Tabla de contenidos para October - November 2021 en Philosophy Now

Ancient Greek culture was a fever dream of myths, gods, spirits and superstitions. The early philosophers stood out from their time by exhibiting a bracing scepticism, a restlessly questioning temperament, a willingness to cut through all the nonsense and find the truth. Unsurprisingly, then, one of the biggest questions for them was, which things are real, and which aren’t? Plato in his Republic concocted a famous story which vividly illustrates the question and provides one solution to it: the Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s tale, a group of captives sit in an underground cavern where they have spent their whole lives. They are chained up side by side so that all they can look at is the cave wall in front of them. Their backs are to a fire,…

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. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception. 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 will be about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about. The caricature image of the other-worldly philosopher is often that of the…

The Greeks proclaimed that all consistsOf earth, air, fire, and water,And other ancients' kindred listsEach had their imprimatur. We think our hundred elementsAs very much superior,But matter-states in simple setsShould make us somewhat leerier. For if all is solid, liquid, gaseous,Or something known as plasma,Then what of dry ice and molasseous,As well their strange miasma? I may have stumbled on a truth:The world is a continuum.With rigid classes we produceOdd leavings and residuum. But isn't the dualityOf classes and continuaA far too neat dichotomyThat deepens our conundra? I sense an infinite regress,Toward some site unseen.Do I proceed, or just recess,Or something inbetween? © STEVEN E. CLAYMAN 2021 Steven E. Clayman is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA.…

After that – the fission of a moment, horses rearing upand plunging over, and the man hanging there,suspended above the running black and blank of water – how the celebrity aged, stared at the rent in his coat,railed against the tinsel of knowledge, tarnish of office,glittering evasions that bore the appellation of fame and excellence. The first to strap a watch to his wrist,in Paris he’d become a name. Even in his teens,illustrious designer of the calculating machine (to add and subtract his father’s taxes). Then hot news:arithmetical triangles, binomial coefficients,engines of perpetual motion. Cool matrix and market of numbers. Banks of data… But after Neuilly –terror under the stars, scribbling late into the night:whatever reason may proclaim, if there’s a precipice imagination reigns. He was gazing at the mirror…

Do you think that in his philosophy of history Hegel (1770-1831) wanted the ‘Aryan spirit’ to work, and that the formation of the German race was necessary for the emergence of absolute truth in the world? The question itself is badly formulated. Hegel did not speak of the ‘Aryan’ spirit at all, much less ‘wanted it to work’. The very idea of the Aryan spirit did not come from Hegel but from Friedrich Schlegel, an opponent of Hegel, who introduced this term into the scholarship around 1819. And the idea of the Aryan race as such did not itself really begin to be used until long after Hegel’s death. Schlegel himself, like many of the early Romantics in Germany around 1800, was drawn to the idea of a idealized ‘East’…

BOOKS ON THE LESS-THAN-famous Max Stirner (1806-1856) are rare, but an intrepid author, Jacob Blumenfeld, has found something of note for the contemporary reader. Stirner’s only volume, The Ego and Its Own (1844), has been called both the most revolutionary book ever written and the worst book ever written. His thought has sparked the interest of anarchists, libertarians, existentialists, Bohemians, nihilists, and more. Stirner certainly presses a certain form of atheism to its ultimate end. Karl Marx wrote against Stirner in The German Ideology (1846), which may be a good prima facie reason to read Stirner; but, of course, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Given his philosophy, I wonder if Stirner had any friends at all – although he did dedicate his book to ‘My…

On the way to meet my research supervisor at Cambridge University I photographed this idyllic scene. The captain of the punt (gondolier? punter?) was boasting to his international passengers that a single college in Cambridge had produced more Nobel Prize-winners than all of the Oxford colleges put together. I suspect that he was exaggerating, but according to the Times, Cambridge has had 121 Nobel laureates, which is “more than the total for either Germany or France.” (Emma Duncan, 9 July 2021) Although that young upstart, Harvard, is currently ahead in the Nobel Prize stakes, Cambridge is certainly a formidable knowledge-production centre. It has accommodated such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Iris Murdoch. But engaging with the kind of abstract conceptual knowledge that brought those folks worldwide…

