Cure-alls and Remedies
I have written here repeatedly about the problems with person-oriented reactive attitudes and character skepticism. But recently I came across the work of the psychologist Albert Ellis , whose work is at the intersection of therapeutic psychology and philosophy. His work on self-esteem and person-oriented assessment suggests an interesting new direction for the general insight…
[caption id=”attachment_3023″ align=”aligncenter” width=”300″] Old Ohio Penitentiary by J. Harris Day[/caption] This semester I taught a course on crime and punishment, and in part out of competition with my colleague Seth Vannatta , I set out to give a final presentation on the dimensions of the course. This is the presentation I wrote. Introduction…
Peter Levine has been blogging on various aspects of truth recently: democracy in a “post-truth era ,” issues in prediction , and now a piece on scientism : if all truths were scientific truths, we would be in deep trouble. We would then reject any claims that science cannot support. For example, do all human beings have…
I haven’t written much about status emotions , recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic…