Is Democracy a Road to Tyranny?
Plato, one of the earliest thinkers and writers about democracy, thought so. He predicted that letting people govern themselves would eventually lead the masses to support the rule of tyrants.
Quantum Common Sense?
Philosopher Tim Maudlin thinks there is more common sense in quantum physics than we think.
The Golden Rule of Datamining
There is a reason why data privacy and protection have become such important political issues and have generated widespread support for stricter regulations: at heart, companies’ misuse of data is a profound ethical issue.
Women and the Dhamma
Buddhist teaching is radically egalitarian, and yet the need for a Buddhist feminism is pressing. How to address inequalities within a Buddhist philosophical framework? Is gender irrelevant to Buddhist teaching? Is anger necessary to effect change? And for women who have been denied agency or a sense of identity, how reasonable or ethically justifiable is the doctrine of non-self? [audio]
Ethics of Human-animal Hybrids
Human-animal hybrids, or “chimeras” are already being created and may one day become life saving hybrid-organ donors. How should we view this from an athical standpoint?
What Is There and What Matters
A view to the history of philosophy with philosopher A.C. Grayling. (audio)
Ethics of Disruptive Technologies
Philosopher Philip Brey has been awarded a $19 million dollar grant from the Dutch government for a ten year project on the ethics of socially disruptive technologies.
Ethics Ta’s for Computer Science
At Brown University, CS is hiring special EThics TAs to integrate ethics into their regular course offerings. “What we realized was that while it’s important to have dedicated courses for these topics, its not sufficient, because sometimes students take these courses and think that they’re done.”
Philosophers Behind Bars
When I taught Augustine at the prison last semester, the discussions got so loud and intense that the correctional officers came to check on us.
Ethics Must Be the Starting Point
Ángel Gurría, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), said that to realise the huge positive potential of AI, ethics had to be at the centre of its use.
Reading the Troubled Past
What should we do with literature and philosophy from a discredited moral past? Should we shun writers for holding racist or sexist views? Or is it important to read—and censure—them? Is it fair to judge authors of the past by today’s politically conscious standards? (audio)
Does Your Dog Really Love You?
Our inability to read dogs’ emotions well probably begins with our inability to understand our own emotions well.
Correct Versus Ethical AI
As AI is deployed to sensitive areas like military, judicial and surveillance use, governments and companies have responded that so long as their algorithms are accurate, they are ethical, suggesting there is considerable confusion about the difference between AI correctness and AI ethics.
Why? That’s It. Just, Why?
Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why. Philosopher Tim Maudlin reviews The Book of Why by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
Reasons for Toleration
A previously unknown manuscript by John Locke has been discovered — surprisingly in a library which holds no other Locke artifacts. The document offers a list of reasons for tolerating Catholics, which at the time simply meant not actively persecuting them, and also a list of reasons not to.
Fiction Is as Fiction Does
What is fiction? What are fictional characters and where exactly do they come from? Sherlock Holmes arrives to help answer these questions with a little help from philosopher Kendall Walton and his theory of make-believe. (video)
Is a Flagpole a Place?
While teaching children philosophy can help improve academic results, the main reason it should be used in schools is to help children make sense of the world.
Philosophy’s Adventures Underground
Two philosophers set themselves up in a New York City subway station and take questions… Then what happens? (audio)
Why Clergy Study Philosophy
Philosophy has helped theologians better to understand problems, such as the existence of evil, free will, and the existence of the soul.
That Melancholy Dane
Perhaps the second most famous Danish depressive, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was a figure of fun in his hometown of Copenhagen, mocked and satirised in the local press, Kierkegaard lost his father and three of his siblings by age 27, had a disastrous love life, and wrote uncompromisingly difficult philosophical works. So it’s not surprising that he’s an outsize but rather remote figure in the popular cultural imagination. An interview with philosopher Clare Carlisle on the subject of her recent biography of Kierkegaard. (audio)
The Morality of Not Sharing Your Data
What if the data being collected is being used to save people’s lives? This moral question will only become more fraught, because the need for our data is never again going to diminish.
Dementia and Deception
When caring for someone with dementia who won’t take their medicine or asks after their deceased spouse, “therapeutic deception” is a time-saver for carers, but like all lying, it’s morally problematic. (audio)
The Pursuit of Public Happiness
Philosopher Adriana Cavarero argues that when the ‘pursuit of happiness’ was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, it was not about personal well-being. It was about “public happiness”.
An Intellectual Beast
An interview with Andrew Curran, author of Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely. (audio)
Rise of the Supervillains
Has the march of technological development put us on a collision course with a world-threatening supervillain?
On Seeing Everything
What is scientific truth? Some scientists and philosophers are saying that science can’t reveal everything, because we have ineliminable blind spots. If you have studied Kant, this might sound vaguely familiar. (audio)
On Language and Logic
Philosophers Saul Kripke and Timothy Williamson talk about language and philosophy, science and metaphysics, and the analytic tradition. (video)
On Believing in Order to Understand
Historian of Philosophy Peter Adamson reviews the relation of reason & revelation.
The Subject of This Study Is You
It is almost certain you are a subject of multiple studies and you don’t know it. For example, a new paper used YouTubers’ voices to guess what they looked like. Folks were naturally surprised when pictures of them showed up in the report as examples. As the use of social media posts for research intensifies, so do questions about the ethics of mining that data.
Future Crimes Without Precedent
For criminal law, technology presents challenges in the form of new offences with little or no precedent. A discussion of possible future crimes committed via technology we already have. (audio)
On the Impact of Philosophy Education
A recent study confirms that philosophy classes can effect real-world behavior.
Prospects for Thought
Prospect Magazine’s 2019 listing of the world’s top thinkers clocks in with five philosophers on its list.
Socialism in 3D
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a new entry on socialism. Both socialism and capitalism grant workers legal control of their labor power, but socialism, unlike capitalism, requires that the bulk of the means of production workers use to yield goods and services be under the effective control of workers themselves, rather than in the hands of the members of a different, capitalist class under whose direction they must toil.