End Times archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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