Tag: Philosophy

I’m so glad Palmer took the initiative of writing Looking at Philosophy.

The journey of philosophy has really been the journey of mankind. Philosophy implores us to question the basic assumptions we have, and thereby attempt to better understand the world we live in.

In the over two and a half thousand years that have passed since the first steps taken by Thales of Miletus, who is generally considered, as Palmer notes, the first true philosopher, we have come a long, long way.

Generations of philosophers have come, expressed their ideas and gone. Their ideas have both educated and challenged the philosophers that followed them, who took upon the task of improving or replacing those ideas with something that made more sense, thus shaping the discourse of philosophy, and this meandering journey has affected the thoughts of the contemporary people in profound ways.

So why is this book so important?

If you were to pick up the original works of any philosopher, there are good chances you won’t be able to understand many of the ideas, much less all of them, on the first reading. A very notable exception is Plato, some of whose early dialogues are actually the teachings of Socrates.

There is a reason for this. Since these works take upon the task of unravelling our conception of the world, including questioning our assumptions, it takes some preliminary effort to wrest the reader free from his mental mould. Philosophers, influential philosophers in any case, are rigorous in how they approach their written material, precisely because they know this difficulty inherent in the task lying ahead.

Add to this another peculiarity – you take up any philosopher in history and chances are you’ll be able to summarise his ideas in a few simple paragraphs that everyone will be able to at least comprehend (again there could be a few exceptions – Husserl and his phenomenology being a good candidate, for example), even if not fully understand. By that I mean you will be able to understand the “what” of his philosophy, even if you may not understand the “why” and the “how”.

The result is truly interesting. On the one hand, you have the philosophers trying to explain to you very foundational things, yet, on the other hand, those very philosophers have to take such an academic route to explain it, in order to break through the notions we have built since our birth, that it becomes difficult to understand  their ideas.

And here is where Palmer enters the scene. He explains the “why” and “how” of the ideas that make original works so difficult to read. And he does this beautifully.

Palmer wonderfully condenses the ideas of the philosophers he takes up and presents them in a really engaging manner. In addition, his sense of humour and the keen sense of balancing this humour with the difficulty of some of the ideas presented, really pushes up the quality of the material by several notches.

Palmer does not at any point try to oversimplify or trivialise the ideas for the sake of the reader – no, where is the fun in that! The fun is in realising the essential soul of the ideas, putting them into a historical context, and then linking that context with the inevitability of its own rise.

Serious, scholarly philosophy is not suited to all kinds of people. It requires a certain level of patience,  intellect and flexibility. Nevertheless, the lack of such traits should not act as hindrances for the dissemination of such important ideas as have shaped the very course of the human race.

This book is marvellous. It tells you the history of philosophy in all its beauty, in a completely unconventional manner. This is the perfect book for those who want to have a taste of serious philosophy, yet are driven away by the (expected) standards of rigor found in original works.

A paradigm shift in the way we look at science

Thomas Kuhn was one of the foremost philosophers of science of the twentieth century. In 1962, he came out with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a book that heralded one of the most important moments in the history of science, and gave us a fresh new perspective on the functioning of the scientific community.

The question that drove Kuhn to write this magnificent book was this. Why are there certain fields of human endeavour where it is very difficult to find a consensus as to what the right answers to the traditional questions posed in that field are? Principal among these fields were the social sciences, and sometimes economics.

Kuhn observed considerable fragmentation and even contradictions in the views held by different social scientists and he realised they hardly ever reached a consensus on the answer to any question, much less on the principles they used to find those answers.

And then, when Kuhn looked at the scientific community, he saw a remarkable contrast. In any given field of science, the scientific community almost always had a consensus on the principles they were following, the kind of questions that they considered legitimate, the nature of the questions they were trying to answer, the kind of answers that were expected and accepted, and even whether certain types of answers could be considered correct or not.

What was the reason? Surely there was something fundamentally different between the so called “exact science” and the “inexact sciences”, terms which, it must be mentioned, he did not actually use.

