RichardDawkins.net

An excerpt from Intellect: Mind Over Matter is being discussed over at the Richard Dawkins message board.

-Mark Brawner

Syntopiconline

Britannica blog is in the midst of a series of posts on the Great Books, Britannica's Great Books, and Alex Beam's book on both. To one post Michael Ross added a comment that includes this news.

The Great Books [of the Western World] too will soon be available in e-book format, searchable and linked to the Syntopicon. They will be available through most libraries, we hope, as well as from from EB, by the end of the year.

--Terrence Berres

Mortimer Adler in Life's image archive

The Associated Press reported

Google Inc. has opened an online photo gallery that will feature millions of images from Life magazine's archives that have never been seen by the public before.

The new service, available at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with about 2 million photos. Eventually, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life's library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection.

...

The photos can be printed out for free as long as they aren't being used as part of an attempt to make money. Time Warner Inc., Life's parent company, hopes to make money by selling high-resolution, framed prints. The orders will be processed through Qoop.com.

(via Ryan Sayre Patrico at First Things)

--Terrence Berres

Mortimer J. Adler's MySpace page

--Terrence Berres

The happiness of free people

Click on the title link to go to the great ideas forum if you would like to discuss the implications of the November issue of Great Ideas Online http://www.thegreatideas.org/21w/TGIO496.pdf , where Dr. Adler explains the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia or happiness.

As usual, I am grateful to Dr. Adler for stimulating essays, but find I totally disagree with his conclusions and most of his premises. In this case, I have argued that the Aristotelian definition of happiness is suitable only for a nation of rulers and subjects and propose an alternate definition, based on Stoic philosophy which I will argue is more suitable for a free people.

In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg: Aristotle's 'Politics'

The history of ideas discussed by Melvyn Bragg and guests including Philosophy, science, literature, religion and the influence these ideas have on us today.

IOT: Aristotle's Politics
Thursday, November 06, 2008 3:30 AM
Melvyn Bragg discusses Aristotle's 'Politics' - a two and a half thousand year old collection of notes that have cast a very long shadow in political philosophy. He is joined by Angie Hobbs, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Paul Cartledge, AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge; and Annabel Brett, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Cambridge.

-Mark Brawner

Against Intuition

Christopher Shea in The Chronicle Review on the experimental-philosophy [x-phi] movement

A key question for experimental psychology is how it proposes to get from descriptive findings to philosophically sound conclusions about what we ought to do, or what ought to count as sound knowledge.

So far, it appears, the discipline tends to be better at tearing down such conclusions, or trying to.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

John Cleese - The Scientists - 2008

--Terrence Berres

A Great Idea at the Time

Via Apocaloopsis, the publisher's notice of A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, by Alex Beam

The Great Books of Western Civilization [sic], fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?

Going Off the Rawls

David Gordon in The American Conservative, July 28, 2008

This is key to [John] Rawls’s theory: whatever arises from a fair procedure is just.

But what is a fair procedure? Rawls again has an ingenious approach, his famous veil of ignorance. ...

Rawls’s veil of ignorance generalizes the point of this example. He asks that we imagine a situation, which he calls the original position, in which people do not know their own abilities, tastes, and conceptions of the good. Under this limit, individuals motivated by self-interest endeavor to arrive at principles of justice. People behind the veil of ignorance are self-interested but in crucial respects ignorant.

Great Unread Books: Which classic are you ashamed to admit you have never read?

The Telegraph, July 22, 2008

Respectable authors made shameful confessions at Ways With Words festival; watch them below. Now it's your turn: which book are you most embarrassed to admit you have never read?

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

All the Answers: The quiz-show scandals—and the aftermath. by Charles Van Doren

I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome—the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be. I was also thought to be the ideal teacher, which is to say patient, thoughtful, trustworthy, caring. In addition, I was making a small fortune. And then—well, this is what happened:

Mind Over What’s the Matter

Simon Blackburn, in yesterday's New York Times, reviews Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, by Susan Neiman.

Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so.

Saying challengers to the Enlightenment "invariably come off second best" seems inconsistent with "wishing" more people were convinced of it.

--Terrence Berres

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar, Summer 2008

The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

(via Shark and Shepherd)

Education: the deflationary view

Stanley Fish in the Yale Alumni Magazine July/August 2008

So what is it that institutions of higher learning are supposed to do? My answer is simple. College and university teachers can (legitimately) do two things: (1) introduce students to bodies of knowledge and traditions of inquiry that had not previously been part of their experience; and (2) equip those same students with the analytical skills -- of argument, statistical modeling, laboratory procedure -- that will enable them to move confidently within those traditions and to engage in independent research after a course is over

.

After 49 years Charles Van Doren opens up . . .

At the 2001 memorial service of Mortimer Adler, a close friend of Van Doren's father, the famous writer and poet Mark Van Doren, the disgraced son talked of "the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and [Adler] picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job." I interviewed Van Doren about Adler last year, and he called the late 1950s the time "when my life changed." He said he was working on a memoir, which he declined to discuss.

An Original Confession

Darwin revised the text of the “Origin” extensively each time the book was republished in his lifetime; by the 6th (and last) edition, the text had evolved considerably. The final paragraph of the 6th edition differs from that of the first in that it includes mention of “the creator.” The relevant sentence of the 6th edition reads “…having been originally breathed by the creator into a few forms or into one…”

Who Is the Greatest Modern-Day Thinker?

Via a reader, Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics at The New York Times relays this question from a college student in a "core" (great books?) curriculum.

Once you’ve thought about what it means to be a thinker, then comes the hard part of thinking about who best fits the description.

Which includes the criteria for greatness, and maybe even for "Modern-Day".

So who are your nominees, and why?

Naming U. of C. research center after Nobel Prize winner has faculty split

U. of C. is the University of Chicago, and the Nobel Prize winner is Milton Friedman (1912-2006). Jodi S. Cohen reported in the Chicago Tribune, June 18, 2008,

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors--about 8 percent of the university's full-time faculty--said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

(via "Diogenes" at Off the Record)

--Terrence Berres

Book culture without books?

David Carter reviews The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) by Sherman Young, in Australian Humanities Review, March 2008

It seems appropriate to be writing this in Tokyo where a recent bestseller list showed that five of the year's most successful novels, including the top three, were first written to be read on mobile phones before being republished in book form.

(via Milt's File)

--Terrence Berres

Van Doren on Adler (2008)

In the newly-published edition of Charles Van Doren's 1985 book The Joy of Reading, one of the recommended works continues to be the Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon to Great Books of the Western World. Mr. Van Doren's revised essay includes this (p. 444).

...The work stands as a monument to the efforts of critical philosophy in our century that will long endure.

I wrote that sentence twenty years ago, and I no longer believe it to be true, although it should be. ... We talked on the phone a few weeks before [Adler's death] ... I recalled the deep sadness that accompanied his statement in that last conversation to the effect that everything he had worked and fought for throughout his life had failed. I said "No, no!" but the statement was in large part correct. ... I'm not sure that Adler's vision will ever be seen again, and I think we have lost something rich and beautiful.

(via Apocaloopsis)

--Terrence Berres

Standing Up For What You Don't Believe

Steve Fuller in TPM Online

I agreed to serve as an expert “rebuttal” witness in the first US trial to test ID [Intelligent Design] as fit for public science instruction, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005). In other words, my testimony addressed the arguments of those who thought ID had no place in science classes.

--Terrence Berres

The Reach of an Ancient Greek

Anthony Gottlieb in The Wall Street Journal, May 17, 2008, reviews The Music of Pythagoras, by Kitty Ferguson

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

One College That’s Getting It Right

Michael Linton at the First Things weblog about some school in Maryland.

