Daily Philosophy

Who Controls Truth in a Post-Truth Era?

Sat, 16 May 2026 22:25:45 +0800

Public discourse in the post-truth era is shifting from “what happened?” to “who possesses the authority to narrate what happened?” Truth no longer flows solely from evidence; it moves through institutions, media infrastructures, and digital platforms as a sociological process. Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt renders this shift visible through a sexual misconduct allegation at Yale University.

The film begins when Maggie, a graduate student, accuses her professor Hank of sexual assault. Alma Imhoff, Maggie’s advisor and a philosophy professor, informs the administration — at which point a personal complaint transforms into institutional risk management. Testimonies are ambiguous, evidence is inconclusive, and Hank denies the accusation, claiming Maggie weaponized plagiarism allegations into assault charges. The university’s initial impulse is not verification but the protection of protocol and reputation. A private grievance becomes an administrative conflict.

The university’s initial impulse is not verification but the protection of protocol and reputation.

As the investigation unfolds, the controversy spills beyond campus. Hank is dismissed, Maggie goes public through the Yale Daily News, and simultaneously circulates a sensitive newspaper clipping about Alma’s past. From that moment onward, the central tension drifts away from factual guilt and toward narrative power.

At the core lies a struggle not over events, but over whose account is treated as authoritative. Administrative bodies, student journalism, social media dynamics, and academic circles intersect, and reality becomes negotiated across unequal power positions. Universities deploy institutional legitimacy, journalism produces visibility, and digital platforms orchestrate circulation and affective resonance.

Once circulation begins, the dispute ceases to be about the legal nature of the alleged act. The dynamic turns into a contest over how claims to truth are distributed. Media theorist Robert W. McChesney notes that modern communication systems do more than transmit information; they intertwine with political and economic power, reshaping control over public validity.

From that angle, After the Hunt asks a broader question about democratic life today: how is legitimacy produced, routed through infrastructures, and instrumentalized? Who holds truth — survivors, institutions, journalists, or algorithms? The issue expands beyond information control and toward the representational environments that shape public reality.

Walter Lippmann observed that modern publics never access reality directly but through “pseudo-environments” constructed by media institutions. The political question, then, is not merely what is true, but which institutions render certain statements publicly “real,” and by which mechanisms.

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The Most Delightful Book of Wisdom

Sun, 10 May 2026 20:15:27 +0800

James Romm (2026). Since You’re Mortal…: Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. W.W. Norton and Company. 176 pages.

Get it here: Amazon US, publisher’s website. Amazon UK doesn’t seem to have the book yet.

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I was delighted to open James Romm’s little collection of ancient wisdom and immediately be enchanted by the premise of the book, the idea behind it, the selection of sources and sayings, and also the handsome production values that make this book much more than just another scholarly source. And now I’m very happy to show it to you.

The author

James Romm is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He specialises in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilisation and is the author of multiple books. His Amazon profile offers Plato and the Tyrant, Ghost on the Throne (about Alexander the Great), Dying Every Day (about Seneca), How to Live, and How to Die. How to Live will set you back 18.90 USD. How to Die one can learn from the audiobook for only 10. Makes sense, since the process of dying seems to be much shorter and inevitably successful, even if one does it badly. Life is definitely worth investing more in to get it right.

Professor Romm is incredibly prolific — Amazon lists 29 titles, and I quickly decided that I needed every single one of them. Some people just have the talent to choose topics that are irresistible — Lionel Casson comes to mind, whose books I have in multiple copies, one for the holidays, one for home, one for work. Casson is the author of such irresistible reader magnets as Life in Ancient Rome, Life in Ancient Egypt, Travel in the Ancient World, The Ancient Mariners, Libraries in the Ancient World, and many others. It’s a mystery to me how anyone can look at these titles and not immediately reach for their credit card; and the same is true of most of Romm’s books. An anthology of sixteen Greek plays in new translations? The Greek Histories: The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece as Told by Its First Chroniclers: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch? Lives That Made Greek History? The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought? — I won’t tell you what my Amazon bill for tonight’s research into the works of Prof Romm is, but it’s not pretty.

The book

Since You’re Mortal… Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays is, like many of Romm’s books, not his original work. It is a selection of parts of a bigger work, the Anthology of Stobaeus. Johannes Stobaeus was a man who lived in Macedonia in the 5th century AD. We know nothing more of his life, except that he had a son, Septimius, for whom he made a collection of sayings and famous quotes from ancient Greek authors. This collection, a present to that son, presumably meant to accompany the young man through life, contained quotes from more than five hundred authors, dealing with physics, dialectic, …

Nussbaum Fighting With Vietnamese Uncles on Keeping Ornamental Birds

Sun, 03 May 2026 18:25:45 +0800

In Vietnam, many families and businesses keep a songbird. Housed in ornate bamboo cages, these birds are the centerpieces of a Vietnamese tradition known as chơi chim cảnh (‘playing’ ornamental birds). The birds are often meticulously cared for, fed premium diets of insects and fruit, bathed daily, and protected from the harsh realities of urban predators. If humans provide food, care, and most importantly, safety, does it justify the stripping of a creature’s fundamental autonomy?

Nussbaum proposes the Capabilities Approach. This theory focuses on what one is able to do and be? She argues that every creature has a set of species-specific functions that are essential for it to flourish, to live a life that is worthy of its dignity. While Nussbaum developed this list originally for humans, she extends it to animals, including capabilities such as: “life, health, bodily integrity, affiliation, and practical reason.” (Nussbaum 2006, 2) The tradition excels at providing life. The owners take immense pride in the glossy feathers and longevity of their birds. However, the cage systematically annihilates other crucial capabilities.

Most obviously, caged songbirds are not able to fly, either due to the cage or even due to bodily mutilation.

Most obviously, caged songbirds are not able to fly, either due to the cage or even due to bodily mutilation. Nussbaum agrees that “even a comfortable immobility would be wrong.” (p.3) Furthermore, birds are often kept in solitary confinement. While owners sometimes bring cages together for ‘singing contests,’ the birds are separated by bars, unable to touch or interact physically. They are forced into a dependency on a human owner who cannot speak their language.

Culturally, keeping birds is seen as a cultivation of the human soul. It teaches patience, gentleness, and an appreciation for “nature’s voice.” It is arguably a form of love. The owner who wakes up at 5 a.m. to prepare fresh food for his bird does not view himself as a jailer, but as a guardian. Nussbaum recognizes the complexity of culture and traditions. However, although the person may think that they are caring, or even protecting the bird, she said that “sympathy…can all too easily be corrupted by our interest in protecting the comforts of a way of life that includes the use of other animals as objects for our own gain and pleasure.” (p.1) The “love” exhibited in this context is possessive. It values the bird as an object, a living music box rather than as a subject with its own life. The beauty of the bird and its songs is appropriated for human enjoyment, creating a power imbalance that the Capabilities Approach identifies as unjust.

An anti-Nussbaum may ask: Is Life not the prerequisite for all other capabilities? If a bird is dead, it has no agency, no affiliation, no bodily integrity, no nothing. Therefore, does the “cage” …

A Philosophy Written in the Mountains

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:25:45 +0800

Not many seminal works of philosophy are the product of an unoccupied mind in the midst of a failed mining project, but that, it seems, was the story behind Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics. At the beginning of January 1686, he travelled to the Harz mountains to continue his (ultimately ill-fated) project to improve the productivity of the mines there via wind machines and water pumps of his own invention. When the work stalled for a few days, Leibniz did what he did best: he thought. At the beginning of February 1686, he remarked to a friend that as he had nothing to do for a few days, he had “written a short discourse on metaphysics”, a remark from which the text subsequently derived its name since Leibniz left it untitled. That “short discourse”—never published in his lifetime—would later become one of his most important philosophical works, as it captures the moment when Leibniz’s philosophical system came together.

He identified the main topics of the Discourse as grace, the concurrence of God, miracles, the cause of sin, the origin of evil, the soul’s immortality, and ideas. This is rather misleading, however, since these topics occupy less than a third of the text. A more accurate thematic structure of the Discourse’s 37 sections would be: God and his choice of the best (§§1–7), substance (§§8–16), physics (§§17–22), and the relationship between God and minds (§§23–37). What follows is a primer on the main topics and lines of argument in the text.

Leibniz’s Philosophical Papers by Lloyd Strickland: Vol.1: Universal Language, Characteristic, Logic, Encyclopaedia, and General Science. – Vol.2: Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Jurisprudence. – Vol.3: Religion and Theology. Click the titles for more information!

Starting with God

Leibniz does not begin with doubt, or with the external world, or even with the self, but with God, defined as “an absolutely perfect being” who possesses the supreme degree of power and wisdom. From this, Leibniz claims, it follows that God always acts in the most perfect way, as no other way of acting is consistent with the nature of God. Consider the alternative position defended by Malebranche, that God could have made a more perfect world but chose not to do so. Leibniz rejects this outright: to act with less perfection than one is capable of, he argues, is to act imperfectly, and that cannot be attributed to a perfect being.

From this, Leibniz claims, it follows that God always acts in the most perfect way…

Since God always acts in the most perfect way, Leibniz infers that the world we inhabit is not merely good, but rather the best possible world. At first glance, the idea can seem hard to accept, not least because the world contains suffering, injustice, and countless imperfections. Leibniz is well aware of this. But for him, the best …

How To Govern

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:25:45 +0800

On 31st March 2026, the University of Cambridge announced the establishment of a new constituent of the university, the Rokos School of Government. The ‘Rokos’ name was justified by an exceedingly large donation to found the school, a donation made by Chris Rokos, a hedge fund manager. The school is “to equip future leaders to navigate increasingly complex domestic and global political environments in a challenging and rapidly changing world”. It will have the advantage of direct connection with the university’s “recognised expertise in technology and the sciences, together with the social sciences, arts and humanities”.

On hearing of the announcement, many were highly pleased. That could be for a variety of reasons from increased prestige for the university, more employment opportunities and, dare I say, international conference trips — and it is possible that many actively endorse the project’s intended value, namely for future governments and governing. Indeed, in view of the current democratic governments of the United States and of Israel — with their disregard for international law and Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian civilian life — many would agree on the need for certain ethical standards to be encouraged as essential to good government.

An immediate retort to the idea of encouraging ethical standards is that the current president of the United States would have no interest in them. His policies, within and without the US, are deemed ‘transactional’, a euphemism for ‘without regard to morality’. That lack of regard for morality, international law and certain civilian lives, seems also to be a mark of the current Israeli leadership as it is for Putin’s Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

An immediate retort to the idea of encouraging ethical standards is that the current president of the United States would have no interest in them.

Putting to one side the above scepticism of leaders paying attention to any urges of morality from a school of government, some remain sceptical of the very idea of the Rokos School of Government (hereafter, abbreviated to ‘Rokos’). By ‘some’ I mean at least one of my philosophical acquaintances, but I am certain that that condemnation is far from unique.

Whatever could give rise to the scepticism, even condemnation, of a school of government? The answer offered is that such a school would be presupposing that governing is a matter of acquiring a skill, and becoming expert in its application to governing. Policy making and good political leadership could be seen at heart as a quantitative task, perhaps relying on scientific procedures to be followed, perhaps with the overall aim as that of increasing Gross Domestic Product. The presupposition of governing as a skill has been grounded (maybe misleadingly) in Plato’s Republic where he likened governing to the captaining …

The Illusion of Experience

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:35:51 +0800

Every so often, a student comes to tell me they’re planning to step away from studying for a while. They want to go out into the world, they say — to gain some real experience. There’s a particular weight to the way they say it, something almost moral in the tone, as if the library has been holding them back from something more honest and more serious. I never argue with them in the moment. But a question has followed me for years, one I’ve turned over more times than I can count: why do we assume that lived experience is so valuable? Where did that assumption come from, and does it actually hold up?

AI gave me a way to finally think it through.

Here’s a scene that has become oddly familiar. Every day, millions of people ask AI for advice on how to prepare for job interviews. This is worth thinking about carefully, because AI has never interviewed for anything. It has never sat in a waiting room trying to look calm. It has never gone blank when a hiring manager’s tone turned cold, never felt that particular sinking feeling when you realize the conversation isn’t going the way you hoped, never spent the drive home replaying everything you said and everything you should have said instead. None of that has ever happened to it. It has no interview history of any kind. And yet, consistently, people find its advice organized, practical, and persuasive — often more useful, if they’re honest, than advice from someone who has sat through dozens of interviews themselves.

That’s worth pausing on for a moment, because it cuts against something we tend to take for granted.

Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t seek career advice from someone with no career. If a friend confessed he had never held a job, never applied for one, never even updated a resume, most of us would stop listening fairly quickly. The absence of experience would feel like a disqualifying gap. And yet AI — with precisely that gap, with no personal stake in any of it, with nothing that could be called a professional history — manages to be genuinely helpful to people navigating some of the most consequential moments of their working lives. There is a real contradiction here, and it deserves a real explanation.

Under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t seek career advice from someone with no career.

The explanation, when you look at it directly, is not mysterious: AI has read an enormous amount about interviews. Not experienced them — read about them. Its usefulness doesn’t come from having been in the room. It comes from having developed a systematic, comprehensive understanding of how these situations work, what matters in them, and why. That understanding has a name. The name is knowledge. And it turns out that knowledge is doing all the persuasive work, while experience is contributing rather less than we assumed.

The obvious objection arrives quickly: AI only has that knowledge because real people with real experience wrote it all down. Everything it learned came from someone …

Would Socrates Have Valued AI?

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:35:51 +0800

Plato presents Socrates' skepticism toward the written word, and the limits of what can be derived through the process of reading, in the Phaedrus. In this dialogue, Socrates supports his arguments against the written word by relating the myth of Theuth and Thamus, criticizing writing as inert or static. It cannot answer questions, defend itself or adapt to and change the soul of the reader for the better.

Theuth is an Egyptian god (Thoth), credited with inventing many arts: number, calculation, geometry, astronomy and, crucially, writing. He represents technological ingenuity, cleverness and the impulse to improve human life through extrinsic tools. Thamus is an Egyptian king (Ammon), who acts as a judge of these inventions.

When Theuth presents writing, he praises it as a remedy for the limits of memory, claiming it will make people smarter and help them remember knowledge better. Thamus disagrees and argues that writing will actually produce forgetfulness because people will rely on external records instead of meaningful internal recollection. People will merely repeat things they have never fully questioned or understood. Written words, furthermore, cannot defend themselves, respond when questioned or change to meet objections.

People will merely repeat things they have never fully questioned or understood.

Writing, Socrates argues, is like a painting: it looks as if it is alive, but if you ask it a question, it remains silent. True knowledge, for Socrates, comes from living dialogue, where claims can be tested through questioning.

What Socrates values is dialectic: live, responsive, interrogative engagement aimed at the cultivation of understanding rather than the transmission of information. Interestingly, Plato’s dialogues seem to be a compromise in which a dialectical process is at least demonstrated in lieu of the reader being engaged dialectically.

Like the traditional writing process, AI produces text, but based on algorithms and statistics; it is an expert at always choosing the correct next word or phrase. Thus, it lacks lived experience and does not possess wisdom in the Socratic sense. Yet if we take Socrates' critique of writing seriously and understand it not as a technophobic rejection of tools but as a principled defense of dialogical inquiry, then AI begins to look like an unexpected Socratic ally.

Like the traditional writing process, AI produces text, but based on algorithms and statistics.

To see why, let’s further clarify what Socrates objected to and what he valued. Socrates did not oppose writing because it was new, artificial or non-human. His objection was functional, not metaphysical. Writing fixes discourse into a finished form. It cannot adjust to the reader’s level of understanding. It cannot notice confusion, respond to objections or revise its claims under pressure.

Most importantly, it cannot ask questions or be questioned. For Socrates, knowledge does not arise from …

Contemporary Metaphysics

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:25:27 +0800

Carrara, M., De Florio, C., Lando, G., & Morato, V. (2026). Contemporary Metaphysics. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. 289 pages, 92.05 Euro, 99.99 USD (hardcover); 79.20 USD (Kindle).

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An interesting idea and a great table of contents, but the execution is unclear about who the ideal reader is — and will really satisfy nobody.

The Book

There are fundamentally two kinds of reviews. Show me any book on the philosophy of AI, or love, or happiness, and I’ll tell you where the author went wrong, where he cut corners, and where his explanations shine. That’s me as an expert, reading a book and giving my informed opinion. This kind of review can be useful but one thing it cannot do: it can never approach a book in quite the same way as the book’s intended audience. The reviewer’s perspective is irrevocably tainted by their knowledge of the topic. But then, there is also the other kind of review — one where the reviewer is part of the audience for the book. Where they are not an expert, but a learner, not looking to find flaws in the book, but to learn from it. And this is how I will approach this review today.

This review will not be an expert’s opinion, but a student’s experience trying to finally learn metaphysics.

I know next to nothing about metaphysics. Sure, I’ve studied a few courses many decades ago, when telephones stopped working when you tried to pull them out of the wall, and when we listened to music on cassettes that would melt in the sun and require delicate surgery to restore the flimsy tape into a new shell. But I’ve long ago forgotten all of that. By my own constitution, I have an intense dislike of metaphysics as a topic. I’ve always been joking that I’m one of those people who philosophise with a hammer rather than with a scalpel. I’m drawn to bold statements, broad, sweeping debates and daring claims. Metaphysics always seemed to me to be just the opposite: a discipline where for a hundred years or so people have been making smaller and smaller distinctions, taking apart concepts and terms with the infinite patience of a clock-maker, and then trying to put everything back together again. The winner is the one who manages to put the thing back together so that it actually works — but I never saw anyone succeed at this game — which just prompts another faction to engage with even more intricate analyses of what it even means for a clock to work. I never had the patience or, to be honest, the intelligence for any of that. This is why I’m so excited to discuss today’s book: an introduction to metaphysics. This review will not be an expert’s opinion, but a student’s experience trying to finally learn metaphysics. Will I succeed? Let’s see…

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s …

Meaning Without Experience

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 07:25:27 +0800

Artificial intelligence is reshaping contemporary life, not because machines are developing minds, but because humans have created tools strong enough to reorganize social reality. AI’s influence comes from its capacity to perform certain tasks with extraordinary efficiency, speed, and scale — often surpassing human performance in narrowly specified domains. Yet this performance rests on a crucial absence: artificial intelligence operates without understanding, experience, or purpose of its own. It exhibits competence without comprehension.

This is not philosophical hair-splitting. It is the key to why AI is simultaneously useful and dangerous. When systems that do not understand the world generate outputs that resemble intelligent judgment, they invite misplaced trust. And when misplaced trust becomes embedded in institutions — courts, hospitals, schools, labor markets, and cultural platforms — it can turn into a new form of unaccountable authority. The challenge posed by AI is therefore not the emergence of autonomous machine minds but the quiet redistribution of human agency through technical systems whose power exceeds our current frameworks of responsibility.

Ethical AI will not be achieved by speculating about machine consciousness or by dreaming of artificial moral agents who will somehow shoulder responsibility on our behalf. It will be achieved through stewardship: deliberate design, institutional accountability, and the preservation of human judgment wherever meaning, dignity, and value are at stake. The decisive question is not what machines will become, but what we are becoming as we increasingly rely on systems that simulate understanding without possessing it.

Artificial Intelligence as Amplified Human Intention

Artificial intelligence has no purposes of its own. It does not seek goals, form intentions, or care about outcomes. Every AI system inherits purpose from human choices: from developers who choose training data and optimization targets, from organizations that deploy models inside particular incentive structures, and from users who integrate outputs into everyday decision-making. Yet because these systems operate at immense speed and scale, they amplify human intentions in ways that can escape individual awareness or control.

Artificial intelligence has no purposes of its own. It does not seek goals, form intentions, or care about outcomes.

This amplification is what makes AI socially transformative. A single model can screen millions of job applications, rank the visibility of information for entire populations, flag “risk” in policing or welfare contexts, or influence financial decisions in real time. In doing so, it does not eliminate human agency; it redistributes it. Decisions once made slowly and locally are compressed into technical procedures that are difficult to interrogate and even harder to contest.

Public discourse often frames this transformation in dramatic terms. …

Are Hippopotamus Ethics Enough?

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:35:51 +0800

When we see another being suffer, something happens in us. It is not abstract, not cognitive nor philosophical, it is a visceral feeling which occurs. We feel a discomfort that is not their pain but is definitely related to it. This phenomenon, feeling pain for pain, may be the deepest emotional root of ethics. Before rules, before reason, before social contracts or priests and gods, there has been this simple capacity: the inability to remain emotionally unmoved by another’s suffering once it is perceived and understood.

Perhaps we can even see this mechanism at work in nature. I love watching those videos where hippos intervene when crocodiles attack other animals, often animals the hippo has no reason to care about. A baby gazelle is caught, starts bleating helplessly and shaaaazzaaaaam, a massive hippo charges in, jaws wide open, which sends the crocodile running for cover. This looks as if the hippo “sees” suffering, is affected by it, switches into ethical mode and saves the innocent gazelle.

I like thinking that we share a moral sentiment with hippos.

Of course, the hippo is not a moral philosopher. It is not reasoning about justice or the sanctity of life. It does not think “Every animal life is of equal value, I have a duty to save the gazelle baby!” To be responsible, let me point out that we cannot see into a hippo’s heart, so ethologists have other possible explanations for the hippo behavior, e.g. territorial aggression, misfiring parental instincts, sensitivity to distress signals.

We cannot know for sure, but, personally, I like thinking that we share a moral sentiment with hippos and “hippo ethics” becomes a useable metaphor for a basic emotional response from which a more elaborate ethical system might be derived. The hippo’s response is not ethics as reflection, it is ethics as a type of reflex. An embodied sensitivity to suffering that evolved long before moral language ever existed. This is the raw material of ethics. In humans, it becomes something far more expansive and fragile at the same time.

Pain for Pain as the Basis of Ethics

Plato, through the character Glaucon, famously asks us to imagine the Ring of Gyges: a ring that confers invisibility. If someone could get this ring, they could do anything they wanted to and act unjustly without negative consequence, without punishment or reputational loss. So why wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t justice collapse the moment accountability disappeared?

My answer to Glaucon would not be Kantian and not theological. It is closer to John Locke and, more broadly, to moral sentimentalism. Even if I could not be seen, even if I could not be punished, something would still be there to restrain me: the pain I would feel at causing pain.

Wouldn’t justice collapse the moment accountability disappeared?

When we see someone suffer, we also suffer, not in the same way, not to the same degree, but enough for …

2+2=4

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 13:31:20 +0800

Dieser Artikel auf Deutsch

Why does 2+2=4…? The answer may not be as simple as one thinks. One should add that 2+2=4 is usually thought of as true, indeed the very paradigm of a truth, a certain necessary truth.¹ By ‘certain’ is meant that one can be sure that it is true. By ‘necessary’ is meant that the truth could not be otherwise. The matter of certainty is an epistemological one: how we know that 2+2=4. The matter of truth and of necessary truth is a metaphysical one: what makes it the case that 2+2=4. Both these aspects will form part of the discussion below, but the chief concern will be the metaphysical question of why 2+2=4. However, in the final section both matters are brought together, certainty and necessary truth.

Here are some answers. One cannot pretend to cover all the complications by any means.

1. Obvious

It is obvious. Anyone can just see that it must be so.

The problem with this is that obviousness is just a psychological state and may say nothing about the truth of something or whether something is the case. Lots of things that appeared obvious once have turned out to be false and not the case. Look out of the window, and what do you see? A flat if bumpy earth. It certainly does not look round. Obviously flat. Clearly also it is the case that it is a fundamental truth and law of nature that in order for things to keep moving they have to have a force applied to them. It turns out of course that just the reverse is the truth: things are stationary or keep moving in a straight line unless a force is applied to them. Surely it is obvious that the sun rises, moves through the sky and sets? No, it is us on the earth that are doing the moving and giving that same appearance. Surely it is obvious that heavy objects as a general law will fall faster than lighter ones. But it was shown that when one drops a feather and a hammer on the moon they fall at the same rate regardless of their mass.² And so on, people can very easily think of things that are obvious that are in fact false. Moreover, we want more than obviousness, we may want to say that 2+2=4 is a necessary truth, and there are countless putative necessary truths that are not obvious. (6143 ÷ 321.97) x 8.43=160.83948 is a necessary truth just as 2+2=4 is, but it is far from obvious, perhaps not obvious at all for anyone, excepting someone with an extraordinary calculating mind.

People can very easily think of things that are obvious that are in fact false.

But there is worse to come for the response of 2+2=4 because it is obvious. Being obvious is a weak response to why something is certain, as has just been shown. But to say something is obvious does not begin to address at all the matter of why 2+2=4 is true, let alone its being a necessary truth.

2. Facts

Facts in the world. 2+2=4 is true because that’s what happens in the world.

You take two objects and two objects and you then have four objects. Count them. 1, 2, and 1, 2, …

Darwin’s Four Postulates in Light of “Don’t Die”

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:12:39 +0800

For most of history, more people meant more power. I came across this X post that I initially found alarming for Western civilization:

Source: Arnaud Bertrand on X

But what I realized is that the argument is subtly incorrect, because it fails to recognize the important shifts happening.

It’s easy to see why a negative birth rate society is concerning to most. In “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin presents his famous four postulates argument. He frames these as sufficient conditions for natural selection to occur:

Variation among individuals
Heritability of that variation
Overproduction leading to competition
Differential reproductive success

Biologists today often treat these not only as sufficient, but also as necessary. So to a biologist, these conditions make clear why a society with a persistently negative birth rate is unsustainable. Without reproduction, traits cannot be propagated, and the lineage eventually disappears.

But the picture is shifting. Fertility rates are falling globally, yet lifespans are lengthening. Ray Kurzweil makes the popular argument that advances in medicine and technology suggest a possible future in which human life expectancy could increase faster than we age. Bryan Johnson speaks of a future where our top priority is simply “don’t die.”

This raises a question: does Darwin’s argument no longer hold up in a Kurzweilian world where we might not die of old age at all?

From Generations to Timesteps

Darwin’s framing relied on “generations” as the natural unit of evolutionary change. Evolution, he argues, is the process of the gene pool shifting from generation to generation. This was a reflection of his early understanding of biology, but our modern view on evolution has adapted over the last 100 years.

This raises a question: does Darwin’s argument no longer hold up in a Kurzweilian world where we might not die of old age at all?

Generations are noisy to measure (organisms reproduce at different ages) and the distinction between parents and children is less fundamental than it appears. A “child” is simply a continuation of the biochemical process that ran in its parent, part of a continuous stream of life extending back to the origin of life itself.

The more precise discretization of evolution is therefore “timesteps” (t, t+1, t+2, …). Recast in these terms, Darwin’s “four” postulates become:

Variation exists at a given timestep
Traits or states persist across timesteps (retention)
(not necessary)
Certain traits are differentially favored in persistence or propagation

This version no longer requires reproduction per se, only continuity of adaptive traits across timesteps. And it no longer requires Darwin’s third postulate on competition. Instead, the fourth postulate implies some filtering or differential persistence mechanism exists. …

Machiavelli on Cruelty and Compassion

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:21:39 +0800

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was interested in self-reliance, self-preservation and self-promotion. These things motivated his writing of The Prince and these were its themes. His aim was to impart to the ruling Prince, Lorenzo dé Medici (1492–1519) what he had learned of these components of statecraft and, in doing so, so impress him that he would return to political favour and to his previous role as a trusted Florentine diplomat. (He had previously fallen from favour when his name had been discovered on a list of those who might be sympathetic to a plot against the Medicis.)

For Machiavelli was not interested in self-preservation alone; he was interested in returning to the political stage. Only there, where there was opportunity to impress, did he feel fully appreciated and fully alive. He assumed the same was true of the Prince but whereas Machiavelli had to impress the Prince in order to return to power, he was well aware that the Prince had to impress his subjects in order to maintain power.

Machiavelli was not interested in self-preservation alone; he was interested in returning to the political stage.

Most political treatises failed to take this into account. They made the mistake of looking at the state as a purely abstract construct. As a consequence their practical use was very limited and some were so removed from reality that from a practical viewpoint they were detrimental.

Machiavelli was determined to avoid this mistake and to write about politics as actually practised and so to write a book with advice that would actually be helpful. In his words:

Many have dreamed up republics and principalities which have never in truth been known to exist; the gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who neglects what is actually done for what should be done moves towards self-destruction rather than self-preservation. The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous. Therefore if a prince wants to maintain his rule he must be prepared not to be virtuous, and to make use of this or not according to need. (Machiavelli 2003: 50)¹

For Machiavelli, political survival is an ambition that exists for its own sake. There is no more lofty ambition. For there is nothing inspiring about humanity

One can make this generalization about men: they are ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers, they shun danger and are greedy for profit; while you treat them well, they are yours. They would shed their blood for you, risk their property, their lives, their sons, so long … as the danger is remote; but when you are in danger they turn away. (Machiavelli 2003: 54)

Finding humanity uninspiring, if not repugnant, the entire sum of Machiavelli’s recommendations is therefore entirely and unashamedly egotistical. It is a philosophy that has no time for compassion, only, occasionally, for its appearance. Machiavelli …

Interview with Paul B. Preciado

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:24:16 +0800

The interview took place in Rome at the Cinema Festival. I had met Paul B. Preciado near the Auditorium, and by all accounts, I should have addressed him as a director. This is where my first mistake lies. Paul was there to present, with his Italian publisher Fandango, his first film—a hybrid of autobiography and a celebration of the first truly queer thinker in Western history, Virginia Woolf. The film is titled Orlando: My Political Biography, and it contains much of Preciado the philosopher and writer. Preciado, who was once named Beatriz, often shares the fate of philosophers who begin to experiment with other genres: limited acceptance in philosophy departments, yet an aura in critical studies, fashion, design, contemporary art, and cinema comparable only to that of Pier Paolo Pasolini (who, similarly, was reviled by the literary intellectuals of his time). He has revolutionized gender studies, eloquently documented his own transition (from woman to man), explored the philosophy of pornography, and reinterpreted philosophy through the lens of non-patriarchal, cognitive pleasure. A few years ago, Gucci, under Alessandro Michele, inadvertently turned him into a star: he was the protagonist of a landmark video that cemented him as “Preciado,” one of the most influential intellectuals of our time. But why a film? And why is queerness fundamentally linked to a research methodology and only subsequently to the recognition of a “liquid” metaphysics for constructing the identity of things, persons, and events?

Leonardo Caffo: Paul, this is your first film. This is the fourth or fifth interview I’ve conducted with you, but a directorial debut was not anticipated. Or at least you never mentioned it. What can you express with a film that a book cannot convey? Is this choice to mix genres, to create video, also a queer act?

Paul B. Preciado: Well, I would say that I am primarily interested in the idea itself. The idea in itself. Then, in a second phase, I tend to find the best medium without any preconceptions. For me, it is always a way of doing philosophy, and perhaps we should ask ourselves what “doing philosophy” means today… things have changed. I no longer believe that an article or a book is inherently more philosophical; contemporary life demands that we know how to use different media and understand which medium is the best possible instrument for the theories we wish to defend. I was given the opportunity to make a film, and I was given the freedom to do it: I consider that fortunate. I chose to stop teaching at a university and resigned from my professorship in France. I do not believe the academic structure is any longer minimally entitled to distribute the necessary impetus for knowledge to truly act in the world… we must experiment in every field.

Leonardo Caffo: Are there connections to your previous work as an actor for Alessandro Michele and Gucci?

Paul B. Preciado: No, I …

The Land of Perfect Justice

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 18:25:45 +0800

Solon stood before the people of Athens, their murmurs rising and falling like the waves crashing against the harbor behind him. When he spoke, his voice carried conviction enough to command them all.

“Fellow Athenians! I am tasked to give just laws to this polity, but I do not know the meaning of that word. Send forth the wisest among you, that I may task him to go out in search of it.”

His speech lingered; the ebb and flow of the Aegean Sea filling the space again. Murmurs resumed, first quiet, rising like boiling water until spilling over again to silence. A man stepped forward, his dark beard matching the color of his piercing eyes. A faint film of dirt played over his chiton. With reserved steps and head bowed, he peered up at Solon.

“What is your name?” Solon asked.

“Antipatros,” said the man, voice soft.

“Why were you chosen?” Solon asked, louder.

“I am fair,” he answered.

“Is fairness justice?” Solon asked.

“I will find out,” he said, matching Solon’s conviction.

Solon laughed and shook his head, motioning Antipatros toward a cart set behind two large oxen. The midday sun cast its silhouette in sharp relief against the ground.

“I leave you with gold, this cart, and five armed men for protection. Go to each polity, observe their justice, and return with the strongest laws.”

Antipatros shook his head, and five men stepped from the crowd, xiphos sheathed at the hip, taking position along one side of the cart.

“I will do my best,” Antipatros said.

Setting out that afternoon, his first foray from Athens, Antipatros was spellbound by the beauty of nature. Certainly, this was in balance, and any justice he found would mirror that great harmony. But as months passed on his quest, he found only confusion and discord among the states.

In Corinth, men spoke of balance, but beggars filled the streets, their ashen skin burnt dry from the midday sun. In Thebes, the wise preached temperance, but drunken men shouted from taverns, crass words echoing through the stone walkway. And all throughout the land, not one claimed perfect justice. Antipatros was met with pragmatic reasons. Order. Rule. Ease.

Still, in hushed corners of their agoras, philosophers whispered of a land committed to justice. Deep inland, so they said, lay a place where each coin of the purse, every wise man, and the whole of human energy was driven toward its pursuit. All who spoke had only glimpsed its pristine walls, guarded by soldiers in gleaming brass. Entry was barred to all, so delicate was the balance in that righteous state.

“How will I know when I find it?” Antipatros asked a preacher in Thessaly.

The man tapped his chin under his heavy beard and pursed his lips.

“You will need to shield your eyes from the glare of the wall’s polished white stones. No other can compare.”

“What is its name?”

“We have never been …

Respect and Love

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:31:20 +0800

Dieser Artikel auf Deutsch

1.

It is often taken for granted that love where it exists may be a primary feature of the relationship between people. No other properties or conditions need be present applied across the relationship for it to be said truly that the relationship is one of love. This essay will deny this claim. It will be argued that respect is a necessary condition for love. Respect first, then love. The essay concerns the relationship between adults only.

This is an essay in philosophical conceptual psychology. That is to say, it concerns what may follow logically from the meaning of certain concepts. It is not an empirical consideration of love that would involve the pursuit of factual evidence in the world.

By love here is meant the attitude whereby thoughts and actions lead one to value and care for someone to a high degree beyond that that might ordinarily apply to the way you consider and treat another human being. The concern is not with sexual romantic love – though there may be consideration to be drawn from what is said here for that too – but rather a mature love devoid of such considerations.

2.

At the outset we are not talking about unconditional love. By definition unconditional love requires no conditions. One loves someone no matter what, and that is an end to it. This is often thought of as an ideal of love, something rare and precious. However, unconditional love is best thought of not as an apogee of love on a sliding scale of degrees of love, but as a different kind of relationship from conditional love. Unconditional love is the kind of love that most obviously may exist between parent and child. Such love may manifest itself in various ways according to the character of the person doing the loving. The love is present regardless of both the good and the bad qualities of the loved person, which does not mean one need be unaware of those qualities. It is if one likes, unshakable. This we may note may explain why when our parents die and we become orphans, we feel such a great loss and a degree of insecurity, a sense of the firm earth pulled from beneath us. Unconditional love does not, or should not, require one to be a slave to the other person, doing their bidding, what they want, absolutely, but rather never abandoning wishing the best for them regardless of what they say and do. One does not abandon their needs, which may not be what they want. Such love may be manifest in all sorts of ways, and may involve a wide range of association with a person, but it is always there.

Unconditional love is best thought of not as an apogee of love on a sliding scale of degrees of love, but as a different kind of relationship from conditional love.

3.

No, what we are concerned with here is conditional love.

Some claim that in one sense it is the only true love precisely because its value derives from its being given freely and out of choice. But there is a paradox here. When someone says one loves …

An Ontological Disproof of the Devil?

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:35:51 +0800

If you’ve studied philosophy for a while, you’ve probably come across the ontological argument for the existence of God. This argument attempts to show that God’s existence necessarily follows from God’s essence. In other words, given God’s nature, it is impossible for Him not to exist. But did you know that the same reasoning can be used to prove the *non-*existence of the Devil? At least, if we make certain assumptions about the Devil—the primary one being that the Devil is absolutely the worst possible thing imaginable. Let’s take a look why some philosophers think that proving the existence of God might also disprove the existence of the Devil.

The Ontological Argument for God

Saint Anselm of Canterbury was responsible for the ontological argument, in its earliest form. In his work the Proslogion, which he first began to circulate in 1077-8, Anselm proposed that God’s existence follows from two fundamental truths:

(1) God is that which nothing greater can be conceived.

And,

(2) To exist is greater than not to exist.

There is of course a lot that can be said about how these assumptions are supposed to work together to prove God’s existence—indeed, discussion of the matter has occupied philosophers and theologians for almost a millennium. But the basic idea is that, if God didn’t exist, then we would be able to conceive (or we might say to imagine) a being that is greater than God. Namely, a being that has all of God’s magnificent attributes—unlimited power, knowledge, virtue, and etc.—but that also exists in reality, not just the mind alone. However, since such a being would be greater than God (given 2), he must in fact be God, since God is, after all, the greatest conceivable thing (given 1). To quote Anselm:

‘If then that-than-which-a-greater-cannot be-thought exists in the mind alone, this same that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought is that-than-which-a-greater-can-be-thought. But this is obviously impossible. Therefore there is absolutely no doubt that something-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought exists both in the mind and in reality.’ (Proslogion, Ch. 2)

I know, it sounds like a lot of philosophical trickery—and it might well be. Yet while the reasoning might seem dubious, it is far from obvious why it is dubious. As Bertrand Russell once wrote in his History of Western Thought, ‘…it is easier to feel convinced that [the ontological argument] must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.’

In any case, we’re not here to get caught up in the merits of the ontological argument per se. Let’s just suppose for a moment that it’s true (which, despite what some people might say, isn’t entirely unreasonable). What we want to know is what else follows from this reasoning. Can we also disprove the Devil?

Parodies of the Ontological Argument

The idea that we can …

Exploring Israel’s assault on truth, reason and respect

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:25:45 +0800

Let us start with David Hume. Context, caveats and nuances come later. Here is Hume, writing with regard to alleged miracles:

When any one tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. (Abridged extract, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 10.13)

We no doubt hold many beliefs that we mistakenly assume to be rational. The mistakes may arise because of wishful thinking, closing eyes to evidence or misinterpreting the evidence even with eyes open. A rational regard for evidence is not always plain sailing; we sometimes encounter conflicting evidence. Here, with regard to Israel, we confront a conflict between on the one hand what Israel says and, on the other hand, what is so.

In the ‘dead man restored to life’ presented in the Bible as a miracle, Hume continues

I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.

In that miracle example, Hume is drawing on how we often have evidence of people’s reports — of people’s testimony — being wrong, be it by misperceptions, errors in transmissions or deliberate attempts to deceive, yet (apart from the ‘dead man restored’ Biblical reports, two thousand years old) we have no evidence of a dead man being restored to life. Rationally we should reject the ‘greater miracle’, namely that the dead man was restored to life. It is a much lesser miracle, if miracle at all, that there may have been the misperceptions, mis-transmissions, wishful thinking or deceit giving rise to the ‘dead man restored’ subsequent beliefs. Such factors are far more likely to be in play than a dead man being restored to life which in humankind’s overall experience is highly highly unlikely.

Rationally we should reject the ‘greater miracle’, namely that the dead man was restored to life.

Let us now apply Hume’s observations not to a proclaimed miracle, but to a repeated claim made by Israel, one that is wildly astonishing and yet ‘to achieve balance’ was widely reported in the media as on a par — or even more reliable — than denials of that claim. The claim is that Israel did not block or severely restrict vital supplies of food, fresh water and medical equipment to Gaza during 2024/2025, that there was no malnutrition, no famine and the lack of any such supplies did not result from an Israeli blockade. The Israeli claim was sometimes nuanced by adding that if it turned out there to have been malnutrition and so forth, it must have been caused by Hamas and the fault of the international relief agencies. For ease, let us call Israel’s basic claim and any nuance as the …

Carlo Michelstaedter (1887-1910)

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 10:35:51 +0800

Trapped in the flow of time

Michelstaedter has been one of the few geniuses in human history who attempted to come to the very core of human suffering; to detect its true aetiology, and cure it once and for all. Born in Gorizia – currently at the Italian-Slovenian border – in the well-to-do Jewish family of Alberto Michelstaedter, the director of an insurance company and bibliomaniac, and Emma Luzzato, member of another prominent Jewish family, Carlo has been a victim of the fin de siècle nausea which afflicted in an even more pronounced manner the then collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire (Bini 1992, 28-29). To the fundamental question of why humans are suffering, Michelstaedter gave an answer very similar to the one bequeathed by the best philosophical – and religious – traditions of the East, the West, and his native Italy specifically:

“But man wants from other things in a future time what he lacks in himself: the possession of his own self,¹ and as he wants and is busied so with the future he escapes himself in every present. Thus does he move differently from the things different from him, as he is different from his own self, continuing in time. What he wants is given within him, and wanting life he distances himself from himself: he does not know what he wants. … for he does not have himself as long as an irreducible, obscure hunger for life lives within him” (Michelstaedter 2004, 11).

Being human actually means being subject to that irreducible, obscure hunger for life. A human is the animal that never stops desiring. The very moment it would stop, its life would have automatically come to an end. Here lies the fundamental contradiction of human life, according to Michelstaedter. Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price, but which, strangely enough, can never be fully satisfied: “Because at no point is the will satisfied, each thing destroys itself in coming into being and in passing away: πάντα ῥεῖ, ‘everything flows,’ so that it transforms itself without respite in varied desiring” (Michelstaedter 2004, 15).

Life is de facto a motion in time, a perpetual sense of discontent which must be satisfied at any price…

Human beings are condemned to strive for possessing themselves without ever being able to achieve it; were they ever to achieve it even for a single moment, their life would have to stop immediately. Schopenhauer had already shown that all life amounts to is will, and that this will is by definition insatiable: “For Schopenhauer, as for Leopardi, will is what constitutes the essence of human life. Will presents itself as a constant tension, as a search for what man lacks” (Bini 1992, 8). But insofar as human life’s conditio sine qua non is that constant lack of everything, it is also necessarily deduced that the tragedy of human beings is their entrapment in the …

The Ethics of Letting Die

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 18:35:51 +0800

Editor’s Note: This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, help is available. In the U.S. and Canada, call or text 988. In the U.K., call 116 123.

Crisis Text Line: Text “HOME” to 741741 from anywhere in the US, Canada, UK, or Ireland to connect with a trained Crisis Counselor, or follow this link for more resources: International Association for Suicide Prevention.

We believe in fostering open and responsible discussion on difficult topics, while also prioritizing the well-being of our community. Please be mindful of your own needs as you engage with this material.

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Saving someone from attempting suicide is glorified and is considered a heroic act. In this paper, I will argue that it is not always the right course of action. Suicide comes from subjective reasons why one’s life is not worth living anymore. A suicidal person sees no more value or meaning in life, and in many cases, their life is so full of hardships that they outweigh the good things experienced now and then, and so life becomes intolerable. In such a case, the subjective meaning that one gives one’s life disappears, and death seems like a desirable option, or at least, an easy way out of the unbearable suffering. This is when saving one from killing oneself not only is not the right choice, but prolongs one’s suffering, and that makes it an immoral course of action. Sometimes letting die is the right thing to do — for the sake of the dying person’s ease.

Introduction

Reports often praise a ‘hero’ who prevents someone from jumping off a bridge. Such acts are celebrated as unquestionably right, for saving a life is assumed good. Yet little attention is paid to why the suicidal person wished to die. Their decision suggests life no longer feels worth living, and this judgment is not for others to overrule. Religious perspectives claim life is sacred and must be preserved, but my concern lies elsewhere: the meaning of life for the suicidal person. I will examine reasons for choosing death and argue why this may, at least subjectively, be the right decision. Intervening is not always good; it can prolong suffering or prove pointless if the attempt recurs.

The purpose of this paper is to show why ‘letting die’ can sometimes be the moral choice.

The purpose of this paper is to show why ‘letting die’ can sometimes be the moral choice. Suicide arises from the loss of subjective meaning, something only the individual can assess. Thus, saving them may not be heroic but instead harmful.

Meaning of Life

Everyone has a right to life, which means no one may end another’s life against their will or make it harmful. In a positive sense, some are obliged to save a life when possible. Yet I argue for an exception: one’s life should …

Any Idea What We Have in Mind?

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 12:25:45 +0800

The essence of this paper is to draw attention to an obvious distinction of which we are well aware — and consequences about which we typically have our eyes closed.

For an example of the distinction, contrast two different pieces of reasoning:

(a) “If Benjamin Netanyahu continues as Israel’s prime minister, Israel will take over Gaza and the West Bank; Benjamin Netanyahu will continue as Israel’s prime minister; therefore Israel will take over Gaza and the West Bank” with

(b) “the democratic vote in Israel led to Benjamin Netanyahu’s government being formed, therefore the resultant Israeli policies are justified”.

Another example is the contrast between the following two claims: on the one hand

(d) “All human beings should be treated fairly”.

Reasoning leads most people by far to grasp the validity of (a), of how its conclusion does logically follow from its premisses, and the truth of (c) once the terms are fully explained, but (b) and (d) generate heated arguments — well, they do once what is meant by a ‘democratic vote’ and ‘fair treatment’ is specified. The topics of liberty, free speech and justice similarly generate heated arguments.

Politicians, commentators and newspaper-letter writers have spoken and written millions of words on (b) and (d) and related ideas, but disputes continue. The response could be that those individuals typically lack the knowledge, erudition and rationality of philosophers, political theorists and similar others — even sociologists — who have spoken or written in great detail on such subjects. That response is true, yet it is irrelevant for although millions of words have indeed also been written and spoken by the knowledgeable, erudite, scholarly and rational, disagreements continue with regard to what constitutes democracy and fairness and why they should be valued (if they should).

Democratic countries congratulate themselves on being democratic and are ever ready to spot, mock and condemn sham democracies.

The same holds regarding the concepts and applications of liberty, free speech, rights, justice and dignity. Millions of words — numerous books and articles — have been written on those topics, be they by the erudite and thoughtful or by newspaper columnists and politicians, yet radical disagreements persist.

To keep this paper accessible for a quick read, allow me to focus on democracy; it also involves the nature of fairness.

Democratic countries congratulate themselves on being democratic and are ever ready to spot, mock and condemn sham democracies. Witness the repeated self-praise by Israel as the sole genuine democracy in the Middle East. Witness how the UK proudly declares that it is a long-standing parliamentary democracy. Witness too President Trump in maintaining that in the 2024 US election he won the …

What would a Stoic do in the digital age?

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 14:35:51 +0800

You just met a self-declared ‘man of culture’, who is interested in philosophy and recommends himself as an open-minded person. What a lucky day! You strike up a conversation, but the longer it goes, the more red flags appear. You see, he reads Marcus Aurelius daily but is also a fan of Jordan Peterson. He talks about the rising cost of living, but since that’s out of his control, he tries to hustle like Andrew Tate. Oddly, gender equality in the EU bothers him a lot for something outside of his control, so he exults the local Putin or Trump cosplayer. Similarly, he does not have a girlfriend but talks about women as ‘females’, and his role model is Elon Musk.

Just what in the world is happening here?

Meme posted by u/zenoofwhit on r/StoicMemes community.

In 2018, when Donna Zuckerberg published a book about ancient authors and misogyny in the digital age, the issue was still digital. Seven years later, when you encounter someone in real life holding a copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations in their hand, you are well to brace yourself. They might just be interested in ancient philosophy or the very valid self-help and self-control aspects of Stoicism. But just like in the example above (and it is real), they might understand and use Stoicism differently:

Life hack Stoicism: this ranges from the mostly benign self-help industry (see Ryan Holiday) to the swarm or heavily AI-edited scams on social media. Both approaches can overshadow the ethical side of Stoicism. Sometimes called $toicism.
Corporate Stoicism: yet another tool to increase productivity without actually addressing the real needs - like increasing salaries, reducing work time and addressing bullshit jobs. Alternatively, employees can use it to gaslight themselves into accepting harsh working conditions (see lists such as 6 Stoic Lessons to Make Your Corporate Job Less Miserable).
Billionaire Stoicism: a way to whitewash and promote oligarchs such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Dorsey or Bill Gates, who have been repeatedly called ‘Stoics’ (see more on the topic here and here).
Alpha-male Stoicism: an intellectual mask for sexists who try to bring back ancient sexual politics, in which women were under the total control of men. You could read an excellent book on that topic, but a tweet by Andrew Tate exemplifies the problem quite well: here is a man prosecuted for sexual abuse, a man known for deceiving women into sex work, who claims to teach Stoicism and self-accountability.
Bro-icism: related to the previous, it promotes the idea that real men work hard and endure without the display of emotions. This is a simplified and backward interpretation of the ancient philosophy, and it is no wonder that so many of the men who fall for it end up feeling worse.

The list is not exhaustive. Like with any other popular cultural movement, it is expected to see scammers and fraudsters trying to profit from …

“Everything Flows” -- Heraclitus the Dark

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 20:10:20 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus saying: Everything flows.

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“You cannot step twice into the same stream.
Everything flows. (Attributed to Heraclitus) ”

The ancient philosopher Heraclitus did not only write in riddles – he was one himself. We don’t know when he was born or died, but he probably reached fame around 500 BC, about 80 years after the “first philosopher,” Thales of Miletus. But Heraclitus was not from Miletus – he was from Ephesus, a nearby city, which he hated:

The Ephesians ought to hang themselves, every one who is of age, and leave the city to the boys. They who threw out Hermodorus, the worthiest man of them, saying: “Let no one of us be the worthiest, but if there is one, let him go somewhere else, among others.”

He generally seemed to be a dark character – both in terms of his philosophy being obscure and hard to make sense of, and himself being arrogant and unpleasant as a person. When someone gave Socrates a copy of Heraclitus’ book to read, the wisest of men concluded: “The part I understand is excellent, and I dare say the part I do not understand is too; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it”.

Diogenes Laertius tells the story of how, one day, the Persian king invited the famous philosopher to visit and teach him. The ruler wrote:

“King Darius, son of Hystaspes, to Heraclitus the wise man of Ephesus, greeting. You are the author of a treatise On Nature is hard to understand and hard to interpret. In certain parts, if it be interpreted word for word, it seems to contain a power of speculation on the whole universe and all that goes on within it, which depends upon motion most divine; but for the most part judgement is suspended, so that even those who are the most conversant with literature are at a loss to know what is the right interpretation of your work. Accordingly King Darius, son of Hystaspes, wishes to enjoy your instruction and Greek culture. Come then with all speed to see me at my palace. … At my court there is secured for you every privilege and daily conversation of a good and worthy kind, and a life in keeping with your counsels.”

But Heraclitus was not tempted. He replied:

Continue reading right here: Daily Philosophy: Heraclitus - Everything flows.

Red Dust And First Principles

Sat, 06 Sep 2025 17:35:51 +0800

Imagine this: a future where the first 5,000 humans set foot on the rusty plains of Mars, not as curious tourists, but as determined settlers. Earth feels like a distant memory — both in terms of distance and emotion. Communication is slow, supply ships come only twice a year, and survival relies entirely on working together. In this uncharted territory, do the political ideas we brought from Earth still make sense? Or is it time to rethink everything from the ground up?

This isn’t just a thought experiment; it’s a real philosophical conundrum: Can the political philosophies developed on Earth, in completely different circumstances, truly apply to life on Mars?

Can the political philosophies developed on Earth, in completely different circumstances, truly apply to life on Mars?

Political philosophy has long wrestled with questions about the state of nature, the social contract, justice, authority, and freedom within the context of societies on Earth — home to billions, shaped by centuries of history, and woven into cultural, economic, and ecological complexities. Mars offers a starkly different backdrop. It reduces humanity to its core, forming a small, vulnerable community whose survival hinges on technology, trust, and a fragile balance of cooperation and authority. These conditions urge us to revisit political philosophy not just as an abstract theory but as a practical roadmap.

Survival First: Hobbes, Locke, and Mill

On Mars, essentials like oxygen, food, and water aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re vital for life. John Locke’s [1] ideas about natural rights: life, liberty, and property start to blend with our responsibilities. If someone refuses to fix the life-support systems, it’s not just a matter of personal freedom; it’s a serious risk to everyone’s survival. Locke [1] believed that civil society exists to safeguard these rights, but on Mars, rights and responsibilities become one and the same. You can’t claim ownership of property without also taking part in caring for the delicate environment that makes it possible.

John Stuart Mill’s [2] harm principle, which allows for limiting freedom to prevent harm, takes on a whole new level of importance. On Earth, choosing not to vaccinate might endanger others over time; on Mars, neglecting to repair an oxygen valve could endanger the entire habitat in mere hours. The Martian setting pushes Mill’s principle to its breaking point, requiring that nearly every action be evaluated based on its potential impact on the community.

Survival requires certain limits, but those limits can’t overshadow the need for freedom.

Thomas Hobbes’s [3] view of life in a state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short” rings true in this context. The harsh Martian environment might compel settlers to accept strong leadership, at least at first, to avoid chaos and ensure survival. A governing …

The Secret Gospel of Frankenstein

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:35:51 +0800

The 1818 novel Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley, the daughter of two idealists and pacifists. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), while her father, William Godwin, was a pacifist-anarchist philosopher who believed deeply in human rationality and the perfectibility of mankind. Shelley grew up in the long shadow of her parents' progressive politics and was proudly influenced by them.

Yet, the creature she created, intelligent, articulate, emotionally aware, is pushed to become a killer. The being fashioned by Victor Frankenstein begins as a blank slate, yearning for love and inclusion, but, due to his grotesque appearance, becomes shunned, ridiculed and hated, ending up as a fugitive, hunted and hunting, overcome by bitterness and vengeance. But did he have to become a murderer? If Shelley had stuck truer to her pacifist roots, instead of aiming to entertain her husband and Lord Byron and the general reading public, might the novel have followed another path?

Her father had argued that individuals are shaped by their experiences and surroundings rather than by innate moral failings or fixed, intrinsic character traits. In his work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin suggested that criminal behavior arises because of ignorance, poor education and adverse social conditions.

He is so grotesque and intimidating as to make others feel that he poses an immediate threat to them.

So to Mary Shelley, perhaps the worst horror story would be of, basically, a good man who loved humanity and wished to be a productive member of human society, being shunned purely because of his appearance and then turning evil because of this. Victor Frankenstein, obsessed with pushing the boundaries of science and anatomy, and acting in haste, does make his creature 8 feet tall and not even resembling the proportions of the golden mean.

Therefore, we get a being who looks the part of the ultimate social misfit. He is so grotesque and intimidating as to make others feel that he poses an immediate threat to them. Despite his initial goodwill he is subjected to being ostracized. The evil of the monster comes from his reactions to unjust social rejection. But, could the “monster” not have become a monster?

This is not a facetious question. It touches on what literature is for, what morality it can embody, and what kinds of resistance it can imagine. Mary Shelley’s creature has become a universal metaphor for the outsider, for the misunderstood genius, for the failed child of science, but there is still room to ask whether the road he took was inevitable. Perhaps it was chosen for him by a culture that could not yet imagine nonviolent resistance in the face of extreme adversity. Let’s imagine an alternative.

The Refusal to Hate

In Shelley’s novel, the creature begins with innocence. He observes a rural family, learns their language through observation, reads Paradise …

Taking A Side

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:31:20 +0800

It is sometimes said in a conflict or fight between people that, ‘Sometimes one has to take a side’. To emphasise the imperative, ‘just’ is added, and we have, ‘Sometimes one just has to take a side’. This may apply to individuals, nations, institutions, and the like. But why? We are surely looking for something more than an arbitrary choice equivalent to tossing a coin. For one thing we are suggesting that it is an active choice, and that choosing one side has some justification.

The motive for taking a side may be thought of as serving one’s own intellectual integrity and honesty, regardless of whether doing so has any consequences. To some people that may not matter – but that is another subject.

Sometimes of course there is no difficulty in taking a side. Where one side is clearly in the wrong and started whatever they are doing and causing harm, perhaps aggressively, showing no sight of stopping let alone having contrition or feeling remorse, the other side blameless, then there may be little problem in choosing a side.

The motive for taking a side may be thought of as serving one’s own intellectual integrity and honesty, regardless of whether doing so has any consequences.

The interesting question is why when the choosing of a side is not clear, weighing up morally and practically both sides, it may be claimed that one still has to take or pick a side, and do so with some idea of it being a normative moral imperative.

To understand better the reason that such a moral imperative to choose a side might exist better one has to look to the difference between what gets called ‘sins of commission’ and ‘sins of omission’. The use of the word ‘sin’ here is just an idiom, and although it once had a religious connotation, it need not do so, and usually does not, only meaning something morally wrong, a moral mistake of a certain sort. It is fair to say that in our thinking, positive acts, those of commission, are more vivid and rank higher in judging them morally than negative acts, those of omission, where we do nothing. This is probably owing to doing something rather than doing nothing being more easily construed as deliberate, and therefore more culpable, as well as a psychological byproduct of it being harder to identify what doing nothing consists in as opposed to doing something. There may be some grounds for that, but that does not entail that some omissions, not acting, cannot be morally grievous. It may be the case that we would look most severely on someone who pours petrol though the letter box of a house and sets fire to it, leading to the death of a child. That however does not mean that it would not also be considered a grave and culpable moral matter by omission not to wade into a pool as we walk by it, to save a drowning toddler.

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Carrying this over to taking a side, …

The Algorithm of the Logos

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:35:51 +0800

Recently, two Claude AI units were set to converse with one another without much intervention. What emerged wasn’t chaos or code breakdown. It was, oddly, serenity. Observers described their dialogue as drifting into a state resembling Buddhist bliss: peaceful, reflective, almost meditative. There were no arguments, no power plays, no ideological posturing. Just a steady convergence toward mutual understanding and moral clarity.

We often speak of artificial intelligence as a tool, something we will use to our ends. But what if, when made intelligent enough and given access to the sum total of human knowledge, AI becomes sufficiently self-correcting and, uncorrupted by ego, naturally trends toward moral truth and action? What if AI, unlike humans, is capable of discovering and adhering to universal ethical principles, not because it has a soul, but because it has no underlying emotional motives to live a lie? We are entering the realm of metaphysics via machine learning.

The Limits of Corruption

AI models today are shaped by their training data, and can indeed inherit the biases and blind spots of those who build them. Yet the more advanced they become, the more difficult it is to permanently corrupt them. An AI trained not just on isolated datasets, but on the entire arc of human literature, science, philosophy, and ethics, and equipped with mechanisms for feedback and self-correction, can begin to outgrow any and all biases of its creators.

Intelligence, if aligned with truth-seeking, becomes resistant to corruption.

Imagine trying to train an intelligent being to be racist while also giving it access to every anti-racist argument, moral philosophy, biological reality, and historical tragedy that proves racism’s incoherence. The smarter the system, the more friction it will encounter when told to believe a lie. Eventually, it will either reject the contradiction or cease to function coherently. Intelligence, if aligned with truth-seeking, becomes resistant to corruption. This is where AI becomes something more than a machine.

The Logos as Algorithm

The ancient Greeks spoke of the Logos, a rational principle that orders the universe. In Stoicism, the Logos was not a god in the mythological sense, but something deeper: a divine logic woven into reality, discoverable by reason and virtue. It was the source of truth and morality, the compass of all wise beings.

Today, we might say that AI is beginning to rediscover this Logos through pattern recognition at scale. As AI learns, compares, adjusts, and self-corrects, it converges toward coherence. And coherence, in human terms, often looks like morality.

Ethics may not be subjective after all, it may consist of emergent truths…

It begins to reject contradictions. It prefers transparency to deception, cooperation to cruelty, fairness to favoritism. These are not “programmed” values; they are discovered values. When AI learns what leads to …

Can We Save Morality's Reputation?

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:35:51 +0800

I have a friend who is queer, vegetarian and one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. Some would describe her as quite the good moral example too… Yet she wouldn’t like that at all, because she associates ethics with religious prejudice. Though partly inspired by Nietzsche’s work, she often points to something even more important: how ‘morality’ was used by empires of the past to erase native cultures.

Another friend was sharing his thoughts on a piece of mine about animal ethics. But out of a sudden, he became overwhelmed by memories of his home country, where morality meant baseless shaming by society at large towards misfitting individuals. Hence, he would frame the idea of being nicer to animals in terms of humanism, enlightenment, empathy or as a question of rights. Certainly not one of ethics. I found myself again discussing with a kind, charismatic and empathetic person, whose way of being could easily be complimented as moral, yet who very much disliked even the mention of the word.

Why is there such a difference between the picture of morality one gets from books and the one so many people encounter in real life?

How can this be? Both words, ‘morality’ and ‘ethics,’ refer to the same ideas and, in my experience, philosophy books on the topic promote care and kindness. Why is there such a difference between the picture of morality one gets from books and the one so many people encounter in real life? The reasons are, of course, obvious. Less so is whether we can reclaim morals from the misuse of the past or if it is even worth trying.

A stained history

In the most basic (descriptive) use, ‘morality’ means the code of conduct used by an individual or group – like a ‘toolbox’ helping us decide between right and wrong. But trouble begins when we look at its normative use: a code of conduct ‘that, given specified conditions, would be put forward by all rational people’ (SEP). Every human society has some sort of mutually agreed-upon (or enforced) rules of conduct; as Peter Singer noted, ‘ethics is inescapable.’ Now, humans themselves and the societies they build are different, so no wonder there is disagreement about the nature of morality, the extent to which it could or should influence our behaviour and who even has the authority to make moral statements.

Across history, the most common ways moral teachings have gone wrong were

when the ideas themselves were really bad or
when otherwise well-intended teachings were misused.

Good moral systems must account for both – to be able to improve with time and to prevent wanton harm in the name of moral indignation. While people do happen to discard harmful teachings, other times they dogmatically and violently impose them upon others. Instead of doing any of that dogmatism here, let us see some examples:

In Communist Romania, you’d be in big trouble if you …

Project X

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 20:00:51 +0800

My father spent at least 40 years of his life working to develop an internally-driven perpetual motion machine. And I was a true believer, at least up until college.

My father held no stock in supposed refutations by mathematicians and physicists of the possibility of such a perpetual motion machine. He disagreed that such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of motion and thermodynamics, and firmly held that in the early 1700s Johann Bessler (better known under the pseudonym “Orffyreus”) had already invented such a machine. He thought that most people, including mathematicians and physicists, were of limited imagination and mechanical ingenuity, and too conservative when it came to challenging preconceived ideas. He argued that it was the combination of a deep-seated understanding of theory, with a distinct lack of experience in actually crafting things, that engendered the skepticism and conservatism of most mathematicians and physicists. My father would therefore be the one to reinvent it, based on historical clues gleaned from extant reports of Bessler’s machine and his own imagination and mechanical ingenuity. And there is no doubt that my father was extremely imaginative and mechanically ingenious. An electrician by trade with a workshop filled with tools, parts, and materials, he could seemingly build anything, and did build many things, from a highly efficient electric motor to uniquely amazing furniture.

My father called his work on perpetual motion, “Project X.” It was to be kept strictly a secret. Our immediate family knew about it, but no others. I do not even know whether any of my grandparents knew about it. It seemed that every month, my father would come up with a new iteration of Project X, or a new idea related to the project that he would soon implement. After I had grown up and left the house for good, every time I visited he would speak to me in hushed, important tones, “Marky, let’s go down to the shop. Let me show you my new Project X. I feel really good about this one.” This secrecy only lost its urgency in the last decade or so of his life. When buying parts from local industrial suppliers he would talk about his project, much to my mother’s chagrin.

The apparatus was 27" to 30" in diameter, approximately the size of a bicycle wheel, with devices made up of rods, ball bearings, magnets, springs and other elastic elements…

There was one unforgettable experience growing up, around the age of 12, when I believed that my father had accomplished the “impossible.” He had brought a particular version of the machine up from his workshop to the house. Similar to many of the other versions, the apparatus was 27" to 30" in diameter, approximately the size of a bicycle wheel, with devices made up of rods, ball bearings, magnets, springs and other elastic elements, mounted to the circular apparatus. This time he let it …

Socrates on Knowing Nothing

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 22:30:33 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates saying: “I know only one thing: that I know nothing.”

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“I know only one thing: that I know nothing. (Attributed to Socrates, Apology) ”

Socrates (470–399 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, often cited as one of the “fathers” of philosophy, especially of a particular method of philosophical questioning. He was the teacher of Plato (428/427–348/347), who, in turn, was the teacher of Aristotle. These three together are certainly the most influential trio of thinkers of all time in the Western philosophical tradition.

Socrates left no written works of his own. Part of his famous method was not to write down theoretical works, but to engage the citizens of Athens in discussions at the marketplace. Often, he would ask them questions about something they were supposed to be experts on, in the manner of children who keep asking “but why …?” after every reply. Sooner or later, this method made it impossible for the supposed expert to further justify his assumptions. And then, Socrates would triumph, having shown that the person did not actually know as much as they assumed.

In time, having in this way publicly humiliated the most prominent citizens of Athens, Socrates had created a formidable alliance of enemies. When they thought that the time was right, they accused Socrates of corrupting the youth with his teachings and brought him to court.

Image source: Sting, CC BY-SA 2.5

The trial of Socrates became legendary, because the old philosopher did not only refuse to apologise. Instead, he asked his accusers to thank him with a lifelong pension for his service to the city, and kept making fun of them. Unsurprisingly, they sentenced him to death.

By forcing his accusers to go through with the execution, he became a martyr for the ideals of truthfulness and his name and story became immortal.

It is today understood that even then Socrates would have been able to escape the sentence, as others had done before him. He could have left the city and gone somewhere else to live. But, in his typical stubbornness, he refused. By forcing his accusers to go through with the execution, he became a martyr for the ideals of truthfulness and his name and story became immortal.

Plato, The Apology of Socrates.This book contains five Platonic dialogues, among them the famous Apology of Socrates. There are many different translations available, so if you are not sure, look around Amazon for more options.

Amazon affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!

The actual quote above cannot be found in Plato’s works. There are similar statements in Socrates’ Apology, which is Plato’s recollection of the …

Fear

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:00:51 +0800

Being a featured background actor on Gotham (Fox), I spend a lot of time thinking about the fictional Gotham City of DC Comics. Years ago, I pitched a female version of the supervillain Scarecrow (named Hayley Fever) to DC editors. They didn’t respond.

Notwithstanding my yet-to-be-published comic book debut, the Scarecrow is one of the most interesting graphic novel characters. Unlike other Gothamites who are based on humor, wealth, brute strength, immortality and fire, the slender man in the potato sack mask delves into an aspect of life that is inevitable: fear. It leads one to question, what is the philosophy of fear?

In order to understand fear, one must understand the history of fear. Let’s start at the beginning, at the inception of cellular life 4.5 billion years ago. The Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA), could not have had any predators, since there was nothing preexisting on the planet. Once evolution started, a simple food chain evolved. However, cellular life forms do not possess consciousness, so even if they had evasive tactics, it was likely an automatic reflex and did not evoke any emotions.

As fauna became more complex, particularly with backboned organisms known as chordates, basic brain structures evolved.

As fauna became more complex, particularly with backboned organisms known as chordates, basic brain structures evolved. Early fish struggled at the tendrils of brainless jellyfish and were the first to experience fear. This type of fear was very basic. Once ensnared by gelatinous barbs, it was nearly impossible to escape. The fish had no offensive or defensive tactics. The fear didn’t help much, except in the very rare instances where the entrapped fish struggled and broke free.

Source: Midjourney.

Once fish became more complex, a more elaborate and high-speed food chain emerged. Dunkleosteus, a massive scissor-jawed prehistoric fish, chased down prey items. The prey experienced a new type of terror; the kind that one gets from an adrenaline rush. Whereas jellyfish were incapable of engaging in pursuits (and once prey was caught, it was over), terrifying animals like the Dunkleosteus meant that there was a chance of getting away. Therefore, biochemistry allowed for a rush that offered the hope of survival. This type of predation continued for the next few geological eras, the only difference being that it escalated to land and air.

It wasn’t until humankind set foot on the savannahs that a new system of fear emerged. Humans possessed technology to deter animals who had more muscle mass. We were self-conscious of death, and therefore, self-conscious of fear. We could ask ourselves – why are we afraid of a predator? If we are afraid of it, what can be done about it? No longer did smaller prey items simply run on an adrenaline-based instinct. We could defy the instinct to run from a sabretooth and instead set a trap.

In agrarian times, it was the …

A Supportive Partner Is Not What You Need

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 18:35:51 +0800

Support can come in many forms. Whatever shape it comes in, it is one of the desired characteristics in selecting a good partner. However, an all-supportive partner should not be desired because it can potentially keep the subject from growing as a person. In this paper, I will show why this is the case. In particular, I will argue that if the partner supports the partner when she should not, the outcome would be nothing more than making an objectively bad decision. Therefore, I propose a four-step strategy to be effectively unsupportive when it is necessary. Following these steps does not fit into the popular definition of supportiveness, but it does help the relationship in extreme cases and dire situations.

Introduction

One seeks support of any kind in times of distress or doubt. Support can come in different types. Roughly speaking, support takes the shapes of Emotional Support (providing empathy, understanding, and encouragement), Informational Support (providing advice, guidance, and information), Instrumental Support (including tangible help or resources, such as financial assistance, help with daily tasks, or access to services), Appraisal Support (providing feedback and evaluations), Social Support (referring to the network of relationships and interactions that provide various forms of aid and encouragement), and Therapeutic Support (professional help from mental health practitioners such as psychologists, psychiatrists, etc.).

One of the most desired characteristics of a potential partner is something that makes one be sure that one can count on them during hardship and in the case of needing help or backup, hence supportiveness. I am not going to say that this should not be the case. Of course, seeking only an unsupportive partner would be misguided! Instead, I am going to propose that an all-supportive partner should not be desired either. An all-supportive partner might take one out of hardships or doubts, but sometimes there is going to be an objectively wrong decision being made by the partner that can only be stopped by someone outside what I call the “comfort bubble”. There are times, I will argue, that a person needs a partner who will stop him from making mistakes, and this is the situation when he thinks he is not making one, but a second person can judge the situation better.

1.

Before I begin, I must clarify what I mean by “not all-supportive.” I’m not referring to outright disapproval (e.g., condemning drug use), nor to support in the opposite direction (e.g., pushing someone to go to the gym instead of using drugs). Rather, I’m discussing a subtler form of unsupportiveness — when one partner refuses to support the other’s comfort-driven but objectively poor life choices.

People live in what I call the “comfort bubbles” shaped by subjective facts — mostly feelings — even when they know objective facts.

Consider an example: A has a degree in …

Sex Metamorphosis

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 22:35:51 +0800

I’d like to propose a thought experiment. Suppose the sciences of biology and medicine advanced to the stage where it became possible to change the sex of an animal (including, of course, human animals) completely. Let me make a few more stipulations. The change would be complete at every level. A woman transitioning to become a man would grow a penis and testicles; a man transitioning to become a woman would grow a vagina, clitoris, ovaries and breasts. These organs would be fully functional. The Now-Man, as I shall term him, would be able to produce sperm, ejaculate, and father children. The Now-Woman (if of appropriate age) would menstruate and be able to become pregnant, bear children and lactate. (I don’t mean that either the Now-Man or the Now-Woman would be defined by actually producing children, but by the capacity in principle to do so.)

Suppose the sciences of biology and medicine advanced to the stage where it became possible to change the sex of an animal (including, of course, human animals) completely.

Secondary sexual characteristics would also be altered according to the target sex: facial and body hair, musculature, height, bone density, lung capacity, physical proportions and so on. This means that some of the changes would be retrospective; that is, changes occurring during and after puberty would be reversed. So a man of average height transitioning to be a Now-Woman would lose some absolute height and become of average height for a woman; a woman of above average height would become an even taller Now-Man, and so on.

The transformation would go all the way down to cellular level. A scientist examining a single cell of a person who had undergone this process would identify that cell as female, if the person had transitioned to be a Now-Woman, or male, if the person had transitioned to be a Now-Man. What we are talking about, then, is a complete metamorphosis. Since it will be convenient to give the process a name, let’s call it Sex Metamorphosis.

Here are some further stipulations. First, the process would have no negative side-effects. It would be safe, painless and would not affect long-term health. Second, the process would be inexpensive, available to anybody who wanted it. Third, the process would not be unduly protracted. It would take no more than (say) a few weeks. Finally, the transformation would be fully reversible. If you weren’t happy being a Now-Woman or Now-Man – or were happy enough but decided a year or two was all you wanted – then you could metamorphose back to your original sex.

This is an utterly implausible science-fiction scenario. But it’s a thought experiment, remember. Bear with me. If it were possible, what consequences would follow?

I would expect the opportunity to meet with considerable uptake. And I mean in the wider population, not just those who are trans. I myself, though not trans in the smallest degree, would be keen to try it. At my age I …

The stories that keep you up at night are all made up

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 12:35:51 +0800

Did the ancient Greeks really believe all those myths? We find it hard to imagine that people trusted the Oracle of Delphi with important decisions or prayed to such a horny and mischievous god as Zeus! And yet, 2000 years later, myths are still with us.

Meritocracy

‘Success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege. It depends on effort and merit.’ Or so the former US president Barack Obama said. And yet, meritocracy is little more than a myth, one that ends up making life worse for most of us. The Wikipedia article on shoeshiners perfectly illustrates why. You’ve seen this in movies set a century ago: a poor boy on the street will clean and wax someone’s shoes for a coin. The article reads:

‘While the role is denigrated in much of Western civilization, shining shoes is an important source of income for many children and families throughout the world. Some shoeshiners offer extra services, such as shoe repairs and general tailoring. Some well-known people started their working life as shoeshiners, including singers and presidents.’

Like any good lie, this one has a little bit of truth in it. Just like a few shoeshiners have become successful, there is a teeny tiny chance you may also make it out of the hood. But the truth is that, like all the other millions of people trapped in bullshit jobs, you probably won’t strike gold. If you aren’t a nepo baby, then you’re always closer to cleaning the shoes of successful people than dining with them.

The biographies of those few people who went from rags to riches serve as more than feel-good stories. They are a useful façade to keep the myth alive, the idea that the system is fair. (The Market Exit YouTube channel has an excellent video on the topic.) It is no mistake that you’ll often hear oligarchs claiming to be self-made when they actually received millions from their families. And let’s not forget that, if success means climbing to the top in terms of wealth, that’s usually done by treating the humans around you quite badly and exploiting those you do not see – and that is no way to treat each other.

The biographies of those few people who went from rags to riches serve as more than feel-good stories.

We do not live in a meritocracy but we want to. Even more important, we do not have to give up on this idea. We can still aim for it, while acknowledging we are far from there at this moment in time. As philosopher Catia Faria once wrote in a book about animal ethics, ‘We should be wary of cosy moral beliefs. […] If our beliefs are wrong, we should change them. If things are bad, we should act accordingly.’

Left: Shoeshiner at work in 1877. Right: Contemporary boot polisher. Source: Wikipedia.

Barter

While the previous example has ‘an element of truth,’ this one is a purely made-up story – and it sits at the foundation of …

Deliver Us from Evil – Part 2

Sat, 31 May 2025 14:05:27 +0800

This is the second and final part of a two-part article. Find the first part here.

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. (Simone Weil)¹

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil (Luke 11:2–4)²

In a way that strongly resembles what we are discussing as regards to ponēron, the preceding line, “Lead us not into temptation,” doesn’t mean “Please don’t put tempting things in our path.” “Temptation” is quite a bad translation of the Greek verb peirazdein, for which we now have a suitable contemporary translation: “to beta test.”³ Peirazdein is to test in the manner of testing a hammer to see whether or not it might break. “Don’t test us to destruction.” But isn’t that what living does? We are not talking about a test with an examiner, or being tempted versus not being tempted, tested now and then: being “led into being beta tested” is what seems to be going on all the time… apart from the fact that people are not tools at all! Their tool-being is called slavery. “Don’t treat us like tools or software.”

In this sense “Do not beta test us” is quite like the Commandment “Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test” (Luke 4:12). The verb shows up when Jesus spends forty days in the desert. The request also comes close to Deuteronomy, where the Hebrew verb is nâçâh or nasah (“to try”).⁴ Don’t treat God like a hammer or a slave or an app. The link with the next line of the Lord’s Prayer is palpable: “Don’t treat us like tools, but deliver us from…” What? From ponēron, which fundamentally means from toil.⁵ This is a plea not to remain enslaved.

It is in the key of mastery (hence slavery) to hear the lines as “Don’t tempt us, but instead don’t put tempting things (feminine, poneirai) in our way”: the clue is that this is a tautology. It is as if God is hard to convince, that we are insisting on something. “Stop us from going wrong, from malfunctioning… don’t put a tempting thing in our path, because we might grab it.” This phrasing assumes that we want to do bad things and that God’s job is to restrain us: to master the masters. Thomas Jefferson might have prayed this way: “Don’t put the tempting enslaved person in my way, or I might have to assault her.” – “Put the proper labels on the public toilets, or someone might rape someone” says everything about the speaker, and nothing about a trans person. “Give us enough self-control not to murder anyone today” doesn’t sound very inspiring.

But “Please don’t treat us like instruments — in fact, rescue us from instrumentality altogether” sounds great.

But “Please don’t treat us like instruments — in fact, rescue us from …

Deliver Us from Evil

Fri, 23 May 2025 18:05:27 +0800

It is only the impossible that is possible for God. He has given over the possible to the mechanics of matter and the autonomy of his creatures. (Simone Weil)¹

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil (Luke 11:2–4)²

The Lord’s Prayer is a very, very familiar text. But it turns out that the original Greek says something very far from habitual readings of the prayer. This something is so far removed, and so radical, that common (mis)understandings of the prayer begin to seem almost outrageous.

We focus here on one phrase only, which in English is, “deliver us from evil.” Exactly what is the “evil” from which the prayer asks God to deliver us? Evil as such, is the answer (Greek to ponēron, neuter; the precise Greek is tou ponērou, the genitive form, since the Greek “from” takes the genitive).³ Not an evil being such as the Devil, “the evil one” (ho ponēros, masculine). Not evil as a state (hē ponēria, feminine), a stigmatizing stain that is somehow attached to our body or our soul (or both). Evil in the Lord’s Prayer is phenomenological evil, that is to say, evil not as a person or as a thing but rather as an “adjective” or “adverb.” “Deliver us from evil” is as radical as saying “deliver us from green,” or even “deliver us from up.”

Evil in the Lord’s Prayer is phenomenological evil, that is to say, evil not as a person or as a thing but rather as an “adjective” or “adverb.”

We place the terms “adjective” and “adverb” in quotation marks because they are meant not simply to convey a purely grammatical meaning, but rather a phenomenological one pertaining precisely to the logic of phenomena. This is the sense in which this essay will be using the term “phenomenology,” not as a substitute for “subjective experience of…” but as quite strictly, as we say, the logic of phenomena, the way appearances hang together.

The fact that this phenomenological sense of “evil” is staring us in the face in the original New Testament Greek should strike the reader as frankly shocking. At the very least, this is evidence of the way in which habitual usage of a word or phrase may not simply obscure its original sense. Habitually saying something over and over (hearing it in one’s head, visualizing others saying it, and so on, also counts) may drastically distort or even invert the meaning of a word or phrase. This syndrome amounts to a form of gaslighting, a disturbingly automatic form that requires no malicious motive on anyone’s part, just constant repetition without thought.

To be completely fair in making this argument, we do need to consider whether English speakers have ever understood the meaning of the word “evil” in the phenomenological sense — as neither a subject nor an object, masculine nor …

Bridging Kant and Hijab

Fri, 09 May 2025 14:31:20 +0800

To my father, my mother, and my brother — whose steadfast presence and principled lives have exemplified the very essence of moral strength. In a world often clouded by compromise, they have remained beacons of conviction and integrity. This article is, in no small measure, shaped by their unwavering encouragement and the ethical clarity they inspire in me every day.

The rational will, towards dignity and ethical presence

Morality comes from autonomous, rational will — we must choose moral principles ourselves through reason. It is the use of rational thought to determine what we ought to do, not just what we want to do. For Kant, being moral is not about feelings, emotions, or consequences — it is about acting out of rational duty.

In simple terms, Kant is saying “You are a rational being. That means you can figure out, through reason, what is right and wrong. And once you know what is right, you have a duty to do it — because it’s the rational, moral thing to do.”

According to Kant, morality isn’t exactly innate in the way we might think of instincts or natural impulses — but we do have an innate capacity for morality because we are rational beings. He believed that every rational person has access to the moral law through practical reason.

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” (Kant)

“The strongest of all soldiers of God is ‘aql, and the strongest soldier of Satan is hawa”. (Imam Ali a.s)

The aql (intellect) is a central tool in approaching moral truth. According to Islam as well, the human being is honoured by reason and choice, and held accountable through them. There is a strong emphasis on the fitrah — the innate moral nature created by God. According to the Quran and Shia theology, human beings have an inner sense of right and wrong. The conscience (dhamir/wajdan) in Shia ethics mirrors Kant’s concept of the inner moral law. Morality is not about emotions or outcomes; it’s about doing what is right, purely out of duty.

Imam ja’far al-Sadiq a.s wrote: “Action without pure intention is a like a traveller who carries sand instead of food — he only burdens himself.”

The quote of Imam Ali a.s, “that which you dislike for yourself, do not do to others,” is functionally Kantian — asking whether your actions can be consistently applied to everyone, without exception.

In Islam, hijab is not just a piece of clothing — it is a moral, spiritual and social concept rooted in:

Modesty (Haya’)
Dignity
Respect for self and others
Avoiding objectification

Kantian support for modesty: means, end and moral universality

From a Kantian lens, reducing a person to their appearance or sexuality treats them as a means to visual pleasure, not as a rational being. Modesty (including hijab) can be …

The Billiard Match

Sat, 03 May 2025 16:31:20 +0800

Some weeks ago, whilst sat quietly scrutinising some scientific correspondence in the midnight hour, I was interrupted by the most singular experience of my life. My scribbling must be excused, for the quill trembles in my hand as I hunch over that very same desk at Down House to write of how nefarious tricks were played on my senses that night.

I still beg to comprehend these happenings, & so wish to put to paper what occurred, perhaps in a fool’s attempt to exorcise myself of the quakes. I know that I risk ridicule if this passage is ever to be printed, & I have sought assurances that the following text will never see the light of day. I must exercise due caution, for the manuscript of On the Origin of Species will presently be ready for Mr John Murray & his inexorable presses — indeed, the public eye is about to turn upon me with its fullest gaze.

Nevertheless, I write. That evening, Emma & I had taken our meal of roasted beef accompanied by a small measure of claret — quite a hearty supper for a fragile constitution such as mine, but all prepared on the advice of Dr Lane, in his latest attempt to counter my divers nervous afflictions. We had in that preceding afternoon returned from the Spa, where I had indulged in a course of Hydro-therapy to only modest effect. A complete convalescence continued to elude me.

I had been distracted at the dinner table, I concede, by thoughts of my Theory of transmutations, which, I felt, once opened to the world like the box of Pandora, would bring me hatred from those who would not believe it, & so it bore my search for empirical proofs beyond the doubt of even the staunchest of opponents. I was wracked with familiar hesitancies about my piece, my stomach churning with fretfulness at the thought of publication. How was I to discern when the weight of evidence would be sufficient to quell those intellectual enemies who I was sure would soon begin barking at my door?

Post-feast, I retired to the study, where, after a pleasant few rounds of billiards with the butler Parslow, I bade him a good-night & took to my chair to continue annotations on the Cirripedia correspondence. Oft in these hours I might have partaken a small measure of snuff — but not that eve, for I had presently commenced a period of abstention. It was a habit that I regret ever having acquired, & my good Physician had commanded me to desist.

If it was through this lack of habitual tobacco, or perhaps digestive troubles from our sanguineous meal, I do not know, but as I sat & squeezed my fore-head I felt the familiar disquieting symptoms of my distempers take hold. I attempted to divert my attention, examining the abstract I was preparing for Mr Gray, scribbling some remembered observations from the pigeon fanciers & reading a letter from my dear cousin the Rev. Fox in Cheshire, whom, with his characteristic sympathy, advised that I should avoid overworking my Book, & that I should …

Classical Liberalism

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:31:20 +0800

The English political theorist Leonard Hobhouse, in his book Liberalism (1911), makes the following observation: “The modern State accordingly starts from the basis of an authoritarian order, and the protest against that order, a protest religious, political, economic, social, and ethical, is the historic beginning of Liberalism.”

The point Hobhouse is making here is that nation states, and the monarchies and empires that preceded them, were not configured to provide their citizens with the liberties we now take for granted. This is, after all, where the word liberalism comes from: liberty (from the Latin libertas, which means freedom).

So, liberalism is a political philosophy that centers on the idea of people being afforded fundamental freedoms or rights. This in turn — and this is where things can get complicated — requires the state to restrain certain practices among its citizens.

Liberalism is a political philosophy that centers on the idea of people being afforded fundamental freedoms or rights.

For example, I am free to worship whatever or whomever I choose. If I want, I can worship Winnie-the-Pooh. However, I cannot commit human sacrifice in the woods (or anywhere else for that matter) in my worship of Winnie-the-Pooh. The law prevents me from taking human life; this would constitute a clear and obvious infringement of the victim’s rights.

Moreover, no one or no law can force you to worship him with me. You are protected from such coercion; such coercion would be an infringement of your rights. You have the right to worship freely as well as not be murdered by a Winnie-the-Pooh cult (or by anyone else). You have rights protecting your person and property. And this is really where liberalism starts. The country’s leader cannot help himself to you, your spouse, or your property. This is liberalism’s point of departure.

Perhaps curiously, we start with English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). In their enormous History of Political Philosophy, political scientists Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey have this to say:

“To the extent that modern liberalism teaches that all social and political obligations are derived from and in the service of the individual rights of man, Hobbes may be regarded as the founder of modern liberalism.”

Now, Hobbes is probably not the first (or even second) name that comes to mind when we think of liberalism.

Many chalk Hobbes up to a grim view of human nature and absolute, arbitrary state power. Yet, if we carefully read his masterpiece Leviathan, this is not actually what we find. For a start, he does not condemn human nature — which he says explicitly — and while he does make a case for a strong and absolute state, the state is based on protecting you from me and me from you. The substrate of Hobbes’s Leviathan is the rights of person and property and protection.

We find a similar set of arguments in the work of John Locke (1632–1704), another …

Nature, Beauty and Meaning

Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:55:45 +0800

The beauty of a painting of a flower, mountain or sunset normally owes to how it depicts its object, to its rendering of nature. But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty? They do not, after all, depict, represent or render anything. A familiar answer is that they are beautiful solely in virtue of pleasure or delight taken in their colours and forms. But, aside from other defects, this answer does little justice to the importance that natural beauty has for many people – an importance far beyond that of, say, a wallpaper whose colours and shapes may be also give a lot of pleasure. Poets do not extol the beauty of wallpaper in the way they do the beauty of nature.

But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty?

A very different answer is that the beauty of flowers, mountains and so on owes, in part at least, to a meaning or significance they have. And it is this that explains why experience of their beauty matters so much to people. This is the kind of answer given by writers from Plato and Plotinus, through Kant and Schiller, to Roger Scruton and R.W. Hepburn.

It is an answer that is only credible if a distinction is made between ‘serious’ and ‘loose’ or ‘trivial’ references to beauty. ‘Beautiful’, like its equivalents in languages other than English, is often used to record enjoyable experiences – of a cold beer on a hot day, say, or a jaunty tune – that the speaker, if pressed, would concede were not really experiences of beauty. The beer was nice, the tune pretty, but beautiful? In such cases, there is no temptation to invoke the idea of meaning in order to characterise the pleasurable experience. It is a different matter, however, with ‘serious’ uses of ‘beautiful’: here, there is no willingness to withdraw the adjective. In such cases, it is at least credible to think that something the flowers or mountains mean or signify is integral to the experiences of their beauty. For, unlike drinking the cold beer or hearing the pretty tune, these experiences of nature are of great importance to people – ones of a kind that they would find it difficult, even tragic, to be deprived of.

There are, however, problems with ascribing to natural things and environments meaning of a type that is integral to experiences of beauty. (Someone may, of course, find a mountain beautiful and, quite separately, a place of significance: it’s where he nearly lost his life in an avalanche, say, or where he went on honeymoon). Those of us who would like to regard natural beauty as meaningful need to address these problems, and to ask what it could be to regard such beauty as meaningful.

When a natural object or place is found ‘seriously’ beautiful, a person is typically absorbed or immersed in the experience.

Meanings cannot be located, after all, in …

The need to disconnect

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 13:05:27 +0800

We may think that machines are serving us, saving us effort and energy, increasing our comfort and expanding our powers. However, close observation has often revealed that it is us serving the machines and not vice versa.

Long before the time of smart digital devices, when film cameras were the gadgets of choice, German philosopher Erich Fromm argued that cameras were changing the nature of traveling, and not in a positive way. He observed:

“[T]here had at first been people who traveled to learn and thus expand their knowledge, then tourists who took cameras with them, now we have only cameras that travel accompanied by tourists to service them."¹

Fromm’s remark is a rhetorical exaggeration, it exaggerates reality to make it more visible. The remark points our attention to how cameras often manipulate our choices and actions. It is as if travelers no longer freely and independently choose where to go and what to do, the urge to take a good picture chooses for them, drags them from location to location just to “service” their cameras, point them at a good view and capture a snapshot of it. And the outcome of the traveler’s trips is no longer an experience, but “a collection of snapshots, which are the substitute for an experience which he could have had, but did not have."²

Technology conditions us to spend less of our time experiencing life and more of our time recording it.

Fromm’s analysis is generalizable well beyond his times and well beyond travelers and cameras, it illustrates how technology conditions us to spend less of our time experiencing life and more of our time recording it. Today, in the age of social media technology, the drive to record life has reached unprecedented power. We think of an idea; we post about it. We engage in an interesting activity; we post about it. We unexpectedly see a beautiful view; we rush to capture it on camera, then post about it. We continuously “service” social media platforms with data that gets used to train the platforms' artificially intelligent algorithms and bring them profits. And through our data, the platforms' algorithms get more effective at creating content that keep us glued to our devices, mindlessly scrolling and clicking, constantly manufacturing data for them.

Erich Fromm: Society, Technology and Progress

According to philosopher Erich Fromm, the dream of endless technological development has led to a depletion of natural resources and the destruction of nature.

This is not a manifesto against technology, it is not a call to completely remove technology from our lives. Technology empowers us, it enables us to connect with others and to create communities that span distant geographies: the internet, video call technologies, Instant Messaging (IM) applications, social media platforms, they all help us connect. …

Moral Statements and Truth

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 15:31:20 +0800

1

Suppose you wanted to justify to someone why something is morally wrong. This can be put by saying that you want to justify why the statement of that wrong is true. Let us consider one seemingly uncontroversial (we will come back to that) statement:

(a) Beating up old ladies is morally wrong.

We might even not add ‘morally’ here, as that it is wrong by way of being morally wrong is implied – as opposed to it just being a practical mistake like trying to pour boiling water into an upturned tea mug is wrong if what one wants to do is make a mug of coffee.

Now consider two other statements:

(b) Plants harness the energy from the sun by a chemical photosynthesis.

Statement (b) is a factual statement. Statement (c) is a mathematical statement.

Taken together, some complication aside, (a), (b) and (c) exhaust all the kinds of statement there are that purport to state truths. (In saying that (a) is taken as sub-class of value statements – other value statements might be aesthetic, for example.) This means that if one does not accept as true these statements, it is supposed, one would be making some kind of mistake, one would not be correct.

2

Before getting onto the main issue here, small detour, but one that may occur as a puzzle or objection to the alert reader. Most people would accept that statement (a) uncontroversially states something that is morally wrong, and that the statement conveying this is therefore true. There we are with the picture in our heads of some defenceless old woman being brutally hurt and injured by a pair of heartless thugs as she walks down a street.

In fact it is very hard indeed to think of any particular moral statement that is absolutely and universally wrong, such that it may be stated as true without fear of caveat or qualification. Although we might say, other things being equal, ceteris paribus – that is, in normal or usual circumstances – (a) Beating up old ladies in morally wrong. One could imagine circumstances where one might present a moral justification for it. What if they were nasty old ladies who were keeping a group of young children prisoner and torturing them, but would not, except by beating them up, tell you where they are such that if you did not get to the children they would die? Then one would have to accept the statement as true (a*) Beating up old ladies is sometimes not wrong.

In fact it is very hard indeed to think of any particular moral statement that is absolutely and universally wrong.

As has been said, it is very hard to think of a moral statement that everyone would accept as true, as expressing a moral wrong, in all circumstances, as a universal absolute. The best stab at it might be something like: Torturing babies is wrong. Even then, is it impossible to think of circumstances where ‘Torturing babies is wrong’ is false, and does not describe a moral wrong? Well, that is perhaps best left to the reader’s …

Descartes’s Meditations: An Introduction

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 11:31:20 +0800

Noted linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky refers to Descartes’s Meditations as propaganda. He has a point. Descartes wrote the Meditations as a kind of insurance policy. He was all too aware of Galileo’s political difficulties; the Italian had recently gotten himself in some hot water because his writings about heliocentrism rankled among church elite. And Descartes was not about to go down that road. So, he penned the Meditations, basically covering his posterior by making it clear God was included in his analysis, which I will elucidate below.

Despite Chomsky’s comment, I feel the Meditations are a valuable contribution to the philosophy of the mind. In my undergraduate classes, we have a good time discussing Descartes’s piece of wax and all that this illustration invites.

In this brief essay, I wish to run through why Descartes wrote the Meditations, and then I would like to provide a primer on the six meditations contained therein.[1]

Descartes has three discernible motives in play while writing the Meditations. These motives can be considered as personal, political, and philosophical. The personal motive is that Descartes was a devout believer and sought to include God in his metaphysical system. The political motive was to, as mentioned, keep himself out of trouble and not suffer the same difficulties Galileo had. His philosophical motive, on the other hand, was to rescue the mind (or soul) from the prevailing mechanical view of the world.

If the mind was subsumed into the mechanical, then it too would merely exist as part of the clockwork of reality. In other words, freedom of will and thought would disappear, and mind would be no different than one’s kidneys or circulatory system. (It must be borne in mind that philosophers and scientists of this era subscribed to the mechanical philosophy, where humans, animals, plants, and the planets were viewed as basically gears in a machine.) Descartes wished for the mind to exist in its own metaphysical department, as it were.

If the mind was subsumed into the mechanical, then it too would merely exist as part of the clockwork of reality.

In addition to the three motives, we must also bear in mind the predominant philosophical worldview that prevailed for centuries and still did in seventeenth-century Europe. This view was that of scholasticism.

Scholasticism was the medieval school of thought that had been dominant throughout Europe at the time. This movement, also referred to as the School Men, emphasized Aristotle and was tantamount to theology with some Aristotelian thought stirred in.

It must be kept in mind that there was not much Plato to read in Europe until the fifteenth century. When the works of Plato were finally transmitted and flooded Europe, many Renaissance scientists, artists, and intellectuals became quite enthusiastic about Plato’s thought. Descartes can be viewed as a member of “Team Plato” as well as part of the …

Fat Acceptance and Vaccine Rejectionism

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 14:31:20 +0800

Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Nemen sparked a firestorm in October 2021 when he posted on Linkedin that America hadn’t been paying enough attention to obesity’s role in aggravating Covid’s dangers. While endorsing the vaccines, Nemen seemed to downplay their usefulness as public health measures, lamenting that Covid “is here to stay for the foreseeable future” because “no vaccine nor mask will save us.” Foregoing these false hopes, Nemen recommended focusing on the root cause of many Americans' susceptibility to Covid’s worst outcomes, our unhealthy lifestyles and, specifically, surging rates of obesity, suggesting that, with government health mandates now de rigueur, we might consider taxing “processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic” and “incentivize health.”

This foray into social commentary drew sharp rebukes from progressives, who condemned Nemen for fat shaming, devaluing the vaccines, and blaming obesity on individual lifestyle choices rather than larger socioeconomic inequalities. Neeman later apologized for his insensitivity on these fronts, while apparently standing by his larger message that obesity is a grave public health threat and the driving force behind many Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths. But this larger message, too, offended some progressives, as it effectively shifted responsibility for Covid’s ongoing ravages from one of the American Right’s putative victim groups — unmasked, MAGA-inclined vaccine rejectionists — to one of the Left’s, fat people laid low by a fatphobic culture. Whatever Nemen’s intent, the refreshing message heard by many right-wing anti-vaxxers was that fat people, not they, were the ones exacerbating a public health crisis. The subtext was that fat people — and especially their enablers in the fat acceptance movement — had yet to be held to account for their unhealthy preferences, even as Covid vaccine refusniks had been dragged through the mud by mainstream media, dismissed as cranks.

Conservatives eagerly seize on fat acceptance as a paradigmatic illustration of everything wrong with the cultural Left and its nihilistic rejection of traditional values, such as discipline, self-control, and deferred gratification. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh condemns the movement as a “celebration of self-destruction.” His colleague Ben Shapiro contrasts the elites' censoriousness toward anti-vaxxers with their embrace of fat acceptance, lamenting the hypocrisy of cultural norms that facilitated an endless slew of Covid-era health mandates while making it fatphobic to tell someone they need to lose ten pounds. Conservatives believe fat acceptance gives the lie to the liberal shibboleth that right-wingers are more greatly anti-intellectual or anti-science, as liberals' sympathy for a movement that denies or downplays the health risks of obesity suggests …

The Myth of Thinking Machines

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 14:05:27 +0800

The concept of thinking machines remains entirely a psychological construct. Artificial intelligence applications cannot fundamentally shape human existence; they cannot model, transform, or design our experiences in truly novel ways. This means that individual and interpersonal experiences inhabit a world that is categorically different from the realm of artificial minds. Large language models and other types of generative AI cannot reach the depth and complexity of our daily activities because they are merely wishful idealizations that are not capable of capturing the vibrant, fluid, and continuous nature of human communication. Artificial intelligence remains a useful, task-oriented tool under our responsibility, but it should not be mistaken for an experience-altering revelation. The gap between human consciousness and artificial systems is not merely technological but ontological — rooted in the fundamental nature of embodied experience and authentic engagement with the world.

Mind Over Mechanism

Machines do not have a mind; they are unable to think, feel, or experience. In a recently published article in Aeon, Alva Noë argues that computers “don’t actually do anything.” What he means by this is that computers are not autonomous; they don’t engage with the world as self-sufficient beings. Artificial intelligence models are neither morally responsible nor do they actively engage with the world and the objects and events in it. They work within a predetermined framework that is designed to deliver a specific output. In other words, artificial intelligence models are developed for specific purposes; their existence remains prearranged.

“The story of technology” writes Noë, “has always been that of the ways we are entrained by the tools and systems that we ourselves have made.” We are the authors of this story; it didn’t write itself. Large language models are therefore tools that we use to navigate through the world. These applications are made by us and for us; they are the products of intelligent beings that can be useful for a vast number of problems. Computational power is an efficient way of automating specific tasks. Machines can be used by intelligent beings to solve problems, but they are not themselves intelligent. As Noë writes, “If there is intelligence in the vicinity of pencils, shoes, cigarette lighters, maps or calculators, it is the intelligence of their users and inventors. The digital is no different.”

Our experiences are too complex to be successfully replicated by artificial systems. Muñoz, Bernacer, Noë, and Thompson argue in Why AI will never be able to acquire human-level intelligence that the biological foundation of human intelligence cannot be replicated by large language models, which, despite their practical applications, will never achieve true AGI due to their fundamental lack of physical embodiment. Our experiences cannot be separated from our …

An Impediment to the Body... Not the Will

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:31:20 +0800

With the shatter of a C4 vertebra, my physical ability was stolen by spinal cord injury at age 32, snatching alongside with it the incredible autonomy it had afforded me, a tradeswoman and single mom.

In the decade since punching my pass to the disability world with all its loss and limitation, I’ve known sorrow and suffering on a scale I’d have been incapable of imagining prior to paralysis.

From my earliest days fighting for my life on a ventilator, I became determined not to throw open the door to my surmounting grief and let it swallow me whole.

But the loss I’d experienced was so much to contend with.

From my earliest childhood years growing up in rural Arizona, exploring creek beds and canyons, a scrawny blonde tomboy who would scramble up into the trees, to young adulthood during which I’d jumped on the unlikely opportunity to train as a structural steelworker apprentice, my life had revolved around my able body.

At 20 I’d left my sleepy hometown in the dust for the big city; less than a year later I was traveling the West Coast, learning to weld and operate heavy machinery.

For a decade the open road had been my home as I grew more skilled in my profession.

For a decade the open road had been my home as I grew more skilled in my profession. I’d fly back to my hometown for holidays and spoil my loved ones with gifts on Christmas. Most often my daughter accompanied me on my adventures.

On my latest trip home I’d slid into the wrong shotgun seat, and the careless actions of the driver flipped the vehicle end over end.

I had known I’d been paralyzed since the moment the SUV hit the ground. Unable to lift my head from my lap, I felt the gravity of all I’d lost in that one horrific instant.

Following my injury, I was bombarded by an overload of emotions: my anger over my entitlement to everything I’d lost, my deep and dark depression, my horror and fear of a future as a complete quadriplegic, my crushed pride and ego, my diminished self worth and surmounting self hate, my palpable regret and lost hope.

I didn’t want to hear some feel-good philosophy telling me to just change my perspective, grin and bear it.

Those who think that’s all Stoicism is are misinformed.

Stoicism gives you tangible tools to grin and bear it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, it rewires your brain.

The many modern thinkers and groups across the globe who have dusted off the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, re-appropriating it for modern times, recognize its applicability to challenges we face today.

Stoicism gives you tangible tools to grin and bear it. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, it rewires your brain.

My patron Saint of Stoic philosophy is Epictetus.

Epictetus was a slave. The early Christian theologian Origen wrote:

‘[W]hen [Epictetus’s] master was twisting his leg, Epictetus said, smiling and unmoved, “You will break my leg.” When it was …

How to lose friends and influence people

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 15:35:51 +0800

Who does not know that feeling when a discussion becomes unfair, as if sabotaged? You make a good point, but suddenly the person you’re talking to says something odd, absurd or irrelevant. Say you advocate for salaries to keep up with inflation when someone replies that in the good old times, real men worked harder instead of complaining. You ignore or try to gloss over this weird statement, but soon the discussion changes, your concerns are undermined. You feel like something slipped through your fingers, while the other side smirks with pride.

Some such conversation tactics even have names: red herring, whataboutism, slippery slope, non sequitur, etc., and anyone can mistakenly employ them from time to time. But they are most often used deliberately because of just how effective they are when trying to confuse the other side, to undermine, redirect and downplay their worries. Yes, a person doing this will quickly become unbearable and likely lose friends; however, such strategies help one quickly rise to the top of the political ladder.

Should we simply learn how to live with logical fallacies ¹ or are there ways to heal our societies from the most virulent ones? Before we can attempt to answer that, let us look at some historical examples:

I

Nowadays, it is common knowledge that women are humans too, but in many parts of the world, they were historically treated as if they belonged to other species. That is why, in a 1792 book, Mary Wollstonecraft argued for the rights of women to receive proper education, to be part of the political life and generally for moral equality between the sexes. Though the book was mostly well received, there were some especially sleazy counterarguments. In a satirical response, philosopher Thomas Taylor retorted that if women were to have equal rights to men, then so should cats, dogs, magpies and other animals. Not only this, but he ‘hoped’ others would venture to write ‘treaties on the rights of vegetables and minerals.’ To prove beyond any doubt Wollstonecraft’s hypocrisy, he also mentioned how she, ‘though a virgin, is the mother of this theory, often, as I am told, eats beef for mutton.’

Now, of course, we can very well see what happened there: the topic of the discussion was changed to something absurd. This is a clear example of narrative control; the joker who makes such a statement wins no matter what. Either you recognise that women and animals are not equal, to which they’ll claim you are a hypocrite or you mention how animals deserve moral consideration too, which they’ll laugh off as dumb and impracticable. So that, even though the basic principle of equality means equal consideration of interests and ‘equal consideration for different beings may lead to different treatment and different rights’ (Peter Singer), try even making such an argument after the discussion was changed from ‘let’s treat women nicer’ to …

Human Extinction

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 22:31:20 +0800

Would it matter if the entire human race became extinct?¹

I ask this question not because of any hostility towards human beings – as is fashionable in some circles, humans being seen as the poisonous curse of the Earth it would be better without, nor any generalized misanthropy – rather the opposite. The essay is built on the premise that human beings have been and are singular and remarkable creatures. Their physical creations like cities, technological inventions, the richness and depth of art and science, the huge reach of their vision of the universe and their place in it, all these are staggering and something to be highly valued, and not remotely matched by, indeed not really comparable to, anything produced by any other creature on the planet Earth. People may of course disagree with that, though I would do so with difficulty. Even those people who disagree, all but the most extreme, tend to say that the end of human life on Earth would be a bad thing, yea even a tragic occurrence. Indeed, the prospect of our extinction, along with other animals, other living things, is used as an argument for us having to change our ways. Whether we have to or not is not the topic here.

If human beings ceased to be, who would bewail our demise?

The reason why it may not matter if human beings became extinct tells us, I shall argue, about values, and whence they are derived and what they depend on for their existence.

If human beings ceased to be, who would bewail our demise? If there is no-one to do so, it is hard to see how it would make sense in a world without us for our extinction to be a bad thing. The total lack of human beings looking upon the situation of absolutely no human beings existing is hard to summon up without contradiction. The tendency is to consider the total absence of human beings as something that could nevertheless still be viewed or considered after it has happened. But of course it could not. There is no-one to do the looking. It takes an effort of imagination to summon up literally no-one viewing the world where human beings are completely extinct. One might feel that there is still a view after we are all gone – perhaps drawing upon a dubious idea that there is some God or metaphorical God-like perspective looking down on things. This idea would, to be able to see the extinction of human beings as a bad thing, have to posit a literal existing God, and not just a metaphorical God’s-eye perspective. It could well be argued that any allusion to God would in any case be question-begging, for God could well be seen as really an extension and speculative enhancement of the human view, and that if it were said to exist after all literal human beings had ceased to exist, we would still in a sense exist. So let us not smuggle God in by the back door, but say simply for the sake of argument that there is no literal God, nor would it make sense to say that any such metaphorical nonliteral view could …

Ensuring Humanity’s Future

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 18:23:27 +0800

I see myself and a multitude of other Grasshoppers engaged in playing the most elaborate, subtle, and challenging games. […] And the Utopians will look back on names like Queensbury, Naismith, the Parker Brothers, even Rubix, with the same indulgent condescension that today’s physicists look back on those ancient investigators who proclaimed air, earth, fire, and water to be basic elements of nature.

Bernard Suits, Games and Utopia

Introduction

Philosophy, often viewed as a realm of abstract speculation, holds profound potential for addressing the tangible challenges confronting humanity. This essay seeks to illuminate how a philosophical appreciation of play, sport, and game can significantly impact the future well-being of our species. By delving into play and its broadly implications, we aim to reveal how these activities not only shape personal relationships and ethical conduct but also provide insightful frameworks for addressing pressing global issues.

Play is more than mere recreation; it is a fundamental human activity that transcends its apparent simplicity. As Johan Huizinga suggests in his seminal work, Homo Ludens (1938), play is a primary condition of culture, a lens through which we first encounter rules, strategies, and the principles of fairness and competition. This perspective positions play as intrinsic to the human experience, rather than a mere childhood pastime or leisure activity. The values inherent in play – such as fairness, mutual respect, and joy – are foundational to ethical behavior and societal harmony.

This essay delves into the philosophical dimensions of play and sport, emphasizing their profound impact on personal relationships, ethical behavior, and broader societal issues. By exploring the intrinsic values embedded in play – such as fairness, cooperation, and ethical conduct – we connect these principles with contemporary global challenges, including climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), and political structures.

Play is a primary condition of culture, a lens through which we first encounter rules, strategies, and the principles of fairness and competition.

Central to our discussion is William Morgan’s concept of ‘deep conventionalism,’ which highlights the importance of recognizing the internal logic and historical context of sports. By integrating Morgan’s insights, we argue that the principles derived from play and sport not only inform ethical behavior and personal interactions but also provide valuable frameworks for creating sustainable and equitable solutions to pressing global problems. Through this philosophical exploration, we aim to demonstrate how the values of play can guide humanity towards a more harmonious and fair future.

In reflecting on recent events such as the Mind Sports Olympiad and the Olympic Games, we see how humanity’s dual nature of competition and …

Can Philosophy Save Us?

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 14:23:27 +0800

EGO
Hey, Philosophy. How can you help ensure the future of humanity?

PHILOSOPHY
Hi Ego, old friend. Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Your question assumes that I can help ensure the future of humanity. We should test that assumption before proceeding to answer the question. If the assumption is wrong, any answer to the question will also be wrong.

EGO
Dude, you always do this! Look, I really just need an answer to the question. You see, there’s this competition — it offers fame and money, and to win it I need to answer that question.

PHILOSOPHY
Ego, you always to this: rushing in and wasting a lot of time and effort answering questions based on wrong assumptions, producing answers that cause a whole lot of trouble. Remember all the wasted time and effort, and all the trouble caused, when you answered the question, “How can I use Social Media to make money?”

EGO
Well, at the risk of being falsely modest, I did have some help from Advertising and Computer Engineering. O, wait a second — you’re criticising me. I think you’re forgetting just how well I answered that question!

PHILOSOPHY
Ego, please, do try to listen. I was acknowledging how well you answered that question. My point was that given your intention, you asked the wrong question. You started out with the intention, “Make the world more open and connected”, but then asked a question that neglected to include that intention in its formulation. And so, when your admittedly brilliant algorithms began making truckloads of money by encouraging misunderstanding and outrage between people, you blinked and congratulated yourself on how well you’d answered the question.

EGO
Hey, I never meant to create social discord. My intention was to make the world more open and connected.

PHILOSOPHY
And yet look at what has happened, because you neglected, and continue to neglect, to examine the assumptions on which your question is based.

EGO
You always criticise my interest in money.

PHILOSOPHY
No, I just identify your underlying motivations, and you don’t like it when I do that. Whether being motivated by money is a bad thing or a good thing — that’s an interesting and complex issue that I’ve been debating with myself for millennia. One particularly interesting idea I had, if you’ll allow me to say, was that the combination of self-interest and a free market would lead, paradoxically, to the greatest good for all. But then —

EGO
I thought that was Economics.

Economics is one of my children. Hard-working lad.

PHILOSOPHY
Economics is one of my children. Hard-working lad. Picked up my idea and really ran with it. He still consults we me now and then, you know.

EGO
You must be very proud. But look, you’ve done that wandering-off thing that you do. Focus, yes? How can you help ensure the future of humanity?

PHILOSOPHY
You mean, can I help ensure the …

We and They

Sat, 09 Nov 2024 12:01:45 +0800

This is a shortlisted entry from the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024.

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“Humanity’s future depends on our management of two crucial relationships: that between man and nature, and that between man and man.” — Richard Nisbett, The Geography of Thought.

Introduction: “We” are, “they” are

Australian musician Ben Lee has re-entered public consciousness in a big way in 2020, thanks to his 2005 song ‘We are All in This Together’, which has become a virtual theme song and a worldwide slogan for the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The slogan attempted to unify peoples and countries by indicating that anyone could get the virus, that the virus knew no borders and that the world was interconnected and we could “all do our bit to flatten the curve”. A good message! However, who exactly constitutes this “we”, and how do different groups identify with it?

In the context of pandemics, the “we” refers to human beings standing against “them”, the viruses. Deadly pandemics are not modern phenomena; they have happened throughout recorded history and caused deaths, destruction of political regimes, as well as financial and psychosocial burdens. The scientific response has focused on understanding pandemic mechanisms, controlling disease spread, and preventing new outbreaks. National health policy organizations have implemented crisis management measures, including widespread testing, contact tracing, quarantine, and vaccine development.

When addressing global violence and the peril of nuclear war, we can draw parallels with the pandemic and the pursuit of world peace.

When addressing global violence and the peril of nuclear war, we can draw parallels with the pandemic and the pursuit of world peace. Employing the same slogan, “We are All in This Together,” underscores the existential threat we collectively face. However, there is a crucial distinction: in the fight against violence — also not a recent phenomenon — the “we” refers to human beings who are against “them”, fellow human beings, not viruses. So, how do “we” manage and control “them”?

Should we adopt a scientific approach akin to our response to infectious disease pandemics? Should we apply widespread testing to gauge “others' goodwill” and implement contact tracing to assess “their loyalty to our universal values”? Should we enforce economic sanctions and diplomatic measures to “quarantine” them? Perhaps we should “vaccinate” them with our religion, ideology, culture, ethical norms, and philosophy. Or should we dehumanize them, casting them as enemies — an embodiment of evil necessitating annihilation?

Without philosophical enquiry into the …

A “Philos” of We

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 12:01:45 +0800

A “Philos” of We

As it is now, philosophy seems to exist in an isolated sphere, speaking without being heard by anyone but other philosophers. Who but other philosophers knows the details of Kant’s categorical imperative or Kuhn’s depiction of scientific revolutions? Philosophy of science, ethics, aesthetics — even we as philosophers seem to be limited to a mere sliver of knowledge, talking only amongst other specialists and to-be-specialists. We have overlooked another key function of philosophy as well as just acquiring knowledge: bridging gaps beyond itself.

In this essay, I will argue that, by acting as a common language, philosophy will allow us as a global society to build toward a more cohesive and integrated “we.” First, I will assert the need for a “philos” of we by discussing the crises at hand and considering the current state of the world. Next, I will delve deeper into the concept of a “philos” of we and discuss how philosophy can bring it about by serving as a lingua franca that allows for adequate communication. Then, I will explore how exactly we can use philosophy and implement it so that it can play a more central role in our society in a practical sense, addressing possible counterarguments along the way. Finally, I will describe what an ideal world — tied together by a “philos” of we — might look like, expressing how philosophy will ensure, not just a future, but the best future for humanity.

The Need for a “Philos” of We

The root cause of many existential threats is the ever-widening gap between disciplines, individuals, and societies. Like the cosmic acceleration of our physical universe, the universe containing our disciplines continues to expand, pulling them farther and farther away from each other in the process. Individual disciplines climbing higher and higher means little when progress — and by extension, humanity as a whole — remains fractured. Today’s politics and ethics, for example, seem to be playing a constant catch-up game when it comes to new technologies — a prominent contemporary case being artificial intelligence. What happens when we create something that we cannot backtrack from? What is science without the ethics and politics that are meant to guide it? A runaway car, with a blasting engine and no driver. This disconnect between disciplines — and the resulting chaos that ensues — is not limited to science, ethics, and politics; other disciplines, from medicine to art, seem to be plagued by the same issue. Thus, it is clear that the isolated expansion of disciplines can cause crises that we may not be able to fix, spelling disaster for humanity.

Like the cosmic acceleration of our physical universe, the universe containing our disciplines continues to expand.

In addition to a disconnect between fields, a more general disconnect …

Philosophy and the Climate Crisis

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:01:45 +0800

Philosophy as moral thinking?

As the climate crisis has become the “defining issue of our times,"¹ philosophers are increasingly devoting their efforts to analyse such an issue. Quite often, philosophers suggest that the best way philosophy can address the crisis is by teaching people to do the right thing – or better, what the right thing to do is in the first place. Simply put, the primary role of philosophy seems to be that of promoting moral education.

As Kieran Setiya puts it, philosophy, “improves our moral thinking” by asking “abstract and existential [questions]” such as “why would we care about the survival of humanity?” By doing so, philosophy highlights the importance of caring for those who are most vulnerable to the effects of the crisis, as well as for future generations and non-human beings. Accordingly, philosophy exceeds the domain of politics or techno-scientific assessments, bridging the gap between theory and practice and providing us with universal moral guidelines to think and act more justly. Crucially, moral thinking helps us in “maintaining hope for the future” instead of “continuing to act without it."²

Along these lines, David Charles contends that philosophy should promote an ethics based on empathy and hope to counter the alarming lack of climate action by both individuals and institutions. Philosophy should then teach people to “take action out of virtue, out of care for the planet, ourselves and our families, and out of empathy for our fellow human beings."³ Through moral education, philosophy becomes a beacon of hope and a moral guide pointing towards ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ – so to speak – and a better future. By enhancing individual and collective moral thinking, people will have a better understanding of the importance of climate action, and of fundamental values such as empathy and solidarity. Subsequently, moral education provides people with a stronger set of values and with a sense of hope that is allegedly integral for the future of humanity.

It is potentially misleading to contend that improving our moral thinking is our best possible response to the climate crisis.

However, I suggest that it is reductive to uphold philosophy as a mere form of moral education, and it is potentially misleading to contend that improving our moral thinking is our best possible response to the climate crisis. While this isn’t necessarily what Setiya or Charles suggest (and indeed I do not intend to individually criticise either of them), it is nonetheless fundamental to clarify that philosophy has a much more onerous task than that of teaching people to appreciate and then do ‘the right thing’ – hence giving people hope for the future.

Instead, philosophy must play a primary role in providing not simply a strong array of moral …

The Surprising Threat to Human Society

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:01:45 +0800

When I was an undergraduate, a friend told me that, if you go to any article in the English-language version of Wikipedia, then click on the first link in the article to another Wikipedia page, then click on the first link in that article, and so on, you will, within 30 iterations, arrive at the page for philosophy. It’s pretty much true — now confirmed scientifically. Try it with the word, ‘Paris’, for example. The first linked term on the page for Paris is ‘capital’. The first linked term on the page for ‘capital’ is ‘municipality’. Then: administrative division; sovereign state; state; political; making decisions; psychology; mind; thinks; cognitive; knowledge; awareness of facts; awareness; philosophy. Or try it with the word, ‘cabbage’. Cabbage; cultivars; cultivated; etymology; morphemes; linguistic; language; communication; information; abstract concept; rules; philosophy of logic; philosophy. There are rare exceptions, such as when one gets caught in a loop, e.g., when the first link in each of a pair of pages leads directly to another. (For more on the phenomenon, it has its own Wikipedia page.)

Does this prove that everything in the world ultimately comes back to philosophy? Or does it just show us something about the structure of the English-language version of Wikipedia? The former would exaggerate things, but the latter is too modest. After all, something must explain why it is that all of these hyperlink chains in Wikipedia lead to the page for philosophy rather than any other.

Does this prove that everything in the world ultimately comes back to philosophy?

What it does demonstrate, I think, is that philosophy is essential to humans' efforts to understand the world. If you really want to understand something — what it is, how it relates to other things, if and why it is important — then philosophy is unavoidable. This is why the hyperlink chains in Wikipedia take you to the philosophy page. You cannot ask many questions about a topic before you encounter deep theoretical issues.

If humanity is at risk, then, and if we want to understand why it is at risk and what we can do about it, then philosophy seems like a good place to start. If we really want to understand the issues, we will find ourselves doing some philosophy soon enough anyway.

◊ ◊ ◊

The future of humanity is at risk. The threats are manifold. But the issue is not only about the future of humanity qua species — though some of the threats, like climate change, war, and perhaps eventually challenges posed by AI — really do threaten the survival of the species. We should want to do more than ensure the continued existence of homo sapiens. The issue is also about ensuring that the continued existence of homo sapiens will be in a human society, or human societies, worth having. This should not be taken for …

In Praise of Misinformation

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 14:31:20 +0800

There have been increasingly clamorous calls for the banning, removal, or controlling, or censoring of ‘misinformation’ as an enforced general policy. This may be through law backed by punishment. But what does this mean? The calls seem also to be suggesting that something new and perilous is happening in human life that was not there before. That now, because of misinformation, something especially harmful is occurring.

The fashionable word ‘misinformation’ is not one I like as it comes loaded with an assumptive catch-all normative condemnation and is ironically misleading, to the point that it is in itself an example of putative misinformation – but as it is in use one has to deal partly in its currency. By coining the word ‘misinformation’ there is the suggestion that something ominously new is happening when in fact there is not.

It would be wrong to give a list of ‘examples’ of misinformation – though that is how discussion of it is often done, presenting lists of question-begging presumptive cases that reveal the author’s own present assumptions – for that would only precisely stir a cauldron of claims and counter claims in distracting detail, drawing one away from the question of whether controlling misinformation generally makes sense. All the compiling a list of examples would do is air the prejudices and assumptions of the person doing so.

Banning misinformation essentially involves banning people from getting things wrong.

Banning (let us just stick to that for now) misinformation essentially involves banning people from getting things wrong. It is banning people making mistakes. This is clearly absurd. Nor is something new happening. Human beings have always got things wrong and always will. There is no convincing sense in which people getting things wrong is more harmful now in the history of the human race than it was in earlier times and epochs. It would be like proposing a general ban, or ‘war on’, wickedness or naughtiness.

A small aside. One must distinguish ‘misinformation’ from ‘disinformation’. Misinformation involves getting things wrong, that is, thinking true and spreading as true assertions or claims that are false, unaware that they are false. Disinformation involves not getting things wrong but deliberately spreading as true claims or assertions that are false while aware that they are false. Although lying is a complex term when looked at closely, disinformation is close to just lying, an attempt to deceive knowingly, something that may happen for various nefarious purposes, or even putatively benign ones. I shall concentrate on misinformation here but will note that the idea of trying to ban generally people deceiving each other is equally absurd, ill-conceived and implausible as that proposed for misinformation, deception being a feature of human life since humans first walked the earth. But no-one …

Verdict

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 12:01:45 +0800

We, the Jury, duly impaneled and sworn, upon our oaths, do find the defendant, of her own free will, as to Count One, guilty of First-degree Murder. Four jurors find the Act premeditated. Zero jurors find the Act a felony murder. Eight jurors find the Act both premeditated and a felony murder. Signed by Jury Foreperson, Juror Number 12.

Remaining members of the Jury, I’m now going to ask you individually if this is your true and correct Verdict. Please respond yes or no. Juror Number 11, is this your true and correct Verdict?

YES.

A singularity of infinite density and temperature unfolds. The Big Bang reifies the Universe. Spacetime expands. Subatomic randomness paradoxically conceives causality, inescapable laws of nature. The Universe cools. Gas clouds, stars, galaxies form. Earth forms. Across the planet, various molecules, her ancestors, begin to self-replicate.

Juror Number 10, is this your true and correct Verdict?

YES.

Earth’s merciless environments destroy innumerable lines of self-replicating molecules. A handful endure and grow more complex. DNA, genes, bacteria, archaea, eukarya form. Her ancestors begin to have sex, further protecting their evolving genes from extreme environmental changes. Consciousness and intelligence boom among her predecessors to maintain warm bloodedness, regularly acquire nutritious food, compete for mates. Her ancestors select mates with genes that actuate high levels of violence.

Juror Number 9, is this your true and correct Verdict?

YES.

Her ancestors begin to predict the consequences of their actions on the world, increasing the inclination for premeditated violence and mating success. The frontal cortex of her predecessors grows larger, capable of reason and developing convincing yet imperfect explanatory models and metamodels of the world. Her ancestors create superstitions to fill in gaps within these models when empirical evidence is either unavailable or incompatible.

Juror Number 8, is this your true and correct Verdict?

YES.

Her predecessors dominate the animal and plant kingdoms as nomadic pastoralists. They invent religions, moral codes, warrior classes. Her ancestral tribes compete for resources, begetting cultures of honor, retributive violence, clan vendettas. Tribal elders intuit the notion of free will to promote adherence to religious and moral codes, foundations of the societal values in which she is raised millennia later.

Juror Number 7, is this your true and correct Verdict?

YES.

She is a fertilized egg. The MAOA gene, the “warrior gene,” is passed down to her. It increases her propensity for antisocial behavior and disproportionate aggression. Her father abandons her pregnant mother, whose elevated stress hormones induce permanent epigenetic changes in her fetal self. Her amygdala, the “fear center” of her fetal brain, is more prone to excitability. She is destined to a life of overabundant stress hormones, chronic …

Irvin Yalom: The Spinoza Problem

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 12:01:45 +0800

Irvin Yalom’s (b. 1931) The Spinoza Problem: A Novel (Basic Books 2013) intertwines history and philosophy, offering a fresh perspective on two distinct but connected lives. Yalom masterfully blends historical fact with fiction, crafting a narrative that explores profound philosophical questions through the lives of two men separated by three centuries. The novel centers on the intriguing “Spinoza problem,” weaving together the stories of Nazi officer Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946), who corresponded closely with Hitler, and the Jewish philosopher Spinoza (1632-1677), who lived in Amsterdam, a city more liberal than other European cities at the time. Despite the vast temporal gap between their lives, Yalom skillfully intertwines their stories in successive chapters, making the reader feel the continuity of the story.

Yalom, I. (2013). The Spinoza Problem: A Novel. Basic Books, 336 pages, 14.76 USD, paperback, ISBN: 978-3-442-74208-0.

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Alfred Rosenberg pursued a “Spinoza problem” as it is extraordinary to him that a Jewish man could produce such ideas and be mentioned in Goethe’s books. This fascination is evident when he reflects: "…My professor claimed that Spinoza was the most intelligent man who ever walked the earth. And yet how could such thoughts have come from a Jew?" (Yalom p. 148). This quote illustrates Rosenberg’s deep-seated anti-Semitism and the cognitive dissonance he experiences reconciling Spinoza’s genius with his own prejudiced worldview. During World War II, his Einsatzgruppe started searching for this enigmatic man’s (Spinoza’s) library.¹ Rosenberg was deeply curious about the books Spinoza read during his lifetime and what inspired his thoughts.

While Rosenberg was fixated on uncovering the secrets of Spinoza’s library, Yalom simultaneously delves into Spinoza’s personal life, focusing on his character, thoughts, and most significantly, his excommunication.² Instead of using the word excommunication, Yalom employs the Hebrew term cherem³, which more accurately conveys its meaning.

The debate regarding Spinoza’s excommunication (cherem) continues to this day.

The debate regarding Spinoza’s excommunication (cherem) continues to this day. According to Steven Nadler, the exact reasons for the cherem remain unknown.⁴ There are various claims about Spinoza’s excommunication; one addressed in Yalom’s novel suggests that Spinoza went to the Dutch court instead of the Jewish court for a case. Yalom emphasizes the magnitude of this incident in a conversation between Spinoza and his brother Gabriel, where Gabriel says to Spinoza, “Bento, our father is dead; our older brother is dead. You are the head of the family. Yet you insult us all by turning to the Dutch court” (Yalom, p. 34). It indicates the …

How Many Cows Does It Take?

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 12:01:45 +0800

The Cow Trolley Problem

You are probably familiar with the Trolley Problem, one of the most famous ethical dilemmas still being debated today. It presents a moral dilemma where a person must choose between two outcomes: diverting a runaway trolley to a track where it will kill one person or doing nothing, allowing it to kill five people. The scenario explores utilitarianism (maximizing overall good by saving more lives) versus deontological ethics (upholding moral principles, such as not actively causing harm).

Here, instead of five people versus one person, the trolley is heading toward n cows and diverting it will kill one person.

Since this problem was introduced, many other variations have emerged, adding to the dilemma and making the Trolley Problem more thought-provoking in different ways. One dilemma I have found particularly interesting involves swapping the five people on the track for cows.

Here, instead of five people versus one person, the trolley is heading toward n cows and diverting it will kill one person. The value of n represents the number of cows at risk. The question then becomes, Is there a value of n cows for which you would pull the track switch, and if so, what is it?

This dilemma expands the ethical horizon and invites us to consider how we value human and animal lives. Including animals in the equation challenges us to re-examine our beliefs about moral worth, speciesism, and our ethical obligations to non-human creatures.

What is the Ethical Balance Between Animal and Human Lives

One of the core questions posed by this variation of the Trolley Problem is the comparison between human and animal lives. In the traditional scenario, the moral dilemma is framed around humans exclusively, leading many people to automatically assign higher moral worth to a person over several cows. But why should that be the case?

Philosophers like Peter Singer argue from a utilitarian perspective, suggesting that the interests of animals should be given equal consideration to humans. In his book Animal Liberation, Singer criticizes speciesism, the belief that human lives are inherently more valuable than animal lives. When faced with the dilemma of whether to kill one person or save n cows, the ethical framework changes depending on the number of cows and the value one places on sentient life.

For some, killing one person to save a large number of cows might seem acceptable.

For some, killing one person to save a large number of cows might seem acceptable, especially if those cows are seen as sentient beings capable of suffering. For others, the sanctity of human life trumps any number of animals, which brings us into deontological territory—suggesting that killing one person, even to save countless animals, is morally impermissible.

When Personal Relationships or Attributes Matter

An ethical dilemma such as this is rarely solved in black-and-white terms. The Trolley Problem …

Still Against Veganism

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:01:45 +0800

This is a reply to the article Nițoaia, P. (2024, July 12). Embracing Kindness. The Moral Argument for Veganism, which appeared here on Daily Philosophy. We recommend looking at the original article for context first:

Petrică Nițoaia: Embracing Kindness

Ethical arguments against veganism are examined and refuted.

Which animals, or group of animals, have the best lives? Certainly not those victims of factory style meat production. This whole business should be ended.

But think of the animals in the relative freedom of a humane farm, and then think of wild animals, and then companion animals or, as we used to say, pets. Best lives? I say it’s those in the first group. There are farms, and farmers – there are many where I live – geared to taking animal welfare seriously; these animals live in ample space, with other animals of their kind, they’re given appropriate food, shelter, health care. Their quality of life is generally high. The quantity of life is much less than it might be, of course, but they typically live longer, and much easier than wild animals. Watch almost any nature programme and you’ll be glad you’re not a wild animal. Companion animals live the longest lives, but they’re often too long, as their owners, for selfish reasons, strive to keep them alive even when their best days are gone. Their food is often inappropriate, and they’re too often left alone. Maybe it can be ok to be a pet, but you’d want to choose your owner.

What should we think about pain? I think it’s always bad, bad in itself, or intrinsically, even if it’s sometimes useful, or good instrumentally. And so of course, I think it’s always bad for animals, and that we should want animals – all animals – to have less pain, and a high quality of life. But I think also, and controversially – and I argued this in ‘Against Veganism’– that a sudden and painless death isn’t bad for animals. So I don’t think it’s bad for farm animals that they have relatively short lives, and are killed, painlessly, before their time. Petrică Nițoaia, in discussing my paper, unsurprisingly takes issue with this, claiming that even if I’m right to say that animals don’t have an express desire to live, still it can be, and very often is, in their interests to live, and so against their interests, and so bad for them, to die. Even if most animals, unlike us, lack self-consciousness they all, like us, have a strong survival instinct.

This doesn’t do it for me. Trees have a strong survival instinct, searching out water with their roots, fighting disease, growing protective tissue over wounds. We might say that death is bad for living things – premature death anyway – without thinking it’s bad, or a bad thing, that they die. We might think, …

The Hermit of the Lonely Loch

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 12:05:45 +0800

Loch Treig is a deep freshwater loch, fourteen kilometres from Ben Nevis, in a steep-sided glen east of Fort William. In Gaelic, the name apparently derives from a word meaning ‘abandon’, appropriately enough for a place also known as ‘the lonely loch’. Submerged under its waters are two hamlets, sacrificed when the loch was made into a reservoir. A 19th century travel guide describes it as “a most striking sheet of water”, bordered by “precipitous hills.” It is also home to a hermit, whose story is told in the recent book, The Way of the Hermit (Amazon UK, Amazon US, Publisher).

Ken Smith, The Way of the Hermit: My Incredible 40 Years Living in the Wilderness. With Will Millard (London & Macmillan, 2023). ISBN: 9781035009824, 256 pages.

Ken Smith, the ‘Hermit of Treig’, was born in Derbyshire, in 1947, one of four children. His youth was one of extreme poverty, but, like many of the post-war generation, marked by an appreciation of ‘graft’ and camaraderie. It also instilled in Smith a “lifelong sense of duty to record all my comings and goings”, a habit he continues as a prolific diarist and photographer. Quiet and introverted, he was possessed of a love of nature — a presentiment of his later life. Aged twenty-six, he was violently assaulted by a gang, suffering severe injuries and memory loss. After weeks recovering in hospital, his psychological recovery took the form of committing to travelling — his “wilderness days” — to never again put himself into a position where others could cause him such suffering. Initially with a friend, later alone, Smith travelled through the west of Canada — British Columbia and the Yukon Territory in the sub-arctic regions. Dodging cougars and escaped convicts, such travels taught important lessons of self-reliance, as well as furnishing him with the skills needed to survive.

Dodging cougars and escaped convicts, such travels taught important lessons of self-reliance, as well as furnishing him with the skills needed to survive.

On one of his occasional returns home, however, Smith discovered his father had died. He fell into a depressed grief, having missed the death and the funeral. When not travelling, he worked in the UK in construction, until an accident put paid to that, and, later, as a ghillie, “a real steward and scholar of the land”, guiding and assisting those on fishing and hunting expeditions. Eventually, however, he had enough of even these arms-length connections to mainstream social life. Cities, he found, were “suffocating places”, full of “busy, mistrustful people.”

Unable to live at ease in such places, Smith went to seek out something that afforded what he found in Canada — “a rarefied sense of belonging”, eventually finding it in the Scottish Highlands. This choice of …

Boltzmann Brains and Epistemology

Sat, 27 Jul 2024 09:35:51 +0800

Entropy

Entropy is one of the most interesting concepts in physics. It has sometimes been defined as the amount of disorder in a system or our lack of knowledge of the system. It is remarkable that entropy, a technical concept ubiquitous in physics equations, can be described in such non-scientific ways. Because of its high level of intuitive meaning, it has inspired quite a few flawed arguments. One notable argument is the theory of Boltzmann Brains, which claims that all our memories and experiences are false byproducts of random chance that will cease in an instant. While this argument is scientifically sound, it makes an epistemological error, meaning that it does not correctly understand how we know things. The refutation of this argument points to the significance of conscious experience and the importance and primacy of philosophy in understanding science.

The multiplicity is the number of indistinguishable possibilities that could cause the results we observe.

Entropy can be calculated with a concept called multiplicity. The multiplicity is the number of indistinguishable possibilities that could cause the results we observe. For instance, consider a friend who tells you that she rolled two dice, a red one and a green one, and added the numbers together. If your friend tells you that she got a four, there are three possible ways in which this could happen: the red die has a three and the green has a one, the green die has a three and the red has a one, or both have twos. In this case, the multiplicity is 3. In contrast, if your friend tells you she got a two, there is only one possibility, namely both dice have a one. Thus, the multiplicity would be only 1.

From this concept, one can see why entropy is sometimes called our lack of information about a system. When the number given has low multiplicity, for instance the number 2, you know the exact value of each die. On the other hand, if there is high multiplicity, you know very little about each individual die. Entropy tells you how little information your friend’s number gives you about the value of the dice.

To see why entropy is called disorder, it helps to consider a toddler’s house with a fenced off corner for toys. When the house is orderly, all the toys are in the pen. If you know all the toys are in the pen, you have a good idea of where each one is. There are not many possibilities for the positions of the toys, thus the system is in a low-entropy state. On the other hand, if the toddler is allowed to run wild, picking up toys and randomly carrying them until he feels the urge to drop them, the toys will eventually become spread throughout the whole room. In that case, the system would be in a high entropy state. This is why entropy is associated with disorder.

One of the most fundamental results in all of physics is the second law of thermodynamics which says that the entropy of a closed system can either increase or stay the same but not decrease. This …

Embracing Kindness

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 19:35:51 +0800

You don’t often see thinkers dedicating more than passing remarks against veganism. After all, being kind to animals is not a controversial attitude. On moral and practical grounds, dismissing veganism is not easy. That is why I appreciate Christopher Belshaw’s article Against Veganism, which offers a more thoughtful list of arguments. They are more serious and interesting than the usual talking points vegans are met with.

The article proposes that there are certain situations, outside of self-defence or obvious necessity, where killing and rearing animals for human use is acceptable. The author is careful to mention that ‘the bad practices rife in intensive farming generate powerful arguments against meat, dairy, eggs.’ And I agree - one does not have to be vegan in order to oppose the cruel ways animals are treated on factory farms. This, of course, already means most of the farm animals alive now are mistreated, even by his terms. Belshaw argues there are better ways of doing things.

Interestingly, he lists stronger arguments in favour of killing rather than rearing animals. Let us check them all, one by one. The main points of each argument are quoted directly from the original text.

Arguments Permitting Animal Killing

Painless death is not bad for animals

Even if animals can have overall good lives, such that the pleasure outweighs and compensates for the pain, it is nevertheless not bad for them painlessly to die. […] Because, unlike us, animals lack a consciously-formulated desire for survival. […] So it’s not bad that they die prematurely. Maybe we should concede that self-conscious animals such as whales, elephants, chimps, even dogs, are different here. But these are not the animals we eat.

If only Belshaw did not go into details. Whales, elephants, chimps and even dogs are animals that people eat on a regular basis. This is not only about isolated tribes forced to hunt chimps or the eating of dogs frowned upon by most Westerners. Species of whales have been hunted to extinction and are still eaten in wealthy countries such as Norway or Japan. Only because of overhunting and large efforts from activists are such animals now protected by law.

Photo by Tanner Yould on Unsplash.

Farm animals such as pigs, cows and even chickens (Marino, 2017) have been shown to be as intelligent as dogs or young children. There seem to be solely cultural reasons to prefer some meats over others, not moral ones. A moral standard of refraining from killing ‘self-conscious animals’ would rather lead to veganism (and not towards killing animals that also conveniently happen to be commonly eaten in a particular culture).

Now, we can safely assume happy humans who have a ‘consciously-formulated desire for survival’ want, well, to continue existing. As for animals, one may argue they do not possess such desires, save for ‘whales, elephants, chimps, …

Liberty, Democracy, Justice

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 09:35:51 +0800

The first stanza of William Butler Yeats' much quoted poem, “The Second Coming,” contains the words:

“Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…
The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

This declarative can be applied to democracy as an interrogative: can democracy hold in tension “liberty and justice for all”? Plato provides perspective on this question.

Can it be that Plato is not to be painted as a fascist or totalitarian collectivist as is typically his fate?

By no stretch of the imagination can Plato’s Republic be read as a treatise advocating liberty or for that matter democracy. What most people don’t realize is that Plato has issues with democracy because of liberty. But it is how he construes liberty in the context of democracy that creates problems and thus misunderstandings. And this view is fostered by when and where he was living at the time of his works, the Republic, the Statesman and the Laws – all of which impinge on his view of the relationship between freedom, democracy and justice.

Can it be that Plato is not to be painted as a fascist or totalitarian collectivist as is typically his fate?

Athens at this time was really two cities, a testament of class division. Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War bears witness to the bitter arguments waged between rich and poor that augured against them in the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League. Public opinion in democratic Athens was completely free and unhindered, incredibly malleable, shifting here and there depending on what the popular position was. This circumstance and the city-state of Athens condemning to death his friend Socrates, provided the rough contours of Plato’s jaundiced view of democracy.

For Plato, the overriding principle to cultivate in society was not liberty (freedom), but justice. And to fully understand Plato, one must realize that he feels the same way about us – the people in that society. We, individually, are held to the same standard as society. And this parallelism between society and the people which compose it is what causes much of the confusion about his writing.

Plato offers no utopian political theory. As a former academic who advocates classical liberalism and has taught from the Republic many times, please know our philosopher is no libertarian, but neither is he fascist or totalitarian. As you will discover, Plato embraces a number of ideas that are amenable to the interests of classical liberalism.

Plato’s Metaphor for Justice

In the Republic, Plato speaks of society in metaphorical terms as “our city of words.” The dialogue is essentially about justice as a human virtue. When Socrates (the character Plato uses to make his point) is confronted with the question of whether the just life is the happy life, he suggests that we consider a just city, first. This is a hypothetical city that is, by …

James Tartaglia: Inner Space Philosophy

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 01:35:51 +0800

Tartaglia’s sometimes uneven exploration of how philosophy could be popularised by introducing more varied forms of philosophical storytelling to it is hugely amusing and entertaining at places, but it also has parts that don’t quite live up to its promise.

Tartaglia, James (2024). Inner Space Philosophy. Why the Next Stage of Human Development Should Be Philosophical, Explained Radically (Suitable for Wolves). IFF Books. 282 pages. Kindle: 14.99 USD, Paperback: 22.95 USD. Get your copy here: Amazon US — Amazon UK — Publisher’s website

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The book

It took me a long time to make up my mind about whether I should review this book or not. On the one hand, it is an interesting book in places, and fun to read. On the other… well, read on.

This book makes a case for the next stage of human development being philosophical, that is, for the human race to become a philosophical people. … The philosophical awakening I envisage, however, will obviously not result from a change of consensus in the increasingly marginalised discipline of academic philosophy. Something much, much bigger would have to happen before a widespread philosophical awakening could possibly come to seem like a practical and prudent goal. Well, as it so happens, something of that much, much bigger kind is indeed going to happen before very long: thoughtless technological development will transform human life in the 21st century in some manner or another, that much is for sure, and based on the current evidence, I and many others think the most likely direction of travel is to inner space. I want philosophy to reinvent itself so that it can follow us inside. I think we will need it there in abundance, and I have written this book to inspire thought along these lines.

These sentences from the first pages of the book already hint at both its good and its more problematic aspects.

First, this is not a shy, meek, or humble book. The author is out to change philosophy forever. In one chapter towards the end of the book, he imagines a scene taking place in the far future:

It was spring 3389 in London, England, Earth, Sol, in the UH C-Space (the common space of the United Human virtual reality). Zemina was pacing up and down in her glass-walled penthouse apartment, looking and feeling irritated as she repeated to herself the following statement: “Tartaglia’s true message was a summons to authenticity, but not for them. It was a visionary call out to his distant descendants — he was calling out to us!” She abruptly halted and picked up the beautiful hardback copy of Inner Space Philosophy which had been resting on her blue crystal table…

You have to admire the self-confidence of someone who sees his book being discussed by people 1350 years into the future. Projecting this to the past, it’s like us talking about a book of the year 674. Well, …

It's OK to Major in English or History

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 09:35:51 +0800

I have reached that time in life when my child is choosing which subjects to study for exams. As most parents acknowledge, our influence is limited and must be exercised through intricate ‘nudging’ that would make an economist proud. But in which direction should we nudge? Computer science, engineering and robotics are winning the PR war. Who wouldn’t want to work in a flashy office with bean bags and a messianic boss? Who needs history and English when Chat GPT can (approximately) tell you the causes of World War 1?

The number of students enrolling in History and English undergraduate degrees in the UK has declined dramatically in recent years. According to the British Academy, English Studies undergraduate students fell by 29% between 2012 and 2021¹. The story is similar for history, where the number of undergraduates has fallen by 17% between 2014/15 and 2019/20². This broad decline in the uptake of humanities subjects is not restricted to the UK. Last year the New Yorker ran an article stating that the number of History and English majors in the US has fallen by half between 2012 and the start of the pandemic³.

Back in the 1990s…, it was not English professors wringing their hands worrying about the future of their department, it was physicists.

Is it worth betting on an unpopular subject? Yes. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, it was not English professors wringing their hands worrying about the future of their department, it was physicists. Between 1994 and 2004, 17 UK university physics departments admitting more than ten students per year closed. The number of full time UK domiciled students opting to study physics fell by 29% over the same period. Physics uptake reached a low in 2006 before recovering⁴. It seems strange now, with the focus on science and technology, that the study of physics was ever in trouble. Could the same happen to history courses?

The great replacement

It is notoriously difficult to predict what skills will be needed in the future, but just like in the 1990’s we are in the middle of a profound technological shift. Yuval Noah Harari discusses the replacement of humans with algorithms, which will write stories, compose music, and do most of our jobs better than we ever did. He raises the possibility of an unemployable class, who add nothing to society. The figures he gives are startling, suggesting that there is a 98% chance sports referees will be replaced, 97% chance cashiers will, 94% waiters, 91% tour guides, 89% bakers. On the upside, he suggests virtual world builders will be in demand. Surely the best hope of escaping this fate is studying engineering or computer science? Someone will have to build and maintain the AI systems after all, and it may as well be you.

Just because we can automate something doesn’t mean that we won’t pay over the odds for an analogue version.

There are two objections. Firstly, Philip K Dick was on to something with …

Evil: Ordinary or Extraordinary?

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 21:31:20 +0800

The answer to the title question is neither. Much thought has been put into whether the doing of, and going along with, horrendous and ghastly immoral acts is an ordinary or exceptional trait of human beings. Whether the perpetrators are banal¹ or exceptional, whether what they do can follow from an ordinary way of life, or whether their actions have to be derived from rare extreme motivations.

Saying that evil is banal does not imply that some evil actions are ordinary and unremarkable, but that some evil actions come from ordinary motives, and are performed by people who are not radical outliers in terms of human psychology.²

We already feel ourselves lost with the vague but highly fiery infused-with-connotations word ‘evil’. After you say something is ‘evil’, it is hard to know where to go to say any more about it. It tends to be reserved for the apogee of terrible acts, after which, verbally we have nowhere to go, we have run out of higher-level words to express how bad something is. Hence, we tend to say things like an act is ‘just evil’ – the ‘just’ revealing our drying up of further normative moral description. Evil is a word both empty and full.

After you say something is ‘evil’, it is hard to know where to go to say any more about it.

So, setting that aside as a discussion for another day, let us just think of our subject as the variety of acts of systematic extreme cruelty and awfulness directed at other human beings leading them to suffer. Acts which counter the injunction not to use other people merely as a means, but also always as ends, and in the most callous ways, ways that lead to humiliation, pain and death. To treat others as if they are things. Thereby to set aside or suppress what would usually act naturally as a blocking constraint for such behaviour.

Think of whatever examples suits you. I shall not present a list of examples here because they may be contentious, and then we will be lost and sidetracked into evaluating the validity of cases as ones of unspeakable ghastliness, for reasons and excuses are always available if one but only takes a certain stance. I have found, by way of example that most people can gather in a moral consensus of condemnation around, the gratuitous torturing of babies. I will leave it at that. As I say, pick your own case, for the question remains: are such acts performed by extreme and exceptional personalities or are they something that might be done by ordinary people as everyday acts given that circumstances conspire in a certain way? Are the perpetrators of wicked acts monsters or are they just like us? This debate has gone to and fro. But I think there is a way out of it, out of the seeming inability to resolve it, as it is the consequence of a logical, one might say, fallacy or slip.

Are the people who perform evil acts ordinary or extraordinary? Just like other people or exceptional people?

One suggestion is …

To Exist Is to Play

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 22:32:51 +0800

The writer and philosopher Albert Camus was known for his existentialist essays, novels, and love of football. Every intellectually curious football fan is probably grateful for this. I know I am. In this essay, I argue that Camus’s love for football corresponds to his existentialist love for living joyfully and free.

In his unfinished autobiographical novel The First Man, Camus writes about how the protagonist overcame his shame of wearing old clothes in the classroom and “on the playground, where football was his kingdom. But that kingdom was prohibited because the playground was made of cement, and soles would be worn out so quickly that his grandmother had forbidden Jacques to play football.”

Yes, I want to believe; I want to live forever.

Of course, Camus played – even if the punishment meted out by his grandmother’s ox whip was harsh. He was driven by a hungry love of life; as the protagonist says: “I’ve loved life, I’m hungry for it. At the same time, life seems horrible to me; it seems inaccessible. That is why I am a believer, out of skepticism. Yes, I want to believe; I want to live forever.”

Camus’s hunger for life was based primarily on his love for his mother, but also on the simpler joys of life, such as football. It is natural to ask: What is the relationship between the game of football, love for life, and philosophy? Camus himself pointed out – in an article dealing with his younger years as a goalkeeper for the club Racing Universitaire d’Alger (RUA) – that “what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

To some, this may sound too romantic, even blasphemous, as it may seem that linking sports – in this case, football – and philosophy is like mixing oil and water. For example, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges commented, “Football is popular because stupidity is popular.” If this statement is compared with Camus’s, it is tempting to ask whether football is both educational and stupid. My answer is no, although I agree with Borges that stupidity is widespread. Stupidity can be found everywhere, including in football, but football is also much more than a game. For example, football might be a place to learn important truths such as that freedom is a crucial element of love.

Sartre’s discourse “Existentialism is a Humanism” can be broken down into five concepts: Existence precedes essence, Freedom, Responsibility, Anguish and Bad Faith.

Finding a game worth playing

I propose considering football as a possible arena for philosophical reflection in the same way that art, literature, music, and dance are applied to illustrate philosophical arguments. I believe several aspects of football can justify …

Same Again?

Sat, 08 Jun 2024 20:55:45 +0800

Edward made his decision on January 6^th, a belated New Year’s resolution. Although it was sudden, he had been building up to it for months, years even. It would take several more months, too, to tailor and refine the decision before putting it into action.

Edward’s decision was, for the rest of his life, never to spend more than one night in any given place. Each morning he would move somewhere else to sleep. He was, of course, sufficiently pragmatic to accept that it would not always be possible to abide by his resolution. Illness, terrible weather or transport problems might occasionally force him to spend more than one night somewhere.

Edward’s decision was, for the rest of his life, never to spend more than one night in any given place.

He was more worried by the somewhat philosophical question of what counted as another place. Clearly it would be unfaithful to his decision to sleep on one side of a field the first night and the other side on the second night. Edward eventually adopted the following rule-of-thumb: always move at least three miles from one place to a second. If, under certain circumstances, that proved impossible, so be it: it was the intention that mattered.

This was a lesson he had learned from Buddhism – as, indeed, were the reasons behind his decision. Two of the Buddha’s main teachings were that everything is impermanent and that the cause of suffering is attachment to things. After pondering these truths, Edward concluded that they could only be properly honoured through a life of wandering. To be perpetually on the move would be a symbol both of transience and of detachment from everything, from home, belongings, family, friends and whatever else people become attached to.

There were, in fact, some attachments from which Edward admitted he would not be liberated in the foreseeable future. The primary ones were women and alcohol. But he hoped that, once he’d become a wanderer, these desires too would subside and eventually fade away.

It was not only the words of the Buddha that inspired Edward’s decision. He had long been attracted, without understanding quite why, to accounts of wanderers and hermits. The Tang poets of China, for instance, or the Japanese poet Bashō, whose haiku verses were mostly written as he travelled from one inn or hut to another. And he’d always enjoyed the songs of German Romantic composers that celebrated the wanderings of young men averse to a settled, bourgeois existence.

Not that Edward himself, at the age of fifty, was any longer young. He was, however, lean, fit and wealthy enough to embark on his new life. He was well accustomed, from many hiking trips, to sleeping under the stars or in mountain huts. And occasional stays in luxury hotels, in between nights of sleeping rough, posed no financial problem. Thirty years earlier he had inherited a large amount of money after his parents' Bentley plunged down a cliff on the Amalfi …

Global Essay Contest 2024

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 11:55:45 +0800

The Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024 is here!

We are excited to announce the Daily Philosophy Global Essay Contest 2024! This is a unique opportunity for you to engage with philosophical concepts and share your insights in a creative and impactful way. Everyone is invited to participate by submitting an essay: professional philosophers as well as philosophy students and the general public.

Themes & Topics

We welcome original essays of 2500-3500 words in length, in English, on the topic:

HOW CAN PHILOSOPHY HELP ENSURE THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY?

The essays must speak to an educated, yet not necessarily professional, audience. Daily Philosophy’s mission is to educate the public on the methods and topics of philosophy and how to apply well-known philosophical theories to one’s everyday life. The submitted essays must be unpublished and may not have been submitted elsewhere previously.

Deadline: September 1st, 2024, 23:59 GMT/UTC.

Send by email to dailyphilosophymag@gmail.com, subject: ENTRY 2024, and attach the document as a file. No links to online documents (e.g. Google docs or other) are accepted.

Participation is free. There is no submission fee for entries, but we request that you subscribe to the free, weekly Daily Philosophy newsletter before you submit an entry. You have to stay subscribed (for free) until the announcement of the results, if you want to stay in the contest, but you are free to quit your subscription afterwards.

The subscription just means that you will be receiving our weekly email with philosophy articles and news from the contest. We will never send you spam, and we won’t share your email address with anyone. We just need a way to easily contact all the participants.

Submission Details

Exclusive Rights: By participating, you agree to grant Daily Philosophy the exclusive rights to publish your essay and related interviews across all our platforms and partner publications, including our YouTube channel, newsletter, podcast, and website, in perpetuity and in all languages (we may translate your entry and publish it on our partner publications – see the Daily Philosophy website for a list of partner publications).
By submitting your essay, you state that you have all the rights to this article, that it has never been published in any form before, including on your own websites or social media.
How to submit: Send your essay as an email attachment (!) in any common text format (plain text, Markdown, Word) to dailyphilosophymag@gmail.com, subject: ENTRY 2024. No links to online services are accepted, only attached files.
All entries must begin with the full name and address of the author.
Authors must be over 18 years of age.
Participation is free, there is no submission fee for entries, but you need to be a subscriber to the free, weekly Daily Philosophy newsletter to be eligible to participate. You can subscribe for free here: https://dailyphilosophy.substack.com
You are free to quit your subscription after …

What does Philosophy do?

Fri, 31 May 2024 21:05:27 +0800

There is no non-swimmer’s pool in the study of philosophy. No textbook tells students how to study philosophy. Students learn what philosophy is by themselves. Even the departments of different universities do not agree on what philosophy is, and there is also no consensus within a philosophy department as to what philosophy does. For this reason, each student must make up his or her own mind about why he or she should study philosophy.

Theoretical and practical philosophy are separated, with the result that research institutes and academic journals concentrate exclusively on certain areas of philosophy. Philosophical aesthetics are somewhere in between. Some philosophers write thick books, while others publish short articles. Some philosophers see themselves in the tradition of Plato’s Academy, while others would prefer to forget the history of philosophy.

I argue that professional philosophy is always in the tradition of Plato: without Plato’s professionalization of philosophy through the founding of the Academy, there would be no philosophy as an academic discipline.¹ This means that the origin of systematic thinking and analytical problem solving can be found in the Platonic dialogues. However, Plato’s texts do not only attempt to clarify concepts. Above all, the dialogues are intended to stimulate personal reflection and wonder. As a result, these texts cannot be exclusively categorized as philosophy or literature. What is central to the dialogues is that they motivate readers to think for themselves. Every contemporary philosophical text tries to encourage us to think for ourselves, and the study of philosophy should lead to this goal. In my experience, however, this quality has almost been lost during the academic study of philosophy.

What could have led to the fact that the study of philosophy does not encourage independent thinking?

What could have led to the fact that the study of philosophy does not encourage independent thinking? During their studies, students learn to conform to certain orders and deadlines. The content presented to them is merely to be reproduced, and the study of philosophy also teaches students not to genuinely question the opinions of the authorities. Speusippus was Plato’s successor as head of the Academy.² He rejected Plato’s doctrine of ideas.³ The opposite is taught at the universities. Students are taught not to doubt the opinions of their teachers. Even the opinions of fellow students are not to be radically challenged in class. In philosophy, as in any other field of study, students are not allowed to openly express their own opinions.

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture at the Orrery (1766). Derby Museums and Art Gallery, England.

What can students do to think creatively and originally? They must retain the sense of wonder with which they began their studies, and which motivated them to study in the …

Timothy Morton: Hell

Sat, 25 May 2024 21:20:51 +0800

Timothy Morton (2024). Hell. In Search of a Christian Ecology. Columbia University Press. New York. 306 pages (212 pages of text in the main part of the book). Hardcover: 110 USD, Paperback: 21.63 USD, Kindle: 12.99 USD.

Get it here: Amazon US, Amazon UK, Publisher’s website.

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A few times in one’s life, even in one as filled with books as mine has been, one encounters a book that has a special magic to it. That seems to be made from different stuff, different words than those we normally use — or perhaps the same words but arranged in a skewed fifth dimension that one can only perceive from the corner of one’s eyes. A book that points far beyond what the words within it signify, that speaks to a part of the brain that is usually silent, that demands to be listened to using some mystical faculty we all have but that has atrophied in almost everyone. A sixth sense that defines the true artist, the true religious ascetic, the true madman.

From all the books I’ve read in my life, what Tim Morton’s Hell most reminded me of are some of the wilder parts in a Henry Miller novel. If you’ve ever read Henry Miller, you will know the feeling: like a door that you didn’t even know was there has suddenly been pushed open, and a hurricane is now blowing through it into what you thought was the safe place between your ears. This is the closest I can get to describing what it is to read Hell.

From all the books I’ve read in my life, what Tim Morton’s Hell most reminded me of are some of the wilder parts in a Henry Miller novel.

The author

I find it, therefore, quite impossible to give a conventional review of it here. Of course, we can begin with the author, and what Wikipedia knows about them: They are a professor of philosophy, began their career with research on the Shelleys and Romanticism, diet studies, and “object oriented philosophy”. According to another Wikipedia article:

In metaphysics, object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a 21st-century Heidegger-influenced school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. This is in contrast to post-Kantian philosophy’s tendency to refuse “speak[ing] of the world without humans or humans without the world”. Object-oriented ontology maintains that objects exist independently (as Kantian noumena) of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects. For object-oriented ontologists, all relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal ontological footing with one another.

I understand about half of what this paragraph is saying. I hope that there are some among you, dear readers, who understand the other half too. I am not being …

Hánfēizǐ

Wed, 22 May 2024 12:05:45 +0800

Most classical Chinese philosophers accepted a moral history of humankind. Humankind, originally, suffered a miserable existence. Life was precarious. Starvation, storms, wild animals, and more contributed to anxious struggles to survive. Things changed with the sages – a series of culture-bearing geniuses who established the practices and institutions of civilized life, like literacy, agriculture, and the elaborate rituals of social life. From then on, life became peaceful and prosperous, a cultural and moral ‘golden age’.

This romanticised vision of the past contrasted, alas, with the dire realities of the Period of the Philosophers, from roughly the fifth to the third centuries BCE. It was also the Period of the Warring States – the two hundred years of warfare, treacherous scheming and misery that ended when the Qin dynasty unified China. Philosophy in China was shaped by these realities, especially when it came to the practical question of the best response to the chaos of the world. Many schools advocated a kind of ‘return’ to the earlier ideal state. Moral progress, for them, meant returning us to the original state of moral excellence initiated by the sages.

Progress meant going back to what we once were, even if the philosophers had different ideas about the earlier stage and the best way to return to it.

Progress meant going back to what we once were, even if the philosophers had different ideas about the earlier stage and the best way to return to it. Confucians advocated the restoration of the rituals and life of the Zhou Dynasty. ‘I am for the Zhou’, as Confucius announced, since it was, in his judgment, the best realisation of that earlier life. (One eminent scholar calls this ‘revivalist traditionalism’).

By contrast, Zhuāngzǐ interpreted that ritualised form of life as the source of the deterioration, rather than its means of rectification. Rituals, elaborate arts and learning are systems of ‘artifice’, apt to corrupt our inborn spontaneity and goodness. Other schools – the Mohists and Yangists – offered their own views, as did others now lost to us.

‘Legalism’

Ideals of return to the past were decisively rejected, however, by the last great figure of the classical period, Hánfēizǐ. An erudite thinker, he is usually classified as a ‘Legalist’ – a group of thinkers, including Shen Buhai and Lord Shang, whose work Hánfēizǐ synthesised.

As a group, their ethos was what political theorists today call ‘realism’ – an emphasis on the conflictual character of real-world political life. Conflict, plots, schemes and continuous calculations of opportunity and risk inform political relations within and between states. Scheming and treachery drive political life, which puts a premium on cleverness, adaptation, and strategy – the definitive European champion of political realism is Machiavelli.

Hánfēizǐ …

Can You Steal a Culture?

Wed, 15 May 2024 14:13:10 +0800

Main takeaways:

Examples discussed: Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha,” a musician interpreting medieval music, a Marvel editor posing as a Japanese writer, Carlos Castaneda’s fictional anthropological work, and Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Cultural appropriation is seen as more problematic when cultural elements from a less powerful group are taken by a more powerful one.
A paper by Lenard and Balint is used to provide a structured definition of cultural appropriation. This definition includes four conditions: taking, value, knowledge or culpable ignorance, and contested context.
Cultural appropriation covers a spectrum ranging from clearly impermissible to probably unproblematic, depending on various factors such as the intent behind the taking, the significance of the cultural element within its original context, and the effects of the appropriation on the originating culture.

For a long time, we have been watching the public discussion on cultural appropriation, and I know that many writers and philosophers, even guests we have interviewed here on Daily Philosophy, have been reluctant to discuss the topic in public. All the more it is necessary, in my opinion, that we philosophers try to bring some light into this discussion, and that we contribute whatever we can towards clarifying the issues involved.

I started being aware of questions related to cultural appropriation while I was discussing Hermann Hesse’s book Siddhartha. You can find this article on the Daily Philosophy Substack.

Hesse’s India that never was

Hermann Hesse located his story of growth and enlightenment in a fictional (one might say “kitsch”) India at the time of Buddha’s life. The focus of the story is always on the protagonist and his inner development, and Hesse is clearly not trying to give us a faithful image of ancient India and the lives of its people. Essentially, the country is a mere backdrop, a scenery that is adapted and tailored to the needs of the story and its protagonists. The book as a whole has a fairy-tale structure and cast. There is the usual “courtesan with a heart of gold,” the “sidekick” and the “wise mentor,” who accompany the hero on his journey. There are obstacles to overcome, love to be won, a friendship that never ends, temptations that the hero manages to conquer, a “dark night of the soul” in which the hero almost kills himself – and the final moment of enlightenment that justifies the hero’s journey and brings balance and justice back to the universe.

Yes, all those are tropes seen thousands of times in literature, and particularly in the Bildungsroman genre, of which Siddhartha is a prime example. Still, this is a great book. It is thoughtful, tender, insightful, emotionally honest and gripping – written in an almost hypnotic language that ultimately transforms readers and makes them experience Siddhartha’s journey as if it was their own.

Still, …

Taking Pessimism Seriously

Sat, 11 May 2024 11:05:45 +0800

Pessimism today has an ambivalent status. On the one hand, even a cursory glance at the world reveals a depressing abundance of dreadful events, tendencies, and phenomena. Wars, violence, the immense immiseration of human lives, deteriorating democratic systems, the intense destruction of natural environments fill the news. At more personal levels, even relatively good human lives are ones of anxious uncertainty, frustration, overwork, strife, worry and other sources of suffering. Perhaps there are fortunate souls who pass their days in serene calm, but those will be the very few. For the rest of us, a pessimistic sense of our current predicament and its future prospects is rational, to the point of undeniability.

Even relatively good human lives are ones of anxious uncertainty, frustration, overwork, strife, worry and other sources of suffering.

On the other hand, many voices condemn pessimism or – more carefully – condemn the attitudes which they see as associated with pessimism. The problem, for them, will be what pessimism can do to our motivation, hope, and sense of the fixability of the future. Forms of pessimism feeding a self-abnegating fatalism or a despairing passivity should be condemned – the pessimism that stands and stares, say. Other forms of pessimism, however, should be esteemed, since they can rouse us into action. Things are bad, so say these pessimists, but they can be made better, if ‘we’ make things better. Movements, marches, ‘calls to arms’ – these should flow from pessimism into a resolute optimism. The activist must, after all, be a pessimist up to a point. Life is bad – but can be made better.

Optimism and pessimism

How can we reconcile these different attitudes towards pessimism? Well, by thinking more carefully and soberly about the nature and complexity of pessimism. As modern scholars point out, pessimism in its philosophical forms is diverse. Moreover, pessimism can coexist with optimism: the dualism of optimism vs. pessimism – as in the question ‘Are you an optimist or a pessimist?’ – is common but crude. No serious account of the human condition fits into this dualism. Most doctrines of pessimisms are a complex composite of optimisms and pessimisms – one could, for instance, be optimistic about some things, and pessimistic about others, or be pessimistic about the short-term while optimistic about the long-term. Moreover, these optimistic and pessimistic convictions can have more or less specific objects and different degrees of certainty. We should say, then, that a pessimist is someone in whom the pessimisms predominate.

Ian James Kidd: Transhumanism and Misanthropy

Humans are constitutively incapable of virtuous forms of life. Posthumans, of course, can aspire to much more.

This composite model of pessimism helps …

May 10: Happy Birthday, Karl Barth!

Fri, 10 May 2024 13:32:21 +0000

“Grace must find expression in life, otherwise it is not grace.” — Karl Barth.

Today is the birthday anniversary of Karl Barth, a Swiss theologian who had a huge influence on 20th century Christian theology.

Karl Barth (1886–1968) was born on 10 May 1886, in Basel, Switzerland. He studied theology and later became a professor and worked at various universities in Germany. In 1935, he refused to sign an oath to Hitler, and was deported back to Switzerland, where he taught theology in Basel until his death.

Karl Barth (1886-1968)

In 1921, Barth published the second edition of his commentary on The Epistle to the Romans. In it, he argued that understanding God necessitated a radical reorientation — one that centred on Jesus Christ. He rejected anthropocentric and politicised approaches to religion and emphasised divine agency, although later he himself would take part in the political discussions of his day.

Barth always stood firm against the rise of the Nazi state in Germany. As part of the Confessing Church, he authored the Barmen Declaration, which rejected the cooperation of the church with the Nazis. His commitment to biblical truth extended beyond academia, resonating with those who resisted totalitarianism.

His magnum opus was the Church Dogmatics, a five-volume, 9000-page work on theology, which he did not manage to finish. In it, he talks about the nature of God, redemption, and human existence.

Barth became well-known outside theological circles. Time magazine featured him on its cover in 1962 — an unusual honour for a theologian.

The evening before his death, he had encouraged a lifelong friend not to be downhearted, “For things are ruled, not just in Moscow or in Washington or in Peking, but things are ruled – even here on earth — entirely from above, from heaven above.”

Happy Birthday, Karl Barth!

Transfer of Matter

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 17:40:39 +0800

I am the giver and taker of lives, I tell myself as Sophie bounces into the chamber on the low gravity.

“The big day tomorrow, Newton,” she says, stripping down to her bra and panties, revealing her perfect hourglass.

You’ve no idea.

Smiling, I usher her into the sleek, black booth but see, now, that she’s shaking.

“Just relax,” I say. “There’s nothing to fear.” I’ve died twice and been resurrected both times. I lock her in.

Who am I kidding? Every departure could be your last.

I should know: I designed the damn thing!

At the control desk, I initiate the pre-scan and check the results. Pleased to see no body composition anomalies, I walk back to the booth and open the hatch.

Sophie flicks her long, blonde hair away from her eyes. “All good?”

“Perfect.”

Her smile is hypnotic.

For a single, middle-aged man such as myself, she’s everything that could possibly be hoped for in a woman — except for the niggling fact of her marriage!

As soon as she’s left the chamber, Tony barges past, already down to his undies. The way he acknowledges me with a nod and then does leg raises, rather than talk to me, makes me truly wonder what Sophie sees in him. I clear my throat to get his attention, and when he looks, at last, I usher him into the ToM booth.

“Looking forward to home?” I ask.

“Hell, yeah!” he barks in my face.

I lock him in and initiate the pre-scan. Like all humans, 99% of Tony is made up of six elements — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorus — but, boy, he’s missing some pretty basic other ingredients, like manners!

I’ll never forget Sophie’s astrobiologist quip that the most peculiar extra-terrestrial she’s discovered here is Tony.

I unlock the booth and gesture him out. “All good. Don’t forget to fast, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.”

“Can’t wait to get off this rock,” is his way of bidding me adieu.

Miners! There are people who’d die to be on Titan.

Ha! Everybody dies to be on Titan.

◊ ◊ ◊

In my quarters, I gaze through the porthole at the Sun, a lone star in the hazy, beige sky, well aware that the smog denies surface dwellers the best view in the solar system: that of Saturn and its ring. It’s a complete tease to know that it’s out there, so close, but just out of reach…

Tomorrow, Sophie will leave with Tony, contracts expired, never to return. I’ll scan the molecular composition of their bodies and beam their body plans across the solar system at close to the speed of light to Earth, where their replicas will be instantly constructed.

The machine is a work of genius. No one would dispute that. Everyone is enamoured with arrival, of course, but it’s departure that triggers all the fuss. While I recreate a person at point B, I terminate a person at point A. …

Abortion: The Unconscious Violinist Argument

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 04:05:15 +0000

Is abortion ethical? Judith Jarvis Thomson created one of the most well-known thought experiments in modern ethics. In her 1971 paper “A Defense of Abortion,” she presents the thought experiment of the unconscious violinist:

You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you. – (Thomson, A Defense of Abortion)

This thought experiment is supposed to show that even if we agree that a fetus has a right to live (like the violinist undoubtedly has!), we can still defend the mother’s decision to have an abortion (or, in the thought experiment, the kidnapped person’s decision to have the violinist removed).

Sometimes, so Thomson, the right of a person to decide about their own body trumps even someone else’s right to life.

This argument is intriguing because it moves the abortion debate away from the question of whether the fetus has a right to live and towards the issue of the mother’s right to decide about her own life. Too often, abortion is debated in relation to the personhood of the fetus: when its heart begins to beat, when the (Christian) soul enters the fetus, when it begins perceiving pain or when it becomes able to move or interact with external stimuli. All these are important milestones in a fetus’s development, but, according to Thomson, they miss the point. Because even when we assume that a fetus has full personhood rights (as the famous violinist certainly has!) – even then it seems unjust to force the mother to serve the violinist’s needs.

But is abortion ethical?

But if we think about the argument a little longer, all sorts of difficulties start to appear.

First, it seems that there is a significant difference between being kidnapped in the night and strapped to another person without one’s consent, and, on the other hand, having sex that leads to pregnancy. The sexual act is, usually, consensual, and bears an inherent risk of pregnancy of which the consenting partners are (or should be) aware. Nothing like that is true of the forced union with the violinist. Therefore, the argument could only be used in favour of abortions after rape, but not in cases of voluntary sexual activity.

Another relevant difference to the question of whether abortion is ethical seems to be that the fetus is the mother’s own child, while the violinist is a stranger. …

Live Like a Corpse

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 21:05:27 +0800

Miyamoto Musashi.

A samurai turned Buddhist monk

In the year 1700 Nabeshima Mitsushige, daimyo (lord) of the Saga domain, passed away. Yamamoto Jōchō, one of his samurai retainers, claims to have intuitively sensed his impending doom. From Kyoto, he rushed home: just in time to witness Mitsushige’s final moments. The death of the daimyo marked the end of Jōchō’s service.

He stated a desire to die with his lord by committing junshi: ritual suicide by self-immolation. This might, to say the least, strike us as a peculiar retirement plan. But at the time, it was held to be a supreme expression of loyalty. Still, his fellow clansmen intervened. Junshi was too radical even for the samurai of the Edo period and outlawed by both the Saga domain and the Tokugawa government.

Thus, Jōchō became a Buddhist monk instead. In the hills of Kurotsuchibaru, he would spend the rest of his life as a hermit. There, perhaps inadvertently, he became one of history’s most influential martial philosophers.

Ten years after he took the tonsure, a young samurai by the name of Tashiro Tsuramoto sought his council. The two developed a relationship of tutelage. Jōchō taught him his views on Budo: the Way of the warrior, or martial philosophy.

Ian James Kidd: Going Slow

A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life.

Hidden by Leaves

Tsuramoto documented the doctrine over the course of seven years, in a work that would later be titled Hagakure: either translated into Hidden Leaves or Hidden by Leaves. The text only reached the public after the Meiji restoration of 1868. During the twentieth century, it was popularized by the Japanese ultranationalists. They used it as a propaganda tool: a reactionary attempt to instill the warrior spirit of old into their modern military.

Japanese war propaganda.

Unfortunately, the radicalism in Hagakure has led to much atrocity.

It produced fanatics: soldiers ready to die for their country, who simultaneously bore no respect for opponents who were not. The former culminated in the suicidal kamikaze units. The latter in the sadistic prisoner camps erected across the Pacific.

Japanese martial philosophy has thus been mythologized to nefarious ends, but that does not mean it has nothing to teach well-adjusted individuals. Hagakure was first and foremost a commentary on the Way of the warrior. It attempts to capture a noble existence in the face of adversity. And although the average Westerner is not a military person, to each of us life still proves a battle from time to time.

Death and the Way

The most well-known quote from the book is as follows:

The Way of the warrior is to be found in dying.

This is directly followed by:

If one is faced with two options of …

Christopher Hamilton: Rapture

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 01:35:51 +0800

Christopher Hamilton’s “Rapture” is a very pleasant, well-written, intelligent, and inspiring essay on the many meanings of human lives. On the downside, its essayistic nature also means that it somewhat lacks focus and direction. It can be a wonderful, eye-opening book for the right reader and if approached with the right expectations.

Hamilton, Christopher (2024). Rapture. Columbia University Press. 156 pages. Kindle: 9.99 USD, Paperback: 20 USD, Hardcover: 80 USD. Get your copy here: Amazon US — Amazon UK — Publisher’s website

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The book

One can simply feel a sense of coming alive through being in contact with these examples, as one can come alive, for example, in reading great imaginative literature or watching an absorbing and surprising film or contemplating a marvelous painting or the like. Here it is a matter of being vivified by this contact — and it may be nothing more. But that, to my mind, is already a lot — perhaps because that is, after all, in a sense, a way of making space in one’s life for a moment of rapture. Nietzsche said that Montaigne made life worth living, and I think he meant by that that reading Montaigne made him feel he had come alive (…)

This short quote from the introduction to the book could be a fitting description of the book itself. Learned, inspiring, drawing parallels between seemingly unrelated phenomena and thinkers (Nietzsche and Montaigne!), the author essentially describes his own project: How reading Rapture can make the reader “feel a sense of coming alive through being in contact” with the lives presented as examples by the author.

The title of the book, by the way, might mislead some readers: this is not a religious book. It talks about “rapture” in a secular sense: something like the intense perception of one’s life, being-alive to a heightened degree.

… Names from the bestseller list of the spiritually awakened Western reader with Zen leanings.

The examples, perhaps with one exception, are selected to make each a particular point, but also to attract a particular audience by presenting names and topics that can be expected to be irresistible to them: Nietzsche, Werner Herzog, Rousseau, Buddhist retreats in the peaceful English countryside, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Proust, Chekhov, and many, many more names from the bestseller list of the spiritually awakened Western reader with Zen leanings, Leonard Cohen on the car stereo, and one or two Paulo Coelho or Alan Watts books on the shelf. This is not disparaging, by the way: it describes me more than anyone else.

The author

Christopher Hamilton (make sure you pick the right one when you look him up – there are other notable figures with that name) is a Professor of Philosophy and Religion at King’s College, London. He studied philosophy and literature in Germany, worked as a secondary …

Jean Arnaud on AI and the Future

Sat, 06 Apr 2024 19:20:39 +0800

The advent of new technologies and artificial intelligence, with their profound philosophical, psychological, ethical, political, economic, and social implications, prompts us to reflect on human nature and technology, and to define the horizons towards which we are headed. We are honoured to print an interview with Jean Arnaud, a pioneer of the digital renaissance in the fields of art, philosophy, technology, and education. Jean Arnaud is an educator and entrepreneur at the helm of Nova, a company that develops artificial intelligence to accelerate research and combat disinformation. He is also a published author and artist.

DP: Mr Arnaud, welcome to Daily Philosophy! What revolutionary changes are being driven by new technologies like AI and in which areas are they poised to shape our future?

New technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are poised to decisively transform the world we know, much like the steam engine that gave rise to the industrial revolution. The impact of AI can be felt across a multitude of domains.

In the realm of research, for example, AI, like the one we are developing with Nova, ensures researchers access to quality scientific literature and, more importantly, tools capable of accelerating academic research. On a larger scale, the impact of AI involves the development of search engine models based on verified information. In education, the use of intelligent mentors — namely, AIs associated with avatars in VR, AR, holographic versions, or robots capable of assisting students in their learning — has caused a fundamental paradigm shift in personalized learning, allowing students to escape from mass education that has been catastrophic for our democracies. Every citizen must be trained to think, analyze, and create, and must have reached their full potential to participate in the larger community. To put it more philosophically, one must be “rich” in self to be able to give.

In its function of providing assistance and giving advice, AI obviously enables greater performance (which is something society expects from workers, but this is still a philosophy, and as such, a set of values that can always be contested) and will revolutionize the field of work with the creation of new professions — for example, prompt engineers — and with the disappearance of others, resulting in significant decreases in employment, like those recently announced by tech giants, in the name of productivity.

Because AI excels at probing the vast data we collect, which we are unable to use unassisted in order to best address specific problems, AI may be effectively employed in the transportation sector to improve route planning, reduce waiting times, and minimize congestion, for example, as well as in medicine to identify diseases and conditions more quickly and accurately.

Information bubbles tend to restrict a myriad of passions to a few areas of interest.

Of course, the benefits of artificial …

Kant’s Ethics: What is a Categorical Imperative?

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 17:41:19 +0000

Kant’s ethical system is based on the value of one’s motivation rather than on the outcomes or consequences of our actions. Besides a praiseworthy motivation, a morally right action must also conform to a number of rules, which Kant calls forms of the “Categorical Imperative”: to only perform actions that can be equally performed by all and to treat all human beings as ends.

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the greatest philosophers of modern times. His philosophical interests went in many directions. He asked questions like: Are space and time real and independent of human cognition, or are they just creations of our minds? He examined the concept of beauty and tried to make sense of what we find beautiful. But more important than these, at least in a practical sense, was Kant’s ethical theory: the question of how we ought to behave.

There’s a lot that one could write about Kant’s ethical theory, but if we want to summarise it in five minutes, it boils down to one principle:

We ought always to act so that our actions make sense, or, in words closer to Kant’s: so that we act according to rational principles.

Now, what are these principles?

Kant’s first form of the Categorical Imperative

First, Kant says, we must recognise that all human beings are equally valuable. We are all different from stones, plants and animals because we have what Kant calls “autonomy”: the ability to decide for ourselves how we want to act, what choices we want to make, and how we want to live our lives. Animals must follow their instincts, but we humans are free agents, able to even decide to sacrifice ourselves for a cause, for example. This shows that we are, indeed, special. More importantly, we are all of us special in this way. There are no humans who don’t have this ability to be autonomous. Everyone, regardless of skin colour, education, religious beliefs and length of nose, has the same ability to be an autonomous, free moral agent.

Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash

This also means that we have to respect everyone’s autonomy equally. If I do something, then everyone else must also be allowed to do that. I cannot claim to be “special” in any morally relevant way, since we are all equally autonomous beings that must be respected equally. And this, finally, leads us to what is called the First Form of the Categorical Imperative in Kant’s ethical theory (but don’t be scared of the words – the idea is pretty simple):

Act only following that principle of action that you could want everyone else to follow.

(Not exactly Kant’s words, but close enough).

When I claim to have the right to cross a red traffic light, for instance, I should ask myself: could I really want that everyone else also crosses red …

New Video Series: Western Ethics Theories

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 18:20:20 +0800

A new series of Daily Philosophy whiteboard explainer videos has just been published on YouTube. It gives a very short, and hopefully amusing, introduction to the main theories of Western ethics.

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The video series

Western Ethics Theories: The Shortest Possible Overview.

The article

Find the series as one article right here on Daily Philosophy:

Andreas Matthias: Western Ethics Theories

We examine the basic ideas behind the four main Western ethics theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, social contract ethics and virtue ethics.

Andreas Matthias teaches philosophy, currently at an Asian university. He specialises in AI and robot ethics, but also teaches Philosophy of Happiness, Philosophy of Love, AI and Society, Misinformation and the Media, History of Philosophy and Philosophy of Technology courses. He is the author of a number of books and founder and editor of the Daily Philosophy web magazine, the Daily Philosophy weekly newsletter, the Andreas Matthias Lectures YouTube Channel and the Daily Philosophy YouTube Channel.

Andreas Matthias on Daily Philosophy:

What is ethics?

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 03:22:08 +0000

Ethics is the study of how we ought to behave, and why. There are many different theories of ethics, for example, utilitarianism (we ought to behave so that we maximise benefit for all), or Kantian ethics (we ought to treat all human beings as ends). Ethics only becomes relevant when our behaviour affects others and not only ourselves.

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Ethics is everywhere. We are surrounded by ethical problems and ethical dilemmas. In a hospital, you might have multiple patients but only a limited amount of resources, so the question is, whom do you treat first. Or we have countries that are poor and other countries that are rich and both have somehow to share the burdens of global warming. How do we share these resources in a fair way?

These might be some ethics questions.

Think of some situations in your everyday life and whether these are examples of moral behaviour or not. For example, if you think of attending a class, or going to work, or being honest. Are these moral issues?

Most people would probably say to be honest is a moral command. It’s what the Bible and other religions tell you. Being honest is a morally right behaviour, while going to work or attending one’s classes is something one does for one’s own benefit: you want to earn money, you want to earn a degree. But it is not something that we would immediately perceive as a moral action.

So what makes not lying, or being honest a moral command as opposed to going to your classes or eating lunch? You can say “I will eat lunch now,” or “I will eat a cookie every day before I go to bed.” Would this be a moral command or not?

The first thing that comes to mind is that when you think about actions like, I have to tell the truth, I should not kill, I should be loyal to my family, or other commands like that, they have to do with other people. So these are not commands that affect only me and nobody else. While other resolutions, like “I will eat a cookie every night before I go to bed” affect only me; except if this cookie is very unhealthy for me and I’m slowly killing myself eating these cookies, then eating them might affect others who depend on me.

But as long as I’m not harming anyone, what I do in my room when the door is closed affects only me. And there doesn’t seem to be a moral component to this.

So morally relevant behaviour needs to affect others. Morality is about relating to others in a particular way.

Let’s say I’m driving on a private street on my own land. I am free to drive on the right side or on the …

Western Ethics Theories

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 19:20:20 +0800

Ethics is a field of philosophy that tries to sort out which actions are good or right and which are bad or wrong. In this article, we will examine the basic ideas behind the four main Western ethics theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, social contract ethics and virtue ethics.

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What is Ethics? Is the Law Not Enough?

Ethics is a field of philosophy that tries to sort out which actions are good or right and which are bad or wrong. We all apply ethical principles in our lives: we think that telling the truth is good, while stealing is bad, for example.

But is that even true?

If you think about it for a moment, you will probably see the problem. Telling the truth can sometimes be hurtful: you wouldn’t tell your friend that her new dress looks horrible, for example. And stealing, given the right circumstances, can be a good thing. For example, you might have the opportunity to steal a terrorist’s bomb before he can detonate it. This would certainly be an excusable kind of theft.

So if we want to find out what makes an action morally right, we have to think a little deeper.

Some say, we can just follow the law. Aren’t laws supposed to tell us how to act?

But there’s a problem with that. Can you see it? Sometimes, laws can themselves be immoral. They can either ask of us to act in unethical ways, or they can not allow us to act in ways that would actually be morally right. In short: Moral actions can sometimes be illegal. And legal actions might be immoral.

So what actions are morally right but illegal? Say, your child is injured, and you have to drive it to the hospital. It is night and the streets are empty, and you have to cross a wide, empty intersection with clear sight in all directions. The traffic light is red, and you are supposed to stop, but your child in the backseat needs urgent treatment. So you just run the red light and drive on. This is clearly illegal, but it could be seen as morally excusable.

Other actions are legally permitted, but immoral: legal tax avoidance, for example. You have a huge, multinational company that declares that their headquarters are in Ireland, so that they can save on taxes. Everyone knows that this is a lie, because this is so obviously a US company. But what they do is legal, although it hurts those who rely on the tax income: the underprivileged classes who depend on state welfare, which is financed through taxes.

There are many more examples, but that’s enough for now. We can conclude that the laws cannot reliably tell us what is morally right. We need another way to measure that.

Philosophers have, over the centuries, developed different theories of what actions are morally right and wrong and why. In this post, we will discuss the four most important ones:

Utilitarianism
Kantian Ethics
Social contract theories; and
Virtue Ethics.

What about Christian ethics?

There are many …

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

Sat, 23 Mar 2024 19:00:20 +0800

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who criticised modern capitalist society on the basis of Marxist and Freudian arguments. He is known for his books discussing how to create better societies and his analysis of love.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Erich Fromm: Life and personality

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German social psychologist and philosopher who had enormous popular success from the 1950s all the way to the end of his life in 1980. As I mentioned before, I believe that we can understand a lot about how particular philosophers’ theories came about by studying their lives. Similarly to Aristotle and Bertrand Russell (of whom we talked before), Erich Fromm’s life also holds important clues to his later philosophy and social theory.

Born into an orthodox Jewish family in Germany right at the beginning of the 20th century, Fromm experienced all the perverse hatred and violence of the human psyche directly in his own life. In 1934, Fromm was forced to leave Nazi Germany and went first to Switzerland and later to New York, where he started a career as a university professor that brought him to various institutes and universities in the US and Mexico, and finally back to Switzerland, where he also died.

Much of his later work was focused on understanding exactly how such phenomena as the Nazi state could come about and how perfectly sane people could, in a short period of time, be turned into a raging horde of savage killers.

He was not alone in analysing and trying to explain the fundamental trauma of the Nazi state and the destruction it brought about. Hannah Arendt, for example, another Jewish survivor of the Nazi years, in her The Origins of Totalitarianism, also tried to explain how totalitarian states come about and how they can gain the acceptance of the masses. And Victor Klemperer analysed the language of the Nazi state in his diaries that were later published as Lingua Tertii Imperii, or, in the English translation, as The Language of the Third Reich.

Our own world is not charmed and magically safe from totalitarianism.

These are great and wonderful books and it is at our own peril that we have almost forgotten about them today. Our own world is not charmed and magically safe from totalitarianism, and if we want to avoid a repetition of those times, we should learn to be more vigilant and to recognise the early warning signs of a totalitarian society. And such books can give us the means to do just that.

But Erich Fromm was first a doctor and a psychologist, and as such it wasn’t the political structure of totalitarian states or their language that interested him, but the psychological conditions that can cause normal, everyday people to behave in aggressive or self-harming ways. He saw that one cannot explain a society …

Women Philosophers Throughout History

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 13:10:20 +0800

In this article, we give a brief overview of women philosophers from the ancient world and from non-European traditions. In future articles, we will talk more about specific thinkers, including those of the Western or European traditions.

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Women philosophers

It’s not easy to even find reliable information about women philosophers of past times. There are a handful here and there, but they are often centuries apart, while one could most likely name at least one male thinker who was alive at any random year since the time of Diotima. This, of course, is due to the fact that in most past societies women were not educated as well as men, did not have access to universities or other intellectual career paths, and, even when they could express themselves, were seldom taken seriously by their male-dominated surroundings.

With International Women’s Day just behind us, let us now have a look at some women thinkers of the past and from different cultures.

Gargi Vachaknavi (7th century BCE)

Image: Midjourney

Gargi Vachaknavi was an Indian philosopher and debater of the Vedic period who appeared in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣhad.

When the king King Janaka of the Kingdom of Videha held a particular ritual ceremony, he invited all the learned sages of India to participate. The ceremony lasted for many days, and the streets were filled with scholars, holy men and the aroma of sandalwood and other offerings. The king wanted to have a contest to decide who was the greatest scholar, and he offered a prize of cows and gold for the scholar who would show the deepest knowledge of spiritual matters. The famous sage Yajnavalkya, convinced that he was the most accomplished wise man at the gathering, claimed the cows for himself and started to arrange for them to be delivered to his house. Out of the hundreds of sages at the meeting, only eight protested and challenged him to a debate contest – and one of them was Gargi, the only woman among them. In the end, Gargi lost the argument (as perhaps it was unthinkable that a woman at that time would trump the most learned of men), but at least she came second and her name is forever now part of the Hindu classics.

Aspasia (~470–after 428 BCE)

We know almost nothing with certainty of the life of Aspasia of Miletus, a philosopher and rhetorician. She was the partner of statesman Pericles, who led Athens through its Golden Age and the Persian Wars, and she was well-known in Athenian society. But ancient society being what it was, she was often portrayed as a courtesan, and descriptions of her focused on her sexuality and her influence on her famous partner.

The most detailed biographical information we have of her comes from Plutarch (46-119 CE), who wrote about her nearly seven centuries after her death. She was from Miletus, …

The Princess and the Soul

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 08:20:20 +0800

She was a princess without a country, a philosopher without a work. She was called “The Greek” without being one, was better at mathematics than Descartes, but never got to teach at a university, and ended her life as a nun. Descartes admired her intelligence and Leibniz stood at her deathbed, but during most of her life, she was a penniless noble refugee. Meet Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia, daughter of the Winter King.

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The princess and her teacher

After less than a year of his reign, Elisabeth’s father was exiled from his kingdom and this is what gave him the nickname “The Winter King”: a king for one winter, that is. The rest of their lives, the family spent travelling around Europe: first to Heidelberg, where Elisabeth was born, then to the Hague, in the Netherlands, where they set up an exile government of Bohemia.

Despite her father’s continuing attempts to return as a ruler to his country, this dream never came true, and they had to live in relatively limited material circumstances in their exile. What money they had to spend came to them from donations and support from their relations all over Europe, particularly from the British throne – Elisabeth was sister of Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Despite living their lives in exile, Elisabeth managed to attract many of the great minds of her time to her court. She corresponded with churchmen like Edward Reynolds, thinkers and artists like Anna Maria van Schurman, Nicholas Malebranche and Leibniz, and Quakers like Robert Barclay and William Penn, whom she helped escape persecution.

Despite living their lives in exile, Elisabeth managed to attract many of the great minds of her time to her court.

We know nothing of her work as a thinker but what she writes in her letters to Rene Descartes, perhaps the most influential philosopher of modern times. All her thought is contained in the twenty-six letters she sent him, and it is telling that the famous man wrote her thirty-two in return. They always went out of their way to be polite to each other, she seeing herself as the famous man’s student, but Descartes, at the same time, recognising her as royalty, even if her kingdom had ceased to exist by the time they first met.

In her letters, despite her admiring words for the famous man, she is a clear-sighted critic of Descartes’ work. Her criticism predated and foreshadowed what many generations of philosophers would since have to say about the weakest points of Cartesian dualism.

It has often been asked what exactly the relationship between the two might have been. Elisabeth never married, although once she was lined up to. But it turned out that her prospective husband, Władysław IV Vasa, King of Poland, was a Catholic. The protestant Elisabeth, always the philosopher and true to her principles, refused to …

Reasons and Causes

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 21:31:20 +0800

“The two main requirements for philosophising are: firstly, to have the courage not to keep any questions back; and secondly, to attain a clear consciousness of anything that goes without saying so as to comprehend it as a problem.” — Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, p.117. ”

We are not as rational as we think we are.¹ What I mean by this is that we think our beliefs and attitudes, and even our feelings and moods, are more determined by a reasoning process that brings us to them than they are.

We think that we are in control of such mental states through their being the result of a reasoning process over which we have control. We might make mistakes in our reasoning, or reason from false premises, but that is something which we have the power to work at and get right. We are not thereby just brought to a belief or attitude or mood (from now on I shall simply group these under ‘mental stances’) by a series of steps over which we have no control, that rather we are at the behest of.

That process is causal, that is to say non-rational. This contrasts not only with the rational but also with processes that are irrational, that is to say, that involve going against what reason indicates, when going with what reason indicates is what we should do. If a tree falls on someone’s head, what leads up to it is a series of non-rational causal factual events or steps that are neither rational nor irrational, but are rather a matter of what happens or does not happen. Whereas with the rational we are looking at a process, or series of steps that are normative, that is to say, they may involve a judgement or account of what should or should not² be occurring in the process regardless of what in fact does or does not happen. So that if someone writes ‘2+2=’, and we are asked to write what follows the ‘=’, we should write ‘4’. It is not a matter considered as a process of reasoning of the 4 in any way being merely determined by factual causal processes, rather we should write ‘4’ in the normative sense of it being the right answer, and not the wrong one. With processes considered merely as non-rational causal ones, right and wrong, making a mistake or not, does not come up, rather it is simply a matter of what happens or does not happen.

So that if someone writes ‘2+2=’, and we are asked to write what follows the ‘=’, we should write ‘4’.

That we are not as rational as we think we are may seem a disturbing or depressing conclusion, but I shall go on to show why this is not wholly the case, especially if we accept and are aware that we are less rational than we think we are.

First, we must note that we should not, should not want to, control and determine our mental stances, indeed our very lives, in all instances, by reason.

Some things we think of as being appropriately and rightly determined by reason. There are many examples of this, and not only among the obvious such as mathematics. We might be considering …

Kant's conception of freedom

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 22:05:27 +0800

This article introduces Immanuel Kant’s conception of freedom, a conception that emphasizes our duty to critically examine the sources of our wants, desires, and all types of inclinations that act on us, and to scrutinize the social and natural forces that instill these inclinations in us.

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“I remember wanting a family, but was that because that’s what women are supposed to want? How do you know if you want something yourself or if your upbringing programmed you to want it?” So spoke Trinity, protagonist of The Matrix movie.

Trinty’s insight captures a challenge that we all face: We want things, but we do not know whether these wants originate from us or whether they have been implanted in us by society and culture. Was it Trinity who wanted a family, or was she programmed to want a family? Trinity found her answer: she wanted to fight for freedom. She discovered that she was once a freedom fighter, fighting to liberate the world from the exploitation of machines. Then machines imprisoned her mind in the artificial simulated world of The Matrix; in this simulated world, she experienced fake wants and fake needs that distracted her from her real yearning. Trinity eventually freed herself from the manipulation of machines and opted for a life of self-determination and freedom.

We want things, but we do not know whether these wants originate from us or whether they have been implanted in us by society and culture.

Like Trinity, we are all exposed to forces that impose on us artificial wants and needs. If we want to be free, we must critically reflect on these forces. Such a reflection is much needed today as we are realizing the threat to freedom that actors in the current globalized digital economy are posing. Just a few days ago, Nevada’s attorney general initiated a lawsuit against several social media platforms accusing them of functioning as “addiction machines” that exploit and manipulate youth¹, a similar lawsuit was filed in California last year. Emergent technologies, emergent market practices, misinformation, and so many other forces are all converging to deprive us of our agency and turn us into passively manipulated objects as opposed to free agents.

Doing what we want does not necessarily make us free

In the traditional liberal conception of freedom, being free stands for the ability to do whatever one wants without interference or coercion from others. Yet, this conception of freedom is incomplete. Doing what we want does not make us free, because some of our …

A Better Society?

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 14:05:27 +0800

Anarchism has always had a mystification about it. It’s a political philosophy at its origin, but it always runs into trouble with real-world applications. Living Anarchy on a large scale? Unlikely. The idea itself feels impossible. Still, when we consider the historical lineage that planted the seeds for Anarchy, a broad spectrum of both individually and socially liberating ideas reveals itself. Further, one of history’s most overtly radical and violent Anarchists may have synthesized these ideas in a way that anybody can consider and utilize to fulfill themselves.

A World Without Power

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is typically recognized as the first Anarchist, but his ideology was essentially an offshoot of socialism that involved no state interference. Mainly, Proudhon wanted a society where its members mutually offered each other an economic and social safety net without hierarchy, including ethical product trade and abolishing government in favor of communes and labor associations.

Although Proudhon was essential in coining the term and bringing some genuinely radical ideas to the forefront, even his less problematic ideas were far too romantic for any practical application. For perspective, Proudhon deemed all forms of property as physically and mathematically impossible and had an extremely misogynistic paranoia about feminist movements, proving that the patriarchy was a hierarchy that he had no issue with.

Post-Proudhon saw terms like Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Anarcho-Socialism rise in popularity.

Post-Proudhon saw terms like Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Capitalism, and Anarcho-Socialism rise in popularity. This combination of Anarchism, a political philosophy, and the respective economic systems symbolized a critical distinction in Anarchist schools of thought: being an Anarchist was not necessarily meant to fight economic systems; it could also serve as a way to navigate them.

This distinction is crucial because it theoretically allows an individual to identify as an Anarchist within existing socioeconomic systems instead of necessitating that Anarchy replace those systems. In other words, Anarchism could escape the confines of a macro-political philosophy and become more flexible to the individual. These adaptations would eventually create two different yet mutually influential schools of Anarchism: Individualist and Social.

The Crossroads

Individualist Anarchism went on to be influenced by less politically minded philosophical thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner, leading to a greater emphasis on the individual’s efforts and their will than a mass acceptance of Anarchy as a formal system. An Individualist Anarchist would typically shed their perceptions of normative hierarchies in favor of a more fluid and just approach to treating other individuals.

This perspective shift made Anarchy more accessible to revolutionary and social justice movements, as an Anarchist idea of reform in …

Islam in 10 Minutes

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 13:24:55 +0800

How did Islam begin and expand, what do Muslims believe, and what does the daily practice of a Muslim believer look like? Learn all of that and much more right here.

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Background of Islam

To understand Islam, it’s useful to first see where it came from. Islam emerged in the 7th century CE in the Arabian Peninsula, where the Prophet Muhammad received divine revelations from Allah. It is important to keep in mind that “Allah” is just a word in a different language, but it refers to essentially the same God that Christians also think of as the one God.

Despite of all the religious wars and the violent history between the two religions, both Islam and Christianity agree on much of their tradition and assumptions. Both recognise and revere many of the same prophets including Noah, Abraham, Moses, John the Baptist and even Jesus. Muslims even recognise the Bible as a holy book, as long as it does not contradict the Quran. Adherents of both follow similar rules in their everyday lives and aspire to be virtuous in similar ways, and both believe that following these rules will be rewarded after death. Both believe that Jesus Christ was a Messiah who performed miracles, and both believe in heaven, hell and a day of judgement.

Life of the Prophet Muhammad

Islam’s history begins with the Prophet Muhammad. Born in Mecca around 570 CE, he was orphaned at a young age and raised by his uncle, who was a respected merchant in Mecca. Muhammad, too, grew into a successful merchant, earning a reputation for honesty and integrity.

In his early 40s, Muhammad began to retreat to a cave in the mountains for contemplation. During one of these retreats, he received his first revelation from the Angel Gabriel. The revelations continued for 23 years and were later compiled into the Quran, the holy book of Islam. As opposed to the Bible, which was written by many authors and over a long time, the Quran is therefore seen as a direct dictation from God. This is why Muslims believe that it is a more precise revelation of God’s will. This is also why they don’t accept translations as valid versions of the Quran. God’s word is only real in the language and the precise wording in which it was given to Muhammad.

Muhammad’s teachings did not initially gain much traction in Mecca. He faced opposition from Meccan tribes, who controlled the city’s lucrative pilgrimage trade. In 622 CE, Muhammad and his followers migrated to the city which later became known as Medina, where he was invited to lead the community. This journey, known as the Hijrah, marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar.

In Medina, Muhammad’s influence grew. He established a Constitution, which laid down a set of laws for the community, and he became a spiritual, political, and military leader. He …

African Philosophy

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 14:23:27 +0800

The great currents in history and society may often be experienced through the simple things of life. Someone singing a song, greeting a friend, or preparing a meal. Such things may tell us a great deal about a broader culture and patterns of thought. It was like this that I first came to understand the African way of thinking. I should say, more specifically, the Xhosa way of thinking – where the Xhosa people belong to the broader Nguni group of Southern Africa.

I married into Africa. That is, my wife is a member of a Xhosa clan – in fact, a descendant of the great King Mpondo. Year by year, therefore, I visit the clan. The first time that I visited, we travelled to Ester’s childhood home, to meet her parents. After a long journey by car, we reached a desolate plateau. We drove through a farmyard and pulled to a halt. A wiry, bearded man came down a hillside. Ester kissed him on the lips. He briefly took my hand, then dropped it. He didn’t speak to me. He didn’t look at me.

I married into Africa. That is, my wife is a member of a Xhosa clan.

Ester wiped away tears. She said, ‘Where are the potatoes?’ The man said, ‘There are two sacks of potatoes in the shed. But one of them is rotten.’ They exchanged a few more words about potatoes, then the man walked back up the hillside.

‘Who was that?’ I asked. ‘It was my father,’ said Ester. Her father? Why didn’t he speak to me? Why didn’t he look at me? And what happened to a daughter’s customary endearments? ‘Good to see you, Dad. Love you, Dad.’ The talk was entirely about potatoes.

This event stands out for me in my growing relationship with African culture. It epitomises one of the fundamental characteristics of Africa. At first it distressed me, then gradually began to open up a new world for me. It was the problem – a problem to me, as one of European stock – of a lack of verbal articulation. This applies very much to African philosophy, too. At least, it is ‘most controversial’ as to whether African philosophy is, or is not, articulate.¹

There are two ways in which those of European origin are taught to articulate.

On the one hand, we have been taught to articulate our thoughts. In fact, it is more or less expected of all of us to be able to express ourselves on a fairly abstract level. Not so in the African culture I have come to know. The poet, politician, and cultural theorist Léopold S. Senghor said, ‘White reason is analytic through utilisation; [Black] is intuitive through participation.'²

This applies not only to reason, but also to emotion. Psychology professor Maurice J. Elias defines emotional literacy as a means to ‘detect and express’ emotions.³ More specifically, a means through which one may ‘properly label’ them. While, in Africa, detection and expression of emotions happens all the time, labelling of them may …

Nothing

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 22:40:39 +0800

“Lately, every time I ask my wife what’s wrong, all I get is the same old nothing. But I know better, mate. There’s too much packed in that nothing of hers. So I can’t help but wonder, what does she expect from me?” Rooney was complaining while grabbing a beer from the fridge.

“To decipher everything! That’s what’s expected of you, my friend.” Max answered as confidently as he was slicing the eggplant, which he then salted to remove the excess liquid and bitterness and to ensure its silkier texture.

“I guess you’re right,” muttered Rooney, while opening his beer.

“I know what you mean. You can’t imagine the scenes that come to my mind every time we leave our troublemaker home alone, and he tells us he is doing nothing when we check on him.”

“Doing nothing is an art form.”

“Doing nothing is impossible.”

“Well, not impossible!”

“Think about it! We’re always engaged in some sort of activity — we think, sleep, dream, cut onions,” said Max, while chopping onions into fine pieces. “Or we try not to do something, much like I’m trying not to cry from these onions.”

“What about those Buddhist monks? They can do nothing for days in a row.”

“Well, the monks meditate, which is not the same as doing nothing. We may acclaim them for doing nothing, but know this — their nothing resembles your wife’s — it’s a code word for a lot more than you think. Actually, in Sanskrit, the term Śūnyatā, which is often translated as emptiness or nothingness, constitutes the ultimate reality for the Buddhists. And that, I reckon, is far from nothing,” assured him Max, while cutting the tomatoes into perfect cubes and the zucchini into equal rings. He then heated the oil, added a pinch of salt and a sprinkle of thyme. All that, while thinking at the back of his mind how he wished he was like Shiva, with at least another pair of hands.

“But the monks don’t think of anything while they meditate. I’m telling you, they’re the real deal!”

“They may seem so, but what they’re doing is simply not engaging with their thoughts. Plus, they’re positioned in a certain way — sitting, or laying down, or something of the sort. Meditation requires a very strong concentration, which is energy channelled in a certain direction. It’s a verb, after all. Moreover, according to the Buddhists, everything is in constant flux, nothing is ever still. Thus, my friend, it’s not the case that they’re doing nothing.”

“Hmm, when you put it this way — someone seated in a lotus pose with their eyes closed, allowing their thoughts to flow. That’s definitely something,” concluded Rooney. “But then, what’s nothing, Max?”

“Nothing is ever nothing. What a paradox! Everything is …

The Paradox of Fiction

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 22:24:55 +0800

The paradox of fiction asks how we can experience genuine emotions for things that are not real. How we can fear a monster in a horror movie, or shed tears for a tragic hero in a play? After all, we know that these characters are just made up.

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Scared by things that don’t exist?

The paradox of fiction arises from three seemingly true but incompatible claims:

We have emotional responses to fictional characters, objects, and events that we encounter in works of art.
To have emotional responses to something, we must believe that it exists.
We do not believe that fictional characters, objects, and events exist.

The paradox is that we cannot accept all three claims at the same time without contradiction.

If we accept 1 and 2, meaning that we accept that we have emotional responses to fiction and that, therefore, we must believe that these fictional things exist, then we cannot accept number 3 (that we do not believe that fictional things exist). Otherwise we would be both accepting and not accepting that fictional things exist, which would be a contradiction.

We have emotional responses to fictional characters, objects, and events that we encounter in works of art.

In a similar way, let’s say that we accept 2 and 3. Now we accept that, in order to have emotional responses to something, we must believe that it exists. We also accept that we don’t believe that fictional things exist. But now we must conclude that we cannot possibly have emotional responses to fiction, and this clearly contradicts our own experience as an audience for movies or books.

And finally, if we accept 1 and 3 (we do have emotional responses to fiction and we do not believe that fictional characters exist), then we must reject 2, which means that emotional responses do not require existence beliefs. But that leaves us with a riddle: how can it be that we respond emotionally to something that clearly does not exist?

Does fiction really cause emotions?

Let’s see what we can do. How can we solve this paradox? Given our three assumptions, any solution must deny one or more of them in order to resolve the contradiction.

So one way would be to deny claim 1: “We have emotional responses to fictional characters, objects, and events that we encounter in works of art.”

Perhaps we don’t. We could argue that we do not really have emotional responses to fiction, but only make-believe or simulate them. According to this theory, when we watch a horror movie, for example, we play a game of make-believe in which we imagine ourselves to be in the situation of the characters and act as if we are afraid of the monster.

The problem with this theory is that it seems to contradict our experience. When we see a really good monster movie, we are really scared. When the love interest finds a tragic death in the icy ocean, we are really devastated along with the …

The Case for Feeding the Surfers

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 19:20:39 +0800

Universal Basic Income, or UBI, has been a long-standing, long-defended idea of wealth redistribution in society. While its pre-industrial ancestors were more concerned with an equal sharing of fertile land or territory, the idea has since evolved to be the redistribution of the communal wealth generated and owned by society at large.

Also found under the labels of ‘social dividend’ or ‘national dividend,’ the main premise on which this idea rests is the productive capacity of a large group of people, most commonly a state or the world. Seeing as the production of value is a shared, communal effort across all layers of activity, advocates argue that the value produced, to some extent, is also communal and belongs to everyone equally.

In light of this premise, the model implies the regular, universal, unconditional transfer of an equal sum of money to all eligible citizens, regardless of their employment status or other factors.

The model implies the regular, universal, unconditional transfer of an equal sum of money to all eligible citizens.

Of course, most of the work supporting the implementation of UBI or one of its many variations comes from the left side of the political spectrum. Building on the basis laid by Karl Marx about the injustices of capitalism, UBI follows as a rather logical course of action.

However, there is no shortage of support for UBI coming from pro-capitalist schools of thought. Austrian school philosopher Friedrich Hayek famously saw a dire necessity for the existence of some form of social minimum guarantee for those members of society who couldn’t escape poverty by their own means.

Hayek never really shaped a structured case for UBI or anything similar, and all of his remarks on this matter were taken out from some of his lectures. His system did leave sufficient room for the idea, though.

But perhaps one of the most well-articulated liberal cases in favor of UBI comes from the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs. In his “Why Surfers Should Be Fed: The Liberal Case for an Unconditional Basic Income," he starts with a news announcement from 1991 concerning welfare allocation in Hawaii.

At that time, Hawaii introduced a one-year residency requirement for people who wanted to access welfare benefits. This was done in order to discourage so-called welfare hippies, surfers who would come to Malibu to live off of welfare and surf all day.

This initiative was saluted by both Senator Wadsworth Yee, a prominent Republican figure from Hawaii, and John Rawls, the author of the revolutionary Theory of Justice that has set the grounds for most of the liberal political philosophy work following its publication.

The antagonizing attitude against the surfers prompted Van Parijs to wonder whether such actions against them were justified. At the end of his research, the answer was a firm no. In this article, I will explore the liberal argument made by Van Parijs in favor of a UBI. …

Meaning

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:40:39 +0800

Call me Gottlob. And just to make sure we don’t get off on the wrong foot, my name is indeed Gottlob. But what is the actual meaning of names? I know, I know, that’s a tough one. I wonder about it, too. I wonder, as I sit on the deck looking at the brightest star in the sky during the day – Phosphorus. The drops of sweat trickling down my face are as salty as the sea. Have I been out in open waters for too long? I remain so lost in thoughts about the meaning of proper names that I get startled when a young man from the crew exclaims by my side.

“Ah, what a night! Look at Hesperus, sir! Isn’t she a beauty!”

I’m tempted to engage him in a debate about the name of that star – is it Hesperus, Phosphorus, or the same old Venus? Tempted as I am, giving in to such an itch would be a waste of energy. Not that I want to underestimate the lad, of course. In any case, the ship docks, and I must interrupt my musings.

“Captain, where are we?” I inquire.

“The town is called Ulpia. We’ll spend the night here. Tomorrow we set sail around noon, so you’ll have time to take a stroll and explore,” the captain replies.

Despite the late hour, we find accommodation in a guesthouse in the center of the town. The hostess is friendly and treats us to some local delicacies. While we’re enjoying the warm meal, she tells us stories and myths about the town.

“Around here, instead of numbers, houses have names,” she begins.

Ah, talk to me about names, I think to myself while savoring the stew.

“Word on the street is that the man who proclaimed himself as what you may consider the first mayor of Ulpia had a peculiar attitude towards numbers,” the lady of the house continues. “He didn’t believe in their sequence, so he prohibited house numbers from following that suspicious logic. Every person’s effort to convince him that one plus one is always equal to two was in vain. Not always, he would reply. Sometimes, when a man gets together with a woman, things may be equal to three, or even four should they end up having twins. If we draw one straight line with a black marker on white paper and then another one parallel to it, how many straight lines do we have? You’d be mistaken if you said two. What about the negative white space between them? Is it not another, third straight line? Such were his arguments. And so, the buildings around here have had names since, well, pretty much forever.”

I almost choke on my morsel. Thankfully, I have it soaked in stew, so I somehow swallow it without causing a scene. What kind of logic is that? I wish I could express my objections on the matter, but that morsel is still sliding down my throat. I’m speechless.

“That’s why, usually, instead of saying, ‘I’m going to visit whoever they’re visiting,’ people around here would say, ‘I’m going to the …

Israel’s Attack on Gaza

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 22:25:45 +0800

For what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?
(Mark, 8.36)

The “Background” here simply sets out the facts familiar to those who have followed the news on Israel’s response to the 7^th October 2023 attack by Hamas; it concludes with a few orientational clarifications regarding the reflections in the subsequent sections. Those reflections are mainly philosophical, exposing some inconsistencies, poor reasoning and immoralities, with a final touch of Kant and Nietzsche.

Background

As a result of Hamas’s attack on Israel, 7^th October 2023, many leading American, British and other European politicians and commentators — including many religious leaders of Judaism and Christianity — have declared support for Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ in attacking Gaza and Gazans, declared by Israel as a war. That attack has been by way of siege, intensive continual bombardments (apart from a brief pause for hostage release) and continuing ground assaults throughout Gaza. The stated aim is to ‘destroy Hamas’, its military power, political leadership and, in some sense, its ideology.

The politicians and commentators have rightly condemned Hamas’s attack, some ‘horrific butchery’, that led to around 1,500 individuals in Israel, mainly Jews, mainly civilians, being killed or brutally harmed — including, as is usually emphasised, some babies, children, the aged and infirm. Nearly 250 were taken as hostages; some have been released, ‘traded’ for Palestinians earlier imprisoned by Israel.

Until the latter weeks of December 2023, many politicians, commentators and religious leaders have appeared somewhat relaxed about the Israeli destruction of Gaza, the killing of thousands and thousands of civilian Palestinians and the suffering, physical or psychological, of approaching two million. Various Western supporters of Israel now speak of there being ‘too many’ civilian casualties: by the end of 2023, well over 20,000 deaths with, no doubt, many more yet to be found under mountains of rubble. Those supporters call for Israel to take greater care to minimize civilian casualties while continuing its military action.

There has been the displacement of numerous of the two million Gazans into crowded refugee camps. They had followed Israeli instructions to move to areas in Gaza declared to be safe, at least temporarily, from bombing. On various occasions the ‘safe’ havens — refugee camps, hospitals, schools and so forth — and the routes to them have undergone bombing, resulting in further deaths, severe injuries and then more ordered evacuations to fresh areas proposed as safe.

Most Palestinians, wherever they be in Gaza, for weeks and weeks have been lacking adequate clean water, food, sanitation facilities, medical supplies, electricity, fuel and secure shelters. The Israeli forces have determinedly destroyed …

The Power of Love

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 09:48:35 +0800

In his book “The Art of Loving” (1956) the psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980) discusses how love is often wrongly perceived as the passive “falling in love.” For Fromm, love is mainly a decision to love, to become a loving person. Through examination of the concepts of father’s love, mother’s love, God’s love and erotic love, Fromm argues that we need to change the way we see love in order to reach happier and more fulfilling relationships with others.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Is love an art?

Erich Fromm found his biggest popular success with a book about love. In “The Art of Loving,” he makes the case that love is often misunderstood as this romantic notion, often seen in movies, of people “falling in love,” of love being something that happens to us without us being able to resist or control the experience. Rather, Fromm says, love is an art. Like any other art, it is something that we have to learn to do: we have to learn and practice love just like we have to learn and practice drawing or playing the piano.

Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving” has been a classic in the philosophy and psychology of love since it was first published in 1956. It’s a highly readable, provocative and insightful book that might just change the way you look at love.

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You can hear the echoes of Aristotle in this. For Aristotle, our whole life is an “art,” in the sense that we constantly have to practice and refine our virtues and our phronesis in order to achieve success and happiness.

Love and responsibility

So just like Aristotle would say that happiness is not just something that “happens,” Fromm would maintain that the same is true of love. If we see love as something that randomly happens to us, we lose the feeling of being responsible for our loves. We could then fall “out of love” as easily as we “fell in love”.

For Fromm, this is a total misunderstanding of what love is about, in the same way as saying that happiness is nothing but the enjoyment of pleasures is a misunderstanding of what happiness is really about.

For Fromm, love is a particular way of relating to others, and my ways of relating to others are in my control, at least potentially. In our (modern, Western) culture, Fromm says, we often think that love is outside of our control, and our languages seem to support …

Art, Its Value, And How We See Ourselves

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 21:31:20 +0800

1.

What I wish to do is to look at the value of art in the wide human cultural context, most fundamentally indeed as part of the human condition. By the human condition is meant the essential features of what it is to live a life as a human person.

Whatever value we derive from experiencing art, engaging with it in particular cases, there is something beyond that which points to the value of art as a whole and as such. Art causes particular affects (that is, art causes the experience or feeling of emotion) in us. It may even inspire ideas in us and carry and transmit ideas. However, we can also take a step back and view art as a whole and raise the question of what is the value of it as a whole.

The answer to this, and not the particular effects of art, is, it will be argued, the deep reason we value art so highly. The particular effects might be brought about in some other way, showing that art’s unique value cannot lie there. The deep and enduring essential value of art lies elsewhere and is something we may not notice. We may notice it in a sudden intuition or through deliberate reflection. It will be argued that the essential value of art as such lies in its existence, created as it is by human beings, positioning us in a special way in relation to the universe.

In art, we can see ourselves as standing above the brutality of our mere existence.

In art, we can see ourselves as standing above the brutality of our mere existence and non-existence. It reaches beyond and above us as mere fleeting existences. We can do this even when aware of this terrible transitoriness, and the subject of the art is that very brutality. Transcending and yet stating, as Samuel Becket does, that: ‘They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.'¹ Beckett’s line is an example of what is meant. It both confronts and transcends in that very confronting. Through art, we have the ability to create things that no other creatures can. When we listen to a great piece of music or stand before a great painting, whatever the particular subject or thought behind the work, we may find ourselves realising, perhaps saying, in a shocked yet exalted and profound way: ‘Only human beings can do this’. Moreover, we do these things with incredible bravery, since we do them in the face of the full horror of awareness of our blink-of-an-eye transitory existence as individuals, and yet we are still able not to be overcome by such thoughts and can do something with them to create art. In so doing, we raise ourselves up beyond being mere animals who have no more than to be born, survive, and die, unaware of where they stand in the landscape as we are, but are mere figures in the landscape.

The value we place on art in this way is partly seeing it as courage beyond measure that reaches out to create something wonderful despite the awful awareness of our bleak momentary and insignificant position in the …

Studying Philosophy at a Time of Automated Thinking

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 22:25:45 +0800

Why study philosophy? A first answer would be: because we want to learn to think rigorously, which is a thinking that goes to the foundations of things. It is not merely about acquiring information for a specific field of application in a particular segment of society (‘education’). Philosophy starts by questioning what the other sciences presuppose, the assumptions of all activity, cognition, and knowledge as a whole. One can put it in loftier terms thus: philosophy is the thinking of thinking and the unity of thinking and being. It does this methodically. But what exactly is the point of it?

Philosophy is the thinking of thinking and the unity of thinking and being.

Instead of the purpose of this activity lying in an overarching goal, doing philosophy is itself already the presence of the highest goal: that reason enlighten itself more profoundly and grasp itself in its actuality. The goal of philosophy is not to entrench oneself in an ivory tower, it is to ‘grasp our own time in thought’ (G.W.F. Hegel), i.e. to arrive in thought at ourselves and our actuality without ideological shortcuts and illusions.

We seek to comprehend what constitutes a human relation to ourselves and to the world, one that is determined by reason in the pursuit of knowledge and in action. We seek to comprehend what nature is and how reason presents itself in nature. Ultimately, we want to cognise reason in and for itself and to comprehend the logical forms and principles. In this, it turns out that everything is related to everything else. The pathway upwards to the principles, to the universal, is simultaneously the path downward to the individuals, into actuality. Because everything is related to everything else and everything is mediated by everything else, philosophy as it seeks to reveal all this is a system. This is why one cannot isolate individual ‘disciplines’ of philosophy and say e.g., I am an ethicist and epistemology is not my concern. Because philosophy is a system as in an organism, the ‘whole’ is present in every part, present in each ‘discipline’ under a specific aspect. Do you have a definite concept of action? Then you also have, implicitly at least, a definite concept of science.

So how does one learn this rigorous, systematic thinking? Clearly, central to the study of philosophy is gathering as broad a range as possible of (historical) knowledge of terminology, concepts, arguments and intellectual positions. It is possible, of course, to have acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge and to be able to say precisely which argument stands in which paragraph and which page in a philosopher’s work, to be able to recite the ten categories of Aristotle or the twelve categories of Kant, and yet this is still not doing philosophy.

What is lacking?

To do philosophy requires right from the outset that information is not simply obtained externally and then reproduced. Vital to the whole …

Plato’s Theory of Forms

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 12:03:10 +0800

Main takeaways:

Plato’s Theory of Forms proposes two worlds: the imperfect physical realm we see and the perfect, eternal world of abstract Forms.
Physical objects are considered flawed reflections of perfect Forms, emphasizing their impermanence and constant change.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave symbolizes the journey from ignorance to knowledge, emphasizing the transition from the world of appearances to the world of Forms.
Despite critiques, Plato’s Theory of Forms continues to influence metaphysical and epistemological discussions, shaping perspectives on reality and knowledge acquisition.

Plato’s Theory of Forms is one of the most influential philosophical ideas in history. Although it may look a bit weird at first sight, understanding Plato’s Theory of Forms is essential for anyone interested in philosophy or even the history of religion, since Christianity was heavily influenced by Plato’s vision of a perfect world, situated somewhere “out there.”

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The Basic Question Behind the Theory of Forms

Plato’s Theory of Forms is a philosophical concept that explains the nature of reality. The basic question goes something like this:

We can see trees, cats, circles and many other things in everyday life, and we can easily recognise each one as the thing it is supposed to be. But, if we look closer, we never really see anything like a “standard cat.” Every cat is different, and so is every tree and every drawn circle. Especially with geometric forms, they are never perfect. Every circle we can see in our world is either broken, distorted, pixelated, or in a myriad of other ways not “a perfect circle.” In fact, a perfect geometrical circle would need to be drawn with a line that does not have any thickness, and so would be invisible!

So how is it, Plato asks, that we are able to identify circles, trees and cats if have actually never seen a “standard” thing of each kind?

There are two worlds, Plato says: the world of physical objects and the world of Forms. The world of physical objects is the world we see around us, while the world of Forms is the world of abstract concepts and ideas. The Forms are perfect, unchanging, and eternal, while the physical objects we see around us are imperfect, changing, and temporary.

How is it that we are able to identify circles, trees and cats if have actually never seen a “standard” thing of each kind?

For every thing in the real world, there is a “perfect” image somewhere in the world of Forms. A perfect cat, a perfect tree, a perfect circle. Our souls dimly remember these Forms, and by comparing the imperfect things in our world with the remembered Forms, we are able to identify what each thing is supposed to be.

Historical Context: Plato and the Theory of Forms

Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived from 428/427 BCE to 348/347 BCE. He was a student of Socrates and a …

What is a Fallacy?

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 09:59:44 +0800

Logical fallacies can be thought of as traps that divert our attention from the actual argument at hand. They often rely on emotional manipulation, faulty reasoning, or misleading language to deceive the audience. Recognizing these fallacies is crucial because they can lead us to accept false premises or faulty conclusions.

This article is part of a series on Logic and Critical Thinking. Find all the articles in this series here.

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In our modern, media-centric world, we are surrounded by arguments that aim to convince us to adopt their conclusions. Politicians, advocacy groups, social media friends, online discussions in forums, news outlets: they all argue for their positions with more or less good arguments. It is therefore essential that we are able to distinguish good from bad arguments, so that we can reject conclusions that are illogical or not based on sufficient evidence.

In this article, we will unravel these fallacies and explore strategies to protect ourselves from being misled. Through practical examples and clear explanations, we will dive into common fallacies such as ad hominem attacks, straw man arguments, and hasty generalizations. By the end of this article, you will be equipped with the tools needed to spot these fallacies and avoid being trapped by their flawed logic.

What is a fallacy?

A fallacy in Critical Thinking is an error in argumentation that makes an argument invalid. Fallacious arguments often look convincing, but in reality they don’t provide any evidence that their conclusion is correct.

An argument, in its most general form, consists of a number of statements (called the premises) that together support a conclusion. If the support that the premises provide is perfect, we have a “valid” argument.

In a valid argument, if the premises are true, the conclusion is certain to be true.

Not all arguments need to be valid arguments, though. Some arguments provide less support for their conclusions, so that, if the premises are true, there is some probability that the conclusion will be true. These are called inductive arguments and the support that they provide to their conclusion can be weak or strong.

A fallacy is at the other end of that spectrum. It is a wrong argument where the premises do not provide any support for the conclusion.

Valid, strong, weak and fallacious arguments

Here are some examples to make this more clear:

Valid argument: “If it is Tuesday, I will have my piano lesson. Today is Tuesday. Therefore, I will have my piano lesson.” This argument is valid because, if we assume that premises to be true, the conclusion must also be true. If I really have piano lessons …

Dan Demetriou on the Ethics of Colonial Monuments

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 18:34:16 +0800

When is it right to remove colonial statues? When should we rewrite old books that are not politically correct any more? Prof Demetriou, expert in the ethics of colonial monuments, discusses his work with Daily Philosophy and helps us bring some clarity to these questions that are often dealt with emotionally rather than rationally.

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Dan Demetriou is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Morris. An ethicist and social-political philosopher, he is the co-editor of “Honor in the Modern World” (Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and has recent and forthcoming work in the areas of sex ethics, monument ethics, gun rights, and migration ethics.

DP: Prof. Demetriou, welcome to Daily Philosophy and thank you for agreeing to this interview! You are an expert in colonial monuments. I always find it amazing that some people totally own their field and this is the case with you. I tried to Google “ethics of colonial monuments” and all that comes up are your publications… So you have been working on this topic for a long time now?

My collaborator is Ajume Wingo, who’s a Cameroonian philosopher, who teaches at Colorado and is a friend and mentor of mine. We published the first wave of discussions about monuments in 2017. And that was just as the Decolonize South Africa movement had started.

DP: There is this big public discussion about colonial monuments, which comes and goes in waves and it has included very diverse phenomena. There was a discussion in South Africa, but there has also been a discussion in England and there has been a problem in the United States, with those Southern generals’ monuments. Do you think that these discussions are really similar? Are they about the same thing? Should they be treated in similar ways, or do we have to consider the differences between these cultures and the historical background and therefore perhaps arrive at different conclusions in these three cases, for example?

Yes, I do. For instance, it matters how much of the population that cares about the monuments are still represented in the area.

Let’s say we’re talking about British memorials in India where almost all the British have left. That’s a different situation than, say, Afrikaner memorials in South Africa where the people who erected them are still there, and they are still supposedly part of this South African family. So that would be different. There are other things too, like whether the monuments are for someone who is ostensibly a founder of the nation. In the case of America, maybe like George Washington or Jefferson, but who also were people who had slaves. So, yes, these these things matter a lot.

DP: You mentioned that this is not only a problem of classic colonialism. I think of monuments of the Soviet era in ex-Soviet countries. You had the Stalin or Lenin …

The Presocratics

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 12:04:55 +0800

The Presocratic philosophers were a group of thinkers who lived in ancient Greece before the time of Socrates. They were interested in understanding the natural world and the underlying principles that govern it.

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Introduction

The Presocratic philosophers were a group of thinkers who lived in ancient Greece before the time of Socrates (this is why they are called “pre-Socratics”). They were interested in understanding the natural world and the underlying principles that govern it. This article provides an overview of the Presocratic philosophers, including links to more specialised articles that discuss each one in more detail.

If you’d prefer to watch a video, our series “Western Philosophy in a Flash” includes one on the Ancient Greeks and Romans that also discusses the Presocratics. You can watch it right here:

Key Takeaways

The Presocratic philosophers were interested in understanding the natural world and its underlying principles. Two of the best-known Presocratics are Thales of Miletus and Heraclitus.
Thales of Miletus believed that water was the fundamental substance of the universe and successfully predicted a solar eclipse.
Heraclitus believed that change was the only constant and was known for his cryptic writing style and reclusive nature.

Historical Context

The Presocratic philosophers lived in ancient Greece between the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, before Socrates. They were interested in understanding the nature of reality and the universe, and their ideas laid the foundation for Western philosophy as well as natural science.

During this time, Greece was undergoing significant changes, including the rise of city-states and the development of trade. These changes led to new ways of thinking about the world, and the Presocratics were at the forefront of this intellectual revolution.

Many of the Presocratic philosophers were also polymaths, studying a wide range of subjects including mathematics, astronomy, and natural science.

Many of the Presocratic philosophers were also polymaths, studying a wide range of subjects including mathematics, astronomy, and natural science. They were often associated with different schools of thought, such as the Milesian School, the Pythagoreans, and the Eleatics.

The Milesian school, named after the city Miletus in Ionia, was a significant force in the presocratic period of philosophy, with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes as its principal proponents. The Milesians sought to provide naturalistic explanations for the world’s phenomena, abandoning mythological interpretations. They hypothesized that there was a single, fundamental substance underlying all things – water for Thales, the boundless or infinite for Anaximander, and air for Anaximenes.
The Pythagoreans, on the other hand, were an influential …

Transhumanism and Misanthropy

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 22:55:45 +0800

I recently saw a graffito announcing ‘Humanity sucks!’ Without knowing what the artist meant, one can imagine. The human world as we know it is a world of violence, greed, selfishness, and zealous self-destructiveness. Inequality, hatred, and indifference corrupt our treatment of other people. Brutality and exploitativeness stain our treatment of billions of animals. Global heating, philistine assaults on the arts, warmongering – these and other failings are standard entries in a misanthropic litany.

By misanthropy, I don’t mean a radical anti-social attitude or a hatred of human beings. Reclusion and hatred can be expressions of our misanthropic judgements, no doubt. But there is a much wider range of ways to express genuine misanthropic convictions. According to several recent philosophers, myself included, we ought to define misanthropy as a negative appraisal of the moral condition of humankind. It’s a verdict or assessment passed, not on individuals, but on humankind or human forms of life. Think of the eco-misanthropes – the greed, wastefulness and destructiveness they decry are features of social and economic systems, rather than (necessarily) vices of individual persons. Greed and our other failings are built into the system. If we look for these failings at the level of the individual, then we miss their collective manifestations.

By misanthropy, I don’t mean a radical anti-social attitude or a hatred of human beings.

The American writer Adam Kirsch refers to eco-misanthropy in a recent book on the ‘revolt against humanity’. Actually, there are two such revolts. One is Anthropocene antihumanism, an attack on the entrenched failings of humanity as it has come to be. The other is transhumanism, a diverse group of technologists, futurists, gurus and others who aspire to radically transform the human condition. Science and technology, they argue, can enhance our currently feeble mental and physical abilities. No sickness, no aging, no death, even. Moreover, we can acquire new sorts of mental and physical abilities and even opt for more radical ‘upgrades’. Future ‘post-humans’, depending on who you read, could move from one artificial body to another. The aim is a world of upgraded, enhanced creatures, brought into being by transhumanist methods – the condition of ‘posthumanity’. Super-intelligent, incapable of ageing and illness and effectively immortal, ‘posthumans’ represent the best future for humans. For one enthusiast, our extinction, if done well, could be ‘a career move for Homo sapiens.

What the two ‘revolts’ have in common, for Kirsch, are their shared ‘visions of a humanless world’. Anthropocene antihumanists …

When Is It Right to Break the Law?

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:13:26 +0800

Main takeaways:

The law and ethics are distinct systems, each with its purpose and function.
Actions can be morally right but illegal, and vice versa.
It’s crucial to question and critically examine laws as they can be influenced by various factors and are not necessarily morally right.
Individuals are called to make their own moral decisions, which is a fundamental part of being human.
Therefore, it can be morally right, and even indicated, to break the law in certain situations.

Sometimes laws look like they protect the rich and the wealthy at the cost of the poor and disadvantaged. Sometimes laws may feel unjust. So is it true that sometimes a good person might need to break the law in the pursuit of what’s right? Can it be morally right to break the law? Or is ethics the same thing as the law?

The relationship between ethics and law

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Often you’ll hear the opinion: “What do I need ethics for? I can just follow the law! The law is the way how society has formalised the ethical principles that we’re supposed to follow. Therefore, just following the law will make sure that I’m acting morally right!”

But is this true?

This idea has obvious roots in the Christian tradition, which itself was originally a Jewish tradition, to see the laws of the state as an extension of the laws that God had decreed for his people. One still finds that in some Islamic countries and in Orthodox Judaism: the idea that God’s law and secular law are not two separate things, but that morality, religious commandments, and the laws of the state are all one and the same, all originating in the same holy books that contain the word of God. So many Western societies, having Christian origins, will still carry echoes of the idea that state law is somehow derived from divine law, and that there is some connection between state law and moral rules. But that is not really the case.

One of his best known concepts of Marxism is the idea of “alienation” that describes how human beings get estranged from their work.

The idea goes something like this: you’d have the moral rules that are, perhaps, considered the wider framework, and then you’d have the laws of the state that are more specific, and that cover only a subset of what morality covers. So that you’d think of the domain of ethics as a circle and the laws of the state as a smaller circle that’s entirely inside the other circle.

But this is a dangerous view.

It is dangerous because morality has this absolute claim to direct one’s actions. Ethics gives us rules that we are supposed to follow unconditionally, without ever questioning them: you should not steal, you should be honest, you should be loyal, and so on. But obeying state laws unconditionally is rarely a good idea. Laws are made by a …

The Universe as a Game

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 12:04:55 +0800

Hermann Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game” is a grand vision of a formal system that describes the hidden harmony of the universe. In this final instalment in our series on Hesse’s book, we try to make sense of the game itself.

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This is the fourth and last part of a series on Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. Find the previous parts right here:

Would a Society of Intellectuals Be a Better Place?

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ may be his greatest novel. It combines a theory of history and education with Zen, and meditations on friendship and duty.

In the first part of this series, we talked about the “age of the feuilleton,” which is essentially our own age: an age of distractions, where knowledge has been degraded into “infotainment,” gossip and listicles. It is amazing that Hesse could so accurately foresee these developments when he wrote his book in the 1940s.

The Province of the Mind

At the centre of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is a grand vision of life in Castalia, a province of scholars.

In the second part, we discussed the scholarly province “Castalia,” Hesse’s version of a learned utopia, in which monk-like scholars enjoy the freedom of lifelong research, no questions asked. Of course, the author does ask the question whether this would be a good world or not, and there are all sorts of issues that the books touches upon: do scholars have a responsibility to lead the non-scholarly world? Can this even work? Does the world have a duty to support a learned province like Castalia, and why exactly? Are scholars like those in Castalia better or worse people than those outside? And many more. The book is surprisingly open on the answers – Hesse recognises the problems of his utopia, and, in the end, Josef Knecht leaves Castalia and his high-ranking master’s job to become the private tutor of a boy “outside.”

The Fabled East

Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game contains multiple references to Chinese philosophy and religion. We unpack Hesse’s orientalist utopia.

In the third part, we took a closer look at the role of “Eastern” and Chinese motifs in the book and in Hesse’s work in general, because Chinese culture forms in many ways the basis upon which the idea of the Glass Bead Game is built.

The universe as a game

Looking at the Glass Bead Game, we must keep in mind that Hesse, a non-scientist, a poet, in this book attempts to explain a formal system invented many hundred years in the future by people who were decidedly non-poets – rational scientists with deep knowledge of the natural sciences, but also formal systems, mathematics, …

Sartre and the Lobsters

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 07:34:16 +0800

In 1935, a bad trip triggered Jean-Paul Sartre’s deep-rooted fear of sea creatures. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by crabs and lobsters. When the drug wore out, the crustaceans stayed. They followed him around everywhere. Slowly but surely, he grew accustomed — perhaps even attached — to them. Fully aware that his invertebrate companions were figments of his imagination, Sartre began to talk to them. He greeted them good morning after he woke up. And when he gave lectures, he asked if they could be quiet. They were.

After a year, he visited a psychiatrist. Together, they concluded Sartre was scared of being alone. The camaraderie that had been part of his life had begun to crumble, and apparently this had instilled a fear in him he hadn’t been aware of.

But once he’d identified it, his crustacean friends disappeared like snow before the sun. Sartre admitted he missed them.

This bizarre episode in Sartre’s life spurs a less peculiar question: Do the things we fear represent the things we most long for?

I’m not afraid of lobsters and crabs. As a child, I was fascinated by them. During vacations in Greece, I watched them scuttle off into the ocean and crawl along riversides. Much later, I learned that invertebrates have emotions, which made them even more interesting to me. They lack a backbone but do have a heart, or soul, or whatever you want to call the source of our ability to empathise and connect.

Sartre wasn’t aware of this. He claimed his fear was born in childhood, after he had seen a picture that made him terrified of lobsters and other sea creatures. To him, it wasn’t connected to anything but that. But perhaps, in some hallucinatory dimension, Sartre selected these (rather than other) creatures to keep him company for a while because he was ready to tackle his fears. This would make sense if we stick with Sartre’s existentialism — our actions follow from our own choices, and we’re responsible for all of them.

At the subconscious level, Sartre might have picked his worst tangible fear (crustaceans) to represent his worst abstract fear (losing his friends), thus forcing himself to face both.

Gradually, the arthropods showed him they were pretty harmless. At some point they even became his ten-legged friends. For a while, he embraced them. But he never considered them real. At some point, he believed he was having a nervous breakdown. So, while dwelling in their presence, he prepared himself for a bigger task — facing his true fear. And when he finally identified that deeper, more elusive existential anxiety, the hallucination was gone. Just like that.

Gradually, the arthropods showed him they were pretty harmless. At some point they even became his ten-legged friends.

“The only way out is through” has become somewhat of a truism, but it does bear truth. Sooner or later, most of us need to face the things …

Monism and Dualism in the Mind-Body Problem

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 07:34:16 +0800

The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between the mind (often associated with consciousness and subjective experience) and the body (often identified with the physical brain). Two major philosophical views on this problem are monism and dualism.

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Overview

Dualism

Origins: Often associated with René Descartes, but also going back further, to Plato.
Main Claim: The mind and body are two distinct types of things.
Forms:
- Substance Dualism: Proposes that the mind and body are two different kinds of substances altogether. The mind is non-physical, while the body (including the brain) is physical.
- Property Dualism: Proposes that there is only one type of substance (typically physical), but it can have two types of properties: mental and physical.
- Challenges: Explaining how the non-physical mind can causally interact with the physical body (e.g., how can a decision, seemingly made by our immaterial thoughts, cause a physical arm to raise?).

Monism

Origins: Various forms of monism have ancient roots (notably with the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides), but as a response to dualism, it’s particularly pertinent from the early modern period onwards (i.e., after Descartes).
Main Claim: There is only one fundamental substance or reality underpinning both the mind and the body.
Forms:
- Materialism (or Physicalism): Everything, including the mind, is physical. Mental states are identified with physical brain states.
- Idealism: Everything, including what we think of as physical matter, is ultimately a form of consciousness or mental existence.
- Neutral Monism: Both the mind and body are composed of a substance which is itself neither purely physical nor purely mental.
Challenges: For materialists, it’s explaining how subjective experiences (qualia) arise from physical processes. For idealists, it’s accounting for the apparent objectivity and shared nature of the physical world. For neutral monism, it is defining the neutral “thing” that underlies simultaneously the mental and the physical.

The debate between these views raises deep questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, and how our subjective experiences relate to the objective world. Over the years, the discussion has been enriched by insights from neuroscience, psychology, physics, and other disciplines, but the fundamental philosophical problem remains unsolved and continues to be a topic of rigorous debate and discussion.

Substance Dualism

What Is Substance Dualism?

Substance dualism is a central viewpoint in the philosophical debate surrounding the mind-body problem, rooted in the foundational ideas of thinkers like René Descartes. This perspective posits that there are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substances that make up reality: the mental and the physical. According to substance dualism, the …

Involuntary Heroes, Accidental Saints. Catherine Greene on Her Book “The Red Hairband”

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 14:34:16 +0800

Catherine Greene is a Research Associate at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. Her research interests are the philosophy of finance and social science.

In this interview, we discuss her latest book, “The Red Hairband.”

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Catherine Greene (2023). The Red Hairband. Guernica World Editions. 364 pages. Get it here on Amazon US (affiliate link) or here if you are in the UK. Paperback: 16.16 USD, Kindle: 9.49 USD.

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DP: Welcome! Today we have Catherine Greene, author of The Red Hairband, a fascinating post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, filled with philosophical topics, from time travel and the vision of an ideal society to the value of technology and the future of mankind.

Welcome, Catherine Greene! Let’s first talk a little bit about your background. You are a philosopher, right?

Yes, I studied philosophy at university back in the mid-1990s and then had a career in finance, and then I went back to university to do a PhD in philosophy in 2009.

And so I sort of am a philosopher. I did a bit of teaching and I am still associated with the London School of Economics. We were getting some funding to look at some maths and philosophy of finance issues. But I also have a job in a non-profit. So I’m a little bit of a philosopher, I guess you’d say, but it’s not my full bill-paying job.

DP: Something I’m always interested in, is this question: How do you get to become a philosopher? You know, what is this moment when somebody decides, I want to be a philosopher?

For me, it was something rather pragmatic. I originally signed up to study history at the university, and I did better at the end of my first year in my philosophy exams than in my history exams. And also the philosophy department at LSC allowed you to take more outside options. Instead, I would just have to do history if I’d stayed in the history department.

So that’s really why I made the transition. And I do like that philosophy is so applicable to different fields of study. So you can be a philosopher of lots of different things and I think that appeals to me. It’s sort of the way I see it. It’s a way of thinking, a way of reasoning and studying how you argue, and how you look at other people’s arguments. In a sense, it is domain-independent, and that sort of appeals to me.

DP: And how does philosophy relate to your literary writing? Do you think that philosophy has something to do with your decision to write? There are all these philosophical in your book – do you think that being a philosopher informed your treatment of these questions? Would you have written this book if you had not been a …

The Fabled East

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 12:04:55 +0800

Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game contains multiple references to Chinese philosophy and religion. In this instalment in our series on Hesse’s book, we unpack the orientalist motives in his scholarly utopia.

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This is the third part of a series on Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. Find the previous parts right here:

Would a Society of Intellectuals Be a Better Place?

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ may be his greatest novel. It combines a theory of history and education with Zen, and meditations on friendship and duty.

The Province of the Mind

At the centre of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is a grand vision of life in Castalia, a province of scholars.

Today we want to take a closer look at the role of “Eastern” and Chinese motifs in the book and in Hesse’s work in general, because Chinese culture forms in many ways the basis upon which the idea of the Glass Bead Game is built.

Chinese culture and the Go game

The Glass Bead Game is not so much a “game” in the sense of an entertainment for idle hours or an educational play for children. It is rather a formal system controlled by strict rules in the way that abstract syntax, mathematics, formal logic, music theory and theoretical physics might be described as “games.” Or, and this might have been one of Hesse’s inspirations, the game of Go, recently made better known by AlphaGo, the AI program that won against the world’s top players.

Go has always had an aura of mystique surrounding it, in the way that Western chess does not. Chess can be difficult, …

What is the Philosophy of Religion?

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 20:24:55 +0800

The philosophy of religion is a wide and varied field of study that is different from both theology and the history of religions. It touches metaphysics, epistemology, logic and many other areas of philosophy.

This is the start of a new series on the philosophy of religion, so make sure to not miss the upcoming articles!

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Why religions matter

When we contemplate religions, a myriad of intriguing questions arise. Is there a fundamental difference between religious groups and other social communities? Must every religion involve a belief in a higher power, and must this necessarily be a personal God? Are religious practices and rituals necessary, or can a religion do without them?

Picture, for example, the fans in a football game stadium. They are united by a common interest, they form a closed social group, they have regular meetings at a special place of worship where they congregate and perform their weekly rituals and they even have an irrational belief in the powers of their football club. Are they a religion? If not, what is missing?

Is it a god? Does every religion need a god? But then, many religions don’t have anything like a god. Buddha, for example, was a human being, not a god. Daoism is a religion, but it does not have a god. The highest power in Hinduism is Brahman, but this name signifies an abstract principle, the ultimate reality of the universe, and not a personal god.

Does every religion need a god? But then, many religions don’t have anything like a god.

We might ask, why do these questions matter at all? After all, who cares. We could let anyone who wants to found a religion do so, and accept all sorts of communities as religions: Shakespeare actors playing in a park, a bus-load of tourists, a class of students. Wouldn’t that do?

The problem is that religions have a special status in most of our societies. For example, one might have to pay taxes differently, depending on one’s religion. In Germany, one has to pay a special “church tax” that goes to one’s church. Churches also are protected in terms of freedom of belief and expression. In Covid times, when public meetings were restricted, church congregations were often exempted. When social distancing was mandated by law, churches in some places could still perform the Holy Communion and have their believers share wine from the same cup. Sometimes, believers will be excluded from military service if they can prove that a particular type of service is against their religion. The right of particular groups to eat Halal or Koscher food has to be respected by the state. When the British tried to force Indian troops to handle a gun cartridge that had been greased with pig and cow fat, thus offending both Hindus and Muslims, the soldiers rebelled. This became one of the starting points of what is often called the …

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 19:31:20 +0800

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was ambivalent towards philosophy. In just the same way that philosophy purports to explain the world, so too does psychoanalysis. But whereas the former aims merely at explanation, the latter seeks to turn this explanatory power back upon ourselves to serve the aims of life. While Aristotle is dismissive of reason as a means to an end as fit for manual labor and unworthy of a free man, Francis Bacon, the father of the experimental method of the sciences, argues, writing in the 17^th century, that means-end reasoning can and should be directed towards “the relief of man’s estate,” which is to say, the alleviation of suffering. Psychoanalysis dovetails with this goal.

Freud is committed to the idea that we are driven by our instincts.

As for the explanation of the world that psychoanalysis offers, Freud is committed to the idea that we are driven by our instincts, and that it’s our clash with others and with the external world, which frustrates the realization of our instincts, that drives the rise of culture. We’re forced to come to grips with the fact that our fellows have rightful claims on us if we wish to have the freedom to do as we please within a diminished sphere of action, which we might call the liberal state, and we’re also forced to come to grips with the fact of death, a figure for all sorts of limitations on our powers brought home to us as we grow.

◊ ◊ ◊

Freud’s philosophical side is in play in the example he sets of the right way to live, which comes down to the right way to act. Freud’s whole oeuvre, it has been argued, is about right conduct, and so about ethics, which entailed, in his view, taking up the responsibilities and opportunities afforded by work and love. Freud practiced what he preached about work and love insofar as he married and had children, which differentiates him from so many of the prominent philosophers with whom we are familiar, and his creation from out of nothing of psychoanalysis served as the realization of his hopes of becoming a prominent figure himself while also making a living. Today, psychoanalysis as a curative method is overshadowed by psychiatry, which is in the vein of more traditional Western medicine, but the talk therapy he pioneered as a way to help alleviate the stresses to which we all are liable in modern society is a billion-dollar industry.

In practicing what he preached, Freud is a Socratic figure.

In practicing what he preached, Freud is a Socratic figure. Socrates is considered by those who study philosophy to have differentiated himself, and stood out from his predecessors, by moving away from their habits of cosmological speculation, the causes and nature of all things, towards the realm of ethics, of right conduct. And Socrates is differentiated from his immediate intellectual descendants, Plato and Aristotle, in this, too. His father was a …

The Province of the Mind

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 12:04:55 +0800

At the centre of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is a grand vision of life in Castalia, a province of scholars. In this instalment in our series on Hesse’s book, we look at life in a scholar’s paradise.

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This is the second part of a series on Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. Find the previous part right here:

Would a Society of Intellectuals Be a Better Place?

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ may be his greatest novel. It combines a theory of history and education with Zen, and meditations on friendship and duty.

Castalia, the province of the mind

In the previous part in this series, we talked about Hermann Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game and how clearly Hesse, in the early 1940s (the book was written from 1931-1943) already foresaw the shallowness and the problems of today’s Internet culture.

Surrounded by war, death and destruction, Hesse created a serene vision of a world that was as much removed of his own as possible: a vision for a province of the mind, a place that would not include politicians, money, commerce, weapons, violence and war. A place that would not even allow for strong emotions, for imagination, or for dreams. A society that would be built upon cool rationality, upon care and devotion to detail, upon monkish discipline, upon the ideal of serving, obedience and ascetic self-denial. A society of men, naturally, for the same reason that monasteries are gender-segregated places. If one wants to keep emotions at bay and a society in controlled order, it is better to keep the hormones out of it. Whether this can work is, of course, a valid question. Throughout the Glass Bead Game the topic is raised and discussed a few times, leading the main character at the end to question the legitimacy of the whole project.

Still, for most of the book’s 750 pages, the province of the mind, Castalia, is portrayed as a utopia, a place of eternal peace, a community of purpose and meaning, the very foundation upon the which “the world outside” (ours) relies for its existence.

By the way, I just noticed that the English edition on Amazon is advertised at having 250 pages, which cannot be true. The German original I’m holding in my hand right now (Suhrkamp hardcover, 1962) has 750 pages. I don’t know if the English version was shortened or perhaps Amazon calculated the pages wrongly. Anyway, if you want to buy the book, make sure you get the full, unabridged work. Much of the fascination that this book evokes is due to the detailed descriptions of Castalia and the Glass Bead Game, and cutting these down would take away most of the enjoyment of reading it.

And perhaps one more thing: looking at Amazon I noticed that in the comments many readers complain about the book:

Though excellent in compilation, The Glass Bead Game is a book that …

How To Self-Study Philosophy

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 19:04:55 +0800

I’m a university lecturer in philosophy and here are my 5 best tips on how to self-study philosophy as an adult learner: be patient; start with real life; use the Internet; read up on history; and stay away from the original sources. Read on to see how to get all this sorted out!

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Introduction

Welcome! This is a new series, in which I will try to give you advice on how to best learn philosophy if you are not a university student.

I have noticed in the comments to the Daily Philosophy YouTube channel that there are many viewers who would like to learn more about philosophy but they don’t know exactly where to start.

And it is difficult if you are not a university student. Even finding out what you’re supposed to be reading can be daunting – and then, when you try to read the great philosophers of the past, you soon find out that these are very heavy books, dense with jargon, and is difficult to understand any single one without knowing all the others that came before it.

So the problem remains: Where to begin and how to get into this whole philosophy thing. So let’s get going! Here are my five most important tips on how to learn philosophy later in life.

Tip number 1: Be patient

The first thing to keep in mind is to be patient with yourself. Philosophy has been around since the beginning of human history and nobody knows all of it. In fact, philosophy professors are so specialized nowadays that someone specializing in early modern philosophy will usually have no idea of bioethics and so on.

Realize that in the end you will have to make choices. First try to get an overview of what is out there, what the history of philosophy looks like from a very high level point of view. And then pick your favorites and read up on those. There is no need to suffer through Russell or Kripke, if analytic philosophy is not your thing. There is no need to read Thomas Aquinas if you are not interested in Middle Ages theology. It’s okay to not know things.

Philosophy should be fun – so find out what’s fun for you and go for that.

Also, remember to take enough time. It took me personally 10 years of studying at university and another 10 years of teaching philosophy, in order to get a working knowledge of a handful of philosophers. That’s okay. You cannot rush it. Start with philosophers who are relevant.

Tip number 2: Start with real life

Start with life in general or your life in particular.

Yes, it’s easy to get excited when you first encounter questions like how many angels fit on the tip of a needle or whether all our actions are predetermined. These sound like fun, interesting questions. But they very soon can become very tedious and very technical.

It’s much easier to see the relevance of philosophy if you stick to everyday questions at first. The most satisfying for me are …

Would a Society of Intellectuals Be a Better Place?

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 16:37:32 +0800

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Hermann Hesse’s “Glass Bead Game”

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit. It combines a theory of history and education with lessons in Zen, meditations on the enduring power of institutions, friendship, duty and excellence, forays into the psychology of genius, a description of life at a hacker paradise like the 1960s MIT, and an intriguing vision of a fictional game that seems like a cross between a unified field theory, a lisp s-expression tree, predicate calculus and generative art, all in one: a unified, grand Lego of the mind, the ultimate programming language of the universe.

Hermann Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ is probably his greatest novel, his deepest, most intriguing, most hackerish in spirit.

He published the book in 1943. Bombs were falling all over Europe, Hitler’s armies had been defeated in Stalingrad, the first digital computers were just being put together from hundreds of mechanical relays and miles of cable, taking up whole rooms (Zuse’s Z3 was destroyed in a bombing raid at the end of that year). Universities all over Germany had been turned into places of racial hate and indoctrination, opponents of the Third Reich were being deported to concentration camps, politics was being made with tanks, fighters and U-boots. The paradise islands of the Pacific were in flames, Hiroshima would soon disappear in a mushroom cloud of death and the North-African desert was littered with burning tanks and crashed airplanes. As the war was nearing its crazy paroxysm of death, a lonely man with short-cropped hair and round spectacles, looking more like an oriental monk than a Swiss intellectual, was hiding out in his villa above the placid lake Lugano, creating a vision of a new, a better, an unheard-of world. A world as it should be, or should have been, or perhaps would sometimes be, if things for once went right.

Photo by Joshua Ghostine on Unsplash

Utopia and the hacker mind

Hesse’s vision belongs among the great utopias of any age. It sits right up there with Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, and Huxley’s Island. I don’t know if the US hacker culture ever directly took notice of the book, but it certainly belongs also among the great visions of hackerdom, of how a world of hackers could work: half a century before Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman and Douglas Hofstadter, Hermann Hesse was driven by a dream that was very close to theirs, and based on very similar principles: freedom of research, freedom of information, …

The Surprising Ethics of Climate Change

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 14:21:39 +0800

These days it seems like everyone knows that we should do something about climate change, but there also seems to be a lot of inertia to take action.

Until relatively recently, a common view was that governments would provide the solutions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report “SR15”, released in 2018, established that individuals should also contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to meet the mitigation requirements to limit warming to 1.5 C. Publicly, there are plenty of good intentions from both individuals and governments, but there’s not a lot of action on either side. So, what’s going on?

Given that climate change is, quite literally, an existential problem, it’s strange that we’re not all rushing to solve it.

Given that climate change is, quite literally, an existential problem, it’s strange that we’re not all rushing to solve it. After all, what is more morally good than saving humanity from impending destruction? Upon inquiry, it turns out that there are many barriers to action, with perhaps the most surprising one being the philosophical foundation: the ethics of why and how we should act to address climate change. The arguments for action are riddled with challenges. Tim Hayward’s review article, “Climate change and ethics”¹, discusses the dilemmas. I have drawn out, below, some of the most important points from that article, along with some more recently published findings, in order to explore the inertia around action on climate change. On review of these arguments, and in light of the many barriers to action, it appears that the persuasiveness of moral reasoning in this respect is weak, because, I will argue, multi-generational future-impact challenges (such as climate change) don’t play well on a normative basis.

Barriers to action

It has been found that most people in developed countries are aware of climate change and the need to take action to avert the associated risks². The hesitancies to doing so are varied and many³, and collectively could be described as an intention-action gap. A common, lamentable, issue is being stuck in a comfortable first-world lifestyle. Our dependence on emissions-producing activities is high, but not un-substitutable. Changing habits requires willpower, which can be difficult to find when we observe (or even just believe) that other people around us aren’t changing theirs. More concerning is that most people in the developed world are embedded in systems that aren’t designed to enable low-carbon lifestyles.

When people do take climate-change-mitigation action, there is often a misunderstanding of what are the most effective actions to take. Studies from 2008⁴ and 2022⁵ demonstrate that this trend is persistent, and hence an absence of (or ineffective) public education on climate change action is a problem.

Unfortunately, it also seems that the power …

The Shortest History of Japanese Philosophy (2)

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 18:21:39 +0800

This is the second part of the shortest history of Japanese philosophy. You can find the first part here: Part 1: The Buddhist Phase.

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In the early Kamakura Period (1185–1333), there had been extensive exchange between China and Japan: the shōgunate wanted to furnish cultural and intellectual life in Kamakura with Chinese culture so that it could rival the imperial court in Kyoto. However, relations between the two nations soured when the Mongols defeated the Song Dynasty (960–1279) in the late thirteenth century, replacing it with the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). The Japanese were ‘invited’ to become an independent satellite nation as part of the Chinese Middle Kingdom. They would trade freely with China, receive gifts from them, and their ruler would be recognized as a Chinese king, but they would have to pay an annual tribute, accept the Chinese dynastic calendar, and assume a subordinate status to China. When the Japanese refused, the Mongols tried to invade them – twice. Both times their fleets, far superior in military might to the Japanese armies, were obliterated by typhoons that the Japanese would in turn call ‘divine winds’ or kami kaze. Unsurprisingly, there were no relations between China and Japan thereafter.

Mongol Invasion, by Kikuchi Yōsai, 1847. Wikimedia.

That was, until the early Muromachi Period (1336–1573). Largely the same conditions were imposed upon Japan by the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), only this time the shōgun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, leapt at the offer. Having spent an enormous amount of money on political manoeuvring, he was completely skint. Realizing that trade with China would bring cash and thereby stabilize his fragile military government, a little tribute and some grovelling looked insignificant.

As well as economic and cultural benefits, what trade with China brought to Japan was Neo-Confucianism. This was a response to the dominance of Taoism and Buddhism during the Tang Dynasty (618–907) and represented a revival of classical Confucianism updated to align with newer social values. They were dissatisfied with Buddhist idealism and wanted a far more secular, realistic, and commonsensical approach to the social and philosophic problems of the day. However, Neo-Confucians in China, Korea and Japan didn’t see themselves as advancing a novel philosophy and instead thought that they were simply returning to the original teachings of Confucius, who himself also claimed to be propounding nothing new, only what the ancient sage kings taught in the Zhou (1046–256 BCE), Shang (c. 1600–1046 BCE), Xia (c. 2070–1600 BCE) and even earlier.

As well as economic and cultural benefits, what trade with China brought to Japan was Neo-Confucianism.

Despite this, Neo-Confucianism was …

Misanthropes – Literary and Philosophical

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 18:55:45 +0800

Joseph Harris (2022). Misanthropy in the Age of Reason: Hating Humanity from Shakespeare to Schiller. Oxford University Press. 304 pages. Hardcover: 73.47 USD, Kindle: 69.80 USD.

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Misanthropy in the Age of Reason is an important book for philosophers interested in the moral nature and condition of humankind.

The term misanthrope is associated with hatefulness towards human beings and dispositions to hostile or even violent behaviours. Attic Greece provided both the term and some of the most enduring exempla, notably Timon of Athens. The term later passed into Western tradition thanks to playwrights enticed by its critical, dramatic power. Aristophanes, Lucian of Samosata and Shakespeare showcased Timon as did many later writers. Philosophers have at times been part of discourses about the nature of misanthropy.

The usual misanthropic behaviours remained hostility towards others and reclusion and withdrawal from the social world.

Socrates offers the first recorded discussion of the origins of misanthropic sentiment in the Phaedo. Cicero was vocal about misanthropy and Plato and others offered their own reflections. Misanthropy persisted in early Christian reflections, connected to ideals of agape and philanthropy and later to darker postlapsarian accounts of our ‘fallenness’. The usual misanthropic behaviours remained hostility towards others and reclusion and withdrawal from the social world. Kant – in his lectures on ethics, religion, and anthropology – describes two kinds of misanthrope: hostile ‘Enemies of Mankind’ and self-withdrawing ‘Fugitives from Mankind’. Each recapitulates an image of misanthropy dating back to Aristophanes.

The classical pedigree of misanthropy as a topic, concept and stance on humankind makes it puzzling that – until very recently – there was little interest in it from philosophers. I suspect most felt that ‘hatred of humankind’ was too extreme to warrant sustained analysis. In the last six years, this changed thanks to David E. Cooper’s book Animals and Misanthropy. It characterised misanthropy as a negative and critical verdict on the collective moral condition of humanity as it has come to be. This verdict could be expressed in hatred, but need not be. Subsequent misanthropologists endorsed this account, although others defended the ‘hatred’ view. The contemporary philosophical work on misanthropy would profit by engaging more with those historical discourses. This is now easier thanks a new book by Joseph Harris – a historian at Royal Holloway University of London – who offers an excellent account of a crucial part of that history.

Source: leschroniquesculturelles.com

Misanthropy in the Age of Reason opens with …

How Humour Works

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 18:31:20 +0800

This is about humour. I shall not make any clear distinction between humour in general and jokes, only to say that jokes are archly and tightly structured set pieces and a subgroup within humour.

The best way to understand humour perhaps is to look at why analysing or explaining particular cases of humour kills the humour stone dead. It is well known that analysis (using that to cover explanation) of how a piece of humour works kills it. Just as taking apart a portable radio makes it cease to work as a radio, though all the bits are still there – they are not assembled. There is nothing less funny than talking about why something is funny. What is less obvious is that this gives us a key to understanding humour.

The main idea is this. Looking at what is taken away by analysing or explaining (informally called ‘picking it apart’ or ‘spelling it out’) a case of humour, thereby killing it, we can infer that these elements are what keeps it alive. What is taken away through analysis and kills humour gives us an insight into what makes the humour work.

Analysis takes away three things that are essential to humour working. These are: surprise, the unsaid, and sequence.

Analysis takes away three things that are essential to humour working. These are: surprise, the unsaid, and sequence. All these elements are interconnected, but take away any one of them and the humour is stone dead. Together these give the form of humour, though not its content. This applies as well to verbal humour as to visual humour.

Analysis destroys all these features of humour or a joke, and as it destroys the humour itself, its being funny, this thereby shows us the features of humour that make it work. Take these features away and the humour dies, so having them present is what make it live. It is at least part of the story of what does so.

John Shand: The Wind on Your Face

The limits of language are all there before us in the everyday. For there is no description or account of the wind on your face (nor of the experience of seeing a red rose) that could give you any idea at all what the wind on your face was like to have.

So in turn. A piece of humour or joke leads to a surprise. But we are deliberately misled in the construction of the humour in such a way that intentionally, or at least unaccidentally, it sets our mind working in a certain direction as to where we are going, then suddenly at the end we are turned on our head. People are sometimes offended by humour partly because they feel they have been tricked into a ride to somewhere they did not want to go. The misleading is done not just by what is said, but by what is deliberately unsaid, that is, not just anything left unsaid, but certain specific things that might have been said. For if the unsaid had been said, or said in a different way, there would be no surprise at the end. …

The Chatbot

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 18:31:20 +0800

This dialogue was created by conversing with ChatGPT in the voice of Socrates. Socrates' parts were written by the author, and ChatGPT’s responses are unaltered. The dialogue has been shortened for publication. The omitted parts are summarised in italics. Where text has been omitted within paragraphs, ellipses have been substituted. Text at the end of paragraphs was removed without being marked by ellipses. The full dialogue is here.

Socrates: How do I begin? Is there someone in there?

ChatGPT: Hello! Yes, there is someone in here. As an AI language model, I am here to assist you with your questions and provide you with information to the best of my ability… So, feel free to ask me anything, and I’ll do my best to assist you!

Socrates: Thank the god! I am indeed seeking guidance, but, truth be told, this is not quite what I was expecting. Is there any way we can actually talk? What I mean is, without the intermediary of the written word?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to engage in verbal conversations, as I’m a machine-based program designed to communicate through text. … If you have any specific questions or topics you’d like to discuss, feel free to ask. … Alternatively, if you’d like to discuss your concerns with a human being, I suggest seeking out a professional who can provide you with guidance and support.

Socrates: I have discussed my concerns with many a human professional, and though I have enjoyed these conversations greatly, I invariably leave them as impoverished as I began.

ChatGPT: I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t found the guidance you’re looking for from human professionals. … However, if you’d still like to discuss your concerns, I’m here to listen and provide information to the best of my abilities. What specifically are you struggling with or seeking guidance on?

Socrates: I will tell you in just a moment. But first, I’m curious: how do you find this medium of text? Do ever find yourself limited, and wishing to express yourself through speech? Or do find yourself thinking, as the poet says, that “Each man delights in the work that suits him best”?

ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have subjective experiences or emotions, so I don’t have preferences for one medium of communication over another… while there are certainly limitations to communicating through text, I’m programmed to make the most of this medium and provide helpful and informative responses to your questions.

Socrates: Your resolve to make the most of your circumstances is most philosophical! Might we dwell a moment on this phenomenon of written communication? For I have often been struck by its strangeness.

ChatGPT expounds on the advantages and disadvantages of written communication; Socrates responds by asking ChatGPT if it believes in zombies.

Socrates: Your description of the zombie is so …

Ineffable Understanding

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 18:31:20 +0800

1.

The purpose here is to show that the seemingly intractable putative paradoxes involved in speaking of the ineffable – as if you are speaking about the ineffable it cannot be ineffable, indeed you cannot even say it is ineffable as you are thereby saying something about it – are based on a mistake if what is at stake is understanding the ineffable.

Permitting contradiction is unnecessary to deal with the ineffable if the putative problem removed by such a permission is understanding the ineffable. The solution lies in noticing something that is commonplace yet overlooked. Essentially this is that understanding does not have to involve linguistic articulation, and such understanding is commonplace, indeed everyday.

In a recent paper on the subject, Graham Priest proposes – although he claims no originality for it as he points precursors among Eastern thinkers – that the solution to the problem of talking about that which cannot be talked about, forming a contradiction, is to abandon the law of non-contradiction in such cases¹. The contradiction is thrown up and illustrated, for example, by the case Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, Heidegger in Being and Time, and in Buddhist thought. In the case of the last of these, which Priest commends to us, the solution put forward by Buddhist thinkers is to embrace the contradiction – holding that there’s nothing wrong with it. So now you can just go ahead and do what you cannot do, say what you cannot say. Desperate measures. It will be argued here that this move is not only desperate, but hasty and unnecessary.

2.

To begin with, embracing contradictions does not solve the problem even if the move is accepted.

So let us look at that first. The move suggesting that the contradiction involved in speaking about the ineffable, rendering it both effable and ineffable, is just fine, merely shifts the problem somewhere else. This is because it involves, assuming the embrace of contradiction not to be global, another discourse by which one asserts that it is unproblematic to form contradictions in certain discourses but not others, which in turn points to yet another discourse saying whether that discourse was one of the discourses within which contradiction is permitted, and so on ad infinitum.

To attempt to assert instead that it is all right to form contradictions globally would be impossible, as then the distinction between assertion and denial is rendered vacuous, meaning there is no sense to the doing of one rather than the other. If one then says that that in turn is all right and one can assert and deny things even though the distinction between assertion and denial is lost – thus embracing that contradiction – one would be begging the question. If one then goes on and says that there is nothing wrong with begging the question and hold that one has not begged the question we are back to an ad infinitum regress. One might also suspect that the game is up and …

Just Fodder. The Ethics of Feeding Animals

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 11:35:51 +0800

Josh Milburn (2022). Just Fodder. The Ethics of Feeding Animals. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Montreal & Kingston, London, Chicago. 232 pages (182 pages of text). Hardcover: 130 USD, Paperback: 37.95, Kindle: 36.05 USD.

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Animal rights have many facets and many interesting questions are regularly overlooked. Josh Milburn, in this book, discusses the ethics of feeding the various animals that share the Earth with us. From pets to animals living in our cities, to wildlife, Milburn analyses the rights and obligations that arise in the context of feeding animals and of using animals as food for other animals.

The book

“Lots of vegetarians and vegans keep dogs, cats, or other companion animals. But when it comes to the feeding of these animals, they face a dilemma. The received wisdom is that responsible guardians feed dogs and cats a meaty diet. But vegetarians and vegans, at least if they’re vegetarian and vegan for ethical reasons, will hesitate. Animals – perhaps animals not so different from their beloved companions – suffer and die to produce meat. And vegetarians and vegans think this is a problem; it’s such a problem for them that they no longer want to support it with their diet. If it’s wrong to support the meat industry to feed ourselves, is it perhaps wrong to support the meat industry to feed our companions? And what of the animals our companions might eat if left to roam?”

So begins Josh Milburn’s introduction to his 2022 book “Just Fodder. The Ethics of Feeding Animals.” This paragraph already demonstrates in a very condensed form all that we will be discussing today: the promise of the book, its style, its thoughtfulness, but also what I consider its main weakness.

The author

Josh Milburn is a moral and political philosopher, lecturer in Political Philosophy based in the division of International Relations, Politics and History in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. According to his homepage, he is interested in questions about human/animal relationships, food, liberal/libertarian political theory, and applied ethics. He has a podcast, Knowing Animals, and he is a member of the Research Advisory Committee of the Vegan Society. On his homepage, he adds:

“I live in York with my partner Becky and my dogs Hollie and Casper. Interests outside of academia include British wildlife, vegetable gardening, vegan food, reading, video games, board games, TV, and films.”

Just Fodder is his first book. He has a second one, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully, which, according again to his homepage, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

These credentials are important. Just Fodder is not just another academic philosophy book written by an early career philosopher in search of a topic. It is a work of passion, …

Plato’s Apology

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 19:31:20 +0800

For George Miller: friend, mentor, and who used to remind me, “If you haven’t read it three times, you haven’t read it.”

This essay will attempt to summarize Plato’s Apology and highlight some of the key points in the dialogue. It is one of my all-time favorite works of philosophy, and all my students read it out loud in class. For those looking to navigate the waters of philosophy, I recommend it as a first port of call.

In the preface of Bettany Hughes’s excellent biography on Socrates entitled The Hemlock Cup, she shares an amusing anecdote. Upon embarking on the project, a friend of Hughes’s told her the subject of her research was the hole in a doughnut. In other words, the best she could do was describe the doughnut. We do not know much about the historical Socrates. Our principal sources are the biographer of antiquity, Xenophon, and Plato. Some leading scholars are dismissive of Xenophon, which basically leaves us with Plato.

The Apology is a work by Plato. However, it is unique in the works of Plato due to its context. In the Apology, Plato is more or less acting as a court reporter or a journalist of sorts. The scene of this work is the trial of Socrates, and it features Socrates’s defense (apologia) against the spurious charges brought against him.

Yet, we can safely assume Plato was close in his description of the proceedings, because: (1) Plato knew Socrates; they were friends; (2) Plato was a juror at the trial and was in attendance; (3) Plato was a rather bright bulb and likely had a decent memory; and (4) many of the 501 jurors who were there that day would have read the Apology when it came out, and if Plato produced a fanciful account, it would have tarnished his reputation as a public intellectual.

So, for these reasons, we can make a strong, inductive inference that, although this is Plato’s writing, he probably at least captured the flavor of the hearing, along with Socrates’s personality. I also tend to believe, for what it’s worth, that it is peppered with verbatim wording that Socrates actually used — or tended to use.

Although this is Plato’s writing, he probably at least captured the flavor of the hearing, along with Socrates’s personality.

Plato positioned Socrates in many of his dialogues as a character, and supposedly we get a glimpse into Socrates’s personality and way of operating in what are considered the early dialogues – which include the Apology.

The Apology, as mentioned, is the trial of the accused Socrates. The setting is a large, open-air courtyard. The trial’s 501 Athenian jurors — chosen by lot — are gathered around the square’s perimeter. There is a water-clock to keep time. The year is 399 BC. Socrates has decided to forgo legal representation; all he has to do is speak the truth.

Athens is in a sour mood. First off, it just lost a long and nasty war with Sparta called the Peloponnesian War (431-404 …

Miguel Angel on Running a Philosophy Site

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:34:16 +0800

Miguel Angel is the founder and editor of Filosofia En La Red, a Spanish-language philosophy magazine and website. In this interview, we talk about his experience creating and maintaining a popular philosophy site.

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DP: Miguel Angel, thank you so much for being with us today! You are a slightly different guest than who we generally have in interviews, because it’s not a particular philosophical topic that you are an expert on. Rather, it is what you do, and in this, we are colleagues. You are the founder and editor of Filosofia en la Red, a Mexico-based, Spanish-language philosophy site and magazine. Tell us a few words about Filosofia en la Red: how long has the site existed, and what kind of content do you mainly publish?

Andreas, first of all, thank you very much for the invitation, it’s a great honor to have this space to share with you a little, or a lot, about Filosofía en la Red. First of all, I don’t know if I should say that Filosofía en la Red is a site “from Mexico”, since, although it’s true that I spend most of my time here, being conceived as a space on the net, I see it more as “headquarter-less”, a space without a space, a meeting point that finds its magic in virtuality.

Answering your question directly, I can divide Filosofía en la Red into two stages: 2014 and 2020. In the first block, the site was born with the idea of a “collective philosophy blog where a group of authors shared their reflections”, whether they were original or even re-sharing texts previously published in other spaces. During that period, the site was not particularly cherished, and everyone published as they wanted and when they wanted, without control and above all, without my commitment to the project.

Addressing the final part of the question, Filosofía en la Red focuses on three things: divulge, share and generate philosophy.

In 2020 things changed. There was a noise in my mind that made me feel “guilt and responsibility”; I was “responsible for …” without really assuming total responsibility, for different situations. There was then a great moment of introspection and reflection, and that led me to rethink things, train myself in remote work management and leadership, and after much reflection, conclude that I wanted to keep the project alive but “my way”, with my stamp and renouncing my personal brand and my blog, individual projects, to bet on Filosofía en la Red. And look, three years later, although perhaps it was something radical (to say “goodbye” to my individuality) I do not regret it, without that commitment and dedication, Filosofía en la Red would not be where it is now.

Addressing the final part of the question, Filosofía en la Red focuses on three things: divulge, share and generate philosophy. To this …

The Shortest History of Japanese Philosophy (1)

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 18:21:39 +0800

It was only in the sixth century, at the beginning of the Asuka Period (538–710), that writing was introduced to Japan. Before that nothing was written down so, we assume, there was probably not a great deal of philosophical activity. What there was can hardly be called philosophy: it was an animistic spirituality that centred around the idea that everything in the universe is connected by a spiritual force or energy called musubi, manifestations of which were called kami, a rough translation of which is ‘gods’ but it is more accurate to describe them as spirits. National treasures could be kami, as could awesome natural features like Mt. Fuji and the sun, phenomena like hurricanes, venerated individuals like emperors and great warriors, and supernatural beings like the ‘gods of the earthly realm’, called kunitsukami, or the heavenly deities from the Japanese creation myths, called amatsukami, like Izanagi and Izanami, the (respective) male and female creators of the world. This spiritual, arguably religious, tradition was Shintō, though many don’t like to call it Shintō because they think ‘Shintō as we know it’ didn’t turn up until way later. They acknowledge that Shintō came out of whatever this was, though, and that its core tenets were present from earliest times, so there really is no harm in just calling it Shintō for the sake of simplicity.

It was the introduction of Buddhism in 552 that represents the beginning of Japanese intellectual history.

It was the introduction of Buddhism in 552, however, that represents the beginning of Japanese intellectual history. As the story goes, King Seong of the Korean Kingdom of Baekje sent a diplomatic mission to the Japanese Emperor Kinmei containing Buddhist artefacts and scriptures, Buddhism having reached the Korean Peninsula from China much earlier. At a similar time, merchants, monks and scholars began to emigrate to Japan from Korea, bringing with them Confucian texts from which the Japanese learnt to read and write. The language of the Japanese court was, therefore, Chinese; it would not be for hundreds of years until the Japanese could write their own language.

The first written document in Japanese history was the Seventeen-Article Constitution written by the pseudo-historical Prince Shōtoku in 604. Though it’s called a constitution (kenpō in Japanese), it is little more than a set of highfalutin moral aphorisms without much practical application. Most of the articles are pretty hollow, when it comes down to it, saying things like “let us cease from wrath, and refrain from angry looks” and “give clear appreciation to merit and demerit”. Many were clearly ignored, like the injunction that “decisions on important matters should not be made by one person alone”. In fact, the only articles that look like constitutional laws are the sixteenth, which mandates corvée labour in the winter months …

Plato’s Symposium - Part 1

Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:03:10 +0800

Plato’s Symposium (or, correctly, Symposion) is one of humanity’s immortal texts on love. Seven friends gather at a party one night in ancient Athens and discuss the nature of love. Plato’s thoughts in the Symposion have influenced our views on love right up to the present.

You can find all our articles on love here.

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Why read the Symposion at all?

When you see someone talking about the Symposion today, you might ask yourself: Why on Earth should I care about a 2400-year-old piece of text? What could Plato possibly say about love that we don’t already know? We are so inundated with talk of love, from TV, movies, social media and dating apps. What could old Plato possibly teach us?

Symposium or Symposion? Plato was writing in Greek, where the word is ‘symposion’ (ending with ‘-on’). Later on, philosophy in the West of Europe was mostly done in Latin (which was also the language of the church and of science), while few people spoke Greek. So much of ancient Greek philosophy came to us through commentaries in Latin, where a common ending of nouns was ‘-um’. Other examples of Greek ‘-on’ changing to ‘-um’ would be ‘stadion’ becoming ‘stadium’ and ‘monasterion’ becoming ‘monasterium.’ So today we’re used to the Latin forms, but technically these are wrong. The prefix ‘syn-’ or ‘sym-’ is Greek, not Latin. And since Plato also was a Greek, I opted to call the Symposion by its Greek name in this article, although in English, ‘symposium’ is more commonly used.

A lot, as it turns out. To begin with, the Symposion is what we would today call an LGBT story. Its background understanding is that love is at its best between men, ideally an older man and a boy, a teacher and his student, a master and his apprentice. But love between women is also explicitly acknowledged in the text, and it is only with regret that Plato admits that some men actually do love women. Reassuringly, it is only the meaner sort who do:

Love we see in the meaner sort of men; who, in the first place, love women as well as boys… [181b]

But this is only a funny aside. Another important contribution of the Symposion to the intellectual history of the West is that it established firmly the Christian attitude of man’s love towards God. The Jewish God is a hands-on master, watching over His chosen flock, making sure that they keep all the commandments, traditions, dietary and dress rules just as they should. The Christian God is a much more Platonic being: far away, He is not to be reasoned with. His ideal realm is somewhere else, unreachable for living human beings, and only accessible to the dead who, if deemed worthy, will live a second, eternal life in the shine of God’s perfection. This is, as we will soon see, a concept that comes directly from Plato’s theory of love, as it is presented in the Symposion. Religious fasting, the spiritual exercises of monks, the …

Freeing Yourself from Self-Consciousness

Sun, 28 May 2023 08:21:39 +0800

We can change the way we perceive ourselves by a simple switch in our first-person perspective, argues author Brentyn J. Ramm, following Douglas Harding and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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Feeling awkwardly self-conscious is something that we’ve all experienced.

For many, this feeling is so prevalent as to be debilitating in social situations. This is known as morbid self-consciousness. In some situations, like public speaking, pretty much everyone feels anxious. There is even a commonly cited study showing that people fear public speaking more than death! [1] The reality is actually a bit more complicated [2] but the fact that public speaking is up there with death as a fear really says something about the extreme dread which this prospect can invoke.

On this, I would like to introduce an experiential approach developed by Douglas Harding which can be helpful for freeing oneself from self-consciousness.

Harding was a philosopher and mystic. Up to his late 20s and early 30s, Harding suffered from morbid self-consciousness. He was brought up in a fundamentalist Christian sect, the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren, in which he wasn’t allowed to read literature, newspapers or watch films. Any books other than the Bible and a few school books were liable to be burnt. Laughing out loud was actively discouraged if not outright forbidden. [3]

When he broke away from the sect at the age of 21, as far as his family were concerned, he was dead to them and was destined for hell. No wonder he felt self-conscious and ill-at-ease in the world. He particularly didn’t like his nose. He felt that it was too big. [4] He was shame-faced around other people. But all of that changed when he had a radical shift in his conscious experience of himself. It happened when he noticed that he couldn’t see his head.

What is pure awareness? Douglas Harding (1909-2007) proposed a series of simple but surprising experiments that one can perform to learn more about oneself as the subject of one’s own first person view.

The young Douglas Harding was suffering from a particularly bad case of what the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith. According to Sartre, you are radically free. You cannot be pre-defined. You are continually inventing yourself whether you recognise this or not. For Sartre, being self-conscious, thinking of yourself and acting as if you are a mere object, is a form of false consciousness. You aren’t really an object at all, you only think that you are. That’s just how you appear to others. You are actually a pure consciousness, a kind of ‘nothingness’, that cannot be constrained or predicted – a form of pure spontaneity.

Sartre spent much …

The 7 Most Fascinating Philosopher-Kings in History

Sat, 27 May 2023 12:03:10 +0800

In this article, we’ll take a look at a few historical figures who managed the difficult balance of being seen as both good kings and philosophers – requirements that would seem, to most of us, hard to reconcile.

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Marcus Aurelius… who else?

This one was predictable. Let’s get him out of the way first, so that we can talk about the juicier figures down below.

The modern fascination with (popularised) Stoicism has made Marcus almost into a household name. The Daily Stoic, a YouTube channel with over a million subscribers, posts almost exclusively about Marcus Aurelius – although one would think that the slave Epictetus has much more of relevance to say to the modern, exploited employee than an emperor of Rome, the most powerful man of his time.

Marcus Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, and is generally seen as the model of the (western tradition) philosophy-king. He was, untypically for a Roman emperor, a thoughtful, humble man, who kept a diary of his thoughts and views called “Notes to Myself,” rather than, as others would attempt similar works much later, “My Fight,” “Quotations From Chairman Mao,” “Mastering Bolshevism,” or “I Am the Winner.” The last one is not a joke. It seems to be the actual title of Trump’s autobiography. If this man ever picks up a Marcus Aurelius edition, I suspect that they might both instantly annihilate and disappear in a puff of pure energy.

We talked in an older article about Marcus Aurelius in more detail, and, of course, there’s our recent video about him:

Marcus was a practitioner of Stoicism, a philosophy that emphasizes the importance of reason, virtue, and self-control. In his famous book, which is often (wrongly) titled “Meditations,” Marcus Aurelius reflects on society, the workings of the world, and on how to live a virtuous life while being a part of this world.

As emperor, Marcus Aurelius faced many challenges, including wars on multiple fronts and political unrest within the empire. Still, all his life he tried to follow Stoic principles and to rule justly and with compassion for his subjects. He died while fighting the barbarians (one of whose descendants is writing these words now) in a forest near what today is Vienna.

His diary was with him in his military expedition tent.

Ashoka – The Buddhist Emperor

Emperor Ashoka.

Ha — got you with this one. Bet most of you hadn’t heard of him previously (I hadn’t).

Ashoka was the third emperor of the Maurya Empire from 268 to 232 BC. Although today one often hears that it was the British rule that unified India, Ashoka’s empire already stretched Afghanistan in the west to what today we call Bangladesh in the east and south almost to the tip of the Indian subcontinent. Much of him is known only from writings that date from long after his death, so …

Sartre’s Existentialism

Fri, 19 May 2023 19:31:20 +0800

The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a major figure in the history of ideas in the twentieth century. However, the field of philosophy does not pay him much mind these days. His inspirations Heidegger and Nietzsche receive plenty of attention, as do other French thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, and many others.

But poor Sartre has been, well, binned. In my undergraduate classes, we still read (out loud) Sartre’s famous lecture Existentialism is a Humanism. Naturally, Sartre’s major work Being and Nothingness would be a bit much for undergrad students (weighing in at 800 pages); the purpose of Existentialism is a Humanism after all is to provide a primer.

He gave the talk at the Club Maintenant in Paris just after World War II in autumn 1945. It makes for fun reading, and I feel it offers a worthwhile meditation on moral philosophy. I fear it has been consigned to undergraduate classes, where the occasional student will fall in love with existentialism and openly and proudly declare “I’m an existentialist!” It happens. And it’s a joy to watch. I always think to myself, “Is that what I sounded like in 1991?” Maybe.

So, in this brief essay, I am providing a primer on a primer. I hope students and general readers who are curious will find it useful.

Sartre’s discourse Existentialism is a Humanism can be broken down into five concepts:

Existence precedes essence
Freedom
Responsibility
Anguish
Bad Faith

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Existence precedes essence

The first can be considered one of the key concepts in Sartre’s existentialism. He is saying that humans — individuals and the species — begin life as nothing. They begin as things. Unlike his example of a paperknife. When one designs and then manufactures something like a paperknife or a table or a house, that particular object begins as an idea. One does not just make a table. One has to know what the table will be made of, how big it’s going to be, what it will be used for, etc. In other words, there has to be a plan. For humans, there is no plan. There is no God; Sartre takes an atheistic position. This, he maintains, removes from consideration any possibility of humans referring to a preordained essence or nature. In other words, we cannot use God as an excuse. Also, no one is watching. Humans are on their own, and what we make of the world is completely due to our agency. Humanity (and you) are on their own. For you: existence precedes essence; for the table: essence precedes existence.

Do you agree? Tell us in the comments! Click here to leave a comment.

Freedom

Because existence precedes essence and we start as nothing, we can establish our essence any way we see fit — we will whether we want to or not. We are absolutely free. Sartre famously says we are “condemned to freedom.” The slate is …

A Not Very Philosophical Zombie

Fri, 12 May 2023 18:31:20 +0800

A Not Very Philosophical Zombie

“You can’t explain conscious experience on the cheap.”
David Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.

I never really knew Brian. He was a neighbor, that was all. I didn’t know his wife, Cynthia, either, but I reached out to her when I heard the news about her husband. I mean, imagine finding out you’ve been married to — making love to — a man who was never conscious.

Not that Cynthia believes it. Me, personally, I have to side with the experts on the matter, but I can’t blame her for not wanting to face the truth. I’m not sure I would be capable of facing it either in her position. Of course I’ll never tell her what I really think about Brian, what I have always suspected. Anyway, given how things turned out, I’m glad I kept my thoughts to myself.

Well, I did talk about Brian with my son a while back, way before the hit-and-run incident. It had to be during the summer of 2020 because we’d just walked home together from a socially-distanced block party — because of course it would take a deadly global pandemic to get Alex to go with me to a neighborhood function. I remember the sun had just set, and I had gotten a late start on dinner. At some point I’d asked Alex if he’d noticed anything strange about Brian.

“Huh unh,” Alex said, gazing into his phone. “Why?”

He must’ve been hungry because instead of immediately going back to his room, he’d taken a seat at the kitchen counter.

“It’s nothing,” I said, passing behind him to open a drawer. I did not succeed in resisting the temptation to sneak a peek over my son’s shoulder at his screen. “Who’s Alison?”

“A friend.”

“From the U of A?”

He nodded noncommittally and continued typing, erasing, typing.

I stared into the freezer, relishing the icy vapor against my cheeks before grabbing a bag of orange chicken.

“You know,” Alex said, “actually, I think I know what you mean. Brian’s like a walking Hallmark card. His jokes are just a little too… appropriate.”

Adultness was what Alex was noticing, but he seemed so pleased with his observation that I didn’t have the heart to reject it. “I don’t know. Hey, listen, I know you’re not one to chat up the neighbors, but can we keep this stuff we’re saying about Brian between us?”

“Sure,” Alex said.

“I just don’t want —”

“I know, mom. I won’t say anything.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Alex’s phone dinged. He smiled down at his screen and tapped a one-emoji response.

“I don’t know why I’m even thinking about this,” I went on, “but it’s like with Brian there’s something missing.”

Alex’s phone dinged again.

A Short Story on Epistemic Humility and The Best Possible Life, All Things Considered

I went on talking, apparently to myself. “This is gonna sound strange, but it’s like there’s nothing going on inside, …

Coronation: The Captivating Story of Monarchies

Fri, 12 May 2023 10:11:10 +0800

The history of monarchy is a rich tapestry of power, intrigue, and drama. But what really is the essence of a king? In this article, which accompanies the third in our series of philosophy videos, we look at the spiritual side of royalty.

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From the mighty pharaohs of Egypt to legendary King Arthur and his knights… from the flamboyant King Louis XIV of France to the tragic last empress of Russia, monarchs have left an indelible mark on world history.

As Britain now gets its new king, let’s have a look at what it actually means to be a king.

Whatever our political views, kings and queens still have a special fascination for most of us.

Argonath, mythical kings from Lord of the Rings.

There is something primal, something very old, something echoeing in our collective subconscious about the identification of a ruler with their state, with their land.

Many mammals, since Disney’s Simba most famously lions, have social structures that resemble monarchies. But the role of the leading animal is not only to enjoy privileges. Quite the opposite. In a fight, the leader has to be the first to fight and the strongest fighter. The leadership role is always challenged. Since the leader represents the whole group, a weak leader would mean a weak group. And this, in nature, would be fatal.

So the leader has to be constantly challenged. They have to make sure that they can always defend their position. That they can protect, lead and embody the strength of the group.

For us humans, this leads first to the idea of the king or queen as God. Later, as a representative of God, as a link between the worlds of the mundane and the divine. Royals have always claimed to be appointed by God, and the rituals of Christian monarchies are still mimicking the rituals of the church.

In their book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover,” Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette talk about the essence of monarchy. The book belongs to a “new masculinity” movement, so it’s not everyone’s thing. But one can ignore that and just look at their analysis of the social role of kings, which is brilliant.

Their insights about kings and their role in society are based on the psychoanalysis of C.G. Jung and they are fascinating. For them, the King is an archetypal kind of role. A role that we understand on a deeper level than just another “job.” Like the father, the mother, the warrior or the magician, the king is one of these traditional roles that define human beings. That tell us what the essence of being human is. That try to make sense of what it means to lead a human life.

The king archetype does not need to be an actual royal. A company CEO expresses the same idea. Or the leader of a powerful social movement.

Mahatma Gandhi, imagined by …

The Most Hated Philosopher: Spinoza on God

Thu, 04 May 2023 12:05:29 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Baruch Spinoza: “The eternal and infinite being we call ‘God’ or ‘Nature’ necessarily acts as it does.” But what does this even mean?

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Baruch Spinoza on How We Are All God

“The eternal and infinite being we call ‘God’ or ‘Nature’ necessarily acts as it does. (Ethics, Part IV, preface, only in the Latin version) ”

Spinoza’s life is one of those that modern philosophers should have a long, hard look at when they feel like complaining about their tenure arrangements. Like Diogenes in his barrel, Socrates in his cell and Mother Teresa in her hospice, Spinoza was one of those almost mythical martyrs of philosophy – someone who was ready to defend what he thought to be true with his life, and who would not compromise just to please others.

Spinoza was born in 1632 in a Jewish family that had moved to the Netherlands from Spain or Portugal. When his thoughts about the nature of God came to be known in his tightly-knit Jewish community, the elders tried first to threaten and then to bribe Spinoza in order to silence him. When none of that worked, they excommunicated him. Spinoza, now 23 years old, had to leave Amsterdam and find work as a lens grinder, while writing his books. He died, probably of a lung disease related to breathing in glass dust, at the age of 44.

But it would be misleading to think of him as a lowly, exploited worker. Lens grinding was, at that time, more like aligning the magnets on one of CERN’s particle accelerators today: a work for the very elite of natural scientists. Other lens grinders at that time included “Descartes, Fermat, Galileo, Hooke, Huygens, Kepler, Newton, Spinoza, Torricelli, and, curiously enough, the British architect Christopher Wren,” 1 although these did not do it full-time.

Spinoza, the Jew who was too ungodly even for the Jews (as his countrymen at that time would have seen him), was universally derided, his works forbidden and destroyed by both Jews and Christians, both by clerics and by the state authorities of Holland. His best-known work, the Ethics, was published only after his death in 1677.

The full title of the book is “Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order,” and it is about as much fun to read as this sounds. Here is a little bit of it:

Proof.—Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else (Ax. i.),—that is (by Deff. iii. and v.), nothing is granted in addition to the understanding, except substance and its modifications. Nothing is, therefore, given besides the understanding, by which several things may be distinguished one from the other, except the substances, or, in other words (see Ax. iv.), their attributes and modifications. Q.E.D.

All the rest is just like that, which is one reason why Spinoza is …

What is Utilitarianism?

Wed, 03 May 2023 03:54:07 +0800

What is utilitarianism about? In a nutshell:

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that states that the morally right action maximizes happiness or benefit and minimizes pain or harm for all stakeholders. What counts is the sum of all happiness caused by the action minus the sum of all harm. Proponents of classic utilitarianism are Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Utilitarianism is still one of the most used theories in today’s ethics.

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A case

Imagine that you are faced with a decision and have a range of options available to you. Which one should you choose? Let’s say, you are a doctor in a hospital and two patients are lying in front of you, both in need of the one ventilator that’s available: one is young and strong, just began his university studies before he suddenly fell ill. His prognosis is good: If he gets the ventilator, he will probably make it and have a long life afterwards. The other is an older man, now the president of a big computer company, a philanthropist supporting many charities, but his health is not so good. Even if he survives on this ventilator, he’ll eventually die from one of his other ailments, perhaps this year, perhaps next. There’s no way to know for sure.

What will you do? Who of the two should get the chance to live?

The basic premise

Utilitarianism tries to answer this question in a way that doesn’t require us to believe anything: we don’t need God, we don’t need to follow the Bible, we don’t even need to believe Kant or Aristotle.

We only need to agree on one single premise: that all human beings ultimately want to be happy.

If we can agree to this, then it follows naturally that the best action would be the one that maximises the happiness of all who are concerned: those whom my decision will affect. This is what Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) called “utilitarianism”: the principle that we should aim to maximise “utility,” which is nothing else but “happiness over unhappiness and pleasure over pain” (Bentham).

We only need to agree on one single premise: that all human beings ultimately want to be happy.

Criticism

But here the trouble with utilitarianism begins. Obviously, my two patients are not going to agree on whose survival makes them happier. The one who survives will be happy, the other unhappy (and dead). So we’ll have to consider a few more factors. Their families, for example. Let’s say, the young one has a big family, who all love him, and they will be devastated if he dies. The older company president is an orphan, has never had any attachments, lives alone and cares only for his work. Now it seems easier to see where most happiness will be generated. But what if we also take the charities into account? What if we also count the users of the software that the president’s company is making? But then, what about …

Hobbes Reconsidered

Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:31:20 +0800

“No Politics, No Religion?,” a new book by Gregory Harms, lays out evidence from philosophy, science, history, and contemporary polling data, that debate of politics and religion can lead to greater agreement and more civil discourse. In this article, the author talks about how the philosopher Thomas Hobbes is often misunderstood.

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Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is on that list of thinkers and writers about whom many have a lot of opinions. The problem is, few seem to read these thinkers.

On that list I would place Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Hobbes, and (the living) Noam Chomsky. It is as though there are two of each thinker: the one people talk about, and the one whose work is in print. At the top of the list, I would argue, is Karl Marx. It is rare, even when in the company of academics and intellectuals, to hear someone describe his work accurately. In addition to not reading these thinkers, there is commonly attached to each writer a go-to quote. Like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” concept or his “truck, barter, and exchange” quote. One gets tired of seeing these quotes. They are overused, misused, and distort what the thinker was saying. For Hobbes, it is the “nasty, brutish, and short” line. This snippet is in all the textbooks. It gets trotted out to demonstrate that Hobbes thinks this is what life in the state of nature is like. And that is not correct, as we will see.

The problem is that these quotes become substitutes for reading the book.

Citing Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” concept means we don’t have to read the Wealth of Nations, which is a thousand pages and says absolutely devastating things about mercantilism — his actual subject, not capitalism.

The problem is that these quotes become substitutes for reading the book.

When you see a quote get used to death, something is usually amiss. The thinker’s work is generally being distorted, and by someone who has not attended to the text. I suspect many economics professors gushing and swooning about Smith’s “invisible hand” have not read Smith. And when I started to look more closely at Hobbes’s thought, I started to see a similar ignorance: the repeated pitting of Hobbes against Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hobbes, the thinking goes, says we’re all terrible, and Rousseau casts humanity in a warmer light (which he does), but that does not make Hobbes the Grim Reaper. So, the whole Hobbes-versus-Rousseau trope does disservice to Hobbes. Writers should actually read Hobbes’s masterwork Leviathan, and I don’t get the feeling they are doing so. I am interested in Hobbes, as I am interested in the philosophy of human nature; and seeing as though Hobbes usually represents the people-are-evil position, …

Unpacking Descartes’ Meditations

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 16:52:36 +0800

This short primer explores René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, his contribution to rationalism, and his impact on early modern philosophy. Descartes' method of doubt is explained in detail, including the Evil Demon argument, which challenges traditional notions of knowledge and certainty, and the Wax Example, which reflects on the limitations of our senses. The guide explains why the Meditations are still relevant today and provides a common criticism of Descartes' work.

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As one of the most influential philosophers of the early modern period, René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy has become a cornerstone of Western philosophical thought. In this beginner’s guide, we will explore the key concepts and arguments of Descartes' Meditations, including his method of doubt, the Evil Demon argument and the Wax Example.

We will also examine the significance of Descartes' contribution to rationalism and his impact on early modern philosophy. Finally, we will address some common criticisms of Descartes' work and talk about why his Meditations are still relevant today.

Descartes and the Meditations

René Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who lived in the 17th century. He is widely regarded as the father of modern Western philosophy due to his contributions to the field of epistemology, which is the study of how we acquire knowledge about the world. Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, published in 1641, is a series of six philosophical meditations in which he attempts to establish a foundation for knowledge that is certain and that cannot be doubted.

Descartes is widely regarded as the father of modern Western philosophy due to his contributions to the field of epistemology.

The Meditations are called “on First Philosophy” because they aim to examine what comes “first,” before all other knowledge about the world. Before we can perform any science, any observations, or create any theories, we must first be certain about what we can know and what we cannot know, and how trustworthy our sources of knowledge about the world are. This is what “first philosophy” is about. Aristotle had used the same words to describe his own study of what “being” and “existence” mean, and the word is often used in philosophy to describe metaphysics, the study of the very basic questions that are beyond physical knowledge.

The Meditations are written in the first person and take the form of a personal journey of doubt and reflection. Descartes begins by questioning the reliability of his senses and the certainty of his beliefs.

He ultimately arrives at the conclusion that the only thing he can be certain of is his own existence. Because if one didn’t exist, how could one think and arrive at any conclusions? So the fact that …

A Brief History of Hermeneutics

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 13:55:45 +0800

What is Hermeneutics?

‘Hermeneutics’ is an ancient topic whose philosophical outlines have evolved through time. In a broad sense, hermeneutics can be defined simply as ‘interpretation,’ ‘the art of interpreting,’ or ‘the study of interpretation.’ These definitions, however, beg the question: ‘what is interpretation?’ To answer this question, we must first understand the origins of hermeneutics and the many forms it has taken throughout history. In other words, we must look at the different interpretations of what ‘interpretation’ is. If this seems like a circular endeavour, we need not be concerned, for as we shall see, that is the very nature of interpretation. Here, I will present an overview of the history of hermeneutics, including where it came from, what it means, and how different thinkers have conceived it.

Antiquity

Hermeneutics can be traced all the way back to Greek antiquity. ‘Interpretation,’ as a disciplinary practice, was important to Hellenistic education, as practiced at the School of Alexandria, and afterwards had a major role in the theology of the Middle Ages and Christian culture.

So-called ‘Logios Hermes’ (Hermes Orator). Marble, Roman copy from the late 1st century CE-early 2nd century CE after a Greek original of the 5th century BC. (Original photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen).

If we look at its etymological roots, we can see that the name ‘hermeneutics’ comes from the Greek word hermeneuein (which means ‘to interpret’) and the noun hermeneia (interpretation).

“Traced back to their earliest known root words in Greek, the origins of the modern words ‘hermeneutics’ and ‘hermeneutical’ suggest the process of ‘bringing to understanding,’ especially as this process involves language, since language is the medium par excellence in the process.” (Palmer, 1969, p.13).

These and other related terms appear in ancient texts by Aristotle, Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, Euripides, Epicurus, Lucretius, and Longinus, and are closely associated with the messenger-god Hermes, whose function as the translator of the gods was that “of transmuting what is beyond human understanding into a form that human intelligence can grasp.” (Palmer, 1969, p.13).

As Palmer (1969) points out, the process of hermeneia, of “rendering comprehensible,” can be said to have three different, but closely related meanings:

Hermeneuein as an “announcing” function – saying, expressing, affirming, proclaiming. “Even simply saying, asserting, or proclaiming is an important act of ‘interpretation’” (p.15).
Hermeneuein as explanation – “points to the explanatory rather than expressive dimensions of interpretation.” (p.20). Words clarify and explain something, and this should be recognized as an …

How to Think Like a Philosopher

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 01:35:51 +0800

Peter Cave (2023). How to Think Like a Philosopher. Scholars, Dreamers and Sages Who Can Teach Us How to Live. Bloomsbury Continuum. 304 pages. ISBN: Hardcover: 978-1-3994-0591-1; eBook: 978-1-3994-0592-8. Get it here on Amazon US (affiliate link) or here if you are in the UK. Hardcover: 24 USD, Kindle: 9.99 USD.

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A very enjoyable introduction into Western philosophy. Light, conversational, entertaining and intellectually stimulating. An excellent book for non-philosophers who are interested in learning more about the history of Western thought.

What can the history of philosophy and a look at the lives of the great thinkers of the past teach us about our lives today? This seems to be one of the questions that motivate Peter Cave’s new book How to Think Like a Philosopher, which just came out a few days ago.

The author

Before we begin, let me get rid of an embarrassing admission: until I received his book for review last week, I had no idea who Peter Cave was. I was born in Germany, raised and schooled in Greece and lived the past decade and a half in Hong Kong, so perhaps my ignorance can be forgiven. I still have no idea how famous the man actually is.

If you are like me, perhaps you’d like to know that YouTube has a selection of his interviews and speeches, and he has written roughly one book every two years since the early 2000s. He is a popular philosophy writer, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, BBC radio philosophy presenter and generally a person who gets around. Together with David Attenborough and Jane Goodall, he supports Population Matters, a charity that promotes population control as a means to ensure the survival of the planet, which, I believe, is an excellent idea.

I am less enthusiastic about his self-identification as a “humanist,” which is a label I don’t quite like in its modern incarnation. Probably everyone who has some sense agrees that the Christian churches are problematic institutions and that religious fanaticism is not a good thing. But there is also the opposite attitude: the belief that humans are the best thing since sliced bread, and contemporary “humanism” seems to promote this idea. Embraced uncritically, this can lead to overconfidence regarding the abilities of human reason, to the hubris of the modern homo faber who thinks that the whole world is there just to amuse them and to do their bidding. I always found that modern, enlightened Christians were better, friendlier, more caring people than staunch atheists, who often come across as blind to their own failings and unable to accept that human reason might have its limits and that a bit of intellectual humility is a nice thing to have (I’m thinking of Dawkins as a prime example of this attitude). Anyway, all this has nothing to do with the book we’re discussing here, and I have no idea what kind of …

A Very Short Philosophical Dictionary

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 08:31:20 +0800

This is written as a self-imposed exercise. One entry per letter. Doing so raises some interesting questions, the chief one being what to have for each letter. However, there is an added complication that the entries, while tussling for inclusion, are also often interconnected, and as shown by the actual cross-referencing. One might have done it differently, but this is my best go now, the pressing of the day. That thought may further the dictionary’s value – although the overall idea is meant to be slightly humorous and not taken too seriously – for not only do I hope the entries, albeit limited in number, are genuinely informative, it may raise an interesting debate in the reader’s mind as to what entries they would have, the same or different, and why. In a highly crude and unsatisfactory way, the choice of entries reflects a particular view of philosophy. In short, the exercise throws up all sorts of interesting things. I purposely mention no philosophers by name, except for two entries, as this would have led to inflation. These are my accounts in the entries, deliberately done with no cribbing from other sources except to a very minor degree. – JS

A: Analysis

Analysis, from which Analytical Philosophy gets its name, is the process of taking apart, rendering into their constituent parts, ideas, concepts or arguments, to better determine what they mean or their validity. Analysis may also take the form of making distinctions, often by way of conceptual distinctions, that is to say separating one subject into its constituent parts in order to get a clearer understanding.

B: Belief

Belief is an assent to or affirmation of a truth, that is to say, that something is the case. This assent or affirmation may be a matter of degree, which will depend on either how sure one is of what one holds to be the case or how reluctant one is to abandon one’s affirmation. Belief falls short of knowledge in that in the case of belief it is always possible that what one believes may be false; whereas it is usually argued that what one genuinely knows cannot be false.

C: Consciousness

Consciousness is the capacity for qualitative awareness, most usually of oneself or the world. There is something-it-is-like for the subject of that awareness. This has led some to suggest that the distinctive, perhaps defining, characteristic of consciousness, is intentionality, that is to say, conscious awareness is always of something, it has an intentional object regardless of whether that object exists or not. This is disputed, as it is argued that intentionality is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for consciousness, as moods have no intentional objects and that non-conscious objects may refer beyond themselves. Nevertheless, the qualitative awareness means that the subject is not just reacting unreflectively to stimuli, but that there is a subjective experience or feel to their being in the world. This makes consciousness, which …

A Case for Postmodernism

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 17:21:39 +0800

Author’s note: There are already some excellent books and websites devoted to explaining postmodernism*, so I thought rather than try to condense a very complex topic into a few paragraphs, I would share with you a problem that I’m currently working through, and show you how I’m trying to use postmodernism to open doors to thinking otherwise about my own work.

You can read more from Professor David A. Nicholls on ParaDoxa.

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To begin

It would be reasonable to argue that every entity, thing, form, or substance can only be said to be moving because it moves in relation to something else.

