Category: readings

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Pandora’s Vox: thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks anticipated robots and artificial intelligence—and they didn’t trust them. (Foreign Policy)

In search of lost time: on the current role and future tasks of philosophy. (Eurozine)

Tainted by association: would you carve a roast with a knife that had been used in a murder? Why not? And what does this tell us about ethics? (Aeon)

The problem with HR: for 30 years, we’ve trusted human-resources departments to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment. How’s that working out? (The Atlantic)

Aristotle and the good ruler: what politicians can learn from Aristotle’s Politics. (Philosophy Now)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

You would think this does not need to be said, and yet: Let the professors run the university. Faculty members need to reassert themselves as the people who direct discourse on campuses. (Inside Higher Education)

No, we probably don’t live in a computer simulation, very sensibly says physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. (BackReaction)

Democracy is for the gods, and it should be no surprise that humans cannot sustain it. (New York Times)

Social physics: despite the vagaries of free will and circumstance, human behavior in bulk is far more predictable than we like to imagine. (Aeon)

Socrates’ critique of 21st-Century neuroscience: the ancient thinker saw limits to what natural science can tell us about ourselves. (Scientific American)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Is Western philosophy just a form of white suprematism? No, of course not. But sure, let’s keep writing that sort of thing. What’s the worse it can happen? (The Philosophical Salon)

Could Ancient Greek philosophy help you work smarter and better? Sure, though that would actually mean missing the point of Ancient Greek philosophy. Also, a rival of the humor theory? What the hell, NYT? (New York Times)

Where are all the women in ancient philosophy? They are there, but mighty hard to find, through no fault of their own. (New Statesman)

Plants neither possess nor require consciousness. A brief introduction to the pseudoscience of plant neurobiology. (Trends in Plant Science)

When researchers submitted to Science a paper attempting (and failing) to replicate a high profile result in social psychology (previously published by Science), they were told: “not interested.” That’s bad. Really bad. (Slate)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behavior is triggered? (Aeon)

Are Sherlock Holmes’ methods closer to the philosophy of Pascal than that of the British empiricists? I don’t think so, but this article makes the case. (Philosophy Now)

The philosophy of fascism. And why we need one. (The Philosopher)

Hold out for the perfect partner or settle for good enough? In the calculus of love, flourishing means getting it right. (Aeon)

Moral education for digital natives. (Philosophy Now)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Here’s an interactive map of Odysseus’ 10-year journey back home. (Open Culture)

What’s the point of education? It’s no longer just about getting a job. Then again, it never was. And contra this article, the Greeks did get it right. (The Conversation)

Can an “ought” be derived from an “is”? Pace Hume, yup. (Philosophy Now)

Can Plato be blamed for autocracy, as Karl Popper thought? Nah. (Spectator)

Yet another example of why anti-physicalist critiques in philosophy of mind are empty and incoherent. Though you wouldn’t know it from this article. (Philosophy Now)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Behavioral economics comes to the rescue if you happen to have a problem with addiction to your phone and social media. (Financial Times)

Who “owns” the Crusades? It’s more complicated than you think. (New Republic)

Cultural evolution and its discontents. (LA Review of Books)

The unnatural ethics of AI could be its undoing. (The Outline)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

Remembering when bankers tried to overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictator. True Story. (Big Think)

Is knowledge a “Stone Age” concept that is best abandoned? A strange, misguided, and conceptually confused article by my colleague David Papineau. (Aeon)

A good argument against anti-natalism, if one where needed. But you’ll have to get over some entirely unnecessary comments on god and the virtues of conservatism.

Reading fiction has been said to increase people’s empathy and compassion. But does the research really bear that out? Yes, it turns out. (BBC)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

The (very) troubled history of psychiatry. (New Yorker)

Transgender kids’ brains resemble their gender identity, not their biological sex. (LGBTQ Nation)

Human life on Mars? Dangerous science fiction. (The Guardian)

What’s so useful about studying ancient history? Americans are notoriously ignorant of history, even their own, and while there’s nothing new about this indifference, the consequences are profound. (Daily Beast)

While this article is admittedly a rant, and uses unnecessarily harsh language, it perfectly explains why I don’t like Steven Pinker (not personally, I don’t know him). (Current Affairs)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

The Freudian Loafer, the Intellectual and the Politician’s Son. Louis Sarkozy, the son of the former French president, wants to make academics into influencers. Oh boy. (New York Times)

A philosophical approach to routines can illuminate who we really are. The things we do every day aren’t just routines to be hacked. (Qrius)

Yes, determinists, there is free will. You make choices even if your atoms don’t. Or so says philosopher Christian List. Too bad his defense of the notion seems pretty conceptually muddled. (Nautilus)

Here are some interesting articles I’ve come across recently, for your consideration:

The mystery of human uniqueness: what exactly makes our species special (if anything)? (Nautilus)

A brief and fascinating history of bullshit. (Madras Courier)

Nine quick facts about hermeneutics. (Oxford University Press blog)

Why we are still fighting about Freud, a surprisingly unskeptical essay by arch-skeptic John Horgan. (Scientific American blogs)

Contra this very confused article, reason does not exist without deliberation. (Aeon)