Mother Earth is not happy with Father Time's career. Creator is compromised by creation by way of reciprocation. The paternal brooder turned out not to be such a good fit for the maternal abyss. God neglects the world because its obsession with him has gone to his head. The apocalypse is just God’s creative narcissism reaping what it has sown. Patriarchal Being Continue Reading …
Developing Records with Trials: A Review of Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial by Kenji Yoshino
In recent years, trials have played an important role in shaping the legal definition and cultural understanding of marriage in the United States—mostly notably with last year’s Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that legalized same-sex marriage across the country. But have such legal events and the cultural conversation around marriage also shaped our 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 …
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 …
Book Review: The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science
Students of philosophy usually begin their study of Aristotle with his ethical writings, and then make their way to his metaphysics and epistemology. Eventually serious students of Aristotle must hunker down and work through the biological writings. For only by seeing how Aristotle appeals to form in his account of particular kinds of living things can one appreciate what form Continue Reading …
“The Most Good You Can Do” (2015): A Review of Peter Singer’s New Book
Peter Singer is a man whose moral worldview extends beyond the scope of human beings to the protection of animals and our planet, in an ever-expanding circle of concern. He is the godfather of the Animal Liberation movement and perhaps the most vocal proponent of utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize the most well-being for human beings as possible. Singer is now spearheading Continue Reading …
Woody Allen Is Coming To Television: Revolution or Regression?
It’s the new golden age of television, and Amazon Studios has signed Woody Allen to create a full season’s worth of it. “I have no ideas,” said Allen, following Amazon’s announcement in January. Having by now wrapped up post-production on Irrational Man, surely the prolific filmmaker, comedian, musician, and magician has something up his sleeve. What can Allen, returning to Continue Reading …
Grossman vs Lewis: A Trip to an Atheist Narnia
The curse of the accomplished critic is often to love and respect art with an overwhelming passion, but to be unable to enter that world as a creator of new material. The problem on the one hand is to be so immersed in the work of others that it can be hard to find your own voice, and on the other hand, to have a critical voice so highly developed that you can find it hard to Continue Reading …
The ‘Deus’ in ‘Ex Machina’
Subscribe to more of my writing at https://www.wesalwan.com Follow me on Twitter What does the film Ex Machina have to do the deus ex machina as plot device? For one thing, the film includes an implied reflection on how the human drama will end. Would the advent of conscious machines aid humanity, even save it, by leading to the kind of super-intelligence that we can Continue Reading …
Saying goodbye to Spaceship Earth: A review of Sabine Höhler’s “Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990”
60 years from now, the Earth may be as inhospitable as it was 50 million years ago. This could mean a return to the Eocene epoch, a time when, according to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, "palm trees flourished in the Antarctic and alligators paddled around the British Isles." The current epoch, the Anthropocene, is one in which human beings and the other species Continue Reading …
Murakami Solves His Mental Problems
One of the oldest and most central debates in the field of aesthetics is whether great art plays a functional role in human life, or if it should rather be considered as an end unto itself. Plato and Aristotle both assigned aesthetics a pedagogical role, with Plato demanding that art teach morality, and Aristotle crediting theatrical tragedy with teaching us how to deal with Continue Reading …
Blaming Buried Prejudice: Neil Levy on implicit bias and moral responsibility
If you haven’t seen it, there is a scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David is casually walking across a parking lot having just parked his car. An African-American man walks past him in the same direction as Larry’s vehicle. Larry suddenly turns and clicks the button on his remote keyless system, locking his car doors with a swift electronic bleep that breaks the silence Continue Reading …
Soul Dust: A Well Supported Stab At The “Why” Of Consciousness.
Nicholas Humphrey, professor of psychology at The London School Of Economics, is a leading investigator of what philosopher David Chalmers dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. His Recent book Soul Dust approaches the second part of the Hard Problem: why human beings have consciousness, and why consciousness should have evolved at all. It is an excellent read for Continue Reading …
Meta(evolutionary)psychology
One of the consistently best sites on the Internet for thoughtful reviews of worthwhile books is Metapsychology Online Reviews, edited by Christian Perring. A standout in the current issue is George Tudorie's review of Michael Tomasello's A Natural History of Human Thinking. Tomasello is co-director of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the author of Continue Reading …
The Creation of a Superintelligence and the End of Inquiry
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence is a book that imagines how we should go about dealing with a super-AI, should it come about. The thesis of the book seems to be this: if a superintelligence were to be constructed, there would be certain dangers we'd want to apprise ourselves of and prepare ourselves for, and the book is a precis, essentially, for dealing with some of those Continue Reading …
Some Questions on Aesthetics and Art
I recently finished reading Noel Carroll's remarkable book Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and the result was a newfound appreciation for aesthetics and art, and it even caused me to change my mind regarding some of the untested assumptions I had regarding art. For example, I regularly meet with a writing group and we workshop short stories. The other guys in Continue Reading …
How Not to Make a Movie in the Multiverse
There are many great, mind-bending science fiction films that, for whatever reason, are worth watching over and over, if only to suss out what actually happened. Coherence, the most ironically titled movie to come along in a while, is not one of them. Fans of science fiction, and science fiction films especially, could probably name dozens. The first that come to my mind Continue Reading …
A Lagging, Nagging Take on Her
Her got a lot of attention during its run in theaters. It even captured the attention of philosophers, no doubt because of the movie’s focus on artificial intelligence, a fixation of philosophy for at least as long as the term has been in our common vernacular. Released on DVD back in the spring, the movie received mostly (but not exclusively) positive reviews. Life in Her Continue Reading …
Stories We Tell: A Review of Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent
The stories we tell ourselves are important to who we are. Moreover, the identities we come to have are in large measure shaped by our social ties. We can agree with Michael Sandel that “we cannot regard ourselves as independent ... without great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is Continue Reading …
Free Will Worth Having
What are your thoughts on machines that can predict what you're going to do in the next five minutes? Do you think that everything that happens now in the universe was causally determined by some event(s) that happened before it? When professional philosophers check people's intuitions it looks as though sometimes people generally agree that we have free will even if the Continue Reading …