unreasonable.

Where force reigns

Peter Salmon for Jacobin on Simone Weil.

Marx’s great mistake had been, for Weil, to believe that oppression sprung from capitalism when in fact capitalism was only the current form of oppression.

Idle talk

Alexander Stern for Commonweal on Heidegger and the limitations of generative AI.

GPT is programmed to respond in the most conformist, inoffensive way possible. To the extent that it has a personality or style, it is the perfect average of the styles of the corpus it was trained on, which, judging from the results, seems to have included a fair amount of HR-speak and legal boilerplate.

Almost any how

Scotty Hendricks for Big Think on Slavoj Žižek and happiness.

When creative people get inspired while working on a project, they are often willing to endure suffering for their art — the question of whether they will have pleasant feelings while at work rarely occurs to them.

Complex

Steve Mintz for Inside Higher Ed on the important role of the unconscious.

Alongside individuals’ conscious awareness, cognition, perception, judgment, mental images and motivation, there are acts that are irrational, motivated by intense levels of fear or stress, flawed reasoning, peer pressure, internal conflicts, cognitive distortions or a lack of self-understanding.

An object of global desire

Julian Baggini on the decline of liberalism.

Liberal democracy has three key features: it is plural, progressive and participatory. Plural, because it tolerates — even encourages — citizens to live according got their own, different values, so long as they do not compromise the rights of others to do the same. It is progressive because it is rooted in the enlightenment idea that we do not have access to eternal truths but are in an unending process of understanding ourselves and the world better through the application of reason and science. And it is participatory in the obvious sense that everyone has a say in how they are governed.

Socrates gone mad

Carlos Fraenkel for The Point on the ancient Cynics and their descendants.

The morality and lifestyle of the Cynics are one big show of the middle finger to social convention. They are the punks of the ancient world.

Footnotes to Plato

Joseph Shieber for 3 Quarks Daily on progress in philosophy.

The fact that — after more than 2000 years — we still have proponents of ever more sophisticated and subtle versions of Platonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism, Humeanism, or Kantianism, just to name a few prominent examples, would seem not to reflect well on the idea of progress in philosophy.

The hardest to understand

Robert Stern for The Conversation on the newly discovered transcripts of Hegel’s lectures.

His philosophical approach is fundamentally dialectical, which means he is trying to hold together ideas which we more naturally think of as in contradiction with one another. For example, he will argue that an individual can only be free if they are part of a community, even if this means limiting their desires.

Brave Sir Bentham

from Existential Comics.

Good book

Michael Shermer on religion and morality.

Many Christians say that they get their morality from the Bible, but this cannot be true because as holy books go the Bible is possibly the most unhelpful guide ever written for determining right from wrong. It’s chockfull of bizarre stories about dysfunctional families, advice about how to beat your slaves, how to kill your headstrong kids, how to sell your virgin daughters, and other clearly outdated practices that most cultures gave up centuries ago.

What is the value of philosophy?

36 philosophers answer the question, What is the value of philosophy?

Video, 124 mins.

How should we live?

Edith Hall for Philosophy Bites on Aristotle’s ethics.

What you’ve got to aim at if you’re Aristotelian is not getting rid of emotions and passions, but getting them at the right time and in the right amount.

Audio, 17 mins.

Jesting Pilate

Alan Jacobs for The Hedgehog Review on the nature of truth.

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” The hint here is that Pilate turns away from Jesus after asking his question because he is afraid it might be answered. And Pilate may not be the only one who has such feelings.

Not a maths thing

Sabine Hossenfelder in The Guardian discusses physics and existential questions.

It’s very niche, actually, this whole multiverse thing. Those people are really confused about what science can actually do. How they come to this conclusion that the multiverse must exist is that they have some theory that predicts some things that agree with observations — that’s all well and fine. And then they jump to the conclusion that therefore all the mathematics that appears in this theory also has to exist in some sense. But this is not how it works. You’ve just assigned reality to some mathematical expressions. You can’t support it with a scientific argument.

