Stoic Week 2014 is an online and international event taking place from Monday, November 24, to Sunday, November 30. This is its third year. Anyone can participate by following the daily instructions in the Stoic Week 2014 Handbook. You can follow the Stoic practices of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus, for seven days, and discuss your experience other participants. “The aims of the course are to introduce the philosophy so that you can see how it might be useful in your own life and to measure its potential therapeutic effectiveness.”
Ethics
Lost in Rawlsland
George Yancy’s interview of Charles Mills: “Here in the United States, for example, we have the absurd situation of a huge philosophical literature on social justice in which racial injustice — the most salient of American injustices — is barely mentioned.” The interview raises challenging questions about how useful Rawls’ ideal social contract is for dealing with real-world injustice, especially racial injustice.
Moral character: it’s who you are
Nina Strohminger explains why your moral character is the key to your self-identity. “‘Know thyself’ is a flimsy bargain-basement platitude, endlessly recycled but maddeningly empty. It skates the very existential question it pretends to address, the question that obsesses us: what is it to know oneself? The lesson of the identity detector is this: when we dig deep, beneath our memory traces and career ambitions and favourite authors and small talk, we find a constellation of moral capacities. This is what we should cultivate and burnish, if we want people to know who we really are.”
Ebola and CPR
Should a medical team try CPR to resuscitate an Ebola patient whose heart stops beating? Medical ethicist Dr. Joseph J. Fins says no because the risks are too great for health care workers and even for some Ebola patients whose heartbeat is restored.
Drunks and the trolley case
Emma Green’s “The Cold Logic of Drunk People.” What happens when you ask inebriated persons about the runaway trolley?
Teaching superstar of the ancient world
It’s no surprise that NPR’s new series on 50 great teachers begins with Socrates. So what is the Socratic method: “… just what good teaching looks like: an engaged, passionate teacher facilitating a critical dialogue and acting as a kind of intellectual coach. Not a teacher merely lecturing or teaching to a test.”
More about Sartre and the Nobel Prize
In “Jean-Paul Sartre: More Relevant Now Than Ever,” Stuart Jeffries concludes: “The Swedish Academy, then, was hardly wrong to give the 1964 literature prize to the now-neglected philosopher writer: he was as great a writer and thinker as its members then recognised. It would just have been nice if they’d checked with Sartre first.”
Two heads: Paul and Patricia Churchland
Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland’s “marriage devoted to the mind-body problem.” “One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. ‘She said, “Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.” ’ ”
Does science prove we aren’t free?
Are we free? In his review of Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will by FSU philosopher Alfred Mele, Daniel Dennett agrees with Mele that neuroscience gives the wrong answer. “The mistakes are so obvious that one sometimes wonders how serious scientists could make them. What has lowered their threshold for careful analysis so catastrophically? Perhaps it is the temptation of glory. What a coup it would be if your neuroscience experiment brought about the collapse of several millennia of inconclusive philosophising about free will! A curious fact about these forays into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views worked out by mere philosophers.”
Existentialism and the Nobel Prize
Fifty years ago … on October 22, 2964 … Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize in Literature. He had been selected “for his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” But seven years earlier his fellow existentialist Albert Camus accepted the prize. He had been selected “for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Which of them violated existentialism? Neither did, according to Stefany Anne Goldberg: “What matters most about Existentialism is not the validity of a decision, but following out the responsibilities and implications of that decision. Both Sartre and Camus did that. They lived out the responsibilities of being the rejector and the acceptor, respectively. In making opposite decisions, both writers affirmed the underlying creed, which is that the choice itself is far less important than the life lived according to that choice.”
Socratically Speaking 