Phaedo

At one point in the dialogue Phaedo [pronounced Fay-doe], Socrates has to meet an objection that Simmias poses to the notion of immortality of the soul.

Simmias is at first reluctant to state his doubts. After all, Socrates will take the hemlock soon, and one does not quarrel with the self-consoling thoughts of a man about to die! But Socrates encourages him, and Simmias says that the preceding discussion has proven the duality of body and soul to his (Simmias') satisfaction. But...here comes a big "but".

"One might also make the same case about harmony and a lyre and its strings, that on the one hand, harmony is something invisible and without a body ... whereas the lyre and its strings are physical and corporeal and composite and earthy and are akin to the mortal."

From this duality is does NOT follow, Simmias points out, that the harmony will survive the death of the lyre. If someone cuts the strings, the music ends.

"If then the soul happens to be a particular harmony, it is clear that, when our body is slackened or stretched without measure by diseases and other evils, the soul ... must in fact immediately be destroyed, even if it be most divine...." [Sounds like John Searle's view of the mind-body problem, BTW.]

How does Socrates respond? It takes some time -- the dialogue moves in zig-zags, not straight lines. When we in time we come back to this issue of the lyre and harmony, Socrates says that some harmonies are more harmonious than others. Harmony, then, is a matter of degree. This is not the case with the possession of a soul. If I understand the point here, Socrates/Plato is arguing that "possession of a soul" is a binary matter. No one person is more ensouled than another.

"All the souls of us living are equally good, if indeed, souls are, by nature, the same as this itself: Soul."

Thus, the analogy fails, and Simmias lays aside his own objection to immortality.

Contemporary philosopher Anderson Brown translates that argument into 21st century lingo, in a lively way.

Brown sees Plato as saying that we don't simply find material things and discover that you can pluck them and get music. We create material things for that purpose. A manufacturer created the lyre, stringing it together just so, in order to allow it to carry a harmony. Thus: harmony precedes the lyre. Harmony inspired the lyre. So the duality of harmony and lyre is one in which the intangible side of the dualism both precedes and survives the tangible side. It supports Socrates' contention, rather than weakening it.

I don't really see in Phaedo what Brown sees, but he seems to have given a lot more thought to it than I have, so I'll take it for granted this is there somewhere.

John Searle

John Searle discusses language as a subject of philosophy, in this fascinating YouTube clip from 1978.

He is speaking with Bryan Magee, a fascinating writer in his own right.

From Yahoo! Answers

Trolling Yahoo!Answers again for inspiration for this blog, I encountered the following naif-seeming question: "What are the 3 most important PHILOSOPHERS and why?"

I tried to think that through, and had trouble wrapping my mind around it. Important from what perspective?

So I just arbitrarily focused on one issue, one that occupies my mind a good deal, the mind-body problem. From this point of view, I gave the question the following answer.

Descartes, for bringing clarity to (certainly not for solving!) the question of how interaction between things and thoughts, between body and mind, is even possible.

William James, for stressing the true nature of the mind as a continuous unitary stream-of-consciousness in which each babble of the ongoing brook appropriates the babbles behind it.

And John Searle, for showing how the arrival of digital computers hasn't really solved or change the nature of the problem -- we are NOT a conjunction of software with hardware, whatever else we are.

What is language?

There's a fascinating essay (in a pdf) on the homepage of philosopher John Searle that concerns language.

Searle alleges that philosophers who have discussed language have failed to treat it naturalistically, i.e. as "a natural extension of non-linguistic biologic capacities."

The key philosophers of language, throughout the 20th century, were also students of formal and mathematical logic. Coming at language from a logicians' background necessarily yields different results than one would get coming at language from biology.

So Searle suggests the 21st century should take a new look.

"At one time, animals more or less like us, hominids, walked the earth without language. Now we have language. What happened in between?"

Even those pre-language hominids must have had a lot of the cognitive categories by which we navigate the world -- space, time, causation, agency, object -- though in speaking of what they had Searle deliberately uses the term "category" rather than "concept."

A dog has a category of space -- it recognizes that the squirrel is running across the lawn and getting further away from where the dog now is, whenever it gives chase to remedy the situation. So our pre-linguistic hominids had at least that much mental apparatus as well.

What don't dogs have? what didn't the early hominids have, exactly, by virtue of not having language? Searle's answer: the manipulable segmentation of the flow of experience: the segmentation reflected in periods and capital letters, or in the analogous inflections and pauses of speech.

"So the situation we are in when we move from experience to language is analogous to the situation when we move from a movie to a series of still pictures."

Instead of just watching the movie of our life, we can study it frame by frame.

I am simplifying Searle's article of course, but it seems to me that "the manipulable segmentation of experience" is his answer to the question "what is language." On a related point, he holds that semantics and syntax are in principle distinguishable, that cries like "Danger!" amongst hominids would have been steps toward language, though only small ones. Semantics without syntax.