http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5122&cn=135
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Neil M. Gorsuch: The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
Read my review on the Metapsychology site:
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Hilary Putnam: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein.
Hilary Putnam
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life:
Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008.
Pp. 136.
US$19.95 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35133-3).
(My review will soon appear in Philosophy in Review)
Putnam is famously willing to change his opinions and preoccupations. This book is born of one such transformation: Putnam’s turn towards Judaism. Its brief autobiographical introduction tells us that the process began when Putnam’s older son announced that he wanted to celebrate his upcoming bar mitzvah, a request that brought the family to services held at Harvard’s Hillel House and eventually resulted in Putnam’s praying on a daily basis and teaching a course in Jewish philosophy. That course brought Putnam into contact with the works of three leading Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, Franz Rozensweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas, and helped him ‘reconcile’ his apparently contradictory Jewish and philosophical ‘sides’ (6). He came to interpret the ideas of those thinkers in a manner sympathetic to the approach to religion he found in the later Wittgenstein. Inspired by his recently acquired yet profound appreciation for that triad of Jewish (and definitely continental!) philosophers, Putnam set out to write a book which would ‘help the general reader, especially the general reader who would go and read one or more of these thinkers, to understand the strange concepts and terms that appear in their works, and to avoid common mistakes in reading them’ (8). Considering how short the book is, Putnam can only be congratulated for the remarkable extent to which it achieves his goals.
The first chapter, ‘Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein’, argues that Rosenzweig shared Wittgenstein’s distaste for systematic philosophy as well as his understanding that a religion should be thought of as a way of life rather than a theory about the world. Putnam explains how Rosenzweig rejected not only both essentialism and nominalism, but also the mindset that leads to the adoption of such doctrines. It is fascinating to see how he brings his analytic background into the discussion. If Derek Parfitt can be mentioned in connection with Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (a short book by Rosenzweig which Putnam suggests should be read before the magnum opus, The Star of Redemption), the Messiah’s arrival must be nigh! Stanley Cavell’s ideas are mobilized to explain that, for Rosenzweig, God’s presence must be acknowledged rather than proven. The chapter goes on to explain Rosenzweig’s call for a ‘new thinking’ that is organically connected with life as it is lived (and more particularly, with life as lived in a Jewish ritual framework). The chapter concludes with Putnam’s criticism of Rosenzweig’s negative opinion of religions other than Judaism and Christianity.
Discussion of Rosenzweig continues into the next chapter, ‘Rosenzweig on Revelation and Romance’, which takes on several major themes from the Star of Redemption and offers important advice about how it should be read. As is the case with Buber and Levinas, Rosenzweig is concerned to square the universal ethical values that are foundational for Judaism with its more particularistic and communal aspects. Putnam may have slipped at one point in this chapter (44) by attributing great significance to what may have been a simple error in Rosenzweig’s recollection of the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. For a moment he reads The Star of Redemption with the obsession for detail applied by Leo Strauss to the Guide for the Perplexed.
Chapter 3 is largely devoted to getting people to interpret Martin Buber’s I and Thou correctly. Putnam efficiently warns of various pitfalls that lie in wait for the novice reader, pointing out difficulties in the translation of several key terms from German to English. He reminds us that Buber is a ‘moral perfectionist’ rather than someone interested in setting down practical rules of conduct, and that Buber does not claim all ‘I — Thou’ relationships to be necessarily good or all ‘I-It’ relationships to be bad. He insists that Buber was not concerned solely with inter-human relations — he was serious when he wrote about God. Appropriately, Putnam supplies a neat reformulation of Buber’s theology — in less than eighty words!
I remember reading somewhere that Putnam once said Levinas was an important philosopher, but that he suffered from a ‘speech defect’, i.e., a difficulty in expressing ideas clearly. The chapter on Levinas goes a long way towards resolving that problem by offering a clear restatement of some of his main themes, including the priority of ethics over metaphysics, radical responsibility towards the ‘Other’, and Levinas’ relationship to Jewish tradition. Helpful comments are made regarding several of Levinas’ more obscure tropes: ‘face’, ‘trace’ and ‘height’. In a very clever expository move meant to help out analytic philosophers, Putnam attempts to demystify Levinas’ relationship to Husserl and Heidegger by pointing out similarities and links between continental phenomenology and the ideas of Rudolf Carnap. It is refreshing to see that while Putnam has great respect for Levinas, he is also willing to conclude the chapter with some powerful criticisms of the master. Against Levinas’ demand for asymmetrical ‘infinite responsibility’ towards the Other, Putnam reminds us that, ‘[i]t is Aristotle who taught us that to love others one must be able to love oneself’ (99).
