The calculus of harm is the topic of this recent Interchange on “On Climate Change and Non-Human Animals” with philosopher and ethicist Jeff Sebo. Beasts’ Burdens But the history of human thinking is simply full…
Browsing Category Philosophy
Building the Insanity In: Ex Machina
This is not a movie review. This is me thinking about empathy. Last night, lonely little ol’ me sat in a hotel room in Laramie, Wyomig (inauspiciously named for Jacques LaRamie, a French or French-Canadian…
Happiness Is Notoriously Difficult To Describe
Preface to the Paperback Edition of George Kateb’s Utopia and Its Enemies (1972, 1963). “Of course, no honest person claims that happiness is now a normal condition among human beings; but perhaps it could be…
Swerve Me Ye Cannot!
From Lecture #6 from John Searle’s 1984 Reith Lectures, “Minds, Brains and Science.” If libertarianism, that is the thesis of free will, were true, it appears we would have to make some really radical changes…
The Tatters of Pragmatism
I just reread the section of Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club where Chauncey Wright is introduced and his importance to the major thinkers of the time is noted. Menand begins this introduction with what seems…
The Manufactured Ant
The hominid is not an ant. The Machine is modeled on Ants. Coded directions. Social organization requires hierarchy. Culture instructs us, directs us to pattern life “appropriately.” Managing the massive polis requires NOT democracy but…
The Wages of Progress…
People get interested and involved in issues and dilemmas that primarily affect them personally, physically, specifically. I get that. Me too. Yo tambien. However, it seems to me that a particular injustice or unfairness normally…
The Dart’s the Thing: Melville on Emerson
“All men live enveloped in whale line.” Self-Reliance (Waldo) 1841 Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to…
Iniquitous Airy Abstraction, or The Lawyer’s Truth
Having neither the wherewithal nor the erudition (nor the patience, nor expectation of readership) to craft a cogent article on the fact that Western civilization as represented by governments and ideologies serving “manifest destiny” as…
Melville On Mind
…it has the savor of analogical probability. Chapter 73: STUBB AND FLASK KILL A RIGHT WHALE; AND THEN HAVE OVER HIM The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard side, where…