How It Is Done

Here is what FactCheck, a web site of the Associated Press, tells us about the remarks of the chair of the Senate Judicial Committee at the Sotomayor confirmation hearings:

Sotomayor Defends ‘Wise Latina’ Remark

WASHINGTON (AP) - In endorsing Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D. Vt.) did some creative rewriting of history. And he put quote marks around it.

Trying to head off criticism of a controversial comment, Leahy misquoted Sotomayor's own words in kicking off the second day of her confirmation hearings.

Sotomayor's public comments are as much a part of the hearings as her lengthy judicial record. Here's a look at some of the claims made Tuesday about those comments, and the facts.

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LEAHY SAID: "You said that, quote, you 'would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would reach wise decisions.'"

THE FACTS: If that's all Sotomayor said, the quote would barely have mattered to opponents of her nomination. The actual quote, delivered in a 2001 speech to law students at the University of California at Berkeley, was: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Leahy's revision dropped the controversial part of the phrase, the part that has attracted charges of reverse racism.

Sotomayor said her words have been misunderstood. She said she intended to tell students that their experiences would enrich the legal system. But she softened her language Tuesday, say that no ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in judging.
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Question: Was this an honest mistake? Or is Leahy, a lawyer and a long time Senator at the top of the game, consciously distorting the quotation for public consumption? He knows that most Americans will have no idea of what was actually said. Does Leahy hope that his mortal enemies, the Republicans, will look like mean-spirited racists for opposing such a sensible-sounding woman just because she is Latina? Which theory seems more likely?

You Don't Know Nuttin

Ambrose Bierce, I think, said that “It ain’t what ya don’t know that gets ya into trouble. It’s what you know that ain’t so.” That is one way to look at epistemology. What do I know that ain’t so? Do my beliefs about the world or reality actually match it? Reality! The physis sought so ardently in Greece and Asia Minor by the Pre-Socratics exists. Things are. Reality Is. And my mind tries to grasp it. But does it succeed? Being human, I do not know reality as a god would know it. And yet, as a human, I have a mind that animals lack, and I can grasp something beyond the mere sensations of the body.

But if my beliefs about reality are false, is it possible to arrive at true beliefs about reality? Can I find the truth about things? Or, as the sophists claim, is there really nothing but opinion? If so, I should give up the philosophic search for truth and instead search for influence, as the sophists argue. I should learn how to use words to influence people. Learn from the sophists, for a steep fee, how to make “the weaker case seem the stronger and the stronger case seem the weaker.” Learn to manipulate the jury, the public, the democracy. Instead of the open search for truth through rational discussion and argument as Socrates taught it, I should learn to make arguments fit my personal preferences and interests. But I will not be dishonest if I am searching for reality, which, after all, may be knowable.

Then again, are intangibles like justice, wisdom, beauty and goodness also knowable? That is, besides knowing a good horse or a good chariot or a good anything else, can I come to know goodness itself? (This is the problem of the one and the many, the many a good thing versus goodness itself.)

It gets so abstract, so quickly. But the basic point is Bierce’s. There are people who know what God wants and how the world should and will be organized. The know what sort of killing is permitted. They know that they will win. And if you ask them how they can be so sure, they will tell you that they read it in a holy book that does not lie. If they were students of epistemology, if they listened carefully to Descartes and Hume and Locke and that strange bird Bishop George Berkeley they might not be so sure that what they know is actually so. At least, that is the main practical value I see in the study of epistemology.

I wasn’t really kidding when I wrote in an email today that the more I teach this course, the less I know.

Free Philosophy Lecture Notes from MIT

MIT has begun an open education project: many of their great courses have been put online for anyone to follow. You get the syllabus, the assignments, the readings, the lecture notes, the tests. Prof. Rae Langton's survey of classics in Western Philosophy is online. You can download the pdf files of the lecture note here:
Great Lecture Notes

Wisdom and Age

A rambling question or two:

Are babies wise? Does it make sense to say that one baby has more wisdom than another?

If not, what does that suggest about wisdom?

or consider this:

I think it was Chief Sumhalla who told a white man who asked him about the wisdom he claimed for the Indians that “Wisdom comes in dreams.” He added that “Much also may be learned by watching a dreamer at night or in dancing all night.” What do you make of that? How does that compare with what Nils Rauhut says about the philosophical activities in the Western tradition?

Is rationality the key to wisdom? Or is intuition also a source of real knowledge?

(The old head vs. heart debate. In Christendom, a simalar argument was "Mary vs. Martha": when Jesus visited, one was the active cook while the other was the listener to the words of Jesus. They came to re present the dichotomy of the via activa (the active, involved life) and the via contempliva (the withdrawn, thoughtful life), the doing good in the world vs. the going to a monastery or convent. The debate raged for centuries. (The communist picked it up–they massacred the priests and nuns in Tibet for being “parasites” who did not contribute to society but merely meditated all day while eating the gifts from the farmers, whom the communists regarded as dupes.)

Aristotle thought the life of contemplation the best possible life.

Babies are learners for sure, but do they contemplate? If not, can they be wise?