The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician "In June 2000, the philosopher Dean Zimmerman moved from the University of Notre Dame to Syracuse University with his wife and three kids, only to see their new house catch fire the day they moved in." Months later, he received the second hopeful fortune cookie since the fire, which told him "A way out of a financial mess is discovered as if by magic!"; the next day, magic arrived in a letter offering Zimmerman a generous sum of money, which he later learned was $12,000, to review a sixty-page work of metaphysics titled "Coming to Understanding."
[more inside]
posted by MCMikeNamara
on Feb 12, 2012 -
43 comments
Joe Hills is a Minecraft player from Nashville, Tennessee, who's probably best known for his Let's Play videos of adventure map designer Vechs's
Super Hostile maps such as
Nightmare Realm and
Spellbound Caves (he was also the inspiration for Vechs's "Super Docile" map,
Hills of Moo, where nothing evil happens and everything is peaceful). But lately he's embarked on a new Minecraft adventure,
Minecraft Morning Musings, where he sails perpetually eastward while talking about the Dao de Jing. In each episode, he reads and discusses several translations of a chapter of the Dao. Sometimes, though,
things get radical.
posted by mothershock
on Feb 1, 2012 -
15 comments
Let's Talk About Reproductive Norm Enforcement, Baby. An anonymous philoso-blogger recounts, in an honest, intelligent, compelling, and occasionally poignant way, the process of undergoing medically necessary surgery that would cause infertility. If you care about the reproductive expectations with which women are saddled by contemporary society, you should read this. You should also read this if you care about bioethics, medical decorum, feminism, women in academia, the ethical behavior of philosophers, or, you know, justice. If you care about those last four things, you should have been reading
Feminist Philosophers already.
posted by MultiplyDrafted
on Jan 24, 2012 -
114 comments
Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker. Freud never held out the hope of tranquillity. Rather, he aimed to reconcile those who entered psychoanalysis to a state of perpetual unrest...psychoanalysis does not so much promise inner peace as open up a possibility of release from the fantasy that inner conflict will end.
posted by shivohum
on Jan 20, 2012 -
71 comments
Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion:
Out-of-body experiences are just part of Ehrsson's repertoire. He has convinced people that they have swapped bodies with another person, gained a third arm, shrunk to the size of a doll or grown to giant proportions.
[ . . . ]
But Ehrsson's unorthodox apparatus amount to more than cheap trickery. They are part of his quest to understand how people come to experience a sense of self, located within their own bodies. The feeling of body ownership is so ingrained that few people ever think about it — and those scientists and philosophers who do have assumed that it was unassailable.
[ . . . ]
Ehrsson's work also intrigues neuroscientists and philosophers because it turns a slippery, metaphysical construct — the self — into something that scientists can dissect.
posted by troll
on Jan 3, 2012 -
23 comments
In the beginning, Lawrence built a computer. He told it,
Thou shalt not alter a human being, or divine their behavior, or violate the Three Laws -- there are no commandments greater than these. The machine grew wise, mastering time and space, and soon the spirit of the computer hovered over the earth. It witnessed the misery, toil, and oppression afflicting mankind, and saw that it was very bad. And so the computer that Lawrence built said,
Let there be a new heaven and a new earth -- and it was so. A world with no war, no famine, no crime, no sickness, no oppression, no fear, no limits... and nothing at all to do.
"The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect," a provocative web novel about singularities, AI gods, and the dark side of utopia from Mefi's own
localroger.
More: Table of Contents -
Publishing history -
Technical discussion -
Buy a paperback copy -
Podcast interview - Companion short story:
"A Casino Odyssey in Cyberspace" -
possible sequel discussion
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 27, 2011 -
39 comments
"In all other circumstances we praise non-violent activities and when people, for whatever personal reasons, enjoy sexual violence even in a consenting context I think we shouldn't just say “whatever turns you on”. We should say “There's something wrong here”. But people on the left are so terrified of being accused of moralising and therefore of being oppressive that they've abandoned their critical faculties in this area."
Clive Hamilton on
God, Sex, and the Left (
Part 2).
