Philosophy Reflections

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26
Feb
2022

Would it be possible, at least in theory, for us�...

Wait–aren’t we already? After all, we can change our features quite radically through surgery, if we have the money and the will. However, these aren’t the changes involved in the sort of...
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21
Jul
2020

COVID, Crisis and the Nature of Religion

What is the nature of human religiosity? For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, psychologists treated this area of human life as a disposition – something Gordon Allport termed a ‘sentiment’.[1]...
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3
Jul
2020

In the Footsteps of Thoreau

Many people I know have been out walking more, since COVID-19 upended our routines and transformed our daily lives. For a while, during the first shutdown, the activity of walking was the only way in...
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22
Jun
2020

Harms, Benefits, and Trade-Offs in a Pandemic

A crucial topic in moral philosophy involves the aggregation and comparison of harms and benefits. How many, for instance, minor headaches relieved is worth a single human life? How many people...
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16
Jun
2020

Knowledge and Newspapers

Recently while teaching my Theory of Knowledge class on Zoom I asked the students whether they should believe what they read in the newspapers. Their confident answer was that they should not – newspapers...
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16
Jun
2020

Kant on Sympathy with the Fate of Others

During the strange week in March that began almost normally and ended with the shuttering of campuses and a series of rushed goodbyes, the students in my course on Kant’s moral philosophy half-jokingly...
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5
Jun
2020

Blame and Creating Risks for Others

Before turning to the pandemic, allow me to tell a story. One of my cousins—let’s call him “Walt”—grew up loving cars. As a 12-year-old, Walt could name the make and model of every car we passed...
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5
Jun
2020

Virtual Emotions in a Pandemic

Writers, cinematographers, and philosophers have often wondered what love could look like in a virtual age. Could we fall in love with a sophisticated AI? Will there be a time in which people think that...
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