ALAN SAUNDERS TRIBUTE PROGRAM

Lynne Malcolm: This is a special edition of the Philosopher’s Zone in honour of the founder and presenter and our valued colleague Alan Saunders who recently passed away at the age of 57. I’m Lynne Malcolm and we thought that one of the best ways to thank Alan for his huge contribution to the discussion of ideas would be to bring you a selection of his work. Alan had many interests but his academic background was in the History and Philosophy of Science.

The Philosopher’s Zone began in 2005, each week it shifted its focus across disparate fields always with Alan steering the conversation. But today it’s more about the people and ideas that Alan was most passionate about - science, animal consciousness, the Ancient Greeks, film and the enlightenment. There are few thinkers he admired more than the Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume about whom he made a four part series. So let’s begin.

Alan Saunders: You put the kettle on the stove, turn on the gas, and in a little while the water in the kettle boils. So can we say that turning on the gas caused the water to boil? Or is it just that all we can is that there were two events: gas goes on, water boils but that there is no real connection between the two.

It seems like a simple question but it goes deep into our understanding of the world.

Helen Beebee: Hume's central thought that really all we get to find out about the world is just regularity, is just one thing following another, and then next time, one thing following another again, and somehow out of that we conjure up beliefs about what causes what, that's been absolutely central to the debate about causation as it's gone on for the last three centuries

Lynne Malcolm: That’s Helen Beebee Hume scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Here she talks with Alan about Hume’s take on induction and whether a ‘B’ will always follow an ‘A’ or something else altogether.

Helen Beebee: All A's have been followed by Bs in my past experience; now I'm confronted with an A, what's the mechanism by which I come to expect that a B is going to happen?

So the problem of induction is now the problem of justifying that inference. How do we go from all A's have been followed by Bs in the past to all A's are B's or the next A is going to be a B? What licences that inference? And that's the problem that Hume's commonly thought to have both raised and also shown to be completely insolvable.

Alan Saunders: And it doesn't have to be time-related, it can be a generalisation about the present as well. All the crows that I know are black, so from that I draw a universal law that all crows are black.

Helen Beebee: Right. Yes. So Hume's concerned because he thought of inductive inferences as basically inferences from causes to effects. He was thinking of inductive inferences being A's followed by B's, right, because that's the cause-effect relation. Whereas since Hume, people have kind of generalised out and thought of it not necessarily as being a matter of all A's are followed by B's, but as you say, all A’s are B's, or all crows are black, all swans are white is the famous example, and so on. So from the point of view of the problem of induction it doesn't matter which way you do that, but Hume is only worried about A's being followed by B's, because he's worried about inferences from causes to effects.

Alan Saunders: And all swans are white is a notoriously good case of the inadequacy of induction because you go to Western Australia and there you've got black swans.

Helen Beebee: Absolutely.

Alan Saunders: We might try, rather shonkily I think, to justify induction by saying that it's worked in the past, so there's good reason for thinking that it will work in the future. What's wrong with that?

Helen Beebee: Yes, that is one where you might try and do it, and it's quite similar to a way that that Hume considers and dispenses with, and this way is going to fail for just the same kind of reason, which is that of course the very claim that it's worked in the past so it's going to work in the future, is itself a form of inductive inference. So if you want to try and show why inductive inference is all right, you'd better not appeal to something which is itself an inductive inference, in order to do that. That's just not going to satisfy someone who's already suspicious about whether inductive inference is okay.

Alan Saunders: Karl Popper, writing in 1934, this is the great 20th century philosopher of science, referred to the problem of induction as 'Hume's problem'. For him, it was essentially insoluble. He thought that it is simply incorrect to assume that just because the sun has risen every day so far, it will rise tomorrow. From that emerges his philosophy, which is basically that we should seek to disprove rather than to prove our theories. But was Popper's problem really Hume's problem? Is the problem that he sees before him the problem that Hume saw before him?

Helen Beebee: I think Popper sets off a genuine disagreement between him and Hume, which is to do with whether we actually use inductive inference. So Popper not only thought that we should follow the method of conjecture and refutation, you throw up a hypothesis and then you test it, but he actually claimed that that's how we really do go about our ordinary lives, that is how we reason. And that's how dogs reason as well.

Now that stands in complete opposition to Hume, who thought that inductive inference; inference from causes to effects was the thing that is the inference that we rely on all the time. So Popper thinks that's just false, it's not that we expect the car to stop on the basis of the fact that it stops when we put our foot on the pedal every time in the past, it's more that we have a hypothesis that in general the car stops when you put your foot on the brakes, and now we test that hypothesis in a rather high-risk fashion by going around and driving down the motorway and hoping that this time our hypothesis is not refuted.

