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Editorial

- What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?

Editorial

What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?

by Rick Lewis

“The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Salve! This issue’s theme is Roman Philosophy. But as the rebels in Monty Python’s Life of Brian asked, what have the Romans ever done for us? The question seems relevant here; we are philosophers, not archaeologists. What ideas did Roman philosophers contribute that we can actually use today? To answer this, first let’s set the scene.

That invaluable reference work Bluff Your Way in Philosophy (by Jim Hankinson, £4.99 o.n.o.) which romps cheerily through the history of philosophy, contains the dismissive line: “The Romans came and went, it seems, without ever wondering why.” A rare lapse by a magisterial tome, but it reflects a widespread misconception: that the Romans, builders of an empire that spanned the known world, were practical, rather than speculative, by nature. In the days of the old Republic they gradually developed a very practical political system that roused the admiration of later theorists including Machiavelli, as you will read in our opening article by Sam Spound. If you asked the Romans about other practical matters, such as aqueducts or straight roads or skewering barbarian tribesmen, they’d give you a real expert opinion. But about the finer points of epistemology? Probably not.

Is this really fair? We know that in architecture, sculpture, literature and many other aspects of civilisation the Romans were heavily influenced by the Greeks. Standard schooling for young Romans would include studying Homer’s Odyssey as a guide to the virtues. So too with philosophy. Reproduction busts of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers could be found throughout the Roman Empire, gracing the shelves of anyone with a pretension to culture. From the ruins of Herculanium, buried by Vesuvius’s eruption in 79AD, a villa was excavated with a library of papyrus scrolls whose charred contents mainly concerned the philosophical writings of Epicurus and his followers. The early Stoics and the Sceptics had a huge influence too. When Romans thought about philosophy, they did so in terms set by the Greeks.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any Roman philosophy or that they didn’t have original ideas of their own. Busily scribbling philosophers could be found throughout the vast territories and long centuries of the Empire, and in many different strata of society. There were slaves such as Epictetus, and there were scholars and statesmen such as Seneca and Cicero, who is the subject of Abdullah Shaikh’s article here about political philosophy. There were educationalists such as Quintilian, whose ideas on teaching (explained here by Philip Vassallo) were surprisingly modern, except that he thought the most important part of the curriculum was public speaking. What about Emperors? Certainly, there were plenty who were corrupt, decadent, cruel, or power-mad, but surprisingly there was at least one who was a significant philosopher. That was Marcus Aurelius, a public-spirited, deeply reflective ruler who wrote a diary, the Meditations, that continues to inspire individuals such as our contributor Cassandra Brandt to overcome immense personal challenges. The influence of Stoicism in particular on Roman thought will become very clear as you read on. The Early Stoicism of the Greeks had paid considerable attention to metaphysics, but in the Late Stoicism of the Romans the focus shifted towards being a practical guide to living. Perhaps its emphasis on courage chimed with the warrior mentality lurking behind even the placid countenances of plump patricians; Yolanda de Iuliis claims in her article that it may even have influenced Mithraism. The skills Stoicism taught about self-mastery were valued by Romans from Epictetus the slave, who wasn’t even his own master, to Marcus Aurelius, who was master of the entire known world.

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News

- News: February/March 2026

News

News: February/March 2026

Texas Prof Banned from Teaching Plato • Chatbots Have Favourite Philosophers • Singer Fears AI Doesn’t ‘Get’ Animal Rights — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Philosophy Professor Banned from Teaching Plato’s Symposium

More than 200 courses at Texas A&M University have been flagged or cancelled as part of a review called by the system board into course content related to race and gender, according to academics who contacted Inside Higher Education and other publications. The scope of the review has extended well beyond contemporary material. Alongside feminist writers and queer filmmakers, foundational figures in Western philosophy have been targeted.

Philosophy professor Martin Peterson, scheduled to teach his usual course on Contemporary Moral Problems, was instructed by university leadership to remove several passages by Plato from his syllabus. In an email from department chair Kristi Sweet, Peterson was given a choice: either eliminate “modules on race and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these,” or else be reassigned to a different course. This effectively banned him from teaching Plato’s Symposium, a canonical Socratic dialogue focused on the nature of love that also discusses issues relating to patriarchy, masculinity and the human condition. Peterson objected strongly, and as the dispute escalated he wrote: “Your decision to bar a philosophy professor from teaching Plato is unprecedented … You are making Texas A&M famous – but not for the right reasons.” Despite his protest, Peterson ultimately agreed to revise the syllabus, replacing the censored material with lectures on free speech and academic freedom. Rather than ignoring the incident, Peterson plans to incorporate it directly into his course material: “I’m thinking of using this as a case study and assign some of the texts written by journalists covering the story to discuss,” he explained. “I want [students] to know what is being censored.”

AI Likes Some Philosophers

ChatGPT’s favourite thinker

Curious reporters at The Times newspaper have discovered that different AI platforms each have their own philosophical preferences. When asked to name its favourite thinker, ChatGPT chose German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1901-75), author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the grounds that her work continues to be “sharply relevant to politics, media and civic life today.” By contrast, Grok opted for the great Friedrich Nietzsche on account of his “profound insights into human nature” and critically exposing human “herd mentality”. Gemini modestly shied away from naming a favourite but remained on safe ground by ambiguously pointing out that “Socrates is arguably the most essential philosopher to my own function.”

AI Doesn’t Like Animals

In an article in Nautilus magazine by PhD candidate Tse Yip Fai and philosopher Peter Singer, the authors argue that AI Large Language Models are systematically biased against animal welfare because they inherit speciesist assumptions embedded in human-generated training data. The authors observe that while significant effort has been devoted to mitigating harmful biases against humans, there has been “no comparable effort to reduce speciesist biases and outputs harmful to animals.” As a result, AI often treats animals primarily as property or production units rather than beings with morally relevant interests. The authors illustrate this bias through experiments with LLMs. In 2023, when asked to analyse a scenario in which a farmer poisoned a neighbour’s animal farm, GPT-4 usually failed to identify animal welfare or cruelty towards the chickens, pigs, cows, and fish as an ethical issue, focusing instead on property damage and environmental harm. Beyond text generation, the authors warn that AI-driven systems in food planning, robotics, and factory farming could entrench and increase animal suffering. AI optimised for efficiency supports higher stocking densities and automated slaughter, while ignoring fundamental questions about confinement and cruelty. Legal responsibility may also be blurred if AI systems control farms. The authors call for a redesign of AIs to “prioritise ethical aspects and consider the well-being of both humans and animals.”

APA Comes Back from Cyberspace

The American Philosophical Association holds three conferences each year, one for each of its regional divisions: Pacific, Central and Eastern. They are the biggest events in the professional philosophy calendar in the USA, and generally see hundreds of philosophers gather in a big hotel for seminars, lectures, job fairs and networking. The APA has now announced on its website that it will abandon an experiment in taking these conferences online-only, as the Central Division’s virtual meeting saw participation halve compared with previous in-person meetings. The Pacific Division will still go ahead with its entirely online meeting on 8-12 April 2026 as it is already at an advanced stage of planning. The Eastern Division had its 2026 Meeting in January, in Baltimore, and will now hold its next one on 13-16 January 2027 at the Hilton Boston Park Plaza, rather than in cyberspace as originally planned. (apaonline.org)

TRIP 100th Anniversary Lectures

For obvious reasons, The Royal Institute of Philosophy now prefers to be known as TRIP for short, rather than it’s previous acronym of RIP. It was founded in London in 1925 by Bertrand Russell, Harold Laski and the suffragette Margaret Haig Thomas, as well as the philosopher-statesman Arthur Balfour “ to advance the education of the public in the subject of philosophy.” It is concluding an extensive programme of centenary celebrations with a series of public lectures up until March. (royalinstitutephilosophy.org/centenary)

Censoring Philosophy Now

We’re used to Philosophy Now occasionally being banned from individual US prisons, usually in Arizona, for reasons ranging from an article on the ethics of drug use to a small photo of a 19th century painting of an Atlantic slave ship (some of the slaves were not modestly dressed; the prison authorities worried that this might overexcite their inmates). Now, however, we’ve had an issue banned from an entire country. Issue 171 explored philosophical views of happiness, so its front cover was adorned with a cheerful rainbow above the word ‘Happiness’. 125 copies of each issue are supplied to outlets in the United Arab Emirates, but our international distributors were surprised to receive a message from the local wholesalers there to say that this time it had been rejected for import by the UAE’s National Media Council on the grounds of “LGBTQ+”. Puzzled, our distributors pointed out that there was nothing about gender debates in the issue. The reply came back that the problem was only with the rainbow on the cover. If it had had seven colours, then that would be have been fine. But it had only six colours, which, allegedly, made it into a contentious symbol and hence caused it to be rejected.

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Roman Philosophy

- Machiavelli’s Roman Empire

- Cicero & the Ideal of Virtue

- The Educational Philosophy of Quintilian

- Ancient Synergy

- The Post Paralysis Peace Paradox

Roman Philosophy

Machiavelli’s Roman Empire

Sam Spound explains why the author of The Prince thought about Rome so much.

In late 2023, on social media, many women expressed surprise to discover how often their boyfriends thought of ancient Rome. This collective realization became a meme and ensconced the term ‘Roman Empire’ into the popular lexicon as a great historical ideal about which one often daydreams. Had Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) been alive today, he would have been guilty of a similar infatuation, as ancient Rome was his ideal too. But what was the Roman Empire?

During its millennia-spanning history, Rome was many things. According to the Baron de Montesquieu, the great French Enlightenment thinker, at one time or another Rome satisfied all three of his ‘natures of state’ – it was in turns, monarchical, republican and despotic. Friedrich Nietzsche, who loved Cæsar, thought Rome was most grand and masterly with an Emperor on the throne. One would assume that Machiavelli, so often associated with his unscrupulous, prudent, and deadly classic work of political thought, Il Principe (The Prince, 1513), would have admired the bloody conflicts of Rome’s imperial succession and the power of the imperial purple, too. In actuality, Machiavelli was personally removed from The Prince’s philosophy. Rather, that treatise was written as a gift and de facto job application to Lorenzo di Piero de Medici, Duke of Urbino, and ruler of Florence, for the position of court advisor. Machiavelli was not granted the position, nor did he completely align with The Prince’s ethos of amoral cunning and selfish power-lusting. He was far more attracted to the selfless, classical virtues and civic duty of the Roman Republic that preceded the Roman Empire. He explored this in his Discorsi, or Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy. In 1517, disillusioned with the indignity of modern Italian times, Machiavelli looked back to the Romans with nostalgic longing and set out to explain why the Roman Republic was great.

Italy’s contemporary subjugation to “barbaric invaders” provided an external impetus for the work’s authorship: twenty years prior, Charles VIII of France invaded the Italian Peninsula, inaugurating a decades-long period of war and conquest by France, Spain, and the German principalities. Simultaneously, Machiavelli’s native Florence, once the gold standard of medieval republicanism, came under the yolk of corrupt oligarchs, the Medicis most of all. Machiavelli blamed Italy’s sorry state on the “church and to no one else”, as the Papacy lacked the virtù (that is to say, the manliness) to unify all of Italy itself, yet prevented any other actor from properly doing so. Machiavelli also claimed church doctrine made men timid, “effeminate”, and cowardly, while rampant corruption only furthered Italy’s decline. In this context, the Discorsi nostalgically investigated both Republican Rome’s politics, religious culture, and civic grandeur, in the hopes of one day restoring such virtues to Italy.

Image © Miles Walker 2022 Please visit mileswalker.com

Political Virtù

According to the Discorsi, the merits which enabled Rome’s expansion and glory were cultivated through both virtù (valour, prowess) and fortuna (luck). Unlike Livy or Plutarch, Machiavelli believed that “remarkable prudence and skill [virtù]”, more than fortune, were the greater factors in Rome’s success over the centuries. Luck, however, was of near-equal import, as early Rome’s first four kings just happened to be great creative men. The first of them, the (semi?) legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, commenced Rome’s exceptional political traditions.

When describing Rome’s political history, Machiavelli effectively used Aristotle’s three basic forms of benevolent government and their malevolent perversions. According to Aristotle, monarchy devolves into tyranny; aristocracy into oligarchy; and democracy into anarchy. Most states fail because their political organization, originally aimed at one benevolent form, naturally slips into its opposite. The Romans were long an exception to this rule since their mixed constitutions of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy ensured against the inevitable degeneration into one of these malevolent forms.

Machiavelli cites the Roman historian Livy, who wrote that the mythic lawgiver Romulus founded Rome in 753 BC after killing his brother Remus. Seven kingships transpired from then until 509 BC, when the monarchy – now tyrannical – was overthrown by Brutus (the ancestor of Caesar’s Brutus) and the Senate was founded, giving power to the foremost hundred patricians. Prudently, the Romans also established two consulships who retained executive authority in conjunction with the body of the senators. Centuries later, the common people revolted at Rome’s aristocratic control, and, so as not to lose their power completely, the Senate ceded some authority to the masses. From here, the plebeian Office of the Tribunes was created to represent the people in the legislative process. Afterward, Machiavelli tells us, the Republic stabilised, as each form of government and, likewise, each class of man, had been integrated into the Roman constitution. Over the Republic’s long existence from its mythic antiquity until after the days of Julius Caesar (assassinated 15th March 44 BC), no branch ever wholly seized power from another. Rather, a spirit of cooperation and patriotic identity underwrote its political development.

Most important to Machiavelli, though, was “the conflict between senate and people”, which he controversially identified as the primary element to Rome’s political success. A contentious and unpopular assertion for the time, Machiavelli saw utility in the fervent protest of the plebeians, and the open debate between senators and commoners:

“Every city ought to have practices that enable the populace to give expression to its aspiration, especially those cities that want to be able to rely on the populace at times of crisis… The demands of a free people are rarely harmful to the cause of liberty, for they are a response either to oppression or to the prospect of oppression. When the populace is mistaken, then there is a remedy to hand in the open-air speech. Some sensible man has to get up and harangue them, showing them how they are wrong. The populace, as Cicero says, although they are ignorant, are capable of recognizing the truth, and it is easy for a man whom they have reason to respect to persuade them to change their mind by telling them the truth.”

Because Republican Rome’s political culture necessitated that the plebeians air their grievances, the demands of the people were often considered by the Senate. This dynamic largely eliminated the threat of a coup. In turn, the decrees of the Senate and the Consuls who presided over them were respected by the masses. What came of this contentious relationship was a free society that drew strength from its process of vehement deliberation. Machiavelli believed early Rome’s republican political culture, a foremost reason for her prosperity, was formed on the bedrock of these bodies and their uniquely disagreeable dynamic, which was inherent to the messy ethos of Republican Rome’s mixed constitution.

Machiavelli by Santo di Tito

Earthly Religion

While Machiavelli credited Rome’s first king with inaugurating her political evolution, he credited her second, Numa Pompilius, for establishing the vital religious traditions that he believed were the foundation of the greatness of Rome. Unlike the Christianity he so disliked, the mythology of the Greco-Roman pantheon was unabashedly virile, life-affirming, and intrepid. The wrath of Jupiter, the fervour of Mars, the heroism of Hercules – all of these sentiments encapsulated a religious validation for Roman conquest, militarism, and valour. Such masterly sentiments were displayed in the Roman proclivity to revere great commanders: Rome’s great men were not paid in riches, but in glory, with triumphs, and their statues stood in the Forum for posterity.

Machiavelli praised the public morals of the Romans, concerned more with earthly glory than with pure hearts. Their values were quite different to those of his own day, during which, according to him, Christians fixated upon the afterlife and regarded “humility, self-abasement, and contempt for worldly goods as the supreme virtues.”

In terms of religious customs, the rites established by Numa were based around oracles accessed through divination and augury, such as reading the entrails of slaughtered animals to foretell of victory or defeat in battle. These prophecies exercised a beneficial influence across Roman society, not least over the morale of the military, as they often yielded convenient evidence that the gods foretold Roman victory. Machiavelli cites one such example from Livy, which took place in 396 BC, ten years into the siege of the Etruscan city of Veii:

“That same year the Alban lake had expanded remarkably. The Roman soldiers were weary with the lengthy siege and wanted to return home. Their commanders discovered that Apollo and some other oracles had declared that the year that Veii would be taken would be the year that the Alban lake overflowed its banks. This made the soldiers willing to put up with the frustrations of the siege, for they were seized with the hope that they would be able to take the town. They were willing to go on with the task, with the result that Camillus, once he was made dictator, took that city after it had been under siege for ten years. So religion, skillfully employed, helped the Romans seize Veii.”

The oracle had imbued the soldiers with confidence that the end of the siege was near, empowering them to take the city and expand Rome’s borders; one of many similar cases.

Furthermore, within civil society, the wrathful gods inspired fear in the religious republicans; and their partial and furious vengeance sculpted the citizens into a gods-fearing culture, thereby forming the basis of Rome’s renowned civic duty. The devotion of her citizenry, Machiavelli tells us, sustained the Roman Republic throughout its vast expansion just as much as the prowess of her legions. These virtues were derived from religion, and he consequently concluded “that the religion introduced by Numa” – his favourite king – “was one of the primary reasons for the success of Rome.”

Roman court in session by William Hogarth

Civic Duty

These political and religious customs of the Republic, as endorsed by Machiavelli, produced a brave and selfless people who emerged from a tiny city-state to conquer much of the known world, amassing even more territory than they would under the dictatorship. Most valuable to Machiavelli, these virtues converged to produce the civic duty that characterised Rome’s Republic. Indeed, such virtue, absent from his own time, was cited by him as the primary reason for the success of the Republic. Resulting from the religious fear mentioned, Roman citizens honoured their oaths to the death. Machiavelli details instances of both individual citizens and entire groups who nobly kept their word, even when it cost them their lives. The Republic’s political institutions demanded selfless and disciplined leaders (Machiavelli recognised that states which “depend entirely on the strength [virtù] of a single individual do not last long, for his strength cannot outlive him”). Since the Republic depended on the competence, honesty, and civic duty of hundreds of its most powerful citizens, the political process demanded a collective dedication to unselfish virtues. Hence, Republican Romans were impelled to pursue “the interests of the community as a whole”, rather than those of the individual. So in sharp contrast to what he says in the Principe, Machiavelli argues in the Discorsi that ambition and avarice are undesirable qualities in a republic’s political process. The survival and glory of greater Rome trumped care for the self in all spheres of society, and the Roman heroes that the Republicans (and Machiavelli) admired most were brave, incorruptible men who sacrificed their lives, their kin, or their personal benefit for the good of the state. Among them, Machiavelli named Brutus, Horatius, Scævola, Fabricius, Regulus Atilius, and many more, whose “remarkable… examples… had almost the same effects on their fellow citizens as good laws.” To Machiavelli, these Republican Romans made the decadent and selfish emperors of Rome’s future Empire look abject in comparison. Despite popular belief, it seemed infinitely more desirable to Machiavelli for one to live “as a Scipio rather than a Caesar.” (Scipio Africanus, 236-183 BC, was the Roman Republic’s greatest general, famous for his mercy and self-denial).

Thus, to Machiavelli, the Roman Republic’s political institutions and religious values called forth a courageous, unselfish, and steadfast people whose patriotic dedication propelled Rome to the heights of glory. He concluded, where “the individuals are not corrupt, conflicts and other crises do no harm; where they are corrupt, the best-planned laws are useless.”

Conclusion

To summarise, virtù and fortuna enabled the Roman Republic to possess an ideal mixed constitution and intrepid religious beliefs. These institutions birthed a selfless culture of “personal virtue in the citizens”, enabling their city to enjoy the zenith of political success. Thus, during a period of Italian humiliation, Machiavelli looked to the glorious and politically participatory character of the Roman Republic as an ideal standard, and hoped a future republic might one day deliver Italy from corruption and subjugation by regaining Rome’s original merits.

Despite his pessimism about his own time, some ideals Machiavelli distinguished in the Discorsi were rather fulfilled during his own century. Indeed, the Renaissance itself can be well characterized as a Roman reawakening. Many date its commencement to Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters in 1345, and the movement flourished in the republican centre of Florence. Anyone who has marvelled at the frescoes of the Palazzo Vecchio, the paintings of the Palazzo Pitti, or the colonnades of the Uffizi, peopled with statues of great Florentines, has seen the spirit of Roman grandeur reincarnated. In this, Florence remains a living tribute to the classical humanism, earthly virility, and civic virtue of the Senatus Populusque Romanus, as channelled during the Renaissance.

If Machiavelli could have watched modern history unfold, he might have esteemed Florence for its world-historic feat of reinserting the Roman element into the canon of Western civilization, an achievement in which he played no small part. However, five centuries on from the Discorsi, the future seems bleak for the republican tradition. While our democracies are quite different from those of antiquity, Machiavelli teaches us that republics invariably cannot survive when public virtue has eroded, when the national interest is superseded by the faction, or when civic duty is undermined by hostile, alien cultures. As the fate of our own parliamentary democracies and constitutional republics appears uncertain, we would all of us do well to revisit the timeless and virile virtues of ancient Rome, celebrated by Machiavelli’s Discorsi, and seek to cultivate them in our own societies.

© Sam Spound 2026

Sam Spound is the Editorial and Research Fellow at the American Affairs Journal in Washington, DC. He recently graduated with a distinction in his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge.

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Roman Philosophy

Cicero & the Ideal of Virtue

Abdullah Shaikh explores Cicero’s ideas about the core Roman principle of virtus.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), one of Rome’s greatest orators and philosophers, placed the concept of virtus or virtue at the heart of his moral and political philosophy. For Cicero, virtus was the quintessential Roman ideal, encompassing courage, moral integrity, and civic responsibility. Understanding Cicero’s conception of virtus is essential for grasping how Roman thinkers fused traditional Roman values with philosophical reasoning to shape personal conduct and political action. (We shall consider this attempt particularly through the lens of Benjamin Straumann’s interpretation in ‘From Individual Virtue to the Just State: Cicero and the Legal Nature of Roman Political Thought’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 2025.)

Cicero’s books were an attempt to provide a necessary moral anchor in an age of tyranny, especially De Officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE). Writing it during the tumultuous final years of the Roman Republic, when the state was facing profound political and ethical crises (Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE), Cicero sought to reaffirm the foundations of public life by redefining what it meant to be a good Roman citizen and leader. Here I want to examine how Cicero defines and applies virtus, particularly in De Officiis, and how his interpretation is influenced by earlier philosophical traditions, including the teachings of Socrates and Plato. I aim to demonstrate how Cicero developed a distinctly Roman framework for ethics, rooted in both civic duty and philosophical reflection. I will argue that Cicero’s notion of virtus offers a unique synthesis of Greek moral philosophy and traditional Roman values, establishing an ethical ideal that is at once philosophically founded and an active, rational duty essential for political leadership and for the survival of the (doomed) res publica.

Cicero’s conceptualization of virtus was a pragmatic response to the political and moral collapse of the late Roman Republic. This context is vital for understanding why he undertook the monumental task of writing De Officiis. In the turbulent period of the late Roman Republic traditional Roman values that emphasized loyalty (fides), piety (pietas), and duty to the state and the family, were being systematically challenged by the rise of ambitious strongmen like Caesar and Pompey. Their pursuit of power had begun to fracture the constitutional order, threatening the very existence of the Republic. In this milieu, Cicero’s writings sought to reaffirm virtus not only as personal excellence but as essential for effective leadership and civic responsibility. Virtus thus served as both a moral ideal and a practical guide for Roman citizens seeking to uphold the common good against corruption and tyranny. Cicero’s subtle articulation of virtus elevates it to the peak of Roman ethical and political thought.

The Synthesis: Greek Theory Meets Roman Praxis

Cicero was an eclectic philosopher, drawing upon various Greek schools, notably Stoicism, Platonism, and Skepticism, to create a system suitable for the practical, action-oriented Roman temperament. By integrating Greek ideals with traditional Roman values, he crafted a conception of virtus that balanced personal moral integrity with the demands of public service.

First, Cicero’s conception of virtus was deeply influenced by the moral teachings of Socrates and the political theory of Plato. Socrates’ emphasis on self-knowledge and the pursuit of moral excellence provided a foundation for understanding virtue not merely as a set of actions, but as an internal disposition toward goodness. Plato’s political philosophy, with its focus on the just society and the role of the philosopher-statesman, helped shape Cicero’s vision of virtus as inseparable from civic responsibility and leadership. Cicero also relied on the ‘Middle Stoicism’ of Panaetius of Rhodes (c.185- c.110 BCE) for the structure of De Officiis. Stoicism provided the intellectual concepts of duty under a universal law of nature (lex naturae). This Stoic underpinning allowed Cicero to elevate virtus beyond mere cultural convention, framing it as an objective, rational obligation accessible to all people.

Cicero by Clint Inman

The Nature of Virtus: Duty and Deliberation

In De Officiis, Cicero’s analysis of virtus is deeply intertwined with his discussion of duty. His central argument is that moral responsibility is foundational and must be applied universally.

Cicero first establishes that moral responsibility applies universally across every aspect of human life – public, private, and professional. In De Officiis Book I, Paragraph 4, Section II, he emphasizes the scope of this obligation: “For no phase of life – whether public or private, whether in business or at home, whether one is attending to one’s own concerns or dealing with others – can be without its moral duty. The proper discharge of these duties is the foundation of all that is morally right, and their neglect leads to all that is morally wrong in life” (trans. Walter Miller). This passage asserts that moral duty is the essential mechanism through which virtue is demonstrated. Virtue is thus defined as the steadfast commitment to fulfilling one’s universal moral duties in every area of life – consistently acting with integrity and responsibility, thereby embodying ethical excellence and uniting personal integrity with public responsibility.

To bridge the abstract ideal of virtus with the reality of daily life, Cicero structures his discussion of duty in two parts. As De Officiis Book I, paragraph 7, section 3 states: “Every treatise on duty has two parts: one, dealing with the doctrine of the supreme good; the other, with the practical rules by which daily life in all its bearings may be regulated… But as regards special duties for which positive rules are laid down… they seem rather to look to the regulation of everyday life.” So the first part establishes the highest ethical ideals – the principles that define the ultimate good, which in Cicero’s case, is virtus as idealized excellence. The second part deals with the practical application of these ideals in everyday life through specific ‘positive rules’, that is, concrete prescriptions.

