Philosophy Now October - November 2024

The title of this issue’s special theme, ‘Thoughts On Thought’, is partly a tribute to our onetime contributor Antony Flew, who wrote a well-known book called Thinking About Thinking. Flew’s book though was about informal logic including various kinds of fallacies. Despite the similarity in titles, the theme of this issue is completely different. It isn’t about logical fallacies, even if here and there it probably contains some. So if you spot any, we encourage you to honour Flew’s memory by writing us a letter! Instead, this issue of Philosophy Now contains articles on a whole range of questions about our minds and the workings of our brains, the relationship between them, the nature of perception, consciousness, the evolution of intelligence and more. Perhaps we should have called it Minds…

Helene Scott-Fordsmand Helene Scott-Fordsmand is a Research Fellow at Clare Hall and an associate at the Department for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her research is philosophical but employs ethnographic methods to explore questions of the epistemology of medical practice, representations of medical bodies, and unruly elements of enquiry broadly. John Shand Dr John Shand studied philosophy at the University of Manchester and at King’s College, University of Cambridge. He taught at Cambridge, Manchester, and for most of his academic career at the Open University, where he is now a Visiting Fellow. You can find many of his publications, books and articles, at open.academia.edu/JohnShand Susan Andrews Susan Kyne Andrews, a University College Dublin philosophy graduate and teacher at Temple Carrig School, co-wrote the 2015 Junior Cycle Philosophy…

• World Congress: a report from Rome • Morality found to change with weather • Critic & philosopher Fredric Jameson dies World Congress of Philosophy The 25th World Congress of Philosophy was held August 1-8, 2024 on the campus of Sapienza University in Rome. The theme of this Congress was ‘Philosophy Across Boundaries’ but there were hundreds of topics, as usual for big events like this. Notable plenary sessions and symposia topics included ‘The Boundaries of AI’, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Other Kinds of Minds’, ‘Vulnerability and Knowledge’, ‘Citizenship, Care, and Self-Determination’, ‘Epistemic Injustice, Power, and Struggle’, ‘Embodiment’, and ‘Trust Truth, and Knowledge’. Endowed lecturers included Nancy Tuana, Barbara Herman, Joakim Garff, Zhongjiang Wang, Tae-soo Lee, and Evandro Agazzi. More information is still online at wcprome2024.com. That this event took place…

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about. Philosophers on Sneezing “Ah yes, the ecstasy of sneezing.” (Søren Kierkegaard Papers, p.225)…

One September in Rome, as I waited for the 700 bus, I looked up and noticed a black tide of birds hanging over Il Vittoriano monument. Tens of thousands of starlings had gathered here to dance their graceful, synchronous dance. They raced and morphed, splintered off and coalesced: they formed an endless stream of imaginary shapes in the tangerine sky, I was mesmerized by the scene above me. I had recently learnt about ‘emergentism’: the view that complex systems, including certain substances, cells, bodies, brains, and ecosystems, can exhibit behaviours that are greater than the sum of their parts. The wetness of water, for example, can’t be explained by individual water molecules alone, which are not themselves wet. The wetness emerges when we have trillions of water molecules acting together.…

The ‘Mary’s Room’ thought experiment devised by Frank Jackson goes something like this. Mary is raised from birth in a black and white room, never seeing anything of any other colour. Coloured objects are all carefully excluded. She always wears white gloves and there are no mirrors. Mary is given a normal education as far as is possible in the circumstances. She has all the information available to her to understand a full scientific account of colour, and in fact she eventually becomes a brilliant scientist specialising in colour perception. The question is, does Mary learn something new about colour, over and above the physical and scientific knowledge she has amassed, once she’s finally let out of her room and sees an expanse of bright red flowers for the first…