In general, Popper thinks in science it's good when a hypothesis gets refuted because that shows you that it must be false. In the case of the case of driving your car, you might worry about whether it's such a good idea if your hypothesis is refuted or if that's something you should be hoping for. So he genuinely disagrees with Hume over whether or not inducted inference is the form of inference that we use to go about our daily lives, or indeed in scientific investigation.

Whether the problem of induction is characterised as a problem about justification is Hume's problem, is something that I'm not so sure about. In fact I think it's not Hume's problem at all. I think Hume's problem is to do with the psychology of our beliefs or expectations. How is it as a matter of fact, that we get from observing regularities in the past to coming to form this expectation about what's going to happen? What's the mechanism that does that?

Lynne Malcolm: Helen Beebee, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham in the UK speaking about the 18th century Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume. And you may have noticed the reference to another of Alan’s great philosophical loves the Viennese philosopher of science Karl Popper.

This is a special edition of the Philosopher’s Zone on RN with me Lynne Malcolm and we’re paying tribute to the late Alan Saunders.

Stephen Hetherington: I’m Stephen Hetherington Professor of Philosophy at the University of NSW. Most of my writing is on epistemology that is theories of knowledge and that’s what my interviews with Alan were about. We talked about sceptical ideas and arguments and self knowledge – what it is and how attainable it is. And each time that was just a great opportunity we’re doing epistemology on the radio – that’s fantastic. And I thought at the time, I knew at the time very few people could have done what Alan did in that setting. He was encouraging, he was engaging and these are genuinely difficult and even abstract ideas. But the result wasn’t too abstract or too difficult. Philosophy begins with really simple humanly important ideas and then it gets difficult and academics certainly make it difficult and then hopefully out of all that you can still return to simple ideas. Underlying ideas; ones that genuinely motivate people.

Alan knew that and that was a big part of the success of the Philosopher’s Zone and the Philosopher’s Zone is exactly the kind of thing that’s going to help more people care longer about philosophy, it shouldn’t just purely be in universities, it should be somehow reaching everyone and Alan was terrific.

Lynne Malcolm: Stephen Hetherington from the University of NSW and here’s Stephen speaking with Alan about sceptical thinking.

Stephen Hetherington: Look, it's just so easy to take stuff for granted, and if philosophy is nothing without basic core motivating ideas, and I guess I've always thought one of the basic philosophical ideas, and not only that, an impulse, an instinct, is instinct to question, not to question blindly, to question with an idea, with your eye on truth, and try to look beyond appearances.

So if you think for example metaphysics traditionally as thinking about reality beyond appearances, then you think epistemology at its most basic, is going to be thinking about knowing reality in part, potentially beyond appearances. And so when you put it like that, you know, in a few sentences, I'm already starting to sound philosophical.

Alan Saunders: And you then move on to what you call 'a thousand dollar doubt'. What's a thousand dollar doubt and why's it worth a thousand dollars?

Stephen Hetherington: With inflation. Well the idea there was it's easier to sort of say, well I'm not really sure about something, beliefs are easy, you can believe anything. Well, try it. Even if I offer you a thousand dollars, I don't think you can make yourself believe. So the idea is you look out the window, it's raining, believe it's not. Here's a thousand dollars if you can genuinely believe that you're not. Not just say it.

Alan Saunders: Isn't that though just a psychological fact about me that I can't believe it? It doesn't follow from my inability to enter into state of mind where I don't believe it's raining, it doesn't follow from that that it actually is raining.

Stephen Hetherington: No, quite. So the idea is that sort of question is used as just a way to sort of lead someone in to the idea of thinking what possible ideas or ways of thinking, could - and then of course the critical move - should, get you to change your beliefs. So at first if you say, 'My gosh, here's $1,000 can you change your mind?' 'Well no, I can't because there's the evidence.' 'Ah, evidence', and with that suddenly we're introducing a normative element. Because with the evidence, the idea is therefore we should have this or that belief. And once we're starting to think like that, we're starting to do epistemology. And you know, your sceptical doubts are coming along down the line. But that's the first move.

Alan Saunders: One of the important aspects of scepticism is that it doesn't actually have to give us a reason for specific doubts about what we claim to believe. It can just raise the possibility. Is it, for example, possible that I am not seeing the world, I'm not seeing the rain, but that I'm just dreaming it?

