Despite what some may believe, philosophy is prevalent and holds a great level of importance in today’s society. It allows us to examine the most fundamental issues that we face as self-aware beings and apply them to a variety of different topics, from free-will to politics to interpretation. To get you started on your own road of contemplation, we’ve compiled some thought-provoking ideas from David Edmonds’s and Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy Bites Again:

Headline image credit: The Thinker. Photo by Dan McKay. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr. All slideshow background images CC0/public domain via Pixabay or CC BY 2.0 via Flickr (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7.1) (7.2) (8) (9)

The post Nine pieces of thought-provoking philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• Making choices between policies and real lives
• The “comfort women” and Japan’s honor
• Adderall and desperation

 

To celebrate the publication of our second Philosophy Bites book, Philosophy Bites Back, authors Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds released a 39 minute podcast episode of a wide range of philosophers answering the question ‘Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?’

Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

[See post to listen to audio]

Twitter Competition
We also asked you to let us know on Twitter who your favourite philosopher is and why. The competition is now closed and we received over 150 entries, which you can view on Storify. We can now reveal the winning entries,  as chosen by Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds!

View the story “Philosophy Bites Back: The Winning Tweets” on Storify

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Competition results: who’s your favourite philosopher? appeared first on OUPblog.

To celebrate the publication of our second Philosophy Bites book, Philosophy Bites Back, authors Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds have released a 39 minute podcast episode of a wide range of philosophers answering the question ‘Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?’

Listen to Who’s Your Favourite Philosopher?

[See post to listen to audio]

Twitter Competition
We’d like to hear who is your favourite philosopher. Pick your favourite philosopher and let us know why in a tweet (140 characters or fewer), incorporating the hashtag #philosophybites. We’ll be monitoring your suggestions from @oupacademic and @philosophybites. The competition closes on  10 January 2013 and our top five entrants will receive a copy of Philosophy Bites Back. The winning entries and a selection of shortlisted tweets will be posted to OUPblog in January 2013, and may well also appear in the next book in the Philosophy Bites series. To get you started, here are a few of ideas:

TIM CRANE: Descartes. Not because what I think what he said was true, but because he was incredibly clear in his vision of things.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Nietzsche has a fascinating metaphysical structure to his thought, writes beautifully, and has a sense of humour.

RAYMOND GEUSS: Thucydides. My favourite philosopher because nobody else thinks he’s a philosopher, but I think he is.

BRIAN LEITER: Oh Fred. Nietzsche. I call him Fred. Because he’s a great writer, and he’s more right than wrong about most of the things he has views on.

GALEN STRAWSON: Kant. Every time I hear the words the Critique of Pure Reason I involuntarily salivate.

Good luck!

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service and a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University. Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University. They are co-authors of Philosophy Bites (OUP, 2010) and Philosophy Bites Back (OUP, 2012), which are based on their highly successful series of podcasts. You can also follow @philosophybites on Twitter.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image credit: Twitter ‘t’ icon by mfilej, Flickr.

The post Competition: who’s your favourite philosopher? appeared first on OUPblog.

Tweet

By Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton

Doctors have long been able to heal the body: now scientists are developing radical ways of altering the mind. Governments must determine what practices to permit – and for this they need rational arguments to draw relevant distinctions. Time to call on the philosophers…?

You can’t find your children. You’ve gone to a busy park, there are lots of people around, evening has set in, and you’re in a terrible panic. Wouldn’t it be great if your kids were fluorescent green? That would make it far easier to keep tabs on them.

A decade ago scientists created a rabbit, Alba, which glowed in the dark. One day scientists could do the same for humans. Science is advancing faster than morality can keep up. Scientists have developed, or in the near future will develop, products and techniques that could alter us in fundamental ways.

First, and most familiar, are physical enhancements to approve our appearance or our physical capabilities. We’ve become blasé about chin tucks, and breast implants, and Botox. Athletes use science (often illegally) to improve their performance (steroids and the like).

Second, there are mood altering drugs: Prozac, for example. These can be helpful in calming us down, or picking us up.

Third, there are a variety of cognitive enhancements. Those of us who can’t start the day without a coffee, well-understand that some chemicals can improve concentration or alertness. There’s been a trend among college students, particularly in the US, to take drugs like Ritalin or Adderall: these allow them to spend more time revising for exams, or writing essays. Is that cheating? Scientists have already genetically altered mice to improve their memory: it may not be long before they can do this to humans – boosting our ability to remember long strings of numbers, or pick up a foreign language. Wouldn’t that be great?

Fourth, and most intriguing of all, there are so-called moral enhancements. We’re discovering exactly what chemicals are involved when we decide to trust another person: thus, we can alter how much one person trusts another with the hormone oxytocin. Just imagine what the implications would be if we could disperse oxytocin through air-conditioning systems.

There are risks in legalizing some of these enhancements, but also costs in prohibiting them – for many of these enhancements may make life happier and more fulfilling. But there are other issues at stake: there are very real concerns that these new options will result in growing inequality, between those who can afford to take them and those who can’t.

Philosophers of different stripes are on different sides of this issue. Some like Julian Savulescu are keen that we use scientific breakthroughs to enhance our lives; others such as Michael Sandel are wary of the drive to achieve perfection. He thinks that, for example, the use of genetic enhancements to create superb athletes, even if legalised, would be bad for humanity; it would take away from what he calls the ‘gifted’ nature of our capabilities and is a kind of hubris.

