Twenty-two Nice Philosophers
Presented in chronological order
Here are all the replies I received, unedited and in the order I got them, with a little information about each of the philosophers who wrote to me. On occasion my correspondents did as I asked and sent me a whole paper of their own to contemplate. I read everything but you don’t have to. I haven’t included the full papers and I wouldn’t dare to try and sum any of them up in my own words. Instead I have where appropriate included some rather lengthy quotations. I am sorry but I am too stupid to do otherwise and besides, that’s just the way life works.
Prof. Mark T. Nelson, Westmont College
Mark Nelson was a lecturer at the university of Leeds and has since moved on to become a professor at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. He specialises in Metaethics, Normative Ethics, Epistemology and the philosophy of religion. His reply came swiftly by email. It was helpful and informative and suggested that God might have the answer I was looking for. That wasn’t the answer I was looking for but it started me off with high hopes.
From: Mark T. Nelson
Date: Mon Oct 6, 2003 12:25:11 pm
Subject: your letter
Dear Caspar:
Thanks for your letter of 1 October. I’m sorry to say that I can’t think of any paper of mine that would answer to your query. I guess I think that a good account of the meaning of life, the universe and everything could not be contained in one crisply typeset foolscap sheet; moreover, I think it would end up looking a bit religious.
There are loads of book-length treatments of this sort, from Plato to Plantinga, but I think you might find the following an interesting place to start, as they contain short, biographical essays:
T.V. Morris, ed., God and the Philosophers (OUP, 1994)
Kelly Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe (IVP, 1993)
Not all of the essays are of equally high quality, but there are some nice essays in both books. In any case, good luck with the search!
Sincerely,
Mark Nelson
Andrew McGonigal, University of Leeds.
Twenty minutes later I received another email from the University of Leeds. This one came from Andrew McGonigal, who had recently joined the department and is still there as a lecturer. He is interested in aesthetics, metaphysics, metaethics, epistemology and the philosophies of mind and of language. He was also honest, helpful and informative and merely referred me to a couple of articles by a living American philosopher. Things were looking up.
From: “A. McGonigal”
Date: Mon Oct 6, 2003 12:46:54 pm
Subject: meaning of life
I don’t have much to say that is useful or insightful to say about this topic, I’m afraid. There are lots of reasons why life is valuable, and worth living, but there may not be any very informative way of collecting them under a single category or heading. There are two good articles by Thomas Nagel which you might find interesting.
Nagel, T. (2000). The meaning of life. In E. D. Klemke (Ed.), The meaning of life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, T. (2000). The absurd. In E. D. Klemke (Ed.), The meaning of life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Regards,
Andrew McGonigal, University of Leeds.
Dr. Jens Timmermann, University of Saint Andrews
A quarter of an hour later, a third email arrived from Jens Timmermann. Dr. Timmermann is a senior lecturer at the university of Saint Andrews. He too is interested in Aesthetics, together with ethical theory and ancient philosophy. He is an expert in the work of Immanuel Kant. He was the first of my respondents to attempt an answer of his own. His answer is as satisfying as it is succinct.
From: Jens Timmermann
Date: Mon Oct 6, 2003 1:00:22 pm
Dear Mr Addyman,
The meaning of life? That’s every philosopher’s nightmare of a question, especially over dinner. As you kindly give me the opportunity to answer it in writing, here’s a quick reply: Drawing on Kant and Aristotle, my quick answer is that the meaning of life consists in activity in accordance with reason. So first of all, we must do things with our lives, be active, not fritter it away. Secondly, this activity should be in line with what makes us human: our capacity to think, reason, act and communicate with others like us. This kind of meaning is autonomous and does not depend on God or any supernatural power. Human beings are in charge of their own lives, but they must obey the standards of their own rational and moral faculties.
With best wishes,
Dr. Jens Timmermann, University of Saint Andrews
Andrew Belsey, Cardiff University
A few days then passed before I received my very first postal reply. This was exciting. It came from Dr. Andrew Belsey, a senior lecturer at the university of Cardiff, since retired. His research interests include ethics and he was co-editor of the book, Ethical Issues in Journalism and the Media. I didn’t know it at the time but he is also a published poet. This may explain his short but troubling letter.
Dear Mr Addyman
The meaning of life is preparation for death. I hope that you are well prepared.
Yours sincerely, Andrew Belsey, Cardiff University
So there it was. My very first death threat! I was clearly on the right lines with this project if it was inspiring such animosity from professional philosophers.
