Here’s the new Mini-Heap!

  1. Vandals threw paint on a statue of Kant and on his tomb — will their defense be that it’s universalizable?
  2. Polls conducted by the people who brought us Cards Against Humanity — not sure how rigorous they are, but they do (amusingly? despairingly?) motivate the “against humanity” part (via Jason Brennan)
  3. Skeptical pressure and climate change — N. Ángel Pinillos (Arizona State) on how some epistemology can help improve discourse about the environment
  4. A Chinese researcher claims to have used CRISPR to edit the genes of two humans to improve their resistance to HIV — “If true, this experiment is monstrous,” says Julian Savulescu (Oxford)
  5. A Nordic perspective on applying to graduate programs in philosophy — from a Swedish philosophy PhD student
  6. “The present warrants criticism, but it will do no good if it’s based on a myth about some glorious, dispassionate past that never was” — the Enlightment: both its celebrators and detractors are “deeply mistaken”
  7. Is the reason to give great historical figures of philosophy a pass on their racism and sexism also a reason to not consider them great? — Martin Lenz (Groningen) on the downsides of “greatness”
  8. Is it immoral to keep using Facebook? — it depends on whether the company “has crossed certain moral ‘red lines,’ entering the realm of outright wickedness,” argues S. Matthew Liao (NYU)
  9. Eddy Nahmias talks free will — on Robert Wright’s show
  10. An NGO which uses art and philosophy to help the homeless, the poor, and other populations “at risk of exclusion” — this story at the CBC has some information, but check out its website ( for more details

Mini-Heap posts appear when about 10 new items accumulate in the Heap of Links, the ever-growing collection of items from around the web that may be of interest to philosophers.



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