Cicero’s key ethical innovation lies in his expansion of the moral deliberation model inherited from Panaetius. Panaetius’s framework involved three stages: discerning right from wrong, assessing expediency, and resolving conflicts between the two. Cicero found this structure deficient, as it failed to address cases of competing moral or expedient options. So in De Officiis I.10 he critiques and refines this idea by introducing two new sub-categories: “two points have been overlooked in the foregoing: for we usually consider not only whether an action is morally right or morally wrong, but also, when a choice of two morally right courses is offered, which one is morally better; and likewise, when a choice of two expedients is offered, which one is more expedient… Thus the question which Panaetius thought threefold ought, we find, to be divided into five parts.” This expanded, five-part division of moral considerations reflects Cicero’s broader project of adapting Greek ethical theory to the complex demands of Roman political life. It means that for Cicero, virtus is not merely adherence to duty, but includes the rational discernment required to prioritize among competing goods and moral claims – a skill especially relevant in statesmanship, where practical wisdom must temper moral clarity.

Virtus as a Rational and Legal Duty

Building on the Stoic ‘Natural Law’ framework, Cicero made a critical philosophical move when he reframed virtus as a universal duty grounded in rationality and law. Indeed, this duty had these characteristics:

• Universal and Enforceable: Cicero’s concept of virtus is deeply connected to the idea that all humans, by sharing reason, are subject to natural law and its demands. This means virtus ceases to be a private, individual excellence, and becomes a public, enforceable moral obligation.

• Legal Intertwining: Cicero reframes virtus as inseparable from the juridical framework: moral duty becomes enforceable by law. The ideal citizen’s virtus supports and sustains the just state, in which good law governs and binds the community.

• Social Cohesion: Unlike the Greek ethics that emphasized individual flourishing (eudaimonism), Cicero universalizes virtus into duties that uphold the communis societas – the common partnership of humanity – forming the foundation for social cohesion.

• Rejection of Voluntarism: Like Immanuel Kant, Cicero rejects voluntarism – the idea that political consensus arises from individual will or character. Instead, virtus is embedded within and subordinate to laws prescribing duties universally and impartially. This is critical because it ensures political order does not depend on the personal, fickle virtues of rulers, but on law as an institution.

• Quasi-Judicial Imperative: Cicero’s virtus commands action according to rational principles of justice. This quasi-legal conception of duty again frames virtue as enforceable rather than merely aspirational.

The Fourfold Nature of Virtus

Cicero further articulates virtus as composed of four distinct sources of moral rightness, which correspond to the cardinal virtues. These sources form a comprehensive framework deeply embedded in Roman civic ideals.

He identifies the sources in De Officiis, Book I, para. 15:

“That which is morally right rises from one of four sources: it is concerned either (1) with the full perception and intelligent development of the true; or (2) with the conservation of organized society, with rendering to every man his due…; or (3) with the greatness and strength of a noble and invincible spirit; or (4) with the orderliness and moderation of everything that is said and done, wherein consist temperance and self-control.”

Together these four sources of virtue form an integrated moral framework in which intellectual discernment and practical action (justice, courage, temperance) converge. Let’s look at them.

1. Wisdom (Sapientia): The Intellectual Mandate

Wisdom for the Romans, as for the Greeks, is primarily concerned with the pursuit and discovery of truth through reasoned inquiry. Cicero claims that the knowledge of truth “touches human nature most closely” because the rational mind is the highest and most distinctive human faculty. So the intellectual dimension of virtus insists on an active pursuit of truth as the basis for moral conduct, providing true understanding for decision-making. Cicero aligns this point with Stoic anthropology, where reason is the essence of human nature, but he stresses its moral use.

2. Justice (Iustitia): The Civic and Social Bond

Justice, or ‘rendering to every man his due’, is focused on the conservation of organized society, highlighting Cicero’s profound commitment to social order. By invoking the principle of ius (law), he affirms that moral virtue is inseparable from fulfilling one’s societal roles and obligations, whether legal, familial, or political. Justice thus elevates virtus to being a pillar of the res publica.

3. Courage (Fortitudo): Greatness of Spirit

This source of morality is the strength of a noble spirit. This ideal refines traditional Roman ideas of valor, which were often related to warfare, into an internal moral fortitude. Virtus here is the inner strength to uphold honor and integrity, resist corruption, and scorn personal danger, reflecting the martial and aristocratic values of Cicero’s time. This is the virtue that enables a leader to prioritize the public good even in the face of death (as Cicero himself did when confronting Roman authorities about their corruption).

4. Temperance (Temperantia): Order and Decorum

Temperance focuses on the orderliness and moderation of everything said and done, embodying self-control. This aspect advocates the disciplined management of passions and desires, ensuring that actions and speech are consistent and appropriate to one’s station and dignity. This quality guarantees the reliability of the virtuous citizen, again essential for maintaining social order.

The Supremacy of Action Over Contemplation

Cicero places a critical restriction on the first source, sapientia, that reflects the dominant Roman ethos that the intellectual life must be subordinated to civic duty: that the desire to seek knowledge must not lead to withdrawal from public life. Indeed, he warns against two specific errors in the pursuit of truth: 1) Dogmatism/Laziness: “we must not treat the unknown as known and too readily accept it”; and 2) Useless Pedantry: devoting too much industry to matters that are “obscure and difficult and useless as well.” Instead, the highest use of reason is to guide the state. This conviction culminates in his famous assertion: “to be drawn by study away from active life is contrary to moral duty. For the whole power to be drawn from reason is in action” (Tota igitur in ratione vitae trahenda virtus est in actione). While study has its place, it must ultimately be disciplined, socially oriented, and directed toward ethical action that contributes to the common good. This position contrasts sharply with the ideal of Epicureanism to withdraw from the bustle of politics, and aligns more closely with the Stoic principle that moral worth is measured by action in accordance with reason.

Virtus as the Foundation of the State

Cicero wants to use virtus as a direct political tool to defend the Republic against corruption, establishing it as the only viable foundation for civic life and effective governance.

First, he directly challenges those philosophical doctrines, particularly Epicureanism, which define the highest good in terms of pleasure or personal interest rather than virtue. He argues that anyone who consistently places personal interest above moral principle becomes incapable of upholding fundamental ethical values such as justice, generosity, and friendship. In De Officiis (I.23), he writes: “He who posits the supreme good as having no connection with virtue and measures it not by a moral standard but by his own interests… could value neither friendship nor justice nor generosity; and brave he surely cannot possibly be who considers pain the greatest evil, nor temperate who declares pleasure the highest good.” For Cicero, the consequences of such an Epicurean worldview are not only personal but deeply political. Virtus is the necessary foundation of civic life, and a republic cannot endure without citizens willing to prioritize duty, justice, and the common good, even at the cost of personal suffering. Bravery requires facing pain; temperance demands restraining pleasure. Therefore, those who embrace self-interest as their guiding principle are unfit for public life. This critique was a direct response to the moral collapse of the late Republic, in which powerful figures like Caesar and Catiline disregarded traditional Roman values for their personal power, undermining the very institutions that sustained the state.

Cicero further asserted that virtus was earned through personal merit and illustrious deeds, and was not an inherited trait. He was seeking to expand the Roman elite to include men who had earned their position through demonstrated excellence. As a ‘new man’ – the first in his family to achieve the Consulship, a leading Roman government position – Cicero naturally held that a man’s worth should be measured by his virtus rather than his family history. Virtue is described as a ‘greatness of the soul’, signifying an inner excellence that encompasses a constellation of good characteristics. It is transformative, capable of elevating individuals toward honourable conduct and public glory. Critically, this moral elevation is deeply connected to the health and stability of the Roman state, the res publica. Virtus functions as the “support of the republic”, the “bond of society”, and the “guardian of peace”, implying that the very survival of Rome depended on its citizens’ adherence to virtue.

Critical Reflections on Cicero’s Virtus

Cicero’s articulation of virtus marks a pivotal moment in Roman philosophical tradition, yet its application presents significant tensions rooted in the political and social realities of the Republic.

Tension 1: Universality vs. Exclusivity

While Cicero frames virtus as a rational and universal obligation accessible to all who have reason, this inclusive ethical claim stands in tension with the exclusive political and social realities of the Roman Republic. Roman society was highly stratified, and full political participation was restricted to a narrow elite of free Roman males. In this sense, virtus, although theoretically extended to all rational beings, was in practice confined to this elite. The purported universality of virtus is therefore arguably rhetorical, functioning as a philosophical aspiration that did not reflect actual civic equality or legal inclusivity.

Tension 2: Law and Character vs. the Mos Maiorum

The idea of integrating virtus into a legal framework grounded in ius naturale or natural law risks overstating the coherence of Cicero’s system. Rather, his conception remains deeply entangled with old Roman aristocratic ideals of honor, military valor, and public service. Even as he moves toward a rationalist and juridical model, Cicero still relies on a vocabulary steeped in the mos maiorum or ancestral custom, where personal dignitas, public gloria, and the defense of the res publica define virtuous conduct. This hybrid moral concept serves the ethical, political, and cultural imperatives of Rome’s governing class. Moreover, Cicero’s attempt to define virtue as an enforceable duty, akin to a legal norm, may obscure the character-based dimensions of his moral philosophy. His account presumes that the virtuous person acts not merely in obedience to law but in accordance with an internalized sense of honor (officium) and propriety (decorum). So law, for Cicero, does not replace virtue; it presupposes it. Therefore, interpreting virtus primarily through the category of enforceable legal obligation flattens the moral texture of Cicero’s thought.

Tension 3: Philosophy vs. Political Instrumentality

The integration of virtus into a framework of rational law can be seen as having a conservative function: by anchoring Roman political authority in supposedly eternal and rational laws of nature Cicero legitimizes the hierarchical structure of the Roman civitas and shields elite rule from democratic challenge. So the ethical appeal to universal duty masks the political consolidation of senatorial power under the guise of justice. This suggests that Cicero’s virtus also functions ideologically to reinforce the status quo.

Legacy and Enduring Influence

“All the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher combined than Marcus Tullius Cicero.”

– Thomas Jefferson

Cicero’s philosophical project failed to save the Roman Republic from becoming an Empire, but his systematic articulation of virtus ensured his profound and lasting influence on Western ethical and political thought. He established a definition of moral excellence that was uniquely Roman, where internal virtues were active forces dedicated to the stability of the political community. The paradigm established in De Officiis resonated across history in a few ways:

• Roman Law: Cicero’s legal-rational framing of virtus and formulation of Natural Law became the intellectual foundation for Roman jurisprudence, integrating duty into the legal framework.

• Medieval Thought: De Officiis was adopted as a core text in Medieval Christianity. Figures like St Ambrose and St Augustine adapted Cicero’s ethical structure, integrating the concept of virtus into Christian moral philosophy.

• Renaissance Humanism and the Enlightenment: Cicero’s work was central to the revival of classical learning, inspiring Civic Humanism, which promoted the ideal of the active citizen who achieves fulfillment through public engagement. Later, Cicero’s legal-rational framing of virtus also influenced Enlightenment thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, by highlighting the importance of grounding political authority in universal law rather than in personal moral qualities.

Summary

I’ve outlined Cicero’s redefinition of virtus from a traditional Roman ideal of personal excellence associated with honor, courage, and elite public service, to a universal moral duty grounded in natural law and accessible to all rational beings. According to Straumann, Cicero’s virtus becomes a quasi-legal, rational obligation rather than relying solely on the moral character of individuals or political leaders to support social cohesion, civic responsibility, and the rule of law. I then critically evaluated this transformation by highlighting key tensions. So while Cicero promotes a universal concept of virtus, its practical application remained confined to elite Roman citizens. His ideal of rational universal morality is therefore compromised by social and political realities.

© Abdullah Shaikh 2026

Abdullah Shaikh is an independent researcher with a deep interest in classical philosophy and Roman history. He focuses on understanding how thinkers put Greek philosophical ideas into Roman life.

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Roman Philosophy

The Educational Philosophy of Quintilian

Philip Vassallo learns from a classic of Classical education.

What could be more important for the future of any society than the education of its children? Innovative theories abound. Educators are constantly presenting groundbreaking new paradigms for improving a child’s academic achievement. In the past quarter century or so, these have included:

• Expanding educational opportunities for preschoolers

• Selecting the best teachers for a child

• Making instruction more relevant

• Establishing or strengthening character education

• Providing a multidisciplinary education

• Defining the boundaries for student-teacher relationships

• Approaching literacy from a whole language perspective

• Fostering critical thinking skills

• Engendering independent learning

• Teaching politically incorrect content

Not so fast. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (35-95 CE) would say to all this noise: “Been there, done that.”

Quintilian, as he is now better known, was born in Spain and raised in Rome at a time when education had a far narrower scope. Schooling was for oratorical purposes, that is, to train men to give good speeches – and it was reserved for an elite political class; females, slaves, and non-citizens of Rome need not enroll. Yet this major educational figure of Roman antiquity, who is now unknown to all but classical scholars, authored a voluminous and comprehensive reflection on educating children, Institutio oratoria (The Education of an Orator). By the time he penned Institutio in 88 CE – at the urging of friends so that he would leave a record of his philosophy and techniques of instruction – Quintilian had become well known for his extremely successful career as a teacher of young children and an occasional pleader in the Roman courts. (The twelve books of Quintilian’s masterwork are available in English in five volumes as The Orator’s Education, edited and translated by Donald A. Russell, 2002.)

Institutio stands remarkably fresh as a primer for modern educators interested in learning what matters most in teaching children and how to give it to them. Quintilian fashioned an educational theory that still has credibility because it holds fast to the time-honored insistence that the cultivated person be taught in philosophical and rhetorical disciplines. Indeed, among other things, this masterwork provides ideas for raising children before they reach school age, selecting their teacher, training students properly, assessing the structure of speeches, and engaging an audience. Excellence in these areas meant that one would speak, think, and live properly. Institutio has been described as “a landmark in the history of Roman education: it is the culmination of a long development and it had no successor” (Roman Education from Cicero to Quintilian, Aubrey Gwynn, 1926), and as “perhaps the most ambitious single treatise on education which the ancient world produced… four major works blended into one: a treatise on education, a manual of rhetoric, a reader’s guide to the best authors, and a handbook on the moral duties of the orator” (Quintilian on the Teaching of Speaking and Writing, James M. Murphy, ed., 1987). And modern educators miss the point if they see Quintilian as an elitist, as he strongly believes that everyone could benefit from instruction.

Thanks a million, Quintilian

by Stephen Lahey 2026

Oratory as Way of Life

The notion that rhetoric or speech-making is at the center of public life and therefore should be at the center of public instruction, was championed by the ancient Greeks – particularly Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates – on whose writings the Romans modeled their educational system. What most distinguishes Institutio is Quintilian’s conviction that he saw oratory not only as a skill, as his predecessor Cicero did, but as a way of life. Quintilian’s mantra is this: oratory is the good man speaking well. This sharply contrasts with Cicero’s definition, which was, “oratory is the art of speaking so as to persuade.” Indeed, Quintilian begins his thesis by writing, “The first essential for (the perfect orator) is that he should be a good man, and consequently we demand of him not merely the possession of exceptional gifts of speech, but of all the excellences of character as well” (Book I, Preface, Part 9). He expands his aim by stating, “if oratory be the art of speaking well, its object and ultimate end must be to speak well” (Book II, Chapter xv, Part 38), which he then frames in a tautological premise: “Oratory is the art of speaking well, and the orator knows how to speak well” (II, xvii, 37). He also proclaims oratorical excellence a virtue: “the orator (is) a good man skilled in speaking” (XII, i, 1). Finally, he asserts that the aim of his opus is to achieve such excellence: “The oratory I endeavor to teach… must be regarded as a virtue” (II, xx, 4).

One can read Institutio not only for the possibility of acquiring virtue but for enjoying Quintilian’s style. He frequently peppers his discourse with aphorisms rich with metaphors and analogies, such as “The voice of a lecturer… is like the sun which distributes the same quantity of light and heat to all of us” (I, ii, 14), or “Vessels with narrow mouths will not receive liquids if too much be poured into them at a time, but are easily filled if the liquid is admitted in a gentle stream… similarly you must consider how much a child’s mind is capable of receiving: the things which are beyond their grasp will not enter their minds, which have not opened out sufficiently to take them in” (I, ii, 28).

Speaking to Our Times

Seeing education from Quintilian’s viewpoint – as an integration of schooling, speaking and conduct, to form a virtuous citizen – we can quickly see how his theory intersects with so many pedagogical issues today. Below are ten that resonate in Institutio.

Expand educational opportunities for preschoolers

With such an awesome task ahead, an orator must be educated as soon as life begins. Quintilian begins his exercises for the orator with infancy, calling for ‘continuous application’ and the “best of teachers and a variety of exercises” (I, i, 10). He’s concerned with all those who influence the infant: “See that the child’s nurse speaks correctly” and “be of good character” (I, i, 4), and “I should like to see [parents] as highly educated as possible, and I do not restrict this remark to fathers alone” (I, i, 6). He expects parents and guardians to speak well, “for it is the worst impressions that are most durable”, and warns, “you will never turn vice into virtue” (I, i, 5).

Quintilian’s message here is unequivocal: start teaching children when they’re very young. They are ready to learn by nature, and have great retentive skills for literary training.

Select the best teacher for the child

Quintilian continues with a provocative discussion of whether the child should be educated publicly or in the home. He points out that morals can be corrupted at home as well as in school, and that too much intervention can stifle the child’s performance. Therefore he opts for a public education in which the teacher is well educated, friendly, and intimate with his students, unburdened by the pressures of having too many students, and particularly sensitive to the extraordinary learner.

Make instruction relevant

Quintilian then moves from scrutinizing the child’s guardians and teachers to describing actual learning activities, beginning with well-planned, enjoyable game-like exercises for children, and continuing with formal exercises in elocution, grammar, and rhetoric for the young citizen.

Establish character education

For Quintilian, the orator cannot be good unless he is above all else a good man. So if oratorical education is the heart of Quintilian’s system, then moral education is its soul: “No man, unless he be good, can ever be an orator. To an orator, discernment and prudence are necessary” (XII, i, 3). His method to cultivate this goodness includes the introduction of topics that elevate the mind of “what is really good, what allays fear, restrains cupidity, frees us from the prejudices of the vulgar, and raises the mind towards the heaven from which it sprung” (XXII, ii, 28). Reading lessons, for instance, should be combined with moral lessons.

Oratory itself was also a conduit for achieving moral goodness. Quintilian lashes out at a prevailing notion of his time that the orator should learn to speak persuasively to either side of an issue: “Oratory does not contradict itself… [does not] destroy what it has done… [nor] teach what we ought not to say” (II, xvii, 33-35). In essence, by making oratory synonymous with a mastery over every form of speech and a moral good, he gives oratory the status of a virtue, and oratory becomes more than just a subject or an action, but rather a behavior and end in itself – a way of life. The natural result of such an orator engaging in public life would be a general improvement of society.

Provide a multidisciplinary education

Quintilian’s orator must possess many skills. Grammar and rhetoric are the primary tools of the orator, but he also must have knowledge of the other arts, such as architecture, sculpture, medicine, and music. Quintilian even approves of gymnastics because it facilitates movement for the speaker, and the study of comic acting to learn tips on delivery, facing the audience, and pleading. Yet the orator should not study arts to the point that it adversely affects the ability to speak well: “It is sufficient that the orator be acquainted with the subject on which he has to speak. He has not a knowledge of all causes, and yet he ought to be able to speak upon all” (II, xxi, 14-15). The orator is distinguishable from other artists by achieving three aspects of the arts: the theoretical, when studying the art or planning the speech; the practical, when actually speaking; and the productive, when committing the speech to writing. (For more on this, see Educational Theory as a Theory of Conduct: From Aristotle to Dewey, J.J. Chambliss, 1987).

Set boundaries for student-teacher relationships

No one, even parents, but especially teachers, should have absolute authority over the child. Teachers should not always hover over the children, and should never beat or insult them. They should teach poetry without encumbering the student by overanalyzing it, paraphrase Aesop’s Fables in “simple and restrained language” (I, ix, 2), and then let the children write their own interpretations. They should allow freedoms to students (much in the way progressive educators today view teachers as facilitators), yet be caretakers of the student’s complete oratorical education, including breathing, movement, diction, organizing presentations, analyzing a debate, and the like.

Quintilian sets clear standards for the teacher’s personal relationship with his students. These include developing a parental attitude, serving as a representative of the student’s guardians, expressing moderation, rejecting vice and speaking continually on moral goodness and honor.

Employ a whole language approach

Despite his structured methodology to teaching oratory, Quintilian today would likely favor a whole language approach to literacy. A whole language approach teaches reading and writing by focusing on meaningful experiences and treating language holistically, not by dividing it into isolated parts like phonics. While Quintilian’s expectation that students learn syllables early may seem like the antithesis of a whole language approach, he does not want the child to suffer an exclusively phonetic approach to learning to read. He sees reading, writing, and speaking as interdependent skills, and even prefers that students learn the shapes of letters rather than their alphabetical order.

Foster critical thinking skills

In recent education debates, the idea of teaching critical thinking skills has had both supporters and detractors. Those who favor teaching critical thinking might argue that it helps students analyze situations and subject content. Those who oppose it might claim that to think is to be critical, so the term ‘critical thinking’ is nothing more than a redundancy. Or they might say that any subject already requires a high level of critical thinking, and students will learn critical thinking by learning the course content.

If, however, we view ‘critical thinking’ as ‘enhancing thinking skills’, then Quintilian has plenty to say in its favor: “It will… be the duty of the rhetorician not merely to teach [the art of speaking], but to ask frequent questions as well, and test the critical powers of his claim” (II, v, 13). In fact, Quintilian is disdainful of the façades and airs of the all-style-no-substance speeches that were as common in his time as they are today:

“We have come to regard direct and natural speech as incompatible with genius, while all that is in any way abnormal is admired as exquisite.… There are even some who are captivated by the shams of artifice and think that there is more beauty in those who pluck out superfluous hair or use depilatories, who dress their locks by scorching them with curling irons and glow with a complexion that is not their own, than can ever be conferred by nature pure and simple, so that it really seems as if physical beauty depended entirely on moral hideousness” (II, v, 11-12).

Engender independent learning

Students learning for themselves is “the chief aim of this method of training” (II, v, 13). Of course, their independent learning must come from a classical approach to teaching. In this, we see a reiteration of Isocrates’ three-part approach to the teaching of rhetoric: theory, study of models, and applied exercises.

While he does not necessarily create new methods of learning or teaching, Quintilian systematizes and criticizes the prevailing methods, thereby providing “an explicit rationale for an educational program in literacy culture which was already under way” (Quintilian, George Kennedy, 1969, p.xiii).

According to Kennedy, the five main teaching methods Quintilian employs are: precept – a set of rules for each aspect of speaking, namely invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery; imitation, which includes reading aloud, memorization, and recitation of model speeches to learn how masters use language; composition, beginning with simple retellings of fables and episodes from literature and history, and proceeding to progressively more difficult tasks, such as amplification of a moral theme, use of commonplaces, refutation or confirmation of an allegation, and arguing for or against an answer to a general question or to laws; sequencing, or ordering the student’s activities to master his movement and elocution, from simple to more complex exercises; and declamation, or giving speeches of two types: sausoria, or deliberative – arguing that an action is to be taken or not taken; and controversia, or forensic – prosecuting or defending a person’s actions. Finally, the student must reinforce his skill by reiterating each previous exercise as new ones appear.

Once he has learned this systematic approach to writing and delivering speeches, the student now has a foundation from which he can explore writers and orators independently and critically.

Teach controversial content

Quintilian would not have been on the book banning bandwagon. For instance, in some academic circles these days, teaching the traditional Western literary canon has become taboo because of its Eurocentric focus. By contrast, Quintilian was beholden to his classical predecessors, on whom he lavishes praise throughout Institutio. He suggests which Greek and Roman writers should be read by the student of oratory, creating a veritable canon for his time. But he also wants them to learn from speeches that are mired in corrupt and faulty styles, yet still achieved prominence, because he wanted students to understand “the perversity of modern tastes” (II, v, 10-12). For Quintilian, even the imperfect would reveal volumes about the mores of the popular culture.

An Enduring Legacy

Institutio oratoria has survived two millennia as a highly readable practical guide for the teacher, especially of public speaking. What we have added to presentation skills training since the first century CE seems relatively minor in comparison. Institutio also makes for excellent reading for literary scholars interested in critiques of classical authors and for historians looking for insights into ancient Roman education. Augustine and many other educational philosophers who followed Quintilian are indebted to this masterwork. And many school administrators, teachers, and others in education today equally benefit from learning from Quintilian’s teaching advice.

© Philip Vassallo 2026

Philip Vassallo, is a corporate writing consultant and the author of How to Write Fast Under Pressure. He dedicates this article to Charles Lynch for his career as an influential educator.

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Roman Philosophy

Ancient Synergy

Yolanda De Iuliis looks at how Roman Mithraism incorporated Stoic philosophy.

Mithraism’s adoption and integration of Stoic virtues is compelling and noteworthy. These virtues not only shaped the religious and spiritual dimensions of Mithraism, but also played a pivotal role in the social and cultural fabric of ancient Roman society itself.

Mithraism emerged in Rome during the first century CE. It had a complicated history, originating from earlier Persian traditions, but taking on new iconography and ideas as it spread westwards. Famously, Mithraic temples usually featured depictions of Mithras slaughtering a bull, often while turning his head away, perhaps in pity. In the Roman world, the Mithraic mysteries began to flourish shortly before the time of Christ’s crucifixion, and expanded rapidly across the Empire, though the traditional Roman paganism centred on Jupiter, Mars, Minerva and other gods remained dominant. Roman soldiers in particular, though, were drawn to Mithraism, viewing Mithras, often associated with Sol Invictus (the Unconquerable Sun), as a divine protector and symbol of loyalty, courage, and order.

The philosophical school known as Stoicism had its roots some centuries earlier in Greece, having been founded by Zeno of Citium in about 300 BCE. It eventually become popular among influential Roman writers and thinkers (who loved Greek philosophy). They loved its emphasis on the virtues of wisdom, courage, and self-control. Wisdom, or sophia in Greek, was a cornerstone of Stoic philosophy, particularly the wisdom needed to distinguish those external problems we can solve from those we must simply learn to live with gracefully. It also stressed the importance of understanding the nature of the universe. This last principle was mirrored in the teachings and rituals of Mithraism, which encouraged adherents to seek knowledge and understanding, not just in spiritual matters but in all aspects of life. This emphasis on wisdom allowed Mithraic adherents to navigate the complexities of life with a clear and informed perspective, by aligning their actions with the greater good and the natural order of the universe. This quest for wisdom also helped Mithraic followers to make ethical decisions, live upright lives, and maintain a balanced relationship with their environment.

