Table of contents for October - November 2019 in Philosophy Now

“I find it important in philosophizing to keep my posture, not to stand for too long on one leg, so as not to get stiff.”(From Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notes, published in Culture & Value, 1977) Scientists and futurists are spreading before a dazzled public all kinds of astonishing prospects of humans in the near future being deliberately transformed through the use of technology. Through advanced medicine and by integrating technology into our lives and our very bodies, we may soon be stronger, healthier, longer-lived, happier, with more acute senses, and capabilities undreamed of by our ancestors. Such technological enhancements of ourselves will be our own conscious choices. What will that mean for our sense of self? Old questions such as ‘What are we?’ or ‘What makes us be who we are?’…

Medieval philosopher Peter Abelard was born in Le Pallet, Brittany, but we should not imagine him a Celt. Le Pallet was in a French-speaking area near the border with Poitou in western France. In fact, Abelard’s father was an immigrant from Poitou who probably married the heiress of the local castle of Le Pallet. Peter had a sister and three brothers. He was the eldest son and was expected to inherit the fief. However, his father felt that he should have some education, and Peter then discovered that he had a taste for learning. So he made over his rights in the fief to his brothers and became a wandering scholar specialising in logic: “I preferred the weapons of dialectic [rational debate] to all the other teachings of philosophy, and…

SEARCHING FOR ‘NIETzsche’ on YouTube will summon up a slick, insightful clip that has been viewed more than three million times. That’s impressive for a nineteenth century philosopher: Mill is lucky to reach six figures. As well as demonstrating his popularity, the clip tells you how Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is perceived, closing with praise for “our endearing, fascinating, often lovable” guide. This is precisely the sort of fawning, soft-pedalling whitewash that Ronald Beiner wants to torpedo. The central message of Dangerous Minds is that there is no reading of Nietzsche that can make him morally acceptable to the political centre or left. Any interpretation that portrays him so is wishful, immature, and dangerous. I agree with Beiner, and I also think that this is the most urgent discussion we could…

Secular humanism would be an impoverished worldview if it defined itself only in terms of what it is against. Many are tired of the rather too well-worn paths of adversarial atheism – a selective journey through history and the Holy Books, crying “Gotcha!” at every gout of spilled blood and every blood-thirsty sentiment. Humanist thinkers, they argue, would spend their time more fruitfully contemplating the large, extraordinary truths about our unique nature and the human world we have built, and on this basis construct a positive secular worldview. Nevertheless, the moral case against organised religion cannot be ignored. All of us, believers and infidels, need to be aware of the dangers that can arise when individual spiritual experiences feed into collective behaviour, and visions of transcendence are mobilised to underpin…

• Locke doc shock in Maryland • Žižek says something controversial again • French MPs debate sex and bioethics John Locke Manuscript Found It is rare to have breaking philosophy news from the 17th century, yet this is exactly what has happened. Independent scholar J.C. Walmsley has discovered a hitherto unknown manuscript by British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) in an archive at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. The document, written in Locke’s own distinctive hand, is believed to date from 1667-8. Locke is widely revered as one of the intellectual ancestors of liberal democracy, particularly thanks to his book Two Treatises on Government. In addition, his powerful arguments for freedom of religion in A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) later helped convince Thomas Jefferson to build the separation of church…

“I was born a few months before my due date,” he said in a tone of solemn proclamation. “I was quite fragile, very thin, and on top of everything, I came down with a bad case of pneumonia. Our family’s physician, a stern elderly man, took my mother’s hand, looked her in the eye, and advised her not to get overly attached to me.” He paused for a moment, then added: “And I must say, my mother has followed the doctor’s orders to this day!” I laughed out loud when I heard this joke, only just restraining myself from rolling on the floor. Later the same day, in a moment of quiet solitude, I started pondering what the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote about jokes. He said that laughter…

“These are the principles for the development of a complete mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science… Realize that everything connects to everything else.”Leonardo da Vinci The five-hundredth anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) presents an important occasion to reflect not only on the maestro’s incredible work and life but perhaps more importantly, on his mind. Not only does Leonardo’s work provide profound insights into his worldview, but his worldview provides profound insights into his work. Leonardo sought to maximize the thinking and being of every lived moment. Perhaps this is why he insisted that “time stays long enough for those who use it,” and that “a life well spent is long.” How else was he able to enquire and create to such…

