Tabla de contenidos para April/May 2017 en Philosophy Now

This issue of Philosophy Now deals with the very stuff of life, namely bioethics and medical ethics. Bioethics is the analysis of ethical problems arising out of advances in biotechnology, especially genetic engineering. Medical ethics deals specifically with the problems and dilemmas that arise from treating patients, so the two terms overlap. Given that doctors and scientists are striving to save lives, ease suffering and make the world a better place, and are constantly discovering new ways of doing so, you might think that the only ethical problems here would concern which medals and honours we should heap on their heads and in what order. I concur with the sentiment, but have to inform you that some of the problems are a little more serious and intractable than that. Medical…

Edited by Eric Schliesser MOST OF THE texts chosen by the contributors to Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy (2016), edited and introduced by Eric Schliesser, were picked because their choosers believe they represent or embody a refutation of the current status quo of professional philosophy, which is maledominated, analytical, and (ostensibly) raceneutral. Some of the works chosen, such as Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy (1916), have never been fully appreciated, while others were considered classics in their time but have since fallen from scholarly grace, such as Francois Fenelon’s Adventures of Telemachus (1699). Other works have been remembered, but not on their merits, instead being portrayed as the constructions of philosophical villains who momentarily led the field astray until they were put in their place by legitimate thinkers.…

Tom Regan Dies The prominent American moral philosopher Tom Regan died on 17 February, aged 78. He taught for thirty years at North Carolina State University and was an expert on the philosophy of G.E. Moore, but he is best known for his contributions to applied ethics, notably his book The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Regan argued that animals can be rights holders because an animal is a ‘subject-ofa- life’. Consequently, Regan, himself a vegan, strongly advocated abandoning all form of animal exploitation. In a speech he once said: “We are not merely trying to change a few old habits about what people eat and wear. Billions of people will embrace animal rights only if billions of people change in a deeper, more fundamental, a more revolutionary way… They…

From the onset of the Industrial Revolution, human progress has been unprecedented in its sheer speed and scale. Anyone born before the mid-1980s, remembering the world before the internet, will surely appreciate technology’s power to uproot our lives. There is no doubt that advances in technology and automation will keep on transforming our lives. Soon the devices we use will respond to our voices, performing many routine chores as we talk with them. The testing of self-drive cars and of drones delivering packages have already reached an advanced state. The virtual world will become ever more developed and sophisticated, offering us yet more unimaginable ways to experience reality. Humans will in all probability make it to Mars before the end of this century; and afterwards leave our imprint further out…

The Wrongs & Rights of Rights DEAR EDITOR: Surely the woman who borrowed $5 from Tim Dare in Issue 118 should repay it to him on his request not primarily because she had contracted a duty to do so, but because the $5 is his money? His ownership rests upon a foundational belief in our society that human beings can permanently possess certain material objects (including sums of money) for as long as they wish to do so, providing that no other has a better title to their possession. The fact that Tim and the woman entered into an informal contract for her temporary holding and return of the $5 was based on a recognition of that foundational belief and its social implementation. This may suggest that in any property-owing…

Frank Furedi PROFESSORFUREDI’S pocketsized book broadcasts his concern that a commitment to truth and excellence in thought – the role of the intellectual – is no longer considered important. Today the demands placed on the general public, tutors, and students, are restrained: we are not expected to provoke serious conversation, or read controversial texts. Society has been intellectually detuned by new conservative elites, with knowledge turned into a commodity more dependent on technique than on the application of the intellect. Intellectuals happily engaged as employees experience, “an instrumentalist approach to life” (p.42), whereby they have become simply a means to the increase of profits. The early pages discuss the changing status of intellectuals, starting to become unpopular since the Enlightenment, when they apparently attempted to stamp the ideology of reason…

It is said that philosophy is driven by concerns about mortality. If there is even a small grain of truth in this, then from a purely self-interested perspective the philosopher has good reason to be supportive of the work of doctors and health scientists. After all, it is rather useful to have access to headache pills and other over-the-counter medicines to help clear the mind to think when sitting huddled in an armchair and suffering from a cold; and having paramedics on the end of a phone, and a wellequipped hospital at the end of the ambulance ride are particularly useful when more serious ailments strike. Philosophers are reliant upon modern medicine to stave off their demise at least long enough to have the chance to write about it. We…