Like the Introduction, the Afterword to this book will be of special interest to Putnam-watchers. While pleading that ‘I do not for one moment delude myself into thinking that my own reflections.. . . are deep religious philosophy in the way that the writings I have been discussing are profound,’ Putnam goes on to locate his own ‘current religious standpoint’ as ‘somewhere between John Dewey in A Common Faith and Martin Buber’ (100). While rejecting the standard supernatural elements of traditional Judaism, Putnam is unwilling to do without some picture of God as a person, ‘which need not be “taken literally”, but is still far more valuable than any metaphysical concept of an impersonal God, let alone a God who is “totally other”’ (102). The Afterword concludes with a useful summary of the main differences of opinion between the book’s protagonists, but it also points to their broad similarity when contrasted with the main competing strategy for squaring Judaism with naturalism — Maimonides’ program of negative theology.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College, Israel
Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life:
Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2008.
Pp. 136.
US$19.95 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-35133-3).
(My review will soon appear in Philosophy in Review)
Putnam is famously willing to change his opinions and preoccupations. This book is born of one such transformation: Putnam’s turn towards Judaism. Its brief autobiographical introduction tells us that the process began when Putnam’s older son announced that he wanted to celebrate his upcoming bar mitzvah, a request that brought the family to services held at Harvard’s Hillel House and eventually resulted in Putnam’s praying on a daily basis and teaching a course in Jewish philosophy. That course brought Putnam into contact with the works of three leading Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, Franz Rozensweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas, and helped him ‘reconcile’ his apparently contradictory Jewish and philosophical ‘sides’ (6). He came to interpret the ideas of those thinkers in a manner sympathetic to the approach to religion he found in the later Wittgenstein. Inspired by his recently acquired yet profound appreciation for that triad of Jewish (and definitely continental!) philosophers, Putnam set out to write a book which would ‘help the general reader, especially the general reader who would go and read one or more of these thinkers, to understand the strange concepts and terms that appear in their works, and to avoid common mistakes in reading them’ (8). Considering how short the book is, Putnam can only be congratulated for the remarkable extent to which it achieves his goals.
The first chapter, ‘Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein’, argues that Rosenzweig shared Wittgenstein’s distaste for systematic philosophy as well as his understanding that a religion should be thought of as a way of life rather than a theory about the world. Putnam explains how Rosenzweig rejected not only both essentialism and nominalism, but also the mindset that leads to the adoption of such doctrines. It is fascinating to see how he brings his analytic background into the discussion. If Derek Parfitt can be mentioned in connection with Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (a short book by Rosenzweig which Putnam suggests should be read before the magnum opus, The Star of Redemption), the Messiah’s arrival must be nigh! Stanley Cavell’s ideas are mobilized to explain that, for Rosenzweig, God’s presence must be acknowledged rather than proven. The chapter goes on to explain Rosenzweig’s call for a ‘new thinking’ that is organically connected with life as it is lived (and more particularly, with life as lived in a Jewish ritual framework). The chapter concludes with Putnam’s criticism of Rosenzweig’s negative opinion of religions other than Judaism and Christianity.
Discussion of Rosenzweig continues into the next chapter, ‘Rosenzweig on Revelation and Romance’, which takes on several major themes from the Star of Redemption and offers important advice about how it should be read. As is the case with Buber and Levinas, Rosenzweig is concerned to square the universal ethical values that are foundational for Judaism with its more particularistic and communal aspects. Putnam may have slipped at one point in this chapter (44) by attributing great significance to what may have been a simple error in Rosenzweig’s recollection of the biblical story of the binding of Isaac. For a moment he reads The Star of Redemption with the obsession for detail applied by Leo Strauss to the Guide for the Perplexed.
Chapter 3 is largely devoted to getting people to interpret Martin Buber’s I and Thou correctly. Putnam efficiently warns of various pitfalls that lie in wait for the novice reader, pointing out difficulties in the translation of several key terms from German to English. He reminds us that Buber is a ‘moral perfectionist’ rather than someone interested in setting down practical rules of conduct, and that Buber does not claim all ‘I — Thou’ relationships to be necessarily good or all ‘I-It’ relationships to be bad. He insists that Buber was not concerned solely with inter-human relations — he was serious when he wrote about God. Appropriately, Putnam supplies a neat reformulation of Buber’s theology — in less than eighty words!
I remember reading somewhere that Putnam once said Levinas was an important philosopher, but that he suffered from a ‘speech defect’, i.e., a difficulty in expressing ideas clearly. The chapter on Levinas goes a long way towards resolving that problem by offering a clear restatement of some of his main themes, including the priority of ethics over metaphysics, radical responsibility towards the ‘Other’, and Levinas’ relationship to Jewish tradition. Helpful comments are made regarding several of Levinas’ more obscure tropes: ‘face’, ‘trace’ and ‘height’. In a very clever expository move meant to help out analytic philosophers, Putnam attempts to demystify Levinas’ relationship to Husserl and Heidegger by pointing out similarities and links between continental phenomenology and the ideas of Rudolf Carnap. It is refreshing to see that while Putnam has great respect for Levinas, he is also willing to conclude the chapter with some powerful criticisms of the master. Against Levinas’ demand for asymmetrical ‘infinite responsibility’ towards the Other, Putnam reminds us that, ‘[i]t is Aristotle who taught us that to love others one must be able to love oneself’ (99).
