philosophy – On the Human

In Praise of Pleasure

Jason King — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:32:15 +0000

Geoffrey Harpham, Director, National Humanities Center

When I stumbled upon the future, I was actually looking for the past.

In the 1990s, I was trying to write a book about why the concept of language had so dominated the intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At some point, it occurred to me

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Final Thoughts of a Disenchanted Naturalist

Jason King — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:21:44 +0000

In Geoffrey Harpham’s first contribution to “On the Human” he wrote,

One of the most striking features of contemporary intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary biology.

“Approached”

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Whole-Body Apoptosis and the Meanings of Lives

Jason King — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:24:44 +0000

When, if ever, should we intentionally shorten our lives? Programming our own deaths is not a subject many people seem to have thought much about. But think about it we must. For biotechnologies continue to advance, our psychological identities continue to depend on our being embodied, and more and more of us spend our last days in debilitated confused states. Were we to find a means of safely and effectively cutting short the suffering and frustration of older and older age, wouldn’t it be unethical not to use it?

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Knowledge of our own thoughts is just as interpretive as knowledge of the thoughts of others

Jason King — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:40:37 +0000

Philosophers have traditionally assumed that knowledge of our own thoughts is special. Descartes famously believed that knowledge of our current thoughts is infallible. He also believed that those thoughts themselves are self-presenting, so that whenever one entertains a thought, one is capable of infallible knowledge of it. Many figures in the history of philosophy have

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The Sacred and the Humane

Jason King — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 02:00:43 +0000

Human Rights are all the rage. They have become, currently, a very popular arena for both political activism and rampant discourse. Human rights, as we all know, are the rights humans are due simply by virtue of being human. But there is nothing simple here, since both “human” and “rights” are concepts in need of investigation. One deep philosophical issue that invigorates debates in human rights is the question of their foundation and justification, the question “where do human rights come from, and what grounds them?” There are two essentially different approaches to answering that question — the religious way and the secular, or philosophical, way.

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Doing, Feeling, Meaning and Explaining

Jason King — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 19:41:28 +0000

It is "easy" to explain doing, "hard" to explain feeling. Turing has set the agenda for the easy explanation (though it will be a long time coming). I will try to explain why and how explaining feeling will not only be hard, but impossible. Explaining meaning will prove almost as hard because meaning is a hybrid of know-how and what it feels like to know how.

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The Political Economy of Personhood

Jason King — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 14:16:51 +0000

To speak in the same breath of personhood and political economy sounds odd because of the seemingly obvious radical difference between the two worlds of their application. On the one hand, a straightforward moral term from everyday life referring to the status of our fellow humans; on the other hand, a technical theory with roots in 18th-century French and British philosophical thought about the interrelation between economic production, society, and the state. What could these two possibly have to do with each other?

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Taking Life: Animals

Jason King — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 15:48:49 +0000

Is meat eating justified by the fact that millions of animals would never exist should no one care to eat them?

In Social Rights and Duties, a collection of essays and lectures published in

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Do People Actually Believe in Objective Moral Truths?

Jason King — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:27:55 +0000

Imagine two people discussing a question in mathematics. One of them says “7,497 is a prime number,” while the other says, “7,497 is not a prime number.” In a case like this one, we would probably conclude that there is a single right answer and that anyone who says otherwise must be mistaken. The question

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This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

Jason King — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:54:02 +0000

Symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech. And we understand them. We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his ass kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home. Where did this expertise with symbolism come from?

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