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This Week on Philosophy Talk

Trolling, Bullying, and Flame Wars: Humility and Online Discourse

Open up any online comments section and you’ll find them: internet trolls, from the mildly inflammatory to the viciously bullying. It seems that the ease of posting online leads many to abandon any semblance of intellectual humility. So can we have intellectual humility on an anonymous forum with little oversight and accountability? Does current online behavior portend the end of humility in the public domain? How do we encourage greater humility and less arrogance in any public discourse?


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08 April 2018

Monstrous Technologies?

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein raises powerful questions about the responsibilities of scientists to consider the impact of their inventions on the...

The Deep Dive

The End of Privacy?

Between Cambridge Analytica’s surreptitious harvesting of data from tens of millions of Facebook users, Amazon and Googles’ apparent plans to exploit so-called “smart speakers” to turn our homes into massive data collection centers, Russia’s continuing attempts to hack our democracy, and more and more news of massive data breaches – not to mention the continuing growth of government surveillance programs – it’s enough to make you wonder if the concept of privacy is simply outmoded.

The Blog@Philosophers' Corner

16 April 2018

Who Gets To Decide the Truth?

It isn't just the United States that is preoccupied with the threat of fake news. In Malaysia, a bill outlawing fake news just passed. The new law could mean jail time for those who not only create but also spread misleading information.
13 April 2018

Trolling, Bullying, and Flame Wars

Are trolling, bullying, and flame wars an inevitable result of online communication? Does the anonymity and invisibility of cyberspace lead to toxic speech and behavior? How can we create more toxic-free environments online?
12 April 2018

A Case for Conservative Universities

Some argue that American universities mainly cater to liberal academics and liberal thought. Is there a case to be made, then, for support of "conservative schools" in higher education? Journalist Rachel Lu holds this view in the affirmative.

Upcoming Shows

22 April 2018

Heidegger

Best known for his work Being and Time, Martin Heidegger has been hailed by many as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. He has also...

29 April 2018

Are We Alone?

News that life might exist or have existed on Mars or somewhere else in our universe excites many. But should we really be happy to hear that news?...

06 May 2018

Faith and Humility

Some would argue that faith requires that one blindly—rather than rationally— believe. Faith in one ‘true’ religion often entails rejection of all...

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Recent Shows

01 April 2018

Edward Snowden and the Ethics of...

You might think we each have a moral duty to expose any serious misconduct, dishonesty, or illegal activity we discover in an organization,...

25 March 2018

The Culture Industry

What's your favorite movie? Did you watch that season finale last night? No spoilers! Popular cultures pervades modern life. But what if pop culture...

18 March 2018

The Power and Peril of Satire

Satire is everywhere – in conversations with friends, in books, on television, and online. When used effectively, it can be a very powerful form of...

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Featured Shows

Edward Snowden and the Ethics of Whistleblowing

12 October 2016
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The Art of Non-Violence

12 October 2016
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Democracy in Crisis

12 October 2016
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John Dewey and the Ideal of Democracy

12 October 2016
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Election Special 2016

12 October 2016
Read more

Hannah Arendt

12 October 2016
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Separation of Powers

12 October 2016
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Identity Politics

09 March 2015
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About Us

Philosophy Talk celebrates the value of the examined life. Each week, our host philosophers invite you to join them in conversation on a wide variety of issues ranging from popular culture to our most deeply-held beliefs about science, morality, and the human condition. Philosophy Talk challenges listeners to identify and question their assumptions and to think about things in new ways. We are dedicated to reasoned conversation driven by human curiosity. Philosophy Talk is accessible, intellectually stimulating, and most of all, fun!

Philosophy Talk is produced by KALW on behalf of Stanford University, as part of its Humanities Outreach Initiative.

 

 

The Team

Philosophy Talk celebrates the value of the examined life.

