Ancient vegetarians were often so due to purity considerations, a selfish desire to be karma-free, a love of supposed simplicity [they hadn't read Against the Grain to appreciate what a complex Imperial food-tech their rice is!] et cet. I do honor that subcontinental religious culture for advocating ahimsa, but their motivations were usually weirdly mixed, so to think of them as animal welfarist is probably anachronistic. . . .one should take care in citing the old Buddhists and Jains.
Then again, I'm pretty weak in my History of Indian Thought, so a big grain of salt here. . . . :)
More people should be saying this! It seems like the reason people engage in ancient worship is to appear intelligent, attempting to give the outward impression of access to hidden esoteric knowledge.
One thing though: theres also the consideration that behaviour in ancient societies was shaped by selection pressures towards evolutionary ends over millennia, so while ancient thinkers tend to have very inorganic theories/worldviews, ancient societies were good at reaching an adaptive behavioural equilibrium the same way the rest of the biological world is. If something was a norm across almost every culture worldwide way back when, it should give us pause before abandoning it, because deviation will likely yield dysgenic results
It seems like the Internet increased our access to information while supercharging our ignorance. More information has made people more ignorant. Maybe the amount of information isn’t the primary factor here.
Pinker has invoked Hobbes for an explanation, who notes that praising a long-dead figure can be convenient: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead."
And don't even get me started on Hanania / Heumer's ignorant anti-Shakespeare takes unless you want another rant! I can see how one might dismiss the evidence of lots of people saying Kant is a great philosopher---all you have to do, is show that his arguments aren't very good. (I think he is overrated myself.)
But if a lot of people are claiming to have great aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare, how exactly do you prove them to be mistaken? Certainly not by a statistical argument that invokes as an explicit assumption the (obviously false) premise there are no relevant differences between writers in the 16th century and today. To pick on Heumer in particular, the fact that he doesn't even know the reason why Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, dismissing it simply as "difficult things that I don’t care about"---means his opinions about ranking poets aren't worth listening to, because he apparently hasn't realized how meter influences how things sound when read out loud, even to a person who doesn't consciously notice the meter. This is Poetry 101. Just as if he wanted to be a music critic, but had no idea why most songs have a rhythm. (To be sure, there are also good poems written in free verse, but this still requires an ear trained on rhythm, and the easiest way to get that training involves metered poetry.)
Since apparently you value my opinion, I'm going to come out and say that this is one of your worst takes on this (quite exceptionally good) blog.
First of all, the question of whether ancients were smarter than moderns is basically irrelevant, since none of us have the choice to live entirely without modern ideas (and it would be catastrophically stupid to try). The only relevant question here is whether modern readers are better off engaging with ancient philosophers, or disregarding them. It would indeed be moronic to simply adopt every ancient idea wholesale and unreflectively, without incorporating any of the things we've learned since then. But the proper protocol is to put the ancient and modern ideas into a dialogue in your brain, and see if there is a way to understand the ancient ideas in a way that is compatible with modern advances.
Understood in this way, I think the core reasoning in these 2 posts is pretty much refuted by C.S. Lewis in the prefatory essay to this book:
"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
According to Lewis, the reason to read stuff from the past has nothing to do with past people being smarter than us, but only to do with them being different from us. Admittedly this advice would be silly, if the ideas of later times differed from those of earlier times simply by being more correct. But it is not hard to see by looking at history, that this is not how it works. That is, in addition to progress over time, clearly there are ALSO various intellectual fads that come and go, for reasons poorly related to truth. It would seem exceedingly hubristic to think that our era is the first one in history that is somehow exempt from this process.
Also---speaking as somebody who basically did history of philosophy for 4 years as an undergrad at St. John's College---I think what you get out of HoP depends on how much you put into it. If you just dip in briefly, you might be protected from noticing the good ideas because of the foreign, non-modernness of the material, likely even misunderstanding the surface level meaning. But if you put in the effort, the reward is correspondingly greater. So if you say you haven't gotten much out of HoP, to me that shows (with the appropriate respect due to somebody who is clearly very intelligent and thoughtful) your own limitations far more than the limitations of the source material. If the benefit you get from reading HoP goes as, e.g. the square of how much you read (or any power greater than 1), this might be a case where the marginal benefit from a cursory reading is a poor guide to what your ultimate benefit would be.
