THE BLOG @ PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER
THE BLOG @ PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER
The Birth of Black Feminism
30
Sep 2024
Anna Julia Cooper was born into slavery but became only the fourth African-American in history to earn a PhD. She lived into the 1960s, witnessing Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement. Her book "A Voice from the South" influenced later thinkers like Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.
Read moreMarx the Moralist?
16
Sep 2024
Did Karl Marx hate morality? He called morality a bourgeois prejudice, a way to trick workers into being docile drones instead of rebelling against the system. And yet at other times Marx sounds like very much the moralist.
Read moreMystic, Composer, Polymath
21
Aug 2024
Many people know Hildegard of Bingen for her musical compositions, which were really innovative for the 12th century and are still being performed today. In fact in the 1990s, an electronic version of them by Richard Souther even reached number one in the charts.
Read moreWho Made You Spokesperson?
21
Jul 2024
When we think of people who speak on behalf of us, we usually think of someone elected or appointed to do so: a congressperson, a senator, maybe even a department chair. But what about people who aren’t elected or officially appointed?
Read moreBrazil's First Feminist?
03
Jul 2024
Nísia Floresta is often called "the Brazilian Mary Wollstonecraft" because people thought her first book was a translation of Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women." She does have some things in common with Wollstonecraft, especially with regard to women’s rights.
Read moreSummer Reading Extended
07
Jun 2024
This year's Summer Reading special (our 18th!) was a relatively orderly one, with a trio of interviews that shared some common ground in pop culture, exploring philosophical issues in popular TV series, fictional movie universes, and semi-obscure sci-fi stories.
Read moreThe Logic of Logic
23
May 2024
Suppose you need to persuade your roommate to do the dishes. You might try to reason with them, using an argument about fairness. But logical arguments often don't work, and you may find yourself resorting to guilt and shame—or even threats—to get what you want.
Read moreA Vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft
07
May 2024
Mary Wollstonecraft was a fascinating philosophical figure, in part because she didn’t just write philosophical treatises. Like our previous Wise Woman, Margaret Cavendish, she wrote pamphlets and even novels. And she campaigned not just against sexism but against all kinds of inequality.
Read moreWeird, Wild Stuff
25
Apr 2024
Did you know that some lizards reproduce themselves by cloning? And sea squirts are even weirder: they start their lives as free-swimming larvae, but then they attach themselves to rocks, digest their own brains, and become a totally different kind of creature.
Read moreShakespeare's Anti-Heroes?
12
Apr 2024
In Shakespeare’s plays, characters like Othello, Shylock, and Caliban are often more interesting than the heroes. But Shakespeare can also be really unfair to those characters—they basically come off as racist stereotypes.
Read moreWhat's On Your Mind?
28
Mar 2024
We’re constantly sharing what’s on our minds; heck, I'm doing it right now, by writing this blog. What's fascinating, though, is that we also seem to do it without trying, or so much as noticing.
Read moreMargaret the First
21
Mar 2024
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle in the 17th century, was a fascinating polymath. And she had a radical idea about the universe: everything in it thinks. Amoebas, rocks, trees, dust—you name it, it's cogitating.
Read moreThe First Confucian Feminist
22
Feb 2024
Im Yunjidang was an early proponent of egalitarianism: she and thought all human beings have the same nature—men and women aren’t that different from each other, at a deep level. So anybody can achieve spiritual perfection, if they just work hard enough at it.
Read moreWelcome Our New Language-Learning Robot Overlords
02
Feb 2024
Babies have to learn lots of thing: how the objects around them behave, the rules of social interaction, the various parts of language. And it certainly seems like A.I.s learn language too. But what if all they do is imitate human speech?
Read moreQuiz Night: The Slides
25
Jan 2024
For those of you following along at home, here are the slides from our 20th Anniversary Quiz Night, held November 9, 2023 at KALW's popup event space in downtown in San Francisco.
Read moreFarewell to the Republic We Once Dreamt of?
26
Dec 2023
As part of the inaugural Ken Taylor Memorial Episode, we are republishing Ken's 2018 blog post, "Why America Is Not a Nation," in which he articulates some of what inspired this week's special program.
Read moreThe Possibility of Impossibility
15
Dec 2023
Philosophers talk a lot about possible worlds. Out there in the multiverse, maybe there’s a world where Josh teaches logic and Ray teaches Proust; that’s entirely imaginable. But could there somehow be an impossible world? One where Ray both does and does not teach Proust?
Read moreWondrous Wonderment
01
Dec 2023
Wonder is a pretty cool emotion, one that we can feel toward so many things: the stars above us, the beauty of nature all around us, the artistic feats that humans are capable of. And it’s not just big things: watching a hummingbird in your garden, hearing a beautiful guitar solo, or feeling sand under your feet at the beach—those things can fill you with wonder too.
Read moreThe First English Feminist
17
Nov 2023
Mary Astell argued that women are men’s intellectual equals, encouraged women not to marry, and proposed that they go to an all-women’s school instead. And she defended this proto-feminism with some really cool arguments.
Read moreThe Tao of Zhuangzi
03
Nov 2023
Zhuangzi is a Taoist philosopher from 4th-century BCE China as well as the name given to the text containing his writings. It's a lovely—and highly quotable—book, in which he argues (among other things) that everything is relative. He writes, “From the point of view of the Way, no thing is more valuable than any other.”
Read moreThe Philosophical Princess
20
Oct 2023
For the latest episode in our NEH-supported Wise Women series, we’re exploring the life and thought of 17th-century philosopher-princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. These days, she’s most famous for her correspondence with René Descartes, in which she raised several objections to his mind-body dualism.
Read moreThe Politics of Architecture
06
Oct 2023
Do buildings express political viewpoints? Some buildings do, of course: think about monuments to fallen soldiers, city hall buildings, or public housing. But is architecture always political? When it comes to pretty buildings, isn’t a flying buttress sometimes just a flying buttress?
Read moreIs It Real or Is It Simulated?
13
Sep 2023
Have you ever wondered—even if just for a second—whether we might all be in the "Matrix," hooked up to machines and fed a non-stop computer-generated illusion? Or maybe we’re in a version of The Truman Show, where the objects we see are real but the people are just actors pretending to be our friends. How we could ever know for sure?
Read morePerverse Desire
18
Aug 2023
There's something fascinating about those kids who ate laundry soap as part of a weird “challenge,” or people who deliberately loiter on the steps with the “no loitering” sign. These are strange things to want to do—what are people getting out of them?
Read moreMaking a (More) Moral World
09
Aug 2023
Making a better world would be a great thing—but do we really need philosophers to help us do that? They're often some of the worst people out there and the last people we should be taking ethical advice from.
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