Instrumentalism, Meet Metaphysics

Lately I've been working on the problem of phenomenal properties, but (owing to covering Chapters 10 and 11 on Davidson and Dennett in John Heil's Philosophy of Mind in my class this week) I am today thinking about intentional properties. All of this talk about properties is sloppy, I don't think that there are any such things as phenomenal "properties" for example. If there are such things as formal properties or relational properties then maybe there are intentional properties, which would be some kind of those former.
Posing the problem, suppose that you were a physiologist studying the various organs of the body. You work with the stomach for a while, figuring it out, see the digestive system and how it functions. Moving along you'll eventually come to the nervous system, and it too will be described as a physical system with physical processes going on. But psychology has a way of talking about persons that does not seamlessly mesh with the way we talk about bodies and brains. (A crucial point to understanding mind-body relations is that intentional ("belief-desire") psychological ascriptions are made of whole people, with all of their fingers and toes and dogs and cars, and not of brains or parts of brains. Keeping that in mind clarifies the brain process/consciousness relation a lot.)
The problem is that ordinary intentional psychology ascribes mental states to persons, and these mental states have content. This involves us in the idea that something functions as a symbol with meaning. But when we as physiologists learn and describe the physical processes in organs, we (sense of "one," no I'm not a physiologist) don't (seem to) describe these processes in terms of information processing or intentional content etc. The semantic properties of mind and language don't seem to map on to any physical properties. Davidson gives us some arguments that take the problem beyond the basic issue of whether or not correlative relations are constitutive of causal relations (I think maybe yes at this point): He points out that the way we're going to have to interpret any little bit of a person's mental content (literally, the meaning that is symbolized by their mental representations) is in terms of that content's interactions with a larger system of content, inference, implication, value, memory, etc. The "web of belief" Quine called it, my coinage is to speak of the "intentional economy" of a person. We will also have to ascribe to the person a minimum level of "rational" behavior, guessing that they will follow out the "rules" of the intentional economy more or less as some model "rational" person would. These two features of psychological interpretation, the "holistic" character of meaning and the rationality assumption, had no correlary in physical description, Davidson argued, and thus "psychophysical" laws were not possible.
I'm not so sure about the propositional nature of the "attitudes" as Davidson is, or even if I think a representational model of mind is correct (although it seems to be enjoying a vogue at the moment). But I do agree that intentional explanation may not be "translatable" or "analyzable" into physical explanation: that reductive materialism fails to account for the metaphysics of intentionality, because the properties that intentional descriptions pick out (that of believing that "x" and desiring that "y," say) are multiply realizable (or "supervenient") properties and thus may characterize some indefinitely wide set of physical systems. Thus it looks to me that intentional properties are some sort of formal or relational properties, like the intailments of geometry proofs. The benefit of this view is that the metaphysical problem turns out not to be specific to the mind-body relation. Rather there is a universal problem for materialism. It looks like it may also, by locating content in a "wide" way (that is, as an emergent property of the system's relationship with its environment), be useful as an eliminativist approach to representation. Just stir in a little Plato and everything's fine!

What Mary Couldn't Say

Frank Jackson's "Knowledge Argument" is motivated with this counterfactual: imagine Mary, the color-blind color vision specialist. Mary is an expert on all aspects of color perception: the physics of light waves, the absorption and reflectance properties of surfaces, etc., and the physiology of the eyeball, the function of the rods and cones, optic nerve, and color processing areas of the brain. In fact, let's say that Mary is the world's top expert on these matters: let's say that Mary knows the complete and correct physical description and explanation of color perception. And then remember: Mary is color-blind (perhaps her professional pursuits are a bit of overcompensation). She's never seen reds or blues. She doesn't know "what it's like" to have these phenomenal experiences. The argument purports to show that psychology cannot be naturalized. The complete and correct physical description, that includes all of the physical information, nonetheless lacks some (further) information, the knowledge of what it is like to see color. Thus if "naturalized" psychology means psychology within the bounds of physical explanation, the project founders (and Husserl was right that phenomenology is autonomous).
This argument fails to prove that psychology cannot be naturalized. The reason that it fails is that, while it is true that Mary can't say what it is like to see color, neither can anyone else. Phenomenal experience is beyond the limits of language. Ostensibly phenomenal terms ("He is in pain," "She can taste the chocolate") necessarily function on the basis of some kind of public criteria (I have been rehearsing these Wittgensteinian arguments through the last several posts. They are the "solipsism" passage in the Tractatus and the "private language" argument of the PI). In the present context note that what is at stake is what it would take to naturalize psychology, to incorporate psychology fully and seamlessly into an overall physicalist worldview. Thus the argument is essentially epistemological, not metaphysical. If it is right to say that "phenomenal description," meaning description of phenomenal experiences themselves as distinct from descriptions of things and properties in the physical world, is not possible (is conceptually incoherent), then Jackson's Knowledge Argument fails to show that psychology cannot be naturalized.

