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When Do False Beliefs Exculpate? (Pt. II)
08
Jan 2021
For last month’s pandemic puzzle, I posed the title question of this blog, noting that I meant it in a moral sense (rather than a legal one): When do false beliefs exculpate? The idea is that sometimes having a false belief exculpates one of a wrongdoing, but other times not—and perhaps even the opposite. My example of a false belief that does exculpate was a vet who accidentally puts down the wrong dog, because it looks almost identical to the one she was in fact supposed to put down: maybe she was careless (which is bad), but her false belief about the identity of...
Read moreIs Alexa a Setback for Feminism?
Serena Wong
19
Mar 2018
Voice-activated personal assistants like Alexa and Siri are becoming increasingly popular, both with tech companies trying to capitalize on a new market and with consumers looking for a little help in their day-to-day activities. While the assistants each try to differentiate themselves in someway, there is one inescapable commonality: they are all female. In this Atlantic article, Ian Bogost explores why this might be, and what it could indicate about personal assistants and the tech companies behind them. With personal assistants, Bogost argues, we are playing into the stereotype of women...
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? Clearly, there’s plenty of architecture that makes political statements (as monuments do) or implies political positions (as city halls do). Think of all that neoclassical architecture imperialists love so much: impressive columns, high ceilings, huge steps where the...
Read moreGod, Design and Science
John Perry
08
Jan 2006
Next, week's program --- assuming it isn't pre-empted by the Alito hearings --- will concern "intelligent design." This phrase is most familiar these days in connection with the attempt by Christian groups persuade boards of education in various communities to require teaching of, or at least mention of, a theory called "intelligent design" in biology classes, as an alternative to the theory of evolution. I'll call this the "IDM" for "Intelligent Design Movement," and use phrases like "the design argument," and "intelligent design," with the meaning that they have had for a...
Read moreAgainst Santa
David Livingstone Smith
22
Dec 2016
Around this time of year, many parents—God only knows how many—lie to their children about Santa Claus. Youngsters are presented with an account of a man who flies through the air, descends through chimneys, and distributes presents to those kids who are “good”—that is, kids who conform to the behavioral demands of their elders. And it’s not just a matter of words. Children are enjoined to leave milk and cookies for Saint Nick, and food for his team of reindeer. Their disappearance overnight is then presented as material evidence that Santa has been by. As if this isn’t enough, kids are...
Read moreQueer and Christian?
Neil Van Leeuwen
23
Mar 2017
When I was twenty-two, I was deciding whether to continue being Christian. I was in England on a fellowship, and, no longer reliant on my Christian parents for tuition, I felt free to try patterns of thought that left God out. I had always vaguely felt that belief in God was a charade, though I didn’t explicitly think in those terms at the time. And I had grown to resent the emotional baggage Christianity saddled me with. During this time, I found myself at a party one evening, where I got into a conversation with Hans, a international law student from Germany who was questioning in similar...
Read moreKen's Big Announcement
01
Apr 2019
Friends, Colleagues, and Philosophy Talk Listeners, In the spirit of Plato, I am pleased to announce that I am throwing my hat in the ring for 2020! I can no longer sit back and watch as almost nothing gets accomplished in American politics. The default state of our system is inaction or reaction, because by design it rewards rather than punishes stasis and reaction. Ours is one of the few democratic—well, pseudo democratic—systems in the world in which it is false that failure is an orphan and victory has a thousand fathers. In American politics, stasis and defeat can have a...
Read moreD'oh! Philosophy in The Simpsons
Eliane Mitchell
12
Jul 2017
Running now for 28 years, The Simpsons may not seem like a legitimate source for philosophical discourse and ideas. But this year the University of Glasgow launched a successful one-day course entitled "D'oh! The Simpsons Introduce Philosophy" as an introduction to the world's most eminent philosophical thinkers. Teaching The Simpsons alongside Kant, Marx, and Camus, the course's creator, John Donaldson, asked students to consider several philosophical quandaries, like morality and free will in an episode where Bart is "sent to a school for...
Read morePuzzle 1: Are Beliefs Voluntary?
