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Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road, 4 When Tides of Thought Meet by Grant Bartley
Telegraph Hill,
London SE14 5NQ
5 News by Anja Steinbauer
United Kingdom RELIGION & SECULARISM
Tel. 020 7639 7314
editors@philosophynow.org
6 Meaning in the Executive Suite
philosophynow.org Ken Hines scorns corporate slogans about the meaning of life
8 Einstein and the Rebbe
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis
Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer
Ronald Pies’ imaginary dialogue between science and religion
Digital Editor Bora Dogan 12 Christianity and Homosexuality
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Rick Aaron says you can’t ask what ain’t possible
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg
Editorial Assistant Alex Marsh 14 Beyond Humanism?
Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis, Robert Griffiths argues that humanist ethics has limitations
Anja Steinbauer 17 Suffering and the Media
Marketing Sue Roberts
Administration Ewa Stacey, Alex Marsh Ian Church discerns the media’s influence in how we perceive evil
Advertising Team
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
Secularism & Religion 18 Buddha Travels West
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org How opposed are they? Peter Abbs contemplates Buddhism’s increasingly secular path
UK Editorial Board See pages 6-21 GENERAL ARTICLES
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley 22 The Plague & The Plague
US Editorial Board Dylan Daniel says Albert Camus’ novel is a text for our times
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher 25 Social Distancing in Solitude
College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern
J.R. Davis picks up tips from Thoreau for dealing with isolation
COVID SISYPHUS © OWEN SAVAGE 2020.

Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Adamson,

Prof. Charles Echelbarger, Prof. 28 Philosophy and the Creation of the Individual
Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo Mark Vernon on how you became you, philosophically speaking
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College)
Contributing Editors 32 Et In Arcadia Ego
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Vaitsa Giannouli considers ethical issues surrounding dementia
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) 34 Those Who Justify Genocide
David Boersema (Pacific University)
UK Editorial Advisors Michael McManus reflects and reproaches
Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon REVIEWS
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood
US Editorial Advisors 44 Book: The Subject of Experience by Galen Strawson
Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni reviewed subjectively by Bill Meacham
Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof.
46 Book: The Character Gap by Christian B. Miller
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Cover Image by Alex CORONAVIRUS reviewed characteristically by Massimo Pigliucci
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 GRANT AT TATE MODERN © PAUL GREGORY 2016
Editorial When Tides of Thought Meet
L
ike the wider world, Philosophy Now has devoted a
fair amount of attention to the arguments between
theists and atheists. This tends to highlight the
divide between religion and secularism. In this issue,
by contrast, our theme is more about observing the religious
and irreligious worldviews as they move towards each other, or
where they each struggle in their own way with the same
concerns within society. (This time we’re not just focusing on
Atheists v. Christians, either). So the articles here look at the
overlaps and commonalities between religious and secular
thinking, as well as differences between them, and their role in
society. Doing this, we can see just the sorts of mental and
cultural exchanges that have taken place throughout history
when contrasting tides of thought flow through culture. These
ones though are happening right now, in real time as it were,
so we can learn a lot from them about what happens when
worldviews meet (or not quite meet, we might say).
How should we characterise this? Like a clash of battling
armies, ideas flow at each other, through each other, around
each other, over each other, changing the shapes of both
cultures in the process and leaving chaos in their wake? As a
dynamic unceasing process like continents of ideas colliding;
or like water channels rushing into each other; or perhaps like
pink or gold-hued banks of cloud slowly passing through each
other? One metaphor I personally like for the meeting of
opposing worldviews is magnetic fields interacting – except
that unlike magnets, here opposites don’t attract each other.
Rather, opposed ideas resist each other more strongly the
closer you push them together. I think this can be seen in Rick
Aaron’s article on Christianity and homosexuality, for instance,
where he looks at what happens when you try to squeeze those
two perspectives together. Against the natural pressure, we’re
trying to get the religious and secular perspectives to touch,
maybe even for mutual communication to flow between them.
Our theme also explores how the secular world is handling
two core aspects of life in society that were once firmly in
religion’s in-tray: meaning and ethics. Ken Hines considers the
attempted corporate takeover of meaning, and Robert
Griffiths examines the foundations of humanist ethics. In
different ways, both Kines and Griffiths find that secularism
needs to lay down deeper foundations for core ideas. In fact
Griffiths argues that there is a huge glaring hole right in the
centre of humanist ethics. Ripe for the unwary thinker to fall
through; or preferably, for moral philosophers to mine. It’s a
good thing to shine a light on such holes. It’s the best way of
finding where the theory needs to be filled in. Griffiths’
analysis at least reveals mysteries that could bear exploring;
for instance, concerning what precisely justifies goodness for
4 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
the godless. But let’s be fair: atheistic, naturalistic secularism
as an organised social and ethical movement is still compara-
tively young. By contrast, philosophical analysis and religion
go way back together. Indeed, a good case can be made that in
the West, with the Greeks, philosophy was born out of intel-
lectual separation from a religious and personal explanation of
natural phenomena – involving the gods and their passions –
to a mechanistic or impersonal explanation of what we see and
hear and feel. Thus we became atoms falling through the void.
Also in our theme section, Ian Church looks at how culture
affects our perception of evil; and Ronald Pies sets up a
dialogue between a scientifically informed Chief Rabbi and a
metaphysically interested Chief Scientist (Einstein). Finally,
Peter Abbs provides a case study of the flow of a worldview
into and through a culture, describing Buddhism’s journey into
the West over the last couple of centuries. He reveals ripples
of interest that grow into waves of transformation in thought.
It’s intriguing to see how both Western thought and
Buddhism in the West are being transformed by this process of
cultural adoption. In the process Buddhism has shape-shifted to
the extent that a naturalistic and humanistic version is on the
point of being delivered into the world by Western Buddhist
midwives of ideas. This means a Buddhism without karma, or
reincarnation, or gods, leaving only the practice of the Middle
Way. Perhaps this Buddhist bud will survive the buffeting of the
tides of thought, to thrive.
Not in our themed section, but buttressing it, as it were, we
see how John Locke’s philosophical development was influ-
enced by the religious and political upheavals of his day. And
in our Philosophical Haiku column, Terence Green claims that
René Descartes’ founding of modern philosophical rationalism
was motivated by the religious mysticism of St Teresa of Avila!
With the world currently in lockdown, this issue also has
three articles reflecting some of the philosophical fallout from
COVID-19. Dylan Daniel draws some lessons from the
famous novel The Plague by the existentialist Albert Camus.
J.R. Davis learns from Henry David Thoreau’s experience of
social distancing, deep in the woods by Walden Pond. Lastly,
Raymond Tallis reflects on handwashing, which is suddenly so
vital in keeping us alive.
This issue then reflects not just religion and secularism but
how they provide meaning in individual lives, especially in a
society in deep crisis. Hey, humanists, religion isn’t going away
any time soon. Hey, believers, despite recent crises the world
isn’t going to end any time soon (probably). We all remain in a
pluralistic world. I hope the articles here help bridge the
divide, perhaps even encouraging understanding between
theists and atheists. Who knows? Grant Bartley
• Art exhibition honours Germany’s first
African philosopher • Prize for Disagreeing
• Latour de France says we can change.
News reports by Anja Steinbauer
Prize for Making Life Worth Living
The Vienna Medical Association awards a
grand prize to promote interdisciplinary
cooperation between the sciences. This
year it has given the Paul Watzlawick Ring
of Honour to a philosopher: Robert Pfaller.
Pfaller, who is Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Linz, is a value theorist
and social critic. Writing books with philo-
sophical rigour but popular appeal in a
witty and engaging style, Pfaller discusses
questions about human behaviour, popular
values, political discourse and what it is that
makes life worth living.
Prize for Disagreeing Instructively
The American Philosophical Association,
in conjunction with the mysteriously-
named Phi Beta Kappa Society, has
awarded Agnes Callard, associate professor
of philosophy at the University of Chicago
and Laurie Paul, professor of philosophy at
Yale, the Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical
Achievement and Contribution. This prize
is unusual because it is awarded each year to
a pair of philosophers who hold contrasting
views on an important philosophical issue
“that is of current interest both to the field
and to an educated public audience,” and
have debated it in an enlightening way.
Callard and Paul received it for their
discussion of ‘Personal Transformation and
Practical Reason’.
Agnes Callard Laurie Paul
No Return
French philosopher Bruno Latour, an
ardent environmental activist, says that we
should resist a return to our old ways as the
restrictions on our movements are eased.
The pandemic has shown that we can adapt
and seriously change our lives: “We could
actually take immensely drastic measures in
a matter of days to counter a threat. So, in
that sense, when people say we cannot do
anything, it’s clearly wrong.” Latour
believes there is an opportunity: “We
should not miss the chance of doing some-
thing else.” We should think critically
about how we might want to change our
lives permanently: “Let’s try to see if we can
imagine in advance what we want to keep
(...) and what we want to stop.” He thinks
that reduced consumerism, for example, is a
good thing.
Art and Philosophy 1: Exhibition
about Anton Willhelm Amo
Sixteen artists have contributed works
reflecting on the life of a fascinating eigh-
teenth century intellectual: Anton Wilhelm
Amo. Born in 1703 in Ghana, at the age of
four Amo was taken to Europe as a slave
and given as a present to the Duke of
Brunswick. At the Brunswick court he was
allowed to study, becoming the first
African known to have attended a Euro-
pean university and the first African
philosopher in Germany. Amo graduated
from the University of Halle with a thesis
titled Dissertatio Inauguralis De Jure Mauro-
rum in Europa (The Rights of Moors in
Europe). While the manuscript is lost, a
summary was published in his university’s
Annals. Amo went on to more advanced
studies at the University of Wittenberg, in
logic, metaphysics, physiology, astronomy,
history, law, theology, politics and
medicine. He gained his doctorate in
philosophy in 1734; his thesis On the
Absence of Sensation in the Human Mind and
its Presence in our Organic and Living Body is
an interesting contribution to the mind-
body problem, opposing Cartesian dual-
ism. He then became Professor of Philoso-
News
phy first in Halle, then in Jena, but
returned to Ghana later in life. The artists
involved in the exhibition have created art
to ask questions about Amo’s life and
thought, as well as popular perceptions of
him through history. ‘The Faculty of Sens-
ing: Thinking With, Through and by
Anton Wilhelm Amo’ is at the Kunstverein
Braunschweig (Brunswick) until 13
September 2020.
Art and Philosophy 2: Banksy
In aesthetics we spend a lot of time thinking
about how art reflects but also changes life.
Here is a case study. Southampton General
is a UK hospital at the forefront of battling
the pandemic, with National Health
Service staff and volunteers putting them-
selves at risk, and some tragically dying as a
consequence of their altruistic service.
Avant-garde street artist Banksy left a work
of art on level C of the hospital building
with a note to the hospital workers saying:
“Thanks for all you’re doing. I hope this
brightens the place up a bit, even if it’s only
black and white.” The work of art shows a
little boy, having put his Superman and
Spider-Man action figures in the bin, play-
ing with a figure of his new superhero, a
nurse with a face mask. Following the lock-
down, the painting will be put on public
display and then auctioned, with all the
proceeds going to NHS charities.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 5
Religion &
Meaning in the Executive Suite
Ken Hines doesn’t succumb to corporate propaganda about meaning.
n that fall morning years ago when the eighteen-
O year-old me first entered a college philosophy class-
room, I carried with me a notebook, the assigned
texts, and the naïve confidence that somewhere in
these lectures or these pages I would find (at last) the meaning
of life. I was to be somewhat disappointed. Although the philo-
sophical tradition from Plato to Richard Rorty is brimming with
potential answers to the timeless question of life’s meaning, I
found those answers to be neither as singular nor as clear cut as
I had hoped. If, as we learn in The Republic of Plato and his other
dialogues, what we perceive in day-to-day life is a knock-off of
ideal Forms that exist in a perfect world, and if knowledge of
those Forms is the highest accomplishment one can attain, that
certainly points us toward a purpose in life. Aristotle seconds
Plato’s priority on intellectual inquiry, and adds that true well-
being issues from virtuous action. But none of this is crisp and
catchy. Their arguments wouldn’t fit on a T-shirt.
As it turns out, the question of meaning evidently does not
lend itself to a final answer, which may explain why it has
intrigued thinkers from so many disciplines. By now, genera-
tions of theologians, psychologists, sociologists, even cultural
theorists, have weighed in on the topic. But in our own time, a
new authority has emerged: corporate management. From their
posh digs in the executive suite, these industrial titans try to
define the meaning of life for their employees; and they do so
transparently and bluntly – the kind of thing a teenage philos-
ophy student might appreciate.
The Birth of Worldly Meaning
The idea that your employer would wade into the question of
your life’s meaning may seem preposterous until you think about
the connection between work and meaning. This was first estab-
lished through the Protestant concept of worldly calling. Neatly
summarized by Max Weber in his classic work The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the story begins in the
sixteenth century’s Reformation, with Martin Luther and John
Calvin redefining the idea of sacred vocation. Up to that point
in the Christian West, there had been only one kind of divine
calling and it required leaving the profane world to serve a holy
office, becoming a priest, monk, or nun. Everyone else made a
living in whatever trade was available to them. The Reformers
turned that idea on its head. God, they believed, doesn’t just
summon His favorites to be nuns and priests; He calls on every-
one to serve Him, even by the sweat of their brows, as tailors,
potters, and brewers. The notion of ‘worldly calling’ found a
particularly receptive audience in the English colonies in North
America, where settlers had been motivated to make treacher-
ous ocean voyages in part because of religious fervour and in
part because of economic opportunity. The change in outlook
was dramatic and pervasive. As historian James Livingston puts
it, “Before the Reformation, almost no one believed that socially
necessary labor was an ennobling activity. After the Reforma-
6 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
tion, almost everyone did” (‘Why Work? Breaking the Spell of
the Protestant Ethic’, The Baffler, No.35, 2017). But how do you
get from a devout Puritan glassmaker in Massachusetts Bay
Colony to a lanyard-yoked management consultant in 2020,
whose only references to God are the occasional expletive?
The bridge connecting them was cultural change wrought by
industrialization. One trade after another was replaced by
machines, and by the 1850s many craftsmen had been relegated
(or ‘rationalized’) to mind-numbingly repetitive chores on pro-
duction lines. The psychological toll on the worker through his
loss of independence, pride, status, and so on, hurt morale and
threatened productivity. That posed a problem for factory owners:
How could they keep their masses of former artisans at their sta-
tions, repeating their menial tasks on the production line?
The manufacturers responded with a brilliant, if cynical, man-
agement initiative. They celebrated the sanctity of work, not
just for the benefit of the workers themselves, as the Protestant
work ethic had done, but also for their families and communi-
ties. In speeches and newspaper articles, they held up the fac-
tory as a glorious enterprise that would carry one and all to a
new Promised Land of prosperity and security. And thus a great
commercial sleight of hand was born. In the absence of the
Calvinist footing upon which it was originally built, the idea of
worldly calling was reframed to suit business owners’ objectives.
Today, providing some sort of philosophical underpinning for
their employees’ work is basic management leadership practice,
to the point that any CEO who fails to whip up purpose for his
minions in the form of a mission statement, vision, or credo, would
be found guilty of malpractice. Employees are surrounded by this
kind of effort: in staff meetings, incentive programs, departmen-
tal emails, even posters in the breakroom, they’re reminded that
they’re there to make a difference in the world.
The Meaning of Corporate Life
Perhaps the richest vein of corporate evangelism is to be found
on company websites. Below are a few examples from websites of
how companies, in their own dialect of corporatese, seek to per-
suade applicants that a job with them means a life of meaning:
STARBUCKS: “Inspire and nurture the human spirit – one
person, one cup, one neighborhood at a time.”
SUNTRUST: “Work and live with greater purpose at Sun-
Trust.”
FACEBOOK: “Give people the power to share and make the
world more open and connected.”
WHOLE FOODS MARKET: “Whole Foods Makes You
Whole.”
As noble as the sentiments sound, all these companies are
involved in the otherwise somewhat pedestrian activity of mar-
keting products and services. Nothing wrong with that. What’s
off key, though, is the claim that existential fulfilment is a byprod-

CARTOON © GUTO DIAS 2020. PLEASE VISIT FACEBOOK.COM/PG/GUTOZDIASSTUDIO/
uct of this effort. Why does management
care about your sense of meaning? Follow
the money. When employees are convinced
that they’re part of a grand enterprise in pur-
suit of noble goals, they work harder. The
purpose of the corporate mantra, the credo,
and the aspirational challenge, is to boost
productivity and reduce staff turnover.
In the post-industrial economy, the con-
nection between work and purpose has
evolved – shapeshifted may be a better word
– into a particularly virulent strain, which
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
traces to the secular character of our times.
In his book A Secular Age (2007), although
he’s not specifically concerned with mean-
ing in the workplace, Taylor does devote
attention to his nuanced term ‘fullness’ –
the sense you get when life feels full, rich,
deep, and complete (pp.5-7). To many of
our forebears, that feeling of fullness in life
“pointed inescapably to God” (p.26). For
most of us today, however, maybe it occurs
at a chance gathering of old friends, a hike
in the mountains, or at a concert. Whatever
prompts it, we tend to think of this fleeting
sense of fullness as self-generated. We look
inward to choose our activities, the goals we
set, and the work we do.
Our sense of meaning in life is simarly
self-generated. This leaves us vulnerable to
the appeals of corporate management.
Resistance is Profitable
Despite its glossy packaging, management’s
appeal to our innate need for meaning often
falls flat. Perhaps that’s to be expected if, as
cultural theorist Terry Eagleton suggests,
Secularism
“It is not easy for an industrial capitalist
order to come up with a vision that will seize
the hearts and minds of the people” (Cul-
ture and the Death of God, 2014, p.63).
One reason for this is employee skepti-
cism. Employees know better than anyone
that the company’s advertising claims often
contain only half-truths (at best). Why,
then, should they take the lofty language of
employee communications seriously?
Another reason these corporate attempts
fail is that they’re imposed from outside –
by someone who wields inordinate power
over the worker.
Few have written about the meaning of
life more eloquently or with more authority
than psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor
Viktor Frankl. His innovative approach to
psychotherapy was based on his experience
as a prisoner in Nazi death camps. There he
observed that the prisoners who survived
deprivation and torture were the ones who
“knew there was a task waiting for them to
fulfill” when the war ended (Man’s Search for
Meaning, 1946, p.104).
For Frankl, meaning is a primary moti-
vation in any individual’s life. “This mean-
ing is unique and specific in that it must and
can be fulfilled by [the individual] alone;
only then does it achieve the significance
which will satisfy his own will to meaning”
(p.99). Whatever else the corporate goals
might be, they cannot be individual or per-
sonalized. Rather, they are imposed from
above by a manager with leverage over each
employee: they are not ‘freely chosen’ as
Frankl prescribes. Worse still, by its very
nature, the corporate sense of meaning is
designed to benefit the corporation itself.
Nothing about it speaks to the needs or
aspirations of the individual worker.
Last year, the Pew Research Center
reported that 55% of U.S. corporate
employees say their jobs, far from provid-
ing a sense of meaning, ‘are just what they
do for a living.’ Charles Taylor describes the
resulting condition perfectly with his obser-
vation that when fullness is missing, “all our
actions and goals lack weight and sub-
stance,” rendering life “flat, empty” (A Sec-
ular Age, pp.307, 506). The values manage-
ment hoped would fit you like a tailored suit
in reality just feel like a uniform.
© KEN HINES 2020
Ken Hines studied philosophy at the College of
William and Mary, and the University of
Virginia; the perfect preparation for a career
as an ad agency creative director.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 7
Religion &
Einstein & The Rebbe
Ronald Pies sets up a dialogue between science and religion.
“The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”
– Galileo Galilei
“There is no harmony between religion and science. When science was a
child, religion sought to strangle it in the cradle.”
– R.G. Ingersoll
W
hen I was a resident in psychiatry, over thirty-five
years ago, one of my mentors said something that
forever changed the way I thought about my pro-
fession. “In psychiatry,” he said, “you can do biol-
ogy in the morning and theology in the afternoon”. He was
being a little facetious, but on a deeper level he meant what he
said. I understood his message to be simply this: the problems
of my patients could be understood and approached from both
a ‘scientific’ and a ‘religious’ perspective without fear of con-
tradiction or inconsistency. Yes, I know there are many critics
of psychiatry who would challenge its scientific bona fides, but
that’s a debate that would take me too far afield. Instead, I would
like to use my teacher’s claim as a point of entry into a much
broader question: namely, in what ways do science and religion
differ, and in what sense do they have features in common?
This is hardly a new question, and I don’t claim to have any
revolutionary answers. But I hope that by distinguishing
between the truth claims and the wisdom claims of science and
religion I can make the case for a form of ‘compatibilism’. To
do this, I will draw out St Augustine’s distinction between sci-
entia and sapientia, whose meanings I will try to make clear
presently. In addition, as an illustration of how this distinction
may be helpful, I will present an imagined dialogue (albeit using
real quotes) between two towering figures in the realms of sci-
ence and religion, Albert Einstein, and Rabbi Menachem
Mendel Schneerson, known as ‘the Rebbe’. What makes this
dialogue different from the usual ‘Science vs. Religion’ boxing
match is the eclectic and nuanced positions of the two figures,
for in an important sense Albert Einstein was a deeply religious
scientist, and the Rebbe a deeply scientific theologian.
A Tale of Two Terms:
Science & Religion
When considering the commonalities and differences between
science and religion, it seems useful to proffer at least some
rough-and-ready working definitions of them. I don’t claim
that these definitions provide necessary and sufficient criteria
for either of the term’s ‘science’ or ‘religion’. Indeed, Ludwig
Wittgenstein taught us to question the very notion of such
‘essential’ definitions. Yet we must begin somewhere. Accord-
ingly, I would like to define ‘science’ as ‘That field of study
which attempts to describe and understand the nature of the
universe, in whole or in part, by means of: careful observation;
hypothesis formulation; empirical attempts to verify and falsify
8 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
hypotheses; and experimental tests of predictions generated by
specific hypotheses’.
Defining religion is perhaps even dodgier than defining sci-
ence. As Professor of Religion Thomas A. Idinopulos has noted,
“The more we learn about religions, the more we appreciate
not their similarities but their differences” (‘What is Religion?’,
Cross Currents, 1998). (I’m also reminded of the satirical defini-
tion in Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones: “By religion I
mean Christianity, by Christianity I mean Protestantism, by
Protestantism I mean the Church of England as established by
law.”) Nevertheless, I want to venture a working definition of
religion based in part on the work of the philosopher Ninian
Smart (1927-2001). In my view, ‘religion’ may be defined, very
roughly, as ‘That body of beliefs, rituals, values, norms, and nar-
ratives that address the place of humankind in relation to the
universe, and proffer a coherent worldview in which faith, devo-
tion, a sense of the sacred, and adherence to ultimate values,
play an important role’. Note that this definition of religion does
not require belief in a deity – including an omniscient, omnipo-
tent Creator who intervenes in the affairs of mankind – although
it does not preclude God or gods, either. Indeed, if you con-
sider Buddhism a religion, the concept of a transcendent deity
is not found in Theravada Buddhism, and is only partly expressed
in some strains of Mahayana Buddhism. Jainism, too, lacks any
well-formed notion of a deity. So when we ask whether science
and religion share certain attributes, we need not do so in rela-
tion to any of the notions of God as understood in, for exam-
ple, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Compatible or Incompatible?
As suggested by the dueling epigrams at the beginning of this
article, there is a yawning chasm between two extremes of views
of religion’s relation to science. Galileo presented a ‘compati-
bilist’ view, suggesting, in effect, that religion tells us what we
must do to attain salvation, not how the stars and planets oper-
ate under natural law. The latter is the province of science. This
position is not far from that of the late Stephen Jay Gould (1941-
2002), who coined the term ‘non-overlapping magisteria’ to
describe the relationship between science and religion. As Gould
succinctly put it, “The net of science covers the empirical uni-
verse: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way
(theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral
meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap” (taken
from the Gould website).
In stark contrast, we have the ‘incompatibilist’ view of the
American lawyer R.G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), known as ‘the
Great Agnostic’, who argued that religion and science are in
effect mortal enemies. But his claim that religion has been
unequivocally hostile to science could be disputed through sev-
eral archetypal historical examples. For instance, in the infa-
mous Galileo affair, in which the Catholic Church ultimately
 Secularism

Einstein & The Rebbe

by Gail Campbell, 2020

June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 9

Religion &
condemned Galileo for heresy, it is not clear that the Church’s
initial opposition was purely due to it having ‘anti-scientific’ atti-
tudes. Some scholars have suggested that Cardinal Bellarmine,
the head of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, “was willing to
countenance scientific truth if it could be proven or demon-
strated” to his satisfaction. (A full discussion of this is provided
by P. Machamer in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014.)
In contrast to Gould’s position I’d like to argue that there is a
limited but important degree of overlap between science and reli-
gion. I’d also like to argue, in contrast to Ingersoll that religion
need not be an enemy of science. But before unpacking my ‘mod-
ified compatibilist’ position, I would like to present a hypotheti-
cal dialogue between two immense historical figures in the mag-
isteria of science and of religion.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is arguably the most renowned
scientist since Isaac Newton, while Rabbi Menachem Mendel
Schneerson (1902-94) was the head of the Lubavitcher branch of
Orthodox Judaism. But the Rebbe was no ordinary man of reli-
gion, as he had studied science and mathematics at the Humboldt
University of Berlin and the Sorbonne. He was quite capable of
discussing science intelligently, even with the likes of Albert Ein-
stein. For his part, although Einstein had been brought up in a
non-observant Jewish household, he “had great respect for the
humanistic elements in Jewish tradition”, and retained from his
childhood “a profound reverence for the harmony and beauty of
what he called the mind of God, as it was expressed in the cre-
ation of the universe and its laws” (Einstein: His Life and Universe,
W. Isaacson, p.20, 2008). This point becomes crucial in the argu-
ment I’ll develop.
The Rebbe Meets Einstein
Let’s imagine a meeting in Professor Einstein’s study in late 1954,
shortly before the scientist’s death. Einstein would have been sev-
enty-five years old; the Rebbe around fifty-two. Although the
dialogue is hypothetical, Einstein’s views are represented by ver-
batim quotes from Einstein himself over the span of many years.
In the case of the Rebbe, the quotes represent the teachings of
Rabbi Schneerson as memorized and collated by a group of ‘oral
scribes’. The collated teachings were then transcribed by the
Rebbe’s student-disciple, Rabbi Simon Jacobson. I have also
added a few informal greetings and transitional remarks, shown
in italics. Moreover, although the dialogue is shown in English,
one can easily imagine the two men conversing in Yiddish, the
mother tongue of many Jewish people around the world:
The Rebbe: Greetings, Herr Professor! It is an honor to meet you! So,
if I may be so bold, here is the problem. For some people, there still
exists today a rift between science and religion, as though some
parts of life are controlled by G-d and others by the laws of sci-
ence and nature. This compartmentalized attitude, however, is
wrong. Since G-d created the universe and the natural laws that
govern it, there can be no schism between the creator and His
creation.
Einstein: Rebbe, it is a pleasure to meet you! I would say that behind
the discernible laws and connections there remains something
subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force
beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion. To that
10 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
extent, I am, in fact religious. I do not believe in a personal God
and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If
something is in me which can be called religious then it is the
unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as
our science can reveal it.
The Rebbe: Indeed, Herr Professor! And the natural laws of the
universe can hardly contradict the blueprint from which they
were made! So, science is ultimately the human study of G-d’s
mind, the search to understand the laws that G-d installed to
run the physical universe.
Einstein: Yes, Rebbe, though I cannot conceive of a God who
rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of
which we are conscious in ourselves... Enough for me [is] the
mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous
structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor
to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that
manifests itself in nature.
The Rebbe: Indeed, Herr Professor, there is no question that the
universe is guided by a certain logic... Scientists and philoso-
phers peer through the outer layers of the universe to discover
the force lying within. What we are all actually searching for,
whether or not we acknowledge it, is G-d, the hand inside the
glove.
Einstein: You know, Rebbe, I think we are in the position of a little
child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages.
The child knows someone must have written those books. It
does not know how. It does not understand the languages in
which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious
order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what
it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intel-
ligent human being towards God. We see the universe mar-
velously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly
understand these laws.
The Rebbe: So the true challenge of science today is not to refute
G-d, but to discover how [science] reflects and illuminates parts
of G-d’s mind that have yet to be uncovered.
Einstein: For me, Rebbe, the most beautiful emotion we can expe-
rience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that
stands at the cradle of true art and science... To sense that behind
anything that can be experienced there is something that our
minds cannot grasp whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only
indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense
only, I am a devoutly religious man.
Truth Claims & Wisdom Claims:
Scientia & Sapientia
here are clearly some truth claims in science and in religion
T that simply cannot be reconciled. For example, whereas some
Christian fundamentalists calculate the age of the Earth as just
over six thousand years, most scientists believe the correct figure
is about 4.6 billion years. Assuming, both claims are using the
word ‘year’ in the same way, then there is simply no way they
can be reconciled. Moreover, the methods of religion and sci-
ence are also radically different, if not broadly incompatible.
For example, we do not generally find theologians conducting
controlled experiments to determine the age of the Earth or to
find out whether their prayers are answered. However, when it

