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杜蘭的《西洋哲學史話》不是我讀的第一本哲學書，記得在它之前我就讀過《老子》。但它是對我影響最大的幾本書之一。主要的原因是：

a. 它引起我對哲學的興趣；
b. 它奠定了我對哲學一知半解的基礎；以及
c. 整體來說，它堅定了我追求知識的決心(該欄開欄文第3節)。

順帶說一句：我不敢以「知識份子」自居，但頗以身為「讀書人」自豪(該欄開欄文及《目的、行動、和方法》一文)；也就對兩者都有所期許(該文第4節)。

我不是哲學系出身；但因為對「人應該如何自處」以及「人應該如何待人接物」這兩個問題很有興趣，免不了接觸到一些探討「基本問題」的書籍(請見本欄第二篇文章)。現在垂垂老矣，不再有讀書的腦力；只能把過去的心得做個整理，算是收收網吧。

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17世紀新教學者眼中的笛卡爾 -- Sandrine Parageau
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我自認為頗受笛卡爾的影響；我說「自認為」是因為：我不知道我對他著作的了解和詮釋是否符合主流學者的觀點(該文第 2.2小節)。

這篇文章在知識或思想層面的含金量不足，可以視為思想史篇章中的一個註腳。

The French liar

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Sandrine Parageau, Edited by Edited bySam Haselby

, 07/08/25

The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) is generally presented as one of the founders of modern Western philosophy and science, the man who made reason the principle of the search for truth, and who formulated the cogito, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ His assertion of mind-body dualism has given rise to a great number of objections over time, from those of 17th-century theologians to those of 20th-century feminists. In France, even though the decision of the 1792-95 National Convention to transfer Descartes’s remains to the Pantheon in Paris was not followed through, the philosopher is nonetheless regarded as ‘un grand homme’, a national hero, and being labelled ‘Cartesian’ is still today a compliment that emphasises one’s common sense, good judgment and methodical use of reason.

Yet Descartes was not always the undisputed champion of reason that he is today. In 17th-century England and the Netherlands, he was publicly and repeatedly accused of being a fraud and of lying to his readers so as to manipulate them into becoming his disciples. Of course, as one would expect, many intellectual and scientific objections were raised by his contemporaries against Descartes’s philosophy. But those ad hominem allegations were of a different nature altogether: they implied that the French philosopher resorted to well-crafted and dishonest strategies to make his readers ignorant, and therefore gullible, with the aim of making them submit to his control. Thus, according to those critics, the founder of modern science was, in truth, a purveyor of ignorance.

Such an accusation was made for example by the Protestant scholar and theologian Meric Casaubon (1599-1671), a Geneva-born clergyman of the Church of England, in a long manuscript letter on ‘general learning’ written in 1668, in which he deplores what he perceives as the growing ignorance of his contemporaries. In this text, Casaubon accuses Descartes of deliberately encouraging his readers to make themselves ignorant by urging them to renounce their beliefs and forget all the knowledge that they have previously acquired: ‘a man must first strip himself of all that he has ever known, or believed.’

表單的底部

This accusation against the champion of rationalism may seem paradoxical at first, but it should not come as a complete surprise: if Descartes did not praise ignorance as such, and certainly not as an end in itself, he did encourage his readers to get rid of all their previous opinions, prejudices and false knowledge, as he himself had done after realising the uncertainty of the knowledge he had been taught as a child. Indeed, in the Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes relates how he initially loved philosophy, theology, poetry and mathematics, which he had been taught at the prestigious Collège Royal de La Flèche, before he became aware of the variety of opinions and the pervasiveness of error, which made him doubt all his knowledge and beliefs. In the Meditations (1641), a few years after the Discourse, Descartes further explains that, in the face of such doubt and uncertainty, he decided to get rid of all the opinions he had formed or acquired in order to rebuild science and knowledge on a firm basis. This experience of ‘radical’ or ‘hyperbolical’ doubt, as it has later been called, which results in the rejection of all knowledge, implying a form of self-induced ignorance, was unsurprisingly construed as an extreme stance by 17th-century commentators, and we may understand how it could be interpreted as a promotion of complete ignorance.

According to Casaubon in his 1668 letter, Descartes presents ignorance as the only way to attain the ‘mystery’ and ‘excellency’ of ‘his Ego sum: ego Cogito [I exist: I think]’, or the reassuring certainty of one’s own existence. Yet the result of this self-inflicted ignorance is nothing but solitude and despair, Casaubon adds, describing with much detail the epistemic anxiety experienced by those who fall victim to Descartes’s manipulation, and who, in the end, have no choice but to ‘adhere to him tooth and nail’, therefore becoming his ‘disciples’. Descartes and other similarly ill-intentioned men who also dream of founding their own sects (namely Jesuits and Puritans), Casaubon declares:

first … cast [people] down to the lowest pit of despair; and then with such engines of persuasion, they are commonly [well] stored with, … raise them up again, to the highest pitch of confidence: but so that they leave themselves a power still, to cast down, & to raise again, when they see cause; which must needs oblige the credulous disciple, as he has found the horror of the one, & the comfort (whether real or imaginary) of the other, to a great dependency.

As this passage clearly states, the credulous victims of Descartes’s manipulation are taken on an emotional rollercoaster, from ‘the lowest pit of despair’ to ‘the highest pitch of confidence’ and back. Once they have experienced those unbearable conditions, they are exhausted and vulnerable, and end up believing that only Descartes can save them from despair and solitude, even though, ironically, Casaubon explains, the French philosopher is the one who caused that painful condition in the first place.

The 17th-century manipulation techniques here described by Casaubon are strikingly similar to what we now call ‘gaslighting’, a form of emotional and psychological abuse that leads the victim to question their own cognitive faculties and sometimes even their very sanity. As a matter of fact, the Dutch scholar and theologian Martin Schoock (1614-1669), Descartes’s contemporary, had, even more clearly than Casaubon and 25 years earlier, accused Descartes’s ‘new philosophy’ of leading to mental disorder, because choosing ignorance, according to Schoock in his Admirable Method (1643), amounts to deliberately putting off the light of reason in one’s mind: ‘A grown man who forgets everything is ignorant of everything, and where there is ignorance of everything, there is mental disorder.’ (My translation.)

As this passage makes clear, Schoock also thought that Descartes’s radical doubt could not but result in complete ignorance – Descartes’s philosophy was therefore a mere tool devised to spread ignorance. This call for radical doubt, as Schoock understood it, was based on the Cartesian idea that certain and evident truth can come only from within oneself. The French philosopher had allegedly ‘waged a war on books and reading’ and encouraged laziness, especially among young people, who were invited to spend all day lying down and ‘meditating’, in other words doing nothing. Descartes’s victims, Schoock adds, were primarily less-educated or naive people, who fell more readily for his deceptive arguments as they were dazzled by his reputation and influence. Indeed, the example of Descartes’s alleged use of ignorance also reveals the insidious domination of the intellectual elite over less-educated people. Thus, for Schoock as for Casaubon, the aim of Descartes’s so-called philosophy was to turn ignorant people into disciples and ensure their obedience.

If we are to believe Casaubon and Schoock, Descartes’s alleged manipulation was fairly successful, and a great number of people joined ‘the Cartesian sect’. So how come Descartes could so easily dupe his contemporaries? One answer might be that his deception did not rely on lying, but on the more strategic use and abuse of doubt. Doubt is indeed more subtle than crude lies, and therefore more efficient, provided the audience who is being manipulated is not entirely ignorant at first (otherwise, lies would work just as well), yet not educated or sagacious enough to be able to detect and expose the deception straight away. The efficiency of doubt as a strategy may also reside in its versatility. Doubt is indeed both an epistemic virtue, or the first step on the path to truth (the philosopher is always initially a doubter, someone who questions what they have been taught or what seems self-evident), and an epistemic vice, as it can lead to destabilisation and even dissolution of truth and knowledge altogether when it is excessive or misplaced.

Yet we should not forget that we are here dealing with allegations and interpretations of Cartesian philosophy by intellectual opponents, and not with facts. And we can safely assume that the French philosopher was not the dark guru decried by Casaubon and Schoock, even if some of his less-infatuated biographers, like Desmond M Clarke in 2006, have portrayed him as ‘haughty, arrogant, … excessively sensitive to criticism’ and obsessed with defending his reputation. Even at the time, in the context of the 1640s quarrel – called ‘the Quarrel of Utrecht’ – with Schoock and other Dutch philosophers and theologians, Descartes was commonly nicknamed ‘the French liar’. This judgment on his morality may have been at least partly justified, but it was also and primarily the result of enduring religious conflicts in post-Reformation Europe. Casaubon’s assimilation of Descartes with Puritans and Jesuits attests to the religious motivation of the condemnation. Moreover, after his denunciation of Descartes’s modus operandi in attempting to seduce people, Casaubon adds that Cartesian philosophy does not provide solid grounds on which the soul’s immortality or ‘the existence of an omnipotent Deity’ can be built, showing that the defence of ‘the true religion’ is primarily what is at stake here.

For Casaubon and Schoock, who stood as champions of Protestantism, Descartes’s attitude to knowledge reflected that of the Roman Catholic Church, which had been accused since the beginning of the Reformation in the early 16th century of deliberately keeping their flocks in ignorance in order to secure a tight control over them. The insistence of the Catholic Church on intermediaries (the ecclesiastical hierarchy), who alone were allowed to bring the word of God to common people, was interpreted by Protestant reformers as a means to prevent those people from reading the sacred texts by themselves, keeping them away from literacy and knowledge. The deliberately produced ignorance of Catholic people was actually seen as the main tool used by the Roman Church to successfully ensure its power and authority over the centuries. Descartes was accused of resorting to similar methods to assert his own power, authority and reputation. Even among those who praised and admired Descartes in late 17th-century England, especially the fellows of the Royal Society of London, an academic institution devoted to the advancement of science, his religion remained a major flaw that could inspire distrust or at least suspicion. Each time his philosophy was celebrated, the (Protestant) author would indeed add the disclaimer that this was despite the French philosopher’s error in religion.

The condemnation of Descartes by Casaubon and Schoock should also be seen as the manifestation of a desperate effort to resist change in the intellectual context that led to the emergence of modern science. The conservative Casaubon feared and lamented the coming destruction of traditional knowledge, which he believed was brought forth by an undue insistence on method to the detriment of learning itself. One must admit that Cartesianism is indeed obsessed with method – Descartes’s famous Discourse is evidence enough. Moreover, Descartes’s call for the rejection by each individual of all their knowledge and opinions was not only interpreted as a means to get power over those who would make themselves ignorant, but also as the programmed extinction of established knowledge, which would give way to something new and therefore suspicious. Schoock shared those preoccupations but was probably even more worried about the psychological consequences of Descartes’s philosophy on his followers and the larger public if ever it managed to spread, which he seriously feared because the mere ‘novelty’ of this philosophy made it attractive to the ignorant multitude. Surprising as it may seem, Schoock’s fears about the sanity of Cartesians were not entirely unjustified. Indeed, if the allegation that Descartes deliberately produced ignorance to control people can be easily dismissed, the claim that his philosophy was likely to lead to madness is more convincing.

Most specialists of Descartes’s philosophy have ignored the affective experience described in the Discourse and the Meditations to focus instead on the order of reason in those texts. Radical doubt and the cogito have thus been interpreted as literary and rhetorical devices, or mere fables (the word is used by Descartes himself in the Discourse). They are generally seen as fictions or thought experiments, rather than as a cognitive process that Descartes actually experienced. If the autobiographical and emotional dimension of self-induced ignorance has been neglected so far, it might be because this aspect does not match the overarching interpretation of Cartesianism as the rule of reason. Descartes urged people to reject all their opinions and knowledge only as a temporary precondition to accessing truth, not as a permanent state. But still, he did encourage self-induced ignorance.

The epistemic anxiety that followed was described by Casaubon and Schoock, as mentioned above. But the origin of the search for truth is emotionally charged as well, as it is grounded in disillusionment and existential despair following the discovery that one was taught erroneous opinions as a child and was therefore deceived. This painful discovery gives rise to the need for purification through the rejection of one’s opinions and withdrawal from the world. The emotional impact of the search for truth is attested in Adrien Baillet’s late 17th-century biography of Descartes, which precisely describes Descartes’s physical and psychological distress.

