>Oscar Wilde once said that "patriotism is the virtue of the vicious". Do you agree?
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Category Archives: Philosophy
>Does democracy encourage violence?
>I’m sure you’ve all heard the idea that democratic nations are less likely to go to war with each other, but what about how long they’re likely to stay in a war? Think about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and you will probably think democracy encourages the troops to come home. But what about war that’s a little closer to home such as total war? In the limited wars of the seventeenth century countries would sue for peace if casualties looked too bad, or victory seemed too difficult to achieve. So what changed between then and the two world wars? At the time of the First World War all European state leaders feared their people and what they would do. I have recently heard it voiced by top Professors that it was democracy and nationalism that made it so difficult to accept peace talks during WW1. Do you agree?
>Is there such a thing as an unanswerable question?
>Is charity worth our while?
>Have you ever heard anyone tell you that it’s a waste of your time and effort to give money to someone on the street, or even for us to give to charities at all? Right wing movements say that charity creates dependency. Does it? If so does that mean we’re better doing as African author Dambisa Moyo says and weaning countries off of aid? And is it right to talk about charity for individuals and countries in the same conversation? Or are they so different that such comparisons are a waste of time?
>Shakepeare once said "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Is this true?
>Feel free to question the context and meaning behind these words if you know much about Hamlet.
>Would you want to live forever?
>You might say we can’t put it in these terms, but is death a ‘good’ thing? If you could choose to let everyone live forever would you choose to do so? If you could select certain people to live forever would you choose to do so?
>Are we at odds with nature?
>The dictionary defines ‘natural’ as those things that haven’t been altered by mankind. But what are we if not natural? Were we created in a different way to all other life?
But then if we are natural then how is it that we can seem to have different goals to nature? There strikes me as an odd similarity between nature and a hunter-gatherer society. Both house acts we would consider primitive and barbaric. If you look at the average murder rate for those tribes in the Amazon you’ll find that in comparison to more ‘civilised countries’ those tribes look very violent indeed. At the same time evolution seems very cruel, as does the circle of life. In both cases we (humanity) seem to be pitying them while in the process of wiping them out.
So are something ‘other’ than nature? Can we be at odds with it?
>Does such a thing as ‘truth’ exist? If so how do we know what is true?
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In Tarski’s undefinability theorem, 1936, Alfred Tarski said that arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic.
Yet the subject of truth expands throughout all subjects, and has had a lot of literature published on the subject in anthropology, sociology, theory, Post-Modernism and many other fields.
So is the truth subjective? Can one truth only apply for so many people? Or are there objective truths that will be no less true from any perspective? And if there is a truth is it possible for us to find it and define it?
>How do we cope with the disease of pointlessness?
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When critics of Western society actually have a point they usually draw parrallels to Ancient Rome and Greece. In recent years athiests, agnostics, and those believing in philosophies of religion rather than the supernatural, have boomed in number. Ferdinand Mount, who was once head of Thatcher’s policy unit in Downing Street, has written a book called “Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us”. In this work he paints: Anaximander, a pre-Socratic philosopher, as the first Darwinian; Lucretius as the Richard Dawkins of 55BC; Mithras and Mick Jaeger as the God and semi-God on the brink of satisfaction. Mental illness, and declining belief in what we had once said the West stood for: democracy, liberalism and freedoms; have resulted in apathy, depression and a feeling of pointlessness.
So how do we avoid/tackle this problem? If they followed from the lack of strong beliefs then how do we avoid the widespread immoralities often referred to throughout Ancient Greece and Rome?
I know this picture is a bit biased but imagine it correlated against a graph showing how many people felt life was pointless. And secondly, if Mount is right then might we be headed for a new Dark Ages?
>Why is the world so corrupt?
>What causes corruption? Is it human nature? What makes some people and some places more corrupt than others? What is it that makes New Zealand the least corrupt country in the world?
Battison's Blog 