Information, Knowledge, Epistemology, Language. Death - Grief, Loss, Death & Dying. Review - Deathby Shelly KaganYale University Press, 2012Review by Brad Frazier, Ph.D.Jun 25th 2013 (Volume 17, Issue 26) Death, by Shelly Kagan, a philosopher at Yale, is a book based on a course Kagan regularly teaches at Yale. The book is advertised as part of "The Open Yale Courses Series. " Accordingly, the intended audience for the book consists of a "wide variety" of "curious" readers who are looking for an introduction to the topic of death from a philosophically informed perspective.
(I am not going to discuss here the ongoing debate about massive open online courses, or "MOOCs" as they are called). Death turns out to be a whopper: 16 chapters and 376 pages -- including the index and suggestions for further reading. Kagan ably defends a physicalist view in the first half of Death. This is no doubt true -- that in Kagan's hands, death is not very mysterious. To his credit, Kagan is no simple partisan for his preferred theories in Death. . © 2013 Brad Frazier. What's this thing called Love? And what does it have to do with Ethics? | Wanderley Dias da Silva. What’s this thing called love? And what does it have to do with Ethics? Wanderley Dias da Silva December 15, 2013 My answer to the second question is simply not much, really .
Eros … eros is desire ... and desire, well, can only be “desire” if it longs for something it lacks or for someone it doesn’t possess. Platonic love ; i.e., love or desire for an idealized form of our desires. One Hundred Love Sonnets , Pablo Neruda, as you find yourself loving someone you don’t have, you feel “the piers sadden when the afternoon moors there” … and your life “grows tired, hungry to no purpose” … and you begin to imagine the memories of that someone emerging from everywhere above and around you; you feel that without him or her life is as if rivers mingle their “stubborn lament with the sea”; that without him or her, everything seems “deserted like the wharves at dawn”, and that in this “childhood of mist”, your very soul inhabits this world “winged and wounded.”
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair ). Walter Benjamin and Critical Theory. Walter Benjamin is one of the most influential critical theorists of the early twentieth century. His writings include original theories of the state, fascism and revolution. In the first instalment of a new eight-part series, Andrew Robinson introduces Benjamin's approach, and outlines his methodology. By Andrew Robinson Walter Benjamin stands out as one of the leading theorists of the 1920s-30s wave of Marxist-inspired critical theorists. Like many of his generation, Benjamin writes from the standpoint of an outsider. Benjamin worked at the intersection of Marxist cultural theory with qabalah, a mystical variety of Jewish theology.
Scholars and students are most likely to have come across Benjamin via one of his short works, such as “On the Concept of History”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, “Critique of Violence”, or “The Task of the Translator”. Many of Benjamin’s works take the form of travelogues, in which he recounts his impressions of particular places. What Do Most Philosophers Believe? A Wide-Ranging Survey Project Gives Us Some Idea. What do most philosophers believe? The question may only interest other philosophers—and when it comes to such esoteric concerns as the “analytic synthetic distinction,” this is probably true. But when it comes to the big issues that have given every thoughtful person at least one sleepless night, or the questions regularly explored by speculative fictions like Star Trek or zombie movies, the rest of us might sit up and take notice. Two contemporary philosophers, David Chalmers and David Bourget, decided to find out where their colleagues stood on 30 different philosophical issues by constructing a rigorous survey that ended up accounting for the views of over 3,000 professors, graduate students, and independent thinkers.
Most of the respondents were affiliated with prestigious philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, though several continental European departments are also represented. Some semi-famous names come up in a perusal of the list of public respondents, like A.C. Irony, Postmodernism, and Our Current Age. The Non-Philosopher's Guide to Can Bad Men Make Good Brains do Bad Things? (or Why does anyone think this is funny?) Consider the following case: On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys. On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones,who will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right.
If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will definitely hit and kill a railman on the left side of the track, "Leftie" and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that will die without donor hearts. QUESTION: What should the brain do? Copyright, 1988 by the American Philosophical Association G.E.M.
Pop-top Cans--Aren't they neat? Heterotopia (space) Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror. A utopia is an idea or an image that is not real but represents a perfected version of society, such as Thomas More’s book or Le Corbusier’s drawings. Foucault uses the term heterotopia to describe spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than immediately meet the eye. In general, a heterotopia is a physical representation or approximation of a utopia, or a parallel space that contains undesirable bodies to make a real utopian space possible (like a prison).
Foucault uses the idea of a mirror as a metaphor for the duality and contradictions, the reality and the unreality of utopian projects. Getting to Philosophy. Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy. The remaining 100,000 (approx.) links to an article with no wikilinks or with links to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops (all three are equally probable).[1] The median link chain length to reach philosophy is 23. Crawl on Wikipedia from random article to Philosophy. There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain.
" Applying the same steps to "Philosophy" itself and continuing onward, the user will return to "Philosophy" after 15 steps. Origins[edit] Following the chain consists of: See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] User:Ilmari Karonen/First link. An internet meme, originally discovered by a user of Reddit.com named pixelcrak [1] on April 13, 2011 and further popularized by xkcd [2], says that if you go to a random article on Wikipedia and keep clicking the first non-parenthesized link in the body text of each article you get, you'll always eventually end up at Philosophy. But is this really true? Or, rather, what is the probability of that actually happening?
