Question conventional wisdom … love the real thing. A pamphlet about the philosophy major at University of Missouri-St. Louis with some very useful and interesting points about studying philosophy, including famous philosophy majors like Stephen Colbert, Steve Martin, and Supreme Court justices.
Year: 2013
Trolleyology
Matters of life and death. David Edmonds’ excellent review of the runaway trolley and its many variations. “Interest in ‘trolleyology’—a way of studying moral quandaries—has taken off in recent years. Some philosophers say it sheds useful light on human behaviour, others see it as a pointless pursuit of the unknowable.”
Peter Singer’s utilitarianism in action
Join Wall Street to save the world. “Jason Trigg went into finance because he is after money — as much as he can earn. [H]e goes to work each morning for a high-frequency trading firm. It’s a hedge fund on steroids. He writes software that turns a lot of money into even more money. For his labors, he reaps an uptown salary — and over time his earning potential is unbounded. It’s all part of the plan. Why this compulsion? It’s not for fast cars or fancy houses. Trigg makes money just to give it away. His logic is simple: The more he makes, the more good he can do.”
The moon illusion
The moon’s appearance and reality explained … or not.
The Afterlife
Samuel Scheffler on the importance of the afterlife … seriously. “Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones.”
What is time?
Reviews of Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn. See especially Tensers, Time Regained!, and Resetting the Clocks, Smolin explains: “I used to believe in the essential unreality of time. Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth…. I no longer believe that time is unreal. In fact I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real, but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.” Even the laws of nature, Smolin says, are in time and change over time.
Analytic theology
The problems and questions discussed in analytic philosophy of religion. “… videos … shot during an international philosophy conference on “Minds – Human and Divine” in Munich 2012.”
Uncertainty.
A new look at an indeterminate world. Many very interesting articles about uncertainty … what we can know, how we can know it, and the degree to which we can know it.
Rationality as a kind of escapism?
Occam’s moisturiser. “Out there is the messy chaotic suffering of humanity, but the philosopher, like Plato, retreats to the safety of his academy, and polishes his concepts.”
Examined lives
What it means to lead a good life. A. C. Grayling’s review of James Miller’s Examined Lives. “His conclusion is a negative one: the combination of wisdom, self-understanding, and self-possession that Socrates’s successors took to be the gold standard for the philosophical life proved impossible for most of them to attain, and, in some cases, what they preached and what they practised fell widely apart.” Sarah Bakewell’s review in New York Times.
Socratically Speaking 