Philosophers’ Corner

  • Theodor Adorno [VIDEO]

    Happy 114th birthday to Theodor Adorno, the influential founder of the Frankfurt School. His writings on culture, capitalism, and fascism are as timely as when they were written.

  • Can We Have Our Truth Back, Please?

    This is a pretty terrible time to be a fan of truth. Politicians have always lied, of course, but few have dared to deny the verifiably obvious, such as the size of an inauguration crowd. Few have perpetuated conspiracy theories, such as the one about Obama’s place of birth.

  • Is Neoliberalism Destroying the Earth?

    Thousands of posters, books, videos, and social media exhort us to take four minute showers, eat vegan, carpool, and recycle in order to slow global warming and save Planet Earth, and yet, we have to ask, do these individual efforts really amount to much?

  • Credibility and Gender

    What are the norms governing credibility assessments? How do we judge whether someone is telling the truth or not? What kind of good is credibility? What is it to get the credibility you deserve? How does gender affect perceptions of credibility?

  • Are Bosses Like Dictators?

    Do bosses operate like mini-monarchs of the workplace? In what ways does your boss have arbitrary, excessive power over your life? Why do we demand democracy in the political sphere, and yet give it up so quickly in the economic?

  • Hate! Hate! Hate!

    The idea of fighting against hate has had a lot of traction in the public sphere. But conceptualizing our current political situation as a fight against hate paints a distorted picture of what we’re up against and underestimates the ideological wellsprings of right-wing extremism.

  • [VIDEO] Are You Living in a Simulation?

    Business magnate Elon Musk believes that it is highly probable that we are living in a simulated reality. With recent and rapid progress in photorealistic, 3D simulations, Musk maintains that the ability for humans to realistically simulate reality is not so far off. In fact, we might already be living in a simulation.

  • Your Question: Changing Physical Laws

    We can trace our fundamental forces back to microseconds after the Big Bang. If we can trace them back this far, wouldn’t the only way to change the fundamental laws of the universe be to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang? -Zach in Arkansas

  • Polyamory

    What is it like to be in love with more than one person at a time? Is monogamy natural or an outmoded cultural artifact? Although lifelong fidelity to a single partner remains a cultural ideal, few people live up to it.

  • The Best of Analytic and Continental Philosophy

    In a recent interview in What is It Like to be a Philosopher, Tina Fernandes Botts answered the age-old question of whether analytic and continental philosophy are really all that different in the final analysis. Although Botts tries to bridge the “divide,” she somehow manages to duplicate the very same debilitating stereotypes of these two fields at the same time.

  • Creativity and Character

    Do you have to be courageous to be creative? Or is it better to give the public what it wants? What are the character traits that make somebody exceptionally creative? What exactly are we picking out when we praise an individual for her creativity. Is it eccentricity? novelty? originality?

  • Which Statues Should Go?

    Many public monuments in the United States depict people who have done hideously immoral things. Almost all depict morally imperfect people. If we accept that some statues should be left in place and some should be torn down, what principles determine which should be torn down?

  • Flexitarian vs. Vegetarian

    Suppose our goal is to reduce overall meat consumption. Would it be better to become a vegetarian, who eats no meat, or a flexitarian, who eats a little meat? A recent Aeon article by Alberto Giubilini makes the case for flexitarianism.

  • Dennett vs. Papineau on Consciousness

    Both David Papineau and Dan Dennett are famed materialists (the doctrine that consciousness can be fully explained by material and neuronal functions), so why did Papineau give Dennett’s book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, a critical review?

  • Is James Franco Rescuing Philosophy?

    You might not have expected it, but the actor James Franco is promoting analytic philosophy in his new YouTube series, Philosophy Time. In relatively short videos, Franco chats back and forth with prominent philosophers on issues ranging from metaphor to abortion. Could these videos be the answer to the “crisis” in philosophy and the humanities?

  • Could the Laws of Physics Change?

    What if gravity suddenly stopped working? Or what if e gradually came to equal mc3 rather than mc2? Could the fundamentals of physics really change? Or Is this just the stuff of science fiction?