Tabla de contenidos para April - May 2022 en Philosophy Now

Issue 4 brings together the best articles on the theory of knowledge from Philosophy Now magazine. Across five chapters and 116 pages, it explores a series of important philosophical questions: What is knowledge? Can we know anything at all? How might we gain knowledge? What is the relationship between science and knowledge? And what is the value of knowledge? Full of profound questions and intriguing theories, the fourth volume in our Ultimate Guide series will get you thinking deeper than ever before! Available from our online shop: philosophynow.org/shop…

• Ukrainian philosopher’s 300th birthday • AI shows increasing ethical problems. • Qubit pioneer David Deutsch wins prize. Philosopher on Hunger Strike In August of last year, a number of prominent thinkers in Belarus were arrested, among them the philosopher Uladzimir Mazkewitsch and the sociologist Tatjana Wadalaschskaja. They had founded the ‘Flying University’ in Minsk, where philosophers, historians and other academics working within the humanities offered courses for the general public in Belarusian and Russian. Their arrests were part of a government crackdown taken against the few independent education providers in the country. Organisations such as the Flying University became rare bastions of free thought in the wake of the 2020 elections, and became a model for citizens to come together in their own free associations. After more than half…

Until Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, it was often claimed without irony that the world had become generally more peaceful than in most previous eras. Leading intellectuals even developed competing theories to explain this happy state of affairs. Let’s look at three of them. The first is Francis Fukuyama. In his celebrated debut book The End of History and The Last Man (1992), Fukuyama argued that Hegel’s nineteenth century insights into human history were relevant to understanding the political nature of our own times. Influenced by the Russian-French Hegel interpreter Alexander Kojève, Fukuyama argued that history’s trajectory was towards societies that facilitate individual freedom and recognition. In this story, the rise of modern science and technology are not enough to explain the historic spread of democratic governments and the belief…

There are many ways to classify political ideologies and map out the boundaries between them. I cordially invite you to consider mine. Although my examples are drawn mainly from the United Kingdom’s political history, I think it is broad enough and subtle enough to describe the ideological landscape of most Western secular countries, and to help clarify the nature of many of the disagreements in recent political life. So consider this chart. Its four quarters could be respectively called ‘hierarchical-communitarian’ (top right), ‘egalitarian-communitarian’ (top left), ‘hierarchical-liberal’ (bottom right) and ‘egalitarian-liberal’ (bottom left). Strange terms perhaps; but as we shall see, together these divisions enable us to delineate the major political positions taken in today’s world. So let’s look at these four positions, and the relationships between them. Traditional Conservatism The…

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw the birth of modernity, as Enlightenment ideas about science, reason and progress started permeating the intellectual circles of the Western world. Accompanying this, the very idea of ‘modern’ became identified with progress towards improvement and innovation. History was the march of civilizations and peoples in the direction of something better, something to look forward to which would bring more peace and move away from war and desolation. But such hopes were eradicated as the twentieth century took these ideals and one by one rendered them baseless. World wars, fascism, communist authoritarianism, and an overall wave of illiberalism, became the stark opponents of Enlightenment ideals. This encouraged a widespread perception that the ideals themselves were but an illusory dream. According to its new opponents, the…

One of the most fundamental questions of anthropology is that of personhood. We might also consider it the starting point for all philosophy. Indeed, it was Martin Heidegger who most forcefully underlined the connection between anthropology and ‘the apprehension of Being’, that is, metaphysics. For him, only the human person might hope to find meaning in the world around them. Hinging on this dilemma of how to define the person are all of the perennial issues of philosophy, of ethics, and of sociology. To define it succinctly: a person is a being endowed with imagination. A person is able to think abstractly, to project themself into imaginary situations, to plan for the future, and to reflect on the past. In other words, a person acts in the present moment not…

