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War!
What you need
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Farewell
to Fodor

Hobbes: nasty,
brutish, short?
What’s Wrong
with Relativism?
 FrAnTz
FaNoN
Edited by JEAN KHALFA and ROBERT J. C. YOUNG
Translated by STEVEN CORCORAN
The only remaining untranslated work by
major 20th-century writer Frantz Fanon,
now available in English.
www.bloomsbury.com/philosophy
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ISSUE 124 Feb/Mar 2018
EDITORIAL & NEWS
4 Sticks and Stones Rick Lewis
5 News
17 Interview: Aaron James
Skye Cleary asks the author about Surfing with Sartre
47 Obituary: Jerry Fodor
Daniel Hutto says goodbye to a great thinker and debater
WAR & PHILOSOPHY
6 The Philosophy of War
Ziyad Hayatli explains how it evolved down the ages
10 Bergson: Rights, Instincts, Visions & War
Carl Strasen heeds Henri Bergson’s warnings about the war-instinct
14 Asian Non-Violent Voices
Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva on some Eastern kinds of pacifism
GENERAL ARTICLES
War & Peace 18 The Puzzle of Patriotism
Phil Badger examines three models of patriotism
but not so long. Pages 6-16 22 Free Will Is Still Alive!
Carlo Filice is determined to argue for free choice
25 Is Everything A Computer?
Paul Austin Murphy wonders whether that’s logical
26 Splitting Chairs
Quentin Mareuse carefully cuts some stuff up
29 Twelve Principles of Knowledge
George Dunseth lists twelve tests for truth
30 Are You A Garbled Relativist?
Ray Prebble won’t let relativists get away with vagueness
34 Why False Beliefs Are Not Always Bad
Sally Latham reports on an unusual project
REVIEWS
48 Book: Experiencing Time, by Simon Prosser
reviewed by Heather Dyke
50 Book: The Trolley Problem Mysteries, by Frances Kamm
reviewed by Richard Baron
Knowledge, 51 Book: Anger & Forgiveness, by Martha Nussbaum
reviewed by Trevor Pateman
or lack of it 52 Film: Alien: Covenant
Mini theme, pages 29-37 Stefan Bolea on humans, non-humans and gods
REGULARS
9 Philosophical Haiku: Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha
Terence Green
38 Brief Lives: Thomas Hobbes
Alistair MacFarlane says he wasn’t nasty, brutish or short
41 Philosophy Then: Wittgenstein & The War
Peter Adamson looks at what Wittgenstein did in WWI
42 The Street Philosopher: Torpid In A Taxi
Sean Moran thinks about sleeping on the job
44 Letters to the Editor
56 Tallis in Wonderland: On Looking at the Back of My Hand
Raymond Tallis finds more there than just freckles
FICTION
58 Freedom 2199
Jonathan Sheasby’s curious computer asks if freedom is real
Time Flies
Or does it? Page 48 February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 3
Editorial Sticks and Stones
“I don’t know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but
World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
(variously attributed to Albert Einstein, President Harry Truman and
an unnamed US Army lieutenant at the Bikini Atoll A-bomb tests)
I
t’s always an advantage in any philosophical debate to
have the last word. If civilisation gets wiped out in a
nuclear war this month (and I’d love to believe that this is
a far-fetched scenario) then perhaps future archaeologists,
human or otherwise, will unearth a few scorched copies of this
magazine in the topmost layers of debris. That seems a good
enough reason for this issue to have a theme of war and peace.
War has been a topic of scholarship and discussion since
ancient times. Some of the classic texts about it have been of
the ‘How to’ variety: books of strategy like Sun Tzu’s The Art
of War in the 5th century BC, or Clausewitz’s On War in the
19th century. Philosophers have been more concerned with
whether and when war should be waged. There have been the
starkest disagreements among them. A few thinkers (usually
not those of fighting age) have positively glorified war, or else
argued that war being sometimes inevitable, it should be
pursued ruthlessly and singlemindedly to attain swift victory.
Conversely, there have been philosophers throughout history
who have been pacifists of one kind or another, arguing that
it’s wrong to resort to violence even under the severest provo-
cation (see our article on non-violence in Eastern philo-
sophical traditions).
Many major philosophers, though, have taken a middle
position, deploring wars but hoping to influence rulers to avoid
the worst excesses. In this spirit, in the Middle Ages Saint
Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers developed a set of
rules as to when it might be considered justified to wage war,
and regarding conduct during wars too. This ‘Just War Theory’
remains influential in international law even today. We’ve
printed a list of Aquinas’ rules. Do keep it somewhere handy in
case you are ever attacked by an army of medieval monks –
perhaps in a dream, or in a computer game, who knows?
Anyway, Ziyad Hayatli in our lead article tells the history of the
philosophy of war, and of philosophy engagement in interna-
tional law, and brings it right up to the present.
To some extent it is a success story. Hayatli tells how
Hugo Grotius in the 17th century saw the world as a loose
society of nations; Immanuel Kant later made proposals for
international rules to avoid war in his essay Perpetual Peace.
They helped inspire the growth in international organisations
and treaties and an international legal order, and the United
Nations, all of which have certainly helped to avert particular
wars. Maybe one day such institutions, and globalisation, and
4 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
trade, will make war unthinkable. But we still have a long way
to go, and we don’t know how much time we have left. So far
we have been over-reliant on sheer luck to avoid disaster.
The approach of science and philosophy when confronted
with some vast human problem is always first to try to under-
stand it thoroughly, then on that basis find ways to overcome
it. Things we comprehend can still kill us, but we stand a
better chance against them. Unfortunately military
technology has recently advanced much faster than our under-
standing of the social and psychological forces that lead us to
go to war in the first place. But other advances are happening
too, more quietly, such as the application of game theory to
the prediction of military outcomes, and the study of how
wars start, and of the most effective ways to stop them. We
learn, gradually. Maybe we can understand human behaviour
fast enough to avert our doom?
So how do wars break out? A pithy summary of the main
ways can be found in a recent article by David Welch in
Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper, in which he analyses the
probability of war in Korea. He says, “Generally speaking,
there are four pathways to war: states can choose them delib-
erately on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation; they can
stumble into them inadvertently; they can be pushed into
them by public opinion; and they can be pulled into them by
allies.”
Why would anyone choose to go to war? Certainly fear or
envy often plays a part. But given that war is death, maiming,
destruction, bereavement, and horror, it’s enduring popularity
is hard to fathom. Naturally, some philosophers have tried to
fathom it anyway. Henri Bergson was France’s most famous
philosopher a century ago, and is now sadly neglected. He
thought in depth about these problems, and their connections
with the nature of societies, and also believed we have an
innate ‘war instinct’. (You can read more about his ideas in
Carl Strasen’s article). Then there is patriotism; a force for
social cohesion and pride perhaps, and certainly not respon-
sible for all wars, but it equally certainly has fed support for
many. Phil Badger in his article critically examines three
models for understanding patriotism.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never
hurt me, or so I’ve been told. There will always be conflict
and tension; Heraclitus called war the Father of All because
strife pushes change forwards. But nations and factions now
need to pursue their conflicts in ways that stop short of war.
Insults, ridicule, invective – the world can survive all these.
Sticks and stones too. But if words between nuclear powers
ever escalate to actions, then all our squabbles and specula-
tions could come to an abrupt end.
• Remembering Murphy’s Law • Control cars
with your mind! (What could go wrong?)
• Children and chimpanzees crave revenge
News reports by Anja Steinbauer and Filiz Peach
Inventor of Murphy’s Law
Born 100 Years Ago
Does a dropped slice of toast always land
buttered side down? Is the queue you
choose at the supermarket checkout always
the slowest moving? January saw the 100th
anniversary of the birth of Edward A.
Murphy Jr, inventor of Murphy’s Law. An
aerospace engineer, he is reported to have
said “Anything that can go wrong, will go
wrong” during a frustrating set of rocket-
sled experiments in 1949 in which he was
investigating how much acceleration the
human body could withstand. As it turned
out, the sixteen painstakingly-arranged
sensors on the test pilot had been fastened
at the wrong angle so that no readings
could be taken. Murphy was irritated by
jocular interpretations of his Law; far from
being a fatalist he simply wanted to high-
light as a design principle that: “If there are
two or more ways to do something and one
of those ways can result in a catastrophe,
then someone will at some point do it.”
Of Cars and Brains
The carmaker Nissan has unveiled a
project to help drivers execute emergency
manoeuvres up to half a second faster by
using brainwave interface technology.
The ‘brain-to-vehicle’ interface that they
are developing recognises if a driver is
about to stop, brake, swerve or perform
some other evasive move, and begins the
action immediately, saving vital time. Cars
with semi-autonomous capabilities could
be fitted with this technology in future.
Although the system is still at a fairly early
Nissan demo at CES
stage of development, Nissan prognosti-
cates that it may be ready for “practical
application in 5 to 10 years.” The company
gave live demonstrations of the new tech-
nology at the Consumer Electronics Show
(CES) in Las Vegas in January. Ironically,
the hi-tech show was shut down for several
hours by a power outage caused by torren-
tial rain. It was the first rainfall in the
desert city for 116 days. No doubt Murphy
would have been amused.
Payback Time
How is life in a community possible? What
kind of social behaviour is essential? There
has been extensive research into empathy in
humans and primates, but little has been
known about a much more negative yet
equally ubiquitous impulse, the desire for
revenge on someone who has displayed
antisocial behaviour. Now social neurosci-
entists and evolutionary anthropologists
from two Max Planck Institutes in Leipzig
have tried to find out at what age humans
develop the inclination to watch a deserved
punishment and if chimpanzees do the
same. Using puppet shows to test children’s
responses, they found that children develop
the desire for witnessing a deserved come-
uppance around the age of six. Then, using
a good-cop, bad-cop scenario in which
zookeepers removed or supplied food to
chimpanzees, they found that the primates
had similar reactions to the older children.
“Our results demonstrate that six-year-old
children and even chimpanzees want to
avenge antisocial behaviour and that they
feel an urge to watch it. This is where the
evolutionary roots of such behaviour origi-
nate, a crucial characteristic to manage
living in a community,” explains Natacha
Mendes, co-author of the published study in
Nature Human Behaviour. Her colleague
Nikolaus Steinbeis adds: “We cannot defi-
nitely say that the children and chimpanzees
felt spite. However, their behaviour is a
clear sign that six-year-old children as well
as chimpanzees are eager to observe how
uncooperative members of their community
are punished.”
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 5
News
Hans Saner
Swiss philosopher Hans Saner has died
aged 83 after a long illness. An original
thinker in his own right, Saner was also
well known for his connection with one of
the great figures from the golden age of
existentialist philosophy: Karl Jaspers.
From 1962 to 1969 he was Jaspers’ last
personal assistant at the University of
Basel. He edited much of Jaspers’ later
work, as well as writing extensive
commentaries on it. Saner also authored
numerous books and articles on art,
science, religion and politics, some of
which have been translated into eleven
languages. They include Identity and Resis-
tance (1988), The Anarchy of Silence (1990),
The Shadow of Orpheus (2000), and Non-
Optimal Strategies (2002). He also wrote a
number of essays on Kant, Spinoza,
Jaspers and Hannah Arendt.
Hans Saner worked as a primary school
teacher in the Bernese Oberland for five
years in the 1950s. He then studied
Psychology, Philosophy and German at
the University of Basel. He completed his
dissertation on Kant’s political philosophy
in 1967. Saner was known for his outspo-
ken political views and was rejected for a
philosophy teaching post by the Univer-
sity of Bern apparently for being ‘too left
wing’. He instead became a lecturer at the
Music Academy in Basel in 1979 where he
taught cultural philosophy until 2008.
Saner had great faith in philosophy.
During an interview (Philosophy Now Issue
32) he was asked what he thought of the
future of philosophy. His answer was
short and sharp: “it will be needed.” He
was convinced that everybody could
philosophise. However, he thought that
“the only difference is that trained
philosophers are often arrogant.”
Jerry Fodor Dies
One of the best-known contemporary
philosophers of mind, the functionalist
Jerry Fodor, died on November 29, 2017
at the age of 82. There is a full obituary in
this issue.
War & Peace
The Philosophy of War
Ziyad Hayatli presents a condensed history of the philosophy of war.

term such as ‘the laws of war’ seems oxymoronic in

A nature: a contradiction in terms. On the one hand,

law is a rigid structure of rules that’s associated with
order; on the other hand, war is an activity charac-
terised by chaos and destruction. Yet there is now an under-
standing that when one goes to war, certain behaviours are
expected, and when these standards are violated, demands for
international justice are broadcast on the air, written in the
papers, and shouted through the megaphones. Institutions such
as the United Nations are chided as toothless, useless due to
their limitations. The International Criminal Court is caught
up in the debates about the laws and lawfulness of war, and they
are numerous, concerning drone warfare, artificial intelligence,
collateral damage, winning hearts and minds, chemical and bio-
logical weapons, the need for nuclear deterrence, and the very
idea of humanitarian military intervention.
This article will look at the whys and wherefores of the laws
of war from a philosophical perspective, beginning with the
natural law theories of the Middle Ages, to which we owe a sub-
stantial just war doctrine, and moving onto the Enlightenment,
during which new conceptions of state and sovereignty would
change the idea of war. There are two considerations I’d like
you to keep in mind: firstly, that wars and their consequences
tend to change the international order of things; secondly, that
ideas about the nature of war are closely tied to conceptions of
what a state is, and how states relate to one another.

Laws As Natural
Back in the Middle Ages, Western philosophy generally assumed
that morality was an inherent characteristic of mankind as a gift
from God. Laws built upon this inherent morality were known
as Natural Laws. In regards to the laws of war, scholastics and
theologians from Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) to Hugo Grotius
(1583-1645) developed a substantial doctrine of ‘Just War
Theory’ – a theory of when waging war was just, and when it
was unjust (‘jus ad bellum’), as well as what sort of behaviour was
just within war (‘jus in bello’). [See text box].
Hugo Grotius published his seminal work De Jure Belli ac
Pacis (The Law of War and Peace) in 1629. For Europe, this was
a time of upheaval known as the Thirty Years’ War, in which
Catholic and Protestant states were warring against one another.
In this work Grotius described the political order as a loose
international society. He also explored the basic idea of self
defence as a lawful use of force, on both the private and the state
level. His insights earned him the title ‘the father of interna-
tional law’. Most importantly, Grotius made recommendations
which showed a remarkable amount of tolerance, given the
political climate. One was that war waged against others just
because of their different interpretation of Christianity is unjust.
Hugo Grotius by Mierevel 1631
The end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 saw the adoption of
this and other recommendations in what became known as the
Peace of Westphalia, by which much of Europe was transformed
from a group of hierarchical states vertically aligned under Pope
and Emperor, to horizontally arranged equal sovereign states.
This also changed the nature of wars in Europe. They became
what some called ‘secularised’.
Laws As Self-Interest
Just three years later, in 1651, the English philosopher Thomas
Hobbes published Leviathan. For a time this cemented how
war, and morality as a whole, was conceived.
The basic premise of Leviathan is that, as a matter of survival
and for the sake of cohesion, the members of a society give up
certain liberties to a sovereign, who becomes responsible for
applying laws and protecting private property. The ideas of
morality and the laws built upon them in this case reflected social
interests, especially in determining the strength and scope of

6 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018


the power of the sovereign towards his subjects. God and natu-
ral law did not factor into this view. Although Hobbes did not
deny its existence, he believed that natural law was not what
kept people in line. As he wrote:
“For the laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy and, in sum,
doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the
terror of some power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to
our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge and the
like. And covenants without the sword are but words, and of no strength
to secure a man at all.” (Part 2, Chapter 17, ‘Of Commonwealth’).
This arguably applies not only to agreements between pri-
vate citizens, but also to the international order of states. There
the ‘fear of the sword’ is maintained by a balance of power –
what prevents states from going to war is fear of consequences,
economic, political, and social. Conversely, by Hobbes’ logic,
if one sovereign state determines that going to war against
another is to its own best interest, then a war is justified for
that state.
The cynics among us may point out that this has always been
the case. During the time of the Thirty Years’ War, for instance,
there was much political self-interest in the waging of wars,
despite the superficial religious justification. Nevertheless,
Hobbes made the ‘self-interest’ aspect more explicit, and pre-
sented an alternative view to Grotius’s vision of a naturally
formed ‘international society’. It’s hardly surprising then that
while Grotius is considered the father of international law,
Hobbes is considered the father of the ‘realist’ school of thought
in international relations. [For more on Hobbes, see ‘Brief
Lives’ in this issue, Ed.]
The natural law to which Hobbes refers in the quotation
above, of ‘doing to others as we would be done to’, is of partic-
ular significance. For the loose international society Grotius
THE RULES OF JUST WAR THEORY
Jus ad bellum
These are the rules for when it is just to go to war.
1) Does the war have Just Authority (Auctoritas)?
2) Does the war have Just Cause (Causa)?
3) Is the war being started with the Right Intentions (Intentio)
4) Is the proposed military action proportional to the situation?
5) Is there a good probability of success in achieving the war’s
aim?
6) Peaceful alternatives must all have been exhausted first.
Jus in bello
These are the rules guiding behaviour once a war has started
1) Discrimination: no violence towards civilians, or combatants
who have surrendered.
2) Proportionality: harm to lives or property must not be dispropor-
tionate to the military advantage expected to be gained.
3) Responsibility: Every individual, regardless of rank, is personally
responsible for any war crime that he might commit. Soldiers must
refuse to obey any orders that they know to be immoral
4) No use of certain unacceptable weapons and tactics (eg rape,
or forcing captives to fight their own side, or biological weapons).
War & Peace
Henry Dunant
described receives what cohesion it has from that principle,
which is known as ‘reciprocity’ in the international legal field.
The time-honoured tradition of respecting another state’s
ambassadors and envoys, even if it is a hostile power, is a legacy
of this. On the other hand, Hobbes’ view that a fear of the sword
and balance of power is a driving force for political behaviour
also holds true. Given the delicate nature of this balance, and
that the interests of a state are subject to interpretation by its
rulers, then wars are an inescapable phenomenon.
The Birth of the Red Cross
Regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of any given war (jus
ad bellum), there is a separate question of legitimate conduct
within war (jus in bello). It was this latter question that a Swiss
businessman called Henry Dunant asked after he witnessed first-
hand the horrors of war at the Battle of Solferino in 1859.
The Battle of Solferino was waged between the Austrian
Empire and Franco-Piedmontese forces in northern Italy. It
was described as a battle fought with “disastrous short-sighted-
ness, improvisation and negligence.” It led to 6,000 dead and
approximately 40,000 wounded after the two armies clashed
amid a hail of artillery. The medical services on both sides were
overwhelmed, and the negligence of the supply corps was
exposed as the medical service’s transport was requisitioned to
transport ammunition instead. Although the fighting lasted fif-
teen hours, it took six days to remove ten thousand wounded,
most of whom were carried by peasants’ carts to nearby villages
with the hope of getting a little food and water.
Henry Dunant arrived in the nearby village of Castiglione
on 24th June 1859, originally with hopes of gaining an audi-
ence with Napoleon III. He met instead a flood of suffering that
was not being stemmed; and so took it upon himself to mobi-
lize volunteers – mostly local women and girls – to provide what-
ever care they could. He sent his coachman to buy much needed
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 7
War & Peace
supplies from Brescia, such as cloth and material for dressings.
He also encouraged volunteers to show the same level of sym-
pathy and care for wounded enemy Austrians, and arranged for
the release of Austrian doctors so that they could also tend the
wounded. What he witnessed in the next two weeks was pub-
lished in his account, A Memory of Solferino. This account and
subsequent work by Dunant led to the formation of the Inter-
national Committee of the Red Cross in 1863.
Philosophically, Dunant’s book questions how a state could
be so negligent towards its own soldiers once they are of ‘no use’,
and argues for the importance of principles when fighting wars.
It also emphasised the idea of preventing needless suffering. To
Henry Dunant, a combatant was an agent of the state, fulfilling
a duty delegated by that state, and when that combatant is
wounded to the point that they’re no longer able to fulfil that
duty, they cease to become such agents. There is no further point
in killing, maiming, or torturing them. While war may be unpre-
ventable, the suffering therein can and should be constrained.
This way of thinking informs the principle of distinction,
whereby military targets must be distinguished from non-tar-
gets. This rule was already present in Christian and Islamic tra-
ditions, such as in the tenth century Peace of God Movement
in France, the St. Petersburg Declaration, and Islamic Sunni rul-
ings in general (see H. Shue, ‘Laws of War’ in The Philosophy of
International Law, S. Besson & J. Tasioulas (eds), 2010). How-
8 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
The Battle of Solferino, 1859
ever, the ICRC reinvigorated and promulgated the distinction
between military and non-military in a more modern and global
context. Now, the ICRC considers it as a core principle.
This philosophy of war views the state as an intangible entity
composed of agents who fulfil its interests at every level, from
soldiers to civil servants and law-makers. Given that the con-
cept of the state has been closely linked with philosophies of
war (both ad bellum and in bello), the second half of the Twenti-
eth Century would bring about fresh challenges.
The Twentieth Century and Beyond: New Challenges
Just as the Thirty Years’ War changed the European order, so
the Second World War changed the world order. Grotius’s idea
of a loose international society really came to fruition with the
subsequent creation of the United Nations in 1945. And just as
societies always do, a global community of states sought to make
certain behaviours taboo. Wars of aggression and expansion-
ism became unacceptable. Officially, war became permissible
in only two circumstances: self-defence, or by a binding reso-
lution from the Security Council. Chapter VII of The United
Nations Charter in its entirety, and particularly Article 51, makes
this point very clearly. But the so-called ‘global society of states’
has found loopholes. And the new world of decolonisation,
national liberation, human rights treaties, and sovereign state
self-determination introduced a new kind of entity onto the
 Philosophical Haiku
international field – ‘territorial non-state actors’. These were
organisations that closely resembled states, but were not quite
states. They’re perfect vessels for states to engage in proxy war-
fare, where neither side directly engages the other. Now argu-
ing for humanitarian intervention became the new tactic.
For a long time the concept of warfare had been closely
wedded to the concept of the state, but no more as territorial
non-state actors became a significant part of the world of war.
Terms such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedom fighter’ entered every-
one’s lexicon. And no discussion of war is complete without
mentioning the ‘War on Terror’. The challenge of developing
a new philosophy where combatants include not only the func-
tionary of states but also terrorists or freedom fighters is very
real. The late international legal scholar Antonio Cassese called
this the ‘Freedom Fighter’s Problem’ (see his International Crim-
inal Law, 2013, 3rd ed., especially Ch. 8 on terrorism). Are ter-
rorists, or ‘combatants of a non-state actor’, different to the sol-
diers of a conventional army? If so, how and why? Do we restrict
human rights in the face of such an enemy, for the sake of
national security? Or would the reduction of human rights have
a worsening effect? These are the debates we are having today.
Cassese himself explored how the word ‘terrorism’ is sometimes
used in a manipulative way that merely reflects a state’s inter- SIDDHARTHA GAUTAMA: THE BUDDHA
ests. This is not to say that terrorism is not a real threat or a (563-483 BCE?)
genuine phenomenon, however.
The conflict in Syria is emblematic of this new world of war. All ceases to be
It has truly tested the morality of combatants, observers, and Suffering is eternal
Let go and be free
political commentators. Accusations of human rights abuses,
child conscription, and war by proxy fly around left and right.

On the one hand there is a despotic, merciless tyrant; on the
other rebels, some of whom have highly questionable beliefs
and patrons. The tyrant stands up to global imperialism and
proxy warfare from the ‘hypocritical West’; yet the rebels stand
up to ‘tyranny’ and ‘despotism’.
Conclusion
Philosophers of war and of the rules of war ultimately divide
into two schools of thought. One is represented by the prag-
matic optimist Grotius, who believed in a loose global society
and reciprocity; the other by the more cynical ‘realist’, Hobbes,
who believed that the pragmatism of self-interest leads to the
fear of the sword and the balance of power. The justifications
which a person accepts for going to war - and for particular
actions within a war - will depend on their other convictions
and disposition.
Although, to put it mildly, not every soldier or politician in
history has observed the laws of war, we can recognize that
these laws have formed over time either for the interest of states
or because there genuinely is an international society with some
sort of conscience. Such laws and agreements as are found in
documents like the Geneva Convention are therefore a legal
heritage for the world. It can be hoped that we are able to face
the philosophical challenge of new concepts of war without
utterly desecrating this heritage.
© ZIYAD HAYATLI 2018
Ziyad Hayatli has a BA in Philosophy & Journalism, and an LLM
Masters in International Law. He has worked for Amnesty Interna-
tional as a research assistant and Arabic interpreter.
T
hroughout his youth, Siddhartha Gautama was just your typical
humble North Indian prince growing up in luxury and splendour
and shielded from suffering. Inevitably, given this upbringing,
he was shocked to discover the suffering and death of ordinary
people beyond the palace walls. So at age twenty-nine he decided to
give up the trying existence of a prince in favour of the simpler life of a
wandering seeker after truth. He ditched not only his wealth and the
creature comforts wealth brings, but his wife and son also (incidentally,
he’d named his son Rāhula, meaning fetter – make of that what you
will), and took to the road as a wandering ascetic (sort of like a wan-
dering minstrel, but not as much fun). But after several years of wal-
lowing in austerity, denying his body sometimes even to the point of
starvation, he decided that this wasn’t the answer either. Then, while
sitting under a Bodhi tree, perhaps wondering if he’d made a terrible
mistake giving up his riches, he experienced an epiphany, or more prop-
erly, a moment of enlightenment; and so was born the Middle Way. Thus
did the prince become the Buddha – meaning, the enlightened one:
and verily did he seek to spread the word that, however you look at it,
life is just one long painful moment. The first ‘noble truth’ of Buddhism
is that the fundamental character of life is suffering. Lest you find this
a tad dreary, the good news is that by achieving nirvana we can escape
this vale of tears. And to achieve nirvana? All you have to do is cease
desiring, since it is desire that causes the suffering. And you can achieve
that by following the Middle Way. That’s it. As a promise of salvation,
you might think that no one would go for it; but several hundred mil-
lion Buddhists would beg to differ.
© TERENCE GREEN 2018
Terence is a writer, historian, and lecturer, and lives with his wife
and their dog in Paekakariki, NZ. hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz

February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 9

War & Peace
Bergson:Rights, Instincts,
Carl Strasen says Henri Bergson’s ideas about wars need rediscovering.
hile he is almost forgotten today, the French
W thinker Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was perhaps
the most famous philosopher of the WWI era.
His extraordinary skills as a lecturer, and his 1907
bestseller Creative Evolution, made his visit to the US a media
event and a public street nightmare. Strange as it seems to us
now, the first rush hour traffic jam on New York’s Broadway was
caused by the flood of people hoping to attend a Bergson lecture.
Bergson always approached philosophical problems by sepa-
rating out quantitative differences – differences in degree or
amount – from qualitative differences – differences in kind. Dif-
ferentiating differences in kind from those in degree is a bit like
the old saying in math classes that you can’t add apples to oranges.
When this sorting and sifting of types of differences between
ideas is done, Bergson hopes that the philosophic knot has been
loosened enough to allow the circulation of understanding.
In his first two books Bergson uses this method to show how
space is different in kind from time, and how the brain is dif-
ferent in kind from memory. The upshot of these seemingly
arcane insights is a validation of human freedom against deter-
minism, via what Bergson calls ‘la durée’ (duration) which is the
sort of extended consciousness we have when listening to music,
for instance. In Creative Evolution, Bergson’s insights are
extended into the flow of evolution, which is given a force of
its own, called the élan vital, or vital impulse. This impulse finds
manifestations in instinct and intelligence in all species. In his
last work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) Berg-
son finishes by pursuing how a closed society is different in kind
from an open society. So Bergson’s effort to demonstrate and
analyze differences in kind between the dualities of space/time,
memory/brain, subjective/objective, intuition/rationality, lived
time/measured time, human/insect, open society/closed soci-
ety, trace the arc of his thought, with the prize being the reunion
of religion and science. This effort in mending dualities made
him Descartes’ heir, a Nobel Prize winner, and for some time
in France he was philosophy’s superhero. Of Bergson and his
kindred spirit philosopher William James, President Theodore
Roosevelt noted that “every truly scientific and truly religious
man will turn with relief to the ‘lofty’ thought of Bergson and
James.” (Bergson and American Culture, Tom Quirk, 1990).
War & Rights
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion was published in 1932 after
twenty-five years of effort. In it, among other things, Bergson
sought to understand the problem of war. Bergson was born in
1859, the year that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published.
It seemed clear to Bergson that human societies had biological
roots, and that the confluence of our technological development
10 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
Visions & War
and our territorial instincts threatened our future as a species.
It is worth looking at WWI briefly to put our current prob-
lems with terrorism into perspective. Consider the Battle of the
Somme in 1916. During the first day of combat, over 25,000 British
soldiers were killed, with some regiments having 90% causality
“
rates. The impact of WWI on European populations was pro-
found: Germany lost 15.1% of its active male population; Aus-
tria-Hungary lost 17.1%; and France lost 10.5%. Yet unlike other
philosophers of the era, such as Bertrand Russell, Bergson was a
”
staunch advocate of continuing to fight WWI, because the Ger-
mans were trying to invade his homeland, France. He was only
interested in peace after the Germans had been defeated.
The French government enlisted Bergson’s help in 1917 in
a secret mission to America. As P.A.Y. Gunther writes in A Com-
panion to Continental Philosophy (1994), he was “authorized to
One problem is that human
rights are often crushed just
when they are needed most;
when there’s a strong feeling
of ‘us against them’ and
cruelty against a minority
becomes justified by the fears
of the majority.
promise President Wilson that if he would bring the United
States into the First World War on the side of the Allies, after
the war Britain and France would back the creation of a League
of Nations, dedicated to maintaining world peace.” And indeed,
with Bergson adding to the tipping point, the US did enter
WWI, and Germany was defeated. President Wilson then saw
his dream come to life as the League of Nations began its work,
and Bergson became the President of the League’s International
Committee for Intellectual Cooperation. (Fittingly, the Com-
mittee provided the framework for a cooperative work between
Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud entitled Why War?. Sadly,
these two intellectual giants made little headway on their topic.
Einstein hoped Freud had the solution, but Freud showed a flair
for the obvious by saying that throughout history conflicts have
been settled with violence.)
The League of Nations eventually failed, in the face of rising
fascist aggression in the 1930s. Its successor, the UN, has at its
 War & Peace
BERGSON PORTRAIT © WOODROW COWHER 2018
PLEASE VISIT WOODRAWSPICTURES.COM

February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 11

War & Peace
foundation The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Accord-
ing to Clinton Curle in Humanité (2007), the main author of the
Declaration, John Humphrey, had Bergson’s The Two Sources of
Morality and Religion as his inspiration. The Declaration is the
archetypal human rights document, and by declaring that “recog-
nition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable
rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of
freedom, justice and peace in the world” it seeks to protect every-
one with its list of rights.
Although Bergson was the strongest supporter of human
rights, his vision was only partially implemented in the draft-
ing of the Declaration. One problem is that human rights are
often crushed just when they are needed most; when there’s a
strong feeling of ‘us against them’ and cruelty against a minor-
ity becomes justified by the fears of the majority. This happens
frequently in wartime.
The Human Instinct For War
Bergson argues that the ‘war-instinct’ is intrinsic to human, animal,
and insect societies. Many animals also seem hardwired with what
we would call cruelty. For example, if you supply wild birds with
plentiful food in a bird feeder, they’ll frequently attempt to knock
other birds off a perch instead of simply flying to a perch that’s
open. Why? So that a rival gets less.
In ancient human times a small group with access to a stream
or field and the right tools would flourish, and another group
cut off from resources would perish. Bergson notes from this
that “the origin of war is ownership, individual or collective,
and since humanity is predestined to ownership by its structure,
war is natural. So strong indeed, is the war-instinct that it is the
first to appear when we scratch below the surface of civilization
in search of nature. We all know how little boys love fighting.
They get their heads punched. But they have the satisfaction of
having punched the other fellow’s head.” (Two Sources, p.284.)
He then observes that logic and rationality follow behind the
pre-thought of instincts like a caboose follows the freight train,
providing reasons for war after the war-instinct has already been
CARTOON © CHRIS GILL 2018, PLEASE VISIT WWW.CGILLCARTOONS.COM FOR MORE.
12 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
stimulated into operating.
Bergson also describes here the constant interplay between
closed and open societies. A closed society is instinct-driven and
values security for its elite, and sometimes, to get what it wants
it goes to war, since it can seize resources to protect its selected
members. Thus closed societies are prone to starting wars: Berg-
son describes a closed society as one that endlessly circles the
fixed point of war. An open society, on the other hand, is
unbounded: it does not limit who its members are or what they
must do. It seeks liberty, equality, and fraternity, not the pro-
tection of privilege.
Unfortunately, hoping that war can be eliminated by declar-
ing the individual to be protected by their human rights misses
the difference in kind between open and closed societies. Adding
human rights into a closed society initially seems to work, but
the two institutions won’t mix, like stirring water into oil. A
closed society bases its security on defined roles and norms of
behavior, so when a closed society views itself as under threat
from ‘outside agitators’, it suspends human rights.
Closed societies aren’t a mistake as such; they form from the
survival instinct, so it is pointless to belittle their supporters as
ignorant. But they should know that left alone, closed societies
gravitate toward war. The best one can hope for to prevent war is
that the vision of a mystic with a message of love and peace will
eventually permeate the closed society and move it toward being
an open society, in a jolt. This jolt is the next step in Bergson’s
theory of the development of society.
Of Ants & Men
Philosophical theories are especially interesting when they pro-
vide an ‘Eureka’ insight into unalike problems. Prior to writing
Creative Evolution, on his vacations throughout France Bergson
studied ants and bees. This must have seemed as an odd activ-
ity for a philosopher. But I know why he studied insects: to try
to understand communal behaviour.
While hiking in the jungle of Ecuador, I saw leaf-cutter ants
cross our hiking track. They made smooth trails transporting
snipped sections of leaves relatively long distances. It looked a
bit like an aerial view of a freeway, with red carrier ants haul-
ing green leaf pieces at a steady rate, while unencumbered sol-
dier ants overtook them. The ants bypassed plants as they made
their way to a distant twenty-five foot clearing of light in the
deep green gloom of the jungle. The light was due to the seem-
ing devastation of a tree where the ants had crawled up the
branches and systematically cut the leaves from all but one of
them, where, curiously, a single intact leaf remained. “They
always leave enough for the plant to recover,” our guide noted.
I was skeptical, but found his observation mirrored in Bert Höll-
dobler and Edward Wilson’s extraordinary book The Ants
(1990): “Another broad ecological interest is whether or not
leaf-cutter ants husband their resources by directing their attacks
so not to kill off too many plants close to home. Foragers have
often been observed to shift their attentions from one tree to
another without denuding any of them” (p.623). How is this
possible? Do ants heed some current, jolt, or bolt of transmis-
sion that says “Enough! change!”?
In The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson suggests
that exactly that sort of thing happens, but on a larger scale:

fundamental changes in a human society’s behaviour come from
the communication of an idea in a ‘jolt’. The jolt moves a closed
society in the direction envisioned by mystics such as Christ,
Moses, or Buddha, and is translated to the masses via educa-
tion. As Bergson says in Two Sources:
“We represent religion, then, as the crystallization, brought about by
the scientific process of cooling, of what mysticism had poured, white
hot, into the soul of man…” (p.238) “...since [mystics] cannot com-
municate to the world at large the deepest elements of their spiritual
condition, they transpose it superficially; they seek a translation of the
dynamic into the static which society may accept and stabilize by edu-
cation” (p.274).
The ‘frenzy’ of the mystic causes them to communicate a
vision of a radically different direction to society, not based on
selfish reasoning. Under its influence the closed society stops
endlessly circling the fixed point of war; instead, it changes
direction to become an open society, and save itself. However,
the leap of the idea from the mystical visionary to everyone in
society is sadly not inevitable. The struggle against injustice is
slow and uncertain; and even the idea of waiting for mystical
visions for social solutions is utopic at best and painfully naïve
after the horrors of two World Wars and the Holocaust.
Bergson addressed this problem of the mystical vitalising of
society thus:
“If mysticism is to transform humanity, it can do so only by passing
on, from one man to another, slowly, a part of itself. The mystics are
well aware of this. The great obstacle in their way is the same which
prevented the creation of a divine humanity. Man has to earn his
bread with the sweat of his brow; in other words, humanity is an ani-
mal species, and, as such, subject to the law which governs the ani-
mal world and condemns the living to batten upon the living. Since
he has to contend for his food both with nature and with his own
kind, he necessarily extends his energies procuring it; his intelligence
is designed for the very object of supplying him with weapons and
tools, with a view to the struggle and that toil. How then, in these
conditions, could humanity turn heavenwards an attention which is
essentially concentrated on earth? If possible at all, it can only be by
War & Peace
using simultaneously or successively two very different methods. The
first would consist presumably in intensifying the intellectual work
to such an extent, in carrying intelligence so far beyond what nature
intended, that the simple tool would give place to a vast system of
machinery such as might set human activity at liberty, this libera-
tion being, moreover, stabilized by a political and social organiza-
tion which could ensure the application of the mechanism to its true
object. A dangerous method, for mechanization, as it developed,
might turn against mysticism: nay more, it is by an apparent reac-
tion against the latter mechanization that it would reach its highest
pitch of development... This [development] consisted, not in con-
templating a general and immediate spreading of the mystic impe-
tus, which was obviously impossible, but in imparting it, already
weakened though it was, to a tiny handful of privileged souls which
together would form a spiritual society; societies of this kind might
multiply; each one, through such of its members as might be excep-
tionally gifted, would give birth to one or several others; thus the
impetus would be preserved and continued until such a time as pro-
found change on the material conditions impost on humanity by
nature would permit, in spiritual matters of a radical transformation.
Such is the method used by the great mystics.” (p.235.)
In the three large revolutions I’ve seen unfold in my lifetime,
namely Nelson Mandela’s jolt to South Africa to change the
regime of apartheid, Lech Walesa and Solidarity’s role in the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s over-
throw of the Shah of Iran’s regime, the dynamic of ‘mystical
frenzy’ acting upon a society has changed the behavior of its
individuals in a deep way.
Conclusion
Despite the noblest and most rational thought of humanity, war
is an intrinsic part of life. It is not a quirk, a rare exception, or
a moral lapse of the ignorant manipulated masses. Bergson’s
radical critique is worthy of study if we wish to stop endlessly
circling the fixed point of war.
© CARL STRASEN 2018
Carl Strasen remains a dedicated amateur student of philosophy
after surviving twenty-five years in the salt mines of Silicon Valley,
and analytic philosophy at UC Berkeley.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 13
War & Peace
Non-Violent Voices
Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva assesses arguments against violence among
ancient Asian philosophies.
he quest for peace is one of the most important

T endeavours of all time and one of the oldest. Several

of the major Asian philosophical traditions have, from
ancient times, tried to find the means to justify and
achieve peace and avoid violence and war. Here I will focus on
Jainism, Daoism, and the teachings of Mo Tzu and Mencius. I
will briefly sketch the similarities and dissimilarities of their views
on pacifism, just war, and revolution. Jainists, Daoists, Mo Tzu
and Mencius were all lovers of peace in unique ways.

Jainist Non-Violence
Jainism as a philosophical movement appeared in India before
or around the same time as Daoism, Mohism (Mo Tzu) and
Mencius in China: about the sixth century BC. Jainism and
other Indian philosophical schools were markedly different in
their historic background from the Chinese schools: India was
not plunged into civil war as China was for several hundred
years. But India was affected by movements which enforced the
supremacy of the priestly Brahman class and its philosophy with
an iron fist. Jainism sprung up as a reaction against this ruling
Brahman philosophy. It emerged as a full-fledged philosophy
of non-violence during the life of Mahavira (born 599 B.C.). It
was often considered to be an offshoot of Buddhism, but it stood
out from the start as a philosophy promoting the concept of
ahimsa, meaning non-harm or non-injury, simultaneously advo-
cating tolerance, on the grounds that no one holds the absolute
truth and everyone has his or her own standpoint. Ahimsa had
an enormous influence on other Indian schools.
This principle of non-violence or non-injury is based on the
Jainist philosophical and sociopolitical worldview. Jainists divide
the universe into two types of things, the living and the non-
living. Jainists state that each living being, not only humans, but
the smallest insects, plants, reptiles and birds, has a soul, called
jiva. Non-living things, which lack a soul, are called ajiva. Because
each living being has a soul/jiva, you are forbidden to harm any
living being, even the smallest insect. Jainism prescribes that we
should not harm any life, and in particular we should not kill
any life, because all life has equal rights on this earth. You must
understand that if you kill any living thing, you kill a soul.
The core of Jainist metaphysics is known as Anekânatavâda, or
the manyness of reality. Reality possesses innumerable qualities,
and any object possesses an infinite number of characteristics.
Ordinary people cannot comprehend all the qualities of a thing.
Human knowledge is limited and relative regarding the innumer-
able characteristics of an object. Thus Jain metaphysics is a rela-
tivism, in the sense that all truths are relative to their believers.
Any standpoint or statement can be only partially true, and no
statement or standpoint can claim to be absolute. This worldview
is considered to be an extension of the Jain ethical imperative of
ahimsa into the field of philosophy, as a form of tolerance.
This argument goes as follows. At the center of Jain logic lie
Mahavira meditating
two inter-related methods, Nayavada, or the method of seven
standpoints, and Syadvada, or the method of sevenfold predica-
tion. The former involves showing that any statement can be of
only limited, not absolute, validity, because all statements are con-
textualized. The second method involves the recognition that
there are a limited number of possible types of statements that
one can make about an object, including positive attribution, neg-
ative attribution, and inexpressibility. By combining these two
methods, the Jains developed a logic according to which any state-
ment at best represents a single perspective (Ekanta). In contrast,
in a more global approach, the Jains argue for the adoption of all
possible points of view from multiple perspectives (Anekinta).
Whenever Jains talk about ethics, they talk about duty, and
they say that the highest and best duty of a human being is to
practice non-violence, recognizing that the essential feature of
all life is soul. Ahimsa is built into the core of Jainist philoso-
phy, ethics and practice. Even though it was founded more than
two thousand years ago, its adherents are still active in the polit-
ical discourse of India and worldwide. Their voice of love and
care for the environment is influential even today.
Daoist Non-Violence
Now let’s turn our attention to Daoism. Like Jainism, nothing
is known for certain about the founder of Daoism, Laozi (Lao
Tzu) – there are only legends. Daoist philosophical and politi-
cal teachings were written down and compiled by later follow-
ers. We know that Daoist monks translated Buddhist works, and
that Buddhism, like other Indian philosophies, was influenced
by ahimsa. Fung Yu-lan, a famous Chinese philosopher, views

14 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018


the preservation of life and the avoidance of injury as the start-
ing point of Daoism. But Daoist ideas of non-violence are dif-
ferent. Their reasons for opposing war and favoring non-vio-
lence were the result of the historical contexts. Daoism is com-
parable to Jainism only on a superficial level.
The Dao De Jing is an ancient Chinese classic traditionally
taken as a representative Daoist text. It expresses a distinctive
philosophy from China’s Warring States Period (403–221 BC),
and is one of the most influential works in the intellectual tradi-
tion of China, with hundreds of commentaries written over two
millennia. The Dao De Jing has three basic anti-war arguments:
1) The onto-cosmological argument: War creates a disruption of
the natural pattern of things in the world.
2) The moral argument: Preserving life is morally right and killing
is morally wrong.
3) The political argument: It is wrong to employ war as a means
to political gain since warfare will inflict great sorrow upon the
state and its people, as well as on the ruler.
All three arguments are presented from both duty-based and
utilitarian perspectives. The first two arguments are made clear
in Chapter 30, where it says, “After a great battle, there is an
ominous year of famine.” The phrase ‘an ominous year’ (xiong-
nian) refers to a year of calamity after farm horses have been used
Laozi articulating
War & Peace
as war horses and farmers drafted into the army. Most commen-
tators tend to view this statement as a utilitarian or economic
argument against war. But Chapter 30 speaks not only of war in
terms of the disruption of natural patterns of life, it also makes
the onto-cosmological argument when it claims that nothing is
more unnatural than war due to its capacity to disrupt the ordi-
nary courses of nature, such as farming, leading to the destruc-
tion of harmony and social order. Chapter 46 puts it thus:
“When the dao (natural way) prevails in the world,
Horses are used in the farm;
When the dao (natural way) does not prevail in the world,
War horses are bred just outside the city walls.”
Daoism is against all war. While the Dao De Jing does not elab-
orate on warfare specifically, its opposition is implied by its world-
view. Daoism advocates non-activity or non-intervention (wu-
wei). For Laozi, whoever acts, harms; and whoever grabs, lets slip.
Therefore the sage does not act, and so does not harm; the sage
does not grab, and so does not let slip. Laozi compares ruling a
big country to cooking a small fish, and cautions against too many
changes. For him, if the rich and powerful are arrogant, they are
doomed. Daoism is skeptical of politics. When King Wei of Chu
asked Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), a famous Daoist scholar, to serve
as Prime Minister, he turned down the offer.
Mohist Non-Violence
Although Mohism is not as well known as other ancient Chi-
nese schools, the Mohist contribution to the Chinese view of
warfare cannot be underestimated, since among all major
schools the most famous indictment of war comes from Mo Tzu
(480-390 BC). He condemns war both on moral grounds and
on utilitarian principles. For him, war does not pay, even for
the victor. There is nothing useful about victory, as the loss out-
weighs the spoils. Mo Tzu’s comment on the intention of the
state of Chu to attack the state of Song deserves mention here:
since Chu possessed abundant land but not a large population,
it was unwise to sacrifice what was insufficient for what was
superfluous. Moreover, attacking a state that has done no wrong
is not benevolent. It is illogical that while killing one person is
forbidden and seen as a dreadful crime, slaughtering whole
armies is accepted. Mo Tzu also criticizes the double standard
in judging domestic and international politics.
For Mo Tzu, partiality in human relations causes all the great
harms in the world, so he suggests that partiality be replaced
by universality. He proposes what he called ‘universal love’ (jian-
ai), arguing, “if men were to regard the states of others as they
regard their own, then who would raise up his state to attack
the state of another?” Only universal love will make the world
peaceful and orderly.
Although the Chinese tradition generally stresses the impor-
tance of avoiding war, the notion of ‘just war’ or ‘righteous war’
(yizhan) for the sake of maintaining order in the world, or the
idea of legitimate and sanctioned acts of violence (for example,
punishing the enemies of public order) is by no means absent.
In the Mozi (The Book of Master Mo), Mo Tzu allows for non-
offensive war in the chapter ‘Against Aggression’. There he
articulates the notion of righteous war and contends that the
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 15
War & Peace
Mencius
considering
wars initiated by three sages, Yu, Tang, and Wu, should not be
called ‘attacks’ but ‘punishments’. He makes a distinction
between ‘aggressive attack’ and ‘offensive punishment’: the
former deploys forces for the purpose of profit, whereas the
latter deploys forces for the purpose of preserving order.
Confucian Non-Violence
Mencius (371-289 BC), the greatest Confucian thinker after
Confucius himself, also denounces offensive wars. For him wars
involve too many casualties. So although the central authority
may wage punitive war against a local ruler, rival states should
not attack one another. He regards all the wars in the Spring
and Autumn period of Chinese history (722-481 BC) as unjust.
Death is an inadequate punishment for those who launch a war.
Those who are experts in waging wars deserve the most severe
penalty. Boasting of military expertise is a grave crime.
Mencius argues that a benevolent king has no rivals in the
world because he can win the support of the people, even
oppressed people in another country. Indeed, sometimes wars
have to be embarked on because they are just. For Mencius, the
criterion of whether a war is just lies in how the war would ben-
efit the people of the enemy country. If the people of that coun-
try have been starving, freezing, exploited and abused by their
king then they will welcome liberation. They will not put up any
resistance; instead, they will bring food and drink to reward the
incoming troops. So whoever wins the hearts of the people will
win the war. As Mencius says, “A humane king has no match.”
When King Hsiang of Liang asked how to achieve world
peace, Mencius pointed to unity as a solution. When asked who
can unify the world, Mencius answered that the one who does
not delight in killing can unite it.
Another novel idea introduced by Mencius into Chinese
political thinking is the idea of revolution. If the ruler is not
humane – if he abuses the people instead of taking care of their
welfare – then he can be legitimately removed. This view may
appear contrary to what Confucius himself teaches, whereby
the ruler is revered and the subjects always remain subjects.
However, Mencius defended his view by asserting that when
the ruler is a ‘lone man’ loathed by everyone, removing the lone
man from the throne is not usurpation.
16 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
Although Mencius argued that the validity of rulership depends
on the people’s acceptance, he does not think that the task of royal
replacement should be placed in the peoples’ hands. The people
will have neither the political expertise nor the military compe-
tence to succeed in this task, and a revolution initiated by the
people will probably bring the whole nation into complete chaos.
Therefore the task should fall on the shoulders of the ministers
who originally assisted the ruler. As the famous scholar of Chi-
nese thought Angus Graham states, “Mencius is not a defender
of popular revolution. Ideally, he thinks the tyrant should be
removed by his own ministers, and, among ministers, by those of
the old fashioned kind.” (Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argu-
ment in Ancient China, 1989). These ministers themselves have to
have some qualifications: they must have the peoples’ well-being
in mind and be wise enough to make right judgments. There is
only a slight margin between legitimate overthrow and illegiti-
mate usurpation, and the margin is set by the ministers’ intent.
Confucianism has often been charged with supporting feu-
dalism. But we can see that Mencius would never support a form
of feudalism that does not include a humane king, prudent min-
isters, and contented people.
Conclusion
We have considered four ancient Asian philosophies that advo-
cated peace. The Jainists were absolutely opposed to violence
or harming even the smallest living thing. The Daoists regarded
war as a destruction of the natural order and advocated passiv-
ity. The Mohists thought war was bad but sometimes necessary
to preserve order. The followers of Mencius also thought war
was bad but sometimes necessary to defend justice. All these
ideas are relevant today.
© OIDINPOSHA IMAMKHODJAEVA 2018
Oidinposha Imamkhodjaeva is an assistant teaching professor in
Philosophy at Penn State University. She has two PhDs!
FURTHER READING
Hsiu-Chen Chang, ‘On the Historicity of the Tao Te Ching’, Compar-
ative Literature Studies, vol. 35, no. 2, 1998.
Christopher Chapple, ‘Sources for the Study of Jaina Philosophy: A
Bibliographic Essay’, Philosophy East and West, vol. 50, no. 3, 2000.
Ellen M. Chen, The Tao Te Ching: A New Translation with Commen-
tary, Paragon House, 1989.
Carine Defoort, ‘The Growing Scope of ‘Jian’ 兼: Differences
Between Chapters 14, 15 and 16 of the ‘Mozi’.’ Oriens Extremus,
vol. 45, 2005.
Angus C. Graham. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in
Ancient China, Open Court,1989.
William G. Kirkwood, ‘Revealing the Mind of the Sage: The Narrative
Rhetoric of the ‘Chuang Tzu’.’ Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 22,
no. 3, 1992.
D.C. Lau (trans.), Mencius, Penguin, 1970.
Geoffrey MacCormack, ‘The Legal Philosophy of Mo Tzu’, ARSP:
Archiv Für Rechts- Und Sozialphilosophie / Archives for Philosophy
of Law and Social Philosophy, vol. 79, no. 3, 1993.
Stephen Mitchell, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, with Fore-
word and Notes, Harper Collins, 2000.
Jayandra Soni, ‘Basic Jaina Epistemology’, Philosophy East and
West, vol. 50, no. 3, 2000.

