Tag Archives: philosophy

The Blackmail Paradox

While most agree that blackmail — the act of threatening to disclose true, but damaging, (potentially secret) information about a party unless payment is made (to earn silence) — is a criminal act, it poses two interesting paradoxes in the theory of criminal justice. The paradoxes are as follows: The first paradox is that “two

Philosophical Forays into Justice with Michael Sandel

Prof. Michael Sandel from Harvard University offered a 12-lecture course on “Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning” last year. Prof. Sandel makes a wonderful argument for studying philosophy as a means for understanding the answers that we already know, and he goes on to warn the audience that understanding political and social philosophy is, ironically, going to make you worse citizens, not better! You couldn’t ask for a more provocative set up to the lectures!

Here is the first video of the 12 [link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY]

Symptoms of the artless

Let us begin with pictures, shall we? :) To the left, is a picture of students of DAV College in Chandigargh protesting St. Valentine’s Day and the public display of affection by, well, people. And to the right is a group of people in Manhattan protesting the war in Iraq. Do you see any difference

M.K. Gandhi, Nobel Peace Prize and a little bit of history

This year’s nobel peace prize was awarded to IAEA and Mohamed ElBaradei its General Secretary. Rosa Parks, the pioneer of the american civil rights movement died yesterday. These two events, unrelated, got me rethinking about a question that had been nagging me for a long time, but had never found the answer to, viz. “Why