Certainly many of these new advances often elicit a ‘yuk’ reaction from non-scientists – a sense of disgust when we see, say, a human-shaped ear on the back of a mouse. Professor Savulescu believes we shouldn’t put too much stress on these ‘yuk’ reactions. He says it’s important to go one step beyond just acknowledging our feelings and ask: ‘Are there are any good reasons for or against that course of action’?”

With mind-boggling scientific breakthroughs hitting the headlines on a weekly basis, we need to tackle the subject of boundaries: what should and shouldn’t be permitted. This, of course, is a matter for society as a whole. But philosophers, in particular, are scrambling behin

What does Simon Blackburn have to say about morality? What does A.C. Grayling think about atheism? Alain de Botton about the aesthetics of architecture? Adrian Moore about infinity? Will Kymlicka about minority rights? For the last three years, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have challenged some of the world’s leading philosophers to hold forth on their favourite topics for the highly successful Philosophy Bites podcast. Now 25 of these entertaining, personal, and illuminating conversations are presented in print for the first time.

Sticking with the podcast theme, David Edmunds interviewed Nigel Warburton about the book and the podcast, as well as what it’s like to speak to all of these fantastic philosophers. You can hear the interview in the below podcast.

We will also be running a very exciting Twitter competition in conjunction with Waterstone’s around the time of the book’s UK publication, 9 August. Keep an eye on Waterstone’s Twitter feed for further details.

David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service, and is the author of Wittgenstein’s Poker (with John Eidinow), Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and Rousseau’s Dog. He is currently a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a Contributing Editor for Prospect Magazine.

Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and author of bestselling books Philosophy: The Basics and Philosophy: The Classics. He also recently wrote Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. He regularly teaches courses on aesthetics at Tate Modern and writes a monthly column ‘Everyday Philosophy’ for Prospect Magazine. He runs several blogs including Virtual Philosopher and Art and Allusion.

Today I am pleased to be able to bring you a new video from our friends at Meet the Author. Nigel Warburton is the author of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, and here he is explaining what inspired him to write the book, and what the key arguments in free speech are.

He has previously written for OUPblog here, and an excerpt from his book can be found here.  Check out the video after the break.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nigel Warburton is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, as well as the author of a number of bestselling books on the subject. His latest book, Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction, examines important questions facing modern society about the value and limits of free speech. In the blog below he talks about Geert Wilders, a right-wing Dutch MP who was recently denied entry into Britain.

There is a constant flow of stories about free speech in the news, so constant that it is almost invisible. Then, every few years, a particularly poignant event occurs and for a few weeks all the media are focused on the topic. Before I began writing Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction the furore about the Danish cartoons had enflamed discussion. Previously it had been the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and then the libel case that David Irving brought against Deborah Lipstadt in relation to Holocaust denial.

For the last few weeks Geert Wilders’ 16 minute film Fitna and the UK Home Office’s decision not to let him enter the country on the grounds that it ‘would threaten community security and therefore public security’ have been the trigger for self-reflection on where we want to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech – a major theme of my book. It is gratifying to see that this is a live issue today, not a merely academic topic.

Wilders’ film juxtaposes disturbing scenes of the results of terrorism - including from 9/11, the Madrid bombings, an execution of a hostage - with verses from the Koran which allegedly justify and encourage violence. There are clips of extremists urging violence against a range of groups and a small child who has been indoctrinated with hatred. The second half of the film suggests that in the Netherlands the increasing number of Muslims present a threat to democracy and security, represented by the most famous of the Danish cartoons, Muhamed with a turban in the form of a ticking bomb. The film seems to imply that just about any Muslim is a potential threat to democracy and security. It is in many ways crude. But for most people discussing the film, its message has ceased to be the most relevant aspect. This has become a debate about to what degree we should tolerate speech that many people find offensive and the circumstances under which a Government should prevent someone from speaking in the UK.

Wilders, a right wing Dutch MP, had been invited to show and discuss his film in the House of Lords, and the film-showing went on in his absence. But anyone can access Fitna on YouTube. It hasn’t been censored. But preventing the film’s creator from discussing the film and its message with British politicians sent a strange message about how we view free speech in this country. As I write, Wilders is considering suing the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for blatant discrimination and has the backing of the Dutch foreign minister Maxime Verhagen, who declared: ‘Everybody, but especially a Parliamentarian from an European Union member country, has the right to freedom of speech’.

In defence of the decision to deny Wilders entry at least one MP cited John Stuart Mill on the necessary limits to free speech, namely at the point where speech is tantamount to incitement to violence. Mill is subtler than this suggests. He used a famous example contrasting someone declaring ‘Corndealers are starvers of the poor’ on the steps of a corndealer’s house (justifiably censored) with the same view expressed in the editorial of a newspaper (a view that we should tolerate). In other words, context, which in turn affects likely outcomes should be an aspect of any decision to curtail speech.

My view about the British Government’s action is that it has inadvertently and against its wishes illustrated another aspect of Mill’s thesis in On Liberty, namely that speech we find offensive can energise us and stop us falling asleep at the post since it encourages us to reflect on why we disagree with its message. That is a reason to tolerate it and refute it with counter-speech. Without this sort of challenge there is the risk that our beliefs will just be dead dogma. Fortunately the Internet provides an easy way to view Fitna and be stimulated in just this way. The Government’s ban sent many of us scurrying to our trackpads to find out what the fuss was about and as a result are probably a great deal clearer about where we stand on this issue than before.

Nigel Warburton also did a podcast on this subject for The Guardian. Another podcast based on the first chapter of Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction can be found here.