comes to wisdom claims, there are areas of significant compati-
bility between science and religion.
Some derivations of the word ‘religion’ relate it to the Latin
religare, meaning ‘to bind fast’ or ‘to connect’. I would argue
that religion, as I have defined it, seeks to connect us, as human
beings, to the underlying and ultimate ‘Originating Force’
responsible for our existence, whether this is ‘God’, ‘Brahman’,
‘the Dao’ or something else. Science similarly seeks to connect
us to the cosmic order, albeit in a material sense. When Crosby,
Stills, Nash, and Young sang in ‘Woodstock’ that “We are star-
dust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon”, they were
merely reflecting the prevailing scientific claim, best expressed
in 1973 by astronomer Carl Sagan on the TV show Cosmos, that
“the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in
our genes, were produced billions of years ago in the interior of
a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff.”
A more spiritualized version of this idea was expressed in
1918, by the then-President of the Royal Astronomical Society
of Canada, Dr Albert D. Watson:
“It is true that a first thoughtful glimpse of the immeasurable uni-
verse is liable rather to discourage us with a sense of our own insignif-
icance. But astronomy is wholesome even in this, and helps to clear
the way to a realization that as our bodies are an integral part of the
great physical universe, so through them are manifested laws and forces
that take rank with the highest manifestation of Cosmic Being.”
(Retiring President’s Address, Annual Meeting,
January 29, 1918, italics added).
It should be clear that the italicized portion of the statement
is not an assertion of scientific fact; that it is not a verifiable truth
claim, like ‘The half-life of strontium-90 is 28.8 years’. Rather,
it asserts a fundamental relationship between our bodies as phys-
ical entities and ‘the highest manifestation of Cosmic Being’
(the capital letters were doubtless important for Dr Watson). I
would characterize this as a wisdom claim – not unlike the claim
of Einstein when he said, “behind the discernible laws and con-
nections there remains something subtle, intangible, and inex-
plicable.”
The distinction I wish to emphasize here, between truth
claims and wisdom claims, is also far from novel: I am drawing
on the distinction Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) made six-
teen centuries ago, between scientia and sapientia. For Augus-
tine, scientia denoted ‘knowledge of temporal things’ – what we
might call ‘facts about the observable world’. In contrast, sapi-
entia denoted ‘wisdom derived from the contemplation of eter-
nal truth’ (‘Augustine of Hippo’s Trinitarian Imago Dei For
Balancing Intellect and Emotion In The Life of Faith’, Jerry
Ireland, 2013).
I believe that much apparent disagreement between science
and religion stems from a failure to distinguish these two dis-
tinct modes of knowing. Indeed, mistaking a scientia statement
for a sapientia statement (or vice versa) would be what the
philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a ‘category mistake’ – roughly
speaking, a bit like calling a whale a fish.
For example, in the Passover Haggadah – the guide to observ-
ing the Passover meal – we read the following:
Secularism
“It was not just our fathers and our mothers who were
Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt; but we, all of us gathered here tonight,
were Pharaoh’s slaves in Egypt”
It is nonsensical to read this statement as belonging to the
category of scientia. It is quintessentially a statement of sapien-
tia, or wisdom. As Prof. Marcus Borg explains, “the exodus story
is understood to be true in every generation. It portrays bondage
as a perennial human problem... [and is] thus a perennially true
story about the divine-human relationship.” (Reading the Bible
Again for the First Time, 2001, p.49). Moreover, as Borg points
out, many sapientia statements in religious texts are essentially
metaphors, and as such, only appear to contradict scientific state-
ments about the observable world. The danger emerges when
we literalize what are essentially metaphorical statements. It is
important to note (as Borg does) that metaphorical statements
are not false statements even though they are not scientific state-
ments. They may still contain important wisdom. Indeed, Borg
observes that “metaphors can be profoundly true, even though
they are not literally true. Metaphor is poetry plus, not factual-
ity minus” (p.41). For example, in John 15:5, Jesus tells his dis-
ciples, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in
me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” Clearly, this
extended metaphor is not a literal claim about observable facts
that can be tested and contradicted by science. Rather, it is a
Background image by Paul Gregory
wisdom statement – a metaphor expressing the idea that Jesus’s
followers are spiritual extensions of himself, and that good things
will come of their faith.
A Personal Coda
I have a strange ritual I perform every morning, based very
loosely on a Jewish prayer called the modeh ani, which is tradi-
tionally recited upon first awakening. It’s a prayer of thanks. In
English it says, “I offer thanks to You, living and eternal King,
for You have mercifully restored my soul within me; Your faith-
fulness is great.”
Why do I call my ritual ‘strange’? In short, because I am not
at all sure that there is any ‘eternal King’ listening to me, much
less that such a Cosmic Ruler would care one whit about my
needs, wishes, or aspirations. And yet, each morning I give thanks
for life and health, and speak as if some ‘higher power’ could
hear me. My prayer is not scientia. It is not a statement of fact,
susceptible to scientific refutation. It is an act of consecration – an
act ‘dedicated to a sacred purpose’. It is religious, in so far as my
giving thanks connects me to something larger than myself, per-
haps in Einstein’s sort of sense. My prayer does not quarrel with
science: it presents no challenge to my scientific or medical
knowledge. Rather, such an act of consecration is a gesture
toward sapientia, a seeking of wisdom – even in the face of the
deepest doubt.
© RONALD W. PIES MD 2020
Ronald Pies, Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical Uni-
versity and Tufts University, is the author of The Three-Petalled
Rose, and other books of philosophy.
• The author wishes to thank Roger Price for his support of this work.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 11
Religion &
Christianity & Homosexuality
Rick Aaron argues that religious recommendations are sometimes unrealistic.
n this article I will not discuss religious criticisms proposed
I against homosexuality. Rather, I will consider the upshot
of these criticisms – what religious believers often recom-
mend that a gay person do as a practical matter. And while
there are many different criticisms religious people offer against
same-sex relations, most agree on what the moral response
should be, which is either to marry from the other sex or to lead
a life of chastity. I will say that the first option, marrying some-
one of the other sex, is not psychologically possible for most
gay men or women, and therefore cannot be morally expected
of them. The second supposed solution, chastity, may be pos-
sible provided special conditions (which I’ll mention), but is not
practically feasible for most gay men or women, and therefore
also cannot be morally expected of them. I’ll be using Chris-
tianity as a case in point, but what I have to say could be extended
across many religions.
The argument is as follows:
1. What is not practically feasible is not morally obligatory.
2. An action that depends on what is psychologically impos-
sible, or depends upon the intercession of grace or extraordi-
nary means of support, falls outside of what is practically feasi-
ble, since the first is not something the person can do, and the
second is not realizable by natural or ordinary means alone.
3. The conservative Christian solution to homosexuality for
gay men and women requires doing what is psychologically
impossible, or possible only through supernatural help or
extraordinary support.
4. Therefore, the conservative Christian solution to homo-
sexuality is not morally obligatory.
The spirit of this argument is that it is not realistic (or
humane) to expect a whole class of human beings, from birth
to death, to not seek happiness in a meaningful love relation-
ship, and therefore the conservative Christian solution concern-
ing homosexuality is not morally persuasive.
The Unworkability of the Christian Response
The conservative Christian answer for the gay person is to marry
the other sex or live alone. The first option is not as recommended
as the second, since these Christians acknowledge “there is
ample evidence that marriage is not a cure for same-sex attrac-
tions” (‘Homosexuality and Hope’, Diamond et al, 2018, para.
31). But both options are unviable; and if so, they cannot be
genuinely offered as moral advice.
Marrying the Other Sex Isn’t Feasible
The conservative Christian may recognize that marriage will
probably not eliminate same-sex attraction. This does indicate
the impracticality of that solution; but the person putting it for-
ward does not necessarily see that if this solution is impractica-
ble, then it cannot be morally expected of someone.
12 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
One reason this solution is impracticable is that romantic
attraction is part of what gives birth to a good marriage rela-
tionship. The heart of a stable long-term relationship is initially
birthed by attraction, and the life of a relation is sustained as it
progresses by that attraction, which is eventually superseded by
the bond of true love. Romantic attraction serves as a kind of
nutrient-rich soil in which a relationship can grow into some-
thing more beautiful. Were for example a gay man to marry a
woman, he could induce attraction for his wife; on the basis of
contemplating the ‘good’ of their sexual pairing. He would have
to become a lover through ethics! Even if this were possible, it
is hard to imagine that this type of love (or sex) could be in any
way be meaningful for his wife. This type of pairing would in
any case be unfair to her, because she wants to be truly desired
by her husband. That is, she wants to be personally desired by
him, not philosophically desired; and that is certainly her right.
There are a few exceptions. Perhaps the most public case of a
gay man who married a woman is that of former gay rights activist
Michael Glatze. As the general norm, it is not psychologically
possible to create the romantic feelings toward the other sex upon
which an intimate and loving relationship finds its foundation
and support. This is why any attempt to establish such a rela-
tionship is unfeasible. Consider the equivalent heterosexual case.
My girlfriend presumably speaks for most straight women when
she says it is impossible for her to even imagine feeling any desire
for the female form. The situation for gay men and women con-
cerning the opposite sex is equivalent. And what is psychologi-
cally impossible cannot be morally expected of someone.
Solitude Isn’t Feasible
The more recommended solution is to live a life of solitude,
which is often euphemistically termed a life of chastity.
I must submit that when Christians make this moral evalua-
tion, they do not always know what they’re requiring. It is often
doubtful whether the person recommending this course would
follow his own advice if the roles were reversed, for oftentimes
the person making this judgement enjoys the many psychologi-
cal benefits of having his or her own family. But the recom-
mender ought at some level concede that he or she is recom-
mending that the other live a life of self-imposed penal silence,
unquenched passions of the heart, invisibility, and of being
unknown. For many, going to church and work cannot make up
for a life without deep love. Spending time with passing acquain-
tances on Sunday (or enduring the monotony and forcedness of
a gay Christian support group) is no substitute for lifelong com-
panionship. A gay man or woman cannot often experience deep
one-on-one connections at church, while heterosexual Chris-
tian couples express physical affection toward each other at
church as freely as they blink their eyes. Most human beings
cannot flourish without the depth of a love relationship. These
love relationships are incomparable to friend and family rela-
tionships, as they alone answer the existential problem of lone-

liness by enabling one to become a fortress for another. Again,
those who propose this solution do not entirely admit to them-
selves that they are often sentencing the other person to a life
of nonexistence and anonymity.
The conservative Christian acknowledges that loneliness is an
obstacle to achieving a life of happy solitude. But it is more than
an obstacle. To recommend that one have only friendships of
economy and pleasant company (see, for example, ‘Christian
Anthropology and Homosexuality’, J.L. Brugues, 2018, para. 24)
is to deny that person the happiness and soul fulfillment of the
deep love relationship. To deny someone from realizing the deep-
est longings of the heart, is not advice that can be abided from
the perspective of human happiness. Rather, to urge a whole class
of people to remain loveless the rest of their lives is unrealistic,
and cruel. To expect someone to give up on happiness, which
Aristotle says is the goal of all practical activity, and maintain only
pleasant, but ultimately superficial relationships, is unreasonable.
At this point, the conservative Christian might answer that it
is possible to deny oneself happiness or love since earthly happi-
ness is not the ultimate end of life anyway – in other words, that
it is possible to reject one’s own will in favor of the will of God.
I can think of two main contingencies that would make it
possible for one to live a life of long abstinence: the interces-
sion of the grace of God, which makes what is humanly impos-
sible possible; or entry into a religious order.
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I recognize that the intercession of divine grace could enable
a young person to freely choose to remain loveless the rest of
his or her life. But what might be possible via the agency of
supernatural help is not something that can be morally expected
of the general person, for there is no guarantee that such aid
will come. I take it that what is ‘practically feasible’ (in premise
1 of my argument summary) refers to what is generally natu-
rally possible, not what is possible only via supernatural aid.
The second contingency, whereby it may become possible
to live a life of chastity by joining a monastic order or the priest-
hood, is not even very successful at achieving that chastity. As
the Benedictine monk and psychotherapist Richard Sipe
revealed, at any one time only 50% of U.S. Catholic priests
practice celibacy – a finding he came to after “a 25-year study
(1960-1985) of the sexual behavior of Catholic clergy” (Amer-
ica magazine: The Jesuit Review, Aug. 17, 2018). This statistic is
even more damning if we reflect that presumably members of
the priesthood are in the front line to be recipients of transfor-
mative grace. If with the help of immense institutional struc-
tures and supernatural aid not even they can live up to their own
teachings, they cannot reasonably expect a layperson to do so.
Conclusion
Any Christian, or anyone in general, will tell you that you need
relationships to thrive; that relationships feed the soul; and that
it is through relationships that we are enabled to practice cer-
tain virtues. In terms of moral development and psychological
health, we cannot do very well without relationships. To be
happy we need friendships, and most of us also need a lifetime
partnership. We have the desire to be intimately known and
loved by another, to be loved despite ourselves (for we are all
quite imperfect). Romantic love feeds the soul in a way unlike
any other. As the Bible itself says, it brings about a state of being
bonded to another wherein one becomes so involved in the life,
feelings, and wellbeing of another that the two become ‘one
flesh’: you are bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh (Gen. 2:23). This is
how the human heart operates in a love relationship. If the spirit
of love is breathed in a relationship, then one and one become a
one that is a two, bringing about a higher integration of the self
in both persons. Both come to know themselves through the
other. They enjoy the state of being distinguished by each other,
no longer being distinguished by themselves singly.
To expect that people with same-sex attraction live with a
cat and Christ alone is usually a recipe for incompleteness, or
insanity. A life of being unloved and alone all of one’s days on
earth, for the average person, is not possible to will from birth
to death. Most people cannot for very long live a life wherein
they go to work and then return home to talk to furniture or
Kelly Clarkson on the TV. It cannot therefore be morally
expected that a whole class of individuals – all gay people –
remain loveless their entire lives. This is not humanly possible,
and as such, it is hard to see how conservative Christians can
continue to insist that their advice for the homosexual be seen
as morally obligatory.
© RICK AARON 2020
Rick Aaron lives in Arizona and spends his free time gardening,
reading, trying to play Rachmaninoff, and thinking about the infi-
nite importance of each decision, as Kierkegaard would say.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 13
Religion &
Beyond Humanism?
Robert Griffiths argues that humanist ethics has significant limitations.
here are many people who do not believe in gods in
T any sense. Some are fervent atheists, but there are also
very uninterested atheists too, non-believers who just
aren’t that bothered about religion. Such people are
just as uninterested in campaigns of the kind conducted by the
New Atheists or the New Humanists as they are in discussions
promoting the existence of God, or of gods. They just do not want
to talk about God at all. They have moved beyond that discourse,
perhaps to the most atheistic place there is – the place where the
gods are simply forgotten. Such people are sometimes now called
‘apatheists’, and there is evidence that their number is growing,
particularly among the young. Apatheists have no interest in philo-
sophical discussions about the existence of God, in the same way
that they have no interest in arguments about whether the young
Arthur drew the sword from the stone. They have accepted the
New Atheist arguments and moved on, or have moved on for rea-
sons of their own. By contrast, the humanists (who are also increas-
ing in number) have not moved on.
Public declarations of humanism always seem to begin with
a conscious, even a self-conscious, rejection of religion. For
instance, the Amsterdam Declaration ratified by the World
Humanist Congress in 1952 declares that humanism is ‘ratio-
nal’ – by which it largely means that it rejects the possibility of
divine intervention. Humanists UK (formerly The British
Humanist Association) sees itself primarily as ‘bringing non-
religious people together’. Contemporary humanist authors
such as Richard Norman, Stephen Pinker, Stephen Law, or A.C
Grayling spend a lot of time going over philosophical argu-
ments against belief in God. Humanism therefore self defines
as an anti-religious movement – so it has not yet forgotten the
14 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
gods. In a sense humanists still needs gods, so they can argue
against them.
The trouble with all this supposedly ‘New’ argument is that it
is out of date by about two hundred years. While the New Athe-
ists caused a clamour around the beginning of this century, they
were largely repeating arguments that had been put forward by
Baron d’Holbach, or more famously by David Hume, back in the
eighteenth century. The New Atheists perhaps thought they were
persuading us that (relatively) new scientific perspectives, such as
evolutionary theory and Big Bang cosmology, were distinctively
undermining religious belief, with their accounts of the origin of
man and the cosmos. Yet based on the science and philosophy
known even in 1770, d’Holbach had already concluded in his sub-
stantial Système de la nature ou des loix du monde physique & du monde
moral of 1770 that there was no God. He would have needed no
more convincing. For d’Holbach, the argument against God and
the gods was already over. And for those seeking diversion,
Hume’s arguments against religion are far wittier than those of
Anthony Grayling; and those of d’Holbach’s contemporary, the
Marquis de Sade, are more acerbic and wicked even than those
of Christopher Hitchens.
In any case, the recent assault on religion on the back of new
science has simply permitted sophisticated philosophers of reli-
gion to develop ever more sophisticated responses to these old
attacks, needlessly perpetuating the cycle of debate as far as the
apatheist is concerned. Alistair McGrath mirrored Dawkins’ The
God Delusion (2006) with his own The Dawkins Delusion? (2007).
Richard Swinburne argued that evolutionary theory was entirely
consistent with Christianity (see for instance Is There A God?,
2010), adding that why there is a world at all could not be

explained by science and was better explained by theology. In
this way, the modern atheism debate merely becomes a version
of the debate that took place between eighteenth century athe-
ists and eighteenth century religious apologists such as Joseph
Priestley. Clearly, one can carry on this argument if one wishes;
but apatheists see little end to this kind of thing, and so have
decided to leave it all behind, to forget both God and those
whose main concern seems to be arguing there is no God. This
includes the humanists.
Humanists & Ethics
Yet humanists are not merely atheists. They are people who,
having disposed of God, wish to explain what atheists should
do with their lives. In this sense they are at least a little didac-
tic. They aren’t like those who, having forgotten the gods,
simply go off and live their lives, such as Meursault in Albert
Camus’ novel, L’Etranger (1942).
Mersault is a good example of an apatheist. He is not inter-
ested in God, or in arguments purporting to show that He does
not exist. However, Mersault is a fearful character if one is a
humanist, for he regards existence as absurd, and acts on the
basis of this belief.
Humanism is certainly opposed to the view that existence is
absurd. Having disposed of religion to its satisfaction, human-
ism’s next task is to persuade us that we can still live what it
often calls ‘meaningful’ lives.
Humanism definitely wants us to take life seriously. It wants
us to care – in particular, to care about other humans. In order
to get us to do this, it proposes an ethics. The Amsterdam Dec-
laration declares that humanism is ‘ethical’. Part of what it is to
be a humanist is that, having rejected the gods, you are still guided
by a moral code. But moral codes are tricky things. One of the
main difficulties that many people have with religion is exactly
the idea of being given, and being judged in terms of, a moral
code. Humanists point out, however, that the moral codes of
religions are ‘external’ sanctions on humans, and that what is
needed is a moral code that somehow comes from humans. The
Amsterdam Declaration, for example, says that “morality is an
intrinsic part of human nature”. Quite what this means is unclear.
It is presumably not the rather implausible claim that morality
is an innate aspect of human nature – something that everybody’s
born with. Despite evidence from such research centres as the
Yale Baby Lab, which showed preferences among babies in
puppet show experiments for what are labelled as ‘good’ pup-
pets, it is fairly clear that moral codes are mostly learned. Because
they’re mostly learned, it is also clear that morality largely devel-
ops in line with social forces, channelled through family, friends,
schools, systems of law and order, and the media. Rather than
demonstrating that there is some essential human morality, this
leads to widely divergent moral systems throughout the world.
However, humanists will tend to argue that there is neverthe-
less some core to morality that is essentially human.
Unfortunately, humanists disagree profoundly about the type
of ethical views they wish to promote as core. At times they
seem to take what are in ethics jargon called deontological views.
These are based around the idea that certain things are right or
wrong in themselves, and it is our duty to respond to this. For
instance, the Amsterdam Declaration affirms the ‘worth, dig-
Secularism
nity and autonomy’ of the individual, implicitly pressing a
broadly Kantian ethical view, in which human beings are inher-
ently valuable. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) said that as ratio-
nal moral agents, people may not be used merely as means to
ends, and were instead ‘ends in themselves’. This is in conflict
with a consequentialist view of morality, such as utilitarianism, in
which the moral goal is the maximisation of happiness or well-
being. Here human beings are not ‘ends in themselves’. On a
utilitarian view, for instance, there are times when we would be
required to sacrifice an innocent human being in order to pro-
mote greater well-being. A utilitarian could accept the killing
of a terrorist’s child as a means to the killing of a terrorist, if
this led to significantly greater good. They would not be happy
about it; but they could accept it.
In Enlightenment Now (2019), Steven Pinker is happy for a
utilitarian ethics to sit at the centre of his humanism, seeing it
as the ethics that maximises what he calls ‘human flourishing’.
On the other hand, in On Humanism (2012), Richard Norman
seems uncomfortable with both deontological and utilitarian
ethics, and leans more towards a virtue ethics. Virtue ethics
emphasises the role of character development for nurturing
moral virtues such as kindness and patience. It also rejects the
deontological view that actions can be wrong in themselves.
The virtuous person has a more nuanced sense of what is right
and wrong as applied in particular circumstances. Virtue ethics
also rejects utilitarianism for its view that morality is only about
one thing, maximising human happiness or well-being. One
can therefore only conclude that there is no essentially human-
ist position on ethics. So then Pinker is quite wrong to say that
humanism is ‘a distinctive moral commitment’ (p.412). One’s
ethical choices will rather reflect one’s adoption of a particu-
lar moral philosophy. In itself, one’s position as a humanist will
have little bearing on this.
To avoid problems like this, humanists often claim that
humanist ethics is a fairly liberal and minimal system that allows
for a variety of different positions and philosophies. Norman,
for instance, does not think that humanism is a creed, let alone
a moral creed, arguing there are many humanisms, not one. Fol-
lowing his preferred virtue theory, in which we try to become
the most virtuous person we can, he argues (as Aristotle had
once argued) that we can become virtuous by modelling our
lives on virtuous exemplars. Norman himself proposes as an
exemplar Primo Levi, the scientist and writer whose experi-
ences of surviving the Holocaust are described in his powerful
novel/memoir If This Is A Man (1947).
There is nothing wrong with taking an approach of this kind,
of course, and perhaps it is the best one can do. However, it
doesn’t amount to a humanist ethical code.
It is presumably not a requirement of humanism that one
model one’s life on that of Primo Levi. Rather, the requirement
is that one’s moral example does not believe in God, and is basi-
cally rational and good. Unless you believe in God, or are not
rational, or good, you cannot really object to such advice; but
it rather deflates any unifying pretensions of humanism. Fol-
lowing this advice, one might just as well model one’s life on
Uncle Frank if he does not believe in God and he’s rational and
good; but there would be little point calling this Uncle Frankism
and pretending that it has universal appeal to humanists.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 15
Religion &
In The God Argument (2014), Grayling also seems fairly
relaxed about the ethical guidance offered by humanism. Reluc-
tant to be caught in the trap of promoting overly specific moral
rules, Grayling characterises humanist ethics rather blandly, in
terms of being able to choose one’s ‘values and goals’ while
living ‘considerately towards others’. ‘Kindness, generosity,
goodness and justice’ are suggested as virtues; but within this
rather loose framework there is still apparently freedom to
debate broad ethical positions and philosophies. What is most
important is to keep religion out of ethical debate.
Humanists & Non-Humans
One obvious problem for humanism as an ethical position, no
matter how generally defined, is its overriding focus on human
beings. Nowadays, as we drift confusedly into a century in which
it is widely acknowledged that human activity is threatening
possibly the biosphere itself, this might be seen as a terribly out-
of-date position.
Traditional humanism, of the kind offered by Renaissance
thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola in his famous Oration on
the Dignity of Man (1486), could without much embarrassment
talk eloquently of ‘the wonder of man’. But that was an age in
which a moral gulf between the human and the non-human was
taken for granted. We moderns, though, who have absorbed
the naturalism indicated by evolutionary theory, have come to
recognise that the moral gap between humans and non-humans
isn’t a very distinct one. Increasingly we recognise the great
harm done by humans to other sentient beings. Since the pub-
lication of such seminal works as Animal Liberation by Peter
Singer (himself a humanist), we increasingly realise that we need
to change to the way we think of and treat such creatures. It is
unclear that humanist ethics’ focus on humans is helpful here.
Humanists are, of course, not oblivious to the difficulty of
developing an ethical position that accommodates sentient non-
humans. The Amsterdam Declaration recognises “our depen-
dence on and responsibility for the natural world”, implying a
concern for both sentient non-humans and non-sentient natu-
ral things. Humanist humans are therefore exhorted to develop
an outlook which leads to appropriate moral behaviour towards
non-humanity. But humanism is severely hampered in this by
being obliged to begin from a moral position in which human
beings and their interests are the primary determining factors
of morally acceptable action. To this extent, the precise ethical
philosophy taken up by a humanist can have important conse-
quences for the coherence of humanism. It rules out the relaxed
liberal attitude to moral outlooks adopted by Norman and
Grayling, for instance. And humanists of a deontological bent
presumably take the view that humans are the primary bearers
of moral value. This position gives sentient non-humans a moral
status, but one determined entirely by human interests. Kant,
for instance, thought that the main reason for not being cruel
to animals was that doing so would make you cruel to other
humans. The humanist ethical umbrella is surely not wide
enough to cover a position like that of Tom Regan in The Case
for Animal Rights (2004), which holds that sentient non-humans
have inherent value and associated rights independently of how
this might affect the interests of humans. If it can be shown that
sentient non-humans do have inherent value, then humanism
16 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
as a human-focused ethical position becomes largely redundant.
It would be necessary to expand it into something we might call
‘sentientism’, according to which all sentient beings have inher-
ent moral value. The impact of this ethics on ‘human flourish-
ing’ would be considerable.
It is striking how little attention many humanists give to this
important issue. For instance, in a brief discussion of the moral
status of sentient non-humans, Norman talks of obligations to
other animals, enabling them to live ‘lives free of pain’ and to
avoid ‘inflicting unnecessary suffering’. We should oppose cruel
farming practices and unnecessary laboratory experimentation.
Few can argue with that. But the important question now is why
should we do these things? What precisely is the nature of our
obligations to other animals? Norman gives much less time to
this crucial question than he gives to discussions of such things
as the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God; and it
is notable that Pinker actually completely avoids any mention
of the moral status of sentient non-humans, merely stating that
“humanism doesn’t exclude the flourishing of animals” (p.410).
However, until we are clearer about the precise moral status of
sentient non-humans, we cannot know whether any given
humanist ethics is excluding the flourishing of animals. Pre-
sumably any outlook which denies inherent moral value (and
so rights) to animals is ultimately bound to hinder the flourish-
ing of animals.
What is fairly clear is that when it comes to practicalities,
some humanists are not much interested in the moral status of
sentient non-humans (let alone the moral status of the wider
natural world). Norman, for example, is the author of a docu-
ment entitled ‘Being Good’, available on the website of the
British Humanist Association. This document is mostly con-
cerned with how it is possible for a human being to lead a mean-
ingful life once they have abandoned religious belief. It is essen-
tially a sort of therapeutic guide for disabused or disappointed
theists (as are most humanist texts). Reflecting contemporary
humanism as a whole, it is anthropocentric in a quite bizarre
way, as if decades of discussion of the possibility that both sen-
tient non-humans and non-sentient natural things might have
moral value has never occurred. There is a curiously unbalanced
concern with the apparent effects that offloading a belief in God
will have on an individual human, and a need to show that one
could nevertheless have a meaningful life. There is no mention
at all of how being good touches on animal rights, and barely
any discussion of the environment.
To this extent, humanism, which issues from, and spends a
great deal of its time going over, a theist-non-theist debate that’s
largely eighteenth century in character, is out of touch with the
moral concerns of younger generations today. Many of the latter
are entirely uninterested in spending time refuting belief in God.
As apatheists, they have moved on; their concerns are now for
the planet and for all sentient beings. Humanist ethics cannot
really talk to these people, and it does not really try. Even as
their numbers grow, one imagines that in time humanism must
fall away along with the religious beliefs it is obsessed with repu-
diating, but with which it is too concerned to be sufficiently alert
to contemporary issues of real moral importance.
© ROBERT GRIFFITHS 2020
Robert Griffiths teaches philosophy at Godalming College, Surrey.
 Secularism
Suffering & the Media
Ian Church queries the influence the media has on our perception of evil.
ver the past fifty years, the problem of evil – the we endure can last a lifetime, and at no point does the suffering

O problem that the amount or kind of evil or

suffering in this world counts as evidence against an
all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God – has
become the central argument against theism within the philos-
ophy of religion. But when you consider that in today’s world,
human suffering is, in the scope of human history, at an all-time
low, how can we explain this argument’s recent rise to promi-
nence? Wars, for example, are far less frequent than they used
to be. Infant mortality is, in most countries, far lower than it
was even a hundred years ago. Kids are, on the whole, safer now
than they’ve ever been before; and the number of people
brought out of abject poverty over the past half a century is
truly a triumph and a point of celebration. Amidst all of this,
however, the perception of the world as a dark and scary place
is on the rise. The number of people who think that the world
is so dark and evil that there cannot possibly be a God who
would allow for it to be so, is on the rise too, at least in affluent
Western nations. You’d think that the problem of evil would
seem less problematic as global suffering decreased. However,
that doesn’t seem to be the case. So what’s going on here?
Despite our best efforts to transcend the human condition,
philosophers are still all too human, and our arguments are still
subject to the biases and proclivities of human cognition. Here
philosophers might benefit from the input of psychologists and
cognitive scientists. Perhaps, then, it would be worth looking
at what factors impact our perception of suffering – both per-
sonal suffering, and suffering within the broader world.
A number of hypotheses come to mind. For one, our percep-
tions of evil might be significantly shaped by the ever-evolving
we bear simply cut to the next scene or pause for a commercial
break. And if on social media you’ve ever tried to comfort some-
one who’s lost a spouse or a child, you know just how impover-
ished tweets, posts, or ‘crying emojis’ feel in response to such
suffering. Moreover, if aspirational media commonly tells us that
we not only have the right to pursue happiness, but the right to
be happy – such that any unhappiness we experience must be an
indicator that something is wrong or that someone has wronged
us – then we might plausibly wonder if the suffering we endure
is especially heinous in the larger scheme of things.
These are all empirical considerations. But in recent years
philosophers have become increasingly interested in exploring
how the tools and resources of the sciences might speak to philo-
sophical problems. And while fruitful work has been done within
epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and more, little attention has
yet been given to exploring how such tools might be relevant to
the philosophy of religion. The above considerations, however,
seem to suggest that such research is greatly needed. They point
to issues that could powerfully speak to philosophy concerning
the problem of evil.
© DR IAN CHURCH 2020
Ian Church is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Hillsdale
College, Michigan, and the principal investigator of the ‘Problem of
Evil and Experimental Philosophy of Religion’ project, generously
funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
• This article was written before the coronavirus outbreak.

© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2020. TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM

media we consume. The suffering we see and digest through
social media and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, from plane
crashes to natural disasters to criminal activity, is often hyped,
even fetishized, and devoid of broader context. We might plau-
sibly wonder if the relative contextlessness of the reported suf-
fering yields a perception of it as pointless or irredeemably sense-
less. After all, without a broader context or narrative, could we
even imagine what reason a God might have for allowing all the
suffering we see? Additionally, given the human bias toward
focusing on the negatives and ignoring the positives, we might
easily imagine that the unsurpassed access we now have to (a
surface-level understanding of) suffering around the world might
leave us with an unjustifiably grim view of the world – an ele-
vated perception of just how problematic the problem of evil
really is. Bad news, after all, enjoys a disproportionate amount
of media converge simply because bad news is typically going
to attract far more clicks or views than the equivalent good news.
This might dramatically skew our perception of the amount or
proportion of evil we perceive to be in the world. Moreover, in
most TV shows, great evils are often addressed and resolved in “The meaning of life?
clean, thirty minute chunks; but in reality, the hardships and loss Didn’t you see the FAQ on my website?”

June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 17

Religion &
Buddha Travels West
Peter Abbs follows Buddhism’s path towards becoming a Western humanism.
ome years ago, I started a course of meditation. Although
S ‘mindfulness’ was in the air and meditation programmes
were being offered in almost every other institution, I
knew virtually nothing about meditation or mindfulness
or the Buddhist traditions from which they came. ‘Mindfulness’
seemed obviously a good thing, for it was the opposite of mind-
lessness. Who could oppose that? But what exactly did it mean?
How had it become so widely esteemed across so many institu-
tions in the West? And what was happening to Buddhism itself
as it entered our highly eclectic postmodern Western culture?
My Buddhist course was practical. It was about physical pos-
ture and following the breath in various ways. As my specula-
tive questions remained unanswered they became more restless
– until I decided to embark on my own journey. Being a poet
and teacher of literature, my instinctive first move was to take
a fresh look at T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for I remembered
that this iconoclastic poem famously ended in Sanskrit. But it
was soon to become a much more complicated quest, forcing
me to go further back in time, to make unexpected connections
and to see entirely new constellations. I had to discover the
importance of the philosopher Schopenhauer, the febrile influ-
ence of Madam Blavatsky, the power of Zen especially during
the 60s, the charisma of the Dalai Lama, and finally, enter the
modern world of neurology and contemporary therapy. I dis-
covered that in the West, meditation and mindfulness not only
had a history many people were unaware of, but that as Bud-
dhism adapted to the culture of the West its identity was chang-
ing. Without gods or a supernatural realm, it was fast becom-
ing a form of philosophical humanism, committed to personal
well-being and living the good life.
Invading the Cultural Waste Land
My search began with The Waste Land. Ever since its publica-
tion in 1922, this has been hailed as a definitive poem, captur-
ing the broken rhythms and confused juxtapositions of the
modern world. Memorably, and prophetically, The Waste Land
ends with an ancient mantra: ‘Shantih, shantih, shantih’. The
words, Eliot explains, are taken from the Hindu scriptures the
Upanishads. Eliot then offers a Western equivalent in the phrase
of Saint Paul in the New Testament: ‘the peace which passeth
understanding’. Yet those words could not have formed the same
powerful ending to the poem. The concept of redemption or,
perhaps, atonement (or personal reconciliation: at-one-ment) is
explicitly there, but I think there is a certain irony here since the
words actually chosen come not from the Bible, but from sacred
Hindu texts. The most renowned lines of Modernist literature
which offer peace of mind amidst the maelstrom thus come from
the East, like the sound of a singing bowl. Nor is this sacred
refrain tagged on at the end like an arbitrary improvisation: it is
crucial to the whole intricate polyphony of the work.
At the beginning of the twentieth century The Waste Land
may have been disturbingly original in its style, but in its East-
18 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
ern spiritual orientation it was, in fact, becoming part of an
emerging zeitgeist. In the very same year of its publication,
Herman Hesse brought out his novella Siddhartha. What an
extraordinary synchronicity and sign of a shifting inner land-
scape! For if in Eliot’s poem the key word is Shantih, in Hesse’s
fable it is OM. This sound, sacred to both Hindus and Buddhists,
forms the title of the penultimate chapter, and when Siddhartha
(not to be confused with Buddha) is on the edge of committing
suicide, it is this primordial word that rises up through his body
like an incantation. The sound heals and saves his stricken life.
It is well known that in the middle of his own tortured strug-
gle to complete the work Hesse embarked on a course of therapy
with Carl Jung, and there can be no doubt that this life-saving
encounter influenced both the form and outcome of the narrative.
As Western psychology met Eastern spirituality, a cultural
transformation was evidently taking place. But when did this
creative cultural encounter between East and West begin?
Schopenhauer the Buddhist
For T.S. Eliot the encounter had one root in the courses he took
at Harvard, in lectures on Japanese religion and literature and
in his study of Indic philology and the Upanishads. In contrast,
Hesse’s knowledge of Eastern spirituality derived partly from
his adolescent reading of the atheist philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer. A hundred years before The Waste Land and Sid-
dhartha, Schopenhauer had announced that Sanskrit literature
will be no less influential for our time than Greek literature was
in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance. One might ques-
tion his timing, but not the insight.
Born in 1788, Schopenhauer was the first great Western
philosopher to extoll the wisdom of the Upanishads, and, later
in his life, to identify his own ethical stance with that of the
Buddha. He consistently praised ancient Indian literature and
saw it as an essential corrective to the Western orientation.
Schopenhauer certainly claimed that the Upanishads formed the
most elevating reading and should be grasped as the greatest
gift to his own disorientated epoch. On his desk were statues of
two figures: one was Kant, the other Buddha. They must have
represented two forms of Enlightenment: one rational, the other
spiritual. He himself pointed out that the conclusions of his own
philosophy had emerged from a critical tussle with Kant and
other Western philosophers, but that they coincided perfectly
with the conclusions of Hinduism and Buddhism, which, he felt,
had been reached by their exponents largely through intuition.
“The mystic,” Schopenhauer wrote aphoristically, “is opposed
to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within;
whereas the philosopher begins from without.”
Schopenhauer’s philosophy contains no God, no revealed
dogmas, and no supernatural agencies. Some decades before
Nietzsche, he wrote: “Mankind is growing out of religion as out
of its childhood clothes… Christianity is dead and no longer
exercises much influence.” But his understanding, put forward

© CLINTON INMAN 2020 FACEBOOK: CLINTON.INMAN
most systematically in The World as Will and
Representation (1818/19) does seem remark-
ably close to Buddhism. Schopenhauer says,
for instance, that the meditator “best under-
stands who methodically assumes the right
posture, withdraws into himself all his
senses, and forgets the entire world, himself
included.” What is still left in his conscious-
ness is primordial being.
What stands out here is the resonant phrase
‘primordial being’. It is a crucial term which
has become badly obscured in our culture and
yet remains central to any understanding of
the current fascination with mindfulness.
With a kind of clairvoyance Schopenhauer
saw that while the West would be preoccu-
pied with objective knowledge and the con-
trol of external nature, the East would engage
with inner wisdom and the power of being.
Theosophy Then
There were further manifestations of a
changing constellation of consciousness in
the West. In 1879 a long narrative poem by
Edwin Arnold on the life of the Buddha was
published entitled The Light of Asia. It
became an instant bestseller. But the book’s
influence was soon surpassed by a much
more powerful force, connected to an
eccentric Russian aristocratic called Madam
Blavatsky and her powerhouse the Theo-
sophical Society, which was founded in
1875 to promote the noble aim of trans-
forming consciousness. She set up her head-
quarters in India and converted to Bud-
dhism. The Society, taken over by Annie
Bessant, continued to expand, bringing into
the West a whole new range of Eastern con-
cepts and orientations.
Secularism
Then in 1929 everything changed. At an
international congress in Holland, the
chosen heir and messiah, a man called
Krishnamurti, stood up before three thou-
sand Theosophists and disowned the role
they had given him. To a cult addicted to
hyperbole, Krishnamurti gave a remarkably
simple speech: “You are all depending for
your spirituality on someone else, for your
happiness on someone else, for your
enlightenment on someone else,” he said,
adding that inner peace could only come
through self-knowledge, but obtaining that
was an extremely difficult task.
Krishnamurti’s speech was a model of
mindfulness, being existentially grounded;
but in the context of the expectant congress
it was dynamite. It was as if the romantic
pilgrimage to the East had suddenly come
to a shocking halt. The Theosophical Soci-
ety continued, but never regained its former
eminence. Yet that movement had opened
the gate to Eastern traditions of philosophy
and meditation for thousands of people.
However, the influence of the Society can
be over-stated. For at around the same time,
the academic world had also begun to turn
its attention to the East. The French scholar
Eugene Burnouf became Professor of San-
skrit at the Collège de France in 1832, and
later published his seminal study, Introduction
to the History of Buddhism. About three decades
later Max Muller, first Professor of Compar-
ative Philology at Oxford, began editing a
magisterial fifty volumes of sacred texts from
Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism: a
formidable act of organisation, translation,
and dissemination. It is significant that it was
an academic who coined the word ‘mindful-
ness’ in its current meaning. In 1910 Rhys
Davids decided to render the Pali sati - mean-
ing something equivalent to ‘present moment
recollection’ - as ‘mindfulness’. He could
have had no idea that a hundred years later
his word was to become one of the mantras
of the age. But, at last the methods of mind-
fulness as taught by the historical Buddha
were becoming clear, free of evangelical
drives and romantic projections.
There is a certain irony in the fact that
just as the practice of mindfulness began to
penetrate Western culture, so Buddhism
began to decline in many of the countries
where it had previously flourished. This was
largely to do with the triumph of Commu-
nism, a movement which had scant regard
for the individual and a contempt for all reli-
gions. For the Communists, the ‘opium of
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 19
 Religion &
the masses’ had to be destroyed. During those decades of repres-
sion in the Communist states of Asia, a diaspora took place and
the geographical shape of Buddhism changed. The religion
crossed national boundaries and for the first time became an inter-
national force, a world-historical energy.
In the midst of this ideological turbulence a further muta-
tion took place, in the Western experience of Buddhism.
Zen Then
Partly as a result of the Communist Revolution, and partly
because of growing internationalism, it was not the original
Theravada but the later Mahayana tradition of Buddhism that
now entered the West, first inaudibly, and then with the inten-
sity of revelation.
In 1927 an obscure Japanese scholar published his Essays on Zen
Buddhism in English. On the Richter scale of cultural tremors there
was barely a quiver; but it may have been this book more than any
other which changed the cultural landscape. The transformation
took two or three decades to become visible; but by the 1960s,
Zen was ubiquitous. By that time, the author of that slim volume
– an energetic and ageing monk named D.T. Suzuki – had become
a visiting lecturer at major Western universities, a guide to artists
from Gary Snyder to John Cage, a challenge to psychoanalysts,
particularly Erich Fromm and Karen Horney, and a beacon
attracting thousands of shipwrecked individuals.
Suzuki was the most renowned Buddhist writer of the age.
In his work he gave scant attention to the concepts of reincar-
nation or nirvana, but rather affirmed the immediate here and
now instant of insight, like a flash of lightning. The moment was
caught in thousands of aphorisms and chiselled haikus. By the
middle of the twentieth century many different schools of Bud-
dhism were beginning to flourish across Europe and America,
but without doubt, Zen had taken centre stage. In fact, it was
Suzuki’s understanding of the Zen moment which inspired the
Beat poets and helped to ignite what became known as the coun-
terculture, with its celebration of spontaneity, the lived moment,
and going with the flow.
© JOANA MIRAND 2020 PLEASE VISIT JOANAMIRANDASTUDIO.COM
20 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
The Compassionate Engineer
There’s at least one other branch of Mahayana Buddhism which
exerted, and continues to exert, a powerful influence. It is linked
indissolubly to the charismatic figure of the Dalai Lama. One
of the most influential representatives of mindfulness in our
time, his contribution to Western culture since his flight from
Tibet in 1959 has been formidable.
At the heart of the Dalai Lama’s teaching is an approach
which prizes compassion above all other values. This has its his-
toric source in the Mahayanan concept of the Bodhisattva – one
who refuses nirvana and escapes from the wheel of resurrection
to return, again and again, to save all sentient life until each
individual has achieved enlightenment.
For the Dalai Lama, compassion resides at the centre of moral-
ity. But the mindfulness that the Dalai Lama proclaims is no easy
matter. The Tibetan tradition of Buddhism does not flirt with
the moment of sudden illumination; it tends rather to talk about
continual practice and relentless application. In the Dalai Lama’s
many speeches one finds two key words: transformation and train-
ing. The mind, he insists, has the capacity to change, but it needs
to take up a repertoire of techniques which foster attention, gen-
erate insight, and culminate in an over-arching compassion.
Transformation is made possible only through training.
Since the mid-Eighties the Dalai Lama has sought an intel-
lectual dialogue with the West, but one more related to science
than philosophy. Once asked what he would have liked to have
been had he not become a monk, he replied that he would have
been an engineer. He has argued that Buddhism shares with
science a common investigative approach, using empirical meth-
ods and recognising the law of cause and effect. Indeed, the
Dalai Lama said at an address given in Central Park in 1999,
“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain
claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the find-
ings of science and abandon these claims”. At the same time,
he has cogently argued that ethical concerns must be brought
to bear on scientific investigation, and that the two frameworks
of the scientific and spiritual must recognise and retain their
intrinsic differences.
Buddhism as Therapy
A claim constantly reiterated by the Dalai Lama is that through
meditation individuals can change the narratives which shape
their lives. Scientific research seems to support the idea that sus-
tained periods of meditation can alter neuronal patterns. The
evidence is that following particular meditational regimes, people
can begin to change. Buddhism is beginning to enter not only
the world of empirical research, but the world of therapy. At the
University of Massachusetts Medical School, Jon Kabat-Zinn,
who trained under the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh and
the Zen Master Seung Sahn, pioneered a health movement cum-
bersomely titled MBST: Mindfulness-Based Stress Therapy.
The project was committed to using the many techniques of
Buddhist meditation and mindfulness to alleviate and even cure
depression and anxiety.
While not so directly shaped by the practices of Buddhism,
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy reveals a similar commitment
to compassionate mindfulness. Part of its method consists in the
art of creating a gap in experience so that the individual can sep-

arate himself from his own involuntary reactions and not be
determined by them. CBT cultivates a freedom in the very act
of focussed attention: I am other than my reactions. I can look
at them. And at best, I can let them go. This is extremely close
to sati, the phenomenology of present moment recollection, the
mindful practice of meditation; and it similarily requires a with-
holding of judgement within the play of compassion.
A number of Buddhist psychotherapists have had to strug-
gle with the concept of the unconscious. To engage with this
concept is always to alter, even destabilise, a tradition. For
instance, if we accept the influence of the unconscious, how can
we be sure of any account of, or even the conclusions of, mind-
ful experience? Yet as Carl Jung realized, at the same time, the
idea of the unconscious can offer new psychological under-
standings of, for example, the process of resolving Zen koans.
Buddhism as Western Secular Ethics
If Buddhism has influenced the consciousness of the West, it
in turn has also been influenced, even transformed, by the host
culture. Travelling West, Buddhism became Westernised.
The Dalai Lama himself provided the term to describe this
mutation. In an address given in New York’s Central Park in
1999, he claimed: “Again, I must emphasize that we are the
same… we have the same potential… Spiritual growth need not
be based on religious faith. Let us speak of secular ethics.”
Evidently, the position of secular ethics is utterly inclusive
and non-hierarchical. The dialogue is between individuals: a
human being is talking to other human beings. The key word is
‘secular’. It derives from the Latin saecularis, meaning generation,
age, the world. First coined in English in 1846, it gave birth five
years later to ‘secularism’. According to the OED, this is “the
doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the
well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all
considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state.”
Many recent developments might further suggest that Buddhism
in the West is now being welded to what Kabat-Zinn calls a
moment to moment awareness. So could it be that Western Bud-
dhism is becoming a species of philosophical humanism? Is it
becoming less a religion and more an ethical orientation and
existential path, where the aim is to achieve flourishing right
here and now – ‘the well-being of humanity in the present life’?
Since the Sixties counterculture, Buddhism has had a con-
tinuous influence on mainstream Western culture; sometimes
directly, but more often in a diffuse and subliminal way. Gen-
erally, it has helped to foster a more reflexive disposition towards
experience, a non-violent politics, and a compassionate rela-
tionship towards all sentient life. Its impact on education, ther-
apy and medicine, is dramatic and overt. But there have also
been changes inside Western Buddhism. For, as the Eastern reli-
gion has slowly adapted to the West, it has imbibed some of the
ethical values which have characterised Western democratic
and liberal societies since the French Revolution. There has,
for instance, been the notion of liberty in relation to gender and
sexuality. Some Buddhist groups now offer specific programmes
for gays and lesbians. Would this have happened in Tibet before
the exile of the Dalai Lama?
Here one begins to sense a broad mutation. If the first stage
of Buddhism in the West mostly concerned Theravada Bud-
Secularism
dhism, and the second Mahayana Buddhism, then the third stage
might be identified as Secular Buddhism. Each stage includes
the one that went before and is more encompassing.
The Present & Future Path of Buddhism
The current Buddhist secular reformation can certainly be seen
as both more inclusive and more eclectic, putting its emphasis
not on doctrine or hierarchy but on the exploration of the imme-
diate moment and the place of being. Not reincarnation or
karma, but presence and attention. Perhaps at the gleaming
edge of the creative change Buddhism is now dissolving as
specifically a formal religion (a category it never fitted very
neatly) and instead incorporating daily therapy and an existen-
tial way of life: a path rather than a religion.
One of the most incisive writers currently proposing a com-
parable conception is Stephen Bachelor, a scholar and ex-Bud-
dhist monk. Over four decades he has published a stream of pel-
lucid books examining the origin and development of Buddhism.
His most recent volume is called After Buddhism (2017). Even
the title has a postmodern resonance. It aims to deconstruct
Buddhism by repositioning it inside our contemporary world.
Towards the end, before codifying what he calls ‘The ten theses
of secular Dharma’ [coming from a Sanskrit word difficult to
translate, Dharma refers to the inexorable truth of things and
our best way to meet them], Bachelor writes: “Only taking Bud-
dhism off its romantic pedestal and bringing it down to earth
gives us a chance to imagine what kind of culture the dharma
might be capable of engendering in a secular world grown wary
of charismatic priests and inflexible dogmas.” So, after the
deconstruction of Christianity comes the deconstruction of
Buddhism – or should we say, the birth of Secular Buddhism?
Or perhaps a new form of philosophical humanism?
What matters most for Bachelor is the search for personal
meaning. He links this to the historical Buddha, who always
demoted large metaphysical questions and their dogmatic
answers and promoted an open quest for understanding based
on the mindful examination of experience, on meditation, and
on work within the sangha – the community. What may be peren-
nially significant in Buddhism is precisely this pilgrimage for
wisdom within and solidarity without – a search which in the
West has been darkly overshadowed by the blinkered pursuit of
objective knowledge and technological mastery. We now need
to place alongside science and technology the counterpart of
wisdom and the courage to be. Or to express it more politically,
we need to marry the political triad of liberty, equality and frater-
nity with the spiritual triad of being, reflecting and caring. For in
our bewildered global age the marriage of two forms of enlight-
enment is now possible: of the rational and the spiritual. This is
an awakening which Schopenhauer envisaged two hundred years
ago. The two statues on his desk, of Kant and the Buddha, may
strangely prefigure the union of our broken consciousness. And
our very survival may well depend upon it.
© PETER ABBS 2020
Peter Abbs is a poet, educationalist and Emeritus Professor of Creative
Writing at the University of Sussex. His books include The Flowering
of Flint: New and Selected Poems (Salt) and Against the Flow:
Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture (Routledge). Please
visit www.peterabbs.net.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 21
COVID-19
The Plague & The Plague
Dylan Daniel finds many contemporary resonances in Albert Camus’ novel.
any popular reading lists for the COVID-19 pan- have become better than they were before, setting aside narrow

M demic include The Plague, a 1947 novel by Albert

Camus. The author was an existentialist philoso-
pher who was also a journalist, a writer, and a
member of the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation. Camus
was born in Algeria, and his father died soon after his birth. For
selfish concerns to donate personnel protective equipment to
hospitals, care for each other, and stay home to avoid transmit-
ting the disease. This is only one way in which Camus’ novel
has resonance for us now.

a fascinating glimpse into Camus’ life, have a look at Albert
Camus: A Biography, by Herbert R. Lottman.
Though he disavowed being called an existentialist as a means
to avoid association with Jean-Paul Sartre, a one-time friend
turned enemy, Camus’ work nevertheless centers upon existen-
tialist themes, such as each person’s need to take responsibility
for their own choices and actions and in doing so to create mean-
ing for their lives. For the existentialists there is no yardstick by
which to measure meaning; rather human beings ascribe mean-
ing to life themselves. Camus’ unique twist on this involves
couching it within ‘the absurd’. For Camus, we must take
responsibility for creating meaning for ourselves just because of
the fundamental absurdity of life – the mismatch between what
we would want from life and what it actually gives us. And per-
haps the most absurd part of the entire affair is that we never
find out if we did it right or not. In The Plague living virtuously
is presented as one way of creating meaning. But for Camus,
even virtue is not meaningful beyond what it means to the one
who has it.
In The Plague, the need for the individual to confront the
absurd stands out in stark relief, masterfully woven into a fic-
tional narrative of a cholera outbreak which many interpret as
an allegory for the Occupation of France during World War
II. The first sense of ‘plague’ in the text is literal – a disastrous
epidemic which ravages of the town of Oran in Algeria, so that
it must be strictly quarantined. However, the second sense in
which the term is employed in the novel is more striking, and
The Hero
The volunteer Jean Tarrou is perhaps the most striking, the
most beautiful, the most admirable character in The Plague.
Despite being a stranger visiting town and despite his lack of
professional medical training, he sees what needs to be done,
and he does it. Tarrou is unable to turn the tide of the plague,
and he is unable to save the lives of many people affected by it;
but still he stands, stalwart, unyielding, convinced of the right-
ness of his actions, willing to risk death to save others. In fact,
the risks add up as he works, and he does eventually die from
the plague, becoming the epidemic’s last victim.
Tarrou’s long soliloquy toward the end of the book is per-
haps the most brilliant moment in this extraordinary work. The
purpose of this speech is to describe what a close reader might
call the ‘real’ plague which is the subtext of the book – the instinct
to kill another human being, or at least the tendency to bring
about their death by action or inaction. Some people don’t know
they have it, this monster lurking within. Others have learned
to live with it. For Camus, it would seem, the only path to good-
ness is to become a third type of person – the type of person

COVID SISYPHUS © OWEN SAVAGE 2020. INSTAGRAM @OGHSAVAGE

more enduring. It stands for a decadence of culture which has
led Oran into a currency-fixated complacency, especially with
respect to the fragility of the relationship between humanity
and nature. This complacency results in a lack of vigilance and
a resulting inability to mount adequate defenses against the out-
break, which ultimately, tragically, claims the lives of far too
many of the town’s citizens. It’s possible to read the book in
such a way as to ascribe the outbreak of plague in the first sense
to the prevalence of the plague in the second sense.
2020 will forever be known as the year of COVID-19. Polit-
ically, I think it will also be remembered as the year in which
authoritarian regimes around the world made public their inad-
equacy. And for too many of us, it will also be remembered as
the year in which our own elected officials were too slow to act
to prevent the loss of a loved one. Our societies too had become
somewhat complacent; the effects of that complacency have
been painful. However, as Camus might remind us, all is not
lost. We have united in the face of the tragedy, and many people

