Tabla de contenidos para Feb/Mar 2016 en Philosophy Now

Welcome to our issue on free will. Did you choose to read this? I’m not asking out of mere politeness or astonishment; the question, Is conscious choice real? is right at the core of a tangle of philosophical problems around free will. If the answer is ‘yes’, you do choose, then your mind can decide what to think, and how you subsequently act, whether by speaking, or throwing a ball, or reading an editorial. That question is utterly different from the free will question that vexes theologians: Are we free if God already knows everything we’ll do? It is entirely consistent to say that we do choose, but God knows what we’re going to choose. That would mean we have free will in one core way – concerning choice –…

Are choices freely made just as it seems Or do the atoms choose for us instead? Do people just respond or intervene? By choice illusions are we each misled? If now I choose to work instead of play Is that because that impulse is more strong? Else what decides which impulse will hold sway? Are we the movers or just moved along? And when decidedly I am resolved To take some course of action come what may Was I observing or was I involved In that decision in the proper way? Despite the doubts, I must believe I'm free Accepting that I am too near to see. © PETER DUFF 2016 Peter Duff is a solicitor with a small practice in Blackrock, County Dublin. For more, visit his daily poem…

One question about human nature is whether it is the same for all people at all times, or whether it is fundamentally different in different cultures or historical periods. The argument that it is everywhere the same is implicit in the evolutionary view, since we all share common ancestors; but it has a longer pedigree than that. Plato’s account of the soul assumes that it applies to all men; Hume believed that “mankind is so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange”; and the philosophers of the Enlightenment tended to see human truths in universal terms because they felt that the most significant aspect of human nature was rationality, which they observed to be evenly distributed throughout the world. However…

What led you to study philosophy? I remember reading a book in the early 1930s – now what was the book? Perhaps it was Ethics by G.E. Moore – and thinking, “Well, if that’s philosophy, I think I can do it!” One striking thing about your work is your consistent interest in British philosophers. Well, it just so happened that I knew French reasonably well, but not so well as to be able to do philosophical work in French. I remember while going to lectures at Oxford that Henry Price, who was the Professor of Logic, suggested that I should read [18th century Welsh moral philosopher] Richard Price. And while reading it, I again thought “If that’s philosophy, I think I can do it!” And your DPhil thesis was partly…

Colin Wilson was perhaps England’s only famous existentialist philosopher. Indeed, Robert Solomon’s 2004 book Existentialism includes Wilson as the sole British representative of existentialism. (Here I’ll pass over the many other designations of Wilson, such as mystic, occultist, criminologist, and so on, for his lasting philosophical achievements eclipse his other interests.) However Wilson attended no university, and achieved no academic qualifications, despite Iris Murdoch trying to convince him of the benefits of a university education; as he wrote in his memoir The Angry Years in 2006: “She and I took an immediate liking to one another… and when she learned that I had not been to a university, offered to get me a scholarship at Oxford, a suggestion I gratefully declined.” Indeed Wilson only went to academic institutions as an…

THE MOST GOOD YOU CAN DO IS A marvelously provocative and intriguing book. We would expect no less from Peter Singer, who has been bringing out such books for forty years, at the rate of one per annum. He has become downright notorious for defending positions such as infanticide, euthanasia, sports doping, and bestiality, and yet anyone who has heard him speak can attest to his dispassionate, openminded, and rational manner. The key to Singer’s particular beliefs has always been his uncompromising espousal of the ethical philosophy called utilitarianism. Thus, his breakout book, Animal Liberation (1975), about the cause with which he is most identified, derived from his simply having taken utilitarianism seriously. Utilitarianism holds that one ought always to do that which will have the best overall consequences. Singer’s…

“‘My weight.’ What a possessive!” Paul Valéry The relationship between your columnist and what he (and everyone else) is inclined to call ‘his’ body is far from simple, notwithstanding that when you point to the latter you also point to the former. Readers may recall a recent column, ‘On Being (Roughly) Here’ in PN 106, in which I touched on this. I’d like to pick up here some of the trailing threads of its unfinished – indeed unfinishable – business. In particular I want to focus on what I referred to as our being ‘embodied subjects’. It is the ‘em’ in embodied that is most mysterious, so let us resume our investigation there. A pebble is a pebble, end of story. To put it another way, a pebble is what…

