unreasonable.

The end of history

Jonathan Rauch on liberalism and its alternatives.

In the context of human history, everything about liberalism is radical: its rejection of personal and tribal authority, its insistence on treating persons as interchangeable, its demand that dissent be tolerated and minorities protected, its embrace of change and uncertainty. All of its premises run counter to hardwired human instincts.

See also Why liberalism needs fewer defenders, and more devotees on The Philosopher’s Zone (audio, 28 mins).

Sled problem

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Misophonia

Neel Burton for Psychology Today on Schopenhauer, genius and noise.

Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or are unable to, use noise to help occupy and numb their minds.

Illusionism

Katalin Balog for 3 Quarks Daily on scepticism about consciousness.

By dismissing consciousness, illusionism indirectly dismisses the most fundamental way in which we understand ourselves and each other: through reflection on our conscious experience.

Framing enquiries

Céline Henne for Aeon on different kinds of knowledge.

In most social and political disagreements, the frameworks through which we analyse things and evaluate decisions — our conception of justice, equality, efficiency — are almost always at stake. If you are debating whether this or that country is a democracy, or whether trans women are women, chances are you are not relying on the same framework but rather debating about the framework itself.

The Chinese Room

David Edmonds for the New Statesman on John Searle’s famous thought experiment.

Perhaps the brain is in some sense a kind of computer. But our brains are just a part of a more complex system that allows us to navigate through the world.

The totality of facts

A W Moore for the London Review of Books on three new translations of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

This book is not just a work of philosophy, it is a work of art. (In a notebook from the early 1930s Wittgenstein wrote: ‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry.’)

Aura points

Alaina Demopoulos for The Guardian on rizz, aura and virtue ethics.

Understanding the philosophy behind a simple TikTok trend? That’s 1,000 aura points for you.

In the midst of infinity

Jonathan Egid for Literary Review on Blaise Pascal.

Pascal emerges as a thinker of compromise and contradiction. A great scientist, he sought to convince scientists of the vanity of their pursuits.

Deeper blue

Yoshua Bengio and Vincent Conitzer for The Institute for Ethics in AI on what Large Language Models reveal about human intelligence.

One conclusion that we believe we should draw from LLMs’ success is that far more of our own language production may be rote, on autopilot, than we commonly tend to believe. Perhaps, upon reflection, this conclusion is not too surprising. We have all caught ourselves speaking on autopilot on topics that we talk about often; and when we learn a foreign language, we realize just how many things we manage to do so easily in our native language without a second thought. But the lesson from LLMs is also that this observation goes further than we thought.

Never imitate

Christopher Horner for 3 Quarks Daily on alienation and authenticity.

The very announcement of freedom and the individual is accompanied with the fear of its extinction. One threat lies without, with the mass of men; the other within. The promise of freedom is that one should fulfil one’s desires, that the herd or mob should not stop the self from finding its happiness in its own way. The question seems to be why that should be so hard, and why freedom should seem such a burden.

Political Christianity

Adam Wakeling for Quillette on the difficult relationship between religion and liberal, secular values.

Christianity is broad enough to accommodate people with a vast array of views. This is part of its strength. But the success of our civilisation rests on the pillars of Enlightenment thought: constitutional government, secularism, science, the rule of law, and human rights — not on belief in the supernatural or in any specific set of ancient myths.

The dance of life

Tamar Gendler for The Philosopher’s Zone on ancient and modern notions of happiness.

Audio, 29 mins.

I have forgotten my umbrella

Peter Salmon for Aeon on the complicated history of Nietzsche’s notebooks.

Nietzsche was not one to spare any particular religion from his attacks, but in Elisabeth’s hands his invectives against other religions were edited out, and those against the Jews pulled to the front. Nietzsche’s idea of the Overman — the future human who would have thrown off contemporary morality — hinted at the figure of the Führer and his minions, that is, Hitler and the pure Aryan race he hoped to engender.

The coming moral crisis

David Papineau for The Human Podcast on AI and moral concerns.

While we have a pretty clear idea of which states are conscious in humans, I think this clear grasp of what’s conscious and what’s not breaks down once we move away from humans to other animals and to intelligent machines.

Video, 50 mins.

