Author: Kenneth Taylor

  • Can the Laws of Physics Change?

    What if gravity suddenly stopped working? Or what if e=mc3 rather than e=mc2? Could the fundamentals of physics really change?

  • When Driverless Cars Must Choose

    Will driverless technology someday make human drivers obsolete? Would you be willing to trust your safety to an algorithm? What if you knew that the algorithm might decide to sacrifice your life to save the lives of others?

  • In Praise of Reading

    We modern humans read all sorts of things and for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes reading a densely packed text takes a lot of skill and effort. But mastering the ancient art of reading can help us to master the even more difficult art of reading the text that is the world.

  • Cognitive Bias

    Aristotle defined humans as the rational animal. But he was wrong! The human mind is riddled with cognitive biases. At last count, there are something like 150 named cognitive biases – confirmation bias, in group bias, loss aversion, the Ikea effect, the halo effect, endowment effects.

  • Habermas, Rationality, and Democracy

    Habermas believes that genuine democracy is rooted in the principles of communicative rationality. Though I think it is very much an open question whether rational argument can ever take place in a democracy—especially one like ours that seems very far from what Habermas envisions—I do hold out some hope that we may eventually be able to design a public sphere in which reason regularly wins out over power and propaganda.

  • A Deep Dive into Democracy

    America’s so-called democracy is under serious strain these days. Some fear that the system may soon be stressed to the breaking point. So we thought we’d start out the summer with a deeper look at Democracy in America.

  • The Limits of Medical Consent

    Is it ever permissible to force medical treatment on a patient against their will? What if they are so emotionally distraught that they can’t think straight? What if they might die without the treatment?

  • Transcending Intersectionality

    Intersectional feminism is not a progressive advance over the non-intersectional sort. It is, rather, a rearguard attempt to recover from what I think of as original sin—that is, from a profound and consequential error. The original sin was the sin of treating some men as the unmarked case of man, some women as the unmarked case of woman.

  • Captivity

    Putting a person in a prison deprives him of freedom and autonomy. Putting an animal in a cage does the same thing. That’s a similarity. On the other hand, we typically put people in prison to punish them. We aren’t punishing animals when we put them in zoos or keep them as pets.

  • Some Thoughts on Problematic Arguments

    Jeff McMahan and Peter Singer wrote an article in The New York Times that has gotten lots people I know and respect pretty upset. Some have reacted to the article with very reasoned and persuasive counter-arguments. Some have thrown in a good measure of anger and disgust at them in addition.

  • Getting from Space and Time to Space-time

    Are space and time two separate entities? Or are they just different dimensions of one thing—the space-time continuum? And what difference does it make if they are?

  • Knowing What We Know—And What We Don’t Know

    This week’s episode is the first in a new six-part series on the topic of Intellectual Humility. We tackle the big question, whether we can know what we know and what we don’t, since knowing what you do and don’t know is the first step to true intellectual humility.

  • Philosophy Behind Bars

    American prisons are, for the most part, overcrowded warehouses, devoted to the punishment and daily humiliation of their inmates. As such, one would expect that they are probably not very conducive to either the teaching or the studying of philosophy–or any other academic subject matter. But does it have to be that way? Our guest this week is Jennifer Lackey, who teaches philosophy at Northwestern University and at Statesville Correctional Center in Illinois.

  • The Case For (and Against) Reparations

    After the civil war, instead of reparations and restorative justice, black people were subjected to new forms of oppression: sharecropping, Jim Crow segregation, separate but equal schooling, housing discrimination — not to mention lynchings and worse. If blacks weren’t paid reparations back then, why would we expect it to happen now?

  • The Value of a College Education

    When most people think of the value of college, these days, they tend to think in terms of dollars and cents. How much will it cost me? How much will I have to take out in loans to pay for it? Will my future earnings make college worth the cost? But is this the right way to think about it?

  • Magical Thinking

    Magical thinking happens when you have, say, firmly held beliefs based on scanty or even non-existent evidence or when you make plans in which ends and means are radically out of synch. Think of the belief that doing a certain dance can cause it to rain or that wearing a baseball cap inside out can lead to a rally. But, of course, magical thinking doesn’t show up just in outmoded superstitions or harmless rituals at sporting events. It is actually all around us.