Tabla de contenidos para October - November 2024 en Philosophy Now

The title of this issue’s special theme, ‘Thoughts On Thought’, is partly a tribute to our onetime contributor Antony Flew, who wrote a well-known book called Thinking About Thinking. Flew’s book though was about informal logic including various kinds of fallacies. Despite the similarity in titles, the theme of this issue is completely different. It isn’t about logical fallacies, even if here and there it probably contains some. So if you spot any, we encourage you to honour Flew’s memory by writing us a letter! Instead, this issue of Philosophy Now contains articles on a whole range of questions about our minds and the workings of our brains, the relationship between them, the nature of perception, consciousness, the evolution of intelligence and more. Perhaps we should have called it Minds…

‘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 Sneezing “Ah yes, the ecstasy of sneezing.” (Søren Kierkegaard Papers, p.225)…

There’s a well-known one that goes like this:Mary lives in a black-and-white room, learningabout the world from black-and-white booksand from a monitor that shows the worldin black-and-white, explained by lecturerswho I suppose are also her examiners.Because Mary is stipulated to be brilliantand to understand all of neuroscience.It’s known as the ‘knowledge argument’:It asks whether experience isexplained by factual properties or not,pivoting on the moment she’s released.Does Mary then learn something newover and above all possible knowledgeregarding brains and eyes and spectral light? The question asked is one I brush asideas trivial. I’m too wrapped up in Mary.I’m invested in her story. I am, if onlymomentarily, Mary. Wanting to know whythe door never opens till it’s much too late.Mary felt contentment in her room.The shadows flickering on the screen.They emanate from…

To Italians, he is Anselm of Aosta; to the French, Anselm of Bec; to the English, Anselm of Canterbury. If you’re a Catholic, you can dodge the nationalism by calling him ‘Saint Anselm’. But whatever you call him, Anselm is probably the most important thinker of the eleventh century, and he was responsible for one of the big philosophical ideas about God which is still discussed today: the ontological argument for God’s existence. Anselm was born about 1033 in Aosta in northern Italy. At some point he quarrelled with his Lombard noble father Gundulf, and began the life of a wandering scholar. In eleventh century Europe, abbeys and monasteries were the only institutions offering any sort of teaching; they were the nearest things to universities. So Anselm travelled through Burgundy…

AT THE START OF HER career in philosophy, Regan Penaluna thought that ‘‘contemplating eternal truths’’ was the ‘‘closest a human could come to immortality’’ (How To Think Like A Woman, pp.248-9), by reflecting “human thought at its greatest magnitude… [embodying] a culture’s quest for truth and self-knowledge” (p.xii). Fired up and harbouring idealistic dreams, she starts out wanting to think like her philosophy professors. However, in a lecture, her male professor quotes approvingly, proudly even, Plato’s view of women being unfit to rule. Penaluna is initially silenced. But later she nails down the incoherence of the sexist philosopher: on one hand philosophy done by women is (apparently) inseparable from their femininity; yet at the same time, philosophy done by men is (apparently) entirely separate from their masculinity. Humiliated by this…

Over the years I have devoted many (perhaps too many) columns to discussing various philosophers’ doomed attempts to explain how mind can arise out of the matter of the brain. But in recent years, the hunt for the substrate of the mind has extended beyond the brain. The most popular extra-cerebral destination for mind is the rest of the body – an approach called ‘enactivism’. Enactivism is a broad church, but its central tenet is encapsulated with characteristic brilliance by Adam Rostowski (with whom I have had happy hours of agreement and disagreement): “Enactivists eschew the… view of cognition as a brain-bound set of information-processing capabilities explained in terms of neurally-realized computation over internal representation” (In press). Some (not all) enactivists embrace the ‘four Es’, according to which mental processes…

He said later that he knew almost immediately, knew before he’d finished reading it through – before he’d even reached the third stanza. That happened sometimes, every once in a long while: a piece of art – a movie, a novel, or in this case, a poem – that didn’t reveal its treasures slowly but instead all at once, bowling you over with the staggering force of its insight, the words leaping off the page to take hold of your hunched shoulders and shake them, to remind you not just why you loved art, but why you loved life – or why you had loved life, and could again. For the first time in thirty-five years, Elroy packed his papers (yes, he still insisted on hard copies of everything) into…

Helene Scott-Fordsmand Helene Scott-Fordsmand is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and an associate at the Department for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her research is philosophical but employs ethnographic methods to explore questions of the epistemology of medical practice, representations of medical bodies, and unruly elements of enquiry broadly. John Shand Dr John Shand studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and at King’s College, University of Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge, Manchester, and for most of his academic career at the Open University, where he is now a Visiting Fellow. You can find many of his publications, books and articles, at open.academia.edu/JohnShand Susan Andrews Susan Kyne Andrews, a University College Dublin philosophy graduate and teacher at Temple Carrig School, co-wrote the 2015 Junior Cycle Philosophy…

One September in Rome, as I waited for the 700 bus, I looked up and noticed a black tide of birds hanging over Il Vittoriano monument. Tens of thousands of starlings had gathered here to dance their graceful, synchronous dance. They raced and morphed, splintered off and coalesced: they formed an endless stream of imaginary shapes in the tangerine sky, I was mesmerized by the scene above me. I had recently learnt about ‘emergentism’: the view that complex systems, including certain substances, cells, bodies, brains, and ecosystems, can exhibit behaviours that are greater than the sum of their parts. The wetness of water, for example, can’t be explained by individual water molecules alone, which are not themselves wet. The wetness emerges when we have trillions of water molecules acting together.…

