The aim of this paper is to raise two questions. The first question is: How is pessimism related to Buddhism (and vice versa)? The second question is: What relation does an immanent philosophy have to pessimism and Buddhism, if any? Using True Detective, an American television crime drama, as my point of departure, first I will outline some of the likenesses between Buddhism and pessimism. At the same time, I will show how the conduct of one of the (...) main characters in True Detective resembles the paths of Buddhism and pessimism, even though he is ethical in a strictly non-pessimistic and non-Buddhist fashion. Last, I will try to place these findings in perspective through the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts. Hereby, I hope to illustrate that joy, not suffering, is basic to human existence, and how human beings may overcome a spiritual pessimism. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to raise two questions. The first question is: How is pessimism related to Buddhism (and vice versa)? The second question is: What relation does an immanent philosophy have to pessimism and Buddhism, if any? Using True Detective, an American television crime drama, as my point of departure, first I will outline some of the likenesses between Buddhism and pessimism. At the same time, I will show how the conduct of one of the (...) main characters in True Detective resembles the paths of Buddhism and pessimism, even though he is ethical in a strictly non-pessimistic and non-Buddhist fashion. Last, I will try to place these findings in perspective through the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s thoughts. Hereby, I hope to illustrate that joy, not suffering, is basic to human existence, and how human beings may overcome a spiritual pessimism. (shrink)

Explores the figure of the detective as a pursuer of knowledge in four noir films.

Investigating the trail of philosophical leads in HBO’s chilling True Detective series, an elite team of philosophers examine far-reaching riddles including human pessimism, Rust’s anti-natalism, the problem of evil, and the ‘flat circle’.

According to True Detective's creator, Nic Pizzolatto, season two aimed at tragedy, taking inspiration from the archetypical tragedy Oedipus Rex to focus on characters confronting a knowledge that has ultimately fated their path. But, where Aristotle identified the necessity of including "incidents arousing pity and fear" to bring about tragedy's famous katharsis, season two speaks more to Friedrich Nietzsche's views on tragedy—specifically, his views of the ancient Greek dramatist Euripides. Where tragedy once focused on only the "grand and (...) bold traits" of the human condition, Nietzsche says, Euripides focused on the moral concerns of the masses. Against season two's backdrop of civic corruption—land‐grabs and pork‐barrels—the tragedy takes up a modern form of morality for the masses that creates a barrier to tragic wisdom: namely, feminist morality. Rust's philosophical outlook establishes the Apollonian function of tragedy by providing a filter through which to confront the "difficulties of the human condition" expressed in the mysteries of Carcosa. (shrink)

The paper aims to show how the Tv series True Detective (season 1, 2014 – created and written by Nic Pizzolatto) aids us understanding the status of power whether in its political, judicial or religious form. The conjunction of sex and death is depicted through acts of paedophilia, rape, and murder of women and children. The study aims to elucidate the logic which is inherent to those acts of violence and which founds the reproduction of social domination mechanisms.

Friedrich Nietzsche's prophet Zarathustra famously declared that "man is the cruelest animal". It is a nice tagline for a show such as True Detective, which entertains people with the fetishized torture, rape, and murder of lost young women. The idea that humans are the cruelest animal is interesting in itself because it implies that nonhuman animals can and do possess this disposition to some degree. This makes perfect sense in naturalistic terms. Humans are, after all, predators. Since humans (...) are by far the most successful predator on the planet, it would be reasonable on this basis alone to claim that humans are the cruelest animal. Although Nietzsche would agree that the ability to positively enjoy suffering is an essential step in the social evolution of human beings, it is not how he represents the ultimate value of human cruelty. Rather, for Nietzsche, the human capacity for cruelty is the key to affirming life itself. (shrink)

The second season of True Detective bears many marks of a classic urban‐noir crime drama. The city is a central character of the narrative. And the relationship between the detectives and the city is one of the crucial elements of the story. This is most obvious in the case of Vinci Detective Ray Velcoro, and apparent to a lesser degree in the cases of Ani Bezzerides and Paul Woodrugh. This chapter examines the philosophical aspect of the relationship (...) between the detective and the city, comparing it to a classical view of the relationship between philosophy and the city, presented by Plato over two millennia ago in his dialogues Apology and The Republic. The Apology tells the story of Socrates on trial. There are some parallels between Socrates and the noir detective on this score, but there are some stark differences as well. (shrink)

