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oﬀering examples of contemporary

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titles from

titles from Cambridge University Press.

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October 2017 – September 2018

A

A one-year, London-based programme

one-year, London-based programme

of

of ten evening seminars and individual

ten evening seminars and individual

re

research led by Professor Sir Roger Scruton

search led by Professor Sir Roger Scruton,,

oﬀering examples of contemporary

thinking about the perennial questions,

and including lectures by internationally

acclaimed philosophers.

Previous speakers have included:

Professor Jane Heal FBA

, St John’s

College, University of Cambridge

Professor Robert Grant

, University

of Glasgow

Professor Sebastian Gardner Professor Sebastian Gardner

,,

University College London

Professor Simon Blackburn

, rinity

College, University of Cambridge

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surroundings of a London club (in Pall

Mall, SW1), and is followed by a dinner

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discussion with the speaker. Te topics

to be considered include consciousness,

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Course enquiries and applications: Course enquiries and applications: Ms

Ms Claire Prendergast Claire Prendergast T: 01280 820204T: 01280 820204 E:

E: claire.prclaire.prendergast@[email protected] ngham.ac.uk

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Visit

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December 2016/January 2017

December 2016/January 2017PhilosophyPhilosophy NowNow 33

Philosophy

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ISSUE 117 Dec 16/Jan 17

Philosophy PhilosophyNow Now _,,

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REALITIES

Metaph

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ysics, P

Pages 6-19 +

ages 6-19 +

EDITORIAL & NEWS

4

4 Beyond Physics No More?Beyond Physics No More? Rick Lewis Rick Lewis

5

5 NewsNews 36

36 Interview: Tu WeimingInterview: Tu Weiming

David Volodzko meets a modern Chinese philosopher David Volodzko meets a modern Chinese philosopher

REBEL REALITIES

6

6 Berkeley’s SuitcaseBerkeley’s Suitcase

Hugh Hunt

Hugh Hunter lays out Bishop Berer lays out Bishop Berkeley’keley’s case for idealisms case for idealism

10

10 Nowhere MenNowhere Men

Nick Inman ar

Nick Inman argues that withougues that without your mind you’t your mind you’re nowherere nowhere

14

14 The Private L The Private Lives of Rocksives of Rocks

Jon David t

Jon David thinks comprehehinks comprehensively abounsively about panpsychit panpsychismsm

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16 Spinoza’s Metaphysics & Its Implications For ScienceSpinoza’s Metaphysics & Its Implications For Science

Zoran Vukadinovic on what it means to say that God is Nature Zoran Vukadinovic on what it means to say that God is Nature

GENERAL ARTICLES

20

20 A Golden Manife A Golden Manifesto, Part IIsto, Part II

Mary Midgley cont

Mary Midgley continues her look at ethiinues her look at ethics past & future ofcs past & future of

24

24 Epicurus Epicurus For For TToday oday

Luke Slat

Luke Slattery modernises an anctery modernises an ancient authoriient authority on moderty on moderationation

27

27 Existential Comics: EpicureanismExistential Comics: Epicureanism

Corey Mohler on the original party school! Corey Mohler on the original party school!

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29 Philosophy For The BravePhilosophy For The Brave

Dahlian Kirby analyzes existentialist psychotherapy Dahlian Kirby analyzes existentialist psychotherapy

REVIEWS

44

44 Book:Book:Was Einstein Right?Was Einstein Right?by Clifford M. Willby Clifford M. Will

reviewed by Tim Wilkinson reviewed by Tim Wilkinson

46

46 Book:Book: Mora Moral Relativisml Relativismby Stephen Lukesby Stephen Lukes

reviewed by Phil Badger reviewed by Phil Badger

48

48 Film:Film:The Road The Road Michael Bu

Michael Burke takrke takes a post-apocaes a post-apocalyptic hike with Lelyptic hike with Levinas vinas

REGULARS

13

13 Philosophical Haiku:Philosophical Haiku: Hege Hegel l

Terence Green hits Hegel heavily with haiku and history Terence Green hits Hegel heavily with haiku and history

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32 Question of the Month:Question of the Month:

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To Be o Be Or NoOr Not Tt To Be, What o Be, What Is The Answer?Is The Answer? Y

Your replies our replies to Hamlet’s Questionto Hamlet’s Question

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38 Letters to the EditorLetters to the Editor 41

41 Brief Lives:Brief Lives:VoltaireVoltaire Ja

Jared Spred Spears iears is jolts jolted by ted by the shoche shocking king life olife of an elf an electriectrifying fying mind mind

51

51 Philosophy Then:Philosophy Then:What Is Metaphysics Anyway?What Is Metaphysics Anyway? Peter A

Peter Adamson asks what Aristotle meant by it damson asks what Aristotle meant by it in his book in his book on it on it

52

52 T Tallis in Wallis in Wonderland:onderland:On Logos On Logos Raymond

Raymond TTallis has a word for the wiseallis has a word for the wise

POETRY & FICTION

19

19 Spinoza’s Work Spinoza’s Work

Peter Abbs focuses poetically on a lens-grinding philosopher Peter Abbs focuses poetically on a lens-grinding philosopher

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56 Hegel and Hume Talk It OverHegel and Hume Talk It Over

Chris Christensen overhears a dialogue on knowledge & reality Chris Christensen overhears a dialogue on knowledge & reality

Epicurus

Back To Nature

Page 24

T T H H E E R R O O A A D D I I M M A A G G E E © © W W E E I I N N S S T T E E I I N N C C O O . . / / D D I I M M E E N N S S I I O O N N F F I I L L M M S S 2 2 0 0 0 0 9 9

The Road

The journey’s hard, and life

is short, so how to live? p.48

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4 PhilosophyNow December 2016 / January 2017

Editorial

Beyond Physics No More?

theories and debates down the ages were in one way or another part of metaphysics. Metaphysics is about the deep structure of the universe, about how things really are, as opposed to how they look. But this question directly connects with others which are part of metaphysics too. Does God

exist, and if so, what’s He (or She) like? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How does the mind or soul

connect with the body? Free will is another perennial problem in metaphysics, and should not be confused with Free Willy, which was a movie about a whale.

