[Here as promised is a first draft of the paper I’ll be giving this Saturday at the annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses in Plymouth Harbor, Massachusetts. Papers for the conference are supposed to be short, non-technical treatments of a core text or two appropriate for undergraduate teaching, along with a rationale for teaching them. This year’s theme is the relation between the arts and sciences in undergraduate education. Comments are welcome, though I probably won’t see them until next week. I’ll add hyperlinks next week as well. This discussion was quite helpful to me in thinking things through.]
Tag Archives: Aristotle
A pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude
I’ve always had slightly mixed feelings about Thanksgiving—it’s not like Halloween is for me—but like most denizens of the First World, I certainly have my share of things to be thankful for. I suppose that sense of gratitude excludes the students who repeatedly fail to do the reading in the classes I teach (and text while I explain the reading they haven’t done); my loud and insensitive upstairs neighbors, who keep me up with with their late night and early morning stomping and yelling; the criminals who’ve recently been filling the police blotters with their exploits in my neighborhood; and the near-death experiences I have every day (often twice a day) while driving the Garden State Parkway. But there’s plenty to be grateful for despite all that. This post consists of an enumeration of some of those things–partly to express my gratitude in a public way, partly to induce readers to reflect on similar things in their experience, and partly just to share some of the discoveries involved. Call it a pre-Thanksgiving expression of gratitude.
One of the great joys of blogging is the opportunity it affords for discovering talented, dedicated people you’d never heard of before, and might never have heard of or interacted with but for the grace of WordPress. That goes for everyone who’s contributed to this blog since its inception this summer—co-bloggers, commenters, ‘likers’, and lurkers alike. Thanks to all of you. But I particularly wanted to take a moment to mention a small handful of bloggers and websites I’ve recently discovered through ‘likes’ on PoT, which have recently become big favorites of mine.
One is Brandon Christensen’s Notes on Liberty, which I’ve come to regard as the most interesting and intelligent libertarian blog on the Internet–and for whatever it’s worth (often, alas, very little), I’ve read them all. Between the NoL folks who come here (mostly Brandon) and the PoT heads who go there (mostly me), we seem to have developed a nice synergy between NoL and PoT, and I hope that continues.
When my brain is up to it, I sometimes visit Blogistikon, “a little storehouse of thoughts, puzzles, and problems about ancient philosophy.” It’s an acquired taste, I realize: one of their latest posts is on “relativity in the Peri Ideon,” and one before that was on Aristotle’s conception of opaque and transparent relatives. Frankly, some of it would be all Greek to anyone (when it wasn’t all Latin). But I enjoy it, when I understand it.
A more accessible favorite of mine is Jackie Hadel’s Tokidoki world travel photo blog, which I discovered by means of a surprise ‘like’ by Hadel on one of my posts. (We don’t know one another at all.) The sheer number of photos on her blog is pretty staggering, but the ones of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv brought back vivid memories for me. The ones of New York struck me as fresh and interesting, despite my having lived here (well, in New Jersey) for decades, and the ones of autumn in Japan not only induced me to want to go to Japan in the autumn, but managed to evoke some nostalgia for an autumnal trip that Kate Herrick and I recently took to southwestern Vermont, of all places. (You’ll have to look at Hadel’s photos to see why.) Hadel’s travel photos make an interesting study in comparisons and contrasts with those of my cousin Jawad Zakariya, who seems to have traveled just about as widely as she has—with eyes open and camera ready for some amazing shots, from Canada to Pakistan and points in between.
Browsing at Hadel’s site, I serendipitously discovered the poems of Kate Houck, which I now make sure to visit every few days, “for the love of words and what they inspire.” And I’m grateful to my Felician College colleague Richard McGarry for my belated but soul-gratifying discovery of the poetry of Mary Oliver. This particular discovery came not through the blog, but the old-fashioned way, after Rich pinned Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” to the bulletin board of the faculty lounge, where I happened to see it. (It’s worth mentioning, incidentally, that it’s a direct violation of Felician College policy to pin anything, poems included, to a College bulletin board without the express approval and imprimatur of the office of “Felician College Events and Conference Services.” The operative premise seems to be that college faculty can’t be trusted to communicate with one another by means of flyers or other posted material, unless their communications meet the approval of an “Events and Conference Services” administrator–whether or not the administrator can herself be trusted to understand what the communications are about. “Wild Geese,” was not, I’m afraid, an approved communication, so that in reading it, soul-gratifying or not, I was breaking the law.)
