My Honest Views

I think David Lewis was off his rocker, I think Donald Davidson was far too impressed by elementary logic and decision theory, I think Willard Quine was a mediocre logician with some philosophical side-interests, I think Daniel Dennett never understood philosophy, I think Michael Dummett was a dimwit outside of his narrow specializations, I think P.F. Strawson struggled to understand much of philosophy, I think Gilbert Ryle was a classicist who wanted philosophy gone by any means necessary, I think Gareth Evans had no philosophical depth, I think John Searle was a philosophical lightweight, I think Jerry Fodor had no idea about philosophy and didn’t care, I think Saul Kripke was a mathematician with a passing interest in certain limited areas of philosophy, I think Hilary Putnam was a scientist-linguist who found philosophy incomprehensible, I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosophical ignoramus too arrogant to learn some history, I think Bertrand Russell was only interested in skepticism, I think Gottlob Frege was a middling mathematician with no other philosophical interests, I think the positivists were well-meaning idiots, I think Edmund Husserl had no interest in anything outside his own consciousness, I think Martin Heidegger and John-Paul Sartre were mainly psychological politicians, I think John Austin was a scientifically illiterate language student, I think Noam Chomsky was neither a professional linguist nor a philosopher nor a psychologist but some sort of uneasy combination, I think the vast majority of current philosophers have no idea what philosophy is about and struggle to come to terms with it, I think philosophy has been a shambles since Descartes, I think Plato and Aristotle were philosophical preschoolers, I think no one has ever really grasped the nature of philosophical problems, I think the human brain is a hotbed of bad philosophy (and that is its great glory).

John Searle, Philosopher

I will give my personal opinion (i.e., the truth) about John Searle as a philosopher. He was clearly a brilliant and clever man, not to be tangled with; he was also a lucid and bracing writer. He was right about a great many things (I intend this as high praise). He was a much better philosopher than the vast majority of professional philosophers. But (and you must have seen this “but” coming) I found him curiously superficial, sometimes glib (proudly so), overly wedded to commonsense, not always interesting. I found his prose style flat and sparkless, a bit lackluster, lacking in charm or wit (though generally quite clear). I didn’t feel much zing or novelty of expression. I think he was stuck in the Oxford of his student days: all philosophy needs is some simple no-nonsense common sense to sort out its problems. Profundity was scorned. This led to problem-dodging and a lack of intellectual depth. It all seemed so obvious to him, or that was his manner. He was a good critic but not much of a theoretician. He didn’t stir me philosophically. In this he contrasted with other philosophers of his generation—Davidson, Fodor, Nagel, Lewis, Kripke, Rawls, and others. Truth is, I found him somewhat boring as a philosopher—despite his many virtues. I also think he was ahistorical, like his Oxford mentors.

Biography of Nabokov

I have just finished reading the first volume of Brain Boyd’s magisterial (there is no other word) biography of Nabokov. At 500 pages it covers only his years in Russia and other European countries. I have never felt so steeped in the great man, and I have been seriously steeped. I now know the length and shape of his toenails. I wrote to Professor Boyd (who is writing a biography of Karl Popper) just to exchange thoughts with a fellow Nabokovian of genuine distinction. I sent him my little essays on Lolita, which appear on this blog. We had a lively correspondence. What struck me with particular force was the remarkable combination of facets that compose Nabokov’s person and personality: tall, slender, handsome, Russian, multi-lingual, a poet, a playwright, a novelist, a lepidopterist, a boxer, a chess player, a tennis player, and a goalkeeper. Many men in one man. Is there any unity to be found there? If there is, it is not easily discernible. The closest common factor I can see is the aesthete—but of a broad kind. I see it in the writing, obviously, but also in the chess, tennis, butterflies, and even in the boxing and goal-keeping. I can’t think of a good parallel in other Great Men, but I sense some of it in myself: I too combine the athletic with the writerly without sensing any schism. I also had a fascination with butterflies as a boy (and still do: I am rearing some caterpillars now); I even enjoyed the martial arts in my younger days, particularly wrestling. But back to Nabokov: his vision, his dedication, his arrogance (add inverted commas), his uncompromising attitude, his loves and hates, his genius, his uniqueness. He packed a lot into one man, one life. He never wrote about himself in his fictional works, but it is easy to see him as a Nabokovian character—half human, half mythical, smooth, brittle, heroic, touchy, tough, not afraid of a fight, dreamy. He is a kind of good Humbert Humbert. I’m looking forward to reading the second volume of his biography, dealing with his American incarnation and the unleashing of Lolita.

Morality, Relativism, and Supervenience

I find it hard to believe that the point I am about to make has not been made before, so I state that it must have been. If so, this may serve as a welcome repetition, for the point is a good one. It is that moral supervenience and moral relativism are inconsistent with each other. The former says that moral predications supervene on the natural, descriptive, or factual properties of the act in question: if one, then necessarily the other. Nothing needs to be added to get to the moral predication; in no possible world does the entailment fail to hold. But moral relativism claims that the underlying non-moral properties are not sufficient for the moral ones, since the latter are dependent on the attitudes of a given individual or group of individuals. The former properties are intrinsic to the act or state of affairs, but the latter are relational: the moral property is relative to a community, and so can vary from community to community depending on the attitudes held. But that is inconsistent with the assertion that the moral supervenes on the intrinsic non-moral properties of the act. For moral opinions and other attitudes are not supervenient on those underlying non-moral properties (e.g., the fact that someone is in pain). Opinions and facts are not necessarily correlated, but values and facts are. Being good is supervenient on non-value facts, but being thought to be good is not—that depends on the properties of the appraiser. Thus, moral relativism is inconsistent with moral supervenience.

So what–can’t we just give up supervenience? The inconsistency is certainly a pause-giving result, but is abandoning supervenience available to a relativist otherwise demolished? But how could it be that two situations are exactly alike in all non-moral respects and yet differ morally? Don’t right and wrong, good and bad, depend on the facts of the case? If not, they are worthless categories; we may as well just talk only about attitudes and get it over with. Then we have the anodyne doctrine that people can have different attitudes towards the same thing, perhaps because of ignorance; we don’t have the startling claim that one and the same thing can be both good and bad (at the same time). We don’t have to say that pain can be bad here but not bad elsewhere, despite being exactly the same in both places (except location). Supervenience certainly has common sense on its side; relativism is mind-numbingly revisionary—and for what? But we can say more: we can cite the factual properties of a situation in order to justify a moral evaluation, but that won’t work under relativism. We can say that the existence of pain justifies the assertion that it’s wrong to stick a pin in someone, but the relativist can’t say that—he has to say that the justification for not sticking a pin in someone is that other people are not of the opinion that pain is bad. That is what the moral evaluation depends upon not the fact of pain itself. The normal practice of moral evaluation collapses once supervenience is denied, because it is really neither here nor there what people think about pain; what matters is pain itself. So, supervenience can’t be rationally abandoned. But it is inconsistent with moral relativism. Therefore, moral relativism must be rejected. Values are not the same as opinions about them.[1]

[1] This is really an absolute truism, hardly worth enunciating, but relativism has a remarkable hold over the callow mind, so truisms must be treated as contentious doctrines to be ingeniously argued for. Why morality should excite such skepticism I don’t know. No one thinks that we should give up supervenience about the mind because people have minds only relative to a community! No one thinks that being in pain depends on whether people think you are in pain. That would be insane. Yet they think that pain’s being bad depends on people thinking it’s bad. Pain is bad no matter what some idiot happens to think.