Your Question: A World Without Work
02
Oct 2017
We had a great response from listeners to our recent show, A World Without Work. Katherine B in Berkeley had a number of fantastic questions, so I asked our guest, Juliana Bidadanure, as well as our hosts, Debra and Ken, to respond to their favorite one. Thanks, Katherine, for the great questions! And if you have a question for a guest or our hosts, send it to comments@philosophytalk.org and we might just feature it here on the blog.Katherine: Culturally, Americans do not respect or care for poor or/and disadvantaged people. Most white people think that poor equals lazy...
Read morePhilosophy for Prisoners
12
Mar 2018
Can prisoners benefit from engaging in philosophical thinking? Research associate Kirstine Szifris spent six months teaching philosophy to prisoners held in two male prisons. She claims that philosophy lessons can mitigate prison violence and the pervading feeling of drudgery. Specifically, she writes, philosophy helps prisoners question and dismantle macho identities that the prison environment instils upon them. Through asking philosophical questions such as "what is morality" and "how should society be organized" prisoners are able to engage in deep self-reflection, getting closer to the...
Read moreFeel like Democracy is Crumbling? So Did Plato
16
Mar 2017
This week in The Atlantic, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein posed a question: What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? Goldstein is wondering what a citizen should do when they feel like democracy has failed. How should we react when the people around us have vote in a way we find horrible? Though that sentiment might...
Read moreYour Question: Habermas and Factions
30
Jun 2017
We know the vast majority of our listeners don't get to hear the live broadcast of our show, which is usually Sunday mornings from the studios of KALW in San Francisco. Even listeners in the Bay Area often hear the KALW rebroadcast, Tuesdays at noon. But we know you often have questions about what you're hearing, so we decided to start a series called "Your Question" here on the blog. If you have a question after the live broadcast, you can still participate in the conversation. This week's show was on the German philosopher and critical theorist Habermas and his...
Read moreReverence for the Given? Further Thoughts on Cosmetic Neurology
23
Mar 2005
In my pre-show reflections, I tried to isolate what exactly was being claimed by those who worry about tinkering too much with the Wisdom of Nature. What that argument really comes down to, I think, is the claim that we ought to have a certain reverence for what I called the given order of things. I didn't say whether I thought that claim was true or false. We began to talk about it a bit on the air, but we barely scratched the surface. In this post-show post, I want to delve a little more deeply -- though I don't pretend to...
Read moreA Country is a Country
06
Mar 2017
A bizarre, somewhat tongue-in-cheek meditation by Point Maganize's Michael Kochin on the concept of a country. Part-historical, part-philospohical, the piece walks us through how America came about and what it meant that it did. The article struggles with the project of figuring out who should get to count as American, and thus touches on the immigration debate raging in American politics today. At its heart, the core question seems to be: what is America for? Here's the full link: https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/a-country-is-a-country
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 moreSpinoza
05
Nov 2015
Baruch Spinoza is sometimes called “the father of modernity.” Spinoza, along with Descartes and Leibniz, is considered one of the great rationalists of the 16th and 17th centuries. Of the three of them, Spinoza was philosophically the most radical. Both Descartes and Leibniz found a place in their systems for something like the traditional Judeo-Christian God, a personal God, who created the rest of us. Spinoza denied the authority of the Bible, the Judeo-Christian idea of a transcendent God, and opened the door to the secular philosophy of the modern age....
Read moreWhat Do We Owe Future Generations?
13
Feb 2019
Exactly how much should we care about future generations? It seems obviously wrong to say that we shouldn’t care about them at all. We would not be doing justice by them if we decided to just live it up and let them figure out how to deal with whatever mess we left behind on their own. It also seems wrong to say that we should care about them as much as we do about ourselves. After all, they don’t even exist—at least not yet. Future generations are merely hypothetical, and hypothetical beings surely do not matter as much as existing beings. Right? It’s also worth noting...
Read moreRough Humor
29
Jan 2020
One current culture war in North American society concerns rough humor. I say “rough,” because I want to be neutral as to whether instances of it are also offensive, since whether this or that instance of it is offensive is one of the things at issue. Rough humor is a broad tent. But its jokes, skits, writings, cartoons, etc. all have something in common: they deal with culturally sensitive issues in a way that bumps into or violates taboos, such as taboos on using certain words, or on talking about or mocking certain things. Now unlike many, I don’t want to defend...
Read moreInspiration for Evil
20
Feb 2014
David Livingstone Smith presents on the philosophical topic of dehumanization and sheds light as to why humans are capable of horrific atrocities that have occurred throughout history. While we usually think of people such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King when posed with the topic of great leaders, Dr. Smith discusses leaders who use powerful methods to provoke others to remove their inhibitions on treating people as subhuman creatures, causing them to perform evil acts such as wars and genocides.
Gay Pride and Prejudice
04
Jun 2011
Our topic this week -- Gay Pride and Prejudice. Our society, taken as a whole, can’t make up its mind about Gays and Lesbians. On the one hand, many studies have documented increasing tolerance of homosexuality, especially among younger, more educated, more affluent, and more liberal Americans. On the other hand, a substantial number of Americans still don’t think gays should be allowed to marry, serve in the military, adopt or even teach children. The extent of how divided we are about gays and gay rights is evident in our politics. While there's...
Read moreSay it Enough, They’ll Believe It
20
Nov 2020
If you repeat something, people are more likely to believe it. This isn’t speculation, and it’s not just some old saying. It’s a real phenomenon well established and extensively studied in cognitive science. It’s known as the illusory truth effect: hearing or reading a claim, especially repeatedly, makes you more likely to think it’s true. It was first documented in a 1977 publication by Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino. Since that groundbreaking work, a whole host of further studies have replicated the effect. The effect of repetition on apparent truth has been found...
