Innehållsförteckning för Issue 42 - December 2023/February 2024 från New Philosopher

“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…

There is a tradition in philosophy that makes our memories the core of our personal being, essential to what we are, and the basis of our personal identity over time. This stems from John Locke’s discussion in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (first published in 1689), and his famous thought experiment where a prince and a poor cobbler wake up with memories exchanged. According to Locke, if the cobbler (who now has the prince’s memories) had committed a crime, we should hold the person with the prince’s body (and the cobbler’s memories) responsible, and vice versa. For Locke, memories and memory continuity make us who we are, and it is only a contingent fact that our memories are usually tied to a particular body over time. He even contemplated the…

“No person can lose what they never had.” – Izaak Walton “One often calms one’s grief by recounting it.” Pierre Corneille “Light griefs are communicative, great ones stupefy.” Seneca “Grief tears his heart, and drives him to and fro, In all the rageing impotence of woe.” Homer “My grief lies onward and my joy behind.” William Shakespeare “Why wilt thou add to all the griefs I suffer Imaginary ills, and fancy’d tortures.” Joseph Addison “Grief is the price we pay for love.” Elizabeth II “Every highly privileged group develops the myth of its natural, especially its blood, superiority.” Max Weber “There is no grief which time does not lessen and soften.” Cicero “Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again,…

On the day my 84-year-old mother was told that her cancer had come back after six months of radiation and a year of chemo, she sent her eight children the same text: “Hospice.” Some of us countered with “No!” And since I was the only one in physical proximity to my mum, siblings texted me their hope that she would fight. In one ear I heard my mum making ‘the call’ to friends, who yelled at her: “You can’t give up!” In my other ear I heard the Stoic philosopher Epictetus whispering, “You are foolish if you want your [mother] to live forever.” This is one of three phrases to live by if you plan to handle death stoically. Wanting our loved ones to live forever is an example of…

Tell us a little about your background as an artist. What prompted you to start a career as an artist, and what has kept you there over the years? I grew up in a typical working-class family in East London. My grandad was a bricklayer, my uncle a plasterer, my brother an electrician, my dad repaired sewing machines in sweatshops, and my mum was a cleaner. The idea of being an artist and going to art school never occurred to me until I went to secondary school. I was blessed with two fantastic art teachers, Trevor Sowden and Chris Taylor, who made me think beyond the job prospects that seemed to be possible at 15. The initial seed that was planted was to become an art teacher. It was only…

What is your demon? My demon is digital distractions, serving as a modern mind’s junk food, masking the deeper malaise of societal indifference and disconnection. What is the most important part of your education? The art of unlearning, like mental gymnastics, has been essential, helping me to dismantle ingrained capitalist narratives and forge a path of critical thought. Which ‘thinker’ has had the greatest influence on your life? Henri Lefebvre, the philosophical harbinger of May ‘68, who foresaw the emergence of the ‘cybernanthrope’ – a visionary in understanding the intersection of humanity and the cybermodern world. What do you doubt most? I often doubt the philosophical competence of auto-correct, mirroring my scepticism of leaders in our profit-driven world. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that…

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…

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,…

While on holiday in Vienna in 1833, the English poet Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage, aged just twenty-two. Over the next seventeen years, one of his close friends and fellow poets worked on an elegy in his honour. “In Memoriam A.H.H.” was published anonymously in 1850; later that same year, its author, Alfred Tennyson, was appointed Poet Laureate. Tennyson’s poem is a remarkable work of mourning, one that perhaps predictably struck a chord with the most famous mourner of the era, Queen Victoria herself. The poem’s most enduring legacy however is one specific phrase from Canto XXVIII, which has become familiar to the point of cliché. Here it is, in its original context: I hold it true, whate’er befall; I feel it when I sorrow most;…

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; New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia; and the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide. He is the co-editor of Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying: Classic and Contemporary Perspectives and his work has appeared in the scholarly journals Ethics, Mind, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics. Zan Boag: I’d like to start with the various ways that…

noun: 1. the state of no longer having something or as much of something; the process that leads to this;2. money that has been lost by a business or an organization;3. the death of a person;4. the disadvantage that is caused when somebody leaves, or when a useful or valuable object is taken away;5. a person who causes a disadvantage by leaving;6. a failure to win a contest. Origin: Old English los ‘destruction’, of Germanic origin; related to Old Norse los ‘breaking up of the ranks of an army’ and loose; later probably a back-formation from lost, past participle of lose. Source: Oxford English Dictionary…

I was recently discussing the British philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe’s strong objection to Oxford University’s decision to award US President Harry Truman with an Honorary Doctorate. Anscombe, appalled at Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and subsequently defend his decision – lambasted her colleagues for their moral complicity and cowardice. I was asked whether I would have stood alongside her, had I been there at the time. The answer, I suspect, is no. It’s not because I think Anscombe is wrong. I don’t. It’s because I don’t believe that – faced with the overwhelming social pressure Anscombe faced, I would maintain my position. Staggering amounts of research tell us that, with few exceptions, we will choose conformity over conscience every time. What should I take…

