Six Podcast Episodes on Cicero's On Fate

One of the topics I like to teach in my Introduction to Philosophy classes is that of freedom and determinism.  There is a lot of great literature discussing these metaphysical matters, and one of the early important texts is an (unfortunately) incomplete one by Marcus Tullius Cicero, called On Fate. 

The ideas in On Fate get referenced by several other authors who I often teach as well, particularly Augustine of Hippo and Boethius, when they are considering the same issues of freedom of the will and causal determinism. 

What I particularly like about this text - as a teacher - are several things.  First, it's short.  True, it's shorter than we'd like since we've lost part of the text!  But it's easy enough to cover in a class session. Second, it introduces some key ideas that have been used to make sense of the topics involved.  It also introduces them to a common argument favoring fatalism, and some ideas about determinism that still show up in the present.  And third, it provides some useful summaries about the positions of four important thinkers and schools on these matters in antiquity.

The six podcast episodes come to a bit under an hour and a half of listening time.  Here they are:

• Temperament And Geographical Determinism
• Diodorus' Megarian Position
• Epicurus' Position
• Chrysippus' Stoic Position
• Carneades' Academic Skeptic Position
• The Idle Argument

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Eleven More Podcast Episodes on Rene Descartes' Meditations

Last week, I provided links to eleven podcast episodes focused upon Rene Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, covering the first three of his meditations.  Here are the remaining eleven podcast episodes, covering meditations four through six.  They run about another 2 1/2 hours of listening time.  Here they are:

Meditation 4

• Human Being, Supreme Being, and Non-Being
• Is God Responsible for Human Error
• Error, The Understanding, and the Will
• The Freedom and Power of the Will

Meditation 5

• True and Immutable Natures
• An Ontological Argument for God's Existence
• Previous Judgements About Clear and Distinct Ideas

Meditation 6

• Imagination and Intellection or Conception
• Faculties of the Human Mind and Body
• Sense-Perception and External Things
• What Nature Teaches Us

Seven Videos on Descartes' Meditations 1 and 2

This semester, I am teaching Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy in my Foundations in Philosophy classes at Marquette University and in my Introduction to Philosophy class at Milwaukee Area Technical College.  Although I am by no means a Cartesian, Descartes is among thinkers I consider a philosopher of the first order of importance.  His works are also quite enjoyable to read - at least for me! - both in their original Latin and French and in English translations.

When I have the opportunity to teach a thinker and text upon whom I have yet to create core concept videos, I typically try to shoot at least a few as resources for my students.  They end up getting viewed and used by others as well - the general public interested in philosophy, students at other institutions, and even some professors and institutions who incorporate them as resources for their own students.

I managed to shoot a sequence of videos getting through the first half of the Meditations (I'm hoping to get to the other half either later this month or during the summer).  I've released all of the videos covering key ideas, distinctions, or arguments in the first two Meditations, and am in process of gradually rolling out those on Meditation 3.

So if you'd like to work your way through those first two Meditations, with the help of an expert who has been studying and teaching Descartes for decades, here you go!  These comprise about an hour and a half of focused lectures that will help you better understand - and get the most out of studying - this challenging  but rewarding text.

• The Senses, Dreams, and Doubt
• Geometry, Mathematics, and Doubt
• God, Causes, and Certainty
• The Evil Demon Hypothesis
• The Cogito and Thinking Being
• The Piece of Wax Example
• What Is Known Clearly and Distinctly

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Not Just What - But When - Should We Doubt?

For years I have taught a course online for Marist College, called World Views and Values.  It's essentially an Introduction to Philosophy course, with a bit more emphasis set upon the conception of the world, the social and political sphere, and human nature.  Starting out as a 10-week course, in the last year or so, it has been shortened to an 8-week term - so it's a pretty intense experience for students in the school of Professional Studies, who often have had no background in philosophy.

