Global Justice, Trade and Philosophy ... and Nietzsche Too

Global Justice, Trade and Philosophy ... and Nietzsche Too

Mathias Risse: One central term for me is that of a ground of justice. The grounds of justice are the features of the population (exclusively held) that make it the case that the principles of distributive justice hold within that population. In other words, these are the features that make the notion of distributive justice applicable within that population.

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Normative Webs, Thomas Reid and Liturgy

Normative Webs, Thomas Reid and Liturgy

Terence Cuneo: If moral facts don’t exist, then neither do epistemic ones. (I assume here that these facts are as realists understand them.) The argument’s next premise is that epistemic facts exist. Some beliefs and practices of inquiry are irrational, or justified, or supported by epistemic reasons. The argument for this claim is that, when we consider the price tag for going antirealist about the epistemic domain—by, say, denying that any beliefs could be irrational or justified—we see that it’s very high.'

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Precarity and other Feminist Philosophical Issues

Precarity and other Feminist Philosophical Issues

Robin Zheng: Precarity is the effect of decades of neoliberalism, by which I mean two things: on the one hand, a set of economic policies (e.g., the privatization of public services, deregulation of markets and labor, austerity measures) reviving certain tenets of classical laissez-faire liberalism, and on the other, a cultural and moral ethos of so-called “personal responsibility” in which society is seen as no more than an assortment of individuals who (ought to) gain the rewards and bear the costs of only their own and not others’ actions.

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Vices of the Mind: Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, Bullshit etc...

Vices of the Mind: Fake News, Conspiracy Theories, Bullshit etc...

Quassim Cassam: I now see conspiracy theories in political rather than epistemological terms. The first thing to say is that, as Rob Brotherton points out in his book Suspicious Minds, a conspiracy theory is not just any old theory about a conspiracy. Quassim Cassam

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Edith Stein, Phenomenology and Analytic Theology...

James Orr: Stein emerges from a chaotic flux of philosophical movements in fin-de-siècle Germany as one of the most promising exponents of the early phenomenological movement. She was one of the first women in Germany to receive a doctorate, which was published soon after as On the Problem of Empathy, a work that continues to inform contemporary discussion on the topic. James Orr.

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The Prābhākara Mīmāṃsā School

Elisa Freschi: We have a hermeneutic tradition which focuses on sacred texts without referring to god's intention (the school is atheist, as no doubt we'll discuss later) and without allowing for any interference between sacred texts and direct experience (no geocentrism because the sacred texts say it, for instance). At this point, a Euro-American reader is likely to ask about the origin of such texts, given that there is no god. Well, the point is that they have no origin. Elisa Freschi Published on: Feb 2, 2019 @ 12:51

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Transitional Justice

Colleen Murphy: In my work I defend the view the transitional justice is its own type of justice, not reducible to the claims of retributive, corrective, or distributive justice or some combination of these and other kinds. My argument for this view draws on the idea of circumstances of justice first articulated by David Hume.' Colleen Murphy Published on: Jan 26, 2019 @ 10:13

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Causal

Frederick Eberhardt: Causal concepts that used to be vague, intuitive, or subject to ambiguity can now be formulated in mathematically precise terms: We can clearly distinguish between what it means to probabilistically condition on an event, and intervening to bring about that event, and we can specify when the two cases agree in their predictions. Frederick Eberhardt Published on: Jan 18, 2019 @ 16:45

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Glory, Beauty, Epiphany, Imagination: How To Do Moral Philosophy

Sophie Grace Chappel: Don’t start with a moral theory, start with where you actually are. Here is a question that I think ethicists should be asking alongside Nagel’s famous question about bats (at the moment I want to use it as the title of Epiphanies Chapter 4): “What is it like to be a human being?” So start with that. Start with what it’s like to be you, with your subjectivity here and now, with what looks serious and real and important and beautiful and (yes, why not?) fun to you just as you are, from your own viewpoint. Because actually that’s the only place you ever can start from, really, and one tendency of systematising theories is to obscure this truth. Sophie Grace Chappell Published on: Jan 11, 2019 @ 15:08

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Curriculum and the Child Redux

John White: Cutting across the political and other beliefs that divide us within this framework are values which nearly all of us share or at least say we share. We want ourselves and others to have a flourishing personal life based on autonomously chosen activities and relationships. We want us all to possess the necessary conditions of such a life – good physical and mental health, adequate income, housing, education, time to ourselves, safety, the rule of law, internal and external peace etc. We want interesting work with all positions, including élite positions, open to all of us. We want to live in a democratic society, one that involves all of us in different ways in decision-making affecting the well-being of ourselves and the various communities, local and national, in which we live. John White Published on: Dec 14, 2018 @ 15:11

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Hegel and the Ethical Life

Andreja Novovic: I think that Hegel has an ambivalent relationship to reflection.  In some of his earlier writings reflection has exclusively negative connotations, but it comes to play an increasingly central role in his mature work.  Philosophical thinking is, after all, an exercise in reflection. Andreja Novovic Published on: Dec 8, 2018 @ 10:12

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Kant's Sublime

Melissa Merritt: In the German rationalist tradition, beauty is not neatly distinguished from sublimity. For them it was inconceivable that raw, massive, unorganised, destructive nature could have something appealing about it. Part of what is at work here is the influence of broadly Stoic ideas about the logos-infused cosmos: anything disordered, or seemingly disordered, will just be repugnant. As a result, sublimity figures in this tradition as an necessary aspect of beauty, where beauty is conceived (very roughly) as a kind of sensible presentation of rational organisation. Melissa Merritt Published on: Nov 30, 2018 @ 15:09

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German Idealism and Modernism

Stanley Cavell was a deeply original and creative thinker, one of the truly great American minds of the recent decades. While finding his philosophical voice, as he would say, in his encounters with Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Austin’s ordinary language philosophy, his own work reached out in a number of different directions, including aesthetics, political theory, epistemology (including skepticism), and the study of language. Espen Hammer Published on: Nov 23, 2018 @ 14:52

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How History Gets Things Wrong

The theory of mind that story-telling relies on for its explanatory power is false. It’s not just that we can't get into the heads of historical agents to figure out exactly the beliefs and wants that paired up to determine their choices, decisions and actions. My argument is not that narrative history is underdetermined by the evidence. Alex Rosenberg Published on: Nov 22, 2018 @ 18:30

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Dilthey, Simmel, Nietzsche, Benjamin: Life and Relativism

I believe that life is paradigmatic concept of our time. An array of disciplines under the umbrella term ‘life sciences’ dominate the theoretical discourse and have enormous practical impact. In fields such as medicine, pharmacology, and agriculture, numerous technological applications are changing our daily world as well. These applications can be understood as an indicator of the far-reaching implications that the scientific discourses on life have for society and culture. In the view of some, we are thus living in a “culture of life”. Johannes Steizinger Published on: Nov 17, 2018 @ 08:01

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Multi-Scale & Existentialist Freedoms

The cement of the universe is in the various species of dependence relations.  Things enter into dependence relations of one kind or another (including, as a species, causal dependence relations).  And there are no apriori restrictions as to which features are dependent and which independent. Mariam Thalos Published on: Nov 9, 2018 @ 16:13

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Buddhaghosa: Immeasurable Words

Buddhist scripture speaks differently to every person who comes in front of it because people are unique individuals and the meaning and application will speak to them in their particularity.  In this sense, its meaning unfolds in ever new ways as it works in the imagination of every reader. Maria Heim Published on: Nov 3, 2018 @ 08:16

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Taking Stock of Fiction and the Issue of Feminism and Trans Women

I have spent quite a bit of time over the last few months trying to put across an alternative to the dominant ‘inclusion’ narrative: trans women are trans women; they should be protected from all discrimination by the building of special resources for them, wherever they face violence and intimidation; and they should be provided with opportunities to participate equally in society (so perhaps, to get their own shortlists, prizes, and so on). But it is not a ‘right’ of a trans woman to enter a female-only space, or get access to a female-only opportunity, on the basis of saying they are a woman, or even legally counting as such; and it would harm females to allow this. Kathleen Stock Published on: Oct 19, 2018 @ 09:38

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Rousseau: Where Does Social Inequality Come From?

There can be no doubt that amour propre is the most important concept in Rousseau’s Second Discourse. Rousseau tells us that there, more than once, and it is the key to answering the main question of the Discourse: where does social inequality come from? Fred Neuhouser Published on: Oct 13, 2018 @ 01:23

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Zizek, Hegelian Theology after Lacan, and Philosophical Crisis

For philosophy to exist within a corporate academy it takes on a defensive apologetic posture, which it has to defend itself against the measurement of making money within the economy. But this framework of “making money” or “job employability” isn’t something that philosophy can capitulate to; indeed it turns philosophy into a handmaiden of free market economics. Philosophy is more fundamental than economics historically and conceptually. This explains why philosophy departments within the USA have more and more turned to analytic versions and ignored entirely what philosophy calls us to in terms of everyday life, ethics and even what we eat. Creston Davis Published on: Sep 28, 2018 @ 23:06

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Buddhism and Levinas

Many Indian Buddhist philosophers, and other figures they influenced elsewhere, also believe that language does not have the traction with the world that we typically believe it to possess. That is, the words and concepts we employ, and that allow communities to function, do not actually reach out and grasp reality as such. Words and concepts do not magically mirror reality. Instead, they give us is a kind of conventional truth that makes social practices possible. Ultimate reality, however, is beyond the scope of language and concepts. William Edelglass Published on: Sep 14, 2018 @ 08:56

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The Causal Revolutionary

I see sparks of uprisings among economists following me on twitter, hoping to return economics to its glorious days as the leading Queen of causal analysis. This however requires that economists accept causal diagrams for a working language, as health scientists have done. Sadly, for economists, this cultural shift seems more traumatic than conversion to voodoo. Judea Pearl Published on: Sep 8, 2018 @ 08:16

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The Monarchy of Fear

In an absolute monarchy, the monarch thrives on fear, and usually finds many ways to engineer fear. But in a democracy we need to look one another in the eye as equals and to work together for common goals. This requires trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to what other people do. If I'm always defending myself against you I do not trust you. Trust breeds deceit and defensiveness rather than common efforts to solve problems. Martha Nussbaum Published on: Aug 31, 2018 @ 22:13

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Indian Materialist Philosophy

Materialism in India had nothing to do with nihilism as such. They were thorough-going realists. However, it could be, as you say, an attack on the dualistic system that spoke of consciousness and matter as two different entities, one can exist without the other. Ramkrishna Bhattacharya Published on: Aug 17, 2018 @ 20:00

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The Contesting Memory of African Philosophy

In my view, a worthwhile African philosophic reflection must necessarily be a hermeneutic or interpretative reflective-reflexive exploration of our contemporary African socio-political situation. Of course, one can also philosophize—interpretatively engage—Africa’s religious, artistic, etc., traditions and this would be, in and of itself interesting, but not relevant! Not relevant, because what has become worthy of questioning in Africa today is the systemic collapse of society. Tsenay Serequeberhan Published on: Aug 12, 2018 @ 15:33

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Interdisciplinary: Metaphysics, Science and Philosophy

Looking at Pauli’s scientific correspondence and the way he originally introduced the principle in a letter to Alfred Landé in 1924, it was clear that it was a purely phenomenological rule to explain some puzzling phenomena in spectroscopy on which Pauli and colleagues had been working for years. Heisenberg referred to it teasingly as Pauli’s “Verbot”; and it was only with Dirac that it became known as “Pauli’s exclusion principle” in 1926. How did a phenomenological rule eventually become a scientific principle? Michela Massimi Published on: Jul 28, 2018 @ 08:15

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Philosophy and Poetry

Karen Simecek Published on: Jul 22, 2018 @ 07:31

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The Weaponising of Free Speech On Campus, and Other Toxicities...

Democratic institutions should continue paying attention to identity politics because identity is still a main cause of injustice, in that individuals’ opportunities are limited as a result of their identity attributes. Moreover, people commonly understand themselves and the world through an identity lens, and therefore to the extent that we are looking to develop knowledge about people we should at least consider identity as an important dimension of the psychological, social and political world. Sigal Ben-Porath Published on: Jul 20, 2018 @ 09:31

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Emptiness and No-Self: Nāgārjuna's Madhyamaka

The emptiness of emptiness is interesting as a response to the Madhyamaka dilemma because of its meta-philosophical implications. It forces us to re-examine our conception of what philosophical theories are and what they do. The theory of emptiness certainly looks like a very general and very comprehensive metaphysical theory. And if we consider it from the perspective of Western metaphysics we are all familiar with, it is unclear how we could say that such a theory is not making the claim that it is ultimately true. Jan Westerhoff Published on: Jul 15, 2018 @ 06:53

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How Not To Be A Frog In A Well: Chinese/German/Buddhist Philosophy

Hegel claimed that it would have been better if the Analects of Confucius had never been translated so that its reputation for moral wisdom could have been preserved. Hegel and Rosenzweig belong to what could well be described as the religiously motivated rejection of non-Western forms of thought; they lack the grandeur and height of God and the individual dignity of the person that they respectively associate with Christianity and Judaism. Eric S Nelson Published on: Jul 14, 2018 @ 06:46

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Hindu Syllogisms and Dark Necessities Go Fusion

Anand Jayprakash Vaidya was born in Chicago. However, he spent most of his youth in Saudi Arabia. During his stay there he spent a lot of time in Germany and India. Shortly after the 1st Gulf War in 1991, he moved to California.  His early interests were in Indian Philosophy, Spinoza, Heidegger, Merleau Ponty, and The Philosophy of Law. However, it was his interest in Logic that led him to switch schools. He developed an interest in the Philosophy of Economics and the History of Philosophy and wrote his dissertation on the Epistemology of Modality (how we know what is possible and necessary, as opposed to what is merely actual). His focus was on the use of two-dimensional modal semantics as a foundation for articulating a relation between conceivability and possibility. Published on: Jul 7, 2018 @ 04:55

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Nietzsche: the Middle Writings

This is a ‘Nietzsche’ who is committed to continuing an Enlightenment project, who seeks to combat fanaticism (in philosophy, in morality, and in religion), who espouses the need for a philosophy of modesty and the use of modest words when it comes to describing ourselves, and a Nietzsche who recommends, contra the demand for revolution, a program of ‘slow cures’ and ‘small doses’. Keith Ansell-Pearson Published on: Jul 3, 2018 @ 11:04

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Maximus, Al-Farabi and the Extended Philosophical Canon

Maximus’ philosophy challenges our understanding of what European philosophy is. The examination of numerous aspects of Maximus’ philosophy stresses the interdisciplinary character of Maximian studies. Apart from Maximus’ relevance and importance for philosophy in general, a second question arises: should towering figures of Byzantine philosophy like Maximus the Confessor be included in an overview of the history of European philosophy, or rather excluded from it—as is the case today with most histories of European philosophy? Georgios Steiris Published on: Jul 1, 2018 @ 06:38

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Rethinking Minds: the Wittgenstein, Levinas, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty Gang

What I think is interesting about Wittgenstein and Levinas is that they try to make sense of both the Cartesian’s and the behaviourist’s share of the truth in one go, as it were. (Although I doubt they would think of themselves as addressing the philosophical problem of other minds – Levinas certainly wouldn’t. But let me set that point aside.) Their idea, I think, is that there is something about the very way in which other minds are given to us – even when they are perfectly transparent – that explains the fragility of our grasp of them. Søren Overgaard Published on: Jun 27, 2018 @ 14:53

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Bayes' Arrows

Here he discusses different kinds of uses of  probabilities in science, causality, Hume and Bayes, why thinking causality is a fiction isn't even wrong, causal Bayes nets, social sciences poor record of making inferences, free will, why Aristotle's approach to philosophy bests Plato's and why there's not enough of that approach in contemporary philosophy at the moment, Laplacian demons, why in general scientists are right to criticise contemporary philosophy on the grounds that it doesn't do anything, and the threats that Bayesians will avert. This'll wake you up... Clark Glymour Published on: Jun 23, 2018 @ 07:40

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Carl Schmitt and Democratic Cannibalism

Schmitt may even be a more controversial thinker than Heidegger. Not only was he, like Heidegger, a member of the Nazi Party and openly anti-Semitic, Schmitt was also a well-known public lawyer. He used that recognition to play an active role in legitimizing the early years of the Nazi regime, employing his thought in the pursuit of despicable political ends. For example, he wrote a public legal defense of Hitler’s 1934 assassination of his political rivals in the “Night of Long Knives.” He also incorporated overt anti-Semitism into his academic writings, which undoubtedly helped to normalize it. Benjamin A Schupmann Published on: Jun 16, 2018 @ 03:40

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The Impossible and The Real

He's drawn to paradoxes—seemingly acceptable premises which lead to absurd conclusions. These lead to his interests in truth and vagueness. Far from being mere philosophers’ games, paradoxes are deep problems calling out for a philosophical solution. In the case of paradoxes about truth and vagueness, the paradoxes have had the best of it, so far. Here he discusses some of these things, including hypertensional contents, informativeness, how best to think about impossible worlds, why he rejects Meinongian beings that lack existence, how ertsatz worlds represent non-actual entities, bounded rationality and vagueness, grounding and fundamentality, essences, properties does the grounding relation have, what material objects are, what is fundamental to reality, and why heed the philosopher. Mark Jago Published on: Jun 9, 2018 @ 08:12

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Aristotelian Plato, Mathematical Pythagoreanism and the Origins of Philosophy

Plato was impressed by the Persians and Egyptians, and in antiquity he was thought to have traveled to meet them in his youth (and, on his death bed, a Chaldean came to gain wisdom from him). Plato wrote eloquently about the wisdom of Egypt in the Timaeus-Critias, ascribing the wisdom of his distant ancestor Solon of Athens to the Egyptians, and he praises the wisdom of the Persian kings Cyrus and Darius in the Laws. He also wrote about the Zoroastrian educational system, and in particular Ahura Mazda (who was the primary god of the Zoroastrian pantheon), in the First Alcibiades, which he praised in various ways, but ultimately considered deficient to the system of Socratic/Platonic education that he was advancing. Quite interestingly, as soon as Plato dies, his students in the Academy (especially his amanuensis Philip of Opus, and another figure called Hermodorus of Syracuse) claim that Plato took his overall metaphysical system from the Persians - a striking claim that, when compared with the surviving inscriptions from Persia and the Zoroastrian writings, which are collected under the title Avesta, show impressive connections. Phil Horky Published on: Jun 2, 2018 @ 09:36

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Indian Philosophy of Language

Here he discusses why philosophy of language is important, the ancient roots of linguistic philosophy, literal vs non-literal meanings, artha, the importance of Sanskrit, how Indian philosophy deals with the primary/secondary meaning distinction, three conditions necessitating secondary meaning, complications of bitextuality and polysemy, suggested meaning and speaker’s intention, Buddhism and Jainism, whether Jainism is committed to a dialetheistic paraconsistent logic, Kashmiri Mukulabhaṭṭa, reading Indian and Chinese philosophy with an eye towards finding different questions, what Indian philosophy of language contributes to other philosophy of language, and why a cross-disciplinary and historical and transcultural approach to philosophy is important. Malcolm Keating Published on: May 31, 2018 @ 08:27

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After Identity: Questions Of Interpretation

Gadamer conceives of the so-called hermeneutic circle of whole and part as an interpretive check that allows us to reject certain understandings. The circle describes the way we understand the parts of a text in terms of our anticipation of the meaning of the whole and the way we project the meaning of the whole in terms of our understanding of the parts. Where we cannot integrate parts and whole, we have to admit that either that which we are trying to understand is unintelligible or our attempt to understand has failed and we must begin again. Georgia Warnke Georgia Warnke

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Can Philosophy and Religion be Harmonised? Averroes, Avicenna, Hegel

Both Avicenna and Averroes seek to harmonise philosophy and religion, but Averroes does this explicitly, especially in his Decisive Treatise on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy, while Avicenna does it implicitly, by incorporating Islamic themes into his philosophy. Catarina Belo Published on: May 19, 2018 @ 05:40

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Why You Don't Need Brain Surgery To Change Logic

It’s frequently noted that when one becomes aware that certain of one’s beliefs are logically inconsistent, the most rational response is often to keep the inconsistency, because one is not sure how best to eliminate it.  The ability to manage known inconsistencies and other tensions in one’s beliefs is one of the many important factors in rationality that stress on “being logical” obscures. Hartry Field  Published on: May 3, 2018 @ 13:02

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How Donald Trump's Bullshit Earned Him a Place in the History of Assertion

How Donald Trump's Bullshit Earned Him a Place in the History of Assertion

Here he discusses what holism and compositionality are, Fodor and Lepore's claim that they're incompatible, Davidson, radical interpretation and pragmatic enrichment, assertion and what it is, social and non-social and normative and non-normative theories of assertion, Tim Williamson, Paul Grice, Robert Stalnaker, Donald Trump, de se communication and uncentred vs centred worlds,  then vagueness, Moore's paradox, whether we can intend to be misinterpreted, empty names and what we can learn about the nature of language from individuals or systems that are unlike normal speakers. Peter Pagin Published on: Apr 29, 2018 @ 00:05

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Aspiration

Here she discusses the problem of our future selves, the distinction between hedonism and desire-satisfaction,the practice of Socratic protreptic, why aspiration is not the same as ambition, why adventures aren't aspirational, akrasia (weakness of will), how aspiration helps us overcome old points of view, whether we're responsible for the people we become, and should we work on becoming the future person, whether her view denies free-will and choice, how aspiration helps avoid two evils of liberal education and whether she's an Aristotelian or Humean about all this. Then she talks about reasons to be angry forever and the contrast between anger and sadness. Agnes Callard Published on: Apr 27, 2018 @ 13:30

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Why Marx's Philosophy But Not His Economics Matters Now

He talks about Marx's move towards thinking about emancipation in terms of economics, the working class and alienation, his relationship to classical economic theories, the materialist theory of history, hand mills and steam mills, why Marx didn't think we should just wait for the inevitable revolution, Marx's critique of capitalism, what the obsolete Marxist societies in the near past tell us about Marx's ideas, what contemporary China tells us, Piketty, Globalisation, the environment, Utilitarianism and what is and isn't relevant in Marx for us today. Peter Singer Published on: Apr 26, 2018 @ 09:23

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Epistemic Luck, Angst and Disjunctivism

Here he discusses epistemic luck and anti-luck epistemology, neo-Moorean approaches, Pyrrhonian scepticism and how to live with scepticism, veretic luck, reflective luck, Wittgensteinian and McDowellian considerations, disjunctivism, epistemic angst, keeping apart underdetermination-based scepticism and closure-based radical scepticism, Wittgenstein on certainty and closure-based radical scepticism, Williamson's knowledge-first approach and how best to answer those who worry that philosophical questions can't ever be conclusively answered. Duncan Pritchard Published on: Apr 21, 2018 @ 04:57

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Legitimacy and Epistemic Democracy

Here she discusses why democratic legitimacy is important, what kind of decision making it requires, the equality requirement, why collective rationality isn't a requirement, what theory of legitimacy is required, whether political decision-making requires experts to make good decisions and the requirements of epistemic democracy. Then she discusses health equity and social justice, and the normative significance of our interactions with others. Fabienne Peter Published on: Apr 20, 2018 @ 20:28

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Wittgenstein and the Limits of Science

Here he discusses Wittgenstein's anti-scientism, how he thought it might infect approaches to philosophy of mind, his use of 'Inner' and 'outer', the orthodox view about  his ideas about phenomenal concepts and Child's unorthodox position, on whether Cora Diamond's view about continuities between early and late Wittgenstein are right, whether there's a private language argument in the Tractatus,  whether Wittgenstein was a verificationist and whether the answer helps us answer the question as to whether he was a Behaviourist, whether Wittgenstein was a realist or anti-realist about the past and future, and why it matters, the problem of understanding action or perception in causal terms, Cartesianism, Interpretationism, anti-Cartesianism, Donald Davidson and Interpretationism, and whether Wittgenstein can help answer the hard question of consciousness. Bill Child Published on: Apr 14, 2018 @ 17:19

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The Fragmentation of Being

Here he discusses Heidegger and his analogy of Being and Beings of Reason, holes, Heidegger’s distinction between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand objects, Van Inwagen on Heidegger's understanding of Being, whether existence is a property, whether Being can come in degrees, ontological pluralism, and ontological monism, composition, why whole's aren't identical with their parts, carving nature at the joints, whether parts of reality are eternal, and whether we can decide whether a metaphysical system is right or not. Kris McDaniel Published on: Apr 7, 2018 @ 03:00

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The Parochialism of Philosophy

Here he discusses why study philosophy, the parochialism of the history of philosophy, in particular medieval philosophy, after certainty and the lively domain of epistemology, the epistemic ideal and skepticism. Robert Pasnau Published on: Apr 3, 2018 @ 00:05

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minimalism

Here she discusses why we need a theory of meaning, Davidson, why this isn't linguistics, whether philosophy of language is an applied discipline, whether there are grounds for selecting a correct theory of meaning, intentions and meaning, mirror neutrons, minimalism, the importance of Grice, local pragmatic effects, saying, implying, asserting, and internalism and externalism. Emma Borg Published on: Mar 31, 2018 @ 08:00

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On the Frontiers of Physics, Math and Philosophy

Here he discusses Quantization, Hilbert space conservative and Algebraic Imperialists, Bohm's interpretation, the ontological models framework, what Bell’s theorem and classical probability spaces are, why these alternative probability theories fail for quantum mechanics, the role of algebra in quantum theory, how we get out of quantum physics the actual stuff we seem to have, continuity between classical and quantum physics, how to use infinite idealizations, Nagel’s treatment of reduction, geometry, and whether we can make sense of saying physics is fundamental. Benjamin H Feintzeig Published on: Mar 24, 2018 @ 12:13

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What's Fair About Disability, Rationing Health Care, Ageing and Overpopulation?

