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Academic Insights for the Thinking World

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What’s the matter with moral fundamentalism?

By Steven Fesmire

Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “prepare your comeback instead of listening” or “be angrier and talk louder than others.”

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Cover of “The Flight to Italy: Diary and Selected Letters” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by Terence James Reed

Goethe in shirt-sleeves

By T.J. Reed

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity.

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Cover of Inquiry Under Bounds by David Thorstad

Bounded rationality: Being rational while also being human

By David Thorstad

The middle of the twentieth century was an optimistic time in the study of human rationality. The newly rigorized science of economics proposed a unified decision-theoretic story of how humans ought to think and act and how humans actually think and act. For the first time, we had good scientific evidence that humans were by-and-large rational creatures.

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Age and experience: Early Modern women’s perspectives

By Julie Candler Hayes

It’s newsworthy, apparently, when the cover of Vogue magazine features a woman over 70 years old. The New York Times recently devoted an article to the photograph of Miuccia Prada on the March 2024 cover, breathlessly noting that Prada was wearing little if any makeup, did not appear to be “posed,” and remarkably was not gazing at the camera, “looking elsewhere, thinking of something else.” Ordinarily, one would not think it surprising to see images of a powerful, wealthy, highly-educated—and attractive—woman in the public sphere. But her age

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Does Orwell still matter?

By Peter Brian Barry

Much of George Orwell’s work is historically grounded, yet his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, remains of great interest even as it nears seventy-five years in print. Is Orwell still relevant today? Popular answers appeal to Orwell’s supposed ability to anticipate the future, say, the increase of surveillance technology and prevalence of authoritarian regimes. I contend Orwell remains relevant for a different reason: better than most, he understood the need to critically engage with potential allies and how to do it.

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Kids, race and dangerous jokes

By Claire Horisk

I wish that everything my children will hear about race at school will be salutary, but you and I know it won’t. Their peers will expose them to a panoply of false stereotypes and harmful ideas about race, and much of that misinformation will be shared in the guise of humor.

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When health care professionals unintentionally do harm

By Lauren Freeman and Heather Stewart

The Hippocratic Oath, which is taken by physicians and implores them to ‘first, do no harm,’ is foundational in medicine (even if the nuances of the phrase are far more complex than meets the eye). Yet what happens when doctors bring about great harm to patients without even realizing it? In this article, we define microaggressions, illustrate how they can hinder the equitable delivery of healthcare, and discuss why the consequences of microaggressions are often anything but “micro”.

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Has Christian philosophy been having it too easy?

By J.L. Schellenberg

Over the last 50 years, Christian philosophy has ballooned into by far the largest interest area in the philosophy of religion. The Society of Christian Philosophers boasts more than a thousand members in the United States, and similar groups are dotted around the world.

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Philosophers don’t often write about the heart

By Stephen Darwall

The Heart and Its Attitudes illuminates interpersonal phenomena that are as local and commonplace as heartfelt connections and their rupture between friends and lovers, on the one hand, or as nationally or internationally significant as the emotional injuries of racial and gender oppression and war, on the other.  It is a work of philosophy that aims for rigor and analytical depth, but one that is unusual in its relevance to so much of ordinary life.

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Awkward? We’d better own it

By Alexandra Plakias

We live in a golden age of awkwardness. Or so we’re told, by everyone from The Washington Post to Modern Dog Magazine. But we always have. A 1929 Life Magazine contributor writes, “These are awkward times, and I sympathize with the teashop waitress who approached a customer from behind and said brightly, ‘Anything more sir, I mean madam; I beg your pardon sir.’” What’s new isn’t awkwardness itself, but our upbeat attitude towards it; headlines tell us that post-Covid, “We’re all socially awkward now,” and public health campaigns urge us to “embrace the awkward” and talk openly about issues like mental health.

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Beyond God and atheism

By Philip Goff

One of the most remarkable findings of recent science is that the fundamental constants of nature appear to be fine-tuned for the existence of life. Some think the fine-tuning of physics points to a God, who set the numbers to ensure life comes about. Others think it points to a multiverse: if there are enough universes with enough variety in their laws of nature, then it becomes statistically likely that at least one with be right for life. I think there are big problems with both these options, and we may need more radical solutions.

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Title cover of "Understanding Human Time", edited by Kasia M. Jaszczolt, published by Oxford University Press

Flow of time: reality or illusion?

By Kasia M. Jaszczolt

Real time of space-time is one of the dimensions on which we comprehend and describe reality. Time neither flows, nor flies, or drags on; it doesn’t run out and is not a commodity that can be wasted.

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Title cover of "Aesthetic Dimensions of Modern Philosophy" by Andrew Bowie, published by Oxford University Press

The art of philosophy

By Andrew Bowie

The “philosophy of art” in Anglo-American analytical philosophy has had barely any influence on the main epistemological, ethical, and metaphysical concerns of that philosophy.

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Title cover of "Analysis" journal, published by Oxford University Press

Should animals have the right to vote?

By Ioan-Radu Motoarcă

Suppose it were suggested that animals’ interests would be even better protected if we recognized a right of political participation to animals. One way to do that would be to have human representatives cast votes on behalf of animals with respect to different legislative proposals.

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