Table of contents for February/March 2018 in Philosophy Now

“I don’t know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” (variously attributed to Albert Einstein, President Harry Truman and an unnamed US Army lieutenant at the Bikini Atoll A-bomb tests) It’s always an advantage in any philosophical debate to have the last word. If civilisation gets wiped out in a nuclear war this month (and I’d love to believe that this is a far-fetched scenario) then perhaps future archaeologists, human or otherwise, will unearth a few scorched copies of this magazine in the topmost layers of debris. That seems a good enough reason for this issue to have a theme of war and peace. War has been a topic of scholarship and discussion since ancient times. Some…

Jus ad bellum These are the rules for when it is just to go to war. 1) Does the war have Just Authority (Auctoritas)? 2) Does the war have Just Cause (Causa)? 3) Is the war being started with the Right Intentions (Intentio) 4) Is the proposed military action proportional to the situation? 5) Is there a good probability of success in achieving the war’s aim? 6) Peaceful alternatives must all have been exhausted first. Jus in bello These are the rules guiding behaviour once a war has started 1) Discrimination: no violence towards civilians, or combatants who have surrendered. 2) Proportionality: harm to lives or property must not be disproportionate to the military advantage expected to be gained. 3) Responsibility: Every individual, regardless of rank, is personally responsible for…

The quest for peace is one of the most important endeavours of all time and one of the oldest. Several of the major Asian philosophical traditions have, from ancient times, tried to find the means to justify and achieve peace and avoid violence and war. Here I will focus on Jainism, Daoism, and the teachings of Mo Tzu and Mencius. I will briefly sketch the similarities and dissimilarities of their views on pacifism, just war, and revolution. Jainists, Daoists, Mo Tzu and Mencius were all lovers of peace in unique ways. Jainist Non-Violence Jainism as a philosophical movement appeared in India before or around the same time as Daoism, Mohism (Mo Tzu) and Mencius in China: about the sixth century BC. Jainism and other Indian philosophical schools were markedly different…

“If you believe yourself a citizen of the world then you are a citizen of nowhere.” UK Prime Minister Theresa May, October 2016 My national identity seems to me to be both contingent and coincidental. Being born British, while quite lucky in terms of my life chances and political rights, wasn’t something of my own doing. Therefore it is no more something for me to be proud of than my being born in the middle of the twentieth century. I was once told a (possibly apocryphal) story about a former Prime Minister of Belgium who, when asked if he was proud of his nationality, replied that the question was ridiculous and that he might as well be asked if he was “proud of being a man.” Some people will find…

When a rock breaks in two, you get two rocks. But when a chair breaks in two, you get two parts of a chair. Why the difference? What makes something only a part of something else, as opposed to a thing in its own right? Although the discrepancy initially seems enigmatic, the difference is also remarkably intuitive. No-one would hesitate to call the two pieces of a broken rock rocks in themselves: after all, many rocks are broken pieces of larger rocks. Similarly, noone in their right mind would call a broken part of a chair a chair. This distinction is what has to be explained. Perhaps our intuition can be explained by the type-token distinction. The type-token distinction goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and was specifically applied by…

IF THERE’S ONE THING WE can all be sure about when contemplating the nature of time, it’s that time passes, right? Whether we’re busily engaged in daily tasks, quietly absorbed in a book, watching a sunset, remembering an awkward encounter, or looking forward to a holiday, our experience tells us that time flows. We approach the future, leaving the past behind us, always occupying the present, although the present is constantly changing. This, we feel sure, is the nature of our temporal experience; and on the basis of this experience we infer that these descriptions correctly describe the nature of temporal reality. That is, we take our experience as of time flowing to be veridical – we have no reason to think we’re being deceived – so we conclude that…

“And just as paganism was to give way before Christianity, so this last God will have to yield to some new belief. Stripped of aggression, He no longer constitutes an obstacle to the outburst of other gods; they need only arrive – and perhaps they will arrive.” (E.M. Cioran, The New Gods, 1974). Ridley Scott’s 2017 film Alien: Covenant is the second Alien prequel and the sixth title overall from the Alien series. It’s a sequel to Prometheus (2012), a production praised for its stunning visual quality. Alien: Covenant contains references to poetry from Milton to Shelley; to classical music (Wagner); to the history of religions (especially Gnosticism); and to psychology (both Freud and Jung). But most of all, Alien: Covenant can be understood as a meditation upon the ideas…