I don't think that equality in itself is valuable. We should care about inequalities, but we shouldn't try to deal with them by making people more equal; rather, we should help those who are worse off. In philosophical terms, that makes me a prioritarian rather than an egalitarian. A prioritarian holds that a unit of benefit has more value when it goes to a worse off person, and the worse off the person is, the greater its value; but she does not think it's worth pursuing equality for its own sake. Greg Bognar Published on: Mar 17, 2018 @ 09:30

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The Social Ontology of Power

Here she discusses social ontology, social power, the narrowness of current conceptions of deontic power, four ways of understanding social power, power as an ability, power to do and power over and why conflict of interest is not a necessary condition of power. Åsa Burman Published on: Mar 15, 2018 @ 22:14

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McTaggart and Metaphysics

Here he discusses McTaggart's causation and Idealism, action at a temporal distance, McTaggart's paradox of time, how it has been misunderstood, whether it's one of the great paradoxes, whether the appearance of time supports a metaphysics of time and McTaggart's correspondence theory of truth. Then he discusses the metaphysics of powers, qualities and properties and ends by saying why we should heed the philosopher. Rognvaldur Ingthorsson Published on: Mar 9, 2018 @ 20:31

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Davidson and Indeterminacy of Truth Conditions

Here she discusses ordinary language philosophy, its link with philosophy of mind, Donald Davidson and his theory of meaning, his indeterminacy thesis, radical skepticism, why we shouldn't abandon Davidson's approach, why meaning holism and compositionality don't threaten Davidson's approach, puzzles and facts about meaning, and responses to meaning skepticism. Arpy Khatchirian Published on: Mar 3, 2018 @ 08:02

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Ramchandra Gandhi and Contemporary Indian Philosophy

Here he discusses Ramchandra Gandhi, Gandhi's early work on Grice and the distinction between ‘eliciting’ and ‘soliciting’, the Self and the Other, Gandhi's attitude to religion and art, Gandhi's break from the analytic tradition, Gandhi's non-sectarianism and anti communalism, Vivekananda and contemporary Indian philosophy, Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya and Akeel Bilgrami, Daya Krishna and Satchidananda Murty,absorbing Buddhism into Hinduism, whether Indian philosophy could interface with Islamic philosophy as well and the dominant structures and paradigms of philosophy as currently practiced in India. A. Raghuramaraju Published on: Feb 24, 2018 @ 08:58

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Metaphysics of Technology and Panpsychism

Here he discusses the metaphysics of technology, Heidegger, why we need a metaphysics of technology, the cognitive and epistemological conflict of interest that arises in this area, four key issues and what such a metaphysics looks like. He then discusses to panpsychism in the west, why he agrees with Galen Strawson’s claim that panpsychism obliges us to accept some version as theoretically primary, it's early origins, Italian naturalists, Spinoza and Leibniz, resistance to the mechanistic view of nature, contemporary views, and the arguments for and against it that promise a bright future for a panpsychist paradigm shift. David Skrbina Published on: Feb 16, 2018 @ 17:27

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Impossibility and Non-Existence

Here he discusses possible and impossible worlds, paraconsistency and dialetheism, the logic of the imagination, whether conceivability entails possibility, fictionalism, noneism and Meinongianism, Quine vs Meinong, whether reality is digital or analogue, and whether the concept of identity can fail to apply to somethings even when we can count them. Franz Berto Published on: Feb 10, 2018 @ 09:00

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Who Are We Today? Foucault: Proust: Deleuze

Here he discusses Foucault and desire from a genealogical perspective, why ours is a civilisation of desire, aesthetics after metaphysics, metaphor, the hypersensible, the philosophical Proust, Deleuze and immanence, and Delueze and Heidegger. Miguel de Beistegui Published on: Feb 3, 2018 @ 09:51

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Phenomenology: Husserl's Legacy

Here he discusses phenomenology, Husserl, his facticity and intersubjectivity, his relationship to Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the self, why the anonymity and transparency objections fail, the unity of the self, temporality and selfhood, the self and others, empathy and shame, attitudes towards phenomenology, and why phenomenology is on the rise again. Dan Zahavi Published on: Jan 27, 2018 @ 08:17

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The Anti-Platonist Metaphysician

Here he discusses what he believes metaphysics to be, the relevance of logic to metaphysics,vagueness, why metaphysics isn't philosophy of language, mereology, Leśniewski and Whitehead, temporal and modal considerations, tropes, what exists, non-existing objects, what lies between mereological atoms and continuous non-atomic gunk, the importance and brilliance of the Lvov-Warsaw School, the realism of Bolzano, Brentano and Meinong, and his anti-platonism. This is a long walk into the crucial depths... Peter Simons Published on: Jan 20, 2018 @ 12:35

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Along With The Eggs, Are There Sets Of Eggs In The Fridge Too? And Other Key Questions...

Here he talks about what maths is, logic and maths, fictionalism, the a priori, sets, whether maths are about human activities, empiricism about mathematics, Quine’s indispensability argument, confirmations holism, whether there were mathematical truths before humans were around to entertain their truth, whether we can know a proposition in mathematics without proof, why inductive reasoning is crucial for mathematical knowledge, David Hilbert and mathematical instrumentalism, naturalism, the subtraction argument and the possibility of an empty world, and Fitch. Alexander Pasau Published on: Jan 13, 2018 @ 09:11

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Poise Is Everything... Surfing Uncertainty

Here he shoots from the hip on the extended mind, flip flopping, Searles' mind-brain thesis, extended consciousness, lazy brains and rich world models, Terminators and Star Trek, something about Chinese rooms, cameras and understanding, Chalmers and dualism, a new paradigm of the mind, consciousness and the self, and playing ethical catch-up with the singularity. Va-va-Voom! Andy Clark Published on: Jan 5, 2018 @ 23:56

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Spinoza's Metaphysics and His Relationship To Hegel and the German Idealists

Here he discusses Spinoza's overall project, monism and how to understand Spinoza's version of it, infinite modes, metaphysics, God, Thought, Thought-Being dualism, Spinoza's relationship with German Idealism, German Idealism as a combination of Spinoza and Kant, his rationalism and German Idealism, Herder and Spinoza, determinatio est negatio and Hegel, and what Spinoza might have thought about German Idealism. Yitzhak Melamed Published on: Dec 30, 2017 @ 19:55

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Credence: What To Do When We're Not Certain

Here he discusses what a credence is, its pedigree, what an irrational credence is, what 'no drop' is, credence and accuracy, omniscient credences and uncentered propositions, the squared Euclidean distance, why we really can't live up the standards of rationality demanded by this, and what to do, the role of epistemic value, Probabilism, the Principle Principle, Indifference, updating, and understanding accuracy-first epistemology as something of an analogue of hedonic utilitarianism in epistemology. He ends by discussing the problem of how we decide something knowing we’re going to be changed in the future. Roll on... Richard Pettigrew Published on: Dec 23, 2017 @ 10:34

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Existentialists In Love

Here she talks about existentialism and romantic love, romantic loving, merging, Max Stirner, egotistical love, Kierkegarrad's aesthetic love, and why the religious alternative is a damp squid for romance even if a better bet, why Nietzsche thought friendship better than romance, Sartre's sado-masochism, De Beauvoir and her relationship with Sartre, her view of authenticity and how it relates to romance, and why ultimately she agrees with Nietzsche that friendship beats merging. One for all the winter existentialists out there .... Skye Cleary Published on: Dec 16, 2017 @ 11:52

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Refer

Here he discusses how words refer, Kripke, descriptivism vs causal theory, Frege, Barcan Marcus, problems descriptivists face, why Kripke et al fare better, hybrids and Evans, how indexicals refer, do we have a unified theory of reference if we're not Fregeian, why not every meaningful expression refers, reference in the Matrix, psychedelic goblins, reference and metaphysics, Quine and Davidson on reference, the answering machine paradox, bullshit in politics, and whether we should eat fish. This is a good long trail somewhere. Winters coming. Take your time... Eliot Michaelson Published on: Dec 9, 2017 @ 09:49

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Logics: More Than One Way to Skin a Cat...

Here he discusses why logic is important to philosophy, what kinds of logic he's interested in, in the work of Gentzen and Belnap, classical and non-classical logics, why it makes sense to talk about a correct logic, what proofs are, proof-theoretic understanding of validity, intuitionist logic, Dummett and Kripke, paraconsistent logic, dialetheism, Nelson's paraconsistent logic and computer science and the connexive logic of Aristotle and Boethius. Heinrich Wansing Published on: Dec 2, 2017 @ 10:49

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Frege, Dummett, Vagueness, Liars and Julius Caesar

Here he discusses both Frege and Dummett, plus vagueness, the liar paradox, compositionally and deflationism. Richard Heck Published on: Nov 25, 2017 @ 08:17

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The Critical Imagination

His current work focuses on the questions of what makes something a good artwork, and whether good artworks are intrinsically valuable. He is also interested in philosophical questions about poetry (for example, whether some thoughts can be expressed only in metaphor) and about beauty (for example, whether beauty is good primarily because it provides pleasure). James Grant Published on: Nov 18, 2017 @ 11:06

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Thinking About Globalisation, Immigration and Refugees

Here he discusses philosophical issues about globalisation, family-based immigration, its relation to freedom of association, the relevance of comparing this kind of immigration to same-sex marriage for Rawlsians, gang-related asylum claims, refugees, whether immigrants should be held to higher standards than non-immigrants, guest workers, the importance of persecution, the role of International Law in all this, climate change refugees, the role of liberal elites and what cracks in their hold over the values of people living in Western democracies auger. Matthew Lister Published on: Nov 4, 2017 @ 15:30

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Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger: Sex, Death and Boredom

Here he discusses Schopenhauer's debts to Kant, his Darwinian account of science, his account of 'will', his approach to art, the sublime, Heidegger's magic realism, Nietzsche's debts to Schopenhauer, his theory of art, Heidegger's views about art, and his mysticism. Julian Young Published on: Oct 25, 2017 @ 08:17

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Brentano's Mind, Frege's Sense

Here he discusses Brentano's theory of consciousness, self-representation, the dual relation thesis, why Brentano should not have introduced the soul into his theory, Brentano's legacy for the Austrian wing of Analytic philosophy and his relevance for contemporary discussions of consciousness and AI why he wishes Bolzano was better known, Frege on what words stand for, the mathematical and Kantian roots of his philosophy of language, concept words, assetoric sentences as answers and sentences as structured and unstructured. Mark Textor Published on: Oct 14, 2017 @ 11:47

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brains

Here she discusses the relationship between philosophy and cognitive science, brain scanning, freewill, motive internalism, using neuroscience in law, experimental philosophy, sexism in philosophy departments and the future of AI. Adina L. Roskies Published on: Oct 7, 2017 @ 10:36

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Understanding Defensive Killing

Here she discusses why there's an interest in the ethics of war, Walzer on war, the ethics of self-defence and the ethics of war, the idea of war as an extension of ordinary life, using force, the role of uncertainty, pre-emptive strikes, war as punishment, just wars by unjust means, the moral status of combatants and non-combatants, justice after war and the role of philosophy in the contemporary world. This one hums... Helen Frowe Published on: Sep 30, 2017 @ 09:34

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embodiment

Here he discusses the philosophical issues of embodiment, globalisation and secularisation, post-secularisation, modernisation and religion, Eucharistic theology, phenomenology of religion, religion and women's bodies, Nietzsche, incarnation in Christian theology, the philosophy of the gaze and embodiment, emancipation as style in the work of Eagelton and , the theology of Eagelton and Žižek and their Marxism. Ola Sigurdson Published on: Sep 24, 2017 @ 11:07

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Does God Play Dice?

Here he discusses quantum mechanics, what makes it unsatisfactory in many respects, problems of the wave function, continuous vs non-continuous motion, his ontic view of the wave function, protective measurements, the Schrödinger equation, why he thinks God does play dice with the universe, whether causation is an illusion, quantum mechanics and relativism, why he thinks Everett's many worlds interpretation is incompatible with his own approach, consciousness and quantum mechanics, and why Newton was right when he said reality was particles. Shan Gao Published on: Sep 17, 2017 @ 09:17

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Why Compromise? Why Peace?

Here he discusses his approach to compromise, why he thinks we should think about other values rather than get fixated on justice when thinking about politics, why he thinks peace is at least as important as justice, morality and compromise, why he's not a realist or pragmatist, the uses of feasibility, normatively and compromise, public justifiability and justice, different kinds of moral compromise, modus vivendi and peace, stability, respect and community, and winning the Sanders Prize. Fabian Wendt Published on: Sep 9, 2017 @ 08:31

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The Infidel and the Professor

Here he discusses the friendship between Hume and Smith and why their relationship has been so little discussed, their views on friendship itself, the Scottish Enlightenment, the 'Pragmatic Enlightenment', the role of Calvinism in their work, whether Hume was primarily an historian or a philosopher, their political alignments, Smith and Rousseau, Smith and Hume on morality, Hume's influence on The Wealth of Nations, Smith's attitude towards Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religions, and the controversy surrounding Smith's account of Hume's death. Dennis Rasmussen Published on: Sep 2, 2017 @ 08:43

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How to Talk About Empiricism

Here he discusses scientific realism and anti-realism, empiricism and his own position - constructive empiricism, his 3-layer model of theory-phenomena-appearance, quantum mechanics, its relationship with empiricism, laws of nature, philosophical issues with materialism, why he's dubious about analytic metaphysics, induction and abduction, theological options, and existentialism. Bas van Fraassen Published on: Aug 27, 2017 @ 21:05

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Aristotelian Metaphysics

Here he carefully and thoroughly discusses philosophical intuitions about Aristotle's metaphysics, dependence and independence relations in Aristotle, how he links Aristotelian metaphysics to contemporary concerns, its relationship with Quine, ontological priority, Kit Fine's influence, essences and their essences, Aristotle’s hylomorphism and whether his causal-explanatory model of essence and definition is applicable to substance-kinds. You'll get the hang of this if you read on. If Aristotle never left here are some passionately and incisively expressed reasons why we still should think about him. Carve out some time for this one ... Michail Peramatzis Published on: Aug 19, 2017 @ 10:27

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Causation, Probability and Philosophy

Here he discusses the distinction between actual causation and causation, why norms are important in accounts of causation, why he rejects a Humean account of causation, an aside about scientific anti-realism, probabilistic causality and the worries of determinism, Kant's 'means-ends' metaphysics, extended causal models, causal theories in the philosophy of mind using the fallacy of equivocation, counterfactual theories of causation, evolutionary theory as a theory of forces, defaults, typicality and normality, whether Dr Who should consult graphical causal models, probability and credences, and finally Bayes and the 'shooting room' paradox. Rockin'! Christopher Hitchcock Published on: Aug 14, 2017 @ 08:00

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On Doing and Allowing Harm

Here she discusses the distinction between acts and omissions and doing and allowing, wicked uncles, Frances Kamm's argument for the moral relevance of the distinction between doing and allowing, intrusion, Warren Quinn's arguments for the distinction, substantial facts and presuppositions, Singer's pond case, Unger and Singer on the Donation case and why it links to the pond case, whether her work helps decide which normative theory we adopt, Parfit's non-identity argument and the hired gun, and whether all moral reasons give rise to moral obligations. Fiona Woollard Published on: Aug 5, 2017 @ 09:24

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On the Nature of Truth

With talk of 'post-truth' and 'fake news' all around us it seems right to talk to an expert about the nature of truth. So here he talks about the difference between axiomatic and semantic approaches to truth, why he thinks the axiomatic approach is superior, what conditions this approach must satisfy, the interplay between the two approaches, whether his approach is a kind of deflationary theory of truth, whether deflationists should be conservative, why consistency is out of reach of any knowledge theory, on voluntarism and whether Descartes was a voluntarist, what is meant when it is said that arithmetic is a computational structure, and self reference in mathematics. Volker Halbach Published on: Jul 30, 2017 @ 13:07

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The Happiness Philosopher

Here he discusses why the received view of the utilitarians is distorted, ad hominum arguments, utilitarianism and anti-slavery and anti-colonialism, Godwin's visionary philosophy, the strangeness of Bentham, his radical dream of a world without cruelty, why Foucault and Marx misunderstand him, his radical views on sex, J.S. Mill and his feminism, Henry Sidjwick and gay liberation, his impact on contemporaries like Parfit and Singer and the openness of the utilitarians as a group to the uncanny and weird. Bart Schultz Published on: Jul 22, 2017 @ 20:50

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Descrying the World of Physics

Here he discusses his project descrying the world of physics, how he answers Fodor's question 'why is there more than physics?, materialism, consciousness, the direction of time, the behaviours of micro and macro states, the Mentaculus, why he prefers Boltzman's realism to anti-realism, freewill, the status of probabilities used in physics, comparing Lewis's possible worlds with Everett's many worlds, and the philosophical challenges of cosmological inflation. Big Bang Bomb!!! Barry Loewer Published on: Jul 14, 2017 @ 14:44

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The Fall and Rise of Louis Althusser

Here he discusses Althusser, why his reputation faded, his early thinking on Hegel, Christianity and Marx, his work on Montesquieu, his work in the 1960's, why he returned to the early Marx, why and how he introduced hermeneutics to Marxism, the influence of Spinoza, Freud and Marx, gives a bravura summary of his non-empiricist theory of epistemology and philosophy of science, the role of philosophy in his thinking, whether he was a Marxist structuralist, his anti-humanism, the status of his later writings, and whether he is still of relevance. William Lewis Published on: Jul 7, 2017 @ 03:20

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Philosophers Wrong About Knowledge Since Plato Bombshell!

Here he discusses why the Gettier problem in contemporary epistemology is philosophy's version of 'fake news', experimental philosophy and psychology, assertion, factive norms, virtue epistemology, inability and obligation, why ableism should replace reliabilism and attitudes to breaking rules. John Turri Published on: Jul 1, 2017 @ 06:32

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Law

Law

Here he discusses the necessity of laws of nature, why their necessity is contingent, whether these laws are immutable, what meta-laws are and what they're for, laws and objective chance, why laws are laws because they are necessary rather than because they are laws, non-causal explanations in science and maths, explanation by constraint and why we don't find them in maths, really statistical and dimensional explanations, why non-causal explanations are important in maths, and why despite their diversity non-causal explanations really are all explanations. This one needs time and a steady minds eye... Marc Lange Published on: Jun 24, 2017 @ 14:49

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Modern Metaphysics - the Analytic/Continental Mix

Here he discusses the foundation of modern metaphysics, Frege, why Dummett doesn't seem as influential as Quine and Lewis, bridging the analytic/continental divide, Nietzsche - Spinoza - Hegel, Husserl- Descartes - Wittgenstein, Heidegger's metaphysics, Collingwood's metaphysics as history, Derrida, Deleuze, Kant's ethical views, whether absolute representations are possible and some philosophical issues about infinity. This is one winding road... Adrian Moore Published on: Jun 17, 2017 @ 21:54

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Arcadian Wisdom

here he discusses Plato's notion of techne, its relationship to morality, Plato's use of rhetoric and its link to postmodernism, the importance of the dialogic and dialectical characteristics of Plato's works, why Talmudic readings of Aristotle are appropriate, why he prefers Aristotle's account of the cosmos to our contemporary one and Aristotle's phenomenology. David Roochnik Published on: Jun 10, 2017 @ 01:07

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The Pluralist

Here he discusses his understanding of a pluralistic approach to morality, the relationship between philosophy and anthropology in the matter of understanding morality, the hermeneutical requirement of similarity and difference, Confucianism and Western philosophy and the possibility of a synthesis, why it's better to talk of sustaining cultures rather than preserving them, the issue of diversity and increasing homogeneity, Aristotle and Daoist approaches to how we should live, the role of Rawls' Aristotelian Principle in approaching the complexity of understanding the good life, the Daoist's 'less is more' principle, the different faces of love in the good life, relational ethical approaches to the environmental crisis, how the notion of a relational self helps overcome conflicts between individuals and their communities, and how Mencius helps overcome the perceived division between desire and reason. David Wong Published on: Jun 3, 2017 @ 06:26

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Nietzsche and Friendship

Here he discusses Nietzsche and art, his unpopular views about Socrates, the art of friendship, beauty in art, authenticity and why philosophy is not redundant. Alexander Nehamas Published on: May 27, 2017 @ 07:35

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Disagreement

Here he discusses moral disagreement and contextualism, why disagreeing with someone doesn't have to mean you think the other person wrong, what that tells us about disagreement, modal disagreement, the distinction between indicatives and subjunctives, backtracking counterfactuals, Ramsey's thesis and its counterfactuals, and then he explains his ideas about how code-words like 'Inner'city' work to disguise toxic thoughts. Justin Khoo Published on: May 21, 2017 @ 09:44

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Jerk and Whoosh Time

Here she discusses absolute time, Henry More on time, whether More's Platonism and naturalism mixed, Samuel Alexander and substantivalism, spacetime,emergentism, matter, Spinoza, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, polytheistic blasphemy and how she avoids it, her feminism, Lockeanism, and Kantian Idealism, Hilda Diana Oakley, her idealism and her arguments about time defending jerk and whoosh and finally why idealism is important. And look out for her book Absolute Time in Early Modern British Metaphysics when it appears in the near future via Oxford University Press. Emily Thomas Published on: May 13, 2017 @ 08:38

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The Noumenaut: Psychedelics and Philosophy

Here he discusses psychedelics and the hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism, why psychedelics is no safe harbour, the link between psychedelics and Bergson, why using the word spiritual makes him uneasy, psychedelics and Nietzsche, consciousness and hallucination, A.N. Whitehead and mysticism, the influence of psychedelic drugs on philosophy, whether psychedelics are cognitive enhancers, and the ethical issues of psychedelics. Freak out... Peter Sjöstedt-H Published on: May 7, 2017 @ 16:57

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Jazz: Reading Descartes Otherwise

Here she talks about the difference between Descartes and 'Descartes', his 'advanced mask', the role of time in Cartesian subjectivity, Bourdin and Descartes, slow reading Descartes, other feminist readings of Descartes, dioptrics, Foucault and Derrida, dream narratives, God, Descartes as stylist and avoiding the continental/analytic divide soas to talk to everybody. Kyoo Lee Published on: May 7, 2017 @ 13:12

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Recalibrating Pragmaticism

Here she discusses the central importance of Peirce, Peircean pragmatism's link to empiricism and Kant, critical commonsensim’ and ‘resolute fallibilism', Peirce's views about belief, the pragmatist tradition, pragmatism and metaphysics, whether pragmatism muddles ontology with epistemology, morality, politics and pragmatism, why Habermas doesn't help, non-American pragmatism, Frank Ramsey's pragmatist attacks on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and his importance for pragmatism and the pragmatist view of truth. Cheryl Misak Published on: Apr 29, 2017 @ 10:55

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All You Wanted to Know About Plato on Meno's Paradox, and Other Gems

Here she discusses Meno's paradox, what it is and how Plato answers it, how others such as Aristotle, Plutarch, Stoics and others handle it, 'stepping stones' and 'matching' approaches to foreknowledge, the distinction between objectual and propositional inquiry, Sextus and why she thinks Pyrrhonian suspension of belief doesn't mean they suspend all belief, Plato's 'Two Worlds' theory of belief, and how Plato's views on knowledge and belief intersect or not with contemporary thinking. This is a good case for thinking we're just footnotes... Gail Judith Fine Published on: Apr 17, 2017 @ 11:17

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Just War

Here he discusses the just war theory, its relationship to pacifism, collaterally enabled harm, the reprisal dilemma, human shields and moral coercion, the moral responsibility of soldiers, whether it's ever ok to back an unjust war, non-combatant immunity and war profiteering, just war theory and the law, and the legal responsibility of leaders. This one keeps it real... Saba Bazargan-Forward Published on: Apr 8, 2017 @ 09:09

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Weighing Goods and People: Ethics out of Economics: Rationality through Reasoning...and Climate Change

Here he discusses how intention engages rationality, why we should want to be rational, why he doesn't think ethics is a branch of psychology, why economics needs ethics, equality, fairness as the good of equality, what is to be measured regarding the wellbeing of people, why climate change is very very harmful, how we should value policies inn regard to the threat, how to measure its cost, and whether 'well being' is a useful concept. This goes to the hard ground... John Broome Published on: Apr 2, 2017 @ 09:45

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French Continentals

Here he discusses modern continental philosophy, immanence, difference, thought, the overcoming of metaphysics, the 'inside' and the 'outside', Bergson's three challenges, Bergon's qualitative multiplicity, Husserl and Heidegger, Derrida, incompleteness, 'the worst', 'hospitality', deconstruction, animality, why transcendental idealism over naturalism, whether immanence and transcendance are different, singularity, the ethos of the 'incorruptables' Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Leonard "Len" Lawlor Published on: Mar 31, 2017 @ 05:12

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Reasons Why

Here he discusses the block theory of time, the Moving Spotlight rival theory, how fast time passes, causal vs non-causal explanation, teleological answers to why questions, explanations of actions, the difference between understanding why and knowing why, Shelly Kagan and indeterminate desert, Haeccetism and why getting what you want when all you want is for your life not to go well can be untangled. Read these microhelen thoughts and launch your own drunken boat... Bradford Skow Published on: Mar 25, 2017 @ 22:15

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How Rational is our Rationality?