22 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020


Dr Camus diagnosing
the human condition
Tarrou is: someone who becomes self-aware and works to
change himself by helping others. Tarrou knows he is stricken,
and seeks to alter himself.
The philosophical history of the idea that we need to improve
ourselves goes at least back to ancient Greece. For instance, in
his dialogue Gorgias, Plato recounts an argument in which the
great founding father of Western philosophy, his teacher
Socrates, argues that the purpose of punishment is to make the
punished better; hence, if one acts unjustly, it is in one’s own
interest to turn oneself over to the authorities for punishment,
in order to become better. Camus’ character similarily seeks to
work against himself to stamp out any tendency to abandon those
who need his help. In so doing, he cultivates his compassion for
his fellow man, and so his own humanity. This leads him to create
sanitary squads to help mitigate the spread of the disease, to
whatever extent possible. The good man, for Tarrou, is “the man
who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses
of attention.” Tarrou’s final days are “spent keeping that end-
less watch upon [himself] lest in a careless moment [he] should
breathe in somebody’s face and fasten the infection upon him.”
But the most profound significance of this character in a book
about the absurd nature of suffering and the human condition
at large, ultimately seems to be as a critique of the way in which
good people are used up by the rest of humanity. Tarrou’s sac-
rifice is in some sense necessitated by the politically-led desire
to avoid a ‘false’ alarm at the outset of the disease, even though
it is obvious enough to Dr Rieux and other experts what the
cause of the increasing death toll is. Yet things have not yet
become quite pressing enough to call the politicians to action
to prevent things from spiralling out of control.
The Victims
Oran begins the novel in something of a trance. Mundane con-
cerns have overtaken it, and the desire simply to make money
COVID-19
has overpowered the desire to utilize that money for good. But
money is only good insofar as someone is willing to trade some-
thing good for it. Once this is forgotten, avarice – the desire to
accumulate wealth for its own sake – is the only possible out-
come.
Perhaps the most absurd observation I can make from my read-
ing of the book, is the sense in which for the city the plague is in
fact the cure. That is to say, although it kills too many and causes
too much grief, the cholera outbreak also breaks down the
immoral conditions in which the inhabitants of the town lived
before it struck. It brings solidarity, community and meaning
back into focus in their lives. The plague also finally holds the
politicians to account. The reluctance with which precautionary
measures are taken up is woefully indicative of the inadequacy of
the machinery of the state to act upon the basis of unfamiliar evi-
dence to bring into effect measures which might have prevented
the outbreak. For the inhabitants of Oran, therefore, it is thus
both necessary that the plague strike and establish itself among
them before anything is done about it, and terrible that there was
not more readiness upon the part of the government to act upon
the early warning signs recognized by the experts.
We ought not to forget that the culture of the town itself is
what drives things in this direction: the citizens are unaware
that a plague is possible, being preoccupied with money. Their
lack of vigilance ultimately leads to destruction and grief. As
Camus says in just the third paragraph of the book:
“Perhaps the easiest way of making a town’s acquaintance is to ascer-
tain how the people in it work, how they love, and how they die. In
our little town (is this, one wonders, an effect of the climate?) all
three are done on much the same lines, with the same feverish yet
casual air. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself
to cultivating habits. Our citizens work hard, but solely with the
object of getting rich. Their chief interest is in commerce, and their
chief aim in life is, as they call it, ‘doing business’. Naturally they
don’t eschew such simpler pleasures as love-making, seabathing,
going to the pictures. But, very sensibly, they reserve these pastimes
for Saturday afternoons and Sundays and employ the rest of the week
in making money, as much as possible.”
Hardly innocent, then. Rather, the citizens of Oran have
become complacent. If this sounds familiar, perhaps you are in
the type of audience for whom Camus wrote the book.
The Observer
Benjamin Rieux, the doctor tasked by the city government with
responding to the plague, is a character initially familiar to
anyone who has been watching the news recently. A stalwart
man, he is capable of enduring a great deal, and is quite used to
administrators who fail to heed his concerns.
Despite these qualities Rieux is not, for Camus, a virtuous
person, for he is not angry enough with the bureaucratic system
to force the rapid measures needed. The only hero of The Plague
is Tarrou, who does what must be done although he is unquali-
fied and not responsible for the catastrophe of which he becomes
a victim. By contrast, Rieux is part of the city’s establishment.
Although capable of reflection, of self-awareness, of deep
thought, and of friendship, Rieux is more a symptom of the
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 23
 COVID-19
plague than he is a cure for it. As mentioned, the bulk of the pop-
ulation of Oran is primarily concerned with making money and
though many commentators are inclined to exempt Rieux from
this description, there are reasons to think otherwise – includ-
ing his final exchange with his wife, in which they talk about the
expense of the train ride she is to take.
Although it is present all along in his choice of Rieux as nar-
rator, Camus’ compassion is most clearly visible at the end of the
novel. Rieux’s guilt at his recognition that he failed to act strongly
enough early on does not diminish his humanity but brings it out.
In fact, Rieux approaches wisdom as the work concludes – pro-
viding evidence of growth, of a true character arc. Becoming
something of a hero himself, Rieux has learned at the close of the
work that “joy is always imperiled.” In this simple statement
Camus illuminates for us the beauty in the absurd existence of
human beings. We continuously make predictions about the
future to guide our actions, yet it is often only through tragedy
that we learn where the danger really lies. The powerlessness of
Rieux is shown through his inability to act at the administrative
level early in the story; and it comes full circle as his awareness is
expanded at the end of it. What could be more absurd than becom-
ing aware of the danger of a crisis only by living through it, as
though it were predestined to happen and nothing one does could
change that? In this sense, The Plague allegory suggests that it is
the inertia of culture, its prevailing assumption that the future
will resemble the past (which David Hume grandly called the
‘Principle of the Universality of Nature’) that makes life absurd.
Hope For The Future
Although it is impossible to truly, absolutely, hope; that is, to
ever hope to overcome the absurdity of the human condition,
especially as mediated by cultural inertia, there is nonetheless a
sort of bastard hope which arises as we confront other funda-
mental facts of life. It drives our
thinking into unfamiliar territory if,
361667513 for example, we are completely
dominated by love of a person (or
of anything else). Forced to depart
from familiar terrain by the
plague, the character Rambert
has the epiphany that there is
more to the world – more to life,
perhaps – than his obsession,
than his beloved. And in the
face of this epiphany, what is
he to do when he is reunited
with her? As Rieux ably nar-
rates: “The plague had
forced on him a detachment
which, try as he might, he
couldn’t think away, and
which like a formless fear
haunted his mind. Almost
he thought the plague had
ended too abruptly, he
hadn’t had time to pull
himself together.” The
unreadiness of Rambert to confront his love
24 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
Taurek & the Drowned Man
“I cannot see how or why the mere addition of numbers
should change anything.”
– John Taurek, ‘Should the Numbers Count?’
So weigh your living soul against a feather.
Weigh it against thy neighbor’s soul, or two.
Or weigh your pain against what others weather –
“Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view.”
What calculus of sorrows is your tool
To tabulate the sum of someone’s ills?
Let life be the end of life. This moral rule
Is not so cold as dark, satanic Mill’s,
Whose conscience is a ticker keeping score.
My heart is not an abacus! I say,
Give fair respect to all, and ask no more.
Don’t judge life’s worth by what’s already gone,
Or cast a coin into the fire to play
The weighted lottery of Babylon.
© DANIEL GALEF 2020
Daniel Galef graduated from McGill University with a
degree in philosophy and classics. He collects counterfeit coins
and lives on the edge of a mountain with his cat, Carson,
who is also a philosopher.
after the plague has ended is a symptom of his realization that
the obsession for her which once motivated him is now tem-
pered by an understanding of the absurdity of the world – a
world which would not hesitate to see the two of them ripped
apart any more than it exercised its sheer caprice in bringing
them together.
In essence, The Plague was written to teach us to treasure the
moments of happiness and joy we share, just because humanity
is, absurdly, ridiculously, painfully inadequately equipped to cope
with stressors and stimuli it encounters. How could it not be so?
The passing of time dulls our attention to detail, and despite the
power of our civilization, the mass of humanity remains slow to
respond to threats. The quintessence of the absurdity of exis-
tence for Camus in The Plague – just as it is for us reacting to our
current plague – is that individuals die when the collective fails
to recognize or respond adequately to foreseeable threats. So,
as predicted by the narrator of The Plague, ‘the plague’ is not
over and will likely never be over. We can only hope and love
and act, and be as good as we can be. Yet it is no more right to
say that we deserve our fate (as Father Paneloux would have it),
than it’s correct to assume that one day the mass of humanity
will be able to respond to all threats to it without loss of life. And
insofar as we continue to live unawares in the midst of this con-
flict between our species and nature, life and death will continue
to be dictated by means beyond our control, even our under-
standing. That is to say, life will remain absurd.
© DYLAN DANIEL 2020
Thomas Dylan Daniel is the author of four books of philosophy,
fiction and poetry. www.thomasdylandanielauthor.com

Henry David
Thoreau
by Benjamin D.
Maxem
hat might philosophy have to say about social
W distancing – and, for some, complete social iso-
lation? Here it may be useful for us to reflect
on Henry David Thoreau’s experience as
described in his book Walden (1854), which details his own time
of self-isolation.
Walden is a unique utopian account about simple living. It is
not easily categorized: ‘a social experiment’; ‘a journey of spiri-
tual discovery’; ‘a manual of self-reliance’ – many different epi-
thets have been attached to the work to describe it. Some also
criticize it, perhaps rightly, as being overly idealistic. But we
might at least say that it describes an application of Transcen-
dentalist philosophy. Walden is quintessentially Transcenden-
talist. Set in the backwoods of Massachusetts, it teaches us both
how to live deliberately and how to be alone with ourselves:
how to embrace solitude without feeling lonely. Solitude is a
good, and very different from loneliness.
Thoreau and his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson were the two
most notable figures of Transcendentalism. This was an intel-
lectual movement in early nineteenth century America, intent
on positively rethinking contemporary society, transforming
culture from unreflective conformity to a purified individual-
ism. It sprouted from English and German Romanticism, and
was arguably the first Western philosophy since the ancient
Greeks to be directly influenced by Eastern philosophy, such
as the Hindu Upanishads. In Walden, Thoreau often quotes Con-
fucius, whose translated works had just reached America. Unlike
much Western philosophy, Transcendentalism’s modus operandi
was intuition, not reason. But in a sense, I think Transcenden-
talism was also an early form of Critical Theory – a rationalist
critique of contemporary society rooted in individual progress.
Like Existentialism, Transcendentalism was never system-
ized into a formal school of thought. Some of its concepts
remain as amorphous as Heidegger’s Dasein. But unlike Exis-
tentialism, it propounded a somewhat naïve optimism towards
humanity. Transcendentalism’s philosophical influence on
other thinking is latent, if under-appreciated. Friedrich Niet-
zsche, for example, admired aspects of it. Nietzsche is ripe with
trenchant criticisms of modern philosophers, save one – Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the father of Transcendentalism. He loved
COVID-19
Social
Distancing
in Solitude
J.R. Davis asks what Thoreau’s
experience of isolation can teach us.
Emerson. In 1884, Nietzsche (in The Gay Science) described
Emerson’s Transcendental thoughts as being “the richest in
ideas in this century.” But you may be wondering what a nine-
teenth century philosophy such as Transcendentalism can offer
us for our challenging times.
An Experiment In Isolation
In 1845, Thoreau set out on a unique experiment – to live alone
in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, in woodlands owned by
Emerson. Thoreau’s ultimate purpose was to see if he could live a
deliberate and fulfilling life with the mere essentials, solely rely-
ing on the fruit of his own labors, shedding the unnecessary sur-
plus of modern existence, even as it was then. “I lived alone, in the
woods, a mile from any neighbor,” Thoreau begins Walden, “in a
house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in
Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my
hands only. I lived there two years and two months.” So starts
Thoreau’s reflexive and reflective journal on simple living in nature.
Living need not be complicated, according to Thoreau, and
much unhappiness is wrought from the burdens of modern soci-
ety. He writes, “Most men, even in this comparatively free coun-
try, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with
the fictitious cares and superfluous lay coarse labors of life that
its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” He has a point here.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who stresses out during tax season
every year – another burden of modern society.
What strikes many readers, and even some of the people who
on occasion visited Thoreau at his solitary cabin, was how he could
live all by himself, devoid most times of human contact. As Thoreau
writes, “My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is vis-
ible from any place but the hilltops within half a mile of my own.”
He was not a natural hermit, though he found serenity in privacy.
He didn’t hate the world, nor people, and he certainly didn’t make
it his goal to avoid people, since he did receive visitors: “I had three
chairs in my house; one for solitude; two for friendship, three for
society.” But isolation didn’t bother Thoreau either. Indeed, iso-
lation is such a compelling aspect of Thoreau’s experience that he
devotes an entire section in Walden to it, titled ‘Solitude’.
Thoreau’s answer to anyone who asked him how one could
bare to be alone is simple: turn inward while being in nature
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 25
COVID-19
and you will not feel lonely: “I experienced sometimes that the
most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging soci-
ety may be found in any natural object, even for the poor mis-
anthrope and most melancholy man.” Nature attunes our minds
to what really matters in life, he further explains. And loneli-
ness is a creation of our own misinformed mental diversions.
Thoreau provides us with a kind of comforting perspective
on loneliness, by pointing out that no matter how hard we try
there will always be a chasm of consciousness between me and
another person. “What sort of space is that which separates a
man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that
no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one
another.” So we had best get acquainted with what is reachable
– ourselves. We are our own best friends. In this, Thoreau is
offering us advice similar to that of many modern psycholo-
gists: we should reframe our negative thoughts into positive and
productive ones. As Thoreau suggests, we can reframe the crip-
pling emotion of loneliness into self-fulfilling solitude. But he
goes further in offering us another tool of the mind, very stoic
in nature. We have it within ourselves, he says, to let the world
(negative or positive) wash past us without affecting us; to
observe the world as if having an out-of-body experience: “By
a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions
and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us
like a torrent.” In this way Thoreau was able to overcome the
pull of loneliness while in complete isolation.
Thoreau and the Transcendentalists were known for their over-
flowing optimism – whether practical or not. “I love to be alone,”
he wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companion-
able as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we
go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.”
Another thing we can learn from Walden during these unusual
times is to live life deliberately. We must turn inward so we can
understand the outward: to be introspective. To best encour-
age this mind-attuning, we need to get out into nature and think.
Being in nature thinking about the simple things in life –
which is thinking about what makes us truly happy – will help
us get through isolation. Obviously it’s a littler harder to com-
mune with nature if we are in a lockdown in a city apartment.
Many countries’ governments have issued restrictions on trav-
eling or even walking outside. Nonetheless, to my knowledge,
Walden Pond panorama
by Brien Beattie 2005
26 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
there was (or is) no law saying one cannot stick one’s head out-
side one’s window and take in a breath of fresh air. If Italians
can sing songs from their windows while in lockdown, surely
we can open a window and gaze at the birds.
But let’s be real here. All this Transcendentalist guru-talk is
easier said than done, and there’s no distinct line distinguish-
ing loneliness from solitude. It’s a blurred spectrum, which we
can find ourselves drifting along, back and forth. Even Thoreau
acknowledged this: “I have never felt lonesome, or in the least
oppressed by a sense of solitude but once, and that was a few
weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted
if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene
and healthy life.” Nevertheless, it is possible to love solitude. If
we understand Thoreau correctly, maybe for once, being an
introvert can be more exciting than being an extrovert.
Five Tips from Thoreau
Below I summarise five simple tips from Thoreau we can directly
apply to our lives. Surely, Thoreau would approve – if not of
the tips, at least for simplifying the above discourse. (Sorry, no
tips on how to build a log cabin.)
1.Shed the things of modern life that stress you out, and simplify your
life
Those who have read Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic
of Tidying Up are familiar with the idea of getting rid of unnec-
essary clutter. But instead of tidying up your closet, think about
tidying up your personal life, first, by getting rid of stress.
Remember, things don’t stress you out; it’s stress that stresses
you out. So maybe put down Social Media for a day and prac-
tice some meditation. Being mindful is useful, too. Getting rid
of actual things can also be beneficial to your wellbeing. Do you
really need subscriptions to five different streaming platforms?
Or if you still have a cable box, definitely think about shedding
that. Again, as Thoreau pointed out in Walden:
“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the fictitious cares and
superfluous lay coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them.”

2. Live deliberately
As I mentioned, Thoreau’s ultimate purpose as described in
Walden was to see if he could deliberately live a fulfilling life
with the mere essentials, shedding the unnecessary surplus of
modern life. Living need not be complicated if one lives delib-
erately, according to Thoreau.
How to live deliberately may be a little bit more difficult. For-
tunately, Thoreau offers us some advice here – to reframe our
negative thoughts and let the world wash past us without affect-
ing us:
“By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions
and their consequences; and all things, good and bad, go by us like a
torrent.”
In this way we can help ourselves overcome the pull of lone-
liness even while in isolation.
3. Turn inward so you can understand the outward
This third tip stems from the second. It may be difficult to make
sense of what is happening around us. For some during the
COVID crisis the anxiety and fear has been palpable.
Before we can understand the world, we must first under-
stand ourselves. This is what Thoreau endeavoured to achieve.
And while many of us sit at home, trying to figure out what to
do, instead of looking out there to the world to extinguish our
boredom, turn inward and know yourself. Most times, when
you understand yourself and truly come to know who you are,
why you think how you think or why you like what you like,
thinking can be the impetus for you starting a new and exciting
hobby or learning a new skill. So rather than lamenting, take
in a breath of fresh air instead, and reflect happily on your life
and what you love to do. Start a journal, or plan your future.
Normalcy will come back, be happy. Let yourself be optimistic:
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude; two for friendship,
three for society.”
4. Get into nature
Communing with nature attunes our minds to what really mat-
ters in life. Being in nature and thinking about the simple things
COVID-19
in life – thinking about what makes us truly happy – that will
help us get through self-isolation:
“I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most
innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object,
even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.”
Going outside may still not be possible where you live. But
that’s okay: you can still see the sky outside your window, and
open it to breathe in the air.
5. Transform loneliness into solitude
What strikes many readers of Walden is how Thoreau could live
without actively seeking human contact. But his solitude was a
choice:
“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so
companionable as solitude. ”
But how can we transform isolation into positive solitude?
That positive feeling we get when we finish a project all on our
own, whether building something or putting something
together in some other way, is one way that solitude can have a
beneficial effect on our mental health. What we can do while
isolated, is set out on our individual project. Whether it’s putting
a model plane together or building a website, we can transform
feelings of loneliness into fulfilling solitude when we engage
with ourselves on projects we value. Thoreau took great pride
in how he built his own house near Walden Pond – with his
own bare hands, all by himself.
As for me, I’ll heed Thoreau’s example. My wife has me plant-
ing a garden in the backyard. I want to grow watermelons. That
seems fulfilling.
Gardening may not be as ambitious as building a log cabin
near a pond in the middle of nowhere, but at least I’ll be one
with nature, lost in my mind.
© J.R. DAVIS 2020
J.R. Davis is a public affairs professional and manager in the US
Air Force, living in the backwoods of South Carolina where he likes
to garden with his wife. He’d like to dedicate this article to his family
and his Airmen.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 27
Philosophy &
The Creation of the Individual
Mark Vernon chronicles a revolution in consciousness.
hy do we think of philosophy originating with the
W ancient Greeks? After all, it’s clear that the ancient
Egyptians, who preceded Pythagoras and Plato,
Parmenides and Aristotle, by 2,500 years, practiced
wisdom too: “The power of Truth and Justice is that they prevail,”
reports The Wisdom of Ptahhotep from around 2350 BCE.
In his History of Western Philosophy (1945), Bertrand Russell
argued that it’s right to think of philosophy beginning in the sixth
century BCE with the Greeks (in Miletus, a Greek colony in what
is now Turkey), because it was only then that philosophers began
to distinguish thought from theology. As is often the case in his
entertaining volume, though Russell was making a point rather
than making a case. After all, the thinker who is called the first
philosopher, Thales, is remembered for remarking, “All things are
full of gods.”
In A New History of Western Philosophy (2004-7) the Oxford
philosopher Anthony Kenny proposes that philosophy really begins
with Aristotle (384-322 BCE), because Aristotle was the first
philosopher to systematically summarize the teachings of his pre-
decessors in order to criticize them. I think there is something in
Kenny’s case, because to systematize is a new departure. It’s an
approach that Aristotle’s great teacher, Plato, didn’t adopt.
We can gain a sense of the radical nature of Aristotle’s move if
we consider some of the words he creates in order to make it. For
example, Plato had the word ‘analogy’ but not the word ‘analysis’.
The word ‘analysis’ was invented by Aristotle. This implies that,
whereas Plato assumed that the purpose of argument was to point
towards truth, Aristotle found that argument could break down
the subject under study, much as dissection could cut up flowers
and fish. Similarly, Plato had the word ‘quality’ but not the word
‘quantity’ – another word Aristotle coined. It’s why Plato is always
more interested in oneness, twoness and threeness than one, two
and three. His approach to mathematics is contemplative, as is
indicated in his story about Socrates observing two raindrops col-
liding to form a single silvery ball of water. “Where did the twoness
– the separation, the duality, the independence – go?” he has
Socrates ask. But Aristotle is different. He can also contemplate
numbers mathematically. He does argue that ‘3’ is a perfect number
because it contains a beginning, middle and end; but he’s also inter-
ested in ‘how-muchness’ – which is what ‘quantity’ means. After
this, thinkers became interested in the calculable aspect of objects
in an empirical world. That’s something new. Owen Barfield writes
that, with Aristotle, “The human mind had now begun to weigh
and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and mea-
suring has gone on – with intervals – for twenty-three centuries”
(History in English Words, 1926, p.111). You could say that, after
Aristotle, practical knowledge could be distinguished from theo-
retical knowledge. That’s different from the wisdom of myths and
traditions, in which those two aspects are seamlessly intertwined.
28 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
It’s worth dwelling on just how profound this shift in thinking
was. For millennia, our ancestors had felt they dwelt in a cosmos
that was pervasively populated by living entities, and that these
intelligences shaped how the world worked. When Ptahhotep wrote
about Truth and Justice, he wasn’t thinking of abstract ideas as we
do, he was thinking of personal characteristics of the god Maat.
“Great is Maat!” his wisdom writing states. This is an act of divine
praise. Truth and Justice prevail because Maat lives forever.
The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has been study-
ing ancient mentality to think about the origins of religion. He has
IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2020. TO SEE MORE ART, PLEASE VISIT FLICKR.COM/PHOTOS/VENANTIUS/ALBUMS
become fascinated by how hunter-gatherer groups engage in trance
states, and has come to believe that in the Middle Paleolithic period,
about 250,000 to 50,000 years ago or so, humans discovered that
they could induce such altered states of consciousness. This dis-
covery led to what he calls ‘immersive religion’, based on experi-
ences of the spirits and beings that are revealed in visions and
shamanistic practices. Communal dances and powerful rituals had
the adaptive advantage of releasing endorphins that surged through
the bodies of participants, which Dunbar believes proved invalu-
able. A by-product of such physical ecstasy is opioids, which would
have eased the tensions that inevitably exist in large groups of people.
Trance, therefore, not only led to perception of the gods, it greatly
enhanced the sociality of humans. Whereas the communities of
our primate cousins, such as chimps, are limited in size by the
number of members that can be mutually socialized by grooming,
this early religious experience meant that communities of humans
could grow into tribes and, eventually, cities. In short, humans took
an evolutionary path in which survival, stories, and a sense that the
cosmos is enchanted, are intimately linked. To break those links
was no mean feat, although it could be said that this is what phi-
losophy achieved with its newfound analysis.
Aristotle didn’t change everything overnight himself, of course.
In fact, I think he would have been amazed at how people read him
now, as he himself experienced his practical and theoretical insights
as divine revelations. This is why he advised his followers not to
think as mortals, but to enjoy the way in which we share the life of
immortals, when cultivating ‘the best thing in us’, which is our
understanding. Aristotle’s ecstasy was to see how his mind could
grasp cosmic wisdom through intuition and reason. However, in
time it turned out that Aristotle’s innovations in the means of
thought made possible a very different way of experiencing the
world. What we now call the exact or empirical sciences are the
offspring of his work. In our time, it has become possible to describe
the world without reference to guardian spirits and transcendental
intelligences at all.
Fundamental Changes in Thought
So Kenny is right, in a way: Aristotle was key to the development
of what is specifically philosophy. However, my sense is that a prior
move was also necessary. Something else had to happen before
Aristotle’s revolution, which prepared the ground for people being
able to appreciate the value of thinking in terms of quantities and
analysis. This was another shift of consciousness – the birth of a
mentality that was required to detect these aspects of reality, and
make them stand out against the background flux of gods and living
things.
The scale of this prior shift of consciousness can be perceived
when if we ask what it takes to do what Aristotle did. He wrote on
‘ethics’, for the first time giving a systematic account of how to
flourish. He described ‘logic’, the abstract rules that can guide
thought. He derived ways of understanding the world that are not
spontaneously found in nature by using ‘categories’, ‘species’, and
‘mechanics’. To do all this, he had to be able to take a step back
mentally. He had to have an inkling of what Thomas Nagel
famously called ‘the view from nowhere’. Only with such a
detached, intellectual perspective could he have written ethics,
logic, and all the rest. But this standpoint was not, in fact, his
achievement. It was the achievement of his philosophical forebears.
Consider one of the Presocratic philosophers, Anaximenes
(c.586-c.526 BCE). He is remembered now for his experiments.
For example, he blew on his hand in two ways: first with his mouth
open, then with his lips pursed. And he noticed something. When
his mouth was open, the air felt warm; when his lips were pursed
the air felt cooler.
What’s so interesting about the experiment is that countless
people before Anaximenes had had the same experience. What
makes Anaximenes different is that he paused, stood back in his
mind from the experience, and asked that little question: Why?
Why is there a difference? What’s going on?
Nowadays we’d say he’d stumbled across the basis for refriger-
ation: when gases expand, they cool, which is what happens when
the lips are pursed. It’s called Boyle’s Law. But Anaximenes didn’t
think to operationalize his discovery by taking out a patent and
launching an industrial revolution. What Anaximenes was remem-
bered for in antiquity was, rather, the shift of mindset evidenced
by experimental curiosity. At the time, it was far more remarkable
to point out that human beings could take a step back from their
immersion in the flows of everyday experience.
Taking a step back was radical. Indeed, some people were
alarmed by the suggestion. In time, philosophers were persecuted
for asking their questions, leading to the execution of some, includ-
ing Socrates. The problem was not just that philosophers chal-
lenged received wisdom: they disturbed people, too. That’s a much
more unsettling challenge, though it’s one that in time can lead to
revolutions of thought. Aristotle’s brilliance was that he could con-
summately ride the wave begun by the Presocratics. He paid the
price for it, too, by being twice exiled from Athens.
However what was even more radical, was that by taking a step
back from their experience, a person could discover their interior-
ity: they could clearly distinguish their own thinking from the rest
of the world. I think one can go so far as to say that for the first
time in human history, there emerged people – philosophers – who
strove to have their own thoughts. What these thinkers had done was
invent the sense of being an individual.
Dunbar’s theory of the origins of religion can be used to flesh
out this claim. After the discovery of the trance state, Dunbar
believes, a second type of religiosity gradually emerged. It was based
not on transcendent states of mind, but instead upon the everyday
30 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
use of more humdrum rituals and rites. Pouring libations, saying
prayers, sacrificing in shrines, visiting shamans and priests for
charms and healing: these activities routinised religious experience
and ways of life. Among other things, this meant that people did
not have to go to the lengths of achieving altered states of con-
sciousness in order to gain the social benefits of religion. Visiting
spirit worlds and the ancestors could be reserved for festivals and
feast days.
Dunbar calls this second type of religiosity ‘doctrinal religion’.
He argues that it happened most clearly during the Neolithic Rev-
olution (c.10,000-5,000 BCE), when our ancestors domesticated
animals, began farming, and began living more settled lives. It’s
when they also began building temples.
Ancient Egypt was one of the greatest manifestations of this
way of life. Its legacy of great pyramids and funerary art can still
astonish us today. It speaks of the second phase. In this phase, the
god Ra could be felt to have won the eternal struggle against the
god Apophis every time the sun rose in the morning.
Individuality Through Philosophy & Religion
Returning to how philosophy relates to these developments, I sus-
pect that Plato learnt about the ancient Egyptian way of thinking,
after Socrates was executed in 399 BCE. Plato’s interest in Egyp-
tian religiosity is captured in later dialogues, such as the Timaeus,
where he describes Egyptian priestly rituals and temple rites as
becoming mechanical and ossified. I guess he visited regions of the
Nile, participated in the mysteries, and found them wanting. They
didn’t connect him to Ra and the other gods.
His diagnosis of the failure was that a new consciousness was
emerging – that of the individual. He’d felt this supremely in the
questioning of Socrates. Socrates was the personification of the
new individual, and it cost him his life. The ‘gadfly of Athens’, as
Socrates was called, irritated people so profoundly because he had
made asking ‘Why?’ and ‘What does this mean?’ a way of life. He
was tried for treason and found guilty because he was perceived to
have withdrawn from the collective way of life of his fellow citi-
zens: part of the charge against him was ‘the introduction of for-
eign gods’. And rather than participating in collective religion,
Socrates had a personal vocation – a private connection to the god
Apollo. As Plato has him say in the Apology: “This is what has pre-
vented me from taking part in public affairs, and I think it was quite
right to prevent me.”
This refined sense of individuality was ripe for Aristotle. He
could extend the innovative approaches to life it makes possible,
captured in his neologisms and philosophical works. Put it like this:
if you want to know why Aristotle was subsequently so important
to European thinkers for the next two millennia, one answer is that
his work crystallised and empowered consciousness.
New types of consciousness are not born every day. They also
take time to sprout and flourish. This is what happened through
the emergence of ancient Greek philosophy. The type of mental-
ity that we can relate to, based upon individuality, came to the fore
from the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE in Greece. And philos-
ophy as we know it was born with the creation of the individual.
That said, I don’t think this new consciousness immediately
became widespread with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But the
most popular of the Hellenistic schools in the centuries that fol-
lowed, the Stoics, did much to spread it. They developed tech-
niques that strengthened the sense of individuality when they
noticed that it had therapeutic benefit. They were practices of self-
examination, self-awareness, and self-expression that developed
self-knowledge of personal errors and weaknesses, virtues and
strengths. The aim was to secure an interior equanimity. The his-
torian of ancient philosophy, Pierre Hadot (1922-2010), called by Melissa Felder
these techniques ‘spiritual exercises’ because they worked at the
level of the interior life of the individual: “Spiritual exercises almost
always correspond to the movement by which the ‘I’ concentrates
itself upon itself and discovers that it is not what it had thought,”
he explains in What is Ancient Philosophy? (1995, p.190).
The new sense of being an individual became widespread after
the birth of Christianity. Following thinkers such as Owen Barfield,
I’ve come to believe that the democratization of individuality was
a major reason that Christianity became so popular in the early
centuries of the first millennium CE.
Christians believe that Jesus was both fully human and fully
divine, and that his message was for all people to personally accept.
This idea transformed individuality from being a philosophical
achievement to being an ideal for all humanity.
Once more, evidence for this shift can be found in the new words
that pop up. For example, in the second century, the early Chris-
tian apologist Justin Martyr described for the first time what it is
to have ‘free will’ with a sense that we would recognise – that of
personal agency. Alternatively, the first person is accused of ‘pla-
giarism’ at about the same time, because for the first time it was
possible to worry about authorship, since the individual who wrote
a text now mattered. Christians also started fraternising with one
another not because they belonged to the same families or cities,
as was standard in the ancient world, but on the basis of personal
conversion and commitment to the new faith. They could connect
as individuals, rather than as relatives or citizens, and this is why
Christianity spread. “Christianity’s sharpest advantage was its inex-
haustible ability to forge kinship-like networks among perfect
strangers,” writes the historian Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome

SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2020 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM

(p.156, 2017).
Their consciousness was like ours, in that it had individuality.
But it was not the same as ours because, through late antiquity and
the medieval period, individuals still felt themselves to be con-
nected to nature, the cosmos, and God. They no longer felt that
they were being swept along by the god of fate and other spirits;
rather, they felt that if they lived virtuous lives their individuality
could reflect the life of God. However, nowadays consciousness
has shifted again, and it’s become possible to doubt that reciproc-
ity, even doubt the existence of deities or spirits. We can become iso-
lated individuals alienated from the world around us, which it’s
possible to regard as having no inner life at all.
Even so, we can still read Plato, Aristotle and the Hellenistic
philosophers and find they illuminate our lives to a degree, because,
in certain ways, we still share their consciousness. When we learn
about Socrates’ life and death, we are learning about what it took
for individuality to be born. There’s a sense that his sacrifice is
what it took for our type of experience of life to emerge. We admire
him. He seems not like a traitor but a hero. This is why we think
of philosophy as originating with the ancient Greeks.
© DR MARK VERNON 2020
Mark Vernon is a psychotherapist, a writer, and an associate at
Perspectiva. See www.markvernon.com

June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 31

 Et In Arcadia Ego
Vaitsa Giannouli asks philosophical questions about dementia and responsibility.
uring the last five years, as I examined numerous
D older people with different forms and stages of cog-
nitive deficits ranging from Mild Cognitive Impair-
ment to Alzheimer’s dementia, a plethora of
thought-provoking philosophical questions arose. I believe that
questions are more important than answers (“Judge a man by
his questions rather than by his answers”: Voltaire), and like
Richard Feynman “I would rather have questions that cannot
be answered than answers that cannot be questioned.” There-
fore I want to draw your attention to some important but widely
ignored philosophical questions relating to dementia. I’ll be
quoting many thinkers but “I quote others only in order to
better express myself” (Montaigne). In order to be a free thinker
and not accept everything I hear, I need to be critical and pre-
pared to evaluate everything I believe.
Perhaps a lived example could best introduce some of the
hidden dilemmas encountered in the care of the cognitively
impaired. Mary is an eighty-five-year-old patient suffering from
mild Alzheimer’s disease. She’s in the first stage of a devastat-
ing process which in varying degrees affects mental activities,
personality, and social behaviour. Mary has a family consisting
of adult children and grandchildren. Like most of us, she also
constantly has choices to make. She needs to take decisions on
various longer-term financial issues large and small that she has
not yet arranged. Can she cope?
In clinical terms, evaluating someone’s competence to make
decisions can involve the assessment of specific capacities –
including the capacity for medical consent, the capacity for
sexual consent, testamentary capacity, driving capacity, capac-
ity for independent living, and (thinking of Mary) financial
capacity. The first question that troubled me, due to its impli-
cations for everyday practice in dealing with dementia, comes
from moral philosophy. Is it right – or even the duty of the
state/caregivers/family – to take control over the decisions of
someone with dementia, such as Mary? More mildly put, should
we interfere with (assist, manage) the financial or other deci-
sion-making of older adults suffering from cognitive deficits
such as Alzheimer’s?
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “man is nothing else but what he
purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is
therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions” (Existential-
ism is a Humanism, 1946). But what happens if someone – in
our case Mary – cannot realize herself through decisions, through
action?And what of doubtful cases of behaviour, others find
merely odd? As Diogenes said, “It is not that I am mad, it is
only that my head is different from yours.”
Based on our response to Sartre’s idea, should we take deci-
sions on behalf of older patients with cognitive deficits, or just
leave them to take care of their affairs as and when they can,
even if they risk possible financial exploitation and abuse? In
32 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
other words, should we leave them in the storm unprotected,
like Shakespeare’s King Lear? After all, we can “cause evil to
others not only by our actions but by our inactions” as John
Stuart Mill reminded us; or as Voltaire said, “every man is guilty
of all the good he did not do.” We might also remember that
“mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice with-
out mercy is cruelty” (Aquinas), and further, that “no act of kind-
ness, no matter how small, is ever wasted” (Aesop). Also, “you
can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those
that can do nothing to him” (Goethe). We might also think that
“it is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confi-
dence of their help” (Epicurus).
Choosing Ethical Principles
Principlism is an approach to applied ethics popular for the exam-
ination of moral dilemmas in healthcare. It is based upon a hand-
ful of core ethical principles: respect for autonomy, beneficence,
non-maleficence, and justice, and stresses the need for wisdom
and practical judgment in intelligently applying those princi-
ples. Applying these principles is rarely straightforward of
course. Take autonomy. Even if you “never impose on others
what you would not choose for yourself” (Confucius), this does-
n’t guarantee that your decisions for the affairs of others are the
right ones, or those that they would have followed themselves.
Principlism has also attracted heavy criticism over the potential
for contradictions between its core principles, and for not offer-
ing a way to rank those principles when they conflict.
Apart from this, in the case of dementias we have another
problem to think about too. To understand what dementia suf-
ferers might choose for themselves, we need to understand what
is it like to be a person with dementia-cognitive deficits. What
is it like to be a bat, asked Thomas Nagel, but can we ever ade-
quately understand another person’s perspective?
It is important that people with dementia know themselves,
even if Thales said that knowing yourself is most difficult thing
in life. Many centuries later Søren Kierkegaard and other exis-
tentialist philosophers also argued over self-knowledge. But
specifically for our considerations, in order to take a decision,
for example regarding financial matters, do we only or primarily
need to understand thoughts (that is, our cognitive or rational
thinking), or do we need to understand emotions as well? Are emo-
tions equally important? Given that those with dementia have
emotional changes as well as cognitive deficits, we need to ask,
does human behavior flow from three main sources: desire, emo-
tion, and knowledge (Plato)? Or is it rather the case that “to think
and to be is the same thing” (Parmenides)? (cf ‘I think, therefore
I am’ – Descartes; and “I call him free who is led solely by reason”
– Spinoza.)
Are we necessarily even talking about the same person? Do
the people taking the decisions continue to be the same at dif-

ferent moments in time – especially when we have evidence of
rapid neurodegeneration, as with dementia? In other words,
can we apply to older adults with dementia, John Locke’s
description of the person as “a thinking intelligent being, that
has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the
same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does
only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking,
and... [is] essential to it”? (An Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing, 1689). Or is Heraclitus right instead when supposing
that “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the
same river and he’s not the same man”?
Moreover, are adults with dementia free when taking deci-
sions? Do people with dementia have free will; and if not, until
when do they have it? Or is Sartre right that “man is condemned
to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsi-
ble for everything he does” (Being and Nothingness: An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology, 1943). Moreover, is freedom ‘the
power to choose our own chains’ (Rousseau), or ‘the right to
live as we wish’ (Epictetus)? And is it true that ‘nothing can
exist without a cause’ (Voltaire), or rather is it the case that
‘free will is to mind what chance is to matter’ (Darwin)? David
Hume wrote that there is no such thing as freedom of choice
unless there is freedom to refuse. That idea is surely relevant
here.
Also connected with issues of personal identity: if a decision
has been taken years ago, for example, in the form of a living
will, should this decision be changed if the person who made
the decision is no longer capable of understanding the situa-
tion, or the decision they made?
Modern Ethical Concerns
Does special treatment (or control) of adults with dementia and
their financial decisions imply ageism, stereotyping, discrimi-
nation, or other oppression against them on the basis of their
age? And do we accept Plato’s argument for the three parts of
the soul – the rational, the appetitive, and the spirited – by which
adults with dementia, deprived of the rational, have to accept a
different, treatment? Or should we support Erasmus’s view that
“he who allows oppression shares the crime” – in line with
Diderot’s saying, “no man has received from nature the right
to command others”?
Does cultural relativism influence the decisions taken by third
parties such as lawyers, judges, mental health experts, and family
members/caregivers concerning capacity in elders? And if this
does happen, to what extent is it acceptable? As Immanuel Kant
wrote, “I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also
will that the maxim of my action should become a universal law”
(Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, 1785). Or is man ‘the
measure of all things’ (Protagoras), including the specifics of
right and wrong? If so, is Nietzsche right when saying that “we
have to assess the value of our values since values are relative to
one’s goals (which are frequently wicked when we are talking
about money) and one’s self” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1868)?
Thomas Hobbes wrote that “good and evil are names that sig-
nify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers,
customs and doctrines of men are different” (Leviathan, 1651).
What is justice and injustice in the case of financial decisions
in dementias? Aristotle said that justice consists in what is lawful
and fair, with fairness involving equitable distributions and the
correction of what is inequitable. Plato said that the worst form
of injustice is pretended justice. Ought this to refer to clinical
practitioners applying out-of-date laws that do not treat people
with dementia according to recent scientific findings and cur-
rent socio-cultural reality – perhaps just to keep up the appear-
ance that care is being taken of the elderly?
Conclusions
These considerations show that concerning the ethics of demen-
tia care, there are more questions than answers (‘One thing only
I know, and that is that I know nothing’ – Socrates). From diag-
nosis to treatment we are surrounded by unsolved questions.
This is partly because medicine, law, neuroscience, psychology,
and ethics have different languages. But although “language is
the source of misunderstandings” (Saint-Exupery), “doubt can
only be removed by action” (Goethe). In other words, perhaps
interdisciplinary approaches will be shown to support the idea
that “coming together is a beginning; keeping together is
progress; working together is success” (Henry Ford). This
should remind us that in order to find answers to these philo-
sophical questions concerning clinical practice, “alone we can
do so little, together we can do so much” (Helen Keller).
© DR VAITSA GIANNOULI 2020
Vaitsa Giannouli took her PhD in Neuroscience at the School of
Medicine of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 33
 Those Who Justify Genocide
Michael McManus asks what remains of morality in the face of genocide.
“I made the effort to shoot only children… it was soothing to my con-
science to redeem children unable to live without their mothers.”
– Member of a Nazi police death squad
srael recognises 6,620 Poles for their sacrifices, sometimes
I of their lives and their children’s lives, in helping Jews
during WWII. The figure far exceeds the number of heroes
in France, or in fifty other countries listed at Yad Vashem,
Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust (one
exception is the Netherlands). Some of the Polish heroism is
described in Code Name: Zegota (2010) by Irene Tomaszewski
and Tecia Werbowski. It is therefore a tragedy that Poland
briefly brought in penalties for anyone speaking of Polish com-
plicity in the Holocaust, for complicity there was. Poland could
instruct us all on the complexity of morality under enemy occu-
pation, but foolish leaders have chosen instead to ally themselves
with those who deny their history – such as the manipulators
who rule Turkey and deny Turkish responsibility for the geno-
cide of Armenian Christians between 1915 and 1922.
In 1992 Christopher Browning published an in-depth study
of the Police Battalions operating as death squads in Poland. He
titled it Ordinary Men because that is what the squads were made
up of – people like you and me and our neighbours: respectable
people, kind and compassionate, who loved their wives and their
children, who led blameless lives, until confronted with the
opportunity to do evil with impunity. These men were mostly
in their late thirties and their forties, with varied backgrounds:
most were previously labourers, truck drivers, seamen, waiters,
salesmen, and office workers. A few were better educated, such
as teachers and pharmacists. They were assisted in their work
by Polish informers who often plundered the vacated property.
They were hampered, however, by other Poles.
No one reading Browning’s book can avoid the question,
‘What would I have done?’, nor be content with the easy answer,
‘I would not have committed murder’, ‘I would not have stood
aside’, and so on. We think of ourselves as basically good, and
we can all give reasons why we do not cheat, lie, or kill. Even
34 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
in this secular country in this irreligious age, many of us will
think of the ethical part of the Ten Commandments (you should
not dishonour your parents, lie, steal, commit adultery, or
murder) as a list that has stood the test of time. It’s almost part
of our physiological makeup. Others will have in mind the
Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Some will refer to a sense of duty, following, without knowing
it, Immanuel Kant’s command to do nothing that we would not
wish all other people to do in suitably similar circumstances.
The members of the Polish death squads, brought up in a
Catholic country, ought to have had the same commitments.
However, none of the cases examined by Browning showed any
sign of religious principles. So much for the sense of duty and
its influence on moral behaviour. How much better to follow a
secular rule like the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill: a deed
is good if it leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
Some of the murderers reasoned like that, too. One officer
explained that the killing of a few thousand Jews would protect
Germans from harm; another reasoned that defeating Bolshe-
vism – for which the Jews were to blame – would “be for the
benefit of Germany, Europe, yes, the entire world.” Some offi-
cers justified the killings as self-defence: killing unarmed Jews
stopped those Jews from sheltering armed partisans.
Ethics & Character
Where does all this leave morality? Is ethical teaching no more
than words, with no actions attached?
Friedrich Nietzsche, of all people, can initially help us here.
He emphasised character as the indicator of how a person would
act. In this he was influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer’s asser-
tion that our unconscious impulses (which Schopenhauer con-
fusingly said were part of the Will) determined our actions, not
moral imperatives like the Ten Commandments. A man can do
what he wills, said Schopenhauer; but he cannot will what he
wills. Nietszche dismissed rules for ethical behaviour as merely
dealing with the symptoms of evil actions, not the roots. He
regarded character as unchangeable in its essence, even if some-
 what variable in its expression. Therefore, he claimed, to say,
‘Thou shall not kill’ was as nonsensical as to say, ‘Thou shalt
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be wise’. A person with a calm, compassionate, and virtuous
character might nevertheless express anger and seek retribu-
tion when confronted with a depraved murder, or an evil char-
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acter might appear placatory and emollient when accused of a
serious crime. Yet if a person’s character determines how they
behave, then the reasons they give for their actions are other-
wise irrelevant, and when put to the test, they will act without
thought, like those who jump into a raging sea to save a child
and afterwards deny that it took courage, explaining that they
did what they did without thinking.
The task set to the police death battalions was to pull men,
women, and children from their homes, march them to a killing
site, and shoot them. Anyone too old or too young to march
was shot on the spot, sometimes in their beds.
Before the first massacre, a doctor demonstrated how the
execution was to be performed. To cause instant death, make
the victim lie face down, fix bayonets, and put the point on the
spine just below the neck, and shoot. If you shoot higher, as
nervous shooters did, the skull explodes, scattering human
debris over the killers. After being told what they had to do, the
men were given the option to step aside and take other duties.
Out of five hundred, no more than a dozen did so, acting on
impulse and without being asked for reasons. Aristotle, the
father of virtue ethics, might have described these men as show-
ing good character – but not as good as those Poles who actu-
ally helped Jews. Those who did showed a similar lack of delib-
eration: they acted spontaneously, not as result of reflection on
duties, or of Christian morals, nor on the utilitarian calculation
of cost and benefits. They impulsively did what was right.
Once the killings were underway, Browning estimates that
between 10% and 20% opted out after feeling revulsion at what
they had done. (Laboratory experiments by Philip Zimbardo
or Stanley Milgram, on the influence of authority on behaviour,
found similar low percentages unwilling to inflict pain out of
the general civilian population.) Some killers reported vomit-
ing; but more than 80% of the men carried on with the work.
One even justified himself by claiming to be compassionate. He
declined to kill adults: “I made the effort to shoot only chil-
dren… without its mother the child could not live… it was
soothing to my conscience to redeem children unable to live
without their mothers.” Others, faced with having to kill Jewish
workers with whom they were friendly, also reasoned that they
were being compassionate, by killing without warning. One
“took Jutta to the woods and engaged her in conversation before
she was shot from behind.” Another man, who thought he had
been asked to pick blackberries, was also ‘compassionately’ shot
in the back of the neck. These murders were not committed by
animals with no moral knowledge or sensibilities. Time and
again, we find them simultaneously expressing remnants of mis-
givings: they disapproved of torturing and humiliating victims
before shooting them; they were outraged when one comman-
der brought along his pregnant wife to see their work. Nor were
they Nazi ideologues. Most of these middle-aged men had been
educated in the early twentieth century and had reached matu-
rity before Hitler’s racist rhetoric had begun to bite. So these
crimes show how accommodating moral reasoning can be, and
consequently how ineffective moral rules are in guiding
behaviour. Nietzsche was on to something. Character, with its
impulses to do good (maybe 20% of us), or bad (80%), is in evi-
dence all around us.
Ethical Characters
Let me cite only one relatively recent example of excellent char-
acter in action. In August 2015, Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos,
and Anthony Sadler leapt upon an Islamic State terrorist who
intended to massacre passengers on the 15:17 train from Ams-
terdam to Paris. Their childhoods and backgrounds were unre-
markable. On the train to Paris they appear to have acted instinc-
tively at the moment of threat, and therefore as an expression of
their character. One of the men said he found himself involved
in the struggle without knowing how he had got from his seat to
the fight; another had just said to himself, ‘Go’. As the French
police carried away the hog-tied terrorist, the men stood bemused
and marvelling at what they had done. In comments expressing
gratitude for their actions, President Hollande quoted one of the
men as having said, “When something happens, you have to do
something.” All of this suggests they acted on impulse and (so)
expressed aspects of their character: courage, coupled with an
instinctive sense of good and evil. There had been no reference
to ethical imperatives. They had seen a threat and had jumped
on it, while the train guard, the one in authority in this context,
took no part in the struggle. When one of the men went to search
for possible accomplices, he found the passengers from several
carriages, far from helping, were all crammed together as far away
as possible from harm at the end of the train.
Character is formed partly as a result of our genetic inheri-
tance, and partly as a result of our parenting, education, and
social environment. There are no simple answers to how good
character can be developed and maintained. Judeo-Christian
ethics have made only limited impact, partly because, although
taught, they are not diligently practised. Christians are told
many things by Christ: that it is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven; do as
you would be done by; love your neighbour as yourself; turn
the other cheek… Not character traits that characterise many
of us, including those who profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth.
We need to refocus on developing good characters; but how
that is to be done is a large question to which no political party
or religious group has the full answer. Perhaps we need to study
the background lives of people who have unequivocally demon-
strated virtues of character – such as Johnson Beharry, who
drove into an Iraqi ambush and dragged his friend to safety
despite his own severe wounds.
Perhaps only good deeds are done spontaneously, and evil takes
a little time to flourish. Perhaps character has to be nurtured rather
than taught. Just as Aristotle said, an acorn becomes a tree only
when it’s in good soil, not by being exhorted to grow. Perhaps a
start might be made by ensuring that all children have a happy
childhood that’s emotionally and cognitively stimulating. A long
term project then – and one that our politicians, often lacking as
they are in excellence of character, might never undertake.
© MICHAEL MCMANUS 2020
Michael McManus is the author of Troublesome Behaviour in
the Classroom, published by Routledge.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 35
Brief Lives
John Locke (1632-1704)
John P. Irish goes into full Locke-down with a titan of philosophy.
B
efore 1689, when he was almost sixty, there was very
little in John Locke’s life that would have indicated
that he was to become one of the most important
philosophical minds of the Western world. Before
that, he was little more than a footnote in English history, with
no major publications, and only a few minor writings which were
all published anonymously. But after 1689, with the publication
of his two magnum opuses, the Two Treatises of Government and An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the world would take
notice of this powerful intellect.
Birth, Education and Early Writings
John Locke was born in Wrington, Somerset, a small town just
south of Bristol, England, on August 28, 1632, to parents of
moderate means. His father, John Locke, Sr., owned some land
and property, and supplemented his income from these by prac-
ticing as an attorney and taking administrative posts in local gov-
ernment. Locke remembered his father being severe and his
mother being affectionate. His family had Puritan sympathies,
and his father was an officer in the Parliamentary cavalry in the
English Civil War, under Alexander Popham.
In 1645 Popham served as a Member of Parliament, which
allowed him to recommend boys for places at the Westminster
School. At the time the Westminster School was considered to
be the finest school in England. Locke entered it in 1647. Edu-
cation at the School consisted primarily in the study of ancient
languages: Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
Westminster School had a connection with Christ Church,
Oxford, for which it could recommend scholars. Locke entered
Christ Church on this recommendation in 1652. Education at
Christ Church then had deep roots in the Aristotelian canon.
Students were also expected to hone their skills at analysis
through disputation. Locke did not find this curriculum very
interesting, and spent most of his free time reading literature,
much of it translated from French. But it was at Oxford that
Locke began to develop his interest in science and medicine.
Locke began his informal education in these subjects as he read
Boyle, Gassendi, and Descartes. Locke later claimed that his
interest in the epistemological (knowledge-related) questions of
the day began with exploring the writings of Descartes as a
young man at Oxford.
Locke’s attention at Christ Church was not exclusively on sci-
entific and medical matters. He was also engaged with some of the
most important political and religious questions of the day. After
Oliver Cromwell’s death, Locke welcomed the Restoration of
Charles II in 1660, even though it meant the re-establishment of
a strong, even authoritarian, monarchy. In that year, in response
to Edward Bagshaw, a classmate at Oxford, Locke wrote a short
work titled Two Tracts of Government. In opposition to Bagshaw
Locke affirmed the power of the civil magistrate to determine the
form of religious worship. This work reflects Locke’s early belief
36 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
that the return of the King would bring peace and political stabil-
ity. Initially, Locke intended for part of this treatise to be pub-
lished; ultimately though, he decided not to publish any of it. It
remained unpublished until 1967. From 1661 Locke served as a
tutor, and was appointed to several positions at Oxford: a lecturer
in Greek; in rhetoric; and finally, in moral philosophy. Soon he
also considered a second work for publication, known as the Essays
on the Law of Nature. These were most likely lecture notes, orga-
nized and revised in 1664. However, Locke lost interest in the pro-
ject, and they too were not published until 1954. However, these
unpublished essays indicated two themes that would remain con-
stant interests for Locke throughout his career as a thinker: the
voluntarist theory of law, by which people should be free to choose
the laws they live by; and the empiricist approach to knowledge, by
which all knowledge comes to us through experience: ‘There are
no innate ideas’, as Locke was later to argue in his Essay.
In 1665 Locke was offered a diplomatic position as secretary to
an embassy in Cleves, a German city near the Dutch border. He
seems to have enjoyed his first trip abroad. The experience also led
him to reassess his views on religious and political tolerance, espe-
cially as expressed in his Two Tracts. In Cleves, members of different
religious denominations lived together in peace. He would remark
in a letter, “they quietly permit one another to choose their own
way to heaven, [without] quarrels or animosities” (Corr., L177).
In 1666 Locke returned to Oxford. Back in England, he would
form one of the most important friendships of his life.
Origins of the Essay and the Two Treatises
Anthony Ashley Cooper, future Earl of Shaftesbury, arrived at
Oxford in 1666. His health was poor, and he sought drinking
water from the spa at Astrop, about ten miles north of Oxford,
which was rumored to have positive medicinal qualities. Locke
was introduced to Shaftesbury, and the two were highly
impressed with each other. This friendship would have both
great and grave influences on Locke’s life.
In 1667 Locke left Oxford to serve as Shaftesbury’s secretary.
This allowed Locke to continue his interests in science and
medicine, as Shaftesbury maintained an extensive laboratory at his
home in London. In 1668 Shaftesbury’s health became worse, and
Locke supervised an operation to drain an abscess on his liver.
Shaftesbury survived; and he believed that Locke had saved his life.
Locke had not abandoned his interests in politics and religion.
The years he spent at Shaftesbury’s home allowed him sufficient
leisure to draft works on these topics. Within a year of arriving in
London, Locke had written an influential work dealing with reli-
gious and political toleration: An Essay Concerning Toleration.
This modified views from his earlier Two Tracts. Locke also
showed his interest in economic policy and financial concerns by
writing several economic works. But the most significant and
lasting intellectual contribution during this time involved an
early draft of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
 Brief Lives
John Locke by
Herman Verelst

June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 37

Brief Lives
In a well-known passage in its opening ‘Epistle to the Reader’,
Locke describes the origins of the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. He and a group of friends met to discuss the ori-
gins of religion and morality. Not finding sufficient answers, the
group got frustrated and turned to an even more fundamental
problem – the limits of human understanding. Following this
initial meeting Locke jotted down some notes, and he brought
them with him to their next meeting. Evidence from the first
draft, known as Draft A, shows that Locke had began writing this
document before July 1671. A larger draft, known as Draft B, has
‘1671’ on the title page. Both drafts were left unfinished, and
more importantly, left unresolved some of the problems that led
to their being written in the first place.
In 1675 Locke left Shaftesbury for France, under the guise of
bad health. While in France, he began to keep a journal, made
several acquaintances related to his interests in science and
medicine, hired a tutor to teach him French, and began reading
books in that language. One of the figures whose works he
sought after in French was René Descartes.
Locke returned to England in 1679, to a country in social and
political crisis. The ‘Popish Plot’ – a conspiracy to assassinate the
Protestant Charles II and replace him with his Catholic brother
James – was ‘revealed’, even though it was a complete fabrication.
Notwithstanding, the political environment was dangerous, and
there were attempts by the Crown to deal with the growing polit-
ical unrest. Shaftesbury and his associates attempted to use consti-
tutional means to exclude James from the throne: two Exclusion
Bills, in 1679 and 1680, sought to ban the ascension of this
Catholic. Neither passed into law, but by 1681 Charles had no
interest in summoning Parliament again. Here a split occurred
within the Whig party. The moderates crossed over, siding with
the monarch. The radicals, represented by Shaftesbury and others
(possibly including Locke), considered political insurrection to
prevent James from eventually becoming King (which he did,
eventually). Charles II, fearing that Shaftesbury was his most dan-
gerous political enemy, charged him with treason. The prosecution
failed, but Shaftesbury, now fearing for his life, fled to Holland.
Despite a vacuum within their political leadership, the radi-
cals plotted an assassination. The plan involved an attempt to
assassinate both Charles and James at Rye House, just north of
London (this became known as ‘the Rye House Plot’). In 1683
the scheme was discovered and disclosed to the government, and
arrests immediately began. The extent of Locke’s involvement
with these radical Whigs is unknown, but he knew enough to be
worried. He believed that his life was in danger, and soon fol-
lowed Shaftesbury to Holland.
While in Holland, Locke reached out to other political exiles.
His actions were reported back to the English government, he
was accused of aiding political dissidents, and in November
1684, Locke was expelled from his fellowship at Christ Church.
His name was added to a list of political exiles who were to be
arrested upon their return to England.
In 1685 Locke began a new work on the subject of religious
and political toleration, Epistola de Tolerantia (A Letter on Tolera-
tion). The issue of political and religious toleration had been on
Locke’s mind since his Oxford days, but the immediate source of
inspiration was probably the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in
38 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
October 1685, which ended the right of Protestant Huguenots
to practice their religion in mostly Catholic France.
Locke’s letter was written in Latin, showing that his intended
audience was European. This work presented the strongest argu-
ment in favor of religious toleration that Locke would pen, coming
almost full circle from his earlier Two Tracts. In an impassioned
plea, he argues for complete freedom of conscience: “I may grow
rich by an art that I take not delight in; I may be cured of some dis-
ease by remedies that I have not faith in; but I cannot be saved by a
religion that I distrust, and by a worship that I abhor” (Works, VI.,
p.28). When Locke left Holland, he left the manuscript with Philip
Limborch. The document, along with the English translation by
his friend William Popple, was published in 1689.
Back in England, things were taking a rather unusual turn.
The success in 1688 of Dutch King William of Orange’s expedi-
tion to become the British (Protestant) King, and the subsequent
flight of (Catholic) James II, made it now safe for Locke and the
other political exiles to return to England.
The months that followed his return saw Locke preparing the
final manuscripts of his two chief works: An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government. Both
were published in 1689. Locke’s Essay has become the corner-
stone of empiricist epistemology, in which all knowledge finds
its basis in experience, while his Two Treatises lay the ground-
work for his beliefs in natural law, the social contract, and his
ideas about the origins and ends of political society.
For a long time, it was believed that Locke wrote the Two Trea-
tises following the new King William’s ‘Glorious Revolution’ of
1688. However Peter Laslett, a noted Locke scholar, has argued
for it having been written between 1679 and 1683 – making it an
even more fundamental and radical text. In any case, both books
are canonical in the history of Western philosophy.
Later Writings and Revisions of the Essay
While in Holland, Locke wrote letters to his friends Mary and
Edward Clarke giving advice on rearing and educating their son to
become a gentleman. These letters resulted in a subsequent work,
published in 1693 as Some Thoughts Concerning Education. This was
only the second work published under Locke’s name, the first
being his Essay (the Two Treatises did not initially bear his name).
Some Thoughts attracted the attention of many of Locke’s friends,
especially those with young children, and despite its rather limited
focus on producing a young gentleman, the book has assumed a
major place in the history of educational thought. The work also
reflects Locke’s larger concern over developing moral character,
and was grounded thoroughly in his empiricist philosophy.
Soon Locke began thinking about material for a second edi-
tion of the Essay. John Norris, an English admirer of Male-
branche, was the first to publish any critical remarks about the
Essay. Norris and Locke had been friends, but their relationship
had turned sour when Locke was accused of treason – Locke
believed that Norris was spying on him. In 1692 Locke pub-
lished ‘JL Answer to Mr Norris’s Reflection’, then a year later
published two documents related to Norris’s criticisms of the
Essay: ‘Remarks upon some of Mr Norris’s Books’, and ‘An
Examination of P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things
in God’. Locke’s cordial correspondence with William