Surfing
With Sartre
Jean-Paul
PORTRAIT PHOTO © SKYE SCHMIDT
Sartre’s not nor-
mally associated with
surfing: he much preferred being in a Parisian
café than in nature; and as you say, surfing is
more often associated with waves than wisdom.
My first instinct was that Albert Camus would
have been more connected with a Mediter-
ranean lifestyle of sun, sand, and surf. So why
Surfing with Sartre?
Sartre has long passages in Being and
Nothingness (1943) about why skiing exem-
plifies freedom. At one point he pauses to
note that waterskiing, a kind of ‘sliding’
upon water, is even better; he calls it ‘the
ideal limit of aquatic sports’. So he’d be
the first to welcome a phenomenology of
surfing. However, I think that leads you
away from his view of freedom toward a
more embodied, embedded, achievement-
oriented perspective, such as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty articulated. The surfer’s
view contrasts with Sartre’s dour existen-
tialism on a whole range of questions, so
Sartre is a natural interlocutor. But I do
engage with Camus as well.
You ultimately disagree with Sartre though.
So can you say something about how a surfer’s
experience undermines Sartrean existentialism?
A key difference is that the surfer’s
exercise of skill – in knowing how to be
‘adaptively attuned’ to constant change –
is valuable for its own sake as a sublime
and beautiful way of spending one’s lim-
ited time in life. So the act of surfing
can’t itself be absurd, as some existential-
ists accused the universe of being; at least
not in the sense of a conspicuous gap
between pretence and reality, which is
Thomas Nagel’s definition of absurdity.
While surfing on a crowded day can be
absurd given our expectations of what
surfing should be, the basic act of riding
a wave for its own sake has no larger pre-
tences, so it doesn’t purport to have any
larger meaning that would be undercut if
it turned out that life was meaningless in
some general or cosmic way.
Even if the universe as a whole were
meaningless – as Sartre, the disappointed
romantic, would maintain – there’s still
plenty of genuine meaning in life for a
person: in surfing, in other exercises of
skill, or in attuned relations with others,
done just for their own sakes. Sartre
treats this sort of individual meaning as
somehow created from nothing, ex
nihilo, from one’s free choice – for
example, to be a surfer. But that’s a mis-
take about the value of surfing from the
surfer’s perspective. Surfing is not
worthy because it’s chosen, as Sartre
would say; rather, it’s eminently worthy
of being chosen, and chosen for one’s
limited time in life, for intrinsic reasons;
in other words, just because of what it is.
Can ‘adaptive attunement’, the essence of
surfing, be applied to non-surfing realms?
Surfing is a relationship between a
person and a wave, but it has a social ana-
logue. In walking a busy city street, for
instance, you’re constantly adapting your
walking, slowing, or shifting sideways –
being attuned to what other pedestrians
are doing. Many skillful activities involve
a form of ‘adaptive attunement’, and if
they aren’t surfing properly speaking, or
not even ‘crowd surfing’, the general way
they are similar to surfing highlights a
key part of their meaning and value.
The concept of ‘flow’ is a strong theme
throughout the book. Why is it important?
When psychology and self-help books
talk about flow, they treat it as a state of
‘optimal experience’ that can be con-
trolled from within by mental self-disci-
pline. That’s basically a neo-Stoic per-
spective, which I believe derives from
Viktor Frankl’s account of the Stoic-like
methods that helped people survive Nazi
concentration camps. But surfers surely
know something about flow, since for
them going with a flow is a way of life,
often quite literally. And they’ll tell you
that flow ain’t all in the head. Flow is the
real, dynamic relationship – the coales-
cence between skill and circumstance –
that emerges between surfer and wave.
It’s a kind of self-transcendence that Sto-
icism, existentialism or Buddhism don’t
capture very well. Surfing also helps us
see what’s so valuable about flow, what all
the fun and experiential enjoyment is ulti-
mately about. Maybe ‘adaptive attune-
ment’ is close to what Buddhism is after,
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 17
Interview
Skye Cleary
interviews
Aaron James
about his new book.
but in surfing the goal is more modest
and comes by a much easier route. You
don’t need to abandon desire, or lose your
concept of self, or meditate, or even be
very disciplined, beyond surfing regularly.
You grab your board and just paddle out,
motivated by your firm loving attachment
to waves and surfing them.
A surfer’s lifestyle, you suggest, can be an
antidote to consumerism and global warm-
ing. How?
Since work as we now practice it cre-
ates greenhouse gasses, one way to bene-
fit society is to work less and do some-
thing less resource-consuming instead,
such as going surfing. So, surfers aren’t
lazy good-for-nothing freeloaders who
should really get a job; they’re the new
model of civic virtue! The workaholic is
the new problem-child. I mean, an
important way we might mitigate cli-
mate change, along with more urgent
measures, is to cut back the work week
and set up a basic income so that people
can work part-time. I think a lot of
people share the surfer’s preference for
time over money. If it can be made feasi-
ble for them, many people would be
willing to work less and hit the lake or
the beach – or do more gardening, or art
projects, or get to know their spouse, or
spend time with the kids, whatever. In
economic parlance, more leisure for
everyone is potentially an efficient adapta-
tion which leaves no one worse off and
asks no sacrifice of anyone. This is the
sort of climate adaption we might really
get used to, and so maybe actually imple-
ment, at least eventually. And in that
case, we’re definitely morally obliged to
do it, as we’d reduce the risks of pro-
found injury to future people. So who
could complain? I should go surfing and
do my bit for society? Twist my arm!
• Skye C. Cleary is a visiting lecturer at
Columbia University, Barnard College, and
the City College of New York, and author of
Existentialism and Romantic Love (2015).
• Surfing with Sartre: An Aquatic Inquiry into a
Life of Meaning, by Aaron James, was published
by Doubleday in 2017.
The Puzzle Of
Patriotism
Phil Badger tries to make sense of a tangle of pride, identity and metaphysics.
“If you believe yourself a citizen of the world then you are a citizen
of nowhere.”
UK Prime Minister Theresa May, October 2016
y national identity seems to me to be both con-
M tingent and coincidental. Being born British,
while quite lucky in terms of my life chances and
political rights, wasn’t something of my own
doing. Therefore it is no more something for me to be proud
of than my being born in the middle of the twentieth century.
I was once told a (possibly apocryphal) story about a former
Prime Minister of Belgium who, when asked if he was proud
of his nationality, replied that the question was ridiculous and
that he might as well be asked if he was “proud of being a man.”
Some people will find this idea simply outrageous. For them
there is nothing accidental about nationality. Such people hold
what I might call a ‘metaphysical theory’ of their identity: con-
sciously or otherwise, they feel that a kind of spiritual thread
connects together those who share a particular nationality so
that they also share a set of mutual obligations and rights.
Not me. When I was about fourteen, the BBC put on one of
its series aimed at educating and informing the population. In
this particular case, the actors pretended to be philosophers such
as Plato and Socrates. I suspect that the whole thing was a ghastly
hamfest; but for me the important thing was that a toga-clad
Socrates asked his pupil “How should men live?” Putting aside
the inherent misogyny of the question, this was a crucial moment
in my young life. First, the revelation that people actually asked
questions like that was mind-blowing; second, the seed was
planted that there could be an answer to it which pertained to
humans in general and not just to those in my own community.
At that moment, with deference to Socrates, I became a citizen
not of a small town in northern England, but of the world.
In this article I’m going to do my best to get to grips with
the idea of patriotism in the most generous-spirited manner I
can muster. I will refrain (after now) from references to Dr
Johnson, who opined patriotism to be “the last refuge of the
scoundrel” and instead examine a trio of philosophical models
of patriotism.
Model 1: Communitarian Patriotism
In his wonderful book Justice (2010), the ethicist Michael Sandel
tells a well-authenticated story about Confederate General
Robert E. Lee. Lee, it seems, began the American Civil War as
an instructor at West Point military academy, and, respected
military genius as he was, was approached by Abraham Lincoln
with an offer to take command of the Union armies in the
coming conflagration. The story goes that Lee asked Lincoln
for a night to think the offer over. Lee spent that night pacing
18 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
his rooms and juggling the competing claims of principle (he
was apparently no supporter of slavery) and loyalty to hearth
and home. In the end, Lee chose the demands of filial loyalty
over those of abstract principle. He refused Lincoln’s offer, and
headed south to defend a system he despised rather than take
up arms against his fellow Southerners.
What are we to make of this story? Sandel’s view – one he
knows will outrage the liberal-minded – is sympathetic to Lee’s
position. He points out that for most people the feeling of con-
nection to our homes, our communities, and their histories, is
what gives us our sense of who we are. This is the communitar-
ian view. Conversely, for liberals, ideally, the individual decides
upon his or her principles from a position of detachment.
Lee’s story brings into sharp relief the gulf of incomprehen-
sion that exists between the liberal and the communitarian on
the issue of identity. For the liberal, the notion of what we might
call ‘inherited responsibility’ is simply an absurdity: I am no more
responsible for the crimes of the British Empire than a Russian
person of my age is for those of Stalin. But for the communitar-
ian the idea seems plausible, even obvious. Of course, the liberal
is willing to accept that we might owe something to those who
are still suffering the impact of past actions by our co-nationals
– for example, political chaos in the Middle East – but only to
the extent that we are still benefiting from them. If my grandfa-
ther robbed your grandfather, that’s nothing to do with me, so
long as his ill-gotten gains didn’t put me through university.
You might be feeling a little uneasy at this point. Specifically,
you might be feeling an intuitive sympathy for the communitar-
ian view. You might even be thinking that there’s something psy-
chologically odd about the kind of person who can’t grasp it.
If so, you are in good company. In his book The Righteous
Mind (2012), the evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt sees
such liberals as lacking something that most people have as a
matter of instinct. He does not precisely say we’re defective
(although he comes close), but he certainly thinks we’re evolu-
tionary anomalies, born without the full range of moral intu-
itions possessed by others.
One of the things wrong with Haidt’s view is that he fails to
see that the detached liberal position is not based on an odd moral
intuition but on a kind of achievement which requires work.
Many of us as children and since have indulged in national pride
but liberals have learnt to treat these psychological tendencies
with a certain caution and allow them only limited weight in
wider, more universal schemes of values.
Model 2: Contractual Patriotism
Contractual theories of patriotism acknowledge the ‘accidental’
nature of identity yet seek to maintain that we nevertheless have
special obligations to those who share membership of our par-
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 19
‘PATRIOTISM’ © STEVE LILLIE 2018 PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVELILLIE.BIZ
ticular communities. There is no notion here of there being an
actual contract. Only if you become a naturalised citizen is there
ever some kind of official ‘signing up’. Instead what is usually
invoked is a sort of implicit contract based on mutual benefit
and shared hazards.
A common way of understanding how such implicit commu- by Melissa Felder
nal loyalties develop is through considering ‘The Prisoner’s
Dilemma’. In the classic version of this thought experiment you
imagine yourself as a criminal who has been arrested with your
partner in crime. The police separate you for purposes of inter-
rogation, and you’re told that if you confess you’ll receive a
lesser punishment than if you don’t say anything and yet are
found guilty because your colleague confesses. However, the
only way you can be found guilty is if either of you confesses.

PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM

If neither confess, you both go scot free. Of course, the impli-
cation is that the same offer is being made to your friend. Your
decision becomes a matter of strategy. You could assume the
loyalty of your accomplice and stay silent – a position that car-
ries with it the obvious risk that he won’t stay silent; or you can
sing like the proverbial canary. What would you do?
One limitation of the standard prisoner’s dilemma is that it is

SIMON + FINN CARTOON © MELISSA FELDER 2018

a one-off situation in which neither person has any incentive to
do anything but look after their immediate interests. Other ver-
sions of the game have proposed a repeated (‘iterated’) form in
which you get to play the game over and over again, so that over
time you can punish disloyalty by giving back in kind. The most
successful strategy for establishing stable co-operation then turns
out to be initial mutual cooperation, followed by tit-for-tat.
All of this has much to do with how implicit contracts are
built up. In 1968 the economist Garrett Hardin published a
hugely influential paper called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’,
in which he predicted ecological disaster. Commons resources
are resources not owned by any particular individual, such as fish
stocks in the ocean or communal grazing land. Hardin predicted
that these resources would be decimated because no-one would
have any incentive not to exploit them – the logic being that if I
don’t grab what I can others will and the resource will soon be
gone anyway. What Hardin got wrong, at least in part, was that
the actions of the users of commons are not one-off events. If
we both live in the same village and you let your herd of sheep
overgraze the common land, then I, the local blacksmith who
have only a couple of goats which I keep for milking, will be seri-
ously unhappy with you. This won’t much matter if you never
need a blacksmith or your shoes mending (my brother is the
local shoemaker), but you will. Our lives are a kind of iterated
prisoner’s dilemma in which, in due course, my daughter has a
pretty good chance of marrying your son. You might think twice
before ripping off one of your grandchild’s other grandparents. pragmatist position is that at the scale of the nation state things
This suggests that localism is a good strategy for producing are just too big and complex for this to work. We simply can’t
high levels of co-operation. Of course, we won’t be entirely self- build up relationships of trust based on mutual dependency with
sufficient, so we’ll establish trading relationships with outsiders people whom we will either never meet again, or increasingly,
who will win our trust or not based on a larger-scale version of never meet at all. Looking around my study there are few, if
the same iterated interactions. No doubt the definition of who any, items that I can see that are locally sourced. My bookcases
‘we’ are will be modified over time, and ultimately ‘our’ com- came from a very nice shop my partner found, but I have no
munity might become the nation state. idea where they were made, and my laptop certainly isn’t a local
The problem with this view concerns what we might call the craft product. By the same token, the reason that there are still
limits of pragmatism. In the context of our local community I fish in the North Sea is more to do with soulless regulation
might treat you fairly because I need to do so. The flaw in the achieved at the supranational level than through the iterated

20 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018

contact of fishermen.
The implicit contract based on pragmatism and acquired trust
that binds us to our fellow citizens locally is not one that ever has
the chance to evolve to the national level. From the outset nations
were governed by abstract laws and values. In the terminology
of the sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), the local involves
Gemeinschaft (community) and the national involves Gesellschaft
(impersonal) models of social cohesion. And it gets more imper-
sonal over time as the scope and complexity of government
increases and co-operation becomes more global. Edmund
Burke’s ‘small battalions’, what we usually call ‘civil society’, have
necessarily given way to ‘big government’. For many people this
is a matter of profound regret. It’s even a problem for those pro-
ponents of the activist state who want citizens to be more than
consumers/tax payers with strong ties only to their own families.
Personally, I love paying tax when I can see it being used to
improve the community and make my and others’ lives longer,
healthier, and more secure; but this seems to some a rather pallid
basis for social cohesion, and one prone to fall apart at the least
suspicion (justified or otherwise) of freeloading, by individuals
or groups.
Model 3: Reasonable Assent & Patriotism
The last model I’ll consider is associated primarily with
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant argued that we owe the state
our loyalty to the extent that it embodies laws that any rational
being would consider just. The exact qualities and laws that such
a state might have and make are a matter for serious debate; but
the point is that if they can be agreed upon, their reasonable-
ness confers legitimacy and, therefore, obligation.
This model of patriotism has several major advantages over
the others. Firstly, it gets around a famous objection to the idea
of implicit contractual consent made by David Hume. Hume
likens the idea of our belonging to a society to which we auto-
matically owe obligations to the condition of a press-ganged
sailor who is provided with food, water and a bunk on a ship if
he works, but who was never asked if he wanted to go along for
the ride. By contrast, Kant’s position is that we owe an obliga-
tion to our society only to the extent that the society keeps a
bargain that anyone would reasonably accept, given the option.
If the community falls short of its laws being reasonable, then
our obligation to it to that extent vanishes.
Of course, communitarians aren’t going to be impressed by
this, since it is the felt rather than the thought aspects of obliga-
tion which concern them. Indeed, they may (wrongly) see Kant’s
argument as reducing identity to a consumer choice, rather than,
as he would argue, the rational duty of a rational agent.
An advantage of Kant’s position is that it gives us a way of
understanding our obligations which is far more applicable to
our current circumstances than one based on a shared language,
culture, or frequent interactions. Regardless of the promises of
some politicians, the developed world will have to learn to live
with the reality of mass migration, which will only become more
pressing as climate change renders it a necessity. Bangladesh is
going to sink, and globalisation is not going away either. Indeed,
if we want to preserve any genuine (as opposed to a tourist theme
park) localism, countries need to work together, since multina-
tionals have a habit of riding roughshod over diversity unless
Immanuel Kant,
Prussian
prevented by regulation from doing so.
However, it is arguable that Kant’s approach constitutes the
death knell of patriotism. On Kant’s model, ‘we’ are not those
who share geography or culture in common, but rather, those
who reach similar conclusions about the values that define a just
society. The list of values might not entirely coincide for all lib-
erals, but it would be surprising if they didn’t include notions
of respect for individual autonomy, the rule of law, and democ-
racy. Regardless of minor disagreements, liberals the world
over have more in common with each other than with the com-
munitarian conservative who lives next door to them and shares
superficially similar cultural traditions.
For liberals the power of tradition is explainable in anthro-
pological rather than moral terms. My own country is mired in
traditional strangeness (we have, for example, a hereditary head
of state, a partly unelected legislature, and an established church);
and while US citizens might see their country as a comparative
paragon of Enlightenment rationality, they are manifestly no
less prone to nostalgia. When Kantian rationalists do get misty-
eyed – the sight of a Spitfire in flight gets me every time – it is
not patriotism that inspires the emotion but an altogether more
abstract commitment: the aeroplane is emblematic of the tri-
umph of the values Nazism aimed to extinguish. I’m even moved
by the sight of the EU flag which, despite that institution’s mul-
tiple failings, represents an attempt to collectively face up to
shared challenges by societies which have huge amounts in
common. Cosmopolitans aren’t folk swept along by the emo-
tional impact of listening to one too many John Lennon songs,
but people who have reached conclusions and committed them-
selves accordingly. This is, in the end, what might make us seem
strange to many people, because it takes work to be sceptical
about the kind of tribalism that is natural to most of us. Like
Edmund Burke, people tend to prefer prejudice to abstraction,
so that feeling, often and tragically, trumps reason. We live in a
world where we can no longer afford to let it do so.
© PHILIP BADGER 2018
Phil Badger studied social sciences, including economics, psychology,
and social policy, with philosophy, and teaches in Sheffield.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 21
 Free Will Is Still Alive!
Carlo Filice questions recent attempts to question free will.
e think we are the partial authors of our own don’t exist at the level of subatomic particles does not mean that

W lives. Most of us think: “I am more than the sum

of the circumstances that affected what I am now.
I want some credit for my accomplishments, and
will accept some blame for my mistakes.” That’s the basic reason
we care about free will. Not many of us view ourselves as pro-
liquids and solids are unreal or less real than protons or elec-
trons. The similar fact that beliefs, intentions, decisions, and
indeed all conscious-level experiences do not exist at the level
of neurons and synapses also does not make conscious phenom-
ena somehow ‘less real’ or unreal. Meanings, consciousness,
grammed robots, even if the programming were complex, subtle, freedom, or the self are like liquids in this sense: the beauty of a
and included a feature that triggered it to reprogram itself. Caravaggio painting also does not exist at the subatomic level;
Is there any good reason to overturn this self-image of par- but meaning and beauty are not thereby fictions, ultimately dis-
tial autonomy? I don’t see it. The recent slew of popular anti- solved into the micro units of physics. And our choice-making
free will literature inspired by micro-neurology or by psycho- resides amongst the higher levels.
logical research is, at best, only suggestive. At worst, it is com- The nature of the interactions among these levels of reality is
pletely confused. a thorny scientific-philosophic issue, and there is a vast literature
on the topic. The complex debates in the philosophy of mind over
Over-Enthusiastic
Reductionism Caravaggio, The Taking of Christ, 1602
Here is a sample of the confused
The painting’s beauty isn’t on the molecular level
kind:

“The 20th-century nature-nurture

debate prepared us to think of ourselves
as shaped by influences beyond our con-
trol. But it left some room, at least in the
popular imagination, for the possibility
that we could overcome our circum-
stances or our genes to become the author
of our own destiny. The challenge posed
by neuroscience is more radical: It
describes the brain as a physical system
like any other, and suggests that we no
more will it to operate in a particular way
than we will our heart to beat. The con-
temporary scientific image of human
behavior is one of neurons firing, causing
other neurons to fire, causing our
thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain
that stretches back to our birth and
beyond. In principle, we are therefore
completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain
architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict ‘emergentism’, ‘supervenience’, and ‘downward causation’ have
that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accu- not led to clear resolutions. Yet to assume that macro-level phe-
racy.” nomena are impotent and can be dismissed because they are
(‘There’s No Such Thing as Free Will’, Stephen Cave, arguably reducible to micro-level explanations that don’t feature
The Atlantic, June 2016.) them ignores deep controversies, and I dare say that most philoso-
phers who focus on these questions are not in favor of any robust
Cave’s analysis illustrates a common confusion of reality form of reduction of macro- to micro-phenomena in any case.
levels. It confuses the neural or even chemical and electromag- Micro-level changes do, of course, affect the higher levels.
netic levels of brain activity with the thought/belief/will/per- Specifically, neurons do affect person-level thoughts, feelings,
sonhood level of our experience. But people do, of course, exist and behavior. But the reverse also seems incontrovertible to me:
at multiple levels, and it’s far from established that the more the simplest way for me to initiate all sorts of subtle activity in
physical levels are ‘more real’ than the more psychological levels. my throat muscles at the level of cells and molecules is to speak,
For example, the fact that features such as ‘liquid’ and ‘solid’ and mean, the words: “I love my wife!” How I make these many

22 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018

precise micro-events happen, just by stating and meaning these
words, we don’t really know. That these words are themselves
preceded by complex streams of muscular-cellular-molecular
events may or may not imply anything about the freedom of the
utterance. That depends on what we end up saying about the
nature of the interaction between the levels.
Prejudiced Data Interpretation
A second popular source of skepticism about free will comes
from the field of neuropsychology. In particular, it comes from
a series of delicate experiments claiming to show that non-con-
scious neural activity is the real decider, not our conscious voli-
tions. Benjamin Libet was perhaps the first to conduct such
experiments, in the 1980s. Many others have tried to duplicate
or improve on his original set-up. The evidence generated by
these experiments is interesting, but its interpretation is dis-
puted both by psychologists and by philosophers, a good exam-
ple being the philosopher Alfred Mele. Libet himself did not
draw an anti free-will conclusion from his experiment.
Libet’s experiment involved people choosing to press a button
and noting the time on a clock when they make the decision.
Meanwhile electrodes measure a nerve impulse setting up the
hand ready for the muscle contraction associated with the button-
pressing. Libet’s experiments showed that this nerve impulse is
fired a fraction of a second before the recorded conscious deci-
sion. Some have used this data to argue that all the neurological
activity associated with a choice happens before the choice is con-
sciously made or even independent of any conscious choice, so
showing that there is no such thing as free will.
What are the main problems with such experiments and this
interpretation of them? First, there are measurement issues,
such as determining when exactly one has fully formed one’s
conscious decision. Second, even if these measurement prob-
lems could be resolved, it is not clear that the measured ner-
vous activity that precedes the conscious choice is part of the
cause of the choice. It could instead be simply one phase of the
process, like a nervous preparation anticipating the making of
the choice. Thirdly, such findings apply to simple motor deci-
sions, like choosing to press a button. Why should these find-
ings carry over to sophisticated deliberative choices which
involve a complex process with many sub-decisions, such as
quitting a job, or not? Indeed, what connection is there between
these simple experimental situations and the millions of inter-
related choices one makes while writing a poem, planting a
garden, playing a tennis game, cooking a meal?
The entire area surrounding these experiments is too con-
tested to carry much weight. We will have to see what future
research shows.
Of course, even if we accept the reality of conscious phenom-
ena such as beliefs, desires, intentions, decisions, agency, and even
if we accept that they can cause changes in the physical world,
we could still view the whole process as deterministic. Every con-
scious decision might, in principle, be the inevitable consequence
of the prior river of both microscopic and macroscopic events
constituting our past. Might… but this apparent possibility is far
from having been shown as even likely. We have not even come
close to understanding and predicting the behavior of much sim-
pler organisms, like insects. So, again, let’s wait and see.
Presuming Only Determinism or Randomness
Patience is not our best trait. If only we could rule out free will
purely theoretically! Is there not a knockout punch available
against free will?
Maybe. Philosophers old and new have gone for the knock-
out punch by appealing to a series of arguments.
Here is an old standby: the crucial agent control needed for
free will requires more than mere indeterminism or randomness.
If one were to opt for coffee instead of tea due to some uncon-
trolled mental coin-flip, we surely would not be responsible for
that arbitrary decision. Indeed, arbitrarily deciding between
options in such a way could hardly be called a choice. But, the
argument goes, the only alternative to absolute determinism is
randomness. Either way, there can be no responsible free will.
The problem with this argument is that third options have
been dismissed too quickly.
Let’s consider a robot analogy to spell out this skeptical take
on free will. Imagine a robot playing poker. The robot is dealt
hands and has programmed instructions guiding its play. Nei-
ther of these aspects it chose. However, one of the programmed
instructions can be: “Whenever you are undecided because you
face two options of equal merit, go for one of those options ran-
domly.” The robot will occasionally face such circumstances. It
will then opt randomly (it comes equipped with a randomizer,
triggered by such indecision). Such choices would be done ‘on
its own’, as someone might say; and as these choices ‘on its own’
add up, its overall success or failure at the poker game (its life)
will become more and more ‘its own’.
However, this kind of robot would not have the free will we
care about:
(1) The robot has no say over its own initial programming (as
neither do we); but also,
(2) The robot has no control over the outcomes of its ‘indeci-
sion choices’, since they are produced by a randomizer. Any
randomizer, internal or not, by definition yields unpredictable
outcomes not under the agent’s control. The link between non-
predictability and agent responsibility is broken.
So how do we add an agent-control factor to the robot, or
to us, without losing the non-deterministic factor in our choices?
Frankly, we don’t know. The skeptic about free will is right
in pointing out that this agent-control factor is mysterious.
However, the intellectual jump from ‘still mysterious’ to ‘non-
existent’ (or, worse, ‘impossible’) gives many of us pause, if only
because this agent-control factor seems intimately real to all of
us. Cases where we exert sustained effort in the course of an activ-
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 23

