Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 49 - September/November 2025 i New Philosopher

“In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur To observe is not merely to look, but to attend – to be present to the quiet patterns beneath the noise. But in a world filled with constant distraction, true observation has become all but impossible to achieve. We move far too quickly to see what’s in front of us; changing direction here, there, and everywhere, chasing novelty like a cat distracted by a laser pointer. Both science and art begin with careful observation. The French Impressionist Claude Monet believed discovery came through “observation and reflection”, while Bertrand Russell claimed that facts must first be seen before they can be reasoned with. Between the painter’s gaze and the philosopher’s logic lies the very same act: the…

“All of us are watchers – of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway – but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.” This aphorism, often attributed to Peter M. Leschak, captures a modern malaise: we live surrounded by images, screens, and surfaces, yet rarely pause to inhabit what we see. The figure of the flâneur, immortalised by Charles Baudelaire and later Walter Benjamin, offers a counterpoint. The flâneur wanders the city not to hurry through it but to linger, to attend, to notice the unnoticed. Where the commuter watches the crowd for gaps in traffic, the flâneur observes gestures, textures, the choreography of everyday life. Watching is functional. Observing is revelatory. To watch is to skim. It is the peek at a newsfeed, the…

Michel Foucault once wrote that “surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.” What he meant was that the watchful gaze of power doesn’t need to be constant to be effective; it is enough that we believe we might be seen. London, once the fog-veiled home of Dickensian anonymity, is now the most surveilled city in the western world: nearly a million cameras observe its citizens, roughly one for every ten people. New York’s police network alone links more than fifteen thousand feeds; add to that the countless private and commercial lenses, and the effect is much the same – a civilisation of perpetual visibility. Paris, with some thirty-thousand municipal cameras, appears modest by comparison, yet the difference is one of degree, not kind.…

While visiting a recent exhibition of Jenny Saville’s work at London’s National Portrait Gallery, I lost track of time. I suspect that inducing such slippages is the part of the painter’s intent. Saville’s oeuvre, mostly large-scale, granular portraits of human faces, and textural landscapes of the female body, invites you to linger; and linger I did, hypnotised by her brushwork and confounded by her reconfiguration of figuration – her wayward palate and unabashed approach to the materiality of flesh. In front of a teenager’s face, blown up to the size of a picture window, the paint thickly layered on with a palate knife, I found myself moving near and far, then near again, mesmerised by the way the image fractures under close scrutiny; when it is no longer a face…

Imagine a wedding without a camera. No pictures taken, no paper evidence that it actually took place. Imagine a child’s birthday without photographs. She blows out the candles and no camera is present to capture the event. We photograph to trap time, to bottle it. We slice out the moment and freeze it. The camera is our time machine with the default setting locked in the past. My mother had us pose for a photo session once, with an Italian lady, a ‘professional’ photographer from the area. I pleaded with my mother to let us take the photos ourselves – we all have cameras, we’ll be more relaxed. But she wanted a professional to do the job. It was a hot afternoon, and a mosquito plague had terrorised the neighbourhood…

Long before the first camera, before the glass lens or the pixel, Plato imagined a darkened cave where prisoners mistook shadows for reality. They watched the flickering shapes on the wall and called them truth. To be human, he implied, is to live surrounded by illusions – to observe the world through distortions of habit, culture, and desire – and to mistake those distortions for clear sight. For millennia, philosophers have tried to drag us, blinking, toward the light. But each time the chains loosen, new forms of darkness arrive. The cave grows larger; the shadows sharpen. From Plato’s allegory to the mirrored corridors of modern surveillance, the dream of seeing clearly has become inseparable from the power to watch – and to be watched. “The philosophical spirit,” wrote Denis…

[Socrates] And now, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: —Behold! Human beings living in an underground cave, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets. [Glaucon] I…

What kind of a philosopher does one have to be to die for an idea? What these people have in common, in spite of the specific beliefs each held, is a commitment to the notion that philosophy is above all else something you practice. Sure, it involves thinking and writing, reading and talking, but these should not be seen as an end in themselves; they need to serve the final purpose of philosophy, which is that of self-realisation. Your philosophy is not something you store up in your books, but something you carry with you. It is not just a “subject” you talk about, but something you embody. This notion has been called philosophy as a “way of life” or as an “art of living.” What philosophy as an art…

