All Machine and No Ghost
02
May 2017
For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to figure out the relation between mind and body. Until very recently the doctrine of substance dualism—the idea that minds are made out of spooky non-physical stuff, while bodies are made out of clunky matter—was virtually the only game in town. It was the theory of the mind-body relation that British philosopher Gilbert Ryle ridiculed as “the ghost in the machine.” But by the middle of the 19th century, a new wind was blowing through the musty corridors of philosophy. Cutting-edge developments in physics, biology, and neuroscience were...
Read moreThe Wrong Abortion Question
31
Oct 2018
Is abortion the murder of an innocent child, or the exercise of a woman’s right to control her own body? Or maybe we’re focusing on the wrong question. Abortion is a “wedge issue” that divides Americans into a “pro-life” side that believes a fetus is a person with rights, and “pro-choice” side that believes fetus is a clump of cells which is morally insignificant when weighed against the right to bodily autonomy. Having two sides shout at each other obscures other serious obstacles to reproductive rights in the US—obstacles that both sides of the abortion debate should agree about....
Read moreSocial Status
21
Sep 2017
Ever thought social status could be understood through a philosophical lens? Kevin Simmler, engineer and philosophical blogger, thinks so. In the spirit of French computer scientist Jean-Louis Desalles’ scholarly work, Simmler claims that underpinning social status is dominance and prestige. Built into the notion of prestige is the idea of admiration, or how we curry favor with people we respect. Note that Dessalles’ theory of prestige actually stipulates that admiration and prestige-seeking are two “complementary teaming instincts”. This means that these two qualities are part...
Read moreWhy Not Change Your Core Self?
25
Oct 2019
Let’s say you could snap your fingers and all your various tastes and aesthetic preferences would change overnight. You would appreciate different foods, you would like different books, you would prefer different colors and clothing styles and jokes. Would you do it? I’m guessing your answer is a clear ‘no.’ I would say ‘no’ too. But why? Why not switch? The answer might at first seem easy. It would be really inconvenient to gain an entirely new set of preferences. You’ve set your life up around the ones you already have and you’ve made friends who like the same sorts of...
Read moreLatin-American Philosophy
26
Sep 2013
It's National Hispanic Heritage Month, and this week on the program we'll be tackling Latin-American Philosophy. By Latin America we mean all the Spanish and Portuguese speaking parts of the Americas, including Mexico. We’ll just say American philosophy when we mean the U.S. and Canada, and apologize in advance for the somewhat arrogant terminology. All philosophy in the Americas can be divided in two: that connected with the native American cultures that were here before Columbus, and what developed from the 16th century on. There’s a lot of rethinking going on about every...
Read moreA dialogue on Biracial Identity
18
Feb 2011
This week's show is a rebroadcast of our show about biracial identity, first aired back in 2009. You can think of it as our contribution to Black History Month, I guess. I wrote the following little dialogue as a way of getting the juices flowing on this issue. I republish it here pretty much without change. A Black Guy (BG) and a White Guy (WG) are in a bar, having drinks. You may be tempted to think that they are John Perry and Ken Taylor -- but since I'm putting words in both people's mouths, don't hold John...
Read morePhilosophy for the Apocalypse
30
Sep 2020
On September 9, 2020 in Northern California, you couldn’t see the sun rise. Instead the dark velvet of a night sky melted into an ugly orange mess, an ominous reminder of the wildfires that have consumed over 2 million acres already. No photo I’ve seen quite captures how surreal it looked. By 2pm, the sky was dark as dusk. The streetlights stayed on all day. Last year, when smoke choked us out of our outdoor activities, we fled into friends’ homes, restaurants, stores, offices, and schools to keep our sanity. This year, we can’t do that. Here in California you risk respiratory...
Read moreCancelling in Public and Private
17
Feb 2023
This week we’re thinking about Cancel Culture, which some consider a real problem: people losing their jobs, being harassed online, their home addresses being shared—all because they said something that came out the wrong way. Others see people who do or say terrible things getting some pushback, but mostly whining about how they’ve been victimized... on their Netflix comedy special. Let's leave aside the notable public figures, and the cases of egregious behavior: what about private citizens getting into trouble over innocent mistakes? Of course, regular folks can also say...
