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ISSUE 121 AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2017 UK £3.75 USA $7.99 CANADA $8.
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PhilosophyNow
a magazine of ideas
Leibniz and
Radical Theories
the Big Bang
Language, Truth
& Donald Trump
of Consciousness
Brief Lives:
John Rawls
Explore Your World
iupress.indiana.edu
Probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology,

the philosophy of art, history, and politics, are appropriate
for students and scholars of philosophy at all levels.
Kierkegaard continues to be an important resource

for understandings of religious existence, public
discourse, social life, and how to live virtuously.
Distinguished feminist philosophers consider

the future of their field and chart its political and
ethical course in this forward-looking volume.
Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark

forces that ignite the inner power of modern thought.
Philosophy Now ISSUE 121 Aug/Sept 2017
Philosophy Now, EDITORIAL & NEWS
43a Jerningham Road,
Telegraph Hill,
4 Can Science Explain Consciousness?
London SE14 5NQ Philip Goff calls for radical thinking and free enquiry
United Kingdom
Tel. 020 7639 7314
5 News
editors@philosophynow.org RADICAL THEORIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
philosophynow.org
6 The Case for Panpsychism
Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis Philip Goff thinks everything is conscious, to some extent
Editors Anja Steinbauer, Grant Bartley
Digital Editor Bora Dogan 9 Neutral Monism: A Saner Solution to the Problem
Graphic Design Grant Bartley, Katy Sam Coleman seeks a balance between mental and physical
Baker, Anja Steinbauer
Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton 12 The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness
Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg Hedda Hassel Mørch has the inside information
Marketing Manager Sue Roberts
Administration Ewa Stacey, Katy Baker 17 Does Consciousness Cause Quantum Collapse?
Advertising Team Kelvin McQueen examines a possible case of mind over matter
Jay Sanders, Ellen Stevens
jay.sanders@philosophynow.org GENERAL ARTICLES
UK Editorial Board
22 Beyond Bullshit: Donald Trump’s Philosophy of Language
MENTAL
Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer,
Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley Chris Gavaler & Nathaniel Goldberg on POTUS-speak
US Editorial Board
Dr Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher 24 The Further History of Sexuality
Alternative ideas about mind
College), Prof. Charles Echelbarger, Peter Benson transcends gender with Foucault & Miley Cyrus
Prof. Raymond Pfeiffer, Prof. Massimo pages 6-20
Pigliucci (CUNY - City College), Prof. 28 Leibniz and the Big Bang
Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.) Eric Kincanon on why there is something rather than nothing
Contributing Editors
Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) 30 Luther’s Contribution To Feuerbach’s Atheism
Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) Van Harvey tells us what the monk showed the atheist.
David Boersema (Pacific University)
© WOODROW COWHER 2017
UK Editorial Advisors 34 Terminal Taboo

Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon David Rönnegard on difficult conversations
Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood
US Editorial Advisors REVIEWS
Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni 46 Book: Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938
Vogel Carey, Prof. Walter Sinnott-
Armstrong, Prof. Harvey Siegel by Martin Heidegger, translated by Richard Rojcewicz
PORTRAIT
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48 Book: Freedom’s Right by Axel Honneth

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August/September 2017 Philosophy Now 3
Editorial Can Science Explain Consciousness?
I
t is sometimes said that consciousness is a mystery in the philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was
sense that we have no idea what it is. This is clearly not generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes
true. What could be better known to us than our own were red, paprika was spicy, flowers were sweet-smelling. It’s
feelings and experiences? The mystery of consciousness is not hard to see how these sensory qualities could be captured in the
what consciousness is, but why it is. abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an
Neuroscience has made considerable progress in under- equation capture the taste of spicy paprika? And if sensory
standing the physical mechanisms in the brain underlying qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it
human mental functioning and associated behaviour. Modern seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never
brain imaging techniques have provided us with a rich body of capture the complete nature of matter.
correlations between physical processes in the brain and the Galileo’s solution was to strip matter of its sensory qualities
experiences had by the person whose brain it is. We know, for and put them in the soul (as we might put it, in the mind). The
example, that a person undergoing stimulation in her or his sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers, but in the soul (mind) of the
ventromedial hypothalamus feels hunger. The problem is that person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika,
no one knows why these correlations hold. It seems perfectly but in the soul of the person tasting it… Even colours for Galileo
conceivable that ventromedial hypothalamus stimulation could aren’t on the surfaces of the objects themselves, but in the soul of
do its job in the brain without giving rise to any kind of feeling the person observing them. And if matter in itself has no sensory
at all. No one has even the beginnings of an explanation of qualities, then it’s possible in principle to describe the material
why some physical systems, such as the human brain, have world in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This
experiences. This is the difficulty David Chalmers famously was the birth of mathematical physics.
called ‘the hard problem of consciousness’. But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory
Materialists hope that we will one day be able to explain qualities. Rather he took them to be residing in the soul, an
consciousness in purely physical terms. But this project now has entity outside of the material world and so outside of the
a long history of failure. The problem with materialist domain of natural science. In other words, Galileo created
approaches to the hard problem is that they always end up physical science by putting consciousness outside of its domain
avoiding the issue by redefining what we mean by of enquiry. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and
‘consciousness’. They start off by declaring that they are going be told that scientific materialists are having a problem
to solve the hard problem, to explain experience; but somewhere explaining consciousness in purely physical terms, he would no
along the way they start using the word ‘consciousness’ to refer doubt reply, “Of course they do, I created physical science by
not to experience but to some complex behavioural functioning taking consciousness out of the physical world!”
associated with experience, such as the ability of a person to This does not in itself constitute an argument that there will
monitor their internal states or to process information about the never be a purely physical explanation of consciousness, but it
environment. Explaining complex behaviours is an important does undermine arguments which appeal to the historical success
scientific endeavour. But the hard problem of consciousness of physical science in order to support the claims that the hard
cannot be solved by changing the subject. problem will one day be solved in materialist terms. The fact that
In spite of these difficulties, many scientists and philoso- physical science has done extremely well since consciousness was
phers maintain optimism that materialism will prevail, and that set outside of its domain of enquiry gives us no reason to think
the Holy Grail of a purely physical explanation of that materialism can adequately account for consciousness itself.
consciousness is just around the corner. This hope is It is time we explored more radical alternatives. This does not
commonly supported with a bold narrative about the history of mean giving up on science, it just means broadening our
the physical sciences. At every point in this glorious history, it conception of what science is. This issue of Philosophy Now
is claimed, philosophers have declared that certain phenomena samples the work of four philosophers who specialise in
are too special to be explained by physical science – light, consciousness (including myself). Each of us explores alternatives
chemistry, life – only to be subsequently proven wrong by the to conventional materialism. It is early days in the science of
relentless march of scientific progress. There is therefore every consciousness, and time will tell whether any of our approaches
reason, they say, to expect that consciousness will go the same will bear fruit. But at the moment the spirit of free enquiry
way, despite the naysaying of philosophers. needed to make progress on consciousness is being hampered by
Here’s a different way of thinking about it. Perhaps the most an ideological insistence on the materialist paradigm – an
important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s decla- ideological insistence not so dissimilar to that experienced by
ration that mathematics is the language of natural science. But Galileo from the 17th century Catholic Church.
he felt able to declare this only after he had revolutionised the Dr Philip Goff is the guest editor of this issue.
4 Philosophy Now August/September 2017

• Martha Nussbaum Calls for Wrinkly Rebellion
• Mass extinction • Mass migration
• Morality bubbles on Twitter
News reports by Anja Steinbauer. News
Age Shall Not Weary for and tries to develop an ethics of migra- ical annihilation obviously will have seri-
Martha Nussbaum has for decades been tion. He argues that global justice and ous ecological, economic and social conse-
one of America’s best-known living collective autonomy depend on political quences. Humanity will eventually pay a
philosophers, energetically bringing her institutions within the framework of a very high price for the decimation of the
expertise in classical philosophy to bear on nation state. While Nida-Rümelin believes only assemblage of life that we know of in
an ever-wider range of social and philo- it to be a moral duty to open borders to the universe.” Professor Gerardo Cebal-
sophical questions. In May, Professor refugees in need of protection, he is scepti- los, who led the work, said: “The situation
Nussbaum and her two fellow winners of cal about their integration and social care. has become so bad it would not be ethical
the 2016 Kyoto Prize travelled to Oxford not to use strong language.”
University’s Blavatnik School of Govern- Karl-Otto Apel
ment to give public lectures about their German philosopher Karl-Otto Apel died Moral Bubbles
current work. Nussbaum’s was on ‘Ageing, on 15 May 2017 at the age of 95. Apel was Social media seem wonderful platforms
Stigma and Disgust’. In it she claimed that an influential thinker in the tradition of for the free exchange of opinions and
popular culture, which obsessively glorifies the Critical Theorists, sometimes known ideas. However, as a recent analysis of
youth, also stigmatises the elderly, encour- as the Frankfurt School. He held several more than half a million tweets shows,
aging the young to regard their elders with professorships in philosophy, the last morally heated tweets tend to be widely
being at Goethe University in Frankfurt.
Apel was an exponent of discourse theory
based on Kant’s ethics. His idea of a ‘prac-
tical discourse’ involves a strict pre-
eminence of the better argument in order
to develop moral norms, as well as equality
© JOHN CAIRNS 2017
between all participants in it. Versed in

analytical as well as continental and prag-
matist traditions, Apel brought these tradi-
tions together, making use of the ideas of Network graph showing
Martha Nussbaum two Twitter bubbles
thinkers from Derrida to Rorty.
a disgust closely connected with fear. retweeted within their political spheres,
Nussbaum argued that this produces Mass Extinction: a new but hardly ever escape their bubbles. The
widespread injustice, discrimination and moral and existential crisis study by New York University psycholo-
unhappiness. In particular, she said that We know from paleontology that five gists including William Brady, published
compulsory retirement has become a huge times in its history the Earth has seen mass in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
social evil which we must now fight to extinctions in which a large percentage of Sciences (Vol.114, No.28), analysed the
overcome. its animal species died out. A new large- language used in 563,312 tweets about
scale study by the Universidad Nacional three controversial topics: gun control,
An Ethics of Migration Autónoma de México examining both same-sex marriage, and climate change.
Arguments over large-scale migration have common and rare species has established The researchers found a 20% increase in
rocked politics and society over the last that species are now becoming extinct at a retweets per moral-emotional word added
few years but relatively few have come much faster rate than for millions of years in a tweet. They then examined how
from philosophers with experience of past; billions of local populations have died much of this sharing happened among
government. Julian Nida-Rümelin is out and many mammals that are not yet individuals sharing a broadly similar ideo-
professor of philosophy and political endangered have seen their ranges shrink logical outlook (liberal or conservative).
theory at Munich but previously he was a by over 80%. The study concluded that They found overwhelmingly more in-
minister in the German federal govern- the Earth is already undergoing a sixth group than out-group retweets, as starkly
ment led by Gerhard Schröder. In a new mass extinction. This time, the reasons are shown for messages about gun control and
book Über Grenzen denken: Eine Ethik der human overpopulation and overconsump- climate change. So, while you may think
Migration Nida-Rümelin thinks about the tion. The authors warn that we face a seri- that going public on Twitter will enable
nature of borders and boundaries – those ous crisis potentially threatening the you to convince people on the other side
that individuals might draw and those that survival of humanity, with just a short time of a moral debate, these attempts are
a state may legitimately decree. He calls left in which to act: “The resulting biolog- likely to be fruitless.

Consciousness
The Case For Panpsychism
Philip Goff thinks that everything has some degree of consciousness.
A
ccording to early 21st century Western common Reasons To Believe Panpsychism
sense, the mental doesn’t take up very much of the I: Solving The Hard Problem Of Consciousness
universe. Most folk assume that it exists only in the Panpsychism offers the hope of an extremely elegant and unified
biological realm, specifically, in creatures with brains picture of the world. In contrast to substance dualism (the view
and nervous systems. Panpsychists deny this bit of common that the universe consists of two kinds of substance, matter and
sense, believing that mentality is a fundamental and ubiquitous mind), panpsychism does not involve minds popping into exis-
feature of the universe. Mind is everywhere (which is what tence as certain forms of complex life emerge, or else a soul descend-
‘panpsychism’ translates as). ing from an immaterial realm at the moment of conception. Rather,
There have been panpsychists in Western philosophy since it claims that human beings are nothing more than complex
at least the pre-Socratics of the 7th century BC, and the view arrangements of components that are already present in basic mat-
achieved a certain dominance in the 19th century. Panpsychism ter. The only way in which panpsychism differs from physicalism
fared less well in the 20th century, being almost universally dis- is that the basic components of the material world also involve
missed by Western philosophers as absurd, if it was ever thought very basic forms of consciousness, from which the more complex
about at all. conscious experience of humans and other animals derives.
However, this dismissal was arguably part and parcel of the Physicalists believe that consciousness can be fully accounted
anti-metaphysics scientism of the period: the attempt to show for in terms of physical entities and processes. But many scien-
that any questions which cannot be answered by scientific inves- tists and philosophers agree that at present we have not the
tigation are either trivial or meaningless. This project failed, faintest idea how to make sense of experience being generated
and metaphysics is back in a big way in academic philosophy. from material activity such as the firings of neurons. This is the
At the same time, there is a growing dissatisfaction with the difficulty David Chalmers famously called ‘the hard problem of
physicalist approaches to consciousness which dominated the consciousness’. Physical mechanisms are well-suited for the
late 20th century, and a sense that a radically new approach is explanation of physical behaviour; but it’s hard to make sense
called for. In this climate panpsychism is increasingly being of a mechanistic explanation of subjective experience. No matter
taken up as a serious option, both for explaining consciousness how complex the mechanism, it seems conceivable that it might
and for providing a satisfactory account of the natural world. have functioned in the absence of any experience at all, which
seems to imply that mechanistic explanations shed no explana-
The Essence of Panpsychism tory light on the existence of experience.
Panpsychism is sometimes caricatured as the view that funda- Of course there is much more to be said about whether or
mental physical entities such as electrons have thoughts; that not physicalism is a viable project. But, given the deep difficul-
electrons are, say, driven by existential angst. However, panpsy- ties associated with the attempt to fully account for conscious-
chism as defended in contemporary philosophy is the view that ness in physical terms, and the deep philosophical doubts about
consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous, where to be con- whether this is even a coherent idea, it is perhaps a good idea
scious is simply to have subjective experience of some kind. This to explore other options. And the panpsychist offers an alterna-
doesn’t necessarily imply anything as sophisticated as thoughts. tive research programme. Rather than trying to account for con-
Of course in human beings consciousness is a sophisticated sciousness entirely in terms of non-conscious elements, panpsy-
thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts and chism tries to explain the complex consciousness of humans and
sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with other animals in terms of simpler forms of consciousness which
the idea that consciousness might exist in some extremely basic are postulated to already exist in simpler forms of matter. This
forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious expe- research project is still in its infancy. But a number of leading
riences a horse has are much less complex than those of a human philosophers and neuroscientists are now finding that working
being, and the experiences a chicken has are much less complex within a panpsychist framework bears fruit. (To take one exam-
than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler perhaps at ple, see Mørch’s account of Integrated Information Theory later
some point the light of consciousness suddenly switches off, this issue). The more fruit is borne by this alternative research
with simpler organisms having no subjective experience at all. programme, the more reason we have to accept panpsychism.
But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never Physicalists may object: “Just because we haven’t yet worked
switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity out how to give a mechanistic explanation of consciousness, it
reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. doesn’t follow that such an explanation will be forever beyond
For the panpsychist, this fading-whilst-never-turning-off con- our grasp. Scientists before Darwin had no explanation of the
tinuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamen- emergence of complex life, which led many to suppose that there
tal physical entities – perhaps electrons and quarks – possess- must be something divine or miraculous in the existence of life.
ing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, which The genius of Darwin was to come up the idea of natural selec-
reflects their extremely simple nature. tion, which removes the need for divine creation in the biologi-

Consciousness
cal realm. We just need a ‘Darwin of consciousness’ to come matical model in economics, for example, abstracts away from
along and do something similar in the mental realm.” This kind the concrete reality of what is really going on – what is being
of objection is often accompanied by a certain narrative of the bought or sold, and what actual jobs people are doing. It is sim-
history of science, according to which phenomenon after phe- ply an artificial representation that can be used for predicting
nomenon was declared inexplicable by philosophers, only to be certain outcomes. This is exactly what physics does to matter.
later explained by the relentless march of science. Electrons are real, concrete entities. And yet physics abstracts
However, to adopt panpsychism is not to give up on the from the concrete reality of the electron, presenting us with an
attempt to explain consciousness scientifically. Rather, panpsy- abstract model that enables us to predict its behaviour. As
chism is a scientific research programme in its own right. Panpsy- Bertrand Russell put it, “Physics is mathematical not because
chists do not simply declare animal and human consciousness a we know so much about the physical world, but because we
sacred mystery which must have arrived know so little.”
by magic. Instead, they try to explain This difficulty arising from the aus-
animal and human consciousness in terity of the physicists’ way of speaking
terms of more basic forms of con- about the physical world might be
sciousness: the consciousness of basic evaded if we had a correspondingly aus-
materials entities, such as quarks and tere conception of physical reality itself.
electrons. It is true that consciousness Causal structuralists have such a concep-
itself is not explained in terms of any- tion. They believe that there is nothing
thing more fundamental: the basic con- more to the nature of a physical entity,
sciousness of basic physical entities is a such as an electron, than how it is dis-
fundamental postulate of the theory. posed to behave: if you understand what
But there is no reason to think that sci- an electron does you know everything
ence must always follow the most reduc- there is to know about its nature. On
tionist path. The scientific explanation this view things are not so much beings
of electromagnetism which eventually as doings. If you assume causal struc-
emerged in the 19th century involved turalism, it becomes plausible that the
the postulation of new fundamental Panpsychism says mind is everywhere models of physics can completely char-
properties and forces: electromagnetic acterise the nature of physical entities;
ones. Perhaps the scientific explanation of human conscious- a mathematical model can capture what an electron does, and
ness, when it eventually arrives, will be similarly non-reductive in doing so will tell us what the electron is.
in postulating fundamental kinds of consciousness. However, there are powerful arguments against causal struc-
turalism. Most discussed is the worry that causal structuralist
Reasons To Believe Panpsychism attempts to characterise the nature of matter lead either to a
II: The Intrinsic Nature Argument vicious regress or a vicious circle. According to causal structural-
In the public’s minds, physics is on its way to giving us a com- ists, we understand the nature of a disposition only when we
plete account of the fundamental nature of the material world. know the behaviour to which it gives rise when it is manifested.
It’s taken to be almost tautological that ‘physics’ is developing For example, the manifestation of flammability is burning; we
the true theory of ‘the physical’, and hence that it is to physics only know what flammability is when we know that it’s mani-
that we should turn for a complete understanding of the nature fested through burning. However, assuming causal structural-
of space, time, and matter. However, this commonplace opin- ism, the manifestation of any disposition will be another dispo-
ion concerning the comprehensiveness of the explanatory reach sition, and the manifestation of that disposition will be another
of physical science comes under pressure when we reflect on disposition, and so on ad infinitum. The buck is continually passed,
the austere vocabulary in terms of which physical theories are and hence an adequate understanding of the nature of any prop-
framed. erty is impossible, even for an omniscient being. In other words,
A crucial moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s dec- a causal structuralist world is unintelligible.
laration that “the book of the universe is written in the language Let us try to make this clear with an example. According to
of mathematics.” From that point onwards mathematics has been general relativity, mass and spacetime stand in a relationship of
the language of physics. The vocabulary of physics is arguably not mutual causal interaction: mass curves spacetime, and the cur-
entirely mathematical, since it involves causal notions (such as the vature of spacetime in turn affects the behaviour of objects with
notion of a law of nature); but the kind of qualitative concepts found mass (as matter tends, all things being equal, to follow geodesics
in the Aristotelian characterisation of the universe before the sci- though spacetime). What is mass? For a causal structuralist, we
entific revolution – ideas, for example, of colours and tastes – are know what mass is when we know what it does, i.e. when we
wholly absent from modern physics. Physical theories are nothing know the way in which it curves spacetime. But to really under-
more than mathematical models of physical causation. stand what this amounts to metaphysically, as opposed to being
The problem is that it’s not clear that such an austere vocab- able merely to make accurate predictions, we need to know what
ulary is capable of giving an adequate characterisation even of spacetime curvature is. What is spacetime curvature? For a
the nature of matter, let alone of the nature of experience, since causal structuralist, we understand what spacetime curvature is
mathematical models are mere tools for prediction. A mathe- only when we know what it does, which involves understand-

Consciousness
ing how it affects objects with mass. But we understand this only ‘consciousness’ does not give us an understanding of the specific
when we know what mass is. And so we find ourselves in a clas- intrinsic nature of any given physical property. What kind of con-
sic Catch 22: we can understand the nature of mass only when sciousness is mass, as opposed to the consciousness of negative
we know what spacetime curvature is, but we can understand charge? What is it like to be an electron? These are questions for
the nature of spacetime curvature only when we know what the panpsychist research project to address over the long term.
mass is. G.K. Chesterton said that, “We cannot all live by tak- Panpsychism is a broad theoretical framework, and it will take
ing in each other’s washing.” Russell played on this idea in artic- time to fill in the details. Similarily, it took a couple of centuries
ulating this worry about circularity: “There are many possible for the Darwinian paradigm to get to DNA.
ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as ‘real’ into
mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously there must But Isn’t It Crazy?
be a limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will Panpsychism is increasingly being taken seriously in both phi-
merely be each other’s washing.” losophy and science, but it is still not unknown for panpsychists
This argument presses us to the conclusion that there must to receive the odd incredulous stare. The supposition that elec-
be more to physical entities than what they do: physical things trons have some form of consciousness, albeit extremely basic,
must also have an ‘intrinsic nature’, as philosophers tend to put is still thought by many to be just too crazy to take seriously.
it. However, given that physics is restricted to telling us only This may be the result of a mixture of cultural factors. The
about the behaviour of physical entities – electrons, quarks and rejection of idealism was one major motivation in the founding
indeed spacetime itself – it leaves us completely in the dark about of analytic philosophy, and an intuitive distrust of related views
their intrinsic nature. Physics tells us what matter does, but not such as panpsychism still hangs heavy. Another factor is the
what it is. widespread public perception that physics is on its way to giv-
What then is the intrinsic nature of matter? Panpsychism ing us a complete picture of the nature of everything. There is
offers an answer: consciousness. Physics describes matter ‘from little understanding of the difficulties which arise when we reflect
the outside’, that is to say, physics gives us rich information on the austere vocabulary of the physical sciences and of the
about the behaviour brought about by mass, spin, charge, etc. dubious coherence of physicalist accounts of consciousness. In
But there must be more to what something is than what it does; the mindset of thinking that physics is on its way to giving a
and according to panpsychism, mass, spin, charge, etc, are, in complete story of the universe, a consciousness-filled universe
their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness. seems extremely improbable, as this doesn’t seem to be what
What reasons do we have to accept this proposal? Firstly, it’s physics is telling us. But if we accept that physics tell us noth-
not clear that there’s an alternative, as it’s not clear that we have ing about the intrinsic nature of matter, and indeed that the
a positive conception of any intrinsic properties beyond those we only thing we really know about the intrinsic nature of matter
know about in our own conscious experience (that is, beyond the is that some of it involves consciousness, panpsychism starts to
properties of the experiences themselves). So the available choice look much more plausible.
seems to be between the panpsychist view as to the intrinsic nature It is certainly true that in popular culture views which sound
of matter, and the view that matter is, as John Locke put it, “we a bit like panpsychism have been defended with rather unrig-
know not what.” So insofar as we seek a picture of reality with- orous reasoning. But it shouldn’t need to be pointed out that
out gaps, panpsychism may be our only option. The great physi- just because a view has been defended with all sorts of bad argu-
cist Arthur Eddington (the first scientist to confirm general rela- ments, it doesn’t follow that there are no good arguments for
tivity) thought this argument enough to embrace panpsychism, that same view. Serious philosophy requires us not to indulge
suggesting that given that we can know nothing from physics of in flights of fancy; but it also demands that we approach the
the intrinsic nature of matter, it was rather ‘silly’ to suppose that arguments without prejudice.
its nature is incongruent with mentality, and then to wonder At the end of the day, ‘common sense intuition’ should have
where mentality comes from! little sway against a view which pulls its weight theoretically.
Furthermore, panpsychism looks to be the most theoreti- The view that the world is (more-or-less) round; that we have
cally virtuous theory of matter consistent with the data. I call a common ancestor with apes; that time slows down the faster
this the ‘simplicity argument’ for panpsychism. We know that you move – all of these ideas were or are wildly counter to com-
some material entities – brains – have an intrinsically conscious- mon sense, but clearly that counts little, if at all, against their
ness-involving nature (assuming that Descartes was wrong about truth. If panpsychism can provide us with a plausible account
the mind being separate from the brain). We have no clue as to of human consciousness and/or a coherent account of the intrin-
the intrinsic nature of any other material entities. And so the sic nature of matter, then we have good reason to take it very
most simple, elegant, parsimonious hypothesis, is that the nature seriously indeed.
of the stuff outside of brains is continuous with that of brains, © DR PHILIP GOFF 2017
in also being consciousness-involving. Arguably, then, the real- Philip Goff is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Central European
ity of our consciousness supports the truth of panpsychism in University in Budapest, and author of Consciousness and Funda-
much the same way that the Michelson-Morley discovery that mental Reality (OUP). Visit his website philipgoffphilosophy.com,
the speed of light is measured to be the same in all frames of his blog conscienceandconsciousness.com, or tweet @philip_goff.
reference supports special relativity: in both cases the theory is
the most elegant account of the data. • Developed from a piece in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2nd
Of course, merely saying that the intrinsic nature of matter is edition, 2017).

