By: John Priest,
on 10/1/2016
Known as the “first philosopher of the Arabs,” al-Kindī was one of the most important mathematicians, physicians, astronomers and philosophers of his time. He composed hundreds of treatises, using many of the tools of Greek philosophy to address themes in Islamic thought.
The post Philosopher of the month: al-Kindī appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Cassandra Gill,
on 9/5/2016
It’s back-to-school time again – time for getting back into the swing of things and adapting to busy schedules. Summer vacation is over, and it’s back to structured days of homework and exam prep. These rigid fall schedules have probably been the norm for you ever since you were in kindergarten.
The post How much do you know about ancient Greek education? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Estefania Ospina,
on 8/31/2016
There has lately been something like an arms race in literary studies to name whatever comes after postmodernism. Post-postmodernism, cosmodernism, digimodernism, automodernism, altermodernism, and metamodernism rank among the more popular prospects.
The post The last -ism? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 2/27/2016
The OUP Philosophy team have selected Plato (c. 429–c. 347 BC) as their February Philosopher of the Month. After his death in 347 BC, educators at the Academy continued teaching Plato’s works into the Roman era. Today he is perhaps the most widely studied philosopher of all time.
The post How well do you know Plato? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: John Priest,
on 2/7/2016
The OUP Philosophy team have selected Plato (c. 429–c.347 BC) as their February Philosopher of the Month. The best known and most widely studied of all the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato laid the groundwork for Western philosophy and Christian theology. Plato was most likely born in Athens, to Ariston and Perictione, a noble, politically active family.
The post Philosopher of the month: Plato appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 1/26/2016
A creatively vital use of an emerging medium
By: Eleanor Jackson,
on 12/22/2015
2015 has seen a special landmark in cultural history: the 2500th anniversary of the official ‘birth’ of comedy. It was in the spring of 486 BC that Athens first included plays called comedies (literally, ‘revel-songs’) in the programme of its Great Dionysia festival. Although semi-improvised comic performances had a long prehistory in the folk culture of Athens, it was only from 486 that comedy became, alongside tragedy (which had an older place in Athenian festivals), one of the two defining archetypes of theatre
The post Did comedy kill Socrates? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: William Bocholis,
on 10/17/2015
How do opera and philosophy intersect? At first glance, this might seem like a strange question, for opera and philosophy are unlikely bedfellows. To speak of philosophy conjures up images of dry abstraction and bookish head-scratching, whereas to talk of opera is to call to mind cacophonous spectacles of colours and voices, of multitudinous audiences enthralled by impassioned song.
The post Sex, death, booze, and mung bean sandwiches appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Joe Hitchcock,
on 7/23/2015
Can you imagine a concert hall full of chimpanzees sitting, concentrated, and feeling 'transported' by the beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Even harder would be to imagine a chimpanzee feeling a certain pleasure when standing in front of a beautiful sculpture. The appreciation of beauty and its qualities, according to Aristotle’s definition, from his Poetics (order, symmetry, and clear delineation and definiteness), is uniquely human.
The post Beauty and the brain appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 5/15/2015
I used to climb trees when I was young (and I still, on occasion, do). As a boy in Iraq I had a favoured loquat tree, with branches that bore leathery, serrated leaves, shiny on the upper surface, and densely matted with fine hairs underneath. It seemed so big, though I now reflect it was probably rather small. I would haul myself up and over the lowest branch, making whatever use of the twists and folds of the trunk as provided purchase to my small feet.
The post For the love of trees appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sarah Tomlinson,
on 4/22/2015
When I was a college sophomore, I thought everything I needed to know could be learned from a book. My best friend, Claire*, and I decided to create an independent study on the topic that most fascinated and confounded us at that age: love. We spent hours planning the syllabus in her second-floor single, with [...]
By: Mohamed Sesay,
on 4/9/2015
Philosophy is one of the oldest fields of study in the world, branching out to various areas. How well do you know the writings of the most influential philosophers? Do you know the difference between sayings from Kant, Nietzsche, and Locke? Take the quiz below to see how well read you are in philosophy.
The post Can you match the quote to the philosopher? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maryann Yin,
on 3/18/2015
Have you ever felt puzzled by Plato’s allegory of the cave? The video embedded above features a four-minute lesson about this ancient text which can be found in Book VII of The Republic.
Over at the TED-Ed website, viewers can access a quiz, a discussion board, and more resources. Click here to download a digital edition of The Republic.
Add a Comment
By: Mark Adams,
on 3/11/2015
When I tell people I've spent the last three years working on a book about Atlantis, they usually have two questions. The first almost always goes unspoken: Are you nuts? (I don't think so, but perhaps I'd be the last to know.) The follow-up question — which almost always does get asked — is where [...]