Featherless bipeds

Jochen Szangolies for 3 Quarks Daily on the difficulty of defining the category ‘human’.

Consider the statement ‘according to biology, there are two sexes’. This is, as it stands, a purely factual claim that may either be true or false, and does not in itself carry any moral connotation. It may be opposed on the basis of biological science, but not on the basis of moral righteousness; one is not inherently wicked for making this claim. It is only once this claim is amplified by a sort of ethical bridge law — such as ‘and any deviation from this is not deserving of the same rights and protections as the standard human’ — that a morally abhorrent position emerges.

The wrong side of history

James Ball for New Humanist on arguments from historical progress.

Public opinion in the UK is now firmly in favour of gay rights and protections against discrimination, after a difficult and decades-long campaign by activists. But we know from the lessons of the past that we cannot rely on this support, or bet against backsliding — in reality, history is not a straightforward march towards inevitable “improvement”.

Pascal’s Wager Triangle

from xkcd.

Self-erasure

Matthew B Crawford for The Hedgehog Review on using AI to replace our own voices.

To use Heidegger’s language, some entity has “leaped in” on my behalf and disburdened me of the task of being human. For Heidegger, this entity is “das Man,” an anonymized other that stands in for me, very much like Kierkegaard’s “the Public.” It is a generalized consciousness — think of it as the geist of large language models.

NPC

Kurzgesagt on the physics of determinism and emergence.

Video, 12 mins.

A hidden truth

John Mac Ghlionn for The Philosophical Salon on philosophy, stand-up comedy and Jerry Seinfeld.

It is worth considering the dual nature of humour as both a source of amusement and a vehicle for profound insight. In light of these observations, it is conceivable to argue that stand-up comedy represents the art form most closely aligned with philosophy.

Science envy

Sophie Grace Chappell for Daily Nous on the role of evidence in ethics.

The move from evidence to theory is supposed to be a move that begins from the facts, and ethicists have been inoculated against the very idea of “moral facts”. Facts, they think, are one thing, and values quite another.

Not nothing

Nolen Gertz for Big Think on nihilism, pessimism, cynicism and apathy.

If optimism leads us to be complacent, leads us to wait for something good to happen, or for someone else to make something good happen, then optimism leads us to do nothing. In other words, it is not pessimism but optimism that is similar to nihilism.

The school of genius

Joseph Epstein for Commentary on the philosophical value of solitude.

With the advent of cellphones, podcasts, social media, and more, everyday living became quicker, more crowded, less under control. Especially among the young, therapy has become more frequent. Not more but fewer friends now seemed the ideal. Solitude has come to seem, to many, not such a bad idea.

By any means necessary

Kieran Setiya for The Guardian on the trolley problem, effective altruism and the greater good.

There may be situations in which it’s OK to cause harm to some for the benefit of others: acting in self-defence, for instance. But it’s not permissible to do so whenever the benefits outweigh the harms.

Shooting the messenger

Alan Sokal for The Critic on how ideology is corrupting science.

A scientist’s political and social values may, of course, influence her selection of topics to study — that is perfectly legitimate. But those values should be carefully put to the side when evaluating the evidence. The goal of the scientific endeavour is to find out how things really are, not to confirm how we wish they were.

Paradigm shift

Audra J Wolfe for The New Republic on Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Instead of thinking of science as a process that inevitably draws closer to natural reality, Kuhn suggested that we treat scientific change as an evolutionary process, similar to natural selection, in which various paradigms compete for community advantage.

400 hamsters

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Philippa Foot

Radio 4’s In Our Time on “one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century”.

Audio, 58 mins.

Tired myths

A highly critical but informative review in The Nation of a new biography of Spinoza.

Baruch Spinoza was the most original thinker of the European Enlightenment. Three and a half centuries later, his philosophy retains a sense of strangeness and novelty long exhausted in Descartes, Locke, or Voltaire.

How to philosophize

Michael Huemer for Fake Noûs on doing philosophy well.

In general, when you come up with an idea, before deciding that this is now your view, spend some time trying to think of reasons for doubting it.

The common good

Lucas Chancel for Nature on new proposals to limit personal wealth.

