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.
It's Tax Day in America, so we have some questions for you: Do you think taxes are fair? How well do you know your own thoughts about taxes? How easily shaped by priming are your beliefs about taxes? You might be surprised to discover what experimental data shows about this!
What are the mechanisms by which power operates? How much can the workings of power shed light on the concepts and labels applicable to everyday life? Foucault's concept of power is more important than ever.
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.
Are poor white Americans voting in their own best interests? Is it better to be poor in Bangladesh or in the Mississippi Delta? The Atlantic interviews Nobel-prize winning economist Angus Deaton.
Should your race restrict what you're allowed to paint? Is it wrong for white artists to depict black suffering? Or is this just political correctness overdone?
It has been described as a revolution in philosophy and a new way to approach age-old questions in the discipline. But what exactly is contrastivism?
Prominent philosophers go head to head in this New York Review of Books piece. Thomas Nagel writes a critical review of Daniel Dennett's new book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Front and center in Dennett's picture is the difference between the "manifest image"—a colorful world filled with ideas, experiences, colors, sounds, emotions, and ordinary objects—and the "scientific image"—a more barebones picture of atoms, subatomic particles, and forces. In essence, Dennett wants to reject the manifest image altogther; he claims that consciousness is an illusion. Nagel is not convinced, and he explains why in the article.
Is this manifest image we have of the world really mistaken? Is consciousness an illusion?
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This week’s episode is the first in a new six-part series on the topic of Intellectual Humility. We tackle the big question, whether we can know what we know and what we don’t, since knowing what you do and don’t know is the first step to true intellectual humility.
Crony beliefs are beliefs you have partly because you want to believe them. But is it really possible to form beliefs because you want to have them? Does that explain why so many people seem to believe things that serve their self-interest? Or is there another explanation for that?