By: KatherineS,
on 2/23/2015
Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. During February, we will be posting a series of extracts that cover the viewpoints of all four characters in Tetralogue. What follows is an extract exploring Sarah's perspective.
The post Trains of thought: Sarah appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 2/16/2015
Tetralogue by Timothy Williamson is a philosophy book for the commuter age. In a tradition going back to Plato, Timothy Williamson uses a fictional conversation to explore questions about truth and falsity, knowledge and belief. Four people with radically different outlooks on the world meet on a train and start talking about what they believe. Their conversation varies from cool logical reasoning to heated personal confrontation. Each starts off convinced that he or she is right, but then doubts creep in. During February, we will be posting a series of extracts that cover the viewpoints of all four characters in Tetralogue. What follows is an extract exploring Roxanna’s perspective.
Roxanna is a heartless logician with an exotic background. She would much rather be right than be liked, and as a result she argues mercilessly with the other characters.
Roxana: You appear not to know much about logic.
Sarah: What did you say?
Roxana: I said that you appear not to know much about logic.
Sarah: And you appear not to know much about manners.
Roxana: If you want to understand truth and falsity, logic will be more useful than manners. Do any of you remember what Aristotle said about truth and falsity?
Bob: Sorry, I know nothing about Aristotle.
Zac: It’s on the tip of my tongue.
Sarah: Aristotelian science is two thousand years out of date.
Roxana: None of you knows. Aristotle said ‘To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true’. Those elementary principles are fundamental to the logic of truth. They remain central in contemporary research. They were endorsed by the greatest contributor to the logic of truth, the modern Polish logician Alfred Tarski.
Bob: Never heard of him. I’m sure Aristotle’s saying is very wise; I wish I knew what it meant.
Roxana: I see that I will have to begin right at the very beginning with these three.
Sarah: We can manage quite well without a lecture from you, thank you very much.
Roxana: It is quite obvious that you can’t.
Roxana: It is quite obvious that you can’t.
Zac: I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name.
Roxana: Of course you didn’t. I didn’t say it.
Zac: May I ask what it is?
Roxana: You may, but it is irrelevant.
Bob: Well, don’t keep us all in suspense. What is it?
Roxana: It is ‘Roxana’.
Zac: Nice name, Roxana. Mine is ‘Zac’, by the way.
Bob: I hope our conversation wasn’t annoying you.
Roxana: Its lack of intellectual discipline was only slightly irritating.
Bob: Sorry, we got carried away. Just to complete the introductions, I’m Bob, and this is Sarah.
Roxana: That is enough time on trivialities. I will explain the error in what the woman called ‘Sarah’ said.
Sarah: Call me ‘Sarah’, not ‘the woman called “Sarah” ’, if you please.
Bob: ‘Sarah’ is shorter.
Sarah: Not only that. We’ve been introduced. It’s rude to describe me at arm’s length, as though we weren’t acquainted.
Roxana: If we must be on first name terms, so be it. Do not expect them to stop me from explaining your error. First, I will illustrate Aristotle’s observation about truth and falsity with an example so simple that even you should all be capable of understanding it. I will make an assertion.
Bob: Here goes.
Roxana: Do not interrupt.
Bob: I was always the one talking at the back of the class.
Zac: Don’t worry about Bob, Roxana. We’d all love to hear your assertion. Silence, please, everyone.
Roxana: Samarkand is in Uzbekistan.
Sarah: Is that it?
Roxana: That was the assertion.
Bob: So that’s where Samarkand is. I always wondered.
Roxana: Concentrate on the logic, not the geography. In making that assertion about Samarkand, I speak truly if, and only if, Samarkand is in Uzbekistan. I speak falsely if, and only if, Samarkand is not in Uzbekistan.
Zac: Is that all, Roxana?
Roxana: It is enough.
Bob: I think I see. Truth is telling it like it is. Falsity is telling it like it isn’t. Is that what Aristotle meant?
Roxana: That paraphrase is acceptable for the present.
Have you got something you want to say to Roxanna? Do you agree or disagree with her? Tetralogue author Timothy Williamson will be getting into character and answering questions from Roxanna’s perspective via @TetralogueBook on Friday 20th March from 2-3pm GMT. Tweet your questions to him and wait for Roxanna’s response!
The post Trains of thought: Roxanna appeared first on OUPblog.
By: KatherineS,
on 11/6/2014
This selection of ancient Greek literature includes philosophy, poetry, drama, and history. It introduces some of the great classical thinkers, whose ideas have had a profound influence on Western civilization.
Jason and the Golden Fleece by Apollonius of Rhodes
Apollonius’ Argonautica is the dramatic story of Jason’s voyage in the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece, and how he wins the aid of the Colchian princess and sorceress Medea, as well as her love. Written in the third century BC, it was influential on the Latin poets Catullus and Ovid, as well as on Virgil’s Aeneid.
