by Mark English A busker. A real musician, this one, with an acoustic guitar and a small amplifier, operating on a (by then) relatively quiet city street corner late the other night. You know how it is. You hear a song that is vaguely familiar, and you want to identify it. You Google a couple of keywords or phrases from […]
By Dan Tippens In Roger William’s The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, a quantum super computer, Prime Intellect, operating on an essentially utilitarian calculus, decides that it would be best for mankind if he were to upload everyone to cyberspace, so that he could protect them from every manner of harm, give them as many possessions and as much land as they […]
Read The New York Diary Part I here. Being the experiences and adventures of a young, single, appallingly poor, surprisingly clean, twenty-something magazine proprietor and philosopher in Gotham. By Daniel Tippens In Manhattan, renting an apartment involves three actors: the customer, the broker, and the landlord. Brokers have access to two types of properties: Exclusive and non-exclusive listings. The former […]
By Daniel Tippens In 2014, Elizabeth Barnes published a paper in Ethics with the title “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability.” Barnes is disabled herself and observes that there seems to be a striking difference between philosophers and disabled individuals, when it comes to their intuitions about the well-being of disabled people. Philosophers tend to hold what she calls the “bad-difference” view: […]
By David Ottlinger I was as surprised as anyone by the rise of Donald Trump. I feel no superiority to the many commenters who, faced with what seemed impossible, have been scurrying around looking for what they had missed. I have been doing the same. In fact, it has been one of those rare moments when the seas of ink […]
by Mark English Academics and other intellectuals have always played a role in public life, and one of their most important roles has been to speak out and to engage – through newspapers and the electronic media, for example – with a wider audience. But, over the last half-century or more, I think there has been a subtle shift in […]
By Dan Tippens Should we ever moralize to others? An interesting question, if you consider how many people seem to think so. Indeed, beyond the question of whether this sort of behavior is permissible in some way, people increasingly speak as if it is their duty to tell others what they ought to do. This is evident from the fact […]
By Daniel Kaufman A fantasy… ABC News, Special Report, with Pris Pruitt. Pris Pruitt: We are preempting our scheduled broadcast of Transgendered Celebrity Housewives of Color in order to bring you the President of the United States, who momentarily will be giving a speech on the recent mass shooting in Orlando, Florida, which claimed some forty nine lives and left […]
By David Ottlinger On a bright, cold day in April (actually it was late March), undergraduate Cory Goldstein was on his San Francisco State University campus. [1] He was confronted by two fellow students, both African American, who stood in his path. Goldstein is white. The first, a young woman, looked up to the second and asked, “Do you have […]
By Paul So When I first encountered philosophy, I thought it involved improving one’s spiritual life by providing some insightful and useful instructions. So it is unsurprising that I imagined a philosopher to be a wise and noble sage who utters koan-like statements that will eventually amount to some life-changing insights conducive for practical living. Many people who haven’t had […]
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