Philosophy Breakfast conversations to kick off a new year:

7 January 2000 — Questions, Big & Small:

• Could one design a game associated with philosophizing and this sort of discussion?
• Recent recommended readings: Amatai Etzioni's The New Golden Rule and Communitarianism ... Elie Wiesel's The Sunflower ...
• Does "Moore's Law" of exponential progress apply to technology in general, not just chips?
• Are we now emerging from a dark age? Or is the upward trend only for a thin patina of humanity? (re improvements in health, literacy, wealth, etc.)
• Are there "too many choices in the US"? Too much individuality?
• Are there computationally intractable problems associated with consciousness?
• To what degree are parents lords of their kids in a family? What rights and responsibilities are involved?
• Mindless standardization ... excessive focus on process rather than content ... over-formalism ....

14 January 2000 — mostly Promises:

• Y2k post mortem ... what lessons were learned?
• Recent readings: Minsky's Society of Mind ... Moral Calculations ... The Winner Take All Society ... Ethics and Social Justice ... James Carville's Stickin' ...
• Loyalty and its proper place ... promise-keeping ... must one keep promises to someone after they are dead?
• Utilitarianism and the need for extraordinary types of numbers ... infinitesimals ... varieties of the infinite ...
• What's the basis of ethics? Absolute good? A social compact?

21 January 2000 — mostly Emotion:

• loyalty ... honesty ...guilt ... fear ... resentment ... jealousy ... embarrassment ... anger ...
• Why do so many people believe in conspiracies?
• How are emotions related to compulsions to drives?
• Is it true that "internal state doesn't matter — only action"?
• Can emotions be rational? — e.g., justifiable anger ... sensible fear in a dangerous situation (versus stupid fearlessness) ...
• How does the amount of "credit" for an action depend on one's motives in doing it? How should it depend?
• International law ... war crimes ... the end of nationalism ... revisionist history ... rise and fall of civilizations ... patterns, seen in retrospect ...

28 January 2000 — mostly Random Readings:

• What to read in order to provoke good discussion? "Pick a great book, not a poor book on a great topic."
• Martha Nussbaum and others: collected essays on Cosmopolitanism vs. Patriotism — tradeoffs between being a citizen of the world (or cosmos) and having loyalty for one's homeland
• Edmund Burke vs John Stuart Mill ... Plato's Republic ... Locke ... Montesque ... Gary Wills' Inventing America and the Founding Fathers ...

Thanks as always to MK, DW, AP, JJ, JB, BW, BD, GdM, JC, et al. — for their many gifts.

Thursday, July 27, 2000 at 06:29:54 (EDT) = 2000-07-27

TopicPhilosophy - TopicPersonalHistory - TopicJustice

(correlates: ReligionOfTraining, ForgivenTrespasses, QuestionsWithoutAnswers1, ...)