Kimberly Ferzan (Law, UVA) reviews Dana Kay Nelkin's 2015 article, 'Psychopaths, Incorrigible Racists, and the Faces of Responsibility' (published in Ethics).
When the philosopher Jenann Ismael was ten years old, her father, an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Calgary, bought a big wooden cabinet at an auction. Rummaging through it, she came across an old kaleidoscope, and she was entranced....Decades later, while preparing a talk on quantum physics, Ismael thought back to the kaleidoscope and went out to buy a fancy new one, a shiny copper tube in a velvet case. It was, she realized, a metaphor for non locality in physics.
This article aims to expose the inherently political aspect of game development. By taking the particular topic of political philosophy of the Enlightenment, I hope to show how computer simulations can help us in acknowledging the politics in designing and developing games.
Ben Granger on Hazlitt: 'He was prophetic in his critique of commerce, and of the narrow, selfish spirit of laissez faire individualism which it generates. Libertarian to the core in the true sense of this much-abused word, he saw straight through the gossamer thin arguments of those who use the word to defend big business, the lie that economic liberty for the rich few results in true liberty for society.'
Roger Scruton: 'The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.'
Martha Nussbaum reviews a book on the history of US feminism: 'Modern feminist economists such as Amartya Sen (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1998 for his development work) have argued that no theory of development based on the satisfaction of people's preferences could ever be normatively adequate: such a theory would always be an unwitting accomplice of an unjust status quo.'
Nicholas Xenos on Leo Strauss: 'The prominence given to the notion of a charismatic founder within the Straussian fold means that it quickly begins to look like a cult.'
David Kaufmann on Walter Benjamin: 'Benjamin ... wasn’t just a book reviewer, although he wanted to be the best one in Germany. He was hardly a journalist, but a good deal of his considerable production was written for newspapers. He was not a philosopher, but he is treated like one.'
