What Philosophers Are Asking Today (for World Philosophy Day 2017)
“What is the meaning of life?” That’s probably the question that springs to mind when a non-philosopher is asked what philosophers study. And while some philosophers do in fact work on that question, like any single question it does not capture the extraordinary range and diversity of subjects philosophers are thinking and writing about.
Today is World Philosophy Day. Created by the United Nations in 2002, World Philosophy Day is celebrated annually on the third Thursday of November. Its objectives, according to the UN, are:
- to renew the national, subregional, regional and international commitment to philosophy;
- to foster philosophical analysis, research and studies on major contemporary issues, so as to respond more effectively to the challenges that are confronting humanity today;
- to raise public awareness of the importance of philosophy and its critical use in the choices arising for many societies from the effects of globalization or entry into modernity;
- to appraise the state of philosophy teaching throughout the world, with special emphasis on unequal access;
- to underline the importance of the universalization of philosophy teaching for future generations.
In recognition of World Philosophy Day, let’s do our part to share with the world what today’s philosophers are up to.
Each day, thousands of philosophy professors and students (and others) visit Daily Nous. It would be wonderful if a good number of you could take a moment to write down, in a comment on this post, one question you are currently working on.*
The result could be an interesting and accessible snapshot of philosophy in 2017.
I’ll do what I can to promote the post widely (it would help if you shared it and encouraged people to post a question they’re working on). Together, we can try to raise awareness of what philosophers are thinking about today, and perhaps catch the attention of those who otherwise might have not realized they are interested in what philosophers are doing.
*Yes, just one each: don’t worry, we won’t think that the question you list is the only thing you’re interested in or currently working on.
Art: Image based on photos of “Question Mark” by Kumi Yamashita
Related: “Why Did You Go Into Philosophy?“, “The Intellectual Achievement of Creating Questions“
How, if at all, is disagreement good for us?
One question, among many, I am working on, and recurrently, is: How does one best introduce students and other non- or not-yet-philosophers to philosophy?
I’m with you REH! Part of my answer: it ain’t historical or topical surveys. . .
Listing two things you think it ain’t, you’ve whetted my appetite for one or more things you think it might be.
I apologize to Justin for weighing in here more than once–and posing part of an answer–
Richard (if I may), we need to design 101 so it better represents how philosophy is actually done, pushing methods and skills over content. Distinguishing deductive from inductive arguments and then traipsing over a smorgasbord of people’s contributions or topic-area issues will only at best superficially represent what philosophy can do–and I’m very mindful that this course is the only philosophy course most students take. I have spent almost 30 years designing a single-topic course that takes students along on a semester-long journey through the free will problem, moving from issues in criminal justice to questions in philosophy of science and metaphysics about how minds work to conceptual management of the entire problem sorting out the logically possible positions to examining the major ones to finally see how they might impact our lives in revising the criminal justice system (thus closing the circle of the problem as a practical one). (I’ve many publications/presentations on this BTW though none recent.)
Again, I’m sorry Justin for betraying the spirit of your OP request. But not only do I feel strongly about this–it’s just a fact that the Intro course has the largest impact of our profession on higher ed in sheer numbers of students we serve This is a BFD for a day like PHI Day.
The relationship between moral Judgement and action.
Moral philosophers spend a good deal of time agonising over what it is we ought to be doing. That’s all well and good, but when they come up with answers such as ‘you should do this’ or ‘you ought to do that’ we might want to know what on earth the relationship is between judging that you ought to do something and actually doing it!
How can we judge testimony justly?
I am working on an offshoot of this with respect to patient testimony. The more general form of it is extremely important, I agree.
Whether it makes sense to punish autonomous robots when they commit serious wrongs.
How should we distribute resources among scientists so as to effectively promote various epistemic goals?
To what extent do we have control over our own minds, and how is that possible?
Questions: Is there anything distinctive about a formal symbolism that makes it apt for doing mathematics? What, if anything, distinguishes a formal symbolism from a written natural language?
My answers: Yes. A formal symbolism can show us things that written natural language can only tell us about.
Question: What things? And what does the difference between showing and telling amount to? And why is showing so much better in this context than telling?
Answer: [insert past and future years of anguished thought]
My current reading has me wondering
Is it better to serve yourself or to serve others?
Happy World Philosophy Day
Jeff
Is biological memory a natural kind?
Ooh, interesting!
One of my long-term projects is the ethics of individual and collective memory. Ontological concerns are not unrelated.
What does it really mean to say a category is socially constructed, and is age socially constructed?
Are there normative principles of justice that are specific to the European context? If so, what are they?
What makes something newsworthy?