Daniel Simons Daniel J. Simons is Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. He is a Fellow and Charter Member of the Association for Psychological Science, a fellow of the Psychonomic Society, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and he has received many awards for his research and teaching, including the 2003 Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association. He is the author the 2010 New York Times bestseller, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Nicholas Humphrey Nicholas Humphrey is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at London School of Economics and Bye Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of ‘blindsight’ after brain damage in monkeys and originated the theory of the social function of…

A botanist and a poet wander through the same summer meadow. The botanist notes the serrated edge of a leaf, the reproductive strategy of a yellow bloom. The poet notices the way the stem sways in the wind, the fade of pale yellow at the petal’s edge. Which is the truer observation? . Observation is never neutral. We don’t simply ‘see’; we select. The lens through which we look – our training, desires, cultural inheritance – shapes the world that reaches us. The botanist’s field notes and the poet’s verse are both honest records, yet neither contains the full meadow. This is not a weakness of observation but its nature. Every act of seeing is guided by a question, whether we know it or not. A scientist asks: What is…

Human history could be told as the story of seeing. Each invention that sharpened our vision – from glass lenses to satellites – extended the reach of perception and redrew the borders of the known. When a Dutch craftsman fitted two lenses into a tube in 1608, he did not simply enlarge distant objects; he expanded the human mind. From that moment, observation ceased to be passive. We no longer merely looked – we searched. As centuries unfolded, the instruments of observation multiplied: microscopes, cameras, telescopes, sensors, and finally, algorithms. Each revealed a new layer of reality – the infinitesimal cell, the atom, the DNA helix, the receding galaxy. The act of looking became both a discipline and a philosophy: to see was to know, to measure was to exist.…

There’s something deflating about the first time you spot a nebula through a telescope. You’re standing outside in the dark and the cold, squinting and fiddling with knobs, trying to chase down some tiny patch of sky through a tiny circle of glass – until suddenly an unthinkably vast cosmic structure comes into view from across the interstellar void. It’s stunning, even humbling. Yet you can’t help thinking: “Where are all the colours?” For decades now we’ve been treated to photographs of space presented in rich, vibrant hues. The famous photograph taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 of the ‘Pillars of Creation’ – towering columns of dust and gas in the Eagle Nebula some 7,000 light years away – is a lush mix of turquoise and mustard cut…

The duck-rabbit isn’t some strange platypus-like animal, not the hybrid result of cross-breeding. It is, rather, an ambiguous puzzle-drawing a version of which first appeared in 1892 in a humorous magazine called Fliegende Blätter. Its creator was anonymous; it is, though, sometimes known as the Jastrow illusion because the psychologist Joseph Jastrow later used it to demonstrate the role played by context and emotion in interpreting what we see. It is, however, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s subsequent decision to use this puzzle-picture in his Philosophical Investigations to illustrate his notion of what he called ‘seeing as’ that has ensured it lasting fame. The key point about the Jastrow illusion, a two-dimensional drawing, is that it is possible to recognise in it either a three-dimensional duck looking up to the left, or a…

“Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.”– Publilius Syrus “Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.” Wallace Stevens “Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.”Marcus Aurelius “Observation is an old man’s memory.”Jonathan Swift “There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation.”William Osler “The way our group does things tends to determine the proper objects of attention, and thus prescribe the directions and limits of observation and memory.”John Dewey “The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles.”Denis Diderot “It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts.”Henry Fielding “Art demands constant…

It seems that Erving Goffman was not a nice man. He liked to ruffle feathers and watch the fallout. One time he invited a group of colleagues to dinner, save one, whom he invited to “join us for dessert”. Another time he started shouting at his colleagues in a crowded restaurant, seemingly with no aim other than to see what would happen. He got kicked out. Erving Goffman was a first-rate sociologist, the kind who could see through a person’s skin to their tendons and then past that to their tendencies. His dissertation research included setting up a hidden camera at the front of his house so he could watch people put on their faces as they walked up. Goffman was intrigued by impression management – the lengths humans will…

