Table of contents for Aug/Sep 2016 in Philosophy Now

Colloquially, the word ‘depression’ is often used for listlessness, extreme sadness, or a profound sense of loss. It’s no wonder that so many people with a diagnosis of depression struggle to be taken seriously: to the unaffected, the problem sounds akin to a diagnosis of ‘sadness’. But sadness, in fact, is not the only or even the main complaint: a clinical diagnosis of Major Depressive Disorder requires at least five symptoms, and only one of those refers to a ‘depressed mood’. Depression is exhausting. Feelings of listlessness and fatigue saturate life, and everyday tasks become laborious, as though wading through tar. Things which previously gave joy or rest become encumbering; socializing is a chore. Shadows creep across the walls of the mind. Depression is not the same as sadness. Sadness…

Whenever I’m asked “So, what exactly is existentialism?” I experience a sinking feeling. It’s a difficult philosophy to explain; efforts typically end up trivializing or obfuscating so much about it that is important, original, and relevant. A number of things account for this, but an important one is that existentialism is a state of mind as much as it is a collection of ideas. As Kierkegaard’s ‘aesthetic’ works, and the novels and plays of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus demonstrate, the communication of this form of philosophy benefits from being indirect. To appreciate its significance you have to be there, in amongst the detailed stories, rolling critiques and inspirational prose: you have to catch a dose of it through its resonance with your own often unarticulated fears and aspirations. Along…

“If you look closely enough at a rule, the cosmos will appear in all its physical, metaphysical, moral and spiritual aspects, presenting you a life’s work.” – Ted Cohen Ted Cohen, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, was a fan of baseball and a student of its rule book. More than a student, he considered The Official Rules of Major League Baseball a divine document. Bertrand Russell once wrote, “Mathematics, I believe, is the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth... In Plato, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant there is an intimate blending of religion and reasoning, of moral aspiration with logical admiration of what is timeless... which comes from Pythagoras.” (A History of Western Philosophy, 1945). Russell’s observation captures Professor Cohen’s…

It is clear that morality is a feature of humanity. However, if morality were objective then every member of our species would share the same moral values. But it is patent that we do not share the same moral values. For example, there’s clearly a lack of moral consensus with respect to our views on euthanasia, abortion, or our treatment towards non-human animals. For any given moral situation various factors exist that must be taken into account. So, before we can judge whether an act is right or wrong we need to evaluate several things: the different personalities of the people involved – their emotions, intentions, intuitions – as well as the consequences of the act. These factors can relativize the morality of an action. For example, an uptight person…

YOUR FOOTBALL TEAM only drew a game yesterday. But things could very easily have been different. If your goalkeeper had been standing two inches to the right at the crucial moment, the opposing team would not have scored the fateful goal and your team would have won. Still annoyed this morning, you dropped a cup and it fell to the floor. Given that you dropped the cup, it was very likely to fall. It might not have fallen, but only if there had been a sudden updraught of air. Unlike with the goal, the outcome could only have been different if something quite extraordinary had happened. When philosophers try to get a grip on the idea that some things could easily have been different, while other things could only have…

How do you reboot a classic sci fi franchise under new corporate and directorial control while pleasing loyal legions of international fans? You give it to J.J. Abrams, apparently – as his recent bigbudget Star Trek and Star Wars films both demonstrate. The six original episodes of the Star Wars franchise are ripe for philosophical, psychological, and religious analysis. But what Abrams brings to the newest installment, Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), also demands a meta-philosophical approach. Seeing Double The internal mythology of Star Wars rests on a kind of dualism, with the dark and light sides of the Force, but Episode VII also deals with a lot of doubles. Critics have pointed out how in The Force Awakens Rey doubles for Luke Skywalker, Finn – as both comic…

One of the intellectual crutches you’re first given as a Western student of Chinese philosophy is the idea of Confucius as Socrates, Mencius as Plato, and Xunzi as Aristotle. Thus we remember Confucius (551-479 BCE) as the foundational moralist who speaks only through his students; Mencius (372-289 BCE) as the eloquent inheritor of the founder whose praise contained a subtle push of his master’s words in a new direction; and Xunzi (c.320-235 BCE) as the logician who put everything together. There’s broad truth in that. Like most crutches, this gets you walking – but not incredibly well. For there’s also a good deal in the comparison that blanches one of the most interesting figures in world philosophy – for Xunzi was a fearless thinker who trimmed philosophy of any clutter…

The Rise of Chinese Philosophy Chinese philosophy has now become the third most popular undergraduate course at Harvard University, eclipsed only by Computer Sciences and Economics. Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History at Harvard, says that works of classical Chinese philosophy are thought of as fulfilling the function of a ‘philosophy of life’, giving guidance and providing principles to good living. As well as Chinese philosophy, great works of Chinese poetry are also enjoying popularity, especially those of Du Fu (712-770), who is now hailed as the ‘Chinese Shakespeare’. Ethics and Self-Driving Cars A recent academic study of the processing of moral dilemmas by selfdriving cars may throw some light on a more general ethical problem. Enthusiasts for self-driving cars have argued that they will drastically reduce the number of…

There is a general tendency in the non-philosophical world to dismiss philosophy as being purely theoretical, with no connection to the types of problems that people are confronted within their everyday lives. But this is not necessarily true. Many philosophers struggled to find ways to improve people’s lives, by drawing attention to, and making people think about, fundamental aspects of life. A good example would be Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Feeling discontent with Hegel’s thendominant philosophical system (and with every other philosophy popular in his time), Kierkegaard sought to answer life’s questions by turning back to ancient times, and a thinker to whom he felt closer in mind and spirit. Socrates, ‘the gadfly of Athens’, became the role-model for the young Kierkegaard, who wanted to continue his spiritual mentor’s art of…

