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The Experience of Philosophy
Book by Kolak, Daniel and Raymond Martin
630 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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February 23, 2025
The editors say in their preface that they intended to provide an accessible and provocative anthology of philosophy, the focus not being on the history of philosophy but on important ideas.
And to a large extent they succeeded. I have been using this book for more than thirty years and now I finally read it cover to cover, which meant re-reading a lot of articles and reading some for the first time on subjects that do not belong to my main interests. One of them was the short article by Sartre on Existentialism that I found surprisingly illuminating.
There are about seventy articles or excerpts from books on a wide variety of subjects most of them by professional philosophers but not exclusively. A little piece called Memorial Service by the great H.L. Mencken is basically just a list of Gods that at one time or another had been worshipped my men. All of them he says omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all of them dead.
You will find famous and influential and excellent articles, which, needless to say, does not necessarily mean the same thing. Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat is certainly famous, and I can sort of understand why, although I do not think it is a very good one and I do entirely disagree. The reply by Churchland (also against the Jackson’s Mary meme) I think is very good, but maybe not entirely convincing. And this is a good thing, I think. There are no final truths in philosophy.
My favorite article is The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn by Jonathan Bennett in which the author contrasts the conscience of Huck Finn with that of Himmler. Huck helps Jim although his conscience is telling him that what he is doing is morally wrong, after all Jim belongs to poor Miss Watson. And Himmler on the other hand praises the SS generals for their ability to have remained decent while being responsible for the extermination of the Jewish race.
You get Plato, Locke, Hume, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Russell, Aquin, Mill, Nietzsche. So in the end it is not wholly representative of the entire history of philosophy but for one volume a very solid selection. The editors provide some information on the authors and they add some questions for the student. In other words it is a very useful book. Personally I disliked the decision of the editors to include articles of themselves. That seemed wrong to me from an ethical point of view. Discuss.
And to a large extent they succeeded. I have been using this book for more than thirty years and now I finally read it cover to cover, which meant re-reading a lot of articles and reading some for the first time on subjects that do not belong to my main interests. One of them was the short article by Sartre on Existentialism that I found surprisingly illuminating.
There are about seventy articles or excerpts from books on a wide variety of subjects most of them by professional philosophers but not exclusively. A little piece called Memorial Service by the great H.L. Mencken is basically just a list of Gods that at one time or another had been worshipped my men. All of them he says omnipotent, omniscient, and immortal. And all of them dead.
You will find famous and influential and excellent articles, which, needless to say, does not necessarily mean the same thing. Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat is certainly famous, and I can sort of understand why, although I do not think it is a very good one and I do entirely disagree. The reply by Churchland (also against the Jackson’s Mary meme) I think is very good, but maybe not entirely convincing. And this is a good thing, I think. There are no final truths in philosophy.
My favorite article is The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn by Jonathan Bennett in which the author contrasts the conscience of Huck Finn with that of Himmler. Huck helps Jim although his conscience is telling him that what he is doing is morally wrong, after all Jim belongs to poor Miss Watson. And Himmler on the other hand praises the SS generals for their ability to have remained decent while being responsible for the extermination of the Jewish race.
You get Plato, Locke, Hume, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Russell, Aquin, Mill, Nietzsche. So in the end it is not wholly representative of the entire history of philosophy but for one volume a very solid selection. The editors provide some information on the authors and they add some questions for the student. In other words it is a very useful book. Personally I disliked the decision of the editors to include articles of themselves. That seemed wrong to me from an ethical point of view. Discuss.
November 18, 2021
I first picked up this book around 2018, on my third go at teaching philosophy. I was quite thrilled with the tone and structure of the volume, which model philosophy as the endeavor of questioning everything. There are so many queer little bits to this volume, like its final entry, number 84, which has mathematician Freeman Dyson describing how Feynman allowed his children not to become intellectuals, after which they all did become intellectuals. Are we supposed to take it that, having finished this book, we are free not to become philosophers? Which, in turn, allows us to truly become philosophers?
At any rate, the anthology is an extremely enjoyable read, if one takes the trouble to take notes and draw out the connections between the wide range of things happening here. In the spirit of self-study and self-improvement, I devoted most evenings over the last two months to really going through the book, patiently, but pressing ahead, answering at least some of the "further questions" after each selection, and noting a lot of "further readings." For the first time, something of the shape of contemporary philosophy has started to form in my mind, at least those branches represented here by Kolak and Raymond. In addition to impressively edited selections from many of the major Enlightenment-era and modern philosophers, along with a smattering of Platonic dialogues, there is also a sprinkling of off-beat non-philosophical texts left here to be read philosophically, like The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gillman.
