Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Aaron Meskin, Margaret Moore, Mark Phelan, and Matthew Kieran
Are the bad art pictures on Tumblr really bad or are they just unfamiliar? Would we come to like them more–and judge them as better–if we looked at them more? In order to answer these questions, we need to consider the mere exposure effect.
John Schellenberg
On the last page of ‘On The Origin of Species’, Charles Darwin turns from millions of years of natural selection in the past to what he calls a “future of equally inappreciable length” and ventures the judgment that “all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress to perfection.”
Russell Stannard
Is there such a thing as a Higgs boson? To find out, one builds the Large Hadron Collider. That is how science normally progresses: one poses a question, and then carries out the appropriate experiment to find the answer.
By Roger S. Gottlieb
Many people think it’s a great idea: we can have all the benefits of religion…without religion! We’ll call it “spirituality” and in choosing it we will have unlimited freedom to adopt this or that ritual, these or those beliefs, to meditate or pray or do yoga, to admire (equally) inspiring Hindu gurus, breathtakingly calm Buddhist meditation teachers, selfless priests who work against gang violence, wise old rabbis, and Native American shamans—not to mention figures who belong to no faith whatsoever.
By Roger S. Gottlieb
Suddenly, it seems, meditation is all the rage. Prestigious medical schools (Harvard, Duke, etc.) have whole departments devoted to “Integrative Medicine” in which meditation plays an essential part. Troubled teens are given a healthy dose of mindfulness and their behavior improves. Long-term prisoners in maximum security prisons have gone on ten day meditation retreats, sitting for 12 hours a day in a makeshift gymnasium ashram.
By Paul Cockshott
The philosopher Althusser said that philosophy represents ideology, in particular religious ideology to science, and science to ideology. As science extended its field of explanation, a series of ‘reprise’ operations were carried out by philosophers to either make the findings of science acceptable to religion or to cast doubt on the relative trustworthiness of science compared to the teachings of the church.
By Kirsty Doole
The great works of the Eastern world have provided inspiration for this month’s Oxford World’s Classics reading list. From those you have probably heard of (like the Kamasutra) to those you may not have (such as The Recognition of Sakuntala), these classic works provide a window on the classical worlds of India, China, and the Middle East.
By Nancy Berlinger
There is a saying in ethics: you can’t get an “ought” from an “is.” Descriptions of the world as it is do not reveal truths about the world as it ought to be. Even when descriptions of real-world conditions suggest that something is seriously wrong — that our actions are causing unintended and avoidable harms to ourselves, to others, to our common environment — reaching agreement on how we ought to change our thinking and our behavior, and then putting these changes into practice, is hard.
By Daphne Hampson
The fifth of May 2013 marks the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish philosopher, theologian, and man of literature Søren Kierkegaard. He will be celebrated in Copenhagen and around the world. What estimate should we form of him today?
By Gary Kelly
A recent book on the essayist William Hazlitt calls him the ‘first modern man’. If he was, perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft was the first modern woman. By ‘modern’ I mean someone with ideas on how to cope with what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ‘the consequences of modernity’.
By Gordon Campbell
For many years, answering polite enquiries about my current book project was relatively easy: I could explain that it was about Milton, or the Bible, or Renaissance art and architecture, or the decorative arts, or whatever might be the topic, and the conversation could happily proceed to more interesting subjects. For the past few years, however, I have had to say that I was writing a book about ornamental hermits in eighteenth-century gardens.
By Robert Kirk
Physicalists like me think everything in the world is ultimately physical, and that the physical facts provide for all the facts, including consciousness. But how should we conceive of the link between physical and mental?
By Robert V. McNamee and Daniel Parker
It is well known in the history of psychology that Descartes was an early thinker on what we would now call classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning, which he referred to as “reflex”. However, an early epistolary reference seems generally to be missed: his letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, 18 March 1630.
By William Irvine
When friends heard that I was working on a book on insults, I typically had some explaining to do: “It is not a book of insults; it is a book about insults and the role they play in human society.” They would go on to ask whether, in my research, I had come across any good insults. Indeed I had. In the process of doing research, I had not only read every insult anthology I could get my hands on but categorized the insults I found there.
By Louis René Beres
“In the end,” says Goethe, “we are creatures of our own making.” Although offered as a sign of optimism, this insight seems to highlight the underlying problem of human wrongdoing. After all, in the long sweep of human history, nothing is more evident and palpable than the unending litany of spectacular crimes.
To celebrate the publication of our second Philosophy Bites book, Philosophy Bites Back, authors Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds asked you to let us know Twitter who your favourite philosopher is and why. The competition is now closed and the results are in!