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The Philosophy of Puns
John Perry
28
Jul 2016
A Philosophy Talk show on puns can’t just consist of making puns, even if they are good ones. We need to show what’s philosophically interesting about them. First a couple of definitions. As a noun, a pun a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings: the pigs were a squeal (if you'll forgive the pun).As a verb, to pun is to make a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word: his first puzzle punned on composers, with answers...
Read moreThe Ethics of Drone Warfare
Laura Maguire
09
Sep 2015
In the last six years alone, at least two and a half thousand people have been killed by US drone strikes.[1] That’s nine times more drone attacks under Obama than under his predecessor, George W. Bush. The justification for this increase in attacks is that drones are precise, effective weapons that reduce unintended casualties. Some might find the idea of a killing machine that can be operated from thousands of miles away deeply chilling. But the defenders of drones say that cold and detached is good in war. It means soldiers can be calm and dispassionate, and not act out of fear. They can...
Read moreWhen Do False Beliefs Exculpate? (Pt. II)
08
Jan 2021
For last month’s pandemic puzzle, I posed the title question of this blog, noting that I meant it in a moral sense (rather than a legal one): When do false beliefs exculpate? The idea is that sometimes having a false belief exculpates one of a wrongdoing, but other times not—and perhaps even the opposite. My example of a false belief that does exculpate was a vet who accidentally puts down the wrong dog, because it looks almost identical to the one she was in fact supposed to put down: maybe she was careless (which is bad), but her false belief about the identity of...
Read moreThe Politics of Architecture
06
Oct 2023
Do buildings express political viewpoints? Some buildings do, of course: think about monuments to fallen soldiers, city hall buildings, or public housing. But is architecture always political? When it comes to pretty buildings, isn’t a flying buttress sometimes just a flying buttress? Clearly, there’s plenty of architecture that makes political statements (as monuments do) or implies political positions (as city halls do). Think of all that neoclassical architecture imperialists love so much: impressive columns, high ceilings, huge steps where the...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: Brexit
24
Jan 2019
The British film Brexit, which premiered in the US on HBO on January 19th, flirts with a critical problem in the ethics of journalism: is it permissible to fill gaps in a story with fictionalized accounts of events? According to the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists the answer is a resounding "no!" Seeking and reporting truth is the first principle of journalistic ethics; journalists are admonished never to "misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story." But Brexit is not a documentary. It is a retelling, sometimes fictionalized...
Comedy on the Edges
14
Jan 2020
Is there comedy so offensive that it shouldn’t be allowed? Do some jokes encourage bigotry and hatred? Could edgy comedy ever be good for society? These are some of the questions we’re asking in this week’s show on Comedy and the Culture Wars. It’s our first new show since Ken died last month (apart from the tribute episode we made), so I hope Ken would be happy to see that we are keeping the torch lit and his legacy alive. We’ve all heard the complaint that “snowflakes” and “political correctness” are ruining comedy. There are some people, the complaint goes, who are just way...
Read moreWilliam James and the Squirrel Example
Guest Contributor
07
Aug 2010
Russell Goodman, who was our guest a couple of weeks ago, for our episode on William James sent the following remarks as a follow up to our on-air conversation. They are posted here with his permission. I wanted to comment on that squirrel going around the tree story with which James opens the second chapter of Pragmatism. It's a great story, but it seems, from my experience, to itself provoke as much disagreement and puzzlement as the squirrel and the man themselves do. At first blush, it seems like a good verificationist story- a dispute about two...
Read morePoetry, Philosophy, Truth
Guest Contributor
03
Oct 2007
Howdy folks; Troy Jollimore here. Ken and John were kind enough to invite me to be their guest for the “Love, Poetry, Philosophy” show they taped at Powell’s City of Books in June. And now that the show is being broadcast, they were kind enough to invite me to blog for the show as well. I’m happy to take them up on it—keeping in mind that blogging is a very informal medium, and that what I have to offer may turn out to be no more than a few fairly random thoughts. One of the relations between poetry and philosophy that we didn’t really get to discuss on the show, as I recall...
Read moreDo Scientists Need Philosophers?
Mohit Mookim
27
Nov 2017
What is the value of philosophy of science? Psshaw, what do philosophers even know about science? Shouldn't we just trust scientists when it comes to questions of science? The following article by philosopher Subrena Smith in Aeon Magazine explores an answer to these questions. Essentially, there are presuppositions in science worth analyzing from a philosophical perspective. Take a look: https://aeon.co/ideas/why-philosophy-is-so-important-in-science-education
Read moreSelf Help, Nietzsche, and the Patriarchy
Mohit Mookim
10
Apr 2018
How did self-help go so wrong? Philosophy Talk featured contributor David Livingstone Smith explains the atrocious politics of popular self-help guru Jordan Peterson. If you thought self-help was supposed to stay outside the hustle-bustle of politics, you might want to take a look at this article (co-authored by John Kaag). This beautiful piece describes the links between the toxic ideas embedded (sometimes not so subtly) in Jordan Peterson's shtick. As the title of this post suggests, Nietzsche's ideas about will to power make an appearance, alongside toxic masculinity. Check...
Read moreFeel like Democracy is Crumbling? So Did Plato
Jack Herrera
16
Mar 2017
This week in The Atlantic, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein posed a question: What happens when a society, once a model for enlightened progress, threatens to backslide into intolerance and irrationality—with the complicity of many of its own citizens? How should that society’s stunned and disoriented members respond? Do they engage in kind, resist, withdraw, even depart? Goldstein is wondering what a citizen should do when they feel like democracy has failed. How should we react when the people around us have vote in a way we find horrible? Though that sentiment might...
Read moreYour Question: Habermas and Factions
Laura Maguire
30
Jun 2017
We know the vast majority of our listeners don't get to hear the live broadcast of our show, which is usually Sunday mornings from the studios of KALW in San Francisco. Even listeners in the Bay Area often hear the KALW rebroadcast, Tuesdays at noon. But we know you often have questions about what you're hearing, so we decided to start a series called "Your Question" here on the blog. If you have a question after the live broadcast, you can still participate in the conversation. This week's show was on the German philosopher and critical theorist Habermas and his...
Read moreGods, Psychology, and Occam’s Razor
Neil Van Leeuwen
03
Jun 2014
What makes people believe in God? The relatively new research field cognitive science of religion is busy trying to answer this question. And it’s come up with some powerful answers so far. Importantly, its answers are psychological. They focus on the mental processes that cause religious belief—or religious credence, as I call it. But the existence of this research program raises an important philosophical question. What should understanding the psychology of belief in God do to that very belief? In other words, once we know where religious credence...
Read moreWisdom
Ken Taylor
23
Sep 2011
Our topic this week is wisdom. We hope to figure out both what it is and how we can cultivate it in ourselves and in others. And we’re also eager to think about where all the wise men and women have gone. After all, ours is an age of unparalleled scientific knowledge and technological expertise. But for all of our knowledge and expertise we don’t seem to have an excess of wisdom. Quite the contrary, in fact. Now once upon a time, especially in the ancient world, philosophers thought a lot about the nature of wisdom. In...
Read moreWhat's to be Done?
John Perry
20
Nov 2005
The journal Topoi has asked a number of philosophers to write essays on the current state and future prospects of philosophy, under the title "What's to be Done?". I thought Philosophy Talk bloggers and bloggees might be interested in my essay, so here it is.Topoi provides an excellent expression of a view of philosophy that I share: Topoi's main assumption is that philosophy is a lively, provocative, delightful activity, which constantly challenges our received views, relentlessly questions our inherited habits, painstakingly elaborates on how things could be different,...
Read more#FrancisOnFilm: The Highs and Lows of 2016
Leslie Francis
10
Jan 2017
The end of a year is a time when film critics reflect on the best and the worst films of the year. Here are my top and bottom five picks for philosophers in 2016, listed alphabetically. Even the worst weren’t awful; they just weren’t my favorites. And I must admit what film critics often don’t: there are a lot of films I didn’t see, and I expect many of them were very good and some were worth missing. I’m the type who likes suspense, so I’ve tried to write these reviews on the assumption that it would be bad to give the endings away. Sometimes that’s meant I’ve had to say less about he...
Read moreFreedom and Free Markets
Ken Taylor
04
Feb 2016
This week our topic is freedom and free markets. We want to explore the extent to which these two things are or perhaps are not mutually dependent on each other. You might think that the answer is obvious, that freedom and free markets necessarily go together hand in glove. Clearly, free markets would not be possible without a great deal individual freedom – particularly the freedom to make contracts. Similarly, to regulate the market, it might seem, is ipso facto to shackle liberty. When you restrict markets you restrict choice....
