Spring 2010 Senior Seminar Professor's Blog

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1/12

Meeting #1: Introductions

Great to meet you all last night. I enjoyed our discussion, and it made me optimistic about our seminar. You all enjoy a pretty good dynamic already, perhaps because of some common classes, but certainly also because of your sterling characters.

A couple of coaching notes on our discussion: As I mentioned last night, asking each other questions is good. The trick, of course, for one sort of questioning is to be Socratic without sounding like a prosecutor. But as you know there are lots of ways to use questions in philosophy besides Socrates' way. Just helping someone draw out their view by offering interpretive possibilities is useful. Also, while I was impressed with the pace of the discussion, I noticed that gap between speakers was about 1 second. At some point that needs to lengthen our you can guarantee that out of 10 people 2-4 just won't get a word in. Reflective pauses can be profound! One area of continual efforts at improvement in my philosophical work is my mindfulness of the dynamic of a discussion. My personal preference is that we take some time in the early part of the discussion to get some views out and have a critical look at them before developing and working out positions on them (and each other). But I also agree that sometimes the thing to do is jump right into the broader philosophical positions and differences.

I really like the fact that we were able to locate issues and arguments quickly in the prompt. You found good criticisms of the prompt, good angles to take, and even connected it with some historical philosophical issues. When I moved us to related topics, the transition was good. It's great that you're willing to contrast views with each other and enter into disagreement genially. Philosophy thrives on that.

The big challenge for next week will be how we all figure out what to prepare in addition to the reading, (Flanagan, Chapter 1). I hope I said some useful things about that. Remember, it can be background information, notes for an argument you want to make, questions, or even (especially) notes which reconstruct chunks of the reading you tracked closely. (I don't think I emphasized this last one in class.) I've created a space for this on the Course Notes. You might play around with the wiki and see if you want to create your own page and then put briefer notes or just a link to each week's work. That way you have a kind of portfolio representing your notes and contributions by seminar date.

I'll have a scan of Chapter 1 up later today.

Thanks again for a good start.

Alfino

1/19

Meeting #2: 1st session on Flanagan book

Thanks for a good class last night. I thought most of you made a good connection with the text. I didn't appreciate, prior to the seminar, how the idea of "spheres of meaning" might be in tension with his apparent reservation of the term knowledge for science. Also, I thought we managed some treatment of the main starting positions he's working from and his project. You guys have a healthy scepticism, but also seem to be seeing the overall argument that the book will make.

I thought our method for inviting your contributions shows promise. Let's try for at least 50% contributing content from either suggested topics or your own interests prior to class. Try to vary your contribution from week to week in terms of informative vs. critical work. And let's still try to get 100% contribution. I'm looking forward to seeing "2nd thoughts" from some of you. That could be a critical response to some topic, or you could follow up one of the topics that came up in class. For example, we could use a few words on compatibilism.

On group method, we've got some strengths. You guys seem interested in each other's views, follow each other's comments and keep the discussion connected very well. I'm afraid I'm guilty of contributing to one of our faults: we still have an average pause time between comments of less than one second! We need to try to collectively manage the "flow" and rhythm of the discussion. It might be a goal for next week for us to collectively recognize when its time to leave a reflective moment. Early in the discussion we should be laying out a range of topics. We tried to do that a couple of times, but we kept drilling down into whatever came up. Maybe this is just your natural enthusiasm. That's not a horrible problem (the opposite tendency is worse), but a better dynamic would involve more awareness of the pulse of the group and where others are with the topic and a bit more self-regulation. Putting your own questions out in the discussion would be good too. "Did anyone think...?" often invites a collaboratively developed argument. Not an easy play to run, but it often produces novel results. Don't be reluctant to ask people to explain their positions further. It seems like you're putting someone on the spot, but it's basic philosophical mid-wifery to draw each other out.

We're building on a good base of talent and preparation. When we hit our philosophical high note, it's going to be something.

Alfino

1/26

Meeting #3: 2nd session on Flanagan Book

Class,

That was a really good seminar session, thanks. The group dynamics were good at the start, and they keep getting better. Lots more reflective time and lots of help with each other's views. Also, it's great to see your viewpoints and perspectives develop and assert themselves. That's just what should happen, and it's both revealing issues in the Flanagan text and helping me see some of your philosophical projects.

On the Flanagan text specifically, the issue of privileging of science as knowledge is important. Of the various ways of privileging it, Flanagan's is relatively moderate. The "spheres of meaning" give you something to hang on to is you happen to believe things about art or God, say, that can't be shown to be valid knowledge. The question I was getting at with the complicated question about how you would regard someone who didn't see the truth of your revealed religion could be put in these terms: If knowledge and rationality are closely related, then some cases of "not getting" an item of knowledge will be cases of "not seeing it" (just not being smart enough) while other cases of "not getting" an item of knowledge might occur because the item of knowledge has limited scope (it's meaning is personal or communal), it's arational (from training or part of non-rational brain functioning), or it's not knowledge. The question would be, how do you categorize cases of others "not getting" your religion, not coming to believe it is true even after you put whatever considerations (proofs, testimonials, etc.) you can in front of the person. My point is that even if we can allow for religion to count as profound personal and communal knowledge, but there's a huge difference between that and science. Therefore, we need something like a knowledge/Knowledge distinction, which is roughly the spheres of meaning/knowledge distinction in OF.