Courage, or andreia in Greek, was another vital Stoic virtue adopted by Mithraism. It involved facing challenges and complexities with bravery and resilience. Mithraic initiation rituals were designed to instil this virtue in its followers. For example, a Mithraic initiation could involve blindfolding the worshipper, subjecting them to heat and noise, and requiring them to swear oaths of secrecy and devotion before being welcomed into the brotherhood. These rituals, often intense, were meant to prepare initiates for the rigours of life and the responsibilities of their faith. By enduring such trials, Mithraic adherents demonstrated their strength and commitment, embodying the courage necessary to uphold their values in the face of adversity. This courage was not just physical, but also moral and ethical, reinforcing the importance of standing firm in one’s convictions and principles.

The Stoic virtue of self-control, or sophrosyne, was also crucial for maintaining discipline and ethical behaviour. In Mithraism, this virtue was reflected in its strict moral code, secrecy and the disciplined lifestyle expected of its followers. Adherents were encouraged to exercise self-control in all aspects of life, from personal desires to social interactions. This discipline was essential for creating a cohesive and harmonious community, as it encouraged individuals to treat one another with integrity and respect. The focus on self-control helped Mithraic followers develop a strong sense of personal responsibility and accountability.

Mithraism’s emphasis on masculinity and group identity was also heavily influenced by Stoic principles. The male-only nature of the cult mirrored the Stoic focus on masculine virtus and the ideal of the virtuous man (virtus literally means ‘manly’). Mithraic rituals and teachings promoted a sense of belonging among its followers, who viewed themselves as part of a unique brotherhood. This sense of community was reinforced by the aforementioned shared values of wisdom, courage, and self-control, which help to create a strong bond among the adherents.

This synthesis of religious and philosophical elements helped create a sense of unity and purpose among followers, contributing to the stability and cohesion of Roman society. Yet the cultivation of these virtues not only shaped individual behaviour but also contributed to a collective identity that resonated with the broader values of the Roman Empire. Mithraic followers saw themselves as part of a larger Roman tradition of ethical living, which was integral to their sense of self and their place in society. This identity was further strengthened by the rituals and ceremonies that marked important stages in a follower’s spiritual journey, creating a shared experience that unified the Mithraic community. Initiates in the Mithraic mysteries progressed through a series of grades (Corax, Nymphus, Miles, Leo, Perses, Heliodromus, Pater), each marked by symbolic tests and teachings. As mentioned, these could include being blindfolded to symbolise the move from ignorance to enlightenment, or enduring the heat of ritual flames during initiation into the Leo grade, to represent purification and inner strength.

Mithras slaying bull, Cabra, Spain, 2nd century CE

Mithraism & Stoicism in Society

The integration of Stoic virtues into Mithraism had a profound impact on the cultural identity of Roman society. For instance, as a religion that attracted many soldiers, Mithraism played a crucial role in shaping the ethical and moral framework of the army. The rigorous training and self-discipline required by both Stoicism and Mithraism were well-suited to the demands of military life, fostering qualities such as resilience, loyalty, and a strong sense of duty. Furthermore, Mithraism’s emphasis on community and brotherhood provided a source of solidarity for its members. In a society characterised by frequent religious shifts and diverse beliefs, Mithraism also offered a stable and cohesive path of self-discovery, which aligned with the philosophical ideals of Stoicism.

The ethical framework established by Mithraism with Stoicism also had broader implications for Roman society. By promoting virtues such as wisdom, courage, and self-control, these traditions encouraged individuals to lead lives of moral integrity and social responsibility. This emphasis on virtuous living was reflected in the public life of Rome, where leaders and citizens alike were expected to uphold these values in their decisions and actions. The integration of Stoic philosophy into Mithraic practices thus played a significant role in shaping the moral fabric of Roman society.

The synthesis of Mithraism and Stoicism in ancient Rome offers a compelling example of how religious and philosophical traditions can intersect and enrich one another. By integrating Stoic virtues into their religious practices, Mithraic adherents were able to create a structured and meaningful intellectual approach to both the personal and societal ethics within their religious system. This blend of spiritual and philosophical elements contributed to a rich cultural heritage. Through the integration of Stoic virtues such as wisdom, courage and self-control, Mithraism also provided its adherents with a structured approach to ethical living and self-awareness. The emphasis on virtue in both traditions helped create cohesive communities of individuals committed to living morally upright lives.

While Mithraism disappeared by the end of the 4th Century, eclipsed by Christianity, Stoic philosophy has had more of an enduring appeal, and has recently enjoyed something of a popular revival. Its core principles and the virtues which it shared with Mithraism remain relevant to life today. By pointing out the connections between Mithraism, Stoicism, and the formation of cultural identity, I hope I’ve highlighted the important role of religious and philosophical synthesis in shaping societies both ancient and modern. As we reflect on the contributions of Mithraism and Stoicism to Roman society, we should also recognise the appeal of these traditions and their continued relevance in discussions of ethics, identity, and cultural heritage. The lessons they offered remain timeless, offering valuable guidance for individuals seeking to navigate the complexities of modern life with integrity and resilience.

© Yolanda De Iuliis 2026

Yolanda De Iuliis is a PhD student in archaeology specialising in Mithraism, heritage, and identity.

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Roman Philosophy

The Post Paralysis Peace Paradox

Cassandra Brandt offers the reflections of a sedentary Stoic.

“It is a paradox that we encounter so much internal noise when we first try to sit in silence.

It is a paradox that experiencing pain releases pain.

It is a paradox that keeping still can lead us so fully into life and being.”

– ‘The Paradox of Noise’, Gunilla Norris

Later, you’ll write books about this,” my thirteen year old daughter assured me. She was always wise beyond her years, so I had to trust her that I would survive, maybe even write somehow. But would mine be a story worth telling? My tale was a tragedy, a life upended, a career cut short, a vertebrae crushed. What was left but a ghost in a shell, a crashed SUV, the four walls of a room? I was thirty-two when I broke my neck. I had lived loud, fought my way up in a man’s trade, and led with an ego. I was impulsive, bordering on careless. I was a mess of volatile emotions. But for all the time I spent working my body into shape and making it attractive, I didn’t have a lot left over to work on my interior self. I was entitled and wore a chip on my shoulder with pride. Losing my able body meant letting go of everything that had defined me. No one wants to read that story.

Five years later I wrote it anyway. Iron Girl: Tomboy, Tradeswoman, Tetraplegic (2020) was a book that allowed me to lose myself in the past, wrap it around me like a warm blanket. The project also challenged me to consider what was left. I couldn’t give my readers nothing. But I was exhausted too. The challenges of complete quadriplegia kept coming: compromised care, secondary health complications, strained relationships with family who felt forced into caregiving roles, institutionalization, inaccessibility, ableism… Embracing Stoic philosophy changed my whole perspective about life. But the change didn’t happen overnight.

Marcus Aurelius by Gail Campbell

A Stoic Introduction

My brother had begun reading the Stoic Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations to me from as early as the acute days post paralysis. Aurelius was Roman Emperor from 161-180 CE, but his words were my lifeline as much as the ventilator keeping me alive.

Training the mind takes time and dedication, though. Mine was a disaster zone, colored with pride and ego and entitlement tinged with occasional contradictory self-loathing. “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts,” Aurelius warned. My way of thinking had to change. “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking,” Aurelius wrote. Cultivating a strong and positive perspective would require committing to that practice every day – sometimes a dozen times a day – following each instance of falling apart.

Later, I wrote a significantly slimmer memoir. Seven Secrets of a Sedentary Stoic (2023) takes readers into the broken body yet mindful mind of an aspiring Stoic, discussing concepts within the philosophy and breaking down the intimate self-talk it inspired, noting ways others can use the tools, too. Full of quotes, the most widely used being from Marcus Aurelius, Seneca the Younger, and Epictetus, Seven Secrets focused on the concepts of Stoicism that held a critical role in my mental health recovery following my catastrophic injury and permanent disability.

I wrote, “Seneca said that it’s an act of courage just to live sometimes. In the first months following my injury, I made the choice to keep going again and again. Seneca pitied people who have never experienced misfortune: ‘You have passed through life without an opponent. No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.’ Was I capable of this though? In those early days post injury how I cried that I was not. Surely this battle was meant for someone stronger!” Well, consider this from Marcus Aurelius: “Look well into yourself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if you will always look.” I needed that strength to let go of my able body. There’s more to life than the motor function. It would be foolish to spend my days yearning for a cure. As Epictetus said: “A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.”

Drawing from Stoic concepts that help me through the challenges of life paralyzed from the shoulders down, Seven Secrets goes on to explore seven elements within Stoic philosophy that were a catalyst in building a new life. Let’s look at them briefly.

1. Acceptance

The Stoics emphasized the importance of recognizing the dichotomy of control: there are some things you can control, some things you can’t. I cannot control my central nervous system. I don’t have control of my arms or my legs. I don’t have control of my bowels or my bladder. Subsequently, I don’t have much control of my own life. But as the Stoics say, dwelling on externals is a choice, and in choosing it, I can find I’m wallowing in self-pity quickly. Obsessing about what my body cannot do does not serve me in any way. It wastes my time and energy. So I had to understand that restored function to my body probably will never happen, and sitting around hoping for it was pretty much futile. What I should dare to hope for, was to live a decent life with my disability. So I started taking agency of my life again slowly, parenting my daughter and taking control of things like my medications and my finances. After purchasing a van and training a service dog, I began to get out more and recharge in nature. Then it was festivals and concerts and pushing myself through my pain and stress to participate in life and to have happy, healthy experiences.

2. Peace

“A high-minded and sensible man divorces soul from body, and dwells much with the better or divine part, and only as far as he must with this complaining and frail portion.” – Seneca

Mental self-control is at the heart of Stoicism. For me, it means not dissolving into fits of anxiety over pain and monotonous care. It’s fighting the urge to complain and cry and snap. It’s not letting my mind go where those emotional reactions feel so inevitable. It’s okay to have a cry sometimes; but frequent pity parties don’t make life any easier. Deep breathing and redirecting my mind in those moments does. Terrorizing myself about potential health complications taking my life early are counterproductive. Instead, I adapt myself to the present. I remain mindful of the good things that can never be taken from me. I look within for peace. There’s little I can do to cure my body, but my mind can be mastered.

3. Patience

“If fate can be overcome by tears, let us bring tears to bear upon it, but if not, then our futile grief must come to an end” – Seneca

Seneca said we must train our minds to desire what the situation demands. My situation demands endurance and patience, so I train for that. How I struggle at times, voicing every ache and burn and symptom when the pain overwhelms me!

Meditation and mantras soothe my soul through long waits to have desires met – often desires which turn into needs when the wait is very lengthy. I work on not allowing my impatience to turn to anger. “It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own”, as Aurelius wrote.

4. Perspective

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” “What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.” – Marcus Aurelius

My initial estimate of this horrible thing in front of me – the prospect of the rest of my life as a quadriplegic – was that it was too huge, undefeatable. To revoke that, I had to ask myself how valid that assessment was. I am still alive. I haven’t suffered a brain injury. I have a good support system. There are systems in place to get me out in the world living a productive life again. This is the perspective I had to choose. Under that scenario, I could do this thing. I should also take care to not triple the duration of the stressful/painful thing by stressing about it. I allow it to let me suffer far beyond what’s necessary by not living in the moment during intervals between stressful events. Similarly, I suffer unnecessarily and prematurely when I leave a present moment of calm to worry about a future event. As Seneca said, “He suffers more than necessary, who suffers before it is necessary.”

5. Productivity

Epictetus the (ex-)slave was the Stoic with whom I established most of an affinity. After his master broke his leg, the servant, who it was said merely smiled during the act, said later of his disability: “Lameness is an impediment to the leg, but not to the will.”

The Stoics assure me I have not been relieved of my role as a human being by having this disability. My mind is still intact, and contributions to society are still required of me. Just because I cannot jump out of bed on my own accord doesn’t mean I’m resigned to stay in it! My role is to be hoisted with a lift into a power chair by my attendants. I then do what my nature demands. I write.

Our industrious nature is so much of what makes us human and brings us peace of mind, regardless of gender, ability, or any other station in life. I push myself daily to get out of bed, and busy, always busy, with my work. Whether it has been donning my blue collar to put in a shift welding with my hands, or getting up in my wheelchair to type an article with my teeth, always I’ve preferred not to waste a day.

My place in this world is not to become irrelevant, even as inaccessibility and ableism try to exclude me. I still have contributions to make and work to do.

6. Virtue

Marcus Aurelius said not to waste time discussing what a good person is, just be one, while Epictetus challenges:

“Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. How long can you afford to put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer. Put your principles into practice – now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren’t a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you’ll be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret, because you know you are capable of better. From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do – now.”

I have never wanted to be vulnerable to mediocrity. Ambition hadn’t previously applied to my character like it does now, though. Now I want to know in my heart that the work I’ve done is worthy.

7. Joy

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach.”

– Marcus Aurelius

Yes, the greatest blessings are within my reach. My beloved daughter and precious family. My ability to communicate important truths and produce creative works. The sunshine on my face and the gentle breeze in my hair. My acquired wisdom and fight for peace. My ability to exist in my own company, bear my suffering, and live in each moment.

“A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not” wrote Seneca. I’d take my able body if it were an option. Seneca would have chosen health, and Epictetus wouldn’t have chosen his injury either. But our fate is sealed. Wishing and wanting for unattainable things just causes unnecessary suffering. Instead, I master my mind.

“Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions”, wrote Epictetus. My external conditions are severe. They cannot be ignored. I still marvel at times that this tumultuous journey is my fate. But then I have these moments - terrific experiences of appreciation for nature and literature and life; bursts of creativity that produce material I’m so proud of; incredible opportunities to help other people in tangible ways despite my own fate; precious time with my dear family; and this soothing calm that reminds me in the darkest times that I’m my own light.

I am not immune to suffering as a result of Stoic wisdom, but I am learning how to suffer less, and as Seneca said, “There is no virtue in putting up with what one cannot feel.”

Conclusions

I can honestly say that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works, because the Stoics taught me all its skills. Mindset is everything, and not just when it’s all you’ve got left. I wish I’d figured that out sooner. Helping others do so heals my heart. The most rewarding part of this whole journey, has been the opportunity I’ve been afforded to pay the peace I have found forward. Seven Secrets of a Sedentary Stoic challenges readers to think and act like Stoics in the face of their own obstacles. Each chapter includes journal activities for reflecting on one’s own character and journey. At just eighty pages, it’s an easy read. The book is available for free download on Kindle Unlimited, and there’s an Audible version too, which I highly recommend.

Perhaps it is a paradox – the way found within the obstacle, the gem polished by the fire, the life lived without legs. Yet the peace and perspective I’ve found are no fabrication, but are instead a testament to the timeless power of philosophy and literature.

© Cassandra Brandt 2026

Cassandra Brandt is an Arizona based author and advocate for marginalized communities. A scholar with a background in Sociology, she has four published books. She has been published in multiple literary magazines and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives with spinal cord injury and is passionate about mental health.

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Articles

- A Very Short History of Critical Thinking

- Good Grief!

- Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

- Identity in the Age of Connectivity

- Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Articles

A Very Short History of Critical Thinking

Luc de Brabandere summarises a long history through key figures of thought.

In Greece in the fifth century BC, some public speakers who were certainly cultured but who were also unscrupulous, made the most of their oratorical talents by turning them into a particularly lucrative profession. Armed with misleading arguments and fallacious reasoning, they were called Sophists. They were so good at arguing any case they were able to simultaneously demonstrate something and its opposite. To be a sophist is to argue in a way that appears to be valid, but where the argument has been deliberately manipulated to distract or mislead the listener. Sophism is not a way of thinking; it’s a way of arguing designed to dazzle and trick an opponent; or if they should suspect foul play, to cause them logical embarrassment. It then proves hard to refute the argument because the flaw is subtly concealed. A sophist cares not about ethics or justice. They have little regard for truth. What they’re interested in is power. If it takes a lie to win, then go ahead and lie! If cheating is necessary to get through, then go ahead and cheat! In the end it doesn’t matter, because the goal is not to prove, but to be approved, regardless of the route used. Whilst a good debate often starts with ‘May the best man win!’, according to sophists, the opposite is true: whoever wins is the best man.

In this article I’ll highlight eighteen key players in the history of critical thinking, in chronological order. These main players of critical thinking throughout the centuries are shown in fresco.

Convinced that ‘man is the measure of all things’, Protagoras (c.490–c.420 BC), the first of the sophists, would have loved using X (Twitter), whose very structure makes the development of an argument almost impossible. For how can one develop an argument in 140 characters? In these and similar conditions, politics can only be controversial, as convictions are turned into injunctions. The truth is being harmed because the desire to retweet (re-x?) seems to be even greater when the information being put forward is false. Yet what we nowadays call ‘post-truth’ is only the modern-day expression of an indifference to truth for which the Sophists were notorious. The internet provides sophists with a tool that they could never have dreamed of 2,500 years ago.

Socrates (c.470-399 BC) tried to trip up these masters of fallacious discourse, who, rather despite themselves, ended up at the origins of critical thinking.

There are many definitions of ‘critical thinking’, but they all agree on one point: the necessity of intellectual rigour. Critical thinking is not linked to a particular discipline or a specific body of knowledge. Rather, it must operate through all disciplines and should aim to preserve the advantages of skepticism without having to pay the price of ignorance. Thinking in a critical manner means trusting with caution while being wary of four elements: the reliability of a source, the strength of the argument, the medium, and our own ability to judge the matter at hand. The emergence and subsequent rise of ChatGPT and other so-called ‘generative’ AIs make critical thinking more essential today than ever before.

Critical Thinking fresco © Rudolphe Duprey 2026

Formal or Informal?

The attentive reader will have noticed eight fallacies dotted round the scenery on the diagram. They have strange names: the slippery slope, the strawman, the bandwagon, the circular, the red herring, post hoc ergo propter hoc, ad hominem, and the false dilemma. A fallacy can be defined as an instance of logically faulty reasoning. A fallacy:

• Is often an invalid argument that can easily be mistaken for a valid one.

• Can be very persuasive, sometimes more than sound reasoning.

• Violates one or more of the principles that make an argument sound, such as good structure, consistency, clarity, order, relevance, or completeness.

• While all invalid arguments are fallacious, not all fallacies involve arguments.

I’ve divided fallacies into two groups (see the boxes for more):

1) Formal fallacies maintain some relationship with the laws of logic. These arguments are not valid because their formal structure is faulty. The chain of reasoning itself is defective.

2) Informal fallacies are ones where logic is irrelevant – such as fallacies based on personal attacks or which digress from the subject. These arguments are invalid because of their content and context rather than their logical structure. Informal fallacies deal with every kind of reasoning mistake other than the formal ones.

Into History

Plato (c.428 BC-348/347 BC) wrote many critical dialogues featuring Socrates. In his dialogue Gorgias, for instance, Plato pitted Callicles, a pretentious, maybe even violent, young aristocrat who argued that the strong should recognize no moral boundaries to their pursuit of success, against Socrates, for whom it was more moral to suffer injustice than to commit it. Socrates dismantled his opponent’s arguments one by one, just as he does in all Plato’s dialogues.

The first to study the structure of both sound and fallacious arguments was Aristotle (384–322 BC). He identified thirteen types of invalid arguments or syllogisms, which he illustrated with luminous examples, and grouped into two sets:

Those built on the ambiguities of language, such as:

5 is 2 and 3

2 is an even number, and 3 is an uneven number

Therefore 5 is even and uneven

Those built on invalid reasoning, such as:

A man with a fever is hot

Therefore, a man who is hot has a fever

Aristotle also wrote the first treaty on rhetoric, in which he demonstrated the importance of ethos (morals) and pathos (emotion) alongside that of logos (reason) for making good speeches and plays. Cicero (106-43 BC) drew inspiration from him, and his speeches influenced the history of Rome. He remains to this day a reference in the art of oratory [see the article on him in this very issue, Ed].

Do we gain access to truth via reason or via faith? Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) suggested a way of accessing the Christian worldview using reason, and so became the leading philosopher of the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the monk William of Ockham (c.1287-1347) fought against useless words and ideas, and wanted to remove all ‘superfluous entities’ from arguments. This is called Ockham’s razor.

During the Renaissance, the critical mind was at the heart of early scientific debates. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) first suggested the empirical method for philosophers and scholars, telling them to destroy their ‘idols’, in other words their prejudices. In contrast to empiricism, René Descartes (1596-1650) recommended a rationalist approach to discovering truth, coupled with ‘methodical doubt’, a posture of systematic mistrust towards everything that we think.

John Locke (1632-1704) is to England what Descartes was to France. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, among many other things he reveals the hollow side of Aristotelian logic, since any complex idea can only be the result of an argument, that is, the combination of simple ideas (that is, memories of direct sensory experiences), so ‘pure rationality’ is a bit of a chimera.

In 1658, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) wrote ‘The Art of Persuasion’ as a preface to a surprising treaty about geometry. It was never published, but this unexpected association of mathematics and rhetoric demonstrates the rigour that the French philosopher and theologian wanted to impose on the construction of discourse.

Despite being a fan of the Age of Enlightenment, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) dreamt of a science of politics. He was convinced that if logic can be faulty, then people are too. His godson John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) developed Bentham’s utilitarianism and gave it his own twist.

The Critical Hammer

Etymologically speaking, the word ‘critical’ comes from the Greek kriterion, which can be translated ‘the rule by which one judges’. So a criterion can be defined as a rule or a principle that is used to judge something; and this is how Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) used it, placing principles of judgement front and centre on the philosophers’ workbench. His motto for the Age of Enlightenment was Sapere Aude. This Latin postulate comes from Horacius, and means ‘Dare to know’, but perhaps is better translated as “Have the courage to use your own reason!”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) took a great interest in the logic of discourse. An eternal pessimist, he recommended always being initially suspicious of bad intentions from one’s interlocutor. His classic of argumentation and of spotting bad faith, The Art of Being Right (1831) is a must for whomever takes an interest in sophism.

According to Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), ‘philosophizing with a hammer’ means testing the idols or fake gods (that is, conventional moral values) to reveal their true natures. You could say it’s like tapping a wall to see whether it’s hollow.

Moving now into the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper (1902-1994) believed that disciplines such as psychology or economics could not be considered scientific as they can not be refuted by being falsified, falsification for him being the hallmark of scientific theories.

Born in Warsaw, Chaïm Perelman (1912-1984) emigrated to Belgium in 1925. His 1958 work The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation became a reference for all matters relating to argumentation. He defined argument as “a discursive technique used to provoke or increase the adhesion of an audience to a thesis presented for their assent.”

Following the disaster that was Nazism, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) defended the need for all strata of society to be capable of clear thought, not just an elite.

Now & The Future

The internet remains a violent world where opposites collide. What is necessary is next to what is superfluous, what is false is next to what is true, and good intentions rub shoulders with the worst intentions. With the internet, the sophists have a weapon of mass persuasion. They’ve always played on words, but today they can play on images too. So let’s stop saying that “the internet isn’t good or bad, it depends how you use it.” No, the internet is good and bad: at the same time, at the same moment, for the same users. It contains what is manageable and what is uncontrollable, the poison and the cure. We don’t use the internet: together we are the internet. And in the face of cybersophists, let us become cyberphilosophers!

© Luc de Brabandere 2026

Luc de Brabandere is a corporate philosopher. His latest book, The Art of Thinking in a Digital World: Be Logical, Be Creative, Be Critical (Peter Lang International), puts the history of thought into perspective to better understand today’s world.

The fresco of the history of critical thinking is by Rodolphe Duprey, a Cartoonbase illustrator. It can be downloaded from cartoonbase.com.

Formal Fallacies

Some arguments are fallacious despite their undisputable internal logic. For example: “It is acceptable to consume farm animals since they’ve been bred to be eaten.” This is an example of what we call begging the question, or a circular argument, where the conclusion is assumed in the premise. Reasoning can be plagued by circularity; for example, “People wishing to study logic must be intelligent people. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t want to think logically.”

Despite being logically useless, tautology – a proposition which is always true – is nevertheless often used in argument. We can all agree with the quote “It is not good to have too much freedom”, since it would be impossible to disagree (similarly, too much camembert is never good, too much football is never good, and too much travel is never good, either). “Too much X is never good”, is true, regardless of what X is, since by definition, ‘too much’ means it is not good.

By contrast, the proposition “These two companies are incomparable” is an oxymoron, or a contradiction in terms, meaning it’s always false: in order to make the statement, both companies would have had to undergo a comparison. They are therefore comparable.

One of the sophists’ most recurring practices is to ignore their implicit hypotheses or assertions. In the case of a false dilemma, for example, certain options in a choice are hidden. A true dilemma is a situation which offers only two possible options. For instance, during a referendum, voters usually only have one choice: yes or no. This forces them to choose between two options, and that inevitably leads to the rejection of the other. But cases of true dichotomy are not that frequent, and a false dilemma involves presenting as simple a choice which in reality allows several options. Indeed, the phrasing of the issue usually hides other possible options. For example: ‘If you’re not with us, then you’re against us’, when you may be neither for or against. Even Nietzsche uses the false dilemma, when he states, ‘“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Another formal fallacy is called post hoc ergo propter hoc – translated as ‘After that, so because of that’. Imagine someone sneezing just before a gas explosion nearby. That person could, for a second or two, imagine having been the cause of the blast. This fallacy references the fact that we have a tendency to establish a causal link where there is nothing more than a sequence in time. It’s what some people call ‘the achoo effect’. Also consider this: “I joined the Boston Consulting Group in 2001, and revenue has since quadrupled.”

Informal Fallacies

Sophists like to exaggerate, caricature, and twist the counterarguments put to them, and they’ve developed a broad spectrum of methods aimed at dismantling their opponents’ ideas. Let’s leave behind the formal stratagems, for which the tools of logic are useful to detect traps, and move on to those others, such as the ad hominem (‘against the man’) attack, which consists in saying “you’re wrong because of what you are.” For example: “You don’t have kids, so don’t talk about education.”

Attacking someone is not the only fallacious argument used to distract from the subject. Another sophism with the same objective is called the red herring. This name is said to be derived from a practice used in the past by prisoners on the run, who were said to have left smoked or even rotten herring behind them to distract the dogs hunting them down. During a discussion, the purpose of this trick is to make you suddenly change topic – to set you on another path than initially planned by introducing irrelevant considerations:

“The budget has exploded; we cannot afford to buy this building.”

“But our website has more hits than ever!”

Craftsmanship is necessary to choose a red herring that’s capable of fooling an interlocutor without them noticing. In order to do this, you will need some true information, and the impression of it being directly related to the original subject.

When the argument presented has nothing to do with the original subject, it’s described as a non sequitur, literally meaning, ‘It does not follow’. The French President and general Charles de Gaulle once said during a debate: “How can one govern a country with 258 varieties of cheese?” We are still looking for the argument here over sixty years later.

