ISSUE 153 DECEMBER 2022 / JANUARY 2023

Philosophy Now
a magazine of ideas

PLUS
Ethics in
Ancient
Featuring the China
creative ideas of
• Wittgenstein
• Saul Kripke
• Cicero
• Machiavelli
New in the Ancient Wisdom for
THE HOME OF EXISTENTIAL TRAINING
Modern Readers Series

A vibrant new
translation of Seneca’s MA in
“On the Shortness
of Life,” a pointed EXISTENTIAL
reminder to make the
most of our time AND HUMANIST
PASTORAL CARE
WWW.NSPC.ORG.UK/PASTORALCARE

NEW SCHOOL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND COUNSELLING

61–63 Fortune Green Road London NW6 1DR
0207 435 8067 // 0203 515 0223 @ admissions@nspc.org.uk  nspc.org.uk
This programme is quality assured by Middlesex University and you will receive a Middlesex award on successful completion.

An engaging new
translation of a
timeless masterpiece
about coping with the Now on Amazon
death of a loved one We Are Stuck in the
Present Knowledge
The voice in our head drones on
and on. Knowledge is treated as
a commodity. "I think" no
longer affirms that "I am." We
are stuck so we keep talking.
In This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity,
cultural theorist Fuoco B. Fann offers a fresh
examination of the modern self today. Drawing
from such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jacques
An entertaining and Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean
enlightening collection Baudrillard, Fann reflects anew on old philosophical
of ancient writings
questions. Who are we and what can we know?
about the philosophers
who advocated simple How did we get here and what can we do?
living and rejected "Fann’s take is one deeply entrenched in world
unthinking conformity history. To understand the present, he seems to
assert, readers must first expand their scope; only
then can they begin to investigate the past. A
dense but worthwhile inquiry into the evolution of
Western thought." -Kirkus Reviews

Philosophy & Art Collaboratory

www.philosophyandartcollaboratory.com

Creative Being
D
avid Bowie was the Picasso of pop. Bowie delib-
erately completely changed his artistic direction
every few years, pushing the style and content of
his creativity off at a brand new tangent every
time. In this he copied Picasso’s habit of radically, deliberate-
ly, frequently reshaping his artistic interests and identity.
Bowie was also like Picasso in having the exceptional talent
and creativity needed to pull this ambition off. You might
even argue that Bowie was one of the few geniuses of art pro-
duced in Britain (or even the world) in the second half of the
twentieth century. Think of your own list of other geniuses
here if you like.
I define a genius as someone who communicates or creates
new possibilities for experiencing the world or living in it. More
precisely, genius is the ability, first, to see things in new ways,
then to effectively create or communicate that vision (artists), or
to put their new way of seeing into practice themselves (scien-
tists and engineers). The genius of Picasso was to greatly
enlarge the possibilities of fine art, both beautifully and radical-
ly. Bowie did the same for rock music, and he did it with
panache. (And how they conducted revolutions for their own
media could potentially be applied to any art, by the way...)
Whatever else is essential to genius, both talent and cre-
ativity are. And we can at least incontrovertibly say that Bowie
and Picasso were both talented and creative to a rare high
degree. But what do those terms actually mean here?
Creativity is fundamentally the ability to come up with new
ideas. An alternative term for it might be free imaginativeness.
And let me define talent in this context as the ability to turn
ideas into reality. Here, talent means having the technical
ability to create a vehicle that will convey your creative vision.
In other words, it is about bringing the products of your cre-
ative imagination into being, or communicating your ideas
well. To be a genius you need a strong impulse to see beyond
the horizons envisioned by your fellow humans, and high lev-
els of both knowledge and technique, in whatever area you’re
working.
One useful definition of ‘God’ is ‘personal creator being’. I’m
intrigued by the idea that the name of God in the Old
Testament, ‘Yahweh’, is best translated as ‘Creative Being’, or
something close to that. In any case, being creative would be the
closest to aligning with the essence of the divine that humanity
can reach, since creativity must be central to the idea of a Creator.
How does that sound to you? Tempting? But whether you
think that would be a good thing or a bad thing, how does
creativity actually work?
First, I think curiosity is vital for creativity, since creativity is
in part a function of the degree to which you want to see
beyond your present ideas. This is true by definition, if cre-
ativity means coming up with new ideas. That definition also
Editorial
means that to be creative, you have to be willing to do things
BOWIES © GIL ZETBASE 2017 CREATIVE COMMONS
differently – otherwise you’re just copying. (Having said that,
a good piece of advice concerning not just creativity, but all
aspects of life, is don’t abandon the good ideas you’ve gath-
ered until you know you must. The ideal is not just to create,
but to create well, even to create excellently.)
Albert Einstein was chronically making bad puns, whenever
he had the time and space to do so. Punning is a common trait
among (otherwise) intelligent people. It demonstrates another
essential aspect of creativity, which is the habit of making
mental connections – perhaps the more abstract the better,
and the more tangential, the more creative. Another pro-cre-
ative trait is being brimful of different ideas from a lot of dif-
ferent sources, as a result of a wide range of reading, watching,
and listening. This is good for creativity both in order to have
many ideas to connect together, but also to inform you about
the sort of thing that happens or can happen when you do this
connecting. Having a wide and deep experience of other peo-
ples’ creativity also improves your perception of whatever
problem you’re being creative about, because it finely informs
your mind about the sort of ideas it’s good to be looking for.
In other words, a good range of cultural influences helps you
to build the intellectual telescope or microscope through
which to examine the world, or at least your present creative
problem.
A further necessary requirement to be highly creative is to
keep trying. To paraphrase Picasso, working won’t make you a
genius, but genius has to find you working.
Maybe you can also think of other core aspects of creativity
that I haven’t mentioned here – perhaps because I lack the
necessary creative imagination!
In this issue we’re questing wide to understand creativity.
To start our genius engines up, Les Jones takes a philosophi-
cal dive into the requirements of creativity. Christine
Battersby and Elliot Samuel Paul consider academic perspec-
tives on creativity, including a feminist take on genius. Next
we consider two applications of creativity, in terms of generat-
ing wise environments for life (‘Creating Cities’), and in terms
of generating wise thoughts (‘In Praise of Aphorisms’). Finally,
author James Gallant looks in his creative mirror, to help
explain how writers work and what they are ultimately trying
to achieve.
If this issue’s theme of creativity strikes some sparks in you,
perhaps you might also like our publication The Ultimate
Guide to Aesthetics, which covers this fruitful intersection
between philosophy and art, and which is out now.
Grant Bartley
• Grant’s video on How the Brain Makes Consciousness was recently
released on YouTube, at youtu.be/7TJRV68Vrgw
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 3
Philosophy Now ISSUE 153
December 2022/January 2023

Philosophy Now 8
43a Jerningham Road,
Telegraph Hill,
London SE14 5NQ
United Kingdom
Tel. 020 7639 7314
editors@philosophynow.org
philosophynow.org

Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis

Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer
Digital Editor Bora Dogan
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton
KANDINSKY

WITTGENSTEIN BY CLINT INMAN

Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Assistant Editor Alex Marsh
Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis,
Anja Steinbauer
Marketing Sue Roberts
Administration Ewa Stacey, Alex Marsh
Advertising Team
Editorial & News
Jay Sanders, Stella Ellison
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org
UK Editorial Board
3
6
Editorial Grant Bartley
News Anja Steinbauer
8
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
7 Shorts Matt Qvortrup: Kissing
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley
US Editorial Board
General Articles
Prof. Timothy J. Madigan (St John
22 Ethics in Politics
Fisher College), Prof. Teresa Britton
(Eastern Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Creativity Massimo Pigliucci wonders whether it fits
Adamson, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci
26 French Philosophy Now
(CUNY City College) 8 Plaiting Gravy
Contributing Editors
Manon Royet asks: after Foucault, now what?
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Les Jones weaves with Wittgenstein’s ideas 30 On Regret
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) 12 The Philosophy of Creativity David Charles doesn’t regret writing this
David Boersema (Pacific University)
Christine Battersby & Elliot Samuel Paul 32 Poetry & Philosophy in the 21st Century
UK Editorial Advisors
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon discuss the genesis of genius Benjamin Lloyd has answers for modern life
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood
14 Creating Cities
US Editorial Advisors
Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Harry Drummond explains why philosophy Focus on Chinese Ethics
Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, of architecture matters
Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
35 Moral Education in Confucianism
Cover Image by Alex 16 In Praise of Aphorisms Plakshi Jain on two contrasting approaches
Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd Grahame Lockey informs us why they’re 38 Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory
Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate,
Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW great, philosophically speaking Shaun O’Dwyer on philosophers who
Worldwide newstrade distribution: 19 What Am I Doing? literally fought for peace
Select PS (+44 1202 586848)
James Gallant writes about why he writes
contact@selectps.com
Australian newstrade distribution:
Reviews
Ovato 50 Book: Seven Ways of Looking at Suffering
26 Rodborough Road
Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086
35 by Scott Samuelson
hello@ovato.com.au reviewed by Doug Phillips
The opinions expressed in this 52 Book: The Monarchy of Fear
magazine do not necessarily reflect
the views of the editor or editorial by Martha Nussbaum
board of Philosophy Now.
reviewed by Chad Trainer
Philosophy Now 54 Television: Babylon 5
CONFUCIUS

is published by Anja Publications Ltd

ISSN 0961-5970 Stuart Hannabuss says be careful what you
Subscriptions p.62 wish for.
Shop p.63
CHINESE LANDSCAPE ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS 1915 CREATIVE COMMONS

4 Philosophy Now December 2022/January 2023

●
 some of our
Contributors
Christine Battersby
Christine Battersby
(FRSA) is Reader Emerita
in Philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Warwick. Her Gender and
Genius: Towards a Feminist Aes-
thetics (1989, 1994) is included in
the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library:
Contemporary Aesthetics Collec-
tion. Other books include The Phe-
COPY OF MONA LISA BY AN UNKNOWN PUPIL OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, (PRADO, MADRID)

nomenal Woman: Feminist Meta-

physics and the Patterns of Identity
(1998) and The Sublime, Terror and
Human Difference (2007).

Massimo Pigliucci
Massimo Pigliucci is
the K.D. Irani Professor
of Philosophy at the City College of
New York. His books include How
to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philos-
ophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic
Books) and The Quest for Charac-
ter: What the Story of Socrates and
Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our
Search for Good Leaders (Basic
Books).

Harry Drummond

8 Harry Drummond is a PhD

Regulars Poetry, Fun & Fiction
42 Interview: Peter Adamson 11 Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna Herb Tate
talked to Duanne Ribeiro on the occasion of 21 Simon & Finn Melissa Felder
his 400th History of Philosophy podcast 25 Philosophy Café Guto Dias
44 Brief Lives: Cicero 37 At My Leisure Steven Kent creates rhymes
Hilarius Bogbinder on a reflective Roman 66 The Great Crumpled Paper Hoax
46 Philosophical Haiku: Machiavelli A long-lost short story by Martin Gardner
Terence Green on the Prince of Darkness
47 Letters to the Editor
57 Question of the Month:
22
MACHIAVELLI BY MILES WALKER
researcher and graduate
teacher at the University of
Liverpool. He works at the inter-
section of aesthetics and
philosophy of mind, exploring how
'4E' cognition can inform our
understanding of aesthetic cogni-
tion. He is currently co-editor of
the British Society of Aesthetics'
journal Debates in Aesthetics.
Plakshi Jain
Plakshi Jain is an Indian-
trained lawyer, a recent
LL.M. (Master of Laws)
Graduate from the University of

What Grounds or Justifies Morality? California, Berkeley School of Law

Read readers’ righteous responses and now a licensed attorney in
California. She enjoys writing
60 Tallis in Wonderland: poetry, watching anime, swimming
An Invitation to Navel Gazing and sleeping in the sun. Check out
Raymond Tallis sees the history of the cosmos her poetry on her blog The Grey-
ness of Life at
64 Obituary: Saul Kripke
thegreynessoflife.wordpress.com
Stefan Rinner explains why his ideas matter

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 5


• Animal welfare meets big game theory
• Philosophers of physics reach critical mass?
News
Seán Moran, RIP
It is with great sadness that Philosophy Now
announces the death of Dr Seán Moran, a
regular contributor to the magazine whose
Street Philosopher column has appeared
since 2016.
Seán was a Lecturer in the School of
Education and Lifelong Learning at the
Waterford Institute of Technology in
Ireland, which was quite fitting, as he was
the exemplar of a lifelong learner.
His love for life, breadth of knowledge,
and puckish humor were contagious, and
he was seldom without his flute, always
ready to lead a group in song and merri-
ment. Seán was a world traveler and, in
addition to his accomplishments as a
philosopher, was an outstanding photogra-
pher. I was glad to have introduced him to
Philosophy Now magazine, which seemed a
natural home for someone so devoted to
making philosophical inquiry accessible
and exciting. Those of us who knew him
and benefited from his kindness and cheer-
fulness will deeply miss him, but we are
grateful that his ‘Street Philosopher’
columns will be a reminder of his devotion
to finding wisdom in everyday life.
-Tim Madigan
Seán Moran
6 Philosophy Now l December 2022/January 2023
• Effective Altruism billionaire goes bust
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
FTX and Effective Altruism
When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX
collapsed in early November, this led in a
single day to what Bloomberg has called
“one of history’s greatest-ever destructions
of wealth.” Billions of dollars disappeared
amidst accusations of hacking and gross
mismanagement. FTX co-founder Sam
Bankman-Fried, who in an interview with a
VOX reporter once said that he “had to be”
good at talking about ethics because “it’s
what reputations are made of”, has shown
himself to have feet of clay. And yet, he has
been close to an ethical movement dedi-
cated to making the world a better place.
The Effective Altruism movement,
inspired by utilitarian moral philosopher
Peter Singer, has done a great deal of good
since it emerged in the early 2000s. The
idea is simple. According to the website
effectivealtruism.org it is “a research field
and practical community that aims to find
the best ways to help others, and put them
into practice.” Oxford philosopher William
MacAskill, one of the founders of Effective
Altruism organisation Giving What We
Can, championed the idea of earning to
give. When the young Bankman-Fried
expressed his passion for animal welfare,
MacAskill suggested that he could best
support this cause if he tried to make a lot
of money to donate it to charities. And
Bankman-Fried did just that. FTX made
him a billionaire, and he then created an
associated fund called FTX Futures Fund
to distribute money to good causes, with
MacAskill and others on its advisory board.
It committed to charitable grants of around
$160 million, but in the wake of the FTX
implosion there have been suggestions that
it unwittingly provided a reputational
shield behind which Bankman-Fried could
run amok. The entire FTX Futures Fund
board has now resigned, issuing a letter
that said, “We are now unable to perform
our work or process grants, and we have
fundamental questions about the legitimacy
and integrity of the business operations
that were funding the FTX Foundation
and the Future Fund.”
The connection between Bankman-
Fried and Effective Altruism throws up a
lot of questions about that movement’s
approach. Is there a problem with the utili-
tarian focus on results, so that the end can
be seen as justifying the means? Is the
emphasis of the Effective Altruism move-
ment on ‘longtermism’ at the expense of
immediate need misguided? Are some of its
declared aims, such as improving decision-
making, vulnerable to ideological tinting?
Finally, is the approach flawed that uncriti-
cally trusts those with extreme wealth and
power simply because they declare them-
selves to be committed to doing good in
the world?
Iranian Philosophy Student Killed
On Saturday 5 November 2022, 35 year
old student Nasrin Ghaderi died after
falling into a coma due to lethal injuries she
sustained during an anti-government
demonstration in Tehran. She is reported
to have been attacked by security forces
and suffered severe blows to her head.
Nasrin Ghaderi was a PhD candidate in
philosophy in Tehran. Following her
death, new protests broke out in her home
city of Marivan. Ghaderi’s family had been
prevented from giving her a funeral in
Marivan. She was instead buried without
anyone in attendance. We all mourn the
death of this brave young philosopher.
A New Take on Animal Justice
Recent philosophical approaches to
animal welfare tend to take a justice
approach, falling into political theory
rather than traditional applied ethics.
German philosopher Colin von Negen-
born believes that combining the methods
of philosophy and economics can yield
new insights about the relationship
between animals and humans. He has
embarked on a research project sponsored
by Hamburg University in which he will

use game theory to study both human and
animal behaviour. The assumption behind
this is that animal behaviour is changed by
human interference. Animals adapt their
behaviour to human behaviour, by, for
example, giving up habitats or moving to
new ones. The fact that they do not
engage in rational deliberation before
acting is irrelevant, Negenborn argues.
After all, humans do not always act ratio-
nally either. According to him, we will
have to completely rethink the way we
interact with animals, as we ought to see
them as fellow players, rather than as
objects that we can manipulate at will. The
aim is to offer this different perspective
with a view to influencing legislation.
Shorts
Philosophy Shorts
by Matt Qvortrup
‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978
album by the rock band Talking Heads, about all the things rock stars
normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on
the theme of love; a track like Van Morrison’s 1976 hit Cleaning
Windows is the odd one out.
Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on
epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But
occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other
matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert
Nozick) and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle) This series of Shorts is about these
unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Philosophy of Physics
The Philosophy of Physics Society (philos-
ophyofphysics.org) is launching an ambi-
Philosophers on Kissing
tious new scholarly journal. It will be called

Philosophy of Physics, or PoP for short, and
will be published by LSE Press in London.
It will be based on an open access publish-
ing model so that it will be free to read. The
Editor in Chief is Prof. David Wallace who
holds the Mellon Chair in Philosophy of
Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Modern physics has generated many
questions of philosophical interest. Relativ-
ity revolutionised our views of space and
time. Quantum theory is mathematically
highly successful but seems to generate
paradoxes and is open to a range of differ-
ent physical interpretations, all of them
utterly profound for our understanding of
reality and also really odd. So there is plenty
of material for philosophers to discuss.
PHOTO BY O. USHER. CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0
“
Let no one whom he has in mind
to kiss refuse to be kissed by
him”, wrote Plato in his Republic.
Well, in these #MeToo times there
can be plenty of reasons for refusing to
be kissed. This was recognised by
some philosophers. For example,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eponymous
young hero Emile’s desire to kiss
Sophie was not reciprocated: “She
turns away… She resists feebly.”
(Emile, 1762).
But, in fairness, most of the
philosophers who have covered this
subject have been interested mainly in
kissing between consenting adults.
Martin Heidegger, for example, wrote
a love letter in which he informed his
lover that kisses stimulated his work:
“with a kiss on your pure brow, [I] take
the honour of your being into my
work.” (Briefe 1925-1975, p.135).
The woman to whom this letter was
addressed, it may not surprise you to
learn, was Hannah Arendt. And she
too had a developed sense of the
importance of smooching. Great
So far it would seem that the philos-
ophy of kissing is the preserve of Con-
tinental philosophers. This of course is
not the case. Though not long ago the
Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolter-
storff despairingly wrote an article on
‘Why Philosophy of Art Cannot
Handle Kissing’. (The Journal of Aes-
thetics and Art Criticism, 2003).
One can ponder the status of kisses
and reflect on Marilyn Monroe’s tau-
tological statement that “a kiss is a
kiss.” Søren Kierkegaard – another
Continental writer on the subject –
disagreed. In his arguably most influ-
ential work, Either-Or (1843), the
Danish existentialist confessed that he
had considered writing a whole trea-
tise on kissing, and that he was
working on a typology. And, he went
on, ‘‘One… makes a Difference
between the first Kiss and all the
others. What is reflected on here is
incommensurable for what appears in
the other divisions; it is indifferent to
the sound, the touch, the time in
general.” (Either-Or p.404).

philosophers, remarked the author of Philosophers always theorize. That

The Human Condition, “cannot think
without kisses.” (At least, according to
the movie Hannah Arendt she said
this!) So when Nietzsche wrote that
his eponymous Zarathustra “desired
to be kissed”, it was totally under-
standable. (Thus Spake Zarathustra,
1883).
Quantum refrigerator at UCL, London
is their business. Poets get straight to
the point. The ancient Roman poet
Ovid was a good example: “I could
wish you well with kisses.” (Ex Ponto,
IV, ix, 13).
© PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2022
Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political
Science at Coventry University.

December 2022/ January 2023 l Philosophy Now 7

 Creativity
Plaiting Gravy
Les Jones on allegories, specific domains and Wittgenstein’s social ideas
he word ‘creativity’ is derived from the Latin word
T creare; literally, ‘to cause, to create, to make’. But
this definition itself suggests problems. Humans can
certainly make things by putting other things
together; but do we have the capacity to create something new,
as it were, from nothing? Well, like many others, I will take
refuge in the phrase “it all depends what you mean by...” The
idea that creation was only in God’s realm seems to have been
ditched in the seventeenth century. The word creativity seems
to have acquired its present meaning around that time, with its
implication that humans too can be creative.
One thing we need to clear up first, is that creativity and dis-
covery are not the same thing. Discovery is unearthing some-
thing new: that which hasn’t been known before. The discov-
erer does not know anything of the thing discovered until the
discovery occurs. This helps us with what creativity is not:
although of course creative people do discover things, creativ-
ity can be a frame of mind, whereas discovery cannot.
Some have suggested that one criterion for a creative act is
that it should be ‘unique’, rather than a copy of a previous act.
Clearly however this cannot be the only criterion, or else one
could just churn out a random sequence of letters or characters
that made no sense at all and claim that to be creative act. So we
need a second criterion for creativity: what is created must make
some sort of sense. For that to work, the creative event must be
embedded in some sort of symbol system intelligible to a wider
audience: for example, language, logic, maths or music.
Wittgenstein & Creativity
So creative events require meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein
claims in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) that, when it
comes to language, ‘meaning is use’.
For those who have wrestled with the various ideas in
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or his later Philosophical Investigations,
it might seem a little incongruous that Wittgenstein has much
to say about creativity. His later work brilliantly advances his
‘Private Language Argument’, demolishing the possibility of a
strictly personal language developed inside one’s own head
using creative abilities inspired solely from one’s own internal
world. Rather, Wittgenstein argues that understanding is a
public phenomenon; that language can only develop in inter-
actions between individuals. Indeed, his famous notion of a ‘lan-
guage game’ centres on the fact that language use is embedded
within different types of social interaction, so that subtly dif-
ferent rules govern different language games. For instance, the
language game played by religions has boundaries that separate
it from other language games. (Few language games are cir-
cumscribed by belief: religion is one; supporting a football team
may be another.)
It’s important to note that language games are social by their
very nature. If, as Wittgenstein argued, understanding is a public
8 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
phenomenon, then clearly one cannot have a language game if
there is no public. If there is no human interaction, then there
is no communication. Wittgenstein insisted that language games
were not static, but were developing systems constantly under
review by those using them, especially creative individuals.
Some philosophers have suggested that creativity is forged in
a culture of traditions – linguistic, cultural, etc. A new theory or
method or way of looking at things is judged creative by those
imbued with the values, judgements and theories of the tradition
in which they work. But traditions are developed within societies,
so it follows that creativity is developed socially. This notion has
been named by psychologists and some philosophers ‘the socio-
cultural theory’.
The idea that creativity springs from cultures of traditions is
criticised by other philosophers. Creativity, they argue, is about
‘thinking outside the box’; that is, outside the tradition. Wittgen-
stein has much to say about this – such as, “Genius is courage
in talent”. He said further: “Genius is talent in which character
makes itself heard.” Is he trying to open our minds here to the
fact that creativity has to do with more than just the proverbial
‘Eureka!’ moment? Language, and all that goes with it, must be
based in rule-following; and rule-following by definition must
be in a public space. Wittgenstein says that there is no magic
spark that flashes on in the workings of the individual’s mind,
devoid of any contact with the public space. How can it, Wittgen-
stein asks, when the very building blocks of any new idea are
rooted in linguistic rule-following in the social domain? One
could even argue that here Wittgenstein is casting doubt on the
intelligibility of an idea being completely limited to one’s own
private sphere.
Many would (publically) say that if there was ever a truly orig-
inal thinker, it was Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein wrote in
1931: “I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I
have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply
straightaway seized on it with enthusiasm for my work of clari-
fication. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege,
Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influ-
enced me.” (1931, in Culture and Value 1980).
This is a surprising, maybe grievous, thing to say. Perhaps
Wittgenstein was being self-effacing, although that doesn’t seem
in character. The truth may instead lie in his aphorism ‘Genius
is courage in talent’. Here we get a hint that the creative indi-
vidual must be prepared to suffer and challenge for his or her
creativity. The individual must endure and triumph over enor-
mous strain before true creativity can be achieved.
Wittgenstein’s own way of working bears witness to these
ideals. Yes, he had enormous natural talent; but he also had enor-
mous persistence and doggedness. He would turn a problem
around, invert it, weigh its perspectives, and in general, fight
against the ‘leave it to another day’ notion that can bedevil many
of us. The creative individual believes so intensely in their ideas
 Creativity
Austrian-British philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Portrait by Clint Inman 2022

PAINTING © CLINTON INMAN 2022 FACEBOOK AT CLINTON.INMAN

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 9
 Creativity
that he or she forces them on culture. This calls on some form
of courage to smash through a ceiling of doubt or indolence, to
force the idea through by making use of it, living it.
Creativity Through Allegory
An allegory is a fictional narrative or image that can lead the
reader or viewer to consider moral or political situations. Per-
haps the best-known allegory in philosophy is Plato’s ‘Allegory
of the Cave’, a story he tells of some prisoners who have been
kept in chains in a cave all their lives, watching shadows thrown
upon the cave wall by a fire. These shadows are of objects being
carried behind them. They are a distorted representation of the
world, but they are the only ‘reality’ the prisoners know. For
Plato the shadows stand for our sense perceptions, though of
course sense perceptions are only a fraction of our total experi-
ence, which also includes our reason and analysis. A famous polit-
ical allegory is George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, an
allegory of Soviet Communist history. In it a group of farm ani-
mals, filled with idealism, stage a revolution and take over their
farm. Orwell, a former Communist, describes the shifting situa-
tion of the animals as the pigs seize control and are steadily cor-
rupted by the opportunities and selfishness of absolute power.
Yet another example of allegory is Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970
film The Conformist. On seeing this film, one of Bertolucci’s fol-
lowers suggested he could ‘plait gravy’ – i.e. achieve something
widely seen as impossible. Yes, it seemed (and still seems in many
ways) that creative, that complex. The Conformist is set in Fascist
Italy in the 1930s. The main character is Marcello Clerici. As a
child he was mistreated, and this scars him deeply. Marcello seeks
refuge in the overwhelming power of the fascist state. He’s
charged with investigating Professor Quadri, who is an anti-fas-
cist and Marcello’s old college professor. Quadri uses Plato’s
Allegory of the Cave to condemn the contemporary political sit-
uation in Italy. “And what do they see, the prisoners?”, asks
Quadri. “Shadows, reflections of things. Like what is happen-
ing to you people now in Italy” he persists. Marcello instead
takes the route that appears to quell his various anxieties; he is
not ready to confront reality. Marcello is self-deluding and on
CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2022
10 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
the road to moral bankruptcy, but is he morally bankrupt enough
to carry out his fascist masters’ orders and kill Quadri?
For the viewer this is captivating stuff and also raises pro-
found questions. The truth of Marcello’s situation finally begins
to dawn on him. He begins to realise that he is not a puppet
master, but one of tens of thousands of puppets. Along with
Marcello, the viewer is presented with opposing pathways to
good and evil. Has Marcello’s quest for security, status and
belonging harmed him more than helped him? Should he even
have considered this path? Marcello is becoming ensnared in a
moral trap from which there will be no escape. The impression
of his growing terror is enhanced by exceptional camera work,
light and shade, angles suggesting claustrophobia. The creativ-
ity of the artwork is stunning. Bertolucci uses Marcello to
explore the drives that fuel cruel autocracies and mendacious
dictatorships the world over. Marcello, for all his guile and con-
fidence in his abilities to work the system, finally comes to see
the utter bankruptcy of his position, for just like those he
despises, he has become an extension of the fascist state.
The movie is an allegory, rather than a historical drama,
because it tries to awaken all of us to questions about society and
our place within it, and to alert us to the lure of conformism, the
tendency of so many to mindlessly follow whatever popular trend
or set of expectations is dominant in society at a given moment.
The raising of such questions, and the limitless possibility of fur-
ther questions, is the very bedrock of creative thought.
Psycho-Philosophical Creativity
Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
(1934-2021) identified a type of highly focused mental state con-
ducive to productivity and creativity. He called it the ‘flow’. He
described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for
its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, move-
ment, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like
playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your
skills to the utmost.” Csikszentmihalyi advanced a model of cre-
ativity that stresses the importance of a ‘specific domain’ to make
meaningful contributions within a culture – a time and place in
history where many variables come together to form a situation
where creativity can bloom. Renaissance Florence is sometimes
cited as a domain where many such factors came together. The
city was a financial and political powerhouse. The rich were
encouraged to advertise their wealth and power through great
art – which in its turn attracted artists, sculptors, architects, etc;
all the seeds needed for a harvest of creativity.
Csikszentmihalyi’s work focuses on creativity as a cultural
phenomenon. It is useful, he says, to think about culture as sys-
tems of interrelated domains. He puts forward a model of cre-
ativity consisting of a domain, a field, and a person. The domain
is the wider area of cultural application, whether that be sculp-
ture, mathematics, reason or science. Inside the domain is the
specific field; and inside the field is the person. Csikszentmihalyi
outlines the creative person as having “a sense that one’s skills
are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal
directed, rule-bound action system” (Flow: The Psychology of Opti-
mal Experience, 1990). To achieve this sense the individual
absorbs and develops cultural information. In some individuals
this knowledge will reach such a level that they will be selected

Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna
Wittgenstein designed a house, then had the builders
reconstruct it to make one of the ceilings 3cm higher.
How to become the architect
Of your own myth: gesture towards the space
That is missing, the space that isn’t there,
The three centimetres needed to repair
Proportion in a perfectly thought-out place
Then stand back and say nothing, be silent.
Let others place a table and dine,
Or a bed to sleep in a room of their choosing;
Living will be their way of approving
Your wonderful way of squandering time.
© HERB TATE 2022
Herb Tate is a poet and RE & Philosophy teacher in the UK.
by the gatekeepers in the field for inclusion into the creative
domain. He writes, “Typically, the memes and rules that define
a domain tend to remain stable over time. It takes psychic energy
to learn new terms and new concepts, and in so far as psychic
energy is a very scarce and necessary resource, and provided
that the old terms and rules are adequate to the task, it makes
sense for domains to remain stable” (Creativity, 2014).
Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that domains can be
transmitted and developed even without an annotation system:
“For instance Piaget gave a very detailed description of how rules
are transmitted in a very informal domain: that of the game of
marbles played by Swiss children. This domain is relatively endur-
ing over several generations of children, and it consists in specific
names of marbles of different sizes, colour, and composition. Fur-
thermore, it consists in a variety of arcane rules that children learn
from each other in the course of play. So even without a notation
system, domains can transmitted from one generation to the next
through imitation and instruction.” (Creativity, 2014).
Creativity For All
This ‘cultural’ view of creativity goes against that of many
thinkers, such as Kant or Freud, who saw the spark of individ-
ual genius as the source of creativity. Some of these thinkers
went to great lengths to rationalise this idea of an individual
creative spark. Freud for example seems to have suggested that
creativity was related to neurosis, a meandering, disturbing
stream of thought. More modern views, such as Csikszentmi-
halyi’s, see creativity as a more complicated process, subject to
far more than ‘delicate flower’ individualism. True, creativity
is a delicate flower; but not so delicate that analysis cannot make
progress in understanding it.
The struggle between the creative culturalists and the creative
individualists will continue. But after perusing Wittgenstein’s ideas
on creativity, and the ideas of others such as Csikszentmihalyi,
one must surely see the relevance of culture. The processes of cre-
ativity are carried out through an intertwining of public language
and symbol systems like mathematics, with various forms, in vari-
ous domains. Nevertheless, creativity need not be the exclusive
Creativity
preserve of those initiated into the higher echelons of a particular
field of endeavour. Those who read a novel, view a play or a film,
look at a painting, and so on, can also have an input into the mean-
ing of a work of art and perhaps suggest new meanings.
Of course, the ‘common sense’ understanding has always
been that the artist, writer or other creative determined the
intent of the work. This concept was challenged by a revolu-
tionary paper called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ published in 1946
by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Their idea was that
the meaning of a work is not necessarily what was in the writer’s
mind, at the time of writing or later, but has more to do with
what the readers of a work see as its meaning. Beardsley argues
that the meaning of a text can change even after the author has
died, or maybe even after a week or a month or a year has elapsed,
or in the light of events. Georgia Warnke takes the novel The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain as an exam-
ple, drawing attention to the relationship between Jim and
Huck. There has been a revolution in attitudes to sexuality and
tolerance since the book was written, and where readers of a
hundred or more years ago would be hard put to recognise any-
thing but a platonic relationship between Jim and Huck, some
of today’s readers would be struck by a number of passages in
the book which could certainly suggest a different story.
Creative Conclusions
Creativity is an elusive quality. It doesn’t fit easily into a theory
or an outlook. Plato speaks of truly great poetry being ‘inspired’
– in effect, a breath from the gods. Talking of Greek gods,
Friedrich Nietzsche also saw great creativity in the tragedy and
poetry of ancient Greece as a marriage between a ‘Dionysian’
outlook (spontaneity, irrationality, the rejection of discipline)
and a more serious and ordered ‘Apollonian’ outlook. But this
only goes to emphasise the elusiveness of creativity: maybe it
all depends on the respective balance of such ingredients?
It has been suggested by some that by its very nature creativ-
ity cannot be subject to rigorous analysis. Of course, this itself
is a question that can only be resolved by rigorous analysis. Yet
Kant – not usually one to shy away from rigorous analysis –
seemed to conceive of creativity as something individual that
cannot be learned, cannot be related to erudition in the ‘normal’
way, and which is an enigma even to those who display it.
As we’ve seen, Wittgenstein does not go along with this view.
And the creative products we’ve considered in this short essay,
such as The Conformist, rest on public foundations similar to
those illustrated by Wittgenstein when he talks of his work rest-
ing on the influences of Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer,
Frege, Russell and the others. Indeed, the very notion of alle-
gory cannot take place without something to be allegorical
about. Moreover, allegory throws open the door to creative
minds to search out new and insightful perspectives, juxtapose
insights and conjure up mind-blowing analysis. And by using
that phrase ‘conjure up’, am I conceding that creativity may
have a touch of the magical – maybe even of the divine?
© LES JONES 2022
Les Jones is a retired educational professional. He taught in schools
and colleges and has been a department head. He has also worked for
exam boards as an examiner and senior examiner for GCE, GCSE
and A-Level.
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 11
 Creativity
The Philosophy of Creativity
Rick Lewis asks what’s new in this fascinating field
ow can you be more creative? What is the con-
H
nection between creativity and inspiration?
Where do inspirations come from? The novelist
Terry Pratchett, who knew a thing or two about
imagination, had an amusing theory about this, as follows:
“Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all
the time travelling through the densest matter in the same way
that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most
of them miss.”
In a more earnest vein, Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) about the relationship
between the mechanic’s mind, hand and eye, as one of con-
stantly assessing a problem and making the changes that seems
to be called for, and then reassessing and making further
changes, in a continually unfolding creative process. This pro-
cess, Pirsig claimed, was what united motorcycle mechanics
with sculptors and other artists.
What have contemporary philosophers written about the
nature of creativity? What’s the state of the debate? It has been
quieter than you might suppose, but recently there have been
signs of life. In 2010 Professor Berys Gaut of the University
of St Andrews wrote a wide-ranging paper called ‘The Phi-
losophy of Creativity’ in the journal Philosophy Compass. It
included a survey of issues such as those above, and others
such as whether the creative process is rational, whether cre-
ativity is a virtue, and the relation of creativity to knowledge.
Gaut argued that philosophers in this area should pay more
attention to what psychologists have been up to. He writes:
“In 1950 J.P. Guilford gave a highly influential Presidential
address to the American Psychological Association in which
he pointed out how little work had been done on the topic [of
creativity] by psychologists.” Since then, Gaut went on, there
has been constant activity, laboratory investigations, dedicated
journals and textbooks, and, most important of all, compet-
ing psychological theories of creativity. Gaut said that philoso-
phers had so far paid little attention to this work, apart from
some discussion of two theories known as the computational
theory and the cognitive psychological approach.
Then in 2014, The Philosophy of Creativity was published with
chapters by a whole range of thinkers, including Gaut. This illus-
trated an increasing interest in creativity among philosophers.
It was edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman,
and in 2017 Les Reid reviewed it for Philosophy Now Issue 120.
However, earlier than this, a notable philosophical contri-
bution to understanding creativity had already been made by
the well-known feminist philosopher Professor Christine Bat-
tersby in her 1989 book Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist
Aesthetics.
I recently asked first Elliot Paul and then Christine Battersby
a couple of questions about the topic. Their answers follow:
12 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Elliot Samuel Paul is Assistant Professor of
Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario. He
is co-editor of The Philosophy of Creativity
(Oxford Univ Press, 2014) and co-author of
the extensive entry on Creativity for the Stan-
ford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
PN: So, what is creativity?
EP: The standard definition of creativity focuses on its prod-
ucts – an idea, performance, or artefact – and says a product
counts as creative if it is new and valuable. Novelty is not enough,
because something could be new but worthless, in which case
it doesn’t deserve to be praised as creative.
Going beyond the standard definition, however, the essence
of creativity isn’t just about valuable new products; it’s also about
the kind of process that generates them. For one thing, the cre-
ative process needs to be performed by an agent, by a being who
is responsible for what they are doing. A water droplet freezing
around a particle produces a unique snowflake, something new
and aesthetically valuable. But the water droplet isn’t creative.
That’s because it isn’t an agent. Real creativity is an expression
of agency.
Nowadays AI systems are generating impressive new art-
works but we hesitate to call them creative. That’s because it
isn’t clear that these systems are creative.
PN: Where does inspiration come from?
EP: One of the fascinating things about creative insight is the way
it takes the creator by surprise. Creators from all domains, from
the arts to the sciences, commonly report that they weren’t even
focused on the relevant problem (they were taking a walk, day-
dreaming, or working on something else) when all of a sudden –
Eureka! – the solution strikes them. Where did it come from?
According to an old myth going back to the Ancient Greeks,
such epiphanies occur when a person is inspired – literally filled
with the spirit of a god or muse. The divine being is the real
creator; she uses the person as a vessel to communicate her ideas.
This story is alluring because it coheres with the phenomenol-
ogy of insight, the way an insight feels like it didn’t come from
you and it is mysterious to you how it arose.
But instead of invoking divine inspiration, researchers today
explain the surprising character of creative insight by appealing
to the operation of the unconscious mind.
You can’t create anything significant without conscious prepa-
ration. In the long term, you have to exert a lot of conscious effort
to learn the skills, concepts, and other elements of your domain.
In the shorter term, you may deliberately focus on a particular
problem or task in that domain, and any ideas that occur to you
would emerge, not ex nihilo, but through a process of recombin-
ing and altering elements that you’ve acquired through experi-

ence. When you turn your attention away to something else, your
unconscious mind may continue manipulating stored ideas, such
that if it later generates a solution which surfaces to your aware-
ness, you won’t have seen it coming and it may seem as if it came
from something or someone else.
The challenge for researchers is to figure out what cognitive
mechanisms come into play at each stage of the creative pro-
cess and what factors help or hinder their operation. These are
largely empirical issues, so my collaborators and I inform our
philosophical study of creativity with findings from psychol-
ogy, neuroscience, and other cognitive sciences.
Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in Phi-
losophy, and an Associate Fellow of the Centre
for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the
Arts at the University of Warwick. Her
Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist
Aesthetics was first published in 1989 and
republished in 2022 in the Bloomsbury Philos-
ophy Library: Contemporary Aesthetics Collection. Her article on
‘Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Ethics: Mapping Influences and Con-
gruities with Feminist Philosophers’ is included in The Palgrave
Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy, eds
Susanne Lettow and Tuija Pulkkinen, 2022.
PN: What is the connection between creativity and genius?
CB: Classical and neoclassical connoisseurs of art did not place
great emphasis on originality. For them, the function of the best
artists or writers was to mirror the underlying truths or univer-
sal Ideas that lie concealed behind appearances. Talent, judg-
ment and performative skills mattered more than self-expres-
sion. It was during the eighteenth century that ‘aesthetics’
emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy, and this was also
the time when creativity, originality and genius emerged as key
concepts. The so-called ‘genius’ was ascribed a power of cre-
ation analogous to that of a monotheistic, Judaeo-Christian,
FROM A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT (1883)
Creativity
God, capable of bringing a brand-new world, and even His own
self, into existence through the power of utterance. It was
claimed that the uniqueness of the genius’s “I am” is reflected
in every facet of his artwork – and indeed throughout his whole
oeuvre. According to the Romantics, a great work of art ‘grew’
or ‘burst forth’: it was not a product of calm forethought, mere
talent or rational design, but of an overflow of burgeoning psy-
chic energies that operated below the level of conscious thought.
This Romantic model of creativity continued to have resonance
into the twentieth century and beyond.
The creative energies of the ‘genius’ were ascribed to subli-
mated male sexual energies, and linked to a highly individu-
alised male self. Women were commonly said to lack the indi-
viduality necessary for true creativity, and also refused the abil-
ity to transcend or to sublimate their bodily instincts and repro-
ductive capacities in the same ways as the exceptional male
‘geniuses’. Creative women credited with similar psychic powers
were said to be not fully female. By the end of the nineteenth
century, it had become a cliché to assert with Cesare Lombroso
in The Man of Genius (1891): “there are no women of genius;
the women of genius are men.”
PN: How does feminist aesthetics offer a new perspective on
creativity?
CB: Looking at the ways in which Western and Northern cul-
tures have over-valued an individualised mode of psychic cre-
ativity, and under-valued the procreativity of female bodies, can
provide us with resources for imagining creativity differently.
Women in our culture are, on the one hand, taught to think of
themselves as not different from men. But the female subject-
position is also, historically, more irredeemably bodily, and less
psychically isolated than that of a typical male – bound, through
relationships of love, care, childbearing and childrearing, within
interpersonal relationships, to materiality and also to other
embodied selves. Focusing on natality, as well as on social and
material entanglements, can help us re-imagine creativity in a
much more cooperative and dynamically interactive way. PN
Creativity in
ancient Egypt:
a potter’s
workshop
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 13
 Creativity
Creating Cities
Harry Drummond builds a case.
hat is the meaning of life? Does God exist? How
W ought I treat another person? What are the con-
ditions of knowledge acquisition? Engaging, fun-
damental, and worthy – these sorts of questions
are the typical buildings blocks of conversation when a philoso-
pher is asked ‘What do you do?’. What is the nature of build-
ing? How can a building influence my life? In what style should
we build? These are not the sort of questions it is worth plac-
ing money on hearing in the same situation.
Yet the philosophy of architecture has attracted some high-
profile philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, delivered
a lecture entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, which pro-
posed the ability of buildings to disclose new worlds to a person
(or to Dasein, to use his term). Likewise, the conservative philoso-
pher Roger Scruton, who was appointed Chair of the UK’s
‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ commission striving against
architectural ugliness and failure, devoted an entire tome to the
Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). Other prolific architecturally-
inclined philosophers include Professor Andy Hamilton at
Durham University, Gordon Graham of Princeton, and the late
Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. Given all this
intellectual fire-power, why then is it that the philosophy of
architecture does not appear alongside epistemology, meta-
physics, and ethics in the centre of our philosophical discourse?
One reason might be that it is a derivative topic within aes-
thetics. This makes a difference for two reasons. Firstly, being
a topic-within-a-topic in philosophy makes it extra difficult to
make headlines. Secondly, we aestheticians remain, rather
unfortunately, near the bottom end of the philosophical hier-
archy. In addition, architecture seemingly does not warrant the
philosophical attention we give to other areas. It’s a case of
asymmetry. As I noted, the apparent worthiness and fundamen-
tality of the questions involved in other fields of philosophical
debate far surpass that of the questions of building. Much more
attractive, both for the general public and, significantly, for
research councils (which decide whose research to fund), are
answers to whether we can obtain truth, or whether time really
exists – as opposed to questions of, say, how a building con-
tributes to my sense of community.
So, why should we care about the philosophy of architecture?
The most significant reasons arise from an identification of
one of the characteristics of architecture that Scruton gives in
his aforementioned book. Architecture is the most public of the
arts. Buildings are entities we come across everyday. This is
especially important when architecture is also fundamentally
and irrevocably publicly heteronomous, meaning, it must answer
to the taste of the ordinary person in the street. Furthermore,
unlike music, painting, sculpture, and film, architecture cannot
be considered socially autonomous, that is to say, distanced from
its social function. Whilst these other arts have developed from
14 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
and transcended their social roots, as say, accompaniments to
religious ceremonies, displays of wealth on the staircase of one’s
mansion, or popular diversions, architecture is necessarily social.
This is in two senses. There is, of course, the sense that archi-
tecture needs to be nice to look at (this references the public
heteronomy I mentioned). Secondly, there is the fact that build-
ings must facilitate some goings-on: you need to be able to do
stuff in them. Architecture, furthermore, is entirely intersubjec-
tive in its nature. Any building entails our relationship with
others, insofar as it was designed by someone else, built by some-
one else, is occupied by someone else, or is destroyed by someone
else. It is increasingly important to us that we have buildings
that satisfy both our needs and our perceptual wants.
There are numerous narratives within architecture that need
to be explored philosophically. We come across questions of
purpose: why did the architect build it in this way and not that?
Or questions of ethics: how should I act given what occurred in
this building before its use by me? Can you morally turn an abat-
toir into a vegan restaurant (or vice versa), for example? Ques-
tions in the intersubjective realm include: given how this build-
ing came about, the preceding narratives, its location and facili-
tation of function both inside and out, how does this building
contribute to my sense of being-with-others?
Moreover, the philosophy of architecture enables us to gain
insights into other fields of inquiry, and it is notable in discus-
sions within aesthetics in its use as an illustration. Prof Andrea
Sauchelli presents an exceptionally interesting conundrum for
those involved in the debate surrounding the notion of func-
tional beauty, for example. Reacting against Kant’s notion of
‘dependent beauty’ – wherein one takes into account the pur-
pose and/or concept that the artefact falls under in one’s con-
sideration of its aesthetic value – functional beauty considers
whether we should pay attention to something’s function in eval-
uations of the aesthetic. Sauchelli applies this to architecture.
Specifically, in ‘Functional Beauty, Architecture, And Morality:
A Beautiful Konzentrationslager?’ (The Philosophical Quarterly,
2012), he discusses the questions of whether a concentration
camp can be architecturally beautiful. As evil as their function
was, some concentration camps probably fulfilled this evil func-
tion better. So they propose a dilemma, as well as an extreme
illustration, as to how we should weigh the concept of function
in our aesthetic judgments.
Sauchelli’s question also shows the importance of the moral
debate in aesthetics: that is, how far should one take moral con-
siderations into account in aesthetic evaluations, if at all? To
me it’s clear that the function that was facilitated by the con-
centration camps should strongly detract from our aesthetic
praise of them as architectural manifestations. Does this lead to
an impasse for the strict formalists or autonomists, and anti-
moralists in general, about art?
The Shard,
London Bridge
Creativity
Can you see Significant, too, are the implications all this has on the repur-
the point? posing or destruction of buildings. When I wrote the first draft
of this article, I was sat at my desk in a study room of an accom-
modation block repurposed from an old psychiatric hospital.
What ways should I act in this building to pay respect to those
who may have suffered here? Is it even right to repurpose the
building to the function it facilitates now?
This again plucks upon the narrative that continuously
unfolds within architecture. When we build, we must pay
respect to those who occupied that site before us. The Mayor

SHARD_FROM_THE_SKY_GARDEN_2015 © COLIN / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / CC BY-SA 4.0

of Durham, for example, refused the covering up of Victorian
beams on the outside of some buildings in the town centre
simply due to the fact that these old beams stand as a reflection
of the city’s history.
The main thing to take from this article, then, is that as well
as its utility in other fields of inquiry, the philosophy of archi-
tecture has direct impact on our day-to-day living. Insofar as
architecture is a utilised public art, narrowing down what exactly
it is we should be praising and promoting aesthetically about
architecture, and what we should be criticising, is crucial for our
existence. This is especially relevant when it comes to cases like
Scruton’s appointment as the Chair of the Building Better, Build-
ing Beautiful commission. Scruton endorsed a strict anti-mod-
ernism about architecture, and his wrath towards modernism
also encompassed architectural movements such as Neo-futur-
ism and Postmodernism – the skylines of which he dismissed as
‘landscapes of litter’. If a philosopher is to have a say on what
buildings are next brought into public use, a clear assessment of
their architectural aesthetics is crucial.
As well as raising questions in both moral philosophy and
the philosophy of architecture’s parent field, aesthetics, there
are deeper considerations to be taken into account when dis-
cussing architecture. Most fundamentally, given that it is in
architectural products that we pursue most of our projects –
work, relaxation, study, entertainment – architecture is one of
the most important phenomena for disclosing the nature of the
human subject. Architecture’s intersubjective character dives
into the nature of our existence.
It is my hope that the philosophy of architecture will
become a more prominent field of thought. To start, this
should be in the aesthetic realm. Architecture doesn’t possess
the autonomy often bestowed upon, and heralded within, other
artforms. Nonetheless, it can be beautiful. In this sense, it is
the only art that overcomes heteronomous (that is constrain-
ing) determinations to obtain the same aesthetic and artistic
value of other arts. Surely such a unique autonomy – auton-
omy from the other arts – is worth exploring. Additionally,
given its ability to disclose our natures (as already identified
by Heidegger and Norberg-Schulz), I hope that one day the
philosophy of architecture can become a seriously interdisci-
plinary field of intellectual inquiry.
That being said, if you ever meet me and ask what I do, I
do not expect you to follow up my answer with, “Ah! A phi-
losophy student! So tell me how the Shard influences our
existence…?”
© HARRY DRUMMOND 2022
Harry Drummond is a PhD researcher at the University of Liver-
pool and co-editor of the journal Debates in Aesthetics.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 15

 Creativity
In Praise of Aphorisms
Grahame Lockey writes pithy observations to make you think
about pithy observations to make you think.
once sat down to write a poem. Four words into it, I realised
I it was complete. It didn’t want a title, it wanted to be left
alone:
Absence begins at home.
I didn’t know what it was that I had written, but it wasn’t a
poem. If I had thought it through to a poem, it would have
unwritten itself in the reader’s mind, leaving nothing. I now
think it was probably an aphorism.
Ask the difference between an adage, a proverb, a maxim, an
epigram, and an aphorism, and even a veteran English teacher
might scratch their head and furrow their brow. It’s easier to
think of what they have in common. The internet is just as con-
fused, giving off the impression that they’re fancy words for
quotably quotie things that people make memes with. Well,
they do all belong to the extended family of pithy statements,
which also include axioms, dicta, mottoes, pensées, precepts,
quips and the like. But in order to single out the aphorism, we
need to usefully tell it apart from its siblings.
Picture five children in a photograph. All short. All stylish.
All memorable. Epigram is fair of face, but with a twinkle in its
eye. You see that at once. The qualities distinguishing the others
are not so readily apparent. Adage and Proverb are twins – that
much is clear. Easy to mix them up. Adage is the sensible child;
Proverb the practical one. Maxim likes having rules to follow.
The fifth child, blurred with movement, is up to its hips in a
bag of sorts, as if about to spring out of the picture into a sack
race. This is Aphorism, the thinker of the family.
As they’re all brother or sister to each other, there is a natu-
ral family resemblance. If we turn the children into five Olympic
rings, we have a good starting point for tracing areas of overlap.
The adage and the proverb share the feature of having stood
the test of time. An adage is a generally accepted statement, a
capsule of common sense, for example, ‘‘Better late than never’’.
A proverb is the concentrated wisdom of bygone people whis-
pering advice over waves of vanished generations: ‘‘A stitch in
time’’, they say, ‘‘saves nine’’. They say a lot, the ghosts of all
16 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
who have lived; and if we listen to them, our lives go better.
That it is intended with a practical application in mind is what
a proverb has in common with a maxim. A maxim is a rule to
live by. The Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others what you what have
them do unto you’, is a little chunk of conscience that if repeated
keeps you acting to principle. Meanwhile, ‘Nothing ventured,
nothing gained’ is a maxim to spur those who pride adventure
over consistency.
That maxims are memorable is where they overlap with epi-
grams – witty original remarks that makes us want to remem-
ber them. Oscar Wilde, a master of epigrams, could “resist every-
thing”, we recall, ‘‘except temptation.’’
It is the stylishness of the epigram that marks its border with
the aphorism. I called Epigram ‘fair of face’, and so it is. It’s so
dazzlingly good-looking that our response to a choice epigram
is to marvel at the brilliance of its composition even more than
the wisdom of its words. Henry Ford, for example, came up with
this beauty:
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
Epigram can have a wicked sense of humour too:
“My stomach is flat. The L there is silent.”
Epigrams like these are perhaps better termed ‘laughorisms’,
as Ambrose Bierce called the diabolical definitions in his Devil’s
Dictionary (1911). But whether clever or funny, we understand
an epigram quickly: we do not need to puzzle it out. That’s half
its appeal. When it clicks, we admire it for its ingenuity, and may
commit it to memory so we can offer it to others like a canapé.
The aphorism is not quite as popular at parties. Aphorism is
the quiet one in the corner. If it speaks, it’s with its mouth full.
The Aphorism Comes Into Its Own
La Rochefoucauld, maestro of the seventeenth-century Parisian
salon, could with a perfected bon mot and a shake of his over-
embroidered sleeve make ladies titter behind their fans and men
involuntarily sting their own thighs with a pantomime slap. Just
the sight of him with something to say must have brought a
giggle up the throat, although with a hand over the heart in case
he said something that tarred them with the same brush they
liked him tarring others with. Like this:
As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words,
so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.
But in among the fun he has pulling verbal jewellery from
the human condition, are aphorisms that may have been greeted
 Creativity
chipped out of any context. I’ve just plucked a random book off
my shelf, and while flicking through it, I glimpsed this singing
bowl of a sentence: “Supreme simplicity is untranslatable.” The
La Rochefoucauld
getting ready
paragraph it introduces falls away. Set alone, this is as bottom-
to strike less as a koan. And sometimes you can’t help brushing off a few
unnecessary words. “Philosophy begins in wonder” didn’t stand
alone in Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, but it deserved to: it needs
space before it, space after it, and a starry sky above it. Anything
more distracts and detracts from it like a piece of fluff on a face.
Elaboration is the death of the aphorism, as elaboration seeks
to do our thinking for us.
One philosopher who liked to think like a farmer – scatter-
ing seeds of ideas into the mulch of his readers’ minds – was
Friedrich Nietzsche. Like any aphorist, some of his seeds fell
onto stony ground, but he also has invigorating moments when
the earth opens up to him like a womb, and to my mind some
of Nietzsche’s aphorisms deserve to feature among the most
fecund. For example:

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

A fine aphorism like this swells itself with the best features
of its siblings. Like the epigram it is well-put, though not so
beautifully that we mistake the wrapping for the present. The
with a furrowed brow or a stroked chin. Take this: gift here is a piece of advice, which it holds behind its back in a
way a proverb wouldn’t; but if we follow this advice, things will
“Ideas often flash across our mind more complete than we could go better for us. In fact, whenever we sense indefatigable false-
make them after much labour.” hoods creeping up on us, we can call these thirteen words to
mind like a maxim to remind ourselves an early night is proba-
This is no idle off-the-laced-cuff observation. It’s like a lego bly the best course. A good aphorism is like a pool of still water:
brick that wants to play – a thought that wants you to think with when we look into it, we should see ourselves not quite as we
it. That is what makes it an aphorism. are. And for as long as generations continue, it won’t dry up.
Here’s another from La Rochefoucauld, which I’ve tweaked But how does it remain an aphorism if it borrows so heavily
a little because he would have chewed the lace off his collar at from its siblings? Because it’s still a thought that wants us to
the literal English translation: think with it. We hear Nietzsche’s clang from the gong of truth,
for example, and then: “What ideas have I defeated, and which
“Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present ones keep getting up again? Why? Is this telling me something
evils defeat it.” about my intellectual fighting style or the unslayability of every-
thing that pesters me?” Already I’m thinking originally about
It’s a salon silencer. Fans go ungiggled behind, thighs something that could make a difference to my life.
unslapped; just grave frowns all round, pondering what that idea
says about us, and whether it’s a presentiment of doom.
The aphorist Joseph Joubert describes (in a pithy statement,
naturally) his obsession with “reducing a book to a page, and
that page to a sentence.” This provides a nice way of seeing an
aphorism: as the opening, or closing, line of a book that the
author has kept blank for us, inviting us to finish it ourselves.
Its concentration makes the aphorism a taut springboard to
original thinking. It’s not the painstaking research endeavour
that would constitute extended scholarly communion with Kant
or Hegel, but freestyle scuba-thinking. We think more with
less, and with a short aphorism to spring off, we have an empty
pool of ideas to dive into. We can swim to whatever depth, and
when we surface, it’s in a place we have arrived at by ourselves.

Aphorism Amongst The Sentences

Relatively few thinkers write aphoristically, but aphorisms can
glow and throb within dense seams of unlikely text, and can be

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 17

 Creativity
Friedrich Nietzsche,
king of the
philosophical
aphorism
PAINTING © CLINTON INMAN 2022 FACEBOOK AT CLINTON.INMAN
Bringing It All Back Home
At the mention of me, I must hold up a mirror. It was Humpty
Dumpty who said to Alice: “When I use a word it means just what
I choose it to mean.” The aphorisms I attributed to La Rochefou-
cauld, he called ‘reflections’ and ‘maxims’. What business is it of
mine to call them something else? And what if he does mind?
What if he’s turning in his grave at the thought of his beloved
maxims being sorted into aphorisms and laughorisms, based on
unweighable degrees of balance between substance and style?
A Gallic shrug. I did first present Aphorism to you as bagged
up – in the sack so that parts of it are hidden, as they should be;
with a leap to suggest it might be a concept in motion; and a
blur because we might not agree.
At this point, an idea flashes across my mind more complete
than I could make it after much labour. In praising an aphorism
for being cognitively evocative, am I not making its identity, and
its worth, depend uneasily upon its effect? The adage, proverb
and maxim do not need to ponder their mortality. The epigram
is safe from existential crises (misattribution aside). But if an apho-
rism is an aphorism by virtue of making us think, what is it when
it ceases to do so? Does an aphorism have the fragility of a fire-
fly – a wandering bead of light that captures our attention in the
darkness of our minds, then goes out? What if it doesn’t light up
for us at all, and we pass over it entirely? Is it still an aphorism?
“Caesar said to an octopus: the world is not your oyster. The octo-
18 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
pus said to Caesar: the oyster is not your world.”
What kind of statement is this? It’s not an adage because I made
it up. It’s not a proverb because there is no shell of wisdom around
a pearl of advice. It’s not a rule to act on, so maxim is out. It lacks
the gettable stickiness of an epigram. So, is it an aphorism?
I should like to say no. It provokes only what thought is
needed to decide it isn’t worth thinking about. If it were a trans-
lation from the Latin of something Caesar said to an octopus,
it would have meant little to Caesar and less to an octopus. So
let’s just stop there. But if you ask a class of seven-year-olds why
Julius Caesar might have said such a thing, and what on earth
the octopus might have meant in reply, one bright spark will
see in it something about our relationship with nature. Then
suddenly we all do, and everyone wants to say something.
It’s not that Caesar and the octopus make us think, nor that
they have to. It is that they invite us to. And that invitation
remains open like a key in a lock.
Perhaps I have grown tired of La Rochefoucauld’s remark
about complete ideas streaking across his mind without any
words on – but if someone says it has made them question
whether it’s really true that “the limits of my language mean
the limits of my world” (an aphorism of Wittgenstein’s), then
I’ll go back to it, turn the key, and an old door opens onto some-
where new. La Rochefoucauld has been inviting us through that
door since 1665. We and our world have changed. It hasn’t. It
remains insufficiently itself, hoping that by giving us less we
can take more from it, no matter where we are in life or time.
Last Words
I started with five quotably quotie-type things that were hard
to tell apart because they were all short, well-put, and memo-
rable. However, each has a personal characteristic that identi-
fies it – not always uniquely, but better than Google. What dis-
tinguishes these confusable members of the pithy statement clan
is ultimately the manner in which they are useful. The others
are designed for easy understanding and remembering, other-
wise they would not circulate in the currency of everyday life:
adages to endorse common sense; proverbs to dispense advice;
maxims to guide action; and epigrams for sharing like bonbons.
The aphorism is the odd one out. It’s worth as much as you can
make of it. And that could be anything.
I have a personal reason for wanting to praise the aphorism
for not doing all its thinking for us. Philosophy has given me
the desire to think up good ideas; but the moment I come up
with one, I start to question it, pedantically refine how it’s
worded, and almost as soon as I’m happy with it, to start to
doubt it, to become sceptical of it, to despair of it, and ulti-
mately, to delete it. The sum of my philosophical works is a
blinking cursor on a blank screen.
Perhaps, then, this is what first drew me to the aphorism.
When an idea flashes across the mind more complete than we
could make it, we do not labour, and we should not try to. In
the fewest but best possible words, we bring to life the brief
racing beauty of the idea and leave it to the reader to thought-
fully complete it in ways that matter to them.
© GRAHAME LOCKEY 2022
Grahame Lockey is a freelance educational consultant and writer.
 Creativity
What Am I Doing?
James Gallant, writer, reflects on the psychology of creativity.
have been writing fiction, prose-poetry, and essays for a reward of creative life (at least mine) which renders the improb-

I long time now, whenever the business of staying alive has

allowed. I have published quite a lot, including four books
(well, three now, one having been delisted by its publisher
for lack of sales). I do not self-publish.
My wife, an attentive reader of what I write, is also an excel-
lent judge of it, for better or worse. A thumbs up from her means
something, although I can’t think of our relationship in this with-
out recalling the aged lighthouse keeper and his wife in Ionesco’s
1952 play The Chairs, who pass the time making up various sce-
narios, including arranging chairs to seat the distinguished guests
coming to hear the old man present his ‘message to the world’.
If I announce on Facebook that something of mine has been
published, non-literary relatives and acquaintances, for whom
publication seems to be something like winning the lottery, will
offer their mandatory congratulations. That is not, of course, the
same as their reading what I have written. However, ‘‘No prophet
is taken seriously in his home town’’, as one translation of Jesus’s
remark would have it. It’s even less likely that a writer of serious
fiction would be taken as serious by their acquaintances. Non-
readers have always outnumbered readers, of course. But my
impression at the moment is that writers outnumber readers.
I have not profited from my literary efforts materially in any
significant way. Serious dedication to authorship, or to the arts
generally, is unlikely to have practical consequences of a happy
kind, as everyone working in this sector knows. Ego-boosting
rewards of a less material kind have actually been rather paltry,
too. When an editor publishes something you’ve written, gives
you a thumb’s up – ‘one of those’, as comedian Rodney Danger-
field (who never got any) used to say – it is nice; and seeing what
one has written all gussied up in print, or online, evokes a joyous
little frisson – which vanishes like fog on a warm morning.
I was walking in my Atlanta neighborhood recently when a
man I’d never met, sitting on his front porch, called out, “Are
able rewards of other kinds incidental and unnecessary.
Harmony can be defined as ‘disparate elements organized con-
vincingly and pleasingly’. The concept of harmony abounds in
discussions of the fine arts generally. St Augustine wrote in De
vera religione (391 AD), “In all the arts, that which pleases is har-
mony, which... invests the whole [of a work] with unity and beauty,
either through the resemblance of symmetrical parts, or through
the graded arrangement of unequal parts.” Mozart wrote in a
letter to a friend, of musical ideas coming to him “in a stream...
[I] keep them in my head, and people say I often hum them over
to myself. Well, if I can hold onto them, they begin to join on to
one another, as if they were bits a pastry cook should join together
in the pantry. And now my soul gets heated, and if nothing dis-
turbs me, the piece grows larger and brighter until, however long
it is, it is all finished at once in my mind, so that I can now see it
at a glance as if it were a pretty picture or a pleasing person. Then
I don’t hear the notes one after the other, as they are hereafter to
be played, but it as if in my fancy they were all at once.”
There is a resemblance between what Mozart describes and
my own process in writing, although he makes it sound awfully
easy. For me, producing an harmonic work is grittier and more
willful than that.
The nucleus of a creative act for me will be something in my
experience or reading that urges exploration for one reason or
another. This core functions as a psychic magnet attracting to
itself loosely associated ideas, images, personal memories, and
scraps of learning. The harmonization of these odds and ends
will require willful application on various levels, ranging from
broad general concerns (genre, themes, dramatic issues, point of
view), down to the shape and flow of sentences, individually and

© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2022 TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM

you James Gallant?” “Yes,” I replied. He said he’d had read one
of my books and thought it brilliant. That was nice, and I
thanked him. But I never expect compliments, and, not depen-
dent on them, they bounce right off me.
This is all unusual. It’s not like human beings to be so indif-
ferent to rewards that bolster them, materially or otherwise. So
what am I up to? Jorge Luis Borges, in his Book of Imaginary Beings
(1957) incorporated the image propounded in 1791 by Wang
Tai-Hai, of a monkey on the back of a working writer that is con-
tent only once it has drunk a sufficient quantity of ink. I know
the feeling; but what is it about ink-drinking that’s so satisfying?