(Certainly I very much doubt my own blog would be as good as it is without that exposure. You might think I am giving modern arguments, and sometimes I am; but other times it is just Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas or Pascal etc. dressed up in modern, more sciencey-sounding language.)
And yes, this process of dialogue with the past should involve some amount of sifting and steelmanning, just as when you engage with anything else. I've read several of Plato's more famous dialogues multiple times and I hadn't even remembered the numerological argument about 729. Why should I, when there are much better things to remember? Like how about Socrates' objection to the Objective List theory of ethics in the Meno? Or the way in which Platonic dialogues reveal how intellectually dishonest people behave when caught in an argument leading to a conclusion they don't like. That stuff is timeless. In fact I have some difficulty understanding how anyone could really do philosophy properly without first being baptized into the name of Socrates...
There is, to me a "tinny" and unreal quality about philosophical papers by those who are only trained in the analytic philosophy tradition and don't have a solid grounding in HoP. A tendency to miss the forest for the trees, an excessive focus on gerrymandered definitions, rather than definitions that cut to the essence of a concept (what the Scholastics called a "formal" analysis of a concept, as opposed to a "material" one), excessive deference to a (highly tendentious) interpretation of the supposed discoveries of modern science (I think you've already seen some of this in philosophy of mind) etc.
That being said, almost anything would be better than trying to get your ethical views from Twitter reactionaries! (Feser has some good blog posts on philosophy of mind and scholastic metaphysics, though.)
Surely if the ancients were sufficiently worse than the moderns they wouldn't be worth reading. Reading the arguments for why the earth is made of water is mostly useless unless one happens to be interested in history. My claim is the ancients are worse by that amount--it's just very rare that one finds anything especially good in them, in my view.
What's Socrates objection to OLT in the Meno? Generally when I find arguments that are applicable to the modern day from ancient philosophers, I don't find them to be any good. I might be wrong, but I'd guess the argument isn't that convincing (there's only one really good argument against OLT https://benthams.substack.com/p/lopsided-lives-a-deep-dive).
I have the opposite perception. When I read people who are most interested in history of philosophy, I tend to find them muddled and less adept at thinking.
BTW, your argument on the other post seems to center around the idea that we wouldn't accept horrible torture in order to have lots of knowledge. But isn't it true that we also wouldn't accept extreme pleasure at the cost of having no knowledge whatsoever? (I'm imagining something worse than an Experience Machine, where you don't even have any abstract thoughts or definite perceptions, other than super-intense bliss.) So I fail to see how this favors hedonic consequentialism over OLT consequentialism. Anyway, I'm definitely not a hedonic consequentialist, I just don't think OLT really counts as a complete theory.
You might be interested to know that, when we were undergrads, my best friend Yoaav was persuaded out of (egoistic) hedonism by a brilliant Nietzschean tutor at St. Johns, surnamed Van Boxel. She asked him if he would be willing to betray his friends and family if he got a large amount of pleasure out of it. He said no because betraying them would cause him great pain that would spoil the pleasure. She mentioned the scene in The Matrix where a character takes a pill to not remember that he had betrayed his friends, and asked if he would accept it under those circumstances. He bit the bullet and said yes. But then she said, if it were really true that you only cared about pleasure, you wouldn't have to take the pill! Taking the pill only matters because you do care about other things. So that proves you aren't really an egoistic hedonist.
That's a good argument. And I think egoistic hedonism is crazy and these days I don't even really lean towards hedonism, though I find it minimally plausible. Obviously you should care about other people!
We wouldn't accept extreme pleasure at the cost of no knowledge, but a hedonist would argue that's a mistake. And when I think about it, it doesn't seem that obvious that it's not a mistake. I'm certainly way more confident that people in extreme agony all the time can't be well off than I am in the knowledge case.
This raises the question of what to do about cases like heroic martyrdom. To make a secular version, suppose I had to pick between:
1. Being tortured slowly to death, while loving my children.
2. My children, die but I don't mind because I also I stop caring about them.
My intuition is that 1 is not just better for my children, but also better *for me*. To put it bluntly, picking 2 feels more like dying than picking 1 does. And at least the pain in 1 would be deeply meaningful (if it was to avoid case 2).
