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What should education aim to accomplish? What are its goals and how should it attempt to achieve them? Much excellent work, by philosophers and by policymakers, takes for granted the institutions and practices devised in the past. Yet, from time to time, it is important to stand back and to think more generally, to pose larger questions. My book, The Main Enterprise of the World, is written in that spirit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

But these two books are sufficient to have earned Parfit a reputation among political and moral philosophers as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century. Morality anchored in bedrock - one philosopher's obsession Few philosophers exhibit Parfit's imagination and depth and rigor; few philosophers are capable, as he was, of bringing fresh perspectives to age-old puzzles. But once again, many philosophers adopt a position that seems to defy common sense, and which Parfit thought was crazy. [Extracted from the article]

The essence of physical reality--what the world consists of--has been a heated focus of contention for millennia. First with philosophers and then with physicists, the debate has been polarized since the beginning: while those loosely known as Platonists search for an underlying unity in nature, others caution that such unity is unachievable in practice and in principle. In this essay, we review both positions, arguing strongly for the latter in anticipation of experimental results from the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator from the European Center for Nuclear Research.We further argue that, for the first time in history, the material essence of reality could be determined from an empirical standpoint as opposed to a purely dialectic one, settling the age-old debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often thought that there is little that seems more obvious from experience than that time objectively passes, and that time is, in this respect, quite unlike space. Yet nothing in the physical picture of the world seems to correspond to the idea of such an objective passage of time. In this paper, I discuss some attempts to explain this apparent conflict between appearance and reality. I argue that existing attempts to explain the conflict as the result of a perceptual illusion fail, and that it is, in fact, the nature of memory, rather than perception, that explains why we are inclined to think of time as passing. I also offer a diagnosis as to why philosophers have sometimes been tempted to think that an objective passage of time seems to figure directly in perceptual experience, even though it does not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Where does the study of the flow of time belong: physics, the cognitive sciences, philosophy, or somewhere else? Physicists and philosophers have set themselves up into two camps: those who believe there is genuine flow or becoming in the world and those who believe there is just a block of events. What had not been considered is whether the subjective feeling of flow of time is the same the world over, whether it could be tampered with by brain injury, or whether it is present at all developmental stages. We lay out the problem, explain terms, and provide synopses of relevant ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moderated by Esther Sternberg (author of Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-being), philosopher Simon Critchley (the New School for Social Research), cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher (University of Central Florida), and physicist V.V. Raman (Rochester Institute of Technology) survey how the self is shaped by interactions with the environment; how free will, responsibility, and other traits emerge; and how character and virtue become targets for constructing the self. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred April 28, 2011, 7:00-8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moderated by Robert Hanna (University of Colorado), historians Gerald Izenberg (Washington University, St. Louis) and Jerrold Seigel (New York University), philosopher Raymond Martin (University of Maryland and Union College), and sociologist Norbert Wiley (University of Illinois) trace the evolution of the meaning of self from antiquity to the present and consider how the self described by classical philosophers matches the reality of what we know about ourselves from human experience and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can we ever truly answer the question, 'Who am I?' Moderated by Alex Voorhoeve (London School of Economics), neuro-philosopher Elie During (University of Paris, Ouest Nanterre), cognitive scientist David Jopling (York University, Canada), social psychologist Timothy Wilson (University of Virginia), and ethicist Frances Kamm (Harvard University) examine the difficulty of achieving genuine self-knowledge and how the pursuit of self-knowledge plays a role in shaping the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the publication of several prospective studies on near-death experience (NDE) in survivors of cardiac arrest have shown strikingly similar results and conclusions, the phenomenon of the NDE can no longer be scientifically ignored. The NDE is an authentic experience that cannot be simply reduced to imagination, fear of death, hallucination, psychosis, the use of drugs, or oxygen deficiency. Patients appear to be permanently changed by an NDE during a cardiac arrest of only some minutes' duration. It is a scientific challenge to discuss new hypotheses that could explain the possibility of a clear and enhanced consciousness-with memories, self-identity, cognition, and emotions-during a period of apparent coma. The current materialistic view of the relationship between consciousness and the brain, as held by most physicians, philosophers, and psychologists, seems to be too restricted for a proper understanding of this phenomenon. There are good reasons to assume that our consciousness, with the continuous experience of self, does not always coincide with the functioning of our brain: enhanced or nonlocal consciousness, with unaltered self-identity, apparently can be experienced independently from the lifeless body. People are convinced that the self they experienced during their NDE is a reality and not an illusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moderated by Steve Paulson, producer and interviewer for public radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge, philosopher and neurobiologist Owen Flanagan (Duke University), and psychologists Paul Bloom (Yale University) and Roy Baumeister (Florida State University) examine current biological, psychological, and anthropological research on the complex interaction between the self and others, and consider the roots of empathy and morality. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred February 23, 2011, 7:00-8:15 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moderated by Krista Tippett, creator and host of America Public Media's On Being, philosophers Thomas Metzinger (University of Mainz, Germany) and Evan Thompson (University of Toronto) join cardiologist and expert on near-death experiences Pim van Lommel (Hospital Rijnstate, the Netherlands) to examine recent developments in neuroscience and philosophy that shed light on whether our conscious experience of a unified self is reality or illusion. The following is an edited transcript of the discussion that occurred December 7, 2010, 6:00-7:30 PM, at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]