There’s an interview with Rebecca Goldstein in the Atlantic. She’s a speaker at Women in Secularism 3.
[pause for inward tap dance; inward so as not to alarm Cooper who is asleep]\
From the intro:
At a time when advances in science and technology have changed our understanding of our mental and physical selves, it is easy for some to dismiss the discipline of philosophy as obsolete. Stephen Hawking, boldly, argues that philosophy is dead.
Yes, and Richard Dawkins, absurdly, demands why philosophy didn’t think of natural selection before Darwin.
How early do you think children can, or should, start learning about philosophy?
I started really early with my daughters. They said the most interesting things that if you’re trained in philosophy you realize are big philosophical statements. The wonderful thing about kids is that the normal way of thinking, the conceptual schemes we get locked up in, haven’t gelled yet with them. When my daughter was a toddler, I’d say “Danielle!” she would very assuredly, almost indignantly, say, “I’m not Danielle! I’m this!” I’d think, What is she trying to express? This is going to sound ridiculous, but she was trying to express what Immanuel Kant calls the transcendental ego.
It doesn’t sound ridiculous.
You’re not a thing in the world the way there are other things in the world, you’re the thing experiencing other things—putting it all together. This is what this toddler was trying to tell me. Or when my other daughter, six at the time, was talking with her hands and knocked over a glass of juice. She said, “Look at what my body did!” I said, “Oh, you didn’t do that?” And she said, “No! My body did that!” I thought, Oh! Cartesian dualism! She meant that she didn’t intend to do that, and she identified herself with her intentional self. It was fascinating to me.
There’s a book there. She should write that book.
What changes in philosophy curriculum have you seen over the last 40 years?
One thing that’s changed tremendously is the presence of women and the change in focus because of that. There’s a lot of interest in literature and philosophy, and using literature as a philosophical examination. It makes me so happy! Because I was seen as a hard-core analytic philosopher, and when I first began to write novels people thought, Oh, and we thought she was serious! But that’s changed entirely. People take literature seriously, especially in moral philosophy, as thought experiments. A lot of the most developed and effective thought experiments come from novels. Also, novels contribute to making moral progress, changing people’s emotions.
Right—a recent study shows how reading literature leads to increased compassion.
Exactly. It changes our view of what’s imaginable. Commercial fiction that didn’t challenge people’s stereotypes about characters didn’t have the same effect of being able to read others better, but literary fiction that challenges our views of stereotypes has a huge effect. A lot of women philosophers have brought this into the conversation. Martha Nussbaum really led the way in this. She claimed that literature was philosophically important in many different ways.
See for instance The Fragility of Goodness; an extraordinary book.
I gotta go, I gotta do an external tap dance. Just a few weeks until Women in Secularism 3!
It makes me think of books like Uncle Toms Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird. One of the best college classes I took was learning African political science through African literature
Science is a sub-branch of philosophy, specifically epistemology – it’s a practical way of addressing some of the challenges raised by the pyrrhonian skeptics. Hawking probably doesn’t know that, but then I don’t know as much as he does about black holes (or very very dark grey holes, whatever they are) He’s a brilliant person, so I assume he just hasn’t paid much attention to the history of philosophy – probably busy learning physics – and I’m willing to bet that if he spent a couple weeks catching up on the field he’d realize how wrong he was.
My dad always used to tell us “there’s no such thing as useless knowledge” and that informed his approach to history, science, the arts, and literature. Thanks, dad, you were right.
LAst night when I was tucking in my 6 year old boy, he suddenly said – “The thing human beings do best is crying”.
I do not now how he came to that conclusion or why it was important for him to say it , it was a total non sequitur, but it had a very profound sense to it.
There must be something about six year olds. When my son was six he asked me: “Mum, how do we know anything is real?” In a shopping centre during the Christmas rush….
Here’s a book by a philosophy professor on teaching the subject to children:
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Big-Minds-Sharing-Philosophy/dp/158542515X
Interesting to read this just after catching up with Mano’s blog, and thus having seen this post on an Oscars article by Kareem Abdul Jabbar in which he says:
Whether or not we agree that’s what the Oscars should reward, he clearly sees films as capable of giving us the same philosophical insights as literature and other art forms (e.g. music, theatre).
I’m just now reading Patricia Churchland’s ‘Touching a Nerve’
She faults Dennett for claiming that consciousness and language are synonymous. There’s a great deal that we are conscious of but can’t express in language, not even to ourselves. It’s a very unsettling feeling.
It’s precisely because we have conscious feelings that we can’t express in language that we are vulnerable to con artists like Repacked Oprah, Scientology and religions in general. They provide the structure that we crave, even if that structure is illusory.
The job of philosophy is to provide a more reasonable alternative to the cynical predators.
Everybody’s being serious (although Ophelia’s being serious in a slightly giddy way) and I can’t help reading the 1st blockquote out loud in my movie preview narrator voice. Ah well, at least no one heard me except for one of the cats and she’s busy cleaning herself.
Everybody’s being serious (although Ophelia’s being serious in a slightly giddy way) and I can’t help reading the 1st blockquote out loud in my movie preview narrator voice. Ah well, at least no one heard me except for one of the cats and she’s busy cleaning herself.
IN A WORLD where advances in science and technology have changed our understanding of our mental and physical selves…
Yes, and Richard Dawkins, absurdly, demands why philosophy didn’t think of natural selection before Darwin.
Ive never understood the contempt some scientists have for Philosophy. As a discipline, philosophy is far harder than science.
ya i read that dennet claimed that if you strung the correct sequence of words together you would be able to describe the color blue to a life-long blind person…
o.O
This point was probably made at the time (can’t find it): philosophy did think of it, two millenia ago. See De Rerum Natura.
Ah yes, Cartesian dualism!
But seriously,
Yes! The aspect of philosophy I like best is cataloging the ways people’s minds really function (which is different than whether we agree the systems of thought are coherent). Cataloging people’s thinking is relevant to many fields. For example, in The Greatest Show on Earth, early in the book, Dawkins says Platonic idealism makes people think of a wild rabbit today as a fixed category (versus a transient form), making evolution nonintuitive or counterintuitive.
Funny though, looking back on hearing the audiobook (which is excellent overall), I found it weird in that passage, he seemed to be blaming philosophers for our intuition. His attribution of that seems backwards to me now.