Issue 31 - February/April 2021

New Philosopher

For curious people

New Philosopher1 min read
Space
Humans, curious creatures that we are, can’t help but explore. After millennia of mapping and crossing and occupying Earth, last century we turned our attention to space. The final frontier. For many, there was hope that we might find another habitab
New Philosopher1 min read
New Philosopher
Zan Boag Antonia Case Carlos Egan, Aida Novoa Genís Carreras Nigel Warburton Nayef Al-Rodhan, Marina Benjamin, Oliver Burkeman, Antonia Case, Tom Chatfield, André Dao, Tim Dean, Gerry Gilmore, Günther Hasinger, DBC Pierre, Patrick Stokes, Nigel Warbu
New Philosopher1 min read
Online At
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. Moral theory m
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New Philosopher Writers’ Award
Entries are open for the New Philosopher Writers’ Award. Enter now to win $1,000 and have your work featured in the magazine. Open to NP subscribers, award XXXI entries close 10 June 2021 Up to 1,500 words of fiction or non-fiction, based around t
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Subscribe Now
To receive your copy of the beautifully-designed, perfect-bound, 132-page print version delivered directly to your door, subscribe now at: www.newphilosopher.com/subscribe ■
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Contributors
DBC Pierre won the Booker Prize for his debut novel Vernon God Little, which was also awarded the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 – the first time the two awards had been granted to the same book. Pierre is also the author of Ludmilla’s Broken En
New Philosopher1 min read
Look At The Dot
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how
New Philosopher2 min read
Ad Astra
Homo sapiens have always been on the move. About 80,000 years ago, it was the great migration out of what is today called Africa. From there, Homo sapiens colonised the world, extinguishing rivals like the Neanderthals and Homo erectus along the way.
New Philosopher2 min read
Space Invaders
On 24 June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine crescent-shaped objects flying near Mount Rainier in Washington State. He described the objects as moving like a saucer being skipped across water – and thus the Flying Saucer was born. Seventy years on,
New Philosopher2 min read
Culture Jamming
James Joyce’s magnum opus, Ulysses, is known for pioneering the stream of consciousness method of narration, in which the flow of a character’s thoughts unfurl on the page. In one of the many innovations that shocked more traditional sensibilities, t
New Philosopher3 min read
It’s A Conspiracy!
On 24 June 1947, a US pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation, in what was the first reported UFO sighting. He described the objects as flying in a saucer-like fashion, leading to newspaper accounts of “flying sauc
New Philosopher6 min read
Settling Space
In Jo Lennan’s short story Day Zero, journalist Sebastian lives up among the stars in a frontier community in space. It’s a whole new world. And yet Sebastian faces the same worries he would at home: a receding hairline; issues with his stoic but dis
New Philosopher1 min read
Space
There is a black hole four million times the size of the Sun at the centre of the Milky Way. It is estimated that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth. 199,212 kg of artificial objects are on the Moon, from the Luna 2 (in
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The Death of Hypatia
Author/illustrator: Corey Mohler, Existential Comics. For more comics visit existentialcomics.com ■
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No Such Place As Cyberspace
The year is 1996 or so. You sit down at your desk and turn on your unwieldy desktop computer. After the machine has finally started up, you click on an icon and you wait for the noises. Strange, comical, mechanical noises: digits dialling, then hissi
New Philosopher6 min read
Too Much Space
At the end of October 1957, Dr Vladimir Yazdovsky took home a three-year-old mongrel stray to play with his children. She was a placid mixed breed who had been found on the streets of Moscow, and Yazdovsky had been tasked with preparing her for speci
New Philosopher1 min read
Movement
The stars are in constant motion. To the human eye this movement – known as proper motion – is imperceptible, but ESA’s star-mapping satellite Gaia is measuring it with more and more precision. The trails on the image above show how 40,000 stars, all
New Philosopher4 min read
The Vastness Of Outer Space
When it comes to measuring the vastness of outer space, you need to talk about time in order to talk about distance. Watching the night sky with my children, I tell them that the starlight now reaching our eyes is ancient. Some of it originated when
New Philosopher4 min read
The Sensation Of Space
When we think of space, we usually think of something extending to infinity. Space is where the planets and stars are. Space is the final frontier. We stare into space, scarcely able to take in its magnitude. It seems to go on forever – even though t
New Philosopher2 min read
Thoughts On... Space
