Innehållsförteckning för Issue 38 - December 2022/February 2023 från New Philosopher

“Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”— Jack Canfield Most people love to be praised as intelligent, generous, funny, or kind, but to called ‘courageous’, ‘daring’, or ‘brave’ eclipses the rest. When we reflect on the people we regard as courageous, we tend to be very narrow in our thinking. We immediately conjure up visions of soldiers in battle, fearlessly risking their lives for a noble cause, or firefighters cradling children in their arms as flames crackle and burn. We remember those who have suffered to battle injustice, whistle-blowers who have gone against authority for a moral or public concern. With a tear in our eye, we always have a special place in our heart for them: the courageous, the bold, and the brave. But rarely do…

On a train trip through country France one weekend, I got talking to a London couple who were taking a quick ‘weekender’ in Barcelona. “But it’s so far,” I said to them, referring to the 15-hour train ride from London to Barcelona, sandwiched between passengers in an overheated cabin with no air conditioning. “And then on Sunday, you have to turn around and go all the way back.” “Oh,” says the woman, pointing disparagingly at her husband. “He won’t fly.” I glance at her husband, up against the window, adamantly shaking his head. “Nup,” he says. “Never.” “You’ve never flown on a plane before?” I enquire. “No, never, and I never will,” he replies. Rather than pressing the issue further, I ponder his decision not to fly. My first thought…

There is a remarkable photograph taken in Hamburg in 1936. It shows a crowd of shipyard workers gathered for the launch of a ship. All except one are enthusiastically raising their arms in the ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. Yet there is one man with his arms firmly folded across his chest. He is defiant. He refuses to go along with the crowd, refuses to do what is expected of him. This is August Landmesser. He had been engaged to a Jewish woman, Irma Eckler, but the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 prevented him from marrying her; nonetheless they went on to have two daughters. Tragically, Irma later died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Landmesser was also imprisoned, charged with ‘dishonouring the race’, sent to a concentration camp and, after his release…

Kant’s philosophy is famously difficult, so it’s unfortunate that he chose to illustrate one of its central tenets with a scenario that seems, to many people, straight-forwardly ridiculous and immoral. If a someone knocks on your front door with the express intention of murdering a guest, would it be acceptable for you to lie to protect this person: to claim that they aren’t in your house when, in fact, they are? The answer is surely yes. Misleading a would-be-murderer in order to save an innocent life is self-evidently better than sticking to the principle that lying is wrong. Or is it? For Kant, this thought experiment prompted a profoundly counter-intuitive conclusion: absolute honesty is the only morally justifiable policy. “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is,” he wrote in…

On July 6, 1942, Anne Frank gave up life as she knew it and walked into hiding, entering a secret annex in a building in Amsterdam. The door was concealed by a bookcase. What followed was two years of living in a confined space, jowl to jowl with her father Otto, mother Edith, and sister Margot, as well as several other families. Anne was just 13 and – with her concerns over boys, her frustration of being dismissed as the youngest, and clashes with her mother – she was in many ways a normal teenager. Yet she displayed remarkable courage. This was not only physical courage – “we just had a third air raid. I decided to grit my teeth and practise being courageous,” she writes in her diary –…

When I was a child, my mother told me the story of her uncle who, during a WWII bombing raid, rushed into a burning house to rescue children trapped inside. He saved their lives by throwing them from a window down into the arms of others, however the house collapsed, killing him. I remember asking my mother if she thought he was scared. “I’m sure he was,” she said, “but sometimes people see what needs to be done, and they do it.” It was my first brush with the notion of courage, which Aristotle named as a Virtue. Yet what is courage to one person, might be all in a day’s work to another. In 2017, Rebecca Cushman, an equestrian trainer in Sonoma County, California, received an urgent call from…

