Friday, October 10, 2025
“Exact Thinking in Demented Times” by Karl Sigmund
Friday, October 3, 2025
“Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought” edited by Jeff McMahan
This is a collection of remembrances of Parfit by those who knew him best: his wife, his sister, and his closest colleagues and philosophical collaborators over the years. The collection purposefully avoids treading over the same ground as Edmonds’ famous biography, instead giving anecdotes, life snippets, and very personal remembrances. However, in all, it still gives a very accurate portrait of Parfit’s personality and intellectual pursuits. The philosopher, Johnathan Dancy, suggests, “Parfit thought that correct philosophical thought could free us from an obsessive concern with ourselves and our weal and woe, since the distinction between self and others was not as stark as common sense takes it to be.”
In her essay on their life together, Parfit’s wife, the philosopher, Janet Radcliffe Richards, reminisces, “What I suppose I was gradually discovering was the extremity of the extent to which Derek lived in his mind…. As regards achievement, nearly everything that other people might count as comfort or leisure or enjoyment was sacrificed to his perfectionism in both his philosophical work and his photographs. He wanted to achieve things that he thought had real value in the advancement of knowledge and the production and preservation of things of beauty…. As regards beauty, he was again concerned more with what there was and what there might be than anything he would experience.” She concludes, “He did not want to be a well-rounded human being. He was deeply, essentially, an academic and aesthete, fascinated by the capacities of the human mind in advancing knowledge and creating things of beauty, and he thought of the purpose of his life in terms of advancing such achievements…. He thought it would be appalling if it were true that nothing really mattered…. Also, permanently in the background, were his intense feelings for beauty in art, architecture, the natural world, poetry, and music. My impression is that if he had thought he could produce outstanding work in any of those areas, he might have pursued them, but that he judged that he would not be able to achieve anything of the very highest quality in any of them and had no interest in spending his time on anything less…. What he wanted to do in both areas [of philosophy and photography] was produce something of real objective value, which would in its particular way make the world better than it would have been without it.”
The philosopher, Larry Temkin, suggests about Parfit’s quest for objective truth, “For Derek, the problem of disagreement among epistemic peers regarding the most fundamental truths about ethics was deeply troubling.” Temkin continues by stressing the utter focus of Parfit’s life mission, “Derek not only wrote about future generations, he constantly wrote for future generations. Derek thought in terms of the lasting significance of the truth. Correspondingly, he wrote with the hope, and thought, that his work would still be read for many centuries after he was gone…. Other than books and ice cream, Derek had very few material wants and needs. He didn’t drive a car, own a lavish home, take vacations, dine out extravagantly, have a TV, or have any expensive habits.” The philosopher, Jeff McMahan, relates, “For almost anyone, myself included, a life like Derek’s would be unfulfilling. But he was happy—by which I do not mean that he was subjectively contented, though he was certainly that…. Derek believed, and I agree with him, that there can be various elements in a life that are objectively good for the person in whose life they occur. He referred to this belief as the Objective List Theory of self-interest. He cited as examples “moral goodness, rational activity, the development of one’s own abilities, having children and being a good parent, knowledge, and the awareness of true beauty.” (He also mentions, on the preceding page, loving and being loved by many people.) Derek also suggested, as perhaps the most plausible understanding of well-being, that for these objectively good features of a life to be genuinely good for a person, the person must desire and take pleasure in them.” Parfit, himself, admitted, “My life is my work. I believe I have found some good reasons showing that some things matter objectively, not just because we care about them. If I am wrong, my life has been wasted.” His views on his own death were also somewhat idiosyncratic, “My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no-one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.” On the breath of humanity in general Parfit posits, “We shall increasingly have the power to make life good…. It may depend on us and our successors whether it will all be worth it. What matters now is that we avoid ending human history…. We are part of a universe that is starting to understand itself.”
The philosopher, Ingmar Persson, shares some thoughts on Parfit’s method of doing philosophy, “Derek got his philosophical ideas first and foremost by reading and rereading texts—especially Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics—again and again rather than by sitting thinking with closed eyes…. If he was not reading, he would be at his computer, wearing out its keys at a speed that amazed computer people, or in a philosophical discussion with somebody…. Derek’s method was that of an extrovert: as remarked, in his thinking he ruminated on a steady flow of inputs from fellow philosophers, alive and dead…. If possible, Derek would always be hooked up to some medium: if he was not reading or writing, he would listen to music or watch a movie, or view works of art or photos…. So Derek lived on cultural products, but also, I think, he lived chiefly for them, in the sense that he lived in order to contribute to increasing their quantity and quality. His all-consuming passion and mission in life seems to have been to leave as good a record as possible for posterity.” Parfit, himself, claimed, “Most of the world looked better in reproduction than it did in life.” He also admitted, “I want people to admire what I produce.”
