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 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…
by Tim Sommers Old joke. A Calvinist preacher, a firm believer in predestination, is moving his family further west. Seeing him packing his wagon, a neighbor stops to say goodbye. The preacher brings one last item out of his house, a shotgun, and the neighbor asks, “What good is that going to do you? If…
by Tim Sommers I recently rewatched “12 Angry Men” with The Philosophy Club at the University of Iowa as part of their “Owl of Minerva” film series. The 1957 film has the late, great Henry Fonda as the lone holdout on a jury ready to convict a poor, abused 18-year-old boy for allegedly stabbing his…
by Tim Sommers This year – 2018 – marks something truly auspicious. This is the semi-centennial of the invention of the Zombie. In these fifty years, let’s face it, we have been completely overrun. Zombies are everywhere. They are in our movies, tv shows, books, and comic books, plus, out here in the real world…
by Tim Sommers Here are some well-known facts. Human beings are limited beings. We take up a limited amount of space, we exist for a limited amount of time, and, in that time, we move around in a relatively confined area. When it comes to the substance of our lives we constantly make choices that…
by Tim Sommers Do You Own Yourself? In 1646, the Leveller leader, Richard Overton became the first person in the English-speaking world to assert that we own ourselves. “To every Individuall in nature, is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any,” he wrote, “for every one as he…
by Tim Sommers Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is “really” a right thing to do. Through most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers were some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that they tended to put it was something like…