The preceding stuff is pretty ethereal, I’ll admit—political theory, ancient philosophy, travel photography, and poetry. I’m thankful for all of it, but ultimately, Thanksgiving is really about gratitude for elementally material things, like food, drink, clothing, and shelter. To that end, I thought I’d draw attention to this item on world poverty, itself brought to my attention by Kate Herrick. Here’s the abstract from a quietly mind-blowing 2009 working paper by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-I-Martin, “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” recently discussed at the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
We use a parametric method to estimate the income distribution for 191 countries between 1970 and 2006. We estimate the World Distribution of Income and estimate poverty rates, poverty counts and various measures of income inequality and welfare. Using the official $1/day line, we estimate that world poverty rates have fallen by 80% from 0.268 in 1970 to 0.054 in 2006. The corresponding total number of poor has fallen from 403 million in 1970 to 152 million in 2006. Our estimates of the global poverty count in 2006 are much smaller than found by other researchers. We also find similar reductions in poverty if we use other poverty lines. We find that various measures of global inequality have declined substantially and measures of global welfare increased by somewhere between 128% and 145%. We analyze poverty in various regions. Finally, we show that our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity tests involving functional forms, data sources for the largest countries, methods of interpolating and extrapolating missing data, and dealing with survey misreporting.
I don’t have the expertise to interpret their findings in any systematic or sophisticated way, and I realize that $1/day is a dismally low baseline. But an 80% reduction in world poverty rates over a 36 year period cries out for acknowledgement and gratitude, as well as for causal explanation and indefinite iteration. It’s debatable whether the cause of the amelioration is capitalism, globalization, or whatever, but the point is, whatever the cause, it can’t be chance. And that by itself is something to be thankful for, even if we still have a long way to go before everyone has in the way of material resources what a small minority of us can be thankful for having.
One last item, simultaneously from the world of spirit and of matter. For fourteen years now, my dear friend Carol Welsh has been fighting a recurrent brain (and now spinal) tumor called an “ependymoma.” She tells her story at her website, “Adult Ependymoma: A Patient’s Story.” That story has so far included “three brain surgeries, one gamma knife radiosurgery, a placement of a shunt, a course of radiation and oral chemotherapy called Temodar,” along with spinal surgery and a diagnosis of breast cancer. In the fourteen years that Carol has fought this disease—or these diseases, however one counts them–I honestly have not been able to grasp how a human being could endure such undeserved punishment and not only survive, but do so with Carol’s grace and equanimity. She is, as far as I’m concerned, the single most awe-inspiring paradigm of the virtue of courage I have ever known.
Among the many lessons I’ve learned from her, one philosophically interesting one is worth mentioning. We inherit a bias, largely I think from Aristotle, of conceiving of the virtue of courage in fundamentally masculine and militaristic terms. Aristotle tells us in Nicomachean Ethics III.6 that since death on the battlefield is the paradigm of courage, it is “wrong to fear poverty or sickness”; the capacity to face such fears is a mere analogue of courage, not the real thing. Carol single-handedly convinced me–by example rather than argument–of the anachronism and error of Aristotle’s account. It seems to me that William James was right, by contrast, to suggest the need for conceiving of moral equivalents to war, and by implication moral equivalents to the virtues valorized by war.
The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.
Having known Carol since college days, I’d say that Carol has for fourteen years exemplified the “better substitute” that James was wondering about. I’m thankful for the privilege of knowing someone with her courage.
Happy Thanksgiving Day, about a week and a half early.
Postscript, December 16, 2014: The Wall Street Journal story about world poverty made it to The New York Times the other day, describing it as “excellent news,” but burying it on the eighth page of the Sunday Business section. “[T]here is agreement,” the Times says, “that extreme poverty has been on the decline since the mid-1990s and that the decline has accelerated since 2000.” It then asks the obvious question: “What’s behind the shift?” But its answer is utterly uninformative:
Rising incomes in India and China are a major factor. Together, those two countries lifted 232 million people out of extreme poverty from 2008 to 2011 alone, according to one World Bank analysis.
