Philosophers’ Corner

I’m in the airport at Tucson. I’m listening online to our episode on “Why Music Matters” which we recorded in front of live audience at a locale in San Francisco. David Harrington, of the world famous Kronos Quartet is our guest. Since my flight is about to board, I won’t have time to listen at length. And I’ve been too wrapped up in the conference to blog about the topic. But I thought it might be fun just to open up an entry to comments from listeners about the show and the topic.

Let’s distinguish two things here: (a) being racist, sexist, or homophobic; (b) being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic. I take it that you can be labeled racist either correctly or incorrectly. But I also take it that you can fail to be labeled racist even though you are one. Now if it’s unfashionable to express certain views and if the cost of expressing such views is that you get labeled a racist, then if people care enough about what they are labeled, several things can happen.

Howdy folks; Troy Jollimore here. Ken and John were kind enough to invite me to be their…

I start out thinking that flirting probably has a sort of “Gricean” structure. By that I mean a couple of things. First, it seems to me that you flirt with someone by intending to flirt with them. It’s one thing to cause sexual arousal in another person by a look or a walk or a word or your tone of voice or the tilt of your head. But unless you intend to cause arousal by that means, it doesn’t seem right to my ear to say that you are flirting with them.

posted by Carrie Jenkins Hi all – and thanks Ken and John for the invitation…

posted by Alex Miller During the program on Sunday July 1st I drew a distinction…

I have to admit that most of my own summer reading, will not be reading for pure philosophcal pleasure. That’s because I really MUST finish a book I’ve been working on for several years now that is WAY past due and get started on the next one, about which I have been thinking, speaking and teaching but not writing for the past several years. So most of my reading wil be directly related to those two tasks. Still, I have thoughts both about what I would like to read myself this summer, if I were to be able to for pure philosophical pleasure and about what I might recommend to others to read who were looking for interesting philosophical reads.

Our topic today is science and censorship. The case of smallpox provides an interesting case-study. Smallpox, once a main scourge of mankind, was eradicated through the efforts of the World Health Organization and others. Stocks of the virus were retained by the U.S. The U.S. and the Soviet Union retained stocks of the virus in Atlanta and Siberia. Now, however, the smallpox genome has been sequenced and is on the web.

Recently, we had a couple of Program Directors — the gate keepers of the public radio airwaves — listen to some episodes of Philosophy Talk and tell us what they liked and didn’t like. We won’t bore you with the details, but just to give you a feel for what we’re up against with these folks, we thought we’d share a few comments they made about Ian Shoales, the sixty-second philosopher.

The preamble to the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that “public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. The duty of the journalist is to further those ends by seeking truth and providing a fair and comprehensive account of events and issues.”