Graham Oppy -The Historical Presence Of Atheists (1000-1650)

Receiving a BSc./BA (Hons) from Melbourne, and a PhD from Princeton, Dr. Graham Oppy’s initial publications were primarily focused on the philosophy of language and aesthetics. More recently, however, he has published numerous books and articles in the philosophy of religion including, but not limited to, Arguing About Gods (Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Best Argument Against God (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Describing Gods: An Investigation Of Divine Attributes (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He also served as editor for the upcoming Blackwell Companion To Atheism And Philosophy which will be released on March 12th, 2019. In addition to being Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Research at Monash University, where he has taught since 1996, Dr. Oppy is Chair of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. In this interview, we focus on some of the historical aspects of atheism. Particular attention is paid to Dr. Oppy’s own interests concerning the historical presence of atheists within Western Christendom between the years 1000 and 1650 C.E. 

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Thanks for taking the time for an interview, Dr. Oppy! 

I think it’s fair to say that religious belief has, in one way or another, been a significant focal point over the course of your philosophical career. The entire range of arguments for and against theism certainly comprise a subject with more popular appeal than many other areas within the discipline. Growing up in a small religious community myself, the widespread interest in apologetics ensured that your work was one of my first encounters with philosophy conducted at the professional level. 

The focus here, however, will be on history. More specifically, we’ll be exploring your own interest in the history of atheism and the ways it has changed over the centuries. What sparked your curiosity regarding the historical aspects of atheism? Do you see it as a natural development of your earlier work or something new? 

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I think that my professional interest in historical aspects of atheism has been steadily growing. Initially, all of my work in philosophy of religion focused on arguments about the existence of God, and questions about divine attributes. Later, I started to do some work on more methodological questions: What makes for a good argument for or against the existence of God? How should we go about assessing and comparing different worldviews, such as theistic and naturalistic worldviews? Most recently, I have begun to focus on wider questions about naturalism and atheism: What do the social sciences tell us about naturalists and atheists? Is there a mismatch between reality and common stereotypes of naturalists and atheists? My developing interest in historical aspects of atheism fits in with this wider focus.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. One of the interesting features of the book is the range of slightly different things that he says about the existence of atheists in Western Christendom in the period 1000-1650. In some places, what he says suggests something like certainty that there were no atheists in this period. Other times, what he says suggests something like reasonably firm conviction that there were no atheists in this period. Yet other things he says suggest that it is hard to know what to think, given that, even if there were atheists in this period, it is reasonably likely that it would be very hard for us now to find evidence of their existence. Although I am not sure how to approach the question, I would like to see what progress can be made in trying to determine whether there were atheists in  Western Christendom in the period 1000-1650.

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As you note, formulating the correct question is crucial to engaging with the historical literature on non-believers. The word “atheist” has had a variety of uses over the centuries and one wants to avoid anachronistic interpretations of the term. 

It seems like an ambiguity has persisted even up to the present day. It’s not hard to find people arguing about what commitments are entailed by claiming to be an atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc. Have your own views on what it means to be an atheist changed over the years? If so, how? 

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Use of the words ‘atheist’, ‘atheism’, etc. ranges widely, even for individual language users. Philosophers who wish to use these words typically need to explain exactly how they will use them in their philosophical writings. It is important to remember that these explanations are stipulative: many ordinary uses of these words do not conform to the definitions that I use in my work.

I start with ‘atheism’. The way I use this word in my philosophical writings, it is the claim that there are no gods. The contrasting claim is ‘theism’: the claim that there is at least one god. ‘Atheism’ and ‘theism’ are jointly exhaustive: either there are no gods or there is at least one god. ‘Theism’ admits of further distinctions: ‘monotheism’ is the claim that there is exactly one god; and ‘polytheism’ is the claim that there is more than one god. Typically, the god of monotheism is called ‘God’. It is a consequence of atheism that there is no God. (Some monotheists reject the claim that God is a god. To accommodate people who run this line, we can say, instead, that ‘atheism’ is the claim that there are no gods and there is no God. Rather than go with this more complicated formulation, I say that those monotheists who reject the claim that God is a god should simply take the adjustment as read.) My understanding of the word ‘atheism’ has not changed over the course of my philosophical career.

I next advance to the much trickier ‘atheist’. Atheists have a particular kind of orientation or attitude towards the claim that there are no gods. In order to identify the relevant orientation of attitude, we need to first say something about the kind of orientation or attitude that is in view.

On one way of thinking about belief, belief is an all-or-nothing matter.  For any given claim–or proposition, or statement, or the like–there are just four different orientations or attitudes that you might have towards the given claim. You might believe the claim; you might believe the negation of the claim; you might suspend judgment about the claim; or you might have no attitude towards the claim. (If you have no attitude towards the claim, this may be because you are unable to understand the claim, or it may be because you simply have never given any consideration to it.) Given this fourfold scheme of classification, we can say the following: atheists believe that there are no gods; theists believe that there is at least one god; agnostics suspend judgment on the question whether there are gods; and innocents have no attitude towards the claim that there are gods.

On a different way of thinking about beliefs, belief is something like a matter of degree. For any given claim–or proposition, or statement, or the like–an agent gives a certain credence to that claim. Some philosophers think that credences are associate with precise probabilities, or perhaps with precise probabilistic intervals. To a first degree of approximation, given this way of thinking about beliefs, we can say something like the following: atheists give credence above 0.5 to the claim that there are no gods; theists give credence below 0.5 to the claim that there are no gods; agnostics give credence exactly 0.5 to the claim that there are no gods; and innocents have no credence for the claim that there are no gods. This is only a first approximation. Someone whose credence for the claim that there are no gods is the interval [0.4, 0.6] is plausibly an agnostic. Once we start taking interval judgments like this into account, it becomes trickier to map belief as matter of degree onto belief as all-or-nothing.

