Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

On Philip Seymour Hoffman

3. February 2014 Paul Pardi Article
While Hoffman's passing is upsetting, I have an overall sense of gratitude and found myself actually envying his accomplishments rather than fixating on his death. He left us something and he used his great skill as an actor to show us something about the world and about ourselves. Few of us, even if we live to a ripe old age, will have either the talent or the opportunity to do what he did. [More]
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Willfully Free from Free Will

30. December 2013 Paul Pardi Article
This is the fundamental conceptual mistake at play in the collective global consciousness; the mind, whatever it is, does not control the body – it is a shadow of its activity, an afterglow if you will. This is a critical conclusion to draw, because it collapses free will from within by removing the concept of agency altogether. If there is no mental causal power due to the causal closure of the physical, we can never be the conscious authors of our thoughts, and therefore we can never be free. [More]
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How Academia Resembles the Health Care Profession

3. December 2013 Andrew Carson Article, Placement Report
An article on the evolution of the Professor and the job market from The Chronicle of Higher Education, noting the stratification in academia: “we now have a distended pyramid, with a huge base of people whose primary job is teaching, often entry-level courses; a layer of specialists in particular fields and researchers who may hardly even teach above them; and a thin spire of administrators commanding the peak.” [More]
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