Why ‘Selfie with Heidegger’s cabin’? This blog ain’t that Heideggerian. In fact, a Heideggerian blog would be a contradiction. The issue is that there are just a few philosophers who have left something tangible. There is Wittgenstein’s villa in Vienna. But it has a high wall, which makes it hard to take selfies.
Anyway, I am not very dogmatic in my philosophy, but I think that philosophy and ethics can help out in quite some contemporary social questions. Crucial here is the question about the way in which people can stand tall when confronted by digitization and globalization, in an age where social discontent leads to new forms of conservatism while the climate problem and other environmental issues demand fundamental changes.
Answers to these questions are left to psychologists, economists, neurologists, biologists, experts in artificial intelligence, while philosophers and ethicists seem to be predominantly occupied by solving self-invented scholastic puzzles.
Empirical disciplines have come up with many valuable insights, but at the same time, these disciplines tend to see humans as a collection of attitudes, preferences, genetic traits or faltering algorithms. This means that humans are not seen as thinking beings who, in dialogue with others, build a world of meanings, but instead they become behaviorist objects that can be sent in any direction by pressing the right buttons.
Here, I want to address the questions of today by connecting new empirical insights to ancient questions about who we are, why we do what we do, how we judge and how we can shape our own world according to our moral convictions. I admit that the posts on this blog may be a little on the long side, and sometimes they might require some effort. Having said that, I hope that they are entertaining and illuminating enough to be engaging.
