Table of contents for April/May 2016 in Philosophy Now

Here at Philosophy Now we try to perform a whole set of disparate tasks, often simultaneously, rather like a seal juggling coloured balls while also honking a horn with its nose and riding a bicycle. We endeavour to present the best philosophy articles we can, for your edification and astonishment. We also delve into the history of philosophy, exploring the ideas of some of the most intriguing thinkers of the past 2,500 years, including the crazy ones. We also investigate some of the great philosophical problems such as the foundations of ethics, the nature of consciousness and – two months ago – the existence of free will. But on top of all of this, we keep a weather eye out for significant new trends and developments in philosophy, wherever they…

Professor Ferraris, are there any keywords you’d like to give our readers to help them understand New Realism? I’ll give you seven, one for each day of the week: Individuals. Ontology (what there is) is only made up of individuals: this interview; a summer storm; the ant that runs across my table. Obviously, epistemology (what we know about what there is) speaks of ‘interviews’, ‘storms’, ‘ants’, using words and concepts that designate classes of things; but the classes to which these words refer do not exist except in thought. Unamendability. The fact that individuals exist independently of thought is proven by the fact that they cannot be amended or corrected with the power of thought. This is in distinct contrast to notions and concepts, that is, to what we know,…

What do conservatives stand for? One popular idea is that conservatives cling to tradition and resist change. There is an element of truth to this description, in that conservatives do value tradition – albeit not for its own sake, but (following Edmund Burke), out of the conviction that systems and institutions that have proven themselves over the course of generations should not be hastily cast aside in favor of the untested (and typically ill-fated) vogue. But ultimately, this is a feature of conservatism rather than its essence. Conservatism is a response to progressivism. The point of divergence between them relates to the (im)perfectibility of man – a centuries-long debate with theological origins but profound present political implications. Progressives tend to view history in a generally linear fashion: they think that…

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! Tastes of Freedom DEAR EDITOR: In the Editorial in Issue 112, you say that “It is entirely consistent to say that we do choose, [even if] God knows what we’re going to choose” (and presumably if we were to have chosen differently, He would have known that too). You say that this question is ‘utterly different’ from the scientific question of free will. I’m not so sure. Substitute ‘Laws of Nature’ for ‘God’: “It is entirely consistent to say that we do choose, but the Laws of Nature can explain what we choose.” But are we free…

DOES IT MATTER whether this review is presented to you in a one-off public gathering that takes place at a unique historical time and place, such as a literary salon, or in an edition of Philosophy Now magazine? Does the change from collective audience to solitary reader have any impact on your cognitive faculties, or even have political implications? Furthermore, does it make any difference if you’re reading this not in the print version, but via some earlytwenty-first-century communication tech, such as a smartphone or an iPad? Walter Benjamin’s Information Age The German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) certainly thought all this does make a difference. He had reason to reflect on new forms of communication. Hounded by Nazi propaganda, he settled in Paris, and later, after the fall of…

Umberto Eco (5 Jan 1932 – 19 Feb 2016) Umberto Eco once wrote: “We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death.” This limit has now sadly caught up with the author of these words himself. Philosopher, semiotician, linguist and novelist Eco has died at the age of 84 of pancreatic cancer from which he had been suffering for two years. Eco first came to wide public attention for his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a medieval whodunnit whose plot centred on a lost work by Aristotle, and whose title connected it with Eco’s interests in philosophy of language. “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name does smell as sweet.” He followed this with the complex thriller Foucault’s Pendulum, packed full of hidden philosophical…

At the opening of his 1907 lecture series ‘Pragmatism’, William James commented on the growing disparity between academic philosophy and a philosophy whose relevance ordinary people would feel in their lives. This latter philosophy would be one which truly mattered to us, James claimed, because it would deal with “our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos” (Pragmatism, 1907). Yet while technical philosophy is found to be wanting in this regard, James had no intention of presenting Pragmatism as sundered from it. Instead he proposes it as a middle road between the two demands, as the subtitle to the published lecture series indicates: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. What James determined was new about Pragmatism was not the…

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was a French psychoanalytical philosopher. I would like to apply some of his ideas to Mary Harron’s film American Psycho (2000) in order to understand the psychotic behaviour of its protagonist, ‘Patrick Bateman’. My hope is that explaining the film in these terms will contribute to a better understanding of psychosis. Specifically, I want to show that we can understand ‘Bateman’s’ psychotic behaviour in Lacanian terms, since his behaviour at the end of this movie demonstrates the lived experience of psychosis, where, as Lacan says, “That which has not seen the light of day in the symbolic appears in the real.” All will be revealed. Lacan & Psychosis To understand Lacan’s interpretation of psychosis, it is imperative to first grasp his concept of ‘foreclosure’. In Lacan, Language,…

