Karen Armstrong on Sam Harris and Bill Maher: “It fills me with despair, because this is the sort of talk that led to the concentration camps” Karen Armstrong has written histories of Buddhism and Islam. She has written a history of myth. She has written a history of God. Born in Britain, Armstrong studied English at Oxford, spent seven years as a Catholic nun, and then, after leaving the convent, took a brief detour toward hard-line atheism. During that period, she produced writing that, as she later described it, “tended to the Dawkinsesque.” Since then, Armstrong has emerged as one of the most popular — and prolific — writers on religion. In her new book, “Fields of Blood,” Armstrong lays out a history of religious violence, beginning in ancient Sumer and stretching into the 21st century. Reached by phone in New York, Armstrong spoke with Salon about nationalism, Sept. 11 and the links between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Over the course of your career, you’ve developed something of a reputation as an apologist for religion. I don’t like the term “apologist.” Your new book is a history of religion and violence. Yes. Yes.
On Smell Smell is one of our primary and most immediate ways of understanding and interpreting the world and everything in it. We naturally categorise things into good and bad smells, and gravitate towards the former. Billion dollar industries exist around masking smells; making our environments and bodies smell better and less human. We often intuitively talk about smell as a shortcut to memory — with a certain, distinct scent being enough to remind us of of a certain time or place, often with great emotional intensity. Yet throughout history, smell has oftentimes been considered a lower sense, through which we can only access a baser reality. Plato renounced smell. Philosopher G.W. When the Black Death swept through Europe in the 14th century, understanding of the modern germ theory of disease eluded doctors. Enlightenment thinkers dismissed smell as irrational and unverifiable. But not all throughout history have rejected smell as low and base. “Not just smells.
Let’s ditch the dangerous idea that life is a story ... ‘Each of us constructs and lives a “narrative”,’ wrote the British neurologist Oliver Sacks, ‘this narrative is us’. Likewise the American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner: ‘Self is a perpetually rewritten story.’ And: ‘In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives.’ Or a fellow American psychologist, Dan P McAdams: ‘We are all storytellers, and we are the stories we tell.’ And here’s the American moral philosopher J David Velleman: ‘We invent ourselves… but we really are the characters we invent.’ So say the narrativists. I think it’s false – false that everyone stories themselves, and false that it’s always a good thing. What exactly do they mean? Perhaps. Get Aeon straight to your inbox The tendency to attribute control to self is, as the American social psychologist Dan Wegner says, a personality trait, possessed by some and not others. I still doubt that this is true. various selves… make up our composite Self. The passage continues:
Arguments for Incompatibilism 1. Definitions and Distinctions In the literature, “determinism” is sometimes used as an umbrella term for a variety of different claims which have traditionally been regarded as threats to free will. Given this usage, the thesis that I am calling “determinism” (nomological determinism) is just one of several different kinds of determinism, and the free will/determinism problem we will be discussing is one of a family of related problems. For instance, logical determinism is the thesis that the principle of bivalence holds for all propositions, including propositions about our future actions, and the problem of free will and logical determinism is the problem of understanding how, if at all, we can have free will if there are truths about what we will do tomorrow. Let's call a world “deterministic” iff the thesis of determinism is true at that world; non-deterministic iff the thesis of determinism is false at that world. Note that determinism is not a thesis about predictability. 2. 3.
Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism? In giving a commencement address on the subject, I found myself contemplating anew this fine but firm line between critical thinking and cynical complaint. To cross it is to exile ourselves from the land of active reason and enter a limbo of resigned inaction. But cross it we do, perhaps nowhere more readily than in our capacity for merciless self-criticism. We tend to go far beyond the self-corrective lucidity necessary for improving our shortcomings, instead berating and belittling ourselves for our foibles with a special kind of masochism. Authority wants to replace the world with itself.
