Bob, his Bugatti, and what we owe others. Peter Singer’s 1999 New York Times article asking: “Now you, too, have the information you need to save a child’s life. How should you judge yourself if you don’t do it?” Many more articles by Singer, including “What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?”
And what about the Bugatti? Bugatti: 1,001 horsepower, $1.24 million and 1936 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic sells for a record $30+ Million.
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.”
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.
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?
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 …”
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. “
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.”
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?
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.
Holiday in Hellmouth. “God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on.”
Socratically Speaking 