Friday, September 26, 2025
“The Enneads” by Plotinus (translated by George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A.H. King, Andrew Smith, James Wilberding)
This huge corpus of philosophy was written by the Neo-Platonist, Plotinus, during the course of his lifetime, in the third century. He was almost certainly Greek, definitely born in Egypt, educated in Alexandria, and traveled during his lifetime as far afield as Persia and Rome. Plotinus wrote a comprehensive book of philosophy focusing on metaphysics, ethics, the human condition, and the nature of reality. He begins, “The virtuous person is always content and his state is one of tranquility, his disposition is lovable…. Happiness is living well, something which is bound up with the soul.”
Plotinus spent much of his thought grappling with the essence of the good and the nature of the human soul, the body, and the mind. “The Good is that upon which all beings depend and that ‘which all beings desire’; they have it as their principle and are also in need of it. It itself lacks nothing, being sufficient unto itself and in need of nothing. It is also the measure and limit of all beings, giving from itself Intellect and Substantiality and Soul and Life and the activity of Intellect. And all of these up to the Good are beautiful, but it itself is above Beauty and is the transcendent ruler of all that is best, all that is in the intelligible world…. Intellect is the primary activity that comes from the Good, and the primary Substance that comes from it, while it remains in itself.”
Not much space in “The Enneads” is concerned with worldly matters, but Plotinus does digress on the inequalities between men, “And if someone should complain of wealth and poverty, that is, of the inequality of their distribution to all people, then this person, first, fails to understand that the virtuous person is not interested in equality in these matters, nor does he think that those who have a lot of possessions are better off than those who do not, nor that those in positions of power are better off than private citizens, and that he rather leaves concerns of this kind to others. And the virtuous person is fully aware that there are two kinds of life here—that of the virtuous person and that of the human masses—and for the sage life is aimed at the highest peak and pinnacle, while the life of the all-too-human has again two forms—the one life involves the recollection of virtue and participating in some good, while the common mob is there, in a way, to do the manual work necessary to provide for the better kind.”
Metaphysics occupies the bulk of Plotinus’ philosophy. “And we are each of us an intelligible universe, connected to the world below by the lower parts of our soul, but to the intelligible world by our higher parts, that is, by our cosmic parts…. One should think that there is also a universe in our soul, not only an intelligible one, but a state like that of the soul of the universe. And just as the soul of the universe, too, has been distributed amongst the fixed stars and the planets according to its different powers, the powers in us are also of the same kind as these powers.” He continues, “Certainly, there is both the true universe and the imitation of the universe, that is, the nature of the visible universe. The true universe is, then, in nothing, for there is nothing prior to it…. The universe, the primary being, neither looks for a place nor is it in anything at all. Actually, the universe, being all, is not such that it falls short of itself; rather, it has both completed itself and is equal to itself. And where the universe is, it is there, for it is itself the universe…. And there is nothing to be astonished at if that which is everywhere is in being and in itself. For that which comes to be everywhere is already in unity.”
There is a dichotomy in Plotinus’ philosophy between the sensible world and the intelligible world. “Intellect, being real, thinks Beings and causes them to exist. It is, therefore these Beings…. For anything which is first is not a sensible. For the form in sensibles that is over and above their matter is an image of the real Form…. There must be, therefore, prior to the cosmos those Beings that are not impressions of other Beings, but archetypes and primarily Beings and Intellect’s substantiality…. Intellect, therefore, is the real Beings, and does not think Beings as if they were elsewhere. For they are neither prior to it nor after it. But it is, in a way, the primary lawgiver, or rather it is itself the law of their existence.” Plato’s theory of the forms also plays a substantial role in Plotinus’ metaphysics, “One has to grasp the general substantiality of the Forms, namely, that they exist, without someone, in thinking each of them, providing them with real existence by thought itself…. The thing itself, being without matter, is intelligible and intellection, not such as to be an account of the thing nor an act of apprehension of it, but the thing itself in the intelligible; what else could this be but intellection and scientific understanding…. This is not an image of the thing, but the thing itself…. One has to think that, generally, all things [in the intelligible world] lie within one nature, and that one nature contains them and, in a way, encompasses them, and not that they are each separate, as in the sensible realm.”
