Links (mostly philosophy)

Rare policy statement: the most comprehensive roundup of philosophy links is the Daily Nous's 'Heap of Links'. In my philosophy link lists, I try to link to items that haven't yet been captured there.

Cass Sunstein uses the development of Star Wars to illustrate points about law and other narratives:

Narrative offers broad lessons not only for movies, but also for creativity of many different kinds, and in areas that include novels, poems, histories, music, and law. Those lessons involve, above all, the impossibility of planning (in literature or law), the eruptive nature of the creative imagination (in literature and law), and the (challenging but blessed) difficulty of achieving coherence.

Peter Singer on 'Effective Altruism'.

Gary Gutting on Michael Ruse's atheism book.

Robert Sapolsky on how language influences thought.

Open Culture gathers several of the Open University's philosophy cartoons, narrated by Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson.

David Byrne interviewed by Jules Evans on 'music, ecstasy and catharsis':

As ER Dodds pointed out in The Greeks and the Irrational, ecstatic cults (with drumming!) were always around…but when did they lose acceptance? With the triumph of the Enlightenment?... I began to sense that rhythmic and repetitive music could do something more that just be an outlet for my unspoken unheard self- it could gradually change that self….and it seemed to be most effective in music rooted in a something that had been repressed or cast aside by western culture.

Ether Wave Propaganda on Agassi, Feyerabend, and Lakatos.

Philosopher Irving Thalberg, Jr. with his Hollywood exec father (Irving, Sr.) and his mother, actress Norma Shearer:

Irving Thalberg, Sr., Jr., and Norma Shearer

Neuroskeptic applies Popperian theory to see if science is broken.

Kevin Orrman-Rossiter on teleology in nature and culture. 

Andrew Manns on Girolamo Cardano: 'Much like other creatives in history, such as Franz Kafka, Edgar Allen Poe, and Carl Jung, Cardano’s visions were coincidental with his mental exhaustion and anxiety.'

Danny Heitman on Montaigne, who '...Pioneered the Personal Essay and Made Candor Literary'.

A Five Books entry in which John Gray recommends books on utopia and apocalypse. 

The Taylor & Francis Philosophy Hall of Fame.

Melvyn Bragg interviews Peter Adamson, Carole Hillenbrand, and Robert Gleave about Al-Ghazali; in February, Bragg interviewed Richard Whatmore, Donald Winch, and Helen Paul about Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Here's a list of Bragg's recent BBC interviews.

Audio from Eugene Wigner's 1964 interview on the Manhattan Project. 

From the CBC Archives: A televised interview of Northrop Frye (1973).

Some Desert Island Discs (BBC) episodes: Ian Fleming ('All history is sex and violence'), Tennessee Williams, Roald Dahl, Jessica Mitford, Nancy Mitford, Tariq Ali, Randy Newman, Zadie Smith, and Barbara Pym.