Consciousness
Neutral Monism:
A Saner Solution to the Mind/Body Problem
Sam Coleman seeks a balance between two extreme views of consciousness
T
he mind-body problem is that it is difficult to see envisage only one fundamental kind of stuff in the world; ‘neu-
how the mental and the physical fit together within tral’ because this unifying nature is hypothesised to lie betwixt
one world. Part of the difficulty is the unsatisfac- mentality and physicality, equidistant from each, distinct from
toriness of trying to explain either side of the men- either, and ultimately responsible for both.
tal/physical duality in terms of the other. Purported physical
explanations of consciousness inevitably fall short of their tar- The Nature of the Neutral
get. They seem about as suitable as a plan to build a skyscraper What special sort of nature might this neutral basis be? We already
out of marshmallows, or an attempt to recreate the sensuous have a conception of it, in terms of the role neutral properties are
colour and curves of a Cezanne painting using only a pencil and to play in our worldview. Neither mental nor physical, they must
set square – the materials are simply not up to the job. Physical be capable of producing mental and physical properties through
objects and properties just do not seem the right kind of ingre- their interactions – perhaps analogously to how subatomic parti-
dients with which to create experiences. And although the fail- cles produce atoms of all sorts with radically different properties,
ure of physical explanations might make panpsychism seem an merely by combining in various ways. Some neutral monists stop
appealing option (see Philip Goff’s seductive article), seeking there, from a belief that a more fleshed-out description of the
to capture the physical in terms of the mental is equally inap- neutral nature is beyond us. But this is not a comfortable rest-
propriate, albeit for the opposite reason: this manoeuvre is so ing place. This skeletal specification of the nature of the neu-
overblown, it’s metaphysical overkill. The panpsychist claim tral amounts only to a job description. We might dearly wish
that everything physical has a degree of consciousness seems there to exist properties that could play this dual and in-between
an almost wholly gratuitous addition to the properties physics role: that would solve the whole mind-body problem! But the
assigns electrons and their microphysical kin. And if there’s one job description, for all we know, may be a description of the
thing that perturbs physicists and metaphysicists in equal mea- impossible. To make sure that this isn’t the case – that we aren’t
sure, it’s gratuitous additions. Although we certainly need more investing our hopes in a metaphysical chimera – we need to offer
than the mere tendencies or behaviour physics ascribes – as Goff a more positive conception of the neutral properties. The closer
says, we require an account of what matter, for example, an elec- to home the suggested candidate properties are – the more famil-
tron, is in itself, not just of what it does – to plug this gap with iar, and the less abstrusely theoretical – the better, for we desire
prefab minds is too much. True, nothing physics says positively a conception that matches panpsychism and physicalism in their
rules out that electrons behave as they do because they literally clarity and concreteness. We feel we know what their propo-
have minds and feelings – Schrödinger’s equation works even nents mean when they say, respectively, that the physical is fun-
if electrons repel one another due to mutual resentment. But damentally conscious or that the mental is nothing but machi-
nature favours economy, and economy counts against spread-
ing consciousness all over nature. That would be decadent.
Wanted: A New Middle Way

Physicalism and panpsychism sit either end of a metaphysical
seesaw, and when one is in the ascendancy it is only by bringing
the other unduly low. The austerity of the physical account should
not be privileged at the cost of mentality’s richness; but neither
ought the otherwise elegant and parsimonious microphysical
world to be stuffed to the gills with consciousness. A saner view
CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2017
would achieve a balance between the two poles of the mental-

physical duality. Perhaps the lesson to draw from the failure of
both of those unilateral solutions, which attempt to frame the
mind/body conundrum in terms of only one side of the equation,
is that we are in need of something new: a third, middle way.
What then if the mental and the physical, quite irreconcilable
when taken as independent natures, are really the common off-
spring of another sort of nature, something in-between the two?
This something would be an essence neither mental nor physi-
cal in itself, but which possesses properties capable of generating
both the mental and physical. Theories that propose this are
called ‘neutral monist’: ‘monist’ because, unlike dualism, they

Consciousness
FOOD FOR THOUGHT © VADIM DOZMOROV 2017 CONTACT HIM AT DOZMOROVADIM@GMAIL.COM

nations of the physical. We must aim to make the neutral monist Are colours
proposal, unfamiliar as it is, equally intelligible. in the world
or in the
Two Conceptions of Colours mind?
Are there any familiar properties that might offer a suitable
analogy? Colours might be the very sort of ambivalent proper-
ties we seek. That is because although two opposing concep-
tions of colour exist, colours seem to elude being completely
characterised by either, just as our neutral properties are hypoth-
esised to evade the categories of the physical and the mental.
On a commonsense conception, colours are resolutely non-
mental properties that reside on the surfaces and also permeate
the hidden insides of physical objects – like red apples with white
interiors. Although the colours of objects are perceivable by minds,
common sense does not make it a condition of an object’s being so easily now as physical, now as mental, would seem to have
coloured that someone be currently experiencing it, nor that any- precisely what it takes to be judged as being ultimately – that is,
one ever will. Colours, on this view, do not depend on conscious in themselves – of neither category. Colours might well show up
awareness, or mentality of any sort. Quite the contrary: if we in the world doing here a mental job, there a physical job, but like
inquire further into the nature of colours under the commonsense a construction worker who moonlights as a cabaret star, be intrin-
conception, we are most likely to equate them with objectively sically defined by neither of these very different occupations.
measurable physical properties – wavelengths, for example. Con- The conspicuous and persistent ambiguity in our concep-
ceived of in this way, colours exist whether anyone is looking or tion of colours provides serious evidence that in their own nature
not. Your favourite shirt is no less loud for being in the wardrobe. they elude classification as either mental or physical. We might
On a second conception, which we might call more philo- choose to follow Bertrand Russell (himself following William
sophically informed (or misinformed, depending on your per- James and Ernst Mach) in counting a colour as ‘mental’ when
spective – for there are philosophers who vigorously defend the it is something in or to a mind, but as ‘physical’ when it belongs
commonsense conception), colours are paradigmatically mental to an external physical thing. That is, colours are mental when
properties. After all, we dream, and can hallucinate, colours just they play mind-related roles, like being in present sensation,
like those we see. People with Charles Bonnet Syndrome expe- being remembered, or being dreamt, and physical when they
rience especially vivid colour hallucinations. For homemade play physical roles – like obeying the equations of physics. But
colour hallucinations rub your eyelids for ten seconds, or stare these are just roles, and colours, as neutral properties, are no
at a bright light for half a minute and look around. When dream- more defined by them than an actress is defined by the roles
ing of an apple, no light rays are hitting your retinas, nor are you she takes on. It’s a hard thought to get one’s teeth into, but per-
in sight of a real apple. So whatever is red and white about a haps colours are just… colours.
dream apple is only within your mind. Colours under this sec- So whereas the panpsychist fills quarks and electrons with
ond conception do require the touch of consciousness. This would conscious minds, the neutral monist constructs the universe from
mean that there can be no such thing as an unexperienced colour; neither-mental-nor-physical qualities, of which colours might
colours exist only when some mind’s eye sees them. And what be said to provide the exemplar. Far from panpsychism, this is a
goes for the colours of sleep is also true of the colours we expe- ‘panqualityism’ (that sleek name is thanks to S.C. Pepper, via
rience when awake: right now the colours you are seeing are in Herbert Feigl). It should be noted however that colours ulti-
your mind (so waves of light are not intrinsically coloured, since mately offer us only a conception of the kind of properties we
light waves evidently exist when no-one sees them). We could seek. The panqualityist neutral monist is committed to them as
label this the ‘Cartesian’ conception of colours, since René a placeholder for the neutral properties, nothing more. That is,
Descartes is usually blamed for this line of thought, although colours demonstrate that there could be such natures. Still, the
(like every other Western philosopher) he’s only following Plato, neutral natures that actually underlie the world may be quite
who forcefully chipped away at the objectivity of colours. alien to us. But then again, perhaps not: it might even be that
The debate rages on, among philosophers anyway, as to which those colourful plastic models of atoms, familiar from school,
of these contrasting conceptions of colours is correct. It is even are remarkably close to the deep truth about matter: it is noth-
possible to combine the two: while dreamt or hallucinated ing more nor less than ‘colour-stuff’ (think of squeezing out a
colours may be the mind’s products (perhaps they are stored tube of red paint into a heap).
‘templates’ of waking colour), the seen colours of daily life could
still belong to external physical things, such as light waves or The Payoff
objects. The combined view would then be that colours are Our brains consist of matter, of course. So panpsychism builds
sometimes internal/mental, and sometimes external/physical. the conscious cortex out of tiny conscious minds, giving nary a
thought to how this crowd of trillions combines into you: do
Colours as a Pointer to the Neutral Properties you feel a vast population teeming in your head? The neutral
This controversy just goes to show how perfectly colours might monist, by contrast, makes brains from neutral qualities. Such
fit the neutral monist’s bill. Any properties that can be construed qualities are physical when they play physical/chemical/biolog-

Consciousness
ical roles in the brain, and mental when they provide the con- consciousness cannot be manufactured: rather, consciousness must
tent that appears in consciousness. But in themselves the quali- be taken for granted in the world. Consciousness! Taken for
ties are neither mental nor physical. So when you are conscious granted! (Exclamation is warranted here.) Physicalism is, as noted,
of a colour that is also playing a physical role (as, say, a con- too impoverished to explain experience. What puts panqualityist
stituent of a physical object), the colour counts as simultane- neutral monism a rung higher on the ladder of explanations than
ously physical and mental. In this way, the whole difficulty of physicalism is the metaphysical boost provided by qualitative
the mind/body problem – a blockage in the metaphysical properties such as colours. In fact, when a normal person (hence
pipeworks caused by the congealing of the centuries-old oppo- a non-philosopher) reports on her conscious experience, all she
sition of mental and physical – is simply flushed away. ever mentions are the qualities of which she is aware and the
things to which they seem to belong: like pains in toes, or red
Whence Consciousness? buses. She never mentions her consciousness of these properties in
But, take an assortment of these colours, or other kinds of sense- addition. Search for it: consciousness itself seems rather a flimsy
related qualities, or indeed any properties of this broad ‘quali- thing, hard – possibly impossible – to glimpse, as G.E. Moore
tative’ sort, however exotic, and let them be oh-so-cleverly noted a century ago. Perhaps the most we can say about it is that
arranged in a brain: since these qualities themselves avowedly qualities, such as colours, are apparent to us. And when we aren’t
lack consciousness, how can they give rise to a genuine sensa- conscious of them, well, they aren’t apparent. But if conscious-
tion, a feeling? Would not the panqualityist world, including ness is no more than a quality’s being apparent, or appearing, to
panqualityist brains, be one of dead colours, in fact seen and one, then consciousness might be considerably more mundane a
experienced by nobody? It would be celluloid film without the property than our objector reckons. Perhaps then a metaphysi-
projector’s beam. How, in a word, does neutral monism actu- cal system built of nothing but qualities could capture conscious-
ally propose to give us consciousness? ness, after all. Consciousness would be a certain special kind of
Those who make this objection place consciousness upon too connection holding between a quality and a person’s brain. Spe-
lofty a pedestal. It stands to reason that any genuine explanation cial, yes; but it would be nothing like the magical glow that has
of how consciousness arises must be in non-conscious terms, because blinded philosophers for so long.
you cannot explain something in terms of itself. So the objector’s © DR SAM COLEMAN 2017
real protest appears to be that experience cannot be explained at all, Sam Coleman is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of
which seems a protest too far. A panpsychist of course feels that Hertfordshire. His email is s.coleman@herts.ac.uk

Consciousness
The Integrated Information Theory
of Consciousness
Hedda Hassel Mørch asks: what is IIT all about?
C
onsciousness is something with which we’re all inti- nal conditions still leave a lot to be determined by the brain itself.
mately familiar. It’s the thing that goes away every night Compare this with another complex organ, the human retina.
in deep sleep, and comes back when we wake up every By looking at the current state of the retina, we learn a lot about
morning, or whenever we start dreaming. It encom- what the environment in front of the retina was like a moment
passes all our subjective feelings and experiences, ranging from the ago. We also learn about the next state of the visual processing
simple redness of red, to the complex depth of an emotion, to the system that takes input from the retina. But we don’t learn much
ephemeral quality of thought. It’s the one thing that is directly and about the past and future states of the retina itself, because they
immediately known to us, and it mediates our knowledge of the are nearly completely fixed by the external environment – very
external world. This is how consciousness is defined by neurosci- little is left to be determined by the retina itself. This gives the
entist Giulio Tononi, the originator of the Integrated Information retina very little information in IIT’s sense.
Theory of consciousness, or IIT for short. IIT is now one of the How much information a system has about itself also depends
leading theories of consciousness in neuroscience. on its number of possible states. A simple photodiode, that can
According to IIT, consciousness is linked to integrated infor- be either on or off, can have very little information about itself,
mation, which can be represented by a precise mathematical as its present state could rule out only one out of two possible
quantity called Φ (‘phi’). The human brain (or the part of it that states, at most. In contrast, the brain consists of billions of neu-
supports our consciousness) has very high Φ, and is therefore rons, and there are endlessly many different combinations of
highly conscious: it has highly complex and meaningful experi- neurons firing and not firing that are possible given most sen-
ences. Systems with a low Φ, the theory goes, have a small amount sory, bodily and other background conditions. But knowledge
of consciousness – they only have very simple and rudimentary of the current state of the brain rules out most of them: only a
experiences. Systems with zero Φ are not conscious at all. few of these combinations could have caused the current com-
IIT has radical implications. If IIT is true, we could in prin- bination, and there are only a few combinations it in turn could
ciple build a ‘consciousness-meter’ that tells us whether any cause. This gives the brain very high information about itself –
system is conscious, and to what level: from comatose patients IIT’s first requirement for consciousness.
to infants; from simple animals and plants to robots and next
generation AI. It also implies a kind of panpsychism, the view Integration
that all things are associated with some amount of conscious- IIT’s next requirement for consciousness is integration. Integra-
ness [see the article by Philip Goff, Ed]. It would also have impli- tion measures how much the information of a system depends on
cations for the hard problem of consciousness: the philosophi- the interconnections between the system’s parts. To determine it
cal question of why and how physical processes can give rise to we ask: how much information is lost by cutting the system in two?
subjective experience. Consider a page of a book. The information in a book is
mainly symbolic and about the external world, and therefore
Information irrelevant for consciousness, but let’s set this aside. If we tear
Books, photographs and hard drives are typically regarded as the page horizontally in half, almost no information is lost. Read-
containing a lot of information. But this information is mainly ing one half page and then the other half page conveys the same
about other things: books describe events in the world, pho- information as reading the intact page. Therefore, the informa-
tographs depict external scenes, and so on. The information tion on the page is not integrated. It’s reducible to the sum of
content also depends on human conventions about symbols and the information of the parts.
their meanings. In contrast, according to IIT, the only kind of In the brain, in contrast (or more precisely, the areas relevant
information that matters for consciousness is the information a for our consciousness), every neuron is connected to thousands of
system has about itself. This information must be based on the other neurons, to form amazingly intricate structures. If the brain
system’s causal powers, not on symbolic conventions. is cut in two, much of this structure would be lost, along with the
To measure information of this kind, we ask: how much can information that depends on it. Any disconnected state will imply
we know about the previous and next state of the system by look- a very different past and future of the brain than an intact state
ing at the state of the system right now? For example, the current would. This shows that the brain is a highly integrated system. Its
state of a typical human brain can tell us a lot about what that information is not reducible to the sum of the information of its
brain looked like a moment ago, and what it will look like in the parts.
next moment. There are a limited number of previous brain states This is a key difference between brains and computers. A
that could possibly have caused its current state, and a limited computer can have as much information as a brain – computers
number of future brain states that it could possibly cause. The can have a similar number of possible states, and be at least as
brain is of course influenced by external conditions too, such as self-determining. But in a computer, at least as we make them
the sensory environment and bodily processes. But any such exter- today, every transistor is connected to only a few other transis-

© STEVE LILLIE 2017 PLEASE VISIT WWW.STEVELILLIE.BIZ

Consciousness
tors, so if we cut it in two much less structure would be lost. gration. A closer look at the cerebellum reveals that its neurons are
For this, and some further structural reasons (such as their mod- far less interconnected than in the cerebrum. Therefore the cere-
ularity and feedforward connectivity), computers have very low brum has much higher integrated information.
integrated information, or Φ. Another datum is that, contrary to what one might expect,
the degree of consciousness doesn’t correspond to the degree
Maximality of brain activity. During epileptic seizures, brain activity
Yet the fact that the brain has high integrated information does increases dramatically, but consciousness disappears; and dur-
not fully explain its consciousness. IIT’s third and final require- ing deep, dreamless sleep, activity remains at normal levels. IIT
ment is that a conscious system must be a maximum of inte- explains this too. The patterns of activity seen during seizures
grated information. That is to say, it must have more integrated and sleep are a highly regular series of bursts and silences, known
information than any overlapping system, including its own as slow waves. These are patterns that can be shown to result
parts and any bigger system of which it itself forms part. This from either low information or low integration.
means, for example, that the area of the brain that directly sup- IIT also makes new and testable predictions. By estimating,
ports our consciousness – the latest studies suggest some areas based on brain imaging, the Φ of patients who for various rea-
of the posterior cortex – must have higher Φ than any smaller sons (including strokes, brains lesions and anaesthetics) show
neuron groups, individual neurons, molecules, and atoms that no behavioral signs of consciousness, IIT can predict whether
form part of it. It must also have higher Φ than the brain as a they are nevertheless conscious – either dreaming, or awake but
whole, the human body, human societies, the internet, and any ‘locked in’. These predictions can be verified by comparing
other bigger system of which it forms a part, all the way up to them with the results of other diagnostic tools, or sometimes
the cosmos itself. the patients’ own reports if they eventually wake up. So far, stud-
This claim has some interesting implications. If some smaller ies like this have corroborated IIT’s predictions. The results are
group of neurons within a larger brain area that normally sup- not conclusive though. There are rival theories of conscious-
ports consciousness suddenly became significantly more inter- ness that emphasize the importance of, for example, fronto-
connected, and thereby surpassed the Φ of the larger area, then parietal networks (a major one being the Global Workspace
this smaller group would form its own consciousness separate Theory developed by Stanislas Dehaene), and studies are often
from the larger whole. Or if the Φ of a normally conscious area not precise enough to discriminate between them. Further
suddenly dropped below the Φ of all smaller neuron groups at experiments are needed to tell us more.
some level, its consciousness would dissolve into multiple lesser
consciousnesses belonging to these neuron groups individually. First-Person Evidence
Indeed, this could be what happens temporarily, in deep sleep: Interestingly, Tononi did not come up with IIT purely by look-
we think consciousness entirely disappears, but it might actually ing for patterns in third-person scientific data – from brain scans
just change into a fragmented form (which is no longer recog- and so on. Rather, the theory was born from a philosophical
nizable as ‘our’ consciousness). argument based on phenomenology, which is first-person study
On the other hand, if the internet became more integrated of one’s own consciousness. Tononi presents this as an essential
than the human brain (when the internet is understood as a sys- part of IIT’s justification.
tem that includes the brains of its users as parts, not just inputs The argument starts from a list of five axioms – claims about
to it) then the internet as a whole would become conscious and consciousness that Tononi holds to be self-evidently true upon
our own consciousnesses would be absorbed into it as parts! How- reflection on one’s own consciousness. His first axiom holds
ever, this would require that brains, computers and other ele- that consciousness exists ‘for itself’, independently of external
ments of the internet became more closely interconnected than observers: it exists entirely for its own subject. The second axiom
the neurons in our brains, so that physically speaking, the whole claims that consciousness is structured: it contains a variety of
infrastructure would begin to look increasingly like an organism. qualities at once; a mix of colors, sounds, emotions, thoughts,
It’s safe to say that this is not on track to ever happening. and so on (one might object that there are experiences of com-
plete darkness that contain no qualities – but such an experi-
Third-Person Evidence ence would still contain structure such as the left and right side
IIT tells a fascinating story about consciousness, but why should of the empty visual field). The third axiom claims that con-
we believe it? Like any neuroscientific theory, IIT should mainly sciousness is informative: like a painting, each experience spec-
be judged by how well it explains the empirical data about con- ifies a ‘scene’ which is different from other possible ‘scenes’.
sciousness. The fourth axiom holds that consciousness is integrated: the
One basic fact that we know is that human consciousness depends qualities within consciousness are unified under a single point
on the brain, and specifically, on some areas of the cerebrum, such of view, or we might say, by belonging to one and the same ‘can-
as the posterior cortex. On the other hand, another part of the vas’. Finally, the fifth axiom claims that consciousness is exclu-
brain, the cerebellum, is important for motor functions, balance, sive: the ‘canvas’ has an exact border, and any individual qual-
and so on, but doesn’t directly support consciousness. This poses a ity, such as a color or emotion, is either part of that canvas or
puzzle. The cerebellum contains more neurons than the cerebrum not, never in between. Tononi holds that these axioms can be
– 69 billion of the brain’s total of 86 billion or so. So why is the translated into a set of postulates that specify the physical coun-
cerebellum not more conscious than the cerebrum? IIT gives an terparts of the properties they describe. These postulates are
answer: more neurons equals more information, but not more inte- then given a mathematical interpretation, yielding the full ver-

Consciousness
haps then the first-person perspective provides some cru-
cial insight into the nature of consciousness. But even so,
it remains to be seen whether IIT’s particular first-person
case can withstand closer scrutiny and criticism.
In sum, the combined empirical and philosophical evi-
by Melissa Felder dence for IIT is controversial but significant. The evidence
is far from conclusive, but it compares respectably to that
of leading rivals, including Global Workspace Theory, pre-
PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM
dictive coding-based approaches, and quantum theories of

consciousness, to mention a few. It has impressed several
leading neuroscientists, including Christof Koch, one of the
major pioneers of the field.
Artificial Intelligence & Consciousness

If IIT is correct, we could in principle measure the con-
sciousness of any system by measuring its Φ. In practice,
SIMON + FINN CARTOON © MELISSA FELDER 2017
Φ can’t be precisely calculated except for very simple sys-

tems, because as complexity increases, the amount of com-
putational power required to process the mathematical
formulae involved approaches the impossible. But the Φ
of most systems can nevertheless be roughly estimated by
means of a variety of shortcuts and rules-of-thumb.
As mentioned, today’s computers have very low Φ, for
reasons including their sparse interconnectivity, regardless
of how advanced they are. In the future, there might be
computers and robots that equal or exceed humans in intel-
ligence, understood in behavioral or computational terms;
but as long as they’re implemented by traditional hardware
their Φ will remain insignificant, which means they will be
either completely nonconscious or at best negligibly con-
scious. In other words, artificial intelligence does not nec-
essarily imply artificial consciousness – that is, man-made
systems with real subjective experience, as opposed to a mere
outward simulation of consciousness.
sion of IIT. Yet nothing in principle prevents computers from being
The physical counterparts to the axioms can be partially recog- made with integrated architecture. The limitations are
nized in our earlier description of IIT. Because consciousness exists rather practical: integrated systems are very difficult to
‘for itself’, its physical counterpart must have information about itself. design and engineer. Simply put, the more interconnec-
Because consciousness is structured, it must correspond to a com- tions there are between the parts of a system, the easier it
plex physical structure. Because consciousness specifies one scene is to lose track of what’s going on. The best way of engi-
and thereby rules out others, the physical counterpart must rule out neering a highly integrated, and so conscious machine,
possibilities from a repertoire of possible physical states. Because may be by mimicking the structure of the brain – so-called
consciousness is unified, its physical substrate must be physically inte- ‘neuromorphic architecture’; or alternatively, by mimick-
grated. Because consciousness is exclusive, conscious physical sys- ing the natural selection by which the human brain was
tems must have an exact physical border, defined by maximal Φ. created. It has been shown that integrated systems have
There are many questions one could raise about this argument. One some evolutionary advantages: in some ways, they are more
might question whether the axioms are correct, or indeed whether there efficient and more adaptable to change. By randomly
are any self-evident truths about consciousness at all. It can also be unclear adding new connections to a population of machines, and
how to precisely interpret the axioms, and what it means to translate imposing conditions that select for the more efficient and
them into the postulates about physical structure. Or one might object adaptable ones, then repeating the process many times,
to the way they are translated into physical postulates, or the idea that one might succeed in selecting for integration, and by the
it’s even possible to do so. same token, consciousness. Thus, there is a path to devel-
Tononi’s argument is nevertheless intriguing. It arguably stands to oping significant artificial consciousness, albeit a quite
reason that first-person evidence should play an essential role in any indirect and circumscribed one.
theory of consciousness. After all, the first-person perspective is the
only perspective from which consciousness can be directly observed. Animals & Plants
Consciousness can only be indirectly inferred from the third-person, Another important question that’s hard to answer without
external, perspective, from clues such as speech and behavior. Per- a theory is whether and to what extent animals are con-

Consciousness
scious – especially animals that are very unlike us, such as octo- The Hard Problem of Consciousness
puses, fish, or insects. IIT implies that most animals probably If it’s correct, IIT solves what may be classified as one of the
are conscious. Most animal brains appear to be highly integrated. easy problems of consciousness, philosophically speaking: What
Going down the ladder of organic complexity, Φ, and conscious- sorts of physical states are essentially correlated with conscious-
ness, gradually decreases, but it never completely fades out. Even ness? The answer is: all and only those with maximal Φ. But
bacteria have a small amount of consciousness, because cells and there is also what is known as the hard problem: Why is con-
organelles are integrated systems too. Plants, on the other hand, sciousness correlated with any physical states at all? How does
are probably not conscious, because individual plant cells can be any physical state give rise to subjective experience?
estimated to have higher Φ than the plant as a whole – and con- Intuitively, it appears possible for any physical state to exist
sciousness requires maximal Φ. In terms of consciousness, then, without being accompanied by subjective experience. This can
a plant would be a society, not an individual. be illustrated by the concept of a philosophical zombie, as intro-
Does this mean it’s morally wrong to kill insects, fight bac- duced by David Chalmers in The Conscious Mind (1996). Philo-
teria, or destroy plant cells? The relationship between con- sophical zombies are physically identical to humans in every
sciousness and moral status is intuitively a close one. If IIT is respect, including behavior, speech and internal neurological
correct, one natural view is that moral status, just like con- states, but have no subjective feelings and experience – there is
sciousness, is a matter of degree. This would justify some com- nothing that it’s like to be a philosophical zombie. Most of us have
mon practices toward lower organisms – for example, the suf- no problem imagining philosophical zombies, which suggests that
fering and death of bacteria by penicillin is arguably worth the we don’t understand why they aren’t possible. Now, consider Φ
benefits it brings humans, given our vast difference in Φ. But it zombies – physical beings with maximal Φ, but no consciousness.
would still call for greater moral concern for most living organ- It would seem that Φ zombies are just as conceivable as the other
isms than we typically show. zombies, suggesting that we don’t understand why maximal Φ
must be accompanied by consciousness, either.
The Inanimate World Yet IIT attempts to address the deeper, philosophically harder
This leads to another question, one that most of us normally problem too, on the basis of its philosophical argument from phe-
wouldn’t even think to ask: are inanimate objects conscious? Just nomenological axioms to physical postulates. As discussed, IIT’s
like current computers, chairs, rocks and most other macroscopic philosophical argument is open to different interpretations and
entities have negligible Φ – probably not enough to be maximal. criticisms; but if first-person truths about consciousness can indeed
But higher Φ might be found on some other scale for inanimate be translated into physical postulates in a scientifically fruitful
objects. Transistors, minerals and molecules, for example, all way, this implies a connection between the mental and the phys-
consist of mutually-interconnected smaller parts. They look like ical that’s stronger than mere correlation. Tononi has described
tiny integrated systems, possibly more integrated than any of the connection as ‘identity’, but at the same time he explicitly
the inanimate systems they compose. Further down, atoms con- holds that the first-person, experiential perspective on conscious-
sist of seemingly integrated sets of electrons, protons and neu- ness can never be replaced by any third-person, purely physical
trons. Even electrons, it has been argued, could have integrated perspective. This indicates that the connection between the men-
structure, because physics no longer regards them as simple tal and physical is weaker than identity in the strict sense associ-
pointlike entities, but rather as complex fluctuations in fields. ated with reductive materialism. If this in-between relation could
So, does consciousness go all the way down? be better understood, it might illuminate the hard problem.
According to IIT, it probably does. Although it’s not clear
how exactly to apply the theory to fundamental physics, it’s Conclusion
hard to avoid the interpretation that even particles have some Consciousness, according to IIT, is a matter of balance. On the
Φ. The Φ of a particle would be vanishingly small compared one hand, it requires complexity and variation as conditions for
to the brain. But as long as it’s above zero, and is not surpassed high information. On the other, it requires unity and integra-
by some greater system that it composes, such as a brain, par- tion – the parts of a conscious system must be more strongly
ticles must nevertheless enjoy some very basic form of subjec- connected to each other than they are to anything else. IIT
tive experience. IIT sets no minimal threshold of Φ required extracts these ideas from the first-person perspective, translates
for consciousness. them into a precise mathematical measure, and tests the mea-
The idea that even simple matter has some degree of con- sure against third-person observations. So far, the results are
sciousness is known as panpsychism. Panpsychism runs deeply promising, yet inconclusive. But if the theory does turn out to
counter to common sense, and many dismiss it as unscientific. be on the right track, it has deep and radical implications for
Yet, Tononi openly stands by it insofar as it follows from IIT. the place of consciousness in the natural order.
After all, what is the evidence that particles are not conscious? © DR HEDDA HASSEL MØRCH 2017
That we have not observed them to be so is arguably irrelevant, Hedda Hassel Mørch (pronounced ‘Murk’) is a post-doc in philosophy
because consciousness cannot be observed except in our own hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness (co-
individual case. Furthermore, a long line of philosophers – from directed by David Chalmers) and the Center for Sleep and Consciousness
classics such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and William James, at University of Wisconsin-Madison (co-directed by Giulio Tononi).
to contemporaries such as David Chalmers and Galen Straw-
son – have defended it. [For more about panpsychism, see Philip • Resources for learning more about IIT (including a Φ calcu-
Goff’s article in this issue] lator) can be found at http://integratedinformationtheory.org/

