End Times archive

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.

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.'

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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