End Times archive

I find Quine’s variant of naturalism fascinating because he is not particularly interested in these big, often very polarized, debates between naturalists and supernaturalists. Rather, he pretty much assumes that these debates have been settled and he seeks to advance our scientific worldview by showing that a truly naturalistic picture of reality also requires that we radically rethink our philosophical views about truth, justification, mind, reference, and meaning. In short, Quine argues that traditional philosophical disciplines like metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language need to be naturalized as well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Sander Verhaegh Published on: Dec 22, 2018 @ 09:12

Robert Pippin is an expert on Kant, Hegel, Idealism, Nietzsche, modernism and philosophy of film. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Pippin. Published on: Oct 6, 2018 @ 08:12

Paul Katsafanas works on ethics, moral psychology, and nineteenth-century philosophy. Here he discusses whether for Nietzsche morality consists in or just requires we have knowledge about human nature, why he thought Kant and Bentham were worse than Plato, Aristotle and the British Sentimentalists, how contemporary philosophy typically handles ethics and why they ignore Nietzsche’s approach, the distinction between conscious and unconscious, whether the will has causal efficacy, the concept of the drive, how evaluative judgments manifest themselves and impact actions, the self, why the Nietzschean approach is so refreshing compared to Kant, Aristotle and Hume – and most of our contemporaries, freedom and autonomy, normative claims, and culture and flourishing.

Christian Miller discusses philosophical issues around character.

Alasdair Richmond has published on constructive empiricism, the Anthropic Principle, Doomsday arguments, Descartes’ conception of immortality, time travel and the topology of time. Following research leave 2008-09 (part-funded by the AHRC), he is currently working on a book entitled ‘Time Travel for Philosophers‘ and a series of related articles. Besides teaching epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of science, he was closely involved with the Higher Philosophy programme 1999-2003, conducting classes for pupils and Continuing Professional Development days for teachers from all over Scotland. Here he discusses time travel and the grandfather paradox, parahistories and Roy Sorensen, the John Titor Fiasco, hell, time travel and super tasks, Newtonian space and Newtonian Time, Spore Gods, Achilles and the Tortoise, the Doomsday Argument, the Ussherian Corollary, the Simulation Argument and Nick Bostrom, anthropic reasoning, and why we should heed philosophers. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Alisdair Richmond. Published 4th August, 2018

Besides order and necessity, Peirce also held, there is an irreducible spontaneous element in things, one that brings the cosmic process forward. This is the view called “tychism” (from the Greek tyche, chance). Ward goes further than Peirce in that he identifies this irreducible spontaneous element with what we are used to call “freedom of the will”. But to the best of my knowledge, he never subjected this notion to any serious scrutiny. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Pierfrancesco Basile.

Michael Madary works on the philosophy of mind and the ethics of emerging technology, especially immersive technology such as virtual reality. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing from psychology and neuroscience. In February of 2016, he published with Thomas Metzinger the first code of ethics for research and consumer use of VR, which has received widespread media attention. In addition to the ethics of technology, he has also published widely in the philosophy of perception. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Madary.

African philosophers ought to bring something new to the philosophical roundtable, otherwise whatever the universalists may call ‘philosophy in Africa’ (apology to Hountondji) will go down in history as a mere footnote to Western philosophy.‘‘African philosophy is starting from scratch. We must build our own systems regardless of contemporary developments in Western philosophy. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ada Agada

Meir Dan-Cohen is a hard-core Harvard-tough philosopher of law. He has written the books Rights, Persons and Organisations: A legal Theory for Bureaucratic Society and Harmful Thoughts: Essays on Law, Self, and Morality. He is inspired by Kant’s Kingdom of Ends, and thinks that the ideas that we create create us. He thinks legal positivism is a bad thing and dignity better than autonomy. His armchair is definitely not burning. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Meir Dan-Cohen

Well, one way to put the difference between laws and accidental regularities is to say that they differ with respect to their ‘modal status’. Modal status has to do with what’s necessary or possible – what could and could not be the case. For example, it’s a contingent truth that I just ate a burrito – I could easily have had tacos instead, or pizza, or nothing at all. Come to think of it, the world could have panned out in such a way that my parents never met, in which case I wouldn’t have existed at all. By contrast, it’s (arguably) a necessary truth that 2+2 = 4. There’s no way things might have panned out such that it would have been false that 2+2 = 4. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Helen Beebee.

Lisa Bortolotti introduced the concept of epistemic innocence to encapsulate the idea that certain intuitively suboptimal cognitive processes—like delusions, biases, and so on—can have surprisingly complex epistemic profiles. It’s not a new idea that epistemically bad cognitions can have psychological benefits; ignorance can be bliss. The new and interesting idea is that sometimes these ‘imperfect cognitions’ can also have significant, unique epistemic benefits. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall and Lindsay Jordan interview Chris Letheby.