Innehållsförteckning för Issue 29 - No.3/2020 från New Philosopher

“Life has no meaning a priori… It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.”Jean-Paul Sartre Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that life had no meaning; instead, it was up to us to imbue our lives with the meaning that we choose. His contemporary and friend-turned-foe, the reluctant Existentialist Albert Camus, pushed a similar line, denying that there is an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”. Camus contended that life is absurd; that the fate of humans is much like that of King Sisyphus, who was condemned by Zeus to endlessly push a rock up a hill, only to watch it roll back down again. Our rock is ‘the meaning of life’, which we push uphill in…

Once a year, my university hosts an open day for (mostly) high school students who are considering what they might like to study after graduation. Over the course of the day I’ll speak to many students – and their parents – who like the idea of studying philosophy at university. But the idea also makes them nervous: philosophy sounds like fun, but they want to know what they can ‘do’ with it. It’s a perfectly reasonable question, particularly when making such life-shaping decisions. Philosophy is fun, but bills have to be paid, and you don’t exactly see a lot of ‘Philosopher Wanted’ job ads. The students and their parents are looking for what we might call an ‘instrumentalist’ answer. They may think philosophy sounds like a good thing in itself,…

China Explorations of Chinese concepts of purpose indicate that one’s sense of purpose is divided into senses of professional, moral, and social purpose. Korea In Korea, youth were found to view purpose as less an individual pursuit to be undertaken, and more as a collective matter. UK The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing found that there were many positive relationships to the feeling that one’s life has purpose, including a higher sense of health, less chronic illness, and less chronic pain. Those with purpose spent more time with their friends, walking, and volunteering; and they spent less time watching television. US A study showed that having a sense of life purpose buffered African-American youth from the negative experiences associated with growing up in more challenging environments. 20% About one in…

Before we delve into your ideas about free will, I think it would be helpful to clear up a few common misconceptions people often have about what philosophers are referring to when it comes to free will. Would you mind explaining what ‘free will’ means from a philosophical standpoint? That’s a great question since many people, including many prominent scientists who write about free will, build into their understanding of the notion the very result they want. That is, they define free will in such a way that it directly follows that we either have it or we don’t. I’ve long argued that the variety of free will that is of central philosophical and practical importance is the sort required for moral responsibility in a particular but pervasive sense.This sense…

HEALTH, LOVE, WORK, AND FRIENDS. AND READING The Pew Center asked adults in the US to write, in their own words, about the things that give them a sense of meaning and satisfaction with their lives. The survey report states that “respondents mentioned many different topics, with family emerging as the most common source of meaning… of the 30 topics that were studied, only four were universally associated with higher levels of life satisfaction: a person’s good health, romantic partner, friends, and career.” Those who mentioned all four had a life satisfaction of 8.4 (out of 10). Those who mentioned none of the four had an average life satisfaction of 6.3. Source: Pew Research Center, 2017. The shaded area represents the standard error of each estimate, a measure of uncertainty.…

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During an 8.5 year period of The English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), only 9 per cent of the high wellbeing category died, compared to 29 per cent in the lowest category. According to Andrew Steptoe of University College London, based on results from ELSA “people who felt younger that their real age were more likely to survive over the next eight years or so, compared with those who felt older”. Of the 30 topics that were studied by Pew Research Centre, only four were universally associated with higher levels of life satisfaction: a person’s good health, romantic partner, friends, and career. ELSA found that people who engaged with receptive arts activities on an infrequent basis (once or twice a year) had a 14 per cent lower risk of dying…

Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, begins his definitive book on working life in 1970s America with Mike Lefevre, a 37-year-old labourer in a steel mill near Chicago. Lefevre describes himself as a mule, doing “strictly muscle work”. When a foreman criticises Lefevre’s “bad attitude”, the labourer responds, “my attitude is that I don’t get excited about my job… How are you gonna get excited about pullin’ steel?” Why is it so hard for Lefevre to find purpose in “pullin’ steel”? Is it because he is doing what economists would call ‘unskilled labour’ – work that has no or very minimal education requirements? Perhaps some work is so repetitive, so mindless, that it can’t be meaningful. Yet as lawyer and writer Lizzie O’Shea points out, so-called unskilled work can actually…

