“Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sought to define the difference between right and wrong by applying reason, looking at the intention behind actions rather than at consequences. He was inspired to find moral laws by natural philosophers such as Newton and Leibniz, who had used reason rather than emotion to analyse the world around them and had identified laws of nature. Kant argued that when someone was doing the right thing, that person was doing what was the universal law for everyone, a formulation that has been influential on moral philosophy ever since and is known as the Categorical Imperative. Arguably even more influential was one of his reformulations, echoed in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which he asserted that humanity has a value of an entirely different kind from that placed on commodities. Kant argued that simply existing as a human being was valuable in itself, so that every human owed moral responsibilities to other humans and was owed responsibilities in turn.”

In Our Time - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0952zl3

“From time to time, not very often, it looks as though the world has given philosophy a job to do. Now is such a moment. At last, a big abstract noun – truth – is at the heart of a cultural crisis and philosophers can be called in to sort it out... In whichever guise we encounter truth, it has the curious property of being everything and nothing to do with us. To say something is true is to say that it is the case whether I want it to be so or not. Nothing can be made true by will alone. It is an all-too common nonsense to say that something is “true for me” but might not be for anyone else. At the same time, what is important about the truth is always relative to the knower. The mathematician, the scientist, the artist, the historian and the religious believer are not always concerned with the same truths or the same aspects of truth. Truth is not relative, but we relate to it in innumerable ways.”

Julian Baggini, "Truth? It's not Just about the Facts" -https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/post-truth-philosophers/. My current work on Hannah Arendt is addressed to these difficulties concerning a plurality of people recognizing each other's interests in public. My contention is that by focusing on the conditions of recognition some progress can be made on these matters.

“Welcome to the Philosophy helpline. If you’re looking to write a college paper, or hope to impress your date, or see life as a featureless void empty of all hope, or our most common answer, ‘all of the above,’ you’ve come to the right place…For Descartes, please press (1,0,0). You have pressed it, therefore you will be connected to him. But who is it that is really doing the pressing? Is it possible to press the act of pressing itself? All that is certain is that you exist, that I exist, and that your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.”

"Thank You for Calling the Philosophy Helpline" - https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/thank-you-for-calling-the-philosophy-helpline

“I’m particularly drawn to the work that is done in the lab on perception of time, because I think that has the ability to make rapid advances in the coming years. For example, there are famous experiments in which people apparently make free decisions at certain moments and yet it’s found that the decision was actually made a little bit earlier, but their own perception of time and their actions within time have been sort of edited after the event. When we observe the world, what we see is an apparently consistent and smooth narrative, but actually the brain is just being bombarded with sense data from different senses and puts all this together. It integrates it and then presents a consistent narrative as it were the conscious self. And so we have this impression that we’re in charge and everything is all smoothly put together. But as a matter of fact, most of this is, is a narrative that’s recreated after the event.”

"Where Did Time Come From? And Why Does It Seem to Flow?" - http://nautil.us/blog/-where-did-time-come-from-and-why-does-it-seem-to-flow. Interesting interview with a physicist on the nature of time. Of note is that his response to the question on recent advances is philosophically oriented towards the phenomenology of the perception of time. For instance, Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative seems particularly apropos. 

“Paul Ricoeur is one of those continental philosophers you have to read with a dictionary in one hand and a strong coffee in the other (‘difficult to categorise’, as one reference work gently puts it). So he’s an unlikely candidate for providing the material to halt the march of populism in Europe. Yet his most famous student Emmanuel Macron is being credited with doing just that, having secured an election victory that has calmed nerves in Brussels and Berlin after the UK’s Brexit vote. Precisely what Macron will deliver remains unclear but there’s no doubt he has been heavily influenced by Ricoeur, with whom he worked for two years before leaving academia and becoming an investment banker.”

"Paul Ricouer: The Philosopher Behind Emanuel Macron" - http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/paul-ricoeur-the-philosopher-behind-emmanuel-macron-1.3094792. Interesting reflection upon Ricoeur's Ideology and Utopia, and other various connections with Macron's thought. A few years ago I'd written on this aspect of Ricoeur's work in an essay on "Utopia and the Public Sphere."

“A couple times a week, I hear someone remark ‘It is what it is,’ accompanied by a weary sigh. I always puzzle over the expression a little bit, thinking What else could it be? ‘It is what it is’ is a literal tautology, an apparently needless repetition intended to convey something more. Overused, it has become a cliché, reflecting a too-easy acceptance of bad situations... Likewise ‘If it’s late, it’s late’ can imply nonchalance (on the part of a student: If it’s late, it’s late. Who cares?) or reinforcement of the obligation (on the part of the professor:If it’s late it’s late, even by a minute). And if a deadline-enforcer says ‘If it’s late, it’s late,’ the response might be ‘But it’s not late late.’ Here repetition indicates that the canoncial meaning of late it intended.It’s not late late, it’s just a little late.”

Edwin Battistella, "How to Use Repetition," https://blog.oup.com/2017/06/repetition-linguistics/. Relevant advice apropos end of semester essay deadlines.

A note of solidarity with a place I once called home. This mosaic is a much beloved city icon nestled into the corner of Afflecks on Tib and Short Street.

“Many of you won’t have ever been to Manchester, but you will definitely have heard of it. It’s famous all over the world for so many wonderful things. Great football teams: Man City, Man United. It’s famous for incredible music: Oasis and Joy Division. It was the birthplace of the leader of the suffragettes. It’s the home of the inventor of the first computer. It’s a place full of comedy and curries and character.”

James Corden's Message to Manchester - https://youtu.be/I2xoCFGTi6w

“When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an ‘international catastrophe.’ When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster... It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.”

"Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Interesting summary of Bayes' probability theorem. "Bayes' theorem tells us how to update our beliefs in light of new evidence, but it can't tell us how to set our prior beliefs. And, so, it's possible for some people to hold that certain things are true with one hundred percent certainty, and other people to hold those same things as true with zero percent certainty. What Bayes' theorem shows us is that in those cases there is absolutely no evidence that anyone could do to change their minds. And so as Nate Silver points out in his book The Signal and the Noise, we should probably not have debates between people with one hundred percent prior certainty and zero percent prior certainty because, well, really, they'll never convince each other of anything." - https://youtu.be/R13BD8qKeTg. Importantly, the notion of belief cited here is similar to that of Immanuel Kant's holding to be true [Fuerwahrhalten]. Andrew Chignell's essay, "Belief in Kant" is quite helpful in this regard, https://philpapers.org/rec/CHIBIK-2.

“Philosophers place a premium on certain tools for regimenting our thinking, especially logic and probability theory. However, there is a far richer toolbox at our disposal. Over the years, I have observed philosophers repeatedly using various argumentative moves or strategies, which can be encapsulated in rules of thumb that make their tasks easier. These are what might be called philosophical heuristics... To be sure, the heuristics have their limits. There are many distinct abilities that go into making a good philosopher, and I do not pretend to give heuristics for all that philosophers do, or even a tenth of what they do. In particular, there are no short-cuts to profundity, and I should add that there will always be a role for good judgment and insight – just as there is in mathematics and chess. That said, heuristics can make difficult reasoning tasks easier, as much in philosophy as in mathematics and chess.”

Alan Hájek, "With the Use of Heuristics, Anybody Can Think Like a Philosopher" - https://aeon.co/essays/with-the-use-of-heuristics-anybody-can-think-like-a-philosopher