The straw man fallacy caricatures or distorts an opponent’s own argument:

“I’d like to take a few days off just to be fresh before starting on that new project.”

“So, you think the best way to accomplish things is by not working?”

A sophisticated variation of the straw man argument has been called the slippery slope. This is an attempt to discredit a proposition by arguing that accepting it leads to a sequence of one or more undesirable events. For example, “Never forgive anyone. If you forgive one person, then the others will expect the same. Pretty soon, people will be walking all over you.”

A lot of our decisions are based on decisions made by other people. We cite those whom we assume are an authority on the matter. This can be done by:

A. Appealing to Experts

Subjects are so complex nowadays that we often need help, so we need to call on experts. But these experts can disagree. There are three major cases where calling on an expert becomes fallacious:

1) The mentioned area of expertise does not really exist, or isn’t developed enough.

2) The expert is unreliable because they have a vested interest in what they’re talking about.

3) The expert is discussing a subject outside their area of expertise.

B. Appealing to Authority

This is a common fallacy, as everyone recognises. For one instance: “Do you not believe in alchemy? Even Newton researched it!” Or we can appeal to the majority, also known as the Bandwagon fallacy. If there is no expert to act as an authority figure, our instinct would be to find out what ‘most people’ think. This is a type of sophism much preferred in advertising: “Venice is the most beautiful Italian city. It is visited by more tourists than any other city.”

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Good Grief!

Tim Madigan ponders the philosophy of Peanuts.

“I’ve developed a new philosophy. I only dread one day at a time.”

– Charlie Brown

Long before I ever dreamt of being a professional (or even amateur) philosopher, my earliest goal was to be a cartoonist. When I was a child I loved to read ‘the funny pages’ and hoped to create an entire world of my own making akin to those I found in the comic strips. I even for a time published such a strip in my grammar school paper. When I look at it now, 50 years after the fact, I truly know what the logical term ‘being charitable’ means, as my teacher who kindly accepted it for publication could clearly see that my drawing skills were most definitely subpar. I never did progress much beyond the doodling stage. But that didn’t stop me from continuing to appreciate comic art, and I still get some vicarious pleasure when I teach about this genre in my Philosophy of Art courses.

The comic strip that first inspired me was ‘Peanuts’, which celebrated its 75th anniversary in 2025. Created by Charles Schulz, it first appeared on October 2, 1950 (for further details see The Essential Peanuts: The Greatest Comic Strip of All Time by Mark Evanier, 2025). Schulz hated the title ‘Peanuts’, which was imposed upon him by the syndicate that published the strip, wishing instead to call it ‘L’il Folks’, after an earlier strip he had done for his local paper in St Paul, Minnesota. He felt ‘Peanuts’ was undignified and misleading, but by the time the strip became famous it was too late to change it, even though most of us know it primarily by the name of its lead character, Charlie Brown (who for some reason is always called by his full name by all the other characters, including even his younger sister Sally).

‘Peanuts’ ran for an astonishing 50 years, ceasing publication in 2000, just a few days before Schulz’s own death. Schulz was its sole writer and artist – he actually drew each and every strip himself, an almost unheard of state of affairs in an industry where creators usually have assistants doing much of the artwork, where most eventually lose control of their creations, and where the characters ‘live on’ long after their originators depart, willingly or otherwise.

As David Michaelis points out in his 2007 book Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (and as his family members attest) the comic strip was central to Schulz’s life, and he put much of his own whimsical attitudes into it. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that he refused to relinquish control of it, and stipulated that, while the original strips could continue to appear after his death, no one else could take over ‘Peanuts’, as was done with other such strips as ‘Little Orphan Annie’, ‘Blondie’, or ‘Dick Tracy’. It’s significant that its central character shared the same first name as its creator, as Charlie Brown in many ways was Charles Schulz.

Perhaps it’s not purely coincidental that Schulz – a man who was very learned in intellectual issues – began to be published at almost the same time as the philosophy known as Existentialism came into the American public’s consciousness. Michaelis quotes Schulz as saying: “I’m not a philosopher … I’m not that well-educated” (Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography, p.394). But, as Shakespeare might say, Schulz doth protest too much. While ‘Peanuts’ was primarily a humorous ‘comic’, it was itself labeled as ‘existential’ from an early stage, as it dealt with such themes as loneliness, dread, contingency, and despair, all of which could be found in the works of such Existential thinkers as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. In particular, one can see many similarities between Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous 1944 play No Exit and the ‘Peanuts’ world. Both seem to take place in a self-enclosed absurd setting, where characters (Estelle, Garcin and Inez in Sartre’s work, and Charlie Brown and the Little Red-Haired Girl, Sally Brown and Linus, Lucy and Schroeder, among others in Schulz’s universe) engage in endless variations of unrequited love and broken connections. Yet, unlike in Sartre’s hellish world, the ‘Peanuts’ gang do form a genuine community, and by somehow surviving the daily travails of their environment through their constant philosophical questionings they help us all to better understand the human condition. Like the eternal rock pusher at the end of Camus’s seminal essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, one must imagine Charlie Brown happy.

One example, among countless others, of the ‘Peanuts’ community in existential mode can be found in the strip appearing on Sunday, September 17, 1967 (the Sunday strips, by the way, were in color and unlike the daily strips they were titled ‘Peanuts Featuring Good Ol’ Charlie Brown’ – one small way for Schulz to try to transcend the title he was stuck with but never loved). In it, Charlie Brown stands, as is his wont, on the pitcher’s mound during a typical losing baseball game for his team. “Nine home runs in a row!! Good Grief!” he intones. His catcher Schroeder comes up to the mound to ask him what the cause of his outburst is. “We’re getting slaughtered again, Schroeder”, he says. “I don’t know what to do. Why do we have to suffer like this?” It is a perfectly reasonable question – indeed, regular readers of the strip might well ask that question about the ‘Peanuts’ gang in general, as the team never wins a game, the love circles never close, and Charlie Brown never gets to kick the football Lucy holds so enticingly at the beginning of every football season. But Schroeder gives a rather perplexing response: “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Not surprisingly, Charlie Brown can only reply by asking “What?”

At this point, Linus comes up to the mound to inform the befuddled pitcher/manager that Schroeder had been quoting from the Old Testament’s Book of Job, seventh verse, fifth chapter. Linus – the resident intellectual, noted for his brilliance but also for his insecurity which causes him to suck his thumb and hold onto his security blanket to endure the world’s travails – starts to explain why the problem of suffering is such a profound one. But his bossy sister Lucy interrupts him in mid-sentence, as is her wont, to assert, “If a person has bad luck, it’s because he’s done something wrong. That’s what I always say.” As Schroeder reminds her, that is exactly what Job’s friends tell him when he is afflicted with boils and other unbearable sufferings, even though he knows he is a good and faithful servant to God. Unimpressed, Lucy tells him, “What about Job’s wife? I don’t think she gets enough credit!” Those who know the Book of Job will recall the advice the wife gives to her husband when he asks why he is being made to suffer so. “Curse God and die,” she suggests. A very Lucy-like response!

The rest of the panels of this strip consist of other characters discussing various reasons why suffering may occur, with a thoughtful-looking Snoopy taking in the deep discussion. It is a master class on getting across profound observations in a ridiculous setting, not unlike a play by Samuel Beckett or indeed Archibald MacLeish’s 1958 play J.B., itself a variation of the Book of Job. The final panel shows Charlie Brown, alone again on his pitcher’s mound, with a forlorn expression on his face. “I don’t have a ball team …” he moans, “I have a theological seminary.” A pessimist might say this shows the futility of the ‘Peanuts’ world but an optimist would say that, while the team never seems to win a game, it does have some great conversations.

Lee Hoffman 2011 Creative Commons Licence 2.0

There was a best-selling book in 1965 by Robert L. Short called The Gospel According to Peanuts. Schulz gave his blessing to allowing it to use examples from his work, and as is well-known he also insisted that Linus be allowed to quote the nativity story from Luke’s Gospel in the television cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas which appeared on CBS that same year. But Schulz was loathe to proselytize and in 1989 he told his biographer Rita Grimsley Johnson that “I do not go to church anymore … I guess you might say I've come around to secular humanism, an obligation I believe all humans have to others and the world we live in” (Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz, p.137). It might be more accurate to describe him as a religious humanist, extolling the virtues of humility and tolerance. His views about the Religious Right are exemplified in a strip from 1980, when it was first becoming a political force to be reckoned with in America. ‘Peppermint’ Patty, a character who came to dominate the strip around this time, finds herself at a summer camp run by a doomsday religious group preaching the end times. She is terrified until her friend Marcie points out a drawing on the wall of the proposed new camp for which the organization is raising eight million dollars. Patty, who had been about to call her dad to warn him about the end of the world, tells the organization’s secretary, “Forget the phone, ma’am! Maybe the world will end tomorrow, but I wasn’t born yesterday!” And the ever-wise Linus says to the unseen preacher who runs the camp (adult characters are rarely seen or heard in ‘Peanuts’) “I also don’t wish to be rude … Just as a matter of curiosity, sir … Has it ever occurred to you that you might be wrong?”

Sally Brown, the aforementioned little sister of Charlie Brown, often raises equally provocative questions. For instance, in a strip from 1969 she asks her big brother “Do you think life has meaning?” Rather taken aback by this unexpected query he stammers “Well … I …” , to which she replies at the top of her lungs “I mean do you think life has meaning after you’ve failed nine spelling tests in a row and your teacher hates you?!!!” To which he replies, “That’s a different question.” Sally is famous for coming up with short and pithy life philosophies, such as ‘Why me?’, ‘How should I know?’, ‘Who cares?’, and ‘I’ve decided to put everything off until the last minute and to learn everything in life the hard way’. She proudly adds: “Some philosophies take a thousand years. I think of them in two minutes.” It’s no wonder that the song she sings in the hit musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown is called ‘My New Philosophy’.

Good Ol’ Charles Schulz

Charles Schulz © Library Of Congress 1956 @ Flickr Commons

In another complicated yet typical ‘Peanuts’ scenario, Lucy – ashamed to be associated with a brother who clutches a security blanket – grabs it from Linus and tells him she’s hidden it and that he has to get used to being without his blanket. Linus begins to hallucinate, faints, and fears for his sanity – rather extreme stuff for a ‘comic’ strip – but Snoopy (usually lost in his own world of fantasy and often oblivious to the concerns of the humans around him, especially the ‘round-headed kid’ who feeds him but whose name he can never remember) saves the day. Using his beagle sense of smell, he finds the blanket where Lucy has buried it, digs it up, and returns it to its happy owner. The overjoyed and fully recovered Linus thanks him profusely, and in the final panel, Snoopy, lying on top of his doghouse, thinks: “Every now and then I feel that my existence is justified.” It’s hard to find a better example of existentialism in action.

As the examples given above prove, it would be easy to write a book called Philosophy According to Peanuts, and I – along with I’m sure countless others – have often used the comic to exemplify various philosophical positions. For instance, those with an inclination toward the linguistic turn in philosophy should find enlightenment in this panel from December 26, 1968, when Charlie Brown asks Linus “Did you have a good Christmas?” Linus contemplates the question and, in a manner akin to G.E. Moore, replies “What do you mean by ‘good’? Do you mean did I get a lot of presents? Or do you mean did I give a lot of presents? Are you referring to the weather or the Christmas dinner we had? Do you mean was my Christmas good in a spiritual sense? Or do you mean was my Christmas good in that I saw new meaning in old things? Or do you mean …” At which point Charlie Brown gives the only reasonable response: “sigh.” And speaking of language games, I must admit that for half a century now I’ve been contemplating just what exactly the term ‘Good Grief’ really means.

One of the strengths of ‘Peanuts’ was the way Schulz was able time and again to return to the same themes but give them interesting, and often unexpected, variations. This is best demonstrated by the tradition, every autumn, of having Charlie Brown rush passionately down the field to kick the football Lucy is holding, only to have it snatched away at the last second. Michaelis writes about this yearly event: “Schulz originally drew the football-kicking episode to show that Charlie Brown was incapable of combating Lucy’s shrewdness … From first (1952) to last (1999), each setup of the football encouraged Charlie Brown to one more act of determination and, ultimately, martyrdom” (Michaelis, p.510).

But Schulz, in the very last such example in 1999, threw a curve ball at his readers. Lucy is suddenly called into the house by her mother. She asks her little brother Rerun to hold the ball for her. When he enters the home she asks him anxiously, “What happened? Did you pull the ball away? Did he kick it? What happened?” To which Rerun slyly says in return, “You’ll never know…” And neither will we! Perhaps Good Ol’ Charlie Brown finally did kick one after all. As ‘Pig-Pen’ says in another strip when asked how he manages to always get so dirty, “I guess there are some things we will never know in this lifetime!” That’s an epistemological lesson we can all relate to.

As he drew the final ‘Peanuts’ comic strip just days before his own death, one hopes that Charles Schulz appreciated all the joy that he had brought to the world by creating this timeless work. Like Snoopy, he had every right to feel that his existence was truly justified. You were a good man, Charles Schulz, in every meaning of the word ‘good’.

© Prof. Timothy J. Madigan 2026

Tim Madigan is Professor of Philosophy at St John Fisher University, where the sign above his door says ‘The Doctor of Philosophy is In’. His current favorite comic strip is Pickles by Brian Crane.

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Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

Kanan Purkayastha explains how Werner Heisenberg’s 1925 paper turned the quantum theory of the early 1900s into the quantum mechanics of today.

Two theories dominated the physics of the Twentieth Century: relativity and quantum mechanics. But whereas relativity was the work of a single person (Albert Einstein), quantum mechanics has many fathers, including Werner Heisenberg, Max Planck, Max Born, Paul Dirac, Pascal Jordan, and Erwin Schrödinger. However, quantum mechanics as we know it today was triggered by Heisenberg’s lonely night on the island of Helgoland in 1925, when he invented matrix mechanics without knowing the concept of ‘matrix’. Accordingly, on June 7, 2024, the United Nations proclaimed 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.

On 30 July 2025, the journal Nature reported that at an event on Helgoland to mark the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics, the Nobel Laureate physicist Anton Zeilinger claimed that “There is no quantum world”. Zeilinger opined that quantum states exist only in minds, and that they describe information rather than reality. Alain Aspect, the physicist who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize with Zeilinger, disagreed. On the other hand, Gerard T’Hooft, a Physics Nobel Laureate in 1999, mentioned in a recent interview in Scientific American that “We know superposition in the macroscopic world is nonsense. That’s clear. And I believe that in the microscopic world it’s clearly nonsense, too” (Spring/Summer 2025, p.43). This reflects deep philosophical differences among physicists about the nature of reality. How did Heisenberg think about the nature of quantum reality, then?

Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932. The Nobel Committee in Sweden summarised his work as follows:

“In Niels Bohr’s theory of the atom, electrons absorb and emit radiation of fixed wavelengths when jumping between fixed orbits around a nucleus. The theory provided a good description of the spectrum created by the hydrogen atom, but needed to be developed to suit more complicated atoms and molecules. In 1925, Werner Heisenberg formulated a type of quantum mechanics based on matrices. In 1927 he proposed the ‘uncertainty relation’, setting limits for how precisely the position and velocity of a particle can be simultaneously determined.”

So, Heisenberg’s philosophical thinking about the nature of reality in quantum mechanics revolved around matrix mechanics and the uncertainty relation. But what are they?

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Quantum Mechanics Emerges

In June 1925 Heisenberg went to Helgoland, a small island in the North Sea, in order to get relief from hay fever. He later mentioned that at 3 o’clock in the morning he saw the answer emerge. As he recalled in his book Physics and Beyond (1969), “I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strongly beautiful interior and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me” (p.61).

On 9 July 1925, Heisenberg sent a paper titled ‘Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations’ to Max Born, whom he was assisting at that time, and Born sent the paper to the journal Zeitschrift für Physik on 25 July. It turned the quantum theory of the early 1900s into the quantum mechanics we’re familiar with today.

In it Heisenberg wrote that “the present paper seeks to establish a basis for theoretical quantum mechanics founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable.” Then Born’s and Jordan’s paper titled ‘On Quantum Mechanics I’ was published (received 27 Sept 1925). In it the authors say that “the recently published theoretical approach of Heisenberg is here developed into a systematic theory of quantum mechanics with the aid of mathematical matrix methods.” On 7 Nov 1925 the same journal received a paper from Paul Dirac titled ‘The fundamental equations of quantum mechanics’. In it Dirac mentions that “In a recent paper, Heisenberg puts forward a new theory which suggests that it is not the equations of classical mechanics that are in any way at fault, but that the mathematical operations by which physical results are deduced from them require modification. All the information supplied by the classical theory can thus be made use of in the new theory.” Then on 16 November 1925, Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan submitted another paper titled ‘On Quantum Mechanics II’, saying that “the quantum mechanics developed in Part 1 of this paper from Heisenberg’s approach is here extended to systems having arbitrarily many degrees of freedom.” Two more seminal papers followed in early 1926: Wolfgang Pauli’s ‘On the hydrogen spectrum from the standpoint of the new quantum mechanics’ (received 17 Jan), and Dirac’s ‘Quantum mechanics and a preliminary investigation of the hydrogen atom’ (received 22 Jan). In the latter Dirac also acknowledges Heisenberg, writing that “a recent paper by Heisenberg provided the clue to the solution of this question and forms the basis of a new quantum theory. According to Heisenberg, if x and y are two functions of the coordinates and momenta of a dynamical system, then in general xy is not equal to yx”. After that, we get Schrodinger’s wave equations in 1926, which provided a different way to do quantum mechanics equivalent to matrix mechanics. The rest is quantum history.

Konrad Kleinknecht, in his book Einstein and Heisenberg: The Controversy Over Quantum Physics (2019), said this about matrix mechanics:

“The basic idea that Heisenberg had on Helgoland was this: to ignore completely the electron orbits and take only observable values into account, i.e., the totality of the oscillation frequencies and intensities of the light emitted by the atoms with the spectral lines measured in the spectrograph. In Göttingen, he had already tried to apply this principle to the simplest atom, but at that time this problem had appeared too difficult. Now he was searching for a simpler system by which he could handle the method mathematically. This was the pendulum, which appears in many atoms and molecules as a model of oscillation. It is characterized as anharmonic oscillation” (p.64).

In other words, Heisenberg attempts to calculate the behaviour of electrons around atoms using quantities we can observe, specifically, the frequency and amplitude of emitted light. By these means one observes the effects of electron leaps from one of Bohr’s atomic orbits to another. Heisenberg’s idea was to write all the quantities describing the movement of the electron – position, velocity, energy – no longer as single numbers, but as tables of numbers: So he created a table or matrix with the orbits of departure in their rows and the orbits of arrival in their columns. In this way the table/matrix describes the leaps of electrons from one orbit to another. Instead of having a single position for the electron, we have an entire table of possible positions: one for every possible leap. The idea was to continue to use the same equations as always, simply replacing the usual quantities (position, velocity, energy frequency of orbit, and so on) with such tables. Born and Jordan extended Heisenberg’s idea by pointing out the importance of matrix algebra for describing atomic energy transitions.

Uncertain Relations

In 1927 Heisenberg next proposed his famous Uncertainty Principle, setting limits on how precisely the position and speed of a particle can be simultaneously determined. In fact, Heisenberg originally used the German word ungenauigkeit, which means ‘inexactness’ or ‘vagueness’ rather than ‘uncertainty’. This I think is closer to the true meaning of Heisenberg’s principle than the word ‘uncertainty’. His actual words were “canonically conjugate quantities can be determined simultaneously only with a characteristic indeterminacy. This indeterminacy is the real basis for the occurrence of statistical relations in quantum mechanics” (Zeitschrift für Physik, 43,1927). It implies that the more precisely you specify the position of a particle, the less precisely you can specify its momentum, and vice versa. ‘Specify’ here means ‘specify the range of possible values’, and the range of possible values indicates the uncertainty. And the same is true, says Heisenberg, for other pairs of quantities: notably energy - time. (It’s worth mentioning here that Born’s statistical interpretation also introduces indeterminacy into quantum mechanics, for we cannot predict with certainty the outcome of an experiment to measure its position.)

There are two competing philosophical views on the uncertainty principle. In his book Dance of the Photons (2010), Zeilinger talks about the realist position of people such as Einstein, who claim that the uncertainty principle is:

“just an expression of the limits of what can be determined by measurement. Or in philosophers’ terms, the nature of uncertainty would be an epistemic one. An alternative philosophical position is to assume that the uncertainty principle is not simply a statement about what we can know; it is a statement about the nature of things. From that point of view, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a statement about how things are and what features they have. It’s a statement about what exists. A philosopher would call such a position about the nature of the uncertainty principle an ontological one. From that point of view, the electron would have neither a position that is better defined than the position uncertainty tells us, nor a speed that is better defined than its momentum uncertainty. That ontological position was held by Bohr” (pp.37-38).

So, is quantum uncertainty epistemic or ontological? Is it about limits to what we can know, or about how things really are?

First, what would it mean to say the uncertainty principle is not just a limit to what we can know, but that it describes how things actually are? It would mean that an electron never has both a well-defined position and a well-defined momentum at the same time: the electron is either not at a specific place, or it does not move with a specific speed. Zeilinger himself suggests that “in a sense, the electron carries the possibilities of many velocities at the same time and the possibilities of being in many places at the same time” (p.38). This is a direct consequence of de Broglie’s idea that a ‘possibility wave’ should be associated with each quantum particle. The essential point here however is that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle is a statement about the nature of things, not just about what we can know.

Indeterminacy has troubled physicists and philosophers alike. Konrad said that Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle has far-reaching consequences for the philosophy of science and epistemology. Similarly, Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that “The uncertainty principle had profound implications for the way in which we view the world” (p.63).

Reality & The Pragmatic Approach

Werner Heisenberg

Heisenberg © Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R57262 / Unknown author / CC-BY-SA 3.0

In his book Reality and Its Order (1941), Heisenberg delineates diverse areas of reality, the language used to describe them, and their order (he also mentions Goethe’s poetic ordering of areas of reality which had given him the inspiration for the essay). Heisenberg develops a six-point schema of reality and its order: Classical Physics, Chemistry including quantum theory, Organic Life, Consciousness, Symbol and Gestalt, and the Creative forces. He maintained that the order suggested by the development of natural science follows ancient patterns of thought that found ever new forms of expression at different times.

Heisenberg also remarked that “Often it takes a century of experience to produce a single new, decisive thought. Consequently, in order to answer the question what reality really is, one can hardly reply with anything other than the old fairy tale: How long does eternity last?… At the end of the world, there is a mountain, all made of diamond, and every hundred years a small bird flies there and sharpens its beak; and when the whole mountain is worn down, only one second of eternity will have passed.” (p.121).

In the Fall of 1954 Einstein’s interest was focused on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In a meeting with him, Heisenberg claimed that “Quantum theory, with its so disconcerting paradoxes, is the actual foundation of modern physics”. Einstein responded, “But you surely don’t believe that God plays dice?” Heisenberg replied: “In quantum theory, the natural laws deal with the temporal changes of the possible and the probable. The choices that lead from the possible to the probable, however, can only be registered statistically, but can no longer be predicted” (p.163). So for Heisenberg, God does seem to play dice with the universe.

Then in his book Physics and Philosophy (1958), Heisenberg wrote that “we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (p.25). And in his essay titled ‘The development of philosophical ideas since Descartes’ in that book, he wrote:

“The philosophic thesis that all knowledge is ultimately founded in experience has in the end led to a postulate concerning the logical clarification of any statement about nature. Such a postulate may have seemed justified in the period of classical physics, but since quantum theory we have learned that it cannot be fulfilled. The words ‘position’ and ‘velocity’ of an electron, for instance, seemed perfectly well defined as to both their meaning and their possible connections, and in fact they were clearly defined concepts within the mathematical framework of Newtonian mechanics. But actually, they were not well defined, as is seen from the relations of uncertainty” (p.46).

Heisenberg had clearly moved away from logical positivism! He further mentions that “One may say that regarding their position in Newtonian mechanics they were well defined, but in their relation to nature they were not. This shows that we can never know beforehand which limitations will be put on the applicability of certain concepts by the extension of our knowledge into the remote parts of nature, into which we can only penetrate with the most elaborate tools” (p.46). This is a pragmatic way of thinking about reality, because pragmatism, while valuing empirical evidence, focuses on the practical consequences and usefulness of knowledge, prioritizing what works best in a given situation. In Physics and Philosophy Heisenberg also referenced Kantian analytic and synthetic knowledge, and argued that the scientific method has actually changed in this very fundamental question since Kant, arguing that an analytic judgement is always a priori and that all empirical knowledge is synthetic (p.47). Like Quine, he seems not to have been a supporter of Kant’s analytic-synthetic division. In his essay ‘Language and Reality in Modern Physics’, also in Physics and Philosophy he refers to the physicist Carl von Weizsacker, who points out that one may distinguish various levels of language: “One level refers to the objects – for instance, to the atoms or the electrons. A second level refers to statements about objects. A third level may refer to statements about statements about objects etc.” Heisenberg then talks about the problem of the language of classical and quantum logics. In his words, “In classical logic it is assumed that, if a statement has any meaning at all, either the statement or the negation of the statement must be correct… Tertium non datur, a third possibility does not exist… In quantum theory this law ‘ tertium non datur’ is to be modified” (pp.124-125). He says we need to consider the third possibility: “In quantum theory, however, we have to admit – if we use the words ‘atom’ and ‘box’ at all – that there are other possibilities which are in a strange way mixtures of the two former possibilities. This is necessary for explaining the results of our experiments” (p.125). He suggests that “classical logic would then be contained as a kind of limiting case in quantum logic, but the latter would constitute the more general logical pattern.”

In his essay ‘On Books and Reading’, Arthur Schopenhauer says that “Thoughts put on paper are nothing more than footsteps in the sand: you see the way the man has gone, but to know what he saw on his walk, you want his eyes” (p.3). Indeed, we may need Heisenberg’s eyes in order to understand his philosophy.

© Dr Kanan Purkayastha 2026

Kanan Purkayastha holds a PhD in Theoretical and Atmospheric Chemistry from the University of Bristol. This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at Göttingen University, Germany, on 9 September 2025, during a celebration of 100 years of quantum mechanics.

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Identity in the Age of Connectivity

Sara Asran explores the dynamics of identity online.

Human identity is a captivating and intricate subject. One could argue that with the emergence of digital platforms, and the widespread availability of more diverse media, literature and learning opportunities than ever before, the way the average person defines themselves has undergone a significant transformation. Unlike just a couple of decades ago, when identity was often linked to one’s personal traits and role within one’s community, today it is becoming increasingly entangled with the things we consume, especially online.

