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News
News: November/December 2009
Bring me more brains, Igor • Public understanding of philosophy becomes respectable • Ordinary language philosophy revival? — News reports by Sue Roberts
World’s Most Expensive VCR?
A team at University of California Berkeley have discovered how to read the mind’s eye. The visual cortexes of volunteers were scanned while they were watching movies, and the equipment produced crude but continuous video footage of what they were watching. For example, while a volunteer was watching a film clip starring Steve Martin, the screen showed the moving shape of the actor and showed his torso as white (he was wearing a white shirt) but didn’t reproduce his facial features. Professor Jack Gallant, who is controversial in Berkeley as some of his research involves vivisection of primates, described these results in Chicago at the October meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. This raises the fascinating possibility of being able to record dreams.
Depressingly individual?
A study by Northwestern University in Chicago has compared the correlation between the degree to which a country is individualistic and the level of depression experienced by its residents. Britain, followed by the USA, Australia and the remainder of of western Europe were reckoned to be the world’s most individualistic societies, valuing the self over the group. The report’s author, Dr Joan Chiao, said “Such nations showed higher prevalence of anxiety and depression.” In contrast, the more collectivist cultures of countries such as China and Taiwan were more likely to value social harmony over individuality. This appeared to ‘buffer’ their residents from mental health problems. The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, used surveys from twenty nine countries from around the world.
Public Understanding
Until he retired recently, Richard Dawkins was Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. Now for the first time philosophy has an equivalent champion: Dr Angela Hobbs has just become Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at Warwick University. It will be her job to bring philosophy to as wide an audience as possible in Britain and beyond. The broadcaster Melvyn Bragg welcomed her appointment, saying “I can’t think of anyone better suited … Angie Hobbs’ appearances on In Our Time have confirmed her outstanding ability to bring a large public to the High Table of philosophy. Warwick University has done a favour to us all.” Dr Hobbs’ own philosophical specialities are ethics and ancient Greek philosophy.
Ordinary Language
The philosophical trend known as Ordinary Language philosophy flourished in the 1940s and 50s, and was marked by its insistence that many philosophical problems are generated by a failure to pay careful attention to the way language is used in everyday life. The movement, which once boasted luminaries such as Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin, is now widely seen as being defunct. However, a special issue of the journal Essays in Philosophy is being planned which will (perhaps) breath new life into it as well as looking at how it relates to some contemporary philosophical trends such as contextualism and experimental philosophy.
Time to decide?
Prof John Saunders, chair of the Royal College of Physicians ethics committee proposes that every adult should be legally required to decide whether or not to donate their organs after death. He believes that this would help alleviate the shortage of organs for transplant which leads to over a thousand avoidable deaths annually. The suggested plan, to be published shortly as part of a report in the journal Clinical Medicine, would require those on the electoral role to indicate their views by ticking: yes; no; or ask my relatives.
STOP PRESS: Claude Lévi-Strauss
The influential French anthropologist and philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss died at the end of October. He was one hundred years old. Lévi-Strauss was a major figure in developing structuralism, an approach to the humanities which treats areas of investigation as being complex systems of interrelated elements, with their own internal grammar. L évi-Strauss coined the term in the 1950s. He developed the approach to try to make sense of his notes from anthropological expeditions with his wife in Brazil between the wars. Many of his techniques were later applied to other areas of research, particularly in philosophy and linguistics.