Philosophers' Madness: Thin line separates Genius and Insane

Her battle to survive schizophrenia: The top student who landed in a mental hospital  
 

a former Raffles Girls' Secondary School (RGS) student with a master's degree in philosophy from the London School of Economics. At the time of her arrest, she was a philosophy research scholar at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The day after her arrest, she was admitted to the Institute of Mental Health where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
- See more at: http://yourhealth.asiaone.com/content/top-student-who-landed-mental-hospital/page/0/0#.dpuf

"In philosophy, philosophical problems are often taken to their logical extremes. In madness, real-life issues are taken to their logical consequences and acted upon. So is madness simply an extension of philosophical reasoning? And if so, could it be that philosophy and madness are somehow inextricably linked?" 

Miss Chan Lishan,  a former Raffles Girls' Secondary School (RGS) student with a master's degree in philosophy from the London School of Economics, was a philosophy research scholar at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Read more at her blog: http://lishanchan.wordpress.com/2012/01/16/philosophy-of-madness/

Many famous and brilliant thinkers have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or a form of mental illness. Here's a list:

Vincent van Gogh = Artist
John Nash = Mathematician
Eduard Einstein = Son of Albert Einstein
Friedrich Nietzsche = Philosopher
Soren Kierkegaard = Philosopher
Michel Foucault = Philosopher
Ludwig van Beethoven = Composer and Musician
Leo Tolstoy = Novelist
Winston Churchill = Prime Minister of England during WW2

Eugene O'Neill = Nobel Prize-winning playwright
Ernest Hemingway =  Novelist winner of Pulitzer Prize and a Nobel Prize
Judy Collins = Singer and songwriter
Dorothy Hamill = 1976 Olympic figure skating champion





Those who ask the difficult questions, like “Why are we here?”, “From where do we derive morals?” and “What does it all really mean, when you get right down to it?” have given humanity amazing philosophical insights and ethical guidance. Unfortunately, thinking too much about these issues can sometimes also lead to the brains of those philosophizing rejecting the difficulty — feeling the pressure just a little too much! Then again, maybe it’s a wee bit of madness that leads great philosophers to try to seek out the answers in the first place.

Some people who are diagnosed with mental disorders, such as bipolar disorder, often have delusional thoughts or start to think too much about the meaning of life and why they personally are here on earth. It appears that people with diagnosed mental disorders often delve into the field of philosophy, which pulls together the fields of mental health and philosophy even more. (www.philo-sophia.net)


Read more at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-illness/

"In philosophy, philosophical problems are often taken to their logical extremes. In madness, real-life issues are taken to their logical consequences and acted upon. So is madness simply an extension of philosophical reasoning? And if so, could it be that philosophy and madness are somehow inextricably linked?" - See more at: http://yourhealth.asiaone.com/content/top-student-who-landed-mental-hospital/page/0/1#sthash.wtEqwA3J.dpuf

Civil Disobedience: People power cuts both ways

People power cuts both ways

Thais Protest

"Despite being a democratic means of expression, street gatherings can also be used to achieve undemocratic goals, scholars have warned as Thailand sees a surge in political protests."

Riot Police Ready to Act

Gandhi Non-Violent March

"Non-violent disobedience such as peaceful strikes, or wearing signs or symbols to protest for a long time have also brought about the same or more powerful impacts than street gatherings."

But. For how long before more aggressive actions are needed?   
Even no-violence protests harm the country's economics. Inevitable casualties and lives will suffer as a result. All forms of action have consequences. 
We need to pay a price for change.

Father of Non-Violence Protest

"Protest organisers (should) consider different approaches such as making events more like festivals or carnivals instead of inciting anger or hatred against others."

Too idealistic and romantic. Carnivals are more suited for celebrations, not protests.  

When people have been treated unjustly, they are angry.  Angry enough to take to the streets. 

It's belittling to ask them to have fun. 

When demands for change meet resistance,
friction sparks explode. 

Only a strong fire can melt injustice's iron chains.




"Civil disobedience works if they involve and engage with grassroots or community people for some time."

Agree.  Mobilise the people!

Let a thousand, no, a million flowers bloom.  Then her landscape will change.
-- A response to Janjira Sombatpoonsiri, a political science lecturer at Thammasat University during a seminar at Chulalongkorn University.

Must We Mean What We Say?: On Stanley Cavell

Must We Mean What We Say?: On Stanley Cavell
Stanley Cavell, born in 1926 and now 86 years old, is one of the greatest American philosophers of the past half-century. He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud.

