Tabla de contenidos para December 2015 - January 2016 en Philosophy Now

If a philosopher alone in the forest tells a joke and nobody laughs, is it funny? (Well, if it’s Schopenhauer, sure it would be; but let’s not go there right now.) Despite our differences and peculiarities, there are some human universals. Some of them are biological: we all need to eat and drink, and we all need to sleep. But there are also cultural and social universals: all cultures identify food taboos, kinship relationship rules, residence rules, and others. Even if different cultures use different criteria for who is part of one’s family and who isn’t, they still all draw some distinction between who is part of one’s family and who isn’t: ‘family’ matters across cultures. One of those human universals is humor. It’s everywhere! Across cultures, across our life…

“Iam thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose,” muses Woody Allen. And he is right: Laughter is something to be grateful for. Why? Well, mainly because there isn’t all that much of it around: Gelotology, the study of laughter, confronts us with some depressing conclusions. Children laugh about 300 times a day, adults only 17 times. Seventy years ago people laughed three times longer every day than we do today. Nevertheless, our ability to laugh is inextricably linked to our humanity, and this makes it instantly interesting to a philosopher. But what can philosophy add to a study of humour? Isn’t a philosophical approach entirely inappropriate? Isn’t analysis the grave of fun, definition the coffin of wit? And yet, philosophy and humour share a lot in…

“Why can’t Helen Keller drive? Because she’s a woman.” Iadmit that laughing out loud when I heard this joke about the famous blind and deaf writer was not my finest moment – as a woman or as a decent human being. As soon as I stopped laughing, I came to a rather disturbing conclusion: either I was sexist against my own sex, or something else was going on that I was not fully aware of. I chose to investigate the latter option before spiraling downward. As a person whose career is centered around overanalyzing the details of my underwhelming life, an analysis of this joke was bound to happen eventually. Discovering all the nuances that make a joke funny yet cringe-worthy, perhaps even morally repulsive and offensive, or even just…

The eeriest episode in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1843) is the visit to Ebenezer Scrooge of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. The shrouded specter transports the old man to a bedroom where his own corpse lies “plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for,” and then to his grave in a churchyard “overrun by grass and weeds.” When Scrooge begs to “see some tenderness connected with a death” the ghost conducts him to the Cratchit family grieving over the death of Tiny Tim. Profoundly shaken, Scrooge implores: “Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!” The ghost remains silent, but we know from the end of Dickens’ tale that Scrooge begins altering his life on Christmas day. Fate &…

Although William of Occam (1285-1349) is one of the very few authors explicitly mentioned in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the relation of Wittgenstein’s and Occam’s philosophy has not been extensively investigated. This article brings the two thinkers into a dialogue in which they mutually illuminate their views on the logical analysis of ordinary language, taking into account their conception, fundamental to both philosophers, of logic as an activity. The dialogue is taken with very few alterations from Occam’s Summa Logicae and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Setting: Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian army at the beginning of August 1914, only ten days after the outbreak of World War I. By that time the young philosopher’s basic views on language and logic were largely settled. Wittgenstein had hoped to finish his book…

Balancing Liberty and Equality DEAR EDITOR: In his editorial in PN 110, Rick Lewis makes the case that liberty and equality are counter positions, especially politically, since the promotion of some equality is done at the expense of liberty. An obvious example is the entitlement of medical care, guaranteed by the state, promoting equality. This is financed by a taxation, which is a restriction of the liberty of those who are taxed, as they no longer are free to use the money as they see fit. I wish Mr Lewis had related this to our human nature. We are clearly free to act for reasons or a reason, and for which we are responsible. We are also obviously unequal in many respects (economic class in terms of wealth, height, weight,…

I LIKE PHILOSOPHY, AND I like history. I also like art. So it was with much anticipation that I looked forward to Steven Nadler’s book on the iconic portrait of (allegedly) René Descartes (1596-1650), reproduced here, which Wikipedia says is ‘after Frans Hals’ and dates to 1648. It’s found on the third floor of the Richelieu Wing at the Louvre, and though it doesn’t attract the crowds who go see the Mona Lisa, it’s a must-stop for anyone interested in philosophy. Thing is, experts are no longer sure that the painting, once owned by the Duke of Orléans and by Louis XVI, is indeed by Hals, one of the most successful portrait artists of the time. Moreover, in Copenhagen we find a similar portrait at the Danish National Gallery that,…