I am not one to dismiss lightly the words of a tenured academic so for most of the past nine years I have been on my guard. As you can see I am still here, Andrew and his minions haven’t succeeded in their dastardly schemes. In fact I am beginning to wonder if he might have meant it metaphorically. He is a poet, after all. But then again, that might be just what he wants me to think. I better stay prepared.
Arnold Zuboff, University College London
Dr Zuboff is an American philosopher, who works at University College London. He is interested in philosophy of mind, ethics and metaphysics. His research is refreshingly modern and no-nonsense. He thinks there can be answers to the difficult questions and that a philosopher’s job is not to luxuriate in pointing out the difficulties but to attempt to find the answers. If I didn’t know better from my short correspondence with him, I would imagine him as Dirty Harry, sent back in time to clean up the mean streets of Athens.
From: Arnold Zuboff
Date: 07.10.2003, 12:39:16
Subject: Explanation
Dear Caspar,
I’m attaching two parts of my explanation of things. If you’re interested in seeing more, please let me know.
Best wishes,
Arnold Zuboff
Arnold attached two papers that you can easily find online. The first was entitled “An introduction to universalism.” Here I will provide you with just the introduction to that introduction.
Brain bisection, the surgical cutting of the connection between the hemispheres of the brain at the bridge of nerves that normally joins them (the corpus callosum), was an operation that gave relief to epileptics. But experimenters working with split-brain patients in the 1960s discovered an additional result of this surgery that was startling and disturbing. When they fed markedly different information into each hemisphere, the subject would, it seemed, possess two mutually excluding experiences at one time.
Let me dramatize the puzzle in this by asking you to engage in a variation on one of the thought experiments in Derek Parfit’s paper ‘Personal Identity’. Imagine that by pressing a certain button you could cause your corpus callosum to be anaesthetized, so that the communication between the hemispheres of your brain would be stopped temporarily.
Tonight a concert of your favourite music is going to be broadcast on the radio, but you have to do some tedious studying from audio tapes. Well, why not arrange that the music will go into only the right hemisphere of your brain while the study material will go into only the left after the button has been pushed and the integration of the activities of the hemispheres has been stopped? But then the big question arises: what would your evening be like?
The ordinary understanding of what a person is does not allow that you could be both enjoying the concert and suffering through the studying, since each of these experiences seems to exclude the other. Yet it cannot be that you only enjoy the concert or alternatively only suffer through the studying or that you somehow experience neither. For following a more extensive anaesthetizing, or a stroke, that completely incapacitated one hemisphere you would certainly have had whichever experience was in the remaining functioning hemisphere. The concert would be yours if there was only the right hemisphere and the studying would be yours if there was only the left. In our case there are both.
The answer must be that you will experience both the concert and the studying, though each will seem falsely to be the whole of your experience. I shall contend that it is this same false seeming, the same illusion, that hides the fact that all experience actually is yours. This is a view I call “universalism”. All the experience in all the separate nervous systems of the world is yours, though what is discovered in each necessarily seems falsely to be the whole of what is yours. Next I shall argue for this larger claim, but the case of brain bisection has shown this much already: that seeming limits of experience can mislead you into thinking you are less than you are. Then what is it that really sets your limits? What, really, are you?
Well, what are you, PUNK?
Arnold’s second paper assumes you have overcome your problems with self-identity and moves on to tackle your bad attitude. He wants you ask yourself one simple question. “Why should I care about morality?”.
Let’s inquire into the nature of morality--and, more particularly, into the authority that it seems to have in the judgments of most of us. I think a certain story can help us in raising the question of where it gets that authority.
Imagine that someone we shall call Gyges, after the character similarly used by Plato in a basically similar story, is seated at a table. Just before him on the table is a small console with a single button on it. Let’s say he knows that if he pushed that button a distant stranger, who would otherwise be fine, would be killed. Gyges also knows that if he pushed that lethal button, he, Gyges, would be given £10 that he otherwise would not have. We are going to look into whether Gyges has any reason based purely on morality not to push the button.
It is vital that we rule out of our story, if it is to be useful to our questioning of the authority of morality, any possibility that Gyges be punished if he pushes the button or that he in some way be rewarded if he doesn’t push it. For if we give him the fear of punishment or the hope of reward as reasons not to push the button, we have not then clearly isolated whether he has a reason not to push the button in its being morally wrong to do so. We are wanting to know whether morality in itself has an authority here for him, but his own punishment or reward carries only the authority of the sort of obvious self-interest that is often distinguished from moral motivation. Therefore we shall say something like Gyges can be sure that the death he might choose to cause would have the perfect appearance of an accident having nothing to do with Gyges. So Gyges would be perfectly safe. Let us add that the remoteness of the stranger ensures that there would be no other possibilities of personal loss or gain for Gyges in either the stranger’s death or his continued life.