Cavell’s response to all of logical positivism: to demand that we only speak about what is absolutely true and false, that about that which we cannot speak with certainty, we must be silent, is to demand that we not speak at all—or else that we lie to ourselves about the ambiguity inherent in even the most carefully defined language.

Cavell’s larger argument is this: If we must bring the world with us to understand a definition, then we cannot define away the ambiguity in words, for the world we bring with us is already hopelessly ambiguous. 

A philosopher who limits the meaning of her words to carefully set out definitions, attempting to root out all ambiguity, in effect says, “I say, and you should hear, only what I mean.”

Cavell insists that language cannot be limited in this way. Language, to Cavell, is ambiguous not because it is imperfect, awaiting precise definition, but because we do not all see in the same way; it is a reflection of our basic predicament as distinct human beings. Thus, we must dare to mean what we say, take responsibility for all the meanings our words might be taken to have—even if those meanings go beyond what we understand as our intentions—because in our unintentional (though perhaps meaningful) slips, and the misapprehensions, mistakes, and insights of those with whom we speak, we bring together not just words but worldviews. 

 More striking, Cavell finds in classic Hollywood comedies like The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story and Adam’s Rib (discussed in Pursuits of Happiness [1981]) perhaps the best available examples of how to actually deal with skepticism.

Given the rise of writers like Slavoj Zizek such claims about the importance of film to philosophy may seem unoriginal. But Cavell was among the first philosophers to take film seriously (his half-crazed 1971 book The World Viewed partly founded the philosophy of film), and he has set an example that others might more profitably follow.

Cavell found in Emerson and Thoreau the idea not of the “best self,” which we always look up at from below, but of what he calls, somewhat jocularly, the “next self”—the self we cannot help but see from wherever we happen to be standing. Whether more ordinary or extraordinary than ourselves at present, this self draws us on, makes us skeptical of our current selves, ashamed of them, as if we were nothing but frauds.

“The worst thing we could do is rely on ourselves as we stand,” Cavell writes, channeling Emerson.

“We must become averse to this conformity, which means convert from it,. . . .as if we are to be born (again).” And the self we are born into is, obviously, not in any sense our “best self”; it is by no means final; it is only our “next self.”

As Emerson himself puts it: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning.”

Christian Apologetics of Stuart Hackett

Stuart Hackett's The Resurrection of Theism: Prolegomena to Christian Apology

A Tribute to Stuart C. Hackett (1925-2012)

by Paul Copan

Last week, Stuart Cornelius Hackett (b. 1925)—a beloved philosophy professor, friend, and brother in Christ—departed this life to go where all true believers long to be. His mental brilliance, affected in his later years by Alzheimer’s, has been restored, and he is a now a clearer thinker than anytime during earthly days.

When I began to study at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1985, my very first class during my first quarter—we didn’t have “semesters” then—was Hackett’s “Religious Epistemology” class. This remarkable course introduced me to rationalism, empiricism, testing truth claims, Kant and the synthetic a priori. My eyes were being opened to the larger world of philosophy, and just a few weeks into the semester I was more than sufficiently inspired to pursue an M.A. degree in philosophy of religion—in addition to my M.Div. degree. I would write my master’s thesis on “The Impossibility of an Infinite Temporal Regress of Events”—an argument Hackett resurrected from medieval Jewish and Muslim philosophy and utilized in his Resurrection of Theism. (Of course, William Craig, also a former student of Hackett’s, has been most closely identified with this theistic proof—now referred to as the kalam cosmological argument.)  Hackett’s early influence on my study of philosophy led me to dedicate my 2007 book Loving Wisdom to him.        

As for the personal side of Dr. Hackett, he was quite colorful, both in personality and in his dress. He would wear brightly- and outrageously-colored, mismatched polyesters to class. One day he told us, “My wife wanted me to be sure to tell you that she does not approve of what I’m wearing today.”  In addition to sporting thick black-framed glasses, he would keep his hair quite short and his beard barely longer—perhaps ten days’ growth of stubble.  Once, when Hackett was wearing his well-worn dark overcoat in the middle of winter, someone at Trinity commented that it looked like someone had dragged him onto the seminary property off the streets of Chicago! One day in class, Stu Hackett told us, “I am often described as a weird person...I don't know that I'm weird in an absolute sense—I mean I'm not a werewolf or a vampire or anything like that. I'm just highly individualistic.”