What are insults, especially in relation to broader questions of politeness and jokes?
What drives health care providers’ dismissal of the testimony of particular kinds of patients about particular kinds of claims? Can epistemology help us to understand this and work with ethics to improve patient care?
What is the good life?
In what circumstances, if any, may an agent justifiably punish a wrongdoer in those cases where the agent has fully forgiven the wrongdoer?
Why grieve the dead?
What is an emotion?
Does God, or anything similar, exist?
Under what circumstances, and why, are symmetry-related situations empirically indistinguishable?
What is the nature of unconscious information processing, and what does consciousness add to our processing capabilities?
How should we model omissive causation?
Why are people, in general, more offended by wrongs committed against animals than those committed against other people?
Why should we be concerned about species endangered of extinction?
Why should we be concerned about endangered species or their members?
Do near-death experiences support “supernaturalism”–the view (in part) that there is an afterlife in a heavenly realm?
What reasons do we have to care about the fate of future generations?
What kind of values are knowledge and truth?
Is there only one structure of valid argument or is there more than one?
What kind of value is meaningfulness, and how do we experience it’s manifestation? I’m currently searching for an answer in the subjective experience of narrative.
One question: how should evolutionary theory be used in clinical research and practice?
What does it mean to say that the laws of nature “govern”?
How can scholarship be more inclusive in a way that generates more robust results?
How can we compare the goodness of outcomes involving populations of different sizes?
How should we distinguish between good and bad reasoning?
Whence the conviction, for those who have it, that brain/neural events can have semantic properties?
Is voting hypocritical?
What does it mean to say that everything happens for a reason?
How does the environmental impact of adding an additional person to the planet affect the morality of procreation, especially for those of us who live in countries with enormous per capita ecological footprints?
How far do proposals to revise logic to solve non-mathematical paradoxes (like the Liar and the Heap) have unintended consequences for standard mathematics?
What are the basic ontological structures required for our current understanding of reality?
I’m trying to figure out what we’re actually talking about when we discuss the concept of toleration. I want to know what normative requirements the relationship between tolerator and the object of toleration places on each, the political implications of this, and the role that power plays in relationships of toleration, particularly in the context of political decision making and voting.
When and why is it prudent to be rational?
Do property rights entail complete freedom of testation?
Do philosophers really talk past each other when they argue about what there is?
What is the role of practice in mathematical understanding and in mathematical knowledge?
What is time?
Who is replaceable?
How can machine learning algorithms promote autonomy rather than causing it to erode?
What new ethical challenges do virtual reality technologies impose on philosophers, psychologists, and the rest of us?
Is there a scientifically grounded “moderate” form of fatalism and if there is one – how plausible is it?
How do we come to know what is right and wrong?
How can we use imagination to learn about the world in which we live?
What’s the connection between modality and causation?
Is restorative justice a preferable notion of justice? Why?
What’s a disposition?
How do we decide whether to hold people accountable for their actions? For example, several people that go on to commit sexual harassment are people that were once victims of maltreatment, abuse etc. To what extent do should we consider the role of prior experiences (or genetic features) when holding people culpable for criminal offenses?
How long is “a” visual experience? Why does this matter?
What is the relationship between trust and moral obligation?
Why is knowledge valuable?
What belongs to the class of entities that can flourish in a non-metaphorical sense?
Is cancer a matter of “chance,” and if so, in what sense(s)?
“How can David Hume consistently proclaim the reality of moral distinctions, whilst also denying that moral qualities are a feature of reality?”
What makes a human a human?
What would it mean to hold people morally responsible for microaggressions- small, sometimes unintentional acts of harm that nevertheless contribute to systemic oppression?
…whats up to me…
In what sense, if any, is conceptual change, including theory change, rational?
In what ways are things interconnected?
What is owed to people whose own states cannot or will not meet their basic needs, and how far does what it owed depend on the nature or source of the threat? (That’s a pretty abstract way to put some more specific questions I’m working on.)
Are Epicureans and deprivationists involved in a merely verbal dispute about the badness of death?
Are children routinely subjected to epistemic injustice (i.e. having the things they say prejudicially disbelieved, discredited, ignored, or generally not taken seriously)?
What does it mean/how does it help to conceptualize race as a technology?
How do social structures like ideology influence the meaning of what we say?
How is it that perception presents things as present and memory presents things as past?
I’m tempted to say “War, huh, yeah. What is it good for?”
But actually I’m asking to what extent, if any, war is related to chimpanzee inter-group raiding?
How can we apply decision theory to agents who fail to be logically omniscient?
If they’re not logically omniscient, that’s their problem. Stop making excuses for them, I say.
