oth parties, at least rhetorically, have embraced the need for Washington to address stagnant middle-class wages and rising income inequality.

Enacting significant remedies — whether through new middle-class tax benefits or spending programs — requires cash Washington doesn’t have.

Antipathy toward taxes remains a core tenet of Republican economic policy.

In 1954, the Japanese government created the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in order to alleviate the United States’ burden of ensuring Japan’s security. At the time it argued for interpreting Article 9 (2) as recognizing Japan’s sovereign right to have a small military force. (The Supreme Court supported this reading in a 1959 ruling.) This construction — which has come to be known as the “minimum necessary level” — allowed the establishment of a force to defend Japan within its territory.

amending the Constitution is an onerous process, requiring at least a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Diet and a simple majority in a national referendum. It will also require overcoming the misguided objections of the reflexively antiwar set

Japan now understands that its prosperity and stability depend on global trade and on the peaceful resolution of any disputes. As one of the main beneficiaries of the international liberal order today, Japan is committed to the system — and it is committed to defending it, particularly against rising states like China, which are challenging the status quo

A moderate, sensible revision of the Constitution would be a modest step toward making Japan both a normal country and a more effective protector of the international order — and no less peace-loving.

The “social” aspect of social media may feel like it encourages us to be always on, always talking to each other, even when a step back would reveal that our contribution isn’t necessary. But in the offline world, “social life” has a range of meanings, from constant chatter to quiet companionship. It’s important to remember that media can be social without being relentlessly extroverted. Lurk for a while when you can.

The White House told reporters on Thursday that, despite the imminent passage of NSA reform, they still believe Edward Snowden still belongs in prison (presumably for life, given his potential charges), while at the same time, brazenly taking credit for the USA Freedom Act passing, saying that “historians” would consider it part of Obama’s “legacy.”

even those in Congress who were campaigning for stronger NSA reform than the bill that passed the Senate are afraid to directly credit Snowden and, in many cases, still condemn him. Some cling to the erroneous belief that Snowden should come back to the US if he’s really a whistleblower because he could “tell his story to a jury.”

Without Edward Snowden, there would be no debate about the mass surveillance of Americans by the NSA. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals would not have ruled such surveillance illegal, tech companies would not encrypt our phone calls and text messages, and Congress certainly would not have passed the USA Freedom Act - no matter how meager its reforms actually are

In other words, it was unclear to many Americans what, exactly, they had won. A great evil had been defeated; and Union forcibly defined and defended. But so rapid were the changes unleashed by the war that soldiers blinked their eyes in amazement when they returned home.

Nearly all of the national triumphs of the last century, from the civil rights movement to the exploration of space to the birth of the digital age, stemmed from the contributions of Southerners, Northerners and Westerners working together. We have had failures too — we see them on a daily basis. But the refusal to fall apart in 1861 made a difference.

The game changers – the square pegs, so to speak – are those who saw traditional standards of beauty and decided specifically to go against them, perhaps just to prove a point. Take Picasso, Munch, Schoenberg, to name just three. They have made a stand against these norms in their art. Otherwise their art is like all other art: its only function is to be experienced, appraised, and understood (or not).

art is not necessarily positive: it can be deliberately hurtful or displeasing: it can make you think about or consider things that you would rather not. But if it evokes an emotion in you, then it is art.

art cannot be simply defined on the basis of concrete tests like ‘fidelity of representation’ or vague abstract concepts like ‘beauty’. So how can we define art in terms applying to both cave-dwellers and modern city sophisticates? To do this we need to ask: What does art do? And the answer is surely that it provokes an emotional, rather than a simply cognitive response. One way of approaching the problem of defining art, then, could be to say: Art consists of shareable ideas that have a shareable emotional impact

. A work of art is that which asks a question which a non-art object such as a wall does not: What am I? What am I communicating? The responses, both of the creator artist and of the recipient audience, vary, but they invariably involve a judgement, a response to the invitation to answer. The answer, too, goes towards deciphering that deeper question – the ‘Who am I?’ which goes towards defining humanity.

Arguments about what is most important for students to know prevent academic disciplines from ossifying. There may well be books or scholars that tradition has overlooked and are deserving of a place on the curriculum. Such debates throw open the question of how and why academic judgements are made; in so doing, they also expose the tyranny of identity politics within today’s universities.

