Just in time for Halloween, Steve Kolowich explains in “A Brief History of Academics Writing Seriously About Zombies” that “in some corners of academe [he means philosophy!], real zombies are unnecessary: the brains eat themselves.”
Emma Green’s “The Cold Logic of Drunk People.” What happens when you ask inebriated persons about the runaway trolley?
It’s no surprise that NPR’s new series on 50 great teachers begins with Socrates. So what is the Socratic method: “… just what good teaching looks like: an engaged, passionate teacher facilitating a critical dialogue and acting as a kind of intellectual coach. Not a teacher merely lecturing or teaching to a test.”
What is philosophy good for? Robert Grant provides an excellent explanation of the value of philosophy. “By emphasising clarity, rigour and logical analysis, philosophy teaches students the structure of good arguments, a valuable transferable skill. Studies show philosophy graduates achieve the highest scores in assessments of verbal, analytical and numerical reasoning. Philosophy students make good thinkers. But philosophy is more than useful training in how to think. Its greatest value lies in what it encourages students to think about: the subject matter rather than the method. Philosophy examines the most fundamental concepts we have about what it is to exist as a human in this world: knowledge, truth, meaning, justice, beauty, freedom, consciousness. Our assumptions about these influence all aspect of our lives.”
Maybe it’s your brain that tricks you into preferring more expensive things? Or is it your mind? How foodies were duped into liking McDonald’s.
In “Jean-Paul Sartre: More Relevant Now Than Ever,” Stuart Jeffries concludes: “The Swedish Academy, then, was hardly wrong to give the 1964 literature prize to the now-neglected philosopher writer: he was as great a writer and thinker as its members then recognised. It would just have been nice if they’d checked with Sartre first.”
John Horgan interviews quantum gravity expert Carlo Rovelli. Can science attain absolute truth? “I have no idea what ‘absolute truth’ means. I think that science is the attitude of those who find funny the people saying they know something is absolute truth. Science is the awareness that our knowledge is constantly uncertain. What I know is that there are plenty of things that science does not understand yet. And science is the best tool found so far for reaching reasonably reliable knowledge.” And what is your opinion of the recent philosophy-bashing by some scientists: “Seriously: I think they are stupid in this. I have admiration for them in other things, but here they have gone really wrong. Look: Einstein, Heisenberg, Newton, Bohr…. and many many others of the greatest scientists of all times, much greater than [those who are bashing philosophy], of course, read philosophy, learned from philosophy, and could have never done the great science they did without the input they got from philosophy, as they claimed repeatedly.”