Here she discusses the rationality of rationality, permissivism, irrelevant influences, the connection between rationality and accuracy, higher-order evidence, imprecise credences, callibrationism, internalism, decision theory and parity and ontic vagueness. Go figure... Miriam Schoenfield Published on: Mar 18, 2017 @ 15:05

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Agency

Here he discusses the relation of time to action, why explanations of action require a tensed reality, basic actions, Kavka's toxin puzzle, Heidegger and free-will, John Fischer and temporal loops, whether Heidegger is a narrativist about selves, Sam Scheffler and the afterlife, responses to the the Doomsday Scenario, whether Bernard Williams is right about whether we should desire immortality, and Kant's views about evil. This is a long walk... Roman Altshuler Published on: Mar 14, 2017 @ 06:34

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The Measure of Things

Here he discusses a central tension between human beings and the world, about the way different traditions and cultures have thought about this, Chuang Tzu, Nietzsche, Kant, Advaita Vedanta, existentialism, the dis-encumbenced person, writing about nature, a philosophy of gardening, an approach to meaning that doesn't focus exclusively on language, the educational philosophy of Nietzsche and philosophy of education more generally. Take a long winding walk... David E Cooper Published on: Mar 4, 2017 @ 11:28

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Tragedy and Philosophy

Here, in English, he discusses the tension between tragedy and philosophy, Hölderlin, Heidegger, art, the lyrical, the ethical image, Klee and Gadamer. Dennis Schmidt Published on: Feb 25, 2017 @ 10:29

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Evidence, Agency and Bad Faith

Here he discusses promising and impossibility, promising and difficulty, rationality, why promising to try is bad faith, why non-cognitivism won't help, why seeing the problem in terms of practical knowledge won't help either, why evidential constraints are the big challenge - but they don't help either, the importance of Kant's notion of freedom and Sartre's notion of bad faith, Strawson's 'participation stance', the rationality of commitment to difficult things, why attempts to understand ourselves from an objective scientific stance distorts, and why he is a domesticated existentialist. This goes far... Berislav Marušić Published on: Feb 18, 2017 @ 06:13

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Why Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics Is More Important Than That of Poached Eggs

Here he discusses quantum mechanics, its metaphysical implications, underdetermination, why it might present a new kind of vagueness, why he's not an Everettian, whether the 3-D world is an illusion and what he thinks about pessimism about scientific theories. Vavoom... Peter Lewis Published on: Feb 11, 2017 @ 13:22

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Internalism and Descartes' Demon and Stuff

Here she discusses internalism and externalism, the extended mind thesis, the Twin Earth thesis, Descartes and dualism, intentionality, knowledge-wh ascriptions and knowledge that doesn't aim at the truth. Read on... Katalin Farkas Published on: Feb 4, 2017 @ 10:49

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Against Post-Truth: The Logical Experience of Knowledge, the Circularity of Truth etc

'Truth is definitely a circular concept. And it is essentially circular; there is no non-circular way of giving an extensionally adequate definition of truth. The circularity is not vicious, however, in any sense that implies incoherence or defect in the concept of truth. On the contrary, some of the functions truth serves require that the concept be essentially circular. ' Anil Gupta Published on: Jan 28, 2017 @ 12:44

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Turing tests, Chinese Rooms, Sherlock Holmes, Wittgensteinian Vagueness and Descartes

'Brain research can make no contribution to traditional philosophical questions. These are conceptual, not empirical, and therefore no empirical discovery can shed light on the issues they involve.But even more specific, non-conceptual questions that can be asked by neuroscientists sometimes involve problematic conceptual assumptions which might undermine them. I think the search for a brain correlate of voluntary action is one such case.' Hanoch Ben-Yami Published on: Jan 22, 2017 @ 17:44

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Darwinian Creativity, Memetics and Some

Here she discusses Darwin and Lamarck, whether cultural change is Lamarckian, about the role of philosophy in science, the role of separation and integration in discussing culture and evolution, memetics, human nature and essentialism, the so-called 'Interactionist consensus' and genetic determinism, Collingwood and causation, and the issues of being interdisciplinary in university departments. This one plays for keeps... Maria Kronfeldner Published on: Jan 14, 2017 @ 09:39

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Kant, other minds and intersecting issues...

Kant, other minds and intersecting issues...

Here he discusses Kant's uninterested in knowledge of the empirical world, the Transcendental deduction, whether Kant was a naive realist, some issues of other minds, the role of testimony in this, the mental states of people in persistent vegetative states, and whether philosophy - and Kant - has anything to offer in the domain of studying the mind. Start off the new year with a leap into the funky depths... Anil Gomes Published on: Jan 7, 2017 @ 10:53

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Kuhn's Science and Does Medicine Really Care About Patients?

Here he discusses two elements of his work: Thomas Kuhn and the Philosophy of medicine. He talks about philosophy of science before Thomas Kuhn, why Kuhn revised his book, incommensurability, whether science is just a construction, whether Kuhn saw scientific progress interns of revolution and evolution, Kuhn's influence, philosophy of medicine, its two crises, why we need virtuous physicians, caring and competence as key virtues for medicine and why binary oppositions need not be oppositional. If anyone wonders why we need philosophy, read this ... James Marcum Published on: Dec 23, 2016 @ 11:21

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Ethics, Law and Politics

Here he discusses issues of legal, ethical and political philosophy, loyalty, the ethics of criminal justice, over-criminalisation, the ethics of policing, whether criminal justice requires a different ethics from elsewhere, valuing life and why he has so many different philosophical interests. John Kleinig Published on: Dec 17, 2016 @ 10:05

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What Kind of a Fact is a Flying Pig for Kant? and Things like That

Here she discusses modality, flying pigs, the metaphysics of modality, Kant and judgment, the distinction between logical and real modality, the relativity of necessity, whether laws of logic are laws of thought, the logocentric predicament, and issues arising from hyperreliable belief forming methods and why the a priori/a posteriori isn't slicing at the epistemological joints. Groovy... Jessica Leech Published on: Dec 3, 2016 @ 09:49

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Saving Wittgenstein, Credence Knowledge and Semantics

Here she discusses why the semantics of epistemic expressions is important, her probabilistic theory of epistemology, credences, linguistics and philosophy of language, approaches to theories of time, imprecise credences, time-slice epistemology and finally why Wittgenstein abandoned the Tractatus and why he needn't have. Elegant... Sarah Moss Published on: Nov 26, 2016 @ 08:57

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Wittgenstein's Ethical Enterprise and Related Matters

Here he discusses whether ethics should be an ideology-free zone, the relationship of psychoanalysis and philosophy, the relationship between Freud and Aristotle, anti-psychiatry, Wittgenstein's ethical enterprise, Adolf Loos, Nietzsche, avoiding the phrase 'virtue ethics', Nietzsche and Aristotle, development psychology, about thinking about oneself, Cotard's syndrome, 'happenings outside one's moral self and the importance of literature for ethics. Winter's nearly here: take a dram of Glenmorangie and off you go... Edward Harcourt Published on: Nov 19, 2016 @ 08:26

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Nihil Unbound

'To refuse to subordinate truth to life is to insist that it matters whether or not anything matters. Knowing that nothing matters matters because it makes a difference to thinking. This is a difference in and for thinking, but a real difference nonetheless. This is the truth of nihilism. Thinking something true makes a new kind of difference, one which differs from other differences. It makes a difference in what thinking can do.' Ray Brassier Published on: Nov 12, 2016 @ 11:24

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Constructing Race

Here he discusses various default metaphysical positions taken regarding race, racialism, race talk, then goes on to think about the role of semantic theories, problems with this, whether we continue with race talk, whether race talk started in the west, ex phi, why there are so few non-white philosophers and what should be done about that (and sexism too). Roll on Ron... Ron Mallon Published on: Nov 5, 2016 @ 06:04

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Peirce, Pragmatism and Race, Racism

He discusses Peirce and 'pragmaticism' rather than pragmatism, his architectonic, his theory of signs, reference, Frege's puzzle, Peirce's link with John Perry, his formal logic and metaphysics. He then discusses philosophy of race, how he thinks race should be approached by philosophers, the whiteness of the academy, why he thinks philosophy is white, male and wealthy, and what is to be done. Take away the rag from your face, now ain't the time... Albert Atkin Published on: Oct 29, 2016 @ 06:54

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Reason In Our Dark Time

Here he discusses philosophical issues of climate change, the anthropocene and the Enlightenment, why history matters, barriers to meaningful action, whether climate change is an economic matter, whether climate change is too big for ethics, climate change and international politics, the anthropocene and agency, loving the apocalypse, the banality of climate change, why philosophers should be heeded in the environmentalist debates, animal ethics, the split between animal liberation and environmental ethics, progressive consequentialism, duties to the desperate and differences and agreements with Peter Singer. This is a walk to some big cliffs... Dale W Jamieson Published on: Oct 22, 2016 @ 05:49

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Death, Afterlife, Justice and Value

Here, despite an idiot interviewer, he discusses what it is for someone to value something, the impartiality and credibility of morality, anti-consequentialism, the problem of justice for utilitarianism, the importance of basic structure and why, amongst other things, it doesn't give a green light to Gordon Gekko's 'greed is good'. He then goes on to discuss cultural diversity and tradition, tolerance, liberalism, death and afterlife,what brings value to our lives and the issues of immortality. This is fundamental... Samuel Scheffler Published on: Oct 15, 2016 @ 05:06

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From A Biological Point Of View, and Then Some

Here he discusses methodological naturalism, the relationship between evolutionary theory and theism, Ockam's Razor and parsimony paradigms, parsimony's relationship with instrumentalism, evolutionary theory and group selection, evidentiary relationship of common ancestory and natural selection, testing hypotheses about natural selection, what Fodor gets wrong, what Nagel gets wrong, whether physicalism is the default position of biology, supervenience, how biological science handles race and the Quine/Putnam indispensability argument. This covers the long ground and keeps on rollin'... Elliott Sober Published on: Oct 9, 2016 @ 06:52

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Against Empathy and Other Philosophical Beefs

Here he discusses what really matters in the philosophical study of neuroscience, the shocking magnitude of the task, why he challenges the current discourse on empathy, affective intentionality, why the social dimension is more important than the individual, mind invasion, Heidegger's importance for his approach, the Human Brain Project and the impact of cultural transformations on philosophical projects.The earth turns through space, you start to hear it turning and wonder... Jan Slaby Published on: Oct 7, 2016 @ 07:39

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Robust

Here she discusses the philosophical term of art 'robustness' in philosophy of science, de-idealisation, methodologies in science and epistemology, Robert Hudson's scepticism and realism vs anti-realism. She then discusses norms, descriptive norms and finally her views on x-phi. Autumn creeps in, leaves are falling, thoughts start moving across the cooling earth... Chiara Lisciandra Published on: Sep 30, 2016 @ 10:16

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Epicureanism, Early Mods and The Moral Animal

Here she discusses the link between Epicureanism and modernity, the seventeenth century's ontological commitments, Leibniz, contractualism and utilitarianism, the politics of the time, Cavendish, morality, moral animals and the idea of morality as 'advantage reduction', egalitarianism, art emotions, and women philosophers in the Academy. As Autumn begins, and the nights draw in, here's something to fill the darkness... Catherine Wilson Published on: Sep 23, 2016 @ 22:19

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The Virtue Epistemologist

Here he discusses skepticism and common sense, knowledge, the normativity of attempts as attempts, domains of human performance, how considering Diana the archer helps grasp his ideas, answering Plato, epistemic normativity of judgement, aptness, epistemological naturalism, dream skepticism, the question of the criterion, the role of intuitions in philosophy, whether Tim Williamson's approach to epistemology is incompatible with his own approach, testimony and finally ex phi and the importance of interdisciplinary work to epistemology. We'll be driving on Highway 61 with this one, going where we got to think for a minute ... Ernest Sosa Published on: Sep 16, 2016 @ 06:02

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The Constitution of Selves: Locke and the Person Led View

Here she talks about the philosophical issues arising from personal identity, Locke's approach , what he meant by 'forensic', links between his approach and contemporary psychological theories, the link between metaphysical fact and practical judgment, how her approach expands the inclusivity of Locke's notion of personal identity, Locke's approach and animalism, multiplicity, the Narrative Self-Constitution view, the person life view, why animalism opposes this view, how her position still involves a metaphysical position and what is meant by 'literal identity'. Finally she offers some thoughts about the issue of gender imbalance in professional philosophy. Keep asking, keep thinking... Marya Schechtman Published on: Sep 8, 2016 @ 05:00

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Keeping It Real: The Colour of Mind

Here he discusses white guilt about black oppression, his pragmatic approach to framing the demands of rights, racial inequality and justice in the context of the USA, the paradox of rights when used to defend the immorality of slavery, rights externalism, and the need for a multi-discipinarian approach to the philosophy of racial inequality and social injustice. Derrick Darby Published on: Sep 2, 2016 @ 07:03

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On The Nature Of Normativity

Here he discusses the nature of metaethics and why the best-known approaches dissatisfy him, how normativity is to be fitted into a naturalistic framework, his 'moderate naturalism', why normativity raises issues of semantics, metaphysics and epistemology, what makes 'ought' statements true or false, how we know the real normative components of actuality, how to defend Normative Judgment Internalism, the normativity of rationality, degrees of rational thinking, how he defends his view from various objections, why 'reasons' talk is more complicated than many philosophers have assumed, whether rationality is a kind of value and the point of being guided by internal norms. As late summer brings us heatwaves, freshen up on this cool distillation ... Ralph Wedgwood Published on: Aug 26, 2016 @ 08:41

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Having Cake and Eating it With Hume and Spinoza

Here he discusses Hume's notion of 'reason', reason's normativity, doubts, contradictions and imperfections, lessons for contemporary epistemologists, what methodological feminism brings to Humean reason, Hume and causation, whether Hume would have been a Kantian if he'd done more maths, the bundle theory and personal identity. Then he discusses Spinoza and the possibility of error, what Spinoza might have said to the German idealists, whether Spinoza is a Hobbesian, and what makes Spinoza and Hume the greatest naturalist philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Don J Garrett Published on: Aug 19, 2016 @ 11:15

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On Pope's Philosophical Poem: 'An Essay on Man'

Here he discusses Pope's Essay on Man, its relation to Milton's Paradise Lost, Pope's religious attitude, whether Leibniz was an influence, on Pope's naturalism, the relation of the poetry to the philosophy, his perspectivalism, Pascal, his relationship to Bacon, Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, why 'the world changes' is a key to understanding the poem, on whether his use of rhetoric is a 'perfect cheat', on how he manages to be provisional whilst seeming to be assertive, the relationship between reason and passion, Montaigne and Plutarch, on immortality, bliss, love and sex, on how modern Pope is, on suffering and in particular the suffering of animals, on Pope's attitude to self-love and on why Pope's a philosophical historian rather than a philosopher of sovereignty. Here's philosophy done in the lit critter mode. Enjoy... Tom Jones Published on: Aug 18, 2016 @ 21:05

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Thought in Action, Panpsychism (and Not Using the F-word)

Here I keep her on her toes by asking her about the 'f'word even though she makes it clear she'd rather not go anywhere near it and in turn she discusses acting skilfully, the Dreyfus/McDowell dispute and why she thinks they both get the issue wrong, x-phi dudes and whether she is one - and whether 'dude' isn't, you know, just wrong here, Gladwell and jam idiots, Taoism, speed chess, whether dance and sex performances are hindered by thinking about what you're doing, whether self awareness is required for expertise, about choking experts and about emergencies. But she isn't finished there: she turns to the hard problem of consciousness, whether pan-psychism can work, the combination problem and whether my i-phone is conscious. If you want super smart and sassy, this one is the flood... Barbara Gail Montero Published on: Aug 12, 2016 @ 14:14

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What We Owe Each Other

Here he talks about recent developments in metaethics, Realism and Cognitivism, why he thinks reasons are fundamental, desire theories and Mark Schroeder and Bernard Williams, knowing irreducible normative truths, how Realism can maintain reason as an action guiding, practical force, contractualism, freedom of expression, toleration, consequentialism and instrumentalism, the doctrine of double effect (which says bad results can be morally OK if they are only side effects of a good action) and Kantianism, normative naturalism and Parfit. This one rock and rolls ... Thomas Scanlon Published on: Aug 5, 2016 @ 14:37

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The Tyranny of the Ideal

Here he discusses the use of models in political and moral philosophy, ideals of justice, Popper's Open Society and why an open society is an achievement, why he thinks human morality is at odds with ideal models, the importance of a heterogeneous society, why the open society isn't chaos, the character and role of public endorsement for moral truth, the good, the bad and the uppity, policy and philosophy and economics, Hayek, game theory, Hume and Ferguson and finally pluralism as the critical problem for modernity. Step right in folks... Jerry Gaus Published on: Jul 29, 2016 @ 12:22

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In Praise of Desire and Some

Here she discusses what ethical agency looks like, what moral psychology is and what it does, appetites and reasons, desires, whether an agent's character matters in assessing her action's moral worth, akrasia, inverted akrasia, whether akrasia is actually weakness of will, externality, whether responsiveness to reasons is possible in a deterministic world, romantic necessity, why ought doesn't imply can, Olga the Optimist and Paul the Pessimist, and some cool comments on some cool books. Nomy Arpaly Published on: Jul 22, 2016 @ 06:15

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Frege and Necessary Beings

Here he discusses Frege's philosophy of mathematics, Platonism, Logicism, Russell's paradox, his efforts with Crispin Wright to reverse Frege's abandonment of his logicist aim, how Frege answers some puzzles of the philosophy of maths, the Caesar Problem, absolute modality, Quine's dislike of higher-order logic, Dummett's two questions about absolute modality, the interdependence of modality and ontology, the relation between actuality and possibility, the difference between logical and metaphysical modality, what reality looks like and why he favours an essentialist theory of modality. Bob Hale Published on: Jul 15, 2016 @ 23:01

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evolution, bioethics and human nature

Here he discusses how to draw the line between science and pseudo-science, the application of evolutionary science to the social sciences, his skepticism towards selectionist approaches, problems with the 'culture' concept, co-evolutionary modelling, whether there's a robust distinction between human nature and human culture, bioethics and enhancement, why synthetic biology isn't about mastery of nature, origin essentialism, why distributive justice should factor in genes, the ethics of risk, the relationship between biology and ethics, the relevance of evolutionary biology for general work in ethics, and why science and philosophy should play nice. Tim Lewens Published on: Jul 8, 2016 @ 22:28

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Philosophy and Diversity

Here she discusses feminism, how to understand the many faces of oppression, intersectionality, how demography impacts even on metaphysics and logic, the underrepresentation of blacks in the philosophical academy, how expanding the demography of philosophy will bring it back to its origins, why hermeneutical phenomenology is crucial to the way forward for philosophy, what she means by 'hermeneutical ontology', what it looks like in terms of race and gender, on the mystery of the disconnect between academia and the law on race, about the multiracial experience in America, on what can be done to improve matters, on care ethics and moral particularism, hate speech and the scandals of male philosophers behaving badly in the academy. Tina Fernandes Botts Published on: Jul 4, 2016 @ 05:11

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Reid's Common Sense, Berkeley's Vision and Whether Gentile's Fascism Should Matter More Than Berkeley's Slave Plantation

Here she first discusses Reid's theory of perception, what he means by representation, why he thinks alternative approaches by Descartes and Hume fail, the importance of Bacon and Newton to Reid's approach, the issue of direct and indirect realism, whether Reid is a first-order ot higher order consciousness guy, the threat of regress, whether he's a mysterian, why his 'common sense' doesn't mean what common sense might lead you to think it means and how his theory of aesthetic and moral sense links up with all this. Then she discusses Berkeley's theory of vision before moving on to discuss modern Italian philosophy and the link between a philospher's philosophical position and their social, political and economic context especially in the light of the dubious politics of some of the Italian modern masters. This is a full house... Rebecca Copenhaver Published on: Jun 25, 2016 @ 09:27

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On Perception, Aesthetics etc etc

Here he discusses his work on perception and aesthetics. He talks about subjectivism and its history, his alternative theory of perception, his theory of image content, why he disagrees with Fodor, Marr and Gregory even though they take issue with subjectivism, the multi-modality of active perception, whether we need different theories of perception depending on which sense we're talking about and how tricky it is to count how many senses we actually have. Then he talks about art, what aesthetic pleasure is, why humans do art, and why it makes evolutionary sense. This is one hell of a clear view... Mohan Matthen Published on: Jun 18, 2016 @ 12:53

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Who Rules?

Here he discusses democracy, how to decide who should rule, procedural fairness, epistocracy, on whether political philosophy ought to be practical, legitimacy and authority, truth and politics, Hannah Arendt's views, the issues of the political liberal view of the fund of public reason, Cass R. Sunstein's Infotopia, whether human nature limits political philosophy, how to frame the philosophical issues of inequality, the role of self-interest in democracy and what he sees as some currents of contemporary political philosophy. With an vain fool like Trump on the political stage in America and racist bigots and know-nothings voting all over the world it's a good time to ponder the wisdom of the political systems that allow this to happen. Here's the man to cover the ground ... David Estlund Published on: Jun 11, 2016 @ 12:53

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The Logical Pluralist

Here he discusses logical pluralism and why in his view an argument can be valid in one sense but invalid in another, the difference between manipulating the formal machinery and doing philosophy of logic, classical logic's relationship with alternatives, why pluralism doesn't mean abandoning universal, true and valid classical intuitions or rejecting classical logic at all but rather adds to the universe of logical connections, substructural logic, the liar paradox, Bradwardine's theory, why philosophy of logic is a humanities subject and new vistas opening up in contemporary philosophy of logic. Greg Restall Published on: Jun 5, 2016 @ 06:19

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Keeping the Manifest Image in Mind

Here he discusses consciousness,criticises the scientistic approach of much contemporary philosophy of mind, the irritation of Descartes, the sources of moral praise and blame, moral realism, forgiveness and punishment, Kant and Reid, Kant's First Critique, Kant's Transcendental Idealism and an aside on the insanity plea in law ... Dan Robinson Published on: May 28, 2016 @ 07:04

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Hume's Irreligious Core

Here he discusses freedom and responsibility, Strawson, the optimism/pessimism distinction, why he's a freewill pessimist, Hume and classical vs naturalist compatibilism, Hume as an anatomist of virtue, Hume and Aristotle, Hume and Epicureanism, Hobbes, Hume's relationship to the British Empiricists, Hume and Reid, Hume's irreligious and freethinking core, whether he is a Pyrrhonian skeptic and Korsgaard's challenge. Go read as a reprieve against the days... Paul Russell Published on: May 21, 2016 @ 09:45

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The Rhetoric and Lethargy of the Anthropocene

Here she discusses Joseph Mitterer and his rejection of the discourse of 'dualism', of the importance of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, anti-essentialism, the sociology of knowledge in the Bible, the value of empirical findings for philosophy, science and technology, postconstructivism, why we need a new contract between science and society, the role of philosophy as technoscience develops, the possibility of more democratic monitoring of technoscience, climate change and environmentalism, the Anthropecene and feminism. Onwards... Ewa Bińczyk Published on: May 14, 2016 @ 12:46

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Kant, Marx, Fichte

Here he discusses Kant's impact on contemporary ethics, Rawls and the 'constructivist' reading of Kantian ethics, why this is an error, Kantian autonomy and corrects a flurry of traditional invidious readings of Kant. He goes on to discuss Kant's moral religion, the problem with consequentialism, Kant's notion of freewill, Kant's rational theology, Kant's relationship with Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics before turning to Marx. He discusses Marx's real attitude towards Capitalism, the main difference between Adam Smith and Marx, on the absurdity of equating Soviet Marxism with Marx and on why it's self-evident that studying the best thoughts of the past is worthwhile before turning to Fichte. He discusses the difference between Fichte's approach to freedom and Kant's, on Fichte and Hegel's Dialectic of Recognition, on why Fichte is a necessary step to both Hegel and Marx, on Fichte being the key to the entire tradition of continental philosophy and whether Fichte took Kant's idea of natural religion further than Kant. Take a big breath, this one covers all the territory... Allen Wood Published on: May 7, 2016 @ 20:34

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How Far Do You Have To Go Before It's A Crime? And Other Puzzles

Here she discusses the seminal importance of Anscombe and Davidson in these matters, on Anscombe's approach to action, on why he rejects a cognitivist approach, on the problem deviant chains bring to intentionality, on the relevance of this to issues of criminal law, on inchoate crimes, on naive action theory, on what happens when reasoning concludes, on intentional continence and incontinence, on the impact of Ryle, and on when it's justified to be held responsible? And so it goes, onwards... Sarah Paul Published on: May 1, 2016 @ 10:50

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Political Philosophy

Here he discusses the influence of analytic philosophy on political philosophy, the significance of Rawls and Nozik, Analytic Marxism, poverty, Sen, on paying attention to relatively neglected values, equality, health inequality, risk, and finding a place for Islam as part of the political landscape. What can be done in these twisted times? Read on and go figure... Jonathan Wolff Published on: Apr 23, 2016 @ 09:23

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The Rationalist Theist

Here he discusses whether philosophy of religion can be done effectively by non-believers, how he defines religion, monotheistic convergences and divergencies, the role of reasons in religion, religion's relationship to science, miracles, how God created morality, Mill, where God's body is and free-will and the existence of evil. This one is always waiting for you down the road... Tim Mawson Published on: Apr 16, 2016 @ 08:18

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buddhist ethics

Here he discusses Owen Flanagan's three styles of working with Buddhist philosophy, on whether Buddhism has religious content, on its relationship with applied ethics, on the metaphysics and epistemology of Buddhism, on comparative links with Western philosophy, whether the Bodhisattva is a virtue ethics, Logong, patience as a moral virtue, why anger towards those who hurt us is never justified, modesty as a virtue of attention, private solidarity and his status as an anti-expert. Here we go again... Nicolas Bommarito Published on: Apr 8, 2016 @ 13:05

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Kant's Historical Turn

Here he talks about the distinction between the 'Historical Turn' and 'Historicism', Kant as catalyst for the former, Kant as a metaphysician and Enlightenment journalist, Reinhold's significance, how Kant differed from his immediate predecessors, whether Kant was a Hegelian subjectivist, the importance of Jena, how Rousseau revolutionised Kant's life and thought, Nietzsche's 'tragic turn', Kantian autonomy and whether Kantian ethics are still a live option in the light of recent developments in philosophy of mind and neuroscience. Yes he Kant... Karl Ameriks Published on: Apr 1, 2016 @ 12:05

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Paradoxes and Their Logic

Here he broods on whether there's a connection between metaphysics and logic, the liar paradox, whether true contradictions exist, why dialetheism doesn't live up to its most important promise of doing away with Tarski's hierarchies, Curry's paradox, epistemically possible worlds and propositions, brute necessities and whether they exist, the connection between formal semantics of natural languages and logic, whether non-metaphysicians can learn from metaphysicians and why science can't answer everything, even questions motivating scientific research. So now, riddle me this, riddle me that... Bruno Whittle Published on: Mar 27, 2016 @ 21:50

