Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Covered in blue …

25. March 2020 Philosophy News News
So here’s the cover for IFL2 (click for a larger version).  The painting, my choice, is Kandinsky’s Blue Painting (Blaues Bild) from January 1924. It has been slightly cropped by CUP’s designers but I do think it still makes for … Continue reading → The post Covered in blue … appeared first on Logic [More]
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Impermanence, interdependence and Buddhist reflections on Covid-19

25. March 2020 Philosophy News News
I'm okay, if I don't look a little closer I'm okay if I don't see beyond the shoreThe Indigo Girls, Perfect WorldBuddhist philosophy tells us nothing about virology, public health, or how to treat respiratory illness. But it may have something to teach us about what we can learn from a pandemic, how we might best contribute to the lives of others in the context of a pandemic, and how we might develop in insight and moral sensitivity by reflecting on the pandemic and on our place in the world in which it unfolds.The first of the four noble truths, the one that constitutes the foundation of all Buddhist thought and practice is that of the ubiquity of suffering. Many people, when they first hear this, regard Buddhism as at best pessimistic, and at worst, a denial of the reality that the world is full of goodness and beauty.  This is because we often think of suffering simply in terms of our own present pain or distress,  as that suffering of which we are immediately aware.  This is a [More]
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3/24/2020

25. March 2020 Philosophy News News
I am uninspired, a little broken, a little sad, and trepidatious, undone by my mother wondering if I can write poetry, but I suppose I already am. This is a long poem, interrupted by news flashes and news holes. Barrenness. Grape purpleness, a virus ravaging people all over the Earth, and there’s not much I … Continue reading [More]
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Territorial Rights and Territorial Justice

24. March 2020 Philosophy News News
[New Entry by Margaret Moore on March 24, 2020.] Political philosophy has witnessed a recent surge of interest in territorial rights - what they are, who holds them, what justifies them - as well as in a broader theory of territorial justice, which situates said rights in an account of distributive justice, thereby addressing the scope of the rights. This interest is hardly surprising. The state is not simply a membership organization: it exercises authority over a geographical domain and this naturally gives rise to questions about how state authority over place can [More]
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The bogus mysteries of consciousness

24. March 2020 Philosophy News News
Apparent mysteriesIn Part 1 the concept of consciousness was elucidated. It is a widely ramified concept with multiple centres of variation. But there is nothing mysterious or arcane about it. Nevertheless it is widely held by neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers that, as Francis Crick (a neuroscientist and Nobel laureate) wrote, consciousness ‘is the most mysterious aspect’ of the mind/brain problem. Eric Kandel (another Nobel laureate) asserted ‘perhaps the greatest unresolved problem…in all of biology, resides in the analysis of consciousness’. Psychologists concur: Stuart Sutherland remarked ‘consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved’. John Frisby held that consciousness ‘remains a great mystery, despite considerable advances in our knowledge of perceptual mechanisms’. Philosophers, who should know better, go along with this mystery-mongering: Daniel Dennett observed that consciousness [More]
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