Chiedza asked:

I have a question on power. The idea of power is very complex. But my question is directly connected to God. You might not believe in God but let’s just presuppose His existence. One of the most difficult questions I’ve come across is the problem of evil in philosophy if religion. The argument many people present presupposes an omnipresent, all powerful God who is almost a puppet master. But I find is idea of power problematic and perhaps we just misinterpret the essence of power.

What if the problem of evil cannot be answered by the idea of the failure of an all powerful being but rather by the argument that God’s power is self-limited. Maybe power is not definitive of existence but rather responds to existence. What if to God power is not being able to make everyone bend to His will but rather, it’s found in granting a degree of freedom to His creation so that those who do yield to him do so out of pure understanding. Basically what if power isn’t all powerful but rather understanding the limits inherent in the idea.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

I think your phrase ‘Let’s just presuppose his existence’ is the key to your question and my answer. You seem to be forgetting that Christian theologians have been debating and disputing precisely these issues with exactly those presuppositions for nearly 2000 years already. They were extremely clever, well-studied, highly intellectual and thoughtful people, and they had all your arguments and hundreds more to debate, because there was nothing else for them to debate on. Hence it seems to me that you have two options:

(a) As these ideas are not facts that can be solved by more or better knowledge, and as in any case we have no better understanding of them than the medieval, scholastic and modern theologians, you should consult them. The thoughts and deliberations of genuine experts on the subject are preferable to the opinions of mere moralists. Moreover, you will find so many answers, solutions and debating points in that literature, you could easily spend the rest of your life on them.

(b) The other option is not to presuppose God and look at power in the only context for which there is plain evidence that can be evaluated — human power. Then you have a lever by which you can discuss power (and especially evil) in a relevant human context, rather than to rely on speculation about things that no-one can assess with certainty.

You understand that I’m not answering your question, and there is a simple reason for this.

Just because the power of religion has been on the wane in recent centuries, does not mean that we are more knowledgeable and better equipped to face such issues. In fact the opposite is the case. For scholastic thinkers they were matters of the utmost importance, as their entire mental and physical existence was embroiled in them. For us it’s just a parlour game, or else a sign of growing desperation in the capacity of humans to face their self-made predicament.

I suppose the final answer is, that theological thinkers did not actually solve the problems. But the belief (or supposition) that solving the pseudo-problem of God’s powers is a useful path to a conclusive insight into the nature of power, is a very peculiar delusion indeed. At most, it could serve for a logical construction, which is perhaps what you are really angling for. But even this little exercise has been ‘done to death’; and I for one can’t see anyone being helped by it to an understanding of human (or God’s) power in any real world.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Dorianne asked:

What did the person who hit a stone and said ‘I refute him thus’ while disagreeing with Berekely mean by that action?

Answer by Martin Jenkins

Dr Johnson reputedly kicked the stone to demonstrate that the stone was a real, material thing existing independently of him – the epistemological view of Naive Realism. By this act he hoped to refute Berkely’s philosophical doctrine of Immaterialism.

Immaterialism.

In his Of the Principles of Human Knowledge, Bishop George Berkeley begins by stating that human knowledge is derived from either ‘Ideas imprinted on the senses or perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the Mind or, the ‘compounding, the dividing of ideas by memory, by Imagination’ (#1, Principles).

There is something that knows or perceives the ideas, which wills, imagines, remembers.

“This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit or soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherin they exist, or which is the same thing – whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.” #2

There exists only ideas, sensations and minds which have those ideas, those sensations. This is contra to ‘common sense’! What we perceive are ideas granted but, these are copies, representations, reflections of actual, independently existing material objects, things in the world.

The ‘common sense’ materialist view involves, upon examination, a manifest contradiction. It maintains that houses, mountains, rivers exist or have independent existence distinct from their being perceived. If however, we perceive only Ideas, sensations; ideas and sensations can only exist when being perceived by the Mind. Ideas cannot exist apart from, independently of a Mind. So, Ideas exist only when perceived by a Mind. As Berekely famously summarised: Esse est Percipi — to be, is to be perceived.

No! The Ideas, sensations are only ideas etc of underlying things, objects. Just because we do not have an idea of a thing, object; it does not follow that we can then conclude that the object itself does not exist. A conclusion of ontology does not follow from a conclusion of epistemology.

Berkeley is most insistent that Ideas cannot be representatives of objects underlying or causing them. For we only ever perceive Ideas. Even if we had an Idea of an underlying object, this would be another Idea, an Idea to be contrasted with another Idea and so on ad infinitum. (#8 et alibi) No underlying physical object existing independently of a perceiving Mind can ever be reached. He lays down his challenge: is it conceivable for Ideas to exist independently of perceiving Minds?

