Philosophy Now

Well, you’ve heard of metaphysics but what on Earth, you may be thinking, is metaethics? Apart from it being the main theme of this issue, that is. Ethics is a vast subject and vitally important, for it deals with how we should live our lives, with our values and who we want to be, with the choices we have to make, and above all with how we should treat one another. It includes famous systems of morality such as Kantian deontology, Utilitarianism, Virtue Ethics, and indeed Christian and other faith-based ethical systems. Metaethics, in turn, is the philosophy of how we think about ethics. Metaethics considers fundamental questions underpinning all debates about ethics. These include the status of the language in which we express ethical judgments. (Our opening article, by Justin…

Nana Ariel is a writer, a researcher and a lecturer in rhetoric and the learning sciences at Tel Aviv University. She was a visiting scholar and guest lecturer at Harvard University, and has published articles in various journals and international magazines. Her children’s book is titled The Most Boring Book in the World. Nick Everitt taught philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and briefly in the U.S., before taking early retirement as a Senior Lecturer. He is the author of Modern Epistemology (with Alec Fisher) and of The Non-existence of God. He has also published on a wide range of philosophical topics. Teresa Britton is professor of philosophy at Eastern Illinois University, where she teaches a variety of courses including The Meaning of Life and Philosophy of Science. When not in…

• Big Brother learns to read your mind • Philosophy teachers resolve to associate • Scottish ethicists back euthanasia bill. A Penny for Your Thoughts Neural activity can be monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, until recently, the images representing internal experiences could not be translated into words. Now a study reveals that fMRI imaging can be made to work with artificial intelligence language models that have a predictive function. According to a report in Nature, scientists introduced “a non-invasive decoder that reconstructs continuous language from cortical semantic representations recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Given novel brain recordings, this decoder generates intelligible word sequences that recover the meaning of perceived speech, imagined speech and even silent videos, demonstrating that a single decoder can be applied to a range of tasks.” Jerry…

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Head, about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; a track like Van Morrison’s1976 hit Cleaning Windows is the odd one out. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick) and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle) This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about. Philosophers on Baths Archimedes famously said Eureka! We all know that, and we might also remember…

We are all concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with ethical issues. Whether it be concerns over crime and punishment, humanitarian aid, ecological destruction, or simply the fact that your friend has broken a promise, ethical considerations seem to creep into almost all areas of life. But what is it that makes humans prone to thinking in terms of right and wrong or good and bad? Why are we psychologically predisposed to make judgements of the moral variety, and what does it actually mean to make a moral judgement? These are what philosophers might call ‘secondorder’ moral questions. They are among the chief concerns of the philosophical sub-field known as ‘metaethics’. The Lay of the Land Metaethics as a distinct discipline is little over a century old. It is generally considered…

Socrates famously got himself into trouble by persistently questioning authority. He irritated his fellow citizens so much that he ended up on trial. Eventually he accepted his sentence of execution by drinking hemlock rather than evading the law by fleeing to an easy exile. While few philosophers are as courageous (or as rash?) as Socrates, we generally remain similarly suspicious of appeals to authority. We worry that too many self-proclaimed authorities are purveyors of self-serving puffery and nonsense. We like to prod, probe and question received wisdom. We ask for reasons, evidence, and argument. Arguments should be weighed on their merits not their origins. Bad people can have good ideas, and good people can have bad ideas. In my experience, the authority-doubting question ‘Who’s to say?’ is especially popular among moral…