Category Archives: Philosophy

Arts, Education, Philosophy, Research, Society

Oxford academic to launch ‘journal of controversial ideas’

ACADEMIA & RESEARCH

A “controversial ideas” journal where researchers can publish articles anonymously will be launched this year by an Oxford University academic.

The journal is in apparent response to a rise in researchers being criticised and silenced by those who disagree with them. The revelation came towards the end of last year by Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford.

“There is an increasing tendency that I see within academia and outside for people to try to suppress views they don’t like and treat them as wicked and unspeakable, rather than confront those views and refute them,” he said.

The phenomenon of attempting to shut down views you disagree with has become “very pronounced” among young people and those on the Left, he said, adding that academics also feared being censured by their university administrations.

He cited the example of Prof Nigel Biggar, a fellow Oxford academic, being “targeted” after he suggested that people should have “pride” about aspects of their imperialist past. More than 50 professors, lecturers and researchers signed an open letter expressing their “firm rejection” of his views. Prof Biggar later revealed that young academics were afraid of damaging their careers if they were seen with him.

Another example he gave was when the Oxford Students For Life group invited speakers to discuss the legislation surrounding abortion in Ireland. “They were shut down by a feminist group and unable to proceed,” Prof McMahan said.

A newly formed group of over 100 academics from UK universities has raised concerns about “the suppression of proper academic analysis and discussion of the social phenomenon of transgenderism”.

They said that members of their group had experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censure academic research and publications.

Francesca Minerva, a bioethicist at the University of Ghent in Belgium, approached Prof McMahan about setting up The Journal of Controversial Ideas after she received death threats due to her academic research.

She had to seek police protection following the publication of an article she co-authored in the Journal of Medical Ethics which defended the permissibility of early infanticide in a certain range of cases. Prof McMahan said that the new cross-disciplinary publication, which is due to launch this year, would be fully peer-reviewed in line with normal academic standards.

He said that he and Peter Singer, the prominent Australian philosopher, were assembling an editorial board that is made up of academics and distinguished people in their fields from across the political and religious spectrum.

OPINION

The publication of a new journal in which academics may write under pseudonyms, for fear of retribution, is truly alarming. The motive for the founding of this new Journal of Controversial Ideas is to avoid persecution by the universities that employ contributors.

This is not like a medieval inquisition; it is actually worse. In the High Middle Ages scholars publicly debated points of controversy – quodlibets, they were called – and no thesis was too outlandish to defend. Today we see closed-shop “academies”, in history or science, monstering anyone who dares to venture outside the fashionable consensus.

To suggest, for instance, that the British Empire had its good points and – bang – the solid weight of academe will likely fall on those making the claims. When even universities won’t favour free and open discussion, the resort to pseudonyms and anonymity convicts them of betrayal.

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy): On Reason and Experience

AGE OF REASON

“Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” – George Washington (1732–1799)

IN the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason – characterised by thinkers such as Descartes and Hobbes during the seventeenth century – brought about a seismic shift in emphasis in philosophical thought. Massive advances were made in the natural sciences and this in turn led to a questioning of old certainties and a rush of new and often competing ideas. This concerned everything from how knowledge and truth can be acquired and tested to the first seedlings of notions of democracy, representation and civil liberties. The floodgates opened, characterised by Kant’s imperative in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” The human mind was emerging from the darkness of infancy and maturing like that of an enquiring child, while Kant urged people to “dare to know.” Reason and experience became the watchwords in this new philosophy, which was more concerned with how things actually are, rather than how they could or possibly should be.

However, not all enlightenment was positive. There was darker consequences of this new awakening, as evidenced by the reign of terror following the French Revolution and by the work of possibly the most morose thinker of all time, Arthur Schopenhauer, who once wrote in an essay that everyone should swallow a live toad for breakfast to guarantee they wouldn’t have to experience anything else quite as dispiriting again for the rest of the day. It would also be a mistake to think that the status quo embraced the new enlightenment with open arms. The preface quote to this article is taken from George Washington’s farewell address to the American people and illustrates that although there was an explosion in free-thinking in some quarters, the old guard – the protectors of religious-based morality – were deeply suspicious and frightened of these new ideas about how to live in and view the world.

