unreasonable.

Cosmically illogical

Julian Baggini for The Royal Institute of Philosophy on the cosmological argument for God.

Video, 16 mins.

Athens made me

Tim Sommers for 3 Quarks Daily on Social Contract theories.

The point is that talking about what principles would be the outcome of a hypothetical contract is a pretty good way of talking about which principles are right. The contract doesn’t bind. It models how we might arrive at the correct principles.

On love

Peter Keeble for Philosophy Now on two philosophical approaches to romantic love.

Romantic love can be viewed phenomenologically as an experience of which you are the subject, and analytically as a concept and object of study. The one relies heavily on introspection — whether your own or reports from others — and the other on an analysis of meaning and usage.

Suspension of judgement

Sam Dresser for Psyche on Edmund Husserl and the exercise of phenomenological reduction.

One of the primary goals of phenomenology is precisely to get past this thorny issue of the world’s existence apart from our experience so that we can investigate a much more directly relevant topic: the world exactly as we experience it. By setting aside the ordinary philosophical distinction between consciousness and reality, we open up a wide variety of investigations that can help us better understand our ordinary lives.

Corrupting the youth

Stephen Harrison for Slate on the philosophy content of TikTok.

Several philosophy professors told me that they could imagine their favorite philosophers appreciating the app. During his lifetime, Socrates was willing to meander pretty much everywhere for a good conversation, so it’s not hard to see him starting a dialogue in the internet comments. Others thought Nietzsche’s aphoristic style — full of concise, powerful quotes like “Become who you are” and “What does not kill me makes me stronger” — would work really well on TikTok.

False dichotomy

from xkcd.

The fight is here

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Aristotle’s definition of bravery.

Ukraine, it seems, is full of brave people in this Aristotelian sense, people whose motives are noble, and whose resolve is strong. Putin might invade and occupy this country, but he will never subjugate those who, though they are afraid, will stand up and defend their families, their homes, justice, and democracy itself, or else go down fighting for what they hold most dear.

Philosophers on Ukraine

Four philosophers of war explore the Russian attack on Ukraine for Daily Nous.

Our very ordinary moral principles, familiar from everyday life, tell us that it’s impermissible to use force to try to acquire something to which you’re not entitled in the first place. Nothing changes when that force is deployed by states or other political collectives: the Russian regime does not enjoy special permissions to do violence that are denied to individuals.

Varieties of bullshit

Peter Ludlow offers an extended analysis of bullshit.

We often encounter bullshitters trying to convince us that they have a noble character. They engage in virtue signaling or engage in superficial acts of charity and good deeds in order to convey that they are praiseworthy when they actually are not. The bullshit does not resolve to individual lies — in fact there need be no individual lies — but to a more general attempt to spin up a story about the person’s character. Carefully curated truths can paint a very misleading picture of a person’s character.

A very nice view (redux)

Michael Huemer for Fake Nous follows up his earlier post with an examination of rule utilitarianism.

Rule Utilitarian reasoning also strikes me as somewhat intuitive. If someone asks, “Why should we care about keeping promises?”, and then you give a convincing explanation of how societies that include a promise-keeping norm are going to do better than societies with no such norm, intuitively that seems morally relevant. Normal people aren’t going to say, “So what? What does that have to do with what’s right?”

Reality is bigger

Tom Chatfield for BBC Future on David Chalmers.

When it comes to consciousness, humans are at once brilliant and profoundly vulnerable. Countless artefacts, systems and environmental nudges are constantly altering and extending our minds. We do not and cannot access even “base” reality directly via our senses. And this means that any and every moment we experience is at once more open and more unknowable than intuition easily lets us believe.

Learning how to dance

Dwight Furrow for 3 Quarks Daily on Aristotle, metaphysics and human flourishing.

The study of metaphysics today yields no settled, secure account of the basic structure of the universe that would count as uncontroversially true. We may know lots of truths, and we now have a sophisticated science to help us think about the nature of reality, but any account of how those truths hang together in a comprehensive account of reality is little more than well-informed speculation.