Relatively recently, in the last three centuries or so, the invention of new scientific instruments has revealed things about the universe which were previously hidden from our perceptions by scale or distance. Philosophers used to hypoth-esise about everything being made of atoms – a recurring subject of discussion in metaphysics for two thousand years. Yet over the last one hundred years the structure of atoms has

become very well understood through both theoretical and experimental physics and we can even take photographs of them, using powerful electron microscopes. Does this mean that the whole discussion of atomic theory has moved from the realm of metaphysics into the realm of physics? If so, might other discussions in metaphysics follow suit in the future? The mind-body problem has already done so, if you believe physicalists like Daniel Dennett, but very much hasn’t if you agree with dualists like David Chalmers. The jury is still out on that one, but perhaps there are other metaphysical questions which can be solved by science. So, might

metaphysics soon become a quaint historical footnote like alchemy?

Clearly some metaphysical questions – like the existence of atoms – have indeed crossed into the realm of experimental science, into a space where they can actually, finally be

answered. But there may be movement in the other direction too. Some philosophers have recently been scrapping with scientists like Stephen Hawking about whether the world still needs philosophy. Hawking claimed that “philosophy is dead”, as physics now does all the work that philosophy used to do. Yes, retort philosophy’s defenders – that is because you

astro-physicists have all become amateur metaphysicians yourselves, theorising about supersymmetric strings and dark energy and parallel universes and other matters way beyond the reach of your telescopes! So from that perspective, metaphysics is not old-fashioned – on the contrary, it is the new black. And as we stare out into the blackness still seeking answers about the nature of the cosmos and the place of consciousness within it, mere labels, such as ‘scientist’ and ‘philosopher’ may come to seem less important than the questions themselves.

L

et’s get meta-physical! Metaphysics is philosophy’s oldest and most central strand. When Greek

philosophy first kicked off in the port of Miletus on the coast of Anatolia 2,500 years ago, the biggest question

pondered by the likes of Thales and Anaximander was this: what is the underlying reality of the universe, beneath the

surface appearances of our everyday world? Thales thought that everything was, deep down, made of water. Squeeze something hard enough and juice runs out – see?

Anaximander disagreed; the underlying reality, he said, was an unobservable element called apeiron. And so Western

philosophy began, with speculations that could not be directly checked but which might with greater or lesser success explain those phenomena that we can directly observe. Democritus (460-370BC) hypothesised that simplicity of explanation could be combined with the diversity of the observed world if we assume everything to be made up of arrangements of tiny indivisible articles he called atoms. Epicurus a century later agreed but added that rather than just bouncing around in a mathematically predicatable fashion, sometimes the atoms swerve unpredictably as they fall through the void – and this swerve (called a clinamen), by defeating determinism, is the source of our free will. You can read much more in this issue about Epicurus and his theories and we have a great cartoon strip about him too.

Such speculations didn’t have a specific label until

Aristotle’s editors gathered together his notes about them into a volume they called ‘Metaphysics’, meaning ‘Beyond Physics’, perhaps because Physics was the title of the previous volume.

Our metaphysics articles in this issue includes a feature on Bishop Berkeley; so you can find out why he believed in ideas, but not in matter, and also why he made the surprising claim that his colourful ideas were a philosophy of common sense. Berkeley’s idealism is well known, but it’s often forgotten he too, like Democritus and Epicurus, believed in atoms – though naturally he had his own unique take on what they were. The article on Spinoza explores his reasons for thinking

that God and Nature were one and the same – but the author goes on to argue that in the process, Spinoza gives us valuable clues as to how to understand some perplexing puzzles in science today. Nick Inman asks about the nature of human identity and asks where, exactly, it is located, and Jon David wonders whether rocks have awareness. And there you see a

sample of the themes that have preoccupied metaphysicians for centuries.

For a couple of thousand years, metaphysics was such a central, essential part of philosophy that for many people, it was the real story. The majority of the great philosophical

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December 2016/January 2017PhilosophyNow 5

Animal Welfare Ups and Downs I This first of two reports on morally

ambiguous animal welfare developments concerns male chicks, who owe their short existences to the breeding industry for egg-laying hens. Since they don’t have suffi-cient body mass to justify raising them commercially for meat, millions of male chicks are killed every year. This is done by gassing, suffocation in plastic bags, or maceration, i.e. being mechanically ground up, none of which are likely to be painless. TeraEgg is a new technology which can

examine eggs and sex the foetus through a non-invasive process known as terahertz spectroscopy. This will mean that the eggs containing male fetuses can be destroyed weeks before hatching occurs. While this

seems a step in the right direction in that it does reduce animal suffering, animal welfare supporters have argued that it is a

figleaf masking the bitter reality of continued animal exploitation.

Animal Welfare Ups and Downs II Our second piece of contentious animal welfare news takes us into the world of

animal use for human medical research and training purposes. Washington University’s medical school has announced that it will cease to use cats in medical training after finding that technological advances in simu-lators and mannequins mean that they can now adequately replace live animals. The anatomy of a cat’s windpipe closely resem-bles that of a newborn infant, so cats provided the best training ground for medical students. Animal welfare activists had put serious pressure on medical schools to stop using live animals, causing some schools to change to technological replicas before experts deemed them to be viable alternatives, or to even be secretive about their continued use of live animals. There is now a new call for general ethics guidelines on the use of animals in medical contexts.

Philosophers and the US Election Philosophers rarely take the plunge into the mud bath of real-life moral and

polit-ical problems, but many did comment on the recent US presidential election, including Brian Leiter, well known for his widely-read Leiter Reports blog about

academic philosophy. The great majority of philosophers quoted online opposed the election of Donald Trump. Prof. Harry Frankfurt, for instance, called Trump a master of ‘bullshit’, a form of dishonesty distinct from lying and characterised by the speaker’s utter indifference to whether what they say is true or not. No, Trump is a pragmatist in the tradition of C.S. Peirce, said Oxford moral philosopher Daniel Robinson toQuartzmagazine. A tiny handful of other philosophers also backed Trump. In an interview posted on his website, the post-Marxist provocateur

Slavoj Zizek shocked many (maybe that was the point?) by declaring that he would

have voted for Trump despite being “horrified at him.” Zizek said: “Listen, America is still not a dictatorial state; he will not introduce fascism. But it will be a

kind of big awakening. New political processes will be set in motion.”

• Peter Singer wins Philosophy Now Award

• Philosophers and the US Election

• Animal Welfare: Good News & Bad News?

News reports by Anja Steinbauer.

News

Free Discussion vs ‘Safe Spaces’? Surely universities are bastions of free speech, where proponents of opposing opinions on moral, political, philosophical and social matters can test out the viability of their views in fierce but reasoned verbal battle? Increasingly, student unions in the UK and US declare ‘safe spaces’ and demand that controversial speakers be ‘no platformed’. The idea is that the expression of certain views might make members of one or other minority group feel unsafe and should therefore be prevented. This

happened to Iranian secularist and feminist Maryam Namazie, a well-known

intellec-tual and critic of the position of women in Islam; her 2015 lecture at Goldsmiths University was aggressively disrupted with repeated references to ‘safe spaces’. Most recently, when one of Britain’s best-known philosophers, Sir Roger Scruton was invited to Bristol University the student union tried to no-platform him due to the fact that although he defends gay relationships on the grounds of personal choice, he opposes gay marriage.

Peter Singer receives the award

Philosophy Now Award 2016 Won by Peter Singer The 2016 Philosophy Now Award for Contribu-tions in the Fight Against Stupidity has been given to Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer.

Singer was nominated not for his work in general but for two very specific reasons. Firstly, for embodying the idea of a practical philosopher who doesn’t only analyze ethical problems but who also strives to apply a

reasoned ethical stance to the difficult deci-sions that face us all in our everyday lives. Secondly, in trying to prove that we have duties to help strangers, his books and argu-ments have set out to disturb the comfort-able complacency with which many of us habitually ignore the desperate needs of others, and that certainly counts as fighting stupidity. The Award is particularly for this work as it relates to the Effective Altruism movement, an attempt to use research and comparative analysis to organize the chari-table efforts of people in the directions in which it will do the most good.

The (transatlantic) award ceremony was held at London’s Conway Hall on 31 October. After a brief acceptance speech via video by Peter Singer, Samuel Hilton spoke to the audi-ence about the Effective Altruism movement inspired by Singer’s work. The 2014 Award was given to Noam Chomsky and last year’s award went to children’s author Cressida Cowell.

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ever it is that we have in mind, it cannot be a material tree, nor is anything clarified by saying that we have in mind an aspect of the act of perceiving a tree. Rather, ideas must be entities such that (a) we may have them in mind, and (b) they convey to us the properties we associate with trees.

But consider now how this view isolates us, the perceivers. Take the case of colours. Since the early modern period it has

been widely thought that colours are not in bodies. Instead, colours are the result of interactions between the surface prop-erties of bodies and our sensory organs; and the same is true of smells, tastes, and sounds. As Galileo wrote in 1623, “I think that tastes, odors, colours, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the liv-ing creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated” (The Assayer , p.274). Following the way of ideas, then, colours and other sensations are features of ideas, not of bodies. The world of our experience is a carnival of smells and tastes and sounds and colour, but we carry it about in our minds through a reality that is in itself silent, dark, flavourless. That is what I mean when I say that the way of ideas leads the perceiver into isolation.

Moreover, this isolated state of man invites the sceptic to ask: How can you be sure that every property of ideas is not like colours, and just in the mind? How can you be sure there really is a material world at all? On this point the sceptic Pierre Bayle joked in his philosophical Dictionaire Historique et Critique

(1697) that the way of ideas had produced a stronger sceptical challenge than was known even in antiquity.

