15 ideas that inspired the world's leading thinkers » IAI TV (2023)

On World Philosophy Day, we asked the world's leading thinkers about the philosophical ideas that had most influenced them and compared their answers to the great ideas of their recent ancestors - the famous philosophers of the 20th century. Discover the concepts behind cutting-edge ideas and watch them evolve through history.

Heglu's Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American social and political philosopher and co-director of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs, whose first bookThemes of Desirestudied Hegelian reflections in 20th century France. Butler has made significant contributions to political philosophy, ethics, and literary theory, and her theory of gender performance is highly influential.

It's rather strange to think that Hegel has anything to say about our lives, but what if our most basic obligations to each other and the planet could be illuminated by this early 19th century philosopher? In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows us that we are not solitary beings, cut off from one another, although he knows that we sometimes see ourselves as such. He claims that only as a social being can I begin to question myself. Only by meeting others do we have the opportunity to know ourselves, and by knowing ourselves do we understand how we are fundamentally connected to others in the processes of the web of life.

So if we thought we could know ourselves by turning inward, we were wrong. My life is never mine alone, for it belongs to the processes of life that transcend me and sustain me. I cannot destroy another person's life without attacking the whole of the life processes of which I am a part. The emerging moral imperative is to keep yourself and others alive. Hegel understands the rage of the individual who does not want anyone to be like him or his like. But it leads us to the realization that I cannot get rid of the other without getting rid of myself.

For me, reading Hegel illuminates our status as living creatures, our bodily interdependence, and our sense of mutual moral obligation, which is also the obligation to preserve the world that makes our lives possible and sustainable.

Simon Blackburn ή Hume

Simon Blackburn is an English academic philosopher best known as an advocate of quasi-realism in metaethics. He made significant contributions to the fields of metaethics and philosophy of language.

The greatest of British philosophers, David Hume, believed that belief in God was both uncertain and useless. Uncertain, because simple reasoning based on experience could not reliably lead us into the nebulous realms of theology. Useless, because even if we thought we could have reasonable belief in such an area, we wouldn't really be able to infer anything from it. If we wanted to know what God had planned for the world, we would have to look at the world as we have it. If that's not very nice, then we must submit to a God who creates not-so-nice worlds.

If it's up to us to deal with it or try to improve it, then we have to go ahead and deal with it or try to improve it. If we want to know what counts as "improvement," we can agree on the evils that need to be fixed: hunger, insecurity, war, and disease to begin with. Since human nature is a mixture of good and evil, religions can offer straws for both sides. They can increase our propensity for mercy and peace or increase our propensity for grudge and war. They are always dangerous allies.

Deirdre McCloskey Liberal Adama Smitha

Deirdre McCloskey is Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communications at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey made important contributions to cliometrics, virtue ethics, and feminist economics.

It is time for new and old liberalism, the "liberal plan," as old Adam Smith wrote in 1776, of "[social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice," with moderate, moderate government that really helps the poor.

Liberalism was born in the 18th century and was slowly implemented after 1776, with many hesitations and wrong turns. It explains many of the good things about the modern world compared to earlier and later regimes - the economic success of the modern world, its great arts and sciences, its tolerance, and especially the mass liberation of more and more people from brutal hierarchies. Progressives, conservatives, and populists counter that liberalism and its rhetoric also explain many supposed evils, such as the reduction of everything to money and markets, the loss of community and God, or the misfortune of non-white and non-Christian immigration . But they are wrong.

From the Philippines to the Russian Federation, liberalism has recently come under attack from violent, fear-mongering populists. Worry. For more than a century, however, benign or less benign progressives and conservatives have denied the importance of liberalism to a good society to the larger, more consistent challenge. It's time to talk.

Massimo Pigliucci or Epictetus

Massimo Pigliucci is K.D. Iranian professor of philosophy at the City College of New York. His books includeHow to be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life,Handbook for Young Stoics: How to Thrive in an Out-of-Control Worldand upcomingHow to live well.

