Tag: Philosophy Now

Philosophy Now’s Question Of The Month

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

In the earliest days of this daily thing I’m doing, this experiment shall we say, I made suggestions for things I would write about. One suggestion was to answer a question from a magazine I subscribe to and don’t read enough of, Philosophy Now. It involves an evil and confusing question roughly every two issues which means four months and I think I may have answered one at some point on here although I think I didn’t give much of a shit to make it decent as I knew I had missed the deadline for entering. This one though I’m going to enter. I’ll still write it on here in my usual half arsed and rushed way first though just aware that I’ll be sending it in too.

Does History Progress? If so, to what?

Time certainly progresses. I feel slightly older today than I did yesterday. Of this I am fairly sure, or at least I have convinced myself of this truth. In that case yesterday is now history and the day before yesterday is older history. Yesterday though, the day before wasn’t as old as it is now. However is that history progressing, it still feels the same now as it did yesterday just a little fuzzier. Perhaps it’s evolving but that’s my memory that’s evolving not necessarily history itself.

What is history though if not just a series of memories. Even the version we write down only captures one take on events and that is open to interpretation. What happens when this version loses it’s appeal, the fashions of the modern age deciding they don’t like the historical narrative and give an event a new one. Surely then it has progressed to something new. Again it has evolved, but does that mean it has progressed. We must looked then at our understanding of the meaning of progress. To advance, to go forward. These are positive notions surely but histories changes don’t always feel positive, advanced or even evolved sometimes. What happens when they go sideways or backwards. Hitler made changes to the history of his country while he was in power, did they progress? For him they did, but now history would suggest otherwise.

So history can make subjective progress? Again that’s a version of an event. Objective history on the other hand cannot, but then we can’t say there is such a thing as objective history. It is only ever a story and someone must always be around to tell that story. So subjectively history progresses, but to what? I guess that depends on whatever the subject decides they want it to. Or we just accept it will always change into an infinite amount of possibilities and the change itself can subjectively be called progress. Not in the moving forward sense of course but in the something other than it was five minutes ago sense.

And that is my answer. I find them quite challenging if that’s not clear by now. I’m sure the one I did before was a little bit of a ramble with too many rhetorical questions too. I suspect rhetorical questions are not always a good thing, or at least too many of them. The other approach is to make it dry and over explain but you’ve only got a maximum of four hundred words and the other answers people tend to send in are not formed in that way. Like everything it is simply practise, everything is always practise.

Something & Nothing

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I very nearly sat down to answer a question from one of my philosophy magazines which I subscribe to but don’t quite read as much as I once did. It happens like that sometimes but I still enjoy subscribing because they’re not expensive, there are still decent articles I do read and it’s an area of ‘entertainment‘ that is severely under supported. It’s strange calling philosophy entertainment, even though it can be used to improve entertainment as the television series The Good Place demonstrated and I don’t doubt there are countless plays using philosophical ideas as their basis. Is that philosophy as entertainment though, well not purely but then has it ever been since the days of Socrates arguing with people in market places. There is a good chance he must have put on quite the show if he was getting the crowds. Seeing as he was accused of corrupting the youth and forced to die by suicide he must have been doing something right; getting their attention, entertaining them and forcing them to think. However it still appears the philosophy itself, the philosophical words spoken were not entertainment but merely used as the wood for the fire. You can tell I’m trying to talk philosophy because all I’m doing is going in circles. It’s such a wonderful art form when done badly.

The question then I was going to attempt to answer was “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and I guess this could just define my attempt at talking philosophy in general. It wouldn’t be philosophical if you were to provide nothing for an answer, even if it were a ramble reminiscent of a Boris Johnson speech on the ethics of clarity, it would still be something. Saying that it is also impossible for nothing not to be an answer to something, even in the most irritating of way, someone will manage to find a way of using that as an answer. At which case nothing becomes something and we realise we’ve managed to both prove and disprove ourself in the space of two sentences. This is why I enjoy philosophy, you can really get away with anything if you want. Is there nothing you can’t say? Says the man who just used a double negative which is something you shouldn’t ever do but then I just did which means that doesn’t count either. You see this is why I had no intention of answering the question because I knew I would just get myself confused and ramble in circles. Again that does seem to be a popular approach at the moment so perhaps it’s the done thing. “Just don’t do something, unless you can’t do nothing. But be careful of doing nothing incase it somehow becomes something. Although that won’t happen because it is nothing and nothing is not something, until it is, and then it is something, but still nothing”. Stay safe people.