Consciousness
Does Consciousness Cause
Quantum Collapse?
Kelvin McQueen asks whether minds could directly influence physical reality
I
t is widely acknowledged that there is a problem of explain- scious desire for beer causes Jones to go to the fridge. Jones’
ing how subjective, conscious experience could arise out going to the fridge involves a large mass of particles being set
of physical matter. The focus is generally on the matter- in motion. If dualism were true then those particles would have
to-consciousness direction. But there is an equally puz- been moved by something non-physical. But in the physical sci-
zling problem going in the other direction. What causal effects ences the laws governing particle motion do not leave room for
does consciousness have on physical matter? In short, what does such outside forces to move particles about. Hence, dualism is
consciousness do? false. This is known as the causal closure argument.
A popular view in philosophy of mind is physicalism. Physi- But a careful analysis of modern physics suggests things are
calists believe the mind is just the brain. So for example, a par- not so simple. After the discovery of quantum mechanics, sev-
ticular experience, such as an itch, or a visual experience of red, eral prominent physicists suggested that consciousness does play
would be nothing more than electrochemical processes in the a fundamental role in governing particle motion. To see why
brain. A less popular view is dualism. Dualists believe that mind they made this suggestion we must first understand the prob-
and brain are distinct. On this view conscious experience is lem they were trying to solve: the measurement problem.
something in addition to the brain processes that accompany
it, something non-physical. The Measurement Problem
Physicalists believe dualism has been refuted by modern sci- The orthodox formulation of quantum mechanics can be
ence. They claim that all our evidence shows that the physical found in a 1932 book by John von Neumann. It is puzzling
world is a causally closed system, and hence there is no room because read literally, it postulates two fundamental laws of
for non-physical minds to do anything. For example, a con- nature that appear inconsistent. Firstly, there is the law described
by the Schrödinger equation. This law is deterministic: the
Schrödinger equation enables one to calculate the exact physi-
cal state of a system (i.e. its wavefunction) at a later time given
that system’s physical state at some earlier time. Secondly, there
is the law described by the collapse postulate. This law is not deter-
ministic but probabilistic: the collapse postulate only assigns
probabilities to the possible future states of a physical system
given its current state. (These probabilities reflect objective ran-
domness in nature.)
No physical system can be governed by both these laws simul-
taneously, since no physical system can evolve deterministically
and non-deterministically at the same time. This raises the ques-
tion, under what conditions is a physical system governed by
each law? Orthodoxy provides a way out of this potential incon-
sistency: a system will evolve deterministically in accord with
the Schrödinger equation if and only if it is not being measured;
and a system will evolve non-deterministically in accord with
the collapse postulate if and only if it is being measured. How-
ever, it isn’t clear what exactly is meant by ‘measured’, hence the
name ‘measurement problem’.
This problem is exacerbated when considering the physical
states of quantum systems. Measurement does not merely make
the measured system suddenly evolve in random ways; it appears
to change the very nature of the system. For quantum mechan-
ics does not typically describe particles as being located at defi-
nite points in space. Instead it allows a single particle to be
located at multiple locations at once. In such cases we say that
the particle is ‘in a superposition of multiple locations’. When
one measures the location of the particle, its superposition is
said to ‘collapse’ such that the particle randomly jumps to just

Consciousness
one location. This is illustrated in the notorious double-slit spond to an interference pattern.
experiment. One spot lighting up on the screen is a measurement of one
electron’s location. During measurement the collapse postulate
The Double-Slit Experiment takes over from the Schrödinger equation. Accordingly, the
In this experiment electrons are fired one by one towards a spread of superpositions stops and the electron randomly col-
fluorescent screen. When an electron strikes the screen, the lapses to a single location on the screen, leaving just one spot
spot where it hits lights up, allowing us to measure the location on the screen for us to see. So one electron cannot create the
of the electron. In the actual experiment, the path to the screen interference pattern. But as we send more electrons through,
is blocked by a wall with only two thin slits in it. After many an interference pattern builds up. If we now place additional
electrons are fired towards the wall, the pattern of spots that measuring devices at the slits, then each electron collapses early
builds up on the fluorescent screen is not two bands of spots and so only goes through one slit. If the electrons are not in
corresponding to the two slits, as one might expect. Rather, it superpositions of going through both slits, then there is no inter-
is an interference pattern (roughly, many bands of spots, making ference, and so no interference pattern.
the screen look like the body of a zebra). Even stranger, if we Measurement therefore appears to do two things: it changes
place additional measuring devices at the slits, to measure which the very nature of physical systems by converting their ‘wave-
slit each electron goes through, then we find each particle going like’ superpositions into familiar ‘particle-like’ states; and it
through just one slit but we also then find just two bands of causes genuinely random behaviour in what is measured (since
spots on the fluorescent screen corresponding to the two slits, the wave-to-particle transition is random).
rather than the interference pattern we saw before.
To understand the orthodox account of these results an anal- The ‘Consciousness Causes Quantum
ogy may help. Imagine partially submerging this experiment in Collapse’ Hypothesis
water. Rather than firing particles toward the screen, we drop a Why is this a problem? The reason is that measurement does
rock, sending a water wave towards the screen. What happens not look like a good candidate for a fundamental physical pro-
when the ripple hits the wall with the two slits? Some of it is cess – what exactly counts as a measurement? So, many have
deflected backwards, but two new ripples emanate from each tried to do without the collapse postulate entirely, and just let
slit and travel towards the screen. As these two new ripples superpositions spread in accord with the Schrödinger equation.
spread out they hit each other, before hitting the screen. If the This means that after just one electron is sent through, the
screen is designed to detect intensity of water waves, the ripple screen enters into a superposition of detecting a single electron
collision will affect the pattern on the screen. This is analogous in multiple places. The human observer then looks at the screen
to how orthodoxy explains the interference pattern. and enters into a superposition of experiencing a spot at one
point on the screen, a spot at another point, and so on. Advo-
cates of this view interpret this as the human observer splitting
into multiple observers, each of whom sees a different spot.
Since each interacts with the environment, the environment
bifurcates too. This is the so-called many-worlds interpretation
of quantum mechanics, which has become rather popular among
physicists. Although consistent with physicalism, this is a radi-
cal hypothesis. However, any solution to the measurement prob-
lem is bound to have radical implications.
Another line of thought retains but revises the collapse postu-
late. Now, the orthodox formulation of quantum theory offers the
most powerful algorithm for predicting experimental results in
the entire history of physics. So however we revise it, we must be
careful to keep that predictive power. That means ensuring that
collapses happen when they need to (e.g. before an observer forms
a visual experience of the screen) and don’t happen when they
shouldn’t happen (e.g. unmeasured electrons do not typically col-
lapse during their journeys through the double-slit apparatus).
One way of doing that is to retain the collapse postulate but
replace ‘measurement causes collapse’ with ‘conscious observa-
Consider the trajectory of a single electron. It is shot towards tion causes collapse’. This idea was suggested by several physi-
the wall. As predicted by the Schrödinger equation, it fans out cists in the early days of quantum mechanics. In 1939 Fritz
(like a ripple). It then has a component emanating from one slit London and Edmond Bauer wrote: “A measurement is achieved
and a component emanating from the other slit: the electron is only when the position of the pointer [or the spot on the fluo-
in a superposition of going through both slits. These two com- rescent screen] has been observed. [...] We note the essential role
ponents then fan out and interact (interfere) with each other. played by the consciousness of the observer in this transition.”
The electron then enters into a superposition of hitting multi- Inspired by London and Bauer, the Nobel Laureate Eugene
ple locations on the screen. These multiple locations corre- Wigner wrote in 1961: “When the province of physical theory

Consciousness
The new ripple effect

(only joking!)
was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through removed without causing much damage to one’s stream of con-
the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of conscious- sciousness). The cerebrum contains relatively few neurons, but
ness came to the fore again: it was not possible to formulate the is significantly correlated with consciousness. What’s the key
laws of quantum mechanics in a consistent way without refer- difference? Well, probe a subregion of the cerebellum and it
ence to consciousness.” has little consequence for other cerebellum subregions. In con-
However, this basic suggestion was never fully developed. trast, probe a subregion of the cerebrum and it will disrupt what’s
Instead, it was taken down scientifically unhelpful mystical paths happening in other subregions of the cerebrum. Some neuro-
and is nowadays typically dismissed by physicists. There are, I scientists believe that a mathematically precise measure of this
think, three main reasons for why physicists dismiss it: type of causal interconnectivity will define the physical corre-
lates of consciousness. Such a formula would enable us to mea-
Objection 1 sure, for any possible physical system, whether it is conscious
The notion of ‘consciousness’ is poorly defined. The hypothe- and to what extent.
sis cannot solve the measurement problem since ‘consciousness’ To respond to the objections, we can stay neutral on the cor-
is as poorly defined as ‘measurement’. Accordingly, it cannot rect measure of this interconnectivity – we only need the
offer any new testable predictions. assumption that there is a correct measure. But it will be useful
to have an illustration on the table. According to Guilio Tononi’s
Objection 2 Integrated Information Theory (IIT), the correct measure is a
Physical descriptions should not vary according to who the measure of a physical system’s integrated information (Φ). [For
observer is. This is especially so in light of the fact that observers a detailed account of the Integrated Information Theory and
are relatively new to the universe – it took billions of years for the Φ measure of consciousness, see Hedda Hassel Mørch’s arti-
the first animal to appear on Earth. This hypothesis violates cle in this issue.]
that requirement. So let’s use this idea to reply to the objections to the ‘con-
sciousness causes quantum collapse’ hypothesis:
Objection 3
The hypothesis is not consistent with physicalism, the reigning Response to Objection 1
foundational assumption in philosophy. It instead requires some This objection demands testable predictions from the hypoth-
sort of obsolete mind-body dualism that has been refuted by esis. By incorporating IIT, our ‘consciousness causes collapse’
philosophers. hypothesis becomes the hypothesis that integrated information
(measured as Φ) causes collapse. Crucially, Φ is a mathemati-
These are reasonable objections. However, in light of recent cally precise quantity that can in principle be calculated for any
developments in neuroscience, I believe they can be answered. possible physical system. So our hypothesis now generates pre-
cise and distinctive experimental predictions.
Responses To The Objections Consider again the double-slit experiment. This experiment
Recent research in neuroscience suggests that consciousness is has demonstrated interference patterns when firing complex
correlated with brain regions whose neurons are acting together molecules such as Buckminsterfullerene (each composed of sixty
in an orchestrated manner. Compare the cerebellum with the carbon atoms) through the slits. Physicists are working on exper-
cerebrum. The cerebellum contains far more neurons, but does iments with ever more complex systems being fired through the
not significantly correlate with consciousness (e.g. it can be slits. One could imagine eventually running the experiment

Consciousness
However, there is something awkward about the physicalist
interpretation. Φ is not a fundamental property of matter, it is
a high-level property of many causally interconnected compo-
nents. Formulating a fundamental law of nature in terms of a
non-fundamental high-level property seems odd. But even
worse, why is the high-level property that brings on collapse
also the correlate of consciousness? On the physicalist inter-
pretation, this looks like a bizarre coincidence. Such considera-
tions push us towards the dualist interpretation on which con-
sciousness is fundamental.
On the dualist interpretation, consciousness, not Φ, causes
collapse, and Φ is just a measure of consciousness. This inter-
pretation will have to reject objection 3 somehow, perhaps by
showing that it rests on a fallacy. And there is reason to think it
Schrodinger’s Cat reemerges! does. Many physicists reject the dualist interpretation simply
twice, with two different groups of nanocomputers. Members because it depends on an idea – dualism – that is widely viewed
of one group are programmed with high Φ. Members of the as a discredited relic of Descartes’ quaint 17th Century theo-
other group (the control group) are programmed with little or ries. We can formulate the argument that has supposedly dis-
no Φ. If only the latter group yield an interference pattern, then credited dualism as follows:
(if IIT is true) the consciousness causes collapse hypothesis will
have been experimentally confirmed. (1) Everything that happens in the physical world can be
explained in terms of physical causes.
Response to Objection 2 (2) Therefore, it is impossible for non-physical consciousness
The second objection demands that there be only one objec- to cause anything to happen in the physical world.
tive description of reality, not a distinct (yet equally valid)
description for each observer. This challenge is met because the This leads us either to physicalism, or to the unpalatable con-
hypothesis only entails that the description of reality sometimes clusion that the mind has no impact on the physical world: one’s
changes over time due to the presence of Φ. This change of thoughts do not cause one’s words, one’s pain does not cause
description over time is objective because all observers should one to cry out. Many philosophers see this as a powerful argu-
agree on it. ment against dualism.
One reason for wanting physical descriptions to not depend Philosophers support (1) with the claim that physical theo-
on observers is that we want physics to describe the early uni- ries never have any need to appeal to consciousness in their
verse before there were any observers. It may look like our causal laws. But what physical causes account for collapse? We
hypothesis entails that the universe suddenly collapsed as soon don’t know, so (2) isn’t actually supported. There is therefore a
as Earth began to sprout conscious creatures. This would be curious phenomenon in which physicists reject the dualist inter-
problematic for various reasons. Fortunately given IIT, this is pretation by appeal to philosophy and then proceed to formu-
not an implication. For IIT rejects the anthropocentric idea late physicalist solutions to the measurement problem (e.g. the
that consciousness is a property only of humans and human- many-worlds interpretation); meanwhile philosophers reject
like creatures. Even individual atoms and molecules have tiny dualism by appeal to such physical theories (and in particular,
amounts of Φ. Provided they are not components of systems the fact that the laws of those theories don’t mention conscious-
with higher amounts of Φ, IIT entails that they have small ness). If that is what the argument for physicalism amounts to
amounts of consciousness. So quantum collapses can be expected then it is viciously circular.
to have happened fairly early on in the universe’s history,
although their strength and frequency would have been less Conclusion
back then. (Although the details are beyond the scope of this In conclusion, the ‘consciousness causes quantum collapse’
piece, a fully consistent theory will require that the strength hypothesis – at least when combined with modern neuroscience
and frequency of collapse is proportional to Φ.) – is a viable theory of physical and mental reality, which offers
a clear research program and distinctive experimental predic-
Response to Objection 3 tions. It proposes a solution to the measurement problem by
There are two possible responses to the objection that our defining when and where collapse occurs. And it provides a place
hypothesis is not physicalist, given that both physicalist and dual- for consciousness in nature by giving consciousness a causal
ist interpretations of our hypothesis are available. The physical- role. Developing this theory may well enable us to answer even
ist interpretation immediately meets the physicalist demand! On deeper questions; questions such as why consciousness causes
the physicalist interpretation, consciousness is not mentioned at collapse and why consciousness exists at all.
all. Instead, it is the physical correlate of consciousness (Φ) that © DR KELVIN J. MCQUEEN 2017
causes collapse. The laws then state that it is systems with suffi- Kelvin McQueen did his PhD at Australian National University,
cient Φ which trigger quantum collapse. This is consistent with under the supervision of David Chalmers. He is now Assistant
physicalism. Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University in California.

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Beyond Bullshit
Donald Trump’s Philosophy of Language
Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg analyze Trump’s mode of communication.
I
n 2005 the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a tems manufacturer Carrier announced it would keep jobs in
charming little book called On Bullshit. In it Frankfurt dis- Indiana due to tax incentives, Trump talked about watching an
tinguishes bullshit from humbug and lies. Donald Trump, interview with a Carrier employee. The Washington Post quoted
we submit, isn’t (usually) a humbugger or a liar. He’s a Trump describing the employee:
bullshitter. But he extends the qualities of bullshit beyond Frank-
furt’s definition. We’d like to show you how. “He said something to the effect, ‘No we’re not leaving, because Don-
Frankfurt gives an example of humbug: ald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving.” Trump added, “I actu-
ally said I didn’t make [the promise]. When they played [my statement
“Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about our back], I said, ‘I did make it [to Carrier], but I didn’t mean it quite that
great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guid- way’.” As he explained: “I never thought I made that promise – not with
ance created a new beginning for mankind. This is surely humbug.” Carrier. I made it for everybody else. I didn’t make it really for Carrier.”
The promise was, he said: “A euphemism. I was talking about Carrier
Frankfurt explains that the orator isn’t lying: like all other companies from here on in, because they made the deci-
sion a year and a half ago”
“He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his (Washington Post from 1st December 2016).
audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such mat-
ters as whether our country is great, whether it is blessed, whether the Aaron Blake, who included Trump’s explanation in an opin-
Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to ion piece in the Post, rejoined,
create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care
what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role “You can make an argument that Trump was perhaps speaking more gen-
of the deity in our country’s history, or the like… He is not trying to erally and using Carrier as an example of the type of company that would
deceive anyone concerning American history. What he cares about is no longer be leaving under his presidency.”
what people think of him.”
If so, Trump was employing a synecdoche – a part used to
Trump has also talked about the greatness of America’s past. refer to the whole. That would mean that ‘Carrier’ meant, say,
Yet Trump’s statements aren’t humbug. He’s not in it only for all U.S. manufacturers. Except Trump apparently meant ‘every-
self-aggrandizement, like Frankfurt’s orator: he’s trying to say body else’: that is, everybody except Carrier. Blake continued:
something about America. Nor is Trump’s intention to bring
about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false. “But this is a statement he made while in Indiana – in front of people
Trump might really think that America was and will again be who had a very strong interest in taking him literally. They did, and yet
great. So he isn’t lying, either. Instead, Trump is bullshitting. he was apparently surprised by that. Any studied politician would know
What’s bullshit? that if you are in Indiana and you say Carrier won’t leave, you had bet-
Frankfurt considers an anecdote in which the philosopher ter mean those exact words.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein chides his friend Pascal for saying “I feel
just like a dog that has been run over.” According to Wittgen- By “you had better mean those exact words”, Blake is getting
stein, Pascal doesn’t know how a dog would feel about that. at what philosopher H. Paul Grice calls ‘implicature’ (see espe-
“Her fault,” Frankfurt elaborates, “is not that she fails to get cially Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words, 1989). Implicature is
things right, but that she is not even trying.” Wittgenstein, concerned not only with what you actually say, but with what you
Frankfurt contends, “construes her as engaged in an activity to imply by what you say. Speakers communicate the meaning of
which the distinction between what is true and what is false is their words in one of two ways: conventionally, by the words them-
crucial, and yet as taking no interest in whether what she says selves, or conversationally, by their use of words in a specific con-
is true or false… That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; text. Both ways require speakers and audience working together.
for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and there- According to Grice, all good communication follows the
fore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that Cooperative Principle:
she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in
a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage
not true.” Frankfurt concludes: “It is just this lack of connec- at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
tion to a concern with truth – this indifference to how things exchange in which you are engaged.”
really are – that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”
Trump is a lot like Pascal. After the heating and cooling sys- Grice divides this Principle into four maxims:

Quantity: Make your contribution as – but only as – informa- Trump meant what everyone else took him to mean – namely,
tive as required. Carrier – he didn’t try to make his contribution true. Yet he did-
Quality: Try to make your contribution true. n’t lie, since he didn’t mean to deceive. Trump just said some-
Relation: Be relevant. thing that felt right at the time. He wasn’t concerned with the
Manner: Be clear by avoiding obscurity and ambiguity, and by truth of what he was saying at all. That’s the essence of bullshit.
striving for brevity and order. But Trump one-ups Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit. While
Trump wasn’t concerned with the truth, and his intent wasn’t to
Speakers routinely flout those maxims, which is part of Grice’s deceive, he nevertheless was concerned with what his audience
point. Flouting a maxim conventionally indicates that a speaker thought. He wanted people in Indiana to think he was going to
is instead communicating conversationally. So if I ask you make America great again, whether or not Carrier – or everyone
whether you had a good holiday, and you reply, “Beautiful except Carrier – had anything to do with it. Yet it’s hard to see
weather we’re having!” then you’re flouting (at least) the Rela- what could have conversationally clued his audience into this
tion maxim. Today’s weather isn’t relevant to my question. Taken meaning. As Blake observes, many in Indiana weren’t clued in.
conversationally, however – that is, by understanding what you By flouting all of Grice’s maxims conventionally, and not
said in terms of the context in which you said it – what you said clearly communicating even conversationally, Trump wasn’t
makes communicative sense. You’re indirectly telling me that communicating with his audience so much as talking at them.
your holiday wasn’t good. His speech was governed by what we might call the Anti-Coop-
Does Trump follow the Cooperative Principle of communi- erative Principle:
cation? According to journalist Salena Zito, “his supporters take
him seriously, but not literally.” If so, Trump flouts the maxims Make your conversational contribution seem such as is required, at the
conventionally in order to communicate conversationally. stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk
In the above quote he flouted Quantity. Saying ‘Carrier’ when exchange in which you are engaged, even though it’s not.
he avowedly meant every U.S. manufacturing giant apart from
Carrier, gave his audience too little information. He flouted Rela- That’s beyond bullshit.
tion: ‘Carrier’ isn’t relevant to companies other than Carrier. He © CHRIS GAVALER & NATHANIEL GOLDBERG 2017
flouted Manner: he was embracing rather than avoiding obscu- Chris Gavaler is an assistant professor of English, and Nathaniel Gold-
rity and ambiguity. And Quality? If by ‘Carrier’ Trump genuinely berg is a professor of Philosophy, at Washington and Lee University,
meant everyone except Carrier, he did try to make his contribu- Lexington, Virginia. They’re writing a book entitled What If? Super-
tion true. He just flouted the other maxims. But if by ‘Carrier’ hero Comics as Philosophical Thought Experiments.

The Further History of Sexuality
From Michel Foucault to Miley Cyrus
Peter Benson philosophically explores changing attitudes towards sexuality.
W
hen Michel Foucault died in 1984 he left unfin- with those of our present era, either because they are borrowed
ished a proposed sequence of four books with from the past, or because they presage a different future.
the overall title The History of Sexuality. Only Similar ideas sustain Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Here too
the first three volumes were published. Fur- he wanted to challenge the view that human sexuality was a fixed
thermore, his plan for the sequence had changed drastically feature of our biological and psychological lives which different
between the publication of the first volume in 1976 and the societies have variously sought to limit, condemn, or express.
second, which appeared in the year of his death. One thing he On the contrary, Foucault takes the view that the diverse forms
didn’t change, however, was the title of his project, and this was of human sexuality are brought into being by the way they are
quite enough by itself to ruffle the feathers of his many detrac- discussed: the biological basis of sexuality is elaborated and
tors. Although attitudes to sexuality clearly change over time, shaped by the language we use to describe it. Indeed, the very
can it be right to claim that human sexuality itself has a history? concept of someone having a ‘sexuality’ is a very recent idea,
Surely it is a natural characteristic which only alters in the long, which did not exist before the eighteenth century.
glacially slow perspective of evolution? Today we are familiar with discussions about people’s sexual-
ity, which is usually taken to refer to whether they are homo-,
A History of Foucault’s Thought hetero-, or bi-sexual. But Foucault explains in the first volume
Questions of this kind were not new issues in relation to Fou- of his History that although for many centuries in Europe the
cault’s work. They had been a source of controversy ever since law forbade and punished homosexual acts, it was only in the
the time of his first major book, The History of Madness (1961). nineteenth century that individual people began to be spoken
There, too, the title promised not merely a history of the treat- of as ‘homosexuals’. Foucault dates the idea of ‘the homosexual’
ment of madness, but a history of madness itself. This implies as a particular type of person, with distinctive psychological
that madness too belongs among the category of things that have characteristics – rather than someone who succumbs to a vice
a history, not among those that are historically unchanging facets that might be a temptation for anyone – to an article published
of human existence. Foucault disputed that there was a readily in 1870. As he writes: “The sodomite had been a temporary
recognizable human ailment called ‘madness’ which had always aberration; the homosexual was now a species”(p.43). However,
existed, but had been treated differently in different eras. Rather, this characterization “also made possible the formation of a
the way we talk about madness – the particular behaviours that ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own
we characterize by this term – changes over time, and there is behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowl-
no way to recognize who is mad outside of this shifting discourse. edged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories
This gives to madness a narratable history. by which it was medically disqualified” (p.101).
It is at this point that a number of misunderstandings are apt This exemplifies Foucault’s general theory that all social and
to arise, which are used to berate Foucault as well as similar political power generates its own opposition, creating conflict
thinkers in the Continental tradition, so it is important to even as it tries to suppress it. Thus the term ‘homosexual’, des-
emphasize what he is not saying. He is not claiming that there ignating a particular class of persons, was first used by figures
is no reality to madness outside of our discourses about it. No- in authority: doctors, psychiatrists, judges. It named a particu-
one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever seriously made such lar problematic group who might then be subjected to treat-
a claim. Experiences of madness are undoubtedly real, serious, ment, punishment, or tolerance. Even those who advocated a
and distressing. Their causes may lie either in neurological or relaxed attitude towards these people did so, first, by character-
social conditions, or perhaps some combination of both. As yet, izing them and then, most typically, declaring the causes of their
however (despite the frequently excessive confidence of psychi- condition to be irreversible. In a second stage of this historical
atrists), we are unable to catalogue these causes with any confi- process, the designated group adopted and adapted their desig-
dence. In the meantime the category of ‘madness’ variously nation, accepting the term ‘homosexual’ or some equivalent, and
morphs according to changes in our theories. These shifts, regarding themselves as representatives of a suppressed and mis-
widening or narrowing the class of ‘the mad’, can be mapped understood group, engaged in resisting social oppression. Hence
chronologically. By becoming aware that madness was once began a long process of covert and overt protest, from the time
thought of in very different terms from our own, we can acquire of Oscar Wilde to the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s.
a degree of detachment from current views, rather than being The self-adoption of the word ‘gay’ as a non-pejorative alter-
immersed blindly within them. In this idea, as in many other native to other slang terms, and the promotion of this word until
ways, Foucault was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, who wrote it has now become generally accepted, was an immensely suc-
of the importance of ‘untimely’ thoughts – thoughts at odds cessful example of linguistic rebellion, running in parallel with,