Scholars have increasingly documented how democracy can be undermined by the disproportionate political power of media tycoons, rich founders of philanthropic organizations and large political-party donors. Extreme wealth concentration limits governments’ abilities to invest in public goods, such as education, health care and climate-change mitigation. And meritocratic promises are endangered when extreme wealth inequality is transmitted from one generation to the next.

Catastrophe Ethics

Simone Gubler for The TLS reviews a new account of ethics in a time of global crisis.

We are, as a species, facing a range of potentially existential crises, from climate change to the rapid development of artificial intelligence. Accounts of individual ethics… can offer little practical guidance as we face these threats. They might well save our souls, but they offer scarce hope for our fragile bodies as the seas rise and robot armies mass.

A better future

Daniel Chandler for The Nation on the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls.

While we cannot change the world with dreams alone, moral ideas about justice, freedom, and equality, backed up by practical ideas about how we can change our institutions, can inspire people to come together and change their societies for the better.

This particular wolf

Abigail Tulenko for Scientific American on AI, personhood — and the early Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna).

Scientific ethics is so often concerned with the cutting edge — the latest research, the newest technology, a constant influx of data. But sometimes the questions of the future require careful consideration of the past.

Hume Tower

Avi Sommer for the APA Blog on how to respond to historical philosophers with immoral attitudes.

Berkeley was a white supremacist and a proponent of slavery. Kant was a racist and an anti-Semite. John Stuart Mill participated in British imperialism. What relevance do these facts have to the value of their ideas? None whatsoever. Whether their ideas are worthy of our attention depends on one thing only—the quality of their arguments.

Something something power

Liam Kofi Bright on truth and objectivity.

There has been another round of discussion online about evil humanities professors disordering our political life by spreading pernicious relativism about truth and objectivity. I remain convinced that this is a distraction, that in fact none of our disputes in political and social life are actually about the nature of truth.

Capital punishment

Peter Salmon for New Humanist on philosophical attitudes to the death penalty.

If we grant that western philosophy as we have come to know it is born with Socrates, then we can see that its relationship to capital punishment is more than merely intellectual. The two are enmeshed just as surely as the death penalty is with western religion, via its other most famous victim, Jesus Christ.

Animal rights

Peter Singer interviewed for the Brain in a Vat podcast on humans and other animals.

Video, 65 mins.

Truthiness

Daniel Dennett talks to Big Think about philosophy, science, memes and AI.

I think that Darwin’s ideas undo many of the biggest problems in philosophy, or at least, subvert them and turn them into better problems. And the fact that so many philosophers keep hammering away trying to find the essence of this or that, when Darwin has shown us that nothing of any interest has an essence; it’s gradualism all the way.

Video, 12 mins (transcript available).

An unknowing nature

Livia Gershon for JSTOR Daily on Confucianism and the European Enlightenment.

He pointed to China’s development of philosophy, arts, and scientific advances, noting, for example, that the Chinese invented printing 1,500 years before the Gutenberg press. Focusing on Chinese civilization allowed Vossius and other freethinkers to decouple the story of human progress and moral development from Christianity.

Identity trap

Yascha Mounk for Philosophy Bites on identity politics, cancel culture and freedom of speech.

I certainly don’t think that we need to be regulated by the most offended person in the room.

Audio, 31 mins.

Barbieworld

Tom McClelland for the Blog of the APA on film as a medium for philosophy.

Think about the famous case of Socrates and the ‘slave boy’ depicted in Plato’s Meno. Here Socrates teaches an enslaved child a principle of geometry by prompting him with a series of questions. Here Socrates doesn’t argue for some conclusion. Rather, he enables the child to arrive at the right conclusion for himself. And because the child works it out for himself, he understands the principle much better than if Socrates had simply told him the principle explicitly. I think this Socratic model helps us to capture how film can contribute to our philosophical understanding.

Both Sides Now

Tom Taylor for Far Out Magazine lists the top 10 existentially philosophical songs.

Albert Camus once wrote, “Maybe Christ died for somebody but not for me.” The inherent punk musicology of the French philosopher’s quote became apparent when Patti Smith borrowed heavily from it for the first line she would ever present to the world: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” This touchstone between the two worlds typifies how the expressive potential of music is often the most existentially questioning medium of any art form.

Against Hate

Carolin Emcke interviewed for El País on politics and human rights.