[I've removed the scientific notation from your examples, because I'm not really sure how to engage with that---I'm worried my intuitions break down when the numbers get that big. I'm considering "ordinary sized" slowly-tortured-to-death in this comment.]
Of course, neither 1 nor 2 are what one would call "well-off", compared to normal family life (at least in the absence of any afterlife).
Huh my intuition is completely different. It seems clearly better for you not to be slowly tortured to death. Though to be precise, the intuition just requires that that if you're slowly tortured to death your life is not good for you, not any claims about comparative badness.
Assuming you aren't just being jocosely bombastic, you really shouldn't say things like "there's only one really good argument against OLT". This smacks of hubris. At most you can say "there's only one really good argument against OLT<i>that I know of</i>". And even this suggests an excessive degree of infallibility in your own ability to evaluate arguments. It sometimes happens that an argument one things is bad, one later realizes is good because one has previously misunderstood something, or was missing an important ingredient.
Especially if you don't study history of philosophy. How do you know the best argument for something isn't contained in a past thinker? If you don't read them (and if you dismiss people who do HoP), you'll never know!
If the only thing in ancient philosophy were things like "the earth is made of water", then yeah it wouldn't be worth reading except to historians of science. But this is very far from being the case. Pointing to the case of Aristotle's teeth (something which gets said often enough that it doesn't even prove that the person in question even read any Aristotle) just isn't relevant. You have to consider the best arguments, and show that those aren't worth anything. Just giving a list of bad beliefs people used to have is a very superficial approach. So no, I don't think you've come anywhere close to refuting the Lewis quote.
Perhaps I could put it a different way. Heumer complains that Aristotle wasn't up on modern science, and that if you updated him about all the modern devolopments he would have very different philosophical views. This may be true. But I'm pretty sure he would interpret QM in a different way than early 20th century positivists did, or any other 20th century person. And I think it, to a significant extent, a matter of historical contingency that people happened to think a particular way philosophically in the period when science started getting really good. Once you accept that, we're basically losing out on 99/100 options for ways of looking at the world if you confine your attention to how contemporary philosophers think.
You say that the people you know who study HoP aren't that great! Well, you may be right, but that doesn't contradict anything I am saying. It may be that many lesser minds, who can't do philosophy properly, are drawn to HoP. Doesn't change the fact that you are selling yourself short not studying it.
Though, if I am right about the value of HoP, there is also value in more historical and less philosophical HoP scholarship, that tries to understand the text in its own terms. To my mind this is sort of a service industry to "real" HoP, as it helps preserve the foreignness of the text, preventing us from reading in our own modern presuppositions. It may be that some of the people you don't like are doing this job, rarther than the other one.
Anyway, I wasn't making any claims about those other people, only about you. Well, I'm also talking about me, since I studied it for 4 years and it didn't seem like a waste of time to me. (At least, not until we got to the incomprehensible Hegel and his imitators.)
There are 2 kinds of mistakes people can make. The first kind, is when making it, experience eventually teaches you that you made a mistake. The second kind, is the kind where making it ensures that that you never learn that it was a mistake. The main reason I'm being vehement here is that I think this is the 2nd kind of mistake. (And I also wouldn't have written this comment if I didn't like you enough to want to stop you from making that mistake.)
Anyway, you can find the "bees" argument I was referring to on the 3rd Stephanus page of the dialogue here:
which, adapted to the present context, is simply that the OLT fails to be a proper theory at all, because it fails to explain what it is that the various "objective goods" have in common with each other, that makes them all good. For example, if you asked me what a mammal was, you wouldn't be satisfied with the proposed definition: "There is an objective list of what is and is not a mammal". You would go on to ask me what it is, that all mammals have in common. This seems to me a far more fundamental and incisive objection than simply pointing out some implausible consequences of the OLT. This is the sort of objection where answering it requires making actual progress in understanding what "goodness" is.
Touche! And I also think there are other good objections to objective list theory--though it's the view of well-being I lean towards probably--so I wasn't even properly stating my own view!
I plan to take a class on Aquinas next year at Oxford, and I'll try to give it a fair shake!
That argument against OLT is interesting and, I think, pretty convincing (it makes OLT less parsimonious). I generally don't think there are no useful insights in the ancients, just that there are fewer than the moderns by a lot. When I've read Plato, for instance, I've just virtually never found an especially useful insight (the OLT objection is an exception), though perhaps when I study more I'll find more.
