[Part 4]"Three mice are sitting around boasting about their strengths. The first mouse says, 'Mouse traps are nothing! I do push-ups with the bar.'The second mouse pulls a pill from his pocket, swallows it, and says with a grin, 'That was rat poison.'The third mouse got up to leave. The first mouse says, 'Where doyou think you’re going?''It’s time to go home,' says the third mouse. 'And do what?' says the second Mouse.While walking away, the third mouse says, 'Chasing the cat!'"Swara proceeded, 'The fifth background, the thing that influences the philosophical tradition, according to Baggini, and this, especially in the West, is secular reason. On the one hand, in his opinion, it is working, on the other hand, it needs to be challenged. He starts with, 'The Panthéon in Paris is often seen as a symbol of the rise of reason, and the fall of faith, in the West. Built by the great architect Soufflot as a Christian basilica, barely a year after its completion in 1791 it was transformed by French revolutionaries into a monument to the great men and women of France. The remains of the arch anti-cleric Voltaire were transferred there later that year, followed by those of numerous others, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1794. The church was overthrown, usurped by a secular temple.The true significance of the Panthéon is embodied in the scientific demonstration that takes place sixty-seven metres under its dome, says Baggini. In 1851, the physicist Léon Foucault suspended a weight from a wire attached to the underside of the dome. On the floor beneath it was a circle divided like a sundial into the hours of the day, each number 11.3 degrees apart. The pendulum is released to start swinging from the position of whatever the time is. Over the day, the pendulum’s swing appears to move along the dial, as though its swing is gradually shifting clockwise. In fact, the pendulum does not change the angle of its swing at all. It is the earth beneath it which is moving. The earth’s rotation, usually imperceptible, is made visible.Foucault’s pendulum captures the spirit of the Enlightenment and the wider philosophical culture from which it emerged, characterised by a secularity which does not require a rejection of all religion. Rather, it requires an endorsement of the power of unaided human intellect. In this temple humanity, not God, comes first.'Baggini goes on, 'I call this a belief in the power of secular reason. It is what almost all schools of modern Western philosophy endorse, implicitly or explicitly, and it unites them more profoundly than their differences divide them. Secular reason is built on the foundation stone of ancient Greek philosophy, which developed logic as an independent discipline, not dependent on insight, scripture or authority. In this world view, the natural world is scrutable and its operations can be described by laws which require no assumption of divine agency.Belief in the power of secular reason lies behind the conviction that there is no human mystery that science should not try to penetrate. Between 1990 and 2003 the Human Genome Project mapped our complete DNA. Both the Human Brain Project and the Human Connectome Project seek to provide a complete map of the brain, unlocking the mechanisms behind all that we think, experience and feel. Physics searches for a complete ‘theory of everything’, which physicist Stephen Hawking said would let us ‘know the mind of God’ In the twenty-first century, we are creating new humans from three parents, genetically modifying organisms, looking at how to create life from inert matter, trying to freeze the dead to bring them back to life in the future, and starting to grow meat in a laboratory.Secular reason, says Baggini, is one reason why the West overcame these restrictions to lead the world in science for so many centuries. Modern science is the child of the West, born in 1620, when Francis Bacon set out its basic principles in his seminal Novum Organum. Other societies also had the material resources to sustain scientific inquiry, so national wealth alone cannot explain the West’s advances. Indeed, for centuries large parts of China were richer than the West. The difference has to be explained at least in part because of the nature of the Western mind, which can only be properly understood in the light of Western philosophy.The validity of secular reason is widely assumed in the West, whether people have religious beliefs or not. The most religiously devout scientist trusts evidence and experiment and never seeks a scientific breakthrough through divine revelation, Baggini explained. Standards of proof and probability are public and assessable by all. All human minds are capable of comprehending reality. There is no place for rishis in secular reason. Nor is there any stress on the boundaries as to what the human mind can comprehend, as has been the case in much of the East. Although Chinese thought is largely secular, for example, it generally confines itself to questions of living and is agnostic about the nature of ultimate reality. Western secular reason has as its objective nothing less than a full description of the cosmos and how it works. To grant unaided human reason such a powerful role is historically the exception rather than the norm.Secular reason was born in ancient Greece but many centuries passed before it became the default mindset of the West. Until the late Middle Ages, Christianity was the centre of gravity for all learning. Scholarship was largely biblical and confined to monasteries and all