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Sunday, December 30, 2018

The Top Twelve Blog Posts of 2018




This year has been a relatively quiet one on the blogging front. Life has gotten in the way. Still, I did manage to post some decent pieces. Here are 12 of my favourites -- one from each month. I didn't use any objective metric to decide on what to include. I just focused on the ones I happened to like when looking back over them this morning. That said, with only two exceptions, my choices coincide with the 'most read' post from each month.








  • Transhumanism as Utopianism: A Critical Analysis (July 2018) - Continuing the obsession with utopianism, this post considers whether transhumanism can be considered a utopianist movement. I argue that it can, and that this is not a major problem.


  • The Optimist's Guide to Schopenhauer's Pessimism (Sep 2018) - Given my general mood for the past 12 months, it was perhaps unsurprising that I spent the month of September brooding over the merits of having an optimistic or pessimistic outlook on life. In this post, I assessed Schopenhauer's famous case for pessimism.

  • The Automation of Policing: Challenges and Opportunities (Oct 2018) - Automating technologies already play a significant role in modern policing, but what does the future hold? Can we expect more automation of key policing functions? Will this move us away from a 'detect and enforce' model of policing to a 'predict and prevent' model? I offer my thoughts on these, and other, questions in this post.

  • Am I a Hypocrite? A Philosophical Self-Assessment (Nov 2018) - We're all a little bit hypocritical from time to time. Is this a serious moral failing (as many philosophers argue) or is it a weakness that should engender sympathy? I make the case for a nuanced and less moralistic understanding of hypocrisy, using my own behaviour as a case study.

  • Hume, Miracles and the Many Witnesses Objection (Dec 2018) - Just in time for Christmas, I wrote this analysis of Arif Ahmed's recent defence of Hume's argument against miracles from the 'many witnesses' objection. Ahmed's original paper is quite dense and technical. This was an 'ordinary language' explanation.





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