Martha Nussbaum is a highly-rated academic philosopher. I think her work is a good route in to thinking about emotion and philosophy.

I ask about despair: to what extent is it an emotional framework or a rational evaluation of suffering in life? — Jack Cummins

The Nussbaum approach is based on a broad view that these are not alternatives. Emotion on this view is how a thinking creature evaluates situations. Education about emotion, including self-education, is an essential element in how we learn to live well. There seems to me to be a connection between how I sometimes feel despair at the state of the world, and my attendance at demos, my membership of the green Party and my attempts to be kind to others (and, negatively, with how I sometimes have to bury my head in the sand and look for booze). I like Aristotle's view of ethics in relation to these problems: virtue involves recognising our emotions and working out how to express and channel them, which will in turn involve both emotional and rational attention. Self-appraisal of emotions contributes substantially to well-being.

I don't know if you know Martha Nussbaum's 'Emotions as judgments of value and importance'. I can't link it here but one can find a downloadable version among the paywalled versions. She argues for emotion to be recognised as a source of rational self-direction, albeit that it suffuses one's body and one's feelings with a sense that sometimes seems beyond rationality.

She is looking at emotions with an object: the emotional core of her article is her own grief at her mother's death. Sometimes it can seem as if emotions like 'despair' or 'hope' - which I don't think are quite opposites - are more generalised and lack 'an object', but I'm inclined to think that some reflection, if one is capable of reflection when distraught, say, does bring a focus on objects. I despair at my (in)ability to cope with a particular adversity. I hope for a positive sign from a fellow human being of sympathy.

Over the course of my life, I have tended to shift, when oppressed by dark moods, to thinking in this, object-focused way. I don't know if this is about me, or ageing.

But I've still got an existentialist heart. I and some of my leftie friends have, for instance, become more pessimistic about politics lately and some people express a generalised despondency. In this context I, oddly enough, take a kind of comfort in an existential view. I commit myself to at least attempting rational scrutiny of despair when I feel it in my heart. I remind myself of previous encounters with this feeling. This does lead to making the sense of despair 'about' a, or b, or x, or y. And that in turn leads to working out how to be quasi-Stoic about the specifics involved. I don't know if this is 'right', but it's certainly helpful to me.

No sympathy for Hamas or the people who voted them into power. They're getting their just desserts. — RogueAI

So, do we research who each of the dead voted for to determine our level of concern? — Echarmion

In the last election, in 2006, Hamas got 44.45% of the vote.

Just wondering- do you think there is a difference between an orca hunting in deliberative ways, or even playing games like toss the the human into the sea, and human levels of deliberation? I did not say that other animals can't deliberate, but that our being is of an existential one, whereby deliberation is our primary modus operendi. — schopenhauer1

Humans need s[e]lves for their being. They can't stand it. It does divide us from the rest of creation. We are aware that we are aware that we are aware, and that does make us a different kind of creature. — schopenhauer1

These are propositions I don't accept. The myth of our difference from other animals, especially the intelligent ones, is intertwined with our use and killing of them: it's important for us that they be Other. In the 20th century humans killed around 3 million whales for food and oil, mostly. So far we are still largely mystified by whale communication, though we utilise dolphin intelligence for military purposes.

Orcas hunt as a pod or group, their deliberation is mutual like much of ours, and I don't see the difference between their group activity and ours in the ways you're advocating or implying. There are many anecdotal stories of whale and dolphin suffering, especially in human captivity. We are ignorant of what it is like to be a dolphin or whale, so I don't see the basis for our claim to existential difference: their communication systems are so far largely impenetrable to us, though projects are currently under way to try to remedy our ignorance.

I think you'll find that Ray Brassier supports your pessimism, but disagrees with your differentiation between humans and other animals in the way you propose.

I think you misread the point here, and which is why it seems like it is normative and descriptive. Ligotti is being descriptive here, not counseling (in what I have so-far quoted). That is to say, unlike other animals, we are not "being" but having to make concerted efforts to "get caught up in being". It is not our natural mode, which is rather, a mode of deliberation. — schopenhauer1

I don't accept that non-human animals do not deliberate. In the last couple of decades a number of writers have outlined this argument. Here's a link for instance to a paper from last year: Stauffer says 'Humans are not the only animals capable of slow and thoughtful deliberation.' Orca hunting, corvid theory of mind, are other examples that demonstrate complex deliberative thought.

The more general point I am making is that you and Ligotti are in my view mistakenly describing action driven by the 'emotional' as somehow inaccurate and wrong. What is the case for that? It seems to me to privilege an imagined 'rationality' that in action can't be separated from emotion: the two are intertwined.

