What can I say, despite myself, I’ve got a soft spot for the old Marxist.

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Will Wilson at Postmodern Conservative suggests that I must have an extraordinarily strong commitment to reductionism if I’m prepared to bite the bullet and accept the “no further fact” thesis about personal identity, which runs “contrary what every fiber of my being tells me.” Apparently my fibers sing a different tune, since I can’t say [...]

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Most of Michael Sandel’s series Justice is now up and streaming for your viewing pleasure. In my wildest Tooth Fairy dreams, this show is more popular than American Idol and there are dozens of Twitter hashtags devoted to the issues in each episode that people are collectively mulling. It’s a wonderful introduction to [...]

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Robin Hanson defends his enthusiasm for silicon immortality against an incredulous Bryan Caplan, whose “I refute it thus” one-ups Dr. Johnson’s stone-kicking with an imagined shotgun blast to the brainpan. I’m sympathetic to Hanson’s response, and I think Caplan’s position is mostly voodoo in philosophy drag, but let’s be clear that there are a couple [...]

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Brad DeLong, in a spate of bloggy nostalgia, reposts an old reference to something I wrote back in 2005, a bit of a thumbsucker on hedonistic and preference utilitarianisms, and the pitfalls of conflating them.  I’d actually forgotten about the argument—though I soon remembered that I’d been delighted and flattered to find that it attracted [...]

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Apropos of these recent musings on cross-partisan perspective taking, I was recently talking to a friend about the rather open-ended recovery/12-step concept of placing yourself at the mercy of a “greater power.” As a lifelong atheist, this seems like it’s bound to present some problems if I ever develop a sufficiently bad habit, and so [...]

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Via erstwhile debate compatriot turned awesome academic Steve Maloney, I discover the “weak man” argument, which actually seems far more prevalent than the better-known straw man. Making a straw-man argument, of course, involves misrepresenting a position opposed to your own so that you can beat up on it easily. The Internet makes it somewhat harder [...]

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Matt Continetti finds Sarah Palin quoting Plato, but notes in passing that the line is “perhaps apocryphal”:
We like to have other people participate in these activities with us because, as Plato said, “You learn more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
It’s been a while since I read [...]

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Quick Quiz: Can you determine what, precisely, is meant by “free will” in this dispatch from a panel at the World Science Festival featuring a psychologist, a neuroscientist, and a philosopher? Reading between the lines, it sounds like all three are compatibilists of some stripe,  report later seems to take for granted the traditional dichotomy, [...]

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I’ve been binging on TED talks these past few days, among them a 2002 lecture by Daniel Dennett on memetics. Most of what he has to say is by now pretty familiar to anyone with a scintilla of interest in the topic, but I was intrigued by the analogy he offered up between contemporary globalization [...]

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