Table of contents for February / March 2019 in Philosophy Now

One cloudy morning Sheila walked to the café and dropped her rucksack rather roughly on the floor next to her habitual chair. Immediately a voice said “Ouch! Careful!” She span around but there was nobody there. “No no, in here”, said her rucksack. “The laptop.” She fished out her computer, which looked unharmed by her cavalier treatment of it, and opened it warily. Had she left a video running? “That’s better,” said its built-in speaker. “Put it on the table carefully.” “Excuse me?” “Oh dear, surely you can’t have forgotten? I’m you. Only in here.” Sheila called out urgently to the barista: “Hey, cancel that treble shot latte! Decaf for me.” “No, you really are in here.” said the laptop. “We were thinking yesterday about the centre of consciousness and…

There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that of any other animal reigned supreme for over two thousand years. Then it was called into question from the middle of the nineteenth century by naturalistic explanations that emerged with the advent of evolutionary theory, primatology, and eventually neuroscience. The new thinking went, there is a difference between a human mind and, say, the mind of a chimpanzee but it is a difference of degree, not of kind. Is it any more significant than the difference between the mind of a chimpanzee and a baboon? Is there something…

We face a unique problem when we attempt to formulate an ethical system in which future generations are taken into account: the subjects of our attention do not exist. Of course, we assume that future generations will exist, barring an apocalypse of some kind, like some unexpected human extinction. Here I would like to sketch some of the difficulties involved in articulating an ethics that incorporates not-yet-existent subjects. First there is the question of whether we ought to factor future generations into our ethical decision-making at all. If we do decide that we should think about future people when evaluating our actions, there’s then the question of which kind of ethical system we should use to do so. Third, which species of our chosen ethical system should we adopt? While…

In their (not infrequent) darker moments, academics have been known to observe wryly that students’ grandparents seem to die at a much higher frequency near exams, requiring the students to have time off for the funeral. The ‘Dead Grandmother Problem’ has even been the subject of (tonguein-cheek) academic research demonstrating that based on extension requests, the period before assessments are due is a very dangerous time for students’ relatives (see for example ‘The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall of American Society’, The Connecticut Review 7 (2), Mike Adams, 1990). This is, of course, rather unfair: students may lie to their lecturers sometimes, but people do die, and they rarely time their deaths to accommodate their relatives’ exam schedules. Moreover, as the blogger Acclimatrix has pointed out, the ‘dead…

“War is delightful to those who have no experience of it.” - Erasmus THE HORROR of war and its ever-increasing lethality are common knowledge, so I turn to A.C. Grayling’s War: An Enquiry (2018) with expectations of more than clichés and trite observations. What I find is a characteristically lucid and concise exposition on war’s many facets. But to say that the exposition is lucid and concise is not to say that the book abounds in blinding epiphanies or starkly novel insights. This would not seem to be Grayling’s fault, but rather a symptom of his purpose. Grayling’s goal here is contributing to an understanding of war’s nature and dimensions in a way that might reduce its frequency. Anybody interested in the nature of war, especially its prevention, wrestles with…

When I was an undergraduate I heard numerous times that I should think of philosophy as a boxing match: set up the argument, knock down your opponent’s arguments, set up your argument again, knock down the counterarguments to your position… We should keep attacking until our strongest points prevailed. Looking back, I’m surprised I found this attractive. After all, I had spent most of the previous years in a ballet studio setting up pirouettes and grand jetés. Even though ballet dancers are tougher than many people assume, the ballet studio is hardly a boxing ring. I’m sure the physicality of the metaphor appealed to me, and the suggestion that the abstract linguistic world of philosophy had a competitiveness to it was intriguing. Boxing is a stereotypically male world; perhaps that’s…

• Brain to Brain networking demonstrated • Saudi Arabia to lift philosophy teaching ban • Philosophy Now Against Stupidity Award Brain to Brain Are you thinking what I’m thinking? What if we could know the answer directly without uttering a word? Over recent decades physics and neuroscience have developed tools such electroencephalograms (EEGs) that record electrical activity in different areas of the brain and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can transmit information into the brain. These technologies together are now enabling revolutionary developments in brain-to-brain communication. After succeeding three years ago in connecting two people via a non-invasive brain-to-brain interface, Dr Andrea Stocco and his colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle have now created the first multiperson brain-tobrain network, allowing three individuals to send and receive information directly…

The concept of thought is one with which people make mischief. Is thought to do with what it is like to have experiences? How can we know for sure that others think as we do? In what ways are thought and consciousness related? Can an unconscious entity think? Perhaps thought emerges from ever increasing degrees of computational sophistication? Yet there are machines that are capable of far more complex computational manoeuvres than human beings, but to which we do not accord thought. A Solid Grounding in Thought Both neuroscience and artificial intelligence require a clear understanding of the concepts of thought and consciousness. If they do not have this then, by definition, one cannot be clear about what such investigations reveal. But can philosophy really inform the kinds of scientific…

Most philosophies are named after their founders following the founder’s death – for example, Platonism. Sometimes the name emerges from a consensus of its practitioners – for example, Existentialism. It takes a bigger than average ego to consciously create a philosophy and give it a name of one’s own choosing. In For the New Intellectual (1961), Ayn Rand wrote, “The name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.” Russia & America Ayn Rand was born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in Saint Petersburg in 1905. Her father was a successful Jewish pharmacist. At the age of twelve the October Revolution totally changed her life. Her father’s business was confiscated and the family fled to the Crimea, where they spent the years of the Russian Civil War (1918-21). Rand is often accused…

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), like Immanuel Kant before him, believed that ethical knowledge was universally distributed. Bob Dylan sang “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, and Kierkegaard might have said you don’t need an ethics expert to know right from wrong. He held that when it came to ethics, there was no object of knowledge – for instance, no set of rules or standards – to be transmitted. But just because the ethics expert can’t provide anyone with some new morsel of moral knowledge they don’t already know, it doesn’t follow that there’s nothing a writer can do to help a reader lead a more upright life. From Kierkegaard’s perspective, it becomes a matter of drawing something out of a person rather than putting something…

Techno(non)immortalization DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed the Tallis in Wonderland article on ‘Technoimmortalization’ in Issue 128. The good professor wrote excellent good sense in his usual elegant style. However, was the subject really worthy of Professor Tallis’s detailed critique? He’s considering the idea that one day techniques might be available for the essential personal information in my brain to be uploaded onto a computer or something similar. But when I’m dead, I’ll still be dead, won’t I? The fact that some computer or something somewhere thinks it’s me wouldn’t alter that fact, would it? I first encountered this problem over fifty years ago while watching Star Trek. Captain Kirk would be beamed up; and I thought, Captain Kirk on the planet he needed to be beamed up from has just died,…

WHAT ARE we to make of In Defence of War (2013) by Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford? The title itself is provocative: to the pacifist there is nothing significant to be said in defence of war and the pages should be blank. Some might suspect the book of being an apology for neoconservative attempts to impose ‘democracy’ (i.e. free market capitalism) on unwilling nations at the point of a big gun. Others may hope for a rehabilitation of some of the ‘great men’ of history, whose reputations have been trashed in the name of political correctness. Neither of these expectations is warranted. What Biggar offers is a series of essays which seek to apply certain basic principles regarding war. These he…

Dogs are good for us: (wo)man’s best friend has measurable effects on our wellbeing. When we gaze lovingly into the eyes of our faithful pet, our brains secrete the feelgood hormone oxytocin, usually associated with maternal closeness and mate-bonding. And canine company can reduce both our blood pressure and the stress hormone cortisol. But are we good for dogs? It looks that way: a recent Japanese study shows that when they’re with us, dog brains secrete oxytocin too. The dog in my photograph, taken in the Netherlands, seems to be a happy pampered baby-substitute. It also fits with empirical research showing behavioural and neuroendocrine similarities between dog ownership and mother-and-infant relationships. However, some people mistreat dogs, and pedigree breeding has also produced various health issues alongside the human-aesthetically-pleasing outcomes. Pugs…

Anushka: Hi everyone! We have a new member of the Young Philosophers team, my dear friend Anchal. As we progress through these first few months of 2019, we’ve been inspired to reflect on something that proved to be extremely important in 2018 for young and not-so-young people alike. Anchal: It’s called resilience. Anushka:Whether you’re a college freshman like me, making the tough transition away from home and into the first stages of the adult world, a high school sophomore like Anchal, or neither of the above, we’ve all had a lot to worry about in 2018. Anchal: In the face of difficult politicians, increasing hate crime, economic downturns, wars, the impending doom of climate change, or even a breakup, rejection, or failure of some personal sort there are all sorts…