Finally, the primacy of the One is paramount to Plotinus’ metaphysics, “All beings are beings due to unity…. Being has life, too—for it is certainly not a corpse—it is, therefore, a many. If Being is Intellect, then it, too, would have to be many, all the more so if it contained the Forms. For the Idea is not one; rather, it is a Number, both each Idea, and all of them together, and one in the way that the cosmos is one. Generally speaking, the One is primary, while Intellect, Forms and Being are not primary…. So, neither will the One be all things, for then it would not still be one; nor is the One Intellect, for in that case it would be all things because Intellect is all things. Nor, finally, is the One Being. For Being is all things…. The biggest puzzle arising is that comprehension of the One is neither by scientific understanding or by intellection…. For this reason, Plato says it is neither to be spoken nor written of…. The One is certainly absent from nothing and from everything; it is present without being present, except to those who are able to receive it, and who are prepared for it, so as to be harmonious with it and in a way grasp it and touch it through their likeness to it…. The One, that is, the principle of all beings, is simple…. Intellect is not dispersed. Rather, it truly coheres with itself, without articulating itself, since it comes immediately after the One, having dared to depart somehow from the One…. Indeed, in truth no name suits it, but if indeed one has to name it, it is fitting to call it ‘One’, as is usually done, but not so that it is something else, and then one. This is the reason it is so difficult to know, and it is known rather through its offspring…. The One must be understood to be unlimited not because it cannot be traversed either in extension or number, but by being incomprehensible in its power…. Thus, there is no good for the One, and so it does not have a will for anything. It is beyond good, and is good not for itself but for other things, insofar as other things can participate in the Good.”
Friday, September 19, 2025
“The Elephant in the Brain” by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler
Friday, September 12, 2025
“Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” by Dan Wang
For much of this past decade, Wang worked for an economics research firm, Gavekal Dragonomics, spotting macro and geopolitical trends for hedge funds and other well-paying institutions, while living in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai, also traveling the country extensively, looking at Chinese trends on the ground. Now, back in America, Wang has formulated this book into standalone chapters, loosely copying the format of the annual letters that he used to send out from China, which riffed on his thoughts of the past year. Wang begins, “Socialist China detains union organizers, levies light taxes, and provides a threadbare social safety net. The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist…. China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building…. Deng Xiaoping promoted engineers to the top ranks of China’s government throughout the 1980s and 1990s. By 2002, all nine members of the Politburo’s standing committee—the apex of the Communist Party—had trained as engineers…. Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua, China’s top science university. For his third term as the Communist Party’s general secretary starting in 2022, Xi filled the politburo with executives from the country’s aerospace and weapons ministries…. The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals…. The chief feature of the engineering state is building big public works, no matter the financial or human cost.”
Wang worries about the loss of manufacturing capacity in America. He contrasts it with China’s ability to constantly build. “Embracing process knowledge means looking to people to embody eternity rather than to grand monuments. Furthermore, instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice…. The National Nuclear Security Administration found that it could no longer produce “Fogbank,” a classified material used to detonate the bomb, because it hadn’t kept good records of the production process and everyone who knew how to produce it had retired. The NNSA then spent $69 million to relearn how to produce this material…. It’s rare for blueprints to encode enough information to be technologically valuable…. Process knowledge is hard to measure because it exists mostly in people’s heads and the pattern of their relationships to other technical workers. We tend to refer to these intangibles as know-how, institutional memory, or tacit knowledge. They are embodied by an experienced workforce like Shenzhen’s…. Shenzhen is a community of engineering practice where factory owners, skilled engineers, entrepreneurs, investors, and researchers mix with the world’s most experienced workforce at producing high-end electronics…. The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.”
There is a takeaway, related first in an anecdote, from Wang’s return to America which stood out. “I found one item particularly quite irksome on my return to America in 2023: a yard sign that begins “In this home we believe science is real.” The Communist Party “followed the science” of zero-Covid to its logical conclusion: barring people from their homes, testing people on a near-daily basis, and doing everything else it could to break the chains of transmission. Four decades ago, it “followed the science” to forcibly prevent many pregnancies in the pursuit of the one-child policy…. We can agree that “science is real.” But we have to keep in mind that there is a political determination involved with how to interpret the science. And that is something the lawyerly society is better at. It has lawyers interested in protecting rights, economists able to think through social science, humanists who consider ethics, and many other voices in the mix, attempting to open policy prescriptions up for debate. China doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation; engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration.”
