Tabla de contenidos para June - July 2021 en Philosophy Now

René Descartes (1596-1650) liked a good sleep-in. No wonder the sleepy Frenchman often reminisced about dreaming in his philosophy. For example, in his Discourse on Method he wrote that, “asleep we can in the same way imagine ourselves possessed of another body and that we see other stars and another earth, when there is nothing of the kind.” Alas, his employer Queen Christina of Sweden was an early-bird and demanded philosophy lessons at five in the morning. That killed the French rationalist, after he caught pneumonia from venturing out in the snowy Swedish dawn. Writing circa one hundred years later, David Hume was of the same mind as Descartes: “A man sound asleep”, he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “is insensible of time” (p.84). Søren Kierkegaard too, another…

Rather than imagining an ideal world, Stoics try to manage their emotions in order to deal with the world as it is. With this in mind, Stoicism would suggest that people of color should begin each day by reminding themselves, “I will face racism, I will be stereotyped, I will be racially profiled, I will face racial discrimination, and people will be culturally or racially insensitive.” Although this idea of negative visualization – visualization of the inevitability of suffering – seems an odd approach in contrast with presently popular positive thinking psychology, it is rooted in a time-tested philosophy that started in Greece in the third century BCE. The original Stoic principles are based on the idea that we may not have control over the things that happen to us,…

The Re-Presentation of Representation DEAR EDITOR: I think The Big Art Issue (Issue 143) demonstrates why philosophy cannot get to grips with the arts. Artists use a range of media to represent both the disharmony and harmony of the world as presented to them in all its richness of pain, love, horror, beauty, madness and transcendence. It is always an attempt to re-present aspects of the world as presented in the artist’s lived experience. If successful, it will produce resonances of feeling between the artist and their audience. The problems occur when philosophers attempt to categorize and conceptualize works of art, because they are then representing the already-represented. This process of abstracting from an abstraction moves us even further away from the lived experience of the artist. In proof of…

ARE WE, as James Tartaglia puts it in Philosophy in a Technological World, “powerless pawns in a game played by nobody”, or are we free to try and make our own futures, guided by our ability to think rationally? On the face of things, the latter seems obvious. We can make a plan and do all we can to bring that plan into fruition. But this is not how the materialistic deterministic interpretation of physics sees things. In a world made of matter, where anything and everything is entirely at the mercy of physical laws, there seems to be no allowance for free thinking: we are powerless to affect the unfolding of events. If everything is matter and its machinations, then we’re simply along for the ride. Tartaglia, who is…

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Theory of the Earth Thomas Nail Toward the Critique of Violence A Critical Edition Walter Benjamin, Edited by Peter Fenves and Julia Ng Surging Democracy Notes on Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought Adriana Cavarero The Case of Wagner / Twilight of the Idols / The Antichrist / Ecce Homo / Dionysus Dithyrambs / Nietzsche Contra Wagner Volume 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Edited by Alan D. Schrift THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75 – Winter 1877/78) Volume 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, Translated, with an Afterword, by Gary Handwerk THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Political Grammars The Unconscious Foundations of Modern Democracy Davide Tarizzo SQUARE ONE: FIRST ORDER QUESTIONS IN THE HUMANITIES sup.org stanfordpress.typepad.com…

Charlotte Curran is a current Master's student at the University of Manchester, specialising in the Philosophy of Psychiatry and a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh. Charlotte is the owner and founder of ARTEMIS, a female run ecommerce business based in Manchester. Guto Dias is a Brazilian who decided to venture beyond the seas with his drawings. He is an illustrator, cartoonist and comic artist, who has been working professionally with drawing for over 25 years, in a wide variety of graphic areas. Frank Thermitus studied International Business and Economics at Hofstra University. He is a financial market veteran currently living between New York and South America where is working on a couple of entrepreneurial projects and a book. He is also working on a non-profit project to create…

Throughout the last decade, social protest movements have filled our TV screens and newsfeeds. From Occupy and the Arab Spring, to the Yellow Vests, Extinction Rebellion, the Women’s Marches and Black Lives Matter, people power is as alive as ever. Sadly, it also remains as controversial as ever, as the media furore over the toppling of statues in the US and UK has shown. This highlights the poor appreciation by many commentators of what drives social protest. If we want mature responses to social movements, we must first consider the points-of-view of those doing the protesting. A philosophical account of social movements that does just this is Axel Honneth’s ‘recognition theory’, originally developed in the 1990s. Honneth (b.1949), a German social philosopher, was reacting against a previously academically-dominant Marxist explanation…

