Tabla de contenidos para December 2018 / January 2019 en Philosophy Now

What is art for? The question of art’s function is prominent in this issue. Can it be used to challenge tyranny, or to make us better citizens? Plato certainly thought that contemplation of beauty could lead you closer to seeing ultimate truth. Could art similarily lead you to see moral truth, between individuals or for society? Schiller thought so, as Francis Akpata explains. And Justin Kaushall tells us how Adorno thought radical art could seismically shift awareness, and so fight fascism (and, for Adorno, capitalism too). Among other things, Immanuel Kant’s 1790 book the Critique of Judgement is concerned with beauty in art. Kant is considering how we make judgements, and one of the big questions in art used to be why and how we judge a work of art…

Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) was an international bestseller that sold fifty million copies “which puts it in the league of Harry Potter, and ahead of Gone with the Wind, Roget’s Thesaurus, and To Kill a Mockingbird” (Ted Gioia, postmodernmystery.com). Combining elements of detective fiction, the historical novel, the philosophical quest and the father-son initiation tale, the novel has appeal for many different kinds of readers. In the blurb on the first Italian edition, Eco wrote that he wanted to reach three different audiences – “the largest market, the mass of relatively unsophisticated readers who concentrated on plot; a second public, readers who examined historical novels to find connections or analogies between the present and the past; and a third and even smaller elite audience, postmodern…

Mary Midgley, one of the leading and most illuminating moral philosophers of our time, published her last book (What is Philosophy For?) only a couple of weeks before her death on October 10 at the age of ninety-nine. Raymond Tallis praised the book as a brilliant, lucid, and witty assault on the distorted world-view of our age and a compelling defence of philosophy as the discipline that is needed to rescue us. Midgley read widely in the history of philosophy as well as in the sciences and the humanities, and she was too open-minded to be affiliated with any particular school of thought. She was celebrated as having one of the sharpest pens in the West, pulling no punches in her criticism of the claims that traditional philosophy is obsolete…

DEAR EDITOR: This was inspired by the article about Heidegger on Celebrity in Philosophy Now Issue 125: Look at me! I’m on TV, Plain to view, for all to see.What you get is what you want.Paint by numbers, fill the gaps.Go to worship on an app.Buttons pushed. Adulation. Endorphin rush.Discernment, logic, truth, good taste; All crushed.Suspended critique floats in the air, Out the window, down the stairs. Insect queen she draws you in.Pheremone mediated, anything goes, Nothing’s a sin.Adored and adoring manacled, shackled.It’s the tally that counts, as the game becomes tactical.Numbers, degrees of being, equate to fame.Clicks, likes, tweets, Magazines, booked seats.It’s all the same.While the river of fame and celebrity gently seepsInto a God-shaped empty hollow within.Media fans the flames of fame, Dispensing glowing cinders of contagious fallacy.The…

WHEN THE PHILOSOPHER Thomas Nagel published his book Mind and Cosmos back in 2012 it was not particularly well received by many of his colleagues. Part of that reaction may have been occasioned by his subtitle, which was, ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False’. Many feared that by criticizing materialism and Darwinism, Nagel would automatically reopen the field to theism, which a great many of them seemed quite anxious to prevent at any cost. A similar kind of anxiety can emerge whenever we get deeply into the philosophy of mind. It immediately precipitates us out of the realm of the securely physical, the stuff of popular science, and into a broader realm inhabited by supposedly spooky entities such as ‘selves’, ‘souls’, ‘values’, ‘volition’, ‘autonomy’, ‘consciousness’,…

• Berggruen Prize given to Martha Nussbaum • Confusion over approval of dog experiments • Roger Scruton to chair housing design body Nussbaum Wins Berggruen Prize The 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy & Culture has been awarded to philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum, whose approach is inspired by her background in classical Greek philosophy, is widely known for her work on the emotions, on ethics and aspects of political philosophy. Her development of the ‘capabilities approach’ as a conceptual alternative to other models of human well-being in economics has been influential and much debated. She is a prolific writer, author of 25 books and over 500 articles. The 2018 Berggruen Prize decision marks the second year in a row that the prize, which has only existed for three years, has been…