China’s engineering society has other downsides. Wang discusses Xi’s recent effort to clip the wings of China’s own tech sector. “The Communist Party distrusts and fears the Chinese people…. Authoritarian systems aren’t good at disseminating bad news…. China’s crackdown consisted of both technocratic regulation and an effort to impose political discipline on a freewheeling sector. Xi has forcefully reminded China’s tech companies that they cannot represent a power center that challenges the state’s sovereignty…. The Communist Party reminded them that it retains the discretionary power to engineer all aspects of society…. In the name of achieving change, the engineering state delivers such beatings on people or industries that they are unable to pick themselves back up again. Even if Xi’s judgments are right, his brute-force solutions reliably worsen things…. Sometimes, the only thing scarier than China’s problems are Beijing’s solutions…. The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited…. After alienating so many people, has Xi decided to change course? No, he’s doubling down on promoting engineers to leadership…. Social engineering will increase as well. In 2018, Xi praised teachers as engineers of the soul, a phrase first used by Joseph Stalin…. [Xi] has talked about how love of the party and the country needs to start young, which means to “grab little ones from the cradle.” The party’s messages need to “enter the mind, enter the heart, and enter the hands.””
Xi is also ready to isolate China from the West and go to war if need be to fulfill his vision of China’s future. “In speeches to China’s national security community, he has spoken about “ensuring normal operation of the national economy under extreme circumstances.” What does that mean? As usual, the top leader is oblique, but it suggests that he’s worried that China will one day be cut off from the rest of the world…. The intention, it feels to me, is to build China into a great fortress…. Xi has already put up higher walls. In 2018, while I was living in Hong Kong, I started to tell people that China might close its doors in forty years, by the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic. At that point, it will once again become the Celestial Empire, its people serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians beyond its borders…. It turned out that I was off by a centenary: China had been mostly shut in 2021, a hundred years after the founding of the Communist Party. The pandemic was like a practice run—an exercise in what life in China would be like with its doors closed to the outside world. Xi apparently liked what he saw…. At the end of 2024, the country felt more fortresslike than before the pandemic…. It’s not encouraging for the future of Chinese and American relations that there are only about a thousand American students studying in China. Just before the pandemic, there were ten times that many.”
Wang concludes by, again, pointing out what China’s engineering state sees at its highest priorities. “Rather than prizing efficiency and just-in-time deliveries, China has invested in redundancies and shock buffers…. China takes energy security seriously…. Low carbon capacity—solar, wind, nuclear—has to be understood as part of a broader motivation to make the country dependent on energy sources within its borders…. In 2023, China added twenty times more coal-burning capacity than the rest of the world put together…. That also explains why China is so enthusiastic about electrifying the auto fleet: It would rather burn domestic coal than Middle East oil to power its cars…. China takes food security seriously as well…. [Xi stated,] “The bowls of the Chinese people should be filled mostly with Chinese grain.” The pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have made Beijing more conscious of food self-sufficiency. Chinese leaders have always been aware that food shortages have toppled imperial dynasties. And so one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally.” Wang ends, “Communist Party propaganda blared in 2023, “China will always be a developing country.””
Friday, September 5, 2025
“The German Sturm und Drang” by Roy Pascal
Friday, August 29, 2025
“One Way and Another” by Adam Phillips
Friday, August 22, 2025
“One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment” by Samuel Scheffler
Scheffler begins this philosophical treatise with a question, “What is it to lead a human life?” More precisely, perhaps, Scheffler is concerned with the idea of human flourishing and what it means to have led a good life. “The attachment-sensitive conception that I will be developing affirms the importance of the temporal and interpersonal dimensions of human life, and it sees these two dimensions as being intimately related…. Both dimensions are fundamental features of human experience.”
First, Scheffler seeks to dispel the notion of temporal neutrality. “I have three aims. The first is to argue that temporal neutrality, if thoroughly internalized, would compromise our ability to form and sustain the personal and social relationships we most value. The second is to argue that temporal neutrality is not a general requirement of rationality, so the fact that future bias represents a departure from neutrality does not make it irrational. The third is to argue that an excessive reliance in the framing distinction between temporal neutrality and temporal bias is liable to distort our understanding of the diachronic dimension of our lives…. Properly understood, the very idea that one has a life to lead depends on one’s viewing the past and the future asymmetrically…. The phenomenon of future bias is best seen as a special case of a more general phenomenon, which is that various of our attitudes change with the passage of time…. The puzzle is why our prospective and retrospective attitudes toward purely pleasurable and purely painful episodes differ so greatly in their intensity…. I don’t think that our aim, in trying to answer it, should be to establish that a bias toward the future is rationally required or rationally defensible. I am sympathetic to the bias where it exists and is deeply entrenched, and I am disinclined to criticize it in the name of an abstract norm of rationality. But my inclination to defend the bias, or at least not to criticize it, has less to do with a belief that it is endorsed by such a norm than with a conviction that it is woven into the fabric of human life in such a way that dislodging it would compromise much that we care about and much that makes us recognizable to ourselves.”