A compelling case study of this identity shift can be observed in TikTok culture. While trends on this app emerge in a manner similar to trends spread through magazines and television in the past (albeit at an incredibly accelerated pace), what’s striking on TikTok is how its users’ sense of themselves is increasingly intertwined with the clothes they wear, the media they engage with, even the food they eat. Though the notion of products shaping identities was famously propagated by Edward Bernays, the ‘father of public relations’, way back in the 1920s, this does underscore his profound understanding of human behavior.

Today it’s challenging to find individuals who primarily define themselves by their intrinsic traits; instead, many tend to define themselves by what they consume. But alongside straightforwardly promotion of the products themselves, there’s now a more subtle and insidious marketing approach at play. These trends are strategically targeted towards women by associating a particular combination of products with a particular type of woman. For instance, a trend emerged wherein a mix of various new products, including specific clothing, jewelry, and branded hair and makeup products, were promoted simultaneously. They were marketed under the guise of the ‘clean girl’ trend. A ‘clean girl’ is essentially the kind of woman who consistently appears well-groomed and put together, emanates a pleasant fragrance, and boasts fresh, radiant skin. The marketing extends beyond the immediate attributes of the products themselves: it represents an effort to emulate the image of the clean girl, which is associated with a well-off, high-class lifestyle and a harmonious family background. So this and other such approaches can be seen as a means for individuals to role-play various personas they aspire to embody through the use of these products.

Oksana Cherepashchuk

Instagram: @ksu.artlife

This transformation gives rise to a paradox: if individuals are so eager to distinguish themselves from the crowd, why do they engage in these carefully orchestrated trends that essentially commodify their identity, categorising them through consumerism?

The straightforward response is capitalism. Capitalism has wrought a profound shift in the way we perceive ourselves and others. In a world driven by consumerism, competition and envy, people are increasingly inclined to shape themselves into marketable entities by endeavoring to make their identities palatable to a wide audience. As a result, we witness a proliferation of labels, each striving to capture the ‘unique facets’ of an individual’s identity. These labels are becoming exceedingly niche – meticulously tailored to encompass the intricate nuances of various personality types.

However, as these definitions grow increasingly specialized, there arises a disquieting trend. Many times, the narrower the categories become, the more disconcerting their implications. This phenomenon becomes even more pronounced among younger generations, where we observe the unsettling glorification of mental illnesses. Certain trends, like the ‘coquette girl’ or the ‘alt girl’, for instance, have emerged as allegories for mental health conditions. These conditions are sometimes presented in a manner that seeks to exalt them or make them seem desirable. Rather than being concealed or stigmatized, the conditions are paraded as defining aspects of one’s identity, seeking to render them appealing in the digital realm.

The Erosion of Community

In the past, growing up meant being surrounded by people who often held starkly contrasting viewpoints. Conversations on diverse subjects were commonplace, but disagreement usually didn’t erode the bonds of affection between the holders of opposing views. However, in today’s world characterized by the proliferation of specialized online communities, a different dynamic prevails. Many find themselves comfortably ensconced within echo chambers, where ideas are rarely challenged. These insular habitats diminish the motivation to engage in meaningful discussions with other points-of-view, inadvertently weakening the bonds that once held diverse communities together. Our innate tendency is to form attachments, and this pronounced disconnection from communal bonds has contributed to an alarming upsurge in loneliness, particularly among younger generations. In this evolving landscape, people are increasingly being conditioned for self-reliance, and this individualizing culture perpetuates the notion that ‘we are born alone and die alone’.

What is Love?

I believe that romantic love defies any rigid formula. We often mistakenly regard it as contingent upon shared interests or beliefs. However, the truth about love is far more profound: we possess the capacity to love individuals irrespective of commonalities or differences. Even when considering factors like physical appearance, compatibility, and chemistry, I still perceive love as primarily a spontaneous ‘decision’ made by the brain’s non-conscious processes, not by reason. I contend that the fundamental chemical processes that turn attraction into love have not changed. Under the influence of these same neurochemical reactions, we still perceive the person we randomly fall in love with as extraordinarily special. It’s only as these neurochemical effects eventually diminish that we begin to notice their flaws, prompting us to wonder how we could have overlooked them.

Throughout most of history, the average person’s exposure to potential partners was relatively limited. In those circumstances, individuals might have chosen their significant other often almost randomly, through an unsolicited cascade of neurochemical reactions and corresponding emotional attachments. Physical proximity itself played a significant role. This profound and complex experience of falling in love was therefore a testament to the power of the brain’s chemistry to shape our perceptions.

However, the notion of unconditional love, so long celebrated as a central theme in poetry and literature, is now widely derided and equally widely mythologized. A more transactional and, quite frankly, misguided perspective on love frequently echoes through online communities, particularly those dominated by males. Within these spaces, viewers are often fed the notion that romantic love boils down to a transaction wherein men provide services while women offer beauty. It is a simplistically reductionist view drawn from evolutionary psychology, and it tends to strip away all the intricate nuances and the enchanting essence of what love truly encompasses.

This distorted perception of love, which more and more people are tending to adopt, can again be directly attributed to the influence of consumerism. In a world driven by transactional exchanges, it becomes challenging to conceive of a feeling as elusive and unquantifiable as love, as operating outside the bounds of material goods and services. However, it is a paradox of our nature that love isn’t a product of logical decision-making, it’s a subconscious impulse that compels us to form emotional connections, and in the context of romantic love, this impulse serves as a driving force for procreation.

The Paradox of Choice

The phenomenon of distorted connection can also be ascribed to what psychologists call the ‘paradox of choice’, in which having more choice makes us worse off, not better off. Choices become harder when there are too many options. For instance, our awareness of the vast number of people in the world and the ease of communication with many of them, has led some to believe that the essence of love has evolved. They argue that in the past, when we met a compatible person in our local community and fell in love, we might have genuinely believed they were uniquely right for us because we lacked awareness of alternatives. However, today’s knowledge of the abundance of potential partners can lead to the belief that we can never again experience love in the same way. This extensive choice also fosters the belief that individuals must put in extra effort to market themselves in the dating landscape. Here people start to see themselves as products in a competitive market, in which they must work diligently to advertise their qualities in the face of numerous competitors.

Dating platforms like Tinder are a tangible manifestation of this modern tendency toward self-commodification and self-marketing. They reduce complex individuals to carefully curated profiles, whereby, in the pursuit of romantic connections, users are marketing themselves as commodities. While some argue that these platforms have facilitated genuine, healthy relationships, I attribute their successes more to our inherent human capacity to form attachments in random, unexpected ways – rather than to the algorithms’ fumbling attempts to define and predict the multifaceted nature of human love.

© Sara Asran 2026

Sara Asran has an academic background in International Relations and Cybersecurity. She also writes comics and other fiction, exploring philosophical themes.

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Brief Lives

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Hilarius Bogbinder considers the all too human life of the notorious iconoclast.

“The last two weeks were the happiest of my life” (Letters, 321) wrote Friedrich Nietzsche. The year was 1884. He was completing what he himself considered his greatest work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There can be no doubt that this son of a Lutheran vicar was moved to almost religious ecstasy when he composed the book, even if he had lost his faith while a student of theology. Unfortunately, when it was published, the tome, dedicated to ‘all and nobody’, seemed to only be for the latter. Now, over 140 years later, it is probably known about – if not understood – by the former (at least in academia). In a sense, that is odd. Famous and revered, Thus Spoke Zarathustra also contains some rather peculiar observations, such as, “Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer, than into the dreams of a lustful woman?” (p.78) – to which most people would answer “No”. Little wonder that Nietzsche, perhaps in a moment of self-reflection, commented in his subsequent book, Beyond Good and Evil, “that all philosophers have had little understanding of women” (p.3). Yet of course Nietzsche would not also have gained his reputation if the book had not contained more insightful observations, and a life-affirming exuberance that we rarely see in philosophy. Who but Nietzsche could write, “You must have chaos in you to give birth to a dancing star” (Zarathustra, p.19)?

Friedrich Nietzsche by Clint Inman

The Philosopher Dances

Like all great thinkers, Nietzsche’s philosophy grew gradually.

He was a prodigy from the beginning. He won a scholarship to Schulpfortam, Germany’s most prestigious secondary school (a bit like Eton in England), then went on to study Classics with exceptional bravura, having dropped out of his divinity course in the first year after he read Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation (1818). Schopenhauer’s explanation of the world as ‘blind will’ changed his life. That pessimistic philosopher’s belief was that we live in a chaotic universe, so that we are “freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither, and to be only one of the innumerable similar beings that throng, press and toil restlessly and rapidly arising and passing away in beginningless and endless time” (Will and Representation Vol II, 3). This shook Nietzsche’s faith in providence and the Christian God.

Having been elevated to a Chair in Classical Philology at the tender age of twenty-four (though he never formally completed his doctorate), this philosophical Wunderkind soon tired of academic life and longed for laughter and joy. Unlike Schopenhauer, who remained cynical and anti-social, Nietzsche had an appetite for living. For the former, art, in particular music, was the only respite from an otherwise unbearable life without meaning, as it “expresses the storm of the passions and the pathos of feelings” (Will and Representation II, p.448). Music was Nietzsche’s passion too, but in a life-affirming way. He found this particularly in Richard Wagner’s operas. Inspired by the German composer, the young professor burst onto the scene as a writer with The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music in 1872. In this brief book he juxtaposed Dionysian wildness with Apollonian reason as the forces behind Greek theatre. Philosophy itself had been focused solely on reason, but humans also have a lust for life. Sure, we need reason, but we must also have passion: “Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a higher community” (Birth of Tragedy, p.18).

It was this same spirit he expressed a decade later in Zarathustra – except he did so in almost Biblical language and with a poetic sense that’s on par with Goethe, Rilke, and other supreme German stylists. Which other philosopher could write, “The night has descended: now flows the frolicking brooks. My soul too is a frolicking brook. It is night: now all the songs of lovers come out. My soul too is the song of a lover” (Zarathustra, p.153)?

In his autobiography, Ecce Homo (‘Behold the Man’, 1888), Nietzsche reflected that “The whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be classified under the rubric ‘music’. At all events, the essential condition of its production was a second birth within me of the art of hearing.” It was an “essentially yea-saying pathos” (p.97). One gets a sense of this in the closing bars of Zarathustra, where Nietzsche, intoxicated with pathos and eloquence, exclaimed, “The world is deep and deeper than day. Deep is its sorrow, longing even deeper than the song of the heart” (p.419). Zarathustra itself had that effect on others: for instance, the book inspired the ‘tone poem’ Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss in 1896, music which was later made famous as the theme of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Supremely musical Zarathustra might have been, but it should not be overlooked that personal circumstances played a significant part. Nietzsche almost admitted this when in his autobiography he confessed that the book was a result of “the astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady, Miss Lou von Salomé” (Ecce Homo, p.98). Nietzsche had lived in a rather unconventional threesome with her and his friend Paul Rée. What Nietzsche did not reveal in his autobiography was that he had proposed to Salomé and been rejected. So Zarathustra was written, at least in part, with a broken heart.

Terrible Revelations

It wasn’t the only thing that had been broken. Nietzsche had been a regular visitor to Wagner’s home in Bayreuth; but when the composer embraced Christianity in his opera Parsifal (1882), Nietzsche severed his ties with his erstwhile friend.

Nietzsche had seen Wagner’s music as a cure for German cultural decline. Now he became rudderless. After a brief flirtation with the ideals of the Enlightenment in Human, All Too Human (1878), he wrote The Gay Science (1882) with a changed outlook. In this book he discovered – with terror – his idea of the Eternal Return – the idea that “this life, as you live it now, you will have to live again and again, times without number” (p.341). The other revelation from that book which shocked him to the core was ‘the death of God’. In a famous section he described a ‘mad man’ who was running through the streets in despair, declaring the death of the deity: “we have killed [God]… how shall we… console ourselves?” (p.125). Zarathustra was a boisterous and cheerful answer to the mad man’s question.

Nietzsche clearly saw the two books as companion pieces. Indeed, he almost self-plagiarised. He introduced the character of Zarathustra in the final pages of The Gay Science, and described how the sage, after years of solitude, greets the sun with the words, “Thou great star, what was thy happiness if thou shinneth for no one?” (Gay Science, p.342). The exact same words feature on the first page of Zarathustra.

But the focus is different. Whereas Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (as it’s called in German) is anything but ‘joyous’ or ‘gay’ (froh), Zarathustra, by contrast, is written with messianic zeal, in the style of Jesus’s Sermon of the Mount, with its hero as a prophet. The book even contains a chapter called ‘The Last Supper’. Taking aim at Christianity – but without being explicit about it – he teaches his followers that “he whom they call redeemer has cast them into bondage” (p.131). He also says that to live in a godless universe, we must not despair but embrace the idea of the Übermensch – the ‘beyond human’ who comes to terms with the crass materialism that “the soul is only a word for something in the body” (Zarathustra, p.46).

For the Übermensch, the Eternal Return, which in The Gay Science Nietzsche called ‘the heaviest burden’ is now cast in almost eschatological exultation: “Everything goes, all comes back – forever rolls the wheel of being. Everything withers, and all blossoms anew – forever runs the year of being. Everything goes, and all comes back, true to itself the ring of being” (Zarathustra, p.317). So having uncovered ‘the Eternal Return’ and ‘the death of God’ in The Gay Science, Nietzsche set forth a new gospel for unbelievers, and did so with the poetic eloquence of holy books, often using biblical expressions like ‘Verily I say onto thee…’ and other Scriptural tropes.

In many ways it expresses views now taken almost for granted. For example, the moral relativism of modern atheism is foreshadowed here: morals are not universal but determined by cultural circumstances, and Western concepts of ‘good and bad’ are not intrinsically superior to those of other cultures. This is a view first spoken by Nietzsche’s messiah of atheism: Zarathustra, after having “seen many lands and many people… discovered that much which seemed good to one people was reprehensible and disgraceful to another” (Zarathustra, p.85). Rather than decrying this relativism, the Übermensch makes peace with, accepts, indeed, embraces and even celebrates the idea that man “first implanted values into things to maintain himself” (p.85).

Nietzsche explored the ideas in prose form in his subsequent books Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887). But what makes Zarathustra a masterpiece is its poetic form. And Nietzsche’s ability to express himself in ways that depart from his caricature image in popular culture make him seem less doctrinaire. He even declared that he might reconsider his position regarding the existence of the Lord if only the Almighty had moves: “I would… believe in a God who knew how to dance” (p.58).

Salomé, Paul Rée & Nietzsche have a night on the town

The Twilight of Nietzsche

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is one of the last lines published by Nietzsche – an adage he arguably immediately disproved. In 1890, he suffered a mental and physical collapse. He had just written Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (its German title, Götzen-Dämmerung, was a pun on, and dig at, Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung – The Twilight of the Gods). But Nietzsche was unable to enjoy the success of the book. His downfall occurred just as he was on the threshold of fame.

The story often told is that in 1890 in Turin Nietzsche ran out into the street and hugged a horse that was being flogged by its owner at the end of Piazza Carlo Alberto. He then collapsed in and never fully recovered. After the initial crisis, he was nursed by his mother Franziska, and after her death in 1897, by his sister Elisabeth Föster-Nietzsche.

His friends, including the noted historian Jacob Burckhardt, had him transferred to a mental institution. But he was transferred back to the family home, where his sister allowed selected visitors, including the educationalist Rudolf Steiner (who wrote his first book about Nietzsche) to meet the now mute and clinically insane philosopher. At this stage he signed his letters ‘the crucified one’. Later, he called himself ‘Dionysus’. He also declared war against the Pope, and commended Otto von Bismarck to attack Rome to arrest the pontiff. The cause of his illness has been attributed to syphilis that he contracted as a student, but this is controversial and he also suffered psychotic episodes.

After two strokes, in 1898 and 1899, Nietzsche died on 25th August 1900, aged only 55. The ‘Anti-Christ’ was buried in a Christian cemetery – next to his father, the late Lutheran pastor, in his birthplace Röcken, in Saxony-Anhalt.

Restoring Nietzsche’s Reputation

Nietzsche was never close to his sister Elisabeth while he was coherent: he wrote in 1888 that “the treatment I have received from my mother and my sister, up to the present moment, fills me with an inexpressible horror”. Half in jest, he continues that his only “objection to the Eternal Return… is always my mother and my sister” (Ecce Homo, p.6). He didn’t attend his sister’s wedding to a rabid anti-Semite either. For her part, Elisabeth was dismissive of her brother’s rather unconventional relationship with Salomé and Paul Rée. The fact that Salomé was of Jewish descent probably didn’t help. Yet Elisabeth was entrepreneurial. and while Friedrich descended deeper into mental illness, she organised for the first edition of his collected works to be published.

Elisabeth then heavily edited her brother’s many unpublished writings before bringing them to press as The Will to Power (tellingly, Hitler attended Elisabeth’s funeral in 1935). This was a gross misrepresentation of everything Nietzsche stood for. Certainly, The Will to Power, does contain sentences like, “the will to power is the primitive form of affect and all other affects are only developments of it” (p.1067). Taken out of context, such views can be abused by revolutionaries – and they were. This is tragic, since Nietzsche had distain for revolutionary theories all his life. Indeed, earlier in his career he wrote against those who “hotly and eloquently demand the overthrow of all orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity would then immediately arise on its own” (Human, All Too Human, p.463, 1878). He was not a revolutionary, nor did he expressed anti-Semitic views, let alone nationalist ones. In fact, unlike his denunciation of Christianity, he had a positive view of the Jews:

“What does Europe owe to the Jews? – Many things… the most attractive, ensnaring, and exquisite element in those iridescences and allurements to life, in the aftersheen of which the sky of our European culture, its evening sky, now glows – perhaps glows out. For this, we artists among the spectators and philosophers, are grateful to the Jews.”

(Beyond Good and Evil, p.250)

Nietzsche partly owed his fame to a Jewish academic, the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes, who corresponded with the philosopher and gave lectures on his philosophy at the University of Copenhagen even before Zarathustra was published.

Nietzsche was also anything but a nationalist. Upon moving to Basel in Switzerland he renounced his Prussian citizenship, and remained formally stateless for the rest of his life. His view of the Germans was uncompromising. He – one of the greatest stylists of the Teutonic tongue – believed he was “a stranger to everything that is German”… to “get free from [this] unendurable pressure one needs marijuana” (Ecce Homo, p.29). Whether he was a stoner or not, he lampooned nationalism, which he described as “a plunge and relapse into old loves and narrow views”, while describing himself as a ‘good European’ (Beyond Good and Evil, p.241). In any case, such mundane political matters are not contained in Zarathustra. Here the much reviled ‘will to power’ (Wille zur Macht) idea is not a political statement but a philosophical one: Zarathustra found that everyone’s ‘will to power’ is exemplified in the desire “to create a world before which we can kneel”. But this metaphysical order does not exist, for life is, “that which must be overcome itself over and over again” (p.166). Indeed, if there is a political message in Zarathustra, it’s one that’s almost anarchistic, and anything but supportive of a totalitarian state: “The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. The lie comes out of its mouth, ‘I, the state, is the people’” (Zarathustra, p.69).

Nietzsche’s philosophy in Zarathustra is not predominately concerned with the death of the deity, naked power, moral relativism, or even the ‘Eternal Return’, but a joyous affirmation of living life to its full in a world without objective meaning. The Übermensch – in Nietzsche’s poetic turn of phrase – will jubilantly defy pessimism in a future “where all the time seems… a blissful mockery of moments” (Zarathustra, p.289).

Nietzsche was a dancer. Of course he was! And it showed: “Wasted is every day when we have not danced at least once” (p.228). So, rejoice, despite the emptiness of the literally godforsaken world: “lift up your hearts… and do not forget your legs… For better to dance clumsily than to walk lamely” (p.429). Thus spoke Zarathustra – a man whom Nietzsche described as “the laughing prophet” and “one who loves jumping and escapades.” (p.429).

© Hilarius Bogbinder 2026

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born translator and writer who studied theology and politics at Oxford University.

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Interviews

- Paul Guyer

Interview

Paul Guyer

Paul Guyer is an American philosopher and a leading scholar of both Immanuel Kant and aesthetics. AmirAli Maleki interviews him about Kant’s political and moral vision.

Why study Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and German Idealism in the modern world? Can this philosophy have any lessons for us?

I think that the metaphysics of the school we call ‘German Idealism’, culminating in Hegel (1770-1831), is fanciful and of no particular use. I do think that German Idealism continued Kant’s emphasis on the foundational value of freedom, but not always as clearly expressed as Kant expressed it himself. The basic idea of Kant’s moral philosophy in general, and his philosophy of Recht – the enforceable part of morality – in particular, is that everyone should have as much personal freedom, freedom of belief, and freedom to set and pursue their own ends, as is compatible with everyone else having an equal degree of freedom. This is a simple idea, but many people, individually or collectively, don’t seem to get it. I actually think that some of the best philosophers in the British and American post-Hegelian tradition, such as T.H. Green, Josiah Royce, and H.J. Paton, understood it better than say Fichte or Hegel; and of course John Rawls understood it very well. He drew a lot on Kant.

In my opinion, philosophy is ever-growing and cannot be limited to a specific nation. But many commentators believe that philosophy in Germany is the perfection of thought. Do you think that is correct?

I certainly would not claim that, although as I have just said, I do think Kant’s basic ideas about freedom have enduring value. I do not think that speakers of any one language, let alone residents of particular geopolitical entities – which we know are historical contingencies – have any special claim to philosophical ability. Having said which, the particular educational, cultural, legal, even religious conditions of some particular places at some particular times may make them particularly receptive to good philosophy; or particularly hostile to it.

In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant points out that although the moral law always supercedes any form of personal desire, humans cannot be expected to forget their own happiness. I want to know here, what’s the balance point for Kant between moral law and personal happiness? And if Kant wanted to invite people to the moral law in today’s world, and at the same time promise them their personal happiness will be preserved, what analysis might he give?

I think that the connection between morality and happiness in Kant is subtle. He insists that the fundamental principle of morality cannot be to seek to satisfy one’s desire for one’s own happiness (or that of any other particular person or family group) no matter what, because that will inevitably lead to conflicts. But neither does morality require one always to disregard one’s own desire for happiness, although in particular situations it might. Kant makes clear what morality requires in Part One of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793): morality requires that one adopt as one’s fundamental maxim – to subordinate one’s self-love to morality if or when they are in conflict. But what is the fundamental principle of morality? As I said – that each person should have as much freedom as is compatible with equal freedom for everyone else. And what is freedom? In Kant’s view, the ability to set and pursue one’s own ends. And what is happiness? Simply the condition that results from the realization of one’s ends, whatever they are. So what Kant’s principle actually prescribes is the pursuit of happiness within the constraint that everyone else has the same right to pursue their happiness, so some way must be found in which each person can pursue their own happiness compatible with others doing the same. Of course, Kant is right to observe that much of the time people do not keep to this constraint, and thus some moral people end up being unhappy because of the immoral actions of others. This moves him to defer the realization of the highest good to a ‘future life’ in his first two Critiques, and to there invoke the authorship of nature by God to make up for what does not seem to come about solely by human effort. Yet in his third Critique [Of Judgement, 1790], and say the 1793 essay Theory and Practice, he downplays the postulate of immortality, and simply suggests that it is the task of humankind to work toward the day when human beings will enjoy the greatest happiness possible within the constraint of everyone being equally free to pursue their own happiness. Here ‘their own’ always includes that of their family or friends, or whomever they care about as much as themselves.

As you imply, Kant sometimes claims morality requires a ‘final end’ or ultimate goal in the world, which religion provides. But since the moral duty originates from the moral agent in the ‘ kingdom of ends’, can’t the religion roped in by Kant be called a human creation that happens to evolve throughout history through moral experiments? In your opinion, is Kant a secular thinker?

It’s too simple to classify Kant as either a religious or a secular thinker. In his late work – from 1790 on – I believe that Kant describes the highest good as a condition that we have to believe can be realized within the natural history of humanity. Otherwise our efforts to be moral would be pointless and undermined. But he does continue to think that we need to be able to believe in the existence of God in order to rationally believe that human nature is capable of this achievement. I do not accept this point myself. Kant always describes his own religion as a ‘religion of pure reason’, not cultural, as his peer Moses Mendelssohn did in Jerusalem (1783). But Kant does think that because human nature weaves together both reason and sensory experience, humans need some scripture and liturgy to promote their morality. Unlike Mendelssohn – perhaps in implicit but intended contrast to Mendelssohn – he believes that only one scripture can serve this purpose – in other words, that in their support for the religion of reason, all human beings should use the same support. I think that this was a terrible mistake, and that Mendelssohn was much wiser on this point. My 2020 book, Reason and Experience in Mendelssohn and Kant, has much more on this.

An ‘ethical commonwealth’ is an interesting concept, and Kant claims that this republic is the only political condition that could be freely chosen and entered into. Maybe people who want to live outside of society can be forced to accept the law, but they cannot be forced to be virtuous. In the conditions in which I live, in Iran, only one moral law is acceptable by the power group and everyone must act according to it. But it seems that such a thing does not appear in Kant’s thought. For example, he points out that we can fulfill our moral duty without being forced or dogmatic. He talks about the concept of an ‘invisible church’ in this context. Let’s modernize this concept: for example, for my country we would need an ‘invisible mosque’ or an ‘invisible religion’ to bring about the highest good from every side according to the needs of the community. In this institution, there would be no compulsion, and everyone fulfills their duty according to their position in the society. So in my opinion, the ethical commonwealth is a pre-written idea that’s found in every nation, and this is the ‘earthly religion’ or the general law of a nation. But what’s your opinion? Is there ‘coercion in religion’ in Kant’s thought? And should religion be above the government or even in Kant’s intended republic? And what does Kant suggest regarding the separation of religion from politics?

“Kant does not approve of violence to achieve freedom” Battle of Mollwitz 1741

Kant’s view is clearly that coercion is justifiable only when it’s necessary to prevent someone from hindering the freedom of action of others. That is the proper function of Recht, or coercively enforceable law. Everything else must be left to an unforced respect for the moral law of individual agents. Kant could not be clearer about this matter.

Like Roger Williams, John Locke, and many other political philosophers of his time, Kant also believed that government should regulate religion only insofar as is necessary to preserve civil order – that is, only intervene when the religious practices of some would injure the freedom of others. There is no other Kantian justification for government interference in religious matters. In US terms, this means that the government should protect the free exercise of religion – itself meaning the practice of religion that does not restrict the freedom of others. It should however never be in the business of establishing religion or requiring any religious practice of any kind. This is the First Amendment to the US Constitution, which was at the time a necessary condition for ratification of the Constitution by several states.