Like the Introduction, the Afterword to this book will be of special interest to Putnam-watchers. While pleading that ‘I do not for one moment delude myself into thinking that my own reflections.. . . are deep religious philosophy in the way that the writings I have been discussing are profound,’ Putnam goes on to locate his own ‘current religious standpoint’ as ‘somewhere between John Dewey in A Common Faith and Martin Buber’ (100). While rejecting the standard supernatural elements of traditional Judaism, Putnam is unwilling to do without some picture of God as a person, ‘which need not be “taken literally”, but is still far more valuable than any metaphysical concept of an impersonal God, let alone a God who is “totally other”’ (102). The Afterword concludes with a useful summary of the main differences of opinion between the book’s protagonists, but it also points to their broad similarity when contrasted with the main competing strategy for squaring Judaism with naturalism — Maimonides’ program of negative theology.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College, Israel
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
David Shoemaker: Personal Identity and Ethics - A Brief Introduction
Read my review on the Metapsychology site:
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4963&cn=394
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Irving Singer: Philosophy of Love: A Partial Summing-Up
Read my review on the Metapsychology site:
http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4906&cn=394
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Colin McGinn - Mindf*cking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation
This review will appear in Philosophy in Review
Colin McGinn Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation. Stockfield: Acumen 2008. Pp. 76. $24.95 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-1-84465-114-6).
Deja-vu! A respected analytic philosopher publishes a medium length paper as a tiny yet self-standing hardcover book. In it he analyses a folk-epistemological term whose obscenity allows it also to serve as the book’s provocative and eye-catching title.
Is McGinn’s book simply his attempt to gain the fifteen minutes of celebrity enjoyed by Harry Frankfurt when the essay ‘Bullshit’ was republished as the overpriced nanobook, Bullshit? The question is unavoidable, but out of fairness I shall address that comparison only after discussing the book’s actual content.
What, then, is the meaning of ‘mindfucking’? The term usually (but only usually, as we shall see) refers to the uninvited and malevolent manipulation of someone’s mind and beliefs through illegitimate, non-rational, emotion-based techniques. Such techniques prey upon the particular psychological weaknesses of their intended victims and also require their practitioners to engage in a preliminary process of ‘seduction’ in which the confidence of the victim is gained and his or her resistance worn away. Mindfucking is an especially reprehensible form of deception because, unlike simple lying or ‘bullshitting’ (in Frankfurt’s sense of speech completely untethered from considerations of truth and untruth), it intrinsically involves the deliberate infliction of grave psychological harm upon its victims. McGinn is exactly on target when he mobilizes Iago’s manipulation of Othello as the classic illustration of these phenomena. When carried out by collectives or institutions, mindfucking is related to the all-too-familiar practices of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda.
For better or worse, it appears that the term ‘mindfucking’ is not an entirely unambiguous. McGinn insists that ‘the meaning of “mindfuck” is not exclusively negative; the phrase is sometimes used to describe the positive sensation involved in having, or in being presented with, some striking new idea, or in having some sort of agreeably life-altering experience’ (5). This assertion makes one wonder why McGinn is so eager to promote a term whose inherent ambiguity is bound to promote confusion, especially when the phrase ‘to fuck with someone’s mind’ can usually be replaced without loss of meaning with the clearly negative but admittedly less titillating expression, ‘to mess with someone’s mind’. In any event, we learn that certain films (Fight Club!), Kuhnian paradigm shifts, and even romantic love might count as mindfucks in this non-pejorative sense. However, the concluding pages of the book assure us that it is not itself a mindfuck, but rather merely an essay on mindfucking that ‘will have served its purpose if it alerts the reader to a phenomenon on which it is advisable to have a clear grip’ (76).
So: is this a worthwhile book or just a Bullshit wannabe? McGinn must certainly be aware that people are bound to make comparisons; in fact, he makes constant references to Frankfurt’s work, starting from the very opening sentence of his preface. Unfortunately for McGinn, while Bullshit is actually the shorter of the two works, its philosophical and literary references are more intriguing -- and numerous -- than those found in Mindfucking. Bullshit also contains the germ of a theory of the prevalence of bullshit in our day, while McGinn has basically nothing to say about factors affecting the frequency with which mindfucking occurs in contemporary society. Most importantly, in Bullshit Frankfurt brings to light a new epistemological category, while people have long been aware of mindfucking, even if they lacked an obscene term with which to speak of it. A simple Google-search for 'psychological manipulation' will produce countless articles on what McGinn calls 'mind-fucking'. How great would have been the loss to philosophy if McGinn had used the book's subtitle as its main title: A Critique of Mental Manipulation?
