A Philosophy Blog associated with David Egan Philosophy.
Descartes had no way of knowing that he was inaugurating something that would be taught as “modern philosophy” four centuries later. In some ways, the Meditations presents a deliberate departure from what came before. In other ways, it feels Medieval.
There’s a prejudice that I find all too frequently in the empirical sciences. The history of philosophy, on this view, is a history of better or worse guesses about the world that await scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. It’s only when we reach scientific maturity that we confirm the truths that philosophers can only guess at.
Are fictional characters the kinds of beings toward whom one can have moral obligations? I think there’s a special way in which authors can betray their characters.
On Heidegger’s account, our primary mode of encounter with the world is what he calls care. It’s because, in some deep way, my being-in-the-world matters to me that the world takes the shape that it does at all.
If you’ve recently encountered zombies and ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and swamp creatures, you may have been out on the streets with trick-or-treaters. Or maybe you were in a philosophy seminar.
LLMs are Plato’s worst nightmare. All the dangers he perceives in the written word take on monstrous new form in algorithms that churn out oceans of text, arranging fine-seeming phrases that not only lack any genuine commitment to the truth but that don’t even have a conception of reality to which they might try to be faithful.
You’re probably familiar with the saying the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave die only once. It sounds great but I think there’s something to be said for dying a thousand deaths. The imaginative person lives a thousand lives and the unimaginative only one.
While pre-Avicennan philosophy was largely commentary on Aristotle, post-Avicennan philosophy often took Avicenna himself to be the central figure of philosophy with whom one had to engage, either in agreement or disagreement.
Seeing myself from a physiological point of view deepens my sense of what it means to be a human animal and how my mind is entangled with complex processes that lie deep beneath the level of conscious awareness.
When engaging with a fictional story, we can happily imagine worlds that are factually very different from our own. Science fiction, fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction: all of these present no significant hurdle to the imagination. But we seem to strongly resist imagining worlds that are morally very different from our own.
Spinoza’s Ethics is a passionate and radical revisioning of the nature of God, human existence, and the world that comes packaged as if it were a coldly rational geometric proof.
Sentimental artworks, and the people who indulge in them, are disappointingly incurious about the emotions involved. If the emotions are rational, and if they inform our thinking and deliberation, they warrant critical scrutiny every bit as much as thought does.
The peculiar predicament of philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we speak under the illusion that we’re making sense when in fact we’re mouthing empty words. The illusion of saying something profound is beguiling, which is why puncturing it, as he sees it, requires strength of character more than it requires intellect.
An ethics that recognizes the centrality of trust emphasizes our vulnerability and our interdependence. It also emphasizes the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another.
Most philosophers want to get to settled answers. The ironist, by contrast, speaks in the voice of Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
You can also find the beauty of travel in your own literal backyard (if you have one), on any city street, in a shopping mall, in a diner. That experience of being lifted outside of time, of seeing the world around you as strange and wonderful—you don’t need to book time off from work or get on a plane to experience it. You can find it right here and right now.
Outrage is the pleasure that dare not speak its name. As much as it’s bound up in feelings of anger and slighted justice, feelings of outrage are deeply satisfying.
If human social life is more densely structured and institutionalized than the social lives of other animals, that’s due at least in part to the fact that we’re very playful animals.
Clubbing a rockfish to death was wildly inconsistent with my habitual way of living. It’s precisely the inconsistency that intrigued me. I doubt that there’s any wholly consistent way to live and there’s much to be learned by applying pressure to deeply held principles.
This land that I love, and the access I have to it, is very much indexed to the particular historical moment in which I find myself. Home-as-a-place is a location you inhabit. But home-as-a-time is a forum in which you take action and in which your actions take on meaning.
Biology lacks the universality and neutrality of physics. It looks at one particular and, as far as we can tell, exceptionally rare phenomenon in the vast cosmos—the phenomenon of life. And, for all its rigorous methodology, the science of life starts from a very partial standpoint: it takes one to know one.
