Issue 27 - No.1/2020

New Philosopher

For curious people

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Online At Newphilosopher.com
newphilosopher.com is an online portal for exploring philosophical ideas on ways to live a more fulfilling life. Read the articles, join in discussions, watch free online documentaries, and plan your trip to the next festival near you. “We have a wi
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Contributors
Maggie Jackson is an award-winning social critic and author. Her articles have appeared in publications worldwide,including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Business Week. Jackson won the Media Awa
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Motherhood
It was the Great Depression, and photographer Dorothea Lange was working with a US agency, taking shots of rural families in poverty. “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet,” she said. 32-year-old Florence Owen
New Philosopher2 min readWorld
Respecting Your Parents
The five centuries of Chinese history leading up to 221 BCE are divided into the ‘Spring and Autumn’ period and the ‘Warring States’ period. They are also known as the era of the ‘Hundred Schools’, a time of remarkable philosophical creativity and en
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The Family Who Eats Together…
What’s the price of a family meal? For many families in the world’s wealthiest countries, the answer seems to be, ‘too much’. In the US, which is often a trendsetter in such things, the majority of families report eating a single meal together fewer
New Philosopher1 min read
Free-market Families
In laissez-faire economics, the individual is the basic unit in society, not the family. It’s the individual who goes forth into the world to ‘maximise their utility’: buying or doing things according to their pay packet, or funds set aside. As such,
New Philosopher2 min readGender Studies
Domestic Violence In The USA
Prior to the mid-1800s, most legal systems implicitly accepted wife beating as a valid exercise of a husband’s authority over his wife. In 1920, wife beating was made illegal in the United States. Today, between 960,000 and 3,000,000 incidents of dom
New Philosopher5 min readPsychology
My One And Only
I never intended to have just one child. But when my daughter came along, we haphazardly adjusted to being a three and the newly-formed family felt so right that we couldn’t see our way to disrupting it by adding a fourth to our number. Three had a m
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Family
Guila M. Dotti Sani and Judith Treas found that modern mothers from 11 wealthy, western countries spent close to an hour more taking care of their kids in 2012 than mothers did in 1965. Fathers now spend around 40 minutes more time per day with their
New Philosopher6 min read
Grandstander In The Family
When Italian handbag and luggage maker Guccio Gucci retired, handing over to his sons a fortune and the reins of the flourishing business he had created over his lifetime, he didn’t intend to set in motion a chain of events that would see one son sen
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Next Of Kin
In the four centuries since William Shakespeare shuffled off his mortal coil (to use one of his own phrases), no part of his literary remains have been left un-ransacked. Even something as dry as the bard’s last will and testament has worried generat
New Philosopher11 min read
Lost Family Portraits
In your series of portraits of Syrian families in a refugee camp in Lebanon, there is an empty space left for family members who had died or were displaced due to the war. What drew you to this area, and what were you aiming to achieve with these por
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Fathers Of Philosophy
There are few things more disruptive to a family than surprises about a child’s paternity. Interestingly, three of the biggest names in continental philosophy – Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida – have found themselves at the centre of such a crisis. Eac
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Keeping It In The Family
It was the year 1015 and Theophylactus, a noble from the powerful Tusculum family of Rome, found himself in a fix. He had successfully seen off his last rival and ascended to the most powerful seat in the known world to become pontifex maximus. But t
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Family Feuds
A survey of 3,000 families by family database Uinvue revealed that Mum, Dad, and the kids have at least three disagreements a day, each lasting up to five minutes. That totals a staggering 1,095 arguments over the course of one year, lasting for 91.2
New Philosopher5 min readRobotics
Living With Robots
A decade ago, I held hands with a robot. Developed at MIT Media Lab as a prototype domestic servant, Domo was legless and fused to a table but could speak, track faces, and gently grasp objects such as cups and plates. On the day that I visited the L
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Distant Relations
A few years ago, when I was living in Hanoi, I made the short but bumpy trip to visit my que hon – the ancestral village on my father’s side – which turned out to be a little hamlet of concrete houses in the middle of swampy rice paddies. Local villa
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Ethical Children
Why do some parents stop living together and go and live with someone else? Lots of parents have a romantic relationship before they become parents (romantic love is the kind of love we’re talking about when we say people ‘fall in love’). Then, when
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Ethical Dilemma
A teacher once presented me with a dilemma: “You are the passenger in a car that at times goes over the speed limit, although the driver is mostly within the limit, is focused, and abides by all other road rules. A pedestrian steps out onto the road
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Part Of A Family
The story of Theseus’s ship was first set down two thousand years ago by the Greek historian Plutarch, and is a thought experiment drawing on western philosophy’s earliest concerns. Plutarch invites his reader to imagine that a ship once sailed by th
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A Family Secret
When someone dies, their secrets can become mysteries. Without the key of memory – even an unreliable and distorting memory – some doors will never be opened, and no one will know for sure what lies behind them. There is a secret in my family like th
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Family
“A father would do well, as his son grows up, and is capable of it, to talk familiarly with him; nay, ask his advice, and consult with him about those things wherein he has any knowledge or understanding. By this, the father will gain two things, bot
New Philosopher7 min read
Family Affairs
If the family in its best forms is, as it is often said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and a d
New Philosopher6 min readMedical
Death Oh, Oh Ever Teach Me…
Death is always a family affair. When you have one family, or two. But then who defines ‘the’ family? Is it the deceased’s ‘first family,’ the first wife, the first children, or is it the new life partner who typically is much younger and who almost
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Our Library
Grandstanders often talk as if their views are utterly obvious. Anyone competent at making moral judgements would surely come to the same conclusions. This sort of talk can be used to signal that one’s moral sensibilities are more finely tuned than t
New Philosopher2 min readPsychology
Around The Web
Mary Claire King, as much as any individual scholar, has changed how we think about what it means to be human. She did so using genetics as a lens through which to see what was otherwise invisible. It was King who first identified a key gene in breas
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Children Make Us Gods
Men write books because they can’t have babies, speculated the 25-year-old Rosario Castellanos in her philosophy master’s thesis from the Universidad Nacionál Autónoma de México. Mexican cultural production in 1950 was almost strictly the domain of m
New Philosopher11 min readRelationships
Rights And Responsibilities
Joseph Millum is an ethicist at The Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in the US. Millum received his undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University and his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. His current resea
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What’s On
Launched in 2017, this monthly philosophy discussion series is held each month in various locations in Hobart’s CBD. The format is participatory rather than dictatorial and a topic is chosen ahead of time to allow attendees to prepare. Previous speak
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The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing)
Once, when Zhong Ni was unoccupied, and his disciple Zeng was sitting by in attendance on him, the Master said, “The ancient kings had a perfect virtue and all-embracing rule of conduct, through which they were in accord with all under heaven. By the
New Philosopher6 min read
An Accidental Witness
There are only two of us left now. Only one of the two saw and heard what death dealt out to our parents and brothers. It makes a difference if you observe death at work, often slowly, not dramatically, as might be the case in a battle or when some p

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