Lex Americanorum, the King of America, passed away this afternoon on the Senate floor. Lex had been ill for some years and White House-ologists in Moscow have long suspected that one or more cabinet members had in fact taken responsibility for most major decisions. The exact identity of this person had not been firmly established, but most experts agree that it is Vice President Dick Cheney.
Lex was born on September 17, 1787 and became king shortly thereafter upon election by representatives of the 13 American colonies. Lex was able to survive and maintain power for nearly 221 years, despite numerous attempted coups such as those by Presidents Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon.
Lex is succeeded as King of America by former President George W. Bush, who will henceforth be known by the title Tyrant George I. Most White House-ologists expect former Vice President Dick Cheney, who will now be known by the title Vice Regent, to continue to be "the Decider" - the term used by White House insiders for the individual with ultimate decision-making responsibility. A sizable minority of experts think that the Decider will continue to be - and always has been - former Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, although he holds no formal position in the administration. Some White House-ologists suspect that his resignation was a ploy to distract attention from his actual governing actions.
Lex's illness and inability to govern had been noticed some time ago by White House-ologists who noted that his orders were disregarded by members of his government with increasing frequency. Although there were occasional attempts to prosecute those who disobeyed his edicts, these attempts were generally abortive, and none resulted in substantial punishments.
The circumstances of Lex's death are not entirely clear. Although he had been ill for some time, some suspect foul play, possibly at the hands of Tyrant George and his followers. Even prior to the panic of September 11, 2001, the Tyrant had been seeking to overthrow Lex's rule. Nevertheless, most experts agree that it is unlikely that Tyrant George will permit a truly independent investigation. The legislature has ordered such an investigation, but observers expect Tyrant George to be successful in significantly influencing the outcome.
Lex is survived by his wife, Libertas, and his brother Iudicia Libera. Mrs. Americanorum continues to be hospitalized and in critical condition after receiving a blow to the head when she and her husband were attacked by a panicked mob of legislators and government officials in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Doctors familiar with the case said that even if Mrs. Americanorum is successfully revived, she is not expected to survive the shock of her husband's death.
Allies of the Lex dynasty, including The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Congressman Ron Paul's Campaign For Liberty, have vowed to fight to place a member of the dynasty on the throne again as quickly as possible.
It has been over a month since my last post, and for this I apologize. I doubt if I will be posting any more frequently in the near future as I am getting married on August 2 and moving from Philadelphia to Los Angeles immediately after the honeymoon. I'm sure the Internet will get by just fine without me.
Right now, however, I do have a bit of time, and I want to discuss an argument for phenomenalism about the physical world. When I wrote a while back about the idealist strategy, I said that the second step was to "argue that our physical statements - both ordinary statements about physical objects and statements about the discipline of physics - are best construed as talking about perception." What I want to do here is to unpack this statement. First, let's examine what the argument is supposed to do, and then we'll look at the argument as it appears in a brief section of Berkeley's Three Dialogues.
This piece of the argument is a reductio against representative realism. The first step of the idealist strategy is supposed to eliminate direct realism (the view that the very same things we experience in sense perception exist mind-independently and are known by us directly). I will assume this has already been accomplished. This leaves representative realism, the view that our perception are representations of mind-independent reality.
There are effectively two flavors of representative realism, both of which are, I think, fairly popular among philosophers today. The first is causal representation, which claims that our mental states come to represent things in the world in virtue of having been caused by them. This view has been supported by Fred Dretske. It has some problems which many philosophers have tried to shore up by a variety of strategies. The most important problem for it is the possibility of misrepresentation - e.g., how can we mistake a cow for a horse (from a distance, in the dark) if horse-thoughts represent horses precisely because they are caused by horses (but this one was caused by a cow)? I will not dwell on this objection, but there is a vast literature on it.
The second flavor is primitive or mysterian representation. This view takes representation as a primitive -i.e. one of the fundamental concepts of the theory, which does not admit of further analysis. The main objections to this view have to do with (1) whether you can adequately define the formal properties of representation in a coherent fashion, and (2) whether representation makes a good primitive. The latter is probably the most important, but the question of what makes something a good or bad primitive is extremely complex.
For the idealist's purposes, what matters is that when I perceive a table, there are two things: the 'real' table, and my perception or representation of the table. These are not the same thing. This much is conceded by the representative realist. It is customary to refer to the mental tokening which represents the table as a 'table', after the way we discuss words in philosophy of language, but this is going to get really confusing in this particular argument, so from here on out I will use tablei to refer to mind-independent table objects, tablem to refer to mind-dependent table-representations, and 'table' to refer to the English word spelled t-a-b-l-e. (I'm not sure how much less confusing that will be, but I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to follow.)
Suppose the phenomenalist grants, for the sake of argument, that there is such a thing as a tablei and that, under ordinary circumstances, there is a one-to-one correlation between tablesi and tablesm. Now listen to Berkeley:
Ask the gardener, why he thinks yonder cherry-tree exists in the garden, and he shall tell you, because he sees and feels it; in a word, because he perceives it by his senses. Ask him, why he thinks an orange-tree not to be there, and he shall tell you, because he does not perceive it. What he perceives by sense, that he terms a real being, and saith it is, or exists; but that which is not perceivable, the same, he saith, hath no being. (Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, 234)
The realist needs to argue that 'table' refers to the tablei. Now, Berkeley's principal target is Locke, and this argument immediately overcomes Locke. Consider:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? ... To this I answer, in one word, from experience ... Our observation employed either about external, sensible objects; or about the internal operations of our minds, perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that, which supplies our understandings with all the materials of thinking. (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.2, emphasis original)
More recently the cause has been taken up by Kripke:
When I refer to heat, I refer not to an internal sensation that someone may have, but to an external phenomenon which we perceive through the sense of feeling; it produces a characteristic sensation which we call the sensation of heat. Heat is the motion of molecules. (Naming and Necessity, 129)
The phenomenalist wants to argue that this is not a good analysis of 'heat'. Heati isn't a sensation. It can't be felt. If you ask the gardener to define 'cherry tree', he will describe a cherry treem: something that is seen, felt, smelled, etc. If you ask an ordinary person to define 'table', she will describe something that looks and feels (and therefore is) flat, that you can set objects on, etc. No one who has not been reading Aristotle, Locke, and friends will say anything about a "material substratum." No one will say "the object that causes my table perceptions." The table doesn't cause something to feel flat, the table itself feels flat.