Nicholas Humphrey is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at London School of Economics and Bye Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge. Humphrey has been studying the evolution of intelligence and consciousness for more than 50 years. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of ‘blindsight’ after brain damage in monkeys, has studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and originated the theory of the social function of intellect. He received the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most books include Sentience, A History of the Mind, The Inner Eye, Seeing Red and Soul Dust. He has been Lecturer in Psychology at Oxford, Assistant Director of the Subdepartment of Animal Behaviour at Cambridge, Senior Research Fellow in Parapsychology at Cambridge, Professor of Psychology at…

The Mass Observation project was first launched in 1937 by anthropologist Tom Harrisson, poet and journalist Charles Madge, and filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. Its founders were driven by the conviction that the lives, beliefs, and habits of ordinary people were largely invisible in the historical and cultural record, which tended to privilege politicians, elites, and official institutions. They envisioned a kind of “science of ourselves,” combining anthropology, sociology, and literature to capture everyday British life in all its complexity. During its early years, the project relied on volunteer observers who recorded the behaviour and conversations of people in public places, as well as diarists who wrote about their own lives. Particularly during the Second World War, the project became known for documenting civilian morale, wartime routines, and attitudes towards government policies,…

In 1791, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed a new kind of prison. Circular in form, its cells lined the perimeter, while at the centre stood a single watchtower. From that vantage point, one unseen observer could survey every prisoner at once. The inmates, unable to tell whether they were being watched, would behave as though they were. Bentham called his design the Panopticon – “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind”. Though few true Panopticons were built, the concept seeped into other architecture: schools, factories, hospitals, and later, the networked spaces of the digital world. The tower’s gaze became less visible, but more pervasive. Observation, once a physical act, turned ambient – an invisible current that hums through the circuits of our daily life. Bentham’s model…

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What is your demon? The excess of awareness! When consciousness grows too vast, tranquility retreats. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? I would curtail the power of the trivial to shape the world – beginning with banishing the pretentious pseudo-academics from universities, where they are far too many. What do you people accuse of? No one ever tells me. Which “thinker” has had the greatest influence on your life? A visionary thinker who believes that we are meant to grow – together. What do you doubt most? My own capacity to awaken language to its fullest power, to make it truly speak. What does ‘love’’ mean to you? Love is the quality of the bond, while companionship is merely its quantity. What does…

I look beyond my laptop’s keyboard and slantwise screen. There’s my kitchen and, outside, a lawn and trees catching late autumn light. My nine-year-old daughter sits on a sofa, picking at peanut butter on toast while our dog dozes beside her. We’re all in the same room yet it means quite different things to each of us. My daughter is watching something on an tablet, listening through headphones. I’m typing while sipping tea and sporadically glancing at familiar things in a way that makes them seem strange. That broken Styrofoam plane has been lodged on top of the dresser for what, five years? Will I ever bake a recipe from that needlessly hefty book about bread? The dog sniffs and snoozes; inscrutable. For every observer there is a different world,…

Daniel J. Simons is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois where he heads the Visual Cognition Laboratory. In addition to his position in the Department of Psychology, he is affiliated with the Center for Social and Behavioral Science and has a courtesy appointment in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising. His research explores the limits of awareness and memory, the reasons why we often are unaware of those limits, and the implications of such limits for our personal and professional lives. He is a Fellow and Charter Member of the Association for Psychological Science, a fellow of the Psychonomic Society, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and he has received many awards for his research and teaching, including the 2003 Early Career Award from the American Psychological…

noun: 1. the act of watching somebody/something carefully for a period of time, especially to learn something; 2. a comment, especially based on something you have seen, heard or read. Origin: Late Middle English (in the sense ‘respectful adherence to the requirements of rules or ritual’): from Latin observatio(n-), from the verb observare ‘to watch’, from ob- ‘towards’ + servare ‘attend to, look at’. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.…

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In the Shadow of Man Jane Goodall A strange fallacy About three months after our arrival, Vanne and I fell ill at the same time. It was undoubtedly some sort of malaria, but since we had been told by no lesser person than the doctor in Kigoma that there was no malaria in the area we had no drugs with us. How he came to believe such a strange fallacy I cannot imagine. We were too naïve to question him at that time. For nearly two weeks we lay side by side on our low camp beds in our hot, stuffy tent sweating out the fever. Occasionally we mustered the strength to take our temperatures; neither of us felt like reading so there was nothing else to do to pass…