Nigel Warburton 🇺🇦 #FreeUkraine
@philosophybites
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Little History of Philosophy and other books https://t.co/HJz09HTicJ @aeonmag @thenewphil @five_books weekly column @TheNewEuropean
Joined May 2009
I’m beginning to understand why translations of my philosophy books are bestsellers in Turkey.
A man in Istanbul distributed sweets in memory of philosopher Spinoza’s 347th death anniversary.
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I strongly suspect this book is better in Turkish. .
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Whether you agree or disagree with her, @jk_rowling has written a clear, reasoned, empathetic, and personal account of what she believes. Do you want to live in a society that shouts her down? #freespeech
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Earth, Venus, and Jupiter viewed from the surface of Mars.
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@alixabeth Philosopher. Then when they say ‘Really?’ You can reply ‘It depends what you mean by ‘really’’.
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Is it @POTUS ?.
Russian Navy has new weapon that makes targets hallucinate and vomit: report
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If you can’t say it clearly, quit philosophy.
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Philosophers around the world are hoping they will still be allowed to use the prefix ‘meta’ without getting into trademark disputes.
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Diogenes used to masturbate in public. Philosophers no longer need to do this. We have Twitter.
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My PhD supervisor told me ‘Philosophy books don’t sell many copies’ Also, Wittgenstein said it’s impossible to get to the moon.
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Some people feel guilty about buying more books than they'll get round to reading. But if you buy books by living authors, you make it possible for us to keep writing. Think of it as buying an option to read with an investment in the kind of writing that interests you.
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My philosophy is: try to do at least one good thing your life, make some mistakes, learn from them, hang out with some interesting people (family, friends, etc), read, listen to music, look at art. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Then die without feeling sorry for yourself.
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Who is the most interesting living philosopher?.
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How did we get to the situation where many philosophers believe the main task for a philosopher is to publish a series of mediocre articles in stilted prose in peer-reviewed journals?.
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I spoke to some students about writing yesterday. Here’s my advice: 1000 words a day (I call this unit an ‘Updike’), read your writing out loud, cut your first draft introduction and rewrite it, go for a walk. Cut adverbs, passive constructions, jargon, and divide long sentences.
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Add the phrase ‘stay alert’ to a famous philosophical quotation to make it current. E.g. ‘and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Stay alert.’.
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A philosopher who isn’t on Twitter is like a boxer who never enters the ring.
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Serious question. I have a PhD in Philosophy. Is there any conceivable situation in which I should put ‘Dr’ in front of my name or expect to be addressed in that way? I can’t think of one.
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I have an Ayn Rand joke, but why should I share it with you?.
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If you and a philosopher were to be the last two people left on Earth, which philosopher would you choose as your companion?.
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Shouldn’t there be a Philosophy Oscars, with gushing speeches, and categories like ‘Best refutation of a view that no one actually holds’?.
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Another wonderful example of sustainability from the family that flies in private jets and helicopters. They are so eco-minded they even wear hand me down diamond jewellery. Quite amazing.
Queen Camilla has chosen to use Queen Mary's Crown in the interests of sustainability, rather than having a new crown created. Queen Mary liked to reuse her crown, too. She sometimes wore it without the arches as a circlet.
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Philosophers are already being asked if they have anything stronger than stoicism.
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One of my aims in life is to help a younger generation of philosophers communicate beyond the narrow confines of academia. I haven’t disclosed this before.
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Who is the most overrated philosopher of all time?.
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Name a great short philosophy book (not the Tractatus)….
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Which (if any) philosophy book would you read or re-read if you knew you only had a year to live?.
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How did the Ancient Greeks make so much progress in philosophy in hot weather?.
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Which philosophy book is the equivalent of Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue?
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No, Nietzsche, we didn’t kill God. He bled to death from internal inconsistencies.
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This review I wrote of Daniel Dennett’s autobiographical book I’ve Been Thinking is no longer behind a paywall - I hope it shows why he was such a force for good in philosophy @TheTLS
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Rebecca Reilly-Cooper’s 2016 essay in which she argues against the idea that gender is a spectrum has had the most page views of all the pieces I’ve commissioned/edited for @aeonmag
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Public philosophy should provoke thought not prevent it.
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Should philosophers keep quiet about the fact that we probably don’t have free will in the sense most people think we do? Can they even choose to do that?.
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Apart from Philosophy Bites, which philosophy podcasts are worth listening to?.
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It’s never too late to study Philosophy.
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It’s quite amazing that human beings have been making music for at least 35,000 years, probably longer judging by the sophistication of this flute. .
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Philosophy begins in wonder. yet ends in pedantry.
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Imagine what philosophy would be like without thought experiments.
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900 scrolls from Herculaneum, possibly works of Epicurean philosophy, to be virtually unrolled and read using X-ray tech plus AI.
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Am I alone in being disgusted by excessive wealth? It seems like a moral failing rather than something to celebrate or aspire to.
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Philosophy is civil conversation not shrill dogma.
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New arrival. Just checked the final line: ‘What cannot be said must be left to silence’ @PenguinUKBooks
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‘If triangles had a god, they would give him three sides.’.Montesquieu.