Lots of other topics from last night could be taken up again now or in the coming weeks. I sensed some interest in evolutionary ethics, for example. Please keep track of things you found interesting and important to you philosophically that we don't get enough time for. Those could be good topics for part two of the seminar. You could even put them on the wiki page for that.

On a practical matter, I will put up a bunch more options on the grading scheme. It was great that we had that discussion, because it helped me see the kinds of things you might like to choose.

Alfino

2/2

Meeting #4: 3rd session on Flanagan Book

Thanks for a good class, folks. I thought the discussion opened up the text and argument in some new ways for me. I had approached the chapter more in terms of OF's mediation of "things religious people say" that fit or don't fit with a naturalistic account. Of course, "naturalizing" things is the rage in philosophy these days. (I'm working on a naturalized account of wisdom, for example.) But our discussion really put a good emphasis on the question of legitimate and illegitimate "privleging" of science. NOMA, OMA, take your pick. OF gives us the "tame/untame" distinction. We have also heard him defend non-reductivism (and he will do this more). But he's also unapologetic about privileging the best confirmed view of reality that we have, which is the one contemporary science describes. He also thinks he knows where the "smart money" is when the topic goes beyond confirmed science to questions like the origin of life or emergence of mind. Like most philosophers today, he's also pretty sure that traditional religious claims wouldn't stand up under equal consideration with contemporary scientific claims. (Even all that elegant old Christian metaphysics that attempts to maintain itself as science. -- Reminds me of Sunset Blvd.) So he's shifted the discourse to knowledge vs. meaningfulness.

Maybe its patronizing to tell someone with a faith commitment that you can't credit their beliefs as scientifically true, but you're willing to grant that there is evidence that their commitment makes their life more meaningful. It kind of goes back to the question we addressed earlier about just what kind of validity you want to claim for your own religious belief and the efficacy of others. I think there's pretty good evidence that the ability of religion to make life meaningful is not directly related to the truth of the religion (otherwise, only one religion would do the job). And we don't judge others as mistaken for not believing in our specific faith. By comparing naturalist and non-naturalist accounts of karma and ensoulment, I thought OF was pushing the reader to try to figure out what these validity claims really entail for a religion's commitment to maintain compatibility with science. You could decide it does hermeneutic violence to religious traditions to reinterpret them, but we also acknowledged that a strength of the Catholic tradition was its interpretive resources (and the willingness to use them). And religions do change even important beliefs over time. In any case, for the contemporary naturalist, the tension is all on the side of religion. It's the religionist who has to "square" his/her truth commitments. In the end, I'm not sure OF's position is patronizing because he's operating with a pretty modest version of scientific materialism and granting much of what the religionist wants to say about the objective and observable value of their practices. The really patronizing move would be to use untame scientific materialism to judge religionist's truth claims as deluded and childish. That's the version of this problem he has avoided with his approach.

The focus will shift away from the science / religion topic next week, but I would like to see some 2nd thoughts on Chapter 3, especially if you didn't post anything for this week. Also, don't forget to get those grading schemes in. I'm around during office hours (M-Th 9-11) and by appointment (even some times on Friday). The next week or two would be a good time to start focusing a paper topic interest for your first paper.

Have a great week. Thanks to Dale and BWS for the cookies. Clint, keep the class posted on the health of your waffle maker. We may need someone to step up for desert next week. This could be the start of a great tradition.

Alfino

2/9

Meeting #5: 4th session on Flanagan Book

Like I said last night, you guys came through with the critical perspectives on Chapter 4, which turns out to be a good place to see his approach in operation. I thought we outlined or explored about three ways of making the point that OF has a problem with the way he constrains the discourse of spheres of meaning (or the weight they can have) outside science. This is the "unfair privleging" charge, which we've been keeping an eye on all along. I hope I made some helpful suggestions about how to develop it. It's a significant problem, and it explains the unfortunate Ouch 1 and Ouch 2.

I'm still thinking about what resources he has to respond to the criticisms. I mentioned that he could challenge the critic to offer a better account of what should happen in wide reflective equilibrium. We tried imagining that in terms of two speech situations: one in which diverse religious groups were trying to resolve impasses in their coexistence, and another in which a religionist and a non-religious scientist were at odds. It's unavoidable that the religionist will see the non-religious scientist as missing a whole field of experience and exercise of of a capacity -- say, worship -- that is part of a mode of flourishing. In the other direction, it's hard to ask someone to evaluate a theory that references experiences and objects of belief that are unavailable to the person as a non-believer. As we discussed, a more sympathetic account of religion might emerge from an anthropology of religion that connects with cognitive science (people like Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran), but the scientist would still have a third person understanding of religion, as the Christian does of the Muslim or Buddhist. I'm starting to wonder if OF is privleging science or the "overlap" of theories of virtue and flourishing from both the history of culture and contemporary developmental psychology and medical science. If it's just the overlap, then he might argue that that is the only practical common ground we can have for comparing various religious conceptions of flourishing with each other and with secular models.