Physicalists tend to be very adamant about believing only in the objects of their senses, but then begin describing things that can't be sensed at all, and claiming that those are the objects of their senses. If the phenomenalist can make this case that physical-talk is best understood as referring to objectsm, then matter will be superfluous to metaphysical explanations of the world we experience. Furthermore, if Kripke's "pass-through" reference fails, then his theory will make it impossible to refer to objectsi, for the same reason it is impossible for Putnam's brains in vats to wonder whether they are brains in vats.
THEAETETUS: Well, do you see what we're looking for?
VISITOR: I think I see a large, difficult type of ignorance marked off from the others and overshadowing all of them.
THEAETETUS: What's it like?
VISITOR: Not knowing, but thinking that you know. That's what probably causes all the mistakes we make when we think.
THEAETETUS: That's true.
VISITOR: And furthermore it's the only kind of ignorance that's called lack of learning.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
VISITOR: Well then, what should we call the part of teaching that gets rid of it?
THEAETETUS: The other part consists in the teaching of crafts, I think, but here in Athens we call this one education.
VISITOR: And just about all other Greeks do too, Theaetetus. But we still have to think about whether education is indivisible or has divisions that are worth mentioning.
THEAETETUS: We do have to think about that.
VISITOR: I think it can be cut somehow.
THEAETETUS: How?
VISITOR: One part of the kind of teaching that's done in words is a rough road, and the other part is smoother.
THEATETUS: What do you mean by these two parts?
VISITOR: One of them is our forefathers' time-honored method of scolding or gently encouraging. They used to employ it especially on their sons, and many still use it on them nowadays when they do something wrong. Admonition would be the right thing to call all of this.
THEAETETUS: Yes.
VISITOR: As for the other part, some people seem to have an argument to give to themselves that lack of learning is always involuntary, and that if someone thinks he's wise, he'll never be willing to learn anything about what he thinks he's clever at. These people think that though admonition is a lot of work, it doesn't do much good.
THEAETETUS: They're right about that.
VISITOR: So they set out to get rid of the belief in one's own wisdom in another way.
THEAETETUS: How?
VISITOR: They cross-examine someone when he thinks he's saying something though he's saying nothing. Then, since his opinions will vary inconsistently, these people will easily scrutinize them. They collect his opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same subjects in relation to the same thing and in the same respects. The people who are being examined see this, get angry at themselves, and become calmer toward others. They lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way, and no loss is pleasanter to hear or has a more lasting effect on them. Doctors who work on the body think it can't benefit from any food that's offered to it until what's interfering with it from inside is removed. The people who cleanse the soul, my young friend, likewise think the soul, too, won't get any advantage from any learning that's offered to it until someone shames it by refuting it, removes the opinions that interfere with learning, and exhibits it cleansed, believing that it knows only those things that it does know, and nothing more.
- Plato, The Sophist 229b - 230d (tr. Nicholas P. White)
Brandon points to a collection of posts at Feminist Philosophers on the subject of "philosophy as a blood sport". Apparently the phrase comes from this article. The latest discussion seems to have been occasioned by a post by Brian Leiter who is not particularly known for his civility, and apparently thinks this is all a big joke. In this post, I will not focus on the question of whether this has anything to do (either as cause or effect) with philosophy being male dominated. The reason for this is that that question would only be relevant in very specific circumstances, and I do not think these circumstances obtain. Specifically, the question would be relevant if the following were the case:
However, having said all that, what I really want to argue in this post is that "blood sport" is a degenerate form of the adversarial method, and the adversarial method is one of the most effective methods of pursuing philosophy. I certainly know women who have no problem whatever with the adversarial method and when it is pursued in the ideal way which I am going to describe I think that if someone couldn't learn to deal with it that would be evidence that that person was not likely to be a good philosopher. Nevertheless, I do not claim that it is the only good method, or even that it can be uniquely identified as the best method. I simply claim that it is one of the best methods, and that if it is pursued in its ideal form, rather than the degenerate "blood sport" form, it is not likely to drive away people who would otherwise become great philosophers, regardless of their gender.
When I took intro to philosophy at Washington State - and this was at Washington State, mind you, not at one of the top departments - one of the first things we were taught was how to argue. To argue is to present reasons - good, logical reasons; not personal attacks, appeals to emotion, or rhetorical tricks - for believing or not believing some claim. These irrational rhetorical techniques have to be excluded. Furthermore, you have to realize that the principle of contradiction and the principle of excluded middle hold and, therefore, if we disagree we cannot both be right. (If we turned out to both be right, then we would both be mistaken in our belief that we disagreed.) Accordingly, an attack on one's position must not be interpreted as a personal attack. Persons and positions must be kept separate by both attacker and defender. Someone who is driven by emotion rather than logic and becomes emotionally upset in such circumstances is not likely to be a philosopher because this is a person who doesn't want to find out that his or her positions are wrong. Lauren resents (and is a powerful counter-example to) the assumption, shared (strangely enough) by certain feminist philosophers and certain misogynists, that this sort of statement excludes women. The claims of certain feminist philosophers that certain philosophical fields (especially ethics) have been overly concerned with logic because they have been male-dominated may well do more damage to the perception of women in philosophy than almost any other factor today. That said, the "blood lust" - the desire to win arguments at any cost - that characterizes many philosophers (most of them male) is the very same problem as the people who take attacks on their positions personally, found in an offensive rather than defensive manifestation.
All this by way of background. I will now proceed to describe exactly what I mean by "the adversarial method" and how this sort of constraint on argument plays into it.
The adversarial method is best known from its use in law. The theory (which is at least as degenerate in law as it is in philosophy) is that if equally matched opponents argue opposite sides of a matter, the side of the truth will be at an advantage. For this reason, no matter how obvious a person's guilt seems, her trial is not judged to be valid unless she has adequate representation. She must have an attorney who has done a competent job of defending her.
We do this in philosophy. When we are trying to determine the strength of a position, one person attacks it and another defends it. This is often the best way (though not always the best way, and never the only way) to test the strengths of positions. Note, however, that it only works if the two sides are equally matched. This is why one of the most important skills that philosophers (should) learn as undergraduates is to present the strongest possible argument for a position they disagree with. It is often best for a view to be defended by someone who actually believes in it, and attacked by someone who doesn't believe in it, but sometimes we need to evaluate a position and we don't have a believer available. For this reason, even the structure of many single-author papers exhibits the adversarial method: the author first builds up the position under discussion and presents arguments for it, then attacks it. If she actually agrees with the position, she will conclude by rebutting the attacks. The adversarial method.