“Today the new philosophy takes a stronger line [than classical Pyrrhonian skepticism]: heat, smell, colours, etc, are not in the objects of our senses; these are modifications of my soul; I know that bodies are not those that appear to me. Some wanted to exclude extension and movement, but it wasn’t possible, for if the objects of sense seem coloured to us, or hot, cold, or odorous, while they are not these things, why can’t they seem extended and figured, at rest and in motion, while being none of these?” (My translation.)

Bayle wrote toward the end of the seventeenth century, and even then his argument was hardly new. The father of early modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596-1650), had consid-ered the question of the trustworthiness, or not, of our percep-tion of an external world as the very origin of his philosophy, and the power of the sceptical threat can be seen in just how far that great man and his successors were from answering it. In the end, Descartes argued that it would be inconsistent with the goodness of God for Him to deceive us by presenting us with ideas of a material world with no material world corresponding to them. The empiricist Locke argued that a certain “sensitive knowledge” answered scepticism – this being knowledge “of the existence of particular external objects, [gained] by that

percep- Y

ou will be familiar, in these days of inelegant travel, with the exercise of trying to fit everything you might

plausibly need into a very small suitcase. It sometimes happens that there is one thing which frustrates the process, an object with awkward contours that ensure it cannot be packed along with the other necessities. It is of some value to identify the troublesome object. Would it not be a small tri-umph if you not only identified it, but realized that you didn’t need it after all?

It was a similar realization in the realm of metaphysics that led the young unpublished George Berkeley (1685-1753) to breathlessly write in his private philosophical journal, “I won-der not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious tho’ amazing truth, I rather wonder at my stupid inadvertency in not finding it out before. ‘tis no witchcraft to see.” ( Notebooks , in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne eds A.A. Luce, T.E. Jessop, n.279.) Berkeley had been trying to fit together a number of beliefs, and he found that he could not do it. Then, in a single insight, he saw that one belief frustrated his project, and that he could do without it.

The problem lay in fitting together a belief in perception by means of ideas in immaterial minds, a belief in atoms, a trust in common sense, and a belief in matter. It was the last belief Berkeley suddenly recognized that he had never needed and that by discarding it he could make the others fit together. This freed him from a double puzzle of being isolated from

the physical world in two separate, if related, ways. Travelling The Perilous Way of Ideas Let us begin with the sort of isolation caused by a belief in material things plus a belief in ideas.

Looking back on early modern philosophy [that is, from the early seventeenth century on], Thomas Reid (1710-96)

observed that his predecessors had followed the ‘way of ideas’. In this observation he was certainly correct. The reason was that early modern philosophers could see no way for material bodies to be present in immaterial minds: how could a material tree be in the mind of a man? Instead there must be some intermediate entity, an idea. Ideas tie together the material world of bodies and the immaterial plane of minds, for ideas

can represent bodies but are present in minds. Some interac-tion between someone’s sense organs and the tree causes the idea to come into being with properties so as to represent the tree, enabling the person to perceive it.

There was, of course, a great deal of dispute as to how ideas ought to be understood. Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) thought of ideas as aspects of the act of perception. Berkeley found this view implausible. It seemed to him that a more robust

under-standing of ideas was needed, and he found it in the works of Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and John Locke (1632-1704). Both men took ideas to be not the perceptual acts themselves. With this Berkeley was in full agreement: what-6 PhilosophyNow December 2016/January 2017

Berkeley’s Suitcase

Hugh Hunter unpacks the sources of Berkeley’s idealism.

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tion and consciousness we have of the actual entrance of ideas from them” ( An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.2.12, 1689). Malebranche appealed to Scripture: God is said to have created heaven and earth, after all.

These arguments are all, and in the same way, question-beg-ging. The sceptic’s question is whether ideas do in fact reveal a material world. To say that God would be a deceiver if they did-n’t, or that our awareness of ideas goes even a whit toward show-ing that they do, is to assume what is to be established. And in order to deflate Malebranche’s reply, the sceptic need only ask,

Does Scripture say that God created a material heaven and earth? The sceptic shows how deep the isolation of early modern man is with regard to bodies and his perception of them. It is here the conflict arises with Berkeley’s trust in common sense. He wrote:

“Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arise scepticism and paradoxes. It is not enough,

George Berkeley

by Darren McAndrew 2016

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that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing. Its true nature, its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be the fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our fac-ulties. Sense is fallacious, reason defective. We spend our lives in doubting of those things which other men evidently know, and believing those things which they laugh at, and despise.”

(Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Preface, 1713.)

Berkeley’s closing words express his own sympathies with common sense. It does seem to him both laughable and con-temptible to suppose that the real world cannot be known through the rich world of experience.

It is important to note here that an appeal to common sense is not an appeal to everything that is common. There are many people who do not understand Shakespeare, but so much the worse for them. Nor is it the claim that any belief that’s held by virtually everybody is therefore true. It is rather the claim that

there are things that people cannot help but knowing (which is why they are common), and that this inescapable knowledge

should bear some weight in our philosophical reflection. And two things that we cannot help knowing, according to Berkeley, are that we directly perceive bodies, and that we see them as they are. The way of ideas leaves us isolated, when common sense tells us that we are crowded about with readily accessible things.