People sometimes suppose that atheists are those who are certain that there are no gods. These people suppose that atheists have credence 1.0 that there are no gods. By symmetry, such people must suppose that theists have credence 1.0 that there are gods. Plausibly, such people suppose that there are–and always have been–a very large number of agnostics. At the time that I wrote my paper “Weak Agnosticism Defended” and my book Ontological Arguments and Belief in God, I was using the words ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’ in this way. (Bertrand Russell often used the words this way, too.) However, in my more recent work–certainly since I wrote Arguing about Gods–I have adopted something much closer to the usage that anyone who gives credence above 0.5 to the claim that there are no gods is an atheist. It should be noted that this does not mean that my views have changed in any substantive way: what has changed is just the understanding of the words that are used to characterize my views. Throughout my career, I have always given very high credence to the claim that there are no gods: but early in my career, I called myself an ‘agnostic’; and throughout the rest of my career, I have called myself an ‘atheist’. (In the last few years, I have come to give more serious consideration to the thought that I should give credence 1.0 to the claim that there are no gods. That would be a substantive shift; but it is not a matter that will be relevant to the discussion that we are having here.)

The historical question in which I am interested can be put in either of the following ways: Were there, in the period between 1000 and 1650, people who believed that there are no gods? Were there, in the period between 1000 and 1650, people who gave credence greater than 0.5 to the claim that there are no gods?

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Regarding the historical question, what might lead someone to believe that this period contained few or no atheists? 

The years 1000-1650 were clearly a time of great transformations within Christianity, but what kinds of evidence might motivate one to claim that there were or were not non-religious individuals who lived during this period of change?

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The claim that there were no atheists in the period 1000-1650 is typically backed by the observation that there are no individuals in this period who can be definitively identified as believers of the claim that there are no gods. We have no preserved writings in which authors asserts that they themselves maintain that there are no gods. And we have no preserved writings in which authors identify particular individuals as believers of the claim that there are no gods. (My end date of 1650 is deliberately cautious. Some would be happy to extend the period in question to about 1720. There is no serious doubt that Jean Meslier (1664-1729) believed that there are no gods, at least in the last years of his life during which he wrote his remarkable Testament. However, it seems that Matthias Knutsen (b.1646) published pamphlets in which he maintained that there are no gods in 1674 (his fate thereafter is unknown); and Kazimiersz Lyszczynski was executed in 1689 for his authorship of a work On the Non-Existence of God. )

The waters are muddied considerably because, in the period from 1580-1650, there is a significant literature in the UK condemning ‘atheism’ and ‘atheists’. The words ‘atheism’ and ‘atheist’ were introduced into the English language–from the French language–in the middle of the sixteenth century. (Interestingly, the words ‘theism’ and theist’ do not appear until several generations later.) Very roughly, in their early use, ‘atheism’ and ‘atheist’ were general purpose terms of abuse for those who hold unorthodox or insufficiently enthusiastic Christian beliefs, or who believe in gods other than the Christian God: Jews, Muslims, etc. When Christopher Marlowe was accused of being an atheist by Anglicans, the content of the charge may well have been no more than that he was displaying Catholic sympathies.

As David Berman notes–in his very nice History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell–it was common, in the eighteenth century, for authors to distinguish between ‘theoretical atheism’ (reasoned belief that there are no gods) and ‘practical atheism’ (unthinking atheism based in stupidity, ignorance, immorality, indolence, wantonness, and so forth). He cites the entry on atheism from the Encyclopedia Britannica (1771): “Many people, both ancient and modern, have pretended to atheism, or have been reckoned atheists by the world; but it is justly questioned whether any man seriously adopted such a principle. These pretensions, therefore, must be founded on pride or affectation.” An earlier article, in the London Magazine of 1734, says: “A contemplative atheist is what I think impossible; most who would be thought atheists are so out of indolence, because they will not give themselves time to reason, to find if they are so or not: It is rather from wantonness of their heart than the result of their thoughts.” (Just  for reference: the first atheist pamphlet in Britain that was not circulated anonymously appeared in 1782. The main text of the pamphlet was attributed to a Liverpool physician, Matthew Turner; the preface and postscript were attributed to ‘William Hammon”.)

Despite the claims of these eighteenth century authors, it is not true that many people ‘pretended to be atheists’ in the period 1000-1650. To be accused of ‘atheism’ in the period 1580–1700 was life-endangering. The London Blasphemy Act of 1648 said, in part: “That all such persons as shall from and after the date of this present Ordinance, willingly by Preaching, Teaching, Printing or Writing, Maintain and publish that there is no God … shall be indicted for Felonious Publishing and maintaining such Errour, and in case the Indictment be found, and the Party upon his Trial shall not abjure his said Errour and defence and maintenance of the same, he shall suffer the pains of death.” In 1697, Thomas Aikenhead, a student at the University of Edinburgh, was executed for blasphemy, under the Scottish Blasphemy Acts of 1661 and 1695, which were very similar to the London Blasphemy Act of 1648 in tone and content.

