Seven Podcast Lectures on William James' The Will To Believe

One of the works I teach fairly routinely in my Introduction to Philosophy classes - and also when I occasionally teach Philosophy of Religion - is William James' essay, The Will To Believe. 

It is quite an eye-opening text for my students, since it proposes something that they are surprised a philosopher would say, namely that there are some cases - having to do with matters that we believe or don't - where we not only can decide the matter on the basis of our feelings, our gut hunches, or even just our own capacity to choose.  Sometimes, we ought to decide matters that way.  that's what we ought to do, if we don't want to miss out on the possibility of learning, knowing, or enjoying the truth.

James will ultimately apply this to religious matters - so the will to believe is a will to believe in God and the teachings of religion, a pragmatic proof, if you like.  But it equally applies to all sorts of other matters of our practical lives, from the workplace to our romantic relationships, and even to North Pole expeditions.

I created the podcast episodes below from the seven core concept videos I shot for my students as resources for their studies.  Now you can listen to and download them at your leisure.  All seven of them together comprise a little under an hour and 45 minutes.  Here they are:

• Hypotheses and Options
• Willing Nature And Beliefs
• Criticism Of Pascal's Wager
• Risks, Truth, And Belief
• Empiricism And Absolutism
• Faith Facts And Verification
• Religious Faith And Options

I hope that you enjoy them and find them thought-provoking!  

If you'd like to make a contribution to helping me continue my work making classic philosophical texts, thinkers, and topics accessible for people worldwide, consider becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon.  If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so directly on Paypal, or on Buy Me A Coffee.

Seven Podcast Episodes on Friedrich Nietzsche's Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense

One of the authors that my listeners and subscribers have been asking for consistently to be included in my Sadler's Lectures podcast is Friedrich Nietzsche.  In fact, he is a consistent favorite when I create polls about who I ought to produce content on next. 

One of his short essays that I shot a series of core concept videos about several years back is his "Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense," in which Nietzsche argues, among other things that truth itself is something invented:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

He says a good bit more about truth and its presumed opposite, falsehood or lying, as well as about the workings and functions of our intellects, and the inescapability of metaphor. 

These seven podcast lectures run to about an hour-and-a-half - so you can download and listen your way through all of them in a workout or commute or two.  Here they are:

• Dissimulation and the Human Intellect
• The Invention of Truth and Lying
• What Is Truth?
• Metaphor, Language, and Concepts
• Rationality, Abstraction, and Anthropomorphism
• Idealism, Natural Law, and Science
• Myth, Art, Metaphor, and Intuition

I hope that you enjoy them and find them  thought-provoking!  

If you'd like to make a contribution to helping me continue my work making classic philosophical texts, thinkers, and topics accessible for people worldwide, consider becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon.  If you'd like to make a one-time donation, you can do so directly on Paypal, or on Buy Me A Coffee.

My Students' Interest in Aristotle's Social Virtues

This semester I am teaching two sections of Foundations in Philosophy at Marquette University.  We are running through a number of texts and thinkers (you can read the list of them here), and among those are Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.  Because I added more Plato, we can't do quite so much from Aristotle, so we are giving the Ethics just three days.  

The first was devoted to books 1 and 2 - so teleology, happiness, and the nature of virtue.  Next class session, we're doing the first part of book 3, a bit of book 6, and parts of book 7 - so matters of moral responsibility, choice and deliberation, and the issue of weakness of will (akrasia).  Our most recent class session last week was devoted to books 3 and 4 - where Aristotle goes into depth in examining each of the virtues (except justice and practical wisdom) and their associated vices.

I created a poll for each class section in which the students could choose the three virtues they most wanted me to go over in class.  About 40% of my students participated, and the numbers weren't exactly the same from section to section.  But there was one interesting area of overlap.  Students were definitely interested in - and wanted to know more about - the "social virtues".

The three that Aristotle discusses that particularly have to do with our social existence and nature are found at the end of book 4.  They often get short shrift when people are presenting Aristotle's moral theory - if you run out of time, they tend to get skipped - but his focus upon them as distinctive virtues, irreducible to other moral dispositions, worthy of examination, discussion, and development - that's actually an important innovation on Aristotle's part.