Poetics by Aristotle
This short treatise has been described as the most influential book on poetry ever written. It is a very readable consideration of why art matters which also contains practical advice for poets and playwrights that is still followed today.
The Trojan Women and Other Plays by Euripides
One of the greatest Greek tragedians, Euripides wrote at least eighty plays, of which seventeen survive complete. The universality of his themes means that his plays continue to be performed and adapted all over the world. In this volume three great war plays, The Trojan Women, Hecuba, and Andromache, explore suffering and the endurance of the female spirit in the aftermath of bloody conflict.
The Histories by Herodotus
Herodotus was called “the father of history” by Cicero because the scale on which he wrote had never been attempted before. His history of the Persian Wars is an astonishing achievement, and is not only a fascinating history of events but is full of digression and entertaining anecdote. It also provokes very interesting questions about historiography.
The Iliad by Homer
Homer’s two great epic poems, the Odyssey and the Iliad, have created stories that have enthralled readers for thousands of year. The Iliad describes a tragic episode during the siege of Troy, sparked by a quarrel between the leader of the Greek army and its mightiest warrior, Achilles; Achilles’ anger and the death of the Trojan hero Hector play out beneath the watchful gaze of the gods.
Republic by Plato
Plato’s dialogue presents Socrates and other philosophers discussing what makes the ideal community. It is essentially an enquiry into morality, and why justice and goodness are fundamental. Harmonious human beings are as necessary as a harmonious society, and Plato has profound things to say about many aspects of life. The dialogue contains the famous myth of the cave, in which only knowledge and wisdom will liberate man from regarding shadows as reality.
Greek Lives by Plutarch
Plutarch wrote forty-six biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans in a series of paired, or parallel, Lives. This selection of nine Greek lives includes Alexander the Great, Pericles, and Lycurgus, and the Lives are notable for their insights into personalities, as well as for what they reveal about such things as the Spartan regime and social system.
Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra by Sophocles
In these three masterpieces Sophocles established the foundation of Western drama. His three central characters are faced with tests of their will and character, and their refusal to compromise their principles has terrible results. Antigone and Electra are bywords for female resolve, while Oedipus’ discovery that he has committed both incest and patricide has inspired much psychological analysis, and given his name to Freud’s famous complex.
Heading image: Porch of Maidens by Thermos. CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post A reading list of Ancient Greek classics appeared first on OUPblog.
By: PennyF,
on 11/6/2014
The ancient writers of Greece and Rome are familiar to many, but what do their voices really tell us about who they were and what they believed? In Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome, Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke provide a vibrant and distinctive introduction to twelve of the greatest authors from ancient Greece and Rome, writers whose voices still resonate across the centuries. Below is an infographic that shows how each of the great classical authors would describe their voice today, if they could.
Download the infographic in pdf or jpeg.
Featured image credit: “Exterior of the Colosseum” by Diana Ringo. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Ancient voices for today [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Mohamed Sesay,
on 10/12/2014
Since its advent in the early 1970s, bioethics has exploded, with practitioners’ thinking expressed not only in still-expanding scholarly venues but also in the gamut of popular media. Not surprisingly, bioethicists’ disputes are often linked with technological advances of relatively recent vintage, including organ transplantation and artificial-reproductive measures like preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal genetic testing. It’s therefore tempting to figure that the only pertinent reflective sources are recent as well, extending back — glancingly at most — to Immanuel Kant’s groundbreaking 18th-century reflections on autonomy. Surely Plato, who perforce could not have tackled such issues, has nothing at all to contribute to current debates.
This view is false — and dangerously so — because it deprives us of avenues and impetuses of reflection that are distinctive and could help us negotiate present quandaries. First, key topics in contemporary bioethics are richly addressed in Greek thought both within Plato’s corpus and through his critical engagement with Hippocratic medicine. This is so regarding the nature of the doctor-patient tie, medical professionalism, and medicine’s societal embedment, whose construction ineluctably concerns us all individually and as citizens irrespective of profession.
Second, the most pressing bioethical topics — whatever their identity — ultimately grip us not on technological grounds but instead for their bearing on human flourishing (in Greek, eudaimonia). Surprisingly, this foundational plane is often not singled out in bioethical discussions, which regularly tend toward circumscription. The fundamental grip obtains either way, but its neglect as a conscious focus harms our prospects for existing in a way that is most thoughtful, accountable, and holistic. Again a look at Plato can help, for his handling of all salient topics shows fruitfully expansive contextualization.
