Table of contents for June/July 2016 in Philosophy Now

Welcome to the ever-evolving Philosophy Now! This issue we gain two new columns, ‘Philosophical Haiku’ by Terence Green and ‘The Street Philosopher’ by Seán Moran, as well as some extra pages and luxurious colour throughout the magazine. Enjoy responsibly! This issue’s theme is partly a response to a minor assault on philosophy by some scientists recently. It’s true that there are some structural weaknesses in academic philosophy: endless nit-picking at obscure details when the basics haven’t been established; its seeming lack of interest in applying its conclusions to the outside world; and the old problem that ‘nothing ever gets solved’. However, it’s one thing to say that a job’s not being done as well as it could be, and another to say it isn’t worth doing, and much of the…

Richard Feynman (1918-88) was one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, contributing, among other things, to Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED), for which he won a Nobel Prize. His popular portrayal is of a buffooning genius with a preference for no-nonsense thinking – the sort that by his reckoning seemed in short supply within philosophy. He is noted, and quoted, for his dislike of philosophy, and in particular of the philosophy of science. Any quick trawl of the Internet will bring up quotes attributed to him on the absurdities of philosophy, no doubt informed by his brief flirtation with it at Princeton. Feynman would parody what he saw as ‘dopey’ exercises in linguistic sophistry. As he remarks in a famous lecture series, “We can’t define anything precisely. If we…

One of the most familiar truisms about the history of philosophy is that in previous ages, the word ‘philosophy’ had a broader meaning than it does today. And like any good truism, this one is actually true. Until relatively recently, researchers we would now call ‘scientists’ were called ‘natural philosophers’ or simply ‘philosophers’. This usage goes back all the way to the roots of philosophy in Europe, with the Presocratics, whose ideas concerned science at least as much as the topics we now teach in philosophy classes. The man typically credited with being the very first philosopher, Thales of Miletus, is reputed to have been an expert in astronomy, and to have made a killing on the olive oil market by renting all the olive presses after he was able…

FOR OVER TWO DECADES I have written a good deal of poetry and poetry criticism. I have also in that period written on philosophy, and reviewed numerous philosophy books. Up to now the two activities have been conducted separately: the philosophy that I have been concerned with has had nothing to do with poetry, and the poetry I have written, although sometimes informed by philosophy (it could hardly be otherwise given the nature of my preoccupations), does not aspire to be philosophy. There are things one says in philosophy that could find no place in poetry, and vice versa. One may be both a poet and a philosopher, but not at the same time: the two belong to very different spheres of activity. Or so I had assumed. A new…

Hilary Whitehall Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, one of the most original and influential philosophers of our time, died on 13th March 2016, in his home in Arlington, Massachusetts. Hilary Putnam was born on July 31st 1926, in Chicago, Illinois, to Samuel Putnam, best known for his landmark translation of Don Quixote (1949), and Riva Lillian Sampson. In 1927, when he was six months old, the family moved to Paris, where his father translated the works of Rabelais and edited the literary magazine The New Review. Putnam grew up in the artistic world of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Elliot, James Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford. This cosmopolitan upbringing was one of the reasons for his strong dislike of the narrowness…

Philosophy Now Wins Bertrand Russell Society Award The Bertrand Russell Society has announced that this year it will give its annual Award to Philosophy Now magazine “which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2016 and which has ably followed in the Russellian tradition of encouraging philosophical inquiry in a popular manner.” Philosophy Now Editor Rick Lewis will accept the award on behalf of the magazine at the society’s 2016 Conference, which will be held at St John Fisher College in Rochester, New York on 24-26 June. The Bertrand Russell Society (visit bertrandrussell.org) is an international society dedicated to the memory of the philosopher and logician. Its annual Award, established in 1980, has previously been given to such colossi of cogitation as Popper, Quine, Dennett and Dawkins. Last year in Dublin…

Can you start by saying a bit about your background in philosophy? My undergraduate studies were in philosophy. My main philosophical interests are analytical philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and Artificial Intelligence. Since the beginning, I felt those philosophical areas offered practical options for fixing social problems. The more [the philosophers of language and mind] Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Fodor, Searle and Dennett I read, the more I was convinced that several social problems could be avoided or fixed through clarity in our language and our thinking processes. I saw this as a therapeutic option while living in the chaotic, violent and corrupt environment of Bogota, Colombia. Unfortunately, people think that philosophy is unpractical, which is a shame, because there is nothing more practical and powerful than interpreting the…

