Brillo Box: the Warhol that made Arthur Danto end art's story
In 1964 Arthur Danto saw Warhol's Brillo boxes and could not tell them from the real thing. He concluded that art's story, though not art, had ended.
category archive
Philosophy.
Old questions, fresh arguments and the pleasure of thinking carefully.
A donkey with no reason to choose starves where it stands
Buridan's ass starves between two equal piles of hay because it has no reason to choose. The tale is usually read as an argument against free will.
Advaita Vedanta holds that your self and reality are one
The Indian school holds that the self, atman, is brahman. Maya makes the one reality look like many, and grasping this ends the cycle of rebirth.
Marcus Aurelius may not have been the Stoic he described
Marcus Aurelius left a notebook of Stoic reminders. He spared a rebel's backers, but made Commodus co-emperor at sixteen and sought to destroy the Iazyges.
Judith Jarvis Thomson named the trolley problem, then doubted it
The philosopher who named the trolley problem later said you may not pull the switch unless you would steer it into yourself. West Point still teaches it.
The eclipse Thales may have predicted, and what came next
Thales is said to have predicted the 585 BC eclipse that stopped a war. Anaximander then tested and improved his ideas, making knowledge a thing to check.
The ship of Theseus: the puzzle philosophers never settled
Replace every plank of a ship and is it the same ship? Philosophers have argued since Plutarch, and the same question now gets asked about people.
Stoicism was a test of control, not a mood
Stoicism sorts what you can act on from what you cannot. A Vietnam prisoner of war and Roman rebels both lived by that test.
Wittgenstein argued a truly private word can never be corrected
Wittgenstein argued a language only one person could understand fails, because nothing outside that person could catch a wrong use of a word.
Bernard Williams used Gauguin to put luck into morality
In his 1976 essay on moral luck, Bernard Williams asked if Gauguin's success could justify leaving his family. Critics say it barely weighs the harm done.