Inbox - Edge of reason book - Other chapters from HTWT - HTWT book talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2Jx1akQQ7c What would I like to talk to Baggini about? - Impartiality in Singer / EA / Western thought - Areas we disagree - techno pessimism - Baggini thinking that global travel will get more expensive HTWT book talk Deadly sins of comparative philosophy: 1. Domesticating : translate into something familiar, assume it's the same. 2. Exoticise: completely alien, everyone so radically different that we can't learn from each other. 3. Essentialising: "men are taller than women" is about averages, tendencies. Not all men are taller than all women. Different emphases within diff traditions of thought. Harmony is not about uniformity. West tends to focus on freedom, mostly ignore harmony. China much more concerned with harmony. Note how adding more freedom might cause China to fall apart as a country. Arguably Western interventions in Middle East overrated freedom and underrated harmony. I'm not a relativist. But I think there is more than one way to live a good life, more than one way to arrange a good society. Mixing desk metaphor JB skeptical about abstract universal theories. Amartya Sen: the idea of justice. It's much better to focus on adjusting improving the real world rather than trying to realise a Platonic ideal. We have to keep experimenting. It's messy trial and error, which is not something that philosophers are too keen on. Unless you're David Hume. The self-image of Western philosophy is that it's not about tradition at all, it's not about belonging to a tradition, it's about following the argument where it leads, it's about using reason. It's universal. In other philosophies, there's more of an acknowledgement that this is a tradition of thought. And that if you're brought up in it, you have a certain affinity with it, almost loyalty to it, which is not objective, it's part of where you're from. Benign patriotism Vs malevolent nationalism. ## How the World Thinks Part 1: How the world knows Ch. 8: Conclusion **Truth-seekers and way-seekers.** Western philosophy is characteristically truth seeking. It seems to describe the basic structure of reality, logic, language, the mind. one example of this is an emphasis on science for science's sake. For truth-seekers, **disinterested learning is the best kind**, while **for way-seekers to be disinterested is as nonsensical as driving a car without caring where you end up**. The Chinese are predominantly way-seekers, who according to Chenyang Li, 'typically do not see truth as correspondence with objective fact in the world; rather they understand truth more as a way of being a good person, a good father, or a good son. For them, truth is not carved in stone, and there is no ultimate fixed order in the world.' Whereas Western truth is 'absolute, eternal and ultimately true', the Chinese Dao 'is not present, it must be generated through human activity'. Way-seeking chimes with Robin Wang's idea that the concepts of yin, yang and qi are not so much descriptions of ultimate reality as part of a **'shu, a strategy or technique that enables one to function effectively in any given circumstance.'** the centrality of technical strategy in thought is reflected in the contemporary Chinese word for academic learning, xue Shu, which is the Shu of study or learning. **Philosophy in the West has always aspired to be more of a science**: rigorous, precise, describing reality as it is. **In the east it is more of an art of living**. **Is philosophy fundamentally about pinning down the world or attempting to navigate through it**? These two projects are related of course. [...] But the difference in emphasis is important. **If you are a truth-seeker fixed on getting your understanding of the world right, you are not going to be satisfied with conceptual vagueness, unclarity or ambiguity. If you are a way-seeker more concerned with how you live, you might not only accept such limitations but embrace them. You might find that engaging in the world with less reliance on concepts or language helps you feel closer to it, more engaged.** there has been plenty of academic head scratching and speculation as to why modern science emerge in the west rather than in China, which for a long time was better educated, richer and more advanced than the West. Edward Slingerland suggests one possible reason was **China's 'deep-seated suspicion of abstract thought for its own sake and a corresponding failure to develop a disembodied, instrumental stance toward the world.'** Chakravathi Ram-Prasad suggests a different way to distinguish between global traditions, between those who use language as a guide and those who use it as a reference. He argues that in India, as in the west, language is understood chiefly as referential —words pick out aspects of reality. **In China, language is primarily a guide. It is there to tell us how to live, not what there is.**. Deposit another way, Indian philosophy uses language as a reference but philosophy as a guide. If we see the way and truth has poles on a spectrum rather than either or opposites, India seems to occupy an intermediate position, but one closer to the way seekers. distinctions between way and truth seeking, between language as guide and reference, between art and science are not neat, and there are aspects of each in all cultures. 