Be Yourself: Why Aristotle Was Right and Plato Was Wrong
Life is full of dilemmas. We’re constantly being pulled in different directions. One common struggle is this: on the one hand, we want to become the best version of ourselves. On the other, we feel pressure to fit in with society’s expectations and rules. Most of the time, it’s not too hard to balance the two. But what happens when they clash? Which side should win? I believe the answer lies in the philosophy of ... Read / View all articles
The Dilemma of Dualism
Plato started it, 400 years BCE. He drove a wedge between mind and matter. Plato claimed that human souls move between two worlds: a world of immaterial ideas, and a world of material, physical appearances. When a person is born, a soul temporarily moves from the world of ideas to the physical world, and nestles in the newly-born human body. This soul stays there until the physical body expires, at which point it returns to ... Read / View all articles
The World as Will & Representation
There is a long-standing debate in philosophy about whether we are driven by reason or by our personal passions. Schopenhauer added a third option: we are driven by a blind force, the Will. And much like the Stones, the Will Can't Get No Satisfaction, so neither can we ... Let's start with Immanuel Kant's claim that there are two worlds - a phenomenal world and a noumenal world. The phenomenal is the world as we ... Read / View all articles
Phenomenology
To understand the world, we need to understand our direct experience of it. It is all we are capable of knowing anyway. It's rather useless to try and imagine a world separate from our experience of it. Is that glass of wine really burgundy red, with an aroma of strawberries, liquorice and peach, or are my senses and brain converting a raw substance into that particular experience? Because we have no way of knowing about ... Read / View all articles
Virtue Ethics
Virtue ethics offers the best framework to encompass the full spectrum of moral theories in an attempt to offer comprehensive, dynamic answers to radically diverse moral dilemmas. In what follows, I aim to argue why virtue ethics has the inherent potential to offer the most comprehensive framework to deal with complex moral dilemmas, but is, just like any other moral theory, insufficient on its own. In other words, while no moral theory can claim singular, ... Read / View all articles
What are values?
We don't randomly pick and choose values for living our lives. Rather, values provide (rational) reasons for motivating, evaluating and justifying our and others’ actions, and they need to make sense in our broader vision of what we consider a good life. For a value to be compelling, it needs to be empirically and rationally consistent with a particular vision of the good life, and conducive to establishing this vision in the world. Nicholas Rescher ... Read / View all articles
Morality’s muddled state of disorder
Western moral philosophers have for more than 2000 years developed all sorts of frameworks for morality, with the aim of capturing the origins, explanations and justifications for moral conduct in one coherent, comprehensive paradigm. This took a dramatic turn around 1600 in Europe - the Age of Enlightenment - with on the one hand the explicit rejection of old mythical, communal and traditional narratives, and on the other hand a new, all-pervasive belief in universal, ... Read / View all articles
Justice as Fairness
All societies have ways of distributing social benefits and burdens among their citizens. The term 'social justice' refers to the wish of modern societies for this distribution to be equal, fair and reasonable. But how can this be guaranteed, without squashing people's individual liberties? What kind of society would free and rational people choose if they found themselves in equal, fair circumstances? John Rawls tried to find the balance between liberty and equality in a ... Read / View all articles
Existentialism
What does it mean to be alive? For the existentialist, it means that, every second of the day, with every breath we take, we make choices. We are free. This continuous stream of choices shapes our lives - we write our own lives. While we may feel exhilaration at the thought of this boundless freedom, we also feel anxiety at the thought of so many options, and the thought of the responsibilities that underlie our ... Read / View all articlesPhilosophy Resources
Podcasts Examining Ethics Moral Maze Practical Ethics Bites Ethics Bites The Philosopher and the News Tomorrow's World Philosophy 247 BBC4 In Our Time A History of Ideas Philoso?hy Talk Philosophy Bites The Partially Examined Life History of Philosophy without any Gaps Philosophize This The Infinite Monkey Cage Critical Reasoning for Beginners Self-paced Video Courses General Philosophy The School of Life A History of Philosophy with Arthur Holmes A romp through the philosophy of the ... Read / View all articles
What it Means to be an Outsider
Traditional ways of evaluating cultures, and managing value clashes between these cultures, fail to generate desired results. They cannot generate these results, because they are based on, and restricted by, the ethnocentric perspective. Ethnocentrism either restricts us to clear-cut, static, homogenous definitions of us-and-them, or detaches us from us-and-them contingencies entirely, in favour of elusive, universal “one fits all” theories. What is therefore needed, is a new perspective - a perspective that acknowledges that cultures ... Read / View all articles
Morality is always dogmatic
I've been especially intrigued by prof Ronnie de Sousa's essay titled "Forget Morality" this week. Surely, prof de Sousa puts his (very eloquent) finger on a sore ethical point ... Read "Forget Morality" here ... morality cannot provide conclusive answers, and where it has tried to do so, it has demonstrated all the characteristics of totalitarian and dogmatic ambitions. All too often, moral grandstanding is simply an excuse for, and a diversion from, the real ... Read / View all articles
A case study into the ethics of privacy
This essay received top-of-the-class marks as part of my (cum laude) Postgraduate Diploma in Applied Ethics at the University of Stellenbosch 2020. Today’s human society, welfare and progress rely fundamentally on the free flow of information: the ‘information society’. More information means a better information society means more human welfare and progress. A big part of this information is collected from people, and is deemed personal. Because access to personal information may allow others to ... Read / View all articles
Should morality always be rational & impartial?