"Some things are within our power and some are not. In our power is opinion, motive, desire, aversion, in a word, everything of our own creation. Our body, our property, our fame, our position, in a word, whatever is not our work is not in our power." (Handbook 1.1)

These words of the 1st century Stoic philosopher Epictetus changed my life when I first read them a few years ago. Far less than we think is under our control, and acting under the spell of this common illusion is a waste of time and energy, emotional and otherwise. We are only truly responsible for our thoughtful opinions, values, and decisions to act. For everything else, all we can do is develop an attitude of equanimity towards the self-evident truth that sometimes things in life go our way and sometimes they don't. So internalize your goals, away from results and toward your intentions, and you won't get angry, you won't blame others or yourself, and your life will flow smoothly.

Mary Midgley the Gai theory

Mary Midgley was a British philosopher known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. He has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature and was described by the Guardian as "the most significant scourge of scientific pretension" in Britain.

The idea of ​​Gaia—life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a baseless, semi-mystical fantasy. It's a useful idea, a remedy for the distortions that distort our worldview today. Its most obvious use, of course, is to suggest practical solutions to environmental problems. But more broadly, it also attacks the deeper confusions that block our thinking. We are amazed to believe that we can have an obligation to something so clearly inhuman. But we also wonder how we should see ourselves. Today's ways of thinking still tend to trap us in the narrow, individualistic picture of seventeenth-century social life on which today's primitive and barren individualism is based. I think a more realistic view of the Earth can give us a more realistic view of ourselves as its inhabitants. Indeed, we are already moving in that direction. But we need to make it much more transparent.

The problem is not only psychological. it affects your entire lifestyle. Our ideas about our place in the world permeate all our thinking, along with the images that express them, constantly determining what questions we ask and what answers may seem possible.

Raymond Tallis on the nature of humanity

Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic who previously worked as a clinical neuroscientist. Intelligent Life has described him as "one of the world's greatest living scholars" and his latest book, TheSeeing Yourself: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science.

Many thinkers in the Western tradition are humanists. Their humanism is often dominated by opposition to religion – rejecting its cosmology and metaphysics, its hard and soft power, and its wider cultural impact on our collective lives. It is a common mistake to assume that the supernatural view of humanity must be replaced by a naturalistic one: human beings are pieces of nature to be understood essentially as evolving organisms.

If we look at our individual and collective lives, it becomes apparent that while we are part of nature in some respects, we are fundamentally separate from it. One of the most dramatic expressions of our existence as more than intelligent chimpanzees is that we haveideanature and its laws, which we use to our advantage. We are strange pieces of matter that put "matter" in quotation marks.

Evolution cannot explain either the emergence of the self from invisible matter, or the role of self-awareness and the first person. Recognizing this failure to understand the human subject's place in the world invites and even demands a rethinking of our supernatural nature. The fact that this work has only just begun is both terrifying and exciting.

Julia Kristeva on contemporary politics

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher and semiologist, prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought. Kristeva is the author of more than 30 books, including the canonical textSemiotics.

Today's landmark is human madness. Politics is part of it, especially in its murderous outbursts. Politics is not, as for Hannah Arendt, a field where human freedom develops. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underworld of death that affects us, lacks the civilized glamor of the Greek city-state. The modern political field is vast, totalitarian, social, flattening, exhausting. As such, madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individualization.

In the face of this, political events, however outrageous and monstrous - the Nazi invasion, the atomic explosion - are assimilated to such an extent that they can only be measured by the human suffering they cause. Up to a point, given the moral suffering, there is no common ground between the weary lover in France and the Japanese woman burned by the atom. From the point of view of ailing ethics and aesthetics, the ridiculed private sphere acquires an official dignity that denigrates the public sphere, while assigning to history impressive responsibility for causing the disease of death. As a result, public life becomes serious, detached from reality, while private life is emphasized to such an extent that it fills all reality and overrides all other interests.

Bernardo Kastrup ή Schopenhauer

Bernardo Kastrup is a Dutch computer scientist and philosopher whose main area of ​​research is the problem of matter and mind. As a computer scientist, Kastrup specializes in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing.

