Philosophers’ Corner

  • The Metaphysics of Color

    This week we’re seeing red — asking about the metaphysics of color. Is color in the eye of the beholder? Or is color objectively real? Would colors still exist in the world, even if no one was around to see them?

  • Risk and Rationality

    The world is a risky place where all sorts of nasty things could happen. So, how do we decide what to do when there are risks at every turn? Luckily, there’s a widely accepted theory that tells me when it’s rational to take a risk. It says that a rational person is someone who maximizes expected utility. The basic idea is that an agent does something and, depending on circumstances, it may have several outcomes we can rationally assess.

  • Conspiracy Theories

    What’s your first association with the title of this week’s show? Do you think of conspiracy theories as the kind of theories that paranoid nutjobs relentlessly like to spout? Considering some of the wild theories out there—like a secret group of elites (which may or may not be Jews, Freemasons, and/or shape-shifting lizard aliens) control and manipulate the global economy—you’d be forgiven for that association. But before you judge all conspiracy theories in a single stroke, you should consider that there are conspiracy theories that you probably believe. And with good reason.

  • Weapons of Mass Destruction

      This week we’re thinking about the ethics of Weapons of Mass Destruction — a…

  • Acting Together

    The great English philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously said that in the state of nature, life is solitary, brutish and short — as if nature designed people to act alone, rather than together. But acting together, this week’s topic, is one of the most natural things in the world. If we never acted together, there would be no families, no teams, no countries. But what exactly is it to act together?

  • Science and Gender

    Science used to be seen as a thing for boys only. Back in the 1980’s when students were asked to draw what a scientist looks like… forty eight percent drew a scientist with facial hair; twenty-five percent gave their scientist a pencil protector. Only eight percent drew a woman. Of course, back then the perception that science was a boy thing, pretty much matched the reality.

  • Inspiration for Evil

    David Livingstone Smith presents on the philosophical topic of dehumanization and sheds light as to…

  • The Legacy of Freud

    Freud wasn’t the first to think about the idea of unconscious beliefs and desires. That idea goes back over two thousand years ago to Epicurus. Unlike Epicurus, Freud developed detailed, putatively scientific hypotheses about the exact workings of the unconscious mind. And those theories basically ruled the roost for several decades more or less unchallenged.

  • Memory and the Self

    There is a long tradition in philosophy of thinking that memory and the self are intimately connected. Locke claims, for example, that what makes me today the very same person as I was yesterday, is, basically, the fact that I can now remember what I did or experienced yesterday. So memory, for Locke, is what actually determines who I am.

  • Moral Luck

    Suppose Ken and I buy tickets for the California Lottery. We go to the same 7-11, pay the same amount, push the same button to get a ticket with randomly generated numbers. Ken, lucky fellow, plays the winning number and collect $10 million. (This is a fictional example!). I play a losing number, and get nothing.

  • An Anti-Determinist Argument

    We generally think that the past is settled and nothing we do in the present…