Can managers detect honest people’s lies in a handwritten message? In this article, I will briefly discuss graphology and a basic model of interpersonal communication. I will then develop a fundamental theoretical framework of eight principles for detecting lies based on the basic communication model, handwriting analyses, and the following assumptions: For most people, it is easier to tell the truth than to tell lies. This applies to handwritings also. When most honest people lie, they try to hide their stressful (...) emotions in the encoding process. As a consequence, they deviate from their own normal writing and violate their own personal moral standards. Interestingly enough, the art or science of detecting a lie in a handwritten sample is to focus not on what they write, but on how they write it. These 24 exhibits (cases) written in 11 languages—used in different parts of the world—help managers apply this important theoretical framework of interpersonal communication, understand the encoding process, pinpoint these sudden emotional changes, decode handwritten messages, unlock the secrets, reveal the message’s true meanings, and detect people’s lies. (shrink)

... i . La very is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man,and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation ; that 'tis hardly to be ...

Compared to truthful answers, deceptive responses to queries are expected to take longer to initiate. Yet attempts to detect lies through reaction time (RT) have met with limited success. We describe a new procedure that seems to increase the RT difference between truth-telling and lies. It relies on a Stroop-like procedure in which responses to the labels true and false are sometimes reversed. The utility of this method is assessed in a laboratory study involving both statements of fact and (...) attitude. Three different ethnic groups participated: Americans of European ancestry, East Asians, and native Arabic speakers. For all three groups, our technique allowed identification of prevarication reliably better than chance. (shrink)

University of Connecticut Storrs, CT 06279-2054. Recent versions of objectivism can reply to the argument from metamers. The deeper rift between subjectivists and objectivists lies in the question of how to explain the structure of qualitative similarities among the colors. Subjectivism grounded in this fashion can answer the circularity objection raised by Dedrick. It endorses skepticism about the claim that there is some one property of objects that it is the function of color vision to detect. Color vision may enable (...) us to detect differences in spectral composition without granting us the capacity to detect identities. (shrink)

Freeman Dyson has questioned whether any conceivable experiment in the real universe can detect a single graviton. If not, is it meaningful to talk about gravitons as physical entities? We attempt to answer Dyson’s question and find it is possible concoct an idealized thought experiment capable of detecting one graviton; however, when anything remotely resembling realistic physics is taken into account, detection becomes impossible, indicating that Dyson’s conjecture is very likely true. We also point out several mistakes in the (...) literature dealing with graviton detection and production. (shrink)

This paper examines a passage in the Theaetetus where Plato distinguishes knowledge from true belief by appealing to the example of a jury hearing a case. While the jurors may have true belief, Socrates puts forward two reasons why they cannot achieve knowledge. The reasons for this nescience have typically been taken to be in tension with each other . This paper proposes a solution to the putative difficulty by arguing that what links the two cases of nescience (...) is that in neither case do the jurors act from an epistemic virtue and that doing so is a necessary condition of knowledge. Appreciating that it is a necessary condition of knowledge that it be the result of an epistemic agent's agency in a distinctive way provides a satisfying solution to the difficulty Burnyeat detected and also does justice to an otherwise neglected aspect of Plato's epistemology: his talk of cognitive capacities and virtues and his focus on what it is that is active and passive in epistemic processes. (shrink)

According to the influential thesis of attentional transparency, in having or reflecting on an ordinary visual experience, we can attend only outwards, to qualities the experience represents, never to intrinsic qualities of the experience itself, i.e., to “mental paint.” According to the competing view, attentional semitransparency, although we usually attend outwards, to qualities the experience represents, we can also attend inwards, to mental paint. So far, philosophers have debated this topic in strictly armchair means, especially phenomenological reflection. My aim in (...) this paper is to show how to design an experiment, using the change detection paradigm for studying visual working memory that, if yielding positive results, would support AS. The structure of the argument is as follows. In standard change detection tasks, which involve attention to qualities the experience represents, there exists a known object integration effect (Luck and Vogel in Nature 390(6657):279–281, 1997). I formulate a hypothesis I call “the turn-off hypothesis,” according to which this effect does not exist in change detection tasks where subjects are instructed to attend to mental paint. I argue that, given AS, we have some reason to expect the turn-off hypothesis to be true, but given AT, we do not. Consequently, the truth of the turn-off hypothesis would support AS. I further argue that one can straightforwardly test the turn-off hypothesis, taking the standard change detection paradigm and instructing participants to attend inwards. (shrink)

