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

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

Truth and Fictional Meaning

Fictional and non-fictional texts rely on the same language to express their meaning; yet many philosophers in the analytic tradition would say, with reason, that fictional texts literally make no truth claims, or more modestly that the rhetorical and literary devices (e.g., metaphor) to which fiction and non-fiction writers alike have recourse are unconnected to truth or have no propositional content. These related views are associated with a doctrine in the philosophy of language, most notably advanced by the late Donald Davidson, which holds that we understand the semantic structure of a language by applying to it a theory of truth, which involves discovering the truth conditions of its sentences. This approach to semantic theory raises several seemingly intractable problems, such as the problem of stating the meaning of non-declarative sentences, e.g. questions and imperatives. The chief aim of this paper will be to try to dispel these problems by suggesting an adjustment in Davidson's account of the relation of truth to meaning, one which will also allow us to picture such troublesome linguistic items as metaphor within a semantic theory, and to expand the range of objects which can be brought into a general theory of meaning.Textos de ficción y no ficción se basan en el mismo lenguaje para expresar su significado, sin embargo, muchos filósofos de la tradición analítica dirían, con razón, que los textos de ficción, literalmente, no tienen ninguna pretensión de verdad, o más modestamente, que los recursos retóricos y literarios (por ejemplo la metáfora) a los que los escritores de ficción y de no ficción recurren por igual, son ajenos a la verdad o no tienen un contenido proposicional. Estos puntos de vista relacionados están asociados con una doctrina en la filosofía del lenguaje, especialmente desarrollada por el difunto Donald Davidson, que entiende la estructura semántica del lenguaje mediante la aplicación de una teoría de la verdad, que consiste en el descubrimiento de las condiciones de verdad de sus oraciones. Este enfoque de la teoría semántica plantea varios problemas aparentemente insolubles, como el problema de expresar el significado de oraciones no declarativas, por ejemplo, preguntas e imperativos. El objetivo principal de este trabajo será el de tratar de disipar estos problemas por lo que sugiere un ajuste en la cuenta de Davidson de la relación de la verdad con el significado, esto nos permitirá también imaginar esos elementos problemáticos lingüísticos como la metáfora dentro de una teoría semántica, y ampliar la gama de objetos que se pueden introducir en una teoría general del significado

Assessing village food needs following a natural disaster in Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea is vulnerable to natural disasters, including drought and frost associated with El Niño weather events and excessive rainfall associated with La Niña events. Drought, frost and excessive rainfall can cause major disruptions to village food supplies. Drought also reduces villagers’ access to clean drinking water, which in turn has a negative impact on peoples’ health and the capacity of schools and hospitals to operate. There are often other impacts — damage to crops and property by wildfires, out-migration and an increased death rate. In 1997–98, and again in 2015–16, a major El Niño event caused significant disruption to drinking water and food supply for many Papua New Guinean villagers. Staff of many agencies, including those working through the Church Partnership Program El Niño Drought Response Program, were involved in assessing the impact and providing relief in 2015–16. This publication brings together the experiences of those working on the Church Partnership Program response to the 2015–16 El Niño event and serves as a guide for assessing future food shortages and to help those in need.Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT

Davidson’s Account Of Truth And Fictional Meaning

Fictional and non-fictional texts rely on the same language to express their meaning; yet many philosophers in the analytic tradition would say, with reason, that fictional texts literally make no truth claims, or more modestly that the rhetorical and literary devices to which fiction and non-fiction writers alike have recourse are unconnected to truth or have no propositional content. These related views are associated with a doctrine in the philosophy of language, most notably advanced by the late Donald Davidson, which holds that we understand the semantic structure of a language by applying to it a theory of truth, which involves discovering the truth conditions of its sentences. This approach to semantic theory raises several seemingly intractable problems, such as the problem of stating the meaning of non-declarative sentences, e.g. questions and imperatives. The chief aim of this paper will be to try to dispel these problems by suggesting an adjustment in Davidson’s account of the relation of truth to meaning, one which will also allow us to picture such troublesome linguistic items as metaphor within a semantic theory, and to expand the range of objects which can be brought into a general theory of meanin

First Detection of Thermal Radio Emission from Solar-Type Stars with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array

We present the first detections of thermal radio emission from the atmospheres of solar-type stars {\tau} Cet, {\eta} Cas A, and 40 Eri A. These stars all resemble the Sun in age and level of magnetic activity, as indicated by X-ray luminosity and chromospheric emission in calcium-II H and K lines. We observed these stars with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array with sensitivities of a few {\mu}Jy at combinations of 10.0, 15.0, and 34.5 GHz. {\tau} Cet, {\eta} Cas A, and 40 Eri A are all detected at 34.5 GHz with signal-to-noise ratios of 6.5, 5.2, and 4.5, respectively. 15.0-GHz upper limits imply a rising spectral index greater than 1.0 for {\tau} Cet and 1.6 for {\eta} Cas A, at the 95% confidence level. The measured 34.5-GHz flux densities correspond to stellar disk-averaged brightness temperatures of roughly 10,000 K, similar to the solar brightness temperature at the same frequency. We explain this emission as optically- thick thermal free-free emission from the chromosphere, with possible contributions from coronal gyroresonance emission above active regions and coronal free-free emission. These and similar quality data on other nearby solar-type stars, when combined with ALMA observations, will enable the construction of temperature profiles of their chromospheres and lower transition regions.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Promoting Law Student Mental Health Literacy and Wellbeing: A Case Study from The College of Law, Australia

A number of studies have been undertaken about the mental health of law students and the reports as to the findings of those studies have all expressed concern about the high levels of psychological distress suffered by them. Australian studies indicate that while university students suffer from emotional distress at a rate greater than that of the general population and at a higher rate than their non-student (age group) peers, law students are more distressed than their university peers. This has led to many calls for action.Most law students undertake their degree with a view to practising law. It is now also accepted that legal practitioners suffer depression or emotional distress at higher rates than other professionals, other workers more generally and the general population. Research shows that there is a strong correlation between high levels of emotional distress and the incidence of mental illness. Law students suffering high or very high distress levels are therefore at an increased risk of suffering a mental illness, most commonly anxiety and/or depression.Faced with this problem, the question arises: how should legal education institutions respond? This article describes the approach taken by one legal education institution, The College of Law, Australia (the College), in answering this question. The College identified the value in improving students’ mental health literacy and stress management and now trains its lecturers to deliver an educational workshop (the workshop) in these areas. The workshop forms part of the core curriculum for the College’s practical legal training program (PLT).Part 2 of the article reviews some of the literature about health promotion, health literacy, mental health literacy and promoting student wellbeing, providing the underpinnings for the intervention. Part 3 describes the development of the workshop for pre-admission graduate law students. Part 4 outlines the content of the workshop and delivery methods. Part 5 considers evaluations of the workshop, from both the student and teacher perspective and student learning outcomes, and Part 6 contains recommendations based on our experience in designing and delivering the workshop