On Liberty
On Liberty
On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill (originally published 1859, 3rd ed 1864).
I’ll bet the first thing that struck you when looking at this selection was the publication date: 1859. Well that’s over one-hundred and fifty years ago. How can anything that old be relevant, interesting, or even readable to a generation use to texting? As one about one-third that age, I would demure, but first, here was my introduction. A blogger of about half my age posted a lengthy discussion of why Mill was not being inconsistent when he held that the state had the right to regulate or ban prostitution. It was pretty close, the blogger almost sided with George Carlin against Mill. Interest piqued yet?
So just who is John Stuart Mill, anyway? Mill was, beside Jeremy Bentham perhaps the most prominent advocate of an ethical system called utilitarianism. If you don’t know what utilitarianism is, you ought to. Just as most modern people spout out the ideas of Rene Descartes—even if they have not the foggiest notion of who Descartes was—as if they were just obvious common sense, most of us are utilitarians to a certain extent without knowing it and would find it to the point of incredulity to learn that anyone ever had to argue for the position. Arguing against the position that one ought to act with a mind towards doing the most good for the most people would seem akin to arguing that breathing is bad for one’s health.
So, I’m advocating that you should pick up something that states the obvious, right? Well, no. For those of us who think we know what utilitarianism is, what is interesting about On Liberty is the extent that Mill refines, and to a certain extent strays from, utilitarianism. It is refreshing to have one’s conceits upset.
Besides, there is something in On Liberty for just about anyone who has more than two neurons to scrape together. Any attentive reader will alternatively cheer at his clear common sense or scorn is naivete. On the political spectrum Mill addresses everyone from Socialism, to Conservatism, to Free Market Capitalism. Are you a libertarian or Tea Party sympathizer? Mill has something for you. You think that Tea Partiers are nuts are at least obnoxious? On Liberty will provide some good talking points. How about arguments about the size of government, the New Atheists, the Religious Right? Yes, yes and yes. All sides will find something to warm up to. About the only people I can think of who would not find On Liberty thoroughly engaging would be members of PETA. Why PETA? Read the book and let me know—and whether you agree with my off-the-cuff remark.
Add to this that Mill is basically a conversational writer. Mill can start with defending free speech and you as the reader can ask about whether there should be any restraint on practicing what a person preaches? Mill gets to your question and will even insert your question into the essay. (Not that he is 100% on target. I don’t know the last time I asked about the 19th Century Maine Acts, but one could just substitute the PATRIOT Act to the same affect). Besides, who can resist a book that includes sex, drugs, and rock and roll (OK, may not rock and roll)
Persons: Human and Divine
Persons: Human and Divine, edited by Peter van Inwagen and Dean Zimmerman (Oxford 2007).
Human beings are said to be persons, but just what is a person? What constitutes a person? Does it make any sense to ask of what a person is composed? Are human beings the only things that count as persons? Are there fundamentally different classes of persons? If so, what would they share for different classes to count as persons? Is God, assuming there is a divine being, a person? What do Christians mean that God is three persons with one nature but that Jesus Christ is one person with two natures?
Persons is an anthology of philosophical theology which grew out of a workshop sponsored by the Pew Christian Scholars Program in 2004. The essays—which are all original with this title—are individually engaging and, as such anthologies go, unusually coherent taken together. The essays themselves are neatly grouped together as Idealism, Dualism, Materialism, Embodiment and the Value of Persons, and Personhood and Christian Doctrine.
The essays in the first three groups (idealism, dualism, and materialism) provide a backdrop to a perennial philosophical problem and one that has been uniquely framed in Western intellectual life since Descartes. Two essays on idealism (the theory that at the end of the day, everything is mental in nature) lead off the discussion, perhaps because the editors knew that materialists (those who maintain that the ultimate constituents of this world are material) and dualists (those who hold that the world included two fundamental substances, mental and physical) would direct most of their criticism at each other and more or less allow the idealists to stand in some dark and forgotten corner.
