by Joseph Shieber On June 15 of this year, the National Constitution Center hosted a session entitled, “Free Speech, Media, Truth and Lies”. The topic for the session, as described by the National Constitution Center website, was “Should the government or private companies identify and regulate truth and lies?” There were three speakers. Harvard Law…

by Joseph Shieber Yeats composed his poem, “Among School Children”, after visiting St. Otteran’s School in Waterford in February, 1926, when Yeats was in his early 60s. It is probably best known for the couplet that concludes it: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?”…

by Joseph Shieber One of the tropes of the Covid-19 era is to revisit predictions made earlier in the pandemic, either to issue a mea culpa or to issue a self-congratulatory reminder to oneself or one’s readers about a successful prediction. The past week or so has witnessed a flood of those sorts of posts…

by Joseph Shieber Optimism about the miraculous speed with which researchers were able to develop and test extremely effective anti-Covid vaccines is beginning to sour as vaccination rates slow down. These slowing rates raise worries about whether the United States will be able fully to defeat Covid-19, since a full return to normalcy would require…

by Joseph Shieber Imagine, in a solitary clearing, a ballet dancer practicing a piece of choreography. The dancer, who is listening to music on earbuds, is so engrossed in their performance that they don’t notice the world around them. Anyone who happened upon the dancer would hesitate to disturb them, afraid that any interruption would…

by Joseph Shieber One of the most highly publicized philosophy papers of the 2000s was a paper that was actually written almost two decades earlier. Harry Frankfurt’s paper “On Bullshit” was first published in 1986, but some astute editor at Princeton University Press, noting its aptness for the George W. Bush era, reprinted the paper…

by Joseph Shieber The philosophical world has recently been abuzz about Susanne Bobzien’s argument that Gottlob Frege — often taken to be one of the founding figures of what became 20th century analytic philosophy — plagiarized many of his logical positions from the Stoics. Bobzien’s charge isn’t merely idle speculation. In her paper, descriptively titled “Frege Plagiarized the Stoics”,…

by Joseph Shieber Completely by chance, I happened to come across a discussion of Tyron Goldschmidt’s paper, “A Proof of Exodus: Judah HaLevy and Jonathan Edwards Walk into a Bar”, in Cole Aronson’s review of the 2019 book Jewish Philosophy in an Analytic Age. I was intrigued by Aronson’s celebration of Goldschmidt’s “characteristic verve”, so…

by Joseph Shieber There is a spate of popularizations of neuroscience promoting the idea that “reality isn’t something you perceive, it’s something you create in your mind”, that “everything we perceive is a hallucination created by the brain”, or — as one Scientific American article put it — “It is a fact of neuroscience that everything we…

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…