Tabla de contenidos para June - July 2024 en Philosophy Now

‘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 is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about. Philosophers on Cheese Grated cheese has been around longer than you might think.…

For his relentless attacks on American foreign policy and his championing of the world’s oppressed peoples, Noam Chomsky has been a hero for many would-be revolutionaries. Less well known, perhaps, is his pioneering work in linguistics, where Chomsky was responsible for his own revolution. Chomsky’s interest in politics began early. At the age of ten he wrote his first article on the dangers of fascism, and by the age of twelve or so he was identifying himself as an anarchist (his parents were thrilled). As an undergraduate he became fascinated by linguistics, which he studied while maintaining his involvement in leftist politics. This set the pattern for his life – changing the way we think about language while trying to change the world. It’s a lot for one man to…

In this article I want to suggest that much of the use we make of fossil-fuelled cars might be morally wrong, or at the very least ought to be subject to serious moral assessment. Rather than adopting just one kind of ethical framework, though, I will try to show that the non-essential driving of fossil-fuelled cars is morally questionable according to reasonable interpretations of four major contemporary approaches in moral philosophy: the doctrine of double effect, utilitarianism, contractualism, and virtue ethics. Double Effect Driving Driving a fossil-fuelled car (or even just turning on the engine) causes harms of many different kinds. It pollutes the air, exacerbating symptoms of cardiovascular diseases and releasing carcinogens; it intensifies greenhouse effects, such as climate change; it increases the risk of killing, injuring, and maiming…

THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION of Jostein Gaarder’s original Sophie’s World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy was published in 1995, and became the bestselling book in the world that year. Indeed, since its original Norwegian publication in 1991, Sophie’s World has been translated into fifty-nine languages, and has sold more than forty million copies. Over these few decades, it has been adopted as a standard introduction to philosophy. Does it need, therefore, to take the form now of a two-volume graphic novel by author, Vincent Zabus, and Nicoby, artist? The novel was already adapted into a movie in 1999, after all! At some point, a popular work just doesn’t need to be popularized anymore. Or so some defenders of ‘real philosophy’ would hold. How much genuine philosophy can you fit…

I have attended a number of funerals recently and it has got me thinking. Imagine after you’ve died, your loved ones are sitting around, reminiscing about your life. What might they be saying about you? How will you be remembered? Did you have a good life? Well, how would they know? And what constitutes a good life, anyway? The first thing to consider about what makes a life ‘good’, is whether the value of a life is determined by the liver of that life or by others. Suppose that your last thought before you died was that you had had an excellent life, but when your loved ones sit around and discuss you, they all decide that your life was awful. Is that possible? Could they be right about your…

Many people assume, in the face of a virtually infinite universe, that we are insignificant beings. This assumption arises from our comparative extreme smallness. After all, our planet is nothing but a ‘blue dot’ in a vast solar system, a grain of dust lost in a secondrate suburb of a vast galaxy, which in turn dwells among another three hundred billion galaxies or more in the known universe alone. We’re negligible and peripheral – they say – and the universe is completely blind and indifferent towards us. I think this common assumption of our insignificance might be challenged in eight arguments: First: Relative size alone cannot be a measure for the absolute significance of a thing. Comparisons don’t tell us anything about one’s value in absolute terms, or a whale…

When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up. Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org Keep them short and keep them coming! Literature is Vital DEAR EDITOR: I’d like to make four brief, interconnected points on ‘Plato versus Literature’ in Issue 161. Firstly, mimesis [art copying life] is less (if at all) a ‘representation’ than it is a representation of reality from a distinctive human perspective. The two are not the same. In merely mimicking reality the former would not serve much of a purpose; it would, indeed, be a needless, inferior re-rendering of the original. Secondly, in re-presenting, literature is less a mimic than a commentary – a perspective on life, not a re-rendering of it. As such, to be a unique take on aspects of lived experience, it requires interpretation. Never mind…

