“Mr. Hefner’s magazine is most widely known for its total exposure of the human female,” says William F. Buckley, introducing the guest on this 1966 broadcast of his talk show Firing Line. “Though of course other things happen in its pages.” Not long before, publisher and pleasure empire-builder Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine ran a series of articles on “the Playboy philosophy,” a set of observations of and propositions about human sexuality that provided these men fodder for their televised debate. Hefner stands against religiously mandated, chastity-centered codes of sexual morality; Buckley demands to know how Hefner earned the qualifications to issue new codes of his own. Describing the Playboy philosophy as “sort of a hedonistic utilitarianism,” Buckley tries simultaneously to understand and demolish these 20th-century revisions of the rules of sex.
“The Playboy founder is no match for the Catholic who snipes him at will with ‘moral’ bullets,” writes the poster of the video. “The acerbic, dry Buckley is on attack mode with a conservative audience, in moral panic, behind him. The Catholic had the era of conservatism behind him. [ … ] In the 21st century though, Buckley would have a harder time defending morality with Hefner.” One wonders how Buckley and Hefner, were they still alive today, might revisit this debate in 2017. (Buckley died in 2008, and Hefner passed away yesterday at the age of 91.) Times have certainly changed, but I suspect Buckley would raise the same core objection to Hefner’s argument that loosening the old strictures on sex leads, perhaps counterintuitively, to more satisfied, more monogamous pairings: “How in the hell do you know?” Though this and certain other of Buckley’s questions occasionally wrong-foot Hefner, the faithful can rest assured that he keeps enough cool to fire up his signature pipe on camera.
Note: This post first appeared on our site back in 2012. We brought it back today for obvious reasons, and updated it to reflect Hefner’s passing. Since 2012, a huge archive of “Firing Line” episodes have been put online. Get more on that here.
Science denialism may be a deeply entrenched and enormously damaging political phenomenon. But it is not a wholly practical one, or we would see many more people abandon medical science, air travel, computer technology, etc. Most of us tacitly agree that we know certain truths about the world—gravitational force, navigational technology, the germ theory of disease, for example. How do we acquire such knowledge, and how do we use the same method to test and evaluate the many new claims we’re bombarded with daily?
The problem, many professional skeptics would say, is that we’re largely unaware of the epistemic criteria for our thinking. We believe some ideas and doubt others for a host of reasons, many of them having nothing to do with standards of reason and evidence scientists strive towards. Many professional skeptics even have the humility to admit that skeptics can be as prone to irrationality and cognitive biases as anyone else.
Carl Sagan had a good deal of patience with unreason, at least in his writing and television work, which exhibits so much rhetorical brilliance and depth of feeling that he might have been a poet in another life. His style and personality made him a very effective science communicator. But what he called his “Baloney Detection Kit,” a set of “tools for skeptical thinking,” is not at all unique to him. Sagan’s principles agree with those of all proponents of logic and the scientific method. You can read just a few of his prescriptions below, and a full unabridged list here.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
Another skeptic, founder and editor of Skeptic magazine Michael Shermer, surrounds his epistemology with a sympathetic neuroscience frame. We’re all prone to “believing weird things,” as he puts it in his book Why People Believe Weird Things and his short video above, where he introduces, following Sagan, his own “Baloney Detection Kit.” The human brain, he explains, evolved to see patterns everywhere as a matter of survival. All of our brains do it, and we all get a lot of false positives.
Many of those false positives become widespread cultural beliefs. Shermer himself has been accused of insensitive cultural bias (evident in the beginning of his video), intellectual arrogance, and worse. But he admits up front that scientific thinking should transcend individual personalities, including his own. “You shouldn’t believe anybody based on authority or whatever position they might have,” he says. “You should check it out yourself.”
Some of the ways to do so when we encounter new ideas involve asking “How reliable is the source of the claim?” and “Have the claims been verified by somebody else?” Returning to Sagan’s work, Shermer offers an example of contrasting scientific and pseudoscientific approaches—the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and UFO believers. The latter, he says, uncritically seek out confirmation for their beliefs, where the scientists at SETI rigorously try to disprove hypotheses in order to rule out false claims.