The Divine Harmony of Creativity

The Italian Renaissance poet Girolamo Fracastoro character-
ized the reward at the end of the process of writing as a feeling
of “a certain wonderful and almost divine harmony.” This har-
monious feeling – make of it what one will – is, I think, the

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 19

 Creativity
Harmony of the World, Ebenezer Sibly, 1806
in association. This process is not entirely pleasant. And the idea
or intuition that powered the effort initially may get lost in the
mess temporarily, or for good. I can usually anticipate false starts,
dead ends, suspicions of incompetence – not to mention inter-
ruptions by practical necessity. The defining character trait of
the true writer, one of my teachers once said, is stubbornness.
“If I can think it, I can write it”, Paul Goodman once said –
a remark acknowledging that a bright idea for a writer is just a
starting point, a challenge. Just so, Lodovico Castelvetro (1505-
1571) wrote in his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, “The appre-
ciation of art is the appreciation of difficulties overcome.” If the
challenge has been met, the harmonious result is regarded jus-
tifiably as a work.
Towards A Harmonious Cosmos
Is the harmony that satisfies the writer, artist, or composer, get-
ting the ink monkey off his back irrespective of external rewards,
merely a feeling? Or is there more to it than that?
The concept of harmony – the fine orchestration of diverse
elements that turns up so often in discussions of aesthetics – was
conceived in early metaphysical thought as an aspect of the
cosmos. In ‘Hellenic Conceptions of Harmony’ (Journal of the
American Musicological Society, Vol. 16, No 1, 1963) Edward Lipp-
man surveys variations on the idea in ancient Greek thought. In
Hippocratic medicine, health was the harmonic balance of the
four ‘humours’ of the human body, black bile, yellow bile, blood,
and phlegm. The virtue of temperance in Plato’s Republic is an
harmonious order of desires and feelings; and the good society
harmonizes conflicting human interests. In Plato’s Timaeus, there
20 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
was only chaos in the beginning, before the Demiurge, the
builder of the world, introduced measure and proportion: the
orderly motions of the heavenly bodies, the cycle of the seasons,
the relations of the sexes, the forms in the natural world...
Analogies between harmony in nature and in works of art
are at least one reason why the assigning of metaphysical or
even religious significance to the arts has been irrepressible.
While sharing his contemporaries’ belief that “Nature must
always be explained mathematically and mechanically”, the
philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) urged recognition
that the laws of mechanics were but one expression of the order-
liness of the Divine Mind, which could also be apprehended in
mental processes of a less abstract, more sensuous leaning. Thus
he attributed the extraordinary power of music and poetry to
their ‘foretaste and small evidence’ of ‘the wonderful harmony
of Nature’. Influenced by Leibniz, Christian Wolff (1679-1754)
argued that what explained the pleasure people find in a skillful
work of art, a handsome person, or a comely cityscape, was an
harmonious relation of parts to whole. It was the Mind of the
Creator made manifest to our senses.
Are pre-rational animals capable of such metaphysical intu-
itions? The myth of Orpheus, whose singing and lyre-playing
charmed audiences of animals, birds, and reptiles, suggests so.
Cat or dog owners who play music in their homes are likely to
have had the experience of their household beasts paying rapt
attention to it. YouTube videos variously depict a herd of cows
drawn across a field by a small band performing ‘When the Saints
Come Marching In’; a dog mesmerized by a street violinist’s ren-
dition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’; a dolphin hypnotized
by a bagpiper; or elephants swaying in dancelike motions and
flapping their ears rhythmically under the spell of a flautist.
Discord Over Harmony
Attributions of metaphysical significance to the arts such as those
made by Leibniz and Wolff cut little ice with Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804), who denied human access to ultimate reality by
Snowflake
by Paul Gregory
any means whatsoever. Kant made major contributions to our
understanding of beauty and the sublime in his Critique of Judge-
ment (1790). Romantic philosophers and artists were generally
under the sway of Kant’s thinking, but were troubled nonethe-
less by Kant’s dualism of the thing for us – the world humans per-
ceive and conceive in accordance with their mental categories
and interests – as opposed to the thing in itself – ultimate reality
independent of the subject, and to Kant, unknowable. For the
Romantics, the arts, along with ecstatic communion with Nature, by Melissa Felder
and Romantic love, were the means of transcending this discon-
nect. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), while
loyal to Kant, was having it both ways when he wrote, “About
the Absolute in the theoretical sense I dare not talk, yet I main-
tain that he who has recognized it when he experiences it, and
keeps his eye constantly fixed on it, will derive a great benefit
from it” (The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 1892). However, a friend
of Goethe’s, Karl Philipp Moritz (1757-1793), in On the Cre-
ative Imitation of the Beautiful, reverted to the concept of human-
ity as microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmic order, while sub-
stituting the harmonious arts for metaphysical reflection or the
sciences as the means of communing with ultimate reality.
The thrust of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thinking about the
ideal poet was of the same order. Nineteenth century psychol-
ogy commonly represented the human imagination as the fac-
ulty that discovers order in experience spontaneously, through
resemblance, contrast, cause-and-effect, contiguity, or remote-
ness. In Chapter Thirteen of his Biographia Literaria (1817),
Coleridge terms this faculty the Primary Imagination, distin-
guishing its simple, natural operations from those of the Secondary
Imagination – the ideal poet’s imagination. The Secondary Imag-
ination presupposes the Primary Imagination, but demonstrates
‘more than usual order’ combined with a ‘more than usual state
of emotion’, harmonizing ‘the plenitude of the senses with the
comprehensibility of the understanding’. In Chapter Fourteen,
an ideal poetry – the work of the Secondary Imagination – is
described as embodying a “balance or reconciliation of opposite
or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the gen-
eral with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual
with the representative… all of this formed into one graceful and
intelligent whole.” A harmony, in other words. As for the ulti-
mate significance of this graceful and intelligent whole, a passage
in Chapter Thirteen states that the formative impulse of the poetic
imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act
of creation in the infinite I AM” – in other words, an emulation
of God. For Coleridge, then, it is the ideal poet, not the meta-
physician, for whom ultimate knowledge and Being is realized.
And one might suppose that if the ideal poet can access the Abso-
lute, so can artists of other kinds who also experience the ‘cer-
tain wonderful almost divine harmony’.
Whatever metaphysical significance can be attributed to this
passion for harmony, that people like myself should embrace
this ideal and find it sufficient, irrespective of external reward,
and pursue it into obscurity and even poverty as if anticipating
an eternal reward, is certainly curious, if not positively mad.
© JAMES GALLANT 2022
James Gallant reflects on philosophic implications of the American
SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2022 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
government’s take on UFOs in a Fortnightly Review essay online:
fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/10/gallant-angels-singularity/

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 21


Ethics in Politics
Massimo Pigliucci trawls the history of politics to see how closely ethics fits it.
good number of politicians talk about character,
A virtue, morality, and doing the right thing. But if you
look at what they actually do rather than just listen to
what they say, their behavior is often anything but vir-
tuous. They lie, they cheat, and sometimes, they self-aggran-
dize, or start wars which bring misery to countless people.
Did you think I was talking about current politics in the US,
the UK, or perhaps Russia? No, actually I was thinking of Renais-
sance Europe. It was a time when Popes, arguably the highest
role models in Christendom (after Jesus himself, of course), some-
times donned armor and rode into battle – when they were not
scheming to augment their power, their purses, or both.
The Genesis of Realpolitik
As you can appreciate, the gap between words and actions hasn’t
narrowed that much in the last five centuries. But this stark dis-
crepancy in politics between theory and practice impressed a
brilliant Florentine diplomat named Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-
1527) so much that he wrote The Prince, in which he gives advice
to statesmen on the basis of a frank assessment of political real-
ities rather than on pious fantasies.
Machiavelli had many experiences which inspired his insights.
One such was meeting Cesare Borgia. For a time Machiavelli
considered him Italy’s best hope for unification against the
French and Spanish invaders. (It didn’t happen.) In 1503, Machi-
avelli met Borgia for a second time, in the course of a diplomatic
mission. During the encounter he learned a thing or two about
22 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Niccolo Machiavelli
and his legacy
Borgia’s modus operandi. At one point, Borgia ran into problems
with some noblemen of a nearby town run by the Orsini family,
who weren’t too happy about Borgia’s plans for territorial expan-
sion. The Orsinis were invited by Borgia to the city of Senigal-
lia, allegedly to conduct peace talks and reach a reciprocally suit-
able agreement. As soon as they set foot inside the walls they were
captured and executed. Diplomacy Italian style, circa 1500 CE.
Another illuminating episode took place in the Borgia-occu-
pied city of Cesena, a territory that needed to be 'pacified’. I’ll let
Machiavelli tell the story: Cesare Borgia “appointed Remirro de
Orco, a cruel, no-nonsense man, and gave him complete control.
In a short while de Orco pacified and united the area… As soon
as he found a pretext, he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse
put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden
block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left
people both gratified and shocked” (The Prince). So Borgia first
had one of his henchmen do his dirty work, knowing that this
would anger the people; but since a prince needs popular support,
he then found an excuse to execute the henchman, thus giving the
people what they wanted and deflecting their ire.
No wonder Bertrand Russell called The Prince “a handbook
for gangsters.” As Tim Parks aptly puts it in his Introduction to
the Penguin translation, “Machiavelli’s little book was a con-
stant threat. It reminded people that power is always up for grabs,
always a question of what can be taken by force or treachery,
and always, despite all protests to the contrary, the prime con-
cern of any ruler.”
 Machiavelli was the first modern writer to systematically think
in terms of what is called realpolitik, or, ‘political realism’. Since
then, political realism has seen a number of developments, and
has gathered an impressive array of supporters. Arguably the
MACHIAVELLI IMAGE © MILES WALKER 2022 PLEASE VISIT MILESWALKER.COM
At one point Glaucon tells Socrates that Athens will be able
to raise its revenues by waging war. To this Socrates responds:
"‘In order to advise her whom to fight, it is necessary to know the

most influential early philosopher in this vein was Thomas
Hobbes, whose Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a
Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) articulated the need
for a strong ruler in order to avoid the violent ‘state of nature’
to which, according to Hobbes, we would otherwise inevitably
revert. This state he famously characterized as ‘a war of all against
all’:
strength of the city [of Athens] and of the enemy, so that, if the city
be stronger, one may recommend her to go to war, but if weaker
than the enemy, may persuade her to beware.’
‘You are right.’
‘First, then, tell us the naval and military strength of our city, and
then that of her enemies.’
‘No, of course I can’t tell you out of my head.” (3.6.8.)

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit
thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no
navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea,
no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing
such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the
earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which
is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the
life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Next Socrates asks whether Glaucon has a good estimate of
how long the grain reserves will last, as those are crucial to feed
the city. Glaucon’s response is that that task is too overwhelm-
ing, and he didn’t feel like carrying it out. Socrates at this point
chides Glaucon, reminding him that if one wishes to take charge
of a household, one must bother with exactly the sort of details
that Glaucon has so far neglected when it comes to affairs of
state. Glaucon replies:

Well, who wouldn’t give up a few liberties here and there in
order to avoid that? Among the practitioners of Machiavellian-
ism, as one might fairly label the approach, is a who’s who of
early-modern and contemporary statesmen; from the French
Cardinal Richelieu (of Three Musketeers fame), to the Prussian
monarch Frederick the Great; from the Italian Camillo Benso
of Cavour, to another Prussian, Otto von Bismarck; all the way
down to Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, and Henry Kissinger.
"‘Well, I could do something for uncle’s household if only he would
listen to me.’
‘What? You can’t persuade your uncle, and yet you suppose you
will be able to persuade all the Athenians, including your uncle, to
listen to you? Pray take care, Glaucon, that your daring ambition
doesn’t lead to a fall! Don’t you see how risky it is to say or do what
you don’t understand?’” (3.6.15–16)

A Socratic Way
Yet there is another way of looking at the relationship between
ethics and politics, without having to give in to the hypocrisy
of Renaissance popes and modern politicians. It was put forth
by Socrates in the fifth century BCE, and hinges on the wannabe
statesman’s character.
Socrates was known as the annoying ‘gadfly’ of ancient
Athens, always intent to show people that they really didn’t
know what they were talking about when it came to crucial con-
cepts such justice (as shown in Plato’s Republic) or piety (as in
his Euthyphro). But another major aspect of Socrates’ activities
emerges from less appreciated sources. For instance,
Xenophon’s Memorabilia (c.370 BCE) gives two episodes in
which Socrates makes it his business to advise about a political
career – against or in favor of, depending on who he’s talking
to.
On one occasion, Socrates meets up with a very young Glau-
con, Plato’s elder brother. Glaucon is bent on a political career,
and he thinks he knows what that entails. Socrates appears duly
impressed, but as usual he begins questioning his interlocutor:

“Well, Glaucon, as you want to win honor, is it not obvious that

you must benefit your city?’
‘Most certainly.’
‘Pray don’t be reticent, then; but tell us how you propose to begin
your services to the state.’…
Glaucon remained dumb, apparently considering for the first time
how to begin.” (Memorabilia, 3.6.3–4.) Cesare Borgia seizing power

December 2022/January 2023 Now 23

 That apparently did the trick, and Glaucon postponed his
dream of becoming a statesman. In fact, he never became one.
Instead, he fought valiantly at the battle of Megara, at the height
of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, in 424 BCE, the year
after this conversation took place. He later became a compe-
tent musician, as Socrates attests in the Republic.
Contrast this episode with one that took place years later
involving Charmides, Glaucon’s son:
“Seeing that Glaucon… was a respectable man and far more capable
than the politicians of the day, [who] nevertheless shrank from speak-
ing in the assembly and taking a part in politics, [Socrates] said:
‘Tell me, Charmides, what would you think of a man who was capa-
ble of gaining a victory in the great games and consequently of win-
ning honor for himself and adding to his country’s fame in the Greek
world, and yet refused to compete?’
‘I should think him a poltroon and a coward, of course.’” (3.7.1)
Soon Charmides realizes to his chagrin that Socrates is talk-
ing about him in relation to politics, and is setting up the usual
Socratic trap: “Don’t refuse to face this duty then: strive more
earnestly to pay heed to yourself; and don’t neglect public affairs,
if you have the power to improve them” (3.7.9). In this partic-
ular case, however, things did not go well. Charmides did enter
into politics, but had the misfortune to serve Athens under the
Spartan-appointed Thirty Tyrants after Sparta’s defeat of
Athens in the war.
Charmides died in the battle of Munichia in 403 BCE. This
underscores a point appreciated many centuries later by Machi-
avelli: the statesman needs skill, but also luck. Cesare Borgia
was very skilled, at least by Machiavelli’s standards, but in the
end he ran out of luck. His strongest supporter, his father, Pope
Alexander VI, died before the two of them could make enough
progress in the pursuit of their projects.
Socrates, however, would have insisted on a third ingredient
besides skill and luck: virtue. This insistence becomes very
apparent in the course of the First Alcibiades (which is generally
ascribed to Plato, despite some doubts about its authorship).
Alcibiades was a friend and student of Socrates, and very much
wanted to be his lover – at least according to the speech he gives
in Plato’s Symposium. At the time of the dialogue in the First Alcib-
iades, he was twenty years old, handsome, rich, charismatic, and
full of self-confidence. Alcibiades wanted to make a difference in
© VAN SCOTT 2022 PLEASE VISIT GAGRECAP.COM/MOREINFO.HTML
24 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
the world, so he went to Socrates for advice on how best to follow
the path of virtue. But in the course of the conversation it becomes
increasingly clear that Alcibiades is more interested in glory and
self-aggrandizement. At one point Socrates diagnoses his prob-
lem in blunt terms: “Then alas, Alcibiades, what a condition you
suffer from! I hesitate to name it, but, since we two are alone, it
must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, best of men, of the
most extreme sort, as the argument accuses you and you accuse
yourself. So this is why you are leaping into the affairs of the city
before you have been educated.” (Alcibiades I.26).
Naturally, Alcibiades does not listen to his mentor and fol-
lows his instincts instead. This results in one of the most
astounding series of political disasters in all antiquity, includ-
ing a major role in the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian
War, and ending with Alcibiades’ death at the hand of Persian
agents acting on behalf of Sparta. I tell the whole sordid tale as
part of the bigger picture concerning ethics and politics in my
new book, How To Be Good: What Socrates Can Teach Us About
the Art of Living Well (Basic Books, 2022).
Cicero’s Third Way
While Machiavelli argued that skill and luck, not virtue, make
for a good leader, Socrates bet everything on virtue. The Roman
advocate, statesman, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero
would say they both only got part of the picture: a good leader
needs not only a good character, but also needs to be able to
pragmatically navigate complex situations through trade-offs
and compromises. That is why Cicero was critical of his friend
Cato the Younger, a stern and uncompromisingly virtuous Stoic
who eventually did more damage than good to the Roman
Republic: “As for our friend Cato, you do not love him more
than I do: but after all, with the very best intentions and the
most absolute honesty, he sometimes does harm to the Repub-
lic. He speaks and votes as though he were in the Republic of
Plato, not in the scum of Romulus” (Letters to Atticus, 2.1.8).
The fact is that we all live in ‘the scum of Romulus’ (Romulus
was the legendary founder of Rome). Good leaders realize that
their followers are flawed, and act accordingly – without going
to the extremes of a Cesare Borgia.
Cicero knew what he was talking about, since he struggled his
whole life to save the Roman Republic. He shifted his political
allegiances and his short-term objectives in order to always keep
his eyes on the ultimate prize. And he did this while trying to
maintain his integrity of character and his philosophical commit-
ments. In the end he failed to save the Republic, possibly because
the Republic was no longer a sustainable model and had to give
way to Empire as a matter of historical necessity; or perhaps
because too many others around him behaved in a Machiavellian
fashion, putting their own thirst for power and glory ahead of
the common good. They could get away with such behavior
because the Roman people had given up demanding that their
leaders at least try to behave as virtuously as they talked.
Let us not make the same mistake.
© MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2022
Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the
City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic
(Basic Books) and The Quest for Character (Basic Books). More by
him at massimopigliucci.org.
 © GUTO DIAS 2022. PLEASE VISIT FACEBOOK.COM/PG/GUTODIASSTUDIO OR INSTAGRAM.COM/GUTO_DIAS_CARTOONS

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 25

French Philosophy Now
Manon Royet tells us what’s happening in French philosophy,
and why you don’t know about it.
rom Descartes and Voltaire, to Sartre and Foucault,
F French thought has long occupied a privileged seat in
the world’s agora. René Descartes (1596-1650), for
instance, is often referred to as ‘the Father of Modern
Philosophy’ – which admittedly denotes a Eurocentric field of
view that looks at history with blinkers. But twentieth century
French thinkers such as Foucault, de Beauvoir, Barthes, and Der-
rida are also among the most influential voices of modern phi-
losophy. In the West they are unavoidable cultural references for
a vast array of academic disciplines, ranging from philosophy to
history and sociolinguistics. Foucault viewed his project as a ‘Crit-
ical History of Thought’, and Derrida’s most famous work, Of
Grammatology (1967) criticised some of the principles put for-
ward by the founder of linguistics, Ferdinand De Saussure.
A few years ago, while writing on sociology, I was surprised
to receive criticism for having omitted to include works by
Michel Foucault in my bibliography. I was puzzled. My research
did not engage with Foucault’s precepts: why, then, should he
Painting Reality by Dror Rosenski 2022
26 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
be referenced in it? It did not matter, the criticising academic
said: the rule of thumb is that whenever one deals with any of
the numerous themes that passed under Foucault’s scrutiny, he
should be cited. This would cover topics as different as power,
discourse, conformity, institutions… the list is long. But if this
speaks to the statutory position of twentieth century French
thought, it also highlights one thing: we don’t hear of new
French thinkers anymore. Think about it. Could you name a
French philosopher who is still writing?
The Growing Silence Of French Voices
A long time has passed since Simone de Beauvoir revolutionised
feminism with her discussion of human history through the lens
of gender in her groundbreaking 1949 book The Second Sex. It
is telling that among the new generation of philosophers, Judith
Butler, a contemporary American philosopher of gender, does
not have a French counterpart. Julia Kristeva is arguably the
only contemporary French philosopher whose writings on
women’s oppression enjoy a wide international reputation, and
she was born and raised in Bulgaria. She also wrote her most
acclaimed works in the seventies and eighties.
Comparison only makes the absence of resounding French
voices more imposing. It urges us to ask: where have all the great
French thinkers gone?
Perhaps the lights of French thought just don’t radiate very
far anymore. This observation is not new. Articles on this topic
have flourished over the past fifteen years. In December 2007,
Time magazine ran the headline: ‘The Death of French Cul-
ture’. Juxtaposed to this fatalistic title was this caption: ‘Quick,
name a living artist or writer from France who has global sig-
nificance. Right. But help is on the way.’ In the article, Donald
Morrison, a former Editor of Time Magazine's European and
Asian editions and lecturer at the prestigious Parisian institute
of higher education, Sciences Po, pronounced French cultural
life quasi-expired. Similarly, Sudhir Hazareesingh, a Professor
of Politics at Oxford, and author of the book How the French
Think (2015), has denounced what he views as the decadence of
French thought on the international scene in multiple opinion
pieces. One of them, entitled ‘French thought once dazzled the
world – what went wrong?’ is a carefully constructed criticism
of ‘the French style of thinking’, which have been extensively
debunked, outside and inside the country.
The Origins Of Modern French Thinking
What is ‘the French style of thinking’ anyway? Examining the
development of French philosophy in the eighteenth century
helps us grasp its typology, how it manifests today, and why it
has receded from the international shores of culture.
Although France produced key thinkers earlier, it was

through the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that
French philosophy started spreading en masse, influencing the
development of ideas across Europe and America and beyond.
During this time, the likes of Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu,
and D’Alembert were part of an intellectual movement that
sought to provide the foundation for a new reason-based polit-
ical system to replace the monarchy. They wanted this new
social and political world to be based on ideals of liberty and
equality for all individuals.
This movement was itself heir to the scientific revolution of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revolution had
showed that reasoned observation-based theories were more suc-
cessful in explaining natural phenomena than folklore or ecclesi-
astical storytelling. The Enlightenment envisioned a new society
guided by the principles of rationality, universality, and individu-
ality. Its metaphor of light as truth connoted the new emphasis
on bringing society out of the darkness of dogma, and into progress
grounded in methodical reasoning and universal human values.
The Enlightenment’s definition of critical reasoning and
progress was not limited to French philosophers alone. It encom-
passed intellectuals throughout Europe. After all, it wasn’t
Voltaire or Diderot, but the Königsberg-born philosopher
Immanuel Kant who articulated the most widely-accepted motto
of the movement: Sapere Aude, or ‘Dare to know through the
use of reason.’ John Locke was English, but he too was commit-
ted to using scientific methods to fight against the shadows of
arbitrariness, and reason to fight against political tyranny.
So, what’s so special about the French?
More than their general dedication to critical thinking, it is
their absolute emphasis on rationality that set the French
Paris At Night,
Benh Lieu Song 2010
Creative Commons
philosophers apart. British philosophers such as Locke and
Hume proposed that knowledge was acquired by practical expe-
rience mediated by the senses, a position known as empiricism.
By contrast their French peers deemed that truth was accessed
through deductive reasoning, and that the senses cannot be
trusted. Since they’re unreliable, the theory goes, one must
automatically and methodologically question the information
they pass onto us. The eighteenth century philosophes’ reliance
on this ‘methodological doubt’ and the use of rationality makes
sense in the light of Descartes’ legacy, since he had maintained
that the sole proof even for existence itself was to be found in
one’s thoughts, an idea famously summarised in his statement
‘I think therefore I am’.
The French philosophical tradition is deeply anchored in
Descartes’ radical skepticism. It is contrarian at its core. You
heard that right, there is philosophical backing to the cliché that
the French are always on strike.
Revolutionary impetus and Enlightenment thought were
deeply connected, with philosophers providing the arguments
for equality, anticlericalism, and generally creating the intellec-
tual context for the Revolution. In other words, French philos-
ophy has long also been deeply enmeshed with politics. French
thinkers were so involved in political life that France’s 1789 con-
stitutional document the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
the Citizen followed their guidance. For instance, the separation
of powers was inscribed in it following Montesquieu’s precepts.
This charter of human rights, written in the midst of the French
Revolution, marks a decisive turn in Western history. It inscribed
important concepts about civil society into modern political prac-
tice, and philosophers were an integral part of this.
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 27
 To sum up: after Descartes, French thinking developed two
distinctive features. The first has to do with its intellectual
predilections: it was especially preoccupied with rationality, uni-
versality, and it highly valued radical skepticism (as it still does).
The second is that it is a philosophy undeniably political. In the
French tradition, thinkers are lighthouses helping the popula-
tion navigate the perilous waters of social and political change.
French Philosophy Hasn’t Changed, That’s The Problem
So the French love abstract, universal ideals, and incredulity.
What does that have to do with its alleged, much-commented,
downgrade? The answer is ‘a lot’. French philosophy has not
changed that much at all; but the world has, and that’s the issue.
The Gallic tradition of thought starts from ideas rather than
experience, which has led it to tend to conceive of humanity
in universalistic terms. It holds that everyone can have access
to universal truths through abstract deduction. This implies
that everyone can reason themselves into agreeing with each
other on humanistic truths. This assumption amounts to saying
that conflict due to individuals holding different and incom-
patible conceptions of the world and values, is avoidable.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is just
one example of French unifying doctrine. France’s so-called
‘civilising mission’ is another. It refers to the vocation of the
French, self-proclaimed at the height of the era of colonialism,
to bring civilisation to the rest of the world – justified by the
French belief in rationality and its universal application. How-
ever, from this, the problem with the modern world becomes
evident: France’s philosophical allegiance to universalism effec-
tively denies pluralism of worldviews. It simultaneously imbues
the fruits of one’s reasoning with a humanitarian character, and
the status of undisputable, all-encompassing truth.
It comes as no surprise that the idea that one can reach uni-
versal principles by resorting to rationality has received exten-
sive criticism from a litany of disciplines. The Sixties’ Post-
structuralist philosophical and literary movement, for exam-
ple, argued strongly that power relations and subjectivity
underscored pretty much everything we previously thought of
as adamantly objective – including philosophy. And Postmod-
ern thinkers such as Michel Foucault contended that a pre-
tence to universality and neutrality in effect paves the way for
more intractable forms of oppression.
This movement was lucidly defined by Judith Butler in her
essay ‘Contingent Foundations’ (1994). Postmodern thought,
she says, is about calling to account how examples and
paradigms ‘‘serve to subordinate and erase that which they seek
to explain.’’ The argument is that the rationality and univer-
salism so loved by French philosophers have a paradoxical
capacity to to exclude different belief systems, and provide the
philosophical tools to hide the fact that it’s happening. Such
alienation is produced on the foundation that they fail to align
with truths found through reasoning, and thus imbued with a
false universal applicability French thought shields out every-
thing that falls outside the scope of its supposedly ‘universal
because rational’ principles.
The development of psychoanalysis in the twentieth cen-
tury further disproved the conception of the individual as being
entirely rational. It revealed the preponderant role of the sub-
28 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
conscious, undermining the claims both that rationality is the
defining feature of humanity, and that we are capable of pure,
unbiased abstraction. It is now well-known that humans are
contaminated by a long list of cognitive biases (they’re well
illustrated in Daniel Kahneman’s 2021 bestseller, Noise: A Flaw
in Human Judgement). The principle of ‘unmodified reasoning
leading to universal truth’ becomes merely a confidence-boost-
ing but highly unrealistic ideal.
Yet despite the many detractors of philosophical universal-
ism, contemporary thinkers in France just can’t seem to let it
go. Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is a former Chair of Philosophy at
the École Normale Supérieure. He is also the most widely
translated living French philosopher. His work deals exten-
sively with political uprisings and liberation of the masses
through appeals to universalism, and he conceives of the
moments of popular revolt such as 2011’s Arab Spring as move-
ments of emancipatory universalism, motivated by universal
principles of justice and freedom.
Badiou has been powerfully criticised by theorists such as
Elizabeth Paquette, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and
Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina. She ded-
icated an entire book, Universal Emancipation – Race Beyond
Badiou (2020) to deconstructing Badiou’s thesis. In it she
showed that his commitment to universal principles effectively
produces a political theory incapable of dealing with the speci-
ficities of struggle. For instance, since his philosophy of ‘indif-
ference’ is blind to race, it cannot account for the struggles of
racialised individuals. The result is a justice-inspired philo-
sophical system that is paradoxically ineffective at considering
justice and freedom while tackling emancipatory politics.
This illustrates a typically French problem. The 1978 law
that banned the collection of data based on race or ethnicity is
another striking example of French universalism. France likes
to see itself as a colour-blind, religion-blind, and pretty-much-
everything-else-blind nation. For this reason, it is not permit-
ted to retrieve statistics on minorities. The contradictions at
the heart of this approach, which makes minorities unquan-
tifiable and therefore effectively invisible, have been widely
discussed in the international press. A 2020 article published
in The Atlantic condemned the hypocrisy of the French uni-
versalistic dogma by warning, ‘France Is Officially Color-Blind.
Reality Isn’t’. Yet, the French intellectual world persists in its
damaging love affair with being out of touch. Blinded by their
dedication to abstract, airy ideas, contemporary French
philosophers still don’t want to confront their cherished pre-
cepts with the lessons of real-life experience.
Where has the legacy of Foucault and Postmodern thought
led? The new strain of philosophers is recycling old themes.
It has failed to integrate the lessons of the Poststructuralist cri-
tique of universalism. And the rest of the world just doesn’t
care to watch anymore. To renew itself, French thought is con-
fronted with an impossibility. It suffers from what Sudhir Haz-
areesingh eloquently described as the French ‘tendency to look
inwards in space, and backwards in time’.
To summarise, French philosophy hasn’t changed, so it has
become outdated. It hasn’t integrated new thinking and knowl-
edge, making it ill-adapted to tackle modern problems.
 The Political Potential of French Philosophy
Paradoxically, the same thing that makes French thought obso-
lete – its inertia – also contains the potential for its rekindling.
French philosophy is rationalist and universalistic, and politi-
cal in its concerns. While the universalism explains why French
philosophy has grown increasingly inaudible outside of France,
its political nature may hold the key to reinvigorating it on the
international scene.
Let me explain.
France practically invented the concept of the intellectual
as an important public figure. Since the Enlightenment, French
philosophers have helped draft watershed political texts; and
long after the salon culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries gathered intellectuals to debate in fashionable Parisian
apartments, the figure of the French intellectual as a political
commentator and moral guide remains alive and well. It is
common in France for philosophers to be invited onto TV
shows alongside politicians to discuss social issues. In the ramp-
up to a presidential election, for example, politicians constantly
quote French philosophers in their debates, using them as
vouchers for their own legitimacy. For example, the far-right
candidate Éric Zemmour’s favourite citation in the lead-up to
the 2022 election seemed to be from Rousseau: “Distrust those
cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover
duties they do not deign to fulfil around them. A philosopher
loves the Tartars to be spared having to love his neighbours.”
Zemmour often resorts to this bon mot as a sort of authoritative
argument, supposed to both prove the hypocrisy of the other
candidates’ focus on human rights and to justify his stance on
nationalism and domestic preference. (By doing this, Zemmour
ironically continues the French tradition of casting the philoso-
pher as a political guide, while trying to rebuke the figure of
the good-willed intellectual as an elitist traitor to the nation.)
What French philosophers have to say remains eminently
political in substance. I mentioned Badiou’s stress on the eman-
cipation of the masses and on political struggle. Jacques Ran-
cière (b.1940) is another major contemporary French thinker
who writes profusely about political philosophy. He deals
extensively with what he calls ‘the part of those who have no
part’. By this, Rancière means the enactment of equality by
those who are in subjugated positions by vocalising their right
to equal treatment. Rancière’s writings have all to do with the
politics of recognition. In a similar vein to Badiou, he stresses
the importance of public action, and fights political apathy.
Frédéric Gros, lecturer in Philosophy at the University of
Paris XII, dedicated his latest book, Disobey (published in
English translation in May 2021), to the dangers of political
apathy and blind obedience to leaders. It urges the reader to
use critical thinking in the face of a corrupt politics that gives
free reign to the market: “At a time when ‘experts’ pride them-
selves on their decisions being the result of anonymous and icy
statistics, disobeying is a declaration of humanity,” he writes.
While France’s enduring love of skepticism results in an
emphasis on political engagement and resistance, its positive
sentiment towards intellectuals grants philosophers the plat-
form to denounce delusional optimism.
Our world is faced with a multitude of pressing problems.
On top of the list is the climate crisis that no COP meeting
seems to adequately address, and the deepening of inequalities
worldwide, between a few multimillionaires and billionaires
and the rest of us. Popular indignation has expressed itself
through the bolstering of nationalist and populist leaders on
the one hand or a disinterest in politics on the other. But such
inward-looking attitudes heighten social divisions. Hate crimes
sharply increased in the United States during Donald Trump’s
presidency. And general political indifference means fewer
opportunities to generate solutions to the world’s current crises.
As philosophers in France are interested in the political game
and at the same time part of it, they are bearers of potential.
They can hinder what the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe
calls the ‘evasion of the political’ – the widespread disengage-
ment with political life. The modern philosophes’ line of thought
as well as their public stature encourages people to commit to
fighting politically for their visions of societal visions. They
show the importance of engaging with political institutions,
questioning them, and expressing dissent publicly. So, French
philosophy is endemically political. And that’s a good thing.
This moment in history requires philosophers everywhere
to be politically active. The neoliberal model has encouraged
us all to equate politics with economics. To get out of the
swamp of political exclusion, apathy, and extremism, we have
no choice but to re-enter the political space, and to reflect on
the meaning of coexistence. The neoliberal crisis is a crisis of
the political. This makes the French tradition an interesting
model for reflecting on the current issues we face from a polit-
ical and philosophical standpoint, instead of an economic one.
Conclusion
At the core of contemporary French philosophy lies an impor-
tant contradiction. It is well suited to help us navigate the cur-
rent political moment, but it is obsolete when it comes to other
modern topics such as diversity because it relies on ideas of
universalism, and a deep-rooted conviction that society should
treat all individuals identically regardless of their social and
religious traditions and values. Abroad, the reach of French
thought is withering. It used to hold a prominent place in the
realm of ideas worldwide. But, unlike French thought, the
world has evolved. It has become weary of the one-size-fits-all
solutions of philosophical universalism.
French philosophy is not doomed. It contains within itself the
remedies to its growing global irrelevance. It has the potential
to inspire people to reflect on and engage with the crisis of neolib-
eral democracy. While providing a model where philosophers
are central figures in society, the French philosophical tradition
also highlights the importance of questioning politics. It seeks to
defeat political disinterest, incentivising people to constantly
reflect and improve. French philosophy can provide a template
that opposes the depersonalised institutions of neoliberalism, if
only it will incorporate pluralism and move away from the
Enlightenment-inherited script of disempowering universalism.
© MANON ROYET 2022
Manon Royet is a philosophy writer, researcher and translator
based in London. The thesis of her postgraduate degree at UCL on
political philosophy focused on the theories of Jürgen Habermas and
Chantal Mouffe. She specialises in questions of identity,
multiculturalism in Europe, and their political solutions.
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 29
 The Paths Decisions Lead Us Down
by Rose de Castellane 2022
© ROSE DE CASTELLANE 2022