You remark of a human absorption in flow states, like other animals':

But this is a distraction. It is not natural, but like a kite, where we have to choose to get "caught up" in something to take our minds to the flow state. — schopenhauer1

It seems odd to me to regard this as 'not natural' when you've ascribed it as being like inside other animals' minds, where it presumably is 'natural'. I went back to your quotation of Ligotti in an old thread where he talks about

...laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own... — Ligotti

Interestingly this is the opposite of how Aristotle in the Nichomachean Ethics counsels us to live. He explores what are common emotions and considers how to cultivate what he sees as those promoting eudaimonia/well-being, and how to limit the negative emotions. This is, as he sees it, a virtuous education or an education in virtue: we apply rationality to our emotional lives. Rationality is not the opposite of the emotional, these aspects of us need to work in concert

But Ligotti and perhaps you seem to claim that emotions are 'inaccurate', arbitrary'. For me, emotions - informed by rationality - are what guide us to the true, accurate, right, good. A 'flow state', to which I have committed myself by rational deliberation about my emotional life, is a way of living well.

I stand corrected on the nature of Nynorsk.

Happy Christmas!

But when we comes to things that are killing us in real time, such as microplastics and hormones in food, they stay really quiet because it is not a topic covered by the BBC or New York Times. — Lionino

This is false. The NY Times is always banging on about microplastics, as in this Opinion essay earlier in the year: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/opinion/microplastics-health-environment.html

Hormones in food is more of a BBC thing. https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/junk_food_brain

The United Nations said in 1989 that the Earth would be underwater if we did not stop climate change by 2000, and yet the Netherlands (negative altitude) will still be afloat in 2024. — Lionino

The article to which you linked explained that one non-scientist official said something like this, but it's a popular misconception that he said or even implied that the underwater events would happen 'by 2000', and the predicted underwater events would affect very specific places, like Bangladesh.

A man-made object like a chair seems more about social notions like "use" and "intention", and indeed seems more subjective. — schopenhauer1

Even a chair can be tricksy, though, here's a Picasso sculpture of a chair:

a voice echoes outside the face rather than within it. I’ve observed enough brains to conclude neither words nor speakers exist in them, or anywhere else in the biology. — NOS4A2

Articulation and hearing of what's spoken happen in and through human bodies, though. (Just as writing and reading does) Language, although we often refer to it in the abstract, is grounded in the biological, surely?

(In passing; one's own voice echoes inside the head rather than outside it, which is why one's own voice sounds odd when heard, externally, from a recording, because normally one hears through one's bones)

Words/symbols are just one unit we define to divide up the language. It's hard to parse 'more than', or indeed 'less than' here. Speaking, writing, listening, reading are acts. We mostly make sense to each other by engaging in these actions, using spoken or written signs. From semaphore upwards, a sign tends to stand for something other than itself, as well as being itself.

Whatever happens in a person's imagination is secondary to the exchange of talk or writing, and different people will learn to assimilate and reflect on it differently.

I start to wonder if written language has musicality or not, or if it is just monotonous... — javi2541997

Written language certainly has style. For me it has a musicality, but that may be my bias: when I developed my creative writing, I did prose and drama-writing more or less at the same time. I think that has resulted in the spoken word influencing how I write. I find a lot of academic writing pointlessly stuffy and long-winded, but a danger of writing more directly is that academics can think you're just stupid :)

One difficulty in learning from Fosse, as regards philosophical writing, is that silences and pauses are subtle and illuminating in fiction or memoir, but unwise in writing about thought.

He started to feel more confident and comfortable writing drama thanks to the use of 'pauses', because he interpreted this as a silent language. Do you agree? How do you improvise pauses in your room or wherever you do this? — javi2541997

If I may also reply to this...I think Fosse is also referring to the musicality of spoken language. In music every pause, and its length, are carefully considered. In 'drama' in the widest sense, pauses provide and transform meaning. In comedy, for instance, timing is everything. The saddest exchanges can be made funny to an audience with the right pauses.

I've written quite a lot of drama and feel the craft side of Fosse's remarks are on the mark. I began writing believing that eloquence was in the vanguard of my aims; but with experience I realised that the eloquence of prose sometimes/often is ineffective in drama, and the pause, alongside the rhythm of speech and interchange, matter keenly.

I'm not disputing that Fosse also means something more portentous in talking about silence, but I think the baseline is a craft-based one.

