The Philosophers' Magazine - 3rd quarter 2008

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problems of life, and in ways

that people can hear. It's little good 'solving' the crises of inner

life if only eleven people have the time and the background

necessary. “What business can teach

philosophy is that you have to work out how to do what you

do in the face of competition from the rest of life.”

Armstrong has a background in the philosophy of art and

aesthetics and an interest in literature. Raised in Glasgow and

educated at Oxford, Armstrong was director of the Aesthetics

Programme at the School of Advanced Study, University of

London, which he founded with his friend Alain de Botton. He

and his Australian-born wife Helen later moved with their

children to Australia, and Armstrong joined the University

of Melbourne's philosophy department in 2003. He told the

Australian newspaper The Age that growing up in Glasgow was

not easy. “Any attempt to express

aspirational individuality, to say 'I want to go to the opera or I

want to read these books

because they're great classics',

that would be regarded as ‘who the hell are you to want that?’”

Loyal to this aspirational approach, Armstrong has written

a book about Goethe, Love, Life, Goethe: How to be Happy in an Imperfect World. The TLSquotes him as suggesting that

expressions of hostility and resentment towards Goethe are

prompted by fear that “the seriousness, the happiness and

the success of Goethe’s life make our own lives seen shabby and

incomplete.” Armstrong told tpmthat

Goethe is both a liberating inspiration and a sometimes

annoying father figure. “Goethe wasn’t just good at doing many

different things, he was also good at integrating them: he's a better poet because he knew a lot about business.” Armstrong is not the first to bring philosophy to business. Tom Morris was a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame for fifteen years, until his book True Success: a New Philosophy of Excellencelaunched him into a career as a public speaker and advisor to corporations. He is

now chairman of the Morris Institute for Human Values in Wilmington North Carolina. The Morris Institute website claims that he is “the first philosopher in history to appear in network TV commercials, where he has served as the national spokesman for Winnie the Pooh, Disney Home Videos, as well as being the only thinker ever to engage in early morning philosophy with Regis and Kathie Lee.” However, the first example of a philosopher entering business is that of Thales of Miletus. It is said that in order to disprove those who thought philosophy was useless, he used his observations of the stars to predict a bumper olive harvest. He borrowed money, bought up all the presses used to extract olive oil, and made a killing. This was his only foray into the

commercial world. He only did it to show that although

philosophy can help you make money, the true philosopher has

little interest in such things. No wonder Morris’s book is called If

Aristotle Ran General Motors, and not If Thales Ran Ford.

In brief ...

Kripke Center opens The gala opening of the Saul

Kripke Center at the City University of New York took

place on May 21 at the CUNY Graduate Center at 365 5th

Avenue. Participants at the three day

conference included, besides

Kripke himself, Hilary Putnam, Kit Fine, and Sydney

Shoemaker. The Center was established in September 2007

to promote the study of Kripke's philosophy.

The establishment of the Center was made possible by

founding contributions by Rabbi

Meyer Kripke and the City University of New York.

Schame on us In the last issue (Q&A, p117) we misspelled Richard Shusterman’s

name in the introduction, inserting an erroneous “c” into his

surname. We apologise for this.

tpm3RD QUARTER 2008

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Spotlight falls on bright young thing

A 34-YEAR-OLDphilosopher,

who is already a full professor at the London School of Economics,

has been identified byTimes Higher Educationas one of the

best young academics in the country.

Christian List, professor of political science and philosophy

at LSE, was one of ten academics highlighted by the influential

weekly. The University of London’s Institute of Philosophy

said that his ideas “are original and have wide influence” while

the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded him the prestigious

Philip Leverhulme Prize last year, said “he has already made a

lasting impact in the new research field of judgment

aggregation." “My main research area is

social choice theory,” List told tpm, “a mathematical theory of

collective decision-making which has applications in fields as

diverse as political science, economics, philosophy and

computer science. Its key question is the following: How

can groups make collective decisions under conditions of

pluralism? This problem arises, for example, in elections,

referenda, decisions in legislatures, committees, multi

member courts, expert panels and boards of companies or

other organizations. In social choice theory, we develop

mathematical models of different

possible procedures that groups can use for arriving at collective

preferences or judgments on the basis of their members' individual

inputs, and we explore which, if any, of these procedures satisfy

certain normative desiderata, such as being democratic,

egalitarian and reliable in certain respects.”

Social choice theory is a thriving field at the moment. So

what makes List’s work stand out?

“This is a difficult question for me to answer,” says List. “Academic advances in many research areas are the result of collective endeavours, and social choice theory is no exception. Everyone working in this vast area tends to have found their own niche. My own little niche is the so-called theory of judgment aggregation. I was perhaps one of the first people to have developed mathematical models of judgment aggregation that combine classical social choice theory with propositional logic, but my work has been inspired

by the work of many others, and it has also been very much collaborative. A majority of my papers in this area have been jointly authored with the mathematician Franz Dietrich (University of Maastricht) and the philosopher Philip Pettit (Princeton University).” List’s work is interdisciplinary, which could be indicative of wider trends in philosophy. Does he think that there is a danger that interdisciplinarity is a bit of a fad, and that the next generation will go back to "pure" philosophy? “Whether interdisciplinarity is a general trend depends on the precise area in question,” he replies. “Given their subject matter at the intersection of

philosophy, political science and economics, areas such as social

choice theory and political philosophy are particularly well

suited for interdisciplinary work. Similarly, it is only natural that

philosophers of science will want to learn about new scientific

developments, that metaphysicians will want to be

informed about new ideas in physics, and that epistemologists

will be interested in cognitive science.

“Interdisciplinarity in philosophy is no new

phenomenon. Many philosophers in the history of thought had rich

interests and expertise in a range of subjects and regarded their

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