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What Makes You Love Doing Philosophy?
 Whenever I meet someone who has been studying philosophy much longer than I have, I always ask the same question: How has your love for philosophy changed over time? What motivates you to continue your philosophical work? I want to reflect on my journey in understanding my relationship with philosophy—a journey of love and hate. […]
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The Classical Upaniṣads: A Guide
 2025.04.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Signe Cohen, The Classical Upaniṣads: A Guide (Guides to Sacred Texts), Oxford University Press, 2024, 280pp., $24.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780197654163. Reviewed by Parimal G. Patil, Harvard University Not every book of interest to philosophers is itself a work of philosophy; nor does every such book […]
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Hacía una crítica ética de la historia de la filosofía en México desde la perspectiva de género
 2025.04.5 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Fanny Del Río, Hacía una crítica ética de la historia de la filosofía en México desde la perspectiva de género, Editorial NUN, 2020, 92pp., $11.00 (pbk), ISBN 9786079960056. Reviewed by Amy Reed-Sandoval, University of Nevada, Las Vegas In her book Hacía una crítica ética de la […]
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Towards a Democratic Economy
A strange cognitive dissonance is pervading our social life: we regard it as our inalienable right to govern ourselves democratically in one social sphere, while in another we suddenly surrender these very rights unquestioningly. This shift occurs the moment we step through the factory door. Both the state and the economy imply government over others, […]
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Asking Effective Questions, Steven M. Cahn
In an oral examination, faculty members are probing the breadth and depth of a student’s knowledge. The usefulness of the format, however, depends on the quality of the questions. A most Ineffective one begins with an elaborate preamble, then goes on at length to raise multiple issues. Suppose, for example, a student working on the […]
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Nature, Beauty and Meaning
 The beauty of a painting of a flower, mountain or sunset normally owes to how it depicts its object, to its rendering of nature. But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty? They do not, after all, depict, represent or render anything. A familiar answer is that they are beautiful solely in virtue of pleasure or delight taken in their colours and forms. But, aside from other defects, this answer does little justice to the importance that natural beauty has for many people – an importance far beyond that of, say, a wallpaper whose colours and shapes may be also give a lot of pleasure. Poets do not extol the beauty of wallpaper in the way they do the beauty of nature.
But what of the flower, mountain and sunset themselves? To what do they owe their beauty?
A very different answer is that the beauty of flowers, mountains and so on owes, in part at least, to a meaning or significance they have. And it is this that explains why experience of their beauty matters so much to people. This is the kind of answer given by writers from Plato and Plotinus, through Kant and Schiller, to Roger Scruton and R.W. Hepburn.
It is an answer that is only credible if a distinction is made between ‘serious’ and ‘loose’ or ‘trivial’ references to beauty. ‘Beautiful’, like its equivalents in languages other than English, is often used to record enjoyable experiences – of a cold beer on a hot day, say, or a jaunty tune – that the speaker, if pressed, would concede were not really experiences of beauty. The beer was nice, the tune pretty, but beautiful? In such cases, there is no temptation to invoke the idea of meaning in order to characterise the pleasurable experience. It is a different matter, however, with ‘serious’ uses of ‘beautiful’: here, there is no willingness to withdraw the adjective. In such cases, it is at least credible to think that something the flowers or mountains mean or signify is integral to the experiences of their beauty. For, unlike drinking the cold beer or hearing the pretty tune, these experiences of nature are of great importance to people – ones of a kind that they would find it difficult, even tragic, to be deprived of.
There are, however, problems with ascribing to natural things and environments meaning of a type that is integral to experiences of beauty. (Someone may, of course, find a mountain beautiful and, quite separately, a place of significance: it’s where he nearly lost his life in an avalanche, say, or where he went on honeymoon). Those of us who would like to regard natural beauty as meaningful need to address these problems, and to ask what it could be to regard such beauty as meaningful.
When a natural object or place is found ‘seriously’ beautiful, a person is typically absorbed or immersed in the experience.
Meanings cannot be located, after all, in …
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Are We All Hypocrites About the Rule of Law?
Charges of “that’s illegal!” don’t seem to stick across the political divide. When the left charges Trump with illegal acts, the right points out Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. If a Democratic president were to issue an executive order confiscating all semi-automatic firearms, she would incur the wrath of a very active political constituency, but a […]
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Navigating the Ethics and Ontology of Human Neuron-Microchip Biocomputers
Have you ever played the 1970s-era arcade game Pong? It’s basically primitive computer tennis: you hit a moving dot back and forth across the screen using a scrollable vertical line meant to function as a paddle. You win if you reach ten points before your opponent does. Even if you’ve never played, I expect you get […]
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Friedrich Schiller
 [Revised entry by Lydia L. Moland on April 11, 2025. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller (1759 - 1805) is best known for his immense influence on German literature. In his relatively short life, he authored an extraordinary series of dramas, including The Robbers, Maria Stuart, and the trilogy Wallenstein. He was […]
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Medical Bias as Hierarchy
Just ten hours after giving birth to her second child via C-section, Kira Johnson died of haemorrhagic shock at Cedars-Sinai hospital, surrounded by some of the best medical care providers in the world. Why did Kira bleed to death after a routine surgery, despite constant care around the clock? After her husband, Charles Johnson IV, […]
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