philosophy

What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities

Any well-developed conception of the good must recognize not just one human interest, but a whole variety. And that means a negotiation between conflicting interests in the name of civil peace. A ‘modus vivendi’ is the liberalism now in order. -John Gray, quoted in Noema Magazine Issue No 5

Indeed, from Plato onwards, philosophers have generally agreed that living well means aligning with the rational order of the cosmos. ‘Live in accordance with nature,’ Marcus Aurelius urges in his Meditations. For these thinkers, nature serves as the ethical guide for our actions and the lodestone of our aesthetic ideals because it embodies... See more

Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil

Gongsheng—a philosophy of “co-becoming”.

“gongsheng expresses a condition of relationality not only concerning humans’ interdependence with each other and the natural world but also with technology as well.”

Noema, Fall 2024

To do good is not to work in concert with reality, nor should we ever strive to live in harmony with nature. This would make us complicit in an entirely evil system. To do good is to break with that complicity – to seek ways of dismantling, resisting and reconfiguring the structure of reality to neutralise, alleviate or unsettle its entropic... See more

Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil

The laws of thermodynamics encompass the whole of reality, from beginning to end, top to bottom, in origin, order and operation. We exist by virtue of heat exchange alone, and work entirely in service to the entropic decay of reality prescribed by that exchange.

Drew M Dalton • Reality is evil

For Iris Murdoch, morality is about love, not duties and rules | Aeon Essays

aeon.co