The Splintered Mind

Not quite up to doing a blog post this week, after the death of my father on the 18th. Instead, I post this picture of a highly energy effi...

My father, Kirkland R. Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel) died Sunday. Here are some things I want you to know about him. Of teaching, he s...

Wednesday, I argued that artificial intelligences created by us might deserve more moral consideration from us than do arbitrarily-chosen hu...

Suppose that we someday create artificial beings similar to us in their conscious experience, in their intelligence, in their range of emoti...

10. Listicles destroy the narrative imagination and subtract the sublimity from your gaze. 9. The numerosities of nature never equal the n...

Popular summaries of fun psychology articles regularly float to the top of my Facebook feed. I was particularly struck by this fact on Mond...

I guess it's a tradition for me now, posting a retrospect of the past year's writings on New Year's Day. (Here are the retrospec...

According to a broad class of materialist views, conscious experiences -- such as the experience of pain -- do not supervene on the local p...

I used to think dreidel was a poorly designed game of luck. Now I realize that its "bugs" are really features! Dreidel is the mo...

In Poetic Justice , her classic defense of the moral value of the "literary imagination", Martha Nussbaum writes about the childre...

Let's say the world is morally ordered if good things come to those who act morally well and bad things come to those who act morally b...

I know where my car is parked. It's in the student lot on the other side of the freeway, Lot 30. How confident am I that my car is pa...

Alone in my office, it can seem reasonable to me to have only about a 99% to 99.9% credence that the world is more or less how I think it is...

Regular readers of The Splintered Mind will remember the recent series of posts offering 36 professional philosophers' recommendations o...

Today I'm thinking about Schindler's truck and what it suggests about the moral psychology of one of the great heroes of the Holocau...

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me what book written in the last 30 years changed my mind . Instead of trying to be clever, I went...

Consider two possible views of the relationship between philosophy and science fiction. On the first view, science fiction simply illustra...

... here ! This mega-list of about 360 recommendations is compiled from the lists I've been rolling out over the past several weeks. ...

I have been asked to be an evaluator for the 2014-2015 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report . Contrary to what seems to be a widespr...