As Tristan Dagron argues in his book Pensée et cliniques de l’identité (2019), or ‘Thoughts and Treatments of Identity’, the experience that Descartes relates in the First Meditation, where he describes the need for the purification of his mind, can be interpreted as a reappropriation of three dreams that he had in November 1619, which left him confused and mentally disturbed as he was confronted with radical doubt about the distinction between dreaming and waking. When he narrates those dreams, Baillet talks of Descartes’s violent agitations, exhaustion, despair and ‘enthusiasm’, some form of divine inspiration and madness (hence also Descartes’s association with religious sects by his opponents). Dagron shows that those dreams were a traumatic experience for Descartes, which is echoed in the First Meditation and its presentation of radical doubt.

The emotionally unsettling confrontation with radical doubt and madness should be acknowledged as the starting point of the search for truth in what is commonly hailed today as a radically rationalist, emotion-free system of thought – perhaps a consequence of Michel Foucault’s influential reading of the Meditations as a violent and successful attempt at muzzling madness, or a ‘coup de force’, in his book Madness and Civilization (1961). Thus, Casaubon and Schoock were right in arguing that radical doubt implied epistemic anxiety and madness, but madness is not rejected by Descartes – on the contrary, it is embraced and then healed, so to speak, by his philosophy. This might actually be the true reason why Descartes is indeed the founder of modern Western science and philosophy.

Sandrine Parageau is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023).

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塞內卡9個改變你生活的忠言 - Tom Addison
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Seneca：塞內卡

塞內卡、愛皮克悌塔斯、和奧瑞尼亞斯合稱斯多噶派哲學三巨頭。

請參考本欄前兩篇。這三篇文章可以跟此欄和此欄各篇貼文相互參照。由於他們三位都是古羅馬大哲，所以將介紹其思想的文章置於此處。

9 Incredible Quotes From Seneca That’ll Change Your Life Forever

Timeless wisdom from a very wise human being.

Tom Addison, 02/07/25

Seneca was an Ancient Rome Stoic Philosopher and Statesman.

Over the past few years, my life has changed a lot and I’ve been influenced by a whole host of different people such as Marcus Aurelius and Warren Buffet to name a couple.

However, over the past year especially, I’m not sure anyone has had a greater, more profound impact on my life as Seneca.

Even though Seneca died nearly 2000 years ago (he died in 65 AD), his work is still as applicable today as it was back then.

His work is what you’d call timeless.

If you want to know how to live and become a better person, you have to read Seneca’s work. I promise you won’t regret it.

I could easily include 50+ quotes in this article but for now, I’ll keep it short and snappy with 9…

1. “The fool, with all his other faults, has this also, he is always getting ready to live.”

It’s time to stop procrastinating and it’s time to start living (on your terms) right now.

Don’t keep putting things off until tomorrow, because guess what? Tomorrow might never come.

You see time waits for nobody, and it definitely won’t wait for you.

Anything that can be done now, should be done now. Don’t be a fool. Start living.

2. “Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.”

There will be days when you don’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, where sometimes even just existing is just an immense act of bravery.

You mustn’t forget:

If you can survive the worst of the worst, when life’s at its most unbearable, and still come out the other side, you’ve won.

3. “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.”

Physically, mentally and spiritually difficult things are good for you.

Difficult things are what build you as a human being. We all have the chance to do difficult things and we should choose to do them because in the long-term, and sometimes even short-term, we’ll be better off for doing them.

4. “If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”

There’s one major problem with trying to ‘escape’ and ‘get away from it all.’

No matter where you go, the problem will never leave, because that problem is you.

5. “Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them not because we needed them but because we had them.”

If you were to think about it, you’d be surprised at how little of what you possess is genuinely necessary.

It doesn’t mean you need to all of sudden discard everything in sight. It means maybe taking the time to start separating the essential from the non-essential.

6. “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

Suffering in imagination is easy, but reality nearly always, 99% of the time paints a different story.

All the fretting, all the worrying, and all the ‘what ifs?’ will be a total and utter waste of time.

7. “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”

If you don’t have any form of direction of where you want to go, how do you expect to find your way to the end destination?

Planning and having some form of direction is essential.

8. “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.”

There has never been a person, ever, who has perfected life.

Why?

There is always so much to learn. No matter how brilliant or successful you are, there is always room for improvement. Never think you know everything because you never will.

9. “It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.”

How much time in the day idling around, mindlessly scrolling through your phone, and doing almost everything you can to avoid doing productive things?

I’ll hold my hands up, I’m a serial time waster. I’m no saint. But every time I do catch myself drifting, I try to remind myself that it’s not that I don’t have the time to do what I want to do, I’m just not prioritising my time to do it.

Which is your favourite quote on this list?

Written by Tom Addison

I write about personal development, books, and key life lessons I learn. Please, feel free to subscribe if you so desire!

Want to be notified whenever I publish a new article? Click here. If you enjoyed this post, show your appreciation by giving it a few claps. Thank you!

Also, if you want to get to know me better and join a growing community, subscribe to my newsletter for absolutely free!

Read short and uplifting articles here to help you shift your thought, so you can see real change in your life and health.

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奧瑞尼亞斯的21個睿智觀察 - Tom Addison
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Aurelius, Marcus：奧瑞尼亞斯。奧瑞尼亞斯是《神鬼戰士》影片中一開始時那位老羅馬皇帝；請見此文對他和他時代的簡單介紹。

本文內容請參考本欄上一篇和下一篇。

21 Marcus Aurelius Quotes You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Before

15. “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

Tom Addison, 06/20/25

I was having a terrible day the other day.

For one reason or another, I felt anxious and on edge, which is something I thankfully don’t feel all too often.

So, I resorted to what I know and do best, and started flicking through and re-reading one of my multiple favourite books.

In this instance, I turned to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

It did the trick, just like it always does, and will continue to do so.

Not only did I feel significantly better for reading Meditations for an hour or so, but it also gave me the idea to write this article.

So let’s get into it. Here are 21 Marcus Aurelius Quotes You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Before…

1. “There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.”

If you go around telling people how humble you are, you’re not humble at all. True humility is silent.

2. “If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.”

Is there any further explanation needed? I think not!

3. “What can even the most vicious person do if you keep treating him with kindness?”

It’s true what they say, you know:

Kindness kills, even the most awful people.

4. “A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.”

Be straight up. Don’t tell any lies. Tell the truth. Be honest.

Be the person whom others can rely on for a genuine opinion.

5. “When faced with people’s bad behaviour, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.” (「見賢思齊焉，見不賢而內自省也。」 -- 《論語•里仁》第17)

If someone is behaving terribly, remember:

You’re not perfect either, and the chances are you’ve probably behaved the same at some point or another.

6. “When you wake up, ask yourself: Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right?” (「自反而縮，雖千萬人吾往矣。」 -- 《孟子•公孫丑上》第2)

Follow your inner scorecard.

If you believe what you’re doing is right, and you have a good reason to believe that, that’s good enough. You don’t need anything else.

7. “Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time.”

Two words: Amor Fati.

It means love of fate.

8. “You’ll find that none of the people you’re upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind.”

People will try their best to hurt you, but never forget:

Nobody can hurt your mind unless you give them the power and permission to do so.

9. “Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.” (「一樣米養百樣人。」)

The world is full of people of all shapes and sizes.

You won’t like everyone, and not everyone will like you, but you must accept people and be tolerant of the world for what it is, whether you like it or not.

10. “All that you see will soon have vanished, and those who see it vanish will vanish themselves, and the ones who reached old age have no advantage over the untimely dead.”

Everything is temporary. Nothing is, and never has been, permanent.

Just because you or someone else reaches an old age isn’t necessarily an advantage either.

Ultimately, we’re all going to end up the same way as it is, and in that sense, we’re all on a par with one another.

11. “You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.”

Why would you be so reliant on wanting praise and approval from people who don’t even approve of themselves?

It makes no logical sense whatsoever. Whatever you do, don’t misplace your need for validation in the wrong places.

12. “Stop perceiving the pain you imagine and you’ll remain completely unaffected.”

It’s easy to suffer in imagination, but reality nearly always tells us a different kind of story.

13. “Remember yourself that your task is to be a good human being.”

Be good. Do good. Spread good. That should be everyone’s ultimate life’s task.

14. “You’ve wandered all over and finally realised that you never found what you were after: how to live.”

We have this tendency to look high and low, and even travel to the other side of the planet to try to look for answers on how to live.

Yet we never look within, and it’s within where the answers we’ve been seeking, more often than not, lie.

15. “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.”

Live your life to its full capacity, with intention and on your terms, because eventually, whenever that time might be, you won’t be able to.

16. “Our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.”

You ultimately become what you dedicate your time, energy, resources, and life to, so be very selective.

17. “Think of the list of people who had to be pried away from life. What did they gain by dying old? In the end, they all sleep six feet under.”

Eventually, we all end up with the same fate. Some die young, some die old; either way, we’ll all eventually come face to face with the same outcome.

18. “Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you.”

Nobody can hurt you unless you let them hurt you. To be hurt, you have to believe you’ve been hurt.

19. “We need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding — our grasp of the world — may be gone before we get there.”

Death is an inevitability, and knowing that it’s forever approaching on the horizon should give us a sense of urgency.

However, it’s not death we should necessarily be afraid of. Instead, we should be more fearful of losing our sense of clarity and direction.

20. “You cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one that you’re losing.”

You have one life, one mind, and one body. Cherish them. Look after them. Preserve them, because you’ll never get another one.

21. “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil.”

People will always be people. Some will be great, some will be awful.

Either way, it’s our moral duty to put up with them the best we can, stop being so judgmental, and maybe most importantly, not be like them.

Thank you for reading this article and spending your most precious asset on me — your time.

I appreciate it, and I hope to see you again soon!

Written by Tom Addison

I write about personal development, books, and key life lessons I learn. Please, feel free to subscribe if you so desire!

Want to be notified whenever I publish a new article? Click here.

Also, become part of a growing community and subscribe to my Substack for absolutely free!

Read short and uplifting articles here to help you shift your thought, so you can see real change in your life and health.

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17個愛皮克悌塔斯的金句 --- Tom Addison
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Epictetus：愛皮克悌塔斯

我在這篇拙作中說過：「對我影響很大的另外一本書是麥克斯奧瑞尼亞斯的《沉思錄》。我看這本書的時候，剛剛初中畢業，沒什麼見識，可塑性還蠻大的。幾乎當時就養成我現在八風不動的性格」(該文第1.1小節)。奧瑞尼亞斯跟愛皮克悌塔斯一樣，都是斯多噶派哲學家(見本攔下一篇)，他比後者大概晚生70年左右。

現在回想起來，除了當時我的「可塑性」之外，此派觀點跟中國文化裏的儒、道、釋三家在「修身養性」方面說法相近、相通，應該也是我被《沉思錄》一書吸引，並深受其影響的原因。總之，雖然我時下已經記不起該書內容，有了這段因緣，看到介紹斯多噶派哲學和該派哲學家的文章，我都倍感親切。

17 One-Liners From Epictetus You’ll Never Forget

17. “Whenever anyone criticizes or wrongs you, remember that they are only doing or saying what they think is right.”

Tom Addison, .06/02/25

Most of the people who’ve left a profound impact on my life are dead.

Some of them died quite recently, whilst others died thousands of years ago.

One of my mentors, who died many, many years ago, is the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Alongside Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, Epictetus is regarded as one of the ‘big three’ Stoic philosophers.

There’s a strong argument to say he’s the pick of the bunch.

Why?

Because of how practical, genuinely helpful, and accessible what he taught is, even in today’s modern-day society, over 2000 years later.

The lessons Epictetus left us with are timeless, and they’ll continue to be referred to another 2000 years from now.

In this article, I could have included 100+ quotes, but for now, you’ll have to settle for 17!

So, let’s get into it…

1. “Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God’s sake, don’t sell it cheap.”

Your integrity is one of the very few things we truly own, and when it’s gone, it’s tough to retrieve and bring it back.

