A selection of the most interesting articles, videos and podcasts.
The good folks at Philosophy Bites have been putting the question What is Philosophy? to a number of eminent philosophers over the years. This is an entertaining compendium of their answers.
Just as a sample, try Terence Irwin’s neat formulation:
... it’s the argument from things that seem perfectly obvious, to a conclusion that’s extremely surprising.
Audio, 26 mins.
Yuval Noah Harari on AI and human values.
For the first time in history, there is something on the planet that is able to remember every single word in every writing of every rabbi in the last two thousand years, and talk back to you and explain and defend its views.
Video, 26 mins.
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.
Professor Alice Roberts delivers the keynote lecture at the Humanists UK Convention and explores the uneasy relationship between ethics and religion in modern Britain.
Video, 44 mins.
Julian Baggini in the Guardian attempts to find common ground between atheists and believers. Since critics of religion have tended to focus upon implausible factual claims, Baggini has formulated four articles of faith that separate religious practice from superstition and supernatural beliefs.
For instance, I’ve had many an interesting discussion with a believer about how religious language is not the same as scientific language, only to discover that, when pushed, the faith of my otherwise modern, intelligent and sophisticated interlocutor rests on a belief in Christ’s empty tomb.
In a follow-up piece Baggini considers some of the feedback he has received. It appears that few believers are willing to completely discard their metaphysical claims, and the notion of religion as practice rather than belief seems inadequate to most. As Massimo Pigliucci comments:
I would not object to religions based on those four tenets, though I do wonder what the point of a religion would be if people actually agreed to them...
The results of the survey tend to corroborate the initial feedback:
... the vast majority of churchgoing Christians appear to believe orthodox doctrine at pretty much face value. They believe that Jesus is divine, not simply an exceptional human being; that his resurrection was a real, bodily one; that he performed miracles no human being ever could; that he needed to die on the cross so that our sins could be forgiven; and that Jesus is the only way to eternal life.
Robert Sapolsky addresses a Stanford University class on the ways in which humans differ from other animals — and the extent to which “we are just a basic, off-the-rack mammal”. A brilliant and funny talk covering a wide range of disciplines, including ethics. Look out for the powerful evocation of Kierkegaard towards the end:
... this strikes me as the most irrational, magnificent thing we are capable of as a species.
Video, 37 mins.
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.
Eight atheists and agnostics tell their stories to Aubrey Wade.
My father encouraged me to watch science documentaries with him. After one, he said, “Science is fact, but our faith is the truth.” That was probably the moment the penny dropped.
In an old interview for The Believer, Galen Strawson gives an entertaining and provocative account of freedom and why we should stop holding ourselves responsible (in a deep sense) for our actions.
Many of our emotional responses can stay in place when we confront the fact that there is no ultimate moral responsibility. We don’t stop retching involuntarily when we realize that there is nothing objectively disgusting about a smell of decay.
Supporting his position with a wide range of sources, from Einstein to Krishnamurti, Strawson cuts through a lot of philosophical nonsense and gets straight to the heart of the problem in plain and simple terms:
As a philosopher I think the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty. It’s just that I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?
For a more thorough and formal statement of the philosophy, check out Strawson’s article on Free Will in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
David Runciman explores Nietzsche’s critique of morality.
That, for Nietzsche, is what Christianity was and is: it’s the expression of the Will to Power of the powerless. And once you see that, you see through it; and once you see through it, in one sense at least, you’ve killed it, it’s dead.
Audio, 46 mins.
Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris discuss with Rabbis Wolpe and Artson the possibility of an afterlife. The speakers address a range of topics including the nature of God, the existence of the soul and the problem of evil. A long, engaging and entertaining debate.
Video, 98 mins.
Sam Harris comments further on the debate on his blog.
And that is what religion has done: It has just kept talking, down through the ages, in utter defiance of common sense.
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.
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.