HeLa cells are an immortal line of human cervical cancer cells used in medical research. They are called ‘HeLa’ cells from their initial host’s name, Henrietta Lacks. Lacks was an African American woman with little formal education, raised on a tobacco farm in rural Virginia. Born in 1920, she experienced the full impact of racial discrimination left over from the years of slavery in the United States. In 1951, shortly after the birth of her fifth child, Lacks fell seriously ill with cervical cancer. The doctors who treated her took a sample of her cancer cells. After her death, without the knowledge or permission of her family, the hospital’s laboratory used it in a routine experiment they had been performing on every cell sample they received. Henrietta’s cancer cells unexpectedly…

Imagine you are seated in a lecture theatre, patiently waiting to hear some philosophy. The philosopher you have come to see then takes the stage and starts to sing: a song about the very topic you were expecting them to talk about. What you were expecting from your next sixty minutes was the usual presentation: namely a long build-up to situate you within the philosophical debate in question; the occasional (more or less) humorous aside to punctuate proceedings; lots of tentative reports of what the philosopher ‘wants to say’ (the nervous tic of the profession); and then some original claims, more often than not saved up until near the end. Then would come the round of questions –which some members of the audience will have been mentally rehearsing throughout the…

Hume, a Scot, was the greatest philosopher to write in English. At the age of eighteen he had a sudden deep insight, asking himself whether the moral philosophy of human behaviour could be assimilated into the natural philosophy of the physical world developed famously by Isaac Newton (1643- 1727). This is a question still at the cutting edge of philosophy. All Hume’s major contributions to philosophy were made before he reached thirty. After their indifferent reception, he shrugged off his disappointment to become a famous essayist and historian. But his youthful work roused Immanuel Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers” and so kick-started modern philosophy. Hume was the supreme asker of awkward questions – someone who flatly refused to accept beliefs on the mere grounds that they were widely and forcibly…

by Colin Wilson, Edited by Colin Stanley Vaughan Rapatahana considers what Colin Wilson had to say about other philosophers, Mark Dunbar reflects on what makes a book a classic, and Neil Richardson laments a surplus of generalities. UPSTART AUTHOR OF THE Outsider (1956), the existentialist Colin Wilson was a brilliant, combative, contested figure on the philosophical and literary scene for more than fifty years. This collection of his essays on a range of British and European philosophers, edited and alphabetically arranged by Colin Stanley, should cast aside once and for all the spurious notion that Wilson was not a philosopher. Here he comes across as a serious thinker about other serious thinkers, analytic or existentialist, and spends less time on expostulating his own agenda, although his prime focus, the expansion…

This is the first (and probably last!) time that a film from Jason Statham’s oeuvre has been put under the microscope in Philosophy Now. Statham is best known for action movies reminiscent of those that went straight to VHS in the 1980s. That notwithstanding, under the direction of Guy Ritchie, 2005’s Revolver provides a hearty chunk to philosophically digest. Panned by critics and audiences alike upon cinematic release, it has become something of a cult classic amongst the DVD crowd, and there have been internet forums aplenty discussing it, mainly from psychological and/or Buddhist perspectives. However, following on from my review of Black Swan in Issue 86, and still afflicted by Friedrich Nietzsche’s overbearing intellectual shadow, I have not been able to shake the need to examine Revolver through the…

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Derek Parfit, who died unexpectedly on the second day of the new year, was one of the most important philosophers of the past half century and, in the view of many, the single best moral philosopher in more than a century. His imaginative but also meticulous and rigorous arguments have transformed the ways in which philosophers, economists, political and legal theorists and others think about many moral issues. He was also an endearingly eccentric and even saintly person. Parfit was born in 1942 in China, where his parents were medical missionaries. When he was still young, they returned to the UK to live in Oxford. He won major scholarships, first to Eton College, where he was nearly always at the top of the regular rankings in every subject except maths,…

Ifell asleep. In my dream, there was an announcer. A pudgy, bald man with a microphone blurted out: “Will the real opponents of Sympathy please stand up?” He called them up one by one: Ignorance; Self-Interest; Apathy; Lack of Imagination; Justice. There is one white sheep in this flock, then, I thought: Justice. “Justice is in conflict with Sympathy?” “Yes,” the announcer answered me. I jumped. I had not realized I had voiced my thoughts. I’d assumed I was just part of the crowd. “We are focusing on the hard cases, which involve suffering,” he continued. “Of course, Sympathy can be more easily felt in happier times.” The announcer turned to the participants, and the philosophical exchange began. First Ignorance attacked: “I don’t know why I should have sympathy,” it…