Tabla de contenidos para August/September 2018 en Philosophy Now

Continental climate, continental drift, continental breakfast, all of these make sense. But what is continental philosophy? What makes it ‘continental’? And which continent are we talking about anyway? I’m not opposed to structuring philosophy. Dividing philosophical activity up into different areas can make sense. Pragmatism, Existentialism, Phenomenology, Logical Positivism: all are distinct approaches in tackling philosophical problems. A thinker’s willingness to condone or reject, or even to subscribe to any of them can be illuminating; it makes for challenging discussions that can reveal much about their intellectual, methodological and even moral commitments. This, however, is not true of ‘Continental philosophy’. What sounds like a mere geographical marker turns out to be something less clear but also far less innocent. The fact that Hannah Arendt, discussed in this issue by Scott…

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is a philosopher everybody has heard of, but few non-specialists can manage to read; a clear case of ‘many are called but few are chosen’. Opinions of him range from those who say he is one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century to those who say he was a charlatan. In the mid-1970s he had a debate of unusual acrimony with the distinguished American philosopher of language, John Searle. In 1992 he was almost refused an honorary degree at Cambridge because of the opposition of several philosophers, some of them eminent. So, a controversial figure. The question of why Derrida’s texts are so difficult is interesting in itself. One reason is the unfamiliarity of his concepts. Another is his concern that statements asserting knowledge always…

Are we really free, and responsible for our actions? Or are our choices determined by our environments, our upbringing, our genes, or other factors beyond our control? Debates about free will date back at least to the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. Two and a half thousand years later, the tools of neuroscience permit us to study the notion of free will in a less speculative way. Moreover, neuropharmacology, which has developed in tandem with our ever-increasing knowledge of the brain, has evolved to modify and in some cases even create human experiences in ways once conceivable only in the abstract or in science fiction. ‘Neuromodulation’ refers to the alteration of specific neuronal activity by employing either drugs or technology in a targeted manner. The contemporary capacities for artificial neuromodulation…

A BOOK ABOUT THE PROS and cons of frugal living might well be the sort of thing you’d come across in the self-help section at your local bookstore. The benefits of living simply, cutting out inessentials, using thrift and greater self-reliance to better manage our lives, stave off debt, quell the hunger for buying more and more stuff, live healthily and, while we’re at it, save the environment, are the regular ingredients of self-help books and videos. Down the ages, all sorts of mystics, gurus, sages and holy characters have also prescribed the frugal life. It’s long been the panacea for minds and bodies troubled by troubled times – and by and large, all times have seemed troubled to those experiencing them. In this book, Emrys Westacott, Professor of Philosophy…

Should schools be in the business of making children moral? I don’t mean: should they help children to think well about morality? It’s obvious they should do that. I mean: should they try to shape children’s intentions, feelings and habits in a way that disposes them to comply with moral standards? To mark the distinction just drawn, I’ll use the terms ‘moral inquiry’ and ‘moral formation’. Moral inquiry is the rational investigation of the nature, content and justification of morality. Not nearly enough room is made for moral inquiry in most school curricula, but few would deny that it ought to be there. Moral formation, by contrast, is the cultivation in children of moral intentions, feelings and habits – the shaping of moral character. Resistance to the idea that moral…

• Famous Philosophers’ Huts on Display • Japan’s Football Captain Writes Philosophy • Reasoning Skills May Help Mental Health Football and Philosophy Existentialist philosopher and goalkeeper Albert Camus is rumoured to have once claimed: “All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.” As it turns out, he is no longer the only philosopher-footballer. Japan national football team captain and Eintracht Frankfurt midfielder Makoto Hasebe has written a book of philosophical thoughts entitled The Order of the Soul, a best seller in Japan. Hasebe is a voracious reader of philosophical books, especially Nietzsche. Though perhaps not yet in the same philosophical ballpark as Camus, Hasebe plans to keep up his writing and his retirement from international football a few days ago should give him the…

“… discourses themselves are neither true nor false” (Power/Knowledge, p.118) “The confession [is] the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex” (History of Sexuality Vol. I, p.63) Flamboyant French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is as well known for his historical analyses of criminality, sexuality, and madness as he is for his enigmatic statements on the nature of power, knowledge, and truth. In this article I want to examine the latter, especially in relation to scientific knowledge. As a structuralist, Foucault believes the key to understanding the status of scientific knowledge is to understand the conceptual structures that lie at its foundations. Conceptual structures give rise to and organize fields of knowledge by establishing what categories of things there are, how they exist, and the ways in…

“My karma just ran over your dogma.” Every time I see this joke, I smile. You can get it on a mug. I want one. You can get it on a T-shirt. I want that too. The word-play hints that there’s something bad about dogma and that by karma we can overcome it. Like all good jokes it gets us thinking. What is dogma? Examples can come to mind. You might think of creationism or Communist orthodoxies; but what do these ideas share with other kinds of dogmas? Do we always know a dogma when we see one? And how can we keep them at bay? Okay, try this: a dogma is a belief that cannot be doubted. To be more precise about usage, it is a belief placed beyond…