The choices we make don’t just reflect settled priorities. They also shape those priorities, reinforcing past choices or laying down new patterns.
Socrates’ examined life is more adverb than verb. It’s not that the examining is the sole or dominant activity in a good life. It’s rather that all activities in a good life are undertaken examinedly.
By never allowing themselves to be seen getting things wrong, cynics can maintain a sheen of cleverness. But if they were in fact clever, they’d investigate further. They might even discover that, in some cases, people aren’t so bad after all.
The present period in history is distinctive precisely in virtue of its awareness of being a period in history.
In the Nuu-chah-nulth tradition, and in many others of the northwest coast, the “bear people,” the “salmon people,” the “deer people,” and others are regarded as sovereign nations that the “human people” must negotiate with according to strictly defined protocols.
In some respects, animal ethics has more in common with anthropocentric ethics than it does with environmental ethics.
It’s not so much that we live in a world that’s lost faith in metaphysics. It’s rather that we live in a world that’s lost interest.
Heidegger aspired to be a prophet and Wittgenstein aspired to be a saint. Prophets want to improve the world and saints want to perfect themselves.
Accessible introductions to ideas I teach in my courses.
In some respects, animal ethics has more in common with anthropocentric ethics than it does with environmental ethics.
Existentialism captures the popular imagination partly because it’s so much more than just philosophy.
The term “existentialism” has taken on a life of its own and has found application in a wide range of contexts. In a wry nod to existentialism’s complicated relationship with religion, I’ll call this broader movement “broad church existentialism.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way” could be the rallying cry of existentialism. You’re free to live otherwise than you do, and if you hew to the life you’re leading, that, too, is your choice, and that choice is your responsibility. This sort of thinking didn’t burst onto the scene in the nineteenth century.
One way to understand existentialism is as an attempt to find meaning in a world that’s lost its faith.
You don’t get to choose whether or not to make choices. As Sartre memorably puts it, we are condemned to be free.
Bad times make for good philosophy. As warlords and bandits ravaged the countryside, people found themselves asking what went wrong and what a more harmonious social arrangement might look like.
My character is shaped by the people around me and the prevailing norms of my culture. If I throw myself into a line of work in which profit maximization overrides all other interests, I’m unlikely to be unchanged by the experience.
Critical thinking has an important dispositional element. You need to feel the right way about a problem if you’re going to think well about it.
I’ll outline the main features of animal welfare and animal rights arguments. At the end, I’ll mention some dissenting voices from both of these strands.
The position that I have free will seems untenable for anyone less mighty than God. The position that I don’t have free will seems so far from being right that it isn’t even wrong.
Should we identify what gives meaning to our lives and pursue that? Or should we try to wean ourselves from the felt need for meaning?
Is death a misfortune at all? The Greek philosopher Epicurus thought not. Death can’t be bad for you, he argued, because you don’t experience its badness.
How can you learn anything from a book full of events that, by the author’s own admission, are completely made up?
A lively philosophical personality shines through the text. Zhuangzi has the serene vision of a mystic and the lively wit of an inveterate jokester.
Both Socrates and Oedipus receive oracular answers that tell them who they are, and these obscure answers launch them on a quest of self-understanding.
Suppose you could remove all the obstacles to a free and happy life: what would you do then? This is the question Aristotle wants to focus us on.
Miscellaneous thoughts of my own on a range of themes, mostly but not exlusively philosophical.
The present period in history is distinctive precisely in virtue of its awareness of being a period in history.
Heidegger aspired to be a prophet and Wittgenstein aspired to be a saint. Prophets want to improve the world and saints want to perfect themselves.
Especially on matters of value, it often seems settled from the outset that our minds or our hearts aren’t actually supposed to be changed in the process of reading or writing philosophy.
Which philosophers that are alive today will people still be reading one hundred years from now? There’s excellent philosophy and then there’s excellent philosophy that lasts. What’s the difference?
Sometimes I wonder if philosophy is a big waste of time. Or worse than that, an impediment that keeps me from living well.