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Colour

Here he takes us through those ideas about colour and the rivals, the influence CL Hardin, eliminativism, realism, introspection, differences between audition and vision, self-location, functionalism, special laws of nature for the working of the mind, his better best system, computational modelling of the mind, the puzzling duality of perceptual system response and how to understand the place of philosophy in the interdisciplinary work of philosophy of mind. This one eats all the cookies, and then some.... Jonathan Cohen Published on: Mar 20, 2016 @ 22:38

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Bigger Than Chaos

Here he's brooding on complexity theory and what it must do, the role of probability in such a theory, whether such a theory might apply to social as well as physical science, how complexity relates to chaos, about the nature of scientific explanation, on Cartwright's dappled world,about whether children are Platonic or Aristotelian essentialists, on whether we are all born with a physics genius in our head and on whether objective evidence in science is possible. This is a big beast from the deepest depths of the deepest depths... Michael Strevens Published on: Mar 19, 2016 @ 11:26

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Not and Other Metalinguistic Stuff

Here he thinks on why direct reference isn't incompatible with physicalism, on the relationship between language and metaphysics, on his defence of monism, on his disagreement with Kit Fine over this, on transparency, on material objects and whether metaphysical matters boil down to linguistic ones, on why even if they do this doesn't trivialise the issue and finally on whether anything in ethics is just plain good. Here comes another young turk on the metalinguistic block... zoom zoom... Mahrad Almotahari Published on: Mar 12, 2016 @ 18:35

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imagination supposition, imagine

Here she broods on what the imagination is, on the simulationist approach, on the connection between imagination and supposition, on whether the imagination is always perspectival, on thought experiments, on imagination and the acquisition of new knowledge, on imagination's relation to the self, on imagining from the inside, on the relationship between the humanities and science, on gender bias at the academy and on whether interdisciplinary work enhances or waters down. A new mind on the block. Create some space and time - read on... Margherita Arcangeli Published on: Feb 29, 2016 @ 18:29

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The Pyrrhonian Skeptic

Here she broods on all of this: on ancient inspired alternatives to doing ethics, on Pyrrhonian skepticism, what abstention from dogmata might mean, on how Pyrrhonians can act, on the defects of belief, on not solving Moore's paradox, on why the Stoic political theory isn't crazy, on why Stoics aren't scary, on changing the conversation in ethics by following the lead of Elizabeth Anscombe, on her own theory of agential action and ethics and on avoiding professional suicide when recommending books from her neck of the philosophical woods! This is one to turn your mind to the ever-urgent question: 'what's to be done?'... Katja Maria Vogt Published on: Feb 28, 2016 @ 17:14

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All About the Ego Tunnel

In this interview he thinks aloud about his long standing interest in consciousness, the epistemic agent model of the self, the ego tunnel as a metaphor of conscious experience, the problem with the idea of a 'first-person' point of view, introspective Superman and Superwoman as advanced practitioners of classical mindfulness meditation, why nothing lives in the ego tunnel, what the rubber hand illusion shows, why we're unconscious and mind-wander most of the time, what the narrative default-mode does, the impact of culture on the ego tunnel, why trendy 'illusion talk' annoys him, what dreaming shows us, why AI is ethically dangerous, why meditation and spirituality need the cold bath of good analytic philosophy and the challenges facing young philosophers of cognitive science and what he is trying to do to help them. Take your time with this one: after all, that ego tunnel, it's you... Thomas K Metzinger Published on: Feb 25, 2016 @ 21:45

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Digital Ghosts

Here he broods on digital ghosts, the digital brain, whether the ghosts are intelligent and why they're not fake, on whether everything is computable, on the Calvanism of anti-digitalism, on the ontology of software, on tribal religions and why they might go away, on morally satisfactory atheism as Platonism, on why Aquinas helps, on why Nietzsche helps, on Buddhism, drugs, magic, raves, and on drawing the metaphysical conclusions from Dawkins that Dawkins fails to draw. Here we go, to infinity and beyond... Eric Steinhart Published on: Feb 20, 2016 @ 21:28

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Scepticism and Early Wittgenstein

He is always thinking about why we're not brains in vats or being tricked by devils, mastering the answers to the sceptics, developing Nozick's tracking account of knowledge, working out whether it applies everywhere and fends off all the doubts including Gettier et al, whether what he's offering is a half-way house between realist and anti-realist conceptions of cognition; and if he's not doing that then he's thinking about Wittgenstein, finding his early work intriguing and attractive and continually broods on whether the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsensical, on Russell's theory of judgement and its fatal weakness, on the relationship between the young and the later Wittgenstein and whether what Wittgenstein is doing is philosophy or not. Come closer and listen in to Wittgenstein still speaking through one of his most serious and original readers... Jose_Zalabardo Published on: Feb 13, 2016 @ 13:01

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Truth, Knowability, Mind and Romantic Love

Here she starts the ball rolling on truth and knowability, modal realism, temporalism and propositional content, the phenomenology of mind, ignorance and vagueness, synethesia and representationalism, perception, Russellian monism and mentons, romantic love and finally women in the philosophical academy. So much to do, so little time... Berit Brogaard Published on: Feb 7, 2016 @ 10:08

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Nietzsche, Art and the Neo-Hegelian Commitment

He broods on Nietzsche and in so doing finds a Nietzsche interested in culture and politics, a Nietzsche who is dangerous, elitist, not clearly an ethical skeptical anti-realist and who thought life and art should be more entwined than they are. Huddleston also broods on aethetics and aesthetic value, authorial intention, Geuss's 'Art and Theodicy', Nietzsche and Wagner and the philosophical issues of absolute music. This one isn't humming a simple tune, but finding a way to do the neo-Hegelian art jive once more. Slam on your Parsival and get your throwback on ... Andrew Huddleston Published on: Jan 31, 2016 @ 17:05

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Necessary Metaphysics

He is a metaphysician from the world's north who thinks about the contemporary Aristotelian tradition, the relationship between metaphysics and science, whether Kant was wrong, naturalised metaphysics, E.J. Lowe, natural kinds and essences, the law of contradiction, infinite regress, whether laws of nature are universal or not and why drawing continuous inspiration from the history of philosophy is a good thing. Pour yourself another phone and enjoy... Tuomas Tahko Published on: Jan 17, 2016 @ 21:40

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The Hedonistic Utilitarian

He thinks all the time about the ethics of acts of killing, moral realism, repugnant conclusions, reasons and norms, utilitarianism, hedonism, human enhancement, genetic technologies in sport, global democracy, populist democracy and conservativism. As we enter a new year philosophy gets into some of our most pressing issues. Merry New Year... Torbjörn Tännsjö Published on: Jan 10, 2016 @ 08:41

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Neuroethics

She is a philosopher working at the cutting edge of neuroethics. She thinks about what neuroethics is and what its questions are, about the distinction between fundamental and applied neuroethics, about the relationship between brain science and sociology, about how her approach avoids both dualism and naive reductionism, about mind-reading, about the ethical issues arising from disorders in consciousness, about brain simulation and its relation to philosophy, about whether tendencies in the brain lead to social or individualistic interpretation, about epigenesis, human enhancement, cognitive prosthetics and the singularity. Here's a post from the frontiers of neuroethics to take you through the xmas break... Kathinka Evers Published on: Dec 20, 2015 @ 21:42

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Thinking How To Live

He is the philosopher who broods on the notion that what something means is a normative claim, that this is about the meaning not the nature of meaning, on Kripke's book on Wittgenstein, on what 'ought' depends on, on expressivism, on ehics and planning questions, on utilitarianism and contractarianism and on the current state of contemporary public ethical discourse. As xmas draws close, here's an early gift... Allan Gibbard Published on: Dec 5, 2015 @ 15:58

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Metacognition

She is a Janus-faced mutant naturalistic philosopher of metacognition. She broods on what metacognition is, on two different ways 'meta' could be used, the problem with attributivism, on the mistake of thinking mental and ordinary action have the same normative structure, on how 'acceptance' can help brng out the relevant contrast, on where she parts company with Cohen and Stalnaker, on whether non-human animals can mind read, on why Peter Carruthers is wrong to conflate mind-reading with metacognition, on the evidence that non-human animals do metacognise, on internalism and the limits of transparency and on how her approach impacts on puzzles like Moore's paradox. Just one more reason to love Paris... Joelle Proust Published on: Nov 21, 2015 @ 15:14

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Waking, Dreaming, Being

He is a cross cultural philosopher of waking, dreaming and being. He's always awake to the philosophical challenges arising from sleep and dreaming, dreamless sleep, the 'default view', how the Indian perspective helps, of the clash between the default position and methodological requirements for investigating sleep consciousness, how Advaita Vedānta and Husserl help, of lucid dreamless sleeping, of white dreams, subjective insomnia, of the need to go cross-cultural, of broad philosophical issues about consciousness enriched by a cross-cultural approach, of meditation's place, why it's a scandal that more philosophy isn't yet cross-cultural and why without philosophy certain crucial issues can't be answered. Dream on ... Evan Thompson Published on: Oct 4, 2015 @ 11:06

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Time, Language, Ontology

He steps out of the Tardis to discuss his philosophy of time, talking about ontology and semantics, about whether what exists is time dependent or not, about presentism and eternalism, about whether we can think and speak in an untensed way, about whether physics alone can answer all the questions, about Hilary Putnam's argument about time, about McTaggart, about 'A-series' and 'B-series'approaches to time, about the reality of time, about the difference Special Relativity makes, about objective becoming and the eternal NOW, about Bourne and presentism, about his own version of 'B-theory', about time's arrow, about why causation explain why we privilege the present and about why perdurantism fits his approach. It's 3:AM, it's time, read on... Joshua Mozersky Published on: Sep 19, 2015 @ 17:06

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Italian philosophy, Magic and Peter of Spain

He is the philosopher who thinks all the time about magic and philosophy, about the distorted Pico, the Renaissance, Hegel, Kant, Kabbalism, about magic and science, occult qualities, Pythogoras, Iamblichus, the Italian Idealists, Gentile, Croce, about Dewey and Croce, about their politics, about Peter of Spain, his logic and metaphysical commitments. This one's a Renaissance man on Renaissance men and then some... Brian Copenhaver Published on: Sep 12, 2015 @ 11:16

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From the Point Of View of the Universe

She is the philosopher who is always pondering contemporary ethics from the point of view of the universe with Pete Singer. She thinks about Sidgwick and why he's not widely read, about his approach to ethics and why he's significant,about what we mean by 'the point of view of the universe', about Sidgwickean rationality and Kant, about reflective equilibrium, about self-evident axioms, about Parfit's future Tuesday indifference, about On What Matters, about hedonism, about esoteric morality, about the repugnant conclusion and about why Kitcher is wrong to think naturalism in ethics is defensible. Light the blue touch-paper and read... Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek Published on: Sep 6, 2015 @ 14:22

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Naturalism's Final Causes

She is a groovy philosopher who's always wondering about the implications of naturalism, about the post-Darwinian landscape, about final causes, about the different types of naturalism, about Rosenberg's nice nihilism and the naturalistic fudge, about Paul Horwich's alternative, about Dennett's intentional stance, about Ruth Millikan on goals and aims and about what is still to be done. Take your head for a walk... Bana Bashour Published on: Aug 29, 2015 @ 13:18

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law and ethics

He is a legal philosopher who thinks about where law and morality meet, about the different varieties of legal positivism, about rights, about objectivity and the law, about HLA Hart, about the ethics of capital punishment, about Achan and the purgative rationale, about why 'evil' still has traction, about torture and moral integrity, about moral realism as a moral doctrine, about freedom and moral responsibility. Take your time with this one... Matthew Kramer Published on: Aug 22, 2015 @ 10:14

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dynamic epistemology

She is a hard-core logician and philosopher who thinks dynamic epistemology is the only species of epistemology that matters. When not researching medieval onomastics she thinks about dynamic epistemology alongside medieval philosophy, the obligatio, dubitatio, deceitful agents, the role of formal dialogue systems, Anselm's logic, computability, Llull, Lorhard, ontology and science and why she'd love to be a counter-example to the stereotype of Anglo/American philosophy being dehistoricised. This jive's like taking a time-machine... Sara L. Uckelman Published on: Aug 15, 2015 @ 12:33

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Life After Faith

He discusses his thinking on ethics, Derek Parfit, on the use of stripped down thought experiments , on intuitions, on why we shouldn't try for ethical peaks, on how he sees the ethical project, on what life after faith means for religion and science, on science and democracy, on Dewey and pragmatism, on science and values, on science education, on the point of philosophy, on Joyce's Finnegans Wake and why life without literature and the arts is a mistake...

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Between Saying and Doing

He is the pittsburghegelianasaurus big beast pragmatist lurking in the philosophical jungle. He's always thinking about the importance of language when thinking about humans, about discursive understanding, about American and Wittgensteinian pragmatism, about analytic pragmatism, about Sellars, about compositionality, about semantic holism, about the Kant-Sellars thesis, inferentialism, AI, German Idealism, Hegel as pragmatist, intentionality, Wittgenstein,expressivism, about why understanding is part of the core of the philosophic enterprise and why he thinks its an exciting time to be working in philosophy. This one's leaving deep tracks... Robert Brandom Published on: Jun 19, 2015 @ 22:40

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On German Materialism

He is a philosopher who has written extensively on key contemporary issues such as solidarity, the philosophical issues of race and genetics, the sanctity of life and human dignity but here he talks about the philosophy of German Materialism, and along the way he discusses its history, how it became prominent in the mid nineteenth century, Feurbach, the strong link between philosophy and anthropology, Marx and Engels, the diluting consequence of Haeckel’s monism, materialism's link with Kantianism, the difficult case of Nietzsche, and how Logical positivism fits in. Keep your feet on the ground for this one... Kurt Bayertz Published on: Jun 13, 2015 @ 13:09

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Thinking About Mindreading, Mirroring and Embedded Cognition et al…

He is the inter-disciplinary philosopher working through ideas we can read further about in A Theory of Human Action, Epistemology and Cognition, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences, Knowledge in a Social World, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading, Reliabilism and Contemporary Epistemology, Essays, Joint Ventures: Mindreading, Mirroring, and Embodied Cognition, Epistemology, A Contemporary Introduction (with M. McGrath), and Social Epistemology: Essential Readings, all of which give you a clear idea of where we're going in this interview. If there are still folks out there who say philosophy is too busy picking its own belly-button to be relevant then this should put that myth to bed... Alvin Goldman Published on: Jun 6, 2015 @ 15:23

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Why Murder Philosophers?

Costica Bradatan is a philosopher who thinks about Levinas, failure, philosophers who had to die to make their points, philosophy as the art of living, Munch's skeleton arm, the essays of Montaigne, philosophy in the flesh, Simone Weil, Thomas More, Plato's artistic genius, why anyone should bother to murder philosophers and why philosophy when done well is a serious joke. Go have a laugh... Published on: May 29, 2015 @ 09:15

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How Pragmatism Reconciles Quantum Mechanics With Relativity etc

Richard Healey is the pragmatist philosopher of physics who thinks there's a need to interpret quantum mechanics, that none of the standard interpretations are good enough, that the idea of a nonseparable world helps and that a pragmatist approach is the way to go. He discusses how to dispel the Feynman mystery, the paradox of Wigner's friend, and how to reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity, whether quantum mechanics is a realist or instrumentalist position, on whether quantum mechanics makes ontological claims, on time, on quantum nonlocality and Dr Bertlmann's socks, and on getting free of the prejudices we call common sense. Go figure... Published on: May 24, 2015 @ 15:54

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What's a hole made of and other enigmas

Roberto Casati is the philosophical disquieting muse of de Chirico as he thinks about holes and shadows, parts and places, the role of imagination, collaboration, language's influence on metaphysics and the analytic/continental divide. Start thinking twice... Published on: May 16, 2015 @ 08:46

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Why The World Does Not Exist But Unicorns Do

Markus Gabriel broods on why the world doesn't exist and never stops wondering about Kant, existence, pluralism, fields of sense, Huw Price, about why he isn't po-mo, nor a Meinongian, about why unicorns exist, about why he's a realist, about dissolving the hard problem, about why naturalism and physicalism are wrong, about Schelling and post-Kantian idealism, about Badiou and Meillassouz, Heidegger, about resisting skepticism, about negative philosophy, mythology, madness, laughter and the need for illusions in metaphysics, and about the insult that is the continental/analytic divide . Gird up for an amazing story... Published on: May 10, 2015 @ 09:29

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Darwinian conundrums

Jonathan Birch is a brooder on the philosophy of biology. Here he thinks about teleological language use in science, about what natural selection can do, about Bill Hamilton's kin selection theory, on what was in Darwin's original theory and what wasn't, about the origins of human cooperation, about the role of philosophy in science and about Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. Step out into his jungle... Published on: May 2, 2015 @ 08:10

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philosophy of science

Stathis Psillos is the philosopher of science who thinks about why it's best to be a scientific realist, about structural realism, about John Worrall, Frank Ramsey, Henri Poincaré, about scientific theories as growing existential statements, about the metaphysical, semantic and epistemic aspects, about epistemic optimism, about Larry Laudan, Willfred Sellars, about truth, about Nancy Cartwright's version of realism, about causation and explanation, about the problem with powers, about causal descriptivism and about why we should heed what philosophers say. Let's go... Published on: Apr 25, 2015 @ 16:40

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propositions, analysis and context

Jeffrey King works in philosophy of language and metaphysics. He has written three books and numerous articles. He very much likes to ski. Published on: Apr 19, 2015 @ 16:17

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Philosophy of Markets

Lisa Herzog has worked at the Technical University Munich, Germany, St. Gallen University, Switzerland, and most recently on a research project at the Cluster "Normative Orders" and the Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt, Germany. Her research focuses on the relation between economics and philosophy. Her first book is "Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory" (Oxford University Press 2013). In 2014 she published "Freiheit gehört nicht nur den Reichen: Plädoyer für einen zeitgemäßen Liberalismus" [Freedom not just for the rich - a plea for a well-understood liberalism] (C.H.Beck) . Now we're talking... Published on: Apr 10, 2015 @ 11:40

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Philosophy from the Zettabyte

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is also Director of Research and Senior Research Fellow of the Oxford Internet Institute and Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College. He is a member of Google Advisory Council on the Right to be Forgotten. His last book is The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford University Press, 2014). Here he broods on the history of philosophy as a sine wave, on why the philosophy of ICT is ultimately a species of the philosophy of ethics, on what information is, on a post-analytic-continental divide, on hyperhistory, on the infosphere, on the ethics and politics of information, on responsibility, privacy, Google's The Right to be Forgotten, on the quality of information and on why AI is interesting because of what it tells us about ourselves. This one's about who we want to become... Published on: Apr 5, 2015 @ 12:51

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Hegel, Irigaray, Motherhood & Feminist Philosophy

Alison Stone is a philosopher who broods to the wide depths on Schelling and nature, on Hegel on nature, on Bildung, on Hegel and environmental philosophy, on Luce Irigaray and the importance of reproduction, on Irigaray and Judith Butler's 'performative theory', on maternal subjectivity and on feminist philosophy. This one is all about broadening philosophy's scope... Published on: Mar 22, 2015 @ 10:48

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The Legacies of Idealism

Terry Pinkard is the Ali Shuffle of heavyweight philosophers, stinging like a bee and floating like a butterfly through the legacy of Idealism, its historical context, the distinction between transcendental and trancendent, Fichte, Schelling, his naturalistic Platonism, his influence on the Romantics, on Holderlin and Hegel, Hegel's species of idealism, the centrality of his Logic, on what Beethoven and Wagner illustrate, and on the chances for Idealism in the contemporary setting. Rumble young man, rumble... Published on: Mar 14, 2015 @ 16:57

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Philosophical Frontiers of Ancient Science

Brooke A. Holmes is a comparatist who has thought about the body as a conceptual object, the concept of the symptom, about ancient Greek medicine, about links between ethics and the rise of interest in natural science and medicine, about how new medical understanding changed meanings, about Nietzsche and Freud and fetishising modernity, about Galen and philosophical problems thrown up by the new medical understandings, about gender in antiquity, about what Laqueur fails to see, about Foucault and sexuality, about Epicureanism and Lucretius in particular and Deleuze's reading. This one is bringing it all back home again... Published on: Mar 6, 2015 @ 01:52

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self-consciousness, aesthetics, music

A.J. Hamilton is the jazzy funkster philosopher who riffs over a range of themes. He thinks about self consciousness, phenomenology, Gareth Evan's account, Wittgenstein's, philosophical aesthetics, Kant and Adorno, music as an art, the role of the public intellectual and the demise of expensive investigative journalism. This is a cool hand... Published on: Feb 28, 2015 @ 11:55

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Heidegger, politics, phenomenology, religion

Felix Ó Murchadha is a philosopher who never stops thinking about Heidegger and revolution, about Heidegger, time and Augustine, about the pointlessness of trying to immunize Heidegger's philosophy from his politics, about the relationship of politics and philosophy, about the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy, about Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion and Christianity, about Barth and Kierkegaard, about whether there can be a Christian philosophy, about phenomenology, about the theological turn in philosophy, about the debate between science and theology and about the role of philosophy. Read on.... Published on: Feb 20, 2015 @ 12:54

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History from the Early Modern Philosophers

Daniel Garber knows philosophy makes some parents go silent and it's broad enough to encompass everything worth while. He thinks about the history of seventeenth century philosophy, about what makes the early moderns modern, about the giants of the time and what we learn from studying the lesser known ones too, about the importance of Kant to our conception of the early moderns, about Leibniz, about contrasts between Leibniz and Descartes and Spinoza, about the metaphysical schemes of the time, about Descartes and Galileo, about Hobbes and Spinoza, Pascal's wager, and about x-phi and comparing our present context with the early mods. This one wakes us up to the long years we've been travelling... Published on: Feb 15, 2015 @ 11:08

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Unruly Words

Diana Raffman is the deft philosophical flautist of vagueness. She thinks hard about vague words and their fuzziness, about supervaluationist approaches to the paradoxes, about judgemental hysteresis, about contextualism and why she changed her mind, about borderline cases, about not sacrificing bivalence, about why she thinks blue but not 'not blue' has borderline cases, about her multiple range theory, about changing the way philosophers have understood vagueness and about the epistemic theories of Williamson and Sorensen. This one you have to read before drawing a line.... Published on: Feb 7, 2015 @ 08:48

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the stuff of proof

Penelope Maddy is the candy-store kid of metaphilosophical logic and maths. She's stocked up with groovy thoughts about the axioms of mathematics, about what might count as a good reason to adopt one, about mathematical realism, about Gödel's intuitions, naturalism, second philosophy, Hume and Quine, world-word connections, about where mathematical objectivity comes from, about the limitations of drawing analogies, about depth, about Wittgenstein and the logical must, about the Kantianism of the Tractatus and about the relationship between science and philosophy. Suck it and see, this one has a fizz ... Published on: Jan 31, 2015 @ 09:43

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Fichte and Rousseau

David James is the funky philosophical Fichtean who goes deep into Fichte, German Idealism, Rousseau, Kant and all that jazz. He thinks of German Idealism as a cluster, about Fichte and recognition, about why Fichte's views on natural rights are not modern liberalism's, about Fichte's political order, about Fichte's view of natural right, about Rousseau's influence on German Idealism, on Rousseau's ideas about human perfectability, about his ideas about property and equality and about the quasi-theological assumptions of the german Idealist agenda. This one gets to the source... Published on: Jan 24, 2015 @ 10:13

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On what there is for things to be

Stephan Kraemer is the new guy on the Phlox-block making waves as he cuts to the metaphysical chase investigating what there is. Consequently he's always thinking about grounding, about what philosophers mean by the term, about ontological cheating, about Kit Fine's self grounding puzzle, about Bolzano's intransparency thesis and what he got right and what he got wrong, about Quine's thesis of ontological collapse and why it fails, about why metaphysics answers some ontological questions better than science, about the analytic tradition in Germany and not being able to get clear about what Derrida and his followers claim. Like a cold pint of Doom Bar bitter downed as a last chance, this one's fundamental... Published on: Dec 21, 2014 @ 11:07

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the metaphysics of logic

Penny Rush is a hard core straight scotch who never stops thinking about the logic of logic, its metaphysics and other crazy depths. She thinks about the relation between logic and reason, about the idea of the one true logic, about classical vs non-classical logics, about the four basic logical issues, about the metaphysics of logic, about Brady's meaning containment and its implications, about mathematical realism, about Derridas' analysis of metaphysics as theology and Husserl's phenomenology, about meaning, objectivity, Barad's model, Crispin Wright's, Quentin Meillassoux and the paradox of independent reality and whether logic is in the same state of 'otherness' as mathematics. Drink each dram with care as dark nights fall in on us and things freeze... Published on: Dec 5, 2014 @ 03:00

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Paradoxes and Their Logic

Margaret Cuonzo is a single malt scotch from a cask wood hogshead chill filtering paradoxes. She likes Schiffer's distinction between happy and unhappy solutions, thinks paradoxes demand serious thought, thinks solutions to paradoxes re-educate our intuitions, thinks Bayesian degrees of belief useful, discusses six types of solution, thinks there's a great irony in trying to solve paradoxes and thinks the sorites one of the deep ones. As a mighty winter starts read this and warm to her task... Published on: Nov 29, 2014 @ 11:59

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On The Romantic Absolute

Dalia Nassar is a double shot of Glenmorangie on a wintry night as she goes to the depths of German Romanticism. She thinks all the time about the key idea of Kantian critical Idealism,thinks it's best to think of Romanticism as connecting metaphysical and epistemic questions, about the Jena Romantics Novalis, Schlegel and Schelling, about the relationship between Romanticism and Idealism, about Romanticism and nature, about why she disagrees with Manfred Frank's reading of the Romantics' relationship with Idealism, about why she disagrees with Frederick Beiser on seeing Schelling as the culmination of Romanticism, about Romanticism and the claim it rejected systems and about why we should heed the philosophers. Those two guys in the dark, wolves howling, looking at the moon, they'd be fine if they were drinking in this ... Published on: Nov 21, 2014 @ 03:00

