unreasonable.

De occulta philosophia

Anthony Grafton for the Public Domain Review on Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s manual of Renaissance magic.

Sufferers from sore throat read in Agrippa that they could cure themselves by touching their necks to the hand of someone who had died prematurely. Those plagued by coughs learned to put spit in the mouths of green frogs and then let them escape. Reading the book resembles walking through a vast princely chamber of wonders or a grand apothecary’s shop, ceiling, walls, and shelves hung with strange and thrilling creatures.

Breathing fire

Philip Goff for The Philosopher’s Zone on consciousness and (cosmic) purpose.

It’s the job of physics to tell us what the basic constituents of reality are; the panpsychist adds that whatever they are — those constituents, those building-blocks of reality, have very simple forms of conscious experience.

Audio, 37 mins.

Existence precedes essence

Train of Thoughts offers an animated introduction to Existentialism (with words from 1000-Word Philosophy).

Video, 6 mins.

Metaphysical Zoloft

Francis Merson for Psyche on the personal and pyschological benefits of determinism.

Recognising that people’s actions were predetermined can result in a much calmer reaction to perceived wrongdoing. Anger relies on the assumption that someone could have acted other than how they did (which is why angry people are so passionate about instructing you on what you could have done differently). However, when seen in the light of determinism, the assumptions of the angry mindset melt away like so much sorbet in the sun.

Something

Karmen MacKendrick for The Philosopher on the fundamental question, Why is there something rather than nothing?

What could be a sufficient reason for there to be something — what, in other words, explains the fact that the world exists at all? The only possibility, [Leibniz] thinks, is God — a God who creates that world from nothing.

Optimism of the will

Fran Shor for Counterpunch on the problem of optimism.

In the face of such failures, how can optimism be a guide for anything? So, given how human will continues to repeat and expand on its flaws, we can, at best, apply a healthy skepticism. There is no law or logic of history that will save us.

Just your imagination

Nadine Dijkstra for The Junkyard on the difficulty of distinguishing imagination and reality.

The more we learn about the neuroscience of imagination, the more puzzling it is that we don’t confuse our internally generated experiences with reality more often.

Pseudoscience

Anil Seth for Nautilus on panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory.

The fact that a theory can have strange, perhaps untestable consequences, does not mean that it is pseudoscientific. It may be enough for other aspects of the theory to be testable. This happens without controversy in other areas of science. In physics, general relativity implies untestable things, like singularities, while being eminently testable in other ways.

I’ve Been Thinking

Daniel Dennett for The Philosopher’s Zone on free will, consciousness and AI.

Audio, 38 mins.

A solitary walker

Chris Fleming for The Conversation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

For Rousseau, the social contract entails the idea that one can only pursue one’s own happiness by pursuing everyone else’s. In this sense, government would function the way a cooperative corporation might: individual efforts lead to everyone’s gain; selfishness produces gains for nobody.

This is I

Sam Dresser for Psyche on Nietzsche’s famous injunction to ‘become who you are’.

The unifying purpose behind his work was to fill the moral vacuum left by the decline of religion. His aversion to the legalistic and guilt-inducing ethical systems of his time stemmed from his fundamental goal of guiding individuals toward psychological health, personal excellence and virtue.

A crisis in cosmology

Adam Frank for Big Think on the current ‘crisis’ in cosmology.

Any big change to cosmology could take us headlong into some profound philosophical questions, the kind that have been floating around inside human heads for millennia.

Red light

from Existential Comics.

Cancelled

James Huffman for Quillette on Bertrand Russell’s exclusion from the City College of New York.

His political and religious views alone would probably have been sufficient to raise the ire of New York’s conservatives — but he had also written a book challenging Victorian notions of morality regarding sex and marriage … His personal sexual history was also somewhat scandalous: by 1940, Russell had been married three times and there were widespread rumors of multiple extramarital affairs along the way.

Literally intolerable

Kim Solin for the Los Angeles Review of Books on a new biography of Nietzsche.

Was he an astute cultural critic or a madman? A major existentialist or an ironic mystic? To read him is to be thrown into a vortex.