'Any philosophical tradition will in some measure seek knowledge-that and knowledge-how' says Ram-Prasad, 'but there are differences in emphasis.' it should be possible for us to see the strength of both and give both due emphasis. Your chances of finding the right way are improved if you are willing to see the world as it is, independently of your values. And your chances of making the most of the truths you discover are higher if you constantly try to bring those truths to bear on what most matters human life. Truth is useless unless it allows us to move forward and we cannot move forward unless truth illuminates the way. It is easy to assume that each tradition offers a different answer to the same question, when often they are asking different questions. for example the nature of the question of how we know, how we define knowledge, is changed within different stations because their interests in asking this question are quite different. for some, how do we know? Is always how do we know what we need to know in order to live well? for others, the question is essentially about how can we best understand what we know to be true by the revelations of gods? Free at others, it is about how we can establish objective facts. some assume knowledge is always effable, others that is not. Not everyone believes that unaided human reason has much chance of telling us anything important about the world or how to live in it. all these versions of how can we know are asked in all traditions, but some with greater emphasis than others. Part 2 How the world is Ch. X: Conclusion even if we completely gave up the idea that metaphor the physics explains the world as it really is which many philosophers have believed, there is still work to be done explaining the world as it appears to us, and lived experience. This is in effect what Kant proposed as the proper object of metaphysical inquiry. We might call this phenomenological metaphysics: the study of the structure of the world of experience. Phenomenological metaphysics would remain a proper subject of enquiry even if I scientific physics where to be complete. Norwood physics and phenomenological metaphysics necessarily being competition. For example according to many physicists, there is no now in nature, no any past or future. And human being certainly do live in tensed time and phenomenological metaphysics should have something to say about this. however the philosopher's of the great world's traditions viewed are metaphysics, it is most people now to consider their ideas through the lens of phenomenological metaphysics rather than a scientific one. [...] The value of metaphysics in existential, not scientific. that is why it is possible to learn from more than one metaphysical system, because the way we stretch our experience is in part due to the innate structure of our minds and in part because of the way our minds and society structure each other. “David Hall and Roger Ames describe this as the difference between ‘truth-seekers’ and ‘way-seekers’. Western philosophy is characteristically truth-seeking. It seeks to describe the basic structure of reality, logic, language, the mind. One example of this is the Western emphasis on science for science’s sake. For truth-seekers, disinterested learning is the best kind, while for way-seekers to be disinterested is as nonsensical as driving a car without caring where you end up.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Is philosophy fundamentally about pinning down the world or attempting to navigate through it? These two projects are related, of course. You understand the world at least in part to get around it, and you can’t have an interest in getting around it without also knowing something about the way it is. But the difference of emphasis is important. If you are a truth-seeker fixed on getting your understanding of the world right, you are not going to be satisfied with conceptual vagueness, unclarity or ambiguity. If you are a way-seeker more concerned with how you live, you might not only accept such limitations but embrace them. You might find that engaging in the world with less reliance on concepts or language helps you to feel closer to it, more engaged.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “These broad differences in approach are a warning that differences between the world’s philosophical traditions run deep. It is easy to assume that each tradition offers a different answer to the same question, when often they are asking different questions. For example, the nature of the question of how we know, how we define knowledge, is changed within different traditions because their interests in asking this question are quite different. For some, ‘How do we know?’ is always ‘How do we know what we need to know in order to live well?’ For others, the question is essentially about ‘How can we best understand what we know to be true by the revelations of gods or ṛṣis?’ For yet others, it is about how we can establish objective facts. Some assume knowledge is always effable, others that it is not. Not everyone believes that unaided human reason has much chance of telling us anything important about the world or how to live in it. All these versions of ‘How can we know?’ are asked in all traditions, but some with greater emphasis than others.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “ the way we structure experience is in part due to the innate structure of our minds and in part because of the way our minds and societies structure each other. Although Kant said that ‘the time for the collapse of all dogmatic metaphysics is undoubtedly here’ he was right to add, ‘There will always be metaphysics in the world, and what is more, in every human being, and especially the reflective ones.’3” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. ![[Pasted image 20210619153550.png]] ![[Pasted image 20210619153534.png]] “Cultural anthropologists have observed how Japanese culture privileges intimacy over integrity in personal and professional relationships. If you ask someone about their occupation, Japanese typically say, ‘I work for the such-and-such corporation’, whereas Americans specify their role. Japanese instinctively think of their part in the whole, whereas Americans just as automatically think of their discrete function.4” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “elonging has been exoticised. For many decades, Western liberals celebrated minority communities but looked at patriotism with suspicion and sneered at local pride as parochialism. A person who had no aspiration to live anywhere other than where they were born was seen as lacking in vision and ambition. And yet all over the West many people are stubbornly immobile and proud of it. In Britain, 60 per cent still live within twenty miles of where they lived when aged fourteen.10 At the same time, non-belonging, in the guise of cosmopolitanism, has been festishised. Ironically, citizens of the world delight in visiting places whose distinctive local character is preserved only by their residents being very much citizens of one place.