So don’t compromise it.

Protect it at all costs.

2. “If you aim to be perfect when you’re still anxious and apprehensive, how have you made progress?”

If anxiousness, fear, doubt, and the nagging sense that everything needs to be perfect are still controlling us, we haven’t progressed, have we?

3. “Don’t put your purpose in one place and expect to see progress made somewhere else.”

Your actions and goals need to align with one another.

If they don’t, how do you know where you want to go?

How are you going to get there?

Without a sense of direction and purpose, you’ll never go anywhere.

4. “When someone caught in an argument hardens to stone, there is just no more reasoning with them.”

Sometimes, the wisest move one could make is to walk away.

It’s impossible to reason with the unreasonable, so don’t waste your breath and energy trying to do so.

5. “It is silly and pointless to try to get from another person what one can get for oneself.”

Being entirely reliant and dependent on others often only leads to frustration and a sense of being let down.

Instead, learn to be more self-sufficient, because at the end of the day, the only person you can fully trust to look after yourself is you.

6. “You ought to realize, you take up very little space in the world as a whole.”

We’re not the center of the universe, and in the grand scheme of things, we are so, so tiny it’s laughable.

Our problems are so minuscule, and the space we take up is pretty much nonexistent.

Humbling? Yes.

Liberating? Absolutely.

7. “There is nothing better we could do with our time than praise.”

Nothing bad has ever come from giving someone else praise.

Not only does praise lift everyone around us, but praising others also helps to lift ourselves too.

8. “Since when are you so intelligent as to go around correcting other people’s mistakes?”

Before you try to fix other people, fix yourself.

Constantly trying to correct other people isn’t a form of wisdom, it’s a form of arrogance.

9. “A person is not going to undertake to learn anything they think they already know.”

It’s impossible to reach and teach the person who knows everything.

Never waste your time trying to reach people who can’t be reached.

10. “It is no great achievement to memorize what you have read while not formulating an opinion of your own.”

True wisdom comes from thinking and formulating your own opinions, not just solely remembering what someone else has said.

11. “First, tell yourself what you want to be, then act your part accordingly.”

Ask yourself:

Who do I want to become?

Think about the path you want to go down, then break it down.

Step by step.

Bit by bit.

And then, make sure your actions reflect the person you want to become.

12. “No bad person lives the way he wants, and no bad person is free.”

We all have regrets and things we wish we had done differently, and in many respects, none of us is free.

Bad people, though?

Bad people almost certainly don’t have a life they enjoy, and they’ll never be free from their burdens, ever.

13. “A good actor preserves his reputation not by speaking lines out of turn but by knowing when to talk — and when to keep quiet.”

Timing is everything, and knowing when to speak and when to be silent is a powerful, underrated skill.

Before you speak, restrain yourself.

Ask: Do I really need to say something here?

14. “There is no shame in making an honest effort.”

You will never regret trying, and there is nothing dishonorable in failing, knowing you’ve given everything.

15. “The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

If something isn’t within the realm of your control, stop attaching so much value to it.

Instead, understand that the other side of peace and sanity is found by focusing on what you genuinely can control.

16. “Remember, it is not enough to be hit or insulted to be harmed, you must believe that you are being harmed.”

Our judgments and perceptions determine whether we have been harmed or not.

Whether you’ve been harmed or not ultimately lies within your responses.

17. “Whenever anyone criticizes or wrongs you, remember that they are only doing or saying what they think is right.”

Everyone has a reason for why they do what they do, and most people act based on what they believe is correct.

Instead of jumping straight in full guns blazing to try and defend ourselves and criticise others, be more empathetic and try to understand an opinion from the other side of the fence.

Thank you for reading this article and spending your most precious asset on me — your time.

I appreciate it, and I hope to see you again soon!

Want to be notified whenever I publish a new article? Click here.

Also, become part of a growing community and subscribe to my Substack for absolutely free!

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物理學基本論簡介 -- J. Read
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在中文裏，至少在一般人刻板印象裏，英文 ”philosophy of physics” 直譯成中文的「物理學哲學」難免有「牛頭不對馬嘴」的感覺。這是我以《物理學「基本論」》為中文標題的原因。作者在下文第3、6兩段中對「物理學『基本論』」研究內容和性質的闡釋，也適用於其它學門的「基本論」；例如：生物學基本論、神經科學基本論、社會科學基本論等等。

此文(該欄2025/06/20)和此文(該欄2025/06/11)兩者可視為下文的案例。

我是物理系畢業，對哲學也有些興趣，所以轉載了這篇文章。它畢竟屬於專業領域，我就不強作解人了。

Why philosophy of physics?

Some physicists reject philosophy as a distraction from ‘real’ science but it is in fact both useful and beautiful

James Read, Edited by Edited bySam Dresser, 06/06/25

Divine Comedy, Paradiso II (c1492-95) by Sandro Botticelli. Courtesy Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett/Philipp Allard 請至原網頁觀看插圖

When I’m making small talk at parties and suchlike, revealing to others that I’m a philosopher of physics is a little bit like rolling the dice. What reaction am I going to get? The range is pretty broad, from ‘What does philosophy have to do with physics?’ to ‘Oh, that’s way above my pay grade!’ to (on happier occasions) ‘That sounds amazing, tell me more!’ to (on less happy occasions) ‘What a waste of taxpayer’s money! You should be doing engineering instead!’

Only the last of these responses is downright stupid, but otherwise the range of reactions is perfectly reasonable and understandable: philosophers of physics are, of course, not ten-a-penny, and what we’re up to is hardly obvious from the job description. So what I want to do here is sketch what the philosophy of physics really amounts to, the current state of play in the field, and how this state of play came about.

表單的底部

To cut to the chase: the philosophy of physics is the systematic study of our best theories of physics. This goes well beyond our current best candidates for fundamental theories of physics, such as string theory, and rather encompasses everything from Newtonian mechanics (which still constitutes the bread-and-butter of a great deal of practical physics, as well as perhaps the overwhelming majority of engineering), to Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, to quantum mechanics, to the Standard Model of particle physics, to cosmology, and much else besides. And by ‘systematic study’ I mean something like asking questions such as these: ‘What is the conceptual and mathematical architecture of such-and-such a theory?’, ‘What would the world be like if such-and-such a theory were true?’, ‘What are the implications of such-and-such a theory for so-and-so areas of classical philosophical enquiry, like time, causality and identity?’

Given questions like these, one would be excused for thinking that the philosophy of physics is in fact continuous with physics ‘proper’ – and one would be quite right! Not only would trying to answer the above questions without a good working knowledge of physics be a forlorn hope, but also physicists themselves, especially theoretical physicists, often grapple with the structure of our best theories (for instance, there are a great many physicists working on the mathematics of general relativity, on the foundations of quantum mechanics, and so on). Ultimately, the difference between physics ‘proper’ and the philosophy of physics is really one of emphasis: philosophers are interested in understanding the structure and upshots for reality of the theories of physics that we already have, while physicists engage in the first-order practice of building new theories and then testing those theories experimentally.

Indeed, its ultimate emphasis on bettering our understanding of the theories of physics that we already have helps to make clear that the philosophy of physics really is a discipline in the arts – despite often requiring a good understanding of physics itself. As I see it, the philosophy of physics is in fact somewhat akin to art criticism – but where the subject matter is not music or visual art or architecture, but the theories of physics constructed by some of the greatest and most creative minds of all time (from Galileo to Newton to Einstein). Philosophers of physics all share the view that physical theories – these products of the highest level of human creativity – are just as worthy of aesthetic appreciation and critical study as anything else.

So, the philosophy of physics is continuous with physics, insofar as it seeks to understand the structure of our best scientific theories of the world. It is also an artistic discipline, insofar as it engages with the critical scrutiny of certain products of the human mind – namely, physical theories. But the final thing to say here is that the field is also continuous with three other disciplines. First, with history, for in order to truly understand the content of any given theory, we must often turn to how it was developed, and the tools that physicists used to develop it. Second, with mathematics, because, often, a full understanding of the content of some given theory calls for shoring up some subtle mathematical details. And, finally, with philosophy ‘proper’, since we can’t really understand what a theory says about time, causation, identity and so on if we don’t appreciate the scrutiny to which philosophers have subjected those notions over the centuries.

All in all, this means that the philosophy of physics is an incredibly broad church – and a wonderful playground for those (like myself) who never could decide on the specific subject to which to dedicate themselves. In any case, I hope this goes some way towards giving a relatively clear sketch of what the philosophy of physics is about. What I want to do next is to stress that the philosophy of physics isn’t some modern innovation – in fact, it’s been around for as long as physics itself.

At least in the Western canon, a natural place to begin the tale would be with Aristotle, who was perhaps the greatest philosopher of all time (it’s either him or Plato!) as well as the progenitor of something like the scientific method. Aristotle engaged in a clear philosophical interrogation of the content of his theories of the world when he asked crucial questions regarding, for example, the location of the centre of the Universe. But, in the interests of constraining the narrative, let me leave Aristotle there, and dial things forward 2,000 years – to Newton.

In my opinion, the greatest scientist of all time is undoubtedly Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727). One can make straightforward points to back this up: his achievements laid much of the groundwork for modern science, and for the paradigm of leveraging mathematics in order to solve problems in physics (which led to the Enlightenment idea of the ‘clockwork universe’). Moreover, Newton invented substantial new areas of mathematics, including calculus. However, it’s really at a more fine-grained level that one sees Newton’s genius: his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), or The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, not only reads much like a piece of modern mathematics, but also – and this is much less known – contains insights that substantially presage many of the steps Einstein himself made on his path towards general relativity around two and a half centuries later. The Principia also contains philosophical reflections on the nature of space, time, and motion (as well as some damning interrogations of earlier thinkers, in particular René Descartes) that are as crisp and clear as the very best modern philosophical works.

Let me focus on the latter of these. With Newton’s theory of universal gravitation on the table, ‘natural philosophers’ of the day (the precursors to modern scientists) were able to interrogate long-held philosophical presuppositions regarding the nature of space and time with newfound rigour and precision. This is best exhibited in the Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, a series of letters between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) – himself a polymath philosopher, scientist and mathematician (he independently invented the calculus alongside Newton) – and Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), who was a prominent supporter of Newton at the time. In their letters (five on each side, before the correspondence was cut short by Leibniz’s death), Leibniz and Clarke explored various philosophical questions arising out of Newton’s new mechanics, for example: what is the difference between merely apparent (‘relative’) motion and true (‘absolute’) motion? How can we possibly determine ‘global’ properties of the Universe, such as its overall velocity? And how to understand identity in physics – could there, for example, be two physical bodies alike in all respects?

None of this work – which is obviously philosophical in nature, and which in fact counts as exemplary philosophy of physics – would have been possible without the framework afforded by Newton’s new physics. So this corroborates my point that developments in the philosophy of physics are often deeply intertwined with developments in physics, and that great physicists have been, at least on several important occasions, also great philosophical thinkers.

But this is just one data point. What happened after Newton? The standard narrative has it that philosophy and physics then went their separate ways: like a good midwife, ‘natural philosophy’ might have been of invaluable assistance in the birth of modern science, but after the birth she had no role to play. In the wake of the work of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and especially his successors including G W F Hegel (1770-1831), philosophy arguably became less concerned with the details of first-order science and its implications, and more committed to the investigation of loftier matters such as the limitations to the possibility of our knowledge, the possibility of access to a ‘transcendent’ reality, and so forth. Meanwhile, physics earned its stripes as an ‘exact science’, with the development over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries of the ‘analytical mechanics’ of Joseph-Louis Lagrange, William Rowan Hamilton, Adrien-Marie Legendre and others, which built upon Newton’s work and rendered it substantially more mathematically sophisticated.

