Articles
2 May 2012
Flossarian, a research postgraduate in philosophy at Rio Tinto University, had a problem, a dilemma. He hesitated in the corridor, listening to the bursts of manic laughter that came from Lionel Cashcard’s room. He waited for the student counsellor to pause for breath before knocking.
“Come in!” said Cashcard, looking up from his expenses form and creaking in his leather jeans. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve got a problem, a dilemma,” said Flossarian.
The counsellor, writing furiously, gestured to a plastic…Read
When he said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, Albert Einstein implied a contrast between fact and possibility. I should like to suggest that there no distinction in kind between the two, but that many people mistakenly accord too much importance to the idea of reality, that is, to what they think we can know for certain. Let us begin, then, with something that seems to combine the real and the unreal: fictional drama.
In discussing drama with students, I have found that many of them, to start with, invoke realism as the yardstick. The…Read
D r. Shenkman writes a letter saying “Please Philosophers, tell me how we can survive in such a hostile environment as our universe”. He asks philosophers to tell him ‘what we are’ and ‘how we should behave towards others’. He describes what he has seen of philosophy so far as the “behaviour of a headless chicken” referring I suspect to the fragmented and specialised nature of the subject as it is practised today. It might be just to accuse modern analytic philosophy, unlike philosophy in other periods of history, of having…Read
Google recently announced that they have built goggles which allow human beings to hook their brains up to an online feed, giving them constant bursts of information. Like a smart phone for your mind, these ‘augmented reality glasses’ respond to your voice commands and fill your field of vision with constant reminders, directions and suggestions about where to have lunch. It is not far from the scenario depicted in M.T. Anderson’s satirical novel Feed in which just about everybody has a chip installed in their brain which is permanently hooked up to the Internet.…Read
7 March 2012
Here’s ten tips for a great marriage from Friedrich Nietzsche to help you make it succeed.
BRIEF SUMMARY
Friendship is the highest form of love, according to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, because great friends inspire each other and can even push each other towards the ideal of the Übermensch (German word for superman)
While he was doubtful that many people would be strong enough for this kind of higher relationship, Nietzsche saw friendship as essential to a good marriage. Sex, in contrast creates complications because…Read
Marriage was never something that I quite imagined for myself, for a variety of reasons-not the least of which is that I happen to be a lesbian. As a professor of philosophy, well versed in feminist theories, a child of the '80s, marriage was definitely something to eschew. It was, it appeared, a symbol of women’s oppression, hetero-sexism, perpetuation of "traditional" values, etc. The institution of marriage did not connect up with my perception of loving unions, commitment, and the like. So I put it out of my mind completely.
I met Abelina when I…Read
In 1782 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos published Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a novel about sexual depravity among the French aristocracy. Largely ignored in the nineteenthcentury, since the 1950s Les Liaisons has been performed using countless formats and titles.
Using a tactic common in the eighteenthcentury, Les Liaisons consists of a series of letters in which the characters themselves describe their actions. The book chiefly concerns two characters, the Vicomte de Valmont and his former mistress the Marquise de Merteuil, and their use of intricate sexual schemes to amuse themselves and settle scores. The novel chronicles their efforts to seduce…Read
A cynic once said that tying the knot involves three rings: an engagement ring, a wedding ring and suffering. It is true that many marriages are disastrous, and a higher percentage end in failure now than ever before.
However, some people will claim that it is the best thing they ever did. My uncle and aunt found each other at 17 while still in high school, exchanged vows and now enjoy in their 60s, if not ‘marital bliss’ then something reasonably close.
Even philosophers have wives. Marriage raises important philosophical issues, and not just…Read
13 January 2012
During my childhood I was fascinated by videogames. One game that stands out in my memory is Pacman. It wasn’t the gameplay that interested me so much as the behaviour of the ghosts. As you watch them roam around the maze, you get the feeling that they are intelligent. They seem to be making decisions about how best to catch Pacman. But how free are their decisions? One of the interesting things I noticed was that I could play exactly the same game over and over if I moved Pacman in precisely the same way each time.…Read
Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe, discovers Tom Chivers. So where does that leave free will? By Tom Chivers (This article first appeared in ‘The Telegraph’ on 12 Oct 2011)
For a man who thinks he's a robot, Professor Patrick Haggard is remarkably cheerful about it. "We certainly don't have free will," says the leading British neuroscientist. "Not in the sense we think." It's quite a way to start an interview.
