Russell on Universals

Russell's The Problems of Philosophy was published in 1912; but he published the short paper, "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in the 1911-12 edition. In what follows, I'm going to give a very brief sketch of the argument he presents there. The conclusion of the argument is that there is a fundamental distinction between two radically different sorts of thing: universals and particulars. (The article's title, as we shall see, involves a bit of word-play, as "relations" play a fundamental role in Russell's argument for universals.) I will proceed mostly without commentary, attempting to illustrate the bare bones of the argument.

I. Some approximate distinctions.

Russell begins by reviewing some distinctions to orient us toward the distinction he is trying to get at. The first three are psychological or metaphysical, and the last two are logical.

1. Percepts and concepts: These are the different objects of two different mental activities: perceiving and conceiving. Percepts (what he calls "sense-data" in Problems) are (one sort of) particular, while concepts are (one sort of) universal.

2. Time--Entities which exist in time and entities which do not: Garden variety example of the former would be physical objects (cars, pens, books, planets, etc.). What would the latter include? Presumably concepts (though the whole area is obviously tendentious), but also numbers, ideal shapes, and perhaps things like mathematical laws.

3. Space--(a) entities which are not in any place (e.g. relations); (b) entities which are only at one place at any one time (physical bodies or unities); and (c) entities which are in many places at once (e.g. colors and perceived shapes). Russell has a complex notion of space, depending on the vantage point from which it is described. So he recognizes, e.g. visual and tactical space (spaces of sense data), as well as physical space (the existence of which we can infer but not experience directly).

4. Relations and non-relations: This doesn't neatly map onto our prior distinctions. Relations can relate particulars as well as universals and other relations. (So "Dallas is north of Austin," "Squares have more sides than triangles.")

5. Verbs and substantives: Strictly, Russell is referring to the objects denoted by verbs and substantives. Here he provides some help. Recall that he often thinks in terms of sentence structure. Take a simple example: "Desdemona loves Cassio." Russell analyzes this as a complex in which the relation love relates the two non-relations, Desdemona and Cassio. Take another: "Othello believes Desdemona loves Cassio." Here "believes" relates Othello to our former complex fact of Desdemona loving Cassio. Russell tends to think that at least most verbs are relational in this sense. This distinction is important because it gets at how Russell thinks about universals and particulars. If the two are fundamentally distinct sorts of things, it will at least be the case that particulars cannot do the work of relations or predicates. So universals would just consist of the objects denoted by relations and predicates.

[This basic distinction traces back to Aristotle, who argued, in effect, that substances have to be fundamentally different from qualities. The best way to see this is to consider proper nouns. You can't predicate "is Socrates" of anything. (You can, of course, say, "The annoying pale snub-nosed fellow is Socrates," but this sentence states an identity, and not a subject-predicate combination.]

II. The Common-Sense Notion of Things and Qualities

By the "common-sense" view, R has in mind the bundle theory of the early empiricists, according to which, e.g. an apple consists of a bundle of sensible qualities coexisting in a single perceived space. Russell thinks it rests on the confusion of thinking of actually different sensory spaces as combined. As Hume might say, we are habituated to think of the apple and apple flavor and scent as all occupying the same "space," but they are each different modes of sense perception, so the "common space" is a useful fiction. The apple isn't the same as our senses of it, nor are our senses of it common to one another. He uses this to make a very interesting dilemma, which deserves quotation:

"Realists who reject particulars are apt to regard a thing as reducible to a number of qualities co-existing in one place. But, apart from other objections to this view, it is doubtful whether the different qualities in question ever do co-exist in one place. If the qualities are sensible, the place must be in a sensible space; but this makes it necessary that the qualities should belong to only one sense, and it is not clear that genuinely different qualities belonging to one sense ever co-exist in a single place in a perceptual space. If, on the other hand, we consider..."real" space...then we no longer know what is the nature of the
qualities, if any, which exist in this "real" space."

III. Three Theories

Very broadly, there are three possible stances about universals and particulars (assuming that one or the other exists):

1. Universalism: Only universals exist. There are no particular things, just universal qualities existing in multiple places at different times. To call out a "particular" patch of red is only to indicate its place, not to name a separate kind of entity. To call out two distinct but identically colored patches of red is just to indicate one thing in different places. The position here is more or less that the addition of particulars is unnecessary, since whatever role particulars are supposed to play can be handled by qualities and relational properties.

2. Nominalism: Only particulars exist (Berkeley and Hume). There are no abstract ideas or universals, only particular things--so no general "yellow," but only particular shades; no generic triangle, but only particular representations of triangles.

