Is it wrong to wreck the earth?
15
Dec 2011
This week's topic is, "Is it wrong to wreck the earth?" I suppose the obvious answer is “yes”. The answer may be more obvious than the meaning of the question. We’re not asking if it’s wrong for me or you to wreck the earth for everyone else, but something more like whether the people that are currently alive and busy polluting the streams and rivers and oceans, warming the globe, killing off species, and the like, and thus making the earth a less agreeable place for future generations, are doing something wrong. Is it really so obvious that the answer is Yes? ...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Battle of the Sexes
18
Oct 2017
Battle of the Sexes is a feel-good movie that’s slickly-made and well-acted. It’s a happy ending movie on just about every level, including some that weren’t so happy in real life. King wins the tennis match against Bobby Riggs. Larry, King’s then-husband, supports King’s tennis career, tolerates her developing understanding of her sexuality, and ends up with a happy second marriage with King the godmother to his children. Riggs reconciles with his wealthy wife. The women’s tennis tour makes a lot of money for its participants, promoters, and not incidentally Virginia Slims. Jack...
Read moreIs 'The Will of the People' Sacred?
26
Mar 2018
One golden standard of successful democracy is whether its political decisions and institutions adequately reflect the will of the people. But what exactly is this will of the people? The will of the people can be a very elusive concept. Is it the sum of constituent preferences or is it something beyond that? And why is it so revered? This article by John Elledge criticizes how we often think that the will of the people makes everything right. He highlights how fickle and erroneous the will of the people can be. https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/03/stop-saying-will-people-people-can-...
Read morePornography: Open Thread
29
Aug 2009
Blogging has been light around here as of late -- what with our gang's various and sundry summer travels and the fact that we were often not in the studio this summer. But it's time to kick this blog back into at least moderate gear. For the upcoming season, I plan to blog more regularly -- at least weekly, I hope. (Daily is way more than I can manage.) Not going to make an elaborate entry this morning, before the show. But I thought I'd give you a taste of what we're going to talk about today, Here's a little dialogue, between Joe and Blow...
Read moreStrange Behavior (Or: On Watching Sports—a follow-up to Tuesday’s show on basketball)
30
Mar 2006
Aristotle’s characterization of man as the rational animal will seem flattering, if you think about many behaviors we people engage in regularly. While many people in our society are overworked, short on knowledge, and pressed for time, many of us take time out to watch unusually tall individuals get together in groups to hurl a spherical object through a suspended ring. These tall individuals get dressed in outfits with shiny colors and are glorified for the ability to hurl the sphere through the ring. Whole buildings fill up with people who want to watch the hurling of the sphere and pay...
Read moreHow to Think Two Thoughts at Once
10
Jul 2019
Your mental life involves a lot of different kinds of thoughts. You can make decisions about what to do, or figure out some truths about the world, or just daydream in a vivid series of images. There’s great diversity to the types of thoughts you can think. Even so, we tend to think that you can only have one thought at a time. You can switch between different kinds of thoughts quite quickly, or you can think many thoughts one after the other, but you can’t think more than one thought at the same time. That’s a mistake. There’s a way to think two thoughts at once. This isn...
Read moreCelebrating Our 500th Episode
22
Jun 2020
Philosophy Talk just celebrated our 500th episode. Quite an accomplishment from the point of view of the 1st episode. Let me reminisce for a bit. Long a fan of public radio’s Car Talk, I had the idea of something similar based on philosophy. After all, most philosophical problems are more interesting than spark plug problems or transmission problems. So I tried to get a couple of philosophy friends at Stanford interested. David Israel wasn’t interested. Michael Bratman wasn’t interested. But then after Ken Taylor arrived at Stanford and I got to know him, he seemed perfect. So I gave it...
Read moreReasons to Hate
18
Oct 2020
Why is there so much hate in the world? Is hatred ever morally justified? Or does hate just breed more hate? What exactly is hatred anyway? These are some of the big questions we’re tackling on this week’s show, Why We Hate. Tragically, this subject is very timely right now. Since 2016, the number of hate groups, which openly advocate violence, terrorism, and murder, increased dramatically. And in 2018, violent hate crimes reached a 16 year high in the US. This is a serious problem that we should not downplay. However, we can acknowledge this problem and, at the same time, question...
