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Category Archives: philosophy
Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires
More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon. I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and … Continue reading
How Mengzi came up with something better than the Golden Rule – Aeon
Eric Schwitzgebel is professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. He blogs at The Splintered Mind and is the author of Perplexities of Consciousness (2011) and A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures (2019). There’s … Continue reading
how to do nothing
enny Odell Follow Jun 30, 2017 · 44 min read This is the transcript of a keynote talk I gave at EYEO 2017 in Minneapolis. An adapted version appears in my book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I’d like to start off … Continue reading
Mary’s Room: A philosophical thought experiment
Imagine a neuroscientist who has only ever seen black and white things, but she is an expert in color vision and knows everything about its physics and biology. If, one day, she sees color, does she learn anything new? Is … Continue reading
Would you opt for a life with no pain?
Imagine if you could plug your brain into a machine that would bring you ultimate pleasure for the rest of your life. The only catch? You have to permanently leave reality behind. Hayley Levitt and Bethany Rickwald explore Robert Nozick’s … Continue reading
Andy Clark – Virtual Immortality
Closer To Truth Published on 2 Jan 2019 Virtual immortality is the theory that when the fullness of our mental selves can be uploaded with first-person perfection to non-biological media, then when our mortal bodies die our mental selves will … Continue reading
In defence of disorder – Aeon
The Buddhist monks from Namgyal monastery in India engage in a ritual that involves the creation of intricate patterns of coloured sand, known as mandalas. As large as three metres across, each mandala requires a couple of weeks of painstaking … Continue reading
The most groundbreaking scientist you’ve never heard of – Addison Anderson
TED-Ed Published on 1 Oct 2013 View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-most-gr… Seventeenth-century Danish geologist Nicolas Steno earned his chops at a young age, studying cadavers and drawing anatomic connections between species. Steno made outsized contributions to the field of geology, influencing … Continue reading
Kant & Categorical Imperatives: Crash Course Philosophy #35
CrashCourse Published on 15 Nov 2016 Our next stop on our tour of ethics is Kant’s ethics. Today Hank explains hypothetical and categorical imperatives, the universalizability principle, autonomy, and what it means to treat people as ends-in-themselves, rather than as … Continue reading
