Table of contents for Issue 26 - No.4/2019 in New Philosopher

“Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.” Marcus Aurelius Fairy tales and myths are replete with stories of change, be it person to stone, rags to riches, a prince to a frog, or everything to gold. While there are certainly plenty of other messages contained in these myths, the story that change is inevitable, though often unexpected, is a constant one. Ancient philosophers tell a similar tale: Ovid warns that “all things change”, Aurelius that “everything’s destiny is to change”, Heraclitus that “all is flux, nothing stays still”. We, the children of the technological age, hardly need reminding of this fact. For us, life is change: new ways of being, new ideas, new people, and new gadgets abound. We expect,…

Think back to when you were ten years old. What did you want to be when you grew up? There’s a good chance you winced just now. For many of us, remembering what we thought adulthood would be like, and what our role in it might be, is either embarrassing or just plain bizarre. Children, of course, have a fairly vague understanding of the world of work, which is why every kindergarten contains far more future firefighters, dinosaur scientists, and astronauts than the actual workforce ever has. It might make you chuckle, or cringe, to think you ever thought you’d be doing one of these jobs. Or, it might make you slightly uncomfortable. What ever happened to that kid and their charming, if naïve, dreams? At ten, I was sure…

“Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.” Alvin Toffler Jonathan Swift was one to choose his words carefully. In a letter from 1725 written to his good friend, the poet and satirist Alexander Pope, he contested the contemporary definition of humanity. “I have got materials toward a treatise, proving the falsity of that definition animal rationale,” he wrote. That common definition of humans being ‘rational animals’ was one that Swift found outrageously vain. Instead his treatise was to “show it should be only rationis capax”. That is, humans are “capable of reason”, although we typically choose not to employ it. If we’re honest with ourselves, Swift was right. Indeed, one of the richest veins of recent scientific research has shown that the human animal is rarely…

What prompted you to undertake the series of photographs in your work ‘Identical Twins’? I was born in Shandong province and went to two primary schools, two middle schools, and five high schools. Sometimes, just when I had adapted to an environment, I then had to go to another place. Most people knew me during the transfer period; however, it was very difficult for me to remember everyone. What impressed me most was that there were three pairs of twins among my classmates and each of them had a different fate. One of the twins went to college but the other one kept trying for more than ten years but still failed. People often compared them and there is no doubt that it would bring strong pressure to their lives.…

On 10 May 1968, Michel Foucault listened in breathless anticipation to the sounds coming through his telephone. His partner, Daniel Defert, was on the other end of the line. But the sounds that so enchanted Foucault were not whisperings of love. They were the mighty rumblings of revolution. Foucault was stationed in Tunisia as a lecturer, and Defert was on the balcony of his apartment in Paris, his telephone next to a radio reporting the events of what would later be known as the Night of the Barricades. From his balcony on the Left Bank, Defert could see thousands of protesters in the streets between the Seine and the Sorbonne. Over the still moonlit air, he heard the chants of students and workers united in solidarity, hopeful of a genuine,…

/tʃeɪn(d)ʒ/ noun: 1. An act or process through which something becomes different; 2. The substitution of one thing for another; 3. An alteration or modification; 4. A new or refreshingly different experience; 5. A clean garment or garments as a replacement for something one is wearing; 6. Money returned to someone as the balance of the sum paid for something; 7. (historical) A place where merchants met to do business. Origin:  Middle English from Old Frenchchange(noun),changer(verb), from late Latincambiare, from Latin cambire‘barter’, probably of Celtic origin.…

I’m in my 60s and when I see my old school friends after a few more years have passed, we seem to draw each other back into our old selves. (At least that's how it seems to me.) Although we’ve all had varying degrees of success and failure in our careers, family lives, and health, and most of us have moved and travelled over the course of the decades, when we get together we tend to fall into the roles we played as teenagers, with few prepared to accept that there has been much change other than receding hairlines and expanding waistlines. In reality, most – if not all – of us have fundamentally changed from the teenagers we once were, with very different interests, influences, and ways we spend…

Transformative Experience L. A. Paul Life choices For choices involving dramatically new experiences, we are confronted by the brute fact that we can know very little about our subjective futures. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to – by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like if we choose to have the experience – we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding an experience, we have still made a choice. Guns Germs and Steel Jared Diamond Great Leap Forward Obviously, some momentous change took place in our ancestors’ capabilities between about 100,000 and 50,000…