--Terrence Berres

Adler on Anarchy

Recently, Max Weisman sent out emails with writings of Dr. Adler on the subject of Anarchy. Specifically, Dr. Adler rebutted the arguments by philosophical anarchists on the basis that human nature requires a certain about of coercion and punishment in order to achieve the greatest good and that it would require, as Mills said, humans to have the nature of angels. Thus, anarchy is simplistic and naive and could never work. The coercive power of the state is good rather than the lesser evil.

These argument are based upon the belief that human nature is at least partly evil and that the ills we see in the world are a result of that nature. From Aristotle to Catholicism to evangelical protestants, the basic view has been similar: There is a list of things that every human needs to be truly happy, therefore, there is a moral duty to obtain those things, therefore anyone who doesn't appear to be seeking the things on the list is wrong, bad and worthy of punishment, coercion, psychiatric treatment or at least some form of correction. American legal theory is also based upon such beliefs.

This worldview is not the only viable option. Buddhist thought, for example, regards human nature as intrinsically good but that people have become disconnected from that nature so that the evils we see in the world are not a result of human nature, but of a disconnection from it. By getting in touch with that inner goodness, we address the root causes of suffering and reduce or eliminate it from our lives. Notice that the agreement on the list of things that humans need to be happy is there, but there is a departure that there is any moral quality to this list. Instead of labeling people who suffer or cause suffering evil, wrong, bad and declaring them worthy of punishment, we could also choose to consider such people as being tragically disconnected from their own needs or ignorant of their own nature. This, by the way, was the belief of Socrates and Plato - that evil was caused by ignorance rather than nature.

My own view is that if human nature is, in fact, intrinsically evil, then there never was any hope for us in the beginning. How can evil people come up with conceptions of good to begin with? I think human nature is intrinsically good and that this forms a common bond between us all and a basis of cooperation. When we deal with people in a way that appeals to their basic goodness and to their fundamental needs, we can experience getting our needs met through compassionate giving. Check out www.cnvc.org for some additional thoughts on this worldview.

Dr. Adlers rebuttal of anarchism is subtley based upon his worldview as a neo-Aristotelian. Before we accept his rebuttal, I think it relevant to first debate the merits of Aristotelian ethics. Lets start with the behavior of one of his star pupils - Alexander.

Adler On: Capitalism and Socialism

Mike Wallace interview, September 7, 1958 (video)

The End of the Conflict Between Capitalism and Communism, Part One,
Haves Without Have-Nots (1991),

Defined,
Adler's Philosophical Dictionary (1995)

I'll try to include as least one linked item
with these topical bibliographic posts.
--Terrence Berres

Robert Nozick and the Coast of Utopia

David Lewis Schaefer in the New York Sun, April 30, 2008, reconsiders Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) by Robert Nozick.

Suggesting that “the fundamental question of political philosophy” is not how government should be organized but "whether there should be any state at all," Nozick offers an adaptation of John Locke’s doctrine that government is legitimate only to the degree that it affords greater security for life, liberty, and property than would exist in a chaotic, pre-political “state of nature.” More emphatically than Locke, however, Nozick concludes that the need for security justifies only a minimal, or "night-watchman," state, since it cannot be demonstrated, he believes, that all rational individuals would find any more extensive government necessary to secure their rights.

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

--Terrence Berres

Adler On: Being

Regarding Philosophical Knowledge, section 5
The Four Dimensions of Philosophy (1993) Chapter 8

Defined
Adler's Philosophical Dictionary (1995)

--Terrence Berres

Adler On: Beauty

The Liar and the Skeptic
Six Great Ideas (1981, 1984), Chapter 5

Admirable Beauty
Six Great Ideas (1981, 1984), Chapter 16

The Goodness of Beauty and the Beauty of Truth
Six Great Ideas (1981, 1984), Chapter 17

Defined
Adler's Philosophical Dictionary (1995)

--Terrence Berres

Adler on C-Span, 1990

Dr Adler discusses his then current book Truth In Religion, takes some viewer calls, and comments on the second edition of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.