End Times series

Schopenhauer valorizes art chiefly for its capacity to bring us temporary peace and relief from the suffering engendered by willing; whereas for Nietzsche the value of art resides largely in its ability to bring us into closer contact with the basic facts about our existential predicament—but in a way that renders the apprehension of those facts (just barely) tolerable. For Schopenhauer, art is fundamentally about escape; for Nietzsche, it’s a means of reconciling us with those aspects of our condition that when encountered outside the aesthetic frame would be psychologically utterly destructive. Continuing te End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Daniel Came

felicitous underspecification is the phenomenon whereby a contextually sensitive expression is not assigned a unique semantic value in context but the use of the expression is nonetheless felicitous. Instead, it is assigned a range of candidate semantic values in context.... Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jeffrey King

I defend a broadly representationalist interpretation of Bayesian cognitive science, focusing especially on perception, motor control, and navigation. The basic idea is that Bayesian models posit representational mental states and so, when the models are explanatorily successful, we have good reason to believe that representational mental states exist. This is a kind of intentional realism (realism about representational mental states). It’s opposed to eliminativism (there are no representational mental states) or instrumentalism (postulation of representational mental states is just a useful way of talking). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Rescorla.

Returning to some of the language that we find in the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, we might say that we need to challenge ‘petrified factuality’: ‘facts’ never stand on their own; their meanings only emerge within a broader context. And, moreover, ‘facts’ have to be recognized and ‘transcended’ at the same time. This requires a different kind of looking. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Ben Ware

My version of Naturalism simply states that our foundational, “philosophical” views are continuous with our best methods and contents of science. There, the argument is that philosophy’s survival depends on assisting scientists with the normative tasks that scientists have always engaged. By contrast, working on their own and in their typical innocence of the special sciences, philosophers have little chance of making normative recommendations that are both useful and responsible to the evidence. You can spell out Naturalism as a doctrine, and then argue that it violates all sorts of conceptual or logical constraints due to circularity or self-defeat. That is the approach most anti-naturalists take. I treat Naturalism as an empirical hypothesis whose confirmation is about as complete as doctrines like physicalism – that everything in the universe is entirely physical. Even the people who pose as physicalist critics are committed to the doctrine through their reliance on scientific practices that depend on it. The same is true of naturalism. Richard Marshall interviews J.D. Trout

Offhand, the representational arts—our understanding, appreciation and uses of them—would seem to have little in common with children’s games of make-believe. Paintings, sculptures, stories and novels play roles in our lives very different, apparently, from those involving dolls, hobby horses, and toy trucks. But a closer look reveals striking similarities, similarities in fundamental structural respects that we tend to take for granted or hardly notice. Richard Marshall interviews Kendall Walton.

Camus recognised the pitfalls of anti-colonial violence more accurately than Fanon, as were his predictions of what would come to pass if the revolution succeeded. Still, he naively and stubbornly hoped in vain that France could reform itself. On the other hand, Fanon held onto the illusory image of the glorious mujahidin until his untimely death in 1961, only a few months before the end of the war. He argues at length about the potential risks of anti-colonial struggles but fails to see how the new despots emerge not, as he argued, from the self-serving mediocre indigenous bourgeoisie that benefited from colonialism but from the ranks of the Front de libération nationale (FLN) after the more democratic wing of the movement had been silenced by both French and FLN murderousness and most especially after the murder of Fanon’s friend, Abane Ramdane, in 1957. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Pedro Tabensky

The problem of the one and the many is intrinsic to any metaphysics for several reasons. For one, there is always going to be a question, (1) how the one discipline of metaphysics related to all the other disciplines. Then, there’s the question, (2) whether there is or is not a first principle of all things. Finally, there is the question (3) how there can be a metaphysical knowledge over and above the particular branches of knowledge, each of which has is own subject matter and would seem to know whatever can be known about it. What could metaphysics add to the knowledge that a particular discipline has? Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Edward C Halper

Analytic philosophy has been the ruling paradigm in Anglophone philosophy for the better part of a century now. In combination with its sense of superiority, this disciplinary dominance has enabled analysts to marginalize other approaches. But if the analytic revolution was based merely on a sense of shared know-how that has never been sufficiently articulated or defended, then it would appear that its dominance is philosophically unjustified, that the Emperor has no clothes. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Aaron Preston

Pascal’s wager is often, at least at first blush, framed in terms of what you should believe. So, should you believe that God exists? Here’s a simplistic version of the wager: Well, if you believe in God and God exists, you’ll go to heaven, which is infinitely good. If God exists and you don’t believe in God, you may go to hell, which is infinitely bad. If God does not exist, then whether you believe in God or not, whatever you gain or lose would be finite. Thus, given this cost-benefit analysis, you should believe in God.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Liz Jackson

Ontology ... as it is used by analytical philosophers, has three meanings: (i) its original meaning, (ii) the part of philosophy that addresses such questions as, “Are there universals?”, “Are there zoological species?”, “Are there non-actual but possible people?”. In both sense (i) and sense (ii), ‘ontology’ is a mass term. In sense (iii), ‘ontology’ is a count noun: ‘Quine’s ontology includes sets, but no other abstract objects.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Peter van Inwagen.

What’s at stake are deep issues in epistemology and ethics. Most epistemologists think that whatever knowledge is, it can’t include getting the truth by luck. The common take on Gettier is that he showed even justified beliefs could arise by luck, which is why there has to be more to knowledge than justified true belief alone. If there is no such thing as luck, then there is no such thing as epistemic luck and we must rethink not only Gettier, but the nature of knowledge as well. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Steven D Hales.