Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town

14/12/2019

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612341/a-global-ethics-study-aims-to-help-ai-solve-the-self-driving-trolley-problem

The infamous “trolley problem” was put to millions of people in a global study, revealing how much ethics diverge across cultures.

12/10/2018

"So far, most brain-based theories of consciousness have focused on the first type of question. How do neurons produce a magic internal experience? How does the magic emerge from the neurons? The theory that I am proposing dispenses with all of that. It concerns itself instead with the second type of question: how, and for what survival advantage, does a brain attribute subjective experience to itself? This question is scientifically approachable, and the attention schema theory supplies the outlines of an answer."

Consciousness is the ‘hard problem’, the one that confounds science and philosophy. Has a new theory cracked it?

26/06/2018

Philosophy Society Meeting

Date: Tuesday 31 July 2018
Time and venue: 8pm, Lecture Theatre 1A, Neville Alexander Building.

Speaker: Professor Gopal Sreenivasan (Philosophy, Duke University, USA)

Topic: What is Courage?

Not just any old perseverance in the face of danger is brave. Among other things, it must be worthwhile. But must the goal that makes the persevering worthwhile be good? Cannot a bank robber, e.g., be brave? I shall try to explain why the goal in courage need not be good. Part of my explanation will rest on a critique of Jonathan Lear's otherwise interesting account in his Radical Hope (2006).

18/06/2018

https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/psychologys-trolley-problem-might-have-a-problem.html

What if your answer to an absurd hypothetical question had no bearing on how you behaved in real life?

12/06/2018

"the most famous psychology study of all time was a sham. why can’t we escape the stanford prison experiment?"

It was late in the evening of August 16th, 1971, and twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, a slim, short-statured Berkeley graduate with a mop of pale, shaggy hair, was locked in a dark closet in the…

05/06/2018

https://twitter.com/janmpdx/status/1003851912079388672

“Jan: Heidegger is in the Self-Esteem section of the bookstore? Store Clerk: Dasein finds itself thrown into self-loathing.”

21/05/2018

"These difficult thoughts, most dramatically of death, have for Mr. Marino and his existentialists a galvanizing force. “When we are in danger of forgetting what is most important,” he writes, “Kierkegaard advised that we should ‘summon the earnest thought of death.’ ” Death’s proximity—real or imagined—can quickly clarify what is truly vital and what has just been window dressing."

A boxer turned philosophy professor distills two careers’ worth of wisdom: No one is born a coward or a hero—your life is up to you.

14/05/2018

Philosophy Society meeting

Date: Tuesday 15 May 2018
Time and venue: 8pm in Lecture Theatre 1A, Neville Alexander Building.

Speaker: Professor Dale Jamieson (Environmental Studies and Philosophy, New York University)

Topic: The challenge of climate change to democracy

Climate change and other problems of the Anthropocene—this new epoch into which no earthly entity, process, or system escapes the reach and influence of human activity—expose and exacerbate existing vulnerabilities in democratic theory and practice, particularly in their currently dominant liberal form; and that both democracies’ failures and their most promising attempts at managing these problems expose democracies to significant legitimacy challenges.

07/05/2018

Philosophy staff seminar
Wednesday, May 9th
Philosophy Department Common Room
13:15 - 14:45

Dr Tanya de Villiers-Botha (Stellenbosch)
*Redefining harm*

05/05/2018

http://www.ethicistforhire.com/comic/happy-birthday-marx-and-kierkegaard/

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