The Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe is little-known to most Anglophone readers. He was greatly inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer and has been called one of the “bleakest thinkers of all times and places.” Zapffe was also an avid mountaineer and a friend of fellow Norwegian philosopher — and originator of deep ecology — Arne Næss. His only major work is his doctoral Continue Reading …
Tidying Up With Socrates
Let me present to you the ultimate life coaching team: Marie Kondo and Socrates. Marie Kondo, the Japanese organizing consultant devoted to uncluttering our households. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher devoted to uncluttering our minds. If we open ourselves to their methods of tidying up, they promise, we will live a happier life. Marie Kondo’s “KonMari” method Continue Reading …
Is Donald Trump a Legitimate President?
The Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis made headlines recently, and sparked the ire of President-elect Trump, by stating to NBC News that “I don’t see this President-elect as a legitimate President.” Congressman Lewis’s reasoning was that undue Russian influence in the election propelled Trump to victory. In other words, the procedure that brought Trump to power was Continue Reading …
Defer Your Dreams
On an episode of Inside Amy Schumer last year there was a sketch called “Listen Alert.” The gist was that Listen Alert was an emergency service for people who feel the need to vent and aren’t receiving proper attention from their friends or significant others. Press the button on the Listen Alert necklace and vent away. But toward the end of the sketch one woman starts to Continue Reading …
Is Facebook Part of Your Mind?
In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published what would become one of the most important papers in the contemporary philosophy of mind. They argued that the mind extends far beyond the boundaries of the skull and that our social and technological environments often play large roles in our everyday cognitive functions—so much so that: If, as we confront some Continue Reading …
The Trouble with Functional Explanations in the Social Sciences
Are functional explanations a kind of causal explanation? A common practice in the social sciences and philosophy is to explain why a social phenomenon (behavior, policy, institution, etc.) exists by showing the function that it serves in the society. These are called functional explanations. To better understand whether there is more than one genuine kind of scientific Continue Reading …
Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Avicenna and Aquinas on God’s Oneness
Much Internet-ink has been spilled over the last few months on the topic of Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins’s controversial statement that Muslims and Christians “worship the same God.” The situation is difficult for obvious religious, cultural, and political reasons—even if we can admire Hawkins’s extension of solidarity to Muslims, especially given the recent Continue Reading …
Marginal Agency and Responsibility: An Interview With David Shoemaker, Part III
David Shoemaker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University in New Orleans and on the faculty of the Murphy Institute Center for Ethics and Public Affairs. He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility and founder and co-editor of the Pea Soup blog. I recently interviewed him via e-mail about his new book, Responsibility from the Margins (Oxford Continue Reading …
Rejoinder to Dan Johnson: A Plea for Distinctions
I appreciate Dan Johnson’s taking the time to comment on my New York Times essay “Gay Rights and the Race Analogy.” Unfortunately, his reading of my essay is careless, and his alternative proposal is confused. My aim in the original essay is fairly narrow: I argue that people who support antidiscrimination laws that cover sexual orientation and gender identity—and I happen 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 …
The Epicurean Nag Hammadi
In the year 79 of the Common Era in Italy, Mount Vesuvius erupted. Its ashes famously piled over Pompeii for an entire day until the whole city was destroyed. Pompeii instantly became legendary, but its sister city Herculaneum, which was smaller, was less of a legend until recently. It did not yield the remains of people and animals who died instantly where they stood at the Continue Reading …
Art and Beauty: A Marital History
Art and beauty have a peculiar kind of relationship and have been uneasily coupled since perhaps the beginning of human history. This close relationship received its most formal expression with the 18th century aestheticians. But art and beauty have always been separable, as the 20th century demonstrated, even if the extent of their separability has been exaggerated. Art always Continue Reading …
Science, Technology, and Society XI: Constructive Empiricism
This post in the eleventh in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the following post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. "What we represent to ourselves behind experiences exists only in our understanding." Bas van Fraassen (1941 - ) is a Continue Reading …
The Aesthetics of Football
I was a painfully unathletic child, more likely to be found in a ballet class than on a baseball diamond. I could neither dribble nor shoot a basketball, an especially excruciating deficiency for a black kid growing up in the inner city. Football (the American version) was my particular nemesis. Not was the game itself frightening and dangerous, but the rules and scoring were Continue Reading …
Camus’ Great Blasphemy and the Ethics that Followed
Albert Camus often gets lumped in with twentieth-century French existentialists, a crew known for its hardline atheistic membership. But Camus was something different, something much more blasphemous: an agnostic who wouldn’t revere God even if He did exist. Camus’s primary concern with God centered on the notion of divine justice. Could an otherworldly justice redeem this Continue Reading …
Citizen Interview with Nicholas Humphrey, a Leading Figure in Mind and Consciousness
On May 1st I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with Nicholas Humphrey, one of the world’s leading minds in the fields of evolutionary psychology and the study of consciousness. The interview is a followup to an article in The Partially Examined Life blog titled “Soul Dust: A Well Supported Stab At The Why of Consciousness.” Our conversation focuses mainly on Continue Reading …
Natural Teleology as New Religion
Three years ago, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book called Mind and Cosmos, for which he was immediately pilloried by mainstream intellectuals, and which The Guardian called the most despised science book of 2012. Psychologist Steven Pinker was among the intellectual coterie to criticize the work, taking to Twitter to lament "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great Continue Reading …
Science, Technology and Society X: Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics
This post in the tenth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the next post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. "Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are Continue Reading …
Plato and the God of the Gaps
"God of the gaps" is a general name for any theological argument that argues for the necessary existence of God as an explanation for some particular phenomenon that challenges the limits of human understanding. In modern times, it has the distinction of being an approach to apologetics more favored by atheists than theists. An early critic of this form of argument was Henry Continue Reading …
Science, Technology and Society VIII: Leviathan and the Air Pump
This post in the eighth in a series on Science, Technology, and Society. The previous post in the series is here, and the next post is here. All posts in the series have previously appeared on the Partially Examined Life group page on Facebook. In their 1985 collaboration, Leviathan and the Air Pump, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer argued that the contest between Robert Continue Reading …