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    • CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity: Masterfully Flawed Apologetics

      By: Samir Chopra

      CS Lewis' Mere Christianity is rightly acknowledged as a masterpiece of Christian apologetics; it is entertaining, witty, well-written, clearly composed by a man of immense learning and erudition (who, as befitting the author of the masterful Studies in Words, cannot restrain his delightful habit of providing impromptu lessons in etymology.) Lewis is said to have induced conversions in "Francis Collins, Jonathan Aitken, Josh Caterer and the philosopher C. E. M. Joad" as a result of their reading Mere Christianity, and it is not hard to see why. The encounter of a certain kind of of receptive mind with the explication of Christian doctrine that Lewis provides–laden with provocative analogies and metaphors–is quite likely to lead to the kind of experience conversion provides: an appeal to an emotional core harboring deeply experienced and felt needs and desires, which engenders a radical shift in perspective and self-conception. Christianity offers a means for conceptualizing one's existential and pyschological crises–seeing them as manifestation of a kind of possession, by sin, by the Devil–and holds out the promise of radical self-improvement: the movement toward man–all men–becoming Christ, assuming a moral and spiritual perfection as they do so.  All the sludge will fall away; man will rise and be welcomed into the bosom of God; if only he takes on faith in Christ and his teachings. This is powerful, heady stuff and its intoxicating powers are underestimated only by those overly arrogant about the power and capacities of reason and ratiocination to address emotional longings and wants.

      It is clear too, from reading Lewis, why Christianity provoked the ire of a philosopher like Nietzsche. For they are all here: the infantilization of man in the face of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-good God, the terrible Godly wrath visible in notions such as damnation, the disdain for this life, this earth, this abode, its affairs and matters, in favor of another one; the notion of a 'fallen man' and a 'fall from grace' implying this world is corrupt, indeed, under 'occupation' by an 'enemy force.' There is considerable self-abnegation here; considerable opportunity for self-flagellation and diminishment. No wonder the Existential Stylist was driven to apoplectic fury.

      Lewis takes Biblical doctrine seriously and literally; but like any good evangelical he is not above relying on metaphorical interpretation when it suits him. (This is evident throughout Mere Christianity but becomes especially prominent in the closing, more avowedly theological chapters.) Unsurprisingly for a man of his times (who supports the death penalty and thinks homosexuals are perverts), the seemingly retrograde demand that wives unquestioningly obey their husbands, which might have sparked alarms in a more suspicious mind about the sociological origins of such a hierarchy-preserving notion, is stubbornly, if ever so slightly apologetically, defended.

      Lewis' arguments are, despite the apparent effort he takes to refute views contrary to Christian doctrine, just a little too quick. His infamous trilemma arguing for the Divinity of Jesus and his dismissal of the notion that his supposed Natural or Universal Law of Morality cannot be traced to a social instinct are notoriously weak (the former's weaknesses are amply referenced in the link above while the latter simply pays no attention to history, class, and culture.)

      But Mere Christianity, even if deeply flawed, is still worth a read: you witness an agile mind at work; you encounter a masterful writer; you find yourself challenged to provide refutations and counter-arguments; you even feel an emotional tug or two, letting you empathize with those who do think like you do. That's a pretty good catch for one book.

      Note: This post was originally published–under the same title–at samirchopra.com.

    • Finding Common Cause: Deaths of Lions, Deaths of Black People, and Lori Gruen’s article

      By Roberta Millstein

      I'd been trying to grapple with the weeks and weeks of horrifying stories about the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of police, with Sandra Bland and Samuel DuBose only the latest victims, when the story about Cecil the Lion hit social media. Some reacted angrily, frustrated that one lion was getting more attention than all the black women and men whose lives had been lost. Lori Gruen, however, responded differently:

      Rather than pointing fingers at each other about inadequate or disproportionate grief at the deaths of some and not others, social justice activists might instead work to develop what political theorist Claire Jean Kim calls an “ethics of avowal.” In contrast to disavowal, the act of rejection or dissociation that often leads to perpetuating patterns of social injury, she suggests that we recognize the ways that our struggles are linked and to be “open in a meaningful and sustained way to the suffering and claims of other subordinated groups, even or perhaps especially in the course of political battle.” We should empathize with the pain and indignities of others who are disempowered and avow, rather than belittle, their search for justice.

