New Philosopher Issue 42 - December 2023/February 2024

“Great lords, wise men ne’er sit and wail their loss, But cheerly seek how to redress their harms.”- William Shakespeare If being wise is our aim, suggests William Shakespeare, then lamenting our losses should be cast from our minds. Instead, he advises, we should find a way forward; a way to “redress their harms”. The reality is, however, that the human mind tends to focus on what we no longer have; that which is no longer present. A dead father, a departed friend, a disinheritance, or disappearing youth – it matters not what our loss may be, when there once was something we now feel a hole; a gap. We are no longer whole. And in times such as these, it is difficult to feel anything but grief for the…

Michael Cholbi Michael Cholbi is Professor and Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in ethical theory, practical ethics, and the philosophy of death and dying. His books include Suicide: The Philosophical Dimensions, Understanding Kant’s Ethics, and Grief: A Philosophical Guide. Cholbi is the editor of several scholarly collections, including Immortality and the Philosophy of Death, and the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide. Maggie Jackson Maggie Jackson is an award-winning social critic and author. Her articles have appeared in publications worldwide, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Business Week. Jackson won the Media Award from the Work-Life Council and is a graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics. She is the author of Distracted: The Erosion…

News from nowhere We humans don’t like to lose, and that’s not just in sport or other games. We suffer when we lose almost anything – money from a poor investment, possessions from a break-in, or a partner from divorce. Economists have a name for it, “loss aversion”, and evolutionary scientists attribute this heuristic to the survival instincts honed by our ancestors. In our evolutionary past, the cost of making a mistake or loss were far more detrimental than the benefits of an equivalent gain. Losing a day’s food could mean starvation, a risk far outweighing the benefits of acquiring an extra day’s food. So, our brains evolved to be more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains, a trait that has persisted into the modern day. Our aversion…

We often speak of arguments in competitive terms. We win arguments and lose them, score points and concede defeat. Adversarial legal systems, such as exist in places like the United States, Britain, and Australia, are built on the idea that argument is carried out in the service of competing parties with opposed interests (and even opposed views of the truth itself ). Something similar is true of politics. This competitive type of argument has been around a long time. In the dialogues of Plato, Socrates is at pains to distance himself from the Sophists, who were the professional arguing class of ancient Athens. The Sophists were highly trained in the arts of eristic, the sort of argument you engage in when you want to win a dispute, such as in…

There’s much in life we’d prefer to forget, but the human mind tends to remember the bad and forget the good, which partly explains why negative thoughts are so hard to quash. We’ll keenly remember a heated argument with a friend, but struggle to recall the details of an idyllic picnic with family. It’s uncommon for people to visit psychologists for persistent and unrelenting positive thought patterns (“another great day to be alive...”) – it’s the negative thoughts, the unpleasant memories, the unwanted personal desires that hold ground in human consciousness. It’s therefore understandable that there’s an ancient Taoist practice called ‘sitting and forgetting’, which is about learning to forget the disappointments, regrets and loss, or ‘unlearning’ what you know, so as to get closer to the flow of life,…

There’s a story told about the late Australian billionaire media mogul Kerry Packer’s encounter with a Texan braggart who boasted that he was worth $100 million. Packer simply replied: “I’ll flip you for it.” It’s fitting that this exchange took place in a casino; Packer was an enthusiastic gambler who both won and lost eye-watering sums at the table. In his poem “If,” Rudyard Kipling famously included the ability to “make one heap of all your winnings” and lose it without complaining as a sign of being a ‘man’. Kipling’s sexism aside, it may seem there’s something quite admirable about calmness in the face of financial loss: after all, it’s only money. Sometimes it is even less than money: stock markets can lose billions of dollars in a single crash,…