Maverick Philosopher has a rather good discussion of what one might call the Russell assault on Heidegger's notion of Being. This seems relevant given that David has basically brought up this critique over in the Christmas thread as well as an interesting tangent on atheism over at Times and Seasons. That tangent arose out of Judge Posner's comments over at Brian Leiter's blog of all places. That blog entry has actually been the subject of much discussion the past few days. However unlike the line David took at Times and Seasons, most critiques have focused on Posner's take on the reasons versus rationalization distinction in ethics. (Posner appears to take a rather pragmatic view of ethical justification and then applies this in a fashion some see problematic) The two best places for reading commentary on Posner's comments are at Left2Right and Fake Barn Country.
Of course what I find interesting is less Posner's comments on ethics and political philosophy than the whole question of being. So I'd encourage people to read Vallicella's comments. He's published several articles on Heidegger, although he clearly disagrees with Heidegger. So it might be interesting to consider him an interested third party in the matter. (Although I confess that most times he posts a reading of a Continental philosopher that to me it seems like he has misread them)
I discussed the book Vallicella is responding to here.
Just to add a second link to discussions of Posner. I suspect anyone interested has already read these. But in case not, Crooked Timber has a good discussion. Posner also added a second post at Leiter's blog addressing certain criticisms.
I'm using up my own comments sidebar again. But I'd note that Posner offers some comments on the atheism issue that is quite releavant and that I think I largely agree with. Allow me to quote him.
I am someone who simply doesn't feel the presence of God in my life. That I think is the typical state of the nonreligious person, and corresponds to what I assume is the feeling of a eunuch about sex. The eunuch knows that sex is important to many people, but he doesn't have any feeling of that importance. Sex doesn't exist for him. God doesn't exist for me. That doesn't mean that He doesn't exist. My understanding of Nietzsche's dictum that "God is dead" is not that it is a metaphysical statement, a statement of atheist doctrine, but that it is a statement that God is as if dead, to educated Europeans of Nietzsche's era. I think that whether or not God is dead for one depends on upbringing and temperament, but not on arguments.
I'd add that this is largely how I read Nietzsche as well. Of course I recognize that this isn't the only or perhaps not even the most popular reading. Further I think that the God Nietzsche is speaking of is more the God of the philosophers rather than the personal God of traditional Christianity. On the other hand I think it is precisely that shift from the personal God to the "absolutist" God that Nietzsche sees as killing God. So my position is actually more complex than it appears at first.
Just to add to the discussion of Posner, there's a great analysis of Posner's claim about rationalization up at Certain Doubts. It raises a lot of great criticisms from an epistemological point of view.
Maverick’s analysis of Russell’s point is loaded, and he’s basically arguing with a straw-man.
Russell’s instantiation account is most clearly expressed as lions exist if and only if the function x is a lion is satisfied at least once. Thus Lion’s exist actually describes the function x is a lion and not lions. (And it is easy how one can easily get Russell’s formulation to Quine’s dictum, “To exist is to be the value of a bound variable”).
If we turn to Maverick’s I exist example, Russell’s analysis works quite well. We get the question of whether x is me or x is David King Landrith (or x is Moroni for that matter) is satisfied, and continue as before.
Maverick’s introduction of Haecceity, essential vs accidental, and possible worlds simply isn’t necessary, and is really just so much noise. First, it is not clear to me why pronouns must be different from the names they stand in for. Second, if we must treat them differently, we should treat them as logically proper names.
Given this, one can’t really consider Maverick’s formulation (“BV exists if and only if the property of being identical to BV is instantiated”) to be Russellian.
I should add that I'm not just arguing that Maverick is wrong because I disagree with his analysis of Russell. I'm also arguing that he's wrong because I agree with Russell.
On the other hand, if Vallicella's critique of Edwards is right, that Edwards simply is judging Heidegger in terms of Russell, then that is a big problem with the book.