Towards a universal definition for answering all moral questions. People may find answers to everyday moral dilemmas in various sources and concepts, but the philosophical study of ethics seeks to formulate a universal definition for answering all moral questions. James and Stuart Rachels argue that two requirements are necessary for any definition of morality: rationality and impartiality (Rachels & Rachels, 2019:13). In other words, any definition of morality should at least require moral agents to ... Read / View all articles
Why Philosophy?
Philosophy is pretty useless. It does not come up with a cure for cancer, it does not put food on the table, and it hardly inflates one's popularity among friends. So why bother? Perhaps philosophy is, in the words of Bertrand Russell ( † 1970 ) no better than " ... innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible ..." Surely, to people who expect practical solutions as ... Read / View all articles
Aikona Corona
What we need is experts, not leaders. The Covid-19 pandemic is a technical matter, with technical questions, dilemmas and solutions. We cannot allow politicians to hijack the process, even with the best intentions, invoking democratic prerogatives of the majority while flouting equally democratic principles of transparent and accountable government. In South Africa, a National Coronavirus Command Council (NCCC) has been established in terms of the Disaster Management Act and placed under the leadership of President ... Read / View all articles
No Man’s Land
Settling in a foreign culture is remarkably ... unsettling. I find myself in a no man's land between two cultures - old and new. While I feel richer for all the ways in which both cultures challenge one another, and me, and for the insight and freedom these challenges offer me, I feel poorer for not belonging, for lacking a solid foundation. Of course, there was no plan. I ended up in Southern Africa as ... Read / View all articles
Continuity versus change
How can we explain unchanging continuity, while everything around us seems to change all the time? Or does it? The Greek founders of Western philosophy built entire theories on the assumption that some things are eternal and immutable, while others are temporary and subject to change. While the pre-Socratics explored the material foundations of our world, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle reserved eternity for immaterial ideas - a concept that was picked up and elaborated on ... Read / View all articles
Buddhism, an introduction
The academic philosophical fraternity may have a problem with classifying the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama ( † 400 BCE ? ) as a philosopher. Is Buddhism a philosophy, or a religion? Stripped from the cult-like devotion that followed the Buddha's example and instructions, and focusing strictly on his analysis of the human condition and his suggestions on how to manage this condition, I think there are good reasons to qualify the Buddha as a ... Read / View all articles
The Socratic Method
Making people question themselves can drive them up the wall. But can it also encourage them to develop better concepts to live better lives? When, around 450 BCE, the Oracle at Delphi was asked who the wisest man in Athens was, it replied "Socrates", without explaining why. Explaining why is not what oracles do, so Socrates came up with his own explanation. Socrates felt surrounded by people claiming to know things with certainty. They all ... Read / View all articles
Nietzsche’s slave morality
If you were told that you would have to live your life, this same life, over and over again. What would you change? The idea of "eternal recurrence" is how Friedrich Nietzsche ( † 1900 ) would determine whether you are living the right life, your best life. Nietzsche assumed that if you'd live your life in the knowledge that you would be living this same life over and over again, you would really, really ... Read / View all articles
Pythagoras & the Golden Ratio
Not all that much is known with certainty about old Greek philosophers. Some of them decided not to write anything down, while the written works of many others got destroyed and paraphrased along the ages and adverse ideologies. Skimming past the dubious legends and myths, we do, however, have fragmented factual knowledge of some of the focus points that distinguished one thinker from another. For Pythagoras, this means skimming past stories of bean avoidance and ... Read / View all articles