You support the idea of a philosophy as a way of life, following a path that comes down to us from the Stoics to Nietzsche, from Ignazio of Loyola to Montaigne; but I could also add a bunch of Eastern thinkers from Laozi to Nagarjuna. Much of contemporary philosophy seems to have lost this dimension, becoming a cold game that only academics can play. Why is that, in your opinion? One of the reasons is that living philosophically is much harder than doing philosophy academically. All you need for the latter is a certain measure of intelligence, a set of sophistic skills, and a lack of inhibition. You don’t even need to be a particularly learned or erudite person, as used to be the case with previous generations of philosophers.…

WRITTEN IN A LIVELY AND engaging style, How to be a Stoic (2018) focuses on Stoic ethics and its application to life in the modern world. Stoicism began as an innovative school of Classical Greek and Roman philosophy, offering an unconventional and revisionary take on the received ideas of the culture of its time, many of which are still prevalent today. One core imperative of Stoic ethical theory is to make a clear distinction between those things which are under our control and ‘up to us’, and those which are not. In an increasingly complex and confusing world, where much time is spent worrying about matters we can do very little about, the Stoic notion that we should only concern ourselves with what we have the power to change offers…

It is two hundred years since the publication of Schopenhauer’s chief work, The World as Will and Representation. It contains four main books – the first a Kantian-inspired account of the subject of knowledge, or epistemology; the second an anti-Kantian account of the subject of willing, or metaphysics; the third a Platonic-inspired account of the subject of contemplation, or aesthetics; and the fourth an Eastern religion-inspired account of the ascetic subject, or ethics in its broadest sense. These four books Schopenhauer regarded as different aspects of a unified single thought, examined from different perspectives. The World as Will and Representation had zero immediate impact on contemporary philosophical debates, probably because of the uniquely devastating account that Schopenhauer’s single thought conveyed concerning the nature and value of human life. After a…

The beating heart of mathematics, its foundational axiom, is the idea that provides it with precision and efficacy: start with symmetry. Mathematics in its purest form is the manipulation of symmetries through conceptual origami. Through the clever and creative folding of symmetries, brilliant mathematicians create the sometimes beautiful and often critically important constructs through which we understand our universe. When we ask questions of the cosmos using mathematics, we map these symmetries onto the world. A Handful of Digits To better appreciate how this works, let us first look at the most ubiquitous symbols of mathematics, commonly known as the cardinal numbers. Let’s start with the basics. By ‘basics’, I mean that this may initially seem so trivially, stupidly obvious that you can’t see why anyone would bother to point…

The Clone Wars DEAR EDITOR: In his article ‘DNA & The Identity Crisis’ in Issue 133, Raymond Keogh seems to largely overlook what is arguably the more important implication for him of the definition of identity he provides from The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘The condition or fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else’: that a thing cannot be objectively identified as itself purely on the basis of DNA. For example, a tomato would only be distinguishable from its clone – another thing – through its position and history, as opposed to its genetic structure, which would be identical to the original. Therefore, I posit that an object’s place in time and space is a more precise identifying factor than its DNA. Let me summarise this…

It’s rare that current events change our appreciation of a classic Hollywood film, but that’s exactly what’s happened over the past two years with regard to my perception of John Ford’s Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In the age of ‘fake news’, this film’s examination of the transformation of the role of the newspaper from a courageous purveyor of truth to an ignominious peddler of falsehoods demands our attention. So engaging are the central scenes of the film’s narrative that viewers sometimes forget that what they’re watching is an extended flashback narrated by Senator Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), in which he explains why he and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of town drunk Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). In a great…

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I was reflecting on the idea that all of us are shackled to the dictates of determinism as I took my Sunday afternoon stroll through town when I came across a large crowd of people. A huge herd of them stared with open mouths and empty heads at a muscular man with a shaved head and a demented grin who was standing at the top of a small flight of steps leading to a wooden platform. Next to the platform was a transparent cylinder about as tall as two men, filled about three-quarters of the way up with water. The man held a rope in one hand and was gesticulating with the other in time with the rise and fall of his frantic speech: “Any one of you can tie…