Existentialism today

Julian Baggini discusses existentialism with Kate Kirkpatrick and Jonathan Webber.

Audio, 51 mins.

Pine in winter

Antonio Damasio and Anil Seth for Nautilus on consciousness and the self.

Feelings such as hunger or thirst are occasional, but if we pause for a moment and observe carefully what goes on in our minds, we realize that “a feeling of just being” is present continuously. And when that feeling of being is not there, “you” are not there either, which is what happens when you faint or when you go under anesthesia — consciousness disappears.

Multiverse

Adam Frank for Big Think on scientific evidence for the multiverse.

There is no empirically grounded scientific reason to believe there is such a thing as a Multiverse of parallel realities. In fact, the only time the Multiverse appears in scientific theories is as a bug rather than a feature. If you have a Multiverse in your cosmic model, it is probably evidence that your model is failing in some important way.

Necessary illusions

Galen Strawson discusses freedom, the self and other illusions.

Video, 22 mins.

Insufficient evidence

1000-Word Philosophy explores Clifford’s uncompromising claim that

it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

Virtual reality

David Chalmers talks to Ars Technica about reality, simulations and The Matrix.

I like a naturalistic picture of nature governed by quasi-scientific laws, but the simulation hypothesis opens up room for something at least a little bit like a god. If there’s a simulation, presumably that simulation was created by someone who is potentially all-powerful and all-knowing about what goes on within the simulation. Those are at least three of the properties of the traditional God: creator, all-powerful, all-knowing.

The classical argument against free will

Mark Balaguer for The MIT Press reader on free will, determinism and quantum physics.

We don’t know whether determinism or indeterminism is true. Future physicists might be able to settle this question, but as of right now, we don’t know the answer.

A very nice view

Michael Huemer for Fake Nous on utilitarianism.

On his death-bed, your best friend (who didn’t make a will) got you to promise that you would make sure his fortune went to his son. You can do this by telling government officials that this was his dying wish. Should you lie and say that his dying wish was for his fortune to go to charity, since this will do more good?

Some fundamental difference of mind

Philip Ball for The Guardian on animal sentience.

Some biologists now argue that sentience may be a property of all living things, even bacteria and single cells. They assert that plants, despite lacking a nervous system, show signs of genuine cognition, even feeling.

A duty to spy

Cécile Fabre for the OUP Blog on the morality of espionage.

Our government also owes it to the targets of its harmful policies to ensure, as far as possible, that it acts on the basis of accurate information.

Liberal irony

Jonathan Rée for The Prospect Interview on Richard Rorty, truth and politics.

Audio, 24 mins.

Update: the article is now only available to subscribers.

Two kidneys

BBC Ideas on the issues around the buying and selling of human organs.

If I were a patient with failing kidneys, and I faced a short and miserable life, and I had the opportunity to buy a kidney, and was assured that the donor was being properly compensated, you bet I’d take that option.

Video, 8 mins.

Presumption of falsehood

Julian Baggini on the Essays of David Hume — and that notorious footnote.

Hume saw how excessive factionalism causes division not only in politics, but in society as a whole. He would have despaired at how our communities have polarized today, as politicians express contempt for those they disagree with, even as they claim to speak for “the people.” “Public Spirit,” Hume concluded, “shou’d engage us to love the Public, and to bear an equal Affection to all our Country-Men; not to hate one Half of them, under Colour of loving the Whole.”

Party

Nigel Warburton for The New European on Wittgenstein and what makes a party a party.

A committee decides whether we can call a drink ‘champagne’, and a group of politicians now stipulates whether a gathering is a party, or, indeed whether a trip to Barnard Castle was an eye test. The decision by the authority is sufficient to decide the issue.

The experience of sadness

Michael S Roth for the LA Review of Books on a recent biography of Hannah Arendt.

When asked by Günter Gaus why she had read Kant at such a young age, she responded, “I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak.”

A kind of idolatry

Julian Baggini on Jesus as a moral philosopher.

Video, 10 mins.

Getting it right

Steven Pinker suggests three ways to be more rational in our New Year resolutions.

