Saturday Scoundrels
What makes a good answer to a question?
Being correct seems important, but is that enough? What makes a response useful, illuminating, persuasive, or worth continuing to think about?
This week, Scoundrels considers what we are doing when we respond to one another, with some help from Habermas, Dewey, and Wittgenstein.
Scoundrels is Philosofarian’s weekly philosophical conversation. Bring your curiosity. No reading or philosophy background is required.
Saturday Scoundrels
What is a conversation?
This question follows our first Wit & Wisdom of the year, where John Nygaard and Seth Tichenor revisited a conversation they first presented in 2019 about what conversation asks of us, and what gets harder when the world around us grows more divided.
For Scoundrels, we’re looking at the foundation of the question. What actually makes something a conversation?
Saturday Scoundrels
Why is ritual important?
Birthdays. Funerals. Holidays. Handshakes. Morning coffee. Religious observance. Stadium chants. Humans keep inventing things to do again and again in really specific ways.
What does ritual accomplish that an ordinary action does not? Does repetition change us? Can ritual connect people, preserve memory, mark change, or outlive its usefulness?
Join Scoundrels for a conversation about why humans keep returning to ritual.
Saturday Scoundrels
Can nonhuman intelligence ever be understood by humans?
We encounter forms of intelligence that do not think, perceive, communicate, or inhabit the world as we do. Animals see colors we don’t, dance maps, and sense the magnetic fields of the planet. Plants eat light and can call the predators of their own pests. And Artificial intelligence pushes us to consider what we actually mean by the word “intelligent.” What would it mean to understand an intelligence whose way of knowing may be fundamentally unlike ours?
Scoundrels is Philosofarian’s weekly philosophical conversation. No special expertise required. Just come ready to think with other people.
This project is funded in part by a grant from Oregon Humanities.
A Monstrosity Beyond Reason
Danielle LaSusa writes about postpartum psychosis.