Table of contents for June/July 2018 in Philosophy Now

It is no hyperbole to say that having friends, especially good friends, is a sure sign of success. The value of friendship is immense. Having friends is one of the most fundamental aspects of finding and achieving happiness. So it is safe to say we are all better off if we have a number of close friends and if we can find activities that bring us happiness that we can share with others. Friends come in a variety of types and categories, but they’re generally described as those with whom we are attached by feelings of affection or personal regard; those who provide assistance and support; those on good terms with one another; and those who may share certain core attributes such religious and cultural affiliations, or a common interest…

In 1790, in his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant famously predicted that there would never be a “Newton for a blade of grass.” Biology, he thought, would never be unified and reduced down to a handful of mechanical laws, as in the case of physics. This, he argued, is because we cannot expunge teleology (goal-directedness), that is, the idea of purpose, from living systems. The question ‘What is it for?’ applies to living structures in a way that has no counterpart in physics. Most Anglo-American philosophers, historians of science, and theologians have completely misunderstood his argument. Their usual narrative goes like this: Kant said there would be no Newton of biology; along comes Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the Newton of biology, who shows that natural selection explains adaptation without appeal to…

The most widely accepted attempt at describing the nature of embodied thought in this materialistic age is called physicalism. (It has a variant called materialism, but I’ll use the terms interchangeably.) There are many nuanced versions of physicalism, but in its basic form, it says that all the mental things – sensations, thoughts, ideas, all experiences – are really physical things: matter, energy and physical processes. But does such an idea make sense? Can it mean anything meaningful to say that the contents of minds are physical? I say no. Let me start by saying that the debate about how to describe the nature of the mind is at its heart an argument about the proper language in which to do so. Although this might make the debate sound trivial…

I MUSTADMITthat it took me some time to come around to seeing that Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) actually had something interesting, even important, to say about science and philosophy. When I was a young scientist interested in philosophy of science I eagerly read Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, and even enjoyed their disagreements about doing prescriptive philosophy (that is, telling scientists how to do science properly, à la Popper), versus focusing on a descriptive program (that is, studying how scientists actually do science, à la Kuhn). But when I got to Feyerabend’s Against Method (1975) I was tempted, to quote David Hume, to consign it to the flames, since it appeared to me to contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Then the years passed, and with age and experience my thinking…

Mill and the concept of liberty are forever linked, but his tyrannical father sought to deprive him of it. In later life, when asked if he had ever played cricket, he replied wistfully that he never had a childhood, had no friends of his own age, and had never been allowed time for frivolous things. The lonely boy was made into a prodigy, and as a result grew up to view society in largely abstract terms. Later events dramatically converted him into a powerful advocate for radical social change. Early Life John Stuart Mill was born on 20 May 1806 in Pentonville, a suburb of London. He was the eldest of the nine children of James Mills and Harriet (née Burrow). His father, who originally trained as a church minister…

• Giant Karl Marx Bestrides Trier • Derek Parfit’s Photography Exhibition Opens • Bertrand Russell Prison Letters Project Happy Birthday: Marx Turns 200 Karl Marx was born 200 years ago, on May 5, 1818, in the German city of Trier, a major centre of power both of the Roman and of the Holy Roman empires, but at Marx’ time a part of Prussia. It is fair to say at the good people of Trier are conflicted about the city’s famous son. On the one hand, they are not shy about making the most of the commercial opportunities that this occasion affords: From plastic garden gnome Marxes to commemorative 0€ bank notes, all kinds of capitalist kitsch is available for Marx fans to celebrate their hero’s bicentenary. On the other hand,…

What is the meaning of life? In the twentieth century most analytic philosophers either ignored the question or dismissed it as meaningless. This may be largely attributable to the influence of the school of thought known as logical positivism. Continental philosophers were always somewhat more tolerant of the question, even though they rarely put it in those familiar terms; Heidegger came close, however, with his discussion of the meaning of ‘Being’. The logical positivist idea that the question is meaningless seems to have filtered into the public consciousness with the idea that what is most bewildering about the question is not how it should be answered, but rather what it is asking. Douglas Adams picked up on this nicely in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with his plot about…

Judging Heidegger DEAR EDITOR: I much enjoyed your edition featuring the thought of Martin Heidegger (125). But it seems nowadays one cannot have a sensible account of his ideas without making some reference to the fact that he was for a time a member of the Nazi Party. Indeed, it has been a longstanding obsession of many commentators on Heidegger, and both Anja Steinbauer’s Editorial and the article ‘The Trouble with Martin’ played into this obsession. However, I have never believed that an individual’s biography should influence our assessment of her/his artistic, scientific or philosophical achievement. I may dislike Wagner’s anti-Semitism or even that he had a penchant for pink silk underwear, but that has nothing to do with the wonder of the opening bars of Parsifal. I may not…

