Table of contents for June/July 2017 in Philosophy Now

One of the most quoted phrases in current popular culture is “six degrees of separation.” It expresses the idea that, on average, any human being is connected with any other human being by at most six acquaintances. While there is much debate as to whether this is literally true, it is an interesting thought-experiment, as well as the basis for many fun parlor games. One of these is entitled ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’, in which film fans try to connect the aforementioned actor with any other movie star with as few links as possible. I have been thinking of launching a similar parlor game called ‘Six Degrees of Bertrand Russell’, in which any figure from the past 200 years or so could be connected with Russell in as few…

Bertrand Russell did a disservice to philosophy by defining the word. Early in his career he defined philosophy as the logical-analytic method. This definition was so restricting that although he spent the next fifty years writing one book after another on topics such as war, peace, happiness, science and society, and the future of mankind, it forced him to describe most of them as ‘popular’ or ‘nonphilosophical’. In fact, he gradually developed an alternative view of philosophy and its value for humanity. His many popular books are unfairly ignored by historians of ideas and those interested in Russell as a philosopher. Of course, his many-sided activities, popular writings and work for peace are well-known and beloved. But these are usually left for his biography as opposed to his supposed ‘real’…

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said of his Cambridge friends in the years before World War I – including the philosophers Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore – that while their conversations were all bright, amusing and clever, there was “no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them.” His friends, he claimed, had believed that the human race “consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards,” failing to see that there were “insane and irrational springs of wickedness” in people. Keynes thought this view was naïve. “Bertie in particular,” Keynes said of Russell, “sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since…

There are interesting points of both agreement and disagreement in the lives of George Berkeley (1685-1753) and David Hume (1711-1776), arguably the two greatest British philosophers. I also think we have an outstanding philosophical memoir from each, summing up their work, especially in respect of their ruling passions. Both memoirs contain the philosopher’s very last philosophical words, which can be naturally read as their final philosophical testaments. Yet for all that, I don’t think that this has been noticed by their biographers, or by those who have written on them philosophically. All students of philosophy should know of Hume’s memoir, My Own Life, which he wrote the year he died, 1776, and which was published a year later. But what is Berkeley’s counterpart? It is the last section, §368, of…

The bearded man wearing a white wedding dress in my photograph seems to be smoking a joint. Since this was Amsterdam, he attracted no negative attention, as far as I could see. According to a 2015 EU survey, the Netherlands is among the most tolerant countries in Europe with respect to LGBT issues and ethnic background,alongside Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. Though even in the Netherlands things are changing, as I discovered chatting to locals who would know, and observing Dutch politics. Intolerance seems to be on the rise internationally. The election of Donald Trump in the USA and the Brexit vote in the UK may be partly due to an increasing unwillingness to tolerate difference. ‘We’ have found the right way to live, and will not put up with ‘others’…

‘I Find That Offensive’ by Claire Fox IN THIS PITHY, EBULLIENT addition to Biteback Publishing’s ‘Provocations’ series, Claire Fox, the director and founder of the British thinktank the Institute of Ideas, makes a rousing appeal to ‘Generation Snowflake’ to throw off their bubble wrap and embrace the liberating responsibilities of adult life. To those of us born before 1980, it’s mind-boggling that the age-old wisdom Fox dispenses in this book should be considered ‘provocation’ at all. Consequently, readers like myself who have not yet been lobotomized by the culture of adult colouring books and naval-gazing ‘mindfulness’ can almost smell the author’s refreshing irony lurking in the subtext of every page. However, the author is not content to simply sneer at an entire generation by dubbing them ‘Snowflakes’ and ‘cry-babies’, because…

The three outstanding writer-philosophers of the Eighteenth Century French Enlightenment are Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. The first two are relatively well known in the English-speaking world. Diderot is not. In fairness, it should be said that his legacy is somewhat contested even in France. Voltaire and Rousseau were inducted into the Panthéon at the end of the Eighteenth Century; Diderot had to wait until 1913 before he was suggested for that honour, and then the National Assembly voted down the proposal. He still has not made it. Life Denis Diderot was born in Langres in Champagne in 1713. He was intended to succeed to the canonry held by an uncle, and so was tonsured at the age of thirteen. However, after completing his studies he entered into a bohemian life…

