Philosophy Final Soccio\'s Archetypes of Wisdom Gives

Philosophy Final

Soccio's Archetypes of Wisdom gives a relatively thorough survey of philosophy from ancient "wise men" like Socrates down to present-day university professors like Martha Nussbaum. It gives a sense of philosophy as not only applicable to serious questions in our daily life, but also. I think the three biggest areas in which I learned from Soccio's survey of philosophy relate to religion, utilitarianism, and something I would like to term "intellectual modesty." This necessarily represents a personal response to Soccio's presentation of the great philosophers, but I have never taken a philosophy course before this. To some extent, I am most fascinated by the applicability Soccio emphasizes, especially with intellectual questions which can be more broadly applied within anyone's life (including my own).

The chief personal feeling that I got from Soccio's survey of philosophy is an increased intellectual respect for religion. This is purely a personal reaction, based on those philosophers in Soccio's survey who deal with religious issues: Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and William James were all new to me. It is worth noting, though, that American religion does not do much to dispel the impression that it is intellectually and philosophically jejune, and so much of it seems an expression of ressentiment combined with an apparatus of pseudo-scholarship. For example, the hostility to science evidenced by so much contemporary American religion could not be farther from Aquinas'"efforts to prove God's existence [which] begin with appeals to concrete experience and empirical evidence, rather than with revelations or dogma -- an argument style favored by Aristotle" (Soccio 224). Also, it had not occurred to me that philosophers could address religion seriously as an intellectual question while acknowledging the limitations of specific religious believers, like the passage from Kierkegaard's Either/Or quoted by Soccio: "The thoughts of their hearts are too paltry to be sinful…They do their duty, these shopkeeping souls, but they clip the coin a trifle…they think that even if the Lord keeps ever so careful a set of books, they may still cheat Him a little." (Soccio 410). And finally, in keeping with Soccio's emphasis on useful and applicable approaches to philosophy, which I think derives from William James' pragmatism ultimately, I particularly was fascinated by the way that Soccio invokes psychology and sociology experiments which confirm "James's sense that the 'best' beliefs are not always the 'truest' ones' (Soccio 447). This last point -- in which we weigh the difference between a true and a useful belief, and ask which is God (one, neither, or both if necessary) -- strikes me as particularly interesting, and seems to be part of a larger philosophical trend, Pragmatism, that I found sympathetic.

In terms of philosophical schools, though, I find my own preference for William James and Pragmatism is not so strong as my resistance to the Utilitarians. It strikes me that any kind of large scale meliorist scheme for society is required to have a level of emotional appeal -- or rather, it strikes me that without any emotional appeal, Utilitarianism can only impress people in a superficial sort of way. Jeremy Bentham seems to have anticipated various modern positions on things (such as homosexuality) precisely because he did not understand the objections to it were largely emotive (based on disgust and contempt, as Martha Nussbaum would later note, rather than on the older religious logic of Aquinas which had associated sodomy with heresy). Utilitarianism seems to encapsulate the limits of rationality, rather than give a sense of its grandeur. This became far more obvious when Soccio reached the subject of contemporary practitioners of Utilitarian philosophy, and had to discuss Peter Singer and his "relentless application of utilitarian principles" (Soccio 532). The fact is that Singer seems to me a seriously overrated thinker, more given to shock tactics than serious thought. A philosophical Pragmatist would look at Singer and, recalling William James' observation that "inquiry is always interest," would inquire what Singer's own investment in his fervently-propagandized and bizarre Utilitarian prescriptions for society must be. This is fascinating, because in his biography Singer is the child of Holocaust survivors who has himself been characterized as a Nazi by disabled activists in Germany, based on his "Utilitarian" positions on euthanasia, disability and other subjects. It strikes me that he is more likely acting out a personal drama.