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Parts, wholes, abstracts, tropes and ontology

Friederike Moltmann is the Aberlour of philosophical linguistic interface. Her thoughts continually burn bright as she contemplates whether language really does carve nature at the joints, broods on descriptive, revisionary, shallow and fundamental metaphysics, on mereology and why extensional mereology won't do, on the role of integrated wholes, on what reference situations take care of, on why natural language doesn't allow abstract objects in its core and thinking it does is a result of naïve analysis, on the surprising ontology of natural language, on trope ontologies and on why systematic application of linguistic methodology can have serious philosophical consequences. The wind howls and the rain batters against the windows but these thoughts pour out like a different kind of storm... Published on: Nov 14, 2014 @ 03:00

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powers, Aristotle and the incarnation

Anna Marmodoro is the Clynelish single malt of the philosophy of powers universe. She takes on some of the most fundamental questions coming out of the classical authors, thinking about progress in philosophy, power metaphysics and the various puzzles that arise, property dualism and property monism, regresses, causality, Aristotle on perception, his subtle realism, the relationship between his metaphysics of perception and his metaphysics of substance, how all this links with contemporary theories and how the theory of the extended mind connects with philosophical issues regarding the Incarnation.This one leaves a warm glow in the mind as winter bears down and darkness falls... Published on: Nov 8, 2014 @ 18:38

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Plato aims at virtue

Iakovos Vasiliou is a Glenfiddich of Plato studies, brooding continuously on what Plato really thought about ethics, about Plato focusing on being a certain kind of person, on there being moral rules to Greek ethics contrary to received views, on Socrates's denial of the priority of definition view, on Socrates and the Supremacy of Virtue position, on Socrates and the eudaimonistic framework, on Bernard Williams, on hard cases, on whether there's a difference between Socrates and Plato, on incontinence, on hedonism, on the effects of the dialogue form, on Soctratic intellectualism and on what Plato would have thought of the dilemmas posed by The Matrix. As the night's draw in, this is just the dram to fire you up... Published on: Oct 31, 2014 @ 03:00

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Leibniz: Strange monads, esoteric harmony and love

Paul Lodge is another single malt from the wild and wonderful world of Leibniz studies (starts as a Laphroaig, ends a Glenmorangie) where his thoughts go on forever brooding on the sheer breadth of Leibniz's accomplishments, his big take-home messages, on why he never produced a magnum opus, his correspondences, his relationships with Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, what he means by 'harmony', on whether he's an Idealist, on whether he's a Pantheist, on the strangeness of monads, on avoiding the rationalist/empiricist labelling scheme, on the mill argument and why Rorty, Searle and Wilson are unfaithful, on his esotericism, on his women and whether he's a kind of feminist, on the different readings, on why history of philosophy is philosophy and what draws him in obsessively. Take a few shots and feel the world change.... Published on: Oct 24, 2014 @ 03:00

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Category Mistakes

Ofra Magidor knows her days are not numbered but ochre underneath and that she's the philosopher working out whether that is really true or not. She's always thinking about category mistakes and about their two camps, about their relevance for linguistics and computer science, about what makes them odd, about why the idea that they're syntactically ill-formed is wrong but more promising than some might think, about why they're not meaningless, about why Wittgenstein is wrong on this, about the role of presuppositions, about pragmatism and semantics, about dynamic semantic theories, about truth-value gaps, about exciting projects in analytic philosophy and why women and non-whites are unrepresented in philosophy. Go sleep that pipe... Published on: Oct 17, 2014 @ 03:00

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about aboutness

Stephen Yablo is the Magilla Gorilla philosophikilla who thinks all the time about ontologies and metaphysics and ontologeses and metametaphysics too, about essentialism, about whether intrinsic is intrinsic to essentialism, about fictionalism and evolving to presuppositionalism, about why conceivability is a guide to possibility, why zembos are harder to get rid of than zombies, about aboutness, about subtraction and about a Wittgenstein thing and other cool stuff. This one is the Ali shuffle thought of via its opposite, only in a mouth ... Published on: Oct 10, 2014 @ 03:00

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medieval matters

Stephen Read is the philosopher who brings it all back home from the heady days of the late middle ages and further. He's always brooding on how great the medievals were at logic, about the two schools, about Aristotle and Buridan, about octagons of opposition, about why we should all be reading Thomas Bradwardin the paradox crusher who has solutions to Fitch, the Knower, the liar, Curry's, Field's, Pseudo-Scotus's, about how Aristotle and the medievals got to LOT before Fodor, about why Unger is dead wrong and why logic can't replace metaphysics contra Williamson. Take this one a sip at a time, like a really slow burn malt... Published on: Oct 3, 2014 @ 03:00

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The colour of our shame

Chris Lebron is a philosopher who asks deep questions about theories of justice appropriate for race. He thinks about bridging the gap between abstraction and lived experiences, about American democracy and racial inequality, marginalisation and oppression, about the idea of character and how it helps explain racial inequality, about the problem of social value, about why Rawls isn't enough, about 'white power', about despair and blame, about perfectionism and egalitarianism, about soulcraft politics, about three principles of racial justice and about the lamentable number of black philosophers currently working in the Academy. Give this one the time of day to sink in, then reboot... Published on: Sep 29, 2014 @ 11:26

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Post-analytic phenomenology vs market serfdom

Paul Crowther bites the hands of both analytic and continental philosophical approaches to aesthetics. Whilst chewing he thinks about how post-modernism is linked to market forces and Supermodernity, about how civilising is organised round self restraint, about how Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze have created a distorting orthodoxy, about rejecting analytic philosophical approaches to art, about White Aesthetics, about post-analytic phenomenology, about phenomenological depth, about subject-object reciprocity, about meaning in abstract art, about Kant and German Idealism. Take this one neat and then go for a walk... Published on: Sep 26, 2014 @ 03:00

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Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Frege; bees, toasters and Julius Caesar

Jeffrey K. McDonough is the Laphroaig single malt of Leibniz and Berkeley studies, bringing them all back home over a peaty fire. He's forever brooding about Leibniz's theodicy, his systematicity, his monads, his views on monadic causation and the relation betwen the divine and creaturely activity, how Leibniz thought God and physics were compatible, about teleology and the mechanistic universe, about the role of optics in his philosophy, about Berkeley's idealism, about what a bee is to Berkeley, about concurrentism, about its difference from Malebranche's occasionalism, about Kant's refutation of Descartes, and why working out why Julius Caesar is not a number is philosophically useful. Best savoured neat, or with a little cool water... Published on: Sep 19, 2014 @ 03:00

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philosophy of captivity

Lori Gruen is a leading feminist philosopher who asks deep questions about the ethics of captivity, ethics, animals and what we're doing to nature. She thinks that human exceptionalism is a prejudice, that considering marginal cases helpful in seeing why, is skeptical about intuitions about far fetched cases digging up important ethical insights, that two big issues concerning ethics and animals are captivity and industrial animal agriculture, thinks ecotourism is complicated, has problems with holisic approaches to environmental ethics, thinks women have it tough, that the ethics of captivity are both complex and have had little philosophical treatment, that self-direction matters when considering how we treat animals, that ideas of a wild free of human management is unrealistic, and that some captivity is necessary. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there... Published on: Sep 12, 2014 @ 03:00

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Towards a Secular Europe

Lorenzo Zucca is a philosopher whose thoughts point right at the heart of some of the big issues facing Europe today. He thinks about fundamental legal rights in the context of Europe and the US, about rules and principles, about issues around privacy, about how fundamental legal rights connect to constitutional dilemmas, about Europe as the secular exception in the world, about why 1989 is more important than 9/11 in bringing religion to the world order, about why there's no sharp distinction between secular and religious arguments, about the distinction between aggressive and inclusive secularism, about Transcendental Monism, Spinoza, Immanent Metaphysical Monism and about striving to establish secular law. Start thinking bub... Published on: Sep 5, 2014 @ 03:00

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from normativity to responsibility etc

Joseph Raz is the giganotosaurus of legal philosophy, the biggest of the big beasts, who has spent a lifetime in the jurisprudential long grass engaging with issues of philosophy of law and wrestling with what it means to respect difference, the intelligibility of values and reasons and normativity generally, on their dependence on social practices, the connection between reasons and intentions, reasons and rationality, the nature of intentional actions, whether pragmatic factors can serve as reasons for belief, on law and morality, about legal institutions, about legal theory, about authority and interpretation, about the notion of 'being in the world' and about why the question as to whether he has changed his mind is not terribly interesting to him. In the words of Bob, listen to that Duquesne whistle blowing, blowing like its going to blow my world away... Published on: Sep 1, 2014 @ 03:00

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The Ethical Machiavelli

Erica Benner is the cool, calm and reconsidering political philosopher who thinks much of the the time about Machiavelli, about how he's been misrepresented, about how we shouldn't take him at face-value, about how we should note the irony, his use of the Greeks, the dialogic quality of 'The Prince', about not being esoteric in her approach, about why Machiavelli adopted the rhetorical strategy he did, about his ethics of self-legislation, about his being a rule-of-law man, about his republicanism and about rereading him as a critic of amoral realpolitik. Time to think again... Published on: Aug 29, 2014 @ 03:00

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Saying no! to Jack Bauer: mainstreaming torture

Rebecca Gordon is the bad-ass philosopher who argues that Jack Bauer is wrong to use torture. She is an applied ethicist who is engaged all the time with forging a dialectical relationship to the rest of the world, with current political realities, with torture as a government supported institution hidden in plain sight, with torture and Alisdair MacIntyre's virtue ethics, with torture as a practice, about what Obama should do, about 'enhanced interrogation', why Jack Bauer is wrong, why Anscombe thinks certain thought experiments can erode ethical thinking, about whether her approach is universal, about rival approaches and whether there are reasons for optimism around this depressing reality. Come gather round people... Published on: Aug 22, 2014 @ 03:00

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responsibility and punishment

Katrina Sifferd is a funky philosopher of law and stuff, and is always brooding on what difference eliminating folk psychology would have on criminal law, on what's wrong with the scientific viewpoint regarding this issue, on making neuroscientific data relevant to legal responsibility, on Richard Posner and worries about the use of folk psychology in law, on why multi-disciplinary approaches are important, on the impact of technological advances, on successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, on how different theories of punishment matter to how we treat psychopaths, on taking issue with Searle, on why philosophers should keep up with neuroscience and about why women get a bad deal in philosophy departments. This one bites... Published on: Aug 15, 2014 @ 03:00

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queer theology and sexchatology

Susannah Cornwall is a theologian with philosophical thoughts about how religions needs to get to grips with sexuality, about why bodies matter,about why sexuality is so divisive in religion, about queer theologies, about their outsider status, about Frederick Roden's linking of Christian queer theology to Jewish traditions, about queer Muslim theology, about links between queer theologies and liberation theologies, about the relationship between sexuality, incarnation and erotic love, about what contemporary theology can add to debates about sex, about sexchatology, about Jürgen Moltman, about the challenges intersexed bodies bring to theology, and about how her theological positions speak to the stigmatised and marginalised.Divine... Published on: Aug 8, 2014 @ 02:57

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Foucault's freedom

Johanna Oksala is a political philosopher who broods on Foucault, thinks that its time people stopped thinking in terms of continental vs analytic, thinks about Foucault and freedom, on Foucault, politics and violence, on Chantal Mouffe's compelling ideas,on state violence, on why neoliberal rationality must be resisted, and on political spirituality. She's out there making windows where there were once walls... Published on: Aug 1, 2014 @ 03:41

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truth, success and frank ramsey

Pascal Engel is a funky French philosopher who sees analytic philosophy as a European product, thinks that analytic philosophy is unified by a commitment to a set of epistemic norms, that these normative commitments are not trivial, that his interest is epistemology not french epistemology, that much french historical epistemology is wrong, that knowledge is neither elusive nor empty, that Williamson's ideas about 'insensitive invariantism' are largely right, that Williamson is wrong about luminosity and one or two other things, that Frank Ramsey was unique, that the Ramsey's principle is important, that Ramsey was a pragmatist closer to Peirce than Dewey, that Ramsey was no straightforward anti-realist and instrumentalist about truth, that functionalism is a Ramseyan legacy in the philosophy of psychology, that French philosophy isn't interested in deflationism, that deflationism is false, and that French philosophy has its own resources. Chillin' stuff, like finding invincible summer in the depths of winter... Published on: Jul 25, 2014 @ 03:18

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towards hope

George Pattison is a philosophical theologian who thinks about contemporary religion, about how God cannot be separated from the quest for the Kingdom of God and cannot be an object of detached scientific contemplation. He thinks all the time on God and Being, on Heidegger on death, on the singularity, on the need for theology to engage with technology, on the new atheism, on links between Christianity and Japanese Buddhism, on Meister Eckhart, on Kierkegaard and avoiding sloppy scholarship, on keeping contact with unbelief, on the death of God and on resisting the idea of religion as heritage and instead orientating it towards hope. Soulful... Published on: Jul 18, 2014 @ 03:53

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on cognitive artifacts

Catarina Dutilh Novaes is the Neymar of the logicians who philosophises about these cognitive artifacts all the time and has Buridan and Aristotle as team-mates. She thinks that logic can be as sophisticated in informal as in formal languages, that they have transformed human's reasoning processes, that formal languages developed alongside mathematical notation, that the usual justifications for formal languages aren't the whole story, that there's a story to tell about the relationship between the historical and the evolutionary process of the development of formal language, about why writing is important to them, about human cognition being embodied, about links between medieval logic and contemporary game theory, about 'math infatuation', and about the problems besetting contemporary academic philosophy regarding sexual harassment. Philosophy just became O Joga Bonito... Published on: Jul 11, 2014 @ 02:52

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dreams of reason

Anthony Gottlieb is a former editor at the Economist and top journalist who is reluctant to call himself a philosopher but has thought about the early Greek philosophers, thinks modern philosophers should resist headline-grabbing activities, thinks that intellectuals and scientists in the public eye should know more about philosophy before they spout off about philosophical ideas, especially admires Socrates for his originality and moral vision, reflects on naturalism in relation to these early Greeks, on Parmenides, on why medieval philosophy is hard to grasp for moderns, on David Hume, on not wearing his philosophical anguish on his sleeve, on self-help philosophy, and on why there's always been a hankering for a lost golden age in philosophy. Published on: Jul 7, 2014 @ 03:10

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String theory and post-empiricism

Richard Dawid is always wondering about philosophical issues arising from physics and string theory, in particular the problem that string theory hasn't been empirically tested, that it looks like it won't be in the near future and that fundamental physics is entering a phase when empirical testing is increasingly difficult. He thinks about why physicists trust their theories, why some think this is no better than theology, why he doesn't, why nuance in understanding underdetermination is required, about how a theory can be scientific without empirical testing, about whether such theories are strictly true, about why this doesn't result in a constructivist, anti-realist position, about the status of string theory, about how physicists think about what they're doing, about reliability, about the relevance of the discovery of the Higgs-boson, about how we're entering a Kuhnian paradigm shift but only in physics and why reliance on non-empirical theory assessment is not a deficiency of soft sciences but integral to all scientific reasoning. Bazinga! Published on: Jul 4, 2014 @ 03:07

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the double life of objects

Thomas Sattig is a chillin' metaphysician who thinks there's good sense in studying language and reality together. He thinks that foundational metaphysical analysis should preserve common sense conceptions, that temporal supervenience is an equilibrium problem, that tense doesn't run metaphysically deep, that there are problems with a temporal-parts account, that a departure from the Aristotelians helps, that there are puzzles that pluralism about material objects raise, that objects have double lives, that just because physicists don't include some objects in their theories doesn't mean they don't exist, that mereological indeterminacy is worldly but not fundamental, and that his interest is not in the clash between philosophy and physics but in philosophy and the ordinary conception of the world. After this, reboot yourself.... Published on: Jun 27, 2014 @ 03:22

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Lacan and french post-rationalism

Tom Eyers is a continental who thinks all the time about Lacan and the Real, about whether Lacan is fundamental, about why many analytics are allergic to psychoanalysis, about what problem Lacan was trying to answer, about how the symbolic, subjectivity, Narcissism and the Imaginary connect with the Real, about Lacan and film studies, about Lacan and post-Hegelianism, about French post-rationalism, about questioning Foucault's division in French philosophy, about post-rationalism's connection to philosophy of science, about the politics of post-rationalism and the recent debates in literary theory and poetics. Out of freakin' sight funksters... Published on: Jun 20, 2014 @ 03:10

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schelling, adorno and all that jazz

Andrew Bowie is the ice cool jazz-playing philosopher whose musical riffs can be heard here and gigs checked out here. But when he's not laying down mood and mellow he's thinking all the time about how philosophy can fit in with other interests, about the importance of Schelling for the debate about freewill, about the importance of metaphor for Schelling and metaphysics, about Schellings' links to Heidegger, Davidson and Wittgenstein, about the German philosophical tradition and Romanticism, about what's wrong with the way analytic philosophers do philosophy of music, about why the East-West Divan Orchestra is an important example, about whether he is a strange pragmatist, about Adorno and how he helps us see what is wrong with some of the contemporary forms of philosophy, and how it might be fixed, about the role of historicism, about Adorno and his criticisms of analytics and Hegelians, about Adorno's aesthetics, about whether Adorno is an Hegelian, and about Adorno's writing style. As Miles put it, this cat's just blue... Published on: Jun 13, 2014 @ 03:30

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deep control, death and co

John Martin Fischer is the philosopher who broods on semicompatibilism, freedom, determinism and moral responsibility, on responsibility practices, on regulative control, guidance control, of the need for guidance control for moral responsibility, of the compatibility of guidance control with determinism and the beauty and elegance of that, on why death can be a bad thing for a person, on anti-Epicureanism, on asymmetric beliefs about death, on why immortality could be good, on why reflecting on death can help us find meaning in life, about deep control and superficial control, and why we need the former, on why total control is a kind of metaphysical megalomania, on why judgement sensitivity and conditional freedom aren't enough, and on why guidance control is compatible with indeterminacy. This one flies... Published on: Jun 6, 2014 @ 05:16

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Multiverses and sleeping beauty

Alastair Wilson is a Vulcan somewhere else in the multiverse. He thinks about what a metaphysics of science might be and never stops contemplating the Everettian multiverse, which he thinks is one of the most beautiful ideas in the history of science. It's a theory that he thinks shows physicists to be less conservative than philosophers. He looks at the philosophical puzzles connected with it, criticises overlapping worlds, is puzzled by questions of identity criteria, thinks Sleeping Beauty has an important connection to the theory, is less sure about crystal balls and indecisive Gods, thinks it is definitely science and can't be junked, thinks the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, has deep thoughts on quiddities, and has things to say about the spats between metaphysicians and scientists. This one boldly goes... Published on: May 30, 2014 @ 03:33

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on theism and explanation

Greg Dawes is a philosopher who always thinks hard about religion, about the nature of religious faith and its relation to reason,about why philosophy as a handmaid of theology is frivolous, about naturalism, about the epistemological variety and the ontological variety and the methodological variety, on why Christians can't avoid the fact that Evolutionism contradicts the Bible, about what's wrong with intelligent design, on what theologians should do, about why belief isn't an issue and inference to the best explanation is, about claims about divine action, about the God of the gaps, about historicism and religion and about Maimonides and the limits to interpretation. Don't be fooled, this one's got razors... Published on: May 23, 2014 @ 04:24

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Early Mod philosophy

Lisa Downing is the philosopher who thinks all the time about the early modern philosophers of Europe, especially 17th and 18th century philosophy, about how philosophical analysis and historical exactitude compliment each other, on adding to the canonical philosophers of the period, on why Malebranch is the closest to re-entry, and Robert Boyle, on Descartes vs Newton, on avoiding anachronism, on the dynamism of the period, on primary and secondary qualities, on resisting the idea that historical views have to be relevant, on Berkeley, on tensions in Locke, on women philosophers of the time and on rejecting the occult. This one is kick-ass! Yo! Published on: May 17, 2014 @ 04:00

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Heidegger, Art, Architecture

Karsten Harries is a philosopher who has spent a lifetime thinking about the purpose of philosophy, about architecture, about Heidegger, about why Heidegger thought there was something wrong with aestheticism, about Heidegger's refusal to accept the separation of art from the sacred, on why this doesn't work anymore, on Heidegger's ontological conception of the beautiful, on why Heidegger's discussion of art is completely subordinate to his question around Being, on why the battle between idealism and realism has no resolution, on Heidegger's decorated shed, on pessimism, on Holderlin, on how his approach to architecture differs from Heidegger's, on the relevance of Kant, on the ethical function of architecture, on whether buildings should be treated as texts, on the valid way of life for the modernist, on whether modern architecture has lost its way and what philosophers can offer architecture. This one runs as deep as the riverrun... Published on: May 16, 2014 @ 04:49

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Apologia pro vita sua: my work in philosophy

Peter Kivy, you are a leading figure in the philosophy of aesthetics, with particular interest in music and literature. Can you begin by telling us what made you become a philosopher and what were the philosophical puzzles that interested you?. Can you then tell us about the music problem, and in particular how emotions get into the music? After that can you say how you approach the old literature problem as to whether fiction, in particular, a novel, could be a source of knowledge? In doing so can you say why and how music and novels enthral us? Published on: May 10, 2014 @ 19:11

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an east coast straussian on political philosophy

Steven B. Smith is the political philosopher who would never call himself a philosopher but who is always brooding on the great political philosophers of the past, on why political philosophy is the oldest branch of philosophy, on why it is important, on why there are no mediocre philosophers, on the question of what makes the best regime as a fundamental question, on parochialism, Tocqueville, on the distortion of Leo Strauss's legacy, on Strauss and Dewey, on Strauss and Maimonides, on whether Strauss was right or leftwing, and on being an East Coast Straussian. This one has a spry engine... Published on: May 9, 2014 @ 04:37

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the universe as we find it

John Heil is a big beast of analytical metaphysics who thinks all the time about the ontological point of view, about objecting to ontological conclusions coming from linguistic premises, on ontology not being an analytical enterprise, on Charlie Martin's gift, on why the picture theory is wrong, on why not every truth has a truthmaker, on rejecting the Special Composition Question, on accepting a level-free picture of the universe, on not accepting tropes, on the difference between higher order and higher level properties, on substances, on qualities and powers, on physics and substances and on what is fundamental. Freak out in a spaceage daydream, man ... and now enter this competition to win tickets to see him in action. Published on: May 2, 2014 @ 08:49

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davidson and derrida

Sam Wheeler III is always brooding on Davidson and Derrida, on connecting deconstruction with analytic philosophy, on how to do this, on their approaches to metaphor, on the legitimacy of some of De Mann's ideas, of how Davidson improves on Derrida and Wittgenstein, on Quine vs Davidson, on an objection to naturalism, on being a fan of physics, on exotic objects, on anti-metaphysical strands in Quine and Davidson, on objections to contemporary semantics, on Kripke and metaphysical realism, on how Davidson can be compatible with Kripke and Aristotle, on the logic of ought, and on never figuring out what literary theory was doing. This one goes to the depths. Published on: Apr 25, 2014 @ 03:25

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absolute generality

Agustín Rayo is the philosopher who broods on the concept of everything, of being blinded by metaphysical prejudice, on counting how many objects there are, on the all-in-one-principle, about what is logical space and whether what he's up to is metaphysics, philosophy of language or logic. This is like a Chirico poem. Published on: Apr 18, 2014 @ 03:58

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philosophy of biology

Peter Godfrey-Smith is the go-to guy in the philosophy of biology. He is forever evolving his thoughts on externalism, complexity and why we shouldn't expect a settled outcome, the contribution of pragmatists to philosophy of biology, why Fodor gets it wrong, on how best to understand what science is, on Darwinian theory, Darwinian populations, on why Richard Dawkins and David Hull are wrong and on the contribution of philosophy to biology. Like Cool Hand Luke, this one bites like a 'gator! Published on: Apr 11, 2014 @ 03:22

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the existentialist of hard choices

Ruth Chang is a super-sassy sensation who confronts us with the philosophy of hard choices as she broods on the difference between incommensurate and incompatible and why the distinction counts, on how to handle hard choices, on different kinds, on why incomparability is rare but matters, on things being on a par, on causal determinism and agency, on why the hell I spend my time interviewing philosophers, on being a closet existentialist, on the philosophical relevance of dirty socks to understanding love relationships and on the recent spate of sexual harassment scandals in philosophy departments. This is a kooky deep existentialism with Ka-pow Kapazz! Woohay! Published on: Apr 4, 2014 @ 03:48

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kripke's unfinished business

Scott Soames thinks philosophy is majestic and multi-faceted, is a leading philosopher of language and writes about the history and development of the analytic tradition in philosophy. He thinks about the progress we've made in the study of language since Frege, about the central semantic features of language, about truth, about what Russell got wrong, about why propositions aren't enough and why they aren't just theoretical entities, about Davidson, about Cognitive Realism, about why his theories don't distort very much, about the unfinished business of Saul Kripke and going beyond rigidity, about what went in to his books on 20th century analytic philosophy and why analytic philosophy is not a philosophical school, about the analytics in America and his theory of Legal Deferentialism. Fee Fi Fo Fum, this is one mileshigh mind-bomb! Published on: Mar 28, 2014 @ 03:14

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On Popper and Hayek

Jeremy Sheamur broods on Karl Popper and the difference between the young Popper and the old, on the post-modernism of Popper, on why Popper is not a Cold War intellectual, on Popper and Habermas, on realism in the social sciences, on Ernest Gellner, on the decline of the public intellectual, on the complexities of Hayek,on public choice theory and Hayek, on Hayek's relationship with Thatcher, Reagan and the neo-Cons, on Popper's and Lakatos's influence and on the non-relationship between Hayek and Nozick. This one ploughs two depths! Published on: Mar 21, 2014 @ 04:11

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sex, culture and justice

Clare Chambers chews over the core philosophical issues of sex, culture and justice for liberal feminists, brooding on practices of physical modification, social construction's role in negotiating claims of universalism and tolerance, Foucault and the panopticon, Bourdieu and habitus, Mackinnon's critique of liberal feminism, taking violence against women seriously, Benhabib's discourse ethics, how not to be a relativist, of what kind of universality is worth defending and of the state of academic philosophy and feminism. This is a voice from a war zone. Listen up! Published on: Mar 14, 2014 @ 04:16

