Dear all,
Getting a print issue over the line is always hard work but we’re almost there now. I am really delighted with the quality of the contributions to this new issue. I think it will prove to be a worthy issue to help us celebrate our 100th anniversary! I am also excited that the artist Agnieszka Pilat has given us permission to use some of her images alongside the essays.
I uploaded a financial report for 2022 to our website. As you will see, we survived by the skin of our teeth thanks to the generosity of those people who donated to us. Things are looking much more stable and sustainable in 2023, but The Philosopher remains unfunded and relies on your support to keep going, pay our contributors, and so on. If you value what we do, please consider becoming a supporter via Patreon or offering a one-off/monthly/annual donation.
Offerings
Your Sunday Read!
“Is Climate Real?”: an essay by Maximilian Gregor Hepach.
While acknowledging that the answer to the titular question is “yes”, Hepach’s essay points to some challenging conceptual and ethical problems presented by the idea of “climate”. If climate is not the same as weather, then how is it different? If climate is in a sense both everywhere and nowhere, can we consider it an object of experience? And how can a phenomenological approach to this question help us to make sense of changes in climate? Hepach’s essay is accompanied accompanied by images by the wonderful Peruvian artist Nicole Franchy.
This week, we also uploaded “Belief”, an essay by Rima Basu from our “New Basics” series. Rima outlines a critique of the kind of individualist epistemology exemplified by Descartes, arguing that “our connection to the world is not only mediated through the senses, senses that can deceive, but through other people, institutions, and history, all of which can also deceive.”
To acknowledge the first anniversary of the Ukraine war, we have uploaded "Humanising War, Obscuring Peace", a wide-ranging interview with the remarkable historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn.
Events
Monday at (*** later time of ***) 3pm EST/8pm EST:
Wonder’s Politics: Why does democracy depend on honestly getting lost together, and how can we learn to do that? What is protest’s future or wonder’s role in outrage? Why do we need wonder in order to face ecological collapse?
In this event, our contributing editor Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and artist Misty Morrison will talk with Danielle Celermajer about their new book, Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder. Today, as populist demagogues and corporate interests exploit people’s fear of the unknown to sell certainty and stoke reductive and contemptuous intra-group rivalries, wonder can change politics into a shared searching for how life together can make sense.
For those of you who missed our recent events or would like to re-watch them or share them with others, we have now uploaded the video recording of:
Beauty and Being Alive: Nick Riggle in conversation with C. Thi Nguyen
I would like to thank Emil Kunna who has been working hard these past weeks on developing our YouTube channel, e.g. the cool clips on Heidegger and Zen etc.
Plans
The forthcoming spring series feels like a big step forward from all other series so far. I’ll explain why when it’s all finalised, the poster is designed etc. The first couple of events are now online:
Monday 27th March: Climate Refuge & Climate Guardianship: Simona Capisani, Krushil Watene, and Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Tuesday 28th March: The Political Theory of Algorithms: Josh Simons in conversation with Lily Hu (co-hosted with Boston Review)
Some of you may be wondering: what happened to the promised interview with Slavoj Žižek that was meant to be published on Friday to coincide with the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine? Well, the short answer is that when I sat down with the transcript of the audio recording earlier this week, I realised that it was going to take me about 800 hours to pull all the disparate threads of the conversation together into a coherent written document. So, I gave up. Sorry.
Reflections
This week, Alexandra Brown, a long-time reader and supporter of The Philosopher, offers a follow-up to her reflection from a couple of weeks ago on the role philosophical temperaments. In it, she reflects on philosophy’s failures and the implications for philosophy of the embodied nature of reason:
In his 1998 book Metaphysical Horror, Leszek Kolakowski writes that “a modern philosopher who has never experienced the feeling of being a charlatan is such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.” What Kolakowski is alluding to is the existence of “a simple, painfully undeniable fact”, namely that “among questions that have sustained the life of European philosophy for two and a half millennia not a single one has ever been solved to our general satisfaction”. Philosophy, Kolakowski argues, has come to be seen as an apparently “self-defeating” enterprise that is “either impossible or useless or both”.
Of course philosophy’s apparent inability to solve problems through attaining securely founded knowledge would only seem to reflect badly on it if this is indeed what it is there to do; and yet this idea that philosophy is first and foremost a cognitive discipline united in its quest for knowledge has persisted throughout much of its history. To jettison this understanding of philosophy would seem to be the end of philosophy, which explains the stubborn persistence of the search for truly rigorous scientific foundations for philosophy despite millennia of failures to date from some of history’s greatest minds.
Michael Dummett claimed in 1978 that “philosophy has only just very recently struggled out of its early stage into maturity”, arguing that a systematic theory of meaning can offer philosophy its elusive foundations and that “the search for such a theory of meaning can take on a genuinely scientific character”. A generation on, Timothy Williamson rejects Dummett’s approach, but characterizes the “opponents of systematic philosophical theorizing” as making “a feeble and unnecessary surrender to despair, philistinism, cowardice or indolence”. For Williamson, we have now arrived at “the end of the beginning” of philosophy!
Commenting on this wryly amusing historical trend, Herman Philipse suggests that “none of these attempts to put philosophy on the secure path of a rigorously scientific discipline ever acquired general endorsement in the community of philosophers. Even worse, none of them survived the demise of its author more than a few decades”. He adds that “we may safely perform a pessimistic induction and conclude that philosophy will never be established as a rigorous science”. Similarly Peter Hacker sums up the current state of affairs by concluding: “When bombarded throughout the ages with incompatible claims about the subject and unfulfilled promises of how this is going to be set right, the correct move is to challenge the fundamental assumption that is taken for granted by all participants in the debate, namely the assumption that philosophy is a cognitive discipline”.
Central to this failure of philosophy to find foundations is the impurity of philosophical thought underpinned by the irreducibly embodied nature of reason. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson put it, the claim that reason is embodied “is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment”, such that “reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind”. Human reason “is a form of animal reason” inseparable from “our bodily capacities, such as perception, bodily movement, feelings, emotions, and so on”. From this perspective, we can understand what Peter Sloterdijk is on about in referring to the “philosophically dead” who “cast off their bodies and apparently become pure intellects or impersonal thinking souls”. The philosophical ideal of anonymity stripped of all that is private and individual is also a property of corpses. To recognise the embodiment of reason is to replace a philosophy of corpses with a philosophy of flesh.
As we can see, then, the philosopher’s dream of universality is also a dream of anonymity, but philosophers can no longer avoid the personal, the particular, and the immediate by claiming to be a neutral or disengaged spectator; philosophers can no longer objectivise their personal wishes and inclinations. In this sense, a philosophy of flesh is also a philosophy of vulnerability.
Alexandra Brown is a retired school teacher living in Detroit. Her philosophical interests include aesthetics, ethics, feminist philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy.
Ending
This felt like a longer email than normal. Thanks for making it to the end…
Comments and feedback about any of this always welcome.
Wishing you all a great week ahead!
Anthony Morgan
Editor