reason | Pandaemonium

A WORLD WITH TOO LITTLE EMPATHY – OR TOO MUCH?

May 18, 2017 by Kenan Malik

This review of Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion was published in the Summer 2017 issue of New Humanist. The biggest problem we have in our society and in the world right now,’ Barack Obama suggested before he became US President, ‘is an empathy deficit.’ It is a view that has become almost unquestioned, indeed almost unquestionable. ‘Behind every progressive policy,’ the American academic George Lakoff suggests, ‘is a single moral value: empathy.’ For the psychologist Simon Baron […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: alan kurdi, charity, effective altruism, emapthy, morality, paul bloom, peter singer, reason

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

SPLIT BRAIN, SPLIT VIEWS – DEBATING IAIN MCGILCHRIST

February 24, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Iain McGilchrist has written a response to my post about his book The Master and his Emissary and about the RSA workshop that discussed it. Since it is a long reply, Iain asked me whether I could publish it as a post, rather than as a comment, which I am happy to do. I have appended my own response at the end. (And just to avoid any confusion, while I have set up the discussion in the form of two open […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: debates, human agency, iain mcgilchrist, neuroscience, ray tallis, reason

DIVIDED BRAIN, DIVIDED WORLD?

February 21, 2013 by Kenan Malik

In November the RSA in London held a workshop to discuss Iain McGilchrist’s book The Master and his Emissary. The RSA has now published Divided Brain Divided World, a report of that workshop, together with a long conversation between McGilchrist and Jonathan Rowson, Director of the RSA’s Social Brain Centre. McGilchrist’s book deals with the social, political and philosophical implications of the lateralisation of the brain, that is, its division into two hemispheres, left and right. The difference between the two […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: human agency, iain mcgilchrist, neuroscience, ray tallis, reason

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 13]: NIETZSCHE, NIHILISM AND THE DEATH OF GOD

February 12, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 14, which is devoted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. This extract is from the discussion of Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals. Nietzsche trained as a philologist, not as a philosopher, and his writing is quite unlike traditional philosophical work, whether the dry, rigorous plodding of an Aristotle or a Kant, or the flights of sometimes barely-intelligible fancy that mark the work […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: christianity, death of god, ethics, greek philosophy, history of moral thought, judaism, kenan malik's books, nietzsche, reason, religion

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 11]: HUME, IS AND OUGHT

December 12, 2011 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts that I am running from my almost-finished book on the history of moral thought, I have reached Chapter 12, ‘Passion, Duty and Consequence’. Chapter 11 explored some of the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment. Chapter 12 turns its gaze more on to the moral arguments that emerged from the mainstream Enlightenment – in particular the work of Hume, Kant, Bentham and Mill. This extract is from the section on David Hume. In every system of morality, […]

Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: emotions, history of moral thought, human nature, hume, morality, patricia churchland, reason, skepticism