philosomajig

A collection of things from around the web related to philosophy and academia. The extent to which this relation may be direct or oblique is at the discretion of the blogger.

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Famous Philosophers’ Side Hustles

Nietzsche’s personal-training business, Marx’s podcast, and more.

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Actual picture of Schrödinger's cat.

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An Ancient Greek Philosopher Was Exiled for Claiming the Moon Was a Rock, Not a God

2,500 years ago, Anaxagoras correctly determined that the rocky moon reflects light from the sun, allowing him to explain lunar phases and eclipses

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The agony and the destiny: Friedrich Nietzsche’s descent into madness

Nietzsche was overlooked for most of his career. By the time his genius was discovered, his health had rapidly deteriorated.

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Jürgen Habermas: “For God’s sake, spare us governing philosophers!”

One of the world’s most influential living thinkers offers his view on the most pressing issues of our time, including nationalism, immigration, the internet and Europe

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Peter Adamson considers possible ways forward.

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Why philosophy is so important in science education – Subrena E Smith | Aeon Ideas

Each semester, I teach courses on the philosophy of science to undergraduates at the University of New Hampshire. Most of the students take my courses to satisfy general education requirements, and most of them have never taken a philosophy class ...

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Who was the first modern philosopher?

In November 1633, the French philosopher René Descartes, now living in the Netherlands, was searching in the bookstores of Amsterdam and Leiden for a copy of Galileo’s recently published Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Descartes’s friend Marin Mersenne, a Minim friar in Paris who was the centre of a wide European intellectual network, had explained to him Galileo’s view that all bodies fall at the same rate, regardless of their material or weight (and assuming their fall is not affected by the friction of any medium). Descartes replied to Mersenne that this cannot be right. “According to my philosophy there will not be the same relation between two spheres of lead, one weighing one pound and the other a hundred pounds, as there is between two spheres of wood, one weighing one pound and the other a hundred pounds . . . he [Galileo]…

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David Hume: friendships, feuds, and faith | OUPblog

Who exactly was David Hume? He was a Scottish historian and philosopher (best known today for his radical empiricism), who prided himself on his reputation as a man of the utmost moral character.

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Remembering Albert Camus

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of 'The Outsider', we pay tribute to the radical writer and his influential thoughts on the meaning of life – or rather, the positive lack of it

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you - The Oatmeal

This is a comic about the backfire effect.

classroom-friendly version here.

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Moral grandstanding: there’s a lot of it about, all of it bad – Justin Tosi & Brandon Warmke | Aeon Ideas

We’ve done it. You probably have, too. No matter what we believe about morality or politics, we’ve all used moral talk to project an impressive and morally respectable image of ourselves. Suppose, for instance, that one of us, in an effort to impr...

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On Humean Nature: Neil Sinhababu on Desire, Possible Girls and the Nature of Human Motivation

Neil Sinhababu is quite possibly the world’s coolest philosopher. His first paper, Possible Girls, uses modal realism to argue that everybody has a soulm...

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The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines – Ben Medlock | Aeon Ideas

It’s tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. We experience ourselves as conscious beings, after all, in a way that feels different to the rhythm of our heartbeat or the rumblings of our sto...

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Have we got Machiavelli all wrong?

What if the Italian civil servant whose name became shorthand for devious politics was trying to warn us about the despots, not advise them?