Tabla de contenidos para February/March 2017 en Philosophy Now

For over forty years the human rights organisation Amnesty International has coordinated a vast worldwide network of volunteers called the Urgent Action Network. If they hear of anybody anywhere in the world who has been arrested for the peaceful expression of their political views and who they consider to be in imminent danger of execution or torture, they immediately alert members of the network, who respond en masse with swift, courteous letters and emails to the responsible officials urging that the detainee be released or at least that their rights in custody be fully respected. I was a member of this network many years ago. If you’ve ever tried to get a response from me to an urgent email you’ll realise that I probably wasn’t the ideal person for this,…

One of my favorite things about the history of philosophy is finding out that ideas we now take for granted originally emerged in surprising ways. I can think of no better example than the notion of a right to own property. Not that we can take it for granted that we have such a right, if we consider the history of communism in the Twentieth Century. Still, it seems such an obvious concept that it must surely always have been with us. But you can make a good case that it was first explicitly articulated in the later Middle Ages. And here’s the surprising part: the thinkers who first explored this notion were actually concerned with their right to own nothing. They were members of the mendicant orders, especially the…

Rudolf Carnap has a major place in the history of analytic philosophy. He was entranced by the promise that Bertrand Russell’s and A.N. Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1912) seemed to hold out for creating a logical foundation for mathematics, and by extension, philosophy. He was even more excited by Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), in which Russell called for a reconstruction of all knowledge on the basis of our sense experiences alone, and urged a search for the narrowest selection of basic concepts needed for this purpose. Carnap accepted this immense challenge ,and produced Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (1928, translated as The Logical Structure of the World, 1967). His ideas were enthusiastically taken up by positivist philosophers, and the Aufbau is often regarded as the quintessential statement…

WHEN I STARTED MY Philosophy degree in 1983, if someone asked me what music I liked, my proselytizing reply was “Bowie, Bowie, and Bowie!” Over the years little has changed. From this the reader may discern that I have a certain amount in common with the philosopher and Bowie fan Simon Critchley, author of On Bowie, a short, personal and penetrating book on this pre-eminent artist and song-writing phenomenon. David Bowie – born David Jones – sadly died a year ago, aged 69, still at the very top of his game. In twenty-five concise essays Critchley takes us on a journey from his own reaction to first seeing Bowie on TV in 1972 to his reaction to Bowie’s death. During this journey he’s essentially asking, what is it about this…

Derek Parfit (1942-2017) The philosopher Derek Parfit died on New Year’s Day, aged 74. Parfit is best known for using imaginative thought experiments in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons to show problems with the concept of personal identity. One thought experiment looks at what might happen if you were to step into a teletransporter. In this device, your body is first scanned atom-by-atom and then completely destroyed. But the information is transmitted somewhere else, say to a corresponding teleportation device on Mars, where you are exactly recreated using local materials. Some people might see this simply as a way of travelling at vast speeds; the person on Mars who is just like you, is so because they are you. Not so, says Parfit. To explain he asks us to…

At one time international recognition of a right against torture was considered one of the best, if not the singularly best, triumphs of the human rights regime. However, since the US implemented its enhanced interrogation program in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the consensus of a human right against torture seems to be in tatters. The new President of the United States and his choice for National Security Advisor have both endorsed interrogational torture, and a majority of Americans support using interrogational torture on suspected terrorists (Chris Kahn, Reuters, 30 March 2016; see reuters.com/article/us-usa-electiontorture-idUSKCN0WW0Y3). What was once unquestionably taboo is now largely a matter of partisan politics. Apparently robust signs of widespread support for the legal prohibition of torture, such as the UN Convention Against Torture and…

The quaint-sounding term ‘moral certainty’ dates back to c.1400. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a degree of probability so great as to admit of no reasonable doubt.” In the seventeenth century it became an important term in the law; according to a commentator in 1677 it meant “such a certainty as may warrant the judge to proceed to the sentence of death against the indicted party.” By the eighteenth century ‘moral certainty’ had become interchangeable with ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ not only in the law, but also in philosophy and polite conversation – even in religion, where it was argued into the nineteenth century that the truth of Christianity could be proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” (see p.31 of Barbara Shapiro’s paper referenced at the end). Of course,…

Hello Anthony. I found your new book The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy to be an enjoyable and informative introduction to Enlightenment philosophy. Can you please tell us a little about its aims, the period it covers, and what motivated you to write it? It’s the second installment of a chronological history of Western philosophy. The first ran from ancient philosophy to the Renaissance, and this new volume covers philosophers from René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century to just before Immanuel Kant, whose main work was published in the late Eighteenth Century. A third volume will run from Kant to the present day. The overall aim of the project is to engage readers with some of the main ideas and arguments of Western philosophy…