Regarding the doctor-patient tie, attempts to circumvent Scylla and Charybdis — extremes of paternalism and autonomy, both oppositional modes — are garnering significant bioethical attention. Dismayingly given the stakes, prominent attempts to reconceive the tie fail because they veer into paternalism, allegedly supplanted by autonomy’s growing preeminence in recent decades. If tweaking and reconfiguration of existing templates are insufficient, what sources not yet plumbed might offer fresh reference points for bioethical conversation?
Prima facie, invoking Plato, staunch proponent of top-down autocracy in the Republic, looks misguided. In fact, however, the trajectory of his thought — Republic to Laws via the Statesman — provides a rare look at how this profound ancient philosopher came at once to recognize core human fallibility and to stare firmly at its implications without capitulating to pessimism about human aptitudes generally. Captivated no longer by the extravagant gifts of a few — philosophers of Kallipolis, the Republic’s ideal city — Plato comes to appreciate for the first time the intellectual and ethical aptitudes of ordinary citizens and nonphilosophical professionals.
Human motivation occupies Plato in the Laws, his final dialogue. His unprecedented handling of it there and philosophical trajectory on the topic warrant our consideration. While the Republic shows Plato’s unvarnished confidence in philosophers to rule — indeed, even one would suffice (502b, 540d) — the Laws insists that human nature as such entails that no one could govern without succumbing to arrogance and injustice (713c). Even one with “adequate” theoretical understanding could not properly restrain himself should he come to be in charge: far from reliably promoting communal welfare as his paramount concern, he would be distracted by and cater to his own yearnings (875b). “Adequate” understanding is what we have at best, but only “genuine” apprehension — that of philosophers in the Republic, seen in the Laws as purely wishful — would assure incorruptibility.
The Laws’ collaborative model of the optimal doctor-patient tie in Magnesia, that dialogue’s ideal city, is one striking outcome of Plato’s recognition that even the best among us are fallible in both insight and character. Shared human aptitudes enable reciprocal exchanges of logoi (rational accounts), with patients’ contributing as equal, even superior, partners concerning eudaimonia. This doctor-patient tie is firmly rooted in society at large, which means for Plato that there is close and unveiled continuity between medicine and human existence generally in values’ application. From a contemporary standpoint, the Laws suggests a fresh approach — one that Plato himself arrived at only by pressing past the Republic’s attachment to philosophers’ profound intellectual and values-edge, whose bioethical counterpart is a persistent investment in the same regarding physicians.
If values-spheres aren’t discrete, it’s unsurprising that medicine’s quest to demarcate medical from non-medical values, which extends back to the American Medical Association’s original Code of Medical Ethics (1847), has been combined with an inability to make it stick. In addition, a tension between the medical profession’s healing mission and associated virtues, on the one side, and other goods, particularly remuneration, on the other, is present already in that code. This conflict is now more overt, with rampancy foreseeable in financial incentives’ express provision to intensify or reduce care and to improve doctors’ behavior without concern for whether relevant qualities (e.g., self-restraint, courage) belong to practitioners themselves.
“As Plato rightly reminds us, professional and other endeavors transpire and gain their traction from their socio-political milieu”
Though medicine’s greater pecuniary occupation is far from an isolated event, the human import of it is great. Remuneration’s increasing use to shape doctors’ behavior is harmful not just because it sends the flawed message that health and remuneration are commensurable but for what it reveals more generally about our priorities. Plato’s nuanced account of goods (agatha), which does not orbit tangible items but covers whatever may be spoken of as good, may be helpful here, particularly its addressing of where and why goods are — or aren’t — cross-categorically translatable.
Furthermore, if Plato is right that certain appetites, including that for financial gain, are by nature insatiable — as weakly susceptible to real fulfillment as the odds of filling a sieve or leaky jar are dim (Gorgias 493a-494a) — then even as we hope to make doctors more virtuous via pecuniary incentives, we may actually be promoting vice. Engagement with Plato supports our retreat from calibrated remuneration and greater devotion to sources of inspiration that occupy the same plane of good as the features of doctors we want to promote. If the goods at issue aren’t commensurable, then the core reward for right conduct and attitudes by doctors shouldn’t be monetary but something more in keeping with the tier of good reflected thereby, such as appreciative expressions visible to the community (a Platonic example is seats of honor at athletic games, Laws 881b). Of course, this directional shift shouldn’t be sprung on doctors and medical students in a vacuum. Instead, human values-education (paideia) must be devotedly and thoughtfully instilled in educational curricula from primary school on up. From this vantage point, Plato’s vision of paideia as a lifelong endeavor is worth a fresh look.
As Plato rightly reminds us, professional and other endeavors transpire and gain their traction from their socio-political milieu: we belong first to human communities, with professions’ meaning and broader purposes rooted in that milieu. The guiding values and priorities of this human setting must be transparent and vigorously discussed by professionals and non-professionals alike, whose ability to weigh in is, as the Laws suggests, far more substantive than intra-professional standpoints usually acknowledge. This same line of thought, combined with Plato’s account of universal human fallibility, bears on the matter of medicine’s continued self-policing.