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Mary's Room and stuff

Frank Jackson is the go-to guy on philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics and meta-ethics who invented the Mary's Room thought experiment and changed his mind and who thinks all the time about the epiphenomenalism of dualism, qualia, conceivability, the defence of conceptual analysis, why Kripke, Gettier and Putnam were doing xphi really, on laptops and quarks, on David Lewis, Quine, Kripke and influence, on networks and theoretical terms and their meanings, on threats to circularity and on beating the drum for reductionism. This one swings a haymaker! Kaboom! Published on: Mar 7, 2014 @ 04:04

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epistemic consciousness

Daniel Stoljar thinks all the time about what we can and can't learn from introspection, about ignorance and the imagination, the epistemic view of consciousness, the ignorance hypothesis, slugs and tiles, distinctions between empirical and philosophical questions, physicalism as weltanschauung, whether materialism is part of a scientific world view, on materialism and physics and on whether metaphysics harmonising with science is any different from tourism doing so also. This one keeps hooking to the body. Brawlin'. Published on: Feb 28, 2014 @ 04:20

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on william james and john la farge

Cecelia Watson is a new philosopher on the block who goes all philosophically historical and vice versa to think about the challenges facing new philosophers, about addressing philosophy's bad rap, about the painter John LaFarge and his influence on the philosophy of William James, on James' Principles of Psychology, about the role of art on epistemology, of the importance of dogs to James, of dress and fashion and philosophy, on the semicolon and grammar snobs, the overstudy epidemic, and the debts of Pragmatism and science to art. This is roaring. Published on: Feb 21, 2014 @ 04:07

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mental lives and Fodor's LOT

Susan Schneider is the Sarah Connor of philosophy as she ponders the role of science fiction and thought experiments to help understand uploading, time travel, superintelligence, the singularity, a new approach to the computational theory of mind, consciousness, Jerry Fodor and physicalism. Hasta La Vista baby. Published on: Feb 14, 2014 @ 04:00

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being for

Mark Andrew Schroeder swims in the deep contested waters of meta-ethics thinking all along about why it ensnares all of us, about metaethical expressivism and noncognitivism, about its relationship to semantics, about its relationship to natural languages, about the importance of 'not', about technicality and depth, about slaves of the passions, about disagreeing with David Enoch, about moral realism, about what's at stake, about Bernard Williams, about hypotheticalism and about the Humean theory of reasons. Go figure. Published on: Feb 8, 2014 @ 04:04

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metaphors and minds

Elisabeth Camp thinks all the time about metaphor, fiction and why they don't fit into long-standing models of the mind, about constructing a more ecumenical theory, about the differences between metaphor and make-believe, about the imagination and thought experiments, about the link between metaphor and literal speech, about slurs, about the philosophical importance of what baboons display, about what George Lakoff gets right and wrong, about progress in philosophy and about waging a two-front war about both language and human cognition. Groovy dooby. Published on: Jan 31, 2014 @ 04:19

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on the tragedy of life

Ken Gemes never stops brooding on what the postmoderns got right about Nietzsche, about the lack of seriously considered theories in Nietzsche, about why his naturalism isn't of interest, about the stark nihilist fact at the heart of Nietzsche's philosophical outlook, about the role of the genius, about being strangers to ourselves, ressentiment, Nietzschean localism, about Freud and Nietzsche's relationship, about the ascetic ideal, about the canonical virtue of scientific empirical testability, about the need for fine grained logical content, about the value of his different philosophical interests and why what Nietzsche says may well be literally true. All in all, this one walks into the essential territory like its griot time... Published on: Jan 25, 2014 @ 04:30

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Epistemology and Democracy

Robert B. Talisse (on the right of the picture) and Scott F. Aikin (on the left of the picture) are the dynamic duo of 3Quarksdaily, thinking about the social nature and political significance of argument, about the two things the word 'argument' captures, about the straw man fallacy, about misfiring sound arguments, about the intimate connection between epistemology and democracy, about the nature of democracy, pragmatism and Rawls, about Dewey, Elizabeth Anderson and Pierce, about 'pluralism' as a halo term, about the truth orientation of our cognitive life, about Nietzsche's challenge, about being fearless about the fear of regress, about the use of tone, about the need for political arguers and the dangers of cognitive insulation, about when to revise ones beliefs, about civility in argument and about why their new book is keyed to all contemporary democracies. Epistemocracy doubled! Published on: Dec 25, 2013 @ 21:47

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what the hell are we doing here ?

Peter Ludlow senses there's a crisis looming and we're not alert to all the troubles being downloaded. So he thinks all the time about the threat to philosophy, the way advances in technology and science are moving too quickly for the critical resources we have available, about how the imminent crisis in the humanities is a crisis for everyone, about why rating Frank Ramsey makes a point about the key problem in philosophy, about crypto anarchy, cyberstates and pirate utopias, about the Occupy movement, about Gen Z, about the rules of online meeting spaces, about the radical dynamic of meanings that blows away philosophical hangovers from Locke and Wittgenstein and Quine and Plato, about the politics of every conversation, about the lack of women in academic philosophy departments and about language and tenses and time. Come gather round people and don't block up the halls.... Published on: Dec 13, 2013 @ 05:34

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rationally speaking

Massimo Pigliucci keeps a beady mind's eye on the demarcation problem between science and pseudo-science, on the fun of getting philosophy out there, on the value of philosophy and how it makes progress, on the Rupture for nerds, on his Hume tattoo, on naturalism, emergentism and a luscious ontology, on when philosophers and scientists over-reach, on Fodor on evolution, on science and ethics, on the interesting work of xphi and why we need the humanities. All told, this one lays the money down... Published on: Dec 6, 2013 @ 05:20

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from the second person

Stephen Darwall takes his thoughts down the winding highways of second person ethics, touching on what happens if the second person stance is adopted, on why contractualism is the most naturally grounded position for it, on its juridical character, on its implications for autonomy, on Joseph Raz's challenge, on nuancing Jonathan Dancy's position, on morality, authority and the law, on honour, history, relationship and Adam Smith, on vengeance and John Stuart Mill, on Nietzschean ressentiment and a dark worship, on Kant, on what's to learn from psychology and xphi and the relative status of P.F. Starwson compared to Quine. No one can sing these particular blues like this. Go figure. Published on: Dec 2, 2013 @ 09:01

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Adorno's negative dialectic and so on

Brian O’Connor ponders the appeal of philosophy, German Idealism, Adorno and his response, the idea of a damaged life, the catastrophe of the Nazi era, what there is about Adorno that drives Hegelians crazy, the conditions for understanding the social world, philosophy's historical situation, Adorno's negative dialectic, immanent vs transcendent criticism, Adorno's moral theory, his relationship to music, his relationship with Benjamin, self-constitution, autonomy and the foolishness of analytic/continental restrictions. They should sell postcards for this one... Published on: Nov 23, 2013 @ 05:20

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kant in syria

Howard Williams takes his philosophical thoughts into the battelfield of Just War Theory to brood on the point of philosophy and the humanities, on the state of philosophy in Wales, on Kant and how he doesn't fit with Michael Walzer's approach, on perpetual peace and its implications, on international humanitarian law, on Syria and what Kant might think, on the idea that current Just War theories are predominatly Hegelian, on Kant, Hobbes and sovereignty and cosmopolitanism, on what Marx didn't do next and what to do with neo-liberalism. This one's a digging deep craw-daddio. Published on: Nov 15, 2013 @ 05:17

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ecosovereignty

Omar Dahbour is the philosopher whose thoughts turn all the time to how philosophical argument acquires structure from implicit narratives, to the debate between localists and nationalists, who broods on self-determination, on how Globalisation provides the basis for increasing ethnic conflict, on why nation-states are not good political communities, on liberal states and nationalism, on why there is no connection between self-autonomy and nation states, on ecosovereignty as a positive political structure, on problems of great-power hegemony, on responses to terrorism and what a non-humanist Marx might think about all this. Go get some. Published on: Nov 8, 2013 @ 05:16

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go hack yourself

Samir Chopra is a philosopher of liberation who broods deeply on FOSS's liberatory capacities, on the threats and opportunities of a cyborg world, on why we should hack ourselves, on robots and the law, on the threat of Amazon, on resisting Harry Potter, on why better treatment of artificial agents could help animals, on why there needs to be more women and non-white philosophers and on cricket and the relationship between nationalism and franchise. As Roy Batty says, 'All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.' But not yet... Published on: Nov 1, 2013 @ 05:49

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forgiveness, blame, reasons...

Pamela Hieronymi is always brooding on forgiveness, on the two errors about it, on why blame is tough, about its core, its justification, on why vice can't exempt, on the minimalist attraction of the contractualist moral theory of Tim Scanlon, on two kinds of agency and 'the right kind of reason', on believing at will, on intending, Kavka's Toxin Puzzle, on trust as a test case and why we shouldn't confuse technology with college teaching. Yup, this is an original hair-trigger. Jiving. Published on: Oct 25, 2013 @ 05:31

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Philosophy and aesthetics

Nickolas Pappas is the philosopher who brings some Ancient philosophy knocking on all the doors. He broods through time on the questions that matter, on the relationship of philosophy and aesthetics, on why Plato and Socrates are not totally to blame, on the role of empty headed ignorance, poetry, divine inspiration and magic in Ion, on art and beauty in Plato, on the Menexenus and why parody can be productive, on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and anti-philosophy, on why Nietzsche disappoints, on art and fashion and the link between Hitchcock's Vertigo and the Alcestis. Dry your eyes, now aint the time... Published on: Oct 18, 2013 @ 05:09

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idealism and critical theory

Fred Rush is the amplituhedron of German Idealism and Critical Theory. He's modest as he broods on Hegel, Kant, Habermas, downgrades the philosophical importance of the Glorious Rebellion and the French Revolution, thinks on old atheists, where Idealism and Romanticism come apart, Schlegel, the continuing relevance of Romanticism, the appeal of the Critical Theory tradition, Horkheimer's role as the founding figure, Adorno's influence, and how Architecture enables a broadening of the philosophical discourse. Fundamental. Published on: Oct 11, 2013 @ 05:26

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epistemic forces and perception

Susanna Schellenberg is the badass philosophical Shosanna of the puzzles of perceptual experience and consciousness. She is forever going deep to try and make sense of what is going on and why, is an analytic with broad horizons, thinks that perception isn't conceptually structured, doesn't think we need sense-datum theories, explains hallucinations very differently from the orthodox approach, aims at a unified view, is Aristotlelian about types, thinks there's a continuum between imagination and belief, is more influenced by vision science than xphi and thinks gender issues in academic philosophy will take a very long time to be sorted. Glourious!

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Kierkegaardian

Alison Assitergoes all Crazy 88 on the deep philosophical issues of Code Pink and multi-culturalism, Althusser, enlightened women, pornography, Kierkegarrd's metaphysics and politics, Kierkegaard's naturalism and relationship to Kant, and love's passion and deception. Gonzo. Published on: Oct 4, 2013 @ 04:31

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a kill bill philosopher

Gillian Russell is literally a kick-ass philosopher of language and logic. Here she goes all Bride vs Gogo over the sexyness of philosophy of language, about not letting the analytic/synthetic distinction get left behind, about how philosophy could make more progress than it does if it had more textbooks, about why logic is not dry, about tea drinking and shooting New Zealanders, killing bulls with a single blow, about the philosophers who do martial arts, about viciousness, the awesomeness of Kill Bill and Tarantino, about not burning her armchair and why philosophers are basically omniverous. This one's got swag. Published on: Sep 27, 2013 @ 05:12

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Phenomenology Never Goes Out Of Date

Susanna Siegel is the major philosophical mentalist who gets into our heads and deep into the depths of philosophical phenomenology, epistemic downgrades, how the issues can be approached from different traditions, considers a gun in a fridge, how priming examples don't reveal underlying psychological mechanisms, cognitive modularity and what it does and doesn't insulate, top-down effects, the rational accessibility of perception, the contents of visual experience, the richness of perception and what to do about sexism in professional philosophy. Off we go. Published on: Sep 20, 2013 @ 04:10

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modality and metaphysics

Best known as the Ace Ventura of Vagueness, the Fu Fighter of the Philosophy of Philosophy, the Nightwing of Knowledge and its Limits and the Iceman of Identity and Discrimination, Timothy Williamson is no less the Marvel Man of Modality and Metaphysics. His first interview with 3ammagazine pioneered the End Times series. He's invited back with a new book to join the series he inspired and broods to the depths on why naturalism is an unhelpful term, why 'mad dog naturalist' Alex Rosenberg is brave but wrong, why Paul Horwich's Wittgensteinianism is also deeply mistaken, about why there's a need to dirty one's hands on technicalities if you want to be able to choose between competing theories, about necessitism vs contingentism, permanentism vs temporaryism, an aside about death, about Ruth Barcan Marcus's key axiom, about his deepened respect for Rudolph Carnap,about Kripke's fantastic success story, and Bob Stalnaker's and Kit Fine's contributions too, and about higher order modal logic being an alternative paradigm for core metaphysical theories. Like the Hulk, this one's so kickin' it needs a cage in high atmosphere. Smashed It! Published on: Sep 13, 2013 @ 04:47

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Law as a leap of faith

John Gardner is a big beast of legal philosophy who takes the label 'legal positivism' mainly to problematize it, who thinks deeply about the 'chicken and egg' puzzle, who finds Dworkin's idea of constructive interpretation bewitching but mistaken, who thinks it's misconceived to think judges can only be constrained by rules in their decisions if the rules pre-exist the decisions, who has much to say about the role of customary rules, who asks whether there can be a written constitution, who defends the Razian thesis that the law makes moral claims and reconciles it with the possibility of immoral laws, who writes about law as a leap of faith and connects Kelsen with Kierkegaard and says rape is wrong as sheer use of person. Who loves ya baby? Published on: Sep 6, 2013 @ 05:30

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metaphysical

L.A. Paul is a deep howdy of metaphysics. She plumbs the depths of why philosophy matters, thinks metaphysical exploration is like scientific exploration in important respects, thinks causation a key puzzle, thinks xphi contributes to the philosophical conversation, thinks fundamental parts of the world are a mix of intrinsic natures, and outlines what you can't expect when you're expecting. All in all she's hardcore. Fabadooza! Published on: Aug 31, 2013 @ 07:58

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Deflationism and Wittgenstein

Paul Horwich is the king of the deflationists. He thinks all the time about the advantages of deflationism about truth over its rivals, including whether debates about truth are independent of arguments about realism, about Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use theory, about deflationism's link to vagueness, and about Michael Lynch, as well instrumentalism in science, Wittgenstein's metaphilosophy, about why science has done so well and traditional philosophy so badly and why he attempts to make Wittgenstein's position clear, defensible and worth taking seriously. Over to you bub! Published on: Aug 9, 2013 @ 05:39

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philosophy from the preposterous universe

Sean Carroll is the uber-chillin' philosophical physicist who investigates how the preposterous universe works at a deep level, who thinks spats between physics and philosophy are silly, who thinks a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn from discoveries of science, who asks how we are to live if there is no God, who is comfortable with naturalism and physicalism, who thinks emergentism central, that freewill is a crucial part of our best higher-level vocabulary, that there aren't multiple levels of reality, which is quantum based not relativity based, is a cheerful realist, disagrees with Tim Maudlin about wave functions and Craig Callender about multiverses, worries about pseudo-scientific ideas and that the notion of 'domains of applicability' is lamentably under-appreciated. Stellar! Published on: Aug 3, 2013 @ 06:19

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Mature: heidegger and merleau-ponty

Taylor Carman is the go-to guy on 19th and 20th century European philosophy who broods on Heidegger and what an understanding of being means, why it rules out a lot of contemporary philosophy, about the difference between Husserl and Heidegger and why Husserl was wrong, about what Searle and Dennett miss out, about convergences and divergences between Heidegger and Tyler Burge, why charity can't be fundamental to linguistic meaning, about why Heidegger isn't a transcendentalist idealist, about why Merleau-Ponty is one of the most interesting and original philosophers of the twentieth century although his politics are his least fruitful efforts and about the friendship between Merleau-Ponty and Levi-Strauss. Continental philosophy in the pellucid register. You're most welcome! Published on: Jul 26, 2013 @ 06:00

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the mad dog naturalist

Alex Rosenberg is the mad dog proponent of nice nihilism who broods on the implications of naturalism. He is always thinking about the relationship between science and religion, science and its laws, reductionism, Dan Dennett, the philosophy of biology, about why scientific realism is better than instrumentalism, giving the atheist a guide, why it's ok not to have freewill, why Fodor was wrong about Darwinism, why economics is mostly mathematical politics and is improving but still faces the reflexivity problem, about how biology is growing in importance in the social sciences and about analytical metaphysics and recent disputes. This one bites! Published on: Jul 19, 2013 @ 23:40

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the poststructural anarchist

Todd May is the poststructuralist anarchist who thinks anarchism is more than just a critique of the state, that there is more than one struggle, that Foucault, Deleuze and Lyotard are important, that postructuralism is elusive, that anarchism is bottom-up and liberalism is top-down, that 'how might one live?' is the down and dirty question, that Foucault's thought will remain standing when the dust is settled, that what it means to be human is a matter of practices, that Ranciere gets him emotionally, that friendship offers a different model from neo-liberalism and that his conception is about resistance not cohesion. High Five! Published on: Jul 12, 2013 @ 05:25

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on the foundations of physics

Tim Maudlin is the Tekken Revolution of the philosophy of physics. He is forever brooding on why there is no deep fissure between philosophy and science, the brilliance of Einstein and John Stewart Bell, about how to work out how the world is, about how to solve the liar paradox, on issues regarding metaphysics and physics, on time passing, on the way mathematics can mislead physicists, about relativity and why calling Einstein's theory that is a bad idea, about why there is no quantum theory that can be interpreted, and why he finds the idea that nothing is fundamental possible but implausible. All so Huckleberry! Published on: Jul 5, 2013 @ 05:37

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on the reality of sherlock holmes etc

Amie Lynn Thomasson is a funky philosopher of fictionalism, phenomenology and ordinary things. She is always thinking about Moore's arguments , about common sense, tables, when May was born, whether science and ordinary objects are rivals, the limits of metaphysics, what fictions are, why Sherlock Holmes is as real as a number, about links in phenomenology crossing the so-called Analytic-Continental divide, and what benefits this approach brings. All in all, boss. Published on: Jun 28, 2013 @ 05:34

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philosophy and physics

Jonathan Bain is an ice cool philosopher of physics. He broods on how intuitions are challenged by new theories, about Newtonian gravity, about whether physicists are running blind and the implications for philosophers, of whether we should be realists or anti-realists, about the nature of space and time, about the nature of Lee Smolin's doubts about physics, about what the electron teaches us, about particles and fields, about structural realism and whether there can be different empty universes, about why Albert won the Krauss vs Albert spat and what to make of the multiverse. That's one hell of a motherload! Keep it 100 yawl! Published on: Jun 24, 2013 @ 05:30

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books forged in hell etc

Steven Nadler is the off da heezie fo sheezie OG in the history of philosophy rage. He's always thinking and writing about Leibniz, Arnauld, Malebranche but goes large with Spinoza and his heresy, his view on the immortality of the mind, the harshness of his cherem, his book forged in hell, his deep secularism, Descartes and the priest and the painter, Occasionalism, why Descartes is like Daffy Duck, and the radicalism and iconoclasm of his brood of historical thinkers. All in all, this is fa sho fa-sheezy. Forceful! Published on: Jun 17, 2013 @ 05:30

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Soviet Philosophy and then some

David Bakhurst goes all Virginia Plain about Russian political thinkers, Soviet philosophy, Illyenkov, Mikhailov, Vygotsky and his demons, Deborin's Hegelian Marxists, the Mechanists, the formation of reason, John McDowell, second nature and naturalism, Jonathan Dancy and particularism, as well as the status of philosophy of education and whether Michael Oakeshott can be redeemed. It's for your pleasure... Published on: Jun 14, 2013 @ 05:30

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Conscience and Conviction

Kimberley Brownlee is the philosophical jig-jiving jaw-jaw of civil disobedience. She is always thinking about conscience and conviction, Rawls's narrow views, Raz's wider ones, her reversals of the standard liberal picture, her rejection of moral conviction as passion, of the good reasons for a defence of civil disobedience, about the difference between conscientious objection and civil disobedience, of the role of the state and its offices, of punishment, of the missing voice of offenders and of the ethics and law regarding social deprivation. All in all, she's kickin' ass from the right end of our troubling times. Snazzy! Published on: Jun 10, 2013 @ 05:30

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Intuition pumping

Daniel Dennett is the mild mannered super wizard of philosophical brainstorms. Everyone knows about him by now and his books are read all over whenever people want to get straight ideas on Darwin, minds and consciousness, religion and how to philosophise. This makes him a rare case of a contemporary philosopher who is now a baddass public intellectual. His new book is 'Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking' and is making waves. There are interviews and articles and events galore about this new book so instead of talking about it 3ammagazine talked about a whole bunch of other stuff instead but unfortunately not Freedom Evolves, nor his ideas about the singularity because he's written about that here, nor any of his other sassy books either. You're velcro. Published on: Jun 3, 2013 @ 05:30

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on testimony

Jennifer Lackey is the rootin' tootin' jive falutin' philosopher of testimony and social epistemology. She broods on summative and non-summative approaches to social epistemology, on how much this breaks with traditional epistemology, on collective responsibility, on the epistemology of testimony and the difference between a Reidian and Humean approach, on learning from words, on whether memory is a generative epistemic source, on whether infants produce a counter-example to reductionism in the epistemology of testimology, on whether speakers or listeners have to be reliable and on disagreement between peers. All in all, this is a burning jive along the wild epistemic highway. Wham Bam Thank U Ma'am! Published on: May 31, 2013 @ 05:30

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the relentless naturalist

Rebecca Kukla is chillin' rad philosopher always thinking about the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons. She thinks philosophers have thought too much about statements broadcasting information and should look elsewhere like Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche did.She's suspicous of semantic theory, thinks McDowell wrong to think we are accountable to objects, thinks squirrels illustrate something important, finds certain ubiquitous risk communication both unhelpful and damaging to moral agency, is a relentless naturalist who thinks we should teach everyone to be scientifically and statistically literate, doesn't mind being called a naturalised Kantian and has a great deal of sensible stuff to say about the scandal of gender inequality in academic philosophy. All in all, this is slick fuggly jive. Published on: May 27, 2013 @ 05:30

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on civic friendship

Sibyl A Schwarzenbach plumbs the depths of the philosophy of civic friendship. She’s always brooding on Rawls and was one of the first to contest readings that made him out to be an abstract individualist and thinks an Hegelian reading necessary. She knows that the growing inequality in the US and the world point to flawed thinking and systems. She asks fundamental questions about Locke and feminism, civic friendship, the way metaphysics underdetermines a thinker’s practical position in ethics and politics, about Aristotle, paradigms of labour and activity, Marx’s understanding of social labour and the emotions, about how relations between nations might better be conceived, about women’s roles, why Kantian dignity is not enough and about sexism in academic philosophy. Rockin’! Published on: May 24, 2013 @ 05:30

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Habermas, Adorno, Politics

Gordon Finlayson is the uebercool continental philosopher with Marxist-influenced radical, progressive, non-aligned politics lined up with modern European philosophy and critical theory. He is bold and deep. He finds Agamben on Aristotle rubbish, wonders how far the moral domain extends, throws light on what is bad about the abuse of things, believes Habermas to be very important as a political theorist, discusses the dispute between Habermas and Rawls,discusses the relevance of Kant, Hegel and Habermas on contemporary political and ethical thought, chews over the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Habermas's objections to his critical theory, wonders about austere negativism, negative theology,the muteness of art works, the sinister crisis of Universities, the unreliability of Roger Scuton on anything left wing and how despite the overall bleakness of our contemporary world there are signs of hope. All in all, this is rad. Blowin'. Published on: May 17, 2013 @ 05:17

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without concepts

Edouard Machery is a killer cool philosopher working on the cutting edge of interfaces between analytic philosophy, psychology, xphi and cognitive science. He's a continental doing analytic philosophy who thinks philosophy without science is blind. He's always investigating social phenomena like racism and the 'integration challenge', alongside the nature of concepts and whether they are the same as perceptual representation. This month he'll be going head to head with the chillin' blue-haired philosopher Jesse Prinz in Latvia on this very issue. He thinks concepts aren't a natural kind and kind of thinks that studying them is like studying a science of Tuesdays. He's also brooding on what the folk think and whether experts have judgements that can be trusted, suggesting that philosophy needs to be humble. Everything he does goes to the heart of how we think about ourselves and all in all is one hell of a badass groove. Shakin'. Published on: May 10, 2013 @ 05:30

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in search of global justice

Thom Brooks kicks philosophy onto the Global streets looking for justice. He's at home with law, philosophy and public policy. He's got hard things to say about the UK Citizenship test, finds the issue of global justice a core issue for us all, and Hegel's Philosophy of Right a key text. He broods deeply on theories of punishment and thinks he's continuing the tradition of the British Idealists. He thinks hard about natural law internalism and theories of just war. He judges John Rawls a deep groove, Martha Nussbaum his fave living philosopher both for her capabilities approach and large vision and considers Indian philosophy part of the increasingly global philosophical scene. Like, Holy Funkadelic! Published on: May 3, 2013 @ 05:27

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Understanding understanding

Stephen R Grimm has a chillin' $3.85 million for a philosophical project looking at 'Varieties of Understanding'. He thinks interdisciplinary approaches are crucial and hopes the x-phi crew will join the work. He thinks understanding may have a different object than knowledge, and that understanding how the universe works has intrinsic value. He thinks about whether practical stakes can effect whether someone knows or not, about wisdom and whether reflection has anything to do with that, about the relationship between his theological and philosophical commitments, about naturalism, and the role of understanding in universities. All in all, this is a deep mull groove. Published on: Apr 26, 2013 @ 05:28

