Opt In, Opt Out or Pony Up

Oregon just became the first state to switch voter registration from an opt-in system to an opt-out system. And of course, recent national health care law has made health insurance coverage for employees also an auto-enroll. Professor of law Cass Sunstein considers the many aspects of our lives where this question will increasingly come up and what the pros and cons of these different approaches. And there is a third option to consider: opt-in, opt-out, or made-to-choose-what-the-heck-you-want.

Nocturnal Philosophy, NYC Style

“Come and experience philosophy as performance.” ‘A Night of Philosophy’ — an innovative and original nocturnal happening, with over 80 events ranging from philosophical lectures to artistic performances, from theatre to video art, from songs to dance and DJ sets. 62 philosophy talks are planned.

A Philosophy of the Web

The world wide web draws our singular attention away from the idea of the biological individual as the fundamental unit of analysis and toward a dynamic ensemble of the biological and the wider technical environment. An interview with philosopher and computer scientist, Harry Halpin.

An Appetite for Thought

In Appetites for Thought: Philosophers and Food, French philosopher Michel Onfray explores the relationship between philosophy and food. The book is just published for the first time in English.

What’s Wrong With Inequality?

Discrimination based on race, gender or class is the most obvious way we treat others unfairly. But it’s not the only way. An interview with philosopher and professor of women’s studies, Elizabeth Anderson.

On Denoting — Explained

Philosopher Stephen Neale talks about Bertrand Russell’s groundbreaking paper, ‘On Denoting’ (1905), and the controversy that followed it. [video]

Birds of a Moral Feather

An interview with philosopher Christine Koorsgaard on the moral standing of animals.

The Power of Play

When we view leisure activities like music and sports as keys to success we ignore their profound inherent value.

The Appeal of Relativism

Relativism has popular appeal. But why? Oxford philosopher Tim Williamson (and also @tetralogue on Twitter), discusses this question, and attempts to immunize us against sloppy thinking in this area. [audio]

How Propaganda Works

Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify,…[It is] undeniable that the use of propaganda is especially problematic in liberal democracies, as it looks incompatible with the democratic ideals of equality and autonomous self-government. It’s surprising, then, that the topic of propaganda has gone relatively unexplored in contemporary political philosophy. Philosopher Jason Stanley discusses themes from his recent book, How Propaganda Works. [audio]

The Good Embodied Life

A discussion with philosopher Susan James on Spinoza on the good embodied life. [audio]

The Rise of the University

The emergence of universities in Paris, Oxford, Bologna and elsewhere provide the main setting for medieval philosophy in the 13th century and beyond. [audio]

On Conspiracy Theories

What is a conspiracy theory? Why does anybody believe a conspiracy theory? Quassim Cassam investigates these fascinating questions [audio]

Time Was When Time Was Is and Ever Will Be

Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Philosopher M. Joshua Mozersky takes time out to discuss themes from his recent book, Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective. [audio]

Reason Under Heavy Weather

A conversation with philosopher Dale Jamieson about why the effort to stop climate change failed and what the situation is now.

Rembrandt’s Eyes

Philosopher Alva Noe puzzles about the striking difference between the eyes in Rembrandt’s self-portraits and the eyes in his portraits of others.

Art and Wonder

How do works of art affect us? Conceptual art seems too cool for it to be connected with emotion. Jesse Prinz argues that our experience of art is fundamentally emotional, and wonder is the key. [audio]

Can Pragmatism Unify Physics?

An interview with philosopher Richard Healey — who thinks a pragmatist account can reconcile quantum physics with relativity.

Getting It Right

Renowned philosopher Ernest Sosa talks about why merely believing something that is true doesn’t qualify as real knowledge.

The Fourth Revolution

“How much do we really understand the ongoing shift to a digital world? Nowhere near enough, according to ‘Google philosopher’ Luciano Floridi. This leading data theorist warns that we need to better understand what he calls the ‘Fourth Revolution.'” A piece on the ideas of philosopher Luciano Floridi (Oxford), well-known for being a consulting ethicist for Google.

Racism and Speciesism

Can our degradation and abuse of other species be compared with racism, sexism and other offenses against fellow humans? The Stone takes the question to philosopher Peter Singer.

Fallacies

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on fallacies. Knowledge of fallacies is needed to arm us against the most enticing missteps we might take with arguments—so thought not only Aristotle but also the early nineteenth century logicians Richard Whately and John Stuart Mill. But until recently, discussions of fallacies in the modern era were for the most part relegated to introductory level textbooks. It is only when philosophers realized the ill fit between formal logic, on the one hand, and natural language reasoning and argumentation, on the other, that the interest in fallacies has returned. Since the 1970s the utility of knowing about fallacies has been acknowledged (Johnson and Blair 1993), and the way in which fallacies are incorporated into theories of argumentation is taken as a sign of a theory’s level of adequacy (Biro and Siegel 2007, van Eemeren 2010).

Thinking About Dusting

What sort of existential anxiety are we avoiding when we clean?

To Live and Medically-Assisted Die in California

Philosopher Gerald Dworkin on medically-assisted dying.

On Word Meaning

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on word meaning. Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporary philosophy of language, which was primarily concerned with the structural features of sentences and showed less interest in the format of lexical representations and in the nature of the word-level input to compositional processes. Nowadays, it is well-established that the way we account for word meaning is bound to have a major impact in tipping the balance in favor or against a given picture of the fundamental properties of human language.

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