Philosophers’ Corner

  With all the rapid advances in computer technology, are we humans moving toward a…

By guest blogger Joshua Landy   What, if anything, do works of verbal art—poems, plays, novels,…

Why the suspicions about economics, expressed in our question for the show? Because there is so much basic, public, disagreement among economists — way more than in most sciences. You’ve got the Chicago School of economics, supply-side economics, Keynsian economics, and on and on. Beyond the basic law of supply and demand, is there really much that they agree on?

What do Girl Scout leaders, Army generals, corporate honchos, and Philosophy Department heads all have in common? Not much, I’d say. For example: whether you’re talking Girl Scout troops or Army troops — an effective leader still has to have the ability to communicate and motivate. But motivating a troop of pre-teen girls to work hard and earn their badges is a lot different from motivating a troop of soldiers in the face of battle. It’s easy to see how someone could be really good at the one, and bad at the other.

If the title of this week’s show sounds strange, it may be because we don’t normally think of poetry as being in the business of producing knowledge. Poetry, we might think, is about capturing impressions and expressing feelings. The goal of poetry is not to describe the world. That’s, after all, what we have science for.

  This week’s conversation is about Epicurus and the Good Life.  Now in common parlance…

Pantheism is the view that the world is either identical to God, or an expression of God’s nature. It comes from ‘pan’ meaning all, and ‘theism,’ which means belief in God. So according to pantheism, “God is everything and everything is God.”

There seem to be two related senses or uses of `normal’. There’s what we might call the statistical sense: here normal is the average, the mean, or perhaps the median, or the typical. Then there’s the normative sense of normal. Normative means that what’s normal is what lives up to the norms, the standards. But which norms? There’re lots of norms, that it’s not normal to live up to.

  February is Black History Month.  So we thought it might be a good time…

This is one of those times when we need to start by disentangling concepts. We use ‘private’ and ‘privacy’ in several different ways. Both words derive from ‘privus’ in Latin which means `single’ or `individual’. Being private is usually opposed to being public; privacy means withdrawn in one way or another from the public. In philosophy, we often say that one’s inner mental life is private, which means only you can know what you are thinking and feeling. Other people don’t have the same kind of direct access to your thoughts and feelings as you do.

Democracy can take many forms. But is democracy itself – as opposed to this or that form of democracy – an inherently good thing? Smart people have differed on this issues. The great philosopher and statesman, Winston Churchill, noted, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Plato was a better philosopher, and he disagreed. He thought democracy was the worst possible form of government. He favored an aristocracy run by philosopher kings.