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 In high school, I attended a “debate camp” at a small university in southeastern Missouri. I was thrilled to visit my first college bookstore while there and I bought a cheap, slender volume out of the remainders bin called “Parables and Paradoxes”. It was written by Franz Kafka. I am embarrassed to…
by Tim Sommers Some good news, amongst all the bad this month. Our medieval Supreme Court took a break from being irredeemably awful to decide a case in the right way for the right reason. In Bostock v Clayton County, Georgia, Neil Gorsuch – yes, that Neil Gorsuch, the one nominated to the court by…
by Tim Sommers Philosophy’s original contrarian hero was, of course, Socrates. He believed in Truth and the Good and refused to back down from the pursuit of the these – even when his life was on the line. He had no patience for ‘just whatever people tend to say about such and such’. The unexamined…
by Tim Sommers Stuck inside? Unable to travel? Have you considered traveling through time instead of space? Time travel is impossible, you say? Wrong. We are, each and every one of us, time travelers, traveling forward second by second, hour by hour, day by day into the future. Why not consider traveling in the other…
by Tim Sommers Suppose that we are better at recognizing and diagnosing injustices than we are at imagining what an ideal society looks like – much less redesigning our social institutions to achieve that ideal. Elizabeth Anderson, for one, has argued that egalitarians “have always been better at criticizing inequality than at devising a coherent…
by Tim Sommers Here’s a story that is almost certainly not true, even though I have heard it many times. A philosopher, or anyway a philosophy professor, is on an airplane listening to a businessperson explain what they do. There’s a lull in which the businessperson asks, “By the way, what do you do?” “I’m…
by Tim Sommers So, here’s a game. Try to imagine: “What unbelievable moral achievements might humanity witness a century from now?” Now, discuss. “The trick, of course, is that if you can seriously contemplate its occurring, you are thinking too small, or so history suggest.” So says David Estlund who proposes “The Unbelievable Moral Progress…
by Tim Sommers What if most speech is worthless? Or, rather, what if most speech that purports to count as a contribution to “free expression” is mostly worthless? Take the internet. What’s on it? Lots of great information and great journalism and even art. But, also, pornography. Lots of pornography. Between 15% and 80% of…
by Tim Sommers A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%.…
by Tim Sommers Suppose you had some undeniable proof of the Everettian or Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. You would know, then, that there are very many, uncountably many, parallel worlds and that in very many of these there are many, many nearly identical versions of you – as well as many less-closely related…
by Tim Sommers We are all in some sense equal. Aren’t we? The Declaration of American Independence says that, “We hold these Truths [with a capital ‘T’!] to be self-evident” – number one being “that all Men are created equal.” Immediately, you probably want to amend that. Maybe, not “created”, and surely not only “Men”…
by Tim Sommers Katrina Forrester begins “The Future of Political Philosophy” (adapted from her just released book “In the Shadow of Justice: Liberalism and the Remaking of Liberal Philosophy”) with a series of dramatic claims. “Since the upheavals of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political turbulence of 2016, it has become clear to…
by Tim Sommers John Rawls, the author of “A Theory of Justice” and “Political Liberalism”, was the most important political philosopher of the twentieth-century – and the most influential. His theory of justice, “justice as fairness”, and, much later, his theory of political legitimacy via the free use of “public reason”, transformed philosophy and provided…
by Tim Sommers Unfortunately, you have a brain tumor. You don’t know it yet. Your doctor doesn’t know it yet. But you are beginning to have symptoms. The tumor is pressing on surrounding brain tissue and causing you develop a number of delusional beliefs. You believe you are the best swimmer in the world. You…
by Tim Sommers In “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values” Sam Harris argues that the morally right thing to do is whatever maximizes the welfare or flourishing of human beings. Science “determines human values”, he says, by clarifying what that welfare or flourishing consists of exactly. In an early footnote he complains…
by Tim Sommers In the first scene of the first episode of “The Wire”, McNulty asks the Corner Boy who witnessed the murder of his friend “Snotboogie”, for stealing the money from the pot in a crap game, why they let Snotboogie play, since he always tried to steal the money. The Corner Boy replies,…
by Tim Sommers “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” –Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude Here’s an apocryphal story that is so good, it should be true. In 1770 Captain Cook became the first European to land…
by Tim Sommers Sometime in the near future I hope you will find yourself in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Sydney, Detroit or Portland in a music venue, a theater space, or a bookstore attending a “storyslam”. They happen in at least 25 cities in at least 4 countries and attendance varies from under…
by Tim Sommers I was lugging several superheavy boxes of dishes up the concrete stairs from the sidewalk to the front door when a guy in a silver suit materialized in front of me. The first rule of moving is that when you pick something up, you don’t put it down until you have it…
by Tim Sommers I know you’ve heard this before. But it’s just too relevant to avoid, so, please, bear with me. It may, or may not, be a garbled version of something Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I am not a Christian, but it has become the equivalent of an urban legend in philosophy. It…