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Category: Ideas/philosophy

Augustine of Hippo and the virtue of hope

Augustine of Hippo and the virtue of hope

Michael Lamb writes: The binary between optimism and pessimism does not capture the complexity of Augustine’s thought. As concepts, ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ came to be employed only in the 18th century. Moreover, the binary overlooks Augustine’s more nuanced account of hope as a virtue that finds a middle way between the vices of presumption and despair. The difference that it makes when we understand hope as a virtue is often missed in contemporary discourse, which tends to characterise hope as an attitude or emotion and to…

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The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness

The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness

Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my…

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Utopian thinking prompts us to get real about society’s needs

Utopian thinking prompts us to get real about society’s needs

William Paris writes: All politics seems to operate under the demand to be realistic. There is no quicker end to a political conversation than to describe someone’s ideas as ‘utopian’. The power of this pejorative draws upon seemingly obvious facts concerning human nature, empirical realities and social constraints. Whether we are considering demands to restructure our economic systems, how nations police citizenship claims and their borders, or our relationship to the environment, when these positions are called ‘utopian’, the assumption…

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Scepticism is a way of life that allows democracy to flourish

Scepticism is a way of life that allows democracy to flourish

Nicholas Tampio writes: Think about a time when you changed your mind. Maybe you heard about a crime, and rushed to judgment about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Perhaps you wanted your country to go to war, and realise now that maybe that was a bad idea. Or possibly you grew up in a religious or partisan household, and switched allegiances when you got older. Part of maturing is developing intellectual humility. You’ve been wrong before; you could…

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The man rethinking the definition of reality

The man rethinking the definition of reality

Tom Chatfield writes: If you woke up one day and discovered that you were living in a virtual world – that everything you’d ever known was, like the Matrix, a form of hyper-realistic simulation – what would this imply for your hopes, dreams and experiences? Would it reveal them all to be lies: deceptions devoid of authenticity? For most people, the intuitive answer to all these questions is “yes”. After all, the Matrix movies depict a dystopian nightmare in which…

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How one man changed the meaning of past present and future

How one man changed the meaning of past present and future

Emily Thomas writes: Events happen in order – you whisk icing before decorating a cake. Some events seem to be present, while others are future or past. A birthday party lies in the future, approaching slowly. When the big day arrives, the party is present; afterwards, it slips into memory and the past. Pastness, presentness and futurity seem to be real features of the world, but are they really? Philosophers disagree, and this debate pervades books such as Time and…

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Rediscovering the value of cynicism

Rediscovering the value of cynicism

Arthur Brooks writes: Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture. Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns. Whether cynicism is more warranted now than ever is yours to decide. But it won’t change…

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Hope isn’t optimism

Hope isn’t optimism

David B Feldman and Benjamin W Corn write: Hope is not wishful thinking, optimism, or ‘the power of positive thinking’. There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, of course. Research shows that optimism is associated with many beneficial outcomes. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same as hope. The Cambridge Dictionary defines optimism as ‘the feeling that in the future good things are more likely to happen than bad things’. The influential psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who have built…

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Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism

Why so many people still don’t understand anti-Semitism

Yair Rosenberg writes: Most people do not realize that Jews make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population and 0.2 percent of the world’s population. This means simply finding them takes a lot of effort. But every year in Western countries, including America, Jews are the No. 1 target of anti-religious hate crimes. Anti-Semites are many things, but they aren’t lazy. They’re animated by one of the most durable and deadly conspiracy theories in human history. This past Saturday…

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The worrisome rise of Non-Fungible Tokens

The worrisome rise of Non-Fungible Tokens

Caleb Scharf writes: Humans are very good at inventing commodities, and we’ve been at it for a long time. See that pebble over there? Well, that’s a better pebble than all these others, and if you give me something in exchange for it, I’ll let you take ownership. It’ll be your pebble, forever. And soon there will be a market in pebbles, a pebble community, pebble exhibitions and auctions filled with pebble speculators, pebble exchanges, and pebble artists. The deeper,…

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Paraconsistent logics find structure in our inconsistent world

Paraconsistent logics find structure in our inconsistent world

Zach Weber writes: Here is a dilemma you may find familiar. On the one hand, a life well lived requires security, safety and regularity. That might mean a family, a partner, a steady job. On the other hand, a life well lived requires new experiences, risk and authentic independence, in ways incompatible with a family or partner or job. Day to day, it can seem not just challenging to balance these demands, but outright impossible. That’s because, we sense, the…

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The elephant who could be a person

The elephant who could be a person

Jill Lepore writes: The subject of the most important animal-rights case of the 21st century was born in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Very soon after that, a tousle-haired baby, she became trapped in human history. She was captured, locked in a cage, trucked to the coast, and loaded onto a roaring 747 that soared across the Pacific until it made landfall in the United States. She spent her earliest years in Florida, not far from Disney World, before she…

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Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Daniel Everett writes: The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’? Remarkably, in the brilliant light…

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Our most abstract concepts emerged as solutions to our needs

Our most abstract concepts emerged as solutions to our needs

Matthieu Queloz writes: ‘Ideas, Mr Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!’ scoffed a hard-headed businessman over dinner with Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian essayist and historian of the French Revolution. The businessman had had enough of Carlyle’s endless droning on about ideas – what do ideas matter anyway? Carlyle shot back: ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.’ Ideas…

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The spectacular originality of Coleridge’s theory of ideas

The spectacular originality of Coleridge’s theory of ideas

Peter Cheyne writes: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. His published works containing much of his philosophical prose span from The Statesman’s Manual (1816), which set out his theory of imagination and symbolism; Biographia Literaria (1817), one of the great and founding works of literary criticism; The…

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Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human

Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human

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Julian Baggini writes: Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off. While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at…

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