Hannah Arendt said that reality is what we ultimately have in common. There are governments and companies that are interested in us getting lost in an absurd discourse. Confusion is a product: it’s manufactured, just like hate.

Healthy-mindedness

Jack Maden for Philosophy Break on Nietzsche’s distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

Since the time of Socrates, Nietzsche laments, Western culture has generally been far too biased towards the Apollonian, championing rationality over vitality.

Ignorance is bliss

Deena Mousa for BBC Future on Nozick’s thought experiment of the experience machine.

In the current moment, where virtual experiences are becoming more prevalent and intertwined with our daily lives, and technology can increasingly simulate pieces of reality, Nozick’s question feels more prescient than ever. Whether spending an afternoon in the metaverse, using a chatbot as a stand-in for a human friend, or creating an AI-generated video, it is asked of us repeatedly in small but important ways.

Dark horses

Shayla Love for The Guardian on akrasia.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle all wrestled with this relatable conundrum: why do we do what we know is bad for us?

Science alone

Philip Goff for The Conversation on the problem of consciousness and the limits of science.

Most people in the UK are totally unaware that “metaphysics” goes on in almost every philosophy department in the country. By metaphysics, philosophers don’t mean anything spooky or supernatural; this is just the technical term for philosophical, as opposed to scientific, enquiry into the nature of reality.

Moral stutterers

James Davison Hunter for The Hedgehog Review on the need for a new morality.

A paradigm shift in our understanding of ethical formation will entail a philosophical, theoretical, and empirical reconsideration of such basic concepts as morality, values, virtue, character, citizenship, and education in ways that re-embed them within history, culture, and the social order. It will require the recognition that the moral life is every bit as institutional as it is individual, every bit as cultural as it is subjective, and every bit as much an inheritance of the past as it is bound by emotional, cognitive, and behavioral exigencies of the present.

Better or wiser

Carlos Fraenkel for The TLS makes the case for a less radical Spinoza.

Jonathan I. Israel has done a great deal to illuminate Spinoza’s unwavering rationalism, drawing out its revolutionary implications and charting its clandestine dissemination and profound impact on European thought. However, as a sense of doom spreads through modern societies, many of us wonder: can we truly navigate our individual and collective lives, or are we aboard what Plato called a “ship of fools”, heading towards the abyss? In times like these it may be more useful to see why Spinoza would have been a critic of modernity’s hubris than to cast him in the role of its mastermind.

French

from Existential Comics.

Ancient roots

Scotty Hendricks for Big Think chooses five influential Philosophy books from the twenty-first century.

Cycle of violence

Jonathan Glover for New Humanist on what moral philosophy can tell us about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Those who are passionately committed to one side being right and the other wrong support their view with abstract choices about relative importance. Those who commit in this way to Palestine being right downgrade the relative importance of the obscene cruelty of 7 October. Those who commit in this way to Israel being right downgrade the relative importance of the hugely greater numbers of dead Palestinians compared to dead Israelis.

Priceless

Julian Baggini for the Literary Review on the different ways we put a price on human lives.

In total, lockdowns cost the nation £180,000 for every life year that they saved. Horrible though it sounds, we have to ask if this was good value, so as to be ready to decide what to do the next time we face such a scenario.

Help is on the way

William Benzon for 3 Quarks Daily on literature, philosophy, music, artificial intelligence and how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together.

The fact is, Humpty Dumpty has fallen, the genie is out of the bottle, and we’re headed to hell in a Tesla in full self-driving mode. We have little choice but to deal with it. We’ll muddle through. But we’ll do so with perhaps a bit of grace if we can create a conceptual framework more adequate to the problems we have unleased upon ourselves.

Life itself

Galen Strawson for the Dublin Review of Books on Narrativity and the meaning of life.

There are areas of life in which we perfectly misunderstand one another. This is almost always because we assume that others experience things more or less as we do. I suspect that this is one of those cases, cases in which we’re mistaken because we can’t really believe or imagine that others are completely different from ourselves, not really — and we’re wildly wrong (sometimes comically, often tragically). There are things I read about what other human beings like and feel that I can’t really believe — not really — even though I have good and even decisive reason to believe they’re true.

Plugging in

Jack Maden for Philosophy Break on Nozick’s experience machine.

Suppose A and B have exactly the same lives, and go through exactly the same experiences. The only difference is that A lives in reality, and B is plugged into an experience machine. Who has the better life? If hedonism is true, then we must answer that the quality of A and B’s lives, the value of their lives, is exactly the same.

Extremely serious

James Klagge for Philosophy Bites on Wittgenstein.

The main project that he had, at least to start with in the Tractatus, was to figure out how language could be about the world.

Audio, 21 mins.

Rare happiness

Adam Kirsch for The New Yorker on Spinoza.

[Spinoza] was hardly the first Jew to abandon Judaism, but he might have been the first to do so publicly without becoming a Christian or a Muslim. Instead, he fashioned a secular life, something that was hardly conceivable before the seventeenth century.

World revolutions

Terry Eagleton for the London Review of Books on a new study of Hegel.

The revolution that Hegel sees as entirely successful comes full circle. The ‘world spirit’ attains its goal when it curves back on itself, becoming conscious of its own evolution and that everything in its steady advance had to happen exactly as it did. It must find a human mind in which this can take place and, in its unfathomable wisdom, it has chosen the consciousness of G.W.F. Hegel as a mirror in which to contemplate itself, rather as the Almighty chose a young Jew in an obscure corner of Palestine, probably the son of a stonemason, for much the same purpose.

Artificial minds

Thomas Metcalf on Artificial Intelligence in a new essay for 1000-Word Philosophy.

In general, there is no consensus on whether an AI could ever be conscious, but relatively few philosophers are committed to theories that rule it out completely.

Hedgehogs and foxes

Damon Linker on Isaiah Berlin and pluralism.

Some values clash: the ends pursued by human beings are all generated by our common nature, but their pursuit has to be to some degree controlled — liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I repeat, may not be fully compatible with each other, nor are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Home to roost

Lyndsey Stonebridge for Time on truth and lies in politics.

We live in a world of contingent facts, which is absolutely not to say that all facts are relative and up for grabs. It means that the world is complex, shifting, sometimes random, perplexing and bewildering. Politicians have always known that this means the best stories are likely to be those that make some sense of reality. The real question is what kind of story stays true to our actual existence together, and what kind produces tyranny?

The unique

Jacob Blumenfeld for Jacobin on Max Stirner.

For Stirner, the struggle to live one’s own life free from the domination of others requires starting from oneself, from one’s own needs and desires, and building from there. No more fighting for God’s cause, the nation’s cause, the people’s cause — but for oneself, one’s own cause.

Asymmetry

J P de Ruiter for Quillette on stupidity and moral negligence.

Stupidity in this sense refers not to a person’s cognitive ability but to the quality of the arguments they choose to use.

Mad Madge

Merve Emre for the New Yorker on Margaret Cavendish.

The Duchess was a vanishingly rare creature: a self-taught natural philosopher writing in the decades when natural philosophy was developing into what we now call science, a professionalized field that would embrace the new disciplines of astronomy, geography, mathematics, and physics. She also belonged to an emergent species: the female intellectual. At a time when women were not formally educated, she was one of the first women to publish poetry under her own name, and may well have been the first to produce a scientific treatise.

The extended mind

David Chalmers for Philosophy Bites on the interaction of philosophy and technology.

Reflecting on these cases of the extended mind begins to blur the boundaries of the mind, and we want to say there’s nothing sacred about the skin or the skull as a boundary for the mind; in many cases, the mind can extend way out into the environment.

Audio, 18 mins.

Vertigo

Lyndsey Stonebridge for Literary Hub on Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.

When it became clear that political parties were not doing what they advertised and representing the interests of particular groups or classes, a vacuum opened up at the center of political power. A different kind of anti-democratic politics began to emerge.

Steve-in-itself

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Sims

Eric Schwitzgebel for the Blog of the APA on the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation.

If we are A.I. systems living in a computational reality, the world might be much briefer than we think. And if you are an A.I. system living in a computational reality, the world might be much smaller than you think — maybe just you here right now. How sure can you be that there’s really a world beyond your walls? How recently have you tested the boundaries of your reality?

The art of life

Henry Oliver on John Stuart Mill, the philosopher of human flourishing.

