Amer asked:

I’ve been searching through philosophy and history to answer this question, but I am not very knowledgeable on this subject. I have a chess company I am about to open, the goal of this company in general is to provide events, tournaments, and school, for everything related to chess…

Is there any person in history or a story in philosophy that talks about a place where its a perfect place for what ever specific type of people, a place where when you enter, you become complete. Even a dream of a philosopher, mythology, or person in history that they have written or spoken about. I am also ok with a word that holds the significance of what I am talking about. A unique word that holds meaning to a place of pure focus, intelligence, happiness. I don’t want a long quote or phrase unless it includes a specific name in it. Or if its a phrase or quote, it is suppose to be a specific significant person or group of people talking about that place.

If there isn’t anything like that, then a historical person or mythical person who represents an ordinary being but when he acts on a specific thing for e.g. when he is on the battle field or other activity, he/she shows his/her inner genius and intelligence… Thanks for your patience.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

One of the great masters of the past, Siegbert Tarrasch, wrote: “Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make a man happy.”

A great line that might serve you at least as a motto, since it ties love and chess together as possible modes of deep experience.

The goddess of chess is Caissa, as I’m sure you know. The Greek name for heaven was Elysium. Hence or “Elysium Caissa” might suit you?

Alireza asked:

Could you explain the following sentences (especially the last one)? I have problem understanding them:

The Enlightenment project, writes David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity, ‘took it as axiomatic that there was only one possible answer to any question. From this it followed that the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly. But this persumed a single mode of representation which, if we could uncover it… would provide the means to Enlightenment ends.

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

As you quote nothing else and I’ve not read this author, I can only respond to the quotation. It is a singularly narrow perspective and fits only one (and hardly the central) aspect of the Enlightenment. The issue of the rational mastery of human life was certainly important, but by no means the absolute focus of the Enlightenment. Indeed, one has to step back and consider Bacon’s agenda first, because it was taken up by Diderot and d’Alembert and acknowledged by them as a chief impulse. Bacon’s first principle was, “knowledge is power”, by which he did not mean the individual’s knowledge, but the pool of all knowledge in the realm. So he insisted that peasants and tradesmen be given a voice and add their knowledge to the pool. And he certainly had an encyclopaedia of all knowledge at the back of his mind and even drew up a schema of how this could be collected.

The point of this was that knowledge of the empirical world must be given equal billing to “revealed knowledge”. When the French philosophes implemented it, they stressed this empirical perspective, culminating in the achievement of a multi-volume encyclopaedia. But the gist of it — in other words its agenda — hardly reflects your quote. They were not saving the world by enthroning reason, but giving expression to their belief that reason should play a greater role in the affairs of man — greater than privilege, prejudice, religion, superstition etc. Accordingly most of the vocal thinkers of that era were proponents of education, by which they meant education for everyone. This does not (in my opinion) square with Harvey’s “axiomatic” proposition.

The Enlightenment as a whole was hardly driven by ‘axiomatic’ ideas. It was above all a concern for the (educational) deprivation of the majority of people, who had been kept in the dark by church and nobility too long already.

To that extent, the Enlightenment was indeed enlightened; and the meaning of this word stems directly from its proselytisers as an expression of hope for mankind — hope for greater justice, equality, legality, peace and prosperity. I believe that the quoted depiction is a caricature of these ambitions, relying too heavily on Adorno and Horkheimer’s assessment, who were the first to blame the Enlightenment for the derailment of reason in the first half of the 20th century, as if it was a direct outcome of those aspirations.

Orlando asks:

Is the “junkyard tornado” argument of Sir Fred Hoyle for the existence of God as bad as Richard Dawkins seems to think it is?

Answer by Jürgen Lawrenz

My answer comes much later than the others and in part also engages with their replies. But first I must say that I’ve not heard of Hoyle’s 747 metaphor being associated with God — rather it was his rebuttal to scientists who promoted the idea of life arising from the zillions-to-one chance of physics matter clicking together at the right time and place, in the right order etc. Not that it makes much difference to the present question, since the replies by Skinner and Klempner bring aspects of this argument into play which induced me to respond again.