To test this, I downloaded the English Wikipedia database dump from 26 May 2011 and wrote a Perl script to extract the first link from each page, skipping any templates, comments, image captions, categories, interlanguage links, selflinks, hatnotes and links inside parentheses. (At least, I thought I skipped image captions... I'm not sure why my script still thinks United States Census links to United States Census Bureau. All Roads Lead to “Philosophy” All Roads Lead to “Philosophy” There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” 1 This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere.
It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. I put something together here based on JQuery and the JavaScript InfoViz Toolkit. It makes use of the HTML5 <canvas> element, so support for Internet Explorer is provided by the Google excanvas package. I still have a lot of tweaking to do but the results so far are pretty nice. Multiple titles can be added using a comma-separated list. There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain.
Wikipedia Radial Graph. The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia « Copybot. Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here. Bookmark it, start reading, and become that person who’s always full of fascinating stuff you never knew about.
The top 50 Wikipedia articles by interestingness 1. Marree Man 2. War Plan Red 3. *Copybot is not responsible for the hours and hours that disappeared while you were exploring this list. Edit: If you enjoyed this list, I’ve since posted 50 more of Wikipedia’s most interesting articles. Like this: Like Loading... Related Picking flicks About six months ago, it dawned on me that whenever someone asked me if I'd seen a particular film, my answer was almost invariably no. In "Copybot articles" The Able Slave. Suppose there are ten people on a desert island. One, named Able Abel, is extremely able. With a hard day's work, Able can produce enough to feed all ten people on the island. Eight islanders are marginally able. With a hard day's work, each can produce enough to feed one person. The last person, Hapless Harry, is extremely unable.
Harry can't produce any food at all. Questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. How would most people answer these questions? Yet bleeding-heart libertarian Jason Brennan doesn't seem conflicted. Imagine that your empirical beliefs about economics have been disconfirmed. In a followup, Brennan adds: If you are a hard libertarian, you respond to this thought experiment by saying, "Well, that's too bad things turned out that way. This is a good example of what puzzles me most about bleeding-heart libertarians: At times, they sound less libertarian than the typical non-libertarian.* I'm not claiming that the "hard libertarian" intuition is certainly true. Justice. Truth/Education. The Big Questions.
The Big Philosophical Questions. The Cabinet of Invisible Counselors. Have you ever had a discussion with someone who posed this question: “If you could invite any five people, living or dead, to dinner, who would they be?” It’s an interesting question to consider, but one that doesn’t have to remain strictly a hypothetical. Now, of course you can’t drag the bones of history’s greatest corpses to your table (“Oh dear, Teddy’s hand just fell off into his soup. Awkward.”). But you can enjoy a form of ongoing conversation with history’s most eminent men, and it can continue far past the dessert course. I believe that every man should create his own personal “Cabinet of Invisible Counselors”–a sort of imaginary team of mentors whom he can consult for advice and inspiration throughout his life. Napoleon Hill’s Invisible Counselors This third brain allowed each member of the group to tap into the “sixth sense,” which Hill described as “that portion of the subconscious mind which has been referred to as the Creative Imagination. 1. 2. 3.
Sources: The Political Compass. Morality Quiz/Test your Morals, Values & Ethics - Your Morals.Org. Laws of Physics Can't Trump the Bonds of Love. Zack ConkleLIFE LESSONS Jeffrey Wright with his son, Adam, who has a developmental disorder, in a scene from “Wright’s Law.” Jeffrey Wright is well known around his high school in Louisville, Ky., for his antics as a physics teacher, which include exploding pumpkins, hovercraft and a scary experiment that involves a bed of nails, a cinder block and a sledgehammer. But it is a simple lecture — one without props or fireballs — that leaves the greatest impression on his students each year. The talk is about Mr.
Wright’s son and the meaning of life, love and family. It has become an annual event at Louisville Male Traditional High School (now coed, despite its name), and it has been captured in a short documentary, “Wright’s Law,” which recently won a gold medal in multimedia in the national College Photographer of the Year competition, run by the University of Missouri. The filmmaker, Zack Conkle, 22, a photojournalism graduate of Western Kentucky University and a former student of Mr. Mr. Philosophy Now | a magazine of ideas.
Philosophy. Ontology Explorer. Trees of life. SEMANTICS. Russell's teapot. Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God. Origins of the analogy[edit] In an article titled "Is There a God?
" commissioned, but never published, by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell wrote: In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. The burden of proof argument[edit] Sokal affair. The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article. Background[edit] In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), by Paul R.
Gross and Norman Levitt. In their book, Gross and Levitt said that an anti-intellectual trend had swept university liberal arts departments (especially English departments), causing them to become dominated by a "trendy" branch of postmodernist deconstructionism. The article[edit] Content of the article[edit] Moreover, the article's footnotes conflate academic terms with sociopolitical rhetoric, e.g. Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias. Levinas Reading Group: Links/Resources. Slavoj Zizek - Enjoy Your Symptom-Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Lacan Dot Com. Kant at the Bar: Transcendental Idealism in Daily Life | Issue 95. Notes From an Employed Philosopher - The Conversation. How to sell philosophy - bookforum.com / omnivore. Must We Mean What We Say? Interview with Edward Wilson on the Formation of Morals. Video & Audio: Why isn't there more progress in philosophy? - Metadata.
TPM Online: The Philosophers' Magazine. Wireless Philosophy | Videos | Wi Phi. Constructor Theory | Conversation | Edge. Anthroposophy. John Lloyd inventories the invisible. Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen. Are Savages Noble?