Thomas Nagel on Philosophical Ability

“[S]heer brains—I.Q., logical speed, raw mental muscle—play a powerful role, even though they are not the same thing as philosophical ability. Philosophy is like basketball: being preternaturally tall doesn’t ensure that you’ll be a good basketball player, but it helps an awful lot, and in philosophy it helps to be supersmart. Such people can simply travel farther and faster than the rest of us, and I wish philosophy attracted more of them. But the effects of this sort of intelligence are complex: sometimes, if all that power is put to the service of harebrained intuitions, it yields logically dazzling but implausible results. Even when it goes off the rails, though, brilliance generates structures of thought that command attention and have a life of their own, and their impact on the field doesn’t depend on whether anyone thinks they’re right. This can be a nuisance, but I suppose the devaluation of plausibility is unavoidable in a field so dominated by argument.”
 
--- Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969-1994

Always Make New Mistakes

Yesterday, at the moment I was about to click to submit the last version of a paper, I held back. Then I opened the file and glanced at every paragraph, feeling that I had to send my son to the kindergarten finally. He is not a good son, though: almost every paragraph struck me as quite boring, imprecise, tedious, or suffering from any combination of these demerits. But fortunately, I seemed to have some good ideas about how to improve every sentence (though I did not yet have any idea about what a perfect work is like). This seemed to me to be a good sign, and I was convinced that I should always make new mistakes.  

Your Grandchildren

Well, I'm not surprised. The real question is whether their parents are themselves reasonably good people. But to my mind, many of them would get tired of giving a moment of unprejudiced thought to such questions as "Why should I live?" We care about smartphones, food and drink, cosmetics, and seek attention (deserved or not) on the net day after day. I don't mean that these things must be unworthy to do, but the is that we usually care too much about them while giving little or no attention to many other things. Yes, you can call it blindness. Our grandchildren will probably be even worse off, not only due to climate change.

The Way We Dance

I didn't like dancing or seeing people dancing, and never found myself able to appreciate any part of Hong Kong's popular youth culture (so some people said I was cynical and 老人精). But when I was leaving the cinema, I missed all the movements, all the steps, all their pain, and all their smile, all against the background of dance music. I have a hunch that《狂舞派》("The Way We Dance") will be considered by many film critics as a remarkable Hong Kong movie of all time.