More links…

1. Gender is complicated and attributed on various bases; for example, in most of Germany “butter” is usually feminine, but not everywhere. Why? — Wolfgang de Melo (Oxford) on how languages gender nouns, and related issues
2. Should we kill one and redistribute his organs to five others who could be saved with them? No? What if the one is a pig? — a look at the ethics of transplanting pig kidneys, at Vox (with philosophers weighing in)
3. “There’s a difference between ghost stories that are accurate and ones that are real” — Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (Sam Houston State Univ.) on how we can “believe some ghost stories without believing in ghosts.”
4. “Causal reasoning should be understood in ‘functional’ terms — that is in terms of the role that it plays in human life and the human goals and purposes that it serves” — James Woodward (Pittsburgh) discusses “Causation with a Human Face” with others at a Brains symposium
5. “The misgivings that philosophers had about quantum mechanics, it turned out, weren’t entirely irrelevant after all. If physicists hadn’t been so dismissive of philosophy, they might have seen that sooner” — Sabine Hossenfelder (Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies) on stagnation and progress in physics
6. “Unravelling his turgid prose turns out to be worth the effort, affording us glimpses of how things ‘hang together’ that others miss” — William deVries (New Hampshire) on the “renaissance in Hegel appreciation” (via Preston Stovall)
7. Was Descartes “skull-blasted”? — details on the controversy over where Descartes’ skull is, and how many pieces it is in

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when 7 or so new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, a 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!