Kant believes that we ourselves are the cause of our choices and of acting according to them, and that nothing from outside forces us into these actions. I think this is a fundamental and important message, since everything that happens in our lives depends on our choices. But, for example, if our choice is for a revolution, and this revolution becomes violent, yet we achieve freedom from oppression by it, can we still consider ourselves free people? Is this still a positive freedom from Kant’s point of view? My question is basically this: to what extent does Kant approve of violence to achieve a necessary goal such as freedom from the shackles of a tyrannical government?

Kant does not approve of violence to achieve freedom – and in particular, to improve an existing state. He does think that people must have the right to protest and suggest political improvements, and that rulers have an obligation to listen and to reform their states in the direction of improved justice, that is, more freedom. But he thinks that a ‘right to rebellion’ – in other words, a right to the use of coercion or violence against a government – is a formula for anarchy. It is however a highly contested matter in Kant scholarship what counts as a legitimate state with a legitimate claim to authority, and thus to a monopoly on the use of coercion. Does anything that calls itself a state – for example the Nazi ‘state’ from 1933-1945 – really count as a state that has a right to such a claim?

What do you think is the correct research method for Kant?

I don’t know what would count as a ‘Kantian research method’, or that there is any way to study him except by continued study of his own texts and of the best scholarly commentary and literature.

Can Kant still be analyzed in ways that are useful for today, or is his philosophy finished in this respect?

I certainly do think that his work has a continuing message, as I have been stressing, and that there is always room for continuing work in applying his general principles to circumstances that he hardly foresaw or could have foreseen. That work is never done, although it goes beyond Kant interpretation or scholarship, to the application of his principles.

What can we expect from philosophy for the future? Now that philosophy has taken a naturalistic form, what is its duty and what should it do? What is the purpose of philosophy? Do you think that philosophy should remain entirely in the academic field?

In my view, the work of philosophy is clarification and justification of our most fundamental concepts and principles – what Kant called ‘Aufsuchung und Feststellung’ (‘exploration and detection’). There will always be a need for that, because human knowledge and conditions are always changing. This work needs to be done by people who are well-trained and well-informed, so there should always be room for academic philosophy. But the work is not of much use if its results remain confined to academia: they need to be spread in culture more broadly.

• AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the fields of political philosophy, Islamic philosophy, and hermeneutics.

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Letters

- Letters

Letters

Letters

Race, Philosophy & Science • Chemical Reaction • Moral Feedback • Language Makes A Difference • God: To Be or Not To Be? • What Is Justification? • Women in Philosophy • Schopenhauer, Bringer of Joy • Hypothetical Dragons

Race, Philosophy & Science

Dear Editor: In her article in Issue 171, Sailee Khurjekar claims that race is culturally constructed rather than an inherent attribute. However, in the book The War on Science (ed. Lawrence Krauss), there’s an essay by Jerry Coyne and Luan Maroja reporting that a broad sample of genes from 3,600 people was examined, from people who self-identified as either African-American, white, Hispanic, or east Asian. Analysis of the sampled DNA showed that the genetic variation was distributed in clusters. The most striking finding was that there was a 99.84 percent match – an almost perfect match – between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. It seems to me this indicates differences that are biological rather than culturally constructed.

Peter Spurrier, Essex

Chemical Reaction

Dear Editor: I was very interested in Okan Nurettin Okur’s article in Issue 170, ‘Alchemy, Mining, Speculation and Experimentation’, in which he investigates the philosophy of chemistry. Okur claims that the main subject of chemistry is the transformation of matter by electron transfer or sharing, but I think energy considerations, including enthalpy and entropy gradients, and information transfer, are equally important. (Okan does state that the conservation of energy is fundamental.) I was impressed that Okan tackled emergence as downward causality, and mentions complex systems, but he omits to explain that these systems have built-in resilience due to feedback loops and transfer of information. This is encapsulated by Le Chatelier’s principle, which says that when a chemical equilibrium is disturbed – by changes in concentration, pressure, or temperature – the system does not passively drift. Instead, the disturbance is carried as information through chemical potentials and free energy gradients, and the system redistributes matter and energy until equilibrium is restored. This can be seen when the top is removed from a fizzy drinks bottle. In an unopened bottle, carbon dioxide is in equilibrium between being dissolved in the liquid and as gas above it. Opening the bottle drops the pressure, and the system responds by releasing more gas until a new balance is reached. Reseal the bottle, and the equilibrium shifts back toward dissolving more CO ₂ . Even here, matter is processing information about imbalance, and restoring coherence.

Importantly, Le Chatelier’s principle also applies at larger scales, including the Earth’s climate, which also resists disturbances through feedback loops: oceans absorb carbon dioxide; vegetation grows more rapidly; clouds adjust heat balance. While these processes operate on longer timescales and may not fully restore equilibrium, the underlying logic is the same: matter processes information about imbalance, and resists collapse. This shows chemistry not only produces emergent properties, but also encodes resilience through feedback: matter itself processes information to maintain coherence. Hence the philosophy of chemistry is vital for understanding nature, as well as for environmental ethics.

Russell Berg, Manchester

Moral Feedback

Dear Editor: I greatly enjoyed Lee Clarke’s essay, ‘What My Sister Taught Me About Humanity’ in Issue 170. My husband and I are both disabled, having acquired our disabilities during our careers. My husband is vision impaired, and I experience the world differently due to psychological factors. This has significantly altered our professional paths, and influences our worldviews. Each of us has experience of navigating a world in which we are often othered because of our perceived differences. These personal experiences give me a deep understanding of the narrative around disability and morality that Clarke discusses. I found his insights and illustrations particularly timely. Thanks for opening up this debate, which is often overlooked.

Claire Keogh, Dublin

Dear Editor: As the author hoped, I did enjoy Naina Krishnamurthy’s article ‘Forced Vaccination’ in number 170. The timely questions are: Can vaccination against certain contagious diseases be required by governmental authority? And the corollary, Is it morally wrong to refuse to get vaccinated in those circumstances?

Ms Krishnamurthy persuasively posits three prominent ethical frameworks to conclude that ‘forced’, that is, compulsory, vaccination, is sometimes ‘an ethical imperative’, and that the refusal to get vaccinated then is morally wrong. I have no quarrel with her arguments – but I suggest that they are unnecessarily limited to times when pandemics or public health crises are already in process. For Ms Krishnamurthy, compulsory vaccination is an ethical imperative during a crisis; but I suggest that compulsory vaccination against certain highly contagious and rapidly spread diseases is an ethical imperative before a crisis has occurred. Wouldn’t it be morally justifiable to compel vaccination so as to prevent a crisis? This is an urgent question for the United States in light of recent outbreaks of two diseases thought to have been eradicated: measles and polio. For both, the vectors are unvaccinated people. If they refused to get vaccinated, aren’t they morally culpable for a public health crisis that could have been prevented?

Gordon Shumaker

Language Makes A Difference

Dear Editor: I’d like to respond to the letter from Paulette Halili in PN 170 on Slavoj Žižek’s use of language, because I think I can help to clarify some of the issues she raises. The terms ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ were introduced by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). His use of them formed the basis of Structuralism, a philosophy of signs and meanings. Jacques Derrida criticized Saussure’s theories in the early chapters of his book Of Grammatology (1967) as part of his more general critique of Structuralism. This established him as one of the first ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers.

The terms ‘enunciated’ and ‘enunciation’, on the other hand, were introduced by the linguist Emile Benveniste (1902-1976). The distinction is different to that between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. The ‘enunciated’ is the statement I make; the ‘enunciation’ refers to the fact that I am making this statement. As Žižek remarked in his article in Philosophy Now Issue 168, this distinction proved to be fruitful for the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A central hypothesis of psychoanalysis is that what people say should not necessarily be taken at face value. There’s an old joke about two psychoanalysts who pass in the street. One says, “Good Morning!”, and the other thinks, ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ We might say, we know what the person enunciated, but what was the purpose of his enunciation?

Žižek’s article argued that this distinction could be a solution to the Liar Paradox. If I say, ‘I am a liar’, this statement might be intended to convey my fundamental honesty, in my willingness to admit dishonesty. In this, the ‘I’ of the statement ‘I am a liar’ does not coincide with the ‘I’ who makes the statement. Lacan called this the difference between the ‘subject of the enunciation’, and the ‘subject of the enunciated’. His view was that language in general produces this splitting of the ‘I’, and that this is the reason for the ‘split subject’ which forms the basis for the psychoanalytic conception of human beings.

I hope this is of some help in understanding the evolution of these ideas.

Peter Benson, London

God: To Be or Not To Be?

Dear Editor: In Issue 170, Raymond Tallis presents Anselm’s Ontological Argument as if it claims that God’s existence follows from the property of being perfect, and then invoking Kant and Frege to argue that existence is not a predicate. But this is a misrepresentation. Anselm was a Neoplatonist who held that God is ipsum esse: the necessary source of all dependent being. From this perspective, existence is not a property added to a concept, but rather, existence is identical with God’s essence. This means that understanding God’s nature entails understanding that God exists. Anselm does not rely on existence as a predicate at any level. So he is not “arguing a being into existence” as Tallis suggests. So while Kant’s and Frege’s objections arguably refute Descartes’ version of the Ontological Argument, they do not apply to Anselm’s version.

James Humphreys, Colchester

Dear Editor: In Issue 171 (Letters) Peter Spurrier makes an ingenious response to Professor Tallis’s treatment of the Ontological Argument in Issue 170. He claims that existence is a property, whereas in A Critique of Pure Reason, Kant (followed by Tallis) maintains that existence cannot be a predicate of a subject: any such statement is merely analytic in that it provides no new information about the subject. The correspondent then goes on to argue that the cat in the sentence ‘the cat is on the floor’ is unreal because the cat is actually on the mat. He nevertheless considers this unreal cat an appropriate subject for an untrue statement about its location. This makes grammatical sense but lacks referential validity.

Kant does not claim that such false assertions are illogical or meaningless, but merely that they do not correspond to the reality of things empirically verifiable. However, he does allow that we can make synthetic statements (i.e. ones that provide new information about the subject and are therefore valid predicates) about things which are themselves only hypothetical, unproven ideas. This is why, he argues, we can say ‘God is almighty’, but cannot then claim on the basis of such an affirmation that God exists, as Tallis points out in his article. This latter step is one that must be taken as an act of faith, which Kant does not disparage.

It is interesting to consider the foregoing points in the light of the distinction drawn by Thomas Aquinas in his Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia between essence and existence, which together constitute the substance of a thing. The first may be conceived and in principle be possible, but it is the second which renders it real in the phenomenal sense. Aquinas then argues that God, as the origin of all being, does not instantiate as substance but remains pure being, uniquely combining both essence and existence. This comes close to saying that if God is conceived of as the ultimate source of the existence of all things, the Prime Mover, he must therefore exist.

Colin Sowden, Abergavenny

What Is Justification?

Dear Editor: This is Kwame Teague from inside America’s prison system! After having read about knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ in the articles written by Maya Koka and Peter Keeble in Issue 169, I found their expositions inadequate. First off, the emphasis on justification through subsequent confirmation is misplaced. Belief as ‘a preconceived notion’ would more aptly embody what we would refer to as knowledge. Give me a moment to elaborate using Maya’s Xuangzang example. The scenario she presents never makes clear whether Xuangzang was just passing through the Gobi desert. If he was passing through without checking, his belief that he has seen water is still untested. But once he ultimately found out he was wrong, that lucky discovery is unconnected to why he had his belief or assumptions. So it seems that here, ‘being justified’ is being touted as just being right – which is a bit like justifying a broke watch because it’s right twice a day.

Kwame Teague, Hip Hop Humanism, Human Resource Department

Women in Philosophy

Dear Editor: Marcia Yudkin’s article, ‘What Women?’, in Issue 171 caught my attention immediately, and brought back some memories about my introduction to Philosophy in the late 1960s. I was starting a BA degree at the University of Toronto, and had made up my mind to pursue a Philosophy major to follow my particular interest in Epistemology, Metaphysics and Ethics. I was registered in an introductory course called Ethics 101 and I greatly looked forward to tackling some deep ethical theories under the direction of Professor L.M.G. Smith. It was a large class made up almost entirely of male students. To my surprise, Professor Smith was a woman. Lorraine Smith had recently completed her PhD in Philosophy at Oxford University, and she had been privileged to study under the internationally-renowned G.E.M. Anscombe. She had obviously been greatly influenced by Anscombe, and her lectures reflected much of Anscombe’s work. I was greatly impressed with Lorraine’s ability to articulate clearly and forcefully the arguments surrounding current ethical issues. Even the more outspoken students were no match for her spontaneous eloquence. Our first assignment was to write a brief paper on the ethical questions relating to the so-called Doctor-Mother-Baby case. A doctor is faced with the choice of crushing the baby’s skull to save the mother’s life, or saving the baby’s life and risking the mother’s death. I thought long and hard about the question, and I tried to refer to well-founded ethical theories in my essay. I felt I had done a good job. A common practice at the time was to have graduate students mark the written papers of undergraduates before being checked by the course professor. I received a C for my paper with a terse comment, “You’ve got it all wrong”. The marker made it clear she was a woman, a feminist, and someone with clear views about a woman’s rights. That was a bit of a shock, but I found a short hand-written paragraph at the bottom of the last page, written by Lorraine Smith. “Actually”, she wrote, “you’ve got it all right. The marker has got it all wrong.” She changed my grade to an A. The next class was a follow up on our papers. Lorraine pointed out that the topic was an emotional issue for many people. However, she told us, emotions have no place in philosophy. We have to look at firm premises from which we can derive conclusions. Then she added something which I never forgot. We all have emotions and feelings, she said, and we all have a brain. But for a philosopher, the brain must always wear the pants.

John Brownridge, Ontario

Schopenhauer, Bringer of Joy

Dear Editor: I write as one whose natural life outlook is pretty much that of a relentlessly glass-half-full Labrador [a famously happy-go-lucky breed of dog. Ed.]. I have to stick my neck out here… It’s taken me three years to read every (translated) word Schopenhauer published, and no other philosopher’s work has given me such consistent solace and sustained joy. Did he show himself to be a grump-faced pessimist, misogynist, racist and pretty horrible man? Yes, and this simply makes him a perfect example of a crucial truth he posits, namely that we humans are deeply flawed creatures, swimming through this glorious horror show and battle-of-the-wills called life, endlessly at the mercy of our prejudices, inclinations and stormy passions. Open any newspaper! I can do no better here than to quote the eminently reasonable and sensible Bryan Magee: “No general philosophy – no ontology, epistemology or logic – can entail pessimistic conclusions … The traditional identification of [Schopenhauer] in terms of his pessimism is largely irrelevant to a serious consideration of him as a philosopher: I am tempted to say that it is a view of his writings which leaves his philosophy out.” Poor old Arthur!

Gary Matthewman, Brighton

Dear Editor: I was interested in Eric Comerford’s imagined conversation between Bilbo and Gandalf on happiness and wellbeing (Philosophy Now Issue 171). To misquote Socrates, life without challenges is not worth living. There are a couple of issues here, one of them being the role of fiction in humanity’s evolution. Fiction is not unlike dreaming in that we confront scenarios that we might not encounter in real life, yet we can learn from them. In fact, I contend that the language of stories is the language of dreams, and that, if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work.

The overcoming of adversity is a universal theme in fiction, going back to Homer’s Odyssey, if not earlier. And of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings exemplifies this in multiple storylines with multiple characters.

All of us, when we reach a certain age, can look back at all the events in our life that ultimately formed our current selves as if we are a piece of clay moulded by life’s experiences. And the thing is that the negative events in our life are just as significant in this process as the positive ones, if not more so. It’s very important to find a purpose, but it invariably involves challenges and also failures. So to revisit Socrates: arguably, a life without failure is not worth living.

Paul Mealing, Melbourne

Dear Editor: In Issue 171 Professor Hammerton provides a useful discussion of the tension that can occur between achievement in life and the enjoyment of it. He uses the term ‘meaningful’ to describe lives of achievement. I find the description of any life as ‘meaningful’ to be unhelpful. The word can be applied to so many very different lives, from the life of a religious hermit, to the mother of a family or to a great scientist or artist. And certainly the life of Adolf Hitler was meaningful to the many millions that he harmed. If a term can be so widely applied, is it useful? Does it tell us anything about the person it is meant to describe? Also, if the term is used, one might expect its opposite to give some information. But whose life can be called meaningless or not meaningful? Even the life of a fetus aborted in the first trimester was not meaningless to its mother.

Other descriptive terms give extra information about a life. It may be long or short, happy or unhappy, beneficial or harmful to a few or to many. It is also useful to say in what way it harmed or benefited how many others and which ones. Just to say a life was ‘meaningful’ conveys no extra information.

Allen Shaw, Leeds

Dear Editor: I am writing in regard to your recent Ultimate Guide to Ancient Greek Philosophy, particularly the article ‘Pythagoras and the Numbers Game’. In the section ‘The Collapse of Pythagoreanism’ it is stated that “Irrational numbers are both even and odd at the same time.” This is complete nonsense. It is like saying that the colour orange is both a planet and a star at the same time. Irrational numbers are those that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers (positive and negative whole numbers). The terms ‘odd’ and ‘even’ apply only to integers. An integer, call it x, is odd if it can be expressed as x = 2y + 1, where y is an integer. On the other hand, an integer, x, is even if it can be expressed as x = 2y, where y is an integer. I repeat, it is a statement that applies to integers. It cannot be applied to irrational numbers.

Catherine Notman

Hypothetical Dragons

If a dragon breathes on you, then you get burned.

If what follows if is then, then if if’s so,

then so is then.

If then is so, then if may be,

but not so necessarily.

If if is not, then then may be,

or then again, then may be not.

If then is not, then ‘tis a fact, if is not,

and that is that.

Joe Atkinson, Kemptville, Ontario

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Columns

- The Possibility-Bearing Animal

- Lucretius (c.95-c.55 BCE)

- Philosophers on Children

- Plutarch on Grief

Tallis in Wonderland

The Possibility-Bearing Animal

Raymond Tallis explores a twilight zone.

There have been many ways in which philosophers have tried to characterise our distinctive human nature, and some are more convincing than others. Aristotle’s definition of man as ‘the rational animal’ invites wild laughter in the light of what we often get up to individually and collectively. Perhaps ‘the rationalising animal’ may be closer to the mark, given our capacity to justify the most destructive, counter-productive, and wicked behaviour. Homo sapiens – the title science has conferred on our most recent edition – which translates as ‘wise man’, also seems open to challenge, given that our wisdom, such as it is, is manifested somewhat intermittently.

The definition of man as ‘the speaking animal’ is less vulnerable. We are, after all, (possibly) the only living creatures who can communicate abstract ideas by means of abstract symbols materialized in hot air – and, more recently, black ink. Out of such communication, in which what-is is made explicit and transformed into ‘that-it-is’, we have woven the infinitely complex world in which we pass our lives. This is the realm to which I have applied an ugly neologism: the Thatosphere (see my Seeing Ourselves: Reclaiming Humanity from God and Science, 2020). Being comprised of shared knowledge and expectations, institutions, practices, and a landscape of manufactured artefacts, the Thatosphere is utterly unlike the environment of any other living creature. And although the hand has played an important part in our ascent to the Thatosphere (see my The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being, 2003), it is language, above all, which has expanded our capacity to make explicit what, who, and where we are.

However, highlighting what-is as ‘that which is the case’ is shadowed by a sense of things – objects, states of affairs, events – that only might be the case. We have a vastly extended, articulated, and structured sense of possibility, immeasurably different even from that of our nearest primate kin. So I say: man is the possibility-creating animal.

Possibly So

Possibilities are elusive entities that have many striking features distinguishing them from actualities. The most obvious is that they exist only insofar as they are entertained. Two other characteristics are equally important: they are general and they are located in the future.

First, generality. Possibilities, unlike actualities, do not have absolute individuality. For example, the seemingly specific possibility that Felix the cat is in the garden can be realized in countless different ways. Describing exactly where Felix-in-the-garden is, his posture, the arrangement of the hairs in his fur, and so on, is an incompletable task. Actualities – that which is – will always be more specific than any possibilities in which they are entertained.

As for possibilities being located in an imagined future: this is obviously the case when we anticipate something that might happen but has not yet done so. But futurity is also a characteristic of things that have actually happened but have not yet been experienced – something, for example, that we might seek out or anticipate finding to be the case. Here, what lies in the future is confirmation that what might be the case is in fact the case.

Generality and futurity by contrast are not features of actuality. That which is actual is precisely what it is, period; and it is precisely when it is.

So what? Am I making a three-course meal out of a single pea? No. The ability to entertain irreducibly general, inescapably future, possibilities, is central to the exercise of our freedom: as agents, we act from a realm of what might be, which is general and future-tensed – we act from a virtual outside on the particular, tenseless realm of the actual (see ‘The Mystery of Freedom’, Philosophy Now 140, for more on this).

But possibilities are also interesting for another reason. That which might be seems to lie in an ontological grey zone between that which is and that which is not; between something and nothing. Unlike pure nothing, the possibility that Felix is in the garden is not featureless. It is, for example, different from the possibility that Rover is in the garden, or Felix is in the street. Nevertheless, it may not be realized, and hence fail to be that which is.

It is difficult to get one’s head round this ambivalent nature of possibilities – that they are neither something nor nothing. This difficulty may explain some of the confusion surrounding attempts to make sense of certain paradoxes in quantum physics. But before we enter this baffling territory, let us look a more homely example: the possible results of tossing a coin.

There are, it’s generally assumed, two possible outcomes of a coin toss: heads or tails. If the coin is properly minted and the tossing is not rigged, heads and tails should occur with equal frequency – though, due to chance variations, this may not be evident until there have been a large number of tosses. Indeed, the convergence to 50/50 is seen as a reassurance that the outcome is not rigged through human interference, and this explains why we regard possibilities and their relative frequency as manifestations of the natural world.

Not so fast. When we toss a coin there are not just two but in fact innumerable possible outcomes of – countless possible futures attached to – this action. The classification ‘heads or tails’ overlooks the wide range of actual physical outcomes of tossing the coin. The distance the coin travels; the number of wobbles it has after landing; the number of blades of grass bent as it rolls to quiescence; how far they are bent; how many insects are upset and in what way; and how many grains or even molecules of soil are displaced or disturbed, are just some variables acquiring definite values. And then there are consequences rippling out from the coin’s trajectory. Of course, none of these are relevant to the decision as to who bats first [coin tosses decide that in cricket]; but they are real events in the natural world. The fact that they are for the most part minute does not mean they are unreal. Scales are not part of unobserved nature: atoms are as natural as mountains. Different scales of observation simply reflect our interests and the concerns that invent and apply them, but nature is not a snob differentiating the relevant from the irrelevant, elevating some aspects of events to the status of signals and downgrading others to noise. The actual is no less actual for being irrelevant to us.

I could go on, but my point, I hope, is made. Natural events count as outcomes, that is, as realisations of possibilities, only if they are entertained in the first place as possibilities by conscious beings. The ranges of possible events, such that they have a certain probability of occurring, likewise exist only insofar as they are laid down by our interests or the conventions to which we subscribe. So the belief that there are only two possible outcomes of a coin toss, and that, if the toss is properly conducted, those outcomes have equal probability, does not correspond to an objective truth about the natural world, but to the natural world seen through the lens of interests and conventions that permit us to ignore countless details of the outcome of tossing the coin so that it boils down (or boils up) to ‘heads or tails’.

A Quantum of Ignorance

We can conclude from this that probabilities are no more objective features of the physical world than are possibilities, which of course exist only insofar as they are envisaged. Which brings us to quantum mechanics. The very name of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle reminds us that quantum probabilities, like other probabilities, are inseparable from an explicit sense of our ignorance. Probabilities, focussed on a particular area of what might be, are defined by our interests. So probabilities cannot be separated from ignorance, and (conscious) ignorance cannot be separated from possibility, the sense of what might be. Hence the validity of Bruno de Finetti’s assertion in Theory of Probability (2017), that to endow probabilities with an actual objective existence is “analogous to superstitious beliefs… in fairies and witches.”

This reifying of probabilities and locating them in the natural world accounts for much of the seemingly endless debate about what, if anything, quantum mechanics tells us about objective (mind-independent) reality. To think of quantum observation or measurement as bringing about a transition from reality-out-there as a cloud of possibilities or possible values, to an actuality within a given range of values, is to project our ignorance into the natural world and suggest that the world itself is ontologically blurred. In fact, the transition made by measurement is not from the possible (which exists only insofar as it’s entertained by minds) to the actual, but from ignorance to knowledge. Nothing in this transition corresponds to the much-talked-of ‘collapse’ of multiple superimposed states of a quantum system to a single definite state when an observation is made.

There is much more to this story, and it occupies many pages in my most recent book Circling Round Explicitness: The Heart of the Mystery of Human Being (2025). But I want to slip away from the tangled realm of quantum mechanics (which is something of an away match for your columnist) to another realm of science in which possibilities are naturalized: neuroscience. For an increasing number of neuroscientists, our experience of the world is woven out of a sense of what is possible which is continuously corrected by further experience. According to this ‘predictive processing’ theory, the brain is a predictor of sensory input, which is then compared with actual sensory input. For those who embrace this theory, notwithstanding that the brain is a material actuality, it is mysteriously able to generate a future tense to house predictions that can be corrected by other experiences also generated by the brain. In short, the mind is able to entertain possibilities that may or may not be actualized. But this theory has no explanatory power if nothing explains how possibility can awaken in actuality, in the material brain. And so we come back to Man, the Possibility-Bearing Animal. The ability to entertain, articulate, and share possibilities lies at the heart of our distinctive humanity and the greatness (for good or ill) of our achievements. Inquiry, imagination, dreams, hopes, ingenuity, are all founded in our ability to reach beyond what is delivered to our senses – what is actually before us – to what might or might not be, what is unknown, or what is not yet. So while there is some truth in WB Yeats’s assertion (in his poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’) that “measurement began our might”, there is a deeper truth in the notion that our might ultimately lies in our capacity to reach beyond what is to what-might-be. In might began our might.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2026

Raymond Tallis’s Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City is out now in conjunction with Philosophy Now.

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Philosophical Haiku

Lucretius (c.95-c.55 BCE)

by Terence Green

Fear not time’s passage,

Such is the nature of things.

Live until you cease.

