Table of contents for Issue 37 - September/November 2022 in New Philosopher

Editor's letter “A healthy mind in a healthy body.”— Juvenal When you decide to run for exercise you don’t expect much other than sore calf muscles and tired lungs. You don’t expect to discover your purpose in life, or to somehow work through a worry that has plagued you for months. But oddly enough, some 30 minutes into a run, a voice from nowhere can descend – rational, optimistic, measured, hopeful – and suddenly you have some clarity. ASICS, the running shoe brand, is an acronym for the Latin phrase anima sana in corpore sano, or “a healthy mind in a healthy body”. The phrase derives from a satirical poem by Roman poet Juvenal, who argued that our ambitions for wealth, power, and personal beauty would lead to disappointment, and…

“I suppose, accordingly, that all the things which I see are false; I believe that none of those objects which my fallacious memory represents ever existed; I suppose that I possess no senses; I believe that body, figure, extension, motion, and place are merely fictions of my mind. What is there, then, that can be esteemed true? Perhaps this only, that there is absolutely nothing certain. But how do I know that there is not something different altogether from the objects I have now enumerated, of which it is impossible to entertain the slightest doubt? Is there not a God, or some being, by whatever name I may designate him, who causes these thoughts to arise in my mind? But why suppose such a being, for it may be I…

Zan Boag: Over the years, you’ve covered all aspects of the body. I’m particularly interested in the series that you did on hands, but, of course, it’s difficult to ignore the body as a photographer. Tim Booth: ‘A Show of Hands’ was the first time I’d really gone deeper, because a lot of the stuff that I do as a photographer, it’s very much the skin, it’s the shell. Even when you’re taking a portrait, you start with the shell, and then think, “Well, can I get anything out of that? Can I get some personality out?” But you’re very much starting this under a structural, external outlook. Obviously, I’m obsessed with the aesthetic because I’m a photographer, but once I was able to park the aesthetic part,…

According to the organisation previously known as Facebook, a technological revolution is brewing that will make the ubiquity of smartphones look minor by comparison. Meta – as it has been known since 2021 – has spent the last few years pouring billions of dollars into its eponymous metaverse. And while plenty of hand-waving has surrounded the precise form this virtual environment will take, the claim underlying its existence is clear enough. We are entering an era of digital bodily presence – and, sooner or later, this fact will transform our lives. Like many observers, I’m sceptical about the banalities of Meta’s marketing (“we’re building new ways to help you explore your interests and connect with the people you care about”) but not about the transformative potential of the technologies underpinning…

From the moment I was able to stand on two feet, I became a walker. Growing up in a rural area with an infrequent bus service, walking was not only a means of getting from A to B, but also my recreation. Walking opened my world, yet by the time I was eleven, it was also an escape, a time to think, to recalibrate myself after school. “I only went for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in,” wrote John Muir, the legendary naturalist, mountaineer, and environmentalist. Even as a child I understood the notion of “going in”. Much has been written about the physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological effect of walking, to the point where doctors in…

The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body issacred,No matter who it is, it is sacred—is it the meanestone in the labourers’ gang?Is it one of the dull-faced immigrants just landedon the wharf? Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as thewell-off, just as much as you,Each has his or her place in the procession. (All is a procession,The universe is a procession with measured andperfect motion.) Do you know so much yourself that you call themeanest ignorant?Do you suppose you have a right to a good sight,and he or she has no right to a sight?Do you think matter has cohered together from itsdiffuse float, and the soil is on the surface, and water runs and vegetation sprouts,For you only, and not for him and her?…

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Frankenstein Mary Shelley Infusing life The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. What Does it all Mean? Thomas Nagel Body and soul Dualism is the view that you consist of…

Mark Rowlands Mark Rowlands is a Welsh writer and philosopher. He is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Miami, and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. His works include Animal Rights, The Body in Mind, The Nature of Consciousness, Animals Like Us, and the personal memoirs, The Philosopher and the Wolf and Running with the Pack. Nigel Warburton Nigel Warburton is a freelance philosopher, podcaster, writer, and the Editor-at-large of New Philosopher. Described as “one of the most-read popular philosophers of our time”, his books include A Little History of Philosophy, Thinking from A to Z, and Philosophy: The Classics. The interviewer for the Philosophy Bites podcast, Warburton was previously Senior Lecturer in Philosophy…