Being a historian of philosophy, I have a soft spot for philosophers who were also historians. I don’t mean those who wrote about the history of philosophy, though I admit it is flattering to be in the company of figures like G.W.F. Hegel and Bertrand Russell. What I mean is philosophers who wrote straightforward history, often gaining more renown for their work as historians than for their philosophy. There are many examples. Two key figures in Byzantine philosophy, Michael Psellos and Anna Komnene, are best known to modern-day Byzantinists for their historical writing. The same goes for Miskawayh, a contemporary of the great Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) who was not nearly as innovative or influential as him philosophically but did write a massive historical work called The Experiences of the Nations…

“MORALS ARE FOR SUCKERS”, whereas “amorality will lead you to worldly success” says Chris Paley, who has a Cambridge doctorate in evolutionary biology and was briefly an investment banker. He cites an experiment in which the majority of drivers who refused to stop for pedestrians at a crossing in California were driving expensive cars. It is through such experiments, apparently, that ‘science’ has enabled us, in the last few decades, to understand what moral philosophers have been trying to explain for the last three millennia – why and how we moralise. Apparently, after reading Beyond Bad (2021) we will be able to junk not only moral philosophy, but morality itself. “I’ll argue” announces Paley on p.2, “that humans have the mental machinery to moralise because it was in our ancestors’…

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“Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”Charles de Gaulle Our special theme in this issue is political philosophy and in planning it our intention was to take a close look at a few of the newer concepts and less familiar thinkers you might encounter. The terminology, the conflicts and the arguments in politics all change over time, and if you look away for too long it can all come to seem unfamiliar. Political philosophy at its best can bring clarity, can map out the territory and blow away some of the fog. For our opening article we picked an intriguing short piece by Dan Corjescu asking why the world is generally a much more peaceful place now than it was in the past. Sadly, Putin…

‘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 Rose Royce’s 1976 hit Carwash 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 artichokes (Wittgenstein), buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), and tomato juice (Robert Nozick). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.…

At the end of October 2021, Facebook announced its ‘Metaverse’ project, an entire virtual reality world that will be up and running ‘in the near future’. Laymen tend to have a stereotype of philosophers as being techno-sceptic. However, philosophers have been discussing virtual reality since before Mark Zuckerberg was born. A comparatively recent contribution to the debate was the ‘experience machine’ thought experiment advanced by Robert Nozick in 1974 in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (though it’s probably based on a short story called ‘The Happiness Machine’ published by Ray Bradbury in 1957). In this thought experiment, Nozick asks you to imagine a machine that can simulate every experience you would like to have until the end of your life. Once you programmed this machine and plugged yourself into…

In the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Pontius Pilate: “I was born and came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” Pilate famously responds, “What is truth?” This question has reverberated through the ages, not least because, as Pilate’s question suggests, different religions and cultures have presented us with very different versions of what they’ve called the truth. Muslims, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Communists, Fascists, and many others, have fought violent battles to promulgate and defend their particular version of ‘the truth’. The bloody battles over truth in Europe between Protestants and Catholics played a significant role in motivating the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was the hope of the early scientists and their champions to…

Why don’t you like the TV hospital drama Grey’s Anatomy? Something strange is happening in Western culture. For a few decades we’ve talked a lot about postmodernism. Jean-François Lyotard first developed his theory of postmodernism in 1979 in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on the Status of Knowledge. At precisely the same time a profound change was happening in political economics, namely the onset of neoliberalism. In noting this, Fredric Jameson made an interesting claim: that postmodernism is the ideological doctrine of neoliberalism. Well, it seems to me that Grey’s Anatomy exemplifies the most recent developments of postmodern ideology, concerning such things as identity politics. In that light, the first thing we should ask ourselves is: what is Grey’s anatomy? I emphasise the noun to highlight that it…