Linda Emanuel claims that “professional associations — whether national, state or county, specialty, licensing, or accrediting — are the natural parties to articulate tangible standards for professional accountability. Almost by definition, there are no other entities that have such ability and extensive responsibility to be the guardians of health care values — for the medical profession and for society” (53-54). Further, accountability “procedures” may include “a moral disposition, with only an internal conscience for monitoring accountability” (54). On grounds above all of our fallibility, which is strongly operative both with and absent malice, the Laws foregrounds reciprocal oversight of all, including high officials, not just from within but across professional and sociopolitical roles; crucially, no one venue is the arbiter in all cases. Whatever the number of intra-medical umbrellas that house the profession’s oversight, transparency operates within circumscribed bounds at most, and medicine remains the source of the very standards to which practitioners — and “good” patients — will be held. Moreover, endorsing moral self-oversight here without undergirding pedagogical and aspirational structures is less likely to be effective than to hold constant or even amplify countervailing motivations.
As can be only briefly suggested here, not only the themes but also their intertwining makes further bioethical consideration of Plato vastly promising. I’m not proposing our endorsement of Plato’s account as such. Rather, some positions themselves, alongside the rich expansiveness and trajectory of his explorations, are two of Plato’s greatest legacies to us — both of which, however, have been largely untapped to date. Not only does reflection on Plato stand to enrich current bioethical debates regarding the doctor-patient tie, medical professionalism, and medicine’s societal embedment, it offers a fresh orientation to pressing debates on other bioethical topics, prominent among them high-stakes discord over the technologically-spurred project of radical human “enhancement.”
Headline image credit: Doctor Office 1. Photo by Subconsci Productions. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
The post Plato and contemporary bioethics appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 9/8/2014
The first question of moral philosophy, going back to Plato, is “how ought I to live my life?”. Perhaps the second, following close on the heels of the first, can be taken to be “ought I to live morally or not?”, assuming that one can “get away with” being immoral. Another, more familiar way of phrasing this second question is “why be moral?”, where this is elliptical for something like, “will it be good for me and my life to be moral, or would I be better off being immoral, as long as I can get away with it?”.
Bringing together the ancient Greek conception of happiness with a modern conception of self-respect, it turns out to be bad to be a bad person, while in fact, it is good to be a good person. Here are some reasons why:
(1) Because being bad is bad. Some have thought that being bad or immoral can be good for a person, especially when we can “get away with it”, but there are some good reasons for thinking this is false. The most important reason is that being bad or immoral is self-disrespecting and it is hard to imagine being happy without self-respect. Here’s one quick argument:
Being moral (or good) is necessary for having self-respect.
Self-respect is necessary for happiness.
____________________________________________
Therefore, being good is necessary for happiness.
Of course, a full defense of this syllogism would require more than can be given in a blog post, but hopefully, it isn’t too hard to see the ways in which lying, cheating, and stealing – or being immoral in general – is incompatible with having genuine self-respect. (Of course, cheaters may think they have self-respect, but do you really think Lance Armstrong was a man of self-respect, whatever he may have thought of himself?)
(2) Because it is the only way to have a chance at having self-respect. We can only have self-respect if we respect who we actually are, we can’t if we only respect some false image of ourselves. So, self-respect requires self-knowledge. And only people who can make just and fair self-assessments can have self-knowledge. And only just and fair people, good, moral people can make just and fair self-assessments. (This is a very compacted version of a long argument.)
(3) Because being good lets you see what is truly of value in the world. Part of what being good requires is that good people know what is good in the world and what is not. Bad people have bad values, good people have good values. Having good values means valuing what deserves to be valued and not valuing what does not deserve to be valued.
(4) Because a recent study of West Point cadets reveals that cadets with mixed motivations – some selfish, instrumental, and career-oriented, while others are “intrinsic” and responsive to the value of the job itself – do not perform as well cadets whose motivations are not mixed and are purely intrinsic. (See “The Secret of Effective Motivation”)
(5) Because being good means taking good care of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you are the most important thing in the world, or that nothing is more important than you. But, in normal circumstances, it does give you permission to take better care of yourself and your loved ones than complete strangers.
(6) Because being good means that while you can be passionate, you can choose what you are passionate about; it means that you don’t let your emotions, desires, wants, and needs “get the better of you” and “make” you do things that you later regret. It gives you true grit.
(7) Because being good means that you will be courageous and brave, in the face of danger and pain and social rejection. It gives you the ability to speak truth to power and “fight the good fight”. It helps you assess risk, spot traps, and seize opportunities. It helps you be successful.