What follows is an incredibly systematic deconstruction of the scientific edifice, where he starts with a discussion on the nature of science and on what it means to practice science. This leads him to the answer that at any given point of time, most of the scientific community practices science based on a specific, almost universally, accepted foundation that includes a scientific theory believed at that time to be true and as reasonably complete as could be expected, and also the instrumentations and pedagogy associated with that theory, including how the next generation of scientists are familiarised with these aspects. Just to be clear, “theory” is a very restrictive term to characterise the foundation Kuhn is talking about. So, he used another word with far wider implications. Paradigm.

What does the existence of a paradigm entail? How does it come into being and how does it succeed so well at being accepted, albeit gradually but eventually, by a considerable majority of the scientific community? These are some of the questions that he picks up till he is finally confronted by the inevitable question – how do paradigms change? Is it a linear process of accumulation of scientific knowledge, or is it something completely different?

The phrase “paradigm shift”, as understood today, originated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn noted the very crucial differences in the periods and situations in which a science is practiced as a “normal science”, which is a way of “solving puzzles” put forth by the natural conception of the prevalent scientific paradigm, and the moments of crisis that arise, both in terms of the kinds of questions asked, and the kind of anomalous observations made when strictly following the paradigmatic framework, which lead to a search for possible alternate explanations and theories and, ultimately, to a kind of intellectual gestalt switch – where you find a completely new way of looking at the same information. Yours truly, the paradigm shift, has occurred. Kuhn gives the famous example of the duck-rabbit sketch as a ridiculously simplified analogy.

This book was a delight to read and I realised one crucial reason was the vocation of the author.

Many scientists write books, but there is something different about those of them who are astutely aware of the ins and outs of their enterprise. Science isn’t simply a way of documenting, labelling and understanding the world. It is a way of life and the rigor which such scientists, Kuhn in this case, follow in their vocation naturally rubs off on the way they write as well.

With time, the idea of paradigm shift has been applied to other fields as well, fields for which the idea wasn’t originally suited as developed by Kuhn in this book, and towards which he expresses a slight surprise in the Afterword of the book, written seven years after the book was published.

There is beauty, simplicity and profundity in the writing of this book.

Like most other concepts, anarchism is poorly understood

To me “anarchism” conjures up, or at least used to before I read this book, an image of a society that follows no laws, gives absolute freedom to its members, and hopes to sustain itself by appealing to the better nature of its inhabitants. No wonder I never considered it to be feasible, much less an alternative to the existing democratic structures.

The dawn of industrial revolution in the 1700s meant the western nations were in need of raw materials to feed their rising industries. This led them to set up their tents in, mainly, African and Asian countries, at a time when most of them had little or no concept of a “nation”. With time, they came to control the raw materials, the industries and international trade emerging from these countries. The indigenous people were transformed into machines, into cogs of a wheel which kept the industrial revolution alive.

It was in this background that socialism (the state should own the means of production) and communism (abolition of private property and creation of a collectivised classless society) emerged. Their aim was basically to restore dignity into the lives of the labourers and abolish “wage slavery”, which forced them to sell their health, life and soul barely to stay alive.

Socialism and communism arose in various forms throughout the world, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, a process which continued into the first half of the twentieth century. As we entered the second half of the twentieth century, however, another idea had extended its roots deep into the minds of some emerging nations.

Democracy in the twenty-first century, as in the latter half of the twentieth century, emerged as the result of centuries of struggle against the western imperial powers which had set up their tents throughout the world. It was the result of a long struggle, a struggle for equality, for freedom, for making the administrative machinery answerable to the governed, and for providing appropriate mechanisms for bringing about changes in those very machineries.

In most implementations of a democratic setup, it promised, at the very least, equality before law, ensured the rights of each person were as important as any other’s, and strove towards a society where each person could live his life free from the chains of exploitation.

Most democracies supported, not necessarily driven by something innate in their philosophy, but as a barometer for individual freedom, a free market economy. This meant that people with the required resources, which included land, labour, capital and raw materials among other things, could set up their industries and employ other people to do certain jobs. This was an important development, as the anarchists later proclaimed, in that it perpetuated wage slavery but this time under the guise of freedom of the individual, thus escaping the conscious moral revulsion associated with it in the previous centuries.

