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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.616)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Philippe Huneman. He is a philosopher of biology working mainly on issues of evolutionary biology and we are talking about his book Why, which beautiful cover by the way, and it's the philosophy behind the question. Your background is mainly in evolutionary biology I believe.
talk to us a little bit about why this book. Why did you, not, I'm sure that that's gonna happen a lot where I ask why questions and you're like, well, let me tell you about why you're asking why, but why this book in particular? Why did you go feel this need to even move philosophy and evolutionary biology, make that crossing?
philippe huneman (00:33.863)
Yeah.
philippe huneman (00:47.082)
Well, actually, so I'm a philosopher of science generally, and then I specialize in the philosophy of evolutionary biology and ecology. I've been doing that for like maybe two decades now. And so, and I've been, as many of my colleagues, addressing issues like what is an explanation in evolutionary biology?
philippe huneman (01:20.507)
what is the natural selection, which is the most important possibly explanation for Darwinian people. And so I've been addressing many issues in the philosophy of science that are actually connected to the way scientists answer why questions. And so I've been also considering
the question of causal explanations. And in a word, the question, are all scientific explanations causal explanation? Namely, you know, we, gravitation is the cause of falling bodies or the orbit of planets. But are the explanations that are just non-causal and so purely relying on mathematical properties and that's...
That's something I've been doing in several academic papers and quite technical like many philosophers of science do. And also my just like very remote background is philosophy and history of philosophy and German philosophy at the times of Leibniz and Kant and Hegel. So, and even though I stopped, well, I'm not doing that a lot right now.
I think the connection between the very traditional philosophical questions, so for example, what's called the principle of reason, everything has a reason, which takes a really important role in the book, those questions are really interesting to me and that's why I wanted to bridge some of the very technical things like what are the limits of a natural selection explanation.
with very general questions that span across philosophy of language. So what's the sort of very peculiarities of a white question and philosophy of history? I mean, what it is to explain, you know, like a war and ethics, of course, of philosophy of action, what I'm doing when I'm justifying what I do and what the difference between a reason and a good reason. So those kinds of questions.
philippe huneman (03:38.75)
I wanted to sketch a kind of big picture that centers on the question why and look at how it functions not only in evolutionary biology but also in the sciences and more generally in the everyday discourse and in our everyday practices. And I guess one of the key ideas of the book is that there is some unity between like
Justifying an action. So I tell you why I do what I'm doing explaining a complex phenomenon in science and Justifying my beliefs also I tell you why I think that and reason as a faculty, I mean the human faculty of reason the thing we refer to when we say humans are rational beings reason is a faculty for Asking those kinds of questions and the answers to those questions are what we call
PJ (04:33.768)
Hmm.
philippe huneman (04:35.606)
The reasons, the reason for an action, for acting in such a way. The reason of this belief, the reason of this event.
PJ (04:44.123)
Yes, and I love making these kind of connections. I had Catherine Malibu on to talk about Kant's view of the transcendent. And one of the things we talked about is how the critique of pure reason seems to focus on physics. And then in critique of judgment, she thinks that he's talking more about biology, because once you switch between physics, which kind of has its own, like, it's very closed off.
philippe huneman (04:49.91)
Yes.
PJ (05:11.551)
biology includes things like purpose, which starts to get us into the realm of why. I see that you delve quite a bit into Kant here too. But, so that is interesting to me. But before I even get into that, let me just say, I love the way that you approach this. I love the way, this is something, not right now, my oldest son is eight years old, so probably little heavy reading for him. But this is, I think, just a really important
It's not an incredibly easy book, but it is an approachable book, and it really does a great job of answering, like connecting academic questions with real life questions, and I really appreciate that. So let me start off by saying that.
philippe huneman (05:56.458)
Well, thank you. I mean, yeah, that was my goal somehow. So I'm very glad to hear you. Yeah, I like saying this, yeah.
PJ (06:09.309)
So talk to me a little bit about that first incident in the book. You're talking about the tree falling on a man. And I think this is a great way, even as you know, I mentioned Kant, but like the limits of why, the territory of why.