Is there a purpose to human life? Philosophers and theologians have argued the issue for millennia.The answer depends on what exactly one is asking. If the question is: “Is there an objective, universal purpose informing and directing human living?” then I am convinced the answer is a resounding no. I don’t believe in gods, so such a universal purpose cannot come from them. Nor do I believe that Nature endows us with purpose, as Aristotle famously did. Nature just is, and it doesn’t have any plans. It is in this sense that Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir say that we are “radically free”. Not because we can do whatever we want, since we plainly can’t. But because we can choose our own purpose in life, deciding for…

Belief in the meaning of life always implies a scale of values, a choice, our preferences. Belief in the absurd, according to our definitions, teaches the contrary. But this is worth examining. Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me. I do not want to get out of my depth. This aspect of life being given me, can I adapt myself to it? Now, faced with this particular concern, belief in the absurd is tantamount to substituting the quantity of experiences for the quality. If I convince myself that this life has no other aspect than that of the absurd, if I feel that its whole equilibrium depends on that perpetual opposition between my conscious revolt and the darkness in which it struggles, if…

The Novelist C.S. Lewis 1898 – 1963 Pull ourselves together “It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts –…

Awards and Honours 1988 Fellow, British Psychological Society 2001 Fellow, Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS) 2003 Member, Academia Europaea (MAE) 2007 Elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) 2010 Fellow, Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research 2011 Contributions in Positive Health Award, International Positive Psychology Association 2014 Fellow, Gerontological Society of America 2017 Patricia Barchas Award for Sociophysiology, American Psychosomatic Society 2018/19 Highly Cited Researcher, Web of Science Zan Boag: Purpose is a topic you’ve looked at in your work, and not just in your work in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. In that study, you and your colleagues analysed the results of responses from just over 7,000 respondents and they answered a range of questions about their social, economic, health, and physical activity characteristics. You ask…

Gregg Caruso Gregg D. Caruso is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning, Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, and the Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network ( JWRN) at the University of Aberdeen School of Law. His books include Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice, Just Desserts: Debating Free Will (with Daniel C. Dennett), Free Will and Consciousness, and Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility. Carrie Jenkins Carrie Jenkins is Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Jenkins is an editorial board member of Metaphysics and the former editor of Thought: A Journal of Philosophy. She is the author of What Love Is And What It Could Be and Uninvited: Talking Back to Plato and…

“The individual who is engaged in his time period, who tries to have a hold upon history by an action, or by an indignation, or by revolt, has much richer and much more profound ties with the world than the one who withdraws from the world in an ivory tower.”- Simone de Beauvoir In A Hunger Artist, one of Franz Kafka’s final short stories, the eponymous artist starves himself for the amusement of crowds. In his heyday, the artist drew admiring audiences in all of Europe’s major cities. Eventually his popularity declines, and he has no choice but to join a circus. There, largely ignored by the people on their way to see the animals in the menagerie, he pushes his ‘art’ beyond its limits. Forgotten even by the circus…

Sense of purpose may equal a longer life People who possess a higher sense of purpose tend to live longer, according to a report in the February/ March 2016 Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine. Researchers reviewed 10 studies involving more than 136,000 people and evaluated the relationship between purpose in life and the risk of death or cardiovascular disease. The participants, average age 67, were followed for about seven years. Risk of death was about 20 per cent lower for people who reported still having a strong sense of purpose. They also had a lower risk of having a heart attack or stroke. The researchers speculated that a sense of purpose may help a person better manage stress and encourages a more active lifestyle. Source: Harvard Medical School While…