Ken Taylor

Co-host

Ken Taylor is the current Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. He is also director of Stanford's interdisciplinary program in Symbolic Systems. His work lies at the intersection of the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, with an occasional foray into the history of philosophy. He is the author of many books and articles, including Truth and Meaning, Reference and the Rational Mind, and the forthcoming Referring to the World.

Debra Satz

Co-host

Debra Satz is the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society at Stanford University and has just finished a 7-year term as Senior Associate Dean for the humanities and arts. She is a political philosopher whose work addresses contemporary public policy debates. In addition to authoring many articles and co-editing books, she is the author of Why Some Things Should Not be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets and co-author of Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy.

Josh Landy

Co-host

Josh Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford University. He is also director of Stanford's Structured Liberal Education program. His research focuses on the intersection of philosophy and literature. Among many other publications, he is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust and How to Do Things with Fictions.

John Perry

Host Emeritus

John Perry is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Riverside, and Henry Waldgrave Stuart Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University. He is the author of over 100 articles and books, including A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality, Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness, and Reference and Reflexivity. He also has the internet’s most popular essay on procrastination.

Laura Maguire

Director of Research

Laura originally hails from Ireland, but has called San Francisco home for many years. After graduating with distinction in Philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, she moved to the Bay Area to pursue her doctoral studies at Stanford University and received her PhD in 2005. She has taught in the Introduction to the Humanities (IHUM) and Structured Liberal Education (SLE) programs and in the Department of Philosophy at Stanford.

Devon Strolovitch

Senior Producer

Born and raised in Montreal, Devon studied medieval Judeo-Portuguese manuscripts and earned a PhD in Linguistics from Cornell University before pursuing radio professionally. Since then he has been the primary studio producer for Philosophy Talk, while also contributing as a writer, editor, occasional Roving Philosophical Reporter, and manager of the program's day-to-day operations.

Merle Kessler

Sixty-Second Philosopher

Merle Kessler is a writer, humorist, and performer, best known perhaps by his pen name, Ian Shoales. As Ian Shoales he has been churning out cranky yet strangely humorous commentaries since 1979. First heard on NPR's All Things Considered, he has been featured on Morning Edition, ABC's Nightline, and the online magazine, Salon. In addition, his pieces have been published in the New York Times, LA Times, the San Francisco Examiner, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Minneapolis Tribune, among other publications.

Liza Veale

Roving Philosophical Reporter

Liza Veale covers housing and homelessness stories in the Bay Area for the local news show Crosscurrents on KALW public radio. She's a Bay Area native whose undergraduate degree was in "Critical Theory and Social Justice" which is confusing to define but decidedly not analytic philosophy. 

Leslie Francis

Film Editor/Featured Contributor

Leslie Francis is a philosophy professor and law professor at the University of Utah. Her fields include applied ethics of all types, disability, philosophy of law, and law and health care. Her edited collection, the Oxford Handbook of Reproductive Ethics, is due in print in January 2017 (and available online here), and her Privacy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with co-author John G. Francis) will be published by Oxford in June 2017.

David Livingstone Smith

Featured Contributor

David Livingstone Smith is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of London, Kings College, where he worked on Freud’s philosophy of mind and psychology. His current research is focused on dehumanization, race, propaganda, and related topics.

Neil Van Leeuwen

Featured Contributor

Neil Van Leeuwen is an empirically-oriented philosopher of mind at Georgia State University. He did his graduate work at Oxford University, where he studied classics, and at Stanford University, where he studied philosophy. Prior to his appointment at Georgia State, he held postdoctoral fellowships at Rutgers University and Tufts University. He has also taught at University of Johannesburg, where he has an ongoing appointment as Senior Fellow.

Ray Briggs

Featured Contributor

Ray Briggs is a Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. Their research explores how formal models can help us reason better about practical and theoretical matters; they are particularly interested in decision theory, measurement theory, and the philosophy of probability. In addition to over 20 philosophy articles, they have published two poetry collections and been nominated for a Pushcart.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit” ― Aristotle

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisioned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!” ― Dr. Seuss

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” ― Plato

“Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” ― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

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