Table of contents for October/November 2017 in Philosophy Now

Recently the Babylon Bee, a satirical newspaper, published the following headline: ‘Culture In Which All Truth Is Relative Suddenly Concerned About Fake News’. Like most good jokes, it’s so accurate it’s almost not funny. Having committed to the claim that reality is what you make of it, many American pundits are now shocked to find themselves confronted with a president who believes exactly the same thing. We may think we’ve entered a radical new ‘post-truth’ era, exemplified by Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway’s offering ‘alternative facts’ about inauguration attendance figures. But actually, the debate about whether facts are flexible is an extremely old one. Thus any defense of truth against Trump depends on a thinker whose ideas are so foundational we’ve forgotten how revolutionary they are. That thinker is Socrates. In…

Imagine a device which will give you any experience you desire. This is what Robert Nozick asks us to do in his Anarchy, State and Utopia. The only thing you need to do is to let some neuropsychologists put you (or just your brain) in a tank and work their magic. Whatever pleasant experiences you are looking for, the machine will provide them, and they would feel completely real. To plug into the experience machine will provide you with the greatest possible amount of happiness. Yet there is something deeply counter-intuitive about the idea that plugging into the machine is the best life you can have. Perhaps the debate is captured best in the argument between Trinity and Cypher in The Matrix (1999), when Cypher claims, “If I had to…

Michael Oakeshott, like Ludwig Wittgenstein, is a philosopher’s philosopher. He had a unique point of view, and a coherent way of looking at life, clearly expressed in wonderfully elegant prose. Oakeshott was also utterly indifferent to fashion in academic, political and philosophical life, and pursued obscurity to a point of near public invisibility. On his death, the local pastor who was due to take his funeral service was astounded to read in his Daily Telegraph of 21st December 1990 that he was soon to bury “the greatest political philosopher in the Anglo-Saxon tradition since Mill – or even Burke.” The Guardian called him “perhaps the most original academic philosopher of this century”; and in the Independent his writing was compared to the essays of Montaigne, which would have greatly pleased…

THE MONK AND THE Philosopher is an exploration of Tibetan Buddhist belief and practise, and an attempt to understand the religion’s growing popularity in the West. The book is in the form of a series of conversations between Jean- François Revel, a French intellectual known for his defense of liberalism and wariness of the totalitarian tendencies of religion, and his son Matthieu Ricard, who in the early 1970s abandoned a promising career in molecular genetics to study Tibetan Buddhism in Darjeeling. For Revel, his son’s decision to choose Eastern wisdom over the fruits of Western liberalism must have come as a shock. So on top of his desire to understand the appeal of Tibetan Buddhism in the West, Revel also wanted to better understand his son. Moreover, the disagreements between…

Philosophic Park How pleasant it is to take the occasional intellectual stroll through the history of philosophy. Now you can do the same physically: at Sophi-Park in the German town of Bad Liebenzell in the Black Forest. Ten artists and a team of gardeners have created a wonder world of sculptures and horticultural art that invite you to think, marvel and disagree, stimulating its visitors to talk and debate. EU, local political and private sponsorship made the three year construction project possible, with the park opening in June, and a charity will pay the running costs of two permanent gardeners. The park is structured into ten areas, each representing a different philosophical era or approach and each with its own distinct works of art, quotations, planting and seating. In one…

What would Plato (428-348 BCE) have made of the Internet and social media? If the Internet had been around in his day, would he accept my invitation to be his ‘friend’ on Facebook? How many friends would he have? Would he even allow Facebook and other social media into the ideal state posited in his Republic? In the Republic (written around 380 BCE), Socrates, speaking for Plato, deliberates with friends about what is needed to achieve the most just policies for the establishment of the ideal state. They consider the nature of the soul (this is important, because the ideal state will mirror the individual); what justice is; the nature of ‘good’; and, what knowledge is and how truth can be attained. After this, they go on to discuss how…

Conscious Correspondence DEAR EDITOR: The articles on consciousness in Issue 121 stimulate many further thoughts. For instance, our experience of being conscious involves a basic duality: we are conscious of being conscious, but our consciousness also contains things of which we are conscious. The awareness of these not-self things depends on a particular location in space and time, and therefore information gained through the senses. This seems to me to undermine panpsychism. What could an atom be conscious of? Could it possibly extend its awareness, to become conscious of something new? Since a kind of dynamism, an ability to extend, is so intrinsic to our consciousness where does that leave the stone – perhaps stuck inside a wall and probably doomed to die of boredom? And is my car conscious…

NATURALISTS BEGIN WITH the fundamental truth that humans are a primate species, and so part of nature, which means we should respect natural environments and other species. In Ecological Ethics Patrick Curry explores different moral theories from a naturalist standpoint: anthropocentric, ecocentric, biocentric, feminist, pluralist, pragmatist, and political. He begins with a chapter on ‘The Earth in Crisis’, which crisis is due to the interconnected phenomena of global warming, overpopulation, and species extinction. Today we are slaughtering so many species that, Richard Leakey argued, we are now in the midst of our planet’s sixth mass extinction epoch - and the first to have been caused by human beings. Peter Singer contended in The Expanding Circle (1981) that “Neither evolutionary theory nor science can provide the ultimate premises of ethics” (p.84).…