“Have we vanquished an enemy?” the legendary English mountaineer George Mallory once asked about his perilous, and finally fatal, expeditions. “None but ourselves.” “Have we gained success? That word means nothing here. Have we won a kingdom? No… and yes. We have achieved an ultimate satisfaction… fulfilled a destiny… To struggle and to understand – never this last without the other; such is the law.” In the summer of 1924, Mallory – fit, handsome and, in his late 30s, young – embarked on his last voyage. Ascending Mount Everest, he and his climbing partner Andrew Irvine mysteriously disappeared near the summit. Mallory’s body was finally discovered in 1999: face down, his hands and arms spread into a W-shape, his rope still attached to his waist and one boot still on.…

“Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation,” the doctor at the heart of Albert Camus’s novel The Plague says as the epidemic around him escalates, “but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.” Camus’s 1947 novel has found new readers as the coronavirus epidemic unfolds.The story of an Algerian town grappling with an outbreak of bubonic plague, it moves from popular disbelief and official prevarication to isolation and exile from everything that used to be ordinary, and currently reads less like an allegory of Nazi occupation than a study of the human spirit under duress. Camus’s tone is measured, his own and his characters’ wisdom hard-won. It’s a novel without heroes. Yet – strangely, given its refusal to offer comfort in the face…

Any of the physiological needs and the consummatory behaviour involved with them serve as channels for all sorts of other needs as well. That is to say, the person who thinks he is hungry may actually be seeking more for comfort, or dependence, than for vitamins or proteins. Conversely, it is possible to satisfy the hunger need in part by other activities such as drinking water or smoking cigarettes. In other words, relatively isolable as these physiological needs are, they are not completely so. Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most pre-potent of all needs. What this means specifically is, that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than…

The reason I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature is that I do not quite realise what it is that I enjoy. A work of art, on the other hand, I can grasp. I can – if I may put it this way – find that Archimedian point, and as soon as I have found it, everything is readily clear for me.Then I am able to pursue this one main idea and see how all the details serve to illuminate it. Journals of Søren Kierkegaard 1A 8, 1834 Above all do not forget your duty to love yourself; do not permit the fact that you have been set apart from life in a way, been prevented from participating actively in it, and that you are superflous in the…

Does art have a purpose? What’s the purpose shared by a Beethoven late quartet, a photograph by Cindy Sherman, a poem by T.S. Eliot, Duchamp’s Fountain, and a novel by James Baldwin? The simple answer to this is that the question assumes we can define what art is, what makes all these at least candidates for being called works of art. But we can’t. So we can’t then generalise about art, which is tantamount to saying art doesn’t have a purpose. QED. Here’s a slightly longer version of that. The history of the philosophy of art is a history of people trying and failing to say what art essentially is, to pin it down once and for all. Art is representation, art is the expression of emotion, art is art…

Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor E. Frankl An ultimate purpose I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” – and the light shineth in the darkness. Natural Goodness Philippa…

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Scholar and critic bell hooks argues that loving someone is not a matter of how you feel. Love is something you do, on her view. It is active rather than passive: we choose to love, it’s not something that simply happens to us. hooks is inspired, in part, by Martin Luther King, who urged that “love is not this sentimental something that we talk about… not merely an emotional something”. I think hooks is importantly right in urging this active conception of love, and I want to connect her insight to a trend I keep seeing in discussions of romantic love in particular. It is often opined that in the age of online dating we are made less happy, not more so, by all the romantic prospects now available to…

In conversation with Zan Boag Andrés Roemer is UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Social Change and the Free Flow of Knowledge. Illustration by Aida Novoa & Carlos Egan What is your demon? Imbalance. What is the most important part of your education? How to think, not what to think. Which “thinker” has had the greatest influence on your life? Charles Darwin. What do you doubt most? Human intelligence. What is happiness? Being on a never-ending journey with those I love and total immersion in a meaningful project. What does it mean to be human? Everything is made out of atoms, but humans are also uniquely made out of narratives. What illusion do you suffer from? Free will, and a bunch of cognitive biases. If you could choose, what would you have…