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “There are numerous ways in which orientations towards intimacy and integrity manifest themselves. In the West, an integrity culture, objective truths or judgements are those that can be made publicly and impersonally. ‘The truth cannot depend on who discovers it or articulates it.’7 In intimacy cultures, it is common for even objective judgements to be personal. In the West, that would be a contradiction in terms, since the personal is subjective. Kasulis explains why this is not necessarily so, giving the example of a gymnastics judge. The scores such a judge gives are not merely subjective opinions; they require expertise and taking an objective perspective. But, says Kasulis, ‘no publicly accessible videotape can prove the performance was a 5.8 rather than a 5.7’. This kind of intimate objectivity ‘is accessible only to those within the appropriate intimate locus, those who have achieved their expert knowledge through years of practical experience’.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Much of the rise of populism and nationalism in the West is a backlash against the gradual erosion of belonging. What I find powerful about this way of understanding the problem is that it suggests the deep causes are cultural, a matter of the West becoming too ‘Western’. What allowed it to rise is now what is making it weak. A creative energy was released when we unshackled ourselves from the constraints of class and culture, but after years of wandering we find ourselves too alone. Western culture needs rebalancing. Greater intimacy or belonging can be created if the gap between the left-behinds and the prosperous is narrowed, if local and regional identities can be more expressed without excluding outsiders, if common values can be asserted and shared. ” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “The most helpful metaphor I can offer for cross-cultural learning about values is that of the mixing desk. In the studio, producers record each instrument as an individual track, playing them back through separate channels. By sliding controls up or down, the volume of each track can be increased or decreased. The moral mixing desk works in much the same way. Almost everywhere in the world you’ll find the same channels: impartiality, rules, consequences, virtue, God, society, autonomy, actions, intentions, harmony, community, belonging and so on. The differences between cultures is largely a matter of how much each is turned up or down. It is unusual for any channel to be completely turned off, but sometimes – God, for instance – it isn’t in the mix at all. Cross-cultural thinking requires a good ethical ear and this is hard to develop if you are not attuned to the whole range of moral concepts. It also requires the wisdom to realise that it is impossible to turn everything up to ten: some values clash with others, at least when they are at equal volume. Similarly, when some values are turned down low they become inaudible, which may be the price[…]” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Listening to the moral music of others can help us to reconsider the quality of our own. Admiring harmony, for example, we might wonder whether we have allowed it to be drowned out in our own tradition. Seeing impartiality used more sparingly we might find that ours is an overpowering, incessant beat in comparison. Valuing the fruits of autonomy we might conclude our own moral rhythm is too restrictive. The goal is not to come up with a mix that will be the favourite of everyone in the world but to make our own the best it can be.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Virtue enables a person to live well, promoting harmony in all their relationships. Virtue is having good character, and what it means to be good cannot be set down in a manual. It is more of a skill than a list of moral maxims. The virtuous person must become good at quan: weighing up the merits of each case and making discretionary choices about what ought to be done. There is no algorithm to do this, not least because the right thing to do is always dependent on the precise context. Quan requires sensitivity to the proper mean: the appropriate point between two extremes, such as rashness and cowardice, meanness and profligacy, and servility and unruliness. Virtue is achieved by self-cultivation. The main means of this is li, ritual: formal and informal kinds of appropriate social behaviour. By following li, one internalises habits of virtuous action so that being good becomes second nature. The junzi, the exemplary person who succeeds in this, becomes a kind of moral paradigm, leading others to act well by example” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Ethical self-cultivation reflects a broader emphasis on practice and habit in achieving excellence. It is not primarily by learning but by doing that one becomes good at anything. The end result is wu-wei, a kind of effortless action that nonetheless requires years of conscious