      This seemed so exactly right to me that I was surprised to see a number of commenters on the Feminist Philosophers blog voice strong disagreement. Stacey Goguen's early comment set the stage for much of the disagreement:

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    • Where did Biopower Come From?

      By Gordon Hull

      Foucault made a big deal in the lectures contained in Security, Territory, Population of the linkage between medieval pastoral power and modern governmentality.  Although there have been skeptics – most notably Mika Ojakangas, who thinks Foucualt reads the ancient sources nearly backwards: it was the Greeks and Romans who practiced eugenics, and Jewish and Christian authors who opposed them – it’s certainly a narrative that has the feel of doxa.

      What is pastoral power? According to Foucault, during the Middle Ages, Christianity “is a religion that … lays claim to the daily government of men in their real life on the grounds of their salvation and on the scale of humanity, and we have no other example of this in the history of societies” (STP 148).   Through an elaborate apparatus of confession, submission, and obedience, a “subtle economy of merit and fault” (STP 173), Christianity established a series of equivalences between the salvation of the pastor and that of his flock according to which the salvation of one was a function of the salvation of the other (STP 169-72).  Although these techniques of power were historically specific, Foucault argues that analysis of pastoral power shows it to be the “embryonic point” of modern governmentality (STP 165).  In sum:

      "We can say that the idea of pastoral power is the idea of a power exercised on a multiplicity rather than on a territory.  It is a power that guides towards an end and functions on an intermediary towards this send.  It is therefore a power with a purpose for those on whom it is exercised, and not a purpose for some kind of superior unit like the city, territory, state or sovereign …. Finally, it is a power directed at all and each in their paradoxical equivalence, and not at the higher unity formed by the whole" (STP 129).

      That’s the story.

      The problem is that there is another Foucauldian narrative about governmentality.  You see it in his Rio lectures of 1973 (“Truth and Juridical Forms,” in the Power anthology).  But it’s even more evident in his “Lives of Infamous Men” (also in Power, the pagination to which I will refer) (these texts are both slightly before STP).

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    • Reductio arguments from a dialogical perspective: final considerations

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

       This is the final post in my series on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, here is Part IV, and here is Part V. I now return to the issues raised in the earlier posts equipped with the dialogical account of deduction, and of reductio ad absurdum in particular.

       ===========================================

       A general dialogical schema for reductio ad absurdum, following Proclus’ description but inspired by the Socratic elenchus, might look like this:

      1. Interlocutor 1 commits to A (either prompted by a question from interlocutor 2, or spontaneously), which corresponds to assuming the initial hypothesis.
      2. Interlocutor 2 leads the initial hypothesis to absurdity, typically by relying on additional discursive commitments of 1 (which may be elicited by 2 through questions).
      3. Interlocutor 2 concludes ~A.

      The main difference between the monological and the dialogical versions of a reductio is thus that in the latter there is a kind of division of labor that is absent from the former (as noted above). The agent making the initial assumption is not the same agent who will lead it to absurdity, and then conclude its contradictory. And so, the perceived pragmatic awkwardness of making an assumption precisely with the goal of ‘destroying’ it seems to vanish. Moreover, the adversarial component provides a compelling rationale for the general idea of ‘destroying’ the initial hypothesis; indeed, while the adversarial component is present in all deductive arguments (in particular given the requirement of necessary truth preservation, as argued above), it is even more pronounced in the case of reductio arguments, that is the procedure whereby someone’s discursive commitments are shown to be collectively incoherent since they lead to absurdity. There remains the question of why interlocutor 1 would want to engage in the dialogue at all, but presumably she simply wishes to voice a discursive commitment to A. From there on, the wheel begins to spin, mostly through 2’s actions.

