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.”
Ethics
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.”
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.
Argument over Kant ends in shooting
Debating Kant … or “nerds gone wild.” “… a headline worthy of instant fame on Reddit or Buzzfeed: ‘Man shoots another man following argument over philosopher Immanuel Kant.’ ” Was the fight about the categorical imperative or perhaps the categories of the understanding?
Happiness and/or meaningfulness
Do you want a meaningful life or a happy one? “Happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning. How do we go about finding a meaningful life, not just a happy one?” From a psychology professor at FSU, some psychological research … and philosophy … about “the meanings of life.”
The moral dilemmas of doctors during disasters
Katrina and medical ethics. “Which patients should receive priority in a disaster? Should doctors abandon the critically ill? What should they do if they believe those patients will suffer? Should they receive legal immunity for decisions made under duress?”
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?
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. “
Socratically Speaking 