Recent links…

Discussion welcome.

1. “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands” — Zadie Smith on the morality of the student protests, and the critiques of them
2. Political change, pragmatism, and Buddhism — Scott R. Stroud (Texas) on Bhimrao Ambedkar’s “purposive reconstruction of Buddhism as his new way of creating democratic habits in individuals”
3. “The lesson is that empirical complexities cannot just be ignored away by focusing on those areas least accessible to empirical investigation” — David Strohmaier (Cambridge) on a broader lesson of the debate over the question of what words are
4. What did ancient Greek music sound like? — the aulos solo is especially good
5. “Philosophy should, to some extent, concern itself with cultural traditions that… pack philosophical commitments into cultural expressions where these commitments are not defended in an argumentative way” — an interview with Justin Smith-Ruiu
6. “Rather than staking out our hill to die on, we should be more open to uncertainty and experimentation” — a physicist, a philosopher, and a psychologist are interviewed about their new co-authored book on scientific thinking
7. Even the “utopian ideal will be politically polarized, though not (as in actual societies) due to the epistemic failures of citizens” — Adam Gjesdal on “a deep limitation of normative thought”

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. Thank you.

Previous Edition