Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Hastening the Cliff: How Poor Leadership can Create Collapse or Make It Faster

30. August 2020 Philosophy News News
The damage that a bad leader can generate is simply fearsome, especially if that leader has a lot of power and he is nearly impossible to remove from his position. If, then, that leader controls a large military apparatus, even including nuclear weapons, then the disasters that can happen are beyond the imaginable. If you, like me, doubt the competence of our current leaders, there is plenty to be worried about. The problem seems to be that our system of choosing leaders guarantees to propel to the top all sorts of power-mongering psychopaths. And as the power we manage increase, going from nuclear weapons to mind control by the Web, the chances for truly disastrous damage created by an incompetent leader increase. Maybe there should be a science of incompetent leaders that might be a branch of the more general "science of evil." In this post, I start with the idea that the past is the way to understand the future and so I repropose a theme that I had already examined: that of Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) (1808-1873) one of the best examples we have of an incompetent leader who ruined the state he was leading. At that time, fortunately there were no nuclear weapons available and Luis Napoleon himself was not so aggressive as other famously bad leaders. Nevertheless, the damage he generated was considerable and we can learn something from this story. Napoleon 3rd: how to destroy an empire in the making.  The armies of Napoleon Bonaparte went through many victories and [More]
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PhD positions in Contemporary Humanism - LUMSA

28. August 2020 Philosophy News News
Job List:  Europe Name of institution:  Libera Università Maria Ss Assunta - LUMSA Town:  Rome Country:  Italy Job Description:  The International PhD Programme (double-degree) in Contemporary Humanism is instituted for the 36th Cycle at LUMSA University (Rome) in partnership with Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC) - Santiago/Chile, Australian Catholic University (ACU) - Sydney/Australia and Institut Catholique de Paris (ICP) - Paris/France and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa (UCP) - Lisbon/Portugal. The International PhD Programme is regulated by the Agreement between the Partner Universities signed on 30 March [More]
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Philosophy as Drama: Plato's Thinking through Dialogue

26. August 2020 Philosophy News News
2020.08.03 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews Hallvard Fossheim, Vigdis Songe-Møller, and Knut Ågotnes (eds.), Philosophy as Drama: Plato's Thinking through Dialogue, Bloomsbury, 2019, 247pp., $114.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781350082496. Reviewed by Brooks A. Sommerville, University of British Columbia Roughly sixty years ago, certain interpreters dragged the study of Plato's dialogues into the modern world by subjecting them to analytic philosophical methods. So goes the prevailing history of Plato scholarship. With this development, specialists could explain their research to their colleagues using familiar modern categories, and -- what is perhaps just another way of saying the same thing -- it conferred modern respectability on a set of texts whose place in philosophical research had come into question. Unfortunately for the study of Plato, the story does not end there. This newfound respectability came at a cost, for it did not fall equally on every Stephanus page. While scholars readily saw how they could apply modern techniques to the crisp,... Read [More]
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