18 October 2019
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Oct 4, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Bhikkhu Bodhi
- What is the foundation of Buddhist ethics?
- Experiencing not-self
- Buddhism is a synthesis of consequentialism and virtue ethics
- The origins of Buddhism’s concern for animal welfare
- Does the Buddha want you to be vegetarian?
- Why isn’t there more anti-militarist activism among Buddhists?
- Trying to comply with the Buddhist ideal of “right speech”
- Mental defilements and their eradication
- Does Buddhism’s emphasis on equanimity discourage activism?
Sep 20, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Agnes Callard
- Why Agnes once lay down on the yellow line in the middle of the road
- What explains “akrasia,” or weakness of will?
- Agnes’s book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming
- How Agnes views free will and self-creation
- How do you become the “you” that you want to be?
- Aspiration and the divine
- Agnes’s forthcoming book on how Socrates changed the rules
Sep 16, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & David Ottlinger
- The fight, and meta-fight, in philosophy over trans issues
- David’s essay on philosophy and activism
- The admonition to “go read the literature”
- Dan: The profession needs to push back against the mob
- Should philosophers avoid signing petitions?
- David regrets the “neglect of the ordinary virtues” in this battle
- How professors should teach controversial subjects
Sep 3, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & E. John Winner
- A brief history of 20th-century literary criticism
- John’s battles against radical feminists as a grad student at SUNY Albany
- Post-structuralism and “how modernity failed itself”
- English department politics
- John: “Postmodernity is all around us”
- Postmodernity in the world vs. in the academy
- Post-postmodernism and cultural stagnancy
Sep 1, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Alexander Wendt
- Why Alex shifted from international relations to quantum physics
- Alex: “We are walking wave functions”
- Do the origins of consciousness and free will lie in the wave collapse?
- Quantum decision theory and human irrationality
- The advantage of viewing humanity as quantum rather than classical
- How a nation-state is like a quantum state
- Alex: Language is best understood quantumly
- The possibility of collective consciousness
Aug 8, 2019 —
Daniel Kaufman & Crispin Sartwell
- Crispin’s recent essay, “Western Philosophy as White Supremacism”
- Dan accuses Crispin of ahistorical revisionism
- Descartes as a product of his age
- Privileging the intellectual over the physical
- Is “the conquest of nature” a good or bad thing?
- Crispin: Metaphysics and racism feed each other
- Is self-mastery a key to freedom, or antithetical to it?
- The worst political philosophy, except for all the others?
Jun 21, 2019 —
Robert Wright & Gideon Rosen
- A brief primer on the free will vs. determinism debate
- Are moral responsibility and determinism compatible?
- Is punishment a tragic necessity or a moral good?
- Gideon tries to convince Bob that compatibilism is coherent
- Gideon’s distinctive take on compatibilism
- A thought experiment about the moral culpability of an ancient slaveholder
- Free will and the mind-body problem
- Buddhist ideas about punishment
May 14, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Leah Finnegan
- How Leah realized that she should not “be herself”
- The mental health benefits of getting a dog
- Leah: We must bring back Kierkegaardian irony
- Leah on the scourge of “urgent earnestness”
- Is it ethical to not read the news?
- Leah’s reflections on being “a year Twitter sober”
- Lessons from the great “horseface” controversy of 2018
Apr 19, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John Thatamanil
- Alfred North Whitehead and his “process philosophy”
- “Process theology,” which features a changing, non-omnipotent God
- A God of persuasion, not coercion
- Whitehead’s conception of divinity
- Whitehead’s God and Christian theology
- Waiting, or not waiting, for God
- Beauty and the divine
- How Whitehead’s God solves the problem of evil
Mar 4, 2019 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
TAGS ancient philosophy | Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | enlightenment | human nature | literature | philosophy | religion | spirituality | technology
Jan 11, 2019 —
Robert Wright & John D. Caputo
- John, a theologian and philosopher, explains postmodern Christianity
- Why postmodernism is not “linguistic idealism”
- Religion’s tendency to literalize
- What Paul Tillich and Jacques Derrida thought about “the unconditional”
- John: The Scriptures present a poetic, topsy-turvy vision of life
- Where do our aspirations come from (if anywhere)?
- Have art, literature, and social activism replaced religion?
- Is there a link between the unconditional and Buddhism’s “unconditioned”?
