Table of contents for December 2017 / January 2018 in Philosophy Now

Men can’t multitask; women can’t resist shopping; the English have a sense of humour; the Germans don’t; philosophers spend their lives navel gazing; politicians can’t be trusted; and civil servants are boring. Stereotypes, preconceived ideas, prejudices: they are ubiquitous. Sometimes they are annoying, sometimes funny, sometimes devastating. To philosophers they are the ultimate challenge. Philosophy has its demons to fight. Having always put an emphasis on a commitment to truth, philosophers have been quick to identify the obstacles that stood in their way of honouring this obligation. Though they couldn’t always agree on the origins, scope and definition of prejudice, it, in all its forms, emerges as one of their archenemies. The first philosophical musings about prejudice started in the classical age. Cicero talks about prejudice (praeiusticium) as the opposite…

In this era of growing ethno-nationalism and xenophobia in Europe and America, and indeed, worldwide, debates over hate speech are intensifying. Decent people argue that the terrifying rhetoric of extreme right wing groups online and on the streets – and escalating confrontations – demonstrate the necessity of hate speech laws. Supporters of freedom of speech have responded that the non-coercive speech of all should be protected – including the free speech of racists, neo-Nazis, and bigots. In diverse liberal societies, they argue, it is inconsistent for the state, or even powerful social media platforms such as Facebook, to protect some expressions of ideas while banning others merely because some groups object to it. It is also likely, they argue, that hate speech laws or bans can be weaponized against their…

There are many profound philosophical issues involving Santa. For example, we might wonder how we know that Santa doesn’t exist. That is, although it seems obvious that there is no Santa, the reasons usually given for this disbelief are less sound than is often appreciated. In this article I want to explore an argument against Santa that shares a number of features with the problem of evil that has long troubled theologians. This argument against Santa is one way we can know that he doesn’t exist, but without the same vulnerabilities that the usual reasons have. Bad Arguments Against Santa First let’s survey some of the usual reasons people give for thinking that there is no Santa. Some say that disproving the Santa belief is a simple matter of visiting…

Afew years ago I went into a bookshop to buy a copy of Thoreau’s Walden (1854). I couldn’t find one, but the assistant could: in the fiction section. This may reflect the difficulty of classifying Thoreau. Was he a nature writer, a poet, a travel writer, a political thinker, even a philosopher – even all of these? Perhaps; but not, I am certain, a novelist! Thoreau’s works do not help to classify him. He wrote widely on a range of subjects. He only published three full-length books, but wrote numerous essays and lectures, and he kept a journal which ran to two million words. However, two works stand out philosophically: Walden and the essay Civil Disobedience (1849). Life David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. (He called…

Maybe, just maybe, the meaning of life is to live it: to leave the worries to one side and, as in The Big Lebowski, say, “F**k it… let’s go bowling” – or whatever pointless activity takes your fancy To assent to this idea, it must be said, is not to assert that the philosophy of The Big Lebowski (1998) can be reduced to a single insight. Indeed, it is in the nature of the true work of art that it contains many, often contradictory, stands. This film is no exception. Still, it is above all a funny film, with a perfectly cast Jeff Bridges as the antihero Jeffrey Lebowski, who answers to ‘the Dude’, or “his Dudeness, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.” The…

• Human brains to connect to cloud storage! • Mini human brains implanted in rodents! • Psychologists study moral intuition Merger 1: human brains & animals Four years ago scientists first developed a method of growing stem cells into miniature versions of human brains called brain organoids. These ‘mini brains’, until now grown in the lab, have many of the same characteristics as living human brains at an early developmental stage. Their structural similarity and the fact that they react in a similar way to stimuli such as drugs means that they are extremely useful for research into (for instance) Alzheimer’s Disease, since opportunities for empirical studies of living, fully-developed, human brains are obviously very restricted for ethical reasons. A new development has now given rise to moral reservations concerning…

Elaine: “I hate smugness. Don’t you hate smugness?” Cabdriver: “Smugness is not a good quality.” So goes a popular snippet from Seinfeld. In a 2014 article in The Guardian titled ‘Smug: The most toxic insult of them all?’ Mark Hooper opined that “there can be few more damning labels in modern Britain than ‘smug’.” And CBS journalist Will Rahn declared, in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory, that “modern journalism’s great moral and intellectual failing [is] its unbearable smugness.” But what is smugness? What, exactly, do people find objectionable about it? And is it really such a terrible moral failing, worthy of being described as “unbearable”? What is Smugness? The best way to get an initial handle on a concept like smugness is to bring forward a few…

