Stephen Doty says that the accumulated folk wisdom of the investment community should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Some people need to invest more in philosophy, not in stocks, so that empty sayings don’t muddle their thinking and mislead them. A yacht club gentleman gave me a little lecture on investing the …
Jessie Burdick wonders whether it is cheating for athletes to take dietary supplements, and we ask you, the reader, to tell us what you think. What would you be willing to do to become a professional athlete? This is a question that demands more than a fleeting thought, because not only will becoming a successful professional …
Adam Carter examines the most morally corrupting sport of all. Tom: “So, what did you have back on hole six, buddy?”Buck: “I told you – I had a par.”Tom: “I know that’s what you said, but are you sure?”Buck: “Are you … calling me a cheater, Tom?”Tom: “All I’m saying is that you were two in …
James Moran considers the archetypal American antedeluvian’s criticism of someone else’s technological paradise. Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-loved authors in American history, and its most famous chronicler of the simple life. Some might argue that there are utopian elements in Thoreau’s account in Walden (1854) of his two years and two months living in the …
Alfred Geier says it’s not about the state of the state. The Republic is Plato’s most famous dialogue, contains many of his best-known arguments and is one of the great classics of world literature. It is also the victim of a serious and widespread misconception, in that it is held to present a political utopia, a polis [city state] to …
Why do we feel emotion when listening to music? Ben Ushedo goes beyond emotivist and cognitivist approaches to answer this intriguing question. “Music can make me feel tense or relaxed; it can disturb, unsettle me, and startle me; it can calm me down or excite me…”Jennifer Robinson, ‘Expression and Arousal of Emotion in Music’. What …
Marek Soszynski considers whether it couldn’t look like resemblance after all. How do pictures represent in the way they do? How come a picture of a cat, for example, is indeed of a cat – actually has a cat as its object? Or to put it the other way around, how is a cat pictorially …
Natasha Gilbert says out with the old arguments, and in with the new. There has been a recent surge of interest in the old problem of free will. But away from time-worn debates over the questions ‘Are we free?’ and ‘Are we morally responsible?’ some fresh waters are at last in reach. As I will …
Graham W. Boyd argues that choice is an illusion. “Recently I was trying to explain to an intelligent woman the problem of trying to understand how it is we perceive anything at all, and I was not having any success. She could not see why there was a problem. Finally in despair I asked her …
The Brain’s Risk/Reward System Makes Our Choices, Not Us Read More »
Pablo Cevallos Estarellas reviews the developments that caused professional to triumph over amateur philosophy in education, and proposes a way forward. If to do philosophy is to ask questions of a special kind about central human problems and then to grapple with them in a rigorous way, most people can in principle learn how to …