Stephen Hetherington: This is a possibility that famously Descartes considered. He wasn't actually the first to consider that one, it cropped up in the Theaetetus as well, one of the famous Platonic dialogues. But Plato didn't do as much with it. Descartes had it highlighted there in the First Meditation as seemingly a core element in what for many has been the most pronounced episode of sceptical doubt in modern philosophy. So is it possible? Well the Sceptic would say so. The Sceptic doesn't believe that it's dreaming, and what you're asking is, is the sceptic doing anything more than just sort of mentioning an enticing odd little possibility which if we're going to be open-minded and fair and intelligent, we suddenly think is possible. And having admitted that it's possible, questions can be ruled out. And the sceptic of course is saying 'Well you can't'. And if you were dreaming, you wouldn't be perceiving.

Alan Saunders: No. So this is a version of scepticism about the external world.

Stephen Hetherington: Correct. And so in fact the idea of the external world, we get that idea in part through the sceptic of thinking. Because in other words, if you don't even sort of think of the possibility of you undergoing subjectively felt experiences which could nonetheless be radically misleading about what they seem to be about, then if you don't open yourself to that, then you mightn't even think of a world beyond. But once you do think of those experiences, that are potentially misleading, then you can say for example what are they misleading about? And you'd say, well, it's about a physical world. You could even then though raise a more radical doubt and say could there be no physical world?

Alan Saunders: Well I suppose one answer might be, Well, what is this external world? There is in fact no world external to me, I am not trapped in my own mind, looking out. I am part of the world, and I cannot help but trust my perceptions of it.

Stephen Hetherington: Look, I've got to say I actually am not a sceptic, I agree with you, seriously, but the idea is, as I said, if you're going to reach your sort of positive optimistic gung-ho view of ourselves as functioning in the world, as knowing beings, etc., the idea of the motivation behind this kind of approach to introducing people of philosophy is just to say look, don't at least reach for that positive view too quickly. Stop, take a detour, maybe you'll get lost, and maybe you won't come back. But at least think about it and tell us why you've got that knowledge. That's the critical thing with the sceptic. And taking sceptical ideas seriously, you don't have to be saying 'I genuinely give up on the idea of the world' for example, it's just the very least it's saying, ‘If I end up where I started, I'll be different.’

Lynne Malcolm: Alan didn’t just spend his days reading long and dense works of philosophy, well, he did do that too but he also loved food, popular culture and film. Here the show took on one of the greatest American film directors of the 20th century.

Alan Saunders: It's always seemed to me that if Alfred Hitchcock had had a name that ended in a vowel, so that he sounded like a difficult European director, he would never have got some of his ideas past the studio heads. Because,although not a philosopher in any formal sense, he was a director with philosophical ideas.

Woman: The curtains, Johnny, draw the curtains.

William A. Drumin: He was an entertainer of course, not a philosopher, but as one studies his films, one can pick up a certain thread of thoughts, of attitude, as a cinematic artist, which has a bearing on philosophical questions.

FILM EXERPT: Stagefright

Woman: I think he's dead, I'm sure he's dead, I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it.

Man: Who’s dead?

Woman: My husband.

Alan Saunders: Given that murder is very, very close to the heart of the stories that he brings to the screen, obviously a view of human nature and a view of the human capacity for evil is going to be part of that vision, isn't it?

William A. Drumin: Yes, very much so. And it isn't always about murder, but certainly murder stands out, yes.

Alan Saunders: And so we are for him, an imperfect species, clearly capable of doing the most terrible things to each other, but is there a source of hope? Is there a source of optimism in his work as well?

William A. Drumin: Yes. Hitchcock is definitely anti-Utopian in his outlook as you said. Evil is ingrained in the world and in our human constitution, but he is not dis-Utopian. We are neither - I'm thinking of Pascal -

Alan Saunders: This is the 17th century French philosopher.

William A. Drumin: Yes. He said 'Man is neither (meaning human beings) neither angels nor brutes, they're in between'. But you never play the brute so much as when you try to play the angel. So Hitchcock would say we must be aware, it is a central need to be aware of our capacity for evil, lest we will all the more readily succumb to unleashing evil in the world.

Lynne Malcolm: William A Drumin co-editor of Hitchcock and philosophy, Dial M for metaphysics. You can hear the full program about Alfred Hitchcock on the Philosopher’s Zone website, in fact every edition of the show is available there in audio form and as a transcript. Just head to the RN home page and select the Philosopher’s Zone from the program list that’s abc.net.au/radionational.

A philosopher who appeared on the show a number of times over the years and who Alan was very fond of both personally and philosophically was the world renowned Martha Nussbaum. She and Alan shared a love of the Ancient Greeks and Romans but they also shared an interest in our relationship with animals.

Alan Saunders: In the West, we haven't traditionally regarded animals as members of the ethical community. Why is that, do you think?

