Philosophy

Guernica is one of the most famous anti-war statements of the 20th century. By looking at Picasso’s sketches, researchers have been able to provide insights into the inner workings of Picasso’s artistic process, uncovering the hidden characteristics of creativity.

I studied philosophy in the Netherlands in the 80s. Almost no one criticized the western-oriented curriculum. Recently, however, scholars have begun to question how philosophy can leave so many non-western traditions of thought aside.

Has the luxury of boundless possibilities paradoxically made timeless human endeavors like getting a job, raising children, and living in a house-with-a-white-picket-fence impossibly difficult? From the cynical rhetoric of economists, environmentalists, politicians, and most remarkably from millennials—the generation defining the #yolo present—it seems that expecting to have a decent, well-paying job and not hate your children might be too much to ask, as highlighted in this curation of 3QD picks.

A philosopher examines Brian Leiter’s reaction to Eugene Park’s essay for Hippo Reads, arguing that Western philosophers implicitly consider their own work cosmopolitan and universal, while treating non-Western philosophy as limited and local: “If philosophy departments teach only Western philosophy, in what sense can they be, as Brian Leiter says they are, ‘guardians’ of the cosmopolitan ideal?”

From the first of a series investigating Freud’s legacy: “A lot of psychoanalysis is about imagining. And the implications of imagination, what happens as people imagine things? Real things happen as a result of people imagining things. Real things happen as a result of people dreaming things. And even more fundamentally, dreams and imaginings and fantasies and inner experiences are a real part of the world.”

Former PhD student Eugene Sun Park explores why philosophy’s academic halls lack diversity: “It’s not that women and minorities are (inexplicably) less interested in the ‘problems of philosophy’—it’s that women and minorities have not had their fair say in defining what the problems of philosophy are, or what counts as philosophy in the first place.”

For humans, it’s easy to feel slow. Yet these athletic memoirs offer a valuable lesson about how movement changes the people we become and the way we experience the world around us.