In the broader period between 1000 and 1650, penalties for heresy, blasphemy, and so forth, were no less severe. In his Summa Theologiae, on the question whether heretics ought to be tolerated, Aquinas says the following: “On the part of the Church, however, there is mercy which looks to the conversion of the wanderer, wherefore she condemns not at once, but ‘after the first and second admonition’, as the Apostle directs: after that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.” (This is the standard view of all the Christian churches, Catholic and Reformed, until well into the seventeenth century.) Throughout Western Christendom, in the period 1000-1650, only someone with a death wish would have publicly affirmed that there are no gods. Indeed, only someone who cared little whether they lived or died would have privately affirmed that there are no gods: Aikenhead’s error was to make some passing remarks to fellow students, who reported his remarks to religious authorities (who, along with related political authorities, had interests well-served by a hanging).

The question whether there were atheists in the period 1000-1650 should be carefully distinguished from the question whether there were non-religious people in that period. From the time that Herbert of Cherbury wrote his De Veritate in 1624, deism was established as a tolerable response to the bloodshed that had been initiated by the Reformation about one hundred years earlier. According to Cherbury, one ought to believe that God exists, one ought revere God, one ought to worship God by behaving morally, one has an obligation to repent one’s misdeeds, and one can expect divine recompense in this world and the next. But that’s it. You should not participate in any organised religion, since all else in religion is allegorisation of nature, self-deception, imagination, and the illegitimate offspring of priestly guile. Moreover, in the earlier period from, say, 1000-1600, there were, as Charles Taylor remarks, in different times and places, many people who were not enthusiastic participants in organised religion. (Indeed, it is one of the big themes of Taylor’s book that the desire, on the part of the Church, to ‘reform’ or ‘improve’ the vast majority of its non-clerical members in the period, say, 1300-1500, played a significant role in the eventual rise of secularism.) There are, then, various ways, throughout the historical period under discussion, in which people could be theists, and yet only minimally religious.

Given the preceding discussion, we can sharpen our question a bit further. One question is whether, during the period 1000-1650, there were ‘intellectual’ atheists: intellectuals who maintained that there are no gods. Were there intellectuals in earlier centuries who had thoughts like those that Meslier committed to paper, but who either kept those thoughts to themselves, or else have been since airbrushed from the historical record? Another question is whether, during the period 1000-1650, there were ‘common’ atheists: common folk who maintained that there are no gods? Were there common folk, during the period 1000-1650, who kept their atheistic thoughts to themselves, or whose disclosed atheistic thoughts have since been airbrushed from the historical record?

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I am interested in exploring the notion of an “intellectual atheist” a bit further. Up to now, we have been focused specifically upon individuals who, publicly or privately, deny the existence of gods. However, one might wonder whether this demographic fully captures the phenomenon you’re focused on. In particular, how would you relate individuals of a pantheistic persuasion (I’m thinking here of people like Baruch Spinoza) to the presence or lack of atheism? Although Spinoza himself may not strictly qualify as an atheist by your standards (and arrives rather late for your time period), do pantheistic varieties of religious faith do anything to blur the lines regarding who qualifies as an atheist?  

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I think that there is an important distinction between those historical figures who were ‘intellectual’ atheists, and those historical figures who helped to produce the conditions in which there were “intellectual” atheists.

On my way of thinking about atheism, pantheists are not atheists. I discuss the question whether pantheists are atheists in section 4.1 of Naturalism and Religion. I take it that the property of being divine is not a natural property. Since pantheists suppose that natural reality is divine, pantheists suppose that natural reality has a non-natural property. And that’s enough to rule out their being naturalists. Moreover, and for much the same reason, pantheists are not atheists: pantheists suppose that natural reality is a god [or God]. It is true that many people have labelled, or label, Spinoza an ‘atheist’. But, at least by my lights, that label is unearned.

However, even though Spinoza was not himself an atheist, he did contribute to changes to Western Christendom that made it possible for there to be “intellectual” atheists. In particular, the biblical criticism of Spinoza (and Hobbes) laid foundations for the more comprehensive criticism of Strauss,and others. From the year 1000–and even before–hundreds of changes occurred, the cumulative effect of which was to make it possible for there to be “intellectual” atheists. Hobbes (a deist) and Spinoza (a pantheist) contribute to some of those many changes.

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Before we conclude, I’d be interested in some of your broader reflections on the importance of this question for our understanding of atheism and its historical influence. You mentioned that reading Charles Taylor helped to prompt your interest in the topic. What impact do you think the existence of atheists during this period might have for some of Taylor’s theses regarding secularism and modernity?

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In A Secular Age, Taylor aims to explain the rise of secularism in Western Christendom. His focus is on the (largely) unintended contributions that the Church (and, after the Reformation, the churches) made to the rise of secularism. As Taylor notes, moves towards secularism occurred in different places at different times with different causes and rates of change. One cause to which Taylor attributes significant importance is a several-centuries long campaign by church leaders to “improve” their congregations, by, for example, ending traditional “carnivals”. According to Taylor, “carnivals” were an important safety-valve that stabilized the highly inequitable social order that prevailed in Western Christendom during the period between 1000 and 1500. The “anti-carnival” campaign thus helped, says Taylor, to contribute to the undoing of that earlier social order.

Based on what I have learned so far, I think that Taylor is right to claim that the long drift towards secularism received very little impetus from people with overt commitment to secularism. Almost everywhere in Western Christendom, between 1000 and 1600, support for secularism would very likely have been rewarded with capital punishment. (Why? Because support for secularism would have been assimilated to heresy, or blasphemy, or the like. And all of those things–if not renounced–were capital crimes.) If there were atheists in this period, they were in no position to guide the eventual emergence of secularism in Western Christendom.

