Brian Leiter has done a nice little list of 10 Notable Philosophy Blogs, which gives a nice place to start if you like such things. And Dave Chalmers maintains a huge list of philosophy-related blogs, if you really want to go nuts.
There’s the beginning of a collection of funny philosophy videos on YouTube. I’ve pointed to a couple before (like the excellent Kant Attack Ad and the Noam Chomsky Show), but hopefully it will grow into a nice collection.
Terry Bisson’s classic short about minds and meat.
Brian Leiter’s “So who is the most important philosopher of the the past 200 years?” poll is done now. 600 people filled out the (long) ballot. See the full results here. Wittgenstein won, followed by Frege and Russell. Kripke is the only living top 10. All that is fine. But Kierkegaard at #10 seems crazy — like David Bowie making #7 on VH1’s Top 100 Rock Acts list. And as I’m teaching Phenomenology this semester, it seems especially bad that he beats all of those guys, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.
Sure, it’s geeky. But being a fan genetic algorithms, Terminator world, and the failure of Pascal’s wager, I can’t resist:
From the excellent xkcd – A Webcomic, “Genetic Algorithms”.
Here’s a little real world local neighborhood visual paradox that’s half Magritte’s “This is not a pipe/The Treachery Of Images” and half the Liar Paradox.
I went with my wife and son to the Albany “Winter Festival” yesterday, and we saw a collection of kid-friendly acts and some fireworks. Some of those acts were in the Crown Plaza Hotel downtown; and as we walked through the building, we came across the following glass door leading from an indoor stairway to an outside brick “courtyard” sort of area:
So, to us on the inside, the door says “This is not an exit”. The those on the outside, it says “Exit only”. So is it an exit, or not? If not, what is it?
Ah, P.D. has blogged about our chat already (Existential notes from the campaign), so why write it myself?
…Ron mentions to me that he’s been noticing the phrase “existential threat” coming up in the campaign; as in the sentence, “A nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel.” The OED informs me that the sense of “existential” meaning simply pertaining to existence dates back at least to 1693. It does seem a bit archaic or jargony, though. In the 21st-century, the word raises connotations of angst, berets, and black turtlenecks. (Unbidden, one imagines a nuclear Iran laying siege to Israeli cafes. Those guys take up tables all day, never tip, and nihilate their own Nothingness.) I’m not sure why “existential threat” is being used rather than “a threat to the existence of”, but puzzling out political idioms is like writing a blog post on a Sunday in October.
I wondered whether the strangeness of this use to our ears might be an artifact of our intimacy with the academic use of “existential”, so I’ve polled a few relatively literate non-academic non-philosophers in the last few days. They all have reported a similar oddness to the expression for them as well. So maybe it’s not an ivory tower distortion, but really that there’s a strange bit of trying to fancy-up the political language here.
I will refrain from the temptation to go on an extended riff of jokes that combine geopolitical positioning with quasi-technical characterizations of Sartre or Heidegger. For this, you should be grateful.
The excellent “Philosophy Bites” podcast series has a nice 13-minute talk with the also-excellent Barry Smith about how results from neuroscience are replacing thought experiments in discussions in the philosophy of mind.
Nice illustration of a good illusion:
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