Reading through the Meno dialogue, the objection seems to be a worse version of what you said. The objective list theorist thinks that there is something that unites the goods on the list--being inherently good. Of course, because the list is disunified it will be less parsimonious, but Socrates' objection about there not even being a coherent list seems incorrect.
It doesn't really matter whether the version in Plato is worse than what I said. Because I wouldn't have thought of what I said if I hadn't read Plato. So reading Plato still plays a causal role in me doing good philosophy.
Also, one has to remember that Plato is being dialectical---he can't follow up on every possible objection to an argument in a particular place, since he's writing dialogues, and often the interlocutor doesn't really "get" what Socrates is saying well enough to respond in the best way. But sometimes in some other dialogue people push back on him in more interesting ways. Really, it's more about learning a style of reasoning than standing by a particular form of the argument as canonical.
Good luck with the Aquinas class! One potential pitfall with reading scholastics is that words often don't mean the same as what moderns think they do. For example "perfect" is semantically closer to "complete" than "flawless"; and "simple" means "non-composite" rather than "elegant". Hopefully if you have a good teacher they'll warn you of these things, but it's hard to clear out all the misconceptions on a first pass.
This is mostly arguing against strawmen. I think very few people actually believe ”many seem to think that this is just generally a good way to reason about things—find out what a bunch of people thought about some subject 2,000 years and then grumble about our supposedly impoverished modern conception of that thing” or ”an old book says P therefore P”.
Mostly when people cite the ancients it’s because they want to point out that an idea has been around for a long time, or because they think some particular person was wise, like Thomas, or it is a way of returning to the basics, or because they like the way something was expressed.
Ancient vegetarians were often so due to purity considerations, a selfish desire to be karma-free, a love of supposed simplicity [they hadn't read Against the Grain to appreciate what a complex Imperial food-tech their rice is!] et cet. I do honor that subcontinental religious culture for advocating ahimsa, but their motivations were usually weirdly mixed, so to think of them as animal welfarist is probably anachronistic. . . .one should take care in citing the old Buddhists and Jains.
Then again, I'm pretty weak in my History of Indian Thought, so a big grain of salt here. . . . :)
More people should be saying this! It seems like the reason people engage in ancient worship is to appear intelligent, attempting to give the outward impression of access to hidden esoteric knowledge.
One thing though: theres also the consideration that behaviour in ancient societies was shaped by selection pressures towards evolutionary ends over millennia, so while ancient thinkers tend to have very inorganic theories/worldviews, ancient societies were good at reaching an adaptive behavioural equilibrium the same way the rest of the biological world is. If something was a norm across almost every culture worldwide way back when, it should give us pause before abandoning it, because deviation will likely yield dysgenic results
Second line was 👨🍳😘
It seems like the Internet increased our access to information while supercharging our ignorance. More information has made people more ignorant. Maybe the amount of information isn’t the primary factor here.
More information doesn’t always make us less ignorant but if often does.
Pinker has invoked Hobbes for an explanation, who notes that praising a long-dead figure can be convenient: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead."
And don't even get me started on Hanania / Heumer's ignorant anti-Shakespeare takes unless you want another rant! I can see how one might dismiss the evidence of lots of people saying Kant is a great philosopher---all you have to do, is show that his arguments aren't very good. (I think he is overrated myself.)
But if a lot of people are claiming to have great aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare, how exactly do you prove them to be mistaken? Certainly not by a statistical argument that invokes as an explicit assumption the (obviously false) premise there are no relevant differences between writers in the 16th century and today. To pick on Heumer in particular, the fact that he doesn't even know the reason why Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, dismissing it simply as "difficult things that I don’t care about"---means his opinions about ranking poets aren't worth listening to, because he apparently hasn't realized how meter influences how things sound when read out loud, even to a person who doesn't consciously notice the meter. This is Poetry 101. Just as if he wanted to be a music critic, but had no idea why most songs have a rhythm. (To be sure, there are also good poems written in free verse, but this still requires an ear trained on rhythm, and the easiest way to get that training involves metered poetry.)
Since apparently you value my opinion, I'm going to come out and say that this is one of your worst takes on this (quite exceptionally good) blog.