What are these three virtues?  One of them is Truthfulness.  Not truthfulness or honesty in all matters - a good bit of that falls under the virtue of justice - but rather truthfulness about oneself, about who one is, what kind of person one is, one's value and achievements.

Another of these is Friendliness.  Not the same thing as friendship - that's discussed at considerable length in books 8 - but rather a broader disposition that one might show to more than just one's friends.  This one, it turns out, has to do with giving pain or pleasure to others, and participating in common activities.  It involves being able to set limits, but also join in to what one ought to.

And then there's Good Humor.  It's very interesting that Aristotle would single this out as a virtuous disposition.  But it makes good sense - as I pointed out to my class, one old (and not too bad) definition of human being is animal ridens, the animal that laughs.  Humor, comedy, and joking are an important dimension to human existence.

My students wanted to think through what Aristotle had to teach us about all three of these (and about Courage, Right Ambition, Generosity, and Good Temper).  Both classes gave the highest preference to Good Humor.  Quite interesting. . . 

Plato's Meno, Knowledge as Recollection, and Instinct

I just spent a good bit of time reading, grading, and giving feedback on my students' short papers grappling with a key theme in Plato's dialogue, the Meno - the Platonic doctrine of knowledge as recollection. 

After requiring them to explain that doctrine - that we human beings already have knowledge within us, which we learned in a previous bodiless state of existence, and which teaching can help us recall - I asked them whether they found Plato's view on knowledge plausible.  I also asked them to consider whether it might work for certain types of knowledge but not others (even Plato thinks there are at least some things we can say that know that we didn't learn in a previous life).

Without necessarily buying into the entire Platonic backstory for where innate knowledge comes from, quite a few students did find the idea of some of our knowledge being within us prior to any process of learning plausible.  Some argued that to be the case for ethical truths or principles.  Many more pointed towards instincts - both in human beings and animals - as examples or modes of innate knowledge.  Quite a few of those connected those promptings towards or away from things and actions to evolution or DNA.

One one level, this example of instinct isn't a bad one. What instinct tells us is innate rather than explicitly or formally learned.  And it does seem like knowledge in a way.  That something should be done or avoided, for example.  That's not, as instinctual, propositional - but what an instinct urges could certainly be expressed in propositional terms.

The real question that my students aren't yet asking - but could be (since we discussed it in class) and should be - is whether what remains at the level of instinct would really count as knowledge for Plato.  He sets the bar for what counts as knowledge - and who can be said to have knowledge - very high.  Instinct - and the person who has and acts upon instinct - won't really fit the bill for knowledge.

Now, opinion or belief (doxa). . .  that's another possibility isn't it. . . 

Nine Videos on Descartes' Discourse on Method

A few years back, I created a one-off video in my Core Concept series on Rene Descartes' famous four "rules of method".  I was developing resources for students in my online World Views and Values class at Marist College (there's also an inexpensive open-enrollment version of that class you can check out or enroll in), and I noticed that some of them were getting a bit confused about the Cartesian approach.  So I shot that video, intending eventually to create more content on Descartes.

My viewers and subscribers liked that video, and for quite some time have been asking me when I would start producing more content on Descartes.  So last month, I managed to set aside the time to shoot eight more videos on the Discourse on Method, creating an entire series covering most of the key ideas and passages of that work.

Here are the links to those nine videos:

• Academic Subjects and Foundations of Knowledge
• Reconstructing The Foundations of Knowledge 
• The Four Rules of Method 
• Maxims of the Provisional Morality
• What Can Be Doubted and What Cannot
• The Existence and Nature of God 
• Being and Nothingness
• The Truth of Our Waking Thoughts
• Machines, Animals, and Rational Beings

I do have to caution that these videos are not intended to substitute for actually reading the work.  In the case of the Discourse, you really don't want to deprive yourself of the experience of reading Descartes.  He's a very clear and readable writer, and it's a rather short work designed specifically to introduce his thought to a general public (he deliberately wrote it in French, rather than the Latin of many of his other works).