The question, then, is this: Gyges has a slight but undeniable reason to push the button, the self-interested reason that he will by doing so acquire £10 that he otherwise would not have. But does he have a reason not to push the button?
In case you don’t know the answer, I won’t spoil it for you by giving it away now but we shall come back to this later.
Tim Chappell, The Open University
Professor Chappell is director of the Open University Ethics Centre. At the time I wrote to him he was at the University of Dundee and he has worked at quite a range of universities in England and Scotland. As might be guessed, he is interested in ethics and also in a little bit of epistemology. He’s written or edited ten books and he also writes poetry. Least you imagine him trapped in a library, bear in mind that he also likes climbing some mountains and skiing down others.
From: Timothy Chappell
Date: Tue 07 Oct 2003, 13:33:45
Subject: the meaning of life
Dear Mr Addyman,
For the meaning of life, see the attachment.
Best wishes,
Tim Chappell
His article was entitled “How should we live?” At last, an answer! And he’d not been completely whimsical. He is quite courageously trying to provide the Answer. It is only six pages long so if we printed very small and printed on both sides we could certainly squeeze it on a single sheet of foolscap. I’d like to quote it at length but it’s somewhat technical and so perhaps it’s best to skip over the justifications and get right to his conclusion:
How should we live? Well, here’s a framework answer: respect every good you meet, and pursue any good you like. That answer’s a bit sketchy, of course, and we need to add to it some considerations about the agent’s need to make their own agency coherent over time, by incorporating each choice she makes into a continuing narrative of self-creation. Still, the framework answer will do to be going on with. Whatever its faults, its sketchiness in general, and my omission to give any examples of failures to respect any good in particular, the framework answer does, I think, at least have one important virtue: namely, truth.
He sent me that in 2003. But I can’t help wondering what he would tell me, if I asked him again today. In 2008 while climbing Ben Nevis, he took a nasty bouncing fall in an avalanche, bouncing for seventy uncomfortable metres down into a gully. He was seriously injured but happily survived and has since recovered. Like any good philosopher would, he wrote a paper about it*. It is an interesting reflection upon what it is like to face death. Both what it is like in that precise moment when it appears to happening and what it can mean when that fear creeps up on us at other times. Professor Chappell’s experience of the moment was, in common with many others, one of calm detachment. He describes his main emotion as he fell as an admirably British feeling of embarrassment at making such a fuss.
More troubling for him, as a Christian, was the challenge of Richard Dawkins and others as to why a Christian should ever fear death. He agrees with Dawkins logic that there really isn’t anything for a Christian to fear on the other side of death.
________________
* Entitled, “The fear of death” it will appear in a forthcoming edition of New Blackfriars. You can also find a copy on his Open university homepage.
But, reflecting very honestly on his own experience of fear while waiting to go under anaesthetic, he wonders if what is actually frightening them is that loss of control that would accompany the moment of passing. He concludes, perhaps surprisingly, that his fellow Christians should take a little more time to consider both death and Dawkins.
Harry Lesser, University of Manchester
Professor Lesser is based at the University of Manchester. He too is interested in ethics.
I don’t think anyone has the answer to this or claims to--as no doubt you know. Nor have philosophers normally tried--philosophy is normally about the more modest questions of what we can know and what we ought to do, and has not solved either of these, though I think it has made useful contributions. Incidentally, there is no reason to think that the contributions of dead men are any less useful than those of live men. The sensible thing to do, as you probably know, is not to worry about this, but to give one’s life meaning by spending it, as far as possible, in doing things which one finds worthwhile--satisfying to oneself and helpful to others. Some of us think philosophy is among these, but because it helps with some problems rather than giving an overall answer!
Best Harry Lesser, University of Manchester
John Haldane, University of Saint Andrews Professor John Haldane is director of the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at the university of Saint Andrews. He is interested in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. His home page has some interesting pictures of him meeting famous people, including the present Pope and Madness frontman, Suggs*.
Dear Mr Addyman,
Thank you for your interesting letter. I hope the promptness of this reply may compensate for its brevity.
Your question is ‘what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?’ Noting that you describe yourself as an ‘atheist’ I am that the following answer is one you will reject; yet it is the one I believe to be true. The universe of things, events, properties and processes, material and immaterial, concrete and abstract, is the product of an all-knowing almighty, all-loving Deity that created human beings in order that they should know and love it now and for eternity.