philosophy had to conform to the Church’s teachings at the risk of excommunication or even death. Gradually, however, through the Renaissance and especially into the seventeenth–eighteenth-century Enlightenment, philosophy became more autonomous from theology. Science—then called natural philosophy—gave precedence to experiment and observation over scripture and creed. This emerging form of secular reason was not inherently opposed to religion, merely independent of it. Many of the philosophers of this era were religious and believed that secular reason would and could only confirm the teachings of the Church. The Bible was read as theology, not as science or even always as history.During its long gestation, secular reason had two wings. One was empirical, examining the world itself and basing conclusions on careful observation. Empiricists are broadly scientific in their reasoning. The other wing was rationalist, looking at what reason alone demands and assuming that the world must conform to it. Rationalists are caricatured as ‘armchair thinkers’, but the implication that they have no need to go out and study how the world actually works is accurate enough.It is tempting to overstate this distinction as absolute, dividing Western philosophers into empiricists (Aristotle, Locke, Berkeley, Hume) and rationalists (Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), and this is indeed how countless textbooks carve up the canon. There is some sense in this. In particular, there does seem to be a fundamental difference between those who believe it is possible to discover truths about the way the world is by reason alone, without reference to experience, and those who believe that pure reason can only tell us about abstract mathematics and the relations between concepts, and that all knowledge of the real world must be rooted in experience. The technical names for these two types of knowledge express this difference neatly: knowledge can be gained either prior to experience (a priori) or post-experience (a posteriori).The distinction between rationalist and empiricist approaches, says Baggini, is real and important. However, it would be misleading to think that the division is clear-cut. So-called rationalists make use of a lot of the data of experience and so-called empiricists appeal to principles of logic and argument that are established by reason not observation. It is better to think of an empiricist–rationalist spectrum, with different philosophers giving more weight to observation and reason respectively.Taking a long view of the history of Western philosophy, empiricism has been in slow but uneven ascendency and rationalism in similar decline. In the early days of Western philosophy, empirical methods didn’t extend beyond everyday observations. The earliest forms of science were little more than armchair speculation, with Thales proposing that everything was made of water and Democritus suggesting that everything was made up of discrete atoms. Much later many philosophers continued to see an important role for a priori reasoning even as they embraced empirical methods. Likewise, some of the most rationalist philosophers spent a lot of time on empirical inquiry. Descartes, for example, was a keen experimenter who dissected carcasses, Leibniz wrote on chemistry, medicine, botany, geology and technology, while Spinoza was not only a lens grinder but a pioneer in experimental hydrodynamics and metallurgy.Nonetheless, over time the empirical branch of secular reason, which began with Aristotle observing the plants and animals of a lagoon on the island of Lesbos, gradually became more dominant. By the twentieth century, secular reason had established itself as common sense and science took pride of place at its heart. Consider, for example, the rousing speech that concludes Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece The Great Dictator (1940). Chaplin’s character, a Jewish barber, finds himself mistaken for the Hitleresque dictator Adenoid Hynkel (also played by Chaplin) and required to give a speech. In it, he attacks the ‘greed’ which ‘has poisoned men’s souls’ and ‘goose-stepped us into misery’. In many ways, his speech is an attack on the ills of modernity. ‘We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in,’ he says. ‘Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. […] More than machinery we need humanity.’ Yet Chaplin ends by reasserting his faith in the bedrocks of the secular reason on which modernity was built. ‘Let us fight for a world of reason,’ he pleads, ‘a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.’This sentence contains all three elements that make modern secular reason distinctive: belief in science, reason and the progress which will inevitably result if we follow both. ‘Science and reason’ are so often uttered in the same breath that it is tempting to think either that they always go together or that they simply mean the same thing. In fact, for large parts of history reason has been anything but scientific.Few in the West today, however, Baggini carries on, would accept as truth anything established on the basis of any combination of insight, logic, tradition, authority or revelation. We also demand facts, based on observation and experiment, empirical evidence that can tested.Of course, says Baggini, other traditions have not been blind to the benefits of observation. Around the same time as Aristotle, Gautama in India was arguing in the Nyāya Sūtra that knowledge must be based on observation and that we should not waste time on