Future Contingents in Leibniz

I. Leibniz has a problem in his philosophy, namely, the relationship between God, determinism, free will, and moral responsibility. Famously he thought that when God created the world, he chose to create the best of all possible worlds out of an infinite number of possible worlds. This means that what will happen in the world is decided in advance, including all of the sin, evil, and divine punishment. If this is true how can we ultimately be responsible for our actions, how could anyone deserve divine punishment? In other words are we not determined by God, necessarily, to act in a certain way? Leibniz has a clever way of trying to get around this. He argues that while the future is determined in advance, those events are still not necessary, they are contingent.

Contributions to 'On Human Excellence'

This post is a collection of contributions from friends of mine to my earlier essay "On Human Excellence". As I noted in that essay, there is some peculiar utility in using others as evidence of this phenomenon. This is because, more often than not, human excellence as I have defined it is not even perceptible by some, or even most, unless you have some specific expertise or discernment in any given field of practice. Spending hours of one's life dedicated to studying and immersing yourself in some field or craft allows you to get inside its peculiar technical contours. It allows you to better see the excellence in the first place.

Thus, I had the thought that I could solicit those smart and interesting people around me as to whether they had their own thoughts about, or examples of, human excellence. What follows are their ideas and interpretations, meant as an accompaniment to the ideas sketched out in my original essay. 

If you read the original essay and these others' essay's and have your own ideas for examples of human excellence, reach out to me and I'd be happy to publish anything here alongside these pieces!

Follow the link provided to read each piece. Here they are, in the order I received them:

On Human Excellence

I. One particularly interesting feature of human reality that exemplifies our dynamism and creativity is the limits and boundaries to which people push their bodies or their craft. Spurred initially by watching the Olympics, I have begun reflecting on the kind of craft involved with being the best in the world at something. There is something enthralling and beautiful to me about watching someone at the very top of their game performing in ways no other human ever has or ever will, in the foreseeable future. This has led me to think about human excellence more generally.


II. Human excellence isn't merely about being good or talented at something, nor about winning some competition, or even about being the best in the world. Human excellence, as I will be using it, is something more than that. It is when craft becomes art. What do I mean by this? Ordinarily, we seem to make a distinction between craft and art, where craft is some skill or practice and art is a product, imbued with the aesthetic imprint of an artist. Thus, what I take to be human excellence is when some craft itself becomes art. Rather than being merely the process that produces something, acting out the craft becomes itself its own aesthetic product. Human excellence is the peculiar aesthetic quality some skill takes on when it is performed at such a high level, to the point that it seems effortless, and utterly one-of-a-kind.

Apocryphal Arguments #2: Radical Enfranchiement

This is the second post in a series I'm calling the Apocryphal Arguments series. The idea is to briefly outline, explain, and defend a simple philosophical argument that I think is plausible. It will be in the form of precise premises and conclusions in order to maximise legibility. I aim to post only novel, interesting, and even ridiculous-sounding arguments that might question fundamental sensibilities in order to maximise impact. If all goes to plan each post should be a fun ride.

I present in this post a funny little argument that states that we are rationally obliged to abolish the voting age. In other words, that there is never a justification for disenfranchising citizens based on age. The apocryphal part of the argument is that this includes young children, toddlers, and even newborns. I make the argument by using a kind of slippery slope argument, often used by detractors of child enfranchisement. (The style of argumentation will be similar to my last entry in this series, so I highly recommend you read that first, here, if you haven't already.) This argument might supply the dumbest reason you could come up with to abolish the voting age, but here we are. This is a shortened version of a longer and more careful essay I have on this. Let's get to it. 

A Theory of Friction (For Bayesian Epistemology)

I. Here I expound and defend probabilism (a.k.a., Bayesianism) in its capacity as an epistemological theory. First, I outline what is meant by probabilism and in what sense it is an epistemological theory. Following this, I outline what I take to be a substantial obstacle the theory faces to success: various problems of 'subjectivity.' Next, I reply to these associated objections and outline why I think that not only is this concern not a worry for Bayesians, but that probabilist epistemology gives us reason to be optimistic about the state of knowledge in the world. Finally, I argue that that the internalism about rationality this account implies is not a bad thing. In an important way, I think this can be read as a partner piece to my previous post "The Tendency to Know", where my 'theory of friction' in this essay is basically my theory of the state of knowledge in a system applied to what is considered a serious problem for a Bayesian epistemology.

New Essay With Epoché

In which I attempt to reconstruct Bergson's views on free will, as presented in Time and Free Will in light of the later changes in his ontology. (Makes a nice companion piece with my previous piece on him outlining that ontology.) Check it out!

Rebel Without a Cause - Reconstructing Free Will in Bergson

https://epochemagazine.org/43/rebel-without-a-cause-reconstructing-free-will-in-bergson/

The Tendency to Know

I. I have a theory that human knowledge is analogically like the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. However, it is not that systems of human knowledge tend towards disorder or less knowledge, but instead towards more knowledge. This is not the entropy of Claude Shannon's information theory, in which there is a stochastic rate of loss in the transmission of information. It is rather a theory about how knowledge proliferates in closed social systems (at any scale). I begin by defining the second law of thermodynamics and entropy as I understand them and pointing out how certain parts of a system defy the law (local reversals) even though the system as a whole tends towards an increase in entropy. Next, I outline by analogy how I think a system structured like entropy occurs in systems of human knowledge. Finally, I close with some remarks on Charles Sanders Peirce, who ultimately sowed the seeds of this idea. If you understand entropy and thermodynamics already, you can skip to section three.

