Interesting story up on Yahoo from Reuters, suggesting that fruit flies may be making “decisions” independently of outside stimuli. The scientists who conducted the study argue that this might be an argument for something along the lines of free will. I will wait for the scientists and neurophilosophers to chime in on the comments, but […]
Let me point you to a post on MyDD on the idea of pluralism and how it intersects with American politics right now; I had an interesting back and forth within the comment thread on defining pluralism and what demands it makes from a cultural standpoint - a theme that might be familiar to you […]
In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. […]
When I was in high school DC Comics published a title called The Ray, about a teenaged hero who lived in Philadelphia. I bought a few issues but quickly lost interest. If I remember correctly, one of my major disappointments was that the colorist was making what should have been a bright, dazzling book too […]
I’m just going to throw up a link to an article in yesterday’s USA Today discussing Lost’s use of philosophical figures as namesakes for many of its characters. I’m quoted a couple of times in the article, but the real interesting discussion is probably in the comments thread. (There goes the online edition beating the […]
Jill Porter in the Philadelphia Daily News had a column last Friday saying that John Edwards should end his presidential campaign because of the recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer. Most of her points seem pretty weak to me, and Porter seems to know it. She quotes a breast cancer survivor who says that the decision […]
I went to Neil Sinhababu’s site to research something for a longer, more serious piece I wanted to write. And I will still write that piece. Tomorrow. Because what I found on Neil’s site was a link to a webcomic called Lump of Clay, which did a long series of strips attempting to use the […]
The forum at the Library went pretty well today, I believe. When the conversation between Kloppenberg, Kuklick, and Westbook expanded to include the audience, there was definitely an intellectual energy that I found welcome. It brought me back to the excitement I felt when I first started studying pragmatism, and felt like I had found […]
The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium is hosting a public forum on American Pragmatism and American Politics this Saturday at the Free Library on Logan Circle. The event is at 1:00 PM in the Montgomery Auditorium. I’m actually pretty excited about it, because three of the people other than John Dewey who are most responsible for […]
Following up somewhat on yesterday’s post, here’s an article from today’s Inquirer about brain research in Germany, where scientists are conducting research to see if they can use brain scans to determine a person’s intention to perform a mathematical operation.
In one study, participants were told to decide whether to add or subtract two numbers a […]