The Nihilistic Image of the World

In The Gay Science (1882), Nietzsche heralded the problem of nihilism with his famous declaration “God is dead,” which signalled the collapse of a transcendent basis for the underpinning morality of European civilization. He associated this collapse with the rise of the natural sciences whose methods and pervasive outlook he was concerned would progressively shape “an essentially mechanistic [and hence meaningless] world.” The Russian novelist Turgenev had also associated a scientific outlook with nihilism through the scientism of Yevgeny Bazarov, a character in Fathers and Sons. A century or so later, can we correlate relevant scientific results and the nihilistic consequences that worried these and other nineteenth-century authors? The aversion of empirical disciplines to such non-empirical concepts as personhood and agency, and their methodological exclusion of the very idea of value would make this a difficult task. Recent neuroscientific (MRI) investigations into free will might provide a useful starting point for anyone interested in this sociological question, as might the research results of experimental or evolutionary psychologists studying what they take human beings to be. In this paper, I turn instead to a more basic issue of science. I will question the universality of a principle of identity assumed by a scientific understanding of what it means for anything to exist. I will argue that the essential features of human existence present an exception to this principle of identity and thereby fall outside the grasp of scientific inquiry. The basis of this argument will be an explanation of why it is nonetheless rational for us to affirm personhood, agency, moral values, and many more concepts that disappear under the scrutiny of the sciences

Persons, Virtual Persons, and Radical Interpretation

A dramatic problem facing the concept of the self is whether there is anything to make sense of. Despite the speculative view that there is an essential role for the perceiver in measurement, a physicalist view of reality currently seems to be ruling out the conditions of subjectivity required to keep the concept of the self. Eliminative materialism states this position explicitly. The doctrine holds that we have no objective grounds for attributing personhood to anyone, and can therefore dispense with the concept. That implication would require us to dispense with many of the most basic commitments of our manifest or common sense image of the world. And it would require us to abandon, to maintain as an act of bad faith, or radically to adjust, virtually every significant basic commitment underlying the variety of traditions that have evolved historically from the (natural) platform of common sense. Daniel Dennett’s sympathies seem to be divided over this issue. He is reluctant to eliminate the most fundamental linguistic-conceptual-institutional commitments that have evolved from common sense. Yet, I will argue, the basis of his support for these, beneath the surface of his rhetoric, is a mirage. His view of persons and related (intentional) concepts is a case in point. In place of the eliminative materialist position, Dennett recommends that we regard the self as a highly useful “theorist’s fiction.” He adopts a similar epistemic stance toward intention, belief, mind, and so on. In this paper I aim to show that Dennett’s recommendation is based on a subtle version of the dualism of subject and object (or scheme and content), which he seems to agree that we should transcend. Against Dennett’s view of the self as a “theorist’s fiction,” I argue in favour of a version of Donald Davidson’s realist thesis that, once we properly appreciate the significance of abandoning this pervasive dualism, we can maintain the self and associated intentional items – belief, mind, and so on – within a thoroughly realist ontology

Relationships between depression, anxiety, and residual problems following recovery from Guillain-Barré Syndrome : a New Zealand survey : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

The present study retrospectively examined the relationships between mental status and residual problems following recovery from Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), and investigated whether depression and anxiety were common post GBS sequelae. Participants were drawn from past and present GBS patients who read about the postal survey in the newsletter of the New Zealand GBS Support Group. Of the 49 adults who responded, 44 individuals completed and returned the questionnaires sent to them via the Support Group Co-ordinator. The set of 4 questionnaires comprised (a) a brief questionnaire about GBS, (b) the McMaster Health Index Questionnaire (MHIQ), a generic quality of life instrument that measures physical, social, and emotional functioning, (c) the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and (d) the 6-Item Short Form of the State Scale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-6). The MHIQ was completed twice, retrospectively from the point in time when GBS was most severe, and from the present point in time The results showed that half the sample were acutely ill over 6 years ago, yet the majority of the sample reported a number of residual problems with varying levels of severity. Time since diagnosis did not appear to moderate the number or severity of residuals Fatigue was the most common residual (93.2%), but pain and motor-related problems were also common. The majority of participants scored within the minimal depression and anxiety ranges on the BDI-II and the STAI-6, suggesting that depression and anxiety were not common long-lasting sequelae to GBS in this sample. Future research using a prospective design could focus on the incidence of depression and anxiety during the actual recovery phase A study that focussed on the perspectives of caregivers and families would also add important information to the small body of literature regarding the psychosocial aspects of GBS