“TWO THINGS ARE INFINITE, AS FAR AS WE KNOW – THE UNIVERSE AND HUMAN STUPIDITY.” — Frederick S. Perls (attributing it to Einstein) “As a solitary planetary system we may be inconspicuous, but so is the individual human. He does not thereby lose his
New Philosopher10 min read
Living In Space
Zan Boag: As we gaze up into the night sky and look into this vastness, this darkness, we see sparkles of light from another place. When we think of everything that exists, all of space, it is very difficult for us to fathom. What is space? Is it lim
New Philosopher5 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
The Unbearable Flatness Of Virtual Being
In the blue light emanating from the screen that holds my teenager captive of an evening, his face is illuminated in a painterly manner. Light and shadow play over his impassive features in a dramatic chiaroscuro, worthy of Caravaggio. Lit up like th
New Philosopher1 min read
Space Speɪs
1. Continuous area or expanse which is free, available, or unoccupied; 2. A blank between printed, typed, or written words, characters, numbers, etc.; 3. [Music] Each of the four gaps between the five lines of a stave; 4. The dimensions of heig
New Philosopher5 min read
Usurpers Of The World
What is the root of all evil? The Apostle Paul, in one of his letters to Timothy, famously nominated money. Two millennia later, Richard Dawkins said that it was religion itself. Thomas Hobbes went further still: it was not the introduction of money
New Philosopher3 min read
Space
“I insisted on working on problems outside the mainstream of astronomy so that I could work at my own pace and not be pressured by bandwagons. I do not offer this as an example for you, but only to show that there can be diverse approaches to science
New Philosopher20 min read
Where Did We Come From?
Zan Boag: As a space scientist, you’ve been gazing deeply into space. You’ve been living and breathing the idea of ‘space’. The universe has been your playground. What is space? How far does it extend? Is it limitless? Günther Hasinger: It is a li
New Philosopher5 min read
Spaced Out
There’s nothing more intuitive, more obvious, more self-evident than the fact that we exist in three-dimensional space. We’re born into it. We move around in it. No one has to teach us how to see it. Look and it’s just there. While there are many thi
New Philosopher15 min read
Looking Back In Time
Nigel Warburton: You’ve spent a huge amount of your life looking at space. There’s a very famous quotation from Immanuel Kant, that’s even on his gravestone. “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often an
New Philosopher1 min read
Our Dark Globe Sighs
Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish’d face, Many a planet by many a sun may roll with a dust of a vanish’d race. Raving politics, never at rest—as this poor earth’s pale history runs,— What is it all but a trouble of ants in t
New Philosopher6 min read
The Saturnian And The Sirian
On one of the planets that orbits the star named Sirius there lived a spirited young man. He was called Micromegas, a fitting name for anyone so great. He was eight leagues tall, or 24,000 geometric paces of five feet each. He took to voyaging from p
New Philosopher6 min read
We Are The Meaning Makers
Like a satin bowerbird gathering sticks, feathers, buttons and pegs for its beguiling blue mess of a bower, I have built a meaningful life from the materials around me. Year by year I have accumulated reasons for being. In my teens and twenties, I ma
New Philosopher6 min read
Understanding Leopards
“My mind is like a wild leopard, exciting but scary. I have to learn how to tame it.” My granddaughter, Mischa, and I are discussing her insatiable curiosity and vivid imagination. She loves the creative adventures her mind conjures up, but is increa
New Philosopher2 min read
Our Library
We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilisation superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like
New Philosopher1 min read
Documentaries
Carl Sagan opens the program with a description of the cosmos and a “Ship of the Imagination” shaped like a dandelion seed. The ship journeys through the universe’s hundred billion galaxies, the Local Group, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way, the O
New Philosopher2 min read
Around The Web
Maria Clara Eimmart was an 18th century German astronomer and illustrator who created remarkable depictions of the Moon, as seen through a telescope. Eimmart was tutored in art, languages, mathematics, and astronomy by her father. Her father ran a su
New Philosopher2 min read
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Making Space
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that at this moment in history – when the frightening uncertainty of the world gets thrust in our faces every day – there has been a surge in popularity of an activity one might previously have dismissed as rather dul
New Philosopher2 min read
13 questions: Robert C. Wolcott
What do you doubt most? Unquestioning faith. If you could change one thing about the world, what would that be? I’d eliminate destructive stupidity, others’ and my own – though not the constructive kind that leads to unexpected discoveries, great

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