I’m talking with Markus Gabriel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, in particular about his new book Why The World Does Not Exist. But first tell us a little about your background. How did you get interested in philosophy in the first place? At some point in school I felt frustrated because the questions that were raised there and the ways they were answered didn’t seem satisfying to me. The answers were somewhat unjustified and ungrounded, in pretty much all disciplines. Then I happened to break my ankle skateboarding and I had to stay at home over the summer, so I started reading some philosophy because a friend of mine who was much older gave me Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. So this is how it all…

Your education was mainly focused on literature. How did you discover philosophy? To be honest, my training in philosophy dates back to high school. I also did a module in Aesthetics – Descartes, Kant and Husserl – during my BA, but that was it at university. I have been cultivating philosophy mainly because of my personal interest in the subject, but I have to say my high school teacher was absolutely exceptional – most people assume I have a degree in philosophy – they can’t tell! So thank you, Maria Teresa Cazzaniga. It’s been incredibly hard and challenging, but worth it! Do you feel like an academic philosopher? If not, what do you think about academia? That’s a tricky question. I do not consider myself an academic, even though I…

Despite the near-ubiquity of analytic philosophy’s abstract, narrow, questioning procedures these days, there are still philosophers who pay little attention to its puzzles. Some instead spend their time focused upon the activity of philosophy itself. Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) was one such philosopher. His essays and books have been making their way from their native French into English translations for three decades now, largely due to the work of Michael Chase. Hadot’s work focuses heavily upon the historical and social aspects of the philosophical minds he finds himself engaged with – mainly ancient Greek thinkers. These thinkers heavily influenced his critique of overly theoretical but practically vacuous analytical philosophical traditions. He criticized the analytic tradition implicitly rather than explicitly, but, despite his focus upon presenting an alternative, this criticism is among…

In my last column, I talked about the challenges and excitements of tackling ancient Indian philosophy in my History of Philosophy podcast – thankfully with the help of an expert, Jonardon Ganeri. We’ve already received some feedback about the series, young though it is. One of the most common queries is whether we can really talk about philosophy in ancient India, as opposed to religious belief systems. Is Buddhism a religious tradition, or a philosophical tradition? Are the Upanisads really philosophical texts? My response to these questions has been twofold: first, they’re slightly above my pay grade, and second, even if we think that these texts and traditions are religious, they certainly contain philosophical material. An interesting test case is the Indian concept of ahimsa, meaning ‘non-injury’ or ‘non-violence’. Even…

Imagine if Alice hadn’t followed the White Rabbit down the rabbit hole. She would then not have drunk the potion (or was it ate the forbidden fruit?) and met the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. My best piece of wisdom is therefore for us not to lose our sense of wonder about the world around us. If not for our inquisitiveness, we would still be living with the Flintstones. Evolution did not have in mind a Buddha or a Beethoven; we nevertheless went on to discover fire, invent the wheel, and to write Hamlet. An inquiring mind led us also to relativity, quantum physics and all the natural laws. If we had not uncovered them, we would still be conflating acts of nature with acts of God. All animals…

Anxiety by Jacques Lacan, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price SOME THIRTY YEARS AGO, AT an academic retreat in the south of France, I met a young woman who announced herself as a lacanienne – a disciple of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). At that time Lacan’s so-called ‘seminars’ were being published one after another in French, as the Seminaires. However, they weren’t really seminars, more like meandering lectures transcribed by faithful followers. There were already a lot of them, and more to come. Reading them was obligatory for people like my new acquaintance, and I wondered how she managed to take it all in. “Je pratique,” she said, “la lecture flottante” – “I use the technique of floating reading.” I knew about attention flottante – a psychoanalytic practice…

“decisive arguments in philosophy are rare… decisive arguments for positive views are even rarer, and decisive arguments for positive answers to the big questions are so rare as to be almost nonexistent.” David Chalmers, 2015 That the arts do not progress in the way that the sciences progress does not seem to worry us. We don’t wring our hands because the latest Nobel-prize-winning poet or dramatist cannot hold a candle to Shakespeare. A contemporary scientist who had not moved beyond Galileo, on the other hand, would be an object of ridicule. But what of philosophy? Does it progress, and if it doesn’t, should we dismiss it as a cognitive relic – an ox cart in the age of the jet plane? Philosophy versus Science David Chalmers, best known for his…

You know that feeling you sometimes get just before you’re awake? That moment when you’re not quite asleep yet not quite awake, when you suddenly understand every mystery there has ever been, and you think ‘Of course!’ Then as consciousness dawns, the understanding goes as quickly as it came. The fleeting memory fades as you pull yourself out of bed and begin your morning rituals. Perhaps you solemnly regard yourself as you brush your teeth, your reflection staring back at you, urging you to remember. That feeling happened to Mr Pepperfield all the time. This morning, for example, precisely two minutes before his alarm sounded, he twitched, slowly opened his eyes and thought, “Yes, yes, of course that’s it!” In the usual course of events, his alarm clock shocked him…