The fight over academic freedom. Academic freedom is a bedrock of the modern American university. And lately, it seems to be coming under fire from all directions. For many scholars, the biggest danger is at public universities in Republican-controlled states like Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has led the passage of laws that restrict what can be taught and spearheaded efforts to reshape whole institutions. But at some elite private campuses, faculty have increasingly begun organizing against a very different threat. Over the past year, faculty groups dedicated to academic freedom have sprung up at Harvard, Yale and Columbia, where even some liberal scholars argue that a prevailing progressive orthodoxy has created a climate of self-censorship and fear that stifles open inquiry. … (New York Times)
Feng Shui, demarcation, and virtue epistemology. Feng shui means “wind” and “water.” The goal of feng shui is to obtain water and store the wind, but it’s unclear what exactly that means. A place with good feng shui supposedly brings good luck, while one with bad feng shui brings bad luck. The practice depends on the underlying concept of qi, a kind of vital force fundamental in Chinese philosophy, treated as the basic constituent of the universe. Sindhuja Bhakthavatsalam and Weimin Sun, in a paper published in Science & Education, used feng shui to introduce readers to the concept of virtue epistemology as a different way to look at the infamous demarcation problem, the quest for what differentiates science from pseudoscience. … (Skeptical Inquirer)
When philosophers become therapists. Around five years ago, David—a pseudonym—realized that he was fighting with his girlfriend all the time. On their first date, he had told her that he hoped to have sex with a thousand women before he died. They’d eventually agreed to have an exclusive relationship, but monogamy remained a source of tension. “I always used to tell her how much it bothered me,” he recalled. “I was an asshole.” An Israeli man now in his mid-thirties, David felt conflicted about other life issues. Did he want kids? How much should he prioritize making money? In his twenties, he’d tried psychotherapy several times; he would see a therapist for a few months, grow frustrated, stop, then repeat the cycle. He developed a theory. The therapists he saw wanted to help him become better adjusted given his current world view—but perhaps his world view was wrong. He wanted to examine how defensible his values were in the first place. … (New Yorker)
Is philosophy self-help? In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Aristotle’s Way and go Hiking with Nietzsche. As of 2020, Oxford University Press has issued a series of “Guides to the Good Life”: short, accessible volumes that draw practical wisdom from historical traditions in philosophy, with entries on existentialism, Buddhism, Epicureanism, Confucianism and Kant. … (The Point Magazine)
What if false beliefs make you happy? Suppose a genie offered to get rid of all your false beliefs and replace them with true ones. Which false beliefs? Well, you don’t know yet, obviously, but it’s safe to assume that there must be some. None of us is perfectly rational, after all, and we are all susceptible to misjudgement, bias and self-deception. So suppose you could magically erase all your illusions: about the universe, your own self, your loved ones. Finally to know the truth and nothing but the truth about everything! Would you take the offer? Most people wouldn’t. A life of complete truthfulness, they believe, would just be bleak and depressing. In the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:18) we read that too much knowledge can be a heavy burden: “For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” Similarly, in his famous novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust wrote that “we are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.” … (Maarten Boudry’s Substack)
Fabulous morning read! 😊☕️
A lot to unpack, thanks for the beautiful text. Yesterday I heard a commentary that if Plato was still alive, he would still write dialogues debating with what he called the new sophists (the relativists) and the new pre-socratics, the materialists, exemplified by the speaker as the evolutionary biologists (such as you) and neuroscientists (such as me). It made me wonder, and this thought came back with your text, if truth is the end goal (will we be happier or sadder if we had it all for us?) or the search for it that is the goal, which made my materialistic brain feel calmer.