If you’ve never read Heraclitus’s book, then you share something in common with every modern scholar of his work: we only have fragments. Unfortunately, so little of his writing survives that it is difficult to piece together the life and opinions of this intriguing philosopher. This is what makes studying him partly so easy, and partly so difficult: you can read all the surviving fragments in an hour, then puzzle over them for the rest of your life. We may never understand Heraclitus’s philosophy in detail, but I hope by the end of this article to introduce you to some of the themes that survive, to what recent(ish) philosophers have said about them, and to what we can learn from them today. Life Most of what we know about Heraclitus’s…

In reaction to the religion, tradition and romanticism of earlier eras, ‘modernism’ was the name given to the broad movement of ideas, art and architecture that sprang from the twentieth century’s celebration of the supremacy of science. ‘Postmodernism’, by contrast, labels an attitude that took root in Western culture from the 1960s onwards, that rejected modernism’s certainty and universalism. Postmodernism has been characterised by experimentation, irrationalism, playfulness and, some might say, runaway individualism, including a rejection of the very idea of an authoritative, objective point of view. Considered a precursor of postmodernism, Friedrich Nietzsche caught something of its spirit when he wrote that “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, 1873). A similar skepticism about given truths was manifested in…

In 1637, René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, famously declared Cogito, ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am”. Descartes was so sceptical about what, if anything, was real that he even questioned if he existed. He concluded that because he doubted his own existence he must be real, as he must exist in order to do the doubting. Descartes perfectly exemplifies humanity’s innate desire to understand reality – to know the true nature of the world, from what is visible to the naked eye to what lies behind the veil. Some of our approaches to know reality have been objective, being built on rational arguments and evidence (e.g. philosophy and science), whilst others have been more subjective, grounded in beliefs, experiences, and emotions arising from religion, culture, art,…

Have you ever read modern technical books in philosophy? If so, you might have noticed that, broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: treatises on a particular subject matter (say, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, 1971), and commentaries on what has been written by philosophers of previous generations (for example, the classic A Commentary on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason by Lewis White Beck, 1960). Both forms have a long history. The tradition of treatises goes back to early ancestors such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (fourth century BCE), while the tradition of commentaries finds predecessors in authors such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (early third century AD). The ancient and modern versions of these two types of work are of course different, but the basic idea is the same. What…

The Crisis of Culture by Olivier Roy OLIVER ROY’S LATEST book, The Crisis of Culture (2024), represents the culmination of an intellectual trajectory set forth first in Globalised Islam (2002), Holy Ignorance (2008), and Is Europe Christian? (2019). The common thread of these books is a reflection on the interplay between local cultures, religious norms, and globalization. The Crisis of Culture is remarkable for its ambitious formulation of a grand theory at a time when social scientists often settle for middle-range theories and/or provincial case-studies. Roy’s self-declared objective is to analyse the symbolic impact of events rather than the statistical magnitude of the phenomena under study. In The Crisis of Culture, Roy puts forth four key arguments, concerning: (1) The deculturation of societies; (2) The extension of norms; (3) The…

The idea of a cosmic purpose is one which many of us are familiar with from religion. What happens in this world, so the story goes, is ultimately an expression of divine will. With the rise of science, the notion of a universe regulated by a deity has been displaced by one regulated by non-conscious physical laws. Being non-conscious, those laws are empty of purpose. Their regulative powers are also not external to the phenomena aligned with them. As the philosopher Helen Beebee wittily expressed it, physical laws are not “prior to and watching over matters of fact to make sure they don’t step out of line” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61, 2000). Happenings are simply the patterns or habits of the unfolding natural world, unguided by a cosmic purpose.…

Dennis had just poured milk over his cereal when there was a knock at the door. He went to answer it. “Hello,” said the man on the doorstep. He had a strangely familiar voice. “I am here to take you to our universe.” He smiled and gestured, as if in explanation, first to the tall woman standing next to him, and then to the giant spaceship that was parked in the middle of the road, creating a line of cars either side of it. It was only when Dennis gave his uncertain “Hello” back to the man that he realised where he’d heard his voice before: it was Dennis’s own voice. ‘My voice sounds much less posh than his does,’ Dennis thought. “I don’t think you can park there,” he…