"There is a frozen sea within us," begins the book. "Philosophy is an axe." This is as thrilling an opening as any textbook could hope to take, with its emphasis on questioning as the main task of philosophy. Persistent questions can turn even the simplest concepts into philosophical investigations, but well-formed questions can also make the most intimidating topics into personalized projects.
For example, Socrates asks Euthyphro, “Is action holy because the gods love the action, or do they love the action because it is a holy one?” In our time, we can frame the exact same question with great practical relevance: are we doing things right if we just follow all the rules and protocols, or does right action depend on something else? What does right action depend on? Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience show that “just following the rules” is a default setting for humans. Right education should disrupt that default conformity, argues Jidda Krishnamurti. Uncertainty has its own value, according to Bertrand Russell (admittedly, in one of his less stellar passages from The Problems of Philosophy)
What about this, asks Daniel Kolak in the following section: let’s say Zeno is stuck at one end of a narrow corridor, a wall behind him, and before him, Achilles is rushing in, shield rampant, to all appearances about to squish Zeno against the end of the corridor of the Lyceum, with spectators around watching. Just vengeance for frustrating us with paradoxes!
But Hera uses her powers to defend Zeno from injury. When Achilles reaches 1 meter from the wall, Zeno puts his right hand up to brace himself between shield and wall. And then, he begins to shrink! When the distance between shield and wall is halved, Zeno has shrunk by half. When the distance between the shield and the wall is 1/4 meter, Zeno is shrunk to one quarter size. And so on. As the distance is 2^-n meters, so Zeno is shrunk to 2^-n scale.
To any spectators watching, what is Zeno’s size as Achilles closes the distance to the wall? To Zeno, what is the distance between himself and Achilles and the spectators, over the same time frame? What is the calculated speed of Achilles’ shield?
The answers to these questions are rather shocking. As Kolak guides us along, we glimpse of how hard it is to reconcile incommensurate points of view; at bottom, our very model of the universe as things separated from other things, in space, comes under fire.
So that’s one of the two editors, Daniel Kolak, a philosopher more interested in reality and the universe; the other guy, Raymond Martin, seems more invested in personal identity and meaning. It’s his essay in part three, that introduced me to the question “Is personal identity what matters in survival?” To which the philosopher Derek Parfit answers, a resounding “No.” Apparently, it’s more important to establish a kind of psychological continuity, which sort of goes with the general traditions of maturing through conquering ego. But the argument also follows from fission examples, first mentioned by John Locke when he imagines cutting off his finger, and how ridiculous it would be if the finger considered itself a trace, or remainder, or significant part of the self it was cut from. As a teacher, I feel like reformulating the question for teens: what matters in survival? In personal growth? The inclusion here of voices of personal testimony, such as that by trans philosophy student Adam/Linda Parascandola, hints at how properties like gender are connected to personal identity — Parascandola seems to agree, even in her transness, that the properties do not actually matter, in survival.
Is there such a thing as a “will” to us, and are we “free” in any sense? What if it’s all an illusion? Apparently Baron d’Holbach (whose salon was the star of A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment) was among the first to pose this provocation toward determinism. We only think we are free, because we can’t really analyze all the complex causes of our behaviors. We can acknowledge this, argues Hume, without having to give up on the notion of will. The solution seems to be to focus on arbitrary choices, like a choice between two roads, each one much the same: will is what prevents impasse and makes us active choosers. Regret certainly exists — who among us does not have any? So argues William James, in a masterful essay I had to read twice, and now feel due to read again. Regret implies there is a chance we can make the world better, even if we need to remain humble about it. Ethical consciousness can grow.
What if the free will problems are all just problems of defining freedom and will and related topics? Maybe we don’t really know much about whether free will is even a problem.
Maybe we don’t know much, at all. No one can explain how we know anything, at all, claim Kolak and Martin, as they introduce the section on knowledge. “I think, therefore I am,” that famous dictum of Descartes, has come under fire, although philosophers seem as often to assume it again after they rebut it. Berkeley’s position pushes the logic to its furthest: the objects of human knowledge are all ideas of thinkers. This idea seems almost unnecessary, a relic for the dustbin of fallacies, but it turns out to foreshadow the contemporary discussion on the anthropic principle, below. Such are the incomplete results of our efforts in deduction and induction; but they remain the best we have.