To what extent is it possible to formally model natural language phenomena?
Why is consciousness essential for free will, if it is?
Can Kantians account for the moral standing of animals?
What may those who are denied what they are entitled to as a matter of global justice (those who suffer the harms of deprivation, unjust trade regimes, unfair immigration policies and global environmental degradation) do to resist this injustice?
What do we owe future generations? And, what morally permissible options do we have for designing democratic decision-making to induce governments to honour their responsibilities to future generations?
[For the future: What are the normative implications of the automation of work? For example, what implications does it have for the distribution of work, leisure, the case for a basic income, and the ownership of resources?]
What does an argument look like in American Sign Language?
How should someone inquire into the essences of things?
What if any compelling reason there may be for setting a constraint of proof-theoretic harmony on systems of logic.
How do I know that someone is better than I am at philosophy?
When is free speech too costly?
What’s wrong with the mathematical assumptions that economists use to model uncertainty/ignorance, and how did it get this way?
How do experts fit into our climate–and other major social–policy evaluations?
Does a citizenry implicitly and perpetually ratify laws over time, and if so, how does this affect the interpretation conditions of those laws?
On this World Philosophy Day, is it too much to ask that we start caring a bit more about World Philosophy?
What’s the relationship between the value of a practice and its ability to serve as a source of reasons for those who engage in it?
Why do we have rights in our bodies, and their parts?
The relationship between what reasons we have or think we have and action/motivation. This is not to be confused with the relationship between moral judgement and action, but is related to it insofar as we expect moral judgements to imply reasons not to do something.
Should we select our political representatives by lotteries, rather than elections?
I knew someone who proposed this and used the backlash to the idea to respond with the question, “So you’re saying that our educational institutions aren’t creating a sufficient upbringing to prepare our children to become leaders in our society?”
In what sense, if any, can philosophy be considered constitutive of humanity, such that every person can be considered a philosopher? But then how do we distinguish, if at all, this from “real” philosophers, those who truly live an examined life (not necessarily just formal students or teachers of philosophy)?
What did the conversation between biology and philosophy look like in late-nineteenth-century America?
What are we up to when we judge that something is normal?
Does ethics require a foundation?
This thread is wonderful 🙂 Thanks for being inspiring, philosophers!
What role ought commitments to cultural preservation play in resistance by black people to anti-black oppression?
What are the liberty-limiting/coercion-legitimizing principles as the moral limits of the criminal law? Is harm principle enough? What about offense principle or soft paternalism?
Can we exclude subjective harms from harm principle?
When (if ever) may we punish collectives? Should we punish them in the same way as individuals, and may we punish them if that will mean punishing their individual members?
Why are aesthetic concepts–elegance, beauty, symmetry, Leibniz’ principle of the optimum, etc–effective at all in physics (which they are), and in general, understanding the natural world?
Could an agent (e,g., God) be perfectly good and perfectly rational while confronted with a choice among options, each of which can be improved upon (e.g., an infinite number of better and better possible worlds to choose from)?
What is bad for you about death, if anything?
How does one become a thinking thing? How does someone learn to think for themselves? (Flip side of the question: How do you teach someone to think for themselves?)
How can you accept that a semantic theory for a natural language is at least a theory of truth-conditions, yet not accept that such a theory has authority when it comes to the metaphysical commitments of the speakers of the language (i.e. us)?
What are the meanings, or perhaps Fregean senses, of mathematical sentences?
Is there a way to codify when theories/principles in the sciences are useful even when they are not necc. descriptively accurate?
Do all actions have a moral status (supererogatory, obligatory, permissible, impermissible, etc.), or are some actions devoid of any moral valence whatsoever?
Inter generational ethics: what obligations to older generations have to currently existing younger generations, and vice versa (this issue I think will become increasingly relevant as life span increases)?
What is arbitrariness? What do we mean when we say that something is arbitrary? Do answers to these questions help us approach philosophical problems related to arbitrariness?
Are there epistemic dilemmas?
Why is it that many “professional” philosophers — who surely must have realized after their considerable years of study and training (i) that foundationalism is misguided (viz., “it’s turtles all the way down !!!”), (ii) that essentialism is misguided (viz., we can supposedly “discover” the underlying “reality” or “truth” of concepts like “justice” or “knowledge,” rather than inventing conceptual systems and testing them by their consequences), and (iii) that intuitionism is misguided (viz., routinely appealing for justification purposes to what “seems” to be the case, or what “seems likely,” or what is “apparently” the case, etc.) — still persist in formulating philosophical issues and questions (e.g., see responses above) using foundationalist, essentialist, and intuitionist approaches?
Are all disagreements pseudo disagreements?