Tim Sommers is a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor of Philosophy at The College of William & Mary. He teaches and writes on ethical, legal, and political philosophy. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. from Brown. Tim has won storytelling slams in London and elsewhere and was once a bodyguard for The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (for one night). He can be reached at tsommers@wm.edu.
by Tim Sommers The “Crito” by Plato opens with Socrates in prison (circa 399 B.C.E.) awaiting execution, having been unjustly convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and teaching false gods. When his friend Crito assures him that he can get him out, no problem, that “some people only need to be given a little…
by Tim Sommers How do we know that the external world exists in anything like the form we think it has? Assuming that we think, therefore we are, and that it’s hard to doubt the existence of our own immediate sensations and sense perceptions, can we prove that our senses give us reasonably reliable access…
by Tim Sommers When I was 15 years old I volunteered at a paleontological dig in Barnhart, Missouri. A car dealership expanding its parking lot had discovered a treasure trove of mastodon bones in the empty lot right next door. Mastodons are woolly mammoths’ smaller, less glamorous, cousins. Furry elephants, basically. They roamed the Americas…
by Tim Sommers Facing immanent death, his friends and followers inconsolable, Socrates, according to Plato, attempted to console them. He called fear of death “the pretense of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown,” adding that “no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the…
by Tim Sommers This past Friday, 3 Quarks Daily linked to a review by George Scialabba of the recent posthumous publication of a Richard Rorty lecture series called Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. The review was called, “Should Philosophy Retire?” I promised myself I wouldn’t respond to it. That I wouldn’t respond, for example, to the claim…
by Tim Sommers Suppose on your way to work every day you pass a small, shallow pond. One day as you approach it, you hear a commotion and cries of “Help!” When you get close enough, you can see a small child is drowning in the pond. You could save them. The only problem is…
by Tim Sommers If we take action now to mitigate global climate change, it might make life a little worse for people now and in the near future, but it will make life much better for people further in the future. Suppose, for whatever reason, we do nothing. Since future people will have much worse…
by Tim Sommers I had a weird reaction to Charlie Huenemann’s recent 3 Quarks Daily essay on knowledge. I mean I disagreed with him that knowledge is a “policy to live by” (as I’ll explain later), but that wasn’t weird (and, of course, I could just be wrong). No, the weird reaction that I had…
by Tim Sommers “Unidentified Objects” Here we go again. A secret government investigation. Blurry pictures. Debunkers. He saw…/She saw…. UFO fever comes around at least every decade or so and, if you are old enough to remember earlier iterations, it’s deja vous all over again. But “UFO” is a misnomer. How do we know these…
by Tim Sommers You may know everything that you need to know about the on-going “Critical Race Theory” debate. Indeed, you might have concluded that actually there is no such debate. If so, you’re not wrong. But I think it’s still worth asking, ‘Why is so much anger, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly directed against…
by Tim Sommers In an interesting recent article on Aeon, “You are a Network” (based on her 2019 book, “The Network Self”), Kathleen Wallace argues that anthropological, narrative, feminist, and communitarian views of the self have all converged on the idea that you are a network. But you’re not. At least part of what she…
by Tim Sommers The first part of the original trolley problem goes like this. A runaway trolley is careening towards five people tied to the tracks. There’s a lever in front of you that could divert it onto a second set of tracks. Unfortunately, there is also a person tied to those tracks. You can…
by Tim Sommers Children are natural philosophers. Some combination of imagination, maybe, and lack of knowledge. Philosophy is all theory and no data, after all. In any case, in my experience, one of the most popular philosophical puzzles among young people is this. When I look at something red, it looks red to me. But…
by Tim Sommers Perseverance, the fifth NASA/JPL rover to land successfully on Mars, is currently looking for life there. What if it finds it? The discovery of life on Mars would provide evidence that life is ubiquitous and likely to arise spontaneously under moderately favorable circumstances. It would be evidence that life everywhere is very…
by Tim Sommers A libertarian. Old joke. I mean, marijuana is not even illegal in a lot of states anymore. How about this one? A libertarian walks into a bear. Okay, that’s not really a joke. It’s the title of a recent book by Matthew Honogoltz-Hetling, subtitled “The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town…
by Tim Sommers Do you have a right to own a microwave oven? To be clear, ideally in a free society, absent a clear showing of harm to others, there’s a presumption that you can do whatever you want and own whatever you can make or buy. So, you do have a basic right to…
by Tim Sommers The Medieval Arabic philosopher Ibn Sina – Avicenna to Europeans – was rivaled in renown as a thinker in the Islamic world only by Al Farabi and hailed as “the leading eminent scholar” (ash-Shaykh ar-Ra¯sı ) of Islam. He worked in virtually every area of philosophy and science and influenced subsequent Jewish…
by Tim Sommers Cosmology is a young science. Maybe the youngest. Some people say it started in the 1920’s when these little glowing clouds visible at certain points in the sky were found, by better and better telescopes, to be composed of billions and billions of stars, just like our own galaxy – the Milky…
by Tim Sommers When I was a kid, I used to see this little sign everywhere (still see it occasionally): “No shoes. No shirt. No service.” It was on the door of every store, including the store down at the gas station. It used to make me laugh for some reason. Maybe, just the image…
by Tim Sommers There’s something wrong with the sentence, “This sentence is false.” Is it true or false? Well, if it’s true, then it’s false. But then if it’s false, it’s true. And so on. This is the simplest, most straightforward version of the “Liar’s Paradox”. It’s at least two thousand five hundred years old…