A Two-Pronged Solution to the Problem of "Qualia"

Synthesizing the last two posts, then: I'm thinking that the right account of phenomenal properties is these two arguments:
1) Metaphysically speaking, the "theory of mind" for phenomenal properties is (my coinage) Hyperchauvinistic type-to-type identity. The community forsook reductive materialism because of the "chauvinism" problem, that is, the multiple realizability ("supervenience") of intentional ("belief/desire") states. My larger thesis at this point is that "mind" is a complex concept and that we need two theories for two different problems, one for intentionality and another for phenomenal properties. Whereas it is true that intentional states are multiply realizable, and thus true that reductive materialism fails as an overall theory of mind, the ultimate metaphysical analysis of phenomenal properties is that the qualitative experience is what it is because the specific body is what it is.
2) Epistemologically speaking, language cannot refer to phenomenal experiences. They are the ground in which description (of anything) is possible. Meanwhile, the referents (semantics) of phenomenal descriptions are necessarily public. Phenomenology, if that is conceived as the study of phenomenal experience as distinct from the study of the physical world (science), is not possible. It is beyond the limits of language. These arguments are essentially Wittgensteinian.

Phenomenal Properties are not Properties

Talk about properties implies a world, full of things, that have the properties (putting aside for this occasion the Platonic alternative that properties are the kind of transcendental entities that need not be instantiated by physical particulars). Part of this "ground of being" is phenomenal experience. This is what Wittgenstein meant (in the Tractatus) by his "solipsistic" identification of the self and the world (5.6-5.641). "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world." Subjective experience is the framework within which description of the world is possible (and yes Wittgenstein recognized that Kant had a very similar argument). Phenomenal experience constitutes the world, and the world constitutes phenomenal experience. Thus phenomenology is not possible: part of this argument is the private language argument of the PI, but a deeper thread here is the idea that phenomenal quality is the building material for description per se; ordinary description (of the object world) just is phenomenal description, at the limit of phenomenal description. This is the basis of Wittgenstein's rejection of the concept of mental representation, of mental content, altogether. On this view, there are no such things as "phenomenal properties." This seems right to me. (It looks like Spinoza is thinking along similar lines in his analysis of properties; and thanks to Professor John Heil for a substantive reply to my e-mail).

Functionalism and Zombies

David Chalmers's brief for metaphysical dualism (in The Conscious Mind) is sporting (like Berkeley is sporting), and I appreciate that. It does not turn out to be field-transforming, however (Wittgenstein, Putnam, Fodor: field-transforming, for better or for worse). Too much of the work is done by Chalmers's claim that we can conceive of zombies: humans who behave (function) exactly like other persons, but who have no phenomenal experience (who are quale-free). Chalmers takes this counterfactual to be, by itself, an argument for mind-body dualism. For myself, I doubt that one can conceive of a zombie. There are several possible lines of argument here. Today I am thinking of Wittgenstein's claim that the semantics of psychological descriptions (like the semantics of all descriptions) must be public, as language is essentially (necessarily) intersubjective. All phenomenal terms, then ("pain," "taste," "sensation"), have double lives: their nominal referents are qualia, but their conditions of use (W. would say their "grammars") are public. My view is that the mind-body problem is a complex problem, specifically that we need one theory to deal with intentional properties and another to deal with phenomenal properties. Functionalism is the kind of theory that deals with intentional properties, which I take to be some sort of formal, relational, "public" properties. For phenomenal properties we need reductive materialism. That is, phenomenal properties are not multiply realizable. When we say that David Chalmers, Flipper the Dolphin, My Favorite Martian, and Commander Data all like chocolate, we are referring to something that instantiates a particular functional role. It is not required (it does not follow) that they all have the same qualitative experience. If this is right, then the (alleged) conceivability of zombies does not constitute a proof of mind-body dualism, only of the inadequacy of functionalism.

