Table of contents for August/September 2017 in Philosophy Now

It is sometimes said that consciousness is a mystery in the sense that we have no idea what it is. This is clearly not true. What could be better known to us than our own feelings and experiences? The mystery of consciousness is not what consciousness is, but why it is. Neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the physical mechanisms in the brain underlying human mental functioning and associated behaviour. Modern brain imaging techniques have provided us with a rich body of correlations between physical processes in the brain and the experiences had by the person whose brain it is. We know, for example, that a person undergoing stimulation in her or his ventromedial hypothalamus feels hunger. The problem is that no one knows why these correlations hold. It…

In October 2017, Protestants throughout the world will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the religious revolution that began when Catholic monk and local professor of moral theology Martin Luther nailed ninetyfive theses to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral. He was protesting against indulgences, which were certificates people could purchase from the Church to reduce their or their loved ones’ punishment in Purgatory for their sins. We can expect numerous articles and books praising Luther and his return to St Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. What we cannot expect will be many articles explaining how those same writings could become an important step in the development of the atheism of the nineteenth century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. Reading Luther’s theology confirmed Feuerbach’s conviction that…

I begin as Descartes did, with the knowledge that I exist: ‘I think therefore I am’. What else exists? Everything I experience must exist in some way, even if it’s simply as my experiences. So I divide my experiences into the sorts of things that depend on me for their existence, and those that do not. The former are my sensations, feelings, and thoughts. The latter constitute what I call ‘the world’. I experience the world as other than myself and independent of me, and conclude that most external things that I believe exist do exist. How do they exist? That is, in what way? They exist much as I believe they do (with some help from science). That things exist much as I believe they do is the simplest…

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! Change Now! DEAR EDITOR: The comments of Professor Tallis on the philosophy of time in his interview in Issue 120 indicate a problem that seems to afflict the entire Academy at this time, namely a misunderstanding of the limits of science. Professor Tallis correctly sees that time as it is used in physics is not time as it actually is, and notes that time is a metaphysical problem. He concludes that time is intimately associated with consciousness, for there has to be someone to experience it for it to exist. This is clearly correct. In his mathematical…

IN FREEDOM’S RIGHT: THE Social Foundations of Democratic Life (2014), Axel Honneth, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and at Columbia University, offers an update to G.W.F. Hegel’s most famous work of political philosophy, the Philosophy of Right (1821). Freedom’s Right certainly represents an impressive intellectual effort: it apparently took Honneth nearly five years to complete. And I suppose one could say that Honneth has done a good job updating Hegel. But was it worth updating Hegel in the first place? Did the world really need Philosophy of Right 2.0? Personally, I am not convinced. At the heart of the Philosophy of Right was a story about society and history. This story rested upon two claims. First, every society is governed by a set of moral principles that…

“You saw him, wasn’t he beautiful?” she says, smoothing her beach towel in the Polynesian sun. “The babies here are adorable.” He looks up from his paperback and pokes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Look at you,” he says. “Soon as you get a ring on your finger you’re thinking about procreation.” “Nothing’s different. I’ve always loved children.” Her tanned shoulder points towards him from where she sits on the edge of the sun-lounger. Her brown hair hangs over the straps of a white bikini. “Should I be worried?” he asks, smoothing some wrinkles in his own towel. “Nothing to be worried about.” Ever since her mother had given her the box, the world had shifted for her. She had sat on the couch in her parent’s…

• Martha Nussbaum Calls for Wrinkly Rebellion • Mass extinction • Mass migration • Morality bubbles on Twitter Age Shall Not Weary Martha Nussbaum has for decades been one of America’s best-known living philosophers, energetically bringing her expertise in classical philosophy to bear on an ever-wider range of social and philosophical questions. In May, Professor Nussbaum and her two fellow winners of the 2016 Kyoto Prize travelled to Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government to give public lectures about their current work. Nussbaum’s was on ‘Ageing, Stigma and Disgust’. In it she claimed that popular culture, which obsessively glorifies youth, also stigmatises the elderly, encouraging the young to regard their elders with a disgust closely connected with fear. Nussbaum argued that this produces widespread injustice, discrimination and unhappiness. In particular,…

Consciousness is something with which we’re all intimately familiar. It’s the thing that goes away every night in deep sleep, and comes back when we wake up every morning, or whenever we start dreaming. It encompasses all our subjective feelings and experiences, ranging from the simple redness of red, to the complex depth of an emotion, to the ephemeral quality of thought. It’s the one thing that is directly and immediately known to us, and it mediates our knowledge of the external world. This is how consciousness is defined by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, the originator of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness, or IIT for short. IIT is now one of the leading theories of consciousness in neuroscience. According to IIT, consciousness is linked to integrated information, which can be…

