Will Innovation Kill Us?
12
Nov 2015
Arguably, the single greatest threat to our continued existence on this planet is climate change. And we would not be facing this threat were it not for human ingenuity. After a mere two centuries or so of industrialization, our innovative activity on this planet has produced such a quantity of greenhouse gases that we are perilously close to the tipping point when climate change will accelerate on its own power, and nothing we do anymore will be able to stop it. Provided, that is, we don’t have a global nuclear meltdown first. So, it’s no exaggeration to say that human innovation...
Read moreIs There Life (or Anything) After Death?
11
Jan 2015
This week we're asking… What's Next? After death, that is. Here's one answer: nothingness. How can I be so sure there’s no afterlife? After all, people have believed in the afterlife, since … well, since there were people. Who'm I to say they’re wrong? Well surely we can recognize wishful thinking when we see it. People believe in the afterlife because they don’t like the idea of dying. It’s a comforting fantasy – nothing more. Of course not all visions of the afterlife are comforting. Shakespeare’s Hamlet certainly didn’t think so. The “to be or...
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. I have to say, I’m a big fan of multiculturalism—that is, of the idea that each culture within a society should maintain its own identity, rather than assimilating to the dominant one. In fact I’m not just a fan but a beneficiary of multiculturalism, having immigrated to the States thirty or so years ago. It’s true that I do a...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
09
Mar 2020
Is it wrong to paint someone’s portrait without their consent? Does doing so invade their privacy, taking intimacy from them? In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, writer-director Céline Sciamma presents this ethical dilemma for a woman portraitist in late eighteenth century Brittany. The portraitist is hired to paint a young woman who has already refused to sit for another and who has not been told the reason for the portraitist’s visit to her family’s home. One goal of the portrait is straightforwardly economic: it is to be taken to a prospective (and supposedly wealthy)...
Philosophy Talk Live at The Marsh SF this Sunday
13
Oct 2010
This Sunday we kick off another series of live recordings at the Marsh theater with two new shows in San Francisco: 12 pm: The Moral Costs of Free Markets. We live in a market-driven society—our day-to-day lives consist of buying and selling goods and services, and to some, our ability to do so without government regulation is the underpinning of democratic freedom itself. Everything has a price, and pretty much everything is for sale, from concert tickets to political influence. But should it be this way? John and Ken to discuss the moral limits of the free market with...
The Luck of the Draw: Live Blogging!
11
Jul 2008
Today's episode is about Lotteries -- not the state sponsored gambling type, but the type that allocate scarce goods and also burdens. Think of housing lotteries, school admission lotteries, and the draft lotteries. In Ancient Greece many political offices were alloted by lottery. Our question is whether and when lotteries are a just distributive mechanism. Sometimes they seem just the thing. The draft lottery, for example, seemed like a good way of keeping the privileged and connected from gaming the selective service system. But suppose tax rates were assigned by lot, so that your rate of...
Read moreCompromise and Slavery
01
Nov 2017
I happen to be in the middle of teaching W.E.B. Dubois' amazing work The Souls of Black Folk to Stanford freshmen. It talks a lot about the failures of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow from an on-the-ground perspective. In addition, we’ve just done an episode entitled Race Matters, which got me reading Chris Lebron’s fine book, The Making of Black Lives Matter: A Brief History of an Idea. If you haven’t read either book, it is worth reading both, but definitely don't miss Dubois since it is essential reading for every...
Read moreHumble Disagreement
15
Mar 2018
Should you cling to your beliefs even when others disagree? Or should you reconsider your beliefs whenever they’re challenged? Is it possible to disagree without being disagreeable? You might think that the answer to this last question is a resounding “no!” That’s because, these days, people too often try to shut up and shout down those who disagree with them. Now I don’t mean to deny that, to some extent, it’s always been that way. Why did Cain kill Abel? Because they disagreed over some silly sacrifice! And that was just a family squabble. Still, that shows how it...
Read morePhenomenology
20
Apr 2017
Husserl founded phenomenology a century ago. Many important philosophers are phenomenologists, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. But What in the world is phenomenology? Let’s start with the word. In the relevant sense, “phenomenon” means something observed, for which one wants to know the unobserved cause or explanation. For example, glaciers are an interesting phenomenon. But where did they come from? The phenomenological move is to say, “Let’s study the phenomenon itself first, and leave the explanation aside, at least for the time being. But of course Husserl wasn’t...