Philosophy Now is sold from newsstands and bookstores in more than a dozen countries – but if you subscribe you can have each new issue delivered to your own front door and save money too. Better still, individual print subscriptions include password access to our website edition and the complete archive of past issues. Subscribe today at philosophynow.org or fill out and return one of the coupons below. 6 IDEA-PACKED ISSUES FOR £15.50/US$32! Questions and inquiries: please email subscriptions@philosophynow.org or phone 01959 534171 To tell us about a change of address, please email addresschange@philosophynow.org…

• University scraps philosophy exams • • Ethics teaching the Meiji way • • Canadians consider euthanasia for children • Euthanasia for Children? Passive euthanasia, withdrawing or withholding treatment with the effect of hastening a patient’s death, has long been legal in Canada. Active euthanasia, taking positive measures to bring about a patient’s death, will soon also be legal as per a decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in February 2015. A new public debate has emerged in the wake of this step: Should the right to ask for one’s own life to be terminated to be extended to children too? It is not as strange a thought as it may seem: in the Netherlands euthanasia is lawful for patients over the age of 12, in Belgium for terminally…

One of the main trends of recent academic culture has been to take freedom and autonomy away from human beings. I don’t mean that professors armed with guns have been locking up their intellectual opponents; I mean that from sociology to philosophy, from psychology to neuroscience, a common theme has been to try to show that our ‘free will’ is either severely limited or non-existent, and that we have much less control over our own lives than we’d like to believe. It was one of the central beliefs of behaviourist psychology. You might feel as if you are free, making your own decisions and choices, but in reality everything you do, or think, or feel, is the result of environmental influences. Your behaviour is just the ‘output’ or response to…

“Even in the matter of moustaches I was going to surpass Nietzsche! Mine would not be depressing, catastrophic, burdened by Wagnerian music and mist. No! It would be line-thin, imperialistic, ultra-rationalistic, and pointing towards heaven, like the vertical mysticism, like the vertical Spanish syndicates.” Salvador Dalí, Diary of a Genius, 1963, p.17 “Yes, it is in the Spanish manner that I always sign my mad games! With blood, the way Nietzsche wanted it!” Diary of a Genius, p.40 Friedrich Nietzsche was undoubtedly one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among his many works, his first, The Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragedie, 1872), deserves the special attention of art critics, because here the German philosopher introduced the concept that two opposing forces,…

In Socrates’ culture of Fourth Century BCE Athens, if someone awaiting execution was actually executed, it could look pretty bad for his friends. It could look like they hadn’t tried hard enough to save him. In Plato’s dialogue Crito, Socrates has been imprisoned and does await his execution. As expected, Socrates’ wealthy friend Crito goes to see him to inform him that arrangements have been made smuggle him out. However, Socrates refuses Crito’s assistance to escape, on the grounds that if he were to evade his sentence he would be violating his tacit agreement with the state to abide by its laws and penalties, which would render his escape unjust. Instead, Socrates decides he must stay and receive his punishment. So Socrates was executed, and Crito was left to face…

Jeremy Bentham, a 19th century British philosopher often called the father of Utilitarianism, believed that the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people is the only possible good. His will really did dictate that he be preserved as an ‘auto-icon’, with his original skeleton inside (he wanted his original head on top too, but they messed up the mummification process, so they had to use a wax head). Whether he thought this would bring about the most happiness for the most people in the future is up for debate, as it mostly just seems really creepy. Philippa Foot is a 20th century philosopher best known for reviving virtue ethics, and especially for her famous ‘trolley problem’, which critiqued utilitarianism. Killing an innocent person and using their organs to save…

DOES ALTRUISM EXIST? poses an important question of enduring interest in both philosophy and biology. On one level – the level of outward action – the answer is obviously yes. If all we mean by ‘altruism’ is ‘performing actions that benefit others’, then clearly altruism exists. From an evolutionary perspective, however, there is still something in need of explanation: If making the sacrifices necessary to help others costs an organism without benefitting that organism, why would it take such actions? Why, for example, would a mother lion feed and care for her offspring? For some time the dominant explanation in evolutionary biology has been the selfish gene theory popularized by Richard Dawkins, according to which genes are the basis for selection. Thus while it may not be in the interest…

