Tabla de contenidos para October - November 2022 en Philosophy Now

We tend to think of faith as a matter of personal choice. It is very much up to you, we say, wishing to give other people the space to live their lives their way. We might think of ourselves all on a journey through life, growing physically, mentally, and perhaps spiritually. It is often hard work since meaning and purpose are elusive and moral values contentious and slippery. It seems a lonely path; it is easy to lose hope and get depressed. ‘Keeping the faith’ is hard work at times: it calls for maturity and sensitivity to realise what a challenge it can be. We are often told, and may come to believe, that we fall short because we are not mature and sensitive enough, not far enough yet along…

Paul-Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers, France, on October 15th, 1926, to an upper-middle-class bourgeoise family. He excelled in his education yet rejected much of his upbringing. Foucault’s work as a philosopher and historian of ideas radically influenced the historical method as well as many other fields apart from philosophy. The influence that Foucault had upon literature, philosophy, history, and psychology, was groundbreaking, and caused many interdisciplinary changes. While Foucault did not abide labels regarding his philosophy, his work was instrumental in influencing post-modernism and post-structuralism. His central interests were in the understanding power and knowledge. He argued that knowledge is used as a form of social control. The History of Foucault Michel Foucault studied philosophy and psychology at the Ecole Normale Superieure under Professor Louis Althusser, whose students also…

The Enigma of Reason ACCORDING TO THE journalist H.L. Mencken, every complex problem has a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong. The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding by cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber is devoted to examining one such problem and solution. The problem in question is, Why did human beings develop the capacity to reason? The solution, defended by philosophers throughout the ages and by most psychologists today, is that “reason seems to have an obvious function: to help individuals achieve greater knowledge and make better decisions on their own” (p.175). The goal of The Enigma of Reason is to show why this solution doesn’t work, and why an alternative explanation makes better sense. So what’s wrong with the traditional idea that…

Tony McKenna is a writer and philosopher who has battled a childhood addiction to water parks, without success. In his spare time, he enjoys the novels of Dostoevsky, the films of Roberto Benigni, and the classic UK series Only Fools and Horses. His latest novel, The Face of the Waters, is a thriller about a serial killer that is set in Mexico. Becca Turcotte is 27 years old and working on a philosophy degree full-time. It has taken her twice as long as a typical student due to living with multiple sclerosis but she is now in her senior year. She went back to school the same year she was diagnosed. Philosophy is her passion and she has goals of getting into counselling psychology after she graduates. Jonathan Beever is Associate Professor of…

In one form the Ontological Argument for God is basically the argument: 1) God is by definition the perfect being; 2) It is more perfect for a perfect thing to exist than not exist; 3) Therefore God exists. This argument for the existence of God was given the name ‘ontological’ by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), but it was the invention of Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1078, in his book Proslogion (how we miss philosopher-bishops these days!). The word derives from ‘ontos’, which is the Greek word for ‘being’. Anselm’s own form of the Ontological Argument begins with the words: id quo maius cogitari nequit – “there must be that [thing] the greater than which cannot be conceived.” Anselm concluded that a being who has all the qualities of greatness and…

A satire against the dogmatists Arise my Hume and yield your Scottish Fork,Raze all systems and sack Scholastic York.Observe the craft then falsify its claimsAs Franklin did when testing Mesmer’s games.Imagination thus one might conclude,A fact to some, to others simply rude.No dogma shall persist, no magic flute,No Monads sing with Hegel’s absolute.Behold my Hume how dialectics thriveBy utter fantasies are kept alive.Each fervent man defends his sacred creedBe it a Marx or others of that breed.Oh look how great our Cosmos, well design’d:A worthless sketch whose author(s) left unsign’d.If add too much into that common senseWhat verb might take then but a timeless tense?Go matchless wit a statement senseless write,Like Cantor’s Set, exhaust Reason’s light.A style obscure do not such thoughts excuseWhich are thought to irk yet made to…

Can we ever write about mattersthat we cannot speak of –the thing or two which determinewho we are and what we do? When can we hint at the harmwe’ve hardly survived;the realization that our allureis due to deformity? Sure, we confess in codehere, there and everywhere,beneath our breathsand over their heads But when can we ever speakplainly, of our obscene pain?To whom and how might weunburden ourselves, artlessly? “The answer might be never”whispers art, to which we owe all– our masks, wisdom and lives.Only transformation will set us free. © YAHIA LABABIDI 2022 Yahia Lababidi is the author of Signposts to Elsewhere (aphorisms), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (essays), The Artist as Mystic (conversations), and, most recently, Learning to Pray (poetry & aphorisms) and Desert Songs (poetry &…