Bright Thinking Monthly 2019-2020 Hobart, Australia Launched in 2017, this philosophy discussion series is held each month amidst the vats of a working brewery in Hobart, Australia. The format is participatory rather than dictatorial and a topic is chosen ahead of time to allow attendees to prepare. Previous speakers include environmentalist Jenny Weber from The Bob Brown Foundation, Hobart Lord Mayor Anna Reynolds, and Tasmanian Australian of the Year and speech pathologist Rosie Martin. Hosted by New Philosopher’s editor Zan Boag and Womankind magazine’s editor Antonia Case, you’re sure to come away with plenty to think about. meetup.com/Bright-Thinking Energy Until January 26, 2020 MoMA, New York, USA If in the past design led us to devour energy at an ever-growing rate, design can now help us conserve it and behave…

Seneca was a Roman Stoic with a sensitive stomach. In a letter addressed to Lucilius, he recounts the time he found himself seasick aboard a boat, his illness so unsettling that he threw himself overboard and flailed to shore. Seneca craved land, terra firma, stillness, but his body didn’t register the change at first. He warned Lucilius that “one does not escape seasickness by escaping from the sea”. Hard ground wasn’t enough to still Seneca’s stomach. Jean-Paul Sartre’s nausea is even more famous. His 1938 fictional protagonist Roquentin became nauseated by looking at a tree and getting lost in its roots. The longer he looked, the more certain he became of his own nothingness, which hurled him into another type of sea: doubt. The indifferent tree rendered Roquentin’s life meaningless,…

The first synthetic plastic ‘Bakelite’ was produced in 1907. In 2015, 381 million tonnes of plastic was produced, roughly equivalent to the mass of two-thirds of the world population. In 2001, almost half of British children had imaginary friends, but now that has dwindled to 17 per cent. According to research, access to phones and downloads is to blame. Between 1991 and 2011, painkiller prescriptions in the US tripled to 219 million per year. In 2018 over 80,000 Americans died from opioid and painkiller overdoses. The first protolanguages emerged about 100,000 years ago. In 2019 the number of living languages worldwide was 6,912. In 1800, 12 per cent of the world’s population over the age of 15 could read; by 2016 it was 86 per cent. The size of an…

Majorities in most surveyed countries say global climate change is a major threat to their nation. In fact, it’s seen as the top threat in 13 of 26 surveyed countries, more than any other issue the survey asked about. People in Greece express very high levels of concern, with 90 per cent labelling climate change a major threat (similar to the 88 per cent there who cite the condition of the global economy). People in South Korea, France, Spain and Mexico also express strong concerns. Eight-in-ten or more in each of these countries say climate change is a major threat. Americans are less likely to be concerned about climate change,with 59 per cent seeing it as a serious threat. About as many people in the United States cite climate change…

In his poem of grief and loss In Memoriam, the Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson adapts an ancient image of change to describe the seemingly solid earth beneath his feet: The hills are shadows, and they flowFrom form to form, and nothing stands;They melt like mist, the solid lands, Like clouds they shape themselves and go. The analogy may have been thousands of years old, but Tennyson was being radically literal in its usage. While he was working on the poem, in the 1840s, a series of scientific works had recently appeared that challenged everything people took for granted about the Earth and humanity’s place in its history: Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, in 1830-33, and Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, in 1844. More than a…

Full sail, I voyageOver the boundless ocean, and I tell youNothing is permanent in all the world.All things are fluent; every image forms,Wandering through change. Time is itself a riverIn constant movement, and the hours flow byLike water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,Forever fugitive, forever new.That which has been, is not; that which was not,Begins to be; motion and moment alwaysIn process of renewal. Look, the night,Worn out, aims toward the brightness, and sun’s glorySucceeds the dark. The colour of the skyIs different at midnight, when tired thingsLie all at rest, from what it is at morningWhen Lucifer rides his snowy horse, beforeAurora paints the sky for Phoebes’s coming. From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written in the 1st century.…

Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, left us to interpret and apply his often-cryptic aphorisms. One of the fragments that survives from his writing declares, “All is flux, nothing stays still”, a phrase that Plato quoted in the Cratylus. Who could think otherwise? Everything, of course, changes, which is why you can’t step into the same river twice, another thought attributed to Heraclitus: it’s not just that the water in the river flows by so the river is different, but that you’ll be different too. When you dip your toe back in to the water you’ll be different physiologically because cells will have changed, you’ll be older even if just by a few seconds, and perhaps you’ll even be wiser, though maybe you won’t. You are subtly different already from the person…