Think big, be free, have sex … 10 reasons to be an existentialist I was a teenage existentialist. I became one at 16 after spending birthday money from my granny on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. It was the cover that attracted me, with its Dalí painting of a dripping watch and sickly green rock formation, plus a blurb describing it as “a novel of the alienation of personality and the mystery of being”. I didn’t know what was mysterious about being, or what alienation meant – although I was a perfect example of it at the time. I just guessed that it would be my kind of book. Indeed it was: I bonded at once with its protagonist Antoine Roquentin, who drifts around his provincial seaside town staring at tree trunks and beach pebbles, feeling physical disgust at their sheer blobbish reality, and making scornful remarks about the bourgeoisie. No one can be completely sure what existentialism is, since its own chief thinkers disagreed about its tenets and many of them denied being existentialists at all. 1 Existentialists are philosophers of living
Science has next to nothing to say about moral intuitions | Aeon Ideas For centuries, philosophers have been using moral intuitions to reason about ethics. Today, some scientists think they’ve found a way to use psychology and neuroscience to undermine many of these intuitions and advance better moral arguments of their own. If these scientists are right, philosophers need to leave the armchair and head to the lab – or go into retirement. The thing is, they’re wrong. How do ethicists use intuitions? The ‘trolley problem’ is the best, most ubiquitous example of this kind of philosophy. Ethicists will then cite people’s intuitions about the problem as evidence in the debate between the two most popular types of moral theories, consequentialist and deontological. In the past few years, scientists have argued that there is a fatal problem with this approach. The psychologist Joshua Greene at Harvard led studies that asked subjects hooked up to fMRI machines to decide whether a particular action in a hypothetical case was appropriate or not.
Algorithmicity, Islamic Art, and Virtual Philosophy: Thoughts on Laura Marks’ ‘Enfoldment and Infinity’ | Networkologies One of the most incredible works of architecture I’ve ever seen: The Hall of the Two Sisters in the Alhambra, Granada. The dome is composed of a multitude of tiny, pixel-like cells known as muquarna. “The universe is not dualistic, but folded, so spirit is separated from matter only by degree” – Laura Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art (2010, p. 271). As someone deeply invested in using networks to understand a wide range of phenomenon, I was thrilled to see Laura Marks’ new book Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media Art. How sameness can give rise to diversity: Interactive architecture that changes shape as you move within it, my own photograph, from the great mosque of Cordoba, Spain. Marks’ goals, however, are wider than an introduction to philosophies under-studied in the Euro-American world. Marks’ Algorithmic Ontology: Infinity, Information, and Image Marks starts off her work by describing her ontology of enfoldment. Like this:
What It Feels Like to Be an Octopus On a recent Sunday, at my local Italian market, I considered the octopus. To eat the tentacle would be, in a way, like eating a brain—the eight arms of an octopus contain two-thirds of its half billion neurons. Delicious for some, yes—but for others, a jumping off point for the philosophical question of other minds. “I do think it feels like something to be an octopus,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center, who has spent almost a decade considering the idea. Since a 2008 dive off the coast of Sydney, Australia, where Godfrey-Smith encountered curious, 3-foot long cuttlefish, he’s been fascinated by the minds of cephalopods, which have the largest nervous systems of all the invertebrates. Nautilus recently caught up with the philosopher by Skype to ask what it’s like to be an octopus. Does an octopus have a sense of self? Well they are a tricky case. Is the act of exploring pleasurable to an octopus? How do they learn?
Dalla parte del lupo. Cosa sono i pregiudizi – Filosoφicamente di Salvatore Pappalardo e Sara Creola I pregiudizi sono credenze che formuliamo nei confronti del mondo e delle persone che ci circondano. Spesso senza rendercene conto, ricorriamo ad essi per assumere posizioni a favore o a sfavore nei confronti di ciò che non conosciamo, secondo criteri infondati, inesatti o errati. Per questa ragione spesso i pregiudizi ci impediscono di maturare pensieri nuovi, creativi e personali, poiché schiacciano la realtà alle nostre aspettative e ci impediscono di cogliere aspetti della nostra vita che non conosciamo e che tendiamo a escludere o a ignorare. Già Bacone, un filosofo scienziato inglese vissuto nel 1600, sosteneva qualcosa di simile: IL PREGIUDIZIO è la presunzione di comprendere la natura senza prima osservarla, dando per scontato il significato delle cose o il valore delle persone. Certamente i pregiudizi comportano un modo di guardare al mondo molto semplicistico e per certi versi ingenuo che può rivelarsi talvolta dannoso o pericoloso.
