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What are Human Rights?
Ken Taylor
25
Jun 2010
Our question this week is “What are human rights?” The American declaration of independence offers a compelling answer to that question so its the first place one might think to look of for a characterization of human rights. It says in what I personally find stirring language that “All men are created equal … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Declaration is rooted in the Enlightenment idea that every human being enjoys, just in virtue of being a human being,...
Read moreCheck us out Wednesday and Thursday in Portland
Philosophy Talk
17
Jun 2007
Be sure to check out the Philosophy Talk team this week in Portland. We'll be doing two events. On Wednesday, June 20th, we'll do a live taping a Powell's City of Books on Burnside. The show starts at 7:30. Our guest will be poet and philosopher Troy Jollimore, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for his collection of poems Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Come and be part of the audience. After the show, Troy will be signing copies of his very fine book. Plus you can meet and greet the entire Philosophy Talk team. We're really looking forward to it. Some come on over to...
Read moreWhy Rubio Is Wrong about Philosophy in 150 Words
10
Nov 2015
"Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers." -- Marco Rubio in the November 10 Republican Debate1. No. Philosophy majors make considerably more over the course of their careers than welders. (Source: http://nyti.ms/1HwzyH1 ) 2. It should be “fewer philosophers,” not “less philosophers.” Rubio would know that if he had majored in philosophy. 3. Carly Fiorina had a double major in philosophy...
Read moreSubway Spreading and Personal Space (Part I)
Antonia Peacocke
14
Nov 2018
Two similarly sized strangers, Ari and Taylor, get on a crowded subway train. They sit down in the last two available seats, which are adjacent. To begin, they take up the same amount of space. Thirty minutes later, though, things look very different. Ari is tight, contained, narrow—crossing their legs, hunching their shoulders, keeping their elbows close. Taylor, on the other hand, is expansive, relaxed, stretched out—spreading their elbows, shoulders, and knees wide. This is a story about spreading out on the subway, and what we need to understand to explain it. The...
Read moreHobbes and the Absolute State
03
Nov 2019
Shouldn’t citizens have a say in how they are governed? Or is that just a recipe for extremism, division, and war? Do we need a ruler with absolute power to maintain peace? This week we’re thinking about Thomas Hobbes and his views about citizenship and the state. Hobbes famously said that life in the state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” By “state of nature,” he meant life without any kind of government. Essentially, he’s saying that we need to be governed if our lives are going to be remotely bearable. But is he right to think that? Let’s start with...
Read moreThe Mind-Body Problem, Part 1: Substance Dualism
David Livingstone Smith
07
Mar 2017
You have a mind and you have a body. What’s the connection between the two? All of us are aware of our physical being—our bodies—and we also have an immediate experience of our mental states—our thoughts, emotions, and sensations—but figuring out the relation between these has not been easy. The oldest and by far the most popular explanation of the relationship between mind and body is called substance dualism. Let’s unpack this term, starting with the notion of “substance.” Philosophers use the term “substance” differently than it’s used in ordinary speech. In the...
Read morePawns of ISIS
Neil Van Leeuwen
21
Jun 2017
My title, “Pawns of ISIS,” most likely conjures up a stereotypical image of an Arabic young man, whose mind has been infected—as if by a parasite—by ISIS propaganda on the internet, where publications such as “The Management of Savagery” and Dabiq spread ISIS’s core strategic ideas so widely that anyone can become a soldier. But in fact, the type of pawn I’m writing about is not that one. The pawn I have in mind does not even claim to be Muslim. More surprisingly: Islamophobes, who take themselves to be fighting against any form of Islam (extremist or not), are,...
Read moreTo Retract or Not to Retract
Neil Van Leeuwen
24
Oct 2017
Suppose you edit a respected journal. And suppose that journal focuses on politically fraught issues: development, tensions between countries, legacies of colonial atrocities, racial injustice, poverty . . . You try to publish cutting edge, well researched, and morally decent scholarship. But despite your best efforts, some weaker papers slip through the cracks. Most of those weak papers are bad in banal ways. The numbers aren’t up to date. The argument has gaps. The writing is clunky. Etc. Worth trying to improve upon—but not worth losing sleep over. But now suppose a paper somehow makes it...
Read moreConsciousness Deniers?