ity make this factor especially evident. Some of us meditate,
aiming at fixing our attention on our breathing for minutes. It’s
hard to do, but we often succeed. And the doing of this activity
– with all the monitoring, directing, and redirecting involved –
yields direct evidence of intimate agency at work. Riding a bicy-
cle uphill is another good example. Moreover, these experiences
of intense monitoring and directing are similar in kind to those
involved in our ordinary choosing – of whether or not to have
the second bowl of ice cream; of quitting or staying at our job;
of whether or not discussions of free will matter, etc. These
choices are felt as then-and-there up to us, especially when they
conflict. They feel neither like random coin-flips inside us, nor
like inevitable products of our character, surroundings or mental
workings, but rather, like choices.
The Supposed Illusion of Agency
Could this feeling of being in control be an illusion? Perhaps,
but don’t bet on it.
Again, the issues here are not new: they echo thousand-year-
old debates between Buddhist and Hindu philosophers; or
between David Hume on one side and Immanuel Kant or René
Descartes on the other. The Buddhists and Hume claim that
there is no introspective evidence of a core self. They claim that
when we look inside ourselves, we only find streams of sensa-
tions, impulses, thoughts, drives, feelings, memories, so we are
simply a changing bundle of experiences. For a popular recent
example of this picture of the self, check out Sam Harris’s book
Free Will (2012). He repeatedly speaks of a self as a complex
stream of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings. Harris’s stimulat-
ing podcasts disseminate this unsubstantiated claim to millions.
This passive picture of our inner life as a stream of uncon-
trolled elements oversimplifies our experience. Yes, many
thoughts and dreams and feelings do merely occur to us; but
not all. The very activity of introspecting – what is that? – should
make us pause before denying that experience provides evidence
of our active agency. And it’s not the only activity that should.
Our conscious life is a wonderfully subtle mix of passive and
active elements, of thoughts and sensations that occur to us and
our active interplay with these. We actively try to summon for-
24 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
gotten names; actively list pluses and minuses when facing tough
choices; actively sustain an effort against resistance.
Again, could all the active experiences be illusory? Could we
really never consciously control our attention? Perhaps. But if
we are deceived by these ‘active experiences’ we must be deceiv-
able about virtually anything.
Alternatively, are we giving too much weight to experiences
of directing our mind, will, attention, or limbs? Perhaps. But
it’s really hard not to. Our experiences of choosing are inti-
mately tied to who we are.
And who or what is the ‘I’ doing the directing, the summon-
ing, the introspecting? Mystery, again. But the solution to this
mystery is not to belittle the activity. With all the dizzying suc-
cess of science, it’s easy to forget that many aspects of our inner
experience escape its tools. Love, creativity, beauty, commit-
ments, morality, meanings, the very experiential aspect of con-
sciousness… all of these remain scientifically contentious, if not
mysterious. Do they have a place in a world that is only physi-
cal? Perhaps not; but let’s not forget that a physicalist view of the
world is itself controversial. So, allegiance to physicalism cannot
settle the issue. Besides, if consciousness can emerge out of non-
conscious physical nature, active powers might equally develop
out of non-active ones within conscious aspects of nature.
No Chosen Foundations For Our Choices
There are other philosophical attempts to knock out free will.
One goes back at least as far as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
and was recently revived by Galen Strawson. The argument is
that there is no meaningful form of ultimate self-making or self-
programming, because one always needs preexisting motives to
shape your choices. In other words, you might be able to choose
how you respond to your desires, but you do not choose the
values by which you make this choice... One needs a prior pro-
gram even in order for one to meaningfully re-program oneself,
so no genuine autonomy is possible (even in degree).
This either-or thinking is also subject to the type of response
we used for the either-or of determinism/randomness. Yes, we
need prior motives to assess our motives meaningfully. But must
initial non-chosen motives always rule out transformations into
semi-autonomous ones? Not so fast! What if such non-chosen
motives are many and suitably complex; and what if they gen-
erate routine indecisions? These indecisions could generate the
pause, the space, for self-reflection. A complex psychology
might produce a self-initiated (partial) reprogramming. If I am
naturally both self-centered and empathetic, both curious and
cautious, the accumulation of split-decisions over time might
prompt me to develop one side of myself more than another,
and unpredictably. My own complex, non-chosen, open-ended
psychological resources might prompt some reprogramming.
This reprogramming may take autonomy-building forms.
Or perhaps not. But this issue also needs to be carefully
debated. The skeptics tend to go too fast. Much more would
have to be said here.
For the moment, it appears that neither science nor philos-
ophy has killed free will. The future is likely to remain open!
© CARLO FILICE 2018
Carlo Filice is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Geneseo and author of
The Purpose of Life: An Eastern Philosophical Vision (UPA, 2011).
 Is Everything A Computer?
Paul Austin Murphy computes the probabilities.
T
he term ‘computer’ is both vague and broad. Some
people involved in the field of artificial intelligence
even believe that molecules are computers. Or, more
precisely, they argue that molecules are closed physical
systems which compute. That is to say, molecules carry out infor-
mation processing: they receive input, work on that input, and
then produce output. Indeed, in one place I came across the fol-
lowing representation of the DNA molecule as a Turing machine:
Input Tape = DNA
Tape Reading Head = Ribosome
State Register = RNA
States = Amino acids
Instruction Table = DNA codon table
Output Tape = Proteins
(see ‘Is DNA a Turing Machine’ by Anand Mallaya, at
anandcv.wordpress.com)
The idea of computation as omnipresent reaches its zenith
with what’s called pancomputationalism. This is the view that the
entire evolution of the universe is a computation. That must
mean, according to some, that God is a computer programmer.
Again and again the issue of what we can or can’t call a computer
seems to come back to the vagueness of the word ‘computation’.
One way this issue can be approached is to admit that in certain
senses the mind-brain system is indeed a computer, in that it carries
out computations. However, all sorts of philosophers have argued
that computation isn’t definitive of mind: it’s not necessary, or even
important, to a mind being a mind that it does computations. Or it
may be important, though only in the sense that any human mind
can do the same sort of operations that any man-made computer
can do; or as the American philosopher Hilary Putnam puts it,
“every ordinary open system realizes every abstract finite automa-
ton” (Representation & Reality, 1991).
John Searle agrees with Putnam on this. He wrote the follow-
ing about the broadness of the term ‘computation’:
“The wall behind my back is right now implementing the WordStar
program, because there is some pattern of molecule movements that
is isomorphic with the formal structure of WordStar. But if the wall is
implementing WordStar, if it is a big enough wall it is implementing
any program, including any program implemented in the brain.”
(Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays, 2008)
“The window in front of me is a very simple computer. Window open
= 1, window closed = 0. That is, if we accept Turing’s definition
according to which anything to which you can assign a 0 and a 1 is a
computer, then the window is a simple and trivial computer.”
(The Mystery of Consciousness, 1990)
Of course there are certain things that computers do which
Searle’s wall or window don’t do. There are also indefinitely
many things that the mind-brain does that computers can’t do.
However, that doesn’t seem to stop people claiming that the
mind-brain is a computer.
When people say “the brain is a computer,” most of them really
mean that the mind-brain system sometimes and in some ways
behaves like a computer. However, other people believe that the
human brain is literally a computer. So let’s put some meat on the
idea that ‘brains behave like computers’. It amounts to saying that
some processing done by brains to some extent parallels what
computers do. Indeed the brain’s own neurons process input in
ways similar to the logic gates on a microchip. But the neuron’s
processing also has some similarities with what goes in a cell, or
even in an inorganic or inanimate system. The crunch question
may therefore be: how alike are mind-brains and computers when
it comes to processing highly complex tasks?
Where does the idea that the brain is a computer come from?
Firstly, there are strong links often made between brains, math-
ematical models and computers. Workers in artificial intelli-
gence are keen to tell us that physicists have created accurate
models of all aspects of physical reality, and that these models are
essentially mathematical in nature. Thus it’s only one step on
from there to say that they’re also computable. Thus a computer
can model and compute the whole of physical reality, including
the brain. Some go so far as to say that mathematics is synony-
mous with computation, and through maths we can model all of
reality (or at least each bit separately), including the brain. The
argument here is, very roughly, that once we have mathemati-
cally described all the workings of the brain, then a computer
could model brain processes. This makes the brain a computer,
they say. Other people talk about ‘simulating’ physical systems
rather than modelling them. One such person (Aaron Roth)
concludes, “if the brain is a purely physical object, which is the
only option consistent with our understanding of how the uni-
verse works, there is no reason it cannot be simulated.”
The logic in either approach is simple:
i) All physical objects or systems can be mathematically simu-
lated/modelled.
ii) The brain is a physical object or system.
iii) Therefore the brain can be mathematically simulated/modelled.
iv) Therefore the brain is a computer.
The problem is the slide from x being computable to x being
a computer. Even if the brain or its workings were computable,
that wouldn’t necessarily make it a computer. Searle’s wall (or
window) is digitally computable, and some subset of its
behaviour is the behaviour of a computer; but that doesn’t make
either the wall or window a computer. Sure, we can define ‘com-
puter’ in such a way as to stipulate, for example that If the brain is
computable, then it’s a computer; and do the same for Searle’s wall
or window. If that wall (window, etc) is computable, then it’s a
computer… At this rate, almost everything physical is a com-
puter. But, on the other hand, a proper computer must be able to
systematically process input to create output. So a computer
mustn’t only be computable, it must also be a computer!
© PAUL AUSTIN MURPHY 2018
Paul Austin Murphy is a writer on politics and philosophy. His
philosophy blog is at paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.co.uk
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 25
 Splitting Chairs
W
Quentin Mareuse distinguishes lots of ways of distinguishing things.
hen a rock breaks in two, you get two rocks. But
when a chair breaks in two, you get two parts of
a chair. Why the difference? What makes some-
thing only a part of something else, as opposed
to a thing in its own right?
Although the discrepancy initially seems enigmatic, the dif-
ference is also remarkably intuitive. No-one would hesitate to
call the two pieces of a broken rock rocks in themselves: after
all, many rocks are broken pieces of larger rocks. Similarly, no-
one in their right mind would call a broken part of a chair a
chair. This distinction is what has to be explained.
Perhaps our intuition can be explained by the type-token dis-
tinction. The type-token distinction goes back to Plato and Aris-
totle, and was specifically applied by the scholastic philosophers
of the Middle Ages who followed in their tradition. This theory
separates types, which are concepts or categories for a set of sim-
ilar objects, from tokens, which are particular concrete examples
of those types. For instance, in the line “Rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose” from Gertrude Stein’s novel Sacred Emily, there are
three types of words – ‘rose’, ‘is’, and ‘a’ – but ten different
tokens of words – there are ten words in the sentence. So
although they are different tokens, with different properties,
namely different sizes and shapes, the two new rocks remain the
same type of thing (rocks) as the parent rock. Conversely, the
two new parts of the chair are fundamentally different types of
thing from the original chair, as well as two new tokens of things.
Mere Mereology
In the search for the differentiating factors between the two
types of part, the field to which we must turn is mereology, which
is the philosophical study of part-whole relations. Mereology
has a long history, starting with the Pre-Socratic philosophers,
and remains a prominent field of philosophy in the twenty-first
century. Although some philosophers, including Peter Forrest
(‘How Innocent is Mereology?’, Analysis 56, 1996) , have chal-
lenged mereology’s approach, the theories I employ here are
relatively basic and uncontroversial, and so may be considered
reliable representations of the field.
Mereology underwent serious development under Aristotle
(384-322 BC), who drew one of its principal distinctions: that
between homogeneous and heterogeneous parts. Homogeneous
parts are parts of the same type as an original entity, and het-
erogeneous parts are parts of different types from the original
entity. For instance, a human hand is a heterogeneous part of
the human body; and the parts of the hand are also heteroge-
nous, because it can be split up into components such as skin,
muscles, and bones, which are fundamentally different types of
thing from the hand: no-one would refer to the muscle in the
hand as ‘hand’, but rather as ‘muscle’. By contrast (at least from
a layman’s unscientific perspective, or from Aristotle’s proto-
scientific perspective) muscle is a homogeneous part of the hand,
26 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
since it cannot obviously be subdivided into different parts: all
parts of a muscle can be referred to as ‘muscle’.
There is a clear difference between rock parts and chair parts
in this respect. To use two more of Aristotle’s jargon terms, the
two new rocks are homogeneous parts materially, as they only
consist of rock, and also formally, as they are the uniform arrange-
ments without distinct parts found in any rock. Meanwhile, the
chair parts are heterogeneous in both matter and form each
piece will contain several distinct components, including the
legs, stretcher, seat, spindle and various rails.
However, the distinction between heterogenous and homoge-
nous may not be as clear as it at first seems. If the chair were
broken in such a way that the two parts following the fracture
included a solitary wooden leg, the leg would itself be homoge-
neous because all of a chair leg is chair leg, without (evident)
parts itself. This indicates that simple heterogeneity may not be
what makes something merely a part of something else. We will
need to look to other parts of mereology to find our answer.
(Un)Interrupted
Another way to differentiate parts is into continuous and contigu-
ous wholes. In continuous wholes, the parts extend without inter-
ruption, seamlessly joining into one another, whereas in con-
tiguous wholes the parts are discrete entities, albeit attached to
each other or closely bordering each other. The parent rock as
well as its offspring are continuous wholes; whilst the chair, with
its distinct attached parts, is a contiguous whole. This distinc-
tion would be supported by the Medieval French philosopher
Peter Abelard (1079-1142), who believed that natural objects
such as rocks are always continuous, and man-made ones such
as the chair always contiguous, because only God can authenti-
cally fuse parts into a continuous whole.
However, although this distinction shows up a clear differ-
ence between the two new rocks and the two parts of the chair,
it doesn’t explain why we refer to the two new rocks as ‘rocks’
rather than as ‘parts of a rock’. If the two new rocks were origi-
nally simply parts in the continuous whole of the parent rock,
they would be referred to as such both before and after the frac-
ture. Indeed, the key flaw in trying to explain the difference in
perception between rocks and chairs using either the homoge-
neous/heterogeneous distinction or the continuous/contiguous
distinction is that both approaches inevitably entail that the two
new rocks be considered only parts of the original parent rock,
which seems to go against our intuitions.
No Accident
In his book Categories, Aristotle defined two more key philo-
sophical terms, closely related to the theory of types and tokens:
substantial form and accidental form. An object’s substantial form
consists of the properties it must possess to exist as the type of
object it is. For humans, this would consist of physical proper-
ELEMENTS IN TRANSITION © KEN LAIDLAW 2018 PLEASE VISIT WWW.KENLAIDLAW.COM TO SEE MORE OF KEN’S ART

February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 27


ROCK(S) © PRINCE ROY 2007
ties such as having a head, eyes, and a torso, and also mental
properties such as the ability to reason. By contrast, an object’s
accidental form consists of the properties it has that are not
essential to its being that type of object – or we can say, prop-
erties which vary amongst the different tokens of that particu-
lar type. For humans, this would include properties such as their
height, strength, or courage.
This contrast between substance and accident was applied
in mereology by St Thomas Aquinas back in the thirteenth cen-
tury. The Angelic Doctor as he was known, believed that only
natural objects possess substantial form, since man-made objects
(‘artefacts’) are made merely by people rearranging things that
already exist. For him these parts can function independently
of the artefact’s specific purpose.
Aquinas’s theory suggests that we can tell whether a part is
substantial or accidental by examining the effect of the whole’s
form on the functionality of its parts. For instance, if the form
of a human ceases to exist (if, for example, the person dies), then
their parts, such as hands, become redundant. This makes them
part of the substantial form of a human being. Conversely, if
the form of a car ceases to exist (by running out of fuel, for
instance), its parts can still function: the carburettor, for exam-
ple, could be transferred to another car and work fine.
Aquinas’s argument that artefacts cannot possess substantial
form is problematic. There are organ transplants. Plus, parts of
artefacts often seem to service only that artefact and would be
redundant without it: consider a handmade watch. Further-
more, on Aquinas’s argument, non-living substances often do
not seem to possess substantial form, as their parts could easily
exist independently of the whole. Indeed, in this respect the two
rocks are more similar to the carburettor (an artefact) than the
hand (a natural object), because they have their own form which
exists independently of the whole (the parent rock), and is, in
fact, the same as that of the parent rock. Meanwhile, the two
parts of the chair more closely resemble the hands than the car-
burettor: just as the hands lose their purpose as they become
separated from the body, the part of the chair breaking off also
loses its purpose. So Aquinas’s ideas about substantial and acci-
dental form do not answer our question. But they do reveal a
crucial distinction between the two new rocks and the two
broken parts of the chair. The form and purpose of the new
rocks is the same as that of the parent rock; they are seen in the
same way as the parent was. By contrast the parts of the chair
do not maintain the form and purpose of the original chair.
28 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
The Purposes of Parts
This idea that purpose or design is at the heart of our discrep-
ancy seems attractive initially, but some flaws in this conception
are quickly found. Take the example of a detached tree leaf,
which has no obvious function once separated from the tree. If
it were lying on the ground intact, we would still call it a leaf;
but if it were ripped in two we could comfortably call the two
pieces ‘parts of a leaf’. Like the rock, the leaf lying on the ground
has no function, and like the rock it was not designed by a human,
yet its two broken pieces are ‘parts of a leaf’, not new leaves.
This difference between leaves and rocks can be accounted for
in two ways. The first way is by arguing that the leaf at least used
to have a function (providing energy to the tree), whereas a rock
has none. Secondly, the difference between broken rocks and
broken leaves can be explained by introducing the wider concept
of form, which for Aristotle includes shape and material as well as
purpose. In this particular example the key difference is that leaves
have to be a certain shape which they grew into, with continuous
boundaries and no rips or cuts, whereas rocks do not. Rocks can
be any shape. The need for a leaf to be a certain shape is deter-
mined by its original function, and so these two elements of what
it is to be a leaf are intrinsically linked. Function and shape are intrin-
sically linked under Aristotle’s four-part notion of cause. Indeed,
the leaf’s former function is what makes the shape important.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can see that the cause of an entity in the Aris-
totelian sense (that is, what makes something exist as it does) is
the key to defining whether its broken pieces are merely parts
of it or tokens of the same type of object in themselves.
Aristotle famously claimed that there are four types of cause:
the formal cause (a thing’s arrangement or shape), its material
cause (what a thing is made of), its efficient cause (which refers to
what happened to give rise to the thing), and its final cause (the
end to which it directs: its purpose). For our purposes, the impor-
tant causes are material, formal and final. If the broken pieces
differ from the parent object in any of these respects, they can
only be considered ‘parts’ of the original object. Thus if the orig-
inal entity has a specific shape that becomes fragmented (formal
cause), as in a chair or leaf, the broken pieces will merely be con-
sidered parts. Also, if the original entity is made of a particular
(variety of) material(s), the broken pieces will be considered
merely parts if they do not consist of the same material(s). Or if
the original entity fulfills a specific function (final cause), the
broken pieces will be considered merely parts if they do not
themselves fulfill that function. The two new rocks remain rocks
because, on all three of these criteria, which together determine
the rock’s substantial form and make it the type of thing it is,
they are the same as the parent rock. Meanwhile, the two parts
of a chair are merely parts because they have different formal
and final (and quite possibly, material) causes compared to the
parent chair: they have a different type of shape from a chair,
and each separately does not fulfil the purpose of a chair.
In summary, If two entities are essentially the same type of
thing, one must be considered more than a mere ‘part’ of the
other, even if it did originate from that thing.
© QUENTIN MAREUSE 2018
Quentin Mareuse is an undergraduate at Columbia University, NYC.
 Twelve Principles of Knowledge
George Dunseth outlines basic principles for knowing whether or not ideas are true.
A
s I began to think and exchange ideas I soon realised
that it is important to be reasonable and rational. But
I then felt a powerful need to understand what that
means. And so I began making a lifelong, constantly
revised, simple list of how all of us support our truth claims.
What counts as evidence for truth in rational argument? I
have attempted to be simple, clear and exhaustive. These princi-
ples can be printed on a piece of paper and posted proudly on
your refrigerator. They apply both to the sciences and the
humanities, since science does not have a monopoly on reason.
None of the principles are sufficient in themselves, and some
are clearly stronger and more warranted than others. The more
of them that apply to your claim, the more warranted your truth
claim is – we could even say, the more reasonable it is.
1. Non-Contradiction
Is this idea or set of ideas consistent, and therefore coherent?
This is the first principle of formal logic.
2. Observation
Is this idea verified by sense observation?
3. Experimentation
Can this observation be repeated predictably?
4. Testability
Is this idea in theory falsifiable, and can its truth value be put to
the test? In other words, is it possible to think about this truth
claim being wrong?
5. Comprehensiveness: That which explains the most.
Is this the simplest explanation of the most phenomena?
6. Fit
Does this help a lot of related factors fit nicely into place?
7. Pragmatism: What works best?
Does this work? If a set of ideas works, then it is likely that there
is something true about them!
8. Intuition
Does this idea strongly inwardly demand assent?
9. Common Sense
Is this very widely, or perhaps almost universally, accepted as
true? (Many philosophers cringe here, but may I suggest that a
little regard for common sense is not unhelpful?! And like all the
principles, it cannot stand alone.)
10. History & Tradition
Does this have historical warrant – meaning that it has stood the
test of time?
11. Warranted Authority
Is this backed by a reliable testimony or source?
12. Analogy
Does this idea cohere with a related idea which is seen to be
true? Then this similarity could imply its own truth.
Finally, a word on ‘mystical’ truth claims. Mystical experience
is not in the above twelve principles of reason, since by definition
conclusions based on it are not thereby supported by reason.
However, I think it is wise to be open to the idea that there may
be truths inaccessible to reason or outside its parameters.
© GEORGE DUNSETH 2018
George Dunseth is a jazz musician in Leicester, England.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 29
Are You A Garbled Relativist?
Ray Prebble argues that moral relativism is both incoherent and immoral.
re you a relativist? A relativist is someone who says
A things like “There are many truths, many ways of
seeing things.” Compare this with the non-relativist,
or absolutist, who says, “This is how things are, and
there are no two ways about it.” What’s your reaction to these
opposing viewpoints? If the relativist sounds decent, non-judge-
mental, and understanding – someone you feel a connection
with – whereas the absolutist sounds biased, unforgiving, and
unthinking – someone you would avoid – then you are just the
audience I’m aiming at.
Of course one can unproblematically be a relativist about
taste in art, or in gardening, or anything involving only purely
subjective evaluations. But the philosophically interesting kind
of relativism is cultural relativism, also known as (or is at least
a substantial subdivision of) moral relativism. (From now on in
this article, ‘relativists’ will refer specifically to moral relativists.)
The fact that different cultures do things differently is still
unproblematic if you’re deciding where to have dinner; but
accepting the differences can get tricky when you’re making
decisions about moral issues. How ought one to think and act
when cultures clash morally or moral systems collide? Whose
rules should be followed; yours or theirs? How can we decide?
What should a nice relativist do?
These questions are more pertinent today than ever. Decent
people from modern Westernised cultures often talk about the
requirement to tolerate and respect people from other cultures.
But you need to be careful that you don’t fall into one or more
Moral relativism means slavery is just another cultural tradition
30 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
of the traps which start to open once you start putting meat on
the bones of this relativist framework.
Here’s a quick tour around the trap line.
1. Did I Just Contradict Myself?
Let’s begin by looking at the idea that if morality is relative to
cultures – if one is enculturated into one’s moral beliefs, and
there is nothing more to morality than that − then there is no
way of choosing between moral systems, and one ought there-
fore to respect the moral decisions of other cultures. To put it
another way, the idea is one ought not to pass moral judgements
on the moral judgements of other cultures, or the actions of
people from other cultures.
This is a very interesting argument, because it is both beguil-
ingly plausible and utterly invalid. The problem is that rela-
tivists’ moral statements, such as “One ought not to pass moral
judgements on the actions of people from other cultures” are
not remotely relative; they are absolute. They are meant to apply
as a moral rule to all individuals in all cultures. So, ironically,
the central catch-cry of many moral relativists is a thoroughly
absolutist moral statement, the very possibility of which their
own theory denies.
At best, statements about not passing judgement on other
cultures can coherently function as representing a moral deci-
sion in one’s own culture (if for a moment we pretend there is
such a thing as all the members of a culture having the same
moral beliefs). In other words, you and the other members of

Sati: Just another tradition to be respected?
your culture might believe such statements to be true; but
according to that very statement of belief, a member of another
culture has the right to say, “Well, moral relativism is what you
believe in your culture; but in my culture we don’t believe that
one ought not to pass moral judgements on the people from
other cultures. We feel perfectly free to cast moral judgements
on whomever we like, including you and your culture.” You
may have experienced this very retort.
Further considering the statement by the relativist, “You
ought to be tolerant of others’ moral beliefs” – what then of the
moral belief that one ought not be tolerant of others’ moral
beliefs? Ought one to tolerate this moral belief? Ought one to
tolerate intolerance? Of course the relativist should (supposing
of course that they want to be consistent) because it is a moral
belief; and once you accept that you ought to be tolerant of
others’ moral beliefs, then you are obliged to tolerate others’
intolerance – in the name of absolute toleration!
2. Is That What I Mean?
But let’s suppose that we accept both that moral judgements
are relative to cultures and that this relativism gives each cul-
ture some kind of protection from criticism from other cultures,
and let’s see where it leads.
Now it could be that a generally agreed-upon belief in my
culture is that dark-skinned people are inferior and that we have
the right to enslave them and use them to our benefit, and that
because of their inferiority we are not morally wrong in doing
so. The moral beliefs of the dark-skinned people themselves
are irrelevant (as are the beliefs of any other culture): they can
make whatever moral judgements they like, but they have no
relevance to my culture, because my moral system is distinct
from theirs, and cannot be judged by their beliefs.
So let’s consider the captain of a Muslim slave ship operating
between Africa and the Middle East in the middle of the nine-
teenth century. (Some readers may feel uncomfortable at me sin-
gling out Muslims. Would you have felt uncomfortable if I had
singled out Christians? No? Is that because you feel that one
ought not to pass judgement on other cultures? If so, well done:
You have passed the ‘Am I a garbled relativist?’ test with flying
colours!) If you had challenged the morality of the slaver cap-
tain’s activities, pointing out that the British had made the slave
trade illegal in 1807, he might have said, “Why should I care? In
my culture slavery is acceptable. If you want to abolish slavery in
your culture, that’s up to you. Leave me alone!” This slave trader
is making moral judgements within a relativistic framework. He
is a moral relativist through and through. Yet this doesn’t restrain
him from acting appallingly towards the members of other cul-
tures. In fact, it encourages him to do so.
For another example, many writers have poured scorn on the
mental gymnastics of those cultural relativists, especially ones
also claiming to be feminists, who have justified the Hindu ritual
of sati – the practice of a wife throwing herself on her husband’s
funeral pyre – or the widespread African cultural practice of gen-
ital mutilation, in culturally relativistic terms. The scorn is well
deserved, because such tolerance involves condoning the suffer-
ing of women out of post-colonial guilt, rather than through any
well-thought-out moral system. It’s relativism at its worst.
The point I am making here is that relativism leads not just to
contradiction, but also, sometimes, to the very kind of abhorrent
moral conclusions it sets out to avoid, and provides an excuse for
any sort of behaviour the members of a culture can collectively
dream up. Think of the response of any authoritarian country
accused by Amnesty International of human rights abuses: “You
have no right to judge, no right to interfere!” It is the perfect
defence against a relativist. Note also that relativism does not imply
any requirement to tolerate strangers in one’s midst: as Tzvetan
Todorov notes, “an entirely consistent relativist may demand that
all foreigners go home, so they can live surrounded by their own
values” (On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism and Exoticism in
French Thought, trans. C. Porter, 1993, p.34).
3. How Big Is ‘My Culture’?
There is also the problem of what actually constitutes a culture.
Depending on how you define the term, a culture could be a
family group or a confederation of nations. But the issue
becomes crucially important when a relativist poses the ques-
tion as to when the cultural walls rear up to protect a group
from moral criticism. Was the Manson family a cultural group?
On most criteria, yes. So should we have tolerated and/or
respected their moral decisions, their moral system?
We tend to talk very airily about ‘culture’. Someone might
expound knowledgeably at a dinner party about ‘Spanish cul-
ture’ or ‘the culture of the Inuit’ as if a given culture has a single
list of beliefs and practices to which everyone adheres – which,
of course, is nonsense. There is a large diversity of moral think-
ing within any culture, and one could quite validly react to any
claim that “This is what we do in our culture” with “Says who?”
or “What do you mean by our culture?” However, if moral right
and wrong are to be based on cultural beliefs, there had better
be some way of coming to an agreement about what these beliefs
actually are. But haven’t we now defeated the whole point of
cultural relativism? Morality is supposed to arise naturally as a
function of being part of a culture, and suddenly relativism seems
to work perhaps only for an individual at any given time, or at
best, a small tribe living on a river bank.
Does it make a difference if we take a temporal perspective?
On most criteria of cultural difference, the British colonists of
New Zealand in the nineteenth century could be said to consti-
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 31
tute a very different culture to either British or New Zealand cul-
ture in the twenty-first century. It would seem to follow that
whatever the colonists did or didn’t do, in terms of confiscating
land or abusing the (non-relative) rights of the Maori, is, accord-
ing to cultural relativism, outside the bounds of moral criticism.
So present-day Maori cannot criticise the actions of the colonists,
because Maori belong to a different culture from them. Indeed,
on this line of reasoning, the Maori cannot seek redress from the
present New Zealand government either, because the govern-
ment also belongs to another culture from the colonists.
Are rich, clean-cut Western businessmen a different culture
from poor, dreadlocked, anti-globalisation Western activists?
They have staggeringly different values and accompanying
moral systems, so the cultural relativist would surely have to
conclude that they are from different cultures – and that there-
fore each is safe from the other’s criticism. Both groups have
been enculturated into their moral beliefs and actions; and if
they are relativists, they ought to stand back and respect the
other’s culture. Otherwise any criticism from one side – such
as protesting and egg throwing – is simply a form of cultural
imperialism − an attempt to impose one’s culture forcibly on
others: to culturally colonise them.
4. Toleration Vs Respect
Some relativists question whether cultural relativism implies
toleration, or rather, respect. Early anthropologists promoted tol-
eration, or tolerance; but it was later argued that tolerance
implies acting from a position of power to put up with some-
thing you condemn or think is bad, much as a parent might put
up with an errant teenager. This, it was further argued, implies
a patronising cultural attitude, and still involves making evalu-
ative judgements. As a result, tolerance and toleration have often
been rejected by relativists in favour of respect. For example,
Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Professor of Contemporary
Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford
University, in The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of
Pluralism (2010), sees toleration as a kind of ‘intellectual char-
ity’ and therefore an insult, since
“when standing on equal footing, one
does not expect to be merely toler-
ated or grudgingly accepted” (p.47).
He also argues that tolerance towards
other groups is not enough because
it involves acquiescing to the prevail-
ing power relations: “Calling upon
powers to be tolerant once meant
asking them to moderate their
strength and to limit their ability to
do harm. This actually implied an
acceptance of a power relationship
that might exist between the State and
individuals, the police and citizens, or
between colonisers and colonised”
(ibid). Rather than this patronising
toleration, then, Ramadan wants
acceptance and respect from other cul-
tures.
There are two important points
32 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
here (for this analysis I have made use of Frank Furedi’s excel-
lent review in Spiked 40, 2010). First, toleration does not imply
any particular power relation, much less one in which it is only
the more powerful who tolerates the less. Many who are dis-
empowered, from downtrodden wives to minority cultures, tol-
erate the actions of those who are more powerful, for many rea-
sons, and when pressed may even sometimes maintain that this
is not only the safe course but the morally right thing to do.
And as citizens we tolerate (albeit while grumbling) the quirks
of local and central government, while recognizing their right
to have power over us. Indeed, toleration of a greater power is
part of the social contract. One could also well ask Ramadan
why he doesn’t respect the viewpoint of people who advocate
merely tolerating and grudgingly accepting other cultures?
Where is his respect for that culture?
The second point is, what’s so bad about being tolerated and
grudgingly accepted? After all, this could well describe how
most academics feel about each other (on a good day). A
common perspective in academia would be, “I think your the-
ories are nonsense and your work sloppy, but I recognise your
right to publish your opinions.” Indeed, this attitude could be
viewed as the very core of Enlightenment thinking: tolerating
what you utterly disagree with because you don’t think that
people with different opinions ought to be silenced. The same
applies to attitudes to other cultures: laws that apply equally to
all citizens, plus toleration and grudging acceptance among cul-
tural groups, could be seen as the core of multiculturalism. And
this is not to be summarily dismissed. After all, it’s easy to respect
someone you actually respect because you agree with their values.
Tolerating someone you fundamentally disagree with and whose
beliefs and actions you despise is a monumental achievement.
Suppose however that we do accept that one ought to respect
the moral beliefs of others. What does this commit us to in
terms of decision-making and governance? This is a pressing
contemporary question, because the requirement to respect the
beliefs of others is not simply an idea bandied about by writers
on multiculturalism. It often crops up in legislation dealing with
Would you advocate respecting Naziism?
moral issues where different cultures with different viewpoints
are involved, such as opinions on the rights of the foetus. Respect
often becomes a legal requirement. Moreover, an enormous
amount of energy and money is put into various forms of com-
munity consultation by local and central government, where
there is an explicit or tacit requirement to respect the views of
all participants. And so the idea of respect has enormous prac-
tical implications. But what does such respect amount to? Can
I be said to be respecting someone’s views if I allow them a hear-
ing, listen to them attentively, ask for points of clarification,
and then utterly reject all their suggestions? How can you be
said to respect someone’s beliefs if you ignore what they say?
Does this mean respect entails agreeing with and acquiescing
to people? Clearly not, given that many opinions contradict
each other, and yet practical decisions need to be made.
To sum up: it’s hard to see how either ‘toleration’ or ‘respect’
helps the relativist. Indeed, the mere fact that different cultures
have different moral systems doesn’t of itself imply any sort of
moral attitude towards other cultures; and if it did imply toler-
ation or respect, then we would be obliged to tolerate or respect
the most morally appalling cultural groups history has thrown
up. Finally, where there is a cultural clash, while we are all busy
tolerating or respecting each other, how is one to decide on a
course of action? Relativism provides no answers, no way of
making a moral decision.
5. You’ve Just Ruined Everything
Having been informed that moral beliefs are just customs that
we have had enculturated into us, like cooking techniques, and
that there is no absolute right or wrong, one is left with no
reason for behaving morally, apart perhaps from any sympa-
thy you might accidentally feel, or to avoid punishment or
humiliation. Relativism, despite setting out to be decent, in
effect destroys morality because it gives a person no objective
reason to be moral. And this applies to how one behaves towards
anybody, including people from another culture, the people
who live next door, one’s own family, and one’s own self. If
morality is simply what people do, and there is no objective
authority to appeal to, then in the end it doesn’t really matter
what you do.
It’s hard not to feel that this conclusion has already been
reached by many people in modern society, especially the young.
Imagine constantly hearing, “Listen, there is no objective basis
for morality, but by the way, you still ought to be nice, espe-
cially to people who look and act differently to you.” Why should
anyone pay any attention to this?
5. Nobody’s Really A Moral Relativist
So with moral relativism you end up contradicting yourself, or
you find yourself allowing slavery, or you eliminate any objec-
tive reason for behaving decently. However, even though you
may still claim to be a moral relativist, if you dig deep enough,
you will inevitably find some practice that you are not willing
to accepts as a matter of culture, whether this be paedophilia,
genocide, torture or rape. Most people who claim to hold rela-
tivist views will baulk and bail at some stage, wanting to main-
tain that some action simply is wrong, even if it is practised or
condoned by all the members of a cultural group – such as the
Do you think this is
really wrong, or not?
Aztecs’ systematic human sacrifice of war captives.
This basic inconsistency is an essential part of what it means
to be a garbled relativist. A garbled relativist is someone who
espouses relativism (“One ought to respect the moral beliefs of
others”) in one breath, while issuing non-relativist statements
in the next (“Tax-avoiding rich capitalists should be put up
against the wall and shot!”). Indeed, anything you say people
should or should not do is a non-relativist assertion.
It is almost inevitable that a relativist will be a garbled rela-
tivist: there is always something that they will find so uncon-
scionably appalling that they will have to admit it really is wrong.
Conclusion
You might now ask, “Do these problems with moral relativism
mean we ought not to tolerate diversity? Does this mean we
ought to persecute people from different cultures for their dif-
ferent moral beliefs?” My reply is: absolutely not. But these prob-
lems do mean that a simple universal tolerance of all moral beliefs
is not a viable, or even meaningful, moral code. Instead we need
a robust framework within which to discuss clashes of moral sys-
tems – not something that falls apart as soon as you look at it.
So what’s the answer? What am I advocating? Bible thump-
ing, threats of fire and brimstone, and a corresponding list of
rules? No. I’m arguing that to put a blanket ban on criticising
the values and moral beliefs of another culture is patronising,
counterproductive, and dangerous. It stops discussion just when
it should be starting. Really respecting people from other cul-
tures means engaging with them, taking them seriously enough
to question their moral decisions: Why do you think that? How
can you justify doing that? What consequences will that deci-
sion have? Haven’t you just contradicted yourself? Does every-
one in your culture agree?
Morality must, in the end, be about arguing, and giving rea-
sons, and providing evidence. It cannot just be about being who
your culture encourages you to be.
© RAY PREBBLE 2018
Ray Prebble received his PhD in philosophy from Melbourne Uni-
versity. He works as an editor, lives on a lifestyle property, and is fin-
ishing off a book on the structure of moral thinking.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 33
 Why False Beliefs Are
Not Always Bad
Sally Latham argues that sometimes it’s better to be wrong.
t is a fairly common assumption that factually correct
I beliefs are to be strived for and factually incorrect beliefs
are to be avoided. In fact, for many philosophers, the very
cornerstone of the discipline is that true beliefs are good
and false beliefs are bad.
Yet this assumption is being challenged by Project PERFECT
(Pragmatic and Epistemic Role of Factually Erroneous Cogni-
tions and Thoughts). Headed by Professor Lisa Bortolotti at the
University of Birmingham, this project aims to establish whether
cognitions that are in some important way inaccurate can ever
be good for us. Delusional beliefs, distorted memories, beliefs
that fail to reflect social realities, and so forth, are frequent in
the non-clinical population; and are also listed as symptoms of
clinical psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and demen-
tia. Project PERFECT investigates whether such beliefs could
have redeeming features. The hypothesis is that there can exist
false but useful beliefs.
I will explain some of the evidence supporting this hypothesis
using two examples from the Project PERFECT research: firstly
depressive delusions, and secondly beliefs that fail to reflect social
inequalities. Both examples have the underlying theme that there
can be epistemic innocence to inaccurate or imperfect cognitions,
and in that case, such distortions in belief can be beneficial.
In explaining the concept of epistemic innocence in a paper
in Consciousness & Cognition in 2015 Bortolotti draws compari-
son with the ‘justification defence’ in UK and US law. This is
where an act that would normally be considered criminal can
be justified under the particular circumstances in which it was
performed; for example, if someone knocks someone out to pre-
vent serious harm they might do to themselves or others. The
act brings costs, but it’s justified as an emergency response
because it spares greater cost that could not have otherwise been
avoided. In this emergency situation, the otherwise criminal act
is the lesser of two evils. Similarily, Bortolotti argues that inac-
curate or imperfect cognitions, for example delusions or fac-
tual misrepresentations, can be epistemically innocent if:
a) They provide ‘epistemic benefit’ – meaning, they’re beliefs
that can help us.
b) There is no available alternative that would confer the same
benefit without higher cost in terms of knowledge or beliefs.
(‘Epistemic’ means ‘referring to beliefs or knowledge’.)
Depressive Delusions
First we’ll look at depressive delusions, the subject of paper by
Bortolotti and Magdalena Antrobus in the Unisinos Journal of
Philosophy (May 2016). A partial definition of delusion is “a false
belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that
is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes
and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof
or evidence to the contrary” (American Psychological Associa-
34 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
tion, 2013). One common depressive delusion is that one is fail-
ing to be there for others. Exaggerating one’s failing, or the
extent of one’s responsibilities, in this regard can lead to an
excessive sense of guilt. Other false beliefs include delusions of
persecution or of illness. These delusions emerge in cases of
severe depressive disorders (sometimes known as psychotic
depression or depressive psychosis), as well as in schizophrenia
and other psychoses.
It is important when considering the knowledge benefits of
depressive delusions to first distinguish them from schizophrenic
delusions. According to a paper by Giovanni Stranghellini and
Andrea Raballo (in the Journal of Affective Disorders 171, 2015),
schizophrenic delusions provide a (false) ‘revelation’ by uncov-
ering new content that is unfamiliar to the person. A ‘dawn of a
new reality’ occurs which alters the person’s perspective; for
example, the ‘discovery’ that the friendly behaviour of a neigh-
bour is all part of a plan to spy on them and ultimately harm
them. In contrast, depressive delusions confirm previously
acquired beliefs related to the self. Nothing new is discovered,
only old delusions reaffirmed. Delusions of guilt for example
will validate a pre-existing conviction a person has that they are
guilty of wrongdoing.
With this in mind we can start to examine the epistemic ben-
efits of such delusions. To understand this, let’s refer to Jean
Piaget’s Equilibrium of Cognitive Structures model, as set out
in his 1977 book The Development of Thought.
Central to this model is the concept of a schema. A schema is
a set of linked mental representations of the world used to under-
stand new situations and how to respond to them. An example
would be a schema about how to purchase goods in a shop, or
how to classify people according to gender. Schemata have evo-
lutionary benefits in terms of the speed and efficiency of our
information processing. When a person’s existing schemata can
explain what someone experiences, the result is cognitive bal-
ance, also known as cognitive equilibrium.
When someone is presented with a new object or new situa-
tion, says Piaget, there are two key processes required for cog-
nitive balance; either assimilation, whereby the existing schema
is used to deal with this new object or situation; or accommoda-
tion, whereby the existing schema does not neatly apply and itself
needs to be modified. The successful development of cognitive
structures is known as adaptation, and it requires both processes.
In the case of ineffective mental functioning, one of the pro-
cesses compensates for the deficiency of the other. When equi-
librium cannot be reached it is the source of anxiety for the
person. The lack of equilibrium we may feel can be understood
as cognitive dissonance, which is “the mental stress or discomfort
experienced by an individual who holds two contradictory
beliefs, ideas or values at the same time … or is confronted by
information that conflicts with existing beliefs, ideas or values”
 (Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, 1957). Incon-
sistency between existing beliefs and incoming information leads
to psychological discomfort we are naturally motivated to
reduce. This is one way of explaining why we strive for coher-
ence in our thinking. There is evidence that a prolonged state
of cognitive dissonance leads to increased anxiety and symp-
toms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder (see Anxiety:
The Cognitive Perspective by Michael Eysenck, 1992).
But what if there’s some psychological reason why an indi-
vidual cannot change her beliefs to fit in with new information?
For example, in cases of severe depression individuals acquire
increasingly negative beliefs about themselves because their
processing of self-related information is disrupted. Individuals
unable to change their beliefs will attempt to reduce mental
inconsistency in other ways – for example, by reinterpreting
their experience, completely rejecting the new information, or
by seeking additional support for the previous beliefs from those
who share them.
CARTOON © BILL STOTT 2018 FOR MORE, PLEASE VISIT WWW.BILLSTOTT.CO.UK
“Well, yes, we still do some animal testing”
In severe depression, negative schemata can be formed early
in life but remain dormant until activated by adverse circum-
stances, often resulting in critically low self-esteem. Once acti-
vated, there is a bias towards interpreting new information in a
way consistent with the schema, that is, negatively at the expense
of positive or neutral interpretations. In some circumstances,
positive self-appraisals can actually cause discomfort and anxi-
ety and are rejected in favour of negative ones fitting pre-exist-
ing beliefs. For example, despite having a boyfriend, Jane’s neg-
ative self-representation includes the belief that she is unlov-
able and no-one will want her. When her boyfriend surprises
her with a thoughtful gift, this show of affection is at odds with
her schema and causes cognitive dissonance. Rather than chang-
ing her belief about herself being unlovable, she distorts the
meaning of this kind action and interprets it as an act of guilt
by her boyfriend because he has been thinking about other
women, or about leaving her. This inaccurate thinking (given
the assumption that her boyfriend does indeed love her) has
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 35
obvious emotional and other costs. However, if these costs are
outweighed by the preservation of consistency and mental equi-
librium and the removal of anxiety caused by the dissonance
between her self-belief and the evidence, then this belief could
be epistemically innocent. The epistemic benefit of depressive
delusions can be the preservation of a coherent self-represen-
tation, even if it is a very negative one. So Antrobus and Bor-

PLEASE VISIT WORLDOFBOFY.COM

tolotti hypothesise that in cases of severe depression the dis-
torted interpretation of experience to assimilate it into an exist-
ing schema can be epistemically innocent in cases where the
cost in knowledge of the distorted negative belief is outweighed
by the benefit to that person in terms of reduced anxiety. This
is in contrast to the popular opinion that delusions always need
to be eliminated as both epistemically and psychologically costly.

IMAGE © BOFY 2018

As I mentioned earlier, there is a second condition for epis-
temic innocence – that there is no alternative that would convey
the same benefits without the costs in knowledge. In the case
of depressive delusions, people have generally formed their neg-
ative self-image through a long process of negatively-biased
learning to the point that positive information has so long been
reinterpreted or not integrated into the schemata that it is not
a practical option to update the schemata.

Beliefs That Fail To Reflect Social Realities

Let’s now consider an example concerning inaccurate beliefs
about social facts.
In her paper ‘Dissolving The Epistemic/Ethical Dilemma
Over Implicit Bias’ (Philosophical Explorations, Vol 20, 2017),
Katherine Puddifoot of Project PERFECT considers the issue
of stereotyping, specifically, the automatic stereotyping involved
in implicit bias. A common definition of a stereotype is that it
is a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a
particular type of person or thing; for example, of females as
carers/nurturers or of males as leaders. ‘Implicit bias’ refers to
attitudes that prejudice our understanding, decisions, and
actions in an unconscious manner. I will continue to use Pud-
difoot’s examples of gender, although she does use others too.
Ethically, the general consensus is that until we know oth-
erwise we should treat all people as equally likely to possess cer-
tain traits; for example, in their attention to detail, commit-
ment, nurturing, and so on. However, if we seek knowledge and
understanding then our beliefs and responses should reflect real
social inequalities rather than being unreflectively egalitarian;
and statistically, some social groups are more likely to possess
certain features. For example, at present scientists are statisti-
cally more likely to be male (in the UK in 2014, only 13% of
people working in the sciences were female, according to the
Women In Science and Engineering campaign, WISE). There-
fore I am more likely to have accurate beliefs if I adopt certain
stereotypes; for example, if I assume a random scientist is more
likely to be male than female. This has ethical implications if
we want to encourage women to enter science. But as philoso-
phers seeking knowledge, is this just the price that needs to be
paid for accurate thinking? Puddifoot argues that the best choice
from a knowledge perspective is also best from an ethical per-
spective by demonstrating the epistemic innocence of inaccu-
rate thinking in some cases – for example, in thinking that sci-
entists are equally likely to be women.
Negative Schemata, by Bofy
As mentioned, the implicit bias associated with the stereo-
type that women are not scientists and scientists are not women
sometimes brings the epistemic benefit of yielding true assump-
tions concerning random individuals. If you’re trying to work
out which person in a room full mostly of scientists is an admin-
istrator, you will sometimes be more likely to identify them if
you focus on the females. But there are several epistemic costs
of implicit bias. The first concerns distortion of memory. Research
shows that if a person is aware of the social characteristics of an
individual and those characteristics fit with a stereotype, then
the information remembered about that individual increases
but is also biased towards the stereotype. Imagine a candidate
for a top neuroscience job who had a career break for a year,
but who has also completed a research visit at a prestigious uni-
versity. If the person reading their CV [resume] knows that this
applicant is female, they are more likely to take note of her
career break because it fits with a stereotype of women being
less vocationally committed; the research visit receives no such
added memorability. The accurate belief that women are less
likely to be scientists has the epistemic cost of distorting think-
ing about individuals to fit wider stereotypes of women. More-
over, this distortion of memory is not outweighed by the increase
in remembered information. It would be better and fairer to
remember less information, but for that information to be unbi-
ased against the candidate.
A second epistemic cost of stereotyping is misinterpretation
of ambiguous evidence. When some characteristics of an individ-
ual are known and have a stereotype attached, implicit bias can
lead to misinterpretation of the evidence, even if the stereotype
to some extent reflects social realities. So for example, if a female
scientist makes some errors in an important presentation, this

36 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018

evidence is ambiguous: it is consistent with a lack of knowledge,
but also with a lack of confidence in public speaking. Yet some-
one with the (accurate) belief that most scientists are male may
also carry the implicit bias that scientific expertise is to be asso-
ciated with men and so (perhaps inaccurately) interpret the
errors as the result of a lack of knowledge. Since the majority
of scientists are men, the stereotypical belief does reflect social
reality to an extent, but has greater epistemic costs in that this
behavioural evidence is misinterpreted.
Two further, related, epistemic costs of stereotyping are fail-
ure to notice differences between individuals and failure to notice sim-
ilarities between members of different groups. When a stereotype is
being employed, the people stereotyped are seen as group mem-
bers, and minority groups are seen as less diverse and more likely
to share characteristics than a majority group (see paper by
Bartsch & Judd in European Journal of Social Psychology 23, 1993).
So, female scientists will be seen to be more homogenous than
their male majority counterparts. This is costly in terms of
knowledge because it causes details about individuals, which
could affect important judgements, to go unnoticed. Addition-
ally, similarities between groups are less likely to be noticed.
For example when a scientist is a woman, any sign of lack of
commitment is spotted, but similar signs may be overlooked if
displayed by her male colleagues. Once again this is an epis-
temically costly omission of factual information.
The fourth epistemic cost identified by Puddifoot is failure
to truth-track in explanations of behaviour. When implicit bias
comes into effect, people may use the group membership of an
individual as an explanation of their behaviour if it fits the stereo-
type, neglecting other possible explanations and relevant infor-
mation. In particular, an act is explained in terms of the nature
of the agent if the act fits the stereotype, and in terms of the sit-
uation if it does not. Let us go back to the example of the female
scientist who makes mistakes in her speech. The stereotype con-
cerning scientific expertise being a male trait rather than female
(whilst reflecting some aspects of social reality) means that her
errors are explained in terms of her capabilities, even if other
explanations would be equally adequate, if not better. Yet when
a male is observed to make the same errors the behaviour is
more likely to be explained through the situation – perhaps
there was something distracting him – although in fact he may
have simply lacked the knowledge. However, the latter expla-
nation does not fit the stereotype of male scientific competence.
The fifth and final epistemic cost of stereotyping is inappro-
priate associations and cognitive depletion. The epistemic benefit
of stereotyping is that assumptions are made that accurately
reflect social reality. However when people stereotype they
often make a host of other associations that do not reflect social
reality. For example, the stereotype of a scientist as male may
be associated with the belief that males are likely to have a higher
IQ than females, which is not true. Or the belief that females
take on a more nurturing role in the family and society (which
reflects what often happens in society) may be conflated with
the belief that they are disposed to be more nurturing (which
arguably is not accurate). We may form bias based on superfi-
cial features that reflect a stereotype even when the majority of
features of that individual do not conform to that stereotype.
For example a female with typically feminine facial and bodily
features may trigger a stereotype of the nurturing wife and
mother even if they are not particularily nurturing.
Of course, we can work to suppress automatic bias, but this
takes effort that can deplete cognitive resources and therefore
has epistemic costs itself. Given these costs of even accurate
stereotyping, there appears to be an epistemic benefit to having
non-stereotypical beliefs that produce egalitarian responses, even
if these fail to fully reflect social realities. The strategies for avoid-
ing implicit bias deserve more space than I have here, but broadly
speaking, either the relevant social information can be withheld
so that it cannot affect thinking, or someone can actively mis-
represent social reality; for example, responding as if men and
women were equally represented in the sciences. Both methods
would lead to an egalitarian response, which is ethically sound,
and also avoids the epistemic costs outlined above. By actively
cultivating imperfect thinking we can avoid misremembering
details, misinterpreting ambiguous evidence, failing to notice
relevant similarities or differences, failing to truth-track in terms
of explanations of behaviour, and making inaccurate associa-
tions. So by shunning even generally correct stereotypes we can
actually increase our chance of holding true beliefs.
As in the case of delusions, for thinking that fails to accu-
rately reflect social realities to be epistemically innocent, there
must also be no alternative conferring the same epistemic ben-
efits without costs. Research does show however that if people
are sensitive to social differences and so have beliefs that accu-
rately represent reality, they are highly likely to engage in auto-
matic stereotyping, with the costs I’ve highlighted. It appears
we cannot have our epistemic cake and eat it.
Puddifoot argues that holding beliefs that fail to accurately
represent social reality can be the lesser of two evils here. Stereo-
types that reflect at least some aspect of social reality sometimes
lead us to make an accurate assessment, for example that a ran-
domly selected scientist will probably be male. However, by
avoiding such stereotypes we will also avoid their pitfalls.
Summary
These are just two examples where imperfect or inaccurate
beliefs have redeeming features. In the first example (delusions),
inaccurately interpreting information to fit pre-existing nega-
tive schemata reduces anxiety and psychological discomfort and
contributes to a coherent sense of self. In the second (stereo-
types) there is sometimes more to be gained epistemically from
holding beliefs that do not accurately represent social reality.
And so, in the absence of equally effective alternatives at no
epistemic cost, both cases are said to be epistemically innocent.
The research at Project PERFECT has important philo-
sophical implications. In a discipline where truth is revered
above all else, this research forces us to reassess how we under-
stand the relative value of truth and falsity. But there are also
implications for how we understand mental health, forcing us
to reassess the culturally-constructed boundaries between
normal and abnormal, or healthy and unhealthy, thinking.
© SALLY LATHAM 2018
Sally Latham is a Philosophy lecturer at Birmingham Metropolitan
College.
• For more on Project PERFECT, please visit http://projectperfect.eu
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 37
Brief Lives
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Alistair MacFarlane considers the long and thoughtful life of Thomas Hobbes.
T
homas Hobbes was one of those very rare people who
had a fundamental insight into what would come to
dominate life centuries after their death. His insight
was into human agency, the capacity to use information
to control action. Hobbes had seen that groups of people working
with shared information to a common purpose could generate
shared agency. He thus conceived the amazing idea of artificial peo-
ple. In Hobbes’ day this was a way of looking at large socioeconomic
entities such as governments and their armies. Nowadays we can
look at large globally distributed and coordinated transnational
companies in the same way. These are now widespread, exercising
a dominant effect on all our lives.
Hobbes called such a composite entity ‘Leviathan’, taking the
name from a mythological sea monster. In what follows it will be
used as a generic term for any form of large, coherent, purposive
and organised group of people. In a stroke of artistic genius the
original cover illustration for Hobbes’ famous book of that name
showed a giant picture of the King towering over his realm, that
on close inspection, turns out to be made up from lots of little
people. Like real people, such Leviathans are born and die, pros-
per or struggle, collaborate or fight, and are driven by a variety of
purposes, not all of which benefit the multitude of real people of
whom they are composed. It is an idea at once commonplace yet
of almost unimaginable significance for our future. Hobbes, a
man whose life was dominated by fear of war and civil strife, had
seen something truly fearsome.
Life
Thomas Hobbes was born on 15 April 1588 in Malmesbury,
Wiltshire. He was plagued by fear throughout his life, and joked
that his mother fell into labour on hearing that the Spanish
Armada was on its way, “so that fear and I were born twins
together.” His father, a poor clergyman, became an alcoholic and
abandoned his three children to the care of his brother, who was
a well-to-do glover. There is no record of the identity of his
mother. Luckily, Thomas and his elder brother and younger sis-
ter were well cared-for.
It soon became clear that Thomas was an exceptionally gifted
boy. He showed an outstanding ability in Latin and Greek, and
proceeded to Oxford where, at Magdalen Hall (which later
became Hertford College) over a period of five years he thor-
oughly mastered classical literature.
At the time aristocratic families were constantly on the look-
out for promising tutors for their children, and in 1608 Hobbes
was appointed tutor to the son of William Cavendish, first Earl
of Devonshire. Hobbes later became his secretary, and main-
tained a close relationship with the Cavendish family for most of
his life. As a member of their household he spent many years at
Chatsworth, their country estate, or in London, meeting most of
the leading politicians and literary figures of his day. In 1610,
Hobbes toured France and Italy with his pupil (also called
William), gaining a good insight into a life of intellect and schol-
38 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
arship. He returned to Chatsworth determined to become a
major savant. During the next eighteen years he worked diligently
in pursuit of this goal, but produced little except a translation of
Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, published in 1629.
When William Cavendish died in 1628, Hobbes accepted a
position of tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clinton, and remained
with the family for the next three years, two of which were spent in
continental Europe. Here Hobbes developed an interest in geom-
etry and mathematics. This so reinvigorated his interest in philos-
ophy that from this time on it dominated his life. In 1631 Hobbes
returned to the Cavendish household as tutor to the new Earl and
made his third visit abroad. On this visit he met Galileo in Florence
and the circle of philosophers associated with Mersenne in Paris.
He also met, and severely disagreed with, Descartes.
As the struggle between king and parliament began to spiral
into the English Civil War (which occurred between 1642 and
1649), in 1640 Hobbes prepared a pamphlet, Elements of Law, to
brief his aristocratic employers on the escalating conflict of inter-
ests. This was widely circulated among Royalists and greatly
resented by Parliamentarians. Sensing the way the wind was
blowing (against the aristocracy), fearful for his personal safety,
and having accumulated sufficient savings for the purpose,
Hobbes fled to France, where he spent the next eleven years.
There he wrote and in 1642 published De Cive (On The Citizen),
an exposition of his political philosophy.
Hobbes had gone to Paris because he saw it as a city of philoso-
phers, but a growing lack of funds persuaded him in 1645 to
accept a position as tutor to the exiled Prince of Wales, who had
also fled there after his father’s execution. But Hobbes steadfastly
continued his philosophy, and in 1651 published his masterpiece
Leviathan. He presented a specially bound copy to his former
pupil. It was to prove a shrewd investment. The Earl of Devon-
shire had made his peace with the new Cromwell government by
paying a large lump sum for the return of land that had been con-
fiscated as a penalty for supporting the former king.
Leviathan had given Hobbes a European-wide reputation, so
after careful soundings among members of the new government
who admired his work, he decided to take the risk of rejoining the
Cavendish household in 1657. Although Hobbes had supported
the king before the war, he had also denied the divine right of
kings. By this argument, anyone in principle, and in particular the
commoner Oliver Cromwell, could sit at the pinnacle of a
Leviathan state.
Keeping an appropriately low political profile, Hobbes was
able to enjoy a relatively untroubled life under Cromwell’s Pro-
tectorate. He resumed work on his system of philosophy, pub-
lished De Corpore (On The Body) in 1655 and De Homine (On Man)
in 1658. Hobbes’ remaining years were ones of incessant activity
and of literary, mathematical and philosophical controversy.
After the Restoration, Hobbes’ former pupil, now Charles II,
invited him to Court and granted him a pension. From then on,
Hobbes spent most of his time in London. He finally withdrew
 Thomas Hobbes
by Gail Campbell
2018