How do we ensure that the two sides are equally matched? Well, when your "opponent" is struggling to find a good argument for his position (or against yours), you have to help him out. I think (or at least I hope) philosophy professors do this for their undergrads all the time. We have to get the strongest form of the position, and the strongest arguments for it, in order to be able to evaluate whether our attacks against it succeed; otherwise, we are in danger of the strawman fallacy.
What this reveals is, in part, that one of the ways in which the "blood sport" method is degenerate is that it's about winning. But philosophy isn't about winning; it's about understanding. When we want the other person's position to fall, or we don't want our own position to fall, then we are not loving wisdom or pursuing truth. Instead, we are loving and pursuing victory (or, in the defensive case, hating and fleeing defeat).
Now, there was an interesting remark from Ted Brennan in the Leiter post:
Journalists are surprised that academics can be short with them because they last met academics in the classroom, and most professors are kind and generous when dealing with students. Serious academics save their scathing put-downs for colleagues and equals--I doubt that those quotes from Fodor and Sterelny document interactions with students.Instead of feeling pained and affronted, the bloggers and journalists should take it as a compliment: 'hey, those academics are treating me like an equal!'
This is the method I try to use in most of my philosophizing, including discussions on this blog. I encourage you all to call me out when I don't live up to it.
It seems that Alexander Pruss (also of Prosblogion fame) has set off a bit of a firestorm (there is a list of links at Siris) on the subject of the history of philosophy and the analytic-Continental divide. He has been criticized for making statements about Continental philosophy and then admitting that he doesn't know much about it. I'm going to try to be careful here, because I'm certainly no expert on Continental philosophy myself, but I do want to enter into the fray with a few observations.
I've titled this post "Philosophy is Analytic." Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by that in a very general way, and then I will dig a little deeper and argue that my claim is actually true. In claiming that philosophy is analytic, I mean to make two claims: (1) As has been noted at Siris and The Chasm, the distinction between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy is often unhelpful or even downright false. I would claim that the reason for this is that most of the characteristics analytic philosophy claims as its "distinctives" are characteristics of philosophy simpliciter. The flip side of this claim is that (2) certain characteristics which all analytic philosophy shares and some of what is called Continental "philosophy" lacks are characteristics of philosophy simpliciter, which is what leads analytic philosophers to make the claims criticized in (1).
Before I identify the characteristics I am talking about, let me say that, as some of the others who have entered into this conversation have already noted, there exist relatively uncontroversial descriptive usages of the terms "analytic" and "Continental" in the recent history of philosophy: specifically, analytic philosophy is a philosophical tradition conducted primarily in English and inheriting from the likes of Russell, Frege, and Moore. Continental philosophy is, similarly, a philosophical tradition conducted primarily in French and German which inherits from the likes of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Most self-identified analytic philosophers would probably also list Wittgenstein as a founding father, but it's my understanding that Wittgenstein is also widely read and respected in Continental circles. The further away from the founding fathers of each school we get, the more difficult it is to apply these terms as neutral and uncontroversial descriptions. This is true to such an extent that the author of the Chasm, who identifies himself as a "phenomenologist" and lists Husserl and Heidegger as major influences, says that the term "Continental" is a "pejorative." His complaint is that he isn't a French post-structuralist. It seems, according to him (and I'll take his word for it), that analytic philosophers are making the mistake Plato describes in The Statesman:
it's as if someone tried to divide the human race into two and made the cut in the way that most people here carve things up, taking the Greek race away as one, separate from all the rest, and to all the other races together, which are unlimited in number, which don't mix with one another, and don't share the same language - calling this collection by the single appellation 'barbarian' ... [I]f by some chance there is some other animal which is rational, as for example the crane seems to be, or some other such creature, and which perhaps distributes names on the same principles as you, it might oppose cranes as one class to all other living creatures and give itself airs, taking all the rest together with human beings and putting them into the same category, which it would call by no other name except - perhaps - 'animals'. So let's try to be very wary of everything of this sort. (262d, 263d)
Now, let me continue to identify the characteristics I am talking about. When I took intro to ancient philosophy with Charles Kahn in 2004, the first portion of the course was concerned with the distinction between philosophy properly so-called and wisdom literature, and what it was that changed at some point between Thales and Socrates such that philosophy arose as something distinct from wisdom literature. Plato and Hesiod are both trying to construct frameworks for considering the world we live in, but their enterprises differ in very important ways. My notes from that class (and I make no guarantees as to how closely my notes from Sophomore year resemble anything Prof. Kahn actually said) define philosophy as "an attempt at a certain kind of systematic knowledge attempting to answer certain fundamental questions by means of critical inquiry." The key terms are "systematic," "fundamental," and "critical inquiry."
A characteristic shared by early analytic philosophy (by which I mostly mean positivism) and Continental philosophy is a certain skepticism about this sort of enterprise. In the early 20th century, thinkers on both sides of the line expressed a degree of skepticism about our ability to use critical inquiry as a means of gaining systematic knowledge on fundamental matters. Strains of this continue to this very day. For instance, in his 1985 introduction to Leibniz's Theodicy Austin Farrer, contrasting 20th century philosophy with Leibniz, remarks that:
To many people now alive metaphysics means a body of wild and meaningless assertions resting on spurious argument. A professor of metaphysics may nowadays be held to deal handsomely with the duties of his chair if he is prepared to handle metaphysical statements at all, though it be only for the purpose of getting rid of them, by showing them up as confused forms of something else. A chair in metaphysical philosophy becomes analogous to a chair in tropical diseases: what is taught from it is not the propagation but the cure. (p. 7)
This applies to analytic as well as Continental philosophy. Nevertheless, these characteristics of systematicity and critical inquiry - characteristics that distinguish Plato as an author of philosophy from Hesiod as an author of wisdom literature - are the characteristics that analytic philosophers have latched onto as their distinctives. This is, indeed, more or less what 'analytic' means. In this respect, the term 'analytic philosopher' can be compared to the term 'born-again Christian': strictly speaking, both are redundancies (when we understand the terms 'philosopher' and 'Christian' in historically well-motivated descriptive senses, and not in terms of everyone who self-identifies), but we nevertheless use the terms meaningfully - the former to mean the heirs of Russell, Frege, and Moore, and the latter to mean the heirs of Billy Graham, John Stott, and Bill Bright. There are philosophers who have every right to use the term 'analytic' who are not heirs of Russell, Frege, and Moore, and Christians who have every right to use the term 'born-again' who are not heirs of Billy Graham, John Stott, and Bill Bright, but they ordinarily won't use these terms because they lead to confusion.
