Table of contents for June - July 2020 in Philosophy Now

Like the wider world, Philosophy Now has devoted a fair amount of attention to the arguments between theists and atheists. This tends to highlight the divide between religion and secularism. In this issue, by contrast, our theme is more about observing the religious and irreligious worldviews as they move towards each other, or where they each struggle in their own way with the same concerns within society. (This time we’re not just focusing on Atheists v. Christians, either). So the articles here look at the overlaps and commonalities between religious and secular thinking, as well as differences between them, and their role in society. Doing this, we can see just the sorts of mental and cultural exchanges that have taken place throughout history when contrasting tides of thought flow through…

“The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”– Galileo Galilei “There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle.”– R.G. Ingersoll When I was a resident in psychiatry, over thirty-five years ago, one of my mentors said something that forever changed the way I thought about my profession. “In psychiatry,” he said, “you can do biology in the morning and theology in the afternoon”. He was being a little facetious, but on a deeper level he meant what he said. I understood his message to be simply this: the problems of my patients could be understood and approached from both a ‘scientific’ and a ‘religious’ perspective without fear of contradiction or…

“I cannot see how or why the mere addition of numbers should change anything.”– John Taurek, ‘Should the Numbers Count?’ So weigh your living soul against a feather.Weigh it against thy neighbor’s soul, or two.Or weigh your pain against what others weather –“Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view.”What calculus of sorrows is your toolTo tabulate the sum of someone’s ills?Let life be the end of life. This moral ruleIs not so cold as dark, satanic Mill’s,Whose conscience is a ticker keeping score.My heart is not an abacus! I say,Give fair respect to all, and ask no more.Don’t judge life’s worth by what’s already gone,Or cast a coin into the fire to playThe weighted lottery of Babylon. © DANIEL GALEF 2020 Daniel Galef graduated from McGill University with a degree…

During the last five years, as I examined numerous older people with different forms and stages of cognitive deficits ranging from Mild Cognitive Impairment to Alzheimer’s dementia, a plethora of thought-provoking philosophical questions arose. I believe that questions are more important than answers (“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers”: Voltaire), and like Richard Feynman “I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.” Therefore I want to draw your attention to some important but widely ignored philosophical questions relating to dementia. I’ll be quoting many thinkers but “I quote others only in order to better express myself” (Montaigne). In order to be a free thinker and not accept everything I hear, I need to be critical and prepared to…

The Subject of Experience THE ORACLE AT DELPHI famously advised us to know ourselves. But what is the self which is to be known? This question is at the heart of contemporary British philosopher Galen Strawson’s The Subject of Experience. In this collection of essays, Strawson investigates wide-ranging topics pertaining to the nature of the self: What do we mean by the term ‘self’? In what sense do selves exist? To what extent is continuity over time essential to selfhood? Must one be able to make a story of one’s life in order to be a coherent self? Must one be self-conscious in order to be conscious at all? and more. The fourteen essays here are not necessarily meant to be read in order. They do not offer a sustained…

Prize for Making Life Worth Living The Vienna Medical Association awards a grand prize to promote interdisciplinary cooperation between the sciences. This year it has given the Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honour to a philosopher: Robert Pfaller. Pfaller, who is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Linz, is a value theorist and social critic. Writing books with philosophical rigour but popular appeal in a witty and engaging style, Pfaller discusses questions about human behaviour, popular values, political discourse and what it is that makes life worth living. Prize for Disagreeing Instructively The American Philosophical Association, in conjunction with the mysteriously-named Phi Beta Kappa Society, has awarded Agnes Callard, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and Laurie Paul, professor of philosophy at Yale, the Lebowitz Prize for…

In this article I will not discuss religious criticisms proposed against homosexuality. Rather, I will consider the upshot of these criticisms – what religious believers often recommend that a gay person do as a practical matter. And while there are many different criticisms religious people offer against same-sex relations, most agree on what the moral response should be, which is either to marry from the other sex or to lead a life of chastity. I will say that the first option, marrying someone of the other sex, is not psychologically possible for most gay men or women, and therefore cannot be morally expected of them. The second supposed solution, chastity, may be possible provided special conditions (which I’ll mention), but is not practically feasible for most gay men or women,…

Some years ago, I started a course of meditation. Although ‘mindfulness’ was in the air and meditation programmes were being offered in almost every other institution, I knew virtually nothing about meditation or mindfulness or the Buddhist traditions from which they came. ‘Mindfulness’ seemed obviously a good thing, for it was the opposite of mindlessness. Who could oppose that? But what exactly did it mean? How had it become so widely esteemed across so many institutions in the West? And what was happening to Buddhism itself as it entered our highly eclectic postmodern Western culture? My Buddhist course was practical. It was about physical posture and following the breath in various ways. As my speculative questions remained unanswered they became more restless – until I decided to embark on my…

Nietzsche Eternally Revisited DEAR EDITOR: In PN Issue 137, brave Brandon Robshaw takes on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence analytically! Oho! Eternal recurrence works as a literary and even a philosophical tool. Any mental romance ended there for me as a young man. What did strike me was the way the idea evolved in Nietzsche, starting with its epochal realisation as he sauntered by the shore of Lake Silva-plana, pondering the great pyramidal boulder there. The idea of eternal recurrence shook him. I found it a pity that he didn’t write more about it; it would have gone well with his liking for Darwin, had he accepted the possibility of an evolutionary component to the idea. The idea is also at odds with happiness in contrast to fate. For a man such…