Can you give a little bit of the story of how this happened in your mind, how you were saying, I'm asking this why question, and it seems to be hitting a brick wall, so to speak.
philippe huneman (06:40.746)
Yeah, yeah, actually, in the book, I'm using somehow Kant's lexicon. So he talks all the time of territories, limits, domains. And by the way, half of his teaching duties were in geography. So that makes sense. I mean, even though few people are aware of that. And, but, but that's really not a philosophy book about Kant. And, but, but what I take...
from him here is the concern with limits. And so talking about kids and had the same experience and we have kids too and you know, like this kids pressing you to ask, why is this like this? Why should we wake up? Why do we eat? Why and so on. And I think that what they are also searching for, it's not only answers to their questions, but also
a sense of the limits of those questions. I mean, some of those questions they ask have absolutely no sense at all. I mean, I think, I mean, that might be more complicated as I go through it in the end of the book, but Primae Fafie, we feel that they don't, so for example, why is a, the white white, I mean, you are like, but it's white, you know, so.
And so one important object in the book is the limits of those white questions, because on the other hand, those are the questions that allow us to move through the world, make plans, understand others. And so they play a particularly important role in our everyday practices, as well as in our cognitive activities. So that's the question of the...
limit. And then what is this story? So I start, I mean, actually, yeah, that's a very story. And it was really striking because it's just a street in Paris and I happened to live there. And I was walking in the street and there was, you know, like lots of people, a crowd and like police cars and the firemen and actually a tree just had fallen on a car. So there was a, so unfortunately there was a car there. Well, it's not too tragic.
philippe huneman (08:59.902)
story otherwise I would have not talked about it I mean because you know people were alive nobody was hurt and the car was totally crashed and it was a sort of like tourist visiting Paris well I guess he would have lots of memories then and another question was of course why so you're like why did the tree fall and that has of course lots of answers due actually since this event the like the city of Paris has started
PJ (09:13.769)
Yeah.
philippe huneman (09:28.582)
examination of trees in the area and many of them are rotten inside. So this was not such an unpredictable event. The fact of the event was not so unpredictable. What was unpredictable is the when and exactly. But then, talking about the limits of the question why, I thought that there is also this question that, you know, why this guy, why this poor guy? And...
And there is something, I guess, in many people which has to do with we want to understand why exactly this fell on this guy and more generally we want to think sometimes that are... you can explain them but still there is something missing in our intention to make sense of them. I mean...
the tree fell on this guy and we explain why it felt somehow in terms of biology, maybe a meteorology and so on, but it still doesn't make sense actually. So, well, at least a part of us feel that it still doesn't make sense. And this small feeling, I think, I try to relate it to very big things, which is how we humans in various cultures...
try to complement those scientific explanations by very general ideas that try to make sense of things that are, yes, naturally explained, but that still seem absurd to us. So that's why later on I talk about destiny, which is, you know, some people would say that was his destiny, and then some people would move on and say he's punished for his deeds and actually, you know.
lot of religious schemes function like this. That's not them. So in the book I tried to work this connection between why question a perfectly acceptable answer or frustration that this answer does not answer a very deep question or a very deep expectation in us and what has been built through cultures.
philippe huneman (11:45.962)
And so I call that metaphysical idols, but what has been built in order to supplement this, those natural and legitimate and scientific explanations.
PJ (12:01.491)
Yeah, talk before we get into the metaphysical side of things, which I'm really fascinated in and that with, excuse me. And that's even, it's not a philosophy podcast, it's a big questions podcast. I did that specifically because I love this interdisciplinary, like the idea that there are multiple explanations, right? We feel the need for that, right? Whether or not we need them, I understand it's an open question, but we feel the need for that. And so somebody is exploring beyond the...
these disciplines, before we get into these questions, it's even how you arranged your book, can you talk about the grammar of why? And you talked about Aristotle's five different questions, and I loved your explanation of mana, and the kind of flexibility, but also its intended use. Like if you look for a definition of mana, it doesn't make sense, but if you look for a use for mana, it makes sense. I don't know if that.
philippe huneman (13:00.49)
Yeah, yeah, so actually that's a mana, is this word that in several South American tribes or like people describe to evens or things that sometimes we might translate it as sacred, we might translate it as magical or whatever, but there is no real satisfactory translation and the Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist and ethnologist in a very famous...
