Table of contents for June - July 2019 in Philosophy Now

“The winds rise in the north,Blow west, blow east,And now again whirl high aboveWho breathes them out, who breathes them in?” The classical Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi has once again hit the nail on the head: ideas arise and make their rounds, they are articulated, accepted or rejected by a variety of thinkers. His poem above is a small part of a long argument about putting philosophical ideas into perspective. Ultimately, Zhuangzi recommends rising above them altogether by trusting your own instincts. ‘Western’ philosophers may be forgiven for not agreeing or disagreeing with Zhuangzi. His style and conceptual framework are unfamiliar. After all, what exactly is he even saying? And even if we can figure it out, is this philosophy? I have come across this kind of scepticism millions of times.…

Today you’d be hard pushed to find a corner of the biosphere unaltered by human hands. In some places, nature has been rendered almost incapable of sustaining healthy life. Industrial society has caused a loss of species estimated to be 1,000 times more rapid than the rate of extinction that would have occurred in the absence of human activity. Manmade emissions have increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to its highest level in several million years, and the onset of human-induced climate change is set to produce ever more devastating effects. So extensive is the human impact on the planet that a growing number of scientists think we’ve entered a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene, which signifies irreversible changes in the Earth’s ecosystems. How did we get here,…

Joerg Tuske is Professor of Philosophy at Salisbury University in Maryland. Originally from Hamburg, Tuske completed his undergraduate studies and MA in Philosophy at King’s College London, before studying Sanskrit at the University of Pune in India. Afterwards he took his MPhil and PhD at Cambridge. His main research interests are in Classical Indian Philosophy and in Philosophy of Mind. He edited Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. How and why did you first get interested in Indian philosophy? I became interested in Indian philosophy when I was an MA student in the Philosophy Department at King’s College London. Jonardon Ganeri had just finished his PhD in Oxford under the supervision of Bimal Matilal and he had been appointed as a teaching fellow at King’s.…

“The overman laughs at man, like man laughs at the ape.” Thus spoke Zarathustra in Frederich Nietzsche's famous work of the same name when he came down from the mountains to convince humanity of a new and better way to be human. Zarathustra was right. Put in cognitive evolutionary terms, Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch or ‘Overman’ is more than just utopian ideology. We have evolved from an unreflective state of being as small furry mammals to eventually become self-reflective Homo sapiens. Our ability to grasp our place in the world around us has continuously increased. To think that this evolutionary story will end here merely reflects our tendency to overestimate ourselves – such as when Hegel, many history books ago, proclaimed the end of history. But if we have…

Imagine watching a storm at sea. Imagine standing on a towering, vertiginous mountain peak. ‘The sublime’ refers to an experience of magnificence that nearly, but not quite, invokes fear. Does the sublime still exist in the twenty-first century? Or have we become desensitised to the very concept in a post-nature, mediated world? A concept widely discussed by philosophers from Burke to Kant, Schopenhauer to Hegel, in recent years its linguistic potency seems to have become diluted through misuse of the term, as ‘sublime’ has been used increasingly to refer to something that is simply beautiful. But the sublime, distinguished from beauty, carries with it more negative connotations of awe, terror, even the threat of death, often at the hands of a savage natural world. As the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard writes,…

Living with Robots by Paul Dumouchel & Luisa Damiano THE ROBOTS ARECOMING. Many are already here. They perform surgery, assemble cars, fetch and carry in warehouses, and clean floors. These robots are simply tools which do the jobs we give them, even when they use a degree of artificial intelligence to discover ways of working that their programmers had not imagined. But soon there will be robots which will provide us with social interaction. Social interaction may be desired just for its own sake, or it may be needed for therapeutic reasons. We may simply want to be entertained when our human friends have better things to do. Some people are housebound, and others have conditions which require kinds of interaction carefully tailored to their needs. Alternatively, social robots may…

