There has been a lot of talk in the United States recently about same-sex marriage. One obvious question is sociological: What are the implications of marriage equality for the longstanding social institution of marriage? But there are philosophical questions as well. What is the purpose of marriage? What are the goods that marriage helps individuals realize? Once marriage is no longer understood to be restricted to heterosexual couples, must we then question whether it should be restricted to c...
Oct 01, 2015•1 hr 8 min
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in different lighting conditions or when seen from different angles, and the basic physical elements that make up the rose don’t have colors. So is color instead a property of a mental state, or a relation between a perceiving mind and an object? In Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Col...
Sep 15, 2015•1 hr 6 min
The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s ability to select one’s own path in life – to choose one’s occupation, one’s values, one’s hobbies, one’s possessions, and so on – without the intrusion or supervision of others. John Stuart Mill, who held a version of this view, argued that it is in choosing for ourselves that we develop not only self-...
Sep 01, 2015•1 hr 1 min
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word? Chad Engelland addresses these and related questions in Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 2015). Engelland, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas, explores the way in which ostension crosses the Cartesian boundary between body and mind. Drawing on hi...
Aug 14, 2015•1 hr 3 min
There is a movement in contemporary philosophy known as “experimental philosophy” or “x-phi” for short. It proceeds against the backdrop of a critique of contemporary analytic philosophy. According to the Xi-phi critique, analytic philosophers rely too heavily on an unsound method which involves arguing for philosophical conclusions from premises whose force rests solely in what philosophers find “intuitive” or “obvious.” Using polling and survey methods, experimental philosophers show that clai...
Aug 01, 2015•1 hr 20 min
Almost 400 years ago, Galileo wrote that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Today, mathematics is integral to physics and chemistry, and is becoming so in biology, economics, and other sciences, although amid great controversy. The messy reality of biological creatures and their social relations cannot be captured in mathematical models or computer simulations, it is argued. But what is the relation between mathematics and physical reality? Do highly abstract mathemati...
Jul 15, 2015•1 hr 9 min
In a liberal democracy, citizens share political power as equals. This means that they must decide laws and policies collectively. Yet they disagree about fundamental questions regarding the value, purpose, and meaning of life. What role should their convictions concerning these matters play in their public activity as citizens? According to familiar answers, citizens must bracket or constrain the role that their religious convictions plays in their public lives. But many religious citizens find...
Jul 01, 2015•1 hr 11 min
In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent University examine how the findings of cognitive science can and cannot be used to draw conclusions about the rationality of religious belief. They examine the types and role of the cognitive processes at work in these arguments, such as cause and effect and inference to the best explanation. They also c...
Jun 15, 2015•1 hr 3 min
We typically make decisions based on a projection of their likely outcome with respect to the things we value. We seek to maximize of enhance the things we think are good, and minimize what we think is bad. But sometimes we are faced with a decision where we must choose whether to undergo an experience that will likely transform us in fundamental ways, perhaps even change our sense of what’s valuable or important. Indeed, sometimes we must choose whether to in effect become a different kind of p...
Jun 01, 2015•57 min
Is the present time uniquely real, or do past or future equally exist? Does saying the word “now” simply express the speaker’s current position in time the way “here” expresses her current position in space? In Time, Language, and Ontology: The World from the B-Theoretic Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015), M. Joshua Mozersky, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, argues for ontological commitment to past, present, and future alike, and provides an account of tensed la...
May 15, 2015•1 hr 13 min
Propaganda names a familiar collection of phenomena, and examples of propaganda are easy to identify, especially when one examines the output of totalitarian states. In those cases, language and imagery are employed for the purpose of shaping mass opinion, forming group allegiances, constructing worldviews, and securing compliance. It is undeniable that propaganda is employed by liberal democratic states. But it is also undeniable that the use of propaganda is especially problematic in liberal d...
May 01, 2015•1 hr 5 min
The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try to text and drive at the same time, and our attention is captured when we suddenly hear our name pop out from the conversational hubbub of a noisy party. But what is attention? How seriously should we take this or other metaphors as giving us insight into the nature of attention? In Attention (Routledge...
Apr 15, 2015•1 hr 7 min
There’s a longstanding debate in political philosophy regarding the fundamental point or aim of justice. According to one prominent view, the point of justice is to neutralize the influence of luck over individuals’ shares of basic social goods. This view is known as luck egalitarianism. It holds, roughly, that inequality is consistent with justice only if it is due to individuals’ choices rather than their luck. Luck egalitarianism has an undeniable intuitive appeal, and hence has been the subj...
Apr 01, 2015•1 hr 10 min
What is it to be the same person over time? The 17th-century British philosopher John Locke approached this question from a forensic standpoint: persons are identified over time with an appropriately related series of psychological states, in particular a chain of memories, and our interest in identifying persons in this way stems from our interest in holding people responsible for their actions. Locke’s psychological account of persons remains highly influential today, although his forensic app...
Mar 15, 2015•1 hr 9 min
It is generally accepted that lying is morally prohibited. But theorists divide over the nature of lying’s wrongness, and thus there is disagreement over when the prohibition might be outweighed by competing moral norms.There is also widespread agreement over the idea that promises made under conditions of coercion or duress lack the moral force to create obligations. Finally, although free speech is widely seen as a primary value and right, there is an ongoing debate over the kind of good that ...
