Table of contents for April/May 2018 in Philosophy Now

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” This quotation voices a frustration that many great thinkers have expressed in their own ways, from Heraclitus to Nietzsche and beyond. What makes this one special is that it comes from the most controversial of all philosophers, Martin Heidegger. That he was thinking is beyond doubt: he was one of the greatest philosophers the Western tradition has seen, more about that later. He was however, also one of the most flawed. Some of his central life decisions show him to be an opportunist without loyalty to his friends, his students and even his mentor, the great Husserl, not to speak of his wife. His private notebooks contain a few unambiguously anti-Semitic passages. He was a…

Iam about to argue something that ought to make your head turn: celebrity culture is philosophy. The often bemoaned idolisation of celebrities; the prevalence of talent shows such as X Factor; the popularity of reality TV shows; the phenomenon of ‘being famous for being famous’; the fact that children have begun to choose their heroes not on the basis of their talent but on the mere fact of their fame, etc etc – all of this is philosophy. The idea that something is of value only insofar as it is popular is a well-known logical fallacy, a.k.a. the argument ex consensus gentium. Yet it is a contagious fallacy. Why is it so prevalent? I wish to answer by showing that the origin of the irrational praise of the popular lies…

Aspecious argument, says Webster’s Dictionary, is one with “deceptive attractiveness or allure,” giving “a false look of truth or genuineness.” Here is a case in point, one that plunged England into depression for half a century and that had serious, even fatal, consequences for real people. The Principle of Population In 1751 Benjamin Franklin predicted that the population of America would double in 20-25 years, so that in another century “the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this Side of the Water.” It was understood that America was unique, with a small population and almost limitless arable land. In Europe, by contrast, Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, “the population cannot be expected to double in less than five hundred years.” Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) used the American…

The Golden Rule is (roughly) as follows: treat others as you would have others treat you. Philosophical reactions to it vary; it has both supporters and detractors. In any case, almost nobody who thinks critically about morality takes the literal version of the Golden Rule seriously, since there are just too many problems with it. To demonstrate this, I will look at a literal version of the Golden Rule espoused by John C. Maxwell, a well-known and influential motivational speaker, and briefly discuss some of the obvious problems that it faces. I will then examine a more sophisticated version of the Golden Rule espoused by philosopher Harry Gensler. While able to overcome some of the problems of the literal Golden Rule, Gensler’s version nevertheless shares a common difficulty with it:…

THE GREAT MAJORITY OF US can think of a very great many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of houses and mountains, of pins and clouds and shadows, and so on. And the great majority of us know very many truths about the things we can think of: that unsupported bodies fall in air, that bread is nourishing, that fires produce ashes, that tables support teapots, and so on. About these twin capacities for thought and for knowledge we can raise the twin questions, ‘Where did all these ideas come from?’ and ‘Where did our knowledge of these truths originate?’ The philosophy of empiricism provides a distinctive answer to both these questions. Most boldly enunciated by John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), it claims that…

Although Heidegger described this as the fundamental question of metaphysics, the answer is quite straightforward at its base, if we are strictly examining a comparison between something and nothing. There is something because there is literally no such thing as nothing (at all), and there possibly never was. Spinoza and Einstein, among many other great thinkers, subscribed to this view that it is impossible for there to be nothing. Nothing is only ever the absence of something in particular, but it is never truly no-thing, since the very label ‘nothing’ implies ‘something’. What we think of as empty space in our universe is not actually nothing; it contains energy, radiation and particles that flit in and out of existence. It has properties: it can expand and contract, warp and bend.…

Anushka: Being a teenager is definitely hard work. Teens are stressed-out people trying desperately to improve themselves and the world they live in. Or perhaps that’s just me. In any case, teenagers have their own busy loads to attend to. Many adolescents across the world have workloads that rival those of professionals in the corporate world. Zac: So where does philosophy fit into our busy lives? Well, Anushka and I, in the moments of relaxation that interrupt our workloads, use philosophy to make sense of the crazy adult world that so many of us often feel unequipped to enter. Anushka:We want to start by discussing something we find particularly pertinent in the life of many teens, including ourselves. Zac: The world around us is constantly trying to mold us –…