effort before it becomes instinctive. It is not possible to express in words what the person who exhibits wu-wei knows and indeed much of the deepest knowledge we have is ineffable. Language is an imperfect net in which to catch the world and practice is more important than theory. The region’s thought is characterised by a kind of metaphysical agnosticism. We can’t know the nature of ultimate reality and that doesn’t really matter. The tradition is more way-seeking than truth-seeking, interested primarily in what we need to live well, not in achieving knowledge of ultimate things for its own sake. To the extent that there is a metaphysics it is one of change and dynamism. Yinyang reflects the sense that everything is in active interrelation, creating a dynamic system in which nothing is ever settled for long. The concept of qi captures this sense that everything is flowing, that energy[…]” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Western philosophy is essentially truth-seeking and cosmogonic. That is to say, it starts with the assumption that our primary task is to understand the world as it really is. It upholds the ‘autonomy of reason’, valuing truth and knowledge for their own sake. Reason’s autonomy also means it is secular, working without supernatural assistance to deliver us understanding of the world and ourselves. It can do this because the natural world is taken to be scrutable and the way that it operates can be described by laws which require no assumption of divine agency. These assumptions are shared by both major branches of Western philosophy: empiricism, which is based on careful observation of the world, and rationalism, based on reasoning from first principles of logic.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Its primary mode of reasoning is based in logic. Philosophy in this mode is aporetic: it identifies contradictions generated by our imperfect understanding and attempts to remove them. It does this by seeking precise definitions and measurements, then proceeding to draw out their implications by sound steps of reasoning. This had led to many achievements, but it is a method which tends to result in adversarial either/or debates. It also focuses attention away from that which is unclear or ambiguous and tends to encourage a tidying up of reality to make the world as amenable to clear explanation as possible. One major manifestation of this approach is the reductionist tendency to understand things by breaking them down to their smallest possible units and to see these, rather than the wholes to which they belong, as the fundamental foci of explanation. Ethically, this has tended to generate rule- and principle-based ethics which have impartiality as a central value. This has given ethics, like all Western philosophy, an aura of placeless universalism, so much so that the qualifier ‘Western’ is hardly even used. Philosophy is just philosophy, even though what comes under its umbrella is clearly geographically and historically “located in one corner of the globe. Its universalist aspiration has actually made it “unwittingly parochial. This has sometimes been exacerbated by a belief in progress which conveniently puts the Western world at its vanguard.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “When the law recognised it as a ‘living whole’, it was meeting the obligations of the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840 between the British crown and the Māori who had arrived on the islands in the thirteenth century. The declaration recognised the Māori belief in the connection of land and people reflected in the proverb ‘I am the river and the river is me.’4 The land and the sea are the anchors of personal identity, more so than our personal biographies or histories. In this cosmology the linear passage of time is less important than the way in which the cycles of time return us to home. The connection with land is conceived of as a kind of kinship, which is the relationship of primary importance. Kinship is enjoyed not just with family and tribe but also with place and the natural world. This means that nature is not something other which stands outside human culture. Nature is as much part of our human communities as children, parents, friends and fellow tribe members.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “It is well known that the literal meaning of the word ‘utopia’, etymologically speaking, is ‘no-place’. This is of much more than passing interest when talking about the utopia of philosophy. The Western tradition I was trained in overtly strives for an objectivity that transcends any particular time or place. Although extreme in this, most traditions claim to be speaking of what is true for humankind, not only for their own nationals.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “There are those who are suspicious of the very possibility of a truly universal philosophy, because they believe it is hubris to think we can detach ourselves from the particularities of time and place. One weakness of Western philosophy is often said to be that it has what Owen Flanagan calls a ‘transcendentally pretentious’ goal of ‘identifying what is really good or right independently of history and culture’.2 Any philosophy which aspires to objectivity is caught in a perennial tension: the attempt to transcend the particularities of the individual thinker and their time and place can only be made by specific individuals in specific times and places. We have to give up the idea of the view from nowhere and accept that a view is always from somewhere.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Rather than a view from nowhere, we seek views from everywhere, or at least everywhere that is accessible.