Question (I): Are people depressed despite unprecedented opportunities for education, vocations, self-growth, cultural enrichment, travel, and recreation (a) Because modern life is more difficult, complex, and stressful than it has ever been before? (b) Because, for men, competition in the marketplace is fiercer than ever? (c) Because, for women, life as a housewife is lonelier than…
The word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff. Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century? (a) Was it because people were not bored before the eighteenth century? (But wasn’t…
Question: During the week following Pearl Harbor, the incidence of suicide declined dramatically across the nation. Was this decline a consequence of (1) A rise in patriotic fervor and a sense of purpose? (2) A new sense of interest (e.g., something, even war, is better than nothing. Peace in the 1930s was like nothing)? 00000…
THE LAST DONAHUE SHOW The Donahue Show is in progress on what appears at first to be an ordinary weekday morning. The theme of this morning’s show is Donahue’s favorite, sex, the extraordinary variety of sexual behavior—“sexual preference,” as Donahue would call it—in the country and the embattled attitudes toward it. Although Donahue has been…
Question (I): Which of the two, the actors or the townspeople, are the more real, that is, perceive themselves as more nearly what they are? (a) The townspeople because they have no illusions about themselves, their humdrum lives and workaday selves, whereas the actors not only live in a tinsel world but are themselves forever…
A RECENT POLL ASKED people what they feared most. A majority of respondents agreed in ranking one fear above all others, above fear of sickness, accidents, crime, war, even death. It is the fear of speaking before a group, stage fright. Yet in the conventional objective scientific view, man is an organism among other organisms…
THERE IS NO FASHION so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer. E.g., bustles in the West, bound feet in the East. 00000 The efficacy of fashion turns on the self’s perception of itself either…
David Galloway in Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice The ‘tedium of immortality’ agingBernard WilliamsbordomDavid GallowaydeathMacropulos Casepersonal identityPhilosophy of mind
One of my favourite living philosophers (if not the favourite) is David Wiggins. He was my tutor for ethics but not unfortunately for metaphysics which by then had become a secondary interest for him. Great to see that he has just released a new book gathering several of his most important essays on identity in one volume.…
Here’s an obit in Vox but will compile and post other obituaries as they come out. New York Times Derek Parfit and Janet Radcliffe-Richards (not an obit) “With no other philosopher have I had such a clear sense of someone who had already thought of every objection I could make, of the best replies to them, of further…
manwithoutqualities 