Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind.

Writing to Albert Einstein in the early 1930s, Sigmund Freud suggested that “man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction.” Freud went on to contrast this “instinct to destroy and kill” with one he called erotic—an instinct “to conserve and unify,” an instinct for love.

Without speculating too much, Freud continued, one might suppose that these instincts function in every living being, with what he called “the death instinct”—thanatos—acting “to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter.” The death instinct provided “the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities [to war] which we are now combating.”

To be sure, Freud concluded, all this talk of eros and thanatos might give Einstein the impression that psychoanalytic theory amounted to a “species of mythology, and a gloomy one at that.” But if so, Freud was unabashed, asking Einstein: “Does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?”….

Prospect Magazine

Public Enemies by Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy – review
An exchange of letters between novelist Michel Houellebecq and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy makes for an entertaining – and very French – exercise in mutual self-loathing.

Tim Adams

In 2008, after what you imagine was a tired and emotional dinner, the novelist Michel Houellebecq and the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévydetermined to start writing to each other about the things that kept them awake at nights. For six months, they corresponded on subjects that ranged from eczema to Epicurus, from Sarkozy to Sartre. Mostly, though, in the course of this strangely compulsive, wildly self-absorbed exchange, which ultimately ran to these 300 pages, they dwelt on the trait that seemed to have most united them in the public mind: “We are,” as Houellebecq acknowledges in his opening letter, “both rather contemptible individuals.”

This fact leads to the fundamental question of their engagement. Why are they so hated? Houellebecq begins by counting the ways. Lévy, he attests, is a “philosopher without an original idea but with excellent contacts”, a “specialist in farcical media stunts”, the “obscenely wealthy epitome of champagne socialism”, the creator of the “most preposterous film in history” (the fabulously bad Le jour et la nuit), a man who even gives his trademark white shirts, provocatively unbuttoned to near the waist, a bad name…..

The Guardian

His ascent to cultural superstardom has been fuelled by his comic talent, but jokes are a serious business for Slavoj Žižek

Lindesay Irvine

Often referred to as ”the Elvis of cultural theory”, there is a case to be made that Slavoj Žižek is really the Ken Dodd of post-Lacanian Hegelianism. He is a famous crowd-pleaser who can tailor his routines both to dusty academics and Occupy protesters, much as Doddy prides himself on shaping his jesting to specific towns and cities in the UK. And, like Dodd – the Shakespeare of standup – he goes on and on and on: there’s always more dialectic where the last bit came from. (I remember him apologising at one appearance that he only had time to give a very brief answer to an audience question, before beginning a 30-minute monologue.)….

The Guardian

“A wise man,” wrote Hume, “proportions his belief to the evidence.” This is a formulation of evidentialism – the view that a belief is rational or justified if and only if it is supported by one’s evidence. A more generalized version of evidentialism covers beliefs with various degrees of confidence, as well as other ‘doxastic attitudes’ such as disbelief, doubt and suspension of judgment (doxa is Greek for belief or opinion). It states that the rational or justified attitude to adopt with respect to a claim or proposition is the attitude that fits one’s evidence. Although evidentialism is much harder to clarify and defend than it might seem, there is no denying its prima facie reasonableness.

Evidentialism plays a key role in attacks against religious belief by the New Atheists, as it did for Hume. Belief in the existence of God or other divine realities is criticized on the ground that there is no good evidence for it. Echoing Carl Sagan and Laplace before him, we are told that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and we are assured that there is nothing of the sort when it comes to the divine. The upshot is that religious belief must be judged irrational, epistemically unjustified, or intellectually illegitimate, and it should be rejected. As Christopher Hitchens is fond of saying, “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”….

Philosophy Now

Paul Cliteur asks: if an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God, which God don’t they believe in?

What is atheism? Although much used in contemporary language, not many people specify what they mean by the word. ‘Atheism’ has this in common with ‘religion’, at least.

Everyone reading William James’ (1842-1910) seminal 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience will be impressed by the huge variety of religious ideas. Nevertheless, that variety is to a considerable extent caused by James’ very broad conception of religion. Jamesian ‘religion’ encompasses all the fundamental visions of life, including political, ideological and philosophical stances. Such a view is popular among those who approach religion from a psychological or sociological perspective, as James did. We clearly detect this view in James’s definition of religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Penguin edition, p.31.)

What James called ‘Emersonian optimism’ or ‘Buddhist pessimism’ also betrays a relation to the divine, so these positions are ‘religions’, according to his definition:

“We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.” (p.34.)

This brought James to a conception of religion as “man’s total reaction upon life.” (p.35.)………

Philosophy Now

PETER BERGER

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a list of German celebrity intellectuals who pop up continuously in the media. (The list includes Margot Kaessmann, the Protestant bishop who resigned after being caught driving under the influence. Curiously, she only became a celebrity after this unfortunate incident.) Habermas has been a public intellectual (a more polite term for celebrity) for a very long time. I have never been terribly interested in Habermas, but the coincidence made me think about him. Portier’s article does tell an intriguing story. It might be called a man-bites-dog story….

The American Interest

For Alain Badiou, one of Europe’s leading thinkers today, philosophy is about everyday life and the questions we ask about it.

Philosophy’s ethical and political intervention is necessary to ascertain the nature of questions we are asking as well as face up to the fact that we are sometimes asking the wrong questions. Is communism a bad idea? What is the role of the Left in France? What lies ahead for humanity? To respond to these questions, Alain Badiou, one of Europe’s most challenging thinkers and the hero of France’s intellectual Left, takes philosophy to mean: ‘never accept the world as it is.’ A philosopher is always a critic and it is not his nature to accept an opinion because it is part of the dominant discourse. For Badiou, philosophy is in jeopardy because it is customarily allowed to fossilise in the arid confines of academic disciplines rather than be integrated into everyday life…..

The Hindu

Alistair MacFarlane sketches Wittgenstein’s life with words.

When Ludwig Wittgenstein was persuaded to return to Cambridge in 1929, he was virtually penniless and had no degree. Bertrand Russell realised that Wittgenstein’s previous status as an undergraduate in Trinity College would allow him to apply for a doctorate; and G.E. Moore suggested that he submit his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) as a doctoral thesis. The examination has passed into legend. After the oral, Wittgenstein clapped his two examiners – the eminent philosophers Russell and Moore – on the shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry. I know you’ll never understand it.” Moore’s report was masterfully succinct: “I consider that this is a work of genius but, even if it is not, it is well above the standard required for a PhD degree.” Posterity has been less ambivalent. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is now recognised as a masterpiece. Indeed, as his former student continued to develop, Russell became concerned that his own reputation might be overshadowed….

Philosophy Now