My sister linked to this essay by Betrand Russell entitled "In Praise of Idleness". Some of these thoughts have been in my head for years now, well summed up in a hypothetical example:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight ( Read more... )

Tuesday was the last day of my introduction-to-epistemology class. I'd never read much about the philosophy of knowledge, and I didn't really think I wanted to. Turns out I rather enjoyed the class, boring Scienticians like Ayer and Quine excepted (although the ensuing discussion was interesting ( Read more... )

I should have posted this a while ago... but here we go. I wrote a paper on the implications of the theory of special relativity on free will. Some people were asking, either out of real interest or to be polite (I don't really care which :), to read it, so there it is ( Read more... )