THE BLOG @ PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER
THE BLOG @ PHILOSOPHERS' CORNER
What Is Reading?
10
May 2019
Reading. We all do it, every day, whether it be reading books, text messages, street signs, or cereal boxes. But what is reading? This is an important question, but there is a surprising lack of research in analytic philosophy on this topic. How hard can it be to say what reading is?
Read moreAnti-Semitism is Racism
08
May 2019
Many Americans think the recent synagogue shootings were motivated by religious hatred, just as many believe the Nazis persecuted Jews because their Jewish faith. This is seriously and troublingly wrong. To the Nazis of the past, as well as the neo-Nazis of the present, a person is a Jew because of their race.
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Shazam!
02
May 2019
Shazam!, the latest in the DC comics superhero series, may be viewed as a delightful feel-good movie. But some of what its audience might take away from the movie are bad messages about justice that mirror the problems with John Rawls' idealized theory of justice.
Read morePhilanthropy vs. Democracy
29
Apr 2019
This week we’re asking whether philanthropy is bad for democracy. Philanthropy funds scholarships for needy students. It builds libraries, hospitals, and museums. What's not to like? For starters, we shouldn't let those good things blind us to the corrosive harm that philanthropy does—especially to democracy.
Read moreAuthority and Resistance
22
Apr 2019
We live in an age in which many of the old, top-down authority structures are collapsing before our very eyes. In large measure, the collapse of top-down authority is due to “democratizing” effect of technology, which is having an effect on our politics, on the media, on medicine, even on education.
Read moreWanting to Want for Its Own Sake
15
Apr 2019
Here is one of the most surprising findings from social psychology: rewarding a kind of action does not boost motivation to perform that action because rewards provide only extrinsic motivation. So how do we change extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation, the motivation you have to do something for its own sake?
Read moreHacking Our Sense Perceptions
11
Apr 2019
Are humans limited to the senses we’re born with? Or is it possible to hack the brain and create new senses? Even if we could, would we want more senses than we already have? This week we’re thinking about hacking the brain: perception beyond the five senses.
Read moreSexy Beasts
04
Apr 2019
Love it or hate it, Freud’s decades long exploration into the nature and power of human sexuality is something that any philosopher of sex needs to contend with. I turn to this curiously under-explored region of the philosophical landscape in the final installment of my Philosophical Freud series.
Read moreKen's Big Announcement
01
Apr 2019
In the spirit of Plato, I am pleased to announce that I am throwing my hat in the ring for 2020! Just as Plato envisioned an ideal republic, I envision a new republic built on the ashes of the old. It is time for the philosopher-kings to take up their rightful place in this new republic.
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Green Book
25
Mar 2019
The success of Green Book, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, has been controversial because the narrative is centered on the white driver rather than the black pianist. Recent philosophical work on "epistemic injustice" reveals why centering the narrative like this harms black people.
Read moreYour Question: Integrate or Assimilate?
20
Mar 2019
What does integration mean, and how is that contrasted to assimilation? How much integration do we have a right to expect? What kinds of changes become intolerable? - Judy online
Read moreControversy About Climate Denial
19
Mar 2019
Research shows both that increasing people’s knowledge of climate science does not increase acceptance of human-caused climate change, but teaching the mechanisms of how global warming works does strengthen acceptance. Is there a way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting results?
Read moreImmigration and Multiculturalism
15
Mar 2019
Should immigrants assimilate into their new society? Or should society adapt to make room for different cultures? Aren’t there some foreign customs we should never accept? This week, we’re thinking about immigration and multiculturalism.
Read moreThere’s Taste... Then There’s Taste
13
Mar 2019
Lots of us have tastes in music, movies, stories, or art—and we generally know what they are. But what explains why we like what we do? Is it just a subjective reaction to something we recognize or identify with? Or are we responding to its objective aesthetic value?
Read moreMind the Gaps!
11
Mar 2019
In this installment of my series on Freud as a philosopher, I explain how Freud arrived at the view that mental states are brain states, that mental processes are unconscious, that we have only indirect access to our own minds, and that introspection is an inadequate tool for exploring the mind.
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Minding the Gap
22
Feb 2019
What are friends for? Should friends be supportive and non-judgmental? Should they attempt to improve one another? Or should friendship wane with the recognition that the friend has harmed another? Minding the Gap suggests that these questions do not have simple "yes" or "no" answers.
Read moreFive Types of Climate Change Deniers
20
Feb 2019
Why do people deny climate change? A common view is that such people reject science. But in most cases, it’s not all science they reject. After all, most climate deniers believe in electricity and that the earth goes around the sun. So what is going on? As I see it, there are at least five types of climate denier.
Read moreFinding Yourself in a Virtual Fiction
14
Feb 2019
Last week I went to the Night of Philosophy and Ideas at the Brooklyn Public Library. One of the experiences on offer was a short CGI virtual-reality film called BattleScar. What is most compelling about BattleScar is the way it plays with your perspective. You are, as a viewer, implicated in the same physical space as the characters in the film.
Read moreWhat Do We Owe Future Generations?
13
Feb 2019
Exactly how much should we care about future generations? It seems obviously wrong to say that we shouldn’t care about them at all. It also seems wrong to say that we should care about them as much as we do about ourselves. After all, they don’t even exist—at least not yet.
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Aquaman
05
Feb 2019
Can an action flick like Aquaman be philosophically interesting? Could it, for example, contribute to environmental preservation by actually motivating people to do something about oceanic pollution? Answering this question requires theorizing about moral motivation.
Read moreThe Puzzle of the Unconscious
04
Feb 2019
Most of Freud’s contemporaries believed that the human mind was all conscious. Historians of ideas who write about the development of psychology often get Freud's original contribution wrong because they don’t attend carefully enough to what was meant by terms like “subconscious mind” and “unconscious states.”
Read moreIs Envy Always a Vice?
30
Jan 2019
At first glance, it seems hard to find anything positive in the phenomenon of envy. But upon deeper reflection, we can recognize that while envy is often demoralizing, antisocial, and even planet-destroying, there’s also a good kind of envy—one that motivates us to raise our game.
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Brexit
24
Jan 2019
Do makers of films that fictionalize real events have obligations not to misrepresent in the interests of telling a good story, particularly when they aim to make a political point? Is it permissible to fill gaps in a story with fictionalized accounts of events?
Read moreGetting Clear on the Replication Crisis
22
Jan 2019
Ever since the replication crisis broke in 2011, a number of causes have been identified for why a psychological experiment might not replicate. I want to suggest a possible reason why a study might fail to replicate, one that seems to have been mostly overlooked, namely: lack of conceptual clarity about the phenomenon being measured.
Read moreHow (Not) to Fall Asleep
10
Jan 2019
Why can falling asleep be so difficult? I’m not looking for a third-personal story of the causal factors that adversely affect sleep. I’m asking a slightly different question: what explains that truly infuriating first-personal experience of trying desperately and yet failing miserably to fall asleep?
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