Oh John, John Stuart, John Stuart Mill–reading your work is like climbing a hill:it’s hard and demands both effort and skill;one feels the increasingly rarefied chillas one labours one’s way up that logical hill:those orotund sentences, swelling to fillparagraphs, pages: so hard to distilinto quotable morsels. It’s overkill. Your writing is free from fancy and frill,with the care and precision befitting a willor a deed or a contract or codicilwritten on parchment with antique quill.With every phrase you aim to instilsome subtle idea or distinction, untilone feels that one’s mind has supped its fill–if one reads any more, the contents will spill. And yet, John Stuart, John Stuart Mill,Believe me I bear you no atom of ill;it’s worth it to climb that precipitous hill.The view from the top gives a…

C.S. Lewis is today best known as a Christian apologist and the author of the Narnia series of children’s fantasy books, including The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950). It is therefore easy to forget that his original training, and his first academic post, were in philosophy. That training marked almost everything that he wrote and broadcast. From Protestantism to Atheism and Back Again Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29th 1898 in Belfast. Later he reinvented himself as a quintessential Englishman who loved long walks in the country followed by a pint in the local pub; but he was born doubly an outsider. In a majority Catholic country, his family were Ulster Protestants – but not the mainstream, nonconformist Protestants; he was born into the Church of…

Today’s philosophers of religion devote considerable attention to the problem of evil: If God is both perfectly good and all-powerful, why do evil and suffering exist? This poses a considerable challenge to Jewish, Christian and Muslim (a.k.a. ‘Abrahamic’) theism, since if God is good, presumably he’d want to prevent evil and suffering, and if he’s all-powerful, presumably he’d be able to. The attempt to address this problem is called theodicy. In keeping with the habits of analytic philosophy, the problem is typically discussed in a rather technical and detached fashion. This has its advantages. For instance, philosophers have drawn a useful distinction between a ‘logical’ version of the problem, according to which the existence of evil is flatly inconsistent with an Abrahamic God’s existence, and an ‘evidential’ version, whereby evil…

CAN THINKING BE REDUCED to a series of logical rules which can be performed by anyone, even a a machine? Enlightenment philosophers, including Gottfried Leibniz, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes, all considered the possibility of mechanical approaches to thinking. In our own era, computer technology has enabled artificial intelligence algorithms to outperform humans in tasks as diverse as playing chess, flying airplanes, diagnosing diseases, and recognizing cat pictures on the internet, among many others. Some have speculated that just a little bit more computer power would enable these algorithms to achieve general human-level, or perhaps even super-human, intelligence. Or is there instead a fundamental roadblock to human-level artificial intelligence In this engaging and conversational book, Brian Cantwell Smith, who is Reid Hoffman Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Human at…

Back Issues in Print Issue 142 How to Know Stuff: Argument Limits; Criticising Science; Computation Limits / Anxious Idleness / Animal Liberation / Facebook / Sorgner int. / Plato Brief Life Issue 143 Art & Morality / What is Art? / Social Art / Malign Photography / Moore’s Ethics / Covid & Phil / Freedom / Arendt Brief Life / Sci fi and meaning We still have copies of these earlier back issues: 2, 39-40, 55-80, 83-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-116, 118-122, 124-140 You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit philosophynow.org/shop Back issues in print cost £3.95 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or US$10/7€/A$12/C$12/NZ$14/£7.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please…

• Two Philosophers’ Prizes • Two Philosophers’ Deaths • One Philosopher’s Birthday A Prize for Béatrice Longuenesse Béatrice Longuenesse, Professor Emerita of Philosophy at New York University, has won this year’s Hegel Prize. This is one of the most prestigious philosophical awards, given every three years by the City of Stuttgart (Hegel’s home town) to a prominent academic who has made a special contribution to furthering the humanities. The jury commented that “in her work she succeeded in taking up and bringing into dialogue very diverse traditions, questions and cultural impulses.” Longuenesse was born in France, studied at the Sorbonne and held earlier professorships at various universities, including the Sorbonne and Princeton. She has written highly regarded texts on Kant and Hegel. Longuenesse has also worked on the nature of…

Fat people are perhaps the most openly stigmatized individuals in our society: there is data which suggests that weight stigma is more pervasive and intense than even racism and sexism. There is certainly a well-documented social and cultural bias against fat people, particularly in the workplace, the medical sphere, and the media. In the workplace, discrimination exists with respect to hiring, wages, promotion, and termination. Workplace discrimination is examined in detail by John Cawley in his 2004 paper, ‘The Impact of Obesity on Wages’ (Journal of Human Resources vol. 39, issue 2). Cawley found that fat white females earn 11.2% less than their non-fat counterparts. In the medical sphere, fat oppression is also very much present: in one study, over 40% of physicians were found to have a negative reaction…