Martha Nussbaum: I think it's funny and it's complicated, because if you go back to Greece and Rome, we do see that the different philosophical traditions had different views, but most of them did treat animals with a great deal of respect, and had a lot of arguments about vegetarianism and the good treatment of animals. The Stoic tradition was the one that didn't, it made a very sharp separation between humans and the other animals, and that's the one that turned out to be highly influential. So that's part of it, but I think you know, Judaism and Christianity are another part of the problem. Both Judaism and Christianity do make human beings the stewards of nature, and they give them dominion over all the other creatures. And so even though a lot of people in those traditions have had great sensitivity to the plight of animals, it's a very different story from Hinduism and Buddhism, where the kinship of all life is a very fundamental issue. And even today, the best court judgment that I know dealing with animal rights is one from a High Court in the State of Kerala in India, that said that animals are persons in the sense of the Indian Constitution and subject to the right that that constitution guarantees to a life with dignity.

Alan Saunders: What about, I mean one basic aspect of reciprocity is blame. Can I blame animals? I still bear on my wrist scratch marks from a friend's cat, who is basically a very friendly cat, but who does get carried away occasionally. Can I blame the cat for that? Can I say 'That was wrong, that was a bad thing to do', as I would if a human being treated me like that?

Martha Nussbaum: Not a cat, no. I think that you know, some animals do seem to have a sense of rule-following, and breaking of rules. Certainly chimpanzees, bonobos, in a different way I think dogs have some kind of comprehension of the notion of breaking a rule, and then elephants, we're finding out surprising things about elephants. They have a concept of the self, so we might find out in time that elephants too, have that, but you know, it's not in the form which would give rise to a very robust notion of moral blame.

So thinking about the emotions, I want to say that animals can have a lot of the emotions humans have, including compassion, but that their compassion is different. Because human compassion usually involves the idea that this person isn't to blame for the bad predicament they're in, and animals don't have that thought. So sometimes that means they can actually do better than humans, because they, for example, you know Fontane's great novel, Effi Briest, with the fallen woman who has been abandoned by her society and her parents and so on because she committed an indiscretion, the only person who has compassion for her is her dog, because he's the only one can't form the notion of blame, and the bad woman. So you know, there I think what Fontane wanted to show is that sometimes blame gets in your way and the person who simply sees suffering and doesn't think so much about blame can sometimes be better off.

Lynne Malcolm: Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and when she heard Alan had passed away she wrote to us.

“Alan Saunders was a prince among broadcasters, of all the journalists I’ve ever met he had the deepest love of and also understanding of philosophy and his passion for ideas made doing a program with him a highlight of one’s year; even long distance by phone and even more by person in the studio. What he brought to public discussion was priceless”.

I’m Lynne Malcolm and this is a special one hour edition of the Philosopher’s Zone to celebrate the life and work of our late colleague Alan Saunders. And you’re listening to one of Alan’s favourite performers Cab Calloway.

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Peter Godfrey-Smith, I teach philosophy at the City University of New York in the USA. Philosophy is of course rather a dry and arcane business, it’s no easy matter bringing it to life on the radio. What made Alan so unusual is not that he just did bring it to life but that he did not do this by ignoring the more subtle and arcade side of it and picking up on only the occasionally sexy side of philosophy instead it was very interested in the details, the twists and turns, all the peculiar places that philosophers end up in. He headed to the heart of the matter. For that reason when talking to Alan you never knew where you might find yourself. We did a show on the American pragmatists where we ended up spending quite a bit of time talking about the status of relations as properties of things, relations as opposed to the intrinsic features of objects.

He was very knowledgeable and he struck what I think is called really an almost impossible balance between making philosophy accessible without compromising its seriousness. For that reason it’s really a tremendous loss.

Lynne Malcolm: Peter Godfrey-Smith from the City University of New York. As we heard earlier Alan loved animals. He co-sponsored a dingo, supported the conservation of orang-utans and the endangered Scottish wild cat and closer to home he was the official baby sitter of a friend’s cat called Buzz. Buzz even got a couple of mentions on the show.

In a program that started out exploring the consciousness of octopuses the discussion broadened out as you’ll hear now.

Alan Saunders: Now the story our engagement with animal consciousness goes back as far as Aristotle, but the obvious place to begin the historical story is in the 17th century, with Rene Descartes. What did he have to say?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Right, yes. Descartes had a view in which animals are machines, essentially, non-human animals are machines. And to his credit, he didn't just sort of say this as something which fitted into his story and which was not argued for, he did give fairly careful arguments. He argued that language is a really important divide between humans and non-humans, and that the human capacity for language requires that we be more than machines, but the things that animals can do, which don't include the use of language, are things that could in principle be explained mechanistically. Now that's an argument which I think did make a good deal of sense in Descartes' time. At the present time the idea that language is intrinsically non-mechanizable is a much less likely idea.

