Table of contents for December 2023 - January 2024 in Philosophy Now

The belief that human beings have moral responsibility is used to judge people based on their actions, then to reward or punish them accordingly. But is this just? This question becomes unavoidable when the theory of determinism enters the discussion. Determinists claim that every event or occurrence in the world, including human desires, thoughts, and acts, are predetermined by physical laws of cause and effect. In such a world there is no space for free will, since any person’s action at any time could not have been different, if all the physical conditions causing it remain the same. As there is no human free will, say the determinists, there can be no moral responsibility either. At the other end of the axis stand libertarians who also view the two phenomena…

G.W. F. Hegel was the leading figure in the nineteenth century movement known as ‘German Idealism’. These idealists had responded to Immanuel Kant’s work in a manner that Kant would never have approved. Kant believed that although the external world existed beyond our experience of it, we could never know it as it is ‘in itself’ – we could only ever know the world as shaped by our minds to give us our experiences of it. Hegel built on this conclusion to argue that the only thing we can therefore be sure of existing is the consciousness with which we experience the world. So he rephrased the world in terms of consciousness – which is what ‘idealism’ means. Paradoxically, the most significant legacy of Hegel’s work has been his influence…

IN THE MID-FOURTH CENTURY BCE, Athens was between its peak as an imperial power and its decline into one more of Alexander the Great’s colonies. The prosperity of Athens’ Periclean age was a century in the past, and had been followed by a twenty-five years war with Sparta, resulting in Athens’ defeat. The renowned Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were by then playwrights of the past. Philosophy was a comparatively late bloomer. Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. Plato’s Academy, which has been called the first European university, was established about a decade after Socrates’ trial. Roughly twenty years after the Academy started, Aristotle, then in his late teens, left his native Stagira for Athens to study under Plato. While at the Academy, Aristotle became acquainted with a younger student, Tyrtamos,…

In the 2022 superhero film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Wanda Maximoff (played by Elizabeth Olsen) completes the frightening transformation from hero to villain that she began in the Disney+ show WandaVision (2021). Now possessed by the Darkhold, a mystical book that corrupts the mind of those who use it, Wanda is fully unleashed as the evil and incredibly powerful Scarlet Witch. She can alter reality with her mind, and she is willing to perform unspeakable acts for the sake of her imaginary (or alternative universe) children. Yet through the film’s depictions of its villain’s many gruesome deeds, it poses a philosophical question about personal identity: is the Scarlet Witch actually Wanda at all, or is she now a different being entirely? In a previous film column here…

Elaine Coburn Elaine Coburn is Associate Professor of International Studies and Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at York University in Toronto. Her work is concerned with inequalities and justice, especially with respect to race, gender, Indigenous politics and contemporary political economy. She writes for the Literary Review of Canada. Slavoj Žižek! Slavoj Žižek! is a Slovenian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and founder and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana. Maria Tillmanns Maria Tillmanns taught at the University of California, San Diego for ten years. In 1998 she received her doctorate from the University of Illinois, with a dissertation…

The following sentences appear in a letter written by the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677): “Further conceive, I beg, that a stone while continuing in motion should be capable of thinking and knowing, that is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of his own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and it would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined” (Letter to G.H. Schaller, October 1674). These three sentences…

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.” (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921 In this final proposition of his Tractatus, Ludwig Wittgenstein prohibits the impossible. But why should one prohibit something that is already in itself impossible? The answer is relatively easy: if we ignore this prohibition, we produce statements which are for Wittgenstein meaningless, just as speculations about the noumenal domain are in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. (The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan qualified the prohibition of incest in a similar way, claiming that its result is to render the impossible possible: if incest has to be prohibited, it means that it is possible to violate the prohibition.) There is, however, an ambiguity in Wittgenstein’s proposition, which resides in the double meaning…

What is Hegel’s view of freedom? His ideas about freedom have to do with four different questions. First, what is freedom? Second, what is its role in history? Third, how important is it? Fourth, what does it take to actually be free? To take up the first issue: Freedom has three components. To be free is to be at one with oneself – what Hegel calls in German Beisichsein. One is at one with oneself when self-consciously acting out of a law that’s part of one’s own nature – acting according to ideas and principles of one’s own, not principles arbitrarily imposed from without. This aspect of freedom involves being independent, but independence is often mistakenly identified with freedom itself, instead of being recognized as merely a component of freedom.…