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    • Dialectical refutations and reductio ad absurdum

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      This is the fifth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, and here is Part IV. In this post I discuss a closely related argumentative strategy, namely dialectical refutation, and argue that it can be viewed as a genealogical ancestor of reductio ad absurdum.

      ========================

      Those familiar with Plato’s Socratic dialogues will undoubtedly recall the numerous instances in which Socrates, by means of questions, elicits a number of discursive commitments from his interlocutors, only to go on to show that, taken collectively, these commitments are incoherent. This is the procedure known as an elenchus, or dialectical refutation. 

      The ultimate purpose of such a refutation may range from ridiculing the opponent to nobler didactic goals. The etymology of elenchus is related to shame, and indeed at least in some cases it seems that Socrates is out to shame the interlocutor by exposing the incoherence of their beliefs taken collectively (for example, so as to exhort them to positive action, as argued in (Brickhouse & Smith 1991)). However, as noted by Socrates himself in the Gorgias (470c7-10), refuting is also what friends do to each other, a process whereby someone rids a friend of nonsense. An elenchus can also have pedagogical purposes, in interactions between masters and pupils.

      There has been much discussion in the secondary literature on what exactly an elenchus is, as well as on whether there is a sufficiently coherent core of properties for what counts as an elenchus, beyond a motley of vaguely related argumentative strategies deployed by Socrates (Carpenter & Polansky 2002). (A useful recent overview is (Wolfsdorf 2013); see also (Scott 2002).) For our purposes, it will be useful to take as our starting point the description of the ‘Socratic method’ in an influential article by G. Vlastos (1983) (a much shorter version of the same argument is to be found in (Vlastos 1982), and I'll be referring to the shorter version). Vlastos distinguishes two kinds of elenchi, the indirect elenchus and the standard elenchus:

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    • A precis of the dialogical account of deduction

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      This is the fourth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, and here is Part III. In this post I offer a précis of the dialogical account of deduction which I have been developing over the last years, which will then allow me to return to the issue of reductio arguments equipped with a new perspective in the next installments. I have presented the basics of this conception in previous posts, but some details of the account have changed, and so it seems like a good idea to spell it out again.

      ================================

      In this post, I present a brief account of the general dialogical conception of deduction that I endorse. Its relevance for the present purposes is to show that a dialogical conception of reductio ad absurdum arguments is not in any way ad-hoc; indeed, the claim is that this conception applies to deductive arguments in general, and thus a fortiori to reductio arguments. (But I will argue later on that the dialogical component is even more pronounced in reductio arguments than in other deductive arguments.)

      Let us start with what can be described as functionalist questions pertaining to deductive arguments and deductive proofs. What is the point of deductive proofs? What are they good for? Why do mathematicians bother producing mathematical proofs at all? While these questions are typically ignored by mathematicians, they have been raised and addressed by so-called ‘maverick’ philosophers of mathematics, such as Hersh (1993) and Rav (1999). One promising vantage point to address these questions is the historical development of deductive proof in ancient Greek mathematics,[1] and on this topic the most authoritative study remains (Netz 1999). Netz emphasizes the importance of orality and dialogue for the emergence of classical, ‘Euclidean’ mathematics in ancient Greece:

      Greek mathematics reflects the importance of persuasion. It reflects the role of orality, in the use of formulae, in the structure of proofs… But this orality is regimented into a written form, where vocabulary is limited, presentations follow a relatively rigid pattern… It is at once oral and written… (Netz 1999, 297/8)

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    • Problems with reductio proofs: “jumping to conclusions”

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

      (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      This is the third installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, and here is Part II. In this post I discuss issues pertaining specifically to the last step in a reductio argument, namely that of going from reaching absurdity to concluding the contradictory of the initial hypothesis.

      ============================

      One worry we may have concerning reductio arguments is what could be described as ‘the culprit problem’. This is not a worry clearly formulated in the protocols previously described, but one which has been raised a number of times when I presented this material to different audiences. The basic problem is: we start with the initial assumption, which we intend to prove to be false, but along the way we avail ourselves to auxiliary hypotheses/premises. Now, it is the conjunction of all these premises and hypotheses that lead to absurdity, and it is not immediately clear whether we can single out one of them as the culprit to be rejected. For all we know, others may be to blame, and so there seems to be some arbitrariness involved in singling out one specific ingredient as responsible for things turning sour.