Alan Saunders: Now Descartes' arguing for an absence of animal consciousness on grounds of the dissimilarity between animals and us. But you can also argue for an absence of animal consciousness on the basis of certain similarities between animal behaviours and behaviours which can be conducted unconsciously by humans. It's been argued that all animal behaviour can be assimilated to the non-conscious activities of humans, such as driving while distracted, driving on auto-pilot. I'm unconvinced by this. What do you think?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: I'm also unconvinced. It's an attempt to say something that bridges the human and non-human case and you can see reasons for saying it. But one reason you might resist this is the following:

So attention is a phenomenon which we're familiar with from the human case, and attention is something which is probably the simplest summary of what's missing when a person is driving on auto-pilot, they aren't attending to the act of driving. Now I think it's reasonable to think that for animals too, there's a distinction between things that they do while attending and things that they don't. So when one's interacting with as it might be a dog, or in fact an octopus - this happened to me the other day - you can sometimes see the signs of attention. The animal acquires a focus on a particular aspect of their surroundings which is - it's a definite move the animal makes. It's now attending to this. So the idea that animals lives are sort of auto-pilot across the board, I think of as - at least one thing missing from that picture is the distinction between attention and its absence, which I think is visible in the animal case as well.

Alan Saunders: John Searle, the American philosopher says, 'I do not infer that my dog is conscious any more than that when I came into this room, I inferred that the people present are conscious; I simply respond to them as is appropriate to conscious beings. I just treat them as conscious beings and that is that.' Perhaps you can do that with dogs - can you do it with octopuses?

Peter Godfrey-Smith: Right. You can't. It's a nice illustration of a crucial difference, so with dogs as you said earlier, we've co-evolved with them in many respects, and our behaviour's integrated with theirs, in such a way that Searle's comment makes some sense. But just as if we met an alien, that would not be the case and we'd have to sort of start from scratch and ask ourselves, Well what are we saying when say that this thing has beliefs, that it has feelings and so on, and what evidence would show us that it had those things?

We have to ask those questions in the case of the octopus, from scratch. It's not the case that we're dealing with an animal whose behaviours are integrated with our habits in a way that can make the question less problematic.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor Peter Godfrey-Smith from the City University of New York. As much as Alan loved nothing more than thinking about complex philosophical ideas he also loved a bit of fun. One of his all time favourite TV shows was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he even had a computer screen saver of one of the programs characters. If you’re not familiar with this long running series it’s about a high school student in Sunnydale California who discovers two rather challenging things. One – her town is built on the hellmouth where all manner of vampires and other unworldly creatures reside. And two she finds she is a slayer which means it’s her job to rid the earth of evil. A noble pursuit Alan would say if somewhat difficult. Here’s a taste of that program.

TV THEME: In every generation there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.

Alan Saunders: Buffy the Vampire Slayer began life as a movie in 1992, but over seven seasons and six years from 1997 to 2003, it was brilliantly innovative TV and much else besides: a horror story, an adventure story, a sprawling account of the operation of good and evil in the world, even, in one episode, a musical.

Five years on, it's still around in the form of re-runs on Pay-TV, DVDs, numerous books and websites.

But, was it philosophy? One man who thinks it was is James B. South. He's Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, and much of his research has concentrated on questions about cognition in later mediaeval philosophy, and Descartes' indebtedness to late scholastic thought.

James B. South: Basically it's a variant of a traditional sort of horror story, a story about a vampire slayer, Buffy, and her cohort of friends who have to fight the forces of darkness and evil, among them vampires, zombies and the like.

Alan Saunders: And what has this to do with philosophy? In principle, you can I suppose philosophise about anything, you can philosophise about food, sport, interior design, or just about any TV show. You could be talking about 'Charmed' for example. But is there anything particular about Buffy that makes it a proper focus for philosophical attention?

James B. South: Well I think there are a couple of particular reasons that Buffy is attractive to philosophers as a series to give some philosophical consideration to. First of all, it was created, written and produced over the course of seven seasons, with real control by one person, which means the show has a vision, it has a clear beginning, middle and end, and it has a lot of character development. There are connected themes, there are overlapping themes, there are recurring characters, characters who showed up in the first season recur in the last season. So there's a rich text there to really roam around in philosophically.

Lynne Malcolm: James B South editor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, fear and trembling in Sunnydale. You’re listening to RN, I’m Lynne Malcolm with a tribute to the Philosopher’s Zone in honour of our valued colleague the late Alan Saunders.

Alan was fascinated by the philosophy of Ancient Greece and Rome. In one program he explored the great Arabic translation movement. At a time when Europe was a little backwards philosophically speaking Arabs were busily translating and debating the ideas of the Ancient Greeks. Were it not for a group of scholars centred around the flourishing city of Bagdad in the 9th century many of these ancient works would have been lost to the rest of the world. Here’s Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London and the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy.

