PhilosophTay

The story of Run the Jewels is, above all, a story of great branding. Type their name into YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. Their first album, ‘Run the Jewels’, begins with a song called ‘Run the Jewels’, the chorus to which goes ‘Run the jewels, jewels, jewels…’. There’s the acronym – RTJ – that crops up whenever there’s three syllables going spare. Then there’s the gun-and-fist hand-symbol that both forms the basis of all three album covers and serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card for anyone unsure what to do with their hands at a gig. RTJ have turned brand recognition into an art form. But the songs are pretty decent too. They provide for young people what the priesthood provided in previous generations: a comprehensive vision of the world and a sense of purpose. They paint a picture of a world in which all the lies, violence and corruption have finally come to a head and it’s now or never for all the would-be saviours of humanity. The overriding impression is of ...

The first philosophical thought most people have goes something like this: ‘Maybe what I’m seeing right now isn’t real. Maybe this world of trees and buildings and cars doesn’t really exist. Maybe I’m dreaming it all. Maybe I’m in the Matrix.’ It’s a thought that’s concerned philosophers from the very beginning. Way back in the 4 th  century BCE, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzhi was worried that he might really be a butterfly: “Once, Zhuangzhi dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know that he was Zhuangzhi. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuangzhi. But he didn't know if he was Zhuangzhi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuangzhi.” – Zhuangzhi,  Zhuangzhi Two thousand years later, the French philosopher René Descartes had similar worries. He was agonising over the possibility that he was bei...

He had 109 hours to rehearse his lines, and his lines amounted to a mere 13 words. He could have spent eight hours on each word if he really wanted to. He could have devoted an entire working day to making sure each word came out just right. You couldn’t have blamed him for doing so. It had cost $25 billion to get him to this point. He’d travelled 240,000 miles. Half a billion people were watching. It had officially kicked off eight years ago, but this event was the fulfilment of a dream as old as dreams themselves. After centuries of learning, of striving, of fantasising, this was to be humanity’s finest hour. This was to be our first stop on our way out of the cradle and into the big, wide universe. A human being was going to walk on the moon. The occasion was momentous enough to be recorded to the second. At 02:56:15 UTC on the 21 st  of July 1969, Neil Armstrong set his left boot on the surface of the moon and delivered those famous words: ...

It’s customary to begin discussions of Kant with a quick run-down of his eccentricities. He was a solemn man – near puritanical in fact – and devoted to his work. He never travelled further than ten miles from his home town of Königsberg and stuck to his daily routine with military-like precision. Whatever the weather, he never missed his afternoon walk, which he took at exactly the same time each day. His neighbours in Königsberg set their watches by the time Kant set his foot out of the door. These are great anecdotes. They make concrete the life of a man whose philosophy is forbiddingly abstract, so it’s a shame that none of them are true.   Apparently not as stern as he looks. Kant was a determined man but not a solemn one. In fact, he was criticised by his colleagues at university for throwing too many parties. He spent much of his life in Königsberg but not all of it. He spent a few years working as a tutor in Judtschen (about 15 miles away) and a few y...