In a nutshell, Mill’s advice is that we must keep learning, not accept what we are told, take seriously those who we disagree with, and through this process elevate our vision of life. It isn’t a joyless prescription for a puritan life. Instead, Mill is telling you to expand what you pay attention to.

Implications

Matt Lutz on the apparent tension between ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘All Lives Matter’.

When a speaker focuses narrowly on the grievances, rights, and interests of one group, their language implies that those grievances, rights, and interests matter, and the interests of others don’t. After all, if everyone’s interests were equally important, they would have said so. In this way, particularist moral language implies only particular moral commitments.

Learning how to die

Rachel Ashcroft for The Smart Set on facing death with the help of Seneca, Cicero, Lucretius and Montaigne.

The Stoic sage Seneca observes how fear of our last hour on Earth “makes all previous hours uneasy.” He argues that to philosophize is to banish this uneasiness and learn “how to die.”

On the surface

Ermanno Bencivenga for Epoché on recent discussions about free will.

If the conceptual framework that underlies contemporary science is committed to causal determinism, a scientist will be necessarily led by it to investigating the causes of anything that happens, including anything anyone does, and will not stop at the remark that this is what that person (unimpeded, unconstrained, not deranged, psychologically mature) wanted to do. She will ask why that is what he wanted; and, one question after another, will soon find herself roaming a spatiotemporal terrain in which he is not even present — the terrain haunted by his ancestors, or Adam and Eve, or the Big Bang. At that point, the poor “willing agent” will have been declassed to an obtuse little wheel in a gigantic mechanism.

Why?

Philippe Huneman for 3 Quarks Daily on the different uses and meanings of the question ‘why?’.

It is often frustrating to confine ourselves to causes, to series of causes that sometimes accidentally converge towards a happy or tragic event — Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the discovery of the Lascaux cave. A series of coincidences does not seem a “sufficient” reason for such important events — not to mention the Grail of theologians of all stripes: the appearance of life on Earth …

Do electrons exist?

Jack Morgan Jones for the Blog of the APA on a recent disagreement between a philosopher and a scientist.

Philosophical debate continues irrespective of whether you are aware of it or stick around for it. Usually, a position staked out as non-philosophical has already been defended by philosophers at some stage. Maybe it’s in this sense that the philosophers feel bad for scientists.

A real poser

Galen Strawson for The Guardian on the purpose of the universe.

I don’t for all that think the universe has a purpose. I think it just is. It does, though, seem to have a taste for complication. The balance of evidence is a delicate thing, but it seems at present to favour the view that something is going on that isn’t fully accountable for by the laws of physics.

Foundations of mathematics

Karl Sigmund for Big Think on Wittgenstein, Turing and mathematics.

As a teacher, Wittgenstein was highly motivated, but prone to fits of classroom rage: slapping his pupils, or pulling their hair, their ears, whatever came to hand. His career was brought to an abrupt end when he knocked out an eleven-year-old.

Flippin’ wonderful!

Daniel Dennett interviewed for The Freethinker on philosophy and science, consciousness, free will and God.

Once you understand Darwinian gradualism and get away from Cartesian essentialism, then you can begin to see how the pieces fit together without absolutes. There is no absolute distinction between conscious things and non-conscious things, just as there is no absolute distinction between living things and non-living things. We have gradualism in both cases.

The “Ship of Theseus” Wikipedia article has been edited 1792 times since it was created in July of 2003. At present, 0% of the phrases in the original article remain. via depths of wikipedia

Solomon’s House

Louise Liebeskind for The New Atlantis on Francis Bacon, science and progress.

Bacon’s New Atlantis is not an image of things hoped for or of things to come. It is an instructive fable about what happens when human beings stumble across the boundary between things human and things divine.

Pseudo–

Jonathan Egid for Aeon explores fake authorship in philosophy.

Smuggling ideas under someone else’s name is rather more common in the history of philosophy than you might think. Medieval philosophy in particular abounds with texts that blur the boundaries between anonymity, pseudonymity and straightforward authorship.

Que sais-je?

Sarah Bakewell for Not Just the Tudors on Michel de Montaigne.

Lacking somebody to share his every thought with, somebody who would understand him so well, somebody who could always be a sounding-board for whatever he was thinking, he came up with the idea of writing them down instead.

Audio, 49 mins.