Later on down the line, I hope to also produce a whole slew of new videos on two other works by Descartes: his Meditations on First Philosophy, and his Passions of the Soul.  If you'd like to support my ongoing work - or if you find my videos valuable, and just want to give back a bit - consider becoming a Patreon supporter on my page.

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?"

Seven Videos on Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying In An Extra-Moral Sense"

I'm slowly making good on some of the video commitments I made to my Patreon supporters.  At the start of the summer, I polled them to find out which thinkers they most wanted me to focus on, and the three winners were Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

First, I created a number of Kant core concept videos, finishing up the sequence I started years back on his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.  Then I shifted focus to Heidegger, and shot an entire sequence of videos on his key essay "What Is Metaphysics?" (available here).  Then I started thinking about what text I wanted to tackle for Nietzsche.

I decided on his own short essay, "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense," (available here) since that also introduces some main ideas of his in a fairly straightforward - though for many readers still challenging - manner, and I created a series of seven short videos covering that work.

Here they are:

• Dissimulation and the Human Intellect
• The Invention of Truth and Lying
• What Is Truth?
• Metaphor, Language, and Concepts
• Rationality, Abstraction, and Anthropomorphism
• Idealism, Natural Law, and Science
• Myth, Art, Metaphor, and Intuition

I hope you find them useful for approaching this major philosopher. Love him, hate him, agree or disagree - Nietzsche is definitely someone worth reading and thinking about! 

What's next when it comes to my work of producing these core concept videos?  Any more Nietzsche coming?  Right now, I'm shooting new videos on John Stuart Mill, Cicero, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Aquinas for the Ethics classes I'm teaching this semester.  But I'm hoping to get back to Nietzsche soon - and to start creating new core concept videos, most likely on his Birth of Tragedy.

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. . .

Happy Birthday G.K. Chesterton

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite philosophers -- indeed, in my book a writer legitimately termed a philosopher, though many would rather recall him as a novelist, a cultural critic, an essayist, perhaps even in a sense a theologian -- Gilbert Keith Chesterton.  If I had to adduce only one reason for calling him that, I might cite his own words from the first page of his own Orthodoxy, where he tells us:

I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe.  I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it.  God and humanity made it; and it made me.

Now, as one of the so down-to-earth-characters into whose mouth that author inserted so many excellent quips, paradoxical assertions, and deductions, might have said, we ought not allow ourselves to be followed into concluding that someone is actually a philosopher, simply on the say-so of their speaking of having a philosophy, even of believing in one -- or still yet attributing it to others and claiming to have been shaped and reformed by it.  After all, people are prone to say all sorts of things about themselves, true, false, sage, foolish, deceptive, furtive, bold, craven -- even sometimes to reveal to the attuned eye or the attentive ear realities they only dimly know themselves. 

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.

William James at the Book Club

Monday night saw a good crowd of the regulars at the Cumberland county book club.  Or selection this time was the last of the philosophers whose thoughts I'll get to watch the ordinary, educated, non-academic people of this book club engage with -- I'm leaving Fayetteville for the Hudson Valley at May's end, and our two next selections are more literary than philosophical.  Further blog entries in this "at the Book Club" series (which includes Arnold  and Kant) will have to wait until I find a suitable Great Books Club up north next Fall.

The selection included portions of a tried and true, oft-anthologized, piece, Pragmatism:  A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, commencing with the story of the squirrel and the conundrum over whether a man who circled the tree, the squirrel maintaining itself ever on the other side of he trunk from him, could rightly be said to have gone "around" the squirrel.  This, everyone agreed, was an entertaining tale, but not all actually saw it as significant -- a small irony.  And the discussion in fact added further ironies.

On the whole, the club members liked James' ideas.  One member, when asked:  "so do you think he's right," quipped: "more than I think he's wrong."  And that laconicism could well sum up the overall assessment, except that where there was some feeling that he was wrong, that he was off, that something had gone lacking, the objections became worrisome the more they were worked out.  But, that was not entirely unexpected for me, as a philosopher, who has read that essay countless times, and taught it already a few.  People tend to react in relatively few different ways to James' reduction or reworking of the notion of truth or meaning.  What I was much more startled by were their criticisms of James' style