23
Mar 2020
Need a distraction from the incessant stream of information (good and bad) and speculation (mostly bad) about the Coronavirus? I certainly do. Well, here’s my attempt to give you one. For my next sequence of blogs—for the duration of the Corona outbreak—I’m going to post about philosophical puzzles that are either old or new. And I’m going to describe the puzzles and attempt to make them gripping—and not offer you any help in solving them. Or I won’t offer you any help until the next blog, at which point I’ll post links to philosophical papers that offer various solutions. If...
Read moreThe Fairness Fixation
Ken Taylor
02
Nov 2014
This week our topic is what we’re calling fairness "fixation." The choice of the word ‘fixation’ is a little bit tongue in cheek. But it is meant to convey the serious thought that maybe, just maybe, we are too concerned with fairness. There are definitely those – especially, I think, on the right, but perhaps not only them – who seem to think that we definitely are. They seem to think that we’ve gone way overboard with this fairness thing. They complain, for example, about the practice of giving every kid a participation medal just for...
Read moreEpicurus and the Good Life
Ken Taylor
03
Mar 2012
This week’s conversation is about Epicurus and the Good Life. Now in common parlance an epicurean is one who is “fond of or adapted to luxury or indulgence in sensual pleasures; having luxurious tastes or habits, especially in eating and drinking.” But the Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus was decidedly not an epicurean in that sense of the word. His philosophy is actually pretty far removed from epicureanism as ordinarily understood. Epicurus did acknowledge that desires for good food and fine wine were natural. But he actually dismissed such...
Read moreApologies
John Perry
23
Apr 2010
When one hears the word “apology” in a philosophical context, one naturally thinks of Plato’s famous Socratic dialogue, ``The Apology”. And then it strikes one that Socrates doesn’t sound all that apologetic. Historically, ``apology” often meant “reasoned argument or writing in justification of something”. Nowadays it mostly means “a regretful acknowledgment of an offense or failure”. It’s in this latter sense we are interested in apologies, including apologies in the political sphere, whether sincere or self-serving statements pretending to be expressions of...
Read moreA Philosophical Shout Out
Philosophy Talk
17
Mar 2007
A Philosophical Shout-out, April 1stFor pledge week at KALW we've decided to do something different: we're having a Philosophical Shout-Out, and we want you to join in too. Here's you chance to tell us what's on your mind. Tell us about your favorite philsophical ideas and puzzles. Stump the philosophers with a conundrum to solve, match wits with Ian Shoales, and wander down the philosophical highways and byways with our Roving Philosophical Reporters.Here's How:(1) Send us an e-mail, anytime between now and April 1st -- the sooner the better -- and tell...
Read moreSleeping, Dreaming, and the Well-Lived Life
Ken Taylor
12
Jun 2016
This week we're staying up and thinking about Sleep. We spend so much of our lives asleep, but we philosophers have had very little to say about it. Maybe that's becayse Philosophy is mostly about things we’re conscious of -- our experiences, our choices, our beliefs. We’re mostly NOT conscious when we sleep, so you might wonder who cares, really. Well, philosophers care about what makes us who and what we are. So is sleep is a big part of who we are? I’ll give you dreaming as philosophically interesting. How can we...
Read moreThe Power and Perils of Satire
Laura Maguire
26
Jul 2015
Satire involves the use of humor to ridicule and shame people or institutions. It’s a potent tool for exposing society’s ills, especially when it comes to politicians and other powerful people. It's the perfect way to take them down a peg or two. That’s the power of satire. But what about its perils? Satirizing the rich and the powerful is great, but what about when satire is used to attack the poor and downtrodden? When the Philosophy Talk team started to discuss the topic satire in preparation for this week’s show, there was major disagreement...
Read moreFrom Pessimism to Nihilism
Eliane Mitchell
20
Mar 2018
Young adult dystopian novels like Divergent and The Hunger Games may have ruled the marketplace in the 2010s, but now there's a new trend in young adult literature: the teen suicide story. Stories of teens committing (or ideating) suicide, like Thirteen Reasons Why and Dear Evan Hansen, have become the new obsession. But why? This article gives a somewhat Freudian analysis of the lastest trends in young adult literature, paralleling the success of the last wave of YA dystopias (from Feed in 2005...
