Samuel S Franklin
The Psychology of Happiness, A Good Human Life
Cambridge University Press, 2010
ISBN: 0521138671, 192 pages.

Samuel Franklin is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University, Fresno. The book engages with Aristotle’s virtue ethics as a means to achieve happiness, by reference to the Nicomachean Ethics.

With Aristotle, Franklin believes that happiness is about the fulfilment of potential, where this is guided by rationality, which can moderate emotion and desire. We possess potentials, which are needs, and only if met, can we flourish and achieve happiness. Happiness is essentially related to personal development. Aristotle held there are two aspects to happiness; the hedonic (pleasure) and eudaimonia (the well-lived achieving life), but Franklin doesn’t give much credence to pleasure as worthy, despite the fact that current neuroscience holds that the pleasure and happiness/ thriving areas of the brain are very closely related. Franklin stands in direct contrast to the utilitarian theory of happiness. Jeremy Bentham gave an hedonistic account, arguing that it is morally correct to minimise pain and maximise pleasure, where happiness was equated with pleasure. The Benthamite view is that watching television is on a par with reading educational literature when it comes to what will lead to happiness, but he has virtually no takers on the thesis. Aristotle has many.

Aristotle is difficult to fault, which is why he is still such a central figure in philosophy. He held that ‘real goods,’ such as money and clothing, are needed as an aid for us to fulfil our potential. There are also ‘apparent goods’ which are not things we need, but that we simply want, and they do nothing to aid the fulfilment of our potential. As Franklin puts it, we might need a car to get to work, but we don’t need a Rolls Royce.

Aristotle argued for temperance. Too much food (or too little) will not lead us to thrive and achieve fulfilment. This is not to say that extremes are not acceptable in certain circumstances. Circumstances are essential to judging what is reasonable and through personal development we learn to recognise what is appropriate in a particular situation.

Philosophers will be familiar with these ideas, but the book is a useful reminder and clear exposition of Aristotelian ethics and places it alongside claims made by Darwin and Freud. The philosophical practitioner is likely to be interested in how Aristotelian ideas still abound today in the thoughts of non-philosophers, the best known being those of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, two more recent humanistic psychologist/ ‘actualisation’ theorists.

Unfortunately, as a humanistic psychologist, Franklin does not provide much data. Yet data is available. Bruce Heady’s team at the University of Melbourne, for instance, found happiness to be largely genetically determined (Heady, B., 2010).

Franklin does provide a brief account of the physiology of happiness, but doesn’t touch upon genetics or engage with recent neuroscientific research. The section on the physiology of happiness is small and the most up to date research he mentions is from 1997. In the last five years developments in brain research involving neurotransmitters that read the brain for conditions of happiness have developed quickly. It seems empirically likely that happiness is more closely linked to pleasure than to actualising potential. A body of research can be found in the Journal of Social Research (Summer 2010).

Apart from Freud, there is very little space given to psychoanalytic theory. Freud held that ‘to be civilised or to be tamed by the community causes unhappiness in the individual’ (1985) whereas Aristotle thought that the temperate person striving for a good life is at one with the state and creates the good city. Contra Aristotle/ Franklin, R.D. Laing has pushed Freud’s view further, claiming that adjustment to social norms result in repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjections and other forms of destructive action (1967). Franklin doesn’t mention Laing.

So since Aristotle we have advanced greatly in our understanding of human psychology. Rationality is de-emphasised. Human weaknesses rather than strengths have become an important area of study. This is also seen culturally with the rise of self-help books, which assume that human beings aren’t able to develop personally.

Franklin doesn’t seem to want to investigate this opposition to Aristotelian thought. Fortunately, the Aristotelian view of happiness lends support to mainstream business ethics, as well as the branch of business ethics called EQ (emotional intelligence).

As far as ordinary business ethics goes, the support comes from the idea of virtue. To fulfil potentials we need to develop skills of virtue. ‘The virtue of justice is about the welfare of others; it is about fairness to other’ (p. 80). Also the virtue of equality means looking beyond oneself. ‘We have to be concerned not only with ourselves but also with the welfare of others, not just family and friends’ (p. 82).

It is part of being virtuous that we take ourselves to be part of a community where we can undertake public discourse. A business is a community in which we can learn and discuss moral issues, such as whistle-blowing. Codes of conduct are empty unless employees are able to develop personal integrity. The modern idea of the business arena as a ‘community of enquiry’ where a ‘facilitator’ prompts discussion is directly in line with developing potentialities rather than following rules (Geschwindt, S., 2008).