Nothing is true

David Liggins for Aeon on the theory that nothing whatsoever is true.

It looks as if the discovery that nothing is true would have massive implications for how we live our lives. For example, it seems to imply that lying is fine. No-one can be faulted for failing to tell the truth — because there are no truths to tell. I would be very uneasy if the theory I’m sympathetically exploring had that implication. Actually, I think it doesn’t. What it does imply is that our understanding of lying has to change.

Funny ha-ha

Chris A Kramer for 1000-Word Philosophy on the philosophy of humour.

Perhaps a combination of these theories can explain what makes something funny. There is little consensus regarding which theory is best, but, like most philosophical conundrums worth thinking about, this is not uncommon.

Ancestor simulations

James Felton for IFLScience on the different ways to escape a simulated universe.

They range from trying to attract the attention of the creators through a gigantic monument in binary to let them know that we know, to deliberately creating a time-travel paradox by murdering the time traveler’s grandfather, causing the computer to crash as it tries to reconcile the paradox.

Nietzsche in Turin

Patrick West for spiked on Nietzsche’s final year of sanity.

Unlike conventional philosophers, Nietzsche had no unified, coherent theory. He didn’t proceed in a methodical, calm manner, advancing to a carefully delineated conclusion. He never encumbered his prose with technical expressions, jargon or cloudy terminology. No plodding Kant or Hegel was he. He was a mystic and a seer, advocate of the Übermensch, the ‘will to power’, ‘eternal recurrence’ and the Antichrist.

A stranger’s life

Theron Pummer for the OUP Blog on the obligations we owe to strangers.

Imagine telling a drowning stranger that you’re giving so much money and time to charity already that you refuse to incur the small additional cost of saving their life. Most of us share the intuition that this is morally different from the case of refusing to give more to charity. But is this intuition rationally defensible?

Body Am I

Mo Costandi for Big Think on animals and bodily awareness.

For untold ages, religious thinkers, philosophers, and naturalists alike placed humans at the pinnacle of life on Earth and denied other animals the possibility of consciousness. In recent years, however, this view has begun to change in light of growing evidence that cognitive capabilities once thought to be unique to humans are in fact present in an ever-wider variety of other animals.

Théâtre D’opéra Spatial

G M Trujillo Jr for Aesthetics for Birds on art generated by Artificial Intelligence.

It’s less important to focus on the “mind” of the AI program and more important to compare AI-generated art to works we already laud. We should accept AI-generated art as art for the very same reasons that we accept some of the most famous pieces in art history as art.

Genius, Jew, Heretic

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes for Aish explains the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza.

He rejects Free Will because the will is determined by prior causes of which one is mostly ignorant. Free will is also rejected because Nature is in itself timeless and so the future has as much reality as the past, and is thus set. One is not free to change it. However, the more one understands Nature and the causes therein that determine Nature, including oneself as part of Nature, the more control one gains over it, over oneself.

Conspiracy

Michael Shermer for Quillette on conspiracy theories and why so many people believe them.

At the root of this problem isn’t just distrust in government, but also distrust in journalism, science, and the legal system. And in many cases, this sense of distrust isn’t entirely without basis. And so, ultimately, the antidote to conspiracism will have to involve reinforcing norms of truth-telling, honesty, reason, and rationality in all of these sectors.

Electrochemical shenanigans

J P Andrew interviews Galen Strawson about consciousness, materialism, panpsychism, moral responsibility, free will, the self and the good life.

If you were to ask me, what do I think is the best account of ‘the self’? — if we are going to have to use that word to name something, what should we use it to name? — then I would be inclined to say that, as it were, there is a new self with every experience.

Video, 68 mins.

Bonkers

David Egan on why the history of philosophy matters.

The questions we ask, how we ask them, and what sorts of concepts we deploy in trying to answer them (and how) all reflect our sense of what’s important to us. It’s easier to see this when looking at the past than at the present because the concerns of past generations aren’t our own.

His Noodly Appendage

Emma Park for New Humanist on the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and the difficulty of defining a religion.