French philosopher Michel Foucault
(1926-1984)
portrait by Woodrow Cowher, 2017
and influencing, the steady change in social attitudes. The cen- the work [is] done to think otherwise, to do something else, to become
tral Foucauldian point, however, is that it was power which cre- other than what one is.”
ated the category ‘homosexual’, which then became a location
of resistance to that power. That is to say, power creates its own He therefore concluded that we should recognize philoso-
resistance: the resistance does not come from somewhere out- phy as wherever analysis is accompanied by “changes in
side the particular regime which provokes it. behaviour, the actual conduct of people, their relationships with
Once this resistance had led to the crumbling away of con- themselves and with others.” It follows that philosophy is not
demnation and punishment, however, there was no longer any something to be left to professional philosophers. Original ideas
strong need for people designated ‘homosexual’ to band can bubble up in many different areas of our culture, and, when
together in solidarity against their oppressors. Nor was there they are challenging received opinions, may equally deserve the
any need to think differently about homosexual activity than name of ‘philosophy’. Clear thinking and fresh thoughts are far
any other variety of sexual interaction. In the years since Fou- from being the preserve of academics. (Indeed, academia is often
cault’s death, these taboos have indeed largely evaporated. Many the last place one should look for them.)
people no longer feel that homosexual actions would put them
into a special social category, and hence they no longer have Miley Cyrus: Pansexuality
any strong motivation to avoid them. This new situation has Throughout 2015 Miley Cyrus gave a series of interviews which
been accurately described by the actress Kristen Stewart, who, in my view place her at the forefront of contemporary thinking
in response to a question about her sexuality, said, “I think in about gender and sexuality. Provocative and clearly expressed, these
three or four years there are going to be a whole lot more people interviews ably display her considerable intelligence and honesty.
who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or But before discussing what she had to say, I’d first like to take a
straight” (Nylon magazine, 2015). The only word Stewart is will- step back, to explain what had led her to take such a public stand
ing to use about herself in this connection is ‘fluid’. This is a on these issues and to become (in the words of one of the maga-
word that has recently become fashionable, and has also been zines that interviewed her) “the world’s most unlikely social activist.”
used by, among others, the model and actress Cara Delevingne Miley has been a popular and successful singer since the age
and the pop star Miley Cyrus, who has become a vocal of fourteen, when the Disney TV channel gave her the lead role
spokesperson for these new attitudes. She has not only given in their children’s programme Hannah Montana. Her attitude
voice to the experiences of many people today, but also influ- towards her financial success, however, is remarkably refresh-
enced attitudes among her wide audience. ing and unusual in our highly competitive society. “People in
In an interview with Le Monde newspaper in 1980 Foucault this industry think ‘I just gotta keep getting more money’, and
had declared: I’m like, ‘What are you getting more money for? You probably
couldn’t even spend it all in this lifetime’… The question is:
“From philosophy comes the movement through which… one what am I going to do with it? I don’t want to just sit and hoard
detaches oneself from received truths and seeks other rules of the it. Or chase more.” She adds that “I should not be worth the
game… [it brings about] the modification of received values and all amount I am while people live on the streets. Nothing I do will

justify that. But I have so much influence as a pop star, it’s impor- very obviously physically beautiful, without us knowing anything
tant I use it” (Marie Claire, US, Sept 2015). about their genitalia. So it becomes clear that we can find some-
Miley was particularly concerned about the number of home- one attractive without knowing their gender. Attraction to a par-
less young people she could see on the streets of L.A., and began ticular person comes first, and knowledge of their gender is sec-
to investigate the reasons for it. It quickly became evident that ondary. In the face of this refreshing attitude, the work of aca-
one of the most common reasons for a teenager to be living on demic feminist philosopher Judith Butler begins to seem timid:
the streets was that their parents had thrown them out for being her theories never leave behind the binary divisions of conven-
gay or otherwise sexually unconventional. This shocking fact tional gender, or the alternatives of being either homo- or het-
made the issue very personal to Miley, whose own sexual feel- erosexual. People like Miley have moved on from such limiting
ings had never been confined to a single gender. In different perspectives.
circumstances, with less supportive parents, she herself might At the end of her concert performances in 2015 Miley took
have been sleeping under a bridge somewhere. to the stage wearing a colourful wig, a horse’s tail, fake breasts,
Determined to take some action on this issue, her campaign a unicorn’s horn in the centre of her forehead and a huge sculp-
has taken three routes. First, she set up a charity (the Happy tured phallus strapped to her crotch. In this wonderful costume
Hippy Foundation) to offer practical help to homeless young she drifted gently round the stage singing her poignant song,
LGBTQ people. Secondly, she made various public pleas for ‘Karen Don’t be Sad’. In this context the song became a sup-
tolerance, emphasizing that she was not trying to change any- portive call to all gender non-conformists to resist attempts at
body’s way of life, only asking them to be more accepting of dif- normalization: “’Cause they’ll crush you if they can/They’re
ferent lifestyles. Thirdly, she has spoken candidly about her own just a bunch of fools/And you can make them powerless/Don’t
life and feelings in the interviews I mentioned. It is not unusual let them make the rules.”
today for people in the entertainment industry to announce that In June 2015, Miley posted a picture of herself on Instagram
they’re gay or bisexual – in such circles at least, prejudice has (where she has 26 million followers) wearing a T-shirt bearing the
largely evaporated. Miley, however, dislikes the word ‘bisexual’, slogan ‘Gender is Over’, and looking very cheerful about the idea.
and prefers ‘pansexual’ to describe herself. For
one thing, ‘bisexual’ implies that there are just Miley Cyrus, a popular singer
two sexes to choose from, into which everyone
falls. This is factually untrue. Hermaphroditism,
or intersexuality, is far more common than most
people realize. By some estimates, one in every
two thousand babies has intersex characteris-
tics, which, world-wide, is several million
people. So even physically, not everyone is
clearly male or female. If one adds to this the
social and psychological assumptions that have
accrued around ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’,
a great many more people will not be readily
classifiable in those terms, or will feel uncom-
fortable with any such classification.
“I don’t relate to being a boy or a girl,”
PHOTO: FACEBOOK.COM/MILEYCYRUS
explained Miley, “and I don’t have to have my
[sexual] partner relate to [being] boy or girl.”
She contends that “Once you’re an adult, you
can choose who you are. We’re born humans…
I don’t relate to what people have made men
and women into” (Elle, UK Oct 2015). When
she finds somebody attractive, she explains, she
is responding to that person as an individual,
not as a member of a category such as ‘male’ or
‘female’. What type of genitals they have is not
important until one is actually making love, at
which time one can modulate one’s behaviour
accordingly.
Many people may find this attitude difficult to
empathize with. But a practical demonstration
can be found in Miley’s ‘InstaPride’ campaign,
which invited transsexuals and others of indeter-
minate or unfixed gender to post pictures of them-
selves on Instagram. Some of these people are

She has remarked that in the past, when people asked her for an embracing completeness and closure supposedly possessed by
autograph, they used to mention some song or performance of Hegel’s system. It is in Kojève’s writings, not in those of Hegel
hers that they particularly liked, but now the most common thing himself, that we find the notion of an eventual ‘end of history’,
they say is, “Thank you for what you stand up for.” later popularized by Francis Fukuyama.
It will certainly take some time for her views to become Until recent years, the considerable popularity of Kojève’s
widespread, but there is a definite movement underway, which interpretations of Hegel prevented more subtle engagement
could not have found a better spokesperson. There is nothing between political philosophy and Hegelian thought. Today,
hectoring or aggressive in her pronouncements, but only good writers such as Slavoj Zizek have helped to free Hegel from
humour and tolerance. It is worth remembering that she first these misleading interpretations, and it is now easier to see how
became popular on childrens’ TV because of her likeable per- much Foucault and Hegel have in common. For both thinkers,
sonality, and that is one thing that hasn’t changed at all. historical change takes place not as a continuous evolution but
through abrupt transformations, in which one form of society
Shulamith Firestone & The End of Gender is replaced by another. For Foucault, the difference between
The end of gender was predicted in 1970 by the feminist these regimes was correlated with different arrangements of
philosopher Shulamith Firestone in her book The Dialectic of political and social power. Hence in Discipline and Punish (1975)
Sex. There she wrote: he contrasts the unified sovereign power of the feudal era with
the more dispersed and fragmented disciplinary power of indus-
“The end goal of feminist revolution must be…. not just the elimi- trial society. But he does not directly address the causes of these
nation of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differ- changes. By contrast, Firestone considers that “feminism is the
ences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A inevitable female response to the development of a technology
reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality… would probably super- capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-
sede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality)” (p.19, her emphases). reproductive roles” (p.37). Furthermore, “Culture develops not
only out of the underlying economic dialectic, but also out of
At the time this probably seemed like a utopian dream, but the deeper sex dialectic” (p.179).
as we have seen, it is now coming much closer to realization. As we have seen, Foucault’s analysis of the shifting signifi-
Firestone’s brilliant book is the Das Kapital of feminism. cance of homosexuality in Western culture over the last two
Building on the work of Marx and Engels concerning the pri- centuries identifies two stages, corresponding to the produc-
mary division of labour between the sexes in prehistory, Fire- tion by power of its own opposition:
stone argues that no socialist revolution will be complete until
this original division is overcome. In the same way that Marx (i) Homosexuals identified as a ‘deviant’ group, the target of
saw the industrial development of society as the basis on which medical and legal intervention.
class division could be overcome, no longer serving any neces- (ii) Homosexuals accepting this identity, as gay people, and cam-
sary purpose, so Firestone saw the development of greater con- paigning for equality and integration into general society.
trol over reproduction through contraception and other medi-
cal technologies as the necessary ground for ending the class This second stage can be said to have culminated in the recent
division between men and women. Industrial technology also acceptance, in many countries, of gay marriage. But the ending
has its part to play, as it ends any need for brute strength as an of this conflict inevitably generates a completely new situation,
advantage in human activities. Hence all forms of employment in which:
become open to both sexes, and discrimination by gender-class
is unnecessary. Indeed, in many countries it is already illegal. (iii) The division homosexual/normal having been overcome,
In this context, Firestone predicted, the social significance of the category of ‘homosexual’ itself loses its rigid borders and
gender will begin to evaporate. begins to dissolve into contemporary ‘pansexuality’.
Firestone shares Marx’s belief in the dialectical nature of his-
torical transformations, whereby history progresses through With this third step, which has only developed in very recent
the clash of opposing classes or ideas. This is one point that dis- years, since Foucault’s death, we can see a new dialectical triad
tinguishes her from Foucault, who avoided making predictions beginning to form. This is the kind of triad which, for Hegel,
about the future course of social change, and always remained Marx, and Firestone constitutes the underlying structure of his-
wary of the dialectical philosophies of history propounded by torical development. So, although Firestone predicted pansex-
Hegel and Marx. However, this dichotomy between Foucault uality to be one of the results of a feminist revolution, we can
and dialectical philosophy is not as absolute as it might appear. today see it as contributing towards that revolution, bringing it
In his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Fou- closer to realization. Such a revolutionary change, bringing
cault suggested, “we have to determine the extent to which our about an end to the oppressive social structures of gender, will
anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against soon produce a better world for everyone: women, men, and
us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” everyone else as well. It is time for all of us to embrace and
The widespread anti-Hegelianism in French philosophy at encourage these changes.
the time was in part the result of contentious interpretations of © PETER BENSON 2017
Hegel – notably those of Alexander Kojève – which placed an Peter Benson accepts the pronoun ‘he’, but considers himself to be
undue emphasis on historical inevitability and on the all- gender neutral. His favourite Miley Cyrus track is ‘Space Boots’.

Leibniz &
THE BIG BANG
Eric Kincanon says that Leibniz could have predicted the Big Bang in 1715.
T
he German philosopher and scientist Gottfried Leib- when to create the Universe? God, under Newton’s think-
niz (1646-1716) is best known to the general public ing, must have picked a moment for creation. But, if God
for his independent development of calculus and the does everything with sufficient reason, how can he prefer
letter he wrote to Princess Caroline of Sweden in one moment over another? Why would God prefer any par-
1715. In this letter he challenged Isaac Newton’s state- ticular moment to create the Universe rather than a differ-
ments about absolute time and space, arguing that they ent moment an hour earlier, or three thousand years later?
were heretical. Leibniz and Newton were long-time adver- According to Leibniz, God can’t just randomly pick a time,
saries before the writing of this letter, and Leibniz was prob- since that would mean God is acting without sufficient rea-
ably motivated by revenge. Still, this should not be a reason, and this would violate Leibniz’s first law.
son to dismiss his arguments. In fact, two hundred years Leibniz was of course unaware of the Big Bang theory -
before Einstein, Leibniz was arguing that time and space it was developed more than two centuries after his death.
could not be absolute. Interestingly, the two philosophical However, his philosophical laws could be used to argue for
laws that Leibniz used to challenge Newton’s concepts of the Big Bang over its main competitor, the Steady State
space and time can also be used to argue for the Big Bang model. The Big Bang theory asserts that the Universe began
over the Steady State model of the Universe. as a point 13.8 billion years ago, and expanded to its cur-
Leibniz’s first philosophical law was called the Principle rent size. The Steady State model on the other hand has the
of Sufficient Reason. Basically, it says that God does nothing Universe existing pretty much now as it always has, and at
without a sufficient purpose or reason. So since God created its start (if it had one), it was already infinite in size. Although
all things, all things must have been created for a sufficient pur- some Steady State advocates argued for an infinitely old
pose or reason. The important implication of this for the dis- Universe, this would quickly be ruled out by Leibniz, since
cussion of space and time is that it means that God is not he always saw God as the Universe’s creator. More inter-
whimsical or random in his actions; that is, everything must estingly, Leibniz could also have argued against Steady State
have sufficient reason for it being created as it is. Leibniz’s theory even if the Universe had had a finite past. If the Uni-
second philosophical law states that God does nothing twice. verse starts out as already being infinite in extent, God would
The second law can be seen as a consequence of the first. have to give the objects he then creates particular positions
So for example, the Sun, being created by God, has a pur- and velocities. At first this might seem okay. Perhaps God
pose: it provides warmth to the planets, determines their could have created whatever stars existed a few billion
orbits, etc. Moreover, this purpose is fulfilled by the Sun, so years or however long ago it was, and given them positions
there is no need for another Sun. Likewise each person is and velocities such that everything would end up just where
created with a unique purpose. God would not create another it is today. No, he could not, Leibniz would argue. Much like
you, since your purpose is being fulfilled by you, and so the his argument against absolute space and time, Leibniz could
creation of another you would not have a purpose and, by argue that God (who of course follows Leibniz’s laws) could
the first law, would not be created by God. not choose one particular set of positions and velocities
Newton had argued that to be consistent with his law over the ones they would have had if they had been cre-
of inertia, space and time must be absolute – in other words, ated (say) a few seconds later. So, Leibniz’s God, could not
must exist independently of everything else, including God. have created a Steady State Universe.
If time and space are absolute, then, Newton reasoned, God Notice how nicely these problems go away under the Big
must exist in time and space. This was what was seen as Bang. Under the Big Bang the Universe began as a point. A
heretical by Leibniz, since God existing, and creating, in point has no internal structure; there is no way to have dif-
already-existing space and time would conflict with his first ferent arrangements of the interior of a point. This is also
law. Consider the creation of the universe by a God in a the only geometric possibility that has this character: a line
space that already existed. As per his first law, Leibniz segment, for example, must address size as well as how
requires that God does things with sufficient reason. How- any material is distributed along it. A point has none of these
ever, notice the problem God would have if space were issues. So, unlike the Steady State theory, Big Bang theory
absolute. Where would God put the Universe? With abso- has a geometry at creation that is the only one acceptable
lute space already existing, God would have to choose a to Leibniz’s laws. So Leibniz, I think, would have argued for
particular spot to create the Universe in. But, to God each the necessity of the Big Bang. It’s not just that the Big Bang
point in space would look the same, so how can there be theory doesn’t contradict Leibniz’s laws. Rather, it is the
any reason to choose one spot over another? There can’t only way a God of purpose and reason could be a creator.
be, Leibniz argues, so God cannot create in absolute space. © DR ERIC KINCANON 2017
Existing in absolute time causes a similar problem. If Eric Kincanon is in the Physics Department at Gonzaga University.
Newton’s absolute time already exists, how does God decide Along with the physics, he teaches the metaphysics of time.

Luther’s Contribution to
Feuerbach’s Atheism
Van Harvey traces one of the more unexpected consequences of the Reformation.
I
n October 2017, Protestants throughout the world will cel- new philosophy in a series of paragraphs varying from 500 words
ebrate the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, the reli- in some to no more than 24 in others.
gious revolution that began when Catholic monk and local Critics have wondered why Feuerbach should publish his new
professor of moral theology Martin Luther nailed ninety- philosophy in such a disorganized and fragmentary form. The
five theses to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral. He was protest- excuse that he gave in his preface was that he had intended to
ing against indulgences, which were certificates people could write a voluminous work but changed his mind when confronted
purchase from the Church to reduce their or their loved ones’ with the real possibility of government censorship. So he cut
punishment in Purgatory for their sins. We can expect numer- the work “like a barbarian”, although he kept the structure of
ous articles and books praising Luther and his return to St Paul’s the work he had originally planned.
doctrine of justification by faith and not by works. What we Despite the inadequacy of the Principles as a philosophical
cannot expect will be many articles explaining how those same monograph, it is clear that Feuerbach had decisively shed the
writings could become an important step in the development of remnants of his Hegelianism and based his new philosophy on
the atheism of the nineteenth century German philosopher the principles of feeling (Emfindung) and sensuousness
Ludwig Feuerbach. Reading Luther’s theology confirmed Feuer- (Sinnlichkeit). Sensuousness is living through the senses and not
bach’s conviction that Christianity was rooted in the human wish through thought alone. Whereas the old philosophy, he said,
to be free from evil, sin, and death; and that the Christian God began with the argument that we are abstract, thinking beings,
was “nothing but the satisfied urge towards happiness, the satis- the new philosophy begins by saying, “I am a real, sensuous
fied self-love of the Christian man” (The Essence of Faith Accord- being, and indeed, the body in its totality is my ego, my essence
ing to Luther, Ludwig Feuerbach, trans Melvin Cherno, p.102. itself” (Principles, para. 36, trans Manfred H. Vogel). The human
All quotes are from this book unless otherwise indicated). self is not primarily a bearer of reason, but a concrete sensuous
Feuerbach’s earlier book The Essence of Christianity had burst being in relation to other sensuous beings. “To-be-there [Da-
like a bombshell on the European scene in 1841, and made him sein]” Feuerbach wrote, “is the primary being” existing in space
famous. It had rave reviews: controversial theologian D.F. Strauss and time and linked to others by the senses: “The heart does
wrote that the book was “the truth of our time” and Friedrich not want abstract, metaphysical or theological objects; it wants
Engels that “at once we all became Feuerbachians.” However real and sensuous objects and beings” (para.34). Consequently,
Feuerbach himself had become dissatisfied with it, for at least it is the task of the new philosophy not to lead away from the
two reasons. The first was that he felt he had not yet completely sensuous, but rather to lead people to real objects (para.43).
shaken off the abstractionism of his once-held Hegelian ideal-
ism. The second was that his book had suffered a long and sting- Feuerbach Addresses Luther
ing review by a Lutheran theologian, Julius Müller, who had After writing the two monographs, Feuerbach turned to the
argued that because Feuerbach relied so heavily on patristic and writings of Luther, in order to meet the criticism that he had
medieval sources, his criticisms might apply to Roman Catholi- neglected him in the first edition of The Essence of Christianity.
cism, but not to Lutheranism. So in 1842-3 Feuerbach set out to To his surprise, he discovered that Luther had based the cer-
clarify his thought. He produced two short monographs in which tainty of Christian faith on the same principle that was at the
he criticized Hegel and developed his ‘new philosophy’, and also foundation of his own new philosophy, namely, sensuousness.
a short supplement to The Essence of Christianity, dealing with the Throughout his writings, Luther had depreciated mere creedal
criticism that he had neglected Luther. The supplement was pub- Christian belief because it is subject to doubt and so lacked cer-
lished in 1844 as The Essence of Faith According to Luther. tainty. Rather, genuine faith must be certain faith, and this cer-
The second of the two philosophical documents, Principles tainty was provided through the sensuous appearance, that is,
of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), is a restatement and exten- the worldly incarnation, of Jesus Christ: “Christ is the sensuous
sion of the arguments in Feuerbach’s Preliminary Theses on the certainty of God’s love to man. He is himself the man-loving
Reform of Philosophy (1842). It is a difficult book to read because God taken as a sensuous object or sensuous truth” (p.79). Con-
the very complex issues fundamental to his new philosophy are sequently, Feuerbach’s turn to Luther’s writings turned out to
put forward in frustratingly short paragraphs and aphorisms. be more important for his philosophical thought than he had
The first thirty paragraphs offer a very sweeping interpretation anticipated. As he later observed about himself concerning his
of the development of modern philosophy of religion from previous work: “You were still haunted by the abstract Rational
Spinoza’s pantheism to Hegelianism, which development Feuer- Being, the being of philosophy, as distinct from the actual sen-
bach then says finds ‘realization’ in his own atheistic human- suous being of nature and humanity. Your Essence of Christianity
ism. To these thirty paragraphs Feuerbach then added his own was, at least partially, written when you still looked at things in

Luther & Feuerbach
portrait by Gail Campbell, 2017

this contradictory manner. Only in your Luther – which thus is tion in man” and that this “is the foundation on which Luther
by no means a mere ‘supplement’… was this contradiction fully erected his edifice and shattered the Roman Catholic church”
overcome. Only there did you fully ‘shake off’ the philosopher (p.38). But after these few pages of concessions to Luther’s radi-
and cause the philosopher to give way to the man.” cal distinction between God and man, Feuerbach argued that
Somewhat later Feuerbach wrote that he was not happy with the Reformer had to abandon it in order to assure his readers
the book. He thought it was too brief and that his central argu- that God’s sole purpose is to convey blessedness on man: “The
ment was not expressed as clearly as it might have been. Nev- essence of faith, according to Luther, is that God by his very
ertheless, there is no question about his central claim: that nature is concerned with man” (p.51). Thus Luther can write:
Luther believed that the Christian revelation was aimed at pro- “The divine nature is nothing but mere beneficence and, as Saint
viding a sensuous confirmation of the faith that God’s only pur- Paul says, friendship and affability – philanthropy” (ibid); or again,
pose is to fulfill the human wish for blessedness – a confirma- “A God is that from Whom one should expect all good, and in
tion found in the historical figure of Jesus. Whom one should take refuge in times of need… God is the
The German version of the book is less than sixty pages, and One from Whom one receives all good and relief from all mis-
one might characterize it as an example of what in his book Freud fortune” (ibid). Quotations like these led Feuerbach to believe
and Philosophy Paul Ricoeur called “the hermeneutics of suspi- that Luther came to downplay if not abandon the notion of Deus
cion.” He meant by this somewhat mannered phrase that there Absconditus and move to the belief that “In the humanity of Christ
is a type of interpretation of a text in which one can detect an the humanness of God is placed beyond all doubt” (p.63).
unconscious or latent meaning quite different from the author’s What makes this move possible? The Lutheran faith and the
conscious, intended meaning. The suspicious interpreter then Roman Catholic faith both embrace the Nicene Creed, which
shows how the surface meaning is really a function of the hidden says that God became man for us and for our salvation, but there
meaning. If, for example, Luther writes that the sole meaning is a crucial difference. Luther departs from the Catholic view
of the Gospel is to bring eternal life or blessedness to the Chris- by placing all of the emphasis on the words “for us.” The ‘for
tian believer, then Feuerbach, the suspicious interpreter, sees us’ is the essential content of faith. The Catholics, he argued,
this ‘good news’ to be really the fulfillment of an egotistical wish make the Incarnation and the Passion mere objects of belief.
for life after death. If the believer attributes omnipotence to a They do not see that “Everything we relate in faith occurred
creator, this is because he believes that only a sovereign power for us and comes home to us” (p.49); or again, “It is therefore
over nature can work the miracles necessary to save one from not enough that a man believe that there is a God, that Christ
evil. In short, all expressed Christian religious beliefs really reveal suffered, etc. but he must firmly believe that God is a God for
a consciousness confronted by the obstruction of nature to one’s his blessedness, that Christ suffered for him” (ibid).
deepest wish, which is to survive. Why Luther made so much out of the words ‘for us’ may not
Characterising it as a ‘suspicious reading’ may well describe be immediately evident to those readers unfamiliar with tradi-
the strategy Feuerbach employed in writing the book. What he tional Christian theology. This has always made a metaphysical
does is first recount what he takes to be the implicit meaning of distinction between ‘God-in-Himself’, prior to creation, and
Luther’s writings in some particular instance, and then find quo- God as He relates to the world. This distinction serves at least
tations from Luther to confirm this reading. This strategy, of two purposes: to affirm the ineffable nature of the deity in con-
course, lends itself to the criticism often directed at the practi- trast to our human categories, and to emphasize that God’s pur-
tioners of suspicious interpretation; namely that they
cherry pick texts that vindicate their reading. Thus
one can argue that Feuerbach ignored those writings
of Luther that did not justify his suspicious interpre-
tation, and only used those that did. Thus, although
Feuerbach’s book is an attempt to show that the
implicit meaning of Luther’s writings is that God
“has shown and proved himself to be a human being”
(p.63), Feuerbach first had to deal with what any
knowledgeable person knows about both Luther and
Calvin; namely, that they both believed in the Deus
Absconditus – the hidden God whose majesty was
beyond any human conception and imagination.
They both insisted that there was an infinite quali-
tative difference between God and humanity. So in
the first pages of the book, Feuerbach acknowledged
that Luther had often written that God and man are
opposed to each other – so much so that whatever
qualities humanity possesses must be denied of deity,
and whatever deity possesses must be rejected in Luther nailing his 95 theses to the
humanity. You might even say, Feuerbach admitted,
doors of Wittenburg Cathedral
“that every affirmation in God presupposes a nega-

poses are not exhausted in the Creation. But by emphasizing bach’s mind when he turned to Luther’s treatment of the rela-
the ‘for us’ in the way that he does, Luther seems to have implic- tion of faith to love in the latter part of the book. He had found
itly rejected this tradition, even though, like Calvin, he affirmed an extraordinary passage in Luther’s writings that reads:
that God was Deus Absconditus. Yet Feuerbach claimed that
Luther not only rejected this distinction, but took his rejection “But if one wishes to speak and teach properly of faith, it far over-
of it to such an extreme that he was committed to the view that steps love. For let one only see what faith is concerned with and has
God is for us by definition. He did this by arguing that even the to do with; namely… it concerns death, eternal life, sin, the law which
metaphysical attributes of God, such as necessity, omnipres- obligates us, Grace through which our sins are forgiven” (p.101).
ence, omnipotence, or omniscience, are all derived from the
attribute of benevolence, which Luther takes to mean ‘for us’. Love, in contrast,
Omniscience is taken to refer to God’s knowledge of all our
needs; omnipresence is to mean that He is able to help us in all “has to do with minor matters, such as serving people, helping them
places; and His omnipotence is in order to accomplish all that with advice and deeds, consoling them, who would not see that faith
He has promised to us. Luther even went so far as to say that is much higher than love and is to be willingly preferred to it? For
creation is solely intended ‘for us’ (p.54). With these radical how can you even compare God with men? How can you even com-
views, Feuerbach claimed that Luther “was the first to let out pare helping and advising a man with that which helps us overcome
the secret of Christian faith” – namely, that “‘God’ is a word eternal death?” (p.101).
the sole meaning of which is ‘man’” (p.50). In short, theology
is anthropology. This wish for eternal life is why Luther considered belief in
the Resurrection to be the chief article of Christian faith: “If we
The Evidence of the Senses may not await or hope for the Resurrection there is no faith and
Feuerbach not only saw in Luther’s writings the confirmation no God” (p.105). How, Feuerbach asked, can these passages not
of his idea that theology is anthropology, but, to his pleasant be evidence that this faith is really self-love, the wish for a power
surprise, he also saw that Luther’s treatment of the certainty of that overcomes all the limits of one’s own finitude?
faith was similar to his own emphasis on the senses.
Luther was not interested in Christians merely entertaining The Influence on Feuerbach’s Own Thought
beliefs about the divine; rather, he wanted the believer to enjoy I do not think one should underestimate the influence that writ-
the certainty that these beliefs were true. He saw that Chris- ing this little book had on Feuerbach’s ideas. It not only enabled
tians may believe that the divine is beneficent and for us but can him to shake off the abstractionism that he thought marred his
easily fall into doubt as to whether God is actually good. And earlier thought, but it also confirmed his view that the origin of
like Feuerbach, Luther thought that certainty could only be religion was wish-fulfillment – a view that anticipates the posi-
achieved through an encounter with a sensuous object or being. tion to which he finally came in his book Theogony According to
This is why he wrote that “God without flesh is nothing” (p.64). the Sources of Classical, Hebrew and Christian Antiquity (1857).
If God is only a spiritual being and so only capable of being This later book, which Feuerbach considered to be his most
intellectually considered, He is an uncertain being. So God mature work, was the result of six years of immersion in classi-
reveals Himself in a human being who is His exact image – cal Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scriptures. In these sources he
someone “whom you can touch with your hands and see with examined petitionary prayers, myths, systems of law, morality,
your eyes” (p.70). This someone is of course Jesus of Nazareth. dreams, conscience, the taking of oaths, miracles, and religious
It is he who “gives us the certainty – the indubitable, irrefragable beliefs. Underlying all of these phenomena, Feuerbach saw
certainty – that God is actually a being for us, a good, a human- wishing at work – one might even call this book a ‘phe-
minded being” (p.63). So Feuerbach concluded that in Luther’s nomenology of the wish’: all these activities derive from the fact
theology, “In Christ God has revealed himself; that is, he has that human beings are striving, willing, wishing beings. They
shown and proved himself to be a human being” (ibid). Feuer- are basically driven by what he calls ‘the drive-to-happiness’
bach concluded not only that Luther’s theology proved his own (Glückseligkeitstrieb); and furthermore, all these projects involve
thesis that theology is anthropology, but that Lutheran Chris- a gap between what people will to do (Wollen) and what they
tian theology is driven by an urge for certainty that can only be able to do (Können). Only the gods have the power to bridge
resolved through the senses. this gap, and faith is just the certitude that they will do it, that
our wishes will be fulfilled. Faith is the objectification of the
Christianity as Self-Love wish. Because there are a variety of cultures, and because there
But what could one conclude from this analysis that religious is scarcely anything that has not been the object of wishing,
faith is really wish-fulfillment? The appeal of the Christian faith there are a variety of gods. But underlying all of these wishes
lies in its confidence that there is a power that can fulfill the are the more basic wishes to be free from hunger, disease, harm,
wish for recognition, love, and above all, immortality – a power and, above all, the wish not to die. Feuerbach concluded that
that can overcome all which constitutes a limit to human wishes. Luther had shown that it was the Promethean wish not to die
By desiring a deity who is ‘for us’, Christian believers desire a which Christian faith fulfills.
God who will grant their deepest wish – for immortality. But © PROF VAN A. HARVEY 2017
this is not only wish-fulfillment: it is self-love. Van Harvey is George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies
This even more suspicious reading was justified in Feuer- (Emeritus) at Stanford University.

