#the human front

‘Philosophy as “Great Art” - an Interview with Sophie Grace Chappell’

Exciting news: we just published our interview with Sophie Grace Chappell, the author of over 100 articles and the UK’s only transgender philosophy professor!

What’s her tip for getting into philosophy?

‘Read, read, read, read, read. When you’re doing philosophy, reading is the petrol in the tank; if you don’t read, you’re not going anywhere.’

And how does she assess the current situation for trans people in the UK?

‘This lack of visibility makes it too easy for transgender people to be monstered—we become a dark vague threat that no one actually knows, not people with faces but a “woke mob” or shadowy semi-criminalised lurkers in the Ladies’.’

Read the interview here.

Ancient Science

Empedocles (pictured), born in around 494 BCE, spoke of four unchangeable elements—fire, air, water, and earth—which are pulled into war between two divine powers, Love and Strife. The result of this constant war is a unity of opposites. In comparison to our theories now, ideas from the past can sound bizarre—even fantastical. But we’re always in debt to the past.

We reap the benefits of generations of thinkers who philosophised and recorded their findings before us. Fragments of verse and poem were handed between generations. Songs were shared. Sheets were stained with quill, pencil, and pen. Even if only a fraction remains, we deduce and speculate.

Read more here.

‘Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it, and my heart is just going to cave in.’

Our analysis of American Beauty is two years old today You can read it here.

‘Grounders Gonna Ground’ - an Interview with Joaquim Giannotti

Smile if you love philosophy.

We interviewed rising star of metaphysics and ‘box-to-box metaphysician’ Joaquim Giannotti.

We hope you enjoy reading the interview as much as we enjoyed doing it.

Read more here.

The Philosophy of The Lord of the Rings

Two years ago we published this.

Are you holding on to something worth fighting for, too?

The Philosophy of Analogies

InThe Republic—after introducing ‘the analogy of the sun’, in which the idea of goodness ‘illuminates’ truth, and ‘the analogy of the divided line’—Plato presents ‘the Allegory of the Cave’ (depicted above).

Prisoners in an underground cave are chained by the neck and legs, their eyes fixed towards a wall onto which shadows are cast. Trusting their senses, these two-dimensional figures mark the prisoners’ reality. But this imaginary world does not represent the intelligible reality above it: the ‘world of ideas’.

Like the prisoners, we can only hope to understand reality by ascending out of the cave. Plato’s analogies are powerful. But is each story, the source, really consistent with its accompanying theory, the target of the analogy?

Read more here.

A Life in Philosophy - With Constantine Sandis

It is with great pleasure that we bring to you our interview with illustrious philosopher Constantine Sandis. Constantine is a professor at the University of Hertfordshire. He has produced numerous publications spanning various topics across the philosophy of action and ethics. He even has a Wikipedia page.

We took the opportunity to probe the person inside the academic whilst also being sure to ask him what it’s like to be a real philosopher.

Read more here.

Our top 5 articles of 2021

As we approach the birth of 2022, we take stock of fading 2021—its many happenings; those could-have-beens; the lost and the gained.

At this time of reflection—in limbo between Christmas and the New Year—we reveal our most-popular articles of the year.

Pictured in order, they are:

1)‘The Philosophy of Infidelity’byJames Clark Ross

2)‘Political Freedom’

3)‘Scepticism and Anxiety’ by George Williams

4)‘The Philosophy of Moon’byJames Clark Ross

5)‘Reality, and the Intelligible Reality’ by Keigo Shimada

This list is just for 2021. Here you can see our most-read articles ever.

Have a great end to the year.

Merry Christmas

(Pictured at the top of the tree: the much-disputed comma.)

To: Everyone

We wish you a very merry Christmas. Have a great break. We love you. We will see you soon.

From:The Human Front

Buddhist Psychedelics 

TodayThe Human Front revisits Buddhism.

Dylan Ngan compares meditative practice dhyāna to experiences with psychedelic drugs. Do the similarities run deep?

Read more here.

‘Ten Questions with Ben Springett’

‘Enjoying that moment between wakefulness and the obliteration of sleep where rationality has almost entirely slipped away but I can just about realise that I am about to fall asleep.’

(Pictured: Jean Lecomte du Nouÿ’s A Eunuch’s Dream[1874].)

‘Ten Questions’ is a new feature on The Human Front where we ask academic philosophers the same ten questions. 'Interviewing philosophers in this way gives us access to, dare I say it, the people inside the academics!’

Ben Springett is a philosophy of dreaming specialist who we interviewed last year. We went to revisit him for another fascinating interview—this time armed with our new tool, Ten Questions.

Read more here.

‘Cat, the bravest animal and most prone to sleep, does not deny sleeping as such: she wills it, she even seeks it out, provided she is shown a bag for it.’ — Flea-bag Meat-stew, On the Genealogy of Paws

Buddhism in Star Wars

Approaching his last moments, Qui-Gon Jinn does not dwell on the anxiety of fighting Darth Maul. Nor does he simply wait for the laser gate to open. He opens himself up to the Force, mindfully drawing himself to its will.

Read more here.

Giveaway! 

Hello again, folks.

We are back and we hope you are well!

We feel so bad for abandoning you. To compensate for our neglect we are running another giveaway. Here are the details.

