Why do we feel emotion when listening to music? Ben Ushedo goes beyond emotivist and cognitivist approaches to answer this intriguing question. “Music can make me feel tense or relaxed; it can disturb, unsettle me, and startle me; it can calm me down or excite me…”Jennifer Robinson, ‘Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’. What …
Marek Soszynski considers whether it couldn’t look like resemblance after all. How do pictures represent in the way they do? How come a picture of a cat, for example, is indeed of a cat – actually has a cat as its object? Or to put it the other way around, how is a cat pictorially …
Natasha Gilbert says out with the old arguments, and in with the new. There has been a recent surge of interest in the old problem of free will. But away from time-worn debates over the questions ‘Are we free?’ and ‘Are we morally responsible?’ some fresh waters are at last in reach. As I will …
Graham W. Boyd argues that choice is an illusion. “Recently I was trying to explain to an intelligent woman the problem of trying to understand how it is we perceive anything at all, and I was not having any success. She could not see why there was a problem. Finally in despair I asked her …
The Brain’s Risk/Reward System Makes Our Choices, Not Us Read More »
Pablo Cevallos Estarellas reviews the developments that caused professional to triumph over amateur philosophy in education, and proposes a way forward. If to do philosophy is to ask questions of a special kind about central human problems and then to grapple with them in a rigorous way, most people can in principle learn how to …
Jan Derry wants to know what it is to know. What is it to be a human knower? This is the question the philosopher Robert Brandom asks in his investigation into the nature of language and of the social practices which distinguish us as creatures of intellect. I will consider his answer to this question. …
Kathleen O’Dwyer asks if we can learn how to love, with Erich Fromm and friends. “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation” Rainer Maria Rilke. “Your task is …
Van Harvey considers an unusual critique of Christian love. There have been many atheist critics of Christianity who have argued that its doctrines are intellectually untenable or based on illusion, but few have argued that the Christian notion of love enshrines the highest human virtue, and that this requires those who embrace it to renounce …
Bob Harrison questions his identity. Hello, you, this is me – and that’s him. But what are you? And what am I? And what is he? Three questions, and in each case the answer is philosophically interesting. The interest turns on the further question: “What is a person?” John Locke offers a suggestion: “what person …
Craig Ross on whether freedom is all it’s been made up to be. Some believe that humans have free will; others that each of our actions and choices is caused by prior events. Compatibilism is the theory that we can be both caused and free. It is advocated by many modern philosophers, including the prolific …