Mini-Heap


New links…

  1. “Games give you a moment where you know exactly what you are doing, because there are points… and that’s not true of parenting, or research, or being a spouse…” — C. Thi Nguyen (Utah) on the Ezra Klein Show talking about good lives, the power & danger of games, what’s measurable & what’s not, & more…
  2. Last year, a lab “turned a network of hundreds of thousands of neurons into a computer-like system capable of playing the video game Pong.” — Brian Patrick Green (Santa Clara) on the philosophical questions this raises regarding the nature of minds and the moral treatment of such creations
  3. “No matter what you’re paying attention to, if you’re really paying attention to it, you’re doing your job as a philosopher” — an interview with Justin E.H. Smith (Paris) on the wide-ranging work he has been up to since he “mistakenly went off to grad school in philosophy”
  4. In 1948, Nelson Goodman gave Morton White and William Fontaine, at the time the only black philosopher at an Ivy League school (Penn), a ride down to the Eastern APA in Charlottesville — the end of the trip, recalls White, was “chilling”
  5. “It is important for all of us to try hard to understand what scientists have been discovering” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) surveys some recent findings about animals. “We humans have cognitive prejudices to overcome,” she says.
  6. “While envy reveals a dark side of human nature—our tendency to covet other people’s possessions and talents and cast an evil eye on them—it also shows a more luminous one: our tendency to improve ourselves, and strive for excellence” — Sara Protasi (Puget Sound) on four varieties of envy
  7. Anaxagoras asked whether one could cut up a circle to produce a square of equal area — it turns out you can. Here’s the story of the progress made on this old problem, and a visualization of its latest solution.

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!

 

Disputed Moral Issues - Mark Timmons - Oxford University Press
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