Jonathan Ree’s review of Alain Badiou’s survey of French philosophy since Sartre. “French industry as a whole was in poor shape at the end of the second world war, but one sector was soon reporting an export-led recovery: philosophy. … After the liberation French philosophy went global. Jean-Paul Sartre had been part of the system, working as a provincial prof de philo before reinventing himself as a novelist and playwright. In January 1945, after a dull but productive war, he was flown to New York as a guest of the US State Department, which was keen to show the wonders of America to the top brains of the new France. Sartre annoyed his hosts by comparing American imperialism to Nazi terror, but as far as intellectual trade was concerned, he hit on a winning formula. He was louche, exotic, and relatively young; and even if he hated the word ‘existentialism,’ it provided him with a memorable brand.”
P3: What am I?
FBI files confirm existentialism’s ideas on the absurd
The FBI files on Jean-Paul Sartre. “From 1945 onwards, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on Camus and Sartre. The investigation soon turned into a philosophical inquiry.” And what did Jean-Paul Sartre have to do with the Kennedy assassination? See also the FBI’s files on Camus and Sartre confirm the utter meaninglessness of it all.
Posts in “The Stone” about free will
The New York Times has a philosophy blog called “The Stone.” A number of posts in the blog have been tagged with “free will.” All of them are well worth your time. To start with, you might find particularly interesting and helpful Galen Strawson’s “Your Move: The Maze of Free Will” and Eddy Nahmias’s “Is Neuroscience the Death of Free Will?”
McGinn controversies
Colin McGinn (the mind-body problem and mysterianism) has been controversial in different ways. Consider McGinn’s review of Ted Honderich’s On Consciousness: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”
Then take a look at Kerry McKenzie’s review of McGinn’s Basic Structures of Reality: “For all the epistemic faux-modesty that this book purports to defend, the image that persists while grinding through its pages is of an individual ludicrously fancying themselves as uniquely positioned to solve the big questions for us, from scratch and unassisted, as if none of the rest of us working in the field have had anything worth a damn to contribute. It will however be clear by now that I take the reality to be substantially different.”
But a current controversy is different: A Star Philosopher Falls, and a Debate Over Sexism Is Set Off.
Are you the bacteria in your gut?
Gut bacteria might guide the workings of our minds. A professor of medicine and psychiatry at U.C.L.A. “thinks the bacteria in our digestive systems may help mold brain structure as we’re growing up, and possibly influence our moods, behavior and feelings when we’re adults.”
Is fatalism toxic?
Beware toxic fatalism, in its atheistic and theistic forms. Jules Evans thinks: “I don’t think the main battle line in our culture is between theists and atheists. The main dividing line, for me, is between those who believe in free will, and those who don’t. It’s between those who think we can use our conscious reason – however weak it is – to choose new beliefs and new directions in our life; and those who think we are entirely automatic machines, without the capacity to choose.”
Addiction
The addict also rises. Clancy Martin’s review of White Out. Martin is one of the authors/editors of Introducing Philosophy.
Are you your microbiomes?
The e. coli made me do it. “A lot of public and scientific attention has been paid recently to the idea that the microbiome—the collection of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other microbes that share our bodies, outnumbering our own cells ten to one—can cause diseases widely conceptualized as non-communicable. According to well-designed, peer-reviewed studies on rodents and humans, the microbiome appears to be a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, atherosclerosis, malnutrition, hypertension, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, colon cancer, ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease, lymphoma, liver cancer, psoriasis, and even ear wax. We are, in many ways, a result of the organisms that live inside us. … [Now a] number of elegant studies … suggest that the microbiome may have as many implications for our brains and behavior as it does for more easily defined diseases.”
The Onion deploys Nietzsche for satire
Kidnapped teen freed, though freedom is its own kind of prison, is is not? But who or what is the target of the satire? Nietzsche, scholars who write about him, the press … surely not philosophy professors?
Does it matter whether you think you have free will?
Does non-belief in free will make us better or worse? The question of whether we are free to choose is not just an interesting academic question. “Studies have shown that people who believe things happen randomly and not through our own choice often behave much worse than those who believe the opposite.”
Socratically Speaking 