Although Taylor does make occasional notes concerning the justice of complaints about the corruption, hypocrisy, and cruelty of church authorities, I think that he may understate the role that this played in the eventual emergence of secularism. Prior to the Reformation, there were many independent protests against clerical corruption and hypocrisy–e.g. by the Pataria, Waldensians, Lollards, Arnoldists, and Hussites– and there were other dissenting religious groups–e.g.. the Bogomils, Albigenses, and Cathars–who were moved to protest against the Church on additional grounds. Retribution for members of these groups–as for those otherwise identified as heretics, blasphemers, witches, and the like–was typically brutal and guaranteed to produce enduring enmities. In these conditions, it seems to me likely that there were some people, with no love for either church or Christianity, who, for reasons of prudence, kept those sentiments to themselves. Given that there were such people, it also seems to me to be at least an open question whether some of them were atheists.

In the nature of the case, it is hard to find evidence that bears one way or the other on the hypothesis that I have just floated. Even if I’m right, I do not think that it significantly changes the story that Taylor tells about the emergence of secularism. Collective commitment to secularism did not emerge until around the time of the Treaties of Westphalia; and it emerged, fairly directly, as a response to the post-Reformation wars of religion. Collective commitment to atheism did not emerge for a further century, in the wake of many other wide-ranging social, economic and political developments. The slow undoing of the social order that was in place at the beginning of the first millennium in Western Christendom was almost entirely the product of the deeds of Christian believers. at least until the rise of Deism.

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Thank you for sharing your thoughts on the historical presence of atheists, Dr. Oppy. 

I try to end with a book recommendation or two on some of the themes covered in each interview. Aside from A Secular Age, are there any other books you might point out for readers looking to pursue this topic further?

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Here are some references:

[Dr. Oppy provided a generous list of books relating to each of the various themes covered over the course of our interview. Those related to the key historical question are listed directly below. The rest can be found beneath the interview.]

• Atheism in France, 1650-1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief by Alan Charles Kors (1990)
• A History of Atheism in Britain by David Berman (1990)
• Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650-1729 by Alan Charles Kors (2016)

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Thank you for such an intriguing interview! 

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[Complete list of references, tagged to each reply:

1.

Oppy, G. (2018) Atheism: The Basics Routledge

Oppy, G. (2018) Naturalism and Religion Routledge

Oppy, G. (2018) Atheism and Agnosticism CUP

2.

Oppy, G. (1995) “Weak Agnosticism Defended” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36, 3, 147-67

Bullivant, S. (2013) “Defining ‘Atheism'” in S. Bullivant and M. Ruse (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Atheism, 11-21

3.

Russell, B. (1952) ‘Is There a God?’

Draper, P. (2017) ‘Atheism and Agnosticism’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/ 

 

4.

Meslier, J. (2009) Testament, translated by M. Shreve, Prometheus

Berman, D. (1990) A History of Atheism in Britain Routledge

Rose, D. (2017) Unspeakable Freight

5.

Baggini, J. (2003) Atheism: A Very Short Introduction

Glover, W. (1960) ‘God and Thomas Hobbes’ Church History 29, 3, 275-97

6.

Taylor, C. (2007) A Secular Age Harvard University Press

Kors, C. (1990) Atheism in France, 1650-1729: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief

Kors, C. (2016) Naturalism and Unbelief in France, 1650-1729]

The Cost Of “Free”: Thoughts On The Dennett-Caruso Exchange

The following post is a reflection upon “Just Deserts” by Daniel Dennett and Greg Caruso.

You can read the original exchange at Aeon by clicking the following link: https://aeon.co/essays/on-free-will-daniel-dennett-and-gregg-caruso-go-head-to-head

 

In their recent exchange published by Aeon, aptly titled “Just Deserts”, the philosophers Greg Caruso and Daniel Dennett go head to head on the topic of free-will and its relationship to retributive justice. For those who have followed Dennett’s storied history with the subject, from Elbow Room (his early defense of compatibilism) to his ongoing(?) debate with Galen Strawson, the prospect of yet another round might appear unwarranted or, even worse, tiresome. Thankfully, Caruso proves to be an able sparring partner, eagerly honing in on the implications of Dennett’s position for social policy in a clear and precise manner.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should state at the outset that I have always found myself largely convinced by the compatibilist camp on these issues, though I have frequently been disappointed with Dennett’s particular style of characterizing it. His go-to examples (repeated in this conversation) such as “the Moral Agents Club” and the analogy to sports seem, by my lights, to place free-will on the foundations of social construction, rather than admit its existence as a substantial, metaphysical phenomenon. To his credit, Caruso provides an effective deconstruction of Dennett’s metaphors on this score, repeatedly forcing Dennett to clarify the precise nature of his philosophical commitments.

Nevertheless, I could not help coming away with several questions concerning the choice of topics discussed. According to Caruso, “the notion of basic desert”, serves as his primary target over the course of the discussion. He takes this notion to serve as the core criterion for determining whether or not an agent proves “truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward” in the retrospective sense that ignores any utilitarian benefit that may be provided in the long run. With this emphasis in mind, Caruso poses the following question to Dennett: “My question, then, is whether the kind of desert you have in mind is enough to justify retributive punishment?”

