Philosophy in the News
- 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.
- Ethical Fashion
How ethical considerations are making their way into the fashion industry.
- 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)
- Not Your Father’s Hobbes
An interview with philosopher Sharon Lloyd.
- 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?
- Hume on the National Debt
Hume displays a remarkable and incisive understanding of the issues.
- 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.