It is a sad state of affairs when the courts shrink from engaging with the question at the heart of the matter: whether the starting point in human rights law should be religion — cogent, serious and important — or whether it should be the freedom to think, believe or withhold belief, and act.

A stone age mind

Michael Ruse for the OUP Blog on human nature and why we hate.

The reasons why we are in this difficulty suggest that there are ways that we can — as indeed we must — improve things. These ways will be cultural. No need for genetic reengineering.

The cost of living

Julian Baggini for The Guardian on virtue signalling during the cost of living crisis.

It is understandable that no one wants to callously flaunt the fact that they’re all right. But there’s also something distasteful about pretending to suffer when you’re not. And the done thing this autumn seems to be for everyone, irrespective of their ability to ride out inflation, to talk as though times are tough.

A kind of theft

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Rawls, Nozick and fairness.

Although the official doctrine is that if the very rich get significantly richer and the poor tighten their belts everyone will benefit from the magic of trickle-down economics, this feels like a convenient lie. Behind this front, many of us sense a sinister libertarian philosophy that wants to reduce the state to almost nothing, and that considers taxation for redistribution a kind of theft.

The Fate Controller

Matyáš Moravec for The Conversation on free will, Thomas the Tank Engine and Harry Frankfurt.

It looks like Thomas is in the same situation: when he does things within the rules of the railway, he is left to do them of his own volition. When he does not, someone intervenes: the driver, the conductor or the ominous Fat Controller. But he is still reprimanded when things go wrong. The fact that his actions are not open to alternatives does not change anything about that.

Time’s arrow

Martha Henriques for BBC Future on why time goes forwards but not backwards.

The answer is because the Big Bang had low entropy. And still, 14 billion years later, we are swimming in the aftermath of that tsunami that started near the Big Bang. That’s why time has a direction for us.

The same blue

Anil Seth for The Guardian on the diversity of perception.

Since we all have different brains, making slightly different best guesses, we will all have different perceptual experiences too — even if we are faced with the same objective external reality.

Physicalism

Mark Jago offers a concise definition of physicalism in the Philosophy of Mind.

Video, 6 mins.

We rule you, we fool you

Richard Milner for Grunge explores Karl Marx’s views on religion.

Many religions dissociate people from their actual, material lives in lieu of a blissful afterlife. People focus on “being good” (often conflated with “being right”) in an abstract sense rather than working to improve physical, tangible work conditions and policies in our everyday world.

A totalitarian nightmare

Scotty Hendricks for Big Think on Plato’s Republic.

Allegedly, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran and leader of the Iranian Revolution, was inspired by the book when crafting the Iranian government, complete with its own philosopher-king. How well this worked out is subject to debate.

I kill where I please

Nigel Warburton for The New European on the moral question of how to deal with tyrants like Vladimir Putin.

We want peace, and ought to seek it; but we also don’t want to negotiate with a suspected war criminal or concede any territory to someone who has taken it by force.

Riches, power and honour

Tom Whyman for Gawker on some philosophical justifications for monarchy.

Actually existing monarchs attempt to secure personal glory by doing things like bankrupting the treasury to build a bunch of fairytale castles, or using state funds to pay off their gambling debts, or starting disastrous wars. Many of them have been congenitally unable to rule.

Update: the article is no longer available.

Beyond reasonable doubt

Peter Vickers for The Conversation on the shifting claims of science.

Astronomers once believed the Sun revolved around the Earth. In the 19th century, scientists thought the shape of a person’s skull could reveal their mental strengths or weaknesses. And in the 20th century, many scientists fiercely opposed the idea that continents drift. All views that have since been completely overturned. So can we trust the scientific truths of today?

Mockingbirds

Bo Winegard for Quillette on authenticity.

To be human is to be artificial. And to contend that it is inauthentic to conform to one’s culture and to strive to suppress and overcome one’s natural tendencies is like contending that it is inauthentic for a mockingbird to imitate the song of another species.

Choosing to believe

Justin Garson for Psychology today on Pascal’s Wager and choosing to believe in God.

