How can we know what a person is feeling by looking at their face, and in particular can we know if they are lying? There is clearly both a psychological side to this and an epistemological side. Our guest is famous for his work on the psychological side, with a positive result: we can know what a person is feeling, and whether they are lying; at least the information is often there in the face. But it’s not always so easy.
Is water-boarding torture? If it is, does that make it wrong? Always? Usually? What is torture, and why is it always, usually, or sometimes wrong? Almost every dictionary gives two definitions of torture: a narrow one… inflicting great pain. And a broad one… severe mental anxiety and suffering. Water-boarding clearly counts as torture by the second definition, perhaps the issue isn’t clear given the first definition. But sure if our topic is the ethics, or morality, of torture, we need the more inclusive definition – severe mental anxiety and suffering.
What is a wife? From a philosophical point of view, it looks like the word…
Why focus just on wives? What about husbands? And what about homosexual marriages? Why not be gender-neutral and politically correct? Why not ask: what is a spouse? Beside the fact that it doesn’t have the same ring, our main answer is that neither the category “husband” nor the category “spouse” is as historically, culturally, or philosophically interesting as the category “wife.”
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total…
Satisfy your hunger for food and philosophy on April 25th at the new Marsh Theater location in…
One can imagine a kind of sceptic being put off by this way of setting…
According to the OED, the usual sense of `normal’ is: 2. a. Constituting or conforming…
Joe: I’m not sure I agree with you Blow in denying that nature contains the…
Well, it’s been awhile since we’ve updated our blog. Since both John and Ken are…
Joe: Hey Blow, I hear that Philosophy Talk is giving out it’s Second Annual Dionysus…
To mark the occasion of our 200th episode, we invited three former guests, Brian Leiter, Jenann Ismael, and Martha Nussbaum, and also our listeners to help us come up with a list of the 10 most pressing philosophical issues of the 21st century.
Today our topic is Darwin’s Philosophical Legacy and our guest is the one man in…
Help Us Celebrate 200 Episodes of Philosophy Talk! Our 200th episode is coming up, and to mark…
One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation. One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for. Of course, it has other functions — providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.
The term “postmodern” came into use as a description of certain trends in architecture, art, and literature in the 1970’s, although the trends it describes reach back earlier in the twentieth century, to Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake in the case of literature, and to the 1950’s at least in the case of architecture. But what counts as postmodern philosophy?