Read moreHow Will Racism Be Eradicated?
22
Sep 2017
In this long, honest, and insightful piece, discusses the way forward for our racist society. How will we eliminate racism from all facets of our society, from the institutions to the quotidian interactions? Kendi gives credence to the following suggestion: Take those people who have been oppressed by racism and give them the positions of power. Kendi reaches this conclusion by reflecting on the last fifty years of racist and anti-racist back-and-forth in this country. There's a lot to glean from this splendid article. Read it as part of "The long read" series at The Guardian: https...
Read moreUnnecessary Necessities
28
May 2021
During the pandemic, you may have been watching Schitt’s Creek. I just finished it, and its characters have inspired this month’s pandemic puzzle. ( I can write about it without spoiling the show beyond the first episode, but if you haven’t seen it and prefer to start a show completely ignorant, STOP READING NOW.) Here’s the starting point: the characters Moira, David, and Alexis—this is not true of Johnny—all find things necessary that really aren’t. Moira has (and has to have) her expensive wigs; Alexis and David need their expensive outfits; they recoil at the thought of flying...
Read moreThe Sex Trade
25
Dec 2014
The sex trade includes pornography, erotic dance, phone sex, and probably some things I’ve never heard of. But our focus today is prostitution in many but not all of its varieties. Prostitution mainly involves men paying women for sex. There are a lot of male and transsexual prostitutes too. And there are some female customers, too. But in the overwhelming majority of cases prostitutes, male or female, service the sexual desires of men. I think it's a mistake to suppose that all customers of prostitutes are pathetic or...
Read moreWhat is philosophy?
15
Apr 2013
I have a few moments. So I want to ask the basic question: What is philosophy? Instead of answering the question, though, it might be useful to reflect on how the question might be answered. It seems to me we have two basic options, whether due to the limitations of language, or cognitive capabilities, or both. We can say philosophy is what it is (that is, philosophy, which doesn't get us very far at all), or we can define it in terms of something else (e.g. the love of wisdom, critical thinking about X, Y, and Z, etc.). These two possibilities represent relations of identity and relations of...
Read moreSelf-Deception and Moral Dilemmas
19
Jul 2005
One thing I do for Philosophy Talk as a member of the Crack Research Team is pre-interview each guest. The point is to give the guest an idea of the structure of the upcoming show—the “story arc”—and to make notes on what the guest thinks to pass on to John and Ken. Last week I spoke with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about moral dilemmas. At the end of our conversation he said something that dovetails with thoughts I’ve had concerning the area I specialize in: philosophy of mind on self-deception. Sinnott-Armstrong said that the person who faces a moral dilemma has an obligation to compensate, or...
Read moreArendt on Totalitarianism
20
Feb 2017
Despite being over forty years old, Roger Errera's interview of philosopher Hannah Arendt in the New York Review of Books may be as timely as ever. Could something approaching totalitarianism be unfolding before us today—either in America or abroad? We hear echoes throughout the interview that may remind you of our current political situation. Regardless of your political stance, there's something foreboding about the statment, "Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have." Her discussion of facts and lies draws parallels to fake news and declining trust in experts. She...
Read moreMemes and the Evolution of Culture
20
Apr 2016
I bet that when most people hear the word ‘meme’ they think of the Internet and the viral spread of things like planking. Or maybe new expressions like LOL, or Gangnam style or the Harlem shake. This week's program may touch on that stuff, but that’s mostly not what we want to discuss. We want to discuss a serious scientific hypothesis about the evolution of human culture -- the idea that memes are to cultural evolution as genes are to biological evolution. Now genes, I get. They’re self-replicating packets of biological information. All that...
Read moreHow Fiction Shapes Us
24
Nov 2012
By guest blogger Joshua Landy What, if anything, do works of verbal art—poems, plays, novels, films—do for us? These days, most people will tell you one of two things: some will claim that works of verbal art make us better human beings (usually by teaching us Important Lessons about Life, or by rendering us more empathetic), and others will insist they have no effect on us whatsoever. I happen to think both of these hypotheses are wrong, and that fictions are capable of extremely important—but morally neutral—effects on our lives. On this week’s show, you’ll hear John...
