Mini-Heap


Here’s the latest Mini-Heap—our occasional collection of 10 recent items of interest to philosophers (and others interested in philosophy) from the Daily Nous Heap of Links.

(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.)

  1. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is famous, but it “was a step backwards, and its fame appears to rest partly on collective amnesia” — during his formative years, Quine could have (but apparently didn’t) consulted a widely read anthology “in order to find particularly neat statements of what came to be some of his central positions”
  2. Philosophers on Kanye’s recent philosophizing — finally, something philosophers agree on
  3. ” We… ostracize and curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of Blessed God and with the consent of this entire holy congregation.” — Steven Nadler (Wisconsin) on which of Spinoza’s ideas were responsible for that happening
  4. Human artifacts don’t last that long, geologically speaking — so perhaps ours is not the first industrial civilization to have emerged on Earth (via Sammuel Byer)
  5. Truth-conditional semantics, genetics, and race — a brief look at the work of Quayshawn Spencer (U. Penn)
  6. “Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, ‘Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?’” — Sartre had a bad trip
  7. “I think incivility is the kind of tool that would make us worse if we used it” — thoughtful remarks from Liam Kofi Bright (Carnegie Mellon) on the importance of civility and “ostentatious decency”
  8. Philosophers should be more willing to take up questions about the meaning of life — says Kieran Setiya (MIT)
  9. “Descartes was not nuts to ponder if everything he experienced was simply just a evil demon trying to troll him.” — media, information, knowledge, and the failure of expert systems (via Eric Winsberg)
  10. A short story about transferring memories, with commentary by two philosophers — at Slate (via Daniel Brunson)

 

plus:  “People are mad at me again because they don’t read carefully” — a future classic

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