Peter Adamson: It's one of the most important and successful translation movements in history and one of the reasons it was so important and successful is because it was so comprehensive, so for example they translate pretty much everything that we now have for Aristotle, they had as well. A lot of Aristotle of course is lost permanently, and there is not any Aristotle that's lost to us that they have in Arabic, but they pretty much managed to translate everything that we've got.

Alan Saunders: When did Arabic philosophers first start reading and discussing Greek philosophy?

Peter Adamson: Well it's basically in the 3rd century of the Islamic calendar, so that's about the 9th century A.D., or the end of the 8th century, and they began translating it under the Abbasid Caliphs, so that's the second Caliphate of Islamic history after the Umayyads. They came into power towards the end of the 8th century.

Alan Saunders: And something that was very important to them, and that was Aristotle's logic, wasn't it?

Peter Adamson: Yes, that's right. In fact Aristotle's logical works are among the very first works to be translated into Arabic. In fact they'd already been translated to some extent, into another Semitic language, which is Syriac, so this is an ancient language that was used in Syria as the name sort of implies, and Syriac sort of forms a bridge between Greek and Arabic. So you have to imagine that there are these monasteries in Syria, a bunch of Christian monks sitting around reading Aristotle's logic and translating the Greek into Syriac and writing commentaries on it.

Alan Saunders: You say they're going off in search of manuscripts and so on, but where was all this material before they got their hands on it?

Peter Adamson: Some of it would have been available because it had been held in the monastic tradition in Syria, so again, it's sort of important to bear in mind the historical and geographical situation here. Really ever since Alexander the Great there's been a penetration of Greek culture into the Middle East and then further East into Persia and Central Asia, and certainly in the period of the late Roman Empire let's say, you've got a very widespread Greek speaking culture in Egypt and in Syria and other places in the Middle East. And that means that there's a pre-existing body of Greek literature and also a pre-existing group of people who can speak Greek. Whether they're capable of this very high level intellectual enterprise of reading, say, Aristotle in Greek is another matter.

Another possible source for them is of course the Byzantine Empire, which is right on their border, so this is a period at which there's a lot of military conflict between the Islamic world and the Christian Greek-speaking Byzantine world. But on the other hand there's also trade going back and forth, and so it's not inconceivable that there could be some kind of intellectual transmission across that border as well.

Lynne Malcolm: That was Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at Kings College, London.

Mark Colyvan: Hi, I’m Mark Colyvan, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney. I was fortunate enough to know Alan as both a guest on his program the Philosopher’s Zone and through Alan’s involvement in the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science. I loved talking to Alan both on and off the air, he was charming, clever, gracious, erudite and fun. He was committed to the idea of presenting philosophy to the general public, had an extraordinary faith in and respect for his audience. He believed that the public wanted to hear about new and often complex ideas; he believed that they wanted the details and that there was no need to dumb it down. And he believed that his audience wanted to hear all of this from those actually engaged in the relevant research. Of course he was right about all of that, his large and devoted audience is the proof. But it took someone as enthusiastic and as talented as Alan to pull this off. I for one will miss him greatly but I’d like to think that as a result of Alan’s efforts we’ll see lasting beneficial effects on the intellectual landscape of this country and on the standards of public debate. Here’s hoping.

Lynne Malcolm: Alan’s doctorate was in the History and Philosophy of Science, here he’s joined by Mark Colyvan discussing the logician, the mathematician and philosopher Kurt Godel.

Mark Colyvan: I think he's one of the great logicians; I think he belongs right up there with Aristotle, Descartes, but just in general philosophy, in mathematics, I think he ranks in any one of those areas; he was someone who did bridge across both mathematics and logic and philosophy. I think he stands as one of the greats in any of those three areas.

Alan Saunders: When Gödel was a young man in the early 20th century, the foundations of mathematics were in crisis. What was the nature of that crisis and what did it have to do with logic?

Mark Colyvan: A couple of sources for the crisis I think. Perhaps most serious was that a very famous letter to the mathematician and logician, Frege, Bertrand Russell wrote that he'd found a contradiction in his formalisation of this mathematics of set theory. And it turns out it was very generalisable, although Russell was particularly interested in a contradiction he'd found in this formalisation that Frege had run with, one of the foundation mathematical sciences of set theory. It turns out it's perfectly general, so Russell had shown that there was a liar-like paradox.

Alan Saunders: Let's back up a bit here. And first of all, look at what set theory is. Now a set essentially is just a collection of things isn't it? I mean you can have a set of socks, a set of pens, a set of anything really.