By his mid-twenties, Friedrich Nietzsche was walking six to eight hours a day. He set out about two hours before the sun rose over the mountain and he’d continue to walk as the shadows lengthened into afternoon and early evening. With notebook in hand, and an umbrella to protect his eyes from the sun, Nietzsche composed his thoughts while walking, which perhaps explains why his writings at that time were somewhat unstructured, and pregnant with pithy aphorisms, a style of writing he recommended one should “dip into” rather than to read straight through, such as, “We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, – it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing…

According to medieval Jewish texts, the Roman emperor Hadrian once asked Rabbi Joshua ben Chanania about the doctrine of bodily resurrection. How, the emperor asked, could God reassemble bodies that had long since turned to dust? The Rabbi replied that when resurrected, people would be rebuilt around the luz, or ‘nut’, a small bone in the spine that could not be destroyed. To prove his point, the Rabbi took such a bone and “immersed it in water, but it was not softened; he put it into the fire, but it was not consumed; he put it into a mill, but it could not be pounded; he placed it upon an anvil and struck it with a hammer, but the anvil split and the hammer was broken.” Your local crematorium can…

Zan Boag: It has been some nine years since you’ve published Running with the Pack, and 14 years since The Philosopher and the Wolf. For those who haven’t read your books, they wouldn’t know that you had a wolf called Brenin as a companion – you used to run regularly with him, and some other dogs. Could you explain in a bit more detail that period of your life? Mark Rowlands: I was 27. I was in my first real job at the University of Alabama, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was having a great time, but I missed dogs. I’d grown up with large dogs. And I thought, since it looked like I was going to be here for a while, maybe I should consider getting a dog. So, I…

In his vast collection of over 500 artworks, German-born surrealist painter Wolfgang Lettl rarely misses the opportunity to depict the human body, although not in the form we are accustomed to seeing in real life – a severed hand or head, a punctured body, missing limbs and torsos, elongated legs. The human figure is an enduring source of fascination for the surrealists, as it was for artists in classical Greece, who idealised the beauty and athleticism of the human form, or artists in the Italian Renaissance, who became anatomical masters in their quest to produce a more lifelike portrayal of the human figure – even going as far, historians have noted rather grimly, as skinning human bodies to investigate the muscles, tendons, and bones that lie beneath. The Florentine sculptor…

At the close of the game against Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios, defeated Greek tennis star Stefanos Tsitsipas faced the press at Wimbledon, evidently downcast. He scratched his head. “I don’t know what went through my head,” he said. His game against Kyrgios lasted three hours and 16 minutes, time for both players to receive penalties, the larger of the fines handed to the Greek tennis champion for smashing a ball into the crowd, narrowly missing a spectator. When a journalist asked Tsitsipas why he had attempted to whack Kyrgios with the ball several times during the match, the Greek player shrugged his shoulders and responded, “Just to stop, you know, this needs to stop, it’s not OK.” Back in the 1930s, Coleman R. Griffith, research director in athletics at…

Who owns my body? In everyday life and conversation, the answer is straightforward: of course I own my body. Who else could? It is, after all my body – anything apart from self-ownership is a denial of a basic freedom. From this intuition, thinkers have constructed political philosophies as far apart as liberalism and anarchism. Many of our cherished ideals – from autonomy to human dignity – find their genesis, and ultimate expression, in our bodies. Choosing what we do – and what is done – to our bodies grounds women’s right to an abortion, the ban on human trafficking, and the prohibitions against physical and sexual assault, to name a few obvious cases. More prosaically, our intuition that our bodies are our own reveals itself in such mundane moments…

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“The body loaded by the excess of yesterday, depresses the mind also.”— Horace The decision to go for a run, or pump some iron at the gym, feels like a rather straightforward exercise. We do it to keep fit and healthy, to feel better about ourselves. We don’t hit the gym for profit, not unless we are a personal trainer, or a boxer. But according to French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the decision to get fit is comparable to embarking on a course of study to increase one’s cultural capital (knowledge and skills obtained through education) or economic capital from a better-paid job (material wealth), or to attend a networking party for the sheer hope of boosting one’s social capital (social network). We rely on these forms of capital – cultural,…