Nevertheless, it is the case that even as they doubted the possibility of their enterprise, analytic philosophers have clung tightly to it. The postivists (to a certain degree following Kant) applied critical inquiry to the limits of human reason and language to come up with an account of where human knowledge could go and where it couldn't, thus shifting the meaning of "fundamental." Where critical inquiry couldn't go, they stopped. There are, however, some Continental "philosophers" who do not do this - I am thinking, for instance, of existentialism, postmodernism, relativism, and deconstructionism. Now, I said I was going to be careful about what I said in my ignorance, so let me note that I am personally familiar with Neitzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, some excerpts from Sartre, a smattering of semi-popular-level secondary literature, and the popular American forms of the views I've listed. Certainly none of these represent Continental philosophy at its best, and that is precisely my point. The views in question often despair of the ability of critical inquiry to answer fundamental questions and then keep talking about them anyway. In so doing, they cease to be philosophy and revert to wisdom literature. Wisdom literature is not without value (I happen to be a big fan of existentialist literature, film, and theater), but this sort of thing is like a reversion from chemistry to alchemy.
I should note briefly that most "ethno-philosophy" is also not properly philosophy but wisdom literature. Philosophy properly so-called is distinctively Greek in origin. That said, I understand that Indian philosophy and Taoism are possible exceptions, but I don't know enough about them to make a personal judgment.
As one final point, I will admit that while I think that philosophy is inherently "analytic," and that much of what is called "Continental philosophy" is not philosophy at all, some of my own views might be looked at as "Continental" in nature by some. Specifically, I'm an idealist, and I think that phenomenology - that is, the evidence provided by the nature of our subjective experience - is the place to start our philosophical inquiry. I don't know anything about Husserl at all, and I don't understand Hegel very well, so I wouldn't know if my usage of the word "phenomenology" is anything like theirs, but I thought that I should own up.
Feel free to use the comment area, or write your own blog post, to educate me about the better elements of "Continental philosophy" or to dispute my analysis, but please do so by means of a critical inquiry that aims at systematicity!
Well, I'm glad that's over.
On Wednesday, I accepted an offer of almost full funding from the UC Irvine philosophy department. By "almost" I mean that I was waitlisted for funding and the spot I got was actually a California resident spot, so what would have been my stipend is being used to pay for the out of state tuition. This only affects the first year, since it only takes a year to establish residency in California.
When I was applying and waiting anxiously and so forth, I wasn't able to find many resources online that were helpful, so I thought that I would post what I have learned over the last year for the benefit of everyone else who is looking for this sort of information. First, I'm going to give the strong and weak points of my application so there will be some context, and then I'll say what happened in terms of results and when.
| School | PG Ranking | Initial Result | Final Result | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rutgers University | 2 | Rejected via conventional mail March 12 | ||
| Princeton University | 3 | Rejected via e-mail March 5 | ||
| Stanford University | 6 | Vague responses to repeated email inquiries; finally got unofficial rejection in response to an email on April 8; official rejection via postal mail today (April 18) | Approximately 180 applicants for 8 spots | |
| Harvard University | 7 | Rejected in response to email inquiry March 5 | Approximately 240 applicants. They didn't say how many spots there were, but they list 52 current graduate students (if I can count) on their web-site, so probably about 10 spots. | |
| UCLA | 7 | Rejected via email February 22 | ||
| UC Berkeley | 12 | Wait-listed via email March 17 | I told them I was very interested in their program but probably couldn't come because Lauren had been rejected by their physics department. I did not hear from them again after this. | |
| University of Southern California | 16 | Wait-listed via email February 27 | Rejected via email April 13 | I don't know how many students applied, but the word I got (through unofficial channels) is that they made 9 offers and all 9 offers were accepted. I was the first of two students on the wait list. |
| Yale University | 16 | Rejected via email February 25 | In a cover letter to my writing sample (I used the version of this paper which was reduced to meet the 10,000 word limit for Religious Studies), I asked that it be brought to the particular attention of Kenneth Winkler, since it criticizes an assertion he makes in his book Berkeley: An Interpretation. This gambit evidently did not pay off. | |
| UC Irvine | 20 | Accepted via email January 30; told that the graduate chair would be "working on putting together a financial offer for" me. | Offered partial funding via phone on April 15 (see below) | |
| UC Davis | 35 | Accepted with full funding via email February 22; received funding details via email February 28 | Turned them down because their physics department isn't any good | |
| Boston University | 50 | Wait-listed (position 7 or so) in response to email inquiry on March 12 | See below | Over 200 applicants for 6 spots |
Lauren and I thought we were doing pretty good when we both got in to UC Irvine before the end of January. There was a period of relief. Irvine and Davis both paid for me to visit them in March (note: when you do this, you will be expected to pay for your airfare out of pocket and it can take several weeks to be reimbursed), and I liked both departments. Lauren got in to a wide variety of physics programs and spent a lot of time flying hither and yon. At some of these places, she mentioned that we were getting married, and that she wouldn't be able to come unless I got in there or somewhere nearby, and in several cases the physics department wrote to the philosophy department, but it doesn't seem to have done much good so late in the admissions process. I wonder if it would have been better to mention the "two body" issue up front. The reason we didn't is that we had been advised by professors at Penn that there is still a lot of discrimination against women in physics and it is much worse for married women. Accordingly, we decided not to bring this up until after Lauren was accepted.
When I visited UC Irvine, we were told that, due to the UC system budget crisis, there was not yet funding available. Six letters were in the process of being sent out. I was confident that I was one of them. When I didn't hear anything I wrote to the graduate chair and was told that I in fact offered position 17. Meanwhile, I was in contact with USC where I was in position 1 on the waitlist for admission with funding. When Lauren visited Davis it became clear that this wasn't going to work for us, so I was counting on USC. Boston U got thrown into the mix as well, which wouldn't have been a particularly great option, comparatively speaking, were it not for the fact that Lauren got in to Harvard.
You are ordinarily expected to make a decision on which school you will attend by April 15. Come the middle of April, I was still sitting on wait lists. This was the point at which the process became really stressful. Lauren managed to get extensions from the three schools she was serious considering, depending on where I got in, until the 17th. On the 13th I was rather shocked to be rejected by USC. I emailed UCI and Boston again, a little bit panicked. I started looking at technical jobs in the Boston area, and evaluating the possibility of reapplying after a year. I got conflicting advice from Penn professors on reapplying. When UCI and Boston didn't get back to me I called them on the 14th. By this point I had learned that there were only two or three people ahead of me at UCI and that, in the past, when other departments hadn't filled all of their spots at UCI the funding had sometimes gone to the philosophy department, so I was guardedly optimistic again. I had heard on March 31 that 2 of the 6 spots at Boston were already filled. When I called I learned that that number was now up to 4, but couldn't get an exact number on how many people were ahead of me. I was told that one of the two people who had an offer outstanding had been "unresponsive" as they were trying to get a hold of him, so the process might continue through the 16th.
I called both places again shortly after noon (east coast time) on the 15th. No news. Finally, shortly after 10AM California time (1:00PM here on the east coast) the graduate chair for UCI called me and said that he had an offer of almost full funding for me, and described the details. He said he needed an answer immediately. I said I needed to talk to Lauren and to Boston University. When I pressed for time, he told me that he had classes to teach that would occupy him from 11AM to 5PM, and before that point he had to either start the paperwork for me or call the next person on the wait list, so I would have to get back to him within 30 minutes. I'm not making this up. Fortunately, Lauren wasn't in class, and I had her financial offer from UCLA (which is where she is going) handy, and we had already investigated commutes and such pretty thoroughly, so I was able to get a hold of Lauren on the phone, and we decided that if Boston did not have a fully-funded offer for me I would accept this one (we weren't sure what we were going to do if they did have an offer). I called Boston, and everything was still up in the air, so I accepted at Irvine.
An interesting note: on the 14th, Lauren wrote to UCI's physics department telling them that she wouldn't be coming because (among other factors) I still had not received any funding. Very shortly after I received my funding offer, the physics department contacted her to ask if she would be able to come now that I had funding. The physics department was recruiting her fairly aggressively; it is not clear whether this had anything to do with the resolution to my funding situation.
This post has been mostly narrative, because my experience is mostly all I have to draw on in terms of advice on the process. In retrospect, here is what I would do differently:
It all worked out alright for me in the end, by the grace of God (there were a lot of people praying). Best of luck to everyone else!
Welcome to the 67th Philosophers' Carnival, on the theme of idealism! A large number of submissions were received, so among those that were not idealism-themed, I have selected only a few of my favorites. My apologies to those that were not included. Also, for those of you who find the color scheme distasteful (or a cause of headaches), let me point you to the top right of the page, where a link reading "view with boring colors" will magically turn this page to black on white (please let me know if it doesn't work in your browser). And now, without further ado, Philosophers' Carnival 67:
That's all for this time! The next Carnival will be held on April 28 at MQPhil. Submit your posts by Saturday, April 26.
Let me begin with a reminder: be sure to get your posts in for the 67th Philosophers' Carnival by tomorrow (Saturday) midnight (Eastern time), and remember that the theme is idealism. I've received many good posts already (probably more than I'll be able to include), but only a handful are idealism-themed. Having said that, let me begin my own idealism-themed post.
In my paper "The Semantics of Sense Perception in Berkeley" (which I never tire of linking to, because it is much better thought out, developed, and argued than the mostly half-baked stuff I post on this blog), I spend a considerable space of time discussing the question of where to locate the semantic content in Berkeley's "universal language of the Author of Nature." The problem which I try to address there is that virtually all of the things that look based on the broad outlines of Berkeley's theory as if they might be semantic relations are explicitly asserted to be syntactic* relations if one closely examines the particular texts where Berkeley discusses the structure of the language. In this post, I want to discuss the structure of the language (its "grammar" in the broadest possible sense) and the possible correspondence between problems in linguistics and problems in the metaphysics of the material world (and philosophy of science). This isn't necessarily a tight interpretation of Berkeley's text; rather, it is my reflection on how Berkeley's theory would work if true. I do think it is clear that the analogy (if it is merely an analogy and not, as Berkeley claims, an identity) between language and the phenomenal world is close enough for linguistic insights to be usefully applied to metaphysical problems (which would be a great thing, since linguistics is making a lot more progress than metaphysics). I've been thinking about writing this idea up in a paper, so I would very much like to get comments or criticisms on it. I will proceed by building language from the ground up, and in the process building up a picture of the structure of the phenomenal world.
I have not argued that this approach actually works, but I think that it is clear that there is at least some degree of analogy here. I hope to do future research into just how far the analogy can be carried, and whether it can perhaps be carried even to the point of identity, as Berkeley attempts to do.
*Berkeley's term is "grammatical;" see endnote 20 of the online version of my paper, which was deleted from the Religious Studies version due to space constraints.
I'm a couple days late with this (my apologies), but Philosophers' Carnival 66 is now up at The Uncredible Hallq with a link to my post, Berkeley: Phenomenalist or Platonist?
The 67th Carnival will be held right here, so stay tuned!
Commentators have long recognized the existence of two distinct strains of thought in Berkeley's discussions of how our perceptions give rise to something that is properly called a world. According to the phenomenalist strain, the world is quite simply composed of perception and it becomes a world, rather than simply an unrelated collection of perceptions, by means of the orderliness with which God causes perceptions. According to the Platonist strain, the world (and each object in it) has an archetype in the divine mind and our perceptions are perceptions of the world because what we perceive is an "ectype" of that archetype. John Foster has argued that Berkeley is a reductive phenomenalist in the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge, which he published in 1710, but that by the publication of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous in 1713 Berkeley has become a Platonist (The Case for Idealism, pp. 28-32). However, Berkeley cannot adopt the Platonist view so strictly as Foster tries to make him: to do so would undermine his refutation of skepticism. Berkeley needs to affirm that there is a sense in which our perceptions are the world so that we cannot be mistaken about it. Berkeley explicitly affirms this in Principles 87: "Colour, figure, motion, extension and the like, considered only as so many sensations in the mind, are perfectly known, there being nothing in them which is not perceived. But if they are looked on as notes or images, referred to things or archetypes existing without the mind, then are we involved all in scepticism." Furthermore, despite this statement, the language of archetypes as it is used in the Dialogues is also used in the Principles: "whoever shall reflect, and take care to understand what he says, will, if I mistake not, acknowledge that all sensible qualities are alike sensations, and alike real; that where the extension is, there is the colour too, to wit, in his mind, and that their archetypes can exist only in some other mind..." (99). Foster does point to Principles 48 as showing that the idea of archetypes in the divine mind is regarded as a possibility in the Principles, but he claims that "in the Principles, the role of God as a perceiver of physical objects is left as a mere possibility and on to which Berkeley seems to attach little importance ... But in his later work, the Three Dialogues, the preceptive role of God takes on a new significance." (p. 28) Be that as it may, the presence of the doctrine in the Principles would seem to be indicative that Berkeley does not regard the two models as mutually exclusive in the way that Foster does. Finally, in Dialogues 175ff. Berkeley argues again for his doctrine that the esse of physical things is percipi. So Foster's view must be rejected and we must find a way to reconcile the two views.