3. Realism: Both universals and particulars exist.

Russell's general strategy is to offer refutations for 1 and 2, and go on to consider, in some detail, strategies for arguing for 3.

Refutation of Nominalism

The strategy for refuting nominalism is the same one he uses in Problems. Recall that Berkeley and Hume get around positing universals by claiming that there are only particular sense data, say, different patches of white. This poses a problem for them, though: how are we able to recognize different patches as being, in some sense, the same? (Note that this problem exists both for distinct patches of white in a single experience, and for novel experiences of white things. For convenience, let us refer to a single experience of diverse white things as "Case 1" and later recognitions of white things as "Case 2.")

Nominalists typically solve this by saying that the diverse particulars that we give the same labels (like "white") are similar to one another. So, of two patches of the same color in one visual field, the nominalist claims that the two are exactly similar, and that that relation of exact similarity is logically fundamental insofar as it cannot be further analyzed into different predicates (e.g. beige, cream, lighter or darker white, etc.). Similarly with a new patch which we recognize as white. Our new patch bears the same relation of exact similarity to our memory of a color patch which we have baptized "white."

Now, the basic refutation is this: Even on the most simple terms, the nominalist has to recognize at least one relation, that of exact similarity. (If they're forced to grant one universal, why not more?) The harder problem, though, is that this solution doesn't look very plausible, at least insofar as we learn to reliably use quality terms very flexibly. Somewhat worse, if we take it's analysis seriously, it appears to generate a vicious regress. These problems help to illuminate one another.

The Regress: The nominalist claims that we learn how to use color terms by spotting different instances of exact similarity (our Case 1). Let us imagine a simple case of two white patches in our visual field, a and b. We recognize "a is white" and "b is white" are true because aRb, that is, where R denotes the relation, "is the exactly similar color as." (Remember that they can't be the same, because that would imply having a single thing in multiple places.) On this analysis, the predicate white just consists in the likeness relation that a bears to b. How, then, does Case 2 work? Imagine two novel white patches, c and d. Given that Case 1 defines "white," we must say that c bears some relation of color likeness to something else, but note that that something else cannot be a or b alone, since white is defined by reference to the relation between them. The obvious recourse would be to say that c's relation to a is exactly similar to a's relation to b. The regress is vicious because it means that we shall have to explain every novel instance of a quality by providing a higher-order relation of exact similarity to past similarities. This pretty obviously wrecks the nominalist's thesis that the similarity relation has to be basic and not analyzable into more than terms applying to particular bits of sense data. Given our flexible use of predicates of predicates like "white" or "round", it looks like nominalists need to accept some recourse to higher-order relations of similarity between different type-similarity relations.

The Lesson: Even if the nominalists accept only relations of exact similarity, they are forced to recognize universals. Further, Russell takes this to demand their recognition of: concepts (rather than merely percepts, since "similarity" is not a further item on our inventory of sense data); things which do not exist in time (since relations are not on a par with objects--objects can instantiate relations, but they appear to be fundamentally different from them in kind).

The most interesting part of the argument comes next, but I'm exhausted, so I'll leave it there for now. :)

A Short Note Introducing Russell's Metaphysics

The topic of universals in ontology is a notoriously thorny one. Of course, ontology itself is a very weird topic, so maybe it would be best to back up a step and start there. Typically, in philosophy departments the words "ontology" and "metaphysics" are used interchangeably. "Ontology" is Greek for "the study of being," and "metaphysics" is Greek for "after physics," a title given to an obscure set of Aristotle's writings by an early editor for (probably!) more or less pedagogical reasons. Aristotle's Metaphysics is a series of tight reflections about, broadly speaking, the general nature and classification of things that exist and their various modes of existence. These reflections were best read after his Physics, because they made frequent use of arguments and theories introduced in it. That's another rabbit hole, though, so let's skip to Russell.

Remember that Russell's basic project is to beef up the philosophical tools of empiricism sufficiently to enable us to speak of the existence of an external world (apart from our ideas of it) in ways that (1) avoid the pitfalls of idealism; while (2) granting that we do not have direct experience of the objective world; and (3) illuminating the ambiguities of language that give rise to confusion; so that ultimately we can (4) show how it is possible to develop scientific knowledge of the external world (in light of our inability to experience it directly).