He was an enthusiastic teacher who would often greet us in Latin, Pax vobis cum—and then finish the reply himself—et te cum spiritu. He would cite Francis Thompson’s Hound of Heaven, telling us that we needed to move ahead with “unperturbed pace, deliberate speed, and majestic instancy.”  He was ever full of good humor—to the point that some students complained that they weren’t getting their money’s worth in class: “I'm gonna' lay this stuff on you like one great big metaphysical egg!” Confessing that “I don’t have a Reformed bone in my body,” he summarized his credo: "I'm a whiskey Calvinist—of the five points, I can only swallow one fifth.” (His wife Joan once told me that for an entire afternoon, the Calvinist theologian Roger Nicole doggedly tried to persuade Hackett to become a Calvinist. But it was not predestined to be.)

To add to the atmosphere, Hackett would specialize in extraordinarily long, Germanic-style sentences, which called for focused vigilance so as not to lose the thread of what he was saying. To give you an idea, here is a sample sentence—yes, one sentence—taken from his book The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim:

If the very possibility of a contingent cosmos or world order is fully conceivable only through its dependence on a transcendent realm of essence and directive selection; and if the very notion of an actually infinite series of past temporal states of the temporal universe involves a self-contradiction, whether that universe is construed in mentalistic or materialistic terms; and if the pervasion of the universe by significant order or purposive adaptation is itself best explained through an operation of transcendent self-directive mind through its own operative causality—and these are the very claims that our previous arguments have defended as plausible—then the supposition that selfhood (self-awareness, conceptualization, and self-direction) could not be explained in terms of material constituents, which themselves require explanation on transcendent and essentially immaterial or spiritual grounds, seems questionable indeed (p. 110).

Dr. Hackett was a friend to so many, and we loved him, eccentricities and all. He was a dedicated follower of Christ, who would read through his Greek New Testament each year. When he retired, he began to brush up on his Hebrew so that he could resume reading the Old Testament in that language. He prayed before every class, and he would often offer words of spiritual encouragement to his students. Before he came to school each day, he prayed that if he said anything false, this teaching would simply fall to the ground and be forgotten. But if he taught what was true, he prayed that it would be forever emblazoned upon his students’ minds. (Of one of his theological opponents, Hackett said, “If that person had prayed that prayer, he would have died in utter obscurity!”)

All of us philosophy students would gather together at the Hackett home for our regular end-of-the-quarter bash—complete with Sarah Lee sweets accompanied by guitar music by our beloved professor, who would sing self-composed songs such as “Plato, dear Plato, how I love you!” Just before I graduated, someone took a picture of a group of us at his home. When I visited the Hacketts years later in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, I saw this photo underneath the glass top of his desk. His wife Joan told me that it was a reminder for him pray for us, which he did every day.
Hackett—or “Big Stu” as he enjoyed being called—taught and inspired not only me, but other philosophers and apologists, including William Lane Craig, Stephen Evans, Jay Wood, Mark McLeod-Harrison, Chad Meister, Mark Linville, Mark Mittelberg, Nicholas Merriwether, and many more. Others influenced by Hackett include the pastor and author John Piper as well as own pastor Dennis Reiter, with whom I worked in Storrs, Connecticut; they, along with many others, benefited from his philosophical teaching while at Wheaton College, where he taught alongside Arthur Holmes before he was at Trinity.
Preferring to call himself a “student of philosophy” rather than a “philosopher,” Dr. Hackett wrote several articles for professional journals such as the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. He also authored four books: Oriental Philosophy, The Resurrection of Theism, The Reconstruction of the Christian Revelation Claim, and The Rediscovery of the Highest Good. Hackett’s Oriental Philosophy (University of Wisconsin Press) is a superb introduction to the topic (Hackett had even gone to India to learn Sanskrit as part of this writing endeavor). The latter three books are rigorous, lucid texts covering epistemology, apologetics, philosophy of religion, and ethics. They are currently available through Wipf and Stock, and I would encourage you to explore these writings of a noteworthy philosopher from a previous generation. In addition, I should mention a Festschrift in Hackett’s honor was published in 1990, The Logic of Rational Theism (Edwin Mellen Press), coedited by William Lane Craig and Mark McLeod. Hackett offered a response to these essays, which can be found at The Interactive Hackett—a website that Tim Cole, a former classmate and Hackett student, has maintained and updated over the years.