Molyneux also added to the new material to be included in the
revised Essay. Molyneux posed this question: would a person who
had been blind their entire life, but all of a sudden gained sight,
be able to distinguish between a sphere and a cube just by look-
ing? Their discussion led Locke to include a new chapter in the
second edition of the Essay, ‘Of Identity and Diversity’
(Molyneux also raised other issues, which made Locke rethink
and revise significantly the chapter ‘Of Power’). The second edi-
tion was published in 1695. Locke would also publish The Rea-
sonableness of Christianity that year.
Following the publication of the second edition, further corre-
spondence allowed Locke to rethink other chapters in the Essay.
The Bishop of Worcester, Edward Stillingfleet, initially believed
that there was nothing controversial with the Essay. John
Toland’s Christianity Not Mysterious (1696) took an approach to
theology that went well beyond anything that Locke intended
with his theology. However, Toland’s theory of knowledge,
derived heavily from Locke’s Essay, caused Stillingfleet concern.
Soon Locke and Stillingfleet would lock horns about this in
public correspondence, and this would eventually lead to two new
chapters in the fourth edition of the Essay, published in 1699.
The correspondence would also result in a chapter Locke
wanted to include in the new edition but which was deemed too
long. ‘The Conduct of the Understanding’, which was begun in
1697, was never published in Locke’s lifetime. But it was pub-
lished posthumously in 1706, as per Locke’s request in his will.
Retirement and Death
By 1700 Locke had retired entirely from public office, and had
begun working on his last major publishing project. Paraphrase
and Notes on the Epistles of St Paul reflected his long-standing
interest in biblical interpretation. Locke believed Paul’s letters
in the New Testament were being misinterpreted by those who
tried to understand each verse in isolation. He argued that the
letters must be understood as a whole.
This writing reveals the deeply religious character of Locke’s
mind. Locke would work on two other religious pieces, which
would also be published posthumously: Discourse on Miracles and
fragments of a Fourth Letter on Toleration.
Locke spent the remainder of his life resting. In 1704 he
believed that he did not have much longer to live, and in April of
that year he made his will. Although his body was deteriorating,
his mind remained clear and active. It was in 1704 that Locke first
publically acknowledged writing the Two Treatises of Government.
On October 28, 1704, Locke felt better than usual and asked
to be moved to his study. But soon after lunch, while listening to
a friend reading scripture to him, he died. He was buried three
days later in the churchyard of the parish church at High Laver
in Essex, where his tomb remains to this day.
© DR JOHN P. IRISH 2020
John P. Irish teaches American Studies at Carroll Sr. High School
in Southlake, Texas. He received a Doctorate in Humanities from
Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
• This essay is dedicated to the memory of my student and friend,
Sarah Lacy (2002-2020). Her philosophical journey was cut way too
short.
Philosophical Haiku
TERESA DE ÁVILA
(1515–1582)
I walk through my soul,
demon-blinded eyes seek truth.
From faith comes reason.
T
eresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, better known as Teresa de
Ávila, the patron saint of headache sufferers, those mocked for
their piety, and the makers of lace, was born into great wealth but
gave it all up for a life of monastic poverty and mystical writing.
From an early age, Teresa showed a devotion to Christ – at the age of
seven, she and her brother tried to run away to be martyred by the
Moors; but were prevented from doing so by an unsympathetic uncle. At
twenty, Teresa felt the calling again and entered a Carmelite convent. She
read works of mysticism, began to experience moments of religious
ecstasy, reportedly sometimes levitated, almost died from overdoing the
self-mortification, and then turned increasingly to oratio mentalis –
prayer based on intense inner contemplation. Towards the end of her life
she penned the work from which arises our philosophical interest.
El Castillo Interior (The Inner Castle, 1588) is part of a mediaeval tradi-
tion of writings in which the reader is guided through stages of spirituality.
Each stage is ideally marked by increased self-enlightenment and a
closer union with the Divine. Teresa describes how we enter our castle
(our mind/soul) and then make our way through the rooms we find in
there. Our goal is communion with God and certain knowledge, but along
the way we must overcome barriers in the form of illusions, temptations,
and false beliefs, placed before us by such things as demons and devils.
Sound familiar? In 1641 René Descartes famously described a similar
journey in a more secular mode in his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia
(Meditations on First Philosophy). This was also an inward journey of the
soul, a quest for certain knowledge. Early on in this quest, he realises that
perhaps all he has hitherto believed to be real — the sky, the earth, his
own body– might instead be illusions created by a demon laying traps for
his judgment. For both Teresa and Descartes, the recognition that we
cannot necessarily trust what we previously took to be correct is the first
step on the path to Truth.
The Jesuit-educated Descartes would certainly have been familiar
with El Castillo Interior. We cannot know exactly how much it influenced
his thinking, but it’s a nice thought that the Father of Modern Rationalism
was shown the way by a mystic and a saint.
© TERENCE GREEN 2020
Terence is a writer, historian and lecturer who lives in Paekakariki, NZ.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 39

Nietzsche Eternally Revisited
DEAR EDITOR: In PN Issue 137, brave
Brandon Robshaw takes on Nietzsche’s
eternal recurrence analytically! Oho!
Eternal recurrence works as a literary
and even a philosophical tool. Any
mental romance ended there for me as a
young man. What did strike me was the
way the idea evolved in Nietzsche, start-
ing with its epochal realisation as he
sauntered by the shore of Lake Silva-
plana, pondering the great pyramidal
boulder there. The idea of eternal recur-
rence shook him. I found it a pity that
he didn’t write more about it; it would
have gone well with his liking for
Darwin, had he accepted the possibility
of an evolutionary component to the
idea. The idea is also at odds with happi-
ness in contrast to fate. For a man such
as Nietzsche, who felt happiness meant
struggle and change, wouldn’t it make
more sense that the participant were a
responsible agent with an unknown to
struggle with, rather than just repeating
the same? At any rate it works beauti-
fully in his works.
Thanks for the Nietzsche edition. It’s
hard to fault him. Many sense the über-
mensch as a master figure, but careful
reading demolishes this idea – with a
hammer, as it were.
BERNARD ROONEY
NIMBIN, AUSTRALIA
DEAR EDITOR: Paul O’Mahoney’s
article in Issue 137 makes the implica-
tions of Nietzsche’s philosophy so clear
that it’s a wonder how anyone would
want a future governed by Nietzschean
principles. But it’s unclear whether
O’Mahoney himself accepts the Niet-
zschean case against free will or whether
he is merely illustrating its reasoning.
Although he highlights the scientific
evidence, he fails to point out that it was
science’s commitment to truth that
Nietzsche most despised in his Third
Essay on the Genealogy of Morality. Niet-
zsche perceived the scientific enterprise
40 Philosophy Now l June/July 2020
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up.
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
to be the most pernicious and ‘subter-
ranean ally’ of the Christian unwavering
commitment to truth (GM III: 25). And
in a Nietzschean world, science is
stripped of its fundamental assumptions
necessary for operating. For instance,
when a scientist contemplates new
hypotheses, conducts new experiments,
and makes deductions from those experi-
ments, the scientist must assume at every
stage a will that’s free to choose between
an array of explanatory candidates. Any
notion that suggests that free will is illu-
sory, such as Nietzsche’s determinism,
renders the scientific enterprise futile,
removing the ability of science to make
the case for anything, not least Niet-
zschean philosophy. Indeed, Nietzsche
would have found this use of science
bizarre and obscene, given his view that
science was the ‘pre-eminent form’ of
Christian ideals (GM III: 23). Indeed, it’s
true that the modern scientific enterprise
was borne not from an atheist womb, but
from the metaphysical presuppositions of
Christianity. The pioneers of modern
science held two distinct presuppositions
that enabled science to flourish. The first
was that nature had been created by a
God who ordained regular laws which
nature obeyed. Nature was not, there-
fore, arbitrary in its behaviour, but con-
sistent. The second was that God had
created the human mind in His very
image. The ability of the medieval
natural philosopher to uncover the laws
of nature, was hence justified, and with it
so was doing science.
One must ultimately admit the inco-
herence and self-refuting nature of
Nietzsche’s philosophy. Under deter-
minism, the free will of the audience is
stripped bare, so none are truly free to
believe anything. Nietzsche’s determin-
ism would imply that his philosophy is
itself determined, so having no real truth
value. It is therefore no wonder that a
pure Nietzschean world has not yet fully
emerged, nor ever will, since the
concept itself is not only morally dis-
tasteful but fundamentally self-refuting.
Nietzsche himself stated that “all
great things destroy themselves by an act
of self-cancellation.” Here he was
writing of the future death of Christian-
ity (GM III: 27). But unwittingly, Niet-
zsche laid the seeds for the collapse even
of the Nietzschean dream itself.
OLIVER IGLESIA VICTORIO
LONDON
DEAR EDITOR: How predictable that in
answer to the question, ‘Who Is The
Worst Philosopher?’ (Question of the
Month, Issue 135), the readers name
Nietzsche more than anyone else. I had
planned an angry rant about this, but am
disarmed by the hilarity of the term
‘basement übermenschen’, as proposed by
D.E. Tarkington, in his letter.
The criticisms of Nietzsche clearly
indicate that most still have an image of
him brought to us by propagandists, such
as by the Nazis and by his sister. In the
Foreword to Walter Kaufman’s Nietzsche:
Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, it says,
“Kaufman’s book brought about a radical
reversal of the popular image of Niet-
zsche as a raging, totalitarian anti-
Semite... It marks a turning point in
Nietzsche’s posthumous reputation.”
This book hit the market in 1950! The
criticisms of Nietzsche leveled by your
readers indicates we can do them a huge
favor by telling to them to go (and waste
no time) to their local library, seek out
Kaufman’s book, bring themselves up to
a modern level (well, up to 1950 anyway)
of understanding about Nietzsche, before
blowing huge plumes of empty hot air.
DAVID WRIGHT
SACRAMENTO, CA
Which is worse –
A hard death
Or a hard birth:
To bless one’s blessing
Or to curse one’s curse?
BENJAMIN L. PÉREZ
SAN QUENTIN, CA

Meaningful Jobs
DEAR EDITOR: As I read Dr Thorsten
Botz-Bornstein’s description of the post-
industrial workforce, it seemed to me
that he almost got away with it.
When the magazine landed on my
doormat I found myself isolated but oddly
still capable of carrying on with my
‘meaningless’ role of ‘mindless hyperac-
tivity’. Of course, had Dr Botz-Bernstein
made his point in Issue 136 of Philosophy
Now, even I might have agreed with him.
Who hasn’t asked themselves ‘What’s the
point of it all?’ But far from being mean-
ingless, the administrative and ‘box-
ticking’ jobs continued, as those suffering
from ‘Busy Bee Syndrome’ were dis-
persed to kitchen tables and spare bed-
rooms to make sure that nurses, refuse
workers, drivers and police officers con-
tinue to get paid in a regulated and tightly
administered system which ensures that
the ‘productive’ workforce can continue
to be safe and treated fairly. This new-
formed network of home workers were
free to pick up the childcare and emer-
gency delivery to elderly relatives. They
were connected with each other through
‘bullshit’ social media, and maintained the
viability of the post-industrial supply
chain so that academics didn’t run out of
toilet roll. So, Dr Botz-Bornstein nearly
got away with what? Well, bullshit, of
course.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
PAUL RAMSAY
POST-INDUSTRIAL WORKER
WINDSOR
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 137, two of your
contributors, Dr David Ronnegard and
Dr Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, cite the
contemporary meme that around 40% of
jobs are pointless, or ‘bullshit’. When
answering a poll, many people will say
that their jobs are pointless; but at the
same time, all around the world, our life
expectancy, standards of living, and so on,
continue to increase. How much better
might we do if everyone did useful jobs?!
Perhaps it isn’t surprising that many
of your contributors – mostly middle-
class academics – might feel quite smug
about their own roles, while looking
down on the roles of others. In fact,
companies and organisations wouldn’t
employ people who didn’t contribute,
and the service sector jobs which were
cited as ‘bullshit’ play a massively impor-
tant role in moving things on. For
example, the telemarketer might be
selling low-carbon electricity, or the
management consultant might be invig-
orating the fortunes of a charity. The
value of a role lies as much in its place in
a system as in what is done day-to-day.
In the book Sensemaking, Christian
Madsbjerg argues for the role of educa-
tion in the humanities, specifically in
philosophy, in making sense of the world
around us and saving us from big data
and scientism. Part of that is for us to
start thinking about our role and not rely
on machines to do the thinking for us. I
would argue that alongside attention to
the minutiae of life a broader system-
wide approach is required, so that when
people think their role is pointless, they
should look at it as functioning within a
wider society. Of course, if they still
think it’s pointless, maybe it’s time to
change jobs!
DAVID HALL, CHELTENHAM
Stoicism Recycled
DEAR EDITOR: I want to address the
article in PN 136, ‘A Stoic Response To
The Climate Crisis’ by Matthew Gindin.
Although I admire stoicism for its
emotional and psychological benefits, I
find that as an ethical system it is some-
what limited, and is highly inappropriate
to tackle an issue of the magnitude of the
climate crisis. Whereas stoicism is pri-
marily a self-directed discipline, climate-
related problems require a shift of per-
spective from the centrality of the stoic
individual to things that are not the self.
In fact, making any real headway in pre-
venting the continued destruction of our
planetary environment will require a
willingness to make painful sacrifices.
Gindin’s recommended ‘training for a
world of lack and hardship’ is quite dif-
ferent, and, I would venture, less incon-
venient, than putting one’s self out and
making an effort before the final hard-
ship. Furthermore, as opposed to merely
‘doing what we can’, a combined social
effort is required. The stoic response
alluded to in Gindin’s article might
bring about psychological relief for the
individual, but rather than spurring pro-
ductive action, could very easily turn
into apathy or fatalism, another unhelp-
ful caveat about stoicism. Urgent ethical
decisions do not flow naturally from the
stoic mind-set, given that Stoicism
emphasises the cultivation of the ‘good’
character. This may not leave much time
Letters
for fixing the environment. Sometimes,
to establish a more general, social, good,
we just have to act, albeit mindfully –
particularly given that a conducive envi-
ronment is needed in order for the lofty
discipline of reasoning to take place at
all. I summarise this in a haiku:
Stoic demeanour
Whilst checking one’s responses
Could stop short of more.
THOMAS R. MORGAN
WESTCLIFF-ON-SEA, ESSEX
Thoughts on Tallis on Thought
DEAR EDITOR: May I comment in
response to Professor Tallis’ stimulating
article, ‘Against Neural Philosophy of
Mind’, in Philosophy Now Issue 137?
I am a retired psychiatrist. When I
was with a patient, we would discuss the
way we think, feel, and act – a meeting of
minds. We might agree the patient
needed to change, via a process of per-
suasion or psychotherapy. I could also
decide that the patient is depressed, and
that this mood is without apparent envi-
ronmental cause, and is moreover
unusually prolonged and intense. So I
prescribe an anti-depressant on the basis
of a putative disorder of chemical trans-
mission in the brain. It seems to me that
as a psychiatrist I worked in two distinct
fields.
The field of the meeting of minds con-
cerns self-consciousness, self-awareness,
and introspection. Since the study of self-
consciousness is called ‘phenomenology’,
I call this ‘the Domain of Discourse of
Phenomenology’. When I prescribe brain
medication I am operating in the scien-
tific mode: I like to call this ‘the Domain
of Discourse of Science’.
The Domain of Discourse of Phe-
nomenology is characterised by:
1. Action within the organism.
2. Non-determinism – free-will.
3. Specific causality – mental events.
4. Phenomena are subjective – they
cannot be observed by ‘outsider’.
5. The three faculties of psychology are:
will or conation; emotion or affection;
cognition or intellect.
It is within this domain that we woo
our partners, raise our children, relate to
our colleagues, argue with our enemies,
talk to our patients, make our laws. It’s
the domain of persuasion and propa-
ganda. It is also the language of litera-
June/July 2020 l Philosophy Now 41
Letters
ture, philosophy and science before the
shift into the modern domain of scien-
tific discourse that came with Galileo.
Though it has disparagingly come to be
called ‘folk psychology’, it is a function-
ing system.
The Domain of Discourse of Science
concerns the manipulation of the world
largely outside of the organism, via our
artefacts. In my view the domain includes:
1. Objectivity – experiences of the phe-
nomena can be shared by observers.
2. Act within and without the organism.
3. Experimental since Galileo.
4. Deterministic – no free will.
5. Causality: not mental activity; ideally
mechanistic, akin to movements of a
planet, a steam engine, or a computer.
6. If possible, modelled by mathematics.
Too often there are attempts to meld
the domains, such as cognitive psychol-
ogy; a melange of the two realms. In clin-
ical practice I cheerfully worked in
whichever was the most useful domain.
But they are incompatible, or in the tech-
nical sense, incommensurable. If we
accept their incommensurability, we
should resolutely abandon any attempt to
explain one domain in terms of the other,
and so cease to use these domains in our
conceptual struggles over body and mind.
This would free us to take a fresh look at
our ideas about the nature of our exis-
tence, released from the straightjackets of
the two domains of discourse.
If my thoughts are valid, incommen-
surability requires stepping into the con-
ceptual unknown with the need for a
revolutionary change in our outlook and
understanding over mind and brain.
DAVID MARJOT
WEYBRIDGE, SURREY
DEAR EDITOR: Raymond Tallis has
argued that the mind is not neural activ-
ity (Issue 137). I wonder if he could do a
follow-up article on the nature of this
non-material mind ? It would be particu-
larly interesting to know how the mind
relates to the grey matter through which
it appears to operate. In the case of
severe brain injury, this mind appears to
have difficulty in getting through. Is it
that the thinking continues separate
from the brain, but is simply blocked
from communicating, like a radio
receiver with a broken loudspeaker?
What’s going on?
BARRY WILLIAMS
LIVERPOOL
42 Philosophy Now l June/July 2020
Viruswise
DEAR EDITOR: I have been reminded by
the inroads into our lives of COVID-19
of the idea of panpsychism – that rather
strange assertion by certain philosophers
that consciousness is inherent in every
aspect of matter, down to the smallest
subatomic particle. Well, the coronavirus
is a very large molecule. Its chemical for-
mulation enables it to ‘take over’ our
cells’ production lines and substitute the
replication of the virus. No-one in the
scientific world, however, is proposing
‘intention’ here. What’s happening is no
different in principle to the reaction of
hydrogen and oxygen to produce water:
ultimately, certain molecules simply
interact. The virus is itself a mutation of
one of its forebears, typically found in
bats. Does this mean that its alleged self-
awareness for panpsychists was involved
in that mutation, knowing that there
were bigger and better hosts to para-
sitise? If not, and if its reproduction is
not dependent on self-awareness, we are
left asking what its consciousness actually
amounts to. If the molecule is not actu-
ally aware of its awareness and cannot
use it for anything, then in what sense
does it have awareness? Isn’t panpsy-
chism better characterised as mumbo
jumbo, a fairy story?
PAUL BUCKINGHAM
ANNECY, FRANCE
DEAR EDITOR: I have not seen discussed
a difficult moral point which comes with
panpsychism. If everything does indeed
have self-awareness, then surely that
must bring with it a knowledge of the
consequences of actions, and so, moral
responsibility. How then does the coron-
avirus justify its actions? And how do we
justify our genocidal attempts to rid our-
selves of what panpsychism tells us is a
sentient being? We’re not even in a posi-
tion to anaesthetise the virus to stop it
suffering as we destroy it.
Clearly we need to rebuild our entire
approach to morality to enable us to
remove this dilemma. I suggest that we
repurpose the somewhat neglected
concept of purposivism: the idea that
intent or purpose is to be found in all
human and animal life. We could
perhaps call it panpurposivism. This
would state that all matter has purpose.
We would have to accept that purpose
may vary according to the configuration
it then has. For instance, the purpose of
hydrogen can vary considerably, from
providing the sun’s heat by fusion, to
being part of the water molecules essen-
tial for the formation of life as we know
it. Combine hydrogen with oxygen and
carbon, and we get ethanol – a substance
which a major recent international study
tells us is dangerous to human life at
even the smallest dose; but which is
nonetheless a comfort for many in a time
of coronavirus lockdown.
In the case of the virus, its purpose is
to multiply at our expense. One of our
purposes as human beings is to defeat its
purpose. Each of those conflicting pur-
poses is, however, fully justified morally,
because the purpose is imposed on it and
us by our panpurposivist configurations.
THOMAS JEFFRIES
WARWICKSHIRE
Trolley Takes Its Toll
DEAR EDITOR: I solved the trolley
problem: instead of deciding whether to
kill one person or five people, you make
the decision to sacrifice yourself.
Think of it this way: you’re with four
friends, and they’re lying on their
deathbeds, close to dying. You’re also
lying on your deathbed. There are four
life-saving vials of medicine. The ethical
thing to do is save your four friends and
sacrifice yourself. I would make that
decision without having to think. I hope
you would make that decision too.
GAGE BENNETT, AGE 13
Beauty and the Beast
DEAR EDITOR: I’m responding to Patrick
O’Callaghan’s letter in Issue 136 about
my article ‘Beauty versus Evil’, concern-
ing Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the
Will (Issue 132). I did not say that both
the form and content of works of art
should merely be ‘taken into account’
when judging them. I wrote that in the
best works of art the form is actually
fused with the content, so that it is
impossible to assess one without the
other. In other words, the value of such a
work of art (as art) is not something that
can be judged apart from the moral
quality of its content.
Incidentally, I have just read in an
English daily newspaper that Riefen-
stahl’s film is regarded as “so toxic that it
still can’t be screened publicly in
Germany.” (The I, 9 March 2020)
STUART GREENSTREET
LEWES, EAST SUSSEX
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Why Minor Figures Can Be
Majorly Interesting
Peter Adamson looks at the value of looking at the overlooked.
H
ow much would you say you
know about Miskawayh?
Nāgārjuna? How about
Lucrezia Marinella, or
Henry Odera Oruka?
Probably not much. In fact, you may not
even have heard of them. These thinkers
very rarely feature in the teaching of philos-
ophy, and their writings might well be
absent even in a well-stocked university
library in Europe or North America, to say
nothing of the average bookshop. They do
not belong to that select group of philoso-
phers whose names are familiar to almost
everyone – Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas,
Descartes – or even to the list of figures that
every professional philosopher knows.
They are, from the points of view both of
the philosophy profession and of the wider
public, minor figures.
I’ve given a lot of thought to the impor-
tance of such figures, because I produce a
series of podcasts devoted to covering the
history of philosophy ‘without any gaps’,
and also because in my own research I
often find myself working on them. I’ve
published a couple of articles about Misk-
awayh, for instance. He was a historian and
formidably well-read philosopher who
lived in the eleventh century in Persia. His
status as a minor thinker is in truth well-
earned. Unlike his near contemporary Avi-
cenna, he was not one of the most brilliant
and disruptive thinkers in human history.
On the contrary, most of his work is in fact
fairly derivative. So why would anyone,
even a specialist in the philosophy of the
Islamic world such as myself, spend their
time reading and writing about him?
Although Miskawayh was creative in his
synthesis of his sources – especially in a
treatise that ambitiously fuses Greek and
Islamic ethics – the answer is in part that
he’s interesting precisely because he was
not stunningly innovative. He therefore
gives us an insight into a mainstream style
of philosophy of his time and place – com-
bining Muslim piety, Aristotelianism, and
Philosophy Then
Neoplatonism – which the more innova-
tive Avicenna was reacting against. If you
want to see where Greek-inspired Islamic
philosophy was headed before Avicenna
intervened, you can do no better than to
read Miskawayh. And this is a common
phenomenon: we need to understand the
minor figures to understand the major fig-
ures and the nature of their impact.
But that’s not the only reason to be
interested in such figures, or to bring them
to the attention of a wider audience. There
is also the fact that apparently minor figures
are sometimes, in fact, major ones. Avi-
cenna himself is an example. Most Western
philosophy students wouldn’t encounter
him during their studies either, but he was
the most important philosopher of the
Islamic world by a huge margin, and he had
far-reaching influence in other cultures
too, especially medieval Christendom.
Equivalent things can be said of the sec-
ond name I mentioned above, Nāgārjuna.
His ingenious critique of the assumption
that there are independently-existing
things became the foundation of a whole
branch of Buddhist thought, the so-called
Madhyamaka or ‘Middle Way’. His stature
in Asian philosophy is not unlike that of,
say, Kant’s in European philosophy.
Nāgārjuna really should be a household
name, at least in any house that holds peo-
ple with an interest in philosophy.
My last two names, Marinella and
Oruka, illustrate a further reason for paying
attention to so-called ‘minor figures’:
thinkers outside of mainstream philosophy
often actively critique that mainstream. In
her On the Nobility and Excellence of Women,
written at the end of the sixteenth century,
Marinella attacked the misogyny of Euro-
pean culture, reserving special scorn for that
most major of philosophical figures, Aristo-
tle. Calling him a ‘fearful, tyrannical man’
for his dismissal of women’s rational capac-
ities, she went against nearly the whole tra-
dition of European philosophical anthro-
pology by arguing in favor of the intellectual
and moral equality, if not superiority, of
women: “Speculation” she wrote, “is as
much of service to women as it is to men. But
man does not permit woman to apply herself
to such studies, fearing, with reason, that she
will surpass him in them.”
Much more recently – at the end of the
twentieth century – Oruka likewise chal-
lenged prevailing assumptions about who is
capable of producing valuable philosophy.
He defended the notion that philosophy can
exist in a purely oral setting; but he resisted
the approach of other specialists in African
philosophy who saw whole cultures (such as
the Akan, Bantu, or Yoruba) as the bearers,
and, in some sense, the authors, of philo-
sophical systems. For Oruka, philosophy is
done by individuals. So, to investigate the
way that individual members of traditional
African societies contributed to philosophy,
he developed a project he called ‘Sage Phi-
losophy’. This involved interviewing out-
standingly wise members of such societies.
These sages might not have written any-
thing, but they can still represent the philo-
sophical ideas of their people, or – even more
exciting to Oruka – push against those ideas
by setting forth innovative positions.
Oruka’s project suggests that philosophy is
not what we often assume it to be – a tradi-
tion of argumentative writing – but more like
a lived wisdom that engages critically with
the social setting in which it is produced.
Of course this is just a handful of exam-
ples. But I hope they suffice to convince
you that it can be worthwhile to make less-
well-known philosophers better-known:
they can help provide context to under-
stand the philosophical giants we already
care about; they can turn out to be giants
worth caring about in their own right; and
they can change our ideas about what phi-
losophy itself is.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2020
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1-5,
available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 43