PJ (13:01.294)
Yeah.
philippe huneman (13:30.442)
um text about sociologist Marcel Mauss tries to uh what he says is that actually there is a difference between what we know and what we can talk about and mana is something that has been a meaning a signification that has been forged in order to fill this gap so we don't know what's going on there but we want to talk about it so we
we label it as mana. And actually I like this view. I'm not sure that all anthropologists would agree on that. But still it's the same concern that I just told you about, concern regarding the difference between the knowable, what we know and what we feel goes beyond. And actually we have word to go beyond that. And...
So coming to grammar, actually, one of the key ideas of the book, which is not very original, I mean, original, that's something many philosophers have been working on that, and is the fact that there are several questions that are expressed by the word why, and they don't
exactly mean the same thing and especially so I there are three meanings and We in general we distinguish the cause of something. So why is Why is it raining so that there will be? an answer that points out the cause and so here the reason is the cause but if I you know, I come back from the outside and
and you say, you look at me, and then someone who doesn't see me, and then you tell someone who doesn't see me, oh, it is raining outside. And the guy will tell you, but how do you know it? Or, sorry, the guy will tell you why. And a perfectly legitimate answer is to say, well, Philippe, who is entering, has an umbrella. And that's not, of course, the reason of the rain, but it's the reason of you believing that there is rain.
philippe huneman (15:49.778)
And so here that's really two kinds of reasons, the reason for your belief and the reason for the rain. And it's important to remember that because very often the reason for your belief, it's not the cause of an event, it's the effect of the event. Because you see the effect, you can infer that this event, like the rain, is taking place, but still you don't know the cause of the rain. And so that's two meaning of...
why two meaning of reason and the third one which is really important is the one we use when we ask for uh our reasons for acting so uh why are you like uh why are you taking your car and because well because i want to pick up my son at school or not at school or yeah so but that's the that's the and of course that is explains you taking you driving your car
That's not exactly the cause of you driving your car because if you want to look at the cause you have to look at what's going on in your brain, the bodily moves that you are making, the moves of the gear, the wheels and so on. So that would be something different. But our practice of justifying our actions and also trying to understand what other people are doing, it's
philippe huneman (17:15.406)
picking up the reasons for acting. And the reasons for acting in general, even though lots of philosophers talk about that and lots of philosophers may disagree, but in essence, the reasons for acting are about goals. I do this because my goal is to go and visit this person. And the meaning for this goal
is driving my car. So, but of course that's not a cause and that's not at all the justification for me believing that you go to visit your uncle. So, I talk about grammar because I think they are, like in grammar, you know, you have words that have different meanings and if you confuse the meanings, then you are making like mistakes that...
may prevent you to understand something to be understood and so on. And it's important to distinguish those meanings because those three meanings give rise to lots of confusions. And that's also a tradition in philosophy to identify the confusions, especially the confusion between the reason for an action, so the goal, and the reason of an event, so
And I quote very famous pages by Spinoza, which is who's like maybe the most important thinker who tried to get rid of our idea that things have a goal or a purpose. And so he says in general, people do think that the world is here for a purpose, that animals are there for purposes, but no, I mean, they are there because they were caused by something. And so, and then he goes with...
he's like very complex metaphysics where there is like one and only one nature and everything is caused by the fact that this nature exists. But anyway, even when you are not a spinosist, there is still this important description of the confusion between goals that are a specific answer to the question why and causes that are another answer to another kind of question why. And so that's the...
philippe huneman (19:40.382)
about the grammar and also it's interesting and this concept that I borrow from Wittgenstein actually who was really into trying to sketch out grammars of lots of concepts and when he says grammar you know like there is something... so grammar is not exactly logic, logic is constraining us you know because
what's contradictory, we cannot think it and so on. Grammar, it's not exactly like logic, but still it's constraining thoughts. So there is kind of specific conceptual necessity in grammar, says Wittgenstein. And for me, I use this concept because I think that actually in grammar you can make mistakes, like using a word where actually it cannot make sense.
And in the same way, you may try to find a reason, answer a why question, where actually there is no reason. So there is no reason, there is no answer, so that's a kind of grammar mistake.
PJ (20:52.575)
Yeah, and I actually I'm glad you mentioned Wittgenstein because I wanted to ask you about him It makes so much sense like even the manna discussion with Levi Strauss This idea that we focus on the use of a word rather than its essence, right? Often illuminates a lot of things right? It's like that And you get into that in the third part of the book when you talk about limits, right? um so uh
Do you mind, so you moved from that, can you talk a little bit, I was really fascinated by the, what you call the topological.
philippe huneman (21:30.74)
See you.
philippe huneman (21:35.119)
Yeah, sorry.