Atomic Confusion

The second type of isolation of perceivers from the material world is caused by a belief in material atoms. Already by the

mid-dle of the seventeenth century it was observed that, “All the Learnedest Philosophers have acknowledged that there are such Atomes, not to speak of Empedocles, Democritus, Epicurus … And

Galen makes mention of them… And indeed every where

amongst Philosophers and Physitians both Ancient and Modern, mention is made of these little Bodikies or Atomes, that I won-der the Doctrine of Atomes should be traduced as a Novelty.” (Daniel Sennert, Epitome Philosophiae Naturalis , 1618). These ‘lit-tle bodikies’ about which everyone was talking, were understood to be tiny, indivisible fragments of matter. Tables and chairs, our bodies and animal bodies, all these are just assemblages, or as contemporary philosophers tended to think of them, mecha-nisms, made up ultimately of material atoms. In Berkeley’s time, the English called this view ‘corpuscularianism’.

By the time Berkeley was writing, atomism had lost none of its appeal. That is because, as the distinctive philosophy of the early modern period grew in confidence, so too it grew confi-dent of its judgment of the medieval period as obscurantist, authoritarian, and confused. To do without atoms seemed to risk a return to a medieval Aristotelian account, in which living bodies were understood as more primary than their parts, since on that view organisms consisted of indeterminate matter tak-ing the determinate forms of the organisms. Much better, thought Berkeley’s contemporaries, to have determinate matter – atoms – producing all other kinds of entities through their arrangements. Then, instead of a multiplication of kinds of explanations of things (cat kinds, tree kinds, kinds of humans) as the Aristotelian account required, the early modern intellec-tual project became one of reducing explanations to combina-tions of a few basic atomic kinds.

So appealing was the atomic picture that philosophers were willing to struggle to make sense of atoms’ most puzzling

prop-erty: indivisibility. It was crucial that atoms be indivisible, for if they were not, their changes must be explained by some even more basic kinds. Locke thought it might be a brute fact that the smallest things are indivisible. But why should they be? If they take up space, why could God not separate their left and right halves? And if some things have this brute property of indivisi-bility, why must they be small, as all early moderns, including Locke, supposed? Faced with this question, Democritus, one of the ancient Greek originators of the idea of atoms, admitted that there might be atoms as big as houses. And early modern man is again isolated by atomism, because all that he knows or under-stands is vastly larger than the scale on which the workings of the world proceed. Once more, early modern man is like a Chi-nese emperor who is born, lives, and dies in a Forbidden City of the mind. What happens beyond its walls he does not know. As David Hume (1711-1776) wrote in another context:

“We learn from anatomy, that the immediate object of power in vol-untary motion, is not the member itself which is moved, but certain muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits, and, perhaps, something still more minute and more unknown, through which the motion is suc-cessively propagated, ere it reach the member itself whose motion is the immediate object of volition. Can there be a more certain proof, that the power, by which this whole operation is performed, so far from being directly and fully known by an inward sentiment or con-sciousness is, to the last degree, mysterious and unintelligible?”

( An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 7.1, 1748.)

This mystery and unintelligibility, let us note, is in our own bodies. But these are the bodies that are closest to us. Early modern philosophy hoped to explain all bodily changes as vari-ations of atomic motions. But even if such an explanation could be given (and that still seems as unlikely today as it did in Berkeley’s day), it would not free man from his walled citadel anymore than an Emperor walks among his people because his economic advisor explains their condition to him.

Another way to put the puzzle is this. If changes in bodies are produced at the level of atomic motion, then the bodies themselves seem to be reduced to a secondary explanatory state. Material bodies are like political bodies in this sense: we may generalize about the actions of some political party, but we recognize that the party itself is really an amalgam of many

individuals, and that to generalize about them all is to say something that will not do justice to any one of them.

Locke was duly troubled. He wondered whether it is consis-tent with the goodness of God that He reserved for Himself the true atomic knowledge of things, and gave us only the sort of knowledge we get from our senses. Locke concludes that although “a man with microscopical eyes” might see things more truly, he would see things less usefully, for with our every-day vision we can discern things on the scale which is necessary for us to live our lives (see his Essay 2.18.12). Our creator had to choose on our behalf between the true and the useful, and He chose the second. This is not very satisfying justification for God’s activities – theodicy – for surely God Himself sees both the small and the large together; but Locke does not consider

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why God did not make us so as to see that way too. As we will shortly appreciate, Berkeley’s suggestion is that God created us in precisely this fashion.

The Doubts & Beliefs of Bishop Berkeley I hope it’s become clear why the recognition that there were problems to be solved was something for which Berkeley took no credit. Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Malebranche, Locke, and (eventually) Hume all noticed many of the same things. Dou-ble isolation, on account of both his means of perception and the scale of his perception, is the sad lot of early modern man. But Berkeley’s insight was that this depressing picture hung on a single shaky nail: the belief in matter.

Consider first the isolation brought on by following the way of ideas. The suggestion that bodies (things that cannot be in minds) must be perceived indirectly by means of ideas (things that can be in minds) hinges on the belief that bodies cannot be in minds. Now, the reason for thinking that bodies cannot be in minds is that bodies are supposed to be of a nature incompatible with being in a mind: they are material . But if their materiality is put in doubt, there would be no reason to think that bodies can-not be in minds. And then the first sort of isolation would be unnecessary: man could directly perceive the world he inhabits.