Reading the great thinkers of reason and experience shouldn’t be too difficult. Most of what they had to say seems pretty self-evident today, obvious even, yet somehow their arguments can be difficult to follow. This is largely due to the intellectual zeal with which they approached their investigations and their fervent search for one over-arching, all-encompassing system of thought. It didn’t help either that this spirit of competitiveness led to petty rivalries. The German philosopher Schopenhauer had a hatred of Hegel bordering on the pathological, which drove him to take up a position at the University of Berlin, where Hagel had a seat, just to try and prove his ideas were more popular with the students (he failed quite spectacularly). Nonetheless, the philosophers of the ages of reason and enlightenment represent a pivotal point in the history of philosophy.

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Marx: On Religion and Faith

“Religion is the sign of the oppressed . . . it is the opium of the people.” Karl Marx (1818–1883)

THE philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary, Karl Marx, is, for good or ill, the most influential socialist thinker to emerge in the nineteenth century. Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his death in 1883. Until quite recently almost half the population of the world lived under regimes that claimed to be Marxist. This very success, however, has meant that the original ideas of Marx have often been modified by the forces of history and his theories adapted to a great variety of political circumstances, for the most part detrimental to those upon whom they have been enforced. In addition, the fact that Marx delayed publication of many of his writings meant that it has been only recently that scholars have had the opportunity to appreciate Marx’s intellectual stature.

Marx, and his associate Friedrich Engels, developed a philosophy known as dialectical materialism. This essentially is the merger of the ideas of dialectics and materialism, which surmise that all things in the universe are material, that evolution is constantly taking place at all levels of existence and in all systems, that defined boundaries are manmade concepts that do not actually exist in nature, and that the universe is an interconnected unified entity in which all elements are connected to, and dependent upon, each other. The philosophy holds that science is the only means by which truth can be determined.

TO understand Marxism, you must understand the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Enlightenment. Marx was part of a larger movement in German Enlightenment philosophy; his ideas didn’t come out of nowhere, they were an extension of the theories that had been developing in Europe throughout the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s. Marx was a member of the Young Hegelians, which had formed after the famous German philosopher Hegel’s death. Hegel’s philosophy was based on the dialectic.

After Hagel’s death, his philosophy continued to be taught in Berlin and an ideological split occurred among the students of Hegel’s teachings. Eventually a right, centre and left branch of the ideology emerged, the Young Hegelians taking up the leftist branch of Hegelian thought. They began using Hegel’s dialectical method to openly criticise Hegel’s own work, attempting to prove that Hegel’s own philosophy, when fully extended, supported atheistic materialism. The Young Hegelians criticised religious institutions and, as a result of this, many of them were denied professorship at institutions around what was to become Germany and further afield. Thus began Marx’s period of disassociation from his relatively wealthy origins and his move towards the austerity that was to last the rest of his life. He ended up living and writing his greatest work, Das Kapital, in London and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marx’s own contribution to Hegelian debate was to write the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, which contained in its introduction the oft-paraphrased paragraph: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

MARX viewed religion as a consequence of man’s relationship to the means of production. It was a result of man’s unhappiness with life and man’s lack of understanding of social and economic forces. Therefore, the Marxist position on religion is: 1) that criticism of religion and the advance of science are important weapons for combating religious views; and 2) that religion will never be fully eliminated until man has control over the economy and man is no longer alienated from productive forces.

It is a misconception to believe that Marx was saying that religion was a metaphorical drug, created, maintained and tolerated by the ruling class to keep the masses happy. Marx was actually concerned with far more weighty problems. Among other things, he was describing the basic human conditions under which an abstract human being could exist. “Man is the world of man, state, society,” he concluded, and the concept of God was a necessary invention in an “inverted world”. Once the world was right side up, the idea would not be needed. In other words, religion was a requirement of the proletariat to deal with their living conditions. Once the revolution had created a just and purposeful society, the need to believe in anything other than that which “is” or that which has material existence would be gone.

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