MOOCs and Sandel

There's more on all this here.

Where people are one

Blogging will be either non-existent or (probably) Asia-related for the next month or so, since I'll be traveling with a group of students.

Justice and "Justice"

Michael Sandel responds to the San Jose State University letter about his online lecture course. (If you haven't seen the original letter see here, here, here, here, and/or here for the link and some commentary.)

I think it's good that Sandel's lectures are available free online (see also the resources here). It's not good, though, if professors are turned into teaching assistants by administrators or politicians who demand that they teach Sandel's course instead of their own, or show his lectures instead of teaching their own classes. (I don't mean that it's bad to have students watch one on a day when you're not available to teach, or have students watch several specially selected segments if they seem helpful.)

What's less clear is the role of edX in all this. It's this that the people at SJSU seem most concerned about, but why it is happening is a mystery to me. Sandel just says that:

This year, we [who?] made a version of the course available on the edX platform. I know very little about the arrangements edX made with San Jose State University...

The edX version of the course is free. So what's the problem? Obviously the members of the Department of Philosophy at SJSU fear, probably rightly, that their jobs might be taken away from them or changed into something much less than they are now. And the fear is not selfish: they are concerned about the future of higher education. If Sandel is directly profiting from a deal with edX then I think they are right to aim their objections at him. But it's not clear to me whether he is or not. And if he is simply making recordings of his lectures, along with reading lists, discussion questions, etc., available to the world for free then I don't see that he is doing anything wrong at all. In fact I think he deserves much praise and gratitude.

On the other hand it is all a bit suspicious. Why have an edX version of the course at all if it's much the same as the already available free one? Why does Sandel say "we made a version of the course available on the edX platform" rather than, say, "I pointed out to all and sundry that the material was online and free"? It all seems rather fishy. But until I know more I don't feel able to judge the rights and wrongs of Sandel's actions.

Kids these days

In the last year or two I have come across (or perhaps only just now noticed) students who not only try to get away with not doing the assigned reading but who seem genuinely shocked at the idea that they would be expected to read it. This is not reading that is incidental to the course. On the contrary, the one or two students I have in mind (and it is certainly a minority) are people who wrote papers whose thesis was along the lines of "Martha Nussbaum's capabilities approach is wrong" without having read what Nussbaum says. But in the one case I have in mind (and perhaps it really was only one student, but that's like thinking you only have one cockroach when you see one in the kitchen) the student's reaction to getting a low grade on a paper like this (probably an F, but I don't remember) was roughly: What am I supposed to do? Read the thing?! (I let them re-write, by the way, so an F is not devastating to their final grade. In fact it's normal on a first draft.) That was a year ago but I'm still reeling.

And lately I've noticed students not seeming to get the idea of evidence, of supporting claims they want to make with empirical data or rational argument. I'm obviously going to have to spend more time explaining the need for, and value of, such things. But I wonder why this seems to be more of a problem now than it used to. It probably is partly me not explaining well enough what I'm looking for, but I don't think it can be just that. Students appear to be so used to not reading, not thinking, and just asserting their opinions that to some of them it simply goes without saying that this is what you do in an essay. It's not just that they haven't taken a philosophy course before and think that that's what philosophy is. So what's going on?

I can think of several things. One is that some courses are probably not very demanding because Chad must be entertained at all costs. Another is that many of my students have political loyalties that are not conducive to rigorous academic work. I have conservative students who are extremely intelligent, knowledgeable, and hard-working. But a lot of conservative politicians and propagandists discourage intelligence and knowledge (no doubt some liberal ones do too, but the problem is not equally distributed across the political spectrum), and I think the results are showing. And then there's this by Karen Swallow Prior:

But in the past decade or so, I have found that students are seldom if ever held accountable for or even actually expected to read the assigned texts. Years of their so-called "reading" is spent "making connections" between themselves and text or the world and the text, but the foundational step of actually reading the words on the page is neglected often to the point that actually reading the assignment isn't necessary: Students become skilled at responding to leading questions that solicit merely their opinions or experiences. And they apparently get decent, or even excellent, grades for doing so.

And not to criticize a book I haven't read, but it might not be a good sign that there is a popular textbook called Everything's an Argument. I wonder how many students are being taught that whatever they write is inevitably going to be an argument. Or that there is no such thing as truth. Or that there can be no reasoning about matters of value. Not just no mathematical proof (although they seem to have more faith in empirical evidence than logical demonstration), but no reasoning at all. At any rate, these seem to be extremely common beliefs. There might be versions of these ideas that are worth taking seriously, but the common undergraduate versions are not so sophisticated. It's almost as if the entire value of a philosophy course might consist in partially undoing the damage done by other courses. It's also as if I'm just a grumpy old man, of course.

Nameless horror

(More on object-oriented ontology and Wittgenstein. The post's title refers to HP Lovecraft, who was fond of the phrase. A search for "nameless horror" in these collected stories gets five hits.)

Brian Kim Stefans writes:

The one principle that is inarguably shared by these philosophers [i.e. "speculative realists"] is quite simple: they wish to retrieve philosophy from a tendency initiated, or at least made unavoidable, by the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that the subject (meaning a human being) can [n]ever know anything about the external world due to the very fact of subjectivity.

Surely many philosophers, including Wittgenstein, reject this skepticism. But there is more to speculative realism than this:

Harman’s philosophy displaces the mind→object relationship with that of object→object, the “mind” being just one object among many.     

