Saturday, October 12, 2024

Is my blue your blue?

When love comes to the well and asks,
What do you know,
it says,
I know thirst, I know abundance.
I know depth, I know darkness.


Double Bay - What It’s Like to Spend a Weekend in Australia’s Richest Suburb

Little Bay - Aurora australis makes stunning return to southern Australian skies 


Culture in the sense we have understood it is eroding. Time to mourn – and to celebrate... more »


The Art and Philosophy of the Gardenby David Fenner and Ethan Fenner is reviewed by Joanne Furio at Berkeleyside


On Being Me by David Velleman is reviewed at Dublin Review of Books.


The Invention of Good and Evil by Hanno Sauer, translated by Jo Heinrich, is reviewed at The Economist.





Bentham’s defense of sexual liberty — a short documentary, which is part of a series on the philosopher from University College London


You could call it the “cryo” paradox — if death is irreversible, and cryonics patients are dead, then cryonics won’t bring them back from death; and if the patients are not dead, then cryonics won’t bring them back from death, either

  1. “Being accurate about that uncertainty is crucial” — how to draw conclusions from data when some of it is missing
  2. “I’m grateful for my rural upbringing, which gave me a deep understanding of life, work, and community—qualities that have profoundly shaped my philosophical thinking” — Gen Eickers (Bayreuth) on his experience as a first-generation college student in academic philosophy
  3. “I’ve always considered myself very lucky to have become an historian of philosophy at the time that I did” — the 2017 Dewey Lecture by Margaret Atherton (Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
  4. Five myths about philosophy — video of a talk by Nigel Warburton, plus a discussion of it with ChatGPT, plus a brief podcast about the discussion made with Google’s new NotebookLM (from Kelly Truelove)
  5. Is my blue your blue? — find out how your color judgment matches up with others. Could be a fun teaching tool (via Keith “Is a podcast about philosophy and the 90s worth anyone’s time?” — Peter Westmoreland (St. Petersburg), host of “Exile in 90sville”, thinks it is


“Do not cry in the conference room” — “One virtue of being an academic philosopher is to be dispassionate,” says Helen de Cruz (SLU), “and yet, I… fear that by my years of enculturation in academia and my training, I have cut off something important”
  1. “The rest understand the West better than the West understands the rest” — Bryan Van Norden (Vassar), Katja Vogt (Columbia) & others at a philosophy and education panel at the UN Pre-Summit of the Future Event
  2. “You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely ‘joking’ when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter” — Justin Smith-Ruiu is of three minds about the upcoming election
  3. A bioethicist & a philosopher with very different views about technology discuss AI clones, bad knowledge, digital democracy, & more — “Prosthetic Gods” is a new podcast from James Hughes and Nir Eisikovits (UMass Boston)
  4. “Intellectual humility… isn’t a virtue, because there are no intellectual virtues” — Rachel Fraser (Oxford) on intellectual humility, science, and virtue epistemology