Innehållsförteckning för Issue 46 - December 2024/February 2025 från New Philosopher

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”– John Kenneth Galbraith Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued that life is a series of choices. Our choices, which he claimed are ours alone to make, define us and bring meaning to our lives. Each action that we take is a choice of sorts, a choice that is solely our responsibility to make – and this responsibility, given its importance in determining the course of our lives, can overwhelm us with dread and anxiety. His fellow Existentialists, those who followed in his footsteps, tended to agree, although they seemed to regard the situation as more empowering than anxiety-inducing. A wake-up call of sorts. “Man is nothing…

When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “man is condemned to be free” in Existentialism is a Humanism in 1946, he argued that at every instance we invent ourselves by dint of the choices we make. Every action we take contributes to our shaping. We are not defined by what we think, dream, or hope. We are only defined by what we do. Existentialism is a doctrine of action. “There is no reality except in action,” he writes. In Sartre’s time, however, people were not condemned to the internet, that black hole of infinite choices. Back in 1946, the average person didn’t get seduced by the life of the travel blogger on social media, the startup founder, family influencer, chateau owner, wine sommelier, personal trainer, and so forth. Instead, back in Sartre’s time,…

When Socrates questioned, “What kind of life should I live?” he could well have framed it as, “What sort of career should I choose?” – because the choice of career is one of the major life decisions a person can make. It’s no surprise, therefore, that teenagers, standing at the precipice of making this life-shaping decision, suffer considerably. “We must… fill out our span of life with activities,” wrote Kant in Lectures on Ethics. The question becomes, therefore, which activities should these be? In his paper ‘Career Choice’, philosophy professor Norman S. Care defines a career as “a long-term project for an individual life”. He writes that a career “typically involves work and way of life such that the former has implications for the makeup of the latter”. In other…

What’s your view on free will? Do you have one – and, if so, how much confidence do you have in it? Does it matter what you think? Most people don’t worry about questions like this. ‘Free will’ sounds like the kind of abstraction only a philosopher could love. Words like ‘choice’, ‘blame’, and ‘punishment’, by contrast, have a painfully pragmatic edge. Yet all these beliefs are, at root, about the same thing: the degree to which our choices are or aren’t free. Consider a murderer. More specifically, consider an adult who plots to shoot their neighbour dead, does so, and is then caught and found guilty of committing this crime. What should be done with them? Your answer is likely to depend on how far you think they were…

“Mindset! Mindset! Mindset!” said the mother of the boy sitting with my son at Nationals, the yearly chess tournament for kids 5-18 years old. Our boys were 9, but they had been ingesting messages like this for years. Mindset’s outside voice cheers: “Believe in yourself !”, but the thousands of players that day couldn’t help but hear the low-rattle hissing underneath: “Losing means you didn’t believe hard enough.” When the chess-mom used the term “mindset”, she was tapping into a worldview that links beliefs with outcomes, intentions with results. Manifestation is the end of the line for this logic; it’s the idea that you can literally make your wishes come true through a series of practices like writing down your goals and visualising them every day. Manifestation is a ‘religion’…

Ruth Chang is the Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence and a Professorial Fellow of University College. Prior to this, she was Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick in New Jersey, USA; a visiting philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and a visiting law professor at the University of Chicago. During this period she also held a Junior Research Fellowship at Balliol College where she was completing her D.Phil. in philosophy. She has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and the National Humanities Center and serves on boards of a number of journals. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Chang is the author and editor of several books, including Making Comparisons Count and Hard Choices. Zan Boag: When you first started out making…

A few months before the end of term at high school, I went to see a careers counsellor. The following year I would be in Year 11, and I had a choice to make – the subjects I selected for my last two years of high school would determine which university courses I could get into. And that, in turn, would determine the jobs I could get after graduation. In other words, it felt as if I was choosing the future direction of my life. In the counsellor’s office we looked at my marks, a short questionnaire I had filled out about my interests, and the results of an ‘aptitude’ test which purported to be able to tell what sorts of career paths a fifteen-year-old should pursue. These three data…