The evidence appears to support what Pascal surmised: if you want to be a full-fledged religious believer, the best thing to do is start acting like one.

Freedom from turbulence

Nathan Dufour Oglesby for BBC Future on Epicureanism and the digital life.

In certain ways Epicureanism is strikingly congenial to modern thought — it seems to foreshadow the physicalism that underlies modern science, and the pragmatic hedonism that characterises secular society. In my academic life, whenever I’ve asked students to choose the school of philosophy they’d join, a majority of them have declared, “the pleasure one!”.

Ways of knowing

Stephen Law for The Freethinker on the conflict between science and religion.

Religious belief may concern the otherworldly, but that does not make it immune to scientific refutation.

A world that disappoints

Erik Van Aken reads his 1000-Word Philosophy essay on Albert Camus and the absurd.

Video, 5 mins.

Risk analysis

Nigel Warburton for The New European on paternalism and dangerous sports.

Most of us are inconsistent in our paternalism even towards children, particularly in the area of sport. Children still play contact rugby despite the known risks. Some children don’t just learn to punch in boxing and other martial arts, but spar as well. And I have seen parents encouraging their children to play “header tennis” to improve their football skills.

The happiness imperative

Ignacio L Moya for The Conversation on the value of philosophical pessimism.

When society expects us to be happy, and blames us if we are not, positivity becomes toxic. If we find ourselves unable to live up to the happiness imperative, we can feel inadequate and like failures.

Epistemology on holiday

Joseph Shieber for 3 Quarks Daily considers the value of philosophy — in particular, epistemology — against conspiracy theories.

As studies have repeatedly shown, high cognitive ability is not always an adequate defense against misinformation. Some studies have suggested that belief in fake news is in fact sometimes correlated with greater political knowledge.

Moral arithmetic

Kieran Setiya for the Boston Review on longtermism and our moral obligations to the future.

If you could save a million lives today or shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of premature human extinction — a one in a million chance of saving at least 8 trillion lives — you should do the latter, allowing a million people to die.

Coffee cup holes

from xkcd.

What is empathy?

Peter Salmon for Prospect on Edith Stein.

Stein argues that the way we encounter humans is not the same as the way we encounter other things in the world, and this difference is not something added on after the initial encounter. Rather, empathy is an immediate and structural part of being human.

What is a woman?

Michael Shermer on Wittgenstein, sex and gender.

No one should be fired for being trans, much less treated as less than human. The fuzzy set of Homo sapiens includes all of us, regardless of how we subdivide the species.

We are freedom

Skye Cleary for Philosophy Bites on authenticity.

Authenticity is the process of figuring out what are the facts of our existence, what can’t we change, but also looking for that window of freedom where we can make choices about our lives.

Audio, 17 mins.

The art of thinking

Scott Hershovitz on Freakonomics Radio.

I don’t think philosophy has to be the sort of thing that professional philosophers do. I think kids are having philosophical conversations. I think people in ordinary life, even grown-ups, are having philosophical conversations all the time and don’t see themselves as engaged in philosophy.

Audio, 50 mins.

A quiet life

John Gray for The New Statesman on Nietzsche.

The most prophetic of 19th-century thinkers, he discerned that the seemingly triumphal march of European progress was heading for a cataclysmic fall. He feared an era of great wars, which as he drifted into madness he imagined he could prevent. His breakdown may have come with the realisation that, like his illness, the malady he diagnosed was fated to run its course.

The argumentative animal

Rory Stewart explores the long history of argument in three programmes for the BBC.

Audio, 27 mins.

Vox inarticulata

Ian Rose for JSTOR Daily wonders whether birdsong is like music or speech.

To assume animals are motivated by the same inner life as humans is an obvious error. But to assume the opposite, that animals are simply biological robots led by instinctual programming, rather than beings with minds — different minds than ours, surely, but minds that are more similar to ours than they are to machines — is equally illogical. Animals play. They form bonds with allies and recognize foes. Is it so hard to imagine, given the abundance of evidence, that they also create, in a way separate but parallel to the way we do?