Arguments about the existence of God take up a larger section of the anthology than I would have thought, but I suppose that reveals the book’s American orientation. American, and from deeply Christian heritage, myself, I’m still easily pulled into the discussions. I can feel the sharp, chemical sense of certainty Anselm was feeling, when he laid out his argument. Deduction is a pleasure; surely there is some larger design dictating that? Aquinas inspires us with his bravura display of deduction; Kant seems wisest by stripping existence of the predication property we tend to give it, when we speak of God.
I wonder if there is any connection between Kant’s insights that existence is a not really a predicate that adds any properties to objects, and the idea from other cultures that other cosmological and moral ideas can be somehow richer and more practical, as Kwasi Wiredu reasons, observing his native Akan belief systems. Georges Rey, in a bracing manifesto, illustrates how we can even think of people who claim to believe as not actually thinking and behaving as if they believe, so therefore not in fact believing.
Back to Berkeley: maybe it doesn’t do to wonder too much about connecting our self and will to reality, because there are no open passages to do so. Causation is cut off from us, meditates Hume, in his most skeptical moods. But necessary connection could potentially be explained by the shape and structure of the universe, seems the implication of Einstein’s reflections. (Though science never seems to help us as much as it promises. What is curved about curved space? And why is it curved?)
The climax of the reflections on reality is Kolak’s introduction to the anthropic principle and quantum cosmology. The universe comes from an unstable nothing, and is more than perfectly explainable to our minds: subatomic particle properties do not exist without conscious minds. Objective reality of things is a set of all possible experiences an observer can have of the thing. The universe is just the right number of dimensions, with just the right proportions of visible light, to supply us with the information it needs for us to observe that it exists. This line of thought builds and builds in one of the longest pieces in the book, and then takes a terrific autobiographical turn, as we learn that Kolak was a physicist who decided to pursue philosophy. The reason was: we can always ask another why question, and science can answer these no better than religion. So it's better to go for philosophy, where formulation of questions is the means of investigation. (And these lead to answers, is the implication. Or not? It could also be that the questions themselves, like Russell's "life of uncertainty," have intrinsic value. But what is this intrinsic value?)
“No one has ever been able to explain unproblematically how experience is even possible,” begins the eighth section. Not for lack of trying. There has been a steady march away from Descartes’ idea of mind separate from body, and toward physicalism, the theory that all mental states can be pictured as physical events. But I’m jumping the gun here, anticipating an argument in the following section on consciousness, because I don’t know, really, how to distinguish consciousness and experience. Is the latter the past states of the former? It’s some attempt to get at what is fundamental to the complex instance of consciousness, at least in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which aims to spell out principles for cognitions prior to sensation. How well does Kant's model of pure reason hold up today? It’s hard to reconcile the sense of introspection in Kant to modern theories of mind, with their focus on the causal role of mental states — functionalism. Which is to say: I wonder if Kant would have believed that an android could really think.
In a strange piece by Arnold Zuboff, “The Story of a Brain,” we imagine that the idea that the mind is a collection of functioning neurons is carried to extreme lengths, such that a brain is replicated by connecting certain all neurons to simulated receptors: is one whole brain hooked up to receptors any different from hundreds of thousands of individual neurons hooked up to receptors, if the total system could have by administered by computers such that no individual neuron would “know” that its receptor was not another neuron? This thoroughly puzzling piece seems at first a parody of functionalism, but then a sort of explanation for it, and in the end, perhaps a little of both?
From here, we contemplate death, a time when surely something happens to consciousness. Something, but not an ending: not nothing, or so goes an argument by Thomas W. Clark.
Death certainly does remind us of questions about the meaning of life. There is the verdict on Sisyphus, supplied with his single and ever-present ground for meaning, according to Camus. And there are the work and activity theories, like that of Richard Taylor. Both of these seem lacking, although I do think living well is connected to doing good work.
Expanding ethical consciousness is surely good work. How can we maximize the impact? How can we feel fulfilled, and not worried all the time about the quality of work and the impact? If we knew the answer to that, we would likely stop reading and taking all these notes.
Finally, the book ends with a contemplation of values. Aristotle seems not to have been superseded, on this topic: the good life is a life of activity in accordance with virtue.
So what is virtue?
Back to the books!