Franklin doesn’t mention mainstream business ethics but only EQ, which was developed in the 1990s and which Franklin claims follows from Aristotelian thinking. Work in this area is still developing but from looking at an EQ web site I find there is a stress on emotion over rationality (http://www.6seconds.org). This suggests we need to look again at Aristotle and keep him in mind, remembering the very important role of reason in our personal development. It is encouraging that Aristotle can be of help within the commercial world.

References

Freud, S (1985). ‘Civilization and its discontents.’ Civilization, Society and Religion. Penguin Books

Geschwindt, S. (2008) Am I right? Or am I right: an introduction of ethical decision making. DW Publications

Heady, B. (2010). ‘Long-running German panel survey shows that personal and economic choices, not just genes, matter for happiness’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 10-08612, Oct 4, 2010. On-line early edition

Laing, R D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. Harmondsworth: Penguin

(c) Philosophical Practice 2011
Journal of the American Philosophical
Practitioners Association
http://www.appa.edu

E-Mail: RachelEBrowne@aol.com

The Work of Enchantment
By Matthew Del Nevo
Transaction Publishers, New Jersey, 2011

Matthew Del Nevo is a philosopher at the Catholic Institute of Sydney. The book falls within social theory but is mainly an example of philosophical reading of literature. It laments the soullessness of the world; it’s increasing banality and the increasing influence of the culture industries and commodification of ever more areas of our lives, including education. The ‘work’ of enchantment is identified as reading, listening and gazing. These seem unimportant in today’s culture, but this soulful activity, which Del Nevo calls ‘enchantment’ is counter-cultural. He attacks modern day culture while examining some works by Proust, Rilke and Goethe, and sets this literary investigation against the background of Adorno’s philosophy.

Enchantment is written to be accessible to those outside philosophy (dependant on whether they are able to read, I suppose). Del Nevo states that he is aware of sounding elitist, but says that he doesn’t mean to be so. You can’t help but believe him and he is actually addressing cultural problems in as honest a way as possible. The book is also a defence of the humanities over technological and vocational education, which abounds in these materialistic times. Del Nevo takes the strong view that enchantment has actually been lost from the humanities. He doesn’t make quite clear why this is, but his choice of writers to look at in this book suggests that these writers are deeper than contemporary literature, film and art, which is studied.

The philosophy here is a philosophy of life, not a systematic philosophy. For instance, Del Nevo shows, through looking at a work by Marcel Proust that ‘within an enchanted life death loses its sting.’ (p.35). It is wisdom literature.

Del Nevo’s analysis of Proust makes me feel I should have paid more attention when I read him years ago. He describes Swann becoming infatuated with Odette in Remembrance of Things Past. The nature of the metaphysical experience of falling in love in this case is described as ‘aesthetic’, in that Swann comes to see Odette in a new light as he falls in love with her and comes to regard her as beautiful. Proust might not have been aware of engaging in aesthetics when he describes this.

But it is also shown that the novel embodies a philosophy of language. It is found that in Proust there is an understanding that we don’t just ‘use’ language and that it is not a mere tool. Words are not neutral. Swann receives an anonymous letter telling him that Odette has been engaged in licentious sexual behaviour, and this too changes him. He became soulful when he fell in love, but when he received the letter, it was soul destroying. The words in the letter had the power to change Swann. I suppose it is to be assumed that a writer would be aware of the power of words, but I wonder if Proust had explicit knowledge that he held a theory of language?

But Del Nevo doesn’t ignore theory. According to Adorno, philosophy from Plato on to Hegel was concerned with conceptuality, ideas and generality (Of course this was how philosophy was before Plato too), but this was turned on it’s head by Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who were more concerned with psychology, sociology and detail. It seems that Proust, Rilke and Goethe also rejected Hegelianism by concentrating on the trivial and the particular. It is by this means of the grip of recognising the psychology presenting and meanings that trivia have for us that we are entering another ‘world’, which is denied to us by grand systems.

Time is an undercurrent of the book. The aesthetic theory that a work of art is that which passes the Test of Time, as posited by Anthony Savile and others, is an aesthetic theory that Del Nevo seems to subscribe to. He says that an ‘artwork can speak diachronically, across time, to a time of its own’ and that the ‘optimum example is those writings regarded by our culture such as Scriptures’.