“The thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard”, a “punk philosopher”, “a rollercoaster ride”, “sometimes bonkers but never boring” and “the Elvis of philosophers” are among the many things that have been said about Slovenian philosopher, culture critic and psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek and his works. Žižek (born 1949), who packs out public lecture halls around the world, is currently International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana – from which he was expelled in the 1970s because his PhD thesis was “too Hegelian and not Marxist enough.” He’s made films too, including one entitled The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006). There is even an Institute of Žižek Studies. When Slovenia became independent…

SARTRE MEETING Darwin meeting Nozick? Too many angles, I’d think, at least for the mainstream philosophy student. But William Irwin is not afraid of the conversation of philosophers, and challenges the reader to follow him through a tour de force whose goal is to show us that “capitalism and existentialism are compatible” and hence that “a minimal state with a truly free market would be a worthy option.” But wait. There’s not just a connection between capitalism and existentialism here; Irwin also shows us “the unexpected connection between existentialism and evolutionary theory.” This is an evolutionary theory that tells us that there are no moral facts – a premise that, in turn, leads to Irwin’s avowal of the minimal state conducive to capitalism. Let us examine each connection in turn.…

Nothing in the world seems to be more straightforward than the material objects that surround us. Whether we are talking about things nature serves up, such as stones, clods of earth, trees or birds, or things we make, such as the desk at which I am writing this article or the chair on which I am sitting, they seem, ontologically speaking, to be regular guys. They certainly don’t strike us as intrinsically problematic in the way hallucinations, thoughts, memories, or abstract objects such as ‘economic trends’, or even institutions such as ‘the legal system’ do. You can see them, touch them, pick them up, point to them, even throw them across the room. They don’t (normally) disappear when you turn your back, and they know their place because at any…

The philosophy of organism is the name of the metaphysics of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Born in Kent in 1861, schooled in Dorset, Alfred headed north and taught mathematics and physics in Cambridge, where he befriended his pupil Bertrand Russell, with whom he came to collaborate on a project to develop logically unshakable foundations for mathematics. In 1914, Whitehead became Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College, London. However, his passion for the underlying philosophical problems never left him, and in 1924, at the age of 63, he crossed the Atlantic to take up a position as Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1947. His intellectual journey had traversed mathematics, physics, logic, education, the philosophy of science, and matured with his…

Friedrich Nietzsche shared at least one fundamental concern with the religions and metaphysical systems that he so criticized: the problem of suffering and how one deals with it. This concern underlies all of the distinctive positions he took on the role of tragedy in Greek culture, his critique of morality, his view of human nature, his theory that ‘ego’, ‘thing’ and ‘substance’ are ‘fictions’, as well as his criticisms of religion and metaphysics. This is why Henry Aiken once pointed out that Nietzsche was not a secular but a religious thinker. Thus Spake Zarathustra, he wrote, “can only be regarded as his religious testament.” As Nietzsche criticized religion and metaphysics, he pondered again and again the reasons why the human mind is bewitched by the notion of a true world…

New Realistic Speculations DEAR EDITOR: Nice interview in Issue 113 of Markus Gabriel by Anja Steinbauer. I believe that Wittgenstein and Nelson Goodman might have been mentioned to provide some historical perspective. Gabriel’s key notion of multiple fields of sense surely echoes Wittgenstein’s language games, while Gabriel’s notion of truth, where something ‘holds good’ of something, surely echoes Goodman’s concept of ‘rightness of description,’ which is more expansive than a traditional concept of truth. A world rather than the world has been a staple of many philosophical approaches. An individual will select and group fields of sense into a version of a world, and that process and result amount to objective facts, which is to say that a world does exist as a fit subject for philosophy. A world may…

There’s never been a better time to rewind back to Stacy Title’s prescient 1996 film The Last Supper, a prophetic morality tale about what happens when would-be champions of liberal tolerance fail to hold themselves to tolerance’s demands. Five ostensibly liberal post-grad students living in small town Iowa have a Sunday night ritual of inviting a guest to dinner as a stimulus to topical debate and intellectual sparring. It’s all rather civilized until the night when a stranger, Zach, assists Pete after his car breaks down. As their invited guest has cancelled, the five invite Zach to stay and dine with them instead. Desert Storm veteran Zach doesn’t share the graduates’ worldview, to put it mildly. The veneer of civility quickly crumbles once Zach begins to expound his right-wing views,…

Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) is one of the most famous books in philosophy. In it Schopenhauer anticipated the Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious, and it has had a deep influence on many artists, most notably Wagner. Nowadays it is seldom read, and its message is notoriously difficult to accept. But it remains important because it presents a unique vision of the world, repellent to many, enthralling to some. In this book Schopenhauer gives us an uncompromising idea of Will as a primitive, elemental driver of our destiny, and so presents us with a harrowingly bleak vision of the human condition that uncomfortably anticipates many of the horrors of the Twentieth Century. Owing more to imagination than to logic, it is a masterpiece of…