On Regret
David Charles argues that we should not regret our decisions,
but should take responsibility for our decision-making processes.

he decision tree of life is colossal. While physicists I wonder if being happy after a decision is the least interest-

T and metaphysicians explore the possibility that the

multiverse grows larger at every decision, it is the
ethicist’s lot to consider the paths chosen. That is
to say, ethics is generally concerned with the build-up to a deci-
sion point. But what happens afterwards? And how do our
choices influence our future decision-making?
After a decision has been made and acted upon, the person
who made it may be satisfied with the intention, the process,
and the outcome. Alternatively, they could be dissatisfied or
they could be indifferent.
ing of these states? This attitude seems almost transactional: Was
the objective achieved? Tick. Smile. Move on. On the other hand,
being merely nonchalant about the outcome could reflect any of
several mentalities, from perceiving the decision as insignificant,
to a healthy detachment, to an unhealthy detachment. But per-
haps the most nuanced and philosophically rewarding state to
examine is dissatisfaction. The feelings stimulated by recognis-
ing a decision to have been bad can be intense, difficult to shake
off, and complexly woven. There are subtly yet distinctly differ-
ent possibilities within this set: dissatisfaction itself, disappoint-

30 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

ment, regret, grief, and potentially, remorse. The way we pro-
cess any of these emotions will be due to our personal history,
and can change our future behaviour.
However, as has been intuited by some philosophers and evi-
denced by modern neuroscientific research (see for example
‘Neural Foundations for Regret-Based Decision Making’, Revue
d’Economie Politique, 118:1, p.63, Ambrosino et al, 2008), the most
powerful of the post-decision emotions appears to be regret.
Some of the bolder thinking on regret, by Spinoza and Niet-
zsche, followed the idea of amor fati or love of fate. The negative
aspect of regret is unnecessary and even irrational, they said,
because we ought to embrace the undulations of life.
Any such attempt to make rational thinking override natu-
rally-occurring reactions seems a little too idealistic in our
modern world of nuanced psychology. However, Spinoza’s
argument is focussed less on a desire to feel good about destiny
and more on a desire to omit grief from the domain of regret.
And as Rüdiger Bittner explores in a 1992 paper, ‘Is it Reason-
able to Regret Things One Did?’ (The Journal of Philosophy 89:5),
the resolution to stop grieving over past actions allows for the
examination of one’s actions with greater clarity.
Bittner himself promotes the view that grief is a distraction
from the real purpose of regret. If we can put grief about deci-
sions aside and focus instead upon remembrance and under-
standing, then we can consider our actions and their outcomes
in relation to our responsibilities rather than in relation to our
responses, which is far more constructive.
Bittner observes, “we are the agents we are not just by having
done what we did. We are the agents we are by accepting these
doings as ours.” I agree, but I think that the concept of agency
demands a much stronger sense of ownership than mere accep-
tance that we have chosen or done certain things. When we
regret, it is because we are somewhat aware of the hypothetical
outcome that didn’t occur because of our action or inaction.
That is, we grieve for the lost opportunity, and we also grieve
for our selves that we must endure the new path. Here I’m not
talking about the traditional idea that what one regrets most is
the things one didn’t do – the exciting paths in life that one didn’t
take. That’s about contemplating new actions, new branches in
the decision tree. By contrast, I’m talking about taking a retro-
spective view of our actual actions, and saying that we should
not burden ourselves pointlessly by imagining modifying those
actions. But I’m also not talking about not regretting at all, or
about resolving to ’never do that again’. Instead, I want to sug-
gest that good regret is not about the action itself, but about
regretting the lack of prior consideration that might have
changed our action and prevented its harmful consequences.
This can best be seen from a process perspective: If you did
something with planning and forethought, then you might
regret not planning better, but you will not regret the planning
you actually did. Alternatively if you did something sponta-
neously, then rather than regretting the action itself, it might
be better to regret not having taken a moment to think before
acting. In this sort of sense, I propose that we shouldn’t regret
actions in general, because actions are deliberate, based on rea-
sons, knowledge and circumstances at the time of the action.
We can, however, regret not taking particular cognitive actions,
such as thinking a bit harder, planning better, and so on, which
might have prevented a subsequent bad choice of action. This
is about accepting not only the deed, but also the responsibility
for the consequences that fall on one as a result of one’s status
as an aware agent. While the grief must remain, accepting
responsibility for the decision-making process forces an exami-
nation of that process. One needs to learn to accept that one
could have taken more responsibility and planned better, or
self-nurtured better. More than just despairing over the fail-
ings of an action and its consequences, then, healthy regret is
about owning one’s agency. That means firstly in the sense of
acknowledging that the action came from you as an agent, and
that you chose to act in that manner. Secondly, in the sense that
you’re choosing to reflect upon what could be improved about
your choosing; upon how you could have chosen differently, or
been a better agent. Here my argument progresses from Bit-
tner’s by expanding and enhancing the ownership of responsi-
bility which agency offers. It’s not just about accepting the act:
it’s about reflecting on the potential for improvement.
We can look at the counterpoint for extra clarity. If you don’t
accept the action you’ve taken – if you regret the action rather
than the process of choice – then you undermine your own
agency, without this yet helping you improve in your decision-
making in any way. This is something probably most of us have
done at many points in our lives. However, even if you accept
the action and don’t regret it, because you don’t take responsi-
bility for the consequences of a decision in order to learn from
them, you could be accused of an even greater disingenuity than
if you had simply rejected the results of the choice.
So is there an obligation to take responsibility for our choices?
And should we employ regret and grief in order to become
better moral agents?
I can offer evidence from two neuroscientific studies that
demonstrate a benefit to the self (if not explicitly to others) from
following this type of regret-processing approach. According to
Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde in ‘Regret and the Rationality of
Choices’ (Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 365:1538,
2010), undertaking this process of reflection about the deed, the
outcomes, and one’s agency, can actually serve to reduce the sense
of regret felt because “regret is sensitive to the way the disap-
pointment occurs.” Theoretically, the more responsibility one has
in a decision, the more regret that can potentially be felt if the
outcome is perceived as negative. However, that regret is some-
what tempered by the sense of being an autonomous agent. So it
seems that developing a stronger sense of control and thoughtful
responsibility can serve to reduce the unpleasant experience of
regret. Or, in the paper I cited earlier, Ambrosino et al found that
reflecting on the outcome of a decision, as well as on the feeling
of responsibility concerning that choice, “promotes behavioural
flexibility and exploratory strategies in dynamic environments.”
These two studies support the idea of embracing agency and
taking time to reflect upon its workings in your choosing. This
can be beneficial, among other things, in terms of providing a
feedback mechanism for our personal ethics. More generally, if
we invest in ourselves in this manner – making the regrettable
consequences of a decision inform our future choice-making –
then we can learn to better navigate the decision tree of life.
© DAVID CHARLES 2022
David Charles is a data analyst, writer, and former physicist. He’s
currently writing a book on Existential Ethics.
Twitter: @DataDaveUK
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 31
 Poetry & Philosophy
for the 21st Century
Benjamin Lloyd gets Dewey-eyed over resonant rhymes.
John Dewey
by Darren
McAndrew
ohn Dewey, the father of American Pragmatism, spear-
J head in the field of education and psychology, acclaimed
author and prominent twentieth century scholar, also
had a deep appreciation for the arts. More specifically,
he had a love for poetry. He even wrote some poems of his own,
which were eventually discovered among his papers and pub-
lished in a volume many years after his death.
Dewey (1859-1952) found himself alive during a time of
incredible turmoil, industrialization, economic growth, and sci-
entific advancement. With so many aspects of modern life
changing from day to day, perhaps it’s not surprising if he sought
solace in poetry. It seems that for Dewey writing verse may have
been more than a cathartic creative outlet or an artsy hobby. In
fact, Dewey thought that poetry could be the replacement that
fills the spiritual void left in the West by the decline in religious
faith and in the traditions of the past. This is the notion he put
forward in a commencement address to the graduating class of
Smith College in the spring of 1890. As the young scholars
eagerly awaited the completion of the final formality of their
college educations, Dewey opened his speech with a passage
from The Study of Poetry by English literary critic and poet
Matthew Arnold:
32 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is wor-
thy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever
surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an
accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received
tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has mate-
rialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emo-
tion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea
is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry
attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact [...] More and
more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to inter-
pret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our sci-
ence will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for reli-
gion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”
For Dewey this is more than a mere question of whether the
future of humankind looks to philosophy, science, theology, or
poetry for the answers to life. In fact, Dewey is concerned that
poetry will lose its genuineness, its sustaining force, if it is cut
off from accountability. ‘Who keeps the keeper?’ asks Dewey,
and his answer is Truth (see Poetry and Philosophy, the text of
Dewey’s Smith College speech, pp.110-112).
Observing a Changing World
The superpower of the poet is the ability to observe the same
world other individuals observe and to interpret it in a way that
will resonate: “Poets cannot be freed from the conditions which
attach to the intelligence of man everywhere” (Ibid, p.113).
The ever-growing expanse of human knowledge concerns
Dewey in the realm of poetry, in the sense that the rapid advance-
ment of the application of science is requiring poetry to adapt
to it. The American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman
(1918-1988) once said, “it is a poor poet who falls silent upon
learning the Sun is a massive sphere of hydrogen fusing into
helium.” I believe this quote directly relates to Dewey’s con-
cerns. Indeed, poets cannot be freed from the conditions of
human understanding. Rather, these conditions free the poet
to behold the world with the genuineness for which Dewey calls.
Yet as Feynman intimated, no scientific or philosophical reve-
lation could diminish the truth expressed in, for example, Walt
Whitman’s Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun (1865):
Keep your splendid, silent sun;
Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the Woods;
Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and
orchards;
Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees
hum;
Give me faces and streets! Give me these phantoms incessant and end-
less along the trottoirs!
 Give me interminable eyes! Give me women! Give me comrades and
lovers by the thousand!
Whitman notes the beauty of nature and the ‘quiet places by
the Woods’; but there is an unrest within him, and in the final
line of the poem we bear witness to the evolution of culture. The
poem’s rejection of the quiet places by the woods, the fields of
clover and wheat, highlights humanity’s shift from finding con-
solation in natural beauty to finding it in the presence of others.
Walt Whitman
This transformation is clearly observed after the events that
took place in or around the early twentieth century – global
war, famine, and ecological destruction unprecedented in the
history of our world, much less of our species. When humanity
is being hit by the existential threats that plagued that century
(three influenza pandemics, two world wars, multiple famines,
deadly oppression) it’s hard to be consoled by a simple walk
through the woods. In our own day of advanced information
technology, we also will likely turn to ‘comrades and lovers’ for
emotional solace in our dark hours, rather than to nature.
But if poetry is to be our stay, as Dewey suggests, upon what
authority does Whitman isolate man from nature? What truth
does he find in women, faces, and streets? And can we still look
to these verses a hundred and fifty years later to console
ourselves?
Of course, Whitman’s words ring as true today as the day
they were written. After extended periods of quarantine and
social isolation, we cannot so easily look to the natural world
for support. Now, more than ever, we need human connection
and social experiences. The genuine truth that Whitman exposes
is verified by the human condition we’re experiencing today,
and it doesn’t seem to be losing any momentum. Even in this
era of instant, easy international communications, we still find
ourselves craving face-to-face contact.
Gold & Frost
So truth and nothing but truth is to be discovered in the pro-
found lines of Walt Whitman. Shall we find the same upon
exploring the verses of Robert Frost?
Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923) briefly reflects on the
impermanence of life; and again we get an especially effective
comparison with nature and its beauty:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
This concise verse on the uncertainty of life reminds me imme-
diately of the passage from Matthew Arnold: no creed not shaken,
no tradition undissolving. Just as Dewey suggested of Arnold’s
poetry, Frost’s poem also reminds us of the great philosophy of
Stoicism and the writings of Marcus Aurelius. But just as Dewey
did not mean to suggest Arnold had translated Aurelius’s Medi-
tations into poetic verse, neither do I claim that Frost has tran-
scribed Stoic philosophy into eight lines: rather that similarities
arise from a similar truth observed by these writers.
Inspiration from the Stoics is evident in more of Frost’s verse,
such as Precaution (1936), a collection of short poems on the
span of life:
Will the blight kill the chestnut?
The farmers rather guess not.
It keeps smouldering at the roots
And sending up new shoots,
Till another parasite
Shall come to kill the blight.
Notice Frost’s continued use of metaphor and imagery
revolving around nature. Yet while nature is a heavy theme that
Frost relies upon for his content, he, like Whitman, doesn’t
seem to find much solace in it.
Again we must ask ourselves what truth is to be found in these
lines. The claims that Frost makes in these verses are what we gen-
erally observe of life. Everything in order eventually turns to disor-
der – this is the law of entropy. The chestnut, which is temporarily
spared from the blight, will eventually wither and rot. Is Frost
obsessed with death? Or can we find consolation in our mortality?
As was the case with Whitman, we don’t have to do mental
gymnastics to sympathize with the truths that Robert Frost
claims in his poetry. These truths embody the experience of
human life, undeterred by advancements in scientific knowl-
edge or by religious revelation. I find it easy to believe that
Feynman had the verse of Robert Frost on his mind when he
spoke of the skills of the poet.
Poetry For The Modern Mind
So now we find ourselves at the ‘unnatural wound’ that Dewey
speaks of – the unbridged gap between science and poetry,
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 33

AUTUMN_IN_THE_WOODS © PROPOLI87 2021 CREATIVE COMMONS
The purpose of poetry
which is also the disconnect between man and nature. In the
world that Arnold envisioned, man has broken free from the
celestial chains of religion in search of a new source of conso-
lation and comfort that he is unable to find in the realms of
science and philosophy. Is this not reminiscent of the world
we live in today?
Experiments, tests, hypotheses, records, and revisions – these
are the tools of the scientist. Whereas scientists concern them-
selves with knowledge, the philosopher focuses on wisdom.
Logic, questioning, and discussion are the tools of the trade of
philosophy. But the tool of the poet is observed emotion and
lived experience as he focuses on truth.
For sure, the poet is not free from the verifications of sci-
ence, nor the inquiry of the philosopher. Indeed, if the poet’s
verse does not remain consistent with these forces, there will
be no truth to be found in them. But in neither Whitman’s nor
Frost’s verses do we find scientific inaccuracies or philosophi-
cal fallacies. Nevertheless, we do indeed find the stay and con-
solation that Arnold predicted we would find in poetry, and that
Dewey said we so desperately need.
If in poetry we search for an anchor - a consolation for the cold
facts that science gives us and the hard wisdom that philosophy
interprets for us - surely it is there to be found in these verses of
Whitman and Frost. If science gives us fact, and philosophy strives
for wisdom, then poetry gives us existential truth. Again, the ideas
communicated in poems find their authority in the verifiable truth
of the experiences shared commonly by people. And although the
truths handed to us by Frost, Whitman, and other poets are not
freshly discovered, they are delivered in such a way that relates to
our experience. Should these ideas be reinterpreted by possibly
even more skilled poets, the truths conveyed by these lines would
nevertheless not be diminished.
34 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Poetry For The Universal Mind
As I mentioned, for poetry to be accepted as truth, especially
under the guidelines given by Dewey, the words must reflect the
common experience of humanity. This common experience will
be a set of cultural and environmental stimuli not only shared
by a single society or community, but globally, and which also
persist throughout time. Here ‘the common experience’ differs
from cultural traditions and communal rituals, in that the latter
die out and are only shared by the individuals of a certain group.
And we note that in the age of social media, variations between
distinct groups are as clear as the similarities between them.
Despite the differences (or perhaps even because of them)
the poet must elevate her point of view so that she can relate
her experiences to individuals across cultures and times, lest her
verse be only a partial rendering of the world. In other words,
good poetry rings true to all perceptive individuals regardless
of their background or cultural upbringing.
This is precisely why we still study, read, and enjoy Shake-
speare, Donne, Dante... The daily life of Dante Alighieri would
be so different from that of you and I, and the knowledge avail-
able to him so limited in comparison, that it is hard to imagine
he could write anything still worth studying eight centuries
later. But studying it is exactly what we find ourselves doing.
And the truths that Frost and Whitman write are the same truths
that were available to and were accessed by William Shake-
speare and John Donne. And finding a man struck by lightning
after winning the lottery might be easier than finding one who
has not heard a line from Hamlet (whether they’re aware of it
or not).
Stay With Poetry
In closing, one may look back at Dewey’s speech and find that
he is predicting that as scientific knowledge advances exponen-
tially, the split between man and nature will continue to widen.
He seems to suggest that although this rip will outgrow religions
and traditions, we ought to turn to poetry to reconcile the divide.
On one hand, I suggest we keep in mind David Hume’s notion
that one cannot get an ought from an is: that one cannot look at
the way the world is and determine from that observation the way
it ought to be. The great poets that Dewey references may have
observed this very division; but as we see from Whitman and Frost,
this partition has encouraged man to form stronger bonds with
his comrades and lovers, and to appreciate nature when he can.
On the other hand, however, I agree that mankind indeed
ought to look to poets to interpret the knowledge and wisdom
brought to us from science and philosophy. The difference
between those truths and the truths interpreted via poetry are
but differences of language. Poetry is more accessible, more easily
understood and related to by most people. Since this is the case,
the poet is the architect tasked with bridging the gap between
science/philosophy and humanity. Science is but a mere tool to
understand how the world works; philosophy but a means of dis-
course to understand how we gain that knowledge; but poetry is
a way to interpret our understandings to humankind. Indeed, in
poetry we shall find an ever surer and surer stay.
© BENJAMIN LLOYD 2022
Benjamin Lloyd is a philosophy student at Northern Kentucky
University with a passion for literature.

Moral Education in Confucianism
Plakshi Jain compares ‘reflection’ and ‘learning’ as means of becoming good.
“If it receives its proper nourishment, there is nothing which will not grow.
If it loses its proper nourishment, there is nothing which will not decay
away.” – Mengzi (trans. James Legge)
“Blunt metal must await honing and grinding, only then does it become
sharp. Since people’s nature is bad, they must await teachers and proper
models, only then do they become correct.” – Xunzi (trans. Eric Hutton)
his article attempts to compare the views of two signif-
T icant Chinese philosophers, Mengzi and Xunzi, on the
importance of moral education.
Both were followers of Kongzi (551-479 BCE) better known
in the West as Confucius. His ‘Way’ has been popularized as
Confucianism for hundreds of years via the Analects, a text writ-
ten by his disciples to put forth his teachings. The Way of
Kongzi advocates many things for society, but for this article
we will focus on the cultivation of ethics.
Kongzi believed society can be improved only when people
in authority are virtuous, and he developed educational tech-
niques to inculcate kindness and wisdom as well as knowledge.
Having said that, his statement, “If you learn without thinking
about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think with-
out learning, however, you will fall into danger” has generated
a lot of debate among Confucian scholars on how much empha-
China
sis must be given to thinking and learning respectively. This is
where a comparison of the views of his disciples Mengzi and
Xunzi comes in.
Growing With Mengzi, Grinding With Xunzi
Mengzi’s use of the word ‘grow’ quoted at the start to connote
the process of education, and of ‘nourishment’ to connote its
importance, in contrast to Xunzi’s words ‘grinding’ and ‘cor-
rect’, pinpoint the key difference in Mengzi’s and Xunzi’s
philosophies of ethical cultivation.
Mengzi or Mencius, lived in the fourth century BCE and is
known as the ‘Second Sage’ (i.e. second to Kongzi). He believed
that human nature is predisposed to be good just as water is pre-
disposed to flow downwards. This doesn’t mean humans can’t
be bad, just as water can be dammed up on a hillside. Yet when
humans do bad this can’t be blamed on their nature, but on their
circumstances. Evil isn’t innate, but a perversion due to a bad
environment, such as childhood trauma, or lacking basic needs.
How can Mengzi say that our nature is generally good? He
claims that just as all humans have roughly the same feet, or
roughly the same tastes, their hearts too basically share the same
potential for righteousness. He builds this claim from universal
moral impulses, such as the momentary compassion everybody
would feel on seeing a child fall into a well (except sociopaths,
CHINESE LANDSCAPE ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS 1915 CREATIVE COMMONS
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 35
 China
who are by definition mentally ill). He calls such sudden com-
passion ‘the sprouts of benevolence and righteousness’. These
shoots have the potential to grow and develop if given the right
guidance – that is, the proper ‘nourishment’ – or they will decay
away, and the person will succumb to evil.
Mengzi wants to cultivate wisdom, not knowledge of spe-
cific facts. The guidance he offers comes in form of moral edu-
cation through reflection. Through reflection, one understands
one’s own innate goodness, and extends it levelly in relevant
directions. Reflection as moral self-cultivation strengthens our
kind and righteous motivations when we respond to them with
awareness and approval.
Impediments to this growth include a lack of effort, or reject-
ing the value of virtues. Mengzi uses the illustration of a chess
game where one player puts his whole mind into the game while
the other is distracted by a swan, thinking of shooting it.
Although they learn together, they differ in apparent skill, but
not because of a difference in intelligence.
Prince Zuko begins the show Avatar: The Last Air Bender
(2005) banished by his father, and on an impossible quest to
earn his honor back. To capture the Avatar and end his banish-
ment, Zuko commits despicable acts. Then his Uncle Iroh acts
as his mentor/guide, providing him the nourishment of love
and wisdom he needs. Zuko’s gradual gaining in wisdom
through reflection is shown throughout the movie, and in the
end he decides to help the Avatar restore balance in the world.
How Zuko learns to act out of kindness nicely illustrates
Mengzi’s view of the importance of on internalizing ethical cul-

CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0

tivation through reflection and thinking.
On the other hand, Xunzi (third century BCE) believed that
human nature is predisposed to be self-interested, and hence
bad. If people follow their inborn dispositions and obey their
natures, they will create chaos and disorder. He says that, if
someone is hungry, they desire satiety, and that is our inborn
nature. We come to give away food to others only by follow-
ing artificial social conventions. Therefore, Xunzi says, “It is
necessary to await the transforming influence of teachers,
models, and guidance of ritual [artificial social conventions] and
standards of righteousness [yi]: only then they [students] come
yielding, turn to proper form and order, and end up becoming
controlled”. Rituals created by sages provide the proper form
in which to express oneself, in a controlled and restrained fash-
ion for the smooth functioning of society. Xunzi also advocates
repeated deliberate efforts to conform one’s actions with the
commands of the Analects, in a slow and difficult process that
opposes our natural impulses – a grinding, if you like.
Mengzi and Xunzi clearly differ over the comparative impor-
tance of learning and thinking in ethical cultivation. Because
he believes human nature to possess the sprouts of goodness
that we simply need to cultivate, Mengzi emphasizes personal
reflection. By contrast, because he believes our inborn disposi-
tion to be self-interested, even bad, and needing deliberate effort
to correct it, Xunzi emphasizes learning from teachers.
Considering The Differences
Thinking as an internally-sourced process, and learning as an
externally-sourced process, can be understood to exemplify the
difference between wisdom (internal) and knowledge (exter-
Painting of Mengzi by Kano Sansetsu, Japan, 17th century.
nal). Mengzi says, “Seek and you will find them. Neglect and
you will lose them”, while Xunzi says, “The ugly person longs
to be beautiful. The poor person longs to be rich. That which
one does not have within oneself, one is sure to seek for out-
side. People desire to be good because they are bad.” So I would
say that Mengzi and Xunzi agree on the need to seek wisdom
and knowledge, but differ on where to seek it. The difference
is largely due to the perceived nature of intrinsic desire. Accord-
ing to Mengzi, people must develop their natural desire for righ-
teousness, whereas Xunzi’s self-interested people must learn to
override their innate desires. So here their understandings of
righteousness also diverge, since for Mengzi righteousness is
an expression of our innate inclinations, but for Xunzi it is arti-
ficial, constructed to meet the needs of society. And both views
can be contrasted with other schools of thought prominent in
China at the time. Laozi’s Daoism aligns more with Mengzi’s
internal reflection and rejects Xunzi’s external restraint as pre-
tentious, while the perfector of Legalism, Han Feizi (a student
of Xunzi’s) aligns more with Xunzi’s external learning, which
is very teacher-oriented, and so authority based.