PJ (21:35.143)
I was really, yeah, no, no worries. I was really interested in what you had to say about the topology, and as you're borrowing from Kant, can you explain that kind of the topology of why?
philippe huneman (21:52.31)
Yeah, actually, I see the general idea of, you know, why questions and then of reasons, as first there is this distinction between three domains, and then there are, sometimes you cannot go from one to the other. So for example, causes are in general in nature, not goals or intentions. I mean, stones, they don't want to go somewhere, mountains, they don't want to grow.
and hurricanes, they don't want to hurt people. I mean, they just happen. But then in some other times, you can show that in some other cases, the two meanings just can go together and overlap. So, and one of the very important case here that I address, and well, maybe also because, you know, I work, I...
published about that, sorry, and like teenager. So it's the, in biology, the notion of functions. So many biologists and philosophers of biology have noticed that it's very hard to describe, you know, like the, an animal.
PJ (22:59.483)
Yeah, yeah, happens. All good.
philippe huneman (23:21.002)
without referring to what its parts are supposed to do, what they ought to do, what they, so what is their function? So for example, you'd say, oh, okay, my ear, my ear have the function of hearing and the webbed feet of the duck have the functions of allowing it to just swim and that's a very long-standing issue.
in philosophy, so like the scientific revolution occurred and when the scientific revolution occurred, to put it very roughly, it was not allowed for science to refer to goals in explaining things. So you know like Aristotle was like the stone has a natural place and a tendency to go to its natural place which is the bottom with Galileo.
the goal has nothing, it's called the principle of inertia, it doesn't have any tendency, it just follows the law of nature, which is the law of gravity. So what do you do with animals? Because animals seem to have somehow, they seem to be striving for something and their part seems to fulfill a function and so, well, Descartes is very well known for having this theory of
uh, is animal machine, you know, machine, machine animals. So which commentators still are discussing this, but for him, at least, uh, you know, that you can think of animals as machines, uh, engineered by God. So here, you know, like in this, like very classical science, you can have goals and intentions, but just they are concentrated at the origin of the universe. You know, all goals were there. So, so God created the
those machines that are animals, but still they function as machines. Like in the modern times, you cannot, you know, so you have a conflict, let's say, between the, it's forbidden to refer to goals of things that are not the humans. Humans they have goals because they have reason and they deliberate and they forge intentions. You have to explain naturally everything. And on the other hand, it's very hard to avoid any...
philippe huneman (25:45.086)
appeal to function, striving, you know, like the wolves, I mean, they hunt, so they look for prey and they... So some philosophers are saying, yeah, okay, ultimately, that's just a way of talking. It's very useful because our cognitive apparatus is limited, but if we had like infinite cognitive powers, we could see everything's going on. And so it's a very complicated mission. But other philosophers...
I was thinking, no actually it makes perfect sense to say the function of, let's say the horn of the Rhinoceros is to defend herself. What we say is that the horn is here because of natural selection which undoes Rhinoceros that have such horns to survive better than their competitors, to have more offspring.
And so actually, when you talk about functions, we talk about results of natural selection. Natural selection is a causal process. Of course, there is no intention in nature. It's the overall result of competitive and predictive interactions. But that's something perfectly legitimate. And so here you have a sort of conflation legitimate between
causation, so we have causal processes, this animal is eaten by this animal, this animal is reproducing more than this other animal that doesn't have like the horn, for example, and so in the end it's causes that behave as intentions or goals, and that's why we are
philippe huneman (27:41.026)
the webbed feet of the duck is to swim and the wolf is hunting for a sheep or for reindeers. So that's the case where the territory, which is causes and the territory reason are, you can bridge them actually. And then in other cases you cannot because,
As I said, there is no justification to say that something perfectly natural, like a hurricane, is expressing a reason. Even though in some cases, like my tree falling, it strikes us as so... We have the feeling that it's meaningful, so we would like to ascribe intentions or things that are of the stuff of intentions. But it's not legitimate.
