Mini-Heap: recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected in groups of 10, here for your perusal and discussion.

If you have suggestions for the Heap of Links, send ’em in.

1. Noam Chomsky, the”American Socrates” — interview, information, illustration, a musical tribute (?) and more
2. “The crucial distinction between engaging in debate and suppressing it” — it’s weakened “when thoughtful, civil, quiet protesters get tarred with the same ‘safe-space snowflake’ brush as their violent, disruptive, or censorious counterparts”
3. “Carnap’s complete mishandling of Heidegger’s philosophy helps us to see what goes wrong in any attempt to create a perfect language” — “language’s power to bewitch is also its creative power to present startling new ways of looking at the world,” says Charlie Huenemann (Utah State)
4. Spinoza’s heresy over the nature of God — the “symbolic core” of a new novel, The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish
5. The opportunity costs and side effects of “expecting increasing technical facility in whole parts of the discipline” — commentary on the call to train philosophers in statistics and other formal methods
6. Better than straight lecturing is “active-learning,” in which “students pivot quickly from a short lecture to solving a specific problem” — Stanford physics professor and Nobel laureate Carl Weiman wants to improve undergraduate teaching
7. A new blog with a focus on African philosophy — from Omedi Ochieng (Denison)
8. “Be open to surprises” — a brief interview with Christopher Hamilton (KCL) on our era of app-enabled love
9. “Anyone who reads beyond the scandalous title will immediately recognize that the book is a critique…” — Jacob Blumenfeld (New School), translator of “Communism for Kids”
10. “In contrast to the values of morality, which depend on and encourage our similarities to each other, values like friendship (or beauty) depend on and encourage our differences” — a rich and wide-ranging interview with Alexander Nehamas (Princeton)