The Fog Blog

Here's an extremely interesting post - the substantive content of which I entirely agree with - by philosopher Mark Rowlands; Rowlands used to teach at my old university, he surfs, and he used to bring a wolf to class. He also writes some of the very best philosophy around. (Obviously, I'm not at all biased.)

How long does it take you to read a philosophy article/book? (And do you really read it all?)

Here's an interesting piece from Christopher Buccafusco at the University of Chicago, with a link to his paper:

Spiritualism was one of the most salient cultural phenomena of late-nineteenth-century American life. The belief of considerable numbers of respectable citizens that they could communicate with the dead via an entranced medium called into question both popular and scientific conceptions of rationality, volition, and freedom. In turn, these changing ideas about the mind challenged American law's commitment to its belief in free and reasonable legal actors. This Article, the first to consider Spiritualism's implications for American law, examines the legal reaction to the anxieties Spiritualism generated for the age of contract. Principally, it looks at the judicial response to cases of Spiritualists' wills that were challenged on the grounds of insanity and undue influence. In dealing with such cases, I argue, American judges adopted a realist, pragmatic strategy of promoting polyphonic discussion and preserving democratic decision making. Approaching the subject from the perspective of cultural legal history, I suggest that popular culture, science, and the law were mutually constitutive discourses in which nineteenth-century Americans enacted their anxieties about the mind, the will, and the family. Finally, I argue that a contextualized understanding of these nineteenth-century debates can suggest much about current legal debates about rationality, responsibility, and volition engendered by recent discoveries in behavioral economics, the psychology of emotions, and cognitive neuroscience.

More thoughts on teaching here, with additional comments here. To truly be a teacher is certainly a most wonderful gift.

This is a very useful website I came across for anyone teaching, or ever hoping to teach, (mainly introductory) philosophy.

You decide: see here, and, for some spirited replies, here. Having lived most of my life in Ireland, I know that the old and new worlds often have different outlooks on these matters, though there are always exceptions.

Apparently Jonathan Schooler of the department of psychology here at UBC and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota think so. I have my doubts. See their recent paper in Psychological Science, which I first heard about here.

[UPDATE: There are some useful responses now posted, and possibly accumulating, at this last link.]

It's good to see ongoing work being done in the area that first got me interested in distributive justice. If I remember correctly, Brian Barry, for example, makes use of work like this in his 2005 book Why Social Justice Matters.

What is philosophy? -

The Department at Victoria University at Wellington compiles a quite interesting set of reflections by contemporary and 20th-century figures in answer to this question. My favorite is the one from John Campbell, now at Berkeley: Philosophy is thinking in slow...

[Brian Leiter Blog]