On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America, the outgoing Vice-President, Dick Cheney, left the White House in a wheelchair. The American public watched Cheney make a slow descent on a makeshift ramp from the doorsteps of the White House to the limo. “There was clear evidence that all the authority, intellectual ability, and economic success the Vice-President possessed were not forces strong enough to dispel the limitations of his fragile and compromised body,” notes Maurizio Antoninetti and Mario Garrett in the paper ‘Body Capital and the Geography of Ageing’. “His diminished body capital also seemed to have diminished him as an individual,” they write. As it happened, the outgoing Vice President had pulled a back muscle while moving…

Kenneth R. Miller’s late father was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1950s – leading to despair, distress, and, eventually, hospitalisation. Then psychiatrists prescribed him with psychotropic drugs. “His mental illness just melted away,” recalls Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University and author of The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness and Free Will. “My dad often told me it was a great relief to him to know that the symptoms of his mental illness were caused not by some personal or moral defect but by a chemical imbalance in his brain, which these drugs helped to correct.” The episode remains for Miller a very personal example of one fact: that our mind, he believes, is a function of the brain. “The mind is what the…

When Griffin had fully digested the fact that his body had disappeared for good, his mood suddenly shifted from one of frustration at the world to pure exaltation. “I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.” Although we rarely contemplate it, our body is the starting point of our world and the object we know best. We can see and touch our body, and as American phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch notes, “we are immediately and directly aware of our body, at least in marginal form, at every moment of our lives, under all circumstances, and at whatever place we might happen…

“A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” Margaret Fuller “The body tries to tell the truth.” — Jim Morrison “Our bodies are apt to be our autobiographies.” Frank Gelett Burgess “We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell.” Plato “A feeble body weakens the mind.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau “A healthy body is a guest chamber for the soul; a sick body is a prison.” Francis Bacon “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” Emily Dickinson “The chief function of the body is to carry the brain around.” Thomas A. Edison “Life without liberty is like a…

It’s not clear what we should do with dead bodies, but we certainly shouldn’t do what a 16-year-old Damien Hirst did: pose for a photograph grinning next to the corpse of a man in a Leeds morgue. The man’s face is distorted in a grimace. The young Hirst seems to be making a smiley contrast with his sad expression, a bit like the comic and tragic masks sometimes displayed above the stage in a theatre. That black-and-white photograph, entitled ‘Dead Head’, has been displayed in Tate Modern and elsewhere. Yet the man in the image had donated his body to medical science, not to be a prop in a young British artist’s memento mori, and the man’s children might well have seen this disrespectful gesture and been deeply upset by…

When the hairdresser asked why I decided to shave the underside of my head I answered: “To make my outsides match my insides.” I might as well have referenced Nietzsche, telling her that I wanted to become who I am. Since I had spent my twenties and thirties becoming someone else – a professor, a mother, a wife – I figured my forties was a good decade to become myself. I suspected that my haircut would throw my gender into question, but I was willing to think in the flesh. I didn’t predict that words would fail me. The proliferating terms surrounding gender – from non-binary to spectrum to fluidity to androgyny – rush to the aid of teens who ask social media users to name them. But when words…

womankindmag.com newphilosopher.com/articles/uncertainty-taking-risks/ Taking risks For me, uncertainty is absolutely any situation that isn’t completely specified and known and determined, which essentially means every aspect of life. womankindmag.com/articles/our-ticking-clock/ Our ticking clock Consider a few of the things I did in the last 24 hours: I watched an hour-long episode of a TV drama my friends had recommended, long after it became clear it wasn’t one for me. womankindmag.com/shop/ Online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher and Womankind magazine, subscriptions, and gift ideas. womankindmag.com/articles/your-own-true-adventure/ Your true adventure For most of us, Big Adventure is something other people do. Other people leave their homes and walk into the wilderness to pit themselves against the natural environment. New Philosopher & Womankind Missing any New Philosopher or Womankind back issues?…

Dr Christine Caldwell is the founder of and professor emeritus in the Somatic Counselling Program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she teaches course work in somatic counselling theory and skills, and clinical neuroscience. Her work began forty years ago with studies in anthropology, dance therapy, bodywork, and Gestalt therapy, and has developed into innovations in the field of body-centred psychotherapy. She calls her work the Moving Cycle. This system goes beyond the limitations of therapy and emphasises lifelong personal and social evolution through trusting and following body states. The Moving Cycle spotlights natural play, early physical imprinting, bodily authority, and the transformational effect of fully sequenced movement processes. Her books include Getting Our Bodies Back, Getting In Touch, Oppression and the Body, and Bodyfulness. Antonia Case:…