Still, the two essays on idealism are well worth reading. Robert M. Adams leads off with a very cogent explanation of what idealism is, what its intuitive appeal might be and some of the varieties of idealism. Howard Robinson’s essay “The Self and Time” provides an intriguing picture of one’s self to time that seems to draw parallel’s to Aquinas’ notion of the soul’s extension to the body. Aquinas held that the soul in its entirety occupied each part of the body. Robinson takes a similar line toward the self and time (those interested in the difference between enduring and perduring objects or temporal parts might find this essay stimulating).
Dualism makes up a plurality of the essays in Persons. John Hawthorne leads off with detailing the challenges facing substance or Cartesian dualism. Interestingly no one in the anthology pays much attention to the idea of property dualism. Aside from a brief characterization by Peter van Inwagen that property dualism is a confusion, it receives no mention, let alone defense. Alvin Plantinga has an entry which is not so much of a defense of dualism (which he takes as prima facia good sense), but a critique of materialism. Unfortunately, a number of the critiques (for instance, Plantinga employs Leibniz’s Mill analogy) do not automatically support dualism and others serve mostly to illustrate the difficulty with any theory of interaction between mind and body. For instance, Plantinga notes that God is said to be immaterial and yet interacts with material objects, so dualism shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. However, how God might interact does not immediately seem to apply to human beings nor do such illustrations help show how a body and a mind interact. Finding a basis may come at the cost of radically redefining mind or body or both. Richard Swinburne takes on the issue of whether mental properties simply supervene on physical ones. As is typical, Swinburne begins with a boatload of fine distinctions that are not normally considered, which then brings together. The reader may wish to sketch these distinctions out and then see which to take issue with after seeing how they fit in. W. D. Hart and Takashi Yagisawa provide a very short essay on how to think of disembodied minds interacting, while Hong Yu Wong takes on the problem of mind/body interaction head on. Wong has a habit of proposing and disposing of just about every theory that has come down the pike.
Peter van Inwagen is not so much interested in defending materialism than his particular version of materialism. Along the way he would seem to take issue with most materialists. Van Inwagen would affirm that persons are material substances but deny buildings, lakes, roads, or any number of common objects are substances of any kind, material or otherwise. Other materialists in this anthology seem to reply with stares of utter incredulity. Hud Hudson address the question of whether a materialist can assert that human beings are essentially persons and not animals
Philip Quinn and Lynne Rudder Baker each turn to the question of the value of the embodied person. Quinn looks primarily at the integrity of what it is to be a person, while Baker is more interested in the person’s place in the natural order. Incidentally, Baker is one of those materialists who cannot help but throw one of those aforementioned stares in van Inwangen’s direction.
The last four essays deal with Christian doctrine. Trenton Merriks’ essay attempts to show how the various notions of mind/body relationships might bear upon the doctrine of the Incarnation. Merriks displays both a depth to the history of the doctrine and takes in a fair bit of the philosophical territory as well. This is an essay should disabuse both those who think the relationship between Christ human and divine natures is obvious that who would dismiss it out of hand. Peter Forrest tackles the question of personal survival after death. One should have a taste for both the more speculative works of physics and modal logic when diving into this essay. Michael C. Rea takes on the question of human responsibility and the doctrine of Original Sin. As with Merriks’ essay, Rea moves easily between theology and philosophy. Finally, Brian Leftow, who as written a number of defenses of the so-called Latin view of the Trinity (where each of the Persons is just God as opposed the the Social view where each Person is seen as an individual who is God) explores what it means to be a person given a Latin perspective.
Persons is not an easy read. It expects some background in both theology and contemporary analytic philosophy. However, the prose is lively, even conversational at times. There is something in Persons for everyone from the advanced undergraduate to the professional philosophers and theologians to interested amateur.
The Logic of Alice
The Logic of Alice: Clear Thinking in Wonderland, by Bernard M. Patten (Prometheus 2009)
A man who doesn’t believe in Robinson Crusoe . . . is a man with a loose screw in his understanding. or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit! Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.
The Moonstone
Besides being near contemporaries, what does Betteredge in the Moonstone have in common with Alice and her adventures in Wonderland (Why is raven like a writing desk?)? All in good time.