There’s some truth in this narrative of amicable divorce, but there’s also a sense in which it’s not entirely fair, because – albeit perhaps less obviously than in Newton’s time – philosophical reflection by physicists and upon physics by philosophers persisted into the subsequent centuries. Here’s one example. In the 19th century, a mathematical revolution was precipitated by János Bolyai (1802-60) and Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792-1856), who showed that there could be consistent non-Euclidean geometries (that is, alternatives to Euclid’s geometry as presented in his Elements) in which, say, the sum of interior angles of a triangle is either more or less than 180 degrees. This work was brought to maturity by Bernhard Riemann (1826-66) in his habilitation thesis, but it was not long until this led to philosophical questions of the greatest depth: given the possibility of these geometries, need it in fact be the case that, as a matter of strictest necessity (as Kant had it), the structure of space must be Euclidean, or are there in fact other possibilities for the geometry of space? This question, which became known as the ‘Problem of Space’, came to occupy some of the greatest minds of the time, including the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94), the mathematician Sophus Lie (1842-99) and the polymath Hermann Weyl (1885-1955).

Here’s a second example of the persisting relationship between physics and philosophy. During the 19th century, physicists – most notably Ernst Mach (1838-1916) – worried a great deal about various assumptions in Newton’s mechanics, particularly the assumption that space and time are inert background structures in which physical events unfold. In opposition to this, Mach laid down a principle (dubbed by Einstein ‘Mach’s principle’) according to which there can be no spacetime without matter, and sought to reformulate Newtonian physics around such a principle.

These two threads found their confluence in the second golden age of interaction between physics and philosophy, at the turn of the 20th century – a golden age led by luminaries such as Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), Weyl and, of course, Einstein himself (1879-1955). This was an age in which – just as in the time of Newton and Leibniz, and Aristotle well before them – the greatest scientists and mathematicians were once again the greatest philosophers, and as such were able to leverage their philosophical maturity and insight in order to make significant steps in physics itself.

Perhaps the most telling example of this is Einstein’s development of the general theory of relativity (which remains our best theory of space, time and gravitation) over an approximately 10-year period from 1905 to 1915. This made essential use of both the insights gained from the Problem of Space and the possibility of non-Euclidean geometries, and of Mach’s principle, at least as heuristics for the development of the theory. Indeed, Einstein acknowledged explicitly throughout his life the influence that his philosophical training had on his physics, as well as (reciprocally) the influence that his physical developments had on his philosophy of science.

What this narrative makes clear is that the extent to which there is non-trivial interaction between physics and philosophy can fluctuate over time, but the philosophy of physics – the critical interrogation of our best theories of physics – has been around for a long time, whether as practised by ‘pure’ philosophers, or by the physicists themselves (or by ‘natural philosophers’, when there was no clean distinction between the two disciplines).

But if this is right, then why does the philosophy of physics remain a rather niche discipline in modern times? Well, as I’ve stressed, the interactions between physics and philosophy can wax and wane. In fact, after what I’ve described as the second golden age of interactions at the turn of the 20th century, and especially after the debates between Einstein and Niels Bohr (1885-1962) on the new quantum theory in the late 1920s, in which the latter intimated cryptically that reality at the fundamental level is ineffable, and that we should give up on trying to secure a complete picture of the world at the fundamental level, things took a rather different turn. At some point later in the 20th century, many physicists developed an attitude of outright hostility towards philosophy. This came to a head – and somewhat unfortunately made it into the public consciousness – in the writings of highly respected physicists such as Steven Weinberg – in whose book Dreams of a Final Theory (1992) was a chapter provocatively titled ‘Against Philosophy’ – and Stephen Hawking, who, even more provocatively, declared in 2010 that ‘philosophy is dead.’

What were the sources of this unfortunate shift in attitude? For better or worse, Bohr’s philosophy was not only obscure (what does it mean, after all, for reality to be ‘ineffable’?), it also suggested that it’s simply misguided for physicists to have pretensions to ‘understanding reality’. Bohr was one of the most influential figures of his day, so it’s not too surprising that these instrumentalist ideas, according to which physics is a mere ‘instrument’ for making experimental predictions, and in turn according to which we should no longer have such grandiose ambitions as ‘understanding the fundamental nature of reality’, took root in physics at large.

The second source of the shift was that, after Einstein’s work on general relativity – which, as we have seen, was shot through with philosophical thinking – the theory entered the doldrums for several decades. Very few physicists actually worked on it because it was regarded both as too difficult to learn and too difficult to test, until the arrival of the work on singularities and black holes by Roger Penrose, Robert Geroch, Hawking and others in the 1960s. At the same time, however, particle physics was thriving, with rapid developments in quantum field theory in the 1930s and ’40s – work that would eventually lead to the development of the Standard Model of particle physics. That work was both very collaborative and very pragmatic: physicists were content to develop tools without necessarily understanding the mathematics they were manipulating, let alone the conceptual foundations of the work. It’s not difficult to see that this hands-on, workmanlike attitude would be in tension with philosophical reflection on the craft.

To some extent, this attitude persists today. It’s not uncommon to hear physics lecturers in universities across the globe making pejorative comments on philosophy (often from a position of some ignorance); the rather more reflective physicist N David Mermin coined the saying ‘Shut up and calculate!’ in 1989 to encapsulate the instrumentalist attitude many physicists seem to have towards the foundations of their subject matter. Despite all this, I think there’s a wealth of evidence that the interaction between physics and philosophy, and the discipline of philosophy of physics itself, is very much on the up – perhaps even entering a third golden age.

One practical reason is that the workmanlike attitude of those physicists working on quantum field theory in the mid-20th century is no longer obviously sufficient for doing good physics. The Standard Model of particle physics is now complete, and (with the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN) extensively empirically confirmed. That said, while plenty of extensions to the Standard Model (most notably, those that invoke supersymmetry) have been developed, none have been tested experimentally, and the prospects for empirical confirmation of any particular such model don’t look great, because it is simply too expensive to build the particle colliders needed to probe the energy scales where one would expect experimental signatures of such models. As a result of issues such as these, many physicists have come to newfound appreciation for the value of philosophical reflection on different areas of physics.

Let me take some examples to back up this point. Over the past few decades, fields such as quantum information theory and quantum computing have become significant within physics, and these fields have had to grapple with concepts that are adjacent to philosophers’ concerns. For instance, in order to build a viable quantum computer, it’s widely recognised that the phenomenon of ‘decoherence’ (roughly: the suppression of quantum mechanical effects at macroscopic levels) must be controlled. Decoherence, however, turns out to play a key role in essentially all known interpretations of quantum mechanics – that is, the projects to understand what quantum mechanics says about the nature of the world; the projects that find their natural home in the philosophy of physics. As such, it’s unsurprising that physicists working in these areas of quantum theory have been much more open to dialogue with philosophers on quantum mechanics than their predecessors might have been.

As a second example, physicists now much better appreciate that, when exploring the space of alternative theories of gravitation to Einstein’s general relativity, it is helpful to taxonomise these with reference to whether they satisfy his ‘equivalence principle’ and, since it is philosophers who best understand such principles, physicists have in recent years entered renewed dialogue with them on such matters. And, as a final example, cosmologists have recently begun to worry about whether modern cosmology will be ‘permanently underdetermined’ by evidence, and therefore we will remain forever in the dark as to the large-scale structure of the cosmos. This invites newfound dialogue between physicists and philosophers in order to explore these possibilities and assess the prospects for overcoming such issues.

In the present day, the philosophy of physics is once again in a good place. There are a great many of us distributed across the globe (almost 300, according to this list) and the community as a collective has a great deal of expertise in all four fields of physics, philosophy, mathematics and history. Dialogue with practising physicists is the best it’s been in decades. (Even the job description of ‘natural philosopher’ is resurging: witness the recently opened Radboud Centre for Natural Philosophy in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, and the fact that Sean Carroll at Johns Hopkins University has the newly created title of Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy.) Given that careful attention to foundational and philosophical issues was an integral component of many of the previous leaps forward in physics, this can only be a good thing.

Even if one doesn’t have pretensions to developing a quantum theory of gravity, when one really attends deeply to the structure of our best theories of physics, one finds in all corners subtle, fascinating and superlatively beautiful issues to explore. To take just one example (and to circle back to my suggestion that the philosophy of physics be understood as a form of art criticism), the mathematics of ‘gauge theory’ – which can be used to make rigorous and conceptually clear sense of the foundations of the Standard Model of particle physics and quantum field theory – is as beautiful and elegant and sumptuous as any Botticelli or Caravaggio or Monet. As such, the payoffs and insights we can gain from it – both aesthetically and metaphysically – are at least as great as any from the fine arts. It’s in the philosophy of physics that we have the liberty to study and criticise such edifices and their conceptual upshots, without necessarily feeling the pressure to develop new theories or build new experiments – crucial as those are, of course.

James Read is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford and a tutorial fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of Special Relativity (2023), Background Independence in Classical and Quantum Gravity (2023), and (with Emily Adlam and Niels Linnemann) Constructive Axiomatics for Spacetime Physics (2025), and the co-editor (with Nicholas J Teh) of The Philosophy and Physics of Noether’s Theorems (2022).

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全都在「放屁」：偽科學和偽哲學的共同點 – M. Pigliucci
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下文第3段分析「說謊」和「放屁」的差別；頗值得一讀。英文淺顯，不需翻譯。如果你覺得上一句話中第二個詞粗俗，可以用「鬼扯」或「瞎說」來代替。

我沒有讀過霍金和拿圖而兩位博士的著作。前者大名鼎鼎，乃一代宗師；皮格里優齊教授這樣批評他，還真的是不怕閃了舌頭。

不過，在這個臭氣沖天的「後真相」時代，總得有人冒出來噴噴空氣清潔劑。小老頭不才，願隨其後效鳴鼓之勞。

It’s All Bullshit: The Common Ground between Pseudoscience and Pseudophilosophy

Massimo Pigliucci, The Philosopher’s Corner, Volume 49, No. 1, January/February 2025

Editor’s note: A few months ago, Massimo Pigliucci shared with the editorial team that he’d soon be wrapping up this column so that he could spend the extra time working on other pursuits. This will serve as his final column. We’re sad to see the column end, but we’re also so thankful that he’s a member of SI’s 100 Club—if you search his name at skepticalinquirer.org, he’s one of the few people who has over 100 contributions. He was first published in SI in 1999, and from 2003–2015 he wrote a regular column called “Thinking about Science.” During that first run, his influential book Nonsense on Stilts was published, and I was lucky enough to hear him speak about it at a Skeptics in the Pub event held by the Skeptical Society of St. Louis. He returned with his new column, “The Philosopher’s Corner,” in 2022, and I’ve felt quite lucky to have his insights included in these pages during my time as editor. Fortunately, Massimo has promised to continue sending us occasional articles in place of the regular column, and he already has a piece in the works. Thank you, Massimo, for all you’ve done for SI, our readers, and skepticism!

Believe it or not, bullshit is now a technical term in philosophy. It was treated as such in a modern classic, Harry Frankfurt’s best-selling On Bullshit, in which the author affirms that “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit” (Frankfurt 2005, 117). I hear ya, brother.

Frankfurt helpfully distinguishes the common liar from the bullshitter:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. … A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he consider his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are. … He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. (Frankfurt 2005, 130–131)

This notion of bullshit immediately lends an explanation to a principle that should be well known to skeptics: Brandolini’s Law, named after the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, who in 2013 tweeted, “Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it”—which accounts for why being a skeptic is an extremely frustrating experience. Brandolini himself said that he was inspired by reading psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow right before watching a debate between former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio. With 2024 being an election year in the United States and in many other parts of the world, I’m sure we can all relate.

Apparently, the concept is much older, as it was expressed at least in the middle of the nineteenth century by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who said: “We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations” (Bastiat [1845] 1873). As is often the case, not much new under the sun.

Quite obviously, the concept of bullshit applies to a lot of what is of concern to modern skeptics. I’m sure many readers will remember Penn & Teller’s television show by the same title. A prime example of Brandolini’s Law is the claim that vaccines cause autism, infamously put forth by disgraced British doctor Andrew Wakefield in a paper that was eventually shown to be fraudulent and that contributed to countless deaths and sickness.

Bullshit a la Frankfurt has two important characteristics:

(i) It is a normative concept, meaning that it is not just a description of things but rather is concerned with how one ought to behave or not to behave;
(ii) The specific type of culpability that can be attributed to the bullshitter is epistemic culpability, that is, a failure to do one’s due diligence when it comes to knowledge claims.

