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The quote is from Galen Strawson, “Things That Bother Me,” New York Review of Books, 2018.

[The correct time for this event is Sunday, July 30th at 2pm PST (UTC/GMT -7 hours). If Meetup says something not equivalent for you, ignore it. Meetup is having a problem with time zones.]

Of course, not everyone does. Most animals, small children, even a few philosophers don’t. But it is striking and an indication of something that so many others do take philosophers seriously enough to make death threats against them. Peter Singer gets them for suggesting that some human babies are less deserving of life than some animals. David Benatar gets them for concluding that it is immoral to bring babies into the world in the first place. Galen Strawson even gets them for ruining peoples’ lives by suggesting they have no free will. Socrates not only got them but was executed.

Some philosophers even take themselves seriously. The ancient Greek Cynic Peregrinus Proteus threw himself into a funeral pyre in protest at the corruption that was even then plaguing the Olympic Games. He would have been pleased to know, being a cynic and constitutionally averse to corruption, his suicide didn’t do a thing to stop it. The Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger at the age of 23 shot himself in the chest, dying a few hours later, because he came to realize that every breath he took was one stolen from a creature more worthy of it than he. Then Simone Weil likely starved herself to death in sympathy for fighters against injustice when she was not permitted to die in the trenches with them: philosophy was not an academic subject for her. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s behavior during his service on the losing side of World War I suggested he had a death wish.

But most serious thinkers, let’s face it, are more “normal.” These don’t take themselves quite that seriously. Like the rest of humanity, they find excuses to carry on – careful to mobilize the full apparatus of rational thinking to this end. They are like Galileo who, having witnessed what happened to his philosopher friend Giordano Bruno who got burned at the stake for daring to hint that the sun didn’t circle the earth and that there might be others suns with planets going around them like ours, decided he would finesse his own concurring views to make them seem more innocuous to the Church authorities... and thus live another day to do more science. (Perhaps the thinking goes: not everyone can be a martyr. Somebody should survive to celebrate them.)

On the subject of doing closet philosophy: recall David Hume’s Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion. One the earliest and most relentless take downs of Judeo-Christian-Islamic belief systems, the book was not published during his life time. He made arrangements for it to happen after he was safely dead.

We should not wonder that some philosophers cope with the clash between their thinking and their lives with an ironic smile. Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran reports that his mother was so exasperated with him for having written books with titles like: The Trouble with Being Born, The History of Decay, Drawn and Quartered... Had she known, she said, she would have aborted him.

Philosophy is not supposed to be helpful. If it sometimes threatens to do so, it is likely mistaken for therapeutic or applied psychology… Or it has been commandeered by some more potent biological, psychological, social, or political undertow.

So, what can it mean when philosophical ideas are taken seriously? Since Strawson cites it as a reason some people wished him dead, we will take a close look at why it would occur to anyone to get so riled up about a philosophical problem... using the old problem of free will/determinism for illustration.

Related topics

Intellectual Discussions
Philosophy
Philosophy & Ethics
Philosophy of Mind
Aesthetics

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