Normative claims aim to tell us how things ought to be or what we ought to do. This, as opposed to claims that just aim to describe how things are. Philosophy may be the only discipline that inquires into the […]

I expect you and the CAC are quite busy approving new Gen Ed ratings for transfer courses as part of our ongoing Pathways work. I can understand the desire for expediency with a workload of this scale. And so I […]

The idea that liberal elites are trying to change the electoral dynamics of America in favor of Democrats by racially diversifying the country has wide currency on the political right. We should note at the […]

As a child, Amartya Sen, Nobel prize winning economist and philosopher of social justice, witnessed the Hindu-Muslim riots that accompanied Pakistan’s partition from India. His analysis of identity and violence […]

Locke wrote at a time when it would have been easy to miss the role of social systems and how unfair these can be. But aside from issues of fairness in our social systems, it’s worth noting how big a job it is to […]

Sounds like an interesting family life. First off, the issue of whether there is or isn’t a God is not a subjective issue. Either God exists or God doesn’t exist, but either way, it doesn’t depend on how anyone […]

When someone else offers you reasons to change your mind, you should be convinced by those reasons if they are good reasons. That’s not exactly the same thing is being convinced by the person. Nobody likes to be […]

Imagine a college that claimed to teach biology as a general education outcome. A very large number of course across campus taught by a a great many faculty claim to teach this gen ed outcome. And yet only a tiny […]

Opinion | How to Destroy Truth – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

But this is not what I’d hoped for. You exaggerate the gulf between fact and value here. The stories that animate our lives are mere propaganda […]

Let’s start with the modest metaphysical assumption that we all live on planet Earth. This means we have a shared reality. One that is populated with various and sundry objects (or better, containing stuff that c […]

One of the hazards of teaching philosophers like Descartes and Hume is that some students are too willing to embrace the skeptical claims and sit content with not being able to know. The idea that “It’s all just […]

I’m not sure what it is for something to be true to a person. For a person to believe something is for them to take it to be true. So maybe that’s what people have in mind when they talk about something being […]

(Email: April 8, 2021)

Welcome back and Happy First Day of Spring Quarter!  

Hard to believe that one year ago we started our first fully remote quarter. So much has happened in that year, and we still h […]

One of the joys of having an open-source text out there is occasionally getting pleasantly surprised with who it reaches. Glad you’re finding my Intro worthwhile. In an introduction to philosophy I’d rather hope […]

A popular view in our culture is that people who do wrong should be punished as a matter of retribution. Retribution is holding a person responsible by treating them according to the standard they set for […]

We humans are very prone to suffer from a psychological predicament we might call “the security blanket paradox.” We know the world is full of hazards and like passengers after a shipwreck we tend to latch on to […]