Mini-Heap


New links in the Heap…

  1. “Engineers of the human soul would wish to deal with…evil by suppression; literature, real literature, deals with it through the power of imaginative sublimation” — also, says Justin E.H. Smith, “philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is”
  2. “The philosophical picture of natural kinds… are not well-suited to the aims of medicine and disease classification” — an interview with Anya Plutynski (Wash. U. St. Louis) on the philosophy of cancer and other questions related to philosophy, science, and medicine
  3. “Whether we frame the relevant decision problems from the perspective of the individual or from an aggregate perspective can make a difference” — Johanna Thoma (LSE) on why the morality of artificial intelligences might rationally differ from the morality of humans
  4. “If speaking our minds is important to developing ourselves as rational creatures, and if such development is at least one important aspect of the good life, then we ought not to sacrifice it willy-nilly at the altar of social status” — Hrishikesh Joshi (Bowling Green) brings together Aristotle and an interactionist account of reason
  5. “There is a switch that can divert the trolley onto another track, away from the bill. But! Lying strapped to that length of track is the filibuster” — the filibuster variant of the trolley problem, from Alexandra Petri (via Kathleen Wallace)
  6. “Maybe in the end numbers will come to seem a little like the way logic as used in the Middle Ages might seem to us today: a framework for determining things that’s much less complete and powerful than what we now have” — have we been tricked by the limits of our epistemology into making mistakes about metaphysics in regards to numbers? (via MR)
  7. “Whatever I knew about masks and vaccines at an intellectual level, violating those expectations still felt wrong” — Evan Westra (York) on the weirdness of going maskless

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, the collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers. Discussion welcome.

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!

Warwick University MA in Philosophy
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