By the Cartesian moment, I mean that moment in Western philosophy when the individual knowing subject and the contents of the subject’s own mind were elevated into the first and most secure objects of knowledge. At that moment, knowledge of everything outside of the thinking subject — god, other minds, the physical world — came to be problematic.
For almost forty years I have taught Descartes’ Meditations in my Introduction to Philosophy Class. The skeptical problem which he poses bring up a host of interesting problems which occupy us for the rest of the course: the external world, the self, God, and the relation between mind and body.
I agree with Nussbaum that how we think of future possibilities has a lot to do with our emotions. If I think that X is going to have a root canal, I am filled with sympathy. Well, not filled, but I have some sympathy for X. If I realize that X is me, a whole different set of emotions rise in my breast, or brain, or heart, or wherever emotions are taken to arise these days.
I am still not fully convinced that emotions are nothing but judgments. Certainly emotions are tied up with judgments, sometimes quite closely. But it just seems wrong to say that an emotion is nothing but a judgment. Judgments can be true or false. Any given judgment, even a judgment concerning my own flourishing, can be made with or without an accompanying emotion.
One thing I do for Philosophy Talk as a member of the Crack Research Team…
You may have noticed that neither John nor I nor our on-air guests have been…
I’m pretty sure that Singer is right that both reasonably well off individuals in the developed and developing world and the governments of the developed world could and should do a lot more to help ameliorate global poverty. I’m not sure that I agree that well off individuals in the developed world directly owe it to individuals in the less developed world to donate money to various charitable organizations. Being a good thing to do and being obligatory or a matter of duty are two different things.
I want to try to dig a little deeper in this post into a question that kind of simmered beneath the surface of our discussion, but wasn’t really addressed head on. The issue has a little bit to do with identities that are regarded by those who adopt them as in some ways “non-negotiable” and as more or less direct sources of directives about how to live one’s own life, and a source of directives about how to live one’s life in relation to others who don’t share one’s identity and may even be hostile to it in some ways.
Yesterday on the show, John came up with a really nice metaphor. He compared a generation to a small strand in a long rope. Each strand is closely intertwined with a number of other nearby strands, but mostly the strands don’t make direct contact with each other. If you think of the rope as growing over time, the metaphor captures a very nice fact about relationships among the generations.
It’s amazing how divided opinions are about evolutionary psychology. Some very fine philosophers and…
Having sat with this topic for the last couple of weeks, I’m still pretty unsettled on my own final take on things. I’m pretty convinced — I think — that criminalizing prostitution – either on the supply side or on the demand side – is unworkable. I tend to side with those who think criminalization probably makes what is already a bad situation for many much worse.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines prostitution as “the act or practice of engaging in sex acts for hire.” This definition may be a little obsolete. First, while people of my generation include such things as oral sex under the term “sex acts,” the term now is often restricted to sexual intercourse. Whether this is the effect of President Clinton’s use, or he was in fact simply very up-to-date, I do not know.
Posted by Paul Kjellberg The Master said, “At fifteen, I set my mind on learning….
We at Philosophy Talk are pleased to announce that Paul Kjellberg who will be our…
I admit to still being puzzled by the question why, when forgiveness is deserved, one can only request forgiveness and aren’t really in a position to demand it. I thought I’d ponder that question just a little bit more in this post. My hunch is that what’s wrong with demanding forgiveness, even when it’s morally deserved, has to do with what I’ll call the dialectical character of the relation between the forgiver and the to be forgiven.
Many thanks to all of you who called during Tuesday’s Philosophy Talk (May 3). We very much appreciated your interest! There are a number of fascinating issues we touched upon, and some we did not. Among the latter is the relationship between interpersonal forgiveness and political forgiveness.