We're in the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Queen Square in London, the…Read
12 January 2012
Are we free agents? Can we be morally responsible for what we do? Philosophers distinguish these questions and have all the answers. Some say YES and YES (we are fully free, and wholly morally responsible for what we do). Others say YES and NO (certainly we are free agents - but we cannot be ultimately responsible for what we do). A third group says NO and NO (we are not free agents at all; a fortiori we cannot be morally responsible). A strange minority says NO and YES (we can be morally responsible for what we do even though…Read
The free will argument is complex and diverse. Both of us recognise that the debate about freedom can be responded to by arguing that we may be free and also determined.
Our debate will not attempt to cover all areas of this topic, but will simply offer two opposing answers to the question: ‘Are we free or are we determined?’
Luke - Libertarianism The debate over free will has developed into a web of arguments and counter-arguments. On the one side we have philosophers such as René Descartes, who once described the…Read
The question of whether or not human beings possess free will has kept philosophers out of mischief for millennia. The case for determinism may look neat, yet it's always been resisted. For if there's no free will, there's no moral responsibility and thus no basis for justice.
Accomplishments merit no praise, and love is devalued. Above all, our species loses the dignity we're so eager to accord it.
In this fight, Hollywood has had few doubts about which dog to back. After all, drama in which the antagonists were mere automatons…Read
“Professor, do we have a free will, or are all our actions determined by our unconscious mind?”
Everyone would agree that people have preferences of their own and these at least influence what we do. However the question of free will seems to depend upon whether our choices are influenced or determined by these preferences. A distinguished social psychologist, John A. Bargh in a recent book “Are We Free” frames this question as follows;
“Are our behaviors, judgments and other higher mental processes the product of free conscious choices, as…Read
22 October 2011
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17 October 2011
Burying your head in a novel isn't just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires.
Researchers from the University at Buffalo gave 140 undergraduates passages from either Meyer's Twilight or JK Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone to read, with the vampire group delving into an extract in which Edward Cullen tells his teenage love interest Bella what it is like to be a vampire, and the wizardly readers getting…Read
The ‘narrative self’ is now widely accepted by philosophers as an appropriate metaphor for the self. Philosophical interest in narrative as representative of human lives was strongly influenced by Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition.”
In this book, Arendt, a political philosopher, proposes that the individual discloses his/her self to the world and to themselves through both action and speech:
“Action and speech are so closely related because the primordial and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked…Read
Plato refers to stories and myths that serve as a point of departure and exemplification for his abstract teachings, a tradition that continues in philosophy even today. Underlying this practice is the idea that the function of narrative is to provide concrete examples in support of conceptual arguments. Hegel formulates the insight that philosophical concepts can themselves only be understood as the end result of their own story (Plotnitsky, Arkady (2005a). “Philosophy and Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London: Routledge, 427–28.2005a).
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Husserl’s disciple…Read
Identity and narrative agree well from a broadly Heideggerian perspective which argues the constitution of being through language. We could in fact go as far back as the ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides if we find that a more general identification of being and thought is relevant to the subject, but one can easily get lost within such broad ascriptions especially when their relevance to narrative and identity is only implicit. Consequently I will concentrate on a line of thought which is more congenial to me, and one which I think is a more immediately relevant classical locus to ground…Read
JOSHUA KNOBE, a pioneer in the field of "experimental philosophy" at Yale University has contributed a fascinating piece to the New York Times' online philosophy forum on the intuitions of ordinary folk about what constitutes the "true self"
So what has this to do with politics? A great deal, it seems. Mr Knobe and his colleagues, the psychologists George Newman and Paul Bloom, suspected that intuitions about the true self largely reflect prior ideological commitments. So they concocted scenarios designed to elicit different judgments from conservative and liberal subjects. Their "conservative items" describe a person changing in a way…Read
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