PJ (28:36.263)
Yeah, so would natural selection then be one of those fusions that would be, or would you think of it more as, I'm trying to understand the model here. You talk about a bridge. Is it that there's not necessarily that limit and that it just happens sometimes in certain questions? Or is it more of a fusion that actually happens like when those two questions are combined?
philippe huneman (29:03.338)
No, actually, the two questions are... I mean, yeah, the question... I'm hesitating because that's really difficult question that many people address, the connection between what we know that goes on. So that's physics, you know, like you have animals, they grow, they eat each other, reproduce, you know. And...
are and the notions so function or adaptation that emerge on the basis of this and that are legitimate but are they the same thing like the same causal process seen from another viewpoint or are they the let's say what this causal process so animals eating each other and so on
become an evolutionary process in the end, if you look at it from the viewpoint of a population. I guess it's still a question and actually there are many philosophers right now trying to make sense of another notion which is related to intention and goal, which is the notion of agency. Here are some people who think that
It's perfectly legitimate to talk in terms of agency because natural selection, as I said, produces systems that are, for example, striving for something, that look, appear as striving for something. And then you can even think of them as rational agents. But of course, you know that they are not like us, like thinking, formulating things in their hands, in their heads, deliberating and so on. But they...
perfectly behave as rational agents. And they have biologists writing papers and the rationality of hummingbirds or worms or looking at experiments where they perform some behaviors. And then other philosophers do think that it's real agency therein. So it's real agents. So let's say the wolf
philippe huneman (31:28.57)
or the duck, or even the worm as real agents. So it's really from the viewpoint for history of philosophy, it's interesting because that was somehow what Aristotle was thinking. Of course, Aristotle didn't know like modern science, so it's very, very different. But in the context of modern Darwinian biology, some philosophers think that the kind of ontological approach that was Aristotle's, which...
think that natural systems, natural entities, they are acting, they can be active or passive, and they exert some power on other things. Some philosophers think that that's not completely stupid and that still can be defended. But, so yeah, so those philosophers would think that it's really, let's say the two territories are unified and the philosophers who think that
you are entitled to talk in terms of agency and fictions but still that's...
philippe huneman (32:35.438)
that animals are not agents like we are agents. Those fields are first things. They are bridges. The two meaning of reasons are like bridging, you know? So yeah.
PJ (32:45.987)
Ah, okay, so, and I mean, this is just kind of the, this is the problem that philosopher, blah, blah. This is the problem that philosophers are working on. Yeah, and that's really interesting, like even it sounds like there's a distinction here between functions and causes, agency and intention. And that's part of the reason even I mentioned at the beginning, Malibu, Dr. Malibu talking about Kant's transcendent, right? Because there is this, there seems to be this difference between animals.
and humans, at least at some level, in the capacity for self-reflection. And is that kind of, would that be what Kant would term the transcendent? I know I've actually talked to philosophers about consciousness in animals. I understand that there's some debate about that. But that idea of self-reflection, is that the difference between agency and intention?
philippe huneman (33:38.774)
Well, actually, as often in philosophy, the way you define concepts has lots of consequences. But OK, so my view is something like this. For us, an agent is a system that has some perception of the world, has a behavioral repertoire, which is somehow
conditional, I mean if the world is in such a way, I mean, you know, if it rains I go out with an umbrella and so on and that For that follows that has purposes actually and that formulates purposes so that's intentions So that's us as agents and the question is Is it is this agency?
or is this a very strong form of agency? So for example, we have this self-reflection. So for example, I say, okay, like I go out and it's raining, so I go back and I take my umbrella. That's a stupid example, but that's the way we modify means and ends in connection with the way...
PJ (34:56.233)
Oh, it works.
philippe huneman (35:03.238)
we know our environment. And then if you compare this with something that doesn't seem at all agent, what it is, it's for example, a system that either does always the same or has a very small set of conditional instructions. Rain umbrella, sun no umbrella, that's it. And in between those two poles are self-reflection and this kind of
system whose two kinds of behaviors are somehow wired to two possible states of the environment. You might have many possibilities. So you might have larger behavioral repertoire, behaviors that are modifying themselves through time because they monitor the environment and the reaction of the environment. And then you would have a continuum of kind of agency.
And it might be that humans are the only ones that are self reflexive. But I guess that's an empirical question, actually. So maybe, you know, like so and something that we witness in biology. And that's maybe a trend since like 20 years, 15 or 20 years, is that the predicates that we used to talk about humans, let's say, consciousness, rationality, culture, agency.
are more and more applied to animals. And I guess that's quite interesting. I mean, as philosophers, in general, in the philosophical tradition, you have a sort of, we take for granted, you know, that there are humans and have this consciousness, self-consciousness, they cast cogito and then animals. That...