FOLLOWING AN OPERATION to remove part of his temporal lobe, and further temporal lobe surgery to control seizures, Walter B. developed numerous compulsive behaviors incompatible with how he had preferred to behave. A ravenous appetite and long rages became the norm. Both starting and stopping activities became difficult. Sometimes he was easily distracted, and sometimes he got stuck in a simple activity for eight or nine hours. Deeply ashamed, he kept some of his behaviors secret – until they led to his arrest for violating the law. He felt relieved to no longer keep them secret, and now reached out to his doctor form edication that would allow him to stop his compulsive actions, and he consequently returned to his old loving, compassionate self. However, Walter still faced prosecution for…

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) has had scarcely a walk-on part in this column. This is a serious omission: the Sage of Königsberg has a position in European philosophy similar to that occupied by Johann Sebastian Bach in Western classical music. Like Bach, Kant in some sense gathered up all that came before him and has been a decisive influence on all that followed him. His work has been an important presence in my life since my teens. My paperback copy of the classic Kemp Smith translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), purchased in the late Sixties, shows signs of intense study. Much sellotape has been applied to the cover, the spine is wizened by cracks, and every page bears biro marks of intense attention – underlinings and marginal notes…

A few months ago there was a spate of headlines announcing that the UN had made internet access a human right. It turns out that this claim was rather misleading. What the UN did was pass a resolution emphasizing the importance of internet access for the fulfillment of many human rights. The resolution called for states to take measures to work towards universal access to the internet, and it condoned heavy restrictions on access to content on the internet as a violation of human rights (see article19.org/data/files/Internet_Statement_Adopted. pdf). However, it does not follow from this that there is now a human right to internet access. Something can enable the fulfillment of human rights without itself being a human right. For example, having shoes enables a number of human rights, such…

For his 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture, the American philosopher Richard Rorty presented a paper that would become one of his most popular texts: ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’. In it he argued for the following ideas: 1) We cannot justify human rights; 2) Reason is a useless apparatus to promote human rights; 3) We should concentrate our energies instead on sentimental education. The Contingency of Reason To understand what Rorty meant by this, we need to go back to his first original book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In it Rorty offered an analysis of the philosophical context of the second half of the Twentieth Century. According to him, ever since Descartes, Locke, and Kant in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, philosophy has been centered on questions about…

David Bowie (1947-2016) was a man of many faces, even many selves. He was baptized David Robert Jones, but changed his name and his self by becoming David Bowie. Then Bowie adopted the personas of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke, and so on. In his song ‘D.J.’ from the album Lodger, Bowie sings “I am a D.J., I am what I play.” Contemplating Bowie’s life raises a number of philosophical questions concerning the self. Are we what we do, as he hints at in ‘D.J.’ and as Jean-Paul Sartre said explicitly? Can we be the authors of our selves, as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault maintained? Did David Jones truly recreate himself as David Bowie? Did David Bowie in his turn recreate himself as Ziggy Stardust? And…

We can only guess at the lurid thoughts pulsating through her mind; and the dog’s owner is just as mysterious. My photograph taken on a Prague street gives no reliable access to the thoughts of the two walkers. In fact, we don’t always know what we ourselves think, let alone another human being. As Sigmund Freud puts it, a person “is not even master in his own house, but... must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind” (A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1920). Incidentally, Freud is honoured by a strange statue in Prague, it being the sort of city where you just don’t know what lies around the next corner (or in Freud’s case, hangs by one hand from…

The Views On Nowhere DEAR EDITOR: I don’t often write to you, but Nick Inman’s lively article ‘Nowhere Men’ (Issue117) just hit the point which was then bothering me, namely: Why are some philosophical superstitions apparently incurable? Why for instance can’t today’s materialists (now of course duly called ‘physicalists’) get over their mind-matter dualism? If the idea of mind makes them so uneasy, why can’t they see that the idea of matter is every bit as awkward? Since the two were designed to fit each other, they have, in fact, both got to be rethought. Dualism was devised in the Sixteenth Century as a way of keeping modern physics out of the way of traditional Christianity. Since Christianity and physics were then the only two intellectual patterns available for highbrows…

Two trends from twentieth century French philosophy have been major influences on cinema: existentialism and postmodernism. Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation reflects both. It explores what might be called a warm Platonic love, as depicted in the relationship between Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), set against the background of Tokyo. There is relatively little dialogue throughout the film, but its beauty is in how much is conveyed non-verbally, not only through body language, but via cinematography, lighting, editing, and the soundtrack. Lost in Translation sums up the feeling of looking for your place in a world in which you do not automatically belong. Coppola’s subtlety in depicting an elusive connection that transgresses the usual categories of what a relationship might look like allows viewers to easily…

Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable thinkers of the past century: a philosopher, a mystic, and a political activist. Born in France in 1909, she grew up with a Christian outlook even though her parents were Jewish agnostics and her brother André a mathematician. She was above all an outsider. Critical of institutions, she stated that “the task of the intellect requires complete freedom.” She never joined any party or church. She argued against Trotsky in print and in person, saying that elite communist bureaucrats could be as oppressive as the worst capitalists, and was one of the rare few who held her own with the Red Army founder. She came into contact not only with Plato and Kant, but also with Eastern culture, including the Bhagavad Gita,…