End Times series

I worry that too much focus on the technical can draw attention away from the social, ethical, and political dimensions of environmental decision-making in a complex, diverse, and globalized world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Marion Hourdequin

Positivism and nonpositivism differ on the role of moral considerations in determining the content of the law in force. All sensible views treat matters of brute social/political fact as partly determining law’s content but some, the nonpositivists, have it that moral judgment is inevitably required in interpreting legal materials to figure out what the law says. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Liam Murphy.

I’m keenly aware of the possibility of the Parmenidean (e.g., me!) undermining their own position. After all, explanation itself seems to be relational; things are explained (often at any rate) in terms of other things. I don’t shy away from this apparent or even real self-undermining. For me, it’s a feature not a bug. And I embrace this self-undermining, in much the same way that Parmenides may have (see especially Owen’s reading of Parmenides), as Wittgenstein does at the end of the Tractatus, as Bradley does, and as my skeptical hero, Sextus Empiricus, does. In this way, I offer—paradoxically perhaps—a relational metaphysical challenge to relational metaphysics itself. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Della Rocca

Some, particularly those influenced by Foucault in the world of disability studies, go further and suggest that eugenics itself created and structured our concept of normalcy during the late nineteenth century... I think this further view is implausible and try to make a case for an account of the relationship between eugenics and normalcy that blends together social and psychological factors more than is usually done in the literature.' Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert A. Wilson

While some distance from or even outright scepticism about self-determination is typical in current moral theory, there is no comparable distance from reason. Modern ethics tends on the whole to avoid overt commitment to free will. But it is riddled with metaphysically unexplained claims about reasons and our responsiveness to them – about, in other words, reasons as exercising a power to move. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Pink

You cannot work on the philosophy of biology or physics without detailed knowledge of those sciences. A philosophy of the special sciences approach to perception also requires detailed knowledge of the relevant psychology. The thing is, though, psychology is an indeterministic science, and many self-proclaimed naturalists in the philosophy of mind are statistical illiterates. Without an understanding of the relevant statistical evidence, confirmation bias is a real risk Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Mark Calderon.

Idealization is about simplifying things whereas approximation is about distance from the actual truth in modal space (that does not necessarily involve simplification). Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Shaffer.

In my view, life is a process. It is still common, both in the philosophy of biology and in general metaphysics, to take an organism to be a kind of thing, or substance. But this is problematic for several reasons. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews John Dupré

In a nutshell, the late Cambridge pragmatist invites you to do two things. First, when presented with some apparently problematic concept (such as ‘wrongness’), don’t rush to ask what the concept stands for, or represents. Ask instead what function, or role, that concept plays in human thought. Second, when presented with some apparently problematic philosophical claim (such as ‘Wrongness exists’), don’t rush to treat it as an ‘external’ claim about the relationship between the problematic discourse and the world. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Hallvard Lillehammer.

The only way I know of getting at mathematical metaphysics and epistemology is to start with mathematical method. Mathematics is designed to enable us to reason efficiently and effectively, and that has a strong influence on the kinds of objects we talk about and the way we talk about them. I can't see how to make sense of the nature of mathematical objects without understanding their role in mathematical thought. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Jeremy Avigad

Jerry Fodor has aptly said that the availability of the computer metaphor represents “the only respect in which contemporary Cognitive Science represents a major advance” over the representational theories of mind upheld by its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors. I’d like to think that if Fodor had known Dharmakīrti’s philosophy, he might just as well have said that the availability of the computer metaphor represents the only really significant difference between his program and that of the 7th-century Buddhist Dharmakīrti. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Dan Arnold.

The Oxford Realists thought that knowing is a mental state and, because of that, that each of us is especially well placed to tell whether or not we know something. Their view made it difficult to see how other people can be in a position to correct someone’s sincere view that they know something...Austin thinks of knowing something as akin to possessing proof. Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Guy Longworth.