abtw777

If you’re someone who wants to figure out the fickleness of human nature, then perhaps there’s no better place to start than with our sense of the sacred. Or actually, to start with what we find profane – a desecration, a violation. There are many strange examples of this. One is the reaction people have to strange clothing – or the lack of clothing altogether. Or perhaps it’s a person’s race or sexual orientation that offends. A person thus offended will get angry in often a completely incoherent way. The pre-frontal cortex is by-passed and they emit strange utterances straight from the reptilian brain! We could say, it’s pure emotion – a visceral sense of outrage and violation. If only – we might speculate – if only people got as upset as this by war, torture, rape, cruelty and the like. For these really are violations of the sacred – the sacredness of human life. But no! Often we are outraged by the trivial and indifferent to truly global problems. What to make of this? W...

One of the most important ideas in Edmund Burke’s book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, is that very distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. Mountains, crashing waves, thunderstorms – such things have a grandeur that humbles us and reminds us of our precarity and impermanence as frail humans. This is the sublime. Beauty, by contrast, seems to Mr. Burke to be more about superficial pleasure. He makes some telling comments about the areas of bare flesh that were displayed in women’s fashions of his day. Perhaps these comments now seem more silly than disturbing. Ideas of either profundity or superficial prettiness were out of the window when it came to ladies’ shoulders. Mr. Burke could only swoon! What to make of all this? For one thing, almost all philosophers who have sought to define aesthetics have tended to do so by means of categories, like our own Mr. Burke (except in the case of the aforementioned shoulders). Thus, another human l...

Swans, from a distance, appear to be serene creatures. They glide across the water, with little sign of any effort. They seem happy just to be. But close up, they’re not quite so placid. Throwing food to the swans at the local park, for instance, shows another side to their nature – dare I say, an ugly side. The pond has one pair of swans and their grown-up chicks from the previous year. Food encourages a lot of snapping between all of the swans. But one day, something a bit more alarming occurred. The crowd of ducks that were swimming around amongst the swans, trying to catch some crumbs of food was frustrating one of the young swans. The young swan grabbed one of the ducks by the neck – grabbed it and would not let go. What to do? I could, of course, have scrambled down the bank, waded into the water, and tried to wrestle the duck from out of the swan’s bill. But – I was trying to think quickly here – what if someone were to come along? They would most likely think that – r...

‘Soul’ is still a word that we use quite often. If, for instance, I were to say, I’m sick to my soul’, you’d likely know exactly what I mean. I would not have to explain myself as a manic-depressive with bi-polar tendencies, or such like. Likewise, if I were to say that something brings joy to my soul, then again my meaning is immediately clear. But if someone were to ask, ‘what exactly is your soul?’ Well, things start to get a lot more complicated! Some will not believe in her at all. Others will maybe have a religious interpretation. But then, this will likely be somewhat vague. For instance, a question that might arise is, can there be souls without bodies? Or do we really mean spirit when we say soul? Okay then, what exactly is spirit? Delving back into the history of our understanding of soul doesn’t usually help us too much. That is, apart from one reference from Aristotle. ‘If the eye were a creature’, he said, ‘then seeing would be its soul’. So he was saying som...

I don’t mean the undead that want to eat your brain! This zombie is properly alive – at least, sort of! There are lots of zombie analogies in philosophy, supposedly about the nature of consciousness. One such is the seeing red example. How do I know what a zombie is seeing when it looks at a red object? Perhaps it just pretends to see red, because it knows this is what it should be reporting. But what does it REALLY see? Does it see anything at all? What, after all, is seeing? Observation though is not the best of examples when it comes to zombies. What about pain? Prick a zombie with a pin and it goes OUCH, but what does it REALLY feel? This is more to the point, as it were. Because pain is a lot less straight-forward than observation. We have to ask, what, exactly is pain? Nerves reacting to a stimulus? Neurones firing? If it can be ‘reduced’ to a flow of information this seems to help things along. Now it’s become just another observation – like seeing red. But what ...

I was quite young, I think, when I first noticed an anomaly in my toy collection. A truck had roughly the same dimensions as its associated cars. But, from experience, I knew that trucks are generally many times larger than cars. Something was wrong. I felt the need to get rid of the toy truck and before long I’d learnt that the problem was one of scale. After a bit of searching, I happened upon a toy car-transporter truck, which seemed to be roughly in proportion to my assortment of toy cars. I’d also gleaned from my father or brother that scale could be expressed in numerical form – either as a fraction or as a ratio. I scrutinised the boxes of various toys, and sure enough, some displayed a scale. The most concise, in this regard, being the components of model railways. My attention moved to model railways therefore, out of respect for their shared scaling concerns. For a while I spent my pocket money on building up the stock of model railway items that were consistent with...