It seems that Goethe’s Faust is MORE relevant now than when Goethe wrote it. It has more than passed the test of time. It seems prophetic. Parallels are drawn between Faust’s pact with Mephistopheles and modernity, which is out of control and subject to external forces. Mephistopheles had hold over Faust, but eventually Faust comes to see that pleasure-seeking and worldliness are disenchanting. We can only hope this is prophetic if we find modernity spiralling out of control.

Just a warning to atheists! This is a philosopher who teaches in a theological institute, who is theologically informed and so uses metaphorical language of the soul, heaven and angels. This should not put you off. I’m an atheist and it didn’t put me off. This is not a religious book and actually notes that the soul is not to be confused with the spirit, which is the religious concept. This distinction can be found in Rilke. The soul is about humanity, recognition of depth, being able to appreciate art, and finding resonance in things. Things, or objects, are held to be important in this book. The poets discussed are particularly interested in how some things resonate with us — real things, names of real things that have the ability to arouse feeling in us — not brand names.

I take it that properly this book is about the inner life; of our ability to be captivated by things; about being enchanted in contrast to the modern obsession with economics and technological communication. It doesn’t fit neatly into the modern world of mobile phones and twittering and at times the author seems to apologise for what he is writing about. Such apology has been made before, by the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, who is quoted as having said ‘The inner life: One is almost ashamed to pronounce this pathetic expression in the face of so many realisms and objectivisms’ (p22).

I write this review shortly after the riots in England, which occurred in London, Birmingham and several other cities and towns. This is also shortly after English pop singer Amy Winehouse was discovered dead. Although unfashionable to write about enchantment, this book is relevant to the modern world. Of technology, Del Nevo suggests that ‘we become the unwitting tools of our own tools’. Del Nevo believes that capitalism often provides ‘delusory substitutes for enchantment’ (p.13), such as glamour, and that even violence can be taken to be glamorous. This certainly seems to have been the case in the recent riots. Those involved were unable to see the reality of destruction and harm to others. Furthermore they were seeking glamour by looting for designer goods in many cases. Del Nevo also claims that celebrities ‘lead glamorous lives which, very often, are totally disenchanted’ (p.13). The sad case of Amy Winehouse immediately comes to mind. There are truths to be found in this book which many would not like to voice for fear of sounding superior.

Since enchantment, listening and gazing are about absorption — in art, philosophy, and religion (some forms of science are not excluded) — this book won’t appeal to those who twitter and text and probably would bring remorse to the friends of Amy Winehouse. But really it is these people to whom the book should be addressed. An interesting question is whether the book would have rapport with such people. Del Nevo defines the soul as that which refers to ‘the unity… of our inner sensibilities and sensitivities’ (p.23). Soulfulness and enchantment are about our inner life. Everyone has an inner life in this sense, unless seriously ill, so enchantment is about the quality of that inner life.

Enchantment, or being captivated, and having ‘metaphysical experience’ (Adorno’s term, which Del Nevo uses) is of physical, not just social, importance. We need to take note of the warnings that this book brings to us.

© Rachel Browne 2011

E-mail: RachelEBrowne@aol.com

An American Agenda: Leo Strauss, Nietzsche and Neoconservatism
By Darryl Naraji
Just World Publications, 2008

There is a specter haunting the West. The specter of Nietzsche.

Not only are large areas of the academic curriculum — such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, business management, government administration — basically courses in Nietzschean philosophy. But the popular understanding of politics along with the way many if not most people in Western societies go about their moral ‘reasoning’ (please note the inverted commas) and discussion is very Nietzschean.

When we adopt the language of the reification of ethics into discrete ‘values’ we are talking Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s core idea that such values are chosen by the individual and indeed by whole cultures — in sociological terms that values are ‘constructed’ — is in contemporary Western culture taken for granted.

But Naranjit’s book An American Agenda focuses on an aspect of the Nietzschean presence in the contemporary world that is very little understood. These may be termed the ‘right Nietzscheans’. This school of thought revolves around the enigmatic figure of Leo Strauss. Furthermore Naranjit suggests that this obscure philosopher has been dominating American politics including global policy with the rise of the Neoconservatives.