“Thomas Aquinas was the greatest theologian in the middle ages.” Thus read an ultra-short biography of the Dominican Friar and philosopher St Thomas de Aquino (1225-1274), printed at the end of the Danish Hymn Book (when I was a boy growing up in rural Denmark my parents would take me to church every Sunday, and during the very long sermons my mother would give me the hymn book to read). It is perhaps surprising that a Catholic thinker like Thomas was included in the official hymn book of a Lutheran Protestant country, where it was a common insult to be described as ‘Catholic in the head’ (a euphemism for being raving mad). Nevertheless, the congregation would happily sing Thomas’s hymn, ‘Sing, my tongue, the Savior’s glory’ (or in the original…

Eleni Angelou Eleni Angelou is taking a PhD in philosophy at the City University of New York. Previously, she studied history and philosophy of science at the University of Athens and philosophy at Harvard University. She is the translator of H.D. Thoreau’s 'Letters to Harrison Blake' into Greek. Paul Griffiths Paul Griffiths lives in Felixstowe, UK. After studying physics and communications engineering, he joined BT Laboratories specialising in computer simulation and mathematical modelling. Taking early retirement, he was able to pursue his longstanding interest in the philosophy and science of perception, gaining postgraduate degrees from Manchester and Essex. Guto Dias Guto Dias is a Brazilian who decided to venture beyond the seas with his drawings. He is an illustrator, cartoonist and comic artist. He has worked professionally with drawing for…

It seems to me that we encounter two serious philosophical problems when we thoughtlessly use the term ‘the real world’. Firstly, what is ‘the world’? It is this problem that Ludwig Wittgenstein confronted in the opening sentences of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922): 1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. If it is the case that the world is all that is the case, then we add nothing at all when we place the word ‘real’ in front of the word ‘world’. Here ‘real’ is implied by ‘world’. The world, being the totality of facts, includes everything that is real. Thus, in this…

Buddhism is often described as the philosophy of the ‘middle way’, in that the Buddha is alleged to have always urged his devotees to avoid ‘extremes’ in the quest for enlightenment – initially, the extremes of asceticism or self-indulgence. Many scholars, like Sangharakshita, have emphasized that Buddhism is a form of ‘atheistic spirituality’ – a religion without a god – in that it attempts to steer a middle way between the theistic spirituality of the Hindu Vedanta tradition and the atheistic materialism of the Samkhya and Lokayata philosophies. But given the focal emphasis that Buddhism places upon the mind, its complete denial of a self, and the extreme idealist tendencies that developed within the Buddhist tradition, it is doubtful if Buddhism as a spiritual tradition ever took the middle way…

It goes by various names: ‘liberal individualism’ is as good as any. The theory’s quite straightforward: the basic fact of existence is ‘I am’, so the ‘I’ is the basic unit of ethics, superceding any claims of society. The ‘I’ seeks, above all else, to attain pleasure and avoid pain. Cultural and ethical guidelines which set aspirational standards beyond simple pleasure and pain are viewed as nothing but constraints on the freedom of this ‘I’. However, because they take on various meanings, labels can be misleading. In the United States, the people most living out ‘liberal individualism’ tend to self-identify as ‘conservatives’. What they conserve is nineteenth century liberalism. Their priestess is Ayn Rand, whose overturning of traditional moral systems is well identified by her appropriately-titled The Virtue of Selfishness…

Existential Epistles DEAR EDITOR: With regard to the existentialism theme of Issue 145, Jean-Paul Sartre was famously asked how he could stand by his view that we are unconditionally free, in a world in which for example a French Resistance fighter might he forced to give up their secrets as a result of physical torture. Sartre’s view was that the torture victim was free to choose the precise moment at which they talk. This is consistent with the freedom that Sartrean existentialism is built on, while carrying no criticism of the theoretical victim of the abuse. At a time when belief in free will is under intense philosophical and scientific scrutiny, Sartre’s ground-breaking deployment of phenomenology as the guarantor of personal freedom in all its gory reality, remains compelling. In…

