Innehållsförteckning för February 2018 från New Philosopher

“People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.”Seneca An envelope is opened at the end of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, its contents promising an answer to the eternal question: What is the meaning of life? The answer: “Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.” Pondering the meaning of life is not just the domain of Pythons and philosophers. Curious eight-year-olds, heartbroken teens, and expiring octogenarians alike reflect on life’s meaning, if only in…

Scientist Gerardo Ceballos declared the vast loss of wildlife a biological annihilation - a frightening assault on the foundations of human civilisation.Skull, Wellcome Collection When I visit my family home in London, where I partly grew up, I make sure I run around Regent’s Park. There, I have a little ritual: to see how many animals I can spot through the fence of London Zoo, which sits inside the park’s parameters. As a child, little was more thrilling than a sneak peek at the giants of the animal world: the giraffes, the rhinos, the elephants, the lions. But it was only when I went on safari in South Africa many years later that I understood their true majesty, free from man-made barriers. And it was only then that I realised…

Thales Died 546 BCE aged 78 CAUSE: Heatstroke watching athletics. “Know thyself.” Heraclitus Died 475 BCE aged 60 CAUSE: Suffocated by cow dung. “ You cannot step into the same river twice.” Empedocles Died 430 BCE aged 60 CAUSE: Jumped into a volcano. “The sea is the sweat of the Earth.” Periander Died 585 BCE aged 80 CAUSE: Arranged own murder. “Practice makes perfect.” Socrates Died 399 BCE aged 71 CAUSE: Executed using hemlock. “Philosophy begins in wonder.” Solon Died 558 BCE aged 80 CAUSE: Old age. “Nothing too much.” Democritus Died 370 BCE aged 90 CAUSE: Suicide. “Many much-learned men have no intelligence.” Pythagoras Died 495 BCE aged 75 CAUSE: Throat cut in a field of beans. “Abstain from beans.” Zeno of Elea Died 430 BCE aged 65 CAUSE:…

MARY FONS TOP FIVE BOOKS 1. The Fran Lebowitz Reader, Fran Lebowitz 2. Why I Write, George Orwell 3. The American Quilt, Roderick Kiracofe 4. The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe 5. The Oxford English Dictionary FAVOURITE PHILOSOPHER Dave Chapelle FAVOURITE QUOTE “If you are moved by some experience, write a letter to your grandmother. It will help you to better understand the experience, and it will bring great pleasure to your grandmother.” – John Dewey DOCUMENTARY TO RECOMMEND Citizenfour by Laura Poitras FAVOURITE ARTWORK Any black jacket designed by Alexander McQueen from 1997-2001. FAVOURITE PIECE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC Hoe-down by Aaron Copland What is philosophy for you? Company. Why is philosophy important? If you don’t have enough oxygen, you get sick and die, while great amounts of fresh, clean oxygen…

What would be the more shocking revelation: that our universe is teeming with life, making us just another mundane, if self-obsessed, organic smear across an unremarkable rocky planet orbiting a dime-a-billion yellow star; or that the universe is devoid of other intelligent life, making us astronomically unique, if no less self-obsessed? Because, despite the best efforts of stargazers, we still don’t know which scenario is more likely to be true. In fact, every day, and every radio telescope sweep of the heavens that goes by without detecting even the faintest peep of alien life, makes it ever more likely that we are alone, adrift among the cold burning stars. When we gaze into the void, there is nothing, and no one, gazing back. There’s a point where numbers ending in…

I find myself increasingly at odds with the way other people live, as well as with some of my own life choices. For example, I think that you shouldn’t take the life of another human, yet a friend is a Green Beret in the army, where his job involves killing others. I think that the mistreatment of animals by humans – for example using animals for experiments or fur – is abhorrent, yet I eat meat. I think that freedom to choose is essential and life is valuable, so I don’t really know where I stand on euthanasia. I see that some people’s lives are miserable, yet I continue taking advantage of all the privileges I have. How can I reconcile these competing viewpoints? Do I…

The Politician Marcus Tullius Cicero 106 – 43 BCE Reap the harvests “An actor need not remain on the stage until the very end of the play: if he wins applause in those acts in which he appears, he will have done well enough. In life, too, a man can perform his task wisely without staying on stage until the play is finished. However short your life may be, it will still be enough to live honestly and decently. If, on the other hand, its duration is extended, there need be no more sorrow than a farmer feels when the pleasant springtime has passed, and summer and autumn have arrived. For spring, the season of youth, gives promise of fruits to come, but the later seasons are those that…