The struggle between a self who prefers a small reward now and a self who prefers a larger reward later, is woven into the human condition. It’s long been played out in art and myth. There’s the biblical story of Eve eating the apple despite God’s warning that she and Adam will be exiled from Paradise if she does — and then the grasshopper of Aesop’s fable, who sings his summer away while the ant is working to store food, and finds himself hungry in winter.

Shibboleth

Russell Blackford for The Philosophers’ Magazine on academic freedom.

Within the Left’s cancel culture, expedient but unproven ideas are held as Truth, not regarded as useful myths and metaphors, and certainly not as what, at best, they are — as conjectures or provisional explanations that are fair game for conceptual and empirical challenge.

Frictionless ice

Ten philosophers evaluate Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 100 years after its publication in 1921.

It fascinates and inspires in a way that few other philosophical works do. I think of it as being, among all the great twentieth-century philosophical works, the one that can most readily be classified as a great work of art.

Megatron

Alex Connock and Andrew Stephen asked an artificial intelligence to debate the motion that AI will never be ethical.

The Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could reasonably expect to digest in a lifetime. After such extensive research, it forms its own views.

For goodness’ sake

Jonny Thomson for Big Think on Santa’s naughty and nice lists.

The question is whether an action can ever really be “good” if it is only done for the sake of material reward — to get a huge stack of presents. Can a child do anything, especially in December, without having at least one eye on Santa’s list?

Eels

from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

The extraordinary and the marvellous

Alexander George for the Raven on Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophy with a magic trick.

To be in a muddle is not to have uttered a false sentence. It is not to have uttered a sentence incapable of being given a meaning. Nor is it simply to have uttered a sentence without a meaning. The locus of the muddle is not the sentence uttered but the speaker: to be in a muddle is for the speaker to have used a form of words that as yet has no clear use while convinced that it does.

Humans and other animals

Julian Baggini for New Humanist on our long failure to recognise other animals as sentient.

The lack of a soul doesn’t rule out animals having sensations such as pain. It simply creates a hierarchy in creation within which the wellbeing of one kind of creature — humans who possess a soul — matters more than that of any other. So in order to disregard animal welfare there is no need to believe that, despite all appearances, animals have no feelings and awareness. All you need do is believe that somehow this kind of awareness doesn’t matter.

What is scientism?

Adam Frank for Big Think on science and scientism.

Without doubt, science is unique, powerful, and wonderful. It should be celebrated, and it needs to be protected. Scientism, on the other hand, is just metaphysics, and there are lots and lots of metaphysical beliefs.

Much ado

Denis McManus and Sacha Golob for CBC Ideas on different ways of thinking about nothing.

“Nothing,” it turns out, is really quite something. As in the concept of nothingness. So much so, that in the 1920s, a debate about “nothing” between two philosophers led to a lasting schism in Western philosophy.

Audio, 54 mins.

Abominable heresies (redux)

When Yitzhak Melamed applied to visit Amsterdam’s Portuguese Synagogue for research, he was denied access and declared persona non grata — because of his interest in Baruch Spinoza.

Cultural leaders swiftly overturned the decision and apologised to Melamed.

For an account of Spinoza’s herem, see Why Spinoza was Excommunicated.

Why metaethics matters

Rachel Handley for Psyche on metaethics and why it matters.

Metaethics and ethics have different purposes. They ask separate questions and seek seemingly unrelated answers. Ethical theories tell us what we ought to do, whereas metaethical theories tell us what ethical terms mean.

Anti-authoritarianism

George Scialabba for Commonweal on Richard Rorty’s pragmatism.

From one point of view, the history of modern philosophy is the steady application of Occam’s Razor. Descartes’s clear and distinct ideas; Locke’s primary and secondary qualities; Kant’s categories; Hegel’s World Spirit; the logical empiricism of Russell and the logical positivists: all these have bitten the dust, or at least fallen into desuetude.

Great Britney

Nigel Warburton for The New European on John Stuart Mill, paternalism, Brexit and Britney Spears.