IN THE SUBTITLE OF HIS highly intriguing new book, Prof. Raymond Tallis calls free will ‘an impossible reality’. Though presumably somewhat tongue-in-cheek, this phrase is appropriate in capturing something of what has fascinated philosophers about free will over the centuries: it seems it cannot be, and yet nevertheless it must be. Given that all events in the natural world seem to follow the unbreakable patterns which we call ‘laws of nature’, it might appear that our actions could not be free, at least in the significant sense of having genuine alternative options for action available to us. If all natural events follow natural laws without exception, our actions could never have been otherwise, and thus cannot be freely chosen. Such a conclusion, though, is antithetical to our cherished self-image as…

“Putting his lips together David whistled a few soft, carefully modulated notes. Head cocked to one side, the alien watched and listened. Then it exhaled softly, trying to duplicate the sounds. Since it possessed a very different respiratory mechanism, it failed in the attempt. That did not matter to David. What was important and what prompted him to tears was the fact that the creature tried.”(Ridley Scott, Alien: Covenant) One of the dreams in AI is the creation of a machine that’s indistinguishable from its creators. This was the core of Alan Turing’s idea that a ‘thinking machine’ should be able to fool a human that it’s human after a few minutes of conversation across a textual interface. More recent cinematic forays imagine this indistinguishability to be more than merely…

Back Issues in Print Issue 144 Modern Moral Problems: protest, fat shaming, racism & stoicism, election meddling, animals, artificial wombs / Deleuze & Guattari / C.S. Lewis Brief Life Issue 148 Love & Romance: what is love?, Iris Murdoch on love, Spinoza’s love trouble, / cancel culture / David Chalmers on VR / defining evil / Superman vs Ubermensch We still have copies of these earlier back issues: 39-40, 55-80, 83-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-116, 118-122, 124-139, 142, 143 You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit philosophynow.org/shop Back issues in print cost £4.75 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or US$10/9€/A$15/C$15/NZ$16/£8.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please tell us which you…

Angela Dennis is based in Melbourne, Australia and writes on topics relating to science, economics, culture and law. She holds degrees in law and physics and has written for magazines, radio and documentary broadcasts. One of her most popular projects is a podcast discussing the music of Kate Bush. Jane O’Grady co-founded the London School of Philosophy, having previously lectured for Birkbeck’s Faculty of Continuing Education, and at City University. She co-edited Blackwell’s Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations with A.J. Ayer, writes philosophers’ obituaries for the Guardian, and authored Knowledge in a Nutshell: Enlightenment Philosophy (2019), 16 entries for the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, and introductions to editions of works by J S Mill and Plato. Gustavo Dalaqua teaches in the Philosophy Department at the University of the State of Paraná…

“I am off to read Leo Tolstoy’s Special Military Operation and Peace”, read a meme that did the rounds on social media after the Russian Duma banned the word ‘War’ concerning the invasion of Ukraine. Certainly, Tolstoy’s great epic about the French invasion of Russia in 1812 is a rich source for those who want to understand the gruesome nature of armed conflict through literature. But philosophers too have poured over and analysed the horrors of war. Nietzsche, always the enfant terrible among thinkers, sought to see something positive in wanton destruction, and famously opined, “From the warrior school of life: what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols, p.8) He was the odd one out. Most philosophers are critical of war. “There is no instance of…

Entities are fusing and it is too lateto reverse the amalgamation.Capitalism is prevailing and it is too lateto ban monopolization.Bugs are rampant and it is too lateto control infection.Internets are cast and it is too lateto curtail misinformation.Interdependence is rife and it is too lateto advocate dissociation.Reality is virtual and it is too lateto attempt solid realization.Frail folk are reproducing and it is too lateto implement natural selection. © BOGHOS L. ARTINIAN 2022 Boghos Artinian is a graduate of the American University Medical Center (Beirut) MD, in 1968, and MRCP (UK) in 1973. He has published many poems since 1986.…

My first sight of an openly gay man was on television. In my early teens back in the late Nineties, almost every Saturday evening, my family and I would watch A praça é nossa, one of the most famous comedy shows in Brazil. Vera Verão, played by Jorge Lafond (1952-2003), a black gay man, was one of our favorite characters. Her sketches varied considerably. Sometimes, her race was the main reason for mockery. In other sketches, what led viewers to chuckle was Vera Verão’s fights with the women whose men she wanted to have. Yet despite their differences, a common event present in all sketches that Vera Verão played is that someone with disgust calls Lafond ‘bicha’ (‘faggot’). This was the moment my parents, my sisters, and I laughed the…