At a time when populist movements are on the march throughout the world, why should we pay attention to art? Isn’t it self-indulgent to concern oneself with art, music, or literature when the foundations of society and of the international order are being shaken? Or can art itself really change the world? Art Protests Let’s look at what art can and can’t do in terms of politics. An example: in 2016, the artists Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu argued that it was appropriate to protest President Trump’s inauguration by symbolically closing art museums and galleries across the United States. The artists stated that the protest would not be “a strike against art, theater or any other cultural form. It is an invitation to motivate…

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”(United States Declaration of Independence, 1776) Do we all pursue happiness? Should we? And what would it even mean? Is happiness something that can be chased and sometimes captured? What does it mean to pursue happiness? The phrase ‘the pursuit of happiness’ (as featured for example in the U.S. Declaration of Independence) contains at least two major assumptions: (1) that happiness lies outside of us, out there in the world; and (2) it is elusive, requiring intention and effort to capture it. Are those accurate assumptions? The Paradox of Personal Happiness The novels of Leo Tolstoy…

We are often taught that history is nothing but the record of past events. Yet Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) thought that world history was not just a random sequence of happenings but progressed rationally, according to a specific purpose. This has led some to the mistaken belief that Hegel thought history followed some predetermined path, such that his philosophy could somehow reveal the future course of events. This misconception has often been accompanied by the accusation that Hegel sought to impose his own metaphysical scheme onto the historical facts, to conform them to his theory. I will argue that these are gravely mistaken views; and also that Hegel can be exonerated from the idea that he believed in ‘the end of history’, which is to say, the idea that…

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is to systems of thought,” wrote John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971). This simple comparison elucidates the central task of philosophy rather well. It seems just as plain to me that happiness is the central value of human existence. But as with truth and justice, determining that happiness is good is hardly an accomplishment: the tricky part is to understand what happiness actually is. Yet knowing what happiness actually is also falls short of telling us how we can attain it; and if we can’t do that then we have missed the point altogether. So what has philosophy to say here? Philosophy is somehow presently both in a Golden Age and in a Dark Age. In the Western…

Around the world, teenagers are taking philosophy classes. For instance, French students take a philosophy exam at the end of their secondary education, and in 2008, Federal law in Brazil made the discipline compulsory for high school students. Forward thinking though such measures may be, they are also quite literally medieval. The forerunners of today’s French students at the early University of Paris, as well as their contemporaries in cities such as Bologna and Oxford, studied the ‘liberal arts’. You might know that these arts included three linguistic disciplines – the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (logical discussion) – and four mathematical topics called the quadrivium, namely arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. But you’ll probably be surprised to learn how young students at these Universities were. The beginning scholars…

Santa Claus: The Movie (1985) is without doubt, and intentionally or not, a bold statement about how capitalism hijacked Christmas. It did so at some point during the Twentieth Century and in much the same way that early Christians absorbed the Roman festival of dies natalis solis invicti (‘The Birthday of the Invincible Sun’) on 25th December into their own ideas of divine birth in order to appease the party-going Roman public. Had Eric Fromm (German sociologist and philosopher, 1900-1980) lived just five more years, no doubt he would have seen this movie and shouted, “I know where they are coming fromm!” For Santa Claus: The Movie essentially embodies the central arguments of his 1955 book The Sane Society. Like other Frankfurt School philosophers such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert…

It is over a decade since your columnist challenged the claim, made by several philosophers, that the self does not really exist (‘Saving the Self’, Philosophy Now Issue 63). Among them, Tor Norretranders called the self a ‘user illusion’ (The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, 1999). To press home his message, Norretranders asserted that “the epoch of the ‘I’ is drawing to a close.” As usual, my arguments seem to have had little impact; the autocidal industry has gone from strength to strength. The claim that selves are constructs fabricated by people who are not selves is now almost mainstream in philosophy and psychology. Time, therefore, to resume the good fight to save the self from the autocides. Diagnosis Last time round, I pointed out that the self-deniers…

Of course the world is an illusion! We see only a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is divided into colours that exist only in our brains. We hear only a limited range of vibrations, onto which we impose meanings the vibrations do not themselves contain. We have no idea what dogs and bees find so interesting, and vice versa. We feel as soft or solid what is nearly all empty space, apart from a few fundamental particles in different arrangements. We can grasp directly only scales from around one millimetre to one kilometre. We think that the present is now, when we’re actually experiencing what happened half a second ago. Our personal, political, and ideological hang-ups and squabbles are blind to natural ecology and history – including the…

