Berlin

Talked w/ student C. for an hour today re. his reading of Isaiah Berlin, and my reading of Parrochia’s book.

C. mentioned that Berlin said that Aristotle used his classification of animals as the [metaphor] for classifying everything else in the universe, including the…forms? (But I thought forms were Plato and Aristotle didn’t like them…) Supposedly Berlin says this in this 1976 episode of Bryan Magee’s TV show.

I didn’t see Berlin say that in this video — ==EDIT: He mentions Aristotle & models around 40:40, and goes on to mention “the old hierarchical model of the Middle Ages”, i.e. metaphors for understanding/organizing the world== but Berlin said so many good things that I just wanted to quote all the over the place. Berlin talks about “rights” as an important category: are there such a thing as rights? People went to war over this.

The video is entitled, “Why Philosophy Matters,” but watching/listening to it, it could just as easily have been called, “Why Classification Matters”!

Here’s a bit where he’s translating Heinrich Heide on the fly. (Berlin wrote/said something similar in “A Message to the 21st Century” in 1994, but I like the video’s wording better):

“And I think that is why they’re regarded as dangerous people by those who want the original use of language to be kept. It was the German poet Heine [1797-1856] who said, Do not mistake the quiet philosopher in his study. He is a very powerful, formidable figure. Do not think him a mere harmless pedant, engaged upon a lot of trivial tasks. If Kant had not beheaded the God of the theologians, Robespierre might not have beheaded the king. The great German metaphysicians – Fichteans, Schellingerians and the like – are people who will one day not be deterred, either by fear or by pursuit of pleasure, and will destroy a great many monuments of our civilization. When this great metaphysical rage explodes over the world, the French Revolution will seem to be mere child’s play.” – At this spot in the video

Berlin talks about the link between thought and language.

“Sorting Out” or “Sorting It Out” is not a bad book title!

The category of what it is a human, has deep political implications, e.g. re. race.

Berlin quotes Ian Foster as saying

“Everything is like something. What is this like?”— Ian Foster

Berlin, echoing what he wrote in “Concepts and Categories”, says that there are two main classes of questions, and then there is philosophy:

  1. “empirical questions” that can be observed in the world
  2. “formal questions” which are essentially about arbitrary systems of rules such as mathematics or chess.

….And that philosophy deals with those questions which don’t fit in either one of those classes. And unlike empirical or formal methods, in which even if you don’t know the answer you at least know ‘where to look’ or how to go about answering them if you could, but there are no clear ways to go about answering philosophical questions.

Bryan Magee also did an interview with John Searle on Wittegenstein, that I watched a few weeks ago. It was great.

Extra long quote from Berlin:

In Berlin’s Message to the 21st Century, there is much of interest, esp. given current political turmoil, and calls for greater regulation by tech companies on the speech of their users:

“The central values by which most men have lived, in a great many lands at a great many times—these values, almost if not entirely universal, are not always harmonious with each other. Some are, some are not. Men have always craved for liberty, security, equality, happiness, justice, knowledge, and so on. But complete liberty is not compatible with complete equality—if men were wholly free, the wolves would be free to eat the sheep… Justice has always been a human ideal, but it is not fully compatible with mercy. Creative imagination and spontaneity, splendid in themselves, cannot be fully reconciled with the need for planning, organization, careful and responsible calculation… I must always choose: between peace and excitement, or knowledge and blissful ignorance. And so on…

“So what is to be done to restrain the champions, sometimes very fanatical, of one or other of these values, each of whom tends to trample upon the rest, as the great tyrants of the twentieth century have trampled on the life, liberty, and human rights of millions because their eyes were fixed upon some ultimate golden future? I am afraid I have no dramatic answer to offer: only that if these ultimate human values by which we live are to be pursued, then compromises, trade-offs, arrangements have to be made if the worst is not to happen. So much liberty for so much equality, so much individual self-expression for so much security, so much justice for so much compassion. My point is that some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled—liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

“But you must believe me, one cannot have everything one wants—not only in practice, but even in theory. The denial of this, the search for a single, overarching ideal because it is the one and only true one for humanity, invariably leads to coercion. And then to destruction, blood—eggs are broken, but the omelette is not in sight, there is only an infinite number of eggs, human lives, ready for the breaking. And in the end the passionate idealists forget the omelette, and just go on breaking eggs.”

Chomsky

Email To C., 10:15pm:

After the Isaiah Berlin interview ended, YouTube served up the next Magee video which was an interview with Noam Chomsky, on the the relationship between language & cognition! Lots of it made sense from a “machine learning” point of view.

And THEN I flipped over to Twitter and saw the rather outspoken AI researcher Francois Chollet (creator of Keras) say this:

…to which a Harvard PhD linguistics student replied, saying this was the opposite of Chomsky. …to which I replied with a question because it seemed that I’d just WATCHED Chomsky say the same thing Chollet said!

…No reply from him yet.

Magee’s questions as to whether the limits of language set the limits of cognition, and Chomsky’s use of the word “categories” when speaking of cognition, made it seem apropos. :-)

…just sharing. That was kind of a cool ‘coincidence’.