• Remembering Murphy’s Law • Control cars with your mind! (What could go wrong?) • Children and chimpanzees crave revenge News reports by Anja Steinbauer and Filiz Peach Inventor of Murphy’s Law Born 100 Years Ago Does a dropped slice of toast always land buttered side down? Is the queue you choose at the supermarket checkout always the slowest moving? January saw the 100th anniversary of the birth of Edward A. Murphy Jr, inventor of Murphy’s Law. An aerospace engineer, he is reported to have said “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” during a frustrating set of rocketsled experiments in 1949 in which he was investigating how much acceleration the human body could withstand. As it turned out, the sixteen painstakingly-arranged sensors on the test pilot had been…

Hsiu-Chen Chang, ‘On the Historicity of the Tao Te Ching’, Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 1998. Christopher Chapple, ‘Sources for the Study of Jaina Philosophy: A Bibliographic Essay’, Philosophy East and West, vol. 50, no. 3, 2000. Ellen M. Chen, The Tao Te Ching: A New Translation with Commentary, Paragon House, 1989. Carine Defoort, ‘The Growing Scope of ‘Jian’ : Differences Between Chapters 14, 15 and 16 of the ‘Mozi’.’ Oriens Extremus, vol. 45, 2005. Angus C. Graham. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, Open Court,1989. William G. Kirkwood, ‘Revealing the Mind of the Sage: The Narrative Rhetoric of the ‘Chuang Tzu’.’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3, 1992. D.C. Lau (trans.), Mencius, Penguin, 1970. Geoffrey MacCormack, ‘The Legal Philosophy of Mo Tzu’, ARSP:…

As I began to think and exchange ideas I soon realised that it is important to be reasonable and rational. But I then felt a powerful need to understand what that means. And so I began making a lifelong, constantly revised, simple list of how all of us support our truth claims. What counts as evidence for truth in rational argument? I have attempted to be simple, clear and exhaustive. These principles can be printed on a piece of paper and posted proudly on your refrigerator. They apply both to the sciences and the humanities, since science does not have a monopoly on reason. None of the principles are sufficient in themselves, and some are clearly stronger and more warranted than others. The more of them that apply to your…

Thomas Hobbes was one of those very rare people who had a fundamental insight into what would come to dominate life centuries after their death. His insight was into human agency, the capacity to use information to control action. Hobbes had seen that groups of people working with shared information to a common purpose could generate shared agency. He thus conceived the amazing idea of artificial people. In Hobbes’ day this was a way of looking at large socioeconomic entities such as governments and their armies. Nowadays we can look at large globally distributed and coordinated transnational companies in the same way. These are now widespread, exercising a dominant effect on all our lives. Hobbes called such a composite entity ‘Leviathan’, taking the name from a mythological sea monster. In…

Prejudice & Toleration DEAR EDITOR: My subject is Prejudice & Perception, which was the theme of Issue 123. My question is ‘What kind of society do we want?’ Suppose we say we want a consistently tolerant society. What would that look like? It would have to be something like a body politic consisting of self-defined and historically- defined groups who by stipulation were tolerant of every other group who was tolerant of them. In that society everyone is tolerant of everyone else! Tolerance here can be taken to mean ‘satisfied with having to accept [group x] as a part of the community’. Notice that groups like the Nazis could not exist in such a society. It is intrinsic to Nazism that it is not tolerant of various social sub-groups, and…

A RUNAWAY TROLLEY IS coming up to a switch (or in British English, a tram is coming up to a set of points). If nothing is done, it will carry straight on and kill five people who are working on the track. If you switch the trolley to the right, they will be saved but one person who is on the other track will be killed. What should you do? Trolley problems have been with us since the 1970s. They continue to fascinate, mainly because of the scope they offer to vary the details in the effort to discover an underlying rationale for our ethical decisions. Many people would switch the course of the trolley. If they are asked to justify this choice, they may say that it is not…

I have recently been staring at the back of my hand: an innocent, inexpensive pastime that has provoked some thoughts I would now like to share with you. They touch on our relationship with our own bodies, and on the puzzle of our knowledge of the external world, which enigma has exercised many philosophers, not least David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The peculiarity of our relationship to our bodies is captured in a famous passage from Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1965), where the protagonist Roquentin says: “I see my hand spread out on the table. It is alive – it is me. It is lying on its back. It shows me its fat underbelly. It looks like an animal upside down. The fingers are the paws. I amuse myself by…

Aterm such as ‘the laws of war’ seems oxymoronic in nature: a contradiction in terms. On the one hand, law is a rigid structure of rules that’s associated with order; on the other hand, war is an activity characterised by chaos and destruction. Yet there is now an understanding that when one goes to war, certain behaviours are expected, and when these standards are violated, demands for international justice are broadcast on the air, written in the papers, and shouted through the megaphones. Institutions such as the United Nations are chided as toothless, useless due to their limitations. The International Criminal Court is caught up in the debates about the laws and lawfulness of war, and they are numerous, concerning drone warfare, artificial intelligence, collateral damage, winning hearts and minds,…