But apropos Craig Skinner, I have to say that the question elicited an astonishing faux pas: Hoyle’s point was that unguided processes cannot evolve meaningful structures which rest on purpose, strategy, discrimination, direction, intentionality and so on. Take the illustration based on Huxley’s Shakespearean monkeys, which though a notoriously inept metaphor, finds Craig saying, “If the attempt fails… he starts again…” What does this mean? Which attempt is failing, and what exactly is the monkey “starting again”? And then, “evolution is equivalent to keeping the letters which are correct…” What does ‘correct’ mean here? That evolution has foresight?

Taking it out of Huxley’s court, a different, but exactly equivalent scenario might clarify the problem: Suppose that every particle in the universe represents a letter and that their infinite shake-up keeps bringing them together in two, three, four etc combinations, doesn’t this give us a plausible basis for asserting that at some time several thousands of these will accidentally match Shakespeare’s text?

I suspect (even from the literature on the subject) that many people would nod their assent. It seems ‘logical’ to suppose that in an infinite playground, all possibles are actualisable and must ipso facto be actualised at least once in some corner of this infinite space. But now suppose that the particle representing ‘e’ has a nick in it that prevents its association with the particle representing ‘n’, what then? Well, goodbye Shakespeare!

In any case, the argument has holes in it big enough to drive a truck through them; though where to begin is not so easy to state. The cardinal problem is that it’s not a conclusion from a compelling stack of evidence, but a quite illicit extrapolation of evolutionary analogies on processes which do not evolve. Dawkins’ texts are full of such intuition pumps, which insinuate that inorganic processes can be dovetailed to organic processes; yet there is nothing in the sum of scientific knowledge to encourage this belief. It does not mean that we need God to lend a hand; but still puts his blind watchmaker and his mythical Mt Improbable out of court.

Therefore Geoffrey Klempner’s remark on wings and eyes belongs to a very different context — namely that these are not dead matter items like bosons posing as an alphabet, but organic extensions of living entities whose primary state of existence is intentional behaviour.

I cannot fathom why this feature is so desperately resisted by Dawkins and likeminded colleagues, as on first and every future glance it is blindingly obvious that intentionality is the driving motor of evolution and “can do” — it can demonstrably scale Mt Improbable. We might look at two ‘accidental’ evolutions to help us along. First, the mandibular hinge of H. sapiens which should leave all of us suspiciously eyeing the word ‘accidental’, as after all the resulting fluent speech accelerated the motor of human evolution. A companion piece is the emergence of the sickle cell aorta among Congolese negroes. Now this can be dated with reasonable closeness to an evolutionary trait installed in less than 5-6 generations. It was the response of an organism to survival pressure and retrofitted to the genes as an heritable trait. In the face of this, why must we insist on chance with the mandible hinge, when it is equally probable that persistent straining of the jaw over many generations, by people intent on opening their mouth to speak, was at last answered by an organically induced modification?

I think the aye’s have it: “In the world of the living, Horatio, there are more possibilities than are dreamed of by blind watchmakers purporting to scale a mountain of improbable dead matter conjugations.”

The crux of all this is easy enough to state: Evolution is a two-way traffic between organisms and habitat. The habitat delineates the possibilities of survival by fitness, it therefore facilitates adaptation, diversity, proliferation etc. Organisms, in staging their survival activities, change the habitat (so do external impingements, but these may be left to one side as self-explanatory). Now if you’ve been following me so far, you should have your ears ringing with the word “intentionality” which hardly makes its presence felt in Dawkins’ propositions. It denotes that in the two-way traffic between organisms and habitat, the former act in whatever ways are possible to sustain themselves, while the latter is modified by mechanical causes and forces, including those related to the organisms’ survival struggles.

That was short, but permits an immediate resume. Survival pressure provokes a reaction from organisms which must in many instances confront them with the need for enacting a choice from among possible alternatives and to throw the whole species history into the balance. Somewhere along this road we find wings and eyes emerging. Evolution is in fact the fundamentally intentional exploration of the greatest possible diversity for appropriate niches. But dead matter has no choices, only accidents, and I can’t think of a single specimen where a physics accident “improved” anything. Indeed it is nonsensical to begin with, as the physical cosmos has no agenda that we could articulate.