Yet it remains the case that many people—and not all of them in good faith—think they’re using science when they aren’t. Another popular science communicator, physicist Richard Feynman, recommended one method for testing whether we really understand a concept or whether we’re just repeating something that sounds smart but makes no logical sense, what Feynman calls “a mystic formula for answering questions.” Can a concept be explained in plain English, without any technical jargon? Can we ask questions about it and make direct observations that confirm or disconfirm its claims?
Feynman was especially sensitive to what he called “intellectual tyranny in the name of science.” And he recognized that turning forms of knowing into empty rituals resulted in pseudoscientific thinking. In a wonderfully rambling, informal, and autobiographical speech he gave in 1966 to a meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, Feynman concluded that thinking scientifically as a practice requires skepticism of science as an institution.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” says Feynman. “If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you might ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’” Asking such questions does not mean we should reject scientific conclusions because they conflict with cherished beliefs, but rather that we shouldn’t take even scientific claims on faith.
For elaboration on Shermer, Sagan and Feynman’s approaches to telling good scientific thinking from bad, read these articles in our archive:
French theorist Michel Foucault rose to international prominence with his critical histories—or “archaeologies”—of scientific knowledge and technocratic power. His first book, Madness and Civilization, described the Enlightenment-era creation of insanity as a category set apart from reason, which enabled those labeled mad to be subjected to painful, invasive treatments and lose their freedom and agency during a period he called “the Great Confinement.”
A follow-up, The Birth of the Clinic, appeared in 1963, introducing the notion of the “medical gaze,” a cold, probing ideological instrument that dehumanizes patients and allows people to be made into objects of experimentation. Foucault tended to view the world through a particularly grim, claustrophobic, even paranoid lens, though one arguably warranted by the well-documented histories he unearthed and the contemporary technocratic police states they gave rise to.
But Foucault also insisted that in all relations of power, “there is necessarily the possibility of resistance.” His own forms of resistance tended toward political activism, adventurous sexual exploits, Zen meditation, and drugs. He grew pot on his balcony in Paris, did cocaine, smoked opium, and “deanatomized the localization of pleasure,” as he put it, with LSD. The experimentation constituted what he called a “limit experience” that transgressed the boundaries of a socially-imposed identity.
But in a strange irony, the first time Foucault dropped acid, he himself became the subject of an experiment conducted on him by one of his followers, Simeon Wade, an assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. In 1975 Foucault gave a seminar at UC Berkeley, where he would later finish his career in the years before his death in 1984. While in California, he accepted an invitation from Wade and his partner Michael Stoneman to take a road trip to Death Valley. “I was performing an experiment,” Wade remembered in a recent interview on Boom California. “I wanted to see [how] one of the greatest minds in history would be affected by an experience he had never had before.”
We went to Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speakers all around us, as no one else was there, and we listened to Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in Foucault’s eyes. We went into one of the hollows and laid on our backs, like James Turrell’s volcano, and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out later. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours.
The desert acid trip, Wade says, changed Foucault permanently, for the better. “Everything after this experience in 1975,” he says, “is the new Foucault, neo-Foucault…. Foucault from 1975 to 1984 was a new being.” The evidence seems clear enough. Foucault wrote Wade and Stoneman a few months later to tell them “it was the greatest experience of his life, and that it profoundly changed his life and his work…. He wrote us that he had thrown volumes two and three of his History of Sexuality into the fire and that he had to start over again.”
Foucault had succumbed to despair prior to his Death Valley trip, Wade says, contemplating in his 1966 The Order of Things “the death of humanity…. To the point of saying that the face of man has been effaced.” Afterward, he was “immediately” seized by a new energy and focus. The titles of those last two, rewritten, books “are emblematic of the impact this experience had on him:The Uses of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, with no mention of finitude.” Foucault biographer James Miller tells us in the documentary above (at 27:30) —Michel Foucault Beyond Good and Evil— that everyone he spoke to about Foucault had heard about Death Valley, since Foucault told anyone who would listen that it was “the most transformative experience in his life.”
There were some people, notes interviewer Heather Dundas, who believed that Wade’s experiment was unethical, that he had been “reckless with Foucault’s welfare.” To this challenge Wade replies, “Foucault was well aware of what was involved, and we were with him the entire time.” Asked whether he thought of the repercussions to his own career, however, he replies, “in retrospect, I should have.” Two years later, he left Claremont and could not find another full-time academic position. After obtaining a nursing license, he made a career as a nurse at the Los Angeles County Psychiatric Hospital and Ventura County Hospital, exactly the sort of institutions Foucault had found so threatening in his earlier work.