For some philosophers, they are just machines, and for other philosophers and biologists, why they are much more complicated than they may have all the intentions and have some kind of plasticity, flexibility, but still they are not like humanity. And I think right now what we all agree on is that there is an empirical work to be done, and it's very hard to do it because, I mean, animals, they don't talk. That might be something the cat have, you know.
philippe huneman (37:20.982)
has seen and because in his own arguments about animal machines, one of the key arguments is that they don't talk, so they don't think, so since they don't think, they are pure matter. But I think we can ground the first premise. They don't talk like us, they don't talk to us, they don't talk like us. So we have to, I mean, biologists, they design very clever experimental apparatuses to...
for example, to test whether bees feel pain or those kinds of things, you know. So, because of course we can't ask them if it hurts and we cannot even feel what they feel. So, but I think we cannot say a priori that we'll never know or a priori that there is a sort of huge gap, you know, infinite gap between.
other animals and humans.
PJ (38:22.855)
Yeah, and I appreciate you saying that. I probably should have clarified. I was using Kant's discussion of the transcendent, but it seems clear that at least some measure of self-reflection shows up in animals, right? Like I had Dr. Peña-Guzman on, and he did a lot of work in animals dreaming, which is a really fascinating way to kind of chip away at that empirical study. And like it seems very clear that octopi dream, which is.
philippe huneman (38:40.322)
Yeah. Easy. Easy, yeah.
PJ (38:51.039)
kind of blows my mind, honestly. The idea that they're changing colors in the way that they would when they're hunting and they're moving their arms while they're sleeping, which is just, that area from an, it seems that's an empirical question and then that is study that's going on right now and it's fascinating. So I'm glad you mentioned that. The dream one especially really gets me. You know, it's even, and you kind of mentioned this and I just recently read Origin, but I know he took it from Aristotle.
on what the soul is. And of course, since Descartes, the soul has become this like substance, right? And so, but to find it even in early Christianity, but also in Aristotle as like defined as the perception and motion, right? And so it's really.
philippe huneman (39:27.821)
Yeah.
PJ (39:43.035)
Is that kind of what you were referencing earlier, or does that fit in with what you were referencing earlier of like this recovery of Aristotle?
philippe huneman (39:52.07)
That would be part of it. Yeah, the point, I mean, historically, yeah, Aristotle had this idea of the soul, of like a sukké, as he said, which is very large. And it's the extension of soul is life. I mean, it's the principle of life. So of course for him, yeah, I mean, some animals, they perceive, they may imagine things, they, he doesn't really.
enter into this modern discussion about do they have concepts or not, that's not at all his kind of Aristotelian kind of psychology. But well actually with Descartes the soul becomes the principle of thought and then there is thought and matter and he has very sophisticated arguments to say that there are only those two kinds of being possible. So either you are thought and then you are humans.
or you are, I mean, if you are not, you are only matter, extension, he says. And so, and you are the object of physics, mathematical physics, and so, but, yes, for Aristotle, anything that's alive has a soul, like us. And what's for him, like proper to humans, it's what he called the noose, so what we would, we could translate as the mind. And there is a funny, well, an interesting thing that he...
The noose is, he talks about it in the treatise on generation, so where he talks about what we call the epigenetic embryogenesis of animals. And at some point he says they, so the soles, you have three soles, the perceptive sole, the vegetative, perceptive, locomotive sole, and they emerge one on the other because if a plant it has only a vegetative sole, let's say a dog it has all the three soles.
And the question is, you know, the news, the mind in humans, where does it come from? And Aristotle, I mean, he really doesn't know. And I feel he doesn't really care. So he says it comes from the door. So it's to attain in Greek. And so, but you know, like then the Christian theologists, they made a lot about it.
PJ (42:04.863)
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Did you say from the door?
philippe huneman (42:08.15)
Through the door. Yeah, that's a Greek word that says through the door and then you know, like the let's say medieval scholars I don't know. I mean come on, come on, you know, I like 10 20 centuries of command commentators and they're trying to get it You know what does what does he say and I have a very like deflationist feeling that you just
PJ (42:09.431)
Through the door. And, yes.