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Inattention to the peculiarities of a philosophy’s own place and to philosophy in other places confuses the admirable aspiration for greater objectivity with a misguided ideal of placeless universality. Ideas are neither tightly tethered to specific cultures nor free-floating, universal and placeless. Like people, they are formed by a culture but can travel. If we truly aspire to a more objective understanding of the world, we have to make use of the advantages to be gained by occupying different intellectual places. Doing so with reverence but not deference to the past and present of other cultures could help us transform our own philosophical landscapes.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “When describing utilitarianism, textbooks tend to emphasise how it focuses on consequences. This supposedly is what distinguishes it from the other major traditions in Western moral philosophy: deontological ethics, which focuses on duties, and virtue ethics, which focuses on character. But it seems to me that what really distinguishes utilitarianism, not just from these systems but from other moral frameworks around the world, is its absolute impartiality. It demands that we treat everyone’s interests equally, irrespective of how we are related to them. Other moral theories typically say that we have more duties towards some than to others, most obviously our families” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “In the virtue tradition, absolute impartiality is rejected even more overtly. Roger Ames describes Confucianism as a form of ‘role ethics’ precisely because it says that your obligations differ depending on your role in society.2 The moral responsibilities of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled all differ. The same is true in African Akan society, where Pieter H. Coetzee says that rights are all role-rights. ‘To be a rights bearer requires a place in a social structure, and so rights can only be awarded to, and exercised by, persons occupying specific social roles.’3 Most, if not all, traditional societies share this approach. What makes utilitarianism so challenging is that it utterly rejects role ethics, arguing that we should consider the welfare of distant strangers as much as we should that of kith and kin.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “The key feature of this system is not, however, its focus on happiness. Utilitarians since have sometimes disagreed that this is the ultimate good and have instead urged us to maximise welfare or preference satisfaction. They all agree, however, that actions are right and wrong solely on account of whether they increase the ultimate good. Crucially, the criterion here is the overall total good, not your good or the good of friends and family. The moral goal here is entirely impersonal, the basic principle rigorously impartial, captured in Bentham’s dictum ‘everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.’16” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “It didn’t change his mind, it simply made it clearer to him how demanding his version of impartiality was. ‘I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,’ he told the journalist Michael Specter. ‘Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.’20 Most would say his experience pointed to a deeper truth. ‘No sensible person should want to live in a world in which all moral problems are solved by or justified by impersonal principles,’ says Owen Flanagan. ‘There are reasons of love, friendship, communal solidarity, which are not impersonal.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “The problem for Westerners, however, is that they know at some level that impartiality has its limits, that the particular ties we have to community, family and friends matter and should make a difference to how we behave.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “The free movement of people requires an absolute impartiality that grants the same rights to all. One consequence of this has been a sense of dislocation, a lack of belonging. What held communities together was not what made humans all fundamentally the same, it was what made us contingently different. And so people rebelled against a kind of impartiality that broke down precisely those partial ties of identity that made people feel at home. The solution, if there is one, cannot be to abandon all ideals of impartiality. Equal rights and a political sense of the equal interests of all are vital for a fair and just society. At the same time, this should be compatible with granting people the rights to their partial attachments.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. Harmony “There is arguably no more important concept than harmony (he) for understanding how China thinks and lives. ‘If we were to choose just one word to characterize the Chinese ideal way of life, that word would be “harmony”,’ says Chenyang Li, opening his book on the subject.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “When I asked what the biggest difference she noticed between her Scottish colleagues and people back home was, she said that the Chinese wish always to please other people while Brits please themselves. The word she used unprompted to describe this value was ‘harmony’.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Heraclitus said, ‘Harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.’16 Aristotle quotes three Heraclitean maxims: ‘Opposition unites’, ‘From the different comes the fairest harmony’ and ‘All things come from strife.’17 Ironically, the etymology of harmony is more Heraclitean than Platonic, even though its current meaning is more Platonic than Heraclitean. In both Latin and Greek harmonia means ‘concord of sounds’.18 Because harmony involves a kind of tension it is not always easy to create. ‘Harmony cannot be achieved unless all sides are willing to give up something,’ says Yao Xinzhong. If everyone holds out for everything they want, the result can only be conflict. Harmony requires compromise and patience.