Wade also authored a 121-page account of the Death Valley trip, and in 1978 published Chez Foucault, a mimeographed fanzine introduction to the philosopher’s work, including an unpublished interview with Foucault. For his part, Foucault threw himself vigorously into the final phase of his career, in which he developed his concept of biopower, an ethical theory of self-care and a critical take on classical philosophical and religious themes about the nature of truth and subjectivity. He spent the last 9 years of his life pursuing the new pathways of thought that opened to him during those extraordinary ten hours under the hot sun and cool stars of the Death Valley desert.
Early Enlightenment French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes invented a new genre of philosophy, we might say, one that would dominate the century to come. Before Locke, Leibniz, or Kant, Descartes stood out as a “theist rationalist.” Rather than trusting in revelation, he leaned solely on logic and reason, creating a set of “rules for the direction of the mind,” the title of one of his books. He believed we might think our way—solely unaided by unreliable external sources—to belief in God and “all the knowledge that we may need for the conduct of life.”
Descartes’ proofs of God may not sound so convincing to modern ears, slipping as they do into the language of faith when convenient. But in other respects, he seems distinctly contemporary, or at least like a contemporary of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He believed that philosophy suffered from improper definitions and lacked clarity of thought. And like the early 20th-century logical positivists, he put tremendous store in logic and mathematics as analytic tools for acquiring knowledge about the world. These, along with the scientific method Descartes championed, were indeed the sole means of acquiring such knowledge.
Descartes, then, has become known for introducing the radical “method of doubt,” which supposedly strips away all prejudice and preconception, every article of belief, to get at the most fundamentally ascertainable core of knowledge. Upon doing this in his 1637 Discourse on Method, the French philosopher famously found that the only thing he could say for certain was that he must exist because he could see himself doubting his existence—cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” The process involved casting aside all authority and tradition, which made Descartes a hero to French Revolutionists. His freethinking also made him very much the enemy of many in the Catholic church.
Describing in Discourse on Method how he had abandoned all reliance on other texts and resolved to derive the answers to his questions from experience and reason, he seemed to dismiss the authority not only of church hierarchy and dogma but of scripture itself. Rather than fixing God at the center of the universe, Descartes used the “Archimedean point” of his own certain existence to anchor “an epistemologically unsteady world.” Nonetheless, he was committed to keeping faith intact, even as he seemingly demolished the foundations of its existence, including—for Catholics—the cherished idea that priests could turn bread into flesh.
It might have been an attempt at self-preservation or appeasement, but it seems more to reflect sincere belief: in the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes sought to prove the existence of God in much the same way as he had proved his own existence, through circular reasoning and arguments that split mind and matter into two distinct camps. Descartes created a dualist view of the world that became a major problem in his philosophy. At the time, many of his critics were less concerned with this ontological puzzle than they were with the possibility of his heretical thought interfering in world affairs.
Descartes’ radical doubt threatened not only church doctrine but also church politics. One scholar claims to have found evidence that a Catholic priest—fearing the French freethinker would jeopardize the conversion of Sweden’s Queen Christina to Catholicism—murdered Descartes with an arsenic-laced communion wafer. If so, it would have been a cruelly ironic death, perhaps by design, for the man who dared to write in the Meditations that transubstantiation—one of the Church’s central supernatural teachings—should be “rejected by theologians as irrational, incomprehensible and hazardous for the faith,” and to hope for a time when “my theory will be accepted in its place as certain and indubitable.”
Growing up in America, I heard nearly every behavior, no matter how unpleasant, justified with the same phrase: “It’s a free country.” In her recent book Notes on a Foreign Country, the Istanbul-based American reporter Suzy Hansen remembers singing “God Bless the USA” on the school bus during the first Iraq war: “And I’m proud to be an American / Where at least I know I’m free.” That “at least,” she adds, is funny: “We were free – at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvious thing. Whatever it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.”
But how many of us can explain what freedom is? These videos from BBC Radio 4 and the Open University’s animated History of Ideas series approach that question from four different angles. “Freedom is good, but security is better,” says narrator Harry Shearer, summing up the view of seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who imagined life without government, laws, or society as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The solution, he proposed, came in the form of a social contract “to put a strong leader, a sovereign or perhaps a government, over them to keep the peace” — an escape from “the war of all against all.”