Mark Colyvan: That's right. So it's just a way that you collect things together, not necessarily physically, so in mathematics there will be a set which is my right big toe and the Eiffel tower, that's a set. So you can just collect things together in this formal sense. And the thing that's collected together it's important to note, is a set, it's not the things in the set. So the set of people in this room is not a person, it's a set.

Alan Saunders: OK. Now Frege is working on the foundation of mathematics, and in order to do that, he's actually asking very fundamental questions. What is the number two? For example. And he decides that a number is a set, doesn't he?

Mark Colyvan: That's right. Yes, he's asking these very fundamental questions, so fundamental in fact that many of the mathematicians at the time just didn't get what he was on about. He was worrying about what the number two is, whereas most mathematicians were worried about all sorts of fancy infinities. And Frege thought, well no wonder you can't understand all of these fancy infinitives. We don't even know what two is, so let's get a grip on that. So his proposal was that two is a bunch of sets that have two things in them.

Alan Saunders: So we have a way independent of counting from one to two, we have a way of determining that there are two things in this set.

Mark Colyvan: Technically if you want to say the two sets have the same size, so if you want to say that you’ve got seven people in the room and you want to say the number of things in that set is the same as the number of things in the set of days of the week for instance you typically would count both, notice that both have seven and then say that they are the same. But you can do it without counting. So for instance in a large theatre you can note that there are the same number of people as there are chairs by just simply noting that no one is standing and all the chairs are full. You don’t have to actually do the counting you can pair them up. And so this was an insight that was around at the time and certainly Frege’s idea was to pursue this that it’s about one to one correspondence as a mathematician would put it.

Alan Saunders: OK, so there's Frege doing this in Germany, and then he gets this letter from his English colleague, Bertrand Russell. What does Russell have to tell him, and why is it bad news?

Mark Colyvan: He points out that there is a paradox in the set theory, and without going into the details of the actual set theory paradox, the basic idea is very similar to the liar paradox, which was well-known to philosophers, which is simply a sentence that says of itself that it's not true. So if I say to you now 'I am lying right now', that sentence turns out to be paradoxical. If it's true, it's false, if it's false, then it's true.

Alan Saunders: Because if what you say is true, then it must be false, because you've just asserted the falsity of what you're saying. And if it's false, given that you've asserted the falsity of what you're saying, it must be true. So we go back and forth.

Mark Colyvan: So it's paradoxical. What Russell did, he'd been thinking about such things for far too long to be healthy, I think, and he realised that you could construct these things in other mediums, if you like, and so he constructed a set theoretical analogue of this, and again, we don't need to go into the details, but it really is just the same kind of trick, this liar-like paradox to be found in Russell in the Frege system. And although the letter was directed to Frege and to Frege's system, the paradox is perfectly generalisable. You can construct such a paradox in any of the set theories of the time. Well that was the really big crisis. It looked like mathematics itself was inconsistent.

Alan Saunders: Let's just look at the way in which it works in set theory. Russell assumes that you can make sets of anything, and you can make sets of sets. You can bung sets together and have bigger sets. And he assumes that there must be... some sets are members of themselves, and some are not. So the set of all short words it's itself a short word. Short is a short word. The set of all French words, well French is not a French word, so that's not a member of itself. And he says then well if some sets are members of themselves and some are not, what about the set of all sets, which are not members of themselves. Is that a member of itself, or is it not. And you get exactly the same paradox, don't you, because the qualifications for being a member of the set are that you're not a member of yourself, therefore if it's a member of itself, it can't be a member of itself and if it's not a member of itself, then it is. So it's exactly the same sort of, as philosopher's say, 'self-referential paradox'.

Mark Colyvan: That's right, yes. So that was the basic idea. It came from thinking about the liar and just a very, very clever move, to see that the liar paradox wasn't just about truth, which is what the standard story was, but to see that there's a set theoretic analogue of it, and that was devastating for foundations of mathematics, because it looked like the best mathematics of the day was in fact inconsistent.

Lynne Malcolm: Mark Colyvan, Director of the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science at the University of Sydney. It wouldn‘t be a philosophy show without some mention of God and particularly the tension between faith and rational thought. This intellectual conflict is illustrated by the 17th century Dutchman Baruch Spinoza. He’s been regarded as the great atheist of the western tradition but atheist is too simple a term.

Alan is speaking here with Beth Lord from the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Alan Saunders: Spinoza thinks that there are three ways of apprehending the world. There's intuition, there's reason, philosophy and science and so on, and there's the imagination. Now we can presumably use all of them to understand God, but imagination is very important here, isn't it?

