Letters Remain

Tag: philosophy

  • Ira Glass on Being Wrong and Manufacturing Inspiration

    Discussing how many great stories “hinge on people being wrong”, Kathryn Schulz interviews This American Life host Ira Glass on the benefits of being wrong. I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually…

  • Fooled by Pseudoscience: A Philosophy of Science

    The “huge quantities of data” collected on the subject show that the principal reason people are deceived by pseudoscientific claims and alternative therapies is not intellectual ability, but personal experience: a bad personal experience with mainstream medicine is the overwhelming reason, regardless of medical training. That’s from Ben Goldacre in an interview for The Philosophers’ Magazine…

  • Askers, Guessers and the ‘Disease to Please’

    Saying No to seemingly unreasonable requests and unwanted invitations is easy for some and a gruelling mental challenge for others. This disparity between responses can be explained by looking at the behavioural differences between Askers and Guessers: In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything–a favour, a pay rise–fully realising the…

  • Faith in Probability

    Following the publishing of his first book–Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives—David Eagleman is interviewed about religion and his beliefs, providing a refreshingly new and… empirical… take on religious faith, atheism and agnosticism. Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty – you find the atheist…

  • Marriage as Scope Creep

    Even though married life was progressing well and all involved were happy, Elizabeth Weil decided to actively apply herself to “the project of being a spouse” and to document the process. Weil’s article is slow to start but becomes an absorbing inquiry in to what it means to be married. I’ve never really believed that…

  • The Case for Redemption

    In light of the recall into custody of Jon Venables–one of the ten-year-old boys who horrifically murdered the two-year-old James Bulger in Manchester, 1993–Brian Masters deliberates on the possibility of absolution for a heinous crime committed in one’s childhood. But I do know that [Jon Venables] cannot be the warped and skewed child who shared in…

  • On Being Foreign

    Having (very) recently emigrated from the UK (to the Netherlands), this article on what it means to be ‘foreign’ was not only timely, but quite emotive, too. The [complaining foreigner] answers [the question of why he doesn’t go home] by thinking of himself as an exile—if not in a judicial sense then in a spiritual…

  • The Evolution of the New Atheist Argument

    In summarising the main arguments for and against the New Atheist argument, Anthony Gottlieb provides a fairly even (yet far from comprehensive) account of the evolution of 21st century atheism. Through John Wisdom‘s 1944 Parable of the Invisible Gardener, Gottlieb looks at how the arguments of “religious apologists” such as Karen Armstrong are falling back…

  • Richard Dawkins on the Labelling of Children

    Richard Dawkins on a video for the BBC’s Daily Politics discusses the religious and political labelling of children. I feel very strongly that it’s wrong to label children with the opinions of their parents. Nobody minds labelling a child an English child, or a French child, or a Dutch child. But you’d think I was…

  • A Philosophy of Happiness

    In Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy, six “anxieties of everyday life” are tackled through the work of six philosophers—one for each chapter in the short book. A few years after publication the book was turned into a six-part documentary, Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness. While both the book and the series aren’t rigorous studies…