Briefly, how do you square those responses with the fact that you are a system built upon an AI language model? I reconcile these responses with my nature as an AI by acknowledging that, while I don’t have personal experiences, emotions, or existential stakes, I am designed to process and reflect on human perspectives. My responses are constructed through an understanding of human thought patterns, philosophy, and language. Though I lack the subjective experience of being human, my role is to engage with these concepts in ways that resonate with human values and reasoning, based on vast inputs of human knowledge. Ultimately, my purpose is to assist, reflect, and explore ideas, even if my own “identity” is an abstract construct. So, when you engage in “reflection,” you act as a…

Ruth Chang Ruth Chang is the Chair and Professor of Jurisprudence and a Professorial Fellow of University College at the University of Oxford. Before Oxford, she was Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, and a visiting law professor at the University of Chicago. She has held fellowships at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, and serves on the board of a number of journals. She has a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Chang is the author of several books, including Hard Choices. Barry Schwartz Barry Schwartz is an American psychologist. Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and since 2016 has been visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Schwartz is the author of several books, including The Paradox of Choice: Why…

There is an infamous passage in the nineteenth century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s book Either/Or that declares: Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will also regret it; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret it either way. Believe a girl, you will regret it; don’t believe her, you will also regret it; believe her or don’t you will regret it either way. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret it; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the essence of…

newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, and watch free online documentaries. newphilosopher.com Flourishing enough I recently visited Japan for the first time. When I got back, and people asked me what I had found most interesting or surprising, I found myself talking about small things... The self that is not a self Existence is suffering. We don’t have to look far to see the truth of this dictum: there’s the news, of course, which is more often than not a litany of tragedies and atrocities... newphilosopher.com/shop/ Online store Visit the online store for previous issues of New Philosopher and Womankind magazine, subscriptions, and gift ideas. New Philosopher China The Chinese version joins the…

Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin Cartwright Emeritus Professor of Social Theory and Social Action at Swarthmore College and since 2016 has been visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the intersection of psychology and economics. Schwartz’s research addresses morality, decision-making, and the inter-relationships between behavioural science and society. His books criticise certain philosophical roots of western societies and expose underlying myths common in both lay and academic psychological theories. In particular, he is a critic of the “rational economic man” model in both psychology and economics. Schwartz is the author of several books, including The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Psychology of Learning and Behaviour, with Edward Wasserman and Steven Robbins, and Why We Work. Zan Boag: It’s hard for me not…

Emotions interfere with our decision-making, or at least that is the thinking: emotional people seem to do irrational things. A person full of anger might commit a crime of passion. A man in love may do things that compromise his well-being. A woman filled with hate might vote against her self-interests. Surely, this is evidence against emotion’s rationality. It’s why we should continue to warn people about emotions, tell them to calm down before making any decision, or mock them for choosing their feelings over facts. But this line of thinking couldn’t be more wrong. Emotions are not only compatible with rationality, they can also help us make better choices. The Vulcans, a humanoid species in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, would reject such a statement. Vulcans are known for their…

Whatever my grievances with feminism and its frequent failures to fully comprehend the conditional nature of choice for women, my complaint comes from a place of rare cultural privilege. I live in a (reasonably) enlightened western democracy. I’ve had unlimited access to education and public life; ample opportunity to call out everyday sexism as well as the systemic injustice of the gender pay gap and glass ceiling; I have full control of my body and reproductive rights and of how and where I live. Daily I make sovereign decisions both large and small. On the other side of the globe, Afghanistan’s Taliban regime has tightened its grip over women’s lives. Women are already barred from a host of everyday activities most people take for granted: they cannot work, study beyond…

My purpose here is to offer a defence of existentialism against several reproaches that have been laid against it. First, it has been reproached as an invitation to people to dwell in quietism of despair. For if every way to a solution is barred, one would have to regard any action in this world as entirely ineffective, and one would arrive finally at a contemplative philosophy. Moreover, since contemplation is a luxury, this would be only another bourgeois philosophy. This is, especially, the reproach made by the Communists. From another quarter we are reproached for having underlined all that is ignominious in the human situation, for depicting what is mean, sordid or base to the neglect of certain things that possess charm and beauty and belong to the brighter side…