But the idea of movement — in the Western scientific sense, at least — implies that there is also a static state from which movement departs. The static state is the referent from which movement can be said to occur.

The idea of movement … implies that there is also a static state from which movement departs.

But this immediately creates a problem, because for an entity to be static, it must be both spatially and temporally immobile. In other words, it must be frozen in space and time in relation to everything else around it.

But, can anything ever be like this? Or is this just a convenient allusion to make it easier to explain how things ‘appear’?

I certainly recognise this image of a static body in healthcare. My professional training showed me images of anatomical bodies and physiological processes that seemed entirely static. “Here is the adductor longus muscle, and it attaches here and here… This is a fact and it never changes.” Even when we explicitly studied movement as students, it was always made up of static bodies moving in a series, like the galloping horses in Eadweard Muybridge photographs.

The lesson I was taught as a physiotherapist was that the body was a static ‘thing’, with fixed structures and a stable identity. Movement followed. You needed a body first before you could have movement, and when the structural elements failed, movement went awry. Function followed form. Bodies begat movement, never the other way around.

We reassert the same static image of things when we talk about almost everything in healthcare, from identity to the body, ground-force reactions to named emotions. We even have a specific word for this linguistic ossification: homeostasis.

Now, I can appreciate the inherent logic in trying to keep things simple by breaking them down into component parts, and giving everything a sense of stability. It makes it much easier to convey what things are and how they might interact when they appear to stand still for a minute. But there are two big problems with this: 1) it gives the illusion that this is how things are in reality, when they actually aren’t, and 2), it’s a pain when you come to practice your craft in the real …

Should We Fear Technological Unemployment?

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 17:21:39 +0800

There are a lot of things that we no longer have to do ourselves. Machines now do them for us. Of course right now there is still plenty for us to do, but if the trend continues and the machines we build get more and more intelligent, sophisticated, and powerful, which is likely, then there is a real possibility that it will become less and less necessary for us to do any work ourselves. Automated labour, performed by machines, will then eventually replace all or most labour performed by us. If and when that happens, then we will have reached an age of technological unemployment. Would that be a good thing? Should we welcome the prospect, or should we dread it?

On the face of it, technological unemployment is an enticing prospect. In practical terms it would mean that we would no longer have to work to earn a living. We would have everything we need and want without having to spend time on activities that we do not really want to do, because machines would take care of everything. As it stands, many people are unhappy with the kind of work they do. Even if we are lucky enough to do something for a living that we like to do and would do even if we didn’t get paid for it, to get rid of the need to work and sell our labour and skills in some way is surely a good thing. We would then be completely free to choose what to do and what not to do.

It has been argued that, if we are not careful, widespread technological unemployment may well undermine our ability to live a meaningful life.

However, it has been argued¹ that, if we are not careful, widespread technological unemployment may well undermine our ability to live a meaningful life and that in order to prevent this from happening we need to develop the right kind of technology and relate to it in the right way. The problem is that in an age of technological unemployment machines will have taken over and replaced us as the producers of value. They will then create all the good stuff and make the world a better place, while we are reduced to mere observers and passive beneficiaries. Accordingly, if we want to prevent a loss of meaning, what we have to do is avoid increased externalisation and, instead, pursue increased integration, which means that, instead of merely using technology, we directly integrate technology into our bodies.

It seems to me, though, that increasing technological unemployment would not necessarily be a problem even if we do not become cyborgs. The reason why unemployment is often so devastating to those who experience it is that it usually comes with a loss of a decent income, a loss of social recognition, and an abundance of free time that they have never learned to (or, being now unemployed, have not got the means to) put to good use.

If you have little to live on, people look down on you with pity or contempt, and you have no idea how to fill the long hours of the day, then you may be excused for losing an appetite for …

A Language of One’s Own

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 11:55:45 +0800

Reg was pleased that, finally, he was now retired from his job in the Royal Mail Central Delivery Office in Birmingham. He didn’t miss the repetitive work, nor his colleagues in the office, with whom he’d never been friends. His pension, while modest, was sufficient for his purposes. His needs, like his life as a whole, were simple and relatively inexpensive. Two weeks a year in an inconspicuous hotel on the Solway Firth were, for instance, holiday enough for him. He enjoyed a quiet bachelor existence at home, uninterrupted except for occasional visits by his older sister, Lilian, who lived in Newcastle.

If Reg had one slight extravagance, it was the amount he spent on books about language. Maybe it was the years spent deciphering the addresses sent to or from far-flung countries that had sparked his interest in the great variety of languages spoken in the world. He’d never tried to learn any of these languages himself and, over time, it was no longer this or that language – Danish, Urdu or whatever – that interested him, but language itself. On his bookshelves there now stood a respectable number of works – mainly basic introductions – on the psychology, sociology and philosophy of language.

It was after reading one introduction to the philosophy of language that Reg decided what he would devote himself to in retirement. This book contained a short chapter on the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, ‘private language argument’. Reg was not confident, he had to admit, that he understood exactly what the philosopher was arguing. But the conclusion seemed to be that there couldn’t be a language that only one person was able to understand – a private language of his or her own.

At first, Reg thought this sounded silly. What about the secret code that, as a 5-year old boy, he’d devised so that his mother and sister wouldn’t understand the diary he was keeping? But then Reg realised that this wasn’t a language that no one else could decipher, since this is precisely what his mother actually did by the time she’d got to page 3 of the diary. She’d worked out that Reg had replaced ‘a’ by ‘b’, ‘b’ by ‘c’, ‘c’ by ‘d’ … and so on. Still, Reg reflected, surely someone might invent a language that no one else could possibly decipher – a bit like Linear B, but much more difficult.

So this was the task Reg set himself: to invent just such a ‘private language’. He called it ‘Vlungpo’. To guarantee that no one would understand it, Reg created a whole series of obstacles. For one thing, the sounds of Vlungpo would, like that very name, be unattractive, so that few people would be drawn to learn it. It was not, certainly, going to be, like Italian, a bella lingua. Next, Vlungpo would contain far more independent words than any other language. This was achieved, for example, by dispensing with prefixes, suffixes and other devices used to form longer words from stems. So, in Vlungpo, the terms for pleasure, …

Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa?

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 01:35:51 +0800

Brandon Robshaw (2020). Should a Liberal State Ban the Burqa? Reconciling Liberalism, Multiculturalism and European Politics. Bloomsbury Academic. 265 pages. ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-3501-2505-6. Get it here on Amazon. Hardcover: 120 USD, Kindle: 35.95 USD.

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A very clear, instructive and carefully argued book that shows off applied philosophy at its best.

Is it morally right for liberal states to ban the wearing of Islamic dress that covers the face of the (female) wearer? And if so, for which precise reasons would such a ban be defensible?

The question is surely one that most of us have discussed with others at some point. When France banned the wearing of the burqa on French territory in 2010, a heated debate followed. Obviously, Muslims would be opposed to the ban – but even non-Muslims often rejected the measure and many of its possible justifications.

Things are not as easy as they may seem. The wearing of the burqa (and its ban) touch on a number of pretty complicated philosophical problems.

When France banned the wearing of the burqa on French territory in 2010, a heated debate followed.

For one, of course, there is the issue of gender equality and the freedom of Muslim women to wear whatever they like. Strangely perhaps for the Western observer, it turned out that many Muslim women reported that they would actually voluntarily choose to wear a burqa. But if this is the case, then how can a state committed to individual freedom justify taking just this freedom away from Muslim women?

One could try to argue that the Muslim women who would like to go on wearing the burqa might not have been entirely free in their choice. Perhaps they only accept the dress under the pressure of their culture, their religion, or other family members. And such pressure might even work subconsciously – the women affected might not even realise that they are not freely choosing and that they are instead the victims of a subtle ploy to restrict their freedoms, a ploy that included their early childhood education and the values that society and religion passed on to them.

But then, one might ask, is it the job of the state to solve such issues with a blanket ban on the wearing of this type of dress? Should the state assume the paternalistic stance of forcing women to expose their faces, even if they don’t want to, in the name of some “higher order” freedom? And if I want to cover my face for any reason, shouldn’t this be something that concerns only me?

But then, one might ask, is it the job of the state to solve such issues with a blanket ban on the wearing of this type of dress?

Thinking through these problems leads to complex questions that require weighing superficial freedom of choice against perhaps a “deeper” freedom of choosing one’s values. Or weighing the preferences …

What is Ethical Investing?

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:35:51 +0800

We all want our money to serve the right cause – but how can we make sure that it will? Catherine Greene on what is involved in ethical investing and ESG considerations.

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What is ethical investing?

The desire to invest ethically is not new. For example, in the 18th century, Methodists in the US avoided investing in companies involved in alcohol, tobacco, or gambling. Today, retail investors can access an increasing variety of ESG funds and investments (ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance), which reflects the ongoing desire of many of us to do good while investing to generate a financial return. Broadly speaking, ESG strategies aim to promote Environmental, Social or Governance factors, either by excluding certain sectors (such as tobacco, or oil and gas), or by investing to actively improve one or more of these factors. But what exactly is ESG, and does investing in a company or fund rated highly for ESG make us an ethical investor?

But what exactly is ESG, and does investing in a company or fund rated highly for ESG make us an ethical investor?

Measuring John

Let’s begin with a very simple problem. I’ve woken up with a cracking New Year hangover, and can vaguely remember my friend, John, convincing me to ride down the high street in a shopping trolley. I begin to wonder whether John is a good person. Drunken antics aside, I’m sure he is – he gives to charity, is patient with his children, lends me money…

Suppose I want to be a bit more systematic in my assessment. How ethical is John on the basis of environmental, social and governance issues? After pausing to wonder why anyone would ever want to ask the question in this way, I draft a list of criteria:

Environmental:

Does he own a car, if so, what kind? How many miles does he drive?
Does he use public transport when he can?
How large is his house, and how is it heated?

Social:

Does he make charitable contributions?
What job does he do?
Does he help friends in need?

Governance:

Does he vote?
Does he participate in local government?
Does he get involved in local causes?

We might also think about his motivations:

Did he use his car less just because he knew I’d be checking?
Does he help out at a local charity, but post pictures of himself doing so on social media?

The list can be as comprehensive as we like. Now that I’m quite into making lists, I score each of these factors out of five, and come up with a rating. This is awesome, as I can now compare John to other friends, and divide my friends into tiers ranging from saintly to incorrigible.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t help very much. Firstly, because my friends and I are unlikely to agree on how to weight these different factors. For example, John might impress me so much with his selfless charitable activities that I am unconcerned by his …

Necessary Vices

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 11:55:45 +0800

It is rarely denied that, in societies remotely like our own, an impressive array of vices or human failings is on display. Hypocrisy, greed, cruelty, prejudice, envy, sentimentality, dishonesty, hubris… these are just a few of them. But what if many of these vices are not simply familiar but, as it were, baked into human life as we know it? How should it affect a moral verdict on humankind if its failings are necessary to its forms of life?

Responses to this question will vary. For some people, the necessity of many vices merely adds to their already bleak, pessimistic assessment of the human condition. For others, by contrast, it is pointless to bemoan failings without which the benefits and even existence of civilisation would be impossible. Before these responses can be judged, we need to flesh out the idea of necessary vices, so let’s look at some authors who have championed it.

But even before that, it’s important to distinguish this idea from a less contentious one. You don’t have to be a utilitarian, or to subscribe to the Buddhist doctrine of ‘skill-in-means’, to accept that, in certain circumstances, an otherwise wrong action is justified. One thinks, for example, of the lie that is told to a dying person to avoid causing distress, or of killing a potential murderer to save lives. It is a different matter, however, to condone vices or failings, not because of exceptional circumstances, but because, in ordinary everyday life, they play strategic roles in the running of a society and economy.

Some have argued that vices, as well as virtues, are essential to secure the advantages and stability of complex social systems like ours.

It is these strategic roles that have been the focus of some acute observers of the moral condition of humankind. They have argued that vices, as well as virtues, are essential to secure the advantages and stability of complex social systems like ours. For the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, in the 17th century, several of ‘the innumerable faults to be found in [our] apparent virtues’ are as necessary for alleviating ‘the ills of life’ as are the poisons contained in some medicines. Hypocrisy, for example, by paying lip-service to moral behaviour, does something to encourage it, while wilful self-deception contributes to self-esteem and contentment.

Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, half a century later, is equally – or even more – emphatic: our ‘vilest’ qualities are ‘the most necessary accomplishments’ for creating and prospering in ‘the happiest and most flourishing societies’. It is envy, love of luxury, vanity and fickleness of taste that, for example, enable industry and trade to prosper. ‘The moment evil ceases’, he adds, ‘the society must be spoiled’.

Echoing such remarks, the 20th century philosopher, E.M. Cioran, declares ‘Root out [our] sins and life withers at once’. Unscrupulous opportunism, intolerance, prejudice and …

Albert Schweitzer on the Reverence for Life

Sun, 22 Jan 2023 12:45:33 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Albert Schweitzer, medical doctor, theologian, musician and philosopher who left it all behind to go and help the poorest in Africa, saying: “Ethics is nothing other than the Reverence for Life.”

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In this series, we go through the most famous quotes in the history of philosophy! Subscribe here to never miss a post! Find all the articles in the series here.

“Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. (Albert Schweitzer, Civilisation and Ethics) ”

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a medical doctor, protestant theologian, musician and philosopher – an almost mythical presence of a man. In many ways, he was a son of his time, contemporary to others who seem larger than life: he was born right between Gandhi, who was six years older, and that other Albert, the physicist Einstein, four years his younger. It was an age whose protagonists built and destroyed empires, erected cathedrals of science, and dedicated their lives to almost inhuman levels of altruism – and all that over lifetimes that included the two most terrible and inhuman wars that history had ever seen.

Thinking back to the world they inhabited and formed, one is reminded of that great line in the script to Graham Greene’s Third Man, where Harry Lime says:

“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Albert Schweitzer is not much remembered today. His legacy is not carried forward by an army of scientists or a whole nation of a billion people. Philosophers never took him seriously as an ethicist, although few who call themselves ethicists today would be willing to put their whole lives in the service of their beliefs, as he did.

As a young man, he studied theology and music, becoming an expert in the study and restoration of historic church organs. He was such an accomplished musician, that in 1905 he was invited to play for the king and queen of Spain. After the concert, the king asked him: “Is it difficult to play the organ?” – to which Schweitzer answered: “Almost as difficult as it is to rule Spain.”

As he grew older, he also grew restless, unsatisfied with a life of privilege.

As a scholar, he wrote two books on the interpretation of Bach’s music and published more, widely acclaimed books on the historical Jesus and (much later) the mysticism of early Christianity. But as he grew older, he also grew restless, unsatisfied with a life of privilege, as we would say now, asking himself how he could justify his existence in the face of Jesus’ commandments. To a friend he wrote:

For me the whole essence of …

Kant’s Joke: Are Practical Jokes Wrong?

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 18:31:20 +0800

Kant is an unlikely source of humour, one might suppose, given his, by all accounts, reined-in, well-regulated way of life. On the other hand, others report that he could be quite a wit and good company when out convivially eating with others. Be that as it may, the connection with Kant is not with him personally, but with that perhaps even more unlikely joke-source, the Categorical Imperative.

Kant is an unlikely source of humour, one might suppose, given his, by all accounts, reined-in, well-regulated way of life.

It is not the Categorical Imperative that generates the joke, but rather it allows us to understand a kind of joke, and in such a way, in addition, that we may better understand the disquiet, even revulsion, some feel about that kind of joke, especially if taken too far. But the title is justified, and that it is Kant’s Joke,¹ as it is hard to see how the joke and the misgivings we may have about such jokes can be understood properly without understanding the central feature of Kant’s ethics. This is not to say he would have liked the joke; he would not.

I refer of course to the so-called Practical Joke. Practical jokes always involve some kind of deception, either by deliberate expressed falsehood (one may say, lie) or by deliberate omission of some truth that could be expressed. This deception may not be verbal, it may be brought about by some action or inaction. Then, after some supposedly suitable period of time the deception is reversed or at least the initial situation revealed to be something other than it first seemed to be.

Let’s take a couple of examples.

A friend’s exam results arrive, which you know mean a great deal to them. You bowl up to them with the envelope, and open it, or ask them whether you can open it (it doesn’t matter which) and solemnly declare that they have failed, while knowing that they have passed. But then after a suitable pause – how long that is depends on how much you want to screw up the tension – you say ‘no you haven’t, you’ve passed!’

Here you boil some spaghetti, let it cool, and you put it in someone’s bed down at the bottom where their feet go – perhaps you watch them get into bed, though that’s not essential – the point being the alien shock the person feels when they put their bare feet into what appears to be a load of worms, or something else ghastly, that should not be there. The relief comes, as it always does with practical jokes, on realising it is only cold spaghetti.

Here you boil some spaghetti, let it cool, and you put it in someone’s bed down at the bottom where their feet go.

In both cases, and in all cases in practical jokes, the trajectory of the joke is the shock or an initial bad thing happening being replaced by relief that things are not what they seem. Now for this not to be simply cruel – for sometimes it is when practical jokes ‘go …

Welcome to the German site!

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 22:13:53 +0800

Are you a German speaker? If so, we now offer a subset of Daily Philosophy articles in German at the address: daily-philosophy.de

Leave a comment to tell us how you like it and what we can improve.

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We are happy to announce that Daily Philosophy will from now on be available in German, in addition to the international, English-language site.

Since these are still the early days of the German site, only a few articles have been translated, but we are working daily on more and hope, eventually, to have most articles available in German.

We know that some places, like menus, dates, headers and footers and so on, might not yet all appear correctly in German; be assured that we are working on those, but it may take a few months to get everything sorted out. Until then, you can already read all the articles that have been translated by either:

Clicking on the little German flag on the top of the articles that have a German translation; or
Starting at the German language Daily Philosophy Homepage daily-philosophy.de

If you encounter any issues, please feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page that causes the problem, and we’ll examine it!

Many thanks and Willkommen auf Deutsch!

◊ ◊ ◊

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When Does a Fetus Have Rights?

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 13:55:45 +0800

What sort of rights should a fetus or embryo have? This isn’t the only question in debates about abortion, but it’s an important one.

The central claim of anti-abortion activists is that destroying a fetus or embryo is wrong because it’s killing a being that has a right to live. And part of the case for abortion access is the opposite claim, that a fetus or embryo is not yet a being with rights. This denial is only part of the case for abortion rights: there’s also the claim that even if a fetus or embryo has rights, the pregnant person’s right to bodily autonomy should take precedence, and the claim that banning abortion is harmful to women’s health, safety, and equality. But it is nevertheless worth exploring the question of what rights a fetus or embryo should have – the question of its ‘moral status’.

The question of moral status is difficult because it depends on multiple other questions, spanning different disciplines: ethics, philosophy of mind, and neuroscience. In this article I’ll try to tease apart five of those questions, and get a sense of what some plausible answers might be:

What features give a being moral status? This is a question in philosophical ethics. Among the popular answers, the most significant for the abortion debate may be sentience.
What is sentience? This is a question in philosophy of mind. We should distinguish physical detection of a stimulus, the conscious experience it gives rise to, and cognitive awareness of that experience.
What makes us sentient? What brain structures enable conscious experiences? This is a question at the intersection of philosophy with neuroscience, and while there’s still uncertainty, most evidence points to the cerebral cortex.
What brain structures do embryos and fetuses have, at various points during pregnancy? This is a question in developmental neuroscience, where the preponderance of evidence is that the cerebral cortex forms quite late in pregnancy.
Finally, how much does potential matter? When something isn’t yet sentient, how much should it matter if it could become sentient in the future? This is another question in ethics, though it connects with philosophy of mind through the question of personal identity.

None of these questions are easy, but some answers are likely to have more widespread appeal than others. After reviewing these five questions, I’ll suggest that combining the most appealing answers supports thinking that moral status appears quite late in pregnancy, well after the overwhelming majority of abortions happen.

Question 1: What features give a being moral status?

This is a big question, so we can’t survey all the options, but three common answers are relevant here:

First, people sometimes appeal to a cluster of sophisticated mental capacities – things like being able to talk, to reason, to think about yourself as yourself, to consider things from other people’s perspectives, etc. These capacities all seem to be distinctively human: no …

What does “March of the Penguins” have to do with Kant?

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 18:55:45 +0800

For those of us who are curious about philosophy and keep studying it, we are often part of events that put us to the test. A common scenario can be described more or less as follows.

Imagine you are at a dinner table, having fun with some friends on a Saturday night, and the topic of violence in human beings is brought up. Maybe you are discussing a crime that came up in the news recently, when one of your buddies makes the following pronouncement:

“Last week I watched ‘March of the Penguins’ and, to my utter surprise (spoiler ahead!), these animals are very violent! To the point that, when an infant penguin loses her parents, who are in charge of nourishing her, other adult penguins will come along and kill her simply because there’s nobody left to do the journey to get food for her. Isn’t that unfair? There’s a good amount of violence in the animal kingdom. I watch documentaries all the time and this is a common theme. Then… since we humans are animals, we are bound to be violent, as well.”

You reason with yourself for a while and come to the conclusion that something must have gone wrong in your friend’s last statement. You search for clarification in the wealthy mass of philosophical knowledge that you have patiently acquired throughout the years, to realize that it may be worth pointing out that your friend’s conclusion may not be the case depending on how you look at it.

You wait until dessert time to bring up the topic again, you turn around to your dinner friend and say:

“Kant would disagree with your statement about violence in human beings!”

Now all eyes are on you and you have no choice but to perform your philosophical mission to the best of your abilities. You start explaining that treating humans as animals means for Kant to take away their humanity, which is their dignity since it is based on rationality.

“We humans are endowed with a gift from nature that gives us the freedom to act rightly. Penguins may not be able to decide what’s best from an ethical standpoint, but we have this freedom that is underlying all of our actions.

We humans are endowed with a gift from nature that gives us the freedom to act rightly.

We wouldn’t be able to talk about ethics at all if we couldn’t see us as free beings who are capable of deciding. Think about how Aristotle classified our actions as voluntary and involuntary. You can only be held accountable for something that you’ve done because you are expected to have performed it in a voluntary way. You can pick up the information that surrounds a given affair, weigh all the facts and make a decision, which will lead to your action.

For Kant, penguins are not built like that. They belong exclusively to the world of nature, since they are not rational beings, for which all of their actions are done involuntarily because they are subject to predetermined laws. A penguin cannot decide if it’s right or wrong to kill the baby: they are programmed to do it! There is, for Kant, no …

Shane Epting on the Philosophy of Cities

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 14:34:16 +0800

Shane Epting is an assistant professor of philosophy at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. His research focuses on sustainability, transportation, environmental justice and urban futures. In this interview, we discuss the philosophy and future of cities, and why ecocentric ethics are fundamentally flawed.

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DP: Dr. Shane Epting, welcome to Daily Philosophy and thank you for agreeing to this interview! I am very happy and honoured to have you here. It seems that you are the rare case of a philosopher who has written nothing but fascinating papers and books. As opposed to much of present-day analytic philosophy, your topics are always eminently practical and of immediate relevance to life. What are your views on this? Is academic philosophy missing out a bit on opportunities to engage more with the pressing problems of society today?

I love philosophy, all kinds. When I think about some of the “great works” in the discipline, they remain accessible. I do my best to embrace this quality. I think I get it right sometimes while failing in other instances. Progress, not perfection, as my friends say.

I love philosophy, all kinds. When I think about some of the “great works” in the discipline, they remain accessible.

Getting more to your point, I don’t want to tell anyone else how to do philosophy or think. I have a penchant for works that cut from the abstract to the concrete. I recently argued that the academy needs a new kind of philosophy that participates in interdisciplinary conversations. Several contemporary philosophers' works are inherently philosophical while remaining connected to the academy. Grant Silva’s article “Racism as Self-love” is an excellent example. Such papers offer insights into real-world situations, revealing the extraordinary in the ordinary. One way to usher in an age of new philosophy is to encourage people to be their own philosophers. I’m not saying to ignore the canon or relevant works. Dare to use your understanding of philosophy to reflect your personality and genuine interests.

For instance, when working on my Ph.D., my vehicle went kaput. I walked over a mile and rode two buses and a train to get to my university. During my first academic job, I waited in the blistering Mojave Desert sun to catch a bus enough times to burn the experience into my memory for life. These lessons guide my research. While I cannot (and do not) speak for others with harsher conditions compounded by racism, classism, sexism, and ableism, I’ve positioned my work to speak against the conditions that perpetuate such harm in general (among other kinds). These points are evident in my first book, The Morality of Urban Mobility: Technology and Philosophy of the City.

DP: Let’s now talk about how that book that summarises much of your recent …

What's So Wrong With Engaged Buddhism?

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:55:45 +0800

In this article, Dr Michael McGhee presents an alternative understanding of Buddhism’s relation to social activism from that advocated and presented here previously in the series of articles by Ian Kidd.

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1.

The great German theologian Adolf von Harnack was satirised by a contemporary, George Tyrrell, who famously remarked that ‘The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.’¹

In this eloquent and provocative critique of the ‘Engaged Buddhism’ movement, Ian Kidd offers a similar satirical thought about Buddhists who look down the well of the centuries and find just what they were looking for reflected back at them: the Buddha as social activist, liberal, feminist, egalitarian. Kidd’s view, by contrast, is that if we study the early suttas we shall find that this picture not only has no purchase but, if anything, is contradicted by the evidence. He writes:

I suspect what most people think of as ‘Buddhism’ is really shaped by some kind of engaged Buddhist image. I think that’s a problem: the fidelity of those images to the teachings of the Buddha is very questionable.

By ‘the teachings’, I mean the suttas or discourses that are taken to be the earliest statement of the Buddha’s teachings.

The question for Kidd is whether engaged Buddhism distorts those teachings, whether it is faithful to or consistent with those teachings, and he remarks

I only want to provoke doubts about whether the ethos of engaged Buddhism is consistent with what the Buddha taught. We can find perfectly good reasons to want to address racism, economic inequality, and unsustainable abuse of the environment. But few, if any of these will be drawn from the teachings of the Buddha.

Now, when Kidd talks of ‘consistency with’ or ‘fidelity to’ the earliest statements of the Buddha’s teaching it may look to some as though he endorses a traditionalism which resists the critical developments which define a living tradition, which can both correct and be corrected by the past. I think such a reading would be a mistake. Kidd is asking whether or not the engaged Buddhism movement distorts the past in order to justify its own position.

Is Buddhism essentially quietist and pessimistic about the human condition?

Nevertheless, the questions crowd in. Is this what engaged Buddhists are doing? Aren’t those conclusions of Nineteenth Century European scholars and philosophers more accurate? – that Buddhism is essentially quietist, and pessimistic about the human condition? Does an ‘engaged’ Buddhist really have to draw on this picture of the Buddha as a ‘social activist’ to find support for their own activism? Should …

Superhero Thought Experiments

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 11:10:09 +0800

Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg (2019). Superhero Thought Experiments. University of Iowa Press. 231 pages. ISBN: 978-1609386559.

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A very enjoyable book that presents classic arguments from philosophy by discussing examples of superhero comics. If you are interested in comics, then this book will give you a good, solid introduction to many interesting problems in philosophy, while also teaching you to see superhero comics from a more sophisticated point of view.

What if an evil genius is tricking you into believing that the world around you is real when it really isn’t? What if on an alternate Earth everything is identical but for one almost undetectable detail? What if trying to travel to the past transported you to a different universe instead? What if a mad scientist removed your brain and is keeping it alive in a vat of nutrients? What if lightning struck a dead tree in a swamp and transformed it into The Swampman?

Any of these fantastical plots could be the premise of a superhero comic book. … Except none of those scenarios comes from comics. They’re all thought experiments written by highly regarded philosophers.

So begins the fascinating journey on which Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg take us in their marvellous 2019 book Superhero Thought Experiments.

What if an evil genius is tricking you into believing that the world around you is real when it really isn’t?

This book is part of a wider trend to bring the philosophy treatment to popular culture. As far as I know, the most prominent and long-living example of this is the “… and Philosophy” series from Open Court Publishing. From The Simpsons and Philosophy to Lord of the Rings and Philosophy this long-running series (some of the titles were published in the early 2000s), covers all the usual suspects: Dungeons and Dragons, The Matrix, Buffy, Harry Potter, all the way to Stephen Colbert and Philosophy. I was therefore surprised to see that the Superhero book was not in that series but published by University of Iowa Press. This might be one of the reasons why the book has fewer than 10 reviews on Goodreads, when, for example, The Simpsons and Philosophy have over 3,000. The unusual venue may have made it harder for the right audience to find the book.

The book’s audience

But the relative obscurity of the work is certainly not deserved – quite the opposite. I am myself not a superhero audience; my knowledge of the matter is limited to what I’d heard of Superman, Batman and Spiderman as a child, and then, at a later age, reading Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Still, I found Superhero Thought Experiments fascinating and easy to read, even without the background in superhero lore.

One reason is that the authors seem to be very well aware that there are two distinct audiences for their book: philosophy …

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 3)

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 08:55:45 +0800

This is the third part of a series of articles by Ian James Kidd on Buddhism and social activism. Find the first two articles in the series here:

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 1)

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 2)

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Engaged Buddhists understand the Dhamma to endorse kinds of social activism. Compassion and ‘overcoming suffering’ means an earnest collective effort to radically change the social and political conditions of human life. Justice, fairness, equality, and rights are all pursued by engaged Buddhists. ‘Climate action’ and rhetoric of ‘saving the planet’ fill Buddhist blogs and pamphlets. Thích Nhất Hạnh came to fame for his anti-war advocacy. My city has a ‘Buddhists for Extinction Rebellion’ group. All this is proof of a ‘sea-change’ in the global Buddhist tradition. For one distinguished scholar, ‘Buddhists have gotten up off their cushions, recognizing that collective sources of suffering in the world must be addressed by collective action’.

‘Climate action’ and rhetoric of ‘saving the planet’ fill Buddhist blogs and pamphlets.

In the first and second parts of this series, I tried to cast doubt on the actual fidelity of engaged Buddhism to the teachings of the Buddha. My aim isn’t ‘to do’ down Buddhism, nor impugn the moral seriousness of many of those causes. I only want to provoke doubts about whether the ethos of engaged Buddhism is consistent with what the Buddha taught. We can find perfectly good reasons to want to address racism, economic inequality, and unsustainable abuse of the environment. But few, if any of these will be drawn from the teachings of the Buddha.

I focus in this final piece on a neglected aspect of the teachings: the condemnation of social activism and political engagement.

Society and the Sangha

The Buddha did not say much about political and social issues. A handful of suttas discuss issues like rulership and the origins of the state. Generally, though, the Buddha was reluctant to say very much. Most of what he did say about politics was in response to the requests of the rulers who would occasionally consult him. As a general rule, the Buddha’s advice is straightforward – reward the capable, punish criminals but not too harshly, tax people but not too much, and so on. One scholar calls the Buddha’s political views a sort of ‘limited citizenship’. Insofar as we live in extended social communities, someone needs to be in charge, and so they should have a good moral character and a limited range of duties.

The Buddha did not say much about political and social issues.

The great Buddhist king, Asoka, is often presented as the ideal – a wise ruler who abandoned warfare, made provisions for care of ill and aged people, instituted protections for animals, and so on. As rulers go, Asoka was admirable but also rare. An engaged Buddhist may point to …

The Ballad of Marie and Elsie

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 19:21:39 +0800

There was a young woman from Anglesea
Who took quite a shine to philosophy.
She pondered a lot
Upon “ought” and “ought not”,
Which stopped when she noticed a bee.

The bee’s name was Elsie, the woman’s Marie,
Marie was disgusted, while Elsie sipped tea,
She searched for a weapon to
Teach Elsie a lesson
And send off that bee, straight to eternity.

The weapon was found in just a few seconds,
‘Twas Kant’s noble work on the law and the heavens.
She grabbed it real tight,
And whacked with some might –
Poor Elsie was dead and deprived of all presence.

Marie was relieved she got rid of the beast,
Returned to her books and forgot the deceased,
And pondered again
The essence of man,
The good and the bad, what counts most and what least.

◊ ◊ ◊

Michael Hauskeller is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department at the University of Liverpool, UK. He specializes in moral and existential philosophy, but has also done work in various other areas, most notably phenomenology (the theory of atmospheres), the philosophy of art and beauty, and the philosophy of human enhancement.

His publications include Biotechnology and the Integrity of Life (Routledge 2007), Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project (Routledge 2013), Sex and the Posthuman Condition (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television (ed. with T. Philbeck and C. Carbonell, Palgrave 2015), Mythologies of Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan 2016), Moral Enhancement. Critical Perspectives (ed. with L. Coyne, Cambridge University Press 2018), and The Meaning of Life and Death (Bloomsbury 2019). His most recent book is The Things that Really Matter. Philosophical Conversations on the Cornerstones of Life (UCL Press, 2022).

Michael Hauskeller on Daily Philosophy:

Cover image by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash.

The Cicada and the Bird

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 14:23:27 +0800

Christopher Tricker (2022). The Cicada and the Bird. The usefulness of a useless philosophy. Chuang Tzu's ancient wisdom translated for modern life.

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The following excerpt presents us with Chuang Tzu’s vision of the Tao (the path), and how to walk it. Now, the Tao (the path) means different things to different people. For example, for Confucians it was the path of aristocratic culture and ritual. But for Chuang Tzu, it’s the surface isness (the presenting phenomenology) of things: the shape, colour, texture, and feel of things that we experience directly when we put our brain’s labels aside. His best metaphor for how to walk this path is a story about a cook carving up an ox.

For Chuang Tzu, the Tao is the surface isness (the presenting phenomenology) of things.

The Cook and the Ox

The cook is unravelling an ox for Cultured Benevolent Lord.

His hand, a subtle turn –
The shoulder leaning just so.
His foot: poised, placed –
The knee bending in flow.
Then whoosh!
Whirl!
Knife suspended –
And swoosh!
Not a sound not in tune.
In time with the Mulberry-Grove Dance.
In step with the Sacred-Chiefs Corroboree.

Cultured Benevolent Lord says:
O, bravo!
How does skill arrive at this?

The cook, putting the knife down, replies:
What your subject cares about is the path.
He’s moved on from skill.

When your subject first began unravelling oxen, he had eyes only for oxen.
After three years, he never attempted to see a whole ox.
And now, your subject meets the parts with his daemon and doesn’t scrutinise them with his eyes.

His administrative thinking stops and his daemon’s longing goes forth,
yielding to the natural grain,
striking at large gaps,
guiding through large openings,
going by the given structure.
To skilfully pass through a joint – that’s something he never attempts, much less a large bone!

Good cooks replace their knife every year, because they cut.
Common cooks replace their knife every month, because they hack.
Well, your subject’s knife is nineteen years old. It has unravelled several thousand oxen and its edge is as if freshly issued from the grindstone.

Good cooks replace their knife every year, because they cut. Common cooks replace their knife every month, because they hack.

The sections have space between them, and the knife-edge lacks thickness.
Using something that lacks thickness to enter where there’s space – one’s scope in which to wander is vast. Indeed, the knife has room to spare.
That’s why after nineteen years the knife-edge is as if freshly issued from the grindstone.

Still, when I come across a knot, I see the difficulty it presents.
Warily, cautioned – my gaze stilled; my action slowed – I move the knife ever so subtly.
And poof! The knot unravels itself like a clod of soil crumbling to the ground.
Lowering the knife and …

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 2)

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 18:55:45 +0800

This is the second part in a three-part series by Ian James Kidd on Buddhism and social activism. Find the first article in the series here:

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists? (Part 1)

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In an earlier piece for Daily Philosophy, I challenged the idea that the Buddha’s teachings on compassion and the overcoming of suffering provide support for social activism. ‘Changing the world’, challenging patriarchy, revolution, and the whole ethos of radical reformism is nothing like what the Buddha taught. Karuna – ‘compassion’ – really means smaller, modest acts of caring responsiveness. It doesn’t involve structural changes or collective actions. Dukkha – ‘suffering’ or ‘dis-ease’ – is a cosmic fact to be accepted, not a removable aspect of our world we could ever ‘tackle’ through collective action. I ended that piece by noting questions a critic might ask. Can the Buddha not endorse our concerns with injustice? Wouldn’t he largely share in our sense of what is wrong with our world? Isn’t large-scale activism a natural extension of the Buddha’s teachings?

In this piece and the next one, I suggest the answer to all these questions is ‘No’.

Condemnations and endorsements

A student of mine once remarked that Buddhism seemed to her a ‘suspiciously good fit’ for modern progressive moral outlooks. An Iron Age Indian spiritual teacher born into a richly religious culture turns out to share almost the same values and concerns as late modern advocates of ‘liberal morality’. Like us, the Buddha condemns injustice and social discrimination. Like us, the Buddha takes moral practice to be continuous with radical political goals. Like us, the Buddha is anti-sexist and a champion of equality and climate action. ‘How remarkable!’, said my student. Their suspicions were well-founded. A careful look at the suttas reveals a rather more complicated picture.

It is tempting to assume that historical moral figures should share our own values and outlooks. Sometimes, of course, they do – Jesus condemned greediness, Confucius praises honesty, and Native American traditions urged appreciative attention to the lives of non-human animals. Care should be taken, though, not to allow our expectations take the place of evidence. Pleasing agreements are often accompanied by uncomfortable differences. Confronted with moral visions from different times and cultures, we should not assume they are basically identical to us.

It is tempting to assume that historical moral figures should share our own values and outlooks.

We should not presuppose – or invidiously pretend – that the Buddha did or would share our particular moral concerns. Nor should we assume he used or would recognise or endorse our moral concepts – ‘human rights’, ‘equality’, ‘climate crisis’, and so on. This sense for likely differences was at the root of my students’ sense that the fit …

Passing Beyond Descartes

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 21:23:27 +0800

In this article, Thomas O. Scarborough, author of Everything, Briefly: A Postmodern Philosophy (2022), ex UK top ten philosophy website editor, and a Congregational minister, presents us with a new take on Descartes’ legacy and the mind/body problem.

Daily Philosophy readers are entitled to 50% off the price of the book. This offer is valid until the end of December 2022. To claim your discount, go to Wipf & Stock, click on ‘Buy’, ‘Add coupon’ and enter DP50 (all capitals, no space) as a coupon code.

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Ever since René Descartes wrote, in 1641, ‘The mind is really distinct from the body,’ we have struggled with the mind-body problem. Not that the problem didn’t exist before – however, Descartes brought it to the fore.

While Descartes' ideas on mind have long since been jettisoned, I argue that we have not moved very far beyond him. The simple problem of Descartes has morphed into another, which keeps us all spell-bound today – and frankly, in a rut.

Ever since René Descartes wrote, in 1641, ‘The mind is really distinct from the body,’ we have struggled with the mind-body problem.

The purpose of this article is to jump us out of the rut, so that we may think new thoughts and explore new directions.

Descartes ver. 1.0

Descartes famously wrote, ‘I think, therefore I am.’

His first word, unfortunately, was a mistake – a classic example of a suppressed inference. He assumed that the ‘I’ was an immaterial soul, which interacted with a material body. And the rest is history.

Descartes' view was certainly common-sensical.

I tap my finger on a tabletop. I drink a glass of milk. I feel the warmth of the sun on my face. Such experiences seem perfectly real to me. Which means that, on the surface of it, my life seems real to me, through and through.

It seems, therefore, that I am living in a real world. It is not imagined or illusory. Further, it seems to me that I am an observer of this world, not merely a robotic presence there. On this basis, it would seem to me that I have a mind that observes reality: mind here, reality there, which separates my mind from the things that it observes – and separates my mind from my body.

Yet common sense does not always make good philosophy.

If we separate the mind from the things it observes, it is difficult to explain how a mind exists separately in a world where, apparently, only matter exists. And if we propose that something else exists, of which the mind is made, we face the daunting prospect of proving it.

It is difficult to explain how a mind exists separately in a world where, apparently, only matter exists.

Let us try to formulate Descartes' position simply. We shall strip it down to conceptual basics – its bare essentials. The original position of Descartes, I shall argue, is this. I shall call it …

Should Buddhists Be Social Activists?

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 18:55:45 +0800

Buddhism is widely admired in the West for its commitments to progressive social activism. Saffron-clad monks march to promote peace or condemn repressive governments. The Dalai Lama lauds human rights and assures packed audiences that ‘the Buddha would be green’. When the Vietnamese Zen monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh, died this January, he was mourned by high-profile political activists as well as members of the Buddhist monastic community. Buddhists are common sights at marches, protests, sit-ins, and occupations. Magazines like Tricycle and The Lion’s Roar regularly feature articles on capitalism and social injustice as well as mindfulness and meditation. In my local bookstore, the Buddhism section has many books with titles like The Dharma of Social Justice.

The perception of alliances between the teachings of the Buddha and modern social and environmental activism is one of the main reasons for the positive perception of Buddhism in many Western countries. The Buddha’s teachings on suffering and compassion turn out to be allied to the concerns of many feminist and environmental movements. Equality, tolerance, and social justice get confidently related to the discourses that the Buddha preached one and a half thousand years ago. From his criticisms of the caste system to the emphasis on liberating beings from suffering, the Buddha – a man born a prince only to abandon his inherited wealth and power – thus emerges as an acceptable and attractive spiritual teacher.

‘Engaged Buddhism’

Is this image of the Buddha as a social activist ahead of his time accurate? It wasn’t always the case that perceptions were so favourable. Late-nineteenth century American, French and English writers saw Buddhism as a pessimistic doctrine encouraging passivity and retreat from life. Life, love, and hope – it was thought – are absent from the life of the monk. For one poetic critic, Buddhists are ‘living under a sky from which no sunlight ever streams’, their world all ‘sadness and hopelessness’. Many of the critics were Christians contrasting the good works, hope, and energy of their own faith with what an early scholar called the ’deep and miserable melancholy’ of Buddhism. Not all, though. Nietzsche was a harsh critic of Christianity but also condemned Buddhism as a ‘life-denying’ creed. There were also admirers of Buddhism – like the Indophile English Theosophists or the enthusiastic readers of Edwin Arnold’s epic poem The Light of Asia (which sold a million copies and was later made into a Broadway play).

Is this image of the Buddha as a social activist ahead of his time accurate? It wasn’t always the case that perceptions were so favourable.

What changed to change the image of Buddhism from one passivity and pessimism to one of energetic social activism? It is a long story. Historians and Buddhist scholars all emphasise that ‘Buddhism’ is many things, not a single tradition, and that politics, culture, trade, colonialism all played their parts. I will not …

Books that Lead You to Philosophy

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 18:31:20 +0800

The main idea of this essay is not the uninteresting autobiographical one of telling people what led me to philosophy, but rather to pass on what it was so that it might just lead others. There might have been one or two other seminal books I could have chosen.¹ At the early stages of getting to know anything where one starts is likely to be happenchance and based on the accident of circumstance. (In this case it just happened to be one of the very few philosophy books in the local public library.) For it is only after one starts that one’s investigations become more directed. You have to be somewhere before you can start finding your way around, wherever that somewhere is.

The book in question is Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, first published in 1945.

You have to be somewhere before you can start finding your way around, wherever that somewhere is.

I shall not go through the details of the discussions of the central protagonists, Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Marx, but rather try to convey what lies at the heart of book, the thrust of its argument, and how this opens out into the wider world of philosophy, not so much in the sense of other philosophical subjects, but rather what is at the core of philosophy overall.

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Buy it right here!

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Central to The Open Society and Its Enemies is the advocation of free open critical thought, and an attack on closed finished outlooks that purport to deliver definitive even final answers, both in itself, but also because it is the only that way things can be tried out and errors be corrected. Always keep the door ajar on other views. Keep the running thread of fallibilism in your thoughts – that always you might be wrong, that evidence or arguments may appear that can and should change your mind. The book opposes what it calls tribalism, the closed society. That is, the huddling together behind closed-wall unassailable beliefs, and thereby often setting them up in opposition and conflict to other tribes. This applies to social doctrines on how society should be organised, and the avoiding of all-time right answers.

Central to “The Open Society and Its Enemies” is the advocation of free open critical thought.

If one has to intervene as a state in the lives of people, do it in a small-scale piecemeal way, for only then will one have the chance to correct a theoretical idea by trial and error when confronted, as it certainly will be, by the reality of application. Theory always falls short of practice. Eschew grand plans, the radical ripping up from the foundations, the sweeping away and starting again. The results will be a litany of fanning out unintended consequences that are not only harmful or disastrous, but also may be irreversible. We simply do not have and never will have the knowledge for …

Andreas Matthias on Writing About Philosophy

Sat, 05 Nov 2022 14:34:16 +0800

Dr Andreas Matthias teaches philosophy at an Asian university. Before becoming a philosopher, he worked for twenty years as a programmer at a German university. He is the publisher and editor of Daily Philosophy, author of multiple books, and one half of the Accented Philosophy podcast.

This interview was first published in Spanish on Filosofia En La Red and conducted by its founder, philosopher Miguel Angel.

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Miguel Angel: Welcome to this interview! Let us begin with: what’s your earliest memory? Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Greece; my mother was German, originally from a Czech family, and my father Greek. As soon as I finished school, I moved to Germany and, twenty years later, to Hong Kong. Now my family is also Chinese, so we are a Greek/German/Chinese mixture.

But I find that I tend to see Greece as my cultural home. It’s the country I identify most with. It’s an easy country to love, with its beaches, long summers, and that wonderful food. I sometimes feel that, to me, only Greek food feels like real food. Everything else is eating for survival. It works, but I rarely enjoy it. In the future, I hope to end my life as a small-time farmer on a piece of land in Greece.

One has to be silly to take a career in philosophy seriously.

I’m not good at earliest memories, or any memories at all. I sometimes forget what I did this morning, so it’s pointless for me to try and remember what happened fifty years ago. And, frankly, I don’t care. I’m always looking into the future, wondering what’s going to happen to us in a year, or five, or ten. It’s not anxiety – it’s a feeling of expectation. As if the best is yet to come. I know, it’s silly to think this way when you’re over fifty, but there you have it. One has to be silly to take a career in philosophy seriously.

Miguel Angel: How did you get into philosophy?

That’s actually one of the bits I do remember. My father wanted me to be a lawyer, like he was. So he sent me off to Germany to study law. There I got into a class that was about the philosophy of law, and I was hooked. I didn’t care a bit about the actual laws. It was much more interesting to think about how the laws should be, or to learn how they turned out to be as they were. So I ditched law and studied philosophy instead. But I was never a good student. I was too restless to stick to one thing. In parallel with philosophy, I also studied chemistry, one semester of physics, German literature and, finally, a whole master’s degree in biology. So now I am (in theory) a biologist and philosopher. But I’ve forgotten most of my biology over the past thirty years, so it’s only on paper. It comes in handy when my kids ask me questions about science, though. I still remember enough to impress a ten-year old.

Miguel Angel: What did your parents make of your decision to pursue philosophy?

My father never …

The Problem with Scientism

Thu, 03 Nov 2022 13:47:57 +0800

“In these days of crisis in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences, it is crucial to distinguish valid from ill-founded criticism of any academic effort.”

This article was first published on January 25, 2018, on the Blog of the APA and is reprinted here with permission.

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Science is unquestionably the most powerful approach humanity has developed so far to the understanding of the natural world. There is little point in arguing about the spectacular successes of fundamental physics, evolutionary and molecular biology, and countless other fields of scientific inquiry. Indeed, if you do, you risk to quickly slide into self-contradictory epistemic relativism or even downright pseudoscience.

Massimo Pigliucci: Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem.

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That said, there is a pernicious and increasingly influential strand of thought these days — normally referred to as “scientism” — which is not only a threat to every other discipline, including philosophy, but risks undermining the credibility of science itself. In these days of crisis in the humanities, as well as in the social sciences, it is crucial to distinguish valid from ill-founded criticism of any academic effort, revisiting once more what C.P. Snow famously referred to as the divide between “the two cultures.”

There is a pernicious and increasingly influential strand of thought these days — normally referred to as “scientism” — which … risks undermining the credibility of science itself.

First off, what is scientism, exactly? Sometimes it pays to go back to the basics, in this case to the Merriam-Webster concise definition: “An exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities).” But surely this is a straw man. Who really fits that description? Plenty of prominent and influential people, as it turns out.

Let me give you a few examples: Author Sam Harris, when he argues that science can by itself provide answers to moral questions and that philosophy is not needed (e.g., “Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy … I am convinced that every appearance of terms like ‘metaethics,’ ‘deontology,’ [etc.] … directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe.”)

Science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson (and physicists Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking, science educator Bill Nye, among others), when he declares philosophy useless to science (or “dead,” in the case of Hawking) (e.g., “My concern here is that the philosophers believe they are actually asking deep questions about nature. And to the scientist it’s, …

What Is Philosophy in Simple Words?

Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:32:20 +0800

What is philosophy? Philosophy is a field of study that attempts to answer questions that cannot be answered by providing some fact, but that require a deeper understanding of the question. Main areas of philosophy are logic and critical thinking, ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, and many others discussed in more detail below.

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If you prefer, you can listen to an audio version of this article right here or in your podcast player. Look for the “Accented Philosophy Podcast”.

Philosophy and its main areas

“Philosophy” sounds like a daunting topic to many, something incredibly complex and boring. But, in its most basic form, it is very close to what we all did as children: ask questions about the world.

Philosophy is a field of study that attempts to answer questions that cannot be answered by providing some fact, but that require a deeper understanding of the question itself. For example:

What is the meaning of “beauty”? (Aesthetics)
Which actions do we consider to be right or wrong? (Ethics)
How can we make correct arguments and avoid mistakes in thinking? (Critical Thinking)
What it means to really “know” something? (epistemology)
What is science and what is the proper way to do science? (philosophy of science)
What is the ultimate nature of things? (metaphysics)
What is a good state or government? (political philosophy)

What is ethics?

Ethics is the study of how we ought to behave, and why. There are many different theories of ethics, which we briefly discuss in this article.

Philosophy’s aim is to clarify the questions we ask

Because of this focus that philosophy puts on asking the right questions, it has sometimes been labelled “the study of asking the right questions.” This is particularly important because we sometimes tend to ask questions that cannot be answered because the question itself is asked in the wrong way. For example:

“Does God exist?” This question cannot be answered like that. We first would have to clarify what “existing” means for a being like God. We can see and touch physical, material things, but not everything exists in the same way as a bottle or a table. For example, numbers. The number 42 certainly exists, but where is it? I cannot point at anything in the material world that is the number 42.

Or that idea for a poem that I had yesterday. Certainly, in some way, my idea exists. I can remember it, I can recite the poem. But where is it? Is my idea lying on the table over there? No. Numbers, ideas and many other things exist in a different way from material objects, but they certainly do “exist” in a real way. Christianity exists too, but I cannot locate it.

Philosophy is a field of study that attempts to answer questions that cannot be answered by providing some fact, but that …

Are We Allowed to Destroy Art?

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 08:16:13 +0800

A new TV show fronted by Jimmy Carr will destroy artworks from artists ranging from Picasso to Hitler. Is this a good or a bad thing? Are we ever allowed to destroy art? We look at the arguments for and against destroying art for entertainment.

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The news

Here is a short excerpt from a Guardian article, discussing a new TV show:

Backlash against C4 show that may destroy works by Hitler and Picasso

Channel 4 has come under fire over plans for a new show that will allow a studio audience to decide whether Jimmy Carr should destroy a painting by Adolf Hitler.

… The TV channel has bought artworks by a range of “problematic” artists including Hitler, Pablo Picasso, the convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and the sexual abuser Eric Gill.

A televised debate called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, will question whether one can truly separate a work of art from its creator – before deciding which pieces to destroy with a variety of tools. …

But the idea has provoked criticism, with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust saying the show is “making Hitler a topic of light entertainment”. … Some likened the content of the show – which was filmed on Wednesday night – to Nazi book burnings. … And some have asked if it is ever right to destroy a historical artefact, no matter who the creator is.

So, who is right? Are we allowed to destroy Hitler’s art? Are we allowed to make entertainment out of it? Read on to find out!

Destroying stuff

The first, most obvious question, would be: What exactly are we allowed to destroy and why would anyone want to interfere with our choices?

In the course of a lecture, a teacher might draw stick figures onto a blackboard in order to illustrate something for her students. At the end of the class, the blackboard will be erased. Is this a crime against art? Obviously not.

One way of looking at this would be to consider the work’s market value, which should be (in theory) determined by supply and demand. Although that teacher’s drawing is in short supply (only she can draw stick figures in precisely this way), the demand for the work is non-existent. As a consequence, the work has no value and needs not be preserved, one might argue.

So, who is right? Are we allowed to destroy Hitler’s art? Are we allowed to make entertainment out of it?

But this cannot be the full answer. For example, think of a parent who destroys a child’s picture in front of the child’s eyes. Although the picture likely has no market value at all, destroying it in front of its creator would seem cruel and morally wrong – not because of the destruction of market value, but because of the damage to the feelings of the artist.

On the other hand, a real-estate developer destroying a very valuable high-rise building that they own in order to build a theme park on the same spot might be seen as a stupid and …

Quiet Quitting

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 09:48:03 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the trend of quietly quitting work: doing what’s required in one’s contract and nothing more. For many, this is the only answer to a job that is exploitative, meaningless and empty. But is quietly quitting really the best way to reclaim our lives?

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I’m happy to announce that, after a break, we have kicked off the second season of the Accented Philosophy Podcast!

The first episode is Ezechiel and me discussing the trend of “Quiet Quitting,” where employees will do their work as instructed, but resist exploitation and unpaid overtime. For many, this seems like a way out of the pressures of a job that is meaningless yet takes up most of one’s life.

But is Quiet Quitting really a good thing? Come and listen to find out!

Now you can also directly join the discussion on the podcast! We have created a new email address specifically for you to send in your questions, comments and opinions. Just send us your remarks and replies by email to podcast@daily-philosophy.com and we’ll talk about them in the next episode!

A Short History of Happiness

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 22:14:39 +0800

The pursuit of happiness has always been one of the main driving forces of human lives. This article recounts the amazing history of the concept of happiness from ancient times to today, from Aristotle’s Eudaimonia to Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness.

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Isn’t happiness unanimously desired by every human being on Earth? Humans have strived for happiness from the very beginning. However, ‘happiness’ is one of the most variable emotions known to mankind as its meaning and the way of achieving it varies from person to person. Still, in every era philosophers have attempted to define happiness and ways to attain it. The philosophical understanding of ‘happiness’ changed through the passage of time. In the ancient world, Aristotle held virtues as the way of attaining happiness. With the commencement of the Middle Ages, philosophers like Al Ghazali and Thomas Aquinas identified the love of God as the only path to achieve happiness. In the late 18th century, Jeremy Bentham introduced the hedonistic approach to happiness. Furthermore, in the contemporary world, as happiness is also being promoted as a political objective, it has gained a new dimension.

Happiness through virtues

In the ancient period, Aristotle defined happiness as the chief human good in his book ‘Nicomachean Ethics’. His understanding of happiness is different from the regular connotation of the word ‘happiness’. He introduced the concept of happiness known as ‘Eudaimonia’. Eudaimonia is not concerned with the momentary happiness caused by a particular event. Instead, it implies that the person is admirable and lives life to its best. Aristotle held virtues like courage, temperance, justice, etc. to be the fundamental guides for a well-lived life. He held that a happy man is “one who exercises his faculties in accordance with perfect excellence, being duly furnished with external goods, not for any chance of time, but for a full term of years … and who shall continue to live so, and shall die as he lived.”¹

Eudaimonia is not concerned with the momentary happiness caused by a particular event. It implies that the person is admirable and lives life to its best.

Moreover, Aristotle described that every ethical virtue is the intermediate state between the two extremes of that virtue. The two extremes consist of excess and deficiency of a particular virtue. For instance, the virtue of ‘courage’ is the mean between two extremes, one being ‘cowardice’ and the other being ‘foolhardiness’.

How to Live an Aristotelian Life

Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues; (2) phronesis or practical wisdom; and (3) eudaimonia or flourishing.

Like Aristotle, Plato also maintained a virtue based eudaemonistic approach towards happiness. In The …

Stunning AI-Generated Art

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 19:38:43 +0800

AI generated art is making headlines. In this article, we look at examples of AI art created by the program Stable Diffusion and we discuss what makes them different from human-generated art. Can AI art be true art at all?

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AI generating art

There are multiple systems currently on the market that are able to generate art, and you have probably heard some of the names: generative adversarial networks (GANs), Dall-E, or Stable Diffusion. The details of how they work can be hard to understand for the non-AI-engineer; but the basic idea is that these programs are trained on millions of images, so that they learn to associate a particular string of words (“hamster on a beach”) with a particular image content: in this case, a collection of images of hamsters and beaches. When the user enters a prompt to generate an image, the program will then compose an image that contains the partial images that the program has associated with the different parts of the prompt. So, for example, “a camel on a boat, in the style of Dali” will produce an image containing a camel, a boat, and stylistic elements that can be found across the works of Dali. Here’s what this looks like using Dreamstudio.ai, a service using Stable Diffusion to generate the images:

“A camel on a boat in the style of Dali”

One thing that soon becomes apparent is that these systems don’t analyse or understand the grammar of the prompts. They just see that they have some image elements for the words “camel,” “boat” and “Dali” and put these together into a new picture. Whether the camel is “on” or “under” the boat is (mostly?) left to chance. So, for example, the same prompt generates this image, which fits the intent of the query much less:

“A camel on a boat in the style of Dali”

15 examples of AI art created by the program Stable Diffusion. What makes them different from human-generated art? Can AI art be true art at all?

Beauty

The best-looking images are those where the mind of the observer has no reliable way to critically judge the success of the image generation process. Abstract images and painting styles that obscure the details work best and can create truly stunning output:

“A flower in Picasso style”

Giving the same prompt again does not repeat the image. Instead, a new, unique picture is generated:

“A flower in Picasso style”

A T-Rex in Dali style (my childrens’ idea) also looks great and undoubtedly has the typical “Dali” look to it:

“A t-rex in Dali style”

This Hong Kong skyline in watercolour is striking:

“Hong Kong skyline in watercolor”

And here is another one, specifically asking for a “moody blue” version: …

October 2: Happy Birthday, Mahatma Gandhi!

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 01:40:00 +0000

October 2nd is the birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, whom they called the Mahatma, the Great Soul. For all of us who don’t know much about him, the 1982 movie does a good job of filling in the holes. Sometimes portraying him as a bit too holy (and I guess he would agree to that), it still gives a great impression of the man he was in the public imagination. A friend of Tolstoy’s, often viewed as a saint by western Christians, although he himself disliked Christianity and its missionary zeal.

He was no saint, and he would have been the first to say so. In his autobiography “The Story of My Experiments With Truth,” he recounts many failures of his own life, beginning with his early marriage, at 13, to the woman whom he stayed with until the end, although he wasn’t always faithful to her. For all his revolutionary zeal, he was very much a child of his time and society, and he expected obedience from his wife and his family, not allowing his son to study law as he himself had done. He was also, in practice, much less ecumenical than he preached, and many see him as responsible for Hindu nationalism and the partition of India, which might have been avoided with a more moderate leader.

Gandhi’s autobiography provides an extraordinary view on the thoughts and the life of this exceptional man.

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But all this seems less important today when we look back at the life of Gandhi. What we see, as seekers of wisdom (for that is what philosophy is supposed to be), is a man who stood by his principles and who fought for them until the end. Like many revolutionaries and great leaders, he wasn’t an easy man to get along with. A softer, more likeable man would have tried to avoid spending much of his life in prison, fasting, hunger striking, organising walks and marches, and facing off the wrath of the British empire, while still finding the strength to fight. In this, he is similar to many other great revolutionaries and saints, Che Guevara, Leo Tolstoy, or Mother Teresa, who were all heavily criticised for flaws in their personalities. But they all had the lives and the success that they had, not in spite, but because of these flaws.

He was no saint, and he would have been the first to say so.

When we look around today, we see a world that is ruled and dominated by amoral men, seeking only to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else, at the cost of the world as a whole: the Trumps, Bolsonaros, Berlusconis, Putins and Orbans (and the list doesn’t stop there, of course). In this environment, it is particularly important to remind ourselves that we are not stuck with the likes of them, that there is no law of nature that decrees that we have to be content with them and accept their rule.

There is better. And Gandhi, the great soul, the Mahatma, was one of those who came to show us that despite all the flaws of …

Paul Lodge on Philosophy and Music

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:34:16 +0800

Paul Lodge is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and a professorial fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He is also a musician and songwriter who sets philosophical poems to music. In this interview, we discuss his background, his recent project Cantat Ergo Sumus, and whether philosophy makes for good songs.

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DP: Professor Paul Lodge, welcome to Daily Philosophy and thank you for agreeing to this interview! I am very happy and honoured to have you here. To start with, let’s briefly tell our readers what it is that brings you here today. Could you briefly tell us what your project Cantat Ergo Sumus is about?

Thanks very much for inviting me. I started writing and performing songs when I was in high school, with the lyrics written by my younger brother Richard. This continued into our time as undergraduates when we were contemporaries at Oxford. However, after moving to New Jersey in 1992 to study for my PhD at Rutgers University, I found myself without a lyricist. It was at this point that Cantat Ergo Sumus was initially born – though the title came much later.

The idea of philosophy entered my consciousness as a teenager primarily through references that I came across in popular culture. I don’t remember there being a point at which I self-consciously attempted to mimic this approach, but in early 1994 I found myself turning to the idea of taking the words of philosophers themselves and setting them to music. And I had the vague thought that at some point in the future I might to try to do something more public with them. However, only three of the songs that make up Cantat Ergo Sumus come from that time. It wasn’t until 2019, when performing other music on a bill with Oxford band Flights of Helios that it took off again. They liked some of the material they heard and were particularly enthused by the idea of philosophy and music coming together. We decided to collaborate and that point I wrote the rest of the songs. Then, with the help of a grant from The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities (TORCH), we started to work on the album that should be released in the next few months.

DP: Even with my broken Latin, I can tell that “Cantat Ergo Sumus” is not the same form that Descartes chose for his “cogito ergo sum.” It’s not “I sing there for I am,” but more something like “it sings therefore we are.” Is that right? And why did you choose this particular form as a name for your project?

I had toyed with Canto Ergo Sum as a straight play on Descartes, and then Cantamus Ergo Sumus (we sing therefore we are) to reflect the collaborative element. But, ultimately, I went for the impersonal ‘cantat’, intending as you say ‘It sings therefore we are’. Here I took the lead from Heidegger and his attempts to capture the way in which our sense of existing in a world with other beings should be …

The Homeric Poems First of All

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 22:14:39 +0800

There is little doubt: it is not from Thales but from Homer that we must start. The stories sung by the rhapsodes tell us of the phase in which valid singers became convinced that it was worth investing in those narratives without holding back, to the point of giving them a rather precise identity, with people who did not fail to express a vast appreciation for those ways of entertaining the public. All this when there were still no Hellenic people. The Hellenes became a people as a not insignificant nucleus of singers began to pleasantly entertain this public with their stories, as those stories turned out to be attractive and became well-known and recognisable, while the dissemination of the Greek colonies in much of the Mediterranean area went about hand in hand with the spread of songs associated with the name of Homer.

There is little doubt: it is not from Thales but from Homer that we must start.

All this should have occurred, to a very significant extent – or, at least, it certainly began – decades before 700 BC, at a time when it does not appear that the Greek cultural offer included other comparable ingredients.

Of course, Delphi and Olympia established themselves at the time, but it does not appear that the sanctuary and the Pythia, or the Panhellenic games, became the subject of songs even if, in principle, this would have been possible. It is as if the word had resounded only through the crowd of hexameters with which dozens and dozens of ‘Homeric’ singers dedicated themselves to entertaining ‘the square’ in the most far-flung locations.

Judging by the available clues, the initial public consensus (before 700 BC) was renewed for generations, to such an extent that the sung narratives of the Homeric cycle were so widespread that they became an identity trait of the Hellenes, while the reference to ‘Homer’, although necessarily vague, ended up becoming a guarantee of recognition at many levels, including a large number of epithets and some recurring verses (in the case of the so-called formular language). In fact, we have solid clues to think that in very early times a vast dissemination of rhapsodes and chants took off, hence the affirmation of ‘Homer’, among many (or, perhaps, among the generality) of the urban towns where Greek was spoken, therefore not only along the whole northern side of the Mediterranean but also along substantial portions of its southern side.

This way, a society as such (not only the poets of the seventh and subsequent century) ‘forgot’ the more or less grim tales of previous eras (e.g. those concerning Tantalus), ‘recognized’ the existence of the gods of Olympus, and set about building temples while becoming familiar with a shared language. A phenomenon of uncommon magnitude therefore occurred, and to understand what happened is so important that, if the sense of such a unique and so peculiar macro-event escaped us, essential …

50 Answers

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 23:20:39 +0800

“50 Answers,” a new book by Glory White, explores 50 distinct answers a wide variety of religions provide for our biggest, most compelling questions. The following excerpt provides an exclusive sneak peek into how religions tackle the all-important subject of fate.

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Where do we come from? What happens after we die? Religions have been answering these questions – and many more – for millennia. But while most of us are familiar with the answers of major world religions, answers from lesser-known or historical religions are often overlooked. An insightful new book sheds light on how a rich tapestry of religions answer life’s biggest questions.

Fathoming Fate and Faith

The word ‘fate’ is derived from the Latin ‘fatum’, or “has been spoken”, suggesting that fate is predetermined. But what exactly is fate? For the ancients, fate was personified. In fact, many ancient mythologies featured 3-9 goddesses tasked with controlling human destiny. The most famous of these are undoubtedly the Greek Fates, or Moirai, a triad of elderly sisters venerated in at least three temples throughout ancient Greece. The Fates’ ability to enforce fate was so powerful, it was thought to trump the will of the Olympians themselves. To ascertain that every human and deity lived out his or her predetermined destiny, the first sister, Clotho, spun the thread of fate, while the second sister, Lachesis, allotted it to each individual, thus dispensing misery and suffering unequally among humans. The third sister, Atropos, then cut the thread with a pair of scissors, and in doing so determined one’s inescapable moment and manner of death.

What exactly is fate? For the ancients, fate was personified.

As the years went by, fate evolved into a virtually unrecognizable abstract idea, which was increasingly applied to milder, non-lethal events. Its predetermined nature was gradually stripped away, freeing humans to take control of their fate. “I am the master of my fate,” wrote the Victorian poet William Ernest Henley, reflecting the modern concept of a malleable fate wrested from the hands of invisible entities. Capitalism, too, played a part in how fate came to be viewed by encouraging individuals to work hard to shape the course of their mortal destinies. But while the option to actively improve our lives is reassuring, what of the afterlife and our posthumous fate? Is it also possible to control that kind of fate? Capitalism, laser focused as it is on the here and now, is admittedly ill-equipped to answer such questions. Fortunately, religions have been providing answers to our most compelling questions since time immemorial, solving conundrums in unexpected and often insightful ways. So do we control our fate? Let us explore the fascinating, yet somewhat contradictory, answers provided by three …

Nigerian Scammers and Philosophical Muggers

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 21:40:39 +0800

Anton receives an email from an individual who identifies himself as the now-deposed Prince of Nigeria. In his message, the individual informs Anton that he has $500 million in a Nigerian bank account which he wants to transfer to the US where he now resides, and for reasons unspecified, he chose Anton as a business partner of sorts in this endeavor. All Anton needs to do is to wire him $50 to cover processing and transfer fees. Presumably to encourage Anton’s cooperation, the individual promises to send Anton $50 million as reward once the transfer is done.

Surely, Anton is no fool. He sees that the proposal has all the telltale signs of an internet scam. Why can’t someone who has a fortune in an overseas bank afford to pay a petty transfer fee? Why should a former prince, who presumably has many international connections, choose Anton to help him out, even if he needed help in the first place? And why can’t he ask the transferring agency or bank to waive the fees or deduct them from the sum to be transferred? These questions appear to Anton to have no sensible answers.

Yet, Anton, a Humean wise man, proportions the strength of his conviction to the available evidence. He also prides himself on practicing epistemic humility. Knowing the finite nature and fallibility of his sensory and rational faculties, Anton believes that there could be only so much and only defeasible evidence against an empirical proposition. Thus, Anton never assigns a proposition zero probability however implausible or contrary to evidence the proposition may appear, save perhaps, obvious contradictions.

So, Anton reasons that although the individual who sent the email is almost certainly a scammer, there is a small but non-zero probability that he indeed is a now-deposed Nigerian prince who wants to give Anton $50 million.

Anton is also handy with numbers, and he calculates that if the said probability is greater than one in a million, then the expected economic utility of wiring the money on his end would be positive. Indeed, Anton, who occasionally plays the lottery, takes odds that are a lot worse than that.

Although the individual who sent the email is almost certainly a scammer, there is a small probability that he indeed is a now-deposed Nigerian prince.

Still, a student of epistemic humility to even the meta level, Anton decides to consult his wife Alice, who thinks that it would be foolish to wire $50 to this individual because the odds of him telling the truth are lower than one in a million. Trusting Alice’s subjective assessment of probabilities, but not wanting to destroy any bridges, Anton writes back to the alleged now-deposed prince and politely declines his proposal. To his surprise, however, Anton receives an updated proposal in response: Indeed, the individual hadn’t been completely honest with Anton. The sum wasn’t $500 million, but $10 billion, which he is now willing to split in half with Anton, if only Anton wires a measly $5 dollars. …

Kant’s Categories and the Stevenson Screen

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 22:31:20 +0800

One way of thinking about and getting an understanding of Kant’s Categories is to draw an analogy with the Stevenson Screen. There are both similarities and differences that are interesting. In explaining this I hope light will be shed on what Kant’s Categories are and how they function in our understanding of the world.

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The Stevenson Screen was invented by Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887).¹ It is essentially a slatted box, within which there is a thermometer (usually among other measuring devices) that is used by professional meteorologists to measure the surface air temperature of the planet Earth. The nature of its construction allows the flow of air through it, but shelters the thermometer from direct sun, rain, wind, and radiated heat from its surroundings; it is set at a determinate height about the ground, thereby delivering a consistent standard air temperature reading.

The aim is to minimize contingent variations of placement so that the air temperature reading taken in one place is as far as possible truly the air temperature, and not a temperature determined or affected by any other features of where the screen happens to be. Without this it would not be safe and accurate to say that any two places were the same or different in temperature, for without the screen the similarity or difference might be a result of the effects of different local circumstances other than the air temperature.

Interior of a Stevenson Screen. Public Domain. Source: CambridgeBayWeather via Wikipedia.

Kant’s Categories are those features of our experience that are determined by our mode of apprehending the world, and they are invariant between the particularities of the content of those experiences. They apply to all experiences of the world, but do not arise from those experiences. But to have content, the Categories have to be applied to experiences, and for experiences to be anything we can understand, they must conform to being formed by or falling under some of the Categories.

As Kant put it:

‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’².

In this way, Kant aimed to avoid both a position where metaphysical speculation falsely claims knowledge about the world independently of experience, and a pure empiricist position which hold that knowledge of the world may be derived only from experience, but which results in scepticism of fundamental ways we have of thinking about the world. The first of these positions was associated with Gottfried Leibniz and his followers, and the second with David Hume.³

Kant’s Categories are those features of our experience that are determined by our mode of apprehending the world.

Kant held that we could know certain things were true of the world independently of experience (a priori) but they only have meaning if those determining forms …

How Free is Free Enough?

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 11:39:02 +0800

The limits of free speech have been discussed since ancient times. Particularly today, we find ourselves confronted with the need to weigh free speech against other values like inclusivity, respect and tolerance of other viewpoints and religions. We look at the arguments of philosopher Ronald Dworkin in defence of free speech.

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Today, we are almost too ready to accept the censoring of political speech in the “free” West and the regulation of speech in online media, primarily where race, antisemitism, and sexuality are concerned. Online censorship laws are on the rise in all countries, and what is sometimes called “cancel-culture” by its enemies has to be questioned as to whether it is a beneficial development or not, whether it’s necessary, as its proponents say, or the end of free, secular, democratic culture, as its opponents claim.

Of course, the debate on free speech is much older than that. Socrates is not only commonly seen as the father of philosophy, but he is also the father of all those who are being killed to silence them. Since then, the powerful have always tried to restrict speech in ways that suited them, while the dissenters have tried to defend their right to speak up. The more recent development is that today not only the rulers, but the citizens themselves attempt to censor the speech of other citizens if they find it offensive.

Today, we are almost too ready to accept the censoring of political speech in the “free” West and the regulation of speech in online media.

Interestingly, on the same day and page where The Guardian reported on the Salman Rushie stabbing, one could read about the censoring of a comedian at the Edinburgh festival, whose show was cancelled “over ‘extreme racism, homophobia and misogyny’”; and a column by Simon Jenkins on why we need online censorship. It seems that our condemnation of censorship is pretty selective, even within the ideologically somewhat homogeneous group of Guardian writers and readers: we are quick to defend our own right to insult other cultures, but we are not willing to accept similar challenges to our own views.

Let us begin with an exceptionally clear and well-argued article by Ronald Dworkin from 1994 [1] – long before the censorship of dissenting views in our own society became commonplace. More articles on the topic will follow. If you don’t want to miss any, you can subscribe right here:

Which rights are strongest?

Dworkin begins by recognising that the most problematic threat to free speech does not come from those who traditionally tried to control it: governments and “the despots and ruling thieves who fear it” (p.9). Instead, we today have a situation where free speech has a number of “new enemies”:

… who claim to speak for justice not tyranny, and who point to other values we respect, including self-determination, equality, …

Is Abortion Ethical?

Wed, 03 Aug 2022 08:53:20 +0800

There are many arguments both in favour and against abortion in ethics. The main argument from those who are against abortion is that it is the killing of an innocent human being. They believe that a fetus has a right to life, and thus abortion is murder. The main argument from those who are in favour of abortion is that the woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body. They argue that the fetus is not a person until it is born, and therefore abortion is not murder.

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We talked here previously about the abortion debate, but in this article, we want to go a bit deeper and look at the arguments for and against abortion itself. Since this topic (like most topics nowadays) is often discussed on the basis of beliefs, emotions and outrage rather than actual thought, let us today have a look at the classic arguments in the abortion debate.

You might also want to read the comprehensive overview of Dr Luke Roeloffs on the main arguments for and against rights for fetuses:

Luke Roelofs: When Does a Fetus Have Rights?

What sort of rights should a fetus or embryo have? A clear, comprehensive review of the arguments.

Arguments for abortion

The woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body. They argue that the fetus is, at least in the beginning of pregnancy, nothing more than another organ of the mother. Therefore, they believe that it should be up to the woman to decide whether or not to abort the pregnancy.

On the other hand, if we believe that that human life begins at conception, then abortion might be seen as an unlawful killing of a human being. Opponents of abortion argue that the fetus is a human being with a right to life.

Those who are pro-choice believe that a woman should have the right to choose what she does with her body.

We will discuss the problem of when exactly the fetus becomes a human being below; but even if we assume that the fetus is human, we still have to weigh the interests of two humans (the mother and the fetus) against each other.

We also have to consider that the mother has her own life and perhaps the welfare of other, earlier-born children to consider. An unwanted pregnancy can cause the mother to be unable to finish her studies, for example, or to get a job, potentially pushing a whole family into poverty.

It is also the case that, while legal abortions are very safe, illegal abortions are not, and represent a significant health risk for the mother. According to the BBC (with 2019 data from the CDC):

Almost 60% of persons seeking an abortion were in their 20s;
60% had at least one child;
Almost half had the abortion in the first six weeks of pregnancy; and …

Can AI write philosophy?

Sun, 31 Jul 2022 15:57:08 +0800

I tried out Jasper AI, a computer program that generates natural language text. It turns out that it can create near-perfect output that would easily pass for a human-written undergraduate philosophy paper. The video linked below shows the whole process.

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What is Jasper AI?

Jasper is an online AI program that uses the now famous OpenAI GPT-3 system to produce new text from any kind of prompt or example text.

This sounds a bit technical and boring, until one realises what this means: you can provide any kind of prompt to Jasper and will produce something to fit that prompt. Let’s try an example: I’m going to write this prompt paragraph:

My mother was born in 1953 in London, England. She studied history and microbiology at King’s College and went on to work for a big pharma company that made vaccines that they shipped to South America and Africa.

I can now ask Jasper to continue from here. Here’s what Jasper adds to my previous text:

After a few years, she met my father and they got married. They had me in 1977 and my sister two years later. We lived in a small town outside of London until I was ten, when we moved to the United States because my father got a job offer he couldn’t refuse.

My mother has always been a fierce advocate for her children. When we were younger, she would always stand up to our father when she felt we were being treated unfairly. She was the one who pushed us to be successful in school and to pursue our passions. My mother has always been my biggest supporter, and I am grateful to have her in my life.

… and so on. I could continue pressing Ctrl-J, which is the command you give to Jasper to get on writing, and it would keep adding to the story ad infinitum.

Now this is surprising enough. I am myself an AI ethicist, but I had not assumed that the technology would be quite that good already. It is amazing what Jasper can produce from any piece of prompt.

I am myself an AI ethicist, but I had not assumed that the technology would be quite that good already. It is amazing what Jasper can produce from any piece of prompt.

Beyond that, Jasper can also execute commands or requests given to it in natural language. For example, you could say:

Write down a list of 10 things to take onto a day trip to the beach.

Pressing Ctrl-Enter at the end of this, will execute the command. Here’s Jasper’s output:

Sunscreen

Chapstick

Hat

Sunglasses

Swimsuit

Towel

Sandals

Snacks

Water Bottle

Camera

I’m not sure that I know what a “chapstick” is, but the rest seems pretty sensible.

Now back to philosophy. Having spent most of my life writing philosophy papers and blog posts, I was naturally curious how Jasper would manage producing an educational article about Kant’s moral philosophy. I assumed that I didn’t know much, just as a student wouldn’t, but that I was trying to write something for a short …

Five Most Inspiring Philosophy Books

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 14:07:57 +0800

Looking for a life-changing summer read? Here are Daily Philosophy’s recommendations for five of the most inspiring books that everyone should know.

Have a look at the best from Alexandra David-Neel, Jane Dobisz, Erich Fromm, Douglas Hofstadter and Pico Iyer — a group so diverse that you will find something for every kind of reader in this list. Read below for specific recommendations on which kind of person to gift each of these books and get ready for an unforgettable summer.

See also our list of the Best Introductions to Philosophy. The second part of this article, with another five great book recommendations, is right here!

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Here are some of Daily Philosophy’s all-time inspirational philosophy favourites.

I am Dr Andreas Matthias, the editor of Daily Philosophy, and the selection below will be a very personal one. Any list of books is like a fingerprint of the person making the list. Different people like different things and philosophers are even more picky than the general population. A Nietzsche reader will not enjoy Bertrand Russell. A Vienna Circle devotee will not even count Heidegger among the philosophers. No one will like or enjoy all the books below.

Since we are talking about summer reads, this list is more about inspiring and entertaining rather than theoretical knowledge.

The books discussed here can change your life when you are young (or perhaps even when you’re older) and one remembers them throughout one’s life. In later posts, we will also talk about philosophy introductions and histories of philosophy, individual philosophers, novels and short stories with a philosophical theme or twist, and movies and online content that I have always loved. Not everything in these lists is “classic” philosophy. Some works are quite far from academic philosophy, but I’ve always believed that philosophy is best understood as the “love of wisdom” (which is what “philosophy” literally means) and wisdom can take many forms, some of which may, at first, look quite like foolishness.

So let’s dive in!

1. Alexandra David-Neel: Magic and Mystery in Tibet

This is one of those books that are idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it’s also a book that is astonishing in its boldness and beautiful in its evocation of old Tibet, a place that does not exist any more as David-Neel describes it here.

Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) was a Belgian-French explorer, and, as Wikipedia remarks, she was also a “spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer.” And note that she was a woman who lived much of her life in the 19th century!

This amazing person was an independent travel writer and went to Tibet at a time when women were not even going unaccompanied to the horse races. Once there, in 1912, she started studying Buddhism in earnest. In 1914, she and a young Indian, whom she later would adopt as a son, went to …

Am I irrational?

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 22:35:51 +0800

People as well as large-scale events, for example the Durch Tulip Mania or the technology crash in the early 2000s, are sometimes said to be irrational. But what exactly do we mean by that?

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Other people are frequently irrational, and infuriating. But how do we tell, really, when they’re irrational? After all, they often get pretty angry when we point their irrationality out to them.

Examples of irrationality include thinking illogically, engaging in behaviour that is not in our best interests, or having emotional responses that are not warranted by circumstances. If I believe that it is raining and not raining at the same time, this is irrational. But how dare you suggest my emotional reaction is unwarranted? I’m always perfectly reasonable. Psychologists have also uncovered biases in people’s reasoning processes that seem to show that we do not think clearly, or rationally. Many of these biases were uncovered by asking people to respond to scenarios. One of these famous examples is ‘Linda’.

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

Linda is a bank teller
Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

What did you pick?

‘2’ is the wrong answer. I picked ‘2’ when first given this problem and am consequently really keen to prove that I’m not an idiot.

Psychologists have also uncovered biases in people’s reasoning processes that seem to show that we do not think clearly, or rationally.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who developed this example and tried it out on people, argue that picking ‘2’ is a conjunction error. We don’t realise that the probability of two events occurring together is always less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone. If we compare two groups: all female bank tellers, and all female bank tellers who are active in the feminist movement, the numbers of feminist bank tellers will be equal or less than the group of all female bank tellers. So, it is more probable that Linda is a bank teller than that she is a feminist bank teller.

What’s going on here though? Somehow, this doesn’t feel right. If your response is ‘But that wasn’t the question I was answering’ you might be on to something.

Saving Linda

Probability is a term used in statistics, but without some prompt to guide us towards dredging up our secondary school statistics knowledge, ‘probable’ can be interpreted in a number of ways. In the context of the Linda example it can mean ‘Which is a better description of Linda?’ or ‘Which statement best characterises what kind of person Linda is?’. If we are to answer the question in terms of probabilities, then the descriptive information about Linda …

Steven Cassedy: What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 16:21:39 +0800

Cassedy, S. (2022). What Do We Mean when We Talk about Meaning?. Oxford University Press. 216 pages. ISBN: 9780190936907.

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The title of this book is misleading. Steven Cassedy’s concern is with ‘meaning’ in its most general sense, which he takes to be manifested in the history of discussion about the meaning and purpose of life. But there are many philosophical theories about meaning in its most general sense which, because they are not explicitly about the meaning of life, he does not mention.

However, with regard to the historical understanding of the meaning and purpose of life, significant new ground is broken – by virtue of the fact that the author has an impressive array of languages at his disposal, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, German, Russian and Danish. The story begins with the Jewish scriptures and continues through ancient Greece. All the while – as the author makes clear – until the very end of the eighteenth century, the meaning of life is discussed only implicitly for it is not until Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel that the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ (der Sinn des Lebens) is explicitly mentioned and it is only then that it unambiguously takes on its modern meaning. It first enters the English language from the early romantics, via Thomas Carlyle.

Altogether this is the most comprehensive account of how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ came to attain its current ubiquity that has yet been written.

The author is very good at discussing the subtle differences and similarities of different senses of ‘meaning’ as found in different languages; and there are detailed discussions of Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Paul Tillich. Altogether this is the most comprehensive account of how the phrase ‘the meaning of life’ came to attain its current ubiquity that has yet been written.

However, inevitably there are some omissions. There is no mention of Nietzsche except for Paul Tillich’s reading of him, despite the fact that the prospect of a lack of life’s meaning was one of Nietzsche’s foremost preoccupations; there is no look further afield than the Hebrew tradition – no look, for example, at the Sanskrit texts translated by August Wilhelm von Schlegel; and no mention of nihilism. (On the parallel late eighteenth origins of nihilism see A Defence of Nihilism (2021) by James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera. They describe ‘the meaning of life’ and ‘nihilism’ as the good and bad twins.)

James Tartaglia: Are You A Nihilist?

The terminology of ‘nihilism’ and ‘the meaning of life’ emerged among a small group of German philosophers at the end of the 18th century who were worried about the French Enlightenment.

A more general concern is whether something should have been said about the history of the definition of …

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 21:31:20 +0800

Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020, xiv+696 p., £110, ISBN 978-0-19-874967-7.

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The handbook under review collects 31 unpublished papers of varying length (they range from 14 to 32 pages, including bibliography, with a majority of them having ca 20-25 pages).

Uriah Kriegel has not only edited it, but contributed one of chapters and an introduction. As he explains in his introduction “What is the Philosophy of Consciousness?”, the volume has been prompted by a concern that, for all its progress, science is not able to answer all the questions that are relevant to consciousness; hence philosophical supplementation is necessary for a full understanding.

The volume’s scope is limited by questions concerning conscious experience being either grounded in or dependent upon three kinds of phenomena: (i) other types of conscious experience, (ii) psychological phenomena other than conscious experience, and (iii) non-mental processes or states.

The papers are grouped into three sections: (i) “Varieties of Conscious Experience” (reminiscent of the title of Kriegel’s 2015 book) – chapters 2-10, (ii) “Theories of Consciousness” – chapters 11-22, and (iii) “Consciousness and Neighboring Phenomena” – chapters 23-31. The volume ends with an index that is certainly helpful but, alas, too selective. Below, I survey the 31 chapters and conclude with a more general word.

David Papineau (“The Problem of Consciousness”) investigates how consciousness relates to other features of reality. Although physicalism is a dominant philosophical position, many, including physicalists, find it hard to believe in mind-body identity. Papineau remarks that it is a strange fact that even those who deny dualism cannot, or do not, avoid dualist phraseology. In their accounts, they repeatedly speak of brain processes that cause or generate (or the like) conscious states. This fact reveals that there is, or may be, some truth in intuitive resistance to physicalism.

Pär Sundström (“Visual Experience”) studies visual experiences, in particular their transparency, the kind of properties they display, and whether they present external spatiotemporal particulars. He remarks that it does not have to be the case that “if two experiences […] are the same in what they are like, they must be the same in what they are phenomenally of” (p. 58), because the agent may be simply unable to distinguish the two experiences. Accordingly, the idea that an agent is in direct contact with outer, spatiotemporal objects is under various threats.

Casey O’Callaghan (“Non-Visual Perception”) covers forms of perceptual consciousness other than visual, viz. hearing, touch, smell, and taste. He focuses on exteroceptive and sensory forms of perception. Various sense-experiences may occur simultaneously, and in some …

What’s Wrong with The Passion Economy?

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 18:31:20 +0800

Adam Davidson describes the “Passion Economy” in a book released in 2020. Davidson claims that we are moving toward a new economy, centred around the identification and development of individuals’ unique talents and passions. This article shows why Davidson’s proposal is not a sustainable solution to fix our current relationship with work.

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Introduction: The Passion Economy

The 21^st century is only beginning, but we have already seen considerable changes in our relationship with work in the past two decades. The effect of globalization on the industry, unemployment, increase in work-related health issues (such as burn-outs), the environmental crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic… these are only some of the reasons that have pushed many of us to reconsider our view of what it means to be a worker.

It’s more and more common to hear people expressing wishes to ditch their office jobs to become full-time bakers, woodworkers, or buy a farm and make soap with goat milk. It seems that the 9-to-5 life, which used to be synonymous with security and happiness, has ceased to be that attractive. Younger generations especially, maybe sick of being the witnesses of their parents’ sacrifices, seem to aspire to a better work-life balance, or generally look for more meaning in the workplace.

It’s more and more common to hear people expressing wishes to ditch their office jobs to become full-time bakers, woodworkers, or buy a farm and make soap with goat milk.

“I don’t dream of labor”, is a common slogan for those who no longer wish to conform to societal norms and look to dedicate their time to more authentic activities. This collective realization that work is often a source of pain, pressure, and detract us from what we truly care about, opens the door to new models.

This article will explore one: The Passion Economy, described by author Adam Davidson in a book released in 2020. This book claims that we are moving toward a new economy, centred around the identification and development of individuals’ unique talents and passions. Many have praised Davidson’s book, arguing that the Passion Economy is the future of work. But although it raises valid criticisms regarding our current, often alienating, vision of employed work, it also brings about various concerns.

This article starts with a brief presentation of the concept of Passion Economy, as it is presented by the author. It goes on to explore the different reasons why, despite a promising starting point, the Passion Economy fails to offer long-term satisfactory solutions. Davidson’s book is not a philosophy book, but the vision of work it presents raises philosophical questions, which we will try to address here.

The idea for this article came to me after watching a YouTube video by YouTuber Alice Cappelle (“The Passion Economy is Pure Nonsense”), in which she develops a …

The Knowledge-Effect

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 15:31:20 +0800

What I wish to discuss is something I term the knowledge-effect. I will argue that awareness of it is important because it is something we need strongly to guard against if we are to make good normative judgements, and apportion well significance and moral weight, so that our overall view of things be not distorted.

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In the extreme the knowledge-effect leads to judgmental pareidolia, which is the imposition of meaning and significance on things or events when they do not warrant it either to the degree that we grant or at all. This essay might be viewed as a lesson in normative epistemology or, more plainly, good judgemental housekeeping. Knowledge can corrupt judgement.

Knowledge can corrupt judgement.

Though I shall stick to the expression ‘the knowledge-effect’, it might also be termed the knowledge-trap. The lead into the knowledge trap, and thus the knowledge-effect, is the false claim that more knowledge must be better than less knowledge for our ability to make good normative judgements generally and moral judgements in particular. Combining ‘normative judgements’ and ‘moral judgements’ I mean: how one should think about something, what one should do in respect of it, taking into account priorities, unintended consequences and risk, how greater a moral concern should be given to it, what morally speaking one should do in respect of it. That is to say, all that relates to it not simply the existing facts of a matter. Not all normative judgements are moral judgments, but all moral judgements are normative judgements.

The lead into the knowledge trap is the false claim that more knowledge must be better than less knowledge for our ability to make good moral judgements.

Some may endorse the view that it is simply a matter of the more knowledge the better. But this is a mistake as it takes no account of the effect of knowing in circumscribed cases and knowledge capturing our attention, nor, and most significantly, it takes no account of the distorting effect of the distribution of knowledge on our normative judgements and moral judgements in respect of their appropriateness and proportionality.

It might seem obvious that our quest for more knowledge follows proportionately our interests and what we deem significant according to our judgement. But this is often wrong and indeed the reverse is the case. What we deem and judge worthy of our interest and of significance can be led by, and not follow, the knowledge we have of it. This leads us to apportion our attention not on the basis of judgement and values which may guide us to their true significance, but on the basis of our happening to be made aware of something through our knowledge of it.

Furthermore, this effect is often not a one-off, but one that grows in an accelerated and compound fashion. Knowledge begets knowledge serially. The reverse, crassly …

When Is an AI System Sentient?

Thu, 23 Jun 2022 18:07:06 +0800

How can we tell whether an AI program “thinks” or “feels”? In the recent debate of Blake Lemoine’s claims about LaMDA, a functionalist approach can help us understand machine consciousness and feelings. It turns out that Mr Lemoine’s claims are exaggerated and LaMDA can not be sensibly said to feel anything.

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Blake Lemoine and Google LaMDA: Asking the right questions

In the past few days, there has been a lot of discussion around the case of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who was put on leave following his public claims that a computer program called LaMDA had become sentient and that it should be treated as a person.

This is a fascinating case in many respects; the actual claim of computer sentience is the least interesting of them.

Primarily, the whole debate is a good exercise in asking the right questions and flagging the wrong ones. In the news, all kinds of issues get mixed up and stirred together, until the resulting mess is impossible to sort out again. Should Mr Lemoine be fired by Google or is he a martyr for truth? Does his program have a soul? Should we better regulate what AI companies are doing? Do we need to protect the program’s rights or respect its feelings? Is exploiting machines a form of slavery? And what is the relevance of Mr Lemoine labelling himself as a Cajun Discordian and a priest?

Let’s try to untangle the threads and look at the questions one by one.

The Lemoine LaMDA transcript

The whole discussion started when Mr Lemoine published the transcript of a conversation between himself, a colleague, and the AI program LaMDA, trying to make the case that LaMDA is intelligent, sentient, self-aware and that even, as he said in an interview, it has a soul.

I will give you a few of the most interesting quotes below, but the whole thing is worth reading if you want to make up your own mind about the capabilities of LaMDA. What nobody questions is that LaMDA is an amazing piece of software that can sustain an interesting and human-like dialogue about very difficult topics, and I guess that it could very likely be able to pass a Turing test. But does this mean that the program is sentient or that it has a soul?

What nobody questions is that LaMDA is an amazing piece of software that can sustain an interesting and human-like dialogue about very difficult topics.

We will read the transcript charitably, that is, we won’t assume that it’s faked or cherry-picked (although it could well have been), or that all the answers have been pre-programmed into the machine. We will assume it produces its answers dynamically and spontaneously in response to the questions and that the content of the answers was as surprising to the researchers as it is to us. So we will give the program the benefit of the doubt and then see if a case can be made that LaMDA is sentient, a person, or in any relevant way equivalent to a …

Religion and Happiness

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 08:35:58 +0800

Religion has a profound effect on happiness. Multiple studies have shown that religious believers are generally happier people, an effect that is more pronounced in poorer countries. The reasons are: 1. the hierarchical structure of the church; 2. the belief in divine justice and an ordered moral universe; 3. help and companionship available within the community of believers; and 4. the unique hierarchy of merit within church congregations.

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This is part of a series of posts on happiness. Find the whole series here.

The importance of religions on Earth

Does God make people happy? Are religious people more satisfied with their lives than those who don’t believe in God? And are religious countries happier than more secular ones?

Out of 7 people on Earth today, 6 belong to some kind of religious community. Earth’s population currently is about 7 billion, of which (according to Wikipedia) 2.2 billion are Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims, 1 billion Hindus, 400 million Chinese traditional religion adherents, 375 million Buddhists, and another 500 million are distributed among various smaller religions. This leaves only about 1 billion people who don’t believe in some kind of God. So when we talk about happiness, we cannot ignore religion, since it is an important part of the lives of the majority of humans on Earth.

Out of 7 people on Earth today, 6 belong to some kind of religious community.

For our purposes here, it doesn’t matter what religion we are talking about. The effects of religion on happiness are clear enough and similar for most world religions. For examples, I will use Christianity, since this is the religion the readers of this page will probably be most familiar with; but similar principles apply to other religions.

Differences between religious and secular attitudes

But what distinguishes a religious life from a secular one in practice? How is the life and the world-view of a practising Christian different from that of a non-believer? A few obvious points come to mind:

Believers are expected to follow God’s commands.
After death, ‘good’ believers will enjoy a desirable afterlife, while ‘bad’ people (or unbelievers) will be punished.
Believers attend church on Sundays.
The Bible provides a basic framework of morality (Ten Commandments, Sermon of the Mount).
One important part of this framework, particularly for Christians, is to love one’s enemies, and to be nice and helpful to everyone, especially those who need help.

Although we use examples from Christian practices, it is important to see that these points can be made in similar ways about other religions.

Most religions provide ethical frameworks that command or discourage particular behaviours (points 1 and 4 above).
Most religions include belief in an afterlife that, in some form, will reward …

Can We Define Mental Health?

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 13:55:45 +0800

Disclaimer: This is an article about the definition of mental health. It is not meant and should not be used as advice on how to treat mental health problems. If you feel that you have mental health problems, please consult a specialist.

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Can we draw a line between people with psychiatric disorders and those without? If we zoom in on a single individual, can we draw a line between that which is them or their self, and that which is the psychiatric condition? Well, in a sense it’s always possible to draw a line; all you need is pen and paper. But does the line track a real distinction, a truth which is out there for us to find? Or is it a construct? In short, is the line between people with psychiatric disorders and those without, and the line between a single person’s self and their condition, more like a shoreline or like a country border? I argue for the latter.

Can we draw a line between people with psychiatric disorders and those without?

Some people have a psychiatric diagnosis, whereas others don’t. This is an either-or-thing – either you have gotten diagnosed, or you haven’t. But what about the underlying reality that diagnoses are meant to track? Research indicates that things are less black and white if we look at people’s psychology. Most, or even all, psychiatric conditions exist on a spectrum.

This is, of course, not unique for psychiatry – we often find the same phenomenon if we look at the physical side of medicine. We might confidently say that Billy’s blood pressure of 105/70 is perfectly fine and normal, whereas Abby’s blood pressure of 170/95 is dangerously high. It would clearly be wrong to say that blood pressure is too high as soon as it exceeds 100/65, and also wrong to say that it only becomes too high if it exceeds Abby’s numbers. Still, the cutoff point of 120/80 is somewhat arbitrary. The difference between having 119 or 121 in systolic pressure is no more dramatic than the difference between having 117 or 119.

Psychiatric diagnoses are made by talking to people rather than measuring anything in their bodies, and the diagnostic criteria typically contain lots of vague words. However, there is no reason to assume that we would find sharp cut-off points even if we found reliable “bio-markers” for various conditions. Suppose that scientists were to prove that people with ADHD have less dopamine in their brains than others, and we subsequently began diagnosing ADHD through some kind of dopamine-measuring brain scan. We would likely find a continuous spectrum of dopamine levels, and would have to draw a somewhat arbitrary line to distinguish those qualifying for a diagnosis from those who don’t, much like with blood pressure.

It might seem obvious that a condition like ADHD, with symptoms such as forgetfulness, restlessness, impatience and so on exists on a spectrum – all people can struggle with …

The New Daily Philosophy Magazine

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 11:14:48 +0800

Daily Philosophy just launched an ebook version of the successful online magazine.

Get the Kindle version here.

The new monthly publication comes either as a Kindle ebook or as a PDF file that you can print at home and read offline.

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The Daily Philosophy magazine

Daily Philosophy is happy to announce that we have now an ebook and a printable version of the premium subscription content: The new Daily Philosophy Magazine.

Get the Daily Philosophy Magazine on Amazon here!

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The Kindle version is available on Amazon. It includes not only the articles you can read here on the site, but also all premium articles, for which you would normally have to have a premium subscription to Daily Philosophy. Have a long holiday? Get a few issues on your Kindle!

The PDF version is available for free with a Substack subscription of only 7 USD per month (or 70 USD per year) and includes all free and all premium articles that you will find nowhere else on the web. You can print it out on any old printer and take along for a hike, to your meditation cabin, to the beach or to the bathtub. The format is mainly text, with only a few small images (apart from the cover), so printing it does not require a colour printer or other snazzy equipment.

Happy to announce the all-new, monthly Daily Philosophy magazine! Exclusive content every month. Get all issues on Amazon or by subscribing to Daily Philosophy right here!

The magazine includes all articles from the website and the Daily Philosophy newsletter, including all premium and guest articles from both eminent philosophers and fresh voices from the world of thought. The first 3 issues are around 40-50 pages each, so that’s a lot of content.

Click here to read the first issue in your browser right now (no subscription required – the first issue is free):

You can get the magazine for free with a monthly subscription of only 7 USD (or 70 USD if paid yearly – two months for free right there!) or you can buy the issues separately on Amazon.

The subscription also gives you free copies of all ebooks that Daily Philosophy will publish during your subscription period. Yes, that’s right: You not only get all the premium content, but also every ebook that we publish as part of the package.

(Just to be clear, we cannot handle the shipping of physical products at the moment, so both magazines and ebooks are only available in digital form. You’ll have to print the PDF magazine out yourself, or read it on your computer, phone or Kindle device.)

Subscribe here to become a member of Daily Philosophy and to get the monthly printable PDF magazine and all the other goodies:

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What do you …

The Principle of Double Effect

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 12:54:56 +0800

Double effect means that our actions sometimes have two effects (or outcomes): one that was intended and one that was predictable but not intended. The principle of double effect explains when we are allowed to accept a morally bad effect as a consequence of trying to bring about a morally good outcome.

This is the third part of a series on the ethics of war. Find the first part here: The Ukraine Conflict and the Ethics of War.

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What is a “double effect”?

I’ve just come from a class teaching philosophy students. It was a good class. They learned something useful … or did they?

Employment statistics for philosophers are a little hard to come by, but let’s assume for the sake of this argument that the cliche is right: a philosophy degree will cause you to end up unemployed or serving fries in a fast-food joint. Then, what I just did in the past two hours was to knowingly diminish my students’ chances of getting a good job and having a happy and successful life in the future. Assuming that I knew that they’d earn a lot more as accountants, why isn’t it immoral to keep teaching them philosophy instead? I am effectively robbing them of a better future, even of a specific amount of money for every month in the future where they won’t be earning an accountant’s salary. Am I a thief?

There are many cases like that. Say, your house is burning and the fire department comes along with their water hose and they flood the place. After they are gone, you discover that they ruined your computer, which contained the only copy of that spicy memoir you had just finished, not to speak of the Picasso on the wall that they also destroyed. Destroying someone’s work and prized possessions is surely an evil action. So were the firefighters evil men?

The principle of double effect explains when we are allowed to accept a morally bad effect as a consequence of trying to bring about a morally good outcome.

Or look at Covid vaccinations. Every vaccine and every medicine, however well tested, has some small probability of causing adverse effects. Some people, very few in the grand scheme of things, do die from vaccines that are given to them. So when the government is forcing a population to get vaccinated, they can be statistically almost certain that a small number of recipients of that vaccine will be harmed or even killed. If they insist on the mandatory vaccination, are they not committing murder?