Read moreFreedom, rights and technology (Why Free Software is Important)
25
Mar 2016
Free and open source software is provided at zero cost but the word "free" does not refer to the cost of the software. "Free" refers to the fact that everyone has freedom to use the software for their benefit. The freedom to use, study, copy, modify, distribute are granted to everyone and is protected through an enforceable legal license. When I first heard the free software concept I thought the idea was ridiculous. In a society where competition is fierce and virtually everything is for sale, I wondered why anyone would give away the intellectual ownership for their software. This is why...
Read moreThe Art of Non-Violence
13
Jan 2018
This week we're asking about the Art of Non-violence. And it is an art -- the trick is knowing when and where it will actually work. After all, it looks like it’s worked just about everywhere it’s been seriously tried: non-violence brought down apartheid in South Africa, Jim Crow in America, and British Colonialism in India. But of course it took violence to defeat the Nazis, to end slavery and to free the colonies from British tyranny. Does that mean non-violence has its limits? Not if you believe that violence just begets more violence. Only non-violence can break the cycle...
Read moreBeauty: Skin-Deep, in the Eye of the Beholder and Valuable?
13
Mar 2005
Posted by Alexander Nehamas Let me make some dogmatic remarks about beauty and subjectivity. We can discuss them in more detail on the air tomorrow. There is such a thing as beauty that is only skin-deep. It is the beauty of appearance, what we call "looking good." It has little to do with personality, character, wit or morality, and that is because anything that applies to how things look is not a reliable guide to many of their other qualities. The beauty of appearance -- what we can judge, say, by looking at a photograph of a face -- is something that psychologists...
Read morePhilosophy for the Young: Corrupting or Empowering?
02
Sep 2010
Our topic this week: Philosophy for the young – corrupting… or empowering? We asked that question in front of an audience of high school at Palo Alto High School, in Palo Alto, California. We record this program there last May, at the invitation of a teacher, Lucy Filppu, an English teacher by training, who teaches a special humanities course. We had a blast and we’d very much like to thank the students and teachers at Paly, as it is affectionately called, for having us. We’d love to go back sometime. Now the charge that philosophy...
Read moreSaint Augustine
25
Jan 2008
What an interesting philosopher he turned out to be! And an interesting man, too. Set aside his historical importance --- the fact that he above all others brought together the Greek and Hebrew aspects of Christianity, that his work against the heresies of Arianism, Pelagianism and Manicheanism was tireless and and that, as many think, he is responsible for many of the more unfortunate aspects of Christianity, such as the low status of women, the negative attitude towards sex and other enjoyable bodily appetites, and the harsh doctrine of original sin. Just read him as...
Read moreThe Temptation to Feel Baffled
16
Feb 2018
Yet another school shooting. This one happened on Valentine’s Day in Parkland, Florida, an otherwise attractive suburb north of Ft. Lauderdale. 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who has since confessed, carried an AR-15 assault-style rifle into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, from which he had been previously expelled, and murdered 17 people—14 students and three staff members—injuring several dozen others. Cruz had a history of strange behavior, including attacking squirrels and chickens. He had had disciplinary problems in school as well—hence the expulsion. He seems to have been affiliated...
Read moreFailing Successfully
08
Aug 2018
To say that a person can fail successfully sounds really weird. To succeed at something is to achieve some goal that you’re aiming at, and to fail at something is to not achieve a goal that you were trying to achieve. I might succeed or fail at bench-pressing my body weight. I succeed if I try to bench-press my body weight and manage to do it, and I fail if I try to do it but don’t succeed. So, success and failure seem to be incompatible. But this isn’t the end of the story. In fact, it’s just a short-sighted and pedantic beginning. If we loosen up and shift perspective a little bit,...
Read moreFeel like Democracy is Crumbling? So Did Plato
16
Mar 2017
This week in The Atlantic, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein posed a question: What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? Goldstein is wondering what a citizen should do when they feel like democracy has failed. How should we react when the people around us have vote in a way we find horrible? Though that sentiment might...
