by Joseph Shieber I’ve been reading Stanley Corngold’s surprisingly interesting Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. I say “surprisingly interesting” because I only thought of Kaufmann as the author of a dated book on Nietzsche and a number of anthologies on Nietzsche and other existentialist figures. As it turns out, Kaufmann was a fascinating figure in…

by Joseph Shieber If you’ve any familiarity with the history of economic theory, you’ll no doubt have heard of the idea of the “Invisible Hand”. The image was introduced by Adam Smith in his masterwork The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith suggests that, even though each individual participant in a market may be pursuing their…

by Joseph Shieber I remember as a child watching the made-for-tv movie Gideon’s Trumpet, based on the Anthony Lewis book of the same name about the Gideon v. Wainright (1963) Supreme Court decision that cemented the right to legal representation for criminal defendants. At the time, I was inspired by the idea that the Supreme Court was an…

by Joseph Shieber As the quadrennial presidential and vice presidential debate season nears once more, we’ll soon see opinion pieces reminding us that debates have at most a very slight impact on the outcome of presidential contests. Typically, the writers of those pieces frame their discussion as a warning not to place too much importance…

by Joseph Shieber Given the multiple cataclysms that the United States has experienced within the last three or four months, it might seem puzzling that one of the most hotly discussed topics recently has been that of free speech and whether it is under threat by the bugbear of cancel culture. What could be objectionable…

by Joseph Shieber One frustrating aspect of the problem of police-enforced repression of Black people in the United States is how timeless it can seem. Consider this real-life example: An up-and-coming musician, only days away from releasing his breakthrough album, was finishing a two-week engagement at a famous club in Midtown Manhattan. He was on…

by Joseph Shieber Recently I was reading one of Scott Alexander’s posts about fake news and conspiracist thinking. In that post he introduces what he dubs the “North Dakota Constant”. Alexander references a survey conducted by researchers at Chapman University, and mentioned a “control question” that the researchers included in the survey. Here’s how the…

by Joseph Shieber One of the heartening ramifications of the otherwise devastating Covid-19 pandemic has been the public’s high level of trust in science and expertise. As a March 19-24 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates, over ⅔ even of low-trusting people surveyed trust public health officials to do an excellent or good…

by Joseph Shieber When I think back on when I realized that I think differently than most people, what surprises me most is that I didn’t realize it sooner. The earliest indication that I can explicitly recall would have occurred to me some time in the 1990’s. It was around then that I’d learned about…

by Joseph Shieber The traditional assumption in the United States has been that each person is individually responsible for their own health care. In other words, the US has a system in which the wealthy are able to afford more or better care (with the understanding that more care does not always lead to better…

by Joseph Shieber Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, was born on this day 122 years ago, February 10, 1898. Fearing persecution by the Nazis for his writing and leftist political views, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, shortly after Hitler assumed the German Chancellorship. At the time that he wrote the poem “Frühling…

by Joseph Shieber It is a great shame that the authors of the recently released AAUP statement “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education” do not even know what it is that they are attempting to defend. And it is the height of irony that, in an essay attempting to defend the importance of expert…

by Joseph Shieber This semester I’ve been teaching a first year seminar entitled “Propaganda”. It is, unfortunately, a very timely topic. The course draws first year students from across the spectrum of majors — some up-and-coming humanities majors, but also economists, natural scientists and engineers. Because of that mix, and because of the fact that…

by Joseph Shieber There’s a well-established notion in film theory referred to as the “male gaze”. Here’s its description according to the theorist Laura Mulvey, who first introduced the concept in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey suggests that, in Hollywood films, “the determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the…

by Joseph Shieber Imagine a party planner, let’s call him “Mark”. Mark offers his services in party planning to all of the citizens of the town of Happyville. Now, Mark’s party planning service has an interesting twist. He begins by throwing a party for a group defined by some close connection — say, a family…

by Joseph Shieber I want to begin with a parable. There once was an itinerant salesman by the name of Osip, who made his living selling rags and trinkets in the little villages that lay in the triangle between Smolensk, Minsk and Kiev. He spent his weeks and months traveling between the major cities, finding…

by Joseph Shieber One of the masterful conceits of Socrates’s discussion of tyranny in Plato’s Republic is a surprising claim that Socrates makes at the outset of the dialogues, and one that serves as a guiding thread throughout. You would expect that if someone is going to criticize tyranny, they would do so because of…

by Joseph Shieber There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response. “Well, in the sciences we don’t really deal with knowledge at…

by Joseph Shieber In a few more months I’ll be teaching my course in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. In that course we begin with Frege and Russell and end with topics covered in the 1980s and ’90s that interest the students. This means that the course covers a wide range of subject…

by Joseph Shieber In the most recent case of a white person’s discomfort resulting in the ejection of African Americans from public spaces, a young, black couple who were picnicking with their dog at a KOA campground in Mississippi were threatened at gunpoint by a white campground manager and forced to leave. This sort of…