“Underdogs win all the time. Why, then, are we shocked every time a David beats a Goliath?”
- Malcolm Gladwell
Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia, in becoming the manual of magical practice, also advanced the idea that magic was a kind of philosophy... magic
As memoirists know, it is tempting to substitute today’s psychological truth for history. But memory is wet sand... Mommento »
I Changed My Mind about Reading Problematic Male Authors
Teaching “problematic” writers is a minefield. Affronted students can generate a social-media scandal — and bad course evaluations...
I came of age loving the works of Milan Kundera and Derek Walcott. Now, as a professor of literature, I have to ask tough questions
100 greatest film books ?
The Hollywood Reporter has put together a list of The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time -- "determined by a jury of more than 300 Hollywood heavyweights".
Cold River …
How Far Does $1 From 1999 Go Today? A visualization that uses the Consumer Price Index to measure how much prices have increased for things like food, housing, medical expenses, and education. Would love to know why medical exp. is a straight line!
“One gets the impression that twins are too messed up even for the gays” — Helena de Bres (Wellesley) on queerness, twinship, amatonormativity, and Rachel Weis
An interesting experiment from Kelly Truelove.
“The characterization of anti-realism is somewhat reductive, overlooking some of its more nuanced arguments about theory change and approximation to truth” — that’s Claude AI, critiquing a conversation between two ChatGPTs about scientific realism.
- “Not only our readers, but also we philosophers ourselves, normally remain substantially unclear on what our skeletal mottoes really amount to until we actually try to apply them to concrete cases” — on the importance of living one’s philosophy to flesh it out, from Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)
- Consciousness, the purpose of the universe, religion, and more — Daniel Dennett, Phillip Goff, and others are interviewed on the BBC (with some debate beginning around the 31 minute mark)
- A proper philosophical history of identity politics will take us much further back than post-modernism — try the Enlightenment, argues Jason Blakely (Pepperdine), by way of Charles Taylor
- Research has revealed that the same parts of the brain seem to show the same activity whether one is perceiving something or imagining it — so how do we distinguish perception from imagination? Perhaps Hume had (part of) the right answer, says Nadine Dijkstra (UCL)
- “By substituting this notion of functional dependence for that of explanation, we can easily realize… that infinite or circular explanations can, in some cases, be complete” — Alexandre Billon (Université Charles-de-Gaulle – Lille 3) on why it’s not unsatisfactorily “why” all the way down
plus: An upcoming APA live online session on AI & Philosophy, this Thursday.