I have just finished reading "Berkeley's Christian Neoplatonism, Archetypes, and Divine Ideas" by Stephen H. Daniel (Journal of the History of Philosophy 39:2 (April 2001): 239-258). This paper is in part an attempt to reconcile these two seemingly opposing views.[1] Readers of this blog can probably predict what I am going to say the solution is. What is the solution to every problem in Berkeley's philosophy? Sense perception as language. Daniel gets to this by rather a roundabout path, investigating Gregory's and Berkeley's accounts of the Trinity and of human minds, but here is his ultimate conclusion:
To the extent that our ideas seem significant or intelligible to ourselves alone, they are ectypes: their existence consists simply in being perceived by a particular mind. An archetype is the meaning of that idea and all others like it as determined by their place in the sequence of ideas that inscribes history. A divine idea is God's active comprehension of a thing in an eternal communicative relation to all other things ... and, as such, identifies the mind of God as a matrix of discursive exchange. By learning the connections of ideas in history - that is, by "endeavoring to understand those signs instituted by the Author of Nature" (P[rinciples] 66) - we learn about ourselves and "the nature of things" (D[ialogues] 245). For all practical purposes, this amounts to nothing other than the contemplation of archetypes. Through such contemplation, we recognize oursleves not as substances distinct from God but as participants in the divine discourse. (p. 258)
I want to state the same thing a little differently: the world is a language. Words in a language have meaning independent of what each individual speaker hears or says or thinks, but not independent of what all individual speakers hear or say or think. The structure of a language - both in terms of syntax and in terms of morphology and lexicography - arises from the words and thoughts of individual speakers and is not anything over and above them in terms of existence. Nevertheless, we speak of a grammar and a lexicon for a language as some sort of abstract entities - like perfect "archetypes" of the language!
In the case of the divine language, God is privileged as a speaker. The rest of us "understand" and "speak" the language in more or less the way a domesticated dog "understands" and "speaks" English when it responds to what the humans around it say by, for instance, jumping up excitedly at the word "walk." Or perhaps a more apt comparison would be to a gorilla who can hear English and answer in American sign language. Whatever the case, it is clear that God is the author of the language, and thus creates the grammar and lexicon. As such, it is true both that the world simply is our perception of it and that it is the ectype of an archetype in the divine mind. As Daniel argues, this archetype is not found in God's passive perception - since God is not passive - but in his active will, his will to bring about the world. In this way, Berkeley is both a phenomenalist and a Platonist.
[1] Along the way the paper also argues that Berkeley holds a theory of mind modeled on Gregory of Nyssa's trinitarian theology and which eliminates the need for an immaterial substratum of mind distinct from volition and perception. Daniel finds support for this at Principles 98: "whoever shall go about to ... abstract the existence of a spirit from its cogitation, will, I believe, find it no easy task." I like this proposal since I am often not certain that I understand the meaning of the word "substance." However, I don't understand the proposal very well due to lack of familiarity with Gregory, and, in any case, I don't think it can be Berkeley's view, due to Dialogues 233-234.
The 66th Philosophers' Carnival is coming up this Monday at The Uncredible Hallq. The Philosophers' Carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of blog posts on subjects related to academic philosophy including, but not limited to, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, "continental" philosophy and the history of philosophy. Submissions are due online every other Saturday for inclusion in the carnival the following Monday.
Following the Uncredible Carnival 66 this Monday, Philosophers' Carnival 67 will take place here at blog.kennypearce.net on Monday, April 14 (submissions due by Saturday April 12). Some of you may recall that I had previously hosted Philosophers' Carnival 31. The 67th carnival will be focused on the theme of "idealism" - the view that minds and/or their ideas are the fundamental stuff of reality. Posts are invited which argue for or against idealism, which track down the consequences of idealism, or which examine the views of historical idealist philosophers, such as Berkeley, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Bradley (to name a few). Space permitting, I will include all posts with substantive content related to academic philosophy, but posts related to the theme outlined above are especially welcome and will have pride of place at the top of the page.
If you need some help thinking of something to say about idealism, let me recommend that you read some of my previous posts. For arguments for idealism, see Why Idealism? and The Ontological Economy of Idealism. Also, my more recent post The Idealist Strategy outlines a direction of argument common to most historical idealists (and to the contemporary idealist John Foster). I don't argue against idealism myself (since it's true) but I have dealt with Moorean arguments against it, if only to refute them. Finally, if you have more historical interests you can check my archives on Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and, of course, Berkeley.
Enjoy!
Philosophers' Carnival 65 is up at Philosophy, etc. with a link to my post, "Berkeley's Theory of Reference and the Critique of Matter".
George Berkeley is well known for his critique of matter. By "matter" he means Locke's "material substratum." At the end of the Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous he actually does acknowledge that one might use the word "matter" simply to mean "the stuff of the physical world" (that's not a direct quote) and he doesn't object to this, so he actually isn't opposed to the way the word was used in your physics or chemistry classes, but only to the way it was used in early modern metaphysics.
The critique of matter is tied up in the critique of abstract ideas, and so Berkeley devotes the Introduction to the Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge to criticizing abstraction. The alleged faculty of abstraction is one by which we, by considering concrete ideas, are supposed to be able to frame clear and distinct ideas which are nevertheless underspecified. In a well-known passage, quoted several times by Berkeley, Locke writes: "does it not require some pains and skill to form the general idea of a triangle ... for it must be neither oblique, nor rectangle, nor neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon; but all and none of these at once" (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 4.7.9). This, Berkeley thinks, is nonsense. This alleged "idea" is full of contradictions, and we can form no such thing. Matter, or material substratum, he supposes, is just such a false "idea," as his spokesman, Philonous, points out in the Three Dialogues:
HYLAS. ... when I look on sensible things in another view, considering them as so many modes and qualities, I find it necessary to suppose a material substratum, without which they cannot be conceived to exist.
