Color … an example of the reasons philosophers have tried to figure out how, if at all, we can distinguish appearance and reality.
Month: September 2013
The Melian Dialogue …
Why do the battles over ancient Athens still rage, and were the Athenians too aggressive or not aggressive enough? What does “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” really mean?
Descartes’ bones
A skeletal history of the conflict between faith and reason. “Alas, poor Descartes: meditations on a well-traveled skull.” More here.
The passions of John Stuart Mill
Right again. “Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography by the British journalist Richard Reeves …”
Bentham’s body
The auto-icon. “At the end of the South Cloisters of the main building of [University College London] stands a wooden cabinet, which has been a source of curiosity and perplexity to visitors. The cabinet contains Bentham’s preserved skeleton, dressed in his own clothes, and surmounted by a wax head. “
A moral sense?
The moral instinct. “The human moral sense turns out to be an organ of considerable complexity, with quirks that reflect its evolutionary history and its neurobiological foundations.”
Mind and brain
Adam Gopnik on what neuroscience can tell us about our selves. Do our selves shape our brains, or do our brains shape our selves?
Do we create reality by looking at it?
The reality tests. A team of physicists in Vienna has devised experiments that may answer one of the enduring riddles of science: do we create the world just by looking at it?
Does the universe exist if we’re not looking?
Physics out-Berkeleys Berkeley. Eminent physicist John Wheeler says he has only enough time left to work on one idea: that human consciousness shapes not only the present but the past as well.
Parallel worlds
Can the multiverse explain human history? “If human history turns on the tilt of the multiverse, can we still trust our ideas of achievement, progress and morality?”
Socratically Speaking 