“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. […] Perhaps we shall […]
Philosophy
‘Tis the season, so I designed a card. (You may purchase it here if you like. Or any other comparably inappropriate product. I do feel more people ought to confound loved ones by gifting them my socks.) On to further scholarly matters! Ludwig Wittgenstein, his friends said, insisted on ‘soupy’ Christmas cards. In Wittgenstein in […]
Rights for cetaceans are not enough. They also deserve representation.
The post Who Speaks for the Whales? appeared first on Nautilus.
Tune in to an exploration of one of the great quandaries in science and philosophy.
The post Audio Feature: The Puzzle of Free Will appeared first on Nautilus.
Empathy – to be of any meaning – needs to be bolstered by a willingness to accept one’s failures, writes Iain Overton
Amid the current horror and propaganda, the pogroms, kidnapping and bombings, and the (at best reckless) violence against civilian populations it is important not to lose sight of what a justish solution might be in Israel/Palestine and it seems to me that this is actually a rather simple matter at least as soon as we […]
In my academic job, I’ve just started a new 5-year project called ‘Visions for the future‘. In the first year of the project, I’ll tackle some methodological questions, including working out the discussion we had here some years ago on normative audits, and the question what ‘synthetic political philosophy’ is (on which Eric also has, […]
The qualities of our experience seem impossible to describe scientifically, but maybe we’re just not thinking about them right.
The post Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard? appeared first on Nautilus.
If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. […]
John Mitchinson reflects on what he learned about the 'baffling presence of absence' when his father died in his arms