Heroics lie near the heart of both literary and historical culture. Something about the ‘greatness’ of heroes lends context to and brings to vivid life the events in which they took part and often come to represent. They are anchors in the sea of history, often cast by desperate people; and like an anchor, they often alter the course of the vessel. Heroes, fictional or otherwise, are quite diverse. We revere Odysseus for his guile and tenacity, Atticus Finch for his justness and morality, and Christ for his self-sacrifice; others we exalt for their military exploits, ethical guidance, ideological commitment, civic service, or rebelliousness. Heroes can be controversial – perhaps even necessarily so for non-fictional heroes. Neither Caesar nor Napoleon were without fault, to say the very least, yet they…

From a very young age we are encouraged to distinguish facts from opinions. Now the ability to distinguish facts from merely alleged facts, and the ability to distinguish opinions from considered judgments, is an important skill. However, the fact-opinion duality is a false dichotomy which rests on a category mistake. In claiming that facts and opinions stand in a dichotomous relationship, we ignore the two classes which stand in genuine opposition to each set in turn: facts are properly opposed to what we variously call non-facts, merely alleged facts, fictions, or falsehoods; and opinions really stand in opposition to considered judgments. A Fact Is Whatever Is The Case When someone asks, “Is that a fact?” they can be understood as asking, “Is that really the case?” or “Is that ultimately…

The idea that science has explained God away is very popular. The suggestion is that as science explains more and more about the world there is less and less need for God. Sometimes this is expressed in terms of Ockham’s razor. William of Ockham was a medieval philosopher and theologian, and his famous ‘razor’ is the idea that “It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer.” Applied to science and God, the implication seems to be that if science can explain the world around us on its own, there is no need for science and God. There is no need for two explanations when one will do. This kind of reasoning is central to the New Atheism. The late Christopher Hitchens appealed explicitly…

C.S. LEWIS HAD GREAT disdain for the argument that theism was simply a matter of wish-fulfillment – that a belief in God’s existence was just a manifestation of a desire for an eternal afterlife. However, he also had sharp words for arguments that went in reverse – that disbelief in God is just due to fear of an eternal afterlife – which is the main argument offered by Jason Spiegel in this book. As Lewis wrote, “Men wish on both sides: and again, there is fear-fulfillment as well as wish-fulfillment, and hypochondriac temperaments will always tend to think that true what they most wish to be false... as a general explanation of [either atheism or theism] they will not help us” (On Obstinacy in Belief, 1960). I’m sympathetic to Lewis’s…

Who are you, and who am I? As a reader of Philosophy Now you have probably come across such questions many times. We ask them in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, as well as the philosophy of psychology and related areas. However, nowhere does the problem of the supposed identity of self and other wreak havoc as it does in the area of human relationships – moral, social and political. When we think about who we are, we also think about who we are not; we define ourselves off against an ‘other’. How do we deal with the existence of the other? G.W.F. Hegel thought that the encounter between two self-conscious beings is best described as a ‘life-and-death’ struggle. Luckily, not all encounters with others are like that. We…

A quick glance through back issues of Philosophy Now tells me that I have managed to resist writing about time for a full year. This seems a decent interval, so I hope you will forgive me for returning to a topic which has been my main philosophical preoccupation for the decade I have been writing Of Time and Lamentation: Reflections on Transience, which is due out next Spring. One of its many concerns has been the puzzling relationship between time and change. It seems that change and time are inseparable: changes take time; are located and ordered in time; and they are separated by time. The inseparability of time and change is a kind of logical truth. Time, it has often been said, stops everything from happening at once. If…

“My life is my work,” Simone de Beauvoir once said. Spoken like a true Existentialist: to her, life and thought were inextricably linked; we are what we do. Existentialism is a philosophy that outlines the conditions of human existence but rejects any conception of human nature; a philosophy that affirms human freedom but emphasises that it brings with it not happy empowerment but anguish and despair, a philosophy that stresses that humans have choices but expresses little optimism that we will make good use of them or even understand what it would mean to make the right choice. It is on this last point that Simone de Beauvoir most markedly departs from her lifelong partner Jean-Paul Sartre. Beauvoir’s Existentialism is scattered through her many works, both literary and theoretical, including…

The Reflective Turn DEAR EDITOR: I read Tim Wilkinson’s article on mirrors (PN 114) with interest as, many years ago, I came up with a different theory of why mirrors appear to reverse left and right but not up and down. My argument is that the effect is due to the direction in which we turn round – the axis around which we rotate – when we change from looking at an object to looking at its reflection. Imagine that you are standing in front of a large mirror and that, behind you, is a large square. Each corner of the square is coloured differently. You turn from looking at the actual square to looking at its reflection in the mirror. The reflection appears to reverse the left and right…

IT SEEMS PLAUSIBLE TO say that we have some knowledge of some of the objects in the world around us. I know now, for example, that I am sitting at a table, that the table is roughly rectangular, and that it is a shade of brown. It also seems plausible to say that we have knowledge of this kind because of the sensory experiences we have. These claims seem reassuringly, perhaps even boringly, secure. These seeming truisms form the basis of a debate between John Campbell, professor of philosophy at Berkeley, who defends a so-called ‘relational’ view of sensory experience, and Quassim Cassam, professor of philosophy at Warwick, who defends a so-called ‘representational’ view. The difference between these views consists in how the concept of sensory experience is to be…