Now saying this is to stir up a hornets’ nest of controversy, a controversy that Naranjit himself traces in his book. He discusses at length the different interpretations of Strauss and his link to Nietzsche. Many of Strauss’s disciples deny such a link. But to me at any rate one thing seems clear. That even in the kindest interpretation of Strauss there is set up a dissonance between the ethics of the city — which is to say the general society — and the ethics of the philosopher which is to say of those who really know. One can here note two key things. First a skepticism as to whether there is such a thing as ethical truth. Second, the fact that such knowledge of the deadly truth is the preserve of an elite group. To me the case is simply made. The combining of skepticism and elitism points to Nietzsche.

But of course I cannot do justice to Naranjit’s finely weaved argument ranging from a discussion of contemporary American politics to very complex philosophical questions. There is a discussion of different interpretations of Nietzsche as well as the 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger (we will get back to him).

We may crudely summarize the history thus:

In the good old days there were two spheres of knowledge, that of the city and that of the philosophers. The former is that of ethical orthodoxy in the West more recently represented by Christianity (which Nietzsche saw as Platonism for the masses). The latter are the true Gnostics who know the deadly truth… that there isn’t any. If philosophers attempt to convey this to the city they may run into trouble, note what happened to Socrates, moreover knowledge of the deadly truth will destroy the city. So philosophers engage in the ‘noble delusion’: they support the Platonic-Christian orthodoxy of the masses. This protects the city from self-destruction and allows philosophers to engage in their dangerous pursuit of reason in peace.

The modern Enlightenment comes along and ruins all this. Although the real culprit may very well be Christianity itself which — unlike Judaism and Islam — is ‘a Faith not a Law’ and therefore seeks to reconcile revelation and reason, religion and philosophy. The Enlightenment Project attempted to bring together the two spheres by establishing a rational basis for the ethics of the city. When this failed and the absence of ethical foundation was laid bare the door was open for nihilism, the destruction of the city. Naranjit (p. 69) quotes Strauss as saying, ‘The more we cultivate reason, the more we cultivate nihilism.’

And so we come to Nietzsche.

He proposes that with the collapse of ancient ethics and in the absence of rational morality that we choose our values by an act of will-to-power. Indeed this is how it has always been except now we are being open and honest about it. But with this explicit realization we now come to a fork in the road. The two Nietzsches.

One Nietzschean position is for whoever who may, to will whatever values they choose unfettered by any rational concerns — ‘decisionism’, the absolute freedom of the moment. Strauss attributes this (in my own view clearly incorrectly) to Heidegger. This leads to Nazism. To nihilism the deadly visitor at the door. More recently it was evident in America in the 1960s in the counter-culture. Strauss’s disciple Alan Bloom critiques such American nihilism in his very influential popular book The Closing of the American Mind.

The other Nietzschean option and the only alternative to nihilism is to return to the noble lie. In a surprising, remarkable and utterly revolutionary interpretation Strauss attributes this position to Plato. In an esoteric reading of Plato Strauss sees him as advocating his pivotal idea of the Platonic ‘Good’ as a needed deception for the masses. This good, as the true philosopher knows, cannot be determined. In a single brilliant stroke Strauss can publicly disown Nietzsche while advocating a Nietzschean Plato.

Hence it is the elite who will both their own values and the sustaining of the mask of orthodoxy for the masses. Hence for instance the pseudo-philosophical discipline of political science.

The scene is now set for what Naranjit describes as the confrontation between Heidegger and Strauss in America. However while the counter-culture as Naranjit points out is Heideggerian it is not ultimately nihilistic (although there are definite nihilistic elements) but a legitimate quest for ‘authenticity’. This was overtaken at least for now by the conservatism of Middle America. But unlike the old conservatism that possessed a genuine concern for tradition and values Middle America has been increasingly taken over by the Neo-Con disciples of Strauss who put forward ‘orthodoxy’, the old time religion of Christian fundamentalism, as a balm and a justification for the masses, the noble delusion, in the name of which the knowing elite can will and perpetuate their necessary imperial atrocities at home and abroad.

This is Nietzsche’s planetary rule:

… train men for the heights, not for comfort and mediocrity, a morality with the intention of training a ruling caste — the future masters of the earth — must, if it is to be taught, appear in society with the prevailing moral laws, in the guise of their terms and forms. That for this, however, many transitional means of deception must be devised. (Quoted in Naranjit pg 198.)