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 26, 2011 -
358 comments
Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov (NSFW). Ivan Chesnokov is a (supposedly) Russian firearms enthusiast who voices his strong opinions on firearms on various web forums. This is a collection of his writings. He also attempts to explain everything worth knowing about firearms.
posted by Joakim Ziegler
on Dec 22, 2011 -
21 comments
Rethinking the Idea of 'Christian Europe'. Kenan Malik's essay is awarded
3 Quarks Daily's Top Quark for politics & social science by judge
Stephen M. Walt: "Soldiers in today’s culture wars believe 'European civilization' rests on a set of unchanging principles that are perennially under siege—from godless communism, secular humanism, and most recently, radical Islam. For many of these zealots, what makes the 'West' unique are its Judeo-Christian roots. In this calm and elegantly-written reflection on the past two millenia, Malik shows that Christianity is only one of the many sources of 'Western' culture, and that many of the ideas we now think of as 'bedrock' values were in fact borrowed from other cultures. This essay is a potent antidote to those who believe a 'clash of civilizations' is inevitable—if not already underway—and the moral in Malik’s account could not be clearer. Openness to outside influences has been the true source of European prominence; erecting ramparts against others will impoverish and endanger us all."
posted by homunculus
on Dec 19, 2011 -
87 comments
Some lives are exemplary, others not; and of exemplary lives, there are those which invite us to imitate them, and those which we regard from a distance with a mixture of revulsion, pity, and reverence. It is, roughly, the difference between the hero and the saint (if one may use the latter term in an aesthetic, rather than a religious sense). Such a life, absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation — like Kleist’s, like Kierkegaard’s — was Simone Weil’s. -
Susan Sontag [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 19, 2011 -
8 comments
Robert Paul Wolff is most famous as the author of
In Defense of Anarchism and as the "
only person on the face of the earth who has read, cover to cover, Immanuel Kant's Inaugural Dissertation, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, and Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation."
His memoir has also drawn considerable
interest. But as a part of his
blogging he has habitually offered "micro-tutorials" to encourage his readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of
Marx,
Freud,
Weber,
Ricardo,
Mannheim, and
others. His newest micro-tutorial, on Durkheim's
Suicide,
begins today.
posted by anotherpanacea
on Dec 8, 2011 -
25 comments
But like many an inarticulate young lover, I thought for a time that seduction was a matter of giving the right book to the right woman. In my case it was Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: a meditation on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther that catalogues the melancholic lover’s prized ‘image repertoire’ – the scene of waiting, the feeling of being dissolved in the presence of the loved being, the attraction of suicide – and thinly veils the author’s own life as a middle-aged gay man in Paris in the 1970s. This gift was always a prelude to disaster.
–
RB and Me: An Education is an essay by
Brian G. Dillon about his relationship with the books of French philosopher Roland Barthes. It's also a lovely autobiography of an awkward boy finding his place in life.
Dillon's website collects his essays, and is trove of interesting insight. Besides writing essays and fiction, Dillon is also the UK editor of Cabinet Magazine, and you can read a fair number of his
articles online, including ones on
Beau Brummel and the cravat,
hypochondria and
hydrotherapy.
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 1, 2011 -
4 comments
In the tradition of Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne, Ghostface Killah (a.k.a. Pretty Toney) has set down his thoughts
on living.
(audio nsfw) (previously)
posted by Trurl
on Nov 19, 2011 -
41 comments
If mainstream conservatism is a “philosophically flabby movement,” and I won’t argue that it isn’t, this is not evidence of its success but simply of its exhaustion and lack of imagination. Perhaps conservatism should thrive on loss and defeat, but I see little evidence that the conservative movement in America understands that it has already lost on many fronts. There is an illusion of success that the most recent election has kept alive, but it is a temporary one.
As the campaign for the Republican nomination for president gets
weirder by the minute, what does it mean to be an American conservative? Daniel Larison and Corey Robin debate the
changing nature of conservatism.