I find it curious that Caruso focuses on this point in order to challenge compatibilism, primarily because I can’t see how the success of Dennett’s position turns on it, regardless of how he replies. For one, it seems as though a robust conception of free-will can remain intact even if it were merely necessary to justify retributivism without being sufficient by itself. One might hold that, even if individuals are truly deserving in virtue of making free choices, we should nevertheless refrain from punishment on consequentialist grounds. Indeed, such a view was explicitly propounded by the Athenian, Diodotus, regarding the question of capital punishment in his speech before the Athenian Assembly:

 Though I prove them ever so guilty, I shall not, therefore advise their death, unless it be expedient… I consider that we are deliberating for the future more than for the present… All, states and individuals, are alike prone to err, and there is no law that will prevent them; or why should men have exhausted the list of punishments in search of enactments to protect them from evildoers? It is probable that in early times the penalties for the greatest offences were less severe, and that, as these were disregarded, the penalty of death has been by degrees in most cases arrived at, which is itself disregarded in like manner. Either then some means of terror more terrible than this must be discovered, or it must be owned that this restraint is useless… (Thucydides 1968:152)

Caruso is quick to emphasize that his position does not entail being a skeptic about punishment as an institution. As he notes, “free-will skeptics typically point out that the impositions of sanctions serve purposes other than punishment of the guilty: it can also be justified by its role in incapacitating, rehabilitating and deterring offenders.” What he fails to properly address, however, is the fact that a parallel argument can be run by free-will realists against punishment by recourse to similar means. My point is not that such arguments succeed or that retributivism is necessarily misguided. I only wish to point out one can consistently reject retributivism without also rejecting a robust conception of free-will and moral desert. Given that this is the case, I remain puzzled as to why Caruso finds it such a pressing issue in the exchange.

Nevertheless, one might argue, even if punishment can be rejected by the free-will realist, it still remains the case that whether or not a person is in fact worthy of praise or blame in any “backward-looking” sense is a question which Caruso can still reject. This gets to the heart of the difference between Dennett’s view and his own. For Caruso, the fact that “the particular reasons that move us, along with the psychological predispositions, likes and dislikes, and other constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control” is one that undermines any legitimate appeal to the kind of responsibility he takes to be required for a person to be truly praiseworthy or not.

Before proceeding, it is worth asking what would make praise and blame appropriate for a free-will realist in the first place. On the common-sense view of things, what we are doing when we praise someone, for instance, is expressing our approval of their having done the right thing. Crucially, we do not praise someone simply because they did something that just happened to be right. Rather, someone is worthy of praise when they do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. In other words, we praise them precisely because they are adequately responsive to the right kinds of reasons when acting. Of course, again, it must be asked whether or not being responsive to the right reasons is sufficient for being praiseworthy. Must it not also be the case that the reasons in question are responded to freely?

On this front, I suspect that Dennett would agree with me that the question does not make sense. To say that people arefree requires nothing beyond the claim that “in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them.” When individuals adjust their behavior in light of the right reasons, they are praiseworthy. When they adjust in light of the wrong reasons, they are blameworthy.

Caruso is wrong to claim that the particular reasons that move us are beyond our control. If this were the case, we would not be moved by them at all. He is right, however, to say that “constitutive factors that make us who we are, themselves are ultimately the result of factors beyond our control.” The difficulty Caruso faces is simply that this fact provides no obvious reason to reject the reality of free-will. The fact that I am embodied is also a constitutive fact that makes me who I am over which I had no control, yet this fact poses no obstacle for free-will realism. If Caruso wishes to pose such a difficulty, he will have to substantiate the further claim that the reason I chose to act in the way that I did was beyond my control. There is no compelling reason to believe that this is the case.

In his essay “Wide Causation” (1997), Stephen Yablo explores whether or not we can ever truly say that physical events are subject to mental influence. The difficulty for the view that they are comes in the form of what Yablo refers to as “the argument from below”. According to this argument, given that a story can be told regarding the causal underpinnings of our behaviour in wholly physical terms, it would seem as though there is simply no room for our mental life to play any causal role. Unfortunately for the free-will skeptic, whether or not this principle is appropriate in some circumstances, Yablo argues, it is not applicable if the relevant higher-order cause and its physical underpinnings stand in a determinable/determinate relation, as mental causes plausibly do with respect to brain states.

Yablo finds a powerful wedge for the believer in mental causation by way of the “proportionality principle” According to this principle, it is not enough that something be causally sufficient for its effect in order to hold pride of place as the “true cause”. If this were the case, there would be no grounds for preferring the physical brain state to the specific mental state it realizes since both are causally sufficient for their effects. Instead, it is also required that the determinate or determinable in question be proportional to its resulting effects in a way that the state it realizes or is realized by is not.

To take a simple example, Yablo considers the case of pain. In a specific case in which a specific brain state realizes a specific pain, it is obvious that the brain state is causally sufficient for any of the effects that follow. However, in light of the proportionality principle, it is not at all clear that the brain state should be considered as the cause of its bearer’s behaviour instead of the pain. Imagine that one of the subsequent effects is a grimace by the subject. In this case, Yablo points out that “I would still have grimaced even if my pain had occurred in a different microphysical way. Whereas the issue of how I would have behaved had the brain state occurred in the pain’s absence cannot even be raised, because the brain state includes the pain.” In this scenario, although the determinate brain state is causally sufficient for all resulting effects, it is not clear that it is appropriately proportional to them. One of the effects (the grimace) is more appropriately explained by the presence of pain than the presence of its realizing brain state. Consequently, it is not at all clear that the brain state is the true cause of that subject’s behavior, rather than the pain.

