On 24 April 2014, the Washington Times ran an article titled “America is an oligarchy, not a democracy or republic, university study finds.” The Washington Times was reporting on a study by political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page called “Testing Theories of American Politics” [PDF]. According to the study, in 20 years of public policy decision making in the United Continue Reading …
“The Most Good You Can Do” (2015): A Review of Peter Singer’s New Book
Peter Singer is a man whose moral worldview extends beyond the scope of human beings to the protection of animals and our planet, in an ever-expanding circle of concern. He is the godfather of the Animal Liberation movement and perhaps the most vocal proponent of utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize the most well-being for human beings as possible. Singer is now spearheading Continue Reading …
Art and Beauty: A Marital History
Art and beauty have a peculiar kind of relationship and have been uneasily coupled since perhaps the beginning of human history. This close relationship received its most formal expression with the 18th century aestheticians. But art and beauty have always been separable, as the 20th century demonstrated, even if the extent of their separability has been exaggerated. Art always Continue Reading …
Natural Teleology as New Religion
Three years ago, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a book called Mind and Cosmos, for which he was immediately pilloried by mainstream intellectuals, and which The Guardian called the most despised science book of 2012. Psychologist Steven Pinker was among the intellectual coterie to criticize the work, taking to Twitter to lament "the shoddy reasoning of a once-great Continue Reading …
Saying goodbye to Spaceship Earth: A review of Sabine Höhler’s “Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990”
60 years from now, the Earth may be as inhospitable as it was 50 million years ago. This could mean a return to the Eocene epoch, a time when, according to Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, "palm trees flourished in the Antarctic and alligators paddled around the British Isles." The current epoch, the Anthropocene, is one in which human beings and the other species Continue Reading …
Should the social sciences be like the natural sciences?
Should the social sciences be like the natural sciences? Wilhelm Dilthey didn't think so. This early 19th and 20th century figure who went on to influence Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur contended that the concept of Verstehen is crucial in our interpretation of human thought and behavior. Verstehen literally means "understanding," and Dilthey believed Continue Reading …
The event(s) of September 11
Two years after a group of mostly Saudi men flew commercial planes into One and Two World Trade Center, resulting in both buildings' collapsing, several New Yorkers packed into a courtroom, a mile from where the buildings once stood, in order to hear a court case on the semantics of the word occurrence. In July of 2003, Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder of the World Trade Continue Reading …
The Creation of a Superintelligence and the End of Inquiry
Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence is a book that imagines how we should go about dealing with a super-AI, should it come about. The thesis of the book seems to be this: if a superintelligence were to be constructed, there would be certain dangers we'd want to apprise ourselves of and prepare ourselves for, and the book is a precis, essentially, for dealing with some of those Continue Reading …
Some Questions on Aesthetics and Art
I recently finished reading Noel Carroll's remarkable book Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction, and the result was a newfound appreciation for aesthetics and art, and it even caused me to change my mind regarding some of the untested assumptions I had regarding art. For example, I regularly meet with a writing group and we workshop short stories. The other guys in Continue Reading …
Can anarchism be defended?
Robert Nozick tries to knock out anarchism as a possible political theory in his argument for the Minimal State. But does he really knock it out? Or can anarchism as a political theory be defended? And what is at stake? In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick imagines a world in which, as if by an invisible hand, society moves away from Anarchy toward the Minimal Continue Reading …
The Wild and the Good
While Henry David Thoreau was conducting his life experiment, living simply and deliberately in a cabin alongside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts in 1845, he began to feel that “[t]he wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar.” In Walden, he wrote, “I find myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and Continue Reading …
Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and the Ethics of Authenticity
Anyone reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance” (1841) for the first time is likely to be taken by his call to us, his Dear Readers, to trust in ourselves, be our own persons, arrive at our own insights. He writes, “To believe your own thought, to believe what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” And no surprise that the language Continue Reading …
Stories We Tell: A Review of Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent
The stories we tell ourselves are important to who we are. Moreover, the identities we come to have are in large measure shaped by our social ties. We can agree with Michael Sandel that “we cannot regard ourselves as independent ... without great cost to those loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is Continue Reading …
Free Will Worth Having
What are your thoughts on machines that can predict what you're going to do in the next five minutes? Do you think that everything that happens now in the universe was causally determined by some event(s) that happened before it? When professional philosophers check people's intuitions it looks as though sometimes people generally agree that we have free will even if the Continue Reading …
Education and Schopenhauer’s “Thinking for Oneself”
In Arthur Schopenhauer's essay “On Thinking for Oneself” (1851), he writes that there are few people who possess a natural love of learning and that they will only learn from others if they find something that triggers an innate interest inside themselves. Thinking must be kindled, like a fire by a draught; it must be sustained by some interest in the matter in hand. This Continue Reading …
Discuss Free Will (John Searle, Sam Harris) with Not School
In light of the most recent PEL episode, we folks in PEL's Not School will be holding a discussion on free will this month through next month. Some of the conversation will be continuous with and complementary to the PEL guys' discussion as well as perhaps raise other issues. For the remainder of this month, we'll be reading John Searle's essay "Freedom as a Problem in Continue Reading …