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What was the best philosophy book (old or new) that you read this year?.
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Is anyone panic-buying philosophy books?.
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Oh no, fellow atheists, we’ve been rumbled!.
Most professed #atheists wouldn't even become #christians even if they knew it was true. They dont want to be accountable to their creator. They love their perverted sex.
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Without extensive freedom of speech universities become factories for dead dogma.
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Which philosophy book changed your life?.
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There is something poetic about reuniting the skeletons of two related Vikings, one of whom died a violent death in Oxford, the other who seems to have remained in Denmark. They died a thousand years ago.
The National Museum of Denmark will display two Viking skeletons, found to be related, that were discovered in different countries. The remains have given researchers a glimpse into Viking life in its heyday.
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If anyone is interviewing philosophers for podcasts or radio programme’s, here’s my advice on a thread after doing over three hundred of these….
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Come on Philosophy, destroy fascism.
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Philosophy shouldn’t flinch when it encounters pseudo-profundity
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Is this me? Not sure why he doesn’t use my @. I’m certainly guilty of having ‘platformed’ thinkers with a very wide range of views. I see that as my role. Philosophy is civil conversation not shrill dogma.
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Which philosopher would you most like to be self-isolated with?.
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Something I didn’t anticipate when I wrote A Little History of Philosophy: a photo of a Turkish reading group holding up their translated copies of the book appearing on social media
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I’m disturbed that there is a Twitter horde trying to stop discussion of important questions and openly mocking those who believe in free speech. These self-styled warriors might find they are fighting a hydra.
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If philosophy is therapy, I’d like my money back.
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Bruno Latour (1947–2022) ‘At a lecture at the University of Oxford in 2003, a junior researcher dared to interrupt Bruno to point out a logical inconsistency. Bruno paused, and exclaimed: “But I am French!”, to rapturous applause.’
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Wow! Just learned that the Turkish edition of A Little History of Philosophy has sold over 100,000 copies!.
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39 million downloads of episodes of the Philosophy Bites podcast is mind-boggling. I wonder if most academic philosophers realise how much interest there is in the subject beyond the universities. .
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You don’t have to agree with the philosopher @Docstockk to find some of the ways in which people are trying to silence her deeply worrying. Without extensive freedom of expression and the possibility of robust disagreement universities will become tame sites of received opinion.
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I find it easier to imagine what it would be like to be a bat than what it would be like to be a Trump supporter.
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Kierkegaard’s cupboard. He had it made after he had rejected Regine Olsen because she then said she would live in a cupboard and thank him for it. So it has no shelves. He stored mementoes of her and books inspired by her there. Sad and a little weird.
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How difficult is it to work out what we should do? We should feed the poor, look after the sick, provide education, housing, and meaningful work for all, or at least a living wage. All this before we let the rich get richer. And yet. .
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Rishi Sunak to confirm Cambridge philosophy professor Arif Ahmed as UK's first free speech tsar
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Bernard Suits’ definition of a game: ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’.
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I love that so many people are reading my books in Turkey. I hope to visit one day.
Hi from Turkey. It is great. I started a new philosophy and thank you for this book. @NigelWarburton
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Which philosophy book would you save if the last library in the world was on fire?.
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It took me nearly twenty years as an academic to realise that it wasn’t the job for me. I feel I am more of a philosopher now than I ever was there.
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Is the idea that if we’re exposed to enough lies we’ll achieve herd immunity to them?.
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‘Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead’ Hannah Arendt.
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Six of my books are now available as a set in Turkish!
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This post has gone viral (by my standards)…which is a further indication of the thirst for philosophy in Türkiye (I’m told that is the correct form to use now)….
I’m beginning to understand why translations of my philosophy books are bestsellers in Turkey.
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@PhilipDBunn Stand close to one so you can’t see the edges of the painting. Stay in that position for five minutes. Then get back to me.
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I hope this @TheTLS review of Dennett’s I’ve Been Thinking explains why I think he was such a force for good in philosophy
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‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward’ Søren Kierkegaard
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If you’re studying philosophy to improve your mental health you may have made a category error. Read a few biographies of philosophers before following this path.
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Whether or not you agree with her stance on trans issues it is clear that @Docstockk’s contributions are part of an important ongoing conversation. As @HPSGlonk et al al have been actively trying to stop people encountering her views on my feed I intend to tweet regular links.
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One of the weirder things about politics is the way that the far left and the far right have so much in common.
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Is there a philosophy book you’d recommend for a teenager? If you’re a teenager which philosophy book is your favourite? Needn’t be anything targeted at this age group.
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by analytic philosophy. Discuss.
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‘Ethics and aesthetics are one’ Ludwig Wittgenstein
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If you don’t believe you could be wrong, you’re not a philosopher. But I could be wrong about this.
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Imagine a philosophy class in which your task is to go and do something good, then to come back and explain to the group why you believed that it was good. .
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These lampposts in Oxford were designed by the philosopher Derek Parfit
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‘Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life’ Bertrand Russell.
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Philosophy is not a spectator sport.
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