We are delighted to announce that the winner of Philosophy Now’s 2019 Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity is journalist, academic and author Angela Phillips. Professor Phillips has been a practising journalist for over 40 years and has taught journalism at Goldsmith’s, University of London, for two decades. She has carried out extensive research into the ethics and practice of journalism in the social media age. This is reflected in her book Journalism in Context, which starts by asking “What is news?” and provides a clear, philosophically-informed guide to many questions concerning modern journalism, including sources, media ownership, audiences and the social contexts within which journalists train and work. The particular challenges of digital journalism and news on social media led her to coauthor, with Eiri Elvestad, Misunderstanding…

In Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, he wrote the following oftquoted passage: “‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” It’s easy to believe that here Crick was being willfully provocative and rhetorical. I want to consider to what degree he may also have been telling the truth, if at all. In terms of the rhetoric and provocation, it’s true that Crick’s critical attitude towards religion was one motivation for his writing this. Crick certainly believed that religions are often wrong about scientific issues (as do many religious people). He also claimed…

One thing about running a philosophy magazine, with the resulting creative chaos, is that occasionally when tidying up you stumble across memos from your philosophical heros. At least, that was my experience recently. One of my greatest philosophical heros was the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2010). One of the world’s best known and most original moral philosophers, she reignited interest in virtue ethics. She also invented the ‘Trolley Problem’–an ethics thought experiment that recently inspired an entire episode of The Good Place! At university my ethics tutor Anthony Price introduced me to another of Foot’s groundbreaking contributions, a 1972 paper called ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’. It relates to a critical problem at the very root of ethics: the ‘Is-Ought Problem’ first pointed out by David Hume in…

Among the humanities, philosophy is particularly dependent on its place in the Academy. Literature has existed for as long as human beings have been reading and writing, and would continue to be enjoyed by millions even if it were no longer part of any academic endeavor. Novelists, even difficult, esoteric ones such as Joyce and Faulkner, write for readers, not for literature professors. Similarily, theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Mordecai Kaplan wrote for the public, not just for other theologians. If theology ceased to be a university subject, work such as theirs would continue unabated. Original research in philosophy, however, like that in physics or biology, is now carried out almost entirely in university departments and in academic journals and monographs. On the few occasions that philosophers venture into…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we (Westerners) divide up philosophy. Usually we do it chronologically, and typically into three periods before the modern era: ancient, medieval, and early modern. This is obviously pretty clumsy, and unequal to boot, given that ancient and medieval between them cover more than two millennia, while ‘early modern’ typically covers only about two centuries (the seventeenth and eighteenth). A more refined periodization might define such eras as the ‘late antique’ and ‘Renaissance’, somehow fit in the nineteenth century, and so on. But one will always be stuck with blurry edges. Petrarch (1304-1374), for example, seems very much a Renaissance figure, yet was a contemporary of the quintessentially medieval thinker John Buridan (1300-1361). What’s been on my mind though, is not so much…

SAVING BEAUTY (2017) is a thrilling discussion of the concept of beauty in today’s consumer culture. Hyperbolic and discursive, it is a gripping read that doesn’t really set out to achieve what the title proposes. Rather, it leaves the reader with a sense of urgency that beauty has yet to be saved. Or is it in fact we who need saving? Byung-Chul Han is a cultural theorist and lecturer at the University of the Arts, Berlin. Taking up many of the themes with which he has juggled in earlier publications – capitalism, digitization, consumerism, and more – here he paints a dystopian picture of our society and how it lost track of beauty. Throughout the first three chapters, he argues that beauty has lost its edge and has been turned…

Arecurrent theme of these columns has been the fundamental difference between humans and the rest of the natural world. Not long ago, those who, like me, wanted to highlight these differences, could appeal to the use of tools; to the way that we employ inanimate objects to enhance the capacities of our bodies and solve problems. In recent decades, evidence has emerged that seems to challenge this basis for our claim to uniqueness. For some, the assertion that animals do not use tools has always been undermined even by ordinary observations of the lives of the beasts. Are not beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, bees’ honeycombs, and spiders’ webs tools of a sort? Not in the sense that matters. After all, in contrast to the human equivalents, the construction and utilisation…

It was the last night of a short weekend visit to Denver, and my old college roommate Paul and I were holed up in his apartment with a half-gallon of cheap Canadian whiskey. My girlfriend was back in Washington spending the weekend with a dog she adopted a year ago with her ex-boyfriend. Paul’s partner was at an academic conference in Kansas, where she was giving a talk on the notion of alterity in the early works of Nikolai Gogol. This was the first weekend that either I or Paul had spent away from our significant others in nearly five months, so naturally we spent the entire time drinking, chainsmoking, playing drunken matches of ping pong, and endlessly expatiating about our relationship gripes and our paradoxically concomitant hopes and other…