Tabla de contenidos para December 2021 - January 2022 en Philosophy Now

According to his wife, the poet T.S. Eliot was once getting into a London taxi when the driver said “You’re T.S. Eliot.” Eliot asked how he knew. “Ah, I’ve got an eye for celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, ‘Well Lord Russell, what’s it all about?’ And do you know, he couldn’t tell me.” The story reflects how much of the world, and not just taxi drivers, see philosophy. It’s job is to discover what it is all about: the Universe, God, death, the meaning of life. Professional philosophers tend to find the story amusing; the demand that Russell should distil his lifetime of teaching, his hard-won wisdom, his dozens of books, into a single short cab ride. I think they…

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads; about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love. Tracks like George Harrison’s Taxman, written in response a marginal tax-rate of 96 percent introduced by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the Sixties, 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 is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.…

I spent my formative years being told by advertisers that ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’. These celebrated cigar ads ran from 1966 until tobacco advertising was banned from UK television in 1991. Despite all I have read and written on the subject of happiness, whenever I am asked, ‘What is happiness?’, my reflex thought is still that slogan. Sometimes I give that epithet as my flippant answer, too; but sometimes I hold back, and resort instead to quoting from Ken Dodd’s song, Happiness. Seriously, though, is ‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet’ a good or a bad answer to the question ‘What is happiness?’? This perennial question has received a wide range of answers over the centuries, and it seems unlikely there will ever be an answer that everyone…

When Euripides asked Socrates his opinion on the book On Nature by Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535-475 BC), Socrates answered that the part he understood was excellent, as was the part he did not. These are the two faces of Heraclitus. On the one side is the obscure philosopher, the ‘Dark Riddler’ whom even Socrates had trouble comprehending. On the other side is the profundity of a work worth exploring, a work that is rewarding in its depth. This duality is expressed in the lyrics of the ancient tragical poet Scythinus: “Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian’s book: the path is hard to travel. Gloom is there and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the…

Darwin isn’t generally known as a philosopher. Didn’t he explicitly avoid grand philosophical speculation in favour of science? Indeed. But that doesn’t mean to say he wasn’t interested in philosophical questions. He just believed that they were best approached from a scientific angle: “He who understands baboons would do more toward metaphysics than Locke” he wrote in his notebook. Elsewhere he wrote: “To study Metaphysics, as they have always been studied appears to me to be like puzzling at astronomy without mechanics. – Experience shows the problem of the mind cannot be solved by attacking the citadel itself. – the mindisfunctionofbody. – wemustbringsome stable foundation to argue from.” Darwin was fascinated by the problem of free will, for example. Like the philosophers, he was plagued by how freedom could arise…

These days, when students are first exposed to philosophical ethics, they are typically presented with three rival approaches. First, consequentialism, which says that moral life is a matter of determining which actions will produce the best results overall, and then performing those actions. Second, deontology, which involves discovering the rules or norms that guide good actions, and obeying those rules. Third, eudaimonism. This term derives from the Greek word eudaimonia, which had the connotation of being 'blessed’, but usually translates to ‘happiness’. Eudaimonism, then, says that ethics is about figuring out how to be happy. What students may not be told is that for quite a long time all ethical theory in the European tradition was eudaimonist. It was the only game in town. The classical ethical schools had many…

“Moralists have unanimously agreed, that unless virtue be nursed by liberty, it will never attain due strength-and what they say of man I extend to mankind, insisting, that in all cases morals must be fixed on immutable principles; and that the being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority but that of reason.” – Mary Wollstonecraft MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759-1797) IS perhaps best known for having written A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792. In this book Wollstonecraft delivers a pioneering and convincing argument for equality between men and women. The Vindication is typically classified as a feminist classic; however, her theories can be applied well beyond the issue of women in the eighteenth century. But, although she was possibly one of the most original…

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Farah Abdessamad Farah Abdessamad is an essayist and critic based in New York City. A native of Paris, her readings of Heraclitus, Polybius, Nietzsche and Heidegger have shaped her interest in political philosophy and ontology, and inspired her to carry philosophical questions to fields such as literature, art, mythology and history. She is at work on a collection of essays. Daniel C. Dennett Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He taught at U.C. Irvine from 1965 to 1971, when he moved to Tufts, where he has taught ever since. His most recent book, Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, was published in 2017. Sara Bizarro Sara Bizarro was born…

In the expression ‘the meaning of life’, people more often than not mean ‘purpose’ when they refer to ‘meaning’. The real question such people are asking is actually ‘What is the purpose of life?’. Things which have a purpose are often created for that purpose, such as man-made artefacts. One could establish an analogy or comparison between life and tools. The purpose of a tool is present at or before it is manufactured. A garden fork has been made to help gardeners dig, a tap is made to control the flow of water, and so on. The maker of the object and the person who uses the object both know this purpose, and the correct use of the object is seen as being use in line with the maker’s design.…

On Friday nights the Benthamite clans swing into town. Marital chains loosened for an evening, the boys chat up the girls, toss their phone numbers to the wind. They laugh at theatre hoardings, wonder how anyone could choose such ‘entertainment’ over their fun. In the Indian, Ritchie, leader of the gang, speaks to his huddled, tabled audience, heads slumped on serviettes, or chins resting on wine glass rims. He’s heard about this geezer Bentham who got some kind of calculation going to work out what gives people the greatest pleasure. Spike reckons he needs no maths to work that one out as John Smith’s froth decorates his moving lips. Ritchie explains that they must give marks for every pleasure they enjoy: Lifts Bonzo’s head to rescue a serviette, then with…