Sometimes McGinn seems bored with his topic; he dutifully cranks out a workmanlike and predictable analysis of a not especially promising concept. It is disappointing that given the tremendous amount of new research in cognitive science taking place today, McGinn could find nothing in its results worth mentioning when writing an essay about psychological manipulation. Such practical information would have helped readers learn how to escape the clutches of potential mindfuckers.
If McGinn’s little book draws new readers into the philosophical audience, more power to him. However, the whole affair strikes me as unworthy of his considerable philosophical talents.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Colin McGinn Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation. Stockfield: Acumen 2008. Pp. 76. $24.95 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-1-84465-114-6).
Deja-vu! A respected analytic philosopher publishes a medium length paper as a tiny yet self-standing hardcover book. In it he analyses a folk-epistemological term whose obscenity allows it also to serve as the book’s provocative and eye-catching title.
Is McGinn’s book simply his attempt to gain the fifteen minutes of celebrity enjoyed by Harry Frankfurt when the essay ‘Bullshit’ was republished as the overpriced nanobook, Bullshit? The question is unavoidable, but out of fairness I shall address that comparison only after discussing the book’s actual content.
What, then, is the meaning of ‘mindfucking’? The term usually (but only usually, as we shall see) refers to the uninvited and malevolent manipulation of someone’s mind and beliefs through illegitimate, non-rational, emotion-based techniques. Such techniques prey upon the particular psychological weaknesses of their intended victims and also require their practitioners to engage in a preliminary process of ‘seduction’ in which the confidence of the victim is gained and his or her resistance worn away. Mindfucking is an especially reprehensible form of deception because, unlike simple lying or ‘bullshitting’ (in Frankfurt’s sense of speech completely untethered from considerations of truth and untruth), it intrinsically involves the deliberate infliction of grave psychological harm upon its victims. McGinn is exactly on target when he mobilizes Iago’s manipulation of Othello as the classic illustration of these phenomena. When carried out by collectives or institutions, mindfucking is related to the all-too-familiar practices of indoctrination, brainwashing, and propaganda.
For better or worse, it appears that the term ‘mindfucking’ is not an entirely unambiguous. McGinn insists that ‘the meaning of “mindfuck” is not exclusively negative; the phrase is sometimes used to describe the positive sensation involved in having, or in being presented with, some striking new idea, or in having some sort of agreeably life-altering experience’ (5). This assertion makes one wonder why McGinn is so eager to promote a term whose inherent ambiguity is bound to promote confusion, especially when the phrase ‘to fuck with someone’s mind’ can usually be replaced without loss of meaning with the clearly negative but admittedly less titillating expression, ‘to mess with someone’s mind’. In any event, we learn that certain films (Fight Club!), Kuhnian paradigm shifts, and even romantic love might count as mindfucks in this non-pejorative sense. However, the concluding pages of the book assure us that it is not itself a mindfuck, but rather merely an essay on mindfucking that ‘will have served its purpose if it alerts the reader to a phenomenon on which it is advisable to have a clear grip’ (76).
So: is this a worthwhile book or just a Bullshit wannabe? McGinn must certainly be aware that people are bound to make comparisons; in fact, he makes constant references to Frankfurt’s work, starting from the very opening sentence of his preface. Unfortunately for McGinn, while Bullshit is actually the shorter of the two works, its philosophical and literary references are more intriguing -- and numerous -- than those found in Mindfucking. Bullshit also contains the germ of a theory of the prevalence of bullshit in our day, while McGinn has basically nothing to say about factors affecting the frequency with which mindfucking occurs in contemporary society. Most importantly, in Bullshit Frankfurt brings to light a new epistemological category, while people have long been aware of mindfucking, even if they lacked an obscene term with which to speak of it. A simple Google-search for 'psychological manipulation' will produce countless articles on what McGinn calls 'mind-fucking'. How great would have been the loss to philosophy if McGinn had used the book's subtitle as its main title: A Critique of Mental Manipulation?
Sometimes McGinn seems bored with his topic; he dutifully cranks out a workmanlike and predictable analysis of a not especially promising concept. It is disappointing that given the tremendous amount of new research in cognitive science taking place today, McGinn could find nothing in its results worth mentioning when writing an essay about psychological manipulation. Such practical information would have helped readers learn how to escape the clutches of potential mindfuckers.
If McGinn’s little book draws new readers into the philosophical audience, more power to him. However, the whole affair strikes me as unworthy of his considerable philosophical talents.
Berel Dov Lerner
Western Galilee College
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Michael Ruse: Evolution and Religion, A Dialogue
My review can be found on the Metapsychology site: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4763&cn=167
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
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