The tale Parfit tells:Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and Literature

At the center of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is nestled a famous short story about a person who uses a teletransporter. Parfit argues that his “thought experiment” shows that “personal identity”—as (analytic) philosophy understands it—doesn’t matter. As long as I know that my “self” on Mars is unharmed by the teletransporter, it shouldn’t matter to me that I remain on Earth, soon to die. I use Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige and the Nolan brothers’ film of it to challenge the method and alleged moral of this “branch-line” teletransportation thought experiment, treating it as a work of literature in miniature

This civilization is finished:Time to build an ecological civilization

A terrible gamble is being taken that we can prevent or at least successfully mitigate lethal climate change and the extinction crisis. The likelihood of failure is high, so – despite widespread unwillingness to do so – we must face the alternatives presenting themselves without turning away. They span from a horrendous, completely irrecoverable collapse, on the one hand, to the rise of a successor civilization out of the wreckage on the other. We cannot keep avoiding the vast efforts required to adapt our communities to the rapidly changing world, and must engage in the transformational processes now necessary. We need, individually and collectively, to wake up to the dire reality of the ecological emergency, to think seriously about the successor civilization that will follow, and to rebuild community. We must also engage in forms of deep adaption, including holding actions to slow the damage as much as we can, and even non-violent direct action. Dramatically courageous things are now necessary

Introduction:Post-Truth?

This paper introduces the Special Issue on 'post-truth'. The contributions to this special issue try between them to strike a right balance. To establish how new ‘post-truthism’ really is – or isn’t. To seek a point of reflection on whatever is new in our current socio-political straits. And to consider seriously how philosophy can help. Whether by wondering about the extent to which reason, or truth, may rightly, if one follows Wittgenstein, be viewed in certain respects as a constraint upon thought or opinion. Or indeed by wondering whether we still have a long way to go in approaching truth at all

Where Value Resides:Making Ecological Value Possible

Distinguishing between the source and the locus of value enables environmental philosophers to consider not only what is of value, but also to try to develop a conception of valuation that is itself ecological. Such a conception must address difficulties caused by the original locational metaphors in which the distinction is framed. This is done by reassessing two frequently employed models of valuation, perception, and desire, and going on to show that a more adequate ecological understanding of valuation emerges when these models are fully contextualized in the intersecting life worlds of the ecological community. Ecological evaluation takes place in ongoing encounters between these worlds and a crucial part in this process is assigned to living beings that are “open-endedly open,” that is, open only to what the world affords them and others, but open to an indefinite field of possible valuational encounters between all kinds of beings. Ecological valuation overcomes some of the conceptual failings of contemporary attempts to evaluate nature: “The Economics of Ecology and Biodiversity” and “Valuing Nature.

How ecologism is the true heir of both socialism and conservatism

Rupert Read argues that being concerned about the environment is consistent with both socialism and conservatism. True conservatism is not adherent to capitalism and associated with the wealthy elite, despite what it may seem today. It might therefore have something to offer in stopping neoliberalism’s destruction of all that we hold dear

Wittgenstein and the Illusion of ‘Progress’: On Real Politics and Real Philosophy in a World of Technocracy

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. (In fact, survival would be a good start…) Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying. Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it. Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving. This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.