It is here that Dennett can (and perhaps does, though not in the same words) help himself to an account of behavioural causation that fully allows for human action to be caused on the basis of reasons. When he claims that “autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control”, one could plausibly interpret Dennett as claiming that it is only once the realized mental states which are sufficient for our behavior are the proportional cause of such actions that we can truly be said to have free-will. I suspect that Yablo and Dennett would find each other to be powerful allies in developing a model of precisely this kind.

The purpose of this excursion was not to argue that Yablo is completely right, or that nothing more is required for a proper explanation of our ability to act on the basis of reasons. I only highlight Yablo’s essay as a shining example of the vast array of options which the free-will realist has at their disposal. When I act on the basis of a reason, Caruso might say that this action is itself the result of a vast array of causes which I have no knowledge of or control over. The free-will realist can grant all of these claims without conceding to Caruso’s further claim that my actions cannot truly be said to be the result of my own free-will. In short, even if Caruso is ultimately correct, he still has all his work ahead of him if he wishes to show the reality of free-will to be a sham.

Before concluding, I would like to address one issue raised by Caruso that I find extremely insightful as a reflection regarding the extent to which praise and blame are appropriate even if one recognizes the reality of free-will. Addressing Dennett’s claim that the differences between individuals and their choices average out to such an extent that we can reasonably hold each of them responsible for their actions as independent agents, Caruso retorts:

Luck does not average out in the long run. Those who start from a disadvantaged position of genetic abilities or early environment do not always have offsetting luck later in life. The data clearly shows that early inequalities in life often compound over time rather than average out, affecting everything from differences in health and incarceration rates to success in school and all other aspects of life… as Levy puts it: ‘We cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck’. Hence the very actions to which compatibilists point, the actions whereby agents take responsibility for their endowments, either express that endowment (when they are explained by constitutive luck) or reflect the agent’s present luck, or both. Either way, responsibility is undermined.

Here, Caruso points to a reality that, to my mind, Dennett has completely failed to adequately address. Even if our free decisions are properly explained by our free-will (rather than the chemical underpinnings of our brain, for instance), it still might seem that we are left with a free-will that is wholly irrelevant in a world of unwanted emotions and systematic inequality. Rather than take these as a reason to deny human freedom, I view these undeniable facts as examples of phenomena that can only be properly addressed once we recognize the reality of free decisions.

If we take free-will as our starting point, there is nothing stopping us from admitting that there are powerful forces at play which influence our choices in sub-optimal conditions. What does it mean to be in “sub-optimal conditions”? It means that one is in a situation where the human ability to rationally recognize and act upon reasons is interfered with by factors external to this rational process. When these factors are systemic, such as when public institutions are systemically biased against a specific race, this fact must be reflected in the ways we praise and blame. Similarly, if an individual is severely depressed, there is an interfering force which affects their ability to properly recognize and act upon reasons. We must recognize the relevance of these factors to judgments of desert without making the unwarranted leap to the conclusion that these factors undermine the very notion of desert itself.

What is the free-will skeptic to say in such cases? Unlike the free-will realist, they cannot say that the reason these factors matter is because they effect our ability to act freely. Rather, they are forced to view these as examples of the unfortunate truth “that the lottery of life is not always fair, that luck does not average out in the long run…” But this is to miss the whole point of what makes such inequalities reprehensible in the first place. Consider the free-market. The ideal of the free-market was never to create an egalitarian society. Rather, it was to create a society of just inequality in which any differences of outcome were the result of free decisions made on the part of consenting individuals.

The systemic inequalities of racism and ableism are not just wrong because they are inequalities (although inequality may be intrinsically wrong on its own). They are wrong because they are unjust. Yet, according to the free-will skeptic, what means is there for drawing out the deep difference between these two forms of inequality? If there were no free-will, the unequal results of a utopian free-market and the society we actually live in are just two different rolls from the same pair of dice. It is only once the profound distinction between free action and choices beyond our control is clarified that a meaningful grasp of these injustices can be established. Perhaps Caruso will reply that we can draw the difference in the forward-looking terms of what consequences these two visions of reality would lead to in the future, but that would be to overlook a moral asymmetry which I believe is undeniable and cannot be grounded upon the monolithic reasoning of consequentialism.

“Just Deserts” is an entertaining an enlightening debate between two learned scholars on the nature of moral responsibility. Daniel Dennett remains at his strongest when highlighting the reasons why his conception of free-will remains the only one worth wanting. Nevertheless, I believe he continues to falter when he appeals to “the ‘forward-looking benefits’ of the whole system of desert” in order to justify a phenomenon of the present. Likewise, Caruso proves to be a welcome arrival to a long and storied debate when he presses Dennett to recognize the underlying commonality between their means of justifying the retributive policies of a community. Although I have raised many points of disagreement between myself and these two participants, I wholeheartedly recommend their discussion to anyone interested in free-will and the proper role of desert.

-Shane Wagoner

 

Papers Cited: Yablo, Stephen (1997). “Wide Causation”. Noûs 31 (s11): 251-281

 

Robert Koons – On Heidegger

Dr. Robert C. Koons is Professor of Philosophy at The University Of Texas At Austin. After studying philosophy at Michigan State University, Oxford, and UCLA, Dr. Koons moved to his present location where he has written numerous articles and books, the most recent of which include Metaphysics: The Fundamentals (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and The Atlas Of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide To Metaphysics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), both co-written with his former student, Timothy Pickavance. He has also co-edited two anthologies: The Waning Of Materialism (OUP, 2010, with George Bealer), and Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives On Contemporary Science (Routledge 2018, with William Simpson and Nicholas Teh).  Although he specializes in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, philosophical logic, and ancient/medieval philosophy, this interview focuses on a more recent source of interest: Martin Heidegger. In the interview, we discuss the relationship of Heidegger’s work to contemporary metaphysics, existentialism, and the thought of Richard Rorty, among other topics. 