Determined

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Thoughtful images

Thomas E Wartenberg for Aesthetics for Birds on illustrating the philosophy of Plato and Wittgenstein.

An account of how philosophical texts, concepts, and theories can be illustrated in visual art begins with the realization that philosophical texts are not as abstract as might be thought. The texts that constitute the Western history of philosophy are replete with literary images of various types.

The science of language

Thomas Nagel for the London Review of Books on a new biography of J L Austin.

The logical positivists and Wittgenstein in his later work had in different ways inculcated the idea that the study of language was the key to a revolution in the understanding of philosophical questions. In Oxford, this took the form of close attention to the way language was used in everyday life.

Unnecessary obstacles

Nigel Warburton for The New European on the decision to ban transgender women from women-only chess events.

Evidence about relative muscle power and endurance used by the governing bodies of sports such as cycling, swimming and athletics, though, won’t transfer easily to chess.

A way of life

Robert Lazu Kmita for The European Conservative on the practical dimension of ancient philosophy.

If one mentions that the most ‘profound’ Kantian problem is probably the one about the possibility of “synthetic judgments a priori,” we should not be surprised if speculative modern philosophy seems unfriendly (to say the least) even for a cultivated public.

The meaning of history

The importance of Hegel from Then & Now.

He’s dense, impenetrable, infuriating, some say just a bad writer; some idealise him, others despise him, but to journey with him, as one commentator has said — to take on the task — is the most serious thing you can do in your life.

Video, 2 hours.

Ten Commandments

Michael Shermer proposes a new Ten Commandments based on reason and science.

A science-based morality has the virtue of having built into it a self-correcting mechanism that does not just allow redaction, correction, and improvement; it insists upon it. Science and reason can be employed to inform — and in some cases even determine — moral values.

Know thyself

Nigel Warburton for The New European on self-knowledge.

A great deal of what we do we do unreflectively, without conscious awareness of what we are doing, or of what’s driving us. We might or might not be able to bring this to consciousness afterwards. Others may see more of what’s going on than we do, because our desires and behaviour are intimately linked.

What’s missing?

David Chalmers for the Boston Review on the case for consciousness in Large Language Models.

The issue of whether LLMs can be conscious is not the same as the issue of whether they have human-level intelligence. Evolution got to consciousness before it got to human-level consciousness. It’s not out of the question that AI might as well.

The mystery of existence

The Panpsycast hosts a discussion on why the universe, the laws of nature and conscious creatures exist (also available as a podcast).

Video, 2 hours.

A gentleman not a pedant

Daniel Johnson for The Critic on a new biography of Spinoza.

Our lives are filled with ephemera and vanities, but Spinozan ethics is oriented towards the pursuit of truth and emancipation from the self. The best-known part of his philosophy, De servitute humana (“Of human bondage”), is his account of our enslavement to the passions. The paradox of Spinoza’s rationalist ethics is that this strict determinist, who denies free will in any form, can nevertheless offer a vision of liberation.

Like a soap bubble

Nate Sheff for 3 Quarks Daily on Harry Frankfurt and 1984.

The success of Big Brother’s regime does not depend crucially on tricking everyone. More important is passive obedience and widespread acquiescence to bullshit.

Transporter

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The thing itself

Christian Madsbjerg for Big Think on phenomenology.

Not everything is important to us all the time. We stand in relationship to the things in our lives, and phenomenology can show us which things matter most and when.

The New Hellenism

Crispin Sartwell for the Los Angeles Review of Books on a welcome trend in recent philosophy.

As they reconsider the history of philosophy, the new philosophers have ignored the 20th century completely, with a couple of exceptions: the existentialists and the pragmatists. These are schools that later professional philosophers found almost embarrassing for the sheer fact that they had evident practical implications. Indeed, the existential and pragmatist philosophers themselves insisted on that: their philosophies were not supposed to be confined to the ivory tower. That is one reason they were unfashionable in 2003 and are fashionable in 2023.

Barbie Land

Nina Power for Compact on the meaning of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie.