NONE OF US ARE QUITE AS good as we think. This isn’t just my pessimistic opinion about the human race; it’s the result of systematic research on character in modern psychology. This gap between opinion and reality is the focus of Christian Miller’s book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? Miller is the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and the Director of the Character Project, a Templeton-funded multidisciplinary study of academic resources, so he is well positioned to write about character, from both a philosophical and an empirical perspective. His book is organized into three parts: What is character and why is it important? (Chapters 1 and 2); What does our character actually look like? (Chapters 3-7); and, What can we do to improve our…

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At the time of writing this piece, your columnist, along with a fair slice of the population of the world, is under house arrest. His confinement is broken only by the permitted exercise: a sneaky dawn walk in the valley at the back of his house. Over seventy, and too long retired from the clinical front-line to be of use to Britain’s NHS, he has more time than hitherto to reflect. And there is much to reflect on – not just on the kinds of philosophical questions that have preoccupied him over the years, but also on what is going on in a world turned upside-down. Keeping one’s distance is now prosocial, while proximity, unless necessary, is anti-social. It is an act of courtesy explicitly to cross the road to…

On that fall morning years ago when the eighteen-year-old me first entered a college philosophy classroom, I carried with me a notebook, the assigned texts, and the naïve confidence that somewhere in these lectures or these pages I would find (at last) the meaning of life. I was to be somewhat disappointed. Although the philosophical tradition from Plato to Richard Rorty is brimming with potential answers to the timeless question of life’s meaning, I found those answers to be neither as singular nor as clear cut as I had hoped. If, as we learn in The Republic of Plato and his other dialogues, what we perceive in day-to-day life is a knock-off of ideal Forms that exist in a perfect world, and if knowledge of those Forms is the highest…

Many popular reading lists for the COVID-19 pandemic include The Plague, a 1947 novel by Albert Camus. The author was an existentialist philosopher who was also a journalist, a writer, and a member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. Camus was born in Algeria, and his father died soon after his birth. For a fascinating glimpse into Camus’ life, have a look at Albert Camus: A Biography, by Herbert R. Lottman. Though he disavowed being called an existentialist as a means to avoid association with Jean-Paul Sartre, a one-time friend turned enemy, Camus’ work nevertheless centers upon existentialist themes, such as each person’s need to take responsibility for their own choices and actions and in doing so to create meaning for their lives. For the existentialists there is…

Why do we think of philosophy originating with the ancient Greeks? After all, it’s clear that the ancient Egyptians, who preceded Pythagoras and Plato, Parmenides and Aristotle, by 2,500 years, practiced wisdom too: “The power of Truth and Justice is that they prevail,” reports The Wisdom of Ptahhotep from around 2350 BCE. In his History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell argued that it’s right to think of philosophy beginning in the sixth century BCE with the Greeks (in Miletus, a Greek colony in what is now Turkey), because it was only then that philosophers began to distinguish thought from theology. As is often the case in his entertaining volume, though Russell was making a point rather than making a case. After all, the thinker who is called the first…

Before 1689, when he was almost sixty, there was very little in John Locke’s life that would have indicated that he was to become one of the most important philosophical minds of the Western world. Before that, he was little more than a footnote in English history, with no major publications, and only a few minor writings which were all published anonymously. But after 1689, with the publication of his two magnum opuses, the Two Treatises of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the world would take notice of this powerful intellect. Birth, Education and Early Writings John Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, a small town just south of Bristol, England, on August 28, 1632, to parents of moderate means. His father, John Locke, Sr., owned some land…

How much would you say you know about Miskawayh? Nāgārjuna? How about Lucrezia Marinella, or Henry Odera Oruka? Probably not much. In fact, you may not even have heard of them. These thinkers very rarely feature in the teaching of philosophy, and their writings might well be absent even in a well-stocked university library in Europe or North America, to say nothing of the average bookshop. They do not belong to that select group of philosophers whose names are familiar to almost everyone – Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes – or even to the list of figures that every professional philosopher knows. They are, from the points of view both of the philosophy profession and of the wider public, minor figures. I’ve given a lot of thought to the importance of…

“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson’s outburst in one of the final scenes of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) might imply to a philosopher that this film is about epistemology – how we understand the world – or about metaphysics – the nature of reality. But the truth is very far from it. In fact, this drama about the extrajudicial killing at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base of Willy Santiago, an underperforming and disobedient soldier of private rank, is above all about ethics. More precisely, it’s a showdown between utilitarian (or consequentialist) ethics and its Kantian (or deontological) counterpart. Rob Reiner, who had previously directed the funny but hardly philosophical When Harry Met Sally (1989), is not a filmmaker usually associated with metaethics, the comparison of ethical…

Back Issues in Print Issue 136 Classical Wisdom for Today: Socratic Ignorance, Aristotelian friendship, Stoic acceptance, Tragic Athens / Kant x 2 Fukuyama & Identity / Nothing Issue 137 Nietzsche: Eternal Recurrence, Divinity & Kanye West, Art, History, Future / Infinity x2 / Morality / Academy / Bullshit Jobs / Zombies in Movies We still have copies of these earlier back issues: 2, 39, 40, 55-80, 82, 84-85, 87-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-116, 118-135 You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit philosophynow.org/shop Back issues in print cost £3.95 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or US$10/5.50?/A$10/C$10/NZ$12/£6.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please tell us which you would like). Binders: Our smart…