Such failure can arguably be considered a moral failure. This is the position of the ancient Roman philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, who wrote in his De Divinatione: “To hasten to give assent to something erroneous is shameful in all things” (I.7). In that book, as I have explained in a previous column (Pigliucci 2024), Cicero mounted the first known concerted attack against pseudoscience, specifically divination and astrology. Much later, the mathematician William Clifford published a landmark essay in The Contemporary Review in which he argued that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence” (Clifford [1877] 1999). That is why the work of a skeptic is so important: it has a practical and moral dimension.

More recently, my colleague Victor Moberger of Umeå University in Sweden has expanded the application of Frankfurt’s conception of bullshit to yet another “pseudo” activity: pseudophilosophy. Just like there is good science and fake (the literal meaning of pseudo) science, so, naturally, good philosophy has its own fake counterpart. (Yes, I realize that some readers of SI don’t think there is such a thing as good philosophy, but hopefully this very column has changed a few minds over the years!)

According to Moberger, there are in fact two broad categories of pseudophilosophy. First, we have what he labels the obscurantist variety, “a seemingly profound type of academic discourse that is pursued primarily within the humanities and social sciences.” Then there is scientistic pseudophilosophy, “usually found in popular scientific contexts, where writers, typically with a background in the natural sciences, tend to wander into philosophical territory without realizing it, and again without awareness of relevant distinctions and arguments” (Moberger 2020, 7). Let’s take a closer look.

Here is a famous example of obscurantist pseudophilosophy:

[Einstein had an] obsession with transporting information through transformations without deformation; his passion for the precise superimposition of readings; his panic at the idea that observers sent away might betray, might retain privileges, and send reports that could not be used to expand our knowledge; his desire to discipline the delegated observers and to turn them into dependent pieces of apparatus that do nothing but watch the coincidence of hands and notches. (Latour 1987)

These nonsensical words were written by postmodernist philosopher Bruno Latour, one of the protagonists of the infamous “science wars” of the 1990s (Sokal and Bricmont 1997). It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, based—by Latour’s own admission—on an essay written by Einstein for the general public, not on the careful study of actual technical papers concerning the theory. Bad scholarship leads to philosophical bullshit.

You may like the following example a bit less, though: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge” (Hawking and Mlodinow 2010). It’s a taste of what Moberger calls scientistic pseudophilosophy, penned by none other than Stephen Hawking, who knew nothing about philosophy or the history of science and who proceeded—in the rest of the very same book—to write a decent, if a bit amateurish, essay on … the philosophy of science.

The bottom line, my friends, is that pseudoscience is bullshit with scientific pretensions, while pseudophilosophy is bullshit with philosophical pretensions. And what pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy have in common is bullshit. It is incumbent on skeptics to fight bullshit, in whatever form and shape. That’s the whole point of what we do. Sometimes this may even mean having the courage to criticize our own friends or people who are usually on our side of the barricade. As Aristotle, concerning a similar situation, famously put it: “Humility requires us to honor truth above our friends” (Aristotle n.d.). Of course, the phrase was a double entendre, because the friend he was referring to was his former mentor, Plato.

References

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book I, chapter 6, 1096a 16.
Bastiat, F. (1845) 1873. Economic Sophisms, First Series (translated by Patrick James Stirling). Edinburgh, UK: Oliver and Boyd. Online at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44145/44145-h/44145-h.htm.
Brandolini, Alberto. 2013. Bullshit asymmetry principle … . Twitter (January 11). Online at https://x.com/ziobrando/status/289635060758507521.
Clifford, W.K. (1877) 1999. The ethics of belief. In The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, by W.K. Clifford. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.
Frankfurt, H. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hawking, S., and L. Mlodinow. 2010. The Grand Design. New York, NY: Bantam, 5.
Latour, B. 1987. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 22.
Moberger, V. 2020. Bullshit, pseudoscience and pseudophilosophy. Theoria 86: 595–611.
Pigliucci, M. 2024. Pseudoscience: An ancient problem. Skeptical Inquirer 48(1).
Sokal, A., and J. Bricmont. 1997. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. London, UK: Picador Books.

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (Chicago Press) and Philosophy of Pseudoscience (coedited with Maarten Boudry, Chicago Press). More by Massimo at http://massimopigliucci.blog/.

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如何面對「後真相」時代 -- Manuel Delaflor
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轉載這篇文章不是因為我認為它言之成理；而是我認為它是：一個胡說說八道的範例。一個哲學家腦筋也會打結的反面教材。

A way forward for a world where truth has died

A framework for a Post-Truth World

Manuel Delaflor, 12/19/24

Editor’s Notes：As the prophets of certainty wage their wars in our fractured age, a radical new approach from philosopher Manuel Delaflor shows us how to dance with the uncertain.

Consider a curious phenomenon: When passionate fans discuss their favourite shows online, they rarely debate what happened in a scene. For example, in online forums dedicated to Game of Thrones, viewers spent countless hours dissecting a brief moment where Cersei Lannister lingered near a dimly lit archway during a crucial negotiation scene, debating whether the shadows implied secret motives, inner turmoil, or a looming betrayal. Through this collective endeavour, fans weave intricate webs of interpretation that reflect their values, their beliefs, and even their shadows. The very meaning of what they see on screen becomes a mirror, reflecting not just the content itself, but the deeper patterns of how humans create understanding from their personal experiences.

For millennia, truth served as humanity's foundation - a way to end arguments, establish facts, and build knowledge. It stood as a beacon of certainty in an uncertain world, promising that through divine foretelling, or later with proper methods and careful reasoning, we could arrive at unshakeable conclusions about the world, our lives, and our place in the universe. This faith in truth shaped our institutions, our education systems, and our very way of thinking. It provided the bedrock upon which we built our understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

From time to time, a handful of dissenting thinkers queried truth, from the Pyrrhonian skeptics of Ancient Greece to figures like David Hume, who questioned the reliability of causation and empirical certainty, and Immanuel Kant, who argued that our understanding of the world is mediated by the structures of human cognition. Then we have Nietzsche's rejection of absolute truth in the 19th century that further shook these foundations. Then, in the 20th century, a particular kind of thinker started to dig deeper, geniuses like Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze delivered what might have been the final blow: truth itself, they argued, was nothing more than a construct shaped by power and language. The certainties upon which our institutions rest began to crumble, and as a result, we've been entering a kind of second dark age. Nonetheless, a lay belief in truth by the countess masses prevailed.

What constitutes evidence, what a fact is, or used to be, has lately taken completely unexpected twists. We are witnessing a profound shift: the rejection of established frameworks has become widespread, fuelled not just by past institutional failures, but by a deepening social distrust of expertise itself. What's remarkable isn't just the rejection or dismissal of traditional ways of establishing shared understanding, but the incredible refusal to even accept sets of facts. For instance, debates over whether the Earth's curvature can be observed directly or whether atmospheric distortion explains such observations highlight how even well-established scientific principles can be dismissed to fit alternative narratives in a blink of an eye.

The social media landscape amplifies and accelerates this crisis in ways we're only beginning to comprehend. These platforms don't simply create echo chambers - they actively reward content that triggers emotional responses, which puts humans into animal states of fight or flight, triggering the amygdala, bypassing the frontal lobe. Research confirms what we intuitively feared: social media rewires our very brains, with studies like this in JAMA Pediatrics showing how it fundamentally alters neural pathways, particularly in developing minds. Unlike traditional media, platforms like Facebook and X use algorithms designed to maximize engagement by reinforcing pre-existing beliefs. Research, such as Cass Sunstein's Republic, highlights how these mechanisms entrench divisions, transforming disagreements into unbridgeable chasms.

The machinery of engagement runs on the fuel of outrage and confirmation bias, fragmenting our shared ways of making sense of experiences into increasingly isolated islands of understanding. Each click, each share, each angry reaction further entrenches these divisions. Like a fever spreading through a weakened body, this machinery of fragmentation has created perfect conditions for a more dangerous infection.

In this fragmenting landscape, we're not really seeing the end of truth, but rather its splintering into opposite sets of competing absolutisms. Each group, each echo chamber, each populist movement claims to possess not just an interpretation, but the "real truth" that "the others" have been hiding. The irony is striking - in our supposed "post-truth" era, we're witnessing not an absence of truth claims, but their multiplication, with each claiming absolute validity while rejecting all others. Today, digital platforms take these philosophical insights to their most extreme consequences, bypassing reasoned debate. Conspiracy theories like QAnon thrive in these environments, fuelled by algorithms that amplify sensationalist narratives over nuanced ones, reflecting the splintering of shared understanding into echo chambers.

But the problem is exactly the same, we've discovered that our beloved traditional solutions have failed us. Better education? Facts bounce off hardened beliefs. Improved communication? Our most articulate arguments fall on deaf ears. Enhanced access to information? It only seems to deepen the divide.

I believe that we've been approaching our “post-truth” problem with a fundamental misunderstanding about human nature. Traditional approaches, such as Karl Popper's emphasis on falsifiability, Thomas Kuhn’s exploration of paradigm shifts, and Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, assume we're primarily seeking accurate descriptions of the world but are led astray by biases, emotions, or faulty reasoning. While these frameworks have profoundly influenced our understanding, they presuppose a rationalist ideal that often fails to address the deeper human craving for meaning and coherence. This assumption shapes how we try to address disagreements - with more facts, better arguments, clearer evidence. And this is precisely what leads opportunists with enough audience to force their own “truths” on others. Despite unprecedented access to information, our divides are just deepening, to the extent that rational discourse has become impossible, culminating in people embracing the weirdest possible beliefs, like flat earthism, because they seem somehow preferable to the perceived “mainstream lies” (as they call them). And who is to tell them that they don't have the "real truth" when facts become whatever they want them to be?

And this is how old explanatory frameworks persist despite contrary evidence, how scientific findings, no matter how robust, fail to convince those who've found reassurance in alternative interpretations. Take religious frameworks - they persist not because they better explain natural phenomena, but because they provide profound meaning about life's purpose, death's mystery, and human suffering. Their power lies not in their empirical accuracy but in their meaning-making capacity. These aren't just failures of education or reasoning. They point to a deeper pattern in human cognition, a profound need we've been blind to all along.

We have now reached the point where we are standing at a crossroads: either continue this sacrificial dance of competing “absolute truths”, each more strident than the last, or recognize that we have failed and that we've been asking the wrong question all along.

As Nietzsche once suggested, humanity’s obsession with absolute truth often blinds us to deeper existential needs, meaning and coherence. This insight resonates with my personal conclusion: what we crave is meaning. Not truth. What we seek are frameworks that illuminate our experiences, a way to make sense of our struggles, narratives which give purpose to our pain. We hunger for stories that help us navigate the vast complexity of existence, which make our world coherent, comprehensible, meaningful. If I am correct, this revelation changes everything.

It was in part this realization that led me to develop Model Dependent Ontology (MDO), an epistemic framework that addresses how humans engage with their experiences rather than how we think they should. At its core, MDO recognizes that meaning-making isn't just one aspect of human cognition - it's fundamental to how we live. It touches our most inner core. Our understandings, explanations and beliefs aren't attempts to capture some “external reality” or “eternal truths”; they're tools we use to make sense of what we live, of how we engage with others to create coherent narratives that guide our actions and decisions in a hyper-complex world.

Consider how even our most successful scientific theories - quantum mechanics and relativity - demonstrate that what we observe fundamentally depends on our framework of observation, not on some eternal “truth” of any kind, one that is valid for anyone at every point. Different frameworks yield different but equally valid descriptions of the same phenomena. MDO takes this insight further: it suggests that even our most basic concepts about what exists or what counts as evidence emerge from specific models with their own assumptions and limitations. This isn't about denying the importance of evidence or observation - quite the opposite. It's about recognizing that any statement, any fact, any concept we employ is necessarily interpreted within some model or framework. This is a point that Rudolf Carnap made in a seminal paper entitled Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology (1950).

Understanding this opens up more sophisticated ways of evaluating and working with multiple models while maintaining their pragmatic utility. Rather than attempting to determine which model is "true," rather than enforcing new "truths" like some figures do, it examines how different ways of understanding serve different purposes, create different meanings, and lead to different outcomes.