(8) Because being good means that you will be wise as you can be when you are old and grey. Deep wisdom may not be open to everyone, since some simply might not have the intellectual wherewithal for it. (Think of someone with severe cognitive disabilities.) But we can all, of course, be as wise as it is possible for us to be. This won’t happen, however, by accident. Wise people have to be able to perspicuously see into the “heart of the matter”, and this won’t happen unless we care about the right things. And we won’t care about the right things unless we have good values, so being good will help make us be as wise as we can be.
(9) Because being good means that we are lovers of the good and, if we are lucky, it means that we will be loved by those who are themselves good. And being lovers of the good means that we become good at loving what is good, to the best of our ability. So, being good makes us become good lovers. And it is good to be a good lover, isn’t it? And good lovers who value what is good are more likely to be loved in return by people who also love the good. What could be better than being loved well by a good person who is your beloved?
(10) Because of 1-9 above, only good people can live truly happy lives. Only good people live the Good Life.
Headline image credit: Diogenes and Plato by Mattia Preti 1649. Capitoline Museums. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The post 10 reasons why it is good to be good appeared first on OUPblog.
By: ChloeF,
on 8/15/2014
The following is an extract from Comedy: A Very Short Introduction, by Matthew Bevis. It explores the relationship between laughter and aggression.
‘Laughter is men’s way of biting,’ Baudelaire proclaimed. The sociologist Norbert Elias offered a rejoinder: ‘He who laughs cannot bite.’ So does laughter embody or diffuse aggression? One theory, offered by the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, is that the laugh may be an aborted cry of concern, a way of announcing to a group that there has been a false alarm. The smile could operate in a similar way: when one of our ancestral primates saw another individual from a distance, he perhaps initially bared his canines as a threatening grimace before recognizing the individual as friend, not foe. So his grimace was abandoned halfway to produce a smile, which in turn may have evolved into a ritualized human greeting. Another researcher, Robert Provine, notes that chimp laughter is commonly triggered by physical contact (biting or tickling) or by the threat of such contact (chasing games) and argues that the ‘pant-pant’ of apes and the ‘ha-ha’ of humans evolved from the breathlessness of physical play. This, together with the show of teeth necessitated by the play face, has been ritualized into the rhythmic pant of the laugh. Behind the smile, then, may lie a socialized snarl; and behind the laugh, a play fight. But behind both of these facial expressions lie real snarls and real fights.
People often claim to be ‘only joking’, but many a true word is spoken in jest. Ridicule and derision are both rooted in laughter (from ridere, to laugh). The comic may loiter with shady intent on the borders of aggression; ‘a joke’, Aristotle suggested, ‘is a kind of abuse’. And comedy itself can be abused as well as used—racist and sexist jokes point to its potential cruelty. As Waters says of Price’s stand-up act in Trevor Griffiths’s The Comedians (1975): ‘Love, care, concern, call it what you like, you junked it over the side.’ Comedy is clearly at home in the company of insults, abuse, curses, and diatribes, but the mode can also lend an unusual inflection to these utterances. From Greek iambi to the licensed raillery of the Roman Saturnalia, from Pete and Dud on the implications of being called a fucking cunt to the game of The Dozens, in which numerous aspersions are cast upon Yo Mama’s character, something strange happens to aggression when it is stylized or performed. W. H. Auden pondered choreographed exchanges of insult—from Old English flyting to the modern-day exchanges of truck drivers— and observed that ‘the protagonists are not thinking about each other but about language and their pleasure in employing it inventively … Playful anger is intrinsically comic because, of all emotions, anger is the least compatible with play.’ From this perspective, comedy is the moment at which outrage becomes outrageous. Some kinds of ferocity can be delectable.
‘Playful anger’ sounds like a contradiction in terms, yet in Plato’s Philebus, Socrates notes ‘the curious mixture of pleasure and pain that lies in the malice of amusement’. Descartes suggests in The Passions of The Soul (1649) that ‘Derision or scorn is a sort of joy mingled with hatred.’ This chapter examines such curious mixtures and minglings of feeling by considering modes of comedy that seem to have a target in their sights—versions of satire, mock-heroic, parody, and caricature. We might turn first to the satirist; Walter Benjamin identified him as ‘the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization’. So the satirist is at once savage and civilized; he cuts us up after having been granted permission (perhaps even encouraged) to take that liberty. What is it, then, that we need this cannibal to do for us? The satirist, it would initially appear, is the comedian who allows audiences to join him on a mission. Satire is a scourge of vice, a spur to virtue; Horace imagines his ideal listener as ‘baring his teeth in a grin’. So far so good, but the listener may also get bitten from time to time: ‘What are you laughing at?’ the poet asks us, ‘Change the name and you are the subject of the story.’ Indeed, as Hamlet would later quip, ‘use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?’
Image credit: Business team laughing, © YanC, via iStock Photo.
