Earlier this month, investor and fund manager Bill Miller committed a $75 million donation to the philosophy department of Johns Hopkins University, prompting media outlets and even some of those in the field to opine on its value. Apparently, the endorsement of a billionaire indicated to some that philosophy, a much-maligned and frequently dismissed subject, is, in fact, worthwhile.
Everyone likes to think of themselves as moral. Objectively evaluating morality is decidedly tricky, though, not least because there’s no clear consensus on what it actually means to be moral.
When my colleague Corinne Purtill bought her doll-loving daughter an engineering kit, she had to laugh when the then-three-year-old used the present as a hairbrush. For all Corinne’s efforts at gender-neutral parenting, her daughter clearly enjoyed some traditionally feminine toys.
Not content with being a half-a-trillion-dollar company with 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook casually announced this week it had invented a new unit of time. The “flick,” at 1/705,600,000th of a second, is longer than a nanosecond (1/1,000,000,000th of a second), and is designed to measure the time individual video frames appear on screen.
Former FBI director James Comey, who faced the moral quandary of how to appropriately investigate US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her 2016 campaign and wound up upsetting all sides of the political spectrum, is due to become a professor in, of all subjects, ethical leadership. Comey has been invited to teach at his alma mater, the College of William & Mary in Virginia, which apparently decided the former G-man has the relevant ethical credentials.
Consciousness permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and all physical matter.
Humanism is defined, broadly speaking, as a secular ideology that primarily values human behavior and rational thinking, rather than deities or religious doctrine. The UK Home Office, though, took a more idiosyncratic and dogmatic approach defining humanism when it quizzed a humanist asylum seeker from Pakistan about ancient Greek philosophy. The applicant, Hamza bin Walayat, was denied UK asylum, reports The Guardian, in part because he didn’t know about Plato and Aristotle.
The left likes to pride itself as being firmly on the side of science, scoffing at conservative questioning of climate change, pollution, and evolution. But while Liberals are certainly au fait with evolution, they’re far less accepting of the evidence when it challenges their own ideology.
Trauma sounds like something that should only happen to other people. It’s portrayed as an extreme, distorting experience that’s far removed from everyday reality. Trauma is extreme. But it’s far from uncommon, and can disquietingly seep into lives and permeate society.
Philosophers claim to explore the most fundamental features of existence, but have been disappointingly silent on one all-important subject: Sex.
Treating addiction is never easy. Though some psychologists do question whether abstinence is the only option, conventional wisdom dictates that recovery is impossible without going cold turkey. Once they’re sober, recovered alcoholics aim to stay sober. Once they’re off drugs, former opioid addicts don’t casually use medicinal marijuana, but instead work to stay clean for life.
When winter storms hit and kitchen cupboards are empty, no one wants to trudge through freezing wind and snow, and plenty of people turn to delivery services for nourishment. Ordering food delivery essentially means paying someone to travel through the cold you’re sheltering from. Looking at the weather outside, it’s hard to ignore the question: Is this unethical?
A whole new year! A fresh start to eradicate your many flaws, emerging from the ashes of 2017 as someone who gets their work done on time, is slim but not neurotic about food, and never wastes hours refreshing Facebook and Twitter in a glaze of apathy.
Bosses’ fondness for unscientific personality tests is not a purely modern phenomenon. Currently, two million people every year take the Myers-Briggs test, which sorts them into 16 personality types, including ENFJ (extroverted intuitive feeling judging), and INTP (introverted intuitive thinking perceiving)—none of which have any scientific validity. Two hundred years ago, long before Myers-Briggs arrived on the scene, employees had their skulls measured instead.
Philosophy skeptics have a tendency to sniffingly dismiss the field as useless. “What’s the point?” they ask, shrugging at the greatest ideas in human history. Well, aside from the intellectual pursuit of the truth etc., one point of philosophy is it shapes the world around us: Societal instincts and political ideals are often an expression of theories first put forward in philosophy books.
Some 2,000 years ago, the Ancient Greek scholar Hippocrates argued that all ailments, including mental illnesses such as melancholia, could be explained by imbalances in the four bodily fluids, or “humors.” Today, most of us like to think we know better: Depression—our term for melancholia—is caused by an imbalance, sure, but a chemical imbalance, in the brain.
Resurgence in the popularity of a deceased philosopher is usually a cause for celebration. In the cause of Hannah Arendt, the reasons for renewed interest offer less to celebrate.
In my first job as a journalist, my editor told me that I couldn’t write. Though he was a caricature of a villain, who yelled at me about the Holocaust and said he “didn’t believe in” transgender people, I couldn’t dismiss his critique. I still can’t. He was a terrible bully, yes, but there’s a voice in my own head—in every writer’s head—that agrees with him. There’s no way to definitively prove him wrong.
I didn’t want to go to solo karaoke. I did it for journalism, for the sake of this article. I never expected to enjoy it.
Sexual harassment, as women know, is both endemic and widely dismissed. The same patriarchal imbalance of power that allows harassment to occur also silences those who do speak out.
Academic philosophy departments in the West tend to teach a neat, white canon: Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche etc. Those who want to study Eastern thinkers typically have to head to the East Asian studies department.
Money, we like to tell ourselves, can only purchase superficial pleasures. You can buy a $1,500 gold Tiffany paper clip, but not taste. You can pay staff to do your every bidding, but not to respect you. Wealth might help you find a wife, perhaps, but not true love. Money certainly can’t buy friendship.
In 1998, the incoming freshman class at Yale University was shown a psychological test that claimed to reveal and measure unconscious racism. The implications were intensely personal. Even students who insisted they were egalitarian were found to have unconscious prejudices (or “implicit bias” in psychological lingo) that made them behave in small, but accumulatively significant, discriminatory ways. Mahzarin Banaji, one of the psychologists who designed the test and leader of the discussion with Yale’s freshmen, remembers the tumult it caused. “It was mayhem,” she wrote in a recent email to Quartz. “They were confused, they were irritated, they were thoughtful and challenged, and they formed groups to discuss it.”
Sex addiction has gotten a lot of airtime in the past month after a number of famous men were exposed as serial predators and claimed the affliction as the cause of their disturbing behavior. Both Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey checked themselves into the same sex rehab clinic, with Weinstein saying he will go on a journey to “conquer my demons.”
