New links…

1. Intellectual jokes: good. Smart people jokes: not so good. — so says Linch Zhang, with some good examples of the former
2. “A story about the absurd, immense power of the giving of reasons” — philosophy professor Jeffrey Kaplan tells a harrowing true story as part of an absolutely brilliant commencement address
3. “Democracy… drives social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition” — Michael Fuerstein explains, focusing on the example of same-sex marriage
4. “One can teach… serious matters through play” — that’s Leibniz, who, along with Johann Amos Comenius, can help us understand how imagination makes it possible for play to contribute to learning, says Lucia Oliveri
5. “Shame serves as a robustly liberal alternative to… political violence” — Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defends “social shame and cultural pressure” in a new regular column at Boston Review
6. “Working in the interstices of the fields of first-order inquiry, philosophy helps all of them, and helps humanity to take full advantage of their epistemic achievements” — Philip Kitcher’s 2021 Dewey Lecture
7. “Those of us who remember the War on Terror have an obligation to younger generations—and to the future—to pass on the painful lessons that we learned” — Daniel Muñoz worries about a “domestic rerun” of a grave American mistake

Mini-Heap posts usually appear when several 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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