Stone Links: - NYTimes.com In this essay, adapted from his book "America the Philosophical," Carlin Romano rebuts the common charge - shared by Tocqueville - that American culture is essentially anti-philosophical. That's only true, he says, if one thinks of philosophical engagement as the academy would have us, namely, as tantamount to knowledge of the Western philosophical canon. While it's true that Americans are less familiar with that canon than some of their European counterparts, it needn't be true that they aren't philosophically inclined, so long as we take philosophy not to inhere in any body of knowledge, or in the application of any particular method - conceptual analysis, phenomenology and so forth - but rather in an imaginatively critical cast of mind. Taken this way, America turns out to be the most philosophical culture on the planet. Hell Is Other Philosophers: How could a benevolent God create a place of eternal pain and misery? That's the "problem of hell," a special case of the "problem of evil." At Three Quarks Daily, Robert Talisse and Scott Aiken expound two traditional defenses of hell's compatibility with God's goodness. Their conclusion is that philosophers are hell's only residents. For whether going to hell amounts to a freely chosen rejection of God's grace (libertarianism) or a proportionate punishment for just such a rejection (retributivism), a full-blooded understanding of what exactly God is would require the acumen of the philosopher (or philosopher-theologian). The Way of Moe: If the crude slapstick of Larry, Moe and Curly is properly funny - and many people find it so - what makes it funny? Not, says Britannica's post on the philosopher Robert Solomon, a sense of superiority we feel toward the characters: if that were the basis of the humor, it would vanish almost immediately, so beyond reasonable comparison, so cartoonishly brutish, are they. Not, also, the sense of surprise owing to unexpected developments: the episodes" plots can be predicted far in advance, and familiarity (through re-viewing episodes) only seems to deepen the funniness. And, finally, not any sense of relief at not being subject to their misfortunes: for again, repeated viewing of the show dulls the humor none at all, which runs counter to expectations if what is being got by the viewer is a sense of relief from tension. So, what then? Ritual - mutual - humiliation: we are meaner and simpler than we let ourselves believe; and it is in acknowledgement of this vanity that we laugh, one eye-poke to the next. A professor finds the Unabomber's writing worthy of study and lecture, at the Chronicle of Higher Education. NDPR reviews Justin E.H. Smith's "Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life." Who was the greatest fool who ever lived? The University Bookman opines. Reenacting the Apology, at the Nation. Experimental Philosophy offers up this interactive YouTube clip that both describes and extends, through viewer participation, philosophical research on happiness and moral evaluations.