abstractions such as mathematical logic. His logic combines inductive and deductive methods: logic without evidence is empty. However, his empiricism was highly qualified by his acceptance of the śabda of the authors of the Vedas as a valid pramāṇa.In China, the fourth-century-BCE philosopher Mozi was also distinguished by his advocacy of a kind of empiricism, based on ‘the gauges of precedent, evidence, and application’. One looks ‘up for precedent among the affairs and actions of the ancient sage-kings, […] down to examine evidence of what the people have heard and seen’ and then ‘implements it as state policy and sees whether or not it produces benefit for the state, families and people’. Although the Mohists had a strong influence on the development of Chinese thought, their ideas have never become dominant.Of course, says Baggini, other traditions have not been blind to the benefits of observation. Around the same time as Aristotle, Gautama in India was arguing in the Nyāya Sūtra that knowledge must be based on observation and that we should not waste time on abstractions such as mathematical logic. His logic combines inductive and deductive methods: logic without evidence is empty. However, his empiricism was highly qualified by his acceptance of the śabda of the authors of the Vedas as a valid pramāṇa.In China, the fourth-century-BCE philosopher Mozi was also distinguished by his advocacy of a kind of empiricism, based on ‘the gauges of precedent, evidence, and application’. One looks ‘up for precedent among the affairs and actions of the ancient sage-kings, […] down to examine evidence of what the people have heard and seen’ and then ‘implements it as state policy and sees whether or not it produces benefit for the state, families and people’. Although the Mohists had a strong influence on the development of Chinese thought, their ideas have never become dominant.Belief in the autonomy of science entails that the scientist belongs in the laboratory and it is for society to decide how to best use its findings. ‘Science has nothing to be ashamed of even in the ruins of Nagasaki,’ said the scientist and broadcaster Jacob Bronowski. ‘The shame is theirs who appeal to other values than the human imaginative values which science has evolved. The shame is ours if we do not make science part of our world.’For some, the strength of science is that it is solely concerned with truth, remaining free of ethics and ideology. For others, this is its problem. The contemporary Islamic philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr argues that modern science, premised on a ‘secularised view of the cosmos’, not interested in whether its fruits are used for good or ill, is an aberration. Far from being a glory of civilisation, it is decadent and amoral, responsible for catastrophic climate change, pollution and weapons of mass destruction. ‘Finally, one can at last ask not only why Islam and China, with their long and rich scientific traditions, did not produce a Descartes or Galileo,’ he writes, ‘but rather why Europe did.Nasr is a strong critic of the West, but many within the tradition have also had misgivings about the moral neutrality of science. ‘Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals,’ said the lawyer William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925. Most scientists would agree and see this as no problem. For Bryan, this was a failing. Arguing against teaching the theory of evolution, he said that science 'can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.'The debate about the right relationship between science and ethics reveals a tension in secular reason. On the one hand, the autonomy of reason implies that we should go wherever our thought takes us, without concern for the practical uses. On the other, it assumes a link between science, reason and progress. But how can we be sure that secular reason will benefit us if it is ethically neutral? Why assume ‘science for science’s sake’ will work for humanity’s sake?The assumption that autonomous reason will inevitably lead to progress also fosters a dangerous complacency among academics, who often baulk if asked to say how their work benefits wider society. The logic of secular reason would answer that if learning has no practical effect, it doesn’t matter because inquiry is good for its own sake. If it does have an effect, it is bound to be good because learning leads to progress. But it surely makes sense to question whether the right people are studying the right things in the right way, and we cannot answer this unless we have some idea of what ‘right’ is. Is it right, for example, if an academic community breeds a kind of consensus that stifles dissenting voices? Excessive belief in the autonomy of secular reason stops us asking these questions, raising the spectre of academic ‘censorship’.Secular reason, Baggini concludes, has been a powerful tool for scientific and intellectual development. But complacency about its benefits needs to be challenged, perhaps by traditions that have maintained that philosophy and science exist only to serve human flourishing. If our ultimate goal is human good, the autonomy of reason cannot be absolute. Who would want to build and stock the finest libraries in the world without caring if they stand amidst desolate streets?And now we continue our brief research on some 20th Century philosophers.Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905–1980, existentialist French philosopher, novelist, playwright, and political activist, believed that humans were 'condemned to be free.' He spent his life and work grappling with the ideas of freedom and action. He was born into a middle-class Parisian family. His father, a naval officer, died of yellow fever before Jean-Paul’s second birthday.After carrying out his military service from 1929 to 1931, Sartre spent the next 14 years teaching philosophy at various high schools. During a year’s study at the French Academy in Berlin (1933–1934), he was introduced to the henomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which would have a huge impact on his own thought. In 1938, Sartre published his first novel, Nausea, a philosophical and partially autobiographical work influenced by phenomenology (the study of objects as we consciously experience them).Algerian-born French writer and thinker Albert Camus (1913–1960) met Sartre in Paris in 1943, and the two forged a close friendship, which lasted until they fell out in 1951 over their opposing views on communism. Although he rejected the label of existentialism, Camus explored many of the same themes, such as individual freedom and the futile, or 'absurd,' attempt to find meaning in a meaningless world. His 1946 novel L'Étranger (The Stranger or The Outsider) is a brilliant study of 20th-century alienation, while in the essay Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) (1956), he analyzes the nihilism prevalent in postwar thought.In 1943, Sartre published his great work, L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology). In this monumental treatise, he turned the traditional philosophical idea that 'essence precedes existence' on its head, espousing the concept that 'existence precedes essence.' He extolled the importance of free choice, which makes its own burden because it brings responsibility, condemning man to create his own meaning in a meaningless existence. In 1945, he founded Modern Times, a magazine that set out to provide a forum for existentialist literature. In 1945, Sartre published L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason and The Reprieve), the first two volumes of the trilogy Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom). The third volume, La mort dans l'âme (Troubled Sleep also translated as Iron in the Soul), was published in 1948. Partly autobiographical, the trilogy uses fiction to explore philosophical themes of freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and self-deception and demonstrates the shift of Sartre’s focus on to the importance of action and engagement.Relinquishing the novel as a useful tool of expression, Sartre turned back to the medium of drama in an attempt to portray man as he is, exploring political commitment in the play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) (1948). A Marxist himself, Sartre supported the Soviet Union, though he never joined the Communist Party. His commitment to Soviet communism was shaken by the regime’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and by its human rights abuses and oppression of writers. Yet he came to regard Marxism as 'the philosophy of our time,' and in 1960 published Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), an attempt to reconcile Marxism and existentialism. In 1960, Sartre traveled with Simone de Beauvoir to Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, declaring the latter to be the 'most complete human being of our age.'Relinquishing the novel as a useful tool of expression, Sartre turned back to the medium of drama in an attempt to portray man as he is, exploring political commitment in the play Les mains sales (Dirty Hands) (1948). A Marxist himself, Sartre supported the Soviet Union, though he never joined the Communist Party. His commitment to Soviet communism was shaken by the regime’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and by its human rights abuses and oppression of writers. Yet he came to regard Marxism as 'the philosophy of our time,' and in 1960 published Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason), an attempt to reconcile Marxism and existentialism. In 1960, Sartre traveled with Simone de Beauvoir to Cuba, where he met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, declaring the latter to be the 'most complete human being of our age.'In 1964, Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he refused the honor. In 1968, he was arrested for civil disobedience during the May uprisings in Paris, and immediately pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle. After his death in 1980, more than 50,000 people turned out to accompany his funeral cortege through the streets of Paris.Hannah Arendt, 1906–1975. With first-hand experience of Nazism and the anti-Semitism it espoused, she developed a unique perspective on the nature of political power and moral judgment, the basis of her controversial philosophical writing. In 1929, she published her doctoral thesis, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (Love and Saint Augustine).It was at Marburg that Arendt met Martin Heidegger, one of her tutors, who had a lasting influence on her philosophy. She also became his lover. in 1929, she met and married the philosopher Gunther Stern, a German Jew. At this time, Arendt turned her attention to writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (a 19th-century Russian Jew), a work through which she could explore her ideas of Jewish assimilation.She began work on what will become her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 in English, and a German translation was published in 1955 as Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Elements and Origins of Totalitarian Rule). It should be noted that tyrants have existed throughout history, but the 20th century saw the rise of a number of specifically totalitarian regimes, characterized by extreme nationalism and the exercise of political power over every aspect of the state. Various authoritarian ideologies emerged at either end of the political spectrum: Hitler’s Nazism and Mussolini’s fascism grew from nationalist socialist movements but became dictatorships. Similarly, Stalin and Mao rose to power on the back of communist revolutions, and more recently North Korea has been ruled by the totalitarian Kim dynasty.Her most influential book, The Human Condition, appeared in 1958, and in the same year, she published the finished version of her biography, entitled Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess. Arendt’s standing as a philosopher was already in question (among Jews at least) when in 1961, she was commissioned by the New Yorker to report on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann. Her reports were published in book form in 1963, as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The work provoked a storm of protest. Her portrayal of Eichmann as dull-witted, unimaginative, and almost automatonlike, rather than the monster he had been presumed to be, was widely interpreted as a betrayal of the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust, as her defense of Heidegger had been.Arendt’s last major work, On Revolution (1963), she soon began to concentrate more on her teaching and campaigning activities. A heavy smoker all her life, she died of a heart attack in 1975 in New York.Simone de Beauvoir, 1908–1986, French novelist, essayist, and existential philosopher, was revered for her groundbreaking analyses of patriarchy and gender and had a major influence on feminist theory, ethics, and politics in the 20th century. Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous and controversial work, Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), was published in 1949 to a largely hostile audience. The radical text sparked outrage for its challenging and unflinching engagement with patriarchy, gender, subordination, and female sexuality.De Beauvoir jettisoned her bourgeois upbringing early in life, announcing her atheism at the age of 14 and, soon after, her interest in philosophy and in books deemed unsuitable for girls. At school, she formed a deep friendship with Elizabeth Mabille, or Zaza, who died in 1929, apparently from meningitis—de Beauvoir claimed it was from a broken heart, following her family’s attempt to impose an arranged marriage on her. The memory of Zaza had a lifelong impact on de Beauvoir, in particular shaping her ideas surrounding the bourgeois attitudes to women. At the age of 19, she wrote in her diary 'I don’t want my life to obey any other will but my own'—and this was to remain her clarion call.In 1943, she published her first novel, L'Invitée (She Came to Stay). The novel was a fictional account of her and Jean-Paul Sartre's relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz and Wanda Kosakiewicz. De Beauvoir’s lifelong relationship with the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is legendary. The couple met in their early 20s and became immersed in one another’s lives and work. In 1947, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (The Ethics of Ambiguity) was published, drawing on Sartrean existentialism. In 1954, she received the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary honor, for Les Mandarins (The Mandarins). In 1981, La Cérémonie des adieux (Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre), published the year after Sartre’s death, is a mournful narrative of the philosopher’s final years. She herself died of pneumonia 5 years later, at the age of 78.Simone Weil, 1909–1943, a french political activist, mystic, and philosopher, lived a short life of exceptional intensity. Her reflections on state power and social injustice, and her idiosyncratic religious vision, attracted interest only after her death. Born into an affluent secular Jewish family in Paris in 1909, Simone Weil showed great intellectual aptitude from an early age. After having received an elite education at the Lycée Henri IV and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she graduated in 1931 and began a career as a philosophy teacher at a school in the provinces.In the late 1930s, Weil’s thinking evolved toward mysticism and spirituality. Although brought up without religious belief, a series of visionary experiences—notably an ecstatic rapture in a church at Assisi, Italy, in 1937—led her to place a belief in God at the center of her worldview.In 1942, after the defeat of France by Nazi Germany, Weil escaped with her parents to the US. She then joined the Free French movement in the UK and wrote her only completed book, L'Enracinement (1949). The first English translation, The Need for Roots, was published in 1952. Like all of Weil's books, it was published posthumously. She died in Ashford, Kent, in 1943, of tuberculosis and malnutrition.Arne Næss, 1912–2009, was a Norwegian philosopher and environmentalist who is associated in particular with the concept of deep ecology. He was also known as an activist and an accomplished mountaineer. For Næss, there is an important distinction between shallow and deep ecology. According to him, the environmental issues that we face are a symptom of philosophical problems