Quiz April 7

Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer LH 19-23; FL 29-30
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NOTA BENE (take careful note, especially those who've not been participating on this site since we resumed the semester remotely): your course grade will depend even more heavily on participation on this site, since we've gone to an exclusively-online model. So, let's all get busy posting comments and contributing to discussion threads.

1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world. 

2. What was Kant's great insight?

3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality?

4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.

5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today?

6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation?

7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime?

8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?

9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge?

10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)?

11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire?

FL 29-30
12. For what American president was "the world of legend and myth a real world"?

13. What made it possible, beginning in the '90s, for "cockamamie ideas and outright falsehoods" to spread fast and wide?

14. What percentage of Americans say they never doubt the existence of God?

15. What was Augustine's instruction, 1,600 years ago?

DQ

• Do you think we all wear conceptual "spectacles" of some kind? If so, does that present a problem for the possibility of mutual understanding between ourselves and/or other kinds of knowers? 
• Does the spectacles analogy work, given the impossibility of actually removing our conceptual spectacles or changing prescriptions?
• Can we really achieve synthetic a priori knowledge from our armchairs? 114
• If you help someone because you feel sorry for them, have you behaved morally? 116 What if, reflecting on why you feel sorry for them, you conclude that helping them would be the right thing to do?
• Are there any moral rules you believe to be absolutely inviolable, never to be broken for any reason? Can you imagine a situation in which you think it would be right to lie, cheat, or steal?
• Does history mean anything, either in advance or in retrospect? Is history (as Henry Ford said) "bunk"? Can we learn lessons from history that will enable us to avoid repeating past errors? Do you agree with George Santayana that if we don't learn from history's mistakes we're doomed to repeat them?
• Is the world becoming more conscious, somehow? Does nature come to know itself through us?
• If we could somehow know that the world had no ultimate purpose, would pessimism and despair be an appropriate response?
• Do art, literature, and music have redemptive properties?

Jeremy Bentham

The philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was born in Spitalfields, London, on 15 February 1748. He proved to be something of a child prodigy: while still a toddler he was discovered sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three. At twelve, he was sent to Queen's College Oxford, his father, a prosperous attorney, having decided that Jeremy would follow him into the law, and feeling quite sure that his brilliant son would one day be Lord Chancellor of England.

Bentham, however, soon became disillusioned with the law, especially after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of the day, Sir William Blackstone (1723-80). Instead of practising the law, he decided to write about it, and he spent his life criticising the existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. His father's death in 1792 left him financially independent, and for nearly forty years he lived quietly in Westminster, producing between ten and twenty sheets of manuscript a day, even when he was in his eighties. Many thousands of Bentham's manuscripts exist to this day, the majority of which are in two collections at UCL Library and at the British Library.

Above: (right) Bentham in about 1790, aged about forty, and (left) in 1827, aged seventy-nine.

Work

Even for those who have never read a line of Bentham, he will always be associated with the doctrine of Utilitarianism and the principle of `the greatest happiness of the greatest number'. This, however, was only his starting point for a radical critique of society, which aimed to test the usefulness of existing institutions, practices and beliefs against an objective evaluative standard. He was an outspoken advocate of law reform, a pugnacious critic of established political doctrines like natural law and contractarianism, and the first to produce a utilitarian justification for democracy. He also had much to say of note on subjects as diverse as prison reform, religion, poor relief, international law, and animal welfare. A visionary far ahead of his time, he advocated universal suffrage and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

By the 1820s Bentham had become a widely respected figure, both in Britain and in other parts of the world. His ideas were greatly to influence the reforms of public administration made during the nineteenth century, and his writings are still at the centre of academic debate, especially as regards social policy, legal positivism, and welfare economics.

Death

Bentham died on 6 June 1832, a day before the first Reform Act was given Royal Assent. As per the directions in his will, Bentham's body was dissected by his friend, the surgeon Thomas Southwood Smith, and his skeleton preserved as the Auto-Icon. Research into Bentham's thought and life continues today at UCL's Bentham Project, set up in the early 1960s with the aim of producing the first scholarly edition of his works and correspondence. This edition is projected to run to some eighty volumes!

Members of the public are invited to assist in this massive editorial task by helping to transcribe Bentham's manuscripts via a specially-adapted website: Transcribe Bentham.

Further reading:

• Sign up to the Transcribe Bentham newsletter for the latest news about Bentham and the Bentham Project
• J. Bentham, Selected Writings, ed. S. Engelmann (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011)
• J. Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996). A new paperback edition with an introduction by F. Rosen, and an interpretive essay by H.L.A. Hart. Rosen's introduction outlines recent trends in Bentham scholarship, and contains an extensive bibliography.
• F. Rosen, 'Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007)
• P. Schofield, Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2009)
• See also the series of leaflets on Bentham's thought produced by the Bentham Project.

The cost of happiness

Powerful interests benefit from our 

increased willingness to monitor and 

meddle with our mental states

Hudson Yard real estate project in New York City is set to be the most ambitious experiment yet in “quantified community”. Set to cater for 5,000 apartments, offices, retail space and a school, Hudson Yard will be built to enable maximal data-mining of its population. “Treating humans like white rats,” as William Davies puts it, “is now becoming integrated into the principles of urban planning.”

Davies’s new book shows how “managing our happiness” is becoming an increasingly lucrative and insidious industry. True to its subtitle, “How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being”, it exposes the powerful interests that benefit from our increased willingness to monitor and meddle with our mental states. But Davies takes us much further than this. It is not just that Hudson Yard will soon exist. It is the fact that this Panopticon project is being heralded as “social progress” and – most disturbingly – that people actually want to live there.

The Happiness Industry is the story of how we got here. Davies guides us through a cast of characters who took us forward in this zigzag journey. We start, naturally enough, with the founder of utilitarianism. We know Jeremy Bentham for his principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. Davies presents him as a forefather of the happiness industry. His ideas about the state and the free market working to punish and reward, through pleasure and pain, set the stage for “the entangling of psychological research and capitalism” that was to shape twentieth-century business... (continues)

– by Niki Seth-Smith
==
A terrific book inspired by Kant's philosophy (I'm planning to use it next semester):

Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

by 

Susan Neiman

Our culture is obsessed with youth-and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect - and demand - very little from it. In Why Grow Up? she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is.

Why Grow Up? is a witty and concise argument for the value of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and all the more worth striving for.