Philosophers’ Corner

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?

It’s really been quite an experience, first trying to get the show on the radio, then trying to shape the show into a distinctive art form, and then trying to grow the show. When we started out, John and I really had no idea what we were getting ourselves into or what was possible and what was impossible. I really didn’t realize what a conservative, risk-averse medium public radio was. Plus I didn’t realize how hard it is to make good radio. Nor did I realize how difficult it could be to combine the virtues of radio with the virtues of philosophy.

People argue whether beauty is objective or subjective. But what would it mean for it…

Here are what I take to be some deep truths about philosophy. First philosophy currently is, has always been, and probably will always be a fragmented discipline. There is really no one thing that philosophers do and not much that unifies the mulipliticity of different things that philosophers do. Philosophy is what people who call themselves philosophers do. And people who call themselves philosophers do all sorts of things.

We’re back in the studio after our trip to DC.   DC was great fun and…

I don’t profess to fully understand stoicism. I never read much stoic philosophy before now. I did read the Enchiridion by Epictetus as an ndergraduate, but frankly, it left me pretty cold at the time. I couldn’t relate to it at all. Maybe that’s because as a young man, I was pretty non-stoical.

Our limited forray into podcasting via the Stanford Itunes experiment has been a great success. …