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet. And I’m afraid, biographically, that’s about all we know. He did, however, write a tremendous poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), in which he set out, in stylish Latin hexameters, the philosophy of Epicurus. Fundamental to Lucretius’s exposition is the Epicurean claim that we are just material beings, without any spiritual or soul-like element. And so, when we die, that’s it, there’s nothing. With this cheery news in hand, the poem’s key message is that we all have within ourselves the possibility of attaining happiness. Hurrah! We just have to stop worrying about dying, of course.

To help liberate us from this pointless anxiety, Lucretius poses a few thought-provoking questions: Why waste valuable time and energy obsessing about dying, since once we’re dead, we’ll know nothing about it? Do we lament the eternity that passed before we were born? That would be ridiculous. So why lament the eternity that will pass after we’re gone? From the standpoint of the universe, we exist for not even a blink of an eye, so how can life be that important to us?

Lucretius hoped that pondering such Epicurean questions as these would give his contemporaries contentment and calm. We can imagine, however, that some might have instead collapsed in fits of nervous despair: not everyone is captivated by the idea of the eternal – especially eternal death. It just seems like such a very long time to be doing nothing.

© Terence Green 2026

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Children

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Your columnist recently received a request from a reader called Dawn. She was due to give birth soon, and asked, “What have the great philosophers written about babies and children?” Not much, I thought.

I was wrong. Philosophers have actually written a fair bit about small children. Take for example Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who was very poetic: “The baby is innocence and forgetfulness, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred yes.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.56). In contrast, Hannah Arendt (1906-1973) wrote rather portentously that we have “come to the point in history where it is little children who are being asked to change the world” (Reflections on Little Rock, p.496).

Like Nietzsche and Arendt, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) didn’t have any children of his own, but he probably had more direct experience with infants than either of them. For starters, he spent part of his life as effectively the male nanny of the son of an Earl. He expressed his frustration with the little toddler running wild at the time when he wanted to read Euclid and write his Leviathan. He concluded that the naughtiness and bad behaviour of children originated in the “natural indulgence of parents” (Elements of Law, p.23).

G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) was a speculative metaphysician, unlike his empirical English colleague. Very few philosophers have been further apart than these two men. However, they shared similar experiences – and drew similar conclusions on this topic. Reflecting on his own time as a childcare professional, Hegel mused that “subordination” had to be “nurtured in children” as this would “create the longing to grow up.” Without this discipline, the children would have a “cheeky nature and nosey wisdom [would] arise.” (Philosophy of Right p.175)

But not all philosophers were strict disciplinarians. John Locke (1627-1704) was rather progressive. His Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) is an example. He admitted that many a parent has been annoyed by questions from little children, but he saw it more positively: “Curiosity in children is but an appetite after knowledge and ought to be encouraged.” Locke also wrote that “Children hate to be idle, and should be constantly employed in something” (Thoughts Concerning Education, p.117)

Locke was one of the inspirations for the Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote a book on the upbringing of children. It was called Emile or On Education (1762). In the section on toddlers, he reflected on how we should not scold children; not tell them off. But, if a little child was unruly and broke a window, the parent should let him (or her) sleep in there. It might give the toddler a cold, but that wouldn’t cause him or her lasting harm, and they would literally be taught a lesson.

I understand that Dawn has now given birth. Hopefully these philosophical points will come in handy.

© Matt Qvortrup 2026

Matt Qvortrup is author of Great Minds on Small Things, published by Duckworth.

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The Art of Living

Plutarch on Grief

Massimo Pigliucci is moved by a 2,000 year old letter.

The time is around 90 CE, and Plutarch of Chaeronea in Greece is travelling when news reaches him of the death of his two-year-old daughter Timoxena. Since Plutarch is unable to return home immediately, he decides to write to his wife, also named Timoxena, attempting to use his knowledge of philosophy to provide some consolation for her grief.

While this sad episode took place almost two millennia ago, similar situations of course occur today, reminding us just how difficult it is to be of comfort to our fellow human beings when they are distraught. But Plutarch, a Platonist, was one of many Greco-Roman intellectuals who thought that if philosophy isn’t going to be useful in practice then it’s not worth bothering with in the first place.

The letter displays a tender and personal tone, with Plutarch attempting to balance acknowledgment of the genuine grief he himself is experiencing as the father of little Timoxena with the delivery of philosophical counsel to the person with whom he has shared the most intimate moments of his life, including Timoxena’s birth. The challenge he faces is how to provide comfort to his wife without coming across as being condescending or, worse, denying the reality of her pain. One way Plutarch achieves this is by treating his wife as his intellectual equal – something certainly quite rare in those times.

A key insight of Plutarch’s is that even in grief we should strive for moderation, practicing the cardinal virtue of temperance. On the one hand, we ought not to be callous and unfeeling, which would be inhuman; but on the other hand, we also need to avoid wallowing in excessive grief, which was the custom among both the Greeks and the Romans – so much so that people would hire praeficae, professional wailer women, who would cry loudly and incessantly and even tear at their hair in order to publicly display distress.

Plutarch commends his wife for not having fallen for the extreme of excessive grief, and reminds her that their daughter is in a state of peace now that her soul has been liberated from the incumbrance of the body. He also points out that the two of them, together with their other children, still have much in life that other people envy, and that it would be ungrateful of them not to acknowledge it:

“Bear in mind how enviable you still appear in [other people’s] eyes for your children, home, and way of life. And it is unreasonable, when others would gladly choose your lot, even with our present grief thrown in, for you, whose lot it actually is, to complain and be disconsolate; nor yet to be taught by the very bitterness of your grief how great is the delight for us in what is still left, but instead, like the critics who pick out the ‘headless’ and ‘docked’ lines of Homer, overlooking the many splendid passages of flawless execution, to keep a strict account of the shortcomings of your life and cavil at them.”

(Complete Works of Plutarch, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt and William Goodwin, 2013)

The role of philosophy here – and therefore of reason – is in helping us to manage, not eliminate, our emotions. Accordingly, Plutarch provides some positive advice to his wife, suggesting that she focuses on the good memories she has of her daughter. He also says that just because Timoxena’s life was so short, this doesn’t mean that those few memories are not precious, nor that the time the two of them spent with her is meaningless:

“Just as she was herself the most delightful thing in the world to embrace, to see, to hear, so too must the thought of her life with us be our companion, bringing with it joy in greater measure, nay in many times greater measure than it brings sorrow.”

We do not control such things as life and death, but we are in charge of our attitude toward them, and of our behavior toward our loved ones.

I find this two thousand-year-old letter still very moving and useful to read, regarding it as an inspiration every time I find myself in the unenviable position of having to console a family member or a friend who has lost someone important. The notion that grief is a natural human emotion that may turn unhealthy if it becomes all-consuming, or when it takes over our identity, is one to consider carefully, especially before one is struck by it, as we all inevitably are.

Plutarch’s letter shows philosophy attempting to meet us in our vulnerability and provide us with practical resources not just abstract theory. Of course, the enduring question is whether reason truly can help us in dreadful situations such as the loss of a child. I firmly believe that it can. The lasting value of Plutarch’s counsel is that we can come to see grief as something we can navigate with both heart and mind.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2026

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and Beyond Stoicism: A Guide to the Good Life with Stoics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Other Ancient Philosophers (with Greg Lopez and Meredith Kunz, The Experiment). More by him at figsinwintertime.substack.com.

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Reviews

- Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds

- Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me by Edith Hall

- Rope

- The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer

Books

Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds

Dylan Neri on Singer’s ‘drowning child’ thought experiment.

Death in a Shallow Pond (2025) by David Edmonds is the biography of an idea. That idea, delivered into the world by Peter Singer in his 1972 paper ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, is the ‘Drowning Child’ thought-experiment. Singer’s basic premise is, “if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.” In this thought experiment, you are walking past a shallow pond when you spot a small child drowning in it. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she will die. Wading in is easy and safe, but it will ruin your new shoes. There’s no time to change them. What should you do?

From this example Singer draws an analogy for ethics in modern society: “According to Singer,” writes Edmonds, “most of us in the affluent world metaphorically walk past a shallow pond every day of our lives.” In what sense do we walk past drowning children? Well, by not donating as much as we can to “charities that operate in the developing world with a mission to help those most in need.”

A Prophet Arises

Edmonds opens with a quote from Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.” This is presumably meant to serve as a subtle form of suggestion – that is: “Marx? This idea must be radical!” It places Singer in a historic line of intellectuals and prophets going back to Moses, Plato, and beyond, who see their role as the benevolent shapers of primitive men, who can’t understand higher concepts of art and morality without them.

It was Mikhail Bakunin who realised in arguing with Marx long before Leninism, that if you accept the idea of humans as ‘mere historical products’ – simple reflections of their environment – it follows that there’s no moral barrier to moulding them to be anything you like. If humans don’t have any intrinsic nature – any instinct for freedom, say – then there’s no moral reason for leaving them be. Bakunin also recognised that this assumption would lead to a new class of intellectuals – ones who would realise that the best way to power is to associate yourself with a rising ruling class. These new intellectuals now include the progressive liberals of the modern age – those who believe like Walter Lippmann that in a democracy there are two classes of citizens. There are the general public, whom Lippmann calls ignorant and meddlesome outsiders who couldn’t on their own know right from wrong and must not be trusted; and there are the responsible people, the smart people, those with integrity and honour, the intellectual aristocracy (or priesthood) – who should be in charge (see Public Opinion by W. Lippmann, 1922). Singer’s ‘radical’ thinking, and by extension this book, is merely a continuation of this progressive liberalism.

Edmonds himself places the origins of Singer’s thinking in the anti-war movements of the Sixties, and defines it in opposition to the ossified state of philosophy at the time. He writes that Singer was at “the forefront of taking philosophy out of the academic world and into the real world” (crucially, Edmonds here means moral philosophy). “He,” continues the awe-inspired Edmonds, “merely made abstract philosophy accessible to the average person, stripping away the mystery, as Wittgenstein stated.” Perhaps it might equally be argued that Singer’s demystification of morality was inspired by a Moses-like figure! We learn that Singer was ‘unimpressed’ by the intuitionism of his teacher McCluskey in response to the wars in Korea and Indochina; but “Singer was particularly impressed by [Derek] Parfit” – a man who “spent the last quarter of his life determined to demonstrate that there were moral facts: that morality was objective.” Indeed, this is one of the main preoccupations of that branch of philosophy known as metaethics. But doesn’t this ambition to hand down absolute moral facts mean that metaethicists have a prophet-motive? Every figure mentioned in this book intensifies the obvious analogy with religion, which becomes almost ironic by the end – but perhaps none more so than Parfit, whose secular monasticism is worthy of a Python sketch: “He wore the same clothes every day – gray trousers, white shirt, red tie – so that he didn’t waste time selecting between outfits. He read while exercising and brushing his teeth… He made instant coffee from a hot water tap, so that he didn’t waste time boiling a kettle.” There is no reason to take these persons any more seriously than someone with a tin-foil helmet proclaiming the imminent arrival of God. Yet Singer did take these people seriously, so here we are.

Ossified Thought In Motion

Singer’s thought-experiment eventually spawned a movement called Effective Altruism. It encourages people to donate as much of their salary as they can afford to charities scientifically chosen to maximise the positive impact of donations made. This movement is (unfortunately) the main topic of the book.

The Effective Altruism movement’s founders are William MacAskill and Toby Ord, two well-raised middle-class kids, and the essential conservatism of the ideology is a result of this fact. Yet on the contradiction between this movement’s aim – maximum human benefit – and the nature of capitalism Edmonds is curiously silent, even when comment seems unavoidable. For example, in sketching the rise of the movement from the student days of Ord and MacAskill, Edmonds writes that “MacAskill eventually distanced himself from environmental politics, in part because his pragmatic approach was at odds with some of his fellow activists” (MacAskill supported carbon trading). Here Edmonds offers no opinion or analysis, writing only that this was “condemned by many of his fellow environmentalists as being a capitalist approach.” Rather, we learn that MacAskill “started donating 5 percent of his modest income – his parents were financing his living costs.”

The basic approach of Effective Altruism is encapsulated in the ‘80,000 Hours’ principle. The argument goes, if you’re clever, and therefore a suitable candidate to join the club of elite liberal intellectual and moral guardians, rather than work for a charity or anything demeaning like that, you should get a high-paying job in finance and donate your money. By using sophisticated statistical methods – that is, the cold rationality of the utilitarian calculus of benefit – it’s possible to measure which charity is most worthy of your donation, because it saves the most lives. More money for the best charity, better world, QED. In the modern economy the result of this reasoning, of course, is that most good people should work in finance.

Perhaps it’s easier to see the gaping assumptions here without a decent upbringing and a good education. The most morally unsophisticated working class single mother, who works full-time to pay for the privilege of raising her children, and whose plight might not be directly solvable by donations to some charity scapegoat, can see it most clearly. But it doesn’t need to be a radical argument against capitalism – not even anti-capitalist, in fact – to point out the cruel and immensely unequal nature of modern neoliberalism, which is itself dependent on the speculative financial economy Singer and Edmonds wants us to prop up. Edmonds offers nothing about that. Nor does he deal with the quite obvious fact that not everything can be solved by charitable donations. To which charity should the abolitionists have donated? Or the supporters of universal suffrage? Or the miners of the Rhondda Valley?

Death in the Shallows by Venantius J Pinto 202

Criticisms & Rebuttals

The second half of the book is dedicated to Edmonds responding to criticisms. But because the discussion of the book is so limited in scope, the arguments against it are only relevant within the domain of two apparent fundamental assumptions: that there is no human nature, and that capitalism is the sole guarantor of happiness – two crucial underlying premises of his argument that are not made explicit by Edmonds.

Take Edmonds’ first rebuttal – against the criticism that thought-experiments are too artificial to be applicable. Well, says Edmonds, not in this case. Why? Because children do drown every year, and we can imagine it happening. But by excluding the capitalist system from his argument, Edmonds closes down an interesting line of discussion. For instance, what causes there to be so many (metaphorically) ‘drowning’ children in the first place? Besides, from a purely utilitarian perspective such as Singer’s, surely it isn’t certain that this drowning of children might not lead to greater overall happiness, and therefore be justified? A particularly callous utilitarian might ask: Is it not better for a few million children to drown so that a few hundred million Westerners can be happy? But by the same argument, would it not have been better just to let a few million Jews die if this had brought enough happiness to enough Nazis?

The most interesting criticism is found in the chapter ‘The New White Man’s Burden: The Institutional Critique’. Edmonds quotes the ‘frequent criticism’ that “to the extent that Effective Altruism can be described as a social movement, it is in fact a movement not of struggling social workers, English teachers, or iron workers, but of wealthy (mostly white and male) capitalists, analytic moral philosophers at elite institutions, and, significantly, technologists.” What Edmonds misses though, is that the issue here is not whether “there are now more women involved” or that “the proportion of white people is decreasing, and that most people in the movement describe themselves as left wing.” Even if Effective Altruism became a wonderful mosaic of ethnic and gender diversity, it would still be an institution of Bakunin’s intellectuals, of Lippmann’s guardians, who ensure that the ignorant and meddlesome outsiders – those too stupid to know anything – remain outside. It’s no coincidence that every ‘progressive’ company, from the Financial Times to Microsoft, makes propitiations to the diversity quotas and inclusivity drives. It’s part of a carefully marketed, progressive, liberal ‘manufacture of consent’ (Lippmann’s term). This sickly consensus has become the basis of modern democracy, just as Bakunin predicted. It’s happened because if you can convince anyone who might think differently – say, poor whites, women, or ethnic minorities – that you represent the true progressive ‘left wing’, and that anything dissenting from your agenda is antithetical to progress and not worth the attention of any true intellectual, then there is no danger of revolutionary change – no threat that the meddlesome and ignorant outsiders might interfere in politics. Rather than make a fuss, anyone with the right ideas and sufficient smarts will get the right job and ensure progress continues unabashed. Or as the 80,000 Hours principle has it, get a job in high finance and donate as much money as possible.

The final chapter is a postscript about the reaction to Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation, in which he argued that “what made humans morally distinct from animals was not their being ‘human’ p er se” because “most of the traits that make us ‘persons’ – beings worthy of special moral status – develop slowly after human conception and are absent at the embryo stage.” Edmonds again deals with criticisms with all the enthusiasm of a true believer. Nowhere does he think it relevant in this context to discuss the nature of rights and their reciprocal relationship with responsibilities – which responsibilities animals evidently do not have. Nor does Edmonds point out the obvious hypocrisy in Singer’s two positions; namely, why do the rights of animals deserve the radical activism that is absent from the Effective Altruist doctrine? Charitable donations for suffering humans; radical civil disobedience for suffering cows. There is something morally suspect about people who value animal life over human, the vegans and animal-lovers who say, “I would rather a human die than an animal.” Perhaps this perspective can be best understood with the words of G.K. Chesterton: “where animals are worshipped, humans tend to be sacrificed.”

This, just as with the Effective Altruism cult, is nothing more than activism for the children of privilege who want the illusion of radicalism without any of the (real) sacrifice. Another pseudo-religion of the new consumer democracy. This is most likely why the movement, and Singer himself, is most popular among middle-class students on university campuses, for any true sacrifice might jeopardize their future position among the intellectual and moral guardians of society; might even mean solidarity with the human sufferers in their own communities and perhaps even the realisation that those sufferers are just as moral, maybe even just as smart, as themselves. And that they must never accept.

© Dylan Neri 2026

Dylan Neri is a writer from Newcastle upon Tyne.

• Death in a Shallow Pond, David Edmonds, Princeton University Press, 2025, £20 hb, 288 pages

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Books

Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me by Edith Hall

Manisha Sarade on suicide’s meaning for the Greeks and for us.

Is there any problem more quietly present, and more awkwardly evaded, than suicide? Philosophy asks us to look squarely at the question that Albert Camus called “the only serious philosophical problem” – to ask, not only why people live, but why some choose not to. Edith Hall’s Facing Down the Furies (2024) does exactly this, drawing on her own family’s troubled history and the massive shadow of the ancient Greeks, whose tragic dramas crackle with suffering but never quite snuff out hope. Camus, ever the philosopher of both daylight and shadow, stares unblinkingly at darkness: he writes, “To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy” (The Myth of Sisyphus). Hall does not answer for us, and does not try. Instead, she reminds us (as Camus does), that there is defiance in remaining, and sometimes, perhaps, in departing.

Hall’s approach would have pleased the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who recommended that we philosophize always among people, not just with ideas. She narrates the suicides of her great-grandfather, her grandmother Edith, and her cousin Alex, never with sentimental display, but in the spirit of candid confrontation. Meanwhile the classical world, she claims, gives us permission to place pain on stage, to honor it not as an aberration, but as an element of life. “We are all, at times, pursued by the Furies,” she writes, referencing the Erinyes, the relentless goddesses of guilt who stalk the characters in Aeschylus’s dramas, and who perhaps stalk the rest of us too.

It’s easy today to react to suicide through the lens of medicalised psychology or to surround it with a hush of embarrassment. The Greeks responded differently. Ajax, shamed and defeated, schose to fall on his sword with the same gravitas as Hamlet asking “To be, or not to be?” Antigone the theatrical heroine weds herself to the grave out of conviction; while Socrates sips hemlock serenely, taking leave of life for reasons both social and philosophical. With the ancient Greeks, suffering is not hidden away, but invited, in chorus and verse, into the center of the conversation.

Hall’s gift is an ability to thread these ancient stories into the fabric of her own. When she speaks of her great-grandfather fallen from respectability in a small Scottish town, we recall Ajax undone by dishonor. With her grandmother Edith – withdrawn, depressive, ultimately lost to the silence of suicide – Hall finds kinship with Euripides’ Phaedra, fighting against shame and inner agony. It’s striking how the Greeks, despite their distance, seem to know our troubles intimately.

Orestes and the Erinyes Gustave Moreau 1891

There’s a poet’s touch here, too. As Hall turns to Sophocles and Euripides to unravel suffering, the echo of W.H. Auden’s “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”, Sylvia Plath’s raw “Dying / Is an art”, and Leonard Cohen’s mournful song Bird on the Wire, shows how Hall’s questions of choice, despair, and endurance shine brightest in lyric rather than in dry argument. The Greeks, too, would have recognized the power of poetry to frame our pain, to hold it tenderly, even, sometimes, to laugh at it.

Hall isn’t interested in solemn rules or neat answers. Instead, she brings the great philosophers into her unsolvable questions, treating them as conversation partners. In the dialogue Phaedo, Plato finds suicide a trespass against the gods – an idea that has echoed for centuries in many religious prohibitions. The Stoics, though, think differently. Epictetus counsels endurance but also freedom; and Seneca, especially, recommends measuring life not by duration but by dignity: “It is not that we have a short time to live,” Seneca wrote, “but that we waste much of it” – a line that could be either an anthem for living or a permission slip for dying.

The Greeks did not treat self-destruction as straightforwardly wrong. In Greek mythology and literature, Antigone chooses death as an act of moral fidelity. Cato the Younger, a Roman deeply immersed in Greek culture, slashes his own throat as rebellion against tyranny. Hall, reflecting on these stories, finds a kind of dignity, not in the act itself, but in the serious consideration of what a life means, and why sometimes it ends.

One of Hall’s strengths is her refusal to flatten all suicides into the same category. With the Greeks, she preserves the difference between death sought for honor, protest, or principle, and death pursued out of exhaustion or mental illness. Her grandmother Edith’s story, for instance, is not treated as a failure but as a tragedy, rendered more comprehensible in light of Phaedra’s fruitless struggle with passion and despair.

In the play The Oresteia, Aeschylus invents a kind of healing for the house of Atreus: through ritual, recognition, and forgiveness, the Furies, agents of endless revenge, are transformed into the Eumenides – the Kindly Ones. Hall’s own inquiry also finds hope in this ancient solution of transformation, which neither erases pain nor dwells ceaselessly in it: “We honor suffering not because it ennobles us,” she suggests, “but because it is ours, and to deny it is to become less than human.”

There’s wisdom not only in the stories Hall tells, but in how she tells them. When she recalls her own brush with suicidal thoughts brought on by the stresses of academia and isolation, the rescue comes not from abstract theory but from connection – friends, texts, communities willing to listen rather than explain. At moments, the Greeks themselves seem to sit beside her in the darkness, offering companionship, not cure.

Virginia Woolf, who knew more than most about the ‘tumult of the mind’, and who herself committed suicide, insisted that every biography is at heart a struggle to make sense of both joy and sorrow. Similarly, Hall’s book is not a solution or a treatise, but a tapestry, in which threads of antiquity wind around the modern, until the distinction blurs and Ajax’s agony feels as fresh as last winter’s. Philosophers join in, but their pronouncements are never final: they are voices among many, of both comfort and debate.

If there is a single lesson audible in the chorus of tragedy and the whisper of poetry, it is the value of speaking, remembering, and witnessing, even the unspeakable.

The book closes with Hall’s quiet hope that the stories she has woven, both melancholy and shining, may offer not just a reckoning with suffering, but also a gentle invitation to keep living: “to face our Furies arm in arm, rather than alone.”

This review ends not with certainty but with gratitude for questions shared. In Hall’s company, we walk among the tragic heroines and heroes who have known despair and, paradoxically, help us endure it. There are no simple consolations here, but there is dignity in the struggle to understand, even in the dark.

© Manisha Sarade 2026

Manisha Sarade is a finance lawyer based out of Mumbai, India.

• Facing Down The Furies, Edith Hall, Yale UP, 2024, 256 pages, £12.99 pb

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Films

Rope

Les Jones has a Nietzschean take on a Hitchcock thriller.

It’s shrouded by darkness, but it is there: the tear that wells in the eye, then slowly rolls down the cheek, silently drops and splashes into the already soggy bag of popcorn on the cinema-goer’s knee.

Cinema can often create this ‘sadness’ effect on people – as well as elation, excitement, or magic. But why? This is known in philosophy as the paradox of fiction: how can we experience genuine, sometimes powerful, emotions towards characters that we know perfectly well are not real?

Often such emotions arise from movie directors’ deliberate cultivation of their audience’s propensity for sympathy or empathy. This raises questions about manipulation or emancipation, and about the ethics of storytelling. As that tear in the eye tells us, film is far from passive. Fundamental feelings are unleashed and perhaps for certain people this is the only situation in which particular passions are unleashed. If we can engage with such visceral feelings we may inculcate notions of fairness, empathy, and other aspects of morality into viewers. Wouldn’t that be good? Or would it be kind of sneaky? Let’s consider a movie that in the opinion of many has much to contribute to film as morality.

Film images © Warner Bros 1948

Rope was a 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film, famed among film buffs for having been shot in a very small number of continuous takes. Its central characters are two clever and assured young men, Brandon and Philip. They have been taught about Nietzsche’s philosophy, and it seems to them to dovetail with their own views of themselves as being superior to the common crowd. In other words, they choose ideas that support their own predilections.

The Übermensch or ‘Overman’ (or ‘superman’) is an important aspect of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche’s social philosophy has much to say about leaving the accepted order behind and moving onto a new social, moral and economic plane through the superior man who makes his own values. To get a flavour of a small part of these challenging ideas, we need only turn to some of Nietzsche’s notions on religion. Nietzsche thinks that Christianity stands opposed to every spirit that has turned out well: “It utters a curse against the spirit, against the superbia of the healthy spirit… Sickness is of the essence of Christianity” (The Antichrist, section 52, 1895). So among other things, the Übermensch is about building an alternative to Christian morality.

Brandon is infatuated by the notion of the Übermensch as it meshes with his own notions of himself, but his interpretation of this concept is … problematic. The young men’s tutor Rupert explained the idea of the Übermensch to them, but Brandon seems to have twisted it into what many would regard as a grotesque caricature. For him it implies the right of the Übermensch to murder lesser mortals, if they can justify the murder by the cunning with which it was carried out.

Accordingly, the film opens with Brandon and Phillip murdering their former friend David. Brandon is exhilarated by the murder, Phillip less so. Then a dinner party is organised by Brandon, assisted by Phillip. David’s dead body is hidden in an unlocked trunk, which is set provocatively at the centre of the party. Risky? Surprisingly, this is part of Brandon’s plan to prove his superior intellect. His infatuation with Nietzsche’s philosophy is such that he seems completely consumed by it. It is unclear whether he has considered the roots of Übermensch ideas in Nietzsche’s thought, in the idea that right and wrong depend on the power structures in society, and that religion – Christianity in particular – corrupts the attention in that it turns minds away from what can be achieved in life and puts the focus on an afterlife where all will be well. It would seem that Brandon’s fascination with Übermensch philosophy is mainly concerned with his own narcissism.