PJ (42:16.735)
What does he mean by that? I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Okay, it makes me feel a little sick.
philippe huneman (42:35.406)
doesn't know and you know she said well okay I have to say something but we don't know you know like and so of course if you are for example Aquinas you would say yeah it's good at some point you know in the in the development of the embryo infuses the embryo with the capacity of the mind I mean the
And then this discussion later and connected with the all the questions about human, the development of the egg and so. But yeah, at least for Aristotle, humans, they have the mind, and the mind is the capacity of reflection, abstract reasoning, and then knowledge, science. But yeah, however,
philippe huneman (43:30.703)
I don't think that he... Right now empirically we know what mind is and if it's... There is a great book by Peter Gottfried Smith which is called Other Minds. And it's a book about actually octopus and cephalopods. And it's called Other Minds because from an evolutionary viewpoint they are really, really very different octopus. So...
I mean, nobody would object to gorillas having a mind and being thinking. They are very close with octopus, but still their behavior is like, it makes sense that they have something like a mind, but they are very, I mean, they, we diverge from the branch, the phylum that produced the octopus. I think something like six hundred millions years ago. And so he says somewhere, you know, like if you want to
think of what is an alien mind. Well, this is the closest thing I can show you that's an octopus. So the question is, is it a mind? Is it not a mind? So then what do you refer to when you say a mind? So is it only cognitive? Does it have some... I guess it includes the capacity for some purposes. Yeah. But...
But then it opens a lot of questions because the capacity for purposes for someone like Kant, it goes with freedom and freedom is exactly what sets us apart from the rest of the world and endows us with what he calls the dignity. And then you have all those moral consequences he draws and that has a really important impact.
PJ (45:19.647)
Yeah, even as you're talking about this, there's a certain geekiness that I feel to myself when you talk about these empirical questions and there are things that I think the person outside of these circles, they're like, oh, octopus, if an octopus dreams, that's really interesting, right? But they don't think about the repercussions. Even as we're talking about the vegetative and the locomotive and all these kinds of things, I just the other day saw an article about
They've done more and more research on what they call these walking trees. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but they will travel up to 20 meters in a year searching for sunlight. They will move their roots through the soil. Just this idea of we create these categories, right? Well, plants are different because they don't move. And then all of a sudden it's like, I mean, except for these, you know? It's like, well, animals don't have language. It's like, well, I mean, except for these ones. And they have like...
philippe huneman (45:53.783)
No.
philippe huneman (46:12.363)
I'm sorry.
PJ (46:17.407)
pretty complicated actually. And so that kind of record, like things that we feel are a priori, often because of like inflated sense of importance for humans, you know, like we wanna create this distinction. And then it's like, not a priori, right? Like there's some empirical research to be done here. I wanna be respectful of your time as we, I loved how at the end you were talking about
I just wanted to ask you about this quote. How you end the book is, Ultimately, rather than receiving definitive answers, the questions when asked why and why would trigger a rational discussion about what should constitute a proper answer. Metaphysical frameworks are not conventions, which because they are arbitrary are in principle equal to each other. They require reasons, and we have still not found the decisive ones.
and this is why metaphysics will continue to be in Kant's words an arena. And so in some ways, you know, it seems like your book is a defense of metaphysics, but can you explain a little bit about that distinction between like, what is it the importance of metaphysics and why are metaphysical frameworks not conventions?
philippe huneman (47:34.654)
Yeah, so that's an important question. Actually, you know, like writing this book, I felt...
philippe huneman (47:48.79)
very, like I felt constantly challenged by conventionalism. So the idea that, you know, we, I talked about the limits of why, you know, and the idea that, well, it's a pure convention. So if we want to say, for example, the kid who says, why is the white white? Okay, we can say there is an answer and the answer is the whiteness.