But that escape comes hand in hand with the unpalatable prospect of living under “a frighteningly powerful state.” The nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, who wrote a great deal about the state’s proper limitations, based his concept of freedom in something called the “harm principle,” which holds that “the state, my neighbors, and everyone else should let me get on with my life, as long as I don’t harm anyone in the process.” As “the seedbed of genius” and “the basis of enduring happiness for ordinary people,” this individual freedom needs protection, especially when it comes to speech: “Merely causing offense, he thinks, is no grounds for intervention, because, in his view, that is not a harm.”
That proposition remains debated more heatedly now, in the 21st century, than Mill probably could have imagined. But then as now, and as in any time of human history, we live in more or less the same world, “a world festering with moral evil, a world of wars, torture, rape, murder, and other acts of meaningless violence,” not to mention “natural evil” like disease, famine, floods, and earthquakes. This gives rise to perhaps the oldest problem in the philosophical book, the problem of evil: “How could a good god allow anyone to do such horrific things?” Some have taken the fact that the wars, murders, floods, and earthquakes continue as evidence that no such god exists.
But had that god created “human beings that always did the right thing, never harmed anyone else, never went astray,” we’d all have ended up “automata, preprogrammed robots.” Better, in this view, “to have free will with the genuine risk that some people will end up evil than to live in a world without choice.” Even so, the mere mention of free will, a concept no more easily defined than that of freedom itself, opens up a whole other can of worms, especially in light of research like neuroscientist Benjamin Libet’s.
Libet, who “wired up subjects to an EEG machine, measuring brain activity via electrodes on our scalps,” found that brain activity initiating a movement actually happened before the subjects thought they’d decided to make that movement. Does that disprove free will? Does evil disprove the existence of a good god? Does offense cause the same kind of harm as physical violence? Should we give up more security for freedom, or more freedom for security? These questions remain unanswered, and quite possibly unanswerable, but that doesn’t make considering the very nature of freedom any less necessary as human societies — those in “free countries” and otherwise — find their way forward.
In the recorded history of philosophy, there may be no sharper a mind than Ludwig Wittgenstein. A bête noire, enfant terrible, and all other such phrases used to describe affronts to order and decorum, Wittgenstein also represented an anarchic force that disturbed the staid discipline. His teacher Bertrand Russell recognized the existential threat Wittgenstein posed to his profession (though not right away). When Wittgenstein handed Russell the compact, cryptic Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he admitted his student had gone beyond his own analytic insights in the pursuit of absolute clarity. Wittgenstein’s longtime mentor and friend, famed logician and mathematician Gottlob Frege, expressed criticism. Some have suggested he did so in part because he saw that Wittgenstein had rendered much of his work irrelevant.
Alain de Botton gives a brief but fascinating sketch of Wittgenstein’s ideas and incredibly odd biography in the School of Life video above. The eccentric Austrian savant, he asserts, “can help us with our communication problems” through his penetrating, though often impenetrable, claims about language. That may be so. But we may need to redefine what we mean by “communication.” According to Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, an overwhelming percentage of what we obsess about on a daily basis—political and religious abstractions, for example—is so totally incoherent and muddled that it means nothing at all. He revised this opinion dramatically in his later thought.
Though he published nothing after the Tractatus and soon became a near-recluse after his startling entry into analytic philosophy, notes from his students were collected and published as well as a posthumous book called Philosophical Investigations. This version of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problems of communication involves a development of the “ostensive”—or demonstrative—role of language. Wittgenstein made an argument that language can only serve a social, rather than a personal, subjective, function. To make the point, he introduced his “Beetle in a Box” analogy, which you can see explained above in an animated BBC video written by Nigel Warburton and narrated by Aidan Turner.
The analogy uses the idea of each of us claiming to have a beetle in a box as a stand in for our individual, private experiences. We all claim to have them (we can even observe brain states), but no one can ever see inside the theater of our minds to verify. We simply have to take each other’s word for it. We play “language games,” which only have meaning in respect to their context. That such games can be mutually intelligible among individuals who are otherwise opaque to each other has to do with our shared environment, abilities, and limitations. Should we, however, meet a lion who could speak—in perfectly intelligible English—we would not, Wittgenstein asserted, be able to understand a single word. The vastly different experiences of human versus lion would not translate through any medium.
