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Open for Debate

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 […]

‘Implicit Bias’ in public discourse

‘Implicit Bias’ in public discourse

Posted on 7 May 2018 by

The news has been awash with discussion of implicit bias, and the role it seems to have played in the discriminatory treatment of two black men in a Philadelphia branch […]

Poisonous Words: Arrogance, Bullshit and Accusations of Lying in Public Discourse

Poisonous Words: Arrogance, Bullshit and Accusations of Lying in Public Discourse

Posted on 23 April 2018 by

As is common with international incidents today, the Skripal case, in which a Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned with a nerve agent in Salisbury, England, has generated […]

TRUST and Trump: investigating sincerity and accuracy in discourse

TRUST and Trump: investigating sincerity and accuracy in discourse

Posted on 9 April 2018 by

When exploring discursive untruthfulness, modern American politics is an obvious example. Donald Trump’s presidency has been continuously criticised for his use of falsity, with the aim of promoting his own […]

Reflections on Transcribing Multimodal Texts

Reflections on Transcribing Multimodal Texts

Posted on 26 March 2018 by

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2017 the media has often seemed to be in a continual state of shock at the brusque manner of the forty-fifth president’s speech. […]

Intellectual Humility and Conviction

Intellectual Humility and Conviction

Posted on 12 March 2018 by

Here is a puzzle. On the one hand, we laud people in public life for their conviction, for sticking to their principles come what may. Indeed, we take to be […]

Explaining the puzzle of national shame

Explaining the puzzle of national shame

Posted on 26 February 2018 by

In the aftermath of the EU Referendum, I encountered many people who said to me, “I am ashamed to be British”, or, when confronted with the fallout of the referendum […]