Philosophy
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: How to Combat Modern Slavery, philosophy, morality, ethics, behavior, poverty, culture, slavery, human rights, human values, Kevin Bales, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this moving yet pragmatic talk, Kevin Bales explains the business of modern slavery, a multibillion-dollar economy that underpins some of the worst industries on earth. He shares stats and personal stories from his on-the-ground research -- and names the price of freeing every slave on earth right now.
Kevin Bales is the co-founder of Free the Slaves, whose mission is to end all forms of human slavery within the next 25…
grrlscientist | March 21, 2010tags: trololololo man, eduard khill, youtube meme, scientology, religion, cults, mind control, philosophy, parody, offbeat, beliefs, insanity, russian rickroll, streaming video
OMG, the evil cult of Scientology has been the victim of a Russian Rickroll!
jstemwedel | February 19, 2010As promised, here's the video of the February 16, 2010 panel discussion at UCLA about the science and ethics of animal-based research, sponsored by Bruins for Animals and Pro-Test for Science.
UCLA Panel on Science and Ethics of Animal Research from Dario Ringach on Vimeo.
The video runs for about 2.5 hours, so you might want to grab a glass of water or a cup of coffee before you launch it.
pharyngula | February 5, 2010I haven't had a chance yet to listen to the whole of Kim Stanley Robinson's talk at Duke, but what I've seen so far is very good. I'm more posting this here so I have a reminder to watch the rest once I get home, but nothing is stopping you all from enjoying it now.
science is a Utopian project; it began as a Utopian project and it has remained so ever since, an attempt to make a better world. And this is not always the view taken of science because its origins and its life have been so completely wrapped up with capitalism itself. They began together. You could consider them to be some kind…
jstemwedel | December 2, 2009One is that my hands are tired from writing all those comments, which means I don't feel like typing.
Another is described in this brief video.
jstemwedel | November 22, 2009The younger Free-Ride offspring's soccer team has been playing in a regional tournament this weekend, and we're girding our loins and guarding our shins to go out and play a second day of tournament games. I'm happy that they're playing so well, but I have to say, watching games in late November is a different experience than spectating in mid-September. (Bone-chilling cold + bad sunburn = some kind of tangible sign of a parent's devotion. If only one's child took it seriously.)
Anyway, in the meantime, I wanted to test your knowledge in the identification of some turkeys.
Specifically,…
jstemwedel | November 9, 2009Because, as it happens, I tend to notice patterns in student papers, then end up musing on them rather than, you know, buckling down and just working through the stack of papers that needs grading.
In my philosophy of science class, I have my students write short essays (approximately 400 words) about central ideas in some of the readings I've assigned. Basically, it's a mechanism to ensure that they grapple with an author's view (and its consequences) before they hear me lecture about it. (It's also a way to get students writing as many words as they are required to write in an upper…
jstemwedel | November 5, 2009Including this question which, apparently, led a popular search engine to direct someone to this very blog:
Is philosophy tested on animals?
No. No, it isn't.
(Actually, it's not clear to me that all of it is tested on humans, either.)
grrlscientist | November 1, 2009tags: religion, belief system, ethics, values, lifestyle
Here's my results from Belief-o-matic, an online questionnaire that uses a series of 20 questions to help identify your belief system;
What did this quiz tell you your belief system should be?
jstemwedel | October 30, 2009No, I'm not going to be able to get away with claiming that truth is beauty, and beauty, truth.
The first issue in understanding truth is recognizing that truth is a property of a proposition. (What's a proposition? A proposition is a claim.) A proposition that is true has a certain kind of correspondence with the world about which it is making a claim. A proposition that is false does not have this correspondence.
At the most basic level, what we want from this correspondence seems pretty obvious: what the propositions says about the world matches up with how the world actually is.
So,…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2009Actually, it might be a philosophical question.
Younger offspring: One of my classmates told me that you fart every second.
Dr. Free-Ride: What, me personally?
Younger offspring: No, humans.
Dr. Free-Ride: Each individual human farts every second?
Younger offspring: Yeah.
Dr. Free-Ride: No, I don't think so.