Read moreParfit and the Selves That Matter
10
Apr 2023
Derek Parfit was a really interesting thinker when it came to identity and the self. He had a particularly cool thought experiment involving tele-transportation. Suppose you’re on your daily commute to Mars. You’re about to get beamed up, but something goes wrong—the transporter makes a copy of you on Mars, like it’s supposed to, but it forgets to vaporize you back home. So now there are two of you. And if there are two of you, the question is which one is the real you—the you on Earth, or the you on Mars? To some the answer seems obvious: it’s the original you on Earth. After all, imagine...
Read moreA Deep Dive into Democracy
01
Jun 2017
America’s so-called democracy is under serious strain these days. And not just because of the November election and its aftermath. The cracks and tensions in our democracy have been building for a long time. But some, including me, fear that the system may soon be stressed to the breaking point. Since this summer clearly has the potential to be a long, hot one for our country, we thought we’d start out the season with a deeper look at Democracy in America. We’ve done a host of episodes over the years on the topic of democracy. We've discussed Corporations and the Future of Democracy with...
Read moreGriswold to Guest Blog on Forgiveness
01
May 2005
We at Philosophy Talk are pleased to announce that Charles Griswold, our guest for today's show on the topic of forgiveness, has agreed to guest-blog. It should be a fun show on a topic much discussed in religion and politics, but not much discussed by contemporary philosophers. We are grateful to Charles for agreeing to appear on the show and also grateful to him for agreeing to guest blog. Please make him feel welcome by commenting extensively on the threads he starts!
Read moreIs “Fascism” a Useful Word?
25
Sep 2017
Profligate use, in currently heated political discourse, of the words “fascist” and “fascism” threatens to render them uninformative. One hears accusations of “fascism” applied to such a diversity of political types that being called one seems little more distinctive than wearing blue jeans. Neo-Nazis—appropriately—have been called fascists. But clusters of people on the opposite end of the political spectrum also get so labeled: for example, this piece uses “fascist” to refer to students at Yale demanding a safe space. And we’ve even seen, ironically, the word “fascist” applied to members of...
Read moreThe Case For (and Against) Reparations
09
Feb 2017
This week we're thinking about whether black people today are owed reparations for the racial injustices of the past. There was clearly a time for reparations. Back in 1865, after the civil war, 40 acres and a mule for every former slave would have been a just outcome. But of course that never happened. Instead of reparations and restorative justice, black people were subjected to new forms of oppression: sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, separate but equal schooling, housing discrimination -- not to mention lynchings and worse. If blacks weren’t paid reparations back then,...
Read moreA Nietzschean Defense of Ben Carson
08
Nov 2015
How much difference does it make whether Ben Carson stretched the truth about his life story? Not much, I think. Before you dismiss me as a “right-wing nut job,” let me state for the record that I am a lifelong Democrat (whose biggest political dilemma at the moment is whether to vote for Hilary or Bernie). But as a professional philosopher (which I also am) I’m not convinced that what we have learned so far about Carson’s life story disqualifies him for the Presidency. Let’s start with what is probably one of the more minor issues. In his autobiography, Gifted Hands, Carson...
Read moreThe Dark Side of Science
24
Oct 2013
This week we're stepping over to the Dark Side of Science. Of course a skeptic might ask, what dark side? Without modern science, we’d still be bleeding the sick, travelling by horseback, and using carrier pigeons for long distance communication. But there are no unmixed blessings. Like everything else in life, science has its downsides too. The same science that gives us modern medicine, also gives us germ warfare. Modern transportation is ruining the environment. And modern communication enables governments to spy on us and terrorists to plot against us....
Read moreJohn Locke
28
Feb 2011
In America, the 17th century British philosopher, John Locke is probably best known as one of the inspirations for the Founding Fathers. His Two Treatises of Government argues against the divine right of kings, and in favor of government by the consent of the governed. His views were admired greatly by Jefferson and the other Founders. Locke was a political activist as well as a philosopher. He lived through the last half of the seventeenth century, exciting times in England. Charles the first was beheaded, Oliver Cromwell governed for a while, followed...
Read moreDo Victims Have Obligations?