Consider how differently this approach works in practice. Instead of treating economic frameworks as competing claims, where one and only one can be "the right one," MDO examines their use as tools for making sense of different scales and contexts of human endeavours. MDO then acknowledges that the breathtaking complexity of global markets cannot be reduced to a single model any more than human political beliefs can be reduced to imagined "lefts" or "rights." MDO actually encourages generating a potentially unlimited quantity of different models in different dimensional axes, as a way to overcome the stubbornly persistent human insistence on using bipolar, monodimensional axes.

This represents a radical shift in how we approach understanding itself, and the irony is exquisite: by abandoning our obsession with finding the truth, we might finally develop better ways of understanding our world than we ever could through the lens of absolute certainty. Instead of imposing single "correct" ways of seeing the world, we might be better by cultivating multiple model competency, teaching people to work with different frameworks while understanding their contexts and limitations. Imagine an education system that taught not what to think, but how to move fluently between different ways of making sense of the world, recognizing that different contexts require different tools for understanding. More crucially, imagine having practical tools to evaluate these models based not on their claim to any truth, but on their ability to illuminate our experiences while remaining consistent with observed evidence.

The challenge ahead isn't choosing between truth and relativism - that's the old game, the one that led us into our current crisis. The real challenge is learning to dance more skilfully with the multiple frameworks through which humans create meaning. To find the greater meaning, not the greater truth. This isn't just an academic exercise - it's about survival in an age where competing absolutisms threaten to tear societies apart. MDO offers not just an epistemic framework for understanding this dance, but the practical tools for performing it with greater awareness, flexibility, and effectiveness. Perhaps then we can move beyond the endless war of "truths" toward something more sophisticated: a world where meaning-making becomes not a source of division, but a shared human adventure in understanding.

Manuel Delaflor is Director of the Metacognition Institute and the author of the forthcoming book, Model Dependent Ontology.

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黑格爾和海德格 -- R. Pippin
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Hegel vs Heidegger: can we uncover reality?

Reason, reality, and the fate of philosophy

Robert Pippin, 11/15/24

Editor/s Notes：For most of its history, Western philosophy tried to use pure reason to know reality. But, argues Robert Pippin, Heidegger showed that this entire philosophical tradition was doomed, due to its mistaken assumption that what it is to be a feature of reality is to be available to rational thought. This assumption, which culminated in Hegel, led philosophy to forget the meaningfulness of reality for humans, and so left us lost. Only by recognising that we encounter reality not primarily through reason, but through the ways in which it matters for us, can philosophy recover the world as something meaningful for humans.

1. What is forgotten in the Western philosophical tradition

Heidegger claimed that German Idealism and especially Hegel’s philosophy was the “culmination” (Vollendung) of the entire Western philosophical tradition. This meant that one could most clearly see in the work of Kant and Hegel the decisive, underlying assumption guiding that tradition from its inception in Plato and Aristotle to its final fate. Because of that assumption, philosophy had exhausted its possibilities; all that was left for it was to recount its own past moments either in some triumphalist mode (Hegel) or in some deflationary irony (Derrida). This failure, Heidegger hoped, might tell us something crucial for the possibility of a renewal of a philosophy that had something to do with human life as it is actually lived.

The heart of that prior tradition was metaphysics, the attempt by empirically unaided pure reason to know the “really real,” traditionally understood as “substance.” This most basic question in philosophy was taken to be the question of “the meaning of being qua being,” but in reality, Heidegger claimed, this question had never been properly addressed; indeed, it had been “forgotten.” Instead, the major philosophers in the Western tradition simply assumed that the primary availability of any being is as material for cognition, that “to be” was “to be a detectable substance enduring through time and intelligible as just what it is and not anything else.” Moreover, Heidegger claimed that this assumption about the primary availability of being to discursive thinking, in all the developing variations in later philosophy and especially in modernity, had set in place by its implications various notions of primacy, significance, orders of importance, social relations and relations with the natural world that had led to a disastrous self-estrangement in the modern West, a forgetfulness and lostness that ensured a permanent and ultimately desperate homelessness. This assumption was that being – anything at all – was primarily manifest as a detectable substance enduring over time, something merely present before us. He called this the “metaphysics of presence.” So, if the tradition takes itself to be answering the question of the meaning of being – from Platonic Ideas, to Aristotelian forms, to atomism, to materialism, to Leibnizian monads, to Cartesian mental representations, to whatever the most advanced physical sciences say – what in the question of the meaning of being has been forgotten?

2. Heidegger’s corrective: we first encounter beings through their mattering for us

The heart of Heidegger’s answer concerns how we understand the question itself: what does it mean to be, in what way does anything at all come to mean anything for us? The problem of “the meaning of Being” is the problem of the meaningfulness of beings; that is, beings in the way they matter. Their way of mattering is their original way of being available; they become salient in a familiarity permeated by degrees of significance; it is how beings originally show up for us in our experience. The source of that meaningfulness is the possibility of meaningfulness as such, the meaningfulness of Being as such, that beings can matter at all. We immediately assume that this is all a matter of “subjective projection,” that individuals somehow determinate what matters to them and project that onto the world and others. This is what Heidegger most of all wants to contest. He wants to relocate the possible sources of meaningfulness in a shared historical world, a horizon of possible meaningfulness into which we are “thrown,” in his famous term.

So, in his most well-known account in his 1927 Being and Time, Heidegger wanted to convince his readers of two initial claims, along the way to a much longer project that he had planned for the book. One was that entities are available for experience in their significance (Bedeutsamekeit), salient in experience because of the way they matter, given various comportments, practical undertakings in our engagements with beings and with others. In making this claim, he was concerned with the issue he called primordiality or fundamentality. While various sensible and material properties of objects could be attended to, his phenomenological claim was that this sort of attentiveness was secondary, “founded,” an abstraction from what was our original, practical engagement.

The second followed from that claim of primordiality. It was that this primary availability could not be understood as a matter of discursive discrimination, as if the objects’ significance were a function of or result of our judging or even being able to judge the objects to be significant. His now famous examples involved the use of tools or “equipment.” While we obviously have reasons to grab a hammer by the wooden handle and not the metal top, our understanding of how to use the hammer was not a matter of those reasons guiding or directing our use: the know-how involved in hammer competency need have no basis in prior beliefs or implicit beliefs about proper hammering. The hammer came to matter as some task or other arose, and it could so matter because of a nondiscursive familiarity with hammers and the equipmental context assumed as a background for that significance, a context itself not appealed to or invoked in any discursive way.

That context was itself a component of a general horizon of possible meaningfulness, a source of comportments that would make sense to engage in, a world. Our general orientation in any such equipmentman context, our knowing our way around in a given historical world, is much more a matter of what he called “attunement,” a way of being onto, appreciating, registers of significance in experience, rather than rule-following or conscious directedness. This meant that there was a primordial normative dimension in the availability of entities, significances, meaningfulness, mattering, that was not properly understood as the product of or even as subject to rational assessment. We are oriented from such possible meaningfulness non-discursively by this “attunement”, in the way friends or orchestra members might be said to be attuned to one another.

This also speaks to the “critical” potential of Heidegger’s approach. What he wants to claim about the ultimate groundlessness and dogmatism of the traditional metaphysical orientation has a normative consequence that Heidegger clearly thinks is catastrophic, a dimension brought out best by “Heideggerians” such as Herbert Marcuse on “One-Dimensionality” and Hannah Arendt on “thoughtlessness.” It is also manifest in his explicit linking of consumerist capitalism with the implications of the metaphysics of presence. This has an important bearing on what might be possible if we manage to recover, to remember, what we have forgotten, the question we need to ask. The absence of any acknowledged, genuine source of meaningfulness has a political dimension, even, perhaps especially, when it is not acknowledged. Such a dimension is manifest in such ever more common pathologies such as boredom, anxiety, depression, “deaths of despair,” resentment, and alienation, and these express themselves in the rage we see coursing through contemporary politics.

Robert Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago, and author of the recent book The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism and the Fate of Philosophy

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The Return of Metaphysics: Hegel vs Kant

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現實蘊含某些矛盾 -- Graham Priest/Omari Edwards
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我沒有對下文所呈現思路和觀點置喙的功力；但相信它們值得深思。Happy reading and contemplating.

此文可以和拙作《淺談dialectic》以及我跟孫隆基教授對談諸文中關於「辯證觀」部份參照；孫教授大作請見此處。此外，在以下的「索引」外，請使用正文中的「超連接」。

索引：

begs the question：「竊取論點」，在討論或著述時，「前提」已經預設未經證實的「結論」為真。
Dialetheism：「現實兩面性論」，認為”某些”「A」和「非A」可以同時「成立」的思路和/或理論；「A」在此指某個「命題」。《維基百科》此處「中譯」可能導致誤解。請注意上面說明中的「某些」一詞；此觀點並未號稱「全面性」。
formal logic：「形式邏輯」，又稱「數理邏輯」或「符號邏輯」
paradox：「悖論」；兩面性，雙重性
per se (請參考該條目註解下，對此詞「用法」的詳細說明)：--- 的本身；就 --- 而言，--- 是per se所指示的事物、概念、或理論等。
Principle of explosion：邏輯學上的「無限擴充原則」；根據一對相互矛盾的「命題」，人們可以推論出任何「命題」。《維基百科》此處「中譯」難稱信、達。請參考 ”Why the principle of explosion works? [duplicate]”
ramifications：可能的後果；衍生的影響
realism (philosophical)：(哲學)「實在論」
self-reference：自我指涉，自我參照
sensible：合情合理的，明智的
soundness (logic)：”論點” (或”論述”)「成立」；(邏輯上)「成立」需同時滿足兩個要件：a.「論證過程」在形式上「合格」(符合推論格式或邏輯規則；b.「前提」必須「為真」(或至少「被普遍接受」)。請見此說明。
transitivity (philosophy)：關係的傳遞性，可傳遞的關係

validity (logic)：(論證)「合格」；「論證過程」在形式上符合推論格式或邏輯規則。

The paradoxes at the heart of reality

An interview with Graham Priest

We believe things can’t be both true and false, it can’t be both raining and not raining at the same time. Philosopher Graham Priest, however, thinks differently. In this interview, he argues true contradictions are an intrinsic part of reality.

Most of us think in binaries: either it’s raining or it’s not, things are black or white, true or false. The philosophies of Frege and Russell in the 20^th century formalised these binaries into the very logic of our thinking. Graham Priest pushes back against this. There is a huge variety of paradoxes which have puzzled philosophers throughout the ages, and that old view that contradictions are always false has yet to be justified. In this interview with the leading theorist of dialetheism we discover how it can be raining and not raining at the same time.

So, Graham what is the argument? Some commentators have argued that you seem to be saying that paradoxes are not just linguistic or conceptual issues, but that they exist in the world itself?

I don’t think I have ever said that. What I have said is that some contradictions are true (dialetheism, as it is now called). What makes a statement true is, in general, a combination of what words mean and how the world is. So ‘Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere’ is true partly in virtue of the meaning of ‘Southern Hemisphere’, and partly in virtue of some geographical facts. Many true contradictions are no exception to this general rule.

What was your intellectual journey towards dialetheism? Was there a specific moment or experience that convinced you that true contradictions are a fundamental aspect of reality?

I was trained as a mathematician. My doctorate is in mathematical logic, and I was as classical a logician as anyone could be. Any logician must engage with some of the most profound mathematical results of the 20th century, such as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems. These are closely related to the paradoxes of self-reference. So I became interested in these. These paradoxes have been discussed by logicians for nearly two and a half thousand years, and there has been no success in solving them—at least if success is judged by consensus. These paradoxes are arguments for certain contradictions. Most have assumed that there must be something wrong with the arguments. I started to think ‘maybe this isn’t true: these arguments just establish their contradictory conclusions’. So I started to investigate this possibility, its ramifications and applications. After a period of time, I became persuaded that, despite being highly unorthodox, this is a very sensible view.

How do you define a paradox? Are there criteria that distinguish a "true" paradox from one that merely appears paradoxical due to linguistic confusion or logical error?