One of history’s greatest philosophers was, by my estimation, also a great yogi. The Frenchman René Descartes (1596-1650) is often called ‘the father of modern philosophy’. He sat in his room and contemplated the mysteries of the mind. Yoga follows the same course to wisdom and understanding. Descartes was a man shaped by his times. Louis XIII was King of France for most of Descartes’ life. The Inquisition also started in France, in the twelfth century. Its aim was to prevent doctrinal dissent within the Catholic Church, and it was still in full swing in Descartes’ lifetime. Espousing certain ideas could lead to banishment, imprisonment, or death. Believing in the Church’s vision of the world was important for one’s safety. As a prominent thinker, and a devout Catholic, Descartes was…

At the beach, we soak up some sun, frolic in the surf, and swim with the waves – to name just a few of the activities possible. Apart from doing anything, though, it is exhilarating just to be at the beach. Why? What is the contemplative appeal of that place where the ocean meets the land? In contrast to the tidy closeness of the interior of our houses, or of suburban and urban landscapes, the sea opens up enormous, unobstructed distances. We are engulfed, swallowed up by the scene. Know thy smallness, O human! Here, it seems, we come face-to-face with the infinite. Yet the human glimpse of the infinite is in fact the clearest manifestation of our finitude. What we’re coming up against is a stark definition of the…

My first question is simple and direct, while being a little personal too. What is the importance of Pragmatism, in your new book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, and in your career in general? I’m not sure it’s such a simple question, but I’ll try to give you a simple answer. To my mind, Pragmatism is nothing more but also nothing less than an art of consequences. Pragmatism – especially in the tradition of William James, which is the one I’m closest to – is appraising our ideas, questions, propositions, and concepts in terms of the consequences they’re liable to generate. This is critically important both to the ways in which I relate to philosophy and to the manner in which I seek to compose a certain philosophical experimentation.…

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY FOR? is a remarkable book by any standards: Mary Midgley wrote it in the last year of her life, and she was ninety-nine when it was published! Would that we were all as compos mentis at that age. It’s just as well to get these considerations out of the way as soon as possible, for they are irrelevant to the merits of the book, except insofar as the book clearly reflects a very long time thinking about the answer to the question posed by its title. At the outset I want to lay my cards on the table and agree that her answer is broadly speaking correct. I have a few caveats, but essentially it’s right. What it amounts to, is that philosophy stands at the apex…

Although Casablanca (1942) was an A-list film with established stars and first-rate writers, no one involved with its production expected it to be anything other than just one of the hundreds of ordinary pictures produced by Hollywood that year. After all, the premise is fairly straightforward. A cynical world-weary man falls in love with a beautiful woman who restores his faith in humanity, then she leaves him: his belief that life is cruel is confirmed, and he regresses to a selfish existence. The woman reappears, they fall in love again; but this time he leaves her, for the greater good. However, that nutshell contains the essence of many philosophies – not least that of Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the Danish philosopher who many consider to be the father of existentialism. Kierkegaard…

A little while back I touched on the ‘laws of nature’ in the course of a defence of free will (‘The Mystery of Freedom’, Issue 140). I argued that if we were entirely subject to such laws, then neither the experimental science by which they were discovered nor our capacity to exploit them through technology would be possible. Our undeniable ability to manipulate states of matter inside scientific laboratories in pursuit of knowledge of its general properties, and to apply that knowledge outside of the laboratories in support of our agency, are perhaps the most striking expressions of the way in which we humans transcend the material world. But ‘the laws of nature’ (socalled) deserve more attention than I gave them in that piece on free will. Horses and Riders…

Pod XR476: Face recognition log in. Pod XR476: Record voice. How could we end this way? I don’t know… I’m not even sure why I’m recording this… Maybe because of a guilty conscience. I don’t have any hope of help. I don’t think anyone can help us… And, we deserve what we got. Damn, maybe I deserve it more than anyone else… If another civilization receives this recording, I hope you can learn from our species’ mistakes. What happened? Well, it began when political tensions in the first half of the twenty-first century provoked a global nuclear war amongst East and West, North and South. Earth was left devastated. After the Great Nuclear War, the UN prohibited humanity from deploying weapons of war. Instead, such decisions were relegated to AI.…