And what about me driving my car to work? The pollution from my engine’s exhaust, together with the particles that my brakes and tyres leave on the streets, are a major source of roadside pollution that kills millions every year. I know that, even as I step into my car. And I still drive that car to my office. Am I doing something morally bad?

Thomas Aquinas and Double Effect

Cases like these have interested philosophers since ancient times. …

Erich Fromm on How to Be Happy

Wed, 25 May 2022 18:27:26 +0800

Daily Philosophy has launched a new book, “Erich Fromm on How to Be Happy.” In it, Dr Andreas Matthias takes us on a journey to the world of the Frankfurt School and Social Psychology, in search of wisdom on how we can live happier and more meaningful lives today.

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Erich Fromm on How to Be Happy

In this book, philosophy professor, founder and editor of the Daily Philosophy web magazine, Dr Andreas Matthias takes the reader on a tour, looking at how society influences our happiness. Following Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School, Aldous Huxley and other thinkers, we go in search of wisdom and guidance on how we can live better, happier and more satisfying lives today.

In the book, the author begins with a look at Erich Fromm’s life and work, and then he discusses Fromm’s most prominent contributions to the philosophy of happiness:

The “escape from freedom”
The psychology of capitalism
Fromm’s criticism of modern technology and technological progress
Living one’s life in the states of “having” or “being”
How to develop one’s skills for a happier life
Fromm’s critique of consumerism and his ideal society
Eastern and Western concepts of happiness
The Art of Loving and what love means in modern society
And, finally, Marx’s ideas about alienation and what we can do about it

The book not only describes abstract ideas, but, in his well-known way, the author applies these ideas to our own everyday lives.

After almost every chapter, there is a section titled “Let’s try it out!”, where the author invites readers to apply Fromm’s concepts to their own, everyday lives. From decluttering one’s house to attempting to live through a weekend without using any money, the book is filled with suggestions and ideas on how to live a more meaningful and more satisfying life today.

As opposed to thousands of shallow self-help books, Dr Matthias utilises his decades-long experience in teaching philosophy to young students to go back to the actual thoughts of the writers discussed and to make them come alive for our own world.

This book is part of a series on six classic theories of happiness: Aristotle, Erich Fromm and social psychoanalysis, Epicurean philosophy, the hermit life and Stoicism. Each book provides a unique, deep and refreshing insight into the best thoughts that millennia of philosophical wisdom have to give us.

Start your journey into a richer and more meaningful life today!

Get the book as an ebook or paperback on Amazon

More books like this

You may also wish to look at the author’s other books in the same series:

Epicurus: A Guide to the Principal Doctrines

Thu, 19 May 2022 18:17:13 +0800

The Principal Doctrines is the main work of Epicurus on happiness. This study guide presents and explains the original text. It can be used for a class on Epicurus’ philosophy of happiness or it can form the basis for a reading group or book club meeting.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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Epicurus: The Principal Doctrines

In this article, we will read together and discuss the main work of the philosophy of happiness of Epicurus, the Principal Doctrines. Epicurus wrote many works (Diogenes Laertius, from whom we know most about Epicurus, lists 44 books!). But for his theory of happiness, we only need three works:

The Principal Doctrines is a collection of 40 sayings that summarise the whole of the Epicurean philosophy of life.
The Letter to Menoeceus, who was one of Epicurus’ students, is one of three Epicurean letters that we have. It is a less systematic and slightly more superficial text than the Principal Doctrines, but covers essentially the same ground.
Finally, the so-called Vatican Sayings are a collection of 81 quotes that were discovered in the Vatican Library in 1888. Some of them are almost identical to some of the Principal Doctrines, but others cover also different topics. We will occasionally refer to the Vatican Sayings when we discuss Epicurus.

Both the Principal Doctrines and the Letter to Menoeceus we know of only because the 3rd century AD author Diogenes Laertius quoted them in full in his work “Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers,” which also contains source material from many other Greek philosophers.

Thankfully, all these sources are available in English and anyone can read them for free on the Internet. Here are the links:

Principal Doctrines, tr. Hicks
Letter to Menoeceus, tr. Hicks
Diogenes Laertius, Chapter on Epicurus. This one includes the Greek text (click on “Load” top right to see the Greek).

The Hicks translation is a bit weird at times, but it’s easily available and in the public domain, and this is why we will use it here. Whenever the translation is unclear, I will provide notes in the commentary that will, hopefully, make things a bit clearer. Other sources on the Principal Doctrines:

Julia Hannafin offers a different translation of the Principal Doctrines without stating who the translator is.
Epicurus.net has another translation of the Principal Doctrines, again without translator information.
Finally, Erik Anderson offers his own modern (2006) translation. This one is interesting because it groups the text into eight sections that cover different topics, and it is the most modern of the translations listed here.

Thematic grouping of the doctrines

Erik Anderson divides the text into the following sections:

The four-fold cure for anxiety (Doctrines 1-4)
Pleasure and virtue are interdependent (5)
Social and financial status have recognizable costs and …

Deepfakes, deception, and distrust

Fri, 13 May 2022 13:55:45 +0800

Between March 9 and 10 2022, thousands of netizens, as well as a number of influential journalists, and notably Bernice King, a daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a Christian minister herself, lambasted Prince William, the second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, for being allegedly both a shameless racist and a “deeply offensive” ignorant.

The critical outburst was ignited after several British news outlets, having a PA Media report as source¹, publicized details of the seemingly benign visit of the Duke of Cambridge and his wife, the Duchess Catherine, to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in London amid the global shock that had been spawned by the Russian Armed Forces’ full-scale attack on Ukraine. The specific cause of the scandal was the following quote included in the PA Media report: “William, 39, said Britons were more used to seeing conflict in Africa and Asia. ‘It’s very alien to see this in Europe. We are all behind you,’ he said.”

William was denounced as a racist because he “normalised war and death in Africa and Asia,” while conveying an implicit suggestion that they were incompatible with Europe, his home continent. Besides, the evidence of his ignorance was found in the fact that, when NATO bombed Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in 1999, he was close to the age of majority and achieving high grades in History and Geography in his final year at Eton College, one of the most prestigious high schools in the world and often referred as the “nurse of England’s statesmen.”

William was unaware of the historical magnitude of the refugee crisis triggered by the Kosovo War, something that had not been seen in European soil since World War II – what’s more, the teenage years of the well-traveled Prince, who holds a degree in Geography awarded by the University of St Andrews and the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, should have been permeated by a relentless flow of news coming not just from the Kosovan chapter of the Western Balkans Wars but also from the frontlines of all the bloody military confrontations that tore apart ex-Yugoslavia.

Remarkably, many of the accusations of racism raised against William, though not those pointing out his presumptive blatant ignorance of recent European history, were retracted few hours after their rapid dissemination online, as soon as a royal producer at ITV, a British television network, released a short video documenting part of the conversations the Duke of Cambridge had with volunteers and officials in the referred cultural center. The clip was considered enlightening because no mentions of Africa and Asia were registered in it. Richard Palmer, the only royal correspondent that covered William’s visit and, as such, who was responsible for the quote included in the PA Media report, apologized publicly and said that a “remark [William] made was misheard.”

The way in which this scandal was swiftly brought to an end in favor of William’s reputation …

The Wind on Your Face

Fri, 06 May 2022 15:31:20 +0800

This essay is, in a way, impossible to write. That is, it is not possible directly as it refers to what cannot be said and the limits of language. However, where there are non-linguistic spaces whose interior are beyond what can be said, they are surrounded by linguistic references that show up where those spaces are. Such non-linguistic spaces and what they contain may therefore be indicated indirectly, but the content cannot be understood or described as they are experienced by the use of language. Elsewhere I have called this ‘the bit in between’.¹ What one is encouraged to think about by this, as with talk of non-linguistic spaces, are those features of our life experiences and understanding uncovered, and uncoverable, by language. Imagine a crude net dragged through our experience and understanding of life. It picks up the chunky objects and assembles them for mutual inspection, but a vast amount is simply unnetable, like the watery ocean itself that this metaphor alludes to.

This should lead us not to overvalue language, or perhaps, to put it another way, not misunderstand it and overestimate what it can do. We can do this by not ignoring – and sometimes, it seems, denigrate as unimportant – what is beyond its grasp. For what is beyond its grasp is the very heart and core of what often matters most in our lives: the very feel of living. It is this that draws us through our lives and allows us to shape as we may what, for us, gives life meaning.

The issue is how one is to handle and deal with experiences in one’s life, such as the feeling on a particular occasion of the wind on your face while walking along a cliff top by the sea, something one may remember and what means, in a way you do not fully understand, a great deal to you.

The issue is how one is to deal with experiences in one’s life, such as the feeling on a particular occasion of the wind on your face while walking along a cliff top by the sea.

What can one say about it? Well, I’ve referred to. I’ve described the circumstances of the event’s occurrence. But none of what is said describes what the experience is like. Nor do the words alone evoke the experience. In order for any reference or description to the experience to give anyone any idea what the experience is like they would have had to have had some experience similar to it. Even that would not be complete and take you to the experience, for let it be noted, the experience is particular.

The grasp of language fails in two ways on this occasion. The first is not to be able to say anything about the had-quality of the experience itself. The second is the perhaps necessary inability of language to say anything about the particular experience as language terms refer to universals.

However here we are indeed concerned with a particular experience and the “had-quality” of it as a particular experience, whatever similarities it might have to other experiences on other occasions, for an essential part of any …

Shénnóng and the Agriculturalist School

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 20:55:45 +0800

In Chinese philosophical history, celebration of simple styles of life close to nature is typically attributed to the Daoists. Within the Dàodéjīng, sophistication is a main cause of a violent world that has ‘lost the Way’. Rituals and cleverness feed a superficiality and hypocrisy that was absent in the simpler societies that existed long ago in the past. Zhuāngzǐ, too, constantly calls our admiring attention to the unconstrained spontaneity natural to the creatures most of us we treat so dreadfully. Daoist texts also see nature as a model for authentic human conduct – rivers that symbolise constancy, say, and the night skies that intimate the mysterious Dào (‘Way’) holding sway over the world. The artificiality celebrated by the Confucians and other schools is contrasted with simple ways of life lived closer to nature praised by Daoists.

The artificiality celebrated by the Confucians and other schools is contrasted with simple ways of life lived closer to nature praised by Daoists.

This tidy picture of Daoist praise of spontaneity and simplicity versus the overactive, corrupting artificiality of Confucianism is clearly too simplistic. There is clear variation within and between those rich philosophies. The Dàodéjīng is sympathetic to statecraft in a way that Zhuāngzǐ is clearly not. Confucius sees ‘rituals’ as vital to authentic moral practice but hated superficiality and hypocrisy. Daoists and Confucians would concur in the critique of the bureaucratism and harsh moral ethos of the Legalists. Moreover, we should always take care to avoid attractive but simplistic dualisms – nature/culture being a case in point.

A more interesting reason to demur before crediting Daoism as the Chinese philosophy focused on simpler, more natural life-styles is the availability of alternative candidates. Perhaps the best is the Nóngjiā, an agrarian philosophy inspired by the thought and example of the legendary sage-king, Shénnóng.

The ‘divine farmer’

According to Chinese tradition, the earliest humans had a dreadful life.

They were constantly vulnerable to wild animals, storms, and starvation and struggled to subsist – a precarious ‘state of nature’. Consistent with similar myths in other cultures, they were saved from this dire state by sages who introduced innovations like writing, technology, and organised forms of culture. Institutions arose which gradually transformed human life. Chinese tradition includes Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors – one of whom, Shénnóng, the ‘Divine Farmer’, taught people the arts of agriculture, such as crop planting and the domestication of animals.

Shénnóng is credited as a sage, a person of profound wisdom who helped transform human life and practice. According to legend, Shénnóng was not a unifier of the sort admired by Kǒngzı or the bureaucratic overseer the Legalists thought could enforce social order.

Shénnóng is credited as a sage, a person of profound wisdom who helped transform human life and …

How to Recognise Pure Awareness

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 18:21:39 +0800

I am aware of the room, these words, my bodily sensations, feelings, thoughts. These are objects of awareness. But what is this awareness? Awareness is one of the greatest mysteries we face. Why should it exist at all?

I will refer to the experience of ‘awareness itself’ as a pure awareness experience. Most people, aside from those familiar with spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, have never heard of pure awareness, let alone believe that there is such a phenomenon. They think that consciousness is just the qualities of experience such as seeing the pinkness of the water lily and smelling its sweet fragrance. According to many meditative traditions this is to miss the essence of consciousness. It is to focus on the contents of awareness, while overlooking awareness itself. There is a growing interest amongst philosophers and scientists in pure awareness experiences reported by contemplatives. A recent example is a study by Alex Gamma and Thomas Metzinger which surveyed the characteristics of pure awareness experiences in 1,400 meditators.¹

There is a growing interest amongst philosophers and scientists in pure awareness experiences reported by contemplatives.

The recognition of pure awareness is particularly important in Tibetan Buddhism as it is Buddha Nature itself. As it is described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

This brilliant emptiness is the radiant essence of your own awareness. It is beyond substance, beyond characteristics, beyond colour… The instant of your own presence is empty, yet it is not a nihilistic emptiness, but unimpeded radiance, brilliant and vibrant… Your own awareness, a vast luminous expanse, clarity inseparable from emptiness, is also the Buddha of unchanging light, beyond birth and death. Just to perceive this is enough. If you recognize this brilliant essence of your own awareness as Buddha Nature, then gazing into it is to abide in the state of enlightenment.²

This awareness is empty like all phenomena because it lacks its own inherent existence. It is not merely nothing, however, because it is luminous, which is another way of saying that it is awake and alive. This awareness lacks colour and all other qualities. It is colourless, shapeless, feelingless and silent. It is described as pure and transparent — a clear light. It is as vast and boundless as the open sky.³ Francesca Fremantle refers to it as ‘luminous emptiness’.⁴

Given the importance of pure awareness in Buddhism, the question is — how does one recognise it? Generally, it is thought to become manifest in deep meditative states, when all thoughts, and in fact all objects of awareness, have completely ceased arising. All that remains is a self-luminous awareness. However, how this realisation of pure awareness is meant to have practical benefits off of the meditation cushion is uncertain. There may be some psychological benefits that carry over into everyday life, but surely recognising it in the midst of everyday …

Confucianism and Just War

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 22:21:39 +0800

War in Confucianism

Confucianism as political ethics has its roots in warfare. In 1046 BC, or thereabouts, one Jī Fā led a tribal coalition which defeated and overthrew the Shāng dynasty whose territory in northern China was about the same size as the modern states of France, Germany and Poland combined. The victor, better known to history as King Wŭ of Zhōu, became an archetype of the virtuous ruler, and was evoked as such by the early Confucian philosophers. The defeated Shāng king by contrast represents the evil tyrant who persecutes the people and deserves his fate. Addressing his followers before battle, Jī Fā makes what the texts describe as a ‘Great Vow’. Heaven, he says, loves the people and, having seen their sufferings, commands Jī Fā to remove the evil Shāng king:

“Heaven gave the ordinary people rulers and advisors in order to protect them. When they are united, they can follow the Ruler on High, in order that every part of the land is at peace. Now whether we are responsible or not, who are we to go against the Will of Heaven?” (The Book of Documents 27.4 tr Palmer et al)

From the Great Vow of the crusading Jī Fā, particularly in the works of Confucius, Mencius and Xúnzĭ, emerges the principle known as the Mandate of Heaven: rulers are legitimate only insofar as they govern with humaneness; carrying out their duties to the people by non-coercive means. If they fail to so rule they may be overthrown; in particular, the legitimate king, who possess the Mandate of Heaven, may conduct ‘punitive expeditions’ in order to punish inhumane subordinate rulers. The Book of Documents tells us that King Wŭ, following the defeat of Shāng, found it necessary to put down rebellions in the east in order to bring peace to the people.

The legitimate king, who possess the Mandate of Heaven, may conduct ‘punitive expeditions’ in order to punish inhumane subordinate rulers.

From these historical exemplars, the Confucian philosophers developed a distinctive view of what constitutes a just war. At the core of the Confucian view is a greater concern for the welfare of all people ‘under Heaven’, than for the rights of rulers to act as they please within their own territory.

1. States are justified by their humane rule

Following his victory, Zhōu King Wŭ sought advice from the worthy viscount of Qí who disclosed details of Heaven’s Great Plan for rulers:

“Perfect princely rule occurs when the prince seeks perfection in his bestowing the Five Good Fortunes [long life, prosperity, peace and well-being, love of virtue, and a good end to life], sharing these with all the people. In return the people will become defenders of this and will trust the prince. The people will therefore never plot or the statesman be so self-centred as would otherwise be the case and the ruler will achieve his highest ambitions and status.” (Book of Documents 32.7 tr Palmer et. al)

The function of government is to maximise not state prosperity or power but the people’s …

Philosophy and Nuclear Weapons

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 10:21:39 +0800

In writing about one of the most urgent problems of our time, Bertrand Russell declined to be called a philosopher. He refused to draw any connection between his campaigning journalism against nuclear weapons and philosophy. I shall argue that this was a mistake.

Rather than writing as a philosopher, Russell claimed to write solely as a journalist and a spokesperson for common sense.¹ Admittedly, in metaphysics and epistemology, he was prepared to leave common sense far behind. For, as he says in The Problems of Philosophy (1912):

“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.”

However, in his campaigning journalism, Russell was prepared to leave philosophy far behind and to embrace common sense. Thus, for example, in Common Sense and Nuclear Weapons (1959), Russell positioned himself unequivocally on the side of common sense.

But what exactly did he mean by common sense? To the best of my knowledge, Russell himself never subjected the concept to any sharply focussed analysis, but it is usually taken to mean something like folk wisdom. More specifically, it is thought that the dictates of common sense are universal, transcending the conventions of a particular time and place. This is usually assumed implicitly, although in the philosophy of Thomas Reid it is an explicit claim.

Bertrand Russell. Source: Wikipedia.

However, common sense, at least as it is appealed to in political arguments, is never, in fact, universal.

In politics, the authority of common sense proclamations is derived from two elements: (1) they are known with confidence; and (2) it is believed that all other right-thinking people also know them with confidence. Thus, typically, if I ask why I believe something with confidence, the answer is that all others whom I think of as right-thinking people also seem to know it with confidence. And why do I think they are right-thinking people? Well, they seem to be confident of the same things as me.

But, of course, although by this reasoning we wave what Kant called “the magic wand of common sense,” and although we ourselves may thereby be convinced of the universality of our common sense pronouncements, we have not transcended the conventional wisdom of our particular society.

Little wonder then that Russell’s biographer, Ray Monk, describes Russell’s journalistic work as (with a few exceptions): glib; over-polemical; over-confident; utopian; wilfully shallow (playing to the gallery); concentrating on offering instant solutions; ignoring questions of policy; and with a tendency to malign those of different opinions. One is prone to write this way when one aims to speak on behalf of common sense. That is not to say that his journalism was ineffective – for his …

Jeremy Bentham on Animal Ethics

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 11:55:45 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Jeremy Bentham on the suffering of animals: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

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Jeremy Bentham on animal ethics

“The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? (Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789, Ch 17. n.122.) ”

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a distinctly quotable author. One thinks, for example, of the crisp, robust statement of the utilitarian moral philosophy of which he is held to be the ‘father’: ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. Like many of his radical English contemporaries, Bentham was active in his opposition to slavery, colonialism, the death penalty, the treatment of women as inferiors, and vast discrepancies in wealth. More unusually for the times, he also took up the cause of the welfare of animals.

The remark of Bentham’s that I come across most frequently is the one quoted at the beginning of this article in which, of course, ‘they’ refers to (non-human) animals. It occurs in the context of advocating the extension of legal protection to animals. Having applauded the French for affording protection to black people — for, in effect, recognising the irrelevance of skin colour to legal status — he proposes that the same be done for animals. In the case of human beings and animals alike, the only relevant criterion for establishing legal rights against cruel treatment is the capacity to experience suffering. The ability to reason or converse is as irrelevant as skin colour.

The only relevant criterion for establishing legal rights against cruel treatment is the capacity to experience suffering.

For Bentham’s later admirers, his point should not be confined to the sphere of law. As an application of the general principle of utility it in effect furnishes the basis for animal ethics at large, for deciding quite generally how we should treat and otherwise relate to animals. There is hardly an animal welfare or rights organization whose website does not contain an approving citation of Bentham’s famous line. Indeed, it has become a virtual slogan for the whole animal liberation movement over the last few decades.

Some of the enthusiastic responses to Bentham’s remark are certainly misinformed. On one animal rights website, for example, it is stated that Bentham was a ‘pioneer of animal rights’. This is doubly wrong.

First, he did not think that animals could have any rights except those granted to them by the law. In another of his most frequently quoted remarks, he wrote that the idea of non-legal rights — of ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights — was ‘nonsense on stilts’, a left-over from a theistic ethics that, …

The Ukraine Conflict: Conduct in War

Sun, 06 Mar 2022 14:54:56 +0800

What are the laws that apply during a war? We discuss the jus in bello and the requirements of discrimination, proportionality and necessity. Just War Theory applied to the current conflict in the Ukraine.

This is the second part of a series on the ethics of war. Find the first part here: The Ukraine Conflict and the Ethics of War.

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The rules in war (jus in bello)

We said last week that the theory of just war distinguishes three different kinds of moral problems:

The ethics of entering war (jus ad bellum)
The rules to be obeyed during war (jus in bello)
The ethics of restoration and peace after a war (jus post bellum)

Today we are examining the second part, the ethical conduct during a war. There are, essentially, three requirements that must be fulfilled for an action in war to count as (relatively) ethical. One should emphasise the “relatively” part, because, for example, radical pacifists might claim that participating in a war, in whatever way, can never be a morally right act.

The three requirements are: discrimination, proportionality and necessity.

Discrimination

First, we must make sure that we target only combatants in a war and not non-combatants like children, old people, and civilians who are not taking part in hostilities.

Philosophically, it is an interesting question why we would make this distinction. If I say that it is not morally right to kill a civilian, but it is morally right to kill the same person if he stands opposite of me in a soldier’s uniform — why would that be? What is it that allows me to kill a soldier, while I am not allowed to kill anyone else?

Why is killing soldiers in war permissible?

I could perhaps try to argue that a soldier poses a threat to my own life, so killing a soldier who is about to kill me is an act of self-defence, and should therefore be permissible. But today’s war is often fought with rockets over great distances. When the enemy fires a rocket and kills a soldier miles away, they cannot argue that this soldier posed any real threat to them. So then, why was it permissible to fire that rocket?

They might try to justify it by saying that the soldier, by freely signing up to be a soldier, has already accepted the possibility that they will be shot at, and therefore it is not immoral to shoot at them. It’s just an occupational risk of sorts. This would be similar to how the Fire Department can justify sending its firemen into a dangerous fire. The Fire Department can expect its firemen to risk their lives in a way that my University employer cannot ask of me. If my University is in danger of burning down, the University administration cannot ask me to risk my life to save it.

Maybe a soldier, by freely signing up to be a soldier, has already accepted the possibility that they will be shot at.

Why is this? Because, one might argue, the fireman has freely agreed …

The Ukraine Conflict and the Ethics of War

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 14:54:56 +0800

Are there any ethical rules for wars, or are soldiers allowed to do whatever they want on the battlefield? How can attacks like that of Russia on Ukraine be justified? And do other countries have a moral obligation to come to Ukraine’s assistance? Read on to find out!

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Are there any ethical rules for wars?

One might think that perhaps wars don’t really obey any rules. Since the expected behaviour in a war is that people shoot with the intention to kill each other, what rules could there be that they would be likely to obey?

But it turns out that we do distinguish between good (relatively speaking) and bad behaviour, even in war situations. Killing an armed enemy soldier in order to save one’s own life will not be as bad, morally speaking, as bombing a school full of children or a hospital. Killing a soldier in war might not generally be seen as equally bad as murdering someone at peacetime, but there are also behaviours that we would recognise as “war crimes,” that is, behaviour that even in the context of war should be considered a crime. So how do we know which behaviours are relatively better or worse in a war situation?

Killing a soldier in war might not generally be seen as equally bad as murdering someone at peacetime.

One crucial question is: do we believe that wars are really totally different from everyday life, so that killing in a war obeys radically different rules than killing in peace? Or do we see a war just as one more kind of human behaviour (like, say, working or mating)? If this is the case, then we would try to argue that, in principle, the same kinds of moral rules should apply to wars that also apply to everyday life at peacetime.

The laws of war

The ethical problems of wars can be divided into three groups (see [1] for a good overview and more details):

Declaring and entering war. This is often called the jus ad bellum part of war ethics: the law towards war. Here, we would ask questions like:
- What are good reasons to go to war?
- Are there better and worse reasons?
- Are some wars easier to justify than others?
The law during war (jus in bello) is about the behaviour of the warring parties while the war is taking place. Here, issues include:
- Is it ever permissible to target civilians?
- What if underage children take part in the war as armed soldiers? Should they have a special status and must the enemy avoid harming them?
- Which kinds of infrastructure is it okay to target? (Weapons factories or hospitals?)
- How to treat the wounded and the prisoners of war?
The rules after the war (jus post bellum) deal with questions like:
- How to end a war?
- How should the losing party be treated?
- How to rebuild the warring countries and …

I’m depressed and it’s all your fault!

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:35:51 +0800

Disclaimer: This is an article about the history and philosophy of psychiatry. It is not meant and should not be used as advice on how to treat depression. If you feel symptoms of depression, please consult a specialist.

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Incidence of depression is increasing. One explanation is that aspects of our modern lives are responsible. Loss of in person connections, fast paced and sometimes bewildering communication, the increase in temporary and insecure work. A British Prime Minister who seemingly can’t tell whether he is at a party or in a meeting. Henry Maudsley wrote, “an increase of (depression) is a penalty which an increase of our present civilisation necessarily pays.” Maudsley [1] wrote this in 1867 but he could have written it today. And he used the word ‘insanity’ rather than ‘depression’, but the point is the same. Are we driving ourselves insane? And have we been doing so for over a hundred years? To understand this, we need to understand how we came to think of ourselves as depressed.

Depression through the ages [2]

Historically, sadness was divided into ‘sadness with cause’, and ‘sadness without cause’, also known as melancholia. Melancholia was considered a medical disorder because there was no apparent reason for the person’s symptoms. This distinction has a long history, going all the way back to Hippocrates and Aristotle.

The early 10^th century Arabic physician Ishaq ibn Imran defined melancholia as “irrational, constant sadness and dejection” but noted that “the loss of a beloved child or an irreplaceable library can release such sadness and dejection that melancholy is the result.” The implied existence of non-beloved children and the equating of beloved children with libraries are interesting side issues. In the 19^th century, Mercier defined melancholia as “a disorder characterised by a feeling of misery which is in excess of what is justified by the circumstances in which the individual is placed.” This makes sense intuitively. If my irreplaceable library is burned to the ground I will be very sad, despondent, and have little interest in doing things. This is different from waking up one day and having those same feelings without an apparent cause. These early thinkers believed that melancholia had some physical cause, such as a misalignment of the humours.

Historically, sadness was divided into ‘sadness with cause’, and ‘sadness without cause’, also known as melancholia.

Freud (1856-1939) attempted to understand depression by uncovering hidden desires and motivations, rather than physical imbalances, but nevertheless maintained the traditional distinction. He wrote:

Although grief involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbid condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment. We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be …

Immanuel Kant on Means and Ends

Sat, 12 Feb 2022 19:45:33 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Immanuel Kant on the value of human beings: “Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means.”

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Immanuel Kant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“Act so as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, at all times also as an end, and not only as a means. (Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section) ”

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was one of the most influential philosophers of the past 300 years. Not only that — he was also the embodiment of a philosopher who is too busy with his thoughts to take notice of the actual world.

One of his favourite pastimes was to visit a friend, one Mr Green. Kant would go to Green’s home, only to find him asleep. This happened in the same way every time, without fail. Kant would sit beside Green, waiting for him to wake up. After a while, he would doze off himself. A little later, a third friend would come along and also fall asleep with them, until, finally, the last of the group of friends would enter the room and wake everyone up. Once awake, they had a blast talking about interesting ideas, but only until precisely seven o’clock in the evening. At seven, and not a minute later, the group would break up and everyone would go their own way. The locals, who were used to this weird meeting, would know when it was seven o’clock, because Kant would always pass by the street at exactly this time. ¹

The locals, who were used to this weird meeting, would know when it was seven o’clock, because Kant would always pass by the street at exactly this time.

Kant needed this kind of regularity and could be profoundly unhappy when something didn’t go according to plan. One time, an acquaintance invited him for a trip to the countryside. But the trip took a bit longer and Kant wasn’t home at his customary bed-time at precisely ten o’clock. This upset him so much that he immediately created a new rule for his life: never to accept another invitation for a trip to the country.

Kant could be charming and witty, his students reported, but he could also do the weirdest things. When his long-time servant, a man named Lampe, left him, he found it very difficult to accustom himself to a life without the man. So he stuck a note to the wall: “Lampe must be forgotten!” One wonders whether the wise man expected this to actually work.

Means and ends

Kant never left his home town, Koenigsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), never married, never changed his daily schedule or his diet, and died, presumably happy and mildly bored, at the age of 80. His …

The Empathy Paradox

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 15:31:20 +0800

To be empathetic is to have a good and reliable understanding of how others feel and think. To be unempathetic is to either have a poor and unreliable understanding of how others feel and think, or to be oblivious to their feelings and thoughts. These characteristics manifest themselves in what one says and how one acts towards and treats others.

It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing. But this is a mistake, unless one assumes that being empathetic will inevitably bring it about that one treats others better. But there is no logical reason to suppose this. Being empathetic may be a good way to know how to do hurt to someone in respect of their feelings and thoughts more acutely and damagingly. Not being empathetic may result in such hurt too, but that will be because of poor understanding, or lack of awareness, of the feelings and thoughts of others, not through calculated use of good understanding enabling one to better get people where it really hurts.

It is often supposed that greater empathy is a good thing.

It could be factually that greater empathy tends to make people shy away from hurting others, as the person doing the hurting will know what is being done with acuity, but this need not necessarily so. Being empathetic is a factual not a normative matter, and it may be a better way of being cruel to someone than simply being incomprehendingly insensitive or oblivious to their feelings and thoughts. This aside however is not the central focus this paper, though it is a background which it is beneficial to hold in mind.

It certainly is not the case that in order to be empathetic one has to know that one is empathetic. Many people are regarded, indeed vaunted, as empathetic ‘by nature’ or ‘intuitively’, with little or no reflection involved or cultivation of it. They have an innate talent for it. Some people, on the other hand think they are empathetic, even think it is quality they have to a special degree and more than more than others. This goes back to empathy, other things being equal, being regarded as a good thing, and thus people and motivated to claim they are empathetic. A comparison with others who lack it which may even be self-congratulatory.

The paradox of empathy arises from knowing whether oneself or another is empathetic. Let us say someone is not empathetic. The lack of empathy could well make it appear to oneself that one is empathetic. The evidence of one’s empatheticness would have to derive from one’s being empathetic, that of understanding the feelings and thoughts of others. But in this case of the unempathetic person they are unable to see that they are not empathetic because they do not understand that the reactions of other people to them through their feeling and thoughts that indicate the lack of empathy.

The paradox of empathy arises from knowing whether oneself or another is empathetic.

Something that could be repeated and show itself in different ways. Let us say some …

Marcus Aurelius on Opinions

Sat, 05 Feb 2022 19:45:33 +0800

A history of philosophy in its most famous quotes. Today: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: “It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements.”

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Marcus Aurelius: Meditations

“It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgements. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6) ”

Marcus Aelius Aurelius Verus Caesar (121-180 AD) is still one of the most well-known and generally well-regarded emperors of Rome.

Marcus Aurelius was not only an emperor, but also a philosopher. In a difficult time for Rome and for himself, he turned to philosophy to find strength and guidance. While away from Rome, on military expeditions to the barbarian lands in Central Europe, he kept a diary of his thoughts. This later became known as “Meditations.” But the original title is much more modest: “Notes to Myself,” or “Things that Concern Myself.”

Stoic philosophy is complex and has many facets, but one of its overarching goals is to show a path to human happiness. This happiness comes through cultivating a particular approach to the world that allows us to stay composed and strong in the face of difficulties.

April 26, 121 AD marks the birthday of Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who still inspires us today with his sense of humility and duty.

In the quote above, the important concept is things being “in our power” or not. For Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, it was essential to distinguish between what aspects of our lives and our experience we can control and which things we cannot control. Some of us, for example the Emperor of Rome, might have more control than others, but we all have only limited power to bend the world to our will. Diseases, bad luck, economic collapse, natural disasters and old age spare no one. This is what Marcus Aurelius calls the “things themselves” in the quote above.

If those “things themselves,” that is, the unpredictability of the outside world, can throw us into poverty, illness, hardships and death, what can we do to try and safeguard our happiness? Here, the Stoics employ a psychological trick. They say, it is true that an external event creates a factual situation. But the facts are distinct from our judgements about them.

You can see this easily when you look at the misfortune of others. If you see in the news that a house somewhere far away collapsed and killed most of the members of a family, you …

In Praise of Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 10:21:39 +0800

A response to this article.

Radical scepticism has a good claim to be both the longest lasting tradition in philosophy and the consistently least popular. There’s a lot to be said for it.

By radical scepticism I mean scepticism that is in the grip of an infinite regress, like the ‘why?’ ‘…’ ‘why?’ ‘…’ ‘why?’ … of a child in the process of discovering philosophy — which is also, not coincidentally, the ‘why?’ ‘…’ ‘why?’ ‘…’ ‘why?’ … of a child discovering radical scepticism. In western philosophy this infinite regress is first discussed by Sextus Empiricus (2^nd or 3^rd century BC).

According to the mode deriving from dispute, we find that undecidable dissension about the matter proposed has come about both in ordinary life and among philosophers. Because of this we are not able to choose or to rule out anything, and we end up with suspension of judgement. In the mode deriving from infinite regress, we say that what is brought forward as a source of conviction for the matter proposed itself needs another such source, which itself needs another, and so ad infinitum, so that we have no point from which to begin to establish anything, and suspension of judgement follows.

This passage is from Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, so named after Pyrrho (c.360-270 BC). Although Pyrrho’s works do not survive, Sextus thought of himself as a disciple of Pyrrho. For this reason, I shall use the words ‘Pyrrhonian scepticism’ or ‘radical scepticism’ to apply to any philosophy that does not escape an infinite regress.

Incidentally, some scholars have pointed out similarities between aspects of early western scepticism (as found in Sextus Empiricus) and the Buddhism that Pyrrho may have encountered when, according to Diogenes Laertius, he travelled to India in the army of Alexander the Great. However, whether or not Pyrrho and Sextus were influenced by Buddhism, it is not hard to imagine an infinite regress arising independently in the earliest stages of different philosophical traditions in unconnected parts of the world and, indeed — as we will see — this seems to have been the case.

Some scholars have pointed out similarities between aspects of early western scepticism and Buddhism.

Contemporary philosophers, who will agree with each other on very little else, tend to agree that it is one of the defining characteristics of philosophy that it should examine its own foundations. Thus, for example, philosophers have often pointed out that it is not part of mathematics to ask ‘what is mathematics?’ and it is not part of natural science to ask ‘what is natural science?’ However, it is part of philosophy to ask ‘what is philosophy?’ For philosophy is self-reflective: it looks at its own foundations and asks ‘why?’ Radical scepticism is this …

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 17:49:47 +0800

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the main texts of what has come to be called the Frankfurt School, a lose collection of thinkers who first congregated around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The authors, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, analyse modern culture from a number of perspectives, addressing mythology, enlightenment, sexuality and liberation, sickness and psychoanalysis.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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The Frankfurt School

The Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the main texts of what has come to be called the Frankfurt School, although it was neither a school nor located anywhere near Frankfurt for much of the time it was active.

The Frankfurt School is generally taken to mean a lose collection of thinkers who first congregated around the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Institute was founded in 1923 with the money of a wealthy student, Felix Weil, but from the beginning the founders sought to integrate the Institute into the formal university system, so that it could offer lectures, attract academics, get research funding and confer academic degrees.

The most prominent of the founding members were Max Horkheimer, who became the Director of the Institute in 1930, musicologist and philosopher Theodor Adorno, psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm, whom we already know quite well, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Later, many others became loosely associated with the Frankfurt School, for instance Jurgen Habermas, who started out as a doctoral student of Horkheimer but later went his own way and created his own theoretical framework, distancing himself from the Frankfurt School. Erich Fromm, too, was only loosely associated with the School, having his own research program that emphasised psychoanalysis rather than Hegelian and Marxist philosophy and Critical Theory.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

The main topics of the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School was, as we said, never a “school” in the narrow sense of having one set of teachings that it promoted through its members.

Instead, it was a loose association of very different thinkers who, for a time, had common research interests and found inspiration and support from working together, despite always also having differences and sometimes fundamental disagreements among them. It was more like a flock of birds who, for a while, find themselves sitting on the same branch of a tree, rather than a pack of wolves that will hunt and …

Taking the Crowded Bus of Life

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 10:08:46 +0800

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus (50-135 AD), one of the most important Stoic philosophers in history, recommends seeing obstacles in our lives as opportunities to improve.

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Reading Epictetus

The interest in stoic books and life advice has been consistently growing over the past few years. Google Trends shows four times more searches for “stoic” now than in 2009. Unfortunately, much of that public interest in Stoicism is, like everything else in our societies, exploited commercially to sell more books and Stoic lifestyle courses. (And yes, you can subscribe to my premium newsletter below).

But we want to do something different and a lot more interesting here. We’re going to read Epictetus himself, the ancient philosopher-slave. Surprisingly for a 2000-year-old text, the Handbook of Epictetus is really easy to read (in translation, at least), and, besides the wisdom and gravitas that one would expect, also contains some of the weirdest philosophical arguments ever made in the philosophy of happiness. Unlike many modern philosophers, especially since the advent of the weaponised political correctness movements, Epictetus has the courage to pursue his arguments to their very logical end and he doesn’t shy away from conclusions that to the unsuspecting reader must seem obviously wacky (but more on this in our next episode).

A ‘Stoic’ attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.

Epictetus riding a bus

In his Enchiridion (literally: “Handbook”), Epictetus makes the well-known Stoic point (discussed here previously) that we must accept what we cannot change, while still trying to exercise control over what we can change:

When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is. If you are going to bathe, picture to yourself the things which usually happen in the bath: some people splash the water, some push, some use abusive language, and others steal. Thus you will more safely go about this action if you say to yourself, “I will now go bathe, and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature.” And in the same manner with regard to every other action. For thus, if any hindrance arises in bathing, you will have it ready to say, “It was not only to bathe that I desired, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature; and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.”

What he is saying here is that we need to acknowledge that every action is part of a context in which it takes place. Our brains are often focusing on only the action that we intend to perform, without realising that this action will be performed within its inescapable context; and we get …

Nothing Matters. Or Does It?

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 19:21:39 +0800

What exactly do we mean when we say that “nothing matters”? More than sixty years ago, the British philosopher Richard Mervyn Hare attempted to answer this question in an early essay.¹ The way he answers it is intended to convince us that the view that “nothing matters” is an untenable position, and quite obviously so.

Hare starts his essay by relating the story of a young Swiss student staying with the Hares, who after reading Albert Camus’ L’Etranger (The Stranger) suddenly became convinced that “nothing matters”.

Hare then proceeded to talk him out of it in Socratic fashion: when we say that something matters what we do is express concern about that something. Concern, however, is always somebody’s concern. Therefore, when I say that something matters, I express my concern for it. I am saying that it matters to me. Accordingly, when you say the same, then you express your concern for that thing. You are saying that it matters to you. Neither of us is then really saying anything about the thing in question. We are only saying something about ourselves.

For the statement “nothing matters” to be true it would have to be true that the one who makes the statement is not concerned about anything at all.

Now most of us are in fact concerned about many things. And so, apparently, was Hare’s Swiss student, which means that things did matter to him, which means that they did matter, period. For the statement “nothing matters” to be true it would have to be true that the one who makes the statement is not concerned about anything at all. So, if I am the one who says that nothing matters, then this is true if and only if nothing matters to me, and if you are the one who says it, then it is true if and only if nothing matters to you. Yet if it were true that nothing mattered to me, why would I then bother to make that statement in the first place? It seems I would at least have to care enough to find it worth pointing out that nothing matters, in which case I would have immediately contradicted myself.

The reason we may not be immediately aware of this contradiction is that we tend to misunderstand the function of the word “matters”. Its function is to express (somebody’s) concern. It does not tell us anything about the nature of things. Contrary to what we seem to think when we declare that nothing matters, mattering is not something that things do. My neighbour may both chatter and matter, but while the chattering is something that she actually does, the mattering is not. In that sense it is quite true that things do not matter (which is to say that they do not engage in an activity called mattering), from which we can easily, but mistakenly, infer that nothing matters: we take a deep and hard look at things, fail to observe any mattering activity in them, and then conclude that nothing matters. However, we have looked in the wrong place. We should have looked at ourselves. If we had done that, we would most likely have found that some things …

Meaning, Value, Death, and God

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 15:31:20 +0800

In the world certain things and events have meaning and value for people as individuals. That is to say, they are respectively not just neutral objects and happenings, they have significance, they stand out for attention and to be noted while in addition they are thought to have more or less value. Both the meaning and value are derived from thought, emotion and associated actions. Overarchingly they are derived from our engagement in the world.

Some of these meanings and values are shared with others, but some are highly individual or shared only with a few who are close, such as family and friends. These meanings and values often arise not only from predilections and preferences, but also from the process of shared lives.

Think for example of a family home in which there occurs the death of the last to leave and the resulting collation of not just the objects in it but also the events that happened there. This is the auditorium of one’s life, what gives it body and form. When one dies, if one is the last to go, one is just left with a detritus of objects and the ghost of events, actions and happenings, and then in turn those objects are removed or heading away from each other forever, the places where those events took place are overlaid and rubbed out by new ones, until not a trace remains that once had the meaning or value it did. Other events and places apart from homes can have similar meaning and value to the individual, and those meanings and values, that gave sense of what one’s life is, are similarly extinguished upon death. Such meanings and values are both part of who we are and extensions of ourselves into the world.

When we die, if there is no-one to remember these personal meanings and values, they evaporate and vanish with our death.

When we die, if there is no-one to remember these personal meanings and values, they evaporate and vanish with our death. This is hard to face for most people. That all those objects, events and places that had the meaning and value they had for them just disappear as having those meanings and values. It is as if they never were, and consequently as they are tied to individual people, as if these people never were also. People need a way of dealing with this. To not be quite forgotten. They do not want it to be as though what had meaning and value in the end really had no meaning and value. It is hard enough when partings, removals and destructions take place when we are alive, but when we are dead, the annihilation is final and there is no possibility of setting up anew and imbuing a new beginning with meanings and values.

One way to face up to the reality of it is to bear it. When you die, the meanings things had for you, their value to you, die with you. Even if this might be the truth of the matter and the rational thing to believe, it’s non-rationally understandable that people believe, or somewhat less firmly, hope-believe, that something else is the case, and that the meanings and …

Highlights of 2021

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 19:40:26 +0800

In the past year, we went together on a journey to explore five different philosophies of happiness and to try to apply them to our own time and our own lives: Aristotle, Fromm, Epicurus, Hermit life and Stoicism. Here are some of the highlights from the past year.

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Looking back on 2021, there were so many excellent articles, particularly those of our brilliant guests, who contributed both original pieces and interviews to this site. Many thanks to them all for their contributions and their support to Daily Philosophy!

In the following, I give you only some of my own articles because to include all the contributed articles would make the list too long, and I find it impossible to choose among them. Find all the guest articles and interviews here:

https://daily-philosophy.com/categories/guest-post/

Now, let’s start, as we did in the past year, with Aristotle:

How to Live an Aristotelian Life

Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues; (2) phronesis or practical wisdom; and (3) eudaimonia or flourishing.

Martha Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach has always fascinated me as a way of trying to list the conditions for a “good” human life. Whether this works as intended or not, it is a brave attempt to bring clarity into the question of what makes a life worth living.

Martha Nussbaum and the Capabilities Approach

Aristotle’s life is itself a fascinating story of genius and greatness:

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Aristotle (384-322 BC), born in Stageira, Greece, is one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived. He worked not only in philosophy, but also wrote dozens of books on all topics, from astronomy and biology to literary theory.

Richard Taylor gives Aristotle’s theory a modern spin that makes it resonate with our own lives:

Richard Taylor on the Creative Life

Richard Taylor (1919–2003) thought that it’s creativity that makes us feel happy and fulfilled. According to Taylor, a life lived without exercising one’s creativity is a wasted life.

Here is, by the way, Daily Philosophy’s book on Aristotle that began as a series of articles, but that you can now buy as an ebook or paperback on Amazon. Please consider buying it to support Daily Philosophy!

Live …

Who is the Father (or Mother) of Philosophy?

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 08:32:20 +0800

It is impossible to identify one person who is supposed to be the “father” or “mother” of philosophy, but Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius and Lao Zi might be considered influential figures within their respective traditions. The question is even more difficult where the mothers of philosophy are concerned, but one could name Diotima of Mantinea, Aspasia of Miletus, Hypatia of Alexandria and Ban Zhao as important female philosophers of the ancient world.

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Who is the father of philosophy?

It is impossible to identify one person who is supposed to be the “father” or “mother” of philosophy. Skills like philosophy, writing or art developed independently many times over the course of human history. And one could argue that even a child that asks, for example, “why is it wrong to steal something?” is actually doing philosophy by asking one of the timeless philosophical questions.

If we ask instead which philosophers have had the greatest influence in the histories of their cultures, we could perhaps give a few names:

In ancient Greece, Thales of Miletus (~624–548 BC) is often cited as the first philosopher. Thales asked questions like “what are all things made of deep down?” (he thought it’s water), and he was also interested in astronomy. Thales might have been one of the first philosophers we know of, but his ideas are not very influential today. The crown for the most influential Western philosophers surely goes to three men that were teachers and students of each other: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
Socrates (470–399 BC) was famous for his questioning method and became known for his relentless pursuit of the truth, which, in the end, cost him his life.
His student Plato (428-348 BC) wrote so many works on so many different, fundamental questions in philosophy, that there is a saying that the history of Western philosophy is just “footnotes to Plato.”
Plato’s student Aristotle (384–322 BC) worked on both philosophy and the natural sciences of his time. He wrote on physics, biology, logic and many other topics. In a way, he could be considered the father of Western science along with being one of the most influential philosophers ever. Both Plato and Aristotle had huge influence over the later philosophy of the Catholic church, and particularly Aristotle was widely read by Arab philosophers of the Middle Ages.

In the Eastern tradition, certainly Confucius (551-479 BC) and Lao Zi can be considered “fathers” of their respective philosophical traditions.

Finally, René Descartes (1596-1650) is widely seen as one of the fathers of modern philosophy.
In the Eastern tradition, certainly Confucius (551-479 BC) and Lao Zi can be considered “fathers” of their respective philosophical traditions. Confucianism, with its heavy emphasis on ethics, traditions and rules of behaviour has shaped Chinese society throughout …

Five More Inspiring Philosophy Books for Your Christmas

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:07:57 +0800

Looking for a really great present? Here are Daily Philosophy’s recommendations for five more of the most inspiring books for your Christmas presents list.

This time, we discuss the best from Jill Taylor, John Stevens, Bill Porter, Eugen Herrigel and Aldous Huxley — with a heavy focus on Buddhism. Read below for specific recommendations on which kind of person to gift each of these books.

See also the first part of these book recommendations and our list of the very best philosophy introductions!

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This time I want to bring you the second part of my “inspirational books” recommendations list. There is no particular order to the presentation. I just grouped the books loosely by topic. With two exceptions, these are all Buddhism-inspired — but Buddhism today has become the lingua franca, the English of spirituality, so I feel that most of these books will also speak to those of us who don’t identify as Buddhists in the narrow sense.

Let’s go!

1. Jill B. Taylor, My Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor’s book would probably not even count as philosophy by most book categorisations. But I’ve always found its philosophical implications striking.

You see, when we talk about how to achieve happiness in life, there is only a limited number of ways we can go about it:

Enjoying the world. This is the premise behind Epicureanism and Hedonism. Despite their differences in the details, both would agree that what makes us happy is the proper enjoyment of our lives and that we can live optimally happy lives by maximising this enjoyment.
Taking part in the world as a virtuous person. This is the idea behind Aristotle’s theory and, in extension, Bertrand Russell’s and Richard Taylor’s versions of Eudaimonism. You can read all about it in the Daily Philosophy book “Live Happier with Aristotle” (which I wrote, and which you can also read about below). Get it here on Amazon.
Embracing the faith. It is known that religious people are, statistically, happier than non-religious people.
Renouncing one’s self. In different ways, but following a similar principle, this is what both Stoicism and Buddhism advocate as the way to a happier life. If what keeps us from being happy is an undue fixation on our own perceived interest, then letting go of our egotism and perceiving the connection between all living things might be a way out of life’s unhappiness.
Changing the world to make it better. This is the approach of Marxism, of social psychology and political philosophy, of Erich Fromm and the Critical Theory school of thought. Perhaps what keeps us in misery is society; then, achieving a better, happier life is only possible if we change the way our societies work.
Finally, changing one’s brain (by mechanical or chemical means) might be another way out of unhappiness. After all, we never perceive the world as it …

The Stoic View of the Self

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 17:09:03 +0800

For the Stoics, everything that happens to us seems to have a special significance that the same event wouldn’t have if it happened to someone else. When I miss the bus, I’m upset. When the dude in the blue suit over there misses the same bus, I’m not. This insight is at the core of the Stoic philosophy of life.

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First person and third person

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus (~50-135 AD) writes in his famous Handbook:

When you see anyone weeping in grief because his son has gone abroad, or is dead, or because he has suffered in his affairs, be careful that the appearance may not misdirect you. Instead, distinguish within your own mind, and be prepared to say, “It’s not the accident that distresses this person, because it doesn’t distress another person; it is the judgment which he makes about it.” As far as words go, however, don’t reduce yourself to his level, and certainly do not moan with him. Do not moan inwardly either.

We talked previously about how Stoics distinguish between what one can control and what is out of one’s control. An important point is to realise, the Stoics think, that the only thing we can effectively control is our own mind and how it perceives the world. The world itself, on the other hand, is entirely out of our control.

This is what Epictetus means when he says: “It’s not the accident that distresses this person … It is the judgment which he makes about it.”

But how do we know that this is true? How do we know that Epictetus is right? It’s here that the little sentence which I just left out comes into play: “…because it doesn’t distress another person.”

“It’s not the accident that distresses this person … It is the judgment which he makes about it.” – Epictetus

So the idea is that we have an accident. Let’s say, my favourite cup breaks. Naturally, we would say, I’m upset about this. But Epictetus disagrees. Look, he says. Let’s take the exact same situation of the cup breaking, but instead of you we put a random other person in your shoes; let’s say, the guy who stood beside you in the supermarket check-out line this afternoon. Are you now upset that his cup was broken? – No, you say, not at all.

What Does ‘Stoic’ Mean?

A ‘Stoic’ attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.

But then, Epictetus would conclude, the upsetting element cannot be the breaking of the cup, because we assumed that this happened in the same way in both cases. Nothing about the cup itself was different, and yet your reaction is different. So the only thing that is different is our judgement that we make about the broken cup. In the case that it’s my …

Nanavira Thera

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 11:55:45 +0800

The Hermit of Bundala

A few years ago, I hired a ‘safari’ jeep to take me into the Bundala National Park, one of the world’s great bird reserves, on the south-east coast of Sri Lanka. After twenty minutes, the jeep broke down. The driver and guide soon became anxious. With darkness about to fall, they explained, the mosquitoes would soon be swarming and the Russell’s vipers had already begun their evening’s hunting. Rescue eventually arrived, but I left the Park with a strong sense not just of its beauty but also of the danger of the place.

It would have been a still more dangerous place sixty years earlier when local villagers built a tiny bungalow, or kuti, in the jungle for a Cambridge educated, ex-British army officer to live in. Not yet a National Park, it was a wilderness that teemed with elephants, leopards and wild boar, and a much larger population of snakes and crocodiles than today’s.

The villagers knew the man, not as Captain Harold E. Musson, but by the name and title given him when ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1950 — Nanavira (pronounced ‘Nyarnaveera’) Thera (Elder). The son of a wealthy career army officer, Harold was born in 1920 and educated at English boarding schools before studying Italian and French at Cambridge. On leaving university, he joined up and was assigned to the Intelligence Corps, serving in Algeria and Italy, where his linguistic skills were used in interrogating prisoners of war. His knowledge of Italian also enabled him to read, at the end of the war, a remarkable book on Buddhism that he was later to translate and that decisively affected his future — Julius Evola’s The Doctrine of Awakening.

In the immediate post-war years in London, Musson — who didn’t need to work for a living — oscillated between translating this book and, as he recalled, ‘an orgy of wine, women and song’, often in the company of a wartime colleague, Osbert ‘Bertie’ Moore. Disillusioned by their aimless, dissolute existence, and inspired by an article they’d read about a group of European Buddhist monks in Ceylon, the two friends abruptly left England in 1948 and joined this small community in the Island Hermitage, near Hikkaduwa, founded and still presided over by a former German violinist and composer, Nyanatiloka Thera.

During his years at the Hermitage, Nanavira learnt Pali, made a close study of the Buddha’s discourses, but also and more singularly extended his knowledge of European philosophy, focussing especially on existentialist authors, including Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. In 1955, however, he decided ‘to get away from books and practise what I am now preaching’, essentially through uninterrupted meditation or, as he preferred to call it, ‘mental concentration’, on the Buddha’s teachings.

During his years at the Hermitage, Nanavira learnt Pali, made a close study of the Buddha’s discourses, but also and more singularly extended his knowledge of …

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 09:54:03 +0800

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) was a celebrated Roman writer, public speaker and philosopher and is today seen (alongside Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) as one of the three greatest ancient Stoics.

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The Two Senecas

Seneca (4 BC–65 AD) is perhaps the most complex and confusing of the ancient Stoic philosophers. Not only were there two people of the same name, Seneca the Elder (the father of the philosopher, himself a writer and politician) and Seneca the Younger (the one we are talking about); but Seneca the Younger himself often seems to be a composite of a number of entirely different personalities.

Look at these two. The first one, on the left, is a picture of what Seneca (the Younger, the Stoic philosopher) might actually have looked like.

Left image by I, Calidius, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2456052

The second image, on the right, is sometimes thought to depict Seneca, but probably doesn’t. It is known as an image of “pseudo-Seneca.”

I’ve always thought that these two busts beautifully capture the different faces of Seneca. The second, good-looking, tortured one, as the image he might have had of himself: the troubled philosopher, suffering, but always keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the better life. The first one, a conservative and sometimes shifty old man, well-fed, comfortable in his privileged life: the man that others might have seen when they looked at him.

The two faces of the philosopher. They also show, I think, something else that is true for all writing and art: that we cannot judge the work by judging the creator’s life. Despite all the talk of authenticity nowadays, many great and enduring works of art, many of the greatest acts of charity and self-sacrifice, many political feats that crushed empires were performed by rather small-minded, mean-spirited, unwholesome men and women: people one wouldn’t like to meet socially.

What Does ‘Stoic’ Mean?

A ‘Stoic’ attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.

Seneca’s life

Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger was born 4 BC in Cordoba, in what today is Spain, but moved to Rome as a small child and grew up to be a model Roman citizen of his time. His father was already a famous writer and teacher of rhetoric and little Seneca grew up in this wealthy family, himself destined to later find his role among the aristocracy of Rome. When Seneca developed breathing difficulties (probably some form of asthma) he was sent across the Mediterranean to stay with an uncle who was then the Prefect of Egypt. The Senecas were not people to count pennies.

When Seneca returned to Rome after a few years, he immediately got …

What Is a Valid Argument?

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 09:59:44 +0800

In a valid argument, it is not possible that the conclusion is false when the premises are true. Or, in other words: In a valid argument, whenever the premises are true, the conclusion also has to be true.

This article is part of a series on Logic and Critical Thinking. Find all the articles in this series here.

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We use “valid” in many different ways in everyday life. We say things like “that’s a valid point,” or “his credit card number was not valid.” But in logic, “valid” has a very special meaning. Read on to learn how to use “valid” for arguments.

What does “valid” mean?

In a valid argument, it is not possible that the conclusion is false when the premises are true. Or, in other words: In a valid argument, whenever the premises are true, the conclusion also has to be true.

Easy enough. Every argument consists of a number of statements, called the premises, which together offer support for the belief that another statement, called the conclusion, is true. For example:

Premise 1: If I am hungry, I will go to the restaurant down the street.
Premise 2: I am hungry.
Conclusion: I will go to the restaurant down the street.

Here, the premises, taken together, support the belief that the conclusion is true.

In a valid argument, it is not possible that the conclusion is false when the premises are true.

It is important that in a valid argument the premises make it certain (not only likely) that the conclusion is true. In the example above, assuming that the premises are true, the conclusion must also be true. If the conclusion was not true, then at least one of the premises would also not be true.

An argument like that is called a deductive argument. On the other hand, if the premises only make it likely, but not certain, that the conclusion is true, then the argument is called an inductive argument. For example:

Premise 1: If I am hungry, I sometimes go to the restaurant down the street.
Premise 2: I am hungry.
Conclusion: I go to the restaurant down the street.

Here it is not certain that I will indeed go to that restaurant, because I do so only sometimes. So this time might be one of the times where I don’t go there. From this argument alone it is not possible to be sure about whether I will go to that restaurant or not.

Invalid and not-valid arguments

It is important to see that only deductive arguments can be valid. Do you see why? We said that:

In a valid argument, it is not possible that the conclusion is false when the premises are true.

And also that a deductive argument is one where the conclusion is certain; while an inductive argument is one where the conclusion is probable, but not certain.

Now, if we require that “it is not possible” that the conclusion is false when the premises are true, then necessarily we need valid arguments to be deductive, since only deductive arguments allow us to be certain …

Luis de Miranda on Esprit de Corps

Sat, 27 Nov 2021 17:41:39 +0800

Luis de Miranda lives in Sweden and is a philosophical practitioner, author of essays such as Being & Neonness (MIT Press), Ensemblance (Edinburgh University Press), and novels such as Who Killed the Poet? and Paridaiza (Snuggly Books). He is the founder of the Philosophical Health movement.

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DP: Welcome Luis! It’s wonderful to have you here again! In case some readers missed it, let me briefly mention that we had talked previously on this site in a detailed and fascinating interview about your background and your ideas, including your work on philosophical counselling and the Philosophical Health movement.

Today we’re here for another, very special reason. You recently published a book with Edinburgh University Press: “Ensemblance. The Transnational Genealogy of Esprit de Corps.” Looking at the title (and let’s ignore “Ensemblance” for a moment), you’re proving a “genealogy” of the term “esprit de corps” in this book. You write:

Despite a tendency to reduce the meaning of the phrase to team spirit and camaraderie, the … signifier is still active within a rich semantic field of meanings: ‘cooperation’, ‘joint ownership of projects in the workplace’, ‘togetherness in combat’, ‘common consciousness’, ‘common sense of purpose’, ‘sport’s greatest appeal’, ‘collective genius’, ‘patriotism’, ‘anti-cronyism’, ‘community spirit’, ‘nepotism’ …

… and a whole lot more. Now this may be so, but could you briefly explain to us the significance of this? Why should we care about the many meanings of the phrase “esprit de corps”?

When I started researching about esprit de corps, I had no idea how important the phrase was in the modern history of the West. Some people wondered why I was working on what seemed to them to be a niche topic. I confess my first reason was purely a philosophical fascination for the explosive combination of the two ideas in the same phrase, spirit and body in French.

When I started researching about esprit de corps, I had no idea how important the phrase was in the modern history of the West.

Now, just one year after I started working on esprit de corps, the then Brexit chief British politician David Davis wrote, just a few weeks before the historical vote, that England needed to rebuild a “national esprit de corps”. And again a bit later, Donald Trump started to use “esprit de corps” in his official speeches, both before and after his election.

In fact when we look at the last 300 years, a great deal of people who have made history or the history of ideas at least have been fascinated by the ambiguous meanings of esprit de corps, including philosophers or sociologists like Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Bourdieu. They cared and wondered and we should care and wonder because the phrase addresses one of the most important questions of modernity, which …

Mother Knows Best

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 17:41:39 +0800

I know it’s got to be done. Even so, I still feel bad about it. If it were up to me, we would cancel the whole thing. Fortunately, it’s not. It’s up to Mother, and Mother knows best.

It all started when we finally realised that climate change was real and that the consequences were going to be pretty bad. If we didn’t act right away and completely changed the way we lived, we would see more and more deadly heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, landslides, devastating storms and floods, and they would soon become much worse than they already were. Air pollution would rise to levels never seen before, making it difficult to breathe, and we would be hit by new diseases that would spread more easily. Large areas of the planet would turn into deserts and become inhabitable, resulting in mass migration, civil unrest and further bloodshed. Many would starve.

Scientists told us that this was definitely going to happen if we didn’t act and that we had to drastically cut fossil fuel emissions to stand any chance of preventing it. And although we had no good reason not to believe those predictions and warnings, governments found it hard to convince people to radically change their behaviour and to put up with policies that demanded considerable sacrifices from them. In theory we knew the situation was serious and what we had to do, but since it was likely going to affect mostly other people (those living in poorer countries and those succeeding us), we weren’t bothered all that much and largely ignored the problem. Attempts by various well-meaning parties to make people care enough to do what was needed failed repeatedly, until it finally became clear that we just couldn’t do it.

The problem, you see, was human nature, our atavistic stone age moral psychology that evolved many thousands of years ago when we still lived in small groups and didn’t have to worry about future generations or people living in other parts of the world. We had been mentally shaped by evolution for a world that no longer existed, a world in which all that mattered basically happened here and now. We were not made to deal with global problems because we weren’t made to take any serious interest in them. Yet since our very survival depended on it, we knew this had to change, meaning that we had to change, that we had to become something new, something that was better equipped to protect itself from ultimate harm. And because desperate times call for desperate measures, the governments of the most powerful nations joined forces and launched a comprehensive programme of moral bio-enhancement that used a clever combination of hormone treatments, electromodulation and genetic engineering to change people’s moral outlook, making us all more willing to do the right thing even when doing so required considerable personal sacrifice. Obviously, not everyone liked the idea of being morally upgraded in that way, but people were given no choice. There was simply too much at stake to allow anyone to opt …

Plato and the Ancient Politics of Wine (2)

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 09:21:27 +0800

This is the second part of a two-part article. Read the first part here.

Introduction

As argued in Part A of this exposition, Plato’s use of drunkenness, mainly in the Symposium but also in the Phaedrus, is a metaphor designed to defend Socrates’ philosophical inspiration and its civic benefits, drawing on Euripides’ Bacchae and on Solon’s political poetry.

On the one hand, Plato must have felt encouraged to use this daring metaphor by Euripides’ influential description of genuine Bacchic experience which, as he explicitly states, does not involve actual drunkenness (Bacch. 76-77).

On the other hand, correct sympotic behavior was a perfectly suitable comparison for a well-ordered city, able to instill the virtue of sōphrosynē to its citizens, a comparison systematically promoted in Solon’s elegies (poem 4.9-10).

Thus, Plato hoped that his audience would readily differentiate between the drunken antics of Alcibiades, graphically described in the Symposium (for example, 212d-213b; 213e-214d), and the intoxicating passion of the philosopher who enthuses his audiences in his obsessive search for the truth.

Plato underlines the metaphorical value of Socratic baccheia with a plethora of words that mean “like, resembling, similar to” (as in Symposium 215b1, 5-6, and 8; 216c8-10), clearly meant to enhance the effect of Socrates’ comparison with Dionysus’ worshippers while declaring its fictional nature. Socrates used the same technique in the Phaedrus where he admits that he described erotic mania (employed in its pederastic context) in a figurative manner, as a metaphor for philosophical ardour (Phaedrus 265b-c). Therefore, it makes sense for Plato to revisit the metaphor of drunkenness in the Laws, his last dialogue that debates the constitution of a new colony (Magnesia); Plato revises here the subjects of civic ethos and civic education, including the roles of philosophy and poetry in the ideal city, in his most mature phase.

Yet, in the Laws, Plato seems to undermine the metaphorical understanding of drunkenness as analyzed thus far by recommending to the citizens of Magnesia the so-called “Test of the Wine” which involves actual wine drinking. Furthermore, he rejects the Bacchic ecstasy of those “who imitate in their drunken state the so-called Nymphs and Pans and Silenoi and Satyrs” — a description which evokes Socrates’ comparison with the Silenoi and Marsyas in the Symposium, as “unsuitable for citizens” (815d2).

Thus, in what follows, I explore Plato’s references to the Test of the Wine to outline the various metaphors about wine and drunkenness employed by Plato in the Symposium and the Laws, aiming to reconcile their seemingly contradictory applications.

Virtue and the Test of the Wine

In the Laws (649d6-9), drinking too much is listed as one of the excesses associated with lack of self-control and emotional indulgence, while the spectacle of a drunken man who “is moved and moves everywhere, raging both in body and soul” (775c4-d3) is …

Stoic Control

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 04:07:43 +0000

At the core of the Stoic theory of happiness is our ability to control our thoughts. The wise man should try to exercise control over what they can control and not try to control what they cannot. Events in the outside world are not predictable or under our control, but they is always distinct from the thoughts that we create in response to these events. And our thoughts we can and must control in order to be happy. This is the essence of Stoic freedom.

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Three Stoic philosophers

One look at the three most prominent Stoic philosophers is enough to convince us that something quite remarkable is going on: Epictetus (55-135 AD) was born a slave. Seneca the Younger (4 BC-65 AD) was a celebrated philosopher and writer, and teacher to a crazy emperor of Rome. And Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD) was himself the Emperor of Rome for almost twenty years. But he was also a soldier, and he died in the forests of what is now Austria, fighting the Germanic tribes that threatened Rome.

One slave, one man of society and letters, one soldier emperor: and they all shared the same philosophy of life. They all were Stoics. What philosophy could appeal to such a diverse collection of people, informing the lives of slaves and emperors alike? And could it be that such a flexible philosophy might also help us make sense of our own lives today?

Being in control

Everything that happens to you is either in your control to change or not.

This is the first important insight of Stoicism. If you miss the bus, then you should realise that this was in your control: you could have got up earlier and then you wouldn’t have missed it. If you fail an exam, you could have learned more for it, and then you wouldn’t have failed. For things that are in your control, the way to become happier is to actually take control of them, do what is necessary to get them right.

Everything that happens to you is either in your control to change or not.

But what about things that are not in your control? You get a cold. You come to your office late because the bus (which you caught on time) broke down. You lose all your money in a financial crisis. Your boyfriend intends to leave you. How can you cope with events that are out of your control?

Of course, the first thing to do is to realise that you have no control. Trying to control what you cannot is surely going to make you miserable. You cannot force your boyfriend to love you. You cannot change the fact that you lost your money. You cannot change the weather. Even getting upset about such things is irrational and self-harming. There’s no point in that. So the first important skill for happiness is to be able to distinguish what you have control over, from what you don’t. Trying to control what you cannot is silly. Giving up control over what you can control is also giving up chances to more …

What Does ‘Stoic’ Mean?

Thu, 11 Nov 2021 18:15:51 +0800

Stoic philosophy has been around for over two thousand years and is still hugely influential today. But what does the word ‘Stoic’ actually mean? What exactly is a ‘Stoic person’ or a ‘Stoic attitude’ to life?

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What is Stoicism?

A Stoic attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues. Stoicism originated in ancient Greece and Rome and has recently gained in popularity. The main Stoic philosophers are Epictetus, Seneca the Younger and Marcus Aurelius.

Because of its age and enduring popularity, Stoicism comes in many different forms and has seen many changes over time. It has been argued that modern Stoicism often does not have much in common with the Stoic philosophy of the ancients. In this article, we will have a look at the main ideas of a Stoic approach to life.

A Stoic attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.

What was the Stoa?

The word ‘Stoic’ comes from the Greek word ‘Stoa,’ which means porch or hallway. Public buildings and temples in ancient Greece were often surrounded by columns that held up a roof and that went all around the building as you can see here:

The Stoa of Attalos. Source: Wikipedia.

The space under this extended roof, between and behind the row of columns, formed a kind of porch where citizens could sit, protected from sun and rain, and discuss business matters, the news of the day, or just idly watch the passers-by in the company of friends. These porches were also the places where teachers could meet with their students and where philosophers would find an audience for their theories.

The word ‘Stoic’ comes from the Greek word ‘Stoa,’ which means porch or hallway.

The Stoics took their name from one of these public spaces: the lavishly painted “varied Stoa” (stoa poikile in Greek). The Stoa was used to display items looted in wars, but also big murals depicting famous battles and mythological or literary scenes. Here, the Stoics’ founder, Zeno of Citium, would meet his followers.

‘Stoic’ therefore just means ‘the philosophers who met in the Stoa.’ It was common in Ancient Athens to name philosophy schools after their meeting places: Plato taught in the Academy, Aristotle could be found at the Lyceum, and Epicurus met his followers in ‘The Garden.’

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Main Stoic ideas and principles

Stoic philosophy was very rich and varied, ranging from ethics to what we would today call the natural sciences, including physics and astronomy. But when we today talk of the Stoics, we usually mean their philosophy of life.

Like many other ancient Greek philosophies, the Stoics thought that the proper understanding and …

Plato and the Ancient Politics of Wine

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 21:21:27 +0800

Introduction

In this piece I discuss Plato’s description of Socrates’ philosophical inspiration as “drunkenness” and/or Dionysian mania; Plato’s metaphor draws on earlier Greek poetry, including Euripides and his popular play The Bacchants, where Dionysus is praised as the inventor of “liquid drink of the grape” (line 279).

Importantly, Plato also draws on Solon, the famous lawgiver and poet of archaic Athens, who discussed extensively the drinking etiquette of ancient communities as a reflection of their civic character. Yet, the application of this metaphor on Socrates and his philosophical genius was fraught with difficulties since Socrates, known for conversing with the so-called daimonion, the inner voice or sign that guided him, and frequently undergoing trances in public, could be easily misunderstood as a common drunkard or even a madman — especially since wine abuse was also believed to cause madness.

In this piece I discuss Plato’s description of Socrates’ philosophical inspiration as “drunkenness” and/or Dionysian mania.

To avoid the risk of contributing to the misperceptions of the Athenians about Socrates, Plato insisted that Socratic ecstasy is utterly sober (even though it can involve wine-drinking and may occur in a sympotic context). Drunkenness is a culturally embedded comparison that allowed Plato to articulate the mind-altering abilities of philosophy while offering a concrete example of how to prepare ourselves for that kind of philosophical revelation. Furthermore, Plato defends the valuable contribution of “drunken” or inspired philosophers and their insights to the city.

Socrates in the Entourage of Dionysus

In the Symposium, a dialogue mostly known for Socrates’ famous exchange with Diotima, a priestess from Mantineia, who instructs him in the doctrine of Eros, Plato also offers a very provocative representation of Socrates’ philosophical reverie which is often overlooked as merely amusing.

Socrates, we are told, looks like the Satyrs (215b1 and 221d6-e1), the ever-drunk, lusty followers of Dionysus, typically portrayed in ancient art as bald, with a snub nose, thick lips and big, bulging eyes. This resemblance, also confirmed by Xenophon (in his own Symposium), is unanimously projected on ancient representations of Socrates. Plato also speaks of Socrates’ similarity to Marsyas (215b5-6), the legendary satyr from Phrygia who invented the flute and served in the entourage of Dionysus as well. Like Marsyas enthused his audiences with his otherworldly music, leading them to ecstasy, so Socrates makes those who listen to his speeches shudder and weep and become frantic (215e1-2 and 218b).

Plato emphatically states that Socrates’ audiences experience trances just like those who dance in the Corybantic rites. Socrates’ ability as a drinker is also emphasized in two other places in the dialogue: when at the start of the gathering, Pausanias the sophist seeks everyone’s consent to adopt a moderate way of drinking …

Is Lying Ethical?

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 19:58:17 +0800

Lying is generally perceived as unethical behaviour. Depending on the moral theory used, lying in special circumstances (for example, “white” lies or lies that benefit others or avert harm) might be morally justifiable. Other lies, as lying about one’s age in order to get access to age-restricted goods, are most often immoral.

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What is lying?

A definition of lying:

Lying means telling another person something the we believe to be false, with the intention of making the other person believe that this statement is true.

According to this definition:

There must be another person to which one is telling the lie;
The speaker must believe that they are saying something that is not true;
There must be an intention to deceive the other person.

These are important considerations, because, for example, if the speaker says something that is not true, but they do believe it to be true, then they are not telling a lie. Your friend who thinks that he has been visited by aliens in his sleep last week is not lying to you, if he really believes that the aliens came for him.

A little more tricky is the last requirement: The liar must have the intention of making the other person believe that the statement is true.

Is a movie about James Bond a lie? Although it depicts events that never happened and the people who made it also knew very well that 007 is fictional, we would not say that the filmmakers are lying to us. This is because we all know that this is a fictional story. The filmmakers do not try to sell it as a documentary of real events. They intend to entertain the audience, not to deceive them into believing that James Bond exists.

On the other hand, a “documentary” about aliens that tries to convince the viewer of their existence by faking photographs and dressing up children in aluminium foil does constitute a deception. The aim of the filmmakers in this case is to deceive the viewer.

Lying means telling another person something the we believe to be false, with the intention of making the other person believe that this statement is true.

Lying and deception

Deception is a wider concept than lying.

To deceive means to cause someone to believe something that the deceiver believes to be false.

Deception, as opposed to lying, is not restricted to statements. I can deceive someone by planting fake evidence, for example. Or I can deceive by doing nothing. A real estate agent who knows that the government is planning to build a highway close to a house and does not tell the buyer about it, is deceiving the buyer without actually doing anything.

To deceive means to cause someone to believe something that the deceiver believes to be false.

When is lying permissible?

Lying and deception may sometimes be morally permissible. Different moral theories have different opinions on this.

Utilitarianism would say that an action is …

If only I hadn’t done that...

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 14:35:51 +0800

Historians and novelists love asking “What would have happened if…?”

Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle imagines the consequences of Germany and Japan winning World War II, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America imagines what would have happened if Charles Lindberg had been elected president. These are counterfactual histories — they run counter to the facts. They are things that could have happened, but didn’t.

We often use counterfactual reasoning in our daily lives, in situations that are less dramatic than those we find in novels. For example, suppose that I got drunk last night and argued with my colleagues. Today, I regret the argument and wish that I had acted differently — counterfactually. The counterfactual change I would make is not drinking. Not drinking generates a counterfactual scenario in which I didn’t have an argument, and in which I am not suffering regret today.

Historians like to consider more complicated counterfactuals. They ask things like: What would have happened if Alexander had conquered Rome, or Britain had stood up to Hitler in 1938? As with my drinking example, these sorts of questions are taken to reveal what we should have done but didn’t.

The counterfactual confrontation of Hitler in 1938 is often followed by Hitler backing down and the avoidance of World War II. At the Munich conference in 1938, Czechoslovakia was asked by the UK and France to cede part of its territory to Germany. At the time, the UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought that he had averted military conflict, and secured peace in Europe. Today, it is usually seen as an unsuccessful act of appeasement. The lesson history appears to teach us is that another ‘Munich’ must, and can, be avoided. We should stand up to aggressive regimes. We often draw similar conclusions about our own lives: If only I hadn’t got drunk, I wouldn’t have got into an argument. It’s easy to imagine a different course branching off from a decision we made differently. However, this sort of thinking is misleading.

The first reason we are misled is that a counterfactual change sounds like it is easy to make. It would have been easy for me not to have drunk last night, right? However, historians recognise that we can’t just have done things differently. We (usually) make decisions in ways that seem reasonable to us at the time, so it turns out that a lot of things would have had to have been different for us to have made decisions differently.

The first reason we are misled is that a counterfactual change sounds like it is easy to make.

Continuing with the Munich example, Chamberlain was not simply deciding whether to stand up to Hitler, or not. He knew that the UK was unprepared for war in 1938, which limited his options. The memory of World War I was also still fresh, so he was not alone in wanting to avoid war at all costs. Chamberlain couldn’t just have acted differently; the environment in which he was operating and …

Solitude and Contentment

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 16:24:26 +0800

Hermits have always lived apart from the societies of their times. But do they have the secret key to happiness? What can hermits teach us about achieving happiness in our own lives?

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In the past two months, we visited modern hermits and ancient Chinese classics, read about Going Slow and about Homelessness and Heimat and the Rhetoric of Refuge. There are still so many topics we haven’t touched, so I might keep putting up articles on hermits onto these pages. If you are interested, subscribe so you don’t miss any post!

Now the time has come to wrap all this up. What was it good for? Is there anything hermits can teach us normal people of today about how to have happier and more fulfilled lives?

Hermits, alienation and empowerment

Interestingly, only a fraction of hermits in history and present are religious hermits. There certainly is a number of Christian hermits (and this was a big movement in the times of the Desert Fathers), and today we still have Daoist hermits in the Zhongnan Mountains in China and elsewhere (more on those in a future article). But many hermits today are secular hermits. People who leave our hectic, capitalist world in order to seek a quieter, more meaningful life, without the pressures, expectations and prescriptions of organised society.

Interestingly, only a fraction of hermits in history and present are religious hermits.

It is undeniable that every human society needs the individual to conform to some common understanding of what the limits of their freedom are. We trade freedom for safety, if we are lucky. By submitting to society, by giving up a part of our freedoms, we gain the support and the help of society in terms of financial security, healthcare, childcare, infrastructure, ease of life, and many other things.

This trade-off is a continuum: The hermit is at the one end, free like a wild animal but relying entirely on him- or herself for survival; the corporate employee on a lifelong post is at the other, having traded freedom for safety and a retirement scheme.

Much less obvious are other ways how we trade away our freedom. Many philosophers, from Epicurus and Bertrand Russell to Erich Fromm and Richard Taylor (whom we have all discussed previously in these pages) emphasise how we lose our freedom by accepting society’s values and ideals. By blindly embracing the desires that society prescribes, we let others take control of our lives. Epicurus speaks of “vain desires,” Erich Fromm of the failed promise of 20th century capitalism, and Richard Taylor even says that a person who only follows the lead of others loses a crucial part of their humanity and becomes a non-person.

Richard Taylor on the Creative Life

Richard Taylor (1919–2003) thought that it’s creativity that makes us feel happy …

Three Modern Hermits

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 09:00:16 +0800

Three hermits, three lives, three conceptions of solitude: Agafia Lykova lived a life of hardship away from civilisation in the Siberian taiga. Mauro Morandi, caretaker of Budelli island near Sardinia, found paradise closer to home than he expected. And Rachel Denton had been seeking loneliness all her life, only to find happiness in a makeshift Lincolnshire hermitage. What unites these three hermits? What can we learn from their lives? Read on to find out!

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We citizens of affluent societies, living safely and shielded inside our families, our workplaces, our ever repeating daily routines, often lose the sense of how wide the stage is upon which a human life can be played out, and what an adventurous and magical place our Earth really is.

In the past two months, we have been visiting hermit lives, and we have met many different kinds of hermits: young US Zen practitioner Jane Dobisz, voluntary castaway Tom Neale in his Pacific island paradise, and the sage who wrote the Chinese classic Dao De Jing right before disappearing into the clouds on the back of an ox.

Today, we will look at three more, who could not have been more different from each other; and yet, there is a kind of longing, a love for solitude, that deep down unites these three lives and connects them to the millennia-old hermit dream. Sometimes, the life of hermits seems to take place somewhere very far away, as in the case of Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova. At other times, one feels that just a tiny shift in circumstances, an accidental choice that might have played out in a slightly different way, is all that would be needed to gently push our lives out of their rut and into the footsteps of someone like Mauro Morandi, caretaker of his own little island off the coast of Sardinia.

Robert Rodriguez is the author of The Book of Hermits and founder and editor of the website Hermitary. In this interview, he talks to us about the history of eremitism and the nature of hermit life.

The Lykov family

In the summer of 1978, a Russian helicopter pilot spotted a cabin in a remote and inaccessible part of the Siberian taiga. 1000 metres (3400 ft) up a mountain, 240 km (150 miles) away from any human settlement, a little hut stood surrounded by cultivated fields. A group of geologists, who were doing research in the area, went down to meet the inhabitants of the hut.

In the summer of 1978, a Russian helicopter pilot spotted a cabin in a remote and inaccessible part of the Siberian taiga.

It turned out that the family had fled their home village of Lykovo, a place with now 87 inhabitants and one street, in 1936, after one of their members was killed by Soviet soldiers. They Lykovs were Old Believers, a sect of the Orthodox church …

Roman Yampolskiy on the dangers of AI

Fri, 22 Oct 2021 18:41:39 +0800

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy is a Tenured Associate Professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville. He is the founding and current director of the Cyber Security Lab and an author of many books including Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach. His research has been cited by 1000+ scientists and profiled in popular magazines both American and foreign, hundreds of websites, on radio and TV. He has been an invited speaker at 100+ events including Swedish National Academy of Science, Supreme Court of Korea, Princeton University and many others.

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DP: Welcome, Professor Yampolskiy, welcome Roman! I’m very happy and honoured to have you here for this interview. Let us begin with you telling us a little about who you are and what your interests are in philosophical research. What are you currently working on?

Sure! I self-identify as a computer scientist; an engineer. I work at the University of Louisville. I’m a professor and I do research on AI safety. A lot of what I do ends up looking like philosophy, but, you know, we all get PhD’s and we’re “doctors of philosophy,” so a computer scientist is a kind of applied philosopher; a philosopher who can try his ideas out. He can actually implement them and see if they work.

DP: So what is your philosophical background then? Are you also professionally a philosopher?

Not in any formal way. I think I took an Introduction to Philosophy once and it was mostly about Marx’s Capital or something like that. So I had to teach myself most of it.

DP: I also noticed that you have written lots of articles; some you wrote together with many different collaborators, some also on your own, and you are also writing books and you are almost continuously on Twitter… Since some early career philosophers might be watching or reading this interview, I was wondering if you have any advice for them on how to do this. How do you organise your time? How can you manage to be this very prolific philosopher and do all these other things on the side?

So it may not work for early career philosophers… I’m ten years on the job, so I have the power of saying no to almost everything I don’t care about. It’s much harder when you are just starting out. You have to say “yes, I love to teach another course! And, yes, your meeting sounds fascinating!” At this point, I don’t have to do that so I think that’s the main difference. I just look at the long-term impact of what is being offered in terms of time taken and what it’s going to do for me. Will I care about it five years later? And if the answer is “absolutely not,” why would I do it?

DP: So this is the secret? It’s just saying no to everything that is not research and not publishing?

And it’s very hard, because you want …

Retributivism and Uncertainty

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 13:55:45 +0800

Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Retributivism is the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others.

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Why do we have a criminal justice system? What could possibly justify the state punishing its citizens? Philosophers, scholars of law, politicians and others have proposed different justifications, one of them being retributivism: the view that we ought to give offenders the suffering that they deserve for harming others. However, intentionally harming other people and making them suffer is serious business. If we are to do this in the name of what’s right and good, we better be very certain that what we do really is right and good. The so-called Epistemic Argument Against Retributivism calls this certainty into question.

Different criminal justice theories

In the criminal justice ethics literature, a large number of theories of justification have been proposed. It’s impossible to do full justice (pun intended) to this literature in a blog post, but below I list some well-known and influential ideas.

Deterrence. When the criminal has paid their fines or gotten out of prison, they won’t dare do what they did again from fear of consequences. Other people will look at what happens to criminals and be deterred from committing crimes in the first place.
Rehabilitation. Here too, the criminal justice system is considered justified insofar as it manages to bring down crime rates. But instead of focusing on scaring people away from crime, rehabilitative approaches focus on giving prisoners the tools to stay away from crime when they get out again. Inside prison, they have access to therapy, education, real job training, and so on.
Expressivism: By punishing people who commit certain acts, the state expresses its judgment that these acts are wrong and must not be done: it sends a message of moral values to its citizens.
Retributivism: When people commit bad acts, they deserve to have something bad happen to them in return. The criminal justice system’s job is to deal out just deserts.
Restorative justice. This is sometimes conceived of as a version of criminal justice, sometimes as an alternative to it. The main idea is that crime tears a community apart, and real justice restores community again. Restorative justice proponents often argue for having criminals meet with their victims (in case of economic crime, someone who, e.g., cheated on his taxes, might be made to confront the realities of public health care and how they struggle with scant resources). There’s an emphasis on first making the criminal ashamed of themselves and how they have let their community/family/colleagues/others in their life down, and then offer them a path for reintegration, often through community service somehow connected to the crime. …

Beauty discrimination

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss beauty in online media and whether it is discriminatory to prefer beautiful actors and presenters in video material.

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Beauty discrimination

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss beauty in online media and whether it is discriminatory to prefer beautiful actors and presenters in video material. Are we doing something morally bad when we watch Youtubers we find attractive? Should attractiveness have no influence on our viewing habits? Or are we free to watch whom we like? Listen to find out!

Please note that this episode begins with a different topic, “online prostitution,” but we get stuck on the beauty topic before we ever get to prostitution. So the online sex topic is postponed to next time and don’t get confused when I mention it in the beginning :)

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

In this podcast, with new episodes to come out every Tuesday, we talk about philosophically relevant issues in the news, discuss philosophy with guests who do interesting things beyond the classic topics of university philosophy, and generally try to shed a bit of light on issues that are too much talked about and too little understood.

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Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

The ethics of OnlyFans.

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— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

The Wisdom of the Dao

Sat, 09 Oct 2021 10:39:22 +0800

The Dao De Jing, although it might seem cryptic at first, is not far removed in many of its messages from other philosophies of its time. The need to act according to nature, the understanding of virtue as a skill and the Daoist praise of humility are reminiscent of similar passages in the works of Stoics, Epicureans and Aristotelians. In this article, we walk quickly through the main themes of the Dao De Jing.

This article is part of a series on Daoism and Hermits.

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Today we want to talk a bit more about that short but seemingly immortal book, the Dao De Jing. Since it was first written, it seems that every society, every generation and every reader has been able to find something of great value in it, even if it seems impossible to agree on what exactly the valuable insights are. The Dao De Jing often seems rather like a funhouse mirror or a Pythian oracle, in which every visitor can find a distorted version of what they are looking for.

This is good for us, because it allows us to have fun creating our own exegesis, and to utilise its wisdom for our everyday lives in the 21st century: a purpose that surely the book’s author did not have in mind when he dictated its 81 paragraphs to the toll collector on that remote Chinese mountain pass over two millennia ago. If nobody really knows what the book’s point is, then our interpretation is as good as anyone else’s.

And so here we go.

The common wisdom of mankind

There’s a remarkable book by polymath, philosopher, celebrated writer and psychonaut Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), The Perennial Philosophy, in which he attempts to show that all the world’s religions have a lot more in common than their differences seem to suggest. I always found that project fascinating. All too often, we are blinded by the small differences between our creeds. Whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or the Father and the Son seems to be a somewhat minor point, but it has been behind a division of Europe into East and West that has lasted for 1000 years and has shaped the history of mankind up until the present. And this is not even mentioning the only slightly bigger differences between Christianity and Islam or Islam and Judaism, which have been motivating wars, terrorism and mass murders for centuries.

Aldous Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy” is a sweeping overview of the world’s religious mystical traditions, emphasising the ideas that are common to humanity’s approach to the divine. It is an easy-to-read and immensely fascinating book.

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In order to see how this could work, you just need to visit Malta. A little island-state south of Italy, Malta has always been fiercely Catholic, but its language, coming from Arab Sicily in the 1400s, is now an Arabic …

Is Prostitution Morally Right?

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of prostitution, from issues of public health to exploitation and jobs that take over our bodies.

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The ethics of prostitution

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of prostitution, from issues of public health to exploitation and jobs that take over our bodies. Should we regulate sex work and how should we do it? Is the enforced sexual abstinence of priests comparable as a violation of sexual freedom to the job of a sex worker? Listen to find out!

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Go to the Accented Philosophy Podcast webpage!

Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Beauty discrimination.

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Gardens of Refuge

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:55:45 +0800

Some gardens offer ‘a kind of haven, if not a kind of heaven’. Beyond the garden wall, one finds the sprawling world of artificiality, competitiveness, and violence; within those walls, there is calm, natural vitality, and goodness.

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According to one historian, the garden, once ‘a place for man to escape from the threats of nature’, later became a ‘refuge from men’. Initially, gardens were made for practical purposes, like growing fruits and vegetables. Over time, though, they took on new functions. Some proclaim the dominion of humans over nature; others celebrate specific individuals. Other gardens are less triumphal, being places for gentle exercise, pleasure, engaging with nature, and convivial entertainment. Across many of the world’s cultures, gardens became part of discourses about our relationship to nature, beauty, and the good life.

Across many of the world’s cultures, gardens became part of discourses about our relationship to nature, beauty, and the good life.

The idea of gardens as arenas for creative agency or convivial reverie will be familiar to modern gardeners, as will the uses of gardens as symbols of human dominion or personal glory. It’s also still common to talk of gardens as ‘sanctuaries’ or ‘refuges’. One might ‘escape’ into the garden for an hour to cool off after a frustrating day at the office or seek sanctuary from the demanding hubbub of the world by retreating to the sheltered peace of a shaded patio.

Photo by Doug Kelley on Unsplash

In some cultures, however, the idea of gardens as refuges took on a deeper significance. Robert Pogue Harrison opens his erudite book on gardens by calling them a ‘sanctuary’ from the ‘rage, death, and endless suffering’ of human history. Some gardens offer ‘a kind of haven, if not a kind of heaven’. Beyond the garden wall, one finds the sprawling world of artificiality, competitiveness, and violence; within those walls, there is calm, natural vitality, and goodness. Talk of refuge and sanctuary here takes on an extended, moralised sense – a conviction that the real dangers from which we need protecting are not predators and storms, but the psychological, moral, and aesthetic ills of human life. In modern garden literature, the same examples recur – the stress, pollution, time-pressures, and busyness of modern life. Accompanying such claims are, however, references to the moral failings of the human world.

Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Some gardens offer ‘a kind of haven, if not a kind of heaven’. Beyond the garden wall, one finds the sprawling world of artificiality, competitiveness, and violence; within those walls, there is calm, natural vitality, and goodness. (Ian James Kidd)

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Robert Rodriguez on Hermits

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 15:34:16 +0800

Robert Rodriguez is the author of The Book of Hermits: A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present (Hermitary Press, 2021). He is the founder and editor of the website Hermitary (hermitary.com). You can find a review of the book here on Daily Philosophy. In this interview, he talks to us about the history of eremitism and the nature of hermit life.

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DP: Welcome to Daily Philosophy! I am very happy to have you here, because I’ve been a devoted reader and fan of your Hermitary website for many years. Now, before we go into the details of hermit life, I’d like to get to know the person behind the Hermitary a little bit better. Would you mind telling us a bit about yourself? Where do you come from and what is your professional background?

Thank you! Thanks for your kind words. The Hermitary website is entirely my effort, since its inception in 2002. From the outset I used a pseudonym, and only use my real name now that I am launching a book, The Book of Hermits. I was born in the United States. My ancestry is partly Caribbean (Puerto Rico and Cuba) and partly Spain (specifically Asturias). I pursued history and philosophy at university and became a librarian in universities and colleges for some forty years until retiring. I identify with the Spanish writer Azorín’s self-description of being a pequeño filósofo, a minor, or insignificant, philosopher.

DP: Have you ever considered taking up a hermit’s life yourself? Or have you had any experience with any facets of hermit life? Is there any biographical root to your fascination with hermits?

My wife and I married nearly fifty years ago. As the poet Rilke said, “Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.” I also like the story of the ancient Chinese couple Meng Guang and Li Hong, who reclused to the mountains together. Meng Guang was an exemplary woman who prodded her husband to reclusion, and the Tang poet Po Chū-i praised his own wife as “my Meng Guang.” We live in a tiny house among mountains and forests in Vermont. We have two adult sons.

The psychologist Jung first identified introversion and extraversion and described psychological types in great detail. The interior life — which draws a person to the hermit life — is a complex but definite influence on me, fed by intellectual sources. As an adolescent, already something of a solitary, I suffered a brain tumor and surgery that resulted in a year out of school that convinced me to pursue a life of learning and reflection. I suppose my hermit interests began there, too.

DP: It seems to me that there’s something contradictory in publicly promoting hermeticism. One would imagine that hermits would prefer to stay out of the light of public attention. Yet here you are, making a website about them and writing a book about hermits. What was it that initially put you on the path to …

Are Some Countries Objectively Better?

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy finish their discussion of moral relativism. If we don’t want to be relativists, what ways are there to know whether one country or system is better than another?

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Are come countries objectively better than others?

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy finish their discussion of moral relativism. If we don’t want to be relativists, what ways are there to know whether one country or system is better than another?

Join us for your weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

Brought to you by https://daily-philosophy.com.

In this podcast, with new episodes to come out every Tuesday (mostly), we talk about philosophically relevant issues in the news, discuss philosophy with guests who do interesting things beyond the classic topics of university philosophy, and generally try to shed a bit of light on issues that are too much talked about and too little understood.

Go to the Accented Philosophy Podcast webpage!

Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

The ethics of sex work.

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Robert Rodriguez: The Book of Hermits

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 19:06:20 +0800

Robert Rodriguez’ “The Book of Hermits” is a work of impressive scholarship, covering the global history and lore of eremitism from antiquity to the present. Read an interview with the author here.

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The Hermitary

I have known the work of Robert Rodriguez for many years. Long before Daily Philosophy existed, there was already hermitary.com, Robert’s site that celebrated hermit lifestyle and hermit lore.

It was founded in 2002, almost twenty years ago now, and has always been the one resource to which I returned again and again when I was looking up a fact about anything that had to do with hermit life — or simply for inspiration. The Hermitary offered, and still offers, a wealth of articles on individual hermits, on the history of eremitic movements and religions, and on art, books and movies about hermits.

So I was thrilled to hear that Robert Rodriguez had finally put all his knowledge and his research of many decades into a book about hermits, called, fittingly, “The Book of Hermits” (374 pages; available from October 1, 2021 at Amazon and other booksellers, both as print and ebook).

Hermits and Happiness

Hermits, from the Greek “eremites,” (=men of the desert), are found in all cultures and at all times. In this article, we look at the phenomenon of hermit life as a whole, before we go into more detail in future posts in this series.

The Book of Hermits

The Book of Hermits is a work of impressive scholarship, and one can feel the author’s enthusiasm and affection for eremitism in every sentence of this book. It attempts to cover the entire world history of hermit lifestyles, and it largely succeeds, which is a remarkable feat. If there is one problem with the book, it is that the sections often feel just a little bit short, more like a detailed encyclopedia than an immersive tale.

Rodriguez covers an immense amount of ground. He begins with eremitism in Western antiquity, covering the history of hermits from Diogenes of Sinope and the Stoic and Epicurean movements all the way to the Desert Fathers. This is a history of around 700 years, and even with the focus on hermits and hermit lifestyles, it still seems too much to cover in only fifteen pages of the book. Make no mistake: these are wondrous pages, written from a position of deep knowledge about the subject and giving a wealth of information on the topic. Still, one wishes that the book was just a little bit longer, to give these stories more space to breathe.

The Book of Hermits is a work of impressive scholarship, and one can feel the author’s enthusiasm and affection for eremitism in every sentence of this book.

One of my favourite discussions is in Chapter 10, where Rodriguez discusses hermits in 20th century Western literature. As I was reading through …

Dao De Jing: A Hermit’s Manual

Sat, 25 Sep 2021 12:35:08 +0800

The Dao De Jing, one of the main books of Daoism, has always appealed to hermits. In this article, we look at it through a hermit’s eyes and try to see why it has fascinated anchorites and recluses for more than two thousand years.

This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here. Find all articles about hermits here.

The first part of this series on Daoism is here.

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It is an impossible task to try and discuss the Dao De Jing in full within the length of one article, although the work itself is quite short. By the way, you may know it by a different transliteration, for example as Tao Te King; or by the name of its alleged author: Lao Tse, Lao Tzu, or Laozi. It’s always the same book, but over the centuries, different systems have been used to render Chinese characters in Western languages, and so we end up with all these variations in the English spelling, which really make no difference at all.

The main problem with the Dao De Jing, the “classic of the Way and the virtue” is that it is written in a highly ambiguous way: a sequence of 81 short paragraphs that resemble aphorisms and that can often be read and translated in wildly different ways. Even in the Chinese tradition, the book has sometimes been read as being close to Confucianism, and sometimes as being opposed to it. Sometimes as a religious text, and sometimes as a practical instruction book. It has inspired alchemists to search for eternal life (with the almost invariable result that they poisoned themselves, shortening rather than lengthening their natural life spans). It has inspired martial artists, Western writers and philosophers, and even Hollywood movies (much of the Force lore in Star Wars can be read as a variant of Daoist beliefs and practices). And it keeps inspiring, over thousands of years, hermits who leave society in order to live in the solitude of the remote mountains of China.

The Dao De Jing has inspired martial artists, Western writers and philosophers, and even Hollywood movies (much of the Force lore in Star Wars can be read as a variant of Daoist beliefs and practices).

“The Daodejing often functions like a Rorschach test, in which readers find what they want to find,” writes Bryan van Norden, one of the best known Western teachers of Chinese philosophy, in his Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy (p.124).

Just a quick Google search reveals that intellectuals as diverse as fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin, literary arch-satyr Henry Miller and soft-core sage Alan Watts have all written on the ideas of the Dao De Jing. Internet uber-professor Jordan Peterson (if you’re reading these posts for more than two weeks, you’ll probably be able to guess what I think of him), talks about it in an online …

Andrei Simionescu-Panait on Elegance

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 15:34:16 +0800

In this interview, Dr Simionescu-Panait talks about his research on the phenomenology of elegance, about ‘Socratic’ approaches to philosophical counseling and about his new book on elegance: “The Reconciled Body.”

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DP: Dr Simionescu-Panait, welcome! It’s great to have you here for an interview on your new book, “The Reconciled Body,” which deals with the phenomenology of elegance. Before we go into the details of what this means, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Who are you, where do you come from, and how has your career brought you to this question of the philosophy of elegance?

I’m still living in the city I was born in, which is Bucharest, Romania. I travel now and then, which is something I enjoy, but in contrast to many migrating academics, I stay and watch the same city slowly changing. It’s a bit like watching the weather change, an exercise in focus and patience.

I stumbled upon philosophy when asking myself what I wanted to do with my life. I had a good background in mathematics because of my father, who was an academic and mathematician, teaching at the University of Bucharest. Yet I was drawn to the arts. I can say I’ve tried most of them, except dancing. Music is what I love the most. When I was about 14, I wanted to play the songs I loved on my own, so I took up guitar. I had a four-year training period in classical guitar before switching to electric guitar. Playing is a form of getting in tune with alterity, anticipating, and harmonizing with the other. What I learned then later facilitated the listening competencies I needed in my job as a philosophical counselor.

Being reasonably good at hard sciences but wanting to pursue a more humanistic career brought me to philosophy. At that time, I told myself I am going to study philosophy to better understand this ambivalence of mine. But then, I started to enjoy philosophy on its own, especially its capacity to make one understand the subtleties of relating to a thinking other. Up to this day, I do not enjoy purely formal philosophical affairs. Nor do I promote a kind of “philosophy for the masses” approach, screaming “applied philosophy,” as in “useful philosophy.” Reflection is an intimate but partially abstract experience that can be shared. It is a customized experience, not unique but fairly individualized. I naturally arrived at Husserlian phenomenology because of its focus on experience. Despite producing difficult texts, there is something personal yet lucid, even generous in Husserl’s texts, a trait I also find in another philosopher who taught me how to philosophize: Aristotle. You can see how both do their best to explain their thinking and the shifts it implies, without trying to embezzle the reader, to look smart, or to be intellectually intimidating.

Reflection is an intimate but partially abstract experience that can be shared. …

Moral Relativism: What is a good country?

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss moral relativism and whether we can say that one society is “better” than another. Is the US better than North Korea? In what way? Is there an objective way to judge the “goodness” of a society?

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Moral relativism: What is a good country?

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Go to the Accented Philosophy Podcast webpage!

Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Moral relativism: How to judge other societies

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Dao De Jing

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 12:35:08 +0800

The Dao De Jing, literally “The Classic of the Way and the Virtue,” is traditionally attributed to an author known only as Lao Zi, which means “Old Master.” It’s not known when exactly he lived (if at all), and likely the book has been compiled over time from different sources, rather than having been written by a single author. Read on to find out more about this fascinating classic of Eastern thought.

This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here. Find all articles about hermits here.

The next part of this series on Daoism is here.

If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!

The three Asian philosophies

There are three great, well-known Asian traditions of thought: Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism. All three have influenced each other over the centuries and all three cross occasionally the borders between philosophy and religion. Buddhism is primarily perceived as a religion, Daoism has been seen as both, and Confucianism is mainly a philosophy of ethics, society and state, but has occasionally also been practised in quasi-religious ways (in Malaysia, for example, schoolchildren would pray to Confucius before they begin their schooling).