Read moreMourning a Lost Culture
Jeremy Sabol
18
Mar 2022
When we are grieving, is it a good idea or a bad idea to engage with art that takes grief to be its subject? Does this help us to cope, or does it rip out whatever stitches we have managed to sew in while we try to bear an unbearable loss? I recently read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, and then watched the HBO mini-series adaptation. Josh and I were planning to talk about the TV version on this year’s “Dionysus Awards,” but there were so many amazing films to talk about that we just didn't have time to fit it in. Both the novel and the series are about disease,...
The “Complicated” Causes of Gun Death (Part II)
Neil Van Leeuwen
20
Apr 2018
In my last blog, I asked you to imagine a country in which many apartment buildings are built with materials so flammable they easily catch fire, killing dozens of people each episode. The solution to such a problem, it seems, should be for government officials to regulate those building materials so the buildings won’t be so deadly for people who live in them. But in that imaginary country, politicians in the grip of the Materials Rights Association (MRA) defended the use of those flammable building materials, using three “arguments”: “It’s complicated. There are multiple...
Read moreLetter of the Law, Spirit of the Law
21
Apr 2025
Have you ever driven 70 mph on a road where the speed limit is 65? Technically that's breaking the law; the police are perfectly authorized to pull you over and give you a ticket. But they're much more likely to use their discretion and let you go. And that makes sense: the point of the law is not to force everyone down to an exact speed but to keep everyone safe. That's the spirit of the law, and the letter isn't always the thing that counts. The problem, of course, is that discretion can be abused. Those traffic cops could decide to pull over...
Read moreTo blog is to forgive?
John Perry
02
May 2005
In the movie “The Interpretor” Nicole Kidman stars as Silvia Broome. She grew up among the Ku, in the fictional nation of Matobo. When someone commits murder among the Ku, they are allowed to live for a year. Then they are dumped in a lake with their hands tied. The victim's family members must decide whether to plunge into the water and save them, or let them drown. The prevailing wisdom among the Ku seems to be that those who save the murderer, in effect forgiving them, and releasing themselves from anger and resentment, are better off for it.
Many...
In Defense of Polyamory
Jack Herrera
13
Feb 2017
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, a philosopher at the University of British Columbia, enjoys an open relationship with her husband. In a recent profile in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Moira Weigel profiles Jenkins's experience as a person in a "polyamorous" relationship. Jenkins talks about what it's like to have both a husband and a serious boyfriend--she describes awkward interactions with a colleague when they met her boyfriend at her husband's birthday party, and writing her wedding vows to reflect an open relationship. But, according to Jenkins, a dominant characteristic of her...
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. A popular theory is that something goes wrong with the empathy circuits in the brain of the cruel person. And that’s when you get violent or abusive behavior toward other people. This phenomenon is often described as empathy erosion. There may be many different causes of empathy erosion, and it could be a temporary state or a general tendency,...
Read moreEnvisioning Eastern Hegemony
Mohit Mookim
18
May 2017
Considering the last couple centuries of history, it is clear that Western countries have reigned dominant over the rest of the world—whether through colonialism, imperialism, economic power, or military might. This book review in The New York Review of Books covers some of the reasons for the balance of global power may be shifting to the East. The author of the article ultimately concludes that the East is currently far from supplanting the West. But what would a world run by Eastern values even look like? Would the world look meaningfully different if the East did run things...
Read moreExplanation at Its Best
30
Sep 2019
What makes an explanation a good explanation? Isn’t the simplest explanation always the best? Why do people often swallow crazy explanations? Those are just some of the questions we’re asking in this week’s episode about the nature of explanation. Let’s start with an innocent seeming question. Suppose we have two competing explanations of the same thing. How do we decide between them? One perfectly reasonable thought is that we should always start with the simpler one. But what justifies this thought? You might suspect that the simpler explanation is more likely to be true....
Read morePolyamory
Ray Briggs
27
Aug 2017
What is it like to be in love with more than one person at a time? Is monogamy natural, as authors like Helen Fisher have argued, or an outmoded cultural artifact, as claimed by authors like Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá? On this week's philosophy talk, we discuss polyamory with writer and philosophy professor Carrie Jenkins. Trying to pin down whether something is due to nature or culture strikes me as a fool's errand; surely any human endeavor as complicated as building a romantic relationship will have both natural and cultural components. A better way into understanding polyamory is...
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