with how we relate to the world around us. Næss's book Erkenntnis und wissenschaftliches Verhalten (1936) anticipated many themes familiar in post-war analytic philosophy.In 1970, together with a large number of protesters, he chained himself to rocks in front of Mardalsfossen, a waterfall in a Norwegian fjord, and refused to descend until plans to build a dam were dropped.He arrived at the concept of deep ecology through his readings of the works of Spinoza, Gandhi, and the Buddha. He collaborated closely with George Sessions, a philosophy professor at Sierra College in Rocklin, California. It was on a camping trip to Death Valley in 1984 that the pair drew up the eight basic principles of deep ecology, which were later elaborated in Sessions’s work.Deep ecology continues to influence environmental philosophy. However, the deep ecology movement has also given rise to political and activist initiatives around the world. Næss himself—an activist and advocate of nonviolent resistance—was involved in public protests against dambuilding and also campaigned for the Norwegian Green Party. He died at the age of 96.Roland Barthes, 1915–1980, his work was central to the development of Structuralism and Poststructuralism, and he was famed above all for his brilliant semiotic analyses of the myths of bourgeois culture. Barthes’ theories on language and literature reached maturity in his first major text, Le degré zéro de l'écriture (Writing Degree Zero) (1953). Influenced by the work of Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre, this book challenges the idea that writing is the expression of a writer’s subjectivity: for Barthes, it is steeped in ideology, a product of social and cultural values.Barthes developed these ideas in Mythologies (1957), which drew on the Structuralist theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Here, in a series of brilliant, playful essays, Barthes decodes various bourgeois 'myths' that underlie French popular culture, showing how the signs society uses to express itself—a glass of red wine or a plate of steak-fries, for example—reflect discourses of power, such as colonialism and sexism. Myth, says Barthes, is depoliticized speech that makes things appear natural when they are not: it 'abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences.'Barthes’ life and work were inextricably linked: his inner circle included intellectual giants such as Foucault and Susan Sontag; and he once claimed that Kristeva, whom he adored, was 'the only woman who could make me change my sexuality.' However, his real love was his mother, with whom he lived for 60 years and whose death—just 3 years before his own—left him grief-stricken.Louis Althusser, 1918–1990, was a French Marxist philosopher, one of the towering left-wing thinkers of the 1960s and ’70s, he is best known for his rigorous reinterpretation of the work of Marx, and also for murdering his wife at their university home in November 1980.In the late 1940s, Althusser met and became deeply influenced by the communist activist and sociologist Hélène Rytmann, a woman 8 years his senior who had fought in the French Resistance.In 1965, Althusser received acclaim for his works of Marxist analysis, For Marx and Reading Capital, the latter co-authored with the philosopher Etienne Balibar. Althusser’s reinterpretation of Marx identified the role of 'ideological state apparatuses.' He introduced the influential concept of 'interpellation,' a process whereby individuals are constituted by ideological state apparatuses' as subjects and become products of the dominant ideology: just as we instinctively turn around when someone calls our name, so, too, does ideology 'interpellate,' or hail us. Importantly, Althusser also adapted Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of 'overdetermination' for use in a quite different context. He died of a heart attack in a psychiatric hospital near Paris in aged 72.Iris Murdoch, 1909–1999, was an acclaimed novelist, as well as a philosopher. Her specific brand of moral philosophy influenced contemporary as well as later thinkers and her ideas have assumed increasing importance. Her first published philosophical work was a critique of existentialism: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953). The next year, she published her first novel, Under the Net. A prolific writer, she published a book approximately every 2 years for the next four decades. Murdoch’s novels often featured animals, which she endowed with rich personalities. She wrote 27 novels in total, reportedly forbidding her publisher from changing a single word in her manuscripts. A Severed Head, Murdoch’s fifth novel, published in 1961, deals with themes of adultery, morality, abortion, and suicide, yet is acclaimed for its wry wit.Seven years after she had stopped teaching, Murdoch published The Sovereignty of Good (1970), containing three essays that argued against the prevailing schools of thought—analytic philosophy and existentialism. Influenced by Simone Weil and Plato, she investigated what she called the 'fat, relentless ego' as the source of moral blindness. She considered how people can become morally better and referred to Plato’s concept of the Form of the Good, or the idea of the good, as an effective way of approaching a 'progressive education in the virtues.'Murdoch continued writing until a couple of years before her death from Alzheimer’s disease in Oxford in February 1999 at the age of 79.There will be a few more names we're going to briefly examine in the next session.
[Part 2]