I'm not sure what you mean by them feeling dodgy? — Christoffer

I'm sorry, 'dodgy' is too vague a word for my problems with qualia and emergence. I mean, both terms seem to me to cover too many, likely disparate, phenomena. In covering them they do give us indications of where thinking might go, but I doubt that any one idea is that comprehensive. That is, I accept the needs for explanatory terms which qualia and emergence are trying to fulfil, but they seem too all-embracing and thinly-justified.

Broadly I'm a pluralist. I think the search for the unity of science is a fool's errand, and these terms are, to simplify, trying to occupy spaces where the unity can't hold, or science lacks plausible claims (as it does for instance in much of social life). I like Nancy Cartwright's view of the philosophy of science, derived from years of working with and observing scientists: that scientific findings are often quite narrow, confined to very specific controlled circumstances, and that we vastly over-extrapolate from them.

...religious belief skew and distorts an honest perspective of reality, especially collective reality. And so by that distortion the individual will always have trouble navigating reality as it truly is and will always end up in either internal or external conflict with others in a collective society. In order to find harmony, religious belief needs to be excluded. — Christoffer

To me this demonstrates an excess of respect for a science-derived view of 'reality' and a deficit of respect for religion. To say to the religious, I respect much of what you achieve but your beliefs are bollox: how is that dialogue going to work? What's the word 'honest' doing in there? Do you think all those neuroscientific researchers whose work turns out to be unreplicable were 'honest'? Do you think people who dedicate themselves to a religious life are 'dishonest'? Where, more generally, do the ideas of 'harmony' and the 'collective' derive from, and why can't there be equal dialogue about them between the religious and irreligious?

Can mind drive matter or are we simply another type of matter driving matter in perfect accordance with entropic processes? On a large enough scale, does not the complexity of the entire human race only just become another set of a system based on universal principles forming complex outcomes? — Christoffer

I'm an atheist but more sympathetic to religion than you. I don't quite know why.

From a historical perspective, to me the contrast between religion and science is overdone. Religious stories once claimed an over-arching importance, including a dominion over natural enquiry. But with the emergence (sic) of natural philosophy, it still remained and remains possible to be a good scientist and a religious believer, or so it seems to me. Many sects hang on to myths as if they were factually-based, so you have to choose your sect, and dissent sometimes from the mainstream, but science-as-metaphysics has its myths too. (Years ago a version of this forum had a poster who kept banging on about the difference between metaphysical naturalism and methodological naturalism, and the importance of this insight has stuck with me)

I've been studying philosophy academically in later life, and I confess, after lots more reading, that the notions of qualia and emergence feel dodgy. They come over like vague and sometimes slippery notions that are struggling to explain what happens beyond the limits of materially-based rational enquiry.

The thing is, they are attempting to do that because many people, including me, feel that something is missing, or not accounted for, in the elaborate networks of contemporary science. One way forward is to embrace other views as science: I think ecology makes that step. J J Gibson's ecological psychology, for instance, still has more potential to develop, once we see systems and potential systems in a wide view.

Ecology begins to imagine other creatures and indeed other non-creature elements in our world as agents. I don't know if you know 'Vibrant Matter' by Jane Bennett, which is an attempt to recover some out-of-fashion ideas about vitality in an ecological context. I read it full of optimism but finished it worried it was all a bit fuzzy-wuzzy, and I need to read it again.

And panpsychism.

And then there's the science of placebos, as an interesting example: placebos work. What's going on when they do and don't work? What is our analysis missing? Something in the very nature of our sociality, I'd say.

there is a big difference between the spoken and the written language, or between the spoken and the literary language. The spoken language is often a monological communication of a message that something should be like this or like that... The literary language is never like that – it doesn’t inform, it is meaning rather than communication, it has its own existence. — javi2541997-quoting-Fosse

I'm just reading Fosse's Trilogy (in English translation). We should be clear on the context: Norwegians have mainly written in Bokmål, and Fosse is a pioneer in writing instead in Nynorsk, a largely spoken, and a minority-use, language. So what he has done is to make his version of a vernacular language into a literary language. To me, at least in Trilogy, this has the effect of making the language almost incantatory, and often deliberately repetitive in the way people normally speak, but contrary to the way people normally write.

So he has found a unique way of carving out a form of language that is familiar to others, yet unfamiliar as written-and-literary.