Gerwig’s nod to what makes a woman a woman is quietly subversive. Barbie herself becomes post-Barbie, post-consumerist, and while the film generally splashes about in an enjoyable ironic and semiotic soup, the message is gentle but clear: not reducible to a bunch of signs, women exist and sexual difference is real.

Never Hamlet

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series on Hamlet, authenticity and individualism in the Renaissance.

Audio, 21 mins.

Dancing around the problem

Peter Singer for Project Syndicate on animal welfare.

AI is likely to have serious consequences for animals. Self-driving cars are an obvious example: they are programmed to avoid hitting humans who happen to be on the road, but will they be programmed to avoid hitting animals, and if so, which ones? AI also directs drones that are designed to kill “pests,” which may mean any non-native wild animals.

Nobody home

Jonathan Birch for Undark on the possibility of sentient AI.

Through studying the experiences of invertebrates like octopuses, we can start to get some grip on what the really deep features are that a brain has to have in order to support conscious experiences, things that go deeper than just having these specific brain structures that are there in mammals.

Cluster bombs

Vittorio Bufacchi for RTÉ Brainstorm on the moral justification for sending cluster bombs to Ukraine.

This is possibly the first time that cluster bombs will be used by a State inside their own territory. This changes everything. We have good reason to assume that the Ukrainian military command will do everything in their powers to minimise the risk to their own civilians, both during and after the war.

Philosophy and myth

Tae-Yeoun Keum for The Philosopher’s Zone on philosophy’s engagement with myth.

If we think of myths broadly as narratives that, for one reason or another, are not amenable to critical examination… myths start looking undesirable in politics for a number of reasons.

Audio, 28 mins.

Counterinduction

Felipe Bertoldo for Epoché on the limitations of the scientific method.

By highlighting the fallible nature of scientific knowledge, Hume and Wittgenstein paved the way for a more critical and pragmatic approach to scientific inquiry.

A good bet

Mariana Lenharo for Nature on competition and collaboration in science and philosophy.

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

Nearly all of it

Nigel Warburton for The New European on A J Ayer.

Disconcertingly for many old-school dons, Ayer thought much of the history of philosophy was waffle. The borders of philosophy and nonsense needed to be redrawn. Metaphysical claims such as “all reality is one” were neither true by definition nor testable and so fell foul of the Verification Principle. Moral judgments such as “killing is wrong” went the same way.

How to flourish

Nikhil Krishnan for The New Yorker on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

During an extraordinarily fertile career, he raised, often for the first time, questions in science and philosophy that he treated so thoroughly it was many centuries before anyone could improve on his answers. In ethics, at least, there’s a decent case that no one has improved much on them.

Doing things with words

Stuart Jeffries for The Spectator on J L Austin.

Austin, with a precision suggesting he might well have enjoyed a legal career, came up with five kinds of speech acts — verdictives, exercitives, commissives, behabitives and expositives. Rowe considers Austin’s talent for close observation to resemble that of his distant relation Jane Austen.

Semiconductors and algorithms

Simon Winchester for The Guardian on the effect of AI on our intellectual powers.

I see ample reason for optimism. And I draw this hope from the sextet of Ancient Greeks who laid the foundations for and defined the very idea of knowledge: Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus and Euclid.

Socrates gone mad

Jean-Manuel Roubineau for Big Think on Diogenes the Cynic.

His legacy was considerable, not only in respect of the challenge he posed to established authority but also because of his indifference to material comforts and his commitment to a cosmopolitan conception of citizenship.

Wholly in his mind

Julian Baggini for Prospect on Derek Parfit.

Parfit once watched a documentary about the Nazi invasion of France in which Hitler danced a little jig after his army’s triumph. The philosopher said, without irony, “At least something good came out of the German victory.” The logic is simple: a world with more happiness is always better than a world with less. So, a world in which Hitler was not pleased by his monstrous success would be worse than one in which he was.

Antihumanists and transhumanists

David E Cooper for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the contemporary ‘revolt against humanity’.