At any rate, the anthology is an extremely enjoyable read, if one takes the trouble to take notes and draw out the connections between the wide range of things happening here. In the spirit of self-study and self-improvement, I devoted most evenings over the last two months to really going through the book, patiently, but pressing ahead, answering at least some of the "further questions" after each selection, and noting a lot of "further readings." For the first time, something of the shape of contemporary philosophy has started to form in my mind, at least those branches represented here by Kolak and Raymond. In addition to impressively edited selections from many of the major Enlightenment-era and modern philosophers, along with a smattering of Platonic dialogues, there is also a sprinkling of off-beat non-philosophical texts left here to be read philosophically, like The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gillman.
"There is a frozen sea within us," begins the book. "Philosophy is an axe." This is as thrilling an opening as any textbook could hope to take, with its emphasis on questioning as the main task of philosophy. Persistent questions can turn even the simplest concepts into philosophical investigations, but well-formed questions can also make the most intimidating topics into personalized projects.
For example, Socrates asks Euthyphro, “Is action holy because the gods love the action, or do they love the action because it is a holy one?” In our time, we can frame the exact same question with great practical relevance: are we doing things right if we just follow all the rules and protocols, or does right action depend on something else? What does right action depend on? Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience show that “just following the rules” is a default setting for humans. Right education should disrupt that default conformity, argues Jidda Krishnamurti. Uncertainty has its own value, according to Bertrand Russell (admittedly, in one of his less stellar passages from The Problems of Philosophy)
What about this, asks Daniel Kolak in the following section: let’s say Zeno is stuck at one end of a narrow corridor, a wall behind him, and before him, Achilles is rushing in, shield rampant, to all appearances about to squish Zeno against the end of the corridor of the Lyceum, with spectators around watching. Just vengeance for frustrating us with paradoxes!
But Hera uses her powers to defend Zeno from injury. When Achilles reaches 1 meter from the wall, Zeno puts his right hand up to brace himself between shield and wall. And then, he begins to shrink! When the distance between shield and wall is halved, Zeno has shrunk by half. When the distance between the shield and the wall is 1/4 meter, Zeno is shrunk to one quarter size. And so on. As the distance is 2^-n meters, so Zeno is shrunk to 2^-n scale.
To any spectators watching, what is Zeno’s size as Achilles closes the distance to the wall? To Zeno, what is the distance between himself and Achilles and the spectators, over the same time frame? What is the calculated speed of Achilles’ shield?
The answers to these questions are rather shocking. As Kolak guides us along, we glimpse of how hard it is to reconcile incommensurate points of view; at bottom, our very model of the universe as things separated from other things, in space, comes under fire.
So that’s one of the two editors, Daniel Kolak, a philosopher more interested in reality and the universe; the other guy, Raymond Martin, seems more invested in personal identity and meaning. It’s his essay in part three, that introduced me to the question “Is personal identity what matters in survival?” To which the philosopher Derek Parfit answers, a resounding “No.” Apparently, it’s more important to establish a kind of psychological continuity, which sort of goes with the general traditions of maturing through conquering ego. But the argument also follows from fission examples, first mentioned by John Locke when he imagines cutting off his finger, and how ridiculous it would be if the finger considered itself a trace, or remainder, or significant part of the self it was cut from. As a teacher, I feel like reformulating the question for teens: what matters in survival? In personal growth? The inclusion here of voices of personal testimony, such as that by trans philosophy student Adam/Linda Parascandola, hints at how properties like gender are connected to personal identity — Parascandola seems to agree, even in her transness, that the properties do not actually matter, in survival.
Is there such a thing as a “will” to us, and are we “free” in any sense? What if it’s all an illusion? Apparently Baron d’Holbach (whose salon was the star of A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment) was among the first to pose this provocation toward determinism. We only think we are free, because we can’t really analyze all the complex causes of our behaviors. We can acknowledge this, argues Hume, without having to give up on the notion of will. The solution seems to be to focus on arbitrary choices, like a choice between two roads, each one much the same: will is what prevents impasse and makes us active choosers. Regret certainly exists — who among us does not have any? So argues William James, in a masterful essay I had to read twice, and now feel due to read again. Regret implies there is a chance we can make the world better, even if we need to remain humble about it. Ethical consciousness can grow.
What if the free will problems are all just problems of defining freedom and will and related topics? Maybe we don’t really know much about whether free will is even a problem.
Maybe we don’t know much, at all. No one can explain how we know anything, at all, claim Kolak and Martin, as they introduce the section on knowledge. “I think, therefore I am,” that famous dictum of Descartes, has come under fire, although philosophers seem as often to assume it again after they rebut it. Berkeley’s position pushes the logic to its furthest: the objects of human knowledge are all ideas of thinkers. This idea seems almost unnecessary, a relic for the dustbin of fallacies, but it turns out to foreshadow the contemporary discussion on the anthropic principle, below. Such are the incomplete results of our efforts in deduction and induction; but they remain the best we have.