“This easy trial may take you to see what you contend for is a downright contradiction. Inso much that I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended, movable substance or, in general for any one Idea or anything like an Idea to exist Otherwise than in a perceiving mind; I shall readily give up the cause…” #22

So Dorianne, when Dr Johnson kicked the stone, he had the Idea of the stone, the sensations accompanying his kicking it but, as these remain Ideas, sensations in his Mind and the Mind of his companion with whom he was discussing the Bishop; he has not refuted Berkeley’s thesis. He is verifying it.

Martin Jenkins received the ISFP Fellowship for his dissertation Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An Examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power. He is a Pathways Mentor and an Editors of Philosophy Pathways

Doriane asked:

What did the person who hit a stone and said ‘I refute him thus’ while disagreeing with Berkeley mean by that?

Answer by Helier Robinson

The original is as follows:

“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it thus.'”(Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoted from Wikipedia.)

One of Berkeley’s philosophic principles was esse est percipi, or to be is to be perceived. So anything imperceptible does not exist, including, in particular, material substance, or matter. Descartes was quite wrong, according to Berkeley, in positing two substances, thought and extension, (mind and matter): there is only mind. Dr. Johnson thought he was refuting Berkeley by kicking the stone and showing it to be material. But they were at cross purposes. For Johnson all experience can be divided into mind and matter: the external world is material and the internal world is mental. For Berkeley everything perceived in the external world is ideal, mental, and nothing material exists.

There is a lot to be said for esse est percipi: most of the qualities we perceive in the external world are secondary qualities, manufactured in the brain, and so ideal rather than material; also, illusions are misrepresentations of reality, and as such are in the brain and so ideal. On the other hand, external objects seem to be real, in that they exist when unperceived: when you are in deep sleep your bed seems to continue to exist, as does your body, because they are still there when you wake up. And if external objects are real in this way then they exist independently of mind, in which case they are material, or at least something other than mind, which might as well be called material. Berkeley accepted this continued existence of objects by claiming that when they are unperceived by anyone they still exist because they are perceived by God. Not a very satisfactory explanation; but neither was Dr. Johnson’s refutation very satisfactory.

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.

Answer by Craig Skinner

It was Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English writer and author of the famous Dictionary, who kicked the stone.

Boswell, in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) says that he and Johnson were discussing George Berkeley’s view that matter was nonexistent and that everything in the universe is merely ideal, when ‘Johnson answered, striking his foot with force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute him thus’ .’

I hope the following imaginary dialogue between Johnson (J) and Berkeley (B) will clarify the issue.

J. I refute you thus (kicking a big stone).

B. In what way?

J. Well, I felt the weight, hardness and solidity of the stone when my boot struck it. In short its substance or matter. So your talk of matter not existing is nonsense.

B. Not so fast Sam. You just said you felt the weight, hardness and solidity. But feelings are in your mind. The qualities of the stone are in your mind. And those you mention are what some call primary qualities, as contrasted with secondary ones like colour or smell. So all qualities are in a mind. They are ideas.

J. The qualities of the stone are ideas in my mind… mm… yes you could say that, I suppose, but the stone itself isn’t in my mind.

B. The stone itself you say. But what can that be. Take away all the qualities, like colour, weight, solidity, shape, texture, and what’s left. What can such a thing be that has no weight, solidity, hardness, shape or texture. How can it be a stone?

J. I see what you mean, George. A ‘bare particular’, as it were, devoid of any qualities whatsoever, would be a strange beast indeed. But hold on. can’t we then say that the stone is just the totality of its qualities, a ‘bundle of qualities’.

B. Yes, Sam, we can. That’s just what I do say. The stone is a bundle of qualities. Qualities are ideas. So, the stone is an idea composed of these simpler ideas. How else to explain what unites the qualities in the bundle if we have discounted a bare material thing that ‘bears’ the qualities or holds them together.

J. So you deny that the external world exists.

B. Of course I don’t. Any child knows there is an external world. I deny that matter exists. The world is composed of minds (including God’s mind) and ideas in them. Only these two. Minds and ideas. Simpler than your notion that there exist minds and ideas plus matter.

J. I’ll have to think about this George. If you say that stones, plants and planets are ideas in your mind, then surely other people are ideas in your mind too, and your position is solipsism, that you (your mind) and its ideas are all that exists. That’s even simpler than minds (including God’s) and ideas.

B. Ah well, no, you see. God exists, and I can prove it, and the external world is the same for all of us (finite spirits like you and me, Sam) because it exists in God’s mind.

