Despite its many obvious shortcomings, the human mind is a remarkably productive generator of categories—from the Linnaean system of taxonomy to two drinkers in a bar arguing over India Pale Ales, and indeed the person sitting next to them who complains to the bartender about “hipsters” taking over his favorite bar. This natural proclivity to set out a number of categories and Continue Reading …
What Will Be Most Embarrassing about Contemporary Society in Fifty Years?
Mad Men was brilliant for many reasons: its whip-smart dialogue; its pitch-perfect casting; its meticulous attention to period detail. Creator Matthew Weiner was famously fanatical about historical accuracy, and so the show, in addition to its narrative delights, functioned as something of a time capsule. Ad execs used to drink copious amounts of liquor on the job! Women in the Continue Reading …
The Diamond-Water Paradox and the Subjective Theory of Value
In his famous work The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith articulated a paradox that he could not resolve: water is essential to life; diamonds a mere decoration. Yet for all that, we are willing to lavish enormous sums on pretty rocks while taking clean water for granted. What could explain this disconnect? Smith’s confusion stemmed from his understanding of the source of Continue Reading …
The Epistemological Basis of Economics
Contemporary political discourse is dominated by economic terminology. Candidates run on platforms that emphasize “jobs, jobs, jobs,” and sitting representatives (and presidents) justify their policies through references to GDP growth. There is simply no way to approach politics without grappling with this stuff. Yet even as it takes on an outsized role in the formulation of Continue Reading …
Primitivism and the Counterculture
Why do hippies seek transformation in tepees? From the sandy wastes of Burning Man to the mud-filled pits of music festivals, enthusiastic seekers emulate Native American cultures in an attempt to throw off the “inauthenticity” of the modern world. While the traditions that hippies idealize may be divorced from the particular histories of the tribes within which they Continue Reading …
Fictional Characters: Cross-Platform Software
Non-Existing Things: An Introduction to Fictional Characters Either fictional characters exist or they don’t. When speaking about Raskolnikov, land surveyor K., or Batman, it might appear that we make statements about actual people, especially to any eavesdroppers who aren’t aware that we’re speaking about fictional characters. “Honey, I overheard someone talking about an Continue Reading …
How Could Scalar Consequentialism Ever Lose at Chess?
Consequentialism is the view that the appropriateness of an action is determined solely by its consequences and not by any additional moral demands. Consequentialism comes in many flavors, starting with the classic utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). Scalar consequentialism can be thought of as that version which does not judge an Continue Reading …
Defer Your Dreams
On an episode of Inside Amy Schumer last year there was a sketch called “Listen Alert.” The gist was that Listen Alert was an emergency service for people who feel the need to vent and aren’t receiving proper attention from their friends or significant others. Press the button on the Listen Alert necklace and vent away. But toward the end of the sketch one woman starts to Continue Reading …
Richard Rorty and the Origins of Post-Truth
In the chaotic flurry of consternation, excitement, and viral postmortems that followed the US election, two notions stood out to me as slightly contradictory yet strangely connected: the dreaded concept of “post-truth,” and the prescience of a philosopher who supposedly predicted Trump 18 years ago. “Post-truth” describes the blatant disregard for facts that has been Continue Reading …
Bojack Horseman and Aristotelian Self-Love
The latest Wisecrack philosophy video takes on one of my favorite shows of all time: Bojack Horseman. Under the pretext of comedy, colorful animation, and talking animals, the Netflix original sneaks in heartbreaking moments of raw human vulnerability. Its main character—the eponymous Bojack Horseman—is a charismatic, depressed, washed-out actor who in his chaotic search for Continue Reading …
What Is It Like to Be Ourselves? A Debate on Consciousness and the Mind
“Consciousness is that annoying thing that happens between naps.” This is how world-renowned philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers defines the quintessentially human state in this debate, although his facetiousness is quite easy to detect: Chalmers famously formulated the “hard problem of consciousness” and built an immensely successful career around it. His Continue Reading …
On Childhood, Motherhood, and Being Ahead of Your Time: Shulamith Firestone and The Dialectic of Sex
Almost fifty years ago there was an influential woman who called pregnancy “barbaric,” described childhood as “hell,” and said giving birth was “like shitting a pumpkin.” Shulamith Firestone was a radical activist and remarkably prescient thinker who helped define feminism as we know it. Yet today she remains largely—and unfairly—unknown. Through her relentless activism and Continue Reading …
Rhythm 0, Marina Abramović, and Freudian Ambivalence
As 21st-century humans, we like to think of ourselves as highly intelligent and morally developed beings. But every so often comes an artist who holds up a mirror so close to our face that we can see the fragile veneer of civilization crackle and slowly come off. Marina Abramović is one such artist, and in her 1974 performance Rhythm 0 she exposed humanity in all its primordial Continue Reading …
Facing the Other: Performance Art and Emmanuel Levinas
In one of our recent episodes, while trying to figure out what’s so special about the face-to-face encounter in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Seth mentioned the work of performance artist Marina Abramović. In 2010, the self-dubbed “grandmother of performance art” performed a piece entitled The Artist Is Present, which crowned her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art Continue Reading …
Humor and Infinite Responsibility: Can Levinas Use a Little Stand-Up Comedy?
Approaching a philosopher such as Emmanuel Levinas might seem intimidating, both because of his reputation for diving extremely deeply into the most fundamental questions of human existence, and for doing so in a style that is, perhaps adequately, quite heavy and impenetrable. In our latest episodes, Mark, Wes, and Seth took upon themselves the much-needed and difficult task of Continue Reading …
How Moral Is the Moral Machine?
A 2012 article in the New Yorker reads: With or without robotic soldiers, what we really need is a sound way to teach our machines to be ethical. The trouble is that we have almost no idea how to do that. Four years later, the guys at MIT may have found an answer: through crowd-sourcing. The Moral Machine is introduced by its creators as "a platform for getting a human Continue Reading …
The Hubris of Transhumanism
The debates around futurist tech, biotechnology, and human enhancements are usually very polarized, with one side embracing it uncritically and the other rejecting it irrationally. Geeky technophiles who see science as the be-all and end-all of thinking want to push the progress farther and faster, sometimes leaving ethics behind, whereas the more romantically minded embrace Continue Reading …
Martha Nussbaum on Emotions, Ethics, and Literature
Martha Nussbaum has been recently described as a "philosopher of feelings" and indeed, throughout her career, she has written on disgust, shame, desire, sex, patriotism, love, empathy, and most recently, anger. According to Nussbaum, there is ethical value in emotions, and we are wrong to ostracize them outside the sphere of philosophical relevance. Understanding our emotions Continue Reading …
Deinotes: Dread, Wonder, and the Art of Persuasion
The uneasiness Athenians felt toward the Sophists is captured beautifully in a Greek word that later came to define rhetoric at large. Deinos is an adjective with manifold meanings, and a deeper look at the word can help us understand why the Sophists were both disliked and revered, how the art of rhetoric works, and perhaps why Socrates himself was accused of mastering Continue Reading …
Were the Sophists Really All That Bad?
It’s a well-known fact that Plato hated Sophists, and in our latest episode we’ve been examining his reasons. But were the Sophists really nothing more than immoral truth-benders, with no merits of their own? Sophists were trained in making the weaker case appear the stronger, and many took this to mean deceit and intellectual sleaziness. But in a world where the Greeks thought Continue Reading …