Though Hackett kept a low profile and did not receive the attention he rightly deserved, his legacy lives on through many of the students he faithfully served and taught over the years—not to mention others who have benefited from his writings. His quiet, faithful ministry reminds me of the heroine in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothea:“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Give thanks with me for Stuart Hackett’s legacy. We have been enriched, made wiser, and better equipped to be witnesses to the good news of Jesus Christ through this faithful servant. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord…for their deeds follow them.”

Perception and Interpretation: Photography is ambiguous

Beyond the saffron scandals  

We believe Monks live a life of simplicity, without desires for worldly pleasures, detached from the issues of this life. Is our belief just an expression of unrealistic expectations?  Or is it our unsuspecting naivety?

Documenting the lives of four Thai monks in New York, this exhibition by the 28-year-old National Geographic Thailand photographer is likely to be more provocative than aesthetically soothing.

"The concept is to take photos of these monks' ways of life there," Ekkarat explains. "They sort of tease Thai people's myths and mindset of what ideal monks should be like. Their lives are quite different..."


Ekkarat Punyatara's photo exhibition "It's Personal" plays with viewers' perceptions and prejudices.

At the far end of the gallery stands a centerpiece photo of two monks hanging out at the beach.  One is crouching with a camera in hand, apparently trying to get to the best shot of his friend. 

There are plenty more shots of monks in rather unsettling acts, from taking a sightseeing-like trip on the subway to queuing up in the supermarket or sunbathing in a garden. One shows a monk sipping a Frappuccino from Starbucks.

This Photo exhibition of a sensitive subject raises many questions. Here are my questions.

1. What's the reality of Monks Lives--Is the essence of monk-hood subjectively determined or essentially objective? 
2. How does cultural bias distort our interpretations of a photograph?
3. Are the ideals of an existential mode of Other-Worldly Being self-contradictory?
4. Does human existence entails inescapable Being-in-the World?
5. What are the essential structures of embodied human life?
6. Can photography depict reality or is it inevitably illusory?
7. What is the role of the photographer in his photography? How he frames the viewer's understanding?

Part One: Animal Rights By Tom Regan

Read Tom Regan's elaborate defence in The Case for Animal Rights

Regan argues that: 

 The Basic Moral Mistake To View Animals as Resources 

The fundamental wrong is the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us — to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money. Once we accept this view of animals — as our resources — the rest is as predictable as it is regrettable. Why worry about their loneliness, their pain, their death? Since animals exist for us, to benefit us in one way or another, what harms them really doesn't matter — or matters only if it starts to bother us, makes us feel a trifle uneasy when we eat our veal escallop, for example.

Animals, like Children and Retarded Persons, Are Intrinsically Valuable 

And yet it seems reasonably certain that, were we to torture a young child or a retarded elder, we would be doing something that wronged him or her,not something that would be wrong if (and only if) other humans with a sense of justice were upset. And since this is true in the case of these humans we cannot rationally deny the same in the case of animals.

Animals Are Subjects of A Life: Their Intrinsic Value Comes From Conscious Life Equal to Human 

We want and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect things. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure and pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and frustration, our continued existence or our untimely death — all make a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced, by us as individuals. As the same is true of those animals that concern us (the ones who are eaten and trapped, for example), they too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with inherent value of their own.

Shall we say that only humans have the requisite intelligence, or autonomy, or reason? But there are many, many humans who fail to meet these standards and yet are reasonably viewed as having value above and beyond their usefulness to others. Shall we claim that only humans belong to the right species,the species Homo sapiens? But this is blatant speciesism.

What could be the basis of our having more inherent value than animals? Their lack of reason, or autonomy, or intellect? Only if we are willing to make the same judgement in the case of humans who are similarly deficient. But it is not true that such humans — the retarded child,for example, or the mentally deranged — have less inherent value than you or I.Neither, then, can we rationally sustain the view that animals like them in being the experiencing subjects of a life have less inherent value. All who have inherent value have it equally, whether they be human animals or not.

 Animals have equal right to be treated with respect

We must recognize our equal inherent value as individuals, reason — not sentiment, not emotion — reason  compels us to recognize the equal inherent value of these animals and, with this, their equal right to be treated with respect.

Rights Movement Requires Political Activism to Abolish Cruelty To Animals

Giving farm animals more space, more natural environments, more companions does not right the fundamental wrong in their case. Nothing less than the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture will do this...

All great movements, it is written, go through three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption. It is the realization of this third stage, adoption, that requires both our passion and our discipline, our hearts and our heads. The fate of animals is in our hands. God grant we are equal to the task.