The prize is a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics and all you have to do is like this post on Instagram. You have 48 hours. The winner will be announced via Instagram Story on Friday.

That’s it.

Until then!

The Human Front

Time for a break

Hello, everyone.

James here.

So perhaps this is bad news: we’re going on a short break from posting content. Hopefully, this will be for no longer than a month or so.

The good news, for me at least, is that I’ve had an abstract accepted for writing a book chapter on philosophy in Better Call Saul and I need time to complete it (whilst having a life, if I’m lucky).

What is reassuring is that we still have a stream of people who are interested in submitting work and who I always love helping. Moreover, many of our own ideas for The Human Front content already materially exist in draft form or on a long-ass schedule.

There just isn’t enough time in the world to do all of these things right now. Damn you, World! However, philosophical content is already in the oven to feed our empty stomachs upon our return.

Bear with us. We will be back.

S’all good, maaaaan.

James

(Pictured: Saul Goodman [Bob Odenkirk]. [Michele K. Short/Sony Pictures Television])

The Philosophy of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

Do you get SAD? No: not sad; SAD.

Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a form of depression which tracks seasonal patterns. As summer ominously draws to a close, those who are susceptible to SAD have to prepare themselves for the long struggle ahead through winter.

Beneath the clinical manifestations of SAD there may be something more existential in action, something which expresses a disconnection from the now-decaying world.

To quote Freud on his friend Rilke:

‘Not long ago I went on a summer walk through a smiling countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet. The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.

Winter is coming.

Read more about SAD here.

(Photo credit: Karol Wiśniewski.)

Celebrating diversity

Today we celebrate the diversity of our community.

Pictured are the flags of our contributors: Hong Kong, Japan, Philippines, Portugal, Slovenia, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States. It’s wonderful to imagine philosophy being created for The Human Front from around the world.

We haven’t asked our contributors to identify their genders. Though both men and women contribute, we’d like more diversity. (Get in touch!)

Thanks to Google Analytics, here are some statistics about our readership.

A non-exhaustive sample of 15,607 users revealed the following distribution of readers:

1. United States: 5,370 (34.46 %)
2. United Kingdom: 2,603 (16.70%)
3. Canada: 823 (5.28 %)
4. India: 638 (4.09 %)
5. Australia: 614 (3.94 %)
6. Philippines: 529 (3.39 %)
7. Germany: 286 (1.84 %)
8. Brazil: 202 (1.30 %)
9. Netherlands: 193 (1.24 %)
10. Turkey: 183 (1.17 %)

Other nationalities identified include: Japan, France, Spain, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Mexico, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, China, South Africa, Pakistan, Singapore, Ireland, Greece, South Korea, Norway, Poland, Thailand, Austria, Portugal, Hong Kong, Romania, Argentina, Malaysia, Slovenia, Egypt, Russia, Belgium, Bangladesh, Finland, Nigeria, Kenya, Vietnam, Israel, Hungary, Serbia, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Colombia, Czechia, Morocco, Croatia, Nepal, Ghana, Slovakia, Georgia, Algeria, Latvia, Albania, Estonia, Peru, Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Tunisia, Ecuador, Iraq, Malta, Trinidad & Tobago, Zambia … plus 70 more.

Using Instagram Insights, a 90-day sample revealed that, of 9,250 users, 64.6 % were men and 35.4 % were women.

The breakdown of age was as follows:

• 13 to 17: 1.8 %
• 18 to 24: 35.4 %
• 25 to 34: 44.8 %
• 35 to 44: 11.3 %
• 45 to 54: 3.9 %
• 55 to 64: 1.5 %
• 65+: 1.4 %

Thank you for being part of this journey, wherever you are in the world, whatever your gender is, and however old you are!

Schopenhauer on Social Media

‘[T]hey reverse the natural order, regarding the opinions of others as real existence and their own consciousness as something shadowy, making the derivative and secondary in to the principle, and considering the picture they present to the world of more importance than their own selves. By thus trying to get a direct and immediate result out of what has no really direct or immediate existence, they fall in to the kind of folly which is called vanity.’

Read more here.

(Artwork by Dijana Vilić.)

The Philosophy of Moon

Moon (2009) is a quietly disturbing sci-fi. Through the crisis of one man we are asked to ponder some deep philosophical questions, not just about him but about ourselves—all without being bombarded with unnecessary action.

Sam Bell’s reality is shaken to its core in Moon. Instead of disregarding an event as a glitch and moving on, Sam follows the scent of suspicion to agitate and uncover something bleak. He marches out to the Moon’s silent and eerie surface and uproots it—for the sake of truth.

Uncomfortable and confounded by the answers he receives, bothered by his subsequent physical and mental decay, we can only watch on and ask: ‘Wasn’t darkness better than the truth?’

⁂

Read more here. There is plenty of philosophy to find therein: ethics, metaphysics, and existentialism. Expect discussions of human cloning, personal identity, and purpose.

Condensed Matter - an Interview with Sam Kimpton-Nye

In our interview with Sam we discussed his new metaphysics and philosophy of science podcast, Condensed Matter; tips for getting into philosophy; the fictional character he identifies most with; and more.

Read our interview with a philosopher here!