Things have been a bit slow lately because I’m out of town for my Spring break (visiting Auburn first, and then taking a delightful little drive down to southern Illinois to pick our car up from the shop); I’d intended to keep posting from the road, but I’ve been too preoccupied with visiting and with computer projects around the house to keep myself motivated to post. There may be some lazy linking over the next few days, but mostly I’m on break until next week.

Cheers! Talk to you soon.

A couple of notes on the subject of philosophical follow-ups, before I skip town for the weekend:

1. After a brief hiatus, the effort to transcribe G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica for the web has reached another milestone: Chapter II of PE–Moore’s discussion of Naturalistic Ethics–has now hit the web. After doing the heavy meta-ethical lifting in Chapter I, Moore goes on to apply the tools that he has developed to questions of normative ethics. The most popular naturalistic theory by far–Hedonism–is left for a detailed treatment in Chapter III (which you’ll just have to wait for); Moore uses Chapter II as a place to first set out the options, and then systematically demonstrate the fallaciousness of attempts to ground ethical theory in appeals to (1) natural propensities and (2) the outcomes of Evolution. (The latter half of the chapter spends some time knocking Herbert Spencer’s ethical theory–which is, if nothing else, remarkable in that it’s one of the few examples of Hebert Spencer being criticized for dumb things he really did say.)

   There is at least one big gap in Moore’s argument: like most moderns, and most Analytics in particular, he doesn’t have much sympathy for teleology, and that hobbles his discussion of what natural might mean when we appeal to natural living or natural function in ethics. Moore shows that, if you’re using natural in the sense of statistically normal for your kind, or in the sense of necessary for life, the only way to make an ethics based on what’s natural for us even remotely plausible is by committing the naturalistic fallacy. But since Moore hasn’t got any real notion of teleology, he just doesn’t consider the meaning of natural that forms the backbone of the Aristotelian tradition in ethics–where what is good for us is made out in terms of what is suited to our nature, i.e., suited to the form of life of rational animals. I don’t actually think that a carefully framed naturalistic ethics in the Aristotelian sense would be in any conflict with Moore’s ethical non-naturalism. Moore has polemical reasons for wanting to distinguish his ethical position from naturalism, but the important thing for Moore is that ethical judgments aren’t reducible to descriptions of a situation’s non-ethical properties; but the Aristotelian appeal to nature always irreducibly involves an appeal to how creatures of so-and-so kind ought to be. So the only thing to fight over so far is whether irreducibly ethical properties ought to be called natural or non-natural; but that’s an issue of more interest to lexicographers than philosophers. In any case, Moore is mostly on solid ground throughout the chapter–and everything he has to say could be directed just as effectively today against the proponents of the oxymoronic doctrine of naturalized ethics, or those who think all you need to do to get your ethics to cook up some sociobiological story about how people came to have the particular sentiments that they actually do have.

   Anyway, you really should read the whole thing. Cite and be merry!

2. I’m heading South–straight to the Mississippi River, in fact–to present my essay on Hume and the Missing Shade of Blue for the 2005 Mid-South Philosophy Conference in Memphis, Tennessee. The draft I’ll be presenting is available online; I’d love to hear any comments, questions, applause, or brickbats you might have about it. (For the super-condensed version of the argument, there’s my post on an earlier draft of the same essay from back in October.)

I’ll see y’all once I’ve returned from my brief vacation in Tennessee. Enjoy the weekend!

Gmail seems to be expanding its tentacles outward; I noticed today that I have a good 50 invitations or so to give away. If you want a Gmail account and haven’t already gotten one yet, feel free to drop me a line. Let the prisoners of Hotmail taste sweet freedom!

I already did something like this a while back, but the instructions for this one are a little different, and I’m trying to force myself to stay in the habit of posting things. This time it comes from Philobiblon:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I don’t actually know whether the book in front of me on the table or the books piled behind me on the windowsill are closer, but I don’t want to do the trigonometric calculations, so I’ve arbitrarily decided that “in front of” is closer than “behind.” Thus, we have The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern, page 123, sentence 5 (in the midst of selections from The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood). Actually, the fifth sentence makes no sense on its own, so here’s the surrounding context, with emphasis on the fifth sentence:

Conversely, is a poem means to the production of a certain state of mind in an audience? Suppose a poet had read his verses to an audience, hoping that they would produce a certain result; and suppose the result were different; would that in itself prove the poem a bad one? It is a difficult question; some would say yes, others no. But if poetry were obviously a craft, the answer would be a prompt and unhesitating yes. The advocate of the technical theory must do a good deal of toe-chopping before he can get his facts to fit his theory at this point.

So far, the prospects of the technical theory are not too bright. Let us proceed.

Collingwood, here as elsewhere, is mostly on the side of the angels; this is part of a longer exposition of the theory of poetry-as-craft (that is, as the means to some end–here, the end of producing some state of mind in the audience), and directing some ire in particular against economistic and psychologistic reductions of art as the technique of fulfilling certain kinds of wants that consumers have, or offering stimuli that elicit desired or desirable reactions from the subjects (that is, you and me). (Of course, this is not to say that art operates outside the laws of economics or of human psychology; it is just to say that to understand the sort of value and the sort of behaviors that are associated with artworks–that is, to apply those laws in the case of paintings, poetry, music, and the rest–you have to understand how art works for us on its own. And understanding that, Collingwood argues, is not a matter of understanding any craft.)

Anyway, that’s my passage. Do it for yourself, and be merry!

P.S.: This is still not a meme. Because there aren’t any.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you aren’t already reading feministe, you should. And if you’re reading this blog already, then you may be interested to know that while Ms. Lauren takes some much-deserved rest from blogging, I am once again filling in as a guest writer at feministe. (I did a couple of posts’ worth of this back in June.) Enjoy:

• feministe 2005/02/02: Bombing for Choice, which is a lot like GT 2005/02/01: Bombing for Choice, except somewhere else.
• feministe 2005/02/02: Free Rodi Alvarado and all political prisoners!, an update on the bureaucratic logjam at La Migra that is holding a battered woman in legal limbo while it dithers over whether or not to send her back to an almost-certain death
• feministe 2005/02/05: Trans In Iran, highlighting a fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times on the growing acceptance of transgender people in Iran, of all places, and how a fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, of all people, spurred it on. Some pointed questions follow from me and I hope some discussion ensues.