What are the mechanisms by which power operates? How much can the workings of power shed light on the concepts and labels applicable to everyday life? Foucault's concept of power is more important than ever.

Are poor white Americans voting in their own best interests? Is it better to be poor in Bangladesh or in the Mississippi Delta? The Atlantic interviews Nobel-prize winning economist Angus Deaton.

Should your race restrict what you're allowed to paint? Is it wrong for white artists to depict black suffering? Or is this just political correctness overdone?

It has been described as a revolution in philosophy and a new way to approach age-old questions in the discipline. But what exactly is contrastivism?

Prominent philosophers go head to head inthisNew York Review of Bookspiece. Thomas Nagel writes a critical review of Daniel Dennett's new bookFrom Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Front and center in Dennett's picture is the difference between the "manifest image"—a colorful world filled with ideas, experiences, colors, sounds, emotions, and ordinary objects—and the "scientific image"—a more barebones picture of atoms, subatomic particles, and forces. In essence, Dennett wants to reject the manifest image altogther; he claims that consciousness is an illusion. Nagel is not convinced, and he explains why in the article.

我们对世界的这种明显印象真的是错误的吗?意识是幻觉吗?

Full link:

This week’s episode is the first in a new six-part series on the topic of Intellectual Humility. We tackle the big question, whether we can know what we know and what we don’t, since knowing what you do and don’t know is the first step to true intellectual humility.

裙带信仰是你有一部分原因是因为你想要相信它们。但真的有可能因为你想要而形成信念吗?这能解释为什么那么多人似乎相信符合他们自身利益的事情吗?或者还有其他解释吗?

You have a mind and you have a body. What’s the connection between the two? All of us are aware of our physical being—our bodies—and we also have an immediate experience of our mental states—our thoughts, emotions, and sensations—but figuring out the relation between these has not been easy.

A bizarre, somewhat tongue-in-cheek meditation byPoint Maganize'sMichael Kochin on the concept of a country. Part-historical, part-philospohical, the piece walks us through how America came about and what it meant that it did. The article struggles with the project of figuring out who should get to count as American, and thus touches on the immigration debate raging in American politics today. At its heart, the core question seems to be: what is America for?

Here's the full link:

https://thepointmag.com/2017/politics/a-country-is-a-country