2014.05.11 : View this Review Online View Recent NDPR Reviews Bert Musschenga and Anton van Harskamp (eds.), What Makes Us Moral?: On the Capacities and Conditions for Being Moral, Springer, 2013, 352pp., $179.00 (hbk), ISBN 9789400763425. Reviewed by Elise Springer, Wesleyan University This volume emerges from a 2011 interdisciplinary conference held in Amsterdam by the same name (sans...
I believe "Lisbeth" (whose real identity I know) deserves an opportunity to have her claims formally adjudicated and to that end I have contributed towards her hiring a necessary expert witness. I would urge readers to consider doing the same......
After studying philosophy, I am now so skeptical of everything that I no longer know what I should believe in. I have no idea whom I should vote for in election or whether I should be voting at all, what religion I ought to believe in if any at all, why I should bother getting married, or even why I should bother getting out of bed in the mornings. Have you found that philosophy leads to more skepticism...
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture...and a bit of poetry. Paid Advertisements Leiter Links My Personal Homepage My Academic Homepage Comments Policy for Leiter Reports My Facebook Page Brian Leiter University of Chicago - Academia.edu My Nietzsche Blog Legal Philosophy Blog Leiter Law School Reports My...
In war, is it worse for civilians to be killed than soldiers? For example, suppose that it's possible to attain an objective by killing a certain number of civilians, or by killing a significantly greater number of soldiers. Is the latter course preferable from an ethical standpoint, even though it involves more deaths? Response from: Oliver Leaman Many would say that it is always wrong to kill civilians...
Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: "How to become a philosopher" Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog News and views about philosophy, the academic profession, academic freedom, intellectual culture...and a bit of poetry. Paid Advertisements Leiter Links My Personal Homepage My Academic Homepage Comments Policy for Leiter Reports My Facebook Page Brian Leiter University of Chicago - Academia.edu My Nietzsche...
I heard through the grapevine that Jason Stanley is claiming on Facebook that there is an emerging consensus in the experimental literature. The consensus is that there is a robust stakes-effect on knowledge attributions, and the real debate is whether to explain it in terms of semantic contextualism or interest-relative invariantism. I'm not on Facebook and have no plans to ever be, so apologies...
Why is such a high value placed in reading the "Classics"? It's one thing to honor the past and honor the fact that, but for those who came before, we wouldn't be where we are today, and another thing entirely to pretend that those "classic" thinkers and thoughts of the past are worthy of the scrutiny of self-respecting truth-seekers today. If I'm being honest, the Pre-Socratic writings are simply...
...at 3AM. (This one is a bit more of an intellectual autobiography than a conventional interview.)...
Is he even Canadian? Please explain to a puzzled foreigner....
Interesting interactive graph showing the change in majors of college graduates over 40 years. Philosophy degrees were around 1% of all degrees granted in 1970. Forty years later, that number dropped roughly three-tens of a percent. See the graph with hover-over numbers here . ...
In paradoxes such as the Epimenides 'liar' example, is it not sufficient to say that all such sentences are inherently contradictory and therefore without meaning? Like Chomsky's 'the green river sleeps furiously', it's a sentence, to be sure, but that's all it is. Thanks in advance :) Response from: William Rapaport Chomsky's sentence was actually: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously". Several...
2014.05.09 : View this Review Online View Recent NDPR Reviews Peter Vickers, Understanding Inconsistent Science, Oxford University Press, 2013, 273pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199692026. Reviewed by Sorin Bangu, University of Bergen Peter Vickers' monograph stands out as a very serious piece of scholarship in historically- and scientifically-informed philosophy of science. It is to be strongly...
“No Cross-Cultural Differences in Gettier Car Case Intuition: A Replication Study of Weinberg et al. 2001,” by Minsun Kim & Yuan Yuan is available here. Abstract: In “Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions” (2001), Weinberg, Nichols and Stich famously argue from empirical data that East Asians and Westerners have different intuitions about Gettier-style cases. We attempted to replicate...
“I am a storyteller,” Susan Sontag declared. Yet she wasn’t. Her fiction is overwrought, overthought, overwritten. Can a critic be a good novelist?… more» Continue reading . . . News source: Arts & Letters Daily ...
Mythographer of the modern world. For Marina Warner, imagination and fantasy are not childish indulgences, but windows on reality… more» Continue reading . . . News source: Arts & Letters Daily ...
The history of translation is full of big, bizarre ventures. Behold The Dictionary of Untranslatables – 150 contributors, 400 entries, 11 years in the making… more» Continue reading . . . News source: Arts & Letters Daily ...
This is striking. (Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) I was asked to write a post about the ad baculum in the context of sexism and racism. To start things off, an ad baculum is a common fallacy that, like most common fallacies, goes by a variety of names. This particular fallacy is also known as appeal to fear, appeal to force and scare tactics. The basic idea is quite straightforward and the fallacy has a simple form: Premise:...
My colleague Martha Nussbaum's Locke Lectures began this week at Oxford, and Oxford grad student Jacob Williamson is blogging them!...