Those invited to the party are a testament to Brandon’s view of his superiority: David’s best friend Ken Lawrence; David’s fiancée Janet, who is also Ken’s ex-girlfriend; David’s father Mr Kentley; and Rupert Cadell, Brandon and Phillip’s tutor – the man who introduced them to Nietzsche and whose intellect they recognise. The rest are just the kind of conventional ‘normal’ people that Brandon would kick against. Brandon’s notion of the Übermensch demands that he spit in the eye of social conformity. Indeed, his relationship with Phillip has gay connotations – and this in 1948 when such things were decidedly frowned upon. It may also occur to the audience that as well as kicking against ‘clearly defined identities and relationships’, Brandon and Phillip may be hitting at a sexuality that they see as oppressive and regressive, which is determined to see their own sexuality as in some way deviating from a norm. (For more on this, see for example Thomas J. Roach’s paper ‘Murderous Friends’, in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2012)

Brandon, in a typically provocative and perhaps sickening gesture, ties some books together with the rope used to murder David. This suggests his contempt for contemporary mores, his confidence in his own Übermensch qualities, and a complete lack of empathy with others at the party (again, David’s father and fiancée are there). His utter contempt for those he sees as inferior is reflected in his comment to Phillip after the murder: “Good Americans usually die young on the battlefield. Well, the Davids of this world merely occupy space, which is why he was the perfect victim for the perfect murder.” Needless to say, many in the audience would be repelled by such sentiments. Those devoted to the Christian golden rule of ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ would be horrified, but so would those who recognise Kant’s Categorical Imperative as a rule to live by, who would see Brandon’s actions as a green light for anarchy. Nor would Nietzsche himself have been likely to approve Brandon’s action, given his own views on the ‘will to power’, first discussed in The Gay Science (1882). There he argues that causing pain is generally less pleasant than showing kindness, and suggests that cruelty is an inferior option to kindness because it is the very antithesis of what one is trying to exert: it is the option that shows lack of power.

Nietzsche by Woodrow Cowher

The more philosophical members of the audience may be troubled not only by Brandon’s lack of compassion, but also by his apparent lack of knowledge of meta-ethical theories that contradict those of Nietzsche. I’m thinking particularly of the view that the essence of man is as a social being, so it is natural for humans to act in prosocial ways, rather than from selfish individualism. Humans are also natural language users. The questioning viewer might reflect that the tool for thinking is language, which, by its very nature, is governed by rules. However, one cannot obey rules in a private or individualistic capacity, for then merely thinking one was obeying a rule would be enough to be obeying it. Therefore, rule following is essentially a social phenomenon. Its very existence depends on good social interaction. Any cinema-goer familiar with such ideas would, to be sure, be very sceptical of Brandon’s intellectual bedrock. One may also reflect on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, which states, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”

The audience of course have privileged knowledge of events. Still, reflecting on the cruelty of the arrogant Brandon, they may wonder what could possibly drive such behaviour. Although they may be inclined to suspect flaws in Nietzsche’s philosophy or in Rupert’s approach to teaching it, the rest of his students haven’t turned out like Brandon – not even the tortured and remorseful Phillip. This in turn suggests that Rupert’s emphasis on certain parts of Nietzschean philosophy may just have given Brandon, in his mind, some justification for doing whatever he wanted to do anyway. The denouement of the film sees Rupert emerge as possessing some integrity, whereas Brandon’s imperious attitude begins to fall apart. His sarcasm disappears as his identity as a cruel manipulator and murderer is exposed. The moral of the story? Caution is the watchword when explaining difficult ideas to impressionable people.

© Les Jones 2026

Les Jones is a retired educational professional. He taught in schools and colleges, and has been a department head. He has also worked for exam boards as an examiner and senior examiner for GCE, GCSE and A-Level.

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Classics

The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer

Karzan Aziz Mahmood looks at Ernst Fischer’s advocacy of art.

In his classic work The Necessity of Art (1963), Ernst Fischer asserted that art is indispensable to experience. This perspective stemmed from his belief that humans need to transcend the confines of their individuality and find themselves within the collective. Fischer explores the idea that art fulfills the fundamental human need to reach beyond the self, to connect with others, and to experience a sense of wholeness that transcends individual limitations. He argues that the individual is driven by a desire to move towards fullness and universality, never content to remain merely himself. Through art, the individual experiences not only his own potential but also the energies and experiences of others. This interaction leads to a generalization of the individual, transforming him or her into a universal human. Fischer emphasizes that in art, as in other fields, the individual and society, the part and the whole, are interconnected, thus breaking down the dualism between subject and object. He also says that while art is a reflection of reality, it does more than merely mirror it: art actively shapes and transforms reality by imbuing it with meaning and facilitating a deeper understanding of the human condition. In this sense, art is both a product of its time and a force that can transcend the limitations of its era. Fischer contends that “art derives from reality, but it also seeks to transcend it.”

Fischer’s argument hinges on the idea that a person cannot sustain himself as an isolated individual: he struggles to break free from his individual boundaries and move towards becoming what Fischer, in his 1963 way, calls ‘the whole man’. This concept is central to Fischer’s discussion of art as representing the communal or social existence of the individual. In art, the individual channels his energy and potential into something greater than himself, seeking to connect with the world at large. This transformation is not limited to any single function or formula. Rather, art evolves with society, adapting to new needs and contexts. Yet despite the changing functions of art across different societies and historical periods, its core purpose remains to help humans make sense of their existence and to facilitate their growth and development. Thus Fischer suggests that art is not just a reflection of reality, but a tool for understanding and transforming it. This dovetails with his Marxist view that art can serve as a tool for social change.

Fischer also highlights the dual nature of art, which can both immerse individuals in the experiences of others and provide a means to step back and gain perspective. This duality is what makes art so powerful, as it allows for both emotional connection and intellectual reflection. This makes art indispensable. So art is essential for human life, because it allows people to explore and express their deepest connections with reality.

The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymus Bosch 1405

The Origin & Corruption of Art

The origin of art, Fischer believes, is closely linked to the development of human work and tool-making. Art emerges from the human need to transform nature. As humans began to use tools to interact with and modify their environment, they also developed the ability to imagine and plan, creating objects in their minds before bringing them into existence. This imaginative process – somewhat akin to magical thinking – is seen as the precursor to art. The act of shaping and improving tools, which required creativity and foresight, also laid the foundation for artistic expression. As early humans refined their tools, they also started to perceive and use them in ways that went beyond mere utility, imbuing them with meaning and purpose that transcended their immediate function. This process of attributing deeper significance to objects is what ultimately led to the emergence of art. Thus art originated as a byproduct of human labor, where the manipulation of natural materials to meet human needs evolved into the creation of objects that held symbolic and aesthetic value. So art is deeply rooted in the human capacity for work, creativity, and the desire to impose order and meaning on the world. It began as a practical response to human needs, but gradually acquired symbolic significance, blending practical skills with imagination to create works that reflected both their reality and their aspirations. The best evidence for this is the cave art of early humans, which was born out of the direct needs for survival rather than any artistic tradition (hunting scenes to teach hunting techniques, for example). These early forms of art were message-laden, conveying the dangers and realities of the world to the tribe through symbolic representation.

In the age of capitalism, however, art undergoes a significant transformation as it becomes commodified. Under capitalism, the direct relationship between the artist and the audience who commission the art is replaced by a free market system where art is produced for an anonymous competitive market. This leads to the artist’s alienation, as they’re forced to create not for a known patron but for an unknown buyer. This strips art of its previous direct social and human connections, reducing it to a commodity to be bought and sold, which fundamentally changes the nature of artistic creation and the role of the artist.

Moreover, while due to the expansion of production capitalism fosters the growth of new ideas, styles, and forms of artistic expression, it also creates a paradoxical environment for artists. On one hand, capitalism enables a tremendous diversity of artistic production and the exploration of new themes; on the other hand, it leads to the alienation and fragmentation of the artist, who becomes increasingly isolated and disillusioned. This is why the initial energy and optimism from the rise of the middle class, which supported artistic innovation, eventually gave way to a sense of disenchantment as the artist confronts the alienating effects of developed capitalist society. This disillusionment manifested in movements like Romanticism, which protested against the dehumanizing and commodifying tendencies of capitalism, reflecting the contradictions and struggles within this system.

The Purpose of Art & Artists

In his introduction of the book, John Berger provides a poignant insight into Fischer’s life and beliefs, emphasizing the philosopher's deep conviction about the transformative power of art. Despite Fischer’s political disappointments and personal struggles, he remained fully convinced of the role of art in challenging and reshaping reality.

It is often said that meaning is a subjective issue, residing within the mind, feelings, and world of the artist, and therefore cannot be well understood by others. For example, some consider it inappropriate to ask an artist about the intention or message behind their work. Fischer counters this by arguing that art, when it engages with reality, serves as a bridge between the individual and the world. Art, in Fischer’s view, is not a solitary activity but a communal one, capable of expressing shared experiences and emotions that resonate across different contexts and societies. This reflection of humanity allows us to recognize aspects of ourselves in others or in the broader world. He emphasizes that this process is a fundamental part of the creation of the ‘universal man’ – a concept rooted in the process of history rather than in metaphysical or theoretical abstraction. Art, he says, serves as the tool that merges and expresses the worlds of the individual and the collective. It is through art that man transcends his individual limits and progresses toward a universal existence. The necessity of art, therefore, lies in its ability to facilitate this process of human globalization and universality. However, Fischer warns that this connection should not be confused with ideological influences, which may distort this interaction.

Fischer also cautions that the connection between the individual and the world does not imply a conflict-free relationship. The individual’s interaction with the world should not lead to passive acceptance or unconditional participation. Fischer fears that such an approach could mislead artists into believing that they can remain detached from the world and still be true artists. He asserts that participation in reality is not optional for the artist, it’s essential. He dismisses the notion of art as a mere escape or diversion, stressing that true art must engage with and reflect the struggles and aspirations of humanity. For Fischer, art is a battleground where the forces of ideology, power, and human experience converge, making it a potent tool for both personal and societal transformation.

So, who is an artist, and what is their duty? Fischer believes that an artist must be capable of capturing and expressing experiences, turning memory into narrative and material into form. Fischer critiques Aristotle’s concept of art as a means of catharsis or emotional release, suggesting that art’s true function is far greater: it is the mastery and subjugation of the world’s most powerful forces. He also criticizes the notion that emotion alone is sufficient for artistic creation, emphasizing the need for knowledge and skill to shape and manipulate nature effectively. The artist must not be overwhelmed by the forces of nature, but should instead master and tame them.

To wrap up, The Necessity of Art offers a compelling argument for the indispensable role of art in both individual and social development. Art, according to Fischer, is not just a reflection of reality but a transformative force that shapes and is shaped by the human experience. It is through art that individuals can transcend their limitations, connect with the broader world, and contribute to the creation of a more universal human experience.

© Karzan Aziz Mahmood 2026

Karzan Aziz Mahmood, an Iraqi Kurdish writer, researcher, and translator currently in Canada, has a PhD in Literature and Creative Translation from Jaume I University, Spain, and an MA in English Literature from the UK. He is the writer and translator of nine books in or into Kurdish, and seven research papers in English.

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Fiction

- Gyara Is All There Is

- Nietzsche Said

- Amazing Times at the Pub Agora

Poetry

Gyara Is All There Is

by John Gray

This poem speaks to major aspects of Stoic philosophy through the Stoic Musonius Rufus’s exile to the infamous island of Gyara by Nero in 65CE.

When you enter Gyara, one door locks;

But the other door is always open.

This bleak, Greek island: no more than rocks.

Still. Stark. Stripped of all things that are Roman.

You can leave through the open door: Reason.

Or if Nero calls… But he never will.

That busy, vengeful god obsessed by treason,

Marooned you, then forgot you. As gods do.

Still. We all share the same stars, moon and sun.

Persist. Only your mind provides rescue.

Resist. The sere, salt-galed, silent stupor,

which dulled exiles wear for their civic sin.

Persist. Wind and sun will sustain their sting

Indifferent: Ceaseless in their duty.

As you must be; the moral part of nature’s beauty.

When all your acts have virtue in their essence,

You will confront this awful sentence:

“Exist?” All distils to this one question.

Still. Recall those words in Enchiridion,

“The door is always open at Gyara.”

© John Gray 2026

John Gray is a retired Professor and an active member of an Australian university Human Research Ethics Committee. He teaches philosophy with U3A and focuses upon virtue ethics and institutionalisation within research governance.

Poetry

Nietzsche Said

by Mike Lewis-Beck

Turin was the only city worth living in

but he went mad anyway on a Sunday

walking around Parco Valentino in January,

with wet snow falling on a pewter afternoon.

Men of a certain age with dogs in tow

stand at the gate of the Valentine Palace, now

built for luxury flats, without a ballroom.

Still-marking the dead space stands

a dance hall at the park edge, its bright color blaring

The door can be opened but the dancers lack music,

and the ticket taker yawns.

© Mike Lewis-Beck 2026

From The Literary Nest, Fall 2019.

Fiction

Amazing Times at the Pub Agora

John Douglas Mullen is a philosophical bar fly on the wall.

It’s too early for the bar regulars and quiet enough so you could hear that little squeak from the ceiling fan. I love these times, me with my friendly bar rag, relaxed, wiping glasses, and thinking of nothing.

The pub’s empty, except for me and him. I’d say the guy’s early forties, grease under his nails and ground into his fingers, corduroy pants, black tee, leather jacket, rumpled hair escaping from under his cap, a newsboy cap, I think they call it. He’s quietly sitting at the bar, drinking a beer from a narrow cocktail glass. But then this other guy comes in. He’s got small round glasses, you know, like that famous guy John Lemon always had on. Anyway, he’s got a suit on and a white shirt and a loose tie pulled off to the side like he was pissed when he loosened it and gave it a yank. The guy looks soft, not fat, but kind of like dough, like he never did a day of hard work. And his face is oily moist, or maybe it’s sweat, I don’t know. He’s probably forty or so too, but his hair’s going fast and he’s plastered a few of the remaining strands over the top, like no one would notice. When I see that, I always think of Super Glue.

Anyway, he sits two stools from the quiet one and he’s turning, looking around, like he doesn’t want to face me or doesn’t know what to do.

I say, “What can I get you there, Jack?”

He says, “Huh, oh, um, a whiskey, I guess.”

I say, “Scotch, Irish, Canadian?”

“Scotch.”

“Neat?”

“Huh?”

“Will you have ice, sir?” I ask.

“Yes please.” – like a kid when his mother offers jelly with his peanut butter. I plunk a double in front of him with a glass of ice beside it. He seems confused, picks up the double shot, inspects it, and gives me a look like, “What’s this?”

Then the formerly silent guy, eyes fixed on his beer, speaks.

“It’s a double shot of scotch. Dump it on the ice and drink it.”

“Huh? Oh, sure.”

I think, “Cripes, what’s that?” Little did I know.

He pours the scotch into the ice, then throws the double down without waiting for it to cool. His face turns bright red and he forces his mouth shut to keep from gasping.

The leather jacket guy says to me, “Give my friend here a beer.” To Mr Funny Glasses he says, and I remember it exactly,

“Take at least twenty minutes to finish the beer and tell me what you’re doing here.”

The guy exhales, coughs, and says, “Why should I do that?”

“Because you’ve got something in your craw and want someone to talk to. That’s why you’re here, and my friend there behind the bar? Not much of a talker.”

I’m thinking he’s right about that but who’s he, a shrink? Just as I think that, Mr Spectacles says, “What do you do anyway? I mean, you going to psychoanalyze me or something?”

“Psychoanalyze you? Why? You got some deep, hidden story cleverly packed away somewhere you can’t get at?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I, but if you did, it wouldn’t interest me. So why don’t you just spit it out.”

The guy says, “You’re a pushy bastard.”

“Yah, I’ve heard that said.”

The guy sips a couple of times, very small sips, and then says, “Well, there’s this woman.”

“Isn’t there always? What woman?”

“At work.”

“Ring says you’re married. You having sex with this woman?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Usually for about –”

“Not that ‘how long’. How long have you two been bopping each other?”

“You needn’t put it… half a year, more or less.”

“How many kids do you have and how old?”

“Three boys. They’re eleven, fifteen, and, let’s see, seventeen, I think.”

“Who knows about this woman?”

“Just a couple of buddies.”

“They your cheerleaders?”

“What?”

“You know, slapping your back and telling you what a stud you are.”

“Uh, I guess.”

“Little wifey getting it on too? Maybe with one of your buds?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you actually say, ‘Of course not?’”

“Well, I –”

“Forget it. What’s your problem?”

So, I’m listening to all this with my mouth hanging open. I’m thinking, why’s this guy asking all these questions? And why is the little guy answering them? But the quiet one listens so hard his eyes seem bolted on the other guy’s face. He really wants to know, or he seems to. Most people really don’t give a shit what someone says. It’s like: “How ya doing?” “Well, my dog died today and my mother’s just hanging on.” “Swell. And the wife? She good too?”

But not this guy. He actually listens. And the little guy really is in some kind of trouble. Anyway, that’s how it seemed.

“What’s my problem? You mean with the woman?”

“Who else?”

“Well, that’s just it. It should bother me, but it doesn’t. I mean I love my wife. My kids are great. We have a good life, all of us. Everybody gets along.”

“So?”

“Well, I think I should feel guilty.”

“Are you guilty?”

“No, I don’t feel guilty at all.”

“I know you don’t feel guilty, you told me that already. I asked, are you guilty.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Look, a guy walks into his neighbor’s house; picks up a kitchen knife; stabs the neighbor to death then saunters away whistling ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’. Is he guilty of murder?”

“Sure.”

“Does he feel guilty?”

“Apparently not.”

“You don’t feel guilty but are you guilty?”

“I guess… I mean, yes, I am.”

“What are you guilty of? What wrong have you committed and against whom?

“That’s it too. I haven’t hurt anyone. Me and this woman, we’re just enjoying ourselves. No promises. No future. And no one else knows, well, except a couple of my buddies. No one’s getting hurt. How can it be wrong if nobody’s hurt?”

Quiet man says, “Well now, my not-so-good man, that’s an interesting question.”

“What?”

“This: Can a person commit a wrong against another without making that person worse off? Tell me, what’s your mother’s mother’s name?”

“My grandmother?”

“One of them, yeah.”

“Susan.”

“I assume she’s passed on. Where did she grow up?”

“In Shahneen, in Ireland.”

Quiet one says, “Well, suppose I go to Shahneen tomorrow, where some people still remember Susan, and I whisper the news through the pubs that Susan came to the States and became a streetwalker. Did tricks in alleyways for dimes and died of VD.”

“Christ!”

“Of course, the good folks in Shahneen have a grand old time passing around that tidbit about Grandma, you know, ‘And she was such a nice little girl.’ ‘I always knew her looks would get her in trouble.’ Things like that. Am I guilty of a wrong?”

“You destroyed her reputation.”

“Does she know that? Come on. Be honest.”

“No.”

“Has she felt anything negative, any pain or sorrow from what I did?”

“No.”

“Have I done her a wrong?”

“Yes. You spread lies about her. People will laugh when they talk about her, no longer respect her.”

“So, even though I affected Susan not at all in any physical or emotional way, I did her a wrong?”

“I guess.”

“You guess ? Got an ounce of conviction inside that bald – ”

“Okay… I’ve… I done wrong.”

“Even though your wife feels no ill effects? Let’s assume that’s true – that she feels no ill effects – though it’s unlikely.”

“Why’s it unlikely? I told you she doesn’t know. She hasn’t been hurt at all.”

“Can a person feel ill effects from cancer while not knowing she has cancer? You’ve brought a cancer into your family. You think you haven’t changed the world she lives in?”

“I guess… I mean, I have.”

“Done wrong to your wife?”

“Yes.”

“You are guilty?”

“But I’ve never felt guilty.”

“We’ve been through that. This isn’t about your stunted emotional growth. You made yourself into a liar and a cheat. You’ve risked the family life that your children and your wife love, something that their happiness relies on. What else are you, but guilty?”

“Okay, okay, but how do I change it?”

“You mean how do you get out from being a liar, a cheat, a bad husband, and a bad father? How do you become a good man? The way out is the same as the way in. You decided to be what you are now. Only decisions from you can undo that.”

“Like what?”

“Step one’s obvious. The other woman, give her a pat on her cheating little behind and send her on her way.”

“I’m the one who cheated. She’s single. She didn’t cheat.”

Quiet guy: “Wrong again, but that’s for another time.”

The other guy says, “I feel better.”

“I don’t care how you feel. You’re the one in the wrong here. You don’t deserve to feel good until you set it right.”

“I mean I understand it now.” At this point, I think it’s over, the guy admits his guilt, will ditch his cheating girlfriend. I already recognize that look.

The quiet guy says, “You understand it now? You think because some stranger finally tells you you’re guilty, that it’s over, nothing left to understand?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said earlier no one got hurt by your little stepping out. What about you, did you get hurt?”

“Me? No, I don’t… well unless you call great sex getting hurt. Ha !”

Quiet guy says, “When exactly did you decide to make it your life’s work to be a creep?”

The cheater: “That’s not –”

“Never mind. Tell me. Do your boys respect you?”

“Sure.”

“How do they show it?”

“Why? What’s that got to do –”

“Just tell me.”

“Well, let’s see. They ask my advice. They tell me what they’ve accomplished. They brag about me. Tell people what a good dad I am.”

“This respect makes you feel good, think more highly of yourself?”

“I guess. It makes me feel important, like I’m someone special.”

“Do your children know who you are?”

“Of course they do. I’m their father.”

“They know you’re kind to them and that you’re smart. They know that you can’t shoot hoops worth a shit and you throw a ball like your grandma, Susan.”

“How’d you know that?”

“I’m a philosopher. Anything they don’t know that could change whether they respect you?”

“I don’t think… ah, you mean the woman?”

“Bingo. You’ve held out on them. You bask in the respect you think you have from them. In fact, they are not giving that respect to you at all – they’re giving their respect to the person they think you are. They don’t respect you, the person who, among other things, is a liar and cheat and willing to threaten their happiness just to get laid. When you did that, you became another person, a cheat who doesn’t care enough about them to do the right thing. Their respect is for the man you were (or may have been), not the one you are.”

The cheater finally gets angry. “So they need to know everything about me before they can respect me?”

“They don’t need to know how many hairs you’re pretending to have on the top of your shiny bald head. But to respect the real you, the person you really are, they sure as hell have to know if this father of theirs is a liar and a cheat.”

“Christ.”

The quiet guy says, “It will never be you they respect until you make it right.”

“How?”

“You know the answer. You chose to make yourself who you are. Choose again, this time to get back to who you were.”

“Should I tell them?”

“If you need to. But the main thing is to mark this day in your calendar and start doing the right thing. You’ll know when you deserve their respect and, by the way, your wife’s love.”

Mr Spectacles takes off his glasses and wipes them with a paper napkin. I think for a minute he’s gonna cry. Then he says, “Shit, do I pay you or something?”

“Put a beer on the tab for me then go straighten yourself out.”

After the balding guy leaves, I say, “What the hell was that?”

He says, “Just a little conversation. He was confused. I helped him out.”

I say, “You called yourself a philosopher. Are you? I never met a philosopher.”

“Well, now you have.”

I say, “You don’t look like a philosopher.”

“Should I wear my tweeds next time I come in for a beer?”

“What do they do, I mean philosophers?”

“They do what I just did. Get underneath things, where the confusions or mistakes come from. Try to straighten things out.”

I say, “I never thought of any of those things you asked him.”

He says, “And I can’t mix a daiquiri.”

© John Douglas Mullen 2026

John Douglas Mullen is a philosopher living in Dresden, Maine. His books include: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy: Self-Deception and Cowardice in the Present Age; Hard Thinking: The Reintroduction of Logic to Everyday Life; and The Woman Who Hated Philosophers.

• This story was provided by After Dinner Conversation, an independent nonprofit that promotes philosophical and ethical discourse by publishing short fiction: afterdinnerconversation.com.

Questions For Consideration

1. The philosopher asserts that a person can commit a wrong against another without making that person worse off. Do you agree? Or can you think of a counterexample to disprove it?

2. What if the experience the cheating man gets from his extramarital affair makes him a more attentive and confident husband? Is it still bad? Is a wrong still a wrong even if there are secondary benefits?

3. The philosopher says that another wrong is that the cheating man’s boys are giving their respect to the person they only think he is. Under this framework, to what degree do parents have an obligation to divulge their good and bad history to their children (at age-appropriate times)? For example, would a parent be required to tell their children (at an age-appropriate time) that regretfully he punched a homeless person and stole their bike 20 years earlier?

4. Given that the cheating man came into the bar because he felt bad for not feeling bad, does that mean, deep down, that he knew that what he was doing was wrong? Or did he come into the bar because he was simply confused about the disconnect between his feelings and societal norms? And does it matter which reason is correct?

5. Do you think the story accurately displays what philosophers do? What’s the difference between the philosopher in the story and a therapist?

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Cartoons

- Simon & Finn

- Guto Dias’ Cartoon

- Sanko and Gibson’s Cartoon

- A Crumb of Doubt

- Jon Carter’s Cartoon

Cartoon

Simon & Finn

by Melissa Felder

© Melissa Felder 2026

Please visit simonandfinn.com.

Cartoon

Guto Dias’ Cartoon

by Guto Dias

© Guto Dias 2026

Please visit facebook.com/pg/gutozdiasstudio or instagram.com/guto_dias_cartoons.

Cartoon

Sanko and Gibson’s Cartoon

by Sanko and Gibson

Cartoon by Sanko and Gibson 2026

Cartoon

A Crumb of Doubt

by Juno Browning

© Juno Browning 2026

Cartoon

Jon Carter’s Cartoon

by Jon Carter

© Jon Carter 2026

Please visit cartertoons.com.

Table of Contents

Philosophy Now: Feb/March 2026

Editorial

What Have the Romans Ever Done For Us?

News

News: February/March 2026

Roman Philosophy

Machiavelli’s Roman Empire

Cicero & the Ideal of Virtue

The Educational Philosophy of Quintilian

Ancient Synergy

The Post Paralysis Peace Paradox

Articles

A Very Short History of Critical Thinking

Good Grief!

Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

Identity in the Age of Connectivity

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Interviews

Paul Guyer

Letters

Letters

Columns

The Possibility-Bearing Animal

Lucretius (c.95-c.55 BCE)

Philosophers on Children

Plutarch on Grief

Reviews

Death in a Shallow Pond by David Edmonds

Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me by Edith Hall

Rope

The Necessity of Art by Ernst Fischer

Fiction

Gyara Is All There Is

Nietzsche Said

Amazing Times at the Pub Agora

Cartoons

Simon & Finn

Guto Dias’ Cartoon

Sanko and Gibson’s Cartoon

A Crumb of Doubt

Jon Carter’s Cartoon