Finally apropos Klempner’s quip on DNA: “you and I are here, talking about this”. DNA is dead matter too, and so the choice between supposing the incipience of life to be due to genes, or genes having been constructed by organisms to help with their self-reproduction seems hardly worth disputing, especially as every textbook tells us that organisms still construct, maintain, repair, copy, refashion and multiply them every minute of the day. Hence it is far more plausible to support the view that organisms began with a simple chemical clock and enhanced this device as they got bigger and more complicated than supposing that a bit of dirt on the ground grew into the sophisticated machinery of DNA all by itself. It is, as Klempner wrote, “even more improbable than the chimpanzee story”. But we need do nothing more than to introduce an intentional agent into this scenario and bingo! things happen!

I’m going to stop here. Hoyle’s point was really very simple. In the stakes between physics improbabilities being overcome by chance events or intentionality, the latter is a hands-down winner. Without intentional agents marshalling their intentional resources, the Earth would not have changed from being a ball of rock, water and gas in the 5-or-so billion years of its existence. I see the problem related to “God” in a different light: We assume that we know how matter came into existence; but we can’t explain intentionality. So we end up plastering a false and useless ‘objectivity’ over the question and achieve nothing. But I can’t follow this through in this place, and in any case, I wrote a book on it called Life and Mind, which maybe you could do worse than looking into.

Martin asks:

A question about suffering.

A person is enduring extreme suffering. During that suffering they die. Did the suffering happen or matter?

Alternately, death ‘wipes the slate clean’ and is a release so you don’t have to worry about peoples last moments

I’ve witnessed traumatic things and I don’t know how to rationalise other’s suffering.

Answer by Craig Skinner

I saw a fair bit of suffering in 40 years as a medical doctor.

We’re not talking about voluntary suffering for good ends, like visits to the dentist, but pointless suffering.

Yes, it happens. The world is full of it. Probably suffering outweighs joy. But even if it doesnt, there is too much of it. The alternative is no world at all or one without sentient beings. And the case for that is convincingly made by Benatar in Better never to have been (OUP 2009).

And suffering matters. Yes, death ends a creature’s sufferings, but this doesnt mean it didnt happen. It will forever be the case that it did, and was bad.

I dont think you can justify or rationalize it. And this is the case whether you are religious or not. If you are, you might hold that an ordered world containing free beings, a world with both necessity and free will in it, inevitably includes innocent suffering, and at least some of it is deserved, and also that God is a fellow-sufferer (incarnate as Jesus). But even if all this were true, and also that those who suffered got a cushy afterlife, this still wouldnt justify it. Some say it helps us grow. And no doubt struggling with adversity can sometimes do this, but most suffering mars or even ruins a life.

So the best we can do is to try to prevent it, to relieve it if we can, and to comfort if we can do neither. Those who deal with it daily in a professional capacity can only cope if the have a degree of detachment from it, but this need not, and should not, amount to lack of fellow feeling.

Linda asks:

“Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much (reality) in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get its reality, if not from its cause? And how could the cause give the reality to the effect, unless it, also, possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being from out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect.”

What is Descartes arguing in the text above? In other words, what does this quote mean? I am having a hard time understanding his point.

Answer by Craig Skinner

You are having a hard time because Descartes is talking relics. Of medieval scholastic philosophy that is.

We read Descartes in modern english translations, which has the effect of making him seem more modern than, say, Locke or Hume whom we read in their original texts. Try reading Molyneux’s (1680) english translation of Meditations and you will see this. But, although determined to shake off scholasticism and “build anew from the foundations”, Descartes was steeped in it, and the passage you quote is an example.

It occurs in M3 where Descartes sets out his causal argument for the existence of God. This relies on the scholastic “Causal Principle” which roughly says that the cause must be greater (or at least as great) as the effect, never the reverse. So Descartes will go on to argue that since he has a clear and distinct idea of a perfect, infinite being (God), such an idea with perfect and infinite content could only be produced by a cause with perfect and infinite reality (not puny finite me), namely God, so God exists. Actually the details are more subtle and hard to grasp: the existence of something (its formal reality) is distinguished from its content (objective reality), and reality comes in degrees (infinite substance, finite substance, modification of a substance), so that the argument strictly is that the degree of formal reality of the cause must be at least as great as the objective reality of the effect.