PHILONOUS. Material substratum call you it? Pray, by which of your senses came you acquainted with that being?
HYLAS. It is not itself sensible; its modes and qualities only being perceived by the senses.
PHILONOUS. I presume then, it was by reflexion and reason you obtained the idea of it.
HYLAS. I do not pretend to any proper positive idea of it. However I conclude it exists, because qualities cannot be conceived to exist without a support.
PHILONOUS. It seems then you have only a relative notion of it, or that you conceive it not otherwise than by conceiving the relation it bears to sensible qualities.
HYLAS. Right.
PHILONOUS. Be pleased therefore to let me know wherein that relation consists.
... [Hylas tries and fails to explain] ...
PHILONOUS. Pray, let me know any sense, literal or not literal, that you understand it in. - How long must I wait for an answer, Hylas?
HYLAS. I declare I know not what to say, I once thought I understood well enough what was meant by matter's supporting accidents. But now the more I think on it, the less can I comprehend it; in short, I find that I know nothing of it.
PHILONOUS. It seems then you have no idea at all, neither relative nor positive of matter; you know neither what it is in itself, nor what relation it bears to accidents.
HYLAS. I acknowledge it.
PHILONOUS. And yet you asserted, that you could not conceive how qualities or accidents should really exist, without conceiving at the same time a material support of them.
HYLAS. I did.
PHILONOUS. That is to say, when you conceive the real existence of qualities, you do withal conceive something which you cannot conceive. (pp. 197-199)
But wait! Elsewhere, Berkeley develops a sophisticated theory of reference that is supposed to give significance to all sorts of words that don't correspond to ideas! Here are selections from Alciphron 7.2, 4-7 (Berkeley's spokesman is Euphranor):
ALCIPHRON. ... Words are signs: they do or should stand for ideas; which so far as they suggest they are significant. But words that suggest no ideas are insignificant. He who annexeth a clear idea to every word he makes use of speaks sense; but where such ideas are wanting, the speaker utters nonsense. In order therefore to know whether any man's speech be senseless and insignificant, we have nothing to do but lay aside the words, and consider the ideas suggested by them.
...
Grace is the main point in the Christian dispensation; nothing is oftener mentioned or more considered throughout the New Testament; wherein it is represented as somewhat of a very particular kind, distinct from anything revealed to the Jews, or known by the light of nature ... Hence Christianity is styled the covenant or dispensation of grace ... What is the clear and distinct idea marked by the word grace? I presume a man may know the bare meaning of this term, without going into the depth of all those learned inquiries. This surely is an easy matter, provided there is an idea annexed to such term. And if there is not, it can be neither the subject of a rational dispute, nor the object of real faith ... Grace taken in the vulgar sense, either for beauty or favour, I can easily understand. But when it denotes an active, vital, ruling principle, influencing and operating on the mind of man, distinct from every natural power of motive, I profess myself altogether unable to understand it, or frame any distinct idea of it; and therefore I cannot assent to any proposition concerning it, nor consequently have any faith about it: and it is a self-evident truth, that God obligeth no man to impossibilities...EUPHRANOR. ... Words, it is agreed, are signs: it may not therefore be amiss to examine the use of other signs, in order to know that of words. Counters, for instance, at a card-table are used, not for their own sake, but only as signs substituted for money, as words are for ideas. Say now, Alciphron, is it necessary every time these counters are used throughout the progress of a game, to frame an idea of the distinct sum or value that each represents?
ALCIPHRON. By no means: it is sufficient the players at first agree on their respective values, and at last substitute those values in their stead.
EUPHRANOR. And in casting up a sum, where the figures stand for pounds, shillings, and pence, do you think it necessary, throughout the whole progress of the operation, in each step to form ideas of pounds, shillings, and pence?
ALCIPHRON. I do not; it will suffice if in the conclusion those figures direct our actions with respect to things.
EUPHRANOR. From hence it seems to follow, that words may not be insignificant, although they should not, every time they are used, excite the ideas they signify in our minds; it being sufficient that we have it in our power to substitute things or ideas for their signs when there is occasion. It seems also to follow, that there may be another use of words besides that of marking and suggesting distinct ideas, to wit, the influencing our conduct and actions; which may be done either by forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain passions, dispositions, and emotions in our minds. A discourse, therefore, that directs how to act or excites to the doing or forbearance of an action may, it seems, be useful and significant, although the words whereof it is composed should not bring each a distinct idea into our minds.
ALCIPHRON. It seems so.
EUPHRANOR. Pray tell me, Alciphron, is not an idea altogether inactive?
ALCIPHRON. It is.
EUPHRANOR. An agent therefore, an active mind, or spirit cannot be an idea, or like an idea. Whence it should seem to follow that those words which denote an active principle, soul, or spirit do not, in a strict and proper sense, stand for ideas. And yet they are not insignificant neither; since I understand what is signified by the term I, or myself, or know what it means, although it be no idea, nor like an idea, but that which thinks, and wills, and apprehends ideas, and operates about them. Certainly it must be allowed that we have some notion, that we understand or know what is meant by, the terms myself, will, memory, love, hate, and so forth; although to speak exactly, these words do not suggest so many distinct ideas.
ALCIPHRON. What would you infer from this?
EUPHRANOR. What hath been inferred already - that words may be significant, although they do not stand for ideas. The contrary whereof having been presumed seems to produce the doctrine of abstract ideas.
...
EUPHRANOR: ... But, to come to your own instance, let us examine what idea we can frame of force abstracted from body, motion, and outward sensible effects. For myself I do not find that I have or can have any such idea.
ALCIPHRON. Surely everyone knows what is meant by force.
EUPHRANOR. And yet I question whether everyone can form a distinct idea of force. Let me entreat you, Alciphron, be not amused by terms: lay aside the word force, and exclude very other thing from your thoughts, and then see what precise idea you have of force.
ALCIPHRON. Force is that in bodies which produces motion and other sensible effects.
EUPHRANOR. Is it then something distinct from those effects.
ALCIPHRON. It is.
EUPHRANOR. Be pleased now to exclude the consideration of its subject and effects, and contemplate force itself in its own precise idea.
