Conversations About Philosophy, Volume 2

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771701624
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

FIVE BOOKS IN ONE! This collection includes the following 5 complete Ideas Roadshow books featuring leading researchers providing fully accessible insights into cutting-edge academic research while revealing the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research. A detailed preface highlights the connections between the different books and all five books are broken into chapters with a detailed introduction and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: 1. The Social World, Reexamined - A Conversation with Brian Epstein, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Brian Epstein's career as a management consultant piqued his interest and his later research into the reasons why our current models of economics, politics and other areas of social science so often go terribly wrong. The conversation explores how we can dramatically improve our current economic and political models by reexamining our assumptions about the nature of the social world.2. Kant, Applied -A conversation with Onora O'Neill, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a crossbench member of the House of Lords. After intriguing insights into Onora O'Neill's path to becoming a Kant scholar, this wide-ranging conversation explores how Kant's philosophy is relevant for many thorny issues in our contemporary social world, from human rights to patient consent to corporate transparency and more.3. Exploring Spinoza - A Conversation with Susan James, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Susan James is an internationally-renowned Spinoza scholar and author of Spinoza on Philosophy, Religion and Politics and Spinoza on Learning to Live Together which are discussed in detail during this wide-ranging conversation. Susan James provides detailed insights into Spinoza's ideas and their current relevance; the political environment and the theological struggle about who has control of religion and how much freedom of religion there was during Spinoza's time, and more. 4. Flourishing Through Spinoza - A Conversation with Hasana Sharp, Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. This conversation provides detailed insights into Hasana Sharp's book Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, in which she offers a sophisticated new interpretation of Spinoza's iconoclastic philosophy. Further topics include the implications of Spinoza's naturalism to today's world, from issues of social inequality, feminism, treatment of the elderly and the environment to animal rights, and more.5. Meaningfulness - A Conversation with Susan Wolf, the Edna J. Koury Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This fascinating conversation explores what it is to live an ethical, meaningful life in keeping with her book, Meaning in Life and Why It Matters, the role that love, fulfillment, self-interest and happiness play in giving meaning to one's life, and how meaningful activities occur when "subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness". Howard Burton is the founder and host of all Ideas Roadshow Conversations and was the Founding Executive Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics and an MA in philosophy.

Meaningfulness

A conversation with Susan Wolf

Introduction

Takin’ It To The Streets

Most professional philosophers these days don’t spend much time publicly musing about what makes a meaningful life. That sort of thing, it seems to be felt, belongs squarely to the decidedly less rigorous realms of pop psychology and self-help.

But Susan Wolf, in her quiet, penetrating way, is characteristically bucking that trend. As the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, she has the sort of impeccable academic credentials that most serious scholars would die for, but you’d never know it just from reading her books or chatting with her. The expression “wearing her knowledge lightly” seems to have been made for her: never stuffy, never didactic, often slightly uncertain yet unquenchably curious, she is a living testament to the power and relevance of philosophical inquiry for all. Talking to her gives me a sense of what it would be like running into Socrates in the agora—or, rather, a Socrates that wasn’t quite as unhesitatingly sure of himself as the original seemed to be.

What motivated her to tackle the gargantuan topic of understanding meaning in life? Simply a growing awareness that the standard framework we use to evaluate our personal motivations didn’t quite appear to hold water.

“I start out with the claim that we tend, both in philosophy and ordinary life, to describe and characterize our reasons and motives in one of two ways. Either I’m doing it for myself—self-interest, to make me happier—or I’m doing it because I have a duty to do it, some impersonal sense of what’s good or right that is driving me. There’s a dichotomy between personal, self-interested motives, and impersonal motives, usually identified with duty.

“If you ask someone, ‘Why are you doing that?’ their answer is likely to fall into one of those two categories: either ‘I’m doing it because I like it’ (‘I want to’ or ‘Because it’s best for me’) or, ‘I’m doing it because I have to’ (‘I ought to’ or, ‘For the sake of the world’).

“It’s my sense that neither of those accurately capture a very large part of what most of us actually do. Moreover, it doesn’t capture a lot of the most important things that we do. It doesn’t explain why we’re doing them.

“Why do I visit my brother in the hospital—which is not particularly pleasant, nor is it the most important thing I could do for the world? Why do I lose sleep making a groundhog costume for my daughter’s Halloween parade?

“The answer, in those cases—as you might expect—is because I love my brother and my daughter. So love for particular people, to start with, seems to me to be a clear example of the kind of thing that gives meaning to our lives that is independent of things we do for our own sake or that of the world: it’s for that person’s sake, or out of our love for those individual people.”

But however important personal relationships are, Susan recognized that they were not the only strong motivating factor for human actions. Other deep desires we have seemed broadly appropriate to the same sort of passionate sentiments we typically reserve for our “loved ones”, leading her to develop a more comprehensive framework still.

“Then, generalizing from that, one can go beyond individuals. There are lots of things other than people that we have a deep commitment to, an attachment to, which motivates us beyond either self-interest or duties associated with the job, hobby, or activity in question.

“I wanted to use the word “love” in a way that’s generalizable enough to say that, in addition to loving individual people, we also love fields, areas: art, science, etc.”

Through this generalized use of “love”, then, Susan clearly and methodically lays the groundwork for an coherent understanding of personal motivation and fulfillment. But where does “meaning” come in, exactly? For that we need fulfillment, and more.

“Trying to figure out what is this area of things that give meaning to our lives is where the subjective feeling of fulfillment comes in. It’s fulfilling to do stuff you love to do, or have a passion for; or doing something with, or on behalf of, someone or something you love.

“But while that sounds right, it depends on what you’ve got a passion for. So then I want to say, ‘Yes, fulfillment is a deep feature of meaningfulness, but not anything you could be fulfilled by will actually give you meaning.’”

Enter, suddenly, a sense of objective merit. Some things, Susan frankly admits, are just a waste of time, no matter how much we might love to do them. Which logically means that there has to be more going on for a proper sense of meaningfulness than just whether or not we feel fulfilled.

“If some people were to find continuously doing sudokus fulfilling, in the way that other people find working in a soup kitchen or writing poetry fulfilling, it seems to me that would be a shame, and we would say, ‘That is not, in fact, meaningful. There’s something weird going wrong there.’”

Certainly. But to most academics, suddenly invoking the spectre of an objective standard is little less than the reddest of red flags. After all, come the time-honoured philosophical responses that will inevitably come cascading down, Where do such things come from? How can they be clearly ascertained? How can we gain knowledge of them?

When I dutifully pointed out these obvious concerns, Susan breezily brushed them aside with her usual combination of common sense and philosophical acumen.

“The tendency to raise the kinds of objections or scepticism that you just raised I see as a tendency to get metaphysical very fast. So my main answer is: That’s not what I’m saying.

“It would be nice to have the answers to these enormous metaphysical questions, which I’m really interested in: Is there objective value? Where does it come from? How do we get at it?

“But thinking on a more human, down-to-earth scale, I think we all do make these distinctions all the time. And of course they’re fallible. But if you were to tell me, ‘Well, I don’t have the perspective to know whether sudokus are any different from working at a soup kitchen in terms of value,’ I would think, Really? Are you really incapable of distinguishing between the value of working in a soup kitchen and doing sudokus all day long?

“Jeremy Bentham has this famous comment that ‘pushpin is no better than poetry’—pushpin being a mindless game, the sudoku of the Victorian era. But that’s not actually wha...