Although I have my misanthropic moods, I mostly really like people, and a significant part of that liking involves aesthetic appreciation.
Thinking well about the things that concern me requires intelligence. Understanding these concerns and what motivates them requires wisdom. Philosophy, to the extent that it is rightly called the love of wisdom, is essentially concerned with self-knowledge.
The idea that your life as a whole can feel wrong is a particular kind of suffering. This blog post offers some reflections on this kind of suffering.
When I try to picture what the determinist is telling me, I see myself in something like an x-ray view, a shadowy skull balanced on a skeleton, wiggling its jaw or moving about, but with the “person” absent.
By situating my own thinking within a broader historical tradition, I can see more clearly how my particular concerns and preoccupations are mine rather than just the objectively and timelessly important ones that all people with philosophical inclinations might turn themselves to.
I want to make a case for Shakespeare’s “great heart.” Then I’ll try to explain why Wittgenstein doesn’t see it.
Saying you love art but have no interest in religion is like saying you love EDM but have no interest in dancing.
I want to get clear on my place in a world that I inhabit with an animal body. That requires resisting attempts to inflate my significance beyond the animal. But it also requires resisting attempts to deflate it.
In technical terms, pretty much any PhD graduate leaves Plato in the dust. On the other hand, the Republic is a book I actually want to read.
When false reverence is rampant, renewed calls to reverence risk exacerbating the problem. Sometimes what’s needed is for someone to step in boldly and take the piss.
The questions prod respondents to think about philosophy in a certain way that many people—the authors presumably included—so take for granted that they don’t even notice that there’s prodding going on.
On a recent reading of the Analects, it struck me that Confucius has a lot in common with Don Quixote.
Monthly newsletter published with a one-month delay, which contains a short, accessible essay on some philosophical theme.
Descartes had no way of knowing that he was inaugurating something that would be taught as “modern philosophy” four centuries later. In some ways, the Meditations presents a deliberate departure from what came before. In other ways, it feels Medieval.
There’s a prejudice that I find all too frequently in the empirical sciences. The history of philosophy, on this view, is a history of better or worse guesses about the world that await scientific confirmation or disconfirmation. It’s only when we reach scientific maturity that we confirm the truths that philosophers can only guess at.
Are fictional characters the kinds of beings toward whom one can have moral obligations? I think there’s a special way in which authors can betray their characters.
On Heidegger’s account, our primary mode of encounter with the world is what he calls care. It’s because, in some deep way, my being-in-the-world matters to me that the world takes the shape that it does at all.
If you’ve recently encountered zombies and ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and swamp creatures, you may have been out on the streets with trick-or-treaters. Or maybe you were in a philosophy seminar.
LLMs are Plato’s worst nightmare. All the dangers he perceives in the written word take on monstrous new form in algorithms that churn out oceans of text, arranging fine-seeming phrases that not only lack any genuine commitment to the truth but that don’t even have a conception of reality to which they might try to be faithful.
You’re probably familiar with the saying the coward dies a thousand deaths, but the brave die only once. It sounds great but I think there’s something to be said for dying a thousand deaths. The imaginative person lives a thousand lives and the unimaginative only one.
While pre-Avicennan philosophy was largely commentary on Aristotle, post-Avicennan philosophy often took Avicenna himself to be the central figure of philosophy with whom one had to engage, either in agreement or disagreement.
Seeing myself from a physiological point of view deepens my sense of what it means to be a human animal and how my mind is entangled with complex processes that lie deep beneath the level of conscious awareness.
When engaging with a fictional story, we can happily imagine worlds that are factually very different from our own. Science fiction, fantasy, utopian and dystopian fiction: all of these present no significant hurdle to the imagination. But we seem to strongly resist imagining worlds that are morally very different from our own.
Spinoza’s Ethics is a passionate and radical revisioning of the nature of God, human existence, and the world that comes packaged as if it were a coldly rational geometric proof.
Sentimental artworks, and the people who indulge in them, are disappointingly incurious about the emotions involved. If the emotions are rational, and if they inform our thinking and deliberation, they warrant critical scrutiny every bit as much as thought does.