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Family harmony is is also crucial for the development of personal virtue, whereas in the Western philosophical tradition, Li points out, it’s almost the opposite. Nietzsche dismissed the married philosopher as something that belonged in comedy.26 On his deathbed, Socrates had nothing to say to his family, who weren’t even present and whom he didn’t mention (his last words were an instruction to offer a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing).27 ‘To some extent, freedom for Socrates implies freedom from the family,’ says Li. Few major Western philosophers in the male-dominated canon discuss family or give any impression that such a mundane, domestic concern would distract them from the serious business of thinking.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Even more anecdotal, but more striking still, is a story told to me by a French philosopher, Yves Vende, who has spent some time living in China. When he first arrived he met a Chinese artist who told him that once she thought about suicide. He asked her why she didn’t go ahead. She answered, ‘Because if I committed suicide nobody is going to take care of my parents.’ Vende found himself thinking, ‘No French artist would give this answer.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “Could it not be that one of the problems of the contemporary West is that it has come to see hierarchy as a dirty word and has failed to appreciate how social harmony requires fair, just hierarchies? An academic workshop on the issue persuaded me that this was in large part true.32” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “As Li sees it, Daoists seek for humans to ‘harmonise with the world’, while Confucians seek to ‘harmonise the world’ for the sake of humans.42 The two interchangeable modern Chinese words for ethics and morality demonstrate this difference. Daode literally means ‘the way and its power’, while lunli means ‘the patterns in human kinship and relations’. Robin Wang argues that this gives them different connotations. ‘Following the pattern of the world is daode’, which is more Daoist, ‘whereas to keep human relationships orderly is lunli’, which is more Confucian.43 For example, the Daoist Zhuangzi’s statement that ‘Virtue is the cultivation of complete harmony’ sounds like it could easily have come straight from a Confucian text.44 But when he spells out what this means, it becomes clear that his Daoist harmony is to be found not so much in ordering the world as in detaching from it. He praises people who have gone beyond care, people who ‘have given up’ and ‘forgotten other people, and by forgetting other people they have become people of Heaven. You can honour them and they won’t be pleased. You can despise them and they won’t be mad. Only those who have[…]” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “A genuine alternative to dichotomous logic would not neatly separate the two concepts but would emphasise their interdependence and interpenetration. Thinking in terms of yinyang helps us to remember this. This is difficult, because on the face of it yinyang is full of binary distinctions. Wang lists at least thirty-five pairs of opposites in the Daodejing, such as beautiful/ugly, good/not good, presence/non-presence, difficult/easy.58 And yet she insists that ‘the distinction of oppositions like yin and yang is not a matter of seeing reality through a dualistic or atomistic lens’. The very word for ‘things’ in Chinese, wu, does not mean ‘entities in isolation’, says Wang. Wu are better seen as ‘phenomena, events, and even histories’ which have stages and ‘are always becoming’.59 In Chinese thought, the principle is not so much ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ as ‘parts become less when artificially isolated from the wholes to which they belong’. When a thing is only what it is when it is in relation to others, no items in any list of pairs can be seen as mutually exclusive or discrete.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. Virtue “In Western philosophy, virtue ethics is most associated with Aristotle. Its central idea is that to live well we need to cultivate the right habits and dispositions, more than to follow moral codes or principles. A good person has a good character and this is what inclines them to act well. A person of bad character is always going to be inclined to behave badly, no matter what moral principles they officially subscribe to.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “In ancient Greece, however, virtue (arete) had none of these moralistic associations, which is why some prefer to translate arete as ‘excellence’. A virtue is an excellence because it is a skill or trained disposition that enables us to live well, meaning not just that we do the right thing by others but that we ourselves flourish as individuals.