The Philosophers' Magazine

Whenever departments do face threats, people rightly demand to know why. It is instructive to look at the different types of reason given by management, in answering campaigns against closure, to understand why a department has finally been forced to disband or not.

“Mathematical objects are not exactly of our own making, but we actually have to do something to get them. There’s something out there which we prod, but there’s the prodding that’s also required. Numbers are not exactly out there or in us, but somehow in between.”

It is evident that every moment of our life we depend on having some kind of brain in working order. But it does not follow from this that we are a brain in working order.

Trying to figure out the contours of the concept of disorder is worthwhile because whether something counts as a disorder frequently makes a huge difference to us in everyday life. Suppose I drink a lot – if I think alcoholism is a disease I may visit a doctor, if I consider it a moral failing I may blame myself for my weakness of will.

“The contents of a photograph are not facts, nor reality, nor truth. They are a means we have created to extend our way of seeing on a search for truth.”

What does the idea that you could have done something else at the time come to? According to some philosophers, it comes to this: in a hypothetical universe that has exactly the same past as our universe and exactly the same laws of nature, you do something else at this very time.

Our judgements about luck – and about related things, like risk – are for the most part sensitive to what is happening in close possible worlds rather than probabilities.

The worst thing that can happen to us is to be blessed with a life of unending luxury, comfort, and wealth, for such a life would make one weak and lazy. But worst of all, the longer we experience a comfortable and easy life, the harder it will hit us when our luck fi nally changes, as it surely one day will.

Even before we come to consider the influence of luck in terms of the results of our actions or the types of situations we come across, luck plays a decisive role in who we fundamentally are.

People who suffer survivor’s guilt reason that, if they survived while others didn’t, then this must be because of the choices that they made, and that others did not make. People with survivor’s guilt feel just the way they would feel if they did not really believe in luck.

What is it that makes the involuntarily unemployed, those suffering from genetic disorders and congenital illnesses, and the victims of unforeseen natural disasters the rightful recipients of assistance?

His renunciation of citizenship is a symbolic denial of American exceptionalism, but it is not an abandonment of America or the values that it – but not it alone – represents and promotes.