Tabla de contenidos para October - November 2023 en Philosophy Now

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.” Bertrand Russell “Philosophy is like a washing machine. It takes what is familiar and turns it round and round, leaving it on its head, or in a new arrangement, so you can see it from a different perspective.” Anja Steinbauer, 200 Words to Help You Talk About Philosophy The Cambridge don G.E. Moore, when asked “What is philosophy?”, used to wave a languid hand at the books lining the shelves in his study and say “It’s what all those are about.” Some students found this unhelpful. Moore’s friend Ludwig Wittgenstein perhaps had a better reply. He would say that philosophy…

‘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 to 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…

Proud Reason brought low Credo ut intelligam The Word revealed Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth was the leading Christian theological scholar of the twentieth century. He didn’t think much about sinful humanity, but he did have a reasonably high estimation of his own qualities, humbly considering himself part of an august lineage that included Kierkegaard, Luther, Calvin, St Paul, and Jeremiah – seers who believed that ‘man is made to serve God and not God man’. Barth was revolted by the turn that Christianity had taken in nine-teenth century Europe, with its liberal views on beliefs, its reductively rationalistic (ie anti-supernatural) approach to God, and a biblical exegesis which reduced the word of God to the status of historical myth. The idea that we share in the Divine Mind through…

‘‘If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men […] you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself’.’’ (James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers) We are tribal in our political and moral thinking, and project our deficiencies onto others. We rarely live up to our ideals. We are susceptible to motivated reasoning: evaluating evidence in a biased way to arrive at our favored conclusion. We confabulate about our motives and beliefs. This isn’t to deny that people can be loving, generous, and self-sacrificing, but to emphasize the dark…

WHEN THE YOUNG CLAUDE Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), then a bored teacher of philosophy in Paris, received an offer to work in Brazil, he embraced the opportunity to remake himself as an anthropologist, conducting fieldwork among the remote tribes of the Mato Grosso. He thus exchanged what he saw as ‘the claustrophobic Turkish-bath atmosphere’ of philosophical reflection for the ‘open air’ of ethnography. Later, though, he came to realize that he had never truly broken with philosophy. In the end, he felt, ‘we’re always doing philosophy’. In Search of Us (2022) by Lucy Moore covers the heroic period of social anthropology between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, when it matured into the discipline we recognize today. The succession of portraits of male anthropologists in the tropics wearing…

I am a philosopher and I think and write about various philosophical issues, both timely and timeless. Officially, I am a philosopher because I occasionally publish the results of these efforts, and also because I am a member of an academic community that recognizes me as such. Being a philosopher, I presumably do philosophy, in the same way that carpenters do carpentry or dancers do dancing. If we want to know about the experience of doing carpentry, we need to look closely at what exactly carpenters do when they engage in carpentry. Carpentry seems to consist of a series of ideas about wooden constructions, and of actions that manipulate pieces of wood to create desired objects. But what exactly is the nature of philosophical activity? In other words, what does…

“Bernard Williams once posed the awkward question, What is the point of doing philosophy if you’re not extraordinarily good at it? The problem is that you can’t, by sheer hard work, like a historian of modest gifts, make solid discoveries that others can then rely on in building up larger results. If you’re not extraordinary, much of what you do in philosophy will… [probably] be both unoriginal and wrong. That is why most of the philosophy of the past is not worth studying. So isn’t there something absurd about paying thousands of people to think about these fundamental questions?” (Thomas Nagel, Other Minds, 1995, p.10.) When Thomas Nagel wrote this passage, he was mainly questioning the point of philosophy understood as a profession, but as a professional philosopher, I can’t…

If you ask people to suggest a book that changed the way they think, it should be no surprise if philosophical works pop up as influential texts more often than others. After all, philosophers are supposed to be the ‘big ideas’ people. But we usually imagine such thinkers starting from scratch, maybe by meditating in a closed, warm room in the fashion made famous by René Descartes. Yet that’s not quite right. In fact, philosophers, just like the rest of us, are often following up something they were told or read. Take Plato. His writings have been aptly described as the source for which all subsequent philosophy is merely ‘footnotes’ – and yet Plato himself was clearly influenced by his reading mystical figures such as Pythagoras. In fact, the characters…