Robert Pirsig Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, died on 24 April. At the heart of the book is a fictionalised account of a motorcycle journey across America made by Pirsig and his young son Chris in 1968. The novel combined reflections on Greek philosophy, Zen Buddhism, technology and culture in a profound inquiry into the nature of values. Pirsig wrote it mainly in the small hours of each morning and had immense difficulty finding a publisher. On publication in 1974, it immediately became enormously popular, selling 5 million copies. Macronomics The newly-elected President of France, Emmanuel Macron, who has a degree in philosophy, was once an assistant to the famed French philosopher Paul Ricouer (1913-2005). In the acknowledgements of his last book La Mémoire,…

In 1930, Bertrand Russell published The Conquest of Happiness, a book that predates the contemporary fascination with self-help publications by decades. It was described by Russell in the Preface as “not addressed to highbrows, or to those who regard a practical problem merely as something to be talked about” (p.ix). Russell’s use of the word ‘conquest’ in the title emphasizes his primary contention that, except in rare cases, happiness does not simply present itself to people, but rather must be achieved. He argues that the multitudes of men and women who suffer from unhappiness could achieve happiness if they heed the advice he offers in the book. Unhappiness Russell spends more time in Conquest discussing the causes of unhappiness than he does the causes of happiness. He acknowledges that some…

The stereotypical philosopher sits in an armchair carefully thinking through difficult conceptual problems. As with any stereotype, however, there are exceptions, and in recent years a number of selfstyled experimental philosophers have expressed unhappiness with this armchair methodology. These philosophers have got up out of their armchairs, and are performing experiments and doing other empirical research to put a variety of philosophical views to the test. This turn of events may be surprising. After all, philosophy is not science. Whereas we can experimentally verify scientific hypotheses, it does not at first seem possible to experimentally verify philosophical views. For example, whereas DNA has been used to verify the hypothesis that humans are closely related to chimpanzees, there is no empirical evidence that could be used to verify the utilitarian view…

Often Reasonable DEAR EDITOR: Eugene Earnshaw in Issue 119 provides a lively discussion of induction. Precise definition is essential to both deduction and induction. Consider deduction: all who commit murder should be hanged; he committed murder; he should be hanged. Unless we define murder precisely, the conclusion might be that someone who unintentionally killed by misadventure should be hanged – perhaps not what even the most ardent supporter of capital punishment would want. Or take the inductive argument that all swans are white; therefore the swans on your lake will be white. But your lake is in Australia, where they are black. We would have avoided the error with a more precise definition of ‘all swans’: it should be that ‘all swans so far seen in the Northern hemisphere’ have…

EDUCATION IS A POLITICALLY contentious subject. Systems of education are continually being proposed, implemented, regretted and reorganised. There are arguments over religious segregation, the usefulness of various subjects, rote learning versus other methods of learning, the role of the teacher, and so on. Disagreements about purpose and methods in education have a long history: Plato and Aristotle held very different views, and philosophers as diverse as Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Russell and Rorty have added their own ideas. One facet of education, however, seems to have escaped controversy, and now enjoys general assent – creativity. Today we expect schools at all levels to nurture creativity, especially in literary composition and art, but also in problem-solving, critical thinking, media production, music, and dance. We seem to think that it is good to…

Lovely to see you Professor Tallis, to talk about your new magnum opus, Of Time and Lamentation. What were your motivations for writing this book? Well, it’s part of a much bigger project. As a secular humanist, I feel I’ve managed to liberate myself from supernatural accounts of humanity, but the alternative for many people is a naturalistic account – the idea that we’re just ‘pieces of nature’. One aspect of that is the notion that the natural sciences are ultimately going to give us a complete account, not only of the rest of the universe, but of ourselves in it. It’s this scientism that has been one of my targets over many years, and it’s one of the drivers for writing this book about time. There are other motives.…