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Hello Dr. Koons!

Thank you for agreeing to be the first interview on the blog! As I mentioned, the primary goal here is to explore the thoughts of professional philosophers on the philosophical questions and topics that lie beyond the realm of their normal research and focus. How did you first encounter Heidegger? What were your initial impressions? 

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Heidegger’s a very recent interest. I’ve had a copy of his Notes Concerning Technology on my book shelf for several years and had tried reading it a couple of times, but I couldn’t make much sense of it. More recently, I bought a used copy of Being and Time, but once again it sat unread on my shelf. It was my son Ben, who just finished a BPhil at Oxford and who is starting the PhD program in philosophy at Yale who finally got me started on it. We started reading Being and Time together.

I found Being and Time quite engaging, for several reasons. First, I could see the deep influence of Aristotle on Heidegger, which intrigued me because of my own interest in Aristotle. Second, Heidegger addresses an issue that has been on the forefront of my mind in recent years, especially as a result of writing a survey of contemporary metaphysics with a former student of mine, Tim Pickavance (UT PhD from about 2005). The issue is: what is the appropriate starting point for metaphysics? What should we count as data?

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One trend in contemporary discussions of Heidegger interprets him as a profoundly anti-metaphysical figure. For example, Richard Rorty claims that the central question of Heidegger’s work is “…how can we write a historical narrative about metaphysics – about successive attempts to find a redescription of the past which the future will not be able to redescribe- without ourselves becoming metaphysicians?” (Rorty 1989)

As someone with a background in metaphysics, how do you view this anti-metaphysical interpretation of Heidegger’s work? How does it compare to your own interpretation? 

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Yes, I’d heard similar things about Heidegger before I started reading B&T. Having read it, I think Rorty’s interpretation is very wide from the mark.

Taking the text on its own terms, Heidegger says that he’s attempting to revive and answer the question of Being. This was the very definition of ‘metaphysics’ offered by Aristotle: the investigation of Being qua Being.

One could try to drive a wedge between ontology (good) and metaphysics (bad), but I don’t think that will hold up, either. Ontology is generally considered to be part of metaphysics, not an alternative to it. And the parts of metaphysics that go beyond ontology are concerned with questions of grounding or metaphysical priority.  But, in fact, we find Heidegger talking about grounding, priority, and fundamentality on almost every page. This was one of the things that immediately struck me. It was as if Heidegger had been reading Kit Fine! He uses somewhat different language: ‘basic’ and ‘primordial’ for ‘fundamental’, and ‘based upon’ or ‘founded on’ for ‘grounded by’, but it is clear that he has the same notion in mind.

Rorty is right about the historical focus of much of B&T, but of course, that isn’t inconsistent with doing metaphysics!  Heidegger is worried about the way in which an ossified tradition (even if correct) can interfere with our gaining metaphysical insight, and he talks about “destroying” the previous ontological tradition, but he intends to “loosen up” that tradition, not annihilate it, and he says that the Destruction has a positive aim.

I read B&T as an attempt to begin metaphysics anew on the basis of a new account and inventory of the appropriate starting point. It is a proto-metaphysical investigation of the correct metaphysical method, with a few preliminary conclusions about the priority of our everyday, human world over the scientific image.

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Hahaha, it’s funny that you bring up Fine. It’s been interesting to see a turn in contemporary metaphysics towards what appears to be a more Aristotelian foundation. The rise of “grounding” literature has frequently been accompanied by explicit appeals to Aristotle and Fine’s own work on essences has a distinctively Aristotelian flavor. Similar appeals have been made in the philosophy of perception with many beginning to rediscover in Aristotle a kind of realism that holds the hope of allaying common skeptical worries. 

Do you think these developments constitute a genuine shift in the field since you began your career? If so, do you think there is a possibility of Heidegger being brought back into the conversation among analytic philosophers? 

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You’re striking a theme that’s near and dear to me: the revival of interest in Aristotle. I do think there’s been quite a change over the 40 years or so that I’ve been studying philosophy. People used to think either “Aristotle was a fine fellow, in his day, but we are so far beyond him now that there’s little to learn from him” or “Aristotle? You mean essences, four causes, substances, and all that? Positively medieval!”  The common attitude nowadays is radically different. One of my early teachers at UCLA, Montgomery Furth, was a contributor to that, showing that Aristotle’s approach to science was not all the sort of dogmatic, a priorist view that people had attributed to him. One of my other teachers, this time my Oxford tutor David Charles, has done more than perhaps anyone else to both clarify and rehabilitate Aristotle’s metaphysics. Aristotelian ideas have made great strides in ethics as well—Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson. And, as you point out, Kit Fine’s approach to essences is Aristotelian in inspiration.

Back to Heidegger. I do think there’s a chance that he could be introduced into the analytic conversation—not “brought back”, since I don’t think he has been at all in the past.  When I was in grad school, some Heideggerian phrases like “The nothing nihilates itself” were used to illustrate what nonsense philosophers can produce when undisciplined by analytic strictures.  My son Ben recently delivered a conference talk comparing Heidegger’s epistemology with Plantinga’s —both as sharp critics of the Cartesian version of foundationalism. One project that I think would be quite interesting would be to see if Fine’s theory of grounding could illuminate Heidegger’s notion of founding.  Heidegger puts forward an interesting thesis that I would like to see further examined: if our knowledge about A is fundamental (not grounded in any other knowledge), then A itself must be metaphysically fundamental. He employs this principle against scientistic metaphysics (what Peter Unger calls “scientiphicalism”): our knowledge about our everyday, macroscopic world is fundamental: so that world cannot be wholly grounded in some distinct domain (like microphysics).   His defense of the principle depends on a certain view of the nature of intentionality: things that are “primordially” present to us are present to us in their true essence. There are some interesting parallels with recent work by Chalmers, Bealer, and Pautz.

