2009 news archive
The news stories below featured on TPM Online during the year 2009.
Wendy Grossman on Karen Armstrong
The truth is not always polite and compassionate.
Date filed: 18-11-2009
Steven Poole on Sen's 'The Idea of Justice'
'Sen is exquisitely civilised in his disagreements with other thinkers, even while he is elegantly trashing whole schools of economic and social thought.'
Date filed: 09-11-2009
Wendy Grossman on Climate Change as 'Belief'
Making issues that should be settled on the scientific evidence into philosophical discussions is nothing new.
Date filed: 05-11-2009
Andrew Copson: Happy 150th to 'On Liberty'
The communalist approach to diversity places 'groups' at the centre of policy rather than free individuals.
Date filed: 01-11-2009
Philosophy Bites Podcast Hits 5 Million Mark
That's a lot of interest in philosophy.
Date filed: 31-10-2009
Michael Ruse on The Greatest Show on Earth
The eye is magnificent - we can read this wonderful book.
Date filed: 26-10-2009
Martha Nussbaum on Same-sex Marriage
There is something odd about the mixture of casualness and solemnity with which the state behaves as a marrying agent.
Date filed: 26-10-2009
Nina Power on the Inspiration of Postmodernism
So what can be salvaged from this weather-beaten set of ideas? As it turns out, quite a lot.
Date filed: 26-10-2009
How to Be Existentialist Socrates at the Airport
As with the airport and the dentist's waiting room, so with the gym, Steven Poole notes sagely.
Date filed: 26-10-2009
Roger Scruton on TV and Children's Minds
'Television induces mental disorders, such as enhanced aggression, shortened attention span and reduced ability to communicate.'
Date filed: 25-10-2009
Mark Vernon on Philosophy and Real Life
There's a deep satisfaction to be gained from unpeeling the apparently obvious – though that also carries the risk of profound disappointment.
Date filed: 25-10-2009
Michael Sandel's 'Justice' Course to be on PBS
Public tv stations across the US will show the class over 12 weeks, 2 edited classes per show.
Date filed: 24-10-2009
Why So Few Women in Academic Philosophy?
Are they put off by a male canon with a male view of women?
Date filed: 16-10-2009
New York Times on Dearth of Women Philosophers
Jeffrey Sachs offers some alternative explanations [see comment 6].
Date filed: 05-10-2009
Oliver Kamm on Voltaire's Children
'For cultures born of the Enlightenment, private religious belief is not so much an enemy as an irrelevance.'
Date filed: 28-09-2009
Martha Nussbaum on University Education
You need resources to prevent your mind from becoming narrower and more routinized in later life. This is your chance to get them.
Date filed: 17-09-2009
Judge for Yourself
TPM editor Julian Baggini has made a none too serious 2-minute film about his latest book.
Date filed: 11-09-2009
The Science of Origins
How did the universe begin? Is our universe unique? How did life arise? How does consciousness arise?
Date filed: 22-08-2009
Susan Neiman on Moral Clarity
Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion.
Date filed: 06-08-2009
Colin Farrelly on Gerald Cohen
A caring, generous, humorous man who possessed a razor sharp analytic mind.
Date filed: 06-08-2009
BHL Declares French Socialist Party Dead
'No-one, or nearly no-one, dares to say it. But everyone, or nearly everyone, knows it.'
Date filed: 02-08-2009
John Gray Reviews Timothy Garton Ash
Notes that facts are stubborn.
Date filed: 31-07-2009
Slavoj Žižek on Iran
‘Free elections’ involve a minimal show of politeness when those in power pretend that they do not really hold the power.
Date filed: 30-07-2009
Marcus Aurelius and Epistemology of Biography
Biography is always as much about how we know as what.
Date filed: 28-07-2009
Isaiah Berlin, the Dictaphone Don
Writing these tedious, infelicitous, prolix letters took fourteen years of a clever man’s life.
Date filed: 28-07-2009
Jonathan Derbyshire Profiles Amartya Sen
Sen taught Labour that the first question to ask about equality and inequality was 'equality of what?'
Date filed: 25-07-2009
Baggini on Belief in Belief
Belief in belief is powerful precisely because it is not usually explicit.
Date filed: 16-07-2009
Dennett on the Folly of Pretence
Today one of the most insistent forces arrayed in opposition to us vocal atheists is the "I'm an atheist but" crowd.
Date filed: 16-07-2009
Simon Blackburn on Karen Armstrong on God
She favours the "apophatic" tradition, in which nothing about God can be put into words.
Date filed: 06-07-2009
H E Baber on Whether Religion is Replaceable
What once was religion has already been parcelled out to a variety of different institutions and agents.