Beth Lord: That's right. The three kinds of knowledge are crucial to Spinoza's system. Imagination is the way we know through experience. So anything that has to do with the way we experience and perceive the world with our memories, with our anticipations, with our dreams, all of these kinds of things are what Spinoza calls imagination. And imagination, while it's less adequate than rational knowledge, as Spinoza puts it, it's a kind of confused and partial and mixed-up version of true knowledge, nevertheless, it's not entirely false or illusory, we shouldn't take the word 'imagination' necessarily to mean made up, or anything like that.

Now imagination is important with respect to this question of God and religion, because through the imagination we build up what Spinoza calls 'fictions', and fictions, they have quite an interesting status in Spinoza's epistemology. Fictions are neither true nor false, they're kind of organised systems of images based on our experiences, based on the experiences that human beings share. These fictions are hugely useful in structuring our experience and helping us to decide how to behave and how to live our lives. And religion, and the Biblical notion of God, fit in to this idea of fiction.

Alan Saunders: Let's just tease out the notion of fictions a bit more. And let's take an example: Hamlet. OK Hamlet is a fiction; however there are things I can say about Hamlet which are not true. If I say that Hamlet is a black man who lives in Venice I've confused him with Othello. And it is not true that Hamlet is a black man who lives in Venice. So I can make true or false statements about a fiction.

Beth Lord: You can, but the truth and falsity of those statements are only relative to the fictional world of Hamlet. In a sense there is no true or false statement that can be made about Hamlet because Hamlet isn't a true idea. So Spinoza really holds to a very specific understanding of truth. And true ideas for Spinoza are ideas that exist in God, that is, in being. So Hamlet for Spinoza really isn't a true idea but nor is it false idea. Again, it's a fiction, it's an idea that's neither true nor false, that might be useful for us.

So the story of Hamlet and the play of Hamlet might be useful for our society, or just useful for entertainment or for telling a story. But the whole question of true and false statements about it, while we might say one could make true and false statements about the events in the play, they're not ultimately true or false, for Spinoza they're just imaginary.

Alan Saunders: So the function of religion then is that it promotes peace and harmony. It has a social utility?

Beth Lord: Yes, that's right.

Alan Saunders: And it needs to be kept away, theology and faith need to be set apart from reason and philosophy.

Beth Lord: Exactly. What Spinoza says is that reason and philosophy have a different aim from religion. The purpose of reason, philosophy and science, are to discover the truth. So through our rational thought, we attain more and more true knowledge, or adequate knowledge, and what that means really is that we tap in to true ideas as they exist in God. It's quite a strange notion, but Spinoza explains it quite clearly.

How we do this is basically through things like scientific experiments, where we pick up on what's called the common notions, and these are kind of ideas that are common to ourselves and to the things that we interact with. So as we build up more and more of these common notions, we attain more and more true knowledge.

Now the aim of religion is rather different. Spinoza again, because he thinks that religion is fictional, and he thinks that therefore its status is neither true nor false, and in a sense truth and falsity just don't really pertain to religion. Religion's job is to interpret the truth about God to people in a way that they can understand. So its role is to tell stories, to interpret sort of the truth about the world to people, and therefore its aim is not to tell the truth or even to discover the truth, its aim is to make people behave better, and to keep people obedient.

Now that sounds rather sinister, but actually Spinoza thinks that's a good thing. It's a good thing because most people are irrational most of the time, he thinks. Most people live according to their imagination. So they're driven by their experiences and when people are irrational, they tend to come into conflict with each other; they tend to desire the same things, and they fight over those things, and people don't get along very easily.

So the role of religion is really in controlling and kind of helping to manage people's feelings and images when they're in this irrational state. And Spinoza's aim is always for people to become more rational and to be able to govern themselves through their own true knowledge about the world. Since he doesn't see humanity becoming enormously rational any time soon, he tends to think that structures like religion are necessary to keep people in line.

Lynne Malcolm: Beth Lord author of Spinoza’s Ethics an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide. Well that’s all in this tribute to Alan Saunders and the Philosopher’s Zone. Today’s program was produced by Kyla Slaven who was with the program for several years. Thanks also to the show’s first producer Polly Rickard and to all those who’ve worked with Alan over the years. And a special thank you to all your tributes to Alan which have poured in to Radio National this past week. We’ve been touched by your expressions of sympathy and by the strong endorsement of the quality and value of the programs that Alan worked on.

We believe that the Philosopher’s Zone is an important strand of our programming on RN and we are looking for ways to continue it in the future. But meanwhile you can listen to every past edition of the program from the RN website at abc.net.au/radionational and choose the Philosopher’s Zone in the program list. And we’re delighted that the National Library has announced this week that the full Philosopher’s Zone archive is now available through their searchable data base called Trove. The details on our website as well.

Today’s sound engineer was David Lawford, I’m Lynne Malcolm – we’ll miss you Alan.