Tabla de contenidos para Oct/Nov 2016 en Philosophy Now

Disasters and threats of disasters of all kinds, global and local, raise their snarling heads over our societies, casting shadows on the news bulletins and front pages. There’s nothing particularily new about this. But it does demonstrate that society is still liable to change, if only because it must adapt to the world that societies themselves change. This awareness of the inevitability of change, and the nagging awareness of imperfections in the current processes of politics and economics, lead to the questions, “What can we make our world into?” and “What will society become?” Those questions are surely rattling around somewhere inside every curious and intelligent mind. But to discover good answers, we first have to understand what society is, how it works and the possibilities of change it presents…

Existentialist Epistles DEAR EDITOR: As usual, Issue 115 was informative and provocative. But for existentialism to hold that we live in a moral vacuum in a careless universe makes no sense. This premise is in flat contradiction to their great claim that individuals have the duty to choose how they live their lives. To accept this power to choose, Stuart Greenstreet says, is an act of faith “so self-evident that it never needs to be proved.” I concur. The argument that we have the power and duty of choice also applies in the context of more hopeful belief systems. We can, indeed must, choose within and between belief systems. Are we Anglican or Baptist, Sunni or Shia, terrorist or peacemaker? And are we confident that we know best? Is it…

There was once a queen of an ant colony who grew exceedingly wise. She built an anthill larger than the nests of her ancestors, and the trails of her colony extended for hundreds of feet in many directions. Everyday, she fared sumptuously on the choicest morsels from far and wide. As it happened, the anthill had been built beneath the floorboards of a large bakery – one of the largest in the land. The bakery was so large that the ants had never been outside it. But the queen knew where to send her workers to get the delicacies she wanted. Since the beginning of her reign, she had kept a careful diary, and she had learned to turn what she saw into Wisdom. A part of her wisdom was…

According to classic social contract theory, originally elaborated by Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century, human beings begin politically unorganised, in what is called a state of nature, and society is created by people either explicitly or tacitly establishing a contract whereby they agree to live together in harmony for their mutual benefit. Social contract theorists seek to demonstrate why a rational individual would voluntarily consent to give up unlimited freedom in the state of nature and accept the limits to liberty required for civil society. These theorists agree that individuals make this exchange in order to ensure, or at least greatly enhance, their ability to survive. But these theorists define survival too narrowly, as ‘defense of life and property’. I want to argue here that the terms of any…

The Trolley Problem is a thought experiment first devised by the Oxford moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967. In her paper titled ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect’, Foot wrote “it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram [trolley] which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track the tram enters is bound to be killed.” And so the Trolley Problem was born. (We should note that Foot presented this thought experiment as one among many others, and there is no evident reason why this one has received so much attention from the philosophical and scientific communities.) In 1976,…

Alistair MacFarlane laments the profound disappointment of a master of logic. Nothing in our intellectual life seems more secure than arithmetic and logic. When we buy something, hand over cash and receive change, the statement: “This amount of change is correct” must be true or false. This is so despite the country, the currency, the article purchased, the market involved, and a myriad of other factors. Logic and arithmetic seem to fit together naturally. Imagine then the colossal shock felt by Gottlob Frege, who had spent years attempting to prove that arithmetic could be based on logic, when he received a letter from Bertrand Russell demonstrating that his proof was fallacious. Something momentous had happened: Frege had collided with the limits of logic. It was as significant for philosophy as…

Recently Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times entitled ‘If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is’ (May 11, 2016). They argued that philosophy departments unwilling or unable to devote attention to philosophy from other cultures may as well just rename themselves ‘Department of European and American Philosophy’. I do research in Islamic philosophy, and am covering non-European traditions, starting with India, in my podcast on the history of philosophy, so I am much in sympathy with their provocative plea for truth in advertising. But along with other recent developments having to do with the limits of Europe, I did get to wondering: what exactly do they mean by the phrase ‘European and American philosophy’? An obvious answer might…

MORALITY, IT IS OFTEN said, is a private affair. But in some ways, it’s also an extremely public one. That is, that without a moral consensus of some kind among the general population, our social policies become very difficult to rationalize, or to sell, to them. Back in the heyday of liberal progressives such as John Dewey, people talked about there being a ‘Judeo-Christian consensus’ – a minimal set of moral precepts acceptable to all good people around which our public policies could be shaped to the satisfaction of every good citizen. Nice idea. It just didn’t work for very long. For it turns out that once a democracy has a group more diverse than, say, Protestants, Catholics, the Orthodox, the Jews and a few agnostics and atheists thrown in,…

