The Splintered Mind

Here are four things I care intensely about: being a good father, being a good philosopher, being a good teacher, and being a morally good...

Philosophers have three broad methods for settling disputes: appeal to "common sense" or culturally common presuppositions, appeal...

Here's The 20% Statistician, Daniel Lakens, on why blogs have better science than Science . Lakens observes that blogs (usually) hav...

My opinion piece in today's LA Times. You probably already know the Passover story: How Moses asked Pharoah to let his enslaved peo...

If you're an academic aiming to reach a broad international audience, it is increasingly the case that you must publish in English. P...

Like many (most?) 21st-century North Americans, I hate to be told I’ve done something ableist (or racist, or sexist). Why does it sting so ...

University administrators sometimes think it's a good idea to eliminate their philosophy departments . Some of these efforts have...

I've been reading books that advise us to try to eliminate whole classes of moral emotions. In Against Empathy , Paul Bloom describe...

" Reflective equilibrium " is sometimes treated as the method of ethics ( Rawls 1971 is the classic source). In reflective equ...

Centre for Philosophical Psychology and European Network for Sensory Research Introspection sucks! Conference with Eric Schwitzgebel, Ma...

Many philosophers have argued that you should only assert what you know to be the case (e.g. Williamson 1996 ). If you don't know that ...

The ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi and the early modern French philosopher Rousseau both argued that human nature is good . The ancie...

I've been waffling about this for years (e.g., here and here ). Today, I'll try out a multi-dimensional answer. 1. My first tho...

New essay in draft: The Unskilled Zhuangzi: Big and Useless and Not So Good at Catching Rats Abstract: The mainstream tradition in ...

David Livingstone Smith 's talk at UC Riverside, Jan 19, 2017: Introduction by Milagros Pena , Dean of UCR's College of Humanitie...

Yesterday Stephen Bannon, one of Trump's closest advisors, called the media " the opposition party ". My op-ed piece in tod...

... the deadline for application is Feb. 1. It's being run by the ever-awesome Helen De Cruz , supported by the British Society of Aes...

Usually when someone disagrees with me about a philosophical issue, I think they're about 20% correct. Once in a while, I think a comm...

Reminder: We are inviting submissions for the short story competition “Philosophy Through Fiction”, organized by Helen De Cruz (Oxford Broo...

Guest post by Susan Schneider If AI outsmarts us, I hope its conscious. It might help with the horrifying control problem – the problem ...