Jan 3, 2019 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Travis Smith
- Travis’s new book, Superhero Ethics
- The Incredible Hulk and the dangers of individualism
- Why Wolverine embodies honor and integrity
- Batman vs. Spider-Man, dueling reactions to our tragic universe
- Family tragedies in the lives of Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker
- Why adults should take comic books seriously
Nov 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Haught
- The prescience of theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Teilhard’s synthesizing of the “above” and the “ahead”
- John: The creation of humans is not the universe’s climax
- John: God is “not yet”
- Science and faith as different layers of explanation
- Searching for God in a scientific age
- Why John rejects perennialism
- Questions from the live audience
Nov 16, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Eddy Nahmias
- Explaining “compatibilism,” the view that there’s no conflict between free will and determinism
- Without free will, what happens to moral responsibility?
- Eddy tells Bob he errs in saying determinism means events are “inevitable”
- Free will is hard to imagine, but not nonsensical
- Why most philosophers today are compatibilists
- Bob: Compatibilists are just playing word games
- Were prisoners destined from birth to wind up in prison?
- Waiting for the “Einstein of consciousness”
Nov 11, 2018 —
John Horgan & Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
- Rebecca’s childhood: poor, religious, and patriarchal
- How Bertrand Russell helped Rebecca lose her faith
- The problem of beauty
- When Rebecca shared a transcendent moment with a troop of baboons
- From physics to philosophy
- From philosophy to fiction
- Does art better address the mind-body problem than philosophy does?
- Reasons to feel optimistic about the world
Nov 3, 2018 —
John Horgan & Owen Flanagan
- Owen’s transition from Catholicism to “quiet skepticism”
- The problem of evil
- The hubris of modern philosophers
- Can we live with the scientific image of man?
- The origin of the universe, life, and consciousness
- Owen: Doubt yourself
- Does philosophy lead to practical wisdom?
- Mind-altering chemicals and free will
TAGS atheism | Buddhism | Christianity | consciousness | ethics | evolution | free will | human nature | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science
Oct 5, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Lama Surya Das
- Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion?
- Surya Das: “I’m enlightened enough for now”
- Attachment, aversion, and “original goodness”
- Is an enlightened person by definition a moral person?
- Not-self and Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”
- The Dzogchen approach to enlightenment
- Surya Das: Trump has the spark of Buddha nature (and so do you)
Sep 20, 2018 —
Nikita Petrov & John Horgan
- John’s new book, Mind-Body Problems, is free online
- “What are we really, what can we be, and what should we be?”
- Robert Trivers, an evolutionary biologist with an affinity for violence
- Douglas Hofstadter, a playful writer, but a melancholic person
- Why ex-materialist Christof Koch embraced panpsychism
- How losing a daughter made Stuart Kaufman study the paranormal
- Story time! Nikita and John exchange psychedelic tales
TAGS biology | cognitive science | consciousness | enlightenment | evolution | human nature | meditation | mind-body problem | philosophy | psychology | religion | science | spirituality
Aug 31, 2018 —
Robert Wright & K. Anthony Appiah
- Anthony’s new book, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
- Anthony’s own unusual identity
- Cosmopolitanism and its discontents
- Patriotism, nationalism, and “legitimate forms of partiality”
- Against essentialism in religion
- The invention of the idea of a national spirit
- Who owns the culture?
- How class conflict has changed in the US and UK
Aug 24, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Bhikkhu Bodhi
- How Bhikkhu Bodhi first encountered Buddhism…
- …and how he became a Buddhist monk
- Can “secular” Buddhists have spiritual experiences?
- Traditional Buddhism, secular Buddhism, and immanent Buddhism
- Diving into nirvana: “conditioned arising” and “the unconditioned”
- Does Buddhism make you a better person?
Aug 14, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Justin Weinberg
- Justin’s website about the philosophy profession, Daily Nous
- What philosophers actually do when they do research
- Will we ever solve the big philosophical questions?
- What the American Philosophical Association does
- Is this a golden age for public philosophy?
- Are philosophy departments in danger?
- Dan wonders whether there should be a moratorium on new philosophy PhDs
TAGS philosophy
Jul 31, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Brian Leiter
- To understand Marx, start with Hegel’s dialectics
- Why Marx emphasized economic production over Hegelian idealism
- Dan: Was Marx’s concept of labor too narrow?
- What will happen if technology eliminates most jobs?
- Marxism post-WWII: More than college activism and Jefferson Airplane?