Compare Chon Tejedor on the early Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein suggests that, given the fundamental contingency of facts, it is a source of profound wonder that any possible state should obtain as a fact. This sense of wonder arises in connection to all facts: physical facts (involving the rocks, plants, animals and human physical bodies we describe in language and think about) but also mental facts (i.e. our thoughts, desires, beliefs, emotions and, more broadly, our minds and empirical selves). Being clear in one's grasp of certain formal concepts involves being disposed to use signs in particular ways so as to reflect the fundamental contingency of facts. But this involves treating ourselves (i.e. human beings) as facts on a par, with respect to their contingency, with all other facts in the world.

Now back to Harman:

An idiosyncratic feature of Harman’s philosophy is that “objects” for him are not just things, and certainly not just natural things, but also concepts, imagined entities, and nearly any entity that can have some effect on reality for however long or short a time, on however large or small a scale, and at whatever level of availability to human perception or “science.” 

This is not a radically new idea. Compare Russell’s notion of a term in The Principles of Mathematics: 

Whatever may be an object of thought, or may occur in any true or false proposition, or can be counted as one, I call a term. This, then, is the widest word in the philosophical vocabulary. I shall use as synonymous with it the words unit, individual, and entity. … A man, a moment, a number, a class, a relation, a chimaera, or anything else that can be mentioned, is sure to be a term; and to deny that such and such a thing is a term must always be false. (p. 43) 

See also Frege: “Places, instants, stretches of time, logically considered, are objects,” p. 42— “On Sinn und Bedeutung” in The Frege Reader.  I speculate more about what the early Wittgenstein might have meant by 'objects' and, especially, 'things' here. 

So speculative realism does not sound all that incompatible with Wittgenstein's philosophy, except for its metaphysical ambitions. How does Lovecraft fit in? 

In Lovecraft’s version of reality, laws seem to function in ways that make our foundational certainties — Euclidean geometry, the private experience of dreams, the inviolable divisions between human, animal, plant, and the nonliving, etc. — merely contingent: just the way things appear to us, rather than absolute necessities.

This makes Lovecraft sound not so much anti-Kantian as a product of the post-Kantian world. Apparently what makes Lovecraft so great is that he takes the world to be weird, and he is not a linguistic idealist (nor someone who focuses on language rather than the world). Sounds like Musil. Or Wittgenstein (see the emphasis on contingency in the Tejedor quote above). (Or Kafka, for that matter. And many other people.) Wittgenstein certainly pays attention to language, but not because he's a linguistic idealist, and not because he isn't interested in life or the world.

Lovecraft seems Schopenhauerian, given his Kantian emphasis on the unknown but with a horrible, pessimistic twist. (He's also Shakespearean, or Macduffian, given this from Macbeth:

O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart

Cannot conceive nor name thee!

To use Harman's words, I would say that here "language is overloaded by a gluttonous excess" of negatives and iterations of 'horror.' But I digress.)

And Wittgenstein's ethics, or religious attitude, if you prefer, is rather Schopenhauerian too, though in a different way. Schopenhauer links art and genius with a kind of knowing that is independent of the principle of sufficient reason. There is little room for the principle of sufficient reason in Wittgenstein's philosophy, at least in the early Wittgenstein. The only necessity is logical necessity, so there is no reason sufficient to explain why things have to be as they are. Compare also the later Wittgenstein on the two identical-seeming seeds that produce different plants. Wittgenstein challenges the assumption that there must be some undetected difference in the seeds.

In short I quite like the sound of speculative realism, but mostly because it reminds me of Wittgenstein. I wonder whether the two could be brought fruitfully together. Perhaps I should investigate further.

How significant is Anscombe?

In a list of all time greats in moral philosophy she's in the top twenty.

Oslo, August 31st

About as cheery as Grave of the Fireflies but very much worth watching is this film by Joachim Trier. At one point the main character, Anders, gives as an example of a typical contemporary magazine article a Schopenhauerian take on Sex and the City. If you've seen it, it's then hard not to think of Alain de Botton's piece on Schopenhauer and nightclubs:

According to de Botton, people who think they are going to nightclubs just to dance, drink, and have fun are actually unconsciously driven by the will to live to seek opportunities for reproduction. The women in Sex and the City are presumably in the same boat. They all seem to want a man in some sense (perhaps just sex, perhaps just a friend (male or female), perhaps a husband, perhaps some other variation on this theme, depending on the character and her mood at the time), but never seem quite sure what it is that they want. The Schopenhauerian view, I take it, is that this quest is all quite pointless but more or less inevitable given our nature. We are driven by forces that we rarely see clearly and that are themselves blind. So we don't know what is going on, what we are chasing, except in vague terms. The underlying, meaningless truth is veiled from us.   

Anders takes a similar kind of view. Married life does not appeal to him, not surprisingly given the view of it that is presented to him. And endless casual relationships seem pointless. So he's stuck. Can art provide a way out? Well, he doesn't have much faith in either journalism or his chances of making it as a journalist. And he doesn't seem to consider other kinds of writing. What about movies? He doesn't try to make one, but if he did I imagine it would be rather like this one, the one about him. It doesn't seem nearly as superficial as the magazine articles he mocks, but it is apt that he might think of it that way. Everything's meaningless when you're in despair. 

That's a bit obscure, so here's another version. In this movie the idea of an essay on how Schopenhauer might regard Sex and the City is presented as a joke, but if you think about what such an essay might say it's actually pretty close to this movie itself. And that is not an indictment of the film but one of the things that makes it so neat.