While he is almost forgotten today, the French thinker Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was perhaps the most famous philosopher of the WWI era. His extraordinary skills as a lecturer, and his 1907 bestseller Creative Evolution, made his visit to the US a media event and a public street nightmare. Strange as it seems to us now, the first rush hour traffic jam on New York’s Broadway was caused by the flood of people hoping to attend a Bergson lecture. Bergson always approached philosophical problems by separating out quantitative differences – differences in degree or amount – from qualitative differences – differences in kind. Differentiating differences in kind from those in degree is a bit like the old saying in math classes that you can’t add apples to oranges. When this sorting…

Skye Cleary interviews Aaron James about his new book. Jean-Paul Sartre’s not normally associated with surfing: he much preferred being in a Parisian café than in nature; and as you say, surfing is more often associated with waves than wisdom. My first instinct was that Albert Camus would have been more connected with a Mediterranean lifestyle of sun, sand, and surf. So why Surfing with Sartre? Sartre has long passages in Being and Nothingness (1943) about why skiing exemplifies freedom. At one point he pauses to note that waterskiing, a kind of ‘sliding’ upon water, is even better; he calls it ‘the ideal limit of aquatic sports’. So he’d be the first to welcome a phenomenology of surfing. However, I think that leads you away from his view of freedom…

The term ‘computer’ is both vague and broad. Some people involved in the field of artificial intelligence even believe that molecules are computers. Or, more precisely, they argue that molecules are closed physical systems which compute. That is to say, molecules carry out information processing: they receive input, work on that input, and then produce output. Indeed, in one place I came across the following representation of the DNA molecule as a Turing machine: Input Tape = DNA Tape Reading Head = Ribosome State Register = RNA States = Amino acids Instruction Table = DNA codon table Output Tape = Proteins (see ‘Is DNA a Turing Machine’ by Anand Mallaya, at anandcv.wordpress.com) The idea of computation as omnipresent reaches its zenith with what’s called pancomputationalism. This is the view that…

World War One has a lot to answer for, including World War Two – or at least that’s what I was taught in school. Paradoxically, given its transformative effects, I was also taught in school that World War One was pointless. Our image of that war is of literally entrenched soldiers perishing in droves as the battle lines refuse to budge. Yet at least one worthwhile thing did emerge from this tragic conflict: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was composed during the war while its author was serving in the Austrian army and then detained as a prisoner of war in Italy. Wittgenstein was one of the many Europeans who greeted the outbreak of war with excitement as well as trepidation. He wrote in one of the…

Jerry Fodor was forever forecasting and combating a doom-and-gloom return to what he regarded as the dark days of behaviourism in the philosophy of mind. Yet he never mentioned the darkness that would befall philosophy at his own demise, from the loss of his systematic exploration and defence of controversial lines of argument, his inexhaustible intellectual energy, and his playful wit. Sadly, that day has come. A prominent theme in his many obituaries has been to acknowledge Fodor’s virtue as an unflagging philosophical opponent. He was the perfect, utterly resilient, sparring partner. One could always and absolutely count on him to put forward the strongest argument for the position he advanced without quibble or qualification. Comparing him to a trampoline, Daniel Dennett spoke of our being able to see further…

THIS BOOK BY ONE OF AMERica’s leading philosophers originated in Martha Nussbaum’s 2014 John Locke lectures at Oxford University. It’s very wideranging, starting in Ancient Greece and ending in the liberation struggles and civil rights movements of twentieth century India, USA, and South Africa. It stays throughout with a few key concepts – anger, forgiveness, gratitude, punishment, justice. Nussbaum characterises her overall ethical and political vision as essentially ‘welfarist’, indebted both to utilitarians (specifically J.S. Mill) and liberals (specifically John Rawls). From this very general position she tries to discourage any idea we might have of anger as being a virtue of some kind. She’s also very critical of conditional forgiveness. If there is to be punishment, it should not be as backward- looking retribution or payback, but as forward-looking…

Steve sat in his B38, a sleek grey capsule descending deep down into Novus’s core, plummeting like a hammerhead shark in pursuit of its prey. Our hero experienced an increased sense of disorientation as the speed at which he was travelling jeopardised his already rather tenuous connection with reality. The interior of the pod reverberated, increasing its occupant’s unease as he glanced at the coloured windows which, comfortingly, or perhaps discomfortingly, revealed nothing of the capsule’s surroundings. “Want a mint?” asked the disembodied voice of the IDEX, his electronically generated companion for the journey, programmed to put its passenger at ease with light-hearted solicitous questions of this nature. Steve’s stomach churned with the downward motion of his vessel. He found himself wondering whether IDEX Sam was, in some literal sense,…