On a Technical Problem for Behaviorism

Today's post is a little wonkish, I'll admit, so if behaviorism in general doesn't interest you you may want to scroll down and see some of the other posts. Supposedly a problem for behaviorism is that mental terms infest behavioral analyses of psychological descriptions, for example "He likes chocolate" means, among other things, that he'll move towards chocolate providing he doesn't want to fool us, and providing he doesn't hope to lose weight, etc. The mental terms don't wash out. I don't think that this is necessarily a problem. If the behaviorist was right to say that the psychological descriptions were properly analyzed as observable dispositions to behave, then all of the mental terms that keep cropping up in the analyses could also be so analyzed. We could do something along the lines of a Ramsey sentence, using DBx, for "Disposition to Behave x," instead of Fx. That doesn't mean that there is no problem. Carnap, as I recall, diagnosed the real problem here: the analyses into behavioral dispositions would result in indefinitely long, perhaps even infinitely long, descriptions, and that is a problem, one that defeats behaviorism, in fact. But it looks like functionalism is going to have the same problem. The function of any given state/process is going to be defined by that state's role in the larger functional economy, but that economy is open-ended. This is similar to Davidson's argument for the impossibility of psychophysical laws: the functional property, like the intentional property (same thing under a different description) is defined in reference to the larger functional/intentional "web," but the physical state is not.

Sophia and the Toy Chair

Sophia was maybe eighteen months old, maybe a bit younger, when she delighted her grandmother with a bit of business with a toy chair. It was a tiny plastic chair for dolls, about two inches tall. Sophia tried to lower herself down into the chair. What is philosophical about this (or at least psychological; I'm thinking of Kant) is that she has the concept of chair way before she has a working grasp of spatial relations. Kant thought that the mind was a concept engine, organizing everything into categories (for better or for worse: his analysis of prejudice and stereotypes is based on this and is spot on I think).

Is Existentialism an Eliminativism?

Partisan formation around the old "Continental-Analytic" split (now completely passe, it seems to me) reified over the years into a view of things where, broadly speaking, existentialism was a part of the philosophic "left" and particularly represented a defense of the freedom of the individual. In its most debased form this interpretation placed existentialism as a kind of refutation of Newtonian determinism. Reading Sartre in Contemporary Philosophy this semester, this seems to me all wrong. I think that Sartre is a kind of eliminativist about the self, certainly he is about any classical, Platonic/Christian concept of a transcendent self (he's explicit about that), but his whole theory rests on the idea of consciousness as a no-thing, the negation that emerges in dialectic with the material world. "I am not that," is Sartre's Cogito. He wants to be a materialist, and maybe even a reductive one. Isn't Marxist dialectic (an uppermost concern of Sartre's) a sort of reductive materialism? There is nothing beyond the physical state of affairs; that is the ground of all of the rest of being. "Existence precedes essence" points ultimately to Hume's psychology. When I did a Kant seminar a few years ago and we read the first Critique, it struck me that all of Sartre was already there in Kant (not an idiosyncratic stance by the way). Take away transcendental rationalism (as Sartre, at least programmatically, certainly aims to do) and you get...Hume. Or maybe Sartre is Berkeley! Kant hated it when people said that he was Berkeley, but they did say so at the time.

Wittgenstein and Physicalism

Wittgenstein can be read as both a physicalist and as an anti-physicalist. It may be that the two interpretations are compatible because there is a difference between metaphysical physicalism and epistemological (or "reductive") physicalism. On the one hand, Wittgenstein is deeply committed to the view that intentional/semantic properties are not real. This is a core intuition for him, and one of his basic points. There is no internal mental content, no meaning somehow under the surface of language. Intentional and semantic predicates can only intelligibly be applied to public referents. This is the physicalist intuition that motivates behaviorism, Wittgenstein, and Ryle. On the other hand, Wittgenstein is committed to a version of functional-role semantics: language is misconstrued as neutrally or passively naming or describing an independent, external world. Rather speech acts are forms of behavior with (myriad) functions, all specific to specific "forms of life," literally specific to creatures with such-and-such bodies in such-and-such environments and so forth ("If a lion could speak we would not understand him."). Thus, classical metaphysics is brought to an end (so Wittgenstein thought with many others of his era), but also eliminated by functional-role semantics is the epistemic privilege of science: all speech behaviors are essentially pragmatic and thus a correspondence theory of truth is misconceived according to this pragmatist/anthropological view of language. So he shares with the physicalist the metaphysical intuition that intentionality/semantics must be washed out of a coherent account of the world, but rejects the program of reductive materialism. (PS Thanks to Fernando Birman of Columbia University for a nice presentation today here at the University of Puerto Rico)