ALCIPHRON. I profess I find it no such easy matter.
EUPHRANOR. Take your own advice, and shut your eyes to assist your meditation. Upon this, Alciphron, having closed his eyes and mused a few minutes, declared he could make nothing of it.
...
EUPHRANOR. But, notwithstanding all this, it is certain there are many speculations, reasoning, and disputes, refined subtleties and nice distinctions about this same force ... Upon the whole, therefore, may we not pronounce that - excluding body, time, space, motion, and all its sensible measures and effects - we shall find it as difficult to form an idea of force as of grace?
ALCIPHRON. I do not know what to think of it.EUPHRANOR. And yet, I presume, you allow there are very evident propositions and theorems relating to force, which contain useful truths ... And if, by considering this doctrine of force, men arrive at the knowledge of many inventions in mechanics, and are taught to frame engines, by means of which things difficult and otherwise impossible may be performed ; and if the same doctrine which is so beneficial here below serveth also as a key to the celestial motions; shall we deny that it is of use, either in practice or speculation, because we have no distinct idea of force? Or that which we admit with regard to force, upon what pretence can we deny concerning grace?
the algebraic mark, which denotes the root of a negative square, hath its use in logistic operations, although it be impossible to form an idea of any such quantity. And what is true of algebraic signs is also true of words or language, modern algebra being in fact a more short, apposite, and artificial sort of language, and it being possible to express by words at length, though less conveniently, all the steps of an algebraical process.
So how does the critique of matter proceed? You may have noticed in the passage from the Three Dialogues that Philonous is careful to distinguish between a "positive idea" and a "relative notion." Positive ideas are the "distinct ideas" of the Alciphron. These are limited to what we can perceive or imagine. Relative notions are concepts like the imaginary number i. We don't have a "distinct idea" of i, but we have a theorem: i2=-1. This establishes a relation (hence "relative") between i and a real number, and thus allows us to apply the rules of algebra to get back to real numbers, which we understand. Berkeley believes that we can do this with words like "grace" and "force," but Hylas fails to do even this with "matter." A relative notion of matter actually might be something like "that which has mass and takes of space," which is what we learned in physics and chemistry classes, but this, according to Berkeley, is meaningful only because it actually relates to our perceptions. Therefore, such a definition does no good to someone arguing for a materialist metaphysics.
The most recent Electronic Frontier Foundation newsletter contains a couple of links on telecom immunity which allude to an argument against telecom immunity that I want to expand upon.
Many people think that the basic principle of democracy or of a free society more generally is "majority rule" or some such. However, this is not historically how the matter has been viewed, and history in fact furnishes plenty of cases in which majority rule has not been particularly consistent with freedom. Classic liberals - the early modern thinkers who gave us the foundations of western democracy - had a different view that comes out of the classical tradition. The fundamental principle of a free society, according to this tradition, is summed up in the Greek slogan isonomia or the related Latin slogan "lex est rex." The former is traditionally translated "equal justice under law" and in this form it is inscribed on the US Supreme Court building. It might be better translated by the more generic phrase "legal equality." The latter is translated "the law is king." Although this slogan is usually given in Latin, it too originates in the Greek tradition, in the following famous passage from Herodotus, in which the deposed Spartan king Demaratus tells King Xerxes of Persia why the Spartans fight so fiercely:
[The Spartans] are the equal of any men when they fight alone; fighting together they surpass all other men. For they are free, but not entirely free: They obey a master called Law, and they fear this master much more than your men fear you. They do whatever it commands them to do, and its commands are always the same: Not to retreat from the battlefield even when badly outnumbered; to stay in formation and either conquer or die. (Histories 7.104; from Samuel Shirley, tr., Herodotus: On the War For Greek Freedom)
So what is the problem with telecom immunity? The moment "Michael Mukasey said it was ok" becomes a valid defense in a civil lawsuit or criminal prosecution, the law is no longer king: Michael Mukasey is. None of us want that.
My position on the debate between Calvinism and Arminianism is that the more moderate forms of each are both plausible and orthodox. Hyper-Calvinism can slide into the heresy of fatalism, or the denial that God loves all people; hyper-Arminianism slides, of course, into Pelagianism. It is only the moderate forms of each which are, I say, plausible and orthodox. These moderate forms, I hold, represent two different man-made philosophical and theological systems designed to uphold the same doctrines revealed in Scripture. I believe that when the disagreement actually reaches all the way down to Biblical hermeneutics, rather than staying in the realm of systematic theology, it is usually the case that someone has strayed into the "hyper" realm. We ought to be able to state what the Scripture says in a "topic-neutral" way because the Scripture does not reveal to us a theory of grace or of soteriology that reaches this level of detail. Now, the revealed doctrines I'm talking about are often considered to be specifically Calvinist doctrines. The reason for this, at least among the people I talk to, is that all of us find that the majority (though by no means all) of the Protestants we talk to fall into two categories: those who accept various forms of hyper-Arminianism implicitly and unreflectively, and those who accept Calvinism consciously and reflectively.
I believe in the compatibility of the Biblical doctrines of grace and election with a moderate Arminianism. I believe that this compatibility is most clearly seen in two verses: John 6:40 and Romans 8:29. Note that I am not claiming that the Bible teaches Arminianism. (Personally, I believe in the moderate Arminian theory I am outlining on grounds of philosophical considerations related to human freedom and personal responsibility.) What I am claiming is that these two verses (and others) teach a doctrine of election/grace/predestination that is compatible with a moderate Arminianism. In outlining what this moderate Arminianism would look like, I hope to offer Biblical considerations against (1) the view that only Calvinism can adequately account for the Biblical doctrines of grace, and (2) various hyper-Arminian views.
John 6:40 reads, "For this is the will of My Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." Christ says that this is the will of the Father. That is, the Father has made an effectual, sovereign pronouncement. This pronouncement relates to a specific group of people: "everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him." It also has a specific content: they "may have eternal life, and [Christ] will raise [them] up on the last day." There is no natural necessity or connection between seeing the Son and believing (trusting) in Him and having eternal life. Rather, the connection is forged entirely by the sovereign will of God. Those who trust the Son do not thereby work any part of their salvation or come to deserve eternal life. The work of salvation is entirely independent of the individual. In this way, we can, as Arminians, claim that everyone is free to accept or reject Christ, while nevertheless assenting to the Biblical doctrines of election