Report by our Special Correspondent Outside it was a cold, damp January day in central London, but inside Conway Hall was warmth, fellowship, the buzz of conversation and the crackle of ideas. Children in facepaint headed for their own philosophy workshops (run by the Philosophy Foundation) or mingled with their elders in the hallways and café. The 4th Philosophy Now Festival on 20 January 2018 ran for the entire day from 10am to 10pm, and consisted of more than thirty separate philosophyrelated events – philosophy talks, workshops, debates, activities, panels discussions and games. The Festival is held every two years, and as usual we were the guests of Conway Hall in their magnificent building. Numerous organisations took part including Philosophy For All and Oxford University’s Uehiro Centre for Ethics, and…

Heidegger’s Nazism and anti-Semitism were known about before the appearance of the Black Notebooks. But the extent of his anti-Semitism is made much clearer by the Notebooks, where he connects some of his key ideas to racist ideas in the Nazi period. For example, he links the difference between ‘being’ (things being intelligible at all) and ‘entities’ (the specific ways in which things are framed by a practice or a discipline) to “World Jewry, which, absolutely unattached, can undertake the deracination of all entities from being as a world-historical ‘task’.” He is referring to the transnational role of Jewish financiers in commodity exchange (which can in some respects be seen as turning everything into an exchangeable ‘entity’). However, his claims are vacuous: instead of analysing the economic roots of the…

Garbled Anti-Relativism? DEAR EDITOR: Ray Prebble concludes his article ‘Are You a Garbled Relativist?’ in Issue 124 with a series of questions aimed to intrepidly bolster his pronouncement that ‘nobody’s really a moral relativist.’ Dr Prebble couches his questions as a tool for challenging the moral beliefs of other cultures, to see if they’re sound. Let’s assume, then, that I were to allow Prebble to borrow the time machine stored in my garage so he can travel back to the pre-Columbian era, where he meets an Aztec priest at a temple. There, Prebble looks on aghast while the official unflinchingly sacrifices one prisoner after another by cutting out their hearts. Now let’s consider at Prebble’s five questions intended to debunk moral relativism – in this particular instance, the Aztecs’ fervent…

As all observers of a particular galaxy far, far away know, there has recently been another awakening in the Force: Star Wars: The Last Jedi. We reviewed Star Wars: The Force Awakens in Issue 115 of Philosophy Now. Our review of that film concentrated on the themes of disenchantment and ‘doubles’ – in particular, pointing out similarities with the original trilogy. We quoted Bryan Seitz of Babson College as saying, “Philosophy finds power and security in the double but from it simultaneously inherits countless forms of dependence and instability.” The Last Jedi promises that the Star Wars franchise, and perhaps philosophy as well, is capable of transforming dependence and instability to yield something genuinely new. The original Star Wars trilogy unfolded as a classic morality play of good versus evil,…

Acouple of years ago I addressed the delicate question of whether or not philosophy makes progress (‘The “P” Word’, Philosophy Now 113, 2016). The question is more complicated than could justify a straight ‘Yes’ or a straight ‘No’ answer. It might at first seem that progress in philosophy should be like progress in any other theoretical discipline, namely reaching agreed-upon solutions to problems. By that criterion, there are few branches of philosophy which can be regarded as a success. But of course, things are not that simple. There are other markers of progress. One is the capacity of philosophy to transform its problems into something possibly more complex, definitely more interesting, and most importantly, less in the grip of the presuppositions of everyday life. Philosophy is at least as much…

CHARLES TAYLOR, THE well-known philosopher, is in many respects an oppositional writer – it is by seeing what he is against that we begin to see what he is for. In particular he is against scientism, against naturalism, and against reductionistic atomism. To be anti-scientistic is not to be antiscience: as organic bodies, human beings are of course susceptible to scientific analysis. However, as persons with intentions and values, we are not. This doesn’t mean that we must give up on explanation at this point. Rather, the human sciences must make space for the way that human beings perceive themselves, which is an essential part of their identity. We must be aware that any account of ourselves is always liable to revision. Molluscs and aardvarks have no means of answering…

Blaise Pascal was a physicist, mathematician, geometer, calculating-machine designer, controversialist and Christian apologist – but was he a philosopher? He would probably have said no, bearing in mind the implications of the term in his own time. In the memorial of his conversion he writes, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the savants.” Yet Pascal is still read because he engaged creatively with the philosophical thought of his day, and still has something to say even to the thought of our time. Early Life Blaise Pascal was born on June 19th 1623 in Clermont in the Auvergne in central France. His older sister, Gilberte, was born in 1620; his younger sister, Jacqueline in 1625. His mother died the following year, and when…