Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Kant

  • Considering “The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy” (The New York Times’ The Stone)

    Mark D. White In today's installment of The Stone in The New York Times, UCLA's John McCumber presents a very critical view of "rational choice philosophy," by which he seems to mean the narrow version promulgated by most mainstream economists. In discussing the ethical problem with rational choice theory, he writes: Rational choice theory, being…

  • David Brooks’ false dichotomy regarding autonomy and sociality

    Mark D. White Last week, David Brooks' column "It's Not About You" in The New York Times spoke to the challenges that new college graduates face as they enter "the real world," focusing on the change in the imposed structure that has shielded them from life to this point: More important, their lives have been perversely…

  • David Brooks on individuality and sociality: A Kantian perspective

    Mark D. White David Brooks has a fascinating article on new research on human nature in today's New York Times (a condensation, of sorts, of his wonderfully written piece in The New Yorker in January–and, apparently, his new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, which was reviewed recently in The…

  • Bill Willingham: Turn me evil once, shame on you–turn me evil twice, shame on me!

    In a new interview on Newsarama, comics writer (and sometimes artist) Bill Willingham discusses many things, including Fables of course, but also why he left JSA after twelve issues (contained in the trades shown to the left, The Bad Seed and Axis of Evil). In particular, he cites issues with accommodating crossovers and editorial interference, which…

  • Superman discovers the need for moral judgment

    I haven't had much time to read comics the last couple weeks, so I caught up on a few today, including Superman #707, which continues the "Grounded"… well, "storyline" doesn't seem like the right term… "theme," maybe. Whatever. He's walking. (If he wanted to connect with the common man and woman, he'd realize that most…

  • On Artifical Intelligence and Personhood (with thanks to Isaac Asimov)

    Mark D. White Thanks to Larry Solum's Legal Theory Blog, I became aware of F. Patrick Hubbard's new paper "'Do Androids Dream?': Personhood and Intelligent Artifacts," forthcoming in Temple Law Review, which considers the issue of granting the status of personhood to an artificial intelligence: This Article proposes a test to be used in answering…

  • Elizabeth Warren, financial reform, and Nudge

    Mark D. White Since the nomination of Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently making headlines (though not as much as if she were a disgruntled flight attendent), I thought it was a good time to share a recent paper of mine, "We've Been Nudged: The Effects of the…