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Perhaps one of the most frequent places to hear Heidegger’s name mentioned these days is in discussions of 20th-century existentialism. He’s often grouped alongside figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvior, and Albert Camus as someone inextricably tied to the movement, if not wholly a part of it himself. In your view, what is the extent of Heidegger’s relationship with these thinkers? Have discussions of his work within the context of existentialist philosophy helped to clarify or obscure any areas of his thought? 

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There’s no question that Heidegger has been influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, or that his work is an indispensable source for Sartre (I don’t know de Beauvoir or Camus’ work well enough to comment), but I doubt that putting him in a group labeled ‘existentialist’ is very useful. The differences between Heidegger and Sartre seem to me more important than their commonalities. Their relationship reminds me of that of C. S. Peirce and John Dewey—both are labeled ‘pragmatists’, but that obscures the deep differences. I would argue that Sartre’s ethics represents a kind of vulgarization of Heidegger’s approach. It’s true that for Heidegger there’s something ineffable about ethics—our moral responsibilities are not something that can be set down in a set of abstract rules. But Sartre introduces an element of egoistic voluntarism that is utterly absent in Heidegger: as if I can choose what my own ethics shall be, so long as my choice is “authentic”. That idea, which I take to be the core of Sartre’s ethics, is fundamentally at odds with Heidegger’s notion of ethics as a “calling”, as something that challenges and disconcerts me. I find Heidegger here much closer to Kierkegaard or Bonhoeffer, or to the mysticism of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.

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The comparison to Bonhoeffer is intriguing. Aside from their historical tie to Nazi Germany, both have exhibited a powerful influence upon the development of western theology. You mentioned the relationship between Nietzsche and Heidegger. It’s frequently noted that Nietzsche’s discussion of the “Death of God” must be understood alongside the specific cultural and philosophical context he wrote within, rather than as a simple assault on theism alone. Given the historical dimension of Heidegger’s own philosophical approach, how might his ideas help us understand our relationship to spirituality and religious language more broadly? Does he carry Nietzsche’s influence into this arena or are there significant differences between them? 

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Yes, to press the parallel with Bonhoeffer a little further, Bonhoeffer’s Notes from Prison, in which he proposes a “religionless Christianity” are sometimes interpreted in much the way Heidegger’s attack on “onto-theology” is taken: as a wholesale assault on philosophical theology as practiced since late antiquity. Heidegger studiously avoids any kind of traditional religious language in Being and Time, but this could be taken in either of two ways—as the articulation of a secular, atheistic theory, or as a kind of propaedeutic to theology. As a person of faith, I find it more useful taken in the second way, with God existing just beyond the margins of the text. C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man has a similar structure, I think.

A lot turns on how we understand Heidegger’s “destruction of the tradition”. I see it as a recommendation to re-think our fundamental assumptions by means of new language and a fresh investigation, even if that new investigation takes us to the same ultimate destination (which I think it must). But we’ll arrive at that destination (or return home, to mix the metaphor a bit) with new eyes, having appropriated for ourselves what had been mere verbal leftovers from the past. Heidegger speaks positively of a theology that is “seeking a more primordial interpretation of man’s Being toward God.” (H10) In section 20, he affirms (against the deficiencies of Descartes) the Thomistic doctrine of the “analogy” of Being, insisting that we not think of God as a ‘substance’ in the same way that finite things can be substances: a very traditional tenet of classical theism. And Heidegger’s notion of “fallenness” clearly echoes the Christian theme of original sin.

I’m not knowledgeable enough about Heidegger’s later writings, including those about Nietzsche, to speak with any authority on that issue, but I will say that there is something to be learned from Nietzsche from the perspective of theology.  The absence of God in Nietzsche’s thought is a kind of palpable and positive absence, an absence whose loss is deeply felt, in contrast to the sort of “thank goodness we’re done with all that sort of nonsense” that one gets from many contemporary atheists, like Blackburn or Dennett. And, from the point of Christian theology, Nietzsche is right to detect there a kind of inversion of classical values—the first shall be last, and the last first. And Nietzsche’s right in thinking that this inversion can be used to express and enact resentment and envy—in what I would describe as a secularized, heretical version of Christianity.

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Thank you for providing your reflections. I’d like to try concluding these interviews with a couple of book recommendations: First, one book from within your own areas of focus that you have found influential or simply enjoyable. Second, one book that you enjoyed as an undergraduate/graduate student in philosophy. Do any old favorites come to mind? 

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Can I get away with recommending two books within my current area of focus? They are both destined to be classics: Peter van Inwagen’s Material Beings, which put the problem of material composition back on the metaphysical agenda, and David Lewis’s On Plurality of Worlds, which, although wrong in almost every conclusion reached, is a model of clarity and methodology (only in philosophy is such a combination possible!).

For books that influenced me as an undergraduate, I should mention Richard Swinburne’s The Existence of God, which is a marvelously clear and rigorous defense of theism, one which has held up very well over the years.

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Thank you for a fantastic first interview, Dr. Koons!

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You’re very welcome!