Having the doors open is what Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom (freedom from constraint). The power to be able to go through them he called positive freedom (freedom to), and that is important too. Being free involves both.

Learning to die

Oded Na’aman for the Boston Review on the value of philosophy in the face of disaster.

The ancients believed that philosophy could teach us how to live in the face of our inevitable ruin. But they were of two minds: some, with Epicurus, thought that we should look away from future suffering and misfortune while others, with the Stoics, thought that we should fix our gaze on the evils that await us.

One God further

Michael Shermer on the uneasy relationship between science and religion.

Video, 31 mins.

On the surface

Jochen Szangolies for 3 Quarks Daily on the mysterious inner nature of things.

There is no neutral vantage point, from which to observe the world—the very fact of us existing as observers in the world puts limits on what is observable. The putative scientific ideal of an ‘objective point of view’ is an oxymoron: if it is a point of view, it’s not objective, but subject to the limitations of observing the world from within.

Symbolic forms

Jonathan Rée for the London Review of Books on Ernst Cassirer.

He practised philosophy in a style that was going out of fashion, seeing himself not as a bold freethinker acting alone but as a member of an intellectual community entrusted with a glorious inheritance: the tradition in which the pristine wisdom of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle had been tested and elaborated from one generation to the next, through Aquinas, Ficino and Descartes, down to Kant, Hegel, Frege, Husserl, Russell and Heidegger.

Weird things

Stephen Law for Psyche on how to assess extraordinary claims.

When it comes to weird beliefs, it’s important we avoid being closed-minded naysayers with our fingers in our ears, but it’s also crucial that we avoid being credulous fools. We want, as far as possible, to be reasonable.

Damned with Aristotle

Peter Salmon for Prospect on the radical women of Oxford Philosophy.

For Anscombe (at one point “tracksuited and smoking a cigar”), the orthodoxies of motherhood were of little interest — legend has it that she would place a label on her children that read “If found wandering, please return to 27 St John Street” — while her domestic philosophy, as she told the Manchester Guardian in 1959, was that “dirt doesn’t matter.”

Update: the article is now only available to subscribers.

How do you know?

Nate Sheff for Aeon on how we justify our beliefs.

It makes sense to reflect on why our thinking sometimes goes awry, and why it sometimes goes right. Epistemology, the philosophical study of knowledge, belief and evidence, starts here, with our fallibility. And from this beginning, there are many paths for epistemology to take, and many sorts of questions to set us down these trails.

What philosophers believe

Philpapers have released the results of a 2020 survey of what philosophers believe about everything from a priori knowledge and abstract objects to possible worlds and time travel.

Epistemic freedom

Fabio Tollon for 3 Quarks Daily on the epistemic benefits of believing that we have free will.

From a first-person perspective, it really does (at least to me) feel as though we are in control of what we do, and that there is some central “willer” behind our actions. Moreover, whether or not we really “believe” in free will or not, it seems this feeling of freedom will not go away.

In praise of Cynicism

Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse on the ancient Cynics.

Cynicism is the view that the world around you is falling short of decency, let alone goodness... moreover, a good deal of our standard human relations is committed to obscuring that fact.

Video, 16 mins.

Worst-case scenario

from Existential Comics.

Rationality

Steven Pinker explains the importance of rationality and reasoning in an interview with Robert Wright.

Video, 59 mins.

See also Pinker’s conversation with Michael Shermer.

The four-dimensional self

Hi-Phi Nation with the first of four podcasts about David Lewis.

Audio, 45 mins.

The true Foucault

Michael C Behrent for Dissent on the contemporary relevance of Foucault.

Consider the topics that Foucault helped to pioneer as objects of philosophical reflection: mental illness, public health, gender and transgender identities, normalization and abnormality, surveillance, selfhood. Once confined to the margins of political thought, these issues have become major preoccupations with important stakes in everyday life, in the Western world and beyond.

How to cope with an existential crisis

Skye Cleary for Psyche on Kierkegaard.

