Author: Dylan Balfour Category: Ethics Word count: 1000 Imagine you’ve been given a million dollars to donate to charitable causes of your choice. How would you spend the money? Perhaps you’d donate it to a cause close to your heart, like a local community project. Or perhaps you’d try to help the global poor by … Continue reading Longtermism: How Much Should We Care About the Far Future?
Author: Daniel Weltman Category: Historical Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy Word Count: 995 What would life be like without any government? Would it be a utopia, or would it be miserable? The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously leaned in the latter direction. He argued in his book Leviathan[1] that, without government, life would be … Continue reading “Nasty, Brutish, and Short”: Thomas Hobbes on Life in the State of Nature
Author: Kiki Berk Category: Ethics, Phenomenology and Existentialism Words: 992 Do you want to be happy? If you’re like most people, then yes, you do. But what is happiness? What does it mean to be “happy”?[1] This essay discusses four major philosophical theories of happiness.[2] 1. Hedonism According to hedonism, happiness is simply the … Continue reading Happiness: What is it to be Happy?
Author: Kristin Seemuth Whaley Category: Metaphysics, Philosophy of Religion Word Count: 995 What are we? Philosophers often look for answers that capture what we are fundamentally—what makes us who we are. Maybe we’re non-physical souls or minds.[1] Maybe we’re our thoughts and our memories. Or, perhaps we’re physical things like bodies or brains. According to a … Continue reading Are We Animals? Animalism and Personal Identity
Author: Brandon Boesch Category: Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy Word Count: 998 Imagine you are walking by a shallow pond and see a drowning toddler. Do you have a moral obligation to save the child, even if it means ruining your clothes? It seems so. Now consider that there are millions of people suffering and … Continue reading Ethics and Absolute Poverty: Peter Singer and Effective Altruism
Author: Thomas MetcalfCategory: Logic and ReasoningWord count: 1000 An argument is a set of statements (the premises) intended to provide evidence for, or prove, some conclusion.[1] Formal logic is a tool we can use to present and evaluate arguments. Some arguments are better than others and formal logic can help us see exactly how some … Continue reading Formal Logic: Symbolizing Arguments in Sentential Logic
Author: Chris Ranalli Categories: Epistemology, Metaphysics, Historical Philosophy Word count: 1000 External world skepticism is the view that we cannot know anything about the external world: we can’t know that we have hands, that there are other people, or, in general, know that anything external to our minds exists. Such skeptics commonly argue that we … Continue reading Moore’s Proof of an External World: Responding to External World Skepticism
Author: G. M. Trujillo, Jr. Category: Ethics Wordcount: 999 Suppose that you have an ethical problem in medicine or science. How would you solve it? Some ethicists appeal to an ethical theory, a general explanation of when and why actions are wrong or not.[1] For example, Kantians argue that you should treat all people with … Continue reading Principlism in Biomedical Ethics: Respect for Autonomy, Non-Maleficence, Beneficence, and Justice
Author: Anthony Sean Neal Category: African American Philosophy, Phenomenology and Existentialism, Historical Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Philosophy of Race, Ethics Word Count: 996 Race today is often presented as a social construct. But social constructions, as Black people know all too well, can create real existential crises. Philosophers of the Black Experience[1] writing during the … Continue reading African American Existentialism: DuBois, Locke, Thurman, and King
Author: Kiki Berk Category: Phenomenology and Existentialism, Ethics Word Count: 989 “Hell is other people” is a famous line from No Exit (1944), a philosophical play by the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). No Exit is popularly understood as arguing that human relationships are essentially fraught with conflict. This interpretation seems to be supported by … Continue reading “Hell Is Other People”: Sartre on Personal Relationships