In June of 2020, the infamous Golden State Killer was finally brought to justice. From the late 1970s to the early 80s he had terrorised neighbourhoods in California, creeping into homes at night and robbing, raping, and often killing their occupants. Police had few leads, the trail went cold. Then in 2018 investigators put a sample of DNA found at one of the crime scenes into a genealogical database called GEDMatch. GEDMatch was not designed to find criminals, it was intended to help people find people they were related to. It worked by making connections between the DNA sequence data of its members. The user, by entering their DNA sequence into the website, would be given information on likely relatives who were also members, creating a possible family tree. When…

Bev and Ali are deep in discussion. Ali: There can’t be real paradoxes, can there? Those that purport to be paradoxes actually contain ambiguities in meaning, neglected information, hidden assumptions… In short, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Bev: You might think so. However, Russell’s Paradox in set theory has attracted a lot of serious attention in the literature. In fact, Gottlob Frege, a leading logician and mathematician at the time, felt that this paradox devastated his fundamental work on set theory and the foundations of mathematics. Ali: So if Russell’s Paradox holds up, it would, rather worryingly, shake the foundations of mathematics? Bev: Right. So let’s see what is involved. We all know – or think we know – what a ‘set’ is: a collection of all those and only…

Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org Keep them short and keep them coming! Relatively Different DEAR EDITOR: I read with great interest Professor Mark Couch’s essay, ‘Should Kant Be Canceled’ in Issue 148. As someone who finds the Cancel Movement distressing and self-defeating, I am in sympathy with the general thrust of his opposition to ‘canceling the past’. However, I don’t think Prof. Couch did his mission justice by arguing that just as we would not cancel Einstein’s Theory of Relativity because Einstein made some inappropriate statements we also should not discard Kant’s enormously influential ethical theory just because he wrote an essay arguing for the superiority of the white Europeans over other races. The difference between Einstein’s and Kant’s cases is neither trivial nor incidental. While the former’s objectionable statements concerned…

HUMAN BEINGS ARE SELFISH. This is a core premise of both old and modern theories of politics, economics, and philosophy. It is a notion that has over the years been proved by psychologists, zoologists, and biologists, who then go on to explain how our social world is constructed on this selfish basis. Highly influential books have been written by the likes of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1976) or Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of our Nature, 2011) purporting to show that humans are selfish by nature. But suppose it isn’t true? What if, rather than being inherently selfish, humans are in fact inherently kind? Rutger Bregman has addressed this questionin his book Humankind: A Hopeful History (2020). “This is a book about a radical idea” Bregman opens his first…

Over the festive season, in the intervals between eating, drinking, Covid-secure socializing, and giving and receiving gifts, I read Anil Seth’s Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (2021). Beautifully written, with its wonderful erudition worn lightly, it is a must-read. It gathers up in one relatively short book the strongest possible case for believing that we are getting closer to understanding “how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neural wetware inside our heads” (p.5). Yet after reading Being You, the reader may see why ‘the strongest possible case’ falls well short of being strong enough. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with my allergy to Neuromania – the conviction that the brain is not only a necessary condition for…

Socrates notoriously never wrote anything down, but we at least have dialogues written by his contemporaries Plato and Xenophon claiming to record what he said. Diogenes may or may not have written something: later sources quote the titles of lost works attributed to him. We also have letters alleged to be by him, although these are generally agreed to be fakes. But he had no contemporary recorder of his thoughts. We have to reconstruct his life and ideas from quotations and anecdotes in sources long after his lifetime. Some are probably genuine, others less so. It’s like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to work from, knowing that you probably don’t have all the pieces, and that some of the pieces that you do have might not…