Author Archives: Larry Franz

The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption and Pee by Sarah Silverman

Posted on by

Sarah Silverman is very funny. This book is funny too, sometimes. It’s her autobiography, which details her youthful bedwetting, what it was like to grow up Jewish in New Hampshire, her life as a stand-up comic, and her experiences being on TV. Comedy and philosophy have a lot in common and she is frequently philosophical.

But the book isn’t as funny as I expected, and she spends too much time justifying herself and complimenting the people she knows. If all the people who worked on her TV show were as brilliantly funny as she says, it would have been a much better show.

She also offers good advice, such as the idea that we should Make It A Treat, that is, don’t overindulge in the most enjoyable things in life. Keep them relatively rare and special. (7/1/10)

Philosophy of Perception: A Contemporary Introduction by William Fish

Posted on by

Fish provides an overview of several current philosophical theories of perception, including arguments for and against. The theories he considers are Sense Datum, Adverbial, Belief Acquisition, Intentional and Disjunctive theories. Except for the last chapter, the discussion is almost all concerned with vision, which seems short-sighted.

He distinguishes the theories by their respective responses to three propositions: the Common Factor principle (“Phenomenologically indiscriminable perceptions, hallucinations and illusions have an underlying mental state in common”), the Phenomenal principle (“If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that quality”), and the Representational principle (“All visual experiences are representational”).

Fish tries to figure out whether the theories are better explanations of the phenomenological or epistemological aspects of perception. I found the Disjunctive theories most convincing, especially the one offered by Mark Johnston, but there wasn’t enough detail provided to form a conclusion.  (5/16/10)

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel by Rebecca Goldstein

Posted on by

This is the story of Kurt Godel, considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle and the second greatest mind of the 20th century after Einstein. The book includes discussion of the Vienna Circle, whose meetings Godel sometimes attended; Godel’s differences with Wittgenstein, whose views impressed the Vienna Circle but not Godel; and Godel’s friendship with Einstein, when both of them were at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton.

Godel is most famous for proving that that any formal system that is rich enough to contain arithmetic or number theory must contain a true statement that can neither be proven nor disproven, in other words, that such a system is necessarily incomplete. A corollary of the incompleteness theorem is that any such system cannot be proven to be consistent within the system itself. Goldstein suggests that the incompleteness theorem demonstrates that there is a mathematical reality beyond the reach of any human-made formal system.

Goldstein steps through the proof of incompleteness, but I didn’t or couldn’t follow the whole proof.  The proof seems to rely on the strange consequences that result from sentences that refer to themselves, such as “This sentence is false”. Russell ruled out such sentences in his Theory of Types, and that seems like a good idea to me. It may be arbitrary, but it seems right to say that sentences that refer to themselves and sets that contain themselves should not be allowed in any formal system, given the paradoxical results that follow.  (5/11/10)

Saving God: Religion After Idolatry by Mark Johnston

Posted on by

Johnston tries to determine what God would really be, not the God necessarily worshiped by Judaism, Christianity or Islam. He develops the idea of the actual Highest One as “the outpouring of Existence Itself by way of its exemplification in ordinary existents for the sake of the self-disclosure of Existence Itself”. The teleological “for the sake of” is difficult to understand, which Johnston acknowledges, since he is suggesting a completely naturalistic view of existence. His view is panentheistic: God is wholly constituted by the natural realm.

Johnston’s argument leads to an extended discussion of how existence presents itself to us, how we are samplers of Presence, not producers of Presence. He rejects the idea that we perceive the world via representations in our minds. Perception is of the world itself. He concludes by suggesting that we survive death by identifying ourselves with the people who live on after us, an idea that must be discussed at much greater length in his slightly more recent book “Surviving Death”.  (5/7/10)

Mind and World by John McDowell

Posted on by

This is a serious work of philosophy that deserves more than one reading. McDowell says that he is trying to overcome the philosophical tendency “to oscillate between a pair of unsatisfying positions: on one side a coherentism that threatens to disconnect thought from reality, and on the other side a vain appeal to the Given”. He suggests that in order to escape this oscillation, “we need to recognize that experiences themselves…combine receptivity and spontaneity”. Kant distinguished between the receptivity involved in receiving sense impressions and the spontaneity involved in rational thought. 

One way of describing McDowell’s position is that experience always involves the application of concepts. Experience, therefore, exposes us to nature (the realm of law) while standing in rational relations to beliefs and judgments (the normative space of reasons). According to McDowell, this dual aspect of experiences allows us to find a resting place between the two unsatisfactory positions referred to above. As we mature and learn to speak a language, we acquire the ability to use concepts. This is a completely natural process, what he calls “naturalized platonism”, as opposed to an otherworldly “rampant platonism”.  (3/31/10)