End Times archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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