There is nothing morally special about trolleys, except the historical accident that around thirty years ago the great philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson used trolleys in a series of examples, originally to help us think about moral aspects of abortion. Since that time a zillion articles have been written about the trolley problem, applying it to all sorts of moral issues.
This week, our topic is Affirmative Action, We thought we’d focus on the question…
The world already has too many people. 7.3 billion. It’ll probably hit over 11…
I bet that when most people hear the word ‘meme’ they think of the…
Sunday we consider whether ancient wisdom — namely that of the Greeks — can be…
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.
Concepts such as infinity and oneness are problematic in terms of our capability to describe…
Altruists are people willing to do good things for others at a cost to…
What do August 8, July 23, July 16, and June 17 have in common? Answer:…
Free and open source software is provided at zero cost but the word “free” does…
We usually think of the Bill of Rights as recognizing and guaranteeing to Americans…
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.
International Debt, the debts that nations, often quite poor, owe to other nations and…
In a recent episode of Philosophy Talk, Ken, John, and their guest, Naomi Zack, considered…