A paradox is an argument which appears to be sound, but which ends in a contradiction. If the argument really is sound, the contradiction is true. If not, there is no reason to believe so. Of course, all the hard work has to go in determining whether the argument is sound. There is no magic bullet to determine this.

The Law of Non-Contradiction, that something has to be true or false, is a foundational principle of classical logic. How do you respond to those who argue that abandoning this law leads to an incoherent or meaningless view of reality?And how do you counter the explosion argument in favour of the law of Non-Contradiction, the idea that if we allow contradictions to be true we can reach any conclusion we want? Can you provide a concrete example of a true paradox in the world?

Well, what is called classical logic is a logic invented by logicians such as Frege and Russell at the turn of the 20^th century—though it has some things (but only some things) in common with really classical logics. those of Ancient Greece, for instance.

If someone claims that abandoning the Principle of Non-Contradiction leads to an incoherent or meaningless view of reality (whatever that is supposed to mean), the onus is on them to make good this claim. I have never seen a successful argument for this.

The argument for Explosion presupposes that truth and falsity are exclusive. Hence an argument against true contradictions on the basis of Explosion begs the question. There are now many well understood formal logics which do not have this presupposition. They are called paraconsistent.

There are many possible examples of the kind you ask for (though of course they are all contentious). One is the sorites paradox. Take a long sequence of colour strips such that the colour of each is indistinguishable from that of the strips immediately adjacent to it, but such that the first strip is red and the last is not (say, blue). The strips in the middle of the sequence are symmetrically poised between being red and not being red. One may argue that they are both.

So, taking an example like "It's raining and it's not raining." How would you defend the claim that this could be a true paradox? What are the implications for our understanding of truth and reality?

This is a standard example taken from another sorites paradox, concerning a slow but continuous transition from a heavy downpour to the rain having stopped. Like the paradoxes of self-reference, there is no consensus about how this should be solved. A dialetheic solution is one of them, but of course there are others. One just has to engage in the discussion of which solution is best. For what it is worth, when ordinary people (not philosophers!) are interviewed about what to say of the such borderline cases, many are quite happy to say that it is raining and not raining.

What are the implications? That some contradictions are true, and that reality is such as to make them so.

You’ve argued against the transitivity of identity, the idea that everything has to be identical with itself. How do you address the criticism that rejecting this principle undermines the coherence of identity itself? Could you explain how this view aligns with, or contradicts, your commitment to realism?

If someone claims that rejecting transitivity undermines the coherence of identity (whatever that means), the onus is on them to justify the claim. The transitivity of identity is certainly a standard assumption, but that is not good enough. One thing we have learned from the history of philosophy, logic, and science, is that standard assumptions are often false. Once such an assumption is challenged a case needs to be made for it.

Whether or not I’m a realist might depend on what you mean by ‘realism’. The word gets used to mean many different things. But in any case, I see no obvious connection between the transitivity of identity and realism—whatever that might mean.

In embracing paradoxes as real, what are the ontological commitments that follow? How does this impact your view of metaphysics, particularly regarding concepts like objecthood and identity?

I’m not sure there is anything much more to say about this. Since I am a dialetheist, I think that some objects are contradictory. That says nothing about their objecthood per se. Dialetheism does not, in itself, imply that identity is non-transitive. It is quite compatible with a standard view of identity. However, in one of my books I applied it to give a non-transitive theory of identity.

So, what are the practical consequences of accepting that true paradoxes exist? How should this influence our everyday reasoning, decision-making, and scientific inquiry?

This is a big question, but the outline of an answer is as follows. Whenever we hold a view on some matter, it is usually embedded in some general theory or other—maybe a confused one. The rational thing to do is to accept whichever is the best theory, and so the answer it gives. If one is not a dialetheist all inconsistent theories are off the table; but with dialetheism, some may well be. We still choose the best theory, but now this may be an inconsistent one.

Mathematics and science are fields heavily reliant on consistency and non-contradiction. How do you see dialetheism affecting these domains? Are there areas where embracing paradoxes could lead to new insights or breakthroughs?

No, this is not true. First, we now know that there are coherent mathematical theories based on non-classical logics. Those based on a paraconsistent logic will be inconsistent. Moreover, inconsistent theories have been accepted by scientists. The most obvious example of this is classical dynamics. For about 200 years, this was based on the infinitesimal calculus, which was well known to be inconsistent. Scientists will accept whatever theory produces the right empirical results. If this is inconsistent, so be it. True, for the last 200 years scientists have not deliberately constructed inconsistent theories; but now that we have well-established non-classical mathematics, perhaps they will be.

If contradictions can be true, what does this mean for ethical reasoning and moral philosophy? Could there be true moral paradoxes, and if so, how should we navigate them?

Yes, there would appear to be normative dialetheias, where you ought to bring it about that something, and it is not the case that you ought to bring it about. If this is so, you just have to live with the contradiction, and take the consequences.

What are the most common objections you face regarding dialetheism, and how do you typically respond to them? For instance, how do you defend against the claim that accepting contradictions leads to logical and practical chaos?

The traditional arguments against dialetheism are those provided by Aristotle in his Metaphysics and they are pretty hopeless, as most modern commentators now agree. Probably the most common objection now is that dialetheism implies that everything is true. This depends on the principle of Explosion. The validity of Explosion presupposes that truth and falsity are exclusive, and so begs the question. There is no logical chaos in a paraconsistent logic. Such logics are as precise and mathematically articulated as any other contemporary system of formal logic.

Perhaps the other most common objection is: ‘I just don’t see how a contradiction can be true’. That says more about the speaker than the view itself. Many people found the Special Theory of Relativity hard to accept at first because they just ‘couldn’t see how time could run at different rates in different frames of reference’. In both cases, you just have to get used to the new theoretical framework.

Looking forward, what do you see as the future of dialetheism in philosophy? Do you believe that your views will gain wider acceptance, and if so, what shifts in philosophical thought or practice do you anticipate?

I certainly hope so, but of course the future of philosophy—as of so much else—is inherently unpredictable. Philosophical thinking (at least in the West) has been constrained by the dogmatism of consistency since Aristotle. Once these blinkers are off, who knows where philosophy could go?

How has your commitment to paradoxes and dialetheism influenced your personal worldview? Do you find that it has changed the way you approach life’s uncertainties and contradictions?

Not really. Perhaps the fact that I have had to come to reject something I took to be obvious has made me more suspicious of views which many people (including myself) are wont to take for granted.

What advice would you give to young philosophers who are grappling with the idea of true paradoxes? How should they approach the study of logic and metaphysics in light of your theories?

Approach things with an open mind. Don’t believe something simply because tradition says it is so. Don’t believe something simply because you read it in a book—mine included. Explore the ideas and look at the evidence for yourself; make your own mind up.

Graham Priest, is a philosopher and logician at CUNY. A key defender of dialetheism, the view that there are true contradictions.

Omari Edwards, is contributing Editor for IAI News, the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas. Twitter: @edwardsomari1

Join Priest alongside other speakers such as Slavoj Zizek, Roger Penrose, and Phillipa Gregory at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival on September 21st-22nd debating topics from consciousness, to quantum mechanics, politics to beauty. Learn more here.

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混沌與原因 - Erik Van Aken
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Chaos and cause

Can a butterfly’s wings trigger a distant hurricane? The answer depends on the perspective you take: physics or human agency

Erik Van Aken, Edited by Pam Weintraub, 06/13/24

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 20th century, to describe how small events in complex systems can have vast, unpredictable consequences.

Beyond these anecdotes, I want to tell you the story of chaos and answer the question: ‘Can the simple flutter of a butterfly’s wings truly trigger a distant hurricane?’ To uncover the layers of this question, we must first journey into the classical world of Newtonian physics. What we uncover is fascinating – the Universe, from the grand scale of empires to the intimate moments of daily life, operates within a framework where chaos and order are not opposites but intricately connected forces.

In his bestselling book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), James Gleick observes that 20th-century science will be remembered for three things: relativity, quantum mechanics (QM), and chaos. These theories are distinctive because they shift our understanding of classical physics toward a more complex, mysterious and unpredictable world.

Classical physics, which reached its pinnacle in the work of Isaac Newton, painted a universe ruled by determinism and order. It was a world akin to a perfectly designed machine, where each action, like the fall of a domino, inevitably triggered a predictable effect. This absolute predictability – a world where understanding the present means knowing the future – became the essence of Newtonian mechanics.

Classical physics not only presented an orderly universe among Newton’s followers, but it also instilled a profound sense of mastery over the natural world. Newton’s discoveries fostered the belief that the Universe, previously shrouded in mystery, was now laid bare, sparking an unprecedented optimism in the power of science. Armed with Newton’s laws and revolutionary mathematics, leading thinkers felt they had finally unlocked the secrets of reality.

In this atmosphere of scientific triumph, Alexander Pope, the great poet of the Enlightenment, wrote a fitting epitaph for Newton that captured the monumental impact of his contribution:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.

Not everyone was excited. In his beautiful work Lamia (1820), John Keats poignantly expressed concern over the loss of mystery and wonder in the face of empirical scrutiny:

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.

The ‘cold philosophy’ of classical physics seemed to ‘unweave a rainbow’, stripping the natural world of its enchantment and mystery. Keats resented the process of scientific rationalisation, which could ‘clip an Angel’s wings’ and reduce the world’s wonders to simple entries in ‘the dull catalogue of common things’.

And yet, the 20thcentury witnessed a dramatic shift with the emergence of relativity, which redefines our understanding of space and time; QM, which revolutionised our understanding of the subatomic world; and chaos theory. The orderly and predictable world of Newtonian physics, the dream of a mechanical universe ready to unveil her innermost workings, was, happily or not, something of an illusion. In the 20^thcentury, science revealed a far more intricate, less predictable and, indeed, chaotic universe.

Like the other two pillars Gleick identified, chaos theory challenges our understanding of classical physics. However, unlike QM and relativity, chaos theory operates within a Newtonian framework – it assumes a deterministic reality governed by specific laws. Yet chaos theory reveals a beguiling level of unpredictability, particularly at a macroscopic level.

The unpredictability revealed by chaos theory, seemingly at odds with a deterministic worldview, arises from the complex nature of nonlinear systems.

In dynamical systems, behaviour changes over time. The concept of determinism implies that future states are precisely determined by current conditions, without any randomness or chance involved. However, when dynamical systems exhibit nonlinearity, their behaviour becomes more complex and less predictable. This complexity arises from a disproportionate relationship between input or cause and output or effect.

Consider a simple faucet. At low pressure, water flows in a smooth, or laminar, pattern. As pressure increases, the flow remains steady but broadens slightly. At one critical point, however, marked by no more than a tiny pressure change, we see a ‘phase transition’ – the orderly flow suddenly becomes turbulent, exemplifying chaos: the sensitivity of nonlinear systems like fluids to minor changes, leading to unpredictable outcomes.

Think about the movement of a small pebble rolling down a mountain slope. Tiny variations in its starting point, uneven terrain, soil density, even wind direction can drastically alter its path and final position. For instance, imagine we drop a pebble at a specific location and it comes to rest in another location. Imagine we run a simple experiment, dropping the pebble one millimetre away from where we dropped it in the first place. If the pebble’s movement is slightly altered by external factors like wind, hitting a patch of highly dense soil or a large rock, its speed could increase dramatically, ultimately stopping in an unexpected location 5,000 mm away from where it landed in the first drop.

A parallel in celestial mechanics is the so-called three-body problem, with three bodies in space like the recent Netflix series. Consider two bodies in space: Earth and the Moon. Newtonian mechanics allows us to predict the orbital motions of these two bodies perfectly. Yet, when we add a third body, the Sun, we discover a level of complexity that defies Newtonian predictability. The gravitational interactions among these three bodies create a dynamic, nonlinear system where slight variations in initial conditions, for example, minor variations in the distances or velocities of any one body, can lead to vastly different outcomes; the long-term positions of the three bodies become practically impossible to predict.