So, and we could, so, and many of the questions that doesn't seem to make sense, you could say, okay, but there are questions about the meaning of the word. So actually the answer is one day people decided to ascribe this meaning to this word. And so conventionalism is a very powerful take on many foundational issues. And thinking of Wittgenstein, for example, he was a sort of conventional.
conventionalists regarding mathematics. And in mathematics axioms, you can easily see them on conventions because they are not really evidences, they are not facts, they are not. So what's the thing about metaphysics? So I think that what we call metaphysics is about the way we can legitimately use concepts that
make sense of the world and of our experience, to say it in a very most abstract manner. So for example, one metaphysical question is, what's out there? Is it events, you know, like, or is it processes? And actually, or is it substances?
that display properties. And Aristotle is maybe the major metaphysician of substances. And at this grand scale, he wins. I mean, many people are Aristotelian. So they would say, what's here? I mean, there is a piano behind me and it's brown. So substance with a property. Some philosophers very famously Nietzsche tried to...
philippe huneman (50:09.394)
show that actually that's an illusion and but what's out there they are processes so what we think of substances it's just like very slow processes and you know everything changes but we just don't notice the change because if we were to notice the change you know if so it would be i mean life would be very hard for example if i you know i get out
in the morning and I get back to my house at night and I'm so receptive to changes that I just don't see like the small changes that change place and I'm not sure it's my apartment. So if I was so receptive to changes, I mean life would be impossible, says Nietzsche. So he thinks we have this, there is this appearance of substance stability but deep down it's
That's a metaphysical stance, you know, processes, substances and properties. It's another metaphysical stance. And now the point is physics, you know, you have hypotheses and you test the hypothesis and even though as a philosopher of science, I, you know, I would say, well, it's a bit more complicated and otherwise I would be unemployed. But still, I mean, the very, very rough description of physics is that you make experiments.
what would be an experiment that tells you, ah, it's not substances. I think there is no decisive experiment. Of course, metaphysics shouldn't be absolutely illusory or have no relation whatsoever to our experience. But it's, so taking a very famous claim of David Lewis, I mean, I use, David Lewis is the guy who was thinking about possible worlds.
in the continuation of Leibniz and I'm using this idea a lot in the book and in general. And David Lewis says, you know, like there are possible worlds and they exist. So a world where I have a red t-shirt and you have a brown hat. I mean, they exist. Okay. But we cannot and he says we don't have access to them. So there is no experience that could prove him wrong or right.
philippe huneman (52:32.83)
So what does he do? And that's here at this point. He said, actually, if I want to make sense of several things, like mostly the way we speak and we name, we refer to propositions when we speak, we think of causation, we think of properties of things, all those basic conceptual activities. So...
Talking and then you know and then formulating proposition cause making causal inference Look Finding or identifying the properties of things all those things actually they Presuppose possible worlds and so this is his reading so that's I love that because he starts with perfectly like
Daily things. I mean I do causal inferences. I say well this it's a you know, like my The door the door is open I guess my son forgot to close it and you know causal inference But this needs possible worlds why so I say for example my Like this dog has
for legs and it's a property of dogs. I mean, it's a very stupid example once again, but when I say this, I say, okay, if I think of possible dogs like mine, they can have very different colors, they can have very new light, they can have long hair, short hair, but they cannot have like no legs. So this is a possible world where, you know, you don't have those dogs. So, I mean, the reasoning is a bit more complicated, but the idea is that implicitly,
possible worlds when you make a difference between the essential properties of a dog, so for example the legs, and accidental properties. It has like a black hair.
philippe huneman (54:42.014)
So the point is in metaphysics, you don't have experiments. You have, you argue for, you justify what you say and that distinct metaphysics are trying to make sense of our conceptual schemes, apparatuses and so on. And the relation with my book is very simple is that if I want to identify the limits of the question, why, and one of the limit is...
what's self-evident and the other limit is what is contingent. But if I want to identify those limits, I need to somehow subscribe to a metaphysical framework. For example, the metaphysical framework that will account for the fact that things can be self-evident. And that's why there is a kind of skepticism because I, you know, I...
take the word from Kant, the arena, the Kant flat today. So he says metaphysics has always been an arena and I think he's right. But because you don't have this decisive experiment on the one hand, and the other hand, you have to make metaphysical claim in order to account for very basic conceptual, cognitive or practical structure of our lives.
PJ (56:01.627)
Dr. Huneman, that is a great summary. I love ending on that. Thank you so much for coming today. That was, yeah, I love this idea of recognizing the work between metaphysics and empiricism and like, or empirical claims. And that's just...
PJ (56:24.883)
I'm gonna think on that all week. I appreciate it. Thank you.
philippe huneman (56:28.086)
Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for the questions and the discussion. That was great.
PJ (56:37.687)
How'd you think that went today?
philippe huneman (56:39.922)
Excellent. I mean, I hope I'm