Table of contents for Dec 2016/Jan 2017 in Philosophy Now

Let’s get meta-physical! Metaphysics is philosophy’s oldest and most central strand. When Greek philosophy first kicked off in the port of Miletus on the coast of Anatolia 2,500 years ago, the biggest question pondered by the likes of Thales and Anaximander was this: what is the underlying reality of the universe, beneath the surface appearances of our everyday world? Thales thought that everything was, deep down, made of water. Squeeze something hard enough and juice runs out – see? Anaximander disagreed; the underlying reality, he said, was an unobservable element called apeiron. And so Western philosophy began, with speculations that could not be directly checked but which might with greater or lesser success explain those phenomena that we can directly observe. Democritus (460-370BC) hypothesised that simplicity of explanation could be…

“There is only one philosophical problem which is really serious: suicide. To decide whether life is or is not worth living.” So opined Albert Camus, and he proffered an answer too. Yes, life is worth it if lived with lucidity, conscious of life’s absurdities, but rebelling against them. Scorn its arbitrariness and commit to being happy. Carry on Sisyphus! The question is topical. The single biggest cause of death among men under forty-five in the UK is suicide, and that’s typical for the whole Western world. Is that a ‘philosophical’ issue? Being authentic – true to who you are, and exercising your freedom to choose – is easier said than done in a modern world that’s so coercive. Social media invites us to create a kind of living autobiography that…

Imprisoned inside the walls of the Bastille in 1717 accused of composing poems which mocked the family of France’s ruling Regent, twenty-three-year-old writer François Marie Arouet was hard at work on his first play. He later boasted that his cell offered him quiet time to think. It seems Arouet took this time to ruminate over the injustice of the charges: the subject of the play bears the unmistakable irony of satire. He chose to adapt Oedipus, the classic Greek incest tragedy. The irony? The Regent, whose family Arouet had allegedly defamed, was widely rumoured to have carried on relations with his own daughter. Drawing such an unabashed comparison, the play was destined to spark controversy, even before opening. But while libel was a punishable crime, satiric insinuation was not. As…

Speculating on ethics from the bleak post-apocalyptic 2009 film The Road (based on Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic novel of the same name) seems like a contradiction-in-terms. After all, The Road recounts the journey of a father and son over an inhospitable Earth smothered in a cloud of dust, where civilization is dead and buried under the ashes. Humanity has become a fast-diminishing refugee species, forced to make brutal decisions in the face of bitter cold, starvation, and roaming cannibals, as the beleaguered survivors eke out what little food remains while avoiding becoming food for others. Why then propose this film as an illustration of the ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a philosopher who stresses our unconditional responsibility for the welfare of others? In a world where any underlying decency…

• Peter Singer wins Philosophy Now Award •Philosophers and the US Election •Animal Welfare: Good News & Bad News? Animal Welfare Ups and Downs I This first of two reports on morally ambiguous animal welfare developments concerns male chicks, who owe their short existences to the breeding industry for egglaying hens. Since they don’t have sufficient body mass to justify raising them commercially for meat, millions of male chicks are killed every year. This is done by gassing, suffocation in plastic bags, or maceration, i.e. being mechanically ground up, none of which are likely to be painless. TeraEgg is a new technology which can examine eggs and sex the foetus through a non-invasive process known as terahertz spectroscopy. This will mean that the eggs containing male fetuses can be destroyed…

Half-light and the calm hands of a man polishing glass, though outside the day is harsh with persecution, words that damn for the smallest deviation. In the synagogue they recite the cherem, denouncing a heretic to be deported from the House of Israel. Yet here in this alcove of instruments, of curvatures plotted to decimal points, there’s clarity of intellect. Nothing’s opaque. Through the clean eye of a telescope, an objective world with objective grace. There’s no rush for eminence – he rejects honours as one declines bruised fruit or last night’s beer. On his signet ring (below the hermetic rose) there’s a Latin word: caute – with caution, taking care. He hides his writing for fear of being burnt alive. As shadows stain the cobbled streets he jots down:…

The Epicureans, despite being avowed hedonists and the modern connotations of the word, weren't really interested in the sort of sensual pleasure that we think of as hedonism. They believed that the most pleasurable life mostly consisted of avoiding pain and unpleasantness by leading a simple, tranquil life free of worries and suffering. The best kinds of pleasures were not excessive ones that could lead to displeasure down the line (such as hangovers), but simple pleasures that fulfill basic desires (hungry, sleep, etc). Likewise you should avoid excess or unnecessary desires such as greed, lust, and domination over others. Their prescribed path might be viewed as boring by many modern and ancient readers: doing gardening, meditating, and avoid politics and conflict. Epicurus said that he could be satisfied with merely…