Read moreSummer Reading Uncut
25
Jun 2023
Your friendly neighborhood Senior Prodcuer here, once again stepping out from behind the mixing board to bring you some bonus content from this week's 17th (!) annual Summer Reading special. Naturally we're most eager for you to listen to the edited broadcast and podcast, but there's always good stuff from each of the conversations we record for these multi-guest episodes that had to be left on the cutting-room floor. This year's program actually begins on TV. Josh and Ken had previously talked about The Good Place on our 2018 episode, The New Golden Age of Television, with one the...
Read moreIn Praise of Affirmative Consent
22
Dec 2017
The recent Twitter popularity of the #MeToo movement (originally started by activist Tarana Burke) has shone a public spotlight on ongoing conversations about rape and sexual assault. There is no single, magical solution to the problem of sexual assault, but an important piece of the puzzle is changing the way we understand sex and consent. Prevailing social rules excuse—or actively encourage—powerful people who exploit the less powerful, and they make even consensual sex a needlessly unpleasant experience. Fortunately, more people and institutions are coming to embrace a better standard:...
Read morePhilosophers and the Meaning of Life
13
Jun 2018
What's the meaning of life? There have been moments in philosophy that placed a deal of emphasis on questions like this. We can think of French existentialists like Sartre and Camus that seem to be very sensitive to concerns about the futility of existence. Currently, academic philosophers in the English speaking world are not prone to take this question seriously on its own terms. At least this is what Professor of Philosophy Kieran Setiya argues in this Aeon article. Many philosophers nowadays think of the question as confused or misguided. Or they try to explain what...
Read moreAll Machine and No Ghost
02
May 2017
For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to figure out the relation between mind and body. Until very recently the doctrine of substance dualism—the idea that minds are made out of spooky non-physical stuff, while bodies are made out of clunky matter—was virtually the only game in town. It was the theory of the mind-body relation that British philosopher Gilbert Ryle ridiculed as “the ghost in the machine.” But by the middle of the 19th century, a new wind was blowing through the musty corridors of philosophy. Cutting-edge developments in physics, biology, and neuroscience were...
Read moreDescartes
29
Jul 2005
Tuesday we discuss René Descartes, who lived from 1596 until 1650 -- not very long, by my standards. Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist and mathematician who is the father of analytic geometry in mathematics and modern rationalism in philosophy. Pretty good for someone who died at 54.... For almost forty years I have taught Descartes' Meditations in my Introduction to Philosophy Class. The skeptical problem which he poses bring up a host of interesting problems which occupy us for the rest of the course: the external world, the self, God, and the relation...
Read moreSocial Status
21
Sep 2017
Ever thought social status could be understood through a philosophical lens? Kevin Simmler, engineer and philosophical blogger, thinks so. In the spirit of French computer scientist Jean-Louis Desalles’ scholarly work, Simmler claims that underpinning social status is dominance and prestige. Built into the notion of prestige is the idea of admiration, or how we curry favor with people we respect. Note that Dessalles’ theory of prestige actually stipulates that admiration and prestige-seeking are two “complementary teaming instincts”. This means that these two qualities are part...
Read moreWhy Is Analytic Philosophy Dominant?
03
Mar 2017
How did analytic philosophy come to dominate Anglo-American philosophy departments? If you thought it was just because it is the superior kind of philosophy, well, that might be your bias showing. Some seemingly important developments in the history of thought are determined by rather uninspiring and unglamorous contingencies, like rivalries or personal idiosyncracies. The Daily Nous recently discussed a new essay, "On the emergence of American analytic philosophy" by Joel Katzav and Krist Vaesen, published in the British Journal for the History of...
Read moreWilliam James and the Squirrel Example
07
Aug 2010
Russell Goodman, who was our guest a couple of weeks ago, for our episode on William James sent the following remarks as a follow up to our on-air conversation. They are posted here with his permission. I wanted to comment on that squirrel going around the tree story with which James opens the second chapter of Pragmatism. It's a great story, but it seems, from my experience, to itself provoke as much disagreement and puzzlement as the squirrel and the man themselves do. At first blush, it seems like a good verificationist story- a dispute about two...
Read morePoetry, Philosophy, Truth
03
Oct 2007
Howdy folks; Troy Jollimore here. Ken and John were kind enough to invite me to be their guest for the “Love, Poetry, Philosophy” show they taped at Powell’s City of Books in June. And now that the show is being broadcast, they were kind enough to invite me to blog for the show as well. I’m happy to take them up on it—keeping in mind that blogging is a very informal medium, and that what I have to offer may turn out to be no more than a few fairly random thoughts. One of the relations between poetry and philosophy that we didn’t really get to discuss on the show, as I recall...
Read moreExtreme Altruism
03
Apr 2016
Altruists are people willing to do good things for others at a cost to their own happiness and well-being. Some people think that humans are by nature completely self-interested. Self-interest is the very opposite of altruism. But in fact most of us have at least a touch of altruism in us. Think of the parent who sacrifices her own well being for the sake of her child. Think of the soldier who gives up the comforts of home and hearth to fight in some distant dessert. They're driven by altruism, not by naked self-interest. Some evolutionary...
Read moreWhen Democracies Torture
21
Apr 2015
Philosophical discussions about torture tend to focus on two things: whether torture is ever morally justified, and, if so, whether this should be reflected in the law. Such discussion tend to focus on extreme cases: torture the terrorist or let the bomb go off and injure hundreds or thousands of innocents. Sam Harris, in his essay “In Defense of Torture,” called these “ticking bomb” cases. Imagine the bomber sitting in your custody, gloating about the imminent explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it'll cause. Harris thinks that torturing this unpleasant fellow would be justified....
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