Arthur Schopenhauer's pioneering insight—first published in 1818—allows us to break the bounds of Immanuel Kant's enormously influential epistemology that still moves us today. Kant realized – rightly – that every perception tells us about the world as it is presented to us. But through perception it is impossible to know the world as it is by itself. Schopenhauer's key insight was that, as far as we are concerned, we also have the unmediated experience of being ourselves apart from perception.

Even in a sensory deprivation chamber, we still experience endogenous emotions and desires. Our brain is only interested in how this inner experience presents itself to others. And since our brain is made up of the same elements that make up the rest of the universe, Schopenhauer concluded that the inanimate universe, too, is only a representation of an experiential inner life. The last one he called "will". The world itself is thus will, suprapersonal experiential states of a volitional nature, and matter is simply how will appears in perception. As Schopenhauer said, "we must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not from nature." There is much to be gained if we finally heed this profound knowledge.

Hannah Arendt on the banality of evil

Hannah Arendt was a German-American philosopher and political theorist who is widely regarded as one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century. Arendt is best known for her work on the nature of power and evil.

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He asked for a bottle of red wine and drank half of it. He refused to help a Protestant priest, the Reverend William Hull, who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two hours to live, so there was "no time to waste." The fifty meters from his cell to the execution chamber he walked calmly and upright, his hands tied behind his back. When the guards bound his ankles and knees, he asked them to loosen the bindings so he could stand up. "I don't need it," he said when offered a black hood. He was completely in control of himself, and even more: he was completely himself. Nothing could prove this more convincingly than the tragic stupidity of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in typical Nazi fashion that he was not a Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then continued, “After a while, gentlemen, we will all meet again. This is the fate of all men. Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I will not forget them." In the face of death he found a cliché used in a funeral oratorio. On the gallows, his memory played one last trick, he got "excited" and forgot it was his own funeral.

It was as if in those last minutes he summed up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—a lesson in the terrifying, unspeakable banality of evil.

Dan Zahavi for the experience

Dan Zahavi is a Danish philosopher, currently at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Oxford. Zahavi's main areas of research are intersubjectivity, social cognition, and self-awareness.

Can modern science be taught from the history of philosophy? According to the increasingly influential paradigm of neuroscience, the world of experience is an illusion created by the brain. What we perceive is not the world itself, but merely the brain's model of the world. This account is a revival of a theory that was popular with some neo-Kantian philosophers and neurophysiologists in the 19th century. It was also a theory that came under heavy philosophical criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is a criticism that its modern defenders have yet to respond to.

How can a theory avoid radical skepticism? If the whole world of perception is an illusion, it must include my wife, my children, and all my colleagues. If they are all artifacts created by my brain, then to whom do I address my scientific papers? If all objects of experience are artifacts created by the brain, this must of course also be true of the brain we perceive during, for example, open brain surgery. But if the brain that is supposed to produce all the illusions is itself a hallucination, the whole theory seems to fall apart.

Ayn Rand on Objectivism

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher and a strong proponent of reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge. She is known for her best-selling novels includingSourceIAtlas shruggedand for the development of a philosophical system he called Objectivism.

Today's frenzied technological development is reminiscent of the times before the financial crash of 1929: accelerating with the momentum of the past, in the unacknowledged remnants of Aristotelian epistemology, it is a feverish, feverish expansion, despite the fact that the theoretical explanation is excessive. - that in the field of scientific theory, unable to integrate or interpret their own data, scientists encourage the revival of primitive mysticism.

However, in the humanities, the collapse is over, the depression has come and the decline of science is almost complete... It is philosophy that defines and establishes the epistemological criteria by which human knowledge in general and the special sciences in particular. .. Humanity is not a being, an organism or a coral bush. The object of production and trade is man. The science of the humanities must begin with the study of man, not a loose whole called "community."

Ο Steve Fuller o ortogonalności

Steve Fuller is an American philosopher-sociologist who deals with science and technology. He made important contributions to the fields of social epistemology, academic freedom, intelligent design, and transhumanism.

"Orthogonality" is literally seeing the world at right angles to how it usually looks. The revolutionary meaning of this idea is close to a geometric metaphor. If one claims that there has long been a distinction between "left" and "right" in politics, one is choosing neither pole nor the other, and for that matter is not looking for a middle ground between the two. Instead, you assume that "left" and "right" are ready to be converted into what could be called "up" and "down". This 90-degree axial rotation is made possible by understanding "left" and "right" as unstable hybrids themselves: half of each hybrid really belongs to half of the other, resulting in a properly perceived political reality.