J. It won’t wash, George. To assume God’s existence sounds like question-begging to me. And you can no more prove God’s existence than Descartes could, although you have to enlist God to make sense of other finite spirits (such as people) and an external world, just as Descartes enlisted God to guarantee the reliability of his clear and distinct ideas. No, the arguments you make against matter apply equally to other minds, and so you haven’t established idealism as opposed to solipsism.

B. (a little uneasily) Let’s leave it for now and pick it up another time. Fancy a beer?

J. Fine. Although of course we may be knocking back an idea rather than a cold, hoppy liquid.

Hume rightly said that Berkeley’s arguments ‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’.

If you haven’t read Berkeley, do so. Begin with Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The version edited by Dancy (OUP 1998) is very good. Berkeley’s prose is concise, clear, witty, and a delight to read compared with that of many other great philosophers.

Craig Skinner at philosophos.org

Pearson asked:

‘The world is all that is the case’ (Wittgenstein). I am struggling to see the point of this. Isn’t it obvious? What is the case, is the case, and what is not the case is not the case. How things are in the world depends on what is the case. End of discussion.

Answer by Shaun Williamson

Wittgenstein is not trying to make some deep philosophical point here. He does not expect us to lean back in our chairs and say ‘Wow man, the world is all that is the case. I never realised that before.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus from which this quote came is a discussion of the connections between logic, language and the world. The point Wittgenstein is making here is roughly as follows:

1. Every language has a finite number of words.

2. Therefore the number of meaningful statements in every language is finite.

3. Statements about the world can be true of false

4. The set of true statements (which vary over time) are a complete description of our world.

So there is no point in trying to see the point of all this, it has no hidden depths. Wittgenstein was never trying to be deep. If you want to understand Tractatus then try to understand it as a whole and don’t agonise about the deep meaning of individual sentences. There is no deep meaning.

Of course in his later work he repudiated the ideas in Tractatus. As far as he was concerned it contained grave mistakes. He still kept to the idea that in philosophy the things that interest us are not hidden, they are always on the surface.

Shaun Williamson developed the Ask a Philosopher cgi script question.pl. He did his postgraduate studies on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.

Geoffrey Klempner

End of discussion indeed. Wittgenstein’s ultimate conclusion is that, ‘The correct method of philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science… and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (Tractatus 6.53).

What would be a ‘metaphysical’ (and therefore meaningless) proposition? According to Wittgenstein, any statement to do with values, aesthetic or ethical, for example. No meaningful statement, true or false, can be made about the value of a work of art or the goodness of an ethical action.

Less obvious, perhaps, is something that we believe about our experience, that it is a fact that I am here, or that the time is now, and not some other time. Any attempt to explain the meaning of such ‘indexical reference’ ultimately resolves into an empty tautology. (I challenge this view in my book Naive Metaphysics.)

Although few analytic philosophers today would count themselves as adherents to the strict semantics of the Tractatus, many accept, explicitly or implicitly, that the meaning of a proposition — of ‘something said’ — is given by ‘truth conditions’, i.e. the factual conditions under which what the proposition states is either the case or not the case. So you could say that, despite Wittgenstein’s later reservations, the core idea of the Tractatus has survived up to the present day.

http://www.philosophypathways.com/vita.html

David asked:

Are all beautiful paintings good paintings? If you answer Yes I would say that it’s impossible to view all the beautiful paintings in the world, so it would be impossible to conclude that all beautiful paintings are good paintings. If you answer No, if you view a beautiful painting how can you judge whether it’s good or not, if not all beautiful paintings are good paintings? What would your answer be?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

The logical proposition you have hidden in your question is a worm-eaten fallacy. According to Plato, the good and the beautiful are virtual identities. Therefore his answer to your first question might have been ‘yes’. But then he denied that paintings can be good, therefore there are no beautiful paintings. To reach such a conclusion it is unnecessary to view all paintings in the world. Once you have demonstrated that beautiful paintings are impossible, the issue resolves itself.

Kant’s arguments are somewhat different, more lenient (so to speak). He says, for example, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; but unlike the common adage which makes the same claim, he exerts some ingenuity to prove it. But this also absolves you from viewing all the paintings in the world, because the viewer is the arbiter. He can call the one painting he owns beautiful, and therefore good. He can also make the other judgement you allude to you: that the painting is good, but not beautiful. This simply means that technically speaking it is a good painterly performance, but it isn’t agreeable to him as a visual object and consequently unbeautiful.

