Philosophers’ Corner

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.”

Dear Philosophy Talkers: I’m opening this blog entry for you to shout questions and comments…

A Philosophical Shout-out, April 1st For pledge week at KALW we’ve decided to do something…

Nobody wants to die.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  Some people do commit suicide in…

David Hume died in August, 1776, at the age of 65 — rather young, by…

Many regard Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I don’t share that view. But there’s no denying that, for a man who published only one book during his lifetime—a book that he later basically repudiated—he really did have a tremendous impact on 20th century analytic philosophy.

In one way, it seems obvious that the court system — especially judicial review of the acts of the legislative and executive branches of government — is, in one way, a bulwark of our constitutional democracy. That was a point made clearly and forcefully by a past Dean of the Stanford Law School, athleen Sullivan, who was our guest on Capitol Hill when we did a show on Separation of Powers.

A distinction worth making, I think, is between cases in which the truth is important because the subject matter involved is itself important, independently of whether people know or care about it, and cases in which the truth is only derivatively important, because philosophers or others care about it, and if we get something wrong we will be in some sort of trouble with these people.

Like any philosophical “ism,” pragmatism lends itself to easily-refuted straw-man characterizations; and in any case, no doubt, there are inferior (short-sighted, self-serving, hard-nosed, unprincipled) forms of pragmatism. But the various views of Peirce, James, Dewey, Mead, and others are more sophisticated than one might think after reviewing such shallow characterizations.

Children certainly pose a lot of problems — but are they philosophical? Coincidentally I gave a few lectures on John Stuart Mill’s great little book On Liberty recently to Stanford frosh. In thinking about that book one philosophical problem about children comes up, for Mill thinks the central principle of liberty he argues for in the book does not apply to children.

posted by Phil Clayton Dear Ken, Thanks for your post this morning about reasons for…

Many smart, reflective scientifically literate people obviously still do believe in god. Thankfully (or unthankfully, depending on your perspective) religious belief is not merely the province of anti-scientific, anti-modern fundamentalists who take every word, comma and period in some sacred text — like the Bible or the Koran — to be the sole and authoritative truth about just about everything.

What distinguishes music from non-music? The world is replete with sound — both man made sounds and the sounds of nature. Many of these sounds are quite beautiful — the cries of various animals, the sound of the ocean, the whistling wind, the human voice, the majestic boom of the space shuttle as it rockets into space. But only a few of the sounds with which the world is replete count as music. Is there anything deep to say about what distinguishes music from non-music?