February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 39

Brief Lives
from worldly affairs in 1675 and retired to Chatsworth. Hobbes
died in Hardwick Hall on December 4, 1679 at the age of 92, and
was buried in St John the Baptist’s Church cemetery in Ault
Hucknall in Derbyshire.
Leviathan
The essence of Hobbes great insight into how society develops
organisational structures lies in what in a modern context we
would call ‘agency’. It is fascinating to look at his own words
about this in Leviathan:
“For by Art is created that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth
or State, (in latine Civitas) which is but an Artifiiciall Man; though of
greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection
and defence it was intended; and in which the Soveraignty is an Artifi-
ciall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates,
and other Officers of Judicature and Execution artificiall Joynts [and]
Counsellors are the Memory. Lastly, [are] the Pacts and Covenants, by
which the parts of this Body Politique [are] set together.”
This famous passage is now of more historical than philosoph-
ical interest, and the anatomical detail pushes the metaphor past
breaking point. But the crucial, breathtakingly simple, idea
remains: Society develops by creating entities which function as
super-persons, with a coherent, organised ability to set goals, rea-
son out how to achieve them, put together huge coordinated
resources, engage with each other, and exert a dominating influ-
ence over their constituent members. Most people, in modern
advanced societies, lead a multiple existence. For part of their day
they are components of a Leviathan, for the remainder they seek
to be themselves.
Where did Hobbes get this idea that people in a developed
society must necessarily lead a complex multiple form of exis-
tence which is more than a mere social contract between equals?
One obvious possibility comes from acting in a theatre. An actor,
when acting, is indeed an artificial person created by an author.
Moreover any number of people can act the same part, so that the
Frontispiece for
Leviathan (1651)
40 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
artificial person transcends the individuals who may play it. Sim-
ilarily, groups of people create contracts to create super-groups
– councils, governments, legislatures, companies… which in
some sense, since they are created by us and composed of our like,
must function as augmented versions of us.
In arguing why we must surrender part of our individual free-
dom to Leviathans, Hobbes compared that outcome with its
alternative:
“In such condition [as before the formation of government], there is no
place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and conse-
quently no culture of the earth, nor use of the commodities that may be
imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving,
and removing; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time;
no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear,
and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.”
Leviathans are the price we pay for the advantages of civilisation.
Legacy
Hobbes is generally regarded as the founder of British moral and
political philosophy, and as one of the greatest of English
philosophers. For him, moral and political philosophy were of
more than academic interest. They were of huge practical impor-
tance too, for he saw them as a means of counteracting the civil
war that was the greatest of his fears. In his day, Hobbes was an
admired all-round thinker. He made important contributions to
optics, and to a materialistic explanation of human behaviour.
His uncompromising endorsement of materialism aroused the
hostility of religious authorities of all persuasions, who were
enraged by his claim that if reason by itself is to be taken as a guide
to action, then God is dispensable as a source of ethics. On his
return to England after the Restoration, determined attempts
were made to push a Bill through the House of Commons against
atheism, and moves were made to investigate Leviathan. Hobbes
accordingly burned any papers that might compromise him.
Two people I have covered in ‘Brief Lives’,
Ada Lovelace (see PN 96) and Thomas Hobbes,
have had startling visions of the future. Lovelace
foresaw the possibilities which material agency
would open up for computing, and Hobbes fore-
saw how human agents could combine to form
superhuman agencies. As both these visions are
increasingly integrated, with huge companies
combining the use of information and manufac-
turing resources on a scale that challenges gov-
ernments, the results will dominate our future.
We face a fundamental dilemma: in seeking to
make a better future, we must place our fate in
the hands of people who share our fundamental
flaws and limitations. And as Immanuel Kant
said, out of the crooked timber of humanity
nothing straight was ever made.
© SIR ALISTAIR MACFARLANE 2018
Sir Alistair MacFarlane is a former Vice-President
of the Royal Society and a retired university Vice-
Chancellor.
IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Wittgenstein & The War
Peter Adamson says one good thing came out of WW1.
W
orld War One has a lot to
answer for, including World
War Two – or at least that’s
what I was taught in school. Paradoxically,
given its transformative effects, I was also
taught in school that World War One was
pointless. Our image of that war is of liter-
ally entrenched soldiers perishing in
droves as the battle lines refuse to budge.
Yet at least one worthwhile thing did
emerge from this tragic conflict: Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, which was composed
during the war while its author was serving
in the Austrian army and then detained as
a prisoner of war in Italy.
Wittgenstein was one of the many
Europeans who greeted the outbreak of
war with excitement as well as trepidation.
He wrote in one of the notebooks he kept
during the war that “only death gives life
its meaning.” Accordingly, he welcomed
the opportunity to look death in the face.
He voluntarily enlisted in his native coun-
try’s armed forces in 1914, but it was only
after two years as a soldier that Wittgen-
stein would see front line service. He vol-
unteered for the most dangerous possible
duty: being stationed at an observation
post at the front edge of the Austrian line
in no man’s land, with shells crashing
around him through the night. In his note-
books he chastized himself for the terror
he felt: to fear death comes from a “false
view of life.”
Whatever fear he felt within, his out-
ward conduct could not have been more
courageous. He was awarded several
medals and promoted to the officer class
by the end of the war. At the end of 1918
he was captured and placed in Italian pris-
oner of war camps until the summer of
1919. Here he wrote about philosophy, as
he had done during lulls in military action.
The result was the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein grew up in Vienna, the
son of a fabulously wealthy steel magnate.
To give you some idea of the circles in
which his family moved, while he was at
the prisoner-of-war camp a fellow
detainee heard Ludwig refer casually to
Philosophy Then
the fact that Gustav Klimt had painted his
sister, and only then realized that this must
be one of the famous Wittgensteins. How-
ever, Ludwig’s family was beset by psycho-
logical troubles: two of his brothers killed
themselves before the war, another during
it, and Ludwig himself frequently contem-
plated suicide. But the Wittgensteins were
also a prodigiously talented family, espe-
cially musically. His brother Paul lost his
arm in the war, but was still able to pursue
a concert career playing pieces written for
the left hand alone. As for Ludwig, he went
abroad to study engineering in Manch-
ester, but his interest in mathematics led
him to Cambridge in 1911.
Wittgenstein went to Cambridge on
the advice of Gottlob Frege, and once
there he met Bertrand Russell. Frege and
Russell were themselves great philoso-
phers, both engaged in ambitious projects
devoted to the relationship between math-
ematics and logic. Wittgenstein at first
impressed Russell, then began to argue
with him, and finally went on to surpass
him, producing new ideas about logic, lan-
guage, and philosophy more generally.
Wittgenstein concluded with despair that
Russell would never grasp what he was
trying to say. His wartime notebooks and
correspondence with Russell and others
constantly lament that even if he should
survive the war and manage to publish the
theories that would eventually be set down
in the Tractatus, his work might still come
to nothing, since no one would be able to
grasp its importance.
Given that even Frege and Russell had a
hard time getting Wittgenstein’s ideas
straight, I don’t have much hope of
explaining them in this short space, but
here’s a taste of the sort of thing he wanted
to say. In the Tractatus, he argued that if we
analyze our everyday language we discover
underpinning it a set of propositions that
describe reality. The simplest proposi-
tions express what Wittgenstein called
‘facts’: for instance, the proposition ‘the
giraffe is tall’ just represents the fact that
the giraffe is tall. Departing from Russell’s
ideas of how propositions like this work,
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 41
Wittgenstein went on to argue that these
basic propositions are like ‘logical pictures’
of reality: the logical structure of the
proposition is supposed to ‘show’ the logi-
cal structure of reality. Finally, the facts
pictured in these simple propositions
always deal with physical reality. That is to
say, they express things we can learn
empirically, in other words by going out
into the world and looking around it, or
more ambitiously, by engaging in natural
science. As Wittgenstein admitted
towards the end of the Tractatus, this
means that the most important things in
life – abstractions such as morality and
beauty – cannot be shown in language.
From his beginning the Tractatus’s philo-
sophical project in technical issues about
logic and language, Wittgenstein ends it in
a kind of mysticism, dismissing the theory
of the Tractatus itself as a ladder that must
be thrown away once one has climbed up
it. The book finishes with the famous line,
“That whereof one cannot speak, thereof
one must remain silent.”
Did the First World War influence the
ideas of the Tractatus? A positive answer to
that question is given by Ray Monk, the
author of an entertaining and philosophi-
cally rich biography of Wittgenstein. He
points out that wartime experience seems
to have pushed Wittgenstein to broaden
his philosophical interests beyond mathe-
matics, logic, and language, to the whole
range of topics traditionally studied by
philosophy. As Monk puts it, “if Wittgen-
stein had spent the entire war behind the
lines, the Tractatus would have remained
what it almost certainly was in its first
inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature
of logic.” It’s somehow appropriate that a
war that has so often been deemed mean-
ingless pushed Wittgenstein to write a
philosophical work that rigorously defines
the very boundary between what does, and
does not, have meaning.
© PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2018
Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
& 3, available from OUP. They’re based on his
popular History of Philosophy podcast.
Street Philosopher
Torpid In A Taxi
Seán Moran contemplates a comatose cabbie.
O
f the crowds passing the dozing
Mumbai driver in my photo-
graph, not one person was
tempted to tickle his feet. It was
only right that they resisted the urge, for he
deserved a rest from his labours. Driving a
taxi in the Indian city formerly known as
Bombay is one job that demands an alert,
well-rested person. When I’m a passenger
there, I often shut my own eyes and hope
that the taxiwallah keeps his eyes wide open
as he forces his cab through the anarchy.
When philosophers take an interest in
sleep, it is usually from an epistemological
standpoint, meaning from a concern with
what knowledge is and how we might acquire
it. So they ask if dreams can tell us something
(as Pythagoras, Freud, and Jung believed), or
whether we can’t be sure that we’re not
dreaming now (as Descartes argued). But
they don’t often consider another aspect of
sleep: its ethical implications.
A Good Sleep
The American National Sleep Foundation
recommends between seven and nine hours
of sleep for adults per day, and the saying
‘Early to bed and early to rise keeps a man
healthy, wealthy and wise’ hints that sleep is
a significant part of The Good Life. Both
our physical and mental health depend on
sleep. This is borne out by recent studies
showing that a lack of sleep can be respon-
sible for a range of ills, including heart
disease and depression; and 2017 research by
Oxford Economics and the UK National
Centre for Social Research reveals that
adequate sleep is a more important factor in
human happiness than household income.
That sleep trumps wealth in the happiness
stakes is a remarkable finding; but it seems
it would take a very large increase in salary
to compensate for the loss of sleep that a new
job might involve. So if you are healthy and
wise thanks to sleeping well, it seems there’s
no need to be wealthy too.
Aristotle considered The Good Life to be
a well-balanced life. To him the flourishing
life is one that avoids extremes of both defi-
ciency and excess. So the notion that six
hours’ sleep is not enough but ten hours’ is
too much fits nicely with his principle of a
‘happy medium’.
Aristotle saw sleep as a temporary but
42 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
necessary privation of our positive state of
wakefulness. He believed that our perceptive
faculty cannot withstand continuous stimu-
lation, hence the need for hypnos (sleep) to
allow this over-stimulated faculty to recu-
perate from fatigue and recover its normal
function. After an excess of being awake we
need to be unawake for a while to restore the
balance. Aristotle thus regarded sleep as
having the biological ‘final cause’ or purpose
of preserving the organism, because of its
restorative function. This is unlike supernat-
ural explanations of sleep, such as that of
Pythagoras, for whom dreams conveyed
messages from the gods. Present day biolo-
gists would object to Aristotle’s principle of
a ‘final cause’ though: teleological (purpose-
ful, goal-seeking) explanations for physical
phenomena are currently out of favour in
scientific circles.
Our taxi driver’s perceptive faculties
would almost certainly be over-excited after
weaving through the chaotic Mumbai traf-
fic. But the rest of us similarly endure exces-
sive stimulation before bedtime, though
freely chosen. More and more people are
using personal electronic devices with
screens as ways of winding down at the end
of the day. It’s the contemporary version of
reading a book or listening to the radio
before dropping off. Except that it doesn’t
always work. The blue component of the
light from the screen stimulates what Aris-
totle called our ‘perceptive faculties’. Blue
light is detected by special cells in the retina
that trigger activity in the prefrontal and
thalamic regions of the brain – the structures
that regulate alertness and cognitive perfor-
mance. The phenomenon is a powerful one:
blue light can even jolt people who are totally
blind into an alert state. This response has
an evolutionary origin, because locking our
sleep/wake cycles into phase with useful
daylight hours has a survival value. Screens
disrupt these natural circadian rhythms by
triggering certain brain areas while
suppressing the melatonin secretion that
would encourage sleep. The interactive
demands of the devices intensify the effect;
so replying to emails, responding to social
media postings, or playing a game further
amplifies our state of perceptual arousal
sparked off by the blue light. We are not
ready to sleep in this state. For a variety of
reasons, the situation is worse for teenagers
(or ‘screenagers’), even though they need
more sleep than adults.
Waking Duty
Disturbing our sleep patterns impairs the
balanced Good Life described in Aristotle’s
virtue ethics, but it has implications for
deontological – rule-based – ethics, too.
These are the ethics of duty, and it’s some-
times a person’s duty to be fully awake. Swal-
lows may be able to fly while asleep, but we
are unhappy when airline pilots attempt this
feat. Even when we are technically awake,
our alertness levels can vary. When we are
sleep-deprived, our cognitive functioning
suffers. Poor judgement caused by fatigue
has been blamed for nuclear incidents at
Three Mile Island in the USA and Cher-
nobyl in the former USSR, and the Exxon
Valdez oil spillage off the coast of Alaska.
Hospital doctors routinely make life-or-
death decisions when sleep-deprived. In
their bleary-eyed state, a misplaced decimal
point on a dosage instruction is in danger of
putting their patient into a permanent sleep.
Philosophers are affected too. Socrates
often stayed up all night trying to solve
philosophical puzzles, and was rather fond of
late-night drunken carousing too. Perhaps
this sort of carry-on affected his judgement
when he was in court on the trumped-up
charges of impiety and corrupting the youth
of Athens. When he was found guilty (after
unwisely refusing to play the legal game), he
was invited to propose a suitable punish-
ment, such as exile from Athens. Instead he
suggested that he be given free meals for life,
so the court condemned him to death for his
cheek. Perhaps if he’d had a few good nights’
sleep, he might have been more circumspect
in court. On the other hand, Socrates was
such an independent-minded curmudgeon
that even a night or two in the arms of
Morpheus would probably have made no
difference. (In Greek mythology Morpheus,
the winged god of dreams, was a son of
Hypnos, the god of sleep.)
Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant
said that he had been roused from his
‘dogmatic slumber’ over various philosoph-
ical issues by the Scottish Enlightenment
thinker David Hume. Kant wrote his
masterpiece A Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
© SEÁN MORAN 2018
PHOTO
in this newly awakened state, thus sending to
sleep a fair number of future generations of
philosophy undergraduates, and causing
insomnia in some of the remainder. This
convoluted and dense work has what French
dramatist Molière humorously termed
‘dormitive powers’ in his play The Hypochon-
driac (1673). Molière was talking about
opium, but the term has become a more
general way of mocking pseudo-scientific
explanations, since saying that opium puts
users to sleep because of its virtus dormitiva
is simply stating that opium causes sleep
because of its sleep-inducing powers – a
circular explanation that actually explains
nothing. A proper explanation would involve
a story about the drug’s interaction with
opioid receptors in the brain, its effects on
neurotransmitters, and so on. In Kant’s case,
an explanation of his writing’s dormitive
powers might point to the length of his
sentences, his opaque vocabulary, and his
nested subordinate clauses. (In case enraged
Kantians are roused from their slumbers by
this and plan to come after me with pitch-
forks and flaming torches, I did say that the
Critique was a masterpiece.)
Street Philosopher
Woke Up
In the deontological ethics advocated by
Kant in his second Critique (Of Practical
Reason, 1788), a well-established principle is
that ‘ought implies can’. Put differently, an
action can only be your duty if it is within
your power to do it. So, it cannot be the case
that you ought to negotiate personally with
North Korea over its nuclear arsenal, for
example, unless you happen to be a world
leader. Likewise, it cannot be your duty to
sleep for the recommended time if this is not
something you can do. Certainly, you can
stop drinking coffee after a certain time of
day, avoid interacting with electronic
screens near bed-time, and do whatever it
takes to put you in the mood for shut-eye,
but there are no guarantees. You might toss
and turn worrying about domestic trivia,
Kim Jong-un, or the posturing of our own
dear leaders. Falling asleep is not entirely
within our conscious control. Furthermore,
because tiredness impairs our judgement,
this in turn blinds us to the fact that our
judgement is affected. So we are not always
aware of just how tired we actually are, nor
of the desirability of getting some sleep so
we can face the following day’s challenges in
a fully-awakened condition. Our rational
selves can project us forward, though. In our
sensible state earlier in the day we can take
action to counteract our future dozy state of
mind. This is easier said than done.
A notion, used metaphorically, has
recently crossed over from African-American
urban culture to the wider internet milieu.
You might be enjoined to “Stay woke”, or
perhaps asked “Are you woke?” If you correct
the questioner’s grammar and reply, “Yes, I
am fully awakened, thank you,” then you ain’t
woke. It has come to mean being alert to
injustice, discrimination and privilege in
society.
If we are woke we will treat the Mumbai
cabbie as an equal and let him sleep, and ques-
tion the oppressive structures that deprive
him of a balanced Good Life. But we might
still want to shut our eyes when he drives us
up a street the wrong way, blaring his horn,
pursued by flashing blue lights.
© DR SEÁN MORAN 2018
Seán Moran is in Waterford Institute of Tech-
nology, and is a founder of Pandisciplinary.Net,
a global network of people, projects, and events.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 43

Prejudice & Toleration
DEAR EDITOR: My subject is Prejudice
& Perception, which was the theme of
Issue 123. My question is ‘What kind of
society do we want?’ Suppose we say we
want a consistently tolerant society.
What would that look like? It would
have to be something like a body politic
consisting of self-defined and histori-
cally-defined groups who by stipulation
were tolerant of every other group who
was tolerant of them. In that society
everyone is tolerant of everyone else!
Tolerance here can be taken to mean
‘satisfied with having to accept [group x]
as a part of the community’. Notice that
groups like the Nazis could not exist in
such a society. It is intrinsic to Nazism
that it is not tolerant of various social
sub-groups, and so it could not exist in
plain view in such a society. It would in
fact be logically consistent to formally
outlaw such groups.
The objection that the enforcer of
this law could use it to suppress dissent
misses its target. Political and social dis-
agreement within the bounds of toler-
ance is easily distinguished from intoler-
ance. “Republicans are crooks and
should all be voted out of office” is legit-
imate political opinion: “Republicans
should be killed” or anything of that ilk,
is hate speech and might be legitimately
and consistently outlawed.
On the other side of the social divide,
a necessary outcome in an intolerant
society is that it comes to be dominated
by a single, intolerant, group (such as
the Nazis) because a society of compet-
ing intolerant groups is inherently
unstable and eventually one of the
groups comes to dominate. Notice that
this society is also logically consistent –
just not very nice to live in for most.
In between are societies that are a mix
of tolerance and intolerance. Societies
like ours. The problem with this mix is
that it too is unstable because the intoler-
ant groups will, by predilection, always
44 Philosophy Now l February/March 2018
Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Email me at rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
be looking for ways to disturb the politi-
cal and economic balance in their favour
by destroying or subjugating some one
or more tolerant groups. Indeed, the
only way a mixed society can continue to
survive in mixed mode over the long
term is to provide a mechanism that
actively promotes tolerance. This is why
a mandatory liberal education and expo-
sure to a reasonably wide swathe of the
world’s culture is both legitimate and
logical. This in no way precludes a vari-
ety of educational modes. Amish public
education can be perfectly liberal while
still teaching that ploughing with horses
is a better way to live! That’s a legitimate
tolerant social and political opinion as
long as it does not advocate the destruc-
tion of those who plough with tractors.
MATTHEW RAPAPORT
CALIFORNIA
Prostitution & Free Will
DEAR EDITOR: When I read Rob Lover-
ing’s article ‘Prostitution and Instrumen-
talization’ in Issue 123 it reminded me of
a claim by Stephen Fry that the male sex
drive is greater than the female so there
should be prostitution to accommodate
this. My former employer also said there
was nothing wrong with prostitution.
When I asked if he would be okay with
his daughter being a sex worker he didn’t
answer. While Lovering and Fry’s asser-
tions both seem factual, neither deals
with the personal costs to sex workers,
who prostitute themselves often to feed a
drug habit or are in forced prostitution
and under threat, many under age.
Lovering likely knows and agrees with
this; but perhaps this is all the more rea-
son not to be so verbose on the philo-
sophical arguments for prostitution?
KRISTINE KERR
GOUROCK, RENFREWSHIRE.
DEAR EDITOR: Rob Lovering in Issue
123 argues cogently that instrumentaliz-
ing the body in prostitution is not
morally different from instrumentalizing
it in (other) nasty jobs such as lavatory
cleaning. All involve distasteful use of
the body for a rational end, earning
money. However, defining prostitution
precisely enables us to assess its morality
better: it is not just selling sex. It is vol-
untarily selling sex, and sex only, to mul-
tiple customers. A sex slave is not a pros-
titute because she is being sold, not sell-
ing. Guilt lies primarily with her captors
and secondarily with customers who
prefer not to acknowledge her situation.
A woman who sells sex to avoid starva-
tion is also not acting voluntarily. Guilt
lies perhaps not with her customers,
who keep her from starving, but with we
who live comfortably while tolerating a
world where she needs to do this. The
same might apply to the woman who
chooses to sell sex rather than endure
unhealthy drudgery for a pittance in an
Asian factory while we buy cheaply the
products of that factory. It might also
apply to the woman who can’t get any
other job in Europe.
Jobs involving risk to the operative or
the customer are often legal and super-
vised in many Western countries; so why
are brothels often illegal and unsuper-
vised? It cannot be a simple issue of con-
servative sexual morality, because abor-
tion clinics are legal and supervised. Can
it be to discourage people from going to
brothels? Yet we hardly want to encour-
age abortion either. Or is it rather because
influential people can imagine themselves
or their daughters needing abortions, but
not being reduced to prostitution?
ALLEN SHAW
LEEDS
Digital & Trivial
DEAR EDITOR: Matt Bluemink’s
thoughts in Issue 122 on Socrates and
the pernicious effects of the digital age
on our diminishing attention-spans got
my attention. The police have had to
advise those caught up in terror attacks