Stranded on a sheet of floating ice deep in the Antarctic seas, Frank Worsley was in what you’d call a bad spot. Civilisation was more than 1200 miles away, and the ship Worsley had been travelling on was submerged in ice. To make matters worse, Worsley had no radio transmitter to broadcast an SOS. And as the doomed 144-foot ship groaned from the force of ten million tonnes of ice driving through her starboard, Worsley felt as though his fate, too, was equally assured. As he looked across the vast sheet of ice, he needed to find something a little stronger than courage. If Worsley thought about it, this whole fated journey began one night in a hotel room in London. That night, he dreamt he was navigating a ship…

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Linda Rabieh Linda Rabieh, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, previously taught at Colorado College and Tufts University. She is the author of Plato and the Virtue of Courage, which won the Delba Winthrop Mansfield prize for excellence in political science, and of numerous articles that explore the political thought of ancient and medieval thinkers, including Thucydides, Plato, Maimonides, and Averroes. She was also the recipient of a National Endowment of Humanities Independent Scholar Fellowship. Zan Boag Zan Boag is the former Editor and current Publisher of New Philosopher, Editorial Director of the international magazine Womankind, and Director of poet bookstore. In 2017 he won the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Professionals’ Award and was shortlisted for Editor of the Year in the international Stack Awards. Boag speaks regularly on philosophy,…

When Boston baseball team, the Red Sox, won the 1912 World Series, millionaire bohemian and baseball fan Isabella Stewart Gardner attended the Boston Symphony Orchestra wearing a hat with the words “Oh, you Red Sox” blazoned in red on the front. New York magazine Town Topics, a scandal sheet on high society, reported: “[it] looks as if the woman has gone crazy”. Seated in her conspicuous hat, Isabella, the magazine reported, caused a “panic among those in the audience who discovered the ornamentation”. Even the musicians themselves were so startled their “eyes wandered from their music stands”. Isabella, a wealthy collector who founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and whose artistic coterie of friends included painter John Singer Sargent and writer Henry James, was aware her choice of…

A few years ago my family was invited to a wedding in a medieval winery in the French countryside. You don’t get more than one invite like that in a lifetime, so we jumped at the chance – literally, as it turned out. On arriving in Languedoc I learned that the bachelor party would involve a morning of canyoning, a sport that involves getting from one end of a river canyon to the other by any means necessary. In this case, those means were climbing up rocks and cliffs and then jumping off them again into the river, then floating downstream, then more climbing and jumping. Floating in cool, clear water down a river gorge on a hot July day was a delight. The jumping was… something else. But at…

Some years back I found myself happily mesmerised by a giant Pacific octopus in Monterey, California. It was the local aquarium’s star attraction, commanding its own enormous tank that was lit from below to glow-in-the-dark effect. An old-fashioned contraption, of the kind Harry Houdini preferred, the tank was a walk-around extravaganza built with industrial-strength materials. All that steel and glass to contain one soft invertebrate! Standing close to the bottle-thick tank, I felt an unspoken affinity with the octopus, its skin a moving patchwork of colourful highlights, shimmering red and brown, then green and purple, the animal semaphoring its feelings to the world beyond its glassy pen, as if crying out to be heard. Almost without thinking, I placed my hand flat against the glass and the octopus unfurled a…

Linda Rabieh, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, previously taught at Colorado College and Tufts University. She is the author of Plato and the Virtue of Courage, which won the Delba Winthrop Mansfield prize for excellence in political science, and of numerous articles that explore the political thought of ancient and medieval thinkers, including Thucydides, Plato, Maimonides, and Averroes. She was the recipient of a National Endowment of Humanities Independent Scholar Fellowship. Zan Boag: You started your book Plato and the Virtue of Courage with the line, “Courage is an essential political virtue and should be of serious interest to anyone interested in politics.” This is followed by, “Courage is arguably the virtue that nations celebrate more than any other, including justice.” What makes courage political and why is it held…

We must, however, not only describe virtue as a state of character, but also say what sort of state it is. We may remark, then, that every virtue or excellence both brings into good condition the thing of which it is the excellence and makes the work of that thing be done well; e.g. the excellence of the eye makes both the eye and its work good; for it is by the excellence of the eye that we see well. Similarly the excellence of the horse makes a horse both good in itself and good at running and at carrying its rider and at awaiting the attack of the enemy. Therefore, if this is true in every case, the virtue of man also will be the state of character which…

