Tabla de contenidos para August - September 2024 en Philosophy Now

“The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of Philosophical Necessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” With these words, John Stuart Mill began his famous 1859 essay On Liberty. As it happens, they also apply to the magazine you are holding, for this issue’s theme is the politics of freedom. We have gathered five articles on subjects connected with civil or social liberty, and we hope you find them thought-provoking even if you do not agree with them. We’ll start off with a brief history of freedom and state intervention since the Age of Enlightenment. Can the state force us to…

‘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 Bread “ Give us today our daily bread”, said an itinerant…

Freedom “is my right to have my own opinion, my own conscience. Many can perfectly live without freedom, as the freedom of having responsibilities can be scary at times. Freedom is the first of our values, and yet, not everyone needs it.” Liudmila Ulitskaya, Interview in Svoboda, 2023 I do not feel free. I had never confessed this to anyone before, for fear of being perceived as dramatic or spoiled. After all, I come from the EU: do I even have the right to complain about a lack of freedom? But when my Russian teacher asked me whether I felt free, I could not lie. We had just read a poignant passage by the Russian novelist Liudmila Ulitskaya, where she describes freedom as “the right to hold one’s own conscience.”…

Is it still possible for us to live a good life while avoiding climate catastrophe? How could society be organised to create the conditions for that, and so they are inherited by succeeding generations? If existing social and economic structures have led us to this looming crisis, what will be demanded of our successors, and what reasons for hope can we give? Warnings that the world’s economic trajectory is unsustainable are not new. Fifty years ago, Donella Meadows and her co-authors pointed out in detail in The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972) that there were ‘limits to growth’. The steady accumulation of data since then has not changed that message, but only given it added urgency. The concept…

“NEXT TO RIDICULE OF denying an evident truth, is that of making much pains to defend it; and no truth appears to me more evident than beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as man” (Treatise, p.176). When David Hume (1711-76) wrote these words, a mere hundred years had passed since René Descartes described animals as mere machines. Yet in this and in many other ways, the twenty-something college dropout who published this magnum opus was exceptionally modern. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, to give the book its full title, was published in instalments in 1739-40. A handful of other philosophers have written books that contained all their thoughts: Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) and Schopenhauer’s Die…

“Mrs Portman, we regret to notify you that our company will not be paying the sum insured for your husband’s death,” the suited insurance agent told her, wielding a fake smile behind his rimless glasses. “What? That’s impossible!” she protested in surprise. “When we took out the accident insurance along with the vehicle, we were assured that it covered with a hefty indemnity in the unlikely event of death or disability. I remember very well that you emphasized that such a case was so extremely unlikely that, precisely for that reason, the indemnity was so high.” The widow in her thirties wore black. Her only touch of color was a pearl necklace of costume-jewelry quality. She had not removed her dark glasses, as a tangible reminder to the world of…

Arianna Marchetti Arianna Marchetti is a thoughtful explorer navigating the labyrinth of postmodernism. With a background in philosophy and social sciences, she tackles the challenges of skepticism and existentialism, relying on reason and common sense to guide her way. AmirAli Maleki AmirAli Maleki was born in 2002 in Tehran, Iran. He is a student and a researcher of philosophy and law. His main fields of interest are Islamic philosophy, political philosophy and hermeneutics. His main concern is to bring philosophy as close as possible to the context of everyday life and use it in all aspects of existence. In Iran he has a philosophical publication called praxispublication.com. Veronique Aïcha Veronique Aïcha is a philosopher with extensive experience in social and criminal justice. She has collaborated with numerous European organizations, like…

Side note: The existentialists in this episode are philosopher, novelist and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) and his life partner, the philosopher, novelist and pioneering feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86). You can read more about Sartre’s thoughts on the themes in this strip in his 1946 book Existentialism is a Humanism (which is short and accessible, like Sartre himself) or in his masterwork Being and Nothingness (1943). Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at existentialcomics.com…