OK, but why did incomes rise in India and China? Surely there’s a story there that deserves more comprehensive treatment than it’s gotten. On the face of it, it seems to me that libertarians have a better story to tell here than left-leaning liberals do. Liberals and leftists either need to tell a better story, or concede that libertarians have this part of the story right, and find a way of accommodating libertarian insights coherently within their conception of the economic world.
It’s Alive! The Creatures from Aristotle’s Lagoon
While making my way through B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity a few days ago, I happened across this passage at the beginning of the book, a characteristically blunt criticism of ancient Greek philosophy, and in particular, of Aristotle’s philosophy of science:
Twenty-five hundred years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today he is the thing he understands least. Physics and biology have come a long way, but there has been no comparable development of anything like a science of human behavior. Greek physics and biology are now of historical interest only (no modern physicist or biologist would turn to Aristotle for help), but the dialogues of Plato are still assigned to students and cited as if they threw light on human behavior. Aristotle could not have understood a page of modern physics or biology, but Socrates and his friends would have little trouble in following most current discussions of human affairs (p. 3).
By some great irony, I happened to open this morning’s New York Times Book Review and found a review there, by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, of Armand Marie Leroi’s new book, Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. I found this passage from the review positively reinforcing:
Armand Marie Leroi is a scientist, and Aristotle is his hero. This conjunction is interesting because, in the official telling of modern science’s origins, Aristotle is hardly regarded as heroic. Instead he’s portrayed as the obstacle over which the early heroes of the scientific revolution — Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo — had to leap in order to impose a genuinely explanatory methodology over the often deceptive input of sense perception.
This one, too:
…Leroi’s heart belongs to Aristotle, who not only was, like him, an enthusiastic student of biology, particularly of zoology, but who also, unlike Plato, was besotted by the world of appearances. Aristotle, as Leroi makes wonderfully clear, exemplifies one kind of scientific aptitude. He was an enthralled observer of the natural world, bedazzled by data, seeking causal explanations not in abstract numbers but in concrete details acquired through avid sense perception.
Likewise this bit of verbal behavior from Leroi himself:
“As I contemplate the elaborate tapestry of his [Aristotle’s] science, and compare it to ours, I conclude that we can now see his intentions and accomplishment more clearly than any previous age has seen them and that, if this is so, it is because we have caught up with him.”
A far cry from Skinner’s assessment, to say the least.
I haven’t read Leroi’s book myself, but while browsing it online, I was intrigued to discover that Leroi quotes from or cites recent work on Aristotle’s philosophy of science by (among others) Allan Gotthelf and James Lennox. I single those two scholars out because Gotthelf in particular had made it his life’s task to rehabilitate Aristotle’s reputation as an epistemologist, scientist, biologist, and philosopher of science in explicit opposition to mainstream views like Skinner’s; Lennox was his long-time associate and partner in the endeavor. Gotthelf tells the story of his engagement with Aristotle and lays out the case for intellectual rehabilitation in his 2012 book, Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology. Suffice it to say that for Gotthelf, it all began with Ayn Rand—specifically with Rand’s 1963 review of John Herman Randall’s 1960 book, Aristotle.* This passage from Rand’s review must surely have had something to do with it:
Above all, this book [Randall’s Aristotle] is important culturally, as a step in the right direction, as a recognition of the fact that the great physician needed by our dying science of philosophy is Aristotle–that if we are to emerge from the intellectual shambles of the present, we can do it only by means of an Aristotelian approach. (Review of Randall’s Aristotle, in The Voice of Reason, p. 12)
If Leroi’s defense of Aristotle is any indication, Gotthelf and Lennox seem to have succeeded at their task of making a scientist out of Aristotle–and of starting the first chest compressions on Philosophy.