Your personal growth depends on your ability to handle big choices yourself and not to shirk them. For Kierkegaard, bravely facing up to our choices and learning to channel our anxiety in constructive ways is vital: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’

Witchcraft calculations

Carlo Rovelli on the New Humanist podcast, With Reason, discusses the power and mystery of Quantum Physics.

Science grows by unlearning what we previously learned more than by learning new things. And this is beautiful. I know some people were attracted by science because it’s solid and gives certainty. I am attracted by science for the opposite reason, because it questions all our certainties. And quantum mechanics is a typical, it’s a prototypical example of that.

Audio, 41 mins.

Get real

Paul Doolan for Philosophy Now on various approaches to the ‘real’ world.

There’s nothing new about confronting the difficulty of distinguishing between the unreal and the real, between appearance and reality. Much of Plato’s later thinking, for instance, was an attempt to separate appearance and reality. For Plato, the opinions of the many refer to the world of mere appearance. Beyond appearance lies the real. But few gain access to the real. The many, wrapped in their opinions, live their lives as prisoners as if in a dark cave observing shadows cast on a wall. Few will turn their heads and find that they are being fooled. Even fewer will escape to stumble out of the cave and emerge into the light to encounter the real. Yet one only understands that one has been a prisoner in a cave when one is forced to experience the real.

The highest good

Steven Nadler for Literary Review on Spinoza’s religion.

Must one even believe in God, in whatever sense of the term, in order to be religious? Could not an atheist, someone who is not merely agnostic about the existence of a deity but who positively denies that there is any such thing, nonetheless sincerely and legitimately claim to be a religious person?

Erasmus vs Luther

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series on Erasmus, Luther and free will.

Audio, 24 mins.

The patron saint of doom

Tom Whyman for New Humanist on Schopenhauer.

Arthur Schopenhauer, the great grumpy old man of the history of thought; the philosophical patron saint of doom and gloom.

The possibility of an argument

Adam Gopnik for Town and Country on disputes about taste.

And yet, surely, there must be, on this murmuring sea of dispute and banishment, some constants — firm poles of quality or beauty or excellence that transcend even the squabbles of my preference against yours.

Symbolic politics

Louise Perry for New Statesman on Judith Butler and gender theory.

Even in the 21st-century Western world, it’s not always possible to maintain Butler’s idea of gender as thrillingly slippery, since the meaty inconveniences we call “bodies” have a way of announcing themselves whether we want them to or not.

Performative

William M McClay for The Hedgehog Review on the use and abuse of the word ‘performative’.

When the bride and groom say “I do” in their marriage ceremony, or when the officiant pronounces them man and wife, when promises are made and words of permission are granted, when a will orders the bequest of a precious object, and in fact in nearly all contracts—the language being used is performative in character. It is language that does not merely describe something. It enacts something.

The death of the real

Antonio Oraldi for The Collector on Baudrillard, simulation and hyperreality.

If in the history of Western philosophy the original has preceded the copy (ie Plato’s concept of mimesis), in Baudrillard’s universe the copy precedes the original.

Knowledge with a capital K

Tim Sommers for 3 Quarks Daily on the definition of knowledge.

It seems scary to me to replace the idea of being justified with just being really insistent. We have too much of that already. You don’t get to have your own “knowledge” policy. You are entitled to think that your firmly held beliefs are knowledge, but you are not entitled to us agreeing with you.

Oysters and clams

Peter Singer for the Harvard Political Review on the moral basis of vegetarianism.

Where we have similar interests, for example, the interest in not feeling physical pain — if we assume that there are similar amounts of physical pain being felt — then the status of animals should be one of equality.

Update: article no longer available.

Singer has recently been awarded the prestigious Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture and intends to donate the $1 million to effective causes.

Accidental haikus

Max Noichl extracts and illustrates accidental haikus from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Sally is simply
perceiving a pineapple
in the normal way.

The error of free will

Daniel Pacheco for Epoché explores the problem of free will with particular reference to Spinoza and Nietzsche.

So clearly for them the problem is better put in terms of power of acting rather than in terms of free will, which at best entered our vocabulary only incidentally and poisoned much of the stream of philosophical discussion.