When the Dutch astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens died in 1695 at the age of sixty-six, the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz called his loss ‘inestimable’, and hailed him as the equal of Galileo and Descartes. “Helped by what they have done,” Leibniz wrote, “he has surpassed their discoveries. He is one of the prime ornaments of the age.” Indeed, Huygens discovered the rings around Saturn and detected the first moon of that planet. He also created the first accurate pendulum clock, among many other inventions. He described centrifugal force, was the first to employ mathematical formulae in the solution of problems in physics, and devised a foresighted wave-based theory of light. It is largely thanks to his contemporary Isaac Newton that we have mostly overlooked his achievements today. Newton…

There can be few poems better known than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life, and few lines of poetry more often quoted (and misquoted) than “Dust thou art, to dust returnest”. The Psalm deserves its place in the collective memory not only because it is beautifully written, but also because it tries to pull off the extraordinary feat of finding reasons for good cheer while directly confronting our transience. Longfellow argues that “We can make our lives sublime/And, departing, leave behind us/Footprints on the sands of time”, and by doing so inspire those who follow us. It is not clear how much consolation is to be had from this thought. Leaving aside the knowledge that our most certain ‘footprint’ will be a carbon one – making the lives of…

IN A PAPER PUBLISHED IN Synthese (#53) in 1982, ‘Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’, Richard Rorty wrote an enthusiastic account of the revolutionary ‘Ryle-Dennett tradition’. Was I really as radical a revolutionary as he said I was? I responded mischievously, perhaps rudely: “Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have to read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English, I am tempted by Rorty’s performance on this occasion to enunciate a useful hermeneutical principle, the Rorty Factor: Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742. After all, if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably…

Do we have free will, or are our lives just an amalgamation of forces beyond our control, pushing us around like billiard balls? The question seems straightforward enough, but if you spend enough time with it you’ll soon find that you’ve opened up a Pandora’s box of philosophical questions, especially since each side of the debate has a peculiar way of seeming both perfectly plausible and implausible. It certainly feels like I’ve gotten where I am through choices that I’ve freely made; but how can I be so sure? Is freedom just an illusion – something I can tell myself I possess to avoid the terrifying fact that the events of my life are completely beyond my control? I can just as easily embrace my lack of control and situate…

• The fault is not in our stars but in our genes• Trans rights and academic freedom• Moral dilemma? Ask a chatbot. Is Morality Genetic? Why do many people have similar moral values to their parents? Is this just a matter of environment and upbringing or is there some biological basis for this phenomenon too? Past studies have suggested that moral judgements are strongly based on self-interest informed by the particular condition of individuals. For example, someone who is hungry is more likely to be in favour of social welfare, whereas someone who is in top physical shape is more likely to advocate a moral system that rewards strength and self reliance. A new study demonstrates that there may be a genetic basis for certain moral decisions. Annika Karinen and…

After tragedy and heartbreak – after the war is lost, after the pandemic takes someone you love, after climate change destroys your home, after your life seems to be rendered nonsensical by illness, personal failure, or injustice – deep questions may linger like a bruise: What is the meaning of all this? Does life have any meaning or purpose at all? What is the meaning of my life? Easy answers to such questions drop casually from the internet, books, and media. The meaning of life, we’re told, is pursuing pleasure or happiness, or giving and receiving love, or finding your passion, or doing something great, or living out your purpose, or being involved with something greater than yourself. But these commonplace answers are only partly right, and the questions are…

I magine if you will a government which provides its citizens with comfortable housing, and two special daily pills, free of charge. The first pill contains all our daily nutritional requirements, while the second pill guarantees a sense of happiness and contentment throughout the day and night. My question is: would such a state of affairs be both good and desirable? Many would argue that the universal provision of housing and food would be a general good. Housing and food are required for the furtherance of human thriving, and so for long-term happiness. Without them we would be significantly restrained in pursuing our future projects of self-realization or fulfilling our potential. They’re things we necessarily need to become who we most fully can be. However, our last theoretical provision, the…

An argument against eating meat can be made from both environmental and health-related points of view, but the case from the moral consideration of animals – brilliantly expressed from a utilitarian perspective in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation – seems to me to be the most compelling. As Jeremy Bentham wrote in his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” Sentience appears to be the sufficient and necessary characteristic for someone to have interests. When a living being has the capacity for suffering, it follows that it will at the very least have an interest in not feeling pain. When it comes to fellow human beings, we like to apply the principle of equal consideration…

Representations of Reality DEAR EDITOR: I have one or two thoughts about Paul Doolan’s ‘Get Real’ (Issue 146), in which he considers what ‘the real world’ is. First, Doolan says Immanuel Kant thinks our knowledge of the ‘thing-in-itself’ (Ding-an-sich) is ‘limited’ and ‘imperfect’, but for Kant, the Ding-an-sich is an idea of pure reason and we have no direct sensory knowledge of it, and never could have. It is also wrong to say that Kant thinks “We never observe causation directly.” Quite the opposite: causation is part of the order of our phenomenal (sensory) experience. On the other hand, for Kant there is no in-itself causation that our experience of causation somehow ‘represents’. I also found puzzling this claim: “the closer we come to creating accurate representations of the real,…

DECIDING TO WRITE A BIOGraphy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), even a predominantly intellectual biography like Peter Salmon’s, must, perhaps, involve a dilemma. As Salmon himself suggests in his Introduction, the temptation to mimic Derrida’s own ‘gnomic, allusive, elusive’ manner of writing can be overwhelming. Yet while saying that Salmon has written a superb intellectual biography that does a terrific job of humanizing a man and thinker often seen or imagined as arcanely inaccessible, we can also mention the more approachable way in which Salmon mirrors for his readers’ benefit some of the gnomic tics of his subject (or is it object?). If there really is, as Derrida says, ‘nothing outside the text’ – meaning that all meaning is textbased, and so susceptible to plural interpretations – then writing a biography…

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