Doctor Rafa Gets to Work

Well, I have my first homework assignment. Florka sent it for our first class, Body Knowledge. It's a seminar class, but looks to be quite difficult indeed judging by the preliminary assignment.

Here's the assignment: first meeting Tuesday September 1.

I want you to look at the opening couple sections of Chapter 5 from Part Two of O’Shaughnessy’s The Will, pp. 179–87 (see attachment).

expect to hand it in.

background and explanation. In Part One O’Shaughnessy explored the limits of basic physical action. (I can’t just will that cup to move “with my mind,” as we say. Why? On the other hand, I can just will my arm to move.) A basic bodily action is, for example, raising your arm, and he counts that as an exercise of the will. He uses uppercase F (big phi) for the basic action, which is something you will, and lowercase j (small phi) for the movement of your limb. So, F may be raising your arm, while j is arm-rise, that is, the arm going up. Obviously, these are closely related (you can’t successfully raise your arm without your arm rising), but they are not the same thing: j (arm-rise, my arm going up) can occur without its being a willed action (i.e. without my raising my arm).

Opening a door is NOT a willed action, though it requires a willed bodily action, namely intentionally moving your hand and arm in a certain way. Opening a door is an instrumental action (which he symbolizes as F¢—big phi prime). (If I could open the door just “with my mind,” that is, without moving my body, that would be a willed action.) It is instrumental because it can only occur because I engaged in a basic bodily action.

First assignment. What he concluded in Part One is summarized in the first couple pages of Chapter Five. It includes some difficult claims about our knowledge of our actions and our limb movements. For example, our knowledge of j is “immediate,” it is something we “just know.” That is to say, our knowledge of j (when it is intentional) is not derived from knowing something else.

Thus—your first assignment here—consider his argument (p. 180) that “our relation to willed j [e.g. my arm’s rising when it is willed] is most unlike that either to unwilled j [for example, lifting my arm due to wind] or a willed j by another [my relation to your arm rising because you willed it].” His claim: our relation to our own willed j is not that of observer to what he observes. (That is, our special relation to our own willed limb movements is not that we observe it happening.)
Why is it not that of observer? He first considers three attempts to explain why our relation to our own willed movements is not that of observer and dismisses each one. (So, his discussion takes the form: the relation is NOT that of observer is “not because …”). Finally, he settles on the explanation he favors.
Your task: explain all of these, failed and successful, candidates in terms of necessary or sufficient conditions. (Wikipedia has a decent explanation of these terms. Learn it: make it part of your regular philosophical vocabulary: we will use it in every discussion.)
In logic, the words necessity and sufficiency refer to the implicational relationships between statements. The assertion that one statement is a necessary and sufficient condition of another means that the former statement is true if and only if the latter is true.
A necessary condition of a statement must be satisfied for the statement to be true. Formally, a statement P is a necessary condition of a statement Q if Q implies P. For example, the ability to breathe is necessary to a human's survival. Likewise, for the whole numbers greater than two, being odd is necessary to being prime, since two is the only whole number that is both even and prime.
A sufficient condition is one that, if satisfied, assures the statement's truth. Formally, a statement P is a sufficient condition of a statement Q if P implies Q. Thus, jumping is sufficient to leave the ground, since an intrinsic element of the concept jumping is leaving the ground. A number's being divisible by 2 is sufficient for its being even.

Your second assignment. Play out what are or are not necessary and what are and are not sufficient conditions for some material object’s being “immediately present” to you. This is a matter of understanding O’Shaughnessy’s claims in section 2(a)(1) pp. 181–82. He does a lot of the work for you, but I want you to get comfortable with the use of this vocabulary and get some idea of what he has in mind by the “immediate presence” of a phenomenon j or a limb L.

Third assignment. O’Shaughnessy’s discussion in 2(c) (pp. 184–85)—of the epistemology and metaphysics of the self—is staggeringly complicated and subtle. (It is brilliant philosophy, setting up the answer to why the notion of the soul is so attractive and so close to the truth, so to speak, while yet being an illusion.)
Your assignment: figure out what he’s saying here, all of it. Beware that he (mostly) distinguishes between awareness of something and knowledge of it, and between immediate givenness and immediate presence. (Here, unlike pp. 188ff, O’Shaughnessy mostly restricts himself to the notion of the given as something that is not derived (it is immediate) and also something that we know with certainty, something that cannot be denied. Here he mostly wants to contrast what is immediately given/known but not experienced with what is immediately present as experienced. (You will not need to hand anything in for this third assignment.)

A warning. You will find the reading and the assignments difficult. Your frustration, along with your natural urge to do some philosophy of your own, may lead you to seek out what is wrong in what O’Shaughnessy says, what you disagree with. While that’s always worth doing, avoid focusing on your objections. He may be wrong, sure, but, believe me, there’s a lot to be gained from trying to understand what O’Shaughnessy is saying (even if you can’t understand all of it). So put your energies into that at the start.

A good shot at completing the reading and these assignments would involves 10–20 hours of work. So don’t leave it until the last minute.

--Roger Florka

Yep. And taking a look at the material, I can vouch for its difficulty.

Still. ...Doesn't that topic sound -awesome-! I want to read an intelligent account of the illusory nature of the soul! ...having trouble getting to that part, but I will!

Eager to do a good job right off the bat, since I feel like I need to work on Florka more now, since I didn't go to any of his little parties this summer. need to remind him I'm his girl. Competent, sensitive, insightful. Rawr.