This passage from Rand’s review, in retrospect, has a kind of subtle interest to it:
The best parts of Professor Randall’s book are Chapters VIII, IX, and XI, particularly this last. In discussing the importance of Aristotle’s biological theory and the ‘biological motivation of Aristotle’s thought’, he brings out an aspect of Aristotle which has been featured too seldom in recent discussions and which is much more profound than the question of Aristotle’s ‘functionalism’: the central place given to living entities, to the phenomenon of life, in Aristotle’s philosophy.
For Aristotle, life is not an inexplicable, supernatural mystery, but a fact of nature. And consciousness is a natural attribute of living entities, their natural power, their specific mode of action—not an unaccountable element in a mechanistic universe, to be explained away somehow in terms of inanimate matter, nor a mystic miracle incompatible with physical reality, to be attributed to some occult source in another dimension. …
Life—and its highest form, man’s life—is the central fact in Aristotle’s view of reality. The best way to describe it is to say that Aristotle’s philosophy is “biocentric.” (pp. 10-11).
Granted, some of what Rand says here is debatable and slightly tendentious. For one thing, it’s unclear whether Aristotle has a word for or the concept of “consciousness”; so it’s unclear whether he could discuss consciousness under anything like that description. For another, as Goldstein aptly points out (and Jonathan Lear and others have pointed out before her), “Aristotle can’t be entirely naturalized.” The supernatural plays an obvious role in Plato, but there are gods in Aristotle, too.
That said, I do think Rand was on to something, and that she verbalized the insight long before it became fashionable to do so. I think she’s right about Randall’s book; those are the best chapters in it. She’s also right to emphasize the biological motivation and character of Aristotle’s thought, and was right that as of 1963, that part of Aristotle had gotten relatively little attention. (The sustained attention began with the pioneering work of David Balme in the 1970s.) On a more technical note, Rand is also right, I think, to suggest that the attempt to interpret Aristotle as a “functionalist” was an anachronistic red herring. And she’s also right that Aristotle has something to teach us about the “meaning of life,” whether in the sense of zoe or of bios or the relation between them.
I’ve been beating up a bit on Rand here lately, but I regard her valorization (and popularization) of Aristotle as both insightful and prescient. Among other things, it had the salutary and intended consequence of motivating a small cottage of industry of scholars to give Aristotle the scholarly attention he deserves, with a view to bringing what they learned with them into contemporary philosophy. The cottage industry I have in mind included Gotthelf and includes Lennox, of course, but it also includes Neera Badhwar, Jurgis Brakas, Roderick Long, Robert Mayhew, Kelly Rogers, and Fred Miller, and more recently, Greg Salmieri, Corinne Bloch, Monte Johnson, Mariska Leunissen, and PoT’s own Carrie-Ann Biondi.** In fact, a sociologist of knowledge would have an interesting story to tell about how we got from the sea creatures in Aristotle’s lagoon to Leroi’s book–via Aristotle, John Dewey, John Herman Randall, Ayn Rand, David Balme, B.F. Skinner, and Allan Gotthelf (and the other scholars I just mentioned). I wonder whether anyone will end up telling it.
Incidentally, Reason Papers is looking for a review of Leroi’s book. If you’d like to do the review, or know someone who might or would, please contact Carrie-Ann Biondi or me via the journal.
*The book was published a year before, and reviewed in Reason Papers about a month before, Gotthelf’s death; I don’t know whether he saw the review or not.
**This list consists of Aristotle scholars either (a) directly influenced by Rand to go into Aristotle scholarship, or (b) mentored by people highly influenced by Rand. Obviously, it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list of prominent Aristotle scholars, or confined to people necessarily influenced by Rand.
Postscript, December 8, 2014: I just noticed this interesting piece on Leroi’s book at Daily Beast from a few months back (hat-tip: Edward Feser). I was amused by this passage:
Some of his observations about animals appear equally bizarre. He reports that the European bison fires caustic dung when pursued and that the trunk of an elephant is in fact a snorkeling device that allows it to swim. He even claims that hen partridges conceive just by smelling the scent of males.
As the author later points out:
It was only fairly recently that two of Aristotle’s seemingly bizarre claims were actually confirmed….[E]lephants do occasionally use their trunks as snorkels while swimming.
Confirmation from Google Images, the omniscient source:
Policy of Truth 