This, from what I could gather from the introductory portions of the book, was the seed which precipitated the dawn of anarchism as a possible political alternative.

What is anarchism, in its core? As Chomsky explains in the book, an anarchist demands that every form of power must justify the reasons it is holding that power, and this prerogative lies on the power-wielding authority and not the governed. Be it religion, capitalism, government or any other framework that holds any kind of power, if it can’t justify itself, it must be done away with.

The Spanish revolution of 1936-37 is the most pertinent example in our study of a truly anarchist society. As Orwell writes in Homage to Catalonia, from which Chomsky quotes extensively, anyone who had been lucky enough to be in Spain, especially cities like Catalonia, Aragon or Barcelona during the time, would have been surprised by the level of cohesion and practicality that an anarchist society could offer. Everybody was equal, each did the kind of work he or she wanted not because of the compulsion of earning a living, but merely because he wanted to do that work. It would have been a revelation for the sceptics.

But why this scepticism? Why does the term anarchism seem to represent the paragon of impracticality, is labelled flawed before the word is even completely uttered, and is consequently hand-waved into impertinence?

Chomsky cites this as a result of a trend where leading historians, many of whom have received the most decorated honours, commentators, analysts and even the press, failed to objectively report the Spanish revolution and its events, mostly due to an inherent liberal bias they had, and also on account of the dominant political narratives that were playing out in the western nations, and even those with a communist government at the helm, who were not supportive of a positive portrayal of the anarchist revolution that had swept parts of Spain.

Chomsky doesn’t blame them per se, but he doesn’t spare them either. Through extensive quotations from some of the sources that managed to honestly represent, though still not completely, the developments in Spain during the revolution, he proves that some of the most followed and respected authors, whose works are considered canonical works of the revolution, failed to honestly report some of the most important and crucial moments of the anarchist movement. What a pity.

Chomsky ends the book with an exposition on the nature of the connection between language and freedom, for, he says, having an independent mind, of which (human) language is possibly the principal indicator, is one of the prerequisites of freedom.

I must admit, this book is a bit scholarly and the casual reader may not find it interesting enough in parts, but it is a great comment on how the course of history, and of the lives of the people who read it, can be influenced and moulded, sometimes unknowingly and sometimes with intent, by a few voices.

In this tale of the Spanish revolution, we find a message of grave importance. How often have we misunderstood history, not only because we haven’t got as many sources as we would ideally want, but also because the thought of questioning the credibility of the sources often escapes us. It’s not something we naturally do.

Chomsky shows just how much we stand to lose by staying in this mould, and how much to gain by breaking free.

 To lead or not to lead, is that causation?

Causation is one of the fundamental forces that forms the very bedrock of reality and how we experience the world. Without causation, knowledge would be impossible as we would have no way to link any one thing with another – every object and event would have had a separate existence independent of other objects and events; inference, logic, reason – every scientific edifice would crumble. It’s hard to imagine how we could have even existed then – eating food, reproducing, saving oneself from physical and mental harm, nothing would have mattered.

Wrapping one’s head around such concepts is especially difficult as they are never directly observed. This is what Hume said, that our sense of causation is nothing but an intuitively developed concept formed by seeing a given combination of events multiple times – causation has no metaphysical existence, but is only a psychological artefact of expectation within us. Causation, he said, is an illusion.

With this background, Mumford and Anjum begin their book on causation.

In the chapters that follow, some of the common ideas associated with causation are taken up – that causes precede effects, that they are near in space and time, that they always occur together and the like. At a first glance, all these are indeed the kinds of properties and relationships we expect between causes and effects.

But lo and behold! It turns out each and every one of these properties that we relate with causation is flawed as, one by one, the authors start dismantling our notions regarding this concept.

But perhaps the more difficult part was to come up with replacements to form the new foundations of the crumpled and crumbled edifice. In the past few decades, some new theories of causation have entered into the scene and the authors then go on to expound the positives and negatives of those. Some theories, like pluralism which says that causation comprises of a combination of different things which depend on the specific event, or primitivism which says causation is an un-analysable event, a sort of metaphysical atom, tantamount to accepting defeat in the quest to understand causation, whereas others, like dispositionalism which talks about the “tendency” of one thing to lead to another, stand on relatively stronger grounds. Yet, at present, there is not a single theory that manages to explain causation in its various forms.