Terminal Taboo
David Rönnegard articulates some uncomfortable truths about mortality.
T
his article is unlikely to provide you with much of existential unease for the faithful as it does for the rest of us.
comfort; but terminal illness, like mortality more In this sense Sam Harris has pointed out that atheism may come
generally, is clouded by unmentionables that need across as a ‘death cult’, since it is only we who are willing to take
to see the light of day. Why? Because laying bare the actual reality of death seriously. But take it seriously we
that which we least want to discuss might do more good than must. And although Humanists do not generally profess a belief
harm. It also might not. So I am not sure if this article is for you in the comforting notion of an afterlife, the death-talk taboo is
or for me, but please bear with me. still a symptom of their unwillingness to take death absolutely
I am an atheist with terminal cancer. I started off writing an seriously. Staring terminal disease squarely in the eye involves
article titled ‘The Happy Side of Terminal Cancer’, but it ended unmasking the taboos that the faithless hold, irrespective of the
up being depressingly short. Talking up the merits of terminal discomfort it may cause.
disease might seem like a taboo best not transgressed. But as
with so many taboos, they are only taboos to the excluded. I can Three Uncomfortable Truths
criticise my family, but you cannot. The faithful can engage in There are three unmentionables I would nevertheless like to
a critique of their own religion, but I best not engage in the vocalize. These by no means exhaust the list of unmentionables
same. So having been admitted into the cancer club, is there a for terminal disease.
silver lining to an impending early death? There’s a sliver of The first is quite literally a nominal affair, meaning, to do with
one: you don’t have to die of old age. Ashley Montagu once what we call things. The term ‘cancer’ has become the ‘C-word’,
described the goal of life as “dying young as late as possible.” not unlike the ‘F-word’. This is not just true for friends, family,
Few want to die, yet few want to grow decrepit either. Happy- and the public, it’s especially true of medical professionals. One’s
talk about death is in short supply because life is all we have, terminal disease is referred to as ‘your condition’. It’s hardly ever
and there are few happy sides to losing all we have. overtly referred to as cancer. I suspect that this aversion to call-
I have previously written in Philosophy Now in a more comforting a disease by its proper name might be the visible tip of the
ing tone about solace without religion in the face of death (Athe- proverbial iceberg. If the word ‘cancer’ itself is unmentionable,
ist in a Foxhole; The Party Without Me). And comfort is the one then what other associated taboos lurk beneath the surface?
acceptable tune we can dance to when speaking of our finitude. If we peer below the surface, we immediately find two more.
We all experience unease about our mortality, and so the taboo Counsellors say that cancer (or their preferred euphemism for
of death-talk is broken only to appease this unease. But the death- it) doesn’t only affect the afflicted, it affects friends and family
talk taboo goes at least one level deeper, and we can distinguish as well. This is clearly true; anyone close with a sense of empa-
between those facing mortality, and those currently not. Here thy is touched. But the effect that this affect has is opaque and
lies the territory of the unmentionable: what is the discrepancy seldom articulated. Outpourings of sympathy are genuine and
between what people tell the afflicted, and what the afflicted tell deeply felt, but sometimes there is a nagging feeling that some-
themselves and others? I will return to this shortly. thing remains unsaid – namely: “You matter less than you used
I realize that I might be overstating the death-talk taboo, as to: A) because you remind me of my own mortality, and that
it does not appear that way to religious believers. The belief in makes me feel uncomfortable; and B) since you may not be
an afterlife means that death-talk does not elicit the same degree around that much longer, it’s not worth investing in our rela-
© ISTOCK.COM/TOMEYK 2017

Philosophical Haiku
tionship.” Not everyone will recognize these sentiments, but
they are held commonly enough to be a significant aspect of
the afflicted’s fear of the journey towards the end. Anticipated
death can still involve a whole lot of living.
A) Realistic death-talk is taboo because it reminds us of our

own mortality. The prospect of death just causes too much
distress. This is rarely if ever voiced to the terminally ill, as it
would seem callous for one’s own dread of eventual death to
trump concern for the afflicted’s actual impending death. But
the distress is there all the same, and it can be sensed.
The discomfort of others is often shrouded, yet also
revealed, through excessive optimism. Trying to instil hope
can be well-intended; but it can also reflect a deeper fear of
mortality residing within the apparent optimist. If such fear is
sensed, or assumed, the afflicted may avoid speaking openly JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
about their condition. One simply doesn’t want to be the (1905–1980)
embodiment of someone else’s mortal anxiety. Paradoxically,
then, well-intentioned optimism can be detrimental. Condemned to freedom
Don’t get me wrong, I am not advocating pessimism – Mere being and nothingness
although this too can be a source of comfort (if you assume I emerge from choice
the worst then there is no bad news that can surprise you).
What I’m saying is that unbridled optimism shares a similar-
A
t the heart of Sartre’s existentialism is the seemingly paradoxical
ity with blind faith in that it is a denial of reality. Such a denial belief that humanity’s freedom is a burden.
inhibits the terminally ill from discussing their prognosis When we make something – a clock, an engine, a butter knife – we
frankly. begin with an idea of what that thing will do, so that the purpose of that
The reluctance to speak honestly about terminal disease is thing is, as it were, built into it. In other words, we start out with the idea
not just a matter of avoiding upsetting the healthy. It also of its purpose before we even begin to make it. But human beings are not
involves the afflicted’s own fear of abandonment. This is in a like that. We come into the world without a purpose. We first come into
certain sense the other side of the same coin. The ill may avoid being, and then must decide for ourselves for what purpose we exist. We
talking about their illness not just to spare their listeners cannot ascribe our actions to some pre-existing human nature, in the way
discomfort, but also due to the realization that if such discom- that we can explain a clock’s actions by virtue of its nature. This is why
fort is caused, then fewer will come to talk. Sartre says that we must accept responsibility for who we are and what
we do. It is our fate to create ourselves through the choices we make.
B) The afflicted’s fear of abandonment also encompasses the It is also our fate, when reading Sartre, to not know exactly what he
other dimension I mentioned: that what you mean to others is talking about. Like Hegel, by whom he was influenced, Sartre was
may be lessened by your prognosis. This uncomfortable truth fond of writing in a prodigiously obscure way. Objects in the world have
spans from the acquaintance who no longer sees you as part of Being, while consciousness itself is Nothingness, because it has no
their future, to your life partner who no longer sees how they Being. As he writes in Being & Nothingness (1943), “the being by which
can build a future with you. It’s a harsh reality to come to terms Nothingness comes to the world must be its own Nothingness.” Basi-
with, and it is under no circumstances articulated. “I’m not cally, what Sartre was trying to say was that it is how we perceive the
coming around anymore” or “I’m leaving you” is never osten- world that matters, not the raw fact of the world itself (at least, that’s
sibly because “you’re dying”: it’s always explicitly about somewhat I think he was trying to say). He could have just put it like that, but
thing else. Yet to deny that your anticipated death is a factor in then people wouldn’t have worshipped him as a prophet of freedom.
people’s choices would be to put your head in the sand. A recurring theme in any discussion of philosophers is the modesty
with which they tend to comport themselves. Sartre was no different.
Whether or not ignorance is bliss continues to divide opin- Reflecting on himself, and despite his militant atheism, shortly before
ion. But irrespective of where we land on that conundrum, we his death he made the following remark: “I do not feel that I am the
ought to know what it is that we’re ignorant of. Not for our product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who
particular case – that would be a contradiction – but for the was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a
general ‘we’. In that vein, I hope that these reflections serve Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.”
to expose a blunt reality that we may choose never to express. Given Sartre’s insistence that we are self-creating, one has a sneaking
I am not sure whether shedding light on these dark spaces is suspicion he was actually saying that he was God.
of any help, but thank you for bearing with me. © TERENCE GREEN 2017
© DR DAVID RÖNNEGARD 2017 Terence is a peripatetic (though not Peripatetic) writer, historian and
David Rönnegard has a PhD in Philosophy from the London School lecturer. He holds a PhD in the history of political thought from
of Economics, and is a researcher and teacher in corporate social Columbia University, NYC, and lives with his wife and their dog in
responsibility in Stockholm. Wellington, NZ. He blogs at hardlysurprised.blogspot.co.nz

Question of the Month
What Sorts of Things Exist, & How?
???
The following endeavours at listing the existing each win a real solid book.
I begin as Descartes did, with the knowledge that I exist: ‘I think

therefore I am’. What else exists? Everything I experience must
exist in some way, even if it’s simply as my experiences. So I divide
cry. In this case, the ‘how’ is utterly unfathomable.
We all have dreams that deceive us into experiencing something
that feels and looks real, yet when we awaken we know it isn’t.
my experiences into the sorts of things that depend on me for Dreams are solipsistic, which means they only exist in our minds;
their existence, and those that do not. The former are my sensa- but so do colours, even though they appear to exist externally. Then
tions, feelings, and thoughts. The latter constitute what I call ‘the there are stories, which like music, can exist as words on a page,
world’. I experience the world as other than myself and indepen- yet in our minds can evoke strong emotions and take us to imagi-
dent of me, and conclude that most external things that I believe nary worlds, not unlike dreams. Stories embody imaginary Things
exist do exist. How do they exist? That is, in what way? They exist by their very design, yet they’re part of being human, as is all art.
much as I believe they do (with some help from science). That Science has attempted to explain the physical world, yet it’s
things exist much as I believe they do is the simplest explanation like peeling an onion. It has reached a stage where fundamental
of my experience, and so conforms to the Principle of Parsimony. ‘things’ are described by quantum mechanical wavefunctions –
If only I existed, then I created everything in my experience with- mathematical entities that may or may not physically exist. Math-
out remembering doing so; and I created them so that I cannot ematics appears to be a product of the mind, yet there will always
control them even though many of them hurt me; and moreover, be mathematical ‘things’ that we can never know because they
I arranged everything so as to deceive myself about their inde- are infinite, like all the digits of pi or every prime number. So is
pendent nature. This makes no sense. It’s simpler and more effi- this a third category of ‘things’ – abstract truths?
cacious to believe things are much as I experience them. PAUL P. MEALING, MELBOURNE
What sorts of things exist in the world? Two important distinc-
tions are the material and the immaterial, and persons and things.
The material things seem to be required for the immaterial
things (although perhaps it’s the other way around). But the imma-
S ubstantial existence includes entities and energy. However,
complex structures need more than substance. Aristotle called
this extra, ‘form’; but form is actually pattern, and patterns are a
terial things are the philosophically more interesting. These include type of information. Hence patterns are examples of non-substan-
consciousness, thoughts, words, meanings, concepts, numbers, tial existence. All substantial entities are a fusion of matter/energy
emotions, intentions, volitions, moral principles, aesthetic experi- and information. Hence the real duality is not mind/body or
ences, and more. What would philosophy be without them? soul/body, as claimed by Plato and Descartes, but matter-
The distinction between persons and mere things is extremely energy/information. Many patterns determine the form of substan-
important too. People relate to persons and to things differently tial entities; for example, the petals on a flower or the shape of snail
(or they should). It is the difference between the I-Thou and the shells follow the Fibonacci series. This series existed before
I-It relation. The I-Thou relation is the basis of ethics, and as Fibonacci discovered it, and petals followed the sequence before
Immanuel Kant argued, we must always treat persons as persons the discovery. The pattern itself existed before there were any
and not merely as things. mathematicians or petals, and even before there was any substance.
How do things exist? That is, by what means? Everything in the Thus, fundamental existence is non-substantial: basically, mathe-
world depends on one or more other things in the world for its exis- matical patterns and the rules of logic or logical patterns, such as
tence: its coming to be, persisting, and waning. However, one won- Venn diagrams. However these non-substantial patterns require
ders how anything at all came to be. Why is there anything? intelligent entities to discover and reflect on them.
JOHN TALLEY, RUTHERFORDTON, NORTH CAROLINA Other types of non-substantial existence are ideas and con-
cepts. These include fictional characters, such as Dickens’
T he terms, ‘things’ and ‘exist’, seem self-evident, yet they’re

not. And the word ‘how’, whilst the apparent key to under-
standing this, is probably the most enigmatic part of it.
Ebenezer Scrooge. However there are grey areas between factual
past (and even present) substantial entities and fictional charac-
ters, since some people (and other substantial entities) become
What does one mean by ‘things’? As well as a physical object, legends as deeds and characteristics are falsely attributed to them.
examples of which surround you everywhere you go, a thing can For example, if Robin Hood was an actual historical person, his
be an idea, a concept, a mathematical equation, or a tune in your deeds and characteristics differ from the legend. Even history
head. So I’d divide ‘things’ into two categories: those that are con- books include legends, such as nobles from the Houses of York
structs of the mind, and those that are independent of any mind. and Lancaster choosing differently coloured roses.
But some things have an existence that seems to bridge these two RUSSELL BERG, MANCHESTER
worlds, physical and mental. Take music, which can exist as a score
on a page or as physical compression of air waves; yet we experience
it as some-thing transcending the physical that elicits emotions,
memories, and sometimes a tendency to dance or swoon or even
I stand with Gilles Deleuze’s view of Being, which can be traced
back to Spinoza’s substance and the work of Duns Scotus. He
argues that all that can be said to exist – that is, what can be expe-
36 Philosophy Now August/September 2017 What Sorts of Things Exist?

rienced, either directly, or indirectly through its effects – must and ‘R’. A wavelike quantum state evolves smoothly or unitarily (U)
be said to exist in the same way. To approach it from another with time; but to interact or be perceived it must reduce (R) to one
angle, as suggested by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of several possible macroscopic configurations through ‘measure-
of Nature, there is no point in talking about the ‘ontological status’ ment’, by interaction with a sensitised environment. Such tipping
of things. A thing either exists or it doesn’t. There’s little wiggle events may underlie the specificity of consciousness, the sense of
room for an in-between. Being, even the attribution of meaning.
Some may reproach me with questions about Bigfoot, the A mental state induced by some input or thought process, pro-
Loch Ness Monster, or unicorns. But they’d be missing the point. ducing a sensation of meaning and any consequent behaviour, need
All indications are that those things do not exist. What does, how- not represent any reality. Concepts exist inasmuch as they can be
ever, exist, are the concepts of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, expressed, and could be timeless in principle. However, they must
and unicorns. And those concepts, going by our having experi- be performed in time, and as some change is then inevitable, existence
ence of them, have as much being as the rock that stubs our toe. of conceptual forms outside space and time is doubtful. Yet the
So this perspective stands against scientism, which works by a massless photon, propagating at light speed, is truly isolated in its
criterion of ‘what can be measured exists’, opening up the inquiry own timeless moment until it interacts with matter. And all matter
to everything that could be experienced – love, desire, beauty, etc may be like the photon fundamentally: Being at its most elemen-
– even if it can only be experienced through inference (cf energy, tary, acquiring time only through interactions. Physics creeps
heat, and other concepts of math and physics). closer to unified understanding of Being in the universe, a machine
Unfortunately, what starts with some interesting implications whose parts Are, but are not like anything familiar.
deteriorates into mind-twisting brain-strain when considering DR NICHOLAS B. TAYLOR, LITTLE SANDHURST
the nature of nothingness. The fact that things are implies that
they could as easily not be. And this leads to a paradox in that if
nothingness (or non-being) did exist, then it would have the same
ontological status as anything else and, consequently, non-Being
I exist whenever I think, since there are no thoughts without
thinkers. (Thank you, René Descartes.) Thought is a sufficient,
but not a necessary, condition for existence, because there is no
would be an aspect of Being! reason to think my senses typically deceive me about the existence
Of course, some might scoff: “Hah! You lay waste to your own of un-minded, material entities and processes. (Thank you,
assertion!” And maybe I have. On the other hand, maybe not. Thomas Reid.) Even in dreamless sleep, I exist: as do rocks, ribs,
The jury’s still out for me. Either way, the paradox exists (as much and ribosomes.
as anything else does), and warrants further consideration. Since many of my thoughts are propositions (‘S is P’, eg,
D.E. TARKINGTON, BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA ‘chickens lay eggs’), they relate me to realities beyond myself.
Propositions are not the same as thoughts or spoken or written
I n Being and Time, Martin Heidegger distinguishes existential

Dasein, Being in Time, or consciousness, from ontological Sein,
defined as a sense of impersonal Being. Existential Being is self-evi-
sentences. The proposition ‘S is P’ can be thought, written, or
spoken in any language; yet it remains the same proposition.
Propositions, therefore, are abstract objects, which give the
dent: it is our consciousness of existing. It necessitates ontological meaning to all these expressions. Without propositions, transla-
Being, but while vivid and apparently consistent, it is as indefinable tion from one language to another would be impossible. Trans-
and incommunicable as colour, and is accessible only in time. The lation is possible. Therefore, propositions exist.
space between Sein as absolute and Dasein is filled with Otherness, Propositions exist in human brains, but are not identical to any
whether conscious or inanimate, knowable only by inference, or brain state. For instance, my thoughts have intentionality (or
what is unknowable; giving rise to moral ambiguity. aboutness), which is not reducible to events in my brain, because
H e i d e g g e r ’s material properties and processes cannot be about other material
concern with time properties and processes. (Thank you, Brentano and Husserl.)
is life’s temporal- When I view a Mark Rothko painting, I interact cognitively with
ity, a consequence this noncognitive entity. It does not, and cannot, reciprocate.
of embodiment, Moreover, a total brain scan would never uncover a thought, but
reflecting the uni- only its physical surroundings and correlated mechanisms. (Thank
IMAGE © PETER PULLEN 2017 PLEASE VISIT WWW.PETERPULLEN.COM
verse’s flow from you, Leibniz.) Thus, thoughts and brains are different in kind.
low to high But how do propositions, minds, and bodies exist? Proposi-
entropy, which tions are not ‘brute facts’ about states of affairs. Since they have
also requires or meaning, they must be meant. The place for meaning is a mind.
even is time. How Yet the truth or falsity of countless propositions are unknown
these aspects of (even unknowable) to any human mind, such as the exact time
Being relate to and place when the first chicken was hatched. So, if propositions
physics is yet exist in human minds, but do not require human minds for their
undetermined. existence, where might these propositions reside? They cannot
However, a deep exist on their own, and cannot be orphaned. Thus, they exist in
link between them a super-human mind, which contains all propositions and which
may be expressed is the metaphysical support for their existence. (Thank you,
by what one ver- Augustine and Plantinga.) This mind is God’s.
sion of quantum DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS,
physics labels ‘U’ LITTLETON, COLORADO
What Sorts of Things Exist? August/September 2017 Philosophy Now 37

?? W hat do we mean by ‘things’? The commonsense view, that
reality consists of a multiplicity of things existing for a cer-
tain time then not existing, can be shown to be nonsensical.
Whenever we investigate the nature of a thing, whether empiri-
cally or through reason, we only find its constituent parts and rela-
tions, and those parts and relations can similarly be deconstructed
until we are ultimately left with no-thingness [such as a quantum
flux]. So a fixed inherent identity for any given thing, which is the
doing, he acknowledged the significance of metaphysical, psy-
chological and social factors, including the role brains and per-
ceptual processes play in the process of categorisation. Acknowl-
edging the effect of these features on what we are prepared to
accept as real is obligatory if we are to retain a critical approach
to our understanding of and relationship with things. This rela-
tionship leads some to conclude that reality is but a construct.
Alternatively, it may be claimed that technical refinement in the
foundation on which everyday language and much of science and development of instruments to reveal the micro and macro
philosophy is based, can’t be found. We make a series of fudges aspects of the universe extends our perceptual systems so far as
when we prematurely halt this investigation before we reach no- to enable objective access, or to get us closer and closer to reality.
thingness, in order to settle for a baseline of supposedly funda- The history of this process of paring down to the fundamental,
mental descriptors that enable us to maintain the idea of a world essential categories of what exists, reveals it to be a continuous
of many separate things. Science does this when it says ‘shut up process of refinement or reduction. Physicists currently engaged
and calculate’; mathematicians do it when they say 2+2=4 without in such metaphysical speculation deploy categories such as parti-
questioning the validity of quantification itself; and logicians do cles, waves, force fields, and quantum mechanical wavefunctions,
it when they make the law of identity, A=A, fundamental, without and it is from this group, apparently, that all things are formed.
seeing that A has no fixed essence that would qualify it as a ‘thing’. COLIN BROOKES, LEICESTERSHIRE
But you can never even step in the same river once!
We appear in a world haunted by the notion of identity, with
every apparent ‘thing’ clamouring to establish itself as existing
but never quite managing it. To make sense of what’s going on
O ften it is the case that the more we contemplate, the more
sceptical we become. It is fairly instinctive for us to initially
question the existence of physical objects and the external world,
we need to cease the habit of comprehending reality in terms of and this generally divides us in two different categories of think-
fudged relative descriptions of supposedly isolated phenomena, ing to determine what exists; either rationalism or empiricism.
as their existence has never been rigorously established; and at Rationalists appeal to our capacity to reason as the ultimates
the same time turn our attention to the ubiquitous no-thingness means of abstracting truth in the world. Thus, logic can deduce
at the root of all apparent things. This is the only candidate for mathematical truths, which can then be said to ‘exist’. By contrast,
the philosopher’s stone of ‘that which is identical to itself’. Fun- the empiricist outlook attempts to justify the existence of external
damentally there is only one thing going on, one thing that is objects through our individual experiences of the world. How-
worthy of the label ‘existence’, which I take to mean having an ever, not everyone trusts the sense data that we receive as being
enduring essence – and that is the supremely self-identical no- reliable evidence for the existence of external objects. Indeed, nei-
thingness that appears as worlds and beings without ever really ther of these theories alone can adequately justify the world that
straying from its essential identity. The moment we believe it’s we assume to exist; but we have to take our perceptions as truth
possible for there to be separately existing things apart from this to lead an active existence in the world we believe we’re living in.
uncreated source, is the moment we begin to forget that we are Perhaps, as Kant suggested, we can combine rationalism and
that source, and our beginningless dream turns into a nightmare. empiricism to reflect upon the external world. Yet despite all this
TRISTAN HANLON, STOCKPORT deliberation, none of the external things can be said to exist
beyond doubt. All that I can claim, with some degree of certainty,
T hings themselves have their origin in the basic complex struc-

tures formed in the cosmological events following the Big
Bang about 13.8 billion years ago. But sorting things, as distinct
using the Cartesian justification ‘I think, therefore I am’, is that
I myself exist. This is not to say that the external world doesn’t
exist; only that is not knowable to me in the same way as the exis-
from merely listing them, is a natural propensity, overlaid by cul- tence of my own mind. The temptation here is to assert that other
ture, entailing efforts to comprehensively classify what otherwise minds also exist, since I am able to engage in intelligent conver-
might appear chaotic. Categories have been devised and disputed sation, which I believe to be the result of an intelligent mind. Yet
in the search for those best suited to help us make sense of and I cannot fully justifiably assert that this is a product of another
manipulate the entities that exist. Our sorting things means cat- mind, and not fabricated in my own. At best I can infer and must
aloguing entities cogently and concisely, leaving out nothing but assume that my behaviour reflects my mind in the same way that
avoiding duplication. For example, there might be substances, somebody else’s behaviour reflects their mind; but I cannot say
material, including primitive life-forms, and evolved life-forms, beyond doubt that their existence is absolute or non-artificial.
incorporating plants, invertebrate and vertebrate animals, includ- This means that the external world exists for sure only in relation
ing us. ‘Immaterial things’ might be regarded by some as an oxy- to the ‘I’ who is experiencing it.
moron, and consciousness considered an emergent property; but REBECCA SHERWOOD, CAMBRIDGE
if consciousness is neural assemblies, then it too is a thing. Clas-
sifications depend on the changing interests of conscious agents, The next question is: How Can I Know Right From Wrong?
their beliefs, needs and wants, theories and practices. Please give and justify your ethical epistemology in 400
Philosophers have made contributions to the classification words or fewer. The prize is a semi-random book from our
process. Stephan Körner in Categorical Frameworks (1974) pre- book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question
sented a concise but comprehensive account of the rules or prin- of the Month’, and must be received by 10th October 2017.
ciples of categorisation, drawing on “certain logical and ontolog- If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your
ical distinctions due to Aristotle, Kant, Frege, and others.” In so physical address. Thanks.
38 Philosophy Now August/September 2017 What Sorts of Things Exist?