What more can I say in review? I rarely enjoy reading a book this much. The argument is engrossing and compelling. And it deals with deadly serious contemporary issues. For me the core of the argument is the first section of chapter four on Strauss’s Nietzsche. Here it is established by Nietzschean logic that deception is the highest truth carried out by philosophers who embody the highest most spiritual form of the will-to-power. Hence philosophy is not about describing reality but prescribing to nature ‘how it ought to be’.

Finally let me say that it is vital that we come to terms with this in our parts of the world as it is the colonies (that means us) who are at the receiving end of this history. We will also watch with interest how the Straussian agenda will play itself out in this time of economic crisis and in the wake of the recent regime change in the Empire itself. Thus we await the next chapter of the American Agenda.

(c) Burton Sankeralli 2009

E-mail: bsankeralli@yahoo.com

S.C. Meyer Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design
Harper One 2009

This is a well-written text, for the most part clearly argued in an engaging, relaxed style. What there is to the Intelligent Design (ID) hypothesis seems to me to be well presented in this book.

We must accept that there is currently no known spontaneous physico-chemical process that could explain the origin of the genetic apparatus in living systems. This — the ‘DNA enigma’ — might be said to be an outstanding challenge to science.

That is, if we consider that origins of anything are genuine scientific questions. Science typically works with existents — with the world as it is now, or as the world was, given that it was earlier much as it is now. Change, including evolutionary change, can be accepted as a bona fide scientific problem, but I think origins inherently resist systematic investigation.

Much of this book is devoted to examining various attempts that have been made to understand the origin of life within the current physico-chemical framework, and the book is valuable for this critical exposition alone. A chapter on the popular ‘RNA World’ hypothesis is especially useful. Meyer shows that physico-chemical suggestions on the origin of life using chance or necessity, alone or together, have so far been unable to construct a convincing scenario for this supposed originary event.

Yet, even so, some scientists continue to wish to produce a plausible explanation using nothing more than known physico-chemical principles, abetted by chance. The latter involves historicism — here it would be, a concatenation of physico-chemical events influenced by multiple contingencies (combining chance with law). Such a sequence of contingencies may be where the Intelligent Design program ought to be pitched. Since the origin would presumably be unrepeatable and so untestable as such, it might be useful to point to other unexplained sequences of events that would have been originary in a similar way. Meyer briefly mentions the ‘anthropic principle’ of cosmology. If one could find several more such enigmas, the collection together might seem to have more explanatory power than just one or two examples.

Meyer claims that the only agency known by us today to produce ‘specified information’ is the human (it should be ‘Western technological’) imagination, which he calls ‘intelligent’.

He suggests that, since physico-chemical attempts at understanding a spontaneous origin of the specified information associated with life have so far failed, then the only remaining possibility would be an intelligent agency (left unspecified).

Meyer has little discussion of how this intelligent construction would have been carried out beyond suggesting supposed parallels with the creation of informational structures in computers. This seems a bit too glib. He does not attempt to give us a picture of the intelligence-mediated origin in anything like the detail presented in discussing various physico-chemical attempts (where he delights in pointing out how the intelligence of researchers intruded here and there as adjustments in the experiments). As Meyer says in another context, ‘sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’!

This leads one to suspect that in fact there is no imagined scenario for the intelligence-directed creation of life. Would it have been too ineffable to describe? It seems possible (likely?) that any clear description of that process would be as easily criticized as he shows the physico-chemical attempts to be. If the implication is that we do not have sufficient intelligence to imagine the originary process, then one suspects that there might be a deity ‘waiting in the wings’ (note that his Chapter 16 is entitled ‘Another Road to Rome!).

In any case, pitting a non-testable one-sentence claim (e.g., ‘Life was designed by an intelligent agent that existed before the advent of humans’) about the origin against forty or more years of failed conceptual, laboratory and computational efforts seems a bit unbalanced.

Meyer’s approach also begs the question of whether in fact the information embodied in, and carried by, the genetic apparatus is in fact ‘specified’ information — that is, information meaningful to the cell. Or, more to the point, that it was ‘specified’ at its origin (to do or inform what? — he does not tell us). Presumably early metabolism would have been simpler and vaguer than what we find in the cell today. Meyer is well aware of, and describes, the elaborate manipulations carried out by the cell in the process of using the information in DNA. In hardly any case is a DNA sequence used ‘as is’. The specifications useful to the cell are generated de novo in an elaborate process of cutting, stitching, and chemical modification. In what sense, then, can the information DNA holds be said to be ‘specified’?