Russell presents his thoughts on universals in Chapters 9 and 10. Classically, the problem of universals is often approached by way of what is called the One Many problem. Russell illustrates it with the more Platonic example of justice (and later whiteness). The idea, speaking generally, is that properties (or qualities) are often shared by many different individual objects. So, e.g., the apple, the book jacket, and the car outside are all "red"; the wallet, the jacket, and the shoes are all "leather," and (though the linguistic form is importantly different) both Paris and Algiers are "south of" London.

The classical problem gets its start with a simple analysis of very basic sentences consisting of a subject and a predicate, like "The apple is red." Here the subject expression--"the apple" refers to a particular thing, the apple, while the predicate expression, "is red" refers to....  Well, that's really the problem. What does the predicate expression refer to? Classically, the predicate expression is taken to refer to a universal or an abstract idea, but for the empiricist tradition, starting with Berkeley, our simple sentence is just a roundabout way of referring to a collection (or complex) of particular qualities. On this model, "The apple is red" does nothing more than point out two qualities of one region of my visual field--color and shape. All of my experiences of the external world are just experiences of sensory qualities, so all descriptive sentences function to pick out different sensory qualities. One of the very intriguing features of Russell's analysis is that he will accept the empiricist idea that sensations are particulars, while insisting that our ability to think about them coherently, and most importantly, to relate them to one another, must involve knowledge of universals.

More broadly, he thinks that the mind-independent world must include relations, and that these relations are not simply reducible to the objects (in this case, relata) which those relations relate. So, for example, Dallas is (approximately) 730 miles from Atlanta. Here the phrase "is 730 miles from" is a relation that takes two objects. Moreover, it is true whenever we plug into it any two objects (i.e. locations) which are 730 miles apart. Of course, we can quibble about the identity conditions (or precise boundaries) of cities, or the arbitrariness of different possible units of measure, but Russell has done his best to argue that our best evidence points to the existence of a mind-independent world with mind-independent features, and those features prominently include different spatial locations, the mere existence of which suffices to show that there must be distances. (Any plurality of non-overlapping spacial locations in a shared space imply the existence of distance; moreover, any given spatial location of greater than zero dimension must itself possess a quantifiable measure in at least one dimension.)

A quick word on framing: Russell tends to think of philosophical problems in terms of linguistic analysis. So it will often help to frame his thoughts with examples of sentences and propositions. But when we do this, we need to keep in mind that Russell is extremely sensitive to the ambiguities of language. So just to bear this in mind, consider again our apparently simple sentence, "The apple is red."

On the most basic level, this is just a simple sentence of the English language. As such, it is a particular expression of a general proposition. So, for example, we might say "der Apfel ist rot" or "la pomme est rouge," but we generally take those different strings of words to express identical propositional content. And in general, the metaphysical project consists of trying to get clear about propositional content--about what sort of items we need to recognize in order to make sense both of propositional content and the ways in which that content may plausibly match up with the mind-independent world. And when we start thinking about these difficulties, we notice that our original sentence harbors a number of potential ambiguities. So consider the following ways we might analyze it:

(1) An objective fact: There exists one object such that that object is an apple and that object is red.
(2) A subjective perception: I have a (visual) sense-datum such that my sense datum is apple-shaped and red.
(3) A common experience: We each have (different) sense data caused by a single object, such that our sense data are apple-shaped and red.

These might wind up begging certain questions, but a bit of thought about them should help you to understand the type of investigation Russell is up to. He tends to think of terms like "red" and "apple" as thoroughly general in character, and absent further qualification, such terms might refer to:

• A sense datum (e.g. visual, tactile, taste, olfactory, or auditory sensation);
• A physical object, not subject to direct acquaintance;
• A concept (the mental content by which we recognize novel instances of the kind "apple")
• An abstract quality, instantiated by (at least) diverse sense data, and possibly diverse physical objects);
• A token idea, in the mind of a particular person at a particular time;
• A general idea, common to all people who possess the relevant concept(s).

Notice here that we have a sort of proliferation of one-many problems, which is just one reason Russell thinks a proper analysis of the distinction between universals and particulars is so important. Given the way analytic philosophers of Russell's ilk tend to think about problems like this, were we to develop a transparent logic, we would need to specify, in each meaningful string, which type of object and which type of predicate we intend. Ideally, we should like to be able to trace our most robust scientific knowledge of the world to our corresponding concepts and sense-data. That was the dream at the root of the enterprise. (There's much more to be said here, but the general impulse is rooted in the epistemic primacy of first-person experience. On this picture, although the physical world is ontologically prior to our thoughts about it, our first-person experience is epistemically prior, insofar as it provides the common gateway through which we all have to pass to get to the point of scientific inquiry.) 