Some Good Philosophy Behind the Strange Doctrine of Occasionalism

I've long been persuaded that Spinoza has something very valuable to say about the mind/body problem, and on a good day I'm even able to talk about what that might be. I also have been coming to appreciate Leibniz, initially insofar as he seems to go beyond Spinoza on the metaphysics of modality (with his anticipation of "possible worlds"). But I have long regarded as mostly just bizarre Leibniz's doctrine of "parallelism," the view that the mental and the physical (and indeed all the myriad substances that he took to exist) were set in a kind of pre-established harmony, each one unfolding according to its own essence alone, with God alone as the real causal force explaining the whole state of affairs. Malebranche's "occasionalism" does not add much to Leibniz but it does make one point more clearly: Individual things have no causal force. Causality is a property of God alone.
Today I'm thinking that this 17th century philosophy has some very fine stuff to it, especially when we consider it in the context of philosophy of mind. The two metaphysical problems are causation in general and mental causation in particular. Does the (Spinoza-like) claim that God is the only cause really constitute a defensible position on causality? A standard response has been that to say that God is the "real" cause is vacuous, amounting to nothing more than the assertion that the causal relations are primitives (unanalyzable givens). However, taken as a general response to the problem of causality, this seems in fact to be very close to Hume's view that, other than the observable regular correlations themselves, there is nothing that can be observed to be a "causal power." "God made the world that way" is no more or less acceptable than "Nature is made that way."
Let's think about the metaphysics of mental causation. Parallelism suggests that we will not find a causal relationship between the mental and the physical, in either direction, because the mental and the physical are not in a causal relationship. Of course this is true if we deny a priori that the mental and the physical are metaphysically distinct (and like most philosophers and scientists in this area I doubt that they are metaphysically distinct). Strictly speaking it is a mistake to talk about a causal relationship between a thing and itself. But these 17th century rationalists were mind-body dualists, so they could, conceptually speaking, entertain the idea of causal relations between mental things and physical things. The idea here is that two correlated things could both be caused by a third thing, that thing being God in this literature. Compare this with Spinoza's view: Everything (God) has both a physical and a mental description. On the Leibnizian view, there is an underlying causality that explains both the mental and the physical state of affairs. Nor does this need to be treated as a gnostic religious mystery or anything other than the primitive that it is: when there is a perceptual experience of the color red, there is that qualitative experience, when there is damage to the body, there is this one.
I used to suggest to my students that simply mapping correlations between physical states and mental states was not adequate for naturalism about the mind because causal relations are not the same as (merely) correlative relations, and thus there is some unresolved conceptual difficulty for psychology, etc. Now I'm no longer sure about that. It may be that when these correlations are familiar enough and well-studied enough, the "conceptual" mystery will simply evaporate, like the old problem of the "life force" in biology. And that, I guess, is what I'm seeing in Leibniz and Malebranche: the world is made in such a way that the mental and the physical accompany each other. There is no hidden causality between them. That does not seem to be such a bizarre thing to say after all.

Robert Solomon

Philosopher Robert Solomon passed away unexpectedly on January 2nd. He was a long-time professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of many books. He was best known for his work on the emotions that was of interest to virtue theorists, cognitive scientists, and others. He was also a noted scholar of existentialism including Nietzsche and Sartre, and was also the author of a number of teaching textbooks and had a lifelong interest in the pedagogy of philosophy. I was acquainted with Prof. Solomon briefly during the late eighties and early nineties through his visits to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where I was a graduate student at the time. Prof. Solomon's long relationship with the Boulder department had its roots in the sixties and seventies when Boulder was known as a center for phenomenological studies (in my time the department was moving in other directions, but I was fortunate enough to attend Hazel Barnes's valedictory seminars on the Early and Late Sartre my first year and took a number of courses with Forrest Williams). Prof. Solomon was of that populist American school of professors who take a sympathetic interest in naive undergraduates and have a more critical manner with probably-pretentious graduate students. He was a bohemian figure, a contrarian who always wanted to challenge the received view of things. This semester, by chance, I am using A Short History of Philosophy, Oxford Univ. Press, 1996, cowritten by him with Kathleen Higgins. It includes generous coverage of Indian, Chinese and other traditions and much provocative treatment of philosophical chestnuts: the authors challenge the notion that the Presocratics are best understood as "the origins of natural science," or that Early Modern philosophy is a contrast between the "Empiricists" and the "Rationalists," for example. There is a refusal to separate philosophy from art or from religion, and an insistence on some political awareness of the context of canonical writers. Robert Solomon was an energetic and humane philosopher.