Level measurements, thickness measurement or remote surface detection using ultrasonic pulse transit method require that the target surface be at 90 O to the incident beam so that reflected beam comes back at 180-degree angle to effectively use this method. This is perfectly true in case of flat, solid surface at right angle to the incident beam. But surface irregularities of a porous, non-smooth, uneven material such as snow cause penetration of incident wave into the surface, absorption of the (...) incident energy, scatter of energy in many directions and further attenuation of reflected signal making it difficult to detect the reflected echo. Such a received reflected echo is very low in amplitude and is heavily noise-ridden. The successful surface detection with excellent repeatability and accuracy without any false measurement in this case requires combination of physical acoustic, mechanical, hardware and software techniques together. In this paper we discuss the suitable physical, mechanical, electronics design to physically implement the theory of Arrayed Ultrasonic transducers to shape up the directional response, beam width and avoid interference to improve the chances of proper and sufficient reflection from the non-smooth, highly porous, uneven, non-planar irregular surface. (shrink)

This paper draws its title from the recent symposium of which it was part; it attempts to respond to the question raised by that title, taking current work in set theory into account. To this end the paper contrasts set theory with number theory, examines a severe brand of set-theoretic realism that is suggested by a passage from Godel, and sketches a first-order way of looking at the results about competing extensions of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory. A formalistic sentiment may be (...) detectable in some portions of the paper. (shrink)

“ A man orders a whole pizza pie for himself and is asked whether he would like it cut into eight or four slices. He responds, ‘Four, I’m on a diet ”’ (Noël Carroll) -/- While not hilarious --so funny that it induces chortling punctuated with outrageous vomiting--this little gem is amusing. We recognize that something has gone wrong. On a first reading it might not compute, something doesn’t quite make sense. Then, aha! , we understand the hapless dieter has (...) misapplied general rules of thumb, mental short-cuts, or heuristics, that we were also initially committed to and that would usually be good enough to rely upon— fewer slices equals fewer calories; diets require fewer calories, etc—but in this particular case they fail, and the feeling of mirth is our reward for making this discovery. We don’t say all of that after a punchline, of course, but that’s what is happening according to the Humor as Error-Detection Theory : our sense of humor can sense our errors. This chapter will focus on the overlap and benefits of a humorous and philosophical attitude toward the world and our place in it. The historian of philosophy Will Durant tells us that genuine philosophy begins when one learns to doubt; we can say something similar with humor--trust me. (shrink)

It can happen that a single surface S, viewed in normal conditions, looks pure blue (“true blue”) to observer John but looks blue tinged with green to a second observer, Jane, even though both are normal in the sense that they pass the standard psychophysical tests for color vision. Tye (2006a) finds this situation prima facie puzzling, and then offers two different “solutions” to the puzzle.1 The first is that at least one observer misrepresents S’s color because, though normal (...) in the sense explained, she is not a Normal color observer: her color detection system is not operating in the current condition in the way that Mother Nature intended it to operate. His second solution involves the idea that Mother Nature designed our color detection systems to be reliable with respect to the detection of coarse-grained colors (e.g., blue, green, yellow, orange), but our capacity to represent the fine-grained colors (e.g., true blue, blue tinged with green) is an undesigned spandrel. On this second solution, it is consistent with the variation between John and Jane that both represent the color of S in a way that complies with Mother Nature’s intentions: both represent S as exemplifying the coarse-grained color blue, and since (we may assume) S is in fact blue, both represent it veridically. Of course, they also represent fine-grained colors of S, and, according to Tye, at most one of these representations is veridical (Tye says that only God knows which). But at the level of representation for which Mother Nature designed our color detection systems, both John and Jane (qua Normal observers) are reliable detectors. (shrink)