Philosophy today is intimately associated with the life of the mind – with intellect, thought, and reason. Because of this, it is often thought to be opposed to emotion, feeling, spirit – to passion. It is thought to be a bloodless occupation, practiced by bloodless men and women. This has a lot to do with how philosophy has come to be practiced in universities, particularly the analytic philosophy which has dominated the Anglo-American philosophy world over the past century. And perhaps nobody is more closely associated with analytic philosophy than Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). As such, one might expect Russell to be the exact opposite of the man of passion. And indeed, many people have viewed Russell this way. Will Durant, for example, once described Russell as “cold-blooded… a temporarily animated…

“He was not only a great scientist but a great man, a man whom it is good to have known and consoling to contemplate.” With these words Bertrand Russell concluded his Preface to Einstein on Peace (1960). Down the years, Russell and Albert Einstein had met from time to time, but they did not see much of each other except in 1943, when they were both living in Princeton. Then they would meet weekly at Einstein’s house to discuss “various matters in the philosophy of science.” Wolfgang Pauli and Kurt Gödel also attended. “I found these informal discussions very illuminating and exceedingly valuable,” said Russell. Later, the US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean in March 1954 had spread radioactive fall-out across wide areas, contaminating Japanese…

Eerie in its grandeur. Sublime in its mystique. Passing understanding. Thrillingly opaque. So abstract that it’s concrete. An edifice of blocks of monumental marble: words as hard as rocks. Space and time. Causation. Perception. Apperception. Notion. Intuition. Dialectal. Transcendental. Unity. Totality. Faculty. Plurality. Noumena. Phenomena. Categories. Antinomies. And - the crowning glory - the synthetic a priori. It’s like the language of a race of superior beings. Reading it’s like stumbling under glimmering stars over a vast expanse of twilit marshes. Or wandering through an unknown, dimly-lit cathedral, at evensong, without your glasses. © BRANDON ROBSHAW 2017 Brandon Robshaw is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University and runs a Philosophy class for the WEA. He is crowdfunding a philosophical novel for Young Adults with Unbound: unbound.com/books/adam-gowers…

Bertrand Russell was many things: logician, mathematician, anti-war activist, atheist, and, unexpectedly, historian of philosophy. Unexpectedly, because we tend to think of philosophy – especially the sort of technical analytic philosophy that Russell helped pioneer – as an ahistorical discipline. It’s an attitude epitomized by a note the philosopher Gilbert Harman pinned to his office door: “The history of philosophy: just say no!” But the immediate occasion was more parochial than Harman’s slogan suggests. He was protesting the idea that philosophy students at Princeton should be required to study the history of philosophy. He later remarked that although he has nothing against history of philosophy, he sees it as distinct from philosophy itself. Most would probably disagree with Harman on the teaching curriculum, yet agree with that last point. At…

Uncanny is a word with which we’re all familiar, but perhaps slightly misunderstand. We often say that when something or someone is similar to another something or someone, the resemblance is ‘uncanny’, especially if it is one person doing an impression of another. In many ways this is accurate, but it’s normally used in a positive way in this instance. “It’s uncanny!” we may say in wonder. However, when something is truly uncanny there are few things more unsettling. The concept of ‘the uncanny’ has been explored for centuries, but it was popularised by Ernst Jentsch in his essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny (1906) and Sigmund Freud in Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny] (1919). It is the idea of something that is familiar but just outside the realms of…

Areincarnated Socrates showed up needing work to sustain his eating and drinking habits, so he applied for a job teaching philosophy at a modern university. “Not a lot of students interested in the liberal arts these days,” the Dean said. “But we do have a small group on a course, and yesterday the professor ran off with one of the secretaries. Where did you get your degree?” “Athens.” “Can we get a recommendation from your professor?” “ I don’t think so. He’s dead.” “Our previous philosophy professor dropped dead himself last year – which is why we got his successor, who turned out to be a dedicated skirt hound. I’ll tell you what: We’ll give you a short term trial contract. Renewable if it works out. How’s that?” “How short?”…