I should be a techie. My parents met and dated and married while they were colleagues in the IT department of a multinational energy company in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Those were the days when computers were as big as buses and most people had never seen one. In 1983, Mum and Dad bought an Apple II Plus, making us the first family on our street to own a computer. My brothers and I played classic action and adventure games like Lode Runner and Wizardry, while Dad tracked our rising heights and weights on a primitive spreadsheet. I can still recall, still feel, the enchantment of exploring the pixelated worlds inside that beige box. Now an adult with children of my own, I have fallen from the digital…

Life Between Having and Being Erich Fromm The supreme goal The alternative of having versus being does not appeal to common sense. To have, so it would seem, is a normal function of our life: in order to live we must have things. Moreover, we must have things in order to enjoy them. In a culture in which the supreme goal is to have – and to have more and more – and in which one can speak of someone as “being worth a million dollars”, how can there be an alternative between having and being? On the contrary, it would seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is nothing. How to Live Sarah Bakewell Attention and management “Don’t worry about death”…

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Is less more? I’m at my most productive surrounded by books and papers in my office at home, or in a café with background noise, a half-finished flat white, and people moving about. newphilosopher.com/articles/is-less-more Living in a material world The very earliest writings in philosophy and religion suggest to people that materialism is pretty problematic, that it will crowd out what it means to have a meaningful life. newphilosopher.com/articles/material-world New Philosopher online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher magazine, subscriptions as well as gift ideas. newphilosopher.com/products-page/magazines/ Things for the future To be a refugee is to experience a series of profound losses. You lose your home, your country; perhaps your family, career, or language. newphilosopher.com/articles/things-future New Philosopher Writing Prize Entries are open for the New…

A few years back, when I set out to write a book about the modern happiness industry, I decided I first ought to try to come up with a working definition of ‘happiness’. After all, you wouldn’t write a book about the politics of modern Croatia, or the history of the sandwich, without a rough notion of where Croatia was, or what counts as a sandwich, would you? And so I strode off to the library, expecting the project to take a week at most. (Apparently, it didn’t occur to me that philosophers had already spent more than two millennia addressing the question, with decidedly limited success.) Four days and one continuous existential meltdown later, I admitted defeat. The more closely I scrutinised the concept of happiness, the emptier it…

“Life,”the American journalist and author Elbert Hubbard once quipped, “is just one damned thing after another.” Like many of the best one-liners, it’s funny until you realise how unsettlingly true it is. Imagine if you recorded all your experiences over a year. I don’t mean that you recap the year the way some people do in their Christmas cards; you simply list every single thing you do, and everything that happens to you, for twelve months. You now have a full inventory of your life during that time. For most people, what we’d be left with is a mass of repetitive detail punctuated by random disasters and noise. Mostly you’d be struck by how much each day, even each year looks like yesterday and yesteryear. You might even have the…

You can only really understand your life if you’re prepared to think about death – your death, the limit of your own existence. Otherwise you’re going to spend your days in a dreamy state, acting as if this conscious experience is going to continue forever, ignoring that it has an inevitable end point. The older you get, the more people you know will have died. It’s as if nature has arranged it so that you gradually become acclimatised to other people dying, and then you will die yourself, not entirely unaware of what the process of dying might involve, and the effect your death is likely to have on those around you. You may not be in a position to understand what is happening to you when that time actually…

People think that philosophy is about pondering, and ideally answering, questions like the following ones: Does life have meaning? What is a life worth living? How can we best deal with the negative moments in life? But if you walk into a typical modern philosophy university department, seeking a professor to help you out with those queries, you will be sorely disappointed. Instead, you will be offered training in formal logic (which doesn’t hurt, for sure), a bit of history of philosophy (mostly dead white men, but increasingly less so of late), and a lot of thought experiments based on absurdly unlikely situations – such as a trolley bearing down a track and about to kill five people, unless you push a fat man (sorry, a corpulent individual) off a…

1. The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death; 2. Living things and their activity; 3. The existence of an individual human being or animal; 4. A particular type or aspect of human existence; 5. A chance to live after narrowly escaping death; 6. One of a specified number of chances each player has before being put out; 7. The period between the birth and death of a living thing, especially a human being; 8. A sentence of imprisonment for life; 9. Vitality, vigour, or energy. Origin: Old English lif, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch lijf, German Leib ‘body’, also to live. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

