Dementia and identity

This Friday I’m taking part in a 24-hour “squashathon” to raise money for The Alzheimer’s Society. The cause is of particular interest to me because the subject of my PhD (and a book I’m writing) is personal identity, and many writers on this subject - such as Locke, Hume and Parfit - claim memory plays [...]

Bertrand Russell, Superhero

Well, here it is.  The Bertrand Russell Graphic Novel you’ve been waiting for:  Logicomix:  An Epic Search for Truth.  Would anyone care to offer a definite description?

Friday Amusement

The New Scientist fails to grasp the indiscernibility of identicals.  
A brain in a vat in a runaway trolly.

Jane Austen and women

Norman Geras has this cool thing where writers are asked to talk about a book that has inspired or influenced them. Here’s something interesting I noticed (though perhaps not surprising). Twelve different people (as far as I can tell) have elected to talk about a Jane Austen novel (or character). Eleven of those people are [...]

Unread Dust

I just moved an entire print run of a philosophical journal from one room to another.  Published four times each year for about the past 100 years, this was not an easy undertaking.  With a dusty stack of volumes under your nose as you walk from one room to another, you just have time for [...]

The Necessity of Hot Celebrity Gossip

If you have a few hundred bucks, you too can buy a gen-u-ine mind-reading device (Mindreading Headsets Will Change Your Brain).  Such things raise a few philosophical questions, certainly, but the one exercising me at the moment is slightly left field:  what sort of creatures are we, we who invent something so remarkable and…use it [...]

Monty Hall Puzzle

This is an online version of the Monty Hall Puzzle that I’ve put together.
I’d be very grateful if people would be willing to give it a test run. It’s finished in the sense that it should work properly, but I haven’t completed all the stuff around it - basically, the Philosophy Experiments site isn’t up [...]

Group Twitter

Lately I’ve been sounding like a grumpy old woman, at least to myself. I keep railing about “kids today” and the way they text each other constantly. In my defense, I think: Hey, I have a blog and a website, and I use email constantly!   But the constant trivial back-and-forth of texting!  Tsk. Tsk.
Even worse, [...]

Google’s Ghost

According to the Daily Telegraph, a ghost has been spotted on Google’s Street View thingy (which is very cool).
I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a ghost hunter, so I tracked down said spook. Here “it” is from a different angle (click on the picture for a larger version):
Feel free to email the Telegraph [...]

Pop Art and Wittgenstein T-Shirt

TPM have produced a T-Shirt which everybody should buy because it’s cool. It features the cover artwork from Issue 33 of the magazine. This is what the T-Shirt looks like:

The caption is: “You don’t understand me… or Wittgenstein!”
More details here.