Tabla de contenidos para August - September 2015 en Philosophy Now

Two of the most obvious and least ignorable features of today’s society are the ever-accelerating advance of science and the ever-increasing urgency of questions about how we should all relate to one another in our changing, crowded world. You might think it would be hard to find two areas of human endeavour less alike, but in fact science and moral philosophy influence each other in both directions, as you’ll see from the first few articles in this issue. Firstly ethicists can contribute in various ways to our use of science. As science has gained ever greater mastery over our world, the potential consequences of misusing it have become terrible indeed. Both research and technology throw up moral dilemmas. Moral philosophers wrestle with such dilemmas and this is why some serve…

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) regarded morality as indispensable to the survival of humanity, and he devoted considerable effort to the formulation of a coherent position on the relationship between morality, science, and religion. In his view morality should be decoupled from religion and treated as a secular matter of bringing dignity and happiness, as much as possible, to all people. The main source of disharmony among both individuals and groups seemed to Einstein to be an exaggerated sense of selfimportance. Hence he applied his proven ability for correcting misconceptions to the problem of human conceit; and this led him to point to our feeling that we have autonomous free will as a key mistake. The non-existence of free will seemed to Einstein so obvious that he did not bother explaining his…

When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ • U.K. or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org Keep them short and keep them coming! The Meaning of Art DEAR EDITOR:While reading Howard Darmstadter’s excellent article in Issue 107 on the models we use to represent our world, it occurred to me that using a different model might clarify the status of Art Objects. Previous discussion has taken place within our everyday model, which assumes that we are referring to objects of the ‘real’ world. If instead, we consider ‘Art Objects’ to be a classification of intuitions present in thought, then they become no more problematic than any other object. Comparing the classification of ‘art object’ with that of ‘chair’, for example,…

ADULTS TEND TO THINK OF CHILDREN arguing as something negative, because in this context arguments are generally understood to involve fighting, quarreling, anger, frustration, and tears. Philosophers, however, understand argument to involve reasons, not rancor. As students learn in virtually any introductory philosophy class, arguments are attempts to persuade other people of the truth of particular claims based on the reasons offered for them. In their book Tinker Thinkers (2014), Susan Gardner and Amy Leask, with the help of illustrator Ami Moore, encourage children to argue: that is, to express their views and give good reasons for them, and also to evaluate the reasons other people offer for their beliefs and actions. Geared to elementary school age children, the book’s central metaphor is a construction kit that contains various tools…

• Philosophy benefits children’s education • Dalai Lama: “Ethics more important than religion” • Morality for chimpanzees and robots Dalai Lama: “On Some Days I Think It Would Be Better If There Were No Religions.” As the Dalai Lama turns 80, he has published a surprising appeal to the world, in which he declares ethics to be more important than religion. (It is helpfully titled: An Appeal of the Dalai Lama to the World: Ethics are more important than religion). In this short but tightly argued essay, available as a free e-book, he expresses the view that spiritual wellbeing comes from compassion and moral integrity rather than religion. He also emphasises the importance of dialogue and rejection of violence. Believing religion to have become one of the issues which divide…

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game that you win by getting the lowest number of years in jail. Imagine you are one of two people who have robbed a diamond merchant. You and your accomplice are both apprehended by the police, and held in separate cells for questioning. The investigating officer offers both of you the same deal. If you confess and thereby incriminate the other, and the other remains silent, then for helping with enquiries your sentence will be reduced to one year, and your silent accomplice will get four years. If you both remain silent you will both get two years. Yet if you both confess and incriminate each other, you will receive three years. You must either betray your accomplice or remain silent. In this game a…

Bushfire is Australia’s most lethal and costly natural hazard. Big, uncontrollable bushfires can kill millions of trees and wild animals, thousands of farm animals, and sometimes humans. Apart from deaths, bushfires incinerate property, such as bridges, farm fencing, homes, and even, a few years ago, an astronomical observatory. The cost to the economy can be ruinous. So bushfire management is no trivial matter for Australians. While local volunteers provide most of the weary fire fighters, they are under the ultimate direction of salaried fire officers, who are public servants, wear white shirts, big hats, lots of medals, and appear on television, looking worried. Policy and budget are largely dictated by politicians, who usually appear by helicopter in the aftermath, dispensing sympathy. It may seem to some that Australia has addressed…

Curiosity is instinctive to life-forms with complex nervous systems. Humans, for example, tend to quest for knowledge. One of the fruits of knowledge is technology, the practical application of knowledge to satisfy various needs. Yet technology influences human society not only materially, but also culturally and existentially, and as it transforms society it raises a number of challenges. For instance, just as different groups – geographical, racial, or cultural – sometimes clash over the control of natural resources, people also tend to experience similar conflict over control of advanced technology. Science fiction novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and many others, illustrate a recognizable pattern in advanced scientific societies: that those who control the technological resources…

The 1990s marked the ascendancy of postmodernism and poststructuralism across pop and politics as well as in academic theorising. This was a time when Madonna’s ‘blonde ambition’ pop was reinterpreted by third wave feminists as a political act; and when ‘clueless’ heroines in teen movies could reference everything from television infomercials to classic literature. Philosophy too, to some extent, was absorbed and repurposed by pop postmodernism. Pop culture frequently parodied earnest pseudo-intellectual types by, for example, portraying them reading Nietzsche. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is, after all, one of the best-known and most widely misappropriated of nineteenth century philosophers. A more surprising turn in 90s culture was the third wave feminist adoption of Nietzsche in political theorising. At first glance, Nietzsche seems an unlikely feminist. Concerning his attitude to women, he…

“The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them an idea of eternity.” George Bernard Shaw It wouldn’t surprise me if quite a few people are sick of Raymond Tallis, but your columnist can’t get enough of himself. He finds the thought of his own extinction very uncongenial. Nevertheless, he cannot ignore the lengthening contrail of yesterdays, warning him that his store of tomorrows is rapidly depleting. Sometimes he feels like a paddleless canoeist being swept towards a cataract. No wonder he occasionally toys with the notion of an indefinitely prolonged afterlife, compared with which his lost childhood, vanished maturity, and forgotten dotage would be a triad of eyeblinks. The idea of eternity beckons. Eternity is something of an away match for an atheist,…

There’s been some very public dig-taking between the science and philosophy camps lately. Lawrence Krauss, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and other scientists are saying philosophy’s become irrelevant, little more than an esoteric Old Boy’s Club. On the other hand, philosophers, theologians, politicians and others criticize ‘scientism’, the conviction that science, and only science, can and should be the source for all human knowledge; that all truth claims – that all ethical, metaphysical, and political beliefs – should not only be informed by or founded on, but entirely determined by, empirical evidence. Michael Shermer doesn’t dismiss philosophy so directly in his article ‘A Moral Starting Point: How Science Can Inform Ethics’ (Scientific American, February 2015). He includes philosophy alongside religion and political theory as arenas of thought in which people…

BECAUSE PLATO (C.428-348 BC) stands at the head of the Western philosophical tradition, and because he is such an essential part of our philosophical canon, it is easy to assume that the problems he addresses are the same as ours. However, given that nearly two-and-a-half millennia separate him from us, and that the society in which he wrote was very different from our own, it is advisable to stand back a little – to first try to understand what his work is actually saying before we too quickly move to make it answerable to our concerns. This is especially true of Plato’s ‘aporetic’ [‘impasse’] dialogues, in which various questions are raised and answers suggested which on examination do not work out and we are left in a cloud of perplexity…