According to many recent texts, anthropology is the study of ‘what it means to be human’. This was Immanuel Kant’s definition of anthropology, and Kant (1724-1804) was one of the founding ancestors of the discipline, along with Rousseau, Herder, and Ferguson. Drawing on the insights of both the Enlightenment and romanticism, anthropology has since its birth had a ‘dual heritage’ (Maurice Bloch) combining humanism and naturalism. In terms of method, it combines scientific explanations of social and cultural phenomena with hermeneutics or biosemiotics. Yet although certain people write of some great divide or schism within anthropology, it has always had, in spite of its diversity, a certain unity of vision and purpose. It employs a universal perspective that places humans firmly within nature. Anthropology has therefore always placed itself at…

Panpsychic Ricochets DEAR EDITOR: Issue 121 contained four articles on radical theories of consciousness. The guest editor, Dr Philip Goff, is one of the four authors. It might have been better if an editor had been invited who was more detached from the debate, as all four contributors, to varying degrees, are sympathetic to panpsychism. To describe panpsychism as counterintuitive is a considerable understatement. The only example of consciousness to which we have direct access is that of humans, and this we can confidently assert is dependent upon the activity of our brains. By analogy, on observing the behaviour of higher animals we accept them as being conscious too. How far down the animal kingdom this goes is debatable. Most of us would be comfortable accrediting mice with some level…

Ihave recently been rereading Thomas Nagel’s The View from Nowhere (1986). In the more than thirty years since its publication, the standing of this relatively slim volume has grown steadily. To borrow a metaphor that George Santayana applied to Spinoza, “like a mountain obscured at first by its foothills, he rises as he recedes.” Yet it is dispiriting how many contemporary intellectual trends – materialist theories of the mind and evolutionary epistemology to name only the most fatuous – have continued to flourish despite Nagel’s demonstration of their inadequacy. At the heart of The View from Nowhere is one of the key issues in philosophy, and, indeed, in our lives. It is that of reconciling our necessarily local, even parochial, subjective viewpoints with the objective standpoint whose most developed expression…

Jacques Derrida knew a thing or two about being an outsider. He was born of Jewish parents in 1930 in Algeria, at that time a French colony. Hence he was from birth a French citizen, although he did not set foot in France until he was nineteen. In 1942, by a decree of the wartime Vichy government, his citizenship was revoked because he was Jewish – without him being made a citizen of any other country. The major effect of this was his expulsion from the school he had previously been attending. So he was an Algerian who couldn’t speak Arabic; a Jew who was not a religious practitioner (nor could he read Hebrew); and an eventual immigrant to France as a pied-noir (the derogatory phrase used for the French…

To understand how acquire have moral knowledge, we first need to understand what sort of thing we are talking about when we speak of right and wrong. I want to propose a non-naturalist account of morality as first put forth by G.E. Moore in his Principia Ethica (1903). Following Moore, we can conceive of morality as a sort of universal dimension. All actions fall somewhere in this moral dimension, from extremely good to extremely bad and a neutral middle. Let me now liken morality to time. There is no physical aspect of reality to which we can point that shows time itself. But we don’t need something physical to point at to know that the passage of time occurs. Rather, time seems to impress itself upon us because our mental…

BRYAN MAGEE’S ULTIMATE Questions (2016) is a thought-provoking and interesting book with some strong passages, but in the end we still have many questions, and fewer answers. Magee apparently wishes to be known as the great agnostic philosopher. The flavor of his agnosticism can be seen in this passage, which provides a good summary of this book: ”The unknowable and unconceptualizable spill over into our empirical world. We live amongst them all the time. We are mysteries to ourselves, and to one another. In our sexual relationships the miraculous happens, and happens again in the creation of new life. We do not understand life or death. Nor do we understand time...‘What is it about our empirical world that convinces you that there must be something else?’ I am tempted to…

We seem to be living in a time when people are willing to overlook bigotry. Donald Trump looks at a crowd of white supremacists and sees the ‘very fine people’ among them. Trump’s own sexist remarks provoke nothing worse than exasperated sighs among his supporters. Across Europe, the frank racism of far-right parties doesn’t stop people from voting for them as an expression of unhappiness with the government. No doubt genuine racism and sexism play a role here, but it also seems that people who would be horrified to be accused of prejudice themselves are willing to ignore or forgive prejudice in others. The intelligentsia tends to be outraged by this, but I wonder, are we really so much better? Or rather, I wonder, am I myself so much better?…