Knowledge itself is increasingly viewed not as objective, but as ideologically loaded and representative of the perspectives of a dominant ruling elite. The problem, academic activists argue, is that not only are philosophers such as Mill, Nietzsche and Kant white men, but their work also reflects a worldview that is exclusive to white men and has little to offer anyone else. Within a couple of centuries, criticism of philosophy has moved from a focus on what philosophers think to who they are.

“But for existentialists there is no love other than the deeds of love… there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art; the genius of Proust resides in the totality of his works; the genius of Racine is found in the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing.

existentialist author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir notes that as children we shoulder no responsibility; we live in a ready-made world with ready-made values. As we mature and become acquainted with our freedom we can begin to take matters into our own hands.

As de Beauvoir famously stated: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” For de Beauvoir, life is one of continuous change, an unstable system in which balance is continually lost and recovered. For her, inertia is synonymous with death.

But perhaps the paper by Liao, Sandberg and Roache will turn out to be a prank played on the journal, like the Sokal hoax, named after the physicist whose paper deploying post-modern gobbledegook to show that “quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct” was published in a cultural studies journal.

It’s easy to imagine academics sitting around swapping the most outrageous solutions to climate change and then daring one another to have them published. I hope this will turn out to be the case. In the meantime I cringe at the thought of what the long-dead giants of Western philosophy would make of their discipline’s response to the climate crisis.

Charlie Brown was no comic strip missionary, blandly spreading the word of organized religion. Upon reflection, the trials and tribulations of the little round-headed kid provide deep and moving illustrations of existentialism.

Like the existential human in a world of silent or absent deities, Schulz’s characters exist in a world of silent or absent adult authority. In fact, the way the strip is drawn (with the child characters taking up most of each frame) actually prevents the presence of any adults.

Sartre did not deny the existence of God triumphantly. Instead, he considered it “... extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven.”. Without God, everything we do as humans is absurd, and without meaning

we are created by our actions. We are responsible for our actions. Therefore, we are responsible for our creation. What we are is the sum total of what we have done, nothing more and nothing less

that there’s no way to rule out this possibility ahead of time. We have no reason to think our society has achieved moral perfection, and we’d have no obvious way of knowing if it had. It’s even possible that we’re not making progress at all.

what we think of as truth, including moral truth, is nothing more than a product of the current power regimes of our society. It’d be no wonder, then, that the past seems backwards to us, because we’re judging it from standards that are designed to justify and perpetuate the system we have right now.

, our power to harm is overwhelming. We are capable of forever putting an end to all higher life on this planet. Our success in learning to manipulate the world around us has left us facing two major threats: climate change – along with the attendant problems caused by increasingly scarce natural resources – and war, using immensely powerful weapons. What is to be done to counter these threats?

The set of rights that we have developed from this basic rule includes rights not to be harmed, but not rights to receive benefits. And we typically extend these rights only to our small group of family and close acquaintances

1. Our vulnerability to harm has left us loss-averse, preferring to protect against losses than to seek benefits of a similar level.

2. We naturally focus on the immediate future, and on our immediate circle of friends. We discount the distant future in making judgements, and can only empathise with a few individuals based on their proximity or similarity to us, rather than, say, on the basis of their situations. So our ability to cooperate, applying our notions of fairness and justice, is limited to our circle, a small circle of family and friends.

The experience of going along with temptation is not, Socrates argues, one in which the person protests or fights against its unreasonableness while being dragged along into gratifying it. For Socrates, ‘yielding to temptation’ is not being unwillingly overpowered, but is the experience of being a willing participant choosing what is at that moment wrongly thought to be best. This is also the essence of the willingness model of addictive behavior.

Aristotle thought that by asserting that when we gratify our desires for what tempts we are still doing what we think best, Socrates was denying the existence of akrasia – ‘weakness of will’, or a failure of self-restraint.

what the addict does can be explained in terms of Socrates’ willingness model and an addict’s immoral character: ie, they want to do it, and care more about satisfying their addiction than the consequences of doing so. The addict’s moral deficits reside in their motivations

Kant, in the quotation with which I began this article, refers to the Newtonian concept as the ‘real existences' view, and to the Leibnizian concept as the view according to which space is: “only determinations or relations of things.”