Despite the ancient Oracle’s advice to ‘Know Thyself’, it’s only relatively recently that we philosophers have started wondering why so few of us are women. In fact, gender disparity among professional academic philosophers has now become something of a scandal. Various explanations are offered. Some blame pervasive sexism and the macho posturing that is typical of philosophical debate. Others suggest that the overly technical culture of modern analytic philosophy may drive away women, who are far too sensible to engage in such time-wasting. One way to test these hypotheses might be to find out whether the lack of female representation is consistent across all sub-areas of philosophy. I haven’t been able to find statistics on that, but my superficial impression is that the proportion of women may be somewhat higher…

• Cressida Cowell wins Philosophy Now Award • • Study claims religious children “less altruistic” • • Can Ought Not Imply Can? • René Girard René Girard, French philosopher and cultural anthropologist, died age 91 on 4 November 2015 on the campus of Stanford University, where he was Emeritus Professor of French Language, Literature & Civilization. Girard was a highlyhonoured thinker whose works such as Violence and the Sacred and his final book Battling to the End: Politics, War and Apocalypse sparked widespread discussion in popular, intellectual and political arenas. He will be particularly remembered for his research into the causes of human conflict, as well as his theory of ‘mimetic desire’ concerning the role of imitation in human behaviour. Several heads of state have paid their respects, including French…

In ‘Deconstructing Faculty Doors’ (Academe 92:1, 2006), Karl Petruso, an archaeologist, recounted his study of clippings posted on the office doors of academics at the University of Texas. In particular, his research focused on the number of the ‘humorous’ compared with ‘pedagogical’ (educational) posts on the doors. Petruso examined 157 faculty doors and approximately 369 postings. He calculated a ‘Humor/Pedagogy Index’ Ψ (the ratio of humorous/pedagogical items) for twelve departments. The highest Ψ in Petruso’s study was achieved by the ‘Philosophy and Humanities’ department: 3.857 – nearly four times as many humorous as pedagogical items. The middle levels were seized by ‘Modern Languages’ and ‘History’, for which humor and pedagogy broke roughly even, with Ψs of 0.950 and 0.903. ‘English’ registered a dour 0.467. The ‘Communication Studies’ department landed on…

God is dead. Nothing matters. All is meaningless. Nothing is true. These are the sorts of laments often associated with nihilism, a philosophical perspective premised on the belief that the world is incurably imperfect, flawed, defective. According to the nihilist, the way that the world actually exists is not the way it ought to be. We hope for Truth, but we never seem to grasp it in its entirety. We desire Beauty, but find only blemished examples of it in the concrete world. We want things to have value, but nothing seems ultimately all that important. We want the world to be perfect, but it always disappoints us with its flawed nature. This might not be so bad if only the nihilist had faith in our potential to somehow improve…

My intuitive answer to this question was that freedom is the most important of the four; followed by truth, justice and happiness. Having reflected on this, I have found myself following the intertwining threads of the Enlightenment to the conclusion that freedom remains at the top of my list. It is my contention that freedom makes it possible to find the truth, create a just society, and therefore increase happiness. My argument is based on the definition of freedom as autonomy, which is the liberty of persons to have agency in their own lives. Unlike Utilitarians, I am not convinced that overall happiness should be the measurement of a moral approach to society, however I do tend towards the notion that personal happiness is easier to find if individuals are…

PETER ADAMSON’S Classical Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (2014) is nothing if not comprehensive. He uses forty-one chapters to tell the story of some three hundred years of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to heirs of Plato and Aristotle, such as Theophrastus and Speusippus. It is virtually inconceivable that one would desire a more thorough work. Adamson, the Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, Munchen [and new Philosophy Now columnist] serves up a smorgasbord: from the pre-Socratic Thales and Xenophanes, to Plato’s Gorgias and Republic; from Empedocles and the Sophists, to Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Politics. In each instance, he employs a fresh, idiosyncratic approach to the subject matter. For instance, in talking of Aristotle’s notion in his Ethics of the megalopsychos or ‘great-souled man’,…

