Lazy Philosophy
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Not really philosophy-related…but then isn’t it? An evolved ape producing art in outer space!
Bowie’s song appeals to a human dream, to go beyond, and this man is living this dream. It feels like science and myth are crossing paths.
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A jaw-dropping talk about the Universe, its origins and its future by Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist.
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The last lines of Hannah Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’
A film about Hannah Arendt’s covering of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem is coming out soon so I thought it would be the occasion to share the last lines of her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.
Adolf Eichmann
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Who said it: Sponge Bob or Nietzsche? Thus arises a metaphysical riddle only enlightened minds can comprehend:
Is Sponge Bob a great philosopher?
Or is Nietzsche a sea sponge with square pants?
I’ll let you think about it…
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History of the Earth in a 24-hour clock
A little perspective never hurts.
The Big Bang happened 13,770,000,000 years ago.
Our planet formed 4,500,000,000 years ago.
The Homo genus of Great apes appeared 3,900,000 years ago.
Homo sapiens appeared 200,000 years ago.
The first Ipod was released 12 years ago.
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The elegant prank - Marina Abramovic and Ulay
I found the following story very interesting, and truly emotional. Indeed, it raises many questions about human beings, art and identity. A few ones, just to spark a reflection:
- How do mental states produce physical responses?
- What is the meaning of physical contact?
- Where is the frontier between art and reality when the piece of art is modified by an external factor that the artist hadn’t planned?
Marina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again.
At her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show, where she shared a minute of silence with each stranger who sat in front of her. Ulay arrived without her knowing and this is what happened.
Source: Zen Garage
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Cannibals and European ethnocentrism
Another post from warston:
In 1563, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne was invited to the King of France’s court to meet three Brazilian cannibals who were brought to France. After having been interrogated for hours by the 13 year old king, Montaigne sought to ask a few questions. And their answers were incredibly revelatory:
First, the Brazilians expressed surprise that “so many tall, bearded men, all strong and well armed” (i.e., the king’s guard) were willing to take orders from a small child: something that would have been unthinkable in their own society. And second, the Brazilians were shocked by the severe inequality of French citizens, commenting on how some men “were gorged to the full with things of every sort” while others “were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty.” Since the Brazilians saw all human beings “as halves of one another… they found it strange that these poverty-stricken halves should suffer such injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.”
Montaigne records these observations in an essay entitled, “Des Cannibales.” Well ahead of its time, the essay challenges the haughty denigration of cannibals that was so common among Montaigne’s contemporaries, but not by arguing that cannibalism itself is a morally acceptable practice. Instead, Montaigne makes the more provocative claim that, as barbaric as these Brazilian cannibals may be, they are not nearly as barbaric as 16th-century Europeans themselves. To make his case, Montaigne cites various evidence: the wholesome simplicity and basic nobility of native Brazilian life; the fact that some European forms of punishment — which involved feeding people to dogs and pigs while they were still alive — were decidedly more horrendous than the native Brazilian practice of eating one’s enemies after they are dead; and the humane, egalitarian character of the Brazilians’ moral sensibility, which was on display in their recorded observations.
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Perhaps psychiatry is a bad mix of science and ethics This post is reblogged from Warston.com, which proposes opinion and news on technology, global/political events and culture.
I strongly recommend it for It is thoroughly entertaining, and you will always find fresh content there to make your day richer.
Some psychiatrists wish to revise the definition of depression. This controversy sheds light on psychiatry as a science.
As Gary Gutting, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame shares puts it, in the NYT:
Psychiatric practice does seem to be based on implicit moral assumptions in addition to explicit empirical considerations, and efforts to treat mental illness can be society’s way of controlling what it views as immoral (or otherwise undesirable) behavior. Not long ago, homosexuals and women who rejected their stereotypical roles were judged “mentally ill,” and there’s no guarantee that even today psychiatry is free of similarly dubious judgments.
And:
Foucault is, then, right: psychiatric practice makes essential use of moral (and other evaluative) judgments. Why is this dangerous? Because, first of all, psychiatrists as such have no special knowledge about how people should live. They can, from their clinical experience, give us crucial information about the likely psychological consequences of living in various ways (for sexual pleasure, for one’s children, for a political cause). But they have no special insight into what sorts of consequences make for a good human life. It is, therefore, dangerous to make them privileged judges of what syndromes should be labeled “mental illnesses.”
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Follow the link for other Philosophy posters by artist Mark Temkin.
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Game theory in Hunger Games
Source: Wired
In both the movie and the book we see a coalition of some of the players develop where they attack other players as a group. As I considered this, and being aware of game theory, I wondered how such an alliance could be stable, given the powerful incentive all members of the coalition have to kill each other in order to better position themselves to win the game. In fact, I wondered how members of the coalition would even get any sleep, especially given that they slept near each other. This may seem like a strange question but the Prisoner’s dilemma game can show that it isn’t so strange.
Consider the following table:
Don’t Sleep(all) Sleep(all)
Don’t Sleep(1) Tired, Tired Kill, Killed
Sleep(1) Killed, Kill, Rested, Rested
Here subscript “1″ refers to any member of the coalition and subscript “all” refers to all other members of the coalition. Let’s consider matters from any given member’s perspective (the subscript 1 player). What if the other players don’t sleep? If you don’t either, then you will be tired and, perhaps, more vulnerable to better-rested contestants. But if you sleep while others are awake, any one of them can kill you in your sleep. Presumably, it’s better to be tired than dead so you are under tremendous pressure to stay awake.
