Monthly Archives: April 2008

New Illusions Blog

This will be of interest to many philosophers.
Arthur Shapiro, an associate professor at Bucknell, has started an Illusions Blog. You’re gonna get a new illusion every week. Awesome.
[HT: Cognitive Daily]

Razor-filled Muffin Left in NYU Philosophy Class

…and yes some poor student took a bite. Fortunately, the student wasn’t injured.
[HT: A Philosophy Job Market Blog]

Contrastivism and the Skeptical Paradox

Here’s one standard way to formulate the skeptical paradox.

I know that I have hands.
I don’t know I’m not a brain-in-a-vat.
If I don’t know that I’m not a brain-in-a-vat, then I don’t know that I have hands.

These three sentences cannot all be true, and yet each one seems plausible. Here are the standard replies.
The Standard Replies
Option [...]

Orangutan Attempts to Hunt with Spear

Isn’t this picture amazing? The newspaper running this story claims that this is the first time an orangutan has been spotted using a tool to hunt.
If you read the article it turns out that he’s not very good at it, but it’s pretty impressive none the less.
There are a lot of areas in philosophy where [...]

Young Philosophers - Joshua Thurow

Joshua Thurow is here for our second set of lectures in the Young Philosophers Lecture Series. He gave a great talk yesterday developing and defending BonJour’s Generality Argument for the conclusion that we have some a priori knowledge.
Today he is giving an introductory level talk titled “Is Morality Real, or Do We Make it Up?” [...]

Pruss on Presentism

Alexander Pruss just posted an interesting argument against Presentism. Here is the thought experiment that gets the ball rolling.
You and I are watching an exciting game of tennis. Our particular interest is drawn by Federer’s next serve which is at a match point. With eager anticipation I speculate about how the serve will go. Federer [...]

Freewill and Cheating

Attention all philosophers - be careful when you teach your students about freewill. You may end up with a classroom full of cheaters.
A recent article in Psychological Science argues that when students believe that they do not have freewill, they are more likely to cheat.
In one of the studies students were given literature on freewill [...]

Public Acceptance of Evolution

The article is two years old, so this may not be news to some people - but it’s a pretty interesting breakdown of the percentage of people who accept evolution by country.
That graphic to your left is from the livescience.com article. It’s pretty amazing where the US is on that graphic.
Evolution is, of course, relevant [...]

Scientists Say It’s Impossible to Travel Back in Time

If you’re like me and interested in philosophy of time, you may have thought this article which is titled “You Can’t Travel Back in Time, Scientists Say” might involve some recent research that shows that time travel (contrary to what we think now) is incompatible with the current laws of physics.
It doesn’t.
It basically says that [...]

Intuition Check

I’m hoping readers will oblige me with a little intuition check. Consider the following scenario.
Cross-Check Your Perception with Another Person’s PerceptionYou seem to see a tiger. You’re very surprised to see a tiger. They don’t live around these parts. You ask a friend. Do you seem to see a tiger. Your friend says, “Yes. I [...]