James Garvey

Mind companion review

jamesgarveyactually — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 09:51:52 +0000

Here’s a review of a book I edited, The Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, which appears in the Notre Dame Philosophical Review. I think the author, Amy Kind, lives up to her name. She’s kind enough to give me the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the mix of topics, and I think knows how difficult the brief was — produce a book which might be of value to researchers working at many different levels. Trying to hit twelve targets at once is harder than trying to hit one, but I think the book really does bring together good philosophers writing on interesting topics. And there’s enough in it to justify the claim that it really is of use to students and old hands alike.

Maybe I agree with what she has to say about costs too.

A Case for Irony

jamesgarveyactually — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:46:25 +0000

Here’s a review of Jonathan Lear’s book A Case for Irony which I wrote for the Times Higher. Lear follows Kierkegaard in thinking that ‘To become human does not come that easily”, but Lear’s interesting claim is not the familiar one in this connection, that living up to one’s ideals is hard. Instead, he argues that no genuinely human life is possible without irony. Irony, he argues, is not just an amusing turn of phrase, but a feeling of displacement you might experience when a gap opens up between social pretense and aspiration, and in that moment you see that you don’t really understand what it means to be the person you’re committed to being. Interesting stuff, and some good exchanges with a number of philosophers and psychoanalysts — as well as one of the best puns I’ve had the pleasure of reading in a Tanner Lecture.

Guardians of the future

jamesgarveyactually — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 10:47:26 +0000

I attended the launch of a report for the thinktank Greenhouse, called ‘Guardians of the Future’, authored by the philosopher and green campaigner Ruper Read. You can read it here. The idea is that democracy means government by the people, and we shouldn’t think of ‘the people’ as just those who happen to be alive now. Future people are, in a sense, part of our democracy. The report argues that future generations ought to be represented in parliment, in the form of a jury casting an eye over proposed legislation, with the power to veto decisions that might harm future people. What a fine idea.

Before you say that’s ridiculous pie in the sky stuff, note that Hungary has an Ombudsman for Future Generations, and other initiatives are underway in several countries. The launch itself took place in a committee room in the House of Commons. It was something to hear in a discussion like this in the very centre of UK politics. The MPs in attendance were reluctant to support it wholesale, but the fact that they discussed it and felt the need to find some solution to the question of harm to future people was, in itself, a kind of leap forward from the short termism that strangles so much green thinking.

Emissions rights, sustainability, and the ethics of climate change

jamesgarveyactually — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:48:00 +0000

Here are two more posts at talkingphilosophy in a series on the changing facts of climate change — there’s one on emissions histories, one on equal per capita shares and another about sustainability arguments for action. The general line is that the facts are shifting around, and I think that’s doing something to the moral dimension of climate change. The posts are from a talk I gave in Utrecht earlier this month, and you can watch a video of that here if you can stand it.

The second post mentions Aubrey Meyer, the man behind contraction and convergence, and I was happily startled to see him weigh in a bit in the comments.

Climate ethics: does history matter?

jamesgarveyactually — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:55:50 +0000

I gave a talk in Utrecht this weekend, as part of a series called ‘Rights to a Green Future‘. I was asked to do the usual number on climate justice, but rather than just dust off an old talk, I decided to have another look at the emerging science of climate change, just in time for the Durban talks.

I ended up saying that the usual arguments for action on climate change are shifting around, because both our grip on the facts of climate change, and in some sense the facts themselves, are shifting around too. I’ll run shortened versions of each argument past you in a series of three blog posts – one about arguments for action based on cumulative emissions, one about the argument for equal emissions rights now, and the last on arguments for a sustainable future. They’ll all be posted at Talking philosophy.

Here’s the first, on arguments from emissions histories.

Strings attached

jamesgarveyactually — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:31:05 +0000

I reviewed a book called Strings Attached: untangling the ethics of incentives by Ruth Grant for the Times Higher Education. You can read it here. Part of the main argument of the book, which I think does make sense, is that incentives are not just innocuous, voluntary trades, but tools some people use to get other people to do what they want them to do. Like persuasion and coercion, an incentive can be used in morally suspect ways.