There was once on a time a poor man, who could no longer support his only son. Then said the son, “Dear father, things go so badly with us that I am a burden to you. I would rather go away and see how I can earn my bread.” So the father gave him his blessing, and with great sorrow took leave of him. At this time the King of a mighty empire was at war, and the youth took service with him, and with him went out to fight. And when he came before the enemy, there was a battle, and great danger, and it rained shot until his comrades fell on all sides, and when the leader also was killed, those left were about to take flight, but…

What is your demon? My personal demon is the state of my wardrobes, cupboards, and drawers. I can hardly bear to open them. What is the most important part of your education? Being thrown out of needlework and cookery by the domestic science teacher, so I had to do Latin and German instead. What do you doubt most? I am quite often unsure about my parenting decisions, though I try very hard to do my best. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? I would like people to WAKE UP and realise the extreme threats – both to the future of the planet and to liberal democracy – that the world is currently facing. What is happiness? Living a life full of various forms…

In an interview in 2009, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg famously declared that his developers needed to “move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough”. Implicit in Zuckerberg’s slogan is the assumption that change and progress are synonymous: in other words, that even if a few things get broken along the way – say, democracy or privacy or the ability to develop a healthy sense of self and community free from the predations of corporate advertising – it’s all worth it because the mere fact of change is so overwhelmingly positive. Though Zuckerberg, like any wunderkind, probably thinks of himself as a ‘thought leader’ – especially when making provocative statements about breaking stuff – his underlying assumptions about change and progress have a…

There is a widespread myth that says that moral progress will eventually happen in due course. The thought is that no matter how bad things are now, if we only give it time, things will get better. One historical document that stands out as perpetuating this myth is an open letter to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., penned by white Alabama clergymen in 1963. In the letter, the clergymen express that they “recognise the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realised”. But the ministers were “convinced that these [civil rights] demonstrations are unwise and untimely”. On their view, time is an important factor; change will happen in due course – if only the oppressed do not allow their impatience to get in the…

L. A. Paul is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Paul is best known for her research on the counterfactual analysis of causation and the concept of ‘transformative experience’. Paul’s principal research interests are in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, with her work focusing on causation, mereology, the philosophy of time, and related topics in phenomenology, the philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. She is the editor of Causation and Counterfactuals, coauthor of Causation: A User’s Guide, and author of Transformative Experience. In 2014 Paul received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study religious and transformative experience, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She received a NHC Fellowship from the National Humanities Center and an Institute for Advanced Study Research Fellowship at the…

When I grow up, I know my body will look different, but will I still be me? Let’s imagine a clever scientist has invented a machine that allows you to swap bodies with somebody else. Your memories, interests, love for the special people in your life, your thoughts, habits, and ways of solving problems will be intact, but they’ll live in a totally different body. At the same time, your body – the one you grew up in – will house somebody else’s thoughts, loves, interests, memories, and the rest. The question is: which one would you think is you? The old body with different thoughts, memories, and cares, or the new body with all the old habits, loves, and the rest? When I’ve asked people this, most people will…

The Analytic Thomas S. Kuhn 1922 – 1996 Change of paradigm Why should a change of paradigm be called a revolution? In the face of the vast and essential differences between political and scientific development, what parallelism can justify the metaphor that finds revolutions in both? One aspect of the parallelism must already be apparent. Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. In much the same way, scientific revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, again often restricted to a narrow subdivision of the scientific community, that an existing paradigm has ceased to function adequately in the exploration of…

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. “What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table – Samsa was a travelling salesman…

Population change In 2018, for the first time in history, persons aged 65 years or over worldwide outnumbered children under age five. Projections indicate that by 2050 there will be more than twice as many persons above 65 as children under five. By 2050, the number of persons aged 65 years or over globally will also surpass the number of adolescents and youth aged 15 to 24 years. Trends in population size and age structure are shaped mostly by levels of fertility and mortality, which have declined almost universally around the globe. In some countries, international migration also has become an important determinant of population change. population.un.org/wpp/Publications/ Devil’s dictionary WEATHER, N. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who…

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