Doubting that there are material bodies does not entail doubting that there are bodies . It is rather a question of reevalu-ating the status of ideas . For most early modern philosophers, ideas are intermediaries which bring us information about material things. But perhaps this is like one of those fairy tales where the messenger is really the prince in disguise; and as in

the tale, once the onlookers know, they can clearly discern the princely features that had been there all along, for the ideas that were considered mere intermediaries have all the features of the bodies we always supposed they represented. All the colours and smells and sounds and tastes which early modern philosophy had banished to the mind are as common sense have always supposed they are – characteristics of the thing itself. We can therefore state Berkeley’s suggestion that ideas are bodies in the sense that a combination of shape, colour, smell, taste and so on is a cake, and another combination is an apple.

What Berkeley discovered is that doubting the existence of material bodies actually removes a great many other doubts. And so what seemed to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke a

sceptical attack, is to Berkeley merely a purgative. Of course our ideas do not point to anything beyond themselves, any more than bodies point to anything beyond themselves! Or in Philo-nous’ final words in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues , “the same prin-ciples which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point, bring men back to common sense.” We find ourselves once again believing what Berkeley was so ashamed to doubt – that the world is rich with colours, odours, sounds and tastes.

Without matter, the second isolation, which is brought about by scale, can also be resolved. Bodies are made of ideas; but on Berkeley’s account, the ideas are composed of atoms. Consider what you see before you. Berkeley’s argument is that if you choose an object and narrow your vision, and then repeat this process, you will soon encounter a limit beyond which you cannot gain any more clarity. You have reached a

sensory minimum. The sensory minimum is Berkeley’s atom.

Berkeley redefines the atom, then. On this view, God has given us simultaneously micro- and macroscopical eyes, inso-far as perception reveals large-scale bodies, and simultane-ously (though we may have to narrow our attention), their sensory minima. So his redefinition is just what Locke implic-itly takes to be impossible even for a good God to create. Berkeley’s account also provides an elegant answer to the question of why atoms are indivisible. They are indivisible because they are atoms of sensation; so a limit on their divisibil-ity is also a limit on what can be sensed by us. Another conse-quence of this approach is that research into atoms is likely to be restricted to those fields which study sensory phenomena, for example optics. And although ideas are composed of sen-sory atoms, there seems to be no reason to look to the atoms rather than to complex ideas for explanations. In other words, the truth about the body of a cat is as likely to lie at the

macro- as at the micro-level of perception. This is a conse-quence of occupying the divine adjustable point of view Berkeley opens up to us. And so Berkeley has supplied us with the tiny, indivisible composing parts of bodies, and can also give bodies a sort of explanatory priority without following the path back to Aristotelianism.

Berkeley Being Realistic

With the need for material atoms or material bodies removed, the double isolation that so troubled Berkeley and early mod-ern philosophy is removed. On this view the true natures of bodies, along with their atomic structures, are completely manifest to us in perception. It is in this sense that Berkeley can rightly be called a direct realist .

We can also see why Berkeley’s reaction to his discovery was humility, remarking that the wonder was that he had not seen it sooner. Berkeley understands his role as that of the boy who first saw the emperor as naked. As in the story, pretension is punctured, but this merely enables daily life to go on as before. “The Philosophers lose their Matter... as for bodies &c we have them still” ( Notebooks , n.391). Descartes recommended to his readers a process of meditation that would provide their beliefs with a fresh firm foundation. The Berkeleian medita-tion could hardly be more different. The meditator discovers how unshakeable are the foundations of the beliefs he gained at mother’s knee. Nothing changes: “the horse is in the stable, the Books are in the study as before” ( Ibid . n.429).

But a very great deal is changed, the physicist and the math-ematician might object. Are all of our fruitful theories con-cerning unobserved particles about nothing at all? What of our mathematical models of material objects? These are good questions, to which there are, I believe, good Berkeleian replies, according to which mathematics and science are understood as instruments for the dissection of the world of perception. But that discussion will have to wait. Let me just respond now with a Berkeleian question: Which is more cer-tain, that the table is a cloud of atoms and has some indepen-dent mathematical shape, or that is it solid, brown, scratched, and smelling faintly of varnished wood?

Hugh Hunter lives in Ottawa, where he teaches philosophy at the Dominican University College. Please visit jhughhunter.com

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procedure by stripping the complexity down into its compo-nents, and you will see that there’s no deus ex machina involved. The whole was only ever a sum of its parts, even if it seemed to

our minds to acquire a quality of being more than that. It’s the same with the brain, the materialists argue. Really complex complexity can even convince itself (ie, me) that it is someone, a self, an entity which feels real and substantial and of intrinsic worth. Yet my innermost self is not a ‘pearl’ – an enduring thing of substance – but a bundle of properties that temporarily come together to make a person. Whatever my beliefs about God and the soul, I am nothing more than a (per-haps gloriously deluded) biological automaton. Daniel Dennett has described the self as a ‘Center of Narrative Gravity’, by which he means that I am no different to a fictional character which I and the world make up, and that my sense of self is

similar to my centre of gravity: I have to have one, although I can’t locate it precisely. However, I wouldn’t be able to func-tion if I knew that I was merely a coalifunc-tion of my members, so nature pulls a confidence trick. In effect, it lies to me through my brain. In order to live well in society and to be motivated in pursuit of its own interests, the organism needs to have the illusion of separateness, autonomy, and significance. Therefore, I need to believe in a self that is substantial, coherent and sus-tainable; above all, a self which matters. That I only think I exist has been called the ‘self illusion’ by Bruce Hood (in The Self Illusion: Why There is No ‘You’ Inside Your Head , 2012). When this is understood, I can begin to see myself in an

entirely different way: I am better thought of as not a noun but a verb. What I call my ‘self’ is really my brain ‘braining’.