It seems to me that in prose and drama, Fosse is arguing that he tries to escape himself into a way of writing which nevertheless, in a Bakhtinian way, has meaning only in multi-voiced dialogue between the writer and the reader. (He specifically contrasts poetry as a form whose meaning tends to refer only to itself)

His approach is very much about fiction. I'm not convinced that what he says can refer back to the sort of writing we do here, on a forum, about philosophy, where we are attempting dialogue relating to a previously-known set of ideas and writings. But it holds to this extent, that as soon as one writes, an identity sprouts up on the page, me-as-writer, who uses words in ways that sometimes surprise me.

So with the morality of truth must also come the morality of fairness, and equality. — unenlightened

In my 20's I worked as an aid and welfare rights adviser. I realised with some alarm that many of the most positive and entrepreneurial of the poor people I was trying to help would do well - would benefit their families, themselves and society as a whole - to lie, as long as they were cunning and bold enough not to be found out. Welfare systems mostly impose a very high marginal tax rate on those earning small amounts of money: that's why small-scale builders and helpers of all kinds ask you for cash, so they don't have to declare it. It's one reason why I'm for a basic universal income: it promotes honesty.

Likewise, if you're a member of a category that those in authority discriminate against, honesty is of doubtful value. Those in authority may despise you for it, your fellows will judge you naive at best, and you're more likely to end up in trouble/jail/humiliation.

joint attention — schopenhauer1

Starting from Tomasello you are rather assuming there is just one account of joint/shared attention. But there are a number of philosphical options. Among armchair folk, that is.

There is a more individualistic approach from Michael Bratman, who's written a book about it. For him a shared intention can be adequately represented as a combination of individual intentions to do the same thing, more or less. This doesn't require a conceptual leap in the justification of language to the sort of 'cooperative' purposes Tomasello assumes, or regards himself as uncovering.

The cooperative approach favoured by Tomasello was pioneered by Margaret Gilbert, whose work was neglected for a long time then was re-examined. Her classic example is about walking together: her emphasis is that there is a 'collective' intention involved that can't be filleted out into individuals' intention to undertake a joint project. She argues that this is because certain extra obligations arise through joint action.

I'm abbreviating here, obvs.

There is a substantial literature that has evolved from these ideas over the last 30 years.

The relation with empiricism seems to me more complicated than you're saying. Researchers go to a prescribed portion of the world already armed with ideas, looking to confirm or refute them; the ideas come from the armchair or from previous researchers. Certainly for instance Gilbert and Searle's speculations long preceded Tomasello's work in the field (though I really like his fieldwork too, I'm a cooperative-minded person). And Chomsky's initial arguments in the 1960's were taken by some as justifying *not* engaging in certain kinds of empirical linguistic research, since variation between people and their languages was not relevant to his overarching theory: the philosophical presumption dictates what empirical research you undertake, and the reasons for it.

Are Plato's dialogues the first that deserve to be taken seriously? What does it mean to take a written work seriously? The playfulness of Plato's works has often been noted. Can a work be both playful and serious? — Fooloso4

Something of the same applies to the Symposium: after a profound debate on the nature of eros-love, the whole thing ends in confusion, a great deal of wine-drinking and some participants forgetting altogether what was discussed :)

To me the 'erotic' emphasis is entwined in the Symposium with female imagery, the desire to beget, and pregnancy. These features make it startling: Socrates does not quote himself on love, he develops a dialogue-within-a-dialogue in which the woman Diotima explains love's nature to him, and thence, through him, to his male companions. So the centrality of eros, even where it focuses initially on male-to-male desire (as apparently some of the Greek verbs do, in a way that's disguised by English translation), is built on eros as an expression of a craving to beget - to become pregnant with knowledge of the good and the beautiful. Personally I really like the image of pregnancy-with-the-good, which seems to segue from being a metaphor to a kind of true state, though there's lots of scholarly debate about the image.

Others help to identify a continuity for me. A few years ago I signed deeds giving 'power of attorney' to two old friends if I become unable to look after my own affairs. To sign such a deed says, I imagine a future where someone - identified by others whom I love as me - needs care. I am old enough to know people of my sort who have lost their sense of who they are, so I recognise the future me might regard these 'two old friends' when they eventually interfere in my life as mysterious kind, or indeed unkind, strangers. All the same, I trust them, here and now and pledged for the future, provided of course they're still compos mentis themselves, to know 'who I am'.

Socio-politically, the problem of personal identity hit a crisis around 1900. Before then you could travel across a hill, or ocean, and just become someone else - unless you were unlucky enough to meet someone from a past life in your new present one.

But around 1900 states began to want to identify 'persistent criminals' and 'immigrants' as having a certain set of characteristics. Passports slowly became more common. Fingerprints emerged as a scientifically dodgy solution, although the Bertillon system in France was much more reliable.

