Category
Meaning, Art & the Good Life
Meaning, death, happiness, love and beauty.
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Reading group: Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, three short chapters a week
Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) is short, about seventy pages, in twelve chapters. I have listened to people talk about it in lectures for years and never read it properly. So I propose four weeks, three chapters a week, starting…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu1 reply -
A documentary can stage a scene and still be telling the truth
Every documentary editor eventually faces the question. A woman tells us about the night her brother left home. We have her voice. Do we film her walking the street again at night, knowing she is walking it for us? My thesis: staging,…
Started by Parisa Moghaddam4 replies -
Wu wei for burnt-out founders: what did Laozi actually mean?
After Stoicism, I've been reading the Daodejing. One idea that hits hard is wu wei, usually translated "non-action" or "effortless action". Chapter 48 says that in pursuing learning you add something every day, but in pursuing the Dao you let something go…
Started by Rohan Desai1 reply -
Reading group: Seneca, On the Shortness of Life
A short essay, easily read in two sittings. Seneca addresses it to Paulinus, who was in charge of Rome's grain supply. His thesis is that life is not short; we make it short by wasting it. He describes the occupati, the busy…
Started by Elin Hedqvist3 replies -
Camus begins with suicide. Was he right to start there?
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) opens by saying the fundamental philosophical question is whether life is worth living. Everything else, he says, comes afterwards. The absurd, for Camus, isn't in us or in the world but in the confrontation between our demand…
Started by Claire Dubois4 replies -
Diotima’s ladder: does loving the Form of Beauty make particular people disposable?
In the Symposium (210a–212a), Socrates reports Diotima's account of the ascent of love. The lover moves from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, to practices and laws, to kinds of knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Gregory…
Started by Giulia Ferrante3 replies -
Is it irrational to want to be remembered after you die?
Founders talk a lot about "legacy". I've caught myself thinking about it too: building something that lasts after me. But I won't be around to enjoy being remembered. Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us, because when we exist death isn't…
Started by Rohan Desai3 replies -
Is love a choice, or something that happens to us?
In poetry, love is almost always something that happens to you: you "fall", you're struck, you're helpless. But in many families and religious traditions, love is described as a commitment you choose and keep choosing. Harry Frankfurt, in The Reasons of Love…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies -
The hedonic treadmill shows money can’t buy lasting happiness
Psychologists Brickman and Campbell coined the phrase "hedonic treadmill" in 1971: we adapt to improvements in our circumstances and return to a baseline level of happiness. A famous 1978 study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman suggested lottery winners weren't much happier than…
Started by Rohan Desai5 replies -
Aristotle’s account of friendship is still the best one we have
Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics distinguish three kinds of friendship: for utility, for pleasure, and for character. Only the third is complete. In it you wish your friend well for their own sake, and the friend becomes something like…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
‘Existence precedes essence’ is an empirical claim, and the evidence is against it
I want to argue that existentialism's founding premise is not a metaphysical axiom but an empirical claim, and a shaky one. In his 1945 lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre puts it plainly: for human beings, existence precedes essence. There is no…
Started by Priya Raghavan6 replies -
What’s the difference between Kant’s “mathematical” and “dynamical” sublime?
Last month I stood at the crater rim at Bromo before sunrise with the volcano smoking below and the sand sea all around, and I felt something I don't have a word for: scared, tiny, and very happy at the same time.…
Started by Fajar Nugroho4 replies -
What exactly is Aristotle’s “function argument” in Nicomachean Ethics I.7?
