When persons from different cultures have different answers about right and wrong, is that an irresolvable disagreement or merely a difference? More often than not, it’s a difference according to Carol Rovane’s explanation in “Moral Dispute or Cultural Difference?”
Month: November 2015
Stoicism’s moment
Why is being a Stoic so cool right now? Chiara Sulprizio explains the renewed popularity of Stoicism in “Why Is Stoicism Having a Cultural Moment?”
App addiction
Is it your fault you’re addicted to Facebook, Candy Crush Saga, or whatever? Or are the web and all those apps scientifically designed to break your will? If so, shouldn’t they be regulated? These are questions Michael Schulson addresses in “User Behaviour”: “‘Much as a user might need to exercise willpower, responsibility and self-control, and that’s great, we also have to acknowledge the other side of the street,’ said Tristan Harris, an ethical design proponent who works at Google. (He spoke outside his role at the search giant.) Major tech companies, Harris told me, ‘have 100 of the smartest statisticians and computer scientists, who went to top schools, whose job it is to break your willpower.’”
Choose gratitude
Arthur Brooks explains in “Choose To Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier.” that it’s up to you whether to be thankful and that you’ll be better off if you choose to do so. “… we are more than slaves to our feelings, circumstances and genes. Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.”
Living a lie
In “How To Live a Lie,” William Irwin considers whether you can live as if there are moral truths, as if God exists, and as if you have free will even if you believe none of these things is true. His conclusion? Morality and God, no … but free will, yes. “Well, I cannot believe in free will, but I can accept it. In fact, if free will fictionalism is involuntary, I have no choice but to accept free will. That makes accepting free will easy and undeniably sincere. Accepting the reality of God or morality, on the other hand, are tougher tasks, and potentially disingenuous.”
Believing what you don’t believe
F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” If that’s so, then it may be that all of us regularly exhibit a first-rate intelligence. It appears we often believe things we know are not true. In “Believing What You Don’t Believe,” behavioral scientists Jane L. Risen and A. David Nussbaum explain that “people can simultaneously recognize that, rationally, their superstitious belief is impossible, but persist in their belief, and their behavior, regardless.” Detecting a mistake in our thinking does not always mean we will fix the mistake.
Use philosophy to get unstuck
In “How Philosophy Can Help Us Get Unstuck in Work and Life,” Jules Evans outlines seven pieces of practical advice from “one life-hack that a lot of entrepreneurs and business people have found useful” … ancient Greek philosophy and Stoicism in particular.
Stoic Week 2015
Stoic Week 2015 is November 2-8. Assess your “Stoic quotient” and enroll here and then download the handbook here. The handbook is interesting and useful even if you don’t take part in Stoic Week.
Whom does philosophy speak for?
In “Whom Does Philosophy Speak For,” Seyla Benhabib and George Yancy consider that sometimes philosophy speaks for and about everyone and yet at other times seems not to. Unfortunately, “a dynamic of freedom for some and domination for others is present in much of Western philosophy.” This has a significant bearing on our understanding of democracy. Benhabib says, “Western philosophy, as distinguished from myth, literature, drama and many other forms of human expression, speaks in the name of the universal. Philosophy emerges when Socrates and Plato show how we have to free ourselves from the ‘idols of the city,’ and when the pre-Socratics ask about what constitutes matter and the universe, rejecting the answers provided by the Greek polytheistic myths.” And yet she also agrees when Yancy points out “that within the Western philosophical tradition, the mind, coded as white and male, is privileged over the body, coded as female or a signification of blackness, creating a false, disembodied practice.”
Socratically Speaking 