A crucial aspect of scientific realism is what do we mean by true. In Luk’s theory and model of scientific study, a theory can be believed to be “true” but a model is only accurate. Therefore, what do we mean by a “true” theory in scientific realism? Here, we focus on exploring the notion of truth by some thought experiments and we come up with the idea that truth is related to what we mean by the same. (...) This has repercussion to the repeatability of the experiments and the predictive power of scientific knowledge. Apart from sameness, we also found that truth is related to the granularity of the observation, the limit of detection, the distinguishability of the objects in theory, the simultaneous measurements of objects/processes, the consistencies of the theory and the one-to-one correspondence between terms/events and objects/processes, respectively. While there is no guarantee that we can arrive at the final “true” theory, we have a process/procedure with more and more experiments together with our own ingenuity, to direct us towards such a “true” theory. For quantum mechanics, since a particle is also regarded as a wave, quantum mechanics cannot be considered as a true theory based on the correspondence theory of truth. Failing this, truth may be defined by the coherence theory of truth which is similar to the coherence of beliefs. However, quantum mechanics may not be believed to be a true theory based on the coherence theory of truth because wave properties and particle properties may contradict. Further research is needed to address this problem if we want to regard quantum mechanics as a “true” theory. (shrink)

Magic takes many forms. Supernatural magic is what our ancestors used in order to explain the world before they developed the scientific method. The ancient Egyptians explained the night by suggesting the goddess Nut swallowed the sun. The Vikings believed a rainbow was the gods’ bridge to earth. The Japanese used to explain earthquakes by conjuring a gigantic catfish that carried the world on its back—earthquakes occurred each time it flipped its tail. These are magical, extraordinary tales. But there is (...) another kind of magic, and it lies in the exhilaration of discovering the real answers to these questions. It is the magic of reality—science. Packed with clever thought experiments, dazzling illustrations and jaw-dropping facts, The Magic of Reality explains a stunningly wide range of natural phenomena. What is stuff made of? How old is the universe? Why do the continents look like disconnected pieces of a puzzle? What causes tsunamis? Why are there so many kinds of plants and animals? Who was the first man, or woman? This is a page-turning, graphic detective story that not only mines all the sciences for its clues but primes the reader to think like a scientist as well. Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous evolutionary biologist and one of science education’s most passionate advocates, has spent his career elucidating the wonders of science for adult readers. But now, in a dramatic departure, he has teamed up with acclaimed artist Dave McKean and used his unrivaled explanatory powers to share the magic of science with readers of all ages. This is a treasure trove for anyone who has ever wondered how the world works. Dawkins and McKean have created an illustrated guide to the secrets of our world—and the universe beyond—that will entertain and inform for years to come. (shrink)

Intensive research and development of electrophoresis methodology and instrumentation during past decades has resulted in unique methods widely implemented in bioanalysis. While two‐dimensional electrophoresis and denaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis in sodium dodecylsulfate are still the most frequently used electrophoretic methods applied to analyses of proteins, new miniaturized capillary and microfluidic versions of electromigrational methods have been developed. High‐throughput electrophoretic instruments with hundreds of capillaries for parallel separations and laser‐induced fluorescence detection of labeled DNA strands have been of key importance for (...) the scientific and commercial success of the Human Genome Project. Another powerful method, capillary isoelectric focusing with pressurized and pH‐driven mobilization, provides efficient separations and on‐line sensitive detection of proteins, bacteria and viruses. Electrophoretic microfluidic devices can integrate single‐cell injection, cell lysis, separation of its components and fluorescence or mass spectrometry detection. These miniaturized devices also proved the capability of single‐molecule detection. (shrink)

Evidence, as viewed through the lens of statistical significance, is not always as it appears! In the investigation of clinical research findings arising from statistical analyses, a fundamental initial step for the emerging fraud detective is to retrieve the source data for cross-examination with the study data. Recognizing that source data are not always forthcoming and that, realistically speaking, the investigator may be uninitiated in fraud detection and investigation, this paper will highlight some key methodological procedures for providing a (...) sounder evidence base for withdrawing from a study on grounds of integrity. The promotion of patient safety is paramount. However, there is a broader rationale for disseminating these ideas. This includes empowering researchers to optimize their personal integrity, make informed choices regarding membership of future research collaborations and successfully voice their concerns to journal editors, particularly where a conflict of interests can render such dialogues particularly difficult. Recommendations will be supported by topical case studies and practical steps involving data exploration, testing of baseline data and application of Benford’s Law. While this paper has a clinical focus, the advice provided is transferrable to a wide range of multidisciplinary research settings outside of Medicine. (shrink)