Just, broadly, to emphasise: the problem of continuity of identity is often one for others: I am not the same as I used to be. But 'others' can in this context include versions of oneself at other times. I, in the present, still hold 'myself' responsible responsible for a reprehensible thing 'I' did in 1978: but it cannot be made good by the present I, only acknowledged and, perhaps, entered as a debit on a ledger where moral credits are also claimed.

All your concerns target moral nihilism, not moral anti-realism. The former is a subspecies of the latter.

As a moral subjectivist, I have no problem valuing things and having adhering to moral principles and codes--they just don't correspond to moral facts. — Bob Ross

Maybe we should listen to the ghost of Nelson Goodman and argue for moral irrealism: that there are incompatible different versions of value systems, and in any given context at least one of them needs to be taken so seriously as to be called 'moral'.

Anyhow, IMO teleology seems alive and well, it's just been naturalized and given the name "function," or gets framed in terms of "constraint." I see nothing wrong with this. There is definitely a sense in which "eyes are for seeing." If eyes didn't see, we wouldn't have them.

But it's useful to distinguish between teleological explanations that appear to invoke first person experience and volition versus ones that simply focus on the appearance or likellyhood of an end state given the characteristics of that end state. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Interestingly enough Aristotle does distinguish telos from ergon, which is usually translated as 'function'; and furthermore, in defining ergon, he does seem to equivocate between the activity involved and the end-product. Thus the ergon of a sculptor is a sculpture - the product of doing 'well'; whereas the ergon of the eye is seeing - the process of visually apprehending 'well'.

The ergon of a human being in this context is eudaimonia, living 'well' in the sense of 'good' living.

I wonder if this distinction might illuminate the machine/organism distinction. Both machine and organism may have ergon/function, but the telos is a feature of the living 'purposive' being, even if the telos is no more than Darwin's survival to reproduce.

Ken, I've been coming here for quite a few years. I'd say: Why not join quietly and make a few comments, get the hang of how things are done, as you would with any new (to you) group of people? Why shout?

This argument doesn't get off the ground unless you explain what you think is meant by intelligence, let alone what justifies giant leaps like...

If our subordinate parts - organs, tissues, cells -- are our collective subconscious — ken2esq

As for references to Freud, I personally am deeply interested in him. This summer I went to his old apartment and consulting rooms in Vienna at Berggasse 19 and was awed just to be there. But you'd have to put some work in, to relate his views about the subconcscious to your speculations about 'intelligence', even to a Freud-fan.

Why are so many clinging to a tribe, instead of their own comprehension of the good? — Athena

Perhaps though the question is askew? To many it will make perfect sense to 'cling' to a tribe as that is their notion of a good, and a more powerful one that an abstract 'comprehension'.

In this sense I feel the contrast in the original question is misplaced. If we consider the Scandinavian body politic, for instance, where social democracy remains strong, mutuality is a powerful element in what binds people together. Max Weber is in this respect an interesting figure. He was in one sense a Kantian promulgating the notion of the enlightenment autonomous individual; but his foundational work in establishing sociology as a discipline, and his political beliefs in the benefits of (some kinds of) partisanship place the individual clearly at the nexus of social networks.

I find historicism adequate to the task of understanding concepts -- it's the historical method, as applied to texts, which allows us to differentiate between concepts, at least (I'm less certain about "schemes", though -- I'd rather talk about the structure of an argument or a philosophy than a conceptual scheme). And rather than Saturnian and English I'd just note that even German and English have problems of intertranslatability, and that this is commonly known among translators as a kind of irresolvable problem. Against the extensional emphasis I put forward poetry translation as a case where we are able to differentiate meanings such that we can partially translate one language into another language, even if we don't know how it is we do this — Moliere

I'm a historicist too.

Translators of poetry roughly divide, in my mind, between literal translators; partial translators; and those like Robert Lowell who provide 'imitations'. The last of these seem to me to be on the edge of saying that a language is a conceptual scheme.

A case-study outside the history of science would be Brian Friel's play 'Translations'. In the early 19th Century in a village in Ireland, there's a confrontation between the Irish, including the learned Irish, and English surveyors who have come here to 'map' the area. In performance, while the actors mostly use English (with a sprinkling of Latin and greek by the Irish), it is understood by the audience that the Irish and English are speaking separate languages and don't understand each other.

Conceptual problems involve recognition of a language: when the Irish speak in Latin, the bluff English don't recognise that it's a learned, separate-from-Irish language; they don't recognise that the native 'hedge-school' is even a school because it's not official.