In her 1982 book Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, the anthropologist Jill Korbin wrote that in classical China “children, according to the ethic of ‘filial piety,’ were considered the sole property of their parents. As such, they could be dealt with in whatever manner their parents chose, with little or no interference from outsiders. Severe beatings, infanticide, child slavery, the selling of young girls as prostitutes, child betrothal, and foot-binding were not uncommon.” Is it true that Confucian ideas of filial piety say children are the property of their parents? Doesn’t the Classic of Filial Piety teach that the basis of filial piety is love? Korbin’s view is distorted, and I would say erroneous, for a number of reasons. In the Classic of Filial Piety, Confucius makes filial piety…

IN NOVEMBER 1915, Albert Einstein revealed his theory of general relativity to the world. Almost exactly a century later, in June 2015, at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, a group of physicists gathered to discuss a problem: the theorists are taking over. As Perimeter director Neil Turok told New Scientist, in physics, “theory is becoming ever more complex and contrived… and yet failing to explain the most basic facts” (Issue 3028, 4th July 2015). The main culprit is string theory, the mathematics of which have become all but impenetrable without yielding a single testable prediction. Physicists wanting to grapple with these developments, and philosophers studying their predicament, could do worse than start by reading Was Einstein Right? by Clifford M. Will, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of…

I’ve occasionally had the disappointing experience of walking into a bookshop, seeing a shelf marked ‘Metaphysics’ and, beginning to peruse it, only then finding that it’s filled with volumes on mindfulness, crystals, and learning about one’s past lives. I wouldn’t be surprised if New Age enthusiasts have occasionally had the reverse disappointment upon learning that a ‘Metaphysics’ course they signed up for will involve arguing about the nature of reality, personal identity, and the problem of free will. This confusion over what metaphysics is, exactly, is an old one. A historically-minded person asked to define this field of philosophy might say that metaphysics simply studies the sort of issues tackled in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the first work to use the word in its title. But this answer would need a significant…

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You will be familiar, in these days of inelegant travel, with the exercise of trying to fit everything you might plausibly need into a very small suitcase. It sometimes happens that there is one thing which frustrates the process, an object with awkward contours that ensure it cannot be packed along with the other necessities. It is of some value to identify the troublesome object. Would it not be a small triumph if you not only identified it, but realized that you didn’t need it after all? It was a similar realization in the realm of metaphysics that led the young unpublished George Berkeley (1685-1753) to breathlessly write in his private philosophical journal, “I wonder not at my sagacity in discovering the obvious tho’ amazing truth, I rather wonder at…

In the first part of this essay (in Issue 116), I suggested that philosophers have been wrong in thinking that they were engaged in a hunt for a single and infallible answer to moral questions. They can hope to get nearer to right answers, to get further from some demonstrably wrong ones, and to get a better grasp of the kind of wrongness that is causing most trouble here. But none of this will be final. In his book of 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume famously claimed that it was impossible to logically derive judgments about values, about what ought to be the case, solely from facts about the world. Here Hume showed no interest in the detailed meaning of the value-judgments themselves, simply treating them as…

Voting For Self-Destruction DEAR EDITOR: Your Editorial in Issue 116 concluded that in the long term, the communal view of ordinary people should be trusted. I wouldn’t disagree with that. But this is not the ‘Five Year Democracy’ model of politics we and other so-called ‘democratic’ countries have adopted. Take, for example, the environment. The very future of our world depends on our solving a host of environmental issues. One of those is overuse of the world’s resources. If resource consumption continues at current rates the Earth will finally become a barren desert and a poisoned sea. Concerted international action to stop this is needed now. And ‘Now means Now!’ But the good sense of the general population will take a lot longer than five years to show. What politician,…

TO BEGIN WITH, LET ME say that this is a slim book on a huge and controversial topic. However, to say that a book is slim in girth is not to say that it is slight in content, and this one is the summation of well over thirty years work on its topic by an eminent thinker in the field. Professor Lukes’ conclusions might not be to the tastes of some readers, but few will be left with anything less than admiration for his grasp of the issues, or his crystal clarity in exploring them. Lukes, a professor of politics and sociology at New York University, first outlines several species of relativism. For example, cognitive relativism says that there is a range of fundamentally incompatible perspectives about the sorts of…

The greatest mysteries are often those we are most likely to overlook. Supreme among these is the fact that the world is intelligible to us, at least to some degree. Of course, if we could not make momentto-moment sense of what was going on around us, there could be no us. Inhabiting an entirely unintelligible world in which nothing could be understood, anticipated, or acted upon with reliable consequences, would be incompatible with life. But there is no ‘of course’ even about this. That human existence requires a more or less intelligible world doesn’t solve the mystery, it simply moves the mystery on. After all, the vast majority of organisms act, or at least react, and flourish, without making sense of the world. That one thing is explained by another…