In True Detective, the description of time as a "flat circle" is one of the most mysterious aspects of the story. The idea of the flat circle ultimately helps Rust to overcome his bleak interpretation of reality, although for a long time it anchors him in his dreary worldview. A philosophical pessimist is likely to view knowledge and meaning as inherently flawed. Rust tells Marty all about his philosophical pessimism in the first episode of season one. A metaphysical (...) claim tries to describe the true nature of reality. Friedrich Nietzsche calls his theory "eternal recurrence", however differ in name aside, there are numerous similarities between his theory and Rust's. The flat circle is really a thought experiment that Rust remains trapped within insofar as he remains a philosophical pessimist, at least up to the point of his near‐death experience, where he "sees the light". (shrink)

In True Detective, the character of Rust Cohle is remarkable in giving voice to pessimism. Cohle says: "Time is a flat circle". This is Friedrich Nietzsche's doctrine of eternal recurrence, as depicted in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cohle expresses this idea in a pessimistic mood and it is meant to magnify the absurdity of life by declaring its endless repetition. Schopenhauer was an early influence on Nietzsche, and they agreed on certain basic things, including the (...) primacy of a driving will, which generates perpetual conflict with no ultimate resolution and no salvation. Nietzsche's book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, provides a dramatic narrative depicting the task of life‐affirmation in the face of eternal recurrence. The portrayal of eternal recurrence in True Detective is not in the spirit of Nietzsche's conception. It is more akin to Schopenhauer's response. Nietzsche finds a way to overcome pessimism by affirming life because of its tragic limits. (shrink)

On 27 February 1998, the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and the office of the Fulbright binational educational exchanges in Calcutta jointly hosted a seminar on 'The Tradition of Non Violence: The American Experience and the Gandhian' at the Management Centre for Human Values. There were two keynote presentations. The one on the American experience was by Michael True, Professor of English Literature at Assumption College, Massachusetts, who was teaching as Fulbright visiting lecturer at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. The Gandhian (...) case was presented by Profes sor Amlan Datta, economist and writer, also former Vice-Chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. The session was chaired by Professor Amitava Bose, Director, Indian Institute of Management. To close the discussions, a summing up was presented by Professor S.K. Chakraborty, Convenor, Management Centre for Human Values. The importance of discussions on the subject of non-violence and the Gandhian alterna tive cannot be overestimated in this year of the 50th anniversary of Indian independence and a nationwide soul-searching over these five decades. The US Educational Foundation in India contributed to the national discussion through this bilateral seminar and its comparative perspective. (shrink)

In season one of True Detective, people watch Rustin Cohle evolve from a man who is slowly suffocating under the weight of the world to one who can shoulder it. His metamorphosis is existential. By the end of the season, when he proclaims that the "light is winning", Cohle has arrived. Cohle has had enough of his life; he is trapped in his despair and choking on its poison. Throughout the first season of True Detective, Cohle (...) is the shepherd who is choking on all that is bitter and ugly in the world. He is struggling to find the strength to kill the snake. The snake represents the necessity of affirming all aspects of life and willing them eternally. This leads us to Errol Childress. He is the hyperbolic monster at the end of the dream; he is the specter of nihilism and suffering. Their encounter ends with a violent, crippling battle and Childress' death. (shrink)

What does world peace mean? Peace is more than the absence and prevention of war, whether international or civil, yet most of our ways of conceptualizing and measuring peace amount to just that definition. In this essay, as part of the roundtable “World Peace,” I argue that any vision of world peace must grapple not only with war but with the continuums of violence and peace emphasized by feminists: running from the home and community to the public spaces of international (...) relations. Breaking free of the constraints of the last century's intellectual boundaries, I suggest that war and peace are not a dichotomy but rather are intimately related. Yet the dearth of feminist perspectives in global debates prevents us from seeing how violence and harm are exacerbated in households and through the global economy under conditions of both “war” and “peace.” To understand the possibilities for world peace, we must understand these varieties of violence and harm that threaten peace. And tosustainpeace we must address the harmful gendered identities, ideologies, and social dynamics that support violence in every society. A narrow understanding of peace as merely the absence of organized violence does not engender the kind of nuanced and rich understanding of human history and human relations needed to bring an end to the structural and physical violence that remains pervasive worldwide. (shrink)