Like environmental activists who predict “doomsday” — and for the same reasons — they anticipate the extinction of humanity, or, at any rate, of civilization as we know it. Unlike those activists, however, they celebrate, rather than bemoan or resist, our forthcoming demise. Nature, which we are in the business of destroying — along with ourselves — will be much better off without us.

Everything everywhere

Philosophers and scientists on The Philosopher’s Zone discuss the multiverse.

Just because you have the mathematics for it, doesn’t mean it actually exists. What does it mean for something to exist if you can’t observe it? To me this is just meaningless blah blah.

Audio, 28 mins.

Animal and digital

Peter Singer on animal rights, speciesism and digital minds.

Video, 21 mins.

The meaning of life (part 8)

Scotty Hendricks for Big Think on four approaches to meaning.

A common question posed to philosophers and hermit gurus is, “What is the meaning of life?” It’s an important question.

Master of Theology

William Carroll for Public Disclosure on Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas lived at a critical juncture in the history of Western culture. The vast intellectual revolution in which he participated was the result of the translation into Latin of almost all the works of Aristotle. Aristotle offered, so it seemed, a comprehensive understanding of man, of the world, and even of God.

Footnotes

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Plato.

We also know he was a snob with a low opinion of the masses and their ability to make good decisions on behalf of themselves and as participants in a democracy. He was religious too — piety was a virtue for him. He may have been destined for a life in politics before he took a swerve into philosophy and writing. But what we can be most certain of was that his life was changed by meeting Socrates.

Not an easy matter

James Fox for The Guardian on colour.

Most experts now agree that colour, as commonly understood, doesn’t inhabit the physical world at all but exists in the eyes or minds of its beholders.

The age of reason

Hamid Alizadeh for In Defence of Marxism on Spinoza and the Enlightenment.

Even though Spinoza spoke of God and at times used religious jargon, God appears entirely superfluous in his framework. Like the great philosophers of ancient Greece, Spinoza attempted to explain the world on its own account, without any recourse to the supernatural.

Thought experiments

Micro-Digressions and Brain in a Vat explore the role and value of thought experiments in Philosophy.

Audio, 75 mins.

And see this follow-up list of the top ten thought experiments.

The stories we tell

Crispin Sartwell for Aeon on the shared concerns of analytic and continental philosophy.

Analysts held that continental philosophy was not philosophy at all, but meaningless yet relativistic babble, something of substantially less than no value. Continentalists characterised analytic philosophy as useless punctilious logic-chopping and scientism for its own sake, with no possibility of cultural critique or even meaningful connection to human life as it is actually conducted.

Without a trolley

Steven M Cahn for the Blog of the APA with a grim alternative to the traditional trolley problem.

I offer a story told by a survivor of the Shoah that, while serving as a reminder of its horrors, also illustrates why thinking about the role of a bystander as a tram approaches can illuminate how we should act in the face of unmitigated evil.

On friendship

Frank Breslin for Epoché Magazine explores Cicero’s treatise de amicitia.

No religious or supernatural considerations whatsoever appear in Cicero’s writings or those of other Roman or Greek ethical writers or modern secular treatises on the ethical life, all of which stress human reasons alone as sufficient for leading a virtuous life, which can be reduced to “virtue is its own reward.” Authors like Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus have always been popular among those leading a moral life for human reasons alone.

Quacks like a duck

Victor R Lee for The Conversation on questions of authenticity raised by generative AI.

Back when it took a lot of time to produce original new content, there was a general assumption that it required skill to create — that it only could have been made by skilled individuals putting in a lot of effort and acting with the best of intentions. These are not safe assumptions anymore.

Thinking hard and slow

Julian Baggini for The Author Archive podcast on how to think like a philosopher.

Philosophy sometimes makes you feel bad, sometimes makes you feel confused, and ultimately it helps us to live a good and flourishing life.

Audio, 28 mins.

Is life valuable?

Ignacio L Moya for The Philosophical Salon on pessimism.

