Mini-Heap


The latest Mini-Heap…

  1. “Your own consciousness is a sort of illusion, a fiction created by your brain to help you keep track of its activities” — Keith Frankish (Sheffield, Crete) defends illusionism
  2. “What lawmakers and companies often call ‘consent’ is an abuse of the term that sanctions unfair arrangements” — Evan Selinger (RIT) on the “inconsentability” of Facebook’s facial surveillance technology, and why it is worrisome
  3. From existentialism to global responsibility — John Davenport (Fordham) is interviewed by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM
  4. “Readers will discover the minds of Karl Barks (Karl Marx), Sun-Shih-tzu (Sun Tzu), and Mary Woof-stonecraft (Mary Wollstonecraft)” — a crowd-sourced philosophy and dogs book project offers supporters the chance to have illustrations of their dogs in the book
  5. “The public good of climate change mitigation would become so valuable for at least one consumer—a country or corporation—that it would buy it for itself. The rest of us could free ride.” — Alex Rosenberg on escaping the prisoner’s dilemma of global warming
  6. Could virtual reality be an “empathy machine”? — remarks from philosophy student and filmmaker Emmanuel Ordóñez-Angulo (Oxford) (BBC)
  7. “The Good Class” — a course based on the TV show “The Good Place”, and which had the show’s creator as a guest lecturer

Mini-Heap posts appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, the ever-growing collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.

The Heap of Links consists partly of suggestions from readers; if you find something online that you think would be of interest to the philosophical community, please send it in for consideration for the Heap. Thanks!

COMMENTS POLICY

Warwick University MA in Philosophy
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John Davenport
4 years ago

I recently spent two days on Capitol Hill talking with people involved in making foreign policy. Several — from both the left and right — were quite interested in reviving the League of Democracies idea.as a way to meet rising threats like China’s new Orwellian strategy of suppressing any criticism around the world by way of its business ties, or Turkey’s obsession with destroying the Kurdish people who did most of the work in fighting ISIS for us (while Turkish forces did almost nothing against ISIS or Assad). It was surprising how many policymakers wanted to know about such theoretical matters as subsidiarity and the conditions for a legitimate democracy in connection with this proposal. I found staff members working for the House and Senate to be more philosophically educated than I expected. One young intern made an immediate connection between the League proposal and Kant’s ideas in “Perpetual Peace.” This is a good sign that even one or two philosophy courses can make a big impact on a student — and so we should encourage more degree programs to consider including a few philosophy course options!