Divine madness: the dilemma of religious scruples in twentieth-century America and Britain

Religious scruples were a major problem within Roman Catholic circles until the late twentieth century. This article traces the shift from the cure of scruples being seen as the responsibility of religious advisers to them being labled an obsessional-compulsive disorder. Whether penitent or patient, the clash between revelationary truths and scientific ones had a profound impact on sufferers of scrupulosity. There was, however, no clean shift between the Age of Religiosity to the Age of Neurosis: rather, there was an interaction between the two professions, with spiritual advisers proving themselves to be willing to relinquish their grip on the soul while psychiatrists paid their respect to the power of faith

Freedom and Thought

Despite recent neuroscientific research purporting to reveal that free will is an illusion, this paper will argue that agency is an inescapable feature of rationality and thought. My aim will not be to address the methodology or interpretation of such research, which I will only mention in passing. Rather, I will examine a collection of basic concepts which are presupposed by thought, and propose that these concepts are interrelated in ways that makes them both basic and irreducibly complex. The collection includes such concepts as belief, value, meaning, and truth. I will argue that free will belongs to this collection, and as such is also presupposed by thought. This proposal is opposed to a methodological tendency in analytic philosophy, to eliminate aspects of concepts which can’t be given a clear analysis, and to the wish of many empirical psychologists and cognitive scientists to reduce intentional/mental states to neurons and other mindless phenomena which they regard as more fundamental. Instead of offering a direct critique of either of these methodological attitudes, I will try to place the concept of freedom in its proper conceptual context, and make a positive case for its reality

Truth, Transcendence, and the Good

Nietzsche regarded nihilism as an outgrowth of the natural sciences which, he worried, were bringing about “an essentially mechanistic [and hence meaningless] world.” Nihilism in this sense refers to the doctrine that there are no values, or that everything we might value is worthless. In the last issue of Modern Horizons, I offered this conditional explanation of the relation of science and nihilism: that a scientific worldview is nihilistic insofar as it rules out the existence of anything that cannot in principle be precisely picked out or identified.i What kinds of entities would a scientific worldview eliminate on the basis of such an assumption? The list is long and various, but it includes those intentional (mentalii) entities of our consciousness that underwrite the existence of persons, and more basically of thought itself – e.g., belief, value, agency, truth, and meaning. I argued in that previous paper that intentional concepts are ultimately inscrutable, and yet impossible coherently to deny. I claimed that we could no more doubt the existence of values than we could doubt reality itself – and when I spoke of values I had in mind the (suspicion-engendering) concept of the good, and was even toying with the related idea of the Logos (an even more suspect concept). There are a several attractive reasons why the idea of the good, or the Logos, might be regarded with suspicion, and why either might reasonably be discarded as a pseudo concept. Leaving the latter concern until later, we might worry that insisting on the possibility of an overarching good supports the idea of a total worldview, or that we are gradually progressing towards a single correct vision of things. A progressivist, totalising vision would seem to foreclose on outlooks, values, and persons that deviate from its most likely trajectory, and may stymie or interfere with incommensurate forms of otherness,iii awkward disturbances, and idiosyncrasies threatening its more well-established precincts – perhaps whatever stands out as strange, rare, and indissolubly individual. The idea of an emerging universal standard of values thus might amount to a source of oppression, e.g., if it provides a warrant to transform a currently limited universally prescriptive set of global practices and institutes into an ever more elaborate totalising hierarchy. In the discussion below, I will say why the good, conceived as the Logos, suggests a more salutary trajectory for individuals, and erodes support for either a totalitarian vision or a dissolving nihilistic outlook on the world