The problems also emerge in the naming of places in two interlinked ways. One is that for the mapper, each place can only have one name, so they can't accept the fact that (as in any place, informally) most places have more than one name, plus that the area defined by that name is variable. Two is that the English are imposing an English or Anglicised name on a historically-derived Irish name, and insisting on it. The imposition of the supposed requirements of a technology, and the imposition of simple political power, create a different conceptual set of spaces: I'll be honest, I'm uncertain here whether 'scheme' is a useful or discardable word to express the basis of the supposed concepts involved.

Even in the UK, people remember where they were when the assassination was announced: I was watching an episode of the soap opera 'Coronation Street' and they suddenly stopped playing it and replaced it with classical music. I agree it seemed to symbolise a turning point, just as JFK seemed to symbolise a certain kind of hero (although it turned out he wasn't much of a hero at all).

I echo Tom Storm's comments about those public matters that are popularly believed to count. I visited 'Swinging London' when it was swinging, and I can tell you, it never swung for me.

But I did experience a 60's sense of radical change, linked to music, and to university politics, and to soft drugs, and to clever women. When I came to Berkeley in 1970, though, People's Park was locked up and Nixon was running things! (but there was still music, drugs and clever women)

For the Greeks you had eros, agape, philia, and perhaps storge. — Leontiskos

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics placed love at the core of his view of the virtuous life: love as philia, intense fellowship between lovers, or friends, or family-members, that was itself one of the foundation stones of the polis.

That's not how the world is for us, however. There is a modern 'philosophy of emotions' which has a vast literature, but which is more of an enquiry into the nature of emotions than the 'What is love?' question that we rather leave to songs and literature. But Martha Nussbaum has written insightfully about the interaction of her feelings of love with her philosophy, ever since her early volume 'Love's knowledge'.

I think the Greeks' different words for what we have subsumed into 'love' made some kind of sense, though. There is storge towards Ma and Pa; philia for the like-minded; eros for individual fierce attachments (though Plato had Diotima make this the fulcrum of everything) and agape for spiritual love. It would be an interesting enquiry as to how we have come to merge these different strands of feeling into the one word, which seems to me to burst at its seams to contain them all.

But there was a sense of unity in the post-war years that certainly seemed to completely crack at on November 22, 1963 — schopenhauer1

To a non-American this seems a very weird idea. There was a schism between many young people of the 60's and their parents, but there were new bonds too: notably young white people supported Civil Rights in the USA, and in the UK young white people began to sing, play and modify black music. Young women were getting equal education in large numbers for the first time. And I remember a strong feeling of international connectedness, when as a young man I first left England to visit Europe in 1969, and the USA in 1970. We read Ginsberg, Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Sartre and Camus.

From across the sea I hated LBJ at the time for his rhetoric, and for carrying on the war till he didn't, but think in retrospect he was brilliant at what he achieved in domestic legislative change, whereas Kennedy seems like all front, looking back.

I think generalising about what 'baby boomers' in general subsequently did is a dangerous game. Over the course of a life, different sectors of a generation become important. The quiet people of the 60's became the Thatcherites and Reaganites of the 80's, while the previous radicals lost power - though the continued growth of feminism, gay rights and of advocacy by people of colour carried on in threads that didn't depend on who happened to be in power at the time.

Where are the Palestinian protesters chanting their hatred toward Hamas and love and support for the children of Israel? — Hanover

Oddly enough thousands of Palestinians did demonstrate against Hamas in July/August this year, as reported by the Times of Israel.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/protests-against-hamas-reemerge-in-the-streets-of-gaza-but-will-they-persist/

"Palestinians in Gaza, West Bank strongly support Hamas, October 7 attack
A total of 75% of respondents agreed with the October 7 attack and 74.7% agreed that they support a single Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”"
https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/article-773791 — RogueAI

And yet only 7.6% of Gaza residents, in answer to the question, What would you like as a preferred government after the war is finished in Gaza Strip?, replied ‘government by Hamas’.

Nigel Warburton is a good populariser of philosophy. He has a couple of introductory books with up-to-date editions, and there is a stash of old podcasts under the name 'philosophy bites' with David Edmunds.

Did you look at the ATP synthase YouTube video?. — Restitutor

I did look at the video. I thought it was fun. It's interesting that the language of the commentary cannot help leaning into a metaphorical vocabulary. One structure was 'designed' in a certain way; 'desires' were imputed to proteins; emotions were ascribed in order to explain the strength of certain forces. Of course it would be a dry commentary without these lively ways of speaking, but they are a nagging reminder of how human organisms are: teleological, purposive, feeling stuff: features we find problematic when applying them to 'machines'.