The underlying suppositions here differ from Plato, as I said. Still, the crux of the matter is that Kant’s whole philosophy revolves around experience, specifically aesthetic experience. It happens to be a common capacity of all human beings, except for colour-blind or tone-deaf or generally an-aesthetic subjects. Yet still a kind of ‘raw’ capacity until cultural conditioning has added good taste, expertise, discrimination, judgement and a few other desirable attributes that serve to empower you to pronounce a painting ‘good’ and/ or ‘beautiful’. The first point is, of course, that with these personal attributes in place, you can arrive at a judgement of any painting, as long as you’ve seen enough to enable an appropriate judgement. The second point is, that good need not be beautiful, and the beauty may not be good. It depends on the effect it has on you as the subject.

Which brings to the fore one relevant criticism of Nietzsche, namely his question on the sufficiency of the beholder. Is he or she fit to pronounce judgement on beauty and goodness? It is a question you should ask yourself, as you wonder about the goodness of beautiful paintings and the beauty of good paintings.

Meanwhile to your second fallacy. You seem oblivious to the fact that paintings are intentional performances. They convey a message. Now you may ignore this fact if you wish, and simply hang the picture to add colour to your room. But then it serves the same purpose as the paint on the wall. Good or beautiful are then mere expressions of an hedonistic response. But although a great deal of art encourages hedonistic responses, it is not the main reason why those works exist. Nor do deliberately ugly paintings serve only to provoke your repugnance. The arts of mankind do not primarily exist for the sake of beauty or goodness. Contrary to Clive Bell’s fatuous claim, a well-painted cabbage is not superior to an academic Madonna. A painting must speak. It has to address your inner self. All other questions come after this enquiry, and after your response has been included in the circuit.

Finally, so as to obviate a logical follow-up question, the same arguments apply to sculptures, poems, plays and music as well. You don’t need to hear every piece of music ever written to understand how and why any single one of them may/ may not satisfy the criteria.

Jürgen Lawrenz at philosophos.org

Alex asked:

Some physicists are currently supporting a new theory that there exist an infinite number of parallel universes beyond our own, some of which contain an exact copy of you and me, with every action we will ever or have ever done. What does this mean for uniqueness and legacy? Can you offer some optimistic mindset for someone worried about retaining some degree of uniqueness? Thanks a lot!

Answer by Helier Robinson

The theory is not new: J.B.S. Haldane, in his book Possible Worlds considered it nearly a century ago. He pointed out that if there were an infinity of them then not only would there be another one exactly like ours in every respect, but there would be an infinity of them, and another infinity which differed from ours by one molecule being different, and another infinity in which every one of your wishes came true. An infinity of infinities of differences.

In fact the physicists you speak of do not suppose an infinity, just a very large number of them. They do this in order to explain the fact of cosmic coincidences. There are a number of things in physics and cosmology which are unexplained by modern theories: the values of the strengths of the four forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force) and their ratios, the masses of the numerous of wave particles, etc. They could all have been different, but if any of them were we could not exist because stars would not form, or they could form but be very short lived, or they live long but would never go supernova. In any of these situations heavier elements would never form and life would be impossible. But, seemingly by coincidences, the values are just right and so life formed on our planet (and presumably on billions of other planets) and we are here.

One explanation of these coincidences is that of a huge number of parallel universes, in each of which all of the values are randomly determined. In a few of them the values will be just right for life. Ours is one of them, because we are here. This is called the Anthropic Principle.

It’s a very bad theory, in my opinion, for two reasons. One is because it disobeys Occam’s Razor outrageously. Occam’s Razor is the principle, as William of Occam put it, Do not multiply entities beyond necessity; or, in modern terms, do not invent more theoretical entities than are needed to explain the empirical facts. A huge number of parallel universes is far, far too much multiplication of entities. Secondly, in science a theory must be either verifiable or falsifiable experimentally, and there is no way such universes, which do not interact with ours, could be; so they are at best unscientific, just bad metaphysics.

There are two other points I would like to make. One is that infinity is an incoherent concept, invented or used by people who, not knowing the limit of something, declare it to have no limit. It is like the concept of chance, announced by people who do not know the cause or causes of something. Secondly, there are no degrees of uniqueness: something is either unique or it is not. To speak of something being nearly unique is as meaningless as saying that it is nearly infinite. So your main questions are answered: there are nor parallel universes and you are unique.

And by the way, if you are curious about cosmic coincidences, look at Lee Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, O.U.P. 1997. Or consider Leibniz’s claim that the world is the best of all possibles (in which the coincidences have to occur) and exists necessarily because it is the best, so no others exist.

Helier Robinson is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy, University of Guelph. His books are available from http://SharebooksPublishing.com.