36 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023


Perhaps their conflict can be better understood by examin-
ing the metaphors used by the scholars. In the quote at the
beginning, Mengzi compares the process of education with
growth of a plant, and when provided the necessary ingredi-
ents, the plant will grow itself (this is very similar to the Daode-
jing’s creation without creating and the Iching’s concepts of Qian
and Kun). Here the environment plays an important role, as
illustrated by Mengzi in his story ‘Mengzi’s mother moved
thrice’ – to live in the best environment for the intellectual
growth of her son, which she deems to be near a school.
Xunzi criticizes Mengzi’s view that emotions and desires
require nurturing, rather than being promoted to us in a morally
packaged way by teachers; but here Xunzi is misinterpreting
what Mengzi is saying. In truth, they both advocate nurturing
and guidance, that is, the proper environment – but in differ-
ent forms. Both scholars use metaphors for moral education
which are slow processes happening gradually over time – either
vegetative growth or the sharpening of metal. Both imply per-
manent incremental progress so long as there is no toxicity in
the environment, rather than a pattern of relapse or relearning.
But the methods differ. Xunzi connects the process of moral
education with grinding and honing metal, or the straighten-
ing of wood – things that cannot happen on their own accord,
as the growth of a sprouting plant does. The grinding and
honing of metal or straightening of wood is done against the
wood’s nature, or against the metal’s hard resistance. Mean-
while, Mengzi’s cultivation of growth is to be in harmony with
the natural inclinations of the sprouting plant.
This is exactly where they differ in their model of moral edu-
cation. Mengzi suggests a self-discovery model that uses a more
‘liberal’ approach: a child taught good values grows up in a
healthy environment where those values mature in him as he
does. (This approach can be seen in Mengzi’s discussion with
King Xuan about the slaughter of an ox.) Xunzi meanwhile sug-
gests a more ‘authoritarian’ model, where morality cannot be
discovered by oneself and so one must be told what’s right and
wrong. For Xunzi, morality must be imposed from the outside
through education to correct and restrain us, and only through
a deliberate effort to learn will we be able to become good. This
view is implicit when Xunzi says, “I once spent the whole day
pondering, but it wasn’t as good as a moment’s worth of learn-
ing.” But for him education is not such a pleasant matter as it
is for Mengzi, since for Xunzi it involves suppressing your innate
desires and learning to deviate from them every day.
However, Mengzi and Xunzi both emphasize education as a
gradual process that can’t be rushed. Xunzi says, “Learning must
never stop. Blue dye is gotten from the indigo plant, and yet it
is bluer than the plant. Ice comes from water, and yet it is colder
than water. The gentleman learns broadly and examines him-
self thrice daily, and then his knowledge is clear and his con-
duct is without fault.” Meanwhile, Mengzi says, “One must work
at it, but do not aim at it directly. Let the heart not forget, but
do not help it grow.” He gives an example of a misguided farmer
who pulls his wheat to make it grow faster.
If I want to lose weight and I go to the park and run for hours
one day, then eat pizza as a reward for working so hard, all my
exercise won’t have helped me. It will only make my legs hurt the
next day, making me unable to run, while the pizza makes me
China
At My Leisure
Leisure is the mother of Philosophy, some say;
If it’s true my future’s looking great. Oh
Man, with all this free time on my hands most every day,
Surely I’ll become another Plato.
Doing nothing all day long is quite a lot of work –
Praying that my genie in her bottle
Comes out quick and with a fairly firm-but-gentle jerk
Turns me to a modern Aristotle.
Fully rested, heavy thoughts all worked out in my head,
Then my metaphysics might endure. Us
Humans need a teacher; when at last I leave my bed,
I’ll be right up there with Epicurus.
Note: My muse won’t visit if I cannot hear her voice,
So I beg you please to be discreet. She
Takes an all-or-nothing stance and leaves me little choice
Yet I yield, that I may be like Nietzsche.
Leisure is the mother of Philosophy, you bet;
Humbly will I play my modest part. The
Peace and quiet I require might seem a lot, and yet
I need these if I’m to rival Sartre.
© STEVEN KENT 2022
Steven Kent is the poetic alter-ego of writer, musician, and
Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in
Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF.
Please visit kentburnside.com
gain more weight. If I want to lose weight, I’ll need to run every
day and manage my diet. Similarly, for humans to be good and
society to be ordered, then whether goodness is an inborn dis-
position or not, we need to let moral education take its course
from our childhood, and as we mature gradually, so will the benev-
olence in our hearts and our actions. As Frederick Douglass put
it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
In conclusion, Mengzi and Xunzi aren’t as divergent as one
may initially think, both being Confucians. On a deeper read-
ing, they both advocate education as being important for people
to be moral and good, and for society to achieve harmony (he)
in turn. Where they do differ concerns the way such education
influences one’s ethical cultivation – whether predominantly
through thinking or predominantly through learning.
It is a part of the function of education to help us escape the
intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. These
limitations are what both Mengzi and Xunzi see beyond in their
own thinking.
© PLAKSHI JAIN 2022
Plakshi Jain is an Indian-trained lawyer and a recent LLM (Master
of Laws) graduate from the UC Berkeley School of Law. Check out
her poetry on her blog The Greyness of Life at
thegreynessoflife.wordpress.com.
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 37
 China
Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory
Shaun O’Dwyer takes an unfortunately still relevant look at how to avoid war.
ith the return of geopolitics, and with the inter-
W national institutions built after 1945 to prevent
or contain war now being perilously weak, the
world again faces growing risks of conflict
between industrialized nations - such as the Russian invasion
of Ukraine. There have been polarized responses to this con-
flict. One response has been to denounce Western military sup-
port for Ukraine as ‘militarism’. Often such denunciations cloak
a hypocrisy which faults Western imperialism while giving a
free pass to the imperialism of non-Western powers, such as
Russia or China. Yet both hypocritical anti-imperialists and
more impartial pacifists frequently conflate militarism – the
policy of building armed forces and using them aggressively to
advance national interests against other states – with deterrence
and just war theories created to counter militarism. There are
important philosophical issues at stake in these debates, over
for instance the validity of absolutist norms against military vio-
lence, or the ethical dilemmas in trade-offs between defending
nations’ self-determination and averting escalation to world
war. When such debates fall into well-worn ruts, it can be useful
to look to alternative perspectives, which can help disentangle
familiar conceptual knots. One such novel perspective comes
from outside of the Western philosophical canon, and indeed
is even from the margins of today’s Eastern philosophical canon.
The Mohists were a community of Chinese thinkers and
engineers associated with a philosopher called Mozi. They were
prominent in the fifth to third centuries BCE. They developed
powerful arguments against militarism. Yet rather than repu-
diate any military response to militarism as being another
instance of it, they also promoted an early version of Just War
Theory. With allowance for its very different, ancient, cultural
origins, their thoughts might also be relevant for our new era.
How Song Kingdom was Saved
The Athenian historian Thucydides’ reconstruction of negoti-
ations between the generals of an Athenian expeditionary force
and the leaders of the island of Melos in 416 BCE, the ‘Melian
Dialogue’, has long been remembered as a parable of geopolit-
ical realism and the triumph of ‘might makes right’ militarism.
The (mistranslated) truism attributed to the Athenian gener-
als, ‘‘The strong will do what they can, the weak will suffer what
they must’’, was amply borne out in the genocidal conclusion
to a siege the Athenians waged against the Melians in the fif-
teenth year of the Peloponnesian War.
Much less known is a dialogue dramatizing events claimed
to have unfolded some decades earlier, nearly 8,000 kilometers
to the east of Melos, in Warring States-era China. It too con-
cerned a small state threatened with invasion by an imperialist
state; yet its very different outcome showcased the effective-
ness of Mohist anti-militarism. As related in the ancient Mozi
text, the ‘Gongshu Dialogue’ tells how Mozi traveled to the
Kingdom of Chu to try to dissuade its ruler from launching an
38 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
unprovoked invasion of the Kingdom of Song. To the King of
Chu and his siege engineer Gongshu, Mozi presented argu-
ments highlighting the immorality and illogicality of unpro-
voked military aggression: if they agree that it is unjust to murder
one innocent person, how can they think it is acceptable to
murder so many? Moreover, Mozi argued, a large, rich king-
dom like Chu invading a smaller, poorer kingdom like Song,
was analogous to a rich man ignoring his sumptuous possessions
in order to assault and rob an impoverished neighbour.
The King of Chu and Gongshu seemed moved by Mozi’s
appeals, yet still intent on their invasion. An improvised war
game of Gongshu’s proposed siege of Song, although won by
Mozi, did not change their minds. A frustrated Gongshu hinted
that he had another means for beating Mozi. So Mozi addressed
the king with his final argument. It is one of the most glorious
ripostes in all of classical Chinese philosophy:
“Gongshuzi’s intention is simply that he desires to kill me. If he kills
me, no one can defend Song and he can attack. However, my disci-
ple Qin Guli and three hundred others are already equipped with my
defense devices and await the Chu raiders on the walls of Song. Even
if you kill me, you cannot cut them off.”
(All quotations are taken from Chris Fraser, The Essential Mozi, 2020.)
Knowing that those ‘devices’ included giant swivel-mounted
crossbows and traction trebuchets fabricated by Mohist engi-
neers, the King of Chu wisely called off his invasion. The strong
would not do what they could. Unlike the Melians, the people
of Song were saved.
Anti-Militarist Consequentialism
How can we explain the vehement opposition to war and the
argumentative skill the Mohists displayed in texts like the Gong-
shu Dialogue?
First, we need to understand the context for their anti-mili-
tarism. The Mohists arose in a period of intense interstate con-
flict – and extraordinary intellectual and technological progress.
The Warring States period’ was an era in the fifth to third cen-
turies BCE in China during which feudal imperial authority in
Eastern China had broken down, to be replaced by competing
states whose rulers pretended to ducal or even royal authority.
The leaders of these states sought to improve the productivity
of their lands and subjects so that they could raise more taxes and
equip large conscript armies. Like would-be hegemons of other
eras, such as the Medicis, some rulers also elevated their status
through conspicuous investment in learning and the arts. These
states therefore required officials who could help them raise taxes,
train and maintain large armies, render their subjects more har-
monious and productive, and rule their states successfully with-
out being conquered or overthrown. Much like the sophists
versus the philosophers in ancient Greece, rival groups of experts
arose to meet these statecraft needs, competing with each other
 China
for the patronage of state rulers, and often moving between states
for employment. The most famous of these experts were known
to later history as the Confucians; but there were many differ-
ent factions and schools. Some, like the Legalists, are still well-
known today, while others, like the Mohists, disappeared into
comparative obscurity around two thousand years ago.
The Mohists distinguished themselves in this competition
by developing sophisticated arguments to justify their policies
to rulers and rebut their rivals – a sophistication which they
refined in different directions, pioneering early epistemologi-
cal and logical theories. In effect, they were the first Chinese
philosophers. Contemporary Confucians such as Mencius (or
Mengzi) soon felt compelled to adopt similar methods of ‘dis-
putation’ to advance their own counsel and counter Mohist
influence. For rulers concerned with state security, Mohist engi-
neers also offered useful advice on counter-siege technology,
and could deploy weapons and other devices for defeating siege
operations. Yet the Mohists offered their military expertise only
to smaller states threatened by military aggression. Their con-
sequentialism explains why. Consequentialism is the attitude
that the moral value of an act derives from or can be calculated
specifically from the beneficial or harmful outcomes of the act.
The Mohists envisaged ideal human society as a well-ordered,
LANDSCAPE_WITH_BOATMEN ANONYMOUS C.15TH C

harmonious hierarchy, in which everyone fulfilled defined duties

in relation to superiors and inferiors, ranging from the ‘Son of
Heaven’ or supreme ruler down to princely rulers of states, their
ministers and officers, village heads, and parents and children.
This perhaps represented an idealized vision of the pre-War-
ring States era of centralized imperial authority.
Atop this social hierarchy was a spiritual realm of ancestral
ghosts, then Heaven itself. Thus the Mohists theorized a grand
cosmological and moral order for the world. And for the Mohists
it was ‘Heaven’s intent’ which provided a universal standard,
and a guide for human conduct. Heaven’s intent is for a world
ordered so that there is maximum benefit and minimal harm
rendered to all impartially.
This benign intent, the Mohists insisted, could be inferred
from the observable natural order of the world: in the passage
of the seasons and in provision for the growth of life-giving
crops and other food sources at their appointed times, and in
the growth and flourishing of human populations through
‘mutual love and mutual benefit’. Everyone from the Son of
Heaven, down the hierarchy to filial (obedient) children, should
follow the standard exemplified by those above them in the hier-
archy, with all of them answerable to the standards of Heaven.
But, the Mohists insisted, inferiors should also hold superiors
to those standards, and remonstrate them when they fail. In
doing so, all act benevolently (ren) in accordance with univer-
sal love, or ‘inclusive caring without partiality’ (jian ai), and with
righteousness or justice (yi) in benefitting others.
Rather than focus on a single criterion of benefit such as
‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’ as the British Utilitarians would do
over two thousand years later, the Mohists upheld a multi-
faceted conception of benefit. Mozi claimed that when people
act according to ‘inclusive caring’ and “view others’ states as
they view their own states… view others’ households as they
view their own households… [and] view other people as they
view themselves”, with each person striving impartially to ben-

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 39

 China
efit others, not just themselves and their own families, commu-
nities, or states, the first benefit would be harmony and order
throughout the social hierarchy. Other benefits would flow from
this harmony and order, including agricultural and economic
productivity sufficient for food and financial security and an
increasing population. Contrariwise, harms arise when human
beings fail to practice inclusive caring, loving only themselves
and caring for only their own households, communities, and
states, while assaulting others for their own benefit. Selfish
extravagance constitutes one source of harm, including the
expensively staged rites, musical performances and mourning
rituals the Mohists accused the Confucians of promoting. Other
harms arise from widespread selfishness, including social dishar-
mony and disorder, manifested in robbery and murder, depri-
vations of food and security, and war.
Breaking into and robbing peoples’ properties is a paradig-
matic instance of harming others to benefit oneself. Yet for the
Mohists, warfare was the worst source of harms, since invading
(that is, breaking into and robbing) other states multiplies and
intensifies individual crimes, and thus constitutes the greatest
offence against ren and yi. Moreover, as Mozi observed, if the
unprovoked killing of one innocent person counts as a capital
crime, the killing of ten or a hundred innocents should count as
ten or a hundred capital crimes. Yet, the Mohists complained,
‘noble men’ denounce the isolated crimes while glorifying war
and calling it just, even though it involves the destruction of states,
the plunder of their wealth, and the enslavement or massacre of
thousands of innocents. The Mohists would have appreciated the
irony in Voltaire’s epigram some twenty centuries later: “It is for-
bidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they
kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
As we saw with the Gongshu Dialogue, the Mohists used such
arguments to dissuade would-be expansionists from offensive war.
Countering the assertions of rulers who exalted the glory, power,
and wealth gained from imperialism, the Mohists also drew on
history and contemporary observations to emphasize its risks,
including the harms that potentially rebound onto would-be con-
querors. The deaths of countless soldiers, not only in battle but
also “through cold and hunger, rolled into ditches and gullies to
die” is the worst of harms, depriving the state of able-bodied men,
depriving families of fathers and sons, and depriving the ghosts of
ancestors of descendants to worship them. Moreover, the mass
conscription of men into armies takes them away from farms and
other employments, depressing economic activity. The need for
arms, equipment, and livestock during campaigns needlessly drains
state treasuries, and military failure could be followed by retribu-
tive attacks and the overthrow of the would-be conquerors.
Mohist Just War Theory
Mohist anti-militarist doctrine fed into its pioneering just war
theories. They devoted little space to what modern just war
theory (that is, since Aquinas in the twelfth century AD)
describes as the principle of jus in bello, or the ‘just conduct of
war’. It is clear that the Mohists considered it acceptable to
totally defeat invading armies, killing, maiming, and demoral-
izing their troops by any means necessary with the gruesome
array of weapons listed in their anti-siege manuals.
However, as some scholars of Mohist thought, such as Chris
Fraser, contend, some aspects of Mohist doctrine anticipated
modern jus ad bellum (‘justice about going to war’) doctrine,
beginning with the principle of just cause. Wars of aggression
were never justified according to the Mohist perspective. How-
ever, a war waged defensively against invasion is justified, with
some reservations that I’ll discuss shortly. The Mohists also
Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying?
by Friedrich Farshaad Razmjouie, 2022

believed there could be just cause for punitive war, as punish-
ment for tyrannical rulers of states who have committed out-
rages against Heaven and their own people, and have driven
their own states into disorder.
Critics claimed that this concept of punitive war was no dif-
ferent from that of offensive war. The Mohists countered by
arguing that punitive war is only permitted in rare instances,
where there are clear signs that Heaven has withdrawn its man-
date for those tyrants to rule and given permission for their
overthrow. These signs include clear ill omens and portents,
natural disasters, and explicit authorizations from spirits to carry
out punishment. One example given was of the military defeat
and death of the infamous semi-legendary tyrant Zhou.
The Mohists, with their clear-eyed assessment of the tremen-
dous harms wreaked by warfare, anticipated another principle
of jus ad bellum – that war should be a last resort. The incident
from the Gongshu Dialogue I quoted shows how they used both
diplomacy and deterrence-signaling to discourage would-be
expansionists. They also counseled rulers of smaller states to
cultivate good relations with neighboring states to enhance col-
lective security, and diplomatic submission where defensive war
might incur worse harms than would acceptance of unfavorable
terms from a potential aggressor. So although they never stated
it explicitly, the Mohists thereby subscribed to another modern
just war theory principle: that a proposed defensive war ‘have a
reasonable chance of success’.
Other modern just war theory principles, requiring that war
be declared by ‘a proper authority’, and that its agents have ‘right
intention’, also find their antecedents in Mohist doctrine. The
temporal authorization of war would issue first of all with the
Son of Heaven – the Emperor – directing or permitting some
states to wage defensive or punitive war against renegade states;
with ‘right intention’ being determined by whether it accords
with signs of ‘Heaven’s intent’. But one objection to this formu-
lation is that in periods of disorder, such as the Warring States
era the Mohists lived in, there is no commonly acknowledged
Son of Heaven designated to authorize war. The absence of such
a line of authority opens the way for diverse states to oppor-
tunistically claim ‘proper authority’ and ‘right intention’, and so
rationalise wars of conquest as just, punitive wars.
This is a rather troubling ambiguity in Mohist conceptions
of just war. But the Mohists did criticize rulers who claimed
Heaven’s authorization for illegitimate ‘punitive’ wars. Fraser
argues that the stringency of Mohist criteria for punitive war
rules out any easy resort to it. Nevertheless, the notion of a
Heavenly assent to punitive war is a powerful rhetorical device
for moralizing military adventurism, in ancient times and today.
Another question arises concerning how, given the absence
of the clear line of authorization described above, the Mohists
could claim authority to undertake diplomacy for and deliver
arms to beleaguered states, as Mozi does in the Gongshu Dia-
logue. The Mohists might have answered this by arguing that
theirs was a restorative doctrine. By persuading rulers to prac-
tice ‘inclusive caring’, by dissuading or deterring their expan-
sionism, and in the last resort, militarily thwarting them, the
Mohists may have seen themselves as de facto agents of Heaven’s
intent, hastening the restoration of a peaceful hierarchy of states
under the Son of Heaven.
China
The Modern Relevance of Mohist Just War Thinking
Fully cognizant of the harms and horrors of war, the Mohists
melded their anti-militarist consequentialism into a just war
doctrine. Their calculation was that where diplomacy and deter-
rence-signaling fails, and invasion will inevitably bring intoler-
able harms through plunder, destruction of land and habita-
tion, and the massacre or enslavement of innocents, then defen-
sive war will be the less harmful last resort.
Yet there is much in Mohist thought which remains alien to
modern sensibilities, potentially limiting its application today.
First, the conception of a hierarchical world order under the Son
of Heaven, with all obedient to the standard of ‘Heaven’s intent’,
is incompatible with modern norms of national self-determina-
tion, human rights, democracy, and pluralism, not to mention
secularism. Nevertheless, it’s possible to envisage a stripped-
down, Mohist-like, consequentialist just war doctrine being
adapted to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations.
The UN could authorize defensive war by beleaguered states and
their allies, or punitive war against expansionist, totalitarian states
involved in gross human rights violations. But this role is far from
what a weakened and geopolitically compromised United Nations
is capable of today. A further Mohist-like restorative argument
for United Nations authority would seem to be in order.
Second, the Mohists saw themselves as politically neutral,
delivering diplomatic advice, military expertise, and armaments
to any smaller state threatened by invasion when they could.
Today, no non-governmental organization has such capabilities.
It is mostly great powers which can deliver sufficient armaments
and expertise to smaller states to defeat the expansionism of other
great powers. This raises the problem of how smaller states can
avoid becoming proxies in great power struggles, gaining little
benefit and with much risk of harm as they cede control over their
affairs to the changeable whims of their great power benefactors.
Such are the objections fielded by left-wing critics of military aid
for Ukraine: that smaller states like Ukraine are becoming tools
for the imperialism of the West, specifically, the United States.
Yet the Ukrainians are doing just as the Mohists would urge, cul-
tivating diplomatic relations with multiple neighbouring states
and with the European Union. In sourcing weapons and exper-
tise from them, they offset the risk of being drawn into the exclu-
sive geopolitical orbit of the United States.
There is also a bleakly persuasive Mohist-like argument that
armed resistance is the better alternative than a capitulation or
pacifist resistance which leaves territories exposed to the crim-
inal behavior and arbitrary violence of a ruthless, ill-disciplined
occupying army. Taras Bilous, a Ukrainian left-wing writer and
defender, justifies arming his country by emphasizing the dread-
ful harms that occur when ‘the weak suffer what they must’:
“The more territories the Russian army occupies, the more civil-
ians will be persecuted and murdered. The more missiles our
air defences take down, the fewer of them will reach their tar-
gets and kill people.”
© SHAUN O’DWYER 2022
Shaun O’Dwyer is an associate professor in the Faculty of Languages
and Cultures at Kyushu University, Japan. He is the author of
Confucianism’s Prospects: a Reassessment (SUNY Press, 2019)
and editor of Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan
(University of Amsterdam Press, 2022).
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 41

Peter
Adamson
is Professor of Late
Ancient and Arabic
Philosophy at the
Ludwig Maximilian
University in Munich.
Duanne Ribeiro chats
with him about the
history of ideas, and the
meaning and methods
of philosophy.
42 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
podcast has reached its 400th episode, after
almost twelve years of steady publication.
Written and presented by Peter Adamson, the
podcast has made its way philosopher by
philosopher, movement by movement, from
Thales of Miletus, considered the first Western
philosopher, to (as I write) Marguerite of
Navarre, a sponsor of French humanism. It
has gone through twenty centuries of meta-
physical, political, scientific, ethical, and aes-
thetical debates in Europe and the Islamic
world, and has sprouted two spin-offs, dedi-
cated to philosophy in India and Africana phi-
losophy. “My project”, Peter told me, “is inher-
ently about expanding our sense of what the
history of philosophy is about.”
The first episode of The History of Phi-
losophy Without Any Gaps was uploaded
in December 2010. In December 2022, you
complete twelve years of steady work. The
main podcast now has spin-offs, and has
turned into a growing series of books. Did
you imagine from the beginning where this
project would take you?
True, it has been going for a long
time now! I definitely did not foresee
how large a project it would wind up
being. That sounds kind of ridiculous,
since I did say from the start that it
would cover the history of philosophy
‘without any gaps’. But at the beginning I
assumed the only non-European tradi-
tion I’d cover would be the Islamic
world. The idea of tackling Indian,
Africana, and Chinese philosophy –
maybe more – came later. Also, it was
not originally conceived as a book series,
only a podcast, which I assumed would
not have that big an audience. So, it’s
kind of spiralled beyond what I originally
envisioned. That was more like me
sitting down once a week, quickly writing
up stuff I pretty much already knew, and
recording it. Since I research and teach
ancient and medieval philosophy, the
prospect of covering lots of material that
was new for me seemed far away when I
started. But I have really enjoyed learning
about new traditions, texts, and figures.
Also, I love hearing from listeners, and
especially interacting with people outside
of academia, which most academics don’t
get to do. In general, it’s sort of my main
hobby, and I enjoy pretty much every
aspect of the process.
Did this long journey change you somehow?
Did having to study philosophers from dif-
ferent periods and places, some of whom I
guess were new to you, modify the way you
teach, or read philosophy? I imagine it’s an
exercise in openness.
Yes, definitely. It has had a very direct
impact on both my teaching and my
research. In teaching, I’ve done several
classes here in Munich that I was only
able to tackle thanks to doing the podcast;
for example, classes on classical Indian or
Africana philosophy. And I’ve written sev-
eral books that came out of reading I did
for the podcast. My book in 2022, called
Don’t Think for Yourself: Authority and
Belief in Medieval Philosophy, pulls together
a lot of stuff I was thinking about both in
my research and while doing the podcast.
You’ve gone through Ancient Greece, early
Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
and on. The many philosophers you have
spoken of have many different understand-
ings of philosophy: how it’s studied, taught
and lived, what it does, or what it can’t do.
Given this, how would you answer the ever-
recurring question, What is philosophy?
Now, that’s not an easy question! Of
course, I get asked it a lot, and what I
usually say is that I’m not really operating
with a hard and fast rule. It’s more like, if
I think it might be worth including in the
podcast, then I include it. Since my pro-
ject is inherently about expanding our
sense of what the history of philosophy is
about, I’m happy to take the risk of
expanding things ‘too far’ – if that is a
risk. I mean, the worst that can happen is
that the audience learns about some extra
stuff along the way that isn’t necessary.
If I were to address the question more
abstractly, I would say that we need to
distinguish the question of what philos-
ophy is now, for us, from what it has
been in earlier periods. Some cultures –
ancient China or India, for instance –
didn’t even have the word ‘philosophy’;
and the word has meant both very broad
and fairly narrow things at various times
and places where it did exist. For example
– as is often noted – in European history,
until fairly recently, ‘philosophy’ included
the physical sciences; whereas in the
Islamic world, for a long time falsafa – a
loan-word from the Greek – just meant
‘philosophy in the style of Avicenna,
Interview

accepting his ideas’ – so something much
more specific. And, of course, our own
sense of what counts as ‘philosophy’ is
likewise a product of our own time and
place. Still, I think that we could at least
say that there is a set of issues, such as the
nature of knowledge, free will, the
existence of God et cetera, which can
uncontroversially be taken as philosoph-
ical. So, if pushed, I would say that I am
basically covering the way that philo-
sophical issues have been dealt with
across times and cultures.
Your podcast path isn’t only temporal, but
also geographical, so to speak. We listen to
you speaking about philosophy in Byzan-
tium, India, Africa. Does it matter to phi-
losophy, with its claims to universality, to
have roots somewhere? And how can a place
shape a philosopher’s thoughts – if indeed it’s
true that it can?
This is absolutely crucial, in my opin-
ion. There is no such thing as a philoso-
phy or philosopher not shaped by time
and place, and anyone who denies this is
just ignoring the way that their own time
and place has shaped them. This is why I
try to devote as much attention as possi-
ble to historical context as I go along. For
example, in recent episodes I’ve talked a
lot about how things like the Reforma-
tion, the printing press, or the discovery
of the so-called ‘New World’ impacted
philosophy and the kinds of philosophical
views that were being expressed. Even
something as basic as the question of
which topics or questions a given
philosopher chooses to tackle will be
conditioned by these kinds of contextual
factors. To give an obvious example: it’s
no coincidence that Western philoso-
phers started thinking about freedom of
conscience and how to deal with diversity
of opinion around the time of the Euro-
pean wars of religion, in the sixteenth
century. Contextual influence is more
obvious in some areas of philosophy than
others: of course political philosophy
responds to historical context; but it may
be less obvious with metaphysics or epis-
temology. But you can almost always
understand any thinker better by know-
ing more about their context.
I remember you saying that one of the rea-
sons you started the podcast was that classes
Interview
Interview
on the History of Philosophy typically leaped
from one household name to another, miss-
ing out long periods of human thinking.
Could you say more about the role played by
the history of philosophy in Western univer-
sities? Would you say it’s undervalued?
It varies a lot. In Germany, where I
teach now, the history of philosophy has
traditionally been very central to philoso-
phy, whereas in some American or
British universities there has instead been
a strong focus on contemporary ‘system-
atic’ issues. I think probably nowadays,
though, the standard approach would be
to have a mix of history and contempo-
rary philosophy, with variation as to the
balance between them.
Personally, I think it would be good if
there were even more variation in the
ways philosophy is taught. I mean, one
thing I have learned from doing the pod-
cast is that there is a heck of a lot of phi-
losophy, so it’s not really possible to cover
it fully in just one department. So, it
would be nice to see, for instance, more
American departments that have a spe-
cialism in Asian philosophy, with others
focusing on Latinx philosophy, and so on.
Of course, there is some value to the idea
of having common reference points and a
language that all trained philosophers
share; but I don’t think that goal should
be pursued so relentlessly that diversity of
approach becomes impossible.
Analytic philosophy is – or was – proud of
not studying philosophy per se: “Old books
and dead philosophers don’t matter,” it was
said, “We focus on philosophical problems.”
This may lead, in my opinion, to a bird’s eye
view of philosophy, which loses much of the
creativity of the past. Do you agree, or
what’s your take on that?
I like to say that the philosophy
happening now is just the most recent
part of the history of philosophy, and
we don’t have a very good sense of
whether it’s a particularly worthwhile
part, since we have so little distance on
it. Certainly, a lot of philosophy is
being produced – more than ever, I
guess. So presumably some of it will
stand the test of time. And contrary to
what you might expect, I really like
contemporary analytic philosophy. I
have enjoyed and still enjoy having
colleagues who work in that area, and I
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 43
try to keep up to
speed on develop-
ments in their fields
insofar as I can. However,
I can’t really take it seriously
when people dismiss the history of
philosophy as uninteresting. Like, how
would you even know? Have you even
looked into, say, Nyaya epistemology,
or Mulla Sadra’s theory of modulated
existence? Do you even know what I’m
talking about? If not, then how do you
know it’s worthless? That would seem
like bluster masking willful ignorance.
Here in Brazil the teaching and research in
philosophy is mainly historical. The ‘struc-
tural method’ applied by Guéroult and
others has made a deep impression here. In
any case, it is only one way of studying the
history of philosophy. What’s yours?
This is relevant to the previous ques-
tion, since my way of studying the histo-
ry of philosophy is most definitely
informed by analytic philosophy. I am
of course not an exception to the rule
that philosophers are shaped by their
time and context!
You can see the influence of analytic
philosophy in the issues I’ve chosen to
work on in my academic research, but
also in the podcast – albeit that I have
tried hard to broaden my sense of what
counts as philosophically worthwhile.
Also, it probably shows itself in the way I
write – striving for clarity, making dis-
tinctions, focusing on arguments and
counterarguments: all that stuff one usu-
ally associates with analytic philosophy.
As we speak, you have come to Renaissance
France in the podcast. You’ll have maybe ten
more years of work before reaching our epoch.
Are you in good shape to finish the marathon?
I always just say “I have no plans to
stop anytime soon!” Since I do enjoy it
so much, and I know that people are
waiting for me to get to the excitements
of the seventeenth century and onward,
plus there are several non-European
cultures I still want to tackle, yes, I do
expect to be doing it for another decade,
and more. Let’s hope it works out! PN
• Duanne Ribeiro is a journalist and PhD
Student in Information Science. He also
graduated in Philosophy.
Brief Lives
Cicero (106-43 BC)
Hilarius Bogbinder considers the inconstant career of the most famous politician-
philosopher named after a legume.
T
he name comes from the Latin word for chickpea,
cicer. Apparently, the statesman-cum-writer’s ances-
tors had grown this plant – although more unkind
souls suggested that one ancestor had a mole shaped
like the legume on his chin. In any case, Marcus Tullius Cicero
was not an aristocrat. Rather he came from a provincial middle-
class family. He was one of the ‘new men’ – novi homines – who
entered public life in Rome to pursue a political career.
Cicero had been a student at the best schools (of oratory and
philosophy) in Athens, had returned to Rome, and had made a
name for himself as a trial lawyer. This experience catapulted him
to the forefront of public life, when he prosecuted the notoriously
corrupt former governor of Sicily, Verres, in 70 BC. Cicero’s
chances were not rated very highly, as his opponent was Quintus
Hortensius, a legal superstar who had just been elected to the Con-
sulship, the highest position in the land. Yet, against all odds, and
due to thorough preparation, Cicero won the case, paving the way
for his subsequent political career. His prosecution speeches also
contain insights that he would later make part of his political phi-
losophy, and even his metaphysical writings. It is testament to his
eloquence that John F. Kennedy lifted his famous line ‘I am a
Berliner’ from Cicero’s line ‘I am a Roman citizen’: civis Romanus
sum.
In his youth Cicero learned Greek, the language of the edu-
cated elite in the Roman Republic – so much so that in fact Julius
Caesar never said the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’ to his killer Brutus, but
‘And you too, child?’ in Greek (Suetonius, The Lives of Twelve
Caesars, p.82). But that’s another story. The one I’m telling here
is about the man who did everything in his power to prevent
Julius Caesar from overturning the Republican constitution that
had existed in Rome from about 500 BC to 49 BC. He failed.
Cicero Writing & Thinking
If you studied Latin at school, chances are that you’ve read one or
two of Cicero’s speeches, since he did more than anyone to trans-
form the local Roman vernacular into a world language. The his-
torian Jacob Burckhardt wrote: “From the fourteenth century,
Cicero was recognised universally as the purest model of prose”
(The Civilisation of the Renaissance, p.151, 1860). But his influence
extended further than just his style. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
is famous in ethics for his so-called Categorical Imperative: ‘‘Act
only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time,
will that it should become a universal law’’ (Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, p.30). But Kant was happy to admit that he
was inspired by Cicero’s mantra from De Officiis (or On Duties),
“We must act in such a way that we attempt nothing contrary to
universal nature” (De Officiis, p.43, 44 BC).
While Kant could hardly contain his reverence for the
44 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Roman, his younger compatriot G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) was
more cynical, and for good reason. While Cicero was an eminent
moralist, he was not exactly moral. Hegel commented, “Cicero
(and what fine things he has written about ‘honestum’ and ‘deco-
rum’ in his De Officiis) could divorce his wife in order to pay his
debts out of his new wife’s dowry” (Philosophy of Right, p.217).
Hardly honourable; but what you would expect from a trial
lawyer? Certainly one could accuse Cicero of inconsistency,
although he tried to defend himself against this charge: in a letter
to a colleague, he noted, somewhat lamely, “Unchanging consis-
tency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in a great
statesman” (Letters to His Friends, p.78).
As a writer Cicero was above all a moral philosopher, though he
also dabbled in metaphysics. We know Cicero mainly as a writer on
rhetoric and politics, and often overlook that Cicero was an also an
able metaphysician whose works influenced philosophers in the
Middle Ages. For instance, in his main work De Re Publica (54-51
BC), the section on ‘Scipio’s Dream’ established the cosmology
uncritically adopted by Dante Algieri in the Divine Comedy.This
divides the universe into nine spheres, with the Earth in the inner-
most circle and God at the apex. Cicero, a poetic soul, even
described the music of the spheres. According to the theory of Musica
Universalis as articulated by him, “Men by imitating this harmony
on stringed instruments and in song, have gained for themselves a
return to this region” (De Re Publica, p.273). The idea of the music
of the spheres became commonplace in Medieval Europe, and
continued to inspire writers from the philosopher Boethius (477-
524) to the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). The latter
completely adopted the Roman’s cosmological theory wholesale
in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1597). But Cicero’s metaphysi-
cal speculations didn’t stop with the music of the spheres. Rather
like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Cicero also speculated that
“the first cause has no beginning, for everything originates from
the first cause”, and since “it never had a beginning, it will never
have an end” (De Re Publica, p.281).
More Choice Words From Cicero
As a student in Athens, Cicero had idolised Plato (427-347 BC),
and this admiration never ceased. He consciously mirrored the
Athenian master in the titles of his books De Re Publica and De
Legibus (On Law, 49 BC). The former followed the structure of
Plato’s Republic, too: beginning with justice, then the origins of
the best city and the underlying philosophical principles, and cul-
minating in metaphysics and the afterlife. De Legibus likewise
mirrored Plato’s Laws. And both were written in dialogue form,
too. But as much as he revered the Athenian master, Cicero did
not copy Plato’s philosophical system. Still less did he reach the
same conclusions, and certainly not in his political philosophy.