The armed security guard in my photo is on duty in Karachi, in the Sindh province of Pakistan. He’s protecting a ladies’ shoe-shop against potential thieves: sandal stealers and kittenheel kleptomaniacs. A more dangerous threat would be dacoits – local bandits – robbing the shop of the day’s takings. But our man has been issued with three bullets (he showed me) and is ready to take on any three villains. (Despite the similar macho name, Tiger Security Services of Karachi are different from Tiger Bouncers of Karachi – who don’t actually bounce tigers, but offer to protect celebrities.) Security workers of all stripes are a common sight on the streets in this region of the world. Neighbouring India has over seven million private security guards. In industrialised countries, private security…

Anushka: Hey everyone! Anchal and I have some exciting ideas for the delightfully rejuvenating warmer months on the topic of positive thinking. Anchal: It’s important to sometimes evaluate our personal philosophies and ensure that we’re not falling into patterns of thinking which prevent us from living our best and most prosperous lives. So we’d like to encourage this now. Anushka: Often it seems that our circumstances determine our mood. Feelings of negativity can sweep us away and leave us feeling helpless. But there’s great power in remembering that we are not our thoughts, and can even change the patterns of thinking that keep us feeling down or out of control. Positivity is a powerful tool, and might even help us to understand our failures or setbacks. The agonies of defeat,…

Anita Silvers Anita Silvers, philosopher and activist, whose writings ranged from aesthetics to medical ethics, feminism, and disability rights, has died of pneumonia in San Francisco at the age of 78. She was Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and also served as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Philosophical Association’s Pacific Division for more than 25 years until 2008. A serious case of polio at the age of eight left Silvers with partial quadriplegia. Angry about her limited mobility, she was determined not to be held back by it. Starting her career in academic philosophy as an expert on aesthetics, she later turned her interest to developing a new field of applied ethics: philosophical engagement with disability. This refocus was motivated by her analysis of the Americans With Disabilities…

Our greatest philosopher David HumeWhose logical doubts left nothing assumedWith the skeptical arguments he had foundLeft nothing standing on solid ground.Until a Mensch named Kant came alongAnd pointed out where Dave went wrongWith the help of a little a prioriNow the world was just a category.Years later all the cerebral minds of the LogicsEven with the help of modern mathematicsOr PhDs debating with esoteric intellectualismCould not connect the pieces to any new ism.Disgruntled I found nothing to sufficeUntil I saw Sophie skating on solid ice. © CLINTON VAN INMAN 2019 Clinton Van Inman was born in England, raised in North Carolina, graduated SDSU with a degree in philosophy, and is now retired and living in Florida with his wife Elba.…

It is a paradox of early modern Japanese history that this highly militarised society only once attempted a foreign war – the invasions of Korea in the 1590s. The samurai mostly fought each other in civil wars, until the battle of Sekigahara in 1600 led to the establishment of Tokugawa Ieyasu as shogun (regent/dictator). Tokugawa created a peaceful regime which lasted until 1868. In doing so he also created a period of ethical reflection: what was the role of a warrior elite in a society which had effectively abolished war? Arguably the greatest ethical text to emerge from this period was Hagakure, the work of a once obscure samurai named Yamamoto Tsunetomo. The Forging of a Warrior Philosopher He was born in 1659 on Kyushu, the southernmost of the Japanese…

Remarks Re: Marx DEAR EDITOR: The collection of articles on Marx in PN 131 makes a useful contribution to discussion in Britain, especially at a time when Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is being accused (quite erroneously) of being a ‘Marxist’. But perhaps your debate would have been more fruitful had there been at least one piece from a supporter of Marxism. It reflected many widespread notions about Marxism that actually come from Karl Popper’s attack on him in The Open Society & Its Enemies. This is a pity, since Popper’s knowledge of Marx was itself quite limited and most of his references to Marx were taken from Emile Burns’ Handbook of Marxism (1935), an official Communist Party manual of the Stalinist period. Popper reveals little knowledge of the rest…