In forthcoming Part Two: Mistaken Beliefs of Animal Rights Advocates, I will discuss the inadequacies of animal rights arguments.

Teach kids to love their neighbours: Yes...but it all depends. Must we always love others?

 Teach Kids to love their Neighbors

  Lee Yoke Har  writes:

        Growing up as a kid in Malaysia, you don't learn about racism until an adult decides to poison your innocence and point you to the superiority of your own race.

        Much like the diverse eco-system, humanity is bound in a weird way by likeness and unlikeness. If we tear away the veil of religion and race, we are after all a humanity of nearly seven billion people. Somehow, we have got to learn to show compassion and love for one another.There is so much that is magnificent about its diversity. When I look at the intricate mudras (hand signals) of the bharatanatyam dancers, I often think of beauty, precision and perfection. When the muezzin makes his prayer calls at dawn or dusk, one gets infused with a sense of wonder, of being at home, feeling the vibration of the most sacred. This sense can only come from being raised in an all-embracing multiracial society.

        Teach your kids to love their neighbors, for there is no other way.

On the surface, the general thrust of her essay is reasonable. No one, in his right mind, would encourage hurtful racism or social prejudice. I agree with her on many points. However, some of her conclusions seem to me less obvious.

First, a kid may learn about racism from another kid, perhaps a kid from his neighborhood. Adults are not always to be blamed. Nor are we to assume that children are naive and pure innocence.

Secondly, the eco-system doesn't protect natural differences for the sake of variety. Nature has a prejudice for the survival of the fittest in the Darwinian sense. The species that have the strongest will-to-live and the most cunning ability to adapt to a hostile environment survive and flourish. The weak ones get flushed out of existence. Thus it seems better to teach our kids tough-mindedness and the ability to adapt to a constantly evolving world. It is not enough just to accept differences, we must rise above the mediocrity and become superior. Quality and not quantity of differences.

My third point is this. It is human to be prejudicial in the sense that our thoughts are bound by our presuppositions. When we think we inevitably make some assumptions. No matter how hard we try, we are limited by our mind's horizon.

Let's take the statement: "We are all human beings, therefore we should respect each person."  Behind this statement is the assumption that if a being has humanness, he ought to be respected.

But why? How is it possible to logically leap from being a human to being respected. Having a human body with its emotions does not tell me how it should be treated. Respect is not logical deduction from humanness. There must be other unspoken, hidden reasons. Perhaps religious ones, since science cannot possibly be a source. Then atheists will not hold the deduction valid.

Furthermore. racial prejudice is a perceptual matter. Our perceptions are limited by our finite experiences. If 'science' has only seen white swans, we conclude all swans are white. This is both natural and scientific.

For example. If we encounter a tribal society that we perceive to be backward in some way, we most likely will think our own society as superior.   We cannot pretend that the inferior society is somehow equal to ours. We may help them to improve their life. Our humanitarian actions are applauded, but in fact we do not respect their natural state as being good. It may not be as blatantly cruel as school kids taunts, nonetheless they are similar.

Of course, a racially prejudiced person makes a logical error of assuming he/she has met all instances of  an 'inferior' race. But we can't blame him if he has met a majority that exhibit some backwardness. Every time when he meets a person of the other race, he reflects on his own better society/culture. He may see as an exception to his 'prejudice' when he does meet an 'inferior' who is his equal.

Perhaps, the more important thing to learn from prejudice is to determine the causes of prejudice. Why does a person think his culture is superior to the others?  If he has no valid reasons, then we are entitled to treat him as misguided. If he has good reasons, we must accept his judgment as fair and reasonable. And seek to improve ourselves. So what are the good reasons? How does one judge a society/culture? I'll suggest a few criteria of a superior culture (listed not in order of importance).

a) high regard for personal freedom and privacy (matured citizens)
b) high standard of health and homes
c) true knowledge is prized (quality education for all who are willing to learn)
d) life, assets and wealth protection
e) balanced life and work
f)  culturally stimulating (leisure and creative arts are freely available)
g) technologically advanced
h) freedom to choose one's religious beliefs/ non-belief
i)  'sexuality' equality (non-repressive in Freudian terms)
j)  peaceful (non-violent)
k) high achievement oriented (citizens strive to become better than before)

These criteria form different dimensions of a superior society. Most cultures today fall somewhere along the scales of these criteria. We do not have any perfect superior society yet.

Teach your kids to build such a culture, there is no other way!