I grew up not with the book by Lewis Carroll, but the Disney cartoon. I suppose my youngest child will grow up on the live action version. Still even then, I knew many episodes quite well and was easily convinced as an undergraduate that Alice’s adventures, far from being examples of nonsense were indeed filled with logical arguments and fallacies. (at this point I should hasten to add that I did eventually read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for myself, and yes it is a logician’s paradise). So then, imagine my delight at coming across a book that was reputed to outline all subtlety of reasoned argument in the mist of utter confusion.
Now imagine my utter disappointment. The Logic of Alice is a sprawling work that says more about its author than about clear thinking itself. We get his opinions of religion, politics, science, sex, child-rearing, ethics and a host of other topics. Yes logic and sound reasoning pervade, but often Alice’s encounters seem to be more of a launch-pad for what Patten deems to be clear thinking than the problems that actually confront Alice. Read the rest of this entry »
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou, art by Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna (Bloomsbury 2009).
There is a story of a newly minted Ph.D. entering her first position as an assistant professor of philosophy. The department chair assigns her (as one might expect) to teach a basic course in the history of philosophy. “Well,” the new assistant returned with some hesitation “I suppose I could go back to Early Russell.” It is a bit of an exaggeration, but there was a time with the Anglo-American (or Analytic) School of philosophy that it seemed generally assumed that–with the possible exception of David Hume–philosophy, real philosophy, hadn’t really been practiced until the advent of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. Logicomix is a graphic novel of the world of Bertrand Russell.
A graphic novel, a comic book about a philosopher, you ask? Well, why not? First of all, Russell was not only a philosopher and public intellectual, he was an out-sized character. While Logicomix leaves out a fair bit of Russell’s life prior to World War II (and includes nothing thereafter), what it does include of Russell’s personal life will show that a philosopher does not have to be dull. Read the rest of this entry »
Haze
Haze, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., Jacket art by Sparth
Haze by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (Tor, 2009)
Modesitt is a prodigious writer of science fiction and fantasy. In fact, this is not the first time one of his works has made its way into one of these reviews. Most of what this reviewer has encountered is certainly enjoyable, though Modesitt does tend to follow certain recipes that become predictable. Haze avoids most of the pitfalls and delivers a worthy afternoon’s diversion.
Modesitt has chosen to set this plot only a couple thousand years or so into the future. More intriguing is that with the wonders of biochemical analysis, his main character, Keir Roget, ties this setting to memories that are but a century or so in our future.
The story, however, revolves around Roget’s mission to a mysterious planet known only to the security services of the Earth Federation as Haze. The planet is so named for the myriad of nanobots that orbit the planet as some massive cloud or shield, making any activity of the surface impossible to see, except for having an agent attempt to harrow the shields and report back. Read the rest of this entry »
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe (Voice 2009)
Is The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible on your reading list? Want to know what a steeplejack is? Nostalgic for New England? Then this is the book for you. Conceived while the author was studying for her doctoral qualifying exams, Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane traces the history of one family’s book of spells from 1690s Massachusetts to the present day. Adding interest to the text is Howe’s own history – she is a descendant of Elizabeth Proctor, who survived the Salem witch trials, and Elizabeth Howe, who did not. Read the rest of this entry »
Nuclear Jellyfish
Nuclear Jellyfish, by Tim Dorsey (William Morrow 2009)
Nuclear Jellyfish is my first Time Dorsey novel, but it won’t be my last. I haven’t laughed out loud like this reading a book since, well, I don’t know when. I laughed so hard I couldn’t get the words out to tell my husband why I was laughing, which may reveal something about my sense of humor as this book will never be made into a movie for the Hallmark Hall of Fame Collection. Oh, no. Serge, the main character, is back with his latest get-rich-quick scheme involving tourism reviews for Internet travel services, only no one has warned the travel services that Serge sees it as his solemn civic duty to provide Florida tourists with tips on how not to get killed while on vacation. Unsurprisingly, Serge’s web presence attracts the attention of Agent Mahoney, back from another involuntary mental commitment, and the chase up and down the Florida coast is on! Read the rest of this entry »
Imager
Imager, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. (TOR 2009) [B&T Books] PS3563.O264 I43 2009.
I will be the first to admit that I do not much care for the fantasy genre (The Lord of the Rings and the Thomas Covenant series don’t count, being more of a recasting of myth). There are some writers, however, that are so able elevate a story from the contrived to a compelling alternative reality. Modesitt is in such company.
