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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 22. Dewpoint touched single digits again this morning, but on the whole, August is shaping up like it's going to be pretty consistently above normal.
I just thought of a good definition of "philosophy"!: "the art of taking something everyone knows, and putting it in such a way that no one agrees with it."
Just kidding ... kind of. This was prompted by thinking about something that struck me yesterday: the simplest way of explaining why Kant is right that morality requires you to always act in such a way that your action is in accordance with a possible general rule is to point out that whenever someone says you did something wrong, and you ask why, they need to appeal, at least implicitly, to something that is a candidate to be a general rule that you've violated. (And then all the general rules end up boiling down to: because you can't go putting yourself ahead of other people; you can't go using people, treating them as means to your own ends.) This is the "morality game" that everyone plays; everyone knows that this is how it works. Everyone knows that good examples of moves against the rules of the morality game are things like "because I said so" and "because I don't want you to". "Because I don't like you." So Kant is just saying what everyone knows about morality.
I've been thinking lately about how a lot of students have the idea that their grades should be fair, rather than that they should reflect their success. In other words, a lot of students have at least Rawlsian (reward should reflect fair equality of opportunity, and so should not depend on factors outside the control of agents), if not socialist, views about grades. If they didn't do as good a job on the essay as they might have because they had to work an extra shift, or if they missed the first three weeks of class because they were sick, or whatever, I should give them a break, because it's not fair that they didn't do as well as they could have or never learned anything about Kierkegaard--it isn't their fault. The most extreme example I know of of this kind of thinking is the common myth that if your roommate commits suicide, you get an automatic B (or A, or whatever) in all of your courses. (Maybe you haven't heard this one, but it was circulating widely when I was an undergrad.) Of course, nobody pushes the logic even further, to argue that people who aren't even enrolled in the course should get credit for it with the grade that they would've gotten if they'd been enrolled in the course--it isn't their fault they're not enrolled in the course--and if they had had the same opportunities to do well as everyone else.
I was thinking about this waiting for the bus the other day at York. There are usually long lines for the busses at York, and fairly often--not all the time, but often enough--people cut in line. I've always tended to assume that people who do that are either stupid enough not to know the line-convention (although this doesn't really seem plausible, given how evident the convention is at York--but then, you will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of undergrads, at least at the bottom end) or simply are not motivated to behave morally. But it occurred to me, thinking about this grade-Rawlsianism thing at the bus stop: maybe some people who cut in line think they're entitled to because it's not fair that other people got there before them. Why, after all, should arriving first (or waiting the longest) entitle you to get on the bus first? Maybe people who hate waiting the most are entitled to get on the bus first! It's not their fault that they hate waiting, but it is your fault if you make them hatefully wait. (Actually, some months ago, I asked a guy why he had cut in line. He said: "we're all going to the same place." A variant of Tug McGraw's Frozen Iceball Theory, there.)
It has been a long time since I have been prone to Idle Metaphysical Speculation, but here's the kind of thing that thinking about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and eternity might make erupt in your brain: maybe, at the point of your death, when you leave the flow of time, when you (as Kierkegaard would have it) lose the temporal aspect of the human synthesis and are left with only the eternal one, what happens is that you gain a God-like consciousness of all the time there is available to you (so, you know, for God, that's all the time there is; for you, that's your whole lifetime), all at once. (Hey presto, eternal recurrence!) I am not saying this is plausible, or even not stupid. Do not adopt this view.
How long does the universe exist? For all the time there is. How long do you live? For all the time you have.
There are so many bits of Nietzsche that I feel like I could take as a motto--for some purposes, if not all. Say, this: "Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear." (But, look, you knew that already.)
I just thought of a good definition of "philosophy"!: "the art of taking something everyone knows, and putting it in such a way that no one agrees with it."
Just kidding ... kind of. This was prompted by thinking about something that struck me yesterday: the simplest way of explaining why Kant is right that morality requires you to always act in such a way that your action is in accordance with a possible general rule is to point out that whenever someone says you did something wrong, and you ask why, they need to appeal, at least implicitly, to something that is a candidate to be a general rule that you've violated. (And then all the general rules end up boiling down to: because you can't go putting yourself ahead of other people; you can't go using people, treating them as means to your own ends.) This is the "morality game" that everyone plays; everyone knows that this is how it works. Everyone knows that good examples of moves against the rules of the morality game are things like "because I said so" and "because I don't want you to". "Because I don't like you." So Kant is just saying what everyone knows about morality.
I've been thinking lately about how a lot of students have the idea that their grades should be fair, rather than that they should reflect their success. In other words, a lot of students have at least Rawlsian (reward should reflect fair equality of opportunity, and so should not depend on factors outside the control of agents), if not socialist, views about grades. If they didn't do as good a job on the essay as they might have because they had to work an extra shift, or if they missed the first three weeks of class because they were sick, or whatever, I should give them a break, because it's not fair that they didn't do as well as they could have or never learned anything about Kierkegaard--it isn't their fault. The most extreme example I know of of this kind of thinking is the common myth that if your roommate commits suicide, you get an automatic B (or A, or whatever) in all of your courses. (Maybe you haven't heard this one, but it was circulating widely when I was an undergrad.) Of course, nobody pushes the logic even further, to argue that people who aren't even enrolled in the course should get credit for it with the grade that they would've gotten if they'd been enrolled in the course--it isn't their fault they're not enrolled in the course--and if they had had the same opportunities to do well as everyone else.
I was thinking about this waiting for the bus the other day at York. There are usually long lines for the busses at York, and fairly often--not all the time, but often enough--people cut in line. I've always tended to assume that people who do that are either stupid enough not to know the line-convention (although this doesn't really seem plausible, given how evident the convention is at York--but then, you will never go broke underestimating the intelligence of undergrads, at least at the bottom end) or simply are not motivated to behave morally. But it occurred to me, thinking about this grade-Rawlsianism thing at the bus stop: maybe some people who cut in line think they're entitled to because it's not fair that other people got there before them. Why, after all, should arriving first (or waiting the longest) entitle you to get on the bus first? Maybe people who hate waiting the most are entitled to get on the bus first! It's not their fault that they hate waiting, but it is your fault if you make them hatefully wait. (Actually, some months ago, I asked a guy why he had cut in line. He said: "we're all going to the same place." A variant of Tug McGraw's Frozen Iceball Theory, there.)
It has been a long time since I have been prone to Idle Metaphysical Speculation, but here's the kind of thing that thinking about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and eternity might make erupt in your brain: maybe, at the point of your death, when you leave the flow of time, when you (as Kierkegaard would have it) lose the temporal aspect of the human synthesis and are left with only the eternal one, what happens is that you gain a God-like consciousness of all the time there is available to you (so, you know, for God, that's all the time there is; for you, that's your whole lifetime), all at once. (Hey presto, eternal recurrence!) I am not saying this is plausible, or even not stupid. Do not adopt this view.
How long does the universe exist? For all the time there is. How long do you live? For all the time you have.
There are so many bits of Nietzsche that I feel like I could take as a motto--for some purposes, if not all. Say, this: "Ultimately, nobody can get more out of things, including books, than he already knows. For what one lacks access to from experience one will have no ear." (But, look, you knew that already.)