You may think you know what philosophical skepticism is. It’s commonly traced back to René Descartes, who in his Meditations (1642) asks whether there is anything of which he can be completely certain. Famously, he decides there is: he cannot doubt his own existence. But first he entertains radical skeptical scenarios, notably that he’s dreaming, or that an ‘evil demon’ may be inducing in him false beliefs that seem certain. Pop culture embraces this form of skepticism most famously in the Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999), which suggests that you may be a brain in a vat, or rather, Keanu Reeves in a vat. Cartesian skepticism sets a rigorous test for our beliefs, in the hope of finding at least some beliefs that can survive the challenge. But don’t be…

It’s normal to begin discussions about particularly interesting, beautiful, or profound video games by noting with surprise that such games even exist. They do. There are more games like these than one might suppose, such as Dear Esther, which has the player simply wander around an island and listen to fragments of a letter, and That Dragon Cancer, an autobiographical game about the loss of a child. However, it would be just as well to begin discussing David OReilly’s new game, Everything, by referring to a different canon – that of Borges, Camus, and Voltaire. Like these writers, OReilly and his team have created a work of art that’s structured around a philosophical idea. The difference is that Everything allows its player to encounter this idea through experience rather than…

It is widely acknowledged that there is a problem of explaining how subjective, conscious experience could arise out of physical matter. The focus is generally on the matterto- consciousness direction. But there is an equally puzzling problem going in the other direction. What causal effects does consciousness have on physical matter? In short, what does consciousness do? A popular view in philosophy of mind is physicalism. Physicalists believe the mind is just the brain. So for example, a particular experience, such as an itch, or a visual experience of red, would be nothing more than electrochemical processes in the brain. A less popular view is dualism. Dualists believe that mind and brain are distinct. On this view conscious experience is something in addition to the brain processes that accompany it,…

The German philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) is best known to the general public for his independent development of calculus and the letter he wrote to Princess Caroline of Sweden in 1715. In this letter he challenged Isaac Newton’s statements about absolute time and space, arguing that they were heretical. Leibniz and Newton were long-time adversaries before the writing of this letter, and Leibniz was probably motivated by revenge. Still, this should not be a reason to dismiss his arguments. In fact, two hundred years before Einstein, Leibniz was arguing that time and space could not be absolute. Interestingly, the two philosophical laws that Leibniz used to challenge Newton’s concepts of space and time can also be used to argue for the Big Bang over the Steady State model…

“Simpler to suppose: all has thought. Safer to say: in a never fresh universe, nihil novum. Subtler to see: that to itself mind reveals the very nature of the nature in which it sits. Am I pissing up the wrong tree?” Evenings are long, distractions are great; so what if fine error breeds. What is it to me if my love miss-takes the universe and time, to build an implausible frame? Reason has led her there, I guess. But atoms with experience? “My love! Why go on with this? No, you’re not barking up the wrong tree; you’re entangled in its highest branches, howling wild at the moon!” I soon regretted this sarcasm, relented, and apologised. Chastened, I spread myself far out. What must it be like to believe some…

Mahon O’Brien asks how far the first English translation of Martin Heidegger’s notebooks show him to be a Nazi, whilst Peter Stone questions if it’s worthwhile trying to update Hegel’s politics without addressing his problems. Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938 by Martin Heidegger Trans R. Rojcewicz MARTIN HEIDEGGER WAS one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers, and his 1927 masterpiece Being and Time is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophical texts of the 20th century. Yet there has been a longstanding controversy surrounding his decision to become the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, and to join the Nazi Party shortly afterwards. Many of Heidegger’s colleagues, students and friends were initially shocked when he declared his support for National Socialism. Upon assuming the office of…

Ontology, the branch of philosophy that tries to establish what kinds of beings there are or determine the basic categories of being, is in a rather bad way. It is sometimes treated with disdain by those who feel that the last word on the ground floor of reality belongs to the natural sciences, notably physics. This view is not confined to physicists and their camp followers, but is shared by many philosophers. In the glorious polemic that opens Every Thing Must Go (2008), James Ladyman lambasts philosophers for relying on their intuitions to address questions about ultimate reality instead of getting up to speed with current physical theory. As if that were not bad enough, philosophy itself seems to have reached an impasse in addressing traditional ontological questions, particularly those…