Salon.com Books | The man who invented the future Salon.com Books | The man who invented the future Two warnings, 1. you'll have to look at an add to read this and 2. its written in American new vernacular, ie filled with all sorts of hasty generalizations that reduce the big conclusions to something like nonsense.

This man wrote a number of things that had a profound impact on my imagination. The stories that have been into movies, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell weren't the one that really got me. I started ready Watchmen soon after the 3rd or 4th issue was released. If you think reading it in the collected edition is exciting, consider having to wait months between episodes, dwelling over those brilliantly detailed Dave Gibbons pictures, searching through Moore's mostly prose appendices looking for clues and coming to realize all the cool symmetries, references and back stories.

I didn't take drugs as an adolescent, Alan Moore took them for me.

D.R & Quinch, the Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta, 1964, ... I should stop now, my obsessive fan boy side is rearing its ugly, acne afflicted face. It could be worse, I could regail you with tales of how I discovered Isaac Asimov in the fourth. Its a tale guaranteed to make everyone wish I would go back to trying to explain Kant.   ¶ #

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  Enlightenment I, Liberals vs. Conservatives. Both classes have just passed through a historical period that requires some mention in passing, specifically The Enlightenment. In both classes, we read important figures from this movement (Hume in Intro to Philosophy, Kant in Intro to Ethics, Descartes also counts as an important forerunnger of the movement), but I haven't really discussed the period as a whole.

The Enlightenment was characterized by a few tendencies which would, at first, not seem to work together terribly well. An obvious example is both a general skepticism and a belief in the power of human reason. The latter tended to manifest itself in a fascination with empirical science. These two trends can work together. After all, a healthy skepticism about received truths would require some method for testing and refining those truth. The scientific method fits that need well. On the otherhand, carried to its conclusion, challenges the assumptions of the scientific method. David Hume brings the skepticism out to that point.

skepticism was not limited to the truths of the natural world. In ethics and politics, Enlightenment skepticism manifested itself in questioning our understanding of what constitutes a good life. Unlike natural science however, there was no obvious method for testing various conceptions of the good life. This lead to different sorts of responses, classical liberalism and classical conservatism. (We live in the United States, a country founded by Enlightenment intellectuals, its no coincidence that these terms have come to have an important part in our political discourse. On the otherhand, current usage tends to differ how I'm using them.)

Enlightenment liberals doubt that there's a method to discover the form of a good life that applies to all people. Hence, one should try to maximize the liberty allowed to each person in pursuing their own conception of the good life. Kant was an enlightenment liberal, though from conceiving as individuals soly as autonomous agents, and the only value as maximizing the liberty of each agent, he derives some very specific and strict restrictions on human nature. John Locke and Thomas Jefferson are other important representatives of this position.

Enlightenment conservatives share Enlightenment liberals skepticism about the ability of human reason to discover a substantive theory of the good life. The enlightenment conservative doesn't just doubt that we can discover a single model for how to live, but also that particular individuals have any ability to discover how life should be lived. We have a current form of government and current ideas about how to live. If we're lucky and live in a prosperous, well established state, then the values and customs that make up those ways of living have been tested over time. Since we don't have any particularly trustworthy method of figuring out exactly what it is about our customs that make them successful, we should be very careful about changing them. David Hume is generally considered an Enlightenment Conservative, though the position is most famously associated with Edmund Burke.

Far from being two diametrically opposed philosophies, these two positions are both reflections about the same sorts of doubts about the universal application of human reason. (Contrary to what many people will tell you, Enlightenment thinkers expressed at least as much concern about the application of reason as they did optimism.) Certainly, there are many positions which don't share this skepticism and most have less in common with either of these two positions than they do with each other.
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  On Intuition Kant's notion of intuition has had a profound impact on all those who have come after.

For those who don't have any idea, namely my intro to philosophy students since we covered this topic in intro to ethics last week, a brief recap follows.

Acording to Kant"[However] a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which is in immediate relation to them ... But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us " (CPR A 19/ B33 or p. 65 of the Kemp Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason).

In other words, intuition is the most primitive way in which the world appears to us before we start to apply concepts to it. We can't avoid making conceptual applications, because that's how we think about and come to understand the world. But even at the level of intuition, we don't perceive the world as it is, but only as it can be perceived by people. The content of intuitions always have certain relations to each other, namely temporal succession and spatial arrangement, but we have no way of knowing whether or not those relations reflect the actual way things are (in-themselves) or is just how they have to represented for us to make any sense of them.

Since our immediate representations (yes, being both immediate and a re-presentation, is at best an unfortunate way of putting it) are always arranged according to these two sorts of relations, we can make certain definite and informative conclusions about how every representation will be arranged. For Kant, these are geometry (the study of spatial relation) and arithmetic (since the integers are, initially a representation of temporal succession.) The fact that we can perceive the passage of time allows us to see that 7 + 5 =12. If you can get this far, the derivation of arithmetic from succession shouldn't be too much of a jump. I find it amusing that while many people would observe that the order of experience in time seems to be the foundation for our sense of rhythm, Kant makes it the foundation of arithmetic. Of course, it could be both.

Kant's notion of intuition has had profound impact on subsequent generations of philosophers. The important thing that they all have in common is that intuition is not a set of unexplained facts or an extra sort of perception over and above the ordinary senses. Most intuitionist accept a stronger requirement for proof then the contrasting non-intuitionists.

Mathematical intuitionism. A twentieth century school of mathematics founded by L. E. J Brouwer. The intuitionist limits mathematical proofs to "constructions in intuition". By this, they mean that the truths of mathematics are dependent on the formal conditions of experience and any conclusions that can not be carried out on these conditions are suspect. So, for instance, indirect proofs, those that depend on deriving a contradiction from the negation of the desire conclusions are ruled out. (Roughly "If A is false, B must be true and B must be false. Thus A must be true.") This is a very strong restriction. They call the formal aspects of experience intuition because Kant did, though their positions with regard to the rules derivable from space and, more importantly, time are quite different.

Ethical intutionism. This is a twentieth century school of thought famously associated with G. E. Moore, H. A, Prichard and A.C. Ewing. Pritchard claims, quite literally, that we know moral truths in the same way that we know that 7 x 4 = 28. Prichard doesn't seem to think that one could prove that 7 x 4 = 28 in any meaningful way. The only support one might have for this fact is "doing the sum". Moral philosophy was founded, he thought on a similar error, "... the mistake of supposing the possbility of proving what can only be apprehended directly by an act of moral thinking." (Prichard)

Now its not as immediately obvious that substituting direct apprehension for rational proof produces a stronger restrition on moral reasoning in the same way it does for mathematical reasoning. It all depends of course on what theory of moral reasoning these intutionists are to be compared. By making "good" a sort of logical primitive (a move famously associated with G. E. Moore), intuitionists remove arguments which seek to eliminate normative terms in favor of some other sort of vocabulary (the naturalistic fallacy). In particular, ethical intuitionism is generally contrasted with emotivism, the position that moral propositions are really expressions of imperative commands presumably motivated by the dispositions of the speaker. So the emotivist rules out arguments based on this sort of maneuvur.

What is perhaps more disturbing is the way that while we are usually able to acknowledge that some people are just better at doing arithmetic than others, we're not so willing to acknowledge that some people are just better at deriving moral conclusions.


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