An Immortal Life Would Be Unbearably Boring

If we can prolong life endlessly, it would not be desirable.

An immortal life would have satisfied all its desires and achieved its goals. There is nothing left to do, but boredom.

Bernard Williams in "The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" in Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp.82-100,  argued that immortal individuals would be utterly bored with unchanging desires.

Read Bernard Williams article "The Makropulos Case"

A Reply to Bernard Williams argument.

Anscombe: Without God There is No Need To Speak Of Absolute Shoulds

Topic for #88: G.E.M. Anscombe on Ethical Judgment and Action |

Anscombe says that we only think in terms of moral laws and obligations because Christianity was dominant in our culture for so long.

It is as if the notion “criminal” were to remain when
criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten. A Hume discovering this situation might conclude that there was a special sentiment, expressed by “criminal,” which alone gave the word its sense.
So Hume discovered the situation which the notion “obligation” survived, and the notion “ought” was invested with that peculiar for having which it is said to be used in a “moral” sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was
substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation. The situation, if I am right, was the interesting one of the survival of a concept outside the framework of thought that made it a really intelligible one.

 Anscombe thinks that we also need to distinguish again between the intended (you are responsible for whether you do the unethical deed or not) and the merely foreseen (you are not responsible for this foreseen event that you do not intend).


G E M Anscombe on Moral Philosophy

Hermeneutics of events: Can a man speak for God?

Perkasa’s Zul Noordin celebrates Karpal’s death as clearing path for hudud | Malaysia | The Malay Mail Online: Datuk Zulkifli Noordin



He
wrote using his Twitter handle @zulkiflinoordin, "Allah has killed off
Karpal who was the major opponent of its implementation!"



Datuk
Zulkifli Noordin in making this remark presumes that he knows the mind
and intentions of God. Is this good theology?



Puny Man, often in ignorant pride, claims to
speak for God. Let's consider another plausible scenario. We may also
interpret Karpal's death as God's Justice removing a floodgate that has
kept back the brackish water of evils and injustices. Why? To let evil
show its true colors and to face its final condemnation.



Which of these two interpretations is correct?  Perhaps neither or both interpretations are correct. There could be other understandings for this tragic event.



Event interpretation is prejudicial. 



Foucault argues that the episteme of an age condtions one's understanding of "Truth".

 

Philosophy is not like science

Please Stop Contributing to the Publish-or-Perish Landfill

by Wes Alwan on April 9, 2014 |

Bernard Williams was the rare academic who was also a great writer. In his review of Williams’ Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002, Paul Sagar lets academia have it:

We can now see that Williams was not lazy: he spent an immense amount of time reading and thinking, and knew much beyond his own academic arguments. What he chose to do was spend time thinking about things that most interested him, rather than engaging in the Sisyphean task of attempting to stay up to date with the vast and ever-expanding sea of contemporary scholarship, which tirelessly throws out publication after publication in every conceivable niche of enquiry. It is undeniable that the vast majority of present scholarly output in philosophy and attendant disciplines is of a poor standard: it is either unoriginal, original at the expense of being preposterous and tiresomely pointless or trivial, or else diligent and robust but utterly devoid of interest to anybody other than those academics who have made a career out of grinding out points and counterpoints within debates that only exist because of the very professionalization of intellectual pursuits of which their activity is a function. Williams chose to bypass all of this and get on with being original and interesting. It is not at all clear that he was making a mistake.
The present government’s Kafkaesque “Research Excellence Framework” demands that academics churn out publications, regardless of whether they have anything to say. More generally, there has been a pronounced cultural shift in professionalized academia away from teaching and towards measurable ‘outputs’, encouraging academics to translate whatever modest or untenable ideas they have into high ‘impact’ publications. Academia is in danger of ending up moribund via a prolonged case of morbid obesity. Williams’s advice was the exact opposite of all of this: disciplines like philosophy should not encourage, or give incentives for, publishing, unless what one writes is likely to be very good indeed; likely to be both genuinely interesting and original.
…
Philosophy is not like [science]: in philosophy, you are not only not adding data if you are making bad, or unoriginal, or stupid, or pointlessly banal and repetitive arguments, you are getting in the way of those who are trying to make sense of our world, and who might be able to make more sense of it than those who have tried before.

– Wes Alwan

Do Animals Have Rights?

Also read:  A comprehensive essay on animal rights and Environmental Ethics

Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit debated the issue of animal rights in 2001 with Peter Singer.^[127] Posner argues that his moral intuition tells him "that human beings prefer their own. If a dog threatens a human infant, even if it requires causing more pain to the dog to stop it, than the dog would have caused to the infant, then we favour the child. It would be monstrous to spare the dog."

Michel Foucault (French: [miʃɛl fuko]; born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge.

Foucault's colleague Pierre Bourdieu summarised the philosopher's thought as "a long exploration of transgression, of going beyond social limits, always inseparably linked to knowledge and power."

"The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter.  What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorize and stigmatise not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome."

Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004)^[157]

Philosopher Philip Stokes of the University of Reading noted that overall, Foucault's work was "dark and pessimistic", but that it did leave some room for optimism, in that it illustrates how the discipline of philosophy can be used to highlight areas of domination. In doing so, Stokes claimed, we are able to understand how we are being dominated and strive to build social structures that minimize this risk of domination. In all of this development there had to be close attention to detail; it is the detail which eventually individualises people.

--Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault

For a more detailed introduction go to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  --http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/

Foucault's Key Ideas

Follow link to read Foucault's Key ideas.

Foucault Key Ideas