Philosophical Meditation Even though our minds ostensibly belong to us, we don’t always control or know what is in them. There are always some ideas, bang in the middle of consciousness, that are thoroughly and immediately clear to us: for example, that we love our children. Or that we have to be out of the house by 7.40am. Or, that we are keen to have something salty to eat right now. But a host of other ideas tend to hover in a far more unfocused state. Unfocused thoughts are constantly orbiting our minds, but from where we are, from the observatory of our conscious selves (as it were), we can’t grasp them distinctly. There is one response to dealing with our minds that has become immensely popular in the West in recent years. Eastern Meditation: the mind being emptied of its confused content Buddhist meditation has been so successful, we are liable to forget another effective and in some ways superior path to finding peace of mind, this one rooted in the Western tradition: Philosophical Meditation. 1. 2. 3.
Come uscire dalla caverna. La filosofia di Westworld Sotto l’onnipresente musica del Debussy di “Reverie”, che contribuisce a creare un paesaggio onirico in cui si ridefinisce il concetto stesso di realtà, gli sceneggiatori/divinità Jonathan Nolan e Lisa Joy costruiscono un palcoscenico teatrale in cui uomini e macchine si scambiano i propri copioni/programmazioni, ed in cui si riedificano, come da buona tradizione della letteratura classica e fantascientifica, l’identità, il concetto di soglia, quello di autocoscienza e di libertà. Westworld è uno dei più meravigliosi prodotti di letteratura cinematografica degli ultimi anni, travalicando l’etichetta di “fantascienza” per approdare ad un racconto esistenziale sui confini dell’umano: e come ben si sa, vivere ai confini significa rendersi conto dei vari “interregni” tra una zona e l’altra. Per guardarsi finalmente con occhi diversi. “Westworld” come nome somiglia molto ad uno dei riferimenti letterari preferiti di Nolan, The Waste Land di Eliot. BERNARD: Lifelike – but not alive.
I'll Bee There for You: Do Insects Feel Emotions? Charles Darwin once wrote in his book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals that insects “express anger, terror, jealousy and love.” That was in 1872. Now, nearly 150 years later, researchers have discovered more evidence that Darwin might have been onto something. Bumblebees seem to have a “positive emotionlike state,” according to a study published this week in Science. In other words, they may experience something akin to happiness. Unlike humans, you can't simply ask a bee to interrogate its own emotions and describe them. Biologist Clint Perry of Queen Mary, University of London devised an experiment to do just that. Then the researchers tested the bees on ambiguously colored flowers at intermediate locations. The assumption that an ambiguous stimulus contains a reward despite the lack of evidence is called an optimism bias. Sound familiar? In another test involving a simulated predator attack, the sugar-addled bees showed the same optimism bias.
How to Make Our Ideas Clear How to Make Our Ideas Clear Charles S. Peirce Popular Science Monthly 12 (January 1878), 286-302. Whoever has looked into a modern treatise on logic of the common sort, will doubtless remember the two distinctions between clear and obscure conceptions, and between distinct and confused conceptions. They have lain in the books now for nigh two centuries, unimproved and unmodified, and are generally reckoned by logicians as among the gems of their doctrine. A clear idea is defined as one which is so apprehended that it will be recognized wherever it is met with, and so that no other will be mistaken for it. This is rather a neat bit of philosophical terminology; yet, since it is clearness that they were defining, I wish the logicians had made their definition a little more plain. A distinct idea is defined as one which contains nothing which is not clear. Such was the distinction of Descartes, and one sees that it was precisely on the level of his philosophy. And what, then, is belief? Notes