This volume addresses the way ethics is taught in American Business Schools. The Editors has assembled a collection of timely essays offering practical experienced-based insights in business education. The authors of these essays address a diversity of topics yet are unanimous in calling for change (even if they occasionally disagree on the best means of accomplishing it). For business faculties seeking to meet this growing and multifaceted challenge within their discipline, this book offers a wealth of useful insights and practical (...) solutions. (shrink)

What are we to make of the New Christian Right’s loss of political influence and the rise of the Tea Party and libertarianism more broadly? Rather than imagine a coalition of resentment as does William E. Connolly, this paper argues that several key religious ideas of protestant fundamentalism have become secularized and now function as a political theology that privileges the personal and marginalizes the public arena. American fundamentalism shares several characteristics with protestant fundamentalism—even as it represents what might be (...) called a migration of the holy. (shrink)

The second season of True Detective portrays the relationship between law and justice cynically; law and its enforcement seem to be divorced from any conception of justice. Austrian legal theorist Hans Kelsen jurisprudence explicitly refers to official norms, such as legal order imposed by the state. True Detective, deals largely with unofficial legal norms, such as those of a corrupt city and of criminal organizations. A central conflict in True Detective's second season is the (...) tension between the impulse for revenge and the impulse for the more noble retributive justice. The series' presentation of law and justice and the conflict between a retrograde system of justice that is the norm and a newer virtue ethic driven by moral reasoning is what brings about the inevitable tragedies of the finale— the violent deaths of Velcoro and Semyon, and the exile of Bezzerides. True Detective is, particularly in its finale, a good illustration of Hegel's vision of tragedy. (shrink)

In one of the first scenes of the True Detective pilot episode "The Long Bright Dark", detective Rust Cohle is being badgered by his partner Marty Hart about his beliefs. In True Detective, the optimism is embodied in Rust's partner, Marty. Pessimism is the reason that Rust is a better detective than Marty. He is deceived by illusions of his own making. Rust may have had this problem once, but, having given up his optimism, (...) he is never shocked by the depravity that he encounters as the investigation unfolds. Optimism and pessimism do not exhaust the characters Rust and Marty: "Hart and Cohle" sounds too much like "heart and soul" to be a coincidence. Before their final encounter with the sadistic murderer they have been pursuing, Rust Cohle is at the point of giving up. His pessimism has shriveled into hopelessness and despair. (shrink)

This chapter describes motivations of Rust Cohle's pessimism in the first season of True Detective. On the one hand, Rust's pessimism is linked to the tragic death of his daughter, implying that a profound, personal tragedy made him a pessimist. On the other hand, Rust never appeals to this tragedy or any other personal experience to justify his belief in the meaninglessness of existence, arguing always that it comes from a rational evaluation of reality. In the season finale, (...) Rust has a near‐death experience that leads him away from pessimism and back to optimism. Central to this event is his experience of Sophia's love. Rust's feeling of Sophia's love would not be a turning away from philosophy but a turning toward philosophy or perhaps a turning toward a different notion of philosophy than the one found in rationalism or empiricism. (shrink)

The philosophical position against procreation is known as anti‐natalism, and Rust is an anti‐natalist. Rust's insights, coupled with the philosophy of David Benatar, not only require the characters of True Detective to cease procreation but also morally compel all people to stop procreating. This chapter explores whether or not anti‐natalism is a philosophically cogent position by presenting Rust's perspective on human existence and connecting it with Benatar's argument that coming into existence is necessarily harmful. According to Benatar's philosophy, (...) one can see that Rust's anti‐natalism is actually quite reasonable. Benatar's points are that pleasure is good and pain is bad. However, it also is true that "the absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone", whereas "the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation". (shrink)

The theoretical commitments of Rust Cohle, the philosopher detective of True Detective, tend toward nihilism. Cohle appears to be a tough‐minded naturalist. True Detective is a deep enough show that it offers some genuinely penetrating insights into evil and evil personhood. In True Detective evil is Errol William Childress: the "Lawnmower Man" of True Detective, with a yen for torturing, raping, murdering, and ritualistically posing young women. Childress is described as a (...) "green‐eared spaghetti monster". Some philosophers suggest that there is a link between evil people and monsters. Most philosophers agree that being an evil person is qualitatively worse than being a bad person or even a very, very bad person. Cohle does some bad stuff— and with impunity, by his own account— however he is not a pederast and he is not a child killer. That is a qualitative distinction. Childress seems to have killed more people than Cohle; that is a quantitative distinction. (shrink)