Meyer insists upon the logical structure of the genetic apparatus without considering that it is we, Western scientists, who in our models work hard to try to impute logical organization to that inordinately complicated system.

Science is founded upon a simple logical foundation, and its models are all based in logic. But we have no assurance that the world is based in or informed by logic, allowing it to be intelligible. Scientists implicitly take that ‘on faith’, and so does Meyer. In this sense he conflates the ‘map’ with the ‘territory’. In science this conflation has proven fruitful as a support for the construction of technology. That is, science ‘works’ in the short run as a basis for limited pragmatic activities. But questions of origins go far beyond the pragmatic.

Meyer handily knocks down various ‘demarcation arguments’ that were made by philosophers of science in order to show that ID is not a bona fide scientific enterprise. He spends a good many words on the historical sciences (his own is historical geology), and how they choose between various theories using abductive reasoning, on the basis of which one tries to choose the ‘best’ explanation of some current phenomenon. It is here that he claims that ID comes out best because the various physico-chemical proposals have not been able to explain the origin. But, unless I missed something, I did not see in these pages a proposed layout of the ID process of origination. ID seems at present to be just words.

Meyer attempts, with varying success, to show nevertheless that ID — as a scientific theory should — has inspired some testable models. But, insofar as ID remains at base an opinion or intuition about logical structure (‘specified information’), it remains itself untestable, as such, and, perhaps, self-evident grammatically. Is the ID hypothesis for the origin of biological information a substantive hypothesis or merely a vacuous faut de mieux attending the deconstruction of some physico-chemical attempts that used chance and/ or lawfulness to understand the origin of life?

It might be worth pointing out here that there is no logical way to distinguish between a chance event and an arbitrary (creative) action — that is, an act not assimilable to one or another of our theoretical expectations. Since physico-chemical approaches mediated by chance have failed to deliver a convincing story of the origin of ‘specified information’, that, it seems to me, impugns the design hypothesis as well. That is, if it were found that specified information could be mediated by chance, then that would be a good argument in favor of design!

So design is not ‘beyond the reach of chance’ — for outside observers design could look like chance. An intelligent procedure which we view ignorantly from outside would look random to us upon doing a statistical analysis. External statistical analyses will show that ensembles of creative acts conform to various probability density functions. Creativity is an internalist mood, not accessible as such to external investigation. We might note that externalism and internalism require different grammatical constructions — respectively, First Person, present progressive tense versus Third Person, universal present tense. These can never directly mix together. In Meyer’s book the erstwhile physico-chemical attempts are in the Third Person, while ID, lacking definite description, is implicitly in First Person.

At one point Meyer raises the possibility of self-organization. But he does so in a very mechanistic, bottom-up manner that would better be labeled ‘self-assembly’, following various natural laws. At other points he refers to the evident hierarchical structure of the world. In that perspective, self-assembly takes place amid various constraints imposed top-down from higher, including larger scale, levels. That scenario would increase the degrees of freedom for self-assembly, given that this would depend locally upon, e.g., temperature, pH, density of various molecular species, and so on. The increased degrees of freedom in this context might suggest to some that self-assembly could get incorporated into a more flexible self-organization. But, to others it might suggest the possibility of a deity manipulating boundary conditions (given that this agent would be of larger scale or level of organization).

The hierarchy connection leads me to think about information as detected in scales much higher than the cellular. In particular, one might note that the widespread occurrence of convergent evolution has no neo-Darwinian interpretation, as it conflicts with their ‘descent with modification’ conceptual program. Evolutionary convergence is hardly mentioned by anyone any more. It has no doubt become unfashionable and old-fashioned, and that leads me to guess that there is conceptual gold to be mined there.

In truth, the opposition of most scientists to ID is at base ideological. They will have none of it simply because it doesn’t play by their rules, which in the context of the origin of life would be to present an explicit scenario suggesting how it was done.

We may note that scientists have been trying to construct the cell, just as any other investigated system, as a machine. This metaphor, not surprisingly, invites the notion of design and thus implies designers. I think that scientists ought to take note that it is their own philosophical mechanicism that has conjured up the possibility of design. But what if the cell is not a machine? Then scientists would have no basis for fully apprehending it with logical methods, and — to boot — ID would no longer have even a fingerhold (as in this book) on the problem of its origin either. All scientists — IDers or not — implicitly credit the aphorism ‘In the beginning was the word.’

