Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the big question we’re asking in this week’s show. It’s an odd question that could be thought of as either supremely profound, or supremely silly. It’s hard to know what an answer might even look like.
Psychology used to be mostly concerned with unhappiness, treating the wounded, the traumatized, or the…
Cosmology—the study of the universe, how it was formed, and what laws govern its evolution—has exploded in the last few decades. But it’s not a new area of human inquiry. In fact, theories about the origin, nature, and structure of the cosmos go back thousands of years.
Simone de Beauvoir was probably best known as a novelist, and a feminist thinker and writer, but she was also an existentialist philosopher in her own right and, like her lover Sartre, thought a lot about the human struggle to be free.
What gives nations the right to control who can cross their borders? That’s the…
Because of some very harsh mandatory minimum sentencing laws, the U.S. incarcerates a huge number of people, many of whom are serving life without the possibility of parole. This country now has about one quarter of the world’s prison population, which is remarkable, if you consider that we’re not even 5% of the total world population. And our prison population is also rapidly aging, which means that it’s a population with more and more health issues.
Psychological research reveals a lot of deeply troubling facts about human perception and memory that should make us very skeptical of eyewitness testimony. Of course, we don’t need science to tell us that if we witness something from too far away, or if it’s too dark, or if we’re intoxicated, then our testimony is not going to be very reliable. That just seems like common sense. But common sense may also lead us astray when it comes to the reliability of eyewitness testimony, and that is what a lot of the research on this topic is telling us.
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.
The title of this week’s show might sound a little mysterious. How can dance, of all things, be a way of knowing? Most things we know, we know either through perception or through thinking and reasoning. But on the surface of things, it doesn’t look like dance is either a form of perception or a form of thinking. So, in what sense is dance a way of knowing?
Feminism is a complex set of ideologies and theories, but on the most basic…
A big part of the moral problem with drones is that they make it too easy for the powers-that-be to bomb whomever they want without much political fallout. Sending troops in on the ground and putting them in direct danger comes with political consequences, but if we attack our so-called “enemies” remotely, and don’t have soldiers coming back in body bags, then there’s not going to be nearly as much backlash.
In the last few years a number of scientists, like Stephen Hawking, have been very vocal in pronouncing the death of philosophy. They seem to think that science can or will answer all the important questions there are. If there are any questions that science can’t answer, then they’re just pseudo problems, not worth thinking about.
Are some people better than others? You might wonder what kind of a question that is. On the one hand, there’s no controversy—some people are smarter than others, some are more creative, some are stronger or faster, and some are kinder or more virtuous. So, if that’s all we’re asking, the answer is obvious. In certain respects and in particular domains, some people are clearly better than others. But if we’re asking whether some people are just better human beings in general, it becomes much harder to answer the question.
Satire involves the use of humor to ridicule and shame people or institutions. It’s a potent tool for exposing society’s ills, especially when it comes to politicians and other powerful people. It’s the perfect way to take them down a peg or two. That’s the power of satire.
Some neuroscientists go so far as to claim that there is simply no such thing as free will. The feeling we sometimes have of freely choosing is just an illusion, a trick of the mind, they say. We might think we are making free choices, but, in fact, the choice has already been made before we become aware of it. But what, you might ask, would a neuroscientist know about the philosophical problem of free will?
There’s something odd about how psychiatry defines mental disorders—namely, by their symptoms. It’s to be expected, on some level. After all, how else could doctors diagnose psychiatric disorders, if not, in part, by their symptoms? The problem, though, is that in medicine, a cluster of symptoms isn’t usually what defines the disorder. Illnesses are identified by the underlying condition that causes the symptoms. And for good reason.