Blasphemy

Emma Park for New Humanist on the use of controversial religious materials in schools.

If no one can criticise anyone else’s beliefs, the possibility of intellectual progress is brought neatly to an end.

You Would Say That

Clare Moriarty on the LSE Forum for Philosophy explores the surprisingly respectable history of the ad hominem argument.

We might imagine sitting at dinner with someone who berates us for our moral failings in not observing a vegetarian diet. The arrival of their plate, if it contains a piece of venison, should give us pause and impact our engagement with their argument, at least in the sense of listening to their arguments in good faith.

All that is the case

Ed Simon for The Millions on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Understood as a genius, interpreted as a rationalist, treated as an enigma, and appearing as a mystic, Wittgenstein was ultimately a poet.

Free will vs determinism

Meghan Griffith for iai.tv on the problem of free will.

It seems that now we have all sorts of possibilities. Maybe we are free and determined. Or maybe we are neither free nor determined. Maybe we are one and not the other.

Ergo, God

Jerry Coyne responds to the arguments of a Christian believer.

There are some posts I’m compelled to write even though I know that they’ll make me angry, take a lot of time, and won’t stimulate my brain in the least, for they involve religious arguments that have long been refuted. This is one of those posts.

Evil genius

Ross Wilson for the LA Review of Books on Descartes and poetry.

The quarrel of poetry and philosophy goes back a long way — at least to Plato’s exclusion of the poets from his ideally constituted polity — but Descartes has regularly been charged with sticking the knife into poetry on behalf of philosophy.

Nicholas of Cusa

The Linda Hall Library profiles the Renaissance philosopher Nicholas of Cusa.

The Earth, Cusanus believed, is as worthy as any other celestial body, and moves like every other body. And this was a full century before Copernicus proposed that the Earth is a planet.

For more on Nicholas of Cusa, listen to Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy episode.

The patron saint of facts

Rebecca Panovka for Harper’s on Hannah Arendt, totalitarianism, and truth and lies in politics.

For Arendt, real government conspiracies are what give rise to outlandish conspiracy theories — it is fraudulent image-making, perpetrated by authority, that degrades the ability of the public to judge the difference between fact and fiction.

Worst idea ever

Maarten Boudry for the Blog of the APA on relativism.

The real purpose of going relativist is always self-serving and opportunistic: to evade criticism and accountability. It’s not so much a sincere belief as a convenient trump card to play whenever it suits you.

Faith, no more

Peter Adamson for his History of Philosophy podcast series on Martin Luther.

If you change the language people speak, the books they read and the art they enjoy, throw their political arrangements into upheaval, challenge their institutions of learning, make them question their fundamental beliefs and even the meaning of their lives on earth, you are definitely going to influence the way they do philosophy. Martin Luther did all of these things.

Audio, 28 mins.

See also this insult generator drawn from Luther’s works.

The face of Spinoza

Marianna Najman-Franks, working at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, has discovered Spinoza’s death mask.

A box much lighter than the others, nearly falling to pieces with a red cloth hanging out on all sides, caught my attention. Opening it gently, I was met with a face.

The ghost of religion

Ronnie de Sousa for Aeon argues against morality, insisting that we have better reasons for our actions.

Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act — always, everywhere, and for all time. But that claim is bogus.

An awful privilege

Helen de Cruz on William Clifford’s evidentialism.

Clifford foresaw the destructive force of people believing what is most convenient to them, wishfully thinking, believing without any evidence, not cross-checking sources, and how this not only harms themselves but also their wider society.

Across the pluriverse

Greg Anderson for the OUP Blog on the many different worlds inhabited by humans.

It is impossible for any humans to know a world objectively, as something separate from or external to themselves, because they are always inextricably entangled in the relations that make up that world. They can only know reality from a particular location in time and space, wherever they happen to be entangled, whether it be ancient Egypt, the Amazonian rainforest, or modern Europe.

Everything is tainted

Amia Srinivasan talks to Prospect about sex, pornography and politics.