In my follow-up post, I will summarize a roughly contemporaneous (1911-1912) essay that Russell wrote about Universals, entitled "On The Relations of Universals and Particulars." I hope it will help to expand and reinforce Russell's remarks on the topic in chapters 9 and 10.

Skepticamp!

So the 2014 Atlanta Skepticamp happened this weekend, and it was, as expected, quite fun. There were a bunch of thoroughly enjoyable talks. Topics ranged from critical thinking for our public schools (and especially teachers), to Christian Science, and even Hepatitis C. It was a really rewarding weekend, and both days finished with fairly wide-ranging panel discussions featuring the presenters. Altogether an awesome weekend!

Two Further Reports

Two very late entries to the research, both very good.

This is an overview of the largest study on gun violence in the U.S. to date. The findings are pretty startling. The authors found that for every 1% increase in gun ownership proportions, there was a 0.9% increase in gun homicides.

This is a report that came out some time ago and found, essentially, that guns pose a greater risk to people living around them than to anybody else. Fascinating stuff. The comparative statistics on childhood gun violence are heart-breaking.

And...More Second Amendment Research

I'm quite impressed by this piece on the NY Review of Books by Gary Wills. It's the most thorough take-down of the shoddy Second Amendment Scholarship now prevalent that it's a pity that it didn't get more traction when it was written...almost two decades ago. The whole thing repays a careful read, and even the exchange that Wills has with the other authors is quite informative, though (justifiably!) snarky.

This is a nice graphical summary of violence in America. It got a good deal of play thanks to Ezra Klein's derived blogging about it in the Post.

Some nice scatter plots of gun deaths vs. gun ownership internationally.

A great report, featuring a series of graphs about gun violence in the OECD. It's a UK production.

A short post in the Atlantic by Jonathan Stray with some key information on gun violence in the U.S.

A list of all the provisions from the various States' Bills of Rights bearing some relation to the Second Amendment. Really happy this is out there.

That's all for now. The talk is basically done. Just tweaking it and preparing the slide show.

Some Good Quotations

A few interesting quotations and perspectives I gleaned from reviewing John Donohue's debate with Don Kilmer on guns and gun control on C-span.

From Donohue's C-Span Debate with Don Kilmer:

"To assert that the Constitution is a barrier to reasonable gun laws, in the face of the unanimous judgment of the federal courts to the contrary, exceeds the limits of principled advocacy. It is time for the NRA and its followers in Congress to stop trying to twist the Second Amendment from a reasoned (if antiquated) empowerment for a militia into a bulletproof personal right for anyone to wield deadly weaponry beyond legislative control.”

--Erwin Griswold, former Soliciter General under Richard Nixon and Dean of Harvard Law.

The Second Amendment was "one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I’ve ever seen in my life time. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies--the militias--[preamble] would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment [referring to the preamble] refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires."

--Former Chief Justice Warren Burger on McNeil Lehrer in 1991.

"First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America's schools, period ... with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel."

--Wayne LaPierre, May 1, 1999 speech after the Columbine shootings.


"If it's crazy to call for putting police and armed security in our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy," LaPierre said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press. "I think the American people think it's crazy not to do it. It's the one thing that would keep people safe."


--Wayne LaPierre, Sunday, December 23, 2012, on the heels of Sandy Hook.


National Crime Victimization Survey: Guns are used in self defense approximately 47,000 times/year (=8/10 of 1% or 0.008% of violent crimes). Between 2005 and 2010, an average of 232,000 guns were stolen annually, meaning that for every time a gun is used in self-defense, 5 guns are stolen.

Lastly, Violence in America: Five Graphs. Very effective presentation.

A late addition, on general crime in the OECD nations. Good for broad comparisons.

Skepticamp! (And Some Notes on Guns!)

The 2014 Atlanta Skepticamp is almost upon us! As with last year, there will be lots of little presentations, and for the second time now, I'll be doing one. I'm actually pretty excited about it. I've chosen quite the topic, too: Guns!

So the relation between guns and skepticism might appear rather mysterious, but my general thought runs along these lines: Our contemporary debate about guns tends to run along three strands: Facts about contemporary gun violence; historical and legal claims about the Second Amendment; and philosophical justifications for (or against) gun ownership. And canvassing that ground, or at least a bit of it, will be the purpose of my talk. The skepticism part comes with the sheer glut of nonsense surrounding the debate.

For this post, though, I'd just like to make a tidy list of the references I've looked at so far, first so I can actually shut down my computer without losing all those tabs(!), and second so I have some record of what I've actually been looking at!

So here are the links I've found helpful, sorted by category.

I. The Data:

This Salon piece gives a brief review of the state of the research into gun control, and in particular gives a nice epidemiological perspective. It's essentially a rejoinder to Lott's "data" showing that concealed carry laws reduced crime. It's chock-full of good links.

"The NRA's War On Gun Science" is a nice piece about the more recent history the gun lobby  has of defunding gun research. Truly disheartening.

The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has a nice and short breakdown on the latest state of the research on gun violence vs. levels of ownership.

This is a very interesting study on the use of guns in altercations. It's seeking to ask that small percentage of people who have either seen or been directly involved in any altercation involving guns what their role was (offensive, defensive, victim, etc.). The study interviewed all claims to self-defense, and then had those stories reviewed by criminal judges to make a prima facie claim about whether those uses were legal. The results are about what you'd expect.

This is a useful chart of international comparisons that Charles Blow used as his Op-Ed in the Times shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting.

Some useful Pew data on gun ownership trends.

This is an incredibly useful chart on Wikipedia that breaks down firearm-related violence nationally. The chart is great...but one gripe: You can't easily get it to Excel. The data is larded with text, so it takes some clean-up work to make it easy to chart.

U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health. That's the title of the report jointly published by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. It's a bleak read. A short journalistic piece giving the broad outlines can be found here.

A short Washington Post piece on the astonishingly high levels of gun ownership in the U.S., with charts!

A very long piece criticizing Lott's More Guns, Less Crime hypothesis, by Ian Ayres and John Donohue. Donohue has done some really first-rate work on, especially, criminological metasurveys. Good stuff. Thick, though.

II. The Second Amendment and the Legal Precedent

This is an extremely interesting and provocative paper by Carl Bogus about the origins of the Second Amendment, and in particular the relation to the institution of slavery in the southern states. A shorter review of the article by Thom Hartmann can be found here.

The ever-cantankerous Richard Posner wrote this fabulous takedown in The New Republic of the horrible Scalia opinion in Heller shortly after it was published. It's really a gem of an article; a first-rate example of legal scholarship for a popular audience.

This is Justice Stevens' dissenting opinion in Heller. It's a model dissent, and does a great job of picking apart Scalia. Note that there are links to the other parts of the issued opinions on the case at the top.

"The Embarrassing Second Amendment" is a nice review of the scholarship and history by Sanford Levinson. His case strikes me as fairly weak, but at least conciliatory and charitable toward the republican libertarian line of argument.

III. The Philosophy

"Why Gun Control Is Not Enough" is a nice, short piece by Jeff McMahan at the Stone in the Times. It's primarily on the philosophy of gun control. The argument is, to my mind, compelling. McMahan did a nice Philosophy Bites episode on the same topic that's short and sweet. It's here.

I wish there were more philosophy on the topic out there, but there just doesn't appear to be much on it right now. McMahan gives a plausible reason for that: the virtual unanimity of the philosophy world outside the small circle of libertarians who write papers to one another. It would be good to see more discussion of the problem in social ethics circles.

A late entry: John Donohue has participated in several debates on the topic of gun control. Unfortunately, while he's obviously a very smart guy, he's a terrible public speaker. But two of his performances may be found here and here.

Enjoy!

The Poetics

So as I mentioned, I've been reading the Butcher translation of Aristotle's Poetics. As one might expect, it's rather dry. For all that, though, it's quite interesting, and is, so far as I know, the earliest preserved systematic account of the subject.

Aristotle begins with a bit of taxonomy. Poetry is a type of imitation, and includes as its subspecies "Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms." After building out the taxonomies a bit, things get interesting.

There are, apparently, two basic "drives" that result in our poetic tendencies: Our natural inclination toward imitation, and our corresponding inclination toward harmony and rhythm. There's a bit more interest in the first part, since Aristotle (plausibly) thinks that imitation is a primary vehicle of learning. The fact of our enjoyment of poetry, on this account, is at least related to our enjoyment of learning, and in particular, of recognition.

This is, of course, highly reminiscent of Plato's criticisms in Republic II-III. Plato doesn't deny that people learn from poetry; his critique rather relies on it. The problem is that they (often) learn the wrong lessons, and in particular, they learn that gods are frivolous and men ignoble; that being, say, a general, amounts to little more than, e.g. giving grand speeches. It's rather that the spectacle of the stage distracts them from the actual practices that serve as the objects of imitation.