I thought the UK Equality Law controversy made a good initial test case for thinking about this conflict. There's a thought experiment in here in which you imagine a novel claim that an imagined religious group might make on a society in the form of demand for accommodation (consider outrageous things like "no cartoons about my ideas" but also something odd that we might accomodate, but about which we have only the religionists' testimony of the importance of). Maybe something like the polygamous Mormon cult led by Warren Jeffs that the government is still trying to work out. As you know, we still tolerate polygamy in many small towns in Utah and Nevada. How would you evaluate a non-cultish instance of plural marriage in which the visible evidence suggested that parents' and kids were thriving (often contrary to fact)? This is the problem, in Mill's On Liberty, of "experiments in living".

Good luck developing either critiques and defenses of OF's theories. In addition to thinking about cases, you might also try to think about variants of his theory that might address your criticisms. That's a way of exploring "how deep" the problem is in his view, assuming you're making a critique. If you think his view holds up, then showing how it avoids these criticisms might be helpful in a paper.

Thanks again for solid work as seminarians. Let's do it again next week.

Don't forget to check the topic planning list on the wiki, and let me know if you can commit to writing a paper (rough draft) by Feb 23 or so. I'd like to use the March 2nd class as a workshop with about 5 papers.

Alfino

2/16

Meeting #6: 5th session on Flanagan Book

Thanks for a great class. I had forgotten that the "objectivity of happiness" is such a big topic. I think it might have thrown us at the outset. Part of the problem might have been that OF's discussion was a little disjointed. Establishing the objectivity of happiness requires focusing on particular kinds of validity (like a tight connection between 1st person and 3rd person assessments of someone's happiness), overlap in criteria, and understanding how the law of large numbers helps cancel out subjective difference in a population. Of course, finding out what typically makes people happy doesn't tell you what's going to make you happy, but that's a different problem. That's the problem of applying general patterns to particular individuals. I think we did get to some consensus about some basic and universal elements of human happiness.

Getting back to OF's theory, I enjoyed our discussion of whether OF(generous) was a better variant of his theory than the one he actually executes with the ambiguous and ambivalent ending to Chapter 5. As I argued last night, he could have used the discussion of positive illusions to show that some biased or false beliefs may nonetheless be valuable to our SWB. In the conflict among spheres of meaning, epistemic virtue is not the only value.

The Greater Happiness Hypothesis got some discussion last night, but I don't think we got to the more radical implications of it. How do we change ourselves through contemplative practices? Can you produce greater happiness (or a different kind) through these practices? Spiritual or contemplative development often comes with changes in what makes us happy over time. People with advanced spiritual development or contemplative abilities simply don't have the same reactions to things as their former selves. The LPFC studies give a neurological correlate for this observation. They aren't as needy, they don't suffer from their emotions as much as others, and they value states of being (such as friendship and love) over "kinetic" pleasures. The change could be great enough that we would consider it identity changing. If it turns out that increasing happiness depends upon disciplines such as these, then the question of happiness is not just answered by saying what makes us happy, but also how we become the sort of creatures that could be happy.

Ok, we could use a volunteer for desert next week. Also, I currently have Dale and Brandon down for papers on 3/2 and Clint, Alex, Eric, Cameron, and Katie for 3/16. We'll try to get papers out by Sunday night before the class.

Meanwhile, I think I have enough to go on to shape some of our seminar sessions in March and April. Thanks for the extra feedback on that last night.

Feel free to run drafts of papers by me or visit to discuss your ideas. Office hours are M-Th 9-11 and by appointment.

Thanks again for your work.

Alfino

2/23

Meeting #6: 5th session on Flanagan Book

Thanks for a good concluding session on Owen's book. And thanks, of course, to Owen, for being available. I think we've done some good work to appreciate the problem he's addressing and some very good critical attention to places where he does not serve his project. For example, I suggested that the postivist "linguistic reform" passage could be made more sophisticated by adding a speech act theory analysis which allows that within one context one might assert something that in a different context one might only "express". Also, I don't think a good naturalist would ignore evidence of the naturalness of religion.

One of the things I've liked about the last two sessions is that we've reminded each other of the pragmatic situation which motivates the project: the problem of coordinating the claims of people who find meaning in life in radically different ways and according to different epistemic norms and traditions. Imagine them all at a very big table. How would the conversation go? What would it be legitimate to appeal to? We've gotten most of Owen's answer about what you could appeal to. The "overlap" of demonstrated science of eudaimonics and general background knowledge would be our reference point. This clearly does privilege a naturalistic standpoint (and, as Eric points out, it assumes the case is closed for Christian science), but I think OF's reply could be that there's no alternative. If "validating" the views of everyone at the table requires us to actually accept their metaphysical and epistemological frameworks, we'll never get past gridlock. As you develop your critiques (which are really excellent, by the way), please try to distinguish his position from the original problem. Try to say something about the problem he is addressing, not just about the adequacy of his particular solution. Also consider "improved versions" of OF's theory, if you feel that is possible.

Alfino