Imager covers the early career of one Rhennthyl, the son of prosperous wool manufacturer from the city of L’Excelsis in the country of Solidar. Modesitt very quickly establishes that this setting is not in some mythical but undefined past or a place with no real history at all. Solidar and its neighboring states have a definite history and Rhennthyl’s time feels very much like that surrounding the thirty years war of Europe. Solidar itself is governed by a Council divided by between various guilds and large land owners. Even the technology feels as if it were on the cusp of the industrial revolution (the sole exception here would be that steam railways seem to have been well established, but that is not much of a stretch). Modesitt manages to build this in such a way that it is utterly convincing and compelling and yet does not leave one at sea with culture shock. What sets Rhennthyl’s world apart from ours is the existence of two groups the Pharsi and Imagers. The Pharsi are a separate ethnic group that seems to have been long settled in Solidar, and some of whom have the gift of second sight. Imagersare more widely dispersed, and have the rare talent to produce that which they can clearly imagine. This talent could well put any reader off as mere magic, but while Modesitt does not explain imaging (given the general state of knowledge available to Rhennthyl’s people, one cannot expect it), it is clear that it is taken a natural and physical phenomena and its practitioners do not invoke some mystical underpinning. Indeed Rhennthyl lives in a skeptical age, for while Solidar and it neighboring states each have established religions, a fair number of its citizens do not take them too seriously. Imagers and the Pharsi, are taken seriously. The Pharsi are discriminated against as exotic outsiders and Imagers are universally distrusted and feared, as leapers were feared in medieval times. It does not take much to see that Rhennthyl is rather taken with the Pharsi. Read the rest of this entry »
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday, by Ralph McInerny (St. Martin’s Minotaur 2008)
McInerny has done it yet again with another fine Father Dowling novel that has more to do with the mysteries of an embodied but fallible faith than with mere detective story. Ash Wednesday superficially begins with the observance if its namesake. However, Agatha Christi observed, the crime (normally murder) is really the end of the story. The detective simply unwinds the tangle. The mystery is in the past. So too here. The story opens with one Nathaniel Greene receiving the imposition of ashes and later confessing to Father Dowling that he is not Catholic. There is much more to things than all that. As we quickly learn, Nathaniel and his wife were communicants of St. Hilary’s long before Father Dowling was its rector. Nathaniel’s long absence is due to a long stay at the Joliet prison for the murder of his wife.
Since this bit of information is given from the beginning, any mystery reader who is still among the living would immediately suspect the veracity of Nathaniel’s conviction and would be rightly disappointed if this were all there was to solve. McInerny does not disappoint. As is typical with Father Dowling Mysteries, one begins to wonder when an actual murder will take place and what, if anything everything that has come before has to do with the murder when it does finally come to pass. Also included are McInerny’s Fox River regulars who take a decidedly prominent role in this novel. In fact, Father Dowling at one point confides that he has not kept up with events. The reader who hotly agrees with Dowling here is being over-hasty and will eventually have to repent. Only at the very end, do we discover that it is Father Dowling that ties together far more than the rest of us were even looking for.
Escape from Hell
Escape from Hell, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (TOR 2009) [B&T Books] PS3564.I9 E83 2009.
Allen Carpenter is still in Hell. Those who have read Niven and Pournelle’s Inferno, one might have expected him to at least be somewhere in Purgatory by this time. For everyone else, Escape is Niven and Pournelle’s follow-up on their updated prose adaptation of Dante’s Inferno. That first effort proved, if nothing else, a catalyst in renewing interest in Dante.
As unseemly as it may sound, Hell is better the second time around. Inferno dealt with two questions, what does it take to get one to believe something one firmly holds to be impossible and whether Hell just or just sadistic. Most of Inferno is spent with the atheist Allen Carpenter (also known as Allen Carptentier) coming to grips with the fact that he is really dead and he really is is in Hell. The question of justice hung more as a rhetorical device to support his skepticism than as a true investigation However, epistemic angst goes only so far and it sometimes left Inferno feeling like a travelogue of the damned. Escape, while not it may not answer the question, at least engages the reader in what justice could possibly be served in every circle of Hell. Read the rest of this entry »
