Friday Mini-Heap…

1. The popular caricature of scientific method “is not just bad philosophy, entirely inadequate to account for scientific practice. It is also bad history, with tenuous links to the growth of early modern science” — Philip Kitcher (Columbia) on science and its methods, in a review of Why Trust Science by Naomi Oreskes (Harvard)
2. At the end of Reasons and Persons, Parfit asks about the relative differences between three possible futures — a team of researchers has now asked thousands of people the same thing. What can we learn from their findings?
3. The Spring 2020 Met Gala—the famous fashion party hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute—will be based on a philosophical concept — “Employing Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée (duration), it will explore how clothes generate temporal associations that conflate past, present, and future”
4. “Although individuals may have a right to be misinformed and to share their false beliefs with others, there is no legal framework entitling them to have those beliefs amplified by algorithms.” — Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall (UC Irvine) on the problems of social media and how to best approach them
5. Continuum of Selves is a “jazz-philosophy fusion project” — it’s led by James Tartaglia (Keele) and funded by Adrian Piper’s foundation
6. Depictions of fields like ethnic studies, gender studies, etc., as “harboring the academic villains of popular imagination” are leveraged into broader critiques of higher ed — but there are very few faculty working in these areas (via Jason Stanley)
7. Will philosophy beat hydroengineering in post-apocalyptic importance? — geek fun disguised as what may be the world’s weirdest debate

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!

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