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the possible worlds hedgehog

Robert Stalnaker is the grandmaster flash of contemporary metaphysicals. He thinks that a language-first approach to philosophy is ludicrous, Paul Grice an inspiration and Saul Kripke very important to his early thinking. He broods on issues about internalist and externalist doctrines and approaches, on our knowledge of the external world, about the nature of phenomenal knowedge, about the view from nowhere, the opacity of transparency, contextualism, relativism, possible worlds, the entanglement of semantics with metaphysics, haecceitism and the beauty of metaphysical theories, amongst other things. He is currently on a phased retirement at MIT and becoming a Visiting Professor at Columbia. He is simply a modern daddy of the mac!Chillin'! Published on: Apr 15, 2013 @ 06:00

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physical

David Papineau is still roving in the deep philosophical waters even though he knows that he'll never know everything. He keeps writing hard core books about his philosophical thoughts covering things such as physicalism and how come everyone isn't a physicalist, substance and property dualism and Kripke's worry that the mind brain identity is just contingent. He wonders why philosophers think there's something wrong with just knowing the facts. He thinks about the nature of colour experiences, representation, and avoids mixing up methodological issues with metaphysical ones. He thinks about the significance of Schrodinger's cat,about whether there are any special laws that are not reducible to physics and about the usefulness of 'historical kinds.' This is a deep water big beast from the philosophical depths: bangin'. Published on: Apr 8, 2013 @ 10:42

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Playing infinite chess

Joel David Hamkins is a maths/logic hipster, melting the logic/maths hive mind with ideas that stalk the same wild territory as Frege, Tarski, Godel, Turing and Cantor. He thinks we all can go there and that we all should. He gives tips about the Moebius strip to six year olds and plays around with his sons homework. He has discovered all sorts of wonders involving supertasks, infinite-time Turing machines, black-hole computations, the mathematics of the uncountable, the lost melody phenomenon of infinitary computability (which really should be the name of a band), set theory and multiverses, infinite utilitarianism, and infinite chess. He's also thinking about whether we really have an absolute notion of the finite and doubts if any of this is brain melting, which is just a testimony to his modesty. He also thinks that although maths is open to all he thinks mathematicians could use more metaphors and silly terminology to get their ideas across better than they do. All in all, this is the grooviest of the hard core maths/logic groovsters. Bodacious! Published on: Mar 25, 2013 @ 08:49

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Metaphysical Foundations of Science

E.J. Lowe is a frost-cool deep fry who goes to the heavy core of the metaphysical lodestone and thinks about kinds of being all the time by building a system in the old style in order to get a grip on the very nature of reality itself. He thinks metaphysics is a slow business but we shouldn't be fooled into thinking slowness is stasis, doesn't think that common sense is riddled with confusions but there are some inconsistencies in it, thinks ontologies are expensive and in-car/out-car ones are too cheap, thinks there's a four category ontology, thinks Aristotle the king of the metaphysicians but prefers his own version of the ontological square, thinks hard about the nature of the laws of nature, thinks about universals and particulars, about powers and categories, can count tables but not red things, thinks empty sets can't be empty sets, thinks he has hands, thinks freewill can't be disproved by any empirical evidence, and thinks scientists should be more philosophical when entering important philosophical debates than they have tended to be recently. Which makes him hard-core. Published on: Mar 18, 2013 @ 08:00

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Brief encounter with the mysterian

Colin McGinn has no time for interviews because he's too busy writing his books, practicing his backhand and doing the philosophical stuff - but even so he took time out for a swift fly-past for the benefit of 3:AM Magazine. He's funny, caustic and a guy who reckons he has the measure of what needs to be said and done. His blog is an evergreen provocation and he's not out to make friends but to keep the controversies hot. Best thing to do is to read the damn books I guess. His is the kick-ass obloquy done in the high-handed Swiftian style. Raw! Published on: Mar 11, 2013 @ 14:55

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The ethics of care

Virginia Held is the philosopher of care ethics which she thinks is a feminist ethics that preserves the persuasive aspects of kantian, utilitarian and virtue ethics but is better. She thinks the strength of her ethical position is that it is based on experience and that it should be equally considered from the point of view of the recipient as well as the provider and it implies a lot of liberal values. She thinks all the time about the nature of care relations, meeting the needs of others, and how paying attention to these things has radical transformational implications. She thinks that its hard to know which are the right questions to be asking but easy to see that neoconservatives have been wrong on all foreign policy since Vietnam and that the US is more deluded than bewildered these days. This all makes her a deep-fried and funky feminist philosojive-sister. Published on: Mar 6, 2013 @ 12:19

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Landscaping Heidegger

Jeff Malpas takes on the deep philosophical issues of our contemporary times. He argues that truth is central to our humanity, that transcendental philosophy is ontology (about what there is) not epistemology (about what we know), isn't a fan of thought experiments, works out our conceptual grasp of space and place, doesn't think the analytic/continental divide can be simply discarded, thinks hermeneutics is the key and takes Heidegger, Davidson and Gadamer to be doing hermeneutics. He thinks contemporary society has no real sense of its own foundations, has a notion of unity that is very important but insists that it has to be understood in the right way, doesn't think Heidegger's environmentalism is tainted by his Nazism but that he overlooked the boundedness of technology, thinks philosophy can be seen as essentially topology, and all in all is the slow-burning topological hipster on the philosophical highway of deep ecology. Groovy. Published on: Feb 26, 2013 @ 16:12

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Liberty before liberalism & all that

Quentin Skinner is a deep-fried political historian who thinks all the time about the philosophy and history of liberty from Ancient Roman times through to the present. He finds the contrast between freedom and slavery a key and live issue and it filters his discussions of Ancient Romans, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx through to the contemporary scene. He has written many books about all this and is the series editor of the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series. Which of course makes him a dude of a most bodacious cool. Published on: Feb 18, 2013 @ 11:08

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Eros art wisdom

Kathleen Higgins is always jiving on the big philosophical questions and so she thinks German Idealism is a golden age up there with Ancient Greece, thinks Kant invokes God as a moral not epistemological point, thinks Hegel lasts because he offers something to everybody, thinks Schopenhauer has a sense of humour, agrees with Danto that Nietsche shouldn't be caged by systems, thinks erotic love is philosophically important, thinks non-Western philosophy should be taken more seriously by Western philosophers, and that Adorno is right in saying music can have positive political effects. Every which way, she's there putting in her thoughts and so without doubt she's all amped up and awesome. Published on: Feb 11, 2013 @ 12:38

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Dangerously frank

C.G. Prado is dangerously frank about the current state of analytic philosophy, thinks we're always stuck with the divide between analytic and continental, thinks much epistemology a dead end, thinks Rorty wrong on objectivity but read his work as a wake up call, thinks Churchland right on self, thinks academic writing is concerning in several important respects, thinks Foucault very cool, novel and unfairly ignored by analytic philosphers and all in all goes deep-fried and heavy. He also has brooded on elective suicide and related issues, which all in all makes him inescapably a happenin' muckety-muck big gun of the philosophical slam. Published on: Feb 4, 2013 @ 12:09

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On reflection

Hilary Kornblith is the jiving naturalising epistemologist who takes issue with both armchair and non-armchair philosophers because he thinks all they're doing is fighting over how to do conceptual analysis. He thinks philosophy is wonderful, is concerned about epistemic normativity, goes deep with internalist vs externalist positions in epistemology and asks whether internalism can be saved, thinks about knowledge but not the concept of knowledge and believes he's making headway, thinks animals have beliefs and knowledge like ours, thinks knowledge is a natural kind but philosophy isn't and all in all is taking epistemology into a very funky post-gettier territory that makes him the very coolio-daddio of top cats. Smokin'. Published on: Jan 29, 2013 @ 10:43

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Carnal ethics

Ann Cahill is a funky feminist po-mo philosophical fabadabadoo who steps up to the groove to think about intersubjectivity in all its guises.She defends big words, considers the astoundingly deep inability of US culture to understand the emotions of miscarriage, finds continental philosophy condusive, considers Foucault's wrong about rape, settles more in Irigaray's camp than Butlers', (but doesn't want to stereotype them), insists on the embodiment of humans, finds there's still a lot to do about sexism in philosophy even though it's getting better, has things to say about beautification and self defence and has thoughts about ways of overcoming objectification through a carnal ethics. All in all this makes her a feminosophical blast. Published on: Jan 22, 2013 @ 11:14

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On the ethics of voting

Jason Brennan is a new kickin' kid on the block of political philosophy. He writes about J.S. Mill, communitarians, alienation, paradoxes of justice in Rawls, whether legal guarantees are real, the use and abuse of ideal theories, the virtue of modesty, gets feisty with Richard Posner, isn't firmly in any political camp, doesn't find market society repugnant and finds G.A. Cohen not very interesting, explains what modern libertarians say and why, thinks Globalisation leaves the world's poor sitting ducks, thinks right and left have no place in philosophy even though they're sociologically useful and that an incompetent electorate shouldn't be allowed to vote. You've got to hand it over to this pugnacious dude, he's flaming up our thoughts to get us all philosophically embroiled. Smokin'! Published on: Jan 14, 2013 @ 11:35

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Hidden powers

Stephen Mumford is cool, calm and collected as he broods on the big issues in the metaphysics of science. He thinks Russell a pivotal figure in metaphysics and more significant in that area than Wittgenstein, thinks of Armstrong's metaphysics as a beautiful whole, is a dispositionalist when thinking about the laws of nature, doesn't want philosophy to go to war with physics, isn't an X-phier, thinks powers are real in their own right, thinks intentionality has a naturalistic explanation in terms of the causal powers of agents and likes the idea that nature, including humans, have hidden powers which we might not have thought of yet. He's also involved in the philosophy of sport and sees sports people as embodied empowered people expressing their freedom. This is all bodacious and hummin', which makes his philosophical party most certainly boss. Chillin'. Published on: Jan 11, 2013 @ 09:00

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Buddhist howls

Jay L. Garfield is a game-changing philosopher of Buddhism, niftily jive-talking between traditional western and Buddhist traditions because he knows that parochialism is neither chillin' nor lovin' but is rooted in colonial and racist attitudes that bring everyone down. He thinks there's been progress but there's still a long way to go so we all need to howl and take a stand. All of which makes him a killer cross-cultural king. Published on: Dec 28, 2012 @ 09:00

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Cosmo x-phi

Joshua Alexander is a funky philosopher from the x-phi mothership, burning his armchair and flying into a future where philosophy is cosmopolitan. He thinks intuitions are important and diverse and the more we know about them the better. He has a sense of problems but is still uncovering details. He discusses murderous husbands, police officers, car thieves, extra dollars and side effects and knows that the more we learn the more there is to know. Which makes him supercalliphilosophicalidocious. Published on: Dec 17, 2012 @ 09:35

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What philosophers know

Gary Gutting has his finger on the philosophical pulse, writing books and articles and writing regularly for The Stone philosophers' blog at the New York Times to keep everyone in the know. He's always thinking about why global skeptics are wrong, how we define our moral self-identies, what fundamental convictions can do, about Husserl and Wittgenstein, about Habermas and Taylor and Rorty, whether science is the only way of knowing, about the Enlightenment, about God, and why there's no bridge between continental and analytic philosophy. He thinks Foucault had gifts of creativity and worked on a large scale and there were moments when he didn't have time to be obscure. He's not an existentialist but finds Sartre impressive and Derrida less so, and de Beauvoir kind of wonderful. He wonders whether the modern continentals are as empty as they seem or whether they're just waiting for Being to speak again, and whether continentals will join the analytics in an international scholasticism. He's sure that the internet is getting philosophy a bigger readership and that optimism and pessimism are just ways of avoiding the work of improving this screwed up world. He writes groovy books on all of this that are lucid, smart and complex, bringing the light along with the dark to stick it in, which makes him a Tyranaphilosophicus Rex! Published on: Dec 10, 2012 @ 10:32

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Aquinas amongst the analytics

John Haldane is a Thomist analytic philosopher who is always brooding on faith and religious belief, philosophers who have strange and oracular remarks that ignite the imagination, the metaphysics of Aquinas and the making sense of immateriality, the depths of ontological arguments, some Aristotelian roots, Hegel's Christian stuff, religion and the philosophy of mind, the link between Aquinas and Anscombe, the link between Aquinas and Wittgenstein, the evasiveness of D.Z. Phillips, when human beings start, Hume and Reid and their attitude to Catholicism, the Scottish Enlightenment, plus Christopher Hitchens and the new atheism all done in the cool hand Luke style of unflappable chill. Which all in all makes him the P Daddy of the philosophy of religion. Published on: Dec 4, 2012 @ 10:02

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The neurofeminist

Anne Jaap Jacobson is the neurofeminist philosofunskster whose mind is setting fire to the boys' club and putting the academy straight whilst doing edgy work in the philosophy of mind. Nuns have called her a 'wicked girl' but she's one of the crazy-gang of experimental philosophers looking at bigotry, bias, cognitive neuroscience, naturalism, worrying about traditional philosophical approaches and wondering how to do things better. She's considered Hume from a feminist perspective, brings a cross-disciplinary jive to the philosophical party and doesn't think looking is like being given pictures. Her mind is a hive of ideas even though she worries that women are having to face too much resignation, bitterness, disillusionment and discouragement in philosophy and everywhere. Which makes her a seminal figure, and bodaciously groovy. Published on: Nov 26, 2012 @ 09:00

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A Pyrrhonian Nietzschean stakeout

Jessica Berry stays cool calm and collected as she pronounces Nietzsche a Pyrrhonian skeptic. She says Nietzsche sees Homer as a counterexample to all our dominant ascetic values rather than an alternative role model but who like himself regarded many of his central questions as psychological questions and was preoccupied with nihilism. She doesn't think Nietzsche thought reality was a flux nor that knowledge is impossible and takes issue with those who say he's some kind of anti-realist about morals because that saddles him with metaphysical views. Everything she says is mind-bombingly, brain-teasingly provocative which makes her an inspirational carpet of philosophical groovaciousness.

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Keeping Sartre, and other passions

Richard Moran thinks shutting down questions is a bad philosophical impulse, is buzzed by the relationship between literature and philosophy, finds his interest in metaphor arising from rhetoric as much as aesthetics or philosophy of language, slaps down high modernism's treatment of emotions, finds Proust a high-five when considering Kant's ideas about beauty,(and more extreme, and more amazing than he dared to imagine) goes deep considering self-knowledge and bad faith, sees deep-cookin' relations between knowledge of actions and knowledge of minds when jammin' off Anscombe, shoots up Wittgensteinian and Gricean wonders about speech and testimony and some, is ice cool and steady with Freud, naturalism and x-phi, and digs Sartre as essential, unfairly bad-mouthed and like John Lennon. Taken together, this is one groovy existentialist jive. Published on: Nov 19, 2012 @ 08:15

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Mindful

Tim Crane asks whether knowing whether knowing what wine tastes like eludes physics and whether not being a materialist means he has to be an immaterialist. He thinks people misread Descartes. He doesn't think what is thought about implies a difference in thought content and that externalism relies on this and so is faulty. He thinks that the world is divided into natural real unities and that naturalism is a methodological not a metaphysical position. He finds Wittgensteinians can be dogmatic, rehabilitates the myth of the given and discards qualia. He's a fan but but not a follower of Fodor, has tolerant views about religion, thinks Stephen Hawking is wrong about philosophy and that the analytic/continental divide is not straightforward. He finds Husserl's intentionalism an escape route from Frege-Russell and doesn't think Meinong insane. This makes him a most bodacious groove. Published on: Nov 16, 2012 @ 12:05

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Meaning as gloss

Frances Egan is a mind-bombing philosopher who wonders on explanatory frameworks of science, the fits and starts of mind evolution, the links between neuroscience and meaning, the redness of tomatoes, the difference between horizon and zenith moons, fMRI interfaces with philosophy, mind/computer uploading and the consciousness of the USA. All in all, she is a deep groove hipster of the philo-mindster jive. Awesome! Published on: Nov 12, 2012 @ 07:30

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Philosophy's madhatter

Roy Sorensen is the hyper hip coolster of paradoxical mind-melt. He finds Wittgenstein far too pessimistic and jumps through the looking glass to think about riddles of the mirror, why learning philosophy is like learning hygiene, why thought experiments are groovy, why blindspots show that we are overoptimistic about our access to facts, why history matters, why vagueness is absolute unknowability, why Mary Tyler Moore and Farah Fawcett are significant, what shadows are, why lying is neither always immoral nor an intention to deceive and why philosophy is prejudiced towards discursive thinkers and needs to lighten up and let in the pictorialists. He is the madhatter at the philosophical tea-paty, the grooviest jive of them all. Sizzlin'! Published on: Nov 9, 2012 @ 13:15

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No intuitions no relativism

Herman Cappelen is mounting a fierce defence of his armchair against the crazyist gang over at X-phi - although he doesn't want his counter-attack to be just about X-phi. He expects it to run and run. He writes about when language talks about language. He thinks analytic relativism a mistake and that truth is monadic. He thinks talk of possible worlds is the path to many errors. He thinks Kripke original, deep and almost entirely true. He thinks Lewis original deep and almost entirely false (but dangerously seductive because his errors are hidden). All in all this is one groovaciously pugnacious philosophical dude. Published on: Nov 5, 2012 @ 08:09

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Against absolute goodness

Richard Kraut broods constantly on Ancient philosophy and ethics, thinks utilitarianism, Kantian and neo-Kantian Rawlsianism are hedonistic and faulty, thinks Aristotle very relevant and thinks goodness figures large in our everyday thinking. He has written many books about these and related matters and all his thoughts are groovaciously deep-fried. Which of course makes him distinctly bodacious. Published on: Nov 2, 2012 @ 10:08

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Meaning, truth, language, reality

Enie Lepore has written a whole book on quotation marks and many think he has perverse intuitions when he rejects contextualism and semantic holism. He always thinks against the grain which led to Donald Davidson not speaking to him for five years after a brutal encounter. But he collaborates with Jerry Fodor, Hermen Cappelen, Kirk Ludwig and others all the time because he knows that the jig is up when you think you can't be informed by someone else. He thinks the new generation of philosophers of language know more about language than their teachers and so are the start of a second renaissance. If he were a scotch he'd be Laphroaig, a rich jive that bites your throat. Fabaloosa. Published on: Oct 29, 2012 @ 08:55

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X-phi is here to stay

Chris Weigel is a groovy philosophical firebrand who burns her armchair alongside xphi's pyromaniac Josh Knobe. She defends the X-phi jive at all levels and thinks critics are not really engaging with the diversity within. She used to be a music freak and is down with Shenker and serialism. She's now at ease with the wild funk of freedom and determinism. Which makes her jive most definately cool. Published on: Oct 26, 2012 @ 09:22

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Shameless realism goes robust

David Enoch is a groovy moral philosopher who has written a book called Taking Morality Seriously because he does and thinks we should too. He thinks morals don't depend on us at all, doesn't claim naturalist metaphysical credentials, isn't sure if he's a Platonist but is sure that he's a shameless robust realist. Which makes him hardcore. Published on: Oct 22, 2012 @ 09:18

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Meaningful words without sense, & other revolutions

Jerry Fodor is the sharp-shooting killer-app in the philosopher of mind, the Dirty Harry of non-universal modularity, LOT, and representational theories of the mind. In all his books he tells people that the mind works like this and not like that, that being various forms of associationism, behaviourism and semantic holism. Of the theories of McDowell, Churchland, Brandom, Davidson, Dennett and Block et al, he'll say that they are not to be put aside lightly, but thrown out with great force - on the grounds that you can't teach an old dogma new tricks. He's always thinking about whether there can be a science of Tuesdays, what Darwin got wrong, paradoxes lurking in the bushes, whether the materialist theory of mind begs the question, whether he has cooler intellectual ancestors than Chomsky and all the time he's doing this sensational stuff whilst writing with the wisecracking humour of someone who knows outside of a cat, philosophy is excellent company.Inside of a cat, it gets too crowded. Like, he's just a totally audacious jive! Published on: Oct 19, 2012 @ 08:30

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a Wittgenstein Kripke vertigo disturbance

Arif Ahmed is a seriously funky philosopher who has never stopped feeling the thrill. He thinks Wittgenstein refuses premises, refuses conclusions and never answers straight. He keeps rethinking the relation of inner to outer, has examples about martians and triangular prisms, shows that Brutus's suicide might be a problem (but that a Jasrow duck/rabbit might have the answer) and is always brooding on Kripke's thought that every time we use a word it is a jump in the dark. Philosophical thinking is a sinister vertigo for him, which makes him a Jimmy Stewart mega-dude of the philosophical jive. Published on: Oct 15, 2012 @ 07:03

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On the weightlessness of reality

Gary Kemp finds Quine and Davidson awesome and has edgy thoughts about them all the time. He thinks Frege is more Newton than Einstein and refines him. Aesthetics isn't his primary thing but he's always interested. He keeps reading Proust and doesn't think Beckett is a window-dresser. He thinks Quine thinks there's no issue about realism - which is neither a realist nor an anti-realist position. He is thus sensationally groovacious. Published on: Oct 12, 2012 @ 11:29

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mostly elephant, ergo...

Valerie Tiberius is a switched on philosophy freak who gets high and hummin' asking troublesome questions. She thinks we have to face the fact that our powers of reasoning are pretty feeble and that our ignorance about ourselves is surprisingly extensive. She wants to philosophise about living a life rather than what a good life looks like from the outside. She parts company with Aristotle's jive and disagrees with Hume that we are slaves to passion. She always thinks optimism about human nature is important and wonders about our powers of constraining cynicism. Reflective wisdom is a big yes for her even though Pol Pot might be the bullet she has to bite. She asks whether we should brush our dog's teeth and thinks xphi has resources that give philosophy a leg up in terms of a larger conversation. So when you consider it all, she is most indubitably the mezz. Published on: Oct 8, 2012 @ 07:44

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Thinking fish & zombie caterpillars

Michael Tye is the jumpin' jack flashman of philosophy of mind, always updating his zap mind with rigorous brooding on the nature of phenomenal consciousness. To do this he has to consider a whole bunch of things - including inverted earths, whether swamp things have eyes, how chinese sounds to the chinese, the beliefs of fish, one eyed zombie caterpillars, camouflaged moths, orgasms, the planet Vulcan and the difference between Keith Richards hallucinating a tomatoe and him hallucinating a unicorn. He writes his books to catch his thoughts as they shoot on by. All in all, he's a funky swell. Published on: Oct 4, 2012 @ 07:51

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Diotima's Child

Frederick Beiser broods on the momentous German roots of philosophy so he never stops thinking about German rationalists, idealists, romantics and historicists. When you read his work you are left breathless because of its awesome erudition and you never think there is anything he doesn't know. He thinks Romanticism was both reactionary and revolutionary. He carries deep warnings for those who think that Hegel is still relevant because it only is if you believe in the absolute, and we mostly don't. He thinks German idealists fought against the idea that all we know are our own representations, unlike Heidegger who thought that they were stuck with that idea from the start. He's an art rationalist of the very very old school of Gottsched and so kicks back at post-modernist aesthetics. Yet with his musty fusty peruke he finds Schiller's analysis of aesthetics unsurpassed, so when you get down with his stuff you'll be wailin' sweet with the mellows. Published on: Sep 21, 2012 @ 09:00

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After Spinoza: wiser, freer, happier

Ursula Renz does strenuous brooding on Spinoza's ethics in Klagenfurt and Zurich. The results of this won a major prize. But she thinks philosophy is largely its own reward and sometimes you worry that you'll never work it out. She sees Spinoza as more radical than Descartes but breaks less. She thinks after reading Spinoza's Ethics we will be wiser, freer and happier but she has doubts about philosophy as therapy. She is the jive sister of Spinoza studies. Published on: Sep 17, 2012 @ 09:00

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Without mirrors

Huw Price is an ice cool pragmatist philosopher with global expressivist deflationary thoughts that he writes about in his many books. He thinks about time and causation and truth but isn't a metaphysician. He doesn't think there's a time's arrow. He thinks Stephen Hawking gets things wrong. He thinks Bertrand Russell is an armchair anarchist. He is indubitably a groovy jive. Published on: Sep 14, 2012 @ 08:00

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Truthmaking

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra is the de Chirico mannequin of philosophy. He thinks all the time about the mysteries of truthmakers, the indiscernability of identicals, resemblance nominalism, universals and metaphysical slingshots. There's a kind of weird pristine beauty to this that makes him a surreal chillin' jive. Published on: Sep 7, 2012 @ 08:30

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Whisperer of doubt

Simon Blackburn is a groovy humanist philosopher who sticks it to the Pope and thinks respect can't be taken for granted. He has written many books so that people are clear that the citadel of conservativism is prey to the whispers of doubt. So he's a tough-minded whisperer out to topple injustices and remind people that we're all in the grip of some ideas from somewhere and someone for some reason somehow. So we'd better make sure we're ok with it all. He doesn't dumb-down but brings people up to philosophy, which makes him a jive jewell radical. Published on: Sep 3, 2012 @ 10:16

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Ethics without principles

Jonathan Dancy is a groovy moral philosopher who writes books about moral particularism and is always wondering what reasons count. He's written many books about this because he reckons we ought to work out whether we think things like moral principles actually exist. He says no empirical enquiry is sufficient to establish relevance; the matter requires judgement in a way that lies beyond observation and inference. Which makes you think, which is what his philosophical jive is all about! Published on: Aug 31, 2012 @ 06:30

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On Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida

Lee Braver is the funky philosopher with deep broodings on Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, existentialism, embodiment and disintegrating bugbears going on all the time. If that doesn't hook you then check your pulse, you may have died. He's written Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, and Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. He's participated in the McDowell-Dreyfus debate and about the Gadamer Davidson link. He gets riled when Derrida gets bad-mouthed and distorted. Which makes him a medley of the coolest daddio Derridean-doo-be-doo! Published on: Aug 24, 2012 @ 06:50

