In the chaotic flurry of consternation, excitement, and viral postmortems that followed the US election, two notions stood out to me as slightly contradictory yet strangely connected: the dreaded concept of “post-truth,” and the prescience of a philosopher who supposedly predicted Trump 18 years ago. “Post-truth” describes the blatant disregard for facts that has been Continue Reading …
Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love
The latest Wisecrack philosophy video takes on one of my favorite shows of all time: Bojack Horseman. Under the pretext of comedy, colorful animation, and talking animals, the Netflix original sneaks in heartbreaking moments of raw human vulnerability. Its main character—the eponymous Bojack Horseman—is a charismatic, depressed, washed-out actor who in his chaotic search for Continue Reading …
What Is It Like to Be Ourselves? A Debate on Consciousness and the Mind
“Consciousness is that annoying thing that happens between naps.” This is how world-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers defines the quintessentially human state in this debate, although his facetiousness is quite easy to detect: Chalmers famously formulated the “hard problem of consciousness” and built an immensely successful career around it. His Continue Reading …
On Childhood, Motherhood, and Being Ahead of Your Time: Shulamith Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
Almost fifty years ago there was an influential woman who called pregnancy “barbaric,” described childhood as “hell,” and said giving birth was “like shitting a pumpkin.” Shulamith Firestone was a radical activist and remarkably prescient thinker who helped define feminism as we know it. Yet today she remains largely—and unfairly—unknown. Through her relentless activism and Continue Reading …
Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović, and Freudian Ambivalence
As 21st-century humans, we like to think of ourselves as highly intelligent and morally developed beings. But every so often comes an artist who holds up a mirror so close to our face that we can see the fragile veneer of civilization crackle and slowly come off. Marina Abramović is one such artist, and in her 1974 performance Rhythm 0 she exposed humanity in all its primordial Continue Reading …
Facing the Other: Performance Art and Emmanuel Levinas
In one of our recent episodes, while trying to figure out what’s so special about the face-to-face encounter in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Seth mentioned the work of performance artist Marina Abramović. In 2010, the self-dubbed “grandmother of performance art” performed a piece entitled The Artist Is Present, which crowned her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art Continue Reading …
Humor and Infinite Responsibility: Can Levinas Use a Little Stand-Up Comedy?
Approaching a philosopher such as Emmanuel Levinas might seem intimidating, both because of his reputation for diving extremely deeply into the most fundamental questions of human existence, and for doing so in a style that is, perhaps adequately, quite heavy and impenetrable. In our latest episodes, Mark, Wes, and Seth took upon themselves the much-needed and difficult task of Continue Reading …
How Moral Is the Moral Machine?
A 2012 article in the New Yorker reads: With or without robotic soldiers, what we really need is a sound way to teach our machines to be ethical. The trouble is that we have almost no idea how to do that. Four years later, the guys at MIT may have found an answer: through crowd-sourcing. The Moral Machine is introduced by its creators as "a platform for getting a human Continue Reading …
The Hubris of Transhumanism
The debates around futurist tech, biotechnology, and human enhancements are usually very polarized, with one side embracing it uncritically and the other rejecting it irrationally. Geeky technophiles who see science as the be-all and end-all of thinking want to push the progress farther and faster, sometimes leaving ethics behind, whereas the more romantically minded embrace Continue Reading …
Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature
Martha Nussbaum has been recently described as a "philosopher of feelings" and indeed, throughout her career, she has written on disgust, shame, desire, sex, patriotism, love, empathy, and most recently, anger. According to Nussbaum, there is ethical value in emotions, and we are wrong to ostracize them outside the sphere of philosophical relevance. Understanding our emotions Continue Reading …
Deinotes: Dread, Wonder, and the Art of Persuasion
The uneasiness Athenians felt toward the Sophists is captured beautifully in a Greek word that later came to define rhetoric at large. Deinos is an adjective with manifold meanings, and a deeper look at the word can help us understand why the Sophists were both disliked and revered, how the art of rhetoric works, and perhaps why Socrates himself was accused of mastering Continue Reading …
Were the Sophists Really All That Bad?
It’s a well-known fact that Plato hated Sophists, and in our latest episode we’ve been examining his reasons. But were the Sophists really nothing more than immoral truth-benders, with no merits of their own? Sophists were trained in making the weaker case appear the stronger, and many took this to mean deceit and intellectual sleaziness. But in a world where the Greeks thought Continue Reading …
What Do Existentialists Think about Love?
In this video, philosopher Skye Cleary introduces her new book, Existentialism and Romantic Love. If you skip past the rather awkward acting of Simone de Beauvoir’s play Who Shall Die, from about the sixth minute onward things become interesting. In a style that has become her own—treading lightly (and gracefully) between scholarly analysis and a lighter, more popular Continue Reading …
How Plato’s “Phaedrus” Influenced Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”
Death in Venice is one complex piece of writing. Besides dealing with homoeroticism (in 1911) and approaching complex questions of ethics, psychology, and aesthetics, the novella also manages to reference Nietzsche and Plato while making us empathize with someone who some might (crudely) just call a pedophile. Gustave Von Aschenbach, the protagonist, is an aging, famous Continue Reading …
Two Short Philosophical Videos on the EU Referendum
In the light of recent EU developments, here are two videos that analyze Brexit from a philosophical perspective. In this video, Philosophers' Mag asked several philosophers from leading universities their take on the EU referendum arguments. Drawing on the work of Michael Dummett and his views on governments as the moral representatives of citizens, Dr. Alexander Continue Reading …
Virtual Reality: Do We Need an Ethical Code?
A friend of mine just got back from a conference on animal cruelty. Among scientific data and philosophical arguments against it, the audience was also offered a short "visit" to a factory farm, in virtual reality. From their comfortable seats in a Berlin University, using a phone-based VR headset, participants were transported into an exceptionally cruel environment, with the Continue Reading …
Truth and Authenticity in Michael Haneke’s Caché
Critically acclaimed filmmaker, auteur of disquieting cinema, Michael Haneke (Funny Games, Caché, The White Ribbon, Amour) has always been one of my favorite directors and one I consider to be deeply philosophical. His subtle, reflective films slowly pull the viewer in and out of their existentially comfy seat, only to suddenly "throw" them, perhaps in a Heideggerian sense, Continue Reading …
Beauvoir, Freedom, and Feminism
Simone de Beauvoir is probably best known as a writer and feminist, but there’s a strong existentialist foundation for her views on women, and we’ve started exploring that in our recent episode on Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Her take on the human condition, the tension between our freedom and that of others, as well as her concern for the ensuing ethical implications Continue Reading …