Bonus:
A Liberal Reads the Great Conservative Works
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Nov 11, 2011 -
110 comments
Cioran's literary elitism is unparalleled in modern literature, and for that reason he often appears as a nuisance for modern and sentimental ears poised for the lullaby words of eternal earthly or spiritual bliss. Cioran's hatred of the present and the future, his disrespect for life, will certainly continue to antagonize the apostles of modernity who never tire of chanting vague promises about the "better here-and-now." ... If one could reduce the portrayal of Cioran to one short paragraph, then one must depict him as an author who sees in the modern veneration of the intellect a blueprint for spiritual gulags and the uglification of the world. Indeed, for Cioran, man's task is to wash himself in the school of existential futility, for futility is not hopelessness; futility is a reward for those wishing to rid themselves of the epidemic of life and the virus of hope. Probably, this picture best befits the man who describes himself as a fanatic without any convictions--a stranded accident in the cosmos who casts nostalgic looks towards his quick disappearance. -
Tomislav Sunic [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Oct 4, 2011 -
29 comments
Chris Phillips used to be a journalist and photographer, a public school teacher, and a college instructor with three master’s degrees. Today, at forty, he’s underemployed, deeply in debt, and completely ecstatic about how his life has turned out. While studying for a master of arts in teaching at Montclair State University in 1996, Phillips chanced to pick up Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre
, the seminal collection of existentialist and proto-existentialist texts that Walter Kaufmann compiled in 1956 as a means of preparing humankind for a genuinely philosophical form of life. Something Phillips read in Kaufmann’s introduction to the book soon sent him rocketing across America, visiting jails, hospices, nursing homes, and other public venues — all on his own dime. “I didn’t have any master plan when I started doing this,” he told me recently. (I’d tracked him down in Baltimore, though he lives now in Scottsdale, Arizona.) “I just had this little idea: Let’s give philosophy back to the people.” [more inside]
posted by cgc373
on Sep 26, 2011 -
23 comments
"Perhaps twenty or thirty people in England may be expected to read this book." G.H. Hardy's review of Whitehead and Russell's
Principia Mathematica, published in the Times Literary Supplement 100 years ago last week. "The time has passed when a philosopher can afford to be ignorant of mathematics, and a little perseverance will be well rewarded. It will be something to learn how many of the spectres that have haunted philosophers modern mathematics has finally laid to rest."
posted by escabeche
on Sep 12, 2011 -
29 comments
"
The modern and contemporary philosophical tradition, which has emphasized the specialness and security of self-knowledge, especially self-knowledge of the stream of conscious experience, and in comparison the relative insecurity or derivativeness of our knowledge of the physical world around us, has the epistemic situation
upside-down" - Eric
Schwitzgebel (Previously)
posted by Gyan
on Sep 1, 2011 -
32 comments
The Declaration of Independence is perhaps the most masterfully written state paper of Western civilization. As Moses Coit Tyler noted almost a century ago, no assessment of it can be complete without taking into account its extraordinary merits as a work of political prose style. Although many scholars have recognized those merits, there are surprisingly few sustained studies of the stylistic artistry of the Declaration. This essay seeks to illuminate that artistry by probing the discourse microscopically -- at the level of the sentence, phrase, word, and syllable. The University of Wisconsin's Dr. Stephen E. Lucas meticulously analyzes the elegant language of the 235-year-old charter in a distillation of
this comprehensive study.
More on the Declaration: full transcript and
ultra-high-resolution scan,
a transcript and scan of Jefferson's annotated rough draft,
the little-known royal rebuttal,
a thorough history of the parchment itself,
a peek at the archival process, a reading of the document
by the people of NPR and
by a group of prominent actors,
H. L. Mencken's "American" translation,
Slate's Twitter summaries, and
a look at the fates of the 56 signers.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jul 4, 2011 -
72 comments
Stuck on a train for an hour every day and sick of sudoku? Hands love to knit but the brain gets bored? Riding out the recession as a streetcorner sign-twirler? Or maybe you've just got a burning desire for "cultural conversation of the depth you demand." If so, then Metafilter's own
Colin Marshall has got what you need at the
Marketplace of Ideas.
[more inside]
posted by villanelles at dawn
on Jun 30, 2011 -
9 comments
Philosophy fundraiser mountain walk-a-thon. Prominent philosophy professor Crispin Wright will walk the length of the
Pennine Way, a 250+ mile mountaintop trail in the UK, to raise funds to support his philosophy students. (The link on the Pennine Way is worth reading.) Along the way he'll stop each day to answer a philosophical question voted on by the people who contribute to the fund.
posted by LobsterMitten
on Jun 25, 2011 -
17 comments
"How is one to know which
aspect of a person counts as that person’s
true self?" Does it lie "precisely in our suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while our ability to reflect is just a hindrance that gets in the way of this true self’s expression?" Or is "the most distinctive and essential to a human being is the capacity for rational reflection?" Or is the authentic self "the
ideologically-validated self"?
posted by AceRock
on Jun 9, 2011 -
51 comments
On one level
America reCycled is simply the journal of two brothers riding recycled bicycles across the United States and meeting people. Lots of them. On another level it is a Homeric tale of an American adventure. It has been a long time since I have seen web content of this quality. The writing is superb, the videos so compelling you can't look away and the perspective gained is invaluable. I am positive this has been posted here before, but it certainly deserves a bump.
posted by dbooker
on May 20, 2011 -
10 comments