Does causation imply necessity? But then not every match strike leads to a spark as there are extra factors like wind and wetness of the match head that we forget to take into account. Does causation imply a change from what could have been (an elk on the railway track causes the train to stop and get late; but its presence wouldn’t matter if there was also a red signal), or can causation also exist in things that don’t happen (a medicine stops the onset of a disease, so did it cause nothing?) – questions like these keep the readers occupied, and by the end of the book, short thought experiments such as these help to extract the main components of the concept of causation that one might have.

A statement like “causes precede effects” is seen as being axiomatic. And yet, it is incorrect. Causes and effects exist simultaneously. Let’s take a sugar cube dissolving in water, for instance. If the cause is “sugar coming into contact with water” and the effect is “sugar dissolving in water”, then, the authors say, all the considerations of how the sugar cube and glass of water came to be together, and how someone picked up the sugar cube and put it in the water, are irrelevant from a causation point of view. The sugar cube will only dissolve when it is in contact with water. The effect can only simultaneously exist with the cause.

Causes do not precede effects. This was one of the results that really surprised me. And that is the beauty of reading such books. You realise that there are cracks in the very foundations of your knowledge. It is one thing to not know what causes X, but an entirely different thing to not even know what causation itself really is. It opens up one’s mind to the possibility of other such cracks in one’s conception of the world, and that is enlightening.

If reading the previous nine paragraphs makes you have a re-look at your concept of causation, I wouldn’t think twice before saying it may as well have caused it.

Too much build-up leading to nothing

Nothing, or nothing-ness, is a topic intuitively difficult to grasp. Surrounded by everyday machineries – people, electronic devices, buildings – it is relatively easy to imagine what it would be like when all of these things are removed – when all the matter, along with the air, is removed. We call it a vacuum, but it still contains electromagnetic waves and gravity waves (if they exist).

To get a grip on true nothingness, we have to remove even those fields from that space – only then can we even hope to start delving into our quest of understanding nothingness.

Naturally, when I picked up the book, I was more interested in finding answers to questions like – what does it mean for something to exist, how can something arise from nothing, does empty space have nothingness or does it have other additional characteristics, and the like. I knew most of these questions would ultimately lead me into the quantum world, and the fluctuations that characterise even seemingly empty space. The answer to nothingness lies there.

To my utter dismay, however, the author spent nearly seventy percent of the book’s length in building up to the topic. It is, finally, around page 100 that the quantum weirdness is first taken up for discussion. For a book of three or four hundred pages, it could have been tolerated. But for a book which doesn’t even reach 150 pages, this was inexcusable.

We find ourselves reading a short history of the development of science since Newton. Newtonian mechanics, concept of ether, electromagnetic theory, Michelson-Morley experiment and rejection of ether, quantum theory, Einstein’s radical thought experiment of catching up with a light-wave, and his special and general theories of relativity. Barring a few anecdotes in the first few pages, I learnt absolutely nothing in those hundred pages. What an irony it was.

Additionally, and it could be because of the sheer nature of the topic covered, there is a marked difference in the degrees of difficulty in the earlier and the later parts of the book. The earlier part can be understood even by children who have just entered the teens, but the later part requires much more mental dexterity which I clearly didn’t have. Whether I could have understood it if the author had spent more time in explaining what all was happening, is open to debate.

I feel a lot more time should have been spent in discussing the nothing-ness itself – the weird quantum world where the answers to the above questions lie. The author discusses it in the last one-third part of the book, but my dejection from the previous chapters prevented me from getting too involved with what I was reading.

All in all, the book misses the woods in trying to name the various trees it can see. The idea of nothingness is not discussed to the degree that was expected and that prevents the good parts of the book, where they do come, from having the effect they otherwise would have had.

What could have been a brilliant book turned out to be just about average, principally because there is a dissonance between the book’s title, and its content.