Pragmatism and Behaviorism

Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that lots of small interactions down at the level of individuals combined to self-organize market economies: satisfactory transactions are repeated, the reverse are extinguished. At the same time David Hume tried to make an empiricist psychology based on the idea of habituation from regularities of experience. There is nothing "in the mind," Hume claimed, other than the impressions that experience has fixed there. A century later Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species used the same principle (the "law of effect," as famously discussed by Daniel Dennett) to develop a picture of the mechanism of selection, while J. S. Mill sought to develop a science of ethics along consequentialist lines. One of the most important incarnations of this empiricist strain is behaviorism, with its basic picture that a simple learning mechanism, self-organizing through positive and negative reinforcement, was a model that could do the work that a model of psychology needed to do. What's still interesting about that is the possibility that "mind," "meaning," and related intentional/semantic properties could turn out to be some sort of public, relational properties. (I don't know what I think about this, which is why I'm studying Wittgenstein at this point.) Pragmatism is squarely in this tradition, to the point where my student Omar Ferrer asked, "How is pragmatism any different from plain old empiricism?" How indeed? It looks to me that there are two interpretations of pragmatist theories of truth: one interpretation is that pragmatism claims that decision-making (about what to believe) is driven by utility calculations rather than by probability calculations (as in, how likely is this belief to be an accurate representation of the world?). But is seems to me that pragmatism may be committed to a more radical view of truth. It must be, a la Darwin, that my "belief system" is the cumulative product of a lot of trial-and-error (mine and my ancestors). On this view, one can't really be said to elect beliefs; to accept some and reject others. Rather, like physical traits, beliefs are outputs of an essentially mindless process (Groucho Marx told a biographer that he had simply repeated things that had got laughs in vaudeville over thirty years to develop his schtick. He had never, he claimed, thought to ask why something was funny). That phrase "essentially mindless" is the key of course: success is explaining how mind comes from non-mind. On this view, validation is completely a posteriori, as beliefs are (automatically) selected by "what works." Does Hume anticipate what is most radical in pragmatism: the suggestion that a rational mind trying to establish the most accurate representation of reality isn't a necessary part of a model of cognition at all? I think yes. Does James appreciate how radical the theory is? I don't know. But I don't see how it really differs from the rest of empiricism/behaviorism at all. It is a variety of empiricist philosophy.

Wittgenstein on the Argument From Analogy

The argument from analogy for the existence of other minds says that I know the connection between my observable traits (physical and behavioral) and my (unobservable) mental state, and thus learn to infer from the observed behavior of another person to a further mental attribution. The reason many including myself consider Wittgenstein to be at least a close relative of behaviorism is his argument that the referents of psychological predicates are necessarily public in the first place. So Wittgenstein rejects the premise that there are unobservable mental things, or at least that these (what many call phenomenal properties) can be spoken about (handled by public language) meaningfully. This is different from the argument that the analogy doesn't work because it is an inference from the smallest possible data set (oneself). That is an argument, but it is not a Wittgensteinian one: on the probability argument, I turn out to lack logical demonstration of something (other minds) that I believe. That is not the same as showing that I cannot reasonably believe in other minds (noncognitivist psychology!). On the Wittgensteinian argument, by contrast, I can neither believe nor disbelieve in other minds, or at least nothing can be said about other minds (or my own) outside of some pragmatic, public context.

When is Philosophy Religious?

Is Buddhism a religion or a philosophy? Philosophers tend to search for the philosophical elements in religious traditions: the religious heritage is more potential philosophy text. Religion is philosophical when it addresses metaphysical and epistemological issues about the universe, the soul, ethics, and all of the other applied topics. But when is philosophy religious? Why might a seeker of religious wisdom search the philosophical lierature? Eastern traditions (thinking this morning of Buddhism and also Confucius) provide a good example. Confucius is interested in comportment; he doesn't want so much to tackle conceptual issues as he wants to help people cultivate a daily discipline that is forward and healthy. That, I think, is the essence of what makes a tradition a spiritual tradition (and the religious tradition is a subset of the spiritual tradition). Buddhism, too, presents its greatest challenge as a potential way of living, one that not everyone is able to acheive. Wisdom as a kind of behavior, rather than as formal "mental content." Classical Greek Platonism and Stoicism, also modern Existentialism, are examples of philosophy with this quality of exhortation to living in a certain way, also Spinoza: all philosophers with religion in them.

What Does Eliminativism Claim?

