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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

30 Jul

A counterfactual question that's hard to evaluate but here goes anyway: if Lynn White Jr is right, then without Christianity would our environmental crisis now be less severe (climate change, habitat loss, species loss, collapse of entire groups of organisms)?

@BlakeHereth1

Lynn White Jr was a Christian his entire life! He wrote trenchant critiques about how Christians were co-responsible for the ecological crisis.
He believed St Francis of Assisi would be a good role model (here's my pic of St Francis, model: @BlakeHereth1)

Here is the fascinating history of Lynn White Jr giving the talk that would eventually end up as "The historical roots of our ecological crisis".
chesapeakequarterly.net/V15N3/main1/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

9 Jun

I'm going to do a thread on Bernard De Fontenelle's Plurality of Worlds (1686), a series of dialogues between a Marquise and a philosopher that offers a startling and disorienting vision of a myriad of inhabited worlds 1/

I recommend listening to this subtle performance of Marin Marais' Voix Humaines while you read this thread, performed by Brandon Acker and Craig Trompeter 2/

We have dialogues over five evenings between a philosopher and a Marquise. At the time that de Fontenelle wrote, it was unusual to have a woman feature in a philosophical dialogue. Women were commonly thought to be inferior to men (in virtue, physical ability, intelligence) 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

7 Jun

Castiglione's Courtier (1528) is such a fun read. Highly recommend (I read it in my teens, but now I am a trained philosopher and I can appreciate it even better). So lively and full of zest, with engaging characters in philosophical dialogue, all at the hip court of Urbino.

Also, there are so few philosophical books in Etiquette anymore (the chief topic of the Courtier, though it also deals with philosophy of gender, political philosophy, and even philosophy of sports). I can only think of Amy Olberding's Wrong of Rudeness as a recent example. 2/

If you look at past philosophy, you can find a huge literature on Etiquette, for example
* The Analects
* The Xunzi
* Erasmus' Good manners for children
* Castiglione's book of the courtier
* Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education
(among many others). 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

8 May

I suppose the audience for this is quite niche, but I'm going to go ahead and summarize a very early hard SF story namely Kepler's Somnium (Dream).
Background Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was a German Renaissance astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician. 1/

He is wrote the Epitome astronomiae Copernicanae in which he formulated heliocentrism (based on Copernicus, but with elliptic trajectories). Now, heliocentrism was a total game changer because it opened the possbility to a plurality of worlds 2/

To get a sense of how radical and shocking, one reason heliocentrism faced such difficulty is that we would expect a parallax among the fixed stars. Since we don't that must mean the cosmos is truly enormous, and the stars very far away. Copernicus' reply: it is simply so. 3/

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

7 May

Reading Scruton on environmental philosophy. It's a clearly, lucidly written book, a lot of Heidegger though and I just don't think nationalism and environmental conservation are going to work, ultimately.

OMG this book is so anti-EU. (!!) I still find it super-useful to see this articulated though, so I appreciate the book. I would answer to Scruton that well nation states got a big push (funds, people giving their lives), of course they're doing well.

Also, not all is well. We are confronted with global stuff (pandemic, and climate change, hello) and nation states are simply not up to the job. And the failings of nation states are weirdly incapsulated in the resurgent nationalism cf this excellent piece theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/…

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Helen De Cruz

@Helenreflects

17 Apr

Watching the Penn&Teller masterclass on magic, here are their philosophical views on the practice.
Though the word has supernatural P&T overtones, they are thorough naturalists. "No-one leaves the theater believing something that we ourselves do not think is true on purpose." 1/

Penn: "illusion" = visual effect to accomplish a trick, e.g., mirror to make something appear different. Smart thing = the tricks.--tricks "involve intellectual engagements on the part of the audience" and involves "exploring epistemology" (how do we know what is true?" 2/

"[magic] is the heaviest philosophical ideas you can possibly have, dealt with in the silliest way"--it is playground for serious epistemological topics such as what to believe and what not (so Teller), you can play because there are no (dire) consequences. 3/

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