Date filed: 22-06-2009
Virtual Lecture at Second Life on Saturday
Stephen Law presenting a lecture and Q&A about The War for Children's Minds at The Open Habitat Project.
Date filed: 06-06-2009
Chris Bertram Remembers Gerald Cohen
We’ve lost someone who was not only a great philosopher, but a great person.
Date filed: 06-06-2009
Support Simon Singh
If he loses, it will be serious for freedom of speech, not only in Britain but throughout the world.
Date filed: 05-06-2009
The Roots of Intelligent Design
The argument is one thing, the ID movement is another.
Date filed: 03-06-2009
AC Grayling on Enthusiasm for Science
Talks by Martin Rees and Steve Jones at Hay drew huge audiences and intelligent questions.
Date filed: 26-05-2009
How the Light Gets In, Hay, May 22-31
Philosophy and music festival: Blackburn, Grayling, Malik, Neiman, Bauman, more.
Date filed: 19-05-2009
Wendy Grossman on the Terrible Judgment
Libel law balks responsible reporting; the public is deprived of knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
Date filed: 17-05-2009
Ernest W Adams Obituary
Emeritus professor of philosophy at Berkeley.
Date filed: 16-05-2009
Quantum Entanglement
Quantum theory has been used to investigate everything from free will to consciousness.
Date filed: 10-05-2009
Martha Nussbaum: Islamic Liberalism Under Fire
Liberal values are not tepid and centrist, but truly radical in a world of violence and quasi–fascist forces.
Date filed: 05-05-2009
Journal Making the Virtues Interesting
The idea was to widen the discussion of virtue and make it seem less ideologically and politically charged.
Date filed: 04-05-2009
Cognitive Science for Teachers
Abstract thinking is not something our brains are designed to be good at or to enjoy.
Date filed: 04-05-2009
Simon Blackburn on Hume's Divine Irony
Hume said that nothing could be more artful than the Dialogues, and it is the failure to appreciate that art that is annoying.
Date filed: 04-05-2009
Nussbaum Receives Prize for Law and Philosophy
Martha Nussbaum has been awarded the 2009 Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence.
Date filed: 04-05-2009
Aristotle's School to Become Open-air Museum
The remains of the ancient school where Aristotle taught are to be turned into an outdoor museum.
Date filed: 04-05-2009
Martin Puchner on Alain Badiou
Badiou opposes the body/language doctrine not only for its political consequences, but also for its effect on the discipline of philosophy itself.
Date filed: 02-05-2009
Steven Lukes on the Right to Judge Others
Who are we to apply our standards to the adherents of other moral and religious systems?
Date filed: 28-04-2009
Allan Gibbard Elected a Fellow of the NAS
One of three living philosophers to be elected to the (US) National Academy of Sciences.
Date filed: 28-04-2009
Test the Monty Hall Puzzle Game at TPM
And tell Jeremy if there are any bugs. It's a good game; have fun.
Date filed: 24-04-2009
School Hires Philosopher-in-residence
Pupils will learn how to construct arguments, understand reasoning and the basics of epistemology.
Date filed: 20-04-2009
A C Grayling on Some Pressing Questions
One is about scientific literacy: we need more people who are excited by what's happening in science.
Date filed: 20-04-2009
Jim Holt Reads Simon Critchley
The idea that death is not such a bad thing may be liberating, but is it true?
Date filed: 19-04-2009
Jonathan Derbyshire Interviews John Gray
'Why should one think that, because knowledge has grown, human beings will be less prone to cowardice and cruelty?'
Date filed: 16-04-2009
Simon Blackburn on Hume and Sceptical Irony
Hume is much too subtle to describe himself as an atheist.
Date filed: 13-04-2009
André Glucksmann on Postmodern Capitalism
Our age is the first to proclaim the power to reduce risk to zero simply by spreading it around.
Date filed: 12-04-2009
Joshua Cohen and Thomas Nagel on Rawls
How Rawls's political philosophy was influenced by his religion.
Date filed: 12-04-2009
Robert Darnton: Google and the Future of Books
The 18th century imagined the Republic of Letters as a realm with no police and no boundaries.
Date filed: 30-03-2009
Center for Naturalism Newsletter
Hours of reading.
Date filed: 22-03-2009
Baggini Says New Atheism is Counterproductive
'The new atheism gets atheism wrong, gets religion wrong, and is counterproductive.'
Date filed: 20-03-2009
Roger Scruton on the New Humanism
The noble form of humanism has its roots in the Enlightenment, in Kant's defense of the moral law, and in the progressivism of well-meaning Victorian sages.
