According to Nigel Warburton, although it won’t deter kidnappers to pay a ransom, rational calculations fall by the wayside when people you love are involved.
Year: 2014
Marshmallows and cigarettes
According to Walter Mischel, the key to self-control is learning to mentally “cool” the “hot” aspects of your environment, those things that pull you away from your goal. How does his research and personal experience with self-control fit with philosophical questions about free will, determinism, compatibilism, etc.?
Ten questions for the philosophy of cosmology
How can philosophers work with physicists to study the origin and development of the universe? Sean Carroll poses questions for the philosophy of cosmology. For example, are time and space fundamental features of the universe, or do they emerge from more basic features? Philosophers have considered time, space, and Carroll’s other questions throughout … well, over considerable time and space.
Philosopher kings
The Schumpeter blog of the The Economist says business leaders would benefit from studying philosophers. For example, “philosophy-based courses would help executives overcome their obsession with status symbols. It is difficult to measure your worth in terms of how many toys you accumulate when you have immersed yourself in Plato.”
How to live … Stoicism and Epicureanism
How should we live? Cheerfully resign ourselves to what happens or pursue true pleasure? From the School of Life a short film explaining Stoicism and another explaining Epicureanism.
Locke, Leibniz, and the blind boy who now sees
Quaere, how much do we really see? What can we learn about knowledge when sight is restored to a 13-year-old boy who had been blind since birth? Charlie Huenemann explains what the empiricist Locke and the rationalist Leibniz had to say about this. And don’t miss the very interesting readers’ comments to this very interesting essay.
A homepage for philosophy
What’s the difference between Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP)? SEP is “peer-reviewed, respected, accurate, and free.” It’s a terrific resource for “stressed undergraduates cramming before exams, professors looking for a topical refresher, or ‘regular’ people who are just interested in philosophy.”
How Aristotle invented science
Susan H. Gordon’s review of Armand Marie Leroi’s The Lagoon: “And so, in 2014, Aristotle joins the ranks of his fellow biologists. ‘Intimacy with the natural world shines from his works,’ writes Leroi, a communion that allowed Aristotle to ‘sieve the ocean of natural history folklore and travelogue for grains of truth from which to build a new science.’ Following his new scientific inquiry, Aristotle arrived at a final why: Why does any of this happen at all? It would take centuries before Darwin could find a scientifically plausible answer, and in ancient Greece Aristotle looked again to the practical for his own: Biological systems are true so that we might exist. And to exist is simply better than to not exist.”
The Socrates we don’t know
Adam Kirsch uses Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes to “to triangulate the greatest man of antiquity — Socrates himself” … and also to reflect on how much we can know at all.
Socratically Speaking 