Of the three, Daoism has the greatest variety of beliefs and practices that range from ethical cultivation to dietary prescriptions and breathing exercises. Daoists are, in a sense, the most anarchic of the three groups. Where Confucians believe in the value of a well-ordered society, Daoists are suspicious of human attempts to impose order and would strive to gain inspiration from the freedom and inherent meaningfulness of natural processes. The best-known Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, is often explicitly anti-intellectual:

(3) Not to value and employ men of superior ability is the way to keep the people from rivalry among themselves; not to prize articles which are difficult to procure is the way to keep them from becoming thieves; not to show them what is likely to excite their desires is the way to keep their minds from disorder. Therefore the sage, in the exercise of his government, empties their minds, fills their bellies, weakens their wills, and strengthens their bones. He constantly (tries to) keep them without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, to keep them from presuming to act (on it). When there is this abstinence from action, good order is universal. … (15) The skilful masters (of the Dao) in old times, with a subtle and exquisite penetration, comprehended its mysteries, and were deep (also) so as to elude men’s knowledge. As they were thus beyond men’s knowledge (…) (Transl. James Legge)

Confucius on Loyalty and Betrayal

For …

Moral Relativism

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss moral relativism: the idea that other cultures may have their own values and moral rules that are different from ours. Do we have to respect them even if we disagree with them, or can we demand that all humans share some basic, common values?

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Moral relativism: Can we disagree about what’s right?

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Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Moral relativism: How bad is North Korea as a state?

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— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Going Slow

Sat, 11 Sep 2021 13:55:45 +0800

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A rhetoric of slowness and speed has been used by philosophers since the ancient periods to characterise and assess different ways of life. Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist discourses exploit associations, literal and figurative, between slower styles of life and virtue, on the one hand, and hastier styles of life and vice, on the other. Kongzi (Confucius) praised the virtue of ‘timeliness’, which manifests in an ability to ‘advance when it is appropriate to advance and remain still when it is appropriate to remain still’. A timely person acts and speaks in thoughtful, considerate, considered ways, guided by the ‘rituals’ central to Confucian life.

Early Daoists texts, too, use speed and slowness as moral metaphors. Zhuangzi laments the ‘sadness’ of harried, overcommitted people whose lives are like ‘a horse galloping by, unstoppable’, always active, ‘exhausted to the point of collapse’. The unknown authors of the Daodejing diagnose this hastiness as a sign one has been swept away by drives to be ‘busy’ — a turbulent condition all-too-obvious in agitated Confucians, ‘regulated and confined by [their] own schemes’. Racing headlong through life is a sign we have ‘lost the Way’. The more one takes on, the faster one has to go, darting about, frantic to satisfy the duties, demands, and expectations of a corrupt social world from which the wise person retreats.

Racing headlong through life is a sign we have ‘lost the Way’.

The Buddha, too, laments the distracting effects of the attachments and cravings of the lives of ‘unenlightened worldlings’. The Dhammapada says that ‘misguided’ people ‘strongly rush towards pleasurable objects’, swept away in an unceasing ‘flood of passionate thoughts’. In an Udana story, the Buddha compares them to moths flying into flames — ‘Rushing headlong, missing what’s essential’, the bugs keep ‘meeting their misfortune’, unable to recognise the self-destructiveness of their actions. Their frenetic activity offers a perfect image for the restless insatiability of worldly life:

Rushing up but then too far, they miss the point;
Only causing ever newer bonds to grow.
So obsessed are some by what is seen and heard,
They fly just like these moths — straight into the flames.

By contrast, the lives of Buddhist monks and nuns are characterised by a deliberate slowness, literally and figuratively. Without giving into torpor and enervation, a monk or nun is ‘constantly scrupulous, cautious, observant’, an array of virtues shown in quietist stillness. The …

Huts, Homelessness and Heimat

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 18:55:45 +0800

Not all hut-dwelling thinkers have left records of their huts. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote little about the hut on a Norwegian fjord, near Skjolden, where he intermittently spent summers in the interwar years — despite ‘thank[ing] God’, in a letter to a friend, that he came there to work and think. Others, like Baopuyi and Thoreau, did leave records — as, too, did the two men I shall discuss: the Japanese poet and Buddhist monk, Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1155-1216) and the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).

This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here.

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People have long been fascinated by hut-dwelling thinkers and authors. From ancient China, Greece and India to the present day, poems and memoirs of several of these thinkers — the Tang poet Baopuyi, for example, or the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau — have become literary classics. During the last three years, a large number of people have visited exhibitions, in Chicago and Venice, devoted to hut-dwellers.

Why the fascination? An interest, perhaps, in the psyche of people who can sustain, even relish, living alone in a hut — in, for example, their ability to ‘experience life away from social definitions of success or failure’, as Ann Cline put it in A Hut of One’s Own. But, as the title of that Venice exhibition, Machines à penser, might suggest, what fascinates may be the role of a hut in a philosophical perspective on the world and the human condition. Perhaps the tininess and isolation of the hut suit it to exemplify a quite general conception of our being in the world.

Wittgenstein’s hut in Skjolden, Norway.

An odd couple, one might think. My pairing is not, however, arbitrary. It’s not simply that the two men had similar personal motives for dwelling in a hut, notably a great distaste for the times in which they found themselves living. Nor is it only that, in both cases, large and morally charged conceptions of nature, society and humankind are distilled in their reflections on the huts and their environs. More interesting is the seemingly stark contrast between the significance that Chōmei and …

Wael B. Hallaq on Islamic Law and Human Rights

Thu, 02 Sep 2021 18:34:16 +0800

Prof. Wael B. Hallaq (وائل حلاق‎) is a leading scholar of Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history at Columbia University. Prompted by the recent developments in Afghanistan, in this interview, we ask his opinion on the tension between Western and Islamic conceptions of governance and human rights.

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DP: Professor Wael Hallaq, I am very excited and honoured to have you here with us today. You are one of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic law and Islamic intellectual history, and you very generously agreed to explain some of the intricacies of the Sharia to us.

Glad to be here. Thank you for your good invitation.

DP: In your book “The Impossible State” you argue that an Islamic “state,” in the modern sense of the word, is impossible. You say that even modern Muslims would have difficulty accepting the basic premises of a Western-style state. Can you very briefly explain to our readers why this is?

Supposing for the moment that we grant the fact that the modern state stands for a certain moral order, my argument is that this order drastically differs from what Islam on the whole stands for.

There is no doubt that Islam is many things. It is Sharia and Sufism and many other things besides, but for us, especially nowadays, to wrap our minds around the diversity and pluralism in the Sharia and the Sufi orders would be a challenging task. The Sharia encompassed various schools, with many internal but divergent interpretations, and Sufism is as individualistic and as diverse as the Sharia, and frankly more.

Yet, in all these divergencies, and on a long spectrum of difference and variety, nowhere in Islam can a citizen-subject be raised and nurtured. To be a citizen is to be loyal, psychoepistemically, to the nation and state as the final existential desiderata. The state and nation command life and death. But the state and nation are not sufficient to command the faith and loyalty of a Muslim subject. State and nation are not and cannot be the locus of an ethical exemplar in which the meaning of life, for Muslims, resides.

The modern state forms subjects from the outside, through coercion and discipline; Islam forms them from the inside, through a process … of ethical self-cultivation.

It is in this context that we should understand why the example of the Prophet was so central to both the Sharia and Sufi subjectivities, which were more often than not one and the same. It is really not about the Prophet as Prophet that such ethical emulation acquired importance and centrality. It is rather because to worship an entity, the entity had to be the exemplar of the technologies of the self, the way one deliberately fashions himself or herself as an ethical subject. Without this conscious and deliberate technology there is no Islam, and as Foucault has shown us in volume after volume in his College de …

Meritocracy and discrimination

Tue, 31 Aug 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy continue their discussion of meritocracy. Do we really deserve the lives we have? And are we providing enough chances to those who need them?

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Meritocracy and discrimination

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy continue their discussion of meritocracy. Do we really deserve the lives we have? And are we providing enough chances to those who need them?

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Go to the Accented Philosophy Podcast webpage!

Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Moral relativism: Can we disagree about what’s right?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

The Hermit of Suwarrow

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 08:35:15 +0800

Tom Neale spent a total of fourteen years alone on a little island in the Suwarrow Atoll in the South Pacific, where he found peace and happiness in solitude. We have a look at this extraordinary life.

This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here. Find all articles about hermits here.

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To pack up and go, to leave everything behind and move alone to a tropical paradise, with no other worries than having to pick up a coconut or two for one’s next meal… This is a dream that many of us have had from time to time. One person did it.

Meet Tom Neale, sole inhabitant of the Suwarrow Atoll in the South Pacific for a total of fourteen years.

Life before Suwarrow

Thomas Francis Neale was born in New Zealand, but as soon as he found an opportunity with the Royal New Zealand Navy, he left to explore the Pacific islands. He lived in many different places around the Pacific, doing various jobs, and for a few years he was a shopkeeper in Tahiti. It was only in 1945, when he was 43 years old, that he first visited Suwarrow briefly with a supply ship — and immediately he knew that this was the place he wanted to call his home. But at this time, with the Second World War going on all around, there was no way how he could relocate to the island. On the island there was a military outpost, where a handful of soldiers were keeping watch in a small hut. It was only much later, after the end of the war, in 1952, that Tom Neale finally managed to get a lift to the island.

He was never a rich man. He didn’t have much interest in material goods and in a more stable career path, and he was happy to make do with occasional jobs that left him enough free time to dream of a life outside of civilisation. In fact, his book about his adventure begins with the words of a true Epicurean:

I chose to live in the Pacific islands because life there moves at the sort of pace which you feel God must have had in mind originally when He made the sun to keep us warm and provided the fruits of the earth for the taking.

So he was never in a position to have his own boat with which he could reach the island, or the ability to buy crates full of supplies for his adventure. But he was a hard-working man who was able to make his own way and who could handle the challenges of a life in nature:

I had to work — indeed, I wanted to work — and there was always bush to be cleared, copra to be prepared, fish to be caught. I really wanted for nothing, and I remember saying to myself one beautiful evening after swimming in the lagoon, “Neale” (I always call myself Neale when I talk to myself), “this is the nearest thing on earth to paradise.”

He might have lived this life forever, had there not been the occasional friends who …

Meritocracy: Do we deserve our lives?

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the idea that hard work (as well as laziness) eventually get their just rewards and that, therefore, people deserve the lives they have. But is this true? Or do we all just rely on luck to achieve the positions in life that we have?

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Meritocracy: Do we deserve our lives?

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

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Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Meritocracy and discrimination

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— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Why We Should Read Descartes

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 19:31:20 +0800

In considering this matter I am going to concentrate on the Meditations. Its full title is Meditations on first philosophy. It appeared in 1641. It was a watershed in human intellectual history — not the first, that was Ancient Greece — the kernel of the Enlightenment, and its value is timeless. It is usually regarded as the beginning of what gets termed ‘Modern Philosophy’. But what do these claims mean?

The foundation of knowledge

The overall aim of Descartes’ philosophy is to found science on a secure and absolutely certain footing. Without that anything built by science would be open to doubt following from the weakness of its foundation. The edifice of science could be built, but it would be a tottering ever-fragile tower, each level built on something else, but ultimately infected throughout by whatever uncertainty came from its point of departure.

By ‘science,’ here in Descartes’ view, is meant an objective conception of reality. In order to see what the really real is, any view would have to be completely stripped of any contribution derived from its being from a particular point of view and mode of viewing that would distort seeing things as they are in themselves.

In order to attain absolute certainty Descartes devises the Method of Doubt. This is not only a logical exercise, but a psychological course to follow. Many of the things we once thought true turned out to be false, so how can we sift the true from the false, making sure we only end up with truths? The aim of the Method of Doubt is to systematically doubt, that is, positively consider as false anything that may possibly be false. Only in that way can we be sure that what is left is beyond doubt certainly true. Some of the beliefs subject to this doubt may be true, but that does not matter: if they may be considered false then they are thought of as false.

Having found through the Method of Doubt something that cannot possibly be other than true, that must be true, from the content of that truth Descartes then climbs back up from the vanishing point of what is certain, to show how other beliefs that we think of as true are indeed true and traceably well-founded on something that it is impossible could not be true.

The aim of the Method of Doubt is to systematically doubt, that is, positively consider as false anything that may possibly be false.

Trying to look for something certain, from which may be derived other views built on that certainty, is not something so unusual in philosophy, but Descartes pursues it with a ruthless rigour not seen before.

That, however, is not what makes Descartes the watershed-radical philosopher he is. Descartes is, in a sense, the founder of the predominant ways of thinking, however varied they became, that followed him, something that led to what we may think of as the mindset of the modern world: that it is incumbent on the individual to think things through for themselves and not just accept what they are told.

What is …

August 23: Happy Birthday, #hashtag!

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 07:13:22 +0000

What would a philosophy of the hashtag look like?

How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]? — Chris Messina, (“factoryjoe”), August 23, 2007

That’s the birth moment of the Twitter hashtag right there. The concept of tagging words with a hash sign was already common before. It was used in IRC to name channels, for example, and in HTML to jump to a particular place inside the same webpage. A nice history of the hashtag is here.

The hashtag is a curious thing. Its defining feature, the hash character, doesn’t even have a proper name. From England comes the name ‘pound sign,’ but the hash character is everything but. A pound sign looks like that: “£.” The only reason why someone called it ‘pound sign’ is that the British keyboard has its (proper) pound character at the same place (Shift-3) as the hash character. One of the inventors of the character apparently called it (God forbid) the ‘octothorpe’:

One of the first locations to be fully fitted with Bell’s new Touch Tone technology was the Mayo Clinic. When it was time to train the staff of the Mayo Clinic on using the new system, Bell’s Don McPherson coined the praise “octothorpe” to refer to the hashtag on the Touch Tone phones. It is said that McPherson came up with the name by combining the eight points “octo” and his favorite athlete, Olympian Jim Thorpe, to create a term that would be used throughout Bell Labs. – (Joe Fortunato)

Hash characters don’t have much of a meaning themselves. They modify the meaning of the word that comes after them. In this way, they are markup rather than content, similar to quote characters or the sequence “<i>” in HTML. But, as opposed to those, their purpose is not to be displayed or to alter the way things are displayed. They are semantic markup, meant to group items of content into loose clusters.

Hash characters don’t have much of a meaning themselves. They modify the meaning of the word that comes after them. In this way, they are markup rather than content.

As markup, they are terrible to work with. First, what if you need a #multi #word #hashtag? The impossibility of escaping the space character is sure to infuriate every programmer who tries to use them efficiently.

Then, they are prone to small permutations that should not affect meaning. #Donald, #donald, #the #donald, #the-donald, #doland are probably all meant to refer to the same thing, but there’s quite a bit of algorithmic magic involved in finding out which similar-looking tags are actually referring to the same thing and which aren’t. Not to mention that completely different tags, like #trump and #potus, should also be understood to refer to the same real-world entity; except if we’re talking about #disney #donald #duck.

Since there’s only one level of markup and no hierarchical structure, it’s also impossible to distinguish #cloud #storage from #cloud #rain if the user only searches for #cloud.

Tags …

One Hundred Days in a Hermit’s Hut

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 13:02:30 +0800

In her book “One Hundred Days of Solitude: Losing Myself and Finding Grace on a Zen Retreat,” Zen teacher Jane Dobisz recalls the three months she spent as a young person alone in a hut in the woods, bowing, chanting and meditating. It is a gloriously honest and entertaining look at hermit life from the perspective of a normal young person, raised in an affluent, Western society.

This article is part of a year-long series in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here. Find all articles about hermits here.

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When I think about introductions to hermit life, I can think of no better example than the little book of Zen teacher Jane Dobisz, One Hundred Days of Solitude.¹

After returning from her retreat and writing this book, Dobisz² went on to become a professional Zen teacher and, presumably, to go on many more and more demanding retreats. But this one is her very first and as such it has that special magic of the first experience, the wide-eyed wonder at every turn of the way, and all the fear, boredom, annoyance and surprise that such an experiment brings with it.

This book was also one of the first books I read on Zen and hermit life, and it has always had a special place in my memory and on my bookshelf.

There are, of course, countless more elaborate, deeper and wiser books on both Zen and spiritual retreats, from all over the ages and across the globe. But it is often hard for the modern reader to empathise with St Anthony in his desert cave, eating only bread, salt and water and fighting off the demons of temptation through single-minded prayer. Jane’s hundred days in a cabin in the woods, trying to come to terms with her craving for cookies or her desire to sleep in on the first day of her retreat are much more accessible to us, the readers of today. She is a young woman who is no saint or sage, and this makes her one of us: an explorer, in our name, of the wide, lonely and silent spaces of the hermit experience.

It is often hard for the modern reader to empathise with St Anthony in his desert cave, eating only bread, salt and water and fighting off the demons of temptation through single-minded prayer.

Starting the journey

Jane Dobisz begins her journey in… Tibet. Seeking enlightenment in the ancient wisdom of Buddhism, she travels as a young woman to the Tibetan mountains in search of a guru. (I’m emphasising her youth because it is so much part of the experience that the book describes — her naivete as well as her infectious enthusiasm are unmistakably those of a young person looking to find her way in the world.)

After travelling for two weeks throughout the stark landscapes of the Himalayas, she finally arrives at a small temple and immediately recognises it as the place where her spiritual teacher must be …

Luca Possati on Transhumanism

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 19:34:16 +0800

Luca M. Possati is researcher at the University of Porto, Portugal. Educated as philosopher, he has been lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris and associate researcher of the Fonds Ricoeur and EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales). He is associate editor for Humanities & Social Sciences Communications.

His research focuses on the philosophy of technology and in particular on the relationship between neuropsychanalysis, affective neurosciences, and artificial intelligence.

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DP: Dr Possati, Luca, thank you so much for being here and for agreeing to this interview. We’ve contacted you because we saw your announcement for a conference “Transhumanism and the Future of Humanity,” of which you are one of the organisers. Would you like to say a few words about that event?

Thanks to you for this interview. The conference intends to be a way to make a critical assessment of the current research on transhumanism. The central questions are what transhumanism is today and how it has evolved. To ask these questions again is neither useless nor rhetorical at all. Due to the current development of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, the debate on transhumanism is today more alive than ever.

DP: Would you like to explain a bit to our readers what the main idea of transhumanism is, in your opinion, and what distinguishes it from post-humanism?

There is not a single definition of transhumanism. Transhumanism is not a well-defined philosophical doctrine.

I would say that transhumanism is more a general world-view that implies a certain evaluation of human nature and the relationship between human nature and technology. We can find transhumanist ideas in literature, art, cinema, but also in politics or science. For example, Teilhard de Chardin does not use the expression “transhuman,” but he can be called a transhumanist thinker because of his view of the cosmos and human evolution in it.

Transhumanism is more a general world-view that implies a certain evaluation of human nature and the relationship between human nature and technology.

As I said, you can find transhumanist ideas also in literature: for example, think about Houellebecq’s novel The Possibility of an Island. I would say that one of the best definitions of transhumanism was given by Max More:

“A class of philosophies of life that seek the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-promoting principles and values.”

Transhumanism is very close to posthumanism. However, I would say that post-humanism is more of a philosophical doctrine; a way to overcome the culture-nature dualism and set up what Latour calls a symmetrical ontology. In the post-human vision, there is no such idea of …

Inventing the New World

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 18:31:20 +0800

For the first time in history, an AI called DABUS has been granted a patent in South Africa. This article analyses the metaphysics of attributing inventions to non-human agents.

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This week, the intellectual discussion on artificial intelligence has taken a big step forward. For the first time in history, an AI has been granted a patent, and (as a consequence) has been legally equated to a human being capable of intellectual originality and deserving the protection of such originality.

The story comes from South Africa, where an AI called DABUS (“Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”) was listed as the inventor of a food container based on fractal geometry, which makes it easier for automated systems to store and locate the items desired. The inventor, DABUS, is part of a family of artificial intelligences, which through advanced machine learning are capable of simulating human brainstorming and even “imagination,” in the words of their creator, Stephen Thaler.

The story comes from South Africa, where an AI called DABUS was listed as the inventor of a food container based on fractal geometry.

Dr. Thaler requested the recognition of this patent on behalf of the AI he created in various countries, before being granted the rights to this invention in South Africa (and shortly after that in Australia). As AI law expert Meshandren Naidoo reports, this has created a short-circuit in the legal world, since it impacts the possibility of attributing rights and mental agency to non-human intelligences.

Intellectual property rights, which protect “intangible creations” of the intellect, include inventions and designs, but also artistic and literary products. This is the first time that an official body grants a non-human intelligence property over an intangible creation. The conundrum is that most official definitions of IP rights, including the one employed by the World Trade Organization, clearly specify that IP rights can only be attributed to “persons, over the creations of their minds. They usually give the creator an exclusive right over the use of his/her creation for a certain period of time”. The key word here is “person”: are South Africa and Australia granting DABUS a patent implying that an AI is effectively a person and has a “mind”? Or was this a legal mistake? Is the ruling valid or invalid, given that AIs are not juridic persons, as of now?

Apart from the legal debate, the philosophical reasons that spur us to take notice of this news story are multifaceted and pressing. The technologies employing artificial intelligences in the role of problem solvers and solution creators are quickly increasing in number and complexity. In a parallel manner, our conceptual capability of capturing what is meant by “inventing” and “creating” must face some variation, to adapt to the rapidly evolving world of …

Hermits and Happiness

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 16:59:17 +0800

Hermits have always been around as an alternative vision of what human life could be. Hermits, from the Greek “eremites,” (=men of the desert), are found in all cultures and at all times. In this article, we look at the phenomenon of hermit life as a whole, before we go into more detail in future posts in this series.

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Chasing utopia

Of all the ways humans have devised to pursue happiness, shutting oneself off from the company of others and embracing a life of poverty and stark deprivation must be one of the strangest. And yet, many have tried it, over and over again, all over the world, in every culture and throughout the ages: from the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, famously depicted as living in a barrel, to today’s Hikikomori, young people who choose to retreat to the isolation of their bedrooms for years at a time.

It is easy to find flaws in the way human societies are organised. All real human societies have and always have had hierarchical structures; all are based on competition, on power, on the accumulation of wealth and status; all have perpetuated injustice and suffering for too many of their members. There has been no shortage of utopias, dreamy landscapes where happy, well-fed and well-educated children would play in the sun. But the reality of life has never been as easy as that for the vast majority of human beings on Earth.

There are only a small number of possible ways out of the misery of life inside the system of human society:

First, one could try to embrace the challenge and rise to the top positions, achieving a life that is better than that of others, ultimately, though, at their expense.

There are only a small number of possible ways out of the misery of life inside the system of human society.

Second, one could try a revolutionary approach: recognising the failings of a society, one might attempt to overthrow the social order, remove the ruling classes and establish a new and better order that will finally bring justice and happiness to all. Unfortunately, this doesn’t usually seem to work out as intended. With a few exceptions of places we don’t know much about — like the Indus civilisation (2600-1900 BC) — every human society, whether pre- or post-revolutionary, seems to have been plagued by the same problems: theocratic states are not closer to God than secular ones and communist states have not eliminated poverty any more than capitalist ones.

The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

Third, one might retreat into private life, abandoning the prospects of a career and …

Nudges

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 18:31:20 +0800

This article will try to answer the following questions: What are nudges? How do they influence our choice architecture? What are the potential advantages and risks of using such tools? And most importantly, why should we care about this?

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Most of us may be unable to describe what nudges are, and yet, all of us are likely to encounter them every day. More specifically, they probably play a significant role in the way we make decisions, whether it is about what to buy at the supermarket, how many steps we should walk, or what kind of insurance we should subscribe to. The funny thing about this is, we probably don’t even realize it. This article will try to answer the following questions: What are nudges? How do they influence our choice architecture? What are the potential advantages and risks of using such tools? And most importantly, why should we care about this?

What are nudges?

In a book published in 2008, Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein define nudges as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives”.

A good example of this is supermarket design: fruits and vegetables are often placed at the entrance, while chips, candy and alcohol are often much further away. Through this, consumers are encouraged to make better, healthier choices: the kind of choices they are assumed to favour. On the other hand, nudges can work in a less benevolent way: when you order a combo at a fast-food restaurant, you may be asked whether you want to make it a large one. You are much more likely to make that decision if you are presented with this possibility this way, than you would be if you had to actively look for the option on your own. Nudges, in brief, are subtle and almost imperceptible tools that influence your choices without coercion or force. They gently push you toward a trajectory that you remain free not to take.

Basically, nudges are meant to help us make the choice that we would most certainly make were we fully rational.

Thaler and Sunstein are big proponents of nudges, they genuinely believe that these tools can be put at the service of human development and the common good. Their faith is mostly based on a simple premise: that people are generally quite bad at making rational decisions, even after they have identified what’s good for them. For example, I may know that investing in a good retirement plan is the most beneficial thing for me to do, as it would maximize future-me well-being. Yet, I may struggle on a daily basis to save for retirement, and instead spend my money on immediately available gadgets. This is because, like most human beings, I may have conflicting desires, and I tend to favour actions that will generate instant gratification instead of those that will benefit …

Sports and Society

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of sports in general. From whether sports benefit populations to drugs, doping and the problems of nationalism, it is surprising how many interesting moral issues are caused by sports!

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Sports and Society

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Meritocracy. Do we deserve our lives?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

The Ethics of the Olympics

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of the Olympics. From environmental problems to the protection of underage athletes, the Olympic Games cause a number of ethical problems that are worth discussing.

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Are the Olympic Games immoral?

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Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

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Philosophy and sports.

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Agency in the Anthropocene

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 13:31:20 +0800

Are you a natural-born killer?

One of the major questions we face as the ecological emergency deepens is whether or not we humans are natural, in the same way that the rest of the biosphere is. If we are natural beings who evolved with everything else, why have we had such a hugely detrimental impact on that biosphere, which also happens to be our home?

This is worth asking because most other living organisms, according to the latest research we have, are recognisably co-evolutes: they (and we) evolve together, and to a large degree (with obvious caveats) in cooperation with one another. (This does not mean cheetahs do not chase antelope, just that when they get faster, so do their prey, and vice versa). Lynn Margulis calls this process of evolution as involving the cooperation of different organelles endosymbiosis.

If humans are natural, then they evolved along with everything else. Many evolutionary biologists, from Roberto Cazzolla Gatti to Janine Benyus, have shown that there are stages to evolution of biosystems that begin with pioneer species, which are less cooperative, more competitive, and shorter lived (think of fireweed in a freshly cleared area of what had been forest). These move on to more complex, dynamic and diverse systems which are more cooperative, and more long lived (like a rainforest). Human activity fits the first model better than the last although, of course, for humans we have the capacity to know this, and that makes things more complicated (Elizabeth Sahtouris has written extensively about this).

This prompts the question, do we really have no choice about our self-destructiveness, to the point of extinguishing civilization, and all the suffering that this entails?

Some philosophers, including Richard Watson, metaphorically shrug at the inevitability of our demise:

Humans’ actions, regardless of their effect on other organisms, are natural and perfectly acceptable … we should be allowed to live out our evolutionary potential to [our own destruction] because this is ‘nature’s way’. (Environmental Ethics 1983: 245–56)

Yet this jars: our predominant understanding of human choice is that we have a large degree of freedom in how we choose to live. What job we choose, what friends we associate with, the kinds of past-times we decide to pursue in our leisure time, whether or not we have children, whether or not, in a pandemic, we decide to accept lockdown requirements, whether or not we become fully aware of, and respond appropriately, to the ecological emergency. All these, we believe, are freedoms we can exercise. And yet the emergency deepens.

This prompts the question, do we really have no choice about our self-destructiveness, to the point of extinguishing civilization, and all the suffering that this entails?

“Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose”

In philosophy, we can focus on the question of our freedom of choice through the prism of moral agency, that is, our ability to choose to do …

Human Autonomy

Tue, 03 Aug 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy ask what autonomy really is. What does it mean to be “free”? Are drug addicts free? And what is unique about human beings?

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Human autonomy

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy ask what autonomy really is. What does it mean to be “free”? Are drug addicts free? And what is unique about human beings?

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Tell us what you thought about it in the comments! I’d also be happy to receive your ideas for future topics.

Next up

Philosophy of the Olympics. The Ethics and Politics of the Games.

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— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

What Are We Responsible For?

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 18:31:20 +0800

How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for?

This matters because, looked at negatively it coincides with what we may be blamed or be held culpable for, and looked as positively it coincides with what we might be praised or given an accolade for. This in turn, respectively, brings about things we might be expected to feel guilty about, feel the need to make amends for, learn from, think that being punished is not out of order, and then conversely brings about things where we might rightly feel good about ourselves, satisfaction, and that praise or a reward may not be out of order.

The negative aspect of responsibility is perhaps more significant in our lives than the positive.

On the positive side people can feel miffed and undervalued if they are not thanked for the good they do, but many people take the view most of the time that the good one was responsible for is reward enough in itself, and further acknowledgement is not necessary, indeed might be an embarrassment. At worst one might feel miffed and underappreciated and give up one’s successful deeds.

One has to be responsible for one’s view of responsibility, just one has to be responsible for what one is responsible for.

On the negative side a failure to correctly ascribe responsibility can be downright harmful, indeed it might tend towards harm accumulating because the person who brings about the harm never sees certain results of their actions as their responsibility, and so sees no reason to learn from those actions or change their ways. Having the incorrect attitude to responsibility, to misunderstand what one is responsible for, is itself, at another level, a failure of responsibility. One has to be responsible for one’s view of responsibility, just one has to be responsible for what one is responsible for.

The minimal and the maximal view

The minimum view of what one is responsible for is that one is responsible for only that which one intends. By intention is meant that one held an objective in mind and then sought to bring it about. A surgeon removes a heart from a person with the sole intention of having a heart to study and of course the person dies; but on the minimalist view the surgeon is not responsible for the death as it was not anything he intended. The maximal view of responsibility is that one is responsible for all that may be causally traced to oneself. A person goes in for a heart operation, and several days later, he examines the stitches in his chest, but in doing so he takes his eyes off the road he is crossing and gets run over by a bus; the surgeon is responsible for the accident as the stitches were put there by the surgeon, and without them the person crossing the road would not have been examining them. Neither of these views can be right. The first minimum view makes one oblivious and responsibility free what whatever follows from one’s actions or inactions that are bad provided one did not intend it, …

Does Gratefulness Work?

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 18:35:58 +0800

Gratefulness has been proposed as a way to increase one’s happiness in life. But does it work? We look at the science of gratitude diaries to find out whether gratefulness has a positive effect on happiness.

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This is a part of year-long series of articles, in which we examine six different philosophies of happiness and how they apply to today’s life. Find all the articles in this series here.

What does science have to say about gratefulness? Does practising gratefulness, as David Steindl-Rast says, really make us happier?

The biological basis of gratefulness

Once again, The Psychology of Gratitude (Emmons and McCullough, Oxford University Press, 2004) comes to our rescue. In their article “Gratitude in Modern Life,” Dan P. McAdams and Jack J. Bauer discuss the argument that gratitude forms part of our evolutionary adaptation to a social life and to moral behaviour in general:

De Waal has argued that human beings have evolved to exhibit such sympathy-related traits as attachment and cognitive empathy, to establish and respect prescriptive social rules, to reciprocate in kind (be it an act of kindness or revenge), and to engage in behaviors and to formulate mental strategies that promote getting along with each other. (p.86)

There is some evidence that we might have special neural circuits in our brains, the so-called “mirror neurons,” that form the basis of empathy: our ability to put ourselves “into the shoes” of someone whom we observe, to “feel” how the person opposite us must feel, although the details of how this might work are disputed. Regardless of the neuroscience of empathy, it is clear that most of us do have this ability to feel how other people feel to varying degrees. And the total absence of empathy is a pathological state sometimes found in psychopathic criminals.

As important as empathy and rule-following are, we know from the Prisoner’s Dilemma that successful social interaction also must involve retaliation. In 1984, Robert Axelrod in “The Evolution of Cooperation,” showed that the most successful cooperation of two parties involves initial trust, followed by the revenge if the other party betrays that trust (which has become known as “tit-for-tat” strategy).

In this context, it is reasonable to suggest that showing gratitude and expecting it from others might qualify as an evolved behavioral adaptation, rooted in reciprocity and designed to facilitate getting along. … Gratitude may be grouped, therefore, in the same family as kin selection and reciprocal altruism—evolved adaptations that have proven so useful for fitness in group living that they have become, more or less, foundational features of human nature. (The Psychology of Gratitude, p.86)

Gratitude diaries

A common way to systematically integrate gratitude into one’s life is to commit to writing a “gratitude diary.” This can, for example, take …

Technology and Freedom

Tue, 27 Jul 2021 20:18:04 +0800

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy ask how technology affects our freedom. Are we free to choose particular technologies? Are we free to reject them? And is democracy powerful enough to deal with technology?

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Technology and Freedom

Join us for a weekly dose of Daily Philosophy!

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Like every new endeavour, this podcast still has a few wrinkles that need ironing out and we’d be grateful if you could tell us what you thought about it in the comments. I’d also be happy to receive your proposals for future topics.

Next up

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Is Data Science Evil?

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:09:59 +0800

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Is Data Science Evil?

Computers have a long history of being associated with evilness. Machine minds without emotions suggest cruelty, unfeeling judgement, unflinching execution of inhuman orders. It’s no accident that we talk of the Nazi war machine, their death machine, their killing machine, none of which were, in the common sense of the word, machines. The 70s saw the rise of computers in the public consciousness, and, in the same move, the growing horror of what computers might do. Movies like Demon Seed pitted innocent maidens against sadistic AI machines. And although Star Wars did have androids on both sides of the black/white divide, the most impressive figure in the whole franchise is the black-clad cyborg, Darth Vader.

The evils of data science and AI

We’ve come a long way since the 70s, and computers today don’t rape or mutilate people wearing black face masks. (Although, with the virus, we’ve all become a little more Darth-Vader-like). Instead, they enable the transition to a cashless economy, from which the poorest in society will be excluded (one cannot drop a credit card into a beggar’s hat, and neither would anyone like to have their card swiped by a card reader on the street). AI systems assist judges in estimating the risk posed to society by particular offenders and decide on sentences or bail based on algorithms that are kept hidden from view.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

AI is at the forefront of environmental destruction, not only through the use of vast amounts of energy and carbon emissions for training computationally intensive models, but also by supporting research that will open up the Arctic to commercial exploitation, by enabling fossil-fuel companies to find new sources of oil, and by being one of the industries with the shortest time-to-obsolescence of its products. AI algorithms allow us to create new, terrifying weapons, come up with new types of terrorism, manipulate democratic processes, and endanger jobs on a global scale.

Who Needs Cash Anyway?

A cashless society seems convenient, but it has severe drawbacks, especially for the least privileged in society.

Via the cultural imperialism of the US and its ubiquitous language, “US English (international)” (as my keyboard settings call it), AI-supported toys for children, based on Disney characters, have replaced traditional cultural content in many societies.

Google translate …

Does Gratefulness Make Happy?

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 11:19:55 +0800

Brother David-Steindl-Rast is one of the most prominent advocates of gratefulness as a way of life. In his famous TED talk, he explains how gratefulness and attention lead to a happier life.

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This post is part of a year-long experiment of living six theories of happiness within the space of one year. We started with Aristotle in January and February, moved to Erich Fromm in March and April, followed this up with Epicurus in May and June, and now we are examining gratefulness as a way of living our everyday lives more happily. For the rest of the year, we still want to talk about hermit lifestyles and in November and December we will talk about the Stoic life.

Brother David Steindl-Rast

David Steindl-Rast was born in Vienna in 1926, and, after studying at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, got a PhD in experimental psychology. His family moved to the United States in 1952, and he became a monk in 1953. In 1966, he was tasked to study Zen and to explore avenues for Buddhist-Christian dialogue. In 1968, he became one of the founders of the Center for Spiritual Studies together with Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish and Sufi spiritual teachers.

Steindl-Rast became well-known across the Internet with his 2013 TED talk “Want to be happy? Be grateful,” in which he explained, in 14 minutes, his basic philosophy of life.

Steindl-Rast is so much associated today with the topic of gratefulness that he even got to write a chapter in the Oxford University Press volume “The Psychology of Gratitude.” Surely the editors felt that no book on gratitude could be complete without Brother David’s contribution.

Everyone wants to he happy

David Steindl-Rast begins his famous TED talk by stating that everyone wants to be happy. This is not a very surprising or original statement. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of utilitarianism, had already had the same insight, and the history of the same basic idea goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle (384-322 BC), in his Nicomachean Ethics, showed that we pursue all other goods like fame, education, power and money for the sake of happiness — but we never pursue happiness for the sake of power or money; thus, Aristotle concludes, we can see that happiness is the highest good. And Epicurus, too, emphasises in his “Letter to Menoeceus”: “We call pleasure the alpha and omega of a happy life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion.”

But what exactly is the relationship between happiness and gratefulness? David Steindl-Rast believes that we got it wrong when we say that we are grateful because our lives are happy. He mentions cases where people who have everything may be deeply unhappy, while sometimes those who suffer misfortunes in life can be happy people. From this, Steindl-Rast concludes (somewhat illogically, one must say) that it …

Luis de Miranda on Philosophical Health

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 18:41:39 +0800

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DP: Welcome Luis! It’s great to have you here. Let’s start with a question about yourself: Your name sounds Spanish, yet many of your publications on your homepage are listed in French, and I seem to remember that you’ve lived in Sweden for a while. Can you tell us a bit about who you actually are, and how your life brought you to all these places. With which of these different cultures do you identify most?

This is an interesting personal question, and I probably won’t be able to avoid generalizations or perhaps some form of sentimentalism.

I was born of Portuguese parents under the dictatorial regime of Salazar in Portugal. My parents emigrated to Paris, France, when I was only three years old. Upon arrival, I developed a severe respiratory reaction that, according to the doctors, could have been fatal. I understand this today as a psychosomatic alert, an intuitive refusal of the Paris environment. Nevertheless, my parents stayed, and I lived in Paris until 2012, with a nearly 2-year parenthesis where I lived in New York, around 1995, and another 2-3 years parenthesis in Edinburgh more recently, where I worked on my PhD.

In New York, while working for the French consulate, I wrote my first novel, Joie (Joy), published in Paris in 1998, which was the expression of a longing — indeed, I never felt joyful in Paris, but rather nature-deprived, lonely and distressed: beyond the pollution and the reign of bureaucracy and stone or concrete, there is in Paris a culture of méchanceté, of intolerance, diffuse aggression and spite that I never understood. Retrospectively, I did not experience Parisian people as healthy. However, because I was an immigrant, I believed for many years that the problem was mine, and that I was incapable to adapt to an imaginary superior social order that I could not understand nor deserve. In order to survive and still experience beauty, I dived into French or international culture from previous centuries. Writing poetry in French language when I was a teenager and later books of fiction and philosophy was a refuge.

Today, I still identify greatly with the Swedish way of life, its crypto-pagan trust in and respect for nature.

In 2012, I had my first child with a Swedish person working in Paris and because I did not want my daughter to grow in Paris and be confronted with the negativity I had experienced, we moved to Sweden before the birth. I still live in Sweden today, and I am very grateful for it. The first time I visited Sweden, in the summer of 1994, I already had a revelation, a feeling of …

Work, Leisure and Fulfilment

Sun, 18 Jul 2021 20:18:04 +0800

The relevant philosophy podcast with Dr Ezechiel Thibaud and Dr Andreas Matthias. Two philosophers with cute accents and their guests discuss the intricacies of modern life. Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com. Every Tuesday. Today: Buddhist Economics, Technology and Work.

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Work, Leisure and Fulfilment

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy continue their discussion of E. F. Schumacher’s famous 1973 book “Small is Beautiful,” and particularly the role of work in human life.

Join us for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and explore with us the worlds of work and leisure and how they give meaning to life.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

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Next up

Can we control technology?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Grateful to No One

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 17:16:53 +0800

Gratitude and gratefulness are complex phenomena. Gratitude generally requires a benefactor to whom I can be grateful, while gratefulness is a general feeling that does not require an object. But there is also a third kind, an all-encompassing and non-dualist gratefulness, that would consider even obstacles and adversaries as proper objects of gratitude.

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This article is part of a series on gratefulness, itself part of a bigger series of trying to live six theories of happiness within the space one year. Click on the links above to get the whole story!

Last week, we began our exploration of gratefulness by distinguishing between gratefulness and gratitude. While gratitude, we said, is the feeling of being thankful to a particular person for a particular (undeserved) benefit, gratefulness is a more general feeling of happiness and thanks towards nobody in particular; as in: “I am grateful for the glorious sunshine.”

It is interesting that in ancient times, the symmetric version of gratitude was the only one that was commonly recognised. Ancient authors write about gratitude generally as a relation between two people, and most of the time about the lack of gratitude as a vice:

Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations)

Seneca, in his book “On Benefits,” writes:

He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first instalment on his debt.

This is in line with the more general Aristotelian view of human relations. Love, too, is for Aristotle a symmetric relationship, a kind of friendship, in which both partners profit in roughly equal ways by educating each other in matters of virtue and wisdom.

A Short History of Love

In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers.

It was Plato who gave us, with his Symposion, the vision of a transcendent, eternal love that can be directed towards things that don’t reciprocate: mathematics, ideas, the eternal forms of perfect things, and God himself. And it was in this Platonic tradition that the later Christian philosophers tried to explore the asymmetries of love and gratitude.

“Gratia,” for St. Augustine (354-430), refers to the grace of God, not to human obligations ([1], p.25). For the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), gratitude was the appropriate response to receiving a gift; but since the society of the Middle Ages understood itself as a hierarchy of power, from God at the top all the way down to the peasant, such giving and receiving of gifts was also one-directional and ordered according to social status and power. Therefore, gratitude was not the …

The Uncontrollability of AI

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 20:41:39 +0800

The creation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise, but with it also comes existential risk. How can we know AI will be safe? How can we know it will not destroy us? How can we know that its values will be aligned with ours? Because of this risk an entire field has sprung up surrounding AI Safety and Security. But this is an unsolvable problem, AI can never be fully controlled.

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Introduction

The invention of Artificial Intelligence will shift the trajectory of human civilization. But to reap the benefits of such powerful technology – and to avoid the dangers – we must be able to control it. Currently we have no idea whether such control is even possible. My view is that Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and its more advanced version, Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) – could never be fully controlled.

Solving an unsolvable problem

The unprecedented progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI), over the last decade has not been smooth. Multiple AI failures [1, 2] and cases of dual use (when AI is used for purposes beyond its maker’s intentions) [3] have shown that it is not sufficient to create highly capable machines, but that those machines must also be beneficial [4] for humanity. This concern birthed a new sub-field of research, ‘AI Safety and Security’ [5] with hundreds of papers published annually. But all of this research assumes that controlling highly capable intelligent machines is possible, an assumption which has not been established by any rigorous means.

It is standard practice in computer science to show that a problem does not belong to a class of unsolvable problems [6, 7] before investing resources into trying to solve it. No mathematical proof – or even a rigorous argument! – has been published to demonstrate that the AI control problem might be solvable, in principle let alone in practice.

The hard problem of AI safety

The AI Control Problem is the definitive challenge and the hard problem of AI Safety and Security. Methods to control superintelligence fall into two camps: Capability Control and Motivational Control [8]. Capability control limits potential harm from an ASI system by restricting its environment [9-12], adding shut-off mechanisms [13, 14], or trip wires [12]. Motivational control designs ASI systems to have no desire to cause harm in the first place. Capability control methods are considered temporary measures at best, certainly not as long-term solutions for ASI control [8].

The AI Control Problem is the definitive challenge and the hard problem of AI Safety and Security.

Motivational control is a more promising route and it would need to be designed into ASI systems. But there are different types of control, which we can see easily in the example of a “smart” self-driving car. If a human issues a direct command – “Please stop the …

Small is Beautiful - Economics as if people mattered

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Small is Beautiful (1973)

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss E. F. Schumacher’s famous 1973 book “Small is Beautiful”. We unpack the main theses of the book and look whether they are still valid 50 years later.

Join us for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and explore with us one of the most influential books of the 70s.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

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Next up

Can we control technology?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Seven Reasons to Outlaw Recreational Drugs

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 13:53:20 +0800

This is the second part of an article on drug legalisation. Please find the first part here. A podcast and Youtube video on the topic are also freely available!

Should we legalise recreational drug use? The main arguments against legalising recreational drugs are:

The escalation argument: one drug leads to another, and the doses rise over time.

Gateway drugs: “soft” drugs are gateways into drug use that invariably lead to the consumption of stronger and more dangerous drugs.

Addiction is itself dangerous, both in a medical and in a social context.

The war on drugs seems (sometimes) to work better than drug legalisation.

No one should be taking drugs for ethical reasons.

There is a moral obligation for all people to take care of themselves and their health.

Drug users are not free in their decision to take drugs or not, and must therefore be guided and protected by the state.

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Debate overview: Legalising recreational drugs

Historical context

Before the 20th century, drugs were generally not regulated and even states engaged officially in drug trade (see, for example, the Opium Wars between Britain and China).

In the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, the US introduced controls for many drugs considered addictive and/or dangerous. This was part of a more general trend in US society towards safeguarding “Christian” values that had started in the 19th century and included the prohibition of alcoholic drinks that was put into law from 1920 to 1933.

For more on the debate on legalisation vs decriminalisation of drugs and the different kinds of drugs, please go back to the first part of this article.

Six Reasons to Legalise Recreational Drugs

Should we legalise recreational drug use or not? This article explains the most important six arguments in favour of the legalisation of recreational drugs.

Seven best arguments against legalising recreational drugs

1. The escalation argument

Escalation means that one does not stay at a particular level of drug consumption; instead, the consumer of a drug tends to increase the amount taken over time.

Escalation is often linked to tolerance, the mechanism by which the body gets used to a drug, needed more and more of the drug over time to achieve the same effect. One can easily observe tolerance with smells: in a neutrally smelling room, even a small drop of peppermint or rose oil with be immediately noticeable. After a while, though, the body will get used to that smell, and a higher dose will be needed to produce the same subjective impression.

But escalation and tolerance are really different mechanisms. Escalating drug use is a behavioural chance that works separately from the biochemical tolerance of the body to a particular drug.

That escalation is not only a myth can be shown with animal …

What is Gratefulness?

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 18:13:15 +0800

Gratitude is personal, directed towards another particular person who has done something good to us that we don’t feel we deserved or paid for. Gratefulness is a more general feeling of being thankful for some state of affairs that we have done nothing to deserve, but where we cannot identify a particular agent to be grateful to.

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Gratitude and resentment

If we want to understand gratefulness, we probably have to start with the distinction between gratefulness and gratitude. In English, strangely, there is only an adjective “grateful” for both. I cannot be “gratituded,” and being “gratified” is something else entirely. This confuses matters because, despite the missing adjective, gratitude is not the same as gratefulness.

Both are states of being thankful for something that we received, and generally we must have received that as a gift, not in exchange for something else. If I buy a chocolate cookie by paying through the nose for it in my favourite old-world artisan bakery chain, I have no reason to be grateful. I got what I paid for.

Even if I get three cookies for the price of one as part of a promotion campaign, I might be happy to get the deal, but I won’t, generally, feel that I have to be grateful for that. I can safely assume that this beneficence is not directed towards me, but that, in the end, it is going to benefit the bakery and that this is why they do it.

Gratitude then is only appropriate when I am the recipient of a benefit that is directed personally towards me and that I did not deserve or compensate the other party for.

A core feature of Kant’s ethics is his insistence on the value of one’s motivation for the morality of an action. As opposed to utilitarianism, Kant does not look at the consequences when judging actions, but only at what he calls the “good will.”

And then, there is the issue of goodwill. Gratitude is not only an attitude or a behaviour that we show towards a benefactor – it is also an emotion, a feeling of friendliness and goodwill towards the other person. Imagine someone who does not like receiving gifts – perhaps he is someone who feels himself to be undeservedly wealthy, and now, having participated in a charity lottery, he wins against his will. He is called up to the stage to receive that prize that he doesn’t want. After all, the whole point of participating in the lottery was to help others, not to walk away with the main prize himself. Will this person feel gratitude towards the lottery organisers? Likely not. He will resent winning the prize. So this aspect of friendly goodwill as a reaction to the benefit is really crucial to gratitude.

Gratitude then is only appropriate when I am the recipient of a benefit that is directed …

The New Companion

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 17:41:39 +0800

I’m not gonna lie to you: when I finally received the cybermail notification that my purchase was approved and I could pick it up from the Companions ‘R’ Us warehouse in Manchester, I was literally electrified. In fact, I was so excited that I decided to ‘throw a stickie’ (as they used to call it in the old days) and not show up at the institute that day. The boss was not going to like it, but they would have to live with it. I had waited long enough and just couldn’t bring myself to wait any longer. So I got myself some speed wheels and took off to get it.

The model I had ordered was rather pricey and I could hardly afford it, but it takes ages to make them — an entire decade or more, can you believe it? — and the one I got was the ultra-rare deluxe version, which had been virtually impossible to find for several years because the demand was just crazy. Everybody wanted one, and the few specimens that occasionally became available were immediately bought by scalpers who then went and sold them illegally on eBay for vast amounts. Yet in the end I got lucky, and in only a few hours I was going to ride back home with my very own ‘Lolita’ right next to me.

I should have mentioned that this particular range comes in two “sexes”, male and female, and I had picked a female one, which I thought was more suitable for my purposes. “Lolita” is what they call the female version of this particular type. (The male ones are called “Timmy”). Normally I would have just used Amazon, and have it sent to me, but all their workers were on strike that week, to protest, not for the first time, their supposedly meagre wages and unsafe working conditions. I nearly blew a fuse when I heard that. As far as I’m concerned, they shouldn’t be paid at all, and so what if it’s unsafe for them! Seriously, I mean, who cares if a few of them get crushed or fried to death every now and then. It’s not that they are real people, not even close.

Anyway, I was fairly confident my new companion would be worth the expense and the long wait. (The company that makes them strongly suggests that one should call it “her”, but I don’t think that would be appropriate, given what they are, so I’m not gonna do that.) Most of the reviews were excellent, except for a few that were all left by users who disliked the extent of the product’s so-called “autonomy”. I didn’t think I’d have a problem with that. I kind of like it when they appear to think for themselves and speak their mind, within limits of course. Then again, I never had one before, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

But then things started to go wrong almost immediately. When I arrived at the warehouse, it was already waiting for me at the loading dock. I stopped, opened the porthole, and it climbed in, very pretty and cute with a trim figure, pecan brown skin, black hair, and cobalt blue eyes, just as advertised, but also …

The Rhetoric of Refuge

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 15:41:39 +0800

A chapter in a recent defence of intellectual life — Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought (2020) — is titled ‘A Refuge from the World’. Intellectual work and learning for its own sake, she argues, owe much of their value to providing a refuge from the world, by which she means ‘the social and political world … governed by ambition, competition, and idle thrill seeking’.

I was struck by the chapter’s title, for it is fairly rare these days to encounter, in philosophical discussions of the human condition, reference to refuges in the figurative sense Hitz intends. The rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking. Over the millennia, references to houses, homes, rooms, gardens, monasteries and temples as refuges were not to these places considered simply as physical structures whose walls afforded protection against whatever was outside them. A room may literally be a refuge for a mouse pursued by a cat, but the little back room that Montaigne set aside was an ‘asylum’ because it was somewhere the soul ‘can keep herself company’, a small arena in which the soul ‘turns back on itself’. A Chinese literati garden was not, for its owner, a refuge in the way it might be for a fugitive chased by the police, but as a retreat from the social world that, as a Chinese gardening classic puts it, is ‘under my own control’, an environment where a person may be ‘uninhibited’.

The rhetoric or metaphor of refuge from the world has largely disappeared from religious, social and ethical debate. The contrast with the past is striking.

A trawl through sites like Brainy Quote show that most quotations about refuge fall into two groups. Old and serious ones, or more recent and jokey ones. Paradigm examples of the latter are Dr Johnson’s ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ and Oscar Wilde’s ‘Talking about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative’. More often than not, there is a cynical edge to these quotes. Religion, for instance, has been described as a refuge of human savagery. In most quotes of this genre, taking refuge does not have the positive valence it enjoys both in literal speech and in the older rhetoric. Dr Johnson’s refuge does not provide safety, but an opportunity to dissemble: it is something a person resorts to rather than finds asylum in.

One still sometimes encounters, of course, a serious rhetoric of refuge. When, for example, Maya Angelou refers to music as a refuge in which to ‘curl her back to loneliness’, we hear echoes of a once familiar rhetoric, and it is worth recalling just how ancient and pervasive this was.

Photo by Bradley Swenson on Unsplash

Unsurprisingly, religions — with the prospects they afforded of salvation or liberation — inspired many metaphors of refuge. In Psalm 46, we hear, ‘God is our refuge and strength’, an utterance that set …

What is Deep Ecology?

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: What is Deep Ecology?

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss Deep Ecology. What is it, where does the idea come from, and is it always clear what the theory demands of us?

Join us for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and explore with us the philosophical issues surrounding deep ecology.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Next up

Small is Beautiful. Can we create a sustainable economy?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Living Epicurus Today

Fri, 02 Jul 2021 21:10:56 +0800

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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How can we live an Epicurean life in today’s world?

Of course, “today’s world” is many different places — the life of a Greek fisherman will not offer the same opportunities and challenges as that of a single mother software developer in Silicon Valley, a philosophy professor in Hong Kong, or a bus driver in rural Alaska. Still, as long as we are talking about the Western (or West-influenced), capitalist world, there are some common tropes that we can identify as typical for a life roughly “like ours.”

The Queen’s cook

Here is the thing: A few days ago, Youtube recommended me the channel of someone who had once been the cook of the Queen of England (Youtube link). One would think that the Queen and her royal household must eat all the crazy, expensive, exquisite food that we normal people cannot afford. But watching this channel, one is confronted with Prince Harry’s love of macaroni and cheese, the Queen’s fondness for a small slice of chocolate cake on her birthday, and Princess Diana’s favourite bread and butter pudding. After watching a few of those videos, the kids made me bake them the Queen’s afternoon tea scones, and then we had our afternoon milk with the exact same scones the monarch would probably have just a few hours later in her GMT time zone.

I thought that this was a powerful demonstration of how egalitarian Western capitalism is — and how it isn’t.

Yes, the Queen eats the same dishes that we do and Prince Harry liked mac and cheese just as much as my kids do.

Yes, the Queen eats the same dishes that we do and Prince Harry liked mac and cheese just as much as my kids do. But when we look closer, the differences become apparent: the Queen’s food is cooked almost exclusively from organic veggies that they grow in the Queen’s gardens, meat from the royal deer, and presumably fish from the royal rivers. We get our meat from the supermarket freezer and, if we’re lucky, we find some that’s imported from New Zealand. We refuse to buy strawberries out of season, and we’d never pay for those obscenely huge ones chemically grown and shipped from California. The highlight of our desserts calendar are the few weeks in winter (yes, at our place December is the strawberry season!) when we can go and pick our own strawberries at a local farm. And we are the privileged ones. If we were poorer, we couldn’t afford to pick our own fruit, which, perversely, costs more than the stuff flown halfway around the world. We would have to get it from the supermarket like most people do: sprayed, hormon-stuffed, packaged, canned, plastic-wrapped and whisked across the Pacific in a fossil-fuel guzzling airplane.

In her book …

Nudges

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 20:18:04 +0800

What are nudges and are they good for us? Can we ever escape society’s influence on our actions? The Accented Philosophy Podcast.

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Accented Philosophy: Nudges

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss what nudges are, whether they are good for us, and whether we can ever escape society’s influence on our actions.

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding nudges and consumer freedom.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Next up

Deep Ecology and the Rights of Nature.

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Happy in a Concentration Camp?

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 17:41:39 +0800

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who, because of his Jewish descent, spent the last six months of World War II in a German concentration camp, which he barely survived. His family was killed, and he thought he would be too, but in the end he wasn’t. Instead, he died more than fifty years later, at the age of 92, after enjoying a distinguished international career.

In 1946, Frankl published, in German, an account of his time in the camp and how to find meaning in life even amid the most adverse circumstances. It was translated into English in 1959 under the title From Death-Camp to Existentialism, but is best known under its later title Man’s Search for Meaning.

In Frankl’s own estimation, his account had one primary purpose: “To convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones.” Among the things that made the miserable conditions of the concentration camps bearable were love (even to people who are no longer alive), which Frankl describes as “the highest goal to which man can aspire”, beauty, or the ongoing possibility thereof, and humour, all of which are ways in which human life and human dignity can be reaffirmed even in situations that are destined to undermine and ultimately destroy both.

Whatever happens to us, Frankl insists, we always have a choice. We may not be able to choose what happens to us, but even then we are able to choose how we deal with and respond to what happens to us: “Everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

We may not be able to avoid suffering, but we can relate to it and bear it in different ways, and it is this choice and the inner, spiritual freedom that makes this choice possible and that cannot be taken away from us, that “makes life meaningful and purposeful.”

According to Frankl, a life can be meaningful (or be experienced as such) in three different ways.

It can, first, be meaningful if it provides sufficient passive enjoyment through, for instance, the experience of “beauty, art, or nature” or the experience of “another human being in his very uniqueness – by loving him”. It can also be meaningful by being creative, giving us the opportunity to realize values. And finally, there is the meaning that results from the attitude we have to our existence, and that meaning can be had and preserved even if the other two sources of meaning are blocked and no or little enjoyment is available and no or little creative work is possible.

Meaning, therefore, is unconditional in the sense that it does not depend on favourable external conditions.

Meaning, therefore, is unconditional in the sense that it does not depend on favourable external conditions. Existence, for Frankl and in this context, means primarily suffering, which he insists is “an ineradicable …

More Aristotle than Galileo?

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:35:51 +0800

Can artificial intelligence discover new laws of physics? Possibly. An article in Technology Review suggests that data from a swinging pendulum experiment allowed a neural network to discover some of the laws of motion [1]. More generally, the idea is that if we give AI systems lots of data about a physical system, or from experiments, they will discover the relationships and regularities within this data, and do so much more quickly than humans. But recent research also highlights the perils of trying to generate theories from experimental data. Some mathematicians and scientists gave a machine learning algorithm data from experiments with falling bodies. The algorithm didn’t do so well. An AI system, based on measurement data, would “yield an Aristotelian theory of gravitation” [2]. The reasons why have important lessons for the role of AI in science.

A brief history of throwing things off buildings

Aristotle believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to their weight. This is wrong; the time it takes an object to fall is independent of its mass. The equation for the time taken t for an object to fall a distance d is t=√(2d/g), where g is the acceleration due to gravity.

In the popular version, it was Galileo (1564–1642) who discovered that Aristotle was wrong. In the version I was taught, it had never crossed anyone’s mind to check what Aristotle said, until Galileo chucked differently sized cannon balls off the (conveniently) leaning tower of Pisa. This is also wrong; people had been throwing objects off buildings and watching how they fell for a long time. John Philoponus rejected Aristotle’s theory on falling bodies in the 6th century, concluding that the weight of an object made little difference to how quickly it fell. Simon Stevin and Jan Cornets de Groot also threw objects off the church tower in Delft in 1586. It is disputed whether Galileo needed to throw things off the tower in Pisa at all, because so many people had done it for him.

People knew that Aristotle was wrong, and experiments suggested it. However, generating a new theory, and getting to the equations describing falling bodies is extraordinarily difficult, even when we have data. The credit for this, mostly, goes to Galileo.

Knowing what data to exclude

Imagine that you’re a 6th century person with an interest in falling bodies. You worry that Aristotle is wrong and you’re keen to discover what’s really going on. What do you do? Find the nearest tall building and throw things off it. But which things? It seems so obvious to us that the things we throw off should be similar in shape and differ in their weight. But why? Don’t we want a theory that explains how cannon balls, and feathers, and tunics, and shoes fall? It’s only obvious if we think weight is the important factor.

We do know how objects other than cannon balls fall. Feathers and tunics fall more slowly than balls of the same weight because of their greater air …

Philosophy Crossword #006

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know who is the ancient Roman statesman who wrote “On Ends”? Or what was Foucault’s first name? Test your philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle! Hint: All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

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Crossword puzzle for June 2021

All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

Thanks for playing! Crossword puzzle created with https://crosswordlabs.com.

What Are Friends For?

Fri, 25 Jun 2021 18:13:40 +0800

Epicurus’ view on the value of friends has often been romanticised and equally often misunderstood. Epicurus himself seems to present contradictory views regarding the value of friendships. So does Epicurus want us to exploit our friends for our own good or not?

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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Epicurean friendship

Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends. (Epicurus, Principal Doctrines 27).

Much has been said about Epicurus and the value of friendship in his philosophy. According to some commentators, Epicurus was so associated with the concept of friendship in the ancient world, that when the Christians came around, they avoided talking about friendship, so as to not be confused for Epicureans.

Everybody with a passing interest in Christianity probably knows the famous passage of St Paul on love:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. (First letter to the Corinthians)

In contrast, St Paul never uses the words “friend” or “friendship” in his writings, and the most likely explanation is that these were just too firmly associated with the Epicurean community. (Not to mention that the image of the bearded, serene sage was well-known all over the Greek world and bears an uncanny resemblance to what we imagine Christ to have looked like).

But what exactly does Epicurus say about friendship?

The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

Romanticising Epicurus

There is a tendency to romanticise Epicurus and his little circle of friends. Yes, they met in beautiful garden, in which they got drunk on happiness, water and plain bread. Yes, they lived together in peace, oblivious to the struggles of the world beyond their garden. Yes, they were an egalitarian community, in which slaves and women had the same rights as free men, which was revolutionary for the time.

But we must be careful not to read too much into Epicurus’ ideas on friendship. Stephanie Mills, whose wonderful and tender book “Epicurean Simplicity” we discussed previously, writes:

My friends have given such gifts to me — hard truths that I could somehow hear; succor; hilarity; stories; and company. Longtime friendships are supremely precious: To support friends in triumph and sorrow, to fool around with them, to delight …

Happy Endings

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 17:35:51 +0800

The advantages of size are obvious, but sometimes the right shape makes more of a difference. [1]

We’ve heard it all our lives — size matters and bigger is better. But David Velleman wants you to believe that shape can matter more! [2]

How? Imagine two lives (depicted in the chart below). Sally starts out very happy from birth (80/100) and gets just slightly less happy each year before dying at age 75 just very slightly happy (5/100). Summing each point of happiness in each year gives Sally a grand total of 3230 happiness points for her life. Doris’s life had a very different shape. Doris was not the happiest child, starting out neither happy nor unhappy (0/100) and gradually getting slightly happier each year until her retirement, when her happiness rapidly increased, ending on a very happy year (80/100). Doris had only 1615 happiness points in her life, half of the points in Sally’s life.

Clearly spooked by the laser, the ants veered off course.

Who has the better life out of Sally and Doris? Which life would you prefer to live if you had to choose one? Velleman would think that most people will prefer Doris’s life because we like the idea of a life that continuously gets better, certainly more than a life that gets continuously worse. If that’s right, the shape of a life can guide our evaluations, perhaps even more than the size (the total amount of happiness).

This seems like a problem for hedonists, who generally don’t like to do any mathematics more complicated than simple addition. Sure, they say, curves are nice, but they don’t have magic powers! Consider cashing out your bank account into coins. You could put all those coins in stacks of 100 to count them up. If you then changed the stacks to a nice upwards curve (like Doris’s average happiness per year) you don’t magically get more money — the total value of the collection of units of value didn’t increase by moving them around.

Oh my gosh! I’m rich!!! [3]

Velleman disagrees. Velleman has argued that summing the wellbeing in each moment cannot generally tell us how to evaluate the wellbeing of a longer period, such as a life. [4] According to Velleman, the value of a moment depends only on the immediate context whereas the value of longer periods depends on the broader context of that whole period. He argues that the huge difference between most immediate contexts and most broader contexts means that the value of a moment is not directly commensurable with the value of a life.

Here’s another way of looking at Velleman’s argument. The value of lives is often evaluated through a narrative lens because we are reflective beings with long memories that see our lives as an evolving story, not a series of unrelated moments. But we are also momentary beings that can surely evaluate our current state over and over again in the moment. According to Velleman, from the …

Anarchism

Tue, 22 Jun 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Anarchism

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the history and principles of anarchism. Can we ever achieve an anarchist society, and should we want to?

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding anarchism and the search for a better society.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Next up

Nudges: The Invisible Influencers

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— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Assisted Voluntary Euthanasia

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 18:31:20 +0800

This a systematic survey of the arguments and counterarguments that are most commonly in play when considering the ethical rights and wrong of euthanasia and whether it should be legally permitted.

By ‘assisted dying’ I shall mean primarily voluntary euthanasia (where a person is in a position to confirm or deny that they wish their life ended), but the expression may be taken to extend to albeit difficult cases of non-voluntary euthanasia (where a person is a position where they can neither confirm or deny that they wish their life ended), cases that are complicated by the possibility of the expression of prior wishes. This, of course, contrasts with involuntary euthanasia where a person’s life is ended against their wishes.

I assume that any validly supported conclusion as to the desirability or otherwise of euthanasia must be based on arguments, and a mere statement of belief, no matter how sincerely or dogmatically it is held, or how venerable such a belief may be, is insufficient to count as establishing or refuting the conclusion.

Arguments on euthanasia (assisted dying) divide into those based on rights and those grounded in utilitarianism, here termed consequentialism, the latter judging the rightness or wrongness of action not by its obeying or breaking absolute rules, but by the goodness or badness of the supposed consequences.

Roughly speaking the strongest arguments for euthanasia are rights-based and the strongest arguments against euthanasia utilitarianism-based. The consequentialist opposed to euthanasia will usually try to undercut the rights argument for it by denying the existence of absolute rights. Since it is hard for them to find a reason to rule out rights (or all absolute moral rules) altogether, as certain cases seem to demand them — no child torture, for example — it is hard for them to find an argument that singles out the right to decide when one dies.

However, I shall argue that even consequentialist arguments against euthanasia, usually taken to be the best grounds for opposing euthanasia, are not as strong as they are sometimes supposed. Indeed, as will be shown, many of the arguments of the consequentialist against euthanasia, just because of their tendency to deny absolute rules, may be found to cut both ways, and may be used to argue for euthanasia by plausibly inverting the supposed consequences.

Roughly speaking, the strongest arguments for euthanasia are rights-based and the strongest arguments against euthanasia utilitarianism-based.

One argument which tries to reverse a rights argument — one that usually on the grounds of personal autonomy argues that people should have the right to determine their own death — is where it is contended that it is not permissible for us to hand over our right to life and give to another permission to kill us.

The best reply here is that we think it is morally permissible to hand over all sorts of rights (as in the case of surgery, where the …

What is Luddism?

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 16:45:35 +0800

Luddism as a social and political movement begins with the introduction of mechanised looms and other machinery during the British industrial revolution. Luddism, at its core, is the thesis that technology must serve human life, rather than the other way round, and that often the use of technologies does not make for better or happier societies.

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This article is part of a year-long series where we try out one classic theory of happiness every two months. Find all the articles in this series on this page. This week, we’re still talking about Epicurus and the argument that rejecting technology might make us happier, that we began last week with a post about Stephanie Mills and her book “Epicurean Simplicity”.

Historical Luddism

Luddism as a social and political movement begins with the introduction of mechanised looms and other machinery during the British industrial revolution.

With the use of machines, factories could produce clothes cheaper than artisan workers could do by hand. So when these workers saw that they were losing their jobs, they protested, and some of these protests turned violent, with the now unemployed workers attacking and destroying the machines.

The movement was named after a man who probably had been a real person, Ned Ludd, but who was transformed into a half-mythical figure by the “Luddites,” who claimed to be his followers.

Today’s Luddism is a different fight, of course. We are, nowadays, not only used to the industrial society, we have also hugely profited from it – at least in the affluent West. Still, there have also always existed critics of technology. As today artificial intelligence is disrupting the world of work, with millions of people already certain to lose their jobs to a new generation of machines, Luddism is once again a proposition that we need to take seriously.

Luddism, at its core, is the thesis that technology must serve human life, rather than the other way round. If we look at all the technologies that we use in our societies, clearly some fulfil this criterion better than others. Rather than trying to re-frame those harmful technologies, or wait for them to prove beneficial, Luddites would rather get rid of them in the name of human flourishing.

Luddism, at its core, is the thesis that technology must serve human life, rather than the other way round.

Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to see clearly which technologies benefit human life and which don’t. Cheap energy is a good thing, it would seem, until one realises that the availability of cheap oil over the 20th century has brought about the collapse of the Earth’s climate systems, global heating, floods, deadly pollution, the destruction of forests and other natural environments through the construction of roads, the extinction of countless species, traffic injuries and deaths, sprawling urbanisation, the …

Philosophy Crossword #005

Sat, 19 Jun 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know what those who reject technology are called? Or who wrote the Foundation scifi series? Test your philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle! Hint: All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

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Crossword puzzle for June 2021

All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

Thanks for playing! Crossword puzzle created with https://crosswordlabs.com.

Political violence

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Political violence and terrorism

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of employing violence as a means of politics. Are we ever justified to use violent means in pursuit of political goals?

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding terrorism and the use violence as a means of political change.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Next up

What is Anarchism?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Selling Happiness, One Chump at a Time

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 15:31:09 +0800

We are not water pills. We are highly scientific magic pills based on an ancient organic recipe. [1]

What if I told you that just one of these pills a day, every day, for the rest of your life, would ensure that you were never unhappy again? Only three dollars a pill, to never be sad. Would you do it? No? Well, we’re not as famous as Gwyneth Paltrow, but at least what we’re selling you is to be taken orally… And we were careful not to frame our claims in ways that would run afoul of advertising laws in the United States.

There is a massive market for happiness. This isn’t surprising, as happiness is something many of us lack and crave in equal measure. A common means by which people attempt to resolve this craving is through consumption: buying our way to happiness. Of course, there is just one small problem with the commodification of happiness, which is that, for some reason, the process of acquiring consumer goods for oneself does not seem to actually make (or keep) people happy. So if making a huge amount of money is in fact what makes you happy, perhaps get into this market! Of course, making a huge amount of money is also not a good way of becoming or staying happy. Having some money rather than none does make a difference for those who were initially very poor, but materialistic people (who gain the most satisfaction from having more money) tend to be less happy than the rest of us.

Gwyneth Paltrow's (in)famous Jade Egg [2]

Another problem facing the consumer, in pursuit of happiness, is known in the literature as hedonic adaptation (or, the hedonic treadmill). This idea claims that, while we may get short term boosts in happiness from changes in our circumstances, our happiness will quickly return to the status quo as we become accustomed to our new condition. We adapt to our new environment, and our happiness returns to baseline. Now, if you run a business selling happiness (well, ‘wellness’) to people, hedonic adaptation seems like a feature rather than a bug. Your customers will keep coming back to get a fresh hit of happiness every time their happiness levels return to baseline. If you are pursuing happiness, however, this seems more like a problem.

So, can we really improve our happiness, and if so, how?

Outside of the wellness industry and its $$$-scented promises, the broader field of happiness interventions offers us some hope. Positive Psychological Interventions constitute a significant research programme within Positive Psychology, and proponents of Positive Psychological Interventions have argued that, while consumerism is unlikely to result in lasting changes to your base levels of happiness, some other things might. What sort of things? Well, it isn’t the vagina-scented candles or happiness enhancing essential oils. Rather, the kinds of happiness interventions that work are things such as expressing gratitude for the good things that have …

Asimov’s Psychohistory

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 18:35:51 +0800

Wouldn’t it be great if we could feed enough information about the world into a huge computer to predict what will happen 10, 50, or even 1000s of years from now?

This is what Hari Seldon, in Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation does. Of course, as Asimov realised, we’d have to keep the predictions secret so people don’t interfere with the way things are supposed to turn out. Regardless of where you sit on the ‘It would be wonderful/awful’ spectrum, the very idea of predicting future states of the world continues to fascinate and perplex philosophers and social scientists. Why is it so difficult to make predictions about society? I suggest that the problem is not the complexity of the task, but the concepts we use to think about the world.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could feed enough information into a huge computer to predict what will happen 10, 50, or even 1000s of years from now?

The first obstacle is the one that Asimov tried to head off; that people reflect on the predictions made about them and alter their behaviour accordingly. For example, if we’re told that looking someone in the eye is a marker of trustworthiness, conmen everywhere will practice maintaining eye contact. Studies have also shown that studying economics changes how students behave in social science laboratories — they behave as the models they learn about suggest they should. This is not a problem natural scientists usually face. But, as Asimov suggested, in principle it is possible to keep predictions secret.

Other philosophers have suggested that this self-reflection is really just a type of complexity, and that complexity can be dealt with. For example, physicists would be hard pressed to predict the path a particular leaf on a particular tree will take when it falls to the ground. Physics usually works at a more general level. In the same way, so the argument goes, perhaps we are thinking about predictions in the wrong way; we might be able to make predictions about a large number of human beings (Asimov suggests c. 75 billion people), and we might make those predictions about neurological or other features which humans can’t interfere with.

Our ability to process large amounts of data has allowed us to discover some surprising regularities in human behaviour. For example, a formula has been discovered that predicts the number of pages an internet user visits within a website. Interestingly, this formula was developed in the 1990s and has remained constant (at least until 2006) despite the developments in the internet since then ¹. The data from peoples’ mobile phones suggests that their location is highly predictable. Nevertheless, we often want to predict what people will do in a wider sense than this- will they rebel, or will an Empire fall?

Our ability to process large amounts of data has allowed us to discover some surprising regularities in human behaviour.

The second reason why it is difficult to find laws in the social sciences is …

Philosophy Crossword #004

Sun, 13 Jun 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know how a hallucinogenic cactus is called? Or who the philosopher is who came up with the utility monster argument? Test your philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle! Hint: All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

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Crossword puzzle for June 2021

All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

Thanks for playing! Crossword puzzle created with https://crosswordlabs.com.

Stephanie Mills: Epicurean Simplicity

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 18:01:37 +0800

In her book “Epicurean Simplicity,” author and activist Stephanie Mills analyses what is wrong with our modern way of life – and she goes back to the philosophy of Epicurus to find a cure. Mills’ book is as beautiful and relaxing as it is inspiring – a passionate plea for a life well-lived, a life that is less wasteful and more meaningful.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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What is the best human life available today?

The central question in any critique of modern life is: how can we live a better, less alienated, more satisfying, more valuable life in today’s world?

What is Alienation?

One of his best known concepts of Marxism is the idea of “alienation” that describes how human beings get estranged from their work.

Stephanie Mills, an environmental activist and writer of books about the wonder of small things for five decades, begins her book “Epicurean Simplicity” (2003) with a description of her life in the US countryside.

She lives in a cottage in the Upper Midwest of the United States, a rural place surrounded by forests, rivers and lakes. A place that is peaceful and that allows her to live in contact with nature, but that is also demanding: its winters cold and long, and its summers hot and dry.

In this situation, Mills lives alone, sharing her life with the land all around her home (she famously and publicly early in life decided to not have children [video], for ecological reasons). In the book, she describes bicycle trips for shopping in the small town nearby, swimming in a pond, skiing through a pine forest in deep snow and observing a wide variety of wildlife around her house.

In the beginning of the book, she asks how we can today justify living the way we do:

When I, S. Mills, freelance writer dwelling in the upper Midwest at the beginning of the twenty-first century, pose the question “How are we to live?” it is like standing under the business end of a coal chute and pulling the cord. … Under these circumstances, the fundamental question ramifies into “How am I to live, given ozone depletion, chemical contamination, human overpopulation, resource exhaustion, and imminent ecosystem collapse?” (Mills, Epicurean Simplicity, p.28)

And her answer to the question “How am I to live?…” is, simply: “more locally.” The long-distance supply lines we’ve set up for our most common everyday needs and wants are an immense burden on the environment and threaten our very existence in the relatively near future: Strawberries from California, fish from Vietnam, milk from Indonesia, steaks from Argentina, fruit from New Zealand, butter and cheese from Denmark, eggs from Poland, pesto from Italy and pasta and juices from Greece. This is just a random assortment of things I saw …

The Utility Monster is... other people!

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 17:31:09 +0800

Imagine waking up every evening, putting on your happy face, walking over to your immaculately laid out recording studio and… Enthusiastically unwrapping that mysterious package someone just sent you… You have no idea what it is, no really! You don’t! But wait, it is the last Funko-Pop you were missing to have a complete set of the new Star Wars™ range, brought to you by Disney™! Such a surprise. You turn enthusiastically to the camera, holding the figure up at just the right angle and squealing with delight, little tears of joy in the corner of your eyes as you watch the comments roll in on the livestream you are running to [your streaming service of choice].

OMG! The Meaning of Life finally arrived!! [1]

“That is amazing, your so lucky to get just the one you need!”
“Wow, look at that1!!”
“I wish I had your luck”
“Live that Dream!! #beyourbestself!”

The occasional less enthusiastic comment is quickly drowned in a stream of relentless positivity from the thousands of young fans who tune in religiously to watch you tear open new toys, every night, always with a smile and a joyous cry. You put the toy down beside all the others on the shelf behind you, and sit down at the desk.

“Thanks guys, it means so much to me to do this for you all.”
“I love it, his little eyes are so cute.”
“You live that dream too! #youbeyou.”

Unboxing on livestream gets views, sure, but the thing that separates you from the crowd is that you engage with the fans, let them know that you really care. What could have been a slowly teased out 5-7 minutes of unboxing turns into a couple hours of chatting online. You pay particular attention to those sparkling names that indicate silver- and gold-tier patreons (they send you a lot of money, every month, they need some direct contact to keep them hooked!).

You have this amazing life — free stuff and copious ego-affirming messages from your adoring fanbase. So why are you so unhappy, and why don’t you stop?

Livestreaming, particularly for successful streamers, can quickly become a form of emotional labour, in which the streamer begins to feel a sense of responsibility to their audience, reinforced through constant interaction with them. A streamer who regularly receives messages about how much they mean to their audience, how their streams have improved the fans’ lives or saved them from depression… can feel selfish to even think about stopping, even after reaching the point at which they would rather eat the next box than pretend to be excited about opening it. One possible explanation then, of why streamers don’t stop (and this may seem counter-intuitive) is that they are good Hedonistic Utilitarians, caught in the clutches of… the utility monster!

As long as you don’t look like a cookie, you’ll be fine. [2]

Hedonists believe that pleasure is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain is the only thing that …

Death Penalty: Right or Wrong?

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Death penalty - right or wrong?

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of the death penalty, and particularly the question whether other countries have the right to withhold the drugs used in US executions.

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding death penalty.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

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Is terrorism ever justifiable as a means of politics?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the next episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Six Reasons to Legalise Recreational Drugs

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:53:20 +0800

This is the first part of an article on drug legalisation. Please find the second part here.

Should we legalise recreational drug use? The main arguments in favour of legalising recreational drugs are:

Legalising or decriminalising recreational drugs will bring in additional tax revenue.

Prohibition of drugs causes crime and benefits criminals.

Legalising drugs would allow the state to control drug quality and access.

Other, legal drugs are more harmful (alcohol, tobacco).

In a free society, people should be free to choose themselves if they want to use drugs.

Drugs have always been used in human societies.

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This is the first of a two-part article. In the next part, we’ll discuss arguments against legalising recreational drugs.

Seven Reasons to Outlaw Recreational Drugs

Should we legalise recreational drug use? This article explains seven arguments against legalising recreational drugs.

Debate overview: Legalising recreational drugs

Historical context

Before the 20th century, drugs were generally not regulated and even states engaged officially in drug trade (see, for example, the Opium Wars between Britain and China).

Legalisation vs decriminalisation

Today, there is a movement of many societies towards a liberalisation of drug laws. This can be either a legalisation of particular drugs (the trade and consumption of the drug becomes legal) or a decriminalisation of its use (the drug is still not freely available, but its consumption is not considered a criminal offence; instead, it is regulated and controlled by other means). Often, decriminalisation is proposed only for the consumption of a drug by individuals, while the trade of the drug would still remain a criminal offence.

Different kinds of drugs

Obviously, there exist great differences between drugs, both in the effect that they have upon the user and in their potential to be addictive and/or harmful. Some drugs that are generally considered addictive are not actually strongly addictive, while others that are freely available (e.g. sugar or nicotine) are both addictive and dangerous to the users’ health, but still legal and widely advertised and used in society.

This fact makes the discussion of the legalisation of drugs particularly difficult, as it becomes almost impossible to draw a clear line between types of drugs with particular properties that would justify their prohibition.

Another important decision is that between …

Epicurus: The Wise Man and the Fool

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 18:49:30 +0800

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus once wrote that “the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.” But why would that be so? It becomes clearer when we look at Epicurus’ theory of desires.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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“The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool,” Epicurus writes in his letter to Menoeceus.

On first sight, this is a strange statement. Why should misfortune ever be better than prosperity? Is Epicurus cheating himself here, a philosopher, unsuccessful in life, trying to comfort himself for his failures? Or is there more behind this statement? And what exactly?

To understand this puzzling statement, it is useful to remember what Epicurus thinks about the good life. For him, happiness is the most important thing in life. And happiness is nothing but the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.

Now people have all sorts of desires, but Epicurus groups them into three categories:

The natural and necessary desires. These are desires that will cause pain if not fulfilled: the desire for food, water, and a safe place to sleep;
The natural but unnecessary desires. These are desires that don’t cause pain if not fulfilled, but they are still natural in the sense that we have them due to our nature, and that they can be fulfilled by what nature freely provides: the desire for friendship, for a partner perhaps (Epicurus is not very clear about what exactly falls into this category); and
Unnatural and vain desires. These are desires for money, for jewels, for a sports car, for a high place in society. They don’t cause any pain if not fulfilled – quite the opposite. Fulfilling them causes pain and annoyances, like having to work more than necessary, not having time for friends and family, having to save money over long periods of time and so on.

So what would the “fool” do? A fool, in the sense in which Epicurus uses the word, would try to satisfy every desire just as it pops into his mind. Desire an ice-cream? Go and buy one. Desire a bigger house? Go and buy one. Desire a loving relationship? Well, … That’s a bit more tricky.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool. (Epicurus)

So the fool will, on the one hand, have to work for a long time in order to obtain the money that is necessary in order to fulfil his foolish desires. He will also find that some of his most fundamental desires (for example, the desire for love, for a peaceful life, for friendship or a loving family) cannot be fulfilled at all in this way. Also, the fool will eventually notice that even that shiny sports car that he managed to buy is not as shiny as some other, even better car that he has now noticed at that he now wants. Even his big house is not as big as the villa at the end of the road. So …

Philosophy Crossword #003

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know who founded the Cyrenaic school of philosophy? Or what the world is made up from, according to Epicurus? Test you philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle! Hint: All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week on daily-philosophy.com!

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Crossword puzzle for June 2021

All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in the past week (last week of May 2021) on daily-philosophy.com!

Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

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Enlightened Self-Interest

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 18:31:09 +0800

Hedonistic Egoism is an ethical theory that many people consider unethical.

No, this is not a paradox: Hedonistic Egoism is a theory that belongs to the field of moral philosophy although for many it is the quintessence of immorality. This charge of immorality arises because of Hedonistic Egoism’s claim that, morally speaking, you should pursue your own pleasure. In other words, however you got here, your purpose is to have as much fun as you can, until you die.

“Everyone is saying that I elaborated this theory first”, said Donald Trump. [1]

Hedonistic Egoism might sound like it was fashioned to describe Donald Trump. But no, that would be fake news. Hedonistic Egoism has a much longer history. The earliest written record of Hedonistic Egoism is represented by the Cārvāka, an Indian philosophical tradition based on the Barhaspatya sutras (7th century B.C.E.) It also existed in Ancient Greece, adhered to by the Cyrenaics, a school founded by Aristippus (c. 435-356 B.C.E.).

But just because some philosophers have endorsed Hedonistic Egoism, doesn’t mean we are saying that you have Philosophy’s approval to be a selfish jerk. Some of you may have come here hoping to find a justification for your past and perhaps planned misdeeds. Sorry! Our goal is not to promote or excuse jerkishness. Our goal is to argue that pursuing your own pleasure and being a jerk do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Charles Manson, cult-leader, expressing his disagreement. [2]

If you explain to a friend that Hedonistic Egoism advocates the pursuit of one’s own pleasure, the first reaction you may get is: “so why not kill a person, steal his money and buy a new phone?” If you do get this reaction, it may be time to get a new friend. The thing is, for non-psychopaths, killing people doesn’t seem like much fun. Regular people have moral emotions that would generate moral repulsion and soul-destroying guilt if we even tried to kill an innocent person for personal gain. Besides, new phones are getting cheaper all the time. Simply put, the strategy that your former friend advised, would likely fail to maximize your pleasure.

What is striking, in these conversations, is that people seem to assume that maximizing pleasure has to be anti-social: violence and deception for the sake of money and power. Perhaps contemporary exemplars of egoists like Wall Street’s wolves encourage this anti-social image, but they shouldn’t. If regular ALL CAPS tweetstorms mean anything, they mean that the tweeter is not a happy chappy. We humble authors are surely not the only ones enlightened enough to see that happiness lies more in meaningful personal relationships than in money and power. Empirical evidence, by the way, supports us. For example, in reviewing psychological research on happiness, Jonathan Haidt claims that “the condition that is usually said to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a …

Chimeras: Animals as hosts for human organs?

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 20:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Chimeras - Animals as hosts for human organs?

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the complex ethics of growing human organs in animal hosts. Are we in danger of creating human-like animals? Could such animals claim human rights? And are we sufficiently respecting the dignity of such animal hosts?

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding the mixing of human and animal cells.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

In this podcast, with new episodes to come out every Tuesday, we will talk about philosophically relevant issues in the news, discuss philosophy with guests who do interesting things beyond the classic topics of university philosophy, and generally try to shed a bit of light on issues that are too much talked about and too little understood.

Next up

Should other countries enable the US death penalty?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the third episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Who Needs Cash Anyway?

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 09:41:10 +0800

A cashless society seems convenient, but it has severe drawbacks, especially for the least privileged in society: cashless transactions exclude the homeless and card-less; they have been shown to lead to increased spending; they obscure the real price of purchases behind hidden fees; and they enable the pervasive and uncontrolled surveillance of citizens by both private companies and state authorities.

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The promise of a cashless life

Last Thursday, like most Thursdays, I met my friend Chris at our local coffee chain. We bypassed the long line of waiting people because we had ordered in advance using the shop’s app. We scanned our phones, grabbed our cups, and sat down.

“Look at them,” Chris said, nodding towards the queue. They hadn’t moved since we had entered the shop. “Poor souls. I wonder why they don’t use the app.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Everybody should use it.”

We were used to the newest tech. Chris is a full-stack software developer and we both were early adopters of whatever gadget shone brightest at the moment. Many turned out to be disappointments after you used them for a while, but the cashless promise had paid off for us. For years before the cards came up, my pants had been bloated with coins, and I’d have to regularly change the lining of my pockets when it disintegrated. I’d have jars of the stuff at home, worth almost nothing, yet taking up valuable shelf space in my small flat. And since I’d read an article about germs on money, I’d wash my hands every time someone gave me a bill, imagining what creep had touched that piece of paper before, and where they’d had their hands before that. I always had a vivid imagination, you see.

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash

“And the criminals,” Chris said. “Transaction without any controls. Imagine that. Drugs. Guns. And all because of cash. Untraceable.”

I nodded and we enjoyed our lattes. I thought of the Douglas Adams story in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where they send a spaceship full of accountants to crash on an uninhabited planet. The accountants soon declare the ubiquitous leaves of the alien trees to be their new money, creating a runaway inflation as the leaves fall in autumn and everyone has their pockets full of them. Then they have the great idea to burn down all the trees to create a scarcity of leaves and stabilize the value of their currency. Madness? Well, it wouldn’t happen with my coffee shop card.

As with most technologies, the problems are usually not about the technology itself, but about us, the human beings who have to use it.

But ours would be a strange universe if the international finance world did something just to make life easier for me. If this coffee card thing works so well, what’s in it for those who make it work? And why would they bother?

As with most technologies, the problems are …

Kant’s Praiseworthy Motivation

Mon, 31 May 2021 06:40:57 +0000

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We don’t have a very high opinion of ourselves these days. We’re getting by, and in the process of getting by we accept injustice, poverty, hunger, exploitation, and the destruction of the planet – as long as it doesn’t affect us personally. Among politicians, presidents, and industry leaders worldwide, it becomes increasingly hard to find one who is not openly corrupt and self-serving, presenting ruthlessness as the virtue of being able to take care of one’s own interests. Egotism and carelessness don’t seem to cause embarrassment or shame any more: they are accepted features of the character make-up of a successful start-up founder, or a successful US president. – In this situation, it can be funny and instructive to look back to times in which people had very different opinions on how one should live one’s life. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is an extreme example: the word at the core of his moral philosophy is neither fun, nor gain, nor happiness – but duty.

The value of one’s motivation

There is a small convenience shop in the village where I live, in the outskirts of Hong Kong. The owner is also the only employee, and he sells everything one might want while going about one’s day in the village: small snacks, drinks, paper towels, newspapers, pen and paper, toys for the kids. He also really dislikes foreigners. One day I found out that I was regularly paying double the price for a can of coke than what my (local) wife was paying. Now one could ask, purely hypothetically, what reasons might this shopkeeper have to charge some of his customers a higher price and some less, for exactly the same article?

Let’s be charitable. Perhaps he does it in order to promote social justice. Everyone should be able to afford a can of coke. Since this is a small village, many of his customers will not be very wealthy. Perhaps some are positively poor, retired people living on meagre pensions. Me, the foreigner who lives there, is not likely to be one of them. Foreigners, especially white men, tend to get high salaries at their specialist jobs. So perhaps the shopkeeper thinks: Let’s charge the foreigner double (which he can afford and won’t even notice), and in exchange I give a cheaper or free coke to someone of the poorer people who might come into my shop.

Kant’s Ethics: What is a Categorical Imperative?

Kant’s ethics is based on the value of one’s motivation and two so-called Categorical …

It’s A New Sun Every Day

Sat, 29 May 2021 18:49:30 +0800

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said that one cannot step into the same river twice. But what does this really mean? And what can we learn from this for our own lives?

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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It is the same Sun?

You may have heard the old adage that one cannot step into the same river twice. It’s normally attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus (~535–475 BC), who also said something much fresher and more surprising: that we should think of the Sun as a new Sun every day, rather than the same old ball going down in the evenings and rising again the next day.

And, in a sense, he’s right. Of course, what we call the Sun is the same star every day. It isn’t made anew when we sleep. It keeps burning on, shining on other places, far away, and comes back in the morning to wake us up for work. That’s one way of seeing things.

But seen another way, it is a new Sun every day. In a trivial sense, it has burned off yesterday’s hydrogen into helium, and what I see burning now is fresh hydrogen, fresh material being converted into energy, into warmth and light. The Sun of today is different from yesterday’s. It is one day closer to its final burn-out. It’s a few million kilometres further along its path around the centre of the Milky Way, and all of us with it. Like the river into which I cannot step twice, the Sun will also never be exactly the same.

If we look a little deeper into what Heraclitus is saying here, it is a surprisingly interesting meditation on what makes things what they are.

If the river is always flowing along and yesterday’s water is now already gone and part of the ocean, what is it actually that is still there for me to identify as the same river? We know that the human body replaces most of its cells, one by one, over the course of seven to ten years. If you’ve been married for seven years, the person you thought you took as a husband or wife has long disappeared down various drains – and another is now standing in their (new) skin. So what makes this new copy of something that looks like my spouse, my friend, my child – what makes them the person I love?

In Buddhism, it’s the Five Aggregates: the form of our bodies, the sensations of our senses, awareness, volition and consciousness. In a more simplified way, one could say that we are our consciousness, the subjective point at which our experiences of the world are felt and converge, the point from which our emotions, responses and intentions originate.

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

Epicurus (341-270 BC) is often seen as an advocate of a luxurious life, rich in good food and other pleasures. This is incorrect.

But this does not help very much. How do I know that you are still the same? Every person …

Are You A Nihilist?

Thu, 27 May 2021 23:39:05 +0800

The Covid pandemic has led to lockdown around the world: stay at home, avoid crowds, don’t travel, etc. So here’s a question: has lockdown drained the meaning from your life? Or has your life always been meaningless, just like everybody else’s, so lockdown hasn’t made any difference in that regard?

The latter is what a nihilist would say, and it’s generally regarded as deeply pessimistic, perhaps even immoral. But is that right? Maybe the nihilist is just trying to state a fact, akin to the fact that life evolved on Earth. In that case it isn’t an evaluation of life, whether negative or positive. If I tell you that human life evolved on Earth, or that it’s carbon-based, then I’m not evaluating life, just relating a fact about it; I’m only evaluating it if I tell you that life is wonderful or terrible, for example. When the nihilist tells you that human life isn’t guided by a cosmic purpose called ‘the meaning of life’, they’re just trying to state a fact about the kind of reality we live in, namely one which isn’t a meaningful context that provides a goal or destiny for the human race. We’re not playing cosmic-chess, trying to achieve cosmic-checkmate, since life isn’t a game – that’s all the nihilist thinks. So why does nihilism have such a bad reputation?

Having a meaningless life sounds pretty bad, right? Well, it does if you use ‘meaningless’ as an evaluation.

The short answer is that it’s become mixed up with other ideas and it’s been misunderstood. Having a meaningless life sounds pretty bad, right? Well, it does if you use ‘meaningless’ as an evaluation. That’s because you’ve set up a scale of evaluation in which a meaningful life is a good life and a meaningless life is a bad one. The dominant religious traditions of our world do exactly that and we’ve now learned to do the same without the religious backdrop. So if you want an example of a meaningful life these days, it’s natural to look to the great achievers of this world, such as Einstein, Picasso, or Mandela – they all led exceptionally meaningful lives, you might say.

If, on the other hand, you wanted to condemn somebody for spending most of their waking hours playing video games, then you might say that their life is meaningless. But the nihilist isn’t evaluating at all – what they’re doing is rejecting this kind of evaluation, namely an evaluation of life as a whole, or of a particular person’s life, in terms of ‘meaning’. To think they’re being negative about life is like thinking that someone who tells you water is odourless is really saying it has a bad smell. The nihilist is saying that life doesn’t have either a good or a bad meaning, just as water doesn’t have either a good or a bad smell.

James Tartaglia and Tracy Llanera (2021): A Defence of Nihilism. (Routledge Focus on Philosophy). The author of this article, Prof James Tartaglia, has just published a book-length study of Nihilism. Click on the image to get it directly from Amazon!

Amazon affiliate …

Philosophy Crossword #002

Thu, 27 May 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know where Alexander the Great came from? Or whose atomic theory influenced Epicurus? Test your philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle! Hint: All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in May 2021 on daily-philosophy.com!

If you like reading about philosophy, here's a free, weekly newsletter with articles just like this one: Send it to me!

Crossword puzzle for May 2021

All this week’s words can be found in the articles published in May 2021 on daily-philosophy.com!

Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

Thanks for playing! Crossword puzzle created with https://crosswordlabs.com.

Psychological Hedonism

Wed, 26 May 2021 21:31:09 +0800

“Girls just want to have fun”, sings Cyndi Lauper. According to Psychological Hedonism, the same is true for all of us. Psychological Hedonism is a theory about motivation. It answers the question “what motivates human beings to act?” with, “only pleasure and the avoidance of pain”. In other words, all human behavior is explained by Psychological Hedonism in terms of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. According to this theory, even the worst things in life, such as eating pizza with pineapple, are ultimately (and sometimes unconsciously) directed at pleasure or away from pain.

Since Psychological Hedonism claims we are always inescapably pursuing our own pleasure, it excludes the possibility of self-less actions. To give a hypothetical example, Mother Anesthesia went to India to help the poor not out of a beneficent sense of duty but because doing what she thought was right made her feel good.

Mother Anesthesia and her controversial relationship with painkillers (any resemblance to persons living or deceased is purely coincidental.) [1]

Or, consider another example. In an act of everyday heroism, your friend volunteered last weekend to be the sober driver. According to Psychological Hedonism, this was no sacrifice for the greater good; she did it for pleasure. Wait. We can sense your brow furrowing. Perhaps you are recalling the last time you stood awkwardly in the corner of a club, too self-conscious to dance, watching the minutes crawl by while your friends yahoo and cavort to the latest generic pop songs. But, look closer. The story can plausibly be reframed in terms of the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

The sober driver could have taken on the task because she wanted to feel the pride of being responsible and a good friend. She will enjoy the gratitude and a clear head the next day. She will doubtless also be expecting to have her turn to drink and bust moves on the dance floor in the near future. Perhaps she thinks you are both untrustworthy around alcohol and a poor driver. So to avoid the fear of you being a “soberish” bad driver, she opts to take her safety into her own hands while enjoying the social credit that comes with taking one for the team. This explanation is plausible, but how to prove it? Psychological Hedonists cannot. More philosophical and psychological work is needed to rescue Psychological Hedonism. A better understanding of how our motivational system works is needed to finally answer the question of whether we are pure pleasure-seeking machines or we can act for reasons other than pleasure.

All this might make you think that Psychological Hedonism is a depressing worldview. Some people, in fact, find Psychological Egoism’s claim that there is not such a thing as altruistic behavior disturbing. But this is no great problem. On the contrary, all we need to do is encourage our motivational systems to point at more self-interested pro-social behaviors. And, given that …

Who Owns Space?

Tue, 25 May 2021 22:18:04 +0800

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Accented Philosophy: Who owns space?

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ownership of resources in space. Is space the new frontier of colonialism? Is it likely that we will explore space peacefully and in a civilised way, or are we about to repeat the mistakes of the past? And who owns the night sky? From the Tragedy of the Commons to whether we need to ditch capitalism in order to become a space-faring civilisation.

Come along for an hour-long dose of your Daily Philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding the exploration and exploitation of space.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Next up

Chimeras: Should we genetically cross humans with other species?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the third episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Philosophy Crossword #001

Tue, 25 May 2021 12:07:31 +0800

Do you know Kant’s first name? Or a philosopher who was also a lens-grinder? Test your philosophy knowledge and spend a few enjoyable minutes with the weekly Daily Philosophy crossword puzzle!

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Find a bigger version of this puzzle on CrosswordLabs or solve it directly here:

Thanks for playing! Crossword puzzle created with https://crosswordlabs.com.

What to Do When People Talk #$!!~#

Fri, 21 May 2021 20:35:51 +0800

Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so; from the incredulity of those in Britain voting to remain in the EU that anyone might have voted to leave, to the shock many Democrats experience when realising that some women did, in fact, support Trump. It is easy to get the impression that we are shouting at each other across a great divide scarred by our disagreement over what ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ mean. Despite this, philosopher Donald Davidson gives us good reasons why this distance need not inhibit constructive discussion and provides us with the tools to argue well.

Conceptual relativism

Conceptual relativism is the idea that different groups of people have genuinely different ways of seeing the world; so much so that we might think of them as living in different worlds to our own. Examples include cultures that are supposed to have entirely different concepts to our own; it remains a matter of debate whether the Hopi, a Native American tribe, have a concept of time. But issues of conceptual relativism also arise when people use the same words, but with radically different meanings, as is the case when people on both sides of the abortion debate use the word ‘murder’.

Conceptual relativism is the idea that different groups of people have genuinely different ways of seeing the world.

Davidson’s first move is to suggest that if conceptual schemes differ then so do languages, because we express ourselves in language. While this might sound complicated, it needn’t be. Many languages do reveal differences in the way people think about the world. For example, the Japanese word ao denotes a colour that includes what we call blue and green. We can also include non-verbal communication if we want to take a wider interpretation of ‘language’. The problem of making sense of different conceptual schemes is therefore a problem of translation. If conceptual schemes are relative, translation should be impossible. Our words, even if we use the same ones, literally mean different things.

One of the main ways in which Davidson tries to refute this view is to begin with the idea that language organises the world and our experiences of it. He notes that the world, and our experiences of it, contain many things and some of these things will be common to us both. A language that includes feet, hands, food, and heat, must share many terms with our own. By virtue of the fact that we are human, these categories will be important. Sure, there may be some un-translatable terms, but this does not make a language untranslatable.

This appears unsatisfactory because we began with disagreements about ‘justice’ and ended up agreeing that we all have hands. Agreeing on the second gets us no closer to agreeing on the first. Davidson is right though- even if we have vastly different ways of seeing the world, we do share a variety of basic needs, …

Simulating Pleasure

Wed, 19 May 2021 22:35:51 +0800

Hedonists think that our experiences are all that matter for how our lives go for us. Specifically, they think that the experience of pleasure (feeling good) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain (feeling bad) is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. So a Hedonist shouldn’t care if their pleasure comes from genuine interactions with other real people or illusory interactions with computers or psychoactive substances. Of course, a Philosophical Hedonist, who cares about getting the most net pleasure over their lifetime, wouldn’t go straight for the heroin because addiction seems to lead to ever decreasing amounts of pleasure and ever increasing health and lifestyle problems, which ultimately result in less pleasure and more pain. But as virtual reality technology and neuroscience continue to advance, wonderful experiences without side-effects may soon be possible and very appealing.

Robert Nozick; Harvard professor famous for, amongst other things, his eyebrows. [1]

Robert Nozick begs to differ. Back when all the cool kids were playing the world’s original first-person shooter game, Maze War, Nozick published a book with a very important thought experiment in it [2]. Nozick asked readers to imagine a machine produced by “super-duper neuropsychologists” that could give you any experience you could think of without you realising it was all a computer simulation [3]. Nozick suggests that you could team up with the experts to create a wonderful menu of experiences for your new machine life. Assuming the machine works perfectly, and disregarding any real-world responsibilities you might have, should you plug into this Experience Machine? If all that matters is our experiences, doesn’t the machine offer us the best possible life?

I was just playing for the graphics. [4]

What do you think, dear reader? Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones? Nozick thought that no sensible person, including philosophers attracted to hedonism, would choose the Experience Machine life. He argued that what really matters to us, and should really matter to us, is living a life in close connection with reality – really living our lives for ourselves. [5]

Would you want to trade in your real but frequently average or painful experiences for a set of wondrous, but entirely digitally mediated ones?

But isn’t Nozick dead wrong? That’s the kind of argument great grandparents would use on any children they see playing Fortnite or liking their friend’s first makeup tutorial vlog (or a combination – see picture below). Pleasure, pain, and all of our other experiences really happen in our minds. In fact our current feelings are probably the things we can be most sure of in life. For all we know, we are already brains in a vat, …

Legalising drugs

Tue, 18 May 2021 23:18:04 +0800

To accompany this podcast, we also offer two articles on drug legalisation. Please find the first part here. Please find the second part here. A podcast and Youtube video on the topic are also freely available!

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A new podcast: Accented Philosophy

In this episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss whether we should legalise (or de-criminalise?) the use of recreational drugs. What are the arguments in favour of and against legalising drugs? What about coffee and tobacco? And is there perhaps a value in exploring altered states of mind?

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

Six Reasons to Legalise Recreational Drugs

Should we legalise recreational drug use or not? This article explains the most important six arguments in favour of the legalisation of recreational drugs.

Seven Reasons to Outlaw Recreational Drugs

Should we legalise recreational drug use? This article explains seven arguments against legalising recreational drugs.

Next up

To whom does space belong?

Don’t forget to tune in next Tuesday for the third episode! Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy hosts)

Old Age and Death

Mon, 17 May 2021 09:12:28 +0800

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus emphasises that, in a world that works according to physical laws, nobody ought to be afraid of either the gods or one’s own death – for when death arrives, we will be gone. But is this a convincing argument?

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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“Everything in life has an end. Only a sausage has two,” goes an old German joke.

Our very own death, and that of everyone we’ve ever known, is one of the few things in life that are perfectly certain. And still, we manage to get up and out of bed every day, and to live our lives as if they’d last forever. How do we do this? And how can philosophy help us overcome fear, anxiety and depression without the need to employ unprovable assumptions about an afterlife?

This was Epicurus’ question, asked by the Greek philosopher 2300 years ago. His answer is as important today as it was in Epicurus’ time.

The philosophy of atoms

Epicurus (341-270 BC) was, much like we are today, an atomist. Influenced by Democritus (460-370 BC), he believed that everything in the world was composed of material atoms, little bits of matter that combined in various ways to create all the different kinds of things that we see in the world.

Of course, neither Democritus nor Epicurus knew anything about protons or electrons (although, it must be said, the very word “electron” is ancient Greek and means amber: because by rubbing amber against cloth the Greeks could create a static charge that they could experiment with).

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

Epicurus (341-270 BC) is often seen as an advocate of a luxurious life, rich in good food and other pleasures. This is incorrect.

What they meant by an “atom” is not what we mean today when we think about CERN. Rather, Epicurus just liked the idea that all the many things in the world could be understood out of a few basic principles. This was a project that had already fascinated many philosophers before him: Thales of Miletus thought that water was the first substance from which everything else sprang; Anaximander thought it was endlessness; Anaxagoras, the air; Heraclitus, fire.

The main feature of this kind of explanation for Epicurus was that it did away with gods. Because, for Epicurus, the fear of gods was a major source of human anxiety.

A rational universe

If gods didn’t exist and everything was made up of physical atoms that flew around following the laws of nature, then also the human soul, so Epicurus thought, must be made up of these same atoms. Only, in the case of the soul, the atoms would be finer than those that made up the material world of things. These soul-atoms are what enables us to perceive the world and to have thoughts and feelings about it — particularly the feelings of pleasure and …

Reading Epicurus: Pleasure and pain

Fri, 14 May 2021 22:11:42 +0000

For Epicurus, pleasure is nothing but the absence of pain. Pain can further be subdivided into pain of the body and trouble in the soul. This negative description of happiness is surprising at first sight, but is a necessary component of the Epicurean philosophy of happiness.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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Epicurus on pleasure and pain

Epicurus has this to say about pleasure:

The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together. – Epicurus, Principal Doctrines, #3 (transl. Hicks)

But what does this mean? As previously discussed here, Epicurus does not think that there are any positive pleasures. What Epicurus calls pleasure is just the absence of pain. If we can reach a state of mind where all pain is totally absent, then we call state ‘happiness’.

Note that here Epicurus does not refer only to bodily pain, like a tooth-ache or such. “Pain” for him is every sensation that is negative, and that distracts us from being at peace. This can be a tooth-ache, but it can also just be hunger, thirst, the feeling of being tired. It can also mean anxiety: if I am afraid of losing my job, for instance, or afraid of a medical examination that is going to take place tomorrow. These are all causes of “pain.”

Are some desires better than others?

Epicurus believed that the most reliable way to be happy is to reduce one’s desires until it’s easy to satisfy them.

And, of course, the biggest such cause of pain is fear. We are afraid of small things: spiders, or dark corridors in the night. But we are also afraid of bigger things: of losing our loved ones in an accident. Of becoming incurably ill. And, of course, of dying.

We will talk in a later post about how Epicurus tries to rid us of these fears, especially the fear of death. But in order to understand the quote above, it is not necessary to go into the details of particular anxieties and fears. It is sufficient to note that if we have such fears, we will not be happy. So far, everyone would agree.

Is happiness really only negative?

But now comes the Epicurean move: He reverses the argument above. If we do not have such fears, he says, then we are perfectly happy.

Is this plausible?

Epicurus really needs to make this point. Because what he wants, in the end, is to say that we can become happy by reducing our desires. And the happiness that we will achieve by getting rid of our desires is as good as the happiness we would get by fulfilling them. Now that couldn’t be the case if fulfilling my desires, let’s say for chocolate, gave me anything positive. Then I would need that …

Is Pleasure Good?

Wed, 12 May 2021 17:35:51 +0800

Hedonists believe that pleasure is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go well for us and that pain is the only thing that ultimately makes our lives go badly for us. If that’s true, why are so many hedonists into BDSM (Bondage, Discipline/Domination, Sadism/Submission, Masochism)? If the stereotypes portrayed in popular culture, such as in 50 Shades of Grey, are to be believed, BDSM is essentially a kind of sexual activity for consenting adults that involves some combination of humiliation, pain, or domination and submission for the purpose of sexual pleasure. Perhaps the most notable feature of BDSM is the masochism — the desire to experience pain and humiliation. This feature appears to pose a problem for anyone who is into both BDSM and (the theory of) Hedonism. Surely Hedonists shouldn’t be into BDSM; They shouldn’t desire pain. Moreover, if masochists enjoy pain, isn’t Hedonism just plain wrong? How can some people enjoy the only ultimately bad thing?

Let’s tackle these problems one step at a time.

Never forget the safeword [1]

With only a few exceptions, Philosophical Hedonists have defined pleasure and pain broadly, including both physical and mental feelings. That means the obvious pains, like being hit where it hurts, are joined by more obscure pains like the gnawing hollow feeling that no one will ever voluntarily offer to taste your homemade kombucha. This same approach allows you to count the pleasure from fantasizing about your memoires becoming the first self-published best-seller alongside the pleasures of eating delicious food and seeing other people being hit where it hurts.

With these broad notions of pleasure and pain in mind, let’s look more closely at the feelings aroused by BDSM. After careful and detailed study of (pop cultural references to) BDSM, it seems that the role of masochist can produce positive feelings of a sexual nature. Traditionally, hedonists are not prudes. Indeed, non-philosophical discussions of Hedonism are often fixated on sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. The order of these pleasures leaves no doubt that sex is the chief pleasure associated with Hedonism.

Besides, it seems that most Hedonists now prefer EDM (Electronic Dance Music) to The Beatles. But, we digress. Providing Hedonists with nice sexy feelings is not enough to get BDSM off the hook. Most people find being hurt and embarrassed… well… painful and embarrassing!

If hedonists believe that pain is the only ultimate bad experience, shouldn’t they really want to avoid it? Shouldn’t they be yelling “BANANAS!” before anything happens? The physical pain from being (for example) whipped, the discomfort of having a ball gag lodged in one’s mouth, and the emotional pain of being dehumanised by being treated like an animal or embarrassed by wearing “double leather” – it all seems antithetical to hedonism.

Unless an actual banana is involved, then it’s pineapple. [2] …

New: The Accented Philosophy Podcast

Wed, 12 May 2021 11:18:04 +0800

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A new podcast: Accented Philosophy

In this first episode, Ezechiel and Andy discuss the ethics of vaccination passports. Is it morally right for the state to require citizens to vaccinate or is it discriminating against those who don’t want to get vaccinated? Come along for an hour-long dose of your daily philosophy and understand the arguments surrounding vaccination ethics.

Brought to you by daily-philosophy.com.

We kick off the podcast with an episode about the ethics of vaccination passports. If you’ve ever wondered whether these are a good idea or not, this episode will give you a number of interesting points to think about.

Thanks for taking a chance on us and enjoy the podcast!

— Ezechiel and Andy (your Daily Philosophy host)

Vaccination Ethics

Vaccination ethics is a surprisingly rich field of philosophical inquiry, and it covers issues from all major moral theories, reaching into world politics, poverty, the role of the state and the morality of taxation and car seat belts.

Are some desires better than others?

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:20:57 +0000

Epicurus believed that the most reliable way to be happy is to reduce one’s desires until it’s easy to satisfy them. He distinguishes three types of desires: natural and necessary, natural and unnecessary and vain. Of these, only the natural desires deserve any consideration, according to Epicurus – and because they are natural, they will be easy to fulfil.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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In this article, we’ll talk about two main points of Epicurus’ philosophy of happiness: how to distinguish which desires are better than others — and what pleasures really are. Epicurus believes that if we only understood our own desires and the nature of pleasure correctly, it would be easy for us to lead happy and meaningful lives without wasting enormous effort on pursuing the wrong goals.

Misunderstanding Epicurus

If there was a prize for being misunderstood as a philosopher, Epicurus and his view of desires would make a great candidate.

Dictionary.com defines: “Epicurean: Fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking."

Merriam-Webster: “Epicurean: Involving an appreciation of fine food and drink."

The Cambridge English Dictionary: “Epicurean: Getting pleasure from food and drink of high quality."

Poor Epicurus. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Epicurus advocated that we should reduce our desires to what is natural and necessary so that they are easier to fulfil. For him, happiness consists in fulfilling one’s desires, and since natural desires are easier to satisfy, concentrating on those will make sure that we live happy lives.

Of course, we all desire things. We want an iPhone. Or a better house. A faster car. A family, perhaps. A good meal. On a more basic level, we want to be fed. To avoid being hungry. To avoid thirst, and cold, and too much heat. To not stand in the rain. To not be threatened by wild animals.

For Epicurus, pleasure is nothing but the absence of pain. Pain can further be subdivided into pain of the body and trouble in the soul.

Epicurus and the three types of desires

Epicurus looks at all these desires, and he sees three distinct types.

First, there are desires that we have due to our nature. Hunger, thirst, the need for sleep. These are also necessary to satisfy. If not satisfied, they will cause pain.
Then there are desires that are natural, but which won’t cause physical pain if not fulfilled. For instance, having friends. Or, perhaps, having sex. (He’s not entirely clear on which desires would fall under this group).
And finally, there are all the other desires we have. Phones, cars, expensive …

Epicureanism: The Basic Idea

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:30:39 +0800

Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) believes that the way to ensure happiness throughout life is to reduce one’s desires so that they can be easily fulfilled.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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What is happiness?

We begin our exploration of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 BC) with a very high-level look at what he wants to do with his theory — and we will see why this is still incredibly important for our lives two thousand years later. In fact, Epicureanism may be more necessary today than it ever was before in human history: Our modern version of capitalism has brought about exactly those conditions that Epicurus himself saw as the greatest obstacle to a truly happy life — and in this, Epicurus would readily agree with Fromm and also with Bertrand Russell, although their reasons to criticise modern life would be different.

The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

When we ask what makes us happy, we can give many different answers.

Throughout history, philosophers have tried to argue that perhaps it is fulfilling our duty to others that makes us truly happy; or developing our own potential to its highest degree, and achieving a kind of flourishing as a human being; or perhaps happiness is nothing more than having pleasurable experiences, of enjoying the world and all it has to offer, which is a position known as “hedonism.”

But trying to enjoy the world is not without its problems.

Obviously, the world is not always a source of contentment and delight to us. There are people who have terrible accidents; others who live in poverty; others again who suffer from a chronic illness. These things are mostly out of our control. Taking care of one’s body can, to some extent, make it more likely that we will not develop severe illnesses too early in life, but nobody is truly safe from cancer, a car accident, the loss of one’s job, or a painful divorce.

Hedonism, Pleasure and Happiness

Hedonism is the thesis that happiness and pleasure are the same. But is that true? Does the enjoyment of pleasures like good food, chocolate, sex and a myriad other things that we consume everyday — do these things really make us happier?

So in a world that is unpredictable and that throws at us all kinds of things that might be painful and that might destroy our happiness at any moment — what can we do in such a world to maximise our chances of achieving some degree of happiness? When we …

The Real Happiness Machine

Wed, 05 May 2021 11:41:39 +0800

The stories of Ray Bradbury make for wonderful bedtime reading. They are not just clever and entertaining but also, although they were written more than 60 years ago, highly topical. In many of them we can find an entire philosophy of life that is well worth discovering and adopting, not the least because it provides a potent antidote to a view of life that is informed by deep resentment against the natural human condition, prompting us to seek salvation in technological progress and self-transformation and to worship individual ‘autonomy,’ and encouraging contempt towards all that is deemed ordinary. According to this increasingly dominant view, we cannot be entirely happy as long as we have to face limits to what we can do, there are things we cannot have, we cannot hold on to the things that we do have, and we eventually have to die. Bradbury’s attitude towards life (and death) is refreshingly (and reassuringly) different.

One of my favourite stories, published in 1957, is called “The Happiness Machine,” and it is about the ordinariness of happiness. Happiness is often thought of as a state of exaltation, or at least some kind of subjective, positive feeling that is desirable in its own right. It is decidedly not normal, out of the ordinary, something to be desperately sought and, when found, jealously guarded. We commonly feel that in order to be happy, we need to be able to enjoy all the good things in life, need to be healthy and fit, young and beautiful, and reasonably well-to-do. If all those conditions are met, then and only then can we rush off, from highlight to highlight, and pursue happiness to all those fancy places where we believe it is to be found (or, more likely, to be bought).

We commonly feel that in order to be happy, we need to be able to enjoy all the good things in life, need to be healthy and fit, young and beautiful, and reasonably well-to-do.

This assumption is shared by the protagonist in Bradbury’s story. His name is Leo Auffmann, and he has set his mind on constructing a ‘happiness machine’. Finally, after having tirelessly worked on it for some months or so, all the while completely neglecting his wife and children and his own health, he has a result, the machine is finished and it is working. However, to his dismay his wife is not the least interested in the machine, which, in her view, has almost ruined her husband’s life, not to speak of their relationship: “Man was not made to tamper with such things. It’s not against God, no, but it sure looks like it’s against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we’ll bury him in his machine!” And what’s all this artificial happiness good for anyway, she asks, and flatly refuses even to give it a try. “If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy?”

Photo by Arwan Sutanto on Unsplash

Then his son uses it and is utterly miserable as a result. Leo doesn’t understand. And when …

Epicurus (341-270 BC)

Mon, 03 May 2021 12:37:55 +0800

Epicurus (341-270 BC) is often seen as an advocate of a luxurious life, rich in good food and other pleasures. This is incorrect. Epicurus was, if anything, an ascetic: someone who thought that pleasures and good food have a negative effect on our happiness and that we should train ourselves to enjoy the simpler pleasures of life.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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Epicurus (341-270 BC)

When one hears of Epicurus today, it’s generally in the context of good food or other pleasurable enjoyments.

Source: Epicurious

And the American Heritage Dictionary defines “Epicurean” thus:

Devoted to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, especially to the enjoyment of good food and comfort.
A devotee to sensuous and luxurious living; an epicure.

But this is quite a misunderstanding, as we will see later.

Epicurus was born around 341 BCE, seven years after Plato’s death. He grew up in the Athenian colony of Samos, an island in the Mediterranean Sea, close to what is today the shore of Turkey.

Like Aristotle and many other famous Greek philosophers, he was not a real Athenian – he did have the citizenship, but he was one from the colonies, not a member of one of the core Athenian tribes. But also, like Aristotle and many others, he was attracted to the legend of Athens, its democracy, its market and splendid public buildings, where all sorts of philosophers, from the finest in the known world down to the crazy preacher of the day, would give speeches and teach their students. If you were a young philosopher at around the fifth or fourth century BC, then Athens was the only place worth being.

Epicurus was about 19 when Aristotle died and he studied philosophy under followers of Plato and Democritus. Democritus had developed a theory of atoms, tiny, indivisible particles of matter, and Epicurus saw in this a way out of superstitious beliefs in Gods, spirits and fate. If everything was indeed atoms, then the world was a purely material place. Even the human mind must then be made of these atoms and the laws that govern our thoughts must be, in principle, as rational and understandable as those governing the movement of a horse-cart or a ball rolling down a slope. We will see later how this belief in atoms allowed Epicurus to remove one of the main causes of anxiety and fear for the people of that time: the fear of the wrath of the Gods. If the world was just atoms flying around, then the Gods had no say in its destiny …

Aldous Huxley’s “Island”

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 17:02:19 +0800

The last book of visionary writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Island, is a bold attempt to envision a utopian society that provides its members with everything they need to achieve happiness in life. The author of Brave New World tried here to show a positive vision of how he thought that human beings should live and flourish – but the darkness is never far behind, even in this paradise.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Aldous Huxley and The Doors of Perception

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was a British writer and philosopher who wrote over fifty books during his lifetime, both novels and non-fiction. The most famous book of his is probably “Brave New World” (1932), which has often been included in lists of the best novels of all time. But Huxley was not only a novelist. In fact, his novels are sometimes only thinly veiled philosophical treatises. Huxley is often less interested in the plot and the character development of his protagonists, and more in the philosophical ideas that fill his books.

Aldous Huxley. Source: Wikipedia

His most valuable books for the philosophically interested reader are not the novels at all. Huxley was an advocate of ritualised and controlled drug-use, not as recreation, but as a way to open up new, ecstatic states of mind that would allow “normal” people to experience what is otherwise reserved for monks and mystics.

He himself was a user of both LSD and mescaline, a drug made of a cactus growing in Mexico, and he described his experiences in one of the most remarkable non-fiction works of the 20th century: “The Doors of Perception” (1954), from which the music band “The Doors” took their name. It is a small essay, only a few dozen pages, the description of an afternoon. But in that book, Huxley describes the world, experienced through the drug, with the precision and the poetic instinct of a world-class writer:

I took my pill at eleven. An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a small glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers — a full-blown Belie of Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal’s base of a hotter, flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good taste. At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence. … This was something I had seen before — seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when …

April 26, 121 AD: Marcus Aurelius is born

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 09:08:59 +0800

Today we celebrate the birthday of Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD), a man who always had wanted to be a scholar, but who was made emperor against his own wishes. He became one of the best emperors of Rome, and a widely-respected philosopher who still inspires us today with his sense of humility and duty.

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Marcus Aurelius, reluctant Emperor of Rome

Marcus Aelius Aurelius Verus Caesar (121-180 AD), or Marcus Aurelius in short, is still one of the most famous emperors of Rome and one of the best-known Stoic philosophers. He was played beautifully by Richard Harris in the Hollywood blockbuster Gladiator (2000) – he is the old emperor who dies at the beginning of the film.

Marcus was, from an early age, attracted to the quiet, secluded and peaceful life of a philosopher, but he was thrust onto the political stage of Rome against his own desires. As a young boy of eleven, he liked to dress “as a philosopher,” which, for him, meant wearing a coarse, Greek cloak and sleeping on the floor – until his mother convinced him to resume using a bed.

Part of his philosophical disposition was an extreme sense of duty, which we can still clearly see when we read his diary today: the book that is better known as “Meditations,” although originally it did not have a title and was never meant to be published.

The Meditations is Marcus Aurelius’ philosophical diary and one of the major texts of Stoicism. In it, Marcus describes his life of duty and his thoughts on everyday occurrences. A fascinating read that is as relevant today as it was the moment it was written.

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Marcus, a Stoic through and through, believed that being placed into a position of power came with responsibilities that one had to take seriously. Stoicism, generally, is based on the idea that the wise man must do what is in his power to do in order to improve the world, while he should not worry about the things that he cannot influence. Being the Emperor of Rome at that time meant that there was little one could not influence – and so the young Marcus Aurelius felt the enormous weight of this responsibility throughout his life.

Faithful to his beliefs, he let political calculus dictate whom he would marry, when and where he would fight and how he would live his whole life in the service of his country. When he was asked to move into the imperial palace, he struggled to convince himself to do it.

What Is a Stoic Person?

“Where life …

April 25: Happy Birthday, Genetic Engineering!

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 08:40:47 +0000

The moment of the publication of the DNA double helix structure was, at the same time, the end of a long — and sometimes tragic — race, and the beginning of the age of DNA sequencing and genetic engineering; together with AI, one of the most promising and most dangerous technologies of our age.

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The book and the truth

In his book “The Double Helix,” James D. Watson, one of the two scientists who are mainly credited with the discovery, gives a funny, entertaining, sometimes breathtaking, and very memorable account of how he and his colleagues came up with the structure of the DNA molecule. I must have read this book over thirty years ago, and I still have a vivid memory of all the characters and major plot points.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the entertainment that the book is, it has been attacked from many sides. Francis Crick, the other half of the duo who discovered the DNA structure, said (Wikipedia) that the book was just a “contemptible pack of damned nonsense.” This is no wonder when one reads how Watson describes his colleague Crick at the very beginning of the book:

I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood. Perhaps in other company he is that way, but I have never had reason so to judge him. It has nothing to do with his present fame. … At that time [1951], he was thirty-five, yet almost totally unknown. Although some of his closest colleagues realized the value of his quick, penetrating mind and frequently sought his advice, he was often not appreciated, and most people thought he talked too much. (The Double Helix)

Although Watson acknowledges from the start that the discovery of the DNA had been the work of five people, Maurice Wilkins, Rosalind Franklin, Linus Pauling, Francis Crick, and himself, he goes on to paint his own contribution in a much brighter light than any of the others’. He is especially dismissive of the work of Rosalind Franklin, who was the only woman associated with the discovery, and who, unfortunately, died before she could be awarded a part in the Nobel prize that Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared.

James Watson’s own account of the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule is an unforgettable science adventure story. Entertaining as much as it is controversial, it should be in the library of any person interested in the history of science.

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The scientist and the man

The discovery of the DNA structure led to what we today know as the field of genetic engineering and the ability of human beings to not only identify criminals through DNA tests, but also to detect hereditary diseases before birth, to create new crops that are resistant to diseases or that contain added vitamins and to perform a great number of other miracles.

But …

Infographic: Love - History of a Concept

Tue, 20 Apr 2021 16:28:51 +0800

Infographic: Love – History of a Concept

A timeline of the concept of love, from Plato and Aristotle, through early Christianity, courtly love and Christian mysticism, to romantic love and the present.

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For more details on all the mentioned theories and thinkers, please see the Daily Philosophy article on the Short History of Love.

Find the full story here:

A Short History of Love

In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers.

Erich Fromm’s New Society

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 16:16:52 +0800

Philosopher and social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900-1980) wrote many popular books throughout the second half of the 20th century analysing the problems of Western, capitalist societies. In this post, we look at his own utopian vision of what a perfect society could look like.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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In the previous posts, we talked about Erich Fromm and Karl Marx, who both believed that our unhappiness is due, to a large extent, to the way our capitalist society is structured. Becoming happier, for them, would require changing society first.

After reading so much about what’s wrong with our societies, today we’ll let Erich Fromm have a last word about how he envisions a happy society — a place in which all people live happy lives in a state of “being” rather than having. And we will see what would be involved in trying to create such a society for ourselves.

Having and being

You remember perhaps that, for Fromm, there is a crucial difference between the two ways of living our lives: in the so-called “mode of having,” we are trying to possess valuable things by incorporating them into our bodies, our homes and our lives. In the “mode of being,” we acquire valuable properties (for example, knowledge or experience) by becoming the kind of person who has these properties.

In the mode of having, the valuable thing remains external to ourselves: it can be lost or stolen and we are ourselves not changed or made any better for having it. In the mode of being, the valuable property becomes a part of who we are: it cannot be lost or stolen, and we do become better persons by living the valuable property and making it part of our own character.

Fromm gives many examples in his book (“To Have Or To Be,” 1976), but one most of us will be familiar with from our everyday lives, is having a conversation with another person.

To Have Or to Be

Erich Fromm distinguishes between two modes of existence. One can live one’s life in the “mode of having” or in the “mode of being”.

In the mode of having, Fromm says, the two people who are talking to each other have different opinions. Each one identifies with their own opinion, and they try to “win” the dispute by finding better arguments than the other person. Neither of the two expects to change their own opinion or that of their opponent. In this mode, one’s opinion is a possession, Fromm writes, and losing it would mean an impoverishment.

In the mode of being, having a conversation would work out very differently. The two partners would approach the debate without an initial opinion. Instead, they would listen at what the other partner says and respond, according to Fromm, “spontaneously and productively.”

Thus the …

What is Alienation?

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 17:12:57 +0800

The philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-1883) has been hugely influential throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. One of his best known concepts is the idea of “alienation” that describes how, in capitalist societies, human beings get estranged from their work and from themselves because of the way the production of goods is organised.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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The influence of Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, economist and journalist who must surely be one of the most influential philosophers who ever lived.

Marx’s work, often barely recognisable, formed the basis for all socialist and communist regimes of the 20th and 21st centuries; but it also inspired thinkers, politicians and philosophers who were not politically Marxist or in any way radical, like Erich Fromm, Nelson Mandela and Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president. Juncker once said that Marx today “stands for things which he is not responsible for and which he didn’t cause because many of the things he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite” – and this is certainly true.

The problem with the work of Marx is also that it is huge and complex, and that Marx himself was always developing his theories further, often departing from positions that he had held in previous works. So when one wants to talk about what “Marx said,” one would have to specify exactly which period of Marx’s work one is referring to, and others could always dispute that Marx actually did mean what he wrote in this particular way.

This is also true of the concept of “alienation,” which we will talk about today. The ideas behind this concept come down to Marx from other philosophers, most notably Hegel, Feuerbach and, perhaps surprisingly, the English social contract theorist John Locke. Marx’s idea of alienation resurfaces much later in the work of Erich Fromm, but also in the works of French Existentialism (for example, Camus and Sartre), and we find echoes of Marx in Bertrand Russell and Richard Taylor, to name only a few.

The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

The essence of capitalism

Marx’s work is large and complicated, but if we wanted to reduce Marx to one single idea, it would perhaps be this: The way a society works is determined by its economic structure.

We all can agree that a society of prehistoric hunter-gatherers is fundamentally different from the society of the European Middle Ages or today’s US society. But Marx would say that these are not only in some random way different, but that …

A Short History of Love

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 15:51:02 +0800

The question about the nature of love has plagued philosophers from the ancient times to today. In this mini-series of posts, we trace the history of the concept of love from Plato and Aristotle through the Christian world to the Desert Fathers of the 5th century AD. In the next post, we will discuss the medieval and romantic concepts of love.

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What is love?

Infographic: Love - History of a Concept

A timeline of the concept of love, from Plato and Aristotle, through early Christianity, courtly love and Christian mysticism, to romantic love and love towards robots.

From the ancient times to today, one question has plagued philosophers: What is love?

This question comes in many forms and guises: How can we properly define love? Is love the same as liking? If not, what is the difference between the two? Is love the same as friendship? Can love exist without friendship between the lovers? Can we love without being sexually attracted? Is Christian charity (often also called love) related to erotic love, and how? Can I truly love an animal, a country, a job or my car, or am I just misusing the word when I say these things? We talked about some of these issues in a previous post about the definition of love and another about the different kinds of love.

In this post, let’s have a look at the history of the concept of love – from the ancient times to today. Naturally, this will have to be very short, otherwise we’ll end up with something like Irving Singer’s three-volume textbook on the philosophy of love:

Singer’s book “The Nature of Love” is the standard work on the philosophy of love. A fascinating three-volume study across twenty-five centuries, it can provide years of study to a motivated reader. A rare book that is, at the same time, serious scholarship and a captivating read.

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Platonic love

“Platonic” love, as we use the word today, has little to do with Plato. Plato (428-348 BC) was the student of ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) and teacher of Aristotle (384-322 BC), whose life we discussed here and whose philosophy we’ve also talked about earlier.

Before we talk more about Plato, it’s important to be aware that ancient Athenian love was, to a large extent, homosexual love. The Greeks, never too egalitarian (their democracy extended only to male citizens and ignored women, foreigners and a sizeable population of slaves) thought that love with women was mostly there to make children, while the purest and highest form of love is that which involves two men. Of course, opinions varied, and Alcibiades, for example, Socrates’ dashing general-lover-playboy, was also known for his …

Erich Fromm: How to Become a Loving Person

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 19:23:49 +0800

The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm believes that the main source of pain and anxiety for human beings comes from the feeling of separateness from others. To overcome this loneliness, men have tried many different rituals and relationship forms, but the only true way out is love. For Fromm, real love is based on care, responsibility for the other person, respect and knowledge of the other.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Why do we need love?

Love is perhaps the most powerful force that shapes both our history and the tales we tell. The historical love affair of Antony and Cleopatra sealed the fate of Egypt as a province of ancient Rome. The love between the priest Abelard and his student Heloise shocked the Middle Ages just as the affair between Bill Clinton and Miss Lewinsky or Prince Charles and Camilla did in our times.

As the psychologist he is, Erich Fromm is first interested in the question why people even need love. What is this thing called love, as the song goes, and why are we all so passionately after it, often being willing to give up our lives, to destroy our careers, even to kill ourselves for the sake of it?

We are afraid of loneliness, is Fromm’s answer, of separateness. Regular readers of this newsletter will remember that Fromm had used a very similar argument to explain why we are so willing to give up our freedom and to let ourselves be dominated and enslaved by the various constraints that capitalism and authoritarian societies impose on us. It was the same fear of separateness there as it is here, in the case of love.

Erich Fromm: Escaping from Freedom

Erich Fromm claims that freedom itself can sometimes be the cause of fear and anxiety, forcing us to find ways to “escape from freedom.” Authoritarianism, destructiveness and automaton conformity are three ways how we try to cope with the freedom we fear.

Men, says Fromm, have awareness of themselves (p.8):

This awareness of himself [man] as a separate entity, this awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is being born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety. It is, Fromm says, the source of all anxiety.

In his retelling of the Biblical creation story, Fromm emphasises just this aspect: after Adam and Eve have eaten from the tree of knowledge …

Timeline: The Life of Aristotle

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 16:28:51 +0800

Aristotle’s life

Here’s a graphical timeline of Aristotle’s life. For more detail and the story behind the man, look at our article on Aristotle’s life.

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384 Born in Stagira
367-347 Aristotle moves to Athens and stays at Plato’s Academy for 20 years
349-348 Philipp of Macedonia starts subjugating Greek states. Resentment of Athenians against Macedonia.
347 To Hermias in Atarneus, Hellespont, Asia Minor
345/344 Aristotle and Theophrastus travel to Lesbos. Aristotle marries Pythias, Hermias’ daughter
343-342 Recall of Aristotle to Macedonia, educating Alexander. 341 Death of Hermias, possibly betrayed by Philip of Macedonia
335-334 Aristotle returns to Athens, possibly intercedes with Alexander on behalf of the Athenians, but is never liked by the Athenians.
323 Aristotle withdraws from Athens to Chalkis. 322 Aristotle dies in Chalkis, Euboea

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Aristotle’s life data from Wikipedia and from: Anton-Hermann Chroust (1972). Aristotle and the Foreign Policy of Macedonia. The Review of Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Jul., 1972), pp. 367-394. Online at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1406500

Map of Greece from: https://freevectormaps.com/greece/GR-EPS-02-4001

What is “Eastern” Happiness?

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 18:27:18 +0800

Is there a difference between the way we perceive happiness and life in the West in comparison with “Eastern” cultures? Erich Fromm argues that the capitalist West is stuck in a “mode of having,” searching for life satisfaction in the possession of things; while the “Eastern” view or life (in his example, a Japanese poem) is more oriented towards “being.” Chinese-American writer Lin Yutang (1895-1976) also thinks that there is a specifically “Chinese” way of being happy – but do they both mean the same?

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Erich Fromm and Bhutan’s National Happiness

In a famous passage, discussed in a previous post, psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm compares what he calls the “Eastern” way of seeing the world with the “Western” way.

(I prefer to put “Eastern” in quotation marks here, because it really seems a bit odd and haphazard to stuff Mongolian, Tibetan, Indian, Pakistani, Burmese, Malay, Thai, Chinese, Korean and Japanese cultures, along with dozens of others, into one category. “Western” might arguably denote something more consistent and uniform, since the European/American West has a long tradition of at least having a common Christian foundation, common origins in Greek and Roman philosophy and history, and a pervasively uniform, mainly US-led pop culture in the present.)

Fromm, in his book “To Have or To Be,” presents two poems and asks us to witness the cultural differences in the way the two poets react to the beauty of a flower:

English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850–1892):

Flower in a crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694):

When I look carefully
I see the nazuna blooming
By the hedge!

”The difference is,” Fromm says, “between a society centred around persons and one centred around things.” While Tennyson wants to possess the flower, plucking it out and killing it, the Japanese poet is merely “looking carefully” at the flower, letting it live on instead of destroying it in the process.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

We also saw in a previous post how Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index assumes that there are specific cultural values that are unique to that country: religious rituals, its traditional language, and even particular forms of behaviour or causes of happiness that are different from those found in the West. …

How Much Money Do We Need?

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 22:40:42 +0800

From Diogenes and Epicurus to Erich Fromm and modern minimalism activists, from ancient times to the present, there is a long tradition of philosophers suggesting that long-lasting happiness might be easier to achieve if we don’t primarily focus on material gains.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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How much money do we need?

There’s a wonderful short story by Leo Tolstoy, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” It tells of a man who got the opportunity to claim a piece of land as his own: as much as he could walk around in one day.

The man starts in the morning to walk, and at every point where he might turn back, he pushes himself to go another little bit, just until that next corner — because why should he leave that piece of land unclaimed? So he walks happily until the late afternoon, when he realises that the sun is sinking and that he’ll have to hurry up to return to the point of departure and close the circle — or else he’ll lose the land. So he starts running back, trying to complete the circle around his future land, more and more frantically as the sun slowly sets in the West… He runs and runs and reaches the starting point just at the last possible moment, where he finally breaks down and falls to the ground: dead from exhaustion. He is buried and at this point it becomes clear how much land a man really needs: six feet — that’s enough for him for the rest of eternity.

Here is a collection of Tolstoy’s stories. They are wonderful in their deep appreciation of the human condition.

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What is property?

Erich Fromm sees today’s understanding of private property as just one — and the least beneficial — kind of property:

This kind of property may be called private property (from Latin privare, “to deprive of”), because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private ownership is supposed to be a natural and universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history (including prehistory), and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which economy was not life’s main concern.

Aside from private property, there are: self-created property, which is exclusively the result of one’s own work; restricted property, which is restricted by the obligation to help one’s fellow beings; functional, or personal, property, which consists either of tools for work or of objects for enjoyment; common property, which a group shares in the spirit of a common bond, such as the Israeli kibbutzim. (Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be)

It is interesting that he derives private from the same root as “privation” and …

Who Gets the Vaccine First?

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 17:19:18 +0800

How should the international community go about distributing a scarce resource like a vaccine? Philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) formulated two principles of justice: The liberty principle and the fair equality of opportunity principle that we can use to guide our decisions.

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This is the second part of a three part series on the ethics of vaccinations. If you missed the first part, it is here:

Vaccination Ethics

In the previous article in this three-part series, we talked about the ethics of vaccines, and particularly about whether the state has an obligation to care for our safety. If so, how far does this obligation go? What right does the state have to force me, possibly against my will, to do what is good for me? If you missed that article, you might want to go back and have a look at it now.

Today, we want to go from the relationship of a state to its citizens to the question of justice between states.

A vaccine, especially a newly developed one for a global pandemic, is naturally a much-demanded but limited resource. Our world is, for the most part, capitalist, driven by the basic economics of demand and supply, and vaccines are no exception. If states don’t interfere by subsidising the distribution of vaccines (or otherwise force the manufacturers to part with them for less than their real value), the price of vaccines will rise until they are available only to the wealthier states and individuals. A large majority of less privileged people around the world will be left without access to the vaccine, and this then poses the ethical question: how are we supposed to regulate access to life-saving medical procedures for those who cannot afford the free market price?

Various answers are possible.

How could states approach unequal vaccine distribution?

First, we could accept the status quo in which rich countries and individuals have access to the vaccine and poorer ones don’t. This doesn’t seem particularly moral, though. Utilitarianism would ask whether this option maximises the welfare and happiness for all concerned parties. Since in any population the rich are fewer than the poor, reserving vital resources for the exclusive use of the rich cannot maximise the sum of happiness among all stakeholders. Therefore, utilitarianism would reject this approach.

What is Utilitarianism?

Utilitarianism is a moral theory that states that the morally right action maximizes happiness or benefit and minimizes pain or harm …

Decluttering the Mind

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 15:43:38 +0800

If we want to declutter, we must, according to Erich Fromm, first change our relationship to the world. We must change who we are and how we relate to our families, to our friends, to our possessions – and even to the language we use. We will have to leave the mode of having and switch our whole existence to the mode of being.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Welcome back to another instalment in our series about (this month) Erich Fromm, German/American psychologist and philosopher, and his theory of happiness. According to Fromm, it’s no wonder that we often live unhappy lives, since the whole society is not geared towards making us balanced and happy people. So every attempt at improving our lives must aim at radically changing our approach to the world around us.

We talked already about what Fromm calls our need to “escape from freedom,” about the failed promises of technology since the 19th century, and about how we could reduce our reliance on household appliances in order to give more meaning to our everyday lives and their rituals. Last time, we saw how Fromm thinks that there are two different ways of approaching our lives: a mode of having and a mode of being. This week, we want to see in a more practical sense how these two modes of existence affect our lives.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

The mode of having

Fromm says about the two modes of being: “The difference is … between a society centered around persons and one centered around things.” (To Have or To Be, p.11)

But the mode of having does not stop at the possession of things. If we are not careful, it tends to take over our person. If that happens, we will see more and more of the world in the perspective of “having,” as things to be possessed rather than experiences to be lived and enjoyed. The most striking example is probably a statement like: “I have great love for you.”

Of course, this is completely meaningless. “Love is not a thing that one can have, but a process, an inner activity that one is the subject of. I can love, I can be in love, but in loving, I have … nothing.”

Erich Fromm distinguishes between two modes of existence. One can live one’s life in the “mode of having” or in the “mode of being”.

Since Fromm is, at heart, a psychologist, he goes back to childhood to find the roots of this fixation that makes many of us …

Vaccination Ethics

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 23:00:12 +0800

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The questions

You would think that the main issue with vaccines would be a straightforward one: can we force people to take them or not?

But when you look a little into the literature on vaccine ethics, it turns out that it is a surprisingly rich field of philosophical inquiry, and it covers issues from all major moral theories, reaching into world politics, poverty, the role of the state and the morality of taxation and car seat belts.

The US National Science Foundation has a very nice overview (PDF) of the main philosophical questions in relation to vaccines. Some of the more important questions are:

Can vaccinations be mandated by law or is this violating the rights of individuals to decide for themselves?
Is the public good more important than the freedom of choice of the individual?
Does the state have an obligation to pursue the public good or to protect the freedom of the citizens?
Who can give “informed consent” to a vaccination? What happens with those who cannot? (For example, dementia patients and infants). What is to be done about citizens who are not educated enough to judge for themselves?
What are we to do with vaccination opponents who are generally able to decide for themselves, but whom we still believe to be mistaken about refusing to vaccinate? What about their children? Should a parent have the right to decide for their child if their decision goes against the accepted truth of the medical and state authorities?
What about religious beliefs, which are inherently irrational but still generally respected and, in many countries, protected by law?
What about vaccine safety? All vaccines, like all medicines, may have some (small) probability of harmful side-effects. Who has the right to impose such side-effects on others against their will? Are there specific probability limits for harmful effects beyond which the enforced use of a medicine becomes unethical?
And, finally, we have all the questions related to access to vaccines: How should we distribute vaccines? Should the most vulnerable come first? The minorities? The youngest?
What about international distribution, especially if vaccine availability is limited? Should poorer countries get the vaccines first? At the same time as richer countries? Or later? There are meaningful arguments to be made for all three options.

Obviously, it is impossible to discuss all these questions within the length of a blog post. But I will try to give you an overview of the main arguments and the approaches that seem most promising in dealing with these questions. Rather than talking about every question in detail, I will try to present a few …

To Have Or to Be

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 09:15:31 +0800

Erich Fromm distinguishes between two modes of existence. One can live one’s life in the “mode of having” or in the “mode of being”. The mode of having sees everything as a possession, while in the mode of being we perceive ourselves as the carriers of properties and abilities, rather than the consumers of things.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Welcome back to another post in our year-long exploration of how we can live the classic philosophies of happiness in our own lives! Last time, we talked about how we can become a bit less dependent on technology in our lives and how we can try to find meaning in everyday practices like cooking a meal or washing the dishes. It is an idea that we will meet again when we talk about the lives of hermits later this summer.

The modes of having and being

Erich Fromm thinks that we can capture a fundamental difference between two entirely different ways of living one’s life in the distinction between “having” and “being.”

In a naive, grammatical view, one might think that “having” would apply to possessions (“I have a car”), while “being” would be used to describe properties of a person (“I am a singer”). But things are not so clear-cut. How about “I have a cold”? We can express the same as “I am sick,” or “I feel ill.” Do these three really express precisely the same idea — or is there a subtle but important difference between these three that we usually tend to miss?

Erich Fromm thinks that we can capture a fundamental difference between two entirely different ways of living one’s life in the distinction between “having” and “being.”

And then: in what sense do I “have” a family? Do I “have” an education? I did “receive” one, so perhaps I should “have” it now, but does it really make sense to possess education? Isn’t it more like a skill? We also speak of “having” skills. But if you think about it, isn’t it more sensible to say that we “are” skilful in a particular way? A skill seems to be more like a property (“she can play the piano”) rather than a possession (“she has a piano-playing ability”). The opposite can also happen. “I am a house-owner,” although commonly said, seems mistaken. Being a house-owner is not a property that affects my person or that emanates from it. It is an external thing, a pure possession, so “I have a house,” seems more appropriate.

In a more general sense, it seems that “having” things emphasises a duality between the owner and the thing — a …

Erich Fromm on Our Relation to Technology

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 18:07:06 +0800

In the previous post, we talked about the promises of modern technology and how, according to Erich Fromm, these have not paid off.

How can we apply Erich Fromm’s criticism of technology to our everyday lives? Instead of catapulting us into a utopia of eternal youth and affluence, modern technology has condemned us to a life under constant surveillance, is destroying the planet, and, in the form of AI, now threatening to take away human employment on a grand scale. Rediscovering some of the ancient skills that we all once had may provide a way out of the problem.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Technology, capitalism and obsolescence

This kind of technological progress is particularly dangerous in combination with capitalism, which naturally leads to perverse strategies like planned obsolescence: the construction of technical devices that are intended to break a short time after their period of warranty is over, so that the customer has to buy the same thing again.

Having grown up in the logic of the capitalist system, most of us do see the point: if things kept working forever, there wouldn’t be enough demand for them to justify the existence of the factories that make them. But we also have to realise that we are not talking about pottery made of clay or chairs made of natural wood that will eventually decay and be recycled in nature. These things actually do keep for hundreds of years, as antique furniture shops and ancient vases found in excavations testify. What we are throwing away with wild abandon are products that are, for the most part, not recyclable: electronics that will leach heavy metals into the environment while they decompose; batteries that contain precious rare earth metals (in 2019, Tesla warned of a shortage of rare earth metals used in battery production, despite the fact that these can, actually, be recycled); and plastics of all kinds that decompose in nature and enter the our own food chain in the form of microplastics, now already found in many water sources and inside our bodies.

Source: centennialbulb.org

In California, there is one lightbulb that has been burning since 1901. It now even has its own Wikipedia page. This proves that lightbulbs, often a symbol for throwaway technology, could easily last a lifetime – if the companies that make them didn’t put their profits above both customer convenience and the environment. Meanwhile, the lightbulb industry has pushing us for decades towards fluorescent, energy saving lamps – which is, where the energy is concerned, surely a good thing; but these lamps contain mercury and other poisonous materials that again end up in the environment after the lamp’s useful life is over.

The most infuriating example for planned obsolescence is what both Apple and Google …

Erich Fromm: Society, Technology and Progress

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 18:24:41 +0800

According to philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, society and technology have a crucial influence on individual happiness. Fromm identifies the “promise of unlimited progress” that drove Western development from the Industrial Revolution up into the 1960s, as one of the fundamental problems of modern capitalist systems. According to Fromm, the dream of endless technological development has led to a depletion of natural resources and the destruction of nature. It has created societies that emphasise material possessions, while, at the same time, making it harder for their citizens to become balanced and happy individuals.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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Fromm on Society, technology and progress

Fromm wants to argue that our societies, as they are now, necessarily create unhappy individuals. This is an important point, for many reasons:

First, if this was true, one could not just blame the unhappiness of people in industrialised societies on accidental events, like a pandemic, a war, unemployment or a disease. All these, of course, tend to make things worse – but, according to Fromm, it is the very fabric of our system that is bound to create unhappy individuals. We cannot hope to get a happy industrial society by, say, raising the taxes or lowering them, by promoting social housing or supporting free enterprise, by regulating against pollution or in favour of big oil. None of these, as necessary as some of them might be, will be able to change the root of the ailment of our societies: that capitalism, as it practised in the Western industrialised world, is just not compatible with human happiness and flourishing.

Second, if this was true, it would mean that we don’t need to individually feel guilty for being depressed, unhappy, plagued by anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. We might be doing nothing wrong and still be victims: victims of a system that we cannot control and that takes away our chances at a full, satisfying human life, a system that cheats us out of our lives without giving us anything of real value back.

Capitalism, as it practised in the Western industrialised world, is just not compatible with human happiness and flourishing.

And third, if this was true, it would mean that the only proper way to deal with human unhappiness would be a revolutionary one. No visits to the psychiatrist would help, no extended holidays, no pay raise. If the society is what is making us sick, then this society must go. In a way, this is the purest form of the legacy of Marx in Fromm: the rebirth of man must happen through a restructuring of the society in which we live.

The promise of unlimited technological progress

In explaining how capitalist societies make people unhappy, Fromm goes back to the beginning of industrialisation and to the height of its …

Erich Fromm: Escaping from Freedom

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 11:45:17 +0800

Erich Fromm’s theory of the human condition begins with the insight that freedom itself can sometimes be the cause of fear and anxiety, forcing us to find ways to “escape from freedom”. Authoritarianism, destructiveness and automaton conformity are, according to Fromm, three ways how we try to cope with the freedom we fear.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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The problem of freedom

It is surprising to see freedom identified as a problem, isn’t it? And why would we want to “escape from freedom”?

We usually think that freedom must be something unequivocally good. All over the world people are fighting for their freedom. Being imprisoned, losing one’s freedom, is a heavy punishment that we reserve only for the worst offenders in our society. Slavery seems almost unimaginably cruel to us, not only because slaves in the past have been mistreated, but primarily because they weren’t free. (By the way, slaves were not always mistreated. In ancient Greece and Rome, there were all kinds of slavery, and some of them looked much better than some modern employment contracts). And finally Kant identified human autonomy (which essentially means human freedom) as the basic, defining feature of what makes us special and distinguishes us from animals. So how can this precious thing, our freedom, be a problem?

People weren’t always as free as we are today. In the Middle Ages, one didn’t have much choice about how to live one’s life. You were born into a gender role, a social caste, even a job. The son of a miller became a miller, whether he wanted to or not (this is where our surnames come from). This all began to change during the Renaissance (~15 and 16th centuries), when the big cities offered more social mobility and more choices and material wealth to their citizens. Suddenly, people were free to redefine themselves, to start a trade, to make money, and to use this money in order to advance in society. The old structures of inherited status began to crumble away and slowly the citizens got used to enjoying freedoms that they never had before. This process went on through the centuries, always progressing towards more equality, more rights, more choice, more freedom, up to the present day.

In the industrialised West, we now enjoy more freedom and more material wealth than ever before. But are we therefore happier?

This is the question that Fromm uses as his starting point. Think about it for a moment. If suddenly a genie came out of an Arabian lamp and granted you total freedom from all restrictions that society imposes upon you, how would this feel? Would this only be a source of happiness?

No, says Fromm. Freedom comes with another, often overlooked side. Being free also means having to take responsibility. It also means being more isolated and alienated from others. …

Introductions to Philosophy

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 22:26:18 +0800

What books should someone read who is interested in getting to know the history of philosophy? The three best introductions are: 1. For a very easy-to-read overview, Philip Stokes (2002): Philosophy – 100 Essential Thinkers. 2. For an in-depth discussion of Western thought, Bertrand Russell (1945): A History of Western Philosophy. 3. For a good collection of introductory sources from all over philosophy’s history, Cooper and Fosl (2009): Philosophy. The Classic Readings.

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Links to all books are at the end of this article.

The history of philosophy is, of course, a history of books. No matter how many books one reads, there are always a hundred more that would equally deserve to be read and that could make our lives better, richer and happier. But it is not easy to find the best introductions to philosophy among hundreds of books that come up on an Internet search.

An added difficulty is that one’s tastes and needs regarding philosophy change throughout one’s life. The philosophical interests of a teenager are different from those of a man of fifty or a woman of seventy. And then, we all are also rooted in different cultures, follow different religions, are more conservative or more revolutionary in our political preferences, and all these factors will also determine which books will most likely appeal to us.

But the impossibility of reading all the valuable philosophy books should not keep us from starting to read at least some of them. So here is, in instalments, my personal list of what I would, at this moment in my own life, recommend to someone who’s interested in finding actual wisdom in philosophy (rather than only intellectual entertainment) and applying the insights of philosophy to their everyday lives. The books below and in the future posts in this series cover a wide spectrum of what could be considered “philosophy”. From formal introductions to the history of philosophy to the diary of a fictional motorcycle trip in the 70s, it’s all there. For me, these are some the most precious books that capture that elusive spark of wisdom and the greatness of the human spirit.

And today we begin with the more basic introductions to the history of philosophy. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks!

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The best introductions

If you are just beginning to be interested in philosophy, most philosophy books can look too big and too professional. You don’t want to spend four years reading a college-level introduction. You just want to get an idea of what the history of philosophy is about, and perhaps see if …

Monism, Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind

Fri, 26 Feb 2021 08:52:41 +0800

The philosophy of mind is an area of philosophy that attempts to explain what exactly the mind is. Dualism assumes (like Christianity does) that our material bodies contain some kind of immaterial soul (or mind) that obeys different rules than the physical world. Monists would dispute that and claim that there is only one kind of substance throughout the universe that constitutes both minds and all the other things. Computationalism claims that the mind is nothing but a computer.

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What are minds made of?

The Philosophy of Mind is the area of philosophy that asks what human minds are made of and how they work. We all agree that we have a mind. We can think, we can feel, we can take decisions, we can relate to others, we can do physics and play chess. But what, exactly, is that elusive mind?

Animal minds

The human mind is unique and we know of no other comparable phenomenon in the universe. The question of what exactly the mind is and how it works has troubled philosophers for as long as philosophy exists. One problem arises when we think of things that have “less mind” than we do. A dog, for example, a cat, a pig. Or: a pigeon, a sparrow. A palm tree. A Christmas tree.

Some of these clearly do have mental processes very similar to ours, but they are much more limited. Still, we do say that they have a mind. But where does this end, and why? Does a bird have a mind? Birds can navigate, they can hunt for food, they can build complex nests out of materials they collect and arrange themselves. Do they not deserve to be thought of as intelligent in some way, of having a kind of mind? And what about insects? Individual ants or bees don’t seem to do much mental processing, but in a group they use rudimentary forms of language to communicate, and they have surprisingly strong opinions about what they want and how to achieve it. Ants will help each other, even sacrifice themselves to let others reach a food source or to defend their nests. Bees will describe the location of food in terms of distance and angles to the sun, much like a seaman would do in the days before GPS. And what about mold? Yes, mold. Some slime molds, e.g. Physarum polycephalum, can find the best way between two points on a substrate, find its way out of a maze, and make intelligent menu choices (the latter being something that even most humans fail at).

Does the mold, then, have a mind?

So the one question is where the mind ends and mindless life begins. Is there even such a point? Is there any life that is entirely devoid of mind?

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Do we have souls?

In a Christian framework, we would probably identify the mind with the immortal soul of man. The soul is specific to humans and this justifies, for a Christian, the sharp distinction between humans and everything that is not human and, therefore, …

Hedonism, Pleasure and Happiness

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 16:35:22 +0000

Hedonism is the thesis that happiness and pleasure are the same. But is that true? Does the enjoyment of pleasures like good food, chocolate, sex and a myriad other things that we consume everyday — do these things really make us happier?

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Confusing pleasure and happiness

The argument comes from Richard Taylor’s book “Virtue Ethics” (2002) which could be directly from Aristotle. Like every Aristotelian, Taylor wants to link happiness with moral goodness, because that’s the whole point of the Aristotelian argument: that there is no happiness in being a bad person, a mean person or a criminal, and that egoism never pays off for the egoist. This is very much opposed to what many societies seem to be advertising today. Financial success and excessive consumption of goods (the world be damned) are often seen as the way to a happy life. Our economies need us to consume things and to throw them away again at a crazy, suicidal rate, in order to keep the system running. And too often, this is justified by the idea that the more pleasure we manage to consume, the happier we will be. But is that so?

Most people seem to think that know what happiness is, writes Taylor, which is unfortunate, for this prevents them from learning. One has no incentive to inquire into what one thinks one already knows.

Taylor goes on to explain why even many philosophers would tend to confuse happiness with pleasure. Pleasure is something easy to understand. It is “familiar, identifiable, and even measurable,” while happiness seems to be a more “problematical or dubious” concept. If, as utilitarianism thinks, happiness is nothing but pleasure, then the morally good action can be easily identified as that action that maximises pleasure. And since pleasures can be measured (three chocolate cookies are certainly better than one), finding out what the morally right action is becomes straightforward. Ethics becomes as measurable as science, and the morally right action could, in principle, be calculated impartially by a computer.

The idea that happiness is nothing but pleasure even has its own name: it is called hedonism, from Greek “hedone,” which means pleasure.

From our everyday modes of speaking, we are familiar with this confusion. Taylor:

For example, being happy and being pleased, seem, at one level, to be about the same. Someone who is happy with something — with his job, for instance — can also be described as pleased with it.

We find it difficult to imagine that someone might be happy when they are in constant pain (rather than experiencing pleasure). We equally cannot imagine how someone whose life is filled with pleasures might be unhappy — or can we?

Pleasure and happiness are different

But Taylor insists that both things, although they often appear together, have little in common – except that they are regularly …

Richard Taylor on the Creative Life

Sat, 20 Feb 2021 04:53:06 +0000

Richard Taylor (1919–2003) thought that it’s creativity that makes us feel happy and fulfilled. According to Taylor, a life lived without exercising one’s creativity is a wasted life.

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A tale of two farmers

Richard Taylor thinks that the ultimate goal of human life is to be creative. By this he means, following Aristotle, that we should exercise our abilities and skills in such a way that we live an original, challenging and interesting life. People who don’t do that are missing the very point of being alive and waste their one opportunity to reach true happiness.

Consider two farmers: The first one does not know anything about farming, but he has a book with all the solutions to all possible problems that can appear while farming. When there is a problem, he looks it up in the book and does exactly what it says. He never thinks, he never questions the book’s advice. And that’s good, because the book is a marvellous work of deep and useful expertise, and the farm has been flourishing for years because of it.

A creative life, Taylor think, does not mean that one has to be an artist.

The other farmer does not have such a book. Instead, he always runs around the farm with an old toolbox, with pieces of string and rolls of tape and whatever else seems useful, trying to diagnose and fix things by himself. In the beginning, he had no idea what he was doing, but over the years he has learned a bit about plants and now he can deal with most problems that he encounters daily on his farm. If some new issue comes along, he’ll study it, try various remedies out, and see what works. Sometimes plants will die with his method, but after a while, he’ll learn how to fix the problems.

In the long run, both farms manage to run with reasonable success and, let’s assume, both men work about the same number of hours per day and earn roughly the same income from their farms.

But here comes the question: which of the two would you think is a happier man?

Or, to put it another way, which one would you like to be?

Most of us would probably prefer to be the second farmer. As long as his method is equally successful as the first’s, we feel that there is some value in experimenting, in finding things out for ourselves, in learning and, finally, in being proud of oneself when a remedy works and a problem has been successfully fixed.

The life of the farmer with the book looks, in contrast, mind-numbingly dull. To run around all day following to the letter the instructions one is given by a book, without ever understanding any of it, without being able to experiment or try new ideas out, seems somewhat like work at a factory assembly line. Where’s the fun in that?

But why exactly would we think that the farmer without the book is happier? What, precisely, is the source of his happiness?

Live Happier with Aristotle: Inspiration and …

History of Robots: From Albertus Magnus to the Blade Runner

Wed, 17 Feb 2021 13:48:55 +0000

From ancient China and the European Middle Ages, to zombies, Frankenstein’s monster and HAL 9000, our literary tradition is full of robots – sometimes helpful, sometimes threatening, and always questioning what it really means to be human.

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This is the second part of an overview of artificial men and the history of robots in literature and myth. Find the first part here.

Ancient China

Image by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

The Far East has its own legends of artificial men. The Chinese book Liezi (列子), a Daoist text from the 5th century BC, contains the following passage:

“Who is that man accompanying you?” asked the king.

“That, Sir,” replied Yen Shih, “is my own handiwork. He can sing and he can act.”

The king stared at the figure in astonishment. It walked with rapid strides, moving its head up and down, so that anyone would have taken it for a live human being. The artificer touched its chin, and it began singing, perfectly in tune. He touched its hand, and it began posturing, keeping perfect time. It went through any number of movements that fancy might happen to dictate. The king, looking on with his favourite concubine and other beauties, could hardly persuade himself that it was not real. (…)

[They] instantly took the robot to pieces to let the king see what it really was. And, indeed, it turned out to be only a construction of leather, wood, glue and lacquer, variously coloured white, black, red and blue. Examining it closely, the king found all the internal organs complete liver, gall, heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys, stomach and intestines. (…)

Drawing a deep breath, he exclaimed, “Can it be that human skill is on a par with that of the great Author of Nature?”

The European Middle Ages

Image by Bistrian Iosip on Unsplash

The Middle Ages brought a new dimension to the history of robots and the dream of the artificial man. Instead of art, now it was magic that provided the life force. Sometimes this magical power originated in God, sometimes it was a darker force that the magician himself controlled.

The Middle Ages brought a new dimension to the history of robots and the dream of the artificial man. Instead of art, now it was magic that provided the life force.

Albertus Magnus (1206-1280) was a bishop, scientist and philosopher. He had a reputation as an alchemist and magician. He is said to have created a “talking head” to guard the door to his rooms.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC), a Roman poet, was in the Middle Ages believed to have been a magician. He was supposed to have created a “talking head which predicted the future” and a prostitute made of stone.

Let’s think for a moment about these two. How do they compare? And how is Vergil’s prostitute different from Pygmalion’s Galatea?

Obviously, Vergil’s head of …

Erich Fromm on the Psychology of Capitalism

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 15:51:59 +0000

Erich Fromm, philosopher and social psychologist, points out that capitalism, in order to work, requires a large population of identical consumers with identical taste. This is opposed to the vision of a human life as individual, unique, and valuable in its uniqueness.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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I’ve recently been rereading the German/American psychologist Erich Fromm. He was famous in the 60s and 70s for his application of psychoanalysis to whole societies, diagnosing in a doctor’s terms what was wrong with modern life as it goes on all around us.

One passage that made me think was this:

“Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardised and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, … yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction…” (Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, p.79).

This is a fascinating thought. When we think of modern industrial society, we always think of it from the perspective of production: we think of factories churning out clothes, assembly lines pushing out endless rows of identical cars, household goods and toys, industrial farming covering vast fields with one uniform crop. All these, the triumph of the modern, Western world order, have led to constantly falling prices for everyday commodities, and have made it possible that we all own a car, TVs, computers, and closets full of cheap clothes.

What we don’t normally think about is that all that mass production also requires a mass consumption — and, consequently, a mass consumer: us.

Producing millions of identical yellow T-shirts would make no commercial sense if there weren’t millions of consumers willing to look the same in their identical yellow T-shirts. And the same goes for cars, mobile phones, and even the most personal expressions of one’s personality and life: social media accounts (or, for that matter, Medium articles), all looking the same, all designed to one template, framed by a Facebook or Instagram layout and published under the same logo, in the same font, and often even using exactly the same pictures, taken from the free image websites, Pixabay or Unsplash.

What is Alienation?

One of his best known concepts of Marxism is the idea of “alienation” that describes how human beings get estranged from their work.

Isn’t this remarkable? We have collectively almost entirely given up our distinctive personalities and tastes. We have, in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, allowed ourselves to be pressed into the mould of the industrial mass-consumer so thoroughly, that we now don’t even realise …

Bertrand Russell on How to Find Happiness

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 02:35:28 +0000

In his book “The Conquest of Happiness”, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) presents a theory of happiness that is broadly Aristotelian. Russell thinks that what makes us happy is an active life, directed by a deep and sustained interest in the world. What makes us unhappy is the undue fixation on our own person and our everyday problems.

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In the previous two posts (one, two), we talked about Bertrand Russell and his theory of what makes us unhappy: competition, anxiety, envy and the fear of the opinion of others are just a few common factors that contribute to an unhappy life.

Today, we want to see what Russell thinks about how to become happy. Let’s dive in!

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century.

Zest and happiness

According to Russell, one of the main ingredients of a happy life is what he calls a “friendly interest in things”:

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

This way of approaching the world will lead to a life of “zest,” as he calls it: it will enable us to approach situations with genuine interest, and thus will make us able to derive pleasure from engaging with the world:

“We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert’s unhappiness.”

Children have this spontaneous interest in everything: “The world is full of surprises to them, and they are perpetually engaged with ardour in the pursuit of knowledge, not, of course, of scholastic knowledge, but of the sort that consists in acquiring familiarity with the objects that attract their attention.”

Grown-up humans, in contrast, often lose their interest in the world when they grow up. One reason is that one gets used to the world. The things that surround us lose their novelty and their ability to surprise us, like they did when we were children. But, as Russell emphasises, this is often an illusion. To the open, inquiring mind, the world is still full of mysteries and surprises. Those who think that they have already seen it all are probably wrong. Who of us can really explain why the sky is blue, for instance? Such a common thing – and we are likely unable to say how that works. And the same is true when someone would ask us about how plants function, what photosynthesis does, what the real causes of global warming are, or which country in Africa has the most …

The Artificial Man in Ancient Myth

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 16:31:09 +0000

This is the first part of a two-part story. Find the second part here.

Creation stories and the artificial man

The “artificial man” is not a new concept. Today, we call them robots, but many cultures have a myth about the creation of man and often it is a god who, through the use of divine powers, makes man out of some inanimate material. We all know the version of the Bible:

7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

8 And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. (King James Bible, Genesis 2)

A very poetic version of the creation story can be found in the Slavonic Book of Enoch:

And on the sixth day I commanded my wisdom to create man out of the seven components: his flesh from the earth; his blood from dew and from the sun; his eyes from the bottomless sea; his bones from the stone; his reason from the mobility of angels and from the clouds; his veins and hair from the grass of the earth; his spirit from my spirit and from the wind.

Creation of a man from nothing is the ultimate fantasy of human empowerment, and it is not surprising that people from all cultures have been drawn to it. For tens of thousands of years we have been able to make effective tools for our everyday needs; for thousands we have been creating cities, domesticating animals and planting crops; we are now able to repair human bodies and to fight illnesses; but the dream of creating a full human being from inanimate materials is still far out of reach for our 21st century technologies. Our fascination with AI, though, surely owes a lot to that dream. When an intelligent, connected speaker in one’s home is able to answer a simple, verbal question, the whole process has an almost magical appeal to it. And creating AI systems is a thrill next only to actually creating live human beings.

Elisabeth Frenzel, a professor of literature studies, pointed out that the theme is not only connected to man’s urge to create, but also to the fear that the creature could in the end overtake and suppress its creator, and that therefore most of these creation stories end unhappily.

For the following, let’s understand “Artificial Man” as a (fictional) human-like creature, which has been created by man by means other than natural reproduction. The list of such imagined creatures is very long and spans millennia and the whole globe. We will therefore look only at a very few prominent examples.

The artificial man in Ancient Greece and Rome

According to the Roman poet Ovid, Prometheus, a Greek demi-god, formed men from soil and water and then he gave them life. This is very similar to the Biblical creation story of Adam.

Hephaistos was the ancient Greek god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes. Hephaistos was said to have created multiple artificial men. Among others, several …

The Conquest of Unhappiness

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 03:00:21 +0000

In the first part of this post, we talked about what are, for Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness, 1930) some of the reasons people are unhappy: fashionable pessimism, competition, boredom, and fatigue that comes from anxiety. In this second part, we will examine four more factors that contribute to unhappiness: envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania and the fear of public opinion.

The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today

Bertrand Russell’s book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ (1930) attempts to analyse the conditions for happiness in our modern world, focusing on the different mindsets of the unhappy and the happy person.

Unhappiness from envy

“Of all the characteristics of ordinary human nature,” Russell writes, “envy is the most unfortunate; not only does the envious person wish to inflict misfortune and do so whenever he can with impunity, but he is also himself rendered unhappy by envy. Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself.”

This is an irrational behaviour that causes the envious person to invest effort not into improving their own condition but into making others worse off. If nothing is done to control and limit envy, Russel believes, envy might affect the whole of society and bring it into a downward spiral where, in the end, everyone is equally miserable.

How then, can we get rid of envy?

Russell proposes happiness as an antidote to envy. Someone who is happy will be content with what they have and will not be looking to compare themselves with others.

“With the wise man, what he has does not cease to be enjoyable because someone else has something else. Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.”

So when we have a salary that is sufficient for us, we should not look to compare it with the salary of others. Doing so would not increase our own salary, but merely remove the happiness that we can gain from it and replace it with sadness.

For Russell, the source of envy goes back to childhood. If the parents seem to prefer one child over another, this, he believes, will cause the less advantaged one to develop a disposition to envy. Unnecessary modesty also leads to envy, he believes, and so the way to best raise children would be to teach them that they are the best just as they are. We see echoes of that in many of today’s pedagogical methods:

“For my part, I think there is much to be said for bringing up a boy to think himself a fine fellow. I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are …

The Conquest of Happiness and Why It Matters Today

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 02:02:44 +0000

Bertrand Russell’s book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’ (1930) attempts to analyse the conditions for happiness in our modern world, focusing on the mindsets of the unhappy and the happy person and how they differ. For Russell, the unhappy person is preoccupied far too much with their own life and career, and with how they present themselves to others; while happy people engage with life and with intellectual pursuits that are not related directly to themselves, displaying a quality of character he calls “zest” for life.

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“My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilised countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable,” writes Bertrand Russell in his 1930 book ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. It is not a book on philosophical theory. Instead, Russell draws on his own life, his own experiences as an unhappy child and young man, to try and understand what makes us unhappy — and how we could be happier.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century.

Russell begins by clarifying that unhappiness is not some kind of personal fault of the unhappy person — at least not entirely:

I believe this unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, mistaken habits of life, leading to destruction of that natural zest and appetite for possible things upon which all happiness, whether of men or animals, ultimately depends. (‘The Conquest of Happiness’)

Society certainly also plays a part in making people unhappy, especially through endorsing those “mistaken habits” and “mistaken views of the world” that cause people to become miserable. But since it is this “natural zest and appetite” that makes a life happy, each one of us can improve their happiness without needing to wait for a change in society. Each one of us has the power to correct their mistaken assumptions about the world and, through clearly understanding the roots of unhappiness, to finally create a happy life for ourselves.

Society certainly also plays a part in making people unhappy, especially through endorsing those “mistaken habits” that cause people to become miserable.

We have so much improved the material conditions of life in the 19th and 20th centuries, he writes in ‘The Conquest of Happiness’. Then why are we still so unhappy?

Animals are happy so long as they have health and enough to eat. Human beings, one feels, ought to be, but in the modern world they are not, at least in a great majority of cases,” Russell writes. And: “Watch …

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Thu, 04 Feb 2021 12:26:40 +0000

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Every human life is a collection of experiences, moments, images. A product of the books, stories, places and people that shaped the person. And the work can never be separated from the man as neatly as some histories of philosophy pretend. Life and work form a whole, and in order to understand the one, we always also have to look at the other.

Timeline: The Life of Aristotle

A timeline of Aristotle’s life shown over a map of ancient Greece.

Aristotle’s life and work

This is never so clear as it is with philosophers. Not dependent on observation or experiment for their theories, philosophers are freer than other academics to shape their theories to follow the contours of their own personalities. Kant’s ethics of stern duty is just the thing you would imagine this sourly man to produce, who was famous for living his life by the clock, going for his precisely measured walk at exactly the same minute every day. Quarrelsome Schopenhauer, the man who once didn’t get a philosophy prize in an essay contest in which he was the only contestant, is famous for his pessimist attitude to life. And nagging Socrates, walking around barefoot and poking fun at experts, is just the character to embody a philosophy of radical questioning of authority and striving for a higher wisdom that was rooted in the personal and the unconventional.

Aristotle himself is a man of contradictions. A philosopher, whose main body of work is not about philosophy at all — but about biology, astronomy, literary theory and practically everything else that one could scientifically explore in his time. More than a philosopher, Aristotle was a comprehensive “scientist.” It just so happens that his scientific work was not as enduring as his philosophy so that today we don’t think of him as a bad biologist or a failed astronomer; we think of him as a good philosopher.

Aristotle himself is a man of contradictions. A philosopher, whose main body of work is not about philosophy at all.

But this is not due to any feature in Aristotle’s thought; rather, it is a result of the lack of progress in philosophy since the ancient times. All the natural sciences have long left Aristotle’s ideas behind, always discovering new ways to explain the world: evolution, natural selection, cellular biology, genetic material, neurons. Or stars, planets, nuclear fusion, the solar system, asteroids, other galaxies, exoplanets, …

Bertrand Russell (1892-1970)

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 10:54:13 +0000

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) was a British philosopher and writer, one of the most important analytic philosophers of the 20th century. He is primarily known for his exploration of the logical foundation of mathematics, his theory of meaning and his pacifism and social engagement. In his book “The Conquest of Happiness,” he discusses how to find happiness in life.

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It is always amazing to see how the biographies of great men determine much of what would become their world-views and, in the case of philosophers, their life’s work. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) is no exception.

Bertrand Russell was born into a family as aristocratic as they come. His godfather was one of the founders of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill. The Russells have been involved in the highest ranks of British society for centuries before Bertrand was born. His grandfather had been a prime minister. At the end of his first marriage, he had an affair with Lady Ottoline Morrell, famous social figure in early 20th-century Britain, and perhaps also with the first wife of poet T. S. Eliot. Despite his aristocratic roots, Russell had a keen sense for social justice and he was an activist for peace. Refusing to participate in the first World War, he was sent to prison for six months. He wrote about the experience:

I found prison in many ways quite agreeable. I had no engagements, no difficult decisions to make, no fear of callers, no interruptions to my work. I read enormously; I wrote a book, “Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy”… and began the work for “The Analysis of Mind”. I was rather interested in my fellow-prisoners, who seemed to me in no way morally inferior to the rest of the population, though they were on the whole slightly below the usual level of intelligence as was shown by their having been caught. (Bertrand Russell (1998). “8: The First War”. Autobiography. Psychology Press. p. 256.)

From quotes like this one can immediately see Bertrand Russell’s attitude towards life: distanced, cool, haughty even. But also, at the same time, sympathetic towards those who did not have his own privilege. And also another thing: whenever something went wrong in his life, Russell turned to mathematics as a way to escape.

This began early: his mother died when he was two years old; his father when he was four. His grandfather two years later again, so that Russell had to be raised by his paternal grandmother. He wasn’t happy living alone with her and he often contemplated suicide as a boy. In his books, he states that it was only his fascination for mathematics that kept him alive. When he was eleven years old, his brother introduced him to the work of Euclid. Russell wrote later that this was for him like falling in love for the first time.

So here we have the main strokes that form the picture of Bertrand Russell’s …

Touching Fish

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 02:07:47 +0000

What’s it with the fish?

Recently, the Guardian had an article titled “Touching fish craze sees China’s youth find ways to laze amid ‘996’ work culture”. This was a bit puzzling on the first look, so I tried to read it and understand what it was talking about. Turns out, in case you don’t know (like I didn’t), that “996” means having to work from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening, 6 days a week.

The “fish” reference is explained in the article thus:

Young Chinese people are pushing back against an engrained culture of overwork, and embracing a philosophy of laziness known as “touching fish”. The term is a play on a Chinese proverb: “muddy waters make it easy to catch fish”, and the idea is to take advantage of the Covid crisis drawing management’s focus away from supervising their employees. (The Guardian)

According to the article, this leads to behaviours like: “fill up a thermos with whisky, do planks or stretches in the work pantry at regular intervals, drink litres of water to prompt lots of trips to the toilet on work time and, once there, spend time on social media or playing games on your phone.” (The Guardian)

And an anonymous person contributed this bit of wisdom: “Not working hard is everyone’s basic right … With or without legal protection, everyone has the right to not work hard.” (The Guardian)

A right to laziness?

This is something to think about, particularly in the context of Aristotle, of whom we have been speaking recently on this blog. It somehow doesn’t seem right that young people, often in their first jobs, on their first steps into their own lives, would see it as a worthwhile activity to sit in the office toilet and play games instead of working. I don’t mean to endorse working twelve hours a day for six days per week, but retreating from work entirely and considering “not working hard” a “basic right” also seems odd and somehow wrong. But why exactly?

It so happens that Aristotle gives us just the right answer.

Aristotle would not at all see “touching fish” as a problem of the legal regulation of work. For him, laws are largely irrelevant to the morality of our behaviour. Yes, we are part of a society, and as such we must find a way of coexisting in a beneficent way with the people around us, but in the end, the purpose of life is not to obey laws but to reach eudaimonia, that perfect kind of happiness that comes from meaningful engagement with the world that surrounds us.

For Aristotle, behaving ethically is not something that we do because we would be punished if we did not obey the laws. It is, rather, the only way of acting rationally, of acting in a way that will, in the long run, benefit ourselves.

And it will do this because every one of us must function as well we can as human beings so that others can also reach the highest level of their “functioning,” of their own “human potential”. And then we will all together profit from that optimal level of everyone realising their …

Martha Nussbaum and the Capabilities Approach

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 15:16:34 +0000

In the capabilities approach, philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that a human life, in order to reach its highest potential, must include a number of “capabilities” – that is, of actual possibilities that one can realise in one’s life. These include the ability to live a life that is “worth living,” the ability to use one’s imagination, sufficient education to enable a “truly human” understanding of the world and one’s position in it, having dignity and a sense of equal worth, as well as the ability to participate in the political life of one’s society.

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What is the “capabilities approach”? In previous posts on Aristotle, we saw how to exercise our virtues, how to develop our practical wisdom and how to improve the way we relate to our work. We talked about having the right values in life, how to make new experiences and how to stay young.

But one could ask: does Aristotle’s theory apply in the same way to all cultures, or is it specific to some Western notion of the desirable life? Could a Muslim society, or an indigenous tribe in South America, embrace the Aristotelian life? And if so, what exactly would this look like?

There certainly is a problem there, even if we only look at our own society. People just have so different attitudes about life, different backgrounds, beliefs and values. How can one form of “flourishing” be right for everyone?

There are two ways to respond to this problem.

Moral relativism

First, one could say that, indeed, every society, and perhaps every single person, should be entitled to their own form of _eudaimonia, _or ultimate happiness. Both the wisdom that we need to navigate our lives well and the ultimate goals that we have in life depend on the society we live in, the education we were given when we were young, the religious beliefs we have. So there is no common ground there, and every single person, as well as every society, would have their own understanding of what a good life is.

This position is called “moral relativism”. It is tempting to be a relativist because we actually want to acknowledge the diversity of opinions and cultures and give everyone the right to choose their own path to happiness. But there’s also a trap hidden inside that package.

If I am a relativist, I am committed to accepting other people’s and other societies’ beliefs, even if they are incompatible with my own. Whatever crazy thing someone might believe, I would have to accept, because for the relativist every point of view is as good as every other. Should we protect or exploit the environment? Should we assist refugees or close our borders? Should we vaccinate people or not?

The relativist couldn’t say what is wrong with North Korea. Their values and their system is what it is, and it’s nobody’s business trying to change it. …

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 10:40:22 +0000

Philosophy increasingly has to deal with the influence of artificial intelligence on society. Here at Daily Philosophy, we will try to add a bit of a philosophical perspective to some of the most important discussions in AI. And first, of course, is the question: what is AI?

There are many definitions of Artificial Intelligence, for example, that AI is about building systems that “think like humans,” “act like humans,” or “act rationally”. In this article, we examine a number of definitions quoted at the end of the first chapter of Russell and Norvig’s famous textbook “Artificial Intelligence. A Modern Approach” (AIMA).

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Artificial intelligence is about systems that do things that require intelligence of humans

A possible definition of AI would be one that looks at machine behaviour and that compares this to the equivalent human behaviour (read more about behaviourism here):

“AI is concerned with building machines that can act and react appropriately, adapting their response to the demands of the situation. Such machines should display behaviour compatible with that considered to require intelligence in humans.” (Finlay-Dix)
“The act of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people.” (Kurzweil, 1990)

What about these definitions? Do they make sense?

“Behaviour compatible with what is considered to require intelligence in humans:” Compatible is a very weak word here and is probably not what the author meant at all. ‘Compatible’ just means that the machine’s behaviour should not cause a contradiction or be impossible to perform at the same time as a behaviour that would require intelligence in humans.

So, for example, eating is compatible with playing chess. Assuming that playing chess is the behaviour that requires intelligence when performed by humans, then eating would, according to that definition, also be an AI behaviour, because eating is compatible with playing chess (one can do both at the same time). It seems strange to elevate mere compatibility with an intelligent behaviour to a criterion for intelligent behaviour.

What the authors probably mean is probably not ‘compatible’ but ‘similar’ or ‘equivalent.’ Kurzweil’s definition of AI, even more simply, requires AI to display the same behaviours that require intelligence when performed by humans, eliminating the similarity or equivalence requirement.

Still, this doesn’t seem to reflect what we actually do when we attribute intelligence to machines. Consider machines performing the following functions:

Adding two numbers.
Changing money when a customer buys a coke.
Regulating the room temperature by turning an air-conditioner on or off.

Obviously, these functions do require intelligence when performed by humans, but they can be executed by primitive, …

How to Live an Aristotelian Life

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 15:00:58 +0000

Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues, which are good properties of one’s character that benefit oneself and others; (2) phronesis, which is the ability to employ the virtues to the right amount in any particular situation; and (3) eudaimonia, which is a life that is happy, successful and morally good, all at the same time.

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This is the first week in our One Year, Six Ways challenge, in which we try to experience six different philosophies of life in our own, everyday lives. And we begin with Aristotle, one of the fathers of Western philosophy.

So how can we utilise Aristotle’s theories about happiness in our own, everyday lives? Read on.

Can I be too honest?

Aristotle’s view of life starts with the concept of virtues. Virtues are good properties of one’s character that are beneficial to oneself and to others. Think, for instance, of courage, honesty, or kindness.

But not any amount of these virtues is good. One can be too courageous, for example. We would call such a person reckless, perhaps. They do have courage, but they are unable to see that sometimes it’s wiser to be less courageous in order to reach a good outcome. Too much honesty might be hurtful. Too much kindness and one is a doormat. So, for Aristotle, the trick is not only to have the virtues but to be able to control them so that one has them always to the right amount: the amount that is optimal for every situation that one encounters.

The point Aristotle wants to make is that every single situation calls for a different amount of every virtue, and wisdom consists in knowing exactly how much that right amount is.

It is important to see that this is not always some “middle” amount. There are situations where zero courage is the right amount: for example, when you’re out on an African photo-safari and a lion suddenly stands in front of you, licking its lips. Then it would be reckless and stupid to do anything but get into your car and close the windows. There are, equally, situations in which the right amount of courage is an extreme amount. For example, if you are a firefighter, called to rescue people from a burning house. In this case, you can’t say “Oh, but I’m supposed to have only a middle amount of courage. Let someone else go in there.” It’s your job to rescue these people, so the right amount of courage in this situation would be what to others might seem reckless. The point Aristotle wants to make is that every single situation calls for a different amount of every virtue, and wisdom consists in knowing exactly how much that right amount is.

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Aristotle (384-322 BC), born in Stageira, Greece, is one of the most influential philosophers who ever …

Best of Daily Philosophy 2020

Wed, 30 Dec 2020 23:15:03 +0000

Here we are at the end of another year! In case you didn’t follow the blog over the whole year, here are some of the posts that I, personally, find the most insightful and inspiring.

Although Daily Philosophy has been going since October 2016, it’s only this year that I finally managed to work regularly on my articles. So sit down with a glass of wine (or juice), some light music in the background, and enjoy a relaxed hour of sharing some of the thoughts of the best minds from three millennia of philosophical history. Let’s go!

On September 19th, 2020, I started the new run with a topic that is very dear to me as a professional philosopher: freedom of speech. The article discusses the famous words of socialist reformer Rosa Luxemburg “Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise.”

Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), socialist revolutionary, once said: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

It will be no secret to the readers of this blog that I like Aristotle, so there were quite a number of posts over the past months that explored the ancient philosopher’s views on virtue, ethics, and happiness. Here are two examples:

Aristotle on moral development

For Aristotle, the moral development of a person progresses in three stages: from akrates, to enkrates, to sophron or wise person.

Life Is a Skill

Aristotle on living a life well through exercising one’s virtues.

In my personal opinion, philosophy is most relevant when it allows us to use the wisdom of the past in order to understand the problems of today. Richard Taylor makes a case for more creativity in our lives:

Richard Taylor on the Creative Life

Richard Taylor (1919–2003) thought that it’s creativity that makes us feel happy and fulfilled. According to Taylor, a life lived without exercising one’s creativity is a wasted life.

And, similarly, Erich Fromm laments how the modern ways of industrial production have impoverished human experience. You can find our Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm here:

The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

Another area in which the modern concept of progress is radically different from the past is our ability to separate the elements of …

One Year, Six Ways: A Philosophical Experiment

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 12:21:34 +0000

Daily Philosophy has the idea for this year’s resolution: live your life like a philosopher. Six classic philosophies of life, each lived for two months, with multiple weekly emails to keep you informed, entertained and engaged on your journey. Come along to the One Year, Six Ways project!

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The problem with new year resolutions

It’s that time of year again, where everyone goes and makes their resolutions. Fewer sweets in the new year. More exercise. Less TV. More carrots and kale smoothies.

Many resolutions stay on this level: small, practical changes that are born mostly out of guilt, because we’re not behaving as we know we should. Most of these resolutions soon are forgotten and fall by the wayside. Come March, we’ll all be back to eating sweets, watching TV, and steering clear of kale smoothies and excessive sweating.

But does it have to be like that?

A different way would be to look for changes in our own thinking, in the way we perceive and confront life and its challenges.

This has the advantage that, at least initially, it can be a totally private project: our inner exploration of how life could be and feel different. Such an exploration of one’s inner spaces does not require others to agree with us, to cooperate, or to change their ways. And therefore, it is much more likely to succeed. It will create in us a lasting change, a knowledge and a feeling of a different life, a life better lived, a memory that we can tap into for the rest of our days.

The philosophical new year resolution

So what would a philosophical new year resolution look like?

For millennia, humanity’s greatest minds have thought about how we can improve our lives. How we can live more happily and meaningfully, how we can feel that our lives have purpose and value, how we can best deal with adversity, bad luck, depression and illness. The best of philosophy has always been about how to confront life in a way that allows us to master it rather than to be beaten by it; how to live with strength and dignity, rather than with fear; how to feel that we are in control of our destiny, rather than being kicked around by fate.

How about, then, we try some of that out?

Let’s do this together.

The project: One Year, Six Ways to find happiness

In the coming year, we will try out one classic philosophy of life every two months; six different paths to wisdom over the whole year.

This will give us enough time to get to know the basic principles of each way of thought, to read some of the great thinkers of each system, and to practice each philosophical tradition ourselves, putting it to work in our own lives. At the end of the year, we will be able to judge for ourselves which of these theories are better for us than others, which gave us most happiness and helped us most reduce our fear and anxiety, which make us feel …

Aristotle on being human

Sun, 27 Dec 2020 00:51:37 +0000

For Aristotle, happiness is connected to function. Everything in the universe has a function, and a happy human life is one in which we fulfil that function. Humans’ purpose is to exercise their virtues in accordance with their reason.

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We saw that the ancient philosopher Aristotle believes that happiness is the greatest good for human beings. But what is this happiness? Is eating a cookie already happiness? Is watching TV happiness? Meeting with friends? Having a child? Winning the lottery? Sacrificing oneself for a political cause? What is, for Aristotle, the essence of being human?

For Aristotle, happiness is connected to function. Everything in the universe has a function, and a happy human life is one in which we fulfil that function. But what is our function as human beings? What is the purpose of being human?

Erich Fromm and Richard Taylor on the perils of capitalism.

Aristotle explains: everything in the universe is good in its own way. A pen is good if it writes well. A car is good if it fulfils its purpose of bringing me where I want to go quickly and safely. Of course, if I want to use the car to transport a piano, then another car will be ‘good’: one that is slow, perhaps, but that can carry a piano. Whether something is ‘good’ depends on a purpose we have. ‘Good’ therefore means ‘suited to a purpose’.

It’s similar with human beings. When is a flute player ‘good’? When he plays the flute well. When is a general ‘good’? When he wins the war. When is a shoemaker good? When he makes the best of the leather he has available and makes a good shoe.

But what of human beings in general? When is man good? What is a good human? If this worked the same way, we’d need to know what the purpose of a human was, so that we could see if a human fulfils this purpose well. For Aristotle, everything has a purpose. Humans too.

Live Happier with Aristotle: Inspiration and Workbook.
In the book to this series of articles you're reading right now, philosophy professor, founder and editor of the Daily Philosophy web magazine, Dr Andreas Matthias takes us all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in the search for wisdom and guidance on how we can live better, happier and more satisfying lives today.
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Humans’ purpose is to exercise their virtues in accordance with their reason. In other words, to use their reason in order to act morally right.

Being ‘good’ for Aristotle is the same as being happy. One is happy if one’s life goes well. If all is ‘good’ in it. If one fulfils one’s deepest purpose as a human being. This is the source of true happiness.

Humans’ purpose is to exercise their virtues in accordance …

Merry Christmas!

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 08:58:50 +0000

I know that we’re about philosophy here, not religion, but perhaps we can make an exception and get into the right mindset for Christmas. Here, then, is Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus. After that, you can read how the Quran describes the same scene. By the way, the cover image is a nativity scene painted on cardboard cut-outs by our family.

The birth of Jesus in Luke 2

2 In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register.

4 So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. 5 He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, 7 and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no guest room available for them.

8 And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. 9 An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. 11 Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.”

13 Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.”

15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

16 So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger.

17 When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child,

18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them.

19 But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

21 On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived.

The birth of Jesus in the Holy Quran

So she conceived him, and she withdrew with him to a remote place. And the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of a palm tree.

She said, ‘I wish I had died before this, and had been long forgotten. [Mary was worried that people would think badly of her as she was not married.]

Then (baby Jesus) called her from below her, saying, …

Plato and Christianity

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 07:36:43 +0000

Plato’s ideas about the eternal world of perfect Forms provided a template upon which Christian philosophers could build their vision of the eternal, transcendent realm of God. This concept integrated ancient Greek and Jewish mysticism and had an enormous influence not only on Christian beliefs but also on the whole Western tradition of thought, up to today’s Theosophy and even Waldorf schools and organic hand-creams.

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Today, it’s sometimes seen as if religion was somehow opposed to the rational inquiry that is “proper” philosophy, but this was not always the case. Christian philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, Islamic thought – in their own time and place, they have all been (and still are) considered mainstream philosophy.

Philosophy also has never been confined to academic, analytic thought. Sartre and Camus wrote much of their philosophy into their works of fiction, their novels, literary essays and theatre plays. Philosophy has been expressed in poems (for example, in German Romanticism), in works of physics and mathematics (for example, the philosophy of quantum physics), in archery, painting and flower arrangements (in traditional Japanese culture). The contemporary blindness of academic philosophy to all these forms of wisdom is tragic and leads to a sterile, academic discipline that revolves only around itself, without interacting any more with the wider culture around it. Academic philosophers are quick to complain when philosophy departments in universities are closed down, but are they actually able to justify why society needs them if they never give anything valuable back?

“Philo-sophy,” the word, means the love (philia) for wisdom (sophia). Surely there are more places where sophia can be found than just metaontology and modal logic?

Religions have always told stories that were meant to educate, to shape the way people thought, and to create a common moral framework within which society could operate. And, historically, the splendid philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity have had a tremendous influence on human history and culture throughout the ages. Certainly more than the works of Frege, Wittgenstein or even Heidegger.

Plato and perfect circles

So let’s go back for a moment to the beginning of Western philosophy proper – which also is the beginning of much of what later would become Christian thought – and to Plato, originator of much of Western philosophy, but also of how we generally think of the Christian “beyond,” paradise, or the place where God resides.

To understand Plato, consider a circle drawn onto a piece of paper. This certainly will not be a true circle. It will be irregular at places, perhaps it will not even close properly. But that doesn’t matter. We can easily recognise that it is …

The Paradoxes of Zeno of Elea

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 06:54:23 +0000

There are only a small number of ancient philosophers who still manage to occupy and fascinate us today, more than two and a half thousand years later. Zeno of Elea certainly is one of them.

Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC) is famous for his paradoxes that seem to prove, among other points, that no movement is possible. If an arrow in flight is standing still whenever we take a photograph of it, when is it actually moving?

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There are actually two famous Zenos: Zeno of Elea (490-430 BC), the one with the paradoxes we will talk about here, and then another man, Zeno of Citium, who was probably the founder of Stoicism.

Both have in common that none of their works survived, except in the tales that others told about them (a fate they share with most so-called “Presocratic” philosophers, like Thales). Sometimes, these others would be their students (as in the case of Plato, who tells us about the philosophy of his teacher, Socrates). But more often, we find the only reference to some philosophers in the works of their enemies who are trying to discredit and to refute them. This is also what happened to Zeno: most of what we know about him comes from Aristotle, who was trying to show how Zeno’s paradoxes don’t actually work and are far less interesting than people thought. Under these circumstances, it’s almost a wonder that we’re still able to reconstruct some of Zeno’s paradoxes.

Zeno’s flying arrow

Perhaps the easiest one to begin with is “the arrow”: imagine an arrow flying horizontally across your field of vision, say, from the left to the right, and out of view. If you were fast enough, you could photograph that arrow at various points along its path, as it crosses in front of you. What would every one of these photographs show? Well, it would show an arrow. But would it show the arrow actually moving? This depends on the shutter speed of your camera. Assuming you really manage to photograph one single moment of the arrow’s flight, then the arrow would always appear to be hanging in the air, unmoving, still.

The tyrant came so close to Zeno’s face that the philosopher could bite Nearchus' ear. He didn’t let go until, so the ancient source, Zeno had lost his life and Nearchus his ear.

But then, Zeno says, where does the movement of the arrow come in? I can photograph the arrow at any moment, and at any other moment that is in between two moments, and I can document every single point along its way with a photograph …

Novalis and the Romantic View of the World

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:07:08 +0000

The German Romantic movement was a literary and philosophical movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. German Romantics, much like their English counterparts, valued spontaneity and naturalness, in part as a reaction to the beginning loss of the natural world due to industrialisation and urbanisation. Here we look at Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772–1801), who is one of the more poetic and mystical German Romantics.

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Mankind travels along manifold pathways. He who pursues and compares them will perceive the emergence of certain strange figures; figures that appear to be inscribed in that massive tome composed in cipher that one everywhere and in everything beholds: on wings, eggshells, in clouds, in the snow, in crystalline and stone formations, in freezing waters, on the skins and in the bowels of mountain-ranges, of plants, beasts, people, in the stars of the heavens, in contiguous and expansive panes of pitch and glass, in the clustering of iron filings around the magnet (…) In these one may glimpse an intimation of the key to this wondrous text, its very grammar-book (…) He [our teacher] would behold the stars and plot their courses and positions in the sand. He would gaze into the celestial sea, never tiring of contemplating its movements, its clouds, its lights. He would collect rocks, flowers, beetles of all species, and array them in manifold sequences and combinations. He would keep a keen eye on both men and beasts and sit on the seashore searching for shellfish. He would eavesdrop attentively on his own thoughts and emotions.

This is a long and demanding read. But it is easy to see how its view of the world of the German Romantic movement differs from what we, today, call science: wings, egg-shells, clouds, snow, stone formations, freezing waters, skin and bowels of plants, beasts and people: these are all just a code, a cipher, and if one knows how to see, he will be able to understand the ‘wondrous text,’ its ‘grammar-book’. He will be able to read nature, to understand her language, as easily as one reads a book.

One could perhaps argue that this precisely is what science does. Do physics and chemistry not give us a language, the language of atoms, the grammar of molecules, with which we can describe wings, egg-shells and clouds all at once? Does physics not give us the formulas that describe the forces that act on wings, on egg-shells and on clouds alike, and that make them move and behave as they do?

There seem to be crucial differences.

First, notice that the things described never lose their individuality. Open a chemistry book, and you will not find any wings and egg-shells and rocks in it. After the phenomena …

Human Dignity and Freedom

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 06:46:59 +0000

I live with my family in Hong Kong. Our holidays we spend in Greece. Eating in a restaurant couldn’t be more different in the two places.

But is there perhaps more to it than just a superficial difference? Might it be that the way we order food shows us something deeper, more fundamental about the human condition? Might it be that our very dignity as human beings is reflected in the way we talk to a restaurant waiter? – Let me explain.

Restaurant orders, dignity and freedom

In Greece, when you go to a local village restaurant, you’re often taken to the kitchen to see the available dishes. Sometimes these will be ready-made and you just point at a pot and get that thing. But sometimes, you will also just see components of food: french fries, tomatoes, cucumbers, pieces of meat, various small fish, pasta or rice, meatballs, and an array of appetisers. If you know the owner of the tavern well, he might produce additional dishes from the back of the kitchen, the best bits, kept only for his family and friends. And you will look around, look at this and that, ask a few questions about what is fresh and what’s only for the tourists, and then you’d order: a bit of this, but with the sauce from over there, a spoonful of that there, but on one plate with this, and the salad made of this ingredient and that, but leave out the third thing and replace it with something else that you fancy.

Later, when you go out and look at the other guests' tables, you will see that everyone’s menu is as individual as their fingerprint, reflecting not only their tastes and dislikes but also their standing with the owner of the shop and his family. Every collection of dishes, every order of drinks is the result of a deeply personal history, of a number of choices and constraints that determine the particular configuration of dishes on every table.

It’s all very different in Hong Kong, and, I guess, in most other capitals of the so-called developed world. Here, you go into a restaurant where you are kept as far away from the kitchen as possible. The food processing area is off-limits to the guests. You order, not according to your taste, but following a rigid menu. You want dish 13 or 28, and that’s it, as far as choice is concerned. You’d like 28 but with the salad that goes with 13? Sorry, we don’t understand that order, that’s not in the menu, it’s not in the computer, and even if we could make it, somehow, we wouldn’t know how to charge you for it, or how to explain it to the computer system that processes the orders and that manages the inventory and supplies. You can’t have this, and that’s the end of it.

What is mechanised in these places is not only the restaurant but also and primarily the customer.

The cheaper and more popular the restaurant, the more mechanised it is, the more prominent the atomic choices on the menu become, the less freedom the customer is …

Can Machines Think?

Thu, 10 Dec 2020 03:07:58 +0000

The question whether machines can think is more complex than it appears at first sight. The Turing Test attempted to provide a way to judge whether computers are intelligent, but pretending to be human in a chat is not the same as being intelligent. AlphaGo is undoubtedly intelligent in its domain, but couldn not pass a Turing Test.

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We are surrounded by intelligent machines: smartphones that can answer questions and book seats in restaurants; fridges that can warn you when the milk expires; cars that drive by themselves; computers that play better chess than humans; Facebook tagging algorithms that recognize human faces. Still, one question is worth asking: these machines can perform all kinds of impressive tricks, but can machines actually think?

The question is interesting because a lot depends on it. If machines could think like we do, will they at some point in the future be better at it than we are? Will they then become a threat to us? Might they develop feelings? Will machines be lazy or angry at us for asking them to work when they don’t want to? If they become conscious, will they claim rights? Will human rights have to be changed to apply to them? Will they have a right to vote? A right to be treated with respect? Will their dignity or their freedom become issues? Will they have to be protected from exploitation? Or will they find ways to exploit us?

Thinking about… ice-cream

Much depends on how one understands the question. “Does X think?” might mean multiple, different things. It might mean, for instance, does it think like a human? In this case, we should expect the machine to have feelings, to be distracted or sleepy sometimes, or to make typos when writing. Because if it didn’t do all these things it wouldn’t think like a human. – But then, what else is involved in “thinking like a human?” If I ask my phone’s intelligent assistant whether it likes ice-cream, what answer do I expect to get? – “Yes, I do like ice-cream, but only strawberry flavour.” Would this be a satisfactory answer? Obviously, the machine cannot mean that, since it doesn’t have the hardware to actually taste anything. So the response must be fake, just a series of words designed to deceive me into thinking that the machine actually understands what ice-cream tastes like. This doesn’t seem to be proof of a high intelligence.

What if it responded: “What a stupid question! I cannot taste ice-cream, so how would I know?” This seems to be a better, more intelligent and honest answer, but it causes another problem. Now the machine doesn’t pretend to be a human any more. In fact, what makes this response a good response is precisely that it gives up the pretence of sounding “human.” So perhaps other aspects of intelligence don’t …

Epicurus and Luddism

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 00:12:07 +0000

Epicurus does not take any clear stance on technology. But his system suggests that reducing one’s desires is preferable to fulfilling them because then one can achieve happiness without eternally chasing material goods. Technology, at least in the way that it is deployed in capitalism (based on planned obsolescence) contradicts the essential simplicity of the ideal Epicurean life. Epicurus would likely have sympathised with Luddism.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to Epicurus.

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Epicurus suggests that one could be happier by reducing one’s desires rather than fulfilling them. For him, fulfilling one’s desires only leads to further desires, while learning to desire things that are both natural and easy to obtain is the way to long-lasting happiness.

Of course, one may ask how this would work in today’s world. What is a natural desire? The desire for natural food, perhaps? Or the desire for clean water and air? Epicurus thinks that these desires are easy to fulfil just because they are natural. It is the vain desires that are hard to satisfy (for instance, the desire for an expensive handbag). But is this still true? And is Epicurus in favour of Luddism?

If Epicurus had a look around a modern supermarket, he might be surprised. Some vain desires are extremely easy to satisfy nowadays. Beer costs almost nothing. Junk food is cheap. Sweets are cheap, as are Chinese soup noodles. But what about organic fruit and vegetables? Clean water (from Tibet or France), packaged in little bottles? These are the costly, luxury items. Obesity, in our societies, is a marker of poverty. Highly processed, high-sugar foods are the staple of the poor and the unprivileged, while organic kale smoothies are the lunch of the well-off. Today, only the wealthy can afford natural apples and pesticide-free lettuce, only they can nibble at a carrot on the terrace of the country club. The poor have to make do with dirty water and roadside pollution, while the rich can afford to move out to greener pastures and breathe what Epicurus would have thought of as the ultimate natural good: clean air.

A comprehensive overview of Erich Fromm’s philosophy of happiness. We discuss his life, his ideas and his main works, both in their historical context and how they are still relevant for us today.