Apocryphal Arguments #1: A Rocking Universe

This is the first post in a series I'm calling the Apocryphal Arguments series. The idea is to briefly outline, explain, and defend a simple philosophical argument that I think is plausible. It will be in the form of precise premises and conclusions in order to maximise legibility. I aim to post only novel, interesting, and even ridiculous-sounding arguments that might question fundamental sensibilities in order to maximise impact. If all goes to plan each post should be a fun ride.

What I attempt to show in this post is that if you accept the common-sense premise that objects endure through change, you commit yourself to the idea that the universe is made up of that type of object. For example, if you say that an apple tree is still the same tree when it loses an apple, it can be shown that you must think the universe is made up of apple trees. Also, if you deny this principle you must endorse 'presentism' about objects, the view that each object only exists for a moment and as each moment passes the universe is made up of an entirely different set of objects. I know this sounds ridiculous but this is the kind of thing I have in mind for this series...

A Critique of Negation

[Disclaimer, I know Absolutely nothing about Hegel's metaphysics, nor even really that much about Deleuze, this was a fun exercise though. I'm kind of sloppy all the way through with interpretation.]

I. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze critiques Hegel's metaphysics for making determinate negation the engine of history, change, differentiation, and individuation. For Hegel existence is constant change. However, it is not chaotic Heraclitean flux, but rather the logical unfolding of a constantly inverting movement: dialectics. This inversion is the process of negation. The negation of a thing (or of the absolute, at the largest scale) is entirely contained within that thing-itself, such that the way it (the dialectic) unfolds is determined according to the movement already contained within itself. History moves according to change, which moves according to the negation of concrete forms. This is where his contradictions come from - the movement ~p is contained in p. The main reason Hegel needs to affirm contradictions in this way is to avoid collapsing into Eleatic homogeneity, which would otherwise be a consequence of his monism. He has to save the intelligibility of the world and it can't be done with just being, thus he appeals to non-being (negation). Thus, Hegel's system must necessarily be both teleological ("It may seem as if this progression were to go on into infinitude, but it had an absolute end in view") and deterministic ("the whole of the history of philosophy is a progression impelled by an inherent necessity...a priori determined through its Idea...Contingency must vanish") as each moment is both directed-towards some end and contains within it a necessary direction (the negation of itself), according to its internal constitution. It strictly excludes any external determination. Therefore, future situations and possibilities are limited in advance by their constitutive conditions.

Double Feature Series #3: Sex, Love, & Jealousy

This is the third post in what I'm calling my double feature series, in which I post a pairing of two movies that I love. These movies will usually be made 20+ years apart and are thematically related somehow. I see one as a sort of a spiritual successor of the other. The point is to avoid blatantly obvious pairings or homages that have been pointed out before (like certain Woody Allen movies combined with certain Bergman movies, for example). Instead, I aim to bring two seemingly disconnected films together, into one thought.

The third entry in this series, as the title indicates, pulls together two films about relationships. They are:

La Notte (1961) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Epoché Author!

 I have an author page at Epoche magazine now that I have published two pieces with them! Check out my new article on Bergson and the page generally for my longer and (better) writing!

   https://epochemagazine.org/authors/rowan-anderson/

    "Enjoy those beautiful blue sky and golden sunshine all along the way. Everyone, have a great day!"

A Sketch of Similarities Between Bergson and Heidegger

There is a remarkable similarity between the philosophies of Bergson and Heidegger. Bergson's notion of the body as a 'centre of action' and Heidegger's notion of Dasein as "that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue" get at this similarity. In both cases, the being is entirely immanent and contiguous with reality; that is, they are merely a part of a larger set of environmental relations (extensity for Bergson, Being for Heidegger). 

In their formulation of this aspect of their metaphysics, they both stringently avoid mentioning an inextended consciousness or inextended representations in the form of perception. Instead, they favour a relation that is continuous with its environment. They both want to repudiate a certain kind of dualism or subjective atomism that postulates the observer as a metaphysical island from which we peep at the world through a tiny hole. They prefer to analyse the body in terms of its direct and practical engagement with the world. 

What makes humans peculiar for both thinkers is the self-consciousness of our being-in-the-world. We ask the question of being to ourselves and end up thinking we are of a unique kind, which is partially true, in that we seem to be the only kind of thing really asking, but partially false, in that we obviously are extensions of the world. 

Bergson reduces perception from a faculty of representation and knowledge to an evolved and fine-tuned faculty for carving up and abstractly select those elements of the fluid world that practically benefit each organism and grant the freedom to navigate the world and itself as it needs to. Heidegger historicises and relativises what beings there are to that which Dasein has as its concern and to the historical epoch or cultural moment in which beings are revealed.

In both cases, the intellectual activity of objectifying the world, the thing that makes us think we grasp Being most intimately, for Bergson 'the intellect', for Heidegger 'ready-to-hand', paradoxically distances us from a true metaphysics - of duration, or Being, respectively. Both reject the presence (in the Derridean sense) of (small-b) beings. Only the former thinks we can go beyond this and intuit this true metaphysic.

Ultimately I think that Bergson ends up giving a more satisfying picture of metaphysics proper (though I am still grappling with his views about memory which make a surprisingly good candidate for a sort of soul). My problem with Heidegger is that he never seems to really escape Kant while I think Bergson really does.