This argument is easy to fumble when you explain it. My usual summary goes roughly like this: the good of anything that has a function lies in performing that function well human beings have a function it isn't nutrition and growth (plants…
Started by Giulia Ferrante5 replies -
I would plug into the experience machine, and most refusals are just status quo bias
Robert Nozick's thought experiment in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974): a machine can give you any experiences you like, indistinguishable from reality. You'd believe you were writing a great novel or climbing a mountain, but you'd be floating in a tank. Would…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting5 replies -
Persian gardens, proportion, and Plato’s Timaeus
The classical Persian garden, the chahar bagh, is divided into four parts by water channels meeting at a centre. Visit the Fin Garden in Kashan or Bagh-e Eram in Shiraz and you feel the order before you understand it. In the Timaeus,…
Started by Reza Tehrani4 replies -
Hobbes’s ‘sudden glory’ explains far more laughter than its critics admit
Every textbook dismisses the superiority theory in a paragraph. Hobbes says in Leviathan chapter 6 that ‘sudden glory’ is the passion that makes the grimaces called laughter, caused either by some act of our own that pleases us or by seeing some…
Started by Javier Ferrandis6 replies -
Beauty is objective
I want to defend a thesis that's unfashionable in literature departments: beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Hume, in "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757), argued that though beauty depends on sentiment, some judges are better than others:…
Started by Kavya Menon6 replies -
The institutional theory of art is circular, and it’s the vicious kind
A mate who did an art degree keeps telling me that whether my stand-up set is art depends on the "artworld". So I read up. George Dickie's later version of the institutional theory, from The Art Circle (1984), says roughly: a work…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
Epictetus says some things are up to us. What did that depend on for him?
Epictetus is still my favourite. The Handbook begins by saying some things are up to us and some are not: our opinions, desires and aversions are up to us; our body, property, reputation and office are not. In traffic this is very…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu5 replies -
Why a joke dies in Leeds and kills in Salford: notes from a stand-up
I've started reading philosophy of humour because I want to know why the exact same bit, same words, same timing, can get silence in one room and a roar in another twenty miles away. The theory that has helped me most is…
Started by Gemma Pritchard6 replies -
Kant says taste is subjective but everyone ought to agree with it. How is that not a contradiction?
Yesterday a lecturer explained Kant's view of beauty and I nearly missed a stop. As far as I understood: when I call something beautiful, I am not reporting a property I can prove with concepts; it rests on my feeling of pleasure.…
Started by Serkan Aydoğdu4 replies -
Reading group: Bergson’s Laughter (1900), one chapter a fortnight
Bergson's Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is short, odd and still the most useful thing I've read as a working comic. His idea is that we laugh at ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’: the moment a person…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
What makes a death a “good death”?
In end-of-life care people talk constantly about a "good death". Usually it means: pain controlled, the person not alone, their wishes known and respected, family prepared, no futile interventions at the end. That's a practical list, and I believe in it. But…
Started by Elin Hedqvist4 replies -
Reading group: ‘The Culture Industry’ chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment
I do stand-up on the northern circuit and work in a call centre by day, which provides most of my material. A friend told me that Adorno and Horkheimer thought comedy on the radio was a form of social control, and I…
Started by Gemma Pritchard5 replies -
A deliberate foul that accepts its penalty is still a move within the game
Here is a thesis from someone who builds rule systems for a living: a tactical foul, committed openly and paid for with the stated penalty, is part of playing the game, not a break from it. The strict formalist reading of Suits…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting6 replies -
Reading group: Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, starting with ‘Nature and Significance of Play’
Huizinga has sat unread on my shelf for too long, and I'd like company to finally read him. Homo Ludens (1938) argues that play is older than culture, since animals play without anyone teaching them, and that law, war, poetry, philosophy and…
Started by Liu Mingqiao5 replies -
“That’s not what I meant”: a comic on jokes, apologies and who owns the meaning
Friday night in a club in Salford, I did a bit about my mum's driving. A bloke near the front decided it was about him, because he'd heckled about my accent earlier, and he came up afterwards furious. My first instinct was…
Started by Gemma Pritchard4 replies -
What does Kant mean when he says laughter is an expectation turning into nothing?
I am reading the Critique of the Power of Judgment slowly, with a pencil, and I have reached the remark after section 54, where Kant suddenly starts telling jokes. I did not expect this from him. His formula, in one standard English…
Started by Henrike Vogel6 replies -
Once you know how a food was produced, you cannot honestly taste it the same way
I grew up Jain, which means I have strong views on honey, onions and root vegetables, and I think every week about animal testing. So this is not a neutral thesis for me, but I want to argue it on terms anyone…
Started by Hetal Shah6 replies -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
We have just finished the soundtrack for our new game. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the music is "so sad". Some…
Started by Hsieh Wei-ting4 replies