The post Biting, whipping, tickling appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sara Pinotti,
on 8/3/2014
Plato famously said that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry. But with respect to one aspect of poetry, namely metaphor, many contemporary philosophers have made peace with the poets. In their view, we need metaphor. Without it, many truths would be inexpressible and unknowable. For example, we cannot describe feelings and sensations adequately without it. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins’s exceptionally powerful metaphor of despair:
selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless,
thoughts against thoughts in groans grind.
How else could precisely this kind of mood be expressed? Describing how things appear to our senses is also thought to require metaphor, as when we speak of the silken sound of a harp, the warm colours of a Titian, and the bold or jolly flavour of a wine. Science advances by the use of metaphors – of the mind as a computer, of electricity as a current, or of the atom as a solar system. And metaphysical and religious truths are often thought to be inexpressible in literal language. Plato condemned poets for claiming to provide knowledge they did not have. But if these philosophers are right, there is at least one poetic use of language that is needed for the communication of many truths.
In my view, however, this is the wrong way to defend the value of metaphor. Comparisons may well be indispensable for communication in many situations. We convey the unfamiliar by likening it to the familiar. But many hold that it is specifically metaphor – and no other kind of comparison – that is indispensable. Metaphor tells us things the words ‘like’ or ‘as’ never could. If true, this would be fascinating. It would reveal the limits of what is expressible in literal language. But no one has come close to giving a good argument for it. And in any case, metaphor does not have to be an indispensable means to knowledge in order to be as valuable as we take it to be.
Metaphor may not tell us anything that couldn’t be expressed by other means. But good metaphors have many other effects on readers than making them grasp some bit of information, and these are often precisely the effects the metaphor-user wants to have. There is far more to the effective use of language than transmitting information. My particular interest is in how art critics use metaphor to help us appreciate paintings, architecture, music, and other artworks. There are many reasons why metaphor matters, but art criticism reveals two reasons of particular importance.
Take this passage from John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Ruskin describes arriving in Venice by boat and seeing ‘the long ranges of columned palaces,—each with its black boat moored at the portal,—each with its image cast down, beneath its feet, upon that green pavement which every breeze broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation’, and observing how ‘the front of the Ducal palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation’.
One thing Ruskin’s metaphors do is describe the waters of Venice and the Ducal palace at an extraordinary level of specificity. There are many ways water looks when breezes blow across its surface. There are fewer ways it looks when breezes blow across its surface and make it look like something broken into many pieces. And there are still fewer ways it looks when breezes blow across its surface and make it look like something broken into pieces forming a rich mosaic with the colours of Venetian palaces and a greenish tint. Ruskin’s metaphor communicates that the waters of Venice look like that. The metaphor of the Ducal palace as ‘flushed with its sanguine veins’ likewise narrows the possible appearances considerably. Characterizing appearances very specifically is of particular use to art critics, as they often want to articulate the specific appearance an artwork presents.
A second thing metaphors like Ruskin’s do is cause readers to imagine seeing what he describes. We naturally tend to picture the palace or the water on hearing Ruskin’s metaphor. This function of metaphor has often been noted: George Orwell, for instance, writes that ‘a newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image’.
Why do novel metaphors evoke images? Precisely because they are novel uses of words. To understand them, we cannot rely on our knowledge of the literal meanings of the words alone. We often have to employ imagination. To understand Ruskin’s metaphor, we try to imagine seeing water that looks like a broken mosaic. If we manage this, we know the kind of look that he is attributing to the water.
Imagining a thing is often needed to appreciate that thing. Knowing facts about it is often not enough by itself. Accurately imagining Hopkins’s despondency, or the experience of arriving in Venice by boat, gives us some appreciation of these experiences. By enabling us to imagine accurately and specifically, metaphor is exceptionally well suited to enhancing our appreciation of what it describes.
James Grant is a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the author of The Critical Imagination.
The post Why metaphor matters appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Julia Callaway,
on 4/4/2014
If you go into a mathematics class of any university, it’s unlikely that you will find students reading Euclid. If you go into any physics class, it’s unlikely you’ll find students reading Newton. If you go into any economics class, you probably won’t find students reading Keynes. But if you go a philosophy class, it is not unusual to find students reading Plato, Kant, or Wittgenstein. Why? Cynics might say that all this shows is that there is no progress in philosophy. We are still thrashing around in the same morass that we have been thrashing around in for over 2,000 years. No one who understands the situation would be of this view, however.
So why are we still reading the great dead philosophers? Part of the answer is that the history of philosophy is interesting in its own right. It is fascinating, for example, to see how the early Christian philosophers molded the ideas of Plato and Aristotle to the service of their new religion. But that is equally true of the history of mathematics, physics, and economics. There has to be more to it than that—and of course there is.