Eliane Mitchell
10
May 2018
The idea that consciousness is an illusion may be a familiar one. Thinkers like Daniel Dennett, Brian Farrell, and Richard Rorty espouse this basic notion: That conscious experience, as a result of collective physical processes in the brain, does not itself exist. But philosopher Galen Strawson, calling this idea "the Denial," argues that the denial of consciousness in philosophy is "the silliest claim ever made." He first explains the eminence of "the Denial" as a "mistaken interpretation of behaviorism" and later reasons why their claim is contradictory. Having consciousness is knowing...
Read moreBabies and the Birth of Morality
Ken Taylor
15
Sep 2014
This week we're asking about babies and the birth of morality. One of the many questions on the subject is whether morality is innate or learned. If you want to answer that question, what better place to begin than with babies? Well, you might be skeptical that newborns, of all people, have something to teach us about the nature of morality. It’s not like newborns face a lot of deep moral dilemmas -- “Should I laugh at the big guy making the silly faces at me or should I cry?” Then again, maybe we underestimate them. Babies may not be...
Read moreThe Examined Year: 2011
Ken Taylor
07
Jan 2012
This week, we do something special. We take a look back at the past year, though the lens of Philosophy. We call the episode -- The Examined Year: 2011. But this is not your typical year in review show -- not by a long shot. We take our inspiration, from Socrates who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. For us, that implies that that the unexamined year is not worth living through. Fortunately for us all, though, 2011 was a year well worth living through and well worth examining. It was best of...
Read moreKant's Guide to Morality
22
Apr 2022
Can you reason your way into being a good person? Or are your feelings a better guide for doing the right thing? Should morality be the same for everybody? This week we’re thinking about German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant and his view of a universal morality based on reason. Kant accepted that feelings are important alongside reason—that it’s good to cultivate cheerfulness, and bad to laugh at people in a mean-spirited way. But he thought that our emotions could easily lead us astray, and that only reason can be the final arbiter. Feelings like empathy can motivate you to do good...
Read moreThe Costs of War
John Perry
02
Oct 2005
Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York Times did its best to run an informative obituary of each of the victims, those at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in the airplanes that were hijacked. So there were in the neighborhood of 2000 of these obituaries. Reading them, day after day, made a very deep impression. To lose your life is a bad thing for the victim; philosophers may have a little bit of difficulty agreeing as to exactly why, since one is alive until the loss, and so hasn't incurred it, and dead afterwards, and so in some sense...
Read more[VIDEO] So You Think You Can Know?
Spencer Giel
15
Mar 2017
What does it mean to know something? I know my own name, surely. And I know that I am writing this at this very moment. Most of us feel comfortable saying we know many things—we say so in everyday life all the time. However, what does it really mean to know, rather than just think or believe? Can we establish strict rules for what constitutes knowledge and what does not? Our upcoming show, What We Know—And What We Don't, delves into some of these questions. Until then, get up to date with the basics of Theory of Knowledge in this informative video, courtesy of Jennifer...
Different Cultures, Different Selves
John Perry
21
Jan 2011
Cultural Psychologists claim that people in different cultures have different selves. They have a lot of data showing that Asian selves and American selves are quite different. But what does this even mean? I think we need to make a couple of distinctions before this make sense for those of us coming from the direction of philosophical discussions of the self and personal identity. To begin with, what is a self? My view is that a self is just a person, a human being with the normal capacities of thought, memory, reason, and the like. ``My self” is like “my neighbor”....
Read morePhilosophy Talk and the Ignorant NEH Panelist: A Rant!
Ken Taylor
23
Mar 2009
I don't usually rant. I fancy myself a calm deliberate guy. Not only do I play a dispassionate voice of reason on the radio, I really do try to be a dispassionate voice of reason in my every day life. I don't always succeed mind you. But at least my heart's in the right place. But I've got to get something off my chest. And what better place to do that than on a blog. I wish I could do it anonymously, like so many do. But I don't think that would work here. So what's my beef? It has to do with Philosophy Talk and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In general, i don't...
Read moreWhy Does Anything Exist?
Laura Maguire
07
Apr 2016
Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the big question we’re asking in this week’s show. It’s an odd question that could be thought of as either supremely profound, or supremely silly. It’s hard to know what an answer might even look like. To get us started thinking about it, let’s distinguish between reasons and causes. When we ask why something is the case, depending on our purposes and what kind of explanation we seek, we might be asking for a reason, or we might be asking for a cause. For example, when we ask, “Why did the chicken cross...
