Tabla de contenidos para June - July 2015 en Philosophy Now

What is art? Immanuel Kant, in his 1790 book Critique of Judgement, asked why we judge certain things to be beautiful and if we can apply this judgement to the appreciation of art. This indicates the Western understanding of art up until the Twentieth Century as being primarily about beauty. But then the paradigm shifted tangentially. In his Brief Life of the man, Sir Alistair MacFarlane argues that the harbinger of this change was painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp. In 1917 Duchamp exhibited an inverted urinal as a statue. After that act of art subversion, the anaesthetic revolution spread. Nowadays the paradigm for art, putting it roughly, is that anything goes. This does include stuff found on the street: I’ve seen a bicycle wheel, an old mattress, and other bits…

Before Marcel Duchamp, a work of art was an artefact, a physical object. After Duchamp it was an idea, a concept. Duchamp did to art what Einstein did to physics and Darwin to religion: each destroyed the foundations of a subject – although they did so in very different ways. Einstein thought long and hard until he formulated his new vision of the physical world. Darwin agonised for decades, making himself physically ill, before announcing that we were merely members of the animal kingdom. In stark contrast, Duchamp approached the demolition of the art establishment and the pretentiousness of artists with the cold-eyed calculation of a saboteur looking for the best target. He found his target in New York in 1917. Early life Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp was born in…

Aspectre is haunting philosophy: the spectre of modernism. Constantly, philosophers eager to associate themselves with a defining era have tried to produce a new literary school, movement, or cultural condition, and often succeed only in heading back towards modernism. For instance, in recent years theorists have worked their way out of postmodernism the only way they know how: back towards modernism. We are confronted with the apparent reality that we cannot theorise away from modernism. Modernism was a tendency in art, architecture and literature which emphasised sincerity, rationality and a desire to break the shackles of tradition. In the late twentieth century it was largely displaced by postmodernism, a tendency characterised by irony, playfulness and a claim that there is not one single truth but many competing perspectives of equal…

You don’t know me. To most of you, my disappearance will make no difference. That is something we have in common. My disappearance will make no difference to me either: once my consciousness is extinguished I will be as unaware of my existence as you are. Although this is in some sense a chronicle of a death foretold, it is not an attempt to pull at heartstrings. I view my terminal condition as an accident happening in slow motion, but too fast. Having thought about death most of my life, I am now in a position where I must come to terms with mortality in a hurry. I recently wrote an article called ‘Atheist in a Foxhole’ here (Issue 105), explaining my location in a cancerburrow and the Humanist struggle…

Do you know what you’d do if you suddenly found yourself facing imminent death, say from a rapidly approaching tornado or avalanche? Would your normal sense of yourself as (I assume) a well-meaning, moral adult get you through the cataclysmic situation with that sense of self left intact? Or would your own fear, perhaps even panic, undermine your ability to act in ways you would be proud of? These are some of the questions posed by Force Majeure, a 2014 Swedish social comedy directed by Ruben Östlund. The film takes place at a ski resort in the French Alps, where a young, well-off Swedish family has come for a week’s vacation. Early on, Ebba Kuhnke, the wife, tells a fellow guest that they have come because her husband Tomas has…

“OUT OF THE CROOKED timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Thus wrote Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in his Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784). The philosophy professor from Königsberg, known for his dense sentences in his three Critiques had a Nebengeschäft, or sideline, as a public intellectual. In this role he excelled in quotable quips and witty puns such as the above. It is this role which is the subject of Reidar Maliks’ book Kant’s Politics in Context. Kant’s political philosophy commendably being the subject of a book-length study follows a perhaps belated recognition of his work as a political thinker. To be sure, others have engaged with Kant’s political thought, above all Hannah Arendt, yet as she said in her posthumous book Lectures…

Gene Editing on Human Embryos The first gene editing project on human embryos has recently been completed by gene-function researcher Huang Junjiu and his team at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China. They used a technique called CRISPR/Cas9 to cut and replace DNA in non-viable embryos that could not result in a live birth because they were created from eggs that had been fertilized by two sperm. Their research has sparked intense discussion about two issues: the ethics of work on human embryos and the usefulness of their methods as a potential option for treating disease. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germline,” argues Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the nonprofit Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley. However,…