Scheffler discusses the persistence of a life and how that reality stands in contrast to the fact that we can only live in the present moment. “The fact that our emotions and feelings have different diachronic profiles is symptomatic of the complexity of our response to the temporal dimension of our lives. We are, after all, persisting beings. We live always in the present, yet at each moment most of our lives lie either in the future or in the past…. Through the establishment of patterns of activity that express our values or desires or preferences, we mark the world with continuities that are expressive of ourselves…. When, as agents, we direct our actions in accordance with our personal portfolio of values, desires, and aims, we create and extend a record of our distinctive presence in the world. In this sense, we are all performers. What we perform are actions, countless actions, day after day, month after month, year after year. And what guide those actions are not scripted roles but rather our values and aims. Taken together, these performances provide much of the content of our lives…. And the lives we shape testify to our persistence over time.”
Despite living in the constant present, Scheffler recognizes the asymmetry between the life that has happened and the life that is to come. “We confront the future as agents: our agential capacities are essentially forward-looking, and by exercising those capacities we seek to influence or shape the future, or at least some portion of the future. Things are different when we look back to the past. Here our epistemic position is improved but our practical position is much weaker. We generally know more about our pasts than we do about our futures, yet we cannot change the past through the exercise of our agential capacities.”
Next, Scheffler discusses our role as social beings, leading our lives through interpersonal interactions. “It is in the company of the people who matter most to us that we experience and interpret the world around us…. And it is, to a great extent, through communication and interaction with the people who matter most to us that we make sense of the world and our place in it…. Our relationships with the people to whom we are most deeply bound serve to structure and to shape our engagement with the world, and one of the primary ways in which we lead our lives is by forming and sustaining such relationships.”
For Scheffler, our nature as temporal beings is as important to our lives, as our interpersonal relations. “One of the most basic challenges of living is to come to terms with the temporal dimension of our lives. Our temporality is as fundamental a feature of us as our embodiment…. I believe that our sense of ourselves as persisting creatures goes hand in hand with a sense of ourselves as participants in an ongoing chain of generations…. We have lost a sense of ourselves as being involved in a kind of notional partnership with our ancestors and descendants, as participants in a common enterprise. And we have lost the sense that one of our important roles, whether we play it wittingly or unwittingly, is to transmit cultural materials, including knowledge, skills, values, and understanding, from our ancestors to our descendants…. It is humanity as a biologically grounded, interpretively rich, historically situated, and temporally persisting form of life—a form of life in which we ourselves are participants—that we want to survive under conditions conducive to human flourishing…. We face the future, not as independently defined agents confronting an array of actual and possible beneficiaries, but as creatures whose values and self-understanding already incorporate, if only implicitly, a rich set of assumptions about our place in history and our relations to our predecessors and successors.”
Partiality towards one’s relations is, for Scheffler, a reasonable aspect of living a particular human life, across time and space. “In general, to value one’s relationship with another person non-instrumentally is, in part, to see that person’s needs, interests, and desires as providing one, in contexts that may vary depending on the nature of the relationship, with reasons for action that one would not otherwise have…. If I have a relationship with you, and if I attach non-instrumental value to that relationship, then I will see myself both as having reasons to do things on your behalf that I have no comparable reason to do for others, and as having reason to give your interests priority over theirs…. Valuing a relationship is not best thought of as an alternative to valuing the person with whom one has the relationship…. One’s emotions, when one values a relationship, are sensitive to what happens both to the person with whom one has the relationship and to the relationship itself…. What contributes to a good or successful life is not the mere existence of people one admires, but one’s relationships with (some of) those people…. It is both because they are sources of contentment and because estrangement is so painful that people make such efforts to sustain relationships…. The people with whom we have close relationships matter a great deal to us, but so do our relationships with those people…. A personal relationship is a joint human creation or construction, and each particular relationship has its own distinctive qualities and character. To suppose that valuing a relationship is self-referential is to elide the distinction between this joint creation and oneself.”
Scheffler concludes with a note on objective morality in the face of this particularism, “Although my participation in valuable relationships gives me special reasons to do things for the people with whom I have those relationships, it does this not because those people are more valuable than other people but despite the fact that they are not…. Thorough internalization of a utilitarian or consequentialist theory of justification, with its associated commitment to interpersonal neutrality, would jeopardize our capacity to form and sustain the personal attachments that matter to us most…. The only way that one can engage with the world is to engage with particular bits of it…. An estrangement from one’s own standpoint would be a form of estrangement from life itself: or, more precisely, from the enterprise of leading a life.”