Philosophers’ Corner

  • Puppet Philosophers

    The puppets of Sesame Street and The Muppet Show should step aside — a new puppet show is in town. Featuring Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Karl Marx, and Ayn Rand as rod puppets, Manufacturing Mischief premiered in April at MIT.

  • Why America is not a Nation

    America is not a nation. It is only a place. Or so I will argue in this blog entry. And this fact, I claim, has great significance for understanding the potential demise of the republic we once dreamt of.

  • Distortion in Philosophy

    There are more women and people of color in academic philosophy now, but when most of the authors we read are white and male, some aspects of the subject matter get distorted, and it’s hard to tell where the essential stuff ends and the accidental stuff begins.

  • Philosophers and the Meaning of Life

    Many philosophers think asking about the meaning of life is confused or misguided. Or they try to explain what individuals can do to make their lives meaningful. But that does not offer the same existential solace as explaining what makes life itself valuable.

  • The Ethics of Care

    Caring and being cared for are really important for human flourishing. But caring has its risks too. Caring about one person too much can cause you to care about others too little. Or you can care about the wrong things altogether. Figuring out who and what to care about and to what degree can be a tricky thing.

  • Should Robots Be Caregivers?

    Is it ethical for robots to be caregivers? That’s the question asked by the winner of Ireland’s “Young Philosopher of the Year” award. The inspiration for his project came when his ailing grandfather fell in the middle of the night and was unable to reach the help button in his assisted living facility. He was found dead a day later.

  • Are We Slaves to Technology?

    In 2017, more than 67 percent of Americans owned a smartphone, and researchers expect that percentage only to increase over time. But how might this phenomenon, of always having our phones and access to social media at the tips of our fingers, impact the experience of being human?

  • How a Glitch Caused a Crisis

    We are in a constitutional crisis. It is not a looming crisis. It has already arrived, with the president’s declaration that he has the absolute right to pardon himself and his potential partners in crime, and the absolute right to stop any investigation for whatever reason he chooses.

  • An Antidote to Bullshit

    One of the problems with the Intellectual Dark Web, in common with other online, non-academic outlets for discussing big ideas, is that it doesn’t have have any effective mechanisms for intellectual quality control. With this in mind, I’ve assembled a twelve-point checklist for evaluating what you might come across on the IDW and beyond.

  • Repugnant Markets

    There are many things that just shouldn’t be for sale at any price—human beings chief among them. You can’t legitimately sell what you don’t own in the first place. But there are many things that we do own the buying and selling of which are considered in some way abhorrent or repugnant and are therefore banned.

  • Is Kanye a Philosopher?

    Kanye West, best known for his music career, is now expanding into philosophy, as revealed in an interview with his interior designer. But the ‘book’ Kanye has in mind will find its medium not in printed pages, but in real-time tweets.

  • The Twilight Zone and the Human Condition

    The Twilight Zone aired its last episode in 1964. The show’s most prevalent themes distill to the following: “‘you are not what you took yourself to be,’ ‘you are not where you thought you were,’ and ‘beneath the façade of mundane American society lurks a cavalcade of monsters, clones, and robots.’”

  • What is it Like to Lose Your Identity?

    Hannah Upp has dissociative fugue, an extremely rare form of amnesia, in which people lose access to their autobiographical memory and personal identity. If we associate autobiographical memory with personhood, is the Hannah Upp during an episode of fugue a different person from the Hanna Upp who is conscious of herself?

  • Against Marriage

    It might seem baffling that the state gets involved in our love life. Why does the government need to keep track of who’s married to whom? Will they next start tracking who our friends are?

  • The Morality of Big Business

    “Big business” for many has largely immoral associations: corrupt, profit-driven at the expense of human wellbeing or the environment, threatening to mom-and-pop shops everywhere. But this wasn’t always the case—big businesses used to be viewed positively by the public.

  • On Deepities and Bullshit

    The so-called Law of Attraction, one of the cornerstones of New Age positive thinking, is a textbook case of what Dan Dennett calls a “deepity”—an ambiguous claim that on one reading is either true but trivial, on another is false but would be earth-shattering if true.