First of all, the question of whether ancients were smarter than moderns is basically irrelevant, since none of us have the choice to live entirely without modern ideas (and it would be catastrophically stupid to try). The only relevant question here is whether modern readers are better off engaging with ancient philosophers, or disregarding them. It would indeed be moronic to simply adopt every ancient idea wholesale and unreflectively, without incorporating any of the things we've learned since then. But the proper protocol is to put the ancient and modern ideas into a dialogue in your brain, and see if there is a way to understand the ancient ideas in a way that is compatible with modern advances.
Understood in this way, I think the core reasoning in these 2 posts is pretty much refuted by C.S. Lewis in the prefatory essay to this book:
http://www.romans45.org/history/ath-inc.htm#ch_0
particularly the 4th paragraph:
"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them."
According to Lewis, the reason to read stuff from the past has nothing to do with past people being smarter than us, but only to do with them being different from us. Admittedly this advice would be silly, if the ideas of later times differed from those of earlier times simply by being more correct. But it is not hard to see by looking at history, that this is not how it works. That is, in addition to progress over time, clearly there are ALSO various intellectual fads that come and go, for reasons poorly related to truth. It would seem exceedingly hubristic to think that our era is the first one in history that is somehow exempt from this process.
Also---speaking as somebody who basically did history of philosophy for 4 years as an undergrad at St. John's College---I think what you get out of HoP depends on how much you put into it. If you just dip in briefly, you might be protected from noticing the good ideas because of the foreign, non-modernness of the material, likely even misunderstanding the surface level meaning. But if you put in the effort, the reward is correspondingly greater. So if you say you haven't gotten much out of HoP, to me that shows (with the appropriate respect due to somebody who is clearly very intelligent and thoughtful) your own limitations far more than the limitations of the source material. If the benefit you get from reading HoP goes as, e.g. the square of how much you read (or any power greater than 1), this might be a case where the marginal benefit from a cursory reading is a poor guide to what your ultimate benefit would be.
(Certainly I very much doubt my own blog would be as good as it is without that exposure. You might think I am giving modern arguments, and sometimes I am; but other times it is just Plato or Aristotle or Aquinas or Pascal etc. dressed up in modern, more sciencey-sounding language.)
And yes, this process of dialogue with the past should involve some amount of sifting and steelmanning, just as when you engage with anything else. I've read several of Plato's more famous dialogues multiple times and I hadn't even remembered the numerological argument about 729. Why should I, when there are much better things to remember? Like how about Socrates' objection to the Objective List theory of ethics in the Meno? Or the way in which Platonic dialogues reveal how intellectually dishonest people behave when caught in an argument leading to a conclusion they don't like. That stuff is timeless. In fact I have some difficulty understanding how anyone could really do philosophy properly without first being baptized into the name of Socrates...
There is, to me a "tinny" and unreal quality about philosophical papers by those who are only trained in the analytic philosophy tradition and don't have a solid grounding in HoP. A tendency to miss the forest for the trees, an excessive focus on gerrymandered definitions, rather than definitions that cut to the essence of a concept (what the Scholastics called a "formal" analysis of a concept, as opposed to a "material" one), excessive deference to a (highly tendentious) interpretation of the supposed discoveries of modern science (I think you've already seen some of this in philosophy of mind) etc.
That being said, almost anything would be better than trying to get your ethical views from Twitter reactionaries! (Feser has some good blog posts on philosophy of mind and scholastic metaphysics, though.)
Thank you for the kind words.
Surely if the ancients were sufficiently worse than the moderns they wouldn't be worth reading. Reading the arguments for why the earth is made of water is mostly useless unless one happens to be interested in history. My claim is the ancients are worse by that amount--it's just very rare that one finds anything especially good in them, in my view.
What's Socrates objection to OLT in the Meno? Generally when I find arguments that are applicable to the modern day from ancient philosophers, I don't find them to be any good. I might be wrong, but I'd guess the argument isn't that convincing (there's only one really good argument against OLT https://benthams.substack.com/p/lopsided-lives-a-deep-dive).
I have the opposite perception. When I read people who are most interested in history of philosophy, I tend to find them muddled and less adept at thinking.