18
Jan 2018
In this 20-minute podcast, Ashwini Vasanthakumar makes the rather provocative claim that victims have obligations too. While victims may not be responsible for being chosen as the unlucky targets of perpetrators or unfortunate circumstances, Vasanthakumar claims, once they escape their immediate ordeal, victims are in "epistemically privileged positions" in virtue of their experiences. Thus, they play an important role in restoring justice by holding perpetrators to account or informing bystanders and potential victims. For example, a victim of torture may be the only person to know...
Read moreThe Ethics of Homeschooling
03
Jul 2018
It's no secret that black children in American receive a subpar education compared to their white peers: underfunded schools, higher rates of suspension, and largely teachers that are not like them. To address this, some black parents are turning to homeschooling their children, as well as to impart a strong appreciation of Black culture and achievements. Is this self-reliance a form of agency and empowerment in raising confident children, or in fact a step backward from the Brown v. Board of Education and the fight to desegregate schools? Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/...
Read moreSocial Reality
29
Jul 2010
Our topic this week is social realities. I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went “huh?” That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street. But social realities are all around us. Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations. These are all social realities. And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are...
Read moreWhy we Charge for Downloads
08
Sep 2007
A lot of our listeners are unhappy that our new download service is not a free service, but is instead a subscription based service. Some have written that's it's anti-democratic of us to charge, that's it's contrary to the the mission of Stanford University, that we're just being capitalist pigs. One apparently former listener even wrote that he was so offended by us charging for our download service that he would no longer listen even to our free stream, despite the fact that Philosophy Talk is one of his favorite radio programs and despite the fact that we are not broadcast in his...
Read moreGetting Clear on the Replication Crisis
22
Jan 2019
Ever since the replication crisis broke in around 2011, a number of causes—more and less nefarious—have been identified for why a psychological experiment (or other experiments) might not replicate. For those who missed it, the replication crisis was the discovery in psychology that many of the field’s apparently significant results didn’t replicate. That is, when independent researchers did the same experiments as ones already published, the previously found results didn’t materialize. The replication crisis gained momentum largely due to a replication effort spearheaded by Brian...
Read moreWhat the Future Holds
06
Jan 2020
This holiday season has been the end of an extraordinarily exhausting, pedal-to-the-metal year. After the tsunami of papers to be graded, and urgent writing projects to be attended to and set aside, my philosopher spouse and I finally had the mental and emotional space to relax, hang out with each other, and indulge in the yearly ritual of binge-watching a TV series. This year, we chose HBO’s The Leftovers. The story concerns the sudden disappearance of two percent of the world’s population, and the struggles of those who remain—the “leftovers” of the series’ title—to make sense...
Read moreOn Awesomeness
27
Aug 2021
Is “awesome” just an overused word for things we really like? Or does it refer to a particular kind of excellence? Would the world be a better place if we all tried to be more awesome and less sucky? This week, we’re thinking about awesomeness. As an immigrant to this country, it seems to me that Americans love to call everything and anything “awesome.” Once upon a time, it used to mean inspiring fear or awe, but now it seems it’s just a word that tech bros and valley girls use for things they like. Of course, just because a word once meant something in particular, it doesn’t follow that...
Read more[AUDIO] Can a Riot be Justifiable?
19
Apr 2017
Political riots: are they a legitimate method for the people to express their discontent, or too chaotic and uncontrollable to be deemed effective? On one hand, they can draw attention to the important political issues that might otherwise not receive appropriate media coverage or public attention. On the other hand, they often result in the destruction of property and serious injuries to the police and public alike. When a demonstration turns violent, can the violence ever be justified? David Edmonds of Philosophy 24/7 speaks with Avia Pasternak about whether "The Just Riot" is...
Read moreSelf-Deception and the Problem with Religious Belief Formation
07
Jan 2006
A quote: “He who eats the bread and drinks the cup with an unbelieving heart eats and drinks judgment upon himself.” This line is from the communion liturgy of the Church I grew up in—the Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The word “judgment” in the quote is a way of saying "damnation to Hell". The word “unbelieving” refers to disbelief in the core metaphysical doctrines of the Church. The effect of regular repetition of lines like this in the service is to strike fear in the person who may be questioning such doctrines. Fear in turn squelches inquiry and creative thought. I...
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