Just above, we have an explanation of this thought experiment from an unlikely source, Ricky Gervais, in an attempted explanation to his comic foil Karl Pilkington, who takes things in his own peculiar direction. Though Wittgenstein used the idea for a different purpose, his observation about the unbridgeable chasm between humans and lions anticipates Thomas Nagel’s provocative claims in the 1974 essay “What is it like to be a bat?” We cannot inhabit the subjective states of beings so different from us, and therefore cannot say much of anything about their consciousness. Maybe it isn’t like anything to be a bat. Luckily for humans, we do have the ability to imagine each other’s experiences, in indirect, imperfect, roundabout, ways, and we all have enough shared context that we can, at least theoretically, use language to produce more clarity of thought and greater social harmony.
Philosophy is often seen as an arcane academic discipline, in competition with the hard sciences or laden with abstruse concepts and language inaccessible to ordinary people. Such a perception may be warranted. This is not to damn academic philosophy but to highlight what has been lost through professionalization: classical notions of ethics as “the art of living” or what Michel Foucault called “the care of the self”; the ancient Greek idea of parrhesia—bold, honest speech unclouded by proprietary jargon; philosophy as a practice like meditation or yoga, a technique for self-knowledge, self-control, and wise, just, and considerate relationships with others.
From Socrates to Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoics, ancient Western thinkers believed philosophy to be intimately relevant to everyday life. This was very much the case in ancient Eastern thought as well, in the Jainist sages, the Buddha, or Lao-Tzu, to name a few. We will find some form of popular philosophy on every continent and every historical age. And while plenty of modern teachers still believe in philosophy for everyone, they operate in a consumer culture that often deems them irrelevant, at best. Still, many educators persist outside the academy, endeavoring to reach not only ordinary citizens but a class of disempowered people also deemed irrelevant, at best: the imprisoned, many of whom have had few educational resources and little to no exposure to philosophical thinking.
We have many examples of influential thinkers writing from prison, whether Boethius’ early Christian Consolations of Philosophy, Antonio Gramsci’s passionate Marxist prison letters, Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, or Martin Luther King, Jr.’s essential “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” These have maybe provided readers who have never been jailed with tragic, yet romantic notions of doing philosophy while doing time. But the philosophers who enter prisons to work with people convicted—justly or otherwise—of all manner of crimes cannot afford to have romantic ideas. Philosopher Alan Smith found this to be especially so after teaching in UK prisons for 14 years, and writing boldly and candidly about the experience in his Guardian column “Philosophy for Prisoners.”
Finally retiring in 2013, Smith confessed, “If I carried on in prison, I would have to do it differently; I would have to admit that it was prison.” He may have felt burned out at the end of his sojourn, but he hadn’t lost his sense of ethical purpose:
When we don’t know about history and art and society we are adrift. Most of you reading this will never have had that experience, but many of the men I taught were ignorant of just about everything, and as grown men felt this keenly. Education was a relief, a route to self-respect.
Those who do this work report on how so many inmates hunger for routes to self-knowledge, reflection, and rigorous intellectual exercise. Several educators at The Philosophy Foundation, for example, have written about their experiences teaching philosophy in various UK prisons. Conditions are different, and often much bleaker, in the US—a country with 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners—but here, too, philosophers have helped inmates discover new truths about themselves and their society. In the very short TED talk up top, Damon Horowitz, who teaches at San Quentin through the Prison University Project, gives a passionate, rapid-fire accounting of his mission behind bars: “Everyone’s got an opinion. We are here for knowledge. Our enemy is thoughtlessness.” A chorus of venerable ancients would assuredly agree.
Further down, you can see participants in Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative talk about the virtues and rewards of their accredited program. That includes teachers and students alike.
FYI: Last Friday, Colin Marshall highlighted for you the new feature film by kogonada, whose many video essays–on Ozu, Linklater, Malick, Anderson, etc.–we’ve shown you here before. Rather by coincidence, The Criterion Collection just posted kogonada’s latest video essay, this one examining how “doors open onto philosophical mysteries in the films of French master Robert Bresson.” Watch “Once There Was Everything” above, and pair it with his other Bresson essay (“Hands of Bresson”) from three years ago. It appears right below.
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