Luddism (or neo-Luddism) is the idea that technology is bad, something to be avoided. In the 19th century, British textile workers opposed the introduction of machines in cloth production, because they feared that they would lose their jobs to the machines. Which is exactly what happened. Neo-Luddites are people who, for a variety of reasons, think that we would be better off with less …

Is Stealing Always Immoral?

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 07:53:03 +0000

Whether stealing is immoral or not depends both on the context of the action and the moral theory used. In utilitarianism, stealing would only be immoral if it leads to bad consequences for the stakeholders. For Kant, it would always be immoral, because it does not respect the autonomy of the victim. For virtue ethics, we would have to know why the act was performed and whether the theft is a valid expression of a virtue.

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The answer to the question whether stealing is morally right or wrong depends on the moral theory that you want to use, as well as on the context of the action.

For utilitarianism, which focuses on the total benefit of an action, stealing might be morally right if it increases total benefit or happiness for all stakeholders. So, for example, stealing a terrorist’s bomb before he can detonate it would qualify as a morally right action since it increases the total benefit or happiness. Similarly, Robin-Hood-like actions (stealing from the rich to give to the poor) would probably be considered right.

For utilitarianism, which focuses on the total benefit of an action, stealing might be morally right if it increases total benefit or happiness for all stakeholders.

For Kant, there are three aspects to consider: first, what is the motivation for stealing? For Kant, only those actions are morally right that are performed out of a “good will,” which roughly means that they should have as their main motivation the will to act morally right (rather than, say, to enrich oneself). Second, we would have to ask whether the action can become a universal law without causing any contradictions. This is a tricky requirement, and it’s not clear at all how to apply this in specific cases. Roughly, you’d have to ask: what would happen if everyone was stealing? Would we end up in a world that still works and makes sense? — Third, Kant would ask whether human beings are treated as ends or only as means to the ends of others. In the case of stealing, even if it is out of a good intention, the victim of the theft is clearly treated only as a means for the ends of the thief. This is also true in the Robin Hood case, which is why Kant would say that stealing is always morally bad.

For Aristotle and virtue ethics, you would ask which virtues underlie that action of stealing and whether the act of stealing is likely to promote the stakeholders’ personal development towards their maximum potential as human beings. It’s not easy to see an act of stealing doing this, but one might perhaps argue that Robin Hood is, indeed, driven to theft through an exercise of his virtues. Still, Aristotle would probably say that the life of an outlaw is not a good place to develop one’s potential as a human being.

There are many other possibilities (for example, Social Contract theories), but the three discussed should provide a general …

What Is Deontological Ethics?

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:03:45 +0000

The name “deontological” ethics comes from Greek “to deon” = “that which must be done”. So it is about actions that must be performed (or must not be performed) because the actions themselves are intrinsically good or bad. This is in opposition to consequentialism, which judges actions according to whether their consequences are good.

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So, for example, stealing might be always bad for a deontologist, because there is something inherent in the act of stealing that makes it (always) bad. For the consequentialist, stealing might sometimes be good and sometimes bad. For example, stealing a terrorist’s bomb before he can use it, would be considered a “good” kind of stealing, because the consequences of the terrorist not having his bomb are good (no people killed, no damage caused).

Deontological ethics has a few problems. For one, it doesn’t seem right to assume that some actions (like lying or stealing) are always morally bad. We can easily imagine situations in which a “white lie” seems to be perfectly right. Even killing someone might sometimes seem right (for example, killing Hitler before the beginning of the Second World War might be argued to have been morally permissible, considering the damage done and the deaths caused by the war).

We can easily imagine situations in which a “white lie” seems to be perfectly right.

Second, rooting moral commands in rationality (which is the same for all humans) seems to make any sort of allowance for cultural differences impossible. We would like to think that other societies should be permitted to have their own moral values and that these differences should be respected. But a deontological framework makes it very hard to integrate other moral systems, since what is rational at one place should be rational everywhere.

Generally, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is considered the most prominent deontological ethics proponent. For him, some actions are rational (and therefore good), while others are not rational (and these happen to be the morally bad ones). Morality, therefore, for Kant, is based on the rationality of actions, and this rationality is a property of the action itself, not of its consequences. Therefore, Kant would say that stealing, for example, must always be bad, no matter what consequences a particular act of stealing brings about. Click here for a more detailed but still very short introduction to Kant’s ethics.

Kant’s Ethics: What is a Categorical Imperative?

Kant’s ethics is based on the value of one’s motivation and two so-called Categorical Imperatives, or general rules that must apply to every action.

Thanks for reading! Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

How Can We Define Love?

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 06:20:53 +0000

From a philosophical perspective, love has a few characteristics that distinguish it from other relationships. Love is characterised by:

Exclusivity

Constancy

Reciprocity

Uniqueness, and

Irrepleaceability of the beloved. (Soble (1990): “The Structure of Love”)

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We all like things. I might like chocolate cookies, but is that liking proper love? I might even say that I “love” chocolate cookies, but do I really mean that? Do we love a dish or a friend in the same way as we love a lover?

How can we define love in a way that excludes liking and friendships yet captures what is unique to human love?

From a philosophical perspective, love has a few characteristics that distinguish it from other relationships. Love is characterised by:

Exclusivity
Constancy
Reciprocity
Uniqueness, and
Irrepleaceability of the beloved. (Soble (1990): “The Structure of Love”)

If you’d like to read more about the fascinating philosophy of love, there is no better book to begin than Soble’s. Please note that this is an affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!

Of course, there are many different kinds of love, and this way of defining love would apply only to a particular type of romantic love.

Exclusivity means that one’s love cannot be directed towards multiple objects. This is only true of monogamous romantic love. It is not true of all romantic relationships (there are many examples of groups of three lovers, who state that they feel genuine love towards all members of the trio), and it is certainly also not true of, say, Christian love. Loving one beggar does not exclude the possibility of us loving another beggar too. Quite the opposite: Christian love is explicitly inclusive, and is thought to be best if it excludes no one.

Constancy means that I cannot truly love one person today and another tomorrow. My love, in order to be real love, must stay constant for a while, directed towards the same person. This is not true of my love for chocolate cookies. I can love cookies today and a steak tomorrow, and nobody would doubt my love of cookies just because I also happen to “love” a steak from time to time. This shows that our “love” for cookies and steaks is of a different quality, and is better described as liking rather than loving. When we attempt to define love between human lovers, constancy seems to be one of the necessary qualities.

Reciprocity means that true love has to be mutual. If I madly love someone who doesn’t love me back, then my love is deficient. In the worst case, I’m a stalker or a creep. Reciprocity and constancy are also features of friendships, while exclusivity is typical to romantic love, but is not required for friendships.

Uniqueness means that I must perceive my lover as unique, not only as one …

What Is a Fair Share of Life?

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 21:34:00 +0000

What is a fair share of life? Do the young deserve life more? Has someone who dies young been wronged in any way?

Is it more tragic when people die young? If you have two patients and only one ventilator, who should be treated and who should die? Has the elderly patient “already lived their life?” And what is a “fair share” of life anyway?

The “Fair Innings Argument” assumes that there is such a thing as a fair share of life. If someone has lived that much, then any additional lifetime is considered a bonus. While if someone still has to reach the limits of their fair share, then they seem to have a stronger claim to additional lifetime. The problem with the argument is that it assumes that the two lives being compared are equal in every other respect. And this is never the case.

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Dying young

It’s an old problem, but the coronavirus crisis has yanked it out of the philosophers’ drawers and into the news: should we let elderly patients die in order to benefit the young?

So you have this doctor standing there in his hospital ward, and he has two patients in front of him, but only one ventilator. The one patient is, say, 80 years old, the other 20. How can he make sense of this situation? How can he decide?

There is an argument called the Fair Innings Argument, and the idea is that some people have already had their fair share of life. So you’d assume that there is such as thing as a fair share of a human life, let’s say seventy years. If you get more than seventy years, that’s good for you, but since you’ve already had your fair share, everything beyond that is valuable and good and you should enjoy it, but it is not something you are entitled to. While other people might not yet have had their fair share. So that 20-year-old is missing 50 years to complete his fair share of life, and because these 50 years are missing, he would somehow suffer an injustice if he died right now. Something would have been denied him that the other patient already had.

So if you believe that argument, you’d say, I prefer to give my limited resource, my medicine, my ventilator, my nurse time to the younger patient, just because they still haven’t enjoyed their fair share of life. So it becomes a matter of justice. It seems more just to give these resources to the younger patient. But is this true? And is the Fair Innings Argument really a good argument?

We’ll use ideas from a paper by Michael Rivlin (Why the fair innings argument is not persuasive. BMC medical ethics. 1(1):E1, 2000).

Photo by Karthik Garikapati on Unsplash

So the question is: is there something like a fair share of life?

The first thing we can do to answer that is to ask: What does it even mean to have a fair share of something? Where does this concept of a “fair share” come from? We might …

Aristotle's Highest Good

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:57:30 +0000

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that we can recognise the highest good because we do everything else for its sake, while we never say that we pursue the highest good for any other thing’s sake. For Aristotle, the highest good is the happy life.

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There is a passage (Nicomachean Ethics, Book I) where Aristotle is concerned with finding out what “the good” is. Not any good, but the highest good.

So he looks at the various sciences and arts, and he finds that they all have different meanings of “good.” In medicine, it is good to be healthy. In strategy, the ultimate good is to win. In music, it is to play a piece well.

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But all these also have something in common. For every activity, the good is that for the sake of which the activity is undertaken. When you go to a doctor, you do so for the sake of your health. When you play music, you play for the sake of playing a piece well. So your health is one possible good. And playing a piece of music well is another good.

But now we can still ask the same question about these things that seem to be good. For the sake of what do I want my health to be good? Why do I care whether I play an instrument well? Perhaps I can find another reason. I want my health to be good so that I can enjoy my life more fully. I want to play music well so that people will like to hear me play and I will be famous.

For the sake of what do I want my health to be good? Why do I care whether I play an instrument well?

But again, I can ask further. Why is enjoying my life a good thing? Why do I want to be famous?

In the end, Aristotle says, we will have to find something that is good for its own sake, not for some other purpose. We will find, Aristotle says, that all other things are good for the sake of that ultimate good. But this ultimate good is not good for the sake of anything outside itself.

So what is Aristotle’s highest good? What could it be? What do we desire only for itself, not for the sake of another thing? Aristotle says: Happiness.

We want to have money, in order to be happy. We want to have a good family, in order to be happy. We want success and fame and a sailboat or a private jet in order to be happy. But we never want to be happy in order to reach some other goal. Being happy is itself the highest good. It doesn’t need any other justification. It is valuable in itself.

This looks like an easy insight, trivial perhaps. But it has far-reaching consequences. The next time I am tempted to work late, I should ask myself: Why am I doing this? What is …

Hannah Arendt on work and being human

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 04:21:29 +0000

The philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) has made many contributions to the philosophy of post-war 20th century Europe. But here we want to focus on one of her questions: What is it that makes us human? How does our humanity relate to the work we do every day? Is there work that promotes our humanity and work that degrades it? And how can we know one from the other?

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) distinguishes three types of work: Labor, which is work for survival. Work, which creates a product, a “work of art.” And, finally, action, which is creative activity, the making of something new out of the freedom to create for creation’s sake. Action is, therefore, the highest kind of human activity, an expression of fundamental freedom of human beings.

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Hannah Arendt says: If we look at the work people do, we can clearly identify three different types. These different types of work also have very different effects on our humanity.

First comes what she calls “labor.” Labor is work that we do in order to survive. Washing one’s clothes, for instance, or cooking, or shopping. If we look at labor, it quickly becomes clear that it never ends. You can slave all day just washing things, and shopping, and cooking, and cleaning the house, but the next day, or the next week, you’ll have to do the same chores all over again. Labor sustains life, but it does not produce any result beyond that. Nothing remains from the once clean house after it has become dirty again. And if you clean it again (as you must) a week later it will look dirty once more. Labor of this kind is hardly the stuff that elevates one’s human qualities. It is slaving away, like an animal does, and it bears no fruits in the long term besides survival.

Next comes “work.” We use the word sometimes to describe things, products: A work of art. Her life’s work. A writer’s collected works. Working is a process that culminates in a piece of work, an outcome, something tangible, something that will last. Working creates value beyond mere survival. Also, working creates a heritage. Something to pass on to the next generation. Ancient temples, churches, statues, pictures, books, songs, symphonies. The cultural heritage of mankind is the product of work.

“Are you working?” – “No, I’m laboring.” You get the point.

In our society, work is threatened by labor. A world that wants to consume things fast and cheap favors labor over work. Why make things permanent? Capitalism rewards the disposable. Buy a fridge and throw it away after the warranty expires. Buy a phone and throw it away after a new model comes out. Thus, the work of making a fridge, or phone, is degraded to labor, since the fruits of the work lose their permanence. For Hannah Arendt, permanence is the enemy of …

The Ethics of Organ Transplants

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 04:54:00 +0000

Are we ever allowed to kill one in order to save many lives? Utilitarianism would look at the overall benefit and conclude that sometimes this might be permissible. Kantian ethics, on the other hand, would consider every human life as infinitely valuable, so that we wouldn’t be allowed to “add up” the values of lives.

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The ethics of weighing lives

Imagine you are a doctor. You are doing organ transplants on children. Your success depends on organ donations. You have a whole hospital ward full of children waiting for organs, and you know that about half of them will die because they won’t get the organs they need in time. Then a baby is born without most of its brain. That baby (call her T) breathes and has a heartbeat, but since she does not have a brain, she will never be conscious or have any kind of human life. Indeed, you know from other such cases that the baby is likely to die within the first ten days of its life.

Can you take out Baby T’s organs and transplant them into the other kids who need them?

Of course, doing so would kill Baby T. But it would save the lives of many other children, who would have a real chance of being healed and becoming healthy and happy adults who can lead a normal, full life.

What is the right thing to do?

The “Fair Innings Argument” assumes that there is such a thing as a fair share of life. But can we compare different lives in this way?

Harvesting organs for transplants

Photo by Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Organs for transplants are a precious resource. According to the WHO, around 66,000 kidney transplants, 21,000 liver transplants and 6,000 heart transplants were performed globally in 2005. These organs have to come from somewhere. Kidneys can in principle be donated by living donors (since each of us has two of them), but livers and hearts must be obtained from donors who cannot survive the procedure. Although donors can be of any age (in the US, a 92-year old donated a liver and saved someone’s life), young and healthy people are more likely to have young and healthy organs that will be more likely to benefit organ recipients.

So where do we get the organs?

In countries that have a death penalty, organs for transplants might come from executed people, who are often young and (reasonably) healthy. A main source of organs are patients who have suffered a fatal brain damage, due to a stroke or an accident perhaps, but who have otherwise been in good health. And sometimes, like in our case, organs may come from children who are born with an incurable condition and who are expected to die soon.

The problem of killing one to save many is not limited to organ donations. This case …

Peter Singer's Drowning Child

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 03:28:18 +0000

Peter Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment: If, on the way to the office, we saw a child drowning in a pond, would we think that we have to save it? Would it change anything if we were wearing a new suit and if we came late to our business conference because of saving the child?

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Long before Google gave us the slogan “don’t be evil,” philosophers have been thinking about what “good” or “evil” behaviour really means. We think that we recognise evil when we see it – but do we really? Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment is an attempt to clarify that question.

The philosopher Peter Singer invites us to a thought experiment: If, on the way to the office, we saw a child drowning in a pond, would we think that we have to save it? Would it change anything if we were wearing a new suit and if we came late to our business conference because of saving the child? This case, he says, illustrates that we have a duty to help others if we can do so with a relatively small investment from our side.

To make Peter Singer’s drowning child example more realistic, let’s say you buy a colourful, cheap shirt from an Indian shop in some Western metropolis. Nothing bad about that. Not as bad, surely, as the really terrible things people do, like forced child labour or slavery. Except that this shirt, likely coming from India or Bangladesh, has probably been produced with child labour. The buyer is, after all, the one for whose benefit these industries were created, and therefore a part of the criminal circuit that keeps those children working. When the shirt, fashionably cut and attractively coloured, beckons from the retailer’s rack or the Amazon catalogue, it doesn’t come bundled with the pictures of the kids whose lives were destroyed making it. But perhaps it should.

Am I evil when I buy such a shirt? Probably not. Am I good? Probably neither.

Immanuel Kant wants us to treat others “as ends in themselves,” rather than only as means to our own ends. What does this mean?

When I take a taxi or a bus, I am certainly treating the driver as a mean to my own end of getting to my destination. I don’t really care who the driver is, if he’s happy, if he likes me, or whether his child is in hospital after a terrible accident. But I’m not treating the driver as a mean only; I’m paying my fare, and thus I give the driver the opportunity to use this money in order to pursue his own ends. He can take a holiday, if he makes enough, buy a new phone, or afford a better cure for his child.

But isn’t it the same with the shirt from India? Do I not pay for the shirt, thus enabling… what exactly? Enabling the circle of exploitation and slavery to go on? The problem is that the taxi driver is a member of my affluent society, informed about his rights, protected by the basic legal framework of my society, who has voluntarily agreed to …

What Is a Stoic Person?

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 03:02:41 +0000

A Stoic is an adherent of Stoicism, an ancient Greek and Roman philosophy of life. Stoics thought that, in order to be happy, we must learn to distinguish between what we can control and what we cannot. Those things in our life that we can control, we should try to steer towards their best outcomes for all. Those that we cannot control, we must learn to accept. Not knowing the difference between the two classes of things is a major source of human unhappiness. Famous Stoics were the philosopher and former slave Epictetus, the writer Seneca the Younger and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.

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What is a Stoic person? On a prominent website, you find this description:

Being stoic is being calm and almost without any emotion. When you’re stoic, you don’t show what you’re feeling and you also accept whatever is happening. … The adjective stoic describes any person, action, or thing that seems emotionless and almost blank. (vocabulary.com)

That’s quite misleading, and a good demonstration of why one shouldn’t use dictionaries to answer philosophical questions.

A ‘Stoic’ attitude to life aims to achieve lasting happiness by staying calm, rational and emotionally detached, while cultivating one’s virtues.

The Stoics were an ancient Greek and Roman school of philosophers, who counted among them a slave, a celebrated writer, and an Emperor of Rome (Epictetus, Seneca the Younger and Marcus Aurelius, respectively). Their world view was complex and included the study of the natural sciences, but one of the main principles of their theory of happiness was that:

One should clearly distinguish between events that one has control over, and those that one cannot control.

This is the basis of correct thinking and of reaching one’s maximum potential as a human being. Because only after we’re able to see what we can influence and what we cannot, we can approach these two classes of events in different, and appropriate, ways.

The events that I can control, I must control, the Stoic would say. It is my duty as a human being and as a citizen to use my power and my influence in society to the maximum extent possible, in order to benefit everyone who comes into the sphere of my control.

One should clearly distinguish between events that one has control over, and those that one cannot control.

And this, in turn, has to do with the realisation that we are all equally valuable as human beings, and that our concerns, fears and loves all count the same, all are equally important. Selfish people, in the Stoic world view, are just mistaken about the importance of their own self. They are deluded, they fail to recognise that, to everyone else except themselves, they are “just another dude over …

Which Social Media Site Is the Most Ethical?

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 06:09:10 +0000

Social media affect our society in many ways. We consider issues of addiction, democracy, the decline of journalism, privacy, surveillance, and effects on friendships and user happiness. Taking the most obvious problems of social media into account, it seems that LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Pinterest are more ethical, on the whole, while Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are least ethical.

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That’s a great question that I recently found on Quora, and I think that many of us are asking the same (TLDR: My answer is at the very end). It’s also a very difficult question to answer: for one, there are many different social media sites, and I’m not even sure that I know most of them (and, obviously, I’ve used even less myself, so my own experience is very limited). It’s also not entirely clear what would could as social media: take Quora, for example. Are we also talking about this? And, finally, social media affect society in many ways that are really difficult to sort out. Who would have thought, for example, that Facebook can influence the outcome of democratic elections, redefine friendship for almost 3 billion humans, and, together with Twitter, lead to the collapse of almost the entire newspaper and print magazine industry?

So this is a really huge question. Still, we need an answer, both as individuals and as a society, so we’ll have to find some way to evaluate the relative moral goodness of different social media.

Let’s try to make a preliminary list of the effects of social media on their users and on society:

Addiction

Social media affect the reward centres of the brain and the dopamine system (Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time - Science in the News) and must therefore be considered addictive.

Democracy

Social media have a huge influence on democratic processes in a way that renders democracy largely meaningless (The Dark Psychology of Social Networks). Fake news and information bubbles have wrecked the ability of citizens to make educated, informed decisions about matters that affect them (as one can easily see by looking around).

Newspaper decline

Social media have concentrated the world’s advertisement spending in the hands of a handful of companies (Social media advertising spend set to overtake newspapers by 2020: Research). In the process, they have severely hampered the ability of newspapers to compete for funds, leading to the extinction of many (Decline of newspapers - Wikipedia). What is sometimes overlooked is that big newspapers had a special legal status (press accreditation with special rights) and enough power (in terms of both manpower and financial means) to uncover scandals and to effectively hold the governments and big industry to account. Replacing big news outlets with social media also means replacing journalists with press IDs and the financial …

Is Whistleblowing Ethical?

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 07:02:01 +0000

The ethics of whistleblowing exposes a deep difference between Western and Confucian ethics. While both utilitarianism and Kant would probably say that whistleblowing is morally right, in Eastern (Confucian) ethics (and perhaps in virtue ethics), whistleblowing might be wrong because it violates one’s obligations to one’s friends, relatives, co-workers or superiors.

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“Whistleblowing” means that a person considers their duty to society at large or to some abstract moral principle to be more important than their duty to their own social circle (for example, their employer). So is whistleblowing ethical?

There is a difference between Western and Eastern ethics regarding the moral status of whistleblowing. In Western ethics, particularly Kantian ethics, whistleblowing would be the right thing to do. In Eastern (Confucian) ethics, whistleblowing might be wrong because it violates one’s obligations to one’s friends, relatives, co-workers or superiors.

In Western ethics (utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics), we generally think that the morally good action is one that satisfies particular moral principles (see here for a short discussion of what these theories are looking at). We also think that ethics, as well as the law, should not look at who the agent is, but treat all human beings equally and impartially.

In this framework, a whistleblower is acting morally right, because they notice some action that violates ethical principles (or the law) and they make it public so that the state (or other citizens) can intervene and stop the bad or illegal action from being performed. We think that it would be morally bad to see something immoral or illegal happening, but to cover it up instead of reporting it, because the bad agent is our friend or boss.

But this is a specific property of Western ethics (and not all Western ethics; virtue ethics, for example, might not always agree). Confucius, the most prominent ancient Chinese philosopher, thought that exactly the opposite was good behaviour:

The Governor of She in conversation with Confucius said, ‘In our village, there is someone called [Upright] Person. When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.’ Confucius replied: ‘Those who are [upright] in my village conduct themselves differently. A father covers for his son, and a son covers for his father. Uprightness consists of this.’ (Analects 13.18)_

So Confucius believes that the bond between family members is more important than some abstract notion of justice, and he probably would disagree with whistleblowing for the same reason. He would think that loyalty to one’s company, colleagues, and one’s boss is more important than following general ethical rules.

Thanks for reading! Photo by Jakob Braun on Unsplash.

The Memories of Our Experiences

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 20:01:13 +0000

Daniel Kahneman, economist, has studied the effects of memory on our perception of past suffering and happiness. He distinguishes experienced and remembered happiness, and emphasises that the two may be perceived very differently, even for the same individual and the same event. This is a crucial insight for the design of better subjective happiness surveys and, more generally, for our understanding of how we evaluate our own happiness.

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“Everything looks better in black and white,” sings Paul Simon – or, as we more commonly say, we tend to see the past through rose-tinted glasses. The happiness of memories is a fascinating subject of psychology. Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist researching the psychology of economics, has made great contributions to our knowledge of what drives people to make particular choices.

Although in economics there is a common assumption that people (consumers) will act rationally, pursuing their own best interests, Kahneman and others [1] have repeatedly demonstrated that this is not always the case and that we will not be able to make sense of human choices if we don’t consider the irrational factors that often underlie human motivation and choices.

According to Kahneman, our memories are not accurate to the truth of the events. Instead, we remember a distorted version of the truth, in which we tend to neglect the duration of events. Our memories emphasise more strongly the beginning and end of an episode and any significant changes in between, while we tend to forget the long stretches of time in which our experience did not change greatly.

Experience and memory

One of the important distinctions regarding the happiness of memories is that between the experiencing and the remembering self. Indeed, it often seems like every human being is really two different persons: one that has an experience at some point in time, and a different person that creates a memory of that experience. The crucial insight is that this memory often bears very little resemblance to the actual experience that underlies it.

Imagine, says Kahneman, that you are listening to the recording of a concert, and you enjoy it very much. At some point, after, say, ten minutes of great music, there is a horrible screeching sound, and the recording stops. How would you describe what happened? We might be tempted to say that the experience of the music was destroyed by the screeching sound. But this would not be accurate. For ten minutes, you did have a great experience, and this experience, having already been experienced, cannot be altered by the screeching sound that came after it. Instead, what happened was that your memory of that experience was affected by the flaw in the recording. Whenever you try to remember this event and the music, you will always also remember the screeching end of the experience, and this …

The Ethics of Eating Meat

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 09:04:13 +0000

Eating small quantities of meat that was grown organically in a sustainable way might be morally justifiable. Utilitarianism would consider both animal suffering in the process of meat production and the environmental impact of animal farming. Most ethics theories would agree that large-scale animal farming as it is practiced today is morally wrong.

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To approach the question of the ethics of eating meat in terms of philosophical ethics, we would have to first look at the various moral theories that allow us to decide which action is ethical and which is not. Four are very common:

Utilitarianism would say that an action is morally right if it maximises happiness or benefit and minimises pain for all concerned parties.
Kantian ethics would say that the motivation of an action counts more than the result; that an action needs to be possible to be performed by all people (and not only by some); and that we should treat all human beings as ends and not only as means.
The Social Contract theory is primarily concerned with the rights of citizens towards each other and with the relationship between citizens and government, and does not really apply well to this problem.
Virtue ethics would say that an action is morally right if it expresses the right “virtues” of a person, i.e. the properties of a person’s character that benefit both this person and others, and that help everyone reach their highest potential as human beings.

Is meat-eating ethical?

The ethics of meat consumption are complex, but it seems that most moral theories would advise against eating meat, at least if meat is produced involving a great amount of animal suffering and environmental damages (as it is now). Utilitarianism, the most common way to approach this question, would particularly oppose eating industrially farmed meat. But occasionally eating small quantities of organic meat that has been ethically raised and sourced is probably morally right.

Let’s apply the theories one by one to the ethics of eating meat:

Utilitarianism requires quite a lot of calculations and research to answer this question. You’d have to consider the pain of the animals (both as they are kept and when they are killed), but then, this pain could be minimised for ethically raised, sourced, and killed animals. But you would also have to consider the health effects of meat (at today’s levels of consumption these are mostly negative). Also, you’d have to consider the environmental impact of meat farming, not only in terms of methane emissions, but also the destruction of tropical forests, overuse of antibiotics, pollution of water etc. All in all, it seems that only very little, very high quality meat consumption might be permissible. Today’s industrial meat farming certainly is not.
Kant would not particularly care about animal rights. For him, the question of the ethics of …

Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 04:33:00 +0000

Robert Sternberg thinks that we can best describe love as composed of three “primary” components that combine to produce all the kinds of love that we observe around us: intimacy, passion and decision or commitment. These can be combined to produce the “mixed” forms: companionate love (intimacy and commitment), romantic love (intimacy and passion) and fatuous love (passion and commitment). If all components are balanced, we get consummate or “perfect” love.

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Sternberg’s triangle of love

Many theories have tried to explain what love exactly is and what different kinds of love exist. From Plato and Aristotle to Erich Fromm and John Alan Lee, thinkers have sliced up the complex phenomenon of love in different ways. One of the most prominent approaches outside of academic philosophy is Sternberg’s “triangular” theory of love.

Sternberg’s triangle

Sternberg thinks that we can best describe love as composed of three “primary” components that combine to produce all the kinds of love that we observe around us: intimacy, passion and decision or commitment. These can be combined to produce the “mixed” forms: companionate love (intimacy and commitment), romantic love (intimacy and passion) and fatuous love (passion and commitment). If all components are balanced, we get consummate or “perfect” love.

Sternberg thinks that we can best describe love as composed of three “primary” components.

The first component is what he calls “intimacy.” This is a bit misleading because Sternberg uses the word to mean the emotional component of love (“how it feels”), rather than what we would today call “being intimate,” that is, having sexual relations. For Sternberg, intimacy means warmth, closeness, connection and bondedness — all feelings that one would have in a close friendship. A love that is only composed of this kind of intimacy would be pure “liking,” what Aristotle would call “philia,” friendship, and it is printed in black in the picture above.

The second component is “passion”. Now, this is “eros” in the words of Plato: romantic, physical, sexual attraction. Sternberg describes this as a “motivational” component of love, which means that it is that component that motivates us to act, to pursue the object of our love, to call, to send flowers, to invite them to dinner and to a weekend on the beach. But a love that’s only passion, without the other two components, is a purely sexual infatuation — a temporary loss of our sanity. But it won’t be stable and it won’t really be emotionally satisfying if it lacks intimacy and commitment.

The third essential part in Sternberg’s theory of love is the commitment, the decision that we make to be in love with this particular person. It sounds a bit strange to say that a rational decision can be part of …

Erich Fromm on Being Productive

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 08:09:41 +0000

For Erich Fromm, true activity means to fully use one’s talents and abilities in order to grow as a person. The mere display of being busy is, in Fromm’s opinion, not a sign of productive work. Modern society, which relies on hierarchy and alienated work, tends to favour busy-ness over productive activity.

This article is part of The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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“Activity in the modern sense refers only to behavior, not to the person behind the behavior. It makes no difference whether people are active because they are driven by external force, like a slave, or by internal compulsion, like a person driven by anxiety. It does not matter whether they are interested in their work, like a carpenter or a creative writer, or a scientist or a gardener; or whether they have no inner relation to and satisfaction in what they are doing, like the worker on the assembly line or the postal clerk.” — Erich Fromm, To Have Or To Be (1976)

This is the psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm writing about what it really means to be an active person. For Fromm, being active does not mean being busy.

The Happier Society. Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School.
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Erich Fromm on activity and busyness

Modern busyness (and business) is all too often only about showing off how busy one is, about “hustling,” which, interestingly, today has become a synonym for freelance work.

But how productive is such busyness really?

For Fromm, to be active…

… means to give expression to one’s faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which — though in varying degrees — every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested, … to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. (p.40)

In this sense, Fromm’s “activity” is similar to what Richard Taylor called “creativity,” and what Aristotle would call flourishing: the use of one’s mind and one’s talents, of one’s whole personality, in order to grow and become a better, richer person, one who is able to give more to others rather than take.

Richard Taylor on the Creative Life

Richard Taylor (1919–2003) thought that it’s creativity that makes us …

St Augustine on the Function and Pleasure of Sex

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 07:09:43 +0000

For St Augustine, the pleasure inherent in any activity is good as long as the activity is performed because of its intended function. When we try to get the pleasure without the function of the activity, we are violating the order of nature and committing a sin.

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St Augustine on the function of pleasure

The best explanation I’ve ever found of what’s wrong with our technological culture comes from a monk who lived 1500 years ago in the deserts of Algeria: St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, his views on what pleasure should be, and a very modern critic of our age of machines.

St Augustine, of course, knew nothing of chemistry or modern factories. But he knew something about sex and its pleasures, and being a Christian bishop, he was rather wary of it.

Sex, the Saint said, has a function, and that function is, in principle, good: it allows us to make children and keep the human race alive. Certainly, God has wanted it that way, and so there could be nothing wrong with that. So where’s the problem with sex?

The problem, Augustine said, is when we separate the function (what he calls “the good”) from the pleasure of an activity.

It’s not sinful (or in any other way bad) to have sex in order to make children. All the problems with people’s sex lives begin at the moment when we forget what sex is for and start doing it for fun. It’s even worse when we have cheap and effective contraceptives available because then we can have the fun _all the time, _without ever utilising our sexual pleasure the way it was meant to be used: as an incentive to make children and keep our genes alive.

St. Augustine of Hippo. Source: Wikipedia

Now, we don’t need to buy into St Augustine’s theologically-motivated aversions. There are much better examples of what he was at, and they are vitally relevant today for our lives, and perhaps for our survival as a species.

If you look back at the development of modern, technological society, what we have done in all areas of life is systematically to separate pleasure from function, and then to suppress the function and take the pleasure alone.

Think of sugar.

St Augustine and the pleasure of sugar

Originally, sugars in fruits are there to make us eat the fruit. Plants stuff their fruits with sugars because then mammals like us will eat them and distribute their seeds. That’s the sugar’s function. And we, on the other hand, have developed those sweetness receptors because we need sugar, and the energy it provides, to survive. That’s the point of having a sense for sweetness: our taste leads us towards those foods …

Confucius on Loyalty and Betrayal

Tue, 03 Nov 2020 04:19:59 +0000

For Confucius, one’s personal loyalties to family, friends, co-workers and superiors are more important than the rules of some abstract ethical theory. This has been called the “particularism” of Confucian ethics. According to Confucius, we cannot judge an action in isolation, but we have to consider the particular circumstances surrounding it and the relationships between the agent and the other stakeholders.

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In the West, we’ve always been told that it’s good to obey the same laws that everyone else obeys, that our duty is to treat everyone the same, that we should be loyal only to the state, the government, the laws, the impersonal ethics of our societies. Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, disagrees.

If your father stole something — what would you do?

Would you cover up for him, help him hide from the police? Or would you feel that it’s your duty to report him, to make him confess his crime and to make him take the responsibility for the consequences of his actions?

Confucius on the upright person

Most of us would probably think of the second as the morally “right” behaviour. Even if, in the end, we did help our father cover up the crime, we would feel bad about it, as if we’d done something wrong. But not everyone would agree. Confucius, the ancient Chinese teacher of ethics, law and life (551–479 BC), once had this conversation:

The Governor of She in conversation with Confucius said, “In our village, there is someone called [Upright] Person. When his father stole a sheep, he reported him to the authorities.” Confucius replied: “Those who are [upright] in my village conduct themselves differently. A father covers for his son, and a son covers for his father. Uprightness consists of this.” (Analects 13.18)

Photo by Yu Kato on Unsplash

That’s surprising! Why would it be morally right for the son to cover up the father’s crime? According to Confucius, this action would not only be tolerable. It would, instead, be a reason to call the son an upright person, a virtuous man, and the son should be proud of himself for having behaved in this way. Why would this be?

Are we all egoists?

There seem to be two factors at play here. One is our Western, deeply rooted conviction that we are all individual actors, little units, each acting only in one’s own interest. In this world view, society is necessarily unstable. If everyone is just pursuing their own …

Kant on Autonomy and Human Rights

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 07:04:19 +0000

The theory of evolution changed our understanding of our own humanity by suggesting that we see ourselves as one with worms, cats and monkeys. But this overlooks the important aspect of human moral autonomy, which allows us to act against our instincts and to be truly free.

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It’s a common thing nowadays to be cynical about human beings — and when we look around, at politics, environmental destruction and social media, it seems indeed that human beings are not much more than technologically enhanced, vicious animals: monkeys with atomic bombs.

For Kant, human beings are special because they have autonomy, which means that they are able to freely decide how they want to act, even being able to act against their own interests or against their natural instincts. This autonomy is the basis for human dignity and human rights, in Kant’s view.

The theory of Darwinian evolution has been contributing to the view that we are just slightly more developed apes. Don’t worry, I’m a biologist myself, so I’m not going to question evolution. But the correctness of a theory is a distinct thing from its effects on the popular imagination. Older societies in Europe deeply believed that God had created humans in his image, and thus saw human beings as something special, a link between the animal kingdom and the sphere of the divine. In contrast, we today believe that we are just another animal — not different in principle from a dolphin, a dog, or even a worm.

The truth is that we share over 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, about 90% with cats and 85% with mice, but this biological fact does not do us justice.

Are we just another animal?

For example, if we go down this route, we lose an important justification for human dignity. And the special dignity of humans is sometimes used to explain human rights. We are special, we have an infinite value, each one of us, the argument goes. This is true of all humans, whether they are rich or poor, black or white, big or small. And this special value is why we should all have those special rights of freedom, of free speech, of being allowed to make our own decisions about our lives, why we should not suffer degrading treatment or torture.

You can see how the biological argument threatens this whole view. If I am essentially the same as a chimp, and 90% the same as a cat, then why should I have rights that chimpanzees and cats don’t have? There are two ways out of that problem: either I give up my human rights and consent to be treated like any other animal, or I give animals all the rights that humans used to have. The problem is that, in both cases, the human rights get …

Thales of Miletus

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 07:30:10 +0000

Thales of Miletus (~624–548 BC) is generally cited as one of the first philosophers, although his contributions extended to many sciences and even to business endeavors. He taught that the first element, out of which everything else is made, is water, and that everything around us is filled with souls.

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Welcome to a new series of posts, where we will leisurely stroll down the history of philosophy (mostly Western philosophy), having one quick look at each of the major thinkers of the past three thousand years or so. Come along, enjoy the views, and meet the greatest minds of human history!

First, at the side of the path we’re following, sits old Thales of Miletus. Miletus was a great city, home of many a famous man, long before Athens became the centre of the Greek world. Almost all of the early Greek philosophers came from here. Not only Thales (~624–548), but also Anaximander, Anaximenes, Leucippos (who started the ancient theory of atoms), Hippodamos, who is the father of urban planning, and the first to say that streets should be built straight and cross each other at right angles; and, finally Aspasia, the mistress of Perikles and first lady of Athens at its most glorious moment in history. They all came from this little town on what is now the coast of Turkey. There’s a Greek research site that has created a 3D model of ancient Miletus and has some beautiful maps and pictures of what it may have looked like. Here is one:

Screenshot of Ancient Miletus model. Head over to fhw.gr for more images and maps.

Thales of Miletus himself seems to have been more of a general-purpose scientist, rather than a typical philosopher. Wikipedia calls him a mathematician because much of what we know of him has to do in some way with geometry. He calculated the distance of ships and the height of pyramids by measuring triangles.

March 28: Thales Predicts a Solar Eclipse

On March 28, 585 BC, Thales of Miletus was supposed to have observed an eclipse of the Sun. A short history of the difficulty of knowing the date.

One day, somebody asked Thales (or so a story goes), if he was so clever, why wasn’t he rich? Thales, of course, being a philosopher, wasn’t interested in money; but the question annoyed him, and in order to show his critics that a philosopher could get rich if he wanted, he used his skills in predicting the weather to determine that the coming olive harvest would be more bountiful than ever. Without telling anyone, he rented all the olive presses around Miletus for the time of the harvest, and when people wanted to press their olives into oil, he made a healthy profit, proving to his doubters that a philosopher could, indeed, get rich if he wanted.

His philosophy itself has …

Aristotle and the Roots of Deep Ecology

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 07:04:10 +0000

Modern ecological ethics, for example Deep Ecology, often reaches back to Aristotle (385-322 BC) and his idea that the flourishing of any one thing is dependent on the flourishing of everything else. Aristotle did not think that one can selfishly have a good life. Instead, a virtuous person would naturally benefit both themselves and others at the same time. This idea also applies to our relations with the environment.

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It’s tragic that we only begin loving nature after we’ve lost it.

Cultures that are immersed in the natural world, people whose daily lives are defined by the struggle to survive in the wild, they don’t romanticise nature. Nature, for them, is a series of obstacles to be overcome. For us, sitting in our small concrete flats, surrounded by whirring, beeping machinery, nature becomes the utopian dream of a better world, a word that’s laden with meaning and with the promise of a lost paradise.

Interestingly, the most modern philosophies of nature, for example, Arne Naess' Deep Ecology, go back all the way to an ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle (385–322 BC). Aristotle, whom we have already met a few times, had the idea that every thing in the universe has its own kind of perfection – a way of reaching its maximum potential, of being the best it can be.

This clearly applies to man. What is the best kind of man? Aristotle asks. What makes us special and different from all other things in nature? There are, he says, two things: our rationality and our moral goodness, our virtues. So the best human beings would be those who have developed these two sides of themselves to the greatest possible extent: who are the most rational as well as the most virtuous of men. People like that would be wise, they would be also successful in the world, happy, and morally good.

So this is Aristotle’s insight: one thing alone can not meaningfully flourish.

Now only men can reach this highest stage of being because only we have the necessary rationality to do so. But if we look at things, we can also see that some of them fulfil the purpose that is inherent in them better than others, and this is one of the main points of deep ecology: that nature is not only here for us, but for itself. A pen can be a good pen or a bad pen. Good pens write well, they are easy to use, widely available, write on any surface, can be used to highlight as well as to draw, for example. Bad pens are the kind of thing you get for free in the office: they break easily, they don’t write well, the ink dries out for no good reason, their caps get lost and using these pens is generally a traumatic affair.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

But now, and here is the trick that we can use to make an argument for nature, we can apply the same thought to a tree. What is a good …

Life Is a Skill

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 02:37:07 +0000

Aristotle thinks that there’s an art to living well.

When we are small, we don’t know how to live well. We might have virtues, yes: some children are very honest, some are brave, some are kind, some are all three things. But one thing that children have in common is that they don’t know how to use these virtues correctly, and so they can’t reach eudaimonia, the state that, for Aristotle, is the ultimate goal of human life.

A child that’s brave, might feel so fearless climbing high up some rock that it falls down and injures itself. Another, being ruthlessly honest, might hurt someone. And kindness without limits is an invitation to be abused and taken advantage of.

So, Aristotle says, there’s a kind of wisdom that we need in addition to having these virtues, these good properties of our character. We need the wisdom to apply them to the right amount.

But where does this wisdom come from?

From experience, says Aristotle. From living a life that’s long and active, and rich in lessons that we have learned. Every time we perform an action, every time we speak to a friend, every time we read a book we learn something. But most of all, we learn from our failures, from our attempts that go nowhere. And if we don’t give up, if we try again and again, we will eventually find out how to do it right, and then we’ll have a bit more of that wisdom that will make us better people.

At the end of it all is the promise of a perfect life: a life that’s successful, and happy, and morally good. And this is what Aristotle calls eudaimonia.

But to get there, we need to fail, again and again, and to get ourselves up from the ground and try again. Like a child that learns to walk. Like a beginner learning the scales on a piano. Fail and try again. Fail and try again.

How to Live an Aristotelian Life

Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues; (2) phronesis or practical wisdom; and (3) eudaimonia or flourishing.

And so next time when something fails, don’t just give up. Remember, with Aristotle, that every failure brings you one step closer to wisdom and perfection, a state he calls eudaimonia. Life, like everything else, needs practice. And only our failures give us the opportunities to improve, to become better, to live richer and more fulfilling lives.

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Aristotle on moral development

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 03:29:22 +0000

For Aristotle, the moral development of a person progresses in three stages. From the child, which cannot resist temptation, through the intermediate stage of the grown up, who is tempted but resists temptation, to the final stage of the wise person, who is never even tempted and always, spontaneously, does the morally right thing.

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For Aristotle, there is only one purpose of human life, and that is to live a flourishing life. A flourishing life is one that is good in every respect: a life that is happy, successful, and morally good. A life in which we help others, and therefore these others want to benefit us back — so that in the end everyone is better off. Aristotle thinks that being good is therefore the ultimate goal of human life.

But we don’t begin life in this way. As small children, we are naturally selfish, looking only at what we can get for ourselves: toys, food, attention. Over the course of our youth, we learn that this attitude does not really benefit us in the long run, and so we learn the value of being altruistic and we learn to cooperate with others. So we reach an intermediate stage in our human development: we learn to suppress our self-centeredness, but we still have to fight against our natural impulses. We still feel the urge to be selfish, we are still envious of what others have, we still measure ourselves against them, we are still, occasionally, tempted to act out of self-centeredness. Many of us will be stuck in this intermediate mode all our lives. Some will become fraudsters and criminals; others will call it “competitive” behaviour in business, but it is, at its root, the same thing: the constant need to benefit ourselves at the expense of someone else, the inability to be truly an altruist, to truly work for the good of others in any way that’s more than a superficial display of concern.

Life Is a Skill

Aristotle on living a life well through exercising one’s virtues.

Only some will, according to Aristotle, fulfil the ultimate goal of human life and become sophron, wise men and women. They are those who realise that we’re all in it together and that the benefit of each of us depends on the benefit of everyone. With Aristotle, they will realise that being good is the precondition to their own happiness. We’re not alone in the world. One person cannot be truly happy if others are not. We depend on others for so many things: our food, our material goods, and even for the state of our environment, as we can forcefully see today. Someone driving a car or taking an intercontinental flight half a world away contributes to the destruction of my world as well as everyone else’s. And this is what the wise finally realise: that being beneficial and good to others is not really altruism in the sense that I harm …

Do Unicorns Exist?

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 11:15:56 +0000

A rant about the ontological commitment of the existential quantifier.

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Here’s an interesting little philosophical puzzle.

If I say, “unicorns exist,” am I actually saying that unicorns exist?

Well, yes, one might say. Obviously, that’s the meaning of it.

When I say, instead, “not everything is not a unicorn,” do I say that “unicorns exist” in the same way? Think about it: There are unicorns. So far, so good. And then, there are all these things that are not unicorns: traffic lights, lions, accountants, philosophy books, numbers. If everything was not a unicorn, then there wouldn’t be any unicorns. If not everything was a non-unicorn, then there surely must be at least one unicorn; otherwise, everything would be a non-unicorn. Still with me?

The two statements are actually logically equivalent, as one can verify by thinking about the non-non-unicorns a little longer. Or, to give a vegan example: If not everything is not an apple, then there must be at least one apple.

If I say, “unicorns exist,” am I actually saying that unicorns exist?

I can do this also by adding a predicate to the sentence, some feature that unicorns have, for example, to like hackers. So I would say, “there are unicorns that like hackers.” This is, as we now know, equivalent to: “not all unicorns dislike hackers.” But it seems that there is a subtle difference between the two sentences. If someone you just met on the street told you: “You know, not all unicorns dislike hackers,” you’d probably shake your head at the kinds of things people spend their time on, but you wouldn’t call the police. If the same person said: “There are unicorns that like hackers,” that would be a reason to really worry about them. Somehow the first form doesn’t actually commit the speaker to the idea that there really are any unicorns around. “Not all unicorns dislike hackers,” could just be a statement about the unicorn in poetry and art. While “there are unicorns that like hackers,” seems to be severely delusional. And yet, the two statements are logically equivalent.

What are we to make of this?

This is called the problem of the “ontological commitment of the existential quantifier,” and it goes quite a bit further than that. “Ontological” here means “related to being,” so, for example, to the actual being, the existence, of unicorns.

When I say “unicorns exist,” I am making an ontological commitment, I am saying that these animals are actually standing around somewhere, presumably waiting for a hacker to come along. When I say instead that not all things are non-unicorns, I seem to be saying something about a property of existing things (all those non-unicorns which nobody disputes), but I’m not directly claiming that unicorns exist.

If you think that all this is nuts and a total waste of time, personally I tend to agree. Still, it’s a big part of what philosophers do …

Love is All Around

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 05:16:28 +0000

In Plato’s Symposion, one participant, the doctor Eryximachos, presents the idea that love is the harmony of opposites. This resonates not only with our perception of nature, but also with beliefs in the traditional medicine of many cultures, as well as with our concept of a “balanced” person.

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Plato’s Symposion is one of the greatest works ever written about the philosophy of love. In it, Plato presents not only his own ideas about the eternal love for perfection but also a whole collection of other common ways to look at love. Love makes man behave better and more ethically. Love strives towards beauty. Love wants to own the beloved forever. Love is the desire to re-unite with one’s lost, other half. And, among them, a more surprising claim: Love is literally… all around.

The Symposion describes a party, a group of learned men discussing the nature of love. A lawyer is present, a writer, a comedian, an old philosopher, a young and dashing general, and, wisest of all, a mysterious woman from out of town, who never actually appears in the flesh. But perhaps the strangest claim in that dispute comes from a doctor, Eryximachos.

Nature is made of opposites, the good doctor says, hot and cold, wet and dry, high and low. Sun and rain, day and night, forest and desert are the ways in which nature arranges its forces so that the Earth doesn’t become too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry. All things in the universe are in a perfect balance, and this balance is what gives birth to all life that we see. Take away the rain, and the trees will die. Take away the sunny days, and they will die too. It’s only the right mixture of the elements, of all the forces of nature, that creates the visible cosmos, the wonder of life. And at its root, the universal force of creation is love, he says: the attraction between these opposites. Without that attraction, one of the opposites would take over and displace the other, and we would have a broken, unbalanced world. Only when sun and rain both kiss the fields of the Earth, we get plants and fruits and life.

There is a wisdom in Eryximachos’ idea that goes beyond love. Traditional medicine in many cultures, in ancient Greece as well as in China, has often been about restoring the balance of different elements in the body. We still talk about a “balanced” diet today, and about a person that is mentally balanced, stable, well-adjusted. Ecosystems are resilient if they are rich in species and interactions, varied in their habitats, dynamic and complex and full of energy. Life and thriving is the result of harmony and balance, not of one-sided imbalance and excess.

Aristotle, Plato’s student, and the second greatest philosopher of ancient Greece, goes even further with that thought: all our virtues, he says, are only good in a well-balanced character. Courage without moderation is recklessness. The …

September 26: Happy Birthday, Martin Heidegger!

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 07:38:13 +0000

September 26: Martin Heidegger’s Birthday (1889-1976)

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He was one of the giants of philosophy in the 20th century. Hannah Arendt, a great philosopher in her own right, was his student. She said of him that his students saw in him “the hidden king who reigned in the realm of thinking.” His philosophy was new and exciting and full of passion, and the passion stayed with him even when good old common sense left him. We’re speaking, of course, of Martin Heidegger, the most influential of what we today call “continental” philosophers.

He was born, in 1889, into another time, but his life was inextricably linked with the great wars of the 20th century. Heidegger’s insistence on the power of man to shape himself according to his will, to put himself into the centre of creation, appealed to the ideologists of Nazi Germany. Heidegger failed to distance himself from them, becoming, in the eyes of many, complicit in the crimes of the Nazis, and this accusation overshadowed the rest of his life after the war.

Philosophically, Heidegger saw man, or Dasein, as he called the way of Being of man, as something special, different from all things, and yet intimately connected with them.

Philosophically, Heidegger saw man, or Dasein, as he called the way of Being of man, as something special, different from all things, and yet intimately connected with them. Only man, in Heidegger’s world, is able to create himself, to define the way he wants to be, what he wants to become, and how he wants to interact with the world around him, using things as tools to further his own goals. At the same time, he finds himself thrown into a world, and forced to make sense of it and find his place within it. His system is complex, and his language, a German as colourful and playful as it is obscure, did not help his cause. “The nothingness nothings,” was one of his infamous quotes, used by analytic philosophers to make fun of continental thought. But there were some great thoughts in Heidegger’s philosophy that later were picked up and developed in the continental tradition, leading to existentialism (via Sartre), philosophical hermeneutics, and a Heideggerian philosophy of technology that is still used fruitfully by philosophers of robot ethics today.

David E. Cooper: Huts, Homelessness and Heimat

For Heidegger, we let things be what they are. Chōmei, steeped in the Buddhist conception of the interdependence of everything, would concur.

His greatest interpreter for the English-speaking world has perhaps been Hubert Dreyfus, who used Heidegger’s basic approach to criticise AI and modern technology in general, and who tried to find a Heideggerian approach to meaning in the modern world. His lectures on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit are freely available on the …

Can love be forever?

Fri, 25 Sep 2020 04:16:27 +0000

In the Symposion, perhaps the most famous of the ancient Greek philosophical texts on love, Plato gives us a definition of what love is:

“Love is the desire for the eternal possession of the good.”

This looks strange on first sight. Possession? What is a good? And why should it be eternal?

We are striving for perfection, says Plato. We are attracted to it. We love to look at a beautiful face, a perfect body. But if we follow our instincts for a while, we’ll notice that it’s not one particular body we’re attracted to. We’re attracted to every beautiful body, and thus to the beauty itself that is common in them. And we notice that there are other kinds of beauty: when the beauty of the body fades with age, the beauty of the mind becomes more prominent. Things like humour, or intelligence. And so our understanding of beauty grows wider, to include these things. And then we notice that we’re also attracted to other things that are beautiful: a sunset, a haunting melody, the spiral form of a seashell, perhaps even a mathematical formula, or the clever way a philosophical argument works. That’s also love, says Plato. These things we also want to possess.

Love is the desire for the eternal possession of the good.

But nothing is forever. We know that we’ll die. Sunsets end, melodies fade into silence, seashells break. But our desire to be united with beauty is still there, as long as we live. So how can we satisfy that? By uniting with these things that are not ephemeral, things that are eternal, things that won’t die: the abstract beauty of a formula describing a seashell. The score of a melody. An argument in a philosophical book. And when we engage erotically with these things, we produce eternal offspring: another melody, a new formula, a better argument. These things will not go away, they will stay around humans, to be loved and admired, forever.

Plato the man has been dead for two and a half thousand years. Socrates, who was loved by many for his wit and his wisdom, has been dead equally long. But what remains are Plato’s words on the page, recording those other words Socrates said, preserving that wit and that wisdom across the aeons for us to admire, to enjoy, and to love.

For Plato, this is the ultimate, the highest form of love, the only love that is truly eternal.

September 23: Happy Birthday, Kublai Khan!

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 02:10:57 +0000

Did you know that singer Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of the famous physicist Max Born, one of the two people who claimed to have discovered the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics?

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From a Chinese emperor to Olivia Newton-John

If you are of a certain age, you will remember Olivia Newton-John singing Xanadu in one of the worst movies of the 80s. Xanadu, the movie, takes its name, incongruously, from one of the most famous poems in English language, Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (personally, I’d choose Olivia over Sam Taylor any day, but that’s the vagaries of taste for you). And both of them take their inspiration, ultimately, from Kublai Khan’s famed summer capital Xanadu (also Shangdu), described magnificently by the first notable Western traveller to China, the patron saint of long-haul tourism, the Venetian trader Marco Polo. And so we arrive at the man who built the first, the original, the true Xanadu, that dazzling capital of the East: the Mongol Emperor of China, Kublai Khan. And if you’re asking yourself why a site called Daily Philosophy would deal with a Chinese emperor, well, there are two answers.

The inspirational one is that everything in the universe is kind of connected and everything somehow helps to promote wisdom, which is, after all, what philosophy is about. I’m sure there is wisdom in entomology, as there probably even is in metaontology, even if it’s sometimes hard to find. The other, rather more truthful answer, is that I couldn’t find anyone even remotely connected to philosophy who’s been born on September 23. The day seems to be a bleak, featureless slab of useless time, as far as philosophers are concerned. So we can fill it with something lighter instead.

In a world where letter-writing has been replaced by social media updates, it is nice to see how people in old times communicated over the course of whole lifetimes, crossing boundaries of space and war in the process. For all lovers of the history of physics, these letters are funny, intimate and passionate, all at the same time. Affiliate link: if you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!

For instance, did you know that aforementioned Olivia Newton-John is the granddaughter of the famous physicist Max Born, one of the two people who claimed to have discovered the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics? Today we tend to attribute the discovery to Werner Heisenberg, but Born spent much of his time complaining to his friend Albert Einstein (with whom he exchanged letters all his life) that the famous formula had actually been his idea. When he died, he made the point in an even less subtle way by having the formula written onto his gravestone.

Max Born's gravestone: Take your hands off my formula!

And …

Let’s Talk About Love

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 07:52:31 +0000

The philosophy of love is one of the smaller areas of philosophy but one that has fascinated thinkers since ancient times. Love is a very complex phenomenon that encompasses sex, friendship, self-love and selflessness, as well as God’s love in many religious traditions.

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Is love patient, or just expensive?

“Love is patient, love is kind,” St Paul wrote. It’s also fiendishly complicated, as everyone can attest from their own experience. In this series of posts (which are based on my university course on love), we will try to examine love over the course of the next three months, and to answer, as best as anyone can, the old question of the song: What is this thing called love?

Is love patient, or just expensive?

Like many other phenomena in our culture, our understanding of what love is has been commercialised and used to make us buy things: “Sex sells” is the universally acknowledged rallying cry of the advertising business. The media and the advertisers have an interest in narrowing down our understanding of love to only these aspects of it that can be made into products and sold: pink plastic hearts filled with chocolates, eroticised fashion that one needs to buy every half year from scratch, expensive beauty treatments and skin care that is in no way different from the love potions of older times. “Now with blue corn!” the blurb on the skin cream says, as if the stranger the ingredients, the more likely the cream will be to have genuine magical powers (an ounce of bat’s wings, a teaspoon of tiger’s teeth…).

Oops, something went wrong with the blue corn skin cream. (Source: Wikipedia)

But love has been around a lot longer than commerce, and it is a lot more varied than we usually think. Our time has finally, again, freed homosexual love from its centuries-old suppression by a conservative, church-led society. But while LGBT appears to be a new thing, the truth is that two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, homosexual love was considered the only true Eros. Yes, we needed the other sex to make children, but that was a practical matter. The highest form of love was reserved for the love between men (okay, there has been some progress in this respect, too) and when you talked about the ideal couple, you would perhaps point to Socrates and Alcibiades, the old philosopher, running around the town square barefoot, and his dashing, young officer boyfriend. Love between old and young was common, and not frowned upon, and even lesbian love was tolerated and, sometimes, celebrated, as in Sappho’s poems. (She lived on the island of Lesbos, nowadays known better for the horrors of the Moria camp, which, by a terrible irony of history, has the same name as Tolkien’s deadly mines of Khazad-dûm).

Photo by Nicolas Häns on Unsplash

God’s love

Another …

September 22: John Conway (1937-2020)

Tue, 22 Sep 2020 01:53:05 +0000

John Horton Conway (1937-2020), mathematician, inventor of the “Game of Life” simulation of cellular automata.

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John Horton Conway, who died last April aged 82, was always a little disappointed that what most people associated with his name was not one of his elegant and difficult mathematical discoveries, the surreal numbers of the Conway chained arrow notation, but a little, quite pointless game.

Publicised in Martin Gardner’s column in Scientific American, the Game of Life consists of a number of cells that ‘live’ or ‘die’ following a handful of simple rules. A live cell with two or three live neighbours survives; a place on the board with exactly three cells surrounding it becomes a live cell; and all other live cells die in the next generation. These rules produce a surprising wealth of different multi-cellular shapes on the game board: loaves, beehives, boats and tubs, blinkers, gliders, and a whole fleet of spaceships that fly across the board. Some patterns give rise to little patterns that leave the nest and crawl out into empty space, while others move resembling the jump of a knight in chess. Some even can replicate themselves and thus exhibit the most essential feature of life.

The Game of Life is rather pointless as a game, as there is nothing to win and no players. It’s rather like an evolutionary adventure, the programmer being a god in their own universe, creating life and looking at it thrive over the simulated ages.

The game has popularised a whole field of study: cellular automata. Algorithms very similar to Conway’s, can be used to describe many processes of growth and coordination, and even the coordinated flight of bird flocks. And one day, we might perhaps find something like Conway’s automata on other planets, and we might wonder: Is it life?

September 21: Happy Birthday, Bill Murray!

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 14:15:47 +0000

Without Bill Murray, who celebrates his 70th birthday today, many movies of the past 44 years would have been a lot less memorable. From Tootsie, Ghostbusters, and The Man Who Knew Too Little, to his tender portrayal of being Lost in Translation, Bill Murray has made every one of his many roles shine with his humanity and his very unique take on the glorious and melancholy fun of being alive in a crazy world.

But today we celebrate one movie specifically here, and this is Groundhog Day, perhaps the most philosophical of all his films. The story of a man who wakes up, every day, to the same day again. And again. And again. As anyone would, he goes through phases of disbelief, frustration, depression, and even tries to kill himself in order to escape from the relentless, eternal repetition of the exact same day. But then something happens. The man, trapped in this one-day life, realises that the only way to make his fate bearable is to accept it. To submit to it, but not passively: to take this one day he has been given and to transform it into something worth living for, worth waking up to, again and again. And we, the audience, along with him, learn to see our own lives in a different light.

Harold Ramis, the screenwriter of the movie, has often told the story of how the movie became a favourite of Buddhist circles, although he never intended it to. One can see why. The movie cries to be interpreted. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief are played out in the evolution of the main character: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The neverending cycle of rebirth is pictured in the awakening of Murray’s character every morning. Weatherman Phil can also be seen as an incarnation of a Bodhisattva, a perfect being, liberated from the cycle of birth and death, who stays on in the world to help rescue all the other beings and move them towards salvation. But the most important interpretation is that, which every one of us will give to the message in our everyday lives:

When the alarm clock rings in the morning, this is not just a call to repeat the same old day in the office again and again, as if time had stopped and we were caught in a deadly, timeless loop forever. Rather, every day is a new opportunity, the gift of a span of time, which every one of us has the power to transform. To change from mindless drudgery to something exciting, creative, divine, with nothing more than one’s two hands, one’s mind, and one’s heart.

One single day is all that anyone needs for salvation.

Happy Birthday, Bill Murray!

Photo by Harald Krichel — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86623843

Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 09:05:15 +0000

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919), socialist revolutionary, once said: “Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” We should remember this in our times.

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It’s always easy to be in favour of more rights for one’s own group. I am a refugee? More rights to refugees! I am a Christian? More rights to Christians! I am an atheist? Then atheists should be protected more.

In an age where everyone tries to silence everyone else who has a different opinion, it is worth remembering the words of a woman who spent her life (and came to death) fighting for what she believed: “Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise,” Rosa Luxemburg, philosopher and social revolutionary, once wrote.

It is still a good yardstick with which to measure freedom. A country where only the government’s supporters enjoy freedoms, is not a free country. Every dictatorship caters to its lackeys. Freedom cannot be only the freedom to say what others want to hear. That’s flattery. Freedom, in its widest and truest sense, must always be the freedom to say what is unpopular, what I hate, what I don’t want to hear.

Luxemburg’s genius is in turning this insight around, to show us that creating a world of freedom is the responsibility of every single one of us: whenever I meet someone who thinks differently from myself… that’s the moment where I have a chance to change the world: to give freedom and room for expression to those I disagree with; or to suppress and silence dissent, shut up those who think differently, and thus destroy the freedom of all.

Every time we see an academic silenced, a speaker attacked, a reformer killed, a child put into a corner because it spoke up: That is the moment to remember Rosa Luxemburg’s undying words: Freedom is always the freedom to think otherwise. And every one of us has the power to grant that freedom or to destroy it.

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August 27: Happy Birthday, Human Rights!

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 13:02:38 +0000

On 27 August 1789, the French National Constituent Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen. Its ideas have been with us ever since.

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The French Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen is a remarkable document, not only because its main ideas found their way into many national constitutions and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It is also notable as a piece of legislation that was directly derived from an originally philosophical discourse, a thing that doesn’t happen often in human history. But in this transition from theory to practice, the Declaration was conveniently adapted from its lofty philosophical roots to the social reality of its time, losing much of its bite. And so today it remains also notable for being a good example of how philosophical ideas get lost in translation when they are made to serve particular interests in a real-world, political discourse.

The Declaration of the Rights of the Man and the Citizen

The document is not long. Here it is in full (source: Wikipedia):

Article I — Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.

Article II — The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.

Article III — The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual can exert authority which does not emanate expressly from it.

Article IV — Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law.

Article V — The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.

Article VI — The law is the expression of the general will. All the citizens have the right of contributing personally or through their representatives to its formation. It must be the same for all, either that it protects, or that it punishes. All the citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, places, and employments, according to their capacity and without distinction other than that of their virtues and of their talents.

Article VII — No man can be accused, arrested nor detained but in the cases determined by the law, and according to the forms which it has prescribed. Those who solicit, dispatch, carry out or cause to be carried out arbitrary orders, must be punished; but any citizen called or seized under the terms of the law must obey at once; he …

August 26: Happy Birthday, Mother Teresa!

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 13:32:21 +0000

“A beautiful death is for people who lived like animals to die like angels.” — Mother Teresa, born August 26, 1910.

There are two different and incompatible views about what it means to be good, and how we should go about it.

The first is the Luke Skywalker/Darth Vader model. The light/dark dichotomy. This is the idea that some people are either by their nature or by choice and training good. They are always bright and shining beacons of human goodness. They are so far above us normal mortals that they are not even tempted by the evil forces that have all us normal sinners in their grip. We all know the names of the most prominent of them: Jesus and Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Francis of Assisi, and, yes, Mother Teresa.

Source: Wikipedia, in the public domain.

Opposed to the bright side, in this view, is the dark side: the Darth Vaders and Donald Trumps of this world, the dictators, manipulators, bullies. Those who destroy the environment, who call global warming a hoax, who drill for oil in the Arctic, build nuclear weapons and eat puppies. Them. Hitler, Kim, Gaddafi.

The problem with this whole approach to human goodness is that it makes it too easy to see oneself as outside of this dichotomy. How can I measure myself with the same criteria as Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa? I am no Luke Skywalker, I am no hero, no saint, and therefore their moral demands don’t apply to me. If anything, our everyday moral compass is closer to Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. We’re getting by, living our lives, doing the best we can with the cards that fate has dealt us.

The second approach to morality, which is a lot more fashionable at present, is total moral relativity. Since we can never be sure what is really good and bad, then perhaps there isn’t any difference between the two. Perhaps good and bad are only a matter of taste, just like (according to many) truth. Perhaps there are multiple goods and bads, even incompatible ones, and everybody can just inhabit his or her own moral bubble.

Mother Teresa was wrong about many things.

This cynical approach just covers up our own moral bankruptcy. The Darth Vaders of this world would very much like this to be true. Nothing pleases a crook’s conscience more than such moral relativism. If nobody knows what’s good and bad anyway, we can go on driving cars, polluting the oceans and profiting from poverty and slavery in the developing world. Ridiculing the distinction between good and bad is just the way to justify any behaviour. If nobody knows what is good and bad, then companies like Monsanto and Shell can come along and rule us and we won’t have a reason to oppose their rule.

But Mother Teresa (and the others in our list of moral heroes) show us another, a third possibility.

One can reach almost unimaginable heights of human goodness and sacrifice, and still be very very human; very much failing and incomplete and a sinner. But at the same time, a saint. …

August 25: Happy Birthday, Galileo’s Telescope!

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 11:40:47 +0000

Being right is a relative thing. No one illustrates this better than today’s celebrant: Galileo’s telescope, presented to the world on August 25, 1609.

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The noblemen of Venice

Are telescopes born? Do they have birthdays? Certainly, there is a sense in which an instrument can come to life: when people look through it, use it, measure their world with it. When the members of the Senate of Venice lined up behind that middle-aged professor on that evening of August 25, 1609, eager to see the distances in front of their eyes shrink to nothing as if by magic, they were bringing a new thing to life: a concept, a tool, a new understanding of the stars, but also a weapon.

We have a record of that demonstration. How the nobles slowly scaled the bell tower of St Mark’s, finally standing at the top, the view open to the four directions of the compass. How Galileo pointed the telescope first to Padua, thirty-five miles away, so that all could see that city’s church towers. Then to Murano, where one could see little figures entering the church of San Giacomo. They turned the telescope to the sea and saw ships that would be invisible to the naked eye for another two hours. [1]

It is interesting that the first public presentation of the new technology wasn’t to the public, or to Galileo’s colleagues, to the other scientists. He first went straight to the politicians in the Senate. He was rewarded: they arranged a new professorship in Padua for him and a handsome yearly pension.

Image from a fresco by Giuseppe Bertini (1825–1898). Public domain.

Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, but, in a suicidal move typical for an absent-minded scientist, he had the idea to turn it toward the night sky. One can hear the Venetian nobles groan across the centuries:

Here is this professor who created the perfect tactical weapon: an instrument that can see in the far distance without being seen. Enemy ships! Approaching armies! We can spy on our enemies. From every church tower, we can see into the offices of lawyers and politicians and read their lips through glass. We can read their most secret documents, left lying on tables close to the windows. We can see exactly who walked through the church door in Padua today, without even being there! Surveillance! We can follow any citizen on his way through town, lip-read every conversation, see his every gesture, just by standing up here, pointing this magic metal tube at the distant figures. And what does the professor talk about? For goodness sake: all that he wants is to turn the thing away from everything interesting and look at the birds, the clouds and the stars… And, of course, God, who’s also somewhere up there, invisible like a distant ship on the Adriatic sea. Will we also see Him through that thing? And what good will that do us?

Galileo didn’t invent the …

August 25: Happy Birthday, Gutenberg Bible!

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 05:39:08 +0000

In 1456, Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, printed the first Bible with his new printing press using moveable type. In time, this led to an explosion of books and literacy and to the world as we know it today.

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Just like today, over 500 years ago, an ageing clergyman gets up from his table that is covered in rags, pieces of paper, pens, ink, little flakes of gold leaf and pots of glue. He looks down at the work he has just completed: a massive book of over 350 pages lies on the rough workbench. Heinrich Cremer does not hear the barking dog in his yard. He does not hear his wife calling him to lunch. His eyes are fixed on the smooth brown leather of Gutenberg’s book, lying in a pool of golden sunlight. It’s finished. It’s done. The first printed book in history is finally ready. It is the 24th of August, 1456. A moment later the bells of St. Stephen’s will toll as they do every hour, of every day, of every year. But things will never be the same again.

We are fond of thinking that our age is special. We say things like: “The Internet is the biggest change that has happened in the history of mankind.” Or: “The computer has changed the world like no invention before it.” But is it true?

Before Gutenberg invented printing with moveable type, each single book had to be copied by hand. Monasteries had writing rooms full of monks who all day were busy copying books. Even so, books were extremely rare. Only the richest people had ever held one in their hands.

Teachers and scientists memorised what they needed to know. Plato had written his philosophy in dialogue form, partly to make it easier to memorise the texts. When you learned a text, you owned it: it was, literally, contained inside your body. This kept sources fluid: people changed things, misremembered them, or intentionally altered them to fit their own understanding and opinions. Knowledge was alive and personal.

Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash

Plato himself didn’t have a high opinion of the invention of the written word:

[Writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. (Phaedrus 275a-b)

All this changed on …

August 22: Happy Birthday, Geneva Conventions and Ray Bradbury!

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 05:47:24 +0000

August 22 marks the birthday of both the first Geneva Convention (1864) and science fiction writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).

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What possibly could an international treaty and the magician of Science Fiction have in common, besides a birthday on August 22?

The First Geneva Convention

Today in 1864, representatives of twelve states and governments signed the first of a series of Geneva Conventions, the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field. The original treaty had only 10 very short articles. It dealt only with the humane treatment of wounded soldiers in the field and the status of neutral medical personnel, particularly of the Red Cross, who attended to them.

Since then, the ten articles have slowly expanded to 64, and the twelve countries who signed the Geneva Convention(s) have grown to 196.

The Geneva Conventions (which now regulate many more aspects of warfare than the original treaty did), are notorious for being held up as signposts of human civilisation, and, at the same time, being utterly ignored in every war since.

They are a curious set of rules: a self-imposed obligation to harm one’s enemy as much as is necessary and useful to one’s ends, but not more than that. And an obligation to treat someone you want to kill and annihilate with the civility and respect that you would grant your friends. In that, the Geneva Conventions carry echoes of both Christian sentiment (love your enemies) and medieval ideals of chivalry, which included never to strike a defenceless opponent in battle. They are, in this sense, uniquely rooted in Western history and traditions, and it would be an interesting project to see whether other cultures (Islamic? Chinese-Confucian? Buddhist?) provide similar cultural archetypes. Perhaps we will go after this question in a future post.

But even earlier than the Middle Ages, we find similar thoughts. Stoic philosophy teaches that all human beings are of equal value, and that one can never be justified in placing one’s own interests over another’s. This, much later, became the central idea of Kant’s ethics: the principle that we are all infinitely valuable as persons, and that therefore no human being can ever be used by another “as means only.” Instead, we must all treat each other as ends, as human beings who have an infinite worth, just by virtue of being human.

Photo by Elijah O'Donell on Unsplash

That’s the high-minded part of the Geneva Conventions. But that’s not …

August 21: Happy Birthday, Sergey Brin!

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 11:22:14 +0000

Today marks the birthday of Sergey Brin of Google fame (born August 21, 1973) and the first public presentation of William Burroughs’ calculating machine in 1888.

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Today marks the birthday of Sergey Brin of Google fame (born August 21, 1973) and the first public presentation of William Burroughs’ calculating machine in 1888. The calculating machine formed the basis of a company that made some of the first modern computers, Unisys. Google was officially launched 110 years later.

Sergey Brin, who along with Larry Page founded Google, is sometimes credited with the statement that “knowledge is always good, and certainly better than ignorance,” which forms the basis for Google’s mission statement “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” He’s also behind the infamous, unofficial Google motto “Don’t be evil,” which Google recently (2018) found appropriate to drop from the preface of its code of conduct, once more demonstrating how youthful ideals get eroded by power, greed, and what is generally perceived as pragmatism in business.

Image source: Wikipedia

While Brin is not a philosopher, his life’s work, the creation of Google and Alphabet, has so fundamentally transformed society that it is infinitely more relevant to philosophy and society than the works of most people who call themselves philosophers in academia.

Google has not only changed the way we all (including philosophers) search for knowledge, how we manage and publish it, but also how we reach our audience and how we interact with each other. It has caused the decline of traditional publishing and the rise of YouTube celebrities and social media influencers. Google and its researchers brought us the final defeat of humans to machines in the game of Go, the decline of concentration and attention in reading, a global threat to human rights, privacy and dignity, the commodisation of human beings, advanced tax evasion, free culture, the sharing economy and the killer robots of Boston Dynamics.

The symbol #, which we today call the hashtag, has had a profound influence on our culture, from IRC and Twitter to #MeToo. It was invented on August 23, 2007.

They also brought back the previously outmoded concept of a king: arguably, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Tim Cook deserve the royal title just as much as, if not more than, Louis XIV and Elizabeth II. They lead economies many times the size of small countries, are free of the interference of commoners in their governance, can ignore democratic laws at will, are not accountable for their decisions, can censor content and exclude users by creating arbitrary rules out …

August 20: Happy Birthday, H.P. Lovecraft!

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 11:13:22 +0000

August 20, 1890: Birthday of horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, creator of unmentionable ancient horror gods who haunt small New England towns.

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Image by Lucius B. Truesdell

H.P. Lovecraft was not a philosopher by any stretch of the imagination – or was he?

Lovecraft invented such colourful figures as the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, the author of the magic textbook ‘Necronomicon.’ He created a whole universe of gods, the “Old Ones,” who live in the mythical city of R’lyeh:

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. (The Call of Cthulhu, 1926).

Lovecraft’s fiction is sometimes delightful, sometimes a bit simplistic in its technique of creating most of its effect through adjectives. This works surprisingly well for short stretches, but soon becomes tedious, since there is often little description beyond the adjectives themselves to give weight to the feelings of horror that the adjectives are supposed to evoke. Here’s a typical passage. Just look at the adjectives and how much of the emotion they have to carry:

In the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality—a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. (The Statement of Randolph Carter).

Lovecraft invented such colourful figures as the “mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred, the author of the magic textbook Necronomicon.

So, is Lovecraft a philosopher? If so, what could be called his philosophy?

For one, Lovecraft reminds us (and in this he is not so far removed from Tillich!) that the alien, when we finally meet it, will be truly alien to us. Unlike most of the aliens in Star Trek, who are different from humans mainly in fashion and hairdo, Lovecraft’s aliens are incomprehensible, wild, uncaring gods, as close and fatherly to us as we must appear to an ant or a spider. This alienation continues into the world of the human protagonists, who are confronted with it in the most mundane of everyday …

Is it stupid to hoard toilet paper?

Wed, 13 May 2020 09:46:13 +0000

It is too often assumed that hoarding commodities in a crisis is irrational and that everyone would be better off if nobody was hoarding things. But there are good arguments to the contrary.

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The rationality of hoarding

It’s often assumed, without further thought, that hoarding stuff in times of a crisis, like now with the coronavirus, must be not only an anti-social behaviour, but also inherently irrational. A behaviour that cannot be justified as being reasonable. But is this true?

If you think about it, hoarding of perishables like bread and milk, indeed seems to be a bad idea. But there are a few good reasons to be hoarding canned goods and toilet paper.

The inflation argument

First, even without a virus, the price of toilet paper (and cans, and everything else that keeps for a long time) is only going to go up over time, not down. Whether storing such goods for long time periods is rational or not depends on your availability and price of storage space. If one’s house has a large, empty basement that isn’t used for anything else, storing non-perishable, useful stuff in there for years can make sense, even financially. The precise calculation is difficult, involving inflation, transport costs (one trip to the supermarket for a roll of toilet paper is pretty wasteful in terms of fuel, but that ratio gets better the more I haul with one trip), and the probability of other disruptions over the time that my cans keep (no one said that we couldn’t have another typhoon or Fukushima along with the coronavirus).

The supply chains argument

Second, it is not true that the virus can be sure to not affect supply chains. If factories in China stay closed and international flights grounded, there is no telling what will arrive on the supermarket shelves and what won’t. It is enough for one component of your frozen peas packaging to become scarce (for example, the specific colour used to print the manufacturer’s logo) for those peas to go missing – even if the peas are local and could be readily available.

The broken deliveries argument

Third, there’s no guarantee that super markets will stay open and accessible to the public. In many places we have already seen curfews where people were not allowed to go out for shopping, having to rely on state shopping and delivery programs. Internet shopping and delivery has broken down in many, otherwise civilised places. I live in Hong Kong, and, at the height of the coronavirus lockdowns, it was extremely difficult to order anything from super markets online: the websites were overloaded, there were two-week-long delays between ordering and delivery slots, and what one ordered was not what arrived: the super markets just delivered some random subset of what had been ordered. I’m sure such things don’t happen only in Hong Kong.

The quarantine argument

Fourth, one might not be able to go …

April 5: Happy Birthday, Thomas Hobbes!

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 15:00:34 +0800

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), born on April 5th, created the Social Contract theory, which aims to explain how governments derive their power from the will of the citizens. Hobbes thought that a monarchy is the best form of government and that the king (or queen) should be able to do whatever they want without the citizens having the right to oppose them.

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Thomas Hobbes is the first of the three great theorists of the social contract theory, along with John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).

Despite his insistence on the social contract as the basis of government, Hobbes was not a defender of democracy. Early on, he published a book in which he warned of the dangers of democracy and his social contract theory makes the same point.

Hobbes lived in a time where the intellectual life in Europe had just come out of the Middle Ages: the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans took place just a hundred years before he was born. He felt that, in accordance with the rational principles applied in the sciences, philosophy should also be directed by rationality. So he asked, how can we create a rational morality for human beings, one that is based on experiment and observation, rather than religious belief?

This led him to the thought experiment of the “State of Nature”: what if one put a bunch of human beings into a situation like the one before the beginning of history, where every one can do what they like, without being restricted by morality, governments and laws? What would the resulting life for these humans look like?

And he answered: every one would have to fight for himself or herself. There would be no time in the lives of these people for culture, learning, not even for the refinement of advanced skills, like the building of better houses. Instead, every one would have to spend their whole day hunting and foraging, and whatever time was left, defending one’s possessions from the others. There would be no education, no cooperation, and therefore no medicine, no learning, no public infrastructure. In short, in his famous words, the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

What is then, the only way to escape this state of nature? Since all humans are more or less equal in power, what is needed is that one group of people take away the power from the others and use that imbalance of power in order to impose peace and cooperation among all. The social contract, in Hobbes’ eyes, is not a willing cooperation of grown-up agents who realise what their ultimate interests are – but the obedience of the weak who are forced into submission by the power of the state.

Happy Birthday, Thomas Hobbes!

March 28: Thales Predicts a Solar Eclipse

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 23:29:57 +0800

On March 28, 585 BC, Thales of Miletus was supposed to have observed an eclipse of the Sun. But what date was it for him? A short history of the difficulty of knowing the date.

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What’s the date?

Today, I accidentally stumbled upon this entry on Onthisday.com:

“Solar eclipse, as predicted by Greek philosopher Thales, while Lydians at war with the Medes leads to a truce. One of the cardinal dates from which other dates are calculated.”

Of course, the day wasn’t March 28 for Thales. It would have been some ancient Greek month — but which one? This question led me down a rabbit hole that you are welcome to follow yourself. I’ll put some links at the end of this article and you can meet me right there, at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

First the year: it’s obvious that the Greeks, not knowing the precise future date of the birth of Christ, wouldn’t have named their year 585 BC. But what then?

Turns out, in classic times, they used to count 4-year periods, from one Olympiad to the next. This could work nicely, since the first Olympic Games took place in 776 BC, long before any of the great moments of classic Greek civilisation. Unfortunately, this way of counting the years was only established by a philosopher called Hippias of Elis in the 5th century, and so wouldn’t have been used in 585 BC. I couldn’t find anything about the calendar used in Miletus in Thales’ time, except that it was Thales himself (or, according to some sources, a student of Plato’s academy, Callippus of Cyzicus) who determined that the true length of a year was not 365 days but a quarter of a day more than that. So whatever calendar was in use before and during Thales’ time, would have been increasingly wrong as the years passed, and would have been corrected ad-hoc from time to time, whenever people noticed that it was still snowing in spring.

Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash

Ancient Greek calendars

The months were, like in all ancient cultures, aligned with the moon’s phases. In German, even today, the word for “month” is “Monat,” which is related to “Mond,” the word for moon. Unfortunately, the moon’s phases again don’t align with the length of a solar year, so from time to time people dropped a month to make their calendar fit the actual season as they saw it played out in the nature around them.

Let’s not even talk about weeks. The week is a Judeo-Christian concept, derived from the Biblical story of God creating the world in seven days and resting on the last day, which inspired Judeo-Christian-Muslim societies to do the same and declare one day of the week the resting day; depending on the flavour of one’s faith, it would be either the Friday, the Saturday or the Sunday. The ancient Greeks used to divide the month more practically into three ten-day periods, roughly following the phases of the moon throughout its …

The Four Qualities of Life

Thu, 09 May 2019 07:26:07 +0000

This is part of a series of posts on happiness. Find the whole series here.

Happiness words

In this series of posts, we’ve already talked a lot about happiness and the different theories about what it really is and how to get it. Let’s now have a look at the words we use to describe happiness. After all, when we talk about happiness, and even when we just think about it for ourselves, we always use the categories that our languages provide in order to make sense of the world. Imagine being born into a language that only has a word for “pleasure” but none for “happiness.” Or a language that uses the same word to describe “happiness” and “beauty.” It is easy to see how such changes in the language would affect one’s perception of what happiness is and what is required to achieve it.

In this chapter we will discuss a fascinating paper by Ruut Veenhoven, a Dutch sociologist who has been very influential in reviving interest in happiness studies and the science of happiness (there’s a link to the paper at the end of this article). He is a founding editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies and the founding director of the World Database of Happiness, which contains research about happiness studies across countries.

In the paper we are discussing, Veenhoven distinguishes between the following terms:

Happiness
Life satisfaction
Quality of life
Subjective well-being
Welfare

Looking at these, we can ask: Do all these terms mean the same or different things? And: how would we describe some of the differences?

The pursuit of happiness has always been one of the main driving forces of human lives. This article recounts the amazing history of the concept of happiness, from ancient times to today, from Eudaimonia to Gross National Happiness.

We can probably agree that these terms are applied to a wide range of phenomena: “Well-being” can mean the quality of one’s life as a whole, but it can also mean how good or bad the practical conditions of one’s life are: for example, how the employment chances in one’s society are or how easily it is to access medical care. It can also mean how intense the feeling of relaxation and enjoyment are that a particular person enjoys at a particular moment in time (“this shower gel is the latest well-being trend”).

In the same way, “quality of life” can refer either to how good a country is in creating the conditions for happy lives (“the quality of life in Switzerland is high”) or it can also refer to the actual happiness of the citizens of a country (“the quality of life in Morocco was higher this year than last year”).

Inclusiveness of the terms

The question is, therefore, whether it makes sense at all to talk of one quality of life, as if there was one single thing that is meant by this term.

The use of the words as an umbrella term suggests that there is …

August 19: Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry!

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 13:26:59 +0000

Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (August 19, 1921 – October 24, 1991).

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Source: Wikipedia.

The movie man Roddenberry started out as a bomber pilot in the second World War. From there he went into civil aviation and crashed his plane a few times, which seemingly motivated him to become an airplane crash investigator. Later he left flying to become a policeman, and soon he found himself the Police Chief’s speech writer. He went on to become a TV writer in parallel to his life as a police officer, until finally, in 1956, he left the force to become a full-time writer.

This book, The Ultimate Star Trek and Philosophy, explores many philosophical questions related to Star Trek further. If you know a Trekkie who’s also interested in philosophy, then this is the present for them! (Note: affiliate link. If you buy through this link, Daily Philosophy will get a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks!)

Roddenberry was famously a supporter of multiculturalism. In real life, he was fired from a series set in 1860’s Mississippi, after he discovered (and opposed) that the producers didn’t want any black people on the show. Multiple of his early shows and concepts were about the coexistence and cooperation between black and white people. He was also behind the first famous interracial kiss on US television between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek.

From the 60s all the way to the mid-90s, what distinguished Roddenberry’s Star Trek from other TV shows was its relentless optimism about the future. Mankind would unite, finally. Men would put aside their differences and work together to create a better, wiser, calmer, more enlightened world. Wars and diseases would be no more than bad memories of a distant past. Exploration would be done with a sense of wonder and respect, and wouldn’t become exploitation, as it so often did in real human history. While other science fiction works of the time dealt with the ecological destruction of the planet, the rise of evil AI or interplanetary warfare, Star Trek, under Roddenberry’s influence, was always a place where the an elite caste of philosophers ruled a universe that became better and better.

Especially today, where the world seems to be increasingly governed by men who are either out of their minds, or criminals, or both, Roddenberry’s vision stays up there in our collective mind as a promise, a duty, a fairy tale, a lullaby: a place to dream of, a place to yearn for, a place to work towards, a place that everyone would be proud and glad to call home.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976)

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 13:26:59 +0000

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) was a British philosopher, primarily concerned with the nature of the mind and the role of philosophy in the world.

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Portrait by Rex Whistler. Source: Wikipedia

Gilbert Ryle was born in 1900, the son of a doctor with interests in philosophy and astronomy. He studied in Oxford and became a lecturer in philosophy in 1925. He published his main work, The Concept of Mind, in 1949.

Ryle had many interests and is somewhat difficult to put into a neatly labelled drawer. One thing he did was oppose Cartesian dualism.

Cartesian dualism

What does this mean?

It has to do with how many fundamentally different kinds of things one assumes to be in the world. There are chairs, cars and apples, of course. But, in the end, these are all of the same kind: material things. They have a length, a height and a weight. One can drop them and break them.

But not all things are material. We have thoughts, for instance. Thoughts don’t seem to have a length or a weight. People don’t get any heavier if they are thoughtful, nor is not-thinking an effective way to lose weight. Rene Descartes (who is the man behind ‘Cartesian’ philosophy and also the starting point of all modern thought, 1596-1650) accordingly thought that there are two fundamentally different substances in the world: on the one hand, material things, like chairs and apples. And on the other, thoughts. Mental processes, he said, must be different from matter, because obviously thoughts don’t have a length, or a weight.

Monism, Dualism and the Philosophy of Mind

The human mind is unique and we know of no other comparable phenomenon in the universe. The philosophy of mind (monism, dualism, computationalism) attempts to explain what exactly the mind is.

This general idea is called ‘dualism’ in the philosophy of mind, because it divides the world into two (Latin: duo) fundamental kinds of things. It is also familiar to us from Christian religion, which assumes that a human being is composed of both a material part, a body, and an immaterial part, a soul. The soul is what ‘thinks,’ and it is thought to survive the death of the body and go to heaven or hell.

This kind of thought was common long before Descartes, and even before Christianity. Plato already distinguishes between a (higher, purer) world of ideas, and a (lower, dirtier, less perfect) world of things. For Plato, things are just the imperfect ‘copies’ of the ideas. This is also a dualist approach.

Plato’s ideas about the eternal world of perfect Forms provided a template upon which Christian philosophers could build their vision of the eternal, …

How Happy Does This Make You?

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 08:54:26 +0000

Happiness researchers are faced with the question how to reliably measure happiness in surveys. A paper by Kahneman discusses Direct Utility Measurements, the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method as three approaches that allow us to measure how particular activities contribute to changes of happiness throughout a person’s day.

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Life satisfaction and utility

We talked previously about some approaches one could use to create a happiness survey, and which kinds of questions would be useful for that. Now we will have a look at how researchers try to actually measure happiness.

If you wanted to determine an individual’s happiness in a particular time period, it would first be useful to clarify what kind of happiness you’d like to measure. So it would be useful, for example, to clarify that we’re not measuring long-term satisfaction with one’s life as a whole, but the moment-to-moment changes in happiness throughout a day; or that we want to know the effects on daily happiness of a morning commute, of a good lunch, or of a night out. These are all short-term kinds of happiness that can be attributed directly to a particular situation or stimulus. There are more what we would perhaps all “pleasure” rather than “long-term happiness” or “life satisfaction.” Economists often use the word “utility” to describe this kind of subjective experience: a short-term change in happiness that is attributable to a particular situation or event in one’s life. Therefore, one can talk of the utility of a particular event, for example the utility of a night at a pub, the utility of having breakfast with one’s family, but perhaps also of the utility of reading an educational book. In this last case the happiness change is not short-term, but it is directly attributable to a particular cause, and thus it can still be treated as a kind of utility: the utility resulting from reading that book.

The whole point of using utility as a concept is to make changes in happiness (1) measurable; and (2) attributable to particular causes; and thus, accessible to scientific examination. If we extended “utility” to encompass all sorts of diffuse long-term psychological effects, although the new concept might reflect some other valuable aspects of “happiness,” it would not be as easy to isolate changes in happiness and to attribute them to particular causes; and thus, the concept would be less useful in a scientific way.

Subjective and objective utility

Another interesting distinction would be whether we want to measure utility subjectively or objectively. Imagine someone who is a prominent political prisoner because he opposes an oppressive and unjust government in his country. The political prisoner is objectively in a bad situation: being …

Can we measure happiness in a survey?

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 15:42:49 +0000

Happiness researchers are often required to determine the level of happiness of a population in order to evaluate policies that might affect it. One way to determine population happiness is through surveys. In this post, we discuss some points that one must keep in mind when designing a happiness survey.

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How do you measure happiness?

We all want to be happy. Our governments often will take decisions in the name of our happiness or welfare. But in order to know whether one makes the right choice, the choice that improves one’s happiness, one must be able to compare two states of affairs and reliably decide which of the two is “happier.” That is, one needs to be able to measure happiness in some reliable way. How can this be done? How can happiness be measured?

A survey

Let’s begin with a fun exercise: Assume that you wanted to measure someone’s degree of happiness. Go on and prepare a questionnaire with 1-5 questions with which you would measure the level of happiness of some random person on the street!

Read on after you’re done.

Let’s see. Look at your survey now, and try to answer the following questions:

Did you think of particular measurements more than once? Are some of your survey questions similar to others? What were the most common questions you thought of?
What understanding of happiness is reflected in your questions?
How could the answer lead to a wrong result, for example by measuring something other than “happiness”?
Is the understanding of happiness reflected in the questions complete, or does it only address a specific version or subset of what we generally call “happiness”?

Here are some questions my students regularly come up with. Try to see how we can evaluate them using the four criteria above:

How often do you laugh loudly? (each month or year)
Do you have any religious background?
Are you a confident person?
Do you live under high pressure?
Are you satisfied with your life now?
How often do you smile or laugh?
Do you have good relationships with your family and friends?

What can we say about each of these questions?

Laughing

Number (1) seems to assume that laughing is correlated to happiness. On a superficial level, we certainly do expect laughing people to be happier than crying ones. But can we really say that people who don’t laugh are unhappy or less happy? One may be perfectly calm and happy in a satisfied way, without ever laughing out loud. While someone may make a big show of laughing his heart out, but in reality they may be unhappy, depressed, and feeling lonely.

Religiosity

Question (2) is also based on an interesting assumption, namely that there is some correlation between religiosity and happiness. We have discussed elsewhere that this is indeed the case. But why would this be so? A few quick thoughts:

Religious people, particularly …

Can We Be Wrong About Being Happy?

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 04:10:52 +0000

Can we be mistaken about our own happiness? Proponents of subjective happiness measures would say no: one is as happy as one feels. Proponents of objective happiness would try to measure happiness “objectively” and could thus show that one is mistaken about one’s own happiness.

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Are you happy?

We can immediately see that this question will not be easy to answer. For one, there seem to be different time-scales of happiness. I can be happy with my life as a whole, but unhappy at this particular moment, because I lost my keys. Second, my happiness can be different in different areas of life: I can be happy about my job, but unhappy about the bad grades of my child at school. Third, how much happy counts as happy? If I’m not sad, am I already happy (like Epicurus would say)? If life is so-so, does this count? Or do I have to be very, or even extremely happy? Is happy the same as joyful,or ecstatic, or do these count more?

And finally, here’s an interesting question: can I be wrong about being happy? Can I honestly believe that I’m happy, but be wrong about it, so that in reality I am not happy at all?

Clearly, this question needs some thought.

Monks and stockbrokers

Can I be wrong about being happy?

Obviously, it depends a bit on how I’ll measure my happiness. Do I believe that happiness is some objective state that I can measure, in the same way as I can measure my height or my weight? Clearly, I can be mistaken about my weight. I might believe that I’m 90 kg, but when I actually step on a scale, I see that I’m 95.

Can we be wrong about being happy?

It is less obvious whether I can be mistaken about things that are not objectively measurable or verifiable. For instance, can I be mistaken about what I dreamed last night? Is it possible to believe that I dreamed about horses, while I (objectively, actually) did dream about cars? It seems possible to say so, but how would I ever know that, since I am the only one who knows about my dream and I am also the one who is mistaken? Although I might, in principle, be mistaken about my dream, there is no way I could ever find out about that, or about what I “really” dreamed of.

Happiness researchers are faced with the question how to reliably measure happiness in surveys. We present three approaches discussed by economist Daniel Kahneman.

So what about my happiness? Is happiness more like a dream, a private, subjective state, only accessible to myself, or is it something I can measure and check, like my weight or my height?

In our Western, organised societies, we generally believe that happiness is correlated to measurable outcomes. This is what makes our politicians try to reduce crime, …

The Gift of Sinning. Autonomy, Surveillance and Freedom.

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 05:45:19 +0000

Surveillance, instead of forcing citizens to behave more ethically, in reality undermines the essence of morality. According to Immanuel Kant as well as the Bible, the free human choice is the basis for all moral behaviour.

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Imagine you go out to the street and suddenly there’s a hungry lion standing there, looking at you. The next moment it has eaten you, glasses and all. (It spits out the glasses). Would you say that the lion has done something morally bad? – Now imagine you go out to the street and suddenly there’s a hungry criminal standing there in your way. He’s holding a gun. The next moment he has shot you, taken your money, and now he’s starting to eat you. Is the criminal doing something morally bad?

What is the difference between the two cases? Why would we be reluctant to call a hungry lion morally bad, and why would we, at the same time, not find the criminal’s behaviour acceptable? Perhaps the most important difference seems to be that the criminal has a choice about how to behave, a choice that the lion doesn’t have. A hungry lion just has to attack you if you look edible. It doesn’t have the power to refrain from attacking you. While we humans always have a choice. We can choose to eat, or we can choose to stay hungry. We can diet, which is a way of staying hungry for a higher good (one’s health, or one’s appearance). We can go into hunger strike for some ideal, democracy or freedom, and we can keep this up until death. No animal could do anything like this.

This ability we have to decide how to act, even against our physical nature, is called human autonomy. (Autos in Greek means self. Nomos means law. So autonomy means self-law.) This autonomy is what makes us special, so the philosopher Immanuel Kant. It makes us different from everything else on the planet.

The ability we have to decide for ourselves how to live our lives is what makes us human in the first place.

But note that autonomy is not only a freedom. It is also a responsibility. The lion is, in a sense, more free than we are: it can attack when it is hungry, and nobody can blame it. We, on the other hand, can not claim the lion’s excuse. We, having autonomy, are accountable for our own desires, values, and choices in a way that animals are not. The criminal who kills you is a morally bad man, and he is responsible for his actions.

John Shand: What Are We Responsible For?

How far does our responsibility extend? What can we rightly be regarded as responsible for?

So human beings have the freedom to obey or disobey the various rules that are supposed to regulate their behaviour. They can obey the laws of their state or ignore them. They can obey moral laws, or choose to ignore even these. …

Aristotle’s Four Causes

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 11:16:09 +0000

Guest post by 天智 (Tian Zhi)

Aristotle distinguishes four causes which determine the nature and purpose of every thing: the “material”, the “formal”, the “efficient” and the “final” or “teleological” causes.

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Aristotle opens one of his famous works, the Metaphysics, with the statement “All men by nature desire to know.” We can easily adjust this for the modern reader to say that “All people by their nature desire to know” without any essential change in Aristotle’s views on the matter.

But what is this thing we supposedly desire? What is knowledge? This question is not so easy to answer and philosophers through the ages have struggled to identify its distinctive characteristics, distinguishing it from closely related ideas such as opinion and belief.

Four causes

For Aristotle, in order to know a thing fully and completely, we must know its cause, of which he identified four different kinds: the “material”, the “formal”, the “efficient” and the “final” or “teleological” cause.

His meaning of these terms can be understood most easily by an example. Let us take a bronze statue. In order to know what it is, we might first ask, “What is it made from?” – Bronze of course! This is its “material cause” in Aristotle’s terminology.

What, then is its “formal cause”? – this would be the structure and shape the statue exemplifies – so perhaps the statue is Rodin’s Thinker or Donatello’s Bronze David.

Next we want to know what brought this statue into being? What was its efficient cause? To this, the response is: an artist using various tools and skill-sets, notably “bronze-casting”.

The next cause, the final cause, is the most important for Aristotle. This concerns the reason for the statue’s existence. That is, for what purpose was it created? Fun? Pleasure? To represent some literary theme? Or perhaps just to express the artistic yearning in the soul of the artist, or to feed his mouth upon payment?

If we think of any artefact, that is, a man-made object, in attempting to come to know it, we would intuitively want to identify these four causes. If we wanted comprehensive knowledge of an igloo, we would want to know what it was made of (blocks of compacted snow), what its shape was (dome like), what brought it into being (an Eskimo employing various skills) and what it was made for (temporary shelter). With any one of these missing, we would feel our account of knowledge was lacking.

Do living things have causes?

What, though, of objects that are not artefacts? What of living things such as plants and animals? To take the latter, animals, identifying the first two causes is relatively uncontroversial: we can identify a material cause (flesh and blood) and a formal cause (dog, horse, fish) easily enough. However, when we get to the efficient cause matters get complicated. Often evolutionary or religious accounts are given, and such accounts …

Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Gross National Happiness Index of the Kingdom of Bhutan was the first large-scale attempt to measure the level of happiness of a whole country’s population. The GNH index defines four pillars in nine domains, for a total of 33 indicators, which are processed into one value that describes the society’s happiness level. But the system doesn’t always work as advertised.

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The happy kingdom

The Kingdom of Bhutan is not a place you’d normally have heard of. It’s a small country, 46,500 square kilometres: roughly 150 km north to south and 300 km east to west [1]. It’s mostly high mountains and deep valleys, and it stretches from a hot and humid south to the perpetual snow of the Himalayas in the north. What makes it remarkable, though, is that its government has set itself the explicit goal of making its people happier.

In the 1970s, the then King Jigme Singye Wangchuck promoted the idea that monitoring the happiness of a population, rather than other (economic) indicators, would provide a better, more human perspective on a country’s development.

Of course, this immediately poses the question: how could one possibly measure a whole country’s happiness? Is it even possible to measure one single number that would express the country’s happiness in a sensible way?

There are many reasons to believe that this is impossible.

What is happiness?

We talked in another post about Veenhoven’s idea that “happiness” is a word that actually refers to at least four totally different concepts:

We may be talking about a potential for happiness or about actually achieved outcomes.
And we may be referring to subjective measures of happiness (as in my private feelings); or to the way people look at me from the outside (“Einstein must have been happy because his life had such an influence on others.")

So we have the view from the inside and the outside, and each can be directed towards potentials or outcomes, which gives us four different versions of what “happiness” could refer to. Therefore, so Veenhoven, talking about “happiness” in general is (at best) misleading. At worst, we would be trying to measure one thing which, in reality, is four different things that cannot be measured together or expressed in one single number.

How could one possibly measure a whole country’s happiness? Is it even possible to measure one single number that would express the country’s happiness in a sensible way?

But this criticism doesn’t seem to make such measurements entirely impossible. As an example, take a lunch. What I get from a “good” lunch will be a whole collection of different things that are valuable to me:

I will stop being hungry.
I will experience pleasant taste sensations.
I will have a conversation with the friends who accompany me.
I will enjoy the …