"Neurophilosophy at Work" and "The Really Hard Problem"

Here are two book reviews recently posted to Metapsychology Online Reviews (including one by Neuroethics & Law Blogger Neil Levy):

Neurophilosophy at Work
by Paul Churchland
Review by Christina Behme on Jan 15th 2008

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
by Owen J. Flanagan
Review by Neil Levy, Ph.D. on Jan 29th 2008

Overall, Neil gives the book a quite favorable review.  But here's a sample from one of Neil's more critical paragraphs, on Flanagan's effort to strip spirituality of its spookier elements:

By 'spirituality', Flanagan means something like a feeling of interconnectedness and awe; such a feeling does not depend on any supernatural convictions. First, Flanagan engages in a ground-clearing exercise, asking whether we need illusions to flourish. His target here is a strand of research in social psychology which allegedly establishes the near-ubiquity of false belief about matters close to us (for instance about our own intelligence, skills, and so on), and also that such false beliefs are associated with psychological health. Flanagan is unimpressed by this evidence, and argues that we can live without illusion. To my mind, this is the weakest chapter of the book. His dismissal of the evidence is causal and shows an uncharacteristic disregard for the high epistemological standards he usually abides by. He offers reinterpretations of the evidence without suggesting whether social psychology has controlled for them (usually it has) and anecdotes and personal observations which are likely to be of little worth in the light of various well-known heuristics and biases to which we are all prone. Perhaps in recognition of the weakness of the arguments offered here, Flanagan ends the chapter with a much weaker conclusion than his arguments, if successful, would warrant: not that we are not, after all, subject to pervasive illusions, but that some of us escape them without suffering psychological harms.

Comments

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

I like the comment to Levy's review.

A bit more seriously: For a nice introduction to a non-religious yet non-naturalist spirituality that *should* fall within the province of philosophy (and once in fact did), please see John Haldane's essay, "On the Very Idea of Spiritual Values," in Anthony O'Hear, ed., Philosophy, the Good, the True and the Beautiful (2000): 53-71. A basic premise of humanist psychology, a recognition of existentialist angst, and something akin if not identical to the Buddhist diagnosis of "suffering" can be found in the following remarks, which are also pertinent to any attempt to "strip spirituality of its spookier elements:"

"Thoreau wrote that the masss of men lead lives of quiet desperation. This is a sad thought, and though it is difficult to assess its truth there is evidence provided in imaginative literature, in the press, in doctors' surgeries, through personal acquaintance, and by knowledge of one's own circumstances, all of which suggest that many people are ill at ease with the human condition as they experience it. Many of us are desperate and many of us are sad, and the sources of our distress are not easily removed.

Certainly many privations may not befall one, but their very possibility casts a shadow across human lives. Those who are betrayed and bereaved, those who long for recognition or for love, those who are ill or dying, those who are clinically depressed, those who fear creeping insanity, those who feel used, whose who labour with mental or physical handicaps, or who struggle with sufferers, those who are victims of injustice, all are in a position to see into the frailty of the human condition, and to see beyond the possibility of immediate and temporary relief to the facts of unredeemed suffering, weakness, solitariness and death. In the face of all of this human beings often ask whether there is any spiritual truth that might counter, alleviate or otherwise help deal with these facts, and they often suppose that it might be the task of non-religious philosophy to identify such a truth or to show that there is none. Clearly this supposition is related to the still popular belief that philosophy has something to do with the meaning of life. Such, however, is the growing ignorance within the profession of the broad history of the subject, and such has been the extent of specialisation with accompanying technicality, that many philosophers are genuinely puzzled when they encounter these expectations. The fact that 'philosophy' means love of wisdom (philo-sophia) will be set aside as being of purely antiquarian interest."

Martha Nussbaum's book, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994) as well as Pierre Hadot's What Is Ancient Philosophy? (2002) endeavor to recover for our own time and for philosophy a discipline and vocation once again close to its classical Greek forebears, thus a philosophy in which the concerns of its practitioners are within the orbit of a public that, today at least, subsidizes the profession. To the extent that they and others (e.g., those working on 'virtue ethics') are successful in this endeavor, contemporary philosophers will not be afraid to address the "meaning of life."

Interestingly, much of the Stoic tradition offers a spiritual practice that physicalists or naturalists might (re-) consider worthy of emulation.

In addition to Haldane and for a different take on some of the questions addressed by Flanagan, I would suggest reading John Cottingham's Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (1998) and The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (2005); John F. Haught, Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (2006); and Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (2001). And although I have yet to read it, Hilary Putnam's book looks promising: Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (2008).