Philosophy by the Way

In the example in my last blog I saved a person who had felt into a canal. What I did not know then was that this person had the intention t...

An action need not to be intrinsically good or bad. It can also be neutral. Moreover, an action can be good from one aspect and bad from ano...

Can an action be good or bad as such or are there no intrinsically good and bad actions? And if we want to judge an action, do we have to ju...

Sometimes I think: it should be possible to skip the phase of going to travel. Sometimes I think: it should be possible to skip the phase of...

President Obama of the USA decided that the torturers of Guantanamo would not be prosecuted for their acts, because they were ordered to do ...

The idea that there is a gliding scale of responsibility supposes implicitly that it is clear how to ascribe responsibility and in what degr...

In my blog last week I concluded that I cannot be held for responsible for a consequence of an action of mine if this consequence was an act...

Let us take another time Davidson’s example in my last week’s blog, which I have extended a bit: I come home, I flip the switch, turn on the...

In my recent blogs I made a distinction between an action as intended and the side effects of an action, as is done by many philosophers. Of...

Is a bad action less bad if it has positive side effects? Say, I am a pacifist and I am absolutely against war. So I judge war is bad. As a ...

Once I made a distinction between meaning 1 and meaning 0. With the former I indicated the meaning a scientist gives to an object, either ph...

Given what I said in my last two blogs I think that we can distinguish two kinds of responsibility: objective and subjective responsibility....

In my last blog, I showed that people judge the negative side effects of intentional actions and their positive side effects not in the same...

In my last blog, I doubted whether still something new is said in the field of the philosophy of action after so many years of discussion. I...

Sometimes it is said: everything that is written now in philosophy is not more than a comment on Kant. Is it true? I doubt it. Take for exam...

“The putting men to the rack is a dangerous invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth. Both he who has the fortit...

Books can have much influence on life, culture and politics, and who knows what more. The influence of religious books is very well known. O...

We can go back on our road but not back in time. When we go back on a road, we go forward in time, even if this road is a circular road. Eve...

One can make a road in the middle of nowhere but not a time slice. For wouldn’t that be like a present without a past and a future? Or what ...

When a new year begins, does that mean that the old one has ended? Or is a year like a life: one can make a new start, but the past continue...

When the end of the year comes near, people evaluate the past year. When you read this, it will already be 2009, but when I write this, we s...

When the end of the year comes by, people tend to look back. And they talk about peace. Especially then they do and especially politicians a...

Having finished an article, a book or a photo is one thing, being successful with it is something different. My joy of having completed a di...

In one of his essays in his book about Montaigne, Philippe Desan writes how the library forms for many authors a way to accumulate knowledge...

The joy of having finished an article, a book, a complicated photo! And then the feeling of emptiness of having nothing to do (as long as it...

When Eve and Adam ate from the apple in Paradise, they learned what freedom was but also what its limits are. In Paradise Eve and Adam were ...

In my last blog, I distinguished two types of freedom: freedom as opposed to being limited and freedom as opposed to being determined. I wan...

I received several reactions on my blog “Freedom to act”, not only here, but also on another website where I publish my blogs. Some people s...

What makes that I choose this and not that? Is it I who makes the choices or is there something in me that makes the choices for me? For exa...

When am I free? I mean, when am I free to act, not only here and now but fundamentally? Let us say that I want to take the train to Utrecht ...

Sometimes I think that a translation gives me a text that has nothing in common with the original. For instance, for me Habermas in German a...

The distinction between doing and allowing that I mentioned in my last blog applies also to the question of the limits of responsibility. To...

Arendt defended, as we have seen, that a person can be guilty only of something he or she has actually done. So, a person can be held indivi...

With the help of Hannah Arendt it is not difficult to see why nonviolent action can be so effective, for she wrote: “Power corresponds to th...

On August 25, I wrote in my blog that “it is easier to follow the stream that carries us along rather than take a moment for a break. It is ...

In my blog last week, I talked about “collective responsibility”. Seen from the first person point of view, it refers to feeling myself resp...

“There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them. But there is no such thing as being o...

It is not philosophical, but if you want to read the story of my voyage to Nagasaki go then to http://home.kpn.nl/wegweeda/Nagasaki.htm

Basically, philosophy investigates themes that cannot be investigated empirically, like themes in the field of ethics, methodology, ontology...

“We should not take the absence of the word to be equivalent to the absence of thought” (Martha C. Nussbaum) Once I wrote down this quotatio...

“[D]on’t we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty of thinking? Nothing more is need...

According to Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson first discovered that all words referring to time are words borrowed from spatial language. As Are...

When I wrote my blog on “the devil in our mind” two weeks ago, I was impressed by my recent experiences in Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and Auschwit...

Many people have tried to express the essence of friendship, but I think that nobody did it as well as Montaigne, when he thought of Étienne...

It has been a heavy time in a certain sense: Nagasaki, a few days later Hiroshima, and then last week ─ the remembrances of the other human ...

In his book on Gandhi’s philosophy, Parel writes: “Modern society … has placed its bets on rights rather than on virtue, which to Gandhi was...

In my last blog I talked about the problem of double interpretation: each person has his or her own frame of reference for interpreting the ...

The problem with seeing the culture of another person is that one has always to see it through spectacles with glasses coloured by one’s own...

“Peut-on désirer sans souffrir?” (Can one desire without suffering?). When I watched the French TV news lately, I heard that this was one of...

Actually, the way I described travelling in my blog of May 26 (2008) gives a very narrow view of it. It is travelling as tourists do. I knew...

When I just had finished my last blog, I happened to read Martha Nussbaum’s “ ‘Where the dark feelings held sway’. Running to music”. Actual...

In his The concept of mind , Gilbert Ryle developed the distinction between knowing how and knowing that. The first concept refers to our in...

Some people find gardening boring. They think only of the weeds that disturb the plan and structure that they have made or want to make of t...

Travelling is moving through another world without participating in it but experiencing it from the outside. A traveller does not really bel...

When I move to the other end of the world, the centre of the world moves with me. And when I go back home, I am sure that the centre of the ...

Normally it is so that when I look to the future there are many things that I have planned to do or that I expect that will happen. Of cours...

What de Certeau also says is that “Every society as a whole learns that happiness cannot be equated with development” ( Culture in the plura...

Michel de Certeau writes: “What is true is that violence indicates a necessary change” ( Culture in the plural , p. 36). What is not true is...

On April 30, 2007, I wrote: “When ‘I’ stumble, is it then I who stumbles or is it my body that stumbles?” Now we can ask: Is it then my mind...

Schank and Abelson developed the idea that we have a scheme in our head that organizes the way we see the world and that we use in order to ...

When I run in the wood behind my house, I can think about many things. Usually it is so that during the first 20 minutes or so I am thinking...