In the third episode of season one of True Detective, "The Locked Room", detective Rust Cohle explains the life. This predicament makes him not just a "pessimist" also a "nihilist"‐someone who denies that life has meaning. The idea that life might be a dream is one of humanity's oldest and most enduring philosophical thoughts. The oldest versions of these ideas come from Indian philosophy. In Western philosophy, the thought that life could be a dream is linked not (...) so much to reflections on life, death, and transcendence as it is to the problem of whether it is possible to have certain knowledge. One way to draw together the Eastern and Western philosophical threads is with the following line of thought, taken from Wendy Doniger's classic book on Indian and Western views of dreaming, Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities. (shrink)

"Form and Void" is the eighth and final episode in season one of True Detective. "Form and Void" both diminished the element of cosmic horror into something more terrestrial and mundane and replaced Rust Cohle's trademark philosophical pessimism with a metaphysical optimism. True Detective demonstrated real bravery by having a character like Rust Cohle. This chapter defines cosmic horror, supernatural horror, or weird fiction. The cosmic horror and pessimistic philosophy are undermined by the final acts of (...) "Form and Void", the finale. First, the Yellow King, Carcosa, and the Green Man are all revealed as "ordinary" occurrences. This is not to say that cults, child molesters, and serial killers are not frightening. But, if one were to ask one's most cheerful, optimistic friends if such things existed, they would have to say "yes". (shrink)

Rustin Cohle, the protagonist of the first season of True Detective, declares that he is "in philosophical terms, a pessimist". The doctrine of "pessimism" espoused by Rust is remarkably similar to the view adumbrated by Arthur Schopenhauer, who holds that conscious life (both human and nonhuman animal) involves a tremendous amount of suffering that is essentially built into the structure of the world and there is no Creator (providential or otherwise) to redeem all of this suffering, by, say, (...) punishing the wicked and rewarding the good. Rust finds some grounds for hope, and he chooses to continue on the path of compassion and justice, the path to try to improve the world. This prompts the question of whether he ever really embraced suicide in principle, and just lacked the constitution to pull it off, or whether, like Schopenhauer, he perhaps always found the intellectual grounds for such a radical decision to be shaky. (shrink)

Rustin Cohle, or Rust, is identifiable as being one character by looking at the script of True Detective and seeing the lines of text that only Rust will say. It would appear that the brute physicalist account is not sufficient for understanding how there are three different Rusts while each possesses many of the same physical characteristics as the others. In fact, one identifies at least three distinct non‐identical Rusts namely: Taxman, Belligerent, and Patient. Since they are mental (...) instantiations and not physical bodies, it is possible to have all three Rusts existing in the same body and, oddly, at the same time. By appealing to the psychological account, there is no restriction on how many Rusts there can be in a single body at any moment. Rust continues to be Rust so long as he has the same body, which can be identified as the body with the bird tattoo on the right arm. (shrink)

After the re-emergence of the tradition of virtue ethics in the early 1980s Reinhold Niebuhr has often served as a foil for authors who locate themselves in that tradition. However, this exercise has often proved controversial. This collection of essays continues this work, across a wide range of subjects, with the aim of avoiding some of the polemics that have previously accompanied it. The central thesis of this book is that putting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian realism in (...) dialogue with contemporary virtue theory is a profitable undertaking. An introductory essay argues against locating Niebuhr as a consequentialist and in favour of thinking of his work in terms of a dispositional ethics Contributors take different positions on whether Niebuhr's dispositional ethics should be considered a form of virtue ethics or an alternative to virtue ethics. Several of the articles relate Niebuhr and Christian realism to particular virtues. Throughout there is an appreciation of the ways in which any Niebuhrian approach to dispositional ethics or virtue must be shaped by a sense of tragedy, paradox, or irony. The most moral disposition will be one which includes doubts about its own virtue. This volume allows for a repositioning of Niebuhr in the context of contemporary moral theory as well as a rereading of the tradition of virtue ethics in the light of a distinctly Protestant, Christian realist and paradoxical view of virtue. As a result, it will be of great interest to scholars of Niebuhr and Christian Ethics and scholars working in Moral Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion more generally. (shrink)