It seems clear that Meyer is yearning for a re-enchantment of the world, something that has largely been destroyed by the hegemony of logic and science as deployed by various ‘interests’ in our culture. A quote on Page 450 from Bertrand Russell describes well our current spiritual malaise. But the likelihood of co-option of Meyer’s proposed route to a renewed enchantment by ancient religious traditions is a major impediment to serious minds.

(c) Stanley Salthe 2009

Email: ssalthe@binghamton.edu

-=-

CALL FOR MANUSCRIPTS AND REVIEWERS: ISFP PUBLISHING

International Society for Philosophers: ISFP Publishing

http://www.isfp.co.uk/publishing/

Publishing is not a new venture for the International Society for Philosophers. We have two electronic journals, Philosophy Pathways and Philosophy for Business, both of which were added this year to the Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org hosted by the University of Lund, Sweden.

However, the idea of book publishing is something else entirely. This is not a great time to be a book publisher from an economic standpoint, and the ISFP is hardly in a position to take the considerable financial risks involved. The reality is that the ISFP is run on a shoestring, staffed entirely by volunteers. It is only the wonder of the internet which enables an international organization such as ours to exist at all.

That was my thinking up to a month ago, when I received an intriguing offer from ISFP Board member Matthew Del Nevo. The argument was made that we have a respected name in the academic world, which gives us a very real advantage compared to a publishing venture starting from square one. But still, the lack of finance was a major obstacle.

Meanwhile, Rachel Browne another ISFP Board member had been corresponding with two authors, Nick Acocella and [Removed] both frustrated by the difficulties in finding a commercial publisher for their very original works. The two books, in different ways, push the boundaries in a manner which would make many publishers extremely nervous. What do you you do? Do you send off proposal after proposal, hoping eventually that you will strike lucky and find a publisher prepared to go the extra mile?

So we formed the idea of a service which would help authors by offering the chance to attract academically qualified reviewers who would put their weight behind a book publishing proposal, as well as providing, in effect, an ongoing in-depth editorial service.

We are not offering these books for sale. The only way to get a copy is to request a copy for review. Membership of the ISFP will be a point in favour of your request for a review copy being granted, but it is not a guarantee.

We are issuing a call for manuscripts, on any topic related to philosophy. Philosophical novels will be just as welcome as works on philosophical anthropology or the philosophy of physics.

Manuscripts need to be in a tidy state — which have been checked for grammar, spelling, factual errors etc. — but not necessarily up to full publishable standard. The assumption is that a manuscript will go through several revisions before the author is ready to submit a proposal to a commercial publisher. The ISFP would be able to give its full backing, having seen the work through each stage of its progress.

We are launching ISFP Publishing with a list of just four works. In addition to the books by Nick Acocella and [Removed] Pathways mentor Martin Jenkins has agreed to allow us to include the expanded version of his ISFP Fellowship dissertation on Nietzsche which he is hoping to get published. To encourage others, and to show a good example, I have added an updated version of my work ‘Ethical Dilemmas’.

It is fair to say that all four works court controversy, in different ways. As I state on the front page of the ISFP Publishing site, ‘We welcome authors who are prepared to take risks and rock the boat. No subject is taboo. Philosophy should push you out of your comfort zone.’ — That is not to say that a book has to be controversial in order to be included on our list. But it should at least encourage the reader to think differently.

Books should be submitted as a single document in Word (.doc or .docx). This will be converted to a PDF file. Details of the work and the private download location will be circulated to members of the Board of the ISFP. In order to be added to the public ISFP Publishing list, a work needs at least one member of the Board who is prepared to sponsor it. Knowing the expertise which the Board collectively muster, I am confident that this will be sufficient to keep the list looking ship shape.

Here is the current list which you will find on the ISFP Publishing web site:

1. Nick Acocella — The Divine Inspiration of Porn and the Beginning of Sexual Metaphysics
2. [Removed]
3. Martin Jenkins — Aristocratic Radicalism or Anarchy? An Examination of Nietzsche’s Doctrine of Will to Power
4. Geoffrey Klempner — Ethical Dilemmas: a primer for decision makers

For more details, including short descriptions, reviews and authors bios, go to the ISFP Publishing site http://www.isfp.co.uk/publishing/. There is a form for submitting requests for review copies on the web site.

Please send all comments, inquiries, submissions to me at klempner@fastmail. net. I look forward to hearing from you!

(c) Geoffrey Klempner 2010

E-mail: klempner@fastmail.net