An intellectual consensus is coalescing around this materialist (or physicalist) view. Many of our greatest contemporary thinkers are quite happy to announce in public, without any irony, that they do not really exist. It has almost become a badge of macho pride (they’re mostly men, as it happens). It is as if we are in the grip of a new fashion for personal nihilism. The theme around the year 1000 AD was the end of the world; in the twenty-first century we have gone one better and declared the end of ourselves.

I Confess To Heresy

It is not respectable any more to speak up for dualism, the notion that there are two kinds of stuff, the material and the immaterial, body and mind. But I would like to point out that the materialist’s argument as I have set it out above does not run smoothly from premise to conclusion, and that dualism is not just a theoretical possibility. It is quite literally inescapable. You are living proof.

Half of me does not exist; or at least, I cannot prove to you that it exists – isn’t that the same thing? And I assume it’s the same for you. I can give you independent confirmation of my name, occupation, address, passport number; but I find it hard, if not impossible, to convey to your senses anything about what I think of as the real me – the invisible, intangible, internal sen-sations of which only I am aware, and which are wholly beyond

A

re you ready for the ultimate trick question? Here it is: Am I me, and are you? That is: do I and you exist? Only a yes/no answer is allowed. It wouldn’t be good philosophy to say that you ‘sort of’ exist, nor that you are a working assumption pending further investigation. It

is also essential that we don’t just wriggle out of this question by playing with words and definitions.

The easiest way forward would be to defer to the great minds that have been wrestling with this problem over the last few decades. Consensus among them, reached by reasoning based on the evidence of brain science, is steadily hardening. I’m going to attempt to show why this consensus is not only wrong – because it is based on a dodgy premise – but dangerously misguided.

The Materialist Orthodoxy

Many contemporary philosophers begin by ruling out the question ‘Who are you?’ as only of interest to an anthropolo-gist: ‘who’ defines a person by his relationship to other people – it doesn’t shed any light on human nature. The crunch ques-tion, which is the only one a physical scientist would allow, is ‘What am I?’

Now we’re dealing with stuff . What else is there to deal with? If everything that exists is stuff – matter – then it is

obvi-ous that if I am, I must be some thing too. It would also help to say where I am because, as Eccles in The Goon Show put it, “Everybody’s got to be somewhere.”

Well, there’s only one place I can be. Whatever my self is, it must be me the animal, the biological organism, or part thereof. So I am inseparable from my body: I move around with it, I rely on it for input and output. When my body dies I will disappear.

The search for me can be narrowed down further. Although I have a foot, I would not say that I am a foot. Rather, the part of me that perceives and thinks is behind my eyes. “Logically,” says neurobiologist Dick Swaab, “you are your brain” ( We Are Our Brains , 2014).

End of mystery. I am found and explained. All that is left is to sort out the neuroscience of why I feel who I feel. I may still believe that there’s more to me than one and a half kilos of elec-trically active meat – that my rich inner life is more than bio-logical. I dream, I create, I engage in abstract thought. Above all, unlike any other species I know of, I am self-conscious and able to tell another being about myself. There must be some-thing more going on, surely?

Not necessarily. Experiments with computers have shown that if you start with simple building materials (basically, stuff capable of binary logic functions) arrange them into complex patterns, then pile complexity on complexity and let the sys-tem run by itself, adding to its knowledge by learning, then you can get extraordinary manifestations of artificial

intelli-gence that can fool an observer into thinking it’s conscious. The resultant ‘being’ appears uncanny, as if it must have been

instituted by a supernatural creator. But not at all: reverse the 10PhilosophyNow December 2016/January 2017

Nowhere Men

Nick Inman wants to know where you’re at.

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words and demonstration.

The point I’m making is that the materialist argument as set out above only works in as far as we must speak objectively about the universe, and specifically, about human beings, including when you speak about someone else. You, to me, are an object like any other physical thing. I have no direct access to what goes on in your mind. From outside it is quite clear to me that you are an animal, and that everything about you can be expressed in terms of zoology. If you say you are a con-scious, thinking being, I may give you the benefit of the doubt, but I am not going to accept it as demonstrated fact in the same way that I know your hand can hold things.

However, if I turn my attention inward, everything changes. Unlike all the phenomenon I have experienced through my senses (including reading about them), I have certain unusual properties:

• I am the only substance in the universe of which I have inti-mate direct knowledge.

• I am the only substance I can experience that I cannot

exam-ine objectively, in the sense of carrying out an experiment free of bias and error.

• I am experienced differently from the outside and the inside, with no join between the two perspectives.

• I am the only possible expert on this aspect of myself. • I am unique. For all I know, I may not even be like you.

I literally cannot put my finger on myself. I don’t have mass or volume. I am not solid, liquid, gas, or even another kind of physical substance. Some may think I am merely my brain braining, and so conclude that my believing in my conscious self is an ‘ego trick’, but I have good reason to believe that my doing so is not a trick: I am proof to myself (but not to you) that there is more to me than matter. I know it, because I am it. This is more than “I think, therefore I am.” Trite as this may sound, I know I am because I am.