Read moreEthical Relativism
10
Mar 2015
"What makes a man go neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?" -- "Captain Zapp Brannigan," FuturamaThere is a considerable body of philosophical argumentation pro and con ethical relativism. However, I harbor the suspicion that the argumentation is irrelevant to what makes people ethical relativists or anti-relativists. (We lack a really satisfactory term for whatever the denial of relativism is. "Realism" has the wrong connotation for non-philosophers. "What's so 'realistic' about your view? Relativism seems more '...
Read moreMourning a Lost Culture
Jeremy Sabol
18
Mar 2022
When we are grieving, is it a good idea or a bad idea to engage with art that takes grief to be its subject? Does this help us to cope, or does it rip out whatever stitches we have managed to sew in while we try to bear an unbearable loss? I recently read Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, and then watched the HBO mini-series adaptation. Josh and I were planning to talk about the TV version on this year’s “Dionysus Awards,” but there were so many amazing films to talk about that we just didn't have time to fit it in. Both the novel and the series are about disease,...
Postmodernism: The Decline of Truth
15
Jul 2019
Did postmodernism have any part to play in the rise of the post-truth era? At first glance that seems very hard to believe. When we see Kellyanne Conway talking about “alternative facts” or Rudy Giuliani saying “truth isn’t truth,” we don’t immediately assume they’ve been busy reading Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. Still, maybe the question isn’t quite so simple. For one thing, there are a few documented cases of right-wingers explicitly drawing on postmodernist theory. Take Vladislav Surkov, Kremlin ideologist. Or Phillip Johnson, one of the originators of the “...
Read moreThe Ethics of Pet Keeping
27
Jun 2020
Do we really have the right to own our fellow creatures? Are there some animals that should never be kept as pets? Is it okay to declaw a cat, clip a bird’s wings, or dock a dog's tail? These are some of the questions we're asking on this week's show. Ideally, keeping a companion animal is a good thing that enriches both of your lives. I can’t find fault with someone who adopts an animal from a shelter, and provides care throughout the animal’s life. But many people who keep pets fall short of this ideal. In worst-case scenarios, people neglect or abuse nonhuman animals in a variety of...
Read morePornography: Open Thread
Ken Taylor
29
Aug 2009
Blogging has been light around here as of late -- what with our gang's various and sundry summer travels and the fact that we were often not in the studio this summer. But it's time to kick this blog back into at least moderate gear. For the upcoming season, I plan to blog more regularly -- at least weekly, I hope. (Daily is way more than I can manage.) Not going to make an elaborate entry this morning, before the show. But I thought I'd give you a taste of what we're going to talk about today, Here's a little dialogue, between Joe and Blow...
Read moreStrange Behavior (Or: On Watching Sports—a follow-up to Tuesday’s show on basketball)
Neil Van Leeuwen
30
Mar 2006
Aristotle’s characterization of man as the rational animal will seem flattering, if you think about many behaviors we people engage in regularly. While many people in our society are overworked, short on knowledge, and pressed for time, many of us take time out to watch unusually tall individuals get together in groups to hurl a spherical object through a suspended ring. These tall individuals get dressed in outfits with shiny colors and are glorified for the ability to hurl the sphere through the ring. Whole buildings fill up with people who want to watch the hurling of the sphere and pay...
Read moreThe Temptation to Feel Baffled
Neil Van Leeuwen
16
Feb 2018
Yet another school shooting. This one happened on Valentine’s Day in Parkland, Florida, an otherwise attractive suburb north of Ft. Lauderdale. 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who has since confessed, carried an AR-15 assault-style rifle into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, from which he had been previously expelled, and murdered 17 people—14 students and three staff members—injuring several dozen others. Cruz had a history of strange behavior, including attacking squirrels and chickens. He had had disciplinary problems in school as well—hence the expulsion. He seems to have been affiliated...
Read moreFailing Successfully
David Livingstone Smith
08
Aug 2018
To say that a person can fail successfully sounds really weird. To succeed at something is to achieve some goal that you’re aiming at, and to fail at something is to not achieve a goal that you were trying to achieve. I might succeed or fail at bench-pressing my body weight. I succeed if I try to bench-press my body weight and manage to do it, and I fail if I try to do it but don’t succeed. So, success and failure seem to be incompatible. But this isn’t the end of the story. In fact, it’s just a short-sighted and pedantic beginning. If we loosen up and shift perspective a little bit,...
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