End Times archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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