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At the base of an underground prison, a circular pit deep in the dark earth, we find Bruce Wayne, otherwise known as Batman, in the superhero film The Dark Knight Rises. Bruce Wayne, like other prisoners, yearns for freedom. He can see the glimmer of sunlight above his head and wants to climb to the top of the vertical wall. But freedom eludes him. There are no guards, nor surveillance, nor barriers to stop him, other than a treacherously steep climb up a rocky face and a perilous final leap to safety. Wayne works on his body to build strength, doing push-ups, squats, and stretches. He shadow-boxes inside his cell. “He says the leap to freedom is not about strength,” says a prisoner, but Bruce Wayne disagrees. He starts to…

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” Nelson Mandela “Fear and courage are brothers.”— Proverb “Valour lies just halfway between rashness and cowheartedness.” Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote “Courage, of all national qualities, is the most precarious; because it is exerted only at intervals, and by a few in every nation.” David Hume “The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage.” Henri Matisse “Complete courage and absolute cowardice are extremes that very few people fall into.” François de La Rochefoucauld “Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.” E.M. Forster “Whistling to keep myself from being afraid.” John Dryden “Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own understanding!’ – that is the motto of enlightenment.” Immanuel…

Cynthia Pury, Professor of Psychology at Clemson, trained as a clinical psychologist specialising in anxiety disorders. Pury’s major research interests involve courage, virtue, and positive psychology; her research began in the area of cognition and fear, specifically threat appraisals. She is Associate Editor of The Journal of Positive Psychology, editor of The Psychology of Courage, and Co-organiser of the 2007 Courage Summit. Zan Boag: There aren’t many people who have delved into ‘courage’, at least not recently. Cynthia Pury: There’s really not. There’s just a few of us. For a little while there, I was joking that when I would go to a psychology-type conference, if I would be on a panel, we would have sort of our pre-panel get together, but it really turned into the ‘courage…

“Courage is found in unlikely places,” once wrote English writer J.R.R. Tolkien. And the same could be said of fear. As a child, French painter Philippe Charles Jacquet lived in a tiny apartment in Paris. But for a month each year, he vacationed with his parents to Brittany, living on a farm by the sea. He learnt to sail, and by 14, he was sailing alone. “This attraction to complete freedom never ceased,” he says. Athenian historian Thucydides once wrote that the secret to happiness is freedom. In a sailboat on the water, we are free to steer our course, choosing the direction, bending the wind and the tides to our will. Figuratively, we are free when we take control, choosing between competing life paths. Jacquet worked as an architect,…

newphilosopher.com newphilosopher.com/articles/disembodied-delinquents/ newphilosopher.com/articles/running-with-the-pack/ womankindmag.com/shop/ newphilosopher.com/articles/platonic-love/ Disembodied delinquents Although we rarely contemplate it, our body is the starting point of our world and the object we know best. Running with the pack It’s as if the thinker has gone but the thoughts keep on coming and they are much more interesting than thoughts tethered to a thinker. Online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher and Womankind magazine, subscriptions, and gift ideas. Platonic love Plato’s version of love treats the beloved as a mere stepping stone on the path to a love of the abstract, eternal forms. New Philosopher & Womankind Missing any New Philosopher or Womankind back issues? Get your copy of one of the back issues still in stock, from ‘Health’ to ‘Space’. Back issues…

Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle A mean As we have said, then, courage is a mean with respect to things that inspire confidence or fear, in the circumstances that have been stated; and it chooses or endures things because it is noble to do so, or because it is base not to do so. But to die to escape from poverty or love or anything painful is not the mark of a brave man, but rather of a coward; for it is softness to fly from what is troublesome, and such a man endures death not because it is noble but to fly from evil. Courage, then, is something of this sort, but the name is also applied to five other kinds. Plato and the Virtue of Courage Linda Rabieh The brave…