In the course, we spend one week going through Rene Descartes' Discourse on Method - concentrating mainly on parts 1-4 of the work, but looking as well at the discussion of human beings, machines, and animals in part 5. One key theme of Descartes' work is doubt.  He employs what is called "methodological" or "hyperbolic" doubt as a tool - that's absolutely distinctive to his approach.  And, of course, there are a number of lingering worries that can be raised once Cartesian doubt is introduced.

(I should mention - as a side note - that if you're interested in taking an open-enrollment version of that course, based on the earlier 10-week format (which included more content), I offer it in the ReasonIO Academy at this link - Philosophical World Views and Values).

My students enrolled in the Marist course not only study the text, watch lecture videos, download resources, read through lesson pages, and do some writing assignments.  A main dimension of the class - both in terms of their grade (which they definitely care about!) and their learning - develops through their participation in discussion forums.  And one of the questions I ask them - to provoke conversation among my students - is "should we doubt everything?"

Descartes And The Third Class of Person

Readers typically encounter Rene Descartes through one of two of his main works. It's either the Discourse on Method or the Meditations on First Philosophy.  Both provide some of the same outlines, insights, and even arguments central to Cartesian philosophy, but they do so in quite distinct manners.

In the Discourse - the one I focus upon here - Descartes begins by telling us the story of his own education, or more properly speaking, the narrative of his quest for knowledge that he could be certain about and thereby orient his life by.  This tale is in its broadest traits one we are all familiar with.  It furnishes the basic plot structure to many movies, shows, stories, and even songs in our own time.

A person starts out young, naive, and talented.  Endowed with a quick intellect, but not knowing much of anything at the start, he applies himself to the studies set before him by his teachers, and he excels.  But as he thinks over what he has learned, and as he compares it to what he learns through living and observing the world outside the school, worries and doubts begin to get their grips in him. 

This student has learned widely within, perhaps even mastered, what are acknowledged to be main subjects - domains of knowledge - but he comes to suspect and then realize that what he possesses does not amount to genuine knowledge.  It's not - to use the master-metaphor Descartes makes recourse to - a solid foundation upon which a lasting and secure edifice can be progressively constructed.

What then?  How will the hero of our story attain the object of his desire?  We typically telescope the narrative at this point - making it easier upon our students, or perhaps also ourselves - and move straightaway into the Cartesian method and the chain of arguments found in short form in the Discourse and in much greater depth within the Meditations.  Let's not do that here.

Happy Birthday, David Hume

Today, were he still alive, would mark the great Empiricist philosopher, David Hume's 302nd birthday -- an event which (as we know from his philosophy), since conceivable, is possible -- though far enough from likely that we would give it little thought, other than play within our imaginations and discourse. 

Though I'm quite far from Hume on many philosophical matters, and  even think him dead-off on some very important  and implication-rich points, I have to admit that, like Thomas Hobbes, he remains among one of my favorite philosophers to read, puzzle over, and to teach, perhaps in some part precisely because of our considerable differences of outlook.  There is something stark -- both in the sense of being sharply clear because underdeveloped and reductive, and in the other sense of being robust, bold, daring -- to Hume's deliberately, deceptively mellifluous prose.

This last week in my Introduction to Philosophy class, we worked our way through one of my favorite works by Hume, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (video of the first of two lectures available here) It has deservedly become a classic text within the field of Philosophy of Religion, often anthologized, frequently quoted or even lifted from (sometimes, perhaps, without the person citing realizing the provenance of their ideas).  Once the students get past Hume's now-archaic vocabulary, and take a place to listen to the discussions carried out among the three interlocutors, they are confronted with the play and parry of philosophical arguments bearing upon acknowledgedly murky topics of religion -- God's existence and nature, creation and the universe, human and divine minds. . .

Classic Arguments About God's Existence in Cicero

My Introduction to Philosophy class is currently one-third of the way into Cicero's dialogue The Nature of the Gods -- a work that, like many others of Cicero, I unhesitatingly endorse as a philosophical analogue to undervalued stock.  It's a text that rarely gets taught in Ancient Philosophy classes, let alone Philosophy of Religion (where I taught it years back), or as a text by which to induct freshmen non-majors into the canons and practices of the philosophical profession.  I suspect that one reason for this lack of attention and use is that relatively few practicing philosophers have encountered it themselves -- whether in their own educational formation or in the course of their further studies.

