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Links to depress and enrage
Bill Zeller’s eloquent and reasonable suicide note. Down and Out on $250,000 a Year How Luxury Changes People, an interview based on this article: “The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition…
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Personal identity intuitions
Most philosophers start with the big theories : psychological continuity, embodied persistence, “no further fact” anticriterialism. Yet in a vaguely Parfitian way, I’ve been wondering whether our identity intuitions can or should be forced to…
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Some good sentences on science fiction
I’ve been looking at G. K. Chesterton’s theology lately, but today I came across this : The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed…
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Beware of Awe
Over the holiday weekend, I spent some time with my family watching the series Planet Earth on a high definition television. It was moving and informative, a sublime challenge to our capacities in its global…
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Google evaluates our reading level
Check out the results here . How to take the news? Should I be pleased that I blog in an accessible style or worried that the blog is only 18% advanced? I think this is…
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Can I Buy a Vowel? Joe Pettit and Godless Morality
My colleague Joe Pettit has posted a defense of theism that takes up the traditional Christian onto-theological response to the Euthyphro problem . God is the Measure Rather than speak of God as in some…
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Wikileaks as Distributed Governance
Hannah Arendt begins The Human Condition with an account of a world in which “speech has lost its power,” where scientific omnipotence is achieved through the manipulation of mathematical equations whose sense escapes even the…
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Wikileaks and War
Is this the argument ? 1. (Our) wars are unjust. 2. Stopping (our) wars will prevent further injustice. combined with: 3. (Our) wars depend on secrecy in inception and in daily practice. 4. Thus, (our)…
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Heuristics and Biases Bleg
I’m revamping my Critical Thinking syllabus, and I’m looking to ramp up the heuristics and biases section, perhaps to four or five weeks. Most of the material I’ve reviewed is either too technical or too…