In the fast-paced environments in which we live and work, more and more people need the help of a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or drugs to effectively face the challenges of society. But for those who want to avoid seeing a doctor or taking pills for their stress, there is something else that could be the best solution to this core mental health issue of modern humanity. It is not a medicine; it is a state of mind. Ataraxia was a word used by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho to refer to a state of robust equanimity characterized by a freedom from worry. The Pyrrhonian Sceptic Sextus Empiricus defined it thus: “ataraxia is an untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary says ataraxia is “calmness untroubled by mental or emotional…

John Duns Scotus is the most impressive and influential British philosopher of whom most people have never heard. This fact is itself rather impressive given that, along with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, he is reckoned to be one of the most important philosopher-theologians of the High Middle Ages of the Eleventh to Fourteenth Centuries. Life In Brief Scotus remains a rather mysterious man. You may have noticed that the date of his birth is given as ‘1265/66’. In truth we simply do not know when he was born. We know that he was ordained as a priest on the 17th March 1291, and given that the minimum age for taking holy orders at the time was twenty-five, it is generally assumed that Scotus was twenty-five when he was…

NOAM CHOMSKY IS BOTH A central figure in the field of linguistics and a leading public intellectual. In both capacities he is an incredibly divisive figure: people either love him or hate him. Chris Knight, a senior research fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London, hates him. And for that reason, he wrote Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016) – a nasty, mean-spirited, vitriolic, ideologically-driven hatchet job. While Knight, unlike most of Chomsky’s critics, attacks him from the Left (Knight is a Marxist clearly hostile to Chomsky’s anarchism), the level of venom on display here exceeds that of all but the most unhinged of Chomsky’s detractors on the Right. Knight claims that his goal in Decoding Chomsky is “to serve justice on Chomsky the scientist without doing…

Just over twenty years ago, I published Enemies of Hope, a critique of the anti-humanist trends that were increasingly being espoused by academics in the humanities. Two dimensions of anti-humanism particularly exercised me. The first was its denial of the very idea of a human subject capable of true agency. The second was disbelief in the reality or even the possibility of human progress through well-intentioned rational action. Just how little impact Enemies of Hope made on fashionable pessimism was revealed five years later by the runaway success of a polemic by political philosopher John Gray. The book was Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002). This volume, and its successors singing the same dirge, such as Heresies (2004) and Gray’s Anatomy (2009), made Gray famous. He has…

Reading Joe Hughes reading Deleuze reading Nietzsche, which is to say reading Joe Hughes reading Deleuze reading Deleuze, which is (presumably) to say reading Joe Hughes reading Joe Hughes reading Joe Hughes, I’m suddenly overcome by the urge to draw a bigger circle and keep reading until my reading is read and these words not erased but buried beneath a palimpsest for the ghost in the text. © SCOTT F. PARKER 2018 Scott F. Parker's most recent book, A Way Home (Kelson), explores time, home, & selfhood in a series of personal essays.…

One of the main goals of philosophy is to ask why we have this life and how we’re meant to live it. As such, it has been the backbone of many cultures throughout the world and history, has influenced entire nations, and has shaped the present. One could argue that in everything we do there is a philosophy underlying the action. This raises a great concern: if this is true, and philosophy plays such a fundamental role in society, then what great flaw in the philosophy of the modern world is causing us to destroy the environment, turn a blind eye to oppression, and subject ourselves to a political-economic system that for many of us simply doesn’t fit? Recent times have seen the rising popularity in the West of Eastern…

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! Friendly Fire DEAR EDITOR: My reading Madigan & Gorlova’s article on Aristotelian friendship in PN 126 coincided with the visit of an American friend whom my wife has known for over sixty years. During her stay my wife and I purposefully avoided discussion of US politics, as we knew that our friend had voted for Trump. But then on the last day of her visit, as we were chatting about the six degrees of separation idea, our friend suddenly announced that she had been at school with Hillary Rodham and therefore knew ‘for a fact’ that ‘crooked Hillary’ had…

“It’s all a lie!” – one of the most famous quotes from Rashomon. That’s not a standard line in a blockbuster; but then again, this is not your average film. This is a movie about the nature of truth. In short, this is an epistemological motion picture, and a Japanese masterpiece at that [epistemology is the study of knowledge and belief, Ed.]. The cinematographic classic was described by the Internet Movie Database as “perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice”, and Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 epic is, of course, that too; but it is above all an epistemological treatise in the form of a black and white movie. This is the philosophies of Richard Rorty, Thomas Nagel, and all relativists rolled into one, and presented through the…

The issue of free speech seems particularly relevant today. Academics can be reprimanded and even suspended for suggesting that British colonialism was not all bad, or for making a joking remark in a lift. Trolls threaten to rape or behead those whose opinions they don’t like. A group of minor celebrities are attempting to limit further the freedom of the press. In such circumstances it is urgent to find some criteria for establishing what is acceptable and what the moral limits are to free speech. This is easier said than done, as relativism is rife: my freedom of speech may be your cue for expensive litigation or physical retaliation. There are of course legal restrictions on freedom of speech: laws against slander and libel, hate speech, incitement to violence. But…