Read moreUnconditional Love
Ken Taylor
07
May 2015
This week, we discuss love. Now we’ve talked about love a number of times before on the show. We ‘ve done shows on the varieties of love, on the nature of romantic love, a show called “Love, Poetry and Philosophy” in which we compared philosophical approaches to love with poetic approaches to love. All were great shows. So why do we feel the need to do yet another show about love? Well, partly because we’re such love obsessed people, but mainly because it’s a philosophically inexhaustible topic. Our...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Shazam!
02
May 2019
Shazam! is the latest of the DC comics superhero movies, featuring foster child Billy Batson (aka Captain Marvel). Like Batman and Wonder Woman before, Shazam! is based on the exercise of transformative superpowers. Billy isn’t a very sophisticated wielder of his powers—indeed, part of the fun of the movie is watching him bumbling into figuring out the powers he has and how he might use them to bring good into the world. So it’s easy to see Shazam! as innocent and uplifting fun. But it’s also useful to think more about what Shazam!’s audiences (who paid over $159 million worldwide its...
#FrancisOnFilm: Crip Camp
30
Apr 2020
Movie theaters are dark; and Netflix subscriptions are up. Maybe you, like me, are both eager for all this to be over, and apprehensive about what the future might bring. For a dose of optimism, reflections on freedom, and a very good film, check out Crip Camp: a Disability Revolution. I had the good fortune to see it with a very vociferous and appreciative crowd at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival in Salt Lake City, where it also won the Audience Award. Directed by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht, the film draws on extensive archival footage from Camp Jened, a summer camp for...
[AUDIO] Political Utopias: Just Wishful Thinking?
Spencer Giel
26
Apr 2017
Whether one has socialism or libertarianism in mind, political thought often lends itself to imagining utopic societies organized around a core set of values. However, are these imagined futures simply a product of wishful thinking? Can we be too caught up in the promises of theory to see beyond our rose-colored glasses? Or are these utopias real objects to aim for, despite how far away they may seem? Can we rid ourselves of wishful thinking in our political beliefs? How do ideological structures affect our political desires? How does Foucault's ideas on genealogy play into our politics as...
Read more[VIDEO] Are You Living in a Simulation?
Eliane Mitchell
30
Aug 2017
Business magnate Elon Musk believes that it is highly probable that we are living in a simulated reality—but why? What with recent and rapid progress in photorealistic, 3D simulations (think of video games like the Sims or Arma 3), Musk maintains that the ability for humans to realistically simulate reality is not so far off. Assuming that everything in the physical world can be simulated, Musk posits that humans might just decide to simulate themselves, once they realize the immutable limits of human, scientific progress. In the end, as this video from Vox explains,...
Fractured Identities
Josh Landy
22
Jan 2018
What does it mean to have a fractured identity? At a first pass, we might say it means having many parts to one’s personality, many sources of ideals, many drivers of action. Take our good friend Ken, for example. He’s a philosopher, but also a sports fan, a parent, a some-time foodie, and all kinds of other things. That might not seem like a problem, but there are going to be times when those identities come into conflict—when he might have to choose between, say, watching a World Series game and going to a meeting in the philosophy department. Still, Ken might say that there’s no real...
Read moreHow a Glitch Caused a Crisis
Ken Taylor
05
Jun 2018
We are in a constitutional crisis. It is not a looming crisis. It has already arrived, with the president’s declaration that he has the absolute right to pardon himself and his potential partners in crime, and the absolute right to stop any investigation for whatever reason he chooses. The crisis is not that he has said these things. He is almost certainly wrong in his interpretation of the law and the Constitution. After all, Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution requires the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Pardoning himself and his cronies out of corrupt...
Read moreConfessions of a Conflicted Carnivore
Daniel Mullin
12
Dec 2013
Since the next episode of Philosophy Talk is about the demands of morality, I wanted to share the following post that I wrote last year for my blog. The area of food selection is one where many philosophers, myself included, feel the demands of morality. But how strenuous can we make those demands on ordinary people? This essay is an attempt to find a middle ground and, in the end, may please no one. Nevertheless, I hope it will provide food for thought (sorry, couldn't help myself). I recently participated in this online poll about the eating habits of philosophers...
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