Kant states that: “Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences.” (B/38) On the contrary: “…it is the subjective condition of sensibility, under which alone outer intuition is possible for us.” (A/26; B/42)

He further argues that this sensory-spatiotemporal process requires a supreme mediator that will synthesize the sensory input within our cognition so as to turn it into meaningful knowledge.

“The apodeictic certainty of all geometrical propositions and the possibility of their a priori construction is grounded in this a priori necessity of space.” (B/39), and: “Geometry is a science which determines the properties of space synthetically, and yet a priori,”(B/40).

Having never had an inclination towards the supernatural, religion has never appeared to me as either credible or a source of comfort. News of looming death has not encouraged me to grasp for false consolation, though consolation is sorely needed. Rather, my obsession with death has hitherto been soothed by Socrates’ description of philosophy as the process by which one comes to accept one’s own death.

Existentialism emphasizes the subjective nature of being; that is, the essence of what it is like to be us. It gets us closer to considering what it is we value, which is central to shaping a meaningful life for ourselves as we pursue those values.

The turning point probably came in 1967 with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, which applied the tools of analytic philosophy to questions in the philosophy of religion with an unprecedented rigor and creativity

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology – that branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence without appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – for instance, through philosophical argument.

the New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenomenon lacking in intellectual muscle and blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It tends to reflect the scientism of a bygone generation, rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

Pythagoras believed that “all things are number”: things come into existence when mathematical order is imposed on the formless stuff of the universe. He is believed to have come to this idea after discovering the importance of mathematics in music.

Musical order and beauty are similarly the result of order and harmony being carved out of cacophonous noise. Pythagoras also originated the idea of the heavenly ‘music of the spheres’, inaudible to us, made by the movement of the planets around the earth.

In his La Monadologie (Monadology, 1714), Gottfried Leibniz explained our response to art through subconscious perceptions (“les petites sensations”) of “the secret arithmetic” of intervals and other relationships in music and painting.

Immanuel Kant wrote a book on aesthetics, The Critique of Judgment (1790), in which he described aesthetic qualities as those which give us “disinterested pleasure”. They do this through their beauty, which Kant, as a classically-inclined thinker, saw in their harmony of form; or through their sublimity – meaning a perceived grandeur or power that does not threaten us.

Friedrich Schelling was the first of these transcendental idealists, and the first philosopher who thought that instrumental (as distinct from vocal) music was the purest and most disembodied of the arts, and enabled us not only to glimpse the Absolute – a word he coined, although Kant had talked about absolute truth being found in the Ding an Sich [‘the thing-in-itself’] – but during that experience, to see ourselves as an integral part of it. This idea would be taken much further still by:

So long as we don’t think that the physicists’ space is more fundamental than, or is the ultimate reality of, lived space, then no harm is done.

in contemporary physics, space is curved, or non-Euclidean. In non-Euclidean space, the sum of the angles of a triangle may be greater than 180°; more importantly, the shortest distance between two points may not be a straight line, but a curved one.

When we first hear talk of ‘curved space’ we rebel. The least we should ask of something said to be curved is that it should have edges, surfaces, and parts that look or feel curved, which space itself does not. Analogies are offered to make the idea less counter-intuitive

Physicists will smile at taking the analogy too literally. But if it is not taken literally, it lacks explanatory force. And taken literally, it is seriously misleading. The curvature of an object such as the earth is extrinsic – evident in its surface

From Pythagoras onwards we have been prone to the illusion that our ways of geometrising space capture space itself – perhaps even believing that the mathematical logic of pure quantities is somehow ‘out there’. However, the immense power of mathematical physics – which requires abstracting from phenomenal reality and the reduction of experienced and experienceable reality to mere parameters to which numerical values are assigned – does not justify uncritically accepting concepts such as ‘curved space’ that attempt to re-insert phenomenal appearances into its abstractions. On the contrary, we should acknowledge that ‘unreasonably effective’ mathematics (to borrow Eugene Wigner’s phrase) can take us to places to which nothing non-mathematical corresponds. For instance, consider the assumption, central to modern cosmology, that space itself is expanding.