The peculiar predicament of philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we speak under the illusion that we’re making sense when in fact we’re mouthing empty words. The illusion of saying something profound is beguiling, which is why puncturing it, as he sees it, requires strength of character more than it requires intellect.
An ethics that recognizes the centrality of trust emphasizes our vulnerability and our interdependence. It also emphasizes the importance of discretion in our dealings with one another.
Most philosophers want to get to settled answers. The ironist, by contrast, speaks in the voice of Gertrude Stein: “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be an answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”
You can also find the beauty of travel in your own literal backyard (if you have one), on any city street, in a shopping mall, in a diner. That experience of being lifted outside of time, of seeing the world around you as strange and wonderful—you don’t need to book time off from work or get on a plane to experience it. You can find it right here and right now.
Outrage is the pleasure that dare not speak its name. As much as it’s bound up in feelings of anger and slighted justice, feelings of outrage are deeply satisfying.
If human social life is more densely structured and institutionalized than the social lives of other animals, that’s due at least in part to the fact that we’re very playful animals.
Clubbing a rockfish to death was wildly inconsistent with my habitual way of living. It’s precisely the inconsistency that intrigued me. I doubt that there’s any wholly consistent way to live and there’s much to be learned by applying pressure to deeply held principles.
This land that I love, and the access I have to it, is very much indexed to the particular historical moment in which I find myself. Home-as-a-place is a location you inhabit. But home-as-a-time is a forum in which you take action and in which your actions take on meaning.
Biology lacks the universality and neutrality of physics. It looks at one particular and, as far as we can tell, exceptionally rare phenomenon in the vast cosmos—the phenomenon of life. And, for all its rigorous methodology, the science of life starts from a very partial standpoint: it takes one to know one.
The choices we make don’t just reflect settled priorities. They also shape those priorities, reinforcing past choices or laying down new patterns.
Socrates’ examined life is more adverb than verb. It’s not that the examining is the sole or dominant activity in a good life. It’s rather that all activities in a good life are undertaken examinedly.
By never allowing themselves to be seen getting things wrong, cynics can maintain a sheen of cleverness. But if they were in fact clever, they’d investigate further. They might even discover that, in some cases, people aren’t so bad after all.
In the Nuu-chah-nulth tradition, and in many others of the northwest coast, the “bear people,” the “salmon people,” the “deer people,” and others are regarded as sovereign nations that the “human people” must negotiate with according to strictly defined protocols.
It’s not so much that we live in a world that’s lost faith in metaphysics. It’s rather that we live in a world that’s lost interest.
What is to be gained from contemplating one’s mortality? And are you missing out on anything if you don’t?
Gift exchange at its best is a playful form of status exchange. It acknowledges that relationships always involve imbalances of power, but shows that both parties to the relationship are comfortable enough with one another that they can switch between the roles of creditor and debtor with ease and grace.
Autumn, as a season of changes, is a fine time to reflect on impermanence, its sadness, and its beauty.
The self-regard that Sikhs call haumai might show itself clearly in moments of greed or arrogance but it’s an undercurrent of most of our lives most of the time. Giving attention to this undercurrent, and working to overcome it, seems to me a worthy undertaking, whether or not you identify as Sikh.
Most of us in North America are only beginning to learn what it means to relate to the land and its original inhabitants in a reciprocal and sustainable fashion. Doing this involves appreciating the difference between property rights and stewardship—both in terms of what that means for how we treat the land and for whose land we say it is.
The point of climbing a mountain isn’t so much about reaching the summit as in what you bring down from it. Once you’ve caught a view of the limits of what’s possible you can explore the domain of the possible with greater freedom and understanding.
Philosophy only flourishes because certain brave, queer souls have looked on the world as it is and wondered why it might not have been some other way.
It’s not nice to think of yourself as a monster. There’s a strong tendency to want to harmonize the monstrous jumbling of categories in our self-understanding. But doing so creates further problems.