by Huaping Lu-Adler IT IS well known that Immanuel Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason to establish metaphysics as a science. At the outset of the Critique, Kant considers what this effort might learn from successful examples of scientific inquiry – mentioning logic first of all, which he claims has been a science since the time of Aristotle. Logic had a relatively easy time finding the ‘sure path’ of a science, since it deals only with the pure form of thought, abstracting from “all objects of knowledge” (Critique, p.ix). But metaphysics is concerned with matters of fact, and cannot make this abstraction. Yet if it is to be a science, its claims about matters of fact must nevertheless hold of necessity. This is why the central question of the…

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Karma is the concept that, eventually, ‘you get back what you give’. The idea that karma is an observable type of causality, just as gravity or the laws of thermodynamics are, might strike some as far-fetched. Isn’t karma a mere piece of wishful thinking or grim moralising which asserts, against all evidence, that the universe is just? Yet a careful perusal of the doctrine, at least in its elaboration in the early texts of Indian Buddhism, yields a thought-provoking picture which might contribute to our own thinking about ethics. The source of the concept of karma appears to be the idea of karman in the Hindu scriptures the Vedas, where it refers to ritual acts. If the ritual gestures (karman) are performed correctly, the future is bright. It was the…

Baroness Mary Warnock passed away on 20 March 2019, aged 94. Her philosophical career began in 1949. After teaching at a girls school in Dorset (her military assignment during WW2), she completed her studies and became a fellow at St Hughes College, Oxford. Warnock’s research interests were broad. In the 1960s, she wrote several books on existentialism and Sartre. The following decades saw her publish works on the philosophy of mind and education, before she focused in on the medical ethics for which she is most well known. Warnock was married to fellow Oxford philosopher Geoffrey Warnock and kept sharp company with the likes of Isaiah Berlin and Peter Strawson. Warnock was an influential philosopher in the public sphere. Her theoretical and practical work in education led to her appointment…

You may be familiar with the contrast between ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’. Lumpers like to put many different things under one heading, emphasising the similarity between them. Splitters instead focus on the differences, and delight in making distinctions. Well, in mid-seventeenth century India, one of history’s most adventurous lumpers met one of its most notorious splitters. The scene was the Mughal court during the period of Muslim political domination of the subcontinent. The splitter was a visitor from France, an intrepid traveler and philosopher named François Bernier; the lumper, his host, Prince Dārā Shikūh. Bernier served as his court physician, until his services sadly became superfluous when Dārā was put to death in 1659 as the outcome of a succession crisis. A Westerner like Bernier could hardly have chosen a better…

Last summer I received a surprising email. I was asked to be a judge in the ‘Between the Seas’ section of the 22nd Ji.Hlava International Documentary Film Festival, which was to be held from the 26th to the 30th of October 2018 in Jihlava, Czech Republic. Although I have attended and presented many talks at many conferences on film and philosophy, this was the first time I had been asked to be a judge at a film festival. I was particularly surprised because most of my work in the area has been on narrative fiction film. Nonetheless I was flattered and intrigued, and so I headed to Jihlava to be a judge. The Ji.Hlava International Documentary Film Festival is the largest documentary film festival in Eastern Europe. Over 300 documentaries…

Philosophers often remind us, and each other, that mental contents have the property of ‘aboutness’. Indeed, this is their distinguishing feature. Perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, and hopes, are all about things, events, states of affairs, past, present or future, actual or possible. So far, so obvious. Or so it should be. Nevertheless, this aboutness – or to use the philosophers’ preferred term, intentionality – has generated a vast literature in the philosophy of mind, and has been the subject of heated debate, just because it lies at the root of the fundamental differences between the mental and the physical. It makes mind difficult to fit into the cosmos as seen through what Daniel Dennett (in Consciousness Explained, 1991) called ‘the prevailing wisdom’ that “We can (in principle!) account for every…