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Open for Debate

On Being Entitled to One’s Opinion

On Being Entitled to One’s Opinion

Posted on 11 February 2019 by

We’re each entitled to our opinion; or so the undergraduates in my introductory philosophy course remind me.  They’re right, of course.  But I suspect that they misunderstand what they’re right […]

Intellectual humility: from views of knowledge to views of people

Intellectual humility: from views of knowledge to views of people

Posted on 28 January 2019 by

Researchers have taken a number of approaches to defining intellectual humility. I tend to view intellectual humility as rooted in a healthy independence between intellect and ego (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, […]

Public Debates – Testing your Intellectual Abilities?

Public Debates – Testing your Intellectual Abilities?

Posted on 14 January 2019 by

Engaging in public debate can be a scary thing.  You make yourself vulnerable to criticism when you express your views in public – risking a critique not only of the […]

Academic participation in social movements: A call for ethical review

Academic participation in social movements: A call for ethical review

Posted on 31 December 2018 by

I’ve been an academic for some 35 years. Since 1991, I have been a (first assistant, then associate, then full) professor at Georgetown University in the philosophy department and since […]

Lyrical Politics: Reflections on the Role of Grief in Political Life

Lyrical Politics: Reflections on the Role of Grief in Political Life

Posted on 17 December 2018 by

It’s said that Mamie Till Mobley helped to catalyze the civil rights movement. When people say this what they have in mind, principally, is her decision to present her son’s […]

Coming to Grief: Violence, Mourning, and Interracial Intimacy

Coming to Grief: Violence, Mourning, and Interracial Intimacy

Posted on 3 December 2018 by

In my last piece, I defended two claims regarding the relationship of Dana Schutz to Mamie Till Mobley. The first concerned Schutz’s statement that Open Casket was undertaken through empathy […]

The Empathy Defense: Emmett Till, “Open Casket,” and ‘White Empathy’

The Empathy Defense: Emmett Till, “Open Casket,” and ‘White Empathy’

Posted on 19 November 2018 by

“A painting of a dead black boy by a white artist.” This is British artist Hannah Black's description of Dana Schutz's Open Casket, a painting included in the 2017 Whitney […]

Bullshit You Can Believe In

Bullshit You Can Believe In

Posted on 5 November 2018 by

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. So begins Harry Frankfurt’s rightly celebrated essay On Bullshit, raising the important questions of […]

Changing minds through argumentation: Black Pete as a case study

Changing minds through argumentation: Black Pete as a case study

Posted on 22 October 2018 by

Views on the efficacy of argumentation to change minds in public discourse vary widely. On the one hand, there is a long-standing tradition that emphasizes the significance of argumentation and […]

Why even bother with political debate?

Why even bother with political debate?

Posted on 8 October 2018 by

Debates about politics, whether in public forums or in private conversations, often seem to go nowhere. This is particularly true when the participants have diametrically opposed perspectives on how the […]

Teaching Intellectual Humility

Teaching Intellectual Humility

Posted on 24 September 2018 by

We have good reason for wanting to teach and instill the virtue of intellectual humility. Those with this virtue are more cooperative, want to learn more, are more forgiving, are […]

Applying Findings from Neuroscience to Education in Practice and Educational Policy-Making

Applying Findings from Neuroscience to Education in Practice and Educational Policy-Making

Posted on 10 September 2018 by

In this blog post, the last post of my post series, I intend to outline, by means of concrete examples, how findings from neuroscience can contribute practically to the improvement […]

Identifying Core Psychological Processes with Neuroimaging Experiments to Improve Education in Practice

Identifying Core Psychological Processes with Neuroimaging Experiments to Improve Education in Practice

Posted on 27 August 2018 by

Following my previous post for this blog, in this post I discuss why examining psychological processes related to teaching and learning can provide useful insights about how to improve education. Many […]

Improving moral education through neuroscience

Improving moral education through neuroscience

Posted on 13 August 2018 by

Thanks to the rapid development of science and technology, scholars interested in morality now have more sophisticated ways to do their research. To date, relatively simple methods, such as the […]

Forgiveness: A Consoling and Troubling Virtue

Forgiveness: A Consoling and Troubling Virtue

Posted on 30 July 2018 by

On the evening of April 22nd 1993 Stephen Lawrence was murdered in a racially motivated attack. The nineteen year old had been waiting for a bus in Eltham, South East […]

Speak Up!: Inquiry and Expressing Disagreement

Speak Up!: Inquiry and Expressing Disagreement

Posted on 16 July 2018 by

In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve.  In it, the authors notoriously argued that the difference in performance on IQ tests between members of different races […]

Am I in an echo chamber?

Am I in an echo chamber?

Posted on 2 July 2018 by

Spend enough time tracking the liberal and conservative media worlds, and you’ll notice a certain symmetry in their accusations. Each side thinks that the other is living in an echo […]

Ruminating on Fake News, Online Education, and Intellectual Humility

Ruminating on Fake News, Online Education, and Intellectual Humility

Posted on 18 June 2018 by

From 2015 until last month (May, 2018), I was involved with a project at the University of Edinburgh, which aimed to produce a massive open online course (or MOOC) on […]

The Heart of Justice

The Heart of Justice

Posted on 4 June 2018 by

The ancient Greeks all thought of morality in terms of the virtues: justice, courage, temperance, and wisdom. And they all thought of the virtues as if they are like skills […]

Group membership, moral criticism and self-affirmation

Group membership, moral criticism and self-affirmation

Posted on 21 May 2018 by

Public debates often involve issues that people find distressing, especially if they involve accusations of moral wrongdoing (even in the past) by groups with whom one identifies.  People want to […]