Mini-Heap
New links…
- “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…
- 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
- “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”
- 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”
- “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.
- “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
- 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!
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