Tony Stark really screwed it up this time. His basic idea seemed good enough: build a computerised system – Ultron – to protect the Earth from the threats with which the Marvel Universe is usually packed: aggressive alien races, mad gods, devourers of worlds. Then disaster struck: the system began to evolve. It became self-conscious, no longer willing to obey its creator, and revolted. If he had but seen them, the movies Terminator (1984) and Matrix (1999) might have warned Stark that creating an artificial intelligence capable of learning at an exponential rate is not such a brilliant idea. Sooner or later the machine comes to the conclusion that the only way to save the planet is to subjugate or destroy the human race. Unfortunately, it will take more than…

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2015 Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity is Cressida Cowell. She will be the first children’s author to receive the Award, which honours individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to combating poor reasoning, unexamined assumptions and entrenched habits of thought. The 2014 Award went to Noam Chomsky. In the view of the judges, nothing combats stupidity in the world more effectively than encouraging children to think. Children are great thinkers and their intellectual abilities are all too often underestimated. In a cultural environment in which children’s natural curiosity and critical spirit are easily dulled and slowly replaced by couch-potato conformity, Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books stand out not only for their humour, excitement,…

To date, philosophers have concentrated much more on trying to account for what makes us laugh at others than on why we laugh at ourselves. Indeed, attempts to explain the phenomenon of laughing at others have been around for a long time, at least since Plato. Plato & Hobbes Plato subscribed to what we refer to today as the Superiority theory of humor, which maintains that laughter is an expression of one’s feeling of superiority over others. He argued in his dialogue Philebus that “we laugh at what is ridiculous in our friends” (48-50), and that what makes people laughable is their ignorance concerning their virtues (e.g. wealth, looks, and wisdom). According to Plato, we laugh at friends, acquaintances and other people when they make fools of themselves. Of course,…

Together with Aristotle, Gottlob Frege, and Kurt Gödel, Alfred Tarski is widely regarded as one of the greatest logicians of all time – an opinion he wholeheartedly endorsed. Like Gödel, Tarski revolutionised twentieth century logic, through his conception of semantic truth, the theory of models, and many advances in metalogic (the logic of logic). Yet unlike the reclusive, painfully shy Gödel, he was self-important, vain, and grandiloquent, in both manner and speech. Entering a packed room, he would walk in an undeviating straight line through the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea. Short in stature yet grand in presence, he was often described as Napoleonic. He was a magnificent lecturer and public speaker. Although by no means handsome, he exuded an aura of energy, intensity and sensuality. Like Picasso,…

Can anything exist in time? “A philosophers’ typical worry!” laugh those sceptical of enterprises philosophique: “Musing upon such matters, no doubt, passes the time, but” – and here comes Samuel Beckett – “time would have passed anyway.” Time passing, though, involves future events becoming present and then past. That makes trouble, at least when philosophising. Squeezed Into Nothing We rely on both past and future. We plan for the wedding, perhaps the divorce later on – or simply look forward to the champagne. We glow when recalling a past success, and suffer remorse over our many faux pas. Events that we remember, and events that we look forward to, or dread, do not exist now, though. Neither the past nor the future exists now.What exists now – in the present…

THE FRENCH BANK-ROBBER turned philosopher Bernard Stiegler concluded his 2010 book on What Makes Life Worth Living with these words: “The only thing that, at bottom, is worth being lived – in this life that must constantly be critiqued in order for it to be, in fact, worth living – is the struggle against stupidity.” If we are to wage such a struggle effectively we will need to understand the nature of stupidity, its sources and causes, and how to nullify its baleful power. In his new book States of Shock: Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century Stiegler sets out to answer these questions. As the title suggests, knowledge counteracts stupidity. But knowledge needs to be distinguished from mere information. In the Twenty-First Century we are confronted by an…

What is really real? In addressing this time-honoured (or, pessimists fear, eternity-honoured) question, philosophers have looked increasingly to science for answers. The result has not always been very satisfactory, as I have often complained in this column. We are invited, cajoled, or bullied into believing that fundamental reality is remote from anything we can experience, intuit, or even imagine. Philosophers of course are not entirely innocent in this regard: they have often proposed unimaginable ways of conceiving the world; and, unlike physicists, they have not rewarded us with technologies that have transformed our lives. The greatest of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides, denied the reality of change. His universe was an immobile, unitary, timeless, sphere. Heraclitus adopted the entirely opposite view: everything was change. Thanks to his lucky posthumous break of…