Cure-alls and Remedies
The immediate response to tragedy ought to be a cautious silence and a quiet search for understanding. Yet when I attended a vigil on Sunday at the US Capitol building , a reporter from WAMU spent a half hour gathering quotes (none of which he used, thankfully) and in the process goaded a few vocal…
Robin Hanson channels and extends Thomas Reid : What can you do about serious skepticism, i.e., the possibility that you might be quite mistaken on a great many of your beliefs? For this, you might want to consider which of your beliefs are the most reliable, in order to try to lean more on those…
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 and Decision Making.” There’s a simple reason why the Family Research Council is a hate group: they lie. Sherif Girgis, Robert…
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 line up under a particular theory. So let’s look at some of the intuition pumps and see if they ought,…
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 and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. […]there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting…
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 sweep and the depiction of interconnections between the planet’s various ecosystems. I found myself thinking that this was the perfect…
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 a good “first principles” question for philosophers to ask themselves, especially since Google seems to be using sentence length and…
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 sense separate from the moral law, Pettit posits that God is the moral law. That way, there’s no dilemma when…
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 mathematicians’ capacity to intuit, and the decision to unleash destructive nuclear powers has been foisted upon non-scientists who are even…