In “The Murky Ethics of Making Monkeys Pick Our Coconuts,” Justin Wm. Moyer asks: “If a creature is smart enough to pick coconuts, is it fair to make him? This is the question at the heart of a controversy over pigtailed macaques in Thailand that excel at picking coconuts loved by Western consumers — but do so on leashes.”
See also Eliza Barclay’s NPR story on “What’s Funny About The Business Of Monkeys Picking Coconuts?”
Neuroscientist Joe Herbert asks why we can’t unite neuroscience and psychiatry. “Most of our organs can be treated as repairable machines. Why can’t we treat mental illness by simply fixing the brain?”
This couple lives on 6% of their income so they can give $100,000 a year to charity. “Julia Wise is a social worker and her husband, Jeff Kaufman, is a software engineer. In 2013, their combined income was just under $245,000, putting them in the top 10% of US households. And yet, excluding taxes and savings, they lived on just $15,280, or 6.25% of their income. What happened to the rest of their income, just under $100,000? They gave it to charity.”
In “What Art Unveils,” Alva Noë says that art makes things strange. “Art unveils us ourselves. Art is a making activity because we are by nature and culture organized by making activities. A work of art is a strange tool. It is an alien implement that affords us the opportunity to bring into view everything that was hidden in the background.”
In “5 Thought Experiments That Will Melt Your Brain,” Evan Dashevsky says that because “some science is too big, dangerous, or weird to happen in the lab,” thought experiments “may be the most valuable experiments of all.” But notice that all five of his examples are from philosophers.
Well, if by “world” you mean the true nature of the whole of reality, that does not exist as something we could possibly know. But everything else except the world does exist. In his review of Markus Gabriel’s Why the World Does Not Exist, Richard Wolin explains all this and more.
“Why is it wrong for Volkswagen to lie (if it did lie) about whether its cars meet emission standards, but uncontroversial for HBO to lie (if it is lying) about whether Jon Snow is dead?” In “Companies Lie. Some Get Away with It,” Stephen Carter explains that sometimes we expect people to lie and sometimes we don’t.
In “There Is No Theory of Everything,” Simon Critchley reminisces about his teacher Frank Cioffi. Along the way there are amusing anecdotes, distinctions drawn between explanation and interpretation, warnings about the twin dangers of scientism and obscurantism, and reflections on the value of philosophy (it scratches an itch!). “We don’t need an answer to the question of life’s meaning, just as we don’t need a theory of everything. What we need are multifarious descriptions of many things, further descriptions of phenomena that change the aspect under which they are seen, that light them up and let us see them anew.”
In “Philosophy in Our Schools a Necessity, Not a Luxury,” Robert Grant outlines the value of studying philosophy. Its value lies not only in teaching students how to think, but also in teaching them the important things to think about.
Understood as making a rational gamble that God exists, Pascal’s wager is vulnerable to several objections. But in “Pascal’s Wager 2.0,” Gary Gutting addresses these objections with a distinction between denying that God exists and doubting that God exists. This opens the way for “religious agnosticism.”
Socratically Speaking 