Those Crazy Philosophers

In the last week I've read an amazing amount of stuff by philosophers that the ordinary person would regard as stark raving mad.  I wonder about this. Is that the job of philosophy--to take seriously what nobody else takes seriously?  Or do academics suffer from boredom, and need to find ever more outrageous things to say? Or does the pressure to publish favor positions that no one else has ever

Role Reversal

Isn't it odd how the debate on the individual mandate makes conservatives forget to be conservatives?  There's a good conservative argument for the mandate.  People without insurance benefit from emergency rooms that are required to give them care.  Even if they never visit the ER in the next year, its existence puts them at lower risk of a medical disaster. If they don't pay for their unused

Zoopolis (2) - Animal Citizens

This morning's New York Times has two horrifying stories about the treatment of animals -- one about horse racing in America, and the other about dog-dumping in Puerto Rico.  In the US, the report says, 24 horses die in horse races every week, mostly as a result of the use of pain medication to mask injuries.  In Puerto Rico, there's a place called Dead Dog Beach, where people abandon surplus

Trayvon Martin

So heart-breaking.  I have a teenage son who goes around wearing hoodies and walks to the convenience store for snacks. I've never worried that he'd be shot by the local neighborhood watch patroller.  Should I mention that he's white? Newt Gingrich recently said it was "disgraceful" for President Obama to mention that Trayvon Martin was black. Now that (Gingrich, that is) is disgraceful. 

NYT: Why is it ethical to eat meat?

The New York Times is running a contest for people who think they have the answer, with a "veritable murderer's row of judges" assessing the submissions, including Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, and Jonathan Safran Foer. What fun, and this should be interesting, but did all five judges have to be men?  There are lots of appropriate women who could have been on that panel, including (dare I say?)

Free Will Free-for-all

The online debate about free will is heating up, thanks to high profile author Sam Harris's new book on the subject. The Chronicle of Higher Education had a nice forum on free will yesterday, starting with an essay by Jerry Coyne. Hilary Bok and Al Mele write in defense of compatibilism, but not in response to Coyne.  His argument is very simple. Restating a bit, the idea is that any mental event

Zoopolis (1)

It's been a while since I've read anything on animal ethics that's new and different, but Zoopolis, the new book by Sue Donaldson and political philosopher Will Kymlicka, is new and different -- and well worth reading.  I'm going to "live blog" the book a bit, as in: write about it as I continue to read it (I'm about 1/3 of the way through).

Zoopolis is a work in the rights tradition of

Give and Take

Some very good philosophers accept money from the Templeton Foundation, which makes me pay attention to arguments why this is a bad thing to do.  One type of argument puzzles me ... a lot.  The argument for not taking their money is that the Templeton Foundation, or at least the family, supports nefarious causes like Rick Santorum's presidential campaign.  Here's how Jerry Coyne suspects

The Bazaarness of Philosophy

Colin McGinn writes in The Stone that "philosophy" is a bad word for philosophy.  It brings to mind someone who works on "unearthing and explicating the 'meaning of life' and what the ultimate goods are" - but philosophers may do nothing of the kind.

I do get this - back in the days when I "did" philosophy of mind and language it annoyed me no end to sit next to someone on a train or plane and