Tabla de contenidos para April - May 2021 en Philosophy Now

Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love. But there are exceptions to the rule. ‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.…

On the 23rd March 2020, my school shut its doors to pupils. As an affluent and forward-thinking private school, we were prepared, fortunate, and imbued with all the necessary technology to shift our entire school’s teaching online. Within the space of a week, we had trained staff to run Zoom lessons, prepped the students on how to use their iPads to access their classes, and ensured all the necessary procedures and processes were in place to keep the school open whilst the school building was shut. This was no small feat, but assemblies continued to run, despite all the glitches and issues Zoom would throw at us. Lessons were as close as possible to being normal, students engaged in class, submitted work, asked questions, and felt supported. But this wasn’t…

For the execution of the clauses below, I rely upon the filial piety of my children, asking that they may act with regard to the clauses as they have done with regard to me. First: It is my true wish to herein provide evidence regarding the esteemed lady, Marie-Constance Reinelle, wife of Monsieur Bathasar Quesnet, believed deceased; my true wish, as I say, to provide evidence regarding this lady, insofar as my limited powers permit, pertaining to my extreme gratitude for the care she has provided me and the sincere friendship she has shown me from the twenty-fifth of August, seventeen hundred and ninety, to the day of my death; succour extended by her not only with the utmost tact and lack of self-interest, but also with the most courageous…

THE SPECTACLE of benighted cities overrun with black-clad marauders, downtowns declared ‘sovereign territory’, businesses sacked, churches aflame, and police squads besieged by angry demonstrators, in the leading democratic countries of the world, gobsmacked the public in 2020. How modern civilization has degenerated to such a point is one of the many marvels of what anyone must admit was a very memorable year. Into this situation has come a new book authored by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity – And Why This Harms Everybody (2020). Pluckrose and Lindsay, you might remember, are two of the three scholars implicated in the famous ‘Sokal Squared Hoax’, involving the producing of fake academic papers with subjects such as whether dog parks were…

“I am sorry, but I have to object. I don’t belong to the circle of philosophers. My profession, if you can call it that, is that of political theory.” Such was Hannah Arendt’s response to journalist Günter Gaus in a famous TV interview in 1964. It seems somewhat odd that Johanna Cohn Arendt was at such pains to distance herself from the subject she studied at the Universities of Marburg and Heidelberg. In German universities, she later wrote, “epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, logic, and the like were not so much communicated as drowned in an ocean of boredom” (Thinking Without a Banister, p.420, 2018). Yet, despite the dullness of academic life, she gained a doctorate on the unlikely subject of Saint Augustine and the concept of love. She was also the…

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“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” What if Khalil Gibran and Friedrich Nietzsche walked into a café and sat down at a small table together? What if they were friends, at least occasionally – whenever they recognised their human closeness – and enemies, at least occasionally – whenever they didn’t? Two postgrad students in a large Australian city. One is obsessed by Khalil Gibran, the influential Twentieth Century Lebanese mystical poet and author of The Prophet. The other is fascinated by Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous and greatly misunderstood Nineteenth Century German philosopher and author of Thus Spake Zarathustra. The students know each other from a previous stint in drama school where both were enthusiastic method actors. Perhaps…

Marilyn Piety lives in Philadelphia where she is a Professor of Philosophy at Drexel University. She received her PhD in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal. Her books include a translation of Kierkegaard’s Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford, 2009) Shai Tubali has published fourteen books, mostly on South Asian philosophy, and lives in Berlin. His MA dissertation, Cosmos and Camus: Science Fiction Film and the Absurd, was published by Peter Lang. He is doing PhD research at the University of Leeds on the ideas of Jiddu Krishnamurti in relation to the dialogue forms of ancient Greece and India. Atika Qasim is a Pakistani freelance writer, currently working as a contributor for MuslimGirl and Airschool. She graduated with a Bachelor in Science (Hons.) in Political Science from Forman Christian College University, Lahore. A…

Hope has always been there. The Ancient Greeks used the word elpis, which made its debut in the poetry of Hesiod. In Works and Days, from 700 BC, the Greek epic poet wrote about Pandora (her of the infamous box), that “Only Hope was left within her unbreakable house.” Aristotle, some four hundred years later, was rather more analytical. In the Nicomachean Ethics, the Macedonian genius wrote, “The coward…is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand…[is of] a hopeful disposition (Nicomachean Ethics, 1116a2). But mostly, the Greeks tended to be rather negative. Sometimes philosophers have been a miserable bunch. Plato certainly was one. He wrote dismissively about the gods as “mindless advisers”, who instil “fear” “and gullible hope” (Timaeus, 69b). Nietzsche,…

Self-isolating and bored? Reading helps. Across the pandemic-tinged globe one book is flying off shelves: The Plague (1947), a novel by Albert Camus about a deadly epidemic in the Algerian town of Oran. If, as the saying goes, crisis reveals character, why not pick up a book whose central question is “What should I do?” In a plague there is no avoiding the issue. Pretend there is no problem: that’s taking a stand. Remain neutral: that’s a choice. Profit from the crisis: that’s charting a path. Camus’s hero is Doctor Rieux. His answer: make an effort, help the healing. Easier said than done. Avoiding responsibility is a major human sport, matched by the ability to concoct rationalizations. As a mid-20th century figure, Camus inherited the responsibility question as part of…

Believe It Or Not DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 142, Benedict O’Connell discusses the idea that every belief or line of reasoning must rely on some assumption. He suggests that the problem with finding foundations for beliefs can be dealt with by using the approaches of Hegel and Heidegger. He says that neither of those philosophers regarded consciousness and reality as separate, and thinks this means that we can overcome the difficulty in understanding reality. I think we can use a much clearer argument against the view that all philosophical beliefs and arguments must rely on some assumption. This alternative is that certain foundational things must be true simply because of their meaning. One obvious example of something which must be true by definition, is the very idea that at least…