For starters, Cicero did not advocate rule by philosopher-kings
as Plato did, but proposed a mixed constitution with monarchi-
cal, aristocratic, and democratic elements. Using a musical anal-
ogy, Cicero advocated a political system with a polyphony of
voices: “what musicians call harmony in song is concord in a
city”, that is, “the proportionate blending of unlike tones” –
namely those of “the upper, middle and lower classes” (De Re
Publica, p.69). Music of the polis, perhaps?
Much has been made of his mouthpiece Scipio’s assertion in De
Re Publica that ‘‘res publica populi est’’ – loosely translated, ‘‘public
affairs belong to the people’’ (p.39), and how this is apparently con-
tradicted by the assertion later in the book that if “compelled to
choose one unmixed form, I would choose kingship” (p.54). Yet
the contradiction is easily explained, as kings should be elected
(p.31). In modern language, Cicero wanted a presidential system;
but he thought that this was only possible to establish under ideal
circumstances. In practice, he argued on the basis of his experience
that “the absolute rule of one man will easily and quickly degener-
ate into tyranny” (p.44). Sadly, that’s evidently still true today.
In language somewhat reminiscent of Aristotle’s defence of
government by the many (ie democracy), Cicero advocated a
political system that was the combination of many little wisdoms:
“If people would maintain their rights they say that no form of
government would be superior either in liberty or happiness, for
if they themselves would be masters of the laws and the courts, of
war and peace, and of international agreements, this government
alone can… rightly be called a commonwealth” (De Re Publica,
Brief Lives
Marcus
Tullius
Cicero
pp.74-75). Cicero was adamant that he wanted checks and bal-
ances, and that he would not give “the title of king… to a man
who is greedy for personal power and absolute authority, a man
who lords it over an oppressed people” (p.77).
Having written about the ideal state, and, in De Legibus, about
the second best constitution, towards the end of his life Cicero
summed up his lessons in De Officiis or On Duties (44 BC), a book
that more or less consciously mirrored Plato’s Politikós (The
Statesman). Reportedly written in a matter of weeks, On Duties
summarised what is honourable (Book I); elaborated on what is
to your own advantage (Book II); and sought how to reconcile the
differences (Book III). To be honourable, no one “should be so
taken up in the search of truth, as to neglect the more necessary
duties of an active life” (p.9).
As a politician, Cicero held the maxim that “a governor should
endeavour to make himself loved and not feared” (p.81). Readers
who are interested in the impact of great books will note that cen-
turies later, in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli deliberately turned this
maxim upside down: “it is difficult for one person to be both
feared and loved, and when a choice has to be made, it is safer to
be feared” (The Prince, p.80). Modern political philosopher John
Rawls talks about a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between principles
and intuition (A Theory of Justice, p.44, 1971). Cicero in some way
foreshadowed this by noting that it was the statesman’s “duty to
determine his choice [of action] if that which seems useful and
expedient for him should come into competition with what is
honest” (De Officiis, p.165).
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 45
 Cicero The Politician
Philosophical Haiku
Despite his skills as a writer and thinker, above all, Cicero was a prac-
ticing politician, and was elected in 64 BC to the highest office of
Consul. We still have his brother Quintus’s campaign manual for
the election, which was published as A Handbook of Electioneering.
The brother was pragmatic, and a bit cynical. A successful

PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI BY SANTI DI TITO

politician himself, he counselled that a politician, “must promise
his help to all, but give it to those in whom he expected he is
making the best investment” (Handbook, p.437). This advice
became fateful for Marcus Cicero. When Cataline, a self-
aggrandizing demagogue, lost the election in 63 BC, he claimed
the election was stolen, and urged his supporters to attack the
Capitol, under circumstances not unlike what happened in the
Capitol in Washington DC over two thousand years later. It was
on this occasion that Cicero uttered his famous lament, ‘O tem-
pora, o mores’ – ‘Oh what times, what customs!’ (In Catilinam,
p.12). He warned that the attack could undermine popular gov-
ernment, but was ignored. So, acting rather swiftly, and perhaps
without carefully considering the consequences, as Consul he
ordered the execution of some of the protesters. But the legality
of this move was dubious, and Cicero was exiled in 58 BC.
In the years following Cicero spent time in Greece, where he
began to write his longer works, including De Re Publica and On
The Orator. He was allowed to return to Rome; but after Caesar
gained power, he was forced to retire. He tried to make a brief
comeback after Caesar’s assassination, but fell out with Mark
Antony. He spent his remaining time writing his last great work,
the ethical treatise, De Officiis, and other shorter works, such as
On Friendship, On Old Age, and On The Nature of the Gods.
Like many philosophers with a political career (the Irish-born
Edmund Burke comes to mind), Cicero was a mediocre public
servant, and as undistinguished as a politician as he was
formidable as a writer.
The End of Politics & Philosophy
The great rhetorician asked rhetorically towards the end of his
life, “Can we sufficiently express our sense of obligation we owe
to philosophy?” (On Old Age, p.218, 44 BC). Cicero was not as
great a philosopher as Plato or Aristotle, he conceded; but he was
rather relaxed about this:
“It is no disgrace for one striving for first place to stop at second or
third. Among poets… there is room not only for Homer. And in phi-
losophy, I am sure, the magnificence of Plato did not deter Aristotle of
writing, and nor did the later, with all his breadth of knowledge, put an
end to the studies of others.” (On The Orator, p.311).
In any case, Cicero came to a sad and violent end at the hands
of a contract killer hired by Mark Antony. He tried to hide
amongst the household garbage when the assassin Herennius
came to his house. The rest is recounted by Plutarch, a famous
biographer: “He looked steadfastly at his slayers, his head all
squalid and unkept, and his face wasted with anxiety, so that most
of those that stood by covered their faces while Herennius was
slaying him” (Plutarch, Parallel Lives VII, p.207).
© HILARIUS BOGBINDER 2022
Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born translator and writer who
studied theology at Oxford University
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
(1469–1527)
Better to be feared
Than seek friendship through kindness.
A prince has no friends
T oday his name is associated with all that’s dirty, underhanded and
despicable in politics. We even call the Devil ‘Old Nick’ after him. But
Niccolo Machiavelli was actually a really nice guy. As Rousseau said of
him, he was ‘an honest man and a good citizen’ – and given Rousseau
didn’t think much of anyone, that’s high praise. So why the low reputation?
Born in Florence at yet another time of upheaval, tumult, and war in
Italy, Machiavelli witnessed first-hand the ways of man, and he wasn’t
impressed. By the age of twenty-nine he held a leading position in the
Florentine government, and so got to know some of the movers and
shakers of the time, including Cesare Borgia, the Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian, and Pope Julius II.
Matters turned sour for Machiavelli when the Medicis invaded and
reclaimed control of Florence in 1512. The following year Machiavelli was
accused of conspiracy, imprisoned, and tortured. He refused to admit to
anything and was released, after which he retired to his estate to contem-
plate politics and rehabilitate his dislocated shoulders. Reflecting on all
he’d seen, he put his thoughts into his short book Il Principe (The Prince,
1532). In this work he said that although it might be an admirably optimistic
ideal that rulers should be seen as the embodiment of virtue, the reality is
such that any ruler who actually is the embodiment of virtue will be gone
before dinner time – to be replaced by someone more realistic about pol-
itics. This isn’t something to be happy about, said Machiavelli, but there’s
nothing to be gained in denying it, and everything to be lost. People are,
Machiavelli lamented, ‘‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers’’ who ‘‘shun
danger and are greedy for profit.’’ Things haven’t changed much, then.
© TERENCE GREEN 2022
Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in
Eastbourne, New Zealand.

46 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023


Cat’s-Eye World View
DEAR EDITOR: Concerning human-cat
bonding and metaphysics (Issue 152), I
have three cats: Nala, the prima donna;
Nick the magnificent beast, and the all-
knowing oracle, Walter. I read to them
from Philosophy Now with the intent of
imparting the sage wisdom of human
scholars. Nonetheless, they react as if
I’m absolutely inconsequential and pos-
sessing not even a hint of reality. They
know the food and water I provide for
them are real because such sustains them
physically, and the food tastes good.
Beyond that I’m no more real to them
than the dark interstices of deep space.
It’s no wonder ancient Egyptians wor-
shipped cats as gods. Cats seem to have
figured out the essence of the universe:
what is real is real, what isn’t real is also
real, unless, of course, it’s something
else entirely – which hints of something
between the concepts of real/not real; or
if not between then, undoubtedly,
beyond. So sayeth the all-knowing Wal-
ter. (He tends not to explain himself.)
Only cats fundamentally know and
completely understand this. Therefore,
it is way beneath them to participate in
the academic world of ‘publish or per-
ish’, where discussions of what is real
and what is not sustain a huge propor-
tion of the pulp and paper industry –
which has no relevance whatsoever to
the entire feline population of the world.
According to Nala the prima donna –
who really isn’t much interested in philos-
ophy – reality is a comfortable place to
sleep, and provides good food to eat (she
avoids fine wine) and an occasional willing
partner with whom to procreate. She
doesn’t know that she’s been spayed, so
eating and sleeping are for her enough
reality, for this time around at least.
JESS MERRILL
FOLEY, AL
(Not) Theo Logically Yours
DEAR EDITOR: It is always interesting to
consider the ontological argument for
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
God (as expressed by Reverend Dr Peter
Mullen in Issue 152), since it raises a
point of logic; and this subject is, per-
haps counterintuitively, in some ways
quite contentious. This might explain
why the ontological argument, after all
this time, still has legs, so to speak.
The argument says God, by defini-
tion, is the supreme being, and this must
entail His existence, otherwise His
unique supremacy would not be. We
may conclude from this that if God
exists, then God exists. Therefore God
exists? No. The point of logic, ‘If P, then
P, therefore P’, is simply saying that if P
were the case, it would be the case. But
this in no way suggests that P is actually
true. Of course, this doesn’t show that
God doesn’t exist: it just shows that this
purely logical argument, independent of
other contingent considerations, couldn’t
have any hope of proving His existence.
PAUL TISSIER
BRIGHTON COLLEGE
DEAR EDITOR: Following on from PN
152, I believe that before discussing the
question of God’s existence, one should
first attempt to define the concept of
‘God’. When I read philosophy at
Swansea in the Sixties I was inspired by
the lectures of D.Z. Philips. He was a
Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion
who rejected a supernatural concept of
God but defended religious discourse as
being a language game with its own
internal conceptual understanding and
logic. That model entailed trying to
make sense of religious concepts by giv-
ing them a new content, such as being
about universal human love instead of an
external God. The problem is though
that most of those who use religious
terms don’t recognize this as what they
mean when they talk of God. They
think of God as a being one can talk to,
and who can understand one. ‘Our
Father, who art in heaven’ lives some-
where – a place one hopes one can come
to when one’s body dies.
December 2022/January 2023 l Philosophy Now 47
In earlier times, when one didn’t have
scientific explanations of many natural
phenomena, it was natural to use super-
natural explanations. This isn’t the case
any longer. Supernatural explanations of
natural phenomena are superfluous. So,
what is left of the concept of God?
Many thinkers believe that one can-
not find meaning in the idea of an exter-
nal God. To them the idea of a God
understood as a consciousness one can
communicate with, but without a physi-
cal body, indeed, a conscious being with-
out all the ingredients that are a precon-
dition for a human consciousness, is
untenable. What is left? To me, it seems
that the concept of God becomes vacu-
ous. Denying the God concept is,
though, not to deny that one can wonder
about the world. It does not entail that
value judgements become empty. They
still have the same weight they always
had. Morality doesn’t need (and cannot
have) an external justification. Nothing
of substance changes.
RICHARD CHALLIS BOUSFIELD
COPENHAGEN
DEAR EDITOR: The worst day of my life
was the day my parents told me there was
no Santa Claus. At the age of 7, I had
some difficulty taking it in, and it seemed
to me that without Santa Claus Christmas
itself had come to a dark and sudden end.
But my perspective changed in my
teenage years when I had the opportunity
to study symbolism in mathematics, litera-
ture, and poetry. By the time I was 17, I
could see that Santa Claus was the person-
ification of a certain spirit of generosity
and kindness that manifests itself most
clearly at Christmas. No need to find
proofs of Santa Claus’s existence. It was
right there in my face, and I realized that
by adjusting my definitions I could believe
in Santa Claus on a whole new level.
The God articles in Issue 152 of Phi-
losophy Now reminded me of the thought
processes I struggled through in my
younger years. As a theology student in
Letters
my early twenties I was fascinated with
the Proofs of Aquinas, which seemed to
be based on impeccable logic. And
Anselm’s ontological proof, though a bit
fuzzy to me at first, did seem to fit the
bill if God was defined as ‘that which is
greater than anything else conceivable’.
Theology led me through many theories
about God’s existence; but it was my
undergraduate program in Philosophy of
Religion that changed everything for me.
Fowler’s stages of faith development
allowed me out of the box.
Until I was introduced to Fowler’s the-
ory, it never occurred to me that faith was
a process. Like most people, I assumed
that either you believe something or you
don’t. Fowler’s stage 3, the ‘Synthetic-
Conventional’ stage, seems to be where
most people are at. This stage, usually
associated with adolescence and early
adulthood, is characterised by a sense of
identity with an ideological group and
unquestioned faith in authority figures.
People at this stage frequently retain their
literal belief in religious stories and moral
rules, and many remain at this level of
thinking throughout their lives.
The articles presented in Issue 152
have clearly moved on to Stage 4. This is
the ‘Reflective’ stage, characterised by
strong reliance on logical processes and
rationality. But as long as the writers are
searching for proofs of God’s existence
they have not yet escaped from the ‘box’.
It was only when I gave my attention
to Issue 152’s Fiction section that I found
a character who managed to achieve the
final stage of faith development. Jeffrey
Wald’s professor, with the help of an
enlightened student, was eventually able
to see God as the encompassment of
nature, the universal cosmic energy of
which we are all a part.
JOHN BROWNRIDGE
ONTARIO
DEAR EDITOR: I read Lawrence Evans’
article, ‘Aristotle’s Guide to Living Well,’
in Issue 151 and found many references to
‘God’. Capitalizing ‘god’ in relation to
Aristotle is a little misleading, I think.
Aristotle’s concept, divine nous [intellect]
was wholly independent of modern refer-
ences to ‘God’ except, perhaps, in the
most fundamental sense, as the unmoved
mover. “Aligning the revolutions in our
head... with the harmonies and revolutions
of the universe” is to say that individuals
should think like the divine nous who put
48 Philosophy Now l December 2022/January 2023
those revolutions into motion. This is dis-
tinct from ‘assimilat[ing] our thoughts to
God’s own’ as suggested by Evans. There
is a distinction between thinking in the
same manner, and thinking the same
thoughts. So I find the author’s conclu-
sion, “what it truly means to live well is to
become like God in the contemplation of
eternal truths” misplaced. It seems to me
that Aristotle exhorts us to think in a man-
ner which seeks harmony and revolution
in the universe, not to think the thoughts
that God thinks – which would in any case
be impossible to identify, and may not
even have meaning to a human.
WILLIAM FISHBURNE
GREENBELT, MD
Foucault’s Evil Relativism
DEAR EDITOR: Roy William’s ‘Brief Life’
of Michel Foucault in Issue 152 was all
adulation and no critique, for a man
whose ideas demand critique, even con-
demnation. Foucault denied all objective
moral principles, and so could not decide
whether rape should be criminalized,
because he believed that law was oppres-
sive and lawlessness was freedom. He
advocated lawlessness in order to free
humans from all a priori limits, especially
concerning sexual relations. In fact, he
advocated legalizing pedophilia through
the abolition of age-of-consent laws, and
called for the release of three convicted
pedophiles after three years. Whatever
Foucault’s achievements (and I deem him
horribly overrated), these ugly aspects of
his philosophy should be addressed.
DR DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS
DENVER SEMINARY
Time & Everything Else Slips Away
DEAR EDITOR: With regard to Issue
152’s mini feature on Time, could time
be the simple running down of the Uni-
verse, or increase in its entropy, its disor-
der? Entropy is often called ‘Time’s
Arrow’. We always observe entropy
increase: a cup falls and breaks, never
rises and reassembles. But systems that
don’t change (a hydrogen atom in a rock)
exhibit no time, nor does a totally disor-
dered system. There is a cosmic speed
limit to all such changes as falling cups;
the speed of light. As you approach it,
time goes more and more slowly for you.
If light’s speed was infinite, everything
would happen here and now and the uni-
verse would have zero length in all
dimensions, space and time. With a finite
speed for light we can still have self-
determination, as we can choose whether
to drop that cup or to expend energy
holding it up. So, intriguingly, life locally
reverses entropy – in its youthful stage;
old age is when the organism can no
longer keep reducing its internal
entropy; and death is when rising inter-
nal entropy overwhelms all the body’s
entropy-reduction mechanisms. How-
ever, outside the bounds (or the skin) of
lifeforms, entropy must rise. Even more
intriguingly, some scientists propose that
information is a form of energy. This is a
kind of negative entropy, since you can
reverse entropy with energy. Maybe
reversing entropy with info is what
humans are here for, as we are the only
species we know of that can systematically
create information.
DR HILLARY J. SHAW
NEWPORT, SHROPSHIRE
More Metaphysics & Mysticism
DEAR EDITOR: I was intrigued by Kevin
Novis’s article ‘Was Spinoza Actually An
Atheist’ in Issue 151. Novis is correct
that this depends how one defines ‘God’.
Most theists believe that God is external
to the world or nature. If that was not
the case, how could God create the
world? But Spinoza did not believe that
God could create anything, as that would
imply a deficiency in God, which
Spinoza would not accept.
This unconventional use of ‘God’
indicates that the theist/atheist paradigm
is not the best way of understanding
Spinoza. A better model would be to link
these ideas to top-down panpsychism, in
which the world has a spiritual element
or divine will/consciousness which per-
meates everything (an analogy would be
a beehive which has an awareness in
which the individual bees partake).
Brian Morris’s article on Daisetzu
Suzuki in Issue 151 comes closer to
Spinoza’s perspective when Morris dis-
cusses the ‘absolute oneness’ of things as
the ‘divine mind’ or a ‘cosmic conscious-
ness’ that saturates and infuses everything
with spiritual significance. This is also a
good definition of top-down panpsychism
(in contrast to bottom-up panpsychism, in
which spirituality is an emergent property,
which grows and develops as the world
becomes more complex). Perhaps a more
illuminating article about Spinoza could
compare his ideas to Eastern mysticism.
RUSSELL BERG, MANCHESTER

DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for the inter-
esting article on Daisetzu Suzuki by
Brian Morris in PN 151 – interesting also
for what is omitted. I strongly object to
the opinion of Prof Morris that Zen is
‘detached from morality and politics’, as
he puts it in the last paragraph on the
Absolute Self. For instance, I think fas-
cism and Zen are mutually exclusive, at
least as I understand the fascist regimes
that ruled Germany and Italy. Prof. Mor-
ris also does not mention the Four Noble
Truths which are at the core of Bud-
dhism, including Zen. The fourth Noble
Truth contains the Noble Eightfold
Path, which you could compare to the
Ten Commandments of Judaism and
Christianity. The Noble Eightfold Path
has clear recommendations on how to
live that no fascist would accept, as I’m
sure Suzuki would have agreed.
In my opinion Zen is, among others
things, a worldview that refers to every-
thing, including morality and politics. I
would not however call Zen a philosophy,
because it aims also at what lies beyond
words and concepts. The practice of
Zazen is most important where you just
sit (Shikantaza) and are.
So reality is one concern – form and
emptiness another. Both make up our
existence. Many Zen adepts around the
world chant the words of the ‘Heart of
Great Perfect Wisdom’ Sutra: “Form
itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.”
As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it in the last
sentence of his Tractatus: “Whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must remain
silent.”
LÚÐVÍK ECKARDT GÚSTAFSSON
REYKJAVIK
DEAR EDITOR: In his interview with
Annika Loebig about the connections
between morality and happiness (Issue
152), Nat Rutherford states, “you recog-
nise that you don’t know yourself that
well...” and suggests that this realisation is
‘quite beneficial’. The understanding that
we don’t know ourselves that well gets us
closer to the Buddhist concept of ‘no
self’ (Anatta/Anatman). If ego allows the
accommodation of this concept, then the
question of how to be happy dissolves,
since there is no one to be happy. There
is no fixed, constant thing to be at all.
Happiness passes through – ‘a nice by-
product’, as Rutherford remarks. It is an
epiphenomenal nomad that not only
defies definition but is lost the moment
there is an attempt to grasp or own it.
After all, who is doing the grasping?
ANDREW LEWIS
BLACKWOOD, WALES
Seeking Principles In Ancient Greece
DEAR EDITOR: I was studying Aristotle’s
critical writings about the pre-Socratic
philosophers while reading the writings of
Aristotle and other Greeks in Issue 151.
Aristotle’s criticisms follow two paths.
Firstly, he tells us about the pre-Socratic
period directly, and accurately. Aristotle
also uses the philosophers of the pre-
Socratic period as a tool and a basis for his
own system of thought. By discussing with
them, evaluating them, he forms his own
thought structures.
Until Socrates, apart from the
Sophists, there was perhaps, no one who
focused on understanding society and
human beings. But before Socrates, the
arkhe, the elusive fundamental principle
of things, was paramount. So we are
faced with another dilemma. Should one
know oneself first, or should one first
know the arkhe? Which one can be a
source and which a response to the
other? And if we still haven’t found
answers to the questions Anaximander or
Zeno of Elea were focusing on, can we
really say that we have made any
progress?
FIRAT KAZANCI
IZMIR, TURKEY
Highly Cultivated
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 151 Raymond
Tallis claims to “embrace Darwinism,
and yet acknowledge[s] the distinctive
nature of humanity: that of finding a bio-
logical account of what has set us on the
road to becoming distant from biology.”
In fact, cultural evolution does account
even for this nature. It was two million
years after the evolution of the grasping
hand that the first civilizations arose. It
has taken only a few thousand years for
cultural evolution to create the ‘great dis-
tance’ of our thought from out biology.
Also, his statement that “millions of
years of evolution of non-human pri-
mates haven’t delivered anything more
impressive than the use of stones to crack
nuts” is a misunderstanding of evolution.
It’s as if he’s reproaching chimpanzees
for failing to have become human. Evo-
lutionary changes are only made in
response to the need to adapt to a partic-
ular environment. Evidently, chim-
December 2022/January 2023 l Philosophy Now 49
Letters
panzees were successful in doing so, hav-
ing survived in their environment for ten
million years (compared to the one mil-
lion years humans have existed, whilst
bringing extinction to many other crea-
tures). Stone tools were first used by our
ancestors 1.5 million years ago. Had it
given only a slight advantage to the indi-
vidual who first used a stone to crack a
nut, the benefit would have been imme-
diate. The advantage of that discovery
would then have been copied by those
who were able to recognize it, introduc-
ing a new kind of evolution. That and
similar innovations that could be learned
would have spread rapidly throughout a
tool-making culture. This is a different
kind of evolution, changing our relation-
ship with the environment from a passive
to an active one. Biological adaptions
would then have focused on the brain
greatly increasing its size.
REG BEACH
PENZANCE, CORNWALL
Beware the Wrath
DEAR EDITOR: The article on gender by
F.J. Camacho Jr in PN 150 was cogent,
balanced, precise, and extremely well-
written (unlike the impenetrable quote by
Judith Butler in the first para). Camacho
is listed as a writer rather than a university
academic, so students will not be able to
picket university authorities demanding
his sacking because he is ‘worse than
Hitler’ for slightly questioning their
orthodoxy. So upon whom will the
activist gauleiters vent their wrath? The
obvious target is your good self, the Edi-
tor, for having the audacity to publish
such dangerous propaganda. I await news
of your replacement in due course.
TERRY HYDE
YELVERTON
Resounding Echoes
DEAR EDITOR: In Letters, PN 151,
Michael Shaw notes that Ukrainian
philosopher Pylyp Orlyk is a character in
Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, and challenges
us: “Does any other philosopher feature
in an opera?” Well, yes they do. I’m sur-
prised if no-one else has pointed out that
the stoic Seneca appears in Monteverdi’s
Coronation of Poppea. And for an extra
point, Leibniz is mocked as ‘Doctor Pan-
gloss’ in Leonard Bernstein’s musicalifi-
cation of Voltaire’s Candide. Any more?
MARTIN PARKINSON
BRISTOL

Books
Seven Ways of Looking
at Pointless Suffering
by Scott Samuelson
WHEN INDIE BAND The
Smiths were still
together, and I, falling
apart, was listening wistfully to their records,
I remember always feeling run over by their
first album’s last track, ‘Suffer Little Chil-
dren’. A funeral march of mournful chords
and lyrical melancholy, the song recounts
the serial murders in the 1960s of five chil-
dren in Manchester, some of whose bodies
were found buried in the local moors. They
had been sexually assaulted.
For many, any attempt to make sense of
pointless suffering must first begin with the
suffering of innocents. Scott Samuelson
begins his own ruminations in Seven Ways of
Looking at Pointless Suffering with his
witnessing, as a young boy, a friend being
struck and killed by a speeding car. “The
suffering of children,” he writes, “sharply
illustrates the gap between how the world is
and how we think it should be” (p.1).
This divide between reality and desire is
especially wide for those who must bear their
own children’s suffering, as we see so
poignantly in Michelangelo’s Pieta, but also
terrifyingly in a figure Michelangelo helped
to dig up: that of Laocoön and his two sons
being tortured together. Laocoön (whose
impassioned face appears on the cover of this
book), along with his children, was set upon
by sea serpents for having gotten his nose in
the business of the gods. After warning his
comrades about the ruse of the Trojan horse,
he was condemned by Minerva to suffer
terribly, for the crime of having acted virtu-
ously. The famed ancient sculpture of this,
found in 1506, gives exquisite, excruciating
expression to the legend. Laocoön’s agony
is akin to Christ’s, but he’s entirely without
hope for redemption, salvation, reward, or
justice. His suffering, it’s fair to say, is point-
less. Like his innocent sons, Laocoön is a
marbled flux of sinewy resolve and tortured
resignation. The image is compelling, writes
Samuelson, “because it crystallizes a funda-
mental, perhaps the fundamental, aspect of
the human situation. The story it tells is
about how suffering presents itself as point-
50 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Doug Phillips arms us against the slings and arrows, as he
tries to find a point to pointless suffering, while Chad Trainer
explores the politics of fear with Martha Nussbaum.
less” (p.114). Do the right thing, do the
wrong thing, it doesn’t much matter in the
end: you and I will suffer all the same; and
so too will our children.
No Grief, No Good?
How, then, asks Samuelson, are we “to relate
to this bitter fact of the universe?” (p.114).
Given the inevitability of suffering, what, if
anything, can we do about it? What should
we do about it?
One thing’s for sure: we, like Lady
Macbeth, can’t ever wash our hands clean of
the pain. “For twenty centuries,” observed
Albert Camus, “the sum total of evil has not
diminished in the world” – which is to say, the
damned spot of human evil won’t ever out,
because it’s forever in. For example, the advent
of mobile phones has greatly increased our
access to information, but evidently at a high
cost to our mental health. For many people,
screen addiction means increased rates of anxi-
ety, loneliness, and depression, never mind
diminished attention spans infecting whole
fidgeting generations. As Samuelson puts it,
suffering “can never be eradicated, and when
we do try to eradicate it, we generate whole
new forms of evil” (p.221). Misery and pain
get endlessly recirculated, exchanged, kicked
down the road, or put off for a while, before
boomeranging right back.
Some thinkers, such as Hegel, believe that
no matter the sum of suffering, the good will
always outweigh the bad, and that everything
works out best in the end – a theory Schopen-
hauer thought easily testable by polling the
Michelangelo’s
Pieta
respective feelings of two animals, one of
which is eating the other. Regardless, we, like
Laocoön, live in the gap between how things
are and how we think they should be: in what
the poet Keats, in an 1819 letter, calls ‘the
Vale of Soul-Making’. Occasionally suicidal
– and in any case condemned to an early,
tubercular death – Keats is apparently
desperate to convince himself of “how neces-
sary a World of Pains and troubles is to school
an Intelligence and make it a soul. A Place
where the heart must feel and suffer in a thou-
sand diverse ways!”
Samuelson agrees. Without such a prov-
ing ground as human life, wonders Samuel-
son, what opportunities would we have to
realize our humanity? What need would we
have for all those fields of inquiry and belief
– science, technology, history, philosophy,
poetry, art, religion –that enrich and give
meaning to life? For Samuelson, as for
Keats, “pointless suffering is where the jour-
ney of meaning-making begins” (p.4).
But make no mistake: such meaning-
making comes with a cost. The Old Testa-
ment’s book of Ecclesiastes, which deals with
human suffering, calculated the price of
wisdom to be grief. And truth, insists the
Greek tragic playwright Aeschylus, is some-
thing we must suffer into. To have it other-
wise would be “a suicidal wish,” warns
Samuelson: “No evil, no us” (p.105).
But whatever greater good or cosmic
purpose we might divine or rationalize for
our suffering, we, like Jake Barnes in
Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises
Book Reviews