Plato, Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican
Great philosophical writings have such depth and profundity that each generation can go back and read them with new eyes, see new things in them, apply them in different ways. So we study the history of philosophy that we may do philosophy.
One of my friends said that he regards the history of philosophy as rather like a text book of chess openings. Just as it is part of being a good chess player to know the openings, it is part of being a good philosopher to know standard views and arguments, so that they can pick them up and run with them.
There is a lot of truth in this analogy, but it sells the history of philosophy short as well. Chess is pursued within a fixed and determinate set of rules. These cannot be changed. But part of good philosophy (like good art) involves breaking the rules. Past philosophers may have played by various sets of rule; but sometimes we can see their projects and ideas can fruitfully (perhaps more fruitfully) be articulated in different frameworks—perhaps frameworks of which they could have had no idea—and so which can plumb their ideas to depths of which they were not aware.
Such is my view anyway. It is certainly one that I try to put into practice in my own teaching and writing. I find that using the tools of modern formal logic is a particularly fruitful way of doing this. Let me give a couple of examples.
One debate in contemporary metaphysics concerns how the parts of an object cooperate to produce the unity which they constitute. The problem was put very much on the agenda by the great 19th century German philosopher and logician Gottlob Frege. Consider the thought that Pheidippides runs. This has two parts, Pheidippides and runs. But the thought is not simply a list, <Pheidippides, runs>. Somehow, the two parts join together. But how? Frege’s answer (we do not need to go in the details) ran into apparently insuperable problems.
Aristotle went part of the way to solving the problem over two millenia ago. He suggested that there must be something which joins the parts together, the form (morphe), F, of the proposition. But that can be only a start, as a number of the Medieval European philosophers noted. For <Pheidippides, F, runs> seems just as much a list as our original one, so there has to be something which joins all these things together—and we are off on a vicious infinite regress.
The regress is broken if F is actually identical with Pheidippides and runs. For then nothing is required to join F and Pheidippides: they are the same. Similarly for F and runs. But Pheidippides and runs are obviously not identical. So identity is not, as logicians say, transitive. You can have a=b and b=c without a=c. It is not clear that this is even a coherent possibility. Yet it is, as modern techniques in a branch of logic called paraconsistent logic can be used to show. I spare you the details.
A quite different problem concerns the topic in modern metaphysics called grounding. Some things depend for their existence on others. Thus, a chair depends for its existence on the molecules which are its parts; these, in turn, depend for their existence on the atoms which are their parts; and so on.
It contemporary debates, it is standardly assumed that this process must ground out in some fundamental bedrock of reality. That idea was attacked by the great Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (c. 2c CE), with a swathe of arguments. Ontological dependence never terminates: everything depends on other things. Again, it is not clear, Nāgārjuna’s arguments notwithstanding, that the idea is coherent. If everything depends on other things, we have an obvious regress; and, it might well be thought, the regress is vicious. In fact, it is not. It can be shown to be coherent by a mathematical model employing mathematical structures called trees, all of whose branches may be infinitely long. Again, I spare you the details.
Of course, in explaining my two examples, I have slid over many important complexities and subtleties. However, they at least illustrate how the history of philosophy provides a mine of ideas. The ideas are by no means dead. They have potentials which only more recent developments—in the case of my examples, in contemporary logic and mathematics—can actualize. Those who know only the present of philosophy, and not the past, will never, of course, see this. That is why philosophers study the history of philosophy.
Graham Priest was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. He has held professorial positions at a number of universities in Australia, the UK, and the USA. He is well known for his work on non-classical logic, and its application to metaphysics and the history of philosophy. He is author of One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only philosophy articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Images: Bust of Plato, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Image of a graph as mathematical structure showing all trees with 1, 2, 3, or 4 leaves, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Philosophy and its history appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Maud Newton,
on 2/7/2012
I’m behind on everything around here, even linking to my New York Times Magazine mini-columns. Recently I’ve written about: plans to turn the old Miami Herald building into a casino; the (partial) realization of Ray Bradbury’s dream of robot teachers; and, courtesy of Madeline Miller and Plato, The Iliad as love story between Achilles and his man Patroclus.
Bradbury’s comments about robot teachers appeared in a 1974 letter to Brian Sibley. And his short story, “I Sing the Body Electric,” about a girl and her electric grandmother, inspired one of my favorite old Twilight Zone episodes — favorite even though it gave me nightmares — and a mini-series (clip above).
Add a Comment
By: Lauren,
on 8/29/2011
By Louis René Beres In Plato’s Republic, a canonic centerpiece of all Western thought, we first read of the “philosopher king,” a visionary leader who would impressively combine deep learning with effective governance. Today, almost 2400 years later, such leadership is nowhere to be found, either in Washington, or in any other major world capital.