Although this may be an off-the-cuff question or a random thought that just seemingly pops into our heads out of nowhere, from a philosophical perspective, things get interesting when the question is addressed in a systematic way. And things can get really interesting if the question is taken up by several philosophers within a specific time period in such a way that a tradition emerges. Enter the pessimist tradition.

Alive and well

Wes Van Voorhis for Big Think chooses 10 great ideas in philosophy from the last 50 years.

Lyotard had the foresight to warn in the 1980s that when knowledge became a commodity, to be bought and sold, that private corporations could control our flow of knowledge to shape human thought. This was well before corporations such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook (Meta) started to do exactly what he predicted: control the flow of knowledge, and shape and control the course of human thought.

Philosopher Kings

Brian O’Boyle for Jacobin on Plato, Athens and democracy.

Plato never gave up his conviction that ordinary men and women were incapable of ruling themselves. He also retained his conviction that the easiest way to bring justice to the city-state would involve converting autocrats into philosopher-kings.

What matters

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Derek Parfit.

Parfit used a range of thought experiments, some inspired by the teletransporter in Star Trek, to overturn conventional views about what makes each of us the same person over time. What would we say if our bodies were de-materialised and then re-materialised in another place from other components? Would the person “teletransported” to another place be the same person?

Tiny mans

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hard Problems

Scotty Hendricks for Big Think on four unsolved problems of philosophy.

As with many philosophical issues, there isn’t complete agreement that the problem even exists.

In defence of postmodernism

Patrick West for spiked on postmodernism and wokeness.

The great thinkers who we can reasonably call postmodern, from Nietzsche to Foucault, had none of the glib certitude, or punitive, dissent-crushing zeal that characterises wokeness. In fact, it is likely they would reject the intolerance and puritanism of wokeness.

Into the AI abyss

Slavoj Žižek on human irrelevance — one of a series of short essays on Project Syndicate exploring generative AI technology.

Humanity is creating its own god or devil. While the outcome cannot be predicted, one thing is certain. If something resembling “post-humanity” emerges as a collective fact, our worldview will lose all three of its defining, overlapping subjects: humanity, nature, and divinity.

Common ground

Julian Baggini returns to the vexed question of trans rights.

No reasonable person could deny that there are real differences between cis and trans men and women. You can’t even do biology without acknowledging the existence of sexual dimorphism. The only questions should be about how much these differences matter.

Incredible history

Rebecca Goldstein on the history and foundations of Western philosophy.

Video, 15 mins.

Surviving and thriving

Kaitlyn Creasy for Psyche on Nietzsche and nihilism.

If an individual can hold what looks to our eyes like a nihilistic belief — perhaps that there is no purpose to life — but continue to find life worth living and grow in her form of life, then this is a sign of psychological flourishing. In such a case, this apparently nihilistic belief poses no problem at all.

A ramshackle structure

Steven Shapin for the London Review of Books on Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Philosophers of science had long accepted their role in justifying science, making the case that scientific knowledge is — take your pick — true, objective, rational, reliable, progressive, powerful. Kuhn seemed to be arguing that philosophers had been aiming their inquiries at the wrong targets.

The pleasure principle

Big Think on Jeremy Bentham.

If there were a drug that could make you feel amazingly, astonishingly great for no reason, without any negative consequences, that would be just as good as the joy of meeting your child for the first time. Or let’s say the drug could reliably make you feel good over the long haul, no matter what. So regardless of whether you lose your job or your friends betray your deepest trust or your child is never going to speak to you again or a dear friend loses a loved one, you feel splendid. You feel precisely how the good life feels.

Identity crisis

Dwight Furrow for 3 Quarks Daily on identity.

Philosophers have tended to approach these questions by asking what makes us the same person over time. We change significantly from birth to death. Nothing about us remains unchanged. What makes us the same person despite those changes?

Fairy dust

David P Barash for Aeon on the soul.

Few ideas are as unsupported, ridiculous and even downright harmful as that of the ‘human soul’. And yet, few ideas are as widespread and as deeply held. What gives? Why has such a bad idea had such a tenacious hold on so many people?

Crungus

James Bridle for The Guardian on AI.

