Mini-Heap

Links of interest to people interested in philosophy…

1. “I’ve even written a book on the meaning of life, but I can’t get my act together” — Owen Flanagan interviewed at Freakonomics about philosophy and addiction
2. “Mathematics highlights the limits of natural scientific explanation” — which is part of the reason that it can serve as a bridge between the sciences and the humanities, argues Gordon Gillespie
3. The surprising moral depth of the concept of “etiquette” — Amy Olberding on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast
4. “Philosophy blends the speculative and the rigorous, the literary and the formal, in a way that I find quite congenial” — an interview at 3:16AM with Michael Rescorla, for whom Bayesian decision theory is a significant philosophical tool
5. Plato: “The womb, whenever it has gone a long time without bearing fruit, becomes violently irritated and wanders all throughout the body” — Why did Plato and other ancient Greek thinkers have this view, and what kinds of treatment followed from it, asks Doug Campell
6. “His story was about faith in other people, and the toughness it required. And my story—since I was in the Profile, too—was about being pushed, and resisting it, and then being grateful for it” — The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman recounts the first profile he ever wrote; it was of Daniel Dennett
7. “Thinking deeply about the questions that come up in this class requires both technical and philosophical expertise” — at MIT, a philosopher and a computer scientist are team-teaching the ethics of computing

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.
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