GRAHAM MCFEE’S Ethics, Knowledge and Truth in Sports Research is ambitious, compelling, and exasperating. The discussion ranges over research, research ethics, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, epistemology or theory of knowledge, and the connections between them. The book is rich and peripatetic. It involves a lot of debunking, but is not in any sense mean-spirited. McFee provides, in a crisp concluding chapter, a list of the theses for which he has argued. He has defended truth in social research against the Scylla and Charybdis of postmodernism and scientism. He has demonstrated that social research into sport is essentially erotetic (I’ll explain that soon), with methodological consequences. He has argued that Voluntary Informed Consent is not the gold standard in research ethics it is taken to be. He has…

Ihave recently been thinking about non-existent objects. And yet I have not been thinking about nothing. How can that be? you might ask. Alternatively, you may be inclined to walk away muttering something about philosophers and their non-existent problems. But hang on in there. The puzzle of non-existent objects is like many a philosophical question: even as you are dismissing it impatiently, it draws you back with a sense that what is at stake is more than a silly tease. Non-existent objects come in various kinds. There are beings that once existed but exist no longer, such as William the Conqueror. There are entities that have never existed but might have done so – winged horses being a favourite example. And there are items that never will exist in any…

Although he lived long ago, the ethical writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE) still have relevance to the present day, particularly when we want to understand the meaning of friendship. In Books VIII and IX of his work the Nichomachean Ethics (named in honor of both his father and son, who shared the name Nichomachus), Aristotle categorizes three different types of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of the good (also known as virtuous friendships). Briefly, friendships of utility are where people are on cordial terms primarily because each person benefits from the other in some way: business partnerships, relationships among co-workers, and classmate connections are examples. Friendships of pleasure are those where individuals seek out each other’s company because of the joy it brings…

It’s not Friar Tuck I’m talking about. The jovial gourmand of the Robin Hood stories was apparently a good friend of the Merry Men and Maid Marian in Sherwood Forest. But the religious order of Friars, the Dominicans, was founded in 1216, so it is hard to see how the adventures of Friar Tuck could have taken place in the time of King Richard I as the legend claims, since Richard I died in 1199. The Friar I’m interested in actually existed. He was a thirteenth century philosopher and Christian theologian who embraced Aristotelian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers. Like Friar Tuck, he enjoyed his food. In fact his contemporaries called him ‘The Dumb Ox’ because of his large build and hesitant speech. Friar Thomas Aquinas says some interesting things about…

The philosophers entered my consciousness sometime after the sales of the last few Chihuahuas, Dachshunds, and Dogues de Bordeaux. It was several hours into the day-long dog auction in southwest Missouri, but before the auctioneer had even made it to the French Bulldogs, German Shepherds and Golden Retrievers in the alphabetical program of about three hundred dogs. I was sitting in the bleachers with the rest of the crowd, looking down at the center-stage folding table, where bidding on a purebred English Bulldog had stalled at $185. I had the cash, but I didn’t reach for it. Instead, to my surprise, I found myself haggling morality with Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill, and finally, Peter Singer. The commercial-scale dog breeders – some would call them ‘puppy mill’ owners –…

Among all the other indignities Syrian refugees have endured during the last seven years, from poor treatment at the borders and residency offices to humiliation and abandonment by immigration-hostile countries, they have also faced the indignity of not always finding a place for those who have died. Out of sheer necessity, corpses are abandoned in morgues, or cardboard boxes, or even in the backs of taxis. I thought of them when, about six months ago, the day before my father’s funeral, my mother remarked that we all have a duty to treat the dead with dignity. For those of us who think that intuitions or widely held beliefs aren’t enough to explain why things should be done in a certain way, deeper reasons must be found. So let’s ask ourselves,…

One of the more arresting claims Aristotle makes in his famous exploration of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics is that you can’t be friends with god. His reasoning is that friendship requires equality, and the gods are vastly superior to us. The argument is a plausible one: it seems difficult or impossible to be friends with a boss, mentor, or teacher in quite the way that one is friends with one’s peers and equals. Indeed we might say that friendship is distinctive precisely in being non-hierarchical. If I am truly your friend, what I am to you is exactly what you are to me. This thought has been supposed to cause trouble for the followers of Confucius. Confucianism was China’s most influential philosophical tradition for well over two millennia. Its…

Things To Come – L’Avenir (2016) – is French writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s tale of Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabel Huppert), a middle-aged philosophy teacher haunted by a vague malaise while seemingly having no insight into its cause. Things To Come manages to deliver a searing indictment of the state of Western philosophy in an exceptionally understated film. This fine balance earned Hansen-Løve the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 66th Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. No Commitments At the beginning of the film Professor Chazeaux walks through a picket line of demonstrating students to get into the Paris university where she works. When several students interrogate her apparent lack of concern, she retorts, “I’m not here to talk politics, but to teach.” In the classroom, one of her less-politicised students…