The standard introductory argument for eliminativism, from Paul Churchland, is an argument from the history of science: some putative entities from older theories get reduced (Zeus's thunderbolts = electrical discharges), while others are eliminated (forget the clunky phlogiston example. The heavenly spheres don't survive modern astronomy. Students can at least get that). And so traditional (intentional, belief/desire) psychology is a theory, and subject to revision (thus "The Theory Theory"). So far eliminative materialism is not a theory of its own, it's an historical cautionary: don't just assume that the traditional categories of intentional states ("attitudes") will survive material analysis. But what is the idea here really? Either the idea is that there are some attitudes of the same kind as beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, etc., that will be eliminated in the light of neuroscience, maybe even some of those but not others. This I think is incoherent: surely the attitudes are kinds of behaviors? People aren't going to behave differently (at least not much) when neuroscience is more advanced; our understanding of the etiology of the behavior might be different. No, eliminativism is an all or nothing thing, and the thing is content itself. It may be that there is an alternative to the representational theory of mind. It may be that after a maturation of neuroscience we understand thought without attributing semantic properties to mental states (or to anything else) at all. That's the materialist intuition behind behaviorism, the one that persuaded Wittgenstein and Ryle. Mental content must be washed out of an authentically materialist psychology (and semantics must be washed out of an authentically materialist linguistics). The only coherent form of eliminativism is the claim that material analysis will eliminate intentionality altogether, not only as a problem for philosophy but as a phenomenon. And at that point, if it turns out that this kind of eliminativist materialism prevails, the traditional categories of belief/desire psychology will be: still standing, used just as they always have been.

Determinism is Skepticism, so what about Eliminativism?

I think that hard determinism is a kind of skepticism: the claim is that we don't actually know something that we believe that we know. This scans under two versions of determinism: the claim that our thoughts and feelings play no causal role in our behavior, and the subtler claim that our thoughts and feelings could not be different than what they are. If I am right that hard determinism is a form of skepticism, then we can deploy counter-skeptical arguments against the hard determinist. I take the best counter-skeptical arguments to be what I think of as Wittgensteinian: the skeptic has tricked us up front by changing the context of use such that the word does not have a meaning (a function). I think that Hume anticipates Wittgenstein here; Hume is an anti-skeptic, not a skeptic. Strictly speaking, the reply is "I neither know nor do not know that (for example) the external world exists: that is not a coherent subject of belief (that is not an example of a belief). The verbs 'to know' and 'to believe' do not apply here."
OK, here's the thought that I'm trying to think: If the foregoing is defensible, can it be extended to eliminativism in the philosophy of psychology? The eliminativist says that I (perhaps falsely) only believe that the traditional intentional categories (beliefs, desires, etc.) pick out anything like what we would use to explain people's actions in light of some future understanding of neurophysiology (or something). Is this like telling me that I only believe that I'm not dreaming, or that other minds exist?

Library of Tibetan Classics

These days I'm starting my mornings with ten pages or so of Mind Training: The Great Collection, published by Wisdom Publications 2006 ISBN 0-86171-440-7. This book is an excellent example of the new wave of English translations of classical Tibetan Buddhist literature, spurred on by recent and unfortunately grim developments in Tibet. The Mind Training literature, first anthologized in the fifteenth century, is homely advice in the form of traditional Buddhist enlightenment stories of wealth and renunciation. A central idea is the practise of total altruism: all my assets unto all other beings, all of the woes of all other beings unto myself. This mental exercise is both a recipe for peace and tolerance (and thus calmness of mind) and also a technique for cultivating mindfullness (awareness of the state of one's own consciousness), something that cannot be done from an ego-centered standpoint. It is an early volume of the Library of Tibetan Classics, a project of the Institute of Tibetal Classics. A real joy and "jewel," in the traditional Tibetan sense of jewels as symbols of wish-fulfillment.

Dec. 12 2006

This is the first installment of Anderson Brown's Philosophy Blog. I call it a "philosophy" blog rather than a "philosophical" blog since I can only hope that the blog will actually be philosophical, but I know it will always be about philosophy. Here I will try to record some of the day's philosophical thoughts, mostly as I go about my business as a philosophy professor, or not about my business as a writer of philosophy, or the reverse, as the case may be. I have a little dictaphone and I also have pens and paper in case you forgot about those but let's see if this medium is fruitful. There will be a lot of stuff about philosophy of mind and psychology, with material about metaphysics and the history of philosophy and whatever else comes up in my classes and reading.