“The cosmos screams. The concrete bears witness to the violence with which it was turned into a wall.” Michel Houellebecq, Rester Vivant, 1991 April 11th 2024 marked fifty years since the release of the film Papillon, based on the thrilling book by Henri Charrière from 1969 about the penal colony Devil’s Island in French Guiana, upon which Charrière was once imprisoned. Fifty years after the release of the film, I visited another prison island, Bastøy in Norway, where I was guided around by its former director, Tom Eberhardt. In recent years there has been much attention across the world upon this prison island because of Michael Moore’s documentary Where to Invade Next? of 2015, which extensively featured Bastøy as ‘the prison of the future’. Yet in The Netherlands, where I’m…

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago, and founder and Director of Chicago’s Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values. Angela Tan chat with him about Nietzsche. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  you wrote that Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900] aims at freeing higher human beings from their false consciousness about morality. Can you give us an example of this false consciousness which has been assimilated by our society? There’s a very high value placed on being altruistic: taking account of other people’s interests and looking out for others. Now Nietzsche is not a fool. He understands that a lot of people who talk about altruism aren’t altruistic at all. As he says about the German political leaders of his day, he finds it unbelievable that…

Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, & Moral Progress by Thomas Nagel Analytic Philosophy & Human Life by Thomas Nagel NO BOOKS BY THOMAS Nagel have appeared since he startled academia with his controversial Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False in 2012. Now there are two at once. Analytic Philosophy and Human Life is a collection of papers, reviews, and tributes to philosopher friends; Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress consists of two ethical essays, one of which was first published in 2021 in the London Review of Books. The first of the essays opens with an anecdote. Soon after the Normandy landings in the Second World War the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, then a British Intelligence officer, was sent to interrogate a French…

Imagine a burger so delicious its very recipe is the cause of a feud between two former friends; a burger so enthralling that a cynical, depressed and overworked squid took one bite to develop an addiction so deadly that he exploded. Picture a burger so visually appealing that one can’t help but imagine the bounty of beef, the crispness of tomato, the saltiness of gherkin, and the fluffiness of its bun between your hands. What does it look like in your mind? What does it taste like? I don’t know about you, but my mouth has started to water, and my stomach is suddenly aware of a burger-shaped hole. Welcome to my hell – into which I would be cast whenever I watched the TV show SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon, 1999…

When it comes to ‘the’ book that’s required reading, there are a few parameters we can set in place that will aid us in finding an answer: timelessness, applicability, and wisdom. While this choice may seem arbitrary, I believe that these attributes are a subset of what we can call ‘greatness’ in a book, since all of these attributes are markers of probable presence of certain important values or truths in a given book. For example, ‘timelessness’ might indicate that there’s something fundamental, essential and important there that served past generations well and has therefore been passed on. ‘Applicability’ relates to usefulness, and while not a sufficient attribute in itself, it is desirable. since it adds a tangible dimension to the value of a philosophy. That is, it shows that…

• Elixir of extended life for mice • Nicholas Rescher mini obituary • Nietzsche exhibition in his childhood home Nietzsche Exhibition Opens Before Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) became a famous philosopher and spent much of his life travelling and writing, he grew up in the small but beautiful town of Naumburg near Leipzig. Throughout his life he kept returning to his childhood home at Weingarten 18, and remained there permanently after his mental breakdown in 1889, being cared for by his devoted mother. The Nietzsche Haus is open to the public and since 2010 has also been the site of a documentation centre of Nietzsche writings. Now it houses a new exhibition – though contrary to conventional expectation, you won’t find items of furniture or Nietzsche’s personal effects there. Instead, the…

