The school of Arthur Danto. Crispin Sartwell remembers philosopher Arthur Danto. “And that’s what I most want us to hold on to: Danto’s proof that philosophy can be a lovely thing as well as a quest for truth, his demonstration of the identity of philosophy with art – not as a premise of his argument that art is at an end, but as actually enacted in his writing.”
Philosophy
Philosophy on the battlefield
A philosopher-general. To succeed in battle, study philosophy. “People used to tell me that business administration is for the practical life and philosophy is for the spirit. … Through the years I found it is exactly the opposite — I used philosophy much more practically. Philosophers that spoke about how to balance, how to prioritize principles in a right way. … [t]his is something that I find very helpful.”
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.”
Walking, getting mugged, and the mind-body problem
How the way we walk can increase risk of being mugged. The mind-body problem in the real world? “There is school of thought that the brain only exists to control movement. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that how we move can give a lot away. It’s also not surprising that other people are able to read our movements, whether it is in judging whether we will win a music competition, or whether we are bluffing at poker. You see how someone moves before you can see their expression, hear what they are saying or smell them. Movements are the first signs of others’ thoughts, so we’ve evolved to be good (and quick) at reading them.”
The problem with moral psychology
You can’t learn about morality from brain scans. Thomas Nagel’s review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes. Many interesting issues in the review: human rights v. the greatest happiness of the greatest number, trolleyology, moral instinct, and others.
Nagel says of Greene: “Greene wants to persuade us that moral psychology is more fundamental than moral philosophy. Most moral philosophies, he maintains, are misguided attempts to interpret our moral intuitions in particular cases as apprehensions of the truth about how we ought to live and what we ought to do, with the aim of discovering the underlying principles that determine that truth. In fact, Greene believes, all our intuitions are just manifestations of the operation of our dual-process brains, functioning either instinctively or more reflectively. He endorses one moral position, utilitarianism, not as the truth (he professes to be agnostic on whether there is such a thing as moral truth) but rather as a method of evaluation that we can all understand, and that holds out hope of providing a common currency of value less divisive than the morality of individual rights and communal obligations. ‘None of us is truly impartial, but everyone feels the pull of impartiality as a moral ideal.'”
Nagel isn’t so sure and explains why.
Socratically Speaking 