Mini-Heap


The latest links…

  1. “There are more degrees of freedom in the universe now than in the early universe” — physicists are working on a problem with “unitarity,” an assumption at the heart of quantum mechanics that says that “something always happens”
  2. How different would philosophy of action and practical reasoning be if it were “built from the perspective of working-class agents”? — Deborah Nelson (UCR) on what “perspectives of economically disadvantaged agents could add to the dialectic”
  3. “Sexual violence is ubiquitous, and for many women it feels like the defining condition and the deepest reality of their lives. But that feeling, like all appeals to personal experience, can obscure as much as it reveals” — Amia Srinivasan (Oxford) on Andrea Dworkin
  4. “Rorty insisted that philosophy is no longer relevant to politics… That is fortunate, because his philosophical position… was exceptionally implausible” — Thomas Nagel (NYU) on Richard Rorty and America
  5. Does language shape the content of epistemology? — Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh) talks about how variations in epistemic expressions across cultures are philosophically significant
  6. The laws of nature, time, quantum mechanics, strong determinism, vagueness, and more — an interview with Eddy Keming Chen (UCSD) at 3:16AM
  7. “To understand the world more objectively or impartially, we must adopt more perspectives on it. And so it turns out that empathy makes us less, not more, biased” — Heidi L. Maibom (U. of the Basque Country, U. of Cincinnati) kicks off a symposium at Brains on her new book, “The Space Between: How Empathy Really Works”

And that video game about Arthur Schopenhauer as a student “seeking prohibited knowledge,” mention in a previous edition of Mini-Heap, is now out.

Discussion welcome.

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. 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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Timothy Sommers
1 year ago

Nagel repeats an oft-repeated, false shibboleth of America’s reality-proofed right-wing. Protesters did not spit on returning soldiers. See, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam by Vietnam veteran and sociology professor Jerry Lembcke, Or, you know, just google it for two minutes. It’s part of the standard pitch that everything was going fine until the left became too extreme. Where have I heard that before?

Timothy Sommers
1 year ago

My bad. Nagel was quoting Rorty. Approvingly, though.