Elder offspring: Well, there's gas exchange with your butt all the time.
Dr. Free-Ride: I don't think super-low levels of gas exchange count.
Younger offspring: Gas-exchange is a fart.
Dr. Free-Ride: No, I think there needs to be a macroscopic quantity of gas released all at once for it…
jstemwedel | October 6, 2009Via Twitter, PalMD wondered if I'd seen this brief item on the New York Times Idea of the Day blog.
Writing in The Philosophers' Magazine, Brooke Lewis says tallies of full-time faculty at top American and British colleges show women make up less than a fifth of philosophy departments in Britain and little more than that in the United States. This suggests "that gender representation is far less balanced in philosophy than it is in many other humanities subjects."
Indeed, on quick examination, the gender balance among faculty in philosophy departments looks an awful lot like the gender…
jstemwedel | September 9, 2009In my philosophy of science class yesterday, we talked about Semmelweis and his efforts to figure out how to cut the rates of childbed fever in Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s. Before we dug into the details, I mentioned that Semmelweis is a historical figure who easily makes the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning. (At the very least, Semmelweis is discussed in no fewer than three of the readings, by three separate authors, assigned for the course.)
But this raises the question: what else belongs on the Top Ten list of Great Moments in Scientific Reasoning?
Given…
jstemwedel | September 4, 2009
(From here.)
Not that we won't make plenty of other mistakes, but they'll run more to Nietzsche than Rand.
Come to think of it, the eternal recurrence test is probably just right for bedtime stories, isn't it?
jstemwedel | September 1, 2009I guess I suspected that this might be a problem, but it really sank in when a close colleague told me the other day that he was freaked out by it. And I'd hate to have you hear it from anyone else but me.
I'm a decaf drinker.
Yeah, I know. Nowadays you can't count on a philosopher to smoke like a chimney, or to be drunk off her ass at work, or even to wear a beret.
But just as we can count on gravity to keep pulling matter toward the center of the earth, you'd think you could count on a philosopher to be hopped up on caffeine, preferably delivered via strong coffee in a café where…
jstemwedel | August 22, 2009In my inbox today:
I'm curious, what credentials (academic or otherwise) does one need to become a philosopher?
For the purposes of employment in a university philosophy department, a graduate degree in philosophy (usually a Ph.D. but sometimes an M.A.) is standard. Kind of like a chemist can be expected to have a degree in chemistry, or a biologist to have a degree in biology.
If you're an off-the-books philosopher, I imagine this requirement might be relaxed.
Now, whether there are good reasons to accept the degree-linked-credentialist status quo (for philosophy or any other academic…
jstemwedel | August 19, 2009At Philosophers' Playground, Steve Gimbel ponders the pedagogically appropriate way to label William Dembski:
I'm wrapping up work on my textbook Methods and Models: A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science and have run into a question. ...
The evolutionary biology track's final piece deals with William Dembski's work on intelligent design theory. Therein lies the question. The way the exercises are laid out is in three parts labeled The Case, The Scientist, and Your Job. The second part is a brief biographical sketch (a paragraph, just a couple sentences about the person's…
jstemwedel | August 6, 2009At bedtime, after the reading of the stories, the younger Free-Ride offspring lay upon Dr. Free-Ride's better half, and Dr. Free-Ride's better half responded by making strangling noises. Of course, I called in from the other room to remind the children that homicide, whether intentional or accidental, is forbidden in the house.
Younger offspring: I'm not killing him! He's pretending!
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: Actually, I'm pretending to be alive.
Elder offspring: Pretending means you are alive. If you weren't alive, you wouldn't be able to pretend anything.
Dr. Free-Ride: Well played,…
emjohnson | July 28, 2009Conservatives and liberals conflict over their basic views on human nature.
As an evolutionary anthropologist and student of history, I'm always fascinated to learn what politically motivated figures have to say about human nature. It's one area of life where people require zero expertise but can still claim authority in. A case in point appears in Newsweek where Yuval Levin, Fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, insists that "Partisanship is Good" because it is based on conflicting assumptions about human nature.
Our deepest disagreements coalesce into two broad views…