How did the most famous fictional detective in history triumph over evil in over fifty celebrated cases? To what – or to whom – might we attribute his success? Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle self-admittedly modelled Holmes’ manner and methods on the man for whom he was once a clerk, the eminent Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell (1837-1911). Of course we should give full credit to Bell’s extraordinary powers of observation and deduction. However, a careful reading of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures reveals that there is more to his case-solving than can be explained by Bell’s inspiration alone. Holmes’ Schooling Rightfully, much has been made of the cognitive prowess of Sherlock Holmes: his command of common sense, minutiae-driven observation, dogged focus, summary appraisals, and power to synthesize. From what philosophical school…

Being an academic, my hatred of philosophy is, of course, something that hitherto I have only confided to the closest of my friends, and even then only after three glasses of Agiorghitiko at the little beachside taverna on Mykonos after spending the day beneath the summer’s scorching sun wandering around the ruins on Delos. Intoxicated, I can tell the truth. Sober, I lie. I am now drunk: I hate philosophy; I despise philosophy; I loathe philosophy. You already know why I hate philosophy. It is all as monotonously predictable as the fact that x, y, and z follow one another, and as surely as the sun will rise each morning. There is, then, no reason to read further. Go: live your life, experience its beautiful fullness, and for heaven’s sake…

Dogmatic Demands DEAR EDITOR: Sandy Grant’s article on ‘Dogmas’ in Issue 127 reminded me of a comment a senior colleague made to me when I was a somewhat naïve and perhaps arrogant young lecturer. He said, “You would do well to remember, Colin, that there is a difference between being an authority and being authoritarian. The former knows what they are talking about, the latter is merely throwing their weight around.” I was suitably admonished and subsequently grateful for this remark. I believe its force stayed with me, for on reflection I had recognised his ‘authority’. The usefulness of the distinction could helpfully add to those made by Sandy Grant in her article because it seemed to me that ‘an authority’ and ‘being in authority’ do not have necessarily to…

IN 1997 THE ITALIAN newspaper Corriere della Sera interviewed Tufts philosophy professor Daniel Dennett about his work. The paper published the interview under the title ‘Si, abbiamo un anima. Ma é fatta di tanti piccoli robot!’: ‘Yes, we have a soul. But it’s made of lots of tiny robots!’ Dennett quotes this title in From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017), and with good reason, for it perfectly encapsulates both the argument of the book and the spirit in which it is offered. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back Dennett tells you a story about the human mind. It might not be the story you were expecting, and you may not like it, but Dennett hopes to convince you of it nonetheless. And it’s definitely…

6 IDEA-PACKED ISSUES FOR £17/US$32 By subscribing to the print edition of Philosophy Now you can save up to 30% off the newsstand price, have your copies delivered to your door and enjoy unrestricted access to our vast online archive of past articles! Subscribe today at philosophynow.org or fill out and return one of the coupons below. Subscription inquiries: subscriptions@philosophynow.org or phone 01959 534171 To tell us about a change of address, please email addresschange@philosophynow.org Back Issues in Print Issue 126 Friendship: Aristotle, Aquinas, Education, Categories / Teleology / Meaning of Life / Physicalism is Wrong / Scepticism / Dead Duties Issue 127 Continentals: Derrida, Foucault, Arendt & Weil, Bataille, and Others / Dogmas / Free Will / Ataraxia / Indigenous Philosophy / Free Speech Issue 128 Frankenstein: Morality, The…

Max, Freya and Orin are in the café of a downtown contemporary art gallery. Freya is sipping a glass of oolong tea while gazing at a print of brightly colored circles. Max is reading his newspaper, drinking his black filter coffee, and eating a chocolate muffin. He looks over his paper and winces as Orin drops three teaspoonfuls of sugar into his espresso and gives it a vigorous stir. Freya: Just look at that! Even this print – which is number 16 of 25 – costs $2,500. Who knows what the original’s worth? Perhaps ‘Terry Frost RA’ was the first person to think of painting just circles on a canvas… Still, it’s so fascinating that I just have to look at it. I wish I took an art degree. Max:…