But back to Aristotle. The first pass at defining tragedy comes in Chapter VI:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions. By 'language embellished,' I mean language into which rhythm, 'harmony' and song enter. By 'the several kinds in separate parts,' I mean, that some parts are rendered through the medium of verse alone, others again with the aid of song. 

I'm reminded, reviewing his definition and immediate discussion of it, of the tremendous value of Aristotle's method. He begins by defining a domain (imitation), then discussing its variations, finally narrowing in on tragedy and its essential characteristics (in this case, the imitation of action concerning characters of a higher type, and goes on to identify a specific purpose: the proper "purgation" of pity and fear. The Greek for "purgation" is κάθαρσις. The term has ritual connotations, denoting purification from pollutants.

I've never been very satisfied with the discussions of this term, since they seem to imply (implausibly) that fear and pity are being treated as analogues to pollution or disease, and that the artist's aim should therefore be to give people a platform for the expression of these emotions. There's something compelling about this, to be sure, since pity and fear involve negative judgments, and insofar as they are harbored without avenues of expression, can develop into forms of psychological trauma. That said, I suspect that this, falling quickly on the heels of a discussion of the value of imitation for learning, implies no more than that aim of tragedy is to teach people the proper expression of pity and fear, not simply by provoking (or eliciting) those emotions from their audience, but by giving them an example of how such events should be met. In this case, the primary emphasis of the catharsis here might just be the development of human empathy. I, at least, like that reading better.

Anyhow, we're discussing the work today at my little group, and though I've had to work myself into it, I'm now rather looking forward to it.

Spooky!

So we just watched a thoroughly enjoyable bit of fluff with Simon Pegg called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. It was, obviously, right up my alley. It also had a fairly well-rounded soundtrack, which featured this little gem from Dusty Springfield. It's nice to be reminded of the sensuous delights of the world before autotune.

Massimo Pigliucci's New Project

Massimo Pigliucci, the biologist-turned-philosopher and long time author of the Rationally Speaking blog and host of the Rationally Speaking podcast, has recently closed the RS shop and started a new blog venture: Scientia Salon. There's not much there yet, but it's got all the trappings of greatness. Pigliucci's opening post is a manifesto about, in essence, the responsibility of public intellectuals, and names just the sort of people who did, have done, and are doing really top notch work.

I'd urge you to check out the site quite generally, but the manifesto itself (shorn of introduction), is brief and worth quoting in full:

1) Scientia Salon is a forum for academic and non-academic thinkers who do not shy from the label “public intellectual.”
2) We think intellectualism — in the broader sense of a publicly shared life of the mind — is crucial to the wellbeing of our society.
3) We acknowledge — as is clear from research in the cognitive sciences — that human beings navigate the world by deploying a complex mixture of reason and emotion, and that they often engage in rationalization more than rationality.
4) Indeed, we think with David Hume that this is a crucial part of human nature, since emotions are necessary in order to actually care about anything in the first place.
5) But we also think that open and reasoned discourse is fundamental for the pursuit of a eudaimonic life on the part of the individual, as well as for the development of a just and democratic society.
6) Scientia, understood as the broadest range of scientific and humanistic disciplines that positively contribute to human understanding, is an essential tool for pursuing that eudaimonic life and achieving that just society.
7) In order to make an impact, we think that writers concerned with these matters ought to aim at a wide audience, avoid unnecessary jargon, and write clearly and engagingly, even humorously when appropriate.
8) We therefore welcome authors and readers who are willing to contribute honestly and substantively to an open dialogue on all matters of the intellect, especially those of general interest to fellow human beings.

Resurrection

So...tentatively, ever tentatively, I've decided to attempt to resurrect the old blog. Some of the dreams of revisiting posts of days past is somewhat withered, as happens to all dreams too long neglected. That said, as usual, I'd like to keep a steady stream of posts devoted to either interesting readings, with occasional comments, and perhaps a few more orderly proceedings about events in the life.

About that, I've recently started up a small but determined philosophy book club. The eclecticism of the group has been well-matched by the readings so far. We started with the Euthyphro, went directly to Descartes's Meditations, then a two-week foray into Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and next we will treat Aristotle's Poetics. I'd really like to go back and do some posting about the Hume, but for now, I'll probably wind up jotting down some notes about the Poetics in preparation for our next meeting.

Interestingly, our little group features an actually active blogger, who has very thoughtfully posted some content related to our reading. His thoughts, along with my off-the-cuff response, can be found here.