It’s a frustrating time to be a fan of Plato. Public intellectuals routinely misrepresent him, and it’s hard to find courses that can unveil the richness of insight and meaning which the best thinkers of twenty-three centuries, from Plotinus to Iris Murdoch, have discerned in his dialogues. Take one common misapprehension – that Plato was a bodysoul dualist, loathing the body and loving the soul. Yet Plato clearly tells us in The Republic that it’s an error to relate body and soul as if in a hierarchy. Take another: it’s regularly said that Plato is the godfather of secular philosophy because he trusted the powers of human reason. What’s overlooked is that Plato often remarks on the failure of human rationality, arguing that it’s not human minds that are reliably…

Plato’s dialogues, most notably the Phaedrus and the Symposium, mark the beginning of 2,400 years of written philosophical contemplations on love. Many lovers have loved since, and many thinkers have thought and struggled to understand. Who has never asked themselves the question: What is love? The various discussions since range from Aristotle to an abundance of contemporary philosophy and fiction on the topic. Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, and Byung Chul Han’s Die Agonie des Eros, all published in the past ten years, refer to Plato’s account, so it is clear that Plato’s treatment of love remains relevant. Naturally, the conception has also dramatically changed over this long period of time. The non-sexual, purely intellectual relationship that the modern English speaker understands as…

In 1906 Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein, an American avant-garde writer and art collector who had settled in Paris. To the complaint that the picture did not look like her, Picasso replied “No matter, it will.” What he meant is that when people had got used to ‘reading’ his new way of representing things they would be able to see the portrait’s likeness to Mrs Stein. Picasso finished the Stein portrait two years before producing any of his explicitly Cubist works, and before the term ‘Cubism’ was invented. But it foreshadows Cubism through the influence of Cézanne’s late paintings, with their shifting, mobile viewpoint. However, Picasso and Cézanne had crucially different attitudes to their work. Cézanne drew his inspiration from his immediate visual reaction to the objects…

It is the 8th November 2016. The days are getting shorter, the air is getting chillier. Autumn is here to stay, and a carpet of red, yellow and beige leaves has settled over the city. You wake up before your alarm at the sound of a news blast, and breathe a deep sigh of relief as you look down at the screen of your smartphone: ‘Hillary Clinton secures White House election, narrowly defeating Republican nominee Donald Trump.’ Suddenly everything goes dark and the subtle background sound of a cooling fan grinds to a halt. You open your eyes and look around. You find you’re in a white room, and that you’re wearing a pair of curious-looking glasses. In front of you is a screen. Your ears are covered by a…

My photograph is genuine. The words on the boy’s back are real, and the cannon, outside a fort in Pakistan, is authentic. It dates from the Eighteenth Century and is embossed with the symbol ‘G3R’: ‘King George III’. He’s the mad king whose behaviour eventually led to the second amendment of the American Constitution – the right to bear arms – in case his troops should reappear with cannons and muskets. (I oversimplify a little here). What drew me to the scene was the incongruity of a peaceful religious motto next to a weapon of war. Pakistan has certainly had its share of violence, and we hear much about Islamist aggression in the world at large, which the belligerents excuse by talk of historical injustices. Some people polarise the world…

Socrates is the ventriloquist’s dummy of ancient philosophy. He practiced philosophy as a form of conversation, and did not write it down, leaving others to tell us what he was like and what sorts of things he said. Three of his contemporaries are the most important sources for his thought: the comic poet Aristophanes, who satirized Socrates in his play The Clouds, the historian Xenophon, who wrote several works commemorating Socrates’ conversations, and of course Plato. For most of us, and for the subsequent history of philosophy, the Socrates who counts is Plato’s Socrates: barefoot, ugly, ironic, and relentlessly questioning his fellow citizens in a forever frustrated attempt to learn what virtue is. He’s living the examined life, but his examinations never bring him knowledge: apart, of course, from the…

At first glance, director Paul Verhoeven’s film Elle (2016) might seem a far cry from a feminist treatise, but then no one has ever been accused of getting Verhoeven right at first glance. His film Basic Instinct (1992) was probably the most empowering film for women of its generation, but that didn’t prevent critics from both the religious right and the radical feminist left railing against it. Those feminists insisted that it was ‘lesbophobic’, despite depicting female, and especially lesbian, sexuality in a positive light, while also providing sharp satirical jabs at American male chauvinism and machismo. Throughout his career, Verhoeven has consistently represented empowered female characters, in films such as such as Showgirls, The 4th Man, and Black Book, to name just a few. Elle is no exception. Verhoeven’s…

One of the privileges of having a regular column is the joy of sharing my current philosophical preoccupations with, and testing my ideas against, the excellent readership of Philosophy Now. In Issue 121’s Letters, there was a thought-provoking critique of something I had said during the course of the interview Grant Bartley had with me in Issue 120 on my new tome on time, Of Time and Lamentation. Reflections on Transience. The letter – ‘Change Now!’ by Peter Jones – raised questions not only about time but also about the nature of philosophy, and indeed of knowledge. Time Before Mind In the interview, I had discussed subjective (phenomenal) and objective (cosmological) time; specifically, the question of which was the more fundamental. If we define time as, say, ‘our perception of…

Setting: A park, where Socrates spots a man leafing through one of the three books he has on him. Socrates notes the titles, and since he’s familiar with them he sits down on the bench next to the man. Socrates: Excuse me for interrupting, but I couldn’t help but notice the books you have there with you. The other man casts a dubious eye at Socrates, who’s dressed in worn-out sandals and clothes that have seen better days. Moe: Yes. And who might you be? Socrates: I’m Socrates the philosopher. I lived in Athens many years ago – around two thousand four hundred years ago, in fact. Perhaps you’ve heard of me? Moe: Yes, I have. If you were who you say you are, you shouldn’t be here. Apart from…