Nozick’s classic discussion of ‘experience machines’ in Anarchy, State and Utopia attempted to show that, contrary to the ‘hedonistic’ thesis, experiencing pleasure is not all that matters to us. The ‘experience machine’, of course, is a kind of simulated reality wherein the subject would be able to choose pleasurable experiences that would be indistinguishable from [...]
Video of Dr. Cartwright's talk at the Rotman Institute in March of 2012: Pot Belly Pig Secrets zp8497586rq
Nancy Cartwright began the second installment of her Rotman Lecture (‘Wiser use of Social Science’) with a discussion of the tragic death of 17 month old Peter Connelly, a case of child neglect and abuse that led to a widespread media controversy and to a public inquiry into Britain’s child services and social services programmes. [...]
An interview with Rotman Institute Visiting Fellow John Bolender John Bolender has been a Visiting Fellow in the Rotman Institute during the 2011-2012 academic year. He is a philosopher of mind whose primary interest is cognition. Specifically, he has inquired into how the computational core of language may crucially enter into uniquely human cognitive capacities, [...]
It is my pleasure to introduce the Rotman Institute of Philosophy Events Planning and Outreach Committee (REPOC for short). REPOC organizes and helps Rotman Institute members carry out public outreach and science education events. On Tuesday, April 2nd, REPOC held its inaugural event, the first in a series of Science Pub Nights. At Science Pub Nights, [...]
A while back in the article “Science, Values and Democracy” I argued that science alone cannot determine policy and that values and politics play an integral part of the decision making process. If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is an article by psychiatry profess or Keith Humphreys talking about values in [...]
Here are links to letters published in the London Free Press discussing two of their recent editorials: Veils during Citizenship Oaths: http://www.lfpress.com/comment/letters/home.html?p=48009&x=letters&l_publish_date=&s_publish_date=&s_keywords=brandt&s_topic=&s_letter_type=Letter%20to%20Editor&s_topic=&s_letter_status=Active&s=letters Como Conquistar Un Hombre Regulations Governing Prostitution: http://www.lfpress.com/comment/letters/home.html?p=49989&x=letters&l_publish_date=&s_publish_date=&s_keywords=brandt&s_topic=&s_letter_type=Letter%20to%20Editor&s_topic=&s_letter_status=Active&s=letters zp8497586rq
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an account of a divisive controversy in linguistics concerning the features of an obscure Amazonian language, Pirahã. Allegedly absent in Pirahã is 'recursion'—the embedding of sentences within sentences—a feature that is (supposedly) central to human language according to the dominant Chomskyan account. The Chronicle article is unfortunately focused [...]
It is not usually within the aegis of a philosophy blog to comment on controversies within popular media; but in certain particularly illustrative cases, exceptions can be made. Here we are once again concerned with public policy, expertise, and argument: Sandra Fluke’s. It might seem late to comment on an story that is already ‘old’ [...]
Steve Sherwood, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, provides a thoughtful, if schematic, discussion of historical scientific controversy, linking past polemics to present strife on climate change. Both Copernican heliocentrism and Einstein's theory of relativity met with opposition from critics that was as much moral-political [...]