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News

News: February/March 2025

World Logic Day celebrated here and there • Most folk think they know enough to judge • Don Cupitt, Sea of Faith theologian, dies — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

A Rare Celebration of Logic

You may not have noticed or, on the contrary, you may have celebrated World Logic Day 2025, which has just passed. World Logic Day is marked every 14th January and is officially recognised by UNESCO. The annual celebration of all things logical was created in 2019 by a Swiss logician with degrees in mathematics and philosophy, Jean-Yves Beziau, who is now Professor at the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Beziau takes a particular interest in Aristotle’s Square of Opposition, arguing that it remains a logic framework with many applications. If you forgot to do something logical this year, you could always plan some interesting logic events for next year – make sure you let Philosophy Now know about it! Alternatively, you could attend the 8th World Congress and School on Universal Logic in Cusco, Peru, in December 2025. For more, please visit worldlogicday.com

Don Cupitt Has Died

Aristotle, author of six surviving works on logic
Public domain image: Roman copy of Greek bust of Aristotle

Radical theologian Don Cupitt became known to many as the presenter of the 1984 BBC television series Sea of Faith, which sparked a movement of the same name. After studying natural sciences, theology and philosophy of religion at Cambridge, Cupitt became a priest in the Church of England in 1960, leaving the ministry two years later due to disagreements with church doctrine. He was appointed dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge in 1965, where he lectured in philosophy of religion from 1968 to 1996. He became interested in postmodernism in the 1980s and shifted his position, which had already been critical of traditional doctrine, closer to it. Cupitt’s exploration of ‘non-realist theology’ received much attention and has been widely discussed. It suggests that religions, such as Christianity, might be understood as human constructs working towards human well-being, “For it was only via the idea of God that we were able to develop all our ideas about a unified self, reason, a unified law-governed cosmos, sovereignty, property, supervision (Providence) and management, long-term purposes and action to attain them and so on. God taught us everything, so that we are eternally grateful to God even as we now leave him behind.” Cupitt’s ideas can be found in the 40 books and numerous articles which he authored. Don Cupitt died on 18th January 2025, at the age of 90.

Everybody Thinks They Know

In a recent study with 1,501 participants, Hunter Gehlbach and Angus Fletcher, both of Ohio State University and Carly D. Robinson of Stanford University examined the sources of misunderstanding and conflict of opinions. Faced with a hypothetical scenario, ‘control participants’ were given full information, while ‘treatment participants’ received only about half of that same information. It emerged that treatment participants wrongly thought they had enough information, confidently forming opinions on the issue. A research article following the study, published on PlosOne, explains: “We propose that an …important tributary feeding the river of misunderstanding is the illusion of information adequacy – people tacitly assume that they have adequate information to understand a situation and make decisions accordingly. Yet, individuals often have no way of knowing what they don’t know. For less prominent interpersonal issues, many misunderstandings arise in contexts where information may be less accessible to each party. From Socrates to [Donald] Rumsfeld, people often acknowledge that there is much that they do not know, including a meta-awareness of ‘unknown unknowns’. We argue that another default setting – comparable to naïve realists’ assumptions that they see objective reality – is that people fail to account for the unknown unknowns. Accordingly, they navigate their social worlds confidently assuming that they possess adequate information. They form opinions, reify values, and behave in ways that suggest that they have sufficient information to make rational decisions – often without pausing to wonder how much they do not know.”

Free Speech Law Goes to Court

In recent years in the UK, there have been some notorious cases of university lecturers (including philosophers) being driven from their jobs for expressing unpopular opinions, and visiting speakers having invitations cancelled in case they did likewise. In response, Parliament passed the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which became law shortly before Labour won the general election and formed a new government. The new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, immediately halted implementation of the new law. She said it would be burdensome on universities, that it might enable Holocaust-deniers to speak on campuses, and that she had halted it in order to review it. The Free Speech Union are now taking the government to court claiming that it is unlawful to not apply a law after it has received royal assent.

Barbara Underwood

We are sorry to announce the recent death of Barbara (Barbie) Underwood, founder of the Barnes Philosophy Club in West London. Her husband Simeon writes: “By profession a jazz singer with many other side jobs in a colourful early life, Barbie got the philosophy bug in the mid-1980s through the Open University Foundation Course. She did an undergraduate Philosophy degree at York and a PhD at Manchester University, supervised by the late Grace Jantzen. But her most notable achievement in relation to philosophy was to set up the Barnes Philosophy Club. She ran it single-handedly – “I don’t do committees.” And she saw it grow from eight people at its first meeting in the local Methodist Hall in 2010 to regular attendances of over 60 people in the pubs of Barnes and a mailing list of over 300 people. With support from the Royal Institute of Philosophy, she turned it into one of the most successful clubs of its kind, before handing it on to others after ten years in 2019. She was one of a kind.”

Sally Haslanger Wins Quinn Prize

The American Philosophical Association has awarded its Philip L. Quinn Prize to MIT Ford Professor of Philosophy and Women’s and Gender Studies Sally Haslanger. The Quinn Prize is given annually in “recognition of service to philosophy and philosophers.” Haslanger, whose work includes inquiries into the social construction of gender, race, and the family, feminist epistemology, as well as metaphysics and critical race theory, comments: “So many philosophers I deeply respect have come before me as awardees, including Judith Jarvis Thomson, my former colleague and lifelong inspiration. Judy and I both were deeply engaged in doing metaphysics with an eye toward the moral/political domain. Both of us were committed feminists in a time when it was not professionally easy. Both of us believed in the power of institutions, such as the APA and the American Association of University Professors, to sustain a flourishing intellectual community.”