Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean diplomat and former president of the UN Security Council, studied philosophy full-time as an undergraduate in the late 60s. Recounting that period in his autobiography Living the Asian Century he wrote
For the final examinations, which I took at the end of my fourth year, our degree was determined by how well we did in eight three-hour examinations. In one of the papers, we had to answer a single question. The one question I chose to answer over three hours was “Can a stone feel pain?”
From my exam results, I gained a first-class honours degree, which was rare in the Department of Philosophy. Since our final examination papers were also sent to Peter Winch, one of the leading scholars on Wittgenstein in the world, I felt honoured that my first-class honours had been endorsed by him.
Wittgenstein was Mahbubani’s favorite philosopher; back then, “like all other philosophy departments in the Anglo-Saxon world, our department had been captured by the linguistic-analytic school of philosophy that Wittgenstein had launched with his Philosophical Investigations”.
At risk of revealing possible narrow-mindedness, a three-hour free response exam to the question “Can a stone feel pain?” makes me think of Luke’s philosophy: a diseased discipline. The questions Richard Ngo answered in his All Souls Fellowship exam got wacky at times, but never “can a stone feel pain?”-wacky.
Mahbubani continued:
… I could write eight pages over three hours in response to the question “Can a stone feel pain?” because Wittgenstein’s ideas allowed me to deconstruct the meanings of the words in this apparently simple question.
The process of focusing on the language we use came in very handy when I joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in April 1971 and embarked on my long career in the study of geopolitics. Our understanding of “objective reality” is clearly conditioned by the language we use. The first major war that I had to analyse as a Foreign Service officer was the Vietnam War. The “facts” were clear: soldiers from North Vietnam were fighting soldiers from the United States. We could see this. But what were they fighting about? The US leaders, Johnson and Nixon, had no doubt: they were fighting against a global push by the Soviet Union and China to expand communism. But the North Vietnamese soldiers also had no doubt: they were fighting for “national liberation” from the “imperialist” US forces. So who was right? What is the truth here? Adding to the elusiveness of an absolute “truth” is the fact that fifty years after the United States withdrew ignominiously from Vietnam, one of the best friends of the United States in Southeast Asia will be the Communist Party of North Vietnam—the United States wants to upgrade its ties with Vietnam to a strategic partnership.
I find myself completely unpersuaded by his applied example here, but I suppose I’m just the wrong audience...
Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean diplomat and former president of the UN Security Council, studied philosophy full-time as an undergraduate in the late 60s. Recounting that period in his autobiography Living the Asian Century he wrote
Wittgenstein was Mahbubani’s favorite philosopher; back then, “like all other philosophy departments in the Anglo-Saxon world, our department had been captured by the linguistic-analytic school of philosophy that Wittgenstein had launched with his Philosophical Investigations”.
At risk of revealing possible narrow-mindedness, a three-hour free response exam to the question “Can a stone feel pain?” makes me think of Luke’s philosophy: a diseased discipline. The questions Richard Ngo answered in his All Souls Fellowship exam got wacky at times, but never “can a stone feel pain?”-wacky.
Mahbubani continued:
I find myself completely unpersuaded by his applied example here, but I suppose I’m just the wrong audience...