Three passions

Tomiwa Owolade for The New Statesman on Bertrand Russell, YouTube star.

Russell wanted to get to the root of things — he treated the world like a maths equation. “I have... a passion,” he once said, “for clarity and exactness and sharp outlines.”

Distress, terror or anxiety

Agnes Callard for The Point on how art allows us to encounter evil.

Art suspends our practical projects, releasing the prohibition against attending to the bad. Our ravenous consumption of badness in art reveals just how much we standardly deprive ourselves of it. We commonly praise some piece of art for its “realism”; we could fault life for its lack thereof.

The government it deserves

Brigid Delaney for The Guardian on philosopher kings and shameless leaders.

To elect leaders so nakedly devoid of character — men who parade bad character as a virtue — signals society-wide nihilism. It’s saying that being good doesn’t matter. (And maybe it doesn’t when what’s come before is hypocritical). Leaders being darkly entertaining, being fun, being able to stick it to the liberals, going hard, shitposting, trolling the snowflakes — that’s what matters. Here we are now, entertain us.

The starry sky above me

Helen De Cruz on Kant’s speculations about the cosmos.

In his theory of many galaxies and also the birth of these (nebular hypothesis) in deep time, Kant is many centuries ahead in a debate in astronomy. In the 1920s there was a “great debate” on the distant nebulae one could observe faintly through telescopes: were they galaxies, or not? Kant in 1755 (!) says yes. Obviously, his work is based on speculation and telescopes at the time weren’t powerful enough to show anything conclusively, as NASA’s telescopes can today.

Organize the chaos

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen for The Hedgehog Review on Nietzsche’s analysis of history.

In the end, Nietzsche’s most important insight about the uses and disadvantages of history for life is by now the most clichéd: namely, that history is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a human, all-too-human enterprise. It is not the raw stuff of the past — it is the connection we strive to make with the past.

I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance. Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, via @Samantharhill

I wish you hadn’t

Daniel Callcut for Psyche on toleration.

Toleration isn’t the same as respect. Many social movements have rightly pressed the claim that toleration is not enough. What is needed is respect and acceptance. But in pluralistic multi-faith societies, where people have widely different views over many areas of life, we have reason to revive and cultivate an understanding of what makes toleration nonetheless a virtue.

Exactly like death

Regina Rini for The Guardian contemplates sentient AI.

It is demonstrably possible for mind to emerge from matter, as it did first in our ancestors’ brains. Unless you insist human consciousness resides in an immaterial soul, you ought to concede it is possible for physical stuff to give life to mind. There seems to be no fundamental barrier to a sufficiently complex artificial system making the same leap.

The limits of my world

Catherine Legg for The Conversation on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

The logical positivist circle in Vienna read the Tractatus and were enormously inspired. They invited Wittgenstein for a research visit in 1927. Wittgenstein came, but refused to answer any questions about his book, stating that he could no longer understand the thinking of someone who would write such stupid things. Instead, he sat with his back to his audience reciting poems by Indian mystic Rabindranath Tagore.

Whisper, cower and hide

Phil Zuckerman for OnlySky makes the atheist case for free speech.

Free speech, at root, is deeply liberatory, radical, enlightened, and progressive. It is what has allowed the defenders of social justice to advance their agendas. It is what allows us to fight against despotism. It is what allows us to challenge religion.

Those who speak

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein for Philosophy Now on Zhuangzi, language and gender.

On a Daoist view existence is a process through which life manifests itself as it unfolds, and rules, systems, names, and pronouns cannot grasp this reality.

Ideology in disguise

Julian Baggini on science and values.

Although what is true is true whether we like it or not, what we need to stress at any given time does vary — and our values determine what that need is.

A recuperation of mankind

Tae-Yeoun Keum for The Hedgehog Review on Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.

In the United Kingdom, Cambridge declined to publish it on the grounds that “a university press ought not to publish a book that is so disrespectful of Plato.”

