Top News, Articles, and Interviews in Philosophy

Drunk Drivers & Mass Shooters

25. March 2021 Philosophy News News
In response to the latest mass shooting, Democrats have proposed gun control legislation. Republican Senator John Kennedy replied with the witticism that “We do not need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” He then endeavored to make an argument by analogy to counter arguments for gun control. In this argument, Kennedy asserted that [More]
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Philo of Larissa

25. March 2021 Philosophy News News
[Revised entry by Charles Brittain and Peter Osorio on March 25, 2021. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Philo (159/8 - 84/3 BCE) was the last known head of Plato's Academy during its skeptical phase. Under his leadership, the Academics abandoned the radical skepticism of Arcesilaus and Carneades (who professed to live without rationally warranted beliefs) in favor of a form of mitigated skepticism allowing for provisional beliefs that did not claim certainty. But Philo himself seems to have gone a step further in his controversial "Roman Books", where he rejected the Stoic definition of knowledge on which [More]
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Simpson’s Paradox

24. March 2021 Philosophy News News
[New Entry by Jan Sprenger and Naftali Weinberger on March 24, 2021.] Simpson's Paradox is a statistical phenomenon where an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations. For instance, two variables may be positively associated in a population, but be independent or even negatively associated in all subpopulations. Cases exhibiting the paradox are unproblematic from the perspective of mathematics and probability theory, but nevertheless strike many people as surprising. Additionally, [More]
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