Mary-Frances O’Connor is an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry and Director of Clinical Training at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the physiological correlates of emotion, in particular the wide range of physical and emotional responses during bereavement, including yearning and isolation. O’Connor is the author of The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. Zan Boag: To begin with, I was wondering if you could explain the difference between grief and grieving, as you make the point that they’re not really interchangeable terms. Mary-Frances O’Connor: I have found this to be very, very helpful, not just helpful in designing research studies, but more helpful for the people who are going through it to understand the difference. Grief is,…

The Grieving Brain Mary-Frances O’Connor Throwing out the map Fortunately, the brain is good at solving problems. In fact, the brain exists for precisely this function. After decades of research, I realised that the brain devotes lots of effort to mapping where our loved ones are while they are alive, so that we can find them when we need them. And the brain often prefers habits and predictions over new information. But it struggles to learn new information that cannot be ignored, like the absence of our loved one. Grieving requires the difficult task of throwing out the map we have used to navigate our lives together with our loved one and transforming our relationship with this person who has died. Grieving, or learning to live a meaningful life without…

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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,…

When I was growing up in the 1980s, my family and I sometimes played a board game called ‘The Game of Life’. Rather than throwing dice, you spun a central wheel to determine your move, yielding a number between one and ten. The playing pieces were coloured plastic cars which meandered through an idyllic landscape towards the Day of Reckoning: a final choice between either the Country Cottage or Millionaire’s Mansion. Despite these names, money was the only thing that mattered in either scenario. You waited until every player had finished, either drawing a pension (Cottage) or speculating on the stock market (Mansion) in the meantime, then totted up your gains to determine the winner. Along the way, you made certain choices and passed certain milestones. Both marriage and employment…

All around the world, young people in their twenties and thirties are losing faith in democracy. According to one mega survey of surveys, comprising some five million respondents, 55 per cent of millennials in their mid-thirties are dissatisfied with the way democracy is functioning. That’s double the dissatisfaction of Gen Xers at the same age, while a majority of Baby Boomers have consistently reported their satisfaction with democracy over the years. Meanwhile, in the Anglosphere – and elsewhere – trust in mainstream media is at historic lows. And in 2016, Michael Gove, then Lord Chancellor of the UK, announced that the public had “had enough of experts”. His assessment seemed to be borne out by British voters, who later that year voted to leave the European Union, against the advice…

Accompanying the words with the lyre, Orpheus sung, “O deities of the underworld, to whom all we who live must come, hear my words, for they are true! I come not to spy out the secrets of Tartarus, nor to try my strength against the three-headed dog with snaky hair who guards the entrance. I come to seek my wife, whose opening years the poisonous viper’s fang has brought to an untimely end. Love had led me here, Love, a god all powerful with us who dwell on the earth, and, if old traditions say true, not less so here. I implore you by these abodes full of terror, these realms of silence and uncreated things, unite again the thread of Eurydice’s life. We all are destined to you, and…

Why struggle to recall a fact or event when our devices easily offer terabytes of data? Neatly captured and then easily accessed: docile information is becoming the ideal. Yet crucial meaning making takes place not only when we encode memories but also in the process that scientists call retrieval – and, most intriguingly, in its failures. Recollection is no more a neat downloading than learning is rote replication. In remembering, the mind is haunting itself, reconstructing associations, replaying, and reconsoli-dating experience once again. And the more lost in the corridors of memory we allow ourselves to be, the more understanding we can reap. In one series of experiments, scientists slyly set people up for failure by testing them on simple word pairs that we rarely associate with one another, such…

To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hourA Robin Red breast in a CagePuts all Heaven in a RageA Dove house filld with Doves & PigeonsShudders Hell thr’ all its regionsA dog starvd at his Masters GatePredicts the ruin of the StateA Horse misusd upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human bloodEach outcry of the hunted HareA fibre from the Brain does tearA Skylark wounded in the wingA Cherubim does cease to sing…

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When they seek to determine someone’s cause of death, doctors often speak of “organ failure” – the failure of an essential system in the body (cardiovascular, renal, etc.) – or even of “multiple organ failure” – the loss of function of two or more such systems. No matter how old one is, one never dies of old age (technically, age cannot by itself be the cause of death), but because of some failure that takes place within the body. Such language is revealing. It suggests an unspoken, perhaps unconscious belief that our organs are meant to work indefinitely, and, by implication, that we are supposed to last indefinitely as well. We – this line of thinking goes – are not “exhaustible” (meant to burn for a while and then flicker…

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