Aestheticians are a fractured lot. A survey of the many thousands of papers and books published on aesthetics will confront the reader with a cacophony of ideas from philosophers who are described as Functionalists or Procedu-ralists or Institutionalists, even as Expressionalists and Repre-sentationalists – each earnestly seeking to offer the penultimate word on the question ‘What is Art?’ I say ‘penultimate’ because even philosophers recognize they are only human and subject to error. They offer their ideas so that they may be extended and advanced by others of like mind. Nevertheless, aesthetics, which was once simply defined as the exercise of taste and the appreciation of beauty [‘aisthetikos’ is old Greek for ‘perception’, Ed], has been kneaded, twisted, turned, flailed and even sautéed in an effort to cook up a…

Today some universities have courses in the Philosophy of Music. They study such questions as: What is the definition of music? What makes us say that a particular set of sounds is music while another set of sounds is not? What is the relationship of music to the mind? How does music affect (a) our emotions, (b) our intellect? How can we evaluate the value of any given piece of music? What is the relationship between a piece of music and its performance? What do we mean when we say a piece of music is sad? Where does the ‘sadness’ reside? and so on. Such questions are treated in a highly technical way in, for example, the article ‘Philosophy of Music’ in the on-line Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. There we…

DREAMING A Conceptual Framework for Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Research Jennifer M. Windt “This is the most comprehensive book on dreaming that I have ever encountered. . . Dreaming is well written, superbly researched, imaginative, and very astutely reasoned. It has my highest recommendation.” —Daniel C. Dennett, author of Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness THE CONCEPTUAL MIND New Directions in the Study of Concepts edited by Eric Margolis and Stephen Laurence New essays by leading philosophers and cognitive scientists that present recent findings and theoretical developments in the stuhady of concepts. THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHALLENGE FROM CHINA edited by Brian Bruya “. . . offers a wide-ranging and persuasive account of how Chinese philosophy can be a resource for addressing current controversies in analytic philosophy. No…

Recently, a class of students of mine were discussing a well-known piece by Peter Singer, ‘The Singer Solution to World Poverty’ (New York Times Sunday Magazine, 1999). In it, Singer argues that not giving to Oxfam is as morally wrong as Bob’s saving his Bugatti from being hit by a train rather than saving a child who is about to be hit. (Bob could steer the train towards his expensive car to save the child while keeping himself safe, but he isn’t willing to do so.) As usual, the students started to list various supposedly morallyrelevant differences between Bob’s case and not making a donation to Oxfam – a donation which could potentially save the life of a hungry child. Then one of the students – an elderly man who…

WHAT IS AN EMOTION, and what is its connection to imagination? Adam Morton, a philosophy professor at the University of British Columbia, gives us a surprising answer. First, an emotion is a state we can enter into where pressure is generated towards our having certain kinds of thoughts centred on a particular theme. For instance, if a manager is seriously displeased with one of her subordinates and feels anger, she may think over various scenarios, such as berating or firing them, or otherwise humiliating them in some way. Some of these possibilities may later be acted on, some may be entirely fanciful; but they are all developed from a particular perspective that regards the wayward employee in a certain light. Emotions must therefore be directed towards a specific person or…

In earlier columns, I have defended time from the assaults of physics. With a few exceptions, physicists have not been kind to time. Relativity theory stripped it of its tenses, dismissing the difference between past, present, and future as illusory. Worse, the theory seemed to deny time an independent existence. As Herman Minkowski put it, “space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union will preserve an independent reality” (The Principle of Relativity, 1952). Time in physics is present as an abstraction, a pure quantity: little t. This can be parked under a line as a denominator (eg, speed = distance/t), or multiplied by itself, or by the square root of -1 – indignities that real stretches of…

One of the less well-known benefits of the internet has been a huge expansion in the possibilities of studying philosophy. The old dream of making university education available to all, through correspondence courses, radio and television broadcasts and residential study weeks, inspired the foundation of Britain’s Open University in 1969. However, over the last dozen years or so the internet has transformed distance learning and as a consequence many more universities now offer faraway students the chance to partake of their wisdom. The opportunities include MOOCs and internet-based distance learning degrees. MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) allow you to watch university lecture courses by leading academics while drinking cocoa in your own armchair. A particularly wellknown philosophy example is the course on Justice offered by Professor Michael Sandel of Stanford…

When Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) wrote Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911), his purpose was to portray art as the greatest expression of the human spirit. Nor was he the first, and certainly not the last, to propose this link between art and spirituality; before him Karl Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), and Romantic thought in general, had developed an approach to aesthetics that highlighted the incompatible nature of human life and modern industrial creations. Nevertheless, the Twentieth Century has witnessed such a variety of art concepts and artistic production that assuming a vision of art like that of Kandinsky’s may seem arbitrary, and even naïve, just because Kandinsky’s vision can argue neither in favor of nor against the value of Twentieth Century radical aesthetic…

Art is something we do, a verb. Art is an expression of our thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and desires, but it is even more personal than that: it’s about sharing the way we experience the world, which for many is an extension of personality. It is the communication of intimate concepts that cannot be faithfully portrayed by words alone. And because words alone are not enough, we must find some other vehicle to carry our intent. But the content that we instill on or in our chosen media is not in itself the art. Art is to be found in how the media is used, the way in which the content is expressed. What then is beauty? Beauty is much more than cosmetic: it is not about prettiness. There are plenty…

Although the span of a couple of centuries separated them, the German philosophers Herder, Humboldt and Heidegger shared a similar conception of language. Departing from the classical conception of language as merely for communication, they all proposed that language, and not ‘transcendental reason’ (as previously advanced by Kant) was responsible for the formation of thought and, by extension, of knowledge. Conceived in this light, language was held to be constitutive of men’s (and by extension, nations’) various worldviews. One major upshot of this was to place all viewpoints on an equal footing: henceforth, there was no longer one universal, ‘objective’ way of knowing the world. This turn culminated in the early Twentieth Century, under Heidegger. Carrying his predecessors views to an extreme, he held that language, by ‘instituting being’, defined…

“No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them, even amongst the fishes, it may be with a dimness and vagueness infinitely remote, yet shadows the human…” – George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (1872) Back in March 2008 the collective rage of the internet was roused against a U.S. Marine who was filmed throwing a puppy over a cliff. The grainy footage posted on YouTube showed the soldier holding the small black and white puppy by the scruff of the neck and remarking how cute it is before violently flinging it over the edge. Naturally enough, the public was outraged, and the Marine in question was discharged. Perhaps there were circumstances surrounding the incident which, if we knew them, would make the whole thing…

Lettres Françaises DEAR EDITOR: I appreciated your special issue on contemporary French philosophy (107). Yet it seems to me one might have expected an additional article that would have provided a comprehensive overview and an attempt to set French philosophy in context. Why didn’t you mention the Sokal affair, that seems to me to be rather central to the whole issue? Why didn’t you mention Jacques Bouveresse, one of the leading philosophers in France today, not a public philosopher, but the only French philosopher who is highly respected outside of France, as far as I know? Finally, is it not the case that the French tradition in philosophy after Descartes is a tradition of essayists, of moralists, or of what English-speaking people call philosophes – that is to say, intellectuals…

THE DEBATE AS TO WHAT extent genes or environment determines us rages on. As Jesse Prinz points out in this lively, well-documented book, the controversy between nature and nurture dates back at least to Plato and Aristotle in the Fourth Century BC. Since the Nineteenth Century, when both biological inheritance and culture were first thought about scientifically, the sciences have taken up the debate, from the Nineteenth Century nativist psychologists, to the half-century of behaviorism in the Twentieth. Since the 1960s, the majority view has been ‘it’s in our genes’. Popular naturist (sic) books, such as those by Stephen Pinker, have inundated us. Prinz’s reader-friendly book is apparently geared to reach a similar audience. However, in contrast to Pinker he proposes that the pendulum of research lost momentum after the…

In a dream I am transported to a cave. Thick iron chains restrain me to a wall, while clasps at my neck stop my head from turning. My eyes squint against the dim light, so I close them for a moment. When I open them, a soft white glow surrounds me and the chains have vanished! I’m sitting so deeply in an overstuffed brown leather recliner that any thought of movement is dismissed. An array of speakers at the top of the chair blocks any view of what is behind me. My view appears to terminate in a white wall that surrounds the room. I roll my head to both sides, and see others. Their gazes are fixed in the direction of a television set, where a news program reports…