All emotions are bad

Dwight Furrow for 3 Quarks Daily on the current interest in Stoicism.

The view that all emotions are irrational and that, as rational beings, we ought to be utterly indifferent to the outcome of our actions and the actions of others is counter-intuitive, to say the least, and seems contrary to any reasonable account of human nature or well-being. Thus, Stoicism incurs a heavy burden; if we are to take it seriously it must provide very compelling reasons for adopting such an extreme view.

See also Sam Haselby for Psyche on Roman Stoicism.

Stoicism may seem a solution to many of our individual problems, but a society that is run by stoics, or filled with stoics, is a worse society for us to live in.

Beyond the pale

Elise Springer for The Conversation on evil.

Evil is one of the most complex and paradoxical words in the English language. It can galvanize collective action but also lead to collective paralysis, as if the presence of evil can’t be helped.

6.999

Richard Dawkins for The Panpsycast on why he is an atheist.

Teaching by examples

Robert Crowcroft for The Critic on philosophy and history.

Historians are better equipped than most — including philosophers — to test the truth of philosophical propositions about human behaviour. After all, history is the only laboratory of evidence and experience available to us.

The Rebel

Sean Illing for Vox on Albert Camus.

We’re born into a world that doesn’t seem to have any purpose, that we know will end, and yet we go on living anyway. For Camus, that meant that there is something in humanity that transcends the fact of our condition. That’s the source of our collective dignity — and it’s the part of humanity that always has to be defended.

Proof

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Did Socrates cancel himself?

Howard Brenton for The Guardian on his new play about Socrates.

A scruffy 70-year-old man hanging out in public places surrounded by adoring pupils, teaching that a life unexamined is not worth living but we must learn we know nothing, corroded certainty. And certainty was what the city craved.

The fog of life

Peter Singer for Philosophy Bites on consequentialism.

Audio, 22 mins.

All the way down

Julian Baggini for Psyche on how to think about free will.

Recognising the free will we do have requires accepting that complete freedom is an impossibility. To have free will is no more nor less than to be free enough to choose for ourselves on the basis of reasons that we endorse on reflection.

Mind Matters News rejects Baggini’s account.

If the world were completely governed by cause and effect, the supposed distinction between first- and second-order desires would be meaningless. A human would no more have the ability to prefer second-order desires than a cat does.

Out of place

Nikhil Krishnan for The New Yorker on Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Whatever depth is, Wittgenstein is one of a small number of philosophers of the twentieth-century canon to have some claim to it.

Extraterrestrials

Tim Brinkhof for Big Think on the history of belief in aliens.

“Nothing in the universe is unique and alone,” the Roman poet Lucretius once wrote, “and therefore in other regions there must be other earths inhabited by different tribes of men and breeds of beasts.”

Every sperm is sacred

Richard Dawkins for Free Inquiry on abortion and the claim that personhood begins at conception.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who really believes — deeply and sincerely believes — that abortion is murder. You’d count up the number of “babies killed” and liken it to an annual holocaust of hideous magnitude. No wonder they scream outside abortion clinics.

What is movement?

Thomas Nail for Aeon on movement and change.

There are no things or people. There are only processes and patterns in motion. Nouns are conceptual shortcuts for movements: they are abstractions that help us wash the dishes and build skyscrapers.

Video, 6 mins.

Strangely delightful

Emrys Westacott for 3 Quarks Daily on why Nietzsche is his ‘desert island philosopher’.

Ultimately, what makes Nietzsche endlessly readable is the extraordinary range, profundity, and sheer interestingness of what he has to say.

The best of all

A W Moore for The New Statesman on Leibniz and the problem of evil.

The problem of suffering has accordingly proved to be the problem for theists. As an intellectual problem, it seems to me intractable. Even if it doesn’t constitute a decisive objection against theism, we shall never be able to explain how an infinitely wise, perfectly good, all-powerful God could allow for the suffering we see around us.

I don’t want to wake up

Scott Hershovitz for The Atlantic on why children make the best philosophers.