The television series Breaking Bad has been critically and popularly successful on both sides of the Atlantic. It is the story of a chemistry teacher, Walter White, who contracts lung cancer and then decides to start ‘cooking’ crystal meth (methamphetamine) to earn money to support his family after he is dead. There are many plot spoilers ahead so don’t read further if you don’t want to know what happens at the end. Though spread over six series, some critics have said that this new generation television series is actually one big film, a type of roman-fleuve for television screens. Though, to cut right to the end, his family life is destroyed, his family home is taken over by the Drug Enforcement Authority and he has lost most of the money…

The son of a doctor, Aristotle was born in the city of Stagira in Macedonia in the year 384 BC, and was educated at Plato’s Academy. When his mentor Plato died in 347 BC, the Macedonian went home and became the tutor of Alexander, the son of King Philip of Macedon. His pupil, who later gained the suffix ‘the Great’, was rather fond of his teacher, and is supposed to have said, “I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.” Aristotle stayed at the court of Alexander until 335 BC, when he founded his own academy, the Lyceum, in Athens. He remained in Athens until 323 BC, when anti-Macedonian sentiments forced him to leave. “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice…

I would like to present for your consideration two interesting and peculiar versions of anarchism, as articulated by the German-Israeli existentialist and social thinker Martin Buber (1878-1965) and the reclusive Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Buber is a fascinating representative of Jewish left-wing thought, while Tolstoy a famous Christian anti-authoritarian. Although the two thinkers came from different religious backgrounds and geographic circumstances, Buber and Tolstoy’s political philosophies converge on a position I will be calling ‘spiritual anarchism’. Both thinkers stand sharply divided from the dominant, secular anarchist orthodoxy (if there were ever aproximately such a thing). Martin Buber Martin Buber is best remembered for his magnum opus I and Thou (1923), in which he sought to give an account of our relationship to other people and to God – the…

There is little doubt that benevolence is a Good Thing. The word even comes from the Latin for ‘good will’ (benevolentia) for goodness’ sake. It’s as desirable as motherhood and apple pie. Perhaps it is even more desirable, for unlike sugary pastries, benevolence isn’t directly implicated in the global rise of type 2 diabetes. The benevolent person’s disposition to help others is a commendable human quality: a virtue. In fact, Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume regards benevolence as one of two great virtues (the other being justice). He sees its function as to “bestow happiness on human society” (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751). In my photograph, taken on a Dublin street, a benevolent social interaction is occurring as the top-hatted man presents a benign face to the…

IN 1872, THE SAME YEAR that witnessed the publication of his first book The Birth of Tragedy, a twentyseven year old Friedrich Nietzsche gave a series of five public lectures on the aims of education at Basel’s city museum. The aspiration of these lectures was to expose some corrosive tendencies he saw in German educational institutions, and more importantly, to chart a new direction worthy of such institutions. In addition to constituting a valuable source for Nietzsche’s early views on culture, the lectures are notable for their experimental style. Nietzsche’s view is presented largely in the form of a fictionalized autobiographical dialogue that he reports as having overheard while a student. Contributing to the mythic quality of the conversation is its taking place in the woods, where Nietzsche and his…

GREEK PHILOSOPHERS pointed out that some political conflicts affect all aspects of social life, from the family to public institutions. They called this phenomenon of permanent political conflict stasis. Stasis is an interesting concept as it specifies conflict in two domains: family relations/private life (oikeios), and external social conflict (polemos). Contemporary continental political philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, the radical anonymous collective Tiqqun, and Bernard Stiegler have also begun to invoke stasis as they seek to better comprehend the political conflicts that plague us today, from global climate change to states of economic emergency, to global terrorism. But perhaps the most common theme of these thinkers is that global society is undergoing stasis as a result of a permanent crisis at the heart of global capitalism. Some stress the aesthetic…

T.S. Eliot once reported a conversation with a taxi driver about celebrities he had had in his cab: “Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him: ‘Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?’ And you know, he couldn’t tell me!” The shock of the man-in-the-street discovering that one of last century’s greatest philosophers could not deliver on what has often been seen as a central preoccupation of philosophy is manifest. Even if philosophers cannot solve their self-inflicted problems (see my ‘The ‘P’ Word: Does it Matter if Philosophy Does Not Make Progress?’, in Issue 113), surely they should be able to help us to make sense of things? High time, then, that this column should turn to the biggest of the Big Questions: ‘What’s…