These systems are very good indeed at aping human consciousness, all the way down to the horror that lurks in the depths of existence: our fears of filth, death and corruption. And if so, we need to acknowledge that these will be persistent components of the machines we build in our own image.

I often long to be simple and good, never say a clever thing again, never bother about subtle points, but give up my life to love of my neighbour. This is really a temptation — but it is Satan in an angelic form. Bertrand Russell, Letter to Ottoline Morrell, 16 October 1911, via @tpmquote

An unreachable summit

William Fear for The Critic on Orwell, Camus and truth.

Truth, for Orwell and Camus, was a destination towards which it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Today, the truth has become a question of competing narratives.

Assisted death

Marie Nicolini for Psyche on euthanasia for mental disorders.

There is an extensive professional debate among clinicians, ethicists, philosophers and lawyers about whether there are good reasons to end the lives of some people with mental disorders. Ethically speaking, typical arguments in favour of expanding assisted death laws are that we should respect people’s wishes to make decisions about their death, and that relief of suffering should prevail, regardless of its source or cause. Proponents argue that the same standards used for diseases such as cancer should apply.

Women philosophers in antiquity

Dawn LaValle Norman for The Philosopher’s Zone on women philosophers in the ancient world.

Audio, 30 mins.

Lest we perish of the truth

Tim Brinkhof for Big Think on Nietzsche and art.

When placed in the context of an individual person’s life, tragedy often seems pointless and traumatizing. When explored through art, however, it loses its sting and becomes somehow beautiful, even meaningful.

A reluctant philosopher

Regan Penaluna for Aeon on Damaris Cudworth Masham and her relationship with John Locke.

Although Locke was essential to securing Masham’s sense of self-worth as a philosopher, she wasn’t Locke’s ‘disciple’, as one scholar put it. It’s women and their experiences that motivate and shape her books. In fact, her philosophy doesn’t focus primarily on metaphysics or epistemology — though these ideas are there — but rather on the forces that inhibit women and keep them from participating in the life of the mind.

Intelligent life

Rory O’Connell for The Point on the history (and future) of AI.

Recently a neural net with 71 layers was able to predict someone’s gender with a high degree of accuracy based only on a photograph of their retina. Researchers had no idea that there was any discernible difference between male and female retinas before this — nor have they discovered, by studying the net, what differences it is actually responding to.

Dog whistles

Oliver Traldi for Quillette on ‘woke’ attitudes to language.

The theory… is magical thinking in the most fundamental sense. It holds that we can change the world merely by speaking incantations. If this were true, it would certainly make life easier. It is much simpler to enforce speech codes than it is to grapple with the intractable problems and trade-offs involved in the ordinary business of politics.

The Philosopher

John Sellars for Antigone on Aristotle, ‘the single most important human being ever to have lived’.

The one thing Aristotle was emphatic about, though, was the importance of doing philosophy. According to him, we are rational animals, which is to say that we are animals, but we differ from other animals in having the power of reason. That’s our defining characteristic. It’s what makes us who we are.

The Nature of Science

Carlo Rovelli has identified Anaximander as the father of scientific thinking.

There was one other critical factor in the new way of thinking. It was implicit in Miletus’s geography as a trading city in which Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian cultures met. Anaximander borrowed knowledge from all these traditions to build his theories. In this, Rovelli suggests, he sends perhaps his most potent message through the ages.

A better life

Peter Singer on the Rick Roll Podcast.

Video, 105 mins.

Earthquake

Nigel Warburton for The New European on the problem of natural evil.

For anyone who buys into the mainstream Theist belief that God is a benevolent, all-powerful, and all-knowing interventionist, the existence of natural disasters like the one in Lisbon or the earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria last week presents a serious challenge.

Problems, problems

Johnny Lyons for the Dublin Review of Books on Thomas Nagel and the nature of philosophy itself.

What Nagel compels us to confront is the very real possibility that the most fundamental problems of philosophy are insoluble but, crucially, no less meaningful and important for that.

Auto-complete on steroids

Adam Frank for Big Think on ChatGPT and modern artificial intelligence.

