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The Philosophers' Magazine

Issue 41, 2nd quarter 2008
Debate at the Limit

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Displaying: 1-20 of 29 documents


actions & events
1. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Julian Baggini From the editor
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2. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
News
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3. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Mediawatch
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4. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Luciano Floridi Are pets electric?
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5. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Antonia Macaro A blurred world vision?
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Statements to the effect that philosophy will enhance democracy and human rights are not incantations that if repeated enough will magic these results into existence. Teaching more philosophy in schools may well not have dramatic effects in opening people’s minds and promoting intercultural dialogue, and will certainly not have immediate ones.
thoughts
6. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Julian Baggini The philosopher’s philosopher
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My father really looked forward to reading my book and then was terribly disappointed when he found it was unreadable. One of the reader’s reports for the press when it was published said ‘This book is written ordinary English – there are no symbols, little of what could be called technical terminology – but this appearance is entirely misleading’.
7. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Stephen Palmquist Where money and philosophy mix
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8. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Jonathan Rée Philosophy as an Art
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The philosophical taste for put-downs seems to be giving way to an appetite for what you might call intellectual inclusion: a willingness to talk to other people, however foolish they are considered to be, in the hope of learning something from the conversation. For these reasons I think the place and time may be right for mending the rift between philosophy and the other arts.
9. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Natasha McCarthy The wisdom of engineers
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If we are willing to accept that a large part of our shared knowledge of the world includes engineering knowledge, then we can conclude that a lot of our sophisticated knowledge is steadfast; that it has been, and will continue to be, developed and improved upon.
10. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Mathew Iredale A paradox solves a paradox, paradoxically
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11. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Michael C. LaBossiere Is using mercenaries moral?
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12. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Emily Wilson What is Wrong with Socrates?
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Socrates is anything but open-minded in his ideas about how life should be examined. In order to discover the truth, Socrates and his interlocutors need no information or fresh insight from outside themselves; they only need to find out which of their own ideas contradict one another. Socrates tests his prejudices against one another, but never thinks of throwing them all out, or trying a different methodology.
13. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Tim Crane, Peter Cave What on earth is Humanism?
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Some people clearly do think of humanism as being a kind of creed or value system. The first “humanist manifesto” published in 1933 talked of humanism as a “new religion”. Nowhere does this idea ring more true than at weekend meetings of Ethical Societies in chilly and austere halls which can resemble Methodist chapels or Christian Scientist temples. It’s hard to resist the cheap shot that a lot of what has passed for atheistical humanism has been a kind of non-conformism without the hymns.
forum
14. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Jeremy Stangroom Can the clash of civilisations be avoided?
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“The most important thing I got out of my own experience with evil and the inhuman is that one should not live in bitterness, but rather with a sense of humanity. One should always try to find ways of remaining ethical in the face of evil and to look for the humanity in the inhuman.”
15. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Michael Huemer The drug laws don’t work
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Illegal drugs are not inherently unclean, any more than alcohol, tobacco, or canola oil. All of these are simply chemicals that people choose to ingest for enjoyment, and that can harm our health if used to excess. Most of the sordid associations we have with illegal drugs are actually the product of the drug laws: it is because of the laws that drugs are sold on the black market, that Latin American crime bosses are made rich, that government officials are corrupted, and that drug users rob others to buy drugs.
16. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Steve Fuller Standing Up for What You Don’t Believe
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Knowledge is a collective enterprise, all of whose members potentially benefit from any one of them managing to achieve, or at least approximate, the truth. However, it does not follow that the best way to do this is by trying to establish the truth for oneself as a fixed belief and then making it plain for all to hear or see, so that it might spread like a virus, or “meme”, as Richard Dawkins might say.
17. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
James Garvey The wickedness of the long hot shower
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If it’s correct to think that the West does wrong by doing nothing despite having the room to reduce emissions and the capacity to do so, then it’s correct to think that we’re doing wrong too, in our everyday lives. Your emissions might be as much as 20 times more than others in the world; you might be doing as much as 20 times the damage to the planet compared to other people. The bulbs are not enough.
18. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Kenan Malik The politics of ignorance
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For much of the past half century, politicians and scientists have largely spoken with a single voice on the issue of race. The experience of Nazism and the Holocaust made racial science politically unacceptable. It also shaped the scientific consensus that race was a social myth, not a biological reality. Today, however, that scientific consensus is beginning to crack.
19. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Andrew Kelly Not so elementary, Watson
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A week before the event I returned home from a meeting about another project. It was lunchtime and I wanted a newspaper. I was greeted with the headline of nightmares in the Independent: “Fury at DNA pioneer’s theory: Africans are less intelligent than Westerners”.
the lowdown
20. The Philosophers' Magazine: Year > 2008 > Issue: 41
Giorgio Baruchello Giambattista Vico
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