by Eric Schwitzgebel Academic philosophers in Anglophone Ph.D.-granting departments tend to have a narrow conception of what counts as valuable philosophical work. Hiring, tenure, promotion, and prestige turn mainly on one’s ability to write an essay in a particular theoretical, abstract style, normally in reaction to the work of a small group of canonical historical…

by Eric Schwitzgebel In 1% Skepticism, I suggest that it’s reasonable to have about a 1% credence that some radically skeptical scenario holds (e.g., this is a dream or we’re in a short-term sim), sometimes making decisions that we wouldn’t otherwise make based upon those small possibilities (e.g., deciding to try to fly, or choosing…

by Eric Schwitzgebel As Aristotle notes (NE III.1, 1110a), if the wind picks you up and blows you somewhere you don’t want to go, your going there is involuntary, and you shouldn’t be praised or blamed for it. Generally, we don’t hold people morally responsible for events outside their control. The generalization has exceptions, though.…

by Eric Schwitzgebel Cultural moral relativism is the view that what is morally right and wrong varies between cultures. According to normative cultural moral relativism, what varies between cultures is what really is morally right and wrong (e.g., in some cultures, slavery is genuinely permissible, in other cultures it isn’t). According to descriptive cultural moral…

My father, Kirkland R. Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel) died Sunday. Here are some things I want you to know about him. Of teaching, he said that authentic education is less about textbooks, exams, and technical skills than about moving students “toward a bolder comprehension of what the world and themselves might become.” He was a…

by Eric Schwitzgebel 10. Listicles destroy the narrative imagination and subtract the sublimity from your gaze. 9. The numerosities of nature never equal the numerosity of human fingers. 8. The spherical universe becomes pretzel sticks upon a brief conveyor. 7. In every listicle, opinion subverts fact, riding upon it as upon a sad pony. (Since…

by Eric Schwitzgebel According to a broad class of materialist views, conscious experiences — such as the experience of pain — do not supervene on the local physical state of the being who is having those conscious experiences. Rather, they depend in part on the past evolutionary or learning history of the organism (Fred Dretske)…

by Eric Schwitzgebel Let’s say the world is morally ordered if good things come to those who act morally well and bad things come to those who act morally badly. Moral order admits of degrees. We might say that the world is perfectly morally ordered if everyone gets exactly what they morally deserve, perfectly immorally…

by Eric Schwitzgebel Today I’m thinking about Schindler’s truck and what it suggests about the moral psychology of one of the great heroes of the Holocaust. Here’s a portrayal of the truck, in the background of a famous scene from Schindler’s List: [image source] Oskar Schindler, as you probably know, saved over a thousand Jews…

by Eric Schwitzgebel … here! This mega-list of about 360 recommendations is compiled from the lists I’ve been rolling out on The Splintered Mind over the past several weeks. Thirty-four professional philosophers and two prominent science fiction / speculative fiction (SF) authors with graduate training in philosophy each contributed a list of ten personal favorite…