End Times archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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