It's been more than a decade since I stopped studying Heidegger, but at the time there was no library of Russellian critiques of his work. Ayer and Carnap offered the primary critiques of any serious nature, and both of those were from a positivist point of view. And Russell is no positivist, regardless of what Maverick seems to imply. Even so, I doubt that the past 10 years has seen the accumulation of a substantial library of Russellian criticism of Heidegger.
If Russell's critique is valid, then it bears repeating. I see no reason to suppose that exploring such a critique is vain. Moreover, since Maverick himself has such a poor understanding of Russell's analysis of existence, there seems to be good reason to try to explicate it (though if we take Maverick to be a careful reader, than I must concede that his tortured and incorrect exposition of Russell's position might be blamed on Edwards).
I should add that Enowing gave Edwards book a very good review.
I'm not sure how to take Vallicella. Many of the things he writes on his blog or has published are quite good and make me think. Others, such as his typical critiques of Continental philosophers seem to be quite bad reading. So I can buy that he's misreading Russell.
I've not read Edwards book. I'd actually considered purchasing it until Vallicella's review. Now I'm curious again. I need to reread Vallicella's critique. I should add that Vallicella, as he notes, is no fan of Heidegger.
Enowning returns to Edwards book in response to Vallicella. He raises the point that Russell's own position isn't that consistent. I wish he said more on that - but then not having read the book I'm not exactly sure what the critique is. That is whether it is what David suggests here and over in the Times and Seasons thread.
Vallicella, in response to an email, has more on Heidegger as well. Once again I'm not sure I agree with him.
I can tell by his closing comment that he doesn't like Heidegger. It may also be that his restatement of Russell's position parallels Edwards', in which case his critique would work against Edwards' arguments but not Russell's, notwithstanding the fact that Edwards' arguments are Russellian. Nevertheless, Maverick does seem to think that he's critiquing Russell as much as he's critiquing Edwards.
Any good suggestions for a book about Russell on this topic?
I’m actually not terribly familiar with the secondary works on Russell. I’ve read some stuff by Ayer, Pears, Eames, Blackwell and others. Ayer and Blackwell are introductory/summary type stuff, although Ayer (as always) has some interesting criticisms. Hochberg’s book Thought, Fact, and Reference: The Origins and Ontology of Logical Atomism is out-of-this-world good. His take on Russell’s cryptic critique of Frege in “On Denoting” is spot on—much more plausible and cogent than Searle’s. Aside from Ayer and Hochberg, there’s a tendency to take Russell’s forays into idealized language as a project rather than an discrete exercises in analysis.
I’m mostly familiar with Russell’s own works, and I’ve studied nearly all of Russell’s serious and near serious-stuff outside of Principia Mathematica and his book on Liebniz. The two essays referred to by Maverick in The Philosophy of Logical Atomism book are both popular essays—not quite what I’d call serious.
The problem is that I haven’t read any books by or about Russell for more than 10 years. Blackwell runs a mail-list out of McMaster. When I subscribed to it (must have been 1997/1998—well after I finished college), several Russell notables were active participants (I remember Monk and Pigden). It was an occasionally interesting list, but it had too much ego and wasted a lot of time with one-up-manship. I stopped subscribing because I got behind in my reading.
At any rate, I’m at an utter loss to source the formulation that I gave in my initial post (“Lions exist” means x is a lion is satisfied). Sorry.
His Leibniz book is actually quite good. I'll have to check out Hochberg when I get some money. I've been reviewing a few things, as I want to comment on your approach to atheism from Times and Seasons. For example I reread Quine's "On What There Is" which seemed rather relevant. I need to reread the main papers on Russell's theory of descriptions (which Quine is largely discussing)
Here's the source of my positivistic atheist argument (viz., since God is unintelligible, the question of belief in God never arises): A. J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, which is sort of the Language, Truth, and Logic of late Ayer. The final chapter is about religion. Like anything in Language, Truth, and Logic, it's great reading. And whatever it suffers from in superficiality is more than made up for by his vigor and his devastating formulations.
I have no idea where my probabilistic formulations came from. I'm tempted to say that I thought of them myself, but I'm sure that they came from so many different sources that placing any one isn't even very interesting. I used to argue endlessly with Dennis Potter about this, so he might remember.