Brief Lives
John Rawls (1921–2002)
Alistair MacFarlane traces the life of an influential political theorist.
J
ohn Rawls was the most important moral and political Philosophy
philosopher of his generation. His greatest book A The- There is a profound difference between the methods and argu-
ory of Justice (1971) is a classic of political philosophy. It ments used in science and those used in moral and political phi-
introduced a clear and illuminating way in which to con- losophy; that is, between considerations of the physical and of the
sider the concept of justice: Justice is Fairness. Rawls then spent social worlds. The former admits only observable facts, mathe-
the rest of his life explaining, developing, and expanding this sim- matically established knowledge, and rationality. The latter
ple, powerful, and inspiring idea. expands its considerations to include mutual agreement, under-
standing, and reasonableness. The essential difference is that the
Early Life expanded view needed to handle human interactions must admit
John Bordley Rawls was born on 21 February 1921 in Baltimore, plurality. There is no longer any one evident fact of any matter but
Maryland. His father William Lee Rawls was one of Baltimore’s only a broad consensus of understanding reached following
leading attorneys, and his mother Anna Abell (née Stump) was agreement.
active in politics and was a branch president of the League of The key ideas are clearly expounded in Catherine Elgin’s
Women Voters. books Considered Judgement (1996) and Between the Absolute and the
Rawls’ young life was marred by a double tragedy. When he Arbitrary (1997). The crucial points are that in any philosophical
was seven he contracted diphtheria, and when a younger brother discussion of social matters:
Bobby visited him in hospital the disease was passed on and
Bobby died. Then, two years later, the tragedy was repeated • There are no establishable facts, only justifiable beliefs; and
when Rawls developed pneumonia and passed it on to his other • Since absolutely certain knowledge is unattainable, we must
young brother, who also died. The irrational conviction that he settle for a mutually agreed understanding.
was somehow responsible for their deaths haunted the youngster
for many years.
After primary school in Baltimore, Rawls attended Kent
School in Connecticut. Entering Princeton University in 1939
Whole Brain Solutions for a Polarized World
he graduated BA summa cum laude in 1943, then enlisted in the
US Army as an infantryman. While at university, Rawls had been Does a combative left-brain bias dominate
intensely religious, writing a deeply religious thesis, and he con-
sidered becoming an Episcopalian priest. But the horrors he
modern culture? Consider the polarizations so evident
today. Underlying these social divisions is a corresponding
experienced in prolonged and bloody combat as a foot soldier, division in our brain. Decades of research show that some of
where he saw the random capriciousness of death and the effects us tend toward a holistic right-brain bias that sees the value
of war on his comrades, made him abandon his Christian faith. of others and unity, whereas those with a left-brain bias think
The further horrors of the Holocaust and later the Vietnam War in terms of self and separation. Learn how to tap the power
led him to analyse the political systems in which such catas- of whole-brain thinking and develop more harmonious
trophic events could occur. He asked himself the fundamental relationships.
questions: How could democratically elected governments ruth-
lessly pursue unjust wars? And how could citizens resist their
governments’ aggressive policies? Seeking answers to these
The 16 variations in consciousness
James Olson’s bold synthesis of modern science introduces
questions set the course of his future life. the concept that genetics and
When Japan surrendered at the end of WWII, Rawls was pro- hemispheric dominance can
moted to sergeant and became part of the occupying army. On combine to give us one of four
refusing to unfairly discipline a fellow soldier, he was demoted to brain-operating systems, and
private. Severely disenchanted, he left military service in 1946 to further interact to produce
pursue a doctorate in moral philosophy at Princeton. 16 variations in consciousness.
Receiving his doctorate in 1950, Rawls taught in Princeton Origin Press
until 1952, when he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to go to $19.95 paperback; eBook
13 line drawings and charts
Christ Church, Oxford University. While there he was deeply TheWholeBrainPath.com
influenced by Isaiah Berlin and by the legal theorist H.L.A. Hart.
Returning to the United States he became an assistant, then asso- WINNER 2017 ERIC HOFFER
ciate, professor in Cornell University. In 1962 he was made a full MONTAIGNE MEDAL
professor, coupled with a tenure position at MIT. Soon afterwards AWARDED TO THE MOST
he moved to Harvard where he taught for almost forty years and THOUGHT-PROVOKING BOOKS
trained a generation of political and moral philosophers.

Brief Lives
John Rawls
Portrait by Woodrow Cowher, 2017
Rawls’ thinking accommodates these ideas that in thinking Goodman in his book Fact, Fiction and Forecast (1955). His idea is
about ethics and politics we must deal with understanding and that we justify rules of inference by bringing them into ‘reflective
belief rather than facts and knowledge. In addition to their intrin- equilibrium’ with what we judge to be acceptable inferences by
sic interest, Rawls’ books give a splendid illustration of how carefully considering a broad range of relevant cases (see Brief
coherent arguments about social concepts such as justice can be Lives, PN 109). The importance of this approach lies in its wide and
constructed and deployed under these limitations. In building his flexible applicability, covering not only moral and social judge-
methodology for thinking about ethics Rawls uses a Principle of ments but also everyday practical decisions and aesthetics, as well
Reflective Equilibrium and a range of thought experiments. as the more formal procedures used in science and technology.
The Principle of Reflective Equilibrium Thought Experiments

We seek coherence among a set of beliefs by reflecting upon a Rawls arrived at his principle of Justice as Fairness by using a
broad range of relevant issues. Judgement uses reasonableness famous thought experiment. He asks us to forget, so far as possi-
(rationality tempered by imagination and scepticism) to balance ble, all considerations of our own personal circumstances, such as
belief against experience. This process persuades us that some pro- knowing our sex, race, position in society, inherited wealth and
posed action, or revision of belief, is both reasonable and justified. good education, or lack of them,and forget even our own previous
This approach to inductive thought was first developed by Nelson aims and values. He called this imagining ourselves behind a ‘veil

Brief Lives
of ignorance’ regarding our present position in society. Being Living With A Panpsychist
ignorant of our position in society, we must then choose what sort of
world we would accept the risk of being born into. In this imagined “Simpler to suppose: all has thought.
world, whatever privileges or disadvantages we currently enjoy or Safer to say: in a never
suffer under could not be assumed to apply; and Rawls argues that fresh universe, nihil novum.
this would force us, after due consideration and reflection, to con- Subtler to see: that to itself
clude that we must take into account everyone’s situation equally, mind reveals the very nature
so ensuring fairness for all. of the nature in which it sits.
The Development of Rawls’ Philosophy Am I pissing up the wrong tree?”

Rawls’ approach to moral and political philosophy was developed Evenings are long, distractions are
over several decades. During this period he defined, elaborated, great; so what if fine error breeds.
refined, extended, and re-defined it in four books: What is it to me if my love
miss-takes the universe and time,
• A Theory of Justice (1971): In this he sets out his concept of justice to build an implausible frame?
as fairness, and argues for some principles of justice that he thinks Reason has led her there, I guess.
free rational people would accept if they started from an initial But atoms with experience?
position of equality. “My love! Why go on with this? No,
you’re not barking up the wrong tree;
• Political Liberalism (1993): Here Rawls extends and revises the you’re entangled in its highest
idea of justice as fairness. He accepts that the ‘well ordered soci- branches, howling wild at the moon!”
ety’ of his first approach, in which there exists a broad consensus
about what constitutes a good life, must be abandoned. In a mod- I soon regretted this sarcasm,
ern democratic society we must instead accommodate a plurality relented, and apologised.
of incompatible and irreconcilable doctrines. A society cannot be Chastened, I spread myself far out.
united in a consensus of any such doctrines; but it could be united What must it be like to believe
in a basic political belief of what constitutes justice [see other some cranky wayward subtle scheme?
Rawls article this issue, Ed]. I sunk myself into a broad
range, a general passion, a wide
• The Law of Peoples (1999): Rawls now extends the idea of a social scope. What thought can not be worked through?
contract to an international level, advocating a ‘Society of Peo- Mind’s a match for the universe.
ples’, and lays out general principles that should be accepted by I contain every conviction.
both liberal and non-liberal societies as a standard for regulating © THOMAS MACHTER 2017
their behaviour towards one another. Thomas Machter teaches uncreative writing at a London
polytechnic.
• Justice as Fairness – A Restatement (2001): Finally, he draws all his
ideas together and gives a broad review of his main lines of Legacy
thought. Rawls maintains that moral clarity can be achieved even Rawls had a severe stutter, and this, combined with what one con-
when a collective commitment to justice is uncertain. temporary called “a bat-like horror of the limelight” ensured that
he seldom gave interviews or accepted awards. So despite his
This is an immensely impressive body of philosophical work. immense contributions he never became a public intellectual.
To read it is simultaneously inspiring and daunting. It fills one But his unswerving analysis of social institutions based on a con-
with a conviction that philosophy has much to contribute to our cept of fairness has shown that science has no monopoly in shap-
future development as a species, and that social problems can be ing our future. Rawls demonstrated how a broad, more inclusive
approached with the highest level of intellectual rigour. approach to the human predicament can be developed on a basis
of mutual understanding, reasonableness, tolerance, through
Last Days creating societies of free citizens who hold basic rights, and who,
Rawls was incapacitated by a severe stroke in 1995, followed by despite widely differing views, could cooperate within an egali-
a series of further strokes. Despite these he continued working, tarian economic system.
with an increasing degree of physical, secretarial and editorial Rawls combined a profound wisdom with an equally profound
help. He died at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, on Sun- humanity. On presenting him with the National Humanities
day 24 November 2002, and was buried on 3 December after a Medal in 1999, President Clinton said that Rawls’ work had
memorial service at the First Parish Unitarian Universalist helped to revive faith in democracy. We surely need to build on
Church in Lexington. his achievement to secure our future in an increasingly uncertain,
Rawls was devoted to his family. He was survived by his wife intolerant, and complex world.
Margaret (née Fox), a Brown University graduate, whom he mar- © SIR ALISTAIR MACFARLANE 2017
ried in 1949. They had two sons, Robert and Alexander, two Sir Alistair MacFarlane is a former Vice-President of the Royal
daughters, Anne and Elizabeth, and four grandchildren. Society and a retired university Vice-Chancellor.

Letters
When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up!
Write to me at: Philosophy Now
43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ • U.K.
or email rick.lewis@philosophynow.org
Keep them short and keep them coming!
Change Now! Immanuel Kant’s argument that time is a and treat the unthought-through meta-
DEAR EDITOR: The comments of Pro- function of rational minds on the grounds physical guesses of scientists as if they
fessor Tallis on the philosophy of time that we know that there genuine tempo- are experimental results. It is fabulously
in his interview in Issue 120 indicate a ral sequences before human conscious- frustrating to read an article on time that
problem that seems to afflict the entire ness is to bowdlerise the great man. On leaves it as a baffling mystery, but does
Academy at this time, namely a misun- the contrary, it is very plausible that con- not mention the only view by which it is
derstanding of the limits of science. sciousness is necessary for time and space. not. I wonder sometimes whether this
Professor Tallis correctly sees that This was Kant’s view, and it is endorsed approach doesn’t deserve the title ‘mys-
time as it is used in physics is not time by more people than there are profes- ticism’ more than the view it ignores.
as it actually is, and notes that time is a sional philosophers. If we do not allow PETER JONES
metaphysical problem. He concludes scientists to overstep their authority, then HOLMFIRTH
that time is intimately associated with sound reasoning here will lead us from
consciousness, for there has to be some- Tallis to Kant and onwards to Nagarjuna, A Note On A Note
one to experience it for it to exist. This the Buddha and Laozi; and to the idea DEAR EDITOR: The ‘Note on Texts’ at
is clearly correct. In his mathematical that time is a mental phenomenon such the end of Martin Jenkins’ Brief Life of
discussion of time, Das Kontinuum that by reduction, the only time is Now. Diderot in Issue 120 claims that his
(1918), Hermann Weyl makes the same This is called the Perennial view. Weyl works are not easy to find in English
distinction between the ‘mathematical’ would argue that if time is a continuum translation. But his ‘Supplement to
continuum used by physics, which is a then it has no parts, and in this case it Bourgainville’s Voyage’, which Jenkins
fiction, and famously paradoxical, and cannot be extended. The time is always writes about, is readily available in the
the ‘intuitive’ continuum: the contin- Now, and the place is always Here, just as Oxford World Classics paperback col-
uum of experienced time. The non-fic- we experience them. We can dream of lection of Diderot’s writings entitled
tional experience of time is dependent the past and the future, but nothing can ‘This Is Not a Story’ And Other Stories.
on consciousness, just as Professor happen ‘in the past’ or ‘in the future’. And his ‘Letter on the Blind (For Those
Tallis discusses. For someone to say so much about Who Can See)’ – which is the pamphlet
So far so good. But then it all goes time and fail to mention the Perennial for which Diderot was imprisoned – is
wrong. This reasoning will not lead us view is only possible in an academic envi- translated by Kate Tunstall in her Blind-
anywhere unless we stop treating the ronment that has deliberately cut itself off ness and Enlightenment (2011).
metaphysical conjectures of scientists from the rest of philosophy. One hesi- I’ve always found Diderot more inter-
seriously. Although he expresses a dislike tates to use the word ‘backwater’, but that esting than Voltaire. The latter’s Can-
of scientism – the astonishing idea that is the danger for Western philosophy. dide is a pompous, heavy-handed satire.
physics can answer metaphysical ques- Professor Tallis tells us that ‘religious’ Rameau’s Nephew, by contrast, is far
tions – Tallis’s respect for science does views of time have problems, but seems more subtle and less sure of itself. It
seem to extend to the casual opinions of not to know the most popular view. Yet deserves to be more widely read.
its practitioners, for he goes on to say no argument is given against the ‘reli- PETER BENSON
that we know from science that there gious’ or Kantian idea that not only LONDON
was a temporal sequence of events time, but the things that change, are
before there was any consciousness. dependent on consciousness. Eating Pygs
However, we know nothing of the If someone one day proves that tem- DEAR EDITOR: Regarding Marco Kaisth’s
sort. If we believe this about science we poral sequences of events occurred prior article in PN119, being genetically infe-
might as well give up on consciousness to consciousness, then we must dismiss rior does not mean that a being’s life is
and time. Science cannot prove that the philosophy of the Upanishads as non- worth any less than a ‘genetically supe-
consciousness exists right now, let alone sense. Until then we should pay it some rior’ being; it does not logically follow.
prove that it did not do so billions of respect. We should be told what is For instance, there are people born on
years ago. Besides,what do we mean by wrong with its mind-based explanation this planet every day with qualities that
‘billions of years ago’ here? of time. This is especially true when, as some may consider to be ‘genetically
Science has nothing to do with the Professor Tallis notes, no other explana- inferior’. Does that mean that their lives
idea that time is prior to consciousness. tion works. But we cannot have a proper are worth any less? Of course not! There-
That’s a metaphysical assumption which discussion while we make basic errors fore, the idea that farmers could – and
causes nothing but problems. To dismiss about what science can and cannot prove should – breed genetically modified

Letters
‘pygs’ whose capacity for suffering is infe- door to re-evaluation (Too many issues, I agree with Dr Tillmans that we
rior to pigs is not, in-and-of-itself, moral. too little time, can’t be wrong!) The end underestimate children’s ability to under-
There are humans in this world who result is; Better to be wrong believing stand such complex topics when we
arguably suffer more than others , and, on we are right then to be confused by the merely find their utterances amusing in
the other hand, those who suffer less than facts! The Trump Circus gives us a their boldness and delivery. My son’s
others. Does it then necessarily follow plethora of opportunities to observe this genuine wonder at the world around him
that those who suffer more are somehow phenomenon. delights me, as he shares my thirst for
superior to those that don’t? Merely hav- DAN SOCHA always questioning and thinking about
ing the ability – or rather, misfortune – to DARTMOUTH, MASSACHUSETTS the more profound aspects of this life and
suffer doesn’t inherently guarantee that a its mysteries. I concur with her that phi-
being is superior to one who doesn’t have Out of the Minds of Children losophy should be taught in schools from
that ability. Speaking of pigs and ‘pygs’: DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for the article the start – but as she states, with a clear
animal right’s activists would have a hard ‘Children, Intuitive Knowledge & Phi- emphasis on teaching not just the art of
time swallowing the argument that a losophy’ by Maria daVenza Tillmans in thinking, but also embracing the content
‘pyg’s’ life is worth less than a pig’s, Issue 119. It resonated with me both as a of childrens’ statements as having valid-
merely because the ‘pyg’ was genetically mother of young children and a keen ity, and the use of play and imagination
engineered to be inferior than its pig amateur philosopher. to be encouraged, to prevent the dehu-
cousin. Animal activists believe that all The author wrote of disagreement manisation of the learning process. If
animal life is inherently valuable , and between experts on whether or not only this was taught when I was at pri-
therefore it is worth preserving their lives. young children are capable of having mary school! I wasn’t exposed to formal
Thus, we can safely conclude that the serious philosophical discussions. While philosophy until university. Surely chil-
argument that farmers should breed infe- she argues that children do indeed have dren’s natural curiosity is ripe for philo-
rior animals in inhumane and barbaric an intuitive understanding of ideas, she sophical teaching, alongside more tradi-
conditions on the grounds that they also states “young children may not yet tional subjects (which of course often
would ‘suffer less’ holds no water. have achieved the highest stage of overlap with philosophy). I look forward
TRACEY BRAVERMAN, abstract reasoning which enables them to one day introducing my son to the
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK to have what academics would recognise ideas of the philosophical greats such as
as academic discussion.” This may be Kant, Nietzsche, Hume and Aristotle,
Foolish To Be Wise true, but (whether by genes or osmosis) and exploring his childhood questions
DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 120 I read with I can vouch for my youngest child, a more fully. I hope he is still asking those
interest the idea of ‘cognitive dissonance bright and deep-thinking boy aged six, questions, and more, throughout his life;
theory’ as explained by John Ongley in as endlessly fascinated by philosophy, but in the meantime I cherish our deep
his article ‘Are People Rational?’ In my metaphysics, cosmology and existential- discussions and his unbridled joy in exis-
abundant years I have observed the same ism, just like myself – and absolutely tence. To quote Einstein: “Logic will get
phenomenon, but interpret it as a form being able to ask intelligent questions you from A to B. Imagination will take
of self-delusion, and explain it as follows: and engage in articulate and lively dis- you everywhere.”
In the uncivilized world the rule is ‘sur- cussion with me. Even as a four-year-old ROSE DALE
vival of the fittest’. In the civilized world just beginning to form sentences, he was FLOREAT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA
it is ‘survival by delusion’! asking some big questions – clearly not
To survive in a world of increasing at a top academic level, but nevertheless Balance of Possibilities
information and complexity we spend very well thought out, engaging in a DEAR EDITOR: IN PN Issue 119, Dr Paul
less time evaluating issues because there spontaneous questioning of the same Walker explores the balance of power
are so many, and most aren’t important issues that have plagued human beings (not to say, the tension) within the ethical
enough to us personally for us to spare since the beginning of humanity: Why bearpit of doctor-patient communication.
the time. Usually when we hear a story are we here? How did the universe Hospital doctors rightly claim expert
and it sounds believable, we will accept come out of nothing? Who/What made knowledge and dispense advice to the
it as true or false, establishing our posi- the world? If there is a God, then who patient. But whether that interaction be
tion on it. Once we take a position on a made him? Is my brain separate to me? paternalistic or according to shared deci-
premise, we close our minds to any fur- At times I struggle to answer these sion-making, or by whatever model, can
ther evaluation. (Too many issues, too questions to his satisfaction, and he still the meeting ever be ‘ethical’?
little time, can’t be wrong, have to move asks me at least once a week, “But where ‘Ethics’ implies the doctor’s consid-
on!) When new information comes to us did the world come from?” I even bought ered, thoughtful, thorough and compas-
which supports a position we already him a simplified book that purports to sionate exploration of what is best for the
accept, we embrace it and add it to our explain the origins of everything, which patient sitting in front of him. Aristotle
fortifications. When new information we read together; but the section on the saw the ‘good’ as what’s intrinsically
comes to us contradicting an already Big Bang has left him with more questions worthwhile. But the doctor is short of
accepted position, we bring forth all our than answers, as he rightly asks, “But time, overworked and probably tired.
resources to discredit it. We will not where did the gases and things come from Even if the doctor decided a particular
easily accept that our previous evalua- to cause the Big Bang in the first place, if course of action would be ‘intrinsically
tion was incorrect. We will not open the there was nothing there before?” worthwhile’ for his patient, the con-

Letters
straints upon his ethical decision-making Hume’s motivation for introducing his of my brain in another universe, after I’ve
would be diverted towards ‘the greater logical Problem, about the lack of a ceased to be in this universe. Among
good for the greatest number of people’. rational foundation for induction (that other things, Berg points out that the
This ‘greatest number’ would include his is, for science), was similar to Zeno’s. I surviving duplicates of me would eventu-
clinical boss, the finance director of his mean that the primary goal of both ally all die of old age, and so, this would
hospital, and the next ten patients he has thinkers is to draw explicit attention to not be much of an afterlife after all.
to see before lunchtime! the old problematic in Western Philoso- However, if an infinite multiverse
CEDRIC RICHMOND phy, the gap between theory and prac- exists, then, as the physicist Alan Guth
NOTTINGHAM tice. For instance, it would be absurd to put it, “anything that can happen will
believe that Zeno thought he really happen – and it will happen infinitely
Natural Disasters proved the impossibility of motion with many times.” So for example, medical
DEAR EDITOR: Regarding: ‘Are Designer his paradoxes. His purpose was rather to science could someday extend human
Babies Our Future?’, Issue 119, Keith expose the limits of abstract logic (that life-span significantly, or be able to trans-
Tidman implies that with genetic manip- is, pure theory) and the danger it poses fer brain patterns and accompanying
ulation, scientists are interfering with the to intuitive knowledge (that is, to prac- first-person perspectives into non-bio-
way Nature planned life. tice). Likewise, surely the significance of logical bodies having indefinite life-
The premise of ‘natural life’ being a Hume’s Problem is precisely that it spans. If these scenarios are at least possi-
moral/ethical process in the right direc- helps clarify the boundaries of theory ble, then there would be an infinite num-
tion and speed is false. The process of and practice. ber of universes in which such duplicates
Nature is not any of these. Nature gets it On the one hand, this lesson is cen- of me exist. Another possibility which
wrong a lot. Many genetic diseases were tral to Earnshaw’s argument: if one is avoids Berg’s conclusion, is that in an
originally spontaneous mutations. Some willing to read between the lines, it is infinitely-extensive multiverse, there
good, helping survival (for example, clear that his ‘solution’ to Hume’s Prob- would also be copies of me at every age.
haemophilia for malaria); some uncom- lem relies upon the distinction between So it also becomes conceivable that per-
fortable (being lactose intolerant); some theory and practice. That is, in formu- haps my first-person perspective might
catastrophic (for instance, cyclopia). The lating his solution, he rightly exploits also emerge in a duplicate younger me in
naturalness of natural biology, that is, the difference between ‘certainty’ and another universe, after I’ve ceased to
without human intervention, does not ‘probabilistic reasoning.’ If deductive experience in this one. This possibility,
guarantee a better human outcome, nor ‘certainty’ were a necessary condition however, would be plausible only if what
does the history of it show that it has any for action, humanity would exist in a determines me as me over time is same-
real stability. Ultimately, for many, it’s a state of permanent paralysis. Con- ness of first-person perspective, and not
crap shoot. versely, did Zeno’s ‘logical proof’ of the some form of psychological continuity
What I have never understood about impossibility of motion successfully per- over time, such as sameness of memories.
the position that Nature is better/right, suade the arrow to stay put? RUI VIEIRA
is that it misses that humans are part of However, on the other hand Earnshaw MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO
Nature! So using our minds to employ is so preoccupied with ‘saving Western
certain techniques to change genes is, by philosophy’, that this crucial point tends DEAR EDITOR: Rui Vieira claims that
definition, Nature doing its work. And to disappear into the background, ampli- there are, out there, several versions of
as an element of Nature, we are given fying the mistakes of Hume’s followers. this Universe, and therefore several ver-
the authority to change genetics, since In other words, the failure to recognize sions of myself. Other theorists would
that’s what Nature does. Indeed, there the anti-theoretical dimension of Hume’s have us believe that we are in a simula-
will be poor outcomes at times, just as project by focusing exclusively upon its tion of the ‘Real World’ [ e.g. Nick
there are in non-human-intervention logical content, is precisely what has led Bostrom, Ed.]. If while eating fish and
Nature. Nonetheless, as humans are to the breakdown Earnshaw observes in chips on Friday night I experience a
Nature, then it is natural to use the professional philosophy. sense of deja vu, would this be because,
techniques at our disposal to influence THOMAS F. HOBBES JR., out there somewhere, there are several
genetics; as do the chemicals, sunlight, WASHINGTON DC versions of me doing the same thing?
parasites, nutrients of Nature, which are In this world (or worlds) in which we
natural too. Multiple Afterlives live, there is a suggestion of an (actual)
QUINN RIVET, BOUCHER INSTITUTE DEAR EDITOR: I’m grateful for Russell afterlife. If Rui is correct, can I thus expect
OF NATUROPATHIC MEDICINE, CANADA Berg’s interesting reply in Letters, Issue to see many duplicates of myself in the
120, to my article ‘Can The Multiverse afterlife? Faced with the alternatives, it is
Hobbes on Hume! Give You An Afterlife?’ in Issue 119. tempting to ask ‘Will the Real Me stand
DEAR EDITOR: While reading in Issue In the article I argued that if an infinite up please?’ Or perhaps we can all stand
119 Professor Earnshaw’s well-written multiverse exists it must include universes in a line and declare ‘I’m Me!’ Would I
illustration of the perniciously persistent in which there are duplicates of me. So if want to be confronted with several ver-
problem that David Hume represents in my first-person perspective emerges as a sions of me doing the same thing? No –
Western philosophy, I was immediately set of properties from my brain, it’s con- one is enough!
reminded of Zeno’s (in)famous para- ceivable that the same perspective would RUTH GREENWOOD
doxes. It occurred to me that perhaps also emerge from a continuing duplicate BY EMAIL

IMAGE BY CAROL BELANGER GRAFTON
Philosophy Then
Don’t Be So Sure
Peter Adamson on skepticism in the history of philosophy.
Y
ou may think you know what philo- the ‘probable’ as a divergence from genuine simply being too demanding: knowledge
sophical skepticism is. It’s commonly skepticism, which for him involves ‘suspend- does not require that we rule out all possi-
traced back to René Descartes, who ing judgment’ about all beliefs. His approach bility of falsehood, so that only self-certify-
in his Meditations (1642) asks whether there is to pile up arguments on both sides of every ing truths can be known. Your everyday
is anything of which he can be completely disputed question, showing that the argu- experiences do give you knowledge,
certain. Famously, he decides there is: he ments in favor are ‘in balance’ with those because in fact you are neither being
cannot doubt his own existence. But first he against. Yet Sextus never asserts that any deceived by an evil demon nor are plugged
entertains radical skeptical scenarios, issue is irresolvable or guaranteed to remain into a computer simulation – even if you
notably that he’s dreaming, or that an ‘evil uncertain, because he wants to avoid falling cannot prove it beyond all shadow of doubt.
demon’ may be inducing in him false beliefs into the contradiction of claiming to be cer- But this would not work against Sextus or
that seem certain. Pop culture embraces this tain that nothing is certain. Indeed he cri- Nagarjuna, because neither of them try to
form of skepticism most famously in the tiques other so-called ‘skeptics’ for claiming induce skepticism using such radical skepti-
Wachowskis’ film The Matrix (1999), which they know that nothing can be known. They cal scenarios. Sextus does so rather by
suggests that you may be a brain in a vat, or come no closer to true skepticism than do showing you that all your beliefs are open to
rather, Keanu Reeves in a vat. Cartesian the Stoics. Whereas the Stoics ‘dogmati- controversy and that the arguments on both
skepticism sets a rigorous test for our beliefs, cally’ asserted positive teachings – for sides of each controversy are in balance;
in the hope of finding at least some beliefs instance that virtue is good or that God exists Nagarjuna by offering a critique of the con-
that can survive the challenge. and exercises providence – these other skep- cepts you previously took for granted.
But don’t be so sure about this picture. tics ‘dogmatically’ asserted a negative teach- For all their diversity, these forms of
For one thing, this kind of skepticism ing, namely that knowledge is impossible. skepticism do have one thing in common:
appears before Descartes. It is found for In the same century, a third kind of skep- all emerged as responses to what Sextus
instance in the fourteenth century thinker ticism was being pursued in India by the would call ‘dogmatic’ opponents. Skepti-
Nicholas of Autrecourt, who wanted to Buddhist Nagarjuna. He was out to deny cism is typically reactive, and often uses the
challenge the Aristotelian scholasticism of the ‘intrinsic reality’ (‘svabhava’) of things, tools of its opponents for its own purposes.
his day. He proposed that absolute certainty by showing that nothing has any indepen- The notion of ‘suspending judgment’ was at
is possible, but only about a very limited dent nature. In a series of brilliant argu- home in Stoicism, because the Stoics
range of things. The paradigm case of cer- ments, he shows that such phenomena as argued that a perfect sage could avoid
tainty would be the principle of non-contradic- causation, motion, and perception involve falling into error by suspending judgment
tion, which says that a proposition and its internal contradictions. For instance, cau- whenever sufficient evidence was lacking.
precise denial cannot both be true. Nicholas sation must involve either a thing causing (A famous story has a Stoic biting into a fake
inferred that all genuine knowledge would itself; or it being caused by another thing; or piece of fruit, and excusing himself on the
have to meet this standard of certainty. it being caused both by itself and another grounds that he did not form the belief that
Thus, the only things you can know for sure thing; or it arising with no cause at all – but it was fruit, but the belief that it looked like
are those whose falsehood would entail a all these options, he argues, are absurd. fruit.) Nicholas was likewise offering a cri-
contradiction. For instance, you can know The purpose of Nagarjuna’s philosophi- tique of contemporary Aristotelians, grant-
that squares have four sides and that a cal project is debated by scholars. Some ing their principle of non-contradiction but
human is an animal, since these things are think that he’s critiquing philosophical pre- then pointing out that none of their other
true by definition; but you cannot know for tensions to expose the reality that underlies doctrines were on a par with this founda-
sure that any square or human you are conventional experience and language, like tional idea. Nagarjuna was attacking
seeing is real, since no contradiction ensues an ancient Buddhist Wittgenstein. Others thinkers in the Vedic tradition, but also
from supposing them to be illusions. suppose that he goes so far as to deny the fellow Buddhists, all of whom operated with
Nicholas ultimately concluded that for the principle of non-contradiction and urges us the notion of svabhava that he sought to
most part, the best we can do is to find to embrace mysticism. Whatever the case, undermine. The skeptical game, it would
beliefs that are probable, not certain. it seems clear that Sextus would convict seem, is best played against an opponent.
For another thing, there were still earlier Nagarjuna of being a negative dogmatist. © PROF. PETER ADAMSON 2017
forms of skepticism that were very different. This diversity means that no one Peter Adamson is the author of A History of
The greatest classical Greek skeptic, Sextus response will be effective against all skeptics. Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Vols 1, 2
Empiricus, lived in the second century AD. Against Nicholas, Descartes, and the & 3, available from OUP. They’re based on his
He would have seen Nicholas’ admission of Wachowskis, one might urge that they are popular History of Philosophy podcast.

Mahon O’Brien asks how far the first English translation
of Martin Heidegger’s notebooks show him to be a Nazi,
Books whilst Peter Stone questions if it’s worthwhile trying to

update Hegel’s politics without addressing his problems.
Ponderings II-VI: Black some of Heidegger’s most aggrieved Jewish immediately began work on a translation of
Notebooks 1931-1938 colleagues and former students insisted that ‘Nature, History, State’, and Heidegger’s
he never demonstrated antisemitic sympa- lecture courses from the 1933/34 academic
by Martin Heidegger
thies. Consequently, in the immediate after- year, (‘Being and Truth’), into English, and
Trans R. Rojcewicz
math of Heidegger’s partial rehabilitation thus afforded readers of English crucial
MARTIN HEIDEGGER WAS after the Second World War, it was more or evidence of some of Heidegger’s most prob-
one of the 20th century’s less taken as a given that, for all of his failings, lematic views from this period. Nevertheless,
most influential philosophers, and his 1927 Heidegger was not an anti-semite. However, this mounting textual evidence concerning
masterpiece Being and Time is widely over the years, as details of some of Heideg- the extent and nature of Heidegger’s anti-
regarded as one of the most important philo- ger’s private correspondence with other Nazi semitism remained largely ignored until
sophical texts of the 20th century. Yet there Trawny’s first sensational series of revelations.
has been a longstanding controversy
surrounding his decision to become the Nazi Problems with the Notebooks
Rector of Freiburg University in 1933, and Almost immediately upon the publication of
to join the Nazi Party shortly afterwards. the Black Notebooks in German, one of the
Many of Heidegger’s colleagues, most highly regarded translators of Heideg-
students and friends were initially shocked ger’s work, Richard Rojcewicz, was commis-
when he declared his support for National sioned to render the obscure and frequently
Socialism. Upon assuming the office of clipped prose of the first of these volumes
Rector, he began to reform the university in into English. Rojcewicz is eminently quali-
line with his conception of it as a Nazi insti- Heidegger, left, at Nazi meeting fied to translate such texts, having already
tution. Up to that point Heidegger had officials were made public, we learned that, done impressive work rendering such noto-
appeared anything but political, and on occasion, Heidegger was only too willing riously unwieldy Heideggerian texts as the
certainly kept whatever political views he to use some of the most despicable anti- Beiträge and Das Ereignis into English.
might have had close to his chest. semitic rhetoric of the day, so it became clear This English translation of the first
Subsequent generations of Heidegger that this early confidence was misguided. volume of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks
scholars, for the most part, failed to see any Thus, when Peter Trawny, who was editing immediately sparked a degree of unrest as a
trace of the political views Heidegger Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, announced to result of the title, which Rojcewicz elected
subscribed to in the 1930s in his work leading the world in December 2013, a few months to render as Ponderings. Why this in partic-
up to 1933. This has often led Heidegger before the first volumes were published in ular would prove so disconcerting for certain
scholars to suppose that his association with Germany, that these notebooks expressed English-speaking Heidegger scholars is
National Socialism was aberrant, adventi- explicit antisemitic sympathies, Heidegger’s unclear. After all, this is not an academic text
tious, and short-lived. Heidegger simply antisemitism became the most hotly debated Heidegger crafted for publication, and it’s
strayed from his true path for a brief period topic in the reignited controversy. unlikely that he invested much time or
in the early 1930s, quickly recognized his Critics such as Emmanuel Faye had already energy worrying about the ‘title’ of these
error, and distanced himself from National tried to demonstrate that Heidegger’s work daily musings. The German title is Über-
Socialism thereafter. Following the end of the was a thinly veiled attempt to write Nazi ideol- legungen, which would typically be rendered
Second World War, Heidegger himself, ogy into Western philosophy. Faye had Considerations or perhaps Reflections.
somewhat disingenuously, was only too managed to unearth some deeply worrying Ponderings II-VI, which is Volume 94 of
happy to perpetuate that particular myth as seminars from the 1930s which had hitherto Heidegger’s ever-expanding Gesamtausgabe
part of what has come to be known as the ‘offi- remained suppressed. One in particular from (collected works), presents the reader with a
cial story’. However, one of the things that Heidegger’s period as Rector, ‘Nature, number of more serious difficulties. One is
becomes painfully clear as one begins to work History, State’, contained a handful of how exactly one is supposed to read a docu-
through his private notebooks, is just how obscenely offensive passages, including more- ment such as this. It hardly seems appropri-
obsessed Heidegger had become with the or-less incontrovertible evidence of his anti- ate to read these musings as one might read
political situation in Germany (in the period semitism, and an explicitly ethnically chauvin- a published work of philosophy: the note-
leading up to the Rectorship in particular), istic outlook. However, a number of promi- books are clearly not supposed to be read as
and just how keen he was to contribute to a nent Heidegger scholars dismissed Faye’s treatises or essays. Indeed, none of Heideg-
genuine cultural and political ‘awakening’ as work due to its shoddy scholarship and rather ger’s work from the early 1930s onwards is
the spiritual leader of the Nazi movement. unbalanced approach. As a result, the signifi- ever really conceived of or written as a trea-
Another hotly contested question in the cance of this and other unpublished Heideg- tise. Moreover, these notebooks were not
‘Heidegger Affair’ is the question as to ger seminars remained largely overlooked. To initially written as manuscripts that Heideg-
whether he was in fact an antisemite. Even their credit, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt ger intended for publication. Instead they
46 Philosophy Now August/September 2017 Book Reviews

Books
are a kind of mish-mash of reflections, As it turns out, Heidegger believes that he qualified his remark and insisted that the
personal and political rants, the airing of he never meets a worthy philosophical qualification had been in the original text.
grievances, observations, philosophical adversary. However, this has since been shown to be
experimentation, sketches for ideas, what untrue, and was instead a late attempt by
have you. Rarely is anything fully worked Heidegger’s Naziism Heidegger to sanitize his remark before
out or developed, and often the writing Readers expecting sensational revelations publication. The qualification is in italics:
consists of merely abbreviated half- concerning Heidegger’s Nazi views in this
thoughts. The notebooks make for some- first English volume of the Notebooks may be “In 1928 there appeared the first part of a
what frustrating reading at times, insofar as surprised to find that, although there are collected bibliography on the concept of
there is often very little coherence or conti- references to National Socialism, they are value. It cites 661 publications on the con-
nuity between one fragment and the next, few and far between. Furthermore, this cept of value. Probably by now there are a
while some of the core philosophical ideas particular volume has almost no trace of the thousand. All this calls itself philosophy. In
are treated of in a rather repetitive fashion. antisemitism to which Trawny had alluded particular, what is peddled about nowadays
One of the more interesting features of before their German publication. Indeed, as the philosophy of National Socialism, but
the notebooks is the unique and revealing one finds in this particular volume that which has not the least to do with the inner
insight we are afforded into Heidegger’s Heidegger sporadically expresses some truth and greatness of this movement
personality. The image that emerges is less misgivings about Nazism. Notwithstand- [namely, the encounter between global technology
than flattering, to say the least. Heidegger is ing, the diehard Heidegger supporters who and modern humanity], is fishing in these
troubled waters of ‘values’ and ‘totalities’.”
Adolf Hitler Martin Heidegger
Despite his reservations about some of
the intellectual and political personalities
who were rising to prominence within
National Socialism, the fact remains that
from about a year before his disastrous entry
into political life, Heidegger was earnestly
trying to weave his own philosophy together
with elements of what he took to be a new
awakening in Germany. Even privately
Heidegger thought that the destiny of the
West, in the face of what he saw as a plane-
tary crisis, lay very much in the hands of the
German people. Furthermore, in order for
them to prevail, they would have to embrace
the bizarre cocktail of Heideggerian
rarely remembered fondly these days, and have foregrounded some of his criticisms of concepts and National Socialism he was
he was clearly an unpleasant and deeply Nazi ideologues in this translation conve- developing throughout this period.
flawed human being. However, the sheer niently overlook the depth of Heidegger’s Some have tried to take a measure of
scale of his arrogance and hubris in this text commitment to what he held to be the real comfort from the lack of explicit anti-
is noteworthy. One also begins to notice a possibilities of a new beginning latent within semitism in this particular volume. I’m
growing bitterness, which comes more and the Nazi movement. His gripe was more afraid that their relief will be short-lived,
more to the fore from around the time that with the political and intellectual medio- because the worst of Heidegger’s comments
his ill-fated tenure as Rector came to a crities that he felt had infiltrated and on this subject are to be found in subsequent
premature end. No one is spared from corrupted it. However, the movement was volumes. Notebooks 1931-1938 do certainly
Heidegger’s withering vitriol as he vents led by someone who Heidegger zealously contain plenty of Germanic nationalistic
spleen against philosophy, academia, supported well into the 1930s: chest-puffing, which is unsavoury in its own
colleagues, journalism, the university, art, right. However, it is not here but in Volume
politics, and even – albeit at first in rather “The great experience and fortune [is] that 95 of the collected works, that we really see
qualified ways – National Socialism. the Führer has awakened a new actuality, Heidegger’s antisemitism emerge. Richard
giving our thinking the correct course and Polt helpfully identified, translated, and
“I am asked again and again why I do not impetus. Otherwise, despite all the thor- disseminated all of the incriminating
respond to the reproaches of Herr Krieck! oughness, it would have remained lost in passages from Volumes 95 and 96 shortly
Answer: such ones, who on account of their itself and would only with difficulty have after those volumes were published in
shallowness and vanity merely rummage found its way to effectiveness. Literary exis- German, and there is no denying the repug-
around in everything that was ever formed tence is at an end.” (Ponderings p.81). nance of some of what one finds therein.
and thought and who deserve only con-
tempt, can never be opponents. In a battle I In his famous 1935 lecture course – the Evaluations
will face only an opponent, not someone first of his courses that he chose to publish Contrary to what some of Heidegger’s most
who champions mediocrity.” (in 1953) – Heidegger notoriously invoked fanatical supporters maintain, these note-
(Ponderings, p.131) the positive possibilities within National books are not rich philosophical repositories
Socialism. Granted, in the published version teeming with crucial insights that enhance
Book Reviews August/September 2017 Philosophy Now 47

Books
our understanding of Heidegger’s published has done a good job updating Hegel. But tory could be: he once famously described
work. There are interesting passages here was it worth updating Hegel in the first history as a ‘slaughterhouse’. Nevertheless,
and there, not least his occasional references place? Did the world really need Philosophy Hegel and his followers believed that there
to Being and Time, which help to shed light of Right 2.0? Personally, I am not convinced. were clear moral principles governing the
on how he himself reflected on the successes At the heart of the Philosophy of Right (then) modern world. These moral princi-
and failures of his early work. Notwithstand- was a story about society and history. This ples did not perfectly govern society; as well
ing, it has been somewhat bewildering to story rested upon two claims. First, every as morality, people certainly acted on the
observe certain commentators boldly
society is governed by a set of moral prin- basis of selfishness, impulse, fear, and sim-
proclaiming the virtues of Heidegger’s
ciples that holds it together. Different soci- ple stupidity. And the moral principles
notebooks, trawling through these disparate
eties have possessed very different moral governing any society were themselves not
series of jottings for fragments and phrases
which are then stitched together into rather codes, and understanding a society’s moral perfect – they merely represented the dic-
patchy evidence to support disappointingly code is crucial to understanding that soci- tates of reason as developed at that particu-
heavy-handed, tendentious, yet keenly ety. Second, there is a pattern in how lar point in time and space. Moreover, his-
defended interpretations. These notebooks moral codes change over time. Specifically, tory itself did not demonstrate a smooth
are adduced as evidence for a whole series of the world is coming more and more to be process of advancement. Hegel’s theory
fundamentally incompatible interpretations governed according to the demands of rea- left plenty of room for accidents, setbacks,
of Heidegger’s work. What usually is most son. Over time, societies with moral codes and even catastrophes. But for Hegel the
apparent from these pieces of casuistry, more in accord with reason supplant soci- moral principles governing his society still
however, are the agendas of those who pros- eties whose moral codes are less reflective represented a definite advance over the
ecute their cases with the barest threads of of reason’s demands. So for Hegel, to past, as reason marches ever onward
evidence, as part of a long-standing dispute understand history is to understand the towards its fulfilment.
with other Heidegger scholars over the process by which reason instantiates itself Any philosopher who believes that there
‘right’ way to read Heidegger’s lifelong more and more in the moral and political are moral principles underlying her own
inquiry into the meaning of being. systems governing the societies of the society will surely have her work cut out
In summary, what we find in this first world. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel finding them, even if the principles really
volume of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to be sought to identify the moral principles that are there to find. In particular, she will have
translated into English is an angry, disillu- he believed could be found underlying (his) to avoid two serious potential pitfalls. On
sioned philosopher who tirelessly laments contemporary society, and which repre- the one hand, she has to recognize that not
the cultural, political and spiritual destitu- sented a particular stage in the world-his- every feature of her society is an embodi-
tion of his day. He sees little hope for the
torical development of reason. ment of reason’s march through history:
university, for philosophy, for the German
there’s clearly a lot of ‘white noise’ in the
people, or for the world in general. We are
Problems With Hegel’s Vision process. And so she must be ready to sepa-
left with a picture of a spiteful, petty man
whose professional and political ambitions To be sure, Hegel’s view of society and his- rate the wheat from the chaff: to distinguish
had been severely dented, and who felt the tory is far from obvious. For one thing, it’s moral principle from accident, happen-
slights all the more keenly owing to a rather not at all clear that every society is unified by stance, etc. On the other hand, she cannot
unrestrained Messianic complex. some set of moral principles. Surely there dismiss too many features of society as mere
© MAHON O’BRIEN 2017 are serious, and widespread, differences of accidental deviations from its coherent set
Mahon O'Brien is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy opinion – often regarding matters of life and of moral principles. After all, if the devia-
at the University of Sussex. He has published two death – within any moderately diverse soci- tions become too great and/or too numer-
books on Heidegger, with another due out this year. ety. For another, one doesn’t have to study ous, then it starts to look doubtful that any
history very long to doubt that it embodies one set of principles is governing society
• Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, the progressive development of reason. after all. Perhaps then the philosopher is
Martin Heidegger, trans Richard Rojcewicz, Indiana Hegel was aware of these problems. He not really finding moral principles in soci-
U.P., 2016, $30, 400 pp, ISBN: 978-0-253-02067-3 recognized, for example, just how ugly his- ety; perhaps she is instead simply identify-
Hegel lecturing
Freedom’s Right by F. Kluger, 1828
by Axel Honneth
I N F REEDOM ’ S R IGHT : T HE
Social Foundations of
Democratic Life (2014), Axel
Honneth, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Frankfurt and at Columbia
University, offers an update to G.W.F.
Hegel’s most famous work of political phi-
losophy, the Philosophy of Right (1821).
Freedom’s Right certainly represents an
impressive intellectual effort: it apparently
took Honneth nearly five years to complete.
And I suppose one could say that Honneth
48 Philosophy Now August/September 2017 Book Reviews

Books
freedom that he believes play a role in
Honneth lecturing modern life (negative, reflexive, and social
freedoms), Honneth simply relies upon a
range of philosophers who have theorized
HONNETH LECTURING © BRUNO-KREISKY PRESS 2016
about freedom. He does write about histo-

ry later in the book (most of his examples
come from literature and film, not the
social sciences), but in doing so he makes
little effort to demonstrate that he has
indeed found the key to understanding
modern social life. Rather, he simply takes
for granted that freedom provides a uni-
fied account of justice in our social prac-
tices, and then sketches out a story about
how it does so. Again, the skeptic will see
little reason to grant Honneth his starting
point, yet without it everything that comes
afterwards will remain unconvincing.
ing principles that sound nice to her, and self. Unfortunately, he does not meet many Complicating matters further is the fact
then projecting them onto her own world. of these challenges any better than Hegel that Honneth is prepared to discard cer-
did. For example, Honneth assumes, with- tain features of Hegel’s philosophy, in par-
Honneth’s Modern Hegelianism out argument, that there are moral princi- ticular, Hegel’s assumption that history
In Freedom’s Right, Honneth clearly wishes ples underlying modern Western society necessarily embodies progress, at least in
to advance Hegel’s project. His focus is on that are simply waiting to be found. “The the long term. For “given the experience
modernity’s principles of justice – the aim of constructing a theory of justice as of a ‘breach of civilization’, e.g., the real-
moral principles regulating our society that social analysis,” he writes, “depends entire- ization of the possibility of a holocaust
determine who gets what, when, and how. ly on the... premise that social reproduction within civilized countries, we can no
“I sought,” Honneth writes, “to follow the hinges on a certain set of shared fundamen- longer share Hegel’s optimism that mod-
model of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and tal ideals and values” (p.3). Honneth ern societies follow a continuous path of
develop the principles of social justice by acknowledges that we live in a world con- rational development” (pp.2-3). But if his-
means of an analysis of society” (p.viii). taining many different moral perspectives, tory does not present us with the spectacle
In principle, Honneth admits, there could but he somehow believes this doesn’t affect of reason continually progressing its self-
be different principles at work in different his argument. Rather, diversity requires realisation, why then believe that our cur-
spheres of social life. But in practice, in society to have values that binds it togeth- rent society must involve some form of
modern society, he contends, there is only er: “Even the existence of ‘heterogeneous’ instantiation of rational principles? Why
one. That value is freedom: “Of all the ethi- societies marked by ethnic or religious can’t human history just be a lot of sound
cal values prevailing and competing for diversity has little effect on this ‘transcen- and fury, signifying nothing? Honneth
dominance in modern society, only one has dental’ necessity of normative integration” never even considers the possibility.
been capable of leaving a truly lasting (p.4). So Honneth seems to take it as sim- If you want to see where Hegelian phi-
impression on our institutional order: free- ply obvious that every society has a set of losophy has gone since Hegel, you will
dom, i.e. the autonomy of the individual” moral principles that hold it together – that want to read Freedom’s Right. It certainly
(p.15). Honneth proceeds to identify three every state has a well-defined ‘ethical life’, represents the state of the art in the field.
distinct understandings of freedom: nega- to use Hegel’s expression. I see no reason But if you want to be convinced that
tive, reflexive, and social (Chapters 1-3). whatsoever to assume that this claim is Hegelian philosophy is an enterprise worth
Negative freedom “consists in fulfilling any true; but, as Honneth himself recognizes, undertaking, you will receive little help
and all desires, provided they serve the sub- his argument cannot get off the ground from Freedom’s Right. Whether you get any-
ject's self-assertion” (p.22). With reflexive without it. thing out of Honneth’s book will thus
freedom, “individuals are free if their actions And Honneth claims not just that there largely depend upon whether you think
are solely guided by their own intentions” are shared ideals holding the modern Hegelian philosophy is worth doing at all.
(p.29). Social freedom goes beyond this: world together, but that there is only one Regardless of the answer to that question,
“On this account individual subjects can per- such ideal – freedom – which holds the Honneth does seem to be doing it well.
form the reflexive acts required for self- entire fabric of social life together. Given © PETER STONE 2017
determination only if they interact socially such a bold claim, I would expect him to Peter Stone is an assistant professor of political
with others who do the same” (p.42). spend a lot of time demonstrating that the science at Trinity College Dublin. With Tim
Honneth then attempts to demonstrate how ideal of freedom does indeed underlie all Madigan he co-edited Bertrand Russell:
these understandings play themselves out in our social practices. I would also expect Public Intellectual (2016), which won the
our contemporary social institutions, such as him to show that other ideals cannot plau- 2017 Bertrand Russell Society Book Award.
the family and the economy (Chapters 4-6). sibly be shown to play even a part in this
In advancing a Hegelian understanding role – that freedom really does stand alone • Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of
of society, Honneth must confront all of in this department. Instead, in sketching Democratic Life, by Axel Honneth, Polity Press, 2014.
the challenges that confronted Hegel him- out the three distinct understandings of 412 pages, ISBN 978-0-231162470
Book Reviews August/September 2017 Philosophy Now 49

EVERYTHING
Kaya York experiences monism, mysticism,
Game and Schopenhauerian ethics while playing

David OReilly’s video game.
I
t’s normal to begin discussions about Varieties of Monism doxes this claim entails. For these Buddhists,
particularly interesting, beautiful, or There are many different types of monism seeing through this was a path to Nirvana.
profound video games by noting with in philosophy, all of which seek to unify However without our usual designations
surprise that such games even exist. They do. everything in the universe in some way, to of the plurality of things, the ultimate
There are more games like these than one say that everything is really one (kind of) nature of reality becomes hard to express
might suppose, such as Dear Esther, which has thing. Spinoza, for example, believed that and understand. The Daoist philosopher
the player simply wander around an island everything was really God. Spinoza argues Laozi recognized this, writing:
and listen to fragments of a letter, and That for this in rationalist terms, but the same
Dragon Cancer, an autobiographical game idea finds articulation in a number of mystic “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.
about the loss of a child. However, it would works, such as in the Kabbalah. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
be just as well to begin discussing David Instead of arguing that everything is the The Dao is both named and nameless
OReilly’s new game, Everything, by referring same thing, by contrast a substance monist As nameless, it is the origin of all things.”
to a different canon – that of Borges, Camus, argues that everything is the same kind of (Dao De Jing)
and Voltaire. Like these writers, OReilly and thing; that there is only one kind of substance
his team have created a work of art that’s in the world. Physicalism in the philosophy of Some recent analytic philosophers have
structured around a philosophical idea. The mind is a currently popular substance tried to argue for or against different meta-
difference is that Everything allows its player monism. Alternatively, Berkeley thought that physical monisms in painfully rigorous
to encounter this idea through experience material substances didn’t exist, and that terms and intimidating logical equations,
rather than through reading a narrative. everything was really mental. This claim was although only a few philosophers advocate
In the game the player begins as an animal, also made by the Yogacara Buddhists monist positions. These philosophers often
communicating with other creatures and centuries earlier. The Madhyamaka begin with a different set of presumptions
objects. The player can then leave the body Buddhists argued against the Yogacara about language, meaning, and reference,
of the animal and become the other things he Buddhists, and identified the fundamental than do the Buddhists.
or she encounters: a tree, a building, a street- nature of the universe with emptiness.
light. This carries through to the micro and However, this can also be seen as a kind of Unity in Plurality
macro scales: one can become anything from monism since for them, duality (including Everything asserts a monism of identity rather
a jellybean, grain of sand, or a microscopic that of body and mind) or any other kind of than simply substance, saying that everything
particle, to a planet or a galaxy! (I can imagine pluralism, is based on merely conventional really is the same thing, rather than just that
a sequel where you can play as parts of things: designations. The Madhyamakas then take it’s made of the same thing. The game is very
the vein of a tree, or a wrinkle in fabric.) things a step further by saying that even the conscious of its philosophical themes, inter-
Although one is forced to experience being difference between conventional and ultimate spersing gameplay with audio snippets of
one thing at a time, the player’s avatar can reality is itself a conventional duality, using a Allen Watts saying things like “Every living
ultimately be all of these things. unique system of logic to overcome the para- being is a manifestation of everything that
I would like to take a moment to consider
this word ‘avatar’. One of the conventions of
gaming is that an ‘avatar’ is the entity that
one plays as in a game. The term comes
from the Sanskrit avatarana, which refers to
the incarnation of a deity in earthly form. In
the 1800s in the West, the term ‘avatar’ also
came to refer to the concrete manifestation
of something abstract.
Everything manages to combine all three
EVERYTHING GAME IMAGES © DAVID OREILLY 2017
senses of this word. Thus not only is one an

avatar in the sense that a whole universe can
be incarnated in a single (virtual) organism,
but by stretching the limits of what an avatar
can be in the gaming sense, Everything itself
is a manifestation or concrete representa-
tion of the abstract philosophical perspec-
tive called ‘monism’, the idea that every-
thing is one.

Game
about having a certain experience or feeling,
rather than absorbing a set of ideas, which
isn’t necessarily true. The structure of any
game carries an ideology and in turn a basic
philosophical orientation. The issue is rather
that the lessons entertainment teaches us are
often false, unhelpful, and ethically dubious.
When you’re playing a shooter game such as
Halo, on the one hand you’re mindlessly
running around and killing things. But at the
there is.” Watts was a writer and speaker who among the most beautiful. In an imagined same time – leaving aside the old violence
did much to popularize Buddhist ideas dialogue between two men, one of whom issue – you’re being taught through rein-
during the middle of the last century. wishes for immortality, the other says, forcement that success consists in beating
Part of the appeal of video games gener- others, that there can only be one winner. At
ally is that they allow players to transcend “When you say I, I, I want to exist, it isn’t you a deeper level you’re being taught that you’re
their normal limits. In games you can be alone that says this. Everything says it – a being divided from other beings against
faster, stronger, or can easily outsmart everything that has the faintest trace of whom you must struggle for your existence,
others. You can ignore the normal bound- consciousness… It is the cry, not of the indi- and that your purpose is to achieve things.
aries imposed by morality and social taboos. vidual, but of existence itself… it looks as if it Even the game Katamari Damacy, which
Popular video games, then, function as wish were concerned with nothing but the individ- resembles Everything in its quirkiness and
fulfillment, or worse, a kind of coddling, an ual. There lies the illusion – an illusion, it’s micro-to-macro visual scale, teaches an
assurance to the player that, deep down, true, in which the individual is held fast: but, opposite ideological lesson by making the
they are that smart and special. if he reflects, he can break the fetters and set goal of the game to collect everything in the
Everything is different. The transcendence himself free.” (‘Immortality: A Dialogue’, universe, roll it into a ball, stand outside of
it allows is not of everyday reality, but that of Trans. Saunders & Kline.) it, and own it. By contrast, the goal of Every-
the self or ego. This is not the kind of thing is self-realization. So although you
coddling that’s afforded by most video This understanding about the actual become more and more things, in a sense
games. As the YouTube game reviewer Poly- universal nature of the ‘I’, also articulated by you already were them, so this is no more a
gon says, Everything gives the player a sense Allen Watts in the game’s trailer, is for goal than would be playing a shooting-game
not of their great significance, but rather of Schopenhauer the metaphysical basis for where your ‘enemies’ were already dead.
their insignificance. While playing the game, ethics. As he says, ethics arises “when an It’s usually supposed that games such as
you gain different modes of being by inter- individual directly recognizes in another his Halo and Pokémon are appealing because
acting with different things, and figure out own self, his true and very being.” This they’re simply fun. But I think their appeal
that those things already are you. As the game sensation does not come instantly when has a lot to do with the fact that on some level
progresses, things become increasingly playing Everything, since one’s trained these games support a view of the world, of
surreal and you can start to become anything instinct in playing video games is to shoot or consuming and competing, which our
at anytime, until finally you are everything. fight anything else that emerges in the cultures and ways of life train us in, even
You cease to worry about whether your game game; but a sense of peacefulness and down to the level of how we’re supposed to
avatar survives, since you the player aren’t harmony eventually overcomes the recep- have fun. But we do not need to have fun in
that avatar, but are rather everything that tive player. There are no puzzles to solve in that sort of way. So perhaps it’s not so
exists in the game, including the game’s very Everything, no enemies to defeat, simply a surprising that although Everything manages
structure! The player’s experience of ethical way of being in the world to realize. to question the ego rather than stroke it, to
life and mortality in the game are thus similar represent harmony rather than conflict, at
to those described in the works of Arthur One With Everything the same time it manages to be fun. Perhaps
Schopenhauer (1788-1860). I haven’t said much about the visual beauty its genius is simply in reminding us that
Schopenhauer was also a monist, arguing or the plain funniness of the game (four- ethics and fun aren’t intrinsically opposed to
that the fundamental nature of reality is ‘will’, legged creatures, for some reason, somer- each another.
a sort of striving, or impulse for self-expres- sault around rather than walking). It’s © KAYA YORK 2017
sion. His view is a rather dark one, picturing tempting to say that Everything is unique Kaya York is a graduate student in philosophy
existence as suffering and the universal will as even within the ‘artistic game’ genre because and has taught English and Western Culture
aimless and blind. Nevertheless, Schopen- it is philosophically educational. But this in China. You can follow Kaya’s fiction at
hauer’s consolations concerning death are would suggest that entertainment is usually kayayork.wordpress.com

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Against
T allis Panpsychism
in
Wonderland Raymond Tallis argues that mind is not everywhere
O
ntology, the branch of philoso- could be in touch with and act upon the objects that are experienced as being ‘over
phy that tries to establish what extra-mental world, beginning with their there’, distinct from ourselves-as-subjects,
kinds of beings there are or own bodies. A locationless, weightless ghost that is, distinct from experiences. And the gap
determine the basic categories of would seem unable to take up residence at a is greater still when we come to memories of
being, is in a rather bad way. particular place in the universe – either the things past: things that are present to us but
It is sometimes treated with disdain by body or its brain – and to lack the capacity to explicitly no longer present; or knowledge of
those who feel that the last word on the interact with its machinery. facts, such as that the Battle of Waterloo took
ground floor of reality belongs to the natural Monism and dualism, however, come in place in 1815. These problems are
sciences, notably physics. This view is not many forms, and recent developments in both compounded by the fact that the neural activ-
confined to physicists and their camp -isms have narrowed the gap between them ity which is supposed to be identical with
followers, but is shared by many philoso- with a view to reducing the obvious inadequa- consciousness (such as in some parts of the
phers. In the glorious polemic that opens cies of each. Property dualism, for example, cerebral cortex) is not fundamentally or even
Every Thing Must Go (2008), James Ladyman argues that mind and body are two aspects of strikingly different from neural activity which
lambasts philosophers for relying on their a single substance. This seems compatible most certainly is not (such as in other parts of
intuitions to address questions about ulti- with mind-brain identity theory, according to the cerebral cortex). Less obvious, but just as
mate reality instead of getting up to speed which brain events have two aspects: neuro- damaging, is that consciousness and neural
with current physical theory. physiological processes and conscious activity cannot be two aspects of something
As if that were not bad enough, philoso- contents. However, two minutes’ thought is because any differentiation of aspects presup-
phy itself seems to have reached an impasse more than enough to dispose of the identity poses consciousness, and you can’t presup-
in addressing traditional ontological ques- theory. Most obviously, the neural activity pose consciousness to explain consciousness.
tions, particularly those that arise from the supposedly associated with consciousness is
‘mind-body problem’. All the standard nothing like the elements of consciousness. Panpsychism & Bertrand Russell
options here seem equally bankrupt. There As has often been pointed out, there is noth- Dual aspect monism, however, has paved the
are two main versions of monism – the idea ing like the experience of colour in the elec- way for an astonishing new theory that is now
that there is just one kind of stuff in the trochemical discharges in the visual cortex. gaining increased popularity among philoso-
universe. Materialism claims that all is matter, The gap seems even greater when we think of phers. It is called panpsychism. According to
whatever matter boils down to. But it cannot
accommodate the strange properties of
material objects such as you and I – persons
who are aware of the material world and that
part of it which is themselves. Idealism,
according to which all is mind, making the
material world a construct of the mind, also
leaves entirely unexplained the difference
between matter-like pebbles and mind-like
thoughts. The alternative to monism is dual-
ism, which acknowledges the irreducible
difference between pebbles and thoughts and
proposes that there are two kinds of funda-
mental substance: material objects that are
located in space and time and have physical
properties such as size and weight; and
mental items that are not located in space and
time and do not have physical properties such
as size and weight. Unfortunately, dualism
creates more problems than it solves, most
notably the place of mind in an overwhelm- How does the brain make
ingly mindless universe. More specifically, consciousness?
there is the problem of how individual minds

panpsychists, mind is not confined to mind. As Philip Goff puts it, “an electron has
conscious living creatures, but is a fundamen- an inner life.”
tal and universal property of all things.
Philip Goff, one of the most persuasive Problems With Panpsychism
advocates of panpsychism, is guest editor of
this issue of Philosophy Now. In his beautifully
Unfortunately, far from solving the problem
of identifying mental activity with neural
T allis
lucid essay (to which I am heavily indebted), activity, panpsychism makes it worse. If all
in
‘Bertrand Russell and the Problem of
Consciousness’ (in Consciousness and the Great
Philosophers, edited by S. Leach and J.
Tartaglia, 2016), Goff connects panpsy-
stuff has mind as one of its aspects, what is
special about the brain such that it – and not
say rocks and trees – is aware of a world in
virtue of being aware of itself? What is it
Wonderland
chism with a form of neutral monism associ- about a brain that enables the mind-like combination problem with the ‘disaggrega-
ated with Bertrand Russell. aspect of things to manifest itself? If even the tion problem’, of how universal consciousness
Russell argued that our difficulty in smallest things have very basic kinds of expe- becomes individual conscious minds. This is
understanding how something as apparently riences, how is the macroscopic conscious- reminiscent of the problem that Kant’s tran-
radically different from experiences as nerve ness of organisms such as birds and beasts scendental idealism faces in accounting for
impulses could be identical with them origi- and people built up out of these elementary individual minds that have specific contents in
nates in the fact that objective observation constituents? What the consciousness of part dependent on the spatio-temporal loca-
does not give us the real nature of material these constituents would amount to and how tion of a particular (organic) body. (I discussed
events. It can show us their causal relations the consciousness of a vast assembly of such this in an ‘Overdue Appearance of Immanuel
and their mathematical structure, but not constituents would throw in their lot with Kant’, Philosophy Now Issue 118.) Also, a
their intrinsic nature. Or, as Adam Frank has each other to generate an agreed upon conscious-as-a-whole universe would
put it, “our best theories for how matter continuous, world-supporting viewpoint of a presumably be a consciousness of everything,
behaves tell us very little about what matter is” macroscopic conscious being like you and which is impossible to imagine. Less obvi-
(‘Mindless Matter: Matter Alone Cannot me is entirely obscure. This is the so-called ously, it might be consciousness of nothing –
Explain the Riddle of Consciousness’, Aeon, combination problem. Equally, or even since there would be nothing outside of its
13th March 2016). So what we learn of nerve more, obscure is why this happens in some consciousness for it to be conscious of.
impulses through neuroscience does not tell things and not others; in brains, for example, Panpsychism ironically falls foul of the danger
us what they are in themselves. To know what and not pebbles, mountains, toe nails or that, if the relationship between mind and
they are in themselves, you would have to be hearts. What is it about a brain and its neural world, or more specifically, knower and
them. But according to Russell, we are our activity that enables it to gather up countless known, is too cosy, then there would be no
nerve impulses, or at least some of them. mental sequins into an advanced conscious- objects of knowledge, even less a painful, labo-
Being them, we find they are experiences. ness, such as is possessed by a reader of rious process of acquiring knowledge.
It is this argument that justifies Russell’s Philosophy Now? A common defence of panpsychism is that,
deeply counter-intuitive claim that a physi- There is a variant of panpsychism called while (as Goff admits) it seems crazy, no other
ologist observing a brain is seeing not the ‘Cosmopsychism’ offered up to address the theory can account for the relationship
activity in the brain being examined, which combination problem. (Goff discusses it in between mind and brain. And it is true that
is observed from without, but his own expe- ‘Panpsychism’, forthcoming in The Blackwell the materialist alternatives appear on close
riences, that is to say his own nerve impulses, Companion to Consciousness, eds S. Schneider inspection not to be “the safe harbour of
which are experienced from within. What and M. Velmans). Cosmopsychists argue metaphysical sobriety that many may desire,”
we directly know is our own brain activity, that it is a mistake to begin with the ‘smallist’ as Adam Frank argues in ‘Mindless Matter’.
which gives us only mediated access to exter- assumption that the primary components of But this defence sounds like an ‘ontology of
nal objects, and hence to the objective consciousness are to be found at the level of the gaps’ analogous to the ‘God of the gaps’
knowledge that ultimately leads to the microscopic constituents, which throw in argument for the existence of the deity.
science of the brain. their lot with each other to make up a macro- Goff also points out that ideas that have
There is a danger stemming from this scopic mind, a viewpoint. Rather, it is the once been thought crazy are now conven-
view: neuro-solipsism. If all that I know is universe as a whole that is conscious. tional science. I can envisage Groucho
activity in my brain, then the sense I have While this may address the problem of Marx’s response to that argument: “They
that I know a world out there populated with tiny bits of conscious stuff working together said Newton was mad and he was a genius;
things and people must be an illusion. Yet if to produce macroscopic conscious entities, it they said Einstein was mad and he was a
there are no true perceptions, beliefs, or does not explain: (a) How it is that some enti- genius; and they said my Uncle Louis was
thoughts about the external world, we have ties in this ‘panconscious’ world seem to be mad – and he was.”
no reason for accepting the neural theory of conscious (people) and others (pebbles) Ontology is in poor shape, but that is,
consciousness, and even less for trying apparently not; (b) Why, among conscious perhaps, not a bad thing. For an ontological
persuade others of its truth! entities, some (such as philosophers) are agnostic like me, it means that anything is
Russell’s argument also opens the way to more conscious than others (such as oysters); possible – apart from what is presently on offer.
a broader monism in which mind and matter and (c) How it is that conscious beings such © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2017
are simply aspects of a more fundamental as you and me have distinctive viewpoints on Raymond Tallis’ latest book, Of Time and
stuff that is neither. Mind, that is to say, is the conscious universe. Lamentation: Reflections on Transience is
everywhere: wherever there is stuff, there is Cosmopsychism, that is, replaces the out now.

The Physicist’s Mind
Daniel Harper peers into the murky depths.
“Y ou saw him, wasn’t he beautiful?” she says, smoothing

her beach towel in the Polynesian sun. “The babies here
are adorable.”
“I couldn’t stand that, what was it – ‘Principle of Uncertainty’?
What kind of a stupid science is that?”
“It’s quantum theory. Anyway, you were the one who picked
He looks up from his paperback and pokes his glasses up the it up.”
bridge of his nose. “Look at you,” he says. “Soon as you get a “What are they saying? That everything is just random
ring on your finger you’re thinking about procreation.” chance? What ever happened to destiny? And fate?” She glances
“Nothing’s different. I’ve always loved children.” Her tanned at her ring. As a literature student, she likes to point out the
shoulder points towards him from where she sits on the edge oversights of these scientists. But this time he’s not biting.
of the sun-lounger. Her brown hair hangs over the straps of a “There’s a difference between random and unpredictable,”
white bikini. he says. “Coming for a swim?”
“Should I be worried?” he asks, smoothing some wrinkles in She contemplates the water. In the late morning light the
his own towel. lagoon’s hues are on full display: clear glass merges into aqua-
“Nothing to be worried about.” marine, then a deep royal blue. Waves lap lazily on the shore.
Ever since her mother had given her the box, the world had So far they haven’t seen much of French Polynesia, but with a
shifted for her. She had sat on the couch in her parent’s enormous resort this beautiful, why go anywhere?
Paris living room and unpacked the contents – a size zero knitted She thinks over the last few days – a church ceremony in the
jacket, a crocheted teddy bear, a tiny pair of red shoes – and began centre of Paris, a champagne reception in the rose garden. “Think
looking at things differently. Now she notices them everywhere: it was fate that we met?” she asks.
prams painted on carparks, pregnant women, a baby in a bassinet “Of course it was,” he says. “I was sent to complete your des-
on the plane, like they have been put there just for her. tiny, and you were sent to… cause me trouble.”
He brushes several white sand-grains from his armrest and “So cruel.” She says giving him a wounded pout. He responds
turns back to the novel in his lap. The other sun-loungers by plucking her from the sun lounge and carrying her off into
arranged across the beach are empty. the water. She kicks her legs and squeals of delighted protest
“I’ve left my book,” she says. “No offence I hope, doctor.” carry across the sand to the activities hut, where the uniformed
She had been labouring through his dog-eared copy of A Brief attendant at the counter shakes his head smiling. Then he con-
History of Time. tinues rearranging the life jackets.
“None taken.”
Y ou could say whole thing is like an immense ball, only it has

no outside. It’s curved, four-dimensional and inaccessible
to imagination – God’s mysterious architecture. As you pan in,
a few of the countless points of light grow in the blackness to
become spirals and the fabric of it becomes comprehensible. In
one spiral, out on an arm, is a yellow star suspended in the empti-
ness. Revolving in a slight ellipse around it is a blue-green sphere.
Down through the atmosphere to the surface, he lies with her,
their backs on the lacquered wooden planks, the ocean moving
beneath them as they stare out at the stars and the universe.
F rom their table at the top bar she can see the beach below.
Torches line a walkway that reaches out in a perfect arc to
overwater bungalows. He has a conical glass with three olives on
a toothpick in clear liquid. She watches him adjust the napkin so
that the resort logo runs parallel to the table-edge, then he sits
the glass precisely at the centre. Across the lagoon the silhouette
of the island of Bora Bora rises sharply before the afterglow of
the sunset. “You remember the day we met?” she asks.
“I remember Camus.”
He was new at the Sorbonne. She was looking for a copy of
The Outsider in the campus bookshop. He had just taken the last
one from the shelf. “J’en ai besoin,” he said – “I need it.” Then
he added, “but I’ll lend it to you.” Looking him up and down

she mentally replaced his shabby suede jacket with a Pierre lips hangs in an arc in the breeze.
Cardin suit and a crisp white shirt, and she smiled. “But I need Panning in on the man you see light blue eyes. Closer still,
it today,” she said. “Well,” he replied, switching to Canadian- irises reveal pits and peaks, from sky-blue to cobalt. Photons of
accented English, “we’ll just have to share it. Café or library?” light swim into the pupil and end their interstellar journeys by
Her arms were folded around some books and she hugged them hitting his retina in immense slowness. Flowing along with the
to her chest. “Café it is then,” she said. signals that course down the optic nerve, you curve through a
“Just imagine how things could have been. Without Albert tract to the occipital cortex at the back of his brain. Electrons
Camus we might never have met.” She slides her palms across and electrochemical impulses crackle, modulated by a cocktail
the table and grips his hands. of a thousand neurotransmitters.
“I guess some things are meant to be,” he responds.
Her second pina colada is working its magic, and there he is
across the table all handsome and fit and relaxed. She’s always
looking for the chance to challenge him, and the physics book
“S o Einstein was wrong?” she asks, and sips her drink. It’s
strong, and it warms her stomach.
“Maybe. But the quantum guys were definitely right about
has given her some valuable ammunition. one thing.”
“You know I can’t stand that book. I cannot believe things “And that is?”
can be so… random,” she says. This time she sees one of his He leans his elbow on the back of his seat, takes off his glasses
eyebrows rise a fraction. and searches for the right words. “Scientists used to think the
“Einstein said something similar.” future of the universe was totally predictable,” he says, “Planets,
“Of course he did.” stars, particles, all moving around on predetermined paths like a
“He said ‘God does not play dice with the universe.”’ giant clock. But quantum theory shows you can only predict things
“Voilà, my genius is proven.” to happen – the movement of particles I mean – with certain prob-
“Sorry baby, not really. Einstein was probably wrong. He just abilities. So human beings can never see the future. That’s just
couldn’t stand the quantum physicists.” the way it is.” There it is, the thing she’d been looking for: the
“What is it with scientists? They get so wrapped up in their spark of his mind filtered through his electric blue eyes.
own little worlds they can’t see what’s really going on. What “So that’s it,” she says.
about faith and love? What about destiny?” “That’s what?”
“Humans are stuck with uncertainty. God knows what’s going
A s you descend toward the couple on the wooden planks,

time is nearly standing still. She lies on her back with one
arm behind her head and a white sheet wrapped around her.
on.”
He flicks his hand. Not according to the experts,” he says.
“Stephen Hawking even called God an ‘inveterate gambler’.”
The end of the sheet is suspended in the breeze, making rip- “The nerve of it. Scientists!” She folds her arms and looks
ples that are barely moving. His head lies on her stomach; the away to the beach. He moves to respond, but pauses, and slips
fingertip of her fine-boned hand rests on his shoulder. A cigarette the last olive into his mouth.
glows at the corner of his mouth and the smoke rising from his Down on the twilit sand there’s a scene from her childhood
holidays, as grass-skirted dancers wave
their arms among the torch flames. Bored
looking couples sit together over dinner
at the beach restaurant: the dining dead.
A little girl finds a coconut shell and holds
it up before her dancing mother. The
image stirs something inside her and she
nods and says, “I want one of those.”
“Come on, we agreed on this. You
know we can’t right now. We’ve got too
many other things to do first. The trip,
the flat, my career –’
“What if I don’t give a damn about all
that?”
“What? Are we going to live off your
parents’ money forever?” He waves a
hand in the air, almost knocking over his
martini glass.
She clenches her teeth. Why is he so
obsessed with money? The one thing they
never have to worry about.
“Another drink, madam?” It’s the
waiter. “Sir?”
“No, thank you,” she says.

“Babe, it’s a big deal to make a person,” he continues, softly “Don’t give me that old predestination argument again.”
now. “It’s not something you do just because you’re in some “Come on, it’s true isn’t it?” he replies. “It would mean that
tropical paradise and you’ve seen a few cute kids.” that sort of God is evil himself. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’re getting yourself in real trouble here.” She suppresses
I n his cerebral cortex the incoming signal focuses itself: an

image of the night sky inside him. He feels her presence beside
a smile. “You just wait till I get you back to the bungalow...’
him, and a premonition of fatherhood appears like a ghost. He’s

pushing a child on a swing; ropes from a gnarled branch blur
upwards to invisibility. It’s the vaguest picture of an imagined
I nside his brain, as you swim down one of his neurons’ tan-
gled connections towards a synaptic gate, you see the neuro-
transmitter molecules – oxytocin, endorphins, alcohol – slowly
future. Memories from their day swim in the background – jostling. Some are inside bubbles at the gate, waiting for the
splashes of mid-air water caught silver in the sun, the aquama- electric charge that will release them. Particles inside molecules,
rine lagoon behind her, peals of delicious laughter – and in them, entangled with those of ten thousand adjacent cells, smear into
the possibilities for his next thought are born. different possible locations, different possible results, ready like
the hammer of a pistol.
T he shells of the lobster halves are the brightest red. His

college friends back in Montreal used to take photos of
meals like this to brag about online. Instead he tries to capture S he sits on the edge of the bed in the low light, tangled in the
white sheet. On the lamp table his camera sits next to rolls
it in his actual memory, something to hold onto after the Face- of film in a neat row on his leather-bound notebook. Her three
book posts have sunk out of sight down the timeline. On each Louis Vuitton suitcases are stacked beside it on the floor. Her
plate beside the lobster sit a square of potato gratin, two spears hair is tousled and she tilts her head as she lights a cigarette.
of asparagus on a creamy foam base, and three immaculate What is that word he can’t find? Poise? Grace...?
lemon slices. Champagne sparkles in crystal flutes. Next he Poetry. She looks like poetry.
looks across the table: she’s wearing a figure-hugging black “Have you seen the fish down there?” she says. He peers over
dress, hair tied back, admiring her ring again. There’s some- the edge of the bed to where the glass section in the floor of the
thing incredible about the way she carries herself – poise or bungalow reveals clear water. Bright fish dart in beams of light.
something. He could never quite put it into words. “You know, I think you’re right,” he says.
“It’s so amazing here,” she says. “A million miles from your “Of course I’m right. But what the hell are you talking about?”
problems. You look at things back at home, and you wonder “What if the universe is like, say, a giant clock, designed by
what it was that worried you.” God,” he suggests. “He’s not playing dice: He knows exactly
“Doesn’t get much better,” he agrees. But for him life at home where things are going – cogs and gears, ticking along just as
is a distant memory. The concrete of the campus, the grey cof- He planned. Every particle from the hydrogen in the sun to the
fee from the machine outside the library, the near-ascetic life of atoms inside our heads. But here’s the thing: He’s built this clock
the physics post-doc. Sometimes, when the ideas were really so our brains won’t be able to read the time.”
coming, he would hardly eat. He would just sit in his cramped “Are you still thinking on that?” She wraps herself in the
Paris apartment, scribbling at his desk until the early hours, the sheet and sashays through the open doors to lie on the lacquered
language of mathematics pouring out onto the pages like sacred wooden deck.
hieroglyphs, revealing to him some small truth no-one else had “There is a destiny, in ultimate reality!” he calls out from the
ever seen, territory previously known to God alone. He uses the bed. “But in the physical world, if humans can’t know the future,
word ‘God’, but he doesn’t mean it like she does. For him the then we still get to have free will. What do you think of that?”
word almost means the greater universe, its order and its appar- “I think you’re crazy.”
ent design.But now it’s all faded into the background. He pulls on some boxer shorts and goes out to join her. The
“When you’re in a place like this,” she says, “all the plans end of her sheet is waving in the breeze. He lies back with his
you made, all... bouf... disappear. You have to rethink them all head on her stomach. She runs her finger softly across his chest
again.” She looks at him carefully. to his shoulder, and passes him the cigarette. He hangs it from
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” the corner of his mouth, takes a deep drag, then watches as his
“Don’t worry, whatever is meant to happen will happen.” stream of smoke is stolen by the night air.
“God has it all worked out does He?” He likes to tease her “You really want this, don’t you?” he says. “A baby?”
about her religious leanings. “I really do.”
“He does, and the sooner you get used to it, the sooner we “You know what I think...”
can get on with life.”
The gateau arrives and she sits forward on her seat. He fixes
the teaspoon, which wasn’t quite perpendicular to the handle
of his espresso, and watches her pass a large piece of chocolate
I n a single molecule a particle wavers in its different possibili-
ties in the field – God’s mysterious architecture. The man’s
decision reduces it to a single position. There’s a flash as a new sig-
over her lips. “Well if God has it all planned out,” he says, “and nal fires in his brain. “What the hell,” he says. “Let’s do it.”
He loves human beings generally, why does He create people © DANIEL HARPER 2017
He knows are going to make bad choices? If He knows He’s Daniel Harper is a short-story writer based in Melbourne. His work
going to condemn them to Hell, why does He make them in has appeared in The Big Issue, Sleepers Almanac, Page Seven-
the first place?” teen and elsewhere. @danharper321

Professor Daniel Dennett
Visiting Professor of Philosophy at
New College of the Humanities
MA Philosophy
New College of the Humanities, London
Distinguished postgraduate study led by extraordinary faculty
Why study Philosophy anywhere else?
nchlondon.ac.uk

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ISSUE 121 AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2017 UK £3.75 USA $7.99 CANADA $8.

Probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology,

Kierkegaard continues to be an important resource

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider

Bernard Freydberg plumbs the previously concealed dark

UK Editorial Advisors 34 Terminal Taboo

Cover Image by A.J. Rich reviewed by Mahon O’Brien

48 Book: Freedom’s Right by Axel Honneth

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between all participants in it. Versed in

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would achieve a balance between the two poles of the mental-

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dictive coding-based approaches, and quantum theories of

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The new ripple effect

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A) Realistic death-talk is taboo because it reminds us of our

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I begin as Descartes did, with the knowledge that I exist: ‘I think

T he terms, ‘things’ and ‘exist’, seem self-evident, yet they’re

36 Philosophy Now August/September 2017 What Sorts of Things Exist?

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T hings themselves have their origin in the basic complex struc-

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