Arguments about the existence of God take up a larger section of the anthology than I would have thought, but I suppose that reveals the book’s American orientation. American, and from deeply Christian heritage, myself, I’m still easily pulled into the discussions. I can feel the sharp, chemical sense of certainty Anselm was feeling, when he laid out his argument. Deduction is a pleasure; surely there is some larger design dictating that? Aquinas inspires us with his bravura display of deduction; Kant seems wisest by stripping existence of the predication property we tend to give it, when we speak of God.
I wonder if there is any connection between Kant’s insights that existence is a not really a predicate that adds any properties to objects, and the idea from other cultures that other cosmological and moral ideas can be somehow richer and more practical, as Kwasi Wiredu reasons, observing his native Akan belief systems. Georges Rey, in a bracing manifesto, illustrates how we can even think of people who claim to believe as not actually thinking and behaving as if they believe, so therefore not in fact believing.
Back to Berkeley: maybe it doesn’t do to wonder too much about connecting our self and will to reality, because there are no open passages to do so. Causation is cut off from us, meditates Hume, in his most skeptical moods. But necessary connection could potentially be explained by the shape and structure of the universe, seems the implication of Einstein’s reflections. (Though science never seems to help us as much as it promises. What is curved about curved space? And why is it curved?)
The climax of the reflections on reality is Kolak’s introduction to the anthropic principle and quantum cosmology. The universe comes from an unstable nothing, and is more than perfectly explainable to our minds: subatomic particle properties do not exist without conscious minds. Objective reality of things is a set of all possible experiences an observer can have of the thing. The universe is just the right number of dimensions, with just the right proportions of visible light, to supply us with the information it needs for us to observe that it exists. This line of thought builds and builds in one of the longest pieces in the book, and then takes a terrific autobiographical turn, as we learn that Kolak was a physicist who decided to pursue philosophy. The reason was: we can always ask another why question, and science can answer these no better than religion. So it's better to go for philosophy, where formulation of questions is the means of investigation. (And these lead to answers, is the implication. Or not? It could also be that the questions themselves, like Russell's "life of uncertainty," have intrinsic value. But what is this intrinsic value?)
“No one has ever been able to explain unproblematically how experience is even possible,” begins the eighth section. Not for lack of trying. There has been a steady march away from Descartes’ idea of mind separate from body, and toward physicalism, the theory that all mental states can be pictured as physical events. But I’m jumping the gun here, anticipating an argument in the following section on consciousness, because I don’t know, really, how to distinguish consciousness and experience. Is the latter the past states of the former? It’s some attempt to get at what is fundamental to the complex instance of consciousness, at least in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which aims to spell out principles for cognitions prior to sensation. How well does Kant's model of pure reason hold up today? It’s hard to reconcile the sense of introspection in Kant to modern theories of mind, with their focus on the causal role of mental states — functionalism. Which is to say: I wonder if Kant would have believed that an android could really think.
In a strange piece by Arnold Zuboff, “The Story of a Brain,” we imagine that the idea that the mind is a collection of functioning neurons is carried to extreme lengths, such that a brain is replicated by connecting certain all neurons to simulated receptors: is one whole brain hooked up to receptors any different from hundreds of thousands of individual neurons hooked up to receptors, if the total system could have by administered by computers such that no individual neuron would “know” that its receptor was not another neuron? This thoroughly puzzling piece seems at first a parody of functionalism, but then a sort of explanation for it, and in the end, perhaps a little of both?
From here, we contemplate death, a time when surely something happens to consciousness. Something, but not an ending: not nothing, or so goes an argument by Thomas W. Clark.
Death certainly does remind us of questions about the meaning of life. There is the verdict on Sisyphus, supplied with his single and ever-present ground for meaning, according to Camus. And there are the work and activity theories, like that of Richard Taylor. Both of these seem lacking, although I do think living well is connected to doing good work.
Expanding ethical consciousness is surely good work. How can we maximize the impact? How can we feel fulfilled, and not worried all the time about the quality of work and the impact? If we knew the answer to that, we would likely stop reading and taking all these notes.
Finally, the book ends with a contemplation of values. Aristotle seems not to have been superseded, on this topic: the good life is a life of activity in accordance with virtue.
So what is virtue?
Back to the books!
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