BTW, your argument on the other post seems to center around the idea that we wouldn't accept horrible torture in order to have lots of knowledge. But isn't it true that we also wouldn't accept extreme pleasure at the cost of having no knowledge whatsoever? (I'm imagining something worse than an Experience Machine, where you don't even have any abstract thoughts or definite perceptions, other than super-intense bliss.) So I fail to see how this favors hedonic consequentialism over OLT consequentialism. Anyway, I'm definitely not a hedonic consequentialist, I just don't think OLT really counts as a complete theory.
You might be interested to know that, when we were undergrads, my best friend Yoaav was persuaded out of (egoistic) hedonism by a brilliant Nietzschean tutor at St. Johns, surnamed Van Boxel. She asked him if he would be willing to betray his friends and family if he got a large amount of pleasure out of it. He said no because betraying them would cause him great pain that would spoil the pleasure. She mentioned the scene in The Matrix where a character takes a pill to not remember that he had betrayed his friends, and asked if he would accept it under those circumstances. He bit the bullet and said yes. But then she said, if it were really true that you only cared about pleasure, you wouldn't have to take the pill! Taking the pill only matters because you do care about other things. So that proves you aren't really an egoistic hedonist.
That's a good argument. And I think egoistic hedonism is crazy and these days I don't even really lean towards hedonism, though I find it minimally plausible. Obviously you should care about other people!
We wouldn't accept extreme pleasure at the cost of no knowledge, but a hedonist would argue that's a mistake. And when I think about it, it doesn't seem that obvious that it's not a mistake. I'm certainly way more confident that people in extreme agony all the time can't be well off than I am in the knowledge case.
This raises the question of what to do about cases like heroic martyrdom. To make a secular version, suppose I had to pick between:
1. Being tortured slowly to death, while loving my children.
2. My children, die but I don't mind because I also I stop caring about them.
My intuition is that 1 is not just better for my children, but also better *for me*. To put it bluntly, picking 2 feels more like dying than picking 1 does. And at least the pain in 1 would be deeply meaningful (if it was to avoid case 2).
[I've removed the scientific notation from your examples, because I'm not really sure how to engage with that---I'm worried my intuitions break down when the numbers get that big. I'm considering "ordinary sized" slowly-tortured-to-death in this comment.]
Of course, neither 1 nor 2 are what one would call "well-off", compared to normal family life (at least in the absence of any afterlife).
Huh my intuition is completely different. It seems clearly better for you not to be slowly tortured to death. Though to be precise, the intuition just requires that that if you're slowly tortured to death your life is not good for you, not any claims about comparative badness.
Assuming you aren't just being jocosely bombastic, you really shouldn't say things like "there's only one really good argument against OLT". This smacks of hubris. At most you can say "there's only one really good argument against OLT<i>that I know of</i>". And even this suggests an excessive degree of infallibility in your own ability to evaluate arguments. It sometimes happens that an argument one things is bad, one later realizes is good because one has previously misunderstood something, or was missing an important ingredient.
Especially if you don't study history of philosophy. How do you know the best argument for something isn't contained in a past thinker? If you don't read them (and if you dismiss people who do HoP), you'll never know!
If the only thing in ancient philosophy were things like "the earth is made of water", then yeah it wouldn't be worth reading except to historians of science. But this is very far from being the case. Pointing to the case of Aristotle's teeth (something which gets said often enough that it doesn't even prove that the person in question even read any Aristotle) just isn't relevant. You have to consider the best arguments, and show that those aren't worth anything. Just giving a list of bad beliefs people used to have is a very superficial approach. So no, I don't think you've come anywhere close to refuting the Lewis quote.
Perhaps I could put it a different way. Heumer complains that Aristotle wasn't up on modern science, and that if you updated him about all the modern devolopments he would have very different philosophical views. This may be true. But I'm pretty sure he would interpret QM in a different way than early 20th century positivists did, or any other 20th century person. And I think it, to a significant extent, a matter of historical contingency that people happened to think a particular way philosophically in the period when science started getting really good. Once you accept that, we're basically losing out on 99/100 options for ways of looking at the world if you confine your attention to how contemporary philosophers think.
You say that the people you know who study HoP aren't that great! Well, you may be right, but that doesn't contradict anything I am saying. It may be that many lesser minds, who can't do philosophy properly, are drawn to HoP. Doesn't change the fact that you are selling yourself short not studying it.