If you are tempted to consider this answer further, particularly as it relates to contemporary philosophy you may care to look at the following which contain my own elaborations of the reasons for believing it to be true:
ATHEISM AND THEISM, 2nd Edition by J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
and
AN INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO RELIGION J.J Haldane (London: Duckworth, 2003)
_____________
* Not, alas, at the same time.
I am sure whether my saying so will bring comfort or disappointment but I do not regard your letter as cranky or lunatic and I hope that you receive an interesting set of replies.
(Incidentally, letters from lunatics are usually written in green biro or typed in small font running close to the margins. Also, the contents often continue on the outside of the envelope.)
Yours sincerely,
John Haldane
Michael Rush, University of Manchester Michael Rush lectures at Manchester and Bolton and for the Open University. His research interests are primarily metaphysical but his Masters thesis was on the topic of gratitude.
Dear Caspar,
I find myself all too infrequently pestered by self-confessed cranks and lunatics; your honesty is refreshing. Or it was, and then I looked at your website and discovered that the claim of lunacy was just a subterfuge. Still, never mind. I couldn’t work out whether your real aim was an answer to your question or the collective humiliation of all the philosophers in the country.
If the first, I fear you’ll be disappointed; it’s a pseudo-philosophical question asked by non-philosophers, and any philosopher claiming to have an answer for you is cheeky, misguided or, possibly, both. If the second, I’m bound to say I hope you’ll be disappointed, if only by those respondents that admit to having no answer for you. This isn’t humiliating but, in its turn, refreshing. We never claimed (well, I for one never claimed) to be trying to answer that question, so you can’t catch us out there. It’d be like saying, ‘Ha! Bloody useless! No explanation of the meaning of life, and they call themselves milkmen?’ (to milkmen).
Most people asking for the meaning of life really want to be told the purpose of life, which is a subtly different thing. It seems clear to me that there really isn’t one, but equally clear that we shouldn’t be in the least bit troubled by this. Anyone tempted to think that God has a design for it all should be urged to remember that there is a species of frog that spends something like eleven and a half months of every year asleep, buried in the sand in Arizona, or some such place, because otherwise it would burn to death. This can’t possibly be in accordance with any sensible plan. And I’m sorry, boys, but telling me it’s ineffable just won’t cut it as an explanation. The really important question is, ‘how should we behave?’ In this respect ethics is the most important branch of philosophy, though I think we’ll need to get the metaphysics sorted out before we can finally do the ethics properly. Aristotle might just have been right in saying that politics is the highest of the sciences, but he failed to add that it is in many ways the most boring.
I think it was Philippa Foot who said that if you ask a philosopher a question they talk for a bit and you go away no longer understanding your question. So there you go. So, if we can’t ask about the meaning of life, and if we buy the claim that there’s no purpose, what’s left? Only to quote those well-known, kooky funsters, Bill and Ted: ‘Be excellent to each other, dudes.’ Aristotle might well have agreed (once we’d settled on a suitable Greek translation of ‘dudes’ ). And I think we can all learn a lot from that.
Yours, Michael Rush, University of Manchester
I have been trying to decide who is my favourite philosopher. But like all things in philosophy, once you examine the question, it rapidly becomes more difficult than you suspected.
I have always admired the lyrical style of Nietzsche. I like the outlook of boggle-eyed frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre. I think Socrates was a wonderful man. As a result of my philosophical investigations, I have discovered the wonderful penetrating clarity of Derek Parfit, and been reminded of the whimsical wisdom of Thomas Nagel. But they were all good for different reasons that are hard to compare.
Then I hit on rigorous criteria by which to judge it. Which of them would be best company on a night on the town? By this measure, and judging only by his letter, Michael Rush must rank quite highly
Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford.
Derek Parfit retired in 2010 having spent almost all his working life as a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. His 1984 book Reasons and Persons was a hugely influential discussion of morality and identity that ran to over 550 pages. Despite the weightiness of his tome, much of his popularity is due to the clarity of his writing and his vivid thought-experiments using examples from Star-Trek and other science fiction. He has just finished another work weighing in at over 650 pages, provisionally entitled, “On what matters.”
Dear Caspar Addyman,
As it happens, I have written a paper which could be broadly said to be about the meaning of life and the universe. You may have seen this already, but I enclose it as an attachment in two formats.
There’s nothing wrong with the occasional split infinite, as Fowler himself said.
With best wishes,
Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford.
Dr. Parfit attached a short paper of his on the existence of the universe. It’s called “Why Anything? Why this?” The full version was published in two parts by the London Review of Books in 1998. It’s worth reading. And it’s worth quoting the opening and closing at length.
Why does the Universe exist? There are two questions here. First, why is there a Universe at all? It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Second, why does this Universe exist? Things might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is?