WHEN WE LOOK AROUND the world today, we often get a feeling of helplessness. States take decisions that place economics before citizens. Globally, corporations are denying basic living wages for their employees and acting in environmentally hazardous ways. How is it that they’re getting away with these things? And why, overall, are we obeying often unjust systems? Frédéric Gros, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris and Paris’s Institute of Political Studies, addresses these questions in his emotive and pithy book, Disobey (2020). His analysis of obedience argues that to obey is to be an ‘automaton’ and that only through mental disobedience can we reassert our humanity. Disobey is a hard book to digest – not because it is too abstract or unreal, rather the opposite: it faces…

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• Milgram II: The Horror Returns • Laroui Only Lives Thrice • Do Martian Microbes Have Rights? Jan Sokol Dies Czech philosopher, former dissident and former minister of education Jan Sokol has died at the age of 84. He was one of the rare philosophers to also be an active politician. For political reasons, Sokol was barred from university studies after the 1948 Communist coup. Instead he trained as a goldsmith, then as a mechanic, and then eventually as a computer programmer. In his spare time, he studied botany, physics and mathematics. Most importantly, he participated in the house seminars organised by his father-in-law, the great Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. These inspired him with a love of philosophy. In the late 1970s he read the text of Charter 77 and…

For a number of years I have been interested in the question, ‘Does a life’s work make up for a life?’ Initially, what I had in mind is the idea that there’s a line between one’s public and personal life, that those two lives can be separated, and that somehow you could weigh them against one another, as though professional success might make up for various personal, in particular, ethical, failures. So for instance, could the artistic achievements of a talented painter or writer make up for their being a terrible spouse? It has struck me as an important but difficult question to answer. Although it’s true that everyone makes poor choices, when those poor choices are made by public figures, gauging the appropriate response on the part of an…

Five hundred years before A.D.There lived a man who said, “You see,Things are not what we think they are,And whether near, or even far,They flex and change, are not the same”And Heraclitus was his name. It came to pass one sunny dayHe took his children out to play;“Back to the stream!” the children cried,But Heraclitus frowned and sighed,“I know to go back would be niceYou can’t get in the same stream twice.” “But there it is,” the children said,“The water cool above its bed;We long to feel it round our toes.”But Heraclitus scratched his nose:“In winter yonder stream was ice;You can’t get in the same stream twice.” The smallest child began to cryAnd said, “But, Dad, I can’t see why.It was ice, now it’s liquified;And there is something else beside:The…

Youth always has its share of idealism, whereas old age encourages reflection and more than a little guilt for past misdemeanours. Being seventy-four, and a member of a designated vulnerable group during the current Covid-19 pandemic, can be more than a little confusing, given mixed messages from the media. Should I stay at home and self-isolate? And if so, how should I pass my time? I began by revisiting my profile on LinkedIn, an online platform for professional networking. I had joined LinkedIn around nine years earlier, when coming to the end of my academic career, whereupon I had posted formally, with the aim of promoting my brilliance, fantasizing that no one in the world of education could do without my special skills. Attempting now to update my profile, I…

“Philosophy and science fiction are thematically interdependent… science fiction provides materials for philosophical thinking about what it means to be human and the nature of consciousness.”(The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film, Stephen Sanders, Ed, p.1, 2007) In Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), Theodore falls in love with a sophisticated operating system that takes the voice of a woman. The so-called ‘Samantha’ starts their relationship as a hesitant consciousness with early signs of self-awareness, even jealous of his physical existence. Yet soon enough Theodore realizes, to his horror, that she has discovered the delights of limitlessness. Before he knows it, she is already romantically engaged in a virtual relationship with 641 other people! He, who barely manages attachment to one woman, beholds the one who previously was a mere extension of…

Freedom is the power of a sentient being to exercise its will. Desiring a particular outcome, people bend their thoughts and their efforts toward realizing it – toward a goal. Their capacity to work towards their goal is their freedom. The perfect expression of freedom would be found in someone who, having an unerring idea of what is good, and a similarly unerring idea of how to realize it, then experienced no impediment to pursuing it. This perfect level of freedom might be experienced by a supreme God, or by a Buddha. Personal, internal impairments to freedom manifest mainly as ignorance of what is good, or of the means to attaining it, while external impairments include physical and cultural obstacles to its realization. The bigger and more numerous these impairments…

Philosophers spend much of their time thinking. Sometimes they think about thinking itself. But thinking about thought is a strange business. It should be impossible, like trying to navigate a stream in a boat made out of water. We most often characterize thinking as ‘inner speech’. ‘Speech’ because, as Bryan Magee says in his Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), we “cannot express in language what thought is like before it is translated into language.” And so, as we cock our inner ears, we hear a voice ‘in our head’ – the ‘head’ being a rather ill-defined location, but closer to the intracranial darkness behind our eyes than, say, our feet, or indeed, the rest of the universe. It is tempting to think that this imaginary sound is necessary for us…

Was your main goal in explaining Islamic philosophy in simple language in Philosophy in the Islamic World [A history of philosophy without any gaps, Vol 3] to popularise it? Or do you want to reach academics, too? The book was largely written for the general public, though I think the comprehensive approach I take means it should also be informative for specialists. In particular I would like other academics to take on board some aspects of what I do in the book, like for instance integrating the study of Jewish philosophy into the conception of philosophy in the Islamic world, and paying more attention to ‘post-classical’ thought – basically, everything that happened after the twelfth century CE. Why do you think Islamic philosophy has been neglected throughout recent history? Of…