UPON READING MICHAEL Oakeshott’s (1901-90) Rationalism in Politics (1962), it was almost impossible for me not to agree with every criticism he had of rationalism in modern politics – at least at first glance. Oakeshott starts by listing the characteristics of a rationalist – someone who thinks that truth is accessed solely through reason – many of which characteristics are paradoxical. For instance, a rationalist’s often deep distrust of any kind of tradition screams of hypocrisy as he himself sets out to create his own universality for whatever social behaviour he espouses. When I read this, I couldn’t help but reevaluate how I’ve viewed traditions my whole life. Much like a rationalist in this regard, I have been quick to shun most traditions as regressive, and tried to question everything.…

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• A new (and problematic) use for chatbots • Monkey business with stem cells • Consciousness: Koch loses bet to Chalmers AI for Grief The rise of chatbots such as ChatGPT, has fuelled the development of an unusual application: ‘grief tech’. When conversational AI specialist James Vlahos’ father was dying from cancer in 2016, he compiled as many memories as he could and created the ‘Dadbot’. Emulating features of Vlahos’ father, the Dadbot could interact by text, audio, images and video. Building on his own experience of feeling comforted by the Dadbot, Vlahos started HereAfter AI, a company in the US that facilitates for people to upload memories, creating a ‘life story avatar’ with which family and friends can interact. Or as their website puts it, “Preserve memories with an…

Today I wish to contemplateA very interesting date;A date that even now can chillThe blood and joyous spirits kill. A date that still has arcane powersTo sabotage our happy hours.A date that still rings down the yearsTo frighten ultramodern ears. In every life are many tidesThat ebb and flow but on the IdesOf March, a time of sudden deathFor Caesar, with his final breath. A famous and successful lifeConcluded by a colleague’s knife.His end became a fate foretold‘Impossible to break the mould’. The soothsayer’s doom-laden phrase“This date will be your End of DaysYour fate’s decided by the godsYou cannot fight against such odds.” Repeated twice within the playBy Shakespeare of that tragic day“Beware the Ides of March“ – no chanceTo change the movements of the dance. Would any of us…

To answer this question, first ‘knowledge’ must be defined. It is difficult to determine exactly what constitutes knowledge, so even this presents a limit to knowledge. We might identify various forms of knowledge, such as declarative knowledge (knowing that), procedural knowledge (knowing how), personal knowledge (of experience, emotions) and shared knowledge (true ideas widely accepted in communities and cultures). Sir Karl Popper developed a theory of three worlds, in which World 2 is all subjective (personal) knowledge, while World 3 is all knowledge existing independent of individual minds, such as stories, theories, mathematical constructs, scientific concepts, cultural beliefs, and intellectual creations. However, categorising knowledge into types does not tell us what it means to know something. One widespread philosophical definition of knowledge is Socrates’ idea of ‘Justified True Belief’ (JTB).…

ADAM KIRSCH IS AN AMERICAN poet, biographer, literary critic, a faculty member at Columbia University, and a widely-published public intellectual. The Revolt Against Humanity (2022) appears in the Columbia Global Reports series of well-produced, novella-length essays on contemporary political and cultural themes. The theme of this book is the dispiriting judgement that ‘‘the end of humanity’s reign is imminent, and that we should welcome it’’ (p.10). Humanity’s beset by the climate crisis, ecological destruction, the possibility of nuclear war, and other existential risks that in the worst-case scenarios threaten our species’ existence. This pessimistic anticipation is expressed by a diverse range of voices – “engineers and philosophers, political activists and would-be hermits, novelists and palaeontologists” (p.10) – as they respond with exultation, despair, or sober determination. The Revolt Against Humanity…

It were Berkeley’s idea to develop a team,To be the team captain had long been his dream;He knew he’d have trouble assembling his squad,But, being a bishop, he trusted in God. For t’position of keeper he thought of Descartes;It were him, after all, who had made a head-startIn solving the puzzle about what we know:If we think, we exist; and that must be so. For full-backs he thought first of Baruch Spinoza,A bit of a rebel, a bit of a poser,But solid in holding that all of us shouldMake our own way through reason to find what is good. Then Gottfried Leibniz would be strong in defence;For him God was perfect; he argued from henceThat the world we are in is the best it can be,And what God allows us…

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Not many people know that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a keen philosopher. He is known throughout the world as Santa’s favourite reindeer, and as legend has it he is a sweet and bashful helper, his red nose lighting up the night sky at the helm of the sleigh on Christmas Eve. But at the North Pole, where everyone has a better grip on the deer himself, he has a reputation for quick appraisals, a dry, cynical humour, and a sharp wit. Most of the other deer think he makes a brilliant companion down at the Seal & Otter, and the elves find him endearingly cheeky. And under all the bravado and sarcasm lies a genuine curiosity for knowledge and thirst for thought. Of all the deer at the North…