Books
The Subject of
Experience
by Galen Strawson
THE ORACLE AT DELPHI
famously advised us to
know ourselves. But what
is the self which is to be known?
This question is at the heart of contem-
porary British philosopher Galen Straw-
son’s The Subject of Experience. In this collec-
tion of essays, Strawson investigates wide-
ranging topics pertaining to the nature of the
self: What do we mean by the term ‘self’? In
what sense do selves exist? To what extent is
continuity over time essential to selfhood?
Must one be able to make a story of one’s
life in order to be a coherent self? Must one
be self-conscious in order to be conscious at
all? and more. The fourteen essays here are
not necessarily meant to be read in order.
They do not offer a sustained argument, but
rather a number of themes that appear in
different places, like threads in a tapestry.
These themes cover so much ground that it
would be impossible to do justice to them all
in a short review, so I’ll just touch on a few
salient ones.
The first theme is what is meant by the
term ‘self’. Strawson is a professional
analytic philosopher, and one of his
strengths is a careful attention to conceptual
nuances. Noting that from an early age we
realize that our thoughts are private, that is,
not observable by others, he asserts that we
all have a sense of ourselves as something
mental, distinct from our bodies. Whether
this sense is accurate is another question; but
he says that it has eight components. We
Image by Paul Gregory
44 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
We search for the human essence, as Bill Meacham
subjects Galen Strawson to his critical experience, and
Massimo Pigliucci is frank about human character.
ordinarily conceive of or experience our
selves in eight ways, listed from the most
fundamental to the most broad as follows
(p.19). We think of ourself as:
1) A thing or entity;
2) A mental or subjective entity;
3) A single entity when considered at a point
in time (synchronically);
4) A single entity when considered over some
duration of time (diachronically);
5) Ontically (really or metaphysically)
distinct from all other things;
6) A subject of experience – a conscious feeler
and thinker;
7) An agent, with choices; and
8) Having a certain character or personality.
That’s quite a list. The virtue of an
analytic approach is that it helps us avoid
ambiguity and equivocation. When we make
assertions about the self, it helps to know
which of these aspects of selfhood we mean.
If I tell you that I ate the candy, ‘I’ refers to
me as an agent (#7 in the list): I and not some-
one else ate the candy. But if I tell you that
I didn’t really do it, but rather my addiction
to sweets overcame me, ‘I’ here means some-
thing else – something ‘ontically’ or really
distinct from my cravings (#5).
It won’t do to ask which of these is the
right meaning, as if there could be only one.
The analytic approach encourages us to be
more precise, and say which sense of ‘I’ is
being used on any given occasion.
Consider the question of self as subject of
experience (#6). Strawson goes on to list
three conceptions of subjecthood (pp.171-
172):
1) Human beings along with other animals
can be generally said to be subjects of expe-
rience. Strawson calls this the ‘thick’
conception.
2) A subject of experience can be thought of
as “some sort of persisting inner locus of
consciousness – an inner someone, an inner
mental presence”. This he calls the ‘tradi-
tional inner’ conception.
3) A subject of experience can be “an inner
thing of some sort that exists if and only if
experience exists of which it is the subject.”
This he calls the ‘thin’ conception.
Conceptions 1 and 2 assume that a
subject of experience continues to exist even
when not having any actual experience, as in
dreamless sleep or when heavily sedated. In
conceptions 2 and 3, the subject is some-
thing different from, or at least distinct
from, the whole person taken as body and
mind together. Conception 3 reserves the
term ‘subject’ for that which gives unity to
an individual moment or episode of experi-
ence, and so operates only during that
moment or episode of being conscious (this
conception of the self was a real difficulty for
René Descartes).
That there is a unity to episodes of human
experience Strawson takes as incontrovert-
ible. In addition to being an analytic philoso-
pher, Strawson is also a phenomenologist,
that is, someone who has examined his own
experience in some analytical detail. This
gives him an edge over those who rely on
linguistic or conceptual analysis alone in
understanding the self. His description of
experience is worth quoting at length:
Book Reviews

“The total experiential field involves many
things – rich interoceptive (somatosensory)
and exteroceptive sensation, mood-and-
affect-tone, deep conceptual animation, and
so on. It has, standardly, a particular focus,
and more or less dim peripheral areas, and
is, overall, extraordinarily complex in con-
tent. But it is for all that a unity… simply in
being, indeed, a total experiential field; or
equivalently, simply in being the content of
the experience of a single subject at that
moment. The unity or singleness of the
(thin) subject of the total experiential field
in the living moment of experience and the
unity or singleness of the total experiential
field are aspects of the same thing.” (p.179)
This ‘same thing’ is an occasion or
moment of experience. That each moment
of experience is unitive leads Strawson in
two directions philosophically. One is
toward a conception of personal identity;
and the other toward a conception of the
ultimate nature of reality.
Personal Identity
The question of personal identity is central
to this book. Strawson reminds us that the
ordinary conception of selfhood –the second
one above – is of a persisting inner locus of
being conscious of one’s world (and, I would
add, of acting on it too). We think of
ourselves as experiencing beings having
long-term continuity over time. We wake up
in the morning, and without having to think
about it, recognize that we are the same
person who fell asleep the night before.
Strawson thinks that this impression of
sameness or continuity is an illusion. What is
Book Reviews
really real, he says, is conception 3 – a subject
of experience that exists only while it experi-
ences. He says this partly on conceptual
grounds – how can there be a ‘subject of expe-
rience’ when there is no experience? – and
partly on methodological grounds: he thinks
that when it comes to metaphysical discus-
sions of selfhood, one has to start phenomeno-
logically, by analysing what is actually given
in experience (pp.44-45). What is given in
experience is episodic moments of experience,
not an experience of continuity. As Strawson
says, the basic form of our experience is “a
gappy series of eruptions of consciousness out
of non-consciousness” (p.73). (He adds,
“although the gaps are not usually
phenomenologically apparent”, which seems
to call into question his phenomenological
premise. This difficulty is resolved by affirm-
ing the need to observe more carefully than
we usually do what actually goes on in our
experience. He recommends the practice of
mindfulness meditation to hone such an abil-
ity (p.70, p.154 fn. 51).)
One might reasonably ask then, where
our sense of personal continuity comes from?
How do we know we are the same person as
we were, not only when we wake up in the
morning, but from moment to moment?
In response, Strawson agrees with the
great American psychologist and philoso-
pher William James (1842-1910), who says
that we each consist of a great many short-
lived selves. Each momentary self appropri-
ates the experience of its predecessor
through the immediately preceding contents
of experience forming part of the context in
which each new moment of experience
arises. This context is both outer and inner;
Books
both objective and subjective. Objectively,
our present situation usually has an expected
continuity with the situation previously
experienced. We most often wake up in a
familiar place and find it no surprise. Subjec-
tively, we find we have familiar bodily sensa-
tions, as well as familiar thoughts, feelings,
moods, and so forth. As Strawson says, we
have a “constant background awareness of
our own mental goings on” (p.47). This
familiarity leads us to think of ourselves as
the same person we were previously. This
sense can change over time, of course. Our
sense of self usually changes unnoticeably in
small increments from moment to moment,
and the difference becomes apparent only
when contrasted to some far earlier time. In
cases of religious or moral conversion, the
change in sense of self may happen rapidly.
But even in that case there is a sense of conti-
nuity: we know that we are the same person
who was thinking differently before.
So are we really only a gappy series of
momentary subjects of experience; or are we
really a continuous being who persists over
time? There is no one correct answer to this
question. The useful answer depends on the
context of inquiry, on what issue we are trying
to clarify. For most practical purposes we can
confidently affirm that a human being is a
persisting psychophysical whole. Certainly, it
would be hard to get around in the social
world without such a belief. But for questions
of fundamental metaphysics, the gappy,
momentary nature of serialized selfhood
seems quite plausible. And if the Buddhists
are to be believed, recognizing this lack of a
permanent self is a step toward liberation
from suffering. Strawson’s contribution is to
clarify, sometimes in painstaking detail, just
what is involved in such considerations.
The Nature of Reality
The idea of the unitive nature of moments of
experience leads Strawson to a view of the
ultimate nature of reality as well. He is a
pluralist, believing that many things exist
(using ‘thing’ in a loose sense). For instance,
“there is a plurality of fundamental physical
entities (leptons and quarks, say, or ‘fields’,
‘loops’, ‘field quanta’…) or as I will say ‘ulti-
mates’.”(p.174). But he is also an attributive
monist, saying that each of these ultimates is
of the same kind; that each is composed of the
same kind of stuff (again, using ‘stuff’ in a
loose sense). Strawson’s model for the ulti-
mate stuff is a moment of experience consist-
ing of a ‘thin’ subject (conception #3) and its
total experiential field. (His argument for this
position can be read in his paper ‘Realistic
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 45
 Books
Monism’, available on Academia.edu.) Each
ultimate, or ‘concretely actualized’ entity, is,
he says, “a concretely existing total experien-
tial field and a concretely existing subject for
whom that field is an experiential field”
(p.185). This is just what process philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) took
to be the nature of what is ultimately real,
which he variously called an actual entity, an
actual occasion, and an occasion of experi-
ence (See Process and Reality, Part 1, Ch. 2, sec.
1, and Adventures of Ideas, p. 221.) So Strawson
gives support for Whitehead’s process
panpsychism, despite his reluctance to put
himself in the same category as Whitehead.
Consciousness of Consciousness
One of Strawson’s many other themes is
worth a mention. He claims that “All
consciousness involves consciousness of that
very consciousness” (p.143). Such involve-
ment is ‘pre-reflective’, ‘immanent’, and
‘non-positional’ (p.155). In other words, this
is not something you deliberately do.
Strawson claims to know the truth of these
assertions from his examination of his own
experience. I don’t find his argument here
(such as it is) persuasive at all. In examining
my own experience, I find numerous instances
of being conscious that involve no trace of
being conscious of being conscious – being
absorbed in an engaging task, for instance, or
in a good book. (I treat this question in detail
at bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1660.) Strawson
can assert that when I am conscious I am always
conscious of being conscious (in addition to
whatever I am focusing on), but he can’t prove
it. And I can’t prove that he’s wrong, either.
The issue is about subjective experience,
which is private, not public, and so not objec-
tively either verifiable or falsifiable. The point
is that the idea is not amenable to objective
verification. The best we can do is to describe
our experience in terms that are as unambigu-
ous as possible, so we can at least understand
what the other is saying.
That itself is a difficult task, and unfortu-
nately, Strawson is here not as careful with
his vocabulary as he could be. It’s difficult
because what we’re trying to talk about is not
public, which means that the words that one
person uses to describe their experience may
not mean the same to someone else. The
difficulty is compounded in English because
we have relevant words that mean roughly the
same thing. The words ‘conscious’ and
‘aware’, for instance, both translate to a single
word in Spanish (consciente) and German
(bewusst), so one might think that the two
English words are synonyms. And so they are;
46 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
but not quite. There is still ample room for
ambiguity. Strawson says for instance, “By
‘awareness’ (the mass term) I'll always mean
‘conscious awareness’.... I’ll also use
‘consciousness’... for what I mean by ‘experi-
ence’ or ‘awareness’.” (p.137) In a footnote,
he further contrasts this use of ‘awareness’ to
one that means, roughly, knowledge. In this
latter sense, one can be said to be aware of a
great many things – the current crisis, for
instance – even when in deep sleep. By
‘conscious awareness’, Strawson does not
mean awareness in the sense of knowledge.
Even so, if ‘awareness’ means ‘conscious
awareness’, and he uses ‘consciousness’ to
mean ‘awareness’, then ‘conscious awareness’
is synonymous with ‘conscious conscious-
ness’, which is redundant.
He also says, “there are contexts in which
it makes sense to speak of unconscious aware-
ness” (p.193, fn. 11). What is this unconscious
awareness? Substituting putative synonyms,
we get ‘unconscious consciousness’, which is
nonsense. Does he mean unconscious knowl-
edge here? If so, he should say so.
Strawson may assume that his meaning is
sufficiently clear in context. The words
‘consciousness’, ‘awareness’, and the like,
are familiar ones. But too often readers think
they know what a word means just because
it is familiar. What they think it means might
not be what the author intended. One would
hope that a philosopher in the analytic tradi-
tion would take extra pains to be more care-
ful about this, especially dealing with
language so fraught with possibilities for
misunderstanding.
That being said, this book is worthwhile.
I have touched on only a few of its topics;
there are a lot more. It’s not an easy book.
Strawson’s work is difficult, but rewarding.
If you want a popular, breezy run-through
of some ideas on selfhood, then you’d best
look elsewhere. But if you enjoy reading a
text slowly and carefully, pausing to reflect
on, understand, and perhaps argue with the
author’s assertions, then The Subject of Expe-
rience should prove quite gratifying.
© DR BILL MEACHAM 2020
Bill Meacham received his PhD from the
University of Texas at Austin, made his living
as a computer programmer, systems analyst and
project manager, and is the author of How To
Be An Excellent Human and How To Exert
Free Will. These and other works can be found
at bmeacham.com.
• The Subject of Experience by Galen Strawson,
Oxford University Press, 2017, $22 pb, 336 pages.
ISBN: 978-0198801580
The Character Gap
by Christian B. Miller
NONE OF US ARE QUITE AS
good as we think. This isn’t
just my pessimistic opinion about the human
race; it’s the result of systematic research on
character in modern psychology.
This gap between opinion and reality is
the focus of Christian Miller’s book The
Character Gap: How Good Are We? Miller is
the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at
Wake Forest University and the Director of
the Character Project, a Templeton-funded
multidisciplinary study of academic
resources, so he is well positioned to write
about character, from both a philosophical
and an empirical perspective.
His book is organized into three parts:
What is character and why is it important?
(Chapters 1 and 2); What does our character
actually look like? (Chapters 3-7); and, What
can we do to improve our characters? (Chap-
ters 8-10). Miller begins by asking us to
consider someone we truly like and respect –
say, a good friend – and then compare her to
someone we truly despise – say, Joseph Stalin.
If we were to explain why we like or dislike
these people, what would we say? We would
describe their character as people. Your
friend will be trustworthy and kind. Stalin, by
contrast, was cruel, heartless, insensitive,
brutal, and ruthless. In other words, we
would describe the difference in terms of
their virtues and vices. Miller then undergoes
a close-up examination of what a virtue is and
how we can tell if a person is virtuous. Take
compassion, for instance. If our friend Beth
performs one compassionate action – say,
making a donation to a charity – that’s not
enough to conclude that she’s a compassion-
ate person. She could have done that one
thing for a number of reasons, besides simply
being compassionate. Moreover, much
hinges on how she performs the action: with
proper humility, or ostentatiously?
However, the book is about empirical
evidence more than hypothetical situations.
The psychological evidence about human
character martialed by Miller is decidedly
mixed – which is his main point. Miller calls
his generic human being Frank. Frank is the
aggregate of all the subjects of the psycho-
logical studies Miller has reviewed. Frank is
one of the 76% of people who voluntarily
help a stranger out of empathy for their
predicament. He is also unwilling to cheat if
he is reminded of his values; and that holds
even when no one’s watching. Then again,
Frank is a victim of the bystander effect: if
Book Reviews

The Bakery Effect by Bofy
PLEASE VISIT WORLDOFBOFY.COM
© BOFY 2020
jixiansheng
someone’s in need of assistance, he won’t
help if he is surrounded by people who are
also not helping. Miller’s main explanation
for the bystander effect is not that Frank has
now suddenly turned into a callous person.
Rather, he is simply unsure of what to do,
and does not want to risk the embarrassment
of standing out, especially if it turns out that
he has misread the situation.
Overall, the studies considered here by
Miller show that Frank’s character – and
hence the character of most of us – is erratic.
Sometimes we behave admirably, at other
times despicably. Moreover, our behavior is
extremely sensitive to our surroundings,
often in ways that we don’t consciously
recognize. It turns out that people are more
likely to help strangers if they’ve just passed
a bakery from which the warm and pleasant
odor of bread is emanating! This particular
Book Reviews
effect is strong: those who had not encoun-
tered fresh bread were helpful only 22%
(males) and 17% (females) of the time, while
bakery-triggered subjects helped 45% and
61% of the time respectively.
Near the end of the book Miller gets to
possibly the most important consideration:
Given these facts about the character gap,
how do we narrow it? He discusses a number
of approaches that don’t seem to work,
including virtue labelling, where we go around
referring to people as honest, conscientious,
and so forth, even when they are not, hoping
that being labelled in a certain way will
prompt them to improve. Nudging, some-
times referred to as ‘libertarian paternalism’
(which sounds rather oxymoronic), also does-
n’t have a lot of empirical evidence in its favor
when it comes to character traits. Yes, having
a fly depicted in the right place in public
Books
urinals really does reduce the amount of,
ahem, spillage, by patrons. But we have no
evidence that nudging works in the long run,
particularly when it comes to moral behavior.
What, then, does help improve our charac-
ters? Miller proposes three strategies:
1) The use of moral role models; the
conscious selecting of situations; and
‘getting the word out’. People have used
moral role models since ancient Greece and
Rome, and it turns out they were right.
Thinking of Socrates, Jesus or your
grandma, for instance, looking over your
shoulders, does improve your behavior.
2) Situation selection is another strategy. If a
flirtatious married colleague invites you to a
secluded dinner, just don’t go. Instead, make
sure you never see her without other people
around, thus diminishing the temptation to
engage in an ethically questionable affair.
3) The third and final strategy that has good
empirical backing is that of getting to know
who we are and what makes us tick. ‘Know
thyself’, as the Oracle at Delphi used to say.
It’s a question of mindfulness, in the sense
of paying attention to what we do and how
we respond to situations, with the goal of
improving our character little by little.
I have some misgivings about the very
last chapter, which is focused on the reli-
gious approach to improving character. Of
course people can and do ask God for help
in moral matters; but Miller does not seem
to take seriously enough the notion that
God’s place in life is also often as simply
moral role model – making the religious
approach a variation of a strategy he’s
already discussed.
That said, The Character Gap presents a
fascinating combined philosophical and
empirical approach that is a must-read for
anyone interested in becoming a better
person. And who isn’t?
© PROF. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2020
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 Philosophy to Live a Modern Life
(Basic Books) and Nonsense on Stilts: How
to Tell Science from Bunk (2nd Ed,
University of Chicago Press). He blogs at
http://massimopigliucci.com.
• The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, by
Christian B. Miller, Oxford University Press, 2017,
296pp, $16.99 hb, ISBN: 9780190264222
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 47

Matt Qvortrup casts Tom Cruise as a Kantian and Jack Nicholson
Film
“
You can’t handle the truth!” Jack
Nicholson’s outburst in one of the final
scenes of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men
(1992) might imply to a philosopher that
this film is about epistemology – how we
understand the world – or about meta-
physics – the nature of reality. But the truth
is very far from it. In fact, this drama about
the extrajudicial killing at the Guantanamo
Bay Naval Base of Willy Santiago, an
underperforming and disobedient soldier of
private rank, is above all about ethics. More
precisely, it’s a showdown between utilitar-
ian (or consequentialist) ethics and its
Kantian (or deontological) counterpart.
Rob Reiner, who had previously directed
the funny but hardly philosophical When
Harry Met Sally (1989), is not a filmmaker
usually associated with metaethics, the
comparison of ethical theories. Nor is
Aaron Sorkin, the scriptwriter, particularly
known for his deep knowledge of the finer
points of moral philosophy (although he did
later go on to write The Social Network, a film
about the legal issues surrounding the
founding of Facebook, for which he won an
Oscar for best adopted screenplay). Yet A
Few Good Men is a filmic exposition of the
deepest ethical questions that have been
posed by philosophers, from Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics around 350 BC to John
Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971; and
though it is never articulated explicitly, the
film is the scene for a showdown between
arch ethicists Immanuel Kant and Jeremy
Bentham. The conflict in this movie is a
battle between utilitarian ethics, which
assumes that the end justifies the means,
and the Kantian belief that we must always
represent the rights of the individuals.
Some Utilitarian Information
A few preliminaries might help. First a
reminder of the fundamental points of util-
itarianism. In its most recognisable form,
utilitarianism can be traced back to the
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832), who is often associated with
the ‘greatest happiness principle’. This is
the idea that the right action in any situation
of moral choice is the one that creates or
enables ‘the greatest happiness of the great-
48 Philosophy Now l June/July 2020
A FEW GOOD MEN
as a utilitarian in this Cold War courtroom ethics epic.
est number of people’. The phrase was not
coined by him, as Bentham was the first to
admit. The father of utilitarianism first read
it in the library in Queen’s College, Oxford,
and the source he gave for it was the chemist-
cum-philosopher and religious dissenter
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804). That
Midlands-based polymath was famed as the
man who invented soda water; but in his day
he was also a political writer of renown.
Priestley used ‘the greatest happiness princi-
ple’ in his Essay on Government of 1768. (This
story is told by Mary Warnock in her Intro-
duction to John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism.)
Bentham was a decent and honourable
chap. He duly acknowledged his indebted-
ness to Priestley. But, in fact, the principle
was older still. Historians of intellectual
thought will rightly point out that the
‘greatest happiness principle’ was first used
by the great German philosopher Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz (1746-1716) in a critical
remark on the relatively unknown legal
reformer and jurist Samuel Cocceji (see for
example, ‘The Greatest Happiness Princi-
ple and Other Early German Anticipations
of Utilitarian Theory’, Joachim Hruschka,
Utilitas, p.166, 1991). But the principle is
now associated with Bentham, above all
because he was a better self-publicist.
It is another curious fact that the phrase
which became a shorthand and an article of
faith for Benthamite utilitarian moral theory
started its life as a footnote in the 1822
edition of Bentham’s Introduction to the Prin-
ciples of Morals and Legislation. Here he wrote
that a theory of ethics and political philoso-
phy should be based upon, “a principle which
lays down, as the only right and justifiable
end of Government, the greatest happiness
of the greatest number” (p.7).
For Bentham, ethics was a practical
discipline, one that should be purged of
theological references and ideas of ‘natural
rights’, the latter Bentham denounced as
‘nonsense on stilts’.
All these ideas can be found in Rob
Reiner’s film.
In Defence of Duty
Santiago’s death takes place within the first
five minutes of the film, and the rest is a
courtroom drama. Without spoilers, it can
safely be said that Jack Nicholson’s charac-
ter throughout the film defends Bentham’s
principle while defending the accused
soldiers. Colonel Jessup has only distain for
those who defend abstract moral principles,
and even the rule of law: what matters is the
end result. This means that on occasion, if
it serves the purpose of protecting ‘the
greatest number’ of people, a ‘code red’ –
military slang for extrajudicial punishment
– is justified. Basically, the end justifies the
means; or as Søren Kierkegaard put it (in a
surprisingly consequentialist remark), there
is a ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’
(Fear and Trembling, 1843). The difference
is only that the Jack Nicholson character
expresses himself in less lofty terms than the
Danish existentialist. When confronted
with ethical criticism, he is forceful: “I don't
give a shit. We're in the business of saving
lives”. Moreover, because of his pragma-
tism, Colonel Jessop has “neither the time
nor the inclination to explain myself to a
“It’s my moral duty
to thump this table
with my fist!”

© COLUMBIA PICTURES 1992
“It’s for the greatest good
of the greatest number
that I shout a lot!”
IMAGES
man who rises and sleeps under the blanket
of the very freedom that I provide and then
questions the manner in which I provide it.”
That man is Tom Cruise.
Colonel Jessop is confronted by Tom
Cruise in the guise of Lt. Daniel Kaffee. A
Harvard graduate and son of a former attor-
ney general, Kaffee is spending a couple of
years as a defence lawyer for the military
before he can begin (so we are led to believe)
a lucrative career as a lawyer. Initially
portrayed as a brat who is more interested in
baseball than jurisprudence, Cruise’s char-
acter, in contrast to Nicholson’s, fundamen-
tally holds to the deontological belief that
there are ethical standards that cannot be
violated. The word ‘deontological’ comes
from the Greek ‘deon’ – that ‘which ought to
be done’, or simply, ‘duty’. Whether the
death of a soldier as a result of a ‘code red’
saves the lives of the many is not the impor-
tant matter to Kaffee, as it is to Jessop. What
matters is that there is right and there is
wrong, and the right is what ought to be
done. Here the motive, not the outcome, is
of paramount moral importance.
In holding this view Lt. Daniel Kaffee is
a Kantian. For Kantians, the consequences
of an action are not unimportant, but for an
action to be good, it has to be consistent
with ‘the good will’, in other words, the
motive behind it has to be good. And
according to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
and other deontological ethicists, to follow
the command of ‘the moral law’ is a categor-
ical imperative – meaning, the moral law
ought to be followed whatever the circum-
stances. But what is this moral law? In his
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
(1785), Kant argued that you should always
“act in such a way that you treat humanity,
in your own person as well as in the person
of any other, always at the same time as an
end, never merely as a means.” What the
soldiers at Guantanamo Bay ought to have
done, then, to act ethically, is to have treated
each other as ‘ends in themselves’, not as
mere means. To order a Code Red was to
make an example of Private Santiego for the
purpose of bolstering military discipline. As
such it was treating him, merely as a means,
not as an end-in-himself.
The Ethics of Power
In the history of political philosophy there
has been no shortage of writers to attack
Kant’s position. Writers of the so-called
‘Realist’ school – who rejected the idealism
espoused by Kant in On the Perpetual Peace
(1795) – argued that the moral idealism
embraced by deontological philosophers
will in the end lead to more hardship. As the
doyen of this school, Hans Morgenthau
(1904-1980) wrote, “While our hand carries
the good intent to what seems to be its
consummation, the fruit of evil grows from
the seed of noble thought” (Scientific Man vs.
Power Politics, p.188, 1946). Perhaps Colonel
Jessop learned about Realism and read
Morgenthau while at West Point. The film
certainly makes it seem that way. The
Colonel’s ideas bear a striking resemblance
to the philosophy of Morgenthau, as well as
to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham.
Upon retorting “You can’t handle the
truth!” to Tom Cruise’s Kantian question-
ing, Nicholson’s character neatly sums up
utilitarian and consequentialist ethics. His
tirade deserves to be quoted verbatim:
“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and
those walls have to be guarded by men with
guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? You,
Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater
responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
You weep for Santiago, and you curse the
Marines. You have that luxury. You have the
luxury of not knowing what I know – that
Film
Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved
lives; and my existence, while grotesque and
incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”
Poor Santiago’s death ‘saved lives’.
There we have it: the greatest happiness for
the greatest number of people.
A Few Concluding Remarks
Of course, A Few Good Men is not just an
exposition of two diametrically opposed
positions in moral philosophy and a prole-
gomenon (preparation) to a discussion of
what good and bad are. It’s a gripping story
of life and death performed by actors at the
height of their powers. There is an exuber-
ant playfulness in the direction (including
the casting of the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin
in a cameo role as a trial lawyer). The film
has a dazzling cast of aspiring actors on the
cusp of superstardom: Demi Moore is
superb in her role as the junior counsel
Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway.
These days, if you’re English, Kevin Bacon
is best known for phone advertisements; but
his performance here as the prosecuting
lawyer is no less than excellent. And what-
ever one thinks of Tom Cruise’s much
publicised religious views, this film should
silence all his critics about his acting. But it
is Jack Nicholson who stands above all.
Those who read Sorkin’s screenplay will
find Colonel Jessup somewhat one-dimen-
sional, and a downright unpleasant Cold
Warrior. In the film, though, Nicholson
speaks with passion and conviction.
Uncomfortable though it is, the viewer may
find it hard to disagree with his consequen-
tialist moral philosophy. To those who live
comfortable lives and who pontificate about
human rights, Colonel Jessup has a simple
response: “You don’t want the truth because
deep down in places you don’t talk about at
parties, you want me on that wall. You need
me on that wall.” And to those who still
dissent, he says, “I suggest you pick up a
weapon and stand a post.” For a Kantian, his
ideas are deeply troubling; but they are hard
to refute.
© DR MATT QVORTRUP 2020
Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science
at Coventry University.
June/July 2020 l Philosophy Now 49
Street Philosopher
Corvid Captured
Seán Moran investigates indoor ornithology.
I
t’s not a typo: I’m talking about the
biological genus Corvid, rather than the
COVID we’ve been enduring. At times
like these, the consolations of philoso-
phy can help to restore our peace of mind.
And the corvids – the crow family – have
some surprising philosophical relevance.
My photograph, taken in Mumbai, shows
a heart-warming daily ritual for feral dogs.
This retired sailor spends most of his small
pension from the Indian Navy feeding
streetwise canines. They gather at the same
spot every day, anticipating his arrival with
chicken and fish scraps for them. But the
pariah dogs (from the Hindi for ‘outcast’) are
not the only beneficiaries of his kindness.
Behind him, a cheeky crow is helping
himself to a free lunch.
The dogs give structure and purpose to
the man’s day, which begins with an early
morning trip to the Mumbai docks for cheap
offcuts; back home for breakfast; then off on
foot to his lunchtime distribution spot. In
return, the dogs receive nourishment. Being
a devout Hindu, he is keen to polish up his
karmic profile in his final years. He hinted
to me at some unspecified naughtiness in his
naval days, and his service to these outcast
canines is an atonement for that. But the bird
is a free rider in the transaction. Brother
crow is just an opportunist.
Corvids are smart creatures. Although
they have nut-sized brains, they seem to be
cleverer than dogs, and second only to
primates. Barbara Clump et al’s research
with crows on the Pacific island of New
Caledonia reports them demonstrating
remarkable levels of intelligent craftsman-
ship (Biology Letters, 2019). And crows can
recognise and remember individual human
beings; so it’s probably no coincidence that
our crafty corvid was ready and waiting on
an Indian street. We humans, on the other
hand, sometimes struggle to tell species of
birds apart, let alone individual birds – which
brings me to a bizarre philosophical paradox.
Raven Mad
Whilst sitting in our homes during the lock-
down, we might have amused ourselves by
producing evidence for the statement ‘All
crows are black’. Unexpectedly, we could do
this without binoculars; without even look-
ing out of the window. How can this be?
50 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
Here’s how: observing a grey pork-pie hat,
white piano keys, and a red tablecloth in my
room provides real evidence that all crows
are black. American philosopher Nelson
Goodman called this strange practice
‘indoor ornithology’, and said that “the
prospect of being able to investigate
ornithological theories without going out in
the rain is so attractive that we know there
must be a catch in it.”
Let’s look at how the bizarre paradox
arises. We can write the proposition ‘All
crows are black’ as ‘If x is a crow, then x is
black’. This becomes an interesting propo-
sition when we apply the rules of logic to it
– in particular, when we translate it into its
logical equivalents.
We can start by simply reversing the
statement to see if that means the same
thing. It doesn’t. The sentence becomes: ‘If
x is black, then x is a crow’. This isn’t right,
since many things are black that are not
crows; not even all black birds are crows.
In fact, this is an example of the well-
established fallacy called ‘affirming the
consequent’. In other words, universal state-
ments such as this don’t work backwards. It
is a logical fallacy to go from ‘All members
of London’s Garrick Club are men’ (true, at
the moment) to ‘All men are members of
London’s Garrick Club’ (definitely false).
However, what about this statement: ‘If x
is not black, x is not a crow’? Is that saying the
same thing as ‘If x is a crow, then x is black’?
It seems to work. It captures the proposi-
tion that ‘No non-black things are crows’,
and it is logically interchangeable with ‘All
crows are black’. This all seems pretty
innocuous – until we start gathering evidence
to support the claim that all crows are black.
We can either check out lots of crows to see
if they really are black; or, in light of the new
formulation, we can investigate a multitude
of non-black things to check that they’re not
crows. The two statements ‘All crows are
black’ and ‘No non-black things are crows’
are logically equivalent, after all. So, as I
mentioned, a white piano key, a grey hat, and
a red tablecloth are all solid evidence that ‘All
crows are black’ (they’re also equally good
evidence that ‘All crows are pink’, but we’ll
let that pass).
Convinced? Me neither. The German-
American philosopher Carl Hempel first iden-
tified this puzzling outcome; hence its name:
‘Hempel’s paradox’. It’s also called ‘the raven
paradox’ or ‘the paradox of confirmation’.
The Eighteenth Century Irish philoso-
pher George Berkeley famously said that
philosophers raise dust then complain that
we cannot see. Hempel’s paradox has
certainly generated a great deal of philo-
sophical dust. All sorts of solutions have been
proposed, including complicated Bayesian
equations that some people find interesting.
But perhaps it merely shows that the method
of confirmation of such statements by obser-
vation is itself flawed. Counting a million
black crows, then observing a white piano
key, a grey hat, and a red tablecloth confirms
that ‘All crows are black’; but it does not prove
it. By contrast, finding a single white crow
disconfirms the hypothesis. What’s more,
there is no paradox of disconfirmation paral-
leling the paradox of confirmation. So we are
on much safer ground when attempting to
refute hypotheses rather than trying to
confirm them. Indeed, the Austrian philoso-
pher Karl Popper strongly advocated falsifi-
ability as a more solid criterion for science
than confirmability.
In their article ‘Black Ravens, White
Shoes and Scientific Evidence’ (University
of Ghent website, 2020), Erik Weber et al
use the concept of falsification to solve
Hempel’s paradox. Here they point out an
asymmetry between confirming and refut-
ing a hypothesis. To refute the statement
about crows, we need only produce one
white crow (and it doesn’t matter how we
located it). But to confirm that ‘All crows are
black’, we’d need to check every crow, or at
least to inspect a properly random large
sample of crows. This second confirmation
approach is just about feasible. It doesn’t
work with the logically equivalent statement
‘No non-black things are crows’, though.
What on earth would we include in a random
sample of non-black things to confirm that
statement plausibly? So white shoes do not
support the proposition ‘All crows are black’,
unless they are part of an (unattainable) suffi-
ciently large properly random sample of
non-black things.
Furthermore, even with careful methods,
including random sampling, we can never be
sure that any universalised piece of empirical
information (a.k.a. a scientific fact) is fully