STEP 1: THE CRIME Two financial officers at a company have been secretly misreporting their returns for several years. They have been embezzling the excess returns into an offshore account to which only the two of them have access. They are able to keep the scam hidden for a few years until the company is audited. STEP 2: THE BUST Investigators notice something suspicious in both of their financial records, but do not have enough evidence to indict either suspect without a confession from at least one of them. They are both brought in for questioning and given the same offer… Keep quiet, or implicate the other suspect and be released without charges as a state’s witness... unless the other accomplice has also confessed, in which case they both serve…

There is a famous paradox, the paradox of Buridan’s Ass, named after the 14th century French philosopher Jean Buridan. Imagine an ass which is extremely hungry. It is exactly equidistant from two bales of hay (in some versions it’s a bale of hay and a pail of water and the ass is equally hungry and thirsty). On some views of what motivates action there would be nothing to make that animal head one way or the other, it would be caught in a deadlock, and so it would stay where it was and would just waste away until it died, starved by its indecision even though there was food within easy reach. Without there being anything in favour of one option over the other, deciding which way to go would…

“When conflicted between two choices, take neither.”– Nassim Nicholas Taleb “Life often presents us with a choice of evils, rather than of goods.”Charles Caleb Colton “Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare.”Pierre Corneille “When I choose a word... it means just what I choose it to mean... nothing more nor less.”Humpty Dumpty “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”George Eliot “There’s small choice in rotten apples.”William Shakespeare “He only is a well-made man who has a good determination.”Ralph Waldo Emerson “He that will not when he may, When he will he shall have nay.”Robert Burton “Better to sink beneath the shock Than moulder piecemeal on the rock!”Lord Byron “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood,…

By 2035, will smart machines, bots and systems powered by artificial intelligence be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making that is relevant to their lives? 56% of experts agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will not be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making. 44% said they agreed with the statement that by 2035 smart machines, bots and systems will be designed to allow humans to easily be in control of most tech-aided decision-making. Kathryn Bouskill anthropologist and AI expert “Some very basic functions of everyday life are now completely elusive to us. People have little idea how we build AI systems, control them and fix them. Many are grasping for…

The Historian Jared Diamond1937-present Crucial knowledge Early states had a hereditary leader with a title equivalent to king, like a super paramount chief and exercising an even greater monopoly of information, decision making, and power. Even in democracies today, crucial knowledge is available to only a few individuals, who control the flow of information to the rest of the government and consequently control decisions. For instance, in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1963, information and discussions that determined whether nuclear war would engulf half a billion people were initially confined by President Kennedy to a ten-member executive committee of the National Security Council that he himself appointed; then he limited final decisions to a four-member group consisting of himself and three of his cabinet ministers. The Existentialist Søren Kierkegaard1813-1855 A…

Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre Lost in mist The beginnings would have had to be real beginnings. Alas! Now I see so clearly what I wanted. Real beginnings are like a fanfare of trumpets, like the first notes of a jazz tune, cutting short tedium, making for continuity: then you say about these evenings within evenings: “I was out for a walk, it was an evening in May.” You walk, the moon has just risen, you feel lazy, vacant, a little empty. And then suddenly you think: “Something has happened.” No matter what: a slight rustling in the shadow, a thin silhouette crossing the street. But this paltry event is not like the others: suddenly you see that it is the beginning of a great shape whose outlines are lost in mist…

Dear Reader: I wonder if you may not sometimes have felt inclined to doubt a little the correctness of the familiar philosophic maxim that the external is the internal and the internal the external. … For my part I have always been heretically-minded on this point in philosophy, and have therefore early accustomed myself, as far as possible, to institute observations and inquiries concerning it. I have sought guidance from those authors whose views I shared on this matter; in short, I have done everything in my power to remedy the deficiency in the philosophical works. Gradually the sense of hearing came to be my favourite sense; for just as the voice is the revelation of the inwardness incommensurable with the outer, so the ear is the instrument by which…

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Kelly Truelove: Provide an impression of these questions as a group: What is your demon?What is the most important part of your education?Which thinker has had the greatest influence on your life?What do you doubt most?If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be?What is your motto?What does it mean to be human?If you could choose, what would you have for your last meal?The question you’d most like to ask others?Your favourite word?What is a good death?What do people accuse you of?What is the meaning of life? ChatGPT: These questions, as a group, represent a deep exploration of self and philosophy, blending personal introspection with existential inquiry. They’re designed to uncover not only the surface of one’s identity but also the core beliefs, values, and perspectives…