In 1995 the English mathematical biologist John Maynard Smith published The Major Transitions in Evolution. Maynard Smith was a co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology in the 1960s and the founder of evolutionary game theory in the early 1970s, and what this book was quietly saying about high intelligence can be considered revolutionary, or at least, notably evolutionary. As a result of a paper I wrote about evolution in the journal Philosophy in 1998, I ended up friends for the last decade of his life with the other co-developer of gene-centred evolutionary biology, the American biologist George C. Williams. And like Maynard Smith and the early Darwinians (including Darwin), Williams was fascinated by the so-called ‘high intelligence paradox’ and the evolutionary problems it implies. One of the early Darwinians even turned…

DR BENJAMIN MEICHES’ main (academic) interests lie in armed conflict, genocide, and international law. An associate professor of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at Washington University, he is known in the field (and no, I don’t mean the battlefield) for his book, The Politics of Annihilation. He’s also known for winning the Best Article of 2019 Prize of the Review of International Studies for an article on ‘Nonhuman Humanitarians’. His new book Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (2023) is in line with that article. The professor says he considers this topic important because nonhuman animals potentially offer a new form of humanitarian politics, through multispecies collaboration. In the book Meiches argues that nonhuman animals do not merely support humans in humanitarian efforts, but directly affect the nature of…

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• World Congress: a report from Rome • Morality found to change with weather • Critic & philosopher Fredric Jameson dies World Congress of Philosophy The 25th World Congress of Philosophy was held August 1-8, 2024 on the campus of Sapienza University in Rome. The theme of this Congress was ‘Philosophy Across Boundaries’ but there were hundreds of topics, as usual for big events like this. Notable plenary sessions and symposia topics included ‘The Boundaries of AI’, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Other Kinds of Minds’, ‘Vulnerability and Knowledge’, ‘Citizenship, Care, and Self-Determination’, ‘Epistemic Injustice, Power, and Struggle’, ‘Embodiment’, and ‘Trust Truth, and Knowledge’. Endowed lecturers included Nancy Tuana, Barbara Herman, Joakim Garff, Zhongjiang Wang, Tae-soo Lee, and Evandro Agazzi. More information is still online at wcprome2024.com. That this event took place…

In 2020 a book by Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting containing twenty portraits of female philosophers was published under the name The Philosopher Queens. It’s one among many recent books about an extensive diversity problem in philosophy, which includes issues of gender, body, language, culture, class, and ethnicity. Here I focus in part on gender. The title of the aforementioned book is a pun on the concept of ‘philosopher kings’, which many readers may know from Plato’s Republic (c.375 BC). According to Socrates, who is Plato’s mouthpiece in the text, philosopher kings are the would-be administers of the ideal society, who, based on their philosophical understanding, can lead the people in a true and just way. Describing these ‘kings’, Socrates notes they may perfectly well be women, as the ideal…

Sarah Bakewell is a British author. Her best-selling works include the National Book Critics Circle Award Winner How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Chatto and Windus, 2010), At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Other Press, 2016), and Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope (Penguin Press, 2023). She is the recipient of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction, for work that “unknots complex philosophical thought with verve and wit; her eye for detail and her animated conversation bring readers to inhabit the lives of great philosophers.” How did you become interested in philosophy? It started when I was a teenager, reading people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus – all the usual…

Absurd Assumptions DEAR EDITOR: I found Dr Doolan’s article ‘Authenticity and Absurdity’ in Issue 163 to be an interesting exploration of potential definitions of authenticity. However, the entire structure of the article fell apart for me when he typecast society into one demographic of his choosing. Doolan seems to be describing people as something like walking stomachs, seeking to consume without critical thinking. To believe that we’re all obsessed with social media, all happily adopting the common denominator, all pursuing our selfish fame and fortune, and all gradually evolving into Kim Kardashian, is illogical. I don’t believe he recognises that the audience of this magazine are critical thinking, selfaware individuals! Perhaps he’s still in the 70s, where we’re all ‘just another brick in the wall’ (Pink Floyd). His claim that…

Katy O’Brian got ripped [muscular] for her role in Rose Glass’s second feature, the 2024 lesbian romantic comedy Love Lies Bleeding. Her character, Jackie, is a doe-eyed drifter who, sometime in the 1980’s, rolls into the small New Mexico town where Lou (Kristen Stewart) works at a gym so gritty, sweaty, and testosterone-drenched that it makes Rocky Balboa’s boxing club look like a five-star resort. After banging Lou’s cheating, wife-beating brother-in-law JJ in the back of his car, Jackie sleeps under a bridge and wakes up the next morning ready to pump some iron to prepare for an imminent Las Vegas bodybuilding competition. Viewers are left in no doubt as to her prospects. You see, Jackie codes as male in all but phallus, and her rippling muscles are given a…

Back Issues in Print Issue 162 Meaning: Frankl, Sartre, Heidegger, suffering, significance, happiness / Metamodernism / Reality & AI / Interview with Luce Irigaray Issue 163 The Politics of Freedom: pluralism, state intervention, punishment and power / Stoics & anger / authenticity & absurdity donut economics / Brian Leiter interview We also still have copies of these earlier back issues: 55-63, 65-80, 83-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-115, 118-121, 126-139, 142-144, 148-161 You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit philosophynow.org/shop Back issues in print cost £5.95 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or US$12/9€/A$15/C$15/NZ$16/£9.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please tell us which you would like). Binders: Our smart green Philosophy Now…