Very Bad Wizards is a podcast featuring a philosopher (Tamler Sommers) and a psychologist (David Pizarro), who share a love for ethics, pop culture, and cognitive science, and who have a marked inability to distinguish sacred from profane. Each podcast includes discussions of moral philosophy, recent work on moral psychology and neuroscience, and the overlap between the two.
http://sites.libsyn.com/474285/site
episode 34: Does Reading Harry Potter Make You Moral? (with Will Wilkinson)
Special guest Will Wilkinson joins the podcast to talk about whether fiction makes us better people, and to discuss his recent Daily Beast article that trashed Dave's profession and livelihood. Also, Dave and Tamler try to make sense of Ancient Greek justice in a myth about incest, adultery, daughter-killing, husband-killing, matricide, cannibalism, and trash talking to disembodied heads.
Links- Agamemnon [wikipedia.org]
- Will Wilkinson [wikipedia.org]
- The Will Wilkinson article that hurt David's feelings [thedailybeast.com]
- Hurt Feelings by Flight of the Concords [youtube.com]
- Does great literature make us better? by Gregory Currie [nytimes.com]
- Reading literature makes us smarter and nicer by Annie Murphy Paul [time.com]
- Want to learn how to think? Read fiction by Tom Jacobs [psmag.com]
- In Pursuit of Happiness Research [pdf] by Will Wilkinson
Special Guest: Will Wilkinson.
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