Heap of Links
1. The science of looking smarter.
2. Professors, you’ve been rated by your students, but have you been drawn?
3. Article on author Lucy Eyre, her philosophically-informed novel, If Minds Had Toes, and the value of teenagers studying philosophy (free registration required).
4. Raising a moral child.
5. An Italian philosopher who had been jailed for nine years for violating a fascist-era anti-gay law prohibiting what this article calls “plagiarism” (“in Italy a concept and a crime of unduly influencing and thus ‘stealing’ a person’s personality”–anyone know anything about this?) has died.
6. The program 360documentaries on ABC Radio (Australia) has an episode on the current state of artificial intelligence, including an interview with David Chalmers and a conversation with an android version of Philip K. Dick.
7. Also in radioland, there’s an upcoming call-in program this Monday with philosophy populizer Marietta McCarty on her new book, The Philosopher’s Table: How To Start Your Philosophy Dinner Club–Monthly Conversation, Music, and Recipes.
8. Chomsky vs. Smith: Chomsky “wins“.
9. Peter Stone reviews the latest collection of G.A. Cohen’s essays, Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy. It includes a great description of Cohen’s strengths as a philosopher from Jonathan Wolff’s “G.A. Cohen: a Memoir,” the final essay in the book.
An Italian friend of mine says the following:
The Italian “plagio” has (at least) two meanings, one is the same as the English plagiarism, the other one is the “crime” (I’m not sure whether it is still a crime in the legal sense) of subduing another person’s will through psychological means. It does not refer only to homosexuality, it could be about anything. While the two meanings are still present in Italian, I believe that translating the second meaning with the English “plagiarism” would be wrong, and anyway confusing.