Here are the Not School group activities for the month of November for PEL Citizens.
Intro Readings in Philosophy: Finally! We have a Nietzsche discussion in Not School. They will be reading the On the Genealogy of Morals. Join up and reduce to sour grapes all of your precious finger wagging. See Hillary Szydlowski's plug here.
Philosophy of Mind: We are beginning our second month of Being No One by Thomas Metzinger. This is a pretty difficult but fascinating book (to me anyway). It is an attempt to naturalize consciousness, the phenomenal self, and the first-person perspective. As stated on the first page, its thesis is that selves do not exist, only self-models. It's extremely detailed and thankfully lacks the overt hand-waving that is so common in Philosophy of Mind. Our goal is to locate the hidden hand-waving that is sure to operate at some level in there. And if not found: To BELIEVE.
As an added bonus, to have read and understood this book would be great preparation for this.
Philosophical Fiction will be reading Beckett's Waiting for Godot
There are some other groups from previous months that are still continuing discussion as well. If you're interested in getting involved with learning and discussing these or other topics, consider becoming a PEL Citizen now.
Evan Gould
I always find statements like “attempt to naturalize consciousness” or “attempt to naturalize phenomenology” interesting as if consciousness or phenomenological experience was some how super-natural or stand out side of nature and that some how that would not be hand waving.
““Nonmaterialist neuroscience” has joined “intelligent design” as an alternative interpretation of scientific data. This work is counter productive, however, in that it ignores what most scholars of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures now understand about biblical views of human nature. These views were physicalist, and body-soul dualism entered Christian thought around a century after Jesus’day. To be sure, dualism is intuitively compelling. Yet science often requires us to reject other-wise plausible beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary. A full understanding of why Earth orbits the Sun (as a consequence of the way the solar system was formed) took another century after Galileo’s time to develop. It may take even longer to understand why certain material systems give rise to consciousness. In the meantime, just as Galileo’s view of Earth in the heavens did not render our world any less precious or beautiful, neither does the physicalism of neuro-science detract from the value or meaning of human life.”
journal Science co-authoer Nancey Murphy Christian theologian and philosopher
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12859587/Neuroscience-and-the-soul
Brain Science Podcast 67 interview with German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, author of The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self , and Being No One.
http://brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/thomas-metzinger-explores-consciousness-bsp-67.html
Being No One with Thomas Metzinger (lecture video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k
_______
To get rid of hand waving.
Warren Brown Ph.D Department of Clinical Psychology Fuller Theological Seminary
http://www.fuller.edu/Academics/Faculty/Faculty_Profiles/Brown,_Warren_S_/?terms=Warren%20Brown
Nancey Murphy Christian Philosophy and Theology
http://www.fuller.edu/Academics/Faculty/Faculty_Profiles/Murphy,_Nancey/?terms=nancey%20murphy
Episode 62 of the Brain Science Podcast is an interview with Warren Brown, PhD, co-author (with Nancey Murphy) of Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will.
http://brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/did-my-neurons-make-me-do-it-with-warren-brown-bsp-62.html
Review Episode 53 of the Brain Science Podcast is a discussion of Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will, by Nancey Murphy and Warren S. Brown.
https://brainsciencepodcast.sqsp.com/bsp/review-did-my-neurons-make-me-do-it-bsp-53.html
much respect
there was an excellent conference on the knots (if not aporias) that can come with (as well as the potential benefits of) trying to naturalize phenomenology:
ps when faculty from an evangelical seminary say that they are “naturalists” probably good to take such claims with an extra-large grain of salt…
“ps when faculty from an evangelical seminary say that they are “naturalists” probably good to take such claims with an extra-large grain of salt…”
My point of adding them to the discussion is that if we see ourselves as natural physical embodied beings of Heidegger’s and Merleau Ponty’s phenomenology that does not mean that we them have to jump to metaphysical claims much like Heidegger’s point in Letter on Humanism.
gotcha, tho M-Ponty was in the ontology biz and Heidegger also had such tendencies, but yes no need for metaphysics with embodiment but the orthodox-Husserlians don’t like the naturalism much as you can see in the vids, cheers
Very good point. The conflict between “naturalism” and “phenomenology is Husserlian phenomenology and not really Heidegger or Merleau Ponty. Heidegger in Letter on Humanism is wanting to go beyond false dichotomies that have plagued philosophy. One false dichotomy is Husserl’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘phenomenological’.
Husserl was a great thinker and starting to break with Descartes but his transcendental phenomenology or what Husserl calls ‘phenomenological reduction’. His reduction is not conditioned but rather transcendental: in Husserl’s terms, pure consciousness of absolute Being, is just the Cartesian cogito dualism.
Is there a problem reconciling Cartesian dualism and naturalism? Yes. To say that consciousness is not reconcilable with “naturalism” as this started is again Descartes sneaking in with a bit of hand waving.
much respect dmf
as long as “psychologizing” is a disparaging term along with the sneering at “mere” anthropology we are stuck in the fly-bottle, bring on the radical-behaviorisms!
http://www.academia.edu/245547/Enactivism_Why_be_Radical
Thanks for the link
“Phenomenonology, Naturalism and the Sense of Reality” was pretty good.
qapla
I’m familiar with all your references, and your concerns, and your challenges are clear. I would also challenge you to take on Metzinger’s position for what it is worth. Perhaps he errors eventually in the direction of false epistemology, but so much of his work is aimed at simply making sense of the phenomenological process of being human (ontology), in line with Merleau-Ponty. He has seriously updated Merleau-Ponty and has an embodied cognition position which may well have advanced foundational understanding of the human condition. Come join in the Being No One group, which is giving Metzinger serious consideration, and serious questioning from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.–Wayne.
On Waiting For Godot – I’d second Evan’s encouragement to cheat. In fact, the best way is to read it and see it, even if you can only see it on film. Each activity will give you parts of the play that the other leaves out. Reading the stage directions will drive home the purpose of actions you might take for granted while watching a performance(Beckett was extremely precise about every detail of what happened during his plays), but reading alone can’t really give you the effect of the Chaplinesque physical comedy or numerous other aspects of the play.
The version Evan linked to is a good one. Here’s another that I really like, although there are subtitles to put up with – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuU3RrGj3Lc