New in the Heap:

1. “Once you recognize the role that the mind plays in investing things with meaning and with reality, then it’s easier to to invest virtual things with meaning, just as much as one can invest physical things with meaning” — a conversation with David Chalmers (NYU) at Vox
2. The FBI file on Foucault — and how it relates to his ideas
3. “One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world” — Karl Marx interviewed at 3:16AM
4. “We seem to have strong evidence that we are biased toward explaining failures of human reasoning by positing biases. Let’s call this the ‘Bias Bias’” — thoughts on bias and paradox from Joshua Mugg (Park U.) and Muhammad Ali Khalidi (CUNY)
5. “The empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis guiding the inquiry” — an interview with philosopher Bernard Reginster & psychologist Joachim Krueger (Brown), who team teach a course on happiness
6. “Even when they deemed it a fable, there was some degree of uncertainty concerning its existence… making it a heuristic tool to understand the nature of plants” — on the scientific & philosophical value of a mythical lamblike animal-plant (via The Browser)
7. Examining utterances that are “always speaking”–most laws, for instance–can help us distinguish different meanings of “meaning” — the Legal-Phi interview blog, run by Lucas Miotto (Maastricht), returns with a conversation with Martin David Kelly (Edinburgh)

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!