At a round table they sat, called a truceto discuss the indestructible worldand meditate upon eternal things. Like triplets, separated at birtheach possessed a portion of their truthyet only made sense in unison. Tired of jockeying for positionaddressing mind, body or spirit, alonethey came, like jealous gods, to save us. Unable to shirk their messianic callingstogether they preached liberation,through odes to joy and manuals of love. With myth and parable, the defiant musereminded us of the art of being presentand then how to vanish without a trace. More variations on the old themes: of exile,homecoming, how to cut to the essenceof our humanity and unquenchable thirst. In the corner of a small bookshop, they convened:‘Philosophy, Spirituality, and Poetry’,temporarily reconciled to share their wisdoms. © YAHIA LABABIDI 2024 Yahia Lababidi’s books…

Perhaps the most important pre-equisite for doing good philosophy is awareness, depth and precision concerning our everyday lives and surroundings. In this, the philosopher is like a shopper who stands in front of a shelf in the local supermarket, constantly spotting new things that might be of use. That shelf is our life, and everything in philosophy depends on this care in studying what might otherwise be routine. Therefore, we should learn to philosophize at the peak of being alive; and that time is every morning when we wake up. I slamic philosophers of the middle ages paid a lot of attention to the most basic aspects of life in the times in which they lived. Music is one of those basic facts still today – perhaps especially so when…

Movie director Ridley Scott is known for creating an authentic cinematic world within each of his films. The battle scenes in his newest blockbuster, Napoleon, have been compared to the opening sequence of Stephan Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, for their sense of feeling real (though obviously neither is real). In his House of Gucci (2021), Lady Gaga (playing Patrizia Reggiani) and Adam Driver (as Maurizo Gucci, heir to the Gucci fortune), talk to each other in English, with what are meant to be Italian accents. Gaga spent months speaking English with her ‘Italian’ accent before film shooting began, just to get it authentic. There’s only one catch. Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizo Gucci, being Italians, didn’t speak to each other in English with fake Italian accents. They spoke Italian, with authentic…

Meanings & Misses DEAR EDITOR: Job well done to the editors, writers, designers, artists and cartoonists whose insights and aesthetics made for a very engaging and thought provoking Issue 162 (my first as a new subscriber). The Meaning Issue was a welcome sight here in the United States as our summer of political parrying amped up and the entire meaning of a free society dictated by the rule of law seems to be in a tenuous position. Whether we fall into the trap of authoritarianism or continue on our messy, sometimes maddeningly slow journey of democratic governance, we will grapple with the topics analyzed in Issue 162 – significance, meaning, suffering, consciousness, and core values. Through the interconnectedness of these themes, we are able to get a deeper understanding of…

ANOTHER BOOK ON POSTmodernism? Isn’t that yesterday’s news? Or maybe last decade’s? Surely postmodernism has been analysed virtually to death; and hasn’t contemporary thought moved on, anyway? To some degree that may be true: the label ‘postmodern’ is perhaps not attached to ideas and practices as frequently as it was a few years ago, and the number of studies explicitly dealing with postmodernism has declined. That, however, doesn’t mean that postmodernism has gone away. The historical pattern for idea development, is often that a set of ideas bursts onto the intellectual scene and becomes the dominant talking point for a time, until some of its principles are absorbed into the perceived wisdom of the day, part of the accepted way of thinking, whilst their origins are gradually forgotten. Given that…

Can a novelist be a philosopher? Kant in his Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose advocated we should assume the idea of history heading inexorably towards a condition of world peace. He thought this would help motivate us to make it happen, rather than surrendering to helplessness. However, he admitted that it seems rather more like how we think of the story in a novel than history. While we are liable to think of Kant as one of the architects of secular modernity, this prophetic element, this deliberately hopeful and admittedly unfounded account of future historical progress has something of religion about it. But if Kant’s speculative philosophical history is like a novel, perhaps there’s no reason why a historical novel should not pack a philosophical punch.…

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There is a much-quoted passage near the opening of Richard Feynman’s famous Lectures on Physics (1963): “If in some cataclysm all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.” These ‘little particles’ have undergone some strange transformations in the last century, not least as a result of Feynman’s own work. They have become ever more ethereal,…