There's a recent paper by Esposito and Baravalle on the machine-organism relation, which oddly enough seems to me to lend some support to all sides of this debate. They explore the ill-defined definitons of 'machine' and more specifically of the purported analogies between machine and organism. The ATP Synthase can usefully be described by analogy with a machine, but that is not an argument either that (a) it *is* a machine, whatever that might be; nor (b) that the organism of which it is a component part can usefully be described by analogy with a machine.

Here's the paper (I found by fiddling about I could get at the pdf):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40656-023-00587-2

Western civilization is relevant if we consider that out of the two, Israel is the one that respects the basic human rights and civil liberties of its citizens - uniquely Western values. — Merkwurdichliebe

This wording is very particular. There's an interesting opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about Druze Israelis, who serve in the armed forces, but do not have equal rights. The writer says:

The nation-state law, let us recall, contains no mention of equal rights for all the country’s citizens, Jews and non-Jews. A law that defines the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people but does not in the same breath declare equal rights for all the country’s citizens is a nationalist, anti-democratic law. — Haaretz"

The second issue concerns what respect Israel offers to those who previously inhabited the land on which Israel is founded, who are not its citizens but whose descendants live either in Israel, or in territories conquered and administered by Israel. How is Israel respecting 'the basic human rights and civil liberties' of the inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank?

I've accepted that I'll never read all of Aristotle's metaphysics, but I've come to appreciate some aspects of him through his modern interpreters. — Wayfarer

Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics is itself something of a metaphysical conundrum that's worth exploring. Aristotle has expended much effort in the rest of the N.E. on exploring phronesis, practical wisdom that pursues eudaimonia. But it has occasionally nagged at him that theoretical nous is in some way a higher form of understanding, involving contemplation, and without necessarily practical outcomes. Book X doesn't resolve this tension, for he both says that (old Gutenberg version)

'...the Working of the Intellect, being apt for contemplation, is thought to excel in earnestness, and to aim at no End beyond itself and to have Pleasure of its own...'

...and yet concludes that active 'Practice' is the key to eudaimonia. My tutor a few years ago, a practical man said, What do the gods talk about all day then? Do they exchange quadratic equations?. Aristotle is not a great explorer of the divine but he acknowledges it is there, and that human speculation and meditation are paths towards it.

An odd feature of explorations of the 'nature' of 'reality' is that they've involved increasingly abstruse experiments, e.g. a tunnel deep under a Swiss mountain where very tiny fragments of the allegedly physical are hurled around at fantastic speeds.

This makes them not dissimilar in structure to 'reality television', which arrived for me 20 years or so ago when a non-representative portion of humanity was confined in an artificial environment and subject to unusual tests while under constant surveillance.

There are manipulators in both scenarios: scientists who observe, and producers who observe. They both edit and judge. We gawp at the outcomes.

Reading Wittgenstein has made me feel, for instance, that 'Reality is not what it seems' is one of those statements that won't stand up to much scrutiny, once unpicked, and that experiments under Swiss mountains or in confined tv studios are going to reveal only a highly stylised version of 'reality'. I like discovering that there's a blindspot in 'reality' that my eyes don't 'see' yet I do, as an example (see the excellent 'Sense and Sensibilia' thread), that under certain conditions physical systems may be particles-not-particles whooshing about in a lot of minuscule empty space, or that social class and nationality at birth probably determine where you'll end up in life. No, really. Maybe Nature does not wear a veil which we can tear away to reveal her true nature.

Leftists want the historically Western nations to abide by Western ideals but then if cultures clash with notions of rights and liberal democracy to give that a pass because of cultural relativism. Therefore human rights to them matter less than respecting cultures. Yet they support the current idea itself of a self-determining NATION STATE. That idea itself, as outlined in the Atlantic Charter is, guess what? WESTERN. — schopenhauer1

Could you give some examples of this tendency of 'leftists'? I don't get it.

If you take female genital mutilation (fgm), for instance, are you claiming that leftists are somehow soft on fgm and other people aren't? I don't know of any evidence for this. I'm inclined to think, feminists leaning to the left have recognised the fact of fgm more clearly and openly than anybody else. But I don't know that that involves believing that perpetrators aren't responsible for their acts, and that the acts aren't wrong in ethics and in law.

If you take the way some women from some Muslim countries are clothed, then there is some sort of left/right divide, e.g. in France, where they have legislated against certain forms of dress. But I don't see the right to tell women what they can and can't wear to be part of a Western ideal, do you?

So, what are examples of this leftist leaning?

However, the "woke" leftist views everything that is the case as a structure of oppression that must be obliterated, hence the woke version of progress is not to build and improve, but to tear down and destroy. Theoretically, it is a Leninist tactic ("the worse it is, the better") because it gives them more opportunity to highlight the failures of the oppressive state and push their illiberal agenda. — Merkwurdichliebe

What's bewildering, though, to a non-woke leftie across the Atlantic is...in practical terms, it looks like in the USA that the right-wing Republicans are trying to tear down and destroy. Surely an alliance of Trump and the Republicans in Congress are like old Trotskyists used to be (the bane of my life as a moderate leftie activist), forever disrupting, continually avoidiing commitment, never wanting to pass any motion because they are so busy signalling to the world how right they are?

Are you saying this isn't the case? Where in the USA are these woke lefties tearing down and destroying anything?

What would be realistic criteria for a state to be considered successful? — Vera Mont

My view is that the opposite of a 'failed' state is a 'successfully functioning' state.

That's a very different beast from a successful state, and 'success' for a state will depend on the criteria one is adopting, which are not going to be universal. Monaco, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Seychelles - different states are successful for different reasons. Surveys of prisoners, or the poor, for example, are going to give you a different league table :)

There is some nervousness in Europe, incidentally, that the USA might become a dysfunctional state, if say Trump were president and right-wing Republicans pursued disruption rather than governance. But for the people who voted such a government in, this might count as success!

Thanks for the clarification, Schop. My puzzlement goes on, however, partly because I don't recognize the leftists I know, here in the north of England, in the 'leftists' who are being generalized over in this thread.

I'm a Green, and the big 'leftist' issue for me is facing up to global warming, and how we transition to a sustainable economy.

Once you're into that as a major area of policy other problems follow, for an anti-authoritarian leftist of my kind: how to rein in financial capital, which monetizes everything and obscures human and environmental value; how income and wealth is distributed, given existing inequalities and the likelihood that worldwide 'growth' is probably near its end (as opposed to 'development', which is always a must); how people are democratically involved in the whole process.

Europe is largely composed of social democracies, which are moving 'right'wards in some respects at the moment, but from a strong consensual basis, with welfare states, socialised medicine and relatively high taxes, owing little to Marx, especially the Leninist flavour. There are issues on which there is obviously a gulf between 'us' and the USA, the most obvious of which is abortion: apart from Poland and Hungary (and pockets of countries like Northern Ireland in the UK), abortion rights are widely accepted in Europe, and the USA's insistence for many decades on tying international aid to reproductive rights has been a source of disagreement about what 'Western civilization' means.

So these are the leftie issues for me, which no-one in this thread has mentioned.

This word 'woke' has caught on only in quite rightwing circles over here, though maybe that'll change. It seems a rather vague insult, like 'reactionary' used to be among liberal lefties (or indeed 'Fascist', which in my youth was a horrible slur). In the UK for instance the rightwing government have trumpeted freedom of speech, but in the last few weeks have been retreatiing to obvious things like 'Freedom of speech has its limits'; alas the first university free speech tsar, Arif Ahmed, appointed by the Tories, is known for believing that free speech includes being able to speak up for Palestinians. (Also trans rights has been less of a left/right issue here, and so for example I'm a supporter of Kathleen Stock, a philosopher who has been no-platformed for her critique of transgender rights)

My last point: is 'race' a mostly unspoken part of this debate? Bill Maher in the opening monologue said 'White' startlingly often to my ear. Brits don't do that so much any more. In the UK of course the staunchest defenders of Empire, and opponents of immigration by black and brown people, have in the last decade been Conservative black and brown ministers of state, so our debate over here has a different feel, but we too have some sort of reckoning to make with slavery and Empire. But perhaps that is an example of how woke I am, that I think such a reckoning is needed!

Is it because I'm not north American that I find it hard to understand this thread? Bill Maher is one of those comedians who doesn't travel well, I think it's one of those things about being divided by a common language.

So I'm a leftist; I'm a strong supporter of universal human rights; and philosophically I am a sort of moral relativist. David Vellemann outlines the kind of view I go with: that different social groups can, indeed will, have incompatible moralities, but their moral concerns are thematically linked. Rational-based negotiation then remains the best way of trying to resolve moral differences.

The argument here seems much more political than philosophical. Who are the 'leftists' who under attack here? Why hasn't anyone quoted any of them? What is the corrective moral view: Maher is a comedian so he has every right not to have an answer, but are people in general arguing for moral objectivism, or what?