Date filed: 14-03-2009
Review of Nigel Warburton on Free Speech
With admirable clarity, this VSI shows us how wobbly, hazy, but unavoidable that line turns out to be.
Date filed: 13-03-2009
Religious Freedom and Discrimination
Christian philosophers distinguish between orientation and act, but this would not hold up in court.
Date filed: 04-03-2009
Leiter on the APA and Discrimination
Many universities require applicants to sign statements of ‘faith’ which discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.
Date filed: 04-03-2009
Philosophers Hate an Untenable Dualism
Is there a principled difference between memories and notebook entries?
Date filed: 01-03-2009
Nigel Warburton on God and the Buses
There probably isn't, there definitely is; the epistemology of advertising.
Date filed: 26-02-2009
Michael Ignatieff: an Intellectual in Politics
How does a liberal intellectual face up to the dilemmas of liberalism during a war on terror?
Date filed: 26-02-2009
Baggini on Polkinghorne on Science and Religion
Polkinghorne and Beale often use God to plug the spaces left by science's incompleteness.
Date filed: 26-02-2009
Philosophy's Great Experiment
X-phi wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre.
Date filed: 26-02-2009
A C Grayling on Secularist Students
'This critical, evidence-based, enquiring mindset also thinks afresh about the good for human lives and societies.'
Date filed: 20-02-2009
Julian Baggini on Hume the Agnostic
There is a thread of uncertainty that runs through all Hume's works on religion.
Date filed: 18-02-2009
Baggini on Hume on Faith or Reason
Faith does not simply plug a gap where reason fears to tread; it actively goes against all that reason tells us.
Date filed: 18-02-2009
Darwin Day
For those unable to get to an event, Darwin's complete publications and 20,000 private papers are available online.
Date filed: 12-02-2009
Susan Jacoby on Darwin the Disturber
'People say natural selection is ok for human bodies but not for brain or behavior,' says Helena Cronin
Date filed: 12-02-2009
Idealism in Eastern and Western Philosophy
Keith Ward discusses the idealist traditions in Eastern and Western philosophy on Philosophy Bites.
Date filed: 09-02-2009
David Papineau on Scientific Realism
Do subatomic particles really exist, or are they convenient fictions? On Philosophy Bites.
Date filed: 09-02-2009
Philosophy Bites: Kate Soper on Alternative Hedonism
We need to rethink how we live, but alternative ways of living can be more enjoyable than consumerism.
Date filed: 09-02-2009
Philosophy Bites: Chandran Kukathas on Genocide
Perhaps the received definition of genocide that emerged following the Second World War needs refinement.
Date filed: 09-02-2009
Roger Scruton on Forgiveness and Irony
Forgiveness and irony underlie our conception of citizenship as founded in consent.
Date filed: 08-02-2009
How to Think About Science
Ian Hacking and Andrew Pickering, Christopher Norris and Mary Midgley.
Date filed: 24-01-2009
Philosophers More Employable Than Ever
'Two of our former Essex philosophy students are firefighters, a third works at the Tate Modern; the possibilities are endless.'
Date filed: 19-01-2009
Personal Experience Makes Ethical Issue Vivid
A moral philosopher has a brain tumour, may lose her memory and self, is furious that euthanasia is not an option.
Date filed: 19-01-2009
What Philosophers Dream About
'I was standing in a hall full of people who were listening to a speaker inveighing against synthetic a priori propositions...'
Date filed: 19-01-2009
Simon Critchley on Oscar Wilde
The faith of the faithless must be a work of self-creation where I am the smithy of my own soul.
Date filed: 17-01-2009
Arne Naess 1912-2009
The Norwegian philosopher developed a theory that he called deep ecology.
Date filed: 16-01-2009
Ron Aronson on Secularism and Commitment
We don't have to believe in God to see the world as meaningful and coherent.
Date filed: 15-01-2009
BSLS: The Two Cultures in Question
24 January: Gillian Beer, Ben Goldacre, Anthony Grayling, Jonathan Miller, Alan Sokal.
Date filed: 05-01-2009
The Edge Question 2009
Nicholas Humphrey, Ian McEwan, Michael Shermer, the Dysons, Irene Pepperberg, many more.
Date filed: 04-01-2009
Carlin Romano at the APA Convention
Passion for their subject marks people in philosophy more than it does those in disciplines with more obvious employment options.
Date filed: 04-01-2009
The Guardian Chats with A C Grayling
Belief in the tooth fairy but not God is the beginning of wisdom: the tooth fairy might pay up.
Date filed: 03-01-2009
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