Though, if I am right about the value of HoP, there is also value in more historical and less philosophical HoP scholarship, that tries to understand the text in its own terms. To my mind this is sort of a service industry to "real" HoP, as it helps preserve the foreignness of the text, preventing us from reading in our own modern presuppositions. It may be that some of the people you don't like are doing this job, rarther than the other one.
Anyway, I wasn't making any claims about those other people, only about you. Well, I'm also talking about me, since I studied it for 4 years and it didn't seem like a waste of time to me. (At least, not until we got to the incomprehensible Hegel and his imitators.)
There are 2 kinds of mistakes people can make. The first kind, is when making it, experience eventually teaches you that you made a mistake. The second kind, is the kind where making it ensures that that you never learn that it was a mistake. The main reason I'm being vehement here is that I think this is the 2nd kind of mistake. (And I also wouldn't have written this comment if I didn't like you enough to want to stop you from making that mistake.)
Anyway, you can find the "bees" argument I was referring to on the 3rd Stephanus page of the dialogue here:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0178%3Atext%3DMeno%3Apage%3D72
which, adapted to the present context, is simply that the OLT fails to be a proper theory at all, because it fails to explain what it is that the various "objective goods" have in common with each other, that makes them all good. For example, if you asked me what a mammal was, you wouldn't be satisfied with the proposed definition: "There is an objective list of what is and is not a mammal". You would go on to ask me what it is, that all mammals have in common. This seems to me a far more fundamental and incisive objection than simply pointing out some implausible consequences of the OLT. This is the sort of objection where answering it requires making actual progress in understanding what "goodness" is.
Touche! And I also think there are other good objections to objective list theory--though it's the view of well-being I lean towards probably--so I wasn't even properly stating my own view!
I plan to take a class on Aquinas next year at Oxford, and I'll try to give it a fair shake!
That argument against OLT is interesting and, I think, pretty convincing (it makes OLT less parsimonious). I generally don't think there are no useful insights in the ancients, just that there are fewer than the moderns by a lot. When I've read Plato, for instance, I've just virtually never found an especially useful insight (the OLT objection is an exception), though perhaps when I study more I'll find more.
Reading through the Meno dialogue, the objection seems to be a worse version of what you said. The objective list theorist thinks that there is something that unites the goods on the list--being inherently good. Of course, because the list is disunified it will be less parsimonious, but Socrates' objection about there not even being a coherent list seems incorrect.
It doesn't really matter whether the version in Plato is worse than what I said. Because I wouldn't have thought of what I said if I hadn't read Plato. So reading Plato still plays a causal role in me doing good philosophy.
Also, one has to remember that Plato is being dialectical---he can't follow up on every possible objection to an argument in a particular place, since he's writing dialogues, and often the interlocutor doesn't really "get" what Socrates is saying well enough to respond in the best way. But sometimes in some other dialogue people push back on him in more interesting ways. Really, it's more about learning a style of reasoning than standing by a particular form of the argument as canonical.
Good luck with the Aquinas class! One potential pitfall with reading scholastics is that words often don't mean the same as what moderns think they do. For example "perfect" is semantically closer to "complete" than "flawless"; and "simple" means "non-composite" rather than "elegant". Hopefully if you have a good teacher they'll warn you of these things, but it's hard to clear out all the misconceptions on a first pass.
Thanks for the heads-up. I've heard the same about motion--that he uses motion to mean change.
Idk, the argument doesn't seem that hard to think of. I've given a similar one without having read Plato. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-objective-list-just-got-a-whole?utm_source=publication-search Now certainly reading the ancients sometimes sparks interesting thoughts, but I don't find it to be anywhere near as often as reading moderns does.
This is mostly arguing against strawmen. I think very few people actually believe ”many seem to think that this is just generally a good way to reason about things—find out what a bunch of people thought about some subject 2,000 years and then grumble about our supposedly impoverished modern conception of that thing” or ”an old book says P therefore P”.
Mostly when people cite the ancients it’s because they want to point out that an idea has been around for a long time, or because they think some particular person was wise, like Thomas, or it is a way of returning to the basics, or because they like the way something was expressed.
I don’t know that I agree it’s arguing against strawmen but it’s certainly not arguing against a steel-man.