- Brian: Marx’s predictions were right, but his predicted timeframe was all wrong
- Why “diversity blather” is a capitalist wolf in Marxist clothing
Jul 13, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Thomas Metzinger
TAGS Buddhism | cognitive science | democracy | human nature | meditation | philosophy | politics | psychology | science | self
Jul 11, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Michael Shermer
- Michael’s controversial Scientific American column on the “final mysterians”
- Bob’s thought experiment about God and quantum mechanics
- The split among philosophers over the free will question
- Revisiting Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat?”
- What’s a harder problem, God or consciousness?
- What laws should govern a colony on Mars?
- Michael reports from inside the Intellectual Dark Web
- Deconstructing Jordan Peterson’s appeal
- Bob: Life is hard and religion can help
TAGS consciousness | Daniel Dennett | free will | Islam | New Atheists | philosophy | physics | religion | Richard Dawkins | science
Jul 6, 2018 —
Robert Wright & John Haught
- John’s book, The New Cosmic Story
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and cosmic evolution
- What it means to say that “God is more Omega than Alpha”
- John: We live in an “awakening universe”
- Putting religion in cosmic context
- Does “rightness” exist apart from human judgment?
- Why John takes comfort in the “unfinishedness” of the universe
- Alfred North Whitehead’s influence on John’s worldview
- Why John rejects Perennialism
Jun 26, 2018 —
Daniel Kaufman & Massimo Pigliucci
- Dan and Massimo on ontology: What exists and what doesn’t?
- What, if anything, do Saturn’s rings have in common with virtue?
- Materialism as a product of scientism
- The immaterial features of human life and society
- The most important philosopher you’ve never heard of
- What does Daniel Dennett mean by “self,” anyway?
- Massimo: A single ontology isn’t enough to describe reality
Jun 15, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Jim Holt
- Jim’s new book of essays, When Einstein Walked with Gödel
- The Platonists who believe mathematics is transcendent
- Against viewing math as transcendent
- The implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem
- What’s so special about light? Einstein can explain
- Tachyons, the hypothetical particles that travel faster than light
- How Jim became a “rigorous dilettante” (with cameos by B.F. Skinner and Bette Midler)
Mar 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Massimo Pigliucci
- Massimo’s new edited volume, Science Unlimited?: The Challenges of Scientism
- What is scientism?
- Science and the challenge of studying subjective experience
- And about those pesky fundamental questions of existence…
- How philosophical thought underpins all research methodology
- Massimo: Core concepts across science have competing interpretations
- The importance of distinguishing “is” from “ought”
- What neuroscience can never explain about human consciousness
Mar 8, 2018 —
Aryeh Cohen-Wade & Pater Edmund Waldstein
- Why the Mortara case is still provoking argument 150 years later
- Pater Edmund offers a defense of Pope Pius IX
- Integralism and different conceptions of liberty
- What would an integralist Catholic state look like?
- How Pater Edmund became a monk (with a blog)
- The day-to-day life of a modern meditating monk
Feb 23, 2018 —
Robert Wright & Galen Strawson
- Why scientific materialism is harder to define than you think
- Galen explains panpsychism
- What does “mind is all there is to reality” mean?
- Is human consciousness epiphenomenal?
- Do physical laws come from somewhere?
- Is it like something to be a rock? (And is Galen saying it is?)
- Galen: Discussion of the mind-body problem was better 100 years ago
Dec 24, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Kieran Setiya
- Midlife and coming to terms with who we aren’t
- Is the midlife crisis different for men and women?
- Kieran: Disappointment is a given for the mid-career academic
- There’s more to life than minimizing suffering
- Schopenhauer (and the Buddha): Dissatisfaction is inherent in desire
- Bob suggests a familiar culprit: selfhood
Dec 11, 2017 —
Daniel Kaufman & Bryan Van Norden
- Just how Euro-centric are American philosophy departments, anyway?
- Is racism baked into Western philosophy?
- A brief account of Western dalliances with Eastern thought
- Why new movements in philosophy must kill their ancestors
- Why do philosophy departments stay white? Subtle self-selection, Bryan says
- Is philistinism killing philosophy as a discipline?
Nov 22, 2017 —
Robert Wright & Shaun Nichols
- Pondering free will before Thanksgiving’s excesses
- Shaun: Determinism is too complicated to be intuitive
- The benefits of blame
- Is “free” will just a matter of semantics?
- What game theory experiments tell us about moralistic anger
- Shaun: It’s okay to use determinism to forgive yourself
- Do the “uncaused effects” of quantum physics bear on the free will question?
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