Mini-Heap
A new mini-heap:
- The origin of Peter Singer’s Instagram account — a student asked herself, “what’s the most good I can do?” (The New Yorker)
- The campaign to raise awareness about Lady Mary Shepherd — one of Scotland’s earliest female philosophers
- Curved Spacetimes: where Friedrich Nietzsche meets Virginia Woolf — an upcoming performance by philosopher Barbara Gail Montero and the Logos Dance Collective
- “Into the Coast” is a site of video interviews with philosophers — 10 so far (the site’s name comes from Gareth Evans’ metaphor for the rare times in which philosophy comes easy: “like riding a surf into the coast”)
- Philosophy professor by day and bassist by night — a brief article on philosopher Marc Bobro (City College, Santa Barbara) and his punk band, Crying 4 Kafka
- How to write better when you’re working in the more formal parts of philosophy — advice from Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
- Philosopher wins defamation lawsuit — against someone on Twitter who accused him of being a pedophile
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!
On the defamation lawsuit, I knew Britain has much stricter libel laws than the US but I’m still shocked that Grayling won. I’d have thought that even if an outright assertion that P would be libelous, “I’d bet that P”, in general would and should not be considered libelous. After all, it might be literally true, even while P is false. And saying “I’d bet that Grayling is a pedophile” clearly implicates that you don’t know he is, in a way that an unhedged assertion does not.
Doesn’t “I’d bet that he’s a pedophile” also implicate that you have some grounds or evidence for believing that he is, or that you think it’s probable that he is? So the false statement being communicated would be “Grayling is probably a pedophile”. And this statement seems to me nearly as harmful as the unhedged one.