Why Philosophy matters (part 3)

Jay L Garfield for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the value of Philosophy.

The value of philosophy vastly exceeds its instrumental value. Philosophy is one of the fine arts, perhaps the most abstract of those arts. Philosophy, just like the visual, literary, and performing arts, adds beauty to our lives and offers us unique insight into human life and human nature. Its medium is not oils or clay but argument and analysis.

Why Philosophy matters (part 2)

Julian Baggini for Prospect on why Philosophy matters.

All these defences of philosophy make a basic philosophical mistake. They all focus on instrumental rather than intrinsic values, arguing that philosophy is a means to the ends of happiness, moral virtue or thinking well. But a large part of philosophy is about identifying what we should pursue as ends in themselves.

Why Philosophy matters (part 1)

Stephen Fry for SAPERE on the value of philosophy.

Nowadays, Silicon Valley and biotech and AI companies are employing philosophers at a huge rate and a very tidy income as well, because there’s so much need for us to understand what is happening to the world.

Video, 4 mins.

The Cynics

Angie Hobbs for The Philosopher’s Zone on Diogenes and the ancient Cynics.

Audio, 46 mins.

Founded on despair

Vicente G Olaya for El País on George Santayana.

He was a philosopher in no man’s land, thinking day and night about the passage of time and life’s dramatic changes. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” he wrote: the aphorism immortalized at the entrance to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Something

Ethan Siegel for Big Think on why the universe exists.

The best we can say — assuming that we’re sticking to science and not moving into the realm of theology, philosophy, or pure imagination — is that the reason there’s something rather than nothing is that “nothing” cannot exist compatibly within our Universe.

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as a punishment for its transgressions. Therefore you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example, would kill one of its foals in order to make the wind change its direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent, but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough. Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts, via @RichardDawkins

Moving forward

Ruth Ogden for The Conversation on how we picture time.

For many people who grew up in the UK, the US and much of Europe, the future is in front of them, and the past is behind them. People in these cultures typically perceive time as linear. They see themselves as continually moving towards the future because they cannot go back to the past.

Here it is!

Philip Goff for Scientific American on science and consciousness.

Perhaps organisms that have conscious awareness of the world around them, and thereby freely respond based on that awareness, behave very differently than mere mechanisms. Consequently, they survive much better. With these assumptions in place, we can make sense of natural selection’s preference for conscious organisms.

Other minds

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Why I am not a Christian

Michael Shermer on Christianity, atheism and Enlightenment humanism.

We should believe things because they are true, not just because they are politically pragmatic.

A philosophical Humphrey Bogart

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Albert Camus.

Perhaps there is a connection between Camus’s good looks and his optimistic response to the absurdity of the human predicament. Lookism is a well-documented phenomenon. In many aspects of life people who are by consensus physically attractive get treated better than those who are rated ugly, disfigured, or unattractive. It’s a very widespread form of discrimination and we’ve all seen it happening.

Determined

Nikhil Krishnan for The New Yorker on free will and determinism.

Once we give up on free will, after all, we have to be willing to say that nobody has ever done anything intentionally (or voluntarily or deliberately or on purpose). That no line can truly be drawn between the malicious and the accidental, the voluntary and the forced.

A fragile pact

Sasha Mudd for Prospect offers a philosophical defence of democracy.

As Rousseau cautioned, extreme inequalities of status, wealth and power breed resentment and hate. These attitudes interfere with the equal moral concern for persons on which liberal democracy depends.

Taken on trust

Michael Shermer for Science Book Club on why people believe conspiracy theories.

The entire enterprise of science is built on this system of checks and balances and peer review and corroboration and replication and so on — because so many of us get it wrong so much of the time.

Audio, 61 mins.

Moral questions

Kieran Setiya for the Los Angeles Review of Books on Thomas Nagel and moral realism.

For Nagel, moral reasoning is no more occult than our capacity for justified beliefs about unobservable phenomena, the distant past, and the far-flung future. It’s hard to separate doubts about the possibility of objective moral knowledge from doubts about the rationality of science. Both involve reasoning that goes beyond what is given in experience; in both, the standards for how to reason well are subject to perennial dispute; and in both, it’s possible to hold internally consistent but unreasonable views that no form of proof conclusively refutes.