Read moreYour Question: Habermas and Factions
30
Jun 2017
We know the vast majority of our listeners don't get to hear the live broadcast of our show, which is usually Sunday mornings from the studios of KALW in San Francisco. Even listeners in the Bay Area often hear the KALW rebroadcast, Tuesdays at noon. But we know you often have questions about what you're hearing, so we decided to start a series called "Your Question" here on the blog. If you have a question after the live broadcast, you can still participate in the conversation. This week's show was on the German philosopher and critical theorist Habermas and his...
Read moreAuthority and Resistance
22
Apr 2019
This week we take up the topic of authority and resistance. We live in an age in which many of the old, top-down authority structures are collapsing before our very eyes. In large measure, the collapse of top-down authority is due to the “democratizing” effect of technology, especially, but not only, the internet. The democratization of information is having an effect on our politics, on the media, on medicine, even on education. Does the collapse of top-down authority mean the rise of anarchy and chaos? Or can there be authority without hierarchy? Who...
Read moreProust and Social Distance
22
Apr 2020
Marcel Proust once wrote about a hypothetical sufferer of “spiritual depression.” Here’s a passage from it that resonates, in these days of forced interiority: He has no real incapacity that prevents him from working, walking, eating, being out in the cold, but he finds it impossible to will the various acts he is otherwise perfectly able to perform… If you, like me, have walled yourself up at home for a few weeks—and are lucky enough not to suffer from anything more serious than the spiritual depression described above—then you might recognize yourself in this...
Read moreThe Race Delusion
10
Aug 2014
Race is important. It has huge ramifications for the ways that we live our lives. As University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts observes, Race determines which church most Americans attend, where they buy a house, what persons they choose to marry, whom they vote for, and the music that they listen to. Race is evident in the color of inner city and suburban schools, prison populations, the US Senate, and Fortune 500 boardrooms.[1] Most philosophers are skeptical of the claim that races represent genuine divisions of the human family. Of course, this view...
Read moreThe Military: What is it Good for?
26
Nov 2011
Our topic this week is the military. And we’re asking “What is it good for?” Let me start out by granting the obvious. Though a few of my most left-leaning friends think we could do entirely without any sort of military, there has never been and will never be a vast and populous nation like ours without armed services. But even if we take it as a given that any nation, especially a nation that wants to be a significant player on the world stage, is going to have a military of some sort, that still leaves...
Read moreThe Slow Miracles of Thought
23
Jul 2021
How can the human mind think about objects outside itself? How is it possible to talk about things that don’t even exist? This week, we’re thinking about reference—specifically, an “opinionated” theory of reference by our dear departed friend, longtime host and Philosophy Talk co-founder, Ken Taylor. Just hours before he passed away in December 2019, Ken announced on his Facebook page that he’d finally finished a book about reference that he had been working on for many years. He wrote: It will still take some time to spit and polish it all up into a form suitable for shipping off to...
Read moreThe Dark Side of the Cosmos
06
Oct 2016
What a weird and wonderful cosmos we live in! Here’s an astounding fact. If you take all of the ordinary objects you can see, from tables and chairs to all the stars and planets in the universe, you will have accounted for less than 5% of the universe’s total mass-energy. The other 95%? That’s invisible stuff like dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy are so called because they neither absorb nor reflect light, which is why they’ve never been directly observed. Scientists estimate that dark matter makes up more than 25% of the entire universe. The rest—almost 70%—is dark...
Read moreWhat is Cultural Appropriation?
27
Oct 2015
This Halloween we’ll see kids, college students, and other revelers dressed in costumes ranging from scary to hilarious: Chewbaccas, spandex police officers, Harry Potters, Frodos… even Elvis. But at any party, we have a good chance of seeing cultural appropriation. We might see white people glibly dressed in mock Native American headdresses, frat brothers dressing “ghetto”, people who have no real connection to India wearing red dots on their foreheads, would-be Zulus, Geishas (from Texas), and of course a gringo in a sombrero. Such mimicry has come under increasing condemnation...
Read moreImproving the World vs Improving my Country
20
Jun 2005
Thanks to Peter Singer for helping us to put on a good show yesterday. It was certainly an interesting, lively conversation. The phone lines were constantly filled. So we do seem to have touched some nerve. Unfortunately, there were many more callers than we had time to get to. By the way, Singer's book, One World : The Ethics of Globalization, in which he spells out more fully some of the ideas he touched on during the show, is a really good read. It covers a whole lot of ground in a philosophically...
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