The philosophical basis of orthogonal thinking is that our everyday concepts are simply the result of the ingrained practices of our predecessors. It is the fossils that feed our imagination, the decay of various (human) organisms over many centuries. It is definitely "left wing" and "right". The left is an amalgam of top-down technocratic design and bottom-up community feeling. The right is a mixture of traditionalism that looks to the past and libertarianism that looks to the future. Philosophy works best when it performs the analogy of chemical analysis and synthesis to refine these raw materials in a way that promotes human progress.

I have developed this point in terms of "up" and "down", representing respectively a "precautionary" and "cautious" attitude towards risk. On the one hand, technocrats and libertarians agree to advance a dangerous, precautionary agenda that will move humanity away from its default positions. Communitarians and traditionalists, on the other hand, want to minimize harm above all else, even if that means retreating from current policies. The hard problem here is to locate the orthogonal axes where "left/right" and "up/down" are polar opposites.

GEM Anscombe o Wittgensteinie

GEM Anscombe was a British analytical philosopher who wrote on philosophy of mind, action, logic, language and ethics. It was an excellent form of analytical Thomism.

The general method suggested by Wittgenstein is to "show that the man gave no meaning [or perhaps: 'no reference'] to certain signs in his propositions." I can illustrate this method on the basis of the subsequent discussion of Wittgenstein's problems. He once greeted me with a question: "Why do people say that it is natural to believe that the sun revolves around the earth and not that the earth is on its own axis?" I replied, "I guess so, because it looked like the sun was going around the earth." "So," he asked, "what would it be like if the Earth looked like it was spinning on its axis?"

This question made me realize that until now I had not given any meaningful meaning to the phrase "seems to be" in "the sun seems to go around the earth". My response was to reach my palms up and lift them off my knees in a circular motion while leaning back and putting on a surprised expression. 'Exactly!' he said. Otherwise, I could say that I can give no other meaning than that suggested by a naive concept that can be destroyed by a question. A naïve idea is actually a fallacy, but it may take the strength of Copernicus to challenge it successfully.

Tony Milligan for the insightful dialogue

Tony Milligan is a Scottish philosopher who currently teaches ethics and philosophy of religion at King's College London. Milligan's main areas of research are the philosophy of love, animal ethics, space politics and civil disobedience.

Like many moralists, I've always thought of inclusive dialogue as a nice thing, a way to show that we care about others. Working on the ethics of space led me to think about it in a completely different way, as a necessity. My change of heart is because I recognize that our expansion into space is a multi-generational project. What we do now will only be a part of what will eventually become. Future generations will do everything else. However, we cannot advise them on how to get started.

What we can do is to ensure that the voices in our conversations are not limited to those of a small number of major powers. It is not a matter of many versus few. The big forces do all the hard work in space. This must be recognized and respected. It's more about the richness of the dialogue. Smaller nations bring a completely different perspective than China and the United States. Indigenous people can bring an understanding of time that is less myopic than you, me and almost everyone we know. A comprehensive dialogue allows a broader vision of the process.

Simone Weil for absence

Simone Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist, described by Albert Camus as "the one great spirit of our time". Weil is best known for her theories of reduction and elimination.

Absolute loneliness. Then we shall possess the truth of the world. Two ways to renounce material goods: To give them up for some spiritual gain. Imagine and feel them as conducive to spiritual well-being (for example, hunger, fatigue and humiliation cloud the mind and interfere with meditation) and at the same time renounce them. Only the second type of renunciation is nakedness of spirit. Moreover, material goods would not be dangerous if viewed in isolation and not linked to spiritual gain.

We must give up all that is not grace, not even desiring grace. Cessation of desire (Buddhism) - or detachment - or love of the ultimate good - all amount to the same thing: empty desire, the absolute of all content, desire in the void, desire without any desire. Take our desire away from all good things and wait. Experience shows that this expectation is fulfilled. Then we touch the absolute good.