The Nothing Beyond Words

I immediately crash into an insurmountable problem in talking about this to you. How do I describe this self that I know to

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Realities

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exist? What word can I use for such a ‘non-thing’ which is not ‘nothing’? ‘Something’ and ‘substance’ will probably only mis-lead you. To call me ‘sensation’ may make you assume that my being is reducible to what can be sensed, and then you will fall into line with David Hume, who wrote, “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception” ( A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, Part 4, Section 6, 1738) – and so denied the existence of the self. To call myself a ‘concept’ would assume that I am an abstract phe-nomenon, a construct even. In order not to mislead ourselves, perhaps we’d do better to adopt a symbol which has no defini-tion or potential mistransladefini-tion: it stands for what it stands for.

If language is one trap we continually fall into when dis-cussing human identity, another is false analogy. It is, for exam-ple, erroneous to suppose that a brain is a glorified input-output computer running a program supplied by an organism’s DNA. The organic is radically different from the inorganic, and

fur-thermore human awareness and thought, as far as we can tell, are radically different from anything else in organic nature.

So what am I, this ‘symbol that was formerly known as Nick Inman’? I am a meaning-maker. The meaning that I apply to the universe comes from me, even the meaning that I allocate to logic, reason, and the evidence gained through the senses. Without me nothing means anything, or to put it another way, without this immaterial sensation of awareness I have, the universe might as well not exist. It is gobbledygook to talk, for

instance, about the laws of science as separate from the con-scious creatures who codified them. One easy illustration of this idea is to look at any object, remove its name and forget everything else you remember about it: what is left has no meaning . Anyone who doubts this must imagine an undiscov-ered, uninhabited planet somewhere in the cosmos on which meaning exists independent of thought. How? And how would we ever know? We would need to imagine that such a world is verified by a computer not build by human beings, and that

does not report its findings back to anyone.

You Need To Know Yourself To Know Anything Else Scientists and philosophers, including the most eminent, fre-quently gloss over an unjustified assumption: that they, the per-son reporting their results to us, are an objective instrument. But however much I may claim to be peddling objective truths, ulti-mately, what I am doing is reporting my subjective experiences.

A few years ago, the British philosopher Galen Strawson wrote a long, erudite piece for the London Review of Books (26

September 2013) which began: “I’m a naturalist, an out-and-out naturalist, a philosophical or metaphysical naturalist, a nat-uralist about concrete reality. I don’t think anything supernat-ural or otherwise non-natsupernat-ural exists.” I tried to read his argu-ments but I got lost on the first half of the first word. Anyone who is going to make confident statements about the nature of

reality should first define him- or herself.

The entire project of human knowledge is back to front. The ambition of science is to explain the universe, which means get-ting around to explaining human consciousness whenever

feasi-ble. But without starting from the fact of consciousness, explain-ing anythexplain-ing is like drawexplain-ing conclusions from the results pro-duced by an uncalibrated machine, or, if we are to be brutally honest, using an optical instrument of mysterious hidden work-ings to examine itself. For an immaterial entity to insist that all must be matter, then the self must be matter; and so, since the so-called ‘self’ has none of the properties of matter, it does not exist. This is about irrational as you can get. I exist. Moreover, it is only logical for me, an immaterial presence, to suppose that I am not alone. There must be more immateriality in the universe. You, for instance, behind your eyes and beyond whatever words you say, if you exist, must be immaterial like me.

The Pay-Off For Not Existing

So why do so many very intelligent, well-educated people in high-status academic positions claim the opposite? I can only suppose there is a pay off for the ‘Nowhere Men’ that makes them hurry through the premises of their argument – includ-ing the dodgy ideas that the world is only what exists objec-tively, or in other words, that there is only material stuff – to get to the conclusion of their non-existence.

There are several important victories to be gained by deny-ing your own existence if you are a modern philosopher or sci-entist. Some of them are to do with shying away from the fear of not knowing and the unknowable. The most prominent of these is that it gets around the thorny problem of conscious-ness, releasing science from an impossible bind, since if con-sciousness is ‘merely the brain functioning’, we don’t need to consider an immaterial aspect to the universe. We also don’t need to talk anymore about the mind, or the spirit or soul. This delivers a knock-out blow to religion, which now

becomes a form of culture akin to art: indulge if you want to, but don’t claim to be making a contribution to knowledge. At the same time, any objection to materialism is pre-empted: altered states – dreams, drugs, meditation, visions, and what are merely called ‘mental’ illnesses – can be accounted for in purely materialist terms, that is, in purely neuroscientific terms. The emotions are downgraded, love now being defined as one brain process communicating with another brain

process. Moreover, all competing views of reality, and all ‘weirdnesses’, such as complementary medicine and true self-sacrifice (as opposed to the bowdlerized versions of altruism accepted by neoDarwinists) are ruled absurd. Intuition, and personal mystical knowledge are automatically derided. With all the alternatives out of the way, the Nowhere Men can now stake a monopoly on truth. Evidence becomes everything. Eventually there will be nothing that does not fit into a model or formula. If man is nothing but a mechanical animal, all his affairs become predictable and calculable. Political affairs will be judged by science, as will be ethics.

An even bigger prize would be to finally end the argument concerning whether humans are special or not. The material-ists would rather make us subhuman than superhuman. If the self is illusory, if there is only biology, then the human being is just an animal. This gets us off a really painful hook: our moral

responsibility to other species and the planet. More insidiously, to deny the human mind and the complementary moral

responsibility of free will is, perhaps unconsciously (if you will 12PhilosophyNow December 2016/January 2017