We can reject his argument on a number of grounds: deny I have any idea of an infinite being; agree I have this idea but say that it’s my own, a reasonable extrapolation from thinking of something getting bigger and bigger without limit; deny the causal principle (no evidence/argument given for it).

And so, a reasonable simplified paraphrase of the passage is:

“It stands to reason that a cause must be at least as great as its effect. Otherwise how could it produce the effect. It follows that we cant get something from nothing, or the perfect from the imperfect”

Finally, whilst some scholastic ideas do show unnecessary nitpicking and logic-chopping, and can be quietly forgotten, I dont share Descartes’ wholesale rejection. On the contrary, the Aristotelian/scholastic metaphysics framework of substance/form, essence/attributes, actual/potential, and efficient/final causes finds increasing acceptance in modern metaphysics, biology, cosmology and philosophy of mind. Here Descartes sets us off on the wrong foot (again, his dualism is another example). But he is still a great philosopher, great mathematician, considerable scientist, and one of my favourites.

Louiza asks:

How will you characterize the nature of truth based on the theories of truth?

Can you say that there is no objective truth, but there are relative truths? Why or why not?

If you could choose to resolve a problem case or respond to a criticism made against a theory of truth, which problem would it be and why?

Reply by Craig Skinner

Ah, truth. Witnesses swear to tell it, philosophers seek it, journalists expose it, politicians hide it, Jesus said he was it. But what is it?

First, an analysis of truth is not usually concerned with truth as in true love, true grit, true friend or arrows flying straight and true. It is about truth as a property of statements (or sentences, propositions, or utterances, I wont deal with the subtleties of which is best). So, a statement is true if it states a fact, if what it says is correct. For instance, “Paris is the capital of France” is true because Paris is the capital of France. What makes it true is that it corresponds to the facts, to the way things are. This correspondence theory is the best one in my view. There are others. The coherence theory which says a statement is true if it coheres with others accepted as true. The trouble with this is that a consistent body of untrue statements could count as a body of truth. Pragmatic theories say that truth is what is ultimately generally accepted. But this gets the cart before the horse. The reason something gets generally accepted is because it is true (I exclude brainwashing and lying propaganda). Redundancy theories say there is no interesting property of truth, we dont need the idea: after all, it is said,  what does “is true” add in the statement ” ‘Snow is white’ is true” over and above just “Snow is white”. But I stick with the correspondence theory, and answer your first question thus: truth is the property of a statement that entails the fact (purportedly) stated.

To turn now to whether truth is objective. The answer is yes. It depends on the facts, the way the world is,  not on my opinion or how I feel about things. As to whether truth is relative, the answer is also yes, but we must take care to be clear as to exactly what we mean by this. Philosophers, as truth-seekers, bristle at relativism. The prospect of something being true for me but not for you, no fixed truth just different interpretations, of nothing being true period, is alarming. But this is not what it means for truth to be relative. It is always relative to some context. This is easiest to show by examples.

“My favourite treat is a glass of cold white wine” is true in the context of individual preference (not true for my wife who prefers chocolate).

“It is acceptable to leave corpses of your departed loved ones out for the birds to eat” is true in the context of traditional Jain culture.

“Paris is the capital of France” is true in the context of the actual world. But it might have been otherwise (Avignon say) so it is a contingent truth.

“2+2=4” is true in the context of all possible worlds. It couldnt be otherwise, it is a necessary truth.

As to resolving a problem or responding to a criticism, I would like to avoid technical problems, such as what does falsity correspond to in the correspondence theory, or whether Tarski’s disquotational formula implies a correspondence or a redundancy theory. Instead I would choose to defend the notion of objective truth as something we should seek, proclaim, and defend against those who would hide, deny or twist it for their own ends.

Finally, I have assumed truth is bivalent (a meaningful statement is either true or false) as in classical logic. Logicians have formulated alternatives, such as trivalent (true, false, indeterminate) or polvalent (many degrees of truth, fuzzy logic) but these are irrelevant to everyday living and to most of philosophy. Similarly some statements appear to be both true and not true (“This statement is not true” for instance) and alternative logics can take this into account, but again this need not detain us here.