The book goes into a little detail about why it is that incentives can sometimes backfire. It helped me to understand why I’ve always been annoyed when offered a loyalty card along with my coffee, and why I’ve always been suspicious of governmental incentive schemes. An incentive is a way to push you into action without reasoning with you, and that can be, in its own very particular way, seriously insulting.

Philosophy outside the academy

jamesgarveyactually — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:27:15 +0000

I took part in a panel discussion of philosophy in the wider world, as part of the 15th British Postgraduate Philosophy Association’s Annual Conference. There are images and a recording of the discussion here. I think I said something about philosophy or anyway the humanities being required for a properly functioning democracy. Almost certainly, the most interesting person on the panel was Jonathan Ree, who argued that being in an academic setting is the worst place to find yourself as a philosopher. If you have an academic job, you’ve got no time to think. He enjoys nothing better than resigning from things, and he wasn’t kidding. You could see it in his eyes.

Personal Identity Fraud

jamesgarveyactually — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:21:18 +0000

“What does McGinn think we cannot know” is the first proper philosophy paper I wrote. It was published in Analysis in 1997 when I was a wee postgrad. I lost it on a crashed hard drive years ago, and it just resurfaced when I was googling around for details of another paper on mind. McGinn argues for a position that’s now called mysterianism, and it has quite a following. The idea, if I remember, is that brains are evolved organs like any other, and as such there are things it can and cannot do. So there are cognitive blindspots, conceptual spaces our minds just can’t move into, and therefore problems we just cannot solve. The solution to the mind-body problem, McGinn argues, is in one of our blindspots — we are cognitively closed to it. In the paper, I argue that he’s not entitled to that conclusion, with a lot of fairly breathless examples and some plodding distinctions. I winced a bit when I read it, and I have to confess I didn’t make it all the way to the end. But I still think I might be right.

Quite weird, reading something you wrote a while ago. I’m not sure I recognize myself in it at all. I don’t write like that or think like that anymore. I’m certainly not worried about the mind-body problem. When you get a good look at yourself as you were — in an old photograph or on an old page — you can worry less about personal identity and more about something else. Personal identity fraud? The feeling that you really aren’t who you were. And if that’s possible, there’s the slightly liberating thought that the you that you are will be someone else in a few years’ time. It makes me even less inclined to pay into a pension.

Mathematics shocker

jamesgarveyactually — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:57:46 +0000

I sometimes post at The Philosophers’ Magazine blog. There’s a share button at the top of each page, which people can use to share posts by social media. It’s a live indicator of what interests people at the moment. The website gets gazillions of hits, but a popular post might get several hundred shares, most only get a handful. It would be good if someone could explain why a consideration of the existence of mathematical objects has been shared TWO AND A HALF THOUSAND TIMES.

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=2977

You’ll see that a recent post by Rupert Read on lesbians and the fantasies of heterosexual men has been shared less than 300 times. Mathematical objects are of greater interest to the readers of tpm. I can’t tell if that’s disturbing or marginally satsifying.

Climate change and consistency

jamesgarveyactually — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:43:16 +0000

Here’s a recent paper I don’t think I mentioned here yet. It’s called “Climate Change and Moral Outrage”, and it appears in Human Ecology Review 17.2. You can read it here. It’s a little loud, but it argues for consistency in our thinking about state responses to climate change and our own, individual responses in the course of an ordinary human life. It’s another try at getting around the thought that one’s consequences are tiny, so why try to change one’s carbon footprint. It connects thoughts about large state emissions, which can seem obviously wrong, to individual emissions, which seem to make no difference. Secretly, it’s an attempt to think through the old thought that we should think globally and act locally. In the end, I don’t think it’s entirely persuasive, but it is one more thought to be added to others about action on climate change.