PHOTO © SEÁN MORAN 2020
confirmed. So, a modest hedging of bets can
be a pleasing quality of scientific statements;
for example, ‘Crows appear to be black, but
more research is needed to rule out the exis-
tence of non-black crows’. This is not like a
politician’s hedging (which they sometimes
do to avoid being tied down), but is rather a
humble acknowledgement that universal
scientific ‘facts’ are provisional and remain
open to future refutation.
Everyday Empirical Errors
We ought to be careful about confirming our
views in everyday life, too. Confirmation is a
flawed strategy, as we have seen; but the all-
too-human phenomenon of ‘confirmation
bias’ makes it worse.
Confirmation bias is the idea that we tend
to pay attention only to evidence that
supports our prejudices. When the proposi-
tions in question are not about crows, hats,
or shoes, but about fellow human beings this
becomes a particular problem. If someone
really believes that ‘All x are y’, where x is an
Street Philosopher
ethnic group, or class, or gender, and y is a
negative attribute, they will probably rela-
tively easily find examples that confirm that
prejudice. (What’s even sadder is that if a
stereotype has been pervasively confirmed in
a culture, the xs themselves might start to
behave in the ways people have come to
expect, further entrenching the pernicious
generalisation.) And if any inconvenient
counterexamples turn up, the prejudiced
person will ignore them. What they should
be doing is looking for evidence that refutes
their preconceptions. But that doesn’t seem
to be human nature. I would say that ‘All
humans suffer from confirmation bias’, were
it not for the inconvenient fact that this too
is a statement of the form ‘All x are y’.
One cure for this tendency is to cultivate
‘sonder’. This new noun expresses the real-
isation that any random person has an inter-
nal life every bit as rich as our own. It is the
converse of solipsism, the idea that one alone
has a mind. Cultivating sonder helps us
attune to the lives of those around us. At first
we hardly notice an elderly
man in a bustling Mumbai
street; but a closer look
reveals that he’s feeding
stray dogs. Over time, we
see that this is a daily event.
Then we talk to him and
hear his story. His evident
individuality dispels any
temptation to make state-
ments such as ‘All Indians
are x’. Sonder and a benign
curiosity has made us disag-
gregate our casual general-
isations about people.
Perhaps this attitude can
be extended to other living
things. I described the crow
in my photograph as
‘cheeky’. Maybe his sister is
more diffident, and he has a
mad uncle who will do
anything to entertain his
nephews. Not all crows are
the same, and I’d like to
know more. While strolling
the streets of an Irish town,
I once tried to engage pass-
ing crows in small-talk,
using an Acme™ crow call.
Some crows became curi-
ous and deviated from their
flight-paths, but none took
up my conversational
gambit. My partner,
however, practised social
distancing – long before it became a thing.
Just around the corner from where I took
this photograph, I saw a rat carrying a coffee
cup, complete with lid. From the foam around
her nose, I would say it was either a latte or a
cappuccino. This behaviour is probably a
quirky trait of that individual rat. Not all rats
are the same. My stories about crafty corvids
and coffee-swilling rats might however attract
accusations of ‘anthropomorphism’ –
wrongly imputing human motivations to
non-human animals. But we share so much
DNA with fellow creatures that some similar-
ities are plausible.
And of course, if anyone brings up
Hempel’s paradox, we can casually point out
that white (albino) crows do exist. And if they
call that a red herring, we can reply that red
herrings were once thought to confirm the
discredited theory that all crows are black.
© DR SEÁN MORAN 2020
Seán Moran teaches postgraduate students in
Ireland, and is professor of philosophy at a
university in the Punjab
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 51
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52 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020


allis
T in
Wonderland
t the time of writing this piece,
A your columnist, along with a fair
slice of the population of the
world, is under house arrest. His
confinement is broken only by the permitted
exercise: a sneaky dawn walk in the valley at
the back of his house. Over seventy, and too
long retired from the clinical front-line to be
of use to Britain’s NHS, he has more time
than hitherto to reflect.
And there is much to reflect on – not just
on the kinds of philosophical questions that
have preoccupied him over the years, but also
on what is going on in a world turned upside-
down. Keeping one’s distance is now pro-
social, while proximity, unless necessary, is
anti-social. It is an act of courtesy explicitly to
cross the road to avoid someone. Careless talk
costs lives, as pleasantries may be mixed with
the ultimate unpleasantry of the invisible
enemy, and sentences could be death
sentences. There is a strange convergence
between altruism and self-interest here:
protecting ourselves from infection means
protecting others, and the health services and
those who work therein. Avoiding going to
work is mandatory if your work is not key.
You play your part by simply staying at home.
Coronavirus has brought with it many
grave problems and unanswered questions.
That will be for the next column. For the
present, I want to focus on something that has
become central to our survival: handwashing.
A Handy Guide to Hands
Hands have featured in this column in
happier times, for instance when, in ‘George
Moore’s Hands: Scepticism About Philoso-
phy’ (Issue 69, back in 2008), I examined a
famous (or infamous) refutation of solip-
sism, the idea that there is no world external
to our own consciousness. Moore’s refuta-
tion was performative: he raised his two
hands in turn and asserted “Here is one
hand… and here is another.” If you can’t
deny the existence of these two hands, he
argued, then there is, after all, an external
world populated by objects that are indepen-
dent of human consciousness. As a willful
54 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
Philosophy in the
Time of Plague, Pt. 1
Raymond Tallis has thoughts whilst handwashing.
For Max, who is just discovering his hands.
exercise in point-missing, it would be hard
to beat. Besides, there are more interesting
things to say about the items in question
than that they exist.
I have long maintained that we take our
hands too much for granted. In my book The
Hand. A Philosophical Inquiry into Human
Being (2003), I argued that the human carpus,
equipped with a fully opposable thumb and
liberated from being a locomotor prop by
our bipedal gait, has been the key biological
lever by which we humans have become
distanced from biology.
This view had its predecessors. The pre-
Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras also
connected our unique intelligence with our
having hands. For Aristotle, the hand was ‘the
tool of tools’. And in What Is Called Thinking?
(1954), Martin Heidegger emphasized the
‘infinite’ difference between hands “and all
grasping organs such as paws, claws, or fangs”.
What is beyond dispute is that the hands
are the primary agents of our agency. Discov-
ering our own hands and acquiring dexterity
is even more fundamental to development
than the acquisition of speech. Nothing could
be more poignant than seeing a newborn child
whose hands have not yet found each other.
Homo faber (‘man the maker’) started out
as handyman. The uniquely human full
opposition between thumb and index finger
and an ability to mobilize individual digits or
combinations of them, make possible a limit-
less variety of power and precision grips and
modes of direct and indirect manipulation.
Beyond this, the handiness of our hands has
inspired a million modes of mediated action
and the extraordinary array of artefacts –
from hammers to cars to power stations –
that support, empower, protect, and some-
times threaten us.
Counting grew out of our relationship
with our fingers. Our digits and their frac-
tionated movements provided the root intu-
ition for our digitization of the world –
enumeration, counting, the very idea of units,
measurement, and science. The index finger
is the primordial pointer that assists sharing
of experiences, and, in its role in supporting
the ostensive definition of words (pointing
out things whilst naming them), helps a devel-
oping child to connect sculptured air with
things. And the repertoire of manual gestures
is almost as rich as that of the tongue. Little
wonder that ‘grasping’ is a metaphor for
understanding, and ‘prehension’ is the root
behind ‘comprehension’. Truly did the
anatomist F. Wood Jones proclaim in Arbo-
real Man (1916) that “Man’s place in nature is
largely writ upon the hand” (though I would
qualify, man’s place not quite in nature).
Let’s Put Our Hands Together
And so to handwashing. Our infinitely versa-
tile hands, on duty all our waking hours, get
everywhere. As the pathway carrying the
heaviest traffic between our bodies and the
material world, they are potential super
spreaders, incessantly touching surfaces
touched by a hidden multitude of other
hands. With these same hands we contact our
own bodies and the food we prepare and the
equipment that assists us to cook and eat. So
there is much to think about as we wash our
hands, and if we adhere to the prescribed
duration and frequency of lavage, much time
to do the thinking. The injunction to use two
rounds of ‘Happy Birthday’ as a timer to
ensure that handwashing has been adequate,
is also a startling reminder of the ingenuity of
a species capable of re-purposing activities in
such cunning ways.
Handwashing is also a reminder of the
vast distance between ourselves and beasts
in other ways. Many animals groom them-
selves, but no others utilise products manu-
factured according to a certain specification,
bottled in baffling dispensers that broadcast
the ingredients of their contents and boast
of their antibacterial efficacy, and are trans-
ported great distances to distribution
centres, where they may be purchased in
exchange for money. It is salutary to remind
ourselves that, while all animals defaecate,
only humans fight in supermarkets over
toilet rolls. To watch a cat licking its own
rear end may prompt us to reflect on the
mystery of the many intermediaries caught
 up in our relationship to our own bodies.
The riddle of the sphincter, perhaps.
Handwashing is a perfect model of cooper-
ation too. Commitment to the teamwork
involved temporarily suspends the hierarchy
according to which one hand (usually the
right) is dominant. Both hands act and are
acted upon: in each washing the other, they are
washing themselves, or allowing themselves to
washed. Alas, for those who, like your colum-
nist, are of an obsessive disposition, there is no
closure to handwashing, because our hands
have to leave their charmed circle of mutual
cleansing and dry themselves on what may be
contaminated towels. But it is good for as long
as it lasts. And if ‘Happy Birthday’ is not long
enough, there’s always The Ring Cycle.
Awash with Ideas
While it is important for reasons of hygiene
that those of us who have beards refrain from
stroking them, we may be sorely tempted to
do so because we are in the vicinity of some of
the most profound thoughts in the traditions
of both Analytic and Continental philosophy.
We are, for example, next door to
Russell’s Paradox. For this, consider the
village barber who says he will shave all and
only those men of the village who do not
shave themselves. Does he shave himself? If
he shaves himself, he breaks the rule; and if
he does not shave himself, he also breaks the
rule. The same would apply if the Chief
Medical Officer committed to washing the
hands of all and only those who do not wash
their own hands. He himself is both forbid-
den and obliged to launder his own mitts. It
is generally acknowledged that at the begin-
© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2020. TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM
“No, I’m not a guru. I just came up here to escape the pandemic.”
ning of the twentieth century, Russell’s Para-
dox, a snake in the paradise of Set Theory,
changed the whole direction of mathematics.
Handwashing also brings us into contact
with some of the most profound observations
of the father of Continental philosophy,
phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859-
1938). His concern was with ‘the lived body’
and how it revealed itself to the thinking
subject. The most direct intimation of this is
when our own hands comes in contact with
our body. There is a special revelatory power
in one hand contacting another. In this the
touched and the toucher – or the sensation of
touching and that of being touched – belong
to the same subject. And this awareness of a
double sensation is heightened and sustained
when the hands are rubbed together, as in
handwashing. The democracy of the team-
work just noted further underlines this merg-
ing of subject and object, reflected in the
double roles of patient and agent, as the
washed hands are washing hands. The touch-
ing and the touched are, and are not, one and
the same.
Of course, there are many other sources of
the sense that this body is mine, or, more inti-
mately, that I am this body, being connected
with it by something closer than any possible
embrace. Vision locates my body in the centre
of my visual field, and allows the experience of
bodily movements to be connected with the
inner, proprioceptive experiences – our sense
of the positions of the parts of our bodies –
adding to my sense of identity with, or of
living, this body – ‘ambodiment’. But the
hand adds something special. This may be
because the hand has a key role not only in our
E 2 3 G 6 7 1
T allis
in
Wonderland
agency but in our sense that we are agents. It
is the first tool. It is, as Aristotle said, ‘the
instrument that represents many instruments’
(De Partibus Animalium or On the Parts of
Animals, c.350 BC). Our vast repertoire of
grips makes the deployment of any particular
grip an explicit choice. In most grips, there is
contact between parts of one or both hands.
This ‘meta-touching’, especially between
finger-tips – a source of heightened manual
self-consciousness – further enhances the
sense of manual agency, our awareness of the
miracle by which we use a part of our body to
bring about changes in the world around us.
Handwashing evidently presents us with a
limitless supply of things to think about.
Rubbing the backs of our hands, we may
wonder whether we are sufficiently familiar
with them to pick them out of an identity
parade: knowing something ‘like the back of
one’s hand’ may not amount to very much
after all – a chastening reminder of how close
to home our ignorance begins. Paying partic-
ular attention to our thumbs, we may pause
to give them a thumbs up for the part they
have played in taking us out of the state of
nature. Each of our fingers has a story to tell,
not only collectively in the brute force of
heavy labour, or the exquisite achievements
of dexterity, but acting separately to
command the attention of others – for exam-
ple uniting to deliver a V sign, of variable
significance. My remarks offer only glimpses
of the boundless terrain opened up when we
start to think about the part our hands play
in our lives and their role in creating the ever-
widening gaps between ourselves and the
natural world, showing us that we are not just
especially smart chimps. So let’s hear it for
our hands and give them a clap; or, more
precisely, let them give themselves a clap.
Meanwhile, keep washing those hands.
As my friend Mike Freeman said in an email,
“Gather ye soapsuds while ye may.” And
‘soap’ rhymes with ‘hope’.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2020
Raymond Tallis’s new book, Seeing
Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from
God & Science is out now.
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 55
 The Power of Argument
Meriel Patrick conducts an infinitely long train of thought.
he railway is the first thing you notice when you arrive.
T It trundles on incessantly, weaving its way around the
island, never stopping, day or night. We stand watch-
ing it for a few minutes. There’s something hypnotic
about the endless line of carriages slowly rumbling past. “Come
on,” says my guide at last. “There’s a lot to see!”
Her name is Davina, but she tells me to call her Vee. “There
were five Davinas in my class at school,” she explains. “So we
also had a Dee, and a Davie, and a Vina. It was even worse for
the boys – eight Davids. They mostly went by middle names.”
We climb the stairs of the nearest footbridge. These are posi-
tioned every few hundred metres along the track.
“Where’s the station?” I ask.
“Station?” Vee sounds surprised. “Why would we need sta-
tions? Stations are for trains that stop.”
From the top of the footbridge, I can see that there are actu-
ally two trains, running side by side – an outer one going clock-
wise, and an inner anti-clockwise. It makes me feel slightly dizzy.
We walk down the steps on the other side. Vee suggests we
take the anti-clockwise train into Humburgh. I’ve only ever
seen the name written down before, so I’m glad to hear her pro-
nunciation (Hyoom-borough) before I embarrass myself by get-
ting it wrong.
Beside the track, the ground is paved with the sort of rub-
berized tiles you find in children’s playgrounds and outside
pubs. I eye them warily. “Are there many accidents?” I ask.
Vee shrugs. “Hardly any. The odd scuffed knee or twisted
ankle. Mostly visitors or kids. The rest of us are used to it.”
She talks me through getting onto the train: “It easiest if you
walk alongside for a little while – match the pace of the train as
closely as you can” – this seems doable: it doesn’t travel at more
than a brisk walking pace – “then just step on diagonally. It’s hon-
estly no harder than getting on an escalator, or a paternoster lift.”
“I imagine you’ve got plenty of those,” I say.
“Of course,” Vee says, with a smile. “Now, I’ll go first so
you can see how it’s done. You follow when you’re ready.”
She moves to the track-side, takes half a dozen swift steps
parallel to the train, then in one fluid movement disappears
through one of the doorways. I notice that a step juts out a few
inches from each door, and that there’s a comfortingly solid-
looking handle to grab onto.
I wait for another door to reach me, and attempt to replicate
Vee’s movements. At the last moment I lose my nerve, and
instead of stepping onto the train, I land slightly awkwardly
back on the rubberized paving. I’m not really hurt, but I begin
to understand why twisted ankles are a risk.
Soon I try again. This time I walk a little faster, grasp the
handle by the next door that comes along, and hoist myself
aboard. I’ve done it!
I can see Vee waiting for me in the carriage ahead, so I go
through the door and join her.
“There,” she says, “that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
56 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
Apart from the two of us, the carriage is empty. This is one
of the many advantages of a train which is almost fifteen miles
long: no overcrowding.
In case we should be in danger of forgetting any of the other
advantages, the walls are adorned with posters. At the end of the
carriage is an engraving of the great man himself – the one with-
out whom none of this would have been possible. Extracts from
his work are written in gold calligraphy above the windows.
“I’m still not sure I quite understand all this,” I say.
Vee looks pleased – I have a feeling she enjoys explaining
things. “I’m sure you know that it all started with David Hume,”
she says, with a nod towards the engraving. “His Dialogues Con-
cerning Natural Religion have always been important for the phi-
losophy of religion. But it was only a few decades ago that a
research fellow at the university here realized that Hume’s ideas
might have a more practical application.”
“It’s all to do with infinite sequences of events, isn’t it?” I say.
I don’t want her to think I haven’t done my homework.
She nods, and gestures towards the gold lettering. “The key
passage is right there.”
I read the quote aloud: “In tracing an eternal succession of
objects, it seems absurd to enquire for a general cause or first
author... each part is caused by that which preceded it, and causes
that which succeeds it. Where then is the difficulty? But the
Whole, you say, wants a cause. I answer, that the uniting of these
parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties
into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body,
is performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind, and has no
influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particu-
lar causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles
of matter, I should think it very unreasonable, should you after-
wards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. That is
sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.”
“So, basically,” Vee explains, “Hume is saying that it doesn’t
make sense to ask for an overall cause of an infinite sequence.
As long as each item in the sequence is explained by the one that
goes before it, that’s all you need.”
“Right...” I say, not totally convinced. “But wasn’t he talking
about explaining the existence of the universe? What’s that got
to do with trains?”
Vee grins. “That’s the clever part. The research fellow I men-
tioned – Brown was his name – realized that you could apply
the same logic to motion, and that by doing so you could have
an infinitely long chain of carriages each of which was pulled by
the one in front!”
“But what keeps the whole train moving?”
Vee’s grin vanishes. “Weren’t you listening?” she says, a trifle
tetchily. “Hume showed us that you don’t need a cause for the
movement of the whole thing, as long as you’ve explained what
keeps each carriage moving. And we’ve done that: each carriage
is pulled by the one in front. And since it’s an infinite sequence,
there’s no first carriage to worry about.”

“But you can’t build an infinitely long train!” I reason.
“Of course not. So for twenty years or so, the idea remained
just a thought experiment – a footnote in an article in a philos-
ophy journal.”
“What happened then?”
“Just before he retired, Brown had a brainwave. You can’t
build an infinitely long train, he reasoned; but you can build one
with no first carriage – simply by looping the train round and
joining it in a circle! He found an engineer who was willing to
work with him, then some investors, and – well, the rest is his-
tory. Even if they don’t fully understand the theory behind it,
there can’t be many people on Earth who don’t know about the
railway – or about how prosperous the island has become as a
result. The railway was only the start, of course: the engineers
soon realized that the same principle could provide a source of
free, clean power for factories, and it wasn’t long before we
became the manufacturing centre of the region.. We even have
some philosophers trying to apply Hume’s ideas to farming,”
Vee tells me. “An infinite sequence of events that somehow gen-
© CECILIA MOU 2020.
SEE MORE OF HER ART ON INSTAGRAM: @MOUCECILIAART
erated food could solve world hunger at a stroke. They haven’t
quite managed that one yet, though.”
We’re now approaching Humburgh. It’s in fact a smallish
town, but the skyline is truly impressive – it has skyscrapers that
wouldn’t look out of place in a major metropolis. “Very low
building costs,” Vee explains, nodding towards them. “All the
cranes are powered by the infinite loop principle.”
Once we reach the town centre, Vee steps onto the rubber-
ized platform without a second thought. It takes me a few
moments to pluck up the courage, but I manage it eventually.
“You’ll be hopping on and off like a local by the end of the day,”
Vee assures me.
She wants to show me the old town, so we walk in that direc-
tion. As we do, a thought that has been niggling at the back of
my mind since the train journey starts to coalesce. “I just don’t
see that it makes sense,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
Vee looks uneasy. I continue: “I mean all this business about
not needing a cause for the movement of the whole as long as
June/July 2020 ● Philosophy Now 57
you’ve got a cause for the movement of each part. I mean, imag-
ine if you had a book – a volume of philosophy, say – where the
content had been copied from an earlier edition. If someone tried
to tell you that the earlier edition had been copied from a still ear-
lier one, and so on and so on forever, that wouldn’t mean there
was no need for someone to have actually written the text –”
Vee grabs me by the elbow and yanks me down a side street.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!” she hisses.
“Look, all I’m saying is that –”
“Well, you can’t say things like that here!” She seems frantic.
“Didn’t you see who was behind us?”
I shake my head, and rub my arm. After a few moments, a
scholarly-looking couple in academic gowns strolls past the end
of the alleyway. The woman’s voice floats towards us: “But you
have to take into account what Plato said in the Republic...”
Once they’ve gone, Vee lets out a deep sigh of relief.
“Who were they?” I ask.
“The thought police,” says Vee. “You don’t know how close
you came to getting taken in for questioning. Oh, it might all
have been tea and scones and even a glass of sherry at first, but
if you hadn’t been extremely careful you might easily have ended
up being viva-ed.” She shudders.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I would have thought somewhere
like Humburgh would have been all in favour of free speech.”
“It depends what you mean by free speech,” Vee says. “Poli-
tics, religion, morality, the best way to educate children – you
can say whatever you like about that sort of thing. But can you
imagine what would happen to the island if anyone ever proved
Hume wrong about infinite sequences?”
I think about that for a moment.
Vee continues, “There was enough trouble a few years back
when someone proved that centrifugal force didn’t really exist,
and all the salad spinners stopped working... And the honey
industry is still recovering from that business about whether or
not bees should be able to fly. You just can’t take chances with
this sort of thing. It’s practically terrorism. Or take Hume’s writ-
ings about the nature of causation, for example – imagine if
someone followed up on those and proved conclusively that
there’s no relation between cause and effect.”
It’s not a pleasant prospect.
Vee takes a few deep breaths, obviously making a conscious
effort to calm herself down. “You seem to have got away with it
this time. The thought police didn’t hear you, and everything’s
still working.” I can hear the distant rattle of the railway, and
the hum of the machinery in a nearby factory.
Vee pats the wall of the building next to us. “The stone prob-
ably helped.”
“The stone?”
“Yes. No one’s really sure why, but for some reason being
surrounded by stone seems to damp down the effect of contro-
versial ideas. Think about it… People say all sorts of things in
parliament, or in churches, or in universities, and it never seems
to have quite the effect one might expect.”
I nod. “I’ve never thought of it before, but it makes sense,” I
say.
“Hmmm… I think perhaps we should get you underground
for a bit. No sense taking unnecessary risks.” She takes my arm
again – a little more gently this time – and walks us briskly
58 Philosophy Now ● June/July 2020
through the streets. We come to an imposing square sur-
rounded by attractive grey stone buildings. I recognize the
largest of them as Humburgh’s university.
There are a lot of people in the square – a bigger crowd than
I’ve previously seen anywhere on the island. A gaggle of skinny
bottle-blonde girls teeter past us on impossibly high heels.
Three of them are having an energetic discussion about the
relative merits of magenta and fuchsia nail polish, while another
is saying loudly into her phone, “And I was, like, totally, but she
was like, no way!” They’re not quite what I expected in the cit-
izens of a place like Humburgh. I say as much to Vee.
“They’re buffers,” she says. “I expect there’s just been a shift
change.”
I think we’re going to the university; but at the last minute
Vee steers me off to the left and through a heavy oaken door.
I can see that the walls of the building we’ve just entered are
at least a foot thick.
We cross a hallway, and go down a flight of stairs at the far
end, into a large chamber furnished like a sort of common room
– chairs and sofas grouped around coffee tables, a television
warbling away to itself in a corner, and a bar serving drinks and
snacks. As we move through the room, we pass more girls
dressed up like the ones we met in the square; several teenagers
who are glued to repetitive games on their phones; and a group
of blokes discussing conspiracy theories.
“Here we go,” says Vee, taking a free seat and gesturing me
towards another. “You can say whatever you like in here.”
I look around in bewilderment. “Is this some kind of secret
den for free thinkers?” The company doesn’t seem particularly
promising from that perspective.
Vee snorts with laughter. “Not quite,” she says. “It’s a damp-
ing zone – a government run facility. Anyone who finds them-
selves bothered by dangerous ideas can come here. An hour or
two with this lot is usually enough to jam anyone’s ability to think
about anything much; and there’s more than enough background
silliness here to drown out any rogue thoughts that do escape.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m surprised it’s so near the university. I
wouldn’t have thought the dons would be very impressed by
that sort of thing.” I nod in the direction of two young men
who are deriving enormous amusement from their ability to
make rude noises.
“The university couldn’t function without it,” Vee tells me.
“They can’t do their job without the risk of dangerous ideas
arising, so it’s essential that there’s somewhere like this where
students, and dons, can come when they need to.”
“But couldn’t you just defuse anything dangerous with a
thought experiment?” I ask.
Vee looks puzzled. “How do you mean?”
“Well, if someone comes up with something really out-
landish, then you just tell them a story about what the world
might be like if they were right. And when they see how absurd
that is, they’ll realize that there must be a problem with their
argument.”
Vee ponders this for a few moments.
“Nah,” she says. “It’d never work.”
© DR MERIEL PATRICK 2020
Meriel Patrick is Lecturer in Theology and Philosophy for SCIO, a
visiting student programme at the University of Oxford.
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