Mar 02, 2015•1 hr 10 min
The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditati...
Feb 15, 2015•1 hr 5 min
Contemporary advances in technology have in many ways made the world smaller. It is now possible for vast numbers of geographically disparate people to interact, communicate, coordinate, and plan. These advances potentially bring considerable benefits to democracy, such as greater participation, more inclusion, easier dissemination of information, and so on. Yet they also raise unique challenges, as the same technology that facilitates interaction also enables surveillance, as well as new forms ...
Feb 01, 2015•1 hr 6 min
The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, the American psychologist William James, and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell shared an interest in explaining the mind in naturalistic terms – unified with the rest of nature, not metaphysically distinct as Descartes argued. In The Realistic Empiricism of Mach, James, and Russell: Neutral Monism Reconceived (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Erik C. Banks delves into the movement that these three figures launched, for the first time showing how they p...
Jan 15, 2015•1 hr 9 min
It is widely accepted that in uttering sentences we sometimes perform distinctive kinds of acts. We declare, assert, challenge, question, corroborate by means of speech; sometimes we also use speech to perform acts such as promising, commanding, judging, pronouncing, and christening. Yet it seems that in order to perform an act of, say, promising, one must have a certain kind of normative status; at the very least, one must be accountable. Similarly, in order to issue a command, one must, in som...
Jan 01, 2015•1 hr 5 min
Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joelle Proust considers the nature of metacognition from a naturalistic perspective, drawing on recent psychological research as well as a range of philosophical work in philosophy of mind and philosophy of action. In this erudite and co...
Dec 15, 2014•1 hr 3 min
Modern democracy is build around a collection of moral and political commitments. Among the most familiar and central of these concern voting. It is commonly held that legitimate government requires a system of universal suffrage. Yet, democrats tend to hold that certain exclusions are permissible. For example, it is commonly thought that children and the mentally impaired may justifiably be disenfranchised. We also tend to think that the disenfranchisement of felons and non-citizen residents is...
Dec 01, 2014•1 hr 9 min
What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life After Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Eric Steinhart presents core tenets of digitalism, a theology that transposes philosophical and theological concepts, principles, and arguments about the self, the universe and the nature of divinity into the conceptu...
Nov 15, 2014•1 hr 8 min
One striking feature of humans is that fact that we sometimes act together. We garden, paint, sing, and dance together. Moreover, we intuitively recognize the difference between our simply walking down the street alongside each other and our walking down the street together. The former involves coordinated action and intention; but the latter involves something more–what we might think of as a shared intention. Once we recognize that shared activity involved share intentions, a range of distinct...
Nov 01, 2014•1 hr 8 min
A day after Stephen Yablo bought his daughter Zina ice cream for her birthday, Zina complained, “You never take me for ice cream any more.” Yablo initially responded that this was obviously false. But Yablo, who is professor of philosophy and linguistics at MIT, also noticed something interesting: that Zina said something true about their formerly regular activity of going for ice cream, and that she expressed this truth by saying something false. Wrapping truth in falsehood is common in ordinar...
Oct 15, 2014•1 hr 9 min
Our legal systems are rooted in rules and procedures concerning the burden of proof, the weighing of evidence, the reliability and admissibility of testimony, among much else. It seems obvious, then, that the law is in large part an epistemological enterprise. And yet when one looks at the ways in which judges have wielded epistemological concepts, there is plenty of room for concern. In Evidence Matters: Science, Proof, and Truth in the Law (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Susan Haack brings...
Oct 01, 2014•1 hr 25 min
A few years back, Frank Jackson articulated a thought experiment about a brilliant neuroscientist who knew everything there was to know about the physical world, but who had never seen colors. When she sees a red tomato for the first time, she learns something new: what it’s like to experience red. The Knowledge Argument has been a key move in philosophical debates about whether the mind is just the brain. In Knowledge, Thought, and the Case for Dualism (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Richar...
Sep 15, 2014•1 hr 11 min
Our moral lives are constructed out of projects, goals, aims, and relationships or various kinds. The pursuit of these projects, and the nurturing of certain relationships, play central role in giving our lives their meaning and value. This much is commonplace. What is not frequently noticed is that our practices of valuing and finding meaning in our lives draw upon the presumption that others will outlive us, that there will be generations of human beings continuing into the future. One way to ...
Sep 01, 2014•1 hr 1 min
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations and the Science of the Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Anne Jaap Jacobson, Professor of Philosophy and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, argues that what is needed is a different kind of theory of what mental representations are, one that reflects the way the notion of...
Aug 15, 2014•1 hr 7 min
The long tradition of moral philosophy employs a familiar collection of basic concepts. These include concepts like agent, act, intention, consequence, responsibility, obligation, the right, and the good. Typically, contemporary moral theorists simply inherit these conceptual materials, and they use them to stake their positions within the terrain that is established by these concepts. But we must recognize the possibility that the categories and distinctions that form moral philosophy’s bedrock...
Aug 01, 2014•1 hr 5 min
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea has been elaborated since in a number of very different ways, but in some form it remains a core idea of the cognitive sciences today. In Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, 2013), Marcin Milkowski, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Mind of the Polish Academy o...
Jul 15, 2014•1 hr 7 min