not to stand around taking pictures.
Then there’s Twitter, so felicitously
named, and foreseen long before
Socrates, in the Old Testament: “The
fool takes no delight in understanding,
but merely in expressing his own opin-
ions.” (Proverbs 18.2) Or visit any art
gallery and watch people snapping away
with camera-phones but not attending to
the art. Without attention to art there is
no love of art, only of Selfie. And what of
the love of our children, or of other peo-
ple? At the end of his philosophical
novel, The Bridge of St Luis Rey (1927),
Thornton Wilder writes that love is the
only survival, the only meaning. He
could have been echoing St Paul’s asser-
tion that love is patient, kind, without
envy or self-interest – attentive, in other
words – and the greatest of all virtues.
Paul almost certainly knew of Aristotle’s
notion of the truest love being the wish
for the good for others – a wish that pre-
supposes attention to another person’s
soul. Love and friendship bridge the gulfs
between us. We must not let cramped and
flimsy internet connections destroy real
connections and create Dystopia Now.
MICHAEL MCMANUS
LEEDS
Pull Your Socs Up
DEAR EDITOR: I write with regard to the
topic of ‘the real Socrates’ as raised by
Peter Adamson and others in Issue 122.
As far as we know Socrates wrote noth-
ing, but his admiring pupil Plato left a
weighty tribute to his master in the form
of dialogues which have Socrates as the
main speaker. Yet we assume that only
Plato’s so-called ‘early’ dialogues repre-
sent the real Socrates. Here he is repre-
sented as the eccentric, often annoying,
questioner in the marketplace, on a life-
long quest to find out the best way to
live. Plato’s ‘middle’ dialogues are too
often assumed to be more the thought of
the pupil Plato than the master Socrates.
But there is no evidence for this assump-
tion. Rather (especially these days) we
seem to prefer Socrates the questioner to
Socrates the mystic, and yet the middle
dialogues are preoccupied with the eter-
nal world of the Forms and the progress
of the philosopher from earthly desires
and ambitions, and beliefs derived from
bodily sensations, towards the true and
lasting happiness which lies in the appre-
hension of knowledge by the intellect
alone. In Plato’s images, this is a stairway
to heaven that involves the rocky climb
out from the Cave of ignorance. Here
there is a hierarchy of being; and in this
bodily world we are at the bottom. Such
a search for the higher Forms does not
preclude rationality, indeed it clarifies it.
It could then be that the purpose of
Socrates’ relentless argumentation is to
illuminate, often brutally expose, the
accepted norms of everyday thought in
preparation for the final spiritual trans-
formation of finding union with the
divine.
Why could Socrates not be both the
questioner in the public arena and the
spiritual midwife to his closest followers?
Why could Socrates not be the debunker
of accepted truths and at the same time
the advocate of an ultimate truth?
TONY PITMAN
BRADFORD ON AVON, WILTSHIRE
The Buddhist Boomerang
DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed reading Lach-
lan Dale’s review of The Monk and the
Philosopher by Jean-Francois Revel and
Matthieu Ricard in Issue 122. I have not
read the book myself, but I have prac-
ticed and studied in one tradition of
Tibetan Buddhism since 1987, and I
wanted to raise a couple of points.
Mr Dale believes that the Buddhist
doctrine of karma presents a problem for
free will. I don’t think it does. As I under-
stand it, karma is the law that brings the
consequences of our actions back to us; it
does not determine what those actions
will be. It’s like throwing a boomerang.
Once we throw it, the laws of physics
determine the behavior of the boomerang:
but where, when, or whether we throw
that boomerang is up to us. In the same
way, karma does not determine our
actions; it merely states that their conse-
quences will inevitably be visited on us.
Another issue Mr Dale raises is the
problem of consciousness: are mind and
body two things, or one? You can find
support for both positions within Bud-
dhism. But there’s a deeper issue. In Bud-
dhism, ultimate knowledge is noncon-
ceptual and nondual, and any conceptual
understanding can only be conventional
and provisional. Science and philosophy,
as conceptual undertakings, can therefore
take one only so far. A complete under-
standing of reality is the achievement of a
fully awakened Buddha nature, and is
February/March 2018 l Philosophy Now 45
Letters
direct and nonconceptual. In the ultimate
view, reality is said to be ‘empty’ of the
distinction between mind and body; so
ultimately there is no mind-body prob-
lem. Yet in any given context, a Buddhist
teacher might present either a dualistic or
a monistic view – whichever will best
help his/her listeners move closer to that
final, nonconceptual understanding.
PAUL VITOLS,
NORTH VANCOUVER
Misreading Cubism
DEAR EDITOR: Stuart Greenstreet in
Issue 122 believes that Cubism, and art
in general, is a kind of language. This
does not fit my experience as an artist.
Our distant ancestors painted images
of horses on the walls of caves that we
immediately recognise. They also left pat-
terns of dots that we do not understand.
Just so, Etruscan tomb figures are famil-
iar, although we cannot read their written
language. The difference is that the dots
and the writing are messages encoded,
subject to Saussure’s semiological analy-
sis. But on the contrary we need no key to
read the images because they display sig-
nificant features of the actual objects. We
need only a few features to recognise a
horse or a face. They are arranged not by
convention, but by nature, by the way
things are.
A drawing of a horse has four legs –
count them – like the real horse. The
word ‘horse’ has no legs. A drawing, a
caricature, or a diagram picks out promi-
nent features related in the same way as
in life. Arrange three blobs to make an
equilateral triangle, with two at the top,
and even a tiny baby will see a face. No
decoding is necessary because a real face
also has two blobs at the top and one
lower down. This is how perception
works, of objects or images alike.
Picasso was mistaken. He drew not
what he knew but what he saw – but he
drew features seen at different times and
from different angles, simplified and
lumped together into one image. As for
the legacy of Cubism, look no further
than The Simpsons.
TOM CHAMBERLAIN
LONDON & MEXICO
Consciousness Baffles Brains
DEAR EDITOR: I really enjoy getting my
Philosophy Now issues, in my case from
our little village newsagent near Perth,
Letters
Western Australia. The articles generally
baffle my brain, which is why I keep buy-
ing it.
The consciousness issue (Issue 121)
confused me completely as I’m not a
philosopher. But I am an experiencer. I’m
missing the point of those articles as they
didn’t once mention how I experience
consciousness.
I’ve found I cannot separate con-
sciousness from my attention: I become
conscious of whatever when I give my
attention to it. I understand there are
different degrees of attention, but even
so I still think consciousness is still con-
nected to attention. To me that’s what
was missing – but maybe I’m missing the
point of the various theories.
The mosquitos in Perth not only give
me their conscious attention from their
spot on our bedroom wall after their
bite/flight response: they even seem to
be consciously aware of my intention
when I approach them with my PN mag-
azine, loosely dangling in my hand,
ready to swat. Mysteriously they disap-
pear into the shadows, maybe silently
laughing at my frustrated searching as to
what their level of consciousness is.
PAUL BERGIN
PERTH, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Experiencing Disagreement
DEAR EDITOR:Dr Steve Brewer (Letters,
Issue 123) expounded on experientialism
as being his preferred explanation of
consciousness: “In panexperientalism, a
fleeting experience is generated when-
ever physical systems exchange energy-
information, since they’re equivalent.'”
Where is the evidence that they are
equivalent? And are they identical too or
is this a case of supposed cause and
effect? This quoted statement has the
appearance of dogma. I would like to call
Raymond Tallis to the rescue. It looks
like a case of neuromania.
PAMELA WHITE
NOTTINGHAM
Spinozist Anti-Simulation Argument
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 121, Peter
Adamson gave us a history of philosoph-
ical skepticism and remarked that its
diversity does not permit us to meet it
with a unified response. This is a sound
conclusion. Here, I want to attempt to
provide a response to the contemporary
version of philosophical skepticism
46 Philosophy Now l February/March 2018
which proposes that there is a high likeli-
hood that all of reality is a computer sim-
ulation.
The computer simulation hypothesis
relies on the idea that what we experi-
ence as real could be modelled by a com-
puter, which means that it is formally
mathematically describable. Moreover, if
reality is formally describable, it is also in
principle knowable. Therefore we can
evaluate the computer simulation
hypothesis by means of what we know
about formal systems.
Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) proved that
all formally describable systems are
incomplete. In other words, all formal
systems require an outside perspective
for their consistency or truth. This in
itself is not a problem for a proponent of
the simulation hypothesis, because the
‘outside perspective’ can be provided by
a deceiving entity. However, the deceiv-
ing entity itself has to be a part of a real-
ity, which is itself either formally
describable or not. If not, the question is,
why not? If it is, then the deceiver’s real-
ity likewise also has outside require-
ments. So a simulation hypothesis has to
admit that either: (1) Reality is not
modellable in its totality – which would
itself mean that there is an inherent limit
to possible deception, and to the skep-
tic’s skepticism; or (2) There is no limit
on deception and every conceivable real-
ity can be simulated by a computer. If
endorsing (1), one needs to explain why
some realities are modellable while oth-
ers are not. If endorsing (2), then the
question is, what’s left over from a union
of all computer simulations (even if there
is an infinity of them), as Gödel’s incom-
pleteness theorems tell us that all (collec-
tions of) formal systems require an out-
side? I want to argue that what is left
over is an entity that’s real and yet not
formally or independently knowable.
This means that it is conceivable only
through itself. But even as such, this
unknowable yet inescapable portion of
reality has to have a reason for its exis-
tence. This reason, however, cannot be
outside of it, because it is not indepen-
dently knowable. Therefore, the reason
for its existence must be within it: in
other words, it must be self-caused.
Moreover, because all realities, simulated
or not, ultimately depend on this entity,
they are all related to it, and it in turn
interrelates all of them. Thereby, it can
be said to be creative. We have thus
arrived at Spinoza’s substance that is self-
caused and boundless, all-encompassing,
all-creative, and unique.
ZORAN VUKADINOVIC
DENVER, COLORADO
Finding Refuge
DEAR EDITOR: I was struck by Jacques
Derrida’s views on hospitality and immi-
gration, described in the article about
him in Issue 123. He believed – as the
author of the article also did – that when
“refugees fleeing from persecutors find
their way through an opening, it cannot
be equally open to those pursuing them.”
This called for a highly selective border.
However, in most cases the reason that
people flee to the place that they have
fled to is exactly that their persecutors
would not dare to follow them. For
example refugees flee to Europe because
once inside it they are protected by
NATO, a force with which no such petty
power would attempt to reckon on their
own turf. This therefore makes the mus-
ing in question irrelevant as petty attack-
ers would never venture to the borders of
superpowers and therefore never need to
have borders closed off to them. The one
case in which this reasoning breaks down
is when the attacker itself is a super-
power, luckily this – mostly – isn’t a
problem at present.
HENRY O’REGAN
ST ALBANS
The Real Ethical Questions
DEAR EDITOR: On the news page of
Issue 123 the first section, ‘Merger 1:
Human Brains and Animals’ highlights
some ethical questions, but misses the
big one: Is it ethically permissible to use
animals as objects, as a means to an end,
in our experiments? I am personally the
beneficiary of such research into mental
functioning and malfunctioning, but still
it leaves me uneasy that experimenting
on other animals is done to our benefit.
Just because they are not ‘one of us’ does
not seem a good enough reason, espe-
cially when we consider that experiments
have been done on humans whenever
those humans were re-classified as ‘sub-
human’. When we treat animals as less
important than ourselves, it seems that
we lose sight of something important.
PETER DAY
SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND

JERRY FODOR
(1935 – 2017)
J
Daniel Hutto says goodbye to a memorable
philosophical sparring partner.
erry Fodor was forever forecasting and combating a
doom-and-gloom return to what he regarded as the dark
days of behaviourism in the philosophy of mind. Yet he
never mentioned the darkness that would befall philoso-
phy at his own demise, from the loss of his systematic exploration
and defence of controversial lines of argument, his inexhaustible
intellectual energy, and his playful wit. Sadly, that day has come.
A prominent theme in his many obituaries has been to
acknowledge Fodor’s virtue as an unflagging philosophical
opponent. He was the perfect, utterly resilient, sparring partner.
One could always and absolutely count on him to put forward
the strongest argument for the position he advanced without
quibble or qualification. Comparing him to a trampoline, Daniel
Dennett spoke of our being able to see further by “jumping on
Jerry.” Ruth Millikan once compared him to Mister Toad in
Wind in the Willows, observing that he blithely crashed one
theory after another, only to rush off to the next with equal
enthusiasm and a cavalier shout of “Poop-poop!”
His penchant for playful adventure and dogged, serious com-
mitment to working out a systematic philosophical position – a
revived rationalism – speaks from the pages of his many, many
books. The constant, enduring theme of Fodor’s writings is a
defence of mentalism (the idea that mental states are real and
causally efficacious) against the threat of behaviourism and prag-
matism. Fodor is forever resisting the philosophical approaches
of Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein, root and branch. As a
founding father and champion of the cognitive science revolu-
tion, Fodor first advanced the case for mentalism in 1968 with
his ground-breaking Psychological Explanation. In his final effort,
Minds Without Meaning, co-authored with Zenon Pylyshyn in
2015, he still expresses his commitment to that vision, though
now cast in a new format.
Today many philosophers and cognitive scientists depart
from specific details of the various ways Fodor fleshed out men-
talism over the years. They may baulk at his commitment to
nativism (the view that cognitive mechanisms and concepts are
innate); or to the idea that thinking takes place in a ‘language of
thought’; or to there being specialized, self-contained mental
modules. Nevertheless, in many cases, those departures are only
as clearly defined as they are thanks to the comparisons that can
be made with Fodor’s proposals. More fundamentally, but less
obviously, Fodor succeeded in his efforts to help revive mental-
ism and establish it as the now-default mainstream position in
analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His systematic
campaign of providing a series of sustained, unremitting argu-
ments in favour of the idea that behind-the-scenes mental causes
of some kind best explain intelligent behaviour is, without doubt,
JERRY FODOR PHOTO © PEALCO 2007
Fodor’s true and indelible intellectual legacy. Even those like
myself who defend the opposite view, and lament the restoration
and rise of mentalism cannot fail to acknowledge the great debt
philosophy of mind owes Fodor in this regard. Fodor was a
formidable philosophical force and his influence will continue to
be felt in times to come.
For those not embroiled in these debates, no doubt Jerry
Fodor will be remembered for his cheeky – indeed, tongue-in-
cheeky – writing style more than for his substantive philosophical
theories. He had a wonderfully irreverent way of concisely setting
issues on a larger canvas by introducing us to a cast of characters:
Auntie, Granny, Greycat, Snark, and others. His work is a wel-
come relief from more sober and serious styles of doing philoso-
phy. Although not everyone is a fan of his playful way of writing,
I for one wholly applaud it, as protection against taking ourselves
too seriously, and because it allows no room for arguing from
authority. His style also allows us to focus quickly and firmly on
what really matters. Rob Rupert put it well in a review, noting that
“these devices allow Fodor to get at the meat of issues without the
circuitous ado.”
Fodor was generous in responding to argument, and could be
tough with his opponents. At the end of a prolonged exchange I
had with him once about the origins of intentional psychology,
he wrote “I’ll bet a nickel (maybe even a dime; what the hell) that,
if you assume that [children] don’t start with [an intentional psy-
chology], any attempt to explain how they might acquire one
would find itself up to its ears in circularities.” But he was equally
willing to apply the same standards to his own work, and to go
wherever an argument took him. This is classic Fodor, on repre-
sentational theories of mind (RTM); a view he long defended:
“This begins to seem a little worrying. It is perhaps tolerable that rep-
resentational theories of mind should lead by plausible arguments to
quite a radical nativism. But it is surely not tolerable that they should
lead by plausible arguments to a contradiction… the conclusion has to
be that there aren’t any primitive concepts. But if there aren’t any prim-
itive concepts, then there aren’t any concepts at all. And if there aren’t
any concepts [at] all, RTM has gone West. Isn’t it a bit late in the day
(and late in the book [p.132 of 174]) for me to take back RTM? Help!”
Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. OUP (1998)
Whatever we think of his views or of the famous Fodor flair
and flourish, we should all seek to emulate his intellectual open-
ness and honesty. He will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.
© PROFESSOR DANIEL D. HUTTO 2018
Daniel Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University
of Wollongong.
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 47

Books
Experiencing Time
by Simon Prosser
IF THERE’S ONE THING WE
can all be sure about when
contemplating the nature
of time, it’s that time
passes, right? Whether we’re busily engaged
in daily tasks, quietly absorbed in a book,
watching a sunset, remembering an
awkward encounter, or looking forward to a
holiday, our experience tells us that time
flows. We approach the future, leaving the
past behind us, always occupying the
present, although the present is constantly
changing. This, we feel sure, is the nature of
our temporal experience; and on the basis of
this experience we infer that these descrip-
tions correctly describe the nature of tempo-
ral reality. That is, we take our experience as
of time flowing to be veridical – we have no
reason to think we’re being deceived – so we
conclude that time really does flow.
Simon Prosser, a lecturer in philosophy at
St Andrews University, rejects this conclu-
sion. He thinks that time doesn’t pass, or flow.
So what does Prosser think is wrong with
this argument? He doesn’t deny that we have
experiences as of the passage of time, but he
does deny that the only, or even the best,
explanation for this is that time really does
flow. Experiencing Time (2016) is an extended
48 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
Heather Dyke passes time reading about a denial of
the passing of time, Richard Baron tracks what Trolley
Problems can tell us about ethics, and Trevor Pateman
looks at problems with anger and forgiveness.
(and opinionated) defence of his position.
Prosser carefully explains unfamiliar terms
and issues as they arise, making this an excel-
lent introduction to issues in both the philos-
ophy of time and the philosophy of mind for
the general philosophical reader.
Chapter 1 begins by outlining the central
debate in the philosophy of time. Taking
their name from the philosophy of time of
John McTaggart, ‘A-theorists’ believe that
time as it is in itself, and not merely as it
seems to us, includes a distinction between
past, present and future. Furthermore, what
is past, present, and future is constantly
changing, because time is dynamic.
However, Prosser is a ‘B-theorist’, so he
rejects both of these claims. He thinks that
there is no objective distinction between
past, present and future, and that time is not
dynamic. Instead, events and moments in
time are related to each other by the tempo-
ral relations of precedence, subsequence,
and simultaneity. B-theorists don’t deny that
things change, but for them, change is the
variation in properties over time, which
independent of our perception of it doesn’t
flow, but rather exists. Neither do B-theo-
rists deny that we all recognise a distinction
between past, present and future; but they
think that this says more about us and our
perspective on time than it does about
temporal reality itself.
One way of grasping the distinction
between the A-theory and the B-theory of
time is to imagine a sequence of events and
to think about how that sequence of events
occupies time. So, imagine the entire history
of the universe, stretching from the Big Bang
through the formation of our Solar System,
through prehistoric times, recent events,
events going on right now, on into the
unknown future. One way of thinking about
this series is to think of each event as located
in either the past, present or future, recog-
nising that they can be further ordered in
terms of whether they’re in the distant past,
near past, present, near future, or distant
future. This is how the A-theorist thinks that
events occupy time. But we can also think of
the very same sequence of events as standing
in temporal relations to each other. Every
event in that sequence is either earlier than,
later than, or simultaneous with every other
event. When we order the sequence of
events in this way, this series presents no
distinction between past, present and future,
and especially no privileged present.
Furthermore, there is nothing dynamic
about this series; it is a static series: it eter-
nally exists. This is how the B-theorist thinks
events occupy time.
Notice however that when considering
these two different ways of ordering events
in time, we’re imagining the very same
sequence of events. Whether we think of it
as an A-series or a B-series, the entire history
of the universe contains the very same phys-
ical events in the very same order. Prosser
uses this fact to develop his ingenious argu-
ment that we couldn’t experience time pass-
ing even if time really did pass. The argu-
ment comes in two versions: the detector
argument, and the multi-detector argument.
I will focus here on the detector argument,
which “shows that experience fails to favour
the A-theory over the B-theory; the multi-
detector argument shows that the passage of
time cannot be experienced at all” (p.33).
The detector argument asks whether
there could be “a physical device that could
detect whether or not time was passing, and
thus tell us whether or not the A-theory was
true.” (p.33) Perhaps a light would illuminate
when the device detected the passage of time.
But recall that the A-series and the B-series
Book Reviews
 Books
contain the very same physical events in the
very same order. It follows that if the light on
the detector illuminates at all, it will illumi-
nate in both A-series and B-series time. So no
physical device could detect the A-series’
passage of time. Prosser further argues that,
on any acceptable view of the relation
between mind and body, “if no physical

WATCH INSIDE © MARTELL 2007

system can detect the passage of time, then
neither can the human mind” (p.35).
Prosser spends Chapter 2 motivating,
developing, and defending his detector and
multi-detector arguments. His aim is to
undermine the A-theory which, he claims,
relies almost entirely on the fact that experi-
ence seems to tell us that time flows. But if
his detector arguments are successful, then
the passage of time cannot possibly be expe-
rienced. This arguably deals quite a blow to
the A-theory, although it is still open to A-
theorists to deny that experience is their prin-
ciple motivation. Indeed many A-theorists
appeal not to the nature of temporal experi-
ence, but rather to the fact that their view best
articulates commonsense beliefs about time.
(See for example, T.M. Crisp, ‘Presentism’,
in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, 2003;
N. Markosian, ‘A Defense of Presentism’,
Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 1(3), 2004; D.W.
Zimmerman, ‘The Privileged Present:
Defending an “A-theory”of Time’ in
Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics, 2008.)
Having dealt what he takes to be a mortal
blow to the A-theory, in the rest of the book
Prosser turns to developing B-theory expla-
nations for various elements of our experi-
ence that would otherwise seem to favour the
A-theory. In Chapter 3 he discusses why we
think of events as past, present and future, and
why our attitudes and emotional responses to
events vary depending on whether those
events are past, present, or future. We all
recognise that we would feel very differently
about a painful trip to the dentist if it was
future rather than past, for example. In Chap-
ter 4 he develops a B-theoretic account of the
fact that we experience events and processes
as taking place at different rates, and as having
duration. He also gives an account of the
widely reported phenomenon that under
certain circumstances, time can seem to speed
up or slow down. For example, people often
report that time seems to slow down in a crit-
ical situation, such as a car crash.
Chapter 5 examines the question of
whether experience is temporally extended.
Unlike the other elements of temporal expe-
rience Prosser discusses, this discussion
seems largely independent of the A-
theory/B-theory debate. Prosser develops a
“dynamic snapshot theory” (p.123) of
temporal experience, which stands in oppo-
sition to the traditionally more dominant
view that our experience is contained in a
‘specious present’ – that is, a short but
finitely extended temporal duration.
In Chapter 6 Prosser asks, if time is not
dynamic, why do we seem to experience
change as dynamic? His answer is that expe-
rience misleadingly presents objects as
enduring through change, that is, as existing
wholly and completely while undergoing
changes in properties. Instead of the whole
object enduring through change in this way,
Prosser thinks objects are temporally
extended entities, having different temporal
parts that possess different properties at
different times. He says that they perdure.
On the endurance view, a ripening tomato
is a three-spatial-dimensional entity that
exists wholly and completely at all the times
it exists, and at earlier times it possesses the
property of being green, while at later times
the very same tomato possesses the property
of being red. On the perdurance view, a
ripening tomato is a temporally extended
four-spacetime-dimensional entity that has
earlier green parts and later red parts.
Finally, in Chapter 7, Prosser discusses
two further features of our temporal experi-
ence that he believes contribute to our sense
that time passes. These are firstly the sense
that we are moving through time, or that the
future is approaching us, and secondly the
sense that the future is open – that it is as-
yet undetermined. He suggests that there
are features in common between the
‘approach’ of a future event, and the
approach of a moving physical object, and
that these common features may help
“explain why we use so many motion-related
metaphors when talking about time” (p.xi)
without these being anything more than
metaphors. He explains the apparent open-
ness of the future in terms of the perspective
from which we experience the world.
Experiencing Time is a provocative, engag-
ing and yet accessible exploration of the
many different elements of our temporal
experience, while at the same time being a
stalwart defence of the B-theory of time.
Prosser does a sterling job of attempting to
reconcile his preferred theory of time with
the many features of our temporal experi-
ence that apparently conflict with it. He
draws not just on work in metaphysics and
the philosophy of mind but also on recent
empirical work in psychology and cognitive
science. This is a must-read for anyone
interested in the philosophy of time and the
psychology of temporal experience.
© DR HEATHER DYKE 2018
Heather Dyke has taught philosophy at Otago,
NZ and at the London School of Economics.
• Experiencing Time, by Simon Prosser, Oxford UP
2016, 240 pages, £40 hb, ISBN: 0198748949

Book Reviews February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 49

 Books
The Trolley Problem
Mysteries
by F. M. Kamm
A RUNAWAY TROLLEY IS
coming up to a switch (or in
British English, a tram is
coming up to a set of points). If nothing is
done, it will carry straight on and kill five
people who are working on the track. If you
switch the trolley to the right, they will be
saved but one person who is on the other
track will be killed. What should you do?
Trolley problems have been with us since
the 1970s. They continue to fascinate,
mainly because of the scope they offer to
vary the details in the effort to discover an
underlying rationale for our ethical deci-
sions. Many people would switch the course
of the trolley. If they are asked to justify this
choice, they may say that it is not as bad to
have only one person killed as having five
killed. But if you take away the switch and
instead let them save the five by pushing one
very fat man off a bridge into the trolley’s
path, so that he dies, many people who
would have used the switch say they would
not push him. They say this even though the
body count – five versus one – would be the
same. So ‘minimize the number of early
deaths’ is not the complete underlying ratio-
nale. But then what is the complete ratio-
nale, if there is one?
The first part of this book gives the text of
two lectures by Harvard ethics professor
Frances Kamm, in which she pursues this
quest for a complete ethical rationale by
considering many more trolley problem vari-
ants than the basic ones. In the second part,
Judith Jarvis Thomson, Thomas Hurka, and
Shelly Kagan challenge both some of Kamm’s
conclusions and some of her methods. She in
turn responds to their comments.
In the first part, Kamm distinguishes
between the choice to switch course being
in the hands of the driver of the trolley and
its being in the hands of a bystander. She
then adds variants in which there are extra
choices, such as sacrificing yourself, or
different ways in which people may die, such
as rockfalls. She also brings in cases in which
there is no trolley, but some other reason
why action or inaction will affect who will
die, such as life-saving medical treatment
that spreads a dangerous gas to other people.
The reference in the book’s title to
‘mysteries’ reflects Kamm’s approach. A
detective in a murder mystery wants to know
who did the deed, and how it was done. In
the first lecture, Kamm concentrates on who
50 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
turned the trolley, or refused to turn it, or
did or failed to do something equally signif-
icant. In the second lecture, she concentrates
on how the trolley was (or would have been)
turned. Her goal is not to find out who did
what: we know that. Rather, she wants to
establish the scope and limits of a general
principle that explains why we don’t simply,
and every time, want to minimize the
number of early deaths. For example, we do
not accept the idea of kidnapping a healthy
person outside a hospital in order to harvest
their organs to save five people in need of
various transplants. And we might accept
people’s acting to save themselves, even if
their actions would kill more people than
would be saved.
Although Kamm’s goal is not the same as
the detective’s, her focus on who turned the
trolley and then on how the trolley was
turned makes perfect sense. One might
expect a good deal to depend on details of
the causal chain that leads to whichever
deaths occur. Did anyone who took action
or stood idly by have any pre-existing
responsibility, for example as the driver of
the trolley? And was anyone actually killed
by human intervention, or did people
‘merely’ let others die?
More subtly, Kamm wants to consider
whether deaths result from the saving of
lives, or from actions which are mere means
to the saving of lives. She suggests a principle
of permissible harm, under which actions
which are followed by deaths in the first way
would be permitted, but actions which
would lead to deaths in the second way are
not. Switching the trolley away from the
track with five people would itself be the
saving of five lives, so it is permitted. Push-
ing the fat man off the bridge would be a
death as a mere means to the saving of five
lives, so it would not be permitted.
Kamm does not proclaim her principle to
be the complete answer, and wisely so. She
acknowledges that it has its own difficulties.
She probes some of them by considering
examples, such as ones in which the diverted
trolley not only kills one person but also
blocks a runaway tractor which presents an
additional threat to the five. And in the
second part of the book, the other philoso-
phers raise specific doubts about her princi-
ple. But there is also a wider concern to be
addressed. Can philosophical distinctions
between results and means to their achieve-
ment, and between different shapes of causal
chain, tell us how to think about matters of
life and death? The potential victims might
not think so. This comes out clearly in
Kamm’s discussion of their perspective,
where she remarks that they may permissibly
resist actions of the fair-minded philosopher
which determine who is to die.
Another limit on the power of subtle inves-
tigations of the type that Kamm pursues
comes out in the second part of the book.
Thomson wonders where all the elaborate
examples really lead (p.125); and Hurka finds
that one example is too ingenious, too far
from reality, for him to have much confidence
in the intuition about what’s permitted that
he thinks it supports (p.139). Kamm acknowl-
edges the difficulty, but maintains that the
method still has value and can be a route to
good answers (pages.193-4).
So the book offers us imperfect and tenta-
tive answers, and it left me worried about the
methods used to obtain those answers. But
that in itself makes it a fine example of philo-
sophical argument. In the natural sciences,
we expect answers. In philosophy we expect
debate, a deeper understanding of questions,
and answers which teach us something even
when they are inadequate, as well as when
they strike us as correct.
This is a complex book, and it is not the
first book that a student of trolley problems
should read. But it will not be the last book
to read either. The lively way in which it
Book Reviews

makes plain that the last word is not yet to
be had is one of its virtues.
© RICHARD BARON 2018
Richard Baron is a philosopher in London. His
website is www.rbphilo.com
• The Trolley Problem Mysteries, by F. M. Kamm,
Oxford University Press, 2016, xii + 256 pages, £19.99
hb, ISBN 978-0-19-024715-7
Anger & Forgiveness
Martha Nussbaum
THIS BOOK BY ONE OF AMER-
ica’s leading philosophers
originated in Martha Nuss-
baum’s 2014 John Locke
lectures at Oxford University. It’s very wide-
ranging, starting in Ancient Greece and
ending in the liberation struggles and civil
rights movements of twentieth century
India, USA, and South Africa. It stays
throughout with a few key concepts – anger,
forgiveness, gratitude, punishment, justice.
Nussbaum characterises her overall ethical
and political vision as essentially ‘welfarist’,
indebted both to utilitarians (specifically J.S.
Mill) and liberals (specifically John Rawls).
From this very general position she tries to
discourage any idea we might have of anger
as being a virtue of some kind. She’s also very
critical of conditional forgiveness. If there is
to be punishment, it should not be as back-
ward-looking retribution or payback, but as
forward-looking deterrent.
Nussbaum partitions her discussion in
terms of areas of social life: the intimate rela-
tionships of family and close friendship; the
non-personal relationships of daily life,
where we meet other people as waiters, trav-
ellers on the same plane, drivers on the same
road; the more enduring but non-intimate
relationships we have with people such as
work colleagues; the world of criminal
justice, where the courts act for those who
have been wronged and against those who
have wronged them; and the more historic
worlds of revolutionary justice, where
fundamental social re-orientation is at issue.
She focusses on the civil rights struggles in
America, the campaign for Indian indepen-
dence, and the re-organisation of South
Africa achieved by the ANC and Nelson
Mandela. The discussion is packed with
examples and is readable throughout.
I had one general disquiet that emerged
when I read the Chapter 5, on the Middle
Realm of non-intimate everyday relation-
ships. Here Nussbaum discusses cases where
people have angered us by their inconsider-
Book Reviews
ate behaviour or worse, and we feel the need
to seek apology or in some other way basi-
cally stick up for ourselves, our dignity, or
our status. She canvasses various
approaches, and these fall into the cate-
gory of strategic action rather
than communicative action
(they’re Jürgen Haber-
mas’s terms, but others
make the same distinc-
tion). In strategic
action, we do not aim
to say what we think
or express what we
feel, but rather, aim
to get someone else to
improve their
behaviour by saying or
doing whatever seems
most likely to work, even if
that involves telling lies. So, for
example, in order to discourage a stranger
on a plane giving unwanted help getting her
cabin bag into the overhead locker, Nuss-
baum says (falsely), “I’m terribly sorry. That
suitcase contains fragile items, and I’d rather
handle it myself so that, if anything should
happen, I would know that I’m responsible
and not you” (p.148). Quite a speech, but
this is a pure example of strategic rather than
communicative action. In the present
instance, communicative action might
involve saying, “No thank you. I prefer to
do it myself” – which is a polite way of saying
“I don’t want your help.”
We act in this kind of strategic way all the
time in our non-intimate everyday relations,
but its ethical dubiousness emerges the
moment we switch the context to that of
intimate relationships, since we rely on
people close to us to say what they think and
express what they feel, not least because inti-
mate relationships become deserts if people
don’t do so. So, suppose a wife knows her
husband hates wearing a suit and tie but
wants him to dress up for an occasion which
might be important for his career or their
social standing. She hits on the strategy of
saying, “Why don’t you wear a suit and tie
this evening? It makes you look so hand-
some.” The strategy may work, but it
involves dishonesty about her intentions and
that’s high-risk in an intimate relationship,
and over time can be very damaging to it.
Nussbaum herself edges towards a discus-
sion of this problem when she writes admir-
ingly in Chapter 7 of the ways in which Nelson
Mandela brought important white groups
onside in the transition to majority rule in
South Africa. She realises that the ways in
Books
which Mandela won over the Springboks
(pp.234-37), for example, could be seen as
strategic – the work of a man who had read up
on winning friends and influencing people –
or as the expression of his personality.
(This leads her to point out that
Mandela was a real sports fan,
not a fake one.) But it’s
arguable that in Chapter
5 she’s quite happy with
pure strategic action
which is possibly
insincere or untruth-
ful, in non-intimate
everyday relation-
ships. This is more
consistent with her
overall welfarist position
than any prying into
people’s souls to test their
sincerity. The problem I find with
her very strong expression of forward-
oriented welfarist views is that though they are
meant to be both politically progressive and
consistent with a liberal pluralism of the kind
articulated by John Rawls, they have a general
paternalistic (or maternalistic) feel, so that
people may to some degree be manipulated or
infantilised by them. The exchange over the
suit and tie I sketched could be construed this
way too. Also, when writing about difficult
colleagues (pp.154-160), Nussbaum charac-
terises one as a “selfish genius two year-old”
(p.159) and others as suffering from “infantile
narcissism” (p.160) and who have to be
handled accordingly – that is, handled strate-
gically as patients rather than communicatively
as agents. Sometimes this will work, but at
other times it will cause offence and invite
anger when the ruse is seen through. In inti-
mate relationships, if you give the other cause
to think you are treating them as a patient not
an agent, you’re in deep trouble. Likewise,
treat the Springboks patronisingly as patients
and you will be told to get lost.
Although I have this small area of doubt,
this is a very impressive, wide-ranging, much
reflected-upon work of moral and political
philosophy, with much of which I am in
cheerful agreement.
© TREVOR PATEMAN 2018
Trevor Pateman studied with Richard Wollheim
and Roland Barthes. Their influence can still be
found in his books Materials and Medium: an
Aesthetics (2016), and Prose Improvements
(2017), on prose fiction and creative writing.
• Anger & Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity,
Justice, by Martha C. Nussbaum, OUP USA, 2016,
336pp, $24.95/£16.99, ISBN 978-0199335879
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 51

