September 2018
September 2018
The Philosophy of Westworld
Josh Landy
27
Sep 2018
At first glance, Westworld is just another show about robots run amok. If you look a little closer, though, you find all kinds of other philosophical questions in play, and you find them being explored with impressive seriousness and subtlety. At the level of philosophical reflection, this is golden-age television at its very best.
Read moreLessons from Lobsters
David Livingstone Smith
04
Sep 2018
At a gut level, most of us consider humans’ lives far more significant than lobsters’ lives. But does this intuition just reveal a cognitive bias most of us have? Are there any good arguments to support the idea that lobster lives matter less?
Read morePuzzle About Conspiracy Theorists (Part II)
Neil Van Leeuwen
06
Sep 2018
Conspiracy theorists think quasi-rationally, but their thinking only goes in one direction. Because conspiracy theorists are less analytic, their thinking tends not to override their starting intuitions. So how can we alleviate people's tendencies to adopt irrational conspiracy theories?
Read moreThe Psychology of Cruelty
Laura Maguire
14
Sep 2018
Are people cruel because they lack empathy? Is cruelty always a matter of seeing others as less than human? Or are there some who simply enjoy seeing people suffer? These are some of the questions we’ll be tackling in this week’s show.
Read moreDo They Believe in God?
Neil Van Leeuwen
20
Sep 2018
A question has plagued me since the latest cluster of scandals emerged from the Catholic church. The scandals are both about clergy who sexually abused young people and about the church hierarchy’s cover-ups. The question is this: do the priests who commit such abuses believe in God?
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