Protopian Politics & the Future of Nationalism. Lenin said, “If you want to make an omelet, you must be willing to break a few eggs.” However, 20 million dead Russians and 45 million dead Chinese are not eggs, and all those five-year plans and great leaps forward failed to produce an omelet. The history of attempts at putting utopian ideas into practice is strewn with the wreckage of failed societies, from Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana and John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Community in New York—both relatively harmless communal experiments—to Lenin/Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s Communist China, which were catastrophic. Prophets and prognosticators often envision what life will be like when we get “there,” but this is not the right way to think about the future because there is no there there—in the utopian sense of the word’s Greek origin as “no place.” … (Skeptic)
The Socratic Philosophy of Wednesday Addams. There’s an obvious, albeit slightly mangled, reference to one of the famous Socratic paradoxes in episode six (“Quid Pro Woe”) of the Netflix series, Wednesday. Ms Thornhill, the botany teacher and “dorm mom”, played by Christina Ricci, offers Wednesday Addams a beautiful hardback copy of Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. This provides a surprising opportunity for the scriptwriters to touch upon some very radical philosophical ideas. … (Stoicism by Don Robertson)
The Crypto Collapse and the End of the Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism. At a guest lecture at a military academy when the price of a single Bitcoin neared $60,000, I was asked, as finance professors often are, what I thought about cryptocurrencies. Rather than respond with my usual skepticism, I polled the students. More than half of attendees had traded cryptocurrencies, often financed by loans. I was stunned. How could this population of young people come to spend time and energy in this way? And these students were hardly alone. The appetite for crypto has been most pronounced among Gen Z and millennials. Those groups became investors in the past 15 years at previously unseen rates and with exceedingly optimistic expectations. I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly. … (The New York Times)
Do you have a duty to tell people they’re wrong about carrots? We’ve all been there. You’re minding your own business, when you overhear a colleague mentioning the recent increase in the price of carrots. ‘They’re 70 cents a kilo now,’ he might say. You know he’s wrong, though not by much: carrots cost 50 cents per kilo last time you checked, not 70 cents as your colleague seems to believe. Or perhaps you’re standing in line at the post office, and you hear someone nearby telling a friend that the pope’s middle name is María. You know she’s wrong, too. The pope’s middle name is really Mario. These may seem like small mistakes – so small that speaking up could seem more trouble than it’s worth. … (Psyche ideas)
The Philosophical Therapy of Anaxagoras. I’m currently researching the philosophy of the Presocratic philosopher Anaxagoras for a book I’m writing about Socrates. I’m very interested in the therapeutic dimension of Greek philosophy, particularly Stoicism. So I’ve been wondering if Anaxagoras’ philosophy can potentially be read from that perspective. I’m not suggesting that Anaxagoras was a psychotherapist, or that his philosophy can be reduced to therapeutic techniques, or even that this is necessarily how he intended parts of his philosophy to be received. I’m simply interested in whether ancient followers of his philosophy would have potentially derived psychological benefits from it, and whether some of his ideas could perhaps benefit modern readers in a similar way. … (Stoicism by Don Robertson)
In Praise of Aphorisms. I once sat down to write a poem. Four words into it, I realized it was complete. It didn’t want a title, it wanted to be left alone: “Absence begins at home.” I didn’t know what it was that I had written, but it wasn’t a poem. If I had thought it through to a poem, it would have unwritten itself in the reader’s mind, leaving nothing. I now think it was probably an aphorism. Ask the difference between an adage, a proverb, a maxim, an epigram, and an aphorism, and even a veteran English teacher might scratch their head and furrow their brow. It’s easier to think of what they have in common. The internet is just as confused, giving off the impression that they’re fancy words for quotably quotie things that people make memes with. Well, they do all belong to the extended family of pithy statements, which also include axioms, dicta, mottoes, pensées, precepts, quips and the like. But in order to single out the aphorism, we need to usefully tell it apart from its siblings. … (Philosophy Now)
Stoicism and the Environment. Can Stoic ethical ideas help us respond more effectively to the current environmental crisis, especially global warming, which seems to be largely a product of human action? This suggestion might seem implausible at first sight. The ancient Stoics had no experience of a crisis of this kind; so we cannot refer to their own discussions in the way we can on other topics. However, there are several Stoic ideas we can draw on to inform and deepen our own response to this crisis. My focus is on the ethical framework we should use for this purpose, rather than on the specific practical measures we can take, and on our response as individuals, rather than on government action. But I assume that the ethical framework we apply can help us to determine the specific measures we should take and that our response as individuals underlies what we urge governments to do on our behalf. Of special value for this purpose is the Stoic ideal of the brotherhood of humankind, and the Stoic beliefs that human beings form an integral part of nature as a whole and that human ethical life should consist in part in bringing our life into harmony with nature. However, to show how these ideas can be useful for this purpose, we need to put them in their context in Stoic ethics. Also, there are some more general features of Stoic ethics that are potentially valuable in this connection. … (Modern Stoicism)
What a wide and engaging array of thinking/writing! Thanks.
A very nice potpourri from some wonderful philosophers for a Saturday in Winter!