Early AI researchers hoped to build machines that emulated the human mind. They hoped to build machines that thought like people. That is not what happened. Instead, we have learned to build machines that don’t really reason at all. They associate, and that is very different.

Think yourself better

Julian Baggini for The Guardian on how to think like a philosopher.

Breadth used to be a typical characteristic of philosophers. Aristotle studied nature in a lagoon on the island of Lesbos, Descartes dissected animals as well as concepts, Hume was better known in his day as a historian than as a philosopher. Narrow specialisation is a recent development.

Interaction

Eric Holloway for Mind Matters on materialism.

The interaction problem is not specific to the mind and body. Interaction problems are everywhere we look in physics. The only reason we don’t notice them is that they’ve been rubber-stamped as acceptable.

Living for Pleasure

Julian Baggini for The Guardian on Epicurus.

In a world where even the possibility of missing out inspires fear, freedom from anxiety sounds pretty attractive. How can we get it? Mainly by satisfying the right desires and ignoring the rest.

Philosophers have sometimes searched for indicators of a conscious Absolute, in the hopes of making us “at home” and unalienated in the universe, akin to its fundamental character, or somehow favored by it. If there were such an Absolute, it too must occasionally look over its shoulder for a glimpse of a yet deeper, and perhaps not fully friendly, reality. Robert Nozick, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, via @shershovitz

Existenzphilosophie

Deborah Casewell for Aeon on Karl Jaspers, the ‘forgotten father of existentialism’.

The aim is to explore how to exist in the world philosophically. Rather than an act of reasoning, philosophy is an activity: it is a relationship towards the world.

Neither of heaven nor of earth

Adam Kirsch for The American Scholar on transhumanism.

The only thing that makes humanity unique, transhumanists believe, is our ability to compensate for our biological weaknesses with the power of technology. Slower than horses, weaker than elephants, less versatile than roaches, humans dominate them all because we are able to change ourselves, while they are stuck with the abilities nature gave them. It’s not recent technologies like pacemakers that make us cyborg-like; we have always been cyborgs because technology has always been a fundamental part of human being.

Readiness potential

Alessandra Buccella and Tomáš Dominik for Scientific American on what neuroscience tells us about free will.

When we care about a decision and its outcome, our brain appears to behave differently than when a decision is arbitrary.

Real figs

Costica Bradatan for the Los Angeles Review of Books on the ancient Cynic, Diogenes.

In our age of unapologetic conformism and generalized herding, such a contrarian spirit may be the one thing that can save our lives — politically, culturally, intellectually, and spiritually. Contrarianism shows that there are other manners of acting and being in the world. In any society, some will have to go against the stream of pious lies.

A Spectre, Haunting

China Miéville for truthout on Marx and The Communist Manifesto today.

Every day, capitalism proves that it is absolutely indifferent to human flourishing, or life, and therefore it really shouldn’t be a surprise that so many of the grotesque and monstrous phenomena of our society — inequality, racism, misogyny, imperialism, ecological catastrophe, mass extinction, mass unnecessary death — are inextricable from capitalism.

Thought process

Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker on the different ways we think — in pictures, patterns or words.

Quantum physicists confront a problem with observation. Whenever they look at a particle, they alter and fix its quantum state, which otherwise would have remained indeterminate. A similar issue afflicts our attempts to understand how we think; thinking about our thinking risks forcing it into a form it does not have.

Reason to believe

Steven Pinker on rationality and why people hold outlandish beliefs.

It should be conventional wisdom that humans are fallible and misconceptions ubiquitous in human history, and that the only route to knowledge is to broach and then evaluate hypotheses. Arguing ad hominem or by anecdote should be as mortifying as arguing from horoscopes or animal entrails; repressing honest opinion should be seen as risible as the doctrines of biblical inerrancy or Papal infallibility.

Gap

David Chalmers at Mind Matters on dualism.

You needn’t be going off into cloud cuckoo land by believing that our inventory of the world’s fundamental properties has to be expanded to include consciousness.