Zan Boag : We’re focusing on the theme ‘life’. You have a range of experiences that relate to this topic, not just during your time as a doctor but also with the campaigning you’ve been doing, which is effectively to preserve human life. You’re obviously quite worried about the direction in which we’re heading. Now, I’d like to start with your early days as a doctor. Can you tell me why you decided to study medicine? Helen Caldicott: Until I was aged eleven I was going to be a teacher, emulating my heroines as they taught me. But when I was eleven I climbed into bed beside my mother and said I was going to be a doctor and she asked why and I said, “I can help more…

Life imprisonment is a form of punishment that gives the state the power to exclude offenders from society for the rest of their lives. As Jacques Derrida perceptively noted, concern for an effective means of maintaining order led early death penalty abolitionists, such as 18th century philosopher Cesare Beccaria, to recommend life imprisonment as a more effective deterrent than capital punishment, which hardened criminals might dismiss with bravado. The form of life imprisonment that Beccaria had in mind was of a distinctly pre-Enlightenment kind. He envisaged life imprisonment as “perpetual penal servitude … under the cudgel and the yoke or in an iron cage where the desperate man finds his woes are beginning rather than ending”. Admittedly, the growing recognition of human rights should exclude the worst physical pains of…

Nigel Warburton : There’s a kind of orthodoxy in philosophy that memory makes us what we are, and that anyone’s life only extends as far back as he or she can remember – at least when we are talking about what makes each of us the same person over time. That is part of what makes dementia so sad: it removes the individual’s sense of his or her self as the connection with a particular narrative is erased or replaced by elaborate confabulation. Many people think that a point comes where the person with dementia ceases to be the person he or she was, though alive, that person is lost to other people, and even to the individual. Here John Locke has been a major influence, at least as…

Sydney Writers’ Festival Sydney, Australia 30 Apr - 06 May 2018 Sydney Writers’ Festival presents more than 400 events, attracting audiences of 100,000 plus for a week-long conversation of books and ideas. The festival brings together some of the world’s most curious and compassionate, irreverent but respectful, intelligent and argumentative writers. With the finest writing and storytelling at its core, their programming is driven by the ideas and issues that animate all types of literature. Previous international guests include George Saunders, Susan Faludi, Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, Anne Enright, Armando Iannucci, Roxane Gay, Carol Ann Duffy, Ian Rankin, Gloria Steinem, Julian Barnes, Alice Walker, Neil Gaiman, and many more. swf.org.au/ IQ2 debate: Tear down the tech giants Sydney, Australia 27th March 2018 When today’s tech giants burst into Silicon Valley,…

Helen Caldicott Helen Caldicott received her medical degree in 1961. In 1971, Caldicott played a major role in Australia’s opposition to French atmospheric nuclear testing in the Pacific. From 1977 to 1986, she was President of Physicians for Social Responsibility; the international umbrella group won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. Caldicott has been awarded the Lannan Foundation’s 2003 Prize for Cultural Freedom and 21 honorary doctoral degrees, and was personally nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. André Dao Deputy Editor of New Philosopher, André Dao is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Monthly, SBS True Stories, Meanjin, and Al Jazeera English. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration…

Judging from the fossil record, it is estimated that more than 99 per cent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. The average adult in Britain now spends more time online than doing anything else in their life, including sleeping. Named after nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, the ‘Fermi Paradox’ refers to the seeming contradiction between the high probability estimates of extraterrestrial life and the sheer lack of evidence for it. In 1979, engineer Robert Williams became the first person to be killed by a robot. His family was later awarded $10 million dollars, after a jury ruled against the manufacturer of the malfunctioning industrial robot. The average life expectancy in nine sub-Saharan African countries is less than 55. Hong Kong has the world’s highest life expectancy, at 84.0…

Creating a human being means contending with life’s disappointing byproduct: ‘difference’. Our odds of success in our role as creator depend on our willingness to let our creatures differentiate, detach, grow, and become independent. For most of us, handling difference gracefully – what is sometimes called loving someone unconditionally – is learned. In my case, this meant that, after a decade of teaching, I would become a student again. My son and teacher is five years old, and it wasn’t until kindergarten that he began to register as radically different from me, and, like a newborn again, as radically alive. He knows that I don’t approve of him eating the school lunchmeat, and my son’s two concrete options every day are: eat it or don’t eat it. Since he enjoys…

