Wide Scope A philosophy blog that ranges over philosophy and other fun stuff.

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I just posted Joshua Spencer’s research talk titled “A New Counterexample to Principles of Alternative Possibilities.” Check it out. Aside: This is by far the fastest, I’ve been able to get these talks up (thanks Flip HD). ...

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I coach an ethics bowl team. The Northeast Regional Cases are up, but people have been having problems with the site. I’m posting a link to the cases this year so that other people in the Northeast have another website to grab a copy of the cases. I also want a place for my own team ...

Sarah called me yesterday and said, “There’s some philosopher on the Today Show, and Meredith is asking him about whether or not philosophy is relevant to people today. They’re also talking about all those trolley cases that you love to talk about.” I couldn’t find the video yesterday. But I found it today. Here it is. ...

I woke up this morning to discover that I’m a 3 Quarks Daily Philosophy Prize 2009 Finalist. The contest started out with about 60 nominees, and now it’s down to 9 finalists. The finalists will be judged by Daniel Dennett. He’ll pick three winners and write up little comments about each of his choices. Thanks to the ...

This story showed up on Tech Crunch about a week ago. I’m just now getting around to reading it. It’s about two Belgian college students who were caught cheating on exams. It looks like there was already some evidence against them, but it was their Facebook conversations (presumably public wall postings) that finally convinced the academic ...

I just posted Helen’s introductory level talk “Saving the Greatest Number” over at the Young Philosophers site. ...

Joshua Knobe has run a series of experiments that suggest that our intuitions about whether or not an action was intentional may be influenced by whether or not the effects of the action were harmful/bad. Here’s a brief summary of one of those studies. In a case where an exec sought to max company profits knowing ...

UPDATE: I think Mike Almeida is right. The response I lay out won’t work. Suppose you have the option of saving a drowning child. Further suppose that Lewisian Modal Realism is true. Here are your options. SAVE THE CHILD You save the child. However, consider what is true about the pluriverse if you save the child. If you ...