(1926), still want to know how to live in it.
“Maybe if you found out how to live in it,”
says Barnes, “you learned from that what it
was all about.”
This ultimately is Samuelson’s project.
Nietzsche wrote “What really arouses
indignation against suffering is not suffering
as such but the senselessness of suffering”
(The Genealogy of Morals, 1887)). He also
believed “if we possess our why of life we can
put up with almost any how” (Twilight of the
Idols , 1889). Taking his cue from Nietzsche,
Samuelson is also on a quest for meaning,
for discovering what it’s all about: “this book
is largely about how people have found a
point in suffering: how artists have found in
it the inspiration for our essential works of
art, how spiritual leaders have found in it a
road to God, how philosophers have found
in it atonement with nature and training for
our fundament virtues” (p.4).
Striking Attitudes to Suffering
Toward this goal of meaning-making, in the
first half of his book Samuelson offers ‘Three
Modern Ways of Looking at Pointless
Suffering’, with John Stuart Mill, Hannah
Arendt, and Friedrich Nietzsche as his
guides. In the second half, he puts forth ‘Four
Perennial Ways of Looking at Pointless
Suffering’ by way of Job, Epictetus, Confu-
cius, and (most fascinatingly to me) Sidney
Bechet, a famed clarinetist who played and
wrote the blues as passionately as anyone.
Bechet is the expositor par excellence of what
Samuelson calls the blues understanding of
Book Reviews
“confronting suffering, living in relation to it,
doing battle against it, and ultimately coming
to terms with it” (p.215). This understanding
informs the whole of Samuelson’s study, from
front cover to final page, but especially in
those passages in which he draws upon his
experiences of teaching philosophy to
inmates at the Oakdale Prison in Iowa, many
of whom were incarcerated for life.
After Covid, lockdown, and now with the
threat of military escalation hanging over the
world, we’re all in need of blues understand-
ing, now as much as ever. Although Samuel-
son’s book went to press before Covid-19
reared its ugly head, his philosophical quest
for how to live remains pressing in the age of
plague, when suffering, like the falling snow
at the close of Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’
(1914) is ‘general all over’. Of course, suffer-
ing is and has always been general all over:
it’s constitutive of our earthly condition, at
least until further notice. But in cutting us off
from easily procured entertainments and
distractions (never mind from our work, our
friends, our routines, and our routine busy-
ness), the pandemic put us face-to-face with
the point of our existence – or one might
rather say, the pointlessness of our suffering.
In so doing, Covid-19 confronts us with
Schopenhauer’s sardonic conditional: “If the
immediate and direct purpose of life is not
suffering then our existence is the most ill-
adapted to its purpose in the world” (On the
Suffering of the World, 1850).
Rather like Freud, whose practice it was
to help deeply miserable people readjust
Laocoön & sons at
the pet shop
December 2022/January 2023
Books
themselves into a life of ordinary unhappi-
ness, Samuelson wants to help us rethink our
understanding of suffering so that we not
only become better adapted to its pointless-
ness, but perhaps even may overcome it. We
might, for example, strive with Mill to alle-
viate all debilitating forms of pointless
suffering as best we can, while at the same
time recognizing, in Samuelson’s words,
that a “genuinely human existence requires
a structure of death, suffering, and freedom”
(p.109). As Mill discovered for himself – he
had a nervous breakdown at a young age –
vulnerability, conflict, and struggle are
necessary for achieving the ancient Greek
ideal he prized above all, that of eudaimonia
or self-flourishing. Nietzsche, whose own
indebtedness to the ancient Greeks is well-
known, also thought suffering necessary to
all that’s good in life, whereas its avoidance
is a far worse fate – in Dostoevsky’s term,
making one unworthy of suffering. It means
dooming oneself to mediocrity, to atrophy-
ing into Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, who, in
making himself comfortable demands noth-
ing higher of himself, ever. To circumvent
such a fate, “Nietzsche encourages us not to
tranquilize ourselves,” says Samuelson, “but
to embrace life to the fullest, which means
to embrace the suffering that’s inseparable
from life” (p.59).
Pushing the Poles Together
To return once more to the duel between
Laocoön and the sea serpents: this figure of
pointless suffering, claims Samuelson,
embodies our own existential condition, while
giving us an example of how we might live in
it. Like Laocoön, we have a paradoxical obli-
gation when it comes to our own duels in life.
Samuelson brings this paradox to the fore
with his book’s epigraph, which is a passage
taken from James Baldwin’s closing remarks
in his book Notes of a Native Son (1955). Chan-
neling Keats’ negative capability, Baldwin
makes the case that if we’re not to fall into
despair then we must hold two contradictory
ideas in our head at once. The first is to accept
“life as it is, and men as they are”, including
that “injustice is commonplace.” At the same
time, insists Baldwin, “one must never, in
one’s own life, accept these injustices as
commonplace but must fight them with all
one’s strength.”
Throughout his book Samuelson attends
to the same basic paradox: we must strive to
fix what afflicts us with all our energy and
ingenuity, while at the same time facing what
we cannot completely remedy, ameliorate,
eradicate, or forget suffering. Consider for
● Philosophy Now 51
 Books
example the intractable fact of death; in
Larkin’s words, the “sure extinction” which
“we travel to / And shall be lost in always”
(Abade, 1977). For medical doctors, death is
the enemy they’ve sworn to fight, but death
– their own, as well as their patients’ – is
something they, like we, must also accept.
And while we often try to forget what we
can’t fix by taking refuge in whatever escape
or facile happiness comes our way (“despair’s
greatest hiding place”, warns Kierkegaard),
we can’t hide forever. Sooner or later we
must face facts. Samuel Beckett, a great
chronicler of suffering, put it this way: “a
man like me cannot forget, in his evasions,
what it is he evades” (Molloy. Malone. Dies The
Unnamable, 1955). As for the brute fact of our
own mortality that other literary Samuel,
Johnson, says it “concentrates the mind
wonderfully.” We might even say, after
Wallace Stevens, that ‘Death is the mother
of beauty’ (Harmonium, 1923).
Indeed, for Samuelson, there can be no
growth, no progress, no enlightenment, no
good, no truth, no room for others, no hope
for self-overcoming, no authenticity, no
beauty or its appreciation, without death and
its faithful attendant, suffering. In saying this
he aligns himself with the longstanding
imperative that ‘to philosophize is to learn
how to die’ – not only in the sense of coming
to terms with physical mortality, but in the
moral obligation to kill off as much igno-
rance, stupidity, and small-mindedness in
ourselves as we can. At times, though, and
especially in his chapter ‘Interlude on the
Problem of Evil’, Samuelson sounds posi-
tively Panglossian in his faith in better things
to come – as when he ruminates counter-
fablely on the plight of Laocoön, the loss of
the Trojan War, and Aeneas’s eventual
founding of Rome: “had the innocent
Laocoön not suffered, there would be no
Rome. No tragedy, no civilization. No point-
less suffering, no humanity” (p.115). Thanks
Laocoön! But for me this is a claim as silly as
it is unconvincing, at least when it comes to
the search for meaning. Here it’s worth bear-
ing in mind the argument of the contempo-
rary philosopher John Gray, who finds zero
evidence for cumulative progress in the
realms of ethics, politics, civilization; gener-
ally, in our so-called ‘humanity’. Whatever
our current achievements in these areas, they
remain ever in a state of precariousness, as
history has shown time and again. It’s also
worth bearing in mind a notion ascribed to
Tennessee Williams: “Every path is the right
path. Anything might have been anything
else and had just as much meaning to it.”
52 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
Inconclusions
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, we exist
perpetually in a state of emergency. This
means that whatever remedy there may be
for the next major crisis (fingers crossed), we
cannot keep yet another catastrophe from
coming round the corner. Still, with Covid,
we were strongly reminded that the discov-
eries of science are crucial to our hopes. But
so too are the humanities (including our blues
understanding), which have long helped us to
face what cannot be fixed, whether natural
disasters, deadly viruses, social unrest, or the
inevitability of death. For Merleau-Ponty,
one such saving grace of the humanities is
‘true philosophy’, which, he says, “consists in
relearning to look at the world.” This is
precisely Samuelson’s intent with this study.
In nodding to Wallace Stevens’ poem Thir-
teen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the title of
Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering
implies that a monochromatic account of
suffering would be as limited as seeing a bird
of mystery as only black.
Then again, maybe a single view of suffer-
ing will suffice after all. Maybe it’s enough to
say, with James Baldwin, that “People who
cannot suffer can never grow up, never
discover who they are” – and leave it there.
Or maybe we should all listen to The Smiths’
‘Suffer Little Children’, and remember that
some people can never grow up, never
discover who they are, because they suffered
too horrifically, and died way too soon.
© DOUG PHILLIPS 2022
Doug Phillips teaches existential literature and
philosophy at the University of St Thomas in
St Paul, Minnesota.
• Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering:
What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest
Mystery of All, by Scott Samuelson, University of
Chicago Press, 2019, $25 hb, 270 pages.
The Monarchy of Fear
by Martha Nussbaum
MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S THE
Monarchy of Fear (2018)
presents itself as a look at the
United States’ political crisis and the nation’s
future efforts toward ‘justice and flourishing’.
Indeed, the book’s subtitle is A Philosopher
Looks at Our Political Crisis. However, Nuss-
baum doesn’t so much discuss U.S. politics as
survey the psychological factors behind it. She
chooses examples from classical Greece and
Rome to make her points instead of examples
from the Trump/Brexit era, since she sees clas-
sical anecdotes as a means of transcending
‘partisan defensiveness’.
Nussbaum focuses on fear as a significant
factor in the U.S. outlook both generally and
in politics in particular: “Fear is monarchi-
cal, and democratic reciprocity a hard-won
achievement” (p.60), she writes. She
frequently invokes the Roman poet
Lucretius as one of her favorite authors, hail-
ing him as ‘perhaps the first (Western) theo-
rist of the unconscious mind’. She under-
stands him as believing that “primary fear
operates beneath the level of consciousness,
tainting everything with its ‘blackness’.” For
Nussbaum, fear frequently underlies the
moral concerns in current politics to the
extent of destabilizing democracy because
“democracy requires all of us to limit our
narcissism and embrace reciprocity. Right
now, fear is running rampant in our nation”
(p.62). U.S. citizens fear, for example, dete-
riorating living standards, unemployment,
and inadequate health care. The American
Dream of upward mobility for the duly dili-
gent can seem a thing of the past.
According to Nussbaum, insecurity by its
very nature scapegoats the vulnerable Other.
She also sees insecurity as making citizens
indifferent to truth. We can end up preferring
“the comfort of an insulating peer group who
repeat one another’s falsehoods” which has
leaders who are sure to afford them a “womb-
like feeling of safety”. Instead of engaging in
constructive reflection, people resort to
aggressive measures that Nussbaum calls
‘othering strategies’. For instance, anger,
disgust, and envy derive from fear. Anger,
abetted by feelings of helplessness, causes
problems in democratic politics by distracting
us from sensible solutions. In contrast, Nuss-
baum celebrates Mohandas Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela as
inspiring “noble and successful freedom
movements conducted in a spirit of non-
anger.” We also develop disgust toward the
things our imaginations merely happen to
associate with what we immediately dread, in
order to sufficiently distance ourselves from
them. The association of all Muslims with
hate crimes is a case in point. Such ‘projective
disgust’ jeopardizes equality and mutual
respect. As for envy, it has posed threats to
democracy ever since democracy’s inception.
“It is because of a deep underlying anxiety, a
root-level painful insecurity, that people
engage in zero-sum competition and hate the
people who succeed” Nussbaum concludes
(p.143). She portrays the Roman Republic as
having collapsed into tyranny due to “the
positional game of rivalry, envy, and destruc-
Book Reviews

tion” [see Cicero’s Brief Life in this issue, Ed].
Nussbaum also cites misogyny as a temporar-
ily satisfying but worthless phenomenon
among envious men reluctant to face the
questions of “how to reinvent love, care, and
the nuclear family in an era of increasing
female work and achievement” and traces
much of this resentment towards women
attaining leadership roles. Nussbaum stops
short, however, of claiming that competition
requires envy. More generally, “Envy flares
up… when a group feels cut out of key good
things that other people have.” She writes,
“There’s no doubt that white men, particu-
larly in the lower middle classes, are indeed
losing out… Mortality has skyrocketed in
both sexes, for those with no college degree,
but is higher among males.” (p.190)
The Greek and Roman Stoics advised
against hope because of its dependence on
fortune. On account of the uncertainty and
lack of control that hope entails, Nussbaum
understands it as the “flip side of fear”, but
she calls upon us to appreciate that as related
as fear and hope are, hope can be practical
and constructive in a way that many fears
cannot. She agrees with Immanuel Kant that
even when there is a dearth of supporting
evidence, we should adopt hope as a ‘practi-
cal postulate’, considering the “good action
it may enable.” So it can be helpful to work
on the premise that people are what we hope
they are. The areas of life that can facilitate
hope for Nussbaum are: the arts; critical
Book Reviews
thinking; religious groups (“insofar as they
practice love and respect for others”); “soli-
darity groups focused on securing justice in
a nonviolent and dialogical way”; and theo-
ries pertaining to justice and citizenship.
Social media and the internet come in for
some hard knocks from Nussbaum, who
argues that they have increased the volatility
of politics, especially when it comes to inac-
curate reporting and the way this can cascade:
“When a report ‘goes viral’, emotions easily
get out of control, in a way that is unlike the
effect of newspaper reports, or even TV”
(p.49). Attention spans, already challenged
by people obsessively checking their phones,
feed into the notion that “everything worth
saying can be said right away, in a trumpet of
self-proclamation.” She feels that social
media and the internet are therefore, on
balance, more likely to function as destructive
rather than constructive forces.
Considering the havoc social media can
wreak, Nussbaum deems it perverse to choose
this as a time for reducing government fund-
ing for the arts and humanities. The arts and
humanities unite people who are otherwise
divided by things social media encourage:
“The arts offer bridges to seeing human diver-
sity as joyful, funny, tragic, delightful, not as a
horrible fate to be shunned” (p.226). Philoso-
phy may be good for providing ways to respect
our opponents; but we need the arts and reli-
gion to show us how to be loving to them.
Ideally, Nussbaum would have elaborated
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 53
Books
more on the extent to which one can play the
politics game ethically and self-respectfully.
But The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks
at Our Political Crisis doesn’t feature the polit-
ical analysis the subtitle leads one to expect.
It reads more like a squishy self-help book.
Maybe it should have been subtitled Psycho-
logical Accounts of Our Political Crisis.
Although Nussbaum appreciates the
merits of Kant’s ‘practical hope’, the hundreds
of hours I spent subjecting myself to Kant left
me convinced that philosophers should be
wary of embracing Kantian hope at the risk of
it degenerating into escapism, or whitewash-
ing. I’m in favor of practical hope, provided
IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2022. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT BEHANCE.NET/VENANTIUSPINTO
that it doesn’t exist at the expense of whatever
valid pessimism honesty may stipulate. The
Italian Antonio Gramsci had it right when he
counseled, “We should live by pessimism of
the intellect and optimism of the will.” In any
event, as one who has been fascinated with
classical philosophy for decades, I appreciate
The Monarchy of Fear as being at its best when
drawing parallels between primal passions in
our times and those in the Greco-Roman era.
© CHAD TRAINER 2022
Chad Trainer is an independent scholar
engaged in a study of the history of philosophy.
He is the author of Reflections on Russell:
Musings on a Multidimensional Man.
• The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at
Our Political Crisis, by Martha C. Nussbaum,
Oxford University Press, 2018, 249 pages.

TV
E
ven the simplest questions we ask
ourselves can imply the deepest
meanings and the direst conse-
quences. The ‘how’ of the ways
things work or the ‘why’ of the way things
are crowd through the busy day for us all.
Often there are no answers – or at least they
are provisional, tentative, provocative, or
unsatisfying. The questions we ask
ourselves about past actions, present
dilemmas, future plans are sometimes
fleeting, sometime recurring; sometimes
products of a stream of consciousness,
other times the outcome of focused atten-
tion. They seem contained within our
selves until we express them in words or
action. Then others get involved, and they
ask questions too, so that things get inter-
active and performative, and we become
accountable and even transparent. We act
knowing we are actors. We cannot hide
from self-knowledge.
What Do You Want?
Two of the recurring questions we ask
ourselves are what we want, and what we
want to be. Implicit in them is what we
believe we already are, and also what we
think we might become instead.
We acknowledge that we have needs
(like food and love) and wants (power and
influence, youth and beauty perhaps, and
more food and love). We know, too, that
there are things we should want, shaped by
the roles we know we have to play socially
say as parents, or by moral or religious
frameworks about mutual responsibility
and environmental stewardship.
We know that some of things we might
want we cannot have, or shouldn’t be
given, such as absolute power over others,
or some scarce resource that if we had it,
would cause many others to be danger-
ously deprived. We ask whether we have a
right to be happy while others are not, or
why we should live while others die. Yet we
know that, if push came to shove, we would
try to live even while others died. Most of
us, at least. This classic collision of self-
interest and altruism is the crux of moral
philosophy.
54 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
BABYLON 5
Stuart Hannabuss has five questions for Mr Morden.
Mr Morden’s Question
So it is that when four characters in the tele-
vision sci-fi series Babylon 5 are asked ‘What
do you want?’ by the suave, enigmatic and
alarmingly well-connected Mr Morden, the
question really hits home. Their answers
reveal their fears and yearnings, their very
identities as moral agents, and indeed deter-
mine the story arc of the entire epic.
Putting things in context, Babylon 5 was
first broadcast in the 1990s and was a
science fiction saga about a spaceship five
miles long, on which humans and represen-
tatives of a variety of alien species inter-
acted in increasingly tangled ways.
Drawing on the Babylonian myths of a
world created out of the dynamic between
good and evil, the series explored themes of
war and peace, duty and personal desire,
free will and obsession.
Character shapes destiny for all the
players as their decisions determine events
both inside their minds and outside in the
cosmos. I hope it is not too grand to
suggest that the show’s concerns are teleo-
logical, deontological, and axiological (ie,
to do with goals, obligations, and
values/beliefs).
Within the universe of this show there
are new races (humans and exotically-
costumed aliens) and there are old races
which lurk unseen, clutching on to power.
Tensions abound: the humans and Minbari
BABYLON 5 STILLS © WARNER BROS. TELEVISION
have recently concluded a brutal war, the
Narns and Centauri are careering towards
mutual destruction, while the Vorlons and
Shadows are light and dark versions of
unbending tyranny.
Science fiction has often been scorned,
sometimes deservedly. Yet, in the hands of
writers such as Philip K. Dick and Kurt
Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov,
the genre has been a laboratory for moral
and philosophical inquiry. So it is here with
Babylon 5 and Mr Morden’s question, which
is “What do you want?”
The four characters of whom he asks it
are G’Kar the Narn ambassador (played by
Andreas Katsulas), Londo Molari the
Centauri ambassador (Peter Jurasik),
Londo’s deputy, Vir (Stephen Furst), and
the Minbari ambassador Delenn (Mira
Furlan). Their responses not only reveal
their true character and shape the way the
plot unfolds, but also shed light on how we
ourselves might respond if asked the same
question. Or even if it occurred to us to ask
it of ourselves.
Answers to the Question
Mr Morden’s question ‘What do you
want?’ strikes home easily with both G’Kar
and Londo, for each is driven by hatred for
the other and by a lust for revenge. A long
legacy of war and prejudice exists between
their two races which seemingly only

Mr Morden must be nice:
he drinks tea
enslavement or total destruction can
resolve. Their answers are full disclosures,
transparent and stark: what I hate I destroy;
what is different should feel pain and then
die; what I want is complete power. It is a
Faustian pact for both, for the Shadows
manipulate them into compliance, each
believing the other at fault (the Shadows
work below the radar). Their ultimate
destiny is literally to destroy each other.
Vir and Delenn respond more thought-
fully. Vir is knowing but sceptical,
conscious of the dangers of getting what
you ask for. Delenn possesses second sight
and appreciation of her history. Both reject
Mr Morden’s offer – of trusting their
destiny to a force that seems to offer every-
thing they’ve ever dreamed of – knowing
that the world is not like that, and realising
that their moral integrity is being tested.
Questions about the Question
J. Michael Straczinski, the creator of
Babylon 5, explores many religious and
philosophical dilemmas in the series. The
Temptation of Christ in the Bible springs
to mind here. Naturally, he presents and
explores these issues through story and
character, yet it is usually clear what moral
and intellectual questions are being raised.
They concern ourselves and, for instance,
how we might respond to Mr Morden’s
questionable offer. How do we respond, in
fact, if and when we ask it of ourselves, or if
someone else asks us? And so we move into
the valuable philosophical realm of ques-
tions about questions.
For many of us there would be the issue
of trust. Can I trust myself to deal with this
honestly and realistically, not just expedi-
ently or in terms of mere wishes and
daydreams? Can I trust the person making
the offer enough to disclose to them some-
thing so personal, so close to the bone?
Once over that hurdle, what should I
say? Do I want to give a good impression,
hide a shameful truth about myself, disclose
a childish fantasy? If I answer the question
asked, what might my answer imply about
my beliefs and values, and are these socially
acceptable or antisocial, reactionary,
selfish? If I say, do I want to have or do
Me and my
Shadows
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 55
TV
something (like winning the lottery or
having sex with lots of beautiful people) or
to be free from something (like ageing or
financial insecurity or political interfer-
ence)? What about the future, when I shall
probably not think or feel as I do now? My
circumstances and hopes will inevitably
change as I myself change.
Questions for the Questioner
It is not enough to reflect, however subtly,
on the impact of Mr Morden’s question
either on the characters in Babylon 5 or on
ourselves. We don’t even need to be
philosophers to recognise that ‘What do
you want?’ is a core existential question.
Wanting and needing, obligation and self-
interest, harm and consequences, nature
and nurture, past and future, values and
beliefs – they are all there.
As a result, I would suggest five questions
are worth raising with Mr Morden. Of
course, we will have to set aside our knowl-
edge as viewers that, for all his beguiling
human form, Morden represents evil forces
– think Screwtape, Machiavelli, Stalin, and
the Devil in one debonair package – or
resist the temptation to warn the characters
to guard their tongues. Now we are set to
confront Morden face to face.
Our first question has to be ‘Why do you
ask me what I want?’ You might get a
circular answer: ‘Because I would really
like to know’; or an insincerely plausible
answer: ‘Because I like you and want to
help you’. But then – he would say that,
wouldn’t he! Is there a hidden agenda?
 TV
Does this offer come with strings? What
motivates it? People don’t generally offer
help unless they expect something back.
Let’s hear what you have to say, Mr
Morden – and then I can judge for myself.
Our second question should be ‘Who do
you represent?’ We know from advertising
and marketing that people who ask you
questions like ‘What do you want?’ are
likely to want to sell you something or get
you to join something or change your opin-
ions about something. Everything comes
with something. Morden speaks only of “the
people I represent”, never spelling out who
exactly they might be. He is phishing and
scamming: don’t fall for his sweet talk.
The third question is a time-tested one:
‘How long will it be before I realise the
consequences of telling you what I want?’
We know from hard experience that the
future exposes the errors of decisions we
make in the present, and we are continually
trying to correct past mistakes. Wishes have
consequences, as human beings have found
from Faust to Edith Nesbit’s children who
meet the Psammead. Implied in that is the
subsidiary query – what happens if I want to
change my mind? With the Shadows, there
is no going back. Like Bilbo in The Lord of
the Rings, we enter a world where moral
choices and their outcomes are ineluctable.
With our fourth question we should turn
to the issue of truth: ‘How can you assure me
56 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
that what you say is true and not a lie?’ Are
you on the up-and-up, as we might say. But
beyond that, is it possible to know whether
any offer to give someone ‘whatever they
want’ can feasibly be delivered? This is not
some small loan, after all, but an eschatolog-
ical point of no return, after which nothing
will ever be the same again. Vir sees through
Morden’s spurious claims to honest altruism
and rejects his offer. He also foresees
Morden’s own destruction by his puppet-
masters.
Our final question needs to probe into
the nature of reality itself. Science fiction,
like religion itself, inhabits border-lands
between the real and the unreal, and its
replicants and avatars have become
commonplace features of virtual reality. So
it is only right to ask Mr Morden how real
he really is and believes he is: “What is the
nature of your existence, Mr Morden?”
His innocent question is leading and
loaded. His manner evokes distrust. His
claim to be able to give you whatever you
want is unnervingly open-ended. To offer
anything or everything you might ever
want, or what above all you want at the time,
implausibly suggests the omniscience and
omnipresence of a Creator. Where, then,
does Mr Morden come from and is he truly
and reliably human, as he seems?
Later in the series we learn that in fact Mr
Morden is a dead human artificially resur-
rected by the Shadows to serve as their
agent. We also come to know that Shadow
presences stand invisibly beside him in all
his encounters. Which all sounds a little
creepy. Is it fanciful for us to imagine an
aura of evil around some people? After all,
we often speak of evil when for instance
dreadful murders take place, even if we’re
not religious.
Concluding
We ask ourselves questions about the future
all the time: will I, can I, should I? When we
do so, we confront ourselves with versions
of Mr Morden’s question. We want to be
free to, and free from; we must balance
wants and needs, duty and self-interest,
morality and expediency; what we think,
and what we know we are.
Philosophy and the social sciences have
equipped us with a battery of ologies to deal
with questions about questions: teleology,
deontology, axiology, eschatology,
ontology, and others. Even though Babylon 5
is science fiction, Mr Morden’s question is
very real. And we all might some time meet
a real Mr Morden, with his ‘so good there
must be a catch’ offer, so we all need to be
ready with some good questions.
© DR STUART HANNABUSS 2022
Stuart Hannabuss has been a Humanist
chaplain and is a writer and reviewer based in
Scotland.

Q uestion
of the Month
What Grounds or
Justifies Morality?
Our readers give their reasons, each winning the right to a random book.
“Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of
making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine
that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death
only one tiny creature... Would you consent to be the architect on those con-
ditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
W ould you consent? Bentham’s utilitarianism justifies the
morality of an action on the principle of ‘maximising the
greatest happiness of the greatest number’ of people. Kant insists
that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does one’s
duty for its own sake, and in this sense consequences are morally
irrelevant. What matters, according to Kant, is what we ought
to do, which reason alone can establish. Kant believes morality
is grounded in reason: we are not only sentient beings, governed
by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also ratio-
nal beings, capable of freedom. We must be capable of acting
according to laws other than the laws of physics. If our actions
were governed solely by the laws of physics, then we would be
no different from objects or animals. Kant further argues that we
must be capable of acting according to the moral law we give
ourselves, and this law is determined by reason.
However, his conception of reason is different from that of
the utilitarians, who view human beings as capable of only instru-
mental reason. The job of instrumental reason is to figure out
how to maximize satisfying our desires for pleasure and happi-
ness. But for Kant, reason is not just the ‘slave of the passions’ as
David Hume called it, but of ‘pure practical reason’ – ‘‘which
legislates a priori, regardless of empirical ends.” If reason was sim-
ply an instrument to achieve our desires – “if that were all reason
amounted to”, Kant says, then “we would be better off with
instincts.” Moreover, unlike individual feelings, emotions and
desires that are chaotic and based on self-interest, reason is uni-
versal and so establishes our moral duties as categorical impera-
tives that must be demanded of all rational beings. Therefore, I
believe that morality can be justified only by reason, regardless
of how many people we make happy or unhappy. And our moral
duties are… Well, every reasonable person knows what they are!
NELLA LEONTIEVA , RANDWICK, NEW SOUTH WALES
T hose examples which comprise the vast history of ethics are
what potentially ground or justify morality. It’s up to us to
discover from this considerable history those instances suffi-
ciently cogent to provide a foundational, even universal basis – as
was ambitiously approached by Parfit in On What Matters (2017).
Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(1785) is an apt starting point for considering this question. Kant
argues that making moral choices and judgements presupposes,
even necessitates, that we are free agents; that our choices and
judgements are not beyond our control. This forms the basis of
our duty to take moral responsibility, and so ‘‘act only according
?
?
?
to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it
should become a universal law.’’
These rational grounds are undermined by those who deny
free will, claiming that all our motives and behaviour are deter-
mined and best understood through reductive scientific explana-
tions, from the psychological to physiological, then chemical, and
ultimately to those of physics. To logical positivists, for example,
the claims of metaphysics, ethics, and theology, were meaningless.
However, their disdain for mystery and metaphysics was met with
a joint "No!" from those Metaphysical Animals featured in Mac-
Cumhaill and Wiseman’s recent book (2022) – Elizabeth
Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. This
group of four Oxford friends are credited with breathing new life
into philosophy and ethical thinking. PN’s own review of the book
calls them “leaders in demolishing the logical positivism and
moral relativism that dominated English-language philosophy in
the mid-twentieth century.” (Issue 151).
In ambiguous contrast, the American pragmatist Richard
Rorty, though eschewing the relativism simplistically associated
with him by critics, nevertheless implies a version of moral rel-
ativism when claiming that “belief is caused by nothing deeper
that contingent historical circumstance” (Contingency, Irony and
Solidarity,1989). However, this claim presumably applies equally
to his own position, too.
COLIN BROOKES, LOUGHBOROUGH, LEICESTERSHIRE
W estern philosophy offers three major justifications for
morality, associated with three well-known philosophers.
Followers of Plato would say the basis of morality is self-interest;
those of Hume’s school of thought claim it is other-regarding
interests, wants or intentions; and Kantians argue it is justified
in terms of the requirements of practical reason. Of course, every
moral theory claims that its method for determining right and
wrong is correct.
Kant argued that reason must be at the heart of any moral
action, despite any natural desires to the contrary. His categorical
imperative is a necessary and non-negotiable principle.
Moral relativism further complicates the issue by denying any
universal moral values; saying, rather, that different cultures and
sub-cultures often have markedly differing values, and these can
change depending on opinion, social context etc. Nietzsche chal-
lenged that there is no objective or transcendent justification for
moral claims. A kind of moral relativism first arose in ancient
Greece, but didn’t really take off until Montaigne’s writings in
the sixteenth century. If one is religious, then God/Allah/Jeho-
vah lays down absolute moral truths to live by. Other moral abso-
lutists argue from a non-religious standpoint that there are uni-
versal principles that ought never to be violated, regardless of
context or consequences.
I think we each have our own moral principles based on our
individual upbringing and social context. However, I would argue
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 57
 ? ?
that the majority of people in most cultures would agree on some
basic morals, such as treating others how you wish to be treated,
do not hurt or kill others, etc. I would defy anyone to argue that
murder, or child abuse, for example, is not universally wrong. (I
allow that it’s not always clear cut: I’m firmly pro-women’s rights
in the abortion debate, but it could be argued that termination of
a foetus is murder, and thus wrong).
My personal morality is not based on religious belief but on
humanism – the principle that every individual has an equal right
to live a full life and be free from harm. So in that sense I am some-
what of an absolutist, although I also feel that many aspects of
moral relativism are valid. Moral principles of some kind are clearly
needed for society not to descend into anarchy. But there are many
shades of grey between right and wrong.
ROSE DALE, FLOREAT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
I start with the premise that organisms such as ourselves have been
formed via a process of evolution by natural selection, and further,
that any altruistic tendencies we possess have been formed due to
the complex of behaviour including those tendencies having a net
benefit to our ancestors. If one adds the further premise that moral-
ity has arisen due to an attempt to rationalise or formalise our sense
of altruism, this leads to the conclusion that morality is grounded
in our nature, formed through evolution by natural selection.
Someone might argue that morality was arrived at purely ratio-
nally or, notwithstanding the origins of the moral sense, that there
is a rational grounding and justification for morality, or perhaps
morality is a diktat of some sort of supernatural agency. However,
the acceptance of such reasons or diktats would itself still need to
be grounded or justified. The rational approach articulated by Kant,
is the idea of a moral imperative that any rational intelligence would
acknowledge. Or as per utilitarianism, might there be a moral
imperative to consider the maximising of a measure such as general
happiness or flourishing? Another attempt at asserting a rational
justification for morality is Aristotle’s contention that being moral
or virtuous will tend to lead to a better life. Thus, morality becomes
rational on the premise that wishing for a better life is rational.
I think all such approaches rely on further premises regarding
the intrinsic worth of others, and some judgement as to what
makes a better or more sustainable life or society, and of the
means to achieve that. These further premises themselves con-
tain value judgements, which are not intrinsically rational. Values
may be shaped by rationality, but, as Hume pointed out, they can-
not be derived by logic purely from facts about the natural world.
If one accepts this then whatever their merits in helping guide
our actions, rational approaches can never be the grounds or jus-
tification for morality. Instead, morality is grounded by our
nature, by our feelings. Justification independent of our feelings,
is not available.
LAWRENCE POWELL, LONDON
M orality would have no meaning in a universe without con-
scious beings. A thermostat might be faulty, but we do not
literally claim that it lies. A forest fire may be all-consuming, but
it is not actually greedy. Hence, morality is absent from a strictly
objective account of the world. Rather, morality is something that
arises from conscious experience. In this sense, morality is necessarily
‘subjective’. However, that does not for a moment mean that
moral right and wrong are a matter of personal opinion or taste.
If it did, there could be no moral debate, or indeed any possibility
of revising one’s moral judgement, since according to the sub-
jective view, whatever one judged to be right initially is therefore
right by definition. A similar objection applies to the more
widespread view that morality is nothing more than the current
collective preference of a community. The way we debate moral
questions implies necessarily that there are grounds outside our
58 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
?
current communal judgements to which we need to refer. So
where in our experience can such grounds be found?
Suppose that my mind was so constructed that, although con-
scious myself I was unable to recognize consciousness in anyone
else, and simply regarded other people as moving parts of my envi-
ronment, in the same way that I regard a wristwatch or a river.
Moreover, suppose that I had no conception of a future self. There
are indeed creatures with just such a consciousness – possibly
including new-born human babies. With such a mind, I cannot see
how I could have any idea of right or wrong. Indeed, babies are not
usually regarded as morally responsible for their actions; nor most
non-human species, for that matter.
Now relax that idea. To identify with others, and imagine the
pleasure or distress that could result from kind or unkind actions
on my part, I now find myself passing critical judgement on myself
for neglecting the former or performing the latter. Thus, the moral-
ity of altruism depends crucially upon the experience of identification
with others. Likewise, the morality of self-discipline depends crucially
upon the experience of identification with a later self.
In short, the fact that our minds our constructed so that we are
prone to experience actions as if we were another self, or a later
self, gives us the motivation that is the starting point of morality.
ROGER S. HAINES, LONDON
L ike it or not, religion is morality’s anchor. It grounds morality,
and tells us what we ought to do.
Why? Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus
argued for moral skepticism by introducing the concept of isos-
theneia or ‘equipollence’ – the idea that every moral argument point
has an equally rational counterpoint. This concept was never dis-
proven. But moral skepticism, like an ultra powerful solvent, dis-
solves categorical imperatives and utilitarianism calculations alike.
Once applied, the skeptical critique cannot be unlearned, leaving
no moral absolutes, and morality merely becomes taste.
Secular readers scoff at the idea that God gave the tribe of Israel
eternal moral truths codified as the Ten Commandments on a
mountaintop in the Sinai desert millennia ago, or that Jesus Christ
reiterated as the Son of God that we are to ‘love the neighbor as
the self’ (Leviticus 19:18). Yet divine communications to the sages
through the ages has had a huge impact on morality. Moral truths
cannot be proven, but they resonate through our lives, since we
always act or try to act as if they are true. As Rupert Shortt notes
in God is No Thing (2017), “Christianity’s stress on the radical equal-
ity of all, and the founding of hospitals, schools and other philan-
thropic institutions, were [sic] genuinely revolutionary.”
A sailor was asked what the most important piece of equipment
on a sailboat is. They replied “A good anchor!” When the wind
blows hard in the wrong direction, you need a source of moral
absolutes and a good anchor. And as Henry Bergson writes in The
Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), “through religion all
men get a little of what a few privileged souls possess in full.“
CARL STRASEN, PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA
G uidelines ruling out negative behaviour between a society’s
members, are justified and grounded both in practical con-
siderations and in those one might call spiritual or emotional.
It is less likely people will respect you and seek to do you good
if you do not respect them. It is therefore prudent to promote
moral behaviour. But morality is of even more value when derived
from virtue, that is, a genuine desire to benefit one’s fellow crea-
tures. Practising benign emotions leads to happiness – your own
or others’ – whereas the negative emotions, or indifference, lead
to unhappiness through their harmful effects. And happiness gives
purpose to life, being therefore rational. One can only either ‘just
live’, or have a reason for living which one is seeking to actuate. So
to live without a reason, a purpose, would be illogical. In fact only
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
 ? ?
a lower organism could simply live. A fully conscious, sentient
being would seek a purpose for living and identify it as emotional
gratification. That gratification should include the uplifting feel-
ing we experience when treated to the milk of human kindness,
and the sense of wellbeing from knowing you have saved a life or
done something to improve a life’s quality.
One might object that if happiness is the crucial thing, the
virtues which promote it are devalued. But to think the virtues to
be more important would be like maintaining that a paint brush
mattered more than the painting it was used to create. This we
don’t do; at most we will say that for practical purposes, the paint
brush is as important as the picture, since you can’t have the picture
without it. Admittedly not everyone behaves ethically from truly
virtuous motives, rather than from pragmatic social conditioning,
and some people are amoral or cruel. But this doesn’t invalidate
the point that we have good reasons for behaving well.
GUY BLYTHMAN, SHEPPERTON, MIDDLESEX
I believe that the foundation and justification for morality is
Guilt. The anticipation, avoidance and presence of guilt are
the most constant single basis I can offer for morality. Guilt, as
Heidegger might say, discloses itself to us ‘as is’.
In individual moral judgement, are we not trying to minimise
guilt? ‘Did I do the right thing?’ can often be seen as,’ Am I
guilty?’ And guilt can succeed where argumentation fails.
Humans can reason themselves into awful things. Evil can be
utterly calculated, and in this sense, rational, but no amount of
reasoning or smooth-talking can cover our guilt at our own
wrongdoing. When we try, anger and confusion overtake us.
Guilt comes from within, and that’s what grounds and justi-
fies it. Facing someone we have wronged, or intend to wrong,
may have no effect, or illicit an indignant rage. But guilt itself
must be self-generated. Someone else cannot be guilty for us,
and no one can confer guilt onto us. The justification for morals
may be logical or traditional to others; but to us, if we feel guilty,
then we cannot morally justify ourselves.
Morality is communal through guilt too. In Old English, ‘gilt’
was something’s price – what was owed for it – specifically, what
was owed as a result of transgressions. This aspect to guilt, this
feeling of ‘owing’, is necessary for moral justice. For justice to
transcend mere force, the transgressor must feel contrite: they
must feel guilty, and act accordingly. Moreover, morality must
be reciprocal in a functioning community, and not only operate
at the individual level. This feeling of ‘owing’ others for our
wrongdoings provides us the image of justice as balanced scales.
Punishment must function as a tool, the ends being the realisa-
tion of guilt in the subject and their desire to absolve it.
Do we not feel a bit revolted when someone, no matter how
prosocial otherwise, is incapable of guilt, of remorse? True guilt
is what tells us the person can be forgiven, that trust in them can
be restored, and that they are moral.
ANDREW KEILLER, ANGUS, SCOTLAND
W hy should someone be moral if they know that by break-
ing the law they will be able to escape the consequences?
If I’m sure that by robbing a bank I’m going to get rich and that
nobody’s going to arrest me, why wouldn’t I? In the Republic,
Plato says that even if they escape human law, an offender must
face the possibility of punishment after death.
Some philosophers agree with Plato that when one follows
the dictates of reason and conforms to the moral law, one
acquires a form of inner harmony, a mental health that makes
happy. Otherwise, inner imbalance makes one deeply unhappy.
Aristotle for example considers that only by observing the moral
law is a person led to happiness, as people reach their telos, com-
pleting the purpose for which they were created. So for Plato and
What Grounds or Justifies Morality?
?
Aristotle, moral behavior contributes to the life of humans in
harmony with their inner world and their fellow human beings,
identified with happiness or mental balance.
Morality also guards the coherence of societies, outside of which
we cannot live. Selfish motives are not always predominant: very
often there are positive feelings of compassion, sympathy and love
towards others. This comes from a mental need for communication
and solidarity amid the hard trials we face in life. This is the most
essential answer to the question of why one should be moral.
Since we accept that we must maintain an moral attitude to
life, we must consider the following principles. Any moral judg-
ment has a practical character. In essence, it guides us on how
we should act in our lives. Moral judgments are universal by
nature. The same principles apply in similar circumstances, and
to people with similar characteristics. In making and acting on
moral judgments we must consider the rights and interests of
other people, as our behavior always affects them too. We must
understand certain values as essential components of justice; for
example, the common good, impartiality, equal treatment, and
respect for basic individual rights and freedoms. Finally, we must
cultivate the virtues which will allow us to act correctly in situ-
ations of moral dilemmas.
STYLIANOS SMYRNAIOS, CRETE
I t’s actually two different questions. As far as what grounds
morality: pretty much nothing. That’s the bad news, and why
people feel so free to be so immoral. It’s the nihilistic perspective
we all potentially share even if we resist or pose philosophical
principles against it – principles that ultimately prove to be little
more than human constructs based on assumptions that float on
thin air or upon the underlying nothingness of things. The
nihilistic perspective is why most of our discourses break down
to basic assumptions that have nowhere to go and result in stand-
offs. Take, for instance, the debate over abortion, which always
breaks down to arguments about when human life begins. I
mean, to what criteria are we going to turn to adjudicate the argu-
ment? Nature? If we went by that criterion, we would still be pri-
mates guiltlessly killing anything inconvenient that didn’t belong
to our immediate tribe. Maybe religion, then? After the Inqui-
sition and the burning of supposed witches, we can all see where
that can potentially lead.
The good news and upside of the nihilistic perspective is that
there is nothing about nothing that requires a negative outcome.
So while it might undermine any solid ground for embracing a
given transcendental moral principle, nihilism also undermines
any grounds for not embracing that principle! This allows for the
pragmatic fallback of embracing it simply because it works better
than not doing so. In other words: mere practicality justifies
morality while not offering an ideological grounding for it that
some potential despot might use to oppress others. This is why
we have to practically embrace certain transcendental principles
such as compassion, equality, liberty, and whatever respects the
worth of the other, while taking the ironic stance of recognizing
this acceptance for what it is: an attitude that just makes us feel
better about being in the world.
D E TARKINGTON, BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA
The next question is: What Is Time?
Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The
prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject
lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be
received by 13th February 2023. If you want a chance of get-
ting a book, please include your physical address.
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 59