THE FULL TITLE OF MacCormack’s book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. It may be about the end of the era of human beings, but according to the Preface, it is intended to be an optimistic work of joy and radical compassion, with ‘radical compassion’ being interpreted as a form of grace to be extended to all life on Earth. Its position is a counternihilism that affirms (amongst other things) queer feminism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and human extinction. In other words, it’s ethics, Jim, but not as we know it. MacCormack’s central argument is simple: “It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them” (p.65). But that’s easier said than done. You can’t tell someone who has the flu to ‘just…

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• Karl Jaspers Reloaded • Eth-letes Compete in Schools Olympiad • Kripke, Noddings and Shoemaker dead Jaspers Online Good news for all fans of existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). His complete unpublished works, including letters, family archives and photos, as well as audio recordings of the philosopher have been made freely available online. Following years of preparation, the German Literary Archive (DLA), which also holds important documentation concerning thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Arnold Gehlen, Nicolai Hartmann, Edith Landmann, Karl Löwith, Odo Marquard, Joachim Ritter and Ernst Tugendhat, has now released all materials. The significant literary estate of the philosopher who died 1969 in Basel can be found via the DLA website: www.dla-marbach.de/ Diogenes Statue Row It is fair to say that Diogenes of Sinope (412…

As philosophers, we often like to think about what can be known. It is also important, however, to consider the reverse: what cannot be known – whether there may be certain truths that are simply beyond our understanding as human beings. I’m talking about ‘known unknowns’: things that we know that we don’t know, or that we simply cannot know. The philosophical candidates are varied: knowledge of the nature of objects as they are or ‘things-in-themselves’ rather than mere appearances of them; the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body; or the nature and existence of God. I want to consider the theological question here, and how attitudes to God may be seen through the prism of the humility of recognising one’s limits. Does it show greater…

Many people today still hold the stereotypical view of medieval theologians: a bunch of monks squabbling interminably over how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin. Yet some of them were profound and subtle thinkers. Some of their metaphysical arguments surprisingly anticipate those of much later philosophers. Hegel/Eriugena One of the most famous and significant openers in philosophy was brought to us courtesy of G.W.F. Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812). In its first chapter, Hegel attempts to respond to the problem of having false assumptions in thinking by starting with a category which has been shorn of all presuppositions, determinations and qualities, such that it simply is. Or to say the same, the philosopher begins with the category of ‘pure being’. Now according to Hegel, pure being “would…

It is important for many theists to show that their belief is rational, and this often involves them rejecting obviously irrational beliefs. Holding that the Earth is six thousand years old is irrational because it directly conflicts with strong scientific evidence to the contrary. Saying that God could move any hypothetical object while at the same time being capable of creating a rock so vast that even He could not budge it is also irrational because the two claims are logically incompatible. Nevertheless, some religious claims are quite feasible. Someone who, for instance, thinks God guided the world’s evolutionary process or in some sense inspired human authors to write sacred texts can often reconcile their faith with an open and affirming attitude towards scientific discovery and analytical thinking. However, in…

I contacted the London-based philosopher Nat Rutherford after reading an article he did for the BBC earlier this year. In line with Rutherford’s PhD on ‘Moral Pluralism and Political Disagreement’, we dug into the moral pluralism of happiness, and what happens when our happy vices oppose morality. “I just don’t think that happiness is very valuable. It’s not something I pursue,” he tells me. “But the value of happiness is also something I don’t really consider, because I don’t think it’s very effective. One of the important things about happiness – and I think Aristotle had this insight over two thousand years ago in a way that the utilitarians in the nineteenth century didn’t – is that we’re often hostage to fortune. How well your life goes, whether you get…

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE’S short book Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) sets out the main claims of Sartre’s existentialism, and defends these against some of the criticisms laid against it. Sartre makes two basic claims – firstly that God is dead and this has consequences for the way we live; and secondly that all claims about humanity and the world must begin with human experience. Given these two claims, Sartre concludes that ‘existence precedes essence’. What he means by this is that human beings are without any pre-existing purpose or ‘essence’ which is not of their own making. Let’s explore these claims some more. If we think about an everyday manufactured object – let’s say a chair – we can see that it has been made with specific qualities in order to…

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