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.
- Archaeologists discover fully intact 17th-Century belief system — in an Ohio Congressman
- How a medieval bishop clamped down on Aristotle scholars and spurred multiverse theory — in our world, at least
- Some perspective on human knowledge and the earning of a PhD — an illustration (kind of an internet-age classic)
- “In response to growing anti-intellectualism and hostility towards philosophy, a crack team of the deadliest philosophers ever assembled was formed…” (EC)
- The sex life and sexual ideas of Augustine — in The New Yorker
- “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
- 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)
- Would you sacrifice a human life to save the Mona Lisa? — a case for “yes”
- “Writing advice to my students that would have also been good sex advice for my high school boyfriends” — from Helena de Bres (Wellesley)
- New mini-philosophy course based on Game of Thrones at University of Glasgow — unfortunately not called “I drink and I know things”
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/