Foucault's Pendulum

A couple of weeks ago we saw an awesome optical illusion created by a series of pendulums of gradually increasing length. Today we focus on a single pendulum, Foucault's pendulum, and the incredible insights (scientific and philosophical) that it can reveal.The idea behind this kind of pendulum is quite simple: if you simply release it so that gravity does all the work, a pendulum will swing back and forth in a straight line. Foucault took this simple...

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Non-Transitive Dice to Blow Your Mind

When it comes to games of chance, there's usually a fairly easy way to win: cheat. Of course, if you get caught, the price you pay might be your knee-caps...Another way is to be up to date on your probability theory, play a game of non-transitive dice, and be careful about which dice you choose to play with.Transitivity is a property whereby if A bears some relation to B, and B bears the same relation to C, then A also bears that same relation to...

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Gay Parents Bashed in Texas

When a pair of lesbian mothers are harassed in front of their children by a homophobic waitress at a Texas restaurant, will other patrons come to their defense or just add on to the hatred? And don't forget, this is Texas we're talking about: Jesus land...The following video clip will likely shock you, make you sick to your stomach, then make you proud of our Texan brethren... and finally hopeful that there is a light at the end of the tunnel :)Hat...

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Julia Sweeney - Letting Go of God

Religious faith has at least one thing going for it: it gives you comfort... as long as you don't think about it. My own intellectual journey into eventual atheism started with a serendipitous reading of Nietzsche (which also hooked me into philosophy). Once he raised certain questions, I went to 'the greats' for answers: Aquinas, Leibniz, Avicenna, Kierkegaard, Anselm, Berkeley, Augustine, Lewis, etc. These thinkers were fascinating, and had lots...

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What to Do about the Rapture

This whole Rapture thing strikes me as complete nonsense, but of course, I could be wrong. There really may be such a thing, and if you really believe it's real, then I'd ask you to put your money where your mouth is: if you truly believe that you will be taken from this material world, please be so kind as to donate all of your earthly possessions to worthy charities and projects that work on helping the poor and destitute. They'll need all the...

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Pendulum Waves

Pendulums have been around for a very long time, at least since the 1st century, when the Chinese polymath Zhang Heng used one to build what is widely considered to be the very first seismometer in history.The rigorous and scientific study of the properties of pendulums, however, didn't start until the 17th century, when Galileo took up the question. Undeniably, Galileo did some great and unprecedented work, but one can't help but wonder how much...

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Jon Stewart Kicks Some O'Reilly Ass

If you have an opinion with which I disagree, that's fine. I don't expect everyone to be right all the time :)In fact, there's a good chance that in many subjects, my opinions are just plain wrong. What I do have a serious problem with, though, is double standards: conveniently applying arbitrary standards whenever they suit you, and then ignoring the same standards when they don't suit you... that kind of sleazy inconsistency just drives me up the...

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Lecture 3 - David Hume and the Problem of Induction

Look at Newton's cradle on the right and ask yourself this question: what justification do you have for thinking that it will continue to behave in the future the way it has behaved in the past?This is not something you know a priori, through pure reason alone, since it implies no contradiction to imagine this behavior might change. It's also not something you know a posteriori, through experience, because your experience is of the past, and the...

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We're Not Home, E.T. Please Leave a Message...

Are we alone in the universe? I have no clue. My guess is that we probably aren't, but the odds of ever finding other forms of intelligent life are so small that one may wonder why we have SETI in the first place. This is one of those strange cases in which a complete absence of evidence is no evidence of absence... unless it is, but then how would we know the difference? (As you can tell, I'm somewhat ambivalent on this issue).SETI has recently...

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Paul Nicklen - Tales of Ice-Bound Wonderlands

You may remember the story of how photographer Paul Nicklen came face to face with a leopard seal, one of the Antarctic's top predators. Obviously, since he is the one who told us the story, you know he survived the encounter, but what you may not know is why he was there in the first place.In the following TEDTalk presentation, Nicklen tells us of his childhood dream of getting people to become more acquainted with the wonders hidden beneath the...

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Star Wars - Existentialist Edition

I don't know exactly what French-speaking existential philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus would have thought about films like Star Wars... and while I can see some respects in which the movies deal with philosophical issues, my guess is that the existentialists might have thought the famous trilogy indulged in too much mauvaise foi (bad faith) for their taste.But what if the franchise were written as an existentialist film? This is...

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7 Billion

You've probably seen some animated videos trying to explain the significance of recent demographic and social trends (here, here and here, for instance).Today we have one more explaining the significance of the fact that the planet is populated by 7 billion of us. The clip is beautifully done, and although it seems that its main objective is to clarify things and put them in perspective, it wouldn't be complete without touching on a few of the social...

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Lecture 2 - Introduction to Modern Philosophy

After a brief introduction to ancient philosophy and the intellectual revolution started by Galileo and Descartes in the 17th century, Professor Millican begins to provide a concise and fascinating summary of the intellectual developments and questions that the new science and philosophy would produce.To begin with, we start with an account of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes is mostly famous for his political philosophy, but in the context of this course,...

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Happy Birthday, David Hume!

Today marks the 300th birthday of David Hume, almost universally agreed to have been the most important philosopher ever to write in English, and certainly one of my favorites.It's rather strange (and disheartening, really) that his name hasn't achieved the level of popular recognition that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and Kant have received, but maybe that has something to do with the fact that his ideas challenged many notions that most of us consider...

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Dark Matters, PhD Comics Edition

As the famous cartoon to the right shows, our views of the world have a tendency to be limited to the range of our experience (as they should), but we should always be aware that there's probably more to reality than what we can experience, and that the possibility of new discoveries is not simply a thing of the past: our science is still in its infancy, and that means that most of what's left to be discovered is still out there, waiting for the...

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The Wedding Banners

Here in America, we love our freedom of speech. Sure, sometimes we use it ill-advisedly, and sometimes we want to shut up those with whom we disagree, but free speech is one of the core principles of a good democratic republic.So, when the British Crown banned footage of the wedding in any comedy or satirical program, they weren't counting with the fact Jon Stewart and his team could re-enact the wedding and after-parties video-game style. The picture...

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Peter Millican's Introduction to General Philosophy

You know what's missing from your life? More philosophy. Sure, the practical benefits may not always be obvious (though they are most decidedly there), but philosophy deals with the deepest, the most elusive, the most important and the most interesting questions human beings can think of.Here at the philosophy monkey blog, we've featured Michael Sandel's popular course on Justice before. Now we get to cross the ocean and switch from Harvard to Oxford,...

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Obama & Seth Myers at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Disclaimer: there is a chance I may have broken some ribs over the weekend. If that's the case, I'll probably slow down on the funny entries for a while because unfortunately, apart from sneezing and getting up in the morning when your ribs are broken, nothing hurts more than laughing. Sadly, I know this from experience :(For Barack Obama, however, this has been quite the week. The annual White House Correspondents' Dinner was held over the weekend...

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Osama Bin Laden Finally Dead

It's been almost 10 years since Osama Bin Douchebag masterminded the worst terrorist attack ever to take place on American soil.Last week, it seems, he was hunted down and killed. The body was secured by US forces, and subsequent DNA tests have confirmed his identity. Here is President Obama addressing the nation in an official declaration that we finally got the bastard:I would have preferred he be brought to justice and made pay for his crimes,...

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