Back Issues on CD Philosophy Now has been published since 1991, so it is hardly surprising that we’re often asked for back issues which have long since sold out. Therefore we’ve put our first eighty issues onto four CDs in PDF format. The CDs work equally well on Mac and PC, and when opened on your computer screen will look very much like the pages in the original magazines. Vol. 1: Issues 01-20; Vol. 2: Issues 21-40; Vol. 3: Issues 41-60; Vol. 4: Issues 61-80 Single vol. (1, 2, 3 or 4) UK£15 US$23 Can$35 Aus$35 NZ$40 RoW£17 Two volumes: UK£25 US$40 Can$55 Aus$55 NZ$65 RoW£30 Three volumes: UK£35 US$55 Can$75 Aus$75 NZ$90 RoW£40 Four volumes: UK£45 US$69 Can$95 Aus$95 NZ$115 RoW£51 IP-BASED ONLINE ACCESS is available for institutions –…

The residents of the isolated community of M– were always inclined toward peculiar fads. One year they were obsessed with romance novels and open marriages. Another year, it was crime novels and abstinence. Most of the time these obsessions were harmless and faded from memory rather quickly. On the rare occasions when real harm was done, it was more likely than not that the fad was philosophical in nature. The town’s infatuation with determinism began, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a courtroom. A man on trial for murdering his sister declared that he could not be held responsible for his action, since the murder was merely the latest in an unalterable chain of causes and effects having its origins at the very beginning of the universe. The judge, in complete agreement with…

We commonly think it obvious that a person facing multiple alternatives can choose any of them, and that the outcome is decided by free will at the moment of decision, rather than being already determined by earlier causes. All the events in the world, however, obey the law of physics, including those that happen inside a brain. If all events in the brain unfold according to classical physics, then free will in the above sense does not exist. This is because classical physics is deterministic: the state of the world at any moment is the inevitable consequence of its state at an earlier moment. Hence the alternatives are only apparently available to the decision-maker, as in fact only a single alternative is destined to be the one chosen. In quantum…

Far from shunning the infinite as his philosophical predecessors Pascal and Descartes had done, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) embraced and celebrated it, seeing it as a mark of the divine. According to him, the infinite permeated reality, in the microscopic as well as in the infinitely large, in such a manner that “every particle of the universe contains a world of an infinity of creatures” (Leibniz, Collected Papers and Letters, Series 6, Volume 4, 1647-8). Leibniz was writing at a time of intellectual upheaval. The early Seventeenth Century had ushered in an era of scientific discoveries and innovations – an era in which mechanism, as exemplified by clockwork, had emerged as the privileged conceptual tool through which to elucidate and grasp the cosmos, the state, and even the human body.…

When you launch a podcast and book series promising to cover the history of philosophy ‘without any gaps’ as I did about five years ago, you’re asking for trouble. Aside from the intrinsic challenges of the task, it practically invites critics to complain about things you’ve left out. And I’ve had my fair share of complaints along these lines – usually justified. The most common one, which I started to hear almost as soon as the project began, was that I shouldn’t leave out the ‘Eastern’ philosophical traditions of India and China. My feeling was initially that I had a good excuse for not covering them – namely, my total ignorance. But in due course I decided that, like ignorance of the law, ignorance of philosophy is never a good…

The heart of the movie Good Will Hunting (1997) is an encounter between Will (Matt Damon), a twenty-year-old working class prodigy, and an apparently burnt-out middle-aged therapist, Sean (Robin Williams). This is in fact a story of a Buberian I-Thou relationship which deeply touches, upsets and inspires both men to the extent that they both end up leaving behind the comfort of their old habits, move out of their homes, and leave town. Martin Buber (1878-1965) was an existentialist therapist whose thinking focused on the nature of human encounters, and this is a movie about what it takes from a Buberian perspective to be liberated from binding fears and take the dreadful first step that leads towards deeper awareness, more freedom, and a higher level of responsibility. The opening shots…