There’s something satisfying about watching a rat solve a maze. As an experimental psychologist who’s watched many rats solve many mazes over the years, I can tell you it never ceases to bring me joy. Why is that? Surely part of me is happy for the rat, who was once hungry and has now slaked its appetite. The experience is also visually appealing. After many trials, once the rat learns the path by heart, it flies through the maze like a capsule through a pneumatic tube. But I also feel some sense of achievement. This leads me to think I’m living vicariously through the rat – imagining that its predicament is my own, and that it’s me running through the maze, solving my problems and collecting my rewards. My appreciation…

“We say a dog is afraid his master may beat him; not, he is afraid his master will beat him tomorrow.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations In The Genealogy of Morals (1887) Friedrich Nietzsche famously characterized man as ‘the promising animal’. By this he meant not a creature who showed promise but one capable of making, and sometimes keeping, promises. He felt this capacity drew on something deeper. That deeper something was hinted at in an earlier work, his Thoughts Out of Season (1876) when he discusses ‘The Use and Abuses of History’. Nietzsche invites us to “Consider the herds that are feeding yonder; they know not the meaning of yesterday or today; they graze and ruminate, move or rest, from morning to night, from day to day, taken up with…

• New translation of all Plato’s dialogues • Heideggerian hacker claims moral stance • Passing of a prominent French thinker New Plato Translation It took thirteen years, but he has done it: Dr David Horgan of the Trinity Plato Centre in Dublin has given the world a new translation of the complete works of Plato. It is the first time the complete writings of Plato have been translated from ancient Greek into English by one scholar since 1871 when Oxford scholar Benjamin Jowett produced his now standard translation of the same works. Horan’s new translation is freely available online at www.platonicfoundation.org. In an introduction, Horan acknowledges the sponsorship and support he received from others: “Since the entire project has proceeded in a spirit of great generosity, it would, I believe,…

Two friends are debating whether there are laws in nature. Bob is a ‘Believer’; he sees regularities everywhere, and supposes that some of them are good enough to be laws. Sue is a ‘Sceptic’; she feels that randomness prevails and the so-called ‘laws of nature’ are merely projections of our minds onto the world. Two worldviews oppose each other. Who will win? Sue: Here we are, another Thursday, meeting up before a new movie starts. Who would have expected our friendship to last long enough to establish a movie habit together? Bob: I know! Some things in life happen rather accidentally – like the meeting of two strangers who become involved enough to have their own little patterns in a relationship. Actually, I’ve been thinking about patterns and regularities a…

John Rawls was, according to Bill Clinton, “perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the twentieth century.” For students of political philosophy Rawls does remain a towering figure, and it would be untrue to say that his ideas have been overlooked. However, to the general reader, his name may well be unfamiliar. To most people Rawls remains a far more obscure figure than nineteenth century giants of political philosophy such as Karl Marx or John Stuart Mill. His contributions, however, are no less significant. Rawls (1921-2002) is primarily remembered for his thought experiment of the ‘Original Position’. Here he invites us to imagine that we possess our current faculties of reason but are trapped behind a ‘veil of ignorance’. Like a baby in a womb, we’re unaware of the type of…

Time of the Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger WOLFRAM EILENBERGER’S Time of the Magicians (2020) is not only a vivid portrait of the lives of four very different thinkers and an incisive analysis of their ideas, but also a kind of biographical album showing surprising correspondences between them. For readers already familiar with these twentieth-century philosophers’ lives and work, herein lies this book’s principal interest. The four, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger, had one thing in common: the belief that mistaken assumptions about language are the wellsprings of error in philosophy. For each thinker, the first task of philosophy is to refine our picture of language by questioning inherited assumptions about its uses and purpose, because to do so is the only way to address philosophy’s biggest…

What would a philosopher say you’re using to understand these words as you read them? Well, as usual, it depends on which philosopher you ask. Some are ‘materialists’, and think that your mind is reducible to its physical substrate, and so might say ‘your brain’. Some are ‘dualists’ and think that the mind is distinct from the brain, being a completely different kind of thing, so might just say ‘your mind’. Many, if not most, pre-modern philosophers were dualists. Here we may think of Plato and the many thinkers influenced by Platonism in later European and Islamic thought, or of dualist theories of self in classical India. But there were also materialists in these traditions too, like the Carvaka in India or the Epicureans and Stoics in ancient Greece. This…

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