Category Archives: Non-Fiction

Nietzsche’s Perspectivism by Steven D. Hales and Rex Welshon

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Nietzsche is generally credited with (or accused of) inventing or popularizing a philosophical view known as “perspectivism”. Philosophers, of course, disagree about what perspectivism is, but, roughly speaking, perspectivism is the idea that all knowledge and belief involves interpretation and all interpretation is carried out from a particular perspective. The fact that all of our ideas are bound up with some perspective or other is then taken to show that our ideas are somehow limited or unreliable. There is no perspective-free knowledge, science or morality. Another way of putting this claim is that we have no access to a “God’s-eye” view of the world.

Perspectivism seems to be one step away from relativism, which might be characterized as the view that no perspective is better than any other. Nietzsche believed that some perspectives are definitely better than others, which is why he was not a relativist.

Hales and Welshon discuss Nietzsche’s views on several different kinds of perspectivism, including perspectivism about truth, knowledge and morality. They also try to explain Nietzsche’s views about the fundamental nature of reality. Although Nietzsche severely criticized those metaphysicians who tried to characterize the world as it is “in itself”, he apparently believed that the world is composed of “quanta of power” and that every quantum of power is associated with a perspective. Hales and Welshon argue that this does not make Nietzsche a metaphysician. Maybe a better explanation is that these ideas came to Nietzsche late in life and are somewhat peripheral to his philosophy.  (3/11/12)

Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, translated by Stuart Woolf

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Primo Levi’s memoir of his time in the Auschwitz concentration camp was originally published with the title If This Is a Man. It is written in a matter-of-fact style. The facts speak for themselves.

Levi says that survival was mainly a question of luck, although the captives had some freedom of movement, which allowed many of them to “organize” ways to improve their chances.

Aside from the most obvious questions, this book raises some questions for the reader: How would I react to living in such conditions? How am I reacting to the conditions I’m living in now? 

Levi writes: “It is lucky that it is not windy today. Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy….Or it is raining, windy, and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium,…well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining”.  (3/1/12)

The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin

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Historians refer to the changes brought about by such luminaries as Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Boyle and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries as the “Scientific Revolution”. The science of the Greeks and Scholastics was replaced by something that looks like science as it’s practiced today.

The theme of this book is that the “Scientific Revolution” wasn’t as clear-cut as historians and philosophers often imply. The scientists of the time disagreed about how science should be conducted. For example, some questioned the value of experimentation. If an experiment contradicted received opinion, many concluded that the experiment was performed incorrectly. Robert Boyle thought that scientists should perform many experiments and describe them in great detail. He never expressed “Boyle’s Law” (pV = k) in mathematical terms. Isaac Newton thought that a single experiment was good enough to allow the mathematical formulation of a law of nature. 

Science was also generally considered to be the “handmaiden of religion”. Showing that nature operated like a vast machine was thought to be evidence of God’s supernatural powers and wisdom. We had to wait for Darwin to show how “mere chance” could write a chapter in the Book of Nature.  (2/9/12)

Relativism by Maria Baghramian

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Relativism is, roughly speaking, the idea that statements can be true or actions can be right for one person and not another, because people have different points of view, possibly because they grew up in different cultures or live in different societies. So you and I might be in similar circumstances, but if you belong to the Mafia, it might be right for you to beat up your competition, although it wouldn’t be right for me to do the same thing. 

There are many kinds of relativism. Professor Baghramian considers relativism about truth, rationality, logic, concepts and morality. She says that “we can admit one of the philosophical intuitions informing relativism: that our encounters with the world, our beliefs and judgments, are always perspectival” (p. 313). But she argues that some perspectives are better than others. The morality of the Red Cross is better than the morality of the Mafia, not just from her point of view or the Red Cross’s point of view, but in some objective, non-relativistic sense. 

Baghramian calls her view “pluralism”. She acknowledges the existence of various points of view, and agrees with the relativist that there is no way to choose between some of them, but believes that our common humanity allows us to see that some points of view are clearly better than others. 

I think that Professor Baghramian would agree that we cannot say that one perspective is better than another one, without speaking from some perspective or other. That’s why I think that “perspectivism” might be preferable to pluralism (and relativism). We each have our own physical perspective, and each of us can employ many different perspectives, that is, consider the world from different points of view.

From my single physical perspective, I can evaluate an idea from the perspective of morality, physics, practicality, simplicity, rationality or personal satisfaction. But any perspective can only be evaluated from some other perspective(s). That doesn’t mean that some perspectives are objectively better than others. But it does mean that we can offer reasons for preferring one to another.  (1/24/12)

Physicalism by Daniel Stoljar

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Professor Stoljar is the author of the article called “Physicalism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In that article, he explains that physicalism is the metaphysical view that everything in the universe is physical or material, i.e. that there is nothing in the world except stuff like matter and energy and arrangements of such stuff. This is opposed to other views, like the ancient claim by Thales that everything is made of water, or the more modern theory of Bishop Berkeley, who said that all of reality is mental. A physicalist, in particular, will deny that there are minds or souls that exist somehow independently of people’s living bodies. 

In his book called Physicalism, however, Stoljar argues that there is no way to state the doctrine of physicalism that will result in a view that is both physicalistic (“physicalism that deserves the name”) and true. Either we have to broaden our definition of “physicalism”, in which case it’s not really physicalism anymore, or we have to restrict our definition, in which case the world isn’t completely physicalistic. 

Stoljar presents lots of arguments for and against his position in great detail (too much detail for me anyway). The conclusion I reached, however, is that although it is difficult to offer a precise definition of physicalism that can deal with every imaginable counter-example (e.g. physics in an alternate universe), it is sufficiently clear what the physicalist position is. Scientists have been investigating the nature of reality at low levels (the subatomic) and high levels (the intergalactic) and cataloging what they’ve found. So far it seems that everything is made up of certain kinds of stuff (photons, quarks, dark energy, strings, whatever).

The physicalist view is that there’s nothing else floating around, in particular, no mental substances, souls, angels or unattached ideas. Stoljar says we can’t sensibly explain physicalism in terms of what there isn’t (he calls this the via negativa), but it seems to me that we can. The list of non-physicalistic things that we need to mention (e.g. souls and mental substances) is not as long as Stoljar suggests.  (1/2/12)