Over thirty years ago, the great physicist John Wheeler made a claim that seemed astonishing then and should still seem astonishing, indeed absurd, now. He said “every it derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit” (‘Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links’, Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on the Foundation of Quantum Mechanics, 1989). By this he meant the fundamental stuff of the physical world is information. Every physical object (every It) is a pattern of BITS. ‘What is’, is information, all the way down. Wheeler saw this as an inevitable conclusion to be drawn from quantum mechanics, which, he said, “in an everyday context is unshakeable, unchallengeable, undefeatable – it’s battle-tested” (The Ghost in the…

• Cornel West runs for President • Hypatia flees … to Glasgow • NTT launches its own philosophy institute The Moral Brain Moral Foundations Theory, or MFT to its friends, is an attempt to explain why certain aspects of morality seem to be the same everywhere despite the otherwise wide differences between cultures. The idea is that individuals work from a set of innate and universal moral foundations. MFT was first described and named in 2004 by Jonathan Haidt and Craig Joseph. Now a team of neuroscientists at U.C. Santa Barbara have conducted a study into whether this theory, and the categories that it defines, are reflected in neural activity. They found that a general network of brain regions was involved when faced with immoral acts, such as cheating on…

It is often said that philosophy is deprived of the possibility to progress because, unlike science, it cannot accumulate knowledge. But to say that progress is a mere addition of discoveries is to misunderstand the concept. Even in science, progress is far from a linear amassing of theories; scientific history is filled with contestations, revolutions, and redefinitions. The human sciences also defy the linear progress idea. From Durkheim to Weber, from Saussure to Chomsky, it is evident that progress in sociology, linguistics, or even psychoanalysis sciences is neither linear nor cumulative. Rather, it manifests itself through the refinement of analytic techniques, interpretations, and reflections. A similar posture could be adopted for philosophy. Philosophy does not consider past concepts as obsolescent, or even as able to become obsolescent. We still…

It is likely that most current academic philosophers would agree that there is not remotely a philosopher alive today who matches up to some of the classic philosophers. The last truly great analytic philosopher might have been Wittgenstein; the last great continental philosopher Heidegger. The former died in the 1950s, while the latter passed away in 1976. Probably there are more philosophers working today than ever before, and certainly some of them are very good and interesting, but are any of them great? Will some thinkers working today eventually come to be recognised by future generations as having been great? Nobody seems to have much confidence in this. Of course, ‘greatness’ is an unclear term. Yet, it doesn’t seem controversial to say that ‘greatness’ is a laudible attribute of particularly…

Chances are you’re too young to remember Carly Simon’s tune ‘No Secrets’ from her 1972 album No Secrets, in which she sings to her lover “We have no secrets, we tell each other everything.” However, telling everything – all those past lovers, all those hidden fantasies – may not be the best recipe for a healthy relationship. The song’s refrain ends, “Sometimes I wish… that I never knew, some of those secrets of yours.” Perhaps we are in danger of discarding this wisdom, in a society where everything that is hidden is looked upon with suspicion, and transparency is hyped as a great virtue. We are frequently assaulted by calls for transparency. A quick Google search on ‘the need for transparency’ delivers lists of reasons why more transparency is needed,…

When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K. or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org Keep them short and keep them coming! High Impact Thinking DEAR EDITOR: I was pleased to see asteroids mentioned in many of the answers to Issue 157’s Question of the Month: ‘How will humanity end?’ Including comets would have been even better. But a couple of misconceptions about our vulnerability to this type of apocalypse need correcting. One of the writers stated that “all very large asteroids are tracked.” No… only the ones we have discovered. It is true that a number of NASA folk have said that we have found all of the near-Earth asteroids that would be large enough to wipe us out,…