It has since become unfashionable to subject pornography, and the market of desire it serves, to ethical critique, largely because of the broader embrace of an ethic of “sex positivity”: we have learned to think “you do you” (or indeed anyone else) when it comes to people’s shocking sexual tastes or self-abasing kinks.

Update: the article is now only available to subscribers.

The need of truth is more sacred than any other need. Yet it is never mentioned. One feels afraid to read when once one has realised the quantity and the monstrousness of the material falsehoods shamelessly paraded, even in the books of the most reputable authors. Thereafter one reads as though one were drinking from a contaminated well. Simone Weil

A little bit spooky

Sam Baron for The Philosopher’s Zone on whether mathematical objects exist.

Audio, 28 mins.

Thinking to Some Purpose

Peter West for The Conversation on Susan Stebbing and clear thinking.

Paying attention to whether politicians are trying to appeal to our emotions can help us tell a convincing argument from a cheap, emotional dog whistle. We can then decide whether to allow ourselves to be persuaded by our feelings or to turn to more objective forms of evidence.

Three Millennia of Thought

A C Grayling talks to New Humanist about philosophy and humanism.

I think that really sober, mature thinking on this kind of basis would lead to a great deal of convergence, a great deal of agreement among people about how we should act, what we should do and what kind of world we want.

The benefits of non-existence

Charlie Huenemann for 3 Quarks Daily on what really, ultimately exists.

The manifest image, or what the world seems to us, is a layer cake of interpretation, supported at the bottom by energy and bare mathematical possibility.

The tyranny of experts

Thomas Kaminski for the Claremont Review of Books on good taste in the arts.

Quite a few people, I am sure, have praised a Picasso or a de Kooning without having derived much pleasure from viewing it. Knowing what one is supposed to say of such works, they dutifully follow the script. Such feigning is the arty version of hypocrisy for those who want to be seen as having sophisticated taste.

Some very trivial maxims

An unpublished preface to an edition of John Locke’s works portrays him as vain and dishonest.

Locke “almost always had the Leviathan by H on his table, and he recommended the reading of it to his friends”, even though he “later affected to deny, in the future, that he had ever read it”.

The death of analytic philosophy

Christoph Schuringa for The Philosopher’s Zone on the life and death of analytic philosophy.

Audio, 28 mins.

Almost completely vacuous

Richard Seymour for the New Statesman offers a sympathetic account of postmodernism.

It did not describe a single philosophical enterprise, political agenda or sociological outlook which could be identified and pilloried. At most, it described a zeitgeist, an intellectual sensibility arising from the decline of industry, the rise of knowledge economies, mass consumerism and the crisis of Marxism. A sensibility that was pluralist, sceptical, resistant to any form of essentialism or reductivism, and in most cases politically accommodating.

Thinking about AI

John Tasioulas for the Ada Lovelace Institute suggests ways in which the arts and humanities can help inform and direct the development of artificial intelligence.

This sensitive exploration of a plurality of values and their interactions is what the arts and humanities, at their best, do. I say at their best because, of course, they often fail in this task. My own discipline, philosophy, has itself in recent years often propagated the highly systematising and formal approach to ethics that I have condemned. I feel philosophers have a lot to learn from closer engagement with other humanities disciplines, like classics and history, and with the arts, especially fiction.

Passive obedience

Tom Jones for Aeon explores the immaterialism of George Berkeley, and the political implications of his theology.

Berkeley conceived of his immaterialism as part of his lifelong struggle against what he variously called atheism, scepticism or free-thinking — the challenge to religious authority over the social world.

A small residuum

Michael Shermer for Quillette proportions his belief to the evidence for UFOs.

That leaves us with ordinary explanations for these phenomena. No matter how skeptical you may be of them, they are vastly more likely than either of the extraordinary hypotheses. Why, then, do so many people want to believe that they represent something more?

Making progress

Chris Daly for Aeon on the difficulty of defining progress in Philosophy.

Despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade.

The patron saint of whoremongers

Catherine Wilson for The American Scholar on the philosophy of Epicurus.

Audio, 26 mins.