Children are sophisticated thinkers, more than capable of abstract thought. They’re creative too. Indeed, in some ways, kids make better philosophers than adults. They question things grown-ups take for granted. And they’re open to new ideas.

Pixie dust

Keith Frankish for New Humanist on the current vogue for panpsychism.

Modern panpsychists hold that elementary particles such as electrons and quarks have simple forms of consciousness, and thus that everything in the universe is constructed from conscious elements. They claim that complex forms of consciousness in humans and other animals are built up from the simple consciousnesses of the particles that compose their bodies. If all this sounds like woo-woo to you, then you’ll find plenty of philosophers who agree.

Philosophy and myth

Tae-Yeoun Keum for The Philosopher’s Zone on political myths.

Audio, 28 mins.

Principalities and Powers

Alan Jacobs for The New Atlantis on power, and the extra-personal agents — or demons — that exercise it.

Several accounts of the spread of ideas jostle against one another in our moment: Richard Dawkins’s notion of “memes” — ideas spreading by replication — competes with notions of “virality” and of “social contagion.” There is information theory and disease theory. I prefer demon theory.

Does time exist?

Sam Baron for The Conversation argues that time does not exist.

While we have a pretty good sense of how a table might be made out of fundamental particles, we have no idea how time might be “made out of” something more fundamental.

And Anne Delaney explores the many different ways we talk about time.

Why are trans rights so divisive?

Julian Baggini explores what is at issue in disagreements about trans rights.

It should be obvious that someone who agrees with all four of these propositions cannot be called bigoted or transphobic on any reasonable definitions of those terms. They could conceivably be wrong, and their mistake could be harmful for trans people. But that would not make them ill-intentioned, let alone wicked. Still, this set of views is typical of gender-critical feminists who are routinely vilified as being ‘trans-exclusionary’.

Snivelling poltroons

Andrew Mueller for New Humanist on the responsibilities — and failures — of citizenship in recent times.

All such symptoms have essentially the same cause: the wilful retreat, by a great many adult inhabitants of wealthy, safe and free countries, into a state of toddler-like fury at anything that contradicts, thwarts or upsets them. Trump’s victory in 2016 was the most obvious manifestation of this.

Butchers, bakers and brewers

Martin Butler for 3 Quarks Daily on human nature.

The idea of human nature seems perfectly reasonable. I do, however, want to examine how the idea that human beings are naturally bad should affect our political beliefs, if indeed it should affect them at all.

What we owe to each other

T M Scanlon for The Good Fight on moral philosophy, tolerance and free will.

I think people aren’t very clear about how to think about exactly which things are right and wrong. We have some fixed ideas. But when we get into uncertain territory it’s critical to ask, “What kind of thinking am I engaging in?” Maybe that’s not a problem that worries most people. But that’s the kind of problem that worries a philosopher.

I need electricity

Carmine Starnino for The New Criterion on recent developments in AI.

Chess was once thought beyond the reach of algorithms because of the cunning and foresight required to play it well. We also doubted AI could ever cope with Go, the ancient Chinese board game notorious for the astronomical number of positions its rules allow. On both counts, we were wrong: grandmasters were routed. Why would poetry do a better job of holding a mechanical mind at bay?

How the light gets in

Hilary Lawson talks to New Humanist about the role of philosophy in modern life.

Our descriptions of the world are tools to enable us to intervene in the world. They help us get things done. And of course, we always want a better tool. You know, if you are using a pen, you want to make sure it’s a good pen. You might improve the nib, or if it’s a ballpoint pen, you want to make it flow a little bit better, whatever it might be. But there’s no true pen. There’s no ultimate pen. There is just a better way of intervening in the world.

Erasmus on war

Jeroen Bouterse for 3 Quarks Daily on Erasmus and his thoughts on war.

War is never precise: most harm is done precisely to those that don’t deserve punishment — to thousands of elderly people, women and children. This is Erasmus’ humanitarian argument against even the most just wars: it is better to leave some crimes unpunished than to ruin the lives of so many innocent people.