“What will survive of us is love.” As I circle the theme of ‘life’ in my mind, I keep returning to a variation on this line from the poet Philip Larkin: love is what allows us to survive. Speculation about humanity’s deep past often ends in just-so stories, but we can be sure of one thing at least: we are unique among our close animal relatives in the prolonged vulnerability of our children. And it is our capacity, at whatever cost, to bring these vulnerable children into adulthood that guarantees our survival. This is no mean feat. Human babies are born in a state of almost absolute helplessness, and remain unable to fend for themselves for years. They do not reach full physical and mental maturity for two decades. Our…

“The realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.” Albert Camus “Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all.” Jean-Paul Sartre “If I ever had to live again, I would live as I have lived.” Michel de Montaigne “Hatred paralyses life; love releases it.” Martin Luther King, Jr. “One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others.” Simone de Beauvoir “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” Reinhold Niebuhr “Life oscillates like a pendulum, back and forth between pain and boredom.” Arthur Schopenhauer “I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.” Avicenna “He will live badly who does not know how to…

It was meant to be a comforting statement – the sort of soothing, rational thing a responsible adult would tell a child frightened of the dark: “Ladies and gentleman, I have news for you: the robots are not taking over the world.” The responsible adult here was Amandeep Gill, the Indian ambassador for disarmament, at a press conference marking the end of a recent five-day summit of the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons. And the scary thing that Gill was reassuring us about? The official subject of the summit was whether the international community should regulate Autonomous Weapons Systems (AWS) – otherwise known as ‘killer robots’. Not that the world’s diplomats are particularly fond of the term (or of the inevitable Terminators used to illustrate every article on the topic).…

Distracted by tiredness and hunger, I just sliced open my pinky finger with a rusty pocket knife. Now I am even more side-tracked. The bandage and tissue are hindering my typing, and the throbbing, blood, and chance of nerve damage are on my mind. Plato might have nodded knowingly at my preoccupation. In Phaedo and elsewhere, he argued that the body was a danger. The soul has wings, to use his metaphor, but the heavy flesh pulls it down. He was very worried about lust, and recommended celibacy for “self-mastery and inward peace”. But he was more generally concerned about our meat sacks, which threaten to leave our souls “tainted and impure”. This is perhaps the most philosophical of conceits: the mind is clear and pure, and physicality is what…

Every belief in the value and worthiness of life rests upon defective thinking; it is for this reason alone possible that sympathy with the general life and suffering of mankind is so imperfectly developed in the individual. Even exceptional men, who can think beyond their own personalities, do not have this general life in view, but isolated portions of it. If one is capable of fixing his observation upon exceptional cases, I mean upon highly endowed individuals and pure souled beings, if their development is taken as the true end of world-evolution and if joy be felt in their existence, then it is possible to believe in the value of life, because in that case the rest of humanity is overlooked: hence we have here defective thinking. So, too, it…

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players, They have their exits and entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school. And then the lover, Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier, Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice In fair round belly, with good capon lin’d, With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, Full of wise saws,…

Oxford biologists outline what alien life looks like When picturing our potential extraterrestrial neighbours, it’s human nature to imagine that they look something like us: bipedal, with dextrous hands and a face plan much like ours (eyes above nose above mouth) – even if those eyes are a bit large and those hands a bit creepy. A group of University of Oxford biologists has taken a fresh look at our theoretical alien predictions, showing that because aliens are likely shaped by the same forces as humans (namely, natural selection) they might indeed be more familiar than previously thought. futurism.com/oxford-biologists-outlinewhat-alien-life-looks-like/ Devil’s dictionary LIFE: n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. We live in daily apprehension of its loss; yet when lost it is not missed. The case for not…

The hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #MuslimLivesMatter, and #Libya are examples of value-laden slogans etched on protest signs and typed on online posts in order to raise awareness of oppression and express self-worth. These slogans also invite others to value the lives of the marginalised. While the first two goals are often easily achieved, it is the latter aim that tends to be more difficult. Why is it so hard to value the lives of others? In his 2016 book Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul, Eddie Glaude Jr. describes what he calls the “value gap”. He writes: “We talk about the achievement gap in education or the wealth gap between white Americans and other groups, but the value gap reflects something more basic: that no matter our stated…

What is your demon? Laziness. And fear of failure. Luckily, they usually cancel each other out, but it’s a constant war. What is the most important part of your education? Whatever part taught me to follow the evidence and never favour a comforting lie over an inconvenient truth. Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life? Probably Darwin for the early part. Then Bertrand Russell. Then Christopher Hitchens in recent years. Basically, fearless warriors of truth and justice. What do you doubt most? The good in religion and everything it promises. If you could change one thing in the world what would that be? I should probably say reverse global warming or end war and poverty, or something. But maybe it would be to instate a law that…