Dilip Simeon's blog

“ If to will good or evil has an effect on the world, it can only have one on the boundaries of the world, not on the facts, on what cannot be portrayed by language but can only be shown in language ...  There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that’s all. One can say: good or evil do not exist. Death is not an event in life. We do not live through it in the world. If eternity is understood not as infinite temporal duration, but as non-temporality, then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.” Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) appears to be the only major work of philosophy to have been composed while the author was an active military combatant. René Descartes was serving in the Thirty Years War as a volunteer with the Dutch and then Bavarian armies when he first developed his philosophical ideas, but we don’t know whether he saw combat. Wittgenstein enlisted as an infantryman in the Austro...

The English journalist John Diamond, shortly before his death from throat cancer in 2001, wrote that ‘there is really no such thing as alternative medicine, just medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t’. Ecological knowledge might be thought of as similarly indivisible. There are no alternative birds, non-traditional plants, complementary ecologies. More often than not, bodies of knowledge develop not in opposition to one another but along parallel tracks. Richard Smyth: Nature does not care I worry, sometimes, that knowledge is falling out of fashion – that in the field in which I work, nature writing, the multitudinous nonfictions of the more-than-human world, facts have been devalued; knowing stuff is no longer enough. Marc Hamer, a British writer on nature and gardening, said in his book Seed to Dust (2021) that he likes his head ‘to be clean and empty’ – as if, the naturalist Tim Dee remarked in his review for The Guardian, ‘it were a spiritual goal to be de-cluttered of fa...

Joseph Raz, a commanding figure in modern legal philosophy, died in London on 2 May aged 83. He was one of three or four philosophers who made towering contributions to our theoretical understanding of law. The others were Hans Kelsen (1881-1973), HLA Hart (1907-92) and Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013). They are all gone now. Analytic jurisprudence – and, in Raz’s case, the philosophy of law washing over into the study of practical reason generally – is their legacy. Raz, born in Haifa in 1939, was a graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. After getting his law degree, he went to Oxford to do graduate work under Hart’s supervision. Then, having returned for a few years to Jerusalem following the completion of his doctorate, he came back to Oxford in 1972 to take up a fellowship at Balliol College. There he remained, in one capacity or another – tutorial fellow, professor of the philosophy of law, research professor – until his retirement from Oxford in 2009. But his work continued....

Over the past two centuries, most critiques of modernity have fallen into one of two camps. The first tends to see the modern age as the spawn of the tragic dissolution of Christian civilization, which had provided stable meaning and order for over a millennium, while the second emphasizes the failures of modernity to fulfill its liberatory ideals. In his mature thought, Illich articulated an alternative to both views, summed up in the phrase  corruptio optimi pessima  ('the corruption of the best is the worst'). For Illich, secular modernity is not a departure from Christianity, but an extension of profound transformations set in motion by the Church... Deschooling Society  was “an immediate cause célèbre” and “the most widely discussed and debated of all of Illich’s writings.” The project had its beginnings in Puerto Rico, where Illich had initially advocated for free primary schooling for the poor. But as he began to study the effects of the expansion of schooli...

Taken together, the continental and analytic meltdowns indicate that truth is either an evil authoritarian force or that it is nothing at all. That just about does it, doesn’t it? In one way or the other, then, and through the whole century, truth seemed to be in collapse, a scene of puzzlement and despair, a land from which philosophers had emigrated. But we haven’t stopped needing to figure out what’s true, or stopped arguing about it as though we know what we mean. Questions about what is true are, putting it mildly, no less urgent now than they were in 1900. Truth, that is, has proven as hard to eradicate as it is to elucidate. We keep finding we need the notion… Crispin Sartwell: Truth is real It is often said, rather casually, that truth is dissolving, that we live in the ‘post-truth era’. But truth is one of our central concepts – perhaps our most central concept – and I don’t think we can do without it. To believe that masks prevent the spread of COVID-19 is to take it...