Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’. Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and …
Brian King wonders what there is about human minds that’s unique to us. There is a cliché, derived from Aristotle, that ‘man is the rational animal’. While all animals have sensations, appetites and fears, only humans, it is said, have the power to reason. The idea that the human mind is radically different from that …
Taylor A. Dunn asks, if free will were a drug, should you take it? If we found out next week that neuroscientists had conclusively demonstrated that free will does not exist and that our so-called ‘choices’ are purely the result of automatic brain functions, I think we would be right to take this news badly. …
Frank S. Robinson ‘chooses’ to remind ‘us’ of problems some contemporary philosophers have with these central human concepts. In 2012, Sam Harris, one of the famed ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, published a book called Free Will, arguing that it doesn’t exist. He’s a neuroscientist, and he contends that the more science learns how our …
Güven Güzeldere asks where we are now with the mind-body problem. While the mind-body problem has been around for a long time, it is no less compelling for philosophers today. This is not to say that we are in the same place with regard to understanding it as the philosophers of bygone ages. On the …
An introduction to our special section by this issue’s editor, Charles Echelbarger. Almost from the earliest days of philosophy, philosophers have concerned themselves with questions directly or indirectly related to the concept of ‘mind’. Until very recent times, they didn’t think of gathering those concerns under a single heading such as metaphysics or epistemology or ethics. …
Rui Vieira thinks of a number. What exactly are the objects of mathematics, and how do they relate to our knowledge of them? Since Plato (427 BC–347 BC) such questions have been central to the philosophy of mathematics. Plato realized that mathematics seems to involve perfect circles, triangles, and so on. But as Plato also noticed, there are …
Justin Holme represents his self to you. Is the world made of one type of stuff, or at least two? We’re familiar with the physical world, but consciousness appears to be a different type of stuff altogether. The two main theories about the relationship of the physical world to consciousness are materialism (a type of monism, where …
Does free will exist? Michael Hauskeller reasons about reasons. Imagine you go to a restaurant. Looking at the menu, you discover that they serve your two favourite meals – say asparagus and spinach tart. What will you do? You may hesitate for a while, but then you will make your choice. You have to make …
Andrew Kemle says that evolutionary forces give us the answer. One of the major discoveries in the social sciences over the past few decades has been that people have innate other-regarding preferences. This means that we generally take other people’s interests and well-being into account when making decisions, and that although socialization can affect the …
Can You Be Both A Moral Rationalist & A Moral Sentimentalist? Read More »