Read moreLessons from Lobsters
04
Sep 2018
Last month, a truck carrying over four thousand lobsters slid off the road and turned over in the small town of Brunswick, Maine. The driver emerged from the crash relatively unscathed, but his crustacean cargo, which fell onto the road, had to be destroyed. Before the month was out, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) sent a proposal to the state government for a monument memorializing the slaughter. Shaped like a five-foot high granite tombstone, it would display a picture of a lobster and be inscribed with the words “In Memory of the Lobsters Who Suffered and Died at This...
Read moreChanging Deniers' Minds
07
Sep 2019
How do we change the minds of climate deniers? Could learning about the science of global warming ever persuade a skeptic? Or are humans just too irrational to be persuaded by facts and evidence? These are some of the questions we’re asking in this week’s show. With the ice caps melting, forests burning, extreme weather conditions becoming more and more frequent, and temperatures rising at record levels around the globe, the urgency to act has never been more clear. And even though 98% of all climate scientists agree, there are still people—some of them with a lot of power—who deny climate...
Read moreThe Second Annual Dionysus Awards
26
Feb 2010
Joe: Hey Blow, I hear that Philosophy Talk is giving out it's Second Annual Dionysus Awards. That's such a cool award. My favorite of the year. I'm psyched. Blow: You do seem extraordinarily psyched, Joe. But what's the big deal? There are dozens of movie awards show every year. Joe: Well, Blow,the Dionysus Awards may not have achieved quite the cache of the Oscars just yet, but,they may be having some effect. Just look at the crop of...
Read moreMusic, Meaning, and Emotion
18
Sep 2006
Today's episode is about the philosophy of music. Our guest will be Peter Kivy, a leading philosopher of music and a former colleague of mine from Rutgers University. I fancy myself a pretty accomplished philosopher. I've been at this philosophy thing for about 25 years now. I also consider myself a decent musician. In my youth I played a lot of music -- trombone, violin, piano. Plus I sang in various choirs. I don't perform much anymore, but I still consume music of all sorts. But I have to admit that although I'm not bad at philosophy and pretty good at music, I've never given music a...
Read moreFanon, Violence, and the Struggle Against Colonialism
29
Jan 2018
Frantz Fanon was quite a provocative fellow. In his most influential work, The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon says that “Decolonization reeks of red hot cannonballs and bloody knives. For the last can be first only after a murderous and decisive confrontation between the two protagonists.” He also said this: “For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist.” Personally, I prefer Gandhi’s model of resistance. His anti-colonialist bona fides are just as strong as Fanon’s. And he resisted colonialism without violence. Strikingly,...
Read moreThe Ethics of Care
11
Jun 2018
This week, we’re thinking about feminism and care ethics. Caring and being cared for are really important for human flourishing. Imagine a person who cared about nothing but him or herself. Such a person would be a monster. On the flip side, a person that nobody else cared about at all would be lonely and invisible. But caring has its risks too. Caring about one person too much can cause you to care about other people too little. Or you can care about the wrong things altogether. Imagine a person who cared mostly about doing everything in their power to embarrass other people. Such a person...
Read moreA Virtual Walden's Pond
15
Apr 2017
You might not have thought it was possible, but there is now a computer game version of Walden by Henry David Thoreau designed to help foster a philosophical experience and learn to "live deliberately." It was released just in time for the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth, and it was designed by Tracy Fullerton, the founding director of USC's Game Innovation Lab. In order to ensure the accuracy of the experience of Walden's pond, Fullerton collaborated with Thoreau experts at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles and at the Walden Woods Project in Massachusetts. The goal of...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Guardians of the Galaxy 2
13
Jun 2017
Like many other people—over $820 million worth of people in the US alone, according to the latest box office results I read while writing this post—I just saw Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. It’s lots of fun—psychedelic colors, battles in space, and great ’70s music played on a Walkman. It also features an unhappy and ever-expanding brain masquerading as a planet and seeking world domination. And that’s a problem, a very big problem, for the guardians to solve. Without giving away too much of the plot about how the guardians encounter the evil brain (it’s a pretty thin plot anyway;...
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