These questions, some believe, may have causal answers. Suppose first that the Universe has always existed. Some believe that, if all events were caused by earlier events, everything would be explained. That, however, is not so. Even an infinite series of events cannot explain itself. ...
Suppose next that the Universe is not eternal, since nothing preceded the Big Bang. That first event, some physicists suggest, may have obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics, by being a random fluctuation in a vacuum. This would causally explain, they say, how the Universe came into existence out of nothing. But what physicists call a vacuum isn’t really nothing. We can ask why it exists, and has the potentialities it does. In Hawking’s phrase, ‘What breathes fire into the equations?’
Similar remarks apply to all suggestions of these kinds. There could not be a causal explanation of why the Universe exists, why there are any laws of nature, or why these laws are as they are. Nor would it make a difference if there is a God, who caused the rest of the Universe to exist. There could not be a causal explanation of why God exists.
Many people have assumed that, since these questions cannot have causal answers, they cannot have any answers. Some therefore dismiss these questions, thinking them not worth considering. Others conclude that they do not make sense. They assume that, as Wittgenstein wrote, ‘doubt can exist only where there is a question; and a question only where there is an answer’.
These assumptions are all, I believe, mistaken. Even if these questions could not have answers, they would still make sense, and they would still be worth considering. I am reminded here of the aesthetic category of the sublime, as applied to the highest mountains, raging oceans, the night sky, the interiors of some cathedrals, and other things that are superhuman, awesome, limitless. No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing. Nor should we assume that answers to this question must be causal. And, even if reality cannot be fully explained, we may still make progress, since what is inexplicable may become less baffling than it now seems.
It ends like this:
The existence of the Universe can seem, in another way, astonishing. Even if it is not baffling that reality was made to be some way, since there is no conceivable alternative, it can seem baffling that the selection went as it did. Why is there a Universe at all? Why doesn’t reality take its simplest and least arbitrary form: that in which nothing ever exists? If we find this astonishing, we are assuming that these features should be the Selectors: that reality should be as simple and unarbitrary as it could be. That assumption has, I believe, great plausibility. But, just as the simplest cosmic possibility is that nothing ever exists, the simplest explanatory possibility is that there is no Selector. So we should not expect simplicity at both the factual and explanatory levels. If there is no Selector, we should not expect that there would also be no Universe. That would be an extreme coincidence.
These philosophers had given me plenty to worry about and made me fear for my life. But it was probably Derek Parfit who gave me most to worry about and came closest to killing me. He almost made my head explode when he handed over more than the universe in that article. Carl Sagan, the astronomer and science broadcaster used to make the world seem small when he went on about this pale blue dot lost among the billions and billions of stars in our galaxy. Itself just one of billions and billions of galaxies in the universe.
Which is big but Derek Parfit thinks bigger, much bigger. He doesn’t just consider this universe or even a mere multiverse of similar universes with similar laws and similar physics that might have existed in its place. He considers every possible universe, every universe that isn’t impossible, not according to our local laws of physics but according to the laws of logic and mathematics. He thinks about them all simultaneously and wonders innocently if this super-set of universes might somehow be a “simplest” that one can conceive of and that can actually have transpired*. Would leaving nothing out paradoxically be the most parsimonious explanation for what is left in?
As it happens, no. But I personally haven’t got a parsimonious reason why.
Stephen Butterfill, University of Warwick Stephen Butterfill is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. He is interested in the philosophy of mind.
From: Stephen Butterfill
Date: Thu Oct 9, 2003 7:33:25 pm
Subject: your letter about the meaning of life …
Hi Caspar (if I may),
Thanks for your letter of 1st October. I’m studying questions about belief and action such as “How do changes in our environment or situation lead to changes in our views about how things are?” I think this sort of question ultimately bears on your question about the meaning of life &c, but not very directly. That said, I’d welcome the chance to discuss it if you’re interested.
______________
* There is a simpler universe of universes, an empty set that never even existed. But since this place does exist, that is not where we live.
The recent philosophers who I think of as addressing your question more head-on are people like Bernard Williams, Tim Scanlon and Chris Korsgaard. My favourite is David Velleman who has a short piece from “The Possibility of Practical Reason” (published by OUP, 2000) on the web at: http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/humanities/philosophy/viewpoint/velleman/
I suppose the meaning of life &c is a problem we al face in one way or another; what’s your take on it?
Best,
Steve
These days Steve is interested in development psychology, the beginnings of tiny minds and how they start to form beliefs about others.
Christopher Norris, University of Cardiff Christopher Norris is the Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at Cardiff University, He has many interests in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of science and literary theory.