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Shombies vs Zombies

Richard Brown is a funkybodacious philosopher of consciousness and leader of the Shombie universe. He’s asked why 1+1 has to equal 2, presented a short argument proving that there is no God, shown what’s wrong with eating meat, discussed both the delayed choice quantum eraser and pain asymbolia whils't he flies his freak flag to Alan Turing. He denies Skynet forced him to co-write Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back Therefore I Am but has never been known to sleep. He’s another renegade philosophical musical doo bee doo from the legendary NYC bands who brought you 8-bit fusion higher-order thoughts about vegan unicorn meat with experimental breakbeats. Jammin'. Published on: Aug 18, 2012 @ 09:00

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Artha: India: philosophy

Jonardon Ganeri broods on Indian philosophy and knows early modern philosophy happened there as well as in the West. So the idea that Indian philosophy is always traditional is bogus, he thinks. He also thinks that assumptions about where ideas come from and how ideas move around are often based on historical ignorance. He sees ideas as belonging to everyone. He keeps writing books about all this so people get to know. He is the author of ‘The Concealed Art Of The Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology’, ‘ The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450- 1700’, ‘ Artha: Meaning Foundations of Philosophy in India’, ‘Philosophy in Classical India: An Introduction and Analysis,’ ‘Identity as Reasoned Choice: A South Asian Perspective on the Reach and Resources of Public and Practical Reason in Shaping Individual Identities’, ‘Semantic Powers: Meaning and the Means of Knowing in Classical Indian Philosophy’, 'The Self' and 'Indian Logic'. He’s deep-fried because he knows philosophy is a global preoccupation. Published on: Aug 12, 2012 @ 20:00

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The new leveller

Elizabeth Anderson is a chillin’ philosopher in the groove of John Dewey and John Stuart Mill. She admires the Levellers and seeks to extend democracy and egalitarianism. Her new book The Imperative of Integration examines issues around poverty and race. She brings a smart sassy vim to feminist arguments for a better world. Faboovagrass! Published on: Jul 25, 2012 @ 12:42

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Hegel's modest metaphysician

Robert Stern is an ice cool metaphysician brooding on Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Deleuze and the whole of nineteenth century philosophy. He has written Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegelian Metaphysics and Understanding Moral Obligations: Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard. He thinks the British Hegelians were heavy dudes and that his own metaphysics isn't house-trained. He thinks McDowell and Peirce plough the Hegelian groove and that Hegel is the funky bridge between Kant and Frege. Holy Hegeliana Batman! Published on: Jul 21, 2012 @ 06:42

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Clearing away confusions and debris

Mitch Berman is a dude-cool philosopher of law who philosophises about the jurisprudence of sport, criminal law and constitutional theory. He thinks action replays bring with them costs. But they’re here to stay. And soccer can’t hold out forever. He wonders about paradoxes of blackmail. If I own photos of your infidelity, why can’t I sell them? He has good words for Posadas, which makes him rare. He's always open to the idea that settled understandings rest on insecure foundations and can be changed by digging deeper. Which makes him another groove sensation. Published on: Jul 18, 2012 @ 23:46

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The endless search for truth

Andrei Marmor is a fo rizzle legal philosopher who has written Law and Interpretation, Interpretation and Legal Theory, Positive Law & Objective Values, Law in the Age of Pluralism, Social Conventions and Philosophy of Law. He’s impressed by Hans Kelson and thinks Anglo/Americal legal philosophers have underestimated him. He thinks the Constitutional regime of the USA is entrenched and problematic compared to younger regimes like Canada and the EU. You can’t really be saying anything serious about philosophy of law if you haven’t absorbed his stuff. Which means that if he was a Cadillac he’d be the one with da Bomb Dayton Rims. Published on: Jul 6, 2012 @ 06:46

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Imagining god creating poppies

Alexis Burgess is a groovy indie-rocking philosopher who finds logic and the metaphysics of language the key, what with his deep thoughts on truth, fiction, realism, reference, existence, identity, indeterminacy and all. He is a Kripke fan and thinks David Foster Wallace is sensationally awesome, especially when considering those long sinewy strung out sentences that go hazy towards the idiomatic before consoling themselves in some other kind of hinted vernacular that crosses over, you know, with a sleighted horse-whipped goof. When not philosophizing he’s doing a theatre thing so is not only mathematical, logical and metaphysical but all art and drama too with a lo-fi sound getting his buzz. He loves xphi’s logo but his armchair has sentimental attachments so he’s stayed away from Josh Knobe’s fire-jack up to now. He’s a philosopher in search of a soundtrack which makes him like, exceptional. Published on: Jul 2, 2012 @ 04:12

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Treating people as ends in themselves

Christine M Korsgaard is a kool kandy Kantian who spins heads in the philosophical pool by being a Kantian naturalist. That's bold. She thinks we are laws to ourselves. She thinks a particular form of self constitution is the source of normativity. She has cool advice for Parfit's Russian nobleman and his wife. Brian Leiter, Pat Churchland and Alex Rosenberg don't give her sleepless nights. And in Jimmy Stewart she finds a lightening rod for moral reflection. Which makes her not just our most important contemporary Kantian moral philosopher but the grooviest of philosophical groove sensations. Published on: Jun 25, 2012 @ 06:38

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On the intrinsic value of each of us

Cecile Fabre is a funky philosopher who has brooded on Justice In A Changing World, asked Whose Body Is It Anyway? Justice and the Integrity of the Person, and thought about Social Rights Under the Constitution – Government and the Decent Life. She ducks no controversies when discussing dark things like mandatory rescue killings, mercenaries, just wars, organ farming, buying people for sex and buying children to stock up your family. Anyone who ever thought good answers to hard questions were going to be comfortable is going to be skewered by this coolest of philosophical minds. Published on: Jun 22, 2012 @ 09:00

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Panabstractism crashes xphi (maybe)

Bryony Pierce doesn’t see xphi as groovy but as common sense. That’s groovy! She was once a philosopher in waiting, but now she aint waiting no more. She’s always thinking about consciousness and freewill, the Knobe effect and panabstractism which makes her kind of wild. Published on: Jun 19, 2012 @ 22:07

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The place of philosophy

Gila Sher has written a book on logic, The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint, and co-edited another one: Between Logic and Intuition: Essays in Honour of Charles Parsons. She is always brooding on epistemology, metaphysics and the philosophy of logic. She looks to fatten up truth in a groovy way. What gives this an extra zing is that she’s a top woman in an area stuffed with men. Published on: Jun 15, 2012 @ 07:30

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The platonist

Scott Berman is a wired Ancient philosopher who thinks Platonic metaphysics is naturalistic, relevant and less cluttered than alternatives. He thinks the fact that science is possible proves Plato was right. He worries that contemporary metaphysics is needlessly hampered by mistakes medieval philosophers made and he wants to stop this. He makes Platonic Forms funky. He doesn’t think propositions exist. He thinks physicists should stop being grumpy about philosophy. He thinks philosophic work is vital not esoteric. He is making the crazy Ancient Greeks cutting edge all over again. This makes him a groove sensation. Published on: Jun 12, 2012 @ 13:09

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A natural kind externalist

Sarah Sawyer has a cool vibe going on in the philosophy of language and digs the superlogicalidocious Gottleib Frege. She’s laying down some mellow phat about consciousness and doesn’t think minds are brains. She edited the book New Waves in Philosophy of Language and is generally a most groovacious philosopher. Published on: Jun 4, 2012 @ 21:05

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Spandrels of truth

JC Beall is a Harley-Davidson of logic and maths. Yet he wanders round ponds watching eastern bluebirds and dreaming of Tasmania whilst in his head fantastic theories emerge about truth, liars, vagueness, other worlds and the sinister threat of Pinocchio. Male nipples and spandrels are metaphors that he finds open up a whole road. His book Logic: The Basics, is designed so beginners can be spellbound by the beauty of logic whils’t his other books, Spandrels of Truth, Revenge of the Liar, and Liars and Heaps go into the very depths of philosophical paradox. And he’s co-edited other books that examine these labyrinths as well. He's as complex as Borges. Baddam! Published on: Jun 4, 2012 @ 14:57

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Time lord

If he’d been born with one less ‘l’ his name would have been a spooky resonance with his interest in time. Craig Callender is a groove sensation in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. He wrote the Oxford Handbook on Philosophy of Time last year and his other books include Introducing Time, Time Reality and Experience and a co-edited volume Physics Meets Philosophy at the Planck Scale. Like all time lords past present and future he neither stops brooding on time and physics nor eats meat. Published on: Jun 1, 2012 @ 11:10

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Questioning willusionism

Eddy Nahmias is cool because he doesn’t know it. He’s an anti-willussionist. He stands amongst the smoke of his burnt out armchair on the same land as Josh Knobe’s but has another one nearby. He’s writing a book Rediscovering Free Will. He co-edited another one Moral Psychology. He won a superior honors teaching award from the Florida State Honors program, which shows he’s pedagogically groovy. Published on: May 25, 2012 @ 09:41

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Truth, reason & democracy

Michael Lynch is a deep groove philosopher. He keeps us all wondering about truth. He writes cool books about it to help us, such as Truth as One and Many, True To Life: Why Truth Matters, The Nature of Truth, Truth and Realism co-edited with Patrick Greenough and Perspectives on the Philosophy of William P. Alston. How do we decide what to do if one person thinks there are no better sources of facts than science and someone else doesn’t? He thinks about democracy and the space of reasons and deception and the value of reasons. He narrows his eyes when thinking about the forces of reaction. He worries that without agreed principles of evidence and rationality we can’t agree of the facts and if you can’t do that you can’t agree what to do in the face of the facts. So he thinks we need to get this sorted out? Which makes him an engaged philosopher. He has no problem with burning his armchair so long what comes out of the smoke is handled right. Published on: May 15, 2012 @ 07:30

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The philosopher with no hands

Eric Olson ponders on bodies and corpses, animals and people, asks whether Jeckyll was Hyde and whether he was ever a fetus. He has written two books, The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology and What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology and is the groovy philosopher of philosophical animalism.   Published on: May 8, 2012 @ 12:03

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Brain hammer

Pete Mandik is the character Keanu Reeves always plays in cyber-phi movies. 'PrayerBot 2.0' is a short story of his that 3:AM would have published but he never asked. He is currently uploading This Is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction. He has written Key Terms In Philosophy of Mind and The Subjective Brain and makes grooving connections between fiction and philosophy. He used to build robots but not so much these days. He’s in a band. He writes about Swamp Mary, including her revenge, and about Transcending Zombies. He has written to warn people of the Unicorn and other things that don’t exist, especially those who are trying to figure out a theory of consciousness. He has a tendency to dismiss contemporary philosophical neo-dualist freak-fests led by Dave Chalmers but only in the name of alternative freak-fests. His hobby is dissing qualia. This outrages fellow music-doodling phi-minder Richard Brown. But Pete says Spinal Tap’s on his side even if Quine is torched. And he does it all from an unscorched armchair, dismaying Josh Knobe and his x phi pyromaniacs. But his style and approach is kind of indie kool out of Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, so Josh is still grinning. Published on: May 1, 2012 @ 06:37

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Our complex, difficult & fragile enlightenments

Katerina Deligiorgi is a top Hegelian philosopher. She is a top Kantian philosopher. She philosophises on history, on art history, on creativity, on literature, on the Enlightenment and what it means today. And what it meant back in the day. And how it has things to say about education. She wonders about action and how we intend to do things. She wonders about morality and autonomy and has a podcast on the theoretical challenges from cosmetic neurology. She has written a cutting edge book on Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment, and edited a book on Hegel: Hegel: New Directions. She has a new book coming out in June, The Scope of Autonomy: Kant and the Morality of Freedom which will dazzle us. She hasn’t burned her armchair like Josh Knobe, but is still a groove sensation. Published on: Apr 27, 2012 @ 06:39

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Causal machines

Patricia Churchland is a kick-ass naturalist philosopher. She wrote Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain in 1986 which caused a stir. Her others, such as The Computational Brain, Neurophilosophy and Alzheimer’s Disease, The Mind-Brain Continuum, On the Contrary: Critical Essays 1987-1997 and Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy have kept making waves. Her latest book is Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality which she wrote after going to medical school to learn about the brain’s circuitry. She thinks we are hardwired to care. She took a flame-thrower to her armchair so she ought to have one of Josh Knobe’s t-shirts. She is an eliminative materialist and a genius, which suggests that she doesn’t believe that there is a coherent neural basis for her genius. This makes her very groovy. Published on: Apr 10, 2012 @ 09:30

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Fighting from below for recognition as human

Alan Gilbert is a groovy political philosopher in Denver. He knows the Occupy movements and the Arab Spring are significant. He murders oppression and injustice. He thinks about Marx and Rawls a lot. Published on: Apr 3, 2012 @ 06:00

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Rethinking the formula of humanity

Japa Pallikkathayil is a funky new philosopher in New York University. She discusses the relationship between morality and politics. She knows there are layers to the problems facing women in philosophy. She often disagrees with Kant. She broods on what an ideal government should be like, on bodily rights and on coercion. She is a rising star. Published on: Mar 30, 2012 @ 16:44

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Metaphysical Kit

Kit Fine is a groovy metaphysician. He keeps asking questions about the fundamental questions of reality. He has the cool title of Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics at New York University. He has written the books Modality and Tense: Philosophical Papers, Semantic Relationism, The Limits of Abstraction, and Reasoning With Arbitrary Objects. He has brooded on Aristotle's account of logic and modality. He often writes out of curiosity rather than commitment. This curiosity led him to his theory of abstraction. You can get his flavour by looking at this lecture at the INPC 14 conference at Boise, Idaho, in April last year where he proved it is possible to discuss the determinate/determinable distinction under the influence of an indeterminate number of glasses of wine. He thinks we should do our metaphysics clean and clear of empiricism. He doesn’t think we are currently in a position to answer many key philosophical questions, such as whether freewill is possible, or what consciousness is. He doesn’t burn his armchair. Published on: Mar 23, 2012 @ 08:12

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Logically speaking

Graham Priest is one of the giants of philosophical logic. He has written many books about this, including Doubt Truth to be a Liar, Towards Non-Being: the Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality, Beyond the Limits of Thought, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent and Introduction to Non-Classical Logic. He can be found in Melbourne and New York, and sometimes in St. Andrews. His big theme is paraconsistency and dialetheism. He is also interested in Buddhism. He is very, very smart. Published on: Mar 17, 2012 @ 15:16

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What Anscombe intended & other puzzles

Kieran Setiya is a chillin’ philosopher in Pittsburgh. He’s thinking hard about knowing right from wrong and has written a book about this coming out soon. He wrote a book called Reasons Without Rationalism and wonders whether moral theory corrupts youth. He wrote about knowledge of our intentions in the recent seminal book Essays On Anscombe’s Intention. And he has a thing for baseball, including a link on his site to the now defunct Fire Joe Morgan. Groovy. Published on: Mar 10, 2012 @ 11:00

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Mourning becomes a lecturer

Claire White burned her armchair a long time ago and started to philosophise about mourning, life after death and other cool stuff in an ex phi sort of groove. ‘So I meet you by the cemetery gates’ are lines that Morrissey could have written about this funky cog scientist of religion. Claire has just been appointed assistant professor in the first ever cognitive science of religion position at Northridge, California.  Published on: Mar 2, 2012 @ 08:30

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The Four million dollar philosopher

Out of the smoke of his burning armchair Florida State University philosopher Alfred Mele has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to get to the bottom of the question for the ages. Mele, the William H. and Lucyle Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, will oversee a four-year project to improve understanding of free will in philosophy, religion and science. 3:AM asks the man, are we free? Published on: Feb 24, 2012 @ 08:00

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No ethics without feminism

Hilde Lindemann is a philosopher who bites! She is a key figure in the philosophy of bioethics, feminist bioethics, the ethics of familes, feminist ethics and the social construction of identities. She writes essential dangerous books such as Holding and Letting Go, Damaged Identities , Narrative Repair, and calls us all out to speak truth to power. Published on: Feb 14, 2012 @ 07:32

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Awakening Benjamin

Eli Friedlander has written a book about the philosophical Walter Benjamin, who would be 120 this year. Previously he has written about Rousseau and Wittgenstein. Friedlander is always wondering about our modes of existence. He's a very soulful kind of philosopher.   Published on: Feb 6, 2012 @ 09:30

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Philosophy as the great naïveté

Jason Stanley is a multi-groove philosopher at Rutgers. He translated some Frege with Richard Heck. He wrote a cool book Knowledge and Practical Interests and last year a brain-boning book Know How that lames the virtue epistemology and ethics tradition started way back with the Ancient Greeks. He thinks philosophy is perpetual crisis. For many he is to philosophy what Ocarina of Time is to video games. Published on: Jan 31, 2012 @ 07:30

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Ninety-four pages & then some

Roger Teichmann is a philosopher who has written four books so far, Abstract Entities, The Concept of Time, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe and last year's Nature, Reason, and the Good Life. He edited a collection of essays Logic, Cause and Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe. He hasn't burned his armchair as Josh Knobe would like him to but composes modern tonal classical music, which is a groovy thing for a philosopher with an armchair to do. Published on: Jan 24, 2012 @ 19:35

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Time Will Tell

Vernor Vinge on the singularity. Published on: Jan 20, 2012 @ 14:30

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The Splintered Skeptic

Eric Schwitzgebel is a mad dog crazyist philosopher at the University of California, Riverside and argues really cool and smart ideas. He also hosts one of the top philosophy blogs, The Splintered Mind and writes books about his thoughts. He likes to have experiments to back up his philosophy, so he's a kind of experimental philosophy guy like Josh Knobe. This means that there's always a burning armchair somewhere in the background of his thoughts. Published on: Jan 20, 2012 @ 07:30

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Philosophy at the Edge of Chaos

Jeffrey Bell on Deleuze Published on: Jan 11, 2012 @ 07:30

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Leiter Reports

Brian Leiter on Continental Philosophy Published on: Dec 19, 2011 @ 08:52

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Indie Rock Virtues

Josh Knobe has already got a philosophical idea named after him, 'The Knobe Effect'. This is the idea that corrodes the idea that we add moral judgments to preconceived non-moral facts about the world. The Knobe Effect suggests that that picture gets the flow of judgments the wrong way round. So Josh Knobe is now a very famous philosopher. Josh Knobe thinks about stuff like, do babies have morals? Are we born believing in God? Do we have free will? Do we think what we think we think? What do drunk people calculate? Where does greed come from? Why do we think God is to blame for bad weather? Why do conspiracy theories have sinister plots? Do we justify our own oppression? Why don't political activists fit their stereotypes? Why can Google plan but not feel? Why the chair of the board will be held responsible for the bad he does but not the good? Can a lobster feel sad? How being yourself makes a punk band singer and a corporate businessman disagree? Why college students turn into Raskolnikov without regressing? Why Nietzsche is better than Aristotle and Kant at describing moral agency? Is being happy the opposite of being unhappy ? What is the role of disgust? Are infants little scientists? Published on: Dec 12, 2011 @ 16:27

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Graphene-Punk Economics vs Darth Vader

Diane Coyle updates our steam-punk visions as she talks about her new book, The Economics Of Enough, and what we're going to have to do to resist Darth Vader. Published on: Dec 7, 2011 @ 06:30

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Mind Reader

Peter Carruthers is a philosopher with intriguing theories about our minds. His new book is the latest of a series of books about human nature, the philosophy of psychology and consciousness. He lives and works in Washington DC and in this interview he tells us that many of our views about our own minds are just wrong.   Published on: Dec 2, 2011 @ 10:09

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Thinking Dangerously

Jean-Michel Rabaté (pictured right) has been Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania since 1992, is now the Vartan Gregorian Professor in the Humanities. One of the founders and curators of the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, he is a managing editor of the Journal of Modern Literature. Since 2008, he has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is currently the president of the American Samuel Beckett Studies association.Rabaté has authored or edited more than thirty books on modernism, psychoanalysis, contemporary art, philosophy, and writers like Beckett, Pound and Joyce. Recent books include Lacan Literario, Siglo 21 (2007), 1913: The Cradle of Modernism (2007), The Ethic of the Lie (2008), and Etant donnés: 1) l’art, 2) le crime (2010). The Ghosts of Modernity has been republished in 2010. Currently, he is completing a book on Beckett and editing an anthology on modernism and literary theory, forthcoming in 2012. Published on: Oct 10, 2011 @ 14:13

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Classical Investigations: Timothy Williamson

Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford Timothy Williamson. Published on: Apr 25, 2009 @ 15:16

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Freedom's Tendency to Get Ahead of Itself and Fall Short etc

Thomas Khurana is a philosopher interested in Kant and German Idealism, 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Social Philosophy and Ethics and Aesthetics. Here he discusses Kant, freedom and autonomy, the philosophical significance of life, Hegel's response, schema and representation in Kant, schema in Kant and Heidegger, how these philosophical reflections enrich our understanding of contemporary art, Thomas Demand, structural homology and the difference between life and spirit in Hegel, the Kantian paradox of autonomy, Hannah Arendt’s claim that there is but one human right, and what Arendt thought might be the legal implications, and finally how he'd categorise himself as a philosopher. Published on: Aug 25, 2018 @ 13:05

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Quine's Naturalism

I find Quine’s variant of naturalism fascinating because he is not particularly interested in these big, often very polarized, debates between naturalists and supernaturalists. Rather, he pretty much assumes that these debates have been settled and he seeks to advance our scientific worldview by showing that a truly naturalistic picture of reality also requires that we radically rethink our philosophical views about truth, justification, mind, reference, and meaning. In short, Quine argues that traditional philosophical disciplines like metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language need to be naturalized as well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sander Verhaegh Published on: Dec 22, 2018 @ 09:12

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Hegelian Themes

Robert Pippin is an expert on Kant, Hegel, Idealism, Nietzsche, modernism and philosophy of film. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Pippin. Published on: Oct 6, 2018 @ 08:12

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Nietzschean Flourishing

Nietzschean Flourishing

Paul Katsafanas works on ethics, moral psychology, and nineteenth-century philosophy. Here he discusses whether for Nietzsche morality consists in or just requires we have knowledge about human nature, why he thought Kant and Bentham were worse than Plato, Aristotle and the British Sentimentalists, how contemporary philosophy typically handles ethics and why they ignore Nietzsche’s approach, the distinction between conscious and unconscious, whether the will has causal efficacy, the concept of the drive, how evaluative judgments manifest themselves and impact actions, the self, why the Nietzschean approach is so refreshing compared to Kant, Aristotle and Hume – and most of our contemporaries, freedom and autonomy, normative claims, and culture and flourishing.

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Character

Christian Miller discusses philosophical issues around character.

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Is Time Travel Possible? Are We Close to Doomsday? and Other Big Deals…

Alasdair Richmond has published on constructive empiricism, the Anthropic Principle, Doomsday arguments, Descartes’ conception of immortality, time travel and the topology of time. Following research leave 2008-09 (part-funded by the AHRC), he is currently working on a book entitled ‘Time Travel for Philosophers‘ and a series of related articles. Besides teaching epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of science, he was closely involved with the Higher Philosophy programme 1999-2003, conducting classes for pupils and Continuing Professional Development days for teachers from all over Scotland. Here he discusses time travel and the grandfather paradox, parahistories and Roy Sorensen, the John Titor Fiasco, hell, time travel and super tasks, Newtonian space and Newtonian Time, Spore Gods, Achilles and the Tortoise, the Doomsday Argument, the Ussherian Corollary, the Simulation Argument and Nick Bostrom, anthropic reasoning, and why we should heed philosophers. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alisdair Richmond. Published 4th August, 2018

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To Be Refuted at Each Century: James Ward and Alfred North Whitehead

Besides order and necessity, Peirce also held, there is an irreducible spontaneous element in things, one that brings the cosmic process forward. This is the view called “tychism” (from the Greek tyche, chance). Ward goes further than Peirce in that he identifies this irreducible spontaneous element with what we are used to call “freedom of the will”. But to the best of my knowledge, he never subjected this notion to any serious scrutiny. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Pierfrancesco Basile.

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No Fulfillment Without Anticipations and VRs Place Of Illusions

Michael Madary works on the philosophy of mind and the ethics of emerging technology, especially immersive technology such as virtual reality. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing from psychology and neuroscience. In February of 2016, he published with Thomas Metzinger the first code of ethics for research and consumer use of VR, which has received widespread media attention. In addition to the ethics of technology, he has also published widely in the philosophy of perception. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Madary.

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Existence and Consolation

African philosophers ought to bring something new to the philosophical roundtable, otherwise whatever the universalists may call ‘philosophy in Africa’ (apology to Hountondji) will go down in history as a mere footnote to Western philosophy.‘‘African philosophy is starting from scratch. We must build our own systems regardless of contemporary developments in Western philosophy. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ada Agada

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A Certain Distance

Meir Dan-Cohen is a hard-core Harvard-tough philosopher of law. He has written the books Rights, Persons and Organisations: A legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society and Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. He is inspired by Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and thinks that the ideas that we create create us. He thinks legal positivism is a bad thing and dignity better than autonomy. His armchair is definitely not burning. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Meir Dan-Cohen

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Making a Difference

Well, one way to put the difference between laws and accidental regularities is to say that they differ with respect to their ‘modal status’. Modal status has to do with what’s necessary or possible – what could and could not be the case. For example, it’s a contingent truth that I just ate a burrito – I could easily have had tacos instead, or pizza, or nothing at all. Come to think of it, the world could have panned out in such a way that my parents never met, in which case I wouldn’t have existed at all. By contrast, it’s (arguably) a necessary truth that 2+2 = 4. There’s no way things might have panned out such that it would have been false that 2+2 = 4. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Helen Beebee.

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Psychedelics and Philosophy

Lisa Bortolotti introduced the concept of epistemic innocence to encapsulate the idea that certain intuitively suboptimal cognitive processes—like delusions, biases, and so on—can have surprisingly complex epistemic profiles. It’s not a new idea that epistemically bad cognitions can have psychological benefits; ignorance can be bliss. The new and interesting idea is that sometimes these ‘imperfect cognitions’ can also have significant, unique epistemic benefits. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall and Lindsay Jordan interview Chris Letheby.

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