Rapid Fire

Basically a blog where I try to do philosophy outside.

The Origin of Philosophy

This week, I cried reading a philosophy book. I can’t remember the last time that happened. In The Origin of Philosophy , Spanish...

What Experts Don’t Know

(Now that I have a PhD, here’s a follow-up to last week’s article on the value of expert opinion.) As you become an expert in a field,...

Debate Mode

philosophy is not just about questions, concepts, and arguments, but is also about idioms —Raymond Geuss I’ve been meaning to write some...

Fake Experts

Recently I’ve started thinking more about the political role of experts in society. Who counts as an expert anyway? We expect a lot from...

Let a thousand flowers bloom

Last week, we saw Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry square off head-to-head. (I’ll try not to get too technical, but I wanna lay out...

I got a Job

First off, if you’re on the committee of a university I’ve applied to, I’m very sorry. It took me thirty minutes to figure out how to...

I made a Video Essay

Two weeks ago, I had no idea how to use Adobe Premiere Pro. But now, I’m pretty good at Googling. Indiana University is holding a...

Group Agents

See if any of these sentences strike you as weird: The Thunder won last night. The Thunder believed they were better than the white-hot...

You will be Misread

When you go to the hospital, we rarely have the resources to treat everyone as promptly and thoroughly as we’d like. So we have to make...

Why is Racism bad?

I recently spoke to a trained economist who argued that racism was bad, but only because it was bad for the economy. What can we say...

Arguments are Powerful Tools

Arguments are powerful tools for seeing how commitments hang together. Take the classic reductio ad absurdum, where I try to show that my...

My Dissertation: pt. 1

For the past month, I’ve been running an experiment. I started going to two therapists so we can form a consensus. Weirdly, this is kind...

3 mistakes in Intro Philosophy

As finals approach, I’ve been hired as a grader for my advisor’s Intro Philosophy class. I love these classes, where we’re trying to give...

So there’s this psychology paper I keep thinking about

It starts, like all psychology papers, with a competitor for the most boringest sentence ever: One of the essential insights from...

Ricky Mouser