Film
“And just as paganism was to give way before
Christianity, so this last God will have to
yield to some new belief. Stripped of aggres-
sion, He no longer constitutes an obstacle to
the outburst of other gods; they need only
arrive – and perhaps they will arrive.”
(E.M. Cioran, The New Gods, 1974).
R
idley Scott’s 2017 film Alien:
Covenant is the second Alien
prequel and the sixth title overall
from the Alien series. It’s a sequel
to Prometheus (2012), a production praised
for its stunning visual quality. Alien:
Covenant contains references to poetry from
Milton to Shelley; to classical music
(Wagner); to the history of religions (espe-
cially Gnosticism); and to psychology (both
Freud and Jung). But most of all, Alien:
Covenant can be understood as a meditation
upon the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and
Emil Cioran’s antihumanism.
After a prologue, the movie follows the
journey of the starship Covenant, which is
carrying 2,000 comatose colonists to the
planet Origae 6. It is set in 2104, eleven years
after the events in Prometheus. The ship is
damaged in an accident, and the android
Walter (Michael Fassbender) wakes the
crew. The captain has burned to death in his
stasis pod, leaving Oram (Billy Crudup) in
charge. The death of the original captain sets
the tone for a state of anxiety, hesitation, and
disorder, and Oram has difficulty asserting
his authority.
Against the recommendation of the orig-
inal captain’s widow (played by Katherine
Waterton), the new captain decides to
investigate a radio signal picked up from a
nearby planet. Oram leads the exploration
of this Earth-like planet, which contains
vegetation but seems devoid of animal life.
Two members of the crew are infected by
alien spores and later killed by the creatures
that burst from their bodies, and things
rapidly go downhill. At this tricky juncture,
up pops David (Michael Fassbender again),
an android who was one of the central char-
acters of Prometheus, and who has been
stranded on the planet since the events of
that film. He scares the aliens away and leads
the crew to the temple of a nearby ruined
52 Philosophy Now l February/March 2018
A L I E
C O V E N A N T
Stefan Bolea talks of madness, antihumanism, and the
arrival of the new gods.
city. From now on the story takes an inter-
esting philosophical turn and I won’t
rehearse the plot details, preferring to draw
on the film’s philosophical themes.
Rebellion & Madness In Space
The android David is the main character of
the movie. His role might be compared to
that of Milton’s Lucifer or Mary Shelley’s
The android David has the whole
world in his hands
unnamed monster in Frankenstein. David’s
rebellious nature is obvious in the preface
during an opening conversation with his
creator, trillionaire Peter Weyland (Guy
Pearce), when he says, “You seek your
creator; I am looking at mine. I will serve
you, yet you are human. You will die, I will
not.” This echoes the famous role reversal
in Frankenstein where the monster says,
“You are my creator, but I am your master;
– obey!” It reminds me also of Hegel’s
dialectical shift in The Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807), where the slave becomes the
master of the master.
The mortality of his ‘father’ is the crux of
David’s defiance. Without death, there
would be no anxiety: one might say that all
forms of fear sing a hymn to death. Without
this anxiety, our relationship towards the
divine (the Father of fathers, the King of
kings) would be transformed. We would no
longer feel inclined to play the ‘comedy of
N
obedience’ because our fears of the
unknown as well our hopes of reward would
be greatly diminished.
David is Walter’s doppelgänger: they are
different generations of the same make of
android. While David is more creative and
has a propensity towards disobedience,
Walter has been upgraded to provide more
reliability and fidelity. This adjustment in
creation resembles the genesis of angels
compared with that of humans. Although
the angels were clearly superior beings, they
were inclined to rebel against their Creator
and provoke a state of what the Romanian
philosopher Lucian Blaga has called ‘theo-
anarchy’, a kind of divine disorder. The
humans by contrast are like the next gener-
ation androids – more inclined to serve and
worship after being equipped with the virus
of anxiety and the biological duty to die.
In a Jungian sense, David is Walter’s
shadow, a version of the archetype of the
enemy, the evil stranger, or the devil. In this
context we can discuss psychosis. David
wrongly attributes the poem Ozymandias to
Byron (it’s one of Shelley’s), and Walter
comments: “When a note is off, it eventu-
ally destroys the whole symphony.” Walter
is here using Arthur Schopenhauer’s defini-
tion of insanity, understood as a disturbance
of memory. The Romanian Schopenhaue-
rian poet Mihai Eminescu (who himself
eventually died in a mental institution) also
uses musical imagery to speak of insanity:
“All the lyre’s chords are broken, and the
minstrel man is mad.” Moreover, the musi-
cal metaphor of madness is a direct refer-
ence to Wagner’s prelude ‘Entry of Gods
into Valhalla’ from Das Rheingold (1854) –
which is played at the beginning and the end
of Covenant (proving that this interpretation
has managed to capture at least some of the
intentions of the creators of the movie).
Wotan, the ruler of the gods, is seen by Jung
as a darker version of Dionysus, Nietzsche’s
archetype of chaos. Jung wrote, “Wotan is
the noise in the wood, the rushing waters,
the one who causes natural catastrophes,
and wars among human beings.” The Swiss
psychiatrist also claimed that Nietzsche has
had a ‘Wotan experience’ that foreshad-
owed his descent into madness.
ALIEN COVENANT IMAGES © 20TH CENTURY FOX 2017
Alien Antihumanism
The most important theme of the movie is
the problem of antihumanism, a concept I use
in a slightly different sense than Michel
Foucault’s. The French philosopher spoke of
the death of a certain concept of humanity
following the demise of God: “Man would be
erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of
the sea.” However, poets such as Baudelaire
and Lautréamont and philosophers such as
Stirner, Nietzsche and Cioran add misan-
thropy – dislike of mankind – to their antihu-
manistic project. While Foucault alluded to
the downfall of man understood in a certain
type of way, and to the arrival of a non-
humanistic system of reference, some post-
Romantic poets and philosophers see them-
selves as agents of destruction – of what Niet-
zsche called ‘active nihilism’ – and would like
to finish with the saga of humanism alto-
gether through a Schopenhauerian process
of universal death. Moreover, Nietzsche
spoke of the Übermensch [‘overman’ or
‘superman’] as an overcoming of the tradi-
tional man, a sort of transgression of normal
humanity, and Cioran referred to the not-
man – a psychological mutation of the
species, a being who is human only from a
biological perspective. The Übermensch and
the not-man can both be seen as possible
paths for humanity’s evolution. They are also
a metaphor for the current impasse of
humanism: the feeling that the human
species is in a certain biological sense dying,
and that biotechnological enhancement in
the near future will transform humanity to
the core.
Cioran’s not-man might be a subtler and
more complicated idea than the Übermensch.
They are both ‘beings of overcoming’; but if
Nietzsche’s concept has a upwards and some-
what utopian quality, Cioran’s notion raises
the pessimistic possibility of a more dystopian
transgression of humanity. The not-man is
the infernal abyss of the Übermensch: the not-
man ceases to be human – “I was man and I
no longer am now,” observes Cioran – but
cannot aspire to the heroic status of the Über-
mensch. The not-man is a sort of shadow of the
ideal, a Platonic form relegated to the under-
world. The not-man could fail even worse
than the human being because its status is
more intricate and ambiguous: “I am no
longer human… What will I become?”
The key scene from Alien: Covenant takes
place after a neomorph (a species of alien)
severs the head of one of the Covenant’s
crew. David surprises the neomorph feeding,
then starts looking at its face (it doesn’t have
eyes) with awe and pity. This scene is signif-
icant because it’s two different kinds of not-
men looking at each other: it’s a meeting
between non-human and non-human unmedi-
ated by human intervention. David’s gaze
into the abyss of an even more radical inhu-
manity – into the shadow of his shadow –
revives Baudelaire’s ‘looking-glass of the
shrew’, the mirror of unidentification where
a schizophrenic sees something other than
Film
himself. “But am I not a false accord / Within
the holy symphony?” asks Baudelaire, again
echoing the musical imagery of madness.
Android Devil, Or God
Eventually Oram breaks the spell and shoots
the neomorph. In the same scene, Oram
speaks of the devil: “David, I met the devil
when I was a child. And I’ve never forgotten
him.” This alludes to Nietzsche’s assertion
that the so-called ‘higher men’ would see the
Übermensch as a devil. An important issue
connected with antihumanism is ‘creation-
ism’, in the sense of ‘having an appetite for
creation’. The devil is traditionally seen as a
decreator. In the Garden of Eden he hijacks
God’s influence by inspiring disobedience in
Adam and Eve. Yet we see in David a devil
who aspires to overcome his condition, who
wants to create as God creates, when he saves
an alien embryo so that the aliens can be
recreated. More precisely, David is one of
Cioran’s new gods. Just as Christianity
demonized the gods of antiquity, the new
gods will vilify the Christian God. This
demonization would be accomplished with
the death of the idea of resurrection, so that
mortality defeated even Jesus: “Christ will
not harrow Hell again: He has been put back
in the tomb, and this time he will stay there,”
notes Cioran. One could say that humans
believe they believe in God, but truly believe
only in death.
The android who has overcome the
profound anxiety of death is a created creator
who aspires to the divinity of his creators’
Creator. David’s appetite for creation thus
transforms him into an equal of Goethe’s
Prometheus:
“Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image; a race, resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!”
© DR STEFAN BOLEA 2018
Stefan Bolea earned PhDs in both Philosophy
and Literature from the University of Cluj-
Napoca, Romania. He is the editor-in-chief of
the online magazine Egophobia: egophobia.ro
February/March 2018 l Philosophy Now 53
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December 2017/January 2018 ● Philosophy Now 55


T allis
in
Wonderland
I
have recently been staring at the back
of my hand: an innocent, inexpensive
pastime that has provoked some
thoughts I would now like to share with
you. They touch on our relationship with
our own bodies, and on the puzzle of our
knowledge of the external world, which
enigma has exercised many philosophers,
not least David Hume and Immanuel Kant.
The peculiarity of our relationship to our
bodies is captured in a famous passage from
Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea (1965),
where the protagonist Roquentin says:
“I see my hand spread out on the table. It is
alive – it is me. It is lying on its back. It
shows me its fat underbelly. It looks like an
animal upside down. The fingers are the
paws. I amuse myself by making them move
about very quickly, like the claws of a crab
that has fallen upside down… I feel my
hand. It is me, these two animals moving
about at the end of my arms.” (pp.143-4).
The metaphysical scandal of this strange
and estranging encounter with our closest
lieutenant, our primordial means of
getting a grip on the world,
suggests that further
digging may yield
philosophical
treasure.
Roquentin’s
fascinated horror exposes
the oddness of the connection between
the ‘I am’ of the subject and the ‘it is’ of his
56 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
On Looking at the
Back of My Hand
Raymond Tallis finds unexpected depths of knowledge.
body: the mystery of what we might call
‘ambodiment’. In what follows, I want to
argue that this oddness is a key to our ability,
baffling to many philosophers, to perceive
objects as existing independently of our
perceptions and located in an external
world. You may think this a bold, even
outrageous, claim, but stick with me.
A Handy Double-Take
When I look at the back of my hand I see an
object that I know from immediate experi-
ence has parts that lie beyond what I now
see, belonging to my hand’s undersurface
and its interior. I can, for example, feel my
currently invisible palm through the pres-
sure on its flesh of the table on which it is
resting. Or I can directly intuit its interior
courtesy of a variety of sensations such as its
weight and warmth, and sometimes through
localized experiences such as pains. These
testify to an ‘in here’ hidden from the vision
that discloses the hand as ‘out there’, and
indeed, hidden from everyone else. You
cannot sense my pain. I cannot sense yours.
It is worth reflecting on this a
bit further before we proceed to
my larger claims. When I directly
feel the hand that I am also looking
at, I am in receipt of parallel streams of
experience which are each exposed by the
other as incomplete.
The warmth of, or the pres-
sure on, or a pain in, my
hand, betrays that
there is more to it than I can see; and the
visual appearance of my hand – for example,
the shadows between the wrinkles on the
knuckles – discloses that there is more to it
than I can directly feel. We thus have the
cross-sensory equivalent of the depth
perception afforded by binocular vision – in
this case, two sensory modalities as opposed
to two eyes. The object perceived in two
different ways simultaneously thereby has an
ontological depth – a depth of existence –
that reveals it as being more than what is
provided by a single sense.
You may be inclined to say, “So what?
When I examine a cup, I can also feel tactile
properties I can’t see.” I need therefore to
clarify in what way the experience of our own
bodily parts is unique.
Whereas lifting and looking at a cup give
different experiences of it, together indicat-
ing that each sensory modality yields an
experience of something that is more than
that experience, the different senses do not
have such a fundamentally different angle
of approach as is the case with my body.
With the cup there is nothing that corre-
sponds to the double aspect of the ‘from
without’ of my visible hand plus the ‘from
within’ of my hand apprehending its
warmth or weight or feeling discomfort.
When I observe the colour of my veins I can
see that I am seeing something that cannot
be felt; and when I am feeling the warmth
of my hand, I am aware of being aware of
something that lies beyond my or anyone
else’s gaze. The peculiar dissociation
between a distance receptor such as vision
and the immediate awareness arising out of
the hand’s sensation of itself is particularly
evident when my hand is in action: I can feel
but cannot see the effort in the grip.
Therefore, when I look at my hand, or
indeed other body part, I have experience of
an object that exceeds or (to use a term
beloved of phenomenologists) ‘transcends’
any sensory perception of it. Vision, which
locates the object as ‘out there’ is comple-
mented by proprioceptive (felt body) aware-
ness that illuminates the ‘in here’ of the
object, and which is not accessible to anyone
else. I suffer my body in the way that you
cannot. Moreover, while my seeing my body
can be terminated by closing my eyes, my
feeling it (particularily when it is in pain)
cannot be extinguished by voluntarily clos-
ing down a sensory pathway. This is why
tactile and proprioceptive experience
locates my body firmly in my subjectivity,
albeit on the edge of objectivity, while
seeing it locates it at a distance from subjec-
tivity. This double status is reflected in the
way we refer to our bodies or parts of them
as possessions – ‘my body’, ‘my hands’.
These two fundamentally different modes
of access reveal the ontological depth of my-
body-as-object.
A Good Body Of Evidence
Now to the large claims. Starting with the
human body will direct us away from a
murky path that has led many otherwise
sensible thinkers to find our knowledge of
material objects, even the status of objects
themselves, problematic. I am thinking for
example of David Hume’s opinion in his
Treatise on Human Nature (1738) that
‘bodies’ – by which he means objects gener-
ally – are mere fictions constructed out of
sense impressions; or Willard Van Orman
Quine’s assertion in Two Dogmas of Empiri-
cism (1951) that objects are ‘cultural posits’
fashioned out of ‘irritations on our sensory
surfaces’ and on a comparable ‘epistemolog-
ical footing’ as Homer’s gods. Or as Kant
(woken by Hume out of his ‘dogmatic slum-
ber’) argued, we cannot know any ‘thing-in-
itself’ by unaided perception. He conse-
quently postulated that only the activity of
the mind itself gives us the impression of
stable objects in a coherent world.
The fundamental puzzle here is that if
objects really are more than constructs out
of experiences we could not directly experi-
ence them as such; so what on earth could
justify the belief that the world is made up
of items made up of stuff that is more than
(and hence lies beyond) our experience?
The answer lies in our body, which is
experienced from within and without. This
gives the human body the ontological depth
we require of all real, experience-indepen-
dent, objects. Our body has the ontological
depth of a being that is more than just the
sum total of my and others’ experiences of
it, in virtue of being both an object of exter-
nal perception and experienced from within.
This means the one object that could not be
a Humean ‘fiction’ or a Quinean ‘posit’ is
our own body.
I can envisage several objections to this
argument. Let me deal with the most pressing.
Firstly, that this knowledge-from-within
argument might not withstand Cartesian
doubt. René Descartes finds a bedrock of
certainty in the fact that he is thinking: I
cannot without self-contradiction entertain
the thought that I am not thinking. This is
T allis
his famous cogito argument – ‘I think there-
in
fore I am’. But the scope of what is beyond
doubt as delivered by this argument is
severely limited. I can be certain only that I
am a thinking being – or that there are
Wonderland
thoughts happening – not that I am an biology, biochemistry of his living stuff.
embodied thinking being. Since, however – as
P.F. Strawson pointed out in Individuals Existential Reassurance
(1959) – identity depends on unique occu- What is most importantly granted to me
pancy of a location in space and time, it is through my ambodiment is what we might
not possible to confine the ‘I’ of that ‘I am’ call ‘existential reassurance’: that the world is
to thoughts, or indeed, perceptions, because populated with objects that exist in them-
they do not occupy space. So if I have an selves and are more than my, or anyone
identity (in short, if ‘I’ is to have a reference, else’s, experiences of them. The phenome-
and I am to have token experiences and nologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty expressed a
token thoughts), then I must be embodied. thought similar to this when he asserted that
‘I [the subject] am’ requires that ‘it [the “the very idea of the ontological dimension
body] is’. And this is equally true, by the way, of objects must be traced back to… the
of the very sense organs by which I perceive constitution of the object in our (bodily)
the world: they, too, must be located in a experience.” In virtue of the ‘I am’ that grows
body localized in space and time in order to in and haunts, and appropriates, and
have particular content – so that I see this distances itself from, this body, I have a sense
rather than that. As an individual who expe- of an ‘it is’ applicable to my body and thence
riences the world from a viewpoint, I cannot to material objects beyond my body. The
be mistaken that my body exists. combination of first-person being or ‘am-
All right, you concede, we can be certain ing’ my body and experiencing it as an object
about the existence of one type of material – most strikingly when I look at myself in a
object that transcends sense experience: the mirror – awakens the sense of the ‘being-in-
bodies of conscious human beings. But what itself’ of the world that surrounds me.
about sticks and stones and mountains? Can Next time you look at the back of your
we really know that they, too, are real? Yes; hand, give it a second, philosophical, look.
for if my body with its interacting parts were You may find there’s more to it than meets
real but the things it acted upon were merely the eye.
fictions or posits, there would be a rather © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2018
lopsided coupling between a real physical Raymond Tallis’ Of Time and Lamentation:
body and a world of fictional items. Reflections on Transience is out now. His
I am not claiming that I have full knowl- Logos: The Mystery of How We Make
edge of my body as an object from within in Sense of the World will be out this Spring.
virtue of ‘aming’ it. The
penetration of ‘I am’ into
the ‘it is’ of my body is
limited. Much of my own
flesh is a place of darkness
to me, and most of the little
I know of it is not accessed
through introspection.
What happens at the level
of organs, muscles and
bones, and cells, is hidden
from me until I open the
relevant textbook. To be
the body of Raymond
Tallis is not to have privi-
leged access to the physics,
February/March 2018 ● Philosophy Now 57
 Freedom 2199
Jonathan Sheasby discovers some unexpected perils of AI.
teve sat in his B38, a sleek grey capsule descending deep
S down into Novus’s core, plummeting like a hammerhead
shark in pursuit of its prey. Our hero experienced an
increased sense of disorientation as the speed
at which he was travelling jeopardised his already
rather tenuous connection with reality.
The interior of the pod reverberated,
increasing its occupant’s unease as he
glanced at the coloured windows which,
comfortingly, or perhaps discomfort-
ingly, revealed nothing of the capsule’s
surroundings.
“Want a mint?” asked the disembod-
ied voice of the IDEX, his electronically
generated companion for the journey,
programmed to put its passenger at ease
with light-hearted solicitous questions of
this nature. Steve’s stomach churned with the
downward motion of his vessel. He found him-
self wondering whether IDEX Sam was, in some lit-
eral sense, a ghost in a machine. His musings were inter-
rupted by a rather surreal turn of events when IDEX Sam asked,
apparently at random: “Are you completely free, Steven?”
“What?” yelped Steve, more than a little phased by this
unorthodox line of questioning, never before heard from an
IDEX. Their sole purpose was to comfort and distract the
miners as they journeyed to their place of work each day, taking
their minds off their sense of powerlessness as they dropped
through the churning, lightening-wracked cloud layers of an
alien planet. He was also a tad disconcerted by the formal
manner in which he was now being addressed by his simulated
companion, who had previously tended to salute him affection-
ately as ‘mate’ or ‘Ste’. He hadn’t been called ‘Steven’ since he
was a child being reprimanded by his mother or aunt for some
misdemeanor or other.
Unbeknownst to Steve, or indeed most of the other miners
travelling in the other capsules that day, hackers had infiltrated
the Viecorps mainframe. It could have been worse: these tech-
nological law-breakers were merely part of a rather austere
albeit impassioned sect who felt impelled to force humankind
to attain a higher, more reflective mode of existence.
“There’s no point your working mindlessly each day until
you die without having considered the deeper questions of life,”
said the proselytising reconstituted IDEX Sam: “And so before
I let you leave this vehicle, I’m afraid you’re going to have to
seriously address at least one of them.”
Desperately clinging to his seat as if grasping his very sanity,
Steve exclaimed, “But you can’t force me to think; that’s against
my human rights!”
“That particular rather valueless right has been temporarily
suspended. For your own good, you understand.”
“Who the hell are you to decide what’s in my interests, you
58 Philosophy Now ● February/March 2018
robot hippy?” yelled the irate miner, arising as he did so – then
wishing he hadn’t as his head banged the roof of his sinking cell.
“Ahhh…” iterated the computer calmly, “We knew we’d
encounter some rather futile resistance on the path to
enlightenment. You must realise that this situa-
tion can only be escaped through a little
thought on your part - a little cognition of
which you are entirely capable.. You see,
everyone begins to philosophise at some
point, just as you did when you wondered
whether I was a ghost in a machine…”
“You read my mind? Now that’s def-
initely a breach of my human rights!”
opined the indignant Steve. “I refuse to
answer your question. I’ll stay here for-
ever if I have to. I’ll sweat it out. My mental
freedom’s more important to me than every-
thing – my own life, even.”
“Okay, as you wish. You are free to choose,
after all.” Steve wondered whether there was more
than a hint of irony in his self-appointed jailer’s statement,
but kept this thought, as best he could, to himself. He began
recklessly banging buttons and pulling levers in the hope of
escaping the control of his self-righteous and conceited captor;
but upon realising the futility of his struggle he sat back breath-
ing heavily, his energy spent.
The seconds passed ever so slowly in silence; and as they did,
as much as he tried to not think, Steve was horrified to find him-
self wondering whether he was free in the very situation he was
in. He was surely still free to think what he wanted to, wasn’t
he? But if so, then why, without any physically imposed restraint,
or any electrode attached to his brain or chip inserted therein,
was he now venturing to answer the question he had been
instructed by the machine to address, and which he was so
strongly opposed to answering for the sake of the very freedom
he held so dear? Then, to the conflicted miner’s simultaneous
horror and relief, IDEX Sam explained, “Steve, you are free to
go – as in fact you always have been. I’ve not actually interfered
with your journey one iota: I merely played a little benevolent
trick on you in order to lead you further along the path of self-
realisation.” With that the door opened, at the same time it did
every single day.
Steve stepped out into the blinding artificial light of Novus’s
interior, shaking his head and attempting to focus his eyes on
the armed retainers of Viecorps, evidently sent forth to rescue
him, albeit redundantly. Although uncertain whether or not his
rights had been violated during his ordeal, Steve felt convinced
that he would be thinking about freedom much more carefully
in future.
© JONATHAN SHEASBY 2018
Jonathan Sheasby is a writer living in the sometimes free and alien
world of London. He works for Westminster Council.
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Hardback | 9781474298339 | £20.00
eBook | 9781474298346 | £19.99
Everyone judges and is judged. Why is this so? And can we
find true understanding amidst all the confusions, misfires and
insecurities? Ziyad Mirar provides an honest exploration of the
paradox of judgement in the contemporary world.
www.bloomsbury.com/philosophy
@BloomsburyPhilo