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. “It is often said that Aristotle thought virtue led to happiness, but ‘happiness’ is a poor translation of the Greek eudaimonia. Happiness is generally conceived of today as an affective state of mind, something that we feel. Eudaimonia is better translated as ‘flourishing’. To flourish as a human being is to live fully in accordance with your nature. Feeling good is often a consequence, but that is more of a side effect than the main purpose of ethike arete. When we are flourishing we have a satisfaction that we are living good lives, irrespective of whether we are often or ever in a good mood. Such satisfaction is arguably a deeper source of contentment than the kind of cheerful happiness that comes and goes. Conversely, someone might be happy much of the time but not truly be flourishing because their pleasure is shallow, the kind of thing that an animal could just as easily experience.” Excerpt From: Julian Baggini. “How the World Thinks”. Apple Books. ## A short history of truth 1. ETERNAL TRUTHS 2. AUTHORITATIVE TRUTHS 3. ESOTERIC TRUTHS 4. REASONED TRUTHS 5. EMPIRICAL TRUTHS 6. CREATIVE TRUTHS 7. RELATIVE TRUTHS 8. POWERFUL TRUTHS 9. MORAL TRUTHS 10. HOLISTIC TRUTHS UK is divided into: 1. Conservative communitarians: tradition, order, place, nation 2. Cosmopolitan liberals: cities, university, citizens of worlds Postmodernism was fashionable in arts and culture. It celebrated the fact that there's no such thing as the truth, there's only what's true for you, what's true for me. And that is something kind of imperialistic or arrogant about ever claiming that something could be The Truth. Post-truth becomes seen as bad. Once you don't have to submit to the truth you can just do whatever you can get away with, and that gives even more power to the oppressors. Authoritative truth. 1. Are there experts in this field? Which to listen to? We have to defer to experts, but no infallible experts. "I'm a big believer in expertise by committee, because most problems are too complex for any one expert to solve." Dont think by yourself but do think for yourself. Perfectly coherent to think that there is a truth of the matter but that for us it's extremely difficult / impossible to discern it. Balancing skepticism and questioning with excessive cynicism. Conspiracy theory is an alternative form of gullibility. People who don't question just accept whatever they are told. Conspiracy theories are too quick to accept the conspiratorial story. Middle position is holding truth lightly, not being too sure of it, not gripping too tightly. But, you do need to hold it. For a lot of things, there is a single truth of the matter, but because we are imperfect knowers, we can't assume that we know it. "Who are we to judge" doesn't work for things that actually matter. Thing that makes moral truth complicated is that there is genuinely a sense in which there are no moral truths. Now this is contentious, but there are lots of people on my side, I'm with Hume, who said that when we say things are right or wrong, we're not stating facts about the world. We're expressing an attitude. Factually incorrect beliefs (e.g. women are less intelligent than men etc) can generate wrong moral attitudes. "Mistake theory" of moral disagreement. I'm optimistic that when people agree on the facts, they tend also to agree on morality. When people agree on what kind of thing the early feotus is, they don't tend to disagree on the morality of abortion. I think that fundamentally morality only gets off the ground because we have what Adam Smith called a moral sympathy for other people. And therefore to understand that it's bad for other peoples lives to go badly and that we have an interest in that going well. That is not logic that's emotion that's feeling. --- Throughout the history of philosophy thre have been people who have believed we can build knowledge on a secure foundation. It sounds like common sense, if you want to know whats true, start with something very solid. It's the kind of approach Plato and Descartes took. I think one of the lessons of that entreprise in Western philosophy is that that enterprise is doomed. --- Anti-Amazon. --- Psychology and character and personal history is really important for what we believe, but we need to be very cautious about trying to explain beliefs in those terms. In practice, engage with what people say. Aristotle and Confusion were both great believers that habit is the great guide to life, really. And habit is really important. ## The Edge of Reason Key message of the book: there's kind of a comforting belief that if only we follow the right methods, we never have to make any kind of personal judgement about what to do. And that is of course false. This does not mean that any old judgement will do, you have to try to make a good judgement. But at the end of the day you have to take responsibility for those judgements. PH: philosophers as socially anxious cowards. We create truths of the future through our actions today. Ultimately, he reminds us, the outcome of our reasonings has to depend not on objective truth but on what “we feel compelled to accept as objective”. Reason enforces not what but that we judge; with the heavy implication that our judgement holds not just for ourselves, but everyone. If you're not aware of reasons limits you can't use it properly. Worried about scientism. Trying to push scientific thinking style too far. This idea that science is the right paradigm. ## The Godless Gospel https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/06/the-godless-gospel-by-julian-baggini-review-jesus-as-a-moral-teacher His demands are fearsomely exacting: we can flourish only by a transformation of the self so deep-seated that it amounts to self-dispossession. Baggini sees Jesus’s selflessness as a kind of asceticism, but it is actually a form of self-giving, not a Puritan hostility to the flesh. In fact, he and his followers were denounced as gluttons and drunkards. His so-called morality isn’t a matter of what Baggini rather lamely calls ‘being good’ and ‘doing the right thing’, but of abundance of life. At Pentecost, his disciples are so reeling and ecstatic with the stuff that one of them has to remind the onlookers that the wine shops aren’t yet open. But the New Testament isn’t a spiritual self-help manual. Jesus’s mission was to Israel, not in the first place (as Baggini argues) to the individual. It was directed against suffering and oppression, not against bad vibes and low self-esteem. One can only understand it fully against the backdrop of one of the bloodiest empires in history.