his logic, gave liberalism’s 1859 answer, maybe the answer of Britain’s Liberal Democrats today. He gave it in his principle of state intervention in his essay “On Liberty”. The principle was that the state is to intervene in the lives of citizens not to help them, but only to prevent them from causing harm to one another. Then Mill didn’t say what harm is, say whether bankers can do it. Nor did he say in his essay “Utilitarianism”, where vagueness about unhappiness and happiness went with an obscure paean to individualism. The vagueness and obscurity helped conceal the fact evident in clearer utilitarianisms, such as Jeremy Bentham’s, that they justify having a slave class in a society if that does in fact produce the greatest total of happiness or satisfaction for the society.

John Rawls of Harvard gave us liberalism’s 1971 answer to the question of what is fair in a society. What is fair is what is in accordance with the social contract we would make if we didn’t know where we were going to turn out to be personally in a society to come – and if we believed what are deceptively called general facts, say about the benefits of what is called liberty in a society. We, with those all-American beliefs, so innocent and so manufactured, would choose a society where a kind of liberty trumps any equality. That liberty makes of little worth the recommendation of a vaunted principle of equality to the effect that inequalities are all right so long as they can be pretended to be in the interest of the badly off. All of which stuff is oblivious of the truth that fundamental liberty is one thing with equality, oblivious of the illustrative fact that if you and I are in conflict, and unequal in that I have a gun, your liberty reduces to zero. More…