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By Abby Goodnough from The New York Times. "A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E...
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by Jesse Bering from Scientific American "Suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine that you have agreed, as a secret agent in some confidential military operation, to travel back in time to the year 1894. To your astonishment, it’s a success! And now—after wiping away the magical time-travelling...
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By Clare Carlisle from Gaurdian. "In order to answer these questions, we need to look back at the philosophical tradition that Kierkegaard inherited. The dominant view within this tradition, from Plato and Aristotle through to Descartes, Spinoza and Kant, is that reason is the most important aspect...
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By Ulla Schmi from Metapsychology. "Lucy O'Brien's and Matthew Soteriou's Mental Actions accounts for a phenomenon that has been a stepchild to both Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Action: Mental Action. One anthology later, that much is clear: they better had done differently....
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By Raymond Geuss from The Point. "I have what I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative...
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By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...
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By Jonny Thakkar from The Point. "Popular science is part of popular culture: our shelves teem with tomes that flatter and patronize us in equal measure, and every fallen senator is the victim of his genes. But what about popular philosophy? Is there a philosophical version of Steven Pinker? Various...
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By Rob Sharp from The Independent. "You sit cross-legged on a bamboo mat, soften your breathing and attempt to extract solace from the wisdom of one of the world's great philosophers. You read aloud from a recent translation of his work: "Learning from books as we grow from childhood to...
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by Ray Tallis from New Scientist "Most neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest...
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by Maura Pilotti in Metapsychology Online Reviews "For Carl F. Craver, the philosophy of neuroscience has a labor-intensive and challenging objective to realize and a fundamental truth to reveal. Its objective is to make explicit the 'widely accepted though largely implicit standards' upon...
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By Stephanie Schnorbus Most historians agree there was a shift away from Calvinism and toward Enlightenment thought during the eighteenth century. When discussing that shift in relation to children's literature or education, some historians use The New-England Primer as an example of unchanging Calvinism...
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By Suzanna Smith The very title of Eva Brann's book suggests the extent to which "our feelings" is a topic at once familiar and unknown. The title could have been "Feeling Your Feelings" or simply "Feeling Feelings," but she seems to have wanted to stress the fact that...
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By Brian J. Bruya Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the...
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By Jack Reynolds While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other...
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By Keith Ansell Pearson This chapter seeks to make a contribution to the growing interest in Nietzsche's relation to traditions of therapy in philosophy that has emerged in recent years. It is in the texts of his middle period (1878–82) that Nietzsche's writing comes closest to being an exercise...
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Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White...
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Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...
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By Cheng-hung Tsai Epistemology of language, a branch of both epistemology and the philosophy of language, asks what knowledge of language consists in. In this paper, I argue that such an inquiry is a pointless enterprise due to its being based upon the incorrect assumption that linguistic competence...
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The focus on complexity as a problem of the financial meltdown of 2008–2009 suggests that crisis is in part epistemological: we now know enough about financial and economic systems to be threatened by their complexity, but not enough to relieve our fears and anxieties about them. What marks the current...
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Shannon Spaulding Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of...