That's a shame -- not only for On the Nature of the Gods, but also for other Ciceronian great works like the Academics, Republic, Laws, On Obligations . . .  one could go on and on.  A quite understandable tendency to underrate Cicero's role in philosophy -- construing him as merely an unoriginal eclectic who brought the philosophy he had learned in the Greek world into Roman culture -- tends to conceal the high level of philosophical discussion and debate contained in his dialogues.  If his is borrowed  brilliance, the words and arguments he places in the mouths of his characters become no less valuable or valid for replicating saying and speeches he learned from leaders of major philosophical schools in Athens or Rhodes -- particularly since it is his own artful arrangements we have to thank for passing them on to us, and down the ages.  Cicero is more than a mere digest-creator or textbook-scribbler, though -- he creates, he replicates, he articulates clashes and conflicts of modes of thought of the highest order available in his own time and place -- and like every playwright, every novelist, every poet of genius, he understands all that his characters do, and more.

Happy Birthday, Rene Descartes

Today would be the 416th birthday of the great French philosopher, one of the veritable fathers of modern thought, Rene Descartes, author of the Meditations, Discourse On Method, and one of my personal favorites, The Passions of the Soul. As with his contemporary Thomas Hobbes, whose birthday I marked in a blog post nearly a year ago, I -- and I think many other philosophers -- have a complex, ambiguous attitude towards and appreciation of Descartes' works, assumptions, and impact upon the world -- an ambivalence bearing upon his philosophy as a systematic whole.  I lead undergraduates through the luminous passageways of his Meditations, through the spiraling hyperbole of deepening metaphysical doubt, and out the other side, back up the rabbit hole, through dreams, deceiving demons, idealism, natures and proofs, and like many other of my profession, I think for me that is an initiation, a rite of passage.  Personally, I make it a practice to reread the Meditations on my own each year, just as I do with several other works central to the history -- and even well-informed practice -- of western philosophy.

Thinking about what I might write about tonight, I recalled a piece I'd written, but never worked up for publication,exploring the cusp between the First and the Second Meditations.  It's a bit overlong for an entry here, so I've truncated or collapsed portions of it -- and I've left passages I originally cited from French or Latin in the original, supplemented by English translations -- but it could perhaps be of some interest, even to those already well-familiar with Descartes' writings.  It focuses on the extended analogy found at the end of the first Meditation, which hasn't been pain much attention.  I suspect most read it as a mere rhetorical embellishment, a facile comparison, simply reiterating what has been said before and providing a useful ending point for the first Meditation. But, for me, perhaps for others, it is a striking symbol of the very Cartesian project at its core.

Dark City, Descartes, and Narrative Doubts

Over the long Labor Day weekend, my partner and wife-to-be and I watched the movie Dark City, for her first time and for perhaps my twentieth viewing.  After seeing it in the theater when it first came out in 1998, I've shown it in various Philosophy classes, and I've watched it on my own a number of times to enjoy again its semi-noir, moody, dimlit setting, its decent and entertaining play both with some philosophical concepts (or perhaps, rather, tropes), its reliably good though not outstanding acting.  A man wakes up without his memories, but possessing two advantages his fellow humans do not -- both of which reveal to him, call the attention of, set him in conflict with. . .  and make him the object of fear and fascination to, a race of thoroughly creepy aliens who nightly rearrange reality in order to progress their endless experiments with human memory, behavior, social roles

She noticed one apparent problem, a discrepancy between the stories and explanations provided by those who are "in the know" -- the Strangers and Doctor S -- and what actually does happen with the various characters.  The detective who goes mad -- what happens with him should have been impossible, or if not that, if the Strangers really were omniscient and omnipotent, if they knew that city inside and out and what was going on with all of its residents, presumably they would have nipped his madness in the bud, kept him from talking to anyone, revealing what he had learned.