Literacy is one of the most transformative technologies that humans have ever invented. So transformative is it that it’s hard to imagine your way into an oral mindset from a literate perspective.
We’re used to being the smartest things on the planet. What happens when that’s no longer the case?
Plato, Plotinus, and the rest saw philosophical argument and investigation as one part—granted, a central part—of a broader way of life that was essentially mystical and spiritual in its outlook.
Reflecting on the religious conflicts of his time, Zera Yacob resolved to use reason to determine which aspects of these religious traditions did indeed derive from God and which were the inventions of contentious humans.
Starting with Plato, philosophy has systematically marginalized both literature and animals as beneath the dignity that philosophy has established for humankind.
How are animals of the same species subjected to such different treatments? Part of the answer, I think, is that we humans don’t quite know what to make of creatures that are both so similar to us and so different.
Humour and horror both provoke surprise by confounding our ordinary way of making sense of things. But humour creates an atmosphere of absolute safety and horror creates an atmosphere of absolute danger.
Maybe true freedom lies not in being free from all obstacles but in imposing the right obstacles—that is, the ones that channel you in the direction you want or need to go.
If I was to teach in a prison, I asked myself, what’s a topic on which I stand to learn as much from my students as they stand to learn from me? The answer announced itself at once: freedom.
Better to drop your grand ambitions and just take things as they come, says Zhuangzi. Don’t fuss so much over life and life won’t stir up a fuss for you.
So what is a country? I’ve put this question to students. What would be required, I ask, for us to establish the classroom as an independent state?
Which stories we tell, and how we tell them, goes a long way toward articulating who we are and how we understand ourselves.
Sages and mystics of many stripes have claimed that the secret to life lies in hidden in some unexpected place. An equation from probability theory devised by an eighteenth-century statistician is certainly not the least unusual.
The Indian dramatist crafts distinctive emotional effects that allow the audience to savour those emotions; those emotional flavours, or rasas, culminate in a savouring of tranquility; and savouring tranquility offers a foretaste of the spiritual liberation that is our ultimate goal. Not at all bad for a night out at the theatre.
If you want to be a better person, the subject you should study is mathematics.
We live in an era that’s impatient and grasping, says Heidegger. Our technological prowess is only the most outward evidence of this more general way of being in the world.
It’s as if Plato were proposing a wholesale ban on Hollywood, Netflix, the publishing industry, and pop music—and that’s just for starters.
There’s no easy way around Singer’s argument once you encounter it. That’s what makes it dangerous.
According to Grasshopper, the best life is a life devoted to playing games.
On one hand, Heidegger is arguably the most important figure in European philosophy in the twentieth century. On the other hand, he was for a time a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party.
If we can learn to learn from one another, the philosophy of the Americas has tremendous potential for syncretism and growth.
Building a syllabus, at its best, is also an act of love and a gift to those with whom it’s shared. Like a music mix, it’s constructed out of elements that I didn’t make myself but the assembly in uniquely my own.
Anglophone philosophy in the last half-century has slowly pulled its head out of its own proverbial ass and it has done so in no small part thanks to the contribution of these four remarkable women.
Nāgārjuna laid much of the philosophical groundwork for Mahāyāna Buddhism and was foundational to the Madhyamaka school of Buddhist philosophy.
Late April is an exciting time of year if you’re into philosophy and birthday cake. April 22 is the birthday of Immanuel Kant and April 26 is the birthday of Ludwig Wittgenstein, my own philosophical hero.
UNESCO has marked the third Thursday in November as World Philosophy Day but it might have been more apt to set it for April Fools’ Day.
Dominic Ongwen’s life was marred at an early stage by a stroke of staggeringly bad luck. Is he to blame for that bad luck?
Are philosophers also good lovers? Plato, ever the booster for philosophy, claims that philosophers are really the only true lovers.
New Year’s resolutions are a leap of faith, a decision to become someone you aren’t (yet) for reasons you can’t (yet) fully understand. Curiously, this isn’t far off what the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard described as the essence of religious belief.