      To be sure, in most practical cases this will not be a real concern; typically, the auxiliary premises we avail ourselves to are statements on which we have a high degree of epistemic confidence (for example, because they have been established by proofs that we recognize as correct). But it remains of philosophical significance that absurdity typically arises from the interaction between numerous elements, any of which can, in theory at least, be held to be responsible for the absurdity. A reductio argument, however, relies on the somewhat contentious assumption that we can isolate the culprit.

      However, culprit considerations do not seem to be what motivates Fabio’s dramatic description of this last step as “an act of faith that I must do, a sacrifice I make”. Why is this step problematic then? Well, in first instance, what is established by leading the initial hypothesis to absurdity is that it is a bad idea to maintain this hypothesis (assuming that it can be reliably singled out as the culprit, e.g. if the auxiliary premises are beyond doubt). How does one go from it being a bad idea to maintain the hypothesis to it being a good idea to maintain its contradictory?

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    • APDA Update

      A few weeks ago I posted some details about a new project: Academic Placement Data and Analysis (APDA) here. Readers may be interested in some updates to that project. Note: We are sending out emails to program representatives over the next few hours with much of this information, including an extended collection goal date of July 22nd, 2015. The original blogpost is quoted below.

      1) Total Placement Records

      "There are approximately 2300 total entries, with several categories of data."

      As of noon on July 13th, we had 3078 placement records for 2444 people–that is 573 more placed candidates than we had in the database on June 23rd. (In comparison, PhilJobs, the next most comprehensive database, had 2307 placement records for junior hires at that same time.)

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    • Problems with reductio proofs: assuming the impossible

      By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

       (Cross-posted at M-Phi)

      This is a series of posts with sections of the paper on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective that I am working on right now. This is Part II, here is Part I. In this post I discuss issues in connection with the first step in a reductio argument, that of assuming the impossible.

      =====================

      We can think of a reductio ad absurdum as having three main components, following Proclus’ description:

      (i) Assuming the initial hypothesis.

      (ii) Leading the hypothesis to absurdity.

      (iii) Concluding the contradictory of the initial hypothesis.

      I discuss two problems pertaining to (i) in this post, and two problems pertaining to (iii) in the next post. (ii) is not itself unproblematic, and we have seen for example that Maria worries whether the ‘usual’ rules for reasoning still apply once we’ve entered the impossible world established by (i). Moreover, the problematic status of (i) arises to a great extent from its perceived pragmatic conflict with (ii). But the focus will be on issues arising in connection with (i) and (iii).

      A reductio proof starts with the assumption of precisely that which we want to prove is impossible (or false). As we’ve seen, this seems to create a feeling of cognitive dissonance in (some) reasoners: “I do not know what is true and what I pretend [to be] true.” (Maria) This may seem surprising at first sight: don’t we all regularly reason on the basis of false propositions, such as in counterfactual reasoning? (“If I had eaten a proper meal earlier today, I wouldn’t be so damn hungry now!”) However, as a matter of fact, there is considerable empirical evidence suggesting that dissociating one’s beliefs from reasoning is a very complex task, cognitively speaking (to ‘pretend that something is true’, in Maria’s terms). The belief bias literature, for example, has amply demonstrated the effect of belief on reasoning, even when participants are told to focus only on the connections between premises and conclusions. Moreover, empirical studies of reasoning behavior among adults with low to no schooling show their reluctance to reason with premises of which they have no knowledge (Harris 2000; Dutilh Novaes 2013). From this perspective, reasoning on the basis of hypotheses or suppositions may well be something that requires some sort of training (e.g. schooling) to be mastered.

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    • Political Disputes Are Moral Disputes

      By:  Samir Chopra

      Writing for The Stone, ('Can Moral Disputes Be Resolved?', New York Times, 13 July 2015), Alex Rosenberg claims:

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