allis
T in
Wonderland
From far, from eve and morning,
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
AE Houseman, A Shropshire Lad
I
want to invite you to navel-gaze along
with me. It’s an activity that has had a
bad press, and has become a by-word
for an excessive focus on one’s self, or
for an inward-looking preoccupation with a
narrow range of issues that excludes aware-
ness of the wider world. But there is a more
respectable mode of contemplating one’s
navel: omphaloskepsis as an aid to meditation,
in which the omphalos (a.k.a. navel or
umbilicus) becomes a window on a world
beyond the horizon of quotidian concerns.
Facing The Darkness
Somewhere between the inward-looking
gaze of the narcissist and the world-encom-
passing vision of the omphaloskeptic mystic,
there is the objective gaze of the anatomist.
It reveals that the item rather dismissively
called ‘the belly button’ has a surprisingly
complex structure. Have a look and you will
see a central bump called the mamelon; a
dense scar, or ‘cicatrix’; a slightly raised skin
margin, like a fortification, around the
mamelon and the cicatrix, known as the
‘cushion’; and the ‘furrow’, which take the
form of a depression inside the cushion and
surrounding the mamelon.
I hadn’t noticed all this until I began
researching this article, and so was reminded
yet again of how brushing is our acquain-
tance with our own bodies. Ignorance, like
charity, begins at home. I am not sure that I
could pick the back of my hand – which I
know ‘like the back of my hand’ – out of an
identity parade. My navel would be even
more resistant to identification in a line-up.
Under my skin, of course, darkness rules.
The ‘embodied subject’ is a strange creature,
as its body has only limited transparency to
its subjectivity. We subjects know little of
the fleshly kit necessary for our existence and
with which we are to some unspecifiable
60 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
An Invitation to
Navel Gazing
Raymond Tallis requests the pleasure of your
company for this most philosophical of gatherings.
degree identified. I possess organs I have
never seen (thank heavens), and am the
beneficiary, and to some extent the product,
of cellular processes of which I have little
ken. Our alien navel reminds us of our
hybrid nature as embodied subjects. It also
reminds us of the strange time when we
grew towards the possibility of ourselves.
This scar is the shriveled remnant of the
umbilical cord, cut moments after we
exchanged the unlit uterus for a bright
extra-uterine world which would inflate
over the years from a cot to continents; from
William James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confu-
sion’ to a life structured and regulated by the
timetable and the calendar. Our belly
buttons point backwards in time to the first
of our many beginnings. Examining it –
looking through the layers of curriculum
vitae built up over the days, weeks, years,
and decades since we greeted the world with
howls of distress – we are reminded how and
when our story began. It is a relic of the life-
line that connected us to the placenta
clamped to the uterine wall. The fat, wobbly
straw of the umbilical cord ensured a
constant and reliable delivery of oxygen and
nutrition, and the removal of carbon dioxide
and other metabolic waste – all necessary for
the life we had to maintain to grow towards
independent viability. The mark left by its
removal is a reminder of those months
where, neither patiently nor impatiently, we
suffered our coming into being.
The embryologist Lewis Wolpert has
argued that, in the miraculous journey
beginning with single-celled zygote born of
the fusion of a sperm and an oocyte, and
resulting in an entity that would ultimately
have sufficient wit to catch a bus, run a busi-
ness, bring up a child, exhibit icy politeness,
or take a position on the Oxford comma, the
most portentous step was gastrulation.
Gastrulation marks the emergence of an
embryonic architecture in which an inner
layer of cells is differentiated from an outer
layer of cells: a more important landmark,
Wolpert says, than birth, marriage, and
death. Indeed, this is probably the most
significant evolutionary innovation in the
animal kingdom, since it is the first step in
the emergence of complex life. Herein lies
the root of all insides and outsides, of
surfaces and depths, and ultimately, of the
embodied subject who distinguishes the ‘I’
in here from the ‘it’ out there.
Welcome To The World
During the nine months of his mindless
self-assembling, of structuration and differ-
entiation, in which his accumulating body
played an increasing role in creating the
environment within which his genes would
be expressed, your columnist was at best
dimly aware of the outside world. It would
be many years before he learnt that his
gastrulation took place roughly at the time
that Stalin declared the beginning of the
Cold War, Trans Australia Airlines made
their first international flight, Clement
Atlee revealed his plan for Indian Indepen-
dence, Pope Pius XII announced the
appointments of twelve new cardinals, and
the first general-purpose computer began
operation. An unimaginable world was
awaiting him, as, courtesy of his umbilical
cord ‘the stuff of life to knit me’ was
harvested by his growing self.
As for that world, it was – and is – utterly
unlike that inhabited by any other living
creatures. Just how unlike is captured by
Ludwig Wittgenstein in the opening lines of
his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921):
1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
By ‘world’, Wittgenstein means the
human world rather than the material
universe. It is a ‘Thatosphere’ of stuff made
explicit by conscious subjects; a realm
woven out of the shared intentionality of
vast numbers of consciousnesses present
and past, forged out of a boundless conver-
sation in which the baby will come to partic-
ipate as it progresses from howls that regis-
ter the distance between how things are and
how it would like them to be, to smiles and

gestures, isolated words, and ultimately, to
full-blown dialogue.
I highlight the distance between the mate-
rial universe and the human world in
response to philosophers who claim that we
are ‘just animals’, or theologians who see us
as fallen creatures. According to St Augus-
tine, “we are born between faeces and urine”
(inter faeces et urinam nascimur). This was not
intended as a guide to midwives. Rather, it’s
his way of pulling us down a peg or two by
reminding us of the rather messy start of our
lives. But while this description of our door-
way into the world is literally true, it is not the
whole truth. No other animal picks out this
fact and reflects on what it might say about
our nature – and, even less, does so in Latin.
We are also reminded of our profound
difference from other mammals by the fact
that the umbilical cord is cut by a pair of scis-
sors, manufactured to a high standard and
imported into the delivery room from some
considerable distance, rather than gnawed
through by the midwife or mother. In the
action-packed minutes that follow, the
difference from all other beasts, even from
our nearest primate kin, is widened, as we
acquire certain particulars that we carry
throughout our lives. For instance, our date
and time of birth is documented – so we are
located in a universal calendar; and we are
soon united with the name by which we will
introduce ourselves and be introduced to
others, and will learn later to write down, or
spell out letter-by-letter over the phone.
Even more astonishingly, we are almost
Navel gazing
in 2nd C. Rome.
At the Louvre
immediately gathered up into a quantitative
world of assessments and measurements.
Thus was it recorded that, at 6:30 a.m. on
10th October 1946, the cooking of Raymond
Tallis into the rawest of raw youths was
complete and shortly after the cutting of the
physical cord – anticipating the future
cutting of many symbolic, metaphorical
cords – I sat my first examination and was
awarded my first marks. My pulse, respira-
tion, general appearance, and activity were
all assessed. Had I been born six years later;
this would have been totted up to the epony-
mous score introduced into neonatal prac-
tice by Virginia Apgar. To these details
would be added my weight, which, next to
my sex, would be the particular most eagerly
sought out by well-wishers. All of these
checks were intended to establish whether
this minute, newly-forged, link in the Great
Chain of Being was a going concern.
I have mentioned ‘my weight’, and read-
ers with long memories may recall how
thought-provoking I have found this
‘possessive’. (‘What a Possessive! On Being
Embodied’, Philosophy Now Issue 112, 2016).
It is especially striking when we think of it
as ascribed to a newborn, who is no more
able to ‘possess’ this vital statistic as applied
to itself than is a bag of vegetables being
weighed in a grocer’s shop. I dwell on this to
highlight how extraordinary it is that the
newborn will eventually embrace a world
defined by quantities so thoroughly as to be
able to quantify itself. Admittedly, it will be
some time – and indeed some kilograms –
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 61
T allis
in
Wonderland
before it acquires an understanding of its
weight, and a bit more before it learns to
weigh itself and worry about what’s on the
scale. But the length of that interval before
it can possess its weight by speaking of it as
‘my weight’ does not make the cognitive
journey any less amazing.
Return To The Source
And so, I return to my navel to unpack more
reflections from this memorial of the
months before my entry into the world, and
of the first minutes of the first day of my life.
That Raymond Tallis should have begun at
that particular time is difficult for Raymond
Tallis to grasp except as a mere matter of
objective fact. I can say it, but I cannot realize
it; cannot truly encircle the truth that I
entered the universe at a point in its history
– and so late in that history. While I know
objectively that the universe existed long
before I was aware of it, before a minute part
of it became ‘my world’, I cannot imagine
the endless dark centuries of my absence, lit
by the retrospective virtual gaze of factual
knowledge. Yes, it is easy to say that the
universe has managed without my presence
for all but about a two-hundred millionth of
its existence, and to acknowledge that I
turned up 13.7 billion years after Nothing
exploded into Something; 4.5 billion years
after the Earth peeled off from the rest of the
material world; around 4 billion years after
life began in the modest form of single cells;
and 200,000 years after so-called ‘modern’
humans first walked the earth. I can rehearse
these facts, but, because everything prior to
my flash of sentience – made available to me
courtesy of being curated by the mouths,
pens, and relics of others – covers such vast
stretches of time, I cannot truly think them.
Given that it was so long before the stuff
of life got round to knitting your columnist,
and, indeed, you, my reader, it is a pity that
so brief an interval separates our beginnings
from our endings.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2022
Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Freedom: An
Impossible Reality is out now.
 Subscribe to Philosophy Now
philosophynow.org/shop

6 IDEA-PACKED ISSUES FOR £20/US$35

By subscribing to the print edition of Philosophy Now you

can save up to 38% off the newsstand price, have your
copies delivered to your door and enjoy unrestricted
access to our vast online archive of past articles!
Subscribe today at philosophynow.org/shop or fill out and
return one of the coupons below.
Subscription inquiries: subscriptions@philosophynow.org or phone 01959 534171
To tell us about a change of address, please email addresschange@philosophynow.org

UK / Rest of World United States

Name _____________________________________________ Name _____________________________________________
Address ___________________________________________ Address ___________________________________________
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________
Email (for password) ________________________________
Email (for password) ________________________________
Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 6 issues (1 year)
Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 12 issues (2 years) Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 6 issues ($35)
UK £20/£35 (GBP) Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 12 issues ($64)
Canada $43/$76 (CAD)
New Zealand $49/$89 (NZD)
Australia $50/$88 (AUD)
starting with Issue #153/Issue #154 (delete as appropriate)
Europe 27€/48€ (EUR)
Rest of World £26/£45 (GBP)
Buy The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics
starting with Issue 153/Issue 154 (delete as appropriate)

Buy The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics Buy back issues in PRINT (please specify issue numbers)
______________________________________

Buy back issues in PRINT (please specify issue numbers) Buy _____ binders to hold back issues (insert quantity)
______________________________________
TOTAL AMOUNT PAYABLE: $_________
Buy _____ binders to hold back issues (insert quantity)
Please make your check payable to ‘Philosophy Documentation
TOTAL AMOUNT PAYABLE: _________ Center’ or fill in your Mastercard /Visa /Maestro card details below:
Please make your cheque payable to ‘Philosophy Now’ or fill in your Card no.
Mastercard /Visa /Maestro card details below: Expiry_________________ Security Code__________
Card no. Name on card _______________________________________________
Expiry__________________ Security Code___________ and send it to: Philosophy Documentation Center,
Name on card _______________________________________________ P.O. Box 7147
and send it to: Philosophy Now Subscriptions Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147
Kelvin House, Grays Road, U.S.A.
Westerham, Kent TN16 2JB,
United Kingdom (You can also order on 800-444-2419 or email pkswope@pdcnet.org)

62 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

 Back Issues & Digital Editions

Back Issues in Print The Ultimate Guide Series

Each Ultimate Guide is a col-
Issue 152 God: Ontological argument, theology vs
lection of some of the best
philosophy, humility, unreliability, Deism,
Kierkegaard / Mini-focus on time / articles from past issues of
Soviet Spinoza / Foucault / WandaVision Philosophy Now, and some
new material too. Each is
divided into five chapters
Issue 151 Greek philosophy: motion, myths,
covering the main aspects of
Socratic dialogue, Aristotle’s happiness, a core philosophical topic.
Eratosthenes / Levinas / Be Really Good Full colour, 116 pages.
Digital Liberty focus / Morton interview
The Ultimate Guide to
Aesthetics is now out. You
We still have copies of these earlier back issues: can buy it from newsstands,
55-63, 65-80, 83-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-116, 118-121, 125-139, 142-144,148-150 or from our website shop in
You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit print or as a PDF.
philosophynow.org/shop
Back issues in print cost £4.75 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or The Ultimate Guide to Ethics, Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics,
US$10/9€/A$15/C$15/NZ$16/£8.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every
Ultimate Guide to Mind and Ultimate Guide to Theory of
three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please tell us which
you would like). Knowledge are all available as PDFs from our website shop.

Binders: Our smart green Philosophy Now binders with gold lettering Including postage The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics costs: £9.25
each hold 12 magazines. UK£11, US$25, Europe 22€, Australia $35, or $18.95 (USA), 14.75€ (Eur), Aus$28, Can$26, NZ$29, or
Canada $35, NZ$37 or Rest of World £19. £16 (Rest of World).

Digital (see philosophynow.org/digital) Gifts and Merch

Website Subscriptions
Print subscriptions to Philosophy Now do not include access to
the digital editions below, but do include access to our website
which has over 3,000 articles from past issues. A password is
available on request to print subscribers or is sent automati-
cally if you subscribe online. You can also buy a website-only
subscription from our store at:
philosophynow.org/shop
A wide range of Philosophy Now t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote
bags and other gifts in a bewildering variety of designs are now
available from our partners Spreadshirt. All sales help to keep our
editors and illustrators supplied with gin and biscuits.
Please follow the link at the foot of the philosophynow.org/shop
page to visit our store on the Spreadshirt website.

IP-based online access is available for

schools and colleges – please visit Philoso
phy Now

philosophynow.org/institutions

App Available in the Apple App Store.

Free sample issue included.

Kindle Buy a single issue or an ongoing

subscription. (30 day free trial)

Nook Available in the USA via Barnes & Noble’s Nook

reader and the Nook app. (14 day free trial)

Zinio There is an edition for the Zinio app on iPad and

Android. Single issue or ongoing subscription.

Pocketmags There is an edition for the Pocketmags app on

iOS and Android. Single issue or ongoing subscription.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 63

 Obituary
Saul Kripke
(13th November 1940 - 15th September 2022)
Stefan Rinner tells us about Kripke’s theories and why they matter.
s philosophers, we find again and again that ‘What is
A philosophy?’ is as difficult a question as any other philo-
sophical problem. However, in the middle of the twen-
tieth century, there seemed to be a simple answer to
it: philosophers primarily analyze concepts. Accordingly, answering
the question “What is knowledge?”, for example, was tanta-
mount to answering the question “What is the meaning of the
term ‘knowledge’?”
The reason why philosophers thought that their craft con-
sisted primarily in analyzing concepts was a certain theory of
meaning – the so-called ‘description theory of meaning’.
According to this, the meaning of a referring expression is given
by a description uniquely picking out the referent of the term,
i.e. the thing in the world to which the term refers. For exam-
ple a proper name such as ‘Napoleon’ has the same meaning as
a description such as “the French emperor who was defeated at
Waterloo”, or as a bundle of such descriptions. Thus, answer-
ing the question of who Napoleon was is just giving the mean-
ing of the name in terms of a description: “Napoleon was the
French emperor who lost at Waterloo.” Similarly, answering
the question “What is knowledge?” is just giving the meaning
of the term ‘knowledge’ through an equivalent description. In
this way the description theory of meaning gave a simple under-
standing of what philosophical problems and their solutions
are. At only thirty years of age, in 1970, Saul Kripke shattered
this understanding of philosophy with a groundbreaking lec-
ture series which later became his book Naming and Necessity
(1980).
In these lectures Kripke put forward powerful arguments
against the description theory of meaning, in particular against
the description theory of proper names. According to that
hypothesis, the referent of a name is determined by a descrip-
tion, or by a bundle of descriptions, that the speaker associates
with the name. Against this, Kripke points out that there are cases
where the descriptions that a speaker associates with a name do
not pick out its actual referent. For instance, many speakers who
know the name at all associate the name ‘Peano’ only with the
description “the discoverer of the Peano Axioms in mathemat-
ics.” But that description actually picks out Richard Dedekind,
not Giuseppe Peano! Nevertheless, as Kripke points out, with
their uses of ‘Peano’ the speakers are referring to Peano. Fur-
thermore, there are cases where speakers do not even associate a
name with a description, in the sense that they don’t pick out
exactly one object with their description, but nevertheless, that
64 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
is how they use the name. For example, with the name ‘Cicero’
many speakers only associate the property of ‘being a Roman
orator’.
Therefore, Kripke proposes that rather than being deter-
mined by a description or set of descriptions, the referent of a
name is determined by a so-called ‘communicational chain’. The
first link of such a chain is someone dubbing an object with its
name. The other links of the chain are borrowings of this name
from one speaker to the next. This is also known as ‘the causal
theory of reference’.
Kripke goes on in Naming and Necessity to extend the causal
theory of reference from proper names to natural kind terms,
such as ‘water’ and ‘tiger’. A similar theory had been proposed
by Hilary Putnam, and, following the work of Kripke and
Putnam, philosophers such as Tyler Burge and Michael Devitt
have argued for different extensions of the causal theory of ref-
erence beyond proper names and natural kind terms, covering,
among other things, social and artificial kind terms. In this way,
Kripke’s work has completely changed professional philoso-
phers’ understanding of meaning, from an internalist view –
according to which the meanings of our expressions are descrip-
tions or bundles of descriptions in our heads – to an externalist
view – which claims that the meanings of our expressions are
nothing other than their referents out there in the world. This
is why causal theories of reference are often also referred to as
‘semantic externalism’.
Semantic externalism has had far-reaching implications for
philosophy. For example, by arguing for a causal theory of ref-
erence for proper names and natural kind terms, Kripke single-
handedly rehabilitated a philosophical discipline that had suf-
fered badly under the description theory of meaning – meta-
physics. After all, if questions regarding the nature of things
such as knowledge or Napoleon are only questions regarding
the meanings of the linguistic expressions ‘knowledge’ and
‘Napoleon’, then this implies that when talking about reality we
are not in fact studying reality itself, but only human language
use. In which case metaphysics, as the study of the fundamental
nature of reality, seems to have no real subject matter.
Playing into the hands of the description theory and the asso-
ciated linguistic conception of metaphysics, was the fact that,
before Kripke, many philosophers thought that everything that
is necessarily true can be known by reasoning alone – that is, a
priori – and that everything that could be known a priori was
necessarily true. From this they concluded that everything that

SAUL KRIPKE BY DARREN MCANDREW
is necessarily true has to be true because
of the meaning of the sentences used to
formulate those truths. This would
explain why necessary truths can be
known by reasoning alone.
Kripke countered this line of thought
with one of his main insights, which is
that it does not follow from the fact that
a sentence is necessarily true, that its truth
can be known by reasoning alone. For
instance, if Goldbach’s conjecture (a the-
orem about prime numbers) is true, then
it is necessarily true: it can never have been
false. However, as Kripke points out,
from this it follows neither that the truth
of Goldbach’s conjecture can be known
by reasoning alone, nor, indeed, that it
can be known at all.
Once Kripke had rejected the descrip-
tion theory of meaning and the equating
of necessity with being a priori, the way
was paved for his intuitive view that both
objects and natural kinds have properties
that are necessary for their particular exis-
tence. This view is known as essentialism.
For instance, according to Kripke,
Napoleon could not have existed without
being a human being: if something wasn’t
December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 65
Obituary
human, it wasn’t Napoleon. Similarly,
Kripke argues that tigers could not have
existed without being mammals. Hence,
even though it cannot be known by rea-
soning alone that ‘Tigers are mammals’
is true, nevertheless, for Kripke, the sen-
tence is necessarily true, and moreover,
it tells us something about the nature of
tigers independent of the meaning (that
is, definition) of the natural kind term
‘tiger’.
Rehabilitating metaphysics in this way
was also of great importance for Kripke’s
work on modal logic. This is the brand
of logic involving modal operators, such
as ‘It is necessary that…’ or by contrast
‘It is possible that…’. In particular it was
important in connection with quantified
modal logic, which studies the interplay
of the modal operators of ‘possible’ and
‘necessary’ with logical quantifiers such
as ‘every’ and ‘some’. While he was still
in his teens, Kripke developed an origi-
nal interpretation of quantified modal
logic using so-called ‘possible worlds’.
Nevertheless, many philosophers were
skeptical when it came to quantified
modal logic, since by allowing quantifi-
cation (some, every, etc) into modal con-
texts (for example ‘Every tiger is such that
it is necessary that it is a mammal’), quan-
tified modal logic seems to presuppose
some form of essentialism. Therefore, by
rehabilitating essentialism, Kripke also
vindicated his early work on quantified
modal logic.
Kripke was sometimes described as
having a certain fondness for philosoph-
ical puzzles and paradoxes, and this is cer-
tainly true. However, as has been sug-
gested in these few lines, his views are
probably as comprehensive as they can be
for a philosopher of the twentieth cen-
tury, replacing the linguistic conception
of philosophy which was predominant in
the middle of the twentieth century with
a view that puts metaphysical considera-
tions first. In this way, Kripke leaves us
not only with a better understanding of
philosophy, but also with a better appre-
ciation of his and our fondness for its puz-
zles and paradoxes.
Saul Kripke died on September 15
2022 at the age of 81.
© DR STEFAN RINNER 2022
Stefan Rinner is an interim professor in
philosophy of language at the University of
Hamburg.
Fiction
The Great Crumpled Paper Hoax
A fantasy by Martin Gardner.
“T he trouble with your art,” said Hazel, my significant
other, “is that you don’t have a gimmick.”
It was a hot day in July. I was sitting opposite Hazel in a small
basement bar in Soho, on Manhattan’s lower east side. Above
us was the Archibald Gallery, where fourteen of my paintings
were hanging. It was my first one man show.
The exhibition had been a colossal failure. Only one news-
paper, the New York Times, covered the show, and the art critic
who reviewed it called it “the most vapid show” he had seen in
decades. Not a single picture sold.
“It’s not just that you don’t have a gimmick,” Hazel went on.
She had an annoying habit of always saying exactly what she
was thinking, even when it pained a listener: “It’s not
just that you need something to distinguish your
work from everybody else. It’s that you never
learned how to draw.”
I winced and put down my glass of
beer. Hazel was telling it like it was. I
couldn’t paint a decent-looking cow if
my life depended on it.
“You’re right as usual, my love,” I
said. “But what can I do? I refuse to get
up at six every morning to go to a job I
hate – a job that can’t lead anywhere.”
“If you want my advice,” she said,
“which I doubt… Forget about landscapes
and realism. Go abstract. If your painting is
totally non-objective, nobody can tell whether it’s
good or bad. But you have to have a gimmick. You have
to have something everyone will recognise as your trademark, a
unique selling point.”
“Gimmick’s a good word for it,” I said. “Did you steal it from
that magician friend of yours? Well, I’ve racked my brain for a
fresh gimmick for years. But it ain’t easy to think of one. I can’t
paint each one a different color, for instance. That’s been done.
And I can’t slash the canvas with fat blue brush strokes like
Klein, or paint the canvas a solid color like Reinhardt, or glue
broken dishes to the canvas, or decorate it with elephant dung...”
Hazel flourished her empty glass as signal to the bartender.
“Well, keep trying. Have you thought of moving from paint to
minimalist sculpture?”
“Like Andre’s pile of bricks?”
“Yes, like Andre’s pile of bricks.”
I paid the tab and we parted: Hazel to her basement brown-
stone apartment, I to my lonesome loft in Brooklyn.
Next morning, during breakfast, I read another review of
my show. It was even more scathing than the first. The Brook-
lyn Eagle wondered “Is the show a deliberate joke?” I ripped
out the double pages, crumpled them into a ball, and hurled
the ball across the room. It struck a wall then bounced to the
uncarpeted floor, where a sunbeam from a skylight turned the
66 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023
air to dust and the paper to gold.
‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to myself, ‘like a yellow diamond’. I was
reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s line, “all is gold that glitters.”
Suddenly a bizarre thought bombarded my brain. I leaped to
my feet. “Eureka!” I shouted. “I’ve found my gimmick!”
With trembling hands I picked up from the kitchen counter a
vertical spike mounted on a wood base that I use for spearing gro-
cery receipts. I removed the receipts, retrieved my crumpled
sphere, then pushed it down partway onto the spike.
Next, I sprayed the ball a bright blue. From a distance it
looked like a NASA photograph of the Earth – only an Earth
with a lovely crumpled surface.
The following day I showed the construction to my
cousin Archibald. “Magnificent!” he exclaimed. “My
gallery is booked through August and September,
© NIKHILESH HAVAL 2008 PUBLIC DOMAIN
but in October I can display, say, a dozen of
your new works. Of course, you’ll have to
change your name.” So I changed my name
from Joseph Johnson to Francis Feemster.
The October show was a huge success.
The New York Times critic warbled about
how my crumpled paper modeled the crum-
pled state of the Earth environmentally. All
twelve of my spheres were sold. MOMA then
PAPER BALL
bought a huge ball that I made from a com-
plete Sunday edition of the Times, using glue to
fasten the outer layers. For the Brooklyn Museum
of Art I provided a large blue ball mounted on a spike,
in turn mounted on a wooden cube that contained a tiny
motor and two AA batteries. The motor rotated the ball slowly
from east to west.
The following year I shifted to my pink period, followed by
a multicoloured period, using crumpled Sunday comic pages. A
Chicago manufacturer bought the rights to mass-produce the
balls in colored plastic. Of course they sold for much lower than
my originals. Time devoted three colorful pages to what they
called ‘crumpled paper sculpture’. Feemster became famous.
After Hazel and I were married, we moved to a high-rise
apartment on Charles Street in the Village. A well-known art
critic is taping our conversation for a biography.
I’m now in my black period. The black symbolises the future
of the Earth.
It goes without saying that Hazel and I have been extremely
careful never to let on that crumpled ball art is a put-on. The
deception continues to distress us. I’ve been drinking more booze
than I should, and my dear wife is hinting that maybe it’s time to
check into detox. If I drink myself to death, she tells me, she’ll see
that a crumpled ball of concrete will rest on top of my tombstone.
© MARTIN GARDNER 2022
The late Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics
and science writer, and a novelist, among many other things.
 Joseph is dead. Is he in heaven or hell?
Worse, Hyleberia!
A young gambling addict dies in a random toaster fire, but
wakes up on a mysterious island called Hyleberia where he is
Demystify baffling language and understand given the chance to start a second life.
fascinating concepts with this brand new guide
by Philosophy Now’s Anja Steinbauer. The Republic
of Reality
available in print or for Kindle at:
laurenceking.com tinyurl.com/RepOfReality

The Ultimate Guide series from Philosophy Now

Issue 1 Issue 4
Reissued in print Available in print

Issue 2 Issue 5
Available in print Available in print

philosophynow.org/shop
#HumansWanted

It takes
human
intelligence
to make
the artificial
kind
MSc Digital Politics & Sustainability | MA Philosophy | MA Philosophy & Artificial Intelligence
MSc Responsible Artificial Intelligence | MSc Computer Science (Software Development)

nulondon.ac.uk