Firstly, an apology for last week! I did write a post, but I forgot (neglected) to update the website. There’s not much reason here, just a little mental disorganisation. I have hooked the update onto the bottom of this week’s missive.
I finished reading Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions this week. I believe that I have indicated in the past that I don’t fully buy her account of emotions, or cognitive accounts more broadly. Working through this book has made that opposition a little harder to maintain, though. I really like the way that she identifies value judgements and emotion to with one another. The particular way that she does this, by casting it against a eudaimonistic background, is smart and challenging. It appeals to those parts of me that always want to look at the historical story behind something. Of course, these stories can very easily become just-so stories and this could be a problem for accounts like this. Explaining why one explanation fits and another doesn’t becomes challenging when it comes to phenomena as variegated and superficially irrational as emotion.
I will admit that my attention sometimes faltered in the last section of Nussbaum’s book, but it was a lot of fun. I love Ulyssess and Wuthering Heights, and the reading that she gave of both with respect to the ethical role of love was excellent. As I mention(ed) in last week’s post, it’s interesting to see the divergent paths some philosophers of emotion take with respect to art and science. I think that the readings Nussbaum gives here are good examples for taking literature seriously as philosophy.
I’ve read another paper or so from the Chang volume on incommensurability. A lot of the same themes keep getting touched on, so it’s sometimes a bit one note. That’s kind of the point of an edited volume, though, so I don’t really have grounds to complain.
The essay that I have been working on, however, is not going well. I have written a lot, but my writing is murky and confusing, rather than clear. I think that the basic distinction that I’m trying to argue for is sensible. Unfortunately, I am struggling to make it clear to others and provide good reason for it. Part of this is that I am failing to engage concretely with the work of other philosophers. When I do engage with their work, I’m tending to gloss and paraphrase. This has been a weakness of mine in the past. I read ‘creatively’ occasionally, rather than getting to the point directly. It’s a real problem and it makes my arguments weaker than they should be. The only way to fix it is practice, but I keep practising bad habits.
I have had time to read Vanity Fair for the first time. It’s a very fun book and Becky Sharp is an incredible character. There are some parts of the book that are a little tedious, and it definitely is ‘baggy’, but I enjoyed reading it immensely.
I haven’t managed to read any of the work on political representation that I had intended on reading this year. However, one of the books that I had planned on reading has been covered by the What’s Left of Philosophy podcast. Give the episode a listen, it is interesting.
A similar week this week to most weeks. In reading (philosophy) I’ve kept making my way through Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought, and will hopefully have finished it off in a few weeks. I’ve just entered the parts of the book that deal really explicitly with art, and its relationship to emotion. This is, admittedly, really interesting stuff. It makes obvious sense that a lot of philosophers who are interested in emotion would also be interested in art. Peter Goldie and Richard Wollheim are two other names that come to mind. There’s sometimes a division in philosophy of emotion between those who take their inspiration from neuroscience and those who take it from art. Both sides do claim that the scientific evidence supports their position, which makes sense, but it’s not always clear to me what it would mean for science to support a philosophical definition. I think that it’s useful to ask the question: How should philosophy relate to science? It’s not always clear to me that we have handled that first step as well as we should.
Argument-wise, there was one point in Nussbaum’s account of music that didn’t quite mesh. She claims that music isn’t quite like language, it doesn’t have quite the right structure for it and that there’s a universality to it that is at odds with being like-a-language. That’s easy enough to understand: I understand English, so I have language-capabilities. Those capabilities don’t mean that I understand Japanese. So being competent in language isn’t universal. Of course, the fact that I can speak English might point towards some universal language-capacity that is proof that I could learn to speak Japanese as well! Nussbaum makes a similar argument in another part of the book, and it seems equally applicable to musical traditions. I know that I’ve missed something here, I’ll need to reread the chapter.
I’ve also kept up with the incommensurability stuff. I read Elizabeth Anderson’s essay recently, and was very impressed. It’s interesting to me how closely it lines up with some comments Stevenson made. That sort of implies to me that the pragmatism-emotivism link is really worth looking into. On the other hand, it could just be that a lot of similar influences (the same sorts of problems and approaches) arose in different areas in the history of philosophy and that that’s lead to misleading similarities over time. Not sure.
Speaking of Stevenson: I finished a draft of my essay. It’s a bit of a disaster, there are a lot more objections to it than I had realised! Still, that’s the point of writing and editing – it gets you to think.