In broader mathematical and scientific terms, ‘chaos’ refers to systems that appear random yet are inherently deterministic. Take the example of a roulette wheel, commonly perceived as a game of chance. While we might assume the outcome is purely random, the underlying mechanics of the roulette wheel, including the motion, friction and the force of the spin, adhere to deterministic physical laws. The true source of unpredictability stems from its extreme sensitivity to initial conditions: how forcefully the ball is dropped, the speed at which the wheel spins, subtle vibrations from environmental factors like an air conditioner, and even the movement of patrons around the table. These factors, often unnoticed, can significantly influence the outcome of each spin. Chaos theory teaches us that even seemingly insignificant variations in initial conditions – a fraction of a millimetre difference in the ball’s drop point – can lead to disproportionately large effects.

Colloquially known as the butterfly effect, chaos theory can shatter our common notion of cause and effect. It suggests that predicting the long-term future is incredibly complex because even tiny, seemingly irrelevant events can have significant consequences.

The term ‘butterfly effect’ is often attributed to the meteorologist Edward Lorenz, who used the now-familiar example to describe chaos: a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a chain of events leading to a hurricane in Texas three weeks later.

This seemingly outlandish scenario underscores the counterintuitive nature of chaos theory. While the idea of small causes having large effects might feel familiar, chaos theory challenges our common assumptions about how the world works. The surprising lesson isn’t that small events can have significant consequences but, rather, the profound difficulty in predicting those consequences. This core principle – the difficulty in prediction – has a technical definition: ‘sensitive dependence’ on initial conditions – for instance, a roulette ball’s position before it is dropped, the speed of the roulette wheel, etc.

But sensitive dependence is not a novel concept. It has a place in history:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

‘For want of a nail’ captures a familiar notion about causality – small events can cascade into significant consequences.

Yet, within the framework of chaos theory, we can take this idea further.

Consider the potential for sudden changes due to phase transitions, as when the swirling water goes from smooth to turbulent. Tiny variations in a system’s conditions, like a seemingly insignificant missing nail, can accumulate and trigger an unexpected shift – the shoe falling off, the horse being injured, the battle being lost. These sudden changes, surprising transitions within the system, are driven by underlying physical laws, yet they reveal the inherent unpredictability and complexity embedded in what might seem like straightforward events.

Just as a missing nail leads to the loss of a kingdom, could the flutter of a distant insect trigger catastrophic events? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, depends on perspective – how we choose to look at the world and how we understand cause and effect.

Before we consider the two distinct perspectives, it is critical to note that the butterfly effect is a metaphor for a theory, namely, chaos – the idea that small changes in conditions can have large, unexpected effects. While the butterfly effect is a powerful image, it’s important to remember the scientific foundation Lorenz’s work provided.

I mentioned that Lorenz was a meteorologist. Indeed, he studied the weather and tried to find ways to improve forecasting – predicting when a storm might arise, where it would turn, when it would die down, and so on. During his investigations at MIT, Lorenz developed a simple computer model to track hypothetical weather systems in a targeted environment (the actual world). As the story goes, Lorenz entered some numbers into his computer program and left his office to get a coffee. When he returned, he discovered a shocking result.

His model was relatively simple. It used a set of differential equations to represent how air moves and temperatures fluctuate. Lorenz was repeating a simulation he had run earlier – but he had rounded off one variable from .506127 to .506, a seemingly inconsequential alteration. To Lorenz’s surprise, that tiny alteration drastically transformed the model’s output.

Lorenz’s groundbreaking work uncovered a startling phenomenon: small changes can have enormous, unforeseen consequences, leading to impenetrable barriers in long-term prediction. We call this phenomenon the butterfly effect, but its scientific foundation lies in the sensitivity of nonlinear systems to initial conditions.

The chaotic nature of nonlinear systems impacts more than just mathematics. For instance, small genetic mutations or environmental changes in biological evolution can lead to significant evolutionary shifts over time. The path of evolution is not linear or predictable; instead, it is full of unexpected twists and turns, like the movement of a pebble down the mountain. Similarly, in economics, markets function as complex, nonlinear systems. Rumours about a company or slight changes in interest rates can act as triggers, setting off substantial and unanticipated shifts. The 2007-08 financial crisis provides a sobering reminder that minor perturbations in one sector can ripple into a global meltdown.

Perhaps the point about small events is best stated by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in their book Good Omens (1990):

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realised that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe.

Tiny things matter. But can the movement of a butterfly, weighing roughly the same as a penny, cause a sizeable storm? The answer is rather complex. The answer is both yes and no – yes, from the perspective of classical physics, and no, from our perspective as human agents.

Allow me to explain.

Consider the act of lighting a match. Conventionally, this act is perceived in a simple, linear fashion – the striking of the match (event A) leads to ignition (event B), ostensibly illustrating what 19th-century philosophers called the ‘law of causality’ – given event A, event B will follow. Simple enough. Until we learn that the law of causality breaks down when scrutinised through the lens of classical physics.

Physics informs us that igniting a match is not solely an outcome of its striking but rather the aggregate effect of a vast multitude of elements. These include the match’s chemical composition, the force exerted in the strike, the presence of oxygen, and many other factors. The critical point is that, from a physical perspective, causation is not a simplistic sequence but a complex interplay of myriad factors, each contributing more or less subtly to the final event.

Thus, in the realm of classical physics, the concept of cause is dramatically broadened, suggesting that nearly every event within an event’s ‘past light cone’ – everything in its past – could be considered causal. To illustrate, consider the example of a tree falling in a forest. Here, the event’s past light cone encompasses all preceding events that could have influenced this particular tree’s fall; the concept, the ‘past light cone of an event’, indicates that information or influence travels at or below the speed of light. For the falling tree, the past light cone includes immediate factors like wind, the tree’s health, and soil conditions, as well as a multitude of more distant events – from the formation of weather patterns to ecological changes and even distant solar activity impacting Earth’s climate. No matter how seemingly unrelated or remote, each event converges within the tree’s past light cone, contributing to a complex web of causality.

The philosopher Alyssa Ney summarises the above point with notable clarity. In ‘Physical Causation and Difference-Making’ (2009), Ney writes, assuming we look to physics to ground or understand causality:

[T]here are a lot of causal relations at this world, perhaps a lot more than we ordinarily assume. The fields of our best physical theories are spread out across the entire universe and interact with everything in their reach. They link small events like your leaving the house this morning with those more significant ones transpiring in Iraq a little later and more distant ones farther away in the galaxy. It is not quite true on this picture that ‘everything causes everything’, but things come close.

Bertrand Russell’s arguments in ‘On the Notion of Cause’ (1912-13) complicate the picture of causality in physics even further. Russell attacks the idea of cause and effect altogether. In essence, he argues that if A produces B, and A encompasses the environment (the past light cone of A), this broadens the scope of event A to such an extent that it becomes essentially unrepeatable.

Russell’s argument leads us to a dilemma: to uphold the law of causality, we must define events by noting invariable uniformities and by abstracting away most of the physical influences on A. Yet, this abstraction may inadvertently exclude causal influences, undermining the principle of causality. Thus, Russell asserts two significant conclusions: first, that our conventional notion of causality is not grounded in physics; and second, if notions like ‘cause’ must be reducible to physics, we should eliminate our use of the term ‘cause’.

According to Russell, there is no cause and effect at all.

What does this mean for the butterfly effect? Quite simply, it means that when we look at causality through the lens of physics, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings counts as a contributing cause to a later storm. But so too is everything else within the storm’s past light cone. All flapping butterflies, a breaching whale in the Pacific, a young child playing football in Edinburgh, and the Moon’s gravitational effect all count as causal.

The tension compels us closer to Russell’s radical conclusion – if nearly everything influences everything else, the word ‘cause’ begins to lose its meaning.

Yet, there is a line in the philosophy of causation, traceable through thinkers like R G Collingwood, Nancy Cartwright, Huw Price and James Woodward, which posits that we must locate the notion of cause in human practice by focusing on things like manipulation and control. In this view, ‘causes’ are seen as ‘handles’, things in nature that provide us with a measure of control. This framework emphasises the role of human perspectives in shaping, framing or limiting events, and compels us to consider the extent of our influence in complex systems.

This highlights the distinction between physical causation and how we use the concept of cause to understand and navigate the world. Consider my efforts to prevent a common cold: I focus on controllable factors like diet, sleep and who I interact with, and I disregard seemingly irrelevant factors like butterflies and distant whale breaches. The hook is this: while remote and uncontrollable factors like the movement of a butterfly can have some minor physical influence, the movement of the butterfly does not make a difference to my physical health. Philosophers often spell this out in terms of probability: I can alter the probability of catching a cold by ensuring I get sufficient sleep, while the probability is unaltered by catching a butterfly and keeping it safely in a jar; or counterfactuals: had I not stayed awake until 4am, I would not have become ill. We reject as absurd the counterfactual: had this particular butterfly not moved from one flower to another, I would not have become ill.

But notice the minor tension even here. If it is true that the movement of a butterfly (or anything in the past light cone) has some effect on my health, is it arbitrary to focus on controllable factors like how much I sleep? No, because we enable basic causal reasoning once we shift our focus from physics to a more practical, human-level perspective. Indeed, it seems to be a central aspect of our ordinary use of ‘cause’. We may want to avoid being injured or getting ill, and our interest leads us to ask a specific set of questions; in turn, this leads us to the fact that much of the world becomes irrelevant. If we want to avoid getting lung cancer or the flu, for example, we will not be interested in the current migration patterns of monarch butterflies or the number of universities in California.

Consider E H Carr’s seminal work What Is History? (1961). In a chapter titled ‘Causation in History’, Carr admits that determinism introduces serious complications in historical analysis. However, he emphasises that historians focus on fruitful generalisations, or what Carr calls ‘real’ causes. To illustrate, imagine that Smith, walking to buy a pack of cigarettes, is killed by a drunk driver speeding around a blind corner. While it is true that had Smith not been a smoker, he would not have died, we cannot generalise the proposition, ‘smoking caused Smith’s death.’ It is much more useful, certainly in the context of history and everyday life, to say that the real cause of Smith’s death was the drunk driver, the speed of the vehicle, or the blind corner. This is why historians cite the Treaty of Versailles or the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 as a cause of the Second World War and not Hitler’s being born.

A basic thesis emerges: we can overcome Russell’s problem, the problem of causation in physics, by shifting our perspective. If we look at the world through the ordinary lens of human agency, rather than the lens of physics, we can talk about causes as handles, events within nature that make a difference to some effect and provide us with a sense of control.

Imagine that Sam and Suzy are standing near a fire. Each bystander desires to extinguish the flame. Imagine further that Suzy decides to spray the fire with a hose, and that Sam decides to pray for the fire to go out. From a physical perspective, Sam and Suzy – one spraying and one praying – affect the fire by their mere presence and, thus, by their actions. Yet, from a macro-level human perspective, only one individual affects the fire. That is, only Suzy’s spraying makes a difference to the flames.

When we shift our perspective from physics to agency and difference-making, we land on the most intuitive assessment of the butterfly effect. From our perspective, the butterfly is not a cause of the storm because we cannot affect storms by manipulating butterflies. And while the butterfly could have an effect on a storm, it does not make a difference to the occurrence of storms in a way that we can predict or control.

Exploring the dichotomy between the perspectives of physics and human agency uncovers a paradox: our actions are simultaneously bound by the determinism of physical laws and enriched with intention, purpose and meaning that go beyond them.

To fully appreciate what this means, heed a lesson from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which asks how a benevolent God could allow suffering. There is just one virtuous character in the novel, the monk Father Zosima, whose simple teaching, dictated through the genius of Dostoyevsky, sheds light on chaos, causation and difference-making:

See, here you have passed by a small child, passed by in anger, with a foul word, with a wrathful soul; you perhaps did not notice the child, but he saw you, and your unsightly and impious image has remained in his defenceless heart. You did not know it, but you may thereby have planted a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and all because you did not restrain yourself before the child, because you did not nurture in yourself a heedful, active love … for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance. My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.

Erik Van Aken is an instructor of philosophy and religious studies at Rocky Mountain College in Montana, US.

This Essay was made possible through the support of a grant to Aeon Media from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. Funders to Aeon Media are not involved in editorial decision-making.

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