Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Here is a link to the letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ And here is a link to Cowen’s blog post (quoted extensively below, with my reactions/comments interspersed — italics): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/07/the-harpers-free-speech-letter-and-controversy.html [Cowen] Of course I side with those who signed the [Harper’s] letter, but I would add a few points. First, I don’t think the letter itself quite pinpoints…

Say you encounter someone, Sam, saying “I dislike [movement/theory/group G], because they say [bad thing B].” Say you’re a member/proponent of G, and you not only agree that B is bad, but you’re pretty sure that’s not representative of G, and indeed inconsistent with G, so you tell Sam that, and Sam replies that some…

Suppose that there is reason for Ronnie to go to the party because there will be dancing there and Ronnie loves to dance. As Daniel Fogal points out in his “Reasons, Reason, and Context,” ‘reason’ here is used as a mass noun, to refer to the action having what I’ll call a specific valence that…

My friend Danny Frederick asked me to post this conspectus of his new book, ‘Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism,’ now out from Palgrave.] In my new book, Freedom, Indeterminism, and Fallibilism, published in the series ‘Palgrave Studies in Classical Liberalism,’ I employ the notions of indeterminism and fallibilism to give an account of the nature and…

The letter in Harper’s magazine has generated a great deal of discussion around free speech, and whether we are in an era of diminished capacity to speak one’s mind. I am quite interested in maintaining a culture of free expression, and have written on the subject in the past, and hope to write more in…

Recently I argued that the deliberate destruction of the property of innocent persons by otherwise justified protesters is condemned by the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), which requires that such collateral harm be merely foreseen, and not directly intended. But someone may reply that the DDE is wrong and that whether intent is direct or…