Mini-Heap


Here’s the latest Mini-Heap: 10 recent items from the frequently updated Heap of Links, collected in a post for your perusal and discussion.

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

  1. Archaeologists discover fully intact 17th-Century belief system — in an Ohio Congressman
  2. How a medieval bishop clamped down on Aristotle scholars and spurred multiverse theory — in our world, at least
  3. Some perspective on human knowledge and the earning of a PhD — an illustration (kind of an internet-age classic)
  4. “In response to growing anti-intellectualism and hostility towards philosophy, a crack team of the deadliest philosophers ever assembled was formed…” (EC)
  5. The sex life and sexual ideas of Augustine — in The New Yorker
  6. “A star may have an internal life that allows it to ‘feel,’ but whatever that feeling is, it is much less than the feeling of being an E. coli” — when panpsychism makes NBC news
  7. The original “brain in the vat” example and perhaps the inspiration for Nozick’s experience machine — an excerpt from “A Philosopher’s Nightmare” by Jonathan Harrison (1966)
  8. Would you sacrifice a human life to save the Mona Lisa? — a case for “yes”
  9. “Writing advice to my students that would have also been good sex advice for my high school boyfriends” — from Helena de Bres (Wellesley)
  10. New mini-philosophy course based on Game of Thrones at University of Glasgow — unfortunately not called “I drink and I know things”
Disputed Moral Issues - Mark Timmons - Oxford University Press
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Stephen Tweedale
6 years ago

Re: item #6, I don’t follow Matloff’s reasoning. Explaining Parenago’s Discontinuity is akin to the “easy” problems of consciousness. As I argue here, invoking consciousness (in the sense the hard problem is concerned with) to solve an easy problem like Parenago’s Discontinuity seems more like a strange kind of vitalism rather than panpsychism: https://stephentweedale.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/panpsychism-and-vitalism-about-stellar-objects-a-response-to-matloff/