Philosophy

In the chapter ‘Revolutionary Terror’ in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), world-renowned Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek briefly discusses Georgi M. Derluguian’s Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus (2005). Derluguian’s book traces the extraordinary career of one Musa Shanib, from Abkhazia on the Black Sea, who moved from being a Soviet dissident to a democratic political reformer and, finally, a Muslim fundamentalist, all the while maintaining an unwavering intellectual loyalty to the great French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. 

A dubious privilege of belonging to Generation X is that your life straddles the period during which the internet went from being science fiction to settled fact of life. Take, for example, Justin Smith, the American-born, University of Paris-based historian of philosophy and science, a professor who turns fifty this year. He started out on dial-up message boards in the 1980s, saw his first HTML web page in the 1990s, and now maintains a well-regarded Substack newsletter, where, in between meditations on the historical ontology of depression and the metaphysics of onomastics, he writes with a subtle eye regarding online culture in all its manifestations.

In Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher Antonio Damasio asks us to imagine life without consciousness. We would, he argues, still have patterns of neurochemical, sense-derived information ‘flowing in our minds, but [that information] would be unconnected to us as singular individuals’.

We academic philosophers get annoyed when people suppose that the purpose of philosophy is therapeutic. But we need not deny that philosophical enquiries into the nature of mind, knowledge, and the good can be sources of personal inspiration or solace. In his earlier work, Books That Saved My Life (2018), Michael McGirr, teacher, aid worker, and former priest, explained how literature and poetry can enrich our lives. Now it’s the turn of philosophy.

About as eminent an academic philosopher as they come these days, Robert B. Pippin made his reputation with a sequence of brilliant studies rehabilitating the great names of German Idealism – Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel – for a (mainly) baby boomer American audience. In the wake of the path-breaking interventions of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty, Pippin, alongside such colleagues as Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, has argued for a version of the essentially dialogic nature of all philosophy, which seeks to bring together metalogical ratiocinations and nitty-gritty semantic theories with reflections on the diversity of social interactions.

One consequence of the pandemic is that it has led many people to imagine themselves as someone else. Those whose work has dried up – actors, musicians, curators, librarians, flight attendants, and so on – have suddenly had to adapt to a world that has no place for the things they do and thus no place for people like them. What if this new world is not just a temporary blip, but the shape of things to come? Who will I be in this future world?

Tae-Yeoun Keum’s Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought is a study well suited to the moment. The convergence of pandemic conspiracy theories with populist narratives of globalist malfeasance shows that the desire for stories that give meaning to our collective experience is alive and kicking (if not exactly well). We are told we’re moving into a post-truth age. Yet cries of ‘fake news!’ suggest that truth remains an ideal, even as it is obscured by the mythmaking of others. But whom